Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 140

China and India Disengage in Doklam

After three months of tense confrontation, the Sino-Indian border standoff has come to a sudden end. The news first came via a press release from India’s Ministry of External Affairs, stating that the two sides had reached an understanding on “disengagement” in the volatile Doklam Plateau.

MEA Press Statement on Doklam Disengagement Understanding pic.twitter.com/fVo4N0eaf8

— Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) August 28, 2017

Conspicuously absent from this terse statement—and a subsequent follow-up from the Ministry—was a clear explanation of the terms of that understanding. Nonetheless, China was quick to tout the result as a win for Chinese diplomacy, and a fulfillment of Beijing’s longstanding demands for a unilateral Indian pullback. In a press conference after the announcement, the Chinese spokeswoman downplayed any notion of mutual disengagement, stressing repeatedly that India had speedily withdrawn its illegally stationed troops. By contrast, she said, Beijing would only “make necessary adjustments” to its deployments on the ground “as it sees fit.” That image of unilateral Indian retreat, combined with the absence of public concessions from the Chinese side, will allow Beijing’s spinmasters to depict the deal as a clear-cut Chinese victory.

But it is far from clear that Beijing actually got the upper hand over New Delhi. Reporting from India suggests that the agreement’s ambiguity allowed the Chinese to save face but disguised a major concession on China’s road construction efforts. From the Hindustan Times: 

Neither side spoke officially on the status of the road whose construction by Chinese troops had triggered the standoff in mid-June, but sources said the area had been “almost cleared” and bulldozers had been sent back. Some equipment was still to be cleared because of logistical issues on the Chinese side, the sources said.

This was seen as an indication that China might not press on with the construction of the road for now. India had said the road would alter the status quo in the region and have serious security implications.

If the Chinese did indeed pull back their bulldozers and cease the road construction, it is fair to say that Beijing blinked. The primary goal of India’s intervention, after all, was to stop China from building a road near India’s vulnerable Siliguri Corridor. If India achieved that goal and engineered a successful return to the status quo—while proving that it can stand its ground against its larger rival—it has good reason to be pleased with the results of its diplomacy.

But that does not mean that either side can claim a lasting victory. The current understanding on “disengagement” seems less a lasting settlement than a temporary truce, motivated in part by the desire to calm tensions before the BRICS summit in China next week. And going forward, Bhutan—the tiny kingdom whose territory India entered to block the Chinese incursion—is sure to become a heightened source of diplomatic competition between the two powers. Earlier this month, Beijing offered $10 billion in economic aid to Bhutan to persuade the country to soften its objections to China’s claims. The Chinese may believe they can peel the Bhutanese away from India in the long term, by offering economic carrots and exploiting resentments about India’s overbearing role as the kingdom’s protector.

For now, then, the risks of a dangerous armed conflict between China and India have receded—but the underlying disagreements that motivate their competition are here to stay.

The post China and India Disengage in Doklam appeared first on The American Interest.

The Great Global Governance Scare

After the creation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945, world leaders and intellectuals from President Harry Truman to Albert Einstein hoped that the organization would herald the advent of a new era, in which a global government would prevent conflicts and settle disputes between nations. It is safe to say this hope was disappointed. Instead of a central government, the world got an alphabet soup of treaties, agencies, and platforms for cooperation. Some are global, others regional; a few appear well-run, but many are bloated and inefficient; a handful are influential, and many have grown irrelevant. None of them, however, has any real coercive powers.

And yet the fear of “global governance” runs rampant among conservatives and libertarians, as if an unaccountable global autocracy was just around the corner. Hudson Institute’s John Fonte claims that “the forces of global governances” count among three most “serious opponents” to liberal democracy—the other two being “radical Islam” and “a rising autocratic China.” Unless confronted forcefully, it will result in a “suicide of liberal democracy,” which has been underway in European countries, subordinated to the “supranational legal regime of the European Union.”

It is easy for a conservative or a classical liberal to be irritated by the bureaucracy, mission creep, and waste of international organizations. However, no serious person can honestly see those agencies as a threat to free societies in any way comparable to the rise of autocratic regimes around the world. No cabal is being formed to replace democratic decision-making with unaccountable bureaucrats or judges in opaque international agencies. Indeed, pretending that there is is itself a much bigger threat to liberal democracy: it adds fuel to the populist wave that risks undoing the fabric that has kept the western world peaceful, democratic, and increasingly economically integrated.

Where have the critics of global governance gone wrong? First, by seeing “global governance” as a homogenous phenomenon, consisting of a transfer of political authority from sovereign nation states to supranational organizations. The reality has been more complex. First, truly global governance remains the exception. In the area of trade, for example, liberalization through World Trade Organization (WTO) talks has stalled. Instead, countries are mostly pursuing bilateral or regionally defined multilateral projects. The European Union, the most advanced project of political integration—and the most frequent bogeyman of the critics of global governance—is a regionally defined organization.

Critics also allege that by delegating decision-making authority away from the democratically elected representatives to outside powers, political regimes are being fundamentally transformed. “Under global governance […] legitimacy flows from post-national elites in transnational institutions via open-ended treaties downwards to post-sovereign governments enjoying powers regulated by transnational bureaucrats and lawyers to—finally—the voters,” writes John O’Sullivan, former advisor to Margaret Thatcher and president of the Budapest-based Danube Institute. Not only, however, can delegation lead to other forms of decision-making than simple hierarchies he describes, it is also never unconditional or irreversible, as Brexit powerfully illustrates. Whether it is the EU, UN, or any other organization or treaty, exit is always an option.

Far from being a top-down construct devised by cosmopolitan elites, various structures of global governance are best thought of as bottom-up, polycentric orders, to use the vocabulary of the late Nobel laureate in economics Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom’s research focused on local arrangements for managing common-pool resources, and also on understanding the seemingly inefficient structures of governance in U.S. metropolitan areas. However, the analytic framework that she developed with her husband Vincent, a political scientist at the University of Indiana-Bloomington, goes a long way in explaining the ecosystem of international organizations, treaties, and forms of governance that emerged after the Second World War, as well as their successes, failures, and limitations.

A polycentric order is characterized, first, by the existence of autonomous sources of decision-making which interact in a framework shaped by common rules. The EU, for example, is not a top-down hierarchy, locking member states into a subservient position to Brussels. The member states, deciding in the European Council, are the sine qua non of common European rules. The main purpose of those rules is to specify how states, firms, and other actors in the EU interact with each other.

Ostrom’s work aimed to understand the mechanisms created by societies to manage common-pool resources and supply certain public goods. The starting point of her work was the recognition that there was no inherent reason why the scale of such problems—e.g. managing irrigation infrastructure, assigning fishing rights, or providing various municipal services—should correspond to the size of existing political units. In reality, different public goods require different scales of production—from local, national, to supranational. Within countries, the problem can be solved through federalism and devolution of competences, oftentimes including the power to tax, to local authorities. In the case of public goods that span across national borders, overcoming problem might be trickier.

Contrary to any sweeping judgments about “global governance”, specifics matter. For continental states such as the U.S., economic integration with other countries is a relatively low priority item. For small European nations, being able to trade with others without facing tariffs or discriminatory regulation is a necessary condition for economic growth. One reason why Europe is not home to any technological giants such as Google or Facebook has to do with the continuing fragmentation of its digital and service markets.

In the context of common-pool resources, Ostrom argued that social scientists needed a richer vocabulary than the traditional distinction between the market and the state, in order to accommodate the rich array of mechanisms developed by local communities. Likewise, in the international context, the dichotomy between sovereignty and supranational control is inadequate to capture the spectrum of institutional forms that governments have developed in order to cooperate across borders.

Take regulatory barriers to trade as an example. In building the single European market, the EU has relied on a mix of harmonization and mutual recognition of rules to bridge gaps existing between different regulatory regimes. In some areas (most importantly, services), creating a single marketplace has proven too politically contentious, in spite of the substantial economic benefits it would create. There are many other mechanisms for regulatory cooperation, used in different contexts, including regulatory provisions in free trade agreements, formal cooperation partnerships, organizations that maintain dialogue among national regulators (such as the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network), and transnational rules that emerge out of private sector-led efforts at standardization (ISO, IEC, and the like).

