Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 21

The Future of Transatlanticism Is China

It has become common lore in European capitals that the Trump Administration’s purported “transactionalism” when dealing with NATO allies has all but upended America’s relations with Europe, while the President’s “tweet diplomacy” and the alleged determination by the United States to “disengage” from our commitments has made it ever-harder for Europe to continue to rely on America for its security. As a senior European politician recently said while explaining why his country needs to think in terms of “strategic autonomy” and European defense: “Europe’s trust in the United States is gone.”

Setting aside the untidy fact that the United States has not been “leaving Europe” but is, in fact, increasing its military presence on the Continent, I am ever more convinced that the core issues shaping Transatlantic relations are not personalities, rhetoric, or what is posted on social media, but rather differences on threat assessment and policy. Although the U.S.-European relationship went through its share of trials and tribulations during the Cold War, at bottom there always existed the assumption that, when confronted with the existential threat emanating from the Soviet Union, we needed to hang together, lest we hang apart.

Furthermore, the Trump Administration’s calls on Europe to reverse the de facto disarmament of the past two decades is no different in substance than what a number of previous administrations have tried to accomplish. The appeals by Secretary of Defense James Mattis in 2017 echoed those made by former Secretaries Ash Carter and Robert Gates. And all of it is of a piece with Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s recent calls for Europe to do more to counter China and Russia. During the past decade in particular, as state-on-state competition has re-emerged as the reigning paradigm of international relations going forward, Europe has been implored in ever-more-urgent tones by its U.S. allies to abandon its Panglossian view concerning the inevitable triumph of the multilateral rules-based international order, or at least to allow for the possibility that our militaries should be ready for a worst case scenario should another major conflict threaten us all. Yes, there is broad agreement today on both sides of the Atlantic that Putin’s Russia seeks to revise the existing order in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East, even if we diverge on the best way to go about addressing Moscow’s disruptive strategy. But Russia is not the biggest problem. Unlike prior periods of “Transatlantic troubles” during the Cold War and its aftermath, Washington and a number of key European capitals differ in their assessment of the urgency of the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China.

European leaders seem not to have fully recognized that Beijing is engaged in a massive geostrategic project to reconfigure Eurasia, build a blue ocean-going navy, establish bases at critical pressure points in Africa, Europe, and, presumably, the High North, and harvest technology across the Continent. The uncertainty of how precisely to respond to China has made many in Europe less attuned to the danger posed by the fact that the Continent itself is a target for Chinese commercial expansion and could also be disaggregated and subjected to military domination down the line.

What makes the current moment in European history so dangerous is that much of what French President Emmanuel Macron has recently outlined under the rubric of “strategic autonomy” amounts to loosening Europe’s security and defense bonds with the United States. It appears to be little more than yet another expression of the perennial French aspiration to have Paris lead a “militarily sovereign Europe.” Above all, it is unrealistic even in the medium term. President Macron’s claim that “Europe has the capacity to defend itself” and “European countries have strong armies, in particular France” strains credulity. The past three decades have seen de facto demilitarization across the Continent, with defense spending imploding and military capabilities atrophying to the point that many of the forces that remain are non-deployable: Stocks have eroded, and the logistical infrastructure has fallen into disrepair. Even if the collective European will could somehow be mustered to change things—a big if, given how much spending would be required, and what kind of hits to social programs would need to offset the military ramp-up—the change would take some time.

Even more troublingly, the current French push for “sovereignty” has been coupled with Macron’s call to re-open a “strategic dialogue” with Russia, thus undercutting one of the areas of general Transatlantic strategic consensus. Europe’s neighborhood policy cannot be managed by “third parties who do not share the same interests,” Macron mused. Presumably the “third party” is the United States. No thought seems to have been spared by the French President for the concerns of frontline countries on the EU’s eastern flank. And yes, Macron’s grande idée on Russia—seen as fanciful by many specialists—is to attempt to woo Moscow into the European fold, and away from Beijing’s embrace. But instead of recognizing in the same breath that China poses an overwhelming threat to the West, Macron calculates that by bringing Russia on board, he is strengthening Europe to play a balancing role against the United States and China.

It’s important to remember that none of this is the product of the ambition of a single man, nor was the French vision hatched overnight. The French-led European Intervention Initiative (EI2) of 2017, introduced by President Macron in a Sorbonne speech scarcely eight months after Donald Trump was sworn in as America’s 45th President, called for Europe’s “strategic autonomy” in security and defense and the creation of a “real European army.” Macron’s initiative was formally launched in June 2018, when the Defense Ministers of France, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and the UK signed a letter of intent to establish cooperation outside existing structures such as NATO. Finland joined the coalition in November 2018 and Norway and Sweden in September 2019. Although on the face of it the EI2 is the usual declaratory document full of anodyne statements about the need to develop capabilities to deploy forces on joint military operations, civilian evacuation, and disaster relief operations within the NATO context, its goal is to establish a “shared strategic culture.”

In fairness, what makes Europe particularly vulnerable to the French siren song of “strategic autonomy” is the fact that its political scene is arguably more fractured today than at any time since the end of the Cold War. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coalition is only as strong as its weakest link, the Social Democrats, with continued uncertainty about the next election results. In Italy, following the government collapse last summer, Giuseppe Conte’s second coalition—this time of the Five Star Movement and the Democratic Party—seems shaky following the landslide victory in the central Italian region of Umbria by the populist League led by Matteo Salvini. The next and perhaps final test for the current Conte government may come as soon as January during the scheduled regional election in the critical Emilia-Romagna region in northeastern Italy. Meanwhile, the Spanish government is struggling to keep its head above water as the country remains riven by the Catalan separatist movement, with protest demonstrations in Barcelona in the last week of October drawing 350,000 people. But while the current moment may present an opportunity for President Macron (who will not have to face an election until 2022) to assert France’s leadership on foreign and defense policy, such a move risks undermining the security of the rest of the Continent.

The future of NATO and the security of the West are at risk today more than at any time since the end of the Cold War. This is not due to the alleged transactionalism of the U.S. Administration or President Trump’s prolific tweeting, but because the Transatlantic community has yet to fully agree on how to respond to China’s existential geostrategic challenge. If Europe continues to waffle on the nature of the existential threat posed by Beijing’s Eurasian strategy and allows France to chart its course on security and defense, it may end up with the worst possible outcome: marginal EU expeditionary capabilities, a gradually hollowed-out NATO, and ultimately a worse outcome for all involved. Let’s hope common sense prevails.

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A Millennial From Iran On Why America Should Support Democracy Promotion

I am the product of an Islamist government, a confused society, and Marxist-Leninist parents. April 9, 2003 helped clarify who I am.

I was 13 when I watched Saddam Hussein’s grand and ghastly statue taken down by U.S. forces at Firdos Square in Baghdad (it had just been erected in honor of the Iraqi dictator’s 65th birthday). I had spent my whole life in Iran, a country with a government essentially as violent and oppressive as that of Iraq’s. Watching Saddam Hussein’s demise gave me hope that I was not damned to live and die in a totalitarian state—that if Iraq could change, perhaps Iran could too.

Living today in the United States makes me realize how unusual  my path has been. 

My mother was a young activist for the communist Tudeh Party before she was sentenced to five months in prison for her politics. My father was a prominent Marxist intellectual and an established figure in the same party. He also went to prison and was tortured for five years. He did not discuss his views in public after that, for fear of being sent back to prison. But he did discuss them with me. I was expected not just to listen, but also to ask questions and occasionally opine.

My family’s political background meant that there was a greater focus on us, which required greater caution. I went to school with all kinds of kids—religious, not-so-religious, political, apolitical. Most were confused, and all looked purposeless. You would go to school and then college to become an engineer or a doctor. You would get married and have children. You would work to provide for that family. There was no meaning to life beyond that, and nobody asked for it.

Something else that was common in the upper-middle class community where I grew up was grievances against the regime. They existed in a variety of forms and scales, but they were there. For my family, who had been persecuted by the regime and whose many properties had been confiscated after the revolution, it all came down to one thing: Dictatorships were bad.

Of course, as far as communists like my father were concerned, the United States was just as much a dictatorship as Iran. My parents told me about what the Americans had done to the Japanese during World War II, how black people were treated in the United States, the horrors of Ku Klux Klan, and how filthy rich some U.S. citizens were. The last point never sounded so bad to me. After all, my grandfather had been filthy rich before the revolution, and I wanted to be rich too!

The image of the United States was much worse outside the house. America was the Great Satan, responsible for all the ills in Iran and around the world.

Then came the September 11 attacks. I was only 11 when it happened and too young to grasp the enormity of the event. What came after is a different story. George W. Bush—supposedly the evil leader of evil America—stood up and said that the attacks had happened because the Middle East was not free. To prevent future attacks, the United States would bring freedom and democracy to the region. He spoke of how peoples in the Middle East were being mistreated by their governments. As the discussion turned to Iraq, it felt like he was talking to me. Everything he said resonated. The Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime might have been decades-long enemies that fought a bloody war, but both oppressed their own peoples in more or less the same fashion.

The more President Bush talked about exporting democracy, the more I wanted to be a part of his nation. A nation that believed that its interest was aligned with the freedom of others was the only nation worth being part of. 

I couldn’t live in the United States, of course, so I had to settle for the smaller joy of following its politics. I didn’t know much about how Republicans and Democrats differed, but I knew I was a Republican because Bush was one. As I explored democracy promotion on my low-speed internet, the term “neoconservatism” kept popping up. Neoconservatives, I learned, wanted to expand the reach of human rights and democracy and were not shy about using America’s military force.

The predominance of Jews and support for Israel among the neoconservatives did not bother me at all. I never minded Israel. What I didn’t like was the Palestinians’ receiving aid from Iran while Iranians were starving. I had never met a Jewish person, but the regime hated Jews, so I grew to love them out of spite for the regime. 

As I dug deeper, I came across names like Paul Wolfowitz, the Kristol family, Elliott Abrams, Scooter Libby, Eliot Cohen, Eric Edelman, Doug Feith, and the Podhoretz family. By the time I was 19, I had become fluent in English and could read their writings. I also came across think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. The more I read, the more I liked neoconservatism.

Learning more about America was a double-edged sword. It gave me hope that life could be better, but it also made me realize just how much I was missing. Growing up in Iran was bad enough, but the situation had worsened under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As the presidential election of 2009 was coming up, I joined an army of young people to campaign for Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was running on an anti-hardliner platform. When Ahmadinejad was declared the winner, we all knew the election had been rigged.

What happened next is remembered as the Green Movement. Just a few days after the results were announced, millions marched on the streets of Tehran, joined by compatriots in other cities, demanding their votes to be counted. Protests continued for over a year. As the protests downsized, violence rose.

The Green Movement gave me a purpose. For the first time, the selfish and angry society that I had grown up in had become friendly and community oriented. It was not just me. Everybody was happy, everybody was mindful of their fellow protestors. It was a surreal experience. 

As we peacefully marched on the streets during the day and violently clashed with security forces at night, we saw all kinds of foreign peoples and governments, from national to municipal, providing us moral support. We were throwing stones at the security forces, as they shot at us and threw tear gas. The Italian embassy opened its doors to protestors. If you had been injured, they would issue you a visa on the spot to leave for Italy. The Florence city council hung a green flag outside its building.

But President Obama remained silent. He wanted to negotiate a nuclear deal with the regime and did not want to sacrifice that objective for the cause of democracy and human rights. As we chanted, “Obama, either with them (the regime) or with us,” we did not hear back. We told each other, “Bush would not have let this happen. He would not have done this to us.” 

The protests eventually died, and Iran returned to normalcy, but my life had changed. My involvement with the protests had gotten me expelled from college, which I happily saw as my ticket out of Iran. I spent the next thirty months in Budapest, Hungary, where I befriended several foreigners, most of them Israeli. I learned how it felt to talk without self-censorship in public, to drink alcohol without any fear, to flirt with and kiss women in public. But I also understood, there and everywhere else in Europe, that I was not one of them. I was a foreigner.

Assimilation into Hungarian society was impossible. I was living in the Jewish corner of the city. Once, going home at night, a young Hungarian guy locked eyes with me as we were passing each other and spat on me. My friends and I never figured out whether it was because he thought I was Middle Eastern or Jewish. What’s the difference, anyways? 

Language barriers made assimilation more difficult, of course, but there were also cultural differences. I was trying to enter a monolithic society with centuries of established culture and a strong sense of national identity. The feeling that I was out of place remained more or less constant in my travels across Europe. People treated me as a foreigner, sometimes in the kindest and most curious ways, sometimes with hostility, but never neutrally.

The single best moment of my life happened on May 17th, 2014, when I set foot in the United States for the first time. I had a student visa in hand and an admission to Arizona State University. My first interaction in the United States was with a gentleman waiting for his connection flight in Chicago O’Hare airport with me. I told him that I was going to start college and stay in the United States. He was very quick to mention that “this is the country of immigrants.”

Now that I was in the United States, I began practicing democracy. I became a member of College Republicans and volunteered for Jeb Bush’s, John McCain’s, and a few local campaigns. I started reading conservative journals, including The Weekly Standard and Commentary. I got involved with student organizations such as The Alexander Hamilton Society, AEI for Students, Hertog Foundation, and Tikvah Fund. Under their guidance, I studied conservatism and neoconservatism more deeply. They taught me that United States was not a non-profit dedicated to human rights and democracy, but rather had an interest in (and tradition of) promoting them.

So, what does this neoconservative from Iran, raised by Marxist-Leninist parents, think of regime change in the country in which he spent most of his life? The truth is that the term “regime change” has itself become a strawman. There is a middle ground between a ground invasion to promote democracy (which was not the Iraq War’s purpose anyway) and doing nothing. Democratization must come from within, yes, but it can’t always happen without foreign help. After several attempts by the Iranian people, it is now clear that the regime is too powerful for the people. We can begin with supporting labor unions and dissidents who are trying to make change happen from the inside.

In their correspondences with each other, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson called the United States an “empire of liberty.” The reason American imperialism is so successful and stable is that its participants benefit from it—because most peoples would rather live in the free world that America leads than in Iran, and because the benefits of friendship with America significantly outweigh those of animosity with America.

Thomas Paine was right when he said that the cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. America possesses many powers, but its power as a cause is the cheapest to spend and yet the most valuable and impactful. This is something many of my friends and fellow students find bewildering. If only they could visit Iran. 

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The General at the Heart of Iraq’s Protests

Over the past few months, Iraqis from all walks of life have mobilized against their beleaguered, sluggish government, in protests that harken back to the heyday of the Arab Spring. The demonstrations started on October 1, inspired by mounting frustration with corruption, unemployment, and a dearth of public services. Many protesters blame this dysfunction on Iraq’s byzantine, American-devised political system—a cynical spoils system designed to account for the country’s complex sectarian framework. The Iraqi Security Forces’ often brutal response to the protests, which has led to more than 300 deaths, is doing little to reinforce the protesters’ already-faltering confidence in the competence of Iraqi authorities. Meanwhile, Iran’s well-publicized role in the cronyism of the Iraqi state has given the demonstrations a nationalist flair.

