Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 156

Macron’s First of Many Confrontations

The revolt begins. The Financial Times:

Emmanuel Macron is locked in a public battle with France’s senior general over military spending cuts as he faces his toughest opposition yet to proposed austerity measures.

The dispute threatens to become a political crisis as speculation mounts that General Pierre de Villiers, the highly regarded chief of staff, might step down in protest this week ahead of a formal meeting with the French president on Friday.

The spat, over a proposed €850m worth of military cuts, highlights the scale of the challenge facing Mr. Macron as he targets €60bn worth of savings over five years while keeping an election pledge to cut taxes.

Everybody in France loves the idea of budget cuts, but nobody in France is willing to accept budget cuts that affect them. The well-respected head of the armed forces is blackmailing Macron with the threat of a high profile resignation. France is full of other people who will use every weapon that comes to hand to block the cuts that apply to them.

There is no real political constituency for cuts in France, and Macron, a political outsider with no strong, institutional support in the country’s political parties, is going to have the fight of his life as he struggles with the deficit.

If Macron loses, France loses. But too many French don’t care about that so long as their own interests are protected—at least in the short term.

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A Death Rattle, Not Salvation

On the one-year anniversary of Turkey’s failed coup, domestic and international critics of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thought they saw a glimmer of hope in what has become a tide of dark, despotic rule emanating from Ankara. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the country’s largest opposition bloc, Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), began a 250-mile protest march, featuring a series of demonstrations in which tens of thousands chanted “rights, law, justice!

So stirring were these images that they led to an acclamatory revival of Kılıçdaroğlu’s old sobriquet, the “Turkish Gandhi” (originally a minor jab at his frail, diminutive frame) among Turkey-watchers. Since launching his own would-be Salt March, the opposition MP has been lavished with praise, inspiring one retired diplomat to conclude in yesterday’s Arab Digest:

“But I do see signs that the tide may be turning against [President Erdoğan] both politically and economically in ways which would give a united opposition at least a fighting chance in 2019.”

Comments like these are premature—at best. Through seven years of Kılıçdaroğlu’s leadership, the CHP has stagnated, never garnering more than a quarter of the vote. It has repeatedly shown it lacks the discipline and organization to win a majority in a national election, and has failed to breathe new life into its ineffective, provincial coterie of former activists, who seem unwilling to rally around anything approximating a bold vision.

And even if Kılıçdaroğlu has rediscovered himself, and were to oversee an unlikely resurgence of his party’s popularity, Turkey’s domestic political game is well and fully fixed. Since the 2014 local elections, in which suspect tabulations emerged in Antalya and Ankara, evidence has surfaced of routine vote-rigging in favor of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its agenda. This is so well known that commentators in the U.S. and Europe hardly batted their eyelashes at the June release of the OSCE’s final report regarding its findings on the presidential referendum. And AKP’s April victory is set to pay extra dividends: it delivered the already authoritarian President Erdogan a mandate to reorganize the state. His powers to overrule Turkey’s bureaucracies, its National Assembly, and judiciary are set to grow immensely, while his threats against the CHP have become more strident.

And there are more cynical purposes behind Kılıçdaroğlu’s telegenic display of defiance. For several months, he has sought to remove the stains of his previous misdeeds, many of which are becoming convenient ammunition for more able politicians in his own party. He shares in the blame for legislation passed in 2016 which deprived MPs of longstanding immunities from prosecution, resulting in the incarceration of Enis Berberoğlu, a former deputy just sentenced to 25 years imprisonment, as well as many politicians from the Kurdish-linked Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). After an MP from Kılıçdaroğlu’s ranks insisted on an investigation into the CHP’s finances, the leader ensured he was removed from the list of party candidates, resulting in the end of the MP’s career in the National Assembly.

Were he to revive his image despite these foibles, there is still one last detail that removes any doubt that the CHP is doomed to languish as an opposition party under his leadership. As President Erdogan wryly remarked in the last election: “Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is an Alevi but no one ever says anything.” Turkey is 75 percent Sunni, and its voters are unlikely to elect a member of a religious minority in the near future.

Sometimes a death spiral can send up sparks. The recent march from Ankara to Istanbul should not be mistaken for a ray of light.

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Beijing Buys Into GMOs

As the world’s most populous country, China’s agricultural policy choices take on greater significance than anywhere else on the planet. That’s why it’s so encouraging to see that Beijing is (slowly) opening up to the extraordinary potential of genetically modified crops. This week, China green lit imports of two varieties of GM crops, as Reuters reports:

The two new crops, approved from July 16 for a period of three years, are Syngenta’s 5307 insect-resistant corn sold under the Agrisure Duracade brand and Monsanto’s 87427 glyphosate-resistant corn, sold under the Roundup Ready brand, the ministry said on its website on Monday. […]

While the country does not permit planting of GMO food crops, it does allow GMO imports such as soybeans and corn for use in its animal feed industry.

