Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 25

Without the US, European Defense Will Fall to Pieces

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, there has been a rising chorus among Europe’s politicos that the Continent can no longer rely on the United States for its defense. This narrative had already begun to coalesce during the campaign, when European media interpreted then-candidate Trump’s calls for NATO countries to share more defense costs as the beginning of the end for America’s traditional role as security provider and defender of human rights. Some European commentators even questioned whether, in the event of Trump’s election, the United States might simply walk away from NATO altogether. Others sought to reassure themselves and their increasingly unsettled publics that, while President Trump might indeed be unpredictable, his cabinet would be staffed with consummate professionals who understood the “bigger picture.” So it came as perhaps a bit of a shock when U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, on his first official visit to Europe in February 2017, delivered a stern warning to the other 27 NATO members at a closed meeting in Brussels, telling them that the Allies must either meet their financial pledges on defense or America would “moderate” its commitment to the  organization. Since then, the accusations of “Trumpian transactionalism” on defense have only gathered in speed, alongside renewed talk of a “European army,” “European defense,” and finally “strategic autonomy”—the latter presumably implying progressive independence from the United States on security issues.

Action followed words. In December 2017, the European Union launched the so-called Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), with 25 EU members promising to participate in a plan to develop and invest in shared military capability projects. Augmented by the Coordinated Annual Review on Defense (CARD) and the European Defense Fund (EDF), PESCO was intended to focus on specific projects reportedly to avoid duplication and to enhance their effectiveness. However, critics in the United States charged that PESCO would at best have a marginal impact on European military capabilities, lead to duplication and non-interoperable systems within NATO, and was in reality intended to lock out U.S. defense companies from bidding for European contracts. Washington also conveyed the Trump Administration’s concerns that rules for the EDF would prevent companies based outside the European Union, including U.S. defense contractors, from participating in the projects. In short, though PESCO and the EDF were initially met by the Trump Administration with cautious optimism and seen as potentially positive steps to enhance European defense capabilities, both initiatives soon became synonymous with protectionism and a diversion of Europe’s scarce defense resources in a direction that risked creating competition between the EU and NATO.

There was more to come. In November 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron called for the creation of a “true European army,” an initiative subsequently endorsed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who called for a European army to complement NATO. Soon, and perhaps rather predictably, the idea became muddled by the semantics of the choice between calling it a “European army” or an “army of Europeans;” a year later the conversation had devolved into yet another European debate on “cooperative security” that failed to acknowledge the persistent lack of political will necessary to make the dream a reality. In fact, three years into the “we need to become independent on defense” debate in Europe, there is a real danger that a “common European army” of the sort advocated by some in Europe will do little more than further polarize the EU. Indeed, the assumption that there would be such a thing as “European” (as opposed to national) officers and soldiers is as dubious today as the previous attempts to create similar forces, from the Western European Union (WEU) through the Eurocorps and the Franco-German brigade.

The European media and policy elite’s continuing efforts to call into question America’s commitment to Transatlantic defense carries with it a serious risk—one that goes beyond intra-European relations. The anti-Trump sentiment pervasive among European policy elites has increasingly aligned with anti-American strains of European public opinion, to the detriment of the larger relationship. For instance, according to a February 2019 Pew study, between 2013 and 2018, 30 percent more Germans stated that they viewed U.S. influence as a major threat to their country, with increases of 29 percent in France, 25 percent in Spain, 15 percent in the UK, and 12 percent in Italy. Among NATO countries only Poland saw a 5 percent decline. There is a danger that the current round of posturing on European defense will feed into the perception that, while allies refuse to meet their pledges on defense spending (NATO’s 2019 annual report showed that only seven of the 29 allies met the 2 percent target), they nonetheless have the resources to pursue their national defense industrial priorities. The damage to already-strained U.S. relations with key allies in Europe, especially Germany, may become enduring, bolstering the growing chorus in Washington that what Europeans want is to continue to free-ride on defense.

The larger problem is that the impasse in the current debate about “European defense” is playing out against the backdrop of a rapidly deteriorating security environment around Europe (and increasingly also within), while the push for an autonomous European army seems increasingly to be the result of ad hoc politics rather than a sound defense calculus. Amidst the various acronyms and semantic exercises of the past three years, what is missing in Europe today is a keen grasp of history as well as strategic foresight. First, politicians seem to have all but forgotten that the European project was possible to begin with precisely because the United States, through the NATO alliance, provided the overarching security umbrella for the Continent, defusing postwar resentments and assisting in Europe’s reconstruction. It bears remembering that, without America’s commitment to Europe, the Franco-German “grand reconciliation” would have taken much longer to attain, if it were to be achieved at all. And so today, as during the Cold War, it makes sense for European states to speak of “Europe” when it comes to trade and economic policy integration. However, Europe’s security has since 1945 been a direct function of its having been embedded into the Transatlantic system, and this fundamental reality still remains true today. Simply put, there is a great deal of difference between the notion of a protected “common market” linking the economies of likeminded democratic governments, and that of Europe acting as a unitary actor on security and defense.

And yet, if a number of governments in Europe believes—as seems increasingly to be the case—that they can establish a “European” defense structure and a “European security architecture,” then the outcome will be a hollowing out of NATO and at the very least a bifurcation of Europe between the countries facing Russia along the eastern flank and the those that during the Cold War constituted Western Europe. (Even here the divergent security optics are likely to pull individual countries in different directions, with countries like France looking south, and others, such as the Scandinavians, focusing on the north.) The endgame will not be a “pan-European” security and defense system but rather a back to the future scenario: a new age of insecurity in Europe, where deep power differentials among states on the Continent will yield a hierarchy of national interests that will quickly decompose a larger sense of European solidarity. The countries in Central Europe, which are deeply invested in the European Union as a pathway to economic modernization, will nonetheless never wager their national survival on a pan-European defense and security architecture, any more than powers in Western European will be able to credibly guarantee that in an extreme situation—without America’s backing—they would be able to bring their societies to the brink of war and beyond to defend the Baltic States, Poland, or Romania.

Europe’s political leaders seem to be losing sight of the fact that, notwithstanding their differences with Washington, they do not have a better security option than working closely with the United States and strengthening NATO as the centerpiece of Europe’s security and defense policy. In the current atmosphere, in which criticizing the Trump Administration and questioning the U.S. commitment to its allies has become a mantra for European media, the situation on the ground tells a different story. A case in point: Next year Defender 2020 will be the U.S. Army’s largest exercise in Europe in 25 years, ranging across ten countries and involving 37,000 troops from at least 18 countries, of which 20,000 soldiers will be deployed from the United States to Europe.

The impasse in the current debate about European security is driven by a seeming unwillingness in key European capitals to realize the core reality that, without U.S. strategic engagement, a “European security architecture” is a lark. It is time for Europe to stop daydreaming about a “European army” or an “army of Europeans,” or whatever the latest institutional permutation might be. Amidst a period of rapidly growing state-on-state competition, it is high time to focus on the fundamentals. If the common European project is to continue, the United States needs to stay in Europe, and NATO needs to remain the centerpiece of our mutual security and defense.

It is worth remembering that, regardless of occasional policy differences, Europe today has no better friend and no stronger ally than the United States of America. This strategic reality should be the starting point of any conversation in Europe’s capitals about the Continent’s security and defense. However, if the current discussion about European defense as autonomous, parallel, or even complementary to NATO continues on its present course, it will cause lasting harm to Transatlantic relations, with the much-vaunted “strategic autonomy” becoming, in an extreme case, a self-fulfilling prophecy and, as such, Europe’s undoing. If NATO becomes dysfunctional, the European project will be reduced to regional groupings, bilateral alignments, or it may fragment altogether.

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Ukrainegate and Political Decay

Watching the Ukraine scandal unfold from Singapore, I feel like the hapless dental patient in an early George Carlin routine who, muzzled in the chair by his busily probing and poking dentist standing over him armed with sharp metal implements and wads of cotton, strains but fails to respond to the dentist’s insistent defense of Richard Nixon over his Watergate-related behavior. Maybe it’s the perspective that distance affords, but I have never in my adult life seen, heard, and read such a crock of malarkey, ignorance, and full-frontal stupidity as I have over the past few weeks and, particularly, the past few days.

The targets of my ire are many: The President and his acting chief of staff certainly, but also Joe Scarborough and other mutton-headed media types on MSNBC and, yes, CNN. Those targets also include the New York Times and just about everyone, it seems, who has failed utterly to figure out what the infamous Trump-Zelensky conversation—and the President’s understanding of it—really means.

Let me start with Mick the Knife. Did Mulvaney lie the other day about the White House having done nothing wrong? Yes of course, he lied through his teeth about everything except the one thing he is mainly being accused of lying about. Let’s take this slowly and very carefully and without hyperventilating.

Mulvaney offered three reasons for holding up lethal aid to Ukraine (and never mind for the moment whether the provision of that aid is a good idea in the first place): the country is corrupt; the European allies were not chipping in; and the Administration was properly trying to use the aid as leverage concerning what Mulvaney called an ongoing Justice Department investigation into an alleged 2016 Ukrainian attempt to influence the U.S election.

The first reason is illogical. Ukraine is corrupt, yes, although less so now than in years when no White House effort was made to hold up aid. So why this time? Obviously, this “reason” is pure invention.

The second reason is even dumber. Our European NATO allies are not providing lethal military assistance to Ukraine because, with only a few and partial exceptions, they have no such aid to provide. More obvious nonsense.

The third reason is a lot more interesting. Note that Mulvaney specifically speaks of a backward-looking investigation, back to 2016, not to what the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky conversation is clearly about—digging up Biden dirt relevant to a future issue, the 2020 election. It doesn’t even matter if the Justice Department investigation is a lark of politicized shadow-boxing with reference to a conspiracy theory. The point is that Mulvaney was using a combination of obfuscation and  misdirection here to draw attention away from what the President actually asked Zelensky to do as a favor—and the room full of reporters, despite trying rather pathetically to stop him, let him get away with it. Not one of them specifically called out Mulvaney’s sleight of hand and asked him to justify it.

Now this really is rich because there is excellent reason to think that Ukrainian oligarchs did interfere in the November 2016 U.S. election, not by screwing with the DNC server but by funneling money into the Trump campaign. They certainly funneled money into the inaugural committee: Sam Patten, a lobbyist and associate of Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty to this offense in August 2018, admitting that he had laundered the donations of Konstantin Kilimnik and Serhiy Lyovochkin. Lev Parnas did not pass “go” and has sat in jail, too, for similar reasons (never mind Igor Fruman, who is a national of Belarus). And who were all those Ukrainians at the Inaugural Ball, anyway—the ones a New York Times feature drew attention to back in January? Did they donate to the campaign as well as the inauguration? Well, why doesn’t someone just go and ask Paul Manafort? He’s easy to locate these days, and you have to be missing half a brain not to realize what he was doing as campaign manager for Trump at that stage of the electoral season.

Now, it was illegal for the Trump campaign to accept money from foreign nationals, let alone a foreign government. And that’s as true of certain Arab Gulf countries as it is of Ukraine and probably Russia. But this is not an impeachable offense because Trump was not yet President. The campaign likely didn’t fret overly much about this because no one really expected Trump to win the election, and of course had he lost no one would care all that much about any of this today. Someone should go to jail for this 2016 stuff, aside from the someones who are already in jail. But I’m happy to let the lawyers figure out who and when.

Now we see what the 2016 DNC/Ukraine malarkey is really all about. It’s what the Trump White House guys always do, usually with the help of Fox News, whenever they get caught doing something very wrong—of which more in a moment. They invent an equal but opposite narrative of wrongdoing to pin on the other side. Americans who were once young will recognize this right away as the schoolyard “I know you are but what am I?” strategy. Yes, it’s part of a nine-year old’s sparse strategic repertoire, but, well, there you go.

Note that it doesn’t matter if the equal-but-opposite accusation is even remotely supportable. All these guys are trying to do is blow smoke up the asses of the people who compose Trump’s core support base, to keep them from straying. They don’t have to prove anything, just say outrageous things to create a thin film of ambiguity in the minds of reality-TV mesmerized people who are disposed to ambiguous thoughts anyway. It usually works.

Of course, this strategy has the added benefit of driving people like Joe Scarborough crazy, because when he loses his cool and snarks all over the TV screen, that helps the Trump cause even more.

Note, then, what Mulvaney did not lie about. When he said—in reply to Michael McKinley’s plaint in testimony the day before that he wished politics did not interfere with U.S. foreign policymaking—that politics always plays a role in foreign policymaking so just “get over it,” he was absolutely correct. He was clearly riffing off of his imperfect memory of “McKinney’s” remark, even misremembering the name of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s former top adviser, as if his brain had suddenly skipped up one level of abstraction, probably because the remark stuck in his craw for being so naive. Here is exactly what Mulvaney said:

This speaks to an important point, because I heard this yesterday and I can never remember the gentleman who testified. Was it McKinney, the guy—was that his name? I don’t know him. He testified yesterday. And if you go — and if you believe the news reports — okay? Because we’ve not seen any transcripts of this. The only transcript I’ve seen was Sondland’s testimony this morning.

If you read the news reports and you believe them—what did McKinney say yesterday? Well, McKinney said yesterday that he was really upset with the political influence in foreign policy. That was one of the reasons he was so upset about this. And I have news for everybody: Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.

And Mulvaney went on after a short interruption:

That is going to happen. Elections have consequences. And foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration.

And what you’re seeing now, I believe, is a group of mostly career bureaucrats who are saying, “You know what? I don’t like President Trump’s politics, so I’m going to participate in this witch hunt that they’re undertaking on the Hill.” Elections do have consequences and they should. And your foreign policy is going to change. Obama did it in one way; we’re doing it a different way. And there’s no problem with that.

Is it not obvious that Mulvaney is talking about a general point here, not about any quid pro quo real or imagined, facing either backward toward 2016 or forward toward 2020? And yet not a single mainstream news source I have seen, certainly not the New York Times, quotes these passages or mentions McKinley, whose reported remark is the jumping off point for Mulvaney’s comment. The media did indeed rip this remark out of context, whether knowingly or just stupidly is not easy to tell.

And it was a naive plaint. At the presidential level if not also below, politics always plays a role in foreign policy decision-making, whether you or I or Mr. McKinley likes it or not. A President’s key political aides are always in the room when critical foreign policy decisions are being discussed. It’s not just about Mick Mulvaney; go ask about Karl Rove and David Axelrod and every one of those types going all the way back, at least, to FDR; or ask any participant decision-maker if political advisors were in the room when the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations were thinking through their foreign policy options. Every serious person knows they were.

Here is one example that bears on another ongoing story. Why did President Obama decide in 2015 to rely on Kurdish proxies to go after ISIS on the ground rather than use suitable U.S. forces to do the job? Because of the political optic. He wanted to show that U.S. engagement was thinning in the region, not thickening. So he made a poor decision that was always going to come to grief one way or another, because it anviled the Syrian Kurds between us and the Turks. The problem would have eventually emerged anyway had Hillary Clinton been President instead of Donald Trump when it did, though it would surely not have been handled the same way.

Mulvaney was careless not to be clearer that his “get over it” remark referred to McKinley’s more abstract point and not to contentions about a quid pro quo. But in Mulvaney’s mind it could not have referred to any quid pro quo because the tactical burden of his mendacious misdirection effort was to show that there wasn’t one.

So understand now? Yes, Mulvaney was lying because Trump committed an impeachable offense with that remark on the phone to Zelensky, and Mulvaney was trying his damnedest to deflect attention away from it. But folks, thanks to the inert response of the White House press corps, he actually got away with it! Sort of, anyway, for that then led to the press, out of a combination of wishful thinking and hermeneutical illiteracy, to pretend in near unison that he didn’t. It must therefore drive Mulvaney all the way to nuts that the obscenity he has been accused of committing is in fact a bum rap. Yet it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Now the New York Times. Some editor there got Katie Rogers to write an article under the title “Get Over It? Why Political Influence Matters in Foreign Policy.” Ms. Rogers consulted a few lawyers and came up with an answer that almost completely misses the point.