Less well-publicized, however, is the role of an Iraqi war hero by the name of Lieutenant General Abdel-Wahab al-Saadi, adored by many in his country as the Iraqi face of counterterrorism and seen by some as a bulwark against pervasive Iranian influence. The Iraqi government’s move to dismiss al-Saadi in all but name earlier this year served as the straw that broke the camel’s back, convincing thousands of al-Saadi’s compatriots that their politicians amounted to nothing more than Iranian stooges. Today, protesters carry his picture as they march through cities across Iraq, using photographs of al-Saadi as a reminder of why the latest demonstrations began. In an ironic twist, this once-obscure veteran first made a name for himself by avoiding politics—though not the wars that shape them.

Before I arrived in Iraq in June 2016 to cover the Third Battle of Fallujah for the Daily Beast, I never expected to meet al-Saadi. In fact, I only heard of him after I got there. Though al-Saadi, the architect of the month-long Iraqi operation to recapture Fallujah, commanded the respect of many Iraqis for his commitment to his country’s national security, he was far from a household name in the United States. Nonetheless, al-Saadi soon found himself at the center of the American strategy to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS).

Al-Saadi, who became an Iraqi national symbol in 2015 after leading his troops to decisive victories at the Battle of Baiji and the Second Battle of Tikrit, earned further respect for the deftness with which he navigated the ceaseless tug of war between Iran and the United States over Iraq’s peripatetic campaign against ISIS. While Iran armed, funded, and trained many of the factions that composed the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella organization of militias that provided much of the manpower at the heart of the anti-ISIS effort, al-Saadi had no problem refusing Iranian support during his successful bid to retake Baiji lest he appear aligned with the foreign policy of officials in Tehran.

At the same time, the general rarely hesitated to express his frustration with Iraq’s fickle American patrons, once complaining to the news media, “Sometimes, they would carry out airstrikes that I never asked for, and at other times I begged them for a single air strike and they never did it.” In a country where foreign allegiances could make or break military and political careers, al-Saadi’s refusal to take sides made him one of a kind in Iraqis’ eyes.

When I interviewed al-Saadi on the outskirts of Fallujah over three years ago, he was once again trying to shield his soldiers and himself from the consequences of the American-Iranian rivalry in Iraq. The Third Battle of Fallujah, however, presented an even greater challenge than Baiji or Tikrit had. As a motley coalition of Iraqis—American-backed commandos, Iranian-linked police officers, and Iranian-sponsored militiamen—surrounded Fallujah in May 2016 in a bid to expel ISIS militants from a stronghold less than an hour’s drive from the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, the Sunni-majority city’s thousands of residents expressed fears that the Shi‘a militias aligned with Iran would subject them to ethnic cleansing. The concerns of Fallujah’s inhabitants seemed well founded, given that the same notorious Shi‘a factions had faced many accusations of war crimes elsewhere in Iraq, including in campaigns that al-Saadi had led.

According to a landmark report by Human Rights Watch, “militia forces looted, torched, and blew up hundreds of civilian houses and buildings in Tikrit and the neighboring towns of al-Dur, al-Bu ‘Ajil and al-Alam along the Tigris River, in violation of the laws of war,” and “unlawfully detained some two hundred men and boys, at least 160 of whom remain unaccounted for and are feared to have been forcibly disappeared.” Many of the militias to which the human rights group had attributed these abuses were also participating in al-Saadi’s attempt to retake Fallujah. I had even embedded with a few, including the American-designated terrorist organization Kataib Hezbollah, just a couple days before my meeting with the famous general and the other soldiers of the raqi Counterterrorism Service (ICTS).

Though a Shi‘a himself, al-Saadi felt little love for the militias that reported to him on paper but in practice acted at the behest of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a resourceful paramilitary charged with enacting the will of Iran’s Shi‘a theocracy at home and abroad. In fact, al-Saadi had even fought against the IRGC and its Iraqi collaborators during the Iran-Iraq War as a soldier in the military of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s Sunni dictator until 2003. Because the general saw himself first and foremost as an Iraqi, not an Arab or a Shi‘a, he distinguished himself as one of the few public figures in Iraq free of the divisiveness that has plagued the country’s military and politics for so long. This quality made him the perfect choice to recapture Fallujah.

As the second in command of the ICTS, al-Saadi oversaw a unit of commandos recruited from a variety of ethnic groups and religious denominations. Whereas many of the PMF’s Iranian-backed militias restricted their membership to Iraqi Shi‘a, the ICTS and its best-known member sought to represent Iraqi society as a whole. To prevent the kind of backlash that had followed the PMF’s involvement in Tikrit and other campaigns, Iraqi officials decided that al-Saadi and ICTS commandos, supported by units from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, should spearhead the operation to breach ISIS’s defenses in Fallujah while the PMF’s militias remained on the outskirts of the city to secure the rear and sustain the siege. Iraqi leaders hoped that this arrangement would keep the PMF far away from the city’s fearful population and make al-Saadi, already a minor celebrity in Baghdad, the face of Fallujah’s eventual liberation.

Sitting with al-Saadi and his aides on the roof of a half-finished building overlooking Fallujah’s burning skyline, I had no difficulty seeing why a general who was receiving little attention from the Western press had begun to dominate Iraq’s national consciousness. All the Iraqis whom I interviewed—even members of Kataib Hezbollah and other militias that had made a point of killing Americans during the Iraq War—had more or less treated me with respect, but al-Saadi displayed a particular kind of hospitality. While many a soldier of his rank and stature might have regarded a 20-year-old freelance journalist bumbling around Iraq on his own as an oddity at best, al-Saadi answered my questions for hours, assigned several soldiers to protect me, and served me food even though he and most of his commandos were observing Ramadan.

Just as al-Saadi had imprinted himself on the minds of Iraqi Arabs, Kurds, Shi‘as, and Sunnis as a war hero devoid of the geopolitical and sectarian baggage that had defined so many other public figures, the charismatic Iraqi general who enjoyed a stroll across the frontlines in his signature baseball cap and green sweatshirt proved my most memorable interviewee. Nevertheless, I had no inkling that he would become the inspiration for destabilizing protests three years later.

Just days after I departed Iraq in late June 2016, Haider al-Abadi, the Iraqi Prime Minister at the time, announced that al-Saadi had defeated ISIS and freed Fallujah. Despite two notable hiccups—namely, one PMF militia kidnapping Sunni civilians from a village bordering the city and another Iranian-linked faction entering the city against al-Abadi’s direct orders—many analysts viewed the ICTS operation in Fallujah as a success. For his part, al-Saadi had liberated Mosul, the biggest city held by ISIS and once the second largest in Iraq, by July 2017. These two victories cemented his reputation as a commander without peer, yet al-Saadi’s military accomplishments had done little to quell Iraq’s political turmoil.

In the summer of 2018, violent demonstrations swallowed the southern Iraqi city of Basra before spreading across the country. Iraqi protesters complained about issues as varied as the extent of Iran’s influence over Iraq’s military and political system and Iraqi officials’ lackluster response to environmental issues. Al-Abadi’s inability to contain the protests, during which demonstrators went as far as torching the Iranian consulate in Basra, undermined his constituents’ confidence in his government. The economist Adil Abdul-Mahdi replaced al-Abadi as Iraqi Prime Minister on October 25, 2018, yet the new administration did nothing to address the mounting concerns that preceded al-Abadi’s downfall. If anything, Iran’s already substantial sphere of influence in Iraq grew under Abdul-Mahdi as political parties tied to PMF militias became kingmakers in the wobbly coalition government that he assembled. At best, most Iraqis felt disappointed.

At the same time, Iran and its Iraqi proxies were starting to view al-Saadi as a threat. His rare combination of popularity and neutrality stood in stark contrast to the ever-growing hostility with which Iraqis regarded the constellation of militias and political parties beholden to Iran. In late September 2019, Abdul-Mahdi moved al-Saadi from the ICTS to an administrative post in the Iraqi Defense Ministry. Though a technical promotion, many analysts viewed the transfer as an Iranian-orchestrated bid to sideline al-Saadi, who maintained a cordial relationship with Iran’s American rivals. A number of moderate Iraqi politicians, including al-Abadi, criticized the move as an insult to Iraq’s war heroes. Al-Saadi, meanwhile, said at one point that he preferred prison to working within the Iraqi bureaucracy, but he acquiesced to the new job in the end in the name of preserving stability. Even so, Iraqi demonstrators seemed to have far different ideas.

Protesters never had a shortage of grievances to begin with, but the government’s decision to sideline a beloved national symbol proved the final straw. Many of al-Saadi’s admirers viewed his removal from the ICTS as the latest example of feckless Iraqi politicians capitulating to Iran. In no time, Iraqis carrying flags adorned with his face and chanting slogans against their government took to the streets.

What began as demonstrations against the mistreatment of a popular Iraqi war hero with about a thousand attendees swelled into protests of hundreds of thousands demanding a wide range of reforms to the Iraqi state as a whole. Though al-Saadi’s dismissal at the apparent behest of Iran represents only one episode in the decades-long international struggle over the future of Iraq, his downfall reminded Iraqis of how little their government’s actions aligned with their desires. “Our anger is because they removed Abdel-Wahab al-Saadi, a person who sacrificed many things for Iraqis and liberated Mosul from ISIS,” one Iraqi protester told a Turkish news agency. “The government must honor him instead, not punish his service.”

In many ways, al-Saadi embodied what Iraq might have become under better circumstances. He commanded American-trained soldiers, cooperated with Iranian-backed militias, and served on the same front lines as dozens of American and Iranian advisors without ever tying himself to one camp or the other. Unlike his counterparts in the PMF, he stayed away from politics, respecting the will of whichever Iraqi government was giving him orders—even the one that fired him from the job that he loved. Al-Saadi also led a unit of commandos transcending Iraq’s ethnic groups and religious denominations, and Shi‘as and Sunnis alike revered him for his military feats.

In effect, al-Saadi symbolized that Iraqis could overcome their political and sectarian differences, contrary to the claims of pundits who consider the Iraqi state a misguided neocolonial project. The protests that he triggered demonstrate that al-Saadi’s compatriots want the kind of country that he personified. On the other hand, his fate shows just how far Iraq still has to go.

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Rebuilding Reality

Donald J. Trump and his supporters advance a conspiracy theory holding that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in our 2016 elections. 

Daniel Coats, the former director of National Intelligence, is on record stating there is no doubt Russia interfered in our elections. Moscow did so, according to Coats, comprehensively and in unprecedented ways. Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s top Russia expert until summer 2019, was equally clear when she testified before Congress in November. Said Hill:

Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.

You would think it would be difficult to dismiss Hill and Coats as partisan, “deep state” operatives. Both were appointed by President Trump. Coats, a GOP loyalist, served as United States Senator from Indiana from 1989 to 1999, and again from 2011 to 2017. Before that, he was a Republican member of the House of Representatives from 1981 to 1989. In the Senate he sat on the Select Committee on Intelligence. After 9/11, he served as George W. Bush’s Ambassador to Germany.

In the impeachment process, partisan politics define almost everything.

Still. We simply cannot allow blatant disregard for truth. It destroys clear-sightedness. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is an American problem. Ukraine—whatever its flaws—is not. Ukraine has always represented a strategic opportunity to help to contain malign Kremlin influence. Vladimir Putin has a vision of more Russia and less America in Europe, and elsewhere. Other and even more formidable adversarial forces advance their hostile visions, too.

In our next print issue, coming in mid-December, we commend to you articles on China by Charles Edel, Nils Gilman, and TAI contributing editor Andrew Michta. Together these pieces add to the puzzle we need to assemble of the world’s most influential authoritarian power. China is a complex, multi-faceted challenge.

The rise of new authoritarianism raises important questions for us about democracy. Susan Glasser and David Kramer speak in the current issue with Carl Gershman, Richard Fontaine, and Daniel Twining about the future of democracy promotion. We are aware that this collocation has become problematic, to say the least. Iraq knocked the stuffing out of the idea of democracy promotion. We need self-criticism and introspection. But if overreach was a problem in the past, let us not dupe ourselves into thinking that turning away from allies and abandoning our principles—the best of American tradition—will be the remedy. Narrowly defined “America First” nationalism is selfish and short-sighted. It will reveal itself in time as utterly ineffective.

We have our own issues with democracy at home. On tackling the persisting roots of racism, read Stanford law professor and TAI contributing editor Richard Thompson Ford. On getting African American heroes right, have a look at Carolyn Stewart on the new Harriet Tubman film. Problems of history, identity, and cohesion are not America’s alone. TAI contributing editor Ben Judah reviews a new biography of Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion. Thompson Ford, Stewart, and Judah remind us that democracy is a never-ending quest.

As we speak we are unable to imagine the next twists and turns in the impeachment process, yet we feel obligated to weigh in.

The constitution is given to some ambiguity, but it is clear that high crimes and misdemeanors are not limited to actual crimes. In our view, President Trump’s attempt to trade state assets for personal and political gain is the abuse and violation of public trust envisioned by the Framers as grounds for impeachment. Impeached or not, for a growing list of reasons Donald J. Trump has shown himself unfit for office. 

Look to The American Interest to help articulate what new leadership in 2020 must look like. We care deeply about the roots of Trumpism. Elected leaders and elites must listen and learn, so that gaps are bridged and trust in representative democracy is restored. We must contemplate institutional reform. For this, we need expertise, fact-based work, and considered opinion. And we must never lose sight of this: Only a prizing of the common good over sectarian interests will enable us to stave off conspiracy theories and the upending pathologies that threaten to pull America apart.

Jeffrey Gedmin, Editor-in-Chief

Francis Fukuyama, Chairman

Charles Davidson, Publisher

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How Social Security Was Saved—and Might Be Again

Lost amid the impeachment fight and election contests, an epochal moment in the history of America’s welfare state is coming in 2020: For the first time since 1982, the Social Security Trust Fund will begin to shrink. Rather than lending money to the rest of the government, America’s most venerable spending program will begin to call in its nearly $3 trillion of IOUs. This won’t cause any sort of crisis today, or tomorrow. But it points toward a reckoning that is now just a few political cycles away.

This isn’t “news.” Fewer babies born, retiring Baby Boomers, and longer-living old folks have made it inevitable for some time. But this moment is coming sooner than we thought. As recently as 2010, the Social Security Administration predicted that the Old Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund would run surpluses until 2026 and run out only in 2040. Now surpluses are expected to be gone in 2020, and depletion is expected in 2034. Because Social Security runs on its own account by law, at that point, if no adjustments are made, benefits would have to immediately shrink by one quarter to align revenues and payments. Given the popularity of Social Security with the American public, such a drastic cut is almost impossible to imagine—but, then again, so is a deal that would fix things.

