Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 30

Asking the Right Question on Climate Change

Ask yourself whether Donald Trump is right that global warming is a “hoax,” or whether progressive greens are right that the science supporting it is “settled,” and you will be asking the wrong question. Both sides have strong political reasons for taking their positions, which do not conduce toward unbiased conclusions. Trump’s political incentives for dismissing the mounting although still inconclusive evidence that the globe is warming are strong indeed—think West Virginia et al. For their part, Democrats cannot help but be tempted by the opportunity for government expansion that acceptance of the global warming thesis and their proposed solutions entail.

Since we can’t be certain that the globe is warming, and we can’t be certain that it isn’t, we are in the position of a homeowner deciding whether to buy fire insurance. Ask yourself whether your home will burn down, and you will be asking the wrong question. Ask yourself whether there is a possibility that your home will burn down, and you will be asking the right question, the answer to which is “yes.” From this it follows that buying insurance against the probability of such a catastrophe is a good idea.

Similarly, ask yourself whether the globe is warming, and you would have to confess that you do not know with certainty. Ask whether there is a possibility that the globe is warming, and the answer is of course “yes.” And because we cannot dismiss the possibility that we are facing a change in our climate, prudence counsels that we do something. The obvious next question is: What?

We could pile regulations upon regulations, hoping that some of them will have the desired effect—Californiacate the entire country and let the inefficiencies mount. That, as we have learned, would impose costs that often are often commensurate with the benefits only in the eyes of the burgeoning agencies that set about putting flesh on the bare-bones legislation sent to them by Congress. Their regulations will prove enduring beyond any useful life they might have, as the President’s difficulties in getting several of them rolled back demonstrate. Alternatively, we could sign on to a Green New Deal, commit trillions to a variety of measures of uncertain effect, and ignore the opportunity cost of such a trillion-dollar commitment.

My own view is that the “What To Do?” question presents conservative believers in markets with an opportunity. Two, in fact: to correct a massive flaw in the way the price system is operating, and to do something about the outbreak of fiscal imprudence that is careening us toward an unpleasant reckoning with unsustainable trillion-dollar deficits. And for which the solution proposed by print-to-pay believers in Modern Monetary Theory is likely to prove ruinous.

Yes, that means taking another look at carbon taxes, alleged by their opponents to be a sure path to enforced retirement for any politician daring to support them. That might once have been true, but no longer: Poll after poll shows that voters do not share Trump’s opinion that global warming is a hoax, or libertarians’ opinion that it is a sneaky way of turning over to government a larger share of the national income. Pew reports that in 2018, about six in ten Americans (59 percent) said that global climate change was affecting their local community “a great deal or some.”

A carbon tax would advance two long-held Republican/conservative objectives. First, by relying on consumers to make choices based on properly computed prices rather than government directives, it would allow the prices of carbon-inclusive products to reflect all of the costs of producing and distributing those products. As things now stand, only privately incurred costs are included; social costs are not. Although we cannot be absolutely certain that climate change is causing severe weather—rising sea levels and the like—prudence counsels that we plan on the assumption that that CO2 emissions are culpable, and make consumers bear some of that cost. Because quantification is difficult, the best path is to start with a low fee, and watch the results.

Second, a carbon tax that contributes to reducing the deficit does not increase the long-run burden of taxation. Instead, it reduces the debt burden of future generations—it is ultimately an inter-generational transfer of the tax burden to ourselves from our progeny.

The alternatives for Republican candidates are not attractive. They can join Trump in declaring global warming a hoax, but that is an increasingly difficult sell, one that invites accusations of ignoring an existential threat. They can sign on to the Democrats’ Green New Deal, the widely varying cost estimates of which are summarized by the reliable Doug Holtz Eakin, the President of the American Action Forum, as falling in the range of $50 trillion to $90 trillion. That would require huge new taxes or a debased currency, or both. They can duck the issue entirely, relying on vague statements of concern that are unlikely to survive demands for specificity. Or they can say: “We will propose a modest tax that will reduce emissions and deficits, while also reducing the mountain of debt that our children and grandchildren are poised to inherit.”

There are, of course, other possible answers to the “What To Do” question. Regulation might prove attractive to those who feel it offers a certainty of outcomes that carbon taxes do not, and that the cost of regulation is a small price to pay for such certainty. For those who count environmental issues among their top concerns, some version of a Green New Deal might be their answer. Some might prefer conceding that the planet is warming, but prefer devising and funding steps to ameliorate the impact of that change, rather than trying to reverse it.

In any case, formulating the right question is the key to getting answers that are sensible and reflect the variety of personal priorities and individual circumstances that must be balanced when setting policy.

The post Asking the Right Question on Climate Change appeared first on The American Interest.

Breakfast with a Brexiteer

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series assessing the consequences of Brexit. The first, by Robert Singh, can be found here. Coming next week: Rosa Balfour offers a pensive view from the Continent.

TAI Executive Editor Damir Marusic and Richard Kraemer of the Foreign Policy Research Institute recently sat down with Andrew Roberts in Washington, DC to discuss his new book on leadership, the ongoing Brexit drama, and how he sees the U.S.-UK special relationship. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Damir Marusic and Richard Kraemer for TAI: Tell us about your new book.​

Andrew Roberts: It’s called Leadership in War, and it’s a collection of essays about war leadership, concentrating on nine individuals—Nelson, Napoleon, Churchill, de Gaulle, Hitler, Stalin, Eisenhower, Marshall, and Margaret Thatcher—to see what they have in common and what separates them. It’s based on a series of lectures that I gave between 2013 and 2017 at the New York Historical Society, but it works as a standalone book.

TAI:​ August 15th was the 250th anniversary of Napoleon’s birth, and what struck us in your new book is that he comes off as the strongest of the bunch.

AR: ​Precisely, that’s very much what I say. All other leaders have to be judged against his leadership qualities. Now, of course, he wound up in exile, and utterly defeated, and the Battle of Waterloo was a disaster. But overall, when you look at his extraordinary corpus of leadership techniques and skills, he is the one who could naturally inspire people. He said, “Always talk to the men’s souls.” He was also extremely good at talking to their self-interest in the way that he rewarded people. His career demonstrated the importance of compartmentalization, meticulous planning, appreciation of terrain, superb timing, steady nerves, appreciation of the importance of discipline and training, understanding the psychology of the ordinary soldier to create esprit de corps, the issuing of inspirational speeches and proclamations, controlling the news, adapting the tactical ideas of others, asking pertinent questions of the right people, a deep learning and appreciation of history, a formidable memory, utter ruthlessness when necessary, the deployment of personal charisma, immense calm under unimaginable pressure (especially in moments that look like defeat), an almost obsessive-compulsive attention to detail, rigorous control of emotions, and the ability to exploit a momentary numerical advantage at the decisive point on the battlefield—and, not least, good luck.

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Andrew Roberts (Wikimedia Commons)

TAI: ​If Napoleon is the standard for leadership, what about Churchill by comparison? One difference that struck us in Walking with Destiny was what Churchill took away from the Gallipoli campaign. He recognized when he’d made a mistake.

AR: ​Yes. Churchill of course showed great moral and physical courage, but learning from his mistakes was one of his really impressive qualities. Napoleon did so to a much lesser extent. He was still adopting much the same tactics in fighting battles in 1815 as he had been in 1796.

​Churchill made blunder after blunder. He was wrong on women’s suffrage. He was wrong on the abdication crisis, the gold standard, supporting the Black and Tans (a UK-sanctioned militia established by Churchill to combat the Irish Republican Army – ed.) in Ireland, and primarily, as you mentioned, the Gallipoli campaign. What he learned from that was never to overrule the Chiefs of Staff during the Second World War. He had every constitutional right to do so, but he never once overruled when all three of the Chiefs of Staff agreed on something. That, I think, comes from a vestigial memory of what happened to him 25 years earlier at the lowest point in his career.

​You’re right, also, that Napoleon and Churchill’s leadership skills are different. Napoleon wasn’t a very good orator, interestingly enough. He wrote very good orders of the day, he had a fine literary mind, and was even a good novelist, but he wasn’t much of a public speaker. Whereas Churchill was one of the greatest orators of any time.

TAI:​ One of Churchill’s strengths is his ability to take a broader view as a political leader and strategist, in comparison to Napoleon. And in Walking with Destiny you note Churchill’s ability to retain minute knowledge, his attention to detail. As he continued his political career and began to defer more to military leaders, was there a sense that he was more of a strategic thinker and had tactical limitations?

AR: ​I don’t think it’s fair to say that he deferred more to military leaders. He didn’t overrule them, but that didn’t mean that he deferred to them. He used to have fantastic rows that would go on for hours and hours, late into the night. He very much thought that it was his job to try to persuade the military leaders to adopt his overall strategy. They sometimes didn’t want to do that, which ultimately created tensions.

​Napoleon, of course, had nobody brook him at all. Since he was a dictator in a way that Churchill never was, he was able to get his point of view adopted, which in the early part of his career was a very good thing. By the time the Russian campaign engulfed him, the lack of necessity for him to take his marshals’ opinions into account led to tragic disaster.

​Stalin, who of course was a totalitarian dictator, moved from the Hitlerian sense of complete dominance over strategy, to appreciate that some of his Marshals such as Zhukov and Konev and Rokossovsky knew much more about ground strategy than he did, and so he took a bit of a backseat at the Stavka, the high command, and allowed these guys to get on with battles like Stalingrad, Kursk, and the battle for Berlin. He adopted a much more inclusive Churchillian style of leadership, even though he was as totalitarian a dictator as Adolf Hitler.

TAI:​ In the chapter on Hitler, you suggest that there are only negative lessons to learn. You depict him as a proper nullity: a non-actor, not terribly smart, lazy.

AR:​ Well, I think he had a reasonably high IQ, but he was prey to the most extraordinary ideas. I don’t just mean repulsive political ideas, but these sort of strange notions that he told his entourage about. They’d stay up there late at night as the fire crackled at the Berchtesgaden, Hitler sitting in one of those enormous chairs, surrounded by that hideous Nazi art, and coming up with theory after theory about how Czechs and Mongolians were the same people, and you can tell by their mustaches, and how you can tell what dogs think, and how young men in the Tyrol walked around carrying ladders to climb up to seduce girls in their bedrooms. Absolutely extraordinary ideas.

He believed in a form of Atlantis that existed before our modern era, and that ancient ax heads had been left there by the far greater societies that existed before our time in order to fool us. Completely incredible Nazi stuff. Once you look into these, on top of all his misogyny and racism and anti-Semitism, you do wonder how he managed to hold the German nation in awe for 12 years.

TAI:​ Obviously, charisma’s important in leadership, this ability to inspire. Yet you stress that Hitler himself was actually not a terribly charismatic person.

AR: ​Yes. He had an artificially created charisma. And he had outside forces like Leni Riefenstahl in charge of his cinema, and Joseph Goebbels in charge of his propaganda, and Albert Speer organizing those rallies. I mean, if they’re able to do it with Kim Jong-un, where you’ve got even less naturally pre-possessing material to work with, then I think you can see that charisma is an artificial construct.

TAI:​ Still, communication is a skill that some leaders master and some don’t in the modern world. Arguably, Donald Trump understood modern media better than anyone else in 2016. Even now, if you look at all the candidates that are running against him, they’re still reacting to the way he’s using modern media. The only other candidate that may be is his equal on social media is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Do you see this ability to communicate in different ways and by different methods as a key element of leadership?

AR: ​Yes. I think both Hitler and Churchill would have been extremely good on Twitter. Hitler, because you’re just constantly churning out opinions that can be caught in 280 characters or fewer, and most of his opinions really didn’t go much beyond. If you look at Mein Kampf, it’s just a series of angry statements and resentments.

​Most of Churchill’s witticisms—the punchlines, at least—would fit into 280 characters or fewer. There’s a marvelous moment when a Labour MP shouted at him in the House of Commons, “Rot!” Churchill immediately replied, “I thank the honorable man for telling us what’s in his mind.” You could get that into 280 characters, couldn’t you?

​I think that any communication techniques can be used for good or ill, used by democrats as well as fascists.

TAI:​ This is also relevant, perhaps, in comparing Theresa May’s recent run as Prime Minister with Boris Johnson.

AR: ​There’s a perfect example of the charisma bypass. People say that power attracts charisma. The careers of John Major, Gordon Brown, and Theresa May completely undermine that concept.

​Boris Johnson is extremely charismatic. He spotted very early on, whilst he was still at school, the way he was artificially going to construct his own charisma. It’s intimately bound-up with his form of expression, that way in which he does two things that would seem to be mutually exclusive.

​The first is to talk in a way that everybody knows what you’re saying, while at the same time, using an archaic form of expression that jumps from the pages of P.G. Wodehouse. He read classics at Oxford, so we know that he’s bright, but like Churchill, he doesn’t need to shove it down your throat at every available opportunity, and he can go down to the demotic mode as well as anybody in politics.

​He’s physically extraordinary with the hair, of course, and all the rest of it. I know this isn’t a particularly scientific measure of charisma, but I’ve never walked into a room where so many people have wanted to have selfies taken as with Boris, when he came here to New York publicizing his Churchill book. It was an absolute maelstrom.

​The other thing that he shows, like Churchill, is an obvious love of wielding power. He’s really enjoying being Prime Minister. I never got that sense from Major, Brown, or May. They all looked as though this weight and responsibility on their shoulders meant that they had to be glum all the time.

​I don’t know if you have this same dichotomy in American politics, but the great British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote that “All great British Prime Ministers break down between bookies and bishops.” The bishops are the rather serious ecclesiastical leaders—people who have this sense of extreme seriousness, and they’re slightly talking down to you, but you feel you are made to feel you must listen because they’re morally good people. Theresa May was a classic example of the bishop, as was Gordon Brown, whose father was actually a vicar. Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain were a bit like that, and Ramsay MacDonald.

​Then, of course, you have the bookie. You have the Knight and the Knave character who sometimes isn’t faithful to his wife, like David Lloyd George and Boris, somebody who’s going to enjoy life, and doesn’t mind that people realize that they love the attention, and who jollies the country along. Churchill and David Lloyd George and Boris all represent that. Boy, have we had enough bishops. I think the British people are going to be delighted to have a bookie for a bit.

TAI:​ How do you conceive of the role of leadership in a democracy? When it comes to a divisive topic like Brexit, how do you see the will of the people versus the will of leadership? We hear British colleagues say, with all these threats of a second referendum, that there would be a real question of legitimacy about the outcome of a re-do.

AR:​ Well, that’s exactly what the losers of the referendum are doing, calling for a second one. And then one might ask, why not have the best of three? Or the best of five, if we lost twice.