The point is not that supra- or transnational arrangements are always preferable over national solutions. Instead, it is simply shows that each of those carry costs and benefits that are context-dependent. By virtue of their common legal heritage and close economic ties, Australia and New Zealand are home to one of the most successful mutual recognition arrangements in the world, predicated on tight coordination between the two countries’ regulators and legislators. It would be impossible to exactly replicate this structure elsewhere; indeed, in other contexts the best response to divergent regulatory regimes might be to do nothing and let the private sector bear the burden of costs.

As a rule of thumb, a combination of two factors make international cooperation viable and desirable. First, the presence of economies of scale—or of externalities crossing national borders. The larger the economies of scale, the stronger the case for some form of cooperation, or pooling of sovereignty. Second, the absence of a marked heterogeneity of preferences: In areas where citizens of different countries hold vastly divergent views, it might be impossible to agree on a common response.

Technical standards can be characterized by a high degree of scale economies (once a standard is agreed on, it can be used anywhere in the world) and extremely low degree of preference heterogeneity (few care strongly about what the right size of a general-purpose screw thread should be). On the other end of the spectrum are polices where scale economies are low and preference heterogeneity is high: education policy or laws governing gay marriage are appropriate examples.

The most vexing issues involve a high degree of scale economies and a high degree of preference heterogeneity. Climate change might be global in nature, but there is not necessarily an agreement across major polluters on how to tackle it. Similarly, passportless travel across the Schengen area is a valuable public good for citizens and businesses of Europe. However, Schengen is not sustainable without a common border protection and asylum policy—something on which European countries disagree vehemently.

As a seminal paper co-authored by the Harvard economist Alberto Alesina shows, the EU itself has not been very successful in focusing on policies that marry a high degree of external effects with a low degree of preference heterogeneity. Instead, it plays a large role in areas such as citizen and social protection, where cross-border externalities are small and preferences diverge, while not providing a sufficient platform for cooperation on environmental issues, or security.

There are no guarantees that inter- and transnational structures that governments and non-state actors create will be successful. However, failure does not breed tyranny, but dysfunction. Two years since the refugee crisis, the EU has not forced Poland and Hungary to acquiesce to its relocation mechanism for incoming asylum-seekers. “Climate change alarmism”, as some on the right call it, has not led to a global environmentalist tyranny but to the departure of the United States from the Paris Agreement, with no consequences. The numerous UN agencies that have outlived their purpose might be wasting taxpayers’ money—similar to many government agencies at home—but they are emphatically not taking over the world.

It is a well-known fact that the post-WWII international order, built largely thanks to America’s leadership, has coincided with a global decline of violence and a spread of democracy and economic openness around the world. Conservative critics of “global governance” are correct in saying that such correlation tells us little about causation. But it is also conservative, when confronted with complex phenomena, to err on the side of caution rather than jump to unwarranted, though ideologically comforting conclusions. That means developing a much better understanding of the different forms of “global governance”, of their strengths, flaws, and limitations. Otherwise, the reflexive repudiation of any form of international authority or rules that constrain domestic policymaking risks provoking outcomes that few of us will like, regardless of our politics.

The post The Great Global Governance Scare appeared first on The American Interest.

The Race for the Euphrates

With ISIS’s capital Raqqa encircled and the street-to-street battle to capture the city ongoing, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are already looking further south. As the AFP reports:

US-backed Arab and Kurdish fighters said on Friday they would launch an offensive “very soon” to oust the Islamic State group from Syria’s oil-rich Deir Ezzor province.

The strategic territory is also seen as a prize by advancing Syrian troops, but an agreement between regime ally Russia and the US-led coalition is expected to keep the rival assaults from clashing.

The Deir Ezzor Military Council (DEMC), a coalition of Arab tribes and fighters that belongs to the broader US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, announced the upcoming offensive on Friday in northeast Syria.

“Our forces are preparing for the great battle of Deir Ezzor and unifying the tribes,” said DEMC head Ahmad Abu Khawlah in Shadai, some 60 kilometres (35 miles) south of Hasakeh.

Meanwhile, Syrian regime forces are rapidly advancing on Deir ez-Zour from the southwest:

Syrian Arab Army reached Rujm al Hajanah and Jabal Dabbah

Map: https://t.co/QeXZATbIdy pic.twitter.com/v2warIDr5P

— Syrian Civil War Map (@CivilWarMap) August 22, 2017

With the Iraqi army working to recapture Tal Afar on the other side of the border, ISIS is running out of strongholds. While the thousands of ISIS fighters in these cities will hold out until the end, the end of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as something resembling a state holding actual territory appears to be rapidly approaching

ISIS nonetheless appears to be preparing for that eventuality. The oil fields east of Deir ez-Zour still earn the group as much as $1 million each day, money that ISIS is now desperately trying to transfer out of the country. Whether that money will be used to fund attacks in Europe or to renew the insurgency in Iraq and Syria is unclear, but ISIS clearly has the means to continue their campaign of violence indefinitely. As their spate of car ramming attacks has shown, ISIS’ fanatics can produce mass slaughter for the cost of a van rental.

While that shift of money and focus away from Iraq and Syria will cause one set of problems, the removal of ISIS from this territory will cause problems of its own as the regime’s lines meet the SDF. The informal deconfliction line negotiated between Russia and the United States is the Euphrates river itself. In theory, neither sides’ proxies will cross the line under threat of airstrikes. In practice, will the U.S. really bomb Syrian government troops retaking parts of their own country? In particular, the oil fields on the northern side of the Euphrates will look awfully attractive to both sides. Before the war, oil accounted for 23% of the Syrian government’s revenue, with the fields currently controlled by ISIS accounting for the majority of Syria’s pre-war oil production.

The Syrian Civil War is in many ways winding down. The eventual relief of the Syrian army outpost in Deir ez-Zour that has been under ISIS siege for the past three years will be a major propaganda victory for the regime. What’s left of the opposition is quietly being encouraged to accept the reality that Bashar al-Assad isn’t going anywhere. But as we’ve written before, the aftermath of the conflict has the potential to produce a regional conflagration. With each side racing to the Euphrates, and potentially beyond, let’s hope cooler heads prevail.

The post The Race for the Euphrates appeared first on The American Interest.

How Hurricane Harvey Hurts American Energy

The hurricane bearing down on Texas’s coastline is the worst such storm to make landfall in the United States in a dozen years, a fact that’s especially concerning because it will affect one of the biggest energy producing regions in our country.

Hurricane Harvey is moving slowly, and it’s expected to park itself over crucial oil and natural gas infrastructure. Offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico produce one fifth of U.S. oil, while onshore the nearby Eagle Ford shale basin is one of the most productive in the country. Further down the supply chain, one third of American refinery capacity lies along the Texas coast weathering this storm. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has a map where you can track energy disruptions in real time, and a collage of colors blanket Texas right now, belying Harvey’s disruptive power.

But the oil and gas industry isn’t the only one threatened by this hurricane. Wind energy is bracing for a rough week (or more), as producers are shutting down turbines and hoping their towers can make it through the hurricane with minimal damage. That might sound odd—after all, higher wind speeds corollate with higher energy production—but too much wind can be a bad thing. Most turbines have to shut down once winds exceed 55 miles per hour, and Harvey is already well in excess of that. This is a big deal in Texas, which produces more wind power than any other state in the country. Bloomberg estimates it could result in the loss of between 2.1 and 3.6 gigawatts of electricity, more than 10 percent of Texas production.

All around the world, economic activity—and therefore areas of high energy demand—gravitates towards coastlines. These coastlines are, according to a recent leaked draft of a special report on U.S. climate science, going to be subjected to an increased risk of extreme weather due to climate change in the coming years and decades. Though scientists involved in that report estimate with high confidence an increase in precipitation rates for hurricanes thanks to climate change, and an increase in intensity with medium confidence, America has been going through an historic hurricane drought, as no storm has made landfall since 2006—until now.

Every aspect of our energy system entails risk, and our goal shouldn’t be to eliminate those risks, but rather to mitigate them. Harvey is going to disrupt life for many in Texas, and it’s going to disrupt a number of vital energy systems in that part of the country. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it’s this: the more our country relies on a diverse range of energy suppliers, the more resilient it will be when natural disasters like Harvey rear their head.