The sheer insanity of our present political moment is only part of what makes it so hard to see the way forward. A lot of it is just the nature of the problem itself. Ever since Jude Wanniski offered his “Two Santa Claus” theory back in 1976, Democrats have reliably opposed benefit cuts and Republicans tax increases. That makes it awfully difficult to solve public financing problems where the obvious solution is a combination of benefit cuts and tax increases, a description to which a large part of our welfare state now answers. Frugality and foresight are not qualities our political regime produces in abundance, to put it gently. And so the prospects for reform seem bleak. 

Not-so-ancient history offers some hope, however. With an unpopular and stubborn GOP president, a Republican-controlled Senate, and a Democratic House led by a hard-charging partisan, our political class managed the feat of saving Social Security in 1983. They cut benefits, raised taxes, and put the program on sound financial footing for decades—a virtual eternity in political time. The story of their success tells us much about what will be needed to save Social Security again, and why Congress will need to get its act together to shepherd any deal through to political legitimacy. 

The first big attempt at fixing Social Security was a flop. From 1950 until 1970, Congress had gleefully reserved for itself the privilege of making cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) to the program’s benefits, the better to take credit for bigger checks arriving in the mail. By the early 1970s, this task had all the joy sucked out of it by rising expectations, rising inflation, and the nation’s increasingly precarious fiscal situation. In response, Congress put COLAs on autopilot in 1972, indexing them to inflation. Unfortunately, the trajectory they chose was unsustainable, and by mid-decade, the program was expected to eat through its then-modest trust fund soon and face ever-larger deficits later. 

With their party newly in control of the White House, Democrats pushed through a fix in 1977 based mostly on tax increases scheduled to take effect in the 1980s. President Jimmy Carter praised Congress’s “sound judgment and political courage in restoring the social security system to a sound basis” and said that the system would be on firm footing through 2030. In fact, the tax increases scheduled were too little, too late. Both short- and long-term crises loomed again by the 1980 election. With the GOP ousting Carter and taking control of the Senate for the first time since 1954, a divided government would have to figure things out. 

The new Congress tried to proceed in the textbook manner of regular order. In the House Ways and Means Committee, a serious bipartisan plan was crafted by the chairman of the Subcommittee on Social Security, J.J. Pickle (D-TX), and the full committee’s ranking Republican member, Barber Conable (R-NY), who would later become the president of the World Bank. Their bill was voted down by the full committee 14-18, and there didn’t appear to be any other immediate way forward. Apparently, some sort of unconventional path would be necessary to fashion a compromise capable of garnering bipartisan support. 

President Ronald Reagan had made noises about fixing Social Security during his 1980 run, but his administration’s early efforts were lacking. As part of his zealous charge to balance the budget, Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget director, David Stockman, proposed significant cuts to benefits, to take effect immediately. As congressional Republicans were quick to point out, this was essentially an invitation to political harakiri, and they wanted no part in it. By September 1981, Reagan was on the defensive. In an attempt to reset the conversation, he announced his intention to create a commission to solve the problem. In December 1981, the commission was officially launched with 15 members, five each appointed by the President, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. 

The members were a mix of legislators and heavy-hitting outsiders, including industry and labor leaders. Several of the legislators were natural dealmakers, including Conable and Senators Bob Dole (R-KS), Bob Heinz (R-PA), and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY). Others, however, were appointed precisely because of their credibility as hardliners, including Rep. Bill Archer (R-TX) and Senator William Armstrong (R-CO) on the conservative side, and Rep. Claude Pepper (D-FL) on the liberal side.

Pepper, whose role would be pivotal, was an unusual character. Born in 1900 in Alabama, the Florida transplant operated a hat-cleaning business and worked in steel mills in his youth. But he went on to establish himself as a Harvard-trained, silver-tongued lawyer. He won a special election for a U.S. Senate seat in 1936, at the tender age of 36, and became an ardent New Dealer and champion of Lend-Lease assistance to the Allies. Then, in 1950, the proud liberal lost to a primary challenger who attacked him as “Red Pepper,” soft on communism and race issues. After spending a decade practicing law and running a failed campaign to return to the Senate in 1958, he decided to return to national politics via a new House seat for Miami-Dade created in 1962. There he remained ensconced until his death in 1989, gradually becoming one of the more senior members in the lower chamber. From his youthful days in the Florida state Legislature, Pepper had been an advocate of the interests of the elderly. In the 1970s—in his own 70s—he championed the creation of the House Select Committee on Aging, of which he became chairman in 1977. By the time of his appointment to the Social Security Commission in late 1981, he was a vigorous 81—an old man who had been defending old people’s benefits since their creation in America. Clearly, the Commission would not be producing a dressed-up version of Stockman’s benefit-cut plan on his watch. 

It would be pleasant if all that was needed to produce a deal was to toss such actors into a pot and stir, with a compromise emerging as a smooth blend of all the important interests through the magic of open deliberation. If that was the experience, it would suggest a rather straightforward recipe for solving the nation’s entitlement spending problems. 

That is, more or less, the interpretation of events offered by the chairman of Reagan’s commission, Alan Greenspan, who in 1981 was an economic consultant well-connected within Republican circles. By that point in his life, he had been a professional jazz clarinetist, a devotee of Ayn Rand, and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors; only later would he become “The Maestro” credited with producing a decade-long economic boom. In his own memoir, Greenspan gives just a couple pages to the Social Security Commission. He recalls it as “a virtuoso demonstration of how to get things done in Washington” and specially credits his own key negotiating precepts: limit the problem, agree to numerical dimensions, “bring everyone along,” and commit to defend the compromise that emerges. Perhaps a bit more involved than “add the right people and then stir,” but pretty simple. 

What Greenspan’s terse account leaves out is the fact that the commission was ready to close up shop in late 1982 without having agreed to any kind of solution at all. As recounted by political scientist Paul Light, who was embedded in Conable’s office throughout the process, the 15 members of the Greenspan Commission plus Stockman and Reagan’s staff Secretary, Dick Darman, assembled to seek a compromise as the Gang of Seventeen. That turned out to be too unwieldy a gang, including too many members pulling too strongly in opposite directions. 

Nor did the 1982 midterm election season make things any easier. Though voters were surely eager to see a deal concluded before the imminent delay or reduction of benefit checks, their champions on both sides dug into their respective trenches with their campaign rhetoric. As Conable remembered it, Pepper was especially strident, campaigning in more than 40 House races and insisting that there was nothing really wrong with Social Security. After GOP losses in the 1982 midterms, Dole was instructing his fellow Republicans to hold back and seek another way forward. A series of televised hearings in November 1982 were not entirely fruitless, yielding unanimous agreement on reasonable targets, but pointed to no actual solution. 

A final push involved a reduction in gang size—from 17 to nine, with no staff involved. Nine was a small enough number to allow absolute secrecy in negotiations, as well as an intimate setting, in the home of Reagan’s chief of staff, James Baker. Most importantly, the hardliners on both sides, including Pepper, were simply excluded. The key participants in these discussions were Baker, speaking as the trusted envoy of President Reagan, and Robert Ball, longtime veteran of the Social Security Administration and, on the Commission, O’Neill’s most trusted point man. They proved capable of mutual respect and achieved a strong working relationship. 

Why not just stick Reagan and O’Neill across the table from each other, then, perhaps flanked by their respective lieutenants? The devil is in the details, and each side’s top man might have missed subtleties just when they mattered most. In the event, the key breakthrough was discovering a provision that both sides could count as a win. Working privately, Ball and Baker discovered that Democrats would regard a move to tax benefits for high earners as a tax increase, while Republicans would regard it as a benefit reduction, which made the change an ideal keystone for a deal that balanced tax increases and budget cuts. Each side could feel it got a bit more than half of the pie. Whatever their golf course rapport may have been, it would have been difficult for Reagan and O’Neill to know how to accommodate each other’s sides in this way, even if their egos had allowed them to do so. 

Those egos point to another problem: The president’s and Speaker’s need to be the biggest presence in the room might preclude them from showing the kind of deference to each other, or to powerful interests, necessary to make a deal. Baker and Ball’s main exchange was frequently interrupted when, as Conable described it:

Every hour, Baker would announce that he could not guarantee the president’s support. And one of the Democrats would say they could not guarantee the Speaker’s support. It was a ritual. The Republicans would say, “You have to give us something we can take the President,” and the Democrats would say, “You have to give us something we can take to Claude Pepper.” 

The invocation of Pepper, who had been purposefully excluded from the discussions, suggests the sensitivity of the negotiation. The mechanics of working out a deal could be simplified by empowering Baker and Ball to agree upon details—but the struggle was never just to satisfy either of them, or even Reagan and O’Neill. Rather, the task was to adequately represent each important interest in a way that would allow a majority of legislators to consent, even as they lost on some particular point. Had they dispensed with legislators altogether, that might well have been impossible.

To assemble a working majority, ambiguity of authorship was essential. Thanks to Ball and Baker’s work together, the Gang of Nine engineered a solution to avert the short-term crisis and close two-thirds of the long-term shortfall. But they saw no advantage in marketing their deal as the product of super-secret negotiations. Rather, they reassembled the full commission to act as the vehicle, imploring its previously excluded members to support the compromise as the only available means of averting a political catastrophe. Three of the commission’s conservatives balked, insisting that the tax increases included were more than they could take. But with some encouragement from the Speaker and the president, the other 12 members agreed. As Light put it, “The package would be sold as the product of a year-long bipartisan study, not two weeks of secret negotiations.” A myth of a great commission success was ginned up immediately and flowered in the years that followed—indeed, it is sometimes still accepted today. 

Among the commission members voting for the package was Pepper, even though some of his red lines had been crossed and he was opposed to taxing benefits at any income level. He was willing to go along, in part, because he had become chairman of the House Rules Committee at the beginning of 1983, and was therefore in a position to structure debate on the package. In conjunction with Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski and Speaker O’Neill, Pepper agreed that the commission’s package would be protected from all amendments on the floor except for two: one from Pickle, proposing to substitute an increase in the retirement age for some of the Commission’s favored long-term fixes; and one from Pepper, proposing to instead substitute tax increases imposed beginning in 2010 for the same purpose. In other words, careful management of the legislative process allowed Pepper, the foremost champion of the aged, to be on both sides of the issue: He could be for the package as the only way to save Social Security, even as he went to the mat in an attempt to shift the burdens it imposed away from the elderly and onto the broader society. (Pepper also arranged a meeting in which he was able to chew out Ball for being too accommodating in front of some leaders of the AARP, thereby burnishing his credibility as a die-hard defender of the elderly.)

When Congress was asked to pick between Pickle and Pepper (dutifully dubbed “the battle of the condiments” in the press), a conservative coalition narrowly put Pickle’s amendment over the top, while Pepper’s amendment was resoundingly rejected. The amended package passed the House 282–148, drawing support from the center of each party. The Senate soon followed with its own bill, which easily passed 88–9. The conference bill mostly reflected the House’s choices and was quickly passed through both chambers and signed into law by President Reagan on April 20, 1983. Benefits had been cut, taxes had been raised, and the program had been saved. With an assist from some extramural negotiating, the legislative process had delivered in a way that allowed all sides to share the credit.

That included Pepper, who quickly spun his outflanking into a victory. In his 1989 memoir, he depicted himself as a constructive and, indeed, pivotal player in the negotiations of the Greenspan Commission. “Given the enormity of the problem, I regard it as miraculous that we succeeded as well as we did, although I was not happy with all of the changes,” he wrote, reiterating his opposition to taxing benefits. He lamented the adoption of the Pickle Amendment, but cheered himself with the prospect of replacing its slow-moving changes before they took effect since there is always another round to look forward to in politics. This is what legislative compromise can do that judicial decisions or executive branch rules cannot: give losers the option to join arms with the winners and share in the victory celebrations today even as they plot a way to rejoin the issue tomorrow.

In fact, Pickle’s slow-moving increases in the retirement age were never repealed; they are still phasing in through 2027. Together with the Baker- and Ball-negotiated elements of the 1983 deal, they have given Social Security a stability unusual in this stormy era of politics. Without the program facing any kind of imminent crisis, all major attempts at altering it have fallen flat—including President George W. Bush’s 2005 effort to give taxpayers individual accounts, which Democrats stopped dead in its tracks without offering any counterproposal. 

Although we will shortly begin depleting the Trust Fund, we face no imminent crisis today. Does it follow that what Conable called our “crisis-activated system of government” is incapable of adjusting our course now, even if doing so would be much easier to manage than a solution implemented in the 2030s? Probably! But not certainly, for two main reasons. 

First, drawing down the Social Security Trust Fund is essentially equivalent to changing the financing of the program. Since the Trust Fund’s only assets are United States debt, spending down those assets entails the Federal government getting the money somewhere else. But the payroll taxes that have until now sufficed to pay for the program are unlike all the other taxes levied by the government in an important way: They are far more regressive (especially compared to income taxes, the single largest source of revenue). That may seem like an economically perverse feature for a social insurance program, but it was chosen quite deliberately by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who presciently foresaw that a broadly shared burden would be the surest guarantee of the program’s political health. That burden will be less broadly shared in the coming years; put more bluntly, rich people will be paying for proportionately more of Social Security than ever before.

This change could conceivably create room for a political bargain. Rich people, as always, would prefer not to carry the load. Democrats, meanwhile, led by current Chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee John Larson (D-CT), have a bill that would restabilize the program’s long-term finances while simultaneously making benefits more generous for low-income seniors, who depend on them most. The American Enterprise Institute’s Andrew Biggs recently explained how Larson’s willingness to expand the relatively regressive tax burden of payroll taxes might create an opportunity for a bargain if it gave Republicans a way to reduce income tax rates. It’s the kind of artful deal that might make sense in a second Trump term, if only the President could maintain the political will and organizational discipline needed to pull it off.

Second, it is easy to imagine political deadlines as immovable features of the political landscape, but we should remember that they are nearly always elaborate social conventions that matter because the participants decide to make them matter. Most can either be averted through status-quo-extending can-kicking or treated as moments of reckoning. Social Security faced a do-or-die moment in early 1983 largely because Barber Conable decided it should be so. The Senate had advanced a plan in 1982 that would have facilitated internal borrowing between Social Security’s different components for 10 years, thereby alleviating the immediate crunch. Conable used his influence to ensure that this maneuver would only be allowed through the end of 1982 (plus an additional six months in reserves). He bet that Congress was as ready to bite the bullet then as at any time, and it paid off.

If our current crop of legislators were determined to take responsibility, then, they could tweak this or that seemingly-non-salient element of the program and bring on a moment for reform—someone in the Social Security Administration, a successor to Robert Ball, would know how. Doing so would be a gamble, of course, worth taking only if we believe our system would be up to the job of making a deal and selling it to the American people as fair. It’s easy to be jaded—to say that there are no James Bakers, Barber Conables, or even Claude Peppers on the scene any longer. But the moral of the story of 1983 isn’t that it took the efforts of heroic figures to pull a deal off—it’s that, with a bit of ingenuity, our political process can get ideological opponents and political enemies to rally around a workable compromise, even when they have to make real concessions. The 2010s were conspicuously lacking in such compromises. But perhaps a return to normalcy in 2020 is yet in store. 