​I think it comes down to leadership. It also comes down to political philosophy. It’s been centuries since the defeat of the Crown in the English Civil War, and all of the major political philosophers, all of the post-Hobbes “divine right of kings” philosophers who lost the Civil War, have given way to people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in saying that the sovereign power is the will of the people. It’s not the Crown, but neither is it Parliament.

​If there is a moment in which the people are directly asked something, then their answer must be respected, which is, of course, what happened on the 23rd of June 2016. And it wasn’t that close, actually. It was over a million more people who voted to leave than to remain.

​What’s happened in the last three years is that the Remainers—the losers—have utterly refused to abide by this. They have done everything possible to try to subvert the will of the people. If we allow that to happen, I think it would be extremely damaging for the British polity, for our identity as a democratic country, and for our trust in politics, which is leeching away very quickly now according to al the surveys. For the leader of the Liberal Democrats, for example, Jo Swinson, to still call herself a Democrat in her party title, when she has spent three years doing nothing but try to rip up the democratic referendum result, seems to me extremely hypocritical.

​What you have now with the prorogation of Parliament is the prospect of the starkest dichotomy between the will of the people and the will of Parliament. Because Parliament is 70 percent or so pro-Remain. One has got to win.

​It’s an extraordinary irony, really, that the Prime Minister has to use the prerogative powers of the Crown, the loser in the Civil War three and a half centuries ago, in order to impose the sovereignty of the people on Parliament, which was the victor in the English Civil War. This is one of the rare occasions where the unwritten nature of our constitution actually is riding to our rescue. Because what Boris has done is deeply unconventional. It hasn’t been done since 1948, except for one short period in the 1990s when John Major tried it. Otherwise, it’s very unusual, but then the situation is bloody unusual.

Of course, Remainers will argue, “Well, nobody voted for no deal. That wasn’t on the ballot paper.” My stance is, of course, no deal wasn’t on the ballot paper, but leaving was. If we’ve tried three ways of leaving and there’s only one left, then essentially, it was on the ballot paper. It’s like you’ve got to escape from a building and three of the doors turn out to be locked, but there’s a window. If you jump out of the window, at least you’re doing what you need to do. That’s essentially what’s happening here.

TAI:​ You’ve argued that the consequences of a no-deal Brexit may not be as dire as described. You note also that neighbors on the continent have a different starting point for their cultural values. This reveals itself in a variety of ways: civil law traditions like the Napoleonic code versus common law traditions, the Brits’ understanding of individual rights and respect for the private sector compared to the Europeans. Was it inevitable, then, that Britain would find itself in this place? And are the consequences then worth it, as difficult as they may be?

AR:​ Yes. We should never have joined the European project in the first place, because we have fundamentally different outlooks on many aspects of law and economics and society. In that sense, the mistake was made back in 1973, then it was underlined in 1975 with the European referendum. At that stage, we had no idea that for many the ultimate end to the European Economic Community would be a federal superstate. It slowly dawned on the British people, especially by the time of Maastricht in 1992 that they had been lied to and a superstate was the goal.

By the way, something that Americans ought to recognize more is that anti-Americanism runs deep in the genesis of the European Economic Community. Brussels has always wanted to replace the United States as a great economic superpower. They didn’t see China coming, but then nobody did. They always disliked the red in tooth and claw capitalist nature of America and wanted to replace it with a kind of social democracy or socialist alternative, a third way.

​At the moment, the EU is an $18.8 trillion economy. You’re at $20.5 trillion. Britain, when we leave, is going to take away our $2.8 trillion economy and, hopefully, create a much closer trading relationship with the United States. That’s why the bromance between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson is something that every Brexiteer cheers and is delighted by.

​We’re very nerve-wracked about the threats made by Nancy Pelosi not to go along with a comprehensive trade deal. They remind us of Barack Obama’s threats to put us at the back of the queue. It’s going to continue to be a very nerve-wracking process, even after we do leave the European Union on the 31st of October, because we don’t know whether Trump or Pelosi is right on whether we’re going to get this deal.

TAI:​ Do you see that as Britain takes its $2.8 trillion economy out, the idea of the superstate takes a hit? We see across the European Union that the project’s not going very well. Looking further ahead, do you see the EU, and perhaps even NATO, being replaced and this kind of Anglosphere emerging as a new power arrangement in the world?

AR:​ Yes, I do. I see the CANZUK countries—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK—as being a force for good in the world. The fact that no one country of the CANZUK four wants to overrule the laws of any of the others, that they’re not attempting to organize the immigration rules of any of the others, shows that it’s a proper agglomeration of like-minded states rather than a growing imperialist construct, which is what Brussels is all about. Because the way in which these negotiations have gone the last three years, it’s been made clear again and again that we are being punished for the effrontery of leaving and also “pour encourager les autres.”

​I think the British people do recognize there are going to be sacrifices that need to be made. I don’t for a moment think that it’s as bad as the worst of “Project Fear” would suggest: Riots in the street, the Queen having to leave London, people dying because the country with the fifth largest GDP in the world can’t buy medicine and outbreaks of scurvy because we can’t source fresh vegetables, and so on.

I’m not Nostradamus. Some of these things could happen, but worse things have happened in previous attempts to regain our sovereignty and independence. I don’t think it means, necessarily, that everybody is going to try and claw down Boris Johnson. I think that there’s an aspect to the British people that we’ve seen again and again, where severe problems and perils actually produce great support for the leader of the day.

​I also think that if people are ever so slightly worse off, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to vote against the party that brought that. When it comes to Brexit, “It’s not the economy, stupid.” It’s a much more complicated thing to do with identity.

TAI:​ We’ve been seeing across the West that “It’s the economy, stupid” has its limits. Brexit is the prime example, and in a smaller theater, we saw it in the North Macedonia referendum this past September. Basically, there was the carrot of joining the EU and NATO, and the majority of Macedonians didn’t turn out to say, “Well, we’re really up for changing our name in order to gain access to this club.” Which suggested there’s something more deeply rooted in how people vote, besides their pocketbooks.

AR: ​When you hear people say, “Nobody voted to be poorer” about the referendum, well, no, they didn’t vote to be poorer, but a lot of them don’t mind being slightly poorer if they’re going to be freer and if it’s going to give us the chance, therefore, to control our own economy and in 10 or 15 years’ time be richer.

TAI:​ Where do you think Transatlantic values are right now? Because from a liberal order perspective, we’re talking about rule of law and representative government. But increasingly, there seem to be whole swathes of Europe, including the ruling governments in Budapest and Warsaw, that say, “For us, it’s first and foremost about our traditional values. It’s about our ability to determine our own future as a sovereign body.” Can alliances persist with these different understandings?

AR:​ Yes. I think the Orbán government in Hungary is a very interesting case in point. What it effectively said was, “We are not going to take the Syrian refugees.” This outraged the Germans, of course, who were taking over a million of them, and it outraged Brussels, and it outraged the Left, and outraged the media, and it outraged liberal opinion across Europe. It was immensely popular in Hungary. That explains Orban’s continuing success. You see that to a great degree in Poland and in Italy and elsewhere.

​I think that’s OK, so long as none of these nationalist movements have this faintest tinge of fascism, which you can get. In Hungary, it’s not the Orbán people, it’s Jobbik (an ultra-nationalist Hungarian political party – ed.). Sometimes in Italy, Salvini can make tasteless jokes about Mussolini, but he’s not a fascist by any stretch of the imagination. In Poland, it can slip into that register too, and of course, the old Le Pen nationalists in France were ridden through with Vichyite anti-Semitism.

​That’s something you always have to watch out for, but it strikes me that in general this coming generation of populists are not fascist. If we had a stronger conservative movement, they wouldn’t even exist. In England, Nigel Farage is neither a fascist nor a racist, just an old-fashioned Thatcherite (a bit like me). They’re mostly patriotic conservatives on the Continent, who have every right to say that no outsiders should be able to force them to take immigrants that they don’t want to take. They’ve looked at other nations and they’ve understood that mass immigration inevitably profoundly alters the nature of the country and society. That’s certainly true of Britain and true of France. Now, we in Britain and France can celebrate that and argue that immigration’s been a good thing. But if people in Europe see our multicultural societies and conclude that they don’t want the same thing, then we shouldn’t force them to have them. Each to his own.

TAI:​ Let’s come back to leadership. As you look at the global landscape today, do you see any leaders who are approaching their rule from a larger sense of vision?

AR:​ Well, my book is all about leadership in war. Thank God we are not at war. We’re in a long-term war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, of course, but not in a conventional war. And leadership in war is a completely different thing from leadership in peace.

But yes, it strikes me that are world leaders who have powerful visions of the future. Xi in Beijing, with the Belt and Road policy, has an obvious vision of China dominating Asia and Africa, and scooping up the important minerals that are needed to hegemonize the 21st century. That is a vision. We might not like it, but it’s there.

​The recreation of the old Soviet Union in new guise is obviously a thing that excites and thrills Putin. It’s a vision. He’s on his way to achieving it. He might have done it at the expense of the Russian economy and ordinary Russians, and he’s obviously an extremely nasty piece of work, but he has a vision.

​In the West, you do have a vision of a European superstate today to which fewer and fewer people subscribe. It will be interesting to see how it survives after Brexit. Macron and Merkel aren’t making anything like the same noises about our glorious European future that were made by Kohl and Schmidt and d’Estaing back in the ’70s and ’80s, so maybe that’s a vision that’s on the turn.

​Boris Johnson has a vision for Britain, undoubtedly. Your President here has undoubtedly also got a vision for America. Again, it’s going to be painfully divisive for people who hate him.

​Right now, for us Britons, it is absolutely essential that Trump gets re-elected, for the reasons that I mentioned earlier about this trade deal. It’s very nerve-wracking when you have the Speaker of the House making remarks about how we won’t get a trade deal if anyone harms the Good Friday Agreement. It’s appalling and an incitement to dissident republican terrorists to do just that.

TAI:​ Is Britain a more reliable partner than a European Union that is still trying to figure itself out?

AR:​ I think so. The Europeans want to replace you as the great power. That’s something that you should have been undermining from day one, rather than facilitating, which is what the State Department has been doing since the 1970s.

TAI: ​The strategy, I think, was that you Brits would be our partners to keep them in check.

AR:​ You tried that as long as possible; in fact, much longer than was possible. Because it was quite clear, by the time of Maastricht, and that’s over 25 years ago now, that nothing could be stopped. The EU was a juggernaut, and it’s better to jump off the thing that careens along than to stay on it and wait until it smashes up.

The post Breakfast with a Brexiteer appeared first on The American Interest.

Friends Without Benefits: The “Special Relationship” After Brexit

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series assessing the consequences of Brexit. Tomorrow: historian Andrew Roberts makes the case for a no-deal Brexit. Next week: Rosa Balfour offers a pensive view from the Continent.

Boris Johnson’s secret ambition as a boy, according to biographer Andrew Gimson, was “to be President of the United States.” With that option foreclosed, as British Prime Minister he has instead chosen to flatter President Trump by imitation. In just over 50 days on the job, Boris has pursued hardball tactics that have tarnished his party, traduced conservatism, and toxified politics. He has prorogued Parliament, sacked 21 of his party’s MPs, and has promptly lost his House of Commons majority, along with key legislative votes and court cases. He now presides over a chaotic executive mired in stalemate against an obstructionist legislature. Policy gridlock is wedded to political paralysis, fueling a divided public’s distrust of the entire political class. Who needs to be U.S. President when being UK PM can achieve eerily similar results?

Like a bleak geopolitical parody of When Harry Met Sally, the “will they-won’t they?” Brexit ordeal carries on with no happy ending in sight. The world’s fifth-largest economy is now preparing to cope with national shortages of food, fuel, and medical supplies. Hurricane Johnson made landfall in July but, rather than “taking back control,” lost it to a parliament intent on prohibiting a “no-deal” Brexit on the scheduled departure date of October 31. The impasse leaves the United Kingdom, three years after the 2016 EU referendum, with three feasible outcomes: either “no deal” (a misleading phrase that really means postponing EU negotiations from a weaker position), a BRINO deal (“Brexit in name only,” to its detractors) after yet another extension, or a deal, perhaps following a second referendum, to remain in the EU after all. Whether, when, and how this stalemate reaches resolution is unclear.

Despite this inauspicious start, Johnson’s premiership has rekindled hopes of improved relations between Washington and London. To admirers, Boris’s optimism, energy, and charm offer Churchillian echoes. His Cabinet is the most unabashedly Atlanticist in a generation. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton even declared in August that the “special relationship” had “never been stronger.” For romantics, the Johnson-Trump bromance promises the personal and political closeness that has sustained bilateral relations at their best.

Perhaps. But for those of us who prize the U.S.-UK partnership, such hope appears ill-founded. Bolton was wrong: The bilateral is weaker than at any time since the Suez crisis in 1956. The partnership’s four foundations have suffered grievously over the 2010s. From being Washington’s military partner of choice, London is increasingly a source of vexation as much as value. As Hemingway explained in The Sun Also Rises, bankruptcy can occur “gradually, then suddenly.” The sun that supposedly never set on the British empire did so—gradually and then suddenly. A precipitous descent into geostrategic bankruptcy is now eminently conceivable. If Johnson’s high-stakes gamble with his party, parliament, and the European Union backfires, the U.S.-UK partnership will receive its last rites from the most anti-American government in British history.

Brits do not want to have to choose between Europe and America. But whether it precedes or follows a resolution of Brexit, the general election anticipated in the final months of 2019 offers the choice of lethal injection or firing squad: a chaotic and costly Johnson Brexit or an even more catastrophic Jeremy “Stop the West” Corbyn-led cabal of avowed Marxists, Stalinists, and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of the far-Left lunatic fringe. This binary is emblematic of more fundamental decisions that cannot long be deferred. The polarization and fragmentation of the party system is ineluctably leading to a moment where Britain must decide between aligning closer to the United States, tilting to the EU either as an outsider or diminished member, or standing alone to independently associate with one or another major player—offending both while influencing neither. In turn, Washington must calibrate anew the privileged position London has traditionally enjoyed. Adam Smith once cautioned that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” More by accident than design, the U.S.-UK partnership is at a potentially ruinous inflection point. 

The Character of Nations

Foreign policy begins at home, shaped by domestic foundations. During the 2016 referendum, when foreign policy was not even an afterthought in the campaign, opinion was divided on Brexit’s consequences: 64 percent of Brits thought it would make no difference to the conduct of foreign affairs, 21 percent thought the UK would have less international influence, while 15 percent thought it would have more. As it stands, Brexit threatens the strategic pragmatism that London has always put at a premium in the conduct of its external affairs. Decline is, ultimately, a choice, and by weakening Britain’s geopolitical value Brexit invites once more the folly of military weakness, economic contraction, and diplomatic isolation.