The post How Hurricane Harvey Hurts American Energy appeared first on The American Interest.

Is Congress Unfair?

The party in power usually takes a beating in midterm congressional elections. But despite Donald Trump’s ostentatious incompetence and plummeting popularity, it looks like the Democrats could well fail to take back a House majority. And that’s at least in part because while Democrats have a national popular vote majority, they are not winning voters in the right places. In Vox, Matt Yglesias lambasts this apparent unfairness:

If elections for the US House of Representatives were held today, polling averages suggest Democrats would get a little bit over 54 percent of the vote. […]

But here’s the thing. According to Elliott Morris’s model for Decision Desk HQ, 54 percent of the vote won’t deliver Democrats a landslide House majority. […]

There is a somewhat tedious debate involving political scientists, journalists, and election analysts as to whether we should characterize this situation — in which 54 percent of the vote wins Democrats 47 percent of the seats — as the result of “gerrymandering” or just “clustering” into an inefficient geographical pattern.

But whatever you call it, it’s an ugly number.

To the extent that this is the product of Republican gerrymandering, it is indeed a serious problem. Districts should be drawn by non-partisan commissions, not state legislatures. But according to one recent estimate, redistricting has only produced about 12 extra Republican seats, on net. That means that even if all recent redistricting were rolled back, the Democrats would still struggle to win the House with a lopsided 54 percent popular vote majority in individual House races. Why? Because the GOP draws on a geographically dispersed electoral coalition, while Democrats depend on super-majorities in districts around metropolitan areas, especially on the coasts. It doesn’t matter whether Nancy Pelosi wins 75 percent or 85 percent of the vote in her San Francisco district; the seat is still safely blue.

But perhaps the U.S. system of territorial representation itself is unfair. Perhaps, as Dylan Matthews said on Twitter, “if you get 54 percent of the vote, you should get 54 percent of the seats, regardless of where your voters live.” That sounds intuitively compelling. But people don’t vote for a generic, depersonalized party for Congress; they vote for a specific individual. So the claim that “Democrats” will get 54 percent of the vote is a shorthand that doesn’t capture the distinctiveness of individual elections, where some voters cast ballots based on a candidate’s personality and charisma and not just his party affiliation.

But let’s grant that the Democrats are systematically disfavored, as a party, because of their super-strength along the coasts. There is a long-term and constitutional logic to this even if it sometimes seems to create undesirable political outcomes. One of the purposes of proportional representation is to discourage regional factionalism. The American electoral system punishes parties for relying too heavily on a certain region of the country for their political strength. This can be a good thing—it’s not conducive to productive politics if the parties are geographically walled off from one another. In extreme cases, if a certain region of the country drifts too far away from another region politically, and the minority region is out of power at the federal level, that could set the stage for secession or Civil War. At a time when political violence in the United States seems to be on the upswing, it’s especially easy to see the perils of especially balkanized political coalitions.

The U.S. constitutional system is currently all but screaming at Democratic Party to broaden its geographic base, and threatening it with continuing powerlessness if it fails to do so. A more centrist Democratic Party of the Bill Clinton variety would peel off GOP support in the heartland, and perhaps prompt the Republicans to move away from white working class populism and try to compete in some districts closer to city centers. It may be unfair that Republicans have no incentive to move towards the center first. But such a party system would almost surely be more stable. It remains to be seen whether the framers’ design will actually pull us back in that direction, or whether it will merely continue to be a vehicle for ever-more-vituperative polarization and distrust.

The post Is Congress Unfair? appeared first on The American Interest.

The West Needs a Strategy

The last decade has not been good for the collective West. The list of setbacks is long: the resurgence of Russia along Europe’s periphery signaled by the 2008 Russian-Georgian war; the economic meltdown in the United States and Europe; the continued rise of China and the accelerated shift in economic power balances across the globe; the so-called “Arab Spring” in 2010–11 that heralded the final bloody unravelling of the Sykes-Picot system in the Middle East; the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014, war in eastern Ukraine, and the attendant deep freeze in relations with Russia; war in Syria followed by Russia’s military intervention there; the onset of mega-migration from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) into Europe in 2015; and the growing threat of state-on-state conflict, not just on the Korean Peninsula but also in the Baltic Sea, along Europe’s eastern flank, and in the Pacific. Across the West there is also an increasing and justifiable concern about the metastasis of ISIS now that the jihadist homeland project is being reduced to naught in Syria and Iraq. Finally, a surge in cross-national threats from cyberspace, drug trafficking, transnational organized crime, and smuggling continues to force Western security agencies to play defense.

The sharp political polarization in the United States and Europe has only further undermined this deteriorating international security situation, striking at the institutional foundations of Western democracies, degrading states’ resilience, and potentially calling into question their governability and national cohesion. In Europe the key drivers of this societal decomposition are terrorism and MENA migration, both of which increasingly threaten the future of not just the European cooperative project but increasingly also the social and political fabric of individual European states. As the number of terror attacks on European soil continues to climb, states are finding it ever more difficult to manage both the continued influx of new arrivals and the deportation of those whose asylum claims have been rejected. Less than a third of those told to leave are actually removed, creating additional incentives for economic migrants to join the flow and further undermining public confidence in the governments’ ability to address the crisis.

In the United States, decades of group identity politics, in combination with the postmodern, neo-Marxian efforts at colleges and universities to redefine America’s cultural underpinning, have split the society apart, pushing increasing numbers toward the fringes of radical politics and violence. Deindustrialization and the decimation of the American middle and working classes have also brought about a deep decline in public confidence in the elites’ ability to govern, while social trust and the sense of the mutuality of obligations essential to the functioning of a consolidated democracy have dropped precipitously.

Taken together, both Europe and the United States find themselves burdened by challenges at home at a time when international security threats are on the rise. Mounting a strategy to defend the collective West against these threats requires a unity of purpose and cohesion that are at present sorely lacking. In contrast, China and Russia are experiencing national awakenings which, albeit for different reasons, have increased their central governments’ ability to mobilize their populations.

The deepening crisis in the West is also the product of a decline of strategic thought in the United States and Europe. The U.S. failure since the end of the Cold War to produce an overarching foreign policy and national security strategic framework that resonates on both sides of the Atlantic has bred a policymaking approach that is largely reactive and tactical in nature. This policy stasis has resulted in generalized and often ideologically charged declarations of intent, which cannot substitute for an honest accounting of goals and means. Though the roots of this drift can be traced back to the last years of the George H. W. Bush Administration, with the rhetorical excesses of a “new world order” bearing little relationship to the rapidly decomposing post-Soviet sphere and the politically-awakened Middle East, it was the Clinton Administration in the 1990s that set the tenor for how the United States would “do” foreign policy from then on, oscillating between the ideological excesses of the “indispensable nation” on the one hand and, on the other hand, the equally unwarranted conviction that NATO’s defeat of minor power Serbia heralded the arrival of a rules-based international system. Key decisions in the 1990s that would define U.S. policy choices going forward, such as NATO enlargement, morphed from a sound geostrategic response to German unification and the decomposition of the Soviet Union into a policy that resembled a batch approach in manufacturing more than it did nuanced statecraft driven by close analysis of costs and benefits. The strategic myopia on developments in post-Soviet Russia in particular, which in the 1990s was uniformly dismissed in Washington, DC policy circles as a spent force, resulted in arguably the greatest missed opportunity to outline a realistic strategy for engaging with Moscow with an eye to China’s rise as a peer competitor to the United States.

No other event has suppressed strategic thinking in the U.S. policy community more than the 9/11 terrorist attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the heat of the moment, the wounded nation rightly demanded swift retribution against those who nurtured and supported the perpetrators. Too quickly and too easily, however, this brief moment of national unity of a people under attack became an ideologically infused project that was to bring democratic government not just to Afghanistan but also to the Middle East as an antidote to the spread of jihadist ideology. Instead of a measured response to what was an undisputed tragedy and shock to the nation’s sense of security, the so-called Global War on Terror became a vehicle for ideas that were breathtaking in their scope: “nation-building,” “state-building,” and “regime change” entered the policy lexicon with remarkable ease, facilitating a series of military campaigns from Iraq to Libya, the geostrategic consequences of which few seemed willing to entertain. Even the so-called “Arab Spring” did not serve as a wakeup call about the urgent need for at least a regional strategy. It was as though the people charged with charting the course of America’s foreign policy now truly believed that, having unlocked the mystery of how nations evolve (the “end of history”), state systemic breakdowns would yield not more violence but a crop of Jeffersons across the Middle East.