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Harriet Tubman: The Hero We Need

Harriet

Directed by Kasi Lemmons

Focus Features, 2019, 125 minutes

If you’ve seen Harriet, the new Harriet Tubman biopic now playing in theaters, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Harriet was an antebellum James Bond. Dressed in a top hat and gentleman’s tail coat, she could waltz through a southern plantation undetected, tie up a slaveholder’s child, and for good measure, shoot off a man’s hand moments later. All in a day’s work for the “Moses of Her People.”

Quite a story, if it were true. But the Harriet Tubman introduced in Kasi Lemmons’s new biopic starring Cynthia Erivo has more in common with Clark Kent and Tony Stark than the real-life Underground Railroad conductor who guided 70 men, women, and children to freedom. 

Perhaps our current glut of superhero films is to blame. In the last five years, major studios have churned out 52 live-action superhero films, with more than half coming from the Marvel and DC Comics universes. Audiences love watching evil get vanquished by the underdog, while studio executives love profitable and endlessly extendable franchises. 

But the action-packed escapism that makes superhero films so entertaining also distorts our understanding of true, everyday heroism. Despite their focus on the struggle between Good and Evil, the movies lull us into moral laziness. Actor Edward Norton, who played the Incredible Hulk in 2008, notes that superhero films turn viewers “into passive receptors of narrative” who rarely filter the stories on screen through their own morality. Real heroism, he says, is “formed by a [person’s] sense of being proactive, being themselves. It’s a person with a lot of daily battles and problems [who] is going to get off their ass and do something about anything. A lot of what we’re doing is not cultivating those people.”  

A good story, whether fiction or nonfiction, offers itself as a laboratory of character. It invites us to peer into the lives of other people, examining their virtues and faults while learning from their actions. In their What So Proudly We Hail anthology of classic civics texts, editors Amy Kass, Leon Kass, and Diana Schaub write that character goes beyond temperament, personality, and values. It is the “power of choosing, a most peculiar fusion of heart and mind that reveals itself in the choices we make and deeds we do.” That’s a perfect description for Harriet Tubman.

Harriet had those three things: her heart, her mind, and the power of choice. But she had little else. She couldn’t read or write. Childhood abuse inflicted by her slaveholders crippled her for life. She escaped slavery with no funds to her name and little but the shirt on her back. After beginning her life as a free woman in Philadelphia, she labored as a cook and maid, saving whatever she could. 

There’s a certain type of person who, seeing a house on fire and hearing screams, decides to run into the flames. Harriet made that choice again and again. Each time she had saved up enough of her wages in Philadelphia, she embarked on rescue missions to the slave state of Maryland, gathering family, friends, and strangers who were ready to seek freedom. She did this for 15 years, until the outbreak of the Civil War. The attributes of the real Harriet Tubman—her innate strength and goodness—humble any depiction of heroism on offer from Hollywood.

Yet the new biopic gives Tubman the franchise superhero treatment, divorcing her from the real-world circumstances that make her the perfect guide through America’s darker legacies and to its brightest potential. Her life is a rare opportunity to reconcile seemingly contradictory visions of American history—the shameful legacy of slavery, but also the hopeful story of Americans who risked their lives and livelihoods to help others find freedom.

Just outside of Bucktown, Maryland, at a small country store that can still be visited, a moment’s cruelty brought about life-altering changes in Harriet. Then known by her birth name, Araminta “Minty” Ross, she was 13 years old when she visited the local store on a farm errand, just as a local overseer tried to capture an enslaved man within the store. The overseer demanded she help him tie down the field worker, but she refused. A moment later, the fugitive broke free, and just as he ran past Harriet, the overseer threw a two-pound weight in his direction. Harriet was struck instead. The metal weight drove into her skull, cracking the bone and pressing a scrap of shawl deep into the wound. 

Harriet was carried back to her slaveholder’s farm, but received no medical help. Having no bed, she was laid down on the bench of a weaving loom. For two days she floated in and out of feverish consciousness with an injury that could easily have killed her. But on the third day she was forced to return to the fields, working, in her own words, “with the blood and sweat rolling down my face till I couldn’t see.” 

The metal weight that had cracked her skull also damaged the front temporal lobe of her brain. This region is responsible for sight, hearing, taste, and smell, as well as memory and emotion, and damage to the lobes can cause temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). As a result, she would suffer from frequent seizures for the rest of her life, along with debilitating headaches and exhaustion. 

From Harriet’s perspective, the seizures were something else entirely. She was swarmed by religious visions and hallucinations. The prophets of the Old Testament spoke to her in their ancient tongues. Angels carried her over fields and streams, revealing the paths to freedom.

The visions strengthened her faith and sense of purpose. Quaker abolitionist Thomas Garrett worked with Tubman regularly, and noted that he “never met with any person, of any color, who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul.” From a young age, Harriet maintained a constant dialogue with God in her mind, a habit that would continue throughout her rescue missions, when she had faith that God’s active involvement kept her safe amid constant and shifting dangers. 

In the new biopic, Harriet’s seizures take their cue from Spiderman’s “Spidey sense” rather than heaven-sent missives. Her visions foreshadow the dangers to come with high contrast, acid-washed clips of scenes that take place later in the film. While the visions serve as a convenient plot device to warn our conductor that slavecatchers are nearby, they misrepresent this key aspect of Harriet’s life—one of the few facets of the film that could have used more, and not less, heightened drama. 

By treating Harriet’s visions as a supernatural ability, the movie underplays the difficulties of what she actually faced and the real-world experience of coming to terms with a disability: the fear, the ambiguity, and confusion of adapting to a new normal, and even the discovery of a new strength as knowledge and experience is gained.

Following another dictum of superhero films, the biopic also creates an entirely fictional supervillain rather than work from the knottier source material of Harriet’s life. 

Early in the film, Harriet makes her first daring escape. After the death of slaveholder Edward Brodess, the family decides to sell Harriet. Within minutes, slave buyers are lurking throughout the Brodess farm, ready to shackle Harriet on the spot. She is forced to flee, but not before tear-stained farewells with her husband and father. She takes off into the woods—and almost immediately, is hunted by a gang of slavecatchers led by Gideon Brodess (Joe Alwyn), the evil blond-haired son of Harriet’s recently deceased slaveholder.

The gang corners Harriet at the midpoint of a stone bridge, high above the river. As Gideon and his goons hedge closer, Harriet declares that she will “be free or die”—and pushes off of the bridge, plunging into the rapids far below. Will she survive? Will she drown? It’s an odd moment of fictional high-stakes drama, given that we know the answer.

Not one kernel of truth exists in the dramatized scene. Gideon, who appears to be driven by malice and little else, is an entirely fictional character. Yet he has more screen time in the film than anyone save Harriet.

The problem with inserting a fictional supervillain into nonfiction source material is that our fabricated notions of evil will never match the brutality of the real world. Gideon’s presence shifts the course of the film entirely. Instead of watching Harriet fight back against the chilling inhumanity of slavery as a system, we see a cat-and-mouse chase driven by a fictional character’s all-consuming obsession.

The result is a canned moral righteousness, more in the service of the screenwriters than in revealing the messy historical reality of slavery. By focusing on Gideon’s personal villainy, the biopic sidesteps the real ways in which slavery was often masked in the veil of virtue and industry. Examples abound in biographies of Harriet Tubman’s life, particularly Kate Clifford Larson’s Bound for the Promised Land, which reveals the moral excuse-making that slaveholders adopted to feel beneficent in their cruelty, from twisted readings of the Gospel to happy Sambo stereotypes. 

In actuality, by the time Harriet made her successful escape at 27 years old, she had achieved a relative degree of independence for an enslaved woman along Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She had saved up enough money to buy two oxen, and in an arrangement with Edward Brodess, paid him an annual fee for the right to hire herself out to the surrounding farms as an ox team driver. Harriet often worked with her father Ben Ross, a skilled woodsman, clearing timber in the marshes. Far from the eyes of overseers, she learned wilderness navigation and forged important connections with the black mariners who formed a covert communications network linking the free and slave states. 

When Edward Brodess died, word spread among the enslaved community that Harriet and her brothers would be headed to the auction block. To pay off the considerable debt left after Edward’s death, his widowed wife Eliza Brodess had decided to sell them—in essence, to liquidate their lives into cash to pay their captor’s debt. 

Sometimes an act or practice is so brutal, it sends shockwaves through a culture that lasts for generations. The phrase “to be sold down the river,” commonly used by the enslaved community of the Mid-Atlantic, to this day indicates betrayal of the worst kind. It was illegal in Maryland to sell slaves out of state, and considered in “poor moral taste” among slaveholders—which we can now recognize as an immensely hypocritical distinction. And yet, in the “breeder states” of Maryland and Virginia, it was common for enslaved men, women, and children to be sold illegally out of state to Southern slave traders willing to pay a premium. Some slaveholders would tell their neighbors that their enslaved person had escaped when in actuality the person had been sold and smuggled down south.    

The Deep South held comparatively worse conditions for enslaved men, women, and children than the Mid-Atlantic. Separated from their families and attached to chain gangs, they would be forced to march to Georgia, Tennessee, and other states where large sugarcane plantations and western expansion created a demand for slave labor. Severed from the underground communications network of the Mid-Atlantic, many enslaved people were never heard from again—as Harriet’s family knew all too well. The Brodess family sold Harriet’s three older sisters, Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph to out-of-state slaveholders. Two of the sisters had children who likely never heard from their mothers again. 

During Harriet’s real-life escape, she used leisure as her subterfuge. While the film depicts her escaping from the Brodess farm, she was actually living on the farm of Anthony Thompson, her father’s slaveholder. She was already familiar with the mechanics of escape, having watched her father, himself a conductor on the Underground Railroad, help ferry freedom-seekers out of Maryland.

The day of her escape, Harriet walked and skipped down the farm road, past the slave cabins, and in fact past slaveholder Anthony Thompson himself, singing a spiritual of her own devising: “I’m sorry I’m going to leave you, farewell, oh farewell / I’ll meet you in the morning, I’m bound for the Promised Land / On the other side of Jordan, bound for the Promised Land.” Her song was typical enough of an African spiritual to be received at face value, but once her disappearance was apparent, its coded message could reassure friends and family. 

Harriet traveled by night through forests, guided by the North Star. One of the region’s most active Quaker abolitionist communities, the Marshy Creek Friends, lived a mile from Thompson’s farm. The Quakers of the Eastern Shore had made the decision to stop owning slaves 60 years earlier, and this community helped Harriet escape in her own. She posed as a house worker at the first house that sheltered her, sweeping the front yard to avoid suspicion during the day. As night fell, one of the Quaker conductors hid her in a wagon and brought her to the next safe house. And so, hiking, hiding, and slipping from house to house, she made her way to Philadelphia. 

Yet just 150 miles south in Maryland, Harriet’s husband and family remained unfree.

“Slavery is the next thing to hell,” Harriet told her grandnephew one day. In saying so, she drew down her dress to reveal the raised welts where whips had cut her skin. These markings were a memento of the world that she had left but couldn’t escape. It was a hell that continued to exist and threaten her family and friends, the welts a constant reminder of a bitter truth she couldn’t change. This, too, is a truth that the biopic struggles to translate into film.

After escaping to Philadelphia with her own freedom, Harriet worked until she had saved enough wages to fund her next rescue mission. Money functioned as a tool of liberation for Harriet. She eschewed any idea of using money for the comforts of life—a warmer coat, a full larder, enough savings for peace of mind. She began making return trips to save enslaved family members threatened by imminent sale. 

Within two years of her initial escape, Tubman returned to Maryland on a high-risk mission to retrieve her husband. She had married John Tubman, a free black man living in a nearby community, five years earlier. On her trip to the Eastern Shore, Harriet brought the new suit she had bought for him, likely to symbolize the new life they would live together as an equally free couple.

But Harriet came back to unexpected news. John was remarried to a free black woman. Harriet was hiding in a nearby friend’s home and sent word for him to visit her. But he refused to do so, being content with his life as a free man in a slave state. 

Harriet was devastated. The future she dreamed of, perhaps rebuilding their life together in Philadelphia while saving family members from slavery, was dashed. In her grief and fury, Tubman considered storming into John’s house to disrupt his life. Instead, she drew deep from a well of self-respect and dignity in the hours following John’s rejection. As she told others later in life, she realized “how foolish it was just for temper to make mischief.” 

Her next actions speak directly to the kind of person Harriet was. If John “could do without her, she could do without him.” She could still serve as an instrument for good. And so, working with her Underground Railroad contacts, she found another group of fugitive men and women seeking liberty and led them north. 

Even amid grief that would make others feel helpless, Harriet responded to the indifferent cruelty of life as she did the intentional brutality of slaveholders—by focusing on what she could do, rather than on what she had lost. 

For storytellers, the rich potential of Harriet’s inner life is almost unfathomable. What were her thoughts, motivations, and fears as she progressed from being a fugitive to a free woman to a rescuer on a God-given mission? And what type of internal conversation is had by a person who escapes hell, and then immediately devotes herself to returning so that she might save others? What internal thread of compassion and logic tied her to figures like Raoul Wallenberg and Johan van Hulst, people who risked everything because they couldn’t forget the humanity of others?

Unfortunately for us, film editing is a zero-sum game. Every second spent telling one story is a second taken from another story. As the movie progresses, we see just how much of Harriet’s story is lost in an effort to tell Gideon’s fictional story—and it is a loss of epic proportions. 

In the final scenes of the film, the mystery of the unnecessary fictional villain is solved. Gideon has tracked Harriet into the woods, before Harriet manages to turn the tables on him. As he kneels before her, pleading and bleeding, Harriet is overtaken by one of her prophetic Spidey-sense visions. In her vision, Gideon is laying dead on a frozen battlefield. She spares his life—or, rather, the screenwriters do, knowing that attributing a fictional murder to Harriet Tubman would be going too far.

These last moments reveal that Gideon is the proto-Confederate soldier, a man whose anger and racism will fuel the Civil War to come. His death is the wage for the sin of slavery, and by extension, the filmmakers imply that the 258,000 Confederates who died in the Civil War are paying that cost as well. Not finding a figure from Harriet’s actual life who fits our contemporary model of Southern-fried racism, the filmmakers created him from scratch. The story of Harriet’s life is diverted to spotlight a caricature of unredeemable villainy.

To get to know Harriet Tubman, don’t see Harriet. Spend a weekend immersed in her real life, exploring the 40+ sites of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway that winds through Maryland, Delaware, and Philadelphia. Or visit the recently opened Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park, detailing her life along the Eastern Shore. Her final years would be spent fundraising and building a home for elderly African-Americans in New York, which can still be visited today.