The article is not entirely worthless. It does bring us an old and useful Hamilton quote, it does identity George Mason as the author of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and it does relevantly mention a guy named William Blunt from 1797. But by way of history it fails to mention the XYZ Affair or the Alien & Sedition Acts, and so manages to go “lite” on its only point: that relying on foreign governments for political favors or allowing them to mess around in American politics gives them leverage over you, so we frown on it to the point that we made it illegal from the get-go.

One of Rogers’s sources quips that she doesn’t think she really even “needed to say this,” and of course she’s right. The fact that previous administrations have rejected offers of foreign political help does not prove, however, as Rogers has it, that Mulvaney was wrong to assert that “it happens all the time.” As already demonstrated, that wasn’t the “it” Mulvaney was talking about; but like her colleagues Rogers totally misses the message.

Had Rogers a clue what she was doing, she would have consulted scholars of history, government, and politics instead of a couple of lawyers. Why? Because the essence of this whole business is—as Francis Fukuyama is at pains to point out in his two master volumes on political institutions—the problem of institutional decay. The U.S. political system has been suffering institutional decay and regression now for a while. Donald Trump has merely launched the decay process into an entirely new, outer orbit.

A modern state operates through formal institutions that, ideally, form an impenetrable wall between the authority of offices and the authority of persons holding those offices. This modern form of political authority, which works through the rule of law, gradually replaced earlier forms of patrimonial and tribal authority, which Max Weber famously associated with traditional and charismatic authority, respectively. In pre-modern patrimonial set-ups, there are no hard and fast distinctions between a ruler’s personal interests and wealth and those of the state. Need examples? I’ll quickly give you four thumbnails out of hundreds readily available.

First, look at Saudi Arabia. On paper the wealth of the Al-Saud is separate from the wealth of the state. In reality, it isn’t. On paper, too, the Egyptian military regime is not in business; but of course it is, which is why senior army types consider any money-making operation in Egypt poachable and part, essentially, of the military’s “pension fund.”

Third, look at Kenya. Kenya is a formal liberal democracy but its politics are really shaped by its tribal social structure. So it is no surprise that nearly every time there is a presidential election, the social fact that communal agency trumps individual agency leads the country to the brink of civil war. It is also no surprise, and more to the point, that the profit-making rail line that runs from the port of Kismayo to Nairobi, over which a great deal of Kenya’s foreign commerce passes, is considered personal property, in part if not as a whole, by the Kenyan elite. If $400 million a year, roughly, comes to line the pockets of Kismayo’s mayor and the President in the capital, and funds their personal patronage networks, so what of it? That’s completely normal in patrimonial arrangements, which goes to show that corruption is a culture-specific concept, not a universal one.

And fourth, look at the kleptocracy that is Russia and, still, albeit to a lesser extent, Ukraine. The Czar used to own everything, even the people. So in a way did the Communist Party elite that replaced the Czar, and that smooth systemic dovetailing was probably no coincidence. The Russian model of autocracy was the most absolutist ever created, and its shadow has yet to disperse entirely. This matters because, as the late Charles Tilly brilliantly showed, there is a path-dependency relationship between the way that states originally arranged their funding and the regime types that grew up around those ways.

But to get back to the case at hand, what stands out as completely amazing about the President’s reaction to the reaction about his conversation with Zelensky—and also about his idea of using Doral for the G7 meeting—is how completely clueless he seems to be about what a modern law-constituted state actually is. He is the President of the most modern state in history in this regard, and he has the mentality of the mayor of Kismayo.

What, in sum, has happened? Trump made public the smoking gun of his impeachable act by giving out the transcript of his phone call with Zelensky because he did not realize that what he had done was egregiously wrong, leaving Mulvaney with the unenviable task of trying to characterize the President’s cluelessness as something else. Ambassador William Taylor has just made crystal clear that there is no something else. He has reaffirmed Dean Acheson’s famous remark that “things are not always as they seem, but sometimes they are”—and this is one of those sometimes. Trump can be impeached for the inappropriate request, yes; but the far more compelling reason to get him out of office is the cluelessness.

Excuse me, but why hasn’t anyone deployed Max Weber, at the least, to point this out? Am I the only one to see the connection between Trump’s inability to grasp the core insight of the Enlightenment—the existence of non-zero-sum relationships—and his inability to see any blue sky between his personal interests and those of the nation?

Say it ain’t so, Mac.

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How China Rode the Foreign Technology Wave

For all our talk of tariffs, trade war, and corporate censorship, our China debate has largely ignored one of the main drivers of Beijing’s economic success: namely, its high dependence on foreign technology. Foreign technology—provided by American companies operating in China, U.S. universities educating Chinese students, and China’s aggressive pursuit of intellectual property and cyber theft—has been a central element of China’s growth methods. Without it, China’s high investment model would have been much less effective. With it, China has been able to achieve the fastest growth in history.

The story of how this worked has not been well understood. Many are aware that American and other Western companies offshored a lot of manufacturing in the 2000s, but few understand why Western offshoring happened when it did, why so much of it went to China, and how much it boosted China’s exports and growth. The combination of Western technology and China’s cheap labor created new forms of competitive advantage that shifted growth momentum from West to East. This trend operated in its strongest form from 2001 to 2007 but continues to shape China’s competitiveness today.

Over the past 35 years China’s share of global GDP has increased from 3 percent to 16 percent, while America’s share has shrunk from 35 percent to 24 percent. From 2001 to 2013 China increased its share of global manufacturing value added from 6 percent to 24 percent, overtaking both the United States and the European Union to become the largest manufacturer of goods in the world. From 2001 to 2007 China increased its exports fivefold, moving from the seventh largest exporter in the world to the largest.

When America political leaders supported China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, they had no idea that their decisions would lead to such outcomes. The conventional wisdom was that WTO accession would force China to open its markets, which would produce one-sided gains for the United States. Instead China launched a major mercantilist push—using an undervalued currency, state leadership, and recruitment of Western investors to achieve manufacturing hyper-growth.

Many think that China’s main vehicle for technology advance has been IP theft and forced technology transfers. Those have been contributing factors, but the biggest drivers of China’s gains and American losses have been two structural changes in the global economy. The first has been the fragmentation of global supply chains that allowed American and Western companies to offshore low-wage phases of production. The second has been the unusual effectiveness of China’s low-cost strategy, which has allowed it to sweep the field of labor-intensive manufacturing.

The Baldwin Shift

British economist Richard Baldwin has analyzed the change in the global order that made offshoring possible. According to Baldwin, new developments in information and communication technology around 1990 made it possible for Western companies to break up their supply chains into different components done in different countries. This enabled the companies to shift low-wage phases of production to China and other low-wage nations, as long as they sent technology with it. This provided major boosts to the industrial advance of the receiving countries, as Baldwin notes in The Globotics Upheaval:

Offshoring firms sent along their know-how with the offshored stages of production and displaced jobs. How could they have done otherwise? . . . It was exactly these technology flows that triggered the rapid industrialization in China and a few other developing nations. . . . They didn’t have to develop the technology themselves. The offshoring companies brought everything needed except the labor. You could call it “add-labor-and-stir” industrialization.

One of Baldwin’s key insights was that the combination of cheap overseas labor and Western technology created powerful new forms of competitive advantage. Cheap labor by itself is not a strong source of competitive advantage—all low-income countries have it. But offshoring combined the best of the two worlds and created a new business model that was superior to either one on its own. The new model produced major gains in the receiving nations, but imposed serious losses on the sending nations. In Baldwin’s words:

The result was a quite sudden and massive deindustrialization of the advanced economies. . . . Industrialization took a century to build up in advanced economies. Deindustrialization and the shift of manufacturing to emerging nations took only two decades. . . . [Western] workers no longer had privileged access to the know-how developed by their national firms. The monopoly that advanced-economy workers used to have on advanced-economy technology was broken. Manufacturing workers in the [West] found themselves competing with robots at home and with China abroad.

Baldwin’s theories provide critical insights. But as a guide to China’s rise, they need some additions and modifications. First, some manufacturing gains have gone to countries like Indonesia and Thailand, but the vast majority of them went to one country: China. China captured the lion’s share of the offshoring movement, which has allowed it to dominate catch-up growth.

Second, China’s gains from foreign technology did not start in the 1990s. They started at the very beginning of Deng’s reform push in the early 1980s, when companies from Hong Kong and other countries in the region opened plants in China. China already had two decades of foreign company-assisted manufacturing development under its belt when WTO accession helped it hang out an “open for business” sign.

Amazon Nation

Other elements of China’s growth strategy have complemented and supplemented the foreign technology element. One has been China’s single-minded focus on keeping costs low and expanding market shares. China’s growth strategy has been similar to Amazon’s business strategy: compete by offering the lowest prices, plow your earnings into investment, and build market share relentlessly.

This strategy addressed two of China’s biggest challenges: moving workers from farms to factories and raising productivity. Development experience in other countries, as shown in Michael Spence’s The Next Convergence, suggests that shifting workers from rural to urban sectors raises their productivity by a factor of three to six times. Thus, the growth payoffs of moving workers to factories are enormous; the challenge is generating the jobs. Here China’s dominance of offshoring was key. Since “offshoring companies brought everything needed except the labor,” they helped China achieve very rapid urban shifts.

A second supporting element has been China’s extremely high investment. The Asian Tigers all used high savings rates to subsidize high investment, but China has taken these practices to an extreme. While the investment levels of most Asian Tigers peaked at 25-35 percent of their GDPs, China’s investment levels have ranged from 35-45 percent of GDP—unheard of for a major country.

China has a fundamentally different view of capital than America. America’s system focuses on the profitability of investments—high hurdle rates maximize returns on individual investments. China focuses on the volume of investment—it keeps capital extremely cheap in order to maximize the overall level of investment. While we think of the Chinese economy as labor-intensive, finance expert Michael Pettis argues that “China’s growth is actually heavily capital intensive. It is in fact among the most capital intensive in the world. . . . Labor may be cheap, but capital is free.”

Government support for favored investments actually goes further, to include massive subsidies. In the 2000s the government provided such large subsidies to Chinese solar panel producers that it not only drove foreign producers out of business but also hurt its own companies by creating global over-supply. In the electric vehicle industry the government not only gave subsidies to buyers, it also funded most of the build-out of the charging station network in advance of demand—a Chinese version of “if you build it, they will come.”

The Three A’s: Attract, Access, Adapt

China has used three general methods to tap foreign technology: attracting foreign investors by offering low costs, accessing foreign technology by forced technology transfers and IP theft, and adapting foreign technology in local products. We might call these the three A’s.

Attracting foreign investors was pushing on an open door. Companies from the East Asia region saw immediate opportunities in the 1980s and expanded their investments quickly. Later offshoring was very attractive to Western companies because it allowed them to cut costs and expand sales. Offshoring was particularly attractive to American companies because it helped them respond to domestic pressures from the shareholder value movement to increase returns on net assets.

China also worked hard to attract foreign investors. First, it made an early strategic decision to embrace foreign investment. As Harvard historian Julian Gewirtz has argued, China had been obsessed with technological advance since the days of Mao. After Mao died, the Communist Party leadership embraced foreign technology as a way to jumpstart growth under the label “foreign leap forward” (sometimes translated as “Western leap forward”). In this decision China pioneered a new path that differed from the paths of Japan and Korea (both of whom blocked foreign investment because they wanted to develop their export industries on their own.)

Second, China took proactive steps to make itself the most attractive destination for foreign companies. It created special economic zones to cater to foreign companies. It also “paid to play”—it accepted many costs and made many sacrifices in order to make itself the most attractive low-cost producer. These costs included low consumption levels (which allowed high saving and investment), harsh labor conditions, environmental degradation, and an undervalued currency. With these sacrifices and subsidies, China ensured that it offered more to foreign investors than potential competitors.

Because of its natural advantages and these special efforts, China was able to sweep the field of low-wage manufacturing. In effect, China specialized in being the low-wage partner of foreign companies.

China’s second method has been to get access to Western technology, including by monitoring open sources, sending students to the United States, IP theft, cyber espionage, forced technology transfers, and purchases of Western companies. Some of these methods (like monitoring open sources and sending students to our shores) are legal. Other methods (like forced technology transfers) are illegal under WTO rules but have been highly effective because many Western companies have been willing to comply as a cost of doing business. China has taken cyber theft to a new level by specializing in theft from private companies in the United States.

China has taken a different approach regarding internet companies. Contrary to its openness to foreign companies in other fields, China has sharply constrained the abilities of Google, Amazon, and Facebook to operate in China. Instead it has protected and promoted its own local counterparts (Baidu, Alibaba, and TenCent). Like America’s FAANGs, China’s BATs have been highly profitable and are strong investors. They have also benefitted from American technology because of the open access of algorithms, movement of people between Silicon Valley and China, and strong Chinese presence in American companies and universities.

China’s third method has been to adapt foreign technologies in local products. According to business analysts Dan Breznitz and Michael Murphee, Chinese companies don’t try to compete with Western companies at the cutting edge of technology; instead, they specialize in products that are “one step behind.” They focus on process improvements that make them more efficient partners in multinational production or allow them to produce lower-cost versions that are more suitable for China and other emerging-market countries.

Chinese companies have been highly adept at creating local versions that offer 80 percent of the value at 50 percent of the cost. MIT analysts Edward Steinfeld and Jonas Nahm argue that this is an important form of innovation. Western designs are the starting point, but Chinese companies modify the designs to make them cheaper to produce, faster to deliver, and easier to scale, which involves innovation in engineering and manufacturing processes. Because these contributions make the products commercially viable to more people, Chinese companies have “become critical players in a global, cross-border quest to commercialize new-to-the-world technologies.”

“One step behind” and 80 percent of the value for 50 percent of the costs may sound like inferior approaches to innovation. But there are two types of disruptive innovation. One is entirely new products that create new markets; another is lower-cost products that gradually improve their quality and take market share from the previous leaders. As a case of the latter, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen cites the example of mini mills in the U.S. steel industry: Mini-mills first specialized in rebar but gradually improved the quality of their production, which eventually allowed them to displace integrated steel mills.

In a sense this is what China has been doing with its focus on 80 percent of the value at 50 percent of the cost. It has created new, lower-cost products that appeal to customers in China and other emerging-market nations. It started with low-end products but moved on to more sophisticated versions over time (like Huawei phones). These products have allowed Chinese companies to make rapid gains in local markets and in exports. If America has led high-end disruptive innovations, China has led bottom-up disruptive innovations.

Steroids

How much difference has China’s access to foreign investment and technology made in China’s gains in exports and GDP? First, foreign companies have been responsible for a very large share of China’s manufactured exports, especially its high-tech exports. Second, experts believe that foreign technology has made very large contributions to China’s GDP. According to business analyst Michael Enright, foreign investors and foreign-invested enterprises accounted for 33 percent of China’s GDP and 27 percent of its total employment in 2013. According to investment banker Stewart Paterson, China’s accession to the WTO caused its GDP to be twice as large in 2016 as it would have been otherwise.

These are very high numbers. But if we think about the broader historical processes at work, it is plausible that the impacts would be quite large. The Baldwin shift has not been an incremental change in the global economy. It has been a fundamental structural change in which a major source of Western productivity and growth—the technology of Western multinationals—became globally mobile. This has provided enormous boosts to China’s economy.

Offshoring has also focused on manufacturing, which is disproportionately important for economic growth. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution national growth performance has been highly correlated with leadership of manufacturing. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the United States and Germany gained at Great Britain’s expense. After World War II Japan and Europe reduced their gaps with the United States. In these cases, most manufacturing was done within national borders, advanced economies dominated manufacturing, and growth was long and slow. The Baldwin shift changed this system. Now production could move across borders, which helped China greatly. If Western growth was a marathon, China’s has been a sprint.

