Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 22

The Puzzle of Singapore

Singapore, known locally as the little Red Dot, is not called red because it was or is Communist or left-wing in some respect. It’s just because cities are generally indicated by red dots on world maps, and former Indonesian President B.J. Habibie once referred to the country dismissively as a “little red dot.” Singaporeans, naturally, responded by turning the slur into a mild boast.

Actually, most of the time the politics of the ruling People’s Action Party are described as center-right, maybe because the major opposition party, such as it is, is called the Workers’ Party. But the historic leader of the PAP, the late Lee Kuan Yew, got his political start in the labor movement. So did Singapore’s first Chief Minister, David Marshall. Marshall, who was born David Mashal into Singapore’s old Indo-Iraqi Jewish community, founded the aforementioned Workers’ Party. There never were and still are no explicitly conservative political parties in Singapore, at least none that have made a ripple in its reality. It is rather the society, down under the politics, that is conservative in the temperamental and social sense of the term.

Understand? Not really? Not to worry: We will review the history of Singapore’s labor movement and the PAP’s multi-decadal political trajectory, and how both still bind up with current politics, in a later essay. For now the point that needs making is that no curt, generic description—whether as center-right or center-left, democratic or non-democratic, liberal or illiberal—does justice to the singularity of Singapore’s political reality. Bumper-sticker-length descriptions rarely suffice for any useful purpose, but in this case any such thing is bound to be downright misleading.

Singapore’s political singularity, to be defined anon, is responsible for much of the bad press the country often attracts, because it just doesn’t fit well into any conventional category. For example, a friend (a German national currently working in Washington) referred off-handedly to Singapore as a “police state” in a recent personal email. (She has never been here.) Another friend, an American living in Paris, complained that Singapore is boring, like a modernist “Disneyland with the death penalty.” Yet another friend, a Swedish politician and diplomat who confesses to liking her visits to Singapore, expressed guilt about her admiration because Singapore is not a democracy. (She is understandably mistaken, of which more below.) Some Western expats here jokingly refer to Singapore as the sleekest, toniest, best-fed maximum-security prison in the world. They are quick to say they know it’s just a joke, but then why tell it?

Personal missives and anecdotes aside, Singapore’s bad press also turns on some objective realities that run up against the grain of standard-issue Western meliorist sensibilities. Few if any of these realities have anything to do explicitly (or otherwise) with ideology, as Westerners understand the term. They have more to do with a mash-up of certain seemingly enduring characteristics of Chinese culture, with personality (Lee Kuan Yew’s, mainly), with dictates emanating from the conjunction of Singapore’s very small size and its neighborhood, and with certain historical path dependencies that mainly endure, albeit with some twists.

These base realities issue forth in some off-putting governmental behaviors and social traits, a few of which are apparently silly, others much less so. They extend from the ban on chewing gum and the use of caning as a punishment to draconian laws against drug-running, and the related use of the death penalty; and from the insensitive way that foreign low-skilled workers have been treated in Singapore over the years to the various means by which Singaporean electoral politics are rigged.

But these factoids by themselves do not add up to a coherent view of Singapore, not least because they tend to ignore the social virtues that some of these measures encourage—and yes, there are several. To really understand how the place works, warts and all, you must first understand the three elements of Singapore’s improbability that add together to produce its singularity.

One way to reveal these elements is to examine three interrelated questions: Is Singapore’s existence as an independent country normal? Is Singapore a Chinese country? And is Singapore a democracy?

Only a few sovereign nations of the 195 or so in the United Nations have had independence thrust on them against their collective will. Singapore is one of them, along with the United Arab Emirates in 1971 and the “stans” of Central Asia in late 1991. (Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine may count, as well, depending on interpretations of history.) What does that mean for practical purposes?

The upside is that such nations have little historical baggage to work through and few constraining orthodoxies to overcome. But they also tend to lack a firm national identity, much relevant institutional memory, and cadres of experienced managers and political leaders. Singapore’s experience qualifies as a mixed example. It has always had a singular identity, though one far short of “national” in any realistic sense, as a multi-ethnic free port since Stamford Raffles founded the place in 1819. Within Britain’s Straits Settlements colony, and more so as the British Empire began to deconstruct itself after World War II, Singapore had its own identity long before it gained domestic policy autonomy in 1955.

But by the early 1960s virtually all of Singapore’s elite expected the island to become part of the new, soon-to-be-launched nation of Malaysia. Lee Kuan Yew was dedicated to the merger, which in fact took place in 1963. But after some bracing race riots here in 1964, the powers-that-were in Kuala Lumpur expelled Singapore from the federation into unbidden independence. When Lee Kuan Yew delivered Singapore’s first address as leader of the new nation, he had to pause at one point to breathe deeply and collect his wits when he spoke of independence—and it was no act he was putting on.

At that point LKY, as he became known, and his colleagues had to make things up as they went along. And that’s when the defining conditions of Singapore’s reality—multicultural society with a dominant Chinese culture and demography, small island in a not particularly convivial neighborhood, and certain historical patterns with regard to political economy—came into play as shaping factors. The PAP leadership did a pretty good job, all things considered, but Singapore also got lucky, in a way (of which more later). As I said in the first essay in this series, we are dealing here with a place that, albeit very small, contains multitudes. Some of those multitudes are Chinese—so, on to improbability factor number two.

Singapore’s citizenry is about 74 percent Chinese, 15 percent Malay, 8-9 percent South Asian (mainly Tamil), and a smattering “other.” What matters here is that Singapore is the only majority-Chinese country that is not in or part of China. No one has a problem understanding that China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are all geographically, historically, and culturally part of China. But Singapore’s Chinese are all immigrants to what had been basically a Malay island, albeit a sparsely populated one. The PRC claims Hong Kong, Taiwan, and a lot of maritime and air space that does not properly belong to it. It does not claim Singapore.

Not exactly, anyway. You will not be shocked to learn that Chinese diplomats here go about relentlessly whispering to Singapore’s business, government, and military elite that, “You know, Singapore is really a Chinese country,” so why don’t you just reach the inevitable conclusion about Singapore’s future orientation now? And Singapore’s elite are always answering, as politely as possible, “No, it isn’t.” Quoting almost directly from LKY’s aforementioned maiden speech, they answer, “Singapore is not a Chinese country, nor a Malay country, nor an Indian country. It is Singapore, a multi-ethnic and multiracial society.” And they often add, when the occasion encourages them to dare, “—and we mean to keep it that way.” At this, the Chinese diplomats here mostly smile, and gaze down at their Rolexes.

Singapore’s intercommunal harmony is heavily managed, as is almost everything else that matters in this technocratic compression chamber. The motive is overwhelmingly pragmatic. But that doesn’t mean it is entirely insincere; it is on the whole quite sincere. The “one happy kampong” propaganda, visible on billboards, in schools, and in religious institutions, is not just futile eyewash. The government always characterizes social harmony here as an aspiration, not as a done deal to be taken for granted.

That is wise, because not far below the surface there is tension here, frequently expressed in a characteristic passive-aggressive way. Public etiquette is unfailingly proper. I have yet to meet a single truly surly person, even among the infamous “taxi uncles.” But parallel to and hidden from the public devotion to tolerance and fair play is also a tacit “never be a sucker, take care of number one” mentality that dwells on both the individual and communal levels. Called “diasu” in the Malay vernacular, it stipulates an implicit Social Darwinism believed to be at the root of all relationships. The equivalent modern Hebrew slang, for those who prefer that cultural comparison to chew on, is “don’t be a fryer.”

Tolerant public etiquette and affirmed multicultural ideals notwithstanding, the place feels very Chinese. With nearly three-quarters of the population being and speaking Chinese, it really can’t help itself. Indians and Malays are not mere tokens in the system. Meritocracy is real here; those who make the grade in a competitive society reap the rewards, and no one looks askance at such outcomes. But ethnic glass ceilings do seem to exist at the margins and at the very top of key institutions. As a result, social-shaping cultural characteristics that elite Chinese here do not even evince awareness of—another fish-not-discovering-water phenomenon—show up from time to time in the lens of a foreign observer…like me.

So, then, is Singapore a democracy? Yes, if one hews to a precise definition of the term as just a way to elect leaders in a popular-sovereignty constitutional context. It is not less a democracy, or much less so, than Japan, whose one-party LDP dominance has been nearly as complete as Singapore’s PAP dominance. Unlike, say, Ecuador, no one stuffs ballot boxes here, because there is no need.

But Singaporean democracy is not, by disposition or law, a liberal democracy, or a standard multiparty democracy either. Dissent is circumscribed and in several ways the electoral system is stacked against the emergence of viable competition. Nevertheless, the system produces what any typical Westerner would regard as mainly liberal outcomes. These outcomes are the result of the ruling party’s assessment of what is in its own best political interest as well as that of the country. If there is any sense of altruism in the PAP’s attitudes, and there may well be, it is indistinguishable for practical purposes from the elitist-paternalist-technocratic-managed methodologies of control that enshroud it.

So does that mean that Singapore is just a shiny and wealthy example of what the likes of Viktor Orbán or Racip Tayyip Erdoğan would wish for Hungary and Turkey? No. These gentlemen, and rather too many others like them in today’s world, run one-party illiberal marquee democracies on behalf of avowed nationalist agendas. They epitomize what observers have called “Caeserist” or “civilizationist” ideologies that are in thrall to the desiderata of the ethno-linguistic majority, to what Germans call the Leitkultur, but with a vengeance. Singapore is bucking this global trend in its relentless and, as noted, not insincere espousal of multiculturalism and multiracialism. In today’s context, it’s hard to see how anything could be more liberal leaning than that.

Note too, pace the anecdotal digs listed above, Singaporeans can read, write, and say whatever they want as long as it is not directly aimed at either the government’s fundamental legitimacy or the island’s intercommunal harmony. They can travel whenever and wherever they like. They can buy and sell anything not illicit that they like; Singapore’s is a managed capitalism, but not much more so than that of the United States, and in some ways less so.

And here we must reckon with another improbability in the form of a paradox. The PAP is to some considerable extent the victim of its own success. Younger people have become complacent about Singapore’s “economic miracle,” as it is known here. They take their relatively high standard of living mostly for granted. But the crux of the paradox is this: People here are so confident of the government’s technocratic capacities that they assume that any problem which may arise will be taken care of lickety-split by the government. They needn’t do anything. This kind of passivity is usually a characteristic of socialist societies. It hasn’t arisen in Singapore for a confluence of reasons, some of them Sino-cultural. But not least of these reasons is that the technocratically managed character of life in a city-state has engendered a strong social-corporatist sense despite Singapore’s highly competitive, diasu-tinged capitalist individualism. It’s an amalgam not unique to Singapore; Hong Kong evinces some similar characteristics. But it’s uncommon, and it’s bound to be perplexing to Americans.

That’s not all that perplexes Americans and some other Westerners. Singapore is a “police state”? If so, well, where are the police? One hardly ever sees one, and one never sees a uniformed policeman on a beat on the street. There is no visible acute poverty here, no beggars on the street, no evidence of homelessness, no gun violence, no graffiti, and women can walk alone at all hours of the day and night anywhere on the island without having to worry about being accosted. There are a lot of CCTV cameras here, more per capita than in Britain, no doubt, but that’s fine with the law-abiding Singaporeans, and the vast majority of Singaporeans are law-abiding by deep cultural instinct, not by habituated intimidation on the part of the state.

Speaking of cultural instincts, China today calls itself a socialist country with Chinese characteristics. If that’s a label that makes any sense, then Singapore is a capitalist para-democracy with Chinese characteristics. It seems to me that the “Chinese characteristics” part is in many ways more definitive, in a typically unself-aware manner, than the ideological labels part (but then I am a dyed-in-the-wool Huntingtonian). Put slightly differently, Singapore is, by way of cross-cultural comparison, a “softly” illiberal, oligarchically directed liberalism in some of the same ways that Habib Bourguiba’s Tunisia exemplified a soft dictatorship determined to patiently impose liberal values on a conservative society.

The characteristics that make Singapore improbable—its being thrown into independence against its will, its unique, territorially removed Sinocentrism, its non-socialist social corporatism, and its illiberal-democratic liberalism—are themselves an improbable combination of characteristics. This is what makes Singapore singular, and endows it with such multitudes. It is also what makes it so easy for outsiders to misunderstand and thus stereotype the place, and so hard to truly fathom it. I promise you this: I will keep trying, and you may eavesdrop on my further progress, if any.

The post The Puzzle of Singapore appeared first on The American Interest.

The Poverty of Economics

The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging

Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro

Princeton University Press, 2019, 216 pp., $29.95

In 1992, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded its prize in economics to University of Chicago economist Gary Becker. The prize was for “having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour.” Becker’s work was built on the notion that areas historically reserved to other social sciences, particularly sociology, could in fact benefit from the application of economic methodologies. Beginning with his 1955 PhD dissertation, The Economics of Racial Discrimination, Becker made contributions to our understanding of crime and punishment, the household, the family, and even organ donation.

Becker’s radically simple claim—that economics has something to tell us about areas other than GDP and price-setting—changed the face of his profession. It converted economics from a narrow discipline into the wide-ranging, methodologically robust social science it is today. At the same time, it also gave economics what might, by detractors, be seen as a certain conceitedness. Whereas once the field was limited in scope, now it seemed able to offer explanations for everything. Is there really no area where economics cannot speak?

Such is the question that undergirds The Wealth of Religions, the recent book from Harvard economics professors Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro. The book is, more or less, a collection of the pair’s past academic work on the “economics of religion,” meaning the application of economic methodologies to sociological questions about religion. Of necessity, McCleary and Barro’s answer to the Beckerian question is yes, economics has something to tell us about religion. But what?

The inquiries with which the book is concerned are of three kinds. The first is how religion affects economics. That means, for example, empirically revisiting Max Weber’s famous thesis that Protestantism drove the rise of capitalism. It also means an extensive discussion of the effect Islam’s different elements—the Hajj, the Ramadan fast, and so on—have on the comparative economic success of predominantly Islamic nations. The second is how economics affects religion, including a careful examination of all of the evidence on the “secularization hypothesis,” the idea that as countries grow more rich, they become less religious. The third is general-interest religion/economics questions, such as the pair’s exploration of patterns in Catholic saint-making using economic tools.

As far as this goes, The Wealth of Religions can be an enlightening, if occasionally overly academic, read. One imagines it as a sort of Freakanomics for religion, if perhaps lacking Dubner and Levitt’s characteristic wit. In fact, this not-quite Freakanomics approach is a problem with the book: It seems unsure whether it is a compilation of serious academic work or a popularization of that same work, unclear as to its intended audience.

At the same time, The Wealth of Religions invites us, almost begs us, to ask a question not about religion, but about economics itself. McCleary and Barro clearly believe that economics has something to tell us about religion as a sociological phenomenon—they insist more than once that religion is “sui generis,” that religion per se is a legitimate object of economic inquiry. And their book is evidence that there is indeed a “there” there. Their findings in saint-making are particularly interesting, suggesting that the process has been used to shore up Catholicism in countries where it is threatened by emerging Protestantism. This sort of insight is made possible by the data-driven approach with which McCleary and Barro are clearly competent.

Yet McCleary and Barro also offer us evidence that economic methodology, applied in Beckerian fashion, runs up against real limits where religion is concerned. As much as they tell us, the most interesting part of the book is what McCleary and Barro are forced to leave unsaid.