Harriet eventually found herself in the Deep South, that land that took her three sisters and terrorized her family. When she arrived, it was aboard a Union gunboat, rifle at her side. Facing the banks of the Combahee River, she sang a spiritual to signal that the plantations’ enslaved men and women could come to her for freedom. And they came—more than 700 running in her direction. It was the largest liberation of enslaved people in American history, and the first U.S. military raid led by a woman. In that moment and many others, Harriet exercised her power of choice, that “most peculiar fusion of heart and mind,” and lived a life beyond anything a modern film studio could possibly imagine.

The post Harriet Tubman: The Hero We Need appeared first on The American Interest.

Not Waiting for Sputnik: A Call to Geoeconomics

Geoeconomics, the use of economics as an instrument of state power, is often discussed these days in light of U.S. competition with China. But what do we really mean by the word? It cannot simply mean the tactical application of economic instruments to achieve foreign policy goals—sanctions here, tax breaks there, rhetorical flourishes everywhere. Edward Luttwak, in his original definition of geoeconomics for The National Interest in 1990, described it in Clausewitzian terms as the logic of conflict in the grammar of commerce, among nation-states. Luttwak was writing in the heady years before 9/11, when threats from non-state actors and terrorism had not yet moved to the top of the policy agenda, complicating his predictions about the waning importance of military power. But Luttwak correctly foresaw, against the grain of other optimists of the time, that states were not simply going to wither away and allow for untrammeled corporate globalism. He recognized that states would continue to maximize their economic and technological power for domestic reasons, and in their relations with other states take an even more zero-sum approach, using economic strength as a base of power. He understood that a geoeconomic approach has to be truly strategic.

Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris, in their 2016 book War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft, have elaborated on Luttwak’s ideas. They define geoeconomics as “The use of economic interests to promote and defend national interests, and to produce beneficial geopolitical results,” which, of course, is precisely what China has been doing for decades as jingji waijiao, economic diplomacy. As if to follow Blackwill and Harris’s lead, other books, essays, articles, and papers have issued forth with a roll call of Chinese economic statecraft machinations and manipulations—everything from huge globally consequential moves, such as the WTO Accession and the Belt and Road Initiative, to seemingly minor ones, such as the buying of $300 million worth of low-interest Costa Rican bonds by the Chinese State Administration for Foreign Exchange for Costa Rica’s derecognition of Taiwan.

Still, more historical context is needed to fully understand geoeconomics—to see how it was once employed, to grasp how it was seemingly lost as an instrument of statecraft, and to understand how it can be regained. To that end, it helps to look at Dwight D. Eisenhower’s strategy as President.

After Sputnik launched, Ike famously created powerful R&D government agencies, later renamed NASA and DARPA, that would carry payloads of subsequent American innovation. But it’s just as important to recall what he didn’t do. He didn’t—to the surprise of many in Congress—seek a huge increase in defense spending. He didn’t immediately associate Sputnik with a military threat. Indeed, his Democratic critics did precisely that. They harped on a missile gap that even McNamara later admitted was fiction. They howled for a bigger defense budget, for a “flexible response” of the sort that helped to bring us to debacle in Southeast Asia.

Ike’s decision was consistent with his “Great Equation” strategy that long predated Sputnik’s blips. Running for the presidency in 1952, he set forth the formula to his friend Lucius Clay: “Spiritual force multiplied by economic force multiplied by military force is roughly equivalent to security. If any one of those factors fell to zero, or nearly so, the resulting product does likewise.” That there was a threat that required vigilance, there was no doubt. But that threat had to be contextualized, made part of a greater strategic framework. The purpose of the Great Equation strategy was to seek balance, to ensure a harmonious relationship between economic growth and military spending, and to utilize primarily economic means—the real strength, after all, of the United States.

Ike’s formula for defense budgeting reflected this not-so-subtle approach. Simply put, he imposed a budget cap on defense. The military services couldn’t exceed it, but had to divvy up what they were given among themselves. Compared to the maddeningly intricate resourcing and budget system that his New Frontiersmen successors designed, the “Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution System” (PPBE) that we still have today, it perhaps looked hopelessly naive and unsophisticated. In many ways, it was. But Ike’s approach reflected a basic wisdom about priorities: subordinate your military capabilities to national economic well-being; control and balance your economic and military instruments of power; when you can, choose the former over the latter.

The term “Great Equation” more aptly describes Ike’s strategy than the “New Look,” which was its military expression, and which many associate near-exclusively with “massive retaliation.” Ike did seek to save dollars by focusing on nuclear rather than conventional forces. But he also sought to prevent the more immediate, short-term, militarized solution by, according to John Lewis Gaddis in his Strategies of Containment, holding out the specter of nuclear war in the interests of “not getting there,” and thereby restraining one’s own impulses to see every foreign policy nail as needing a military hammer.

He complemented this restrained military strategy with a view that government should foster economic growth and, when needed, should intervene significantly to do so: as Stephen S. Cohen and Bradford DeLong point out in their book Concrete Economics, the National Defense Highway Act of 1956 was the biggest public works project “between the Egyptian pyramids and the great Chinese urbanization at the turn of the twenty-first century.” And during the Suez Crisis, Ike had no compunction about using economic leverage by directing his Secretary of Treasury to dump sterling to pressurize the Brits into stopping what he thought was a foolish and misguided military action.

How and why did the notion of Great Equation strategizing get lost? The culprits are many: a Keynesian-inspired notion that government spending is a free-floating wealth generator, with little regard for the mountain of debt it creates; a laissez faire disdain for government involvement in the private sector that became Republican Party dogma; a bipartisan belief in free trade and the inevitable victory of private enterprise and liberal ideals; a post-Vietnam, draft-free, retooled American military that became the world’s best and mightiest. All the while, the corporate world detached itself from the public sector while Chicago School-inspired economics made “shareholder value” the alpha and omega of corporate existence.

It all metastasized near the end of that annus horribilus, 2001. From September 11 on, the U.S. military became involved in a $2 trillion, near-two-decade effort that immersed the world’s most sophisticated military in a vast, counterinsurgent, nation-building effort in two desolate countries. Of even more long-term consequence, the United States paved the way for China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, which occurred on December 11, three months to the day after the Towers fell. From that point, three-quarters of a billion workers became China’s shock troops in the economic campaign that sucked out America’s manufacturing base over the remainder of the decade with astonishing speed and ease. The disjunction of national security, economic security, and military might was complete.

Not everyone who championed China’s WTO accession believed that it would act as a panacea to neutralize the threat of a rising China; the Pentagon, after all, hardly defunded during these years. But the belief system behind the WTO push often reflected a naive faith that the world was headed to a free market, no-trade-barriers singularity. “China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products,” said Bill Clinton in touting the policy, “it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom.” In any event, China’s accession did not augur the triumph of globalization. It brought instead the resurgence of state capitalism: the capitalism of state-owned enterprises, special economic zones, and sovereign wealth funds. State capitalism became the script for the new millennium. The state—often autocratic, nationalistic, and downright xenophobic—had returned.

Since WTO accession, China has become increasingly ambitious, as seen by its 2013 Belt and Road Initiative and even more so by its Made in China 2025 plan, announced in 2015. That plan seeks, in incremental, decade-long steps, to become the world’s leader in ten industries, from aerospace to IT to agribusiness. No nation in the era of American dominance has laid out such a vision so ambitious, nor thrown down a gauntlet so obviously. Perhaps China has overplayed its hand, but if the announcement of Made in China 2025 was America’s Sputnik moment, we have failed to launch in return.

During his first term of office, Barack Obama tried to reorient the nation onto a path of internal economic innovation-driven policy, and thereby to rebuild a devastated manufacturing base. A major part of the policy Obama sought to promulgate was the “ManufacturingUSA” network of over a dozen public-private partnership manufacturing institutes, roughly modeled on the German Fraunhofer system. Ten years ago, in this very magazine William Bonvillian wrote, “If [Obama] cannot operationalize his campaign rhetoric on innovation and energy, there will be no foundation for innovation-based growth… He must succeed.”

That he didn’t helps to explain why Donald Trump is President. Some of the blame can certainly be placed at the feet of a Republican Party ideologically wedded to a no-government approach to private industry, opposed to anything that smacks of—pick your phrase—“picking winners and losers” or “industrial policy.” But Obama failed as well. His 2011 “Asian pivot” was more style than substance. Events in the Middle East came to dominate his foreign policy, even as America largely became energy independent from the region. This was supremely ironic, for as Bonvillian noted, Obama predicated his innovation policy on energy concerns, not explicitly on national security, nor on what was being done to the U.S. industrial base by China.

In the Trump era, Luttwak’s ideas about “geoeconomics” are more relevant than ever. Yet we have not, as of yet, seen a major turnaround in U.S. national security strategizing. The lack of a basic vocabulary and cultural framework around geoeconomics helps to explain our reductionist understanding of economic statecraft. It results in what Graham Allison calls an “engage but hedge” approach: State and Treasury engage the world to partner in trade agreements; Defense essentially hedges and plans for the worst. This is a crude good cop/bad cop approach that, compared to the sophisticated economic statecraft of China, looks positively amateurish.

Just as important, geoeconomics, when discussed at all, is almost always outwardly directed, focused on the international arena. An “interiorized” strategic approach that seeks Eisenhowerian “Great Equation” balance gets far less attention. As an example, although Blackwill and Harris discuss the need for internal economic growth in their (overall excellent) book, they don’t devote much substance or detail to it. But there is a rich history of American national developmentalism, as Michael Lind and Robert Atkinson term it, in which the government itself outright has protected American industry from outsiders, has outright intervened to “jump start” American innovation and growth. An understanding of that story must be incorporated into our discussion of geoeconomics.

What we have therefore seen in the last few years are helpful but incomplete diagnoses of the problem. Obama was right to see the problem of a rotting manufacturing and innovation base, but he failed to coherently connect that problem to national security. Contemporary geoeconomists are right to see state capitalism as a threat to America, and they’re right to seek to revitalize economic methods as a way to combat state capitalist threats. But geoeconomics remains undeveloped and often fails to tie statecraft to America’s need to innovate and grow.

As for the current President, Trump has done and said things that his predecessors—for better and worse—never would. We are in the throes of a trade war. China is now openly called a currency manipulator. And in the 2017 National Defense Strategy, China is termed a “revisionist power” engaged in “predatory economics.” All in all, this brashness is a painful, scattered, necessary start. But such sound and fury, while certainly signifying something, has not yet signaled a complete and cohesive strategy of the Great Equation sort.

Take the National Security Strategy: its “Pillar II” is all about national prosperity. There is language like, “The U.S. Government will use private sector technical expertise and R&D capabilities more effectively.” These are nice bromides. Yet even with talk about “establish[ing] strategic partnerships with U.S. companies to help align private sector R&D resources to priority national security applications,” there’s little “interior” language about how to do create wealth inside the United States, and certainly nothing touching upon a full-on industrial style policy. Nearly all of the “action” language is about countering foreign competitors. It’s external economic statecraft, which is not Great Equation strategizing.

In 2019, things appear to be moving in a more promising direction. Early this year, Senator Marco Rubio, in his role as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, released two reports that offer the most coherent and cogent geoeconomic strategic thinking yet to come from the U.S. government. The first report, Made in China 2025 and the Future of American Industry, is a detailed backward engineering review of those ten industries China seeks to dominate over the next two decades. The report’s analysis is sophisticated and relentless: the United States cannot “escape or avoid decisions about industrial policy”; China’s “whole-of-state industrial planning provides an extreme example of the inevitability of economic decision making.” And the report openly contends that any future U.S. policy must enact “strategic U.S.-China capital flow restrictions and corresponding defensive measures for domestic industries.”

Rubio followed up that February report with another one in May, American Investment in the 21st Century, which provides a detailed look at the state of corporate innovation investment. Rubio diagnoses the problem by way of reference to economist Clay Christensen’s “capitalist’s dilemma.” According to Christensen, companies, in the name of short-term profits, actually cut against their own long-term success by not investing in longer term, market-creating innovation that will create new customers and new jobs. As Rubio points out, there’s no indication that this trend is reversing in any meaningful way.

And, as if to address Ike’s “spiritual element” of his Great Equation, Rubio followed those reports up with a short piece in the religious ecumenical journal First Things. There he quoted papal encyclicals, wrote of “dignified work,” and castigated the political identitarianism that divides the American order: “These terms—capitalism, socialism, and their variants—have deep meanings and histories, but today they are more often deployed as surface-level expressions of political identity. This is a reckless way to think about our national inheritance of business enterprise to mass employment.”

Rubio’s work has been inevitably attacked by free marketeers and neo-liberal economists. But taken as a whole, it offers a glimpse at what Great Equation strategizing might look like. Such strategizing would involve a thorough and sober examination of what our great competitor, China has done, is doing, and plans to do. It would assess the geoeconomic tools at America’s disposal. It would seek to harmonize—and when possible to prioritize—economic instruments of power over military ones. And it would take a hard look at our stagnant growth, and frame that problem as a national security crisis.

Of course, we do not live in Eisenhower’s time, and no modern President since Ike has remotely resembled him. Ike, after all, engaged in very top-down, formalist, hierarchically-ordered presidential decision-making that could be slow to respond and even stultifying. One could argue that was precisely the point—such processes were designed to slow down response times, not speed them up, and thus prevent foolish, first-impulse decisions. His presidential successors have tended to be far more free-wheeling, open-ended, decentralized, and sometimes outright chaotic in their decision-making.

The operative point is that geoeconomic strategic thinking will more likely emerge from a variety of actors à la Rubio, and thereby create an environment in which geoeconomic ideas can bloom. Better than another “Asian pivot,” than another grandly orchestrated but hollow “plan” to publicly and privately innovate to get things moving, is to let geoeconomic thinking self-organize and emerge from a multitude of sources public and private. But this has to happen in a bipartisan way.

Indeed, the history of American economic innovation policy in the previous century reveals a slew of policy entrepreneurship approaches that crossed political boundaries. Conservatives in the interwar period, for example, may have distrusted governmental market interventions, but they nonetheless supported “associationalist” methods by which the government served as a coordinating body for private industries to exchange information, set industry-wide standards, and establish trade associations. Liberal New Dealers took up associationalist ideas too. The notion was tarred as a failure after the Supreme Court ruled the National Industrial Recovery Act, New Deal associationalism at its apex, unconstitutional in 1935. But as Michael Lind points out, associationalism in various guises continued onward for many years: industry code authorities were reworked into commissions, for instance. Indeed, according to Lind, the postwar boom economy was, in essence, an “associationalist economy” that encompassed ideas from Herbert Hoover as well as FDR, from progressives as well as conservatives.

Why not, for example, an associationalist act calling together the ruling Big Tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) and the other, less successful manufacturing industries to determine what collaboration and coordination is possible? Sharing practices could enable the latter to innovate more at the former’s levels, to examine and perhaps overcome the seemingly structural impediments of the capitalists’ dilemma, such as the high hurdle rates that prevent investment. One can call a meeting without invoking the specter of a command economy.