Foreign technology has acted like steroids in China—it still had to go to the gym in the form of making domestic reforms and investments, but foreign investment made its strength gains at each step much greater.

Costs to America

How costly has China’s strategy and U.S. offshoring been for America? Some economists believe offshoring has been good for the United States. For example, George W. Bush’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Greg Mankiw said in 2004, “Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade. More things are tradable than were tradable in the past and that’s a good thing.” Others recognize that American workers have suffered serious setbacks, but attribute them to technology rather than globalization.

However, if we look at China’s impacts in broader economic terms, they appear much more substantial and much more negative. First, the shift of manufacturing from America to China has had high costs because manufacturing has high productivity and multiplier impacts. When manufacturing slows in the United States, it reduces a prime driver of jobs and growth.

Second, innovation tends to follow production. When the offshoring movement began, many thought American companies could “innovate here and manufacture there.” But as analysts Sridhar Kota and Tom Mahoney point out, “innovation in manufacturing gravitates to where the factories are.” “Innovate here and manufacture there” has often become “manufacture there and innovate there.”

Third, the entry of millions of low-wage Chinese workers into the global production system has suppressed Western wages. If Western workers have to compete in the same markets with low-wage Chinese workers, Western wages will decline. And given the size of the Chinese workforce and the enormous gap in wage levels, the impacts are likely to be quite large. Stewart Paterson puts it this way:

The ramifications of allowing this kind of free trade were bound to be severe. On the one hand, we had a nation of 1.2 billion people with an average income of less than $1,000 a year, and on the other we have the developed-world economies of America, Japan, and parts of Europe with labor costs twenty times higher and a combined population of around 900 million. . . .

Through the last thirty years of the twentieth century, median household income in the U.S. grew at a steady pace of about 5.3 percent. In the first decade after China’s accession to the WTO, that growth slowed to scarcely above 1 percent in nominal terms. In real terms the median household income actually fell 10 percent in that decade. . . .

The inescapable conclusion is that economic engagement with China from 2001 onwards led to a rapid and dramatic deterioration in the real earning power of workers in the developed world. There has not been a period in which median earnings in the developed world have been so stagnant for so long since the Victorian Age.

Can China Innovate?

What about the future? Does the fact that China has achieved spectacular growth with the assistance of foreign technology in the past mean that it will continue to do so in the future?

Many analysts say the answer is no. They make three main arguments. First, China’s growth has already slowed since the Great Recession, and will slow more because of China’s aging population, high corporate debt, and declining productivity. Second, many believe that trade tensions with America will lead to increased decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies that will sharply constrain China’s access to foreign technology. Third, many believe that China is setting itself up for failure with its ambitious goals in Made in China 2025, which call for Chinese companies to not only reduce their dependence on foreign technology, but also challenge Western companies in global markets.  The critics don’t think China’s companies will be able to do either of these because China’s statist system will keep them from innovating.

The critics have some good points. China’s growth is likely to slow, possibly a lot—in the short run because of high debt and in the long run because of a severe aging problem. China’s leaders have under-estimated how hard it will be to compete with Western multinationals at the cutting edge. If they aim for a purist version of Made in China 2025, they will probably face much more serious difficulties than they expect. However, if they pursue a more nuanced approach, they may do better than the critics think, for several reasons.

First, China can pick and choose where it reduces its reliance on foreign technology. It can focus on those areas where it thinks it can advance (like electric vehicles) and in other areas (like semiconductors and technical education) count on continued technology flows from American companies and universities who want to maintain strong ties with China.

Second, China doesn’t have to compete with Western multinationals in the most advanced products; it can continue to rely on strategies of “one step behind” and 80 percent of the value at 50 percent of the cost. These strategies are likely to become even more powerful sources of competitive advantage in the future. Most of the future growth in global demand will not come from aging Western societies, but from the rapidly expanding middle classes of China and other emerging-market nations. China has comparative advantages in the types of goods these markets want. Western companies will also continue to want to partner with Chinese companies to produce for these markets. Thus China is likely to continue to be a strong exporter and continue to benefit from foreign company linkages.

Third, China will continue to benefit from its advantages in cheap capital, including its large public investments for research and education and its low hurdle rates for private investment. For example, China is making massive public investments in quantum computing and large private investments in industrial robots.

The United States may continue to lead in the most advanced forms of technology, but China is also likely to be a strong competitor, especially in manufactured products for emerging-market nations. Who will lead technology in the future, then? The answer may not be fully satisfying to either Washington or Beijing: It could be both nations.

The post How China Rode the Foreign Technology Wave appeared first on The American Interest.

Neuroscience Culture and the Sins of Vaping

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently reported more than 500 cases of severe respiratory illness from vaping, including several deaths. What is curious is how the CDC emphasized the role of e-cigarettes in all this, while practically ignoring the fact that most of the cases involved inappropriate usage of the devices. Many of the victims had laced the devices, which exist to provide a safer way to inhale nicotine, with THC and CBD oils found in cannabis. Others used cartridges prefilled with THC, and purchased from “informal sources.” The logical response would have been for the CDC to warn the public to use e-cigarettes only as directed, especially since cannabis is technically illegal at the federal level—and the CDC is a federal agency. Instead, the CDC focused all its ire on e-cigarettes, almost suggesting that their regular customers go back to smoking tobacco. President Trump quickly followed with plans to ban on all flavored e-cigarettes, including “adult” flavors such as mint and menthol.

This is the kind of event that social scientists like to analyze, for the contradiction suggests some deeper explanation lurking beneath the official line.

Politics may explain some of it. Smoking tobacco is mostly a problem of the lower middle class. The upper middle class rarely smokes, and so doesn’t need e-cigarettes to kick the habit. But the upper middle class is not neutral on vaping. Upper middle class parents fear e-cigarettes because of their high rate of abuse among teenagers. Because the upper middle class enjoys more political clout, CDC policy should not surprise.

A non-event in the form of a Philip Morris product called iQOS is also suggestive. Because iQOS heats tobacco at lower temperatures, it avoids the harmful chemicals arising from traditional smoking. Yet unlike e-cigarettes, which use pure nicotine, iQOS uses actual tobacco; in theory, iQOS represents less of an advance in harm reduction than e-cigarettes. Yet teenage use of iQOS is low compared with e-cigarettes, and so fails to show up on the upper middle class radar screen. Hence, the CDC and FDA ignore iQOS while going after e-cigarettes.

Still, upper middle class parents do not simply call up the CDC and FDA and tell them what to do. Other factors must be involved. Cannabis, for example, is big business. The global cannabis market is now $50 billion, and is expected to reach $65 billion in 2025. Cannabis interests and upper middle class opinion may have combined to sway policy against vaping. Yet the global vaping market is $40 billion, and is expected to rise to $50 billion by 2025. A few billion dollars difference cannot really explain why the CDC and FDA are leveraging a cannabis problem to aggressively police e-cigarettes.

That cannabis use among teenagers is a serious problem only adds to the confusion. It is the most common illicit drug used by teenagers, more than cocaine, heroin, and ecstasy combined. Teenage cannabis use is at its highest level in 30 years. During the 1980s, when many teenagers smoked and even dealt in cannabis (then called “marijuana”), protective upper middle class parents quashed the budding effort toward cannabis legalization. Why is the same sense of urgency not felt today? Moreover, why does public opinion condemn e-cigarette use as a gateway to cannabis among teens, and in some quarters even support a vaping ban, but then adopt a neutral attitude toward cannabis legalization? The public health establishment reveals the same paradoxical attitude. Relative to the outpouring of papers on the dangers of vaping, the public health establishment barely comments on the cannabis issue.

Something bigger—more cultural—explains why vaping has run afoul of the authorities while cannabis continues along the glide path to legality. This cultural element has ramifications beyond cannabis and e-cigarettes, and affects the future of the entire stupefaction industry.

How We Think About Life

Consider the following syllogism: to understand law one must know law books; to understand law books one must know paper, from which law books are made; to know paper one must know trees, from which paper is made; to know trees one must know botany. Therefore, to understand law one must know botany.

The syllogism is ridiculous, and yet it exists today in various forms throughout American life.

In medicine: To understand unhappiness one must know the mind; to know the mind one must know the brain; to know the brain one must know neurotransmitters; therefore, to understand unhappiness one must know neurotransmitters. On the basis of this syllogism, millions of Americans today treat their everyday unhappiness (as opposed to true clinical depression) with psychoactive medication, crediting their unhappiness to a neurotransmitter imbalance problem. On a per capita basis, the use rate of these medications is higher in the United States than anywhere else.

In religion: To understand spirituality one must know how people “feel” spiritual; to understand feeling one must know the mind; to know the mind one must know the brain, especially the temporal lobe, which has been linked to spiritual feeling; therefore, to understand spirituality one must know the temporal lobe. The syllogism supports many Americans in their belief that spirituality is a feeling that exists independently of religion, and that somehow involves the brain. Today, 27 percent of Americans call themselves “spiritual but not religious,” with many of these people purposely dieting on so-called brain-nourishing foods to enhance their spirituality.

Variations on the syllogism abound. In politics, “hate speech” is criticized for its psychological dangers, which are traced back to the amygdala, the brain’s so-called “threat center.” In academia, rather than define truth or beauty, subfields such as neuro-philosophy, neuro-humanities, and neuro-aesthetics explain how the brain processes these concepts. In mass shootings, a shooter’s declared motivations are thought to be rooted in some obscure psychological law, beneath which sits a form of brain pathology that, once discovered, might prevent future shootings—hence, mass shootings are called a “mental health problem.”

In each case a discussion about some aim in life drifts toward a scientific discussion about the origin of that aim—that is, rather than talk about happiness or spirituality as people experience it, we discuss why we feel happiness, or why we feel spiritual, or why we appreciate art, or why we are violent. Life itself is not understood; instead, people try to understand the mind and the brain, from which life proceeds.

Reasoning about life apart from its aim has given rise to the modern stupefaction industry. The word “life” is very short and very clear, and everyone knows what it means, and people obviously still talk about life in that sense that is comprehensible to everyone. People still say, “Life will get better when I make more money,” or “My bad relationship is ruining my life.” But this everyday conception of life has a rival now in an altogether different meaning of life, pushed by neuroscience, where feelings about life are examined at their origin. The life everyone knows—the joys people desire and the sufferings people hate—competes now with “life” in the neuron for the title of life, and for our attention.

During the first half of the 20th century, psychology and psychiatry began the drift away from the traditional conception of life. Doctors traced the source of people’s troubles back to mental phenomena that science had invented—for example, the “guilt complex,” “repressed memories,” and “toxic shame.” In the second half of the 20th century, neuroscientists drifted further away. They located the source of life’s troubles in brain matter and neurotransmitters. They abandoned the old way of thinking about life; in its stead, they investigated the question of why certain feelings associated with life arise. As the new approach seeped into popular culture, everyday people grew more comfortable with stupefying themselves—that is, changing their state of consciousness directly through chemical agents—since feeling good through brain chemistry now constituted “living,” rather than an escape from life. Since neuroscience had redefined life from all that went on around us to the brain processes that accompany life, stupefaction no longer meant oblivion, but instead a way to engage life head on.

The new order reveals itself in different ways. For example, when I asked a psychiatrist why a person suffering from everyday unhappiness should be on Prozac, she replied that each person’s brain reacts differently to life events, causing psychic experiences to vary along a spectrum. What might cause mild unhappiness in me, based on how my brain reacts to events, she explained, might result in a more intense feeling of despair in someone else, which I could not comprehend. By focusing on the “life” of the brain, neuroscience had created a world inside each person beyond the ability of any outsider to grasp or judge. Each person’s brain refracts life through its own “life,” beyond criticism, and demands its own unique response that might include chemical antidotes. No more calling people who stupefy themselves “weak” or “decadent,” as that meant applying the standards of one person’s brain, or many people’s brains, to someone else’s brain. Only when stupefaction results in a lost job or poor health can it be criticized, and even then, rather than be called “bad,” it is called a “disease.”

I first encountered the power of this new idea while practicing anesthesiology. In the past, doctors demanded at least some physical explanation for a patient’s pain before treating it, even if the cause was invisible, as in pain arising from a misfiring of nerves. A patient could not just say, “I’m in pain, doc. Give me some narcotics.” Starting in the 1990s, pain became a completely subjective experience—officially. If a postoperative patient appeared comfortable, with vital signs stable and a facial expression suggesting boredom, but then self-rated his pain as “ten out of ten,” I risked a lawsuit if I failed to aggressively treat that pain. The patient had only to say, “I am the person who feels and no one else. You cannot know my inner experience of pain.”

Neuroscience’s concept has even penetrated identity politics. When someone complains of being offended, the person committing the offense has no recourse but to shut up or apologize, for the victim need only say, “I am the person who feels and no one else. You cannot know my inner experience.” Similarly, when people from marginalized groups discuss their personal histories, those in the dominant group are told to keep quiet, as the marginalized person’s neural network supposedly lies beyond the comprehension of any dominant group member.

Today, more than half of Americans regularly stupefy themselves with a mood-modifying drug, either legal or illegal, in the form of prescription psychoactive medication; cannabis or other illegal drugs; alcohol; smoking; vaping; or opioids; with many of these people believing themselves to be fully justified by science in their behavior. It is “their way.” Over time, entrepreneurs working with scientists will produce cleaner and more precise compounds, such that stupefaction’s harmful consequences, including lost jobs, relationship problems, crime, and physical side-effects, will fade altogether, along with any residual concern that people feel about stupefaction. Neuroscience’s hold on American culture will not abate. On the contrary, it will cement itself. However, until the perfect agents come along—and they will— the older, more imperfect drugs, such as nicotine and cannabis, will linger, causing confusion and strife.

The CDC and the scientific establishment have it out for e-cigarettes, while cannabis receives a pass. Why this is so illustrates the rules that all future stupefying agents must satisfy as dictated by the neuroscience culture that underlies the stupefaction industry.

The Heresies of E-Cigarettes

A man inhales nicotine through vaping (although it could also be through smoking). He sits at his desk. He is alone. He knows he should get to work, but he doesn’t feel like it. He vapes and continues to sit idle. He’s angry with his boss; he admits that his boss didn’t do anything wrong, but he wants to indulge in his bad temper, and so he vapes and continues to be angry. He is supposed to call someone he doesn’t want to talk to. He remembers that he is late with his call, but he doesn’t want to remember, and so he vapes. A colleague comes over to criticize him; the man wants to escape from criticism, so he blames others—and vapes. He begins work at his desk; he doesn’t like what he’s producing, but he doesn’t want to start over, and he vapes.

The peculiarity of nicotine, distinguishing it from all other stupefying agents, is its apparent harmlessness and ability to be applied to all situations. Cannabis, in contrast, has mind-altering effects ranging from euphoria to drowsiness, making it hard to perform serious work. Nor does the cannabis user expect to smoke throughout the day; rather, he or she elects discrete times to relax or feel “high,” or, if smoking cannabis for medical reasons, to feel less pain or nausea. But nicotine stupefaction can be spread out over the entire day, both at work and at home, and can be directed to every separate occasion. If a person has a disagreeable consciousness, for any reason, nicotine does away with the disagreeableness, letting the person occupy himself or herself with other things and forget.

All this occurs because nicotine is very addictive, more so than most stupefying agents. In addition, among the top-tier addictive agents, including cocaine, alcohol, and heroin, nicotine is the only one that lets a user feel fresh, and think and speak clearly. Thus, the major pleasure of using nicotine comes less from any direct mind-altering effects, and more from satisfying one’s craving for nicotine—that is, from satisfying the addiction. It is a closed loop, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: nicotine leads to addiction, and pleasure comes from satisfying the addiction.