Take, for example, their exploration of the effects of state religion on religious adherence. Barro and McCleary adopt a comparative international approach, using panel data from three years—1900, 1970, and 2000—on whether or not each of the world’s many nations has a state religion. Their goal, in part, is to weigh a contest between Adam Smith and David Hume, with the latter claiming that state religions can promote religious belief (or non-belief), and the former claiming they discourage belief. 

Barro and McCleary end up reaching a synthesis of the two positions, but one is forced to wonder about the generalizability of their data. When Hume and Smith wrote about religion in the 18th century, were they writing about the same kind of thing that McCleary and Barro are in the 21st century, or even about the kind of thing experienced by religious believers at the turn of the 20th? This matters, because if the data are bounded in the 20th century, then we cannot necessarily generalize from them to other religious eras—we can only make claims about what, broadly speaking, the effects of state religions were over the 20th century.

A similar objection attaches to the pair’s examination of the determinants of religiosity (chapter two). They use data from the World Values Survey (WVS) to examine what causes nations to be more or less religious, giving particular attention to the secularization hypothesis. They find that the WVS does support a negative relationship between median income and religiosity, confirming the secularization hypothesis. But the WVS has only been administered since 1981—it is hard, therefore, to draw from it a conclusion about the determinants of religion, a category that by its nature shifts and moves on a timeline of millennia as much as decades.

This argument—that the data on which McCleary and Barro are forced to rely are limited in their scope and therefore applicability—may seem like a trifling objection. But it leads us toward a deeper point: If religion has a multi-millennia history, but the data only tell us about a small, late fraction of that history, then the conclusions of a data-driven, economistic methodology will necessarily bias our understanding of what “religion” constitutes to the period for which we have data. 

This matters because the kind of thing that the word “religion” references has shifted dramatically over the centuries, and is likely to shift again in future. In particular, essentially all of Barro and McCleary’s work covers changes that happened after or during the process of religion’s slow retreat from the public square. Yet some western nations now seem intent on undoing that retreat. If Barro and McCleary can only speak to an era of religious retrenchment, then their conclusions are profoundly limited in their future predictive validity.

This brings us to a second, definitional objection to The Wealth of Religions. McCleary and Barro are studying religion, but what, exactly, qualifies a set of beliefs or practices as a religion? One of the pair’s strongest claims is that religions determine economic outcomes in large part through their propagation of beliefs in “[o]therworldly compensators,” i.e. an “afterlife,” state of nirvana, etc. to which our earthly actions are causally related. But this analysis seems to falter at Judaism, which the authors note has substantial economic effects, but is “famously ambiguous” about the afterlife. Similarly, we might suggest that religions are organized ideologies concerned with the divine, but that throws into question Confucianism’s status as a religion, something even Barro and McCleary seem uncertain of.

Religions are a bit like Potter Stewart’s famous formulation for obscenity: We know them when we see them. But a lack of uniformity across the category makes it hard to make generalizations about the determinants and effects of religion per se, rather than religions severally. In Barro and McCleary’s defense, this may be why the book is entitled The Wealth of Religions, plural. But if so, it might be better entitled The Wealth of Protestantism and Islam and Hinduism and So Forth.

As far as it goes, the book does a reasonable job of examining the economic causes and effects of particular religions. But its limits in discussing religion per se—limits imposed not by the authors, who are clearly good social scientists, but by the data and the subject matter—ought to be understood as a challenge to Beckerian “economics of everything.” The author’s comparative international conclusions are at best radically limited to religion in the 20th century, applicable until they are not. Take the secularization hypothesis, for example: infamously, it seems to hold true everywhere except the United States, in which religiosity is on-par with nations with a quarter of the GDP per capita.

The Wealth of Religions, then, can be understood as an indictment of the epistemic priority awarded to economics in the social sciences. Where the data are good, and where the question of concern is of the correct scope, economics can be an incredibly powerful tool. But for the study of religion—as a sociological, never mind theological, phenomenon—the book leaves one feeling that the more qualitative methods of the sociologist, anthropologist, historian, and archeologist are better suited to the task.

Does economics have something to tell us about religion? Probably, the reader of The Wealth of Religions will conclude, but far less than it has to tell us about other issues. The book is worth picking up for its case studies of Protestantism and Islam in particular, but readers who would like to have the mysteries of theology explained to them in fewer than 200 pages are better off looking elsewhere.

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How to Cure Liberal Democracy, Then and Now

“The Western liberal democracies are a declining power in human affairs.” 

“The disorder which has been incapacitating the democracies in this century is, if anything, becoming more virulent as time goes on.”

Europe and America in 2019? Actually, this was the diagnosis of Western democracies in the 1950s from the renowned political commentator Walter Lippmann. Originally penned in 1938, prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, and completed in 1955, Lippmann’s The Public Philosophy outlined his diagnosis and remedy for the maladies of Western liberal democracies. The disorder he described and sought to rectify did not emanate “from the machinations of our enemies and from the adversaries of the human condition but from within ourselves.” In other words, liberty and democracy were at risk of destroying each other; worst of all, we were the cause.

For Lippman, the rise of modernity had unleashed forces that now threatened the very system that had helped foster them. Like a virus, the democratic body politic was becoming infected. He saw that democratic executives in the West had become enfeebled, too dependent on the vagaries of public opinion. Most critical was the need “to stop the electoral process from encroaching upon and invading the government” and simultaneously “invest the government not only with all material power but also with the imponderable force of majesty.” The greatest threat, in his view, was Jacobinism, a philosophy that claimed popular sovereignty could often only be achieved through a radical overthrow of the government. He called the Jacobin doctrine an “obvious reaction, as de Tocqueville’s observation explains, to government by caste. When there is no opening for the gradualness of reform and for enfranchisement by assimilation, a revolutionary collision is most likely.” Fortunately, Lippman had a salve to remedy this democratic illness. 

Lippman’s response to this challenge was based on a return to civility and the renewal of what he called the public philosophy. His salve was rooted in the power of ideas. Ideas, for Lippmann, had  “the power to organize human behavior, [therefore] their efficacy can be radical.” A public philosophy postulated that “there was a universal order on which all reasonable men were agreed: within that public agreement on the fundamentals and on the ultimates.” In Lippmann’s view, democracies were “ceasing to receive the traditions of civility in which the good society, the liberal democratic way of life at its best, originated and developed.” He noted that “with the disappearance of the public philosophy . . . there was opened up a great vacuum in the public mind, yawning to be filled,” and that “[t]he ancient world . . . was not destroyed because the traditions were false. They were submerged, neglected, lost.” A similar phenomenon was occurring again. Democratic institutions were still standing, but people were no longer educated in or adhering to the public philosophy that undergirded those institutions. What was needed, then, was a renewal of public philosophy grounded in the tradition of natural law. Lippmann charged that democratic societies had lost their ability not just to lead but also to command respect. In part, he offered this failure was due to the failure to produce a mandate of heaven—a realm outside the private spheres. It was the re-establishment of and agreement on the universal public realm that Lippmann saw as the potential remedy to liberal democratic malaise. So do Lippmann’s prescriptions still allow us to chart a path forward today?

Lippmann’s call to renew public philosophy continues to resonate now, over a half century later. But before accepting his prescriptions, we should note two challenges with his diagnosis.

First, the idea of achieving consensus through developing and seeking agreement on a public philosophy appears out of step with the complex reality of modern, liberal, democratic societies. Lippmann’s vision of a “great vacuum in the public mind, yawning to be filled” continues to remain one of the key bugs—perhaps a permanent fixture at this point—of liberal democratic life. Even when there is a consensus about the “rules of the game,” there remains a lack of common purpose about what should be achieved through those rules. That vacuum has only become more acute in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this context, it’s unclear whether a return to public philosophy is possible, at least in the manner envisioned by Lippman.

Second, Lippmann’s proposed solution was rooted in a view of the superiority of rational thought, defining the public interest as what people “would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.” But, as Lippman himself points out, “political ideas acquire operative force in human affairs when, as we have seen, they acquire legitimacy, when they have the title of being right which binds men’s consciences.” And legitimacy is not purely rational. As sociologist Ulrich Beck remarked, “politics must not be merely rational in a democratic society, it must also be emotional.” The need to fill the vacuum is undiminished, but it requires an iterative and ongoing legitimation, focused not just on rational principles but also on emotional appeals that articulates a positive, constructive vision of our future. 

Our collective feeling of distemper, then, will likely continue for some time. And if we remain committed to supporting democratic institutions, we should take to heart much of Lippman’s diagnosis while also noting its deficiencies. The prognosis, as always, remains in our collective hands.

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Ben-Gurion’s Letters to America

David Gruen loved Shmuel Fuchs.

He loved him intensely, painfully, in that shape adolescent friendships often take. They were teenagers, they were Jews, and they lived deep in Poland, in the miserable town of Płońsk, in the west of the Russian Empire.

“I so miss you, so very much desire and crave to see you, my beloved friend,” the David who would become Ben-Gurion wrote to the boy he so adored. “O, if I only had shaken your hand before you left, if I could only embrace you and bestow kisses on you.”

But they were not lovers. Theirs was a romantic friendship. “It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning,” was how Evelyn Waugh chose to describe it. “In England, it comes when you are almost men.”

But they were not English. Their world was dark, muddy, almost medieval.

It was a time of pogroms. Before their childhoods were over, the Russian Empire had turned on its Jews. They would read the news from Kishinev and were filled with dread: another 49 dead. They knew the poet Haim Bialik had cried:

My hope and strength are gone.

How long? How much longer?

And when the Jewish newspapers arrived from Warsaw, they looked at the grainy photo of the man that obsessed them all: Theodor Herzl.

He looked like a prophet, this handsome, beautiful man, this man in a Viennese suit, who looked so proud, so elegant—and so unlike them and the rags that surrounded them. This man had appeared like a messiah, advocating for them in the capitals of Europe like nobody had ever done before, promising to save them.

Gruen and Fuchs would go to the river Płonka. They would undress and get in the water. “We’d swim and speak Hebrew,” is what David—in Yiddish, they would pronounce it Dovid—chose to remember many years later. There was little in their world. Little to read—little that wasn’t Jewish and that revolved around its shuls.

The year was 1903 and on the banks of this river is where Tom Segev begins his powerful new biography of David Ben-Gurion, the boy from Goat Alley, who did more than anyone else to build Herzl’s Jewish state.

On their bathing trip, the friends had taken along the latest issue of Hatze-firah, a Hebrew newspaper published in Warsaw, where they learned that the Zionist movement was considering establishing a Jewish state in East Africa and not in Palestine. Even that great man, Herzl himself, had refused to dismiss the idea out of hand. An exploratory delegation was already being dispatched to Uganda.

The boys broke into tears. They felt betrayed by Zionism. They wept, like by the waters of Babylon, and “on the spot, their emotions rising and their bodies wet with river water, they took an oath to leave Poland and settle in Palestine.” Only one of them made it there.

It’s a powerful moment, one of many powerful, literary moments in a powerful, literary book.

But something else struck me about these two boys. Not only is it that one made history and one didn’t. But also that Segev, by beginning here, has more than juxtaposed two lives. He has contrasted two Jewish choices, two Jewish stories, two destinies: one leading to America, the other to Israel.

Fuchs was the first to leave Płońsk. In 1904, he left for London, hoping to study at a Rabbinic college, but struggled to support himself. “Your brother embraces you with fierce love and kisses you,” wrote David.

Before Fuchs left Poland for good, he visited Ben-Gurion, who had, in turn, left Płońsk for Warsaw. As was the fashion of the times, they posed together for a photograph. The set was made to look like a salon of an aristocratic mansion. Fuchs—taller, broader, and almost a head higher—looks decisive and dominant. Ben-Gurion is slight, dependent, almost fragile. He called Shmuel his “big brother.”

But Fuchs was heading not to Palestine, but first to London and then over the ocean to New York. “I feel so much alone as if I have been left on a lonely and deserted island,” Ben-Gurion wrote to him. “At night, I dream that they have captured you and brought you back to Płońsk in chains.”

Fuchs did not return. He arrived in New York, like millions of others, and stayed.

This is where Shmuel Fuchs becomes not only a person but a history—the linear, predictable, mellow history of American Jews that could have been plotted for him and his family from the moment Fuchs arrived in New York. He studied dentistry at New York University, settled in Brooklyn, opened a successful practice, married, had children, bought an apartment building, became a run of the mill landlord, and started calling himself Sam Fox.

He drifted away from Zionist circles like he was almost embarrassed by them. Instead, Sam Fox joined half a dozen socialist organizations that promoted Yiddish culture. He spent the war giving to Yiddish poets in New York and ignoring the Zionists. He supported the Yiddish theatre. He had stopped believing in sacrificing, or in changing himself, for a Hebrew state. Sam Fox believed in his life and the role of his American diaspora. We know this as he once visited Poland briefly to do his tikkun olam, distributing 21,576 toothbrushes to Polish Jews. By the time he grew old, he was frightened of nuclear war. And then, after many years of silence, he wrote to David. He said he was not wealthy but not poor. He never visited Palestine. His friend never stopped asking why.

Sam Fox, like many a zayde, was no fool. He wrote to Ben-Gurion again and again, in the twilight of their lives asking him: “Could the Jewish nation be reborn in its ancestral land without incurring the curse of having to live by the sword? What was the connection between Israel and the Jews of the rest of the world? And what was secular Judaism?”

Writing to Ben-Gurion, this nobody, this everyman, this Brooklyn dentist, communicated with history. Not only with the man who made it, but with the whole other path of Jewish history that Ben-Gurion willed into existence: the zigzagging, contingent, extreme history of Israeli Jews.

Writing this as I am in New York, as yet another university trained Jew obsessed with Israel, surrounded by dozens of people also trained to think about history structurally, it’s easy to forget the makers like Ben-Gurion forge it in darkness.

Few books can truly capture it. In so many big, sweeping, national histories, especially of Israel, causation or argumentation takes over. By highlighting the patterns and chronologies they discover, great historians often efface the uncertainty and complexity that obscures the reality of the past.

The beauty of Segev’s biography of Ben-Gurion is that it chooses not to do that. Segev is less an analyst and more a meticulous historical detective. We are not offered a treatise on anti-Semitism, nationalism, or the historical migration patterns of Jews to the Land of Israel, but instead given a Ben-Gurion’s eye view of events. And this is enormously useful.

Useful, because Jewish history is clouded with politics. It is cluttered with terms that belong to today’s fights and feelings that do little to help us understand what was happening in a place like Płońsk 120 years ago.

These phrases trip off the tongue after the word Zionism: “national self-determination,” “settler colonialism,” “secular nationalism,” or “national liberation.” But they obscure how messy, confusing, and unformed Zionism was in the towns and villages of Eastern Europe when David Gruen was young.

The shtetl Zionism of Gruen’s childhood was as much a religious impulse as a secular one. His father, a Zionist, would lay tefillin daily, scolding his son when he gave up doing so. Educated, like so many townsfolk, in little outside the Bible, his old man, Avigdor, responded viscerally to Herzl’s promise to “take them home” to the land in the only book they had ever read.

The same could be said with Ben-Gurion’s first step into politics. When he and Fuchs established Ezra—what might generously be called a “society” to promote Hebrew in everyday life—on Hanukkah in 1900, it would have looked more like a religious gathering than anything else to a traveling Russian Imperial ethnographer. The same could be said for shtetl Zionism as a whole. Imagining that St. Petersburg ethnographer in Płońsk a little longer: For him, these dreamers, saving coins to depart for the land of their ancestors, would have looked like a printing press-infused version of what charismatic Rabbis had been doing for centuries: gathering the pious and setting out for the Land in the Bible.