It remains true that economics and national security policy largely exist in different worlds, but it need not be so. Geoeconomics needs to integrate fully into national security strategizing. We could conceivably have a strategy of denial that deliberately closes off particular strategic markets through a series of calibrated moves; we could have a “counter-strategy” strategy, that seeks—as Rubio’s Made In China 2025 report did—to decompose China’s strategies and to thereby exploit weaknesses in them; we could have a strategy that purposefully targets weaknesses in China’s system, such as a targeted information campaign that focuses on China’s rampant corruption and crony capitalism. We could, of course, have a combination of all these.

But this kind of strategic analysis is really grand strategy, fully integrated with the other instruments, to include military power, not just a bundle of policy choices about sanctions or about trade deals centered on international mechanisms such as the WTO. This is not realpolitik per se, but a recognition that geoeconomics is about statecraft and about state-driven interests, and not simply adherence to crude populist appeals on the one hand or idealistic free trade aspirations on the other.

This is a call, in the end, not to arms, but to economics; the end result doesn’t have to be armed conflict. Indeed, a Great Equation-like strategy actively seeks to avert that outcome. Eisenhower didn’t panic when Sputnik flew; he saw the long game and sought to harmonize national security with national prosperity while seeking, when possible, to avoid unnecessarily militarizing problems. We shouldn’t panic either, but we need to acknowledge that China has been largely playing a one-sided game for decades. In confronting that challenge, we could do worse than to take our cues from Ike.

The post Not Waiting for Sputnik: A Call to Geoeconomics appeared first on The American Interest.

No Country for Young Men (or Women)

No country in Europe is more critically important to the future of the European Union and the euro currency than today’s Italy. Britain’s leaving the European Union is taking longer than Prime Minister Boris Johnson wishes, but the parliamentary rear-guard actions to delay or even delete Brexit are now weakening, as it becomes clearer that—assuming a Conservative victory at the general election on December 12, by no means certain but presently the best bet—it will happen. Italy, by contrast, is going nowhere: which is its, and the EU’s, largest problem.

Italy is going nowhere economically. Its growth is minimal—0.1 percent this year. Its debt is highest in the developed world after Japan. Its productivity is among the lowest in Europe. Its unemployment rate is hovering around 10 percent, with the three southern regions of Calabria, Campania, and Sicily registering over 20 percent. Youth unemployment stands nationally at 29 percent.

Its government from March 2018 to August 2019 was a coalition between two parties usually described as populist-nationalist. The Five Star Movement (5SM), created by the comedian and government critic Beppe Grillo a mere ten years ago, calling for a sharp reduction in the numbers of members of parliament as the first step in a shift from parliamentary democracy to voting through the internet and—most popularly—providing a citizens’ income, had secured the largest vote of the two, at over 32 percent. The other, the Lega, formerly Lega Nord, was founded thirty years ago with a mission to separate the rich north from the poor south. The main plank of its economic platform was a flat tax, allied to a block on all immigration from North Africa and greater powers for the police. It took a little less than 18 percent.

Together with the small (4.35 percent) Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), they gained majorities in the upper and lower houses. Both saw themselves as mould breakers. And so they might have been, but their time in governance was, from the beginning, fractious. Though the Lega’s vote had been far behind that of the 5SM, the Lega leader, Matteo Salvini, one of two Deputy Prime Ministers with 5SM’s leader Luigi Di Maio, largely ignored his duties as Interior Minister—instead touring Italy giving speeches, having selfies taken, issuing almost daily orders to stop migrants landing on Italy’s shores and execrating leftists and liberals for their softness on crime and incarceration.

Salvini overplayed his hand. With party and personal poll figures approaching 40 percent, he ended the coalition and called for elections. But he was thwarted: A figure seen as largely ceremonial, that of Giuseppe Conte, a law professor drafted in as a Prime Minister (since neither Salvini nor Di Maio could allow the other to take the post) humiliated him in parliament, and—in a pre-planned maneuver with President Sergio Matarella—switched to lead a new, quickly agreed coalition between the center-left Partito Democratico (PD) and the 5SM—a remarkable ideological sleight of hand.

For the past three months, this new creation, bringing together two parties that had vied for the intensity of contempt each felt for the other, have been yoked together in a government whose ability, or lack of ability, to reform Italy and retain power is at the center of concern of the new leadership of Europe’s union. Its ability to do so is constrained by its apparent lack of popularity in Italy. Salvini, now in opposition, gathered his forces and handsomely won the provincial elections in the traditionally leftist province of Umbria in late October. He presently seems able to reconstruct a right-populist coalition, which will again command the assent of the Italian majority—if only he can provoke an election. Lacking one, he can help make the country ungovernable and pile pressure on the 5SM, now in deep trouble electorally, taking a mere seven percent of the Umbrian vote.

As the Italian economist and former Treasury official Lorenzo Cadogno remarks, “new government, same old problems.” Pulling the beautiful peninsula out of its downward spiral would tax the most coherent and experienced administration: The present coalition is neither. I put the issue of Italy’s short-term future to two of the sharpest observers of the country: Cadogno himself, and Martin Wolf, chief economic commentator of the Financial Times, a self-expressed Italophile and one of the leading analysts of the global economy.

John Lloyd for The American Interest:  What are the main forces in play in government, or supporting the government? How likely is the new coalition of the PD and the 5SM to remain together and work effectively.

Lorenzo Cadogno: You have in the coalition the PD and the Five Stars—which has a large representation in parliament, though they have lost a lot of support in the country since they did so well in the March 2018 elections. Then supporting them there is [Matteo] Renzi, former PD Prime Minister, who left the PD to form a new party, Italia Viva, which has not taken off. But he will make a lot of noise, will attract attention. You have the far-Left, which is now very small. Keeping these people together will be very hard. They came together, really, by chance, after the collapse of the Five Stars and the Lega coalition in August. The only thing that keeps them together is fear of Salvini, leader of the Lega.

There isn’t [as of November 2019] an agreed program. There were basic disagreements among them. There seems to be no underlying strategic plan—just a number of different claims from the different parties. It’s still early, but if they don’t come together and thrash out some common positions, things might be difficult for them.

Martin Wolf: Some of the reforms needed are essentially fiscal management reforms. In the end, in the past 25 years, Italy’s fiscal management, given very low growth and aging, has been astonishingly good. But the main problem in the debt issue is simply that GDP has fallen. Yet I would say that, one way or another, they will find a way to manage decline as long as bond yields remain where they have come now—around 2 percent. As long as they can finance that, they can operate effectively.

The question is a different one. It is: Can they generate sustained growth? Given the population, sustained growth wouldn’t be very high, but suppose they had growth of around 1 percent plus, better than zero. Could they do that? And the answer to that is yes—if three conditions apply: 1. The Eurozone itself is growing reasonable strongly, because it’s their most important market; 2. the euro is at a competitive level internationally, which it has been; 3. the productivity dynamic improves without wages absorbing it all. The first is unlikely—because the Eurozone is weak, because Germany is weak. China may never again provide the boost it gave Germany in the past ten years.

As for the second, the euro should remain competitive on most assumptions.

The third is crucial. Can you imagine a big turnaround in competitiveness in the north? The north has to become like Germany. And some of it is, but it’s too small and it needs to be growing much faster. Luigi Zingales [professor of finance at the Chicago University Booth School of Business] has said that, for all its strengths, the traditional Italian SMEs [small- and medium-sized enterprises] cannot succeed as the German Mittelstand [medium-sized companies] does. The Italian sector is not so technologically informed, and their big enterprises are not really the match of the Germans, except Fiat—and much of that company has gone abroad.

A far too large percentage of bright people will move abroad and continue to do so. Taxes will remain high, which is rather a depressant. Italians really don’t embrace a very dynamic service sector. So the reforms one can imagine seem inconceivable to me.

The new coalition was cobbled together quite rapidly at the end of August. Under pressure from President Sergio Mattarella and, behind the scenes, the European Union, two parties agreed to form a government under the premiership of Prime Minister Conte. Di Maio, the 5SM leader, with no experience in foreign affairs, was given the Foreign Minister’s portfolio. The PD took most of the economic posts, including Economy and Finance, which went to Roberto Gualtieri, a former Member of the European Parliament who had headed up its Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. Italians found themselves again under the political leadership of a government that once more professed the more customary enthusiasm for the European project, and its place in it.

But—as in 2011, when Berlusconi was forced to resign under pressure from the then-President Giorgio Napolitano, with open encouragement from German Chancellor Angela Merkel—there was no election. A cabinet of experts under the premiership of Professor Mario Monti, one of the country’s most prominent economists, ruled in 2012—at the end of which Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party withdrew its support from Monti’s unpopular austerity program, which he had judged necessary to tackle the burgeoning debt (it has since grown considerably greater). In the 2013 election, the party Monti had formed, Civic Choice, came in fourth with a mere 10 percent of the votes. Parties and governments that try to make Italians face up to their country’s problems don’t gain popularity.

TAI: The problem with fixing a new government at the behest of the European Union is that, when the government is seen to be irresponsible by the EU and the President, they get together and engineer a new government. But there is no intervention of the people. Democracy suffers. Has it come to the point, in Italy in the 2010s, where either democracy suffers, or the economy suffers? The two can’t win together?

Wolf: Essentially. The problem of the euro is that it separates democratic politics from power. It separates accountability from power. The accountable people—in the sense that you can get rid of them—aren’t in power, and the people in power aren’t accountable to the Italian electorate. The people in power are those like the Germans and Dutch. From the macroeconomic point of view Italy is not a sovereign nation. Its democratic politics is not sovereign politics. The way Italians vote has no bearing on how they are governed. This [the euro] is a political project which creates a divorce. So far it is clear that, in all the governments of the Eurozone, they have accepted the constraints of the euro—very costly and very hard to get out of—and accepted therefore the neutering of the democratic process. An overwhelming majority in the last Italian election said “we don’t like this. We want a big change—of some kind.”

TAI: Prime Minister Conte, who led the previous coalition of the Right and now this one of the center-Left, has himself never been elected to anything. Is that important? Does the electorate not mind?

Cadogno: That is part of the problem but certainly not a major problem. I have to say he is doing surprisingly well as a politician. He is the only positive surprise in this.

TAI: What’s a bad case scenario for Italy today? You [Cadogno] have written that the reforms made by the previous coalition—lowering the pension age, bringing in a citizens income—cannot now be changed, even if they are too expensive. In a recent essay [September 26, 2019], you wrote that, despite the much better relationship with the European Union and some signs of greater confidence in the future of the economy, a great deal of uncertainty surrounds the future:

Italy’s underlying budgetary and economic problems are unchanged and will continue to be a significant concern going forward . . . a coherent plan to enhance potential growth is missing as the current one contains many contradictory statements. . . . [R]eversing the unsustainable rise in spending on pensions introduced by the previous government will be a difficult political hurdle to overcome. . . . [T]he 2011 crisis devastated both the economy and, perhaps more gravely, the mechanism for achieving political consensus for reforms. . . . [A]ny attempt to impose unpopular, socially harmful measures risks further boosting the popularity of the anti-establishment Far Right opposition led by Matteo Salvini and the League.”

This seems a rather despairing forecast.

Cadogno: Well, when you give money to people, it’s very difficult to get it back! And especially the pension reform—when you have people who see their work ending on a specific date and the pension beginning, then suddenly the government changes, the people have already made plans, financial plans, plans for their life—so if there is any change possible, it will be small and in stages, as it will be with the citizens’ income, which is a 5SM policy and thus hard to shift while they are in the governing coalition.

TAI: What’s your [Wolf’s] worst-case immediate future for the Italian economy?

Wolf: A series of events between an imaginable Italian government and imaginable governments in the rest of the European Union could lead to Italy crashing out. To be clear: It would be an accident, the product of a series of events. When you get again a government in Italy which is intensely uncooperative and irresponsible—not of course this government, but an irresponsible government that creates a situation in which there is a run on Italian banks by Italians—this would force the ECB into a massive refinancing operation. Possibly the ECB has to buy Italian government bonds—and certainly to agree to re-liquefy the banks, on an enormous scale. We’re assuming here a government that runs a huge fiscal deficit.

It’s an administration that takes an entirely hostile attitude to the European Union. Salvini would do this. And the only way to proceed legally might be a fully-fledged ECB agreement, IMF involved, with Italy. The Italian government might refuse to do that because it would be seen—and it would be—a massive intervention into sovereignty. But the ECB doesn’t have enough money to refinance Italy—so we are in a situation that Greece was in when its banks were closed. Essentially on this scenario, the Italian government would have to stop Italians taking money out of their own banks.

They could still be notionally in the euro—but if they really shut the banks and forbade transfers, Italian companies couldn’t finance themselves, or finance their trade. No one would lend to them because the exchange rate risks would be so severe. The banks wouldn’t be able to transfer money out of Italy. They would not be able to create euros because it would need the agreement of the ECB.

A populist government—which might even have prepared for this—would say, well, we haven’t done it; they’ve [the EU] thrown us out. And we need to get our lira back. So all the money in your accounts would be converted into lire, and after six months of really terrible chaos you would have a new currency, and would have dropped out of the euro.

If a lack of confidence in Italy becomes really serious, it seems to me this outcome is feasible. Of course, any time an Italian government gets close to this—and they did get close to it in 2012 when they got rid of Berlusconi—the Italian establishment seems to have felt that they had seen this before – so with, I assume, a lot of pressure on the PD, they have created this new (PD and 5SM) coalition. The political system has formed on this—that when they get close this sort of situation, they engineer a euro-acceptable government. They can do that again and again. In fact I don’t imagine that the Italian people have any desire for this kind of outcome: the disaster outcome.

Also, we should say, I think the French will always want Italy in—despite all their difficulties with it. France would be very uncomfortable to be in such a German-dominated EU as would emerge without Italy. I’m saying that France will support—help Italy—will support giving it the rope even if that means breaking the rules. Why is Christine Lagarde head of the ECB? Precisely to do that. Keep Italy going. The ECB has bought a lot of Italian bonds already, but they could buy a lot more.

But a crash-out could happen because you elect a crazy, and you give him enough votes to go ahead with this, and no-one manages to stop him.

So I don’t see any likelihood of a planned exit from the euro, of the European Union, but every likelihood of an accidental one.

TAI: Cadogno is right to warn that efforts to rein back popular programs, as reductions in the pension age, will help the Salvini-led Right. It is clearly still a very powerful force. The three right-wing parties, fielding a single candidate—the Lega’s Donatella Tesei—for presidency of the Umbrian region in late October, won a decisive victory over a Left that has represented Umbria for nearly all of the post-war period—a huge shift in peoples’ voting patterns. Umbria is a small region, with fewer than 900,000 people, but the scale of the defeat, and especially the collapse of the 5SM vote , from 27 percent in the 2018 general election to 7 percent today, is at the least a sign of the right’s continuing strength, and the center-left coalition’s fragility. Prime Minister Conte dismissed the Umbrian vote even before it took place, saying the result would not be about his government, but of course it partly is. And it will be impossible to claim this again if, in January 2020, the 4.5 million-strong population of the Emilia Romagna region, solidly left-wing since the war and the heart of what had been Italy’s “red belt,” votes for the Right (the polls presently show Left and Right neck and neck). That would be, would it not, an existential moment for the center-Left, an opening to a return to power of the Right?