These crops will help strengthen China’s food security, but there’s still room for improvement: China still isn’t cultivating its own varieties of genetically modified food crops, only imports from other countries, and sparingly at that.

This really ought to be a no-brainer. Science has time and again shown GM crops to be perfectly safe for human consumption. The only reasons cited against them at this point boil down to some variant of “they’re unnatural,” even though we’ve been changing food crops to suit our needs for thousands of years—the big difference now is how well we’re able to do so.

Feeding future generations on a warmer, more crowded planet will be one of humanity’s greatest challenges in the coming decades, and GM technologies are some of our best solutions to this problem. Let’s see more of this from China.

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Greens Get a Gift from Rick Perry

When Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced his department’s plan to produce a study looking at the effect of renewables on the security of America’s power grids, environmentalists across the country braced for the worst. This was, to them, a veiled shot at wind and solar power, and the resulting study would surely be used as an excuse for the Trump Administration to hamstring fledgling renewable energy industries.

But as Reuters reports, a draft copy of that report indicates that those green fears were overblown:

The growth of renewable power, including wind and solar, has not harmed the reliability of the U.S. electricity grid, according to a draft U.S. Department of Energy study, echoing the findings of grid operators across the country.

“Numerous technical studies for most regions of the nation indicate that significantly higher levels of renewable energy can be integrated without any compromise of system reliability,” the draft says.

It added that growth of renewables could require the building of more transmission lines, advanced planning, and more flexibility to balance generation and meet demand. But it said that baseload power – coal and nuclear power – “is not as necessary as it used to be” given advances in grid technology.

From the beginning, environmentalists accused this study of being a rush job, so it will be interesting to see whether or not they’ll stick to that criticism now that its conclusion seems to favor renewables. Other observers would do well to keep the expedited nature of this report in mind.

That said, this is an interesting data point for assessing U.S. energy security. The study finds that current wind and solar power supplies have not unduly affected the stability of our grids. That’s important because of the intermittency of those renewables—they can only provide power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and that can make it more difficult for utilities to balance supply and demand for both producers and consumers of electricity.

But last year, wind produced just 5.6 percent of U.S. electricity, and solar just 0.9 percent. Renewables are growing quickly, but they’re still fringe players in our national power mix, and this report suggests that their intermittency hasn’t reached problematic levels.

That doesn’t mean their reliability (or lack thereof) isn’t an issue—just look to Germany, where renewables produce roughly a third of the country’s power and create large variations in supply that have wreaked havoc on neighboring energy grids. Civilization requires consistent energy inputs, and that fact places real limits on the feasibility of current-day solar and wind.

Cost-effective, commercially scalable energy storage options would make quick work of this problem, but they don’t yet exist. As solar and wind continue to chip away at market share here in the U.S., their effects on grids are going to be more pronounced.

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The Bezos Recession?

Since we at Via Meadia are always alert to the ways things could get worse, we read with interest this Financial Times dispatch about the possibility of a retail crash brought about by the disruptive impact of e-commerce companies like Amazon:

For a small band of hedge funds that slapped down prescient bets against the tottering US housing market, the financial crisis was the biggest money-spinner in generations. Some investors think they have now found the next “big short” in the retail industry.

The reshaping of how Americans shop by the internet is accelerating. The US retail industry faces a growing headache, with 10 companies pushed into bankruptcy already in 2017, according to Standard & Poor’s. Even Sears, a once mighty department store chain founded in 1886, is now tottering.

“We think the magnitude of this short could be bigger than subprime,” says Stephen Ketchum, the head of Sound Point Capital, a hedge fund that manages more than $13bn in assets.

As the article notes, there is a possibility that a retail collapse could spill over into the commercial real estate market—a somber second-act to the residential housing crisis that is now almost a decade in the rear-view mirror.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Greg Ip wrote earlier this month: “If you drew up a list of preconditions for recession, it would include the following: a labor market at full strength, frothy asset prices, tightening central banks, and a pervasive sense of calm. In other words, it would look a lot like the present.”

So even as the bull market keeps running and solid jobs numbers keep coming in, it’s important to remember the economy’s potential vulnerabilities in this time of technological change. And if a recession does strike, our political vulnerabilities will be exposed as well.

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Moon Offers Pyongyang Peace Talks

South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in has extended an offer to his counterparts in Pyongyang for a meeting at Panmunjom, the site where the armistice was signed between the two countries, to try to de-escalate the crisis. The Wall Street Journal reports the Chinese are all thumbs-up about the initiative:

Beijing, an ally of Pyongyang’s, voiced support for Seoul’s proposal. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said the effort is a step toward improving relations between the Koreas and easing regional tensions.