It is also easy to understand why Fuchs left for New York, and not Jaffa, in 1904.

Even to a Jew with barely any formal education, it was obvious the hope of building a Jewish state in a province of the Ottoman Empire with hardly any Jews in it was vanishingly slim. Theodor Herzl’s movement had motivated the Yiddish masses of Eastern Europe; it brought hundreds of thousands of supporters like the Gruens into its orbit; but it was seen as a quixotic, rather risible thing by the European governments Herzl had sought to win over.

The pamphleteer behind Der Judenstaat had, after all, lived and died on a linear timeline, a timeline that broke down in 1914, ten years after his death. The safe assumptions of who was crazy and who was sane—between the choices Fuchs and Gruen made—were only turned on their headlong after Herzl had died.

Segev’s framing teaches us to think messily and not impose our own frames on the past. By situating us, moment by moment, with Ben-Gurion, he shows us just how zigzagging, contingent, and improbable the timeline that gives us the Israeli history really was. It is impossible not to think, reading Segev’s book, that had it not been for at least two dozen of the least probable outcomes succeeding each other, this timeline would never have culminated in a Jewish state.

As I read the book, I began to circle Israel’s improbable contingencies. Had the First World War not broken out; had the Ottoman Empire not collapsed as a result; had Lord Balfour not been convinced by Chaim Weizmann and Lord Rothschild to issue his declaration for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine—had any of these things not happened, then the grandchildren of Sam Fox might have done their doctoral dissertations on the weirdly millenarian settlements that had once attracted men like Ben-Gurion. They would be busy explaining the curious occurrence of Petach Tikvah and Rishon Lezion as superficially secularized versions of that centuries-old phenomenon our Russian Imperial ethnographer would have noted: that of pious believers, like the Vilna Gaon’s perushim, who followed their Rabbi’s messianic dreams to live and die in Jerusalem and the Land of Israel.

But even once the British Mandate was in place, the bird’s eye view of Ben-Gurion shows us nothing was inevitable. What if there had not been an economic crisis in Poland in the 1920s that ensured just enough immigrants to fill Tel Aviv with just enough Jews to be viable? What if there had not been just enough friendly Commissioners in Jerusalem or Zionist-friendly Prime Ministers in London? The answer is clear: Ben-Gurion would never have been able to play his historical role and build a state with a state, seize control of the country’s labor market, and forge an underground army. And we would instead have a world where Sam Fox spent long afternoons with his friend Mani Leib at his Yiddish club off Atlantic Avenue in the 1960s, talking of the tragic error he and “Dovid” had made as teens to believe in Herzl’s colonialist fairy tales instead of the socialist cause.

And had the Depression not hit in 1929, had Central European democracy not begun to collapse as a result, then had the Nazi Party not risen to power 1933, what would have happened then? Palestine’s left-leaning community of 150,000 Jews—less than the Jewish population of East London—peripheral to world Jewry demographically and its cause spurned by most of them, would have been unlikely to amount to much beyond an immigration-restricted British protected zone, unlikely to have survived Harold Macmillan’s “winds of change.”

And, as the book goes on, the glaring contingencies pile up right until the turning of the war in 1948. Had the British not defeated the Germans and their gas trucks en route to Palestine at El-Alamein; had the war not been so harsh as to crack apart the British Empire; had Roosevelt, who opposed partition, not died in 1945; had the Soviet Union not voted for partition; had Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin not so badly miscalculated the role the Jewish state would play in the Cold War to permit Czechoslovakia to arm it; had that last one not occurred, the IDF could have lost that war. As Segev explains, the United States feared it would have been obliged to land in Tel Aviv to prevent a massacre in 1948.

The population of this unworldly and absurd experiment, their kibbutzim abandoned, crammed behind American GIs and barbed-wire into Camp Tel Aviv, would have had to emigrate or be evacuated, as Palestine was partitioned—not between Israel and the Hashemites, but between Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Sam Fox would undoubtedly have been raising funds for this tragic, obscure, little cause.

There was a third choice between Ben-Gurion and Sam Fox: the choice for Europe. It was the choice my family made. And so did most of their world.

If you wanted to, you could leave Płońsk and drive about four and a half hours to Rybnik, in the forests at the edge of Silesia. As Herzl was crisscrossing Europe by train with his message, some of my family were calling this home. They chose Germany.

They probably considered Herzl not much more than a pompous and dangerous fool. And when I see their photographs—the thin lips, rather arrogant faces, and narrow eyes—I don’t only see a bit of myself. I see the people whom the Zionists like Ben-Gurion, but also the Yiddish socialists like Sam Fox, disdained.

The Haas of Rybnik were the industrial revolution in this small town. They ran a large leather factory. And at the very edge of the Kaiser’s realm, they wanted to be as German as possible. “There was like a racism,” I remember my grandmother saying in the German accent she never quite lost, “between the German Jews and the Eastern Jews.” And the closer to kith-and-kin with them, the worse it got.

On that linear timeline, they were the lucky ones. Until 1914.

Borders changed. What would have been a teenage cousin was killed by Poles for agitating for Rybnik to stay German in the Upper Silesian plebiscite of 1921. After the murder, the whole family moved to Berlin, where they were still the lucky ones.

Even up until 1933, to choose America, let alone Palestine, was still a bad option for the people that Ben-Gurion needed most to settle in Tel Aviv—the professionals and industrialists of the Jewish bourgeoisie. Why choose to be someone else’s cheap labor or be forced to work in a profession—like a dentist—that didn’t require faultless writing or unaccented speech? Why be shot at by Arab fedayeen scraping together a living trying to export oranges in Rehovot when you could be a journalist, a filmmaker, a politician—almost anything—in Germany?

Hitler destroyed both the family and their assumptions. They left for France when the Nazis took power. The Reich arrived in Paris in 1940. Rybnik turned out to be an hour from Auschwitz. My grandmother narrowly survived. Her mother, uncle, and her grandmother from Rybnik did not. Those who did had made it to America, Britain, or to Palestine on rare immigration visas negotiated by the Zionists. When the Germans entered Rybnik the townsfolk—as if in a fever—dug up the Jewish cemetery and threw all the bones they found into a pond. By the time the Nazis left, six million were gone. Ben-Gurion’s darkest visions had come true.

Zionism, which had never been the dominant movement in the Jewish world, or even the dominant narrative, was the one proved right by the Holocaust. But that validation by history was bound up, for Ben-Gurion, in his greatest defeat.

“The Zionist movement,” Segev finally judges, “had always failed to persuade most of the world’s Jews that it was right—that was its greatest failure. It proved helpless against Hitler and Stalin; that was its greatest tragedy.”

If it says anything, the life of Ben-Gurion shows that the Jews have rarely thought as one. The idea of one political Jewish people, is a myth, an illusion. It would have been insulting to my Sephardi ancestors and irrational to those in Rybnik.

It is an idea which briefly settled on American Jews after 1967, when they began to make Israel integral in those dizzying weeks of pride and relief—the Exodus moment, when the Zionist bestseller became—almost—a common script.

But, half a century on, the choices made by Ben-Gurion and Sam Fox are still playing themselves out. And they have left us with two parallel understandings of history—the linear and the zigzagging—that we will have to break through.

That Exodus myth, once hegemonic, is now giving way to these two incommensurate worldviews. One, in America, which sees history, like America, as made great by sweeping moral change. In this world, the logic of progress and tolerance must surely triumph. The other, in Israel, sees history, like Israel, hanging by a thread. In this world, the logic of war and nation tends to prevail.

The linear sees peace as a fight that should never stop, a long march, a culture war like the civil rights movement. The zigzagging sees it, like Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Rabin as something that cannot be forced, that comes once in a generation, when it must be seized. Both are damaging. Linear histories can make you absolutist, naive, or convinced there must always be progress. Zigzagging, contingent histories can make you paranoid, cruel, or prone to believe in miracles.

All too often, I think, these visions come down to family history. And in Israel, most have Jewish histories which means they live without an American faith in progress. They are not surprised, like Sam Fox was, that their country must “live by the sword.” And they think what is happening there, in Israel, in the Middle East, is the true flight of the Angel of History. The American experience, insofar as it is even comprehensible, seems dangerously idealistic at best.

Today less than a third of Israeli Jews are, shall we say, spiritually from Płońsk—secular Ashkenazi Jews whose families arrived in the lifetime of Ben-Gurion. Today the majority are overlaid waves of immigrants and religious groups, each with histories as contingent—if not more so—than Ben-Gurion’s pioneers.

They are Haredi Jews in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, countless sects who followed their Rabbis to rebuild after the Holocaust; Middle Eastern Jews from Ramat Gan to Kiryat Shmona, whose families were either expelled by Arab regimes or incited to flee them; Messianic settlers building their own reality in the West Bank; Soviet Jews in Ashdod and Be’ersheba who exited 1990s chaos or looming authoritarianism; Beta Israel airlifted from famine in Ethiopia; and many more.

“You perturbed the entire universe,” the Iraqi Jews would sing about Ben-Gurion in his refugee camps. “A bug drove us mad and we all jumped headlong.”

And leaped we have, to a country he’d hardly recognize. Israel today has a thriving economy, a powerful army, and more than 128 billionaires. Yet it is only a half-functioning democracy. Not only its human rights record, but its entire future, inextricably bound up with the Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank. And facing this, relitigating Sam Fox and Ben-Gurion isn’t going to help.

But we still insist on arguing, here in New York, in the nomenclature of their letters, as if these facts on the ground did not exist. We call ourselves Zionists, or Bundists, or anti-Zionists, labeling ourselves as if we are still in Płońsk. But none of these terms really mean anything for how the most affluent and assimilated diaspora in Jewish history should interact with a state they seek to influence in the Middle East. Which is to say not as Jews but as Americans: who either want U.S. policy to shield the occupation—or not; who either want to help support those building new democratic coalitions across a complex society—or not.

We don’t have to agree, fall silent, or follow some line. We have our own values. But we should not forget, as we stand by them, that, strange as it may sound, of all the Jewish experiences in the 20th century, it was not that of Ben-Gurion, whose life was shaped by the storm, that was exceptional. It was that of Sam Fox, the dentist.

The post Ben-Gurion’s Letters to America appeared first on The American Interest.

China, Capitalism, and the New Cold War

“Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell

Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings

A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.”

― John Milton, Paradise Lost

When politicians, pundits, and academics speak of a growing competition, or even a New Cold War, between the United States and China, one thing that is not asked enough is what is being competed for. Likewise, when we speak of an “American” or “Western” model, in contrast to a “Chinese” one, it is worth asking what or who exactly is being modeled, and to what end. One of the virtues of Branko Milanović’s new book, Capitalism, Alone, is that it addresses these questions head-on and with useful insights and results. The answer, according to Milanović, is that the competition is to win the hearts and minds (or, as we will discuss, at least the pocketbooks) of the leaders of what used to be called the Third or developing world, and which is now generally referred to as the Global South.

Competition between economic models for the hearts and minds of the Global South is not new. Such competition was one of the issues at the core of the Cold War: Would countries emerging from the yoke of colonialism choose to follow the “free enterprise” model proposed by the newly emergent capitalist hegemon in the United States, or would they instead adopt the Communist authoritarian model proposed by the Soviet Union. From the late 1940s through the 1980s, billions of dollars in foreign aid were distributed, vast propaganda efforts were pursued, and numerous hot wars and insurgencies were fought across Asia, Africa, and Latin America to determine which of these models would prove more attractive to countries trying to chart the best way to improve their economic conditions. In other words, as Yale historian Odd Arne Westad has argued, the Cold War was above all an ideological competition over which would prove the superior model of development—authoritarian communism or democratic capitalism, and within each of those categories, which flavor—Soviet centralist or Maoist, autarkic-welfarist or neoliberal, and so on. As late as the early 1980s, it was not at all clear to contemporaries which of these models would prove most attractive.

By the late 1980s, however, the fog of ideological war seemed to lift, so much so that in the summer of 1989, a young political scientist named Francis Fukuyama dared to ask whether the ideological war for the hearts and minds of not just the Global South but the entire world was in fact over. It seemed clear to Fukuyama that the one best system for promoting prosperity and freedom was a globally-oriented market economy coupled to a democratic political system. While other systems remained entrenched in a few places such as Iran and China, the ideological debate was over, Fukuyama declared. “The End of History” had arrived, embodied in the form of democratic capitalism shared in some broad sense by all North Atlantic democracies. These systems had proven their superior capacity to deliver rising standards of living and peaceful, inclusive politics to such a degree that no right-thinking political leader anywhere could possibly aspire to anything else. The collapse of Eastern European communism that same Fall, the rapid embrace of capitalist “shock therapy” across the former Soviet Union, as well the “third wave” of democratization across Latin America in the late 1980s and 1990s, made Fukuyama seem like a prophet.

Of course, darker countervailing forces were still active. On June 4th, 1989, the Communist regime in Beijing signaled in the strongest possible terms that it was not about to embrace parliamentary democracy and liberalism as part of its economic “opening up” policy. The slaughter in Tienanmen Square that night indicated the commitment of the Deng Xiaoping regime to continued authoritarian rule no matter what. That same night, on the other side of Asia, the Iranian regime announced Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei had died. But Khomeini’s long-anticipated passing, unlike that of General Francisco Franco in Spain a decade and a half earlier, did not herald a break with the authoritarian order in Tehran. Instead, the Iranian mullahcracy’s ability to move past their original charismatic leader’s death signaled the successful institutionalization of an anti-liberal form of political practice in the Islamic Republic.

Even with these two cases, the case for Fukuyama’s End of History thesis long remained strong. What late-twentieth-century leader in the Global South, after all, looked to either China or Iran as a credible alternative developmental model to capitalism, liberal or otherwise? Up until the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, the Western model of liberal, democratic, and allegedly meritocratic capitalism seemed all but unchallenged from an ideological point of view. Yes, China and Iran and a few other holdouts weren’t yet embracing liberal democracy, but it seemed like only a matter of time before they, too, would come around.

As the Bush Administration’s National Security Strategy in 2002 put it:

The rule of law; limits on the absolute power of the state; free speech; freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance; and respect for private property: no nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them. . . . Many other nations, with different histories and cultures, facing different circumstances, have successfully incorporated these core principles into their own systems of governance . . .

Today, these ideals are a lifeline to lonely defenders of liberty. And when openings arrive, we can encourage change—as we did in central and eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991, or in Belgrade in 2000. When we see democratic processes take hold among our friends in Taiwan or in the Republic of Korea, and see elected leaders replace generals in Latin America and Africa, we see examples of how authoritarian systems can evolve, marrying local history and traditions with the principles we all cherish. . . .  The national security strategy of the United States must start from these core beliefs.

What is most striking about this statement is how confidently it expressed the assumption that history was on the side of “the American model” of liberal democratic capitalism, the universal and final form of political evolution.

In many ways, it feels like a dispatch from a lost world.