Cadogno: Yes: I wrote after the Umbria result that, should regional elections end up with results similar to Umbria’s, things would change. Poor electoral results would force a clarification within the 5SM, and possibly even a split between the left-leaning and the right-leaning part. Moreover, if the 5SM-PD alliance blows up, it would also undermine the current tendency to move back to a bipolar system, which is a positive development for Italy’s political stability . . . despite the repeated attempts by Berlusconi to re-launch his party, Forza Italia continues to weaken. The Lega and Brothers of Italy now try to promote themselves as more moderate, but they would effectively put the far Right in the driving seat of the center-Right coalition. Finally, if the 5SM-PD alliance collapses, with the current electoral system the center-Right would get close to a two-thirds majority in Parliament in any new elections—that is, it could change the constitution and many other things. Bottom line: For now, the above probabilities remain unchanged, but the next regional elections may become key for Italy’s political prospects.

TAI: But will the Right be caught in its own extremism? Or will Salvini tack to the center, partly to get votes from the supporters of Berlusconi’s apparently crumbling Forza Italia, partly to look more like a future Prime Minister of Italy? At the grand rally which the Right held in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome [on October 19] Salvini seemed to gain momentum. He has recreated the right-wing alliance with Silvio Berlusconi’s center-Right Forza Italia and Giorgia Meloni’s far Right Fratelli d’Italia. Both leaders spoke with him at Piazza San Giovanni. The crowds were very large (he claimed 200,000, though it was probably a bit less). The Casa Pound group (extreme Right) was there, but very quiet, unlike in previous gatherings, where it had been seen to support Salvini and give fascist salutes. It was a surprisingly moderate, efficient occasion.

Cadogno: I think Salvini is trying to move towards the center of the country’s politics. Now that the relationship with the Five Star movement is broken for the time being, he has no choice but to move back from the extreme, if he is to lead a right-wing coalition. He gave an interview to Il Foglio [a daily paper], and said that there is no intention to exit from the euro or the European Union. I am still skeptical, because he is clearly still anti-EU, but he is trying to present himself as a reliable right-wing leader. If this succeeds, we may be seeing a movement back to a two-party system (with the Left relying on the PD-5SM coalition and the Right made up of the Lega, Fratelli d’Italia, and Forza Italia).

TAI: Berlusconi, of whom one can never say he is finished after nearly four decades in or near the top of Italian politics, now leads a much-shrunken party. But he still believes he has enough influence to be a moderating, pro-EU force in a Salvini-led coalition.

Cadogno: He believes that, but I know from talking to people in his party that they were very close to splitting. Many of the people in Forza Italia said they would never work with Salvini. Several refused to attend the rally in Piazza San Giovanni at which Berlusconi spoke. And it is anyway in a difficult place. It’s small, and Berlusconi is old [83] and no longer perceived to be a dynamic person. And everyone wants a piece of Forza Italia now. Both the Lega and Fratelli d’Italia want the votes of those who were supporters of Forza Italia—and to get them they must look more moderate.

TAI: People both in Italy and abroad speak of fascism developing from the Right.

Wolf: Salvini is fascist-ic but I don’t think he’s there. I don’t really believe that a very old country which is still reasonably stable and prosperous would go soon for something so rash, so risky. People would think: We’ve done that before and it didn’t go well. It could, however, be Orbánism with a harder edge (as exists under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, who has favored “illiberal democracy”). There’s enough reactionary force in this society to produce Orbánism—or Poland, say—though Catholicism, oddly enough, isn’t as powerful here as there. If Italy were to go in the Orbánist direction, that would be, my God, a crisis for the European Union.

At the heart of the political debate in Italy—not as central as in Brexiting Britain, but much less taken for granted as a good thing than at any time since Italy joined the forerunner of the EU, the European Economic Community, in 1957—is the relationship with Europe, and above all membership in the Eurozone. In this, the two experts diverge—perhaps on national lines. Cadogno, as he says, is “very much a pro-European.” Wolf is pro-EU but has been a consistent opponent of the euro.

TAI:  There’s a view that the euro has been bad for Italy? Do you think it was a mistake to join it?

Cadogno: No, I think it was not a mistake. It was the policies Italy followed after joining that were the mistakes. Italy should have reformed the economy. Italy didn’t fully understand what this was all about. Many other countries were the same. They didn’t see what the new conditions, the new currency, meant—and it took the crises (of 2008 and after) to show something of the facts and the vulnerabilities. I am very much a pro-European, but the problem is that the project isn’t going ahead the way it should. It remains a very fragile construction. Inevitably this makes it subject to other crises in the future.

TAI: Do you think a new leadership in the European Union will try to create greater fiscal integration, to reanimate the project of closer union?

Cadogno: I am not very optimistic to be quite honest. I think that [French] President Macron did try hard to push for this. Germany clearly has to change its stance, but I’m not sure that anyone replacing Merkel will make a big difference. Sometimes there are positive signs from Germany—maybe little by little they will take a more expansive stance. But on the new EU leadership: It doesn’t presently look strong, and it can’t rely on a strong majority in parliament, so I’m not optimistic.

TAI: Martin, you have another view, I think: that Italy’s membership in the euro was a mistake.

Wolf: Italy has been on a course of managed decline. They should never have got rid of the lira—that wouldn’t have solved anything, but it would have been better than it is now. They’re in a prison—though they put themselves in it.

I have had discussions with Italian business leaders. I’ve said: You screwed yourselves. You took advantage of the low interest rates but never said “we must benchmark ourselves against the Germans, in productivity, in pay.”

They thought it was a free lunch. Berlusconi said it was a free lunch. They needed a government to say “we won’t take advantage of the low interest rates, we’ll run a huge surplus so we can really get our debt down.”

They should have had a serious politician to say, “We have decided to join the euro. We are the weakest country in the Eurozone. We have much more debt than anyone else. Our industry isn’t in great shape, so we are going to devote ourselves to change.” The absolute antithesis of what Berlusconi offered. He said “let’s party.” They got rid of Berlusconi, but it was too late!

The problem with the Italian view of Europe is that they think it offered them good governance and credibility on the cheap—and they didn’t have to do anything. The problem is that is not the way the Germans, and the northerners, think. The Italians united themselves with this bunch of Lutherans and Calvinists—Germans think like that even when they’re Catholic. The French believe they have to behave in the same way, and the Spanish bureaucratic elite have internalized this, because in their view, there is no choice.

The euro is not a free lunch. It’s a binding commitment.

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Japan Confronts a Nuclear Future

In no country does opposition to nuclear weapons run deeper than in Japan. The nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II in August 1945 instilled in Japanese society a horror of these armaments that persists, strongly, nearly 75 years later. Three non-nuclear principles are embedded in the country’s public life. The Japanese have forcefully and repeatedly disavowed possessing and producing nuclear weapons and permitting them to enter their country. Despite this pronounced aversion, however, Japan is moving toward the serious consideration of acquiring these weapons of mass destruction. Or rather, and more accurately, Japan is being pushed in that direction by the policies of three countries whose policies bear heavily on its security: North Korea, China, and the United States.

Since World War II Japanese security policy has rested on two pillars: Article 9 of its Constitution, which asserts that “The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes;” and an alliance with the United States that has provided Japan with American protection against attacks by third countries.

Until recently the combination proved remarkably successful. It made Japan secure without the need for powerful armed forces of its own. It reassured Japan’s neighbors that they had no need to fear a repetition of the brutal campaigns of conquest that Japan conducted at their expense during the 1930s and 1940s. In those circumstances Japan flourished economically, building the second-largest economy in the world and achieving an enviable standard of living. 

To be sure, Japan has not spent the last three-quarters of a century as an entirely disarmed, resolutely pacifist member of the international community, as Sheila A. Smith’s timely and useful book Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power makes clear. Smith, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recounts the adjustments to military policy that the country has made, always slowly and deliberately and sometimes after spirited political battles, since the 1950s.

The Japanese have interpreted Article 9 as permitting them to have armed forces and over the decades have built an army, a navy, and an air force that together constitute, in Smith’s words, “one of Asia’s most formidable militaries.” They have deployed their military personnel abroad, although for peace-keeping operations rather than for war. They have expanded military cooperation with American forces in Northeast Asia. The Self Defense Forces, as the Japanese military is called, have earned the respect of the Japanese public. 

Still, Japan’s armed forces remain limited in size and in the operations that they can conduct, and have never, since 1945, engaged in combat. Nor has the country seriously debated equipping them with nuclear weapons. Now, however, North Korean and Chinese military initiatives, along with uncertain American attitudes toward the alliance with Japan, threaten to change all this.

Communist North Korea, only 600 miles from the Japanese archipelago, has steadily developed a nuclear weapons program that poses a growing danger to Japan. The North Koreans have successfully tested nuclear explosives and are believed to possess as many as 60 bombs. They have also test-fired ballistic missiles with ranges sufficient to strike the Japanese islands.

In response, Japan has deployed ballistic missile defense systems to shoot down incoming rockets; but the more bombs North Korea can use in an attack the less likely it becomes that the defensive systems can prevent a nuclear explosive from striking Japanese territory and inflicting horrific damage. The Japanese have therefore begun to debate whether successfully preventing a North Korean attack requires not only a defense against it but also the capacity to retaliate against North Korea itself or even to launch a preemptive attack. The stable deterrence of war during the Cold War, after all, rested on the ability of both the United States and the Soviet Union to retaliate against the other in response to an attack. Retaliation or preemption would in turn require the kinds of ballistic missiles that Japan could certainly develop but currently lacks.

The Japanese-American Security Treaty commits the United States to defend Japan, and it is American military forces that have deterred North Korea. If and when North Korean nuclear-tipped missiles can reach the United States, however, the Japanese will have to decide whether American deterrence will remain credible and therefore effective. For in that case a conflict involving North Korea in which the United States becomes involved might prompt the communist regime in Pyongyang to launch a nuclear attack on North America; and the prospect of such an attack might weaken the American resolve to defend its Japanese ally. Moreover, the Japanese, like other American allies, are already nervous about the willingness of the United States defend them because of the statements of the current American president questioning the value of America’s overseas commitments. With the North Korean nuclear threat growing and American protection uncertain, a serious discussion about acquiring nuclear weapons for the purpose of checking the communist regime in Pyongyang will be difficult for Japan to avoid.

China, too, poses a threat to Japan—in important ways an even more serious threat than does North Korea. As its economy has grown, Beijing’s ambitions to dominate East Asia, supplanting the United States as the major military power there, have similarly expanded. As well as possessing nuclear weapons, China’s communist government has invested in more numerous and more advanced military hardware, which has given the country an already formidable and still-growing navy.

Both China and Japan claim ownership of eight small, uninhabited, Japanese-controlled islands known as the Senkakus (they are called the Diaoyu by the Chinese), which are located in the East China Sea roughly halfway between the two countries. In recent years China has increased its maritime presence in the waters surrounding them, leading to fears that the Chinese navy might one day try forcibly to seize them. In such an eventuality, as with North Korea, Japan would have to depend on the United States for military support; but as in the Korean case, the combination of increasing Chinese military power and doubts about American reliability lead to the question of how Japan could supplement, if not replace entirely, American military might.

Japan has begun to cooperate militarily with other Asian countries that share its concerns about China, but such ties will not provide a full-fledged substitute for the American alliance. As a rich country that had, in the 1930s and 1940s, a powerful navy, Japan could certainly amass naval forces on a par with those that China deploys; but the necessary buildup would take a large financial commitment and years to accomplish. In 2018-2019 China spent $175 billion on its military while Japan’s total defense spending was $47 billion. The quickest, cheapest, and technologically most feasible way for Japan to offset Chinese power would be to acquire nuclear weapons.

The great English economist John Maynard Keynes, criticized for having altered his opinion on an economic matter, is supposed to have relied, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” While the people and the government of Japan remain viscerally opposed to the acquisition of nuclear weapons, the facts of international life in Northeast Asia are changing rapidly; and these changes may force the Japanese, on this issue, with great reluctance, to change their minds.

The post Japan Confronts a Nuclear Future appeared first on The American Interest.

Four Theories of Modern China

The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State

Elizabeth C. Economy

Oxford University Press, 2018, 360 pp., $27.95

China’s Eurasian Century? Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative

Nadège Rolland

The National Bureau of Asian Research, 2017, 208 pp., $34.95

Haunted by Chaos: Chinese Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping

Sulmaan Wasif Khan

Harvard University Press, 2018, 336 pp., $35.00

China Dream

Ma Jian

Chatto & Windus, 2018, 208 pp., $19.09

“There is no easy way to understand China,” the preeminent China historian Jonathan Spence wrote in 1990. Opening his comprehensive work, The Search for Modern China, Spence observed that “for a long time China was a completely unknown quantity to those living in the West.” That had changed, he suggested, but there were still enough questions to “keep us in a state of bewilderment as to China’s real nature.”

Thirty years later, the United States finds itself in the midst of a generational debate on China. Sitting at the heart of that debate are the same fundamental issues about China’s nature and direction that Spence raised three decades ago.

Seeking to answer these questions, three recent works of non-fiction and, surprisingly, one novel stand out in their ability to interpret modern China. Ranging in topic from Xi Jinping’s effect on Chinese society, to an examination of the Belt and Road Initiative, to an analysis of changes in Chinese grand strategy over the past hundred years, to the psychological effects of living under an increasingly authoritarian regime, these books were written by leading thinkers with deep knowledge of and experience in dealing with China. And while their focus and approaches vary considerably, they all seek to explain the nature of the modern Chinese state.

Elizabeth C. Economy opens her latest book, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State, by asking the reader to consider the nature of contemporary China. She notes that China “is a country that often confounds us with contradictions.” Disentangling the contradictions and making sense of today’s China is the daunting task of this ambitious book.

Economy’s central argument is that the key to understanding contemporary China is understanding Xi Jinping. In 2012, when it first emerged that Xi Jinping had defeated his rivals and would become general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he was “largely an unknown quantity.” Economy argues that that’s no longer the case, even if, after almost eight years have passed under his leadership, most observers are still poorly equipped to make sense of the dramatic changes he has imposed on his country.

In Economy’s telling, China’s trajectory under Xi Jinping is clear. Increased centralization of power, more governmental control of society and individuals’ lives, and a growing number of regulatory, legal, and technological barriers to contact with the outside world all characterize today’s China. But if those are internal manifestations of Xi’s China, the external implications include a deeper penetration of the outside world and a more assertive set of foreign policies. Economy posits that it is a serious mistake to focus solely on Chinese foreign policy and not pay attention to the fundamental domestic shifts now underway in China. Both derive from the same basic impulse to reassert the state in the making of China’s policies. Economy contends that China is an “illiberal state seeking leadership in a liberal world order,” and that the implications of China’s domestic political and economic system are profound, far-reaching, and little understood.