The other stupefying agents work differently. Cannabis produces good feelings directly, such as seeing the world in a new and more pleasurable way. Colors are sometimes brighter; aesthetic appreciation can be enhanced.  Alcohol gives the user a warm and fuzzy feeling. Antidepressants provide the user with background contentment, while anti-anxiety agents are calming. But in serious smokers, nicotine mostly satisfies the demand for nicotine, and that satisfaction helps them endure a variety of minor situations with little to no changes in cognition.

Neuroscience culture hates nicotine for this reason, despite the drug’s relative harmlessness. Neuroscience endeavors to grasp the origins of our cognitive life by investigating the brain. The science is not there yet; the connections do not yet exist; but neuroscience believes they will exist, and it bends all the powers of our intelligence to prove the possibility of this at least. Along the way, neuroscientists conduct research on hallucinatory drugs such as cannabis, ketamine, and psychedelics. Although mind-altering, these drugs enjoy some respectability in neuroscience because they are thought to yield insight into our cognitive life, just as antidepressants and narcotics do. They are linked to well-defined brain changes that can be correlated with cognitive changes. Although the information these agents yield in the lab hardly amounts to a full map of our inner life, the research gives people hope that neuroscience is moving humanity closer to realizing science’s vision.

But nicotine yields nothing. And, as a drug, it does nothing. Besides promoting general stimulation, it is mostly a habit that feeds itself, like an itch welcomed solely for the pleasure of being scratched. It is the most primitive form of stupefaction. It illuminates nothing about the neurological origins of cognitive life. It distracts from neuroscience doctrine.

For neuroscience says that we cannot define life in our consciousness, as the traditionalists declare. We cannot define life according to the happiness people feel when they love someone or ride in a new car, or the misery they feel when they lose a race or stub their toes. All such cognitive experiences, infinite in number, the sum total of what people once called “life,” are a kind of illusion, says neuroscience, and life cannot be understood in an illusion. We go astray when we try to understand life through what we experience in consciousness, neuroscience says; nothing reliable or exact ever comes out of such observations. In order to understand the inner life it is necessary to probe brain matter for its origins, says neuroscience, in the same way that biologists probe the body to understand the origins of physical life. Neuroscience conducts tests and discovers receptors, and correlates those receptors with behavior. Only from such observations, and from the laws deduced from them, says neuroscience, can we decipher the laws of the inner life.

From neuroscience’s perspective, nicotine represents a throwback to a pre-scientific age when people located life in consciousness. Nicotine users take seriously fighting with their boss or feeling bored with their work. Rather than try to deaden their minds to life events, they aspire to remain as alert as possible. They want to keep their senses. They merely want the pleasure of satisfying their nicotine addiction, which they admit to. They do not claim to have neurotransmitter issues; they do not justify their activity in science. On the contrary, their mantra is, “It is useless to define life through science, so let’s just live!”

This is why the CDC and the scientific establishment not only despise nicotine, but also view nicotine harm reduction with indifference. Nicotine is heretical, making tobacco and e-cigarettes equally heretical. The fact that e-cigarettes emit less tar and carbon monoxide is secondary; both products involve nicotine. From science’s perspective, the nicotine approach to life has more in common with the Stoics who said life is submission to reason, or with the Buddha, who said life is the abnegation of self. Those philosophies also recognized the supremacy of life in consciousness. Nicotine and philosophical ideas work in an analogous way: Nicotine does not cloud the mind generally, nor does it arouse any particular feeling; it works on conscience, when people have not yet acted but are only thinking, when their consciences alone are working, and where the drug initiates scarcely perceptible changes—as ideas do—yielding surprising, and sometimes shocking, changes in behavior.

Nicotine plays no role in the scientific project to discover life’s origins in brain matter. First, nicotine’s effects on the human body are too general to help neuroscientists probe the origins of cognitive experience. Nicotine receptors are ubiquitous in the human body. They exist in the brain but also in the peripheral nervous system and in skeletal muscle, while nicotine’s stimulating effects work to a high degree through general activation of the sympathetic nervous system, causing a release of epinephrine from the adrenal medulla. This is no different from how a philosophy book works on people, by exciting them and causing their heart rate and blood pressure to rise, and their skin to tingle. A soldier might read political propaganda before heading into battle; he or she might also smoke or vape—the effect is the same.

Second, because nicotine addiction brings pleasure when satisfied, it hardly differs from other addictions—for example, playing golf, shopping, or watching pornography. None of these other addictions helps neuroscience probe the origins of our cognitive life. On the contrary, they confirm people in their belief that real life—that is, the life we experience in consciousness, including the joy we experience golfing or shopping—offers solutions to unhappiness or anxiety. To enjoy such pleasures, one need only more time and money, which philosophers ranging from the ancient hedonists to the modern materialists have encouraged people to work toward for centuries. Nicotine addiction has more in common with the social addictions, and the philosophies that encourage them, than with science’s effort to discover life’s origins in brain matter.

Cannabis, on the other hand, fits well into science’s approach to life. Neuroscience is interested in cannabis as potential therapy for anxiety and depression. The drug has been found to have its own brain receptor, CB1. Having a specialized brain receptor confers respectability on any chemical agent. CB1 mediates cannabis’s psychological effects, and therefore, unlike in nicotine, the cannabis mood change has a specific brain origin, making it useful material for neuroscience. The CB1 receptor is a special door to be opened by science in its search for a special insight into the mind’s inner life. One of many special doors. Opioids have specific mu-receptors in the brain that cause euphoria. Ketamine has specific NMDA receptors in nerve cells that produce pain relief, sedation, and possibly anti-depressant action. Neuroscientists have already discovered that cannabis shares common characteristics with benzodiazepenes (Valium-like drugs), which long ago revealed an association between brain matter and mood through specific action on GABA brain receptors.

Although hallucinatory, cannabis has more in common with some of the new, non-hallucinatory mood-modifying drugs, such as allopregnanolone, which reportedly has a calming effect on the amygdala and insula—brain regions activated in loneliness. Neuroscience has already shown that pregnanolone levels fall in lonely people. Although neuroscience recognizes social isolation’s role in loneliness, it hints at treating the symptoms of loneliness directly. A patient taking allopregnanolone for loneliness has much in common with the patient taking cannabis for anxiety or PTSD. Both patients use drugs to attack unpleasant moods at their brain origins.

Nicotine does none of this. It is a general stimulant, not unlike a philosophical idea. It works by satisfying an addiction, not unlike shopping, although cheaper. It is not material for science.

In the future, to satisfy the cultural gatekeepers of the modern stupefaction industry, drug companies will have to ensure that any new mood-modifying drug works more than just by satisfying an addiction, the way nicotine does. Otherwise the scientific establishment will try to destroy it.

Nicotine commits a second heresy. Although satisfying the craving for nicotine makes a person feel better, nicotine itself is not therapy for any of the categories of disease that science has invented. On the contrary, nicotine’s way of working defies categorization.

Take a boss who muses about giving his veteran employee a raise but worries that it will take money from his own pocket. Thinking about the action presents him with difficulties, so he vapes to drive away from his consciousness the nagging question that demands a decision. The undecided question remains undecided until his next period of enlightenment. But at that next period the same thing repeats itself. Months go by without ever facing squarely the moral dilemma, which also lets the man keep the money.

Nicotine is a convenient adjunct to life as traditionally understood. When some people feel themselves to be in a moral quandary, they use nicotine to silence the critic within. Nicotine doesn’t deny the relevance of the quandary; it just provides a means of temporarily escaping it. It supplies an agreeable feeling, along with great clearness of mind, to help forestall a tough decision, or sidestep an issue, or decide in a way that profits the decision-maker. Nicotine has no broader rationale than this.

Neuroscience, on the other hand, ignores the question of how people should decide moral quandaries. Instead, it searches for life’s origins. It groups together various life situations, and extracts from them the one unpleasant sensation common to them all. It then gives that sensation a name—for example, anxiety, depression, pain, or loneliness. This is how the scientific method works: it denudes life events of their particularities, thereby reducing the number of variables, in order to create formulas or theories that apply in all cases. Once an unpleasant sensation exists as a general concept, it establishes the basis for a disease.

General concepts then guide treatment for that disease. Doctors, for example, do not restrict Valium use only to those cases involving a boss trying to decide whether to stiff his employee. Doctors do not care what moral issue the boss faces, or how the boss decides. They simply diagnose the universal sensation “anxiety,” and treat it, as per the correlation between Valium, brain receptors, and mood.

The entire thrust of neuroscience in the past half century has been to “medicalize” psychological issues along these lines: first, generalize situations to produce a universal sensation; then show how the brain connects to that sensation through receptors; then produce therapies in relation to those connections. Sometimes the second and third events switch places, as, for example, when therapies that lessen unpleasant sensations are shown to work on certain receptors. By doing so, they show how the brain connects with those sensations.

The CDC and the scientific establishment resent nicotine because nicotine bucks the trend. It plays no role in science’s effort to extract universal sensations from particular situations and then treat them with precise antidotes. People inhale nicotine not to oppose painlessness to pain, sleepiness to insomnia, or anti-nausea to nausea. Nicotine use simply satisfies one’s craving for nicotine, producing an agreeable feeling that let’s a person pass the time while also, occasionally, avoiding a moral quandary.

Cannabis, on the other hand, does play such a role. At the very least it offers precise therapy for the universal sensations of pain and nausea. There is “medical marijuana” but there is no “medical nicotine.” Compared to cannabis, nicotine is decidedly non-scientific.

In the future, to satisfy the cultural gatekeepers of the modern stupefaction industry, drug companies will have to ensure that any new mood-modifying drug helps neuroscience in its quest to medicalize life. It must offer a specific antidote to some universal sensation, or, better yet, along with it, an antidote to some universal category of physical disease. Otherwise the scientific establishment will try to destroy it.

Nicotine commits a third heresy. Culturally speaking, nicotine is less harmful than cannabis, but from science’s perspective it is equally harmful.

The traditional attitude toward life views life as a series of stages, such as childhood, young adulthood, and senior citizen, with each stage connected in some way to events in the real world. Some of these events take the form of social milestones—for example, a first day of school, a first kiss, or a first job; others take the form of intellectual and emotional milestones, such as wisdom or the ability to handle disappointment. Neuroscience, on the other hand, looks at life as an evolution in brain development. For example, the traditional attitude toward life views teens as immature and twenty-somethings as responsible young adults. But from neuroscience’s perspective, teens and twenty-somethings have much in common, as the brains of both are still developing. On the other hand, thirty-somethings, seemingly so close to twenty-somethings in life experience, are actually thought to be far apart, as thirty-somethings have begun the aging process and annually lose brain cells.

Upper middle class parents have always hated nicotine, but in the past they hated cannabis even more. In the traditional attitude toward life, nicotine use was a cultural marker for a rebellious teenager. The teenager had lost his or her childish innocence and somehow fallen into “the wrong crowd.” Parents knew that many gamblers smoked. They also knew that many prostitutes smoked. Yet cannabis was even worse. Teenagers on cannabis seemed headed for skid row, as cannabis’s stupefying aspects were more intense. A teen addicted to nicotine could still go on and get a decent job; a teen addicted to cannabis would have a much harder time doing well in law school or medical school.

Neuroscience’s perspective on life ignores these cultural concerns. Its focus is on brain development. Nicotine has been shown to interfere with brain development during adolescence and into a person’s twenties. It also interferes with fetal brain development. Cannabis exhibits similar effects. But for this reason nicotine and cannabis now enjoy a kind of rough parity. The advantage nicotine enjoyed on this front has disappeared. These days, I often hear upper middle class parents fuss about nicotine’s brain effects, but I rarely hear them complain that e-cigarettes might lead their teens into a life of crime.

To upper middle class parents today, nicotine may even be slightly worse than cannabis, for at least cannabis offers scientific advantages. Cannabis can be used to treat cancer pain and nausea, which upper middle class parents fear in their own futures. In addition, unlike nicotine, cannabis is a natural herb, and upper middle class parents have grown used to taking herbs for medical problems. Indeed, they associate herbal medicine with establishment medicine, with both existing in the scientific firmament.

In the future, to satisfy the cultural gatekeepers of the modern stupefaction industry, drug companies will have to ensure that any new mood-modifying drug has minimal effects on brain development. It does not matter if the drug interferes with an adolescent’s morality or desire to lead a bourgeois life, so long as it leaves brain matter untouched. At the very least, to compensate for any flaws in this department, the drug must be able to treat a physical disease, particularly one that upper middle class parents fear.

Science and Stupefaction

E-cigarettes may or may not survive this most recent attack. JUUL Labs dominates the U.S. vaping market. In the wake of the CDC’s announcement and the Trump ban on flavored e-cigarettes, which accounts for 80 percent of JUUL’s sales, the company’s CEO has resigned, staff cutbacks are in the works, and governmental agencies are investigating the company for criminal misconduct. Still, if e-cigarettes disappear, they can one day reappear if they follow the strategy outlined above. Cannabis followed a similar strategy over the past 20 years, and has gone from ostracism to the brink of full-scale legalization. E-cigarettes may have to go into the wilderness before returning.

I do not vape. I do not use any stupefying agents (other than philosophy). I have no favorite product. But I will say this about vaping, that its very existence represents important pushback against the all-enveloping scientific conception of life. Its popularity among adults attests to a belief in the traditional conception of life, where what people experience in consciousness by way of real world engagement is believed to define life. On the most primitive level of stupefaction, nicotine offers an agreeable feeling from time to time, leaving the senses mostly untouched, and real life events still very much in the driver’s seat.

The neuroscience approach to life denigrates nicotine for being physically unhealthy (it is right in the case of tobacco), but also hopelessly primitive. Nicotine tells people that life exists in the world, and in their consciousness of the world, and not in their brain matter. It promises a mild distraction but nothing more; life must still be studied and understood. Neuroscience, on the other hand, seeks the origins of life, and aspires to “solve” unhappiness, anxiety, loneliness, and pain at the level of the brain. The perfect stupefying agent, according to neuroscience, is one that satisfies all psychological needs independent of life, without physical side effects or deficits in reasoning power. It is the age-old dream of arousing only those feelings in one’s mind that one desires. Limitless tranquility.

But while mood-modifying drugs will grow cleaner and more precise, neuroscience will never achieve perfect stupefaction. People with drug-induced contentment will still be able to look around them. When they do, without feeling unhappiness, anxiety, loneliness, or pain, they will feel a strange emptiness in their souls, and, at their very depths, something like a drop of stinging bitterness. No misery, no stress, nothing—only that drop, so small that it will barely be perceived. Yet so bitter that their whole inner lives will be poisoned by it.

For the life they experience in consciousness, arising from countless encounters with the real world, will seem to them almost superfluous. These people will have come into life with a wail; they will leave with a groan; yet in between they will have no emotional care. Every day, when they lie down to sleep, they will be able to say: I spent today without any emotional trouble; life has passed without pain, without unhappiness, without fear, like a calm evening on a peaceful lake. Art, music, poetry, and literature, which exist to convey into people’s minds an indelible impression of the vast grandeur of the human soul, will leave them untouched, strike them as a little monotonous, and seem altogether unnecessary. No reason to grope for eternal light if one doesn’t plunge through infinite abysses. No more metaphysical speculations, no more suggestions of the transcendental, no more wondering about the ultimate nature of reality and the constitution of the world. Such matters will not be worth anyone’s trouble when the brain’s receptors have been completely mapped and correlated with mood, guaranteeing good feeling.

Yet in the deepest recesses of their minds, the well-stupefied will sense they are missing out on something, and they will hold a grudging respect toward those who in an earlier era vaped nicotine. They will marvel at how the latter still needed to worry about what happened in life, and how life’s events dictated their degree of contentment. Those who once vaped nicotine will seem to the well-stupefied the way 19th-century pioneers seem to us: tough, resilient, engaged with the elements, impressive. And the well-stupefied will think privately, “Say what you want about those people who vaped, but they were human.”