It is now clear that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the consequent Great Recession (2007-9) represent a watershed in the legitimacy of Western democratic capitalism. The events and aftermath of the GFC have had three signal effects. First, the GFC inflicted great economic hardship and financial trauma on vast swaths of the population in the United States and Europe, as millions of homes were foreclosed, unemployment spiked, and (especially in Europe) fiscal austerity was imposed. This has brought into persistent question the ability of the Western economic model to “deliver the goods.” Second, fairly or not, the widespread view is that those responsible for the GFC, both in government and in the financial markets, were not “held accountable”: Those who had enriched themselves via the pre-GFC bubble were allowed to walk away with their fortunes largely intact. This has caused widespread political rage, undermining the political legitimacy of Western democracies. Third, while the lack of sufficient fiscal stimulus in Europe and North America led to something approximating a lost decade, with economic growth rates averaging barely half what they had in the decades before the crisis, China continued to grow its economy at an enormous rate. If the proof of the economic pudding is in the eating, China seems to have been using a better cookbook over the last decade. Not surprisingly, it was precisely in the wake of the GFC that questions first started to get asked whether “the China Model” might come to replace the western one. Over the last decade, the fear in the West has risen steadily that China is eating our lunch.

Part of the backlash in the West against China comes from the much-belated recognition that the Chinese were never planning on adopting Western ways. Despite the fact that the post-Tienanmen Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has never been anything but direct that it would never brook any challenge to its political authority, many Westerners during the 1990s and 2000s continued to find evidence to maintain their fantasies, whether it was the New York Times reporting on how fan voting in Chinese gameshows suggested pent-up demand for democracy, or the Carlyle Group’s David Rubinstein claiming in 2012 that continued liberalization was “inevitable,” or various scholars who claimed, as late as 2013, that China’s only choice was to “democratize or die.” Even if the process was slow, many Westerners managed to convince themselves that at least China’s trends were “in the right direction” toward eventual political liberalization and convergence on the liberal democratic capitalism of the West. Subscribing to the hoary old master narrative of modernization-as-convergence convinced many in the West that time was on their side—or at least against the CCP’s.

Historians in the future will debate where the turning point was in the West’s attitude toward China. There will be an inevitable tendency to credit (or blame) the arrival of President Donald Trump, with his belligerent rhetoric toward China, but the shift in mood on China both pre- and post-dated Trump. Human rights organizations had of course long decried China’s treatment of dissidents and Tibet, but the turn to mass internment of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang starting in 2014 significantly raised the volume. Likewise, business groups that had hoped to tap the vast Chinese market became progressively disillusioned with China’s seriousness about providing market access and angrier about persistent intellectual property theft and mandatory IP licensing agreements in exchange for market access. But arguably, the decisive turning point was China’s announcement in early 2018 that it was abolishing term limits for the President of the Republic (which had previously been limited to two terms, a convention both Presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin had respected). This declaration effectively made President Xi Jinping president for life.

Although Trump himself jocularly praised this move, Xi’s announcement shocked the foreign policy establishment in Washington, DC. While internal Chinese factional politics have always been opaque to outsiders, here was a clear, simple marker that China was not moving (however slowly) toward democracy and generalized convergence with the Western model, but rather in the opposite direction. Although the evidence of reinvigorated authoritarianism had been there since the start of Xi’s presidency for anyone paying close attention (in retrospect, the jailing of Xi’s political rival Bo Xilai upon Xi’s accession to power was a strong indicator, even as some western analysts at the time insisted it was actually “a very positive event”), the significance of this announcement was comprehensible to even people with little or no knowledge of China. What the Chinese regarded as a matter of internal politics and governance, and as such of no great relevance or interest to foreigners, represented an earthquake in Washington, putting the nail in the coffin of efforts to maintain the old narrative that China was making inexorable if slow progress towards democratization and generalized convergence with the West.

Trump’s Sinophobic turn, in other words, caught a fundamental shift in the zeitgeist in Washington that had little if anything to do with his own uninformed assessment of the situation in China (which was more a matter of longstanding prejudice than any careful assessment). Indeed, one of the few topics on which there has been almost complete bipartisan consensus in Washington during the Trump years has been toward taking a harder line on a China that everyone now recognizes has no intention (and indeed, never did) of trying to democratize or otherwise emulate the American or Western political system. This bipartisan shift may have coincided with Trump’s arrival but the very fact that it is bipartisan demonstrates that it was not Trump who created it. Like a rooster at dawn, his crowing simply called forth the inevitably rising sun. At this point, the mood has decisively shifted.

What Americans of both parties have belatedly and angrily realized is that we find ourselves locked in a profound struggle not with some communist power slowly democratizing, but rather with a rival, authoritarian brand of capitalism, firm in its own vision of politics, with neither need nor intention of converging with our own model. Indeed, if anything, the illiberal turn in western democracies over the last decade suggests that insofar as convergence is happening, it is via more fragile liberalizing democracies becoming more authoritarian rather than the other way around. What we have belatedly realized is that we are in a situation, as Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman wrote in a much-discussed paper this summer, of “weaponized interdependence,” or perhaps more optimistically, “a partnership of rivals.” At this point even the Chinese, who have watched with horror and disbelief as the relationship with the West has deteriorated, believe that the best we can hope for is to “maintain a mutually beneficial collaboration while managing a benign rivalry.”

Milanović’s Capitalism, Alone begins from this point of departure: Capitalism has conquered the world, operating everywhere, as Milanović puts it, “according to the same economic principles: production organized for profit using legally free wage labor and mostly privately owned capital, with decentralized coordination.” And yet, it turns out that this conquest has not ended geopolitical competition for the hearts and minds of the Global South about the proper developmental model. While central planning imploded in the 1980s and 1990s as a credible alternative to capitalism, Milanović documents how there have now emerged two (broadly stylized) ideological alternatives within capitalism, which he refers to as “Liberal Meritocratic Capitalism” (an abstracted version of contemporary American capitalism) and “Political Capitalism” (whose primary exemplar today is China).

Liberal meritocratic capitalism’s primary selling points are respect for the rule of law, political pluralism, cultural tolerance, and the concept of fair play—which together add up to the promise that everyone should have an equal chance at success, based on their God-given talent and hard work. As Milanović points out, however, the greatest threat to liberal meritocratic capitalism comes not from any direct challenge from political capitalism, but from the widespread sense that the liberal meritocratic order has betrayed its promises. Widening inequality in the West, and the willingness and ability of the elite to game the system to benefit their friends and offspring, have led many to feel that the meritocracy is sham, which in turn has fueled populist illiberalism on the right and neo-socialism on the left.

If liberal meritocratic capitalism was the world that Fukuyama suggested lay at the End of History, political capitalism is a form of market-based political economy in which the government, as opposed to civil society, retains ultimate authority over major economic decision-making. While Milanović names a variety of countries that fit his definition of political capitalism, China represents the “paradigmatic” case. According to Milanović, there are three defining features of political capitalism. First, “a highly efficient and technocratically savvy bureaucracy” is put in charge of the system, with a mandate to realize high economic growth. Second, while capitalists and entrepreneurs may make huge amounts of money under political capitalism, “capitalists’ interests are never allowed to reign supreme, and the state retains significant autonomy to follow national-interests politics.” Third, the state retains ultimate control over the capitalists because the “rule of law” as such is absent. While the system is meritocratic in that the bureaucrats are appointed and promoted based on objective criteria, the political echelon retains final and arbitrary power.

If liberal meritocratic capitalism has legitimation problems, so does political capitalism, albeit of very different sorts. On the one hand, there is an inherent tension (what Marxists would call a contradiction) between the need for technocratic, skilled elites, and the fact that this elite finds itself forced to “operate under conditions of selective application of the rule of law.” On the other hand, corruption tends to be endemic in such systems, in that the ultimately arbitrary power of the political elite provides innumerable opportunities for self-dealing. And this corruption is obviously corrosive to the legitimacy of the system, no matter how meritocratically the political leaders may have achieved the positions that enable them to enrich themselves and their family members. As Milanović glosses it, under political capitalism

the elite should not be seen simply as bureaucracy, because the lines between where bureaucracy ends and business begins are blurred: individuals may move between these roles, or the different roles may be maintained by different individuals with the same ‘organization’ that has its ‘representatives’ dispersed, some in business, others in politics. Using a pejorative term, one could say that such organizations are not too dissimilar from mafias.

Milanović’s definition of “political capitalism” is in part an argument about the world-historical role or function of communism. Communist regimes may have failed to create terrestrial paradises, but what they were successful at, above all, was destroying “feudalism” wherever they took power. This capacity was especially appealing to leaders of the emerging Third World in the middle of the twentieth century, who faced a dual mandate not only to overthrow foreign rule, but also to “get rid of the stifling power of landlords and other magnates.” In fact, Milanović argues, “the only organized force that could affect these two revolutions were communist parties and other parties that were both left-wing and nationalist.”

This latter argument is perhaps an overreach. While communist parties invariably killed off the ancien regime wherever they took power, they were not the only political force capable of achieving such reforms. For example, right-wing (or at any rate anti-communist) governments carried out land reforms in countries such as Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and South Korea. It is unclear whether communist regimes were actually more effective at setting the stage for “political capitalist” models than were various quasi-fascistic regimes. Be that as it may, it is undoubtedly true that wherever Communist regimes came to power, it spelled doom for incumbent elites. And where centrally planned economies collapsed or retreated, especially in the post-Soviet space, what has followed has rarely been liberal meritocratic capitalism, but instead almost always a mafia-esque political capitalism. Even the apparent exceptions, such as in Eastern Europe, are increasingly coming to seem to prove this rule, as demonstrated by the rise of creeping political capitalist regimes in places like Serbia and Hungary.

Fukuyama is not the first Hegelian to think he had reached the end of History only to see the dialectic renew itself at a new plane. “As has occurred so often in human history,” Milanović observes, “the rise and apparent triumph of one system or religion is soon followed by some sort of schism between different variants of the same credo.” In this case, the tension is between two variants within capitalism, rather than between two kinds of modernism, namely capitalism and communism. But if the two systems of capitalism, the liberal-meritocratic and the political, stand less far apart in their operating principles than did Communism and Capitalism, this need not mean the competition will be any less fierce.

Any would-be systemic ideological “peer competitor” to the United States needs three things to appear credible: 1. a viable developmental model; 2. a desire or motive to export that model; and 3. a capacity to export that model. Considering these three questions a decade ago in his much-discussed book When China Rules the World, Martin Jacques argued that China in fact does not have this kind of “export ambition.” For “cultural reasons,” Jacques claimed, the Chinese would prefer to remain “aloof” from the barbarians abroad. But as Milanović points out, “Aloofness is no longer a viable option.” As recent kerfuffles over NBA players and executives commenting on the protests in Hong Kong, or the development of a “corporate social credit system” suggest, China is increasingly flexing its economic and technological muscles to force foreigners to kowtow to its political proclivities.

In terms of the viability of their system as a model for the Global South to emulate, the looming fact is that China is an economic success story. China’s system of political capitalism, for all its flaws, has lifted more people out of poverty than have all the Western development programs of the last half-century. Moreover, since the global financial crisis, China has gone from an economy that was about half the size of the American one, to one as large (or by some measures bigger). Whether China wants to export its system or not, there is no question that many across the Global South are wondering if there are lessons they can learn. As Fukuyama himself has pointed out, at the beginning of this decade China seemed to be toying with the idea of proposing its system as a model for others to follow, as indicated by discussions in Chinese intellectual and social scientific circles about the potential exportability of the “China Model.”

In terms of China’s capacity for exporting its model, the “One Belt, One Road” (一带一路) initiative, now more commonly referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), suggests possibilities. While more a slogan and a vision than a definite set of plans, it is clear that the BRI represents an effort by China to export its surplus capital and know-how in infrastructure development to countries throughout its periphery, with the evident ambition of turning China into the central trading hub of the 21st century. Seen from the hindsight of President Xi Jinping’s more assertive position for China today, it is easy to think that China in the 1990s and 2000s was simply following the famous dictum of former CCP Chairman Deng Xiaoping’s: “Hide your strength, bide your time.”

Milanović presents a nuanced argument in the face of these pregnant possibilities. On the one hand, he suggests it will be difficult for other countries to emulate what China has done. China’s long history of subordinating merchants to the interest of the state, its unique blend of centralized power and authority and decentralized administration, and of course its sheer scale both geographically and demographically make it a hard act to follow. On the other hand, Milanović points out, the attraction of “the China Model” for emerging generations of leaders in the Global South may primarily proceed from extra-economic motives. Political capitalism offers “manifest advantages for those who are in power: they are insulated from the immediate pressure of public opinion, they have the opportunity to parley their political power into economic benefits, and they do not face institutionalized time limits to their rule.” If the competition between liberal meritocratic capitalism and political capitalism is for the hearts and minds of the Global South, then above all it is a competition for the hearts and minds of the political elites in the Global South, and for such elites, the advantages of political capitalism are evident.

But what if the real terms of the competition for those hearts and minds isn’t in fact an ideological competition between two different systems of social and political organizations and value systems? What if the Chinese have, in fact, little interest in exporting their political-economic model to the rest of the world? Looking at China’s more recent statements and behavior in the international arena, there has been scant evidence that the Chinese government cares at all about how countries organize themselves internally, so long as they are deferential to China’s interests and sensibilities. While the United States habitually pressures other countries on their internal politics, the Chinese tend, in fact, to be studiously silent on the internal politics of other countries. China’s commitment to respecting the political sovereignty of other countries to this extent feels sincere.

In fact, China’s primary motive in international affairs does not seem to be about promoting a model, but rather about ensuring that they can maintain internal political stability and control. China’s big lesson from the 1990s was that it must never allow itself to fall into a position like the Japanese in the 1980s, or the Koreans and Thais in the 1990s, where the international financial institutions were able during a financial crisis to dictate internal reforms. Building up a huge current account surplus has been a central aspect of that strategy.

One crucial difference between the first Cold War and this new one is that whereas the Soviet and the American economies were separate from one another, the Chinese and the American ones are deeply interdependent, almost placentally so. Because the economies of the two countries are, at least for now, so intertwined, the new Cold War is less a matter of ideological competition than a struggle for economic ascendency. The frontline in this struggle concerns standard- and norm-setting regarding new technologies, as the battle over the deployment of 5G networking infrastructure has made clear. Dominance in the realm of information and communications technology is especially central because of the centrality of these technologies to control political communications. This has led to much handwringing about the Chinese exporting “totalitarian” surveillance technologies—usually failing to note that plenty of Western countries are exporting similar technologies, indeed sometimes to China itself. In a nutshell, what we are facing is not an ideological Cold War, or even a trade war, but in fact a tech war—that is, a war for control over technological standards and the commercial spoils that go with that. Arguably the greatest geopolitical risk today is thus that “tech may trip the Thucydides trap.”

Overall, the evidence suggests that growing Chinese influence over how countries organize their political economies is the result less of any effort on China’s part to export their ideological model than of the eagerness of leaders in the Global South to exercise the kind of social and political control enabled by these technologies, which the Chinese are happy to sell to them. China’s motives, in short, are commercial rather than political. Nonetheless, even if the Chinese are less interested in exporting their ideological and governance model, they may nonetheless de facto begin pushing countries they work with toward political capitalism because of what political scientists refer to as “isomorphic” conformism: Organizations that interact intensively start to converge in structure and process, not for ideological reasons, but simply so that their interactions can become more efficient. Over time, they increasingly mirror each other’s operational practices and organizational structures and habits. “Convergence,” in short, proceeds not for Hegelian ideological reasons, but for technical ones. In sum, even if China is not pushing anyone to adopt Chinese governance strategies, as China becomes an ever more dominant trade partner, we should expect the leaders of China’s major trade partners to increasingly adopt political capitalism as their de facto governance style.