“We hope the two sides will move in a positive direction to create the conditions to break the stalemate and relaunch dialogue and negotiations,” the spokesman, Lu Kang, said at a media briefing in Beijing.

No word from the Norks yet as to whether they will consent—previous overtures by Moon have gone nowhere—but given China’s enthusiasm, maybe something comes of it this time. The Journal notes that President Trump OK’d the effort during Moon’s visit last month, and notes the stark contrast between Moon’s conciliatory rhetoric the vague threats (“some pretty extreme things”) coming out of the White House. Maybe the tired old routine works?

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A Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Before breaking off relations completely last month, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt were engaged in a brief media war with Qatar in response to the apparent hacking of the Qatar News Agency. The hackers posted inflammatory quotes attributed to Qatar’s Emir Tamim in support of Iran and Hamas.

One of the unanswered questions in the crisis is who hacked QNA and why. A Washington Post report yesterday points the finger at the UAE:

The United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in late May that sparked the ongoing upheaval between Qatar and its neighbors, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Officials became aware last week that newly analyzed information gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that on May 23, senior members of the UAE government discussed the plan and its implementation. The officials said it remains unclear whether the UAE carried out the hacks itself or contracted to have them done. The false reports said that the emir, among other things, had called Iran an “Islamic power” and praised Hamas.

The attribution should be taken with several grains of salt. Last month, CNN— likewise citing anonymous US intelligence officials— attributed the hack to Russians. These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, as it’s conceivable that the UAE may have contracted the hack to an outside group.

Still, there are good reasons to presume that the Post‘s story is true. For one thing the Emiratis had a clear motive to carry out the hack in order to precipitate a crisis. And, as we wrote at the time, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt all acted in unison to block Qatari media outlets shortly after the hack. If true, it dirties the hands of the anti-Qatari bloc, who had been trying to make a moral case that Qatar has been acting in bad faith towards its GCC partners and the United States.

But while a long-festering Arabian cold war would benefit no one, some good may yet come out of all of this. Further afield, the squeeze on Qatar seems to have driven Hamas to the bargaining table. Mohammed Dahlan, supported by the UAE and Egypt, may return to the Gaza strip in a power sharing agreement that would leave him well-placed to succeed the 82 year-old Mahmoud Abbas. The details remain sketchy, but amid disastrous electricity shortages and cut off from international donors like Qatar, the prospect of a deal pushing Hamas towards some kind of moderation or power sharing in Gaza with more moderate forces has never been more plausible.

From the American perspective, a Hamas deal coupled with a meaningful agreement with Qatar to stop financing international terrorist groups should probably count as a win. President Trump’s stated rationale for opposing Qatar in the crisis is their financial support for terrorism. After a round of shuttle diplomacy, Secretary of State Tillerson has secured just such an agreement with Qatar to combat terrorism financing (though the details of the agreement remain unclear). The anti-Qatari bloc has more demands—shutting down all the media organizations deemed as irritants—but it’s not clear that this would be of strategic consequence to, nor a good look for, the United States to be insisting on these matters. Maybe Secretary Tillerson, a man with deep experience in the region, can wind these talks up soon.

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A Match Made in History

The recent two-day visit of Narendra Modi to Israel, the first ever by an Indian Prime Minister, has been depicted as heralding a new strategic partnership between New Delhi and Jerusalem. Indeed, simply by taking place at all, it represented an upgrade of the relationship.

Hitherto the growing connections between India and Israel had taken place behind the scenes, according to India’s preference. New Delhi did not wish to ruffle feathers in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and among its own large Muslim population. Thus, the pillars of the relationship have been mainly economic. Overall trade has grown from around $200 million in 1992, when diplomatic relations were established, to $4.2 billion in 2016. During Modi’s visit, representatives of the two nations signed agreements on cooperation in the fields of agriculture, water, and space. The first two of these areas, in which Israel possesses world-class expertise, are of direct and particular relevance to India. Meanwhile, back in April, Israel Aerospace Industries was awarded the largest single defense contract in the history of Israel’s defense industry: a $1.6 billion deal with the Indian Army, for the provision of surface-to-air missiles and air and missile defense systems. An additional $400 million in contracts went to Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for developments in the same areas.

Historically, diplomatic ties between the two countries have been noticeably weaker. India was traditionally among the most vociferously pro-Palestinian countries in international fora, though this is slowly starting to shift. India has in recent months abstained on a number of UN resolutions critical of Israel, when its support would once have been an automatic. The field of cooperation on counter-terror is deeply relevant here: Indian officials dealing with these matters have spoken to me of their appreciation for the speedy and practical responses of their Israeli counterparts. However, India maintains close relations with Iran, due to New Delhi’s burgeoning energy needs, and is unlikely ever to support a renewed campaign of isolation.