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The Staying Power of Sartre’s No Exit

Jean-Paul Sartre was a rare specimen: Not only one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century, he also possessed real literary skill, with an uncommon ability to translate ideas into drama. No Exit, probably his most famous play, turns 75 this year and its claustrophobic vision of modern life and its discontents still resonates, long after existentialism ceased to be a hot topic among the chattering classes.

Written in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Paris, No Exit is understandably filled with an atmosphere of dread, with a pervading paranoia about the ways in which human beings take their private anguish and frustrations out on one another when there’s no other outlet available. For a nation that had just emerged from years of Nazi occupation and all the gruelingly routine humiliation, guilt, and moral anguish that came with it, this story about the psychological effects of confinement and guilty conscience must have felt painfully relevant. The play was a highly praised hit with the public, dealing in the same themes of paranoia and collective guilt taken up in other Sartre texts and classic French films of that era, such as Clouzot’s Le Corbeau and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer.

If No Exit has lasting value today, though, it’s partly because it resonates differently than it did in 1944—and offers surprising parallels to the way we live now.

The story concerns three very different people: a middle-aged male journalist named Joseph Garcin, and two women, a fairly butch lesbian named Ines Serrano and a young society lady named Estelle Rigault. Each are ushered in by a sullen valet one by one into a room designed in the opulent style of the Second Empire, a telling choice for a theatrical space that suggests subtle enclosure by impersonal luxury and grand ambitions. Each character understands that they are dead, and they assume that they are in hell, expecting the usual fire and brimstone. But as time wears on they gradually realize their predicament: Their eternal punishment will be to stew over the crimes that they don’t yet acknowledge that they have committed, either to themselves or to each other. As one character remarks, it turns out that they are to be their own torturers.

In the 1954 French film version, co-adapted by Sartre, the room is shown as a part of a larger hotel in the afterlife, and a group of people are busy being herded around the lobby while checking in at the front desk. The image of the afterlife as a sort of bureaucratic nightmare is a very modern conception—it’s not a rigidly ordered, Dantean universe of dramatic sights and sounds but a stultifying world of confusion and ennui, which reminds us of how truly secular the modern imagination has become (despite protests to the contrary).

Sartre’s staunch atheism puts this secularism front and center in No Exit, which bases its drama on the ways in which each character is forced to reckon with their deep-seated guilt and self-deceptions. Garcin initially presents himself as a hero for having died in the pacifist cause, boasting of 12 now-invisible bullet wounds. Estelle searches in vain for a mirror and assumes that there’s been some mistake. Ines is very no-nonsense about their individual motives and quite frank about her subversive sexuality. For a play written in the 1940s, it’s a bold move to make such a character so proudly assertive. Ines demands that everyone cut the bullshit and admit what they’ve done.

Ines brazenly explains that she seduced her cousin’s wife and was asphyxiated when the ashamed wife then left the gas on while they both slept. Ines makes no bones about her disdain for men and takes pride in her own selfishness and cruelty, which she believes is more honest than the preening pettiness of the other two. The Grande dame of French cinema, Arletty, plays her in the 1954 film with self-assured pride and a wicked eye for the vulnerabilities of others. There is more than a hint of the “homosexual villain” trope in Ines, but she is simultaneously the most powerful of the characters and the least self-deluded by far.

Given the plot’s forced constriction, it’s to Sartre’s credit as a writer that the drama keeps steadily building as each character is forced to admit that their preferred narratives are actually subtle methods to avoid confronting the reality of their actions. We discover that Garcin isn’t a martyr to a noble cause at all but was in fact shot as a deserter during the war. Estelle threw the unintentional result of an affair into the sea from a hotel balcony rather than admit its existence, which caused her lover to kill himself in grief. At different points, we see how Garcin’s wounded masculinity drives his need to be regarded as the principled tough guy, how Estelle’s denial about her own actions feeds into her desire to be desired by Garcin, and how Ines’s unrequited attraction to Estelle drives both of them crazy. Each character’s tangled motivations cause them to lash out at one another in various ways, which in turn makes them only more vulnerable as to how others will see them.

This is where Sartre’s existentialism comes to the forefront. Put simply, Sartre’s famous phrase “existence precedes essence” argues that the human condition is to exist in the world before you have a chance to make anything of yourself. One’s life is a constant battle to make choices within the vast possibilities of an indifferent universe, and precisely because of this radical freedom every choice is one that you must take ultimate responsibility for making—you’re “condemned to be free.” The characters in No Exit may be dead, but the tremendous burden of how to make sense of their lives hasn’t gone away. But, of course, if everybody’s existentially free their choices are going to inevitably bump up against those of others, and the inevitable judgment that results ultimately becomes an unbearable responsibility for all involved.

One of the notable changes in the film version is that instead of simply narrating as in the original, each character eventually pulls back the curtains and watches life go on without them through the empty window. They can’t help but futilely comment on the action and plead for the living to change their opinions about the deceased. In a sense, their lives are projected onto large screens, and the forced exposure puts their private lives out in public for all to see, much as the screens that dominate our daily life now create the opportunity for endless self-display.

In an age where being “judgmental” is frowned upon, where the mainstream culture encourages tolerance and acceptance as guiding virtues, it’s quite ironic how we’re all judging each other pretty much all the time. Of course, the media loves to attract eyeballs with headlines and photographs depicting the vulgarity of one group of people or another, whether they are faces twisted in outrage at a rally or anonymous trolls operating somewhere in the vast space of the internet. The constant need for self-display fostered by social media brings the image of the Other paradoxically closer and farther away, since you can gaze at as many images of other people’s lives as you want, but they’re all just abstracted images floating in cyberspace, easily disposable with a mere click.

Easily the most famous part of the play is the often-misunderstood line that Garcin murmurs towards the end: “Hell is other people.” This is not a fancy way of saying that people are annoying, but a concise way of pointing out that, like it or not, one’s own existence is inevitably defined in large part by others. As Proust (whom Sartre wrote critically about) suggests in the overture to Swann’s Way, “our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.”  Is there any more relevant way to explain both the tragedy and the allure of social media?

The idea of hell being other people surely had more bite when heard by an audience that had recently been smothered under Nazi occupation. But in today’s atomized world, it’s no less relevant. As Robert Putnam made famous, the social clubs and community institutions that were once the bedrock of our civil society have now faded dramatically, with the majority of people’s time spent in enclosed areas like cars, cubicles, and in front of screens. Wrapped in a cocoon of self-curated media, mini- speakers wedged in both ears, it becomes all too easy to ignore the outside world. The very technology that makes facile promises about promoting “connection” and “community” only make one’s experience of the outside world more myopic and disconnected.

The inevitable result is that an encounter with a new person will tend to be filled with more anxiety and apprehension than it probably should; other people’s strangeness becomes more immediately apparent right off the bat. When a new person appears in one’s carefully constructed space, it’s easy to notice their quirks and defects much faster—and much easier to assume the worst of others when they’re not specifically catering to you. One tends to buoy oneself from the constant inner chatter by pointing out the flaws in others, as if to prove that at least you’re not as bad as all those other weirdos.

It’s a dynamic that can now be seen in the structure of any sitcom. Think Seinfeld, with its small cast of characters who only hang out with each other while joking about other people’s foibles. There’s an atheistic, Sartrean quality to the “show about nothing”: None of the Seinfeld gang seems to care or believe in anything beyond their immediate surroundings, and the perpetual strangeness thereof. Their conversation is almost entirely focused on things like man hands, marble ryes, and soup Nazis. Part of the show’s genius is how it plays the character’s self-absorption for laughs, even as we might relate to their neuroses. It’s easy to imagine the gang yakking away within a Sartrean afterlife setting, eternally stuck at that diner or in Jerry’s apartment.

But then again, I don’t really have to imagine it—Sartre got there first. Recall that the final scene in the last episode of Seinfeld is of the four leads sitting in a jail cell, chatting away amiably to the end of time. Sartre’s ending to No Exit is a darker variation on the theme. By the play’s end the trio starts laughing uncontrollably at the sheer absurdity of their predicament, and then Garcin composes himself and fatalistically says “well then, let’s get on with it.”

At this point, the characters have spent the entire play inflicting emotional damage on each other, and they’ve only just begun. They have an eternity of passive aggression to look forward to. This is Sartre’s modern version of hell. If we alone are responsible for our life choices, but they inevitably end up as fodder to be scrutinized and judged by others, then we must all sort out our guilty consciences in front of one another. That is why, for Sartre, “hell is other people”—and it’s why No Exit still resonates more than 75 years later.

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Parliament Over Presidents

I’m a dual citizen of the United States, where I was born, and Canada, where I live. I vote and pay taxes in both jurisdictions, and admire both countries. For years, I have journalistically covered their disparate political systems and have come to prefer Canada’s parliamentary democracy for its efficiency, transparency, accountability, and resistance to corruption.

Of course, neither system is perfect. Untold volumes of comparative studies have been done by political scientists comparing and contrasting parliamentary and presidential democracies. And indeed, there are pronounced differences among parliamentary democracies themselves, at least in part the result of how the electoral systems—first past the post versus proportional representation—are set up. But it’s hard for me to be indifferent to the surface differences that face a citizen of two North American democracies: Canada’s transparency, efficiency and the ability to rid itself of dysfunctional leaders through snap elections is preferable to Washington’s endless, chronic gridlock.

Generally speaking, parliamentary democracies can be more efficient because the executive and legislative branches are fused and the Prime Minister is not only the country’s CEO but its chief legislator. America’s separation of powers, by contrast, has created an adversarial system that pits everyone against one another. If America were a corporation, its bylaws would partition the CEO from his executive and legislative teams and place them permanently at odds, often leaving shareholders in the lurch.

By contrast, a Prime Minister is not elected separately, like a President, but is simply another Member of Parliament who holds a seat representing a specific constituency. However, he or she has risen to become the leader of the political party that ends up winning the most seats in the House of Commons, or has formed a coalition with another party to create a majority. Prime Ministers recruit their cabinets from among their legislative team. As such, a Prime Minister is like a CEO, with support from his or her management team, who devises and passes policies and laws on behalf of his or her voters.

Furthermore, the parliamentary structure is self-purging. Prime Ministers and their parties serve at the pleasure of the public as long as they maintain control. If they lose their majority in a vote on an important issue, like a proposed annual budget, this is considered a non-confidence motion and an election ensues immediately. By contrast, Presidents and Congress rarely approve budgets, and battles or paralysis have led to multiple government shutdowns, two during Trump’s term including the longest in U.S. history (35 days).

Elections cull Canada’s political system of undesirable or ineffective leadership. But getting rid of a President, even if guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, is nearly impossible. The process involves an arduous impeachment inquiry and vote by the House of Representatives and then a trial in the Senate where two-thirds must approve removal. This near-unanimity threshold is difficult to achieve and the process takes months or years, during which time society is roiled, government is immobilized, misdeeds can continue, and rancor rises. This has occurred three times in two generations.

The American model is rooted in conflict and division whereas the Canadian one, due to the need to hold a majority together in order to govern, leads to consensus and compromise. This necessity results in disciplined, cohesive political parties whose members are forced to toe the party line or face expulsion from the caucus.

In the United States, the Democrats and Republicans are not parties in the parliamentary sense. They are coalitions of convenience for entrepreneurial politicians who seek party branding in order to get on ballots or to get financing. Once elected, they often end up representing competing or extremist agendas, regional interests, ideologies, and goals that vary from party platforms or from their party leader’s recommendations. This, in turn, opens up more fronts of political warfare: the Senate versus the House, the President versus one or both, and dozens of partisans against one another. And voters are often ignored in between elections.

Canada’s system is less prone to corruption because fundraising has been dramatically reduced in importance, since elections last only a few weeks. There is government funding for parties during elections in the form of a per-vote subsidy (based on the previous election results) and reimbursement of more than half of their election expenses. There are also strict advertising restrictions and campaign contribution limits imposed on individuals, unions, corporations, and special interest groups. This liberates candidates and their parties from burdensome fundraising, which, in turn, limits influences by outside interests.

Parties with majorities in Parliament must also remain aligned with public opinion. “In parliamentary systems, leaders cannot be dictators,” said former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada John Manley. “They need the support of their caucus and they can lose their confidence if a majority or key members of their own caucus threaten to defect unless they change course. Every Member of Parliament thinks first of his or her own re-election chances. They go home regularly and don’t need opinion polls to smell trouble. If the Prime Minister is unpopular, they know it and they thrash this out in caucus.”

Canada’s parliamentary system is also more transparent. A ritual known as Question Period takes place every day that Parliament sits, and is televised for 45 minutes from the chamber of the House of Commons. During this time, the Prime Minister and cabinet must answer questions from opposition Members of Parliament. These exchanges are also reproduced in transcripts, called Hansards, available the following day for public consumption along with the proceedings of parliamentary committees.

In the United States, public pronouncements are at the pleasure of the incumbent President. The first white House press conference was held by Woodrow Wilson in 1913, but since then have been intermittent. In the 1950s, the first press briefings were broadcasted, but in recent years the public and media have been kept at arm’s length for the most part. Access is often restricted to supportive outlets or commentators. More significantly, United States Presidents are never compelled to face and debate Presidential opponents while Congress is in session.

There has only been one President—the late Woodrow Wilson, a historian by training—who favored the parliamentary system to the presidential one. In 1885, before becoming President, he wrote Congressional Government, a Study in American Politics about the presidential system’s shortcomings. Of particular concern were the 47 Congressional committees run by chairs selected on the basis of seniority, who conduct meetings in private, and are thoroughly unaccountable. He said there were too many and described them as “seignories” run by “petty barons”. Today, there are 200 committees and sub-committees in Washington where the same secrecy rules, enabling backroom deals and influence-peddling. Transcripts of their proceedings are not even available to the press and public and should be.

Wilson suggested the creation of a “cabinet government” to fuse executive and legislative branches as is the case in parliamentary architecture. He believed that Presidents should be required to appoint key legislators, from both parties, to sit in their cabinets. This would alleviate the acrimony and enhance bipartisanship initiatives as well as cabinet ministers who could command votes to get legislation and budgets passed in a timely fashion.

Not surprisingly, Wilson was blocked from implementing his reforms during his Presidency 25 years later by the very impediments that he hoped to eliminate. But his observations remain valid. These flaws and inefficiencies in American democracy are part of the reason why most of the dozens of countries that have democratized in the past century have opted for a version of the parliamentary template.

To be fair, Canada’s system has flaws, too. Its Senate is largely stocked with political appointees, for example, and could probably be safely abolished. But overall, its system is designed to reach accommodation and compromise in an increasingly diverse and sprawling society.

The United States, by contrast, increasingly feels ungovernable. For a country that is otherwise first in class in most endeavors, it can be easy to fall into denial about this reality. Unfortunately, making substantial changes is probably not on the table. As TAI Chairman Francis Fukuyama noted several years ago in these pages as he wrestled with many of these same issues, “Americans regard their Constitution as a quasi-religious document. Persuading them to rethink its most basic tenets short of an outright system collapse is highly unlikely. So, we have a problem.”

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Why Canada Won’t Go Populist

Populism seems to be on the rise everywhere you look, from India and Hungary to the U.K. and the U.S. Everywhere, that is, except Canada. The Canadian federal election taking place in just a few days looks set to confirm this immunity, with the closest thing that Canada has to a populist party seemingly on course for an abysmal showing. Canada, the story goes, is a highly multicultural and diverse society, with a history of integrating new arrivals and the most highly educated population in the OECD. Its economy is heavily dependent on trade, has a relatively equal wealth distribution that supportsa relatively strong middle class—all of which supposedly keeps the dark forces of nationalism and xenophobia at bay.