The central question facing American foreign policymakers is how to promote the liberal values associated with meritocratic capitalism in a world of growing de facto support for the political capitalism that China symbolizes. In the end, that comes down to renewing the faltering appeal of liberal meritocratic capitalism. As Milanović points out, the ultimate appeal of liberal meritocratic capitalism is great—most people living in democracies, after all, consider meritocratic democracy a “primary good,” that is, an end in itself—so long as it actually lives up to its promises. Liberal meritocratic capitalism does not need as much growth as political capitalism in order to legitimate itself, but it does need to ensure that there is in fact reasonably equal opportunity to succeed. Redressing the widespread view that the system is rigged in favor of incumbents is essential for reinvigorating both the moral justification for and political legitimacy of liberal meritocratic capitalism.

Here Milanović offers up several recommendations that can help restore the meritocratic promises of liberal capitalism. First, it is essential to equalize access to high-quality education. In the United States today, in particular, the educational system at every level is intensely stratified, and incumbent elites have largely reserved access to the best institutions for their own class. When more students at Ivy League schools are children of the One Percent than from the bottom half of the income bracket, it undermines the legitimacy of the entire system. Massive renewed investment in public education is thus one critical leg. “The objective is to reduce transmission of advantages across generations and make equality of opportunity real.”

Second, because income from capital grows more quickly than income from labor, as Thomas Piketty has taught us, abating growing inequality requires a broader distribution of access to capital. Milanović cheekily co-opts Margaret Thatcher’s term “the people’s capitalism” to suggest a renewed commitment to spreading access to capital, by ensuring that shares in enterprises are owned broadly, not confined to a narrow class of rentiers and executives. The goal should be to “reduce the concentration of wealth and income from capital” and increase inter-generational income mobility. To achieve these objectives, Milanović proposes increases in the taxation of the rich, especially a return to high taxation of inheritance with the explicit goal of reducing the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich. How individual states are supposed to accomplish such an objective in a world where the truly wealthy mostly stash their lucre in corporate and offshore vehicles is left unexplored, though elsewhere Milanović has praised the work of Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, who along with his colleague Emmanuel Saez has been exploring precisely this policy challenge.

If liberal meritocratic capitalism can address the betrayal of its own ethical operating principles, or perhaps even evolve into some more mutualistic form of “people’s capitalism,” then it may well be able to renew its long-term appeal to the Global South, albeit perhaps not directly to political elites. Conversely, if China’s style of political capitalism can avoid the besetting sins of previous authoritarian regimes, namely the tendency to generate bad policies and social outcomes that benefit only political insiders, and instead continue to deliver higher rates of growth, efficient administration, and an ability to address perceived social challenges, the appeal of the Chinese system may only grow. But even if China succeeds in this goal, it is unclear whether other countries will be capable of following China’s model of political capitalism.

In the end, Milanović doubts whether either the political or liberal meritocratic variants of capitalism is likely to achieve total global victory. For one thing, neither the United States nor China is going to embrace the other’s system for themselves. Despite Americans’ eternal optimism that if foreigners just tried a little harder they could become just like us, there’s little indication that the Chinese have any desire to adopt “barbarian” ways. Contrariwise, the Chinese retain an abiding skepticism about the capacity of barbarians ever to cease being barbarous, which as Jacques suggested puts breaks on their ambitions to export their model. In the end, whereas Americans want to be emulated, the Chinese merely want to be paid tribute.

The post China, Capitalism, and the New Cold War appeared first on The American Interest.

Democracy Promotion in the Age of Trump

The American Interest recently published a series of three essays, commissioned by the Reagan Institute, on the legacy of Ronald Reagan’s famous 1982 Westminster speech on democracy promotion. Last week, we gathered the three authors—Carl Gershman of the National Endowment for Democracy, Daniel Twining of the International Republican Institute, and Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security—to discuss the speech’s lessons for today with Susan B. Glasser of the New Yorker and TAI contributing editor David J. Kramer. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

David J. Kramer: What was the source of Reagan’s optimism? What was his inspiration for believing that democracy would prevail over communism and authoritarianism?

Daniel Twining: He was very alive to the idea that these were not Western principles. He called it “cultural condescension” to think that only Europeans and Americans aspired to democratic freedoms and that the rest of the world was happily resigned to despotism. A lot of Europeans at the time thought he was quite naive and unworldly, but in fact it was that very American form of optimism that gave him the inspiration that our ideals are universal. When you read the Westminster speech, he makes very clear that there are no cultural or geographic exceptions, that this is something innate to the human condition and the God-given dignity of men and women.

DJK: Carl, you have described how the situation in 1982 could have offered cause for despair. And yet Reagan saw through any reason for pessimism and reached for optimism.

Carl Gershman: Well, there were a lot of factors that wouldn’t have led to optimism. Carter had just a couple of years before talked about a malaise, the “crisis of confidence.” You had the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the crackdown in Poland—martial law was imposed just six months earlier—and you even had Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the bicentennial of 1976 saying democracy was where the world was, not where the world was going. But when Reagan got elected, it was really bipartisan; you had the AFL-CIO and a lot of people who really wanted to revive American engagement in the world. Reagan was pushing in that direction.

There was also a feeling, which he articulated terrifically in the speech, that there was a crisis of communism. He saw the contradiction between a modernizing world economy and a political system that could not allow the Soviet Union to modernize. He predicted the downfall, but he also saw, quite remarkably, a democratic revolution emerging. Within just a few years, the third wave of democratization crested, and you had a doubling of the number of democracies in the world. And it’s not just that he saw it happening; he helped make it happen. Obviously he was not alone—Pope John Paul II played a very important role in this, and the Solidarity movement, and the Soviet dissident movement—but he pushed in the right direction.

DJK: Let me pick up on that point about the malaise of the Carter era. We also still had the hangover effects of Vietnam and the Iranian hostage-taking. Richard, to what extent do you think Reagan saw the goodness of America and the cause of democracy as an antidote to what the country had been going through?

Richard Fontaine: Well, I would add one more set of factors to your list, and that’s the economy. In 1982, the U.S. gross domestic product contracted by 2.5 percent. Unemployment was the highest it had been since the Great Depression. Interest rates were above 21 percent, and the United States was actually doing pretty well compared to other industrialized democracies like Canada and the United Kingdom.

So, to bet on democracy and freedom as opposed to autocracy and communism was pretty bold. I think it was both Reagan’s optimism about the universal attractiveness of democratic and liberal values, but also his clear-eyedness about the internal contradictions of the communist system, that allowed him to step back from the situation at hand in order to see the long view with clarity.

Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were quite different people, to state the obvious, but Carter had a saying that America did not invent human rights, human rights invented America. I think that Reagan would have agreed with that. This was not something to be exported from the United States, it was not a politically convenient narrative or set of talking points, but rather intrinsic to the blessings that the United States has enjoyed and therefore intrinsic to the human spirit.

Susan B. Glasser: Carl, you had an interesting observation that Reagan’s speech was not just rhetoric but involved the creation of an infrastructure and coherent plan around democracy promotion. Do you think that America’s institutionalized democracy promotion community, as it exists today, is something that Reagan would recognize?

CG: Well, certainly when he spoke, nothing really existed. You had the German party foundations, but his speech was the founding document for everything that was done thereafter. And there is a vision in the speech of how this work should be done. He makes the point, repeatedly, that it’s the people on the ground themselves who want freedom and democracy. Our job is to help; it’s not to do it for them. That’s been the philosophy of the National Endowment for Democracy since the very beginning.

I think as the field grew and became bureaucratized, you did have the tendency for big development agencies and governments to take a top-down approach. But the speech itself contains this brilliant concept that the only reason this work can succeed is because people want freedom and they’re fighting for it. And the question then is, how can you properly be of assistance without imposing your own priorities on them, how do you empower them to achieve their own vision. That’s what it’s all about.

DJK: How indispensable was the U.S. role in supporting democracy, perceived in 1982, and how indispensable is it today?

DT: The world expects America to lead on democracy and human rights issues and the world is surprised when we don’t. And that surprise doesn’t necessarily relate to which party is in power, or who happens to be President, because our record will always be imperfect in an imperfect world. But one thing I’ve certainly found in this line of work is that it feels naturally right to Americans, because this is part of our own founding story.

It doesn’t make sense that we would want to cast off the bonds of tyranny in America, but we would be agnostic about the wishes of anyone else in the world to do that. Those things actually go together. Small-d democrats around the world want our help, our alliance, our association. As Carl said, they want to do it themselves—it’s for them, it’s not for us. But they do sometimes need help because they are operating in systems where there is no level playing field, and there is no free political competition.

But the other thing I have found, and it’s another Reagan insight, is that authoritarians also expect the Americans to stand up for our values and what we believe in. And they are often surprised when we don’t. Bad actors, from the Middle East to China to Russia, don’t expect America to be like them. They don’t think of America as just another great power. And that’s what still gives a lot of hope and inspiration to their publics.

SBG: Let’s address the elephant in the room. How can we still talk this way in the age of Donald Trump? We have a President of the United States who calls the media enemies of the people, who not only admires dictators and strongmen but even has favorite dictators, whom he calls that way and praises. How can American democracy promotion have any credibility in the future?

CG: You’re correct about the President, but the Congress has taken a very different, bipartisan approach. The work continues. Part of the legacy of Reagan is that there are institutions that continue this work despite what the particular person who’s in charge right now might be saying. My experience is that people around the world don’t say, “Well, look, you don’t have any credibility because what you’re doing is inconsistent with what we’re hearing from the White House.” Quite the contrary. They want to be reassured that there still is a strong body of support in the United States for these values. And there is, and so I think what we do has never been more needed, has never been more important, and frankly, has never been more welcomed by the people that we work with.

RF: U.S. foreign policy and its support for democracy and freedom has always been contradictory. In the 1960s, the United States touted itself in the third world as a beacon for democracy and freedom against communism. But African-Americans couldn’t vote in the South in large numbers. Not that many years ago, we condemned torture around the world while the CIA was running black sites. If you’re waiting around for internal consistency between our own practice and what we would like to see obtain at home and abroad, you’ll be waiting forever.

Just because we are an imperfect democracy, though, doesn’t mean that we would get out of the business of supporting democracies abroad or trying to perfect our democracy at home. We just have to acknowledge that contradictions are going to exist and try to deal with whatever hits to credibility occur because of it.

DT: People in Hong Kong aren’t in the streets because of America. People in Venezuela aren’t in the streets because of who is or isn’t President in America. In Algeria, in Sudan, all of these movements around the world are about these people’s aspirations in their own countries. And it’s slightly American of us to think that it always has to be all about us.

SBG: That is an important point. There’s been a fascinating rise of protest movements across the world in places like Egypt, Russia, and Hong Kong. Carl, you had a fascinating statistic that more than 10 percent of the world’s governments have had corruption-related changes of governments in the last five years. And the United States has not been leading in any of those cases, or possibly has been unconstructive.

CG: That’s true, Susan. I think there’s a tension in the world today between what Larry Diamond calls the “democratic recession”—the rise of illiberalism and populism and nationalism as well as resurgent authoritarianism and backsliding in democratic countries in central Europe and elsewhere—and the astounding and unexpected democratic resilience in the places you mentioned. And I think that relates to what Reagan was talking about, that authoritarians are inherently vulnerable because they have no political legitimacy. Democratic countries have a certain resilience because people want freedom and democracy.

So this is going to be a battle. The critical test is, first of all, can these struggles around the world re-ignite a spirit of democracy in our own country where people do get cynical and pessimistic? And, second, can we find a way to support these struggles that are taking place?

DJK: Could this time be looked back upon as a real missed opportunity? Today there’s still programmatic support for democracy promotion, but there is no Westminster speech on the horizon.

DT: I think we could probably itemize a whole set of historical cases where we wish presidents had risen to the moment. And the moment can be quite muddled and unclear. I think Obama missed a big opportunity in Iran with the Green Revolution, for instance.

But in terms of missed opportunities, it does strike me that authoritarian great powers like Russia and China are actually going on offense in exporting authoritarian values. The Russians and the Chinese are not simply trying to strengthen dictatorship in their own countries. The Kremlin and the CCP are very much about subverting, assaulting, and weakening open societies. And that takes different forms: disinformation, Belt & Road, corruption, whatever the case may be.

We in the democracies are not having a serious enough conversation about defending our own democratic institutions, particularly our electoral integrity and our free speech on social media. The bad actors are on offense and it does not feel like we are. We are unsure of ourselves, we are polarized and divided. And the authoritarian competitors are actually quite clear about their purpose, which is to disrupt and weaken the open, free, democratic world the West built.

RF: I think the missed opportunity stems from not seeing that this contest of systems is intrinsic to the broader competition, which is now widely acknowledged by the current Administration and by the foreign policy establishment. If you look at the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy, they say that China and Russia seek to make a world safe for their particular brands of autocracy, and that there’s a competition of systems going on.

I think that’s right, and I think most in the foreign policy establishment would also say that’s right. So what’s our response? Our response has not been framed in terms of democracy promotion being intrinsic to this geopolitical competition as opposed to something that we kind of do here and there when it doesn’t get in the way of our other interests—like tight relations with Egypt or the Philippines or Saudi Arabia.

CG: When Reagan spoke, he really invoked the idea of a battle of ideas, an ideological competition, a competition of systems. And I think a lot of people came to the conclusion after the Cold War that this battle had ended—in other words, that democracy was no longer being contested. Now, on the 30th anniversary of these historic events, many people are saying that it wasn’t the end of history, but it took a long time to realize that. The real question now is, does authoritarianism itself represent a coherent competitor to the democratic idea?

There is a kind of Authoritarian International; they do cooperate with each other in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other structures, like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. And then recently in Sudan, for instance, Russia went in along with the Gulf States and Egypt to try to stop the struggle for democracy. So there is a competition that’s taking place today. It doesn’t have the same coherence, it’s not as bilateral as it was during the Cold War, but it does exist, and we have to realize that. We don’t have that consensus yet.

SBG: Is the threat to American democracy more of an external threat, or one from within? We have a President, again, who appears to be hostile to many of the basic building blocks of democracy. He represents a part of our society, however large. Polarization in America is not externally imposed by the Russians, although they seek to widen our divisions.

CG: In a way, Susan, this is what’s changed. Back during the Cold War we saw the threat as entirely external, but I don’t think anyone today does. Our whole information system has changed where you have a breakdown, a kind of echo chamber effect, where people get information from just the sources that they agree with. And we’re losing civility. We’re losing an ability to understand what unites us because everything we’re looking at is what divides us. And this, I think, is inherent in a period of globalization when people feel like their identities are being threatened. People who support liberal democratic values have to come to terms with this. And we have to find a way of fighting illiberal nationalism with a kind of civic patriotism that can respond to people’s quest for identity and being part of a community without allowing demagogues to dominate that issue of identity.

RF: I might answer that a little more starkly. If you step back from the overall project of supporting democracy in the world, then of course, the protection of our own democracy from external manipulation is vital. And tending to the health of our democracy might be more vital still. This is not American democracy’s finest modern moment. The President in the name of efficacy often wants to run roughshod over democratic institutions and norms. Congress has been alternating between being quiescent and combative. I don’t think it’s the case that we have to perfect ourselves in order to support democracy abroad, but I do think it’s the case that if we’re going to support democracy abroad, we need to attend to our democracy at home.

DT: We do need to consider, too, that open societies have been buffeted by a tremendous set of forces over the last ten years. A global financial crisis that was as bad as anything that’s happened since the Great Depression; the entry of 2 billion new workers into the global economy from China, India, and the rest of the rising world; automation, which has created huge middle-class gaps in terms of productive employment; the extraordinary transformations of information technology, which are highly dislocating in a democratic society and have helped give rise to fringe voices; and finally migration.