Alliances between sovereign nation-states are a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. The “liberal international order” may have been neither as liberal, global, nor orderly as its strongest proponents claim. But a strong Anglo-American partnership was vital to the West’s collective security. A shared history and language, liberal democracy, common law framework, and close commercial and cultural ties have underpinned a steadfast partnership that brooks few historical comparisons. Between the fears of abandonment and entrapment that have accompanied multiple allies’ relations with the more powerful United States since 1945, the UK has invariably erred towards the former.

Among the metropolitan left-liberal circles in Britain into which I sometimes inadvertently stray—where policing gender pronouns assumes greater urgency than policing the global commons—it is nonetheless fashionable to trash the U.S.-UK relationship as more specious than special. (The nationalist Right possesses no monopoly in pining for British “independence.”) Depicting Prime Ministers who cleave to the United States as “poodles” while yearning for the “Love Actually moment” (when Hugh Grant’s fictional PM stands up to the overbearing Yanks), cosmopolitan critics invariably raise hackles about bilateral tensions: from Suez in 1956 to divisions over Iran, China, climate change, a digital services tax, and the repatriation of ISIS fighters today. But the Left habitually makes the perfect the enemy of the good. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all special relationships are unhappy in their own way. A relationship does not need to be either symmetrical or equal to count as privileged. While Washington has allies aplenty, few have developed as close or institutionalized ties as the UK, especially in the diplomatic, defense, and intelligence realms.

That amity has not required identical interests or consistent joint action. But when Washington has needed the legitimacy that allies confer, London has mostly been there. The UK joined nine of the 12 operations the U.S. military conducted between 1991 and 2018, as the second-largest force contributor in all of them. As the most important U.S. partner in the Gulf War in 1991 and Iraq in 2003, Britain fielded 43,000 troops in the former and 12,500 in the latter. Militarily, the United States did not need the UK, nor did the UK need to contribute. But Britain’s reflexive and consistent orientation shaped the decision. To the extent that London has had a grand strategy since World War II, staying close to Washington has been at its core.

But the return of great power competition accentuates the challenge of U.S. alliance management in an era of growing capability gaps. If its allies’ military capabilities atrophy, the United States will have few alternatives to a unilateralism of necessity rather than choice. Washington can hardly be blamed for viewing Britain as an ally in good, but diminished, standing. Having divested itself of the capacities it possessed in the two decades following the Cold War’s conclusion, the UK has found it difficult to deploy even a brigade (6,500 troops) in overseas combat operations. The navy’s expeditionary power has attenuated while the RAF has shrunk to the size of roughly five U.S. air squadrons and can barely mount a sustained air campaign (its contribution to the counter-ISIS campaign has been modest).

Diminished capacity wedded to declining political will undercuts the prospect of the UK being a serious co-belligerent in future conflicts of consequence. An economic downturn would add strains on British capacities, as would Scottish or Northern Irish secession. Illusory aspirations for “Global Britain” unmatched by will or wallet will go unfulfilled. 

Britain’s American Future?

On both sides of the Atlantic, a kind of faith-based foreign policy now exists, one that relies more on appeals to nostalgia and rejecting defeatism than evidence and reason. Applied to Brexit, its Pollyanna-esque quality relies on implausible conditions: That a trade deal, equitable to both the United States and United Kingdom, can be achieved, and fast; that divergent national interests yield accommodation, not deadlock; that Johnson wins a general election with a majority in Parliament; and that Trump secures re-election in 2020 and remains faithful to the “best friend forever” du jour. Another implicit condition is that British opinion shifts in a direction that endorses aligning with America over Europe. But would a proud nation like the United Kingdom wish to become an American vassal? And would the United States even find such a vassal attractive?

Brexit portends multi-year rolling damage to the partnership.

First, the UK’s lack of strategic significance is likely to be embarrassingly exposed. London has invariably joined with Washington from conviction even as part of American “coalitions of convenience.” But the UK has proven, as Michael Clarke puts it, a “ten per cent military ally,” spending about one tenth of the U.S. government on defense to obtain about one tenth the size of forces. However coherent the strategy and competent the forces—the latter compromised by their less-than-stellar record in Basra, Helmand, and Libya—this has not consistently amounted to making a real difference. As Clarke notes, “British leaders have always been in danger of mistaking the liking of American chiefs for the British military with their professional judgement of its strategic significance.” With Britain more isolated, poorer, and suffering reputational damage in and beyond Europe, Washington may increasingly regard other allies (Japan, South Korea, the GCC, France) as more militarily useful where it counts.

Second, with less wallet, will, or standing in an age of metastasizing new security threats, London faces substantial challenges—as a mid-ranking democratic power in an increasingly unsympathetic, disorderly world—taking care of its own affairs, never mind “doing good” overseas. A more muscular foreign policy is not in the cards, as was vividly evident this summer when Iran seized an oil tanker under a British flag. To be fair to Johnson, the promised $2.2 billion of new defense spending suggests a serious injection (by recent standards), which will raise the British contribution above the agreed NATO norm of 2 percent of GDP. But this is suggestive more of the extent of decline than a shining new ambition. London may be no albatross but its status as an asset is waning in absolute and relative terms.

Third, the inevitable economic fallout of Brexit will have geostrategic consequences. Estimates suggest a disorderly exit is likely to shrink UK output by anywhere from 3 to as much as 9 percent and see rising inflation and unemployment, with knock-on effects on business and investor confidence and serious impacts on the EU and global economy. That in turn will inhibit prospects for a U.S.-UK trade deal, a negotiation less about tariffs than distinct regulatory approaches and standards. Unless the U.S. Trade Representative compromises significantly from the official negotiation aims set out in February, the UK will be confronted by the starkest of choices. Currently, Britain does about $262 billion of commerce with the United States and some $800 billion of goods and services trade with the EU. Will London bet the house on Trump’s promise that a U.S. deal will quadruple bilateral trade? Would you? Trump’s interventions since 2017 have neither benefited Britain’s standing with Brussels nor helped the U.S. reputation in London. Whatever his protestations to the contrary, Trump is clearly more focused on damaging the EU than assisting the UK.

Trade is doubly problematic. A clear Transatlantic difference exists in how to go about a deal. Initially, the U.S. government favored a sector-by sector approach that could proceed rapidly, offer concrete results and postpone problem areas—agriculture, health care—until last. But WTO rules do not allow for a sector-specific approach. Johnson has stated that, while he admired the U.S. urge for quick results, he wants a comprehensive deal and suggested that somewhere between one to five years was a realistic timeframe.

Nor is there clarity on content. In June, Trump was insistent that Britain’s sacred National Health Service be included, only to back away. In August, Johnson was adamant the NHS was off limits. Any deal will require years to negotiate—while UK negotiators must also finesse new trading arrangements with Brussels—even before the complex process of gaining congressional approval is factored in. Moreover, this assumes that lawmakers are keen to approve a deal. If the Irish border issue is not resolved to the satisfaction of Dublin and Belfast, those prospects are remote. While Nancy Pelosi has been emphatic that the House would not move, 45 Republican Senators pledged in an August 3 letter to support “whatever course Britain takes.” The signals from the White House and Congress are increasingly discordant, threatening to transform the United Kingdom—like Israel—from a solidly bipartisan pillar of U.S. foreign policy into the subject of increasing domestic dissensus. The conditions are not propitious for a Transatlantic renaissance that requires substantial trust and goodwill on both sides. 

Brexit Breaking Bad

What attracts many Americans to Brexit is the Westphalian notion that self-governing nation-states are sacrosanct. But not all nations are equal in power or fortuitous in location. Johnson may admire Trumpian tactics but the resulting strains are reaching levels rarely seen. The pressure to once again hold a referendum on Scottish independence is gaining traction. At the same time, sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland are once again finding violent expression. Cynics might suggest that the prospect of an English parliament dominated by Tories is worth the cost: A June 2019 YouGov poll found that 63 percent of members of the Conservative and Unionist Party would accept the UK’s break-up if that was necessary to secure Brexit. But the costs to British international influence will be grave. Three years on from a referendum that was supposed to settle Britain’s collective future status in or outside the EU, the Union itself may be the ultimate casualty. Such is the reward of a government unable to govern and a parliament unable to decide: ever-greater disunion.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man? Johnson does not lack for self-regard. Some view him as a P.G. Wodehouse character, while Boris seems to look in the mirror and concur with Hegel that “the great man is the man who actualizes his age.” Boris is seen by others as a good man driven to do bad things he does not wish to for a higher purpose: Walter White, with fewer chemicals and more Latin. Yet Johnson could plausibly become the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history. Through his recklessness, Boris is risking a rapid transformation from electoral asset to liability and could lose the next election (and even his own seat) if his governing style continues to alienate as much as inspire.

The Conservatives have achieved a lead in the opinion polls over Labour, up to a margin of ten points. But in an exceptionally volatile moment and with multi-party politics on the rise, the national lead may not yield a secure majority. Traditionally trusted for economic competence rather than compassion, the divided and divisive Tories are threatened with the loss of votes to the Brexit party if a “clean break” is not achieved by Halloween. But such efforts need Labour Leave constituencies—pro-Brexit but anti-Tory—to switch allegiance. The Tories will forfeit pro-Remain areas across Scotland and south-west England. Even if returned with a working majority in the Commons, the PM’s scorched earth tactics offer a toxic legacy that makes dealing with both Westminster and Brussels difficult. Winning the battle may not achieve victory in the war. Traditionally, the Tories have appreciated the electoral value of remaining a broad church. Increasingly, they resemble a madrassa. A Conservative Party transformed into a populist English National Party and exiled from office means a special relationship hanging by a thread.

Johnson’s re-election with a working majority is therefore a necessary but insufficient condition of reviving the U.S.-UK partnership. The divisions among the pro-Remain parties—Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Scottish National Party, and Plaid Cymru (the Welsh nationalists)—might facilitate this minimalist outcome. If their tactical voting means the Conservatives are defeated, however, a “hung Parliament” in which no party holds a majority would likely result in some type of Labour government, either a minority or in coalition with the Scottish National Party, the Greens and/or the Liberal Democrats. Or against the odds Labour may secure a majority, framing the general election on the broad domestic agenda rather than narrowly focusing on Brexit.

At that point, whatever the path taken—and Labour remains riven between delivering an orderly “soft” Brexit or staying in the EU—the prospect of a rupture with Washington becomes very real. Corbyn’s red dawn would represent a clear and present danger to the bilateral. Having championed every anti-Western, anti-American, anti-British and anti-Israeli cause over his 36 years in Parliament, Comrade Corbyn is not about to change. Unlike François Mitterrand of France, whose intelligence, judgment, and experience of power lead him as President to moderate his socialist views and warm up to Washington, Corbyn has minimal shrewdness. As the least intelligent or qualified figure ever to come close to being Prime Minister, convincing him of the centrality of the United States to British national security would be, to quote Veep’s Selina Myer, like “explaining gravity to a chicken.”

Given his reflexive anti-Americanism, it is not difficult to imagine Corbyn ceasing to cooperate with Five Eyes, ordering the four British nuclear submarines to port, slashing the defense budget, bringing UK troops back home, closing U.S. bases in Britain and expelling U.S. personnel, and altering the UK’s diplomatic mission dramatically (to vote against the United States and Israel in the UN Security Council and align with the “anti-imperialist” forces in the General Assembly). While the public would not countenance withdrawal from NATO, the UK would cease to be a reliable force under a Corbyn leadership.

Moreover, with punitive policies towards business, Britain would look singularly unattractive to investors at precisely the moment it was most in need of inward funds (affluent Brits are already moving funds offshore and preparing to migrate). A U.S. trade deal would be dead on arrival. Having suspended Parliament for policy ends through prorogation, Johnson has also established a constitutional precedent that would prove especially appealing to a cultish Labour leadership that has never believed in a parliamentary road to socialism. Although President Trump prides himself on his ability to strike deals with the most implacable U.S. foes—from Kim Jong-un and Putin to the Taliban—it is unlikely that the Corbynistas would be willing to parlay. “Taking back control” may be a chimera, but a Labour regime intent on taking Britain back to 1968 is all too real.

Should Trump lose in 2020, circumstances would not necessarily be improved. A Biden, Warren, or Sanders Administration might be more aligned to Labour on domestic matters and selective international concerns, but at least as hostile to new trade deals as Trump. And while most Brits favor Democrats in presidential elections, what sentimental affection for the old country exists among political elites tends to be more pronounced among Republicans (as the 45 Senators’ letter eloquently demonstrated). As British experience with Carter, Clinton, and Obama revealed, Democrats can be every bit as unsentimental and hard-headed when it comes to international affairs. A Democratic administration in 2021 might adopt more congenial policies on issues such as climate change, but the prospects that the UK’s standing in and influence over Washington would grow is minimal (Brexit barely merits a mention in the limited space afforded to foreign policy on their campaign websites). While a Democrat may reverse some of the Trump policies abroad that are most egregious to European sensibilities, the more general trajectory away from a forward-leaning posture may prove irreversible if a “new consensus” is indeed emerging.

By the same token, London is understandably wary of a Washington that champions America First. Serious figures in the UK know that dealing with the EU post-Brexit is going to be tough. An American administration willing to exert diplomatic influence on partners in Europe to reach productive new accommodations with London would be immensely valuable. But that is not what we have seen from Trump (the parallels with the recent breakdown in relations, and intelligence cooperation, between South Korea and Japan may be instructive). If Washington is forced to choose between the UK and EU as legacy of the Brexit fallout, we may not see it from a successor administration either.

Some might hope that a Labour or coalition government could return London to the “golden age” before 2016. Most American foreign policy mavens saw the UK as of substantially greater value to Washington as a fully-fledged member of the EU than outside of it. But the distinct possibility looms that, should Johnson lose his gambit and the UK choose to remain in the EU—either through government action or a second referendum—then Britain will become an even more reluctant European nation by default. That is, having failed to exit, what leverage would a less-than-Prodigal Son exercise upon his ignoble return to the European fold? (The BBC fly-on-the-wall documentary, Brexit: Behind Closed Doors, offers vivid scenes of EU negotiators expressing scathing contempt for their nominal British “partners” as they negotiated a withdrawal agreement. A “return” would surely fuel even greater triumphalism.)