For the most part, Europe has been disconcertingly content to stay at a “sub-strategic” level since the Cold War. The one bright moment was Berlin’s ability to build up a consensus around EU enlargement—a policy that stabilized postcommunist Europe and, through structural and cohesion funds, restored markets across the region, with the free flow of labor launching a grand and successful reconstruction of the former Eastern Europe. The same cannot be said of the decision to pursue a quasi-federal project embodied in the Lisbon treaty, or of the virtual collapse of Europe’s military capabilities over the past decade and the waning of its strategic culture. Nor can it be said of the elite conviction that Europe was capable of generating a larger shared identity to eventually equal the national allegiances of its peoples.

Today the collective West is at a crossroads in part because tactics and policy have substituted for an implementable and shared Transatlantic strategic framework for foreign and security policy. The last successful grand strategy that harnessed the combined resources of the West, while generating a lasting commitment to mutuality across the Atlantic, was the Containment Strategy of the Cold War era. George Kennan’s initial vision would come to serve as an overarching concept for the multi-tiered and nuanced responses to Soviet efforts to delink the United States from Europe and expand Moscow’s geostrategic reach so as to ultimately dominate Eurasia and beyond. The U.S. success in the Cold War was in large part the result of the overall clarity of its grand strategy and the broad Transatlantic consensus behind it, regardless of the adjustments, policy adaptations, and occasional setbacks during the 45 years of the increasingly global competition between liberal democracy and communism.

Today, as in the Kennan era, the starting point for a coherent grand strategy has to be a clear elucidation by the United State and Europe of shared threats to their vital national interests, in defense of which we are prepared to harness our national political, military, economic, and diplomatic tools. In order to ensure that this attempt at a grand strategy debate doesn’t lapse into another academic contest to crown the best turn of phrase (whether “global engagement” or “global war on what-have-you”), the United States and its European allies need to start a new strategic dialogue with national rather than global security optics. This is necessary because, historically, any grand strategy that actually worked—containment included—always stipulated that national interests come first. A clear delineation between vital, important, and peripheral interests is the sine qua non of this effort to frame a new grand strategic dialogue for the collective West. Likewise, a clear understanding of the constraints we all currently face—whether budgetary, cultural, or institutional—needs to be on the bargaining table from the beginning.

A new Transatlantic grand strategy requires not only that the United States and Europe establish what their shared threats are but also that they speak clearly to issues where they differ in emphasis. Governments need to be direct and specific, rather than falling prey yet again to ideological flights of fancy and grandiose but unworkable pronouncements. Amidst the differences between the United States and Europe on a range of issues, one key principle to be kept in focus is this: globalization, as the intersection of international politics, markets, culture and technology, has to take a back seat to the nation-state and state action in the realm of security and foreign policy. While globalization has generated complex interdependence across the international economic system, it lags in importance behind action by unitary states and by the NATO alliance when it comes to Transatlantic security. If a new strategic dialogue among the West is to succeed, the current emphasis on globalization in policy debates needs to give way.

The United States and Europe both face a combination of internal political pressures and external threats of a magnitude not seen since the Cold War, raising questions about the security of the Transatlantic realm itself. The confluence of the deepening internal disorder in the United States and Europe and rising tensions across the globe demand a coherent and coordinated strategic response from the United States and Europe. What is urgently needed is a new strategic dialogue in the West, for in light of the impending tectonic shifts in the global power distribution, especially in Asia and Eurasia, the United States and Europe need each other more today than at any point since the Cold War.

The post The West Needs a Strategy appeared first on The American Interest.

Courting Corruption

In January 2010, the nation’s highest court issued its opinion in the Citizens United campaign finance case, its most controversial ruling in this century. Yet despite the widespread criticism it has provoked, the full meaning and impact of this decision is still poorly understood by political leaders and the general public. While the court’s specific holding—that corporations can spend independently of candidates in elections—is widely recognized, its underlying constitutional rationale is rarely discussed. This is important because that rationale has nearly erased the court’s longtime standard for evaluating campaign finance restrictions, casting a shadow over every local, state, and Federal effort to control money in politics. In just seven years, the role of the wealthy few in financing Federal elections has increased geometrically.

Why has so little attention been paid to this legal transformation? Certainly, America’s byzantine system of campaign finance regulation makes it difficult for observers to comprehend the significance of judicial decisions. But in this case, the Supreme Court itself has been the primary obfuscator. Even as it has claimed to be largely following its long-reigning campaign finance precedent—Buckley v. Valeo (1976)—it has rather surreptitiously undermined Buckley’s justification for campaign finance regulation.

How Citizens United and its Descendants Changed the Game

In Citizens United, the court reaffirmed Buckley’s ruling that campaign spending that is not coordinated with a candidate does not pose a sufficient danger of corruption—or its appearance—to justify government intrusion into freedom of expression. However, it failed to take account of Buckley’s important qualifier that there was not “presently” such a danger in 1976, when only $15,802 had been spent independently in the 1974 congressional elections. The court then took one further step. It extended the independent spending umbrella, which covered individuals and non-corporate associations, to corporations, thereby invalidating a Federal law (Buckley had not considered this issue).1

Yet contrary to much political conversation, for-profit corporations have not become the leading independent spenders in elections. Rather, the primary actors are new political committees, commonly called “super PACS.” Next, but of much less importance, are tax-exempt nonprofits (social welfare organizations and trade associations, often adopting corporate forms, and labor unions). Dubbed “dark money groups” because, unlike super PACS, they are not required by Federal regulators to disclose their donors, these organizations have long participated in campaigns as secondary activities. Before Citizens United, they, as well as for-profit corporations, were permitted to run “issue ads” tearing down or building up candidates—so long as they avoided “magic words” of “express advocacy” like “vote for” or “vote against.” They were also, with limited exceptions, prohibited from mentioning the names of candidates in television and radio spots 30 to 60 days before primaries and general elections. However, with the court’s enabling of independent corporate spending, these moderate restraints have disappeared. So Citizen United did not create super PACs or dark money groups, or introduce corporate electioneering. What it really did was allow nonprofits and for-profit corporations to make more explicit “vote for” and “vote against” appeals at any time.

What proved truly revolutionary in Citizens United was not its specific holding—which, just by the way, went well beyond what the case required—but its underlying legal rationale.2 In the court’s 5-4 majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy recalled Buckley’s characterization of corruption: “To the extent that large contributions are given to secure a political quid pro quo from current and potential officeholders, the integrity of our system of representative democracy is undermined.” He then interpreted this sentence narrowly as referring to something akin to criminal bribery. He emphasized that a Federal judge in the important 2003 McConnell campaign finance case did not find, in a more than 100,000-page record, “any direct examples of votes being exchanged for . . . expenditures.” Therefore, he concluded: “This confirms Buckley’s reasoning that independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.” By making it more difficult to establish a threat of corruption, the court made it harder to justify campaign finance restrictions. Ironically, then, the Court achieved its reaffirmation/extension of Buckley’s holding on independent spending by constricting Buckley’s definition of the kind of corruption the government could legitimately regulate!

The broader impact of this new interpretation became manifest just two months later when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided the comparatively unknown SpeechNow case. The court unanimously ruled that the Federal government could no longer enforce its $5,000 limit on the amount a donor could contribute to an independent spender. The opinion argued that Citizens United had been faithful to Buckley’s original definition of corruption “that focused on quid pro quo.” In contrast, certain intervening cases, such as McConnell, had “expanded the concept to include the ‘appearance of undue influence’ created by large donations given for the purpose of ‘buying access.’” Without further analysis, the Court simply deduced that since Citizens United held that “independent expenditures do not corrupt or create the appearance of corruption, contributions to groups that make only independent expenditures also cannot….”