There are more refugees in the world today than at any time since 1945. And guess where most of those people want to go? They want to get to the rich, democratic, open societies that include the United States and our European allies. All of these forces have contributed in large part to the rise of nationalism and populism, and none of them are unique to the United States.

DJK: In Reagan’s speech, he was obviously very prescient in seeing that the Soviet system was not sustainable. If you look at the landscape today around the world, which system would you say is most vulnerable?

DT: One for me is Egypt. If you were designing a formula for a country to explode, it would look like what El-Sisi is doing in Egypt—with repression worse than anything under Mubarak, with a huge demographic boom on top of very weak economic performance, on top of climate and other pressures.

I would also mention Russia. Everyone likes to imagine that Russia has always been czarist and always will be. But a recent poll I saw said that 60 percent of Russians seek “decisive change” in their country. What that means in Russia, even if they can’t always say it directly, is that they want a different kind of leadership in a different kind of system. And Putin actually is aware of this. He’s much less confident than, say, the Chinese leadership is. That doesn’t mean that everything’s going to become Jeffersonian, but I can imagine us being surprised by developments in Egypt and Russia over the next 5 to 10 years.

CG: In the municipal elections that took place in Russia two months ago, the candidates for Putin’s party ran as independents because the United Russia brand was considered so toxic. That’s indicative of what you’re talking about. I don’t think you can take the stability of the Russian system for granted.

In the case of China, you see the declining economy, the death of the ideology, corruption, CCP conflicts within the leadership as Xi Jinping concentrates power—there’s more vulnerability there. And China has entered the economic zone where countries like South Korea and others have transitioned to democracy. So I think Xi Jinping is extremely nervous.

And then of course you have the protests in Iran, you have what’s happening in Venezuela. I think authoritarian countries are more inherently vulnerable than democracies. Democracies have the capacity to self-correct. We’re going through a crisis right now, but I think people are awakening to the fact that you can’t take democracy for granted. You have to protect it.

RF: I would just add that if you look across the wider Middle East, most of the forces that gave rise to the Arab Spring are still there, and the same pre-Arab Spring formula is still largely in place, which is to say you keep a lid on discontent by trying to create as many jobs as you can. You have a very heavy-handed security state and a lack of democracy that keeps the popular will down. Egypt is a perfect example, but there are others as well. The long-term sustainability of that model has been tested once and I can’t believe it won’t be tested again.

SBG: One final thought: We still tend to be talking in Reagan’s terms about a struggle between freedom and democracy on the one hand, and autocracy and tyranny on the other. But listening to a lot of the specific examples we’ve mentioned, I wonder if it’s now more about corruption and transparency. Does the Reagan frame of freedom versus tyranny still apply today, or is it that rhyming version of corruption versus openness?

RF: I totally agree with you. And if you look at Reagan’s Westminster speech, he emphasizes the very traditional components of what we think of as democracy: free speech and periodic free elections, free trade unions, the right to assemble, and all of these other important things. But there’s a huge rule of law component that seems really absent in many of the countries where the most vigorous protests are occurring. And that is sometimes related to the ability to choose one’s own leaders, but it also reflects great frustration about the absence of rule of law, impunity, and corruption. And so in my mind, the project of support for democracy abroad has to take into account the anti-corruption aspect as much as it does the traditional components like election monitoring and polling.

CG: We live in a much different world today than when Reagan spoke. You have a much higher level of consciousness because of the spread of information and the Internet. And so, yes, you’re going to have demands that governments actually deliver for the people and don’t steal from them. All over the world, these regimes steal because that’s what a lot of them have done for centuries. Our job is to support forces at the bottom, civil society and free media and others, that can increase this pressure to hold governments accountable and to demand honesty and the rule of law.

DT: One way to think about authoritarianism today is really as a business model, right? What Putin and the Kremlin oligarchs are doing is not necessarily running a political system. They are running an extractive state for a very small oligarchic elite. And as Carl alluded to, what really agitates people all over the world irrespective of their culture, geography, or outlook is outrage at public officials stealing from the public purse. The fact that Putin is one of the richest people in the world actually gets a lot of traction when Russian opposition leaders highlight that. There’s a lot more to do here, but the way to tackle corruption as a business model is actually to improve democratic transparency and accountability.

CG: And pressure from below.

DT: Yes, and that includes civic watchdogs and investigative journalists.

DJK: How do you think about China in reference to fragility and possible change?

DT: Hong Kong is particularly interesting in this regard. Remember this is the richest part of China, with Swiss-like levels of per capita income. And prosperity is not enough for them. They want openness and accountability and political choice. People always said the Chinese have developed this new system where as long as you put money in people’s pockets and develop some broad-based prosperity, that’s enough. And there are very few Hong Kongers who actually think that’s enough. I think they are the tip of the spear for this debate inside greater China.

The post Democracy Promotion in the Age of Trump appeared first on The American Interest.

Erdoğan’s Undeserving and Underwhelming Visit to DC

Foreign leaders have long coveted invitations to Washington to meet with the President in the White House. Such encounters should be hard to come by, but President Trump has thrown open the Oval Office doors to a number of undeserving foreign officials, including Egypt’s authoritarian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and Hungary’s self-declared illiberal Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who met with Trump Wednesday, is the latest on that list. For Trump, the meeting with his Turkish counterpart was a welcome distraction from the impeachment hearings playing out on Capitol Hill. Aside from demonstrating the already well-established warm chemistry between the two leaders, however, the meeting produced no major breakthroughs on a range of contentious issues in the U.S.-Turkish relationship.

That didn’t stop Trump from gushing during a joint news conference at the White House that he is “a big fan” and “very big friend” of Erdoğan. In his typical hyperbolic fashion, Trump declared Turkey to be a “great NATO ally and a strategic partner of the United States around the world,” and described their talks as “wonderful and productive.”

The attitude on Capitol Hill toward Erdoğan’s visit has been very different. A bipartisan group in the House had urged Trump to rescind the invitation to his Turkish counterpart. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “I share my colleagues’ uneasiness at seeing President Erdoğan honored at the White House,” a stinging rebuke by McConnell’s standards. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, blasted Trump for letting Turkey “off the hook for invading Syria, causing a mass exodus of Kurds, and purchasing the S-400 missile system from Russia.”

The animosity toward Erdoğan in Congress has been building for a while. Last month, the House passed a resolution with only a handful of dissenting votes labelling the mass killings of some 1.5 million Armenians a century ago by the Ottoman Empire an act of genocide.

The House has also passed a bill threatening sanctions on Turkey for its recent brutal military incursion into northern Syria—which Erdoğan launched after Trump ordered U.S. troops out of the region. Erdoğan’s forces have killed Kurdish civilians, displaced more than 100,000 from their homes, and, according to an internal State Department assessment on the ground, engaged in “war crimes and ethnic cleansing.” With the Erdoğan visit over, McConnell, who had been blocking similar legislation in the Senate, should allow a vote to proceed.

During yesterday’s meeting with Erdoğan, Trump boasted that a ceasefire negotiated last month by Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with Erdoğan was holding. That claim was immediately disputed by Mazloum Abdi, the commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who wrote in a Twitter post that Turkish forces attacked the Syrian town of Tal Tamar, causing “massive displacement of the residents, in clear violation of the cease-fire agreement.” Syrian Kurdish forces have been America’s most reliable allies in the region in the fight against ISIS.

Erdoğan’s reliance on proxies, largely an undisciplined bunch of repurposed jihadists, is guaranteed to continue generating mayhem, human rights abuses and war crimes, and new recruits for ISIS. Equally disturbing are recent reports that the late ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had traveled to Turkey just before the U.S. operation that killed him amid speculation that he may have been trying to relocate his family to Turkey.

If true, these developments raise questions about the competency and reliability of Turkish intelligence agencies—recalling concerns about Pakistan and Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. Erdoğan’s recent announcement that Turkish forces had captured al-Baghdadi’s wife, sister, and brother-in-law only serves to deepen suspicions about what Turkish intelligence knew about al-Baghdadi and when they knew it. Erdoğan is clearly aware of this vulnerability, and it no doubt explains his announcement that several of al-Baghdadi’s relatives had been detained in Turkey. These steps were undoubtedly taken to inoculate the Turkish President against possible reproaches in the United States for the lassitude with which Turkey has dealt with ISIS over the years. Yet the fact that these arrests only took place after al-Baghdadi’s elimination by U.S. special forces only underlines the concerns about Turkey’s policy of turning a blind eye to the jihadists in its midst.

Moreover, Turkey’s increasing cooperation in Syria with Russian forces highlights growing doubts about its status as a NATO ally—Turkey has the second largest military in the Alliance—and reinforces the case for moving ahead with sanctions on Turkey for its acquisition of S-400 missiles from Rosoboronexport, a Russian entity sanctioned by the United States.

Although NATO is purportedly an alliance of democracies, Turkey is trending toward authoritarian one-man rule. Erdoğan holds the dubious distinction of jailing more journalists than any other leader in the world. More than 100,000 public servants have been swept up in a purge following the coup attempt in 2016, and Turkish security forces stand accused of torturing alleged coup supporters.

In light of all this, how could Trump possibly host Erdoğan? John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, has suggested Trump’s personal and financial interests might have played a role. In a private speech to a Morgan Stanley gathering in Miami last week, as reported by NBC News, people present said Bolton “believes there is a personal or business relationship dictating Trump’s position on Turkey because none of his advisers are aligned with him on the issue.”

This theory was reinforced by a recent report in the New York Times, which examined the connections between the two leaders’ sons-in-law—Jared Kushner, son-in-law and senior adviser to Trump, and Berat Albayrak, Erdoğan’s son-in-law and Finance Minister in Turkey. It is worth noting that the Trump Organization has a property in Istanbul.

The involvement of Trump’s personal attorney in Turkey may shed additional light on Trump’s readiness to bend over backward to accommodate Erdoğan. Rudy Giuliani represented Turkish-Iranian dual national, Reza Zarrab, who later pled guilty to running a massive scheme to evade Iran sanctions, in the process corrupting several Turkish government ministers and Erdoğan’s family, according to his courtroom testimony.

Giuliani attempted to engineer a swap of Zarrab for Pastor Andrew Brunson—a perfectly innocent Protestant Evangelical who had lived peacefully in Turkey for 20 years and whose only crime was preaching the gospel. Officials at the State and Justice Departments wisely blocked such an exchange; Brunson was eventually released last October.

Giuliani has pressed the Trump Administration to extradite controversial Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom Erdoğan accuses of orchestrating the 2016 coup attempt, despite the fact that Turkish authorities have persistently failed to provide the Justice Department with credible evidence of his involvement. Erdoğan noted at the joint press conference that he was carrying “new evidence” that he hoped would persuade U.S. authorities to finally agree to return Gülen to Turkey. This is not the first time that Turkish delegations have come carrying purported evidence that will convince the United States to render the cleric to Turkish authorities. Given the reliance of Turkish courts on documents of dubious provenance, this “new evidence” hopefully will be turned over to the Justice Department to be handled in appropriate channels. This is all the more important since Giuliani’s role in Turkey, much as in Ukraine, is testimony to the President’s tendency to de-institutionalize U.S. foreign relations and utilize family members or cronies to create dubious diplomatic back channels subject to improper influence.

Giuliani’s role also makes him an enabler of Erdoğan’s efforts to export his contempt for rule of law from Turkey to the United States. Recall past Erdoğan trips to Washington during which his bodyguards attacked American citizens peacefully protesting his visits. Amid a heavy DC police presence Wednesday, and absent the thuggishness shown in the past by Erdoğan security forces, protests against the Turkish leader’s visit remained largely peaceful.

Despite efforts by Trump and Erdoğan to paper over the deep differences on Syria, the S-400 purchase, the F-35 fighter jet, and the continued detention of U.S. Embassy and consulate local employees, no one should be taken in by this charade. Congress especially, including the five Republican Senators whom Trump invited, awkwardly, to join for part of the Erdoğan meeting (among them some who have been very critical of the Turkish leader), should not be swayed by the ongoing authoritarian bromance between the two leaders.

So what should be done? First, Congress, as a co-equal branch of government in the conduct of foreign policy, should continue to demand an immediate end to violence and attacks against the Kurds by Turkey’s proxies as well as Turkish forces in northeastern Syria.

Second, the Administration should impose carefully targeted sanctions, as mandated by law, for Erdoğan’s acquisition of Russian military capabilities, which are incompatible with NATO. These sanctions should target those involved in prohibited transactions with Russia and Erdoğan’s cronies and family who profit from them, but not the Turkish economy as a whole. Erdoğan will try to spin them as anti-Turkish, but Congress should strive to make sure that they are clearly aimed at the Erdoğan regime. Turkey remains a pivotal state and a NATO ally, and the United States must be prepared to play a long game and lay the groundwork now for relations with a post-Erdoğan Turkey.

Third, the United States should coordinate with NATO allies to make clear that, while it values Turkey’s contributions to the Alliance, Turkey does not have a free pass to engage in reckless behavior.

Finally, while Washington and European capitals should express appreciation for (and  provide additional resources to cope with) the burden Turkey has borne for taking in several million refugees from Syria, it should make clear that threatening a mass release of refugees into Europe or forcible resettlement of refugees in the so-called Syrian “safe-zone” will trigger further sanctions.

Turkey has been and should continue to be a vital member of NATO, but Erdoğan has responsibilities to live up to as well. Those include respecting human rights, not consorting with Putin, and not committing ethnic cleansing and war crimes against the Kurds. Unless and until he does these things, Erdoğan should not set foot inside the Oval Office again.

The post Erdoğan’s Undeserving and Underwhelming Visit to DC appeared first on The American Interest.

The Dangerous Blinders of Realism

By circumstance, we were compelled to advance our dominion to what it is principally as a consequence of fear, then for the sake of honor, and finally for advantage.

—The Athenians, in Thucyides’ History of the Peloponnesian War

Seventy years ago, in 1948, a German Jewish emigre named Hans J. Morgenthau, recently arrived at the University of Chicago, published a weighty tome, entitled Politics Among Nations, that took the American academy by storm. In the first twenty years after its initial appearance, it went through four editions and was reprinted twenty-one times; and, though not revised since 1985, it remains in print and is still employed. For many years, it was the standard textbook for political science courses in international relations. To this day, it defines the field.

It is not difficult to see why Morgenthau’s magnum opus was so popular and had so great an impact. It is crisply written and provocative; it is replete with astute observations; and, when it first appeared, it must have seemed to Americans like a breath of fresh air. The United States had always been party to power politics, and, in the Americas in particular, it had never been averse to throwing its weight around. But prior to 1917, very few Americans, apart from the handful who determined the country’s foreign policy, had paid much attention to the rivalry between nations. What George Washington once termed America’s “distant and detached situation” had left the country’s citizens comparatively free from such concerns and inclined to suppose that they were, as Americans, above dirty business of that sort. In keeping with the naiveté that this attitude fostered, Americans were told upon the country’s entrance into the First World War that the struggle they were about to engage in was a moral crusade—“a war to end all wars.” When this slogan turned out to be a snare and a delusion, the citizens of the United States rallied in bitter disappointment behind those who insisted that they could and should return to the “distant and detached situation” they had abandoned in 1917.

Pearl Harbor put an end to the presumption that their North American redoubt still constituted a sheltered retreat, and the eruption of the Cold War shortly before the publication of Morgenthau’s book suggested that Americans might have to resign themselves to the crude power politics of the Old World. If students, graduate students, diplomats, and statesmen turned with relish to Morgenthau for guidance, it was because he promised to tell them the unvarnished truth about the world that they had been forced to enter.