Perfidious Albion would have had its bluff well and truly called. Having defeated the nascent threat of contagion—surely no other EU state will contemplate leaving after the bungled British effort—Brussels will be emboldened to tell London to put up or shut up should plans for ever closer union once more gain traction. The UK may well forfeit its budget rebate, be pressured into closer regulatory alignment and joining the euro, and even sign up to an EU army that seeks publicly to supplement—but privately to displace—NATO. The status quo ante will resume, after four convulsive but wasted years, with much reduced UK leverage. Even if Brexit is reversed, much as its currency has depreciated against the dollar, the UK’s geopolitical worth is undergoing a profound devaluation.

Essence of Indecision

Churchill once remarked, “Sometimes when Fortune scowls most spitefully, she is preparing her most dazzling gifts.” If somehow the Gordian knot of Brexit is broken, perhaps the outcome will resemble the typical British pragmatism of keeping calm, carrying on, and muddling through. Not-so-splendid quasi-isolation may be a price worth paying for the reclamation of British sovereignty. Even if the worst comes to pass, as the Cassandras predict, Britain is not about to become a failed or pariah state bereft of friends. But it may become short of friends with benefits.

There is a poignant section in Andrew Gimson’s biography of Boris, where he notes that:

There is something about Euroscepticism which can turn sensible men into cranks. They decide, quite reasonably, that the European Union is a mortal threat to our ancient liberties, including our form of government, and adopt a tone of intense hostility towards Brussels which starts to make them seem narrow and paranoid. On finding themselves ignored or dismissed by the pro-Europeans, the anti-Europeans become ever more vehement and ever more suspicious, until in the end they can only preach to the converted.

Boris, Gimson adds, “never started on that downward path.” Maybe, but he is doing a fine impression of having ended up there.

In the short term, the chaos theory approach that Boris projects—personifying Homer Simpson’s plaintive, “Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand”—is aggravating a crisis to a momentous denouement whose outcome few can confidently predict. Even if he wins plaudits for decisiveness and making the trains run on time (an elusive achievement in Britain), playing fast and loose with the constitution is dangerous. In the longer term, the essential problem remains that Britain is deeply divided in ways that transcend the left-right divide to frustrate conventional party politics. Since they turn on fundamental questions of identity, demography, and values more than economics or distributive politics—certain traditional conceptions of nationhood pitted against a new kind of postmodern, blank-slate, cosmopolitan Britishness—these are highly resistant to the compromises that have long been a hallmark of British pragmatism. In a contest for the soul of Britain, neither side is minded to settle for half a loaf.

Regardless of the eventual result of Brexit in coming weeks or months, a substantial proportion of Brits will therefore reject and agitate against it as a betrayal of the nation’s destiny. For many Leavers, faced with the choice of no Brexit or no deal, the threat to democracy outweighs that to the economy. For Remainers, the caricature that a bunch of old, white, xenophobic know-nothings smothered their tolerant multicultural British baby in its cradle—despite one in three black and ethnic minority voters supporting Brexit—continues to animate anguished efforts to reverse the plebiscite’s result by hook or crook. (Jonathan Freedland’s lament for the lost optimism of the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony is a pellucid example of the genre; only someone hermetically sealed in the bubbliest of bourgeois London bubbles could take such sporting propaganda seriously.) Absent an external shock on the scale of war or depression, this generational power-play, and the identity politics that inform it, will continue to disfigure British politics and society—and tarnish what remains of Britain’s “credibility”—for many years to come.

The British strategic personality is increasingly schizophrenic. Already shaky, the U.S.-UK partnership risks soon being imperiled, sawing off the branch upon which our mutual security sits. What will Britain offer Washington in the 2020s? If the Wilsonian Century is over, as Colin Dueck persuasively argues, perhaps a downsized vocation for Britain may abet rather than frustrate the United States to concentrate on a conservative agenda for what remains of the liberal order: preserving the West rather than transforming the globe. Diminished resources may yield a new resolve to refocus where the UK can make a genuine difference. But where it can make most difference is in the theater where its diplomatic heft is under greatest retreat: Europe.

As we Brits wonder whether we still recognize each other or our country, perhaps those beyond our shores now know us better than we know ourselves. At a safe distance from the Sturm und Drang of Westminster’s convulsions, Americans might reassure us that we plucky Brits, with our wacky humor and weird sports, always pull through. Temporary discomfort need not dislodge us from Making Britain Great Again. Independence and the path to global influence await our industrious talents and stiff upper lips. For the U.S.-UK bilateral, though, the signs of irreversible decline grow more vivid by the day. Outwardly, the symbolism and rhetoric will display continuity. Diplomacy, tourism, commerce, educational exchange and our great cultural affinity will continue apace. But in terms of substance, the partnership is likely to resemble the Cheshire cat’s smile in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: the smile remains but the body has disappeared. History may not be kind to larger-than-life blonde populists who once yearned to be President.

The post Friends Without Benefits: The “Special Relationship” After Brexit appeared first on The American Interest.

As China Surges, Europe Is on the Menu

Geopolitics is back, in no small part because of the growing realization in Washington that the China strategy the United States has pursued since the end of the Cold War has failed. China’s challenge to the United States, and the West in general, is systemic, and intent on redefining the existing global trading regime, the structure of our alliances, and, last but not least, the existing framework of norms and values that has historically favored the democratic West. After four decades of misplaced expectations that the PRC’s export-driven modernization would bring about democratization, and that Beijing would opt for merging its trajectory with that of the larger global trade and security system, the United States is now confronted with a near-peer competitor intent on assembling a constellation of states to challenge America and its allies. For three post-Cold war decades, encomia for the internationalization of manufacturing and the inevitable triumph of our normative institutions served to push the cause of China’s ever-deeper integration with the West. So it is perhaps ironic that Sino-American competition is now gearing up to spread beyond the Indo-Pacific, deep into the European part of the Eurasian Rimland.

For years now, the People’s Republic of China has pursued a geostrategic project aimed at establishing an alternative supply chain across Eurasia, with the goal of securing national autonomy by guaranteeing the insularity of its own economic space while at the same time maintaining at-will access to U.S. and European markets. The endgame of Beijing’s strategy is what I call the “global inversion” of established trade flows that have thus far rested on U.S. naval supremacy and the overall preeminence of maritime trade over land routes, thereby constituting arguably the greatest potential redefinition of worldwide power distribution in half a millennium. Beijing has gambled that, if it can successfully develop and defend the Eurasian land route through conventional, nuclear, cyber, and space-based systems while also acquiring sufficient naval power projection capabilities and anti-access/area denial (A2AD) capabilities to tie down the U.S. Navy in the Indo-Pacific, it will be in a position to significantly tilt the risk premium assigned to maritime trade versus the Eurasian land route, thereby giving it a lever to reduce the flow of maritime trade or, in an emergency, shut it down altogether.

There have been numerous indications of Beijing’s strategic intent to dominate Europe. There is, for example, the rapid expansion of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), in terms of both size and planned acquisition of new assets, especially the aircraft carrier battle groups projected to be operational by 2035. The PLAN is already operating in the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea, and is aiming for a major expansion into the High North and the Arctic (hence its development of a new fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers, including the currently planned next-generation vessels rated at 33,000 tons each, which would make them the largest such ships in the world).

Aided by Russian revisionism in Europe, Beijing is positioning itself to launch an all-out challenge to U.S. military preeminence. The de facto alignment of Chinese and Russian interests in Europe in opposition to the United States—though it falls short of an all-out alliance—presents the United States and its allies with a confluence of threats that exceed in their potential consequences the scope of the Soviet threat during the Cold War. The combination of Beijing’s efforts to aggregate economically and financially dependent states in Europe and Moscow’s pressure to disaggregate NATO and the European Union poses a clear and present danger to the security of the Transatlantic community.

Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has sought to ensure access to the lands surrounding Eurasia, including Europe, the Maghreb, the Middle East, and the territories of the Indo-Pacific, as part of its grand strategy. The forces forward-deployed in Europe and Asia served as an essential bridge between the need to counter the overwhelming land power of the Soviet Union and the stand-off capacity afforded to America by its powerful navy. America’s unfettered access to the so-called Rimland, buttressed by our robust network of alliances, fostered an unprecedented level of stability worldwide.

Today, ensuring access to and the defense of the Rimland, especially its European gateway, continues to be critical in preventing China from realizing its strategy of building an autonomous supply chain across the continental Heartland. For the United States and its allies to nullify the Chinese strategy, the Europeans must grasp fully the gravity of the situation and respond accordingly.

In a number of European capitals there seems to be some ambivalence about the scope of the Sino-American rivalry, and about how best to proceed; both the security risks and the economic opportunities that China has brought to the Continent are tugging at Europeans’ consciences. The outcome of this debate is anything but settled: There is no reason to assume that, as competition between China and the United States heats up, all of Europe will see the threat the way the United States does. Whether through Chinese loans for equity, structural investment such as the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s “17+1” cooperation with Greece and Central and East European states, or the direct acquisition of European technology by Chinese companies, Europe is on the menu. To understand the nature of the challenge requires revisiting the rudiments of geostrategy outlined above. Our European allies urgently need to develop a coordinated response to Chinese economic penetration, and to work closely with the United States to properly resource their own defense by investing in real, usable military capabilities.

And yet a number of crosscurrents in Europe continue to raise questions about the Continent’s ability to rise to the challenge. Five years since the Russian seizure of Crimea and the war in Ukraine, and notwithstanding several NATO summits in which alliance members have committed to spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, a number of NATO allies continue to struggle to generate sufficient political will to rebuild their defenses. Equally important, internal political pressures continue to fracture the Continent. The fragmentation of the European Union raises serious questions about the EU’s ability to weather the storm: The idea of a “multi-speed” Europe is gaining currency in Brussels, and the Continent is splitting into an increasingly “postmodern” West and a more traditionally oriented “modern” East. Last but not least, over the past three years new fissures in Transatlantic relations, which both Russia and China have sought to widen, have made it difficult to achieve the consensus necessary to confront Chinese imperialism.

The United States needs to remain fully engaged in Europe, working through NATO and bilaterally to keep the larger strategic objective of countering China’s push into Europe firmly on the Transatlantic agenda. Gone are the heady days of liberal institutionalism and globalization as our preferred frameworks for thinking about national security strategy; the United States has been forced to grapple once again with enduring geopolitical verities, requiring a healthy dose of realism, alliance-building, and carefully considered power-balancing. Today China’s expanding economic, military, and political reach across the globe, assisted by Russia’s deepening geostrategic revisionism, should provide the foundation of a shared NATO threat assessment going forward. More than at any time since the end of the Cold War, how Europe responds in the next decade to Beijing’s imperial drive, and especially how it defines its commercial relations with China, will be critical to the outcome of the current round of great power competition.

The post As China Surges, Europe Is on the Menu appeared first on The American Interest.

The European Union Honors Competition More Than the “Land of the Free”

Let’s start with a few anecdotes, a no-no in scholarly writing. Walk into a German big-city discount supermarket and check out a bagful of groceries—it will cost about one-half of the equivalent at Safeway’s, let alone Gristede’s in New York. U.S. consumers pay $80 per month for their cellphone; that is $50 more than the average in Britain. In Germany you can get a mobile flat rate for $17, and cable/landline for as low as $28. In America, the price for cable averages out at $85.

A bizarre world. Isn’t the United States the beacon of free and competitive markets—and the EU a bureaucratic monster that regulates everything down to the curvature of cucumbers? Let’s skip the shoppers’ tales and look at the facts and figures, as assembled by New York University’s Thomas Philippon in his forthcoming book, The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets. For a sneak preview, see an earlier paper, How America Lost Its Competitive Edge: A Study of Institutional Drift, co-authored with German Gutierrez.

The beacon was erected more than a century ago. In the Gilded Age, monopolies and cartels had run rampant; recall the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Carnegies, then known as “robber barons”. Mercilessly, they wiped out competition, raising prices and entry barriers. Untrammeled capitalism ended with the Sherman Act of 1890. The law was successively tightened all the way to the Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950. Even better, U.S. antitrust legislation became the model for European countries, particularly in postwar Germany, which had been the most cartelized economy of the Continent. (It helped to have the United States as an occupier.) France and Italy, hide-bound to the core, lagged behind for three decades. 

“The American antitrust doctrine had spread globally,” relate Philippon and Gutierrez, “and, by the 1990’s, a broad international consensus had emerged among policy makers in favor of US-style regulations. . . .particularly in Europe. The U.S. retained a head-start, and it had a longer history of independent enforcement.” To simplify, the philosophical difference between America  and Europe used to be wide. European customs and legislation tended to favor producers, giving them a long leash. U.S. competition policy would come down on the side of consumers, which drove down prices and raised real incomes. Such was the Golden Age of American prosperity in the postwar era.

Given these different points of departure, U.S. markets should have “remained more competitive,” the authors aver. So why have America and Europe traded places, as they argue? The quick answer is “because of the EU.” In the 1980s, the EU Commission began to dismantle the old dispensation, deregulating airlines, railroads, utilities, telecoms, energy, and postal services. Coddled “national champions” were exposed to EU-wide competition and prices dropped.

Why this counter-intuitive outcome? Why did those “faceless bureaucrats” succeed? First, they did the dirty work national politicians dared not touch. Elected officials could point to Brussels as the master and culprit, which could do in the name of Europe what entrenched interests and their political allies would block at home.

Second, they had an easier time cracking the problem of “regulatory capture.” On the national level, it is a short step from, say, the farm lobby to the Ministry/Department of Agriculture. Not so in Brussels where the Agri-Commissioner is beholden to 28 governments. National politicians are caught in a squeeze. Though they dearly want to capture the agency for their nation’s benefit, they don’t want any other EU member to grab it in a counter-move; so better to keep their hands off. 

Third, given its multinational construction, the EU could raise the barriers to political influence in Brussels, hemming in stratagems that convert cash into clout. At home, a trade association can harness parties and politicos to its self-serving purposes by feeding them with funds. Such time-honored strategy has proven quite profitable in the halls of Congress. Once elected or re-elected, favored politicos are expected to return the favor by weighing down on national watchdogs. But how do you buy influence in a European-wide election? The relatively powerless EU parliament cannot match the centrality of national legislatures. When parliamentary leverage is low, the money game does not generate too many winnings. To boot, paying off 28 caucuses, or even a majority, would mean spreading lots of money far and wide. In the United States, a lobby need only zero in on key Congresspersons or a single party.

All this, rather than unbounded free market ideology, has served to insulate Europe’s watch dogs from outside intrusion. “The E.U.’s Directorate-General for Competition is more independent than the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission,” argue the authors, adding that in the U.S., “political expenditures have decreased enforcement and increased regulatory barriers to entry.” To exaggerate wildly, it is back to the Gilded Age.

Take the airline sector, which is dominated by four big players. In the EU, there are six heavy-weights, plus five middle-weights like SAS and four smaller companies like Finair (which still has a global network). The level of concentration, which has been rising relentlessly, is about three times higher in the United States than in the EU. Naturally, the profit margin of U.S. airlines is significantly higher: 9 vs. 2.5 percent.