Modi’s visit announces the arrival of something new: an openly proclaimed partnership that is diplomatic as well as economic. His decision to break with protocol and refrain from visiting the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah further reinforces the message.

Countries operate according to interest, not sentiment, so we must be wary of reading too much into the visit. But the international system is also full of relationships between states that transcend merely instrumental concerns, and are instead based on perceived deeper commonalities. The U.S. relationship with Israel is an example of a relationship of this kind. The bond between the United States and other English-speaking countries, based on common Anglo-Saxon cultural, political, and legal heritage, is another. Now, such a connection may well be emerging between Israel and India.

Commonalities that would make such a relationship possible are visible in the political and even cultural trajectories of both countries, though that may seem surprising. Can comparisons and connections really be drawn between a massive, settled, and ancient sub-continent of 1.3 billion people in the heart of South Asia and a tiny, re-established Jewish state of 8.4 million on the western edge of the same continent? The answer is yes, but if the comparisons are to move beyond the platitudes of official receptions, a deeper look at the political culture and history of both countries is required.

To understand these, we cannot look upon “Israel” and “India” as unified wholes. Rather, we must observe the specific political contexts that shaped Binyamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi, and the political traditions to which they belong.

The modern republics of India and Israel were established within a few months of each other. The dominant national movements that piloted these newborn states—the Israel Workers Party (Mapai) in Israel and Congress in India—had a considerable amount in common. They were self-consciously secular, left-leaning parties, concerned in the fashion of the time with rapid development and constructing the future. Despite their resemblances, Congress and Mapai did not preside over a partnership between their respective countries, due to their sharply different stances on the key foreign policy issue of the day: the Cold War.

Neither Modi nor Netanyahu is associated with these movements. Rather, they are the scions of the opposition movements created during those days of foundation, and which have since taken the helm in both nations.

Many Israelis and foreign observers see Netanyahu as an Americanized figure, one step removed from the deeper political traditions in Israel, who introduced the individualistic, personality-centered American political style to Israel. This is only half the story, however. Netanyahu’s family history, career, and outlook are steeped in a particular Zionist tradition—namely the current known as Revisionist Zionism.

The Israeli Prime Minister’s father, Ben-Zion, was the personal secretary of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of that movement. Even Binyamin Netanyahu’s connection to the United States derives from his father’s lifelong association with this movement. The domination by Mapai of Israel’s institutions in the 1950s made it close to impossible for individuals associated with the rival Revisionist current to make academic careers in Israel, at least in the humanities. Thus, Ben-Zion Netanyahu decided to take up an academic position in the United States in 1956, bringing his family to America, where young Bibi received much of his education.

The heirs of Revisionist Zionism have dominated Israeli political life since 1977. The ongoing electoral successes of Likud derive from a coalition of former “outsiders” in Israeli society who have now become the “inside”: Jews of North African and Middle Eastern extraction, and secular nationalists and religious traditionalists of East European origin. These groups were excluded or relegated to secondary status in the version of Israel established by Mapai, with its flagship communal farms (kibbutzim) and labor union affiliations.

This social coalition was present in embryonic form even before the foundation of the state. The standard-bearers of Revisionism in the 1930s and ‘40s, for example, were the military undergrounds who fought British rule in Mandate Palestine: most importantly the Irgun Tzvai Leumi (National Military Organization, or IZL) and, though it had a more complex and weaker relationship to Revisionism, the Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Israel Freedom Fighters, or Lehi). The members of these small groups came from precisely those populations that would propel Likud to near-hegemony in post-1977 Israel, a period that has been called the “Second Israeli Republic.”

The essential outlook uniting these populations has remained constant —a hawkish attitude toward the surrounding Arab/Muslim powers, support for the United States and the West, an embrace of free-market capitalism, and a close attachment to Jewish religious tradition.

Binyamin Netanyahu is the scion of this movement, and he today stands at the head of it. It may well be that Netanyahu is the last (secular) Israeli politician to possess such a clear and unmistakable link to one of Israel’s founding traditions. Today, secular Israeli parties have become largely loose, improvised coalitions of ambitious politicians, or shells built around a single figure (such as Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid.) It is this background that explains why this MIT graduate and former special forces officer spent his first term as Prime Minister goading the “old elites” and the “media” for their alleged detachment from the realities of the region.