The Court’s opinion contained no separate discussion of the donors to independent groups who, unlike the groups themselves, are free to discuss or prearrange their efforts with benefiting candidates, and even to contribute directly to their campaigns. It took no account of Buckley’s famous analysis that reasonable restrictions on contributions were lesser threats to freedom of speech than ones on expenditures because donors did not speak themselves. Thus, it seems fair to conclude that while Citizens United inspired the DC Circuit court’s deductive decision, it did not compel it. Nevertheless, by 2013, five other Circuit Courts had cited SpeechNow in issuing similar preliminary or final rulings.

It was these appellate courts’ unshackling of wealthy donors that spawned super PACs and powered the enormous surge in independent expenditures. The latter more than quadrupled between the 2008 presidential and congressional elections and the 2016 ones, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.3 By the 2016 election cycle, mainly super PACs, but also nonprofits and assorted corporations, individuals, and other groups, were spending $1.43 billion—about 22 percent of the total cost of the elections. Even these figures underestimated their impact, because super PACs, which spent $1.1 billion, concentrated their efforts on the most competitive races, especially those for the Senate and the presidency. (Donald Trump was less dependent on super PACs than Hillary Clinton during his unorthodox general election campaign, but this was the exception that proved the rule.) Most important, there was little that was democratic about this spending. Super PACs were overwhelmingly financed by contributions from the wealthy few. In the 2016 cycle, the top 1 percent of donors (516 individuals or organizations) provided 76.5 percent of the funds raised and the top hundred givers supplied 61 percent.

And the beat went on. In the 2014 McCutcheon case, the Supreme Court overturned a third Federal limit, one that capped a person’s aggregate contributions to all candidates, parties, and other political committees at $123,200 per two-year election cycle. Buckley had upheld the original provision as preventing donors from circumventing limits on contributions to a candidate by donating to multiple political and party committees that were likely to support their favorites. In the Court’s plurality opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts referenced Citizen United’s narrow interpretation of Buckley. “Any regulation,” he declared, “must . . . target what we have called ‘quid pro quo’ corruption or its appearance. . . . That Latin phrase captures the notion of a direct exchange of an official act for money.” This narrow interpretation of Buckley now contributed to the Court’s overturning of one of Buckley’s holdings (the reversal was also based on the Court’s finding that legal and regulatory changes since 1976 had obviated the danger of circumvention).

Buckley vs. Citizens United et al.

It is not just that the Supreme Court has been tampering with Buckley’s definition of corruption. It has also quietly disregarded its key conclusions on the relevance of real-world harbingers of corruption and the importance of preventing the appearance of corruption.

A close examination of the Buckley opinion finds support for Citizens United’s and McCutcheon’s emphasis on quid pro quo corruption, but not for confining the meaning of that phrase to “direct examples of votes being exchanged for . . . expenditures” or “a direct exchange of an official act for money.” It reveals that, unlike the contemporary Court, Buckley gave strong weight to independent evidence of access and influence-seeking by those pursuing obvious policy and personal interests because this signaled a danger of corruption. Finally, Buckley was distinctive in viewing “the appearance of corruption”—an inherently lower standard than corruption for justifying government regulation—as “of almost equal concern as the danger of actual quid pro quo arrangements.” By misinterpreting a portion of Buckley’s anti-corruption rationale and refraining from discussing its other key premises, the Court recast its jurisprudence on campaign finance regulation.

Defining Corruption

In the first section of its opinion, Buckley determined that the government had “a constitutionally sufficient interest” in preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption “spawned by the real or imagined coercive influence of large financial contributions on candidates’ positions and on their actions if elected to office.” Regarding actual corruption, it stated, “To the extent that large contributions are given to secure a political quid pro quo from current and potential officeholders, the integrity of our system is undermined.” Like Citizens United and its progeny, this definition highlighted the central problem of quid pro quos. But unlike them, it made no reference to a direct exchange of money for an official act, which is of course the focus of anti-bribery laws.

Indeed, the Court specifically rejected the argument that such laws offered a less restrictive means than contribution limits of combatting “proven and suspected quid pro quo arrangements.” It stated, “the giving and taking of bribes deal with only the most blatant and specific attempts of those with money to influence governmental action.” Neither the Citizens United nor the McCutcheon opinions take note of this passage. Unfortunately, the original opinion did not elaborate on its statement, but its words clearly implied that there were subtler “quid pro quo arrangements” than those subject to anti-bribery prosecutions. Consider the current Federal anti-bribery law. It contains specific terms that can be used to target: whoever “gives, offers, or promises” contributions to an elected official “with the intent to influence an official act” or an elected official who “demands, seeks, receives, or accepts” contributions “in return for being influenced in the performance of an official act.” It is not difficult to imagine how a donor or officeholder could evade their application via the proverbial winks and nods or by employing more nuanced tactics to achieve the same quid pro quo.

This is approximately what Deputy Solicitor General Richard Friedman told Justice Potter Stewart, the author of this section of the opinion, during the oral argument of the case. Stewart had argued, “[I]nsofar as [money] is used to buy people to vote, that is covered by other criminal statutes.” Friedman responded, “[Those statues cover] purchasing a vote in the crude sense, if it is bribery. But there are often subtle influences that . . . may not come to the purchase of a vote, but which may nevertheless have the same effect.” This idea resonated in the first draft of Stewart’s opinion, found among the Justice’s papers. After the reference to the limitations of anti-bribery laws that appears in the final opinion, the draft added: “Experience teaches that such laws are inadequate to police more subtle understandings and logic suggests that they have no effect on the use of the club of massive contributions to influence the candidate’s stance on public questions.” This sentence, along with a few others elaborating on the discussion of corruption, was deleted in the second draft that Stewart sent to his colleagues. At the time, his clerk reported to Justice Lewis Powell’s clerk that this second draft was “greatly reduced in length but not changed in substance.” Unfortunately, this seems to be a place where a concern for concision weakened the opinion. What remains clear in the Court’s opinion is that quid pro quo was more than bribery.

In his remorseful 2011 book, Capitol Punishment, ex-lobbyist and convicted briber Jack Abramoff discusses informal arrangements that resemble what Justice Stewart’s draft called “more subtle understandings.” Abramoff writes: “As a lobbyist, I thought it only natural and right that my clients reward those members who saved them such substantial sums with generous contributions. This quid pro quo became one of the hallmarks of our lobbying efforts. . . . The early, grateful contributions by the [Indian] tribes soon led to contributions designed to create gratitude on the part of the member.”

Clearly, one way to realize an effective quid pro quo without falling afoul of bribery laws is for a candidate to solicit donations from those seeking official favors and, upon election, direct relevant agencies to meet with the donor, file progress reports on negotiations, and hopefully come to an agreement with him. As I write, a well-researched front-page story in the New York Times (July 24, 2017) reports that this is what happened in New York City when Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to assist a major donor who was having difficulty paying for his lease on city property.

Detecting the Danger of Corruption

It has been remarkably little noticed, but in contrast to Citizens United and its descendants, Buckley considered certain real-world cases of influence-seeking that clearly fell short of quid pro quo corruption as evidence strengthening the case for anti-corruption regulation. Buckley stated, “Although the scope of such pernicious [corrupt] practices can never be reliably ascertained, the deeply disturbing examples surfacing after the 1972 election demonstrate that the problem is not an illusory one.” A footnote referred to a page of text and three long notes from opinion of the DC Court of Appeals, which “discussed a number of the abuses uncovered after the 1972 elections.”

Remarkably, almost all of these examples—which were drawn from an investigative report by the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Campaign Activities and factual findings agreed to by the parties to the case—plainly lacked the characteristics of quid pro quo corruption. Either there was no decisive evidence of a “quid pro quo arrangement” or the specific quos donors might be pursuing had not yet been identified. What was clear, however, was the general political interests of the donors and the relevance of the recipients of their contributions. Donors were portrayed as seeking or obtaining access to officeholders whom they hoped would use their influence to benefit (or prevent harm to) the donors’ interests in the future.