Mergers are a lot easier in the U.S. than on the other side of the Atlantic. According to figures presented by the authors, the “Top-8 Concentration” in manufacturing shows a steep rise since 1990, whereas in the EU it has plummeted at the same pace. Intuitively, the lay person does not need any fancy mathematics, as arrayed in the paper. Looking at the digital world of Google et al., the untutored see concentration soaring before their own eyes—with Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft buying up companies as if there were no tomorrow. And, of course, Amazon, which is conquering the universe of retail day by day.[image error]The above graph, taken from Philippon and Gutierrez, shows the dramatic difference between the United States and EU when it comes to antitrust enforcement in terms of fines. In the period from 1995-99, the U.S. was still far ahead on the penalty front. Then the EU sped forward. Ten years later (2005-9), the EU imposed fines worth nine billion euros, whereas the U.S. clocked in at three billion. In the most recent period (2015-17), the EU left the “Land of the Free” in the dust, imposing fines six times higher than those levied in the United States. And so it goes, graph after graph. 

Now, let’s make a pitch for the United States. Is “evil capitalism” at work here? It is more correct to invoke yet another philosophical difference. The EU focuses on the number of players, which it tries to keep high in order to strengthen competition. In U.S. antitrust law, the focus is on prices rather than concentration. So, Amazon is semi-okay. It wipes out competitors left and right, but it conquers markets with rock-bottom prices. Too bad for the competition, but wonderful for the consumer. Let’s add the case of Volkswagen, which does not highlight antitrust enforcement, but vigilance. The systematic prettification of Diesel emissions was exposed by U.S., not German, authorities.

That said, concentration is soaring in the United States while profit margins and prices are generally rising—not what the trustbusters around the turn of the 20th century had in mind. Airlines and telecoms are among the most dramatic examples of concentration, hurting America consumers. Yet a hundred years ago, the Claytons and Kefauvers had no inkling of Facebook and the like. Why carp about such monopolists if they don’t charge us for their wares? “It’s not about price, stupid!,” to borrow from Bill Clinton once more. It is about the unchecked, nay, invisible power that suffuses not only the market, but also society as a whole.

How do you cut such giants down to size in the way the government dealt with Standard Oil? Social networks don’t restrict output to raise prices as in the olden days. They offer more and more, yet monopolize our minds, not to put too fine a point on it. Classical antitrust theory runs up against its limits here; still,  the Europeans moved first, highlighting the “Great Reversal.” They may be animated by a bias against Almighty America, but that does not delegitimize the overall impetus. 

Since 2017, EU antitrust authorities have hit Google with a total of $9.5 billion in fines for abusing the dominance of its search engine. Facebook and Apple are looking at investigations. The House Judiciary Committee started one of its own in June. The outcome could be legislation to amend or supplant the laws laid down between 1890 and 1950. Given the accelerating tech-revolution and the snail-like pace of legislation, the task is as hard as it is urgent. 

The breakup of a previous tech-giant, ATT, took eight years. In 1992, the Government went after Microsoft for abusing its Windows monopoly. In 2000, a Federal judge ordered the “deconstruction” of the company. Microsoft is still around—and bigger than ever.

The post The European Union Honors Competition More Than the “Land of the Free” appeared first on The American Interest.

The European Union Honors Competition More than the “Land of the Free”

Let’s start with a few anecdotes, a no-no in scholarly writing. Walk into a German big-city discount supermarket and check out a bagful of groceries—it will cost about one-half of the equivalent at Safeway’s, let alone Gristede’s in New York. U.S. consumers pay $80 per month for their cellphone; that is $50 more than the average in Britain. In Germany you can get a mobile flat rate for $17, and cable/landline for as low as $28. In America, the price for cable averages out at $85.

A bizarre world. Isn’t the United States the beacon of free and competitive markets—and the EU a bureaucratic monster that regulates everything down to the curvature of cucumbers? Let’s skip the shoppers’ tales and look at the facts and figures, as assembled by New York University’s Thomas Philippon in his forthcoming book, The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets. For a sneak preview, see an earlier paper, How America Lost Its Competitive Edge: A Study of Institutional Drift, co-authored with German Gutierrez.

The beacon was erected more than a century ago. In the Gilded Age, monopolies and cartels had run rampant; recall the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Carnegies, then known as “robber barons”. Mercilessly, they wiped out competition, raising prices and entry barriers. Untrammeled capitalism ended with the Sherman Act of 1890. The law was successively tightened all the way to the Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950. Even better, U.S. antitrust legislation became the model for European countries, particularly in postwar Germany, which had been the most cartelized economy of the Continent. (It helped to have the United States as an occupier.) France and Italy, hide-bound to the core, lagged behind for three decades. 

“The American antitrust doctrine had spread globally,” relate Philippon and Gutierrez, “and, by the 1990’s, a broad international consensus had emerged among policy makers in favor of US-style regulations. . . .particularly in Europe. The U.S. retained a head-start, and it had a longer history of independent enforcement.” To simplify, the philosophical difference between America  and Europe used to be wide. European customs and legislation tended to favor producers, giving them a long leash. U.S. competition policy would come down on the side of consumers, which drove down prices and raised real incomes. Such was the Golden Age of American prosperity in the postwar era.

Given these different points of departure, U.S. markets should have “remained more competitive,” the authors aver. So why have America and Europe traded places, as they argue? The quick answer is “because of the EU.” In the 1980s, the EU Commission began to dismantle the old dispensation, deregulating airlines, railroads, utilities, telecoms, energy, and postal services. Coddled “national champions” were exposed to EU-wide competition and prices dropped.

Why this counter-intuitive outcome? Why did those “faceless bureaucrats” succeed? First, they did the dirty work national politicians dared not touch. Elected officials could point to Brussels as the master and culprit, which could do in the name of Europe what entrenched interests and their political allies would block at home.

Second, they had an easier time cracking the problem of “regulatory capture.” On the national level, it is a short step from, say, the farm lobby to the Ministry/Department of Agriculture. Not so in Brussels where the Agri-Commissioner is beholden to 28 governments. National politicians are caught in a squeeze. Though they dearly want to capture the agency for their nation’s benefit, they don’t want any other EU member to grab it in a counter-move; so better to keep their hands off. 

Third, given its multinational construction, the EU could raise the barriers to political influence in Brussels, hemming in stratagems that convert cash into clout. At home, a trade association can harness parties and politicos to its self-serving purposes by feeding them with funds. Such time-honored strategy has proven quite profitable in the halls of Congress. Once elected or re-elected, favored politicos are expected to return the favor by weighing down on national watchdogs. But how do you buy influence in a European-wide election? The relatively powerless EU parliament cannot match the centrality of national legislatures. When parliamentary leverage is low, the money game does not generate too many winnings. To boot, paying off 28 caucuses, or even a majority, would mean spreading lots of money far and wide. In the United States, a lobby need only zero in on key Congresspersons or a single party.

All this, rather than unbounded free market ideology, has served to insulate Europe’s watch dogs from outside intrusion. “The E.U.’s Directorate-General for Competition is more independent than the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission,” argue the authors, adding that in the U.S., “political expenditures have decreased enforcement and increased regulatory barriers to entry.” To exaggerate wildly, it is back to the Gilded Age.

Take the airline sector, which is dominated by four big players. In the EU, there are six heavy-weights, plus five middle-weights like SAS and four smaller companies like Finair (which still has a global network). The level of concentration, which has been rising relentlessly, is about three times higher in the United States than in the EU. Naturally, the profit margin of U.S. airlines is significantly higher: 9 vs. 2.5 percent.

Mergers are a lot easier in the U.S. than on the other side of the Atlantic. According to figures presented by the authors, the “Top-8 Concentration” in manufacturing shows a steep rise since 1990, whereas in the EU it has plummeted at the same pace. Intuitively, the lay person does not need any fancy mathematics, as arrayed in the paper. Looking at the digital world of Google et al., the untutored see concentration soaring before their own eyes—with Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft buying up companies as if there were no tomorrow. And, of course, Amazon, which is conquering the universe of retail day by day.[image error]The above graph, taken from Philippon and Gutierrez, shows the dramatic difference between the United States and EU when it comes to antitrust enforcement in terms of fines. In the period from 1995-99, the U.S. was still far ahead on the penalty front. Then the EU sped forward. Ten years later (2005-9), the EU imposed fines worth nine billion euros, whereas the U.S. clocked in at three billion. In the most recent period (2015-17), the EU left the “Land of the Free” in the dust, imposing fines six times higher than those levied in the United States. And so it goes, graph after graph. 

Now, let’s make a pitch for the United States. Is “evil capitalism” at work here? It is more correct to invoke yet another philosophical difference. The EU focuses on the number of players, which it tries to keep high in order to strengthen competition. In U.S. antitrust law, the focus is on prices rather than concentration. So, Amazon is semi-okay. It wipes out competitors left and right, but it conquers markets with rock-bottom prices. Too bad for the competition, but wonderful for the consumer. Let’s add the case of Volkswagen, which does not highlight antitrust enforcement, but vigilance. The systematic prettification of Diesel emissions was exposed by U.S., not German, authorities.

That said, concentration is soaring in the United States while profit margins and prices are generally rising—not what the trustbusters around the turn of the 20th century had in mind. Airlines and telecoms are among the most dramatic examples of concentration, hurting America consumers. Yet a hundred years ago, the Claytons and Kefauvers had no inkling of Facebook and the like. Why carp about such monopolists if they don’t charge us for their wares? “It’s not about price, stupid!,” to borrow from Bill Clinton once more. It is about the unchecked, nay, invisible power that suffuses not only the market, but also society as a whole.

How do you cut such giants down to size in the way the government dealt with Standard Oil? Social networks don’t restrict output to raise prices as in the olden days. They offer more and more, yet monopolize our minds, not to put too fine a point on it. Classical antitrust theory runs up against its limits here; still,  the Europeans moved first, highlighting the “Great Reversal.” They may be animated by a bias against Almighty America, but that does not delegitimize the overall impetus. 

Since 2017, EU antitrust authorities have hit Google with a total of $9.5 billion in fines for abusing the dominance of its search engine. Facebook and Apple are looking at investigations. The House Judiciary Committee started one of its own in June. The outcome could be legislation to amend or supplant the laws laid down between 1890 and 1950. Given the accelerating tech-revolution and the snail-like pace of legislation, the task is as hard as it is urgent. 

The breakup of a previous tech-giant, ATT, took eight years. In 1992, the Government went after Microsoft for abusing its Windows monopoly. In 2000, a Federal judge ordered the “deconstruction” of the company. Microsoft is still around—and bigger than ever.

The post The European Union Honors Competition More than the “Land of the Free” appeared first on The American Interest.

A Trump-Zelensky Meeting? On Second Thought…

Ukrainians are confused, and for good reason. Ever since winning election in a landslide in April, Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and his team have been waiting for a promised invitation to Washington and a meeting with President Trump. When an Oval Office visit seemed stalled, Zelensky at least hoped he would rendezvous with Trump in Warsaw during Poland’s commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of that country, which both leaders were slated to attend.

That meeting got scrubbed, however, when Trump canceled his trip ostensibly to oversee preparations for Hurricane Dorian. Zelensky instead met with Vice President Mike Pence in Warsaw. This was Zelensky’s second recent high-level meeting with a U.S. official; the week before, former National Security Adviser John Bolton visited Kyiv and met the Ukrainian leader there. Zelensky was not lacking for high-level American attention, but securing a meeting with Trump was proving increasingly elusive. After being one of the first leaders to congratulate Zelensky on his huge victory this past April, Trump has been giving Ukraine and Zelensky the cold shoulder.

Both Pence and Bolton, to their credit, reassured Ukraine of American support for a country that has been the victim of Russian invasion and aggression since 2014. Such messages are important, but it would be even better if Ukraine heard similar reassurances directly from the American President—particularly now that Bolton has left the Administration.

In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula and then sent Russian forces into the eastern Donbas region, though Putin himself denies that Russian troops are active there. More than 13,000 Ukrainians have been killed as a result, 298 passengers aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 were shot out of the sky by a Russian missile, and close to 2 million Ukrainians have been displaced in the fighting. The human rights situation in Crimea, under de facto Russian control, is appalling, and Putin bears responsibility for all of this.

Trump’s assent in 2017 to provide Javelin missiles and other systems stood in contrast to President Obama’s stubborn and ill-advised decision to ban such assistance to Ukraine. It is widely known that Trump likes to do the opposite in many cases from what his immediate predecessor did.

But now Trump is resembling Obama, and not in a good way. Obama failed to visit Ukraine during his entire presidency, a missed opportunity to demonstrate American solidarity with a country literally under attack from Putin. Trump, too, has yet to visit Ukraine. Obama at least hosted Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, on a number of occasions. And not only has Trump resisted following through on an invitation to his Ukrainian counterpart to visit Washington, he has also held up $250 million in congressionally approved military assistance, a decision that has drawn bipartisan criticism on Capitol Hill. According to administration officials, Trump tasked Bolton and Defense Secretary Mark Esper with reviewing the military aid proposed for Ukraine. The Pentagon has already given the green light, and Bolton cannot be the cause of further delay. The problem seems to lie with the President himself.

If ever there was a time to demonstrate American support for Ukraine at the highest levels, that time is now. Ukrainians are determined to integrate more closely with the European Union, and the election of Zelensky represents hope among the population that he would get serious about fighting corruption, a cancer that has eaten away at Ukraine for decades.

The disconnect between the support demonstrated from Trump’s top advisers and Vice President and the lack of interest manifested by Trump himself is not only confusing, but dangerous. Putin may well read Trump’s position as an opening to ramp up military and other pressure on Ukraine, notwithstanding the historic prisoner exchange over the weekend. Trump’s posture is demoralizing to Ukrainians who literally are on the frontlines defending against further Russian aggression and encroachment, with casualties on a daily basis. Trump, in short, risks both emboldening Putin and alienating Ukrainians. What for? Two explanations seem plausible.

First, Trump the candidate and Trump the President have been consistent about seeking an improvement in relations with Putin. At the G-7 meeting in France last month, just as he did at last year’s gathering in Canada, Trump called for reconstituting the G-8 by bringing Putin’s Russia back into the fold. Russia, of course was expelled from the G-8 in 2014 after Putin’s invasion and illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and further Russian attacks against Ukraine in its Donbas region. Trump has made no mention of this fact; nor has he conditioned Russia’s return to the G-8 on its withdrawal from eastern Ukraine and its return of Crimea to Ukrainian control. Instead, he repeatedly and wrongly claims that Putin “outsmarted” Obama and, out of pique, Obama kicked Putin out. All G-7 leaders unanimously agreed in 2014 that Putin did not belong in their group. Trump never utters a negative word about his Russian counterpart and instead talks about how the world would be better off if Russia and the United States “got along.” Ukraine would undoubtedly be one of the casualties of any such rapprochement.