The history of Israel’s main opposition movement has a fascinating parallel in India’s own such movement. Like the Zionist revisionists, the Hindu nationalists of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh emerged in the 1920s – as the opposition to the Indian National Congress. The RSS was characterized by its advocacy of a “Hindu Rashtra” (Hindu nation) in contrast to the overt secularism of Congress. It organized its youth along paramilitary lines and created a military department (interestingly, the RSS did not fight the British, preferring to preserve its structures for later battles against rival Muslim groups during the period of partition). Throughout the history of the modern republic of India, RSS and its heirs have stood for a profoundly different vision of the country from that of Congress and its two seminal figures, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Narendra Modi joined the RSS as a boy in Gujarat, and from the age of 21 in 1971 worked as a full-time organizer for the movement. He quickly rose through its ranks, finally become the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), an offshoot of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which was formed in 1951 in cooperation with the RSS, and generally regarded as its political arm. Modi returned the BJP to power after a ten-year absence (its first stint in power lasted from 1998 to 2004). His personal popularity, and his ability to extend the BJP’s support beyond its traditional base among upper-class and upper-caste Hindus, played a significant role in the victory, along with perceptions of widespread corruption in Congress.

In power, Modi, like Netanyahu, has engaged in a somewhat adversarial relationship with the country’s media. He has sought to use social media to bypass the traditional press. This forms part of a more general stance of populist assertion against the liberal, Nehruvian elite of New Delhi that is key to the BJP’s appeal. Modi also combines Hindu nationalism and the use of potent traditional symbols with a focus on technology and development, a vision that mirrors Netanyahu’s own., Though Modi’s rise has been watched with horror by the traditional elites, Congress remains at present in organizational disarray, with no alternative to offer. As Modi, like Bibi, surveys a landscape with few likely competitors, he is even more willing to shift India in new directions, such as toward Israel.

Of course, because the India-Israel “honeymoon” is a romance between two political streams now enjoying unusual dominance, it will depend markedly on the continuation of that dominance. As such, it is inherently more vulnerable than the other “special relationships” mentioned above.  With Netanyahu presently beset by scandal and investigation and Modi still dogged by allegations that he condoned communal violence against the Muslim minority in Gujarat in 2002, nothing is written in stone. Though at the present time, neither man’s hold on power appears seriously shaky.

In an uncertain global political climate, in which political Islam is a primary cause of instability, it is not difficult to account for the current success of political movements such as those that Netanyahu and Modi represent. It is interesting to note that in the United States and Western Europe, these times have brought figures from outside of recognizable political traditions to prominence—Trump, of course, in the United States, Geert Wilders in Holland, Emmanuel Macron in France, and so on. By contrast, Netanyahu and Modi emerge from stable, if oppositional, political traditions of long standing in their respective countries. The chemistry between them was evident throughout Modi’s brief visit in July. But it is rooted in more than personal connection. It is, or more accurately may prove to be, a match made in history.

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The Validator-in-Chief

Whether or not the FBI discovers serious and intentional (rather than just aspirational) collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, President Trump’s relentless dissembling and attacks on America’s free press—along with his attacks on the courts, independent pollsters, U.S. intelligence agencies, the Congressional Budget Office, or anyone who can marshal facts to challenge his assertions—are doing Putin’s work for him by undermining the White House’s credibility. If Trump continues this way, he will undermine the strength and credibility of the United States.

The broader message coming from this White House is chillingly similar to one the Kremlin has spent billions of dollars over the past decade promoting to audiences across Europe and the United States through its RT network, Sputnik news agency, multiple local language websites, and industrial-level social media operations: Western institutions are weak or unraveling; elections are rigged; predatory migrants and bloodthirsty terrorists lurk around every corner; and honest working people are under siege by insidious “cosmopolitan” interests.

President Trump might have used his recent trip to the G-20 meeting in Europe to champion the uplifting power of American democratic ideals and the unbreakable bonds of the Atlantic alliance. Instead he reinforced Putin’s west-in-crisis-clash-of-civilizations narrative.

During his speech in Warsaw, where there is no love for the Russians, he issued the obligatory call to Moscow to end its “destabilizing activity in Ukraine” and finally endorsed NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense commitment. The President offered no criticism of the Polish government’s attempts to undermine the independence of its judges and journalists. The core of the speech was Trump’s declaration that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive”—leaving no doubt that his definition of “the West” and “our civilization” is not the inclusive liberal democratic order built up over the past seventy years but one founded instead on the exclusion of those (forces “from the South or the East”) who seek to breach American and European borders and undermine Judeo-Christian values.

“Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?” Trump asked the crowd. “Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”

Trump also felt no compunction about continuing his battles with U.S. intelligence agencies and news organizations on foreign soil. At a joint press conference with Poland’s President Andrzej Duda, he attacked CNN and NBC as “fake news,” even inviting Duda, who has tried to muzzle his own journalists, to recount his experiences with so-called dishonest reporters. When Putin, who has stifled nearly all independent journalism in Russia, trolled Trump at a photo op before their private meeting in Hamburg, pointing to reporters and asking, “These are the ones hurting you?” Trump replied: “These are the ones. You’re right about that.”