Morgenthau was himself a product of the German Kaiserreich, and the doctrine of “realism” that he articulated in Politics Among Nations owed a great deal to the species of Realpolitik practiced with great aplomb by the architect of that polity, Otto von Bismarck. Morgenthau rightly regarded the turn to isolationism that took place in the United States in the wake of the First World War as an unmitigated disaster, and he wrote his book with an eye to schooling his new compatriots in the responsibility that had devolved on their country when it emerged as a great power. To this end, he sought to provide them with a framework within which to locate unfolding events. Above all, he sought to dispel the illusions that underpinned the moralism that, he thought, threatened to hobble American statesmanship. As he put it,

The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power. This concept provides the link between reason trying to understand international politics and the facts to be understood. It sets politics as an autonomous sphere of action and understanding apart from other spheres, such as economics (understood in terms of interest defined as wealth), ethics, aesthetics, or religion. Without such a concept a theory of politics, international or domestic, would be altogether impossible, for without it we could not distinguish between political and nonpolitical facts, nor could we bring at least a measure of systematic order to the political sphere.

We assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power, and the evidence of history bears that assumption out. That assumption allows us to retrace and anticipate, as it were, the steps a statesman—past, present, or future—has taken or will take on the political scene. We look over his shoulder when he writes his dispatches; we listen in on his conversation with other statesmen; we read and anticipate his very thoughts. Thinking in terms of interest defined as power, we think as he does, and as disinterested observers we understand his thoughts and actions perhaps better than he, the actor on the political scene, does himself.

The concept of interest defined as power imposes intellectual discipline upon the observer, infuses rational order into the subject matter of politics, and thus makes the theoretical understanding of politics possible. On the side of the actor, it provides for rational discipline in action and creates that astounding continuity in foreign policy which makes American, British, or Russian foreign policy appear as an intelligible, rational continuum, by and large consistent within itself, regardless of the different motives, preferences, and intellectual and moral qualities of successive statesmen.

Above all, Morgenthau hoped that his “realist theory of international politics” would “guard against two popular fallacies: the concern with motives and the concern with ideological preferences.” He readily acknowledged that “the contingent elements of personality, prejudice, and subjective preference, and of all the weaknesses of intellect and will which flesh is heir to, are bound to deflect foreign policies from their rational course.” Indeed, he thought it especially likely that “where foreign policy is conducted under the conditions of democratic control . . . the need to marshal popular emotions” in support of a program would “impair the rationality” of the policy pursued. He merely insisted that “a theory of foreign policy which aims at rationality must . . . abstract from these irrational elements and seek to paint a picture of foreign policy which presents the rational essence to be found in experience, without the contingent deviations from rationality which are also found in experience.”

As these remarks suggest, the “realism” recommended by Hans Morgenthau and his followers (including the so-called neo-realists and structural realists) is not what it pretends to be. It is not, in fact, meant as an accurate and dispassionate description of the world as it is, and it will not allow “us to retrace and anticipate, as it were, the steps a statesman—past, present, or future—has taken or will take on the political scene,” for it is subtly prescriptive, not descriptive, and it weeds out everything that is, in Morgenthau’s estimation, irrational.

In short, “realism” not only possesses what he calls “a normative element.” It is normative at its very core. The “rational theory” Morgenthau espouses is, as he proudly asserts, less like “a photograph” than “a painted portrait.”

The photograph shows everything that can be seen by the naked eye; the painted portrait does not show everything that can be seen by the naked eye, but it shows, or at least seeks to show, one thing that the naked eye cannot see: the human essence of the person portrayed.

There is, Morgenthau claims, a point to the exercise: “Political realism considers a rational foreign policy to be good foreign policy; for only a rational foreign policy minimizes risks and maximizes benefits and, hence, complies both with the moral precept of prudence and the political requirement of success.” Realism’s aim is to make “the photographic picture of the political world” conform “as much as possible” to “its painted portrait.” In other words, what presents itself as “realism” is unreal; it is a strange new form of idealism very thinly disguised.

There are many reasons to look kindly upon Morgenthau’s project. When he claims that “the lighthearted equation between a particular nationalism and the counsels of Providence is morally indefensible” and “politically pernicious,” he is surely right. All human beings, and not just “politicians,” display what he calls “an ineradicable tendency to deceive themselves about what they are doing” by justifying their actions in terms of “ethical and legal principles.” Furthermore, at one point Morgenthau asserts that “political realism does not require, nor does it condone, indifference to political ideals and moral principles, but it requires indeed a sharp distinction between the desirable and the possible—between what is desirable everywhere and at all times and what is possible under the concrete circumstances of time and place.” Indeed, if this were the essence of his position—that prudence must govern, restrain, and moderate the pursuit of political ideals and moral principles with an eye to the limits imposed by concrete circumstance on the statesman’s ability to work his will—it would be utterly unobjectionable and wholly admirable. But nowhere does Morgenthau show how “realism” can accommodate political ideals and moral principles. Instead, he treats them as matters which the realist, in his pursuit of “interest defined as power,” must assiduously ignore.

There is a kind of logic to Morgenthau’s posture. As Thomas Hobbes intimated in Leviathan long ago, jettisoning moral and religious concerns and focusing narrowly on material interest can produce in naturally quarrelsome beings a certain salutary sobriety. Among other things, Morgenthau observes, it enables us to step back and “judge other nations as we judge our own,” and thereby it renders us “capable of pursuing policies that respect the interests of other nations, while protecting and promoting those of our own.” At least some of the time, it really is true that “moderation in policy cannot fail to reflect” what Morgenthau terms “the moderation of moral judgment.”

Unfortunately, however, Morgenthau never shows us how moral judgment can be moderated without being entirely excluded from politics; and, as Thucydides’ description of the Athenian trajectory in the course of the Peloponnesian War is intended to teach us, the habit of relying solely on a cold calculation of interests, to which the Athenians aspired, and the systematic treatment of international relations as a sphere within which moral judgment can be simply set aside tend over time to erode and even destroy decency and moral restraint in a people’s conduct at home as well as abroad.

That is one defect attendant on the embrace of Realpolitik. There is another which is no less serious. The “portrait” of statesmanship “painted” by “realism” is supposed to enable us to see “the rational essence to be found in experience.” To this end, it abstracts from what Morgenthau acknowledges are “the ultimate goals of political action,” which is to say “those ultimate objectives for the realization of which political power is sought,” and these it is wont to dismiss with disdain as “the pretexts and false fronts behind which the element of power, inherent in all politics, is concealed.” As should be readily apparent, it is through this leap of logic that realism systematically distorts political reality. 

Morgenthau concedes that “a government whose foreign policy appeals to the intellectual convictions and moral valuations of its own people has gained an incalculable advantage over an opponent who has not succeeded in choosing goals that have such appeal or in making the chosen goals appear to have it.” He fails, however, to reflect on the implications of his insight. In his eagerness to weed out what he takes to be “irrational,” he deprives himself and the practitioners of “realism” of the capacity to see what is really happening and what is likely to follow.

Long ago, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu—whom Morgenthau is wont to quote with approbation—observed that “all states have the same object in general, which is to maintain themselves.” But he insisted as well that “each state has an object that is particular to it.”

Aggrandizement was the object of Rome; war, that of Lacedaemon; religion, that of the Jewish laws; commerce, that of Marseilles; public tranquillity, that of the laws of China; the carrying trade, that of the laws of the Rhodians; natural liberty was the object of public administration among the savages; in general, the delights of the prince was its object in despotic states; his glory and that of the state, its object in monarchies; the independence of each individual is the object of the laws of Poland, and what results from this is the oppression of all. There is also one nation in the world which has for the direct object of its constitution political liberty.

It is, I would submit, only if we pay close attention not just to the one objective the various polities have in common but also to the diverse objectives that distinguish them that we can have any hope of understanding why they conduct themselves in the manner they do and any chance at all of predicting what any one of them is likely to do next.

This point can be made in other terms. In politics, what Morgenthau calls “the ultimate goals” are not epiphenomenal. Indeed, they are the primary phenomena from which everything else follows. If all polities are similar and all pursue “interest defined as power,” it is because they are all dedicated to maintaining themselves, and they all recognize power as a means for pursuing this particular goal. But there is also an element of diversity in the mix, and it cannot be ignored if one wants to understand what is really going on. Cleomenes, Leonidas, and Pausanias the Regent at Sparta; Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristeides, and Xanthippus of Athens; Darius and Xerxes of Persia; the Cardinal de Richelieu and Louis XIV; the first duke of Marlborough; George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams; Napoleon Bonaparte; the elder William Pitt; Otto von Bismarck; the Count of Cavour; Woodrow Wilson; Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin; Winston Churchill; Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and Charles de Gaulle; and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were all statesmen. None of them was indifferent to power; but their aims—and what they were likely to do in given circumstances—were by no means the same. If we wish to retrace or anticipate their steps, to look over their shoulders as they write their dispatches, to listen in on their conversations, to read and anticipate their very thoughts, we will have to attend not only to their focus on “interest defined as power” but also to the concerns that Morgenthau dismisses as “irrational”—and not the least of the latter are regime imperatives of the sort singled out by Montesquieu. 

Thucydides, whom Morgenthau and his successors are also wont to cite as an authority, has his Athenians trace their acquisition of dominion in the Aegean to fear, first and foremost, but also to honor and to advantage. When forecasting how another polity is apt to act, no statesman should, as the realists recommend, leave out of his calculus considerations of honor and advantage—for, in deciding what is to be done, neither he nor any other statesman will, in fact, ignore the dictates of honor and advantage, as they are understood within the regime each heads.

As I have attempted to show in a recent volume, it was in part with honor and advantage in mind that Darius sent an armada to Marathon. It was even more emphatically with honor and advantage in mind that Xerxes invaded Greece, and it was first and foremost with honor and advantage in mind that the Spartans, the Athenians, and their allies obstinately defended their liberty. Had these Hellenes soberly calculated their interests in the restricted fashion recommended by Morgenthau, they would have joined the Macedonians, the Thessalians, the Thebans, and the Argives in going over to the Mede. If there is an “astounding continuity” which makes the foreign policy of each of these three powers “appear as an intelligible, rational continuum, by and large consistent within itself, regardless of the different motives, preferences, and intellectual and moral qualities of successive statesmen,” it is not, as self-styled realists suppose, because each of these polities was obsessively intent on maximizing power. It is, instead, because each was governed not only by a concern with its own security but also by a limited set of regime imperatives particular to the form of government and way of life it embraced and cherished.

In what is perhaps the most important passage in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, his Corinthians try to bring this point home to the Spartans, who are inclined to think their strategic rival like themselves. “The Athenians are,” they warn their longtime ally,

innovators, keen in forming plans, and quick to accomplish in deed what they have contrived in thought. You Spartans are intent on saving what you now possess; you are always indecisive, and you leave even what is needed undone. They are daring beyond their strength, they are risk-takers against all judgment, and in the midst of terrors they remain of good hope—while you accomplish less than is in your power, mistrust your judgment in matters most firm, and think not how to release yourselves from the terrors you face. In addition, they are unhesitant where you are inclined to delay, and they are always out and about in the larger world while you stay at home. 

No analyst of the international arena can afford to ignore the diversity of regimes and the variety of imperatives and propensities to which that diversity gives rise.

Wearing blinders of the sort designed by the so-called Realists can, in fact, be quite dangerous. If policy makers were to operate in this fashion in analyzing politics among nations in their own time, they would all too often lack foresight—both with regard to the course likely to be taken by the country they serve and with regard to the paths likely to be followed by its rivals and allies. In contemplating foreign affairs and in thinking about diplomacy, intelligence, military strength, and its economic foundations, one must always acknowledge the primacy of domestic policy. This is the deeper meaning of Clausewitz’ famous assertion that “war is the continuation of policy by other means.”

It was with Clausewitz’ dictum and this complex of concerns in mind that Julian Stafford Corbett first revived the term “grand strategy,” reconfigured it, and deployed it both in the lectures he delivered at the Royal Naval War College between 1904 and 1906 and in the so-called Green Pamphlet that he prepared as a handout for his students. And it was from this broad perspective that J. F. C. Fuller wrote when he introduced the concept to the general public in 1923. As he put it,

The first duty of the grand strategist is . . . to appreciate the commercial and financial position of his country; to discover what its resources and liabilities are. Secondly, he must understand the moral characteristics of his countrymen, their history, peculiarities, social customs and system of government, for all these quantities and qualities form the pillars of the military arch which it is his duty to construct.

To this end he added, the grand strategist must be “a student of the permanent characteristics and slowly changing institutions of the nation to which he belongs, and which he is called upon to secure against war and defeat. He must, in fact, be a learned historian and a far-seeing philosopher, as well as a skillful strategist and tactician.” Indeed, he observes, “from the grand strategical point of view, it is just as important to realize the quality of the moral power of a nation, as the quantity of its man-power.” With this in mind, the grand strategist must concern himself with establishing throughout his own nation and its fighting services “a common thought—the will to win”—and he must at the same time ponder how to deprive his country’s rivals of that same will.

As recent studies of the Roman, Byzantine, and Hapsburg empires and my own work on Achaemenid Persia and on ancient Athens and Sparta strongly suggest, every political community of substance that manages to survive for an extended time is forced by the challenges it faces to work out—usually, by a process of trial and error—a grand strategy of sorts and to develop a strategic culture and an operational code compatible with that strategy. The study of history, of the particular conditions and challenges that inspire the strategic cultures of different peoples, and of the role played within the inter-communal order in times past by the imperatives attendant on the diversity of political regimes—this is the proper school of statesmanship. 

Social science theories that abstract from the circumstances in which peoples find themselves, deny the central importance of regime difference, and treat all polities as equivalent may be instructive. But, if thought dispositive, they are apt to lead statesmen astray. 

The post The Dangerous Blinders of Realism appeared first on The American Interest.

Laughter As Medicine

As we survey open societies across the world since the heady days of 1989-91, we cannot help but observe—as Freedom House annually documents—not an increase but rather a steady decline in the number of democracies in the world. Once open societies across the democratic world—some so-called new, others old established ones— are one by one turning toward what they themselves proudly proclaim as “illiberal democracy,” characterized by restrictions of freedom, by corruption, arbitrariness, and sometimes even by fear and repressions of the sort we in the formerly communist East strived so hard to leave behind us.

The various putative causes for this have been weighed and discussed enough. But to little avail: “Globalism,” “the revolt of ones left behind,” the “failure of the elites,”—I find many of these etiologies lacking, especially when those reasons are raised in discussions of what ails Eastern Europe. The framing of the argument ignores real data. It takes but a look at the Gini coefficient in these countries—the measure of income inequality—to see this is nonsense. Income inequality across the whole of the EU has been stable, and in some cases declining. Across the board it is much lower than it is in, say, the United States, where it has been high and rising, especially under the current populist administration. And there is no absence of populists in the countries with one of the lowest income differential coefficients, Hungary.

What we do see across countries regardless of the actual inequality is the exploitation of emotions against the “other”—be they foreigners and immigrants, or the domestic other, what populists call “the elite.” Be it the United States, the UK, or Hungary, where populists are in power, or among significant opposition parties such as Italy’s Lega, Germany’s AfD, the Swedish Democrats and France’s National Front (now renamed Rassemblement National), paranoid opposition to an enemy has become a major trend among democracies.