The second explanation for Trump’s position is arguably uglier. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has pressured the new Ukrainian government to launch an investigation into former Vice President and Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden. Giuliani claims that Biden interfered to kill a Ukrainian investigation involving his son, Hunter, and a controversial Ukrainian company. The recently departed Ukrainian Prosecutor General, Yuri Lutsenko, after initially playing along with Giuliani, finally acknowledged having no evidence to support any wrongdoing by Biden or his son.

Giuliani has also sought to flip the Russia collusion narrative by arguing that it was Ukrainian collusion with the Clinton campaign, not Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, that should be investigated both in Kyiv and Washington, as reported in the New York Times. He cites a former Ukrainian parliamentary deputy’s exposure of payments made to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort as proof of such interference; in fact, the truly nefarious activity was carried out by Manafort, who now sits in prison.

Regardless of the deleterious effect his efforts may be having on U.S.-Ukrainian relations, Giuliani appears hell-bent on entangling authorities in Kyiv in American domestic politics. He has spun up certain members of the media to implicate Ukraine as conspirators with the Democrats, not the Russians with the Republicans. It appears Giuliani has convinced Trump to condition a White House invitation to Zelensky on Ukraine’s agreement to investigate Biden and possible collusion between Ukrainians and the Clinton campaign.

Zelensky should resist such pressure, even if it costs him an Oval Office meeting with Trump. A Washington Post editorial nailed it:

Mr. Trump is not just soliciting Ukraine’s help with his presidential campaign; he is using U.S. military aid the country desperately needs in an attempt to extort it.

On Monday, three House committees—Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight and Government Reform— announced the launch of an investigation into the matter. “The Trump Administration’s decision to withhold vital security assistance to Ukraine is only the latest in a series of actions in which President Trump appears to undermine U.S. foreign policy to placate Russia and place his personal interests above the national interest,” the Democratic chairmen of the committees said in a joint statement.

At a time when Ukraine and Zelensky need a full embrace and support from the West and the United States in particular, Trump is placing his political and electoral interests above those of U.S. national security interests. Congress must step in and demand an end to such reckless behavior. It should make a full-court press to release the military aid being held hostage by Trump and Giuliani.

In addition, Zelensky is expected to travel to New York this month to speak before the UN General Assembly. Perhaps the House and Senate should invite Zelensky to visit the Capitol and deliver a joint address to Congress if Trump refuses to host Zelensky himself. There is precedent for such a decision: Congress bestowed the honor upon a previous Ukrainian President, Viktor Yushchenko in 2005. At the end of the day, maybe it is just as well Zelensky doesn’t meet Trump.

Note: This piece was originally published before the departure of National Security Adviser John Bolton. It has been updated to account for that development.

The post A Trump-Zelensky Meeting? On Second Thought… appeared first on The American Interest.

Is Pompeo’s Rights Commission More or Less Than Meets the Eye?

Editor’s Note: This essay is third in a series on American Ideals and Interests. The first essay, Tod Lindberg’s “Moral Responsibility and the National Interest,” can be found here. The second, David J. Kramer’s “Human Rights Problems a Commission Won’t Solve,” can be found here.

Back on July 7, a Wall Street Journal op-ed signed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced his intention to site a Commission on Unalienable Rights in the Department of State. Pompeo argued that since the end of the Cold War a proliferation of loose advocacy about new human rights has muddled the waters fed by the Founders’ oracle of Enlightenment truth. The Secretary opined that by getting back to basics good things could happen—even, perhaps, the reorienting of “international institutions specifically tasked to protect human rights, like the United Nations, back to their original missions.”

The next day at a State Department press conference the Secretary repeated a version of the op-ed but added references to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and to both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. He then introduced as chair of the commission Harvard Law School Professor and former Vatican Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon and asked her to say a few words. Pompeo also announced the nine other members of the commission, plus a head of the Executive Secretariat of the commission (basically an executive director) and a rapporteur—both State Department officials. Announcement of the commission soon appeared in the Federal Register, proving that it was about to become a going concern: The commission’s first meeting is scheduled for some time this month.

The news from July 7-8 sparked my curiosity, particularly as it came just after the convening of the second annual Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom at the State Department, also presided over by the Secretary, and after a secretarial speech in May titled “A Foreign Policy from the Founding.” Like several other observers, I saw a likely connection between the ministerial and the commission, and between both and the Secretary’s lack of shyness about expressing the influence of his Evangelical Christian beliefs on his policy views. Those views certainly include a perspective on America’s role in the world—most volubly the Middle East—but also on an array of culture war controversies at home, not least the perennial issues of so-called gay rights, and especially the even more hoary issue of abortion.

These lines merge from time to time in policy domains, as for example over the question of whether U.S. government money should go to organizations at home (Planned Parenthood, for example) and abroad that either directly support abortion, or that support other organizations that support and even perform abortions. Thus on March 26 the State Department announced the expansion of the “Mexico City policy,” which bans funding for once-removed organizations abroad that support, pay for, or perform abortion. Predictably, left-of-center organizations in the United States and abroad characterized the decision as part of a “war on abortion”—the Guardian’s chosen locution—while those who oppose abortion lauded the policy shift in equally breathless language.

It is a mark of maturity and prudence to resist coming to overly rapid and certain conclusions about the meaning of such things. Believe me, I tried my best to be mature and prudent. But despite dutifully framing my thinking in terms of three hypotheses to be pondered and if possible tested, I felt myself leaning toward crediting my hunches with a status greater than the term allows. Here they are in brief.

First, the idea that a Commission on Unalienable Rights sited in the U.S. State Department in the Trump Administration could actually move the United Nations, including its own Human Rights Council, to mend its ways struck me as galactically risible. Many Americans take ideology and abstract moral principles seriously, but most of the foreigners who hang around the United Nations are transactional types to a fare-thee-well. Pompeo’s Commission will not rock these sinecured cynics to their souls any more than throwing celery at a lion will turn it into a vegetarian.

The aspiration also gave off a strong whiff of hypocrisy, or perhaps mere dissonance. The President despises all multilateral organizations because, as an unreconstructed Randian, he cannot wrap his mind around any non-zero-sum relationship and thinks all the Abrahamic virtues—generosity, compassion, honesty, humility—are synonyms for weakness. Trump’s National Security Advisor is also an unreconstructed Randian, although he actually read the books instead of just watched a movie or two. John Bolton’s disdain for UN culture is well known and well-practiced, since Turtle Bay is where he was exiled for about two years during the George W. Bush Administration. Most obviously and blatantly, if the Administration as a whole really cared about human rights as they elide with practical policy questions, the President would think twice (or even once, perhaps?) about cozying up to the world’s most egregious violators of human rights. So is the resulting optic one of hypocrisy or mere dissonance? Given all the others deeply distressing things about this Administration it hardly matters.

Second, as soon as I read the list of commissioners, I knew that controversy would roll down the tracks in some combination of the aforementioned culture war issues. That was less a hunch than a simple inference, for everything the Trump Administration does attracts criticism: sometimes honest criticism; sometimes ideologically deranged criticism that often feels like an equal but opposite reaction to the Administration’s own ideological derangement—usually some of both. I have often been among critics of the first sort, stipulating the possibility that just because the President says or the Administration does something doesn’t automatically mean it’s wrong or evil. Criticism of the second sort starts but also stops with presumption.

The empaneling of the commission, even more than the religious freedom ministerial, struck me as an exemplar of an American trait that never fails to manifest. We have always been and remain a very religious people, however over-layered with a secular manqué the original theology-based concepts have since become. The resultant lowest-common-denominator civil religion owes its core characteristics to dissenter Protestantism. As a consequence, given Protestantism’s coterminous 16th century evolution with the Enlightenment, American political culture unerringly demonstrates three biases: toward scripturalism, usually in the form of a written-contract orientation; toward social egalitarianism and against arbitrary hierarchy; and toward abstract creedal as opposed to concrete pragmatic thinking about politics. In this case, that third bias typically entails the assumption of a “best moral practice” universalism.

Thus I fully expected the criticism to share more in common with Secretary Pompeo and Ambassador Glendon than either side expected, not least a focus on texts and an insistence on the universal applicability of whatever human rights were determined to exist.

Above all I marveled at the exceptionalism of the exercise itself. What other contemporary secular nation delves into its founding documents, centuries after the fact, to scrutinize and if necessary correct current thinking and practice? What other nation that typically denies it even has an ideology is so blatantly ideological? What other nation treats its founding political texts with the sacred reverence Americans reserve for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and so on? No other nation on earth is remotely as scripturally devoted as the American nation.

What has become of my hunches over the past several weeks? Let me take the third one first and so leave the more serious aspects of all this for last.

It soon dawned on me that Ambassador Glendon’s role in the commission—she being not nearly as jaded about organizations such as the United Nations and no obvious fan of Donald Trump—explained the accidentally hypocritical line about the UN in the op-ed and the State Department press conference. Indeed, maybe she had a hand in writing the op-ed. Why did I think that?

I know Ambassador Glendon to be a good and clear writer, both from her book Rights Talk and from her having coauthored a fine essay in this magazine last year. Part of that essay, just by the way, bears an uncanny resemblance to the basic argument of Pompeo’s op-ed. Glendon was one of Pompeo’s professors at Harvard Law School, and now she chairs a State Department commission. If there really is such a thing as natural law, that’s an example. Why is Glendon doing this, knowing the flak that would come her way? Through the commission she seeks to advance the argument of Rights Talk. Apparently, to her dismay, just writing and publishing it failed to do the trick.

To make sure I was on the right trail I consulted some former State Department colleagues as to what if any backstory existed on this commission. There is a bureau in the State Department that is in charge of human rights: Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL). All else equal, one would expect DRL staff to have been part of the brain trust that prepared the idea of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, right? Not a chance, since all else is rarely equal. As it happens, the President’s very belated nominee to be Assistant Secretary for DRL, Catholic University Law Professor Robert Destro, is still awaiting Senate confirmation. In the meantime, the Bureau is being run by Ambassador Mike Kozak, even while he also serves as deputy to Venezuela Special Representative Elliott Abrams.

Since the July 8 announcement of the Commission, Ambassador Glendon has conducted several conversations with DRL leadership. At a July 30 meeting she assured those assembled that they would not be shut out of the commission’s future work as they were the work that led to its inception, and that she intended to run an intellectually rigorous process, with no preconceived outcomes. She may well be able to do that because, from all appearances, the White House doesn’t seem to care what the State Department does so long as it avoids generating negative political news. The Secretary, in turn, appears to have plenty of time for esoteric commission work because the list of foreign policy decision-makers in the Trump Administration, at least since the exits of H. R. McMaster and James Mattis is, with but a few fairly recent exceptions, unusually short.

The commission promises to do more than take up the foreign policy implications of loose rights talk. As Pompeo wrote: “Human-rights advocacy has lost its bearings and become more of an industry than a moral compass. And ‘rights talk’ has become a constant element of our domestic political discourse, without any serious effort to distinguish what rights mean and where they come from.” Note Pompeo’s passing reference to the title of Glendon’s latest book.

Fine, but unfortunately, Pompeo and Glendon have so far failed to properly clarify what they are trying to do. It would have helped had they first distinguished unalienable rights, which putatively come from outside and are above the governments of men, from civil rights, which are the contingent domain of governments. In autocratic systems civil rights are granted; in systems validated by the principle of popular sovereignty civil rights are debated and determined in law. An unalienable right is to a civil right what constitutional law is to ordinary law, the latter deriving and drawing its a priori legitimacy from the former.

A case in point can clarify the distinction: the rapid proliferation in recent years of declamations that, at least for Americans, “health care is a human right.” Let’s unpack this in the context of the distinction between unalienable rights and civil rights.

Is anyone in the United States today, whether citizen, green card holder, or even someone without legal residency rights, denied medical services? No: Everyone already has a “right” to health care from whatever practitioners may be available; no form of medical apartheid exists in the United States anymore, thank God. What those who proclaim health care as a human right really mean is that all Americans should be able to avail themselves of health services and, if necessary, have someone else pay for it. But, in principle at least, that “right” was already firmly established in 1965 with Medicaid. So what the slogan actually means today in practice is a demand that government generously subsidize health care insurance for all those who cannot afford it and who are not otherwise covered by Medicaid. That does not sound as morally lofty as a “human right to health care,” but how it sounds and what it actually amounts to are not the same. The demand is couched in the language of a human right, but it is really about determining the extent of a civil right.

There is obviously a problem with the rising cost of health insurance squeezing the lower quintiles of the American middle class, but does that sound like a right on the same general plane as “life” and “liberty”? Of course not. This is a garden-variety political economy issue, albeit an important one, gussied up to look like something morally transcendent. If the commission can shine a light on such evasive language, good. It has a far, far better shot at achieving that than it does at reforming the United Nations.

My other hunches drift in and out of one another, so let’s take them together. About the controversy and its nature, I’m afraid I was right, but controversy is not in itself a bad thing. In this instance, the character of some of the criticism of Pompeo’s commission is revelatory of some more profound attitudes that beg analysis and understanding.

Assuming that Ambassador Glendon did not dissemble in her remarks to the DRL staff, her pledges matter, because most critics of the commission are sure that the whole thing is a narrow-bore effort to roll back abortion and homosexual rights. The criticism is the flip-side, in a sense, of the critics’ own obsession with pressing for “LGBTQ equality worldwide.” Even if one shares this ambition, that hardly means there are not other worthy objectives a human rights commission might be expected to treat. Care to see a list of such worthy objectives? Just read the table of contents of Rights Talk.

Maybe the critics will be proven correct, but there is no sign to date that Ambassador Glendon views the prospective work of the commission in such a narrow manner. And yet some 350 self-described human rights organizations and assorted individuals signed an omnibus letter on July 22 criticizing the decision even to create the commission on the assumption, without any actual evidence, that they already know what its conclusions will be. There were similar letters within letters, meaning that particular groups decided to pen their own accusations. A slightly more apoplectic than average example is a letter courtesy of the New Ways Ministry signed by more than 125 “Catholic leaders.” One of dozens of protests by LGBTQ groups, the letter objects to “both the goals and the composition” of the commission, which is led by the “highly LGBTQ-negative Catholic Mary Ann Glendon.”