For an autocrat like Putin, the benefits are obvious. “The message is there is no such thing as democracy, so there is no point in asking for it,” says Ben Nimmo, of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. As for the broader propaganda strategy—what Nimmo calls the 4Ds: deception, denial, distortion, and distraction—the payoff is also big. It keeps his base enflamed, his opponents off balance, alienates and demoralizes most voters, and sows divisions among his neighbors.

The same approach works for Trump. There is no way of knowing if he would have won without a push from Moscow’s hackers and “news technologists.” (Do you need RT when you’ve got Breitbart?) His version of blood-and-soil populism and his mastery of the 4Ds served him incredibly well in the campaign.

The post-inaugural flood of distortions and grandiose or abusive tweets continue to deflect attention from his doubtful-to-disastrous policy proposals and his family’s many conflicts of interest, although nothing could deflect from the New York Times’ discovery of emails showing Donald Trump, Jr. leaping at the chance to meet during the campaign with a Kremlin-linked lawyer promising Russian-government sourced dirt on Hillary Clinton. When even those hard facts failed to shake Republican leaders out of their denial, Trump was quickly back on Twitter attacking the press, calling the story “the greatest Witch Hunt in political history” and lashing out at pollsters and Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s 4D powers, and their destructive implications, were on full display during that Warsaw press conference, when he was asked “once and for all” to state whether he believed Russia interfered in the U.S. election. In a three minute response (including follow up):

He tentatively endorses the idea, “I think it was Russia,” then immediately undercuts even that, saying “a lot of people interfered” and “it’s been happening for a long time.”
He then tries to deflect attention to, by implication, an even bigger scandal: “Why did [President Obama] do nothing about it?” He offers two possible explanations, both of which would be more distracting if we hadn’t heard them before: “I don’t think he choked. I think what happened is he thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, and he said let’s not do anything about it.”

When the questioner reminds the President that his own intelligence agencies “have been far more definitive” and asks why he won’t agree and say it was Russia, Trump continues deflecting:

He says the judgment is not definitive since after “some very heavy research” he discovered “only three or four” of the country’s 17 intelligence agencies signed the finding. What he neglects to say is the Director of National Intelligence only asked the FBI, CIA, and NSA to do the assessment. All were in agreement.
And then after saying “nobody really knows for sure,” he offers his final Soviet-style “whataboutism”: “I remember . . . how everybody was 100 percent sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Guess what? That led to one big mess.”

Trump and his inner circle may believe this approach is working, or at least buying time. But the damage to American credibility is real and dangerous. On the most transactional level—the one the art of the dealmaker should at least understand—if the American President doesn’t think his own intelligence agencies are credible, why should any other leader invest political capital, treasure, or blood when Trump makes the case for action—whether against Syria’s Bashar al Assad or North Korea’s Kim Jong-un—based on findings from those same agencies?

And it surpasses understanding that this White House, so sensitive to power dynamics, fails to see how its influence is already draining away. One of the most striking and disturbing takeaways from the G-20 summit was how isolated the United States has already become on both climate change and trade. The day before the summit opened, the European Union and Japan announced a free trade deal. If it goes through, it will cover 10 percent of the world’s population, 30 percent of the global economy, and 40 percent of global trade. It will not include the United States.

A few days reading and watching the website of the Kremlin-owned RT (Russia Today until its rebranding) network shows just how closely the Trump and RT narratives track—and how hard it will be to push back until the President changes his.

The network’s slogan is “Question More” and alleged Fake News (irony is not RT’s strong point) is the favorite topic. The day before Trump tweeted “I am thinking about changing the name of “FakeNewsCNN to #FraudNewsCNN (followed soon after by a retweet of a video of him body slamming a man with a CNN logo superimposed on his head), RT’s flagship CrossTalk show devoted its full thirty minutes to the “Counterfeit News Network,” asking “if CNN’s evidence-free war on Donald Trump is really at the expense of real journalism.” CrossTalk’s most recent show on the Donald Trump, Jr. emails opens: “Investigations without crimes, hysteria without facts and substance…. The longer this witch hunt continues, the more the mainstream media loses the trust of the public.”

RT’s other evergreen is the European version of Trump’s “American carnage:” stories about a West staggering under the weight of immigrant-driven sexual assaults and murders, corporate greed, and “deep state” abuses. Like Breitbart and American news sites ranging from hard- to alt-right, RT seems particularly obsessed with fictitious European “no-go zones” and the supposed unraveling of Sweden. RT’s coverage of the G-20 summit focused more on the anti-globalization street protests—including a live homepage feed—than on the actual meeting.