One way of understanding those forces is as a manifestation of cultural “particularism”—movements that stand against the universalizing tendencies of liberalism. They are built on a shared sense of distinctiveness, and on the boundaries that enable them to make distinctions. Canada’s seeming immunity to such movements is often taken as proof that, as Justin Trudeau told the New York Times magazine in 2015, Canada is the world’s first “post-national state,” with “no core identity” or “mainstream. It is hard to imagine another western leader, even a self-proclaimed liberal champion like Emmanuel Macron, making such claims about their country, and yet Trudeau faced almost no blowback. Nor did Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian philosopher, when he said that Canada is “the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.”

What, then, makes Canada Canadian?

The political philosopher George Grant famously struggled with this question. In his Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965), Grant argued that Canada’s relationship with the United States has always been the defining fact of its national identity. Modern day Ontario was heavily settled by loyalist refugees that fled north after the American Revolution. These loyalists shaped the political culture of English Canada, and their rejection of the Revolution and the liberalism that undergirded it helped distinguish British North America from its colonial neighbor. One of the impetuses for the Revolution was the Quebec Act in 1774, which guaranteed religious freedom for French Catholics and restored civil law in Quebec, greatly angering anti-Catholic American colonists, who both feared and despised the existence of a French speaking Catholic colony in their backyard. A failed invasion of Quebec in 1775 ensured that the animus of anti-Catholic America also helped shape French Canadian political culture. The loyalists that fled and the French that repelled the American Revolutionaries provided the foundations for what would become a distinctively British North American, and eventually Canadian, identity. 

As Grant suggests, this attempt to distinguish British North America from the United States also meant an attempt to distinguish it from Lockean liberalism. While not denying that Anglo liberalism was Lockean on both sides of the Atlantic, Grant made clear Canada’s attempt to distinguish itself from America elevated pre-liberal and non-liberal traditions in Canada’s identity:  

If Lockean liberalism is the conservatism of the English-speaking peoples, what was there in British conservatism that was not present in the bourgeois thought of Hamilton and Madison? If there was nothing, then the acts of the Loyalists are deprived of all moral substance. Many of the American Tories were Anglicans and knew well that in opposing the revolution they were opposing Locke. They appealed to the older political philosophy of Richard Hooker. They were not, as liberal Canadian historians have often described them, a mixture of selfish and unfortunate men who chose the wrong side. If there was nothing valuable in the founders of English-speaking Canada, what makes it valuable for Canadians to continue as a nation today?

Both English and French Canada, despite their differences, agreed that they were not, and did not want to become, Americans. Around this opposition formed a not quite liberal identity that became distinctly Canadian. Scholars have debated whether this influence was Tory, repbulican, communitarian, or something else, but the key is that Canada’s origins and founding myths were not solely liberal. 

Grant’s “lament” was that this distinctive identity was being eroded, in part because of the decline of Canadian Protestantism. The death of these foundations destroyed whatever it was that allowed Canada to distinguish itself from the United States, which would lead to Canada being absorbed into the American liberal regime, not just culturally but politically. For all intents and purposes, it would cease to exist. 

But while Grant was right about the death of this part-liberal, part-Toryist identity, his prediction of Canada’s complete absorption into the United States has proved less accurate. Though a distinctive Canadian identity may have disappeared, Canadian insistence on not being American remains a powerful and unifying force. But in this effort to distinguish itself from America, what it means to be “not American” has changed. In the same interview where he lauded Canada’s post-national character, Trudeau also claimed that, while there is no core identity, “there are shared values—openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice.” Here, the Prime Minister was echoing his father, Pierre Trudeau, who said in his Memoirs that “with the charter [Canada’s constitutionally enshrined bill of rights] in place, we can now say that Canada is a society where all people are equal and where they share some fundamental values based on freedom. The search for this Canadian identity, as much as my philosophical views, had led me to insist on the charter.” 

Pierre Trudeau’s search for a Canadian identity shows how by the late 20th century Canada’s previous identity had been extinguished. But in its place Trudeau sought to create new, fundamentally liberal identity. What made this liberal, universalistic identity different from American liberalism was not that it was less liberal than America, but rather more. In its effort to remain distinct, Canadian nationalism became wholly intertwined with liberalism, and the homogenizing universalism that undergirds it. Paradoxically, to be Canadian was to consciously embrace a complete lack of distinctiveness as its own form of distinctiveness. 

This is what distinguishes Canada from “backwards”, less enlightened America today. To be Canadian now is to utterly reject whatever is understood as American illiberalism, which means embracing things like public heathcare, peacekeeping, abortion, and multiculturalism. The values that undergird this liberal identity are buzzwords such as openness, equality, and justice.

The contemporary Canadian political order, and the one that has entrenched this hollow universalism at the heart of Canada’s modern identity, did not evolve by accident. It was consciously constructed by Pierre Trudeau in an attempt to remake Canada in a wholly liberal image. The charter instantly became more than a written crystallization of Canadian liberalism; it shredded the old Canadian political order that was built as a replica of the Westminster system, with its emphasis on parliamentary supremacy. Upon its enshrinement the charter rapidly defenestrated parliament and supplanted it with an aggressive form of judicial supremacy in which important and contentious issues were removed from democratic debate and transferred to the courts. This judicial usurpation has helped de-politicize Canada through a rapidly expanding empire of rights that now holds near-hegemonic status over political discourse. Canada’s judicial (and political) class are for the most part wholly committed to this project. The empire of rights has expanded beyond those initially set out in the charter and towards a form of judicial interpretation based on “charter values,” in which judicial philosopher kings deem as rights an ever-larger list of liberal orthodoxies. 

This depoliticized regime nicely complements Canada’s attempt to disguise an indistinct liberalism as nationalism. The things that make Canada “Canadian” are things that make it indistinguishable from other liberal polities; the only distinctive aspect of this new universalist identity is that it embraces universalism as its central, defining tenet. But the anti-American flavor of the real-world manifestations of this universalism still allows it to operate like a functioning form of nationalism, even if it lacks true distinctiveness. This helps explain why Canada has seen no real particularist backlash. Because Canada’s purported particularism is a form of universalism, there is no clear particularist force around which a backlash can build. To react against liberal universalism is to react against Canada itself. 

But this does not mean a backlash of some sort is not possible. At the national level, Canada has evolved into a post-national, post-political country, but this is not true at the local and regional level. While most non-Canadians generally think of Canada as being divided into English Canada and French Canada, with English Canada being a homogeneous group, this does not reflect the realities of local and regional identities within Canada. Quebec is the most obvious of these, and in fact Canada’s constitutional debates in the late 20th century were often centred around whether or not Quebec should be formally and explicitly recognized as a “distinct society” within Canada. Historically, Quebec’s distinctiveness was rooted not just in its French, but also its Catholic identity. After the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, the Catholic core of this identity began to change, but did not disappear, and Quebec’s contemporary identity is centred not only on language and culture, but also an attempt to imitate French-style secularism while at the same time preserving Quebec’s Catholic culture as a dead but important part of its heritage. 

Grant admired French Canada’s sense of distinctiveness, even as it was changing and secularizing, and once referred to French-Canadian nationalism as a “last-ditch stand” against the inevitable anglo-American absorption of both English and French Canada. Similarly, despite his serious Catholicism and his admiration for the disappearing conservative and Catholic Quebec, McLuhan saw the Quiet Revolution and the changes it brought as a reaction against the industrialism and individualism of the print age, and an embrace of the re-tribalization of the world that would be brought about in the digital age, saying that “the desire to break away from the industrial community . . . has been felt by all our young people today. . . . French Canada is going through something like that on a big scale.”

But Quebec isn’t the only part of Canada that has a distinct sense of itself. Partly as a response to the liberal nation-building project that Pierre Trudeau embarked on, Western Canada began to develop its own identity, one that was built on a deep sense of frustration with and alienation from the perceived domination of Canada by Ontario and Quebec. Alberta has begun to develop its own bizarre form of “petro-nationalism,” closely connected to its oil resources and fuelled by political grievances over stalled and failed attempts to build new pipelines and energy infrastructure. Newfoundland, which only joined Canada in 1949, has a long and rich cultural history connected primarily to Irish, not English, culture and history. Most of the contemporary inhabitants of the island are descended from Irish immigrants, and this unique Newfoundland identity and culture has only gotten stronger since 1949. While traditional, Irish-influenced culture is deeply embedded across Newfoundland, the sense of a unified Newfoundland identity is a more recent development, one aided both by a broader cultural renaissance and the relative economic weakness of Newfoundland when compared to the rest of Canada. Just as Newfoundland’s sense of its own distinctiveness is a relatively new phenomena, other forms of local particularism are coalescing as well. 

It isn’t a coincidence that these identities have grown in tandem with the emergence of Canada’s hollow and universalistic national identity. As the national community ceases to be a source of rich and distinctive attachments, local attachments will naturally become more important. Particularist backlashes in Canada, then, won’t be national movements. They will manifest instead as local backlashes against liberal universalism—which is to say, against Canada’s national culture. 

These local identities are not necessarily incompatible with a thin nationalism that leaves room for diverse communities to flourish. Canada’s constitutional structure has produced a relatively decentralized federal system in which Canadian provinces are given a relatively high degree of autonomy, but that does not mean there is no conflict on the horizon. 

While Canadian federalism on its own might allow for a relatively cohesive, decentralized system, the charter regime that has been imposed on top of this structure is an expansive force. As the empire of rights has grown, many of the charter’s basic principles have been reinterpreted so as to legitimate and impose progressive orthodoxy. While the charter regime includes explicit recognition of Canada’s linguistic and cultural diversity by protecting things like language rights, the judiciary has shown itself to be incapable of tolerating diversity that deviates from liberal norms, and conflict along these fault lines has already begun.

In 2018 Quebec elected the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) for the first time in its history, breaking the dominance of the Quebec Liberal Party and the Parti Quebecois. The CAQ has passed a secularism law that bans some public servants from wearing religious symbols, plans to cut immigration numbers, and wants to impose a values test on new migrants. Premier François Legault has explicitly said that he wants more immigrants to come from Europe. The government has also said it plans to transfer the control of some anglophone schools over to francophone boards—all moves very popular with French-speakers outside of Montreal. The secularism bill is already being challenged in the courts, but Legault has threatened to invoke the “notwithstanding clause,” a section of the charter that allows governments to overturn a court ruling for a limited period of time. (The clause was included theoretically to preserve parliamentary supremacy, but it is rarely used and only applies to certain sections of the charter.) While federal politicians and defenders of the charter regime like Trudeau have been rather muted in their reaction to the law, the return of particularist nationalism to Quebec politics does not appear to be a temporary aberration. The federal election has seen a sudden revival of the separatist Bloc Quebecois party, that seemed until recently to be in terminal decline, but this revival makes sense when understood as a manifestation of this localistic particularism. CAQ is not a separatist party, but it is explicitly committed to defending Quebec’s autonomy and heritage. While the charter regime protects language rights, it remains to be seen whether this will cover more overtly illiberal attempts to preserve distinctiveness. 

But the most palpable fragmentation today is in Western Canada, not Quebec. Pierre Trudeau’s post-national project led to a widespread feeling in the west that Trudeau had attempted to appease Quebec at their expense. Federal transfer programs and energy policy moved wealth from west to east, bilingualism felt like an imposition in places where francophones were a tiny minority, and incessant constitutional debates about Quebec as a distinct society turned Quebec into a favorite and spoiled child. This alienation produced a political party, the Reform Party, that destroyed the old Progressive Conservative Party and eventually brought forth a new Conservative Party that empowered the west. But now alienation has reappeared once more, motivated by much the same issues.

The election of another Trudeau has rekindled old tensions, and even led to whispers and more than a few newspaper columns openly talking about Western separatism. While this is not a serious proposal at the moment, long term trends do not suggest the movement will disappear. A recent Environics Institute survey found that the proportion of Canadians who said their province or region is important to their identity rose from 69 percent to 77 percent between 2003 and 2018. The survey also found that, for the first time in Alberta and Saskatchewan, a majority now agree with the proposition that “Western Canada gets so few benefits from being part of Canada that they might as well go it on their own.” Alberta’s new Conservative Premier, Jason Kenney, won a big majority this year by wedding conventional Albertan conservatism with an appeal to “petro-patriotism,” promising to hold a referendum on Canada’s system of federal transfers if there is no major progress on pipeline expansion by 2021. This referendum would have no legal power, given that the transfers are constitutionally guaranteed, but it would stoke tensions between Alberta and Canada over issues that have been removed from the political realm. 

In New Brunswick, the populist People’s Alliance Party won 13 percent of the popular vote and three seats in the provincial legislature in 2018, giving them the balance of power in a hung parliament. While the party has campaigned on a variety of idiosyncratic issues, its real appeal has been its attacks on the province’s language policies. New Brunswick is Canada’s only officially bilingual province, with roughly one-third of its population being francophones. This has caused tensions over the years with New Brunswick’s anglophone majority, primarily over the bilingual requirements for public service jobs and the cost of having separate services in both English and French. The People’s Alliance promised what they called “common sense” language policies, which would include scrapping the province’s official language commissioner, ending the bilingual requirement for paramedics, and getting rid of separate school buses for English and French students. 

Although New Brunswick voted to become officially bilingual, people disagree about what this means. Some see bilingualism as requiring “duality,” whereby services and programs are duplicated across the board regardless of actual demographics, while skeptics would prefer a model that provides French services only in French-speaking areas. Official bilingualism is constitutionally protected, and very few people are opposed to bilingualism itself, even if anti-bilingual politics are often built upon anti-francophone sentiment. The contentious issue is where the boundaries should be drawn. New Brunswickers have a constitutional right to be served by the government in English or French, and the charter guarantees separate educational institutions for French and English, resulting in two separate school boards. But does that extend to areas like school buses? Here as elsewhere, the courts will get to decide what are ultimately political questions—thus the “common sense” backlash that undergirds parties like the People’s Alliance.

Weak national attachments, strong regional ties, and growing inter-regional resentments all point to a future in which fragmentation is a real possibility. The merging of liberal principles with national values has inoculated Canada against the sort of nationalist populism springing up across the West. But it has also created an opening for local attachments to grow more politically salient. If citizens are forced to choose between them and (liberal) nationalism, chances are they will choose the former.

While Grant feared the disappearance of Canada via absorption, his fears have not yet come to pass. Canadian anti-Americanism is still an important part of national identity, even if this anti-Americanism is now tied to a hyper-liberal understanding of what makes Canada different. But that difference is essentially the absence of distinctiveness—which means Canadian nationalism is no match for its sub-national challengers. Fragmentation and balkanization loom large on the horizon, and Grant’s prediction of Canada’s disappearance may yet come to pass, just not in the form he expected. 

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The Geopolitical Stakes in Iraq

When President Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal from northeast Syria, he was abandoning the Kurdish forces that have fought at our side against ISIS to Turkey and setting the stage for the possible resurgence of an ISIS 2.0. Leaving aside the moral and humanitarian dimensions of the decision, subsequent developments have shown it to have been recklessly rash. It was a disaster that signaled to all our adversaries and allies that the world’s sole superpower is both profoundly unreliable and irresponsibly erratic. Perhaps worst of all, it was incoherent from the Trump Administration’s own strategic premises outlined in the 2017 National Security Strategy. Great power competition was supposed to be the order of the day, and yet the moves in Syria were clearly ceding ground to both Russia and Iran.

Lost in the general uproar is a consideration of the particular knock-on effects of Trump’s decision. Iraq serves as a good case study. Despite Trump’s talk of withdrawal from the Middle East as a whole, the U.S. remains engaged in that country for the immediate future. Indeed, a number of American troops will reportedly reposition from Syria into Iraq, with the U.S. likely to continue supporting counter-terrorism efforts in Baghdad. And though American commitment to the country—and more broadly to the Middle East—is ever more ambiguous for the long term given recent events, it’s worth examining the geopolitical stakes in Iraq, especially with regards to Russia, to understand more clearly how they are being jeopardized by Trump’s recent move.

There are soft and hard power components to Russia’s strategy in Iraq, and they have been having a measurable effect for some time now.