According to the signers, the commission’s view of human rights is “conditional, limiting, and based on a very narrow religious perspective that is inconsistent with the beliefs and practices of billions in this country and around the world.” But of course it is impossible to take a view that encompasses everyone’s idea of human rights and be left with anything remotely useful or coherent—exactly the problem that defines the commission’s starting point. Not only does the criticism exemplify the problem; it accuses the commission of vast aspirations it does not claim. Its explicit aim is to sort out, mainly for ourselves as Americans, the bases and meaning of human rights at this philosophically confused point in time. In her brief press conference remarks Glendon referred explicitly to “the distinctive rights tradition of the United States of America.” No one involved with the commission has claimed that its conclusions would apply to “billions of people around the world.”

And there is nothing wrong with understanding that rights acknowledged by social authorities—whether “human” or merely “civil”—must be limited at the margins because rights can be incommensurate. Individual rights can conflict with the rights of faith communities and the corporate minority rights of ethno-national communities within the larger nation. The LGBTQ-based critics—and there seem to be no other kinds—generally refuse to acknowledge this but insist instead that their rights override all other rights.

That is not all. The signatories of the aforementioned New Ways Ministry letter claim that the commission will lead “our State Department to adopt policies that will harm people who are already vulnerable, especially poor women, children, LGBTI people, immigrants, refugees, and those in need of reproductive health services.” It’s easy to get a feel for what the self-described Catholics of the New Ways Ministry really care about. Along the margins of the letter the website draws the reader’s attention to other recent features, including: “In First for Colombia, Both Names of Lesbian Mothers Listed on Child’s Baptismal Certificate,” “LGBTQ Catholics from Philippines, Mexico, Uganda Speak at Fordham University Event,” “Two Months Later, Conversation Still Continues Over Vatican’s latest Document on Gender,” “Brazilian Archbishop Forces Cancellation of Performance by Transgender Artists,” “Anti-LGBT Criminalization Efforts,” “This Month in Catholic LGBT History,” and so on. This is the operative context for further comments in the letter. Thus Rev. Bryan Massingale:

It should be unthinkable that that a U.S. Cabinet member would question a landmark principle in our nation’s founding document, the “Declaration of Independence.” To undermine the conviction that all human beings, created in the image of God, possess inherent rights to life and liberty, is both disturbing as an American and offensive as a Christian.

It would be disturbing, if it were true—and note the scripturalist bias common to both sides. In the press conference Pompeo did reel off three questions, the last one in this rhetorical form: “Is it, in fact, true, as our Declaration of Independence asserts, that as human beings we—all of us, every member of our human family—are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights?” But to read that as if Pompeo means to suggest that the answer is “no” is bizarre. Indeed, in the very next paragraph of Pompeo’s press conference he refers to “the timeless truths embedded in the American founding.” Nowhere in any op-ed text, interview, or speech is there any hint of anyone associated with the commission wanting to deprive any American of the right to life or liberty, unless one or the other of those two abstract nouns has been redefined well beyond conventional definition.

But that is exactly the point. Massingale’s accusation, seen in its context, only makes sense if one believes that so-called marriage equality is a God-given or otherwise absolute human right. The very idea that is it is or should be is of very recent vintage, and is by no means universally accepted, much less clearly a majority view in the United States. Massingale’s complaint, when you dissect it a bit, has nothing to do with a human right as it was understood in 1948, when the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was promulgated. It has instead to do with a group-based claim to a set of civil rights. It asserts in essence that this point of view about homosexuality should be above political debate, and the way you shield a point of view from being criticized in debate is to get it classified as a human right.

Playing bait-and-switch between “human” and “civil” rights is not a new tactic, as Pompeo and Glendon have said. More than a thousand new “human rights” have been inscribed into a host of international treaties and documents over the past sixty or so years, the vast majority of which people like Madison and Lincoln, and Eleanor Roosevelt for that matter, never dreamed of. This proliferation stems from special-interest advocacy having successfully piggybacked on the solemn reputation of the 1948 Declaration, and to some extent from Cold War-era attempts by Soviet leaders to dilute the 1948 Declaration with claims to economic rights and the like.

Some accusations against the commission get even more strident and evidence-free. Critical groups contend that the commission should be abolished based on members’ “extreme positions opposing [LGBTQ] and reproductive rights”—this remark from the Washington Blade. Why do these critics assume that there is no diversity of views among the commissioners, who include Democrats and independents as well as Republicans, Jews and a Muslim as well as Protestants and Catholics, or that views would not change in the course of debate and discussion? How do they know a priori that the commissioners’ conclusions would rule out the exercise of tolerance for the views of others? Most if not all of these dark assumptions are probably projections of the signatories’ own modus operandi, were they members of a similarly constructed but differently minded commission. That goes double for the assumption that this is the only issue that such a Commission could possibly be about, because, again, it’s the only issue that these groups seem to care about.

Now, in the same New Ways Ministry letter, Rev. Drew Christianson, S.J., offers a more serious challenge to the commission’s presumed perspective, claiming that “Secretary Pompeo’s review of unalienable rights represents a threat to two key dimensions of the modern human rights law: First, it threatens our acknowledgement of the historic development of rights over the centuries. . . . Second, it puts the universality of rights, proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, at risk.” The first point is almost a fair one; who was “equal” under the Declaration in 1776 was a more limited concept than it is now. But this does not call into question the array of human rights but rather the extent of inclusion in them—not at all the same thing. Either way, I cannot imagine Pompeo or Glendon preferring the narrower definition of inclusion that existed in 1776, and neither Christianson nor anyone else has offered any evidence that they do.

Christianson, moreover, wants to drive a semi-truck through a hula-hoop. Just because the understanding of civil rights, or who is included as having civil rights, has broadened over time doesn’t mean that all new claims to civil rights are ipso facto legitimate. It certainly does not mean that new claims to human rights should be judged in an expansive matter as a default orientation, for that risks rendering the entire category banal. Again, it is by now a well-worn tactic to translate a particular “progressive” desideratum from a political position into a “right” in order to gain leverage in political debate, since rights are supposedly beyond scrutiny.

The second part of Christianson’s claim is, like Massingale’s, nonsense. Did traditional bias against homosexuality in most human cultures over many centuries stop the historic development of presumably universal rights to include the fight against religious and racial bigotry? Certainly it did not. Critics sometimes make it seem that, were it within their power to do so, Pompeo and Glendon would want to kill or imprison LGBTQ people, the conflationary logic here being that any theoretical denial of LGBTQ rights pointed toward the future implies the disavowal of all rights progress pointed toward the past.

I want to be clear here concerning an obviously fraught and emotional subject. I support full civil rights for all American citizens regardless of any circumstance of birth, up to and including same-sex civil unions with all non-discriminatory spousal rights protected by law. Discrimination, both cultural and occasionally legal, against homosexuals is and has always been shameful, no less than discrimination against people of color has been shameful. I doubt that Secretary Pompeo or Ambassador Glendon hold a different view, and if that is true, most of the critics’ fears disappear in a puff of sobriety.

Most but not all. There is a real conflict here living beneath the ambient hysteria of the critics. It is important, however, to understand what it is and what it isn’t.

It isn’t about denying gay rights in toto, and it wouldn’t even be about so-called marriage equality if its status as a putative right did not bear a potential to create reverse discrimination against individuals and organizations that did not share that view. But that is clearly a prospect, and LGBTQ warriors have been actively trying to force the issue. Just ask that baker in Lakeland, Colorado, who was willing to bake and sell anyone a wedding cake, but not to inscribe a message on the cake that ran against the dictates of his conscience. He was sought out not for the purpose of baking a cake but to make a precedential legal point at his expense.

The effort failed—Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission—but it might not have, given the many bizarre Supreme Court rulings of recent times. It is all too easy to envision the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department issuing rulings that discriminate in terms of public support for parochial education and tax code specifics against Catholic and Orthodox Jewish institutions because their clergy refuse to ordain women or perform same-sex marriage ceremonies.

So when Ambassador Glendon said in a Lawfare podcast last month that, “What same-sex marriage advocates have tried to present as a civil rights issue is really a bid for special preferences,” she was exactly correct. To be valid within the American rights tradition, “gay” rights must be understood as falling under the nest of protections that all American citizens enjoy as individuals, not as members of some group seeking rights as a group. The issue here is the extension of the terms of inclusivity under rights already promulgated and accepted by consensus, which is exactly why Martin Luther King, Jr. was both correct and shrewd to emphasize that he demanded equal rights for African Americans under the same pieces of paper that established rights for all other American citizens. “Gay” rights put in those terms are inarguable; there can be no basis for discrimination against any American citizen’s civil rights because of sexual orientation. But to put it in terms of special preferences for a group insinuates that these rights must always prevail when they conflict with the rights of other individuals or groups—hence the origin of Masterpiece Cakeshop. That is not only an example of insufferable arrogance, it is very specifically un-American.

The attempted elevation of “gay” rights above all other rights leads us to an orthogonal observation about the American historical experience. The concept of human rights in the American philosophical tradition stressed individual rights, which is nothing odd for a political community born in the womb of the Enlightenment. But, as already noted in passing, the rights of dissenter faith communities as communities were also deemed legitimate, and by eventual extension the rights of non-Christian faith communities as well. The letter George Washington wrote to the members of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, is rightly considered a foundational document of religious freedom in American history, and it is addressed to a group. Nevertheless, from the perspective of political philosophy, the true depth of the distinctive American concept of religious tolerance applies foremostly to individuals, and here, as briefly as I can manage to explain it, is why.

The Protestant Reformation was or soon became a twin theological-political movement, for it was based on the fertile idea of conscience as the pivot, so to speak, of moral reasoning. Conscience was central to arriving at theological truth through scripture, since the theology of the Catholic Church was deemed untransmittable by fiat from priest to parishioner, just as the rituals of the Church could not save someone who was not “born again.” This concept of how to arrive at theological truth led to a social consensus in Protestant communities on the importance of conscience in the political arena as well, the simple understanding being that if the capacity for moral reasoning is essential for an individual to come to religious truth, then moral reasoning collected into a social ethos is the only foundation for a morally just political order. That idea in turn led to the usually implicit conclusion that individual and socio-political facets of conscience reinforce one another in a virtuous cycle; a good person more readily becomes a good citizen, and being a good citizen includes being a good person.

Note carefully that this distinctively Protestant way of thinking about the moral bonds between the individual and society, with conscience as the fulcrum between the two, is quintessentially modern because it starts with individual, not corporate, agency. God’s will is implemented upward through popular sovereignty conceived as the structured integration of individual citizens into a corporate or civil will, not downward from the divine right of kings. This is where the moral basis for modern liberal democracy comes from; this is, in other words, the conceptual origin of We the People. One may assert that it is an Enlightenment concept validated by innovation in Christian theology, or that it is rather a Protestant concept validated by the new intellectual influence of the Enlightenment. It was of course dialectically both.

Why belabor this here? Because it shows that the right to follow one’s conscience, the very foundation of the American idea of religious freedom, is central to the entire edifice of American political thought. It is at its heart the main reason justifying the concept of limited government: The state may not, cannot, tell a citizen what to believe, only what he or she may or may not do as a matter of law. The right of conscience is not just some garden-variety right among many rights; it is the right that makes the American rights tradition distinctive.

That, in turn, is why the key criticism of the Commission, that, as the New Ways Ministry letter states, “Almost all of the Commission’s members have focused their professional lives and scholarship on questions of religious freedom,” is true as stated but wildly strange as intended. It is obvious from context that the critics mean that this focus is a bad thing. Perhaps it is, and of course it is true that, like all civil rights, the right to conscience based on religious belief must have limits too. But the right to conscience is also the very plinth of American political thought, so to reject it so blithely is therefore to thoughtlessly reject a lot. One has to wonder if the critics realize the implied scope of their complaint.

One also has to wonder if the critics understand where their criticism ultimately leads and lands them. It seems to land them in a plainly anti-Abrahamic space, and here we come to the nub of the matter.

The objections of LGBTQ critics are all based on an insistence of the unlimited right of individual choice, whether to an abortion or, more to their concerns, to any election of gender and sexual orientation and to its socially uncriticizable open expression. It seems to be a logical extension of countercultural-bred “expressive individualism” applied to, or rather against, traditional American religious establishments. Again, if those choices never abraded on other people’s rights, they would not much matter. But when they do, in this framework all other claimed rights are subordinate, including the group rights of faith communities or any individual’s right to religion-based conscience.

This is not only philosophically un-American, it also turns the proximate purpose of the 1948 Declaration on its head. That Declaration was largely about protecting the rights of religious and ethnic groups from systematic bigotry (and mass murder) perpetrated by governments against their own and other people. Now LGBTQ and other “progressive” activists (like those trying to ban ritual circumcision because it allegedly violates some right to physical integrity of a new-born male child) insist that the U.S. government behave in prejudicial ways against those same groups. This view is held with what is clearly a religious conviction, but what it has to do with Christianity—or in the case of the New Ways Ministry with Catholicism—is a mystery to me.

What is particularly intriguing in all this concerns how self-avowedly religious people, in the case of the New Ways Ministry letter Christian religious people, have become focused unrelentingly on the human body, with the anti-circumcision effort, more advanced in Europe than in the United States but also growing here, being just another indication of it. Why is this?

An answer has to begin with a simple observation: This is not a traditional focus of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Yes, religious law does apply to the body, for example in the prohibition in Jewish law against tattoos and other markings. But the main concern of both Abrahamic theologians and lawmakers alike has always been on some combination of behavior and belief—the heart and the soul, in other words. Normative Abrahamic religion has always prioritized discipline in the relationship between man and his fellow man (morality) and between man and God (spirituality). The self-avowed Catholics who signed the New Ways Ministry letter seem, from all appearances, to prioritize the very opposite: not discipline but unfettered choice focused not on their behavior toward others or toward God, but overwhelmingly on their physical selves.

What does this mean? Well, all sorts of para-Freudian suppositions leap to some minds,  but I would suggest something different: The essence of the LGBTQ criticism of the Commission (and of course not only the Commission) is based on a particular form of idolatry, a form in which the godhead is the self. Somehow, the idea of human beings being created in the spiritual image of God has slid imperceptibly into the idea of human beings being gods unto themselves. As God is unlimited, so in this dispensation is the individual imagined to be unlimited, at least with regard to what seems to obsess them: human genitalia and how to use them for pleasure rather than for procreation. Through this transformation all shame disappears, and since shame is the emotional bellwether of sin, sin disappears as well, at least within this vast precinct of human behavior. The yoke of the kingdom of heaven thus lies broken in pieces on the floor in the face of what appears to be the ultimate form of narcissism.