Not surprisingly, RT doesn’t do a lot of in-depth reporting. It relies mainly on not-so-outside experts—a quick Google search of a name often leads back either to RT or some other pro-Russian website. The network draws some high profile commentators, including “America’s most important intellectual” Noam Chomsky (‘If you criticize policies you are anti-American. That only happens in dictatorships’—Chomsky to RT.) and the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein. Stein, you may recall, was also a guest at Putin’s head table for RT’s December 2015 anniversary gala, the one General Mike Flynn was paid $45,000 to address from the dais.

In late December 2015, RT ran this headline: ‘Putin killed reporters? Prove it!’—Trump to ABC show host. As the story explained, then-candidate Donald Trump “fiercely defended Vladimir Putin” when George Stephanopoulos asked him how he could praise the Russian leader who has been accused of ordering the deaths of opponents and journalists. Trump’s reply: “He’s never—it’s never been proven that he’s killed anybody. So, you know, you’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, at least in our country.” Nimmo says that during the early months of 2016 RT started giving Trump even more headlines, after he began saying that the U.S. political system was rigged. “He became a high profile validator [for the] Russians’ main narrative that U.S. democracy is a stitch up, all fake.”

In May of this year, clearly looking for a younger demographic, RT launched FAKEbook Live, a hipper, slyer weekly talk show streaming on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, notably without obvious RT branding. Two potty-mouthed millennial hosts respond to posted questions and take gleeful shots at Trump: ridiculing his sword-dancing visit to Saudi Arabia and raising the jocular specter of a World War III superpower showdown over Syria. They are both huge fans of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, and offer indulgent criticism for Syria’s Assad—“You can’t back him up completely because he has made some huge mistakes.” Their main message is don’t trust the U.S. media, especially not the “fake” New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN.

For all of the slick production and cynical hipster tone, the show doesn’t appear to have taken off. The most successful FAKEbook Live show has scored fewer than 3,000 views on YouTube. By the end of the season there were heavy hints on air that at least one of the hosts wouldn’t be coming back in the fall.

You don’t have to look too deeply into what is happening inside Russia to know that Putin is no genius. But his “political technologists” were far ahead of Washington in recognizing the growing anxiety out there and the power of social media to feed, exploit, and leverage those anxieties for the Kremlin’s political gain.

It is hard to assess RT’s actual influence. The network reports an annual budget of around $300 million and claims that its potential reach is 700 million viewers in a hundred countries. While its cable presence in the United States is negligible, English language RT has more than two million YouTube subscribers (more than three times Fox News and four times NBC News), claiming to be the “most watched network on YouTube with over 4 billion views.” Even then, its most popular videos are clickbait: four-year-old footage of a meteorite crashing in Russia and six-year old videos of the Japanese Tsunami. The same video of Trump chasing a marine’s hat blown off by the downdraft from Marine One’s rotors led the site for days after the G-20 summit. This is not the stuff of grand conspiracies.

But RT and the Sputnik news agency are only the most visible parts of a much larger ecosystem that also includes Russian-financed nationalist and conspiracy-fueling websites in multiple languages, sophisticated social media operations—24-hour troll factories and bots—and, of course, government-sponsored hackers.

In Ukraine, non-stop Russian propaganda and lies (a three-year old boy tortured and crucified by the Ukrainian military; the shoot down of flight MH17 was a Ukrainian plot to assassinate Putin; or visa free-travel to the EU will increase sex trafficking) are intrinsic parts of a hybrid warfare strategy that also includes military and cyber attacks on the Kiev government.

How much has the Russian campaign of hacked, hyped, and faked news contributed to the rise of populist governments in Hungary and the Czech Republic—and how much damage can it do to leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel or France’s Emmanuel Macron? The Kremlin certainly thinks it is worth the continued investment.

A recent Disinformation Review, a handy compendium of the fruits of this investment from the European Union’s Stratcom East monitoring service, includes several pernicious gems: One story offered up in English and Finnish claiming that a German family “escaped” to Russia either because there were too many immigrants or because German authorities threatened to take away their children unless they stopped demonstrating against immigrants. A story in Czech claims that new documents obtained in U.S. courts prove the U.S. government created and supports ISIS. A story in Georgian claims that an LGBT “mafia” is working to undermine the Orthodox Church. Stories in several languages predict the imminent collapse of Sweden.

If the U.S. election was the most spectacular success so far for the Kremlin hack-and-hype team, the most spectacular failure was this May’s French election. A last minute dump of hacked emails from the Macron campaign—with supposed revelations of offshore accounts and tax evasion—received very little coverage. Macron went on to overwhelmingly defeat his populist, far-right opponent, Marine LePen, a Putin and Trump favorite.