The Kremlin is making deals and forging relationships in the country’s energy industry, security infrastructure, media landscape, and government. “We are very interested in increasing our trade, economic and investment ties,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in January 2019 when he hosted his Iraqi counterpart Mohamed Ali al-Hakim in Moscow. Iraqi Ambassador to Russia Haidar Mansour Hadi said Lavrov’s visit to Iraq shows not only interest in developing better relations with Iraq but also “in the settlement of the situation in the region.”  During his most recent trip to Baghdad and Irbil this month, Lavrov said that Russia and Iraq have the same position on Syria.

Russia’s total investment in Iraq’s energy industry has exceeded $10 billion, a result of years of Kremlin efforts to return to Iraq after the 2003 war, when the new government in Baghdad cancelled many Saddam Hussein- era energy contracts with Russia. In February 2008, Moscow wrote off the bulk of Iraq’s Soviet-era $12.9 billion of debt in exchange for a $4 billion oil deal that included access to West Qurna-2, one of the world’s largest oil fields.

Lukoil and Gazprom Neft entered the Iraqi Kurdistan energy market in 2012 and subsequently won a number of contracts. Three years later, as American energy companies began to decrease their presence in part due to security concerns, the Kurdistan Regional government (KRG) invited more Russian firms. Russian energy giant Rosneft, sanctioned by the United States in 2014, signed oil contracts with both the Iraqi government and the KRG. Moscow also fronted the KRG a $3.5 billion loan, to be repaid to Rosneft with oil in the future. The payment threw the KRG a financial lifeline when it was struggling, and provided it with a degree of leverage vis-à-vis Baghdad, which wants control of the KRG oil sales but now has to deal with Rosneft on this issue. Moreover, Rosneft bought a majority stake in the KRG oil pipeline to Turkey and agreed to construct a parallel gas pipeline. For Moscow, energy is largely a foreign policy tool, and control of a pipeline holds long-term strategic implications not only for in the KRG and Baghdad but also for Turkey.

In October 2013, Moscow began arms deliveries to Iraq as part of a $4.2 billion arms deal, revived after Iraq withdrew from it the year before due to corruption allegations. In early 2014, Washington delayed the delivery of F-16 fighter planes and Apache helicopters to Iraq in part because Congress stalled and in part because the lengthy bureaucratic process of the program could not be synchronized with the immediate situation on the ground. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi appealed to Putin, who quickly provided 12 fighter jets to Baghdad, and without any restrictions at that. The first batch of F-16s ultimately arrived in July 2015, and more followed over the years. More to the point, however, in early 2014 the Iraqis also needed U.S. airstrikes against ISIS, which the White House delayed until August of the same year. In my conversations in Baghdad last month, Iraqis still remember the speed with which Russian weaponry came at a time when they needed it the most. Moscow’s quick arms delivery helped shape a perception of Putin as someone who helped Iraq fight the Islamic State.

In October 2015, days after Moscow announced its Syria intervention, a new intelligence sharing center opened in Baghdad, staffed with Russian, Iranian, and Syrian personnel, with participation of Hezbollah, and aimed to provide intelligence for air strikes targeting ISIS fighters. In reality, the center achieved nothing in this regard but instead succeeded at establishing a legitimate reason for Moscow to maintain an intelligence presence in Iraq.

Moscow hardly appears as the dominant actor in Iraq but it cultivated a perception of someone that, unlike the U.S., doesn’t overpromise—and when it does promise something, that it delivers. Since December 2018, plans are on the way to reopen the Iraqi-Russian culture center in Baghdad, which Moscow closed in 2003.  RT Arabic contributes to shaping a positive image of the Kremlin and Iraqis perceive the outlet as a legitimate source of information. Among RT Arabic’s claims is that Russia consistently fought ISIS. Moscow also cultivates an image of a country that cares about human rights by repatriating children of Russian citizens who joined ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government suspended the U.S.-funded Al-Hurra Iraq after it broadcast corruption allegations surrounding the clergy.

Moscow provides Iraqi university students with a small number of scholarships to study in Russia and Lavrov observed that “dozens of diplomats from Iraq take part in special training courses at the Diplomatic Academy at the Russian Foreign Ministry.” Iraqi Higher Education Minister Qusay Al-Suhail signed a memorandum of understanding in September to increase Russian scholarships to Iraqis and to expand cooperation more broadly. Overall, Iraqis tend to prefer to study to in the West, but high costs and bureaucratic hurdles often get in the way. Moreover, many senior Iraqi officers in the military who had experience in pre-2003 Iraq had Soviet training, unlike the younger generation that has primarily worked with the United States.

Moscow faces competition in Iraq from Iran, but the Russians tend to try to cooperate with Iran rather than working at cross-purposes. Anti-Americanism and a joint opposition to American influence in the Middle East has united the two countries for years, but the two countries haven’t been quite this aligned for centuries, with the war in Syria, in particular, lifting the partnership to unprecedented heights.

Baghdad is also expanding outreach to China as part of a broader effort to finance reconstruction. And as Beijing’s appetite for energy continues to grow, it will increasingly set its sights on the Middle East. As far as top-line figures, Russia’s $1.7 billion in bilateral trade with Iraq is dwarfed by the $30 billion of business Baghdad does with Beijing. Still, when it comes to security and energy development, Iraq turns to Moscow rather than Beijing.

For many Americans, there is a profound sense of Iraq fatigue. What most don’t recognize is that despite the country’s troubles, some hard-won freedoms have taken hold since the fall of Saddam, a brutal dictator who openly admired Joseph Stalin. Iraq faces many daunting challenges, but Iraqis are unafraid to ask their government tough questions in public forums, something I witnessed firsthand on my recent trip. It is difficult to find this anywhere in the broader Middle East, other than in Israel and perhaps Tunisia. In another positive development, polls show that sectarianism in Iraq has declined in recent years, with more and more citizens identifying themselves as Iraqi first.

President Trump’s announced withdrawal inflicts enormous damage to American credibility in the broader Middle East, but the United States still can—and should—engage in Iraq. It should do so not only to ensure security and counter Iranian influence (which still supposedly matters to the White House), but also that of Russia, one of the rising competitors identified in the National Security Strategy.

The lift will not be easy, but if the United States continues to de-prioritize Iraq, it will surely be lost to the rising authoritarian tide sweeping the region. And above all, we should remember the truism that what happens in the Middle East rarely stays in the Middle East…

The post The Geopolitical Stakes in Iraq appeared first on The American Interest.

Azerbaijan: Reform Behind a Static Façade

A wave of political dynamism is passing through Central Asia and the Caucasus. Under new leadership since 2016, Uzbekistan has embarked on a major effort to reform and modernize. Armenia’s former President’s attempt to cling to power launched a Velvet Revolution in 2018 and ushered in a new administration explicitly committed to tackling the country’s oligarchic system. Kazakhstan, whose first President engineered a managed succession to a long-term confidant, continues on its path to reform the economy, while pledging a more inclusive political atmosphere.

Less well covered in the Western press are the changes currently underway in Azerbaijan. These shifts have not been the result of a popular revolution, and they are not a result of top-level change: Strongman President Ilham Aliyev remains firmly in charge and could likely even see his rule strengthened by the reforms. The process that is underway should not be confused with political liberalization. Still, the changes afoot do have major ramifications for the future of the country. A long overdue generational change is taking place in Azerbaijan’s political system, accompanied by what appears to be a serious effort to wean the country off its dependence on oil and to make its state institutions more responsive to the population’s needs. In other words, Azerbaijan is undergoing a classic example of authoritarian modernization.

This raises several questions. Are the reforms real, and could they usher in change that matters? Why are these reforms taking place now? And why does all of this matter to the United States?

Take the last question first: Azerbaijan matters to the United States because of its crucial geopolitical location and its particular national affinities. It is a Shi‘a-majority country on Iran’s northern border that  has a largely pro-Western population and a secular state with a close relationship to Israel. Azerbaijan is the only country that borders Iran, Turkey, and Russia. It is key to the development of a land transportation route linking Europe with China through Central Asia. More than that, Azerbaijan’s efforts to build pipelines to market its oil and gas resources to European markets have succeeded in building a beachhead that could help reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian gas.

The U.S.-Azerbaijan strategic relationship is therefore much more important than Azerbaijan’s size would suggest. It has a direct bearing on American policies with regard to Iran, Turkey, Russia, and even China. And given that the Trump Administration appears to be rethinking the U.S. strategic posture in Eurasia to confront China, Azerbaijan’s turn to a reform agenda comes at a propitious time.

The current reform effort dates to the 2015 slump in oil prices, but Azerbaijan had seen reforms before then. The success stories, however, almost exclusively involved the creation of new institutions under executive supervision rather than reform of existing ones. The State Oil Fund was established in 2001 on the Norwegian model, for instance, and is widely considered transparent and professionally run, audited by international companies on a regular basis.

In 2012, Azerbaijan launched the Azerbaijani Service and Assessment Network (ASAN) model of single-window, electronic provision of public services ranging from birth certificates and driving licenses to real estate documents. ASAN eliminated the proverbial middleman, thus reducing interaction between citizens and public servants and decreasing the petty corruption that had plagued the country’s public service provision. ASAN remains massively popular, and has been praised by the OECD for “eliminating the conditions that are conducive to corruption” in the provision of public services. But this type of reform could only go so far without infringing on the powerful informal networks that dominate Azerbaijan’s economy and administration. President Aliyev was visibly reluctant to confront these networks, which had been in place long before his presidency began in 2003.

By 2015, however, President Aliyev appeared to do just that. As several senior officials relate privately, Aliyev let the country’s “oligarchs” know that business as usual could not go on. They were told to stop deriving revenue from unfair competition or the extraction of rents through systematic corruption, and to stop the predatory behavior that had been prevalent in large parts of the state bureaucracy. Since then, Aliyev has made more personnel changes in three years than in the first 12 years of his presidency. And he has sent such signals publicly, too: on October 16, Aliyev blasted members of the government who “blackmail others, denigrate them, and cast a shadow over the reforms.” He went on: “There is no alternative to reforms. . . .Whoever is against this and is stealthily trying to interfere with our work, is not with us.”

Ilham Aliyev is himself the son of Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s Soviet-era strongman, who returned to power a year after the country became independent and ruled until his death in 2003. He has presided over a system of government that has been widely criticized for its authoritarian inclinations and widespread corruption. So why this sudden interest in reforms?

Grasping the rationale requires a short dive into Azerbaijan’s murky politics. The country’s political system emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union and was coupled with a debilitating war with Armenia. Amid considerable domestic political turmoil, Azerbaijan lost over a sixth of its territory. The country was essentially a failed state, and in this void a political system emerged where formal and real power were very different things. While Azerbaijan has a highly centralized presidential form of government on paper, the anarchy and war economy of the early 1990s led to the emergence of independent power-brokers—known, as in Russia, as oligarchs—who established quasi-monopolies over sectors of the economy as well as various state institutions. Heydar Aliyev capitalized on his Soviet-era experience and political acumen to stabilize the country and put it on the road to recovery. But he ailed before mustering the power to deal with these oligarchs.

When Ilham Aliyev took over the presidency in 2003, the constitution granted him enormous formal powers. But in reality, the cake had already been baked: he had to deal with the considerable informal power of the oligarchs, many of whom were 20 years his senior and hardly appeared to consider him their uncontested leader. In fact, some sought to capitalize on the transition to a younger President to expand their influence.

While these oligarchs posed a challenge to Aliyev’s rule, a confrontation was avoided because of the enormous windfall oil revenues that started flowing into the country in 2005. There was simply enough money to keep almost everyone happy: Aliyev could build his popularity by presiding over record economic growth, which reduced poverty rates to under 5 percent and allowed tens of thousands to build a middle-class life. In the meantime, his family also managed to build an informal power base of its own to rival that of the oligarchs. But windfall revenues have never generated any urgency for structural reform anywhere. While they did bring positive results in large infrastructure projects and poverty reduction, they also allowed the government to co-opt both political rivals and the opposition, and splurge on vanity projects such as giant flagpoles, European Games, and Formula One races. They also had a less pleasant side, as a variety of real or self-styled Azerbaijani potentates engaged in financial shenanigans at home and abroad, some of which continue to reverberate in the Western media.

The 2014 oil price drop upended this state of affairs. Suddenly, the expansion of Azerbaijan’s budget became unsustainable and in 2015, the government’s efforts to defend the currency collapsed, leading to a devaluation of the currency by half. Prices shot up, people could no longer service mortgages denominated in dollars, and the country’s banks experienced serious liquidity problems. The government managed to rescue the economy by dipping into the country’s oil fund and taking on considerable debt. But the crisis led the country’s implicit social contract to take a hit: the population had largely supported Aliyev’s rule in exchange for political stability and economic prosperity. Now, the government’s ability to keep its part of the bargain was in question.

The chaos in the neighborhood provided some respite, as very few Azerbaijanis wanted to take the risk of sparking upheavals that could turn the country into a Syria or Ukraine. Still, President Aliyev needed to restore the legitimacy of his government’s stewardship of the economy. Interviews with dozens of Azerbaijani officials in the past five years make it clear the leadership realized that it could not just wait for oil prices to rise again. Diversification of the economy had now become a necessity. The problem? Improving the country’s attractiveness to foreign investment required fundamental changes to the country’s informal politics, especially the de facto monopolies that various oligarchs had built. For example, an obvious way to diversify the economy was to take a role in Chinese and European plans to develop the land transportation corridor connecting Europe and Asia. But the level of corruption in the Ministry of Transportation made Azerbaijan the bottleneck of the corridor. Similarly, foreign investment would not come as long as the Customs authority charged onerous fees, both formal and informal, to move anything in and out of the country.

For a decade, President Aliyev had largely avoided confrontation with the oligarchs surrounding him. Now, his government’s success, and possibly its survival, required that confrontation.

The oligarchs reacted differently to the new rules of the road. Some complied: the powerful Ministry of Emergency Situations, for example, appears to have cleaned up much of the corruption in its ranks. Others, however, failed to read the writing on the wall. The Ministry of Transportation, whose leadership had been implicated in a variety of scandals involving foreign partners like Bombardier and the Trump Organization, was one such entity. The Minister was fired in 2017, and the Ministry itself abolished the following year and merged with IT & Telecommunications. Of course, this does not mean all high officials implicated in shady deals have been purged. For example, the head of the Anti-Corruption department in the Prosecutor General’s Office, who was implicated in a financial fraud scheme in 2017, was promoted to head of the state security services this June.

President Aliyev’s approach has always been, where possible, to create new institutions rather than overhauling old ones. He used this approach to deal with the entrenched bureaucratic holdovers dating back to the Soviet system that dominated the bureaucracy, including the octogenarian Head of the President’s Administration, and the septuagenarian Minister of Interior. Aliyev therefore introduced the institution of a First Vice President through constitutional amendment in 2016, and appointed his wife, First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva, to this position. Mrs. Aliyeva, whose family has considerable business interests of its own, had taken on an increasingly prominent role in Azerbaijani politics. She has chaired the Heydar Aliyev Foundation since 2004, and has been a Member of Parliament since 2005.

Western observers found this appointment unorthodox, if not downright corrupt. But seen in a more charitable light, the appointment served to supersede alternative centers of powers and create a focal body for the coordination of reform policy. In the three years that followed, the First Vice President’s office has distinctively emerged as the initiator and flag-bearer of reforms, first in the economic sphere and increasingly also in judicial matters.

The process gathered speed following President Aliyev’s re-election in 2018—a foreordained result that nonetheless brought a major government reshuffle. Across the board, a younger generation was promoted to ministerial positions. The 39-year old deputy Minister of Economy Sahil Babayev was appointed Minister of Labor. Inam Karimov, who holds a doctorate from Paris’s Sorbonne University and spearheaded the ASAN service centers, was promoted to Minister of Agriculture. Vusal Huseynov, a Harvard graduate, now leads Migration Services, a job with key importance to foreign investors. Even before the election, 42-year-old Mikayil Jabbarov, a member of the New York bar who had been appointed Minister of Education in 2013, was moved to the key position of Minister of Taxation. All in all, 13 of the cabinet’s members are now under the age of 50; the average age is 54. The portion of cabinet members with any adult experience of the Soviet Union is rapidly dwindling.