In some cases such as Hungary or here in Estonia, two of the most racially homogeneous countries in Europe, the foreign “others” are imagined; politicians rage against them, yet they are not present in any noticeable number. However, as a result, the few foreigners who are in these countries are subject to harassment, sanctioned by hateful rhetoric.

The “Elite” and Ressentiment

More interesting to me, since it is present in all populist countries, is hatred of the so-called elite, one’s own compatriots, people who share the culture and look like us.

There are two components to this—one proposed, the other described—by German thinkers.

The first comes from Carl Schmitt, a legal scholar and generally considered the smartest Nazi, who proposed an alternative definition of politics to liberal democracies. Whereas politics in democracies is thought to strive for compromise and common solutions, Schmitt, in his The Concept of the Political, argued that the goal of politics is the destruction of the other, where political opponents are the enemy to be liquidated. One of the politicians in power today in Estonia has called for precisely this: the annihilation of the largest political party, currently in opposition due to the current Prime Minister ignoring the norms of democratic electoral procedure.

The other concept we see working overtime in the current populist revolt is a moral calculus described first by Friedrich Nietzsche, what he disapprovingly called a slave morality above all based on resentment. In his Genealogy of Morals, he calls this emotion ressentiment, using a French word, claiming that the notion was absent in the German language. Ressentiment is a hateful desire for revenge, which Nietzsche says is the basis of the “slave revolt” that in his estimation forms the basis of Christianity. Leaving Christianity aside for the purposes of our current discussion, Nietzsche says that the slave, a member of a repressed underclass, defines himself as “good” and the elite as “evil”. (By contrast, the elite—in Nietzsche’s terms, the aristocracy—also defines its own actions as “good” but the actions of others simply as “not good,” or “bad,” without any moral implications.)

In the populisms of today’s liberal democratic order we see these two operate in tandem. Populists appealing to ressentiment proclaim to speak for the common man against an imagined elite that must be destroyed.

Some elites can reasonably elicit ressentiment. The clannish aristocracies that dominated Europe for centuries are one such elite. Another is the product of ethnic or racial hierarchies, such as the ones enshrined in law in Jim Crow America. But a second kind of unmeritocratic elite also exists. It is the result of collaborationism-based stratification, where a party-based nomenklatura enjoys extra privileges from joining an authoritarian, undemocratic regime. The more loyal you appear to the CPSU, the NSDAP, Fidesz, or the coterie in Donald Trump’s MAGA camarilla, the greater the odds to get ahead, to get that government, contract, that ambassadorial or ministerial appointment.

Meritocracy has its flaws—big ones. All too often the beneficiaries of meritocracy lack a sense of the noblesse oblige that kept social peace in times of aristocracy—a sense of obligation to help others that once was also present in the United States when robber barons such as Andrew Carnegie spent lavishly on the public good. Nonetheless, we can agree that generally, meritocracy has led to better outcomes than hereditary aristocracy or corrupt collaborationism. Better outcomes, because in meritocracies stupidity or incompetence is neither rewarded nor given a pass, as it was in aristocracies and routinely is in party-loyalty based arrangements of authoritarian states. In a meritocracy, the ones at the top are constantly plagued by the rival competence of others. In meritocracies, competition is eternal and essential.

It is this feature of illiberalism—the hatred of the elite—that gives me the greatest hope for its temporariness.

Populists simplify and reduce the complexity of societies to simple problems supposedly created by elites, and assume that these societies are so secure that no disaster can actually befall them no matter who is in charge. We can see the results of what can happen when incompetent populists and their cronies take over by studying the fallout of the Trump Administration’s approach to Ukraine. The same is true of any issue were competence and experience previously was a sine qua non. Anyone who has really dealt with avoiding disaster—be it military planning, cyber-attacks, or financial disaster—knows what a difficult and constant state this is.

Yet the populists do not understand this. Indeed, the attitude of populists is that elites have no qualifications and thus there are no consequences from replacing them with a crony. The failure of the incompetent politics of ressentiment is its most outstanding and common feature.

A Strategy, Not Just For Coping

All of this is so well studied and documented that in social psychology, it even has a name: the Dunning-Kruger Effect—the tendency of meager intellects to overestimate their knowledge and intelligence. This phenomenon was first discussed in a paper in 2011 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger. The study focused on subjects’ ability to gauge their own performance relative to others, an ability Dunning and Kruger termed metacognition. The incompetent, they went on to argue, suffer a double curse: people whose performance is subpar are not only less skilled, but they are unaware they are less skilled. They are simply unaware of their incompetence, in both the task at hand as well as their competence relative to others.

I would go so far as to say that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is the core functioning metaphor for the populism we are inundated with today. People who fail to recognize their incompetence make incompetent decisions on issues that require a highly developed set of skills. And when they fail, they place the blame on others. This is a dangerous, and potentially self-perpetuating mechanism. Unchallenged, the failure can constantly be foisted on the menacing “other”, foreign or domestic, lurking in the shadows, thwarting the populist at every turn.

Which is why we need to adopt at least a strategy, a response not just for coping, but for overcoming and ultimately restoring decency and civilized discourse: Laughter.

All this incompetence is all so laughable. Yet, we don’t laugh. Instead we are appalled, as we believe in decency and the progress made by the accumulation of knowledge and our hard-learned respect for humanity. We share outrageous tweets, we despair, we shake our heads and hope it will soon be over. What we fail recognize is that it is all laughable. It is ridiculous—they are ludicrous. Alas, we cling to the idea that mockery is outside the realm of the acceptable. We—but not they!—find it uncivilized to laugh and mock. It’s just not done in our societies. For we do not want to become like them. Yet I fear we are well past Marcus Aurelius’ dictum, that the best revenge is not to become like them. 

What the pompous and preposterously self-important, stentorian little minds in power cannot stand—what exposes their weakness, their nakedness—is ridicule. We know this from Hans Christian Anderson’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes, a tale of the ridiculousness of a stupid ruler, kept in power only by the willingness of his subjects to go along with what everyone realizes is utter nonsense.

There is no need to go along with it. None. In real life and not from a fairy tale, we have the perfect example of the power of ridicule in the downfall of Nicolai Ceaucescu, the Romanian communist despot with one of the most effective repressive apparatuses in the 20th Century.

What happened when Ceaucescu, faced with increased unrest in 1989 following the liberation of Germany, Czechoslovakia, and other authoritarian European countries, faced a crowd before him and began one of his risible speeches promising assembled Romanian miners a pitiful raise? Someone in the crowd laughed at his promises. Soon others joined in. The crowd laughed at the dictator, and kept on laughing. It was new. He did not know how to respond. He grew distraught, and continuing with his communist jargon, appealed to the crowd, “Comrades, comrades, calm down!” But the miners were not his comrades, and he was simply a privileged fool with the trappings of power and a title. Ultimately he fled, whisked out of Bucharest in a helicopter. Now, while our current populist leaders in Europe hardly deserve Ceaucescu’s ultimate fate, I do believe public laughter and ridicule is our best response, our antidote to the preposterous antics on display every day.

If you have doubts, I would direct you to a video of the green-shirt guy, a clip showing a man unable to contain his laughter when two people wearing their MAGA hats disrupted a meeting in Arizona to discuss immigration. “The green shirt guy” is now a meme. Why did the video go viral? Because, as with the case of the unclothed emperor and Nicolai Ceaucescu, it was laughter that broke the spell. The spell of horror, of “My God, what did they say now?”, of the sheer din by which our populists dominate our public square these days. It is important to note that the laughter of the Green Shirt Man is not even heard above the brutish yelling of the MAGA hat wearer. But it is the populist foot soldier whom no one remembers. The content of her disruptive yelling is quickly forgotten. Meanwhile the Green-shirt man speaks—or laughs—for the rest of us.

So I say laugh. Laugh at their press conferences, laugh at their statements. Laugh publicly. Laugh when you see them. We all know how silly their statements are, how laughable their pronouncements can be.

A Dishonor to Our Heritage

The dream, ever since the stirring of national consciousness here in Estonia some 200 hundred years ago, when we here on this small patch of land began to understand that we too were humans and no less capable than our overlords, that the natural order of things did not mean we were a natural underclass, that our language too was a real language—that dream has been equality and freedom. 

It is the struggle to achieve liberty and equality that is the dominant motif of our history for the past two centuries. From the Alexander School, asking that we be educated in our own language, to the freedom marches in 1917 in Petersburg. From the War of Independence and the establishment of statehood. Through the darkness of one occupation after another and yet another. Through mass deportations, mass flight to the West, through the summary executions, through the false hope of the 1960s Soviet “thaw.” Through the reawakening in the 1980s, the singing, the hard first years when we learned the lessons of real independence, through the struggles to rejoin Europe, the West, the European Union and NATO, it was freedom we wanted, liberté, and equality, egalité—to be taken as free and equal by those who had fared better than we, but otherwise were not better than us.

We need to be reminded, especially today, when so many have forgotten where we were and how far we have come, of how sacred freedom and democracy are. We especially need to be reminded by those who know from living memory what its absence means. We need to collectively recall, to remember. Especially these days, when we see among us, and at the highest levels of power, a forgetting, an amnesia, of what our nation has aspired to for two centuries.

We want our speech to be free: after all, we have known it for too few periods in our history. We want to be able to love whom we love, we want to believe what, and in what, our consciences have brought us to. We must reject the incompetents that have ridden to power through hatred and ressentiment, and who sincerely believe, as Carl Schmitt advocated, that the goal of politics is to destroy the opposition.

The imprint of our achievements in history, fleeting though it may seem in time, is too strong to erase with the boorish belching and insults that today passes for political speech in too many Western countries. We have worked too hard, we have sacrificed for too many years, sweated too long, for too many generations to allow this to happen to the efforts of all those who preceded us. The dream of our forefathers, in the fields of the baronial manors, in the Gulag, on the Song Festival grounds—their dreams are our dreams, and we won’t let them be trampled upon.

We must never stop laughing at those who dishonor our heritage.

The post Laughter As Medicine appeared first on The American Interest.

Three Reichs and You’re Out

“We do not want a reunited Germany,” Britain’s prime minister Margaret Thatcher told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev just two months before the Wall fell. Afterwards, she reportedly snapped: “We beat the Germans twice, and now they are back.” Nor was she alone. The ghost of a resurgent Germany also tortured French president Francois Mitterrand and Italy’s premier Giulio Andreotti, who quipped: “I love Germany so much that I preferred two of them.” Actually, the author of that line was Francois Mauriac, the French novelist and Nobel laureate, who died in 1970.

The point of this excursion into the past is that memories die hard. In the 20th century, the Kaiser’s Second and Hitler’s Third Reich had tried to grab supremacy over Europe, with Der Fuhrer making it all the way to the gates of Moscow and Cairo. A world war and 80 million dead later, Germany was crushed. The country was dismembered, divided and safely chained—the West in the American, the East in the Soviet bloc. But suddenly, the Cold War order collapsed along with the Berlin Wall. Once reunified, Germany would shed its fetters and again reach for domination. No wonder that its neighbors feared for the worst. With Europe’s largest population and economy, Germany might soon be on the march again.

Yet the “Fourth Reich,” a favorite shibboleth of the time, did not materialize. Why not, as so many imagined in the angst-ridden months between the fall of the Wall and reunification on October 3, 1990?

“Three Reichs and you are out,” is the entertaining answer. The serious explanation goes like this: For the first time in German history, the strategic setting was just right. The First Reich—the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” undone by Napoleon in 1806—was too weak to hold off its covetous neighbors. For centuries, Mittleleuropa served as central battleground for the Continent’s major wars. The Second and Third Reich—the Wilhelmine Empire and the Nazi scourge—were too strong for Europe, but never strong enough to turn conquest into lasting gain. 

After total defeat in World War II, the torturous “German Question” was no more. Germany was now safely embedded in the Pax Americana. Fully integrated in NATO, its military could not threaten anybody. Nor could others threaten the Federal Republic, a protégé of the United States. After reunification, they had no good reason to go after the new giant in their midst. For in 1990, national unity was not forged in an expansionist war, as waged by Bismarck against France in 1870-71, but with the consent of the powers great and small. Even better, the Soviet Union committed suicide on Christmas Day 1991; soon its former satrapies joined the American-led Alliance. It was a miraculous turn. For the first time in history, Germany was encircled only by friends. No threat, no temptation.

Next, look at the benign nexus between safety and liberal democracy. Wrapped in a security blanket Made in U.S.A., West Germany’s nascent democracy could sink sturdy roots into a previously hostile soil. A country surrounded by enemies, as the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic had been, is a god-send for demagogues and chauvinists. Strongmen flourish when they can manipulate national humiliation and the specter of the enemy next door. Facing Britain, France, and Russia helped Kaiser Bill to mobilize the country for war and to suppress democracy in the runup to 1914. “Making Germany great again,” to coin a phrase, propelled the Nazis into power in the aftermath of World War I. The business model of “Deutschland über alles” is bound to fail when security is assured. 

In the post-1945 setting, democracy and the liberal state could flourish, and extremist parties, left or right, fell by the wayside one by one. By some measures, present-day Germany may be a more liberal construction than are France or Britain. Individual rights keep trumping the power of the state, and the Bundestag (parliament) has grown into a mighty bulwark against the executive, as has the Constitutional Court. The Berlin Republic has remained a bastion of pacificity. In 2014, an international poll conducted by the BBC anointed Germany as the globe’s “most liked” country. By then, Margaret Thatcher was dead physically as well as figuratively.

So, what’s the problem? 

It is a “cultural revolution.” Courtesy of the American security umbrella, Germany “studied war no more,” as Nat King Cole and Pete Seeger sang by cribbing from Isaiah. Sneakers replaced hobnailed boots. Pacifism became Germany’s reigning secular religion. The army of united Germany shrank from 680,000 to 180,000, its panzer force from 2,500 to 250. Defense outlays have dwindled to 1.2 percent of GDP today, down from around 3 in the Cold War. Clausewitz doesn’t live here anymore, the Prussian theoretician of war who famously preached that force must be an integral adjunct of diplomacy. If Germany does act, it is only gingerly and behind allied forces, preferably with a UN mandate. Parliamentary permission is a must, as is its renewal year after year. 

Overreach, which once brought untold misery to Europe, has turned into underreach, which does not nourish stability in troubling times. In the west, Donald Trump inflicts trade war on Europe while blackmailing his NATO partners: Pay up, or we pull out. In the east, Vladimir Putin is on an expansionist roll, pressuring the Baltics and Poland and lording it over the Levant. Iran is back in the nuclear weapons business while threatening shipping in the Gulf. Yet mighty Germany, the world’s second-largest exporter, is loath to dispatch a flotilla to safeguard the freedom of the seas. It remains what it has been while up to 300,000 U.S. troops stood guard on this side of the Iron Curtain. Berlin is a net consumer of security, not a producer. “Let George do it,” runs the unspoken message

A shell-shocked nation burned in two world wars and weaned on security at a steep discount will not soon step up to necessity. Why get into harm’s way and risk the domestic tranquility of a nation that has profited so handsomely from abstinence? 

Which brings us full circle. This time, the problem is not German imperialism, but the reluctance to shoulder responsibility in line with the country’s ample size and riches. What an irony! Thirty years ago, Germany’s allies feared the “Fourth Reich. Today, in the age of Trump, Putin and Xi, they worry not about excessive, but deficient German clout. If they were movie buffs, they would recite Uncle Ben’s last words to Spider-Man: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

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