There are a variety of explanations for this failure. The information arrived just before a pre-election news blackout, suggesting that the Russians were scrambling after having underestimated Macron’s chances. French voters and journalists were skeptical after the U.S. election experience. While French news organizations stayed away, under orders from France’s election commission not to report the contents of the hacked emails and warnings from the Macron campaign that some of the content was faked, the emails were picked up and pushed back to France by Russia’s Sputnik news agency and by Twitter users in the United States.

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab moved quickly to identify the sources of the social media campaign. As Nimmo explained in an article on Medium, they tracked the #Macronleaks hashtag, as it reached “47,000 tweets in just three and a half hours,” tracing it back “through a machine analysis . . . to the Twitter account of Jack Posobiec, the Washington DC Bureau Chief of an obscure, alt-right website, theRebel.media.” That information, shared widely with the press, appears to have further undermined the credibility of the hack.

What lessons the Russians learned from their failure isn’t yet clear. The German elections are still ten weeks away, and Russian hackers may be sitting on a pile of data from the German Parliament and Merkel’s party. It remains to be seen what they will do with them.

There are a host of ideas on how—and how hard—to push back against the Russian disinformation campaign. Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss, who raised an early alarm about the Kremlin’s “weaponization” of “information, culture, and money,” called for creating a “Transparency International”-style rating system for disinformation; “counter-propaganda editors” for newspapers; a “disinformation charter” for media (and exclusion for “organizations that practice conscious deception”); tracking Kremlin networks and money back to pundits and think tanks; and public information campaigns. But while the French elections show the power of public awareness, the censorship potential of charters, rating systems, and shunning should rightly make us queasy.

Germany’s threats to fine social networks up to €50 million for carrying hate speech and “Fake News” have the tech companies scrambling to come up with algorithms to edit out offensive or extremist content. Allowing a machine to decide preemptively what language is merely foul and offensive versus what is foul, offensive, and dangerous (or at least dangerous to a company’s bottom line) can too easily lead to the 21st-century version of airbrushed Soviet photos. Who will even know when a thought or image or fact—or thousands of them—disappear?

There have been calls on Capitol Hill for reinvigorating the U.S. Cold War-era broadcasting system to push back against RT and Putin’s larger propaganda machine. I am a big fan of VOA, but if the President keeps bashing the credibility of U.S. independent media, who is going to believe a U.S.-funded broadcaster? Worryingly, under a new “reform,” the VOA and the rest of the system are to be placed under the control of a new chief appointed by President Trump—rather than the bipartisan Broadcasting Board of Governors. In June, Politico reported that the White House was “eyeing” an ally of Steve Bannon, the White House strategist and former Breitbart editor, for the job.

All of these, of course, are tactical answers to a more fundamental set of questions: Why is the narrative of exploitation and victimhood so compelling? Why do so many people feel so fed up with politics and the press that they are buying into the hype and distortions, or checking out altogether? Is there any hope of pushing back against the Russian propaganda machine so long as the President of the most powerful democracy in the world is validating so much of Putin’s anti-democratic worldview?

The first two questions demand serious responses. But they are normal questions. It is extraordinary—and frightening—that we even have to consider the third.

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Macron Denounces Anti-Semitism

A clear message, and an important one, from French President Emmanuel Macron:

Standing at a site from which thousands of French Jews were sent to their deaths during the Holocaust, President Emmanuel Macron of France on Sunday deplored his nation’s wartime role in abetting murder and pledged to fight a renewed tide of anti-Semitism.

Joined by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, as well as Holocaust survivors, the Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld and others, Mr. Macron commemorated the 75th anniversary of a roundup of Jews at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, or Vel d’Hiv, a stadium on the outskirts of Paris.

“It was indeed France that organized” the roundup of 13,000 people at the stadium on July 16 and 17, 1942, he said. “Not a single German” was directly involved.

It’s also a politically smart move. The hotbeds of anti-Semitism in France are, first and foremost, the Islamists and their allies who mostly inhabit the far Left and, secondarily, the hard ultra-nationalist Right. Both of these groups are broadly unpopular among the average French voters who back Macron, and they hate each other too much to form an effective coalition.

Macron’s statement helps consolidate the middle ground in France that he hopes will back him while enhancing his moral and political stature in both Germany and the United States. It also helps bring his government into a closer alignment with Israel, helpful at a time when France’s traditional Arab allies are moving closer to the Jewish state, and where European weakness in the Middle East makes it important for countries like France who have interests there to make friends.

The post Macron Denounces Anti-Semitism appeared first on The American Interest.