Economy systematically documents the steps Beijing has taken to exert further control in virtually every field of human endeavor, with chapters examining the political and cyber arenas, the economic realm—to include innovation, state-owned enterprises, and the environment—and Beijing’s foreign and national security policies. To research this book, Economy immersed herself in Xi Jinping thought, reading scores of his speeches, commentary, and official party documents in an attempt to understand “how Xi’s model is taking root and transforming Chinese political and economic life.”

In this wide-ranging survey, three core arguments stand out: the importance of Xi Jinping, the presence of a definitive strategy informing all aspects of Chinese policy, and the centrality of ideology. Each of these propositions respond to core questions about today’s China—and for each, she makes a compelling case.

On Xi Jinping, there is ongoing debate about both how much he represents a break from the past and whether his actions are products of a larger leadership consensus. Economy notes that not every policy decision China has pursued since his ascension is new, but argues that the turn towards more internal repression and external assertiveness have hardened and accelerated during his tenure. Xi took power determined to change China’s course, Economy writes, and his reign has born that impulse out by largely rejecting Deng Xiaoping’s previous efforts to open up the Chinese economy and reassure the rest of the world of China’s benign intentions by pursuing a low-profile foreign policy. What makes Xi distinct is his accumulation of power within the CCP—unrivaled since Mao—and the particular strategy he has set out for a CCP-led China.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Xi’s call for a China Dream of national rejuvenation. Because of the ubiquity of the phrase and its ill-defined nature, many observers have dismissed it as either purely rhetorical or inchoate. Economy believes this is an error, as under its banality lies a “number of concrete objectives,” intended to allow a CCP-led China to “reclaim the country’s ancient greatness.” There is a strong belief in Beijing that by historical right, by correction of the past 200 years of humiliation by foreign powers, and by its extraordinary economic growth, China will regain its dominant position in the region. Internally, this means that the CCP must stay in power and increase the Chinese state’s control. Externally, it means China must regain its position of prominence by steadily accruing more power than its international competitors. These objectives inform Chinese strategy and help explain decisions on tightening the control over the domestic economy, expanding propaganda and other forms of social control, investing deeply in and acquiring technology, and developing cutting-edge military weapons.

Finally, Economy highlights that Xi Jinping’s China is an increasingly ideological state that sees the CCP existentially threatened by liberal values. She quotes Xi speaking to the Chinese National Propaganda and Ideological Work Conference in 2013, when he held that “the disintegration of a regime often starts from the ideological area. . . . If the ideological defenses are breached, other defenses become very difficult to hold.”

Policy has following accordingly. Domestically, the party has ramped up its rhetoric, casting constitutional democracy, human rights, academic freedom, freedom of the press, and judicial independence as fundamental threats. It has increased its control over the media, expanded ideological training of its citizens, and winnowed the opportunities for exposure to information from the outside world. Externally, it has sought to suppress and censor speech it deems offensive while also exporting its technological tools for social control to struggling democracies and like-minded regimes. Economy warns about Beijing’s efforts to export elements of its authoritarian model, undermine democracies by taking advantage of their openness, and engage in an ideological struggle against liberal values. In so doing, she raises several challenging questions for those who dismiss ideology as a driving force behind Chinese policies.

If Economy’s work is broad survey of China under Xi Jinping, Nadège Rolland’s monograph on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a much more narrowly focused examination of Chinese aspirations. China’s Eurasian Century? Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative looks at Xi Jinping’s signature policy and analyzes its origins, ambitions, and implications. Organized around transportation, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure projects, BRI is meant to connect Europe and Africa to Asia, strengthen cooperation among the nations of Eurasia, and increase political, monetary, and cultural integration. BRI has both economic and strategic components. Indeed, the two are intimately related, as deepening economic cooperation between China and its neighbors is intended not as an end, but rather as a means to promote Beijing’s political and strategic gains. This, Rolland argues, is the “core of BRI.”

Although writing almost exclusively on BRI, Rolland paints on a much broader canvas. Making extensive use of official and quasi-official documents, Rolland finds that BRI has multiple objectives, including using China’s overcapacity in construction materials, lifting the fortunes of its state-owned enterprises, boosting regional development, hedging against possible disruptions to maritime supply in the event of a conflict, and strengthening other authoritarian regimes.

To Rolland, the vision “reflects Beijing’s desire to shape Eurasia according to its own worldview.” BRI is much greater than the sum of its parts and should be understood as “a grand strategy that advances China’s goals of establishing itself as the preponderant power in Eurasia and a global power second to none.” In this reading, BRI is a key tool to return China to a dominant global position.

Rolland warns against the temptation to dismiss BRI as merely an ill-defined collection of infrastructure projects. China’s leaders take it seriously and Xi Jinping has staked his reputation on it, declaring its success a personal priority of the highest order. Mentions of BRI permeate official speeches, statements, the media, and even popular culture. Moreover, China has plowed enormous amounts of prestige, intellectual energy, and money into the initiative. Dismissing it, in her view, amounts to strategic malpractice, combining willful blindness of what China’s rulers say they want to achieve with a lack of imagination about just how profoundly Beijing is moving to reshape the global order.

According to Rolland, “BRI remains—arguably purposely—an amorphous and ambiguous construct.” Her work attempts to nail down the nature of that project, zero in on its stated—and unstated—objectives, and answer why Beijing has mobilized the full resources of the state behind it. The monograph proceeds in a forensic fashion, accumulating evidence and clues as it analytically moves its way toward its conclusions.

Rolland believes that through BRI, China offers the promise of material benefit, and in return expects muted criticism of its policies and compliance with its wishes. In exchange for offers of investment, infrastructure projects, and security benefits, Beijing “expects that they [BRI partners] tacitly agree not to challenge China’s core interests, criticize its posture, or seek to challenge its political system.”

Rolland sees BRI as a laboratory and prototype for the type of order China seeks to build. Eurasia would be linked by high-speed trains; the Digital Silk Road would effectively be sealed off from the rest of the world and closely monitored and controlled; when BRI countries have disputes with China, they would appeal not to international law, but instead to Beijing on bilateral—and inherently inferior—terms; U.S. alliances would be substantially weakened in both Asia and Europe; increasing webs of aid and trade between China and its neighbors would create fundamental dependencies at all levels. In this vision of the future, transparency has weakened while corruption and social control have strengthened, breathing new life into authoritarian regimes. The end result is that, “wary that they might be punished and isolated, most countries silently acquiesce to Beijing’s diplomatic priorities.”

Of course, such a future is by no means assured. Because BRI is an external project of grand dimensions, its success depends on other states deciding that BRI is in their interests. But that means that its ultimate fate rests on “the rest of the world’s willingness to accept China’s objectives and go along with its plans.” Rolland describes what Chinese analysts have identified as the main challenges to the realization of this vision and the strategies Beijing has undertaken to mitigate them. Of special attention is the negative reaction BRI has engendered in both large and small partner countries, and Beijing’s renewed efforts to soften, transform, and manipulate public opinion in various capitals.

Along the way, she reveals some other key insights. One is the role of media in BRI. In 2016, at the Media Cooperation Forum on Belt and Road, Xi declared that “media plays an essential role in communicating information, enhancing mutual trust and building consensus.” This, in essence, is how the CCP, and Xi, view media: indistinguishable from propaganda and meant to advance the aims of the state. Such information might not be fake news, but it is state-sanctioned and intended to harness, manufacture, and when necessary manipulate public opinion—at home and abroad.

And yet, despite these conclusions, Rolland’s study should be read as neither a wholesale dismissal of BRI nor a blanket call for its rejection. Rather, it is a much-needed attempt to understand its often obscured purposes. Why are those purposes obscured? Rolland suggests that it might be because BRI is not yet fully developed and, being opaque, allows for adaptability. Alternatively, it may be because BRI has no strategic design, and is simply an accumulation of many dispersed initiatives. Or, most alarmingly, it might be because Chinese officials fear that being transparent about their aims would produce an intense counter-reaction. Hardly definitive, but certainly suggestive, is her quoting of an officer in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army: “If you tell people, ‘I come with political and ideological intentions,’ who will accept you?”

The promise of economic benefit in exchange for political obedience is not a particularly new concept. Neither, of course, is spending money and manpower to win friends and build diplomatic support. And, if these approaches fail, there are always other forms of coercion that can be employed. As much as these strategies can be seen in China’s near abroad, they are squarely in keeping with how China’s leaders have approached their own population.

This is one of the primary arguments in Sulmaan Wasif Khan’s Haunted by Chaos: Chinese Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping. In this brief survey, Khan attempts to dissect the major movements of Chinese statecraft, charting the fears, objectives, and strategies of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. Unlike Economy, he finds very little new under the sun and in his telling, there is far more continuity than discontinuity in the past hundred years of CCP strategy. “The dramatic changes modern China has endured,” Khan writes, “have obscured the commonality of purpose and power.”

Khan’s book is a search for those commonalities, an attempt to understand the calculus behind China’s decision-making, and an explanation of how its leaders have seen the world. All saw China as brittle and constantly threatened by a dangerous world. All believed that security lay in territorial expansion. And all held that preserving their hold on power necessitated political cohesion, economic growth, a strong military, and a favorable balance of power. Khan also finds that CCP leadership, from Mao to Xi, approached diplomacy in a similar fashion, by promoting good relations, protecting core interests, calibrating the use of force, and being pragmatic. These conclusions are largely unsurprising. What makes Khan’s take of greater interest are the conclusions about Beijing’s expanding ambitions, and its read of, and response to, American actions.

Khan claims, paradoxically, that while China is more powerful than it has been in centuries, it now feels more insecure and threatened than it has in decades. “With growing strength came a broader definition of what it took to stay safe,” Khan writes. The more powerful China has become, the greater its ambitions have grown and the further afield its grasp has reached. Ambitions alter with circumstances, Khan notes, and success has allowed Chinese leaders, from Mao to Xi, to redefine their goals, demanding more for China and asking more from others. It is particularly illuminating to read his account of the lessons the Chinese leadership drew from the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995-1996. It was America’s under-reaction to initial Chinese attempts to dial up pressure on Taiwan that signaled that “American inaction meant acquiescence.” That particular read proved to be a miscalculation, but as Chinese power has grown and foreign responses have remained muted, one wonders how often Beijing takes silence for consent.

In one way or another, each of these authors focus on what is known to describe something that is, ultimately, unknowable—the direction of contemporary China. And all attempt to describe something of the country’s nature.

Ma Jian, the Chinese writer and dissident living in self-exile in London, does the same—but, with the license of a poet, his novel China Dream is far less constrained. A searing work of fiction that is at turns darkly humorous, satirical, and hallucinatory, Ma’s dystopian tale undercuts and ridicules the Chinese Communist Party, which he accuses of destroying China’s society, erasing its history, and perverting the nation’s soul.

In his take on contemporary China, Ma weaves together references to real events and documents, as he chronicles the unravelling of Ma Daode, a fictitious corrupt CCP party official. In between attempts to appease multiple mistresses, hoard stolen goods, and evict peasants off their land, Ma Daode runs the “China Dream Bureau,” charged with promoting Xi Jinping’s China Dream of national rejuvenation. In order to champion the glorious future the Chinese Communist Party is steering China toward, Ma must erase the memory of its violent past and replace all private dreams with a collective dream of a greater China. As Ma tells his staff, “our job, in this Bureau, is to ensure that the China Dream enters the brain of every resident of Ziyang City. It seems to me that if the communal China Dream is to fully impregnate the mind, all private remembrances and dreams must first be washed away.” The problem, however, is this mission proves impossible. Unable to suppress memories from the Cultural Revolution, Ma is consumed by visions of students beaten to death and his own denouncement of his parents. The cultural madness of China’s recent past seeps like a poison into the present as Ma increasingly has trouble distinguishing the two and, ultimately, is driven mad.

An engrossing story in its own right, Ma Jian’s novel works as historical testimony, social commentary, and description of the workings—and effects—of dictatorship. What emerges is a scathing indictment of the regime, exposing its hypocrisy, its brutality, and its willingness to mete out violence to anyone who deviates from the official line. By blending the past and present, Ma shows how the destruction of trust between student and teacher, parent and child, governor and governed brings a coarsening effect on a whole society. And he offers a powerful explanation of why totalitarian regimes attempt not to erase history, but to re-write it. “Of course, the past must be buried before the future can be forged,” the novel’s protagonist declares. Authoritarian regimes understand that their claims to legitimacy rest, at least in part, on a particular interpretation of the past. Anything that deviates from that line must be eradicated.

Ma Jian is not particularly shy about where he stands. In the book’s foreword, he writes that “Chinese tyrants have never limited themselves to controlling people’s lives: they have always sought to enter people’s brains and remould them from the inside.” In Xi Jinping’s China, there are no actual devices implanted in people’s brains to censor the past and control what people think. Ma Jian’s China Dream argues that that is beside the point, because both the intent of Chinese leadership, and the demand on its population, is the same. While the entirety of the novel’s action take place in China, it also suggests that Beijing’s ambitions to shape, suppress, and guide thought extend far beyond its borders and are “beginning to corrupt the democracies around the world.”

Each of the four authors use a different lens to understand the nature and direction of China. Whether it is the particular significance of Xi Jinping, the motivations behind the Belt and Road Initiative, the continuity of Chinese grand strategy, or authoritarianism with Chinese characteristics, there are plenty of ways to explain China’s present course. Despite their differences, though, there are several common themes woven throughout these books—the expanding level of Chinese aspirations, the centrality the Chinese Communist Party plays in shaping those aspirations, the internal and foreign repercussions, and the mixture of confidence and insecurity driving China’s leaders.

Of course, these are not the only questions to ask about China’s direction today. Looming over public debates are rising international concerns about China’s crackdown in Hong Kong, its ongoing interment of over a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs, and others into camps and prisons in Xinjiang, and the level and depth of CCP interference activities overseas.

Responding to an emerging China is the strategic question of our time. America’s longstanding policy has been to try to engage, integrate, and bind China into the existing liberal order. That approach no longer seems viable; whatever economic benefits it has generated, U.S. policy has not produced the China that policymakers had hoped for. What has instead emerged is a richer, more powerful, more repressive China that is expanding its political influence around the world and attempting to impose a regional version of the Chinese domestic contract: stability, growth, and acquiescence. While there is now an emerging consensus that it is time for an overhaul of America’s China policy, there is less agreement on what exactly that should be.

These policy questions are ultimately about how America chooses to respond to shifts in Chinese behavior, and less about why China’s domestic and foreign policies have changed. But a firm grasp on these questions remains essential not only to understanding China, but also to fashioning an appropriate policy response. These books offer an excellent place to start.

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