“Looming large” in congressional and public perceptions, the appellate judges recounted, was “the revelation concerning contributions of dairy organizations to [President Richard] Nixon fundraisers, in order to gain a meeting with White House officials on price supports.” Nixon himself later met with dairy representatives and promptly overruled his Secretary of Agriculture on raising price supports. But the judges made no attempt to link the quid of contributions to the quo of official action.  “It is not material for present purposes,” they wrote, “to review . . . the controverted issue of whether the President’s decision was in fact, or was represented to be, conditioned upon or ‘linked to’ the reaffirmation of the pledge [to provide $2 million to the President’s re-election campaign].” The donors got access and possibly influenced policy, but there was no proven quid pro quo.

Next, the appellate court discussed “lavish contributions by groups or individuals with special interests to legislators from both parties.” In 1973-74 campaign season the American Dental Association donated $60,500 to 32 of the 37 California House incumbents who faced major party opposition: 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans, ranging from conservative Republican Barry Goldwater, Jr., to liberal Democrat Ron Dellums. In the same period, H. Ross Perot, whose company was one of the largest suppliers to the government of data processing for Medicare and Medicaid programs, contributed $50,000 to members of the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees and to a House Appropriations Subcommittee, all of which had some jurisdictional responsibility for those programs. The court also highlighted testimony by corporate executives who made illegal contributions either as “a calling card, something that would get us in the door and make our point of view heard,” or for fear that not responding to a campaign solicitation would result in “a competitive disadvantage.” In all of these instances, the donors provided quids but there were no identifiable quos beyond the hope for access and future favorable treatment for their interests.

Lastly, the Court noted “the scale and volume” of President Nixon’s appointment of large contributors to ambassadorships and “the widespread understanding that such contributions were a means of obtaining the recognition needed to be actively considered.” It acknowledged that the fundraisers “routinely advised that only the President could guarantee nomination.” Here there was an identifiable quo in the distance, but your quid only got you on a list for consideration.

How then did these examples show that the “problem” of corruption was “not an illusory one”? The answer would have been clearer had the court addressed this question explicitly. Still, the only reasonable inference consistent with Buckley’s repeated reference to corruption as involving “quid pro quo arrangements” is that these large donors’ strivings for access and influence were danger signs of potential corruption. They were, so to speak, the canaries in the coalmine. As previously mentioned, the Court prefaced its reference to the Circuit Court findings by noting that “the scope” of corrupt practices “can never be reliably ascertained,” indicating how hard it was to document actual corruption. And after referring to the Circuit Court’s examples, the next sentence in the opinion begins, “Of almost equal concern as the danger of actual quid pro quo arrangements. . . ” [emphasis added]. This is additional evidence that the court viewed these examples not as corruption but potential harbingers of corruption, further justifying government regulation.

The Significance of “Appearance of Corruption”

Buckley held that “the appearance of corruption spawned by the…imagined coercive influence of large financial contributions” was a constitutionally sufficient justification for contribution limits. “The impact of the appearance of corruption stemming from public awareness of the opportunities for abuse inherent in a regime of large individual contributions” was “of almost equal concern as the danger of actual quid pro quo arrangements.” Therefore, “Congress could legitimately conclude that the avoidance of the appearance of improper influence ‘is also critical…if confidence in the system of representative Government is not to be eroded to a dangerous extent.’”

Thus, to pass constitutional muster, the government had only to convince the Court that it was preventing contributions that the public could reasonably imagine were corrupting. Some of the aforementioned examples from the DC Circuit Court might well fit this criterion. To see how this lower standard for constitutional action might broaden the current anti-corruption rationale, consider the potential impact of amending Chief Justice Roberts’s statement in McCutcheon to read “the appearance of a direct exchange of an official act for money.” [emphasis added]. Yet Citizen United’s trail of decisions give only perfunctory attention to apparent corruption.

The appearance standard was so important that it became the deciding factor in Buckley’s dismissal of an “overbreadth” challenge to the law limiting an individual’s contribution to a candidate to $1,000 per election. The argument was that since most large contributors do not seek improper influence, this limit was disproportionate to the threat. In response, the Court underlined that broad restrictions on contributions were mainly justified by the interest in “safeguarding against the appearance of impropriety.” In other words, apparent corruption occurred much more frequently than actual corruption, justifying more far-reaching government controls. 

The Price of Deflection

Often the Supreme Court divides over whether a precedent is being correctly applied. For example, the McConnell campaign finance case upheld Congress’s ban on unlimited “soft money” contributions to political parties for partisan voter identification, registration, and get-out-the-vote campaigns, and for “issue ads” that mention candidates. In that case, the majority invoked Buckley’s concepts of the harbingers and appearance of corruption to uphold a prohibition on trading large party contributions for access and influence. Justice Kennedy’s minority opinion protested that Buckley concerned quids that were solicited by a candidate or official who could deliver a quo, not those otherwise received by his or her party and not spent directly on his campaign. Kennedy also insisted that regulating contributions to prevent mere access and influence exceeded Buckley’s quid pro quo standard. Both sides presented plausible arguments for their positions.

In contrast, the majority opinions in Citizens United and its descendants have unfolded by declaration, deduction, and disregard. The present Supreme Court has misread Buckley’s definition of corruption. More fundamentally, it has declined to confront Buckley’s full anti-corruption rationale. In the process, the Court has helped keep the public in the dark about where it is going on campaign finance regulation and, just as important, what it is leaving behind. This has impeded broad political discussion of the appropriate criteria for the regulation of money in politics. Thus, even if Citizens United were overturned by the Court or by a future constitutional amendment, Congress has given little thought to what kinds of campaign finance restrictions it might pass on the day after.

Furthermore, the Court’s passive-aggressive approach to Buckley opened the way for the D.C. Circuit Court and its followers to go beyond Citizens United by allowing unlimited contributions for independent expenditures. The SpeechNow decision gave birth to super PACs. Had Citizens United dealt squarely with Buckley’s anti-corruption rationale, it would have likely addressed Buckley’s fundamental distinction between contributions (“symbolic speech” that can be more easily regulated) and expenditures, rather than leaving the issue to be decided by the deduction of an appellate court. Seven years later, we still do not know where the Supreme Court would come down on this fateful issue or whether it will rule on it in the future.

Finally, had the Citizens United majority spoken more forthrightly, it would have elevated the Court’s internal debate. The four dissenters candidly expressed their desire to expand Buckley’s definition of corruption. For them, donors’ general efforts to gain access to and influence over officeholders—even without the identified political interests and relevant official targets described in Buckley’s footnoted examples—were part of a “spectrum” of corruption where “the difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree not kind.” In the end, both the majority and the minority were dealing with, or circling around, the central elements of Buckley’s anti-corruption rationale: the nature and relevance of quid pro quo corruption, the significance of the appearance of corruption, and what other kinds of influence-seeking might justify regulation to prevent corruption and its appearance. Had the majority directly challenged Buckley’s key premises, it would have clarified its differences with the minority. Possibly, the ensuing discussion might have narrowed the gap between them. That still happens sometimes, when ideas openly duel. It cannot happen when serious people duck genuine debate.

1This article does not discuss the separate category of political party independent expenditures.

2See Nathaniel Persily, “The Campaign Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” The American Interest (November/December 2015).

3https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/ accessed July 15, 2017. Figures in this paragraph are drawn from browsing choices on this web page. 

The post Courting Corruption appeared first on The American Interest.

China Warns India Against Building Border Road

Hardly a week after Indian and Chinese troops pelted stones at each other in the Ladakh region of Kashmir, India has begun building a road near the Line of Actual Control with China—and the Chinese are not happy. From The Hindu:

China on Thursday slammed India for apparently building a new road in the Ladakh sector, but lavished praise on Pakistan as its key partner. The move signals a sharper polarisation of Beijing’s ties in the subcontinent, following the Doklam crisis.

“It seems that [the] Indian side is slapping its own face,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said, in response to reports that India was building a road between Marsimik La to Hot Spring. The area is not far from the Pangong lake in Ladakh, where there was an unarmed clash between Indian and Chinese troops earlier this month.

Ms. Hua’s warning that the decision to build a road could boomerang on India, came in the backdrop of the crisis in the Doklam plateau, where Indian and Chinese troops are engaged in a lengthy stand-off.

China’s angry response to the road construction suggests that border tensions in Ladakh may be more serious than first thought. What could have been a one-off incident of stone-throwing and shoving may well escalate into a second major border dispute, even as the Chinese and Indians remain at loggerheads in the Doklam plateau, hundreds of miles away.