The generational shift in Azerbaijan’s government, then, is clear—and it’s been accompanied by some real steps to reform the country’s institutions.

In 2016, the Presidential Administration hired McKinsey to develop a road map for reforms. The report it produced outlined 11 areas for the development of the non-oil sector, including agriculture, light industry, tourism, and transport. But the report was not developed in meaningful coordination with existing government agencies, weakening its impact. Since late 2017, however, the office of First Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva has coordinated a new drive for reform, targeting the structural problems in the economy and legal system much more directly.

The most serious changes have been implemented in the customs and taxation fields. The long-serving head of the customs committee was fired in 2018, leading to rapid changes. There is now a transparent, electronic customs declaration process, and duties now go directly to the government budget, rather than through the intermediary of the Customs Committee. This means that businesses are, for the first time, able to import and export at will, as long as they pay proper taxes and duties—effectively doing away with the system that enabled influential forces to maintain effective monopolies over entire sectors of the economy by denying rivals a level regulatory playing field.

Meanwhile, the government has begun to target the judicial sector. In April 2019, President Aliyev signed a decree on judicial reforms, which can be termed a warning to the courts: he explicitly urged judges to exercise their profession fairly, and demanded the implementation of concrete reforms to address corruption in the legal system. The document is explicit in identifying the problems in the system, including the lack of transparency and inconsistencies between judgments on similar cases, and specifically seeks to remedy the impediments for businesses. Thus, the decree calls for the oral recording of all court proceedings and the publication of transcripts, a more transparent and randomized system of assigning judges to cases to prevent corruption, the full development of an electronic database of judgments, and stronger measures to prevent interference in judicial affairs and to punish judges for violations of their code of ethics. The decree also called for setting up specialized courts to handle tax and customs matters, and an expansion of the number of judges in the country.

The light industry sector is being developed by way of industrial parks managed by the Ministry of Economy. The city of Sumgait near Baku boasts two: a Chemical Industrial Park as well as a Technologies Park, which involves the production of cables, polymer pipes, and galvanized metal. At the Mingachavir Industrial Park in western Azerbaijan, the focus so far has been on cotton, wool and leather products; whereas Masalli in the south is preoccupied with textiles. The Special Economic Zone at the new Baku port of Alat, run by a young, American-trained professional, should be added to the list. The SEZ was approved by parliament in May 2018, will operate under British law, and all business in the zone is exempt of taxes and duties. Common to these new initiatives are incentives for foreign investors, including a seven-year tax-free regime, as well as waivers on duties for the importation of equipment. Azerbaijan has begun producing automobiles and light trucks and tractors in cooperation with foreign partners, primarily from Iran, China, and Belarus.

The government has created a standalone tourism agency, separated from the Ministry of Culture, to which tourism issues were previously subordinated. Key to the development of tourism is the simplification of visa procedures, which were notoriously complicated. Azerbaijan’s electronic visa, now managed through the ASAN system, has been rated the easiest visa in the world to obtain, and citizens of China, South Korea and several Gulf states can receive a visa on arrival. This has led to a significant increase in tourism: Azerbaijan saw 2.6 million visitors in 2017 compared to one million in 2008. The number is expected to exceed three million in 2019. Much of this tourism originates in the Gulf states: Baku, with its cosmopolitan atmosphere and vivid cultural scene, appears to be turning into a breathing space for upper middle-class Gulf Arabs, similar to the role Beirut held before the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. But as a result of active government efforts, tourists from South Asia, among others, are now common on the streets of Baku.

In terms of transportation, Azerbaijan’s plan is to establish the country as the hub of two transport corridors: the East-West corridor promoted by the EU and China, as well as the North-South corridor linking Russia with Iran and India. Key in this regard is the port of Alat near Baku, with its Special Economic Zone. Alat Port feeds into the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars pipeline, inaugurated in October 2017. As a result, cargo arriving to Alat from Russia, Central Asia or Iran can rapidly be shipped on toward European destinations by rail. Moreover, because container trains can be transported to Alat by rail ferry from ports in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, Alat enables container traffic from China to seamlessly continue on toward European destinations. The port will have a cargo transshipment capacity of 25 million tons.  The transportation route, and Azerbaijan’s role in it, holds enormous potential. But the challenges are considerable, as the question whether it can compete with sea and air routes remains to be answered.

These reforms led the World Bank to bump Azerbaijan from 57th place in its “Ease of Doing Business” index in 2018 to 25th place in 2019. The Bank particularly highlighted the ease of starting a business, the one-stop shop system for construction permits, property registration, and the institution of electronic and transparent systems both for paying taxes and benefits, as well as for customs procedures. More reforms are in the pipeline: Azerbaijan is now expanding the use of a “Green Corridor” for customs, in which goods are released immediately without examination to compliant business deemed low-risk. Azerbaijan also removed income taxes for incomes up to $5,000 in the non-oil sector, and is reforming the migration service to facilitate the issuing of work permits for foreign businesses, hitherto a major problem for foreign investors. In addition, the government has increased the minimum wage and pensions, and plans to introduce compulsory medical insurance in 2020.

A critic would be right in nothing that many of these reforms are declarations of intent that, powerful as they may be, will only prove their worth if properly implemented. Furthermore, many doubt the credibility of these reforms for two inter-related reasons: First, as already noted, President Aliyev has been in power for a decade and a half—why would he suddenly work to transform the country? Second, none of these reforms bears on political liberalization, without which the long-term success of reforms is questionable.

As noted, Azerbaijan’s reforms are geared toward making the economy more attractive, and should not be confused with political liberalization. If anything, they signify a shift from an essentially oligarchic system of government to a more centralized system, concentrating more real power in the executive. Still, the reform process was coupled with a large amnesty, in which most prisoners considered political by Western governments and organizations were released. Moreover, the reform effort coincides with an effort to rein in the law enforcement agencies. The National Security Ministry, which was feared by entrepreneurs for its predatory behavior, was dissolved in 2015. And in June 2019, the Minister of Interior, appointed in 1994, was moved to the largely symbolic office of the Presidential Security Council. This could signify a major shift, with meaningful change in this key ministry, which has been the government body most clearly associated with the human rights violations that activists have decried in Azerbaijan.

If these reforms do not really serve to open up the political system, how far could they go? While democracy advocates tend to focus strongly on electoral systems and on the promotion of civil society, the fact is that political liberalization in the absence of responsive and well-functioning state institutions does not have a very good track record. A focus on democratization without attending to essential institutions has tended to lead to the development of illiberal democracy or a return to populist authoritarianism, as the trajectories of Russia, Venezuela, and Egypt all attest. The point is that by creating more accountable public institutions and laying the ground for diversification of the economy, the reform process in Azerbaijan generates visible improvements for the country’s population, while also developing the prerequisites for successful future liberalization.

In the short term, Azerbaijan’s leadership appears determined to proceed with governance reforms that improve efficiency and transparency of government. But as the President himself alluded to in his October 16 speech, these reforms run counter to the interests of relatively strong domestic constituencies, which the President has managed to put on the defensive. It remains to be seen whether these entrenched interests will mount a viable counter-offensive. A key aspect of the Azerbaijani reforms is that they are coupled with a centralization of power and a top-down logic common to projects of authoritarian modernization. This comes with its own obvious challenges: as Jack Snyder has pointed out, it is not clear that authoritarian modernization can help countries past the middle-income level, as “only rule-based institutions can lead the breakthrough to higher levels of economic development.” Azerbaijan’s rulers want to create enough of a rules-based environment for the economy to develop, but successful modernization processes generate growing demands for reforms to spread into the political realm as well. As Roberto Stefan Foa has noted, many developing authoritarian states have reached a point where the citizenry is demanding greater political rights. Azerbaijan’s neighbor Kazakhstan, where popular demonstrations contributed to new President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev launching the notion of a “listening state,” is a case in point. It remains to be seen if the Azerbaijani leadership will be willing or able to expand its reforms to the political sphere when that becomes necessary.

While the reforms in Azerbaijan are limited in scope and their outcome uncertain, the process is important to the United States. They do not take place in isolation: the three most populous countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus—Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan—are now in the midst of serious reform processes. Kazakhstan is key because of its location at the intersection of Russian and Chinese interests, and Uzbekistan derives its importance from its large population and proximity to Afghanistan. Yet Azerbaijan has always been the linchpin of the region because, along with Georgia, it provides the only realistic access route for the West to the Caspian Sea and Central Asia. Because of its location and close historical relations with Iran and Turkey, it is also of direct relevance to American interests in the Middle East.

For too long, leaders in Baku, as in Astana and Tashkent, have been suspicious of Western intentions in their neighborhood, often fearing the specter of Western-led “regime change.” More recently, the calculus has shifted. Just like in Washington, leaders in these countries have all observed the intensification of great power competition—and its growing volatility at a time when the great powers seem less bound by international norms and rules of behavior than they have been in recent decades. And as these three states look to strengthen their governing institutions in response to both outside pressure and domestic demands, neither Russia, Iran, China, or Turkey have much to offer.

This is an opportunity that America should not ignore. As relatively small countries encircled by great powers, the Central Asian countries are inclined to look positively on an American role in Eurasian geopolitics. Washington has a stake in the success of these reforms, and in assisting the reformists in the government against the more retrograde forces that seek to neutralize the effects of change. The reform effort in Azerbaijan provides an opportunity for the U.S.-Azerbaijan political dialogue to be centered on positive cooperation, and thus to strengthen rather than weaken the bilateral strategic dialogue. This, in turn, would be an important accomplishment in the context of Washington’s efforts to devise a coherent strategy toward great power competition in Eurasia.

The post Azerbaijan: Reform Behind a Static Façade appeared first on The American Interest.

Trump on a Rampage

Since Vietnam, the Munich Analogy—stop the bad guys while you still can—has fallen on hard times, starting with America’s hapless war against the NVA. Munich provided the rationale for Lyndon Johnson’s massive escalation. He wrote: “Everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam. . . .then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression.”

As we know, Asia’s dominoes did not fall, and communism did not triumph. But the sacrifice of blood and treasure ended up as America’s most foolish war. So “let’s retire Munich as a handy one-size-fits-all catchphrase used to galvanize support for any action against any dictator at any time,” runs the counsel. Yet Donald Trump’s Kurdish catastrophe should make us rethink the wisdom of passivity when a small effort in time can preempt a large disaster down the road.

Let’s start with Winston Churchill’s bitter verdict on the Munich Agreement of September 1938. This is when the British and French prime ministers, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, bought “peace in our time” by throwing Czechoslovakia under Adolf Hitler’s bus. The price of an illusionary peace was the cession of the Czech Sudetenland to the Third Reich. Whereupon Churchill famously orated: “The government had to choose between war and shame. They chose shame. They will get war, too.” And so London and Paris did one year later when Der Fuhrer unleashed World War II.

Trump has improved dramatically on the two appeasement artists. At least Chamberlain and Daladier had bought a one-year reprieve before Hitler attacked Poland, forcing Britain and France to declare war a few days later. Also, Hitler had sworn a holy oath that the Sudetenland was the end of his road to expansion. The duo could at least pretend to have acted with good conscience.

When Donald Trump green-lighted Recep Tayyib Erdogan’s move against the Kurds in Eastern Syria, Ankara’s strongman had not even deigned to lie. Nor did he grant Trump a decent interval. His bombers took off almost immediately while his tanks began to roll. This time, the Kurdish enclave was not a “far-away country of which we know little,” to recall Chamberlain’s infamous line about Czechoslovakia. This time, betrayal hit America’s best allies in the war against ISIS.

Hard-boiled realists will always argue that in the affairs of nations Realpolitik must trump Moralpolitik. The national interest must come first—damn the country’s obligations. History abounds with examples where nations betrayed and abandoned their comrades-in-arms. The Kurds in particular have been the born victims of America’s hauteur. The Nixon Administration armed them against Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, then left them to the mercy of a killer who took bloody revenge. In the Gulf War of 1991, Bush encouraged Iraq’s Kurds to rise against Saddam, then looked on as they were massacred. Treachery took its course. Under Bill Clinton, Ankara deployed massive U.S. arms shipments against its own Kurdish population. Tens of thousands are said to have perished during Ankara’s war against its own citizens.

This author has since formulated an iron law: “If you are a Kurd, you shall be f***ed.” Unlike the Palestinians whose national ambitions threaten only one small country—Israel—the Kurds are spread across four large states: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. When the chips are down, extra-regional powers like the United States will invariably come down on the side of any of the Big Four. “Thank you for services rendered,” is the unspoken message, “but now we have bigger fish to fry”—be they Saddam or Erdogan. Moral delinquency has been built into the relationship between the United States and its quondam protégés.

But let’s not dwell on decency that has been betrayed over and over again. The Trump case is so egregious because, for once, there is no conflict between goodness and callousness. In Turkey’s war against the Kurds, moral obligation and hard-nosed national interest point in the same direction—which is rare in the annals of international politics. Trump’s collusion with Erdogan is not just a moral crime, but also a body blow to America’s well-considered interests.

One: In desperation, the Kurds in Eastern Syria went for immediate counter-betrayal by throwing themselves into the arms of the Damascene dictator Bashar Assad. Previously, Trump had marked him as “war criminal.” So what? With Kurdish forces in Assad’s pocket, there goes America’s trustiest ally in the region.

Two: This “reversal of alliances,” to invoke a standby of diplomatic history, has strengthened America’s worst foes in the area, namely Russia, Syria, and Iran. The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to train and equip the Kurds; now watch them being incorporated into Assad’s army, allowing him to subdue the rest of his tormented people. Once the retraction of U.S. troops is complete, Trump will have no chips on the table. In Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran, it must be high-fives these days.

Three: ISIS, imprisoned by the thousands in the Kurdish enclave, will be back, exploiting the chaos by breaking out of the internment camps and regrouping elsewhere. Recall Barack Obama’s extraction of combat troops from Iraq in 2011. It was an act of folly. ISIS went to the gates of Baghdad while spreading its terror tentacles around the world. Thus U.S. fighting forces had to come back to slug it out in years of new warfare. American troops are still on the ground.

Four: Nuclear horror is brewing. The United States has some 50 nuclear weapons in its sprawling Turkish base at Incirlik. Placed there to protect Turkey, they are now hostages to Erdogan, so to speak, and plans are afoot to evacuate them. By force? If so, this is the end of the U.S.-Turkish alliance and a powerful incentive for Erdogan to go nuclear. He has already muttered that it is “unacceptable” for his country to have to renounce nuclear weapons.

Trump keeps tweeting that all these calamities are “7000 miles away,” hence of no concern to the United States. He is falling prey to the illusion of distance in an age of international terror and intercontinental missiles. The Royal Navy no longer patrols the Atlantic. Nor can Trump count on the Europeans even though they are directly threatened by turmoil in the Middle East. The EU has not imposed an arms cut-off on Turkey; it has only decided to “limit” the flow. According to Germany’s mass-circulation Bild, the country’s Foreign Office has instructed its emissaries to the European Council to nix an embargo and to accept only a “collective re-examination” of arms exports. Do not look forward to serious sanctions against Turkey.

Trump has not ended America’s “endless wars” in the Middle East. He has merely enlarged the war zone in one of the world’s most critical strategic arenas. Forget the moral tragedy if you can. Think instead about the betrayal of America’s (and the West’s) critical interests. It took Chamberlain and Daladier a whole year to comprehend the foolhardiness of their credulity—first shame, then war. In Trump’s case, the disaster was predictable, and it is unfolding in real time. History will judge him as harshly as it has the apostles of “peace in our time.”

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