In one way, the emerging dispute in Ladakh mirrors the beginnings of the Doklam crisis. There, too, the dispute was triggered by a road—but in that case, it was the Chinese who were constructing it and the Indians who objected. The parallel has not been lost on the Chinese, who have swiftly accused New Delhi of hypocrisy. “The Indian side is closely following China’s road-building recently but India’s actions themselves have proven that the Indian side says something and does another,” said the spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry. “Its words are in complete contradiction to its deeds in terms of border issues.”

Of course, neither side can claim the virtue of consistency here; both are positioning themselves for advantage and exploiting ambiguities along their frontier. But it is the Chinese whose actions have instigated the immediate conflicts: in Doklam, by extending a road into Bhutanese territory that threatened India’s vulnerable Chicken’s Neck; and in Ladakh, by provocatively crossing into the India-claimed section of the Pangong Lake. The latter move occurred on India’s Independence Day, and it sent an ominous reminder to New Delhi about the lake’s strategic vulnerabilities, as the Indian Express explains:

By itself, the lake does not have major tactical significance. But it lies in the path of the Chushul approach, one of the main approaches that China can use for an offensive into Indian-held territory. Indian assessments show that a major Chinese offensive, if it comes, will flow across both the north and south of the lake. During the 1962 war, this was where China launched its main offensive.

If the Chinese wanted to intimidate New Delhi with the incursion into Ladakh, however, their move may have backfired; it seems to have only strengthened India’s resolve to fortify and develop its side of the border. Days after the stone-throwing incident at Pangong Lake, the Indian government speedily approved construction of the road that the Chinese are now protesting. The road in question is just one of dozens that India is planning to construct along its side of the Line of Actual Control, after years of neglect that have left China’s side of the border much more heavily developed. Beijing is none too happy about India trying to catch up.

Regardless of how these particular disputes resolve themselves, this kind of open confrontation and intensified competition looks likely to become a new normal for the two rivals. It’s not just a matter of petty grievances over unclear borders. The competition is compounded by a host of factors: historical enmity, longstanding disagreements over Tibet, Indian anxieties about China’s alliance with Pakistan, and Chinese concerns about the U.S. throwing in definitively with India. As South Asia rebalances and both Beijing and New Delhi grow stronger, the forecast is for more conflict, not less.

The post China Warns India Against Building Border Road appeared first on The American Interest.

The Lost Leviathan

The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony

Perry Anderson

New York: Verso (2017)

Perry Anderson, the noted New Left Marxist historian, has written a new book on the history of an uncomfortable idea: hegemony. The peripeteia in the subtitle refers to a sudden shift in narrative—a reversal of fortune in a literary arc. And it says something about Anderson’s standing that a publisher would consent to an obscure literary term on the cover of a book meant for a general audience. But whether it’s the right term is not exactly clear—was hegemony ever on the outs? As Anderson shows, while occasionally the term becomes publicly vulgar, there are always professional euphemists ready to proclaim its virtues or cloak it in the friendly veil of “global leadership”.

The book is not a comprehensive, heavily-footnoted study of hegemony—but then again, it’s not meant to be. Instead, it presents a series of vignettes tracing the evolution of thought about hegemony—mostly modern, mostly Western, with some fascinating detours into Asia. The intellectual history is worthwhile on its own terms. But by the time Anderson is tangling with today’s conceptions of hegemony, the debate becomes genuinely compelling—especially in the shadow of the Trump Presidency.

As a modern political term, hegemony has only existed for a century and a half, but the arguments around it extend back millennia. The deep ambiguity of hegemony repeatedly surfaces in the book as a battle between two competing notions: benevolent (and perhaps necessary) leadership versus brutal, self-interested domination. In its original sense of hēgemonia—leadership based on consent—Thucydides used the concept to describe the role played by Athens in spearheading Greek resistance against the Persian Empire. But in his narrative, hēgemonia is never far from its evil twin, arkhē—coercion that extracts assent by force. Thucydides argues, in part, that Athens’ transition from the first to the second eventually leads to the Peloponnesian War. Yet even in his own book the moral distinction is unclear; Pericles, for example, argues that Athenians should be proud of arkhē. As Anderson admits, there is no clear defining line between the two. Hegemony is “unthinkable without assent, impracticable without force.”

This tension between the two faces of hegemony is repeatedly explored in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. It reappears as wangdao (“The Kingly Way”) versus badao (culture of force) in imperial China. It surfaces again in interwar Germany as Herrschaft (domination) versus Einfluss (influence). The Marxist conception of hegemony, seeing everything through the lens of class conflict, turned away from the international and developed a domestic view of hegemony as a relationship between social groups. This tradition, beginning with Pavel Axelrod and George Plekhanov, paralleled the ancient Greek conception of a hegemon as the leader of an alliance. But instead of an alliance of states against Persia, it was to be an alliance of social classes against the tsar, with the working class playing the role of Athens. For Lenin, the hegemony of the revolutionary class meant possessing ultimate strength, but also leading by example. This conception soon curdled into the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The influential Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci picks up on this thread, conceiving of hegemony as something originating in social relations. But for him, it came to denote the sometimes-invisible but pervasive dominance of the bourgeoisie. This was a different kind of consent, “not the adhesion of allies in a common cause, but the submission of adversaries to an order inimical to them.” How was this hegemony achieved? One path was through intellectuals (the pundits and the thought leaders, as we would call them today), who became “enablers of hegemony”. Another was through civil society—newspapers, clubs, and churches who hawked “in one way or another the outlook of capital”. Far from being a liberating force, for Gramsci civil society upheld hegemonic ideologies that kept elites in power.

As the narrative heads into modern day, Anderson gets more antagonistic with his interlocutors. He is contemptuous of the German-American scholar Hans Morgenthau, a key founder of the “realist” school of international politics. Anderson describes his first book, Scientific Man and Power Politics (1946), as “a cannonade against the predominance of legalism, moralism and sentimentalism,” which were “products of a decadent middle-class liberalism, patron of the forces of nationalism which would destroy it.” But despite Morgenthau’s links with Carl Schmitt, and his suspicion of majoritarian democracy (a common sentiment after 1933), he never advanced an illiberal critique of modern political life. Anderson presents Morgenthau as a figure who was morally and intellectually compromised, not even by his own will to power, but by his will to proximity to power. He claims Morgenthau continuously watered down his critique of American hegemony, to the point of embracing it in later years as a means of personal advancement. This line of argument is petty and poorly substantiated. Morgenthau was above all an anti-foundationalist, who refused to embrace any ideology fully in the way that (say) Anderson has sometimes done. He remained a harsh critic of U.S. foreign policy throughout the Cold War, including during the Vietnam War, but also refused a position of moral equivalence between the U.S. and USSR.

Anderson’s greatest disdain is reserved for liberal justifications of hegemony—the economistic reinvention of the hegemon as the provider of public goods and the protector of global commons. This line of thought becomes especially powerful after World War II, through the works of Charles Kindleberger, Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, and more recently in John Ikenberry’s vision of the “Liberal Leviathan”. For Anderson, this view gives rise to the stubborn liberal inability to see American hegemony as anything but benign; in their hands, the so-called liberal order becomes a euphemism for American domination. Anderson has no patience for such wooly-headed softening of the concept. Hegemony is force, he seems to say. Stop dressing it up! (Given their vastly different views on the nature of the state, it may seem surprising to have a Marxist siding with the realists on this question. Yet realism and Marxism always shared an appreciation of the centrality of hegemony, and a deep cynicism about the exercise of power as an altruistic endeavor.)

In his contempt for hegemony, Anderson sometimes turns the story into a polemical genealogy, albeit a truncated and selective one. In his view, there can be no demand for hegemony. It is something to be imposed from the outside. For those who experience it, hegemony cannot bring relief, only resistance or weary acquiescence. This is consistent with Anderson’s broader ideological views, but also happens to be a selective reading of modern history. After 1945, both superpowers were hegemonic in their aspirations and universalist in their goals. The dark side of this utopian universalism was a shared imperial mentality, tinged with a self-righteous paternalism. This is the face of hegemony that Anderson attacks. And indeed, many of today’s laments about the waning global order tend to forget that outside of Western Europe, the “liberal order” was not always liberal and rarely very orderly. In Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, its exercise and maintenance have at times become a flimsy mask for American dominance.

But the parallels between American and Soviet hegemony do not require a position of moral (or even definitional) equivalence between them. Europeans felt a range of sentiments about American postwar dominance, which the French disdained and the Austrians cheerfully accepted. Still, by and large, America’s presence in Western Europe comprised what Geir Lundestad called “an empire by invitation.” The local fear was not too much American involvement, but too little.

On the continent’s eastern half, Soviet presence was also initially welcomed, but the feeling quickly dissipated once people realized what this presence actually entailed. In post-1945 Europe, the fastest way for a young believer to reject communism was to experience it. The periodic Soviet incursions into Eastern Europe testified to the fragility and artifice of local communist support. American hegemony in Europe brought unease, cultural anxiety, or feelings of inferiority. Soviet hegemony brought tanks into the street—an unease of a qualitatively different sort.

Anderson’s critique of liberal hegemony was written before Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in November of last year. And in a way, Trump’s election might serve as a vindication of Anderson’s attack—the liberal leviathan, for all the triumphant proclamations that followed the Soviet collapse, may be fading in front of our eyes. All the more reason to seriously consider the ways in which ideas about hegemony have been abused by its practitioners, either to fit their own ideological needs or to reflect the pressing concerns of the time. Anderson’s book, however flawed, manages to accomplish that task in an impressive fashion.

The post The Lost Leviathan appeared first on The American Interest.

Twilight for Hong Kong’s Democracy?

Exactly twenty years since it reverted to Chinese rule, Hong Kong has its first political prisoners. A group of 16 young activists who took part in the unauthorized pro-democracy protests that began in 2014 were spared jail time after their first trial this past year. The judge sentenced the young protesters to varying lengths of community service, justifying his relatively mild decision by arguing that they had fought “for a noble cause.” However, the Hong Kong government, which brought the cases to court, was dissatisfied with the judge’s leniency. It saw nothing noble in the youngsters’ activism, and so it appealed.

By the time the cases reached the appellate court, all the defendants had already fulfilled the terms of the community service imposed on them. No matter: On August 15, the first group of 13 protesters—who had stormed the local legislature when it was holding a nighttime vote in the absence of the opposition to approve a highly controversial and disruptive development project—were sentenced to between 8 to 13 months in jail for “unlawful assembly.” This second, stunning sentence met with the approval of Hong Kong’s Department of Justice.

Two days later, three of the most renowned student activists were put on the stand again and received jail time: Joshua Wong, now 20, who was still a minor at the time of the protests that became known as the Umbrella Movement; Nathan Law, 24; and Alex Chow, 27.

The sentences have shocked many observers, both locally and internationally, for their harshness and vindictiveness. The same government that refused to talk to its young people through years of growing political polarization now seems to rejoice in jailing them. The young activists were taken to two maximum-security prisons on the very evening of the sentencing.

The prison terms imposed on the student leaders mark the true end of Hong Kong’s Occupy protests, which blocked key districts of Hong Kong for a full 79 days. But they are by no means the end of the story. Many more court cases linked to those protests are due to start in the days and weeks ahead, and the sentences already pronounced by the Court of Appeal make clear that more pro-democracy activists will wind up behind bars in Hong Kong.

The consequences for those found guilty are greater than the immediate jail terms: Not only will these young people have to go through life with criminal records, but by serving sentences of three or more months in jail, they are automatically barred from running for election for the next five years.

Further proof that both the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities do not want any of the Umbrella Movement activists to enter into Hong Kong’s political institutions is easy to find. Nathan Law, an activist who in September 2016 became Hong Kong’s youngest legislator, was disqualified from office for having taken the oath with an inflection in his voice that betrayed a lack of sincerity—or so the judge decreed. As with the recent case against the 16 youngsters, Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive at the time, formally brought the case against Law on behalf of the government—a sign of how firmly opposed the government is to engaging with Hong Kong’s new brand of pro-democracy activists. Law is now barred from the current legislature, and from the one that will be elected in 2021. He and the other jailed activists will not be allowed to run for election until 2026.

Hong Kong’s governance has been under strain ever since it ceased to be a British colony and reverted to Chinese rule in 1997. A semi-democratic territory with more than seven million inhabitants, it boasts a free internet and a free press, the right to form political parties and hold demonstrations, and certain voting rights (if not real universal suffrage). Its universities are still free to teach subjects deemed too sensitive on the Chinese mainland, freedom of religion is guaranteed to all, and non-government organizations are active in a variety of fields, including human rights and environmental protection. Yet Hong Kong offers no real means by which the citizenry can hold the authorities accountable. Political representation is strictly limited: Though Beijing rules Hong Kong under the increasingly hollow formulas of “One Country Two Systems” and “A high degree of autonomy,” it is too obsessed with control to let Hong Kong truly govern itself.

The territory is run by an Executive who is not elected by universal suffrage, but rather selected by a Chief Executive who is, in turn, selected by a group of 1,200 people whom the central authorities consider to be representative. The Chief Executive’s loyalty, thus, has always been to the central government—its direct boss—even while tasked with governing seven million people who are, in large part, descendants of those who fled the Chinese mainland and Communist rule.

Friction between the people and their rulers is unavoidable, and has only increased in the past twenty years. The mass demonstrations of 2014, which drew more than 100,000 people at their peak, can be seen as the overflow of frustration at the lack of agency and the means to address the people’s concerns.

The spark that ignited the lengthy occupation was the government’s betrayal of its promise of greater political representation. The first demonstrations erupted as Beijing published its proposal to reform the election process for the Chief Executive. After delaying the provision, sanctioned by the Basic Law (Hong Kong’s mini-constitution), that there must be universal suffrage for the election of the Chief Executive, the central authorities came up with what they deemed an acceptable compromise: Everyone would be allowed to vote, but only for a maximum of three candidates, pre-screened by the authorities. Sort of like Iranian democracy, in other words. That version of watered-down universal suffrage did not pass muster with Hong Kong’s pro-democracy politicians and their numerous supporters, including the majority of Hong Kong’s youth.

That this request for true universal suffrage should end, for now, with the jailing of student activists shows that, after twenty years of trying to square an impossible circle, Beijing has lost patience with Hong Kong. It has decided there is no point in trying to keep up appearances any longer. Despite China’s many efforts to favor those political parties belonging to the pro-Beijing camp—permitting them to receive funding from Chinese donors, mobilizing pro-Beijing grassroots groups, or allowing a number of their representatives to sit in high-level positions in the Chinese government, for example—Hong Kong’s hearts and minds have yet to be won over. On the contrary: The more China has attempted to assert its control, despite the velvet glove that initially covered its heavy hand, the more opposition it has encountered.

But the evolution of Hong Kong in the past twenty years also reflects the changes in China itself. The past few years have been particularly dire for those hoping for political reforms and greater openness in the country. The leadership of General Party Secretary Xi Jinping, who is also China’s President, has been marked by a growing assertiveness of China on the international scene, and the subsequent increase of its economic, diplomatic, and military clout. At the same time, political repression inside the country has been intensifying, reaching levels comparable to the immediate post-Tiananmen years—enhanced, though, by the greater scope for control offered by new technologies. It would have been naive to hope that a politically repressive China that has been jailing its own writers, dissidents, lawyers, feminists, labor rights activists, and many others would allow reform in Hong Kong. After all, Hong Kong enjoys freedoms that are unthinkable on the mainland, and its hunger for even greater freedoms comes across to unreconstructed autocrats as an unpatriotic lack of gratitude—and also as an example for mainland Chinese that the Politburo would prefer not to exist.

Nothing is over yet: The large demonstration that followed the jailing of the student activists (the biggest protest since the Umbrella Movement, with participation estimated at 22,000 by the police and at least three times that by the organizers) has shown that, even if depressed by the lack of tangible achievements, the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong is still strong. It will need to remain so, hoping for the day in which China, too, will move toward democracy, or at least a less repressive society.

The post Twilight for Hong Kong’s Democracy? appeared first on The American Interest.