Again, such views closely resemble religious views in their categorical and emotional nature, but ones bearing a greater likeness to pre-Abrahamic inclinations: the ubiquitous phallus and fertility worship cults of the ancient world. Christian, Jewish, or Islamic, however, they are not.

Just a final remark about the New Ways Ministry letter. Note that its title refers to the commission being a “natural law” commission, which the signatories abhor. But an earlier New Ways Ministry essay was entitled “Catholics Must Stop Trump’s Misuse of Natural Law Theory against LGBTQ Equality.” Now, Trump himself cannot be misusing or using natural law theory because he has no idea what it is. But it’s not clear that New Ways Ministry knows what it is either. Is the commission a natural law commission, implying that natural law is bad, or is it misusing natural law, implying that natural law when not misused is good? If you read the two essays together you might suppose an answer would come clear. It doesn’t.

To simplify for the sake of brevity, all natural law meant at the outset, in Aristotle’s hands, was that the world was knit logically together. Reason and invariant causality are embedded in creation—fine, if bad press for magicians. Much later on, in Aquinas’s 13th-century hands, natural law was developed as a way to settle a dispute as to whether theology and philosophy were compatible. This same dispute also occupied the other two branches of the Abrahamic family: Maimonides concluded that they were compatible about a century before Aquinas, which led some Jews in Paris to burn his books; and so did Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in arguing against Ibn Ghazala at about the same time.

Now, when Spinoza got his hands on the same basic idea in the 17th century, he spun it into the center of his philosophy, basically arguing that God was reason and reason was God, so that the whole world was suffused with the Divine because creation was utterly reasonable and hence naturally lawful. Others around the same time determined to use the concept to transcend the denominational mayhem of the wars of the Reformation and their aftermath, and at the same time affirm the triumph of Enlightenment science over religious superstition. So natural law, in this dispensation, became a de-denominationalized way of smuggling God into the picture as “first cause” without naming Him. This was necessary because, at the time, naming and claiming Him for any particular denomination started huge fights, but without some first cause the rather mechanistic system they imagined, suggested to them by clock escapements and orreries, didn’t work. It was in a similar 18th-century dispensation that natural law came down to the American Founders, notably to Deists like Franklin and Jefferson.

So then, which of the several versions or uses of natural law over the centuries is the New Ways Ministry referring to? It is impossible to say, for philosophical literacy has gone begging, not for the first time in the saga of Secretary Pompeo’s Commission.

What all this comes down to—and I don’t expect everyone to agree—is that there is no firm epistemological basis for defining what is and is not a fundamental human right. Certainly natural law fails any test in this regard because those who would use it to derive positive moral law—which is what the whole human rights business is all about—immediately commit the is/ought fallacy and hence piss off the ghosts of both David Hume and Jeremy Bentham. Aristotle had it right from the get-go in the sense that the world is indeed causally coherent, but from that coherence about what is one cannot derive any conclusion about what ought to be.

Human knowledge of what ought to be can only come from extrinsic revelation or, if one does not credit that possibility, then from aspirational efforts to establish moral law in general and human rights in particular that happen to catch on and prevail, at least for a time. Maybe long-term cumulative progress in this regard is possible; many think so. Certainly, philosophers and moralists over the centuries in just about every civilization zone imaginable have struggled to determine what human values, if any, are both irreducible and universal. There is widespread consensus that there must be some, and the recently certified unity of the human genome leans us further in that direction. But there is also widespread consensus that establishing a firm consensus on what these irreducible and universal values are is very difficult. Cultural diversity abounds, which to my mind is no less a good thing than is biodiversity.

The American Founders understood this. But they were willing to give the notion their best shot in part because they knew that the rights iterated as irreducible and universal in the Declaration had to compose a very short list in order to ensure maximum feasible consensus, and so keep the “Whig”-inclined nation on the same simple sheet of music in advance of a war. Jefferson turned the trick as a 33 year old with “among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Note that he wrote “among them,” leaving all but three of some unknown number implicit. This was very shrewd.

The Founders knew that for the Revolution to succeed, they had to stir up the spiritual energies of the American people and find language that united enough of them to prevail. To do that they had to make bold claims, and young people who make bold claims, whatever their tactical origins, very often come to believe in them. So in the throes of revolt and then war, most of the Founders and their followers really came to believe that America was, as it says on the dollar bill, a novus ordo seclorum. They believed, or came to believe, that they were beginning the world anew, a world without dynasties and their mercantilist war-seeding ways, a world without aristocracies and their heinous social hierarchies, a world without whimsical justice but real rule of law, a world without conscience smothered by “established” religions, a world, in short, in thrall ultimately to a future American “Empire of Liberty,” as Jefferson put it.

This was in the main Protestant eschatology secularized, spiced with Enlightenment vocabulary, and then fit to their late 18th-century purpose; but the Founders didn’t see it that way anymore than a fish “sees” the water it swims in. At the time it sounded like something new under the sun, and in its specific context it was something new under the sun. Because it succeeded and survived thereafter a series of trials and tests, not least a catastrophic Civil War, its claims concerning the existence of irreducible and universal human rights earned consideration. Praxis thus redeemed philosophy. In my biased, native-born view, the world is better off for the American experience and experiment, but since I am not an evangelical American by manqué religion I know that neither my view nor anyone else’s makes these claims true. In the end, all such claims are faith-based, one way or another.

Don’t take just my word for it. In 1948 the American Anthropological Association took a dim view of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On the basis of what its members knew about human cultural diversity, it feared that the fiat of the World War II victors would pretend to an objective universality that did not exist and might incline American and other Western political leaders to hubristic forms of cultural imperialism. Were they wrong?

Mike Pompeo’s commission isn’t really about abortion or homosexual rights or anything so fleshy. He and Ambassador Glendon at least are able to lift their gaze above their own and other people’s genitalia. Rather, it is the larger trend to conflate civil with human rights in the service of parochial political claims that they wish to call out and resist. I’m fine with that. The fact that the most vociferous criticism has come from LGBTQ organizations says more about the trajectory of American culture right now than it does about the commission. But if Pompeo and Glendon think that they can, for the first time ever, establish a foolproof epistemology for determining which human rights are “real” and which are ersatz and politically tactical in nature, then they are either bound to be sorely disappointed or guilty of philosophical atrocity. That is far more important in the end than their ridiculous delusions about “saving” the United Nations from itself. I, for one, can barely wait to see how they manage the inevitable finesse between what they promise and what they can deliver.

Finally, one thing that sticks out about all of this is the multiple failures of nearly all concerned to be able to think philosophically. The proponents are still struggling with naming basic categories, such as human as opposed to civil rights, and with identifying what they aspire to as an exercise in moral epistemology. At least some of the critics can’t distinguish natural law from Gray’s Anatomy. Let me conclude, then, by quoting that great 20th-century philosopher, Casey Stengel. As manager of the hapless 1962 New York Mets (40-120), he spoke of baseball, the most philosophical of sports for its being infinite in both time and space. So I take the liberty of repurposing his immortal words to refer to philosophy itself: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

The post Is Pompeo’s Rights Commission More or Less Than Meets the Eye? appeared first on The American Interest.

Is Globalized Electioneering the New Normal?

One of the ironies of globalization—the natural phenomenon, not the ideology—is that many who seemingly oppose it are themselves inadvertently furthering it.

Since the advent of the Westphalian nation-state it has been a mantra of traditional statesmanship that “we don’t comment on or interfere in another country’s internal affairs.” Interference happens anyway, of course, but until recently those in power reserved this for clandestine activities while publicly pronouncing their respect for the sacred sovereignty and territorial integrity of their neighbors. We would all wink and look the other way.

Not anymore. Since 2016 some of the most outspoken economic nationalists, anti-federalists, and anti-globalists have openly, actively, and brazenly interjected themselves into the politics of other countries. Thanks to Steve Bannon, a U.S. President has proudly proclaimed his support for the Brexiteers in the United Kingdom’s great domestic debate and had no qualms about identifying his favorite politicians during Britain’s and Israel’s recent selection of prime ministers. To return the favor, British politicians like Nigel Farage have joyfully expressed their preferences in a U.S. presidential election.

It comes as no surprise that former, still unreformed imperialist states like Russia actively pursue strategies to influence elections in other countries, especially real (but fragile) democracies. It’s no secret that Russian money has funded Euroskeptic political parties across Europe, influencing domestic elections as well as those of the European Parliament.

But it’s not just Russia. Many other sovereign states had a stake in the outcome of the recent U.S. elections, be it to protect energy interests, further foreign policy priorities, or spread ideological preferences. The extent to which they may have directly funded and supported individual U.S. politicians is not yet fully known, but the evidence is growing. For example, according to a recent U.S. House Oversight Committee finding, the United Arab Emirates helped write an “America First” energy policy campaign speech for presidential candidate Donald Trump.

When Robert Mueller was asked by Congressman Peter Welch if unreported foreign influence was becoming typical for political campaigns, Mueller bluntly answered: “I hope this is not the new normal, but I fear it is.”

What exactly is The New Normal? It’s too early to say definitively, but the outlines are coming into view. Unilateralism is merging with multilateralism, and vice versa.

On the one hand, anti-globalists disdain organizations like the United Nations and European Union because they inhibit national sovereignty. Yet the same anti-interference advocates have no qualms about openly engaging in the policies and election campaigns of other countries. Your country is not only your business, it’s our business too.

Traditional statesmen of the old school continue to insist that Brexit is a decision for the British people to make. But President Barack Obama openly supported the anti-Brexit vote during a visit to London in the weeks prior to the British referendum when he said, “The UK is at its best when it’s helping to lead a strong European Union.” While the Brits continue to debate the aftermath of the Brexit vote, Phil Bryant, the Republican Governor of Mississippi, recently spoke at a fundraiser for a new U.S.-based organization called “World4Brexit.” Peggy Grande, the Chair of the group and a former assistant to Ronald Reagan, proudly stated, “We are here to support the democratic vote of the British people—they voted to leave the European Union and we want to make this happen.” American politicians appear to have no qualms about taking sides in this internal European issue.

This is not an entirely new phenomenon, of course: influencing the politics of other countries has long been a lucrative—and legal—business. Professional consultants, many of them from the United States, have always collected big fees for advising foreign politicians. In my own country of Latvia, for instance, a former GOP campaign strategist openly advised a local Moscow-friendly party during the last parliamentary election.

But the activity of a group like World4Brexit seems qualitatively different from such discrete cases of pay-to-play lobbying. The group merges the advocacy of current elected U.S. officials (like Bryant) with unelected advisers (like Grande) not merely to influence U.S. policy on Brexit, but to achieve a specific diplomatic outcome for another country. Moreover, the group seems intent on presenting a transnational front to achieve a hard Brexit, even including former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott in its marketing materials to suggest his support.

Most significantly, the group justifies its advocacy by way of reference to the “globalist” elite it claims to despise. “George Soros funds every single one of the pro-EU groups in the U.K. and it’s quite legal to do so as long as it is outside of election time,” said Farage upon launching the group. “Why should they be able to do whatever they want and we can’t?” Here is a telling admission on the part of Farage: that those who fear that globalization will concentrate power in capitals like Brussels, Beijing, or Washington are themselves content to globalize world politics in a different way.

If this trend continues, multinational business interests, stateless oligarchs, former officeholders, and other national election “influencers” will be supplemented by governments that openly support, finance, and endorse local parties in elections around the world. The Trump Administration’s support for a hard Brexit, or the Russian government’s covert backing of populist parties in Europe, could be just the beginning. In the future, voters in Europe could choose among parties openly sponsored by the governments of China, the United States, Saudi Arabia, or Russia. Major countries like the United Kingdom, India, and Brazil will each have a favorite U.S. party and a direct stake in the outcome of every election—and could even take their case to American voters directly.

Far-fetched? Maybe. But recent elections have already seen lines of sovereignty blur in unpredictable ways. In 2017, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all but endorsed Viktor Orban’s re-election in Hungary, as the Israeli Foreign Ministry backed an anti-George Soros campaign that to many observers smacked of anti-Semitism. Orban, in turn, has embraced Israel’s leader openly, seeing in him a kindred spirit. Donald Trump tacitly endorsed Marine Le Pen as the “strongest” candidate in the 2017 French presidential race, the same election that saw Emmanuel Macron tout the last-minute support of Barack Obama. Electoral contests are increasingly overspilling their national boundaries, and the trend shows no signs of abating.

If this process reaches its natural conclusion, the anti-globalists who feared that the UN would emerge as a world government will, in a sense, have achieved their goal. Power will not be centralized in a single global capital run by One World politicians and an army of transnational bureaucrats. Power will be distributed around the world. But it will be controlled by those who have the money, know-how, and resources to nimbly work The New Normal.

In that case, the ultra-nationalists who disdain the cooperation that is encouraged by multinational bodies like the United Nations, IMF, World Bank, and European Union will pursue it through their own political party-based ideological transnationalism. One hand not only helps the other, it also votes for it.

In a way, that’s not so different from The Old Normal we have come to know and loathe. It’ll just be more openly global than ever before.

The post Is Globalized Electioneering the New Normal? appeared first on The American Interest.

A Catholic Novel for a Post-Truth World

Original Prin

Randy Boyagoda

Biblioasis, 2019, $14.95, 240 pp. 

In a widely circulated 2012 essay in the New York Times entitled “Has Fiction Lost its Faith?” author Paul Elie lamented that contemporary novels fail to take religion seriously. This wasn’t always the case, he claimed. For midcentury writers like Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, and Graham Greene, religious belief, or lack thereof, drove every decision their characters made. No matter how frequently they failed to live up to their calling—think of Greene’s “whiskey priest” from The Power and the Glory—the men and women of these novels knew that if Christianity were in fact true, it demanded nothing short of everything. Our culture has grown more secular in the intervening years, and in our time, Elie argued, fiction writers treat Christian belief “as something between a dead language and a hangover.” Even still, Elie hoped for an author who tackled the realities of the present day, for a religious fiction that “dramatize[d] belief the way it feels in your experience.”

Which, in 2019, leaves us with the question: What would such a novel look like in the age of Silicon Valley and Donald Trump? Original Prin, the third novel by Canadian author and academic Randy Boyagoda, offers an answer.

Original Prin is a riotously funny satire, written more in the style of John Kennedy Toole and David Foster Wallace than O’Connor or Greene. The Sri Lankan Prin, a happily married, devoutly Catholic father of four who lives in Toronto, is a professor of English who specializes in representations of seahorses in Canadian literature (phallic or otherwise). In the novel’s first line we learn that he becomes a suicide bomber by the end. Boyagoda’s clear, tight prose propels the plot, and the book feels even shorter than its 223 pages. The whirling dervish of a story is dizzying at times, but is ultimately grounded by the protagonist, whose sincerity and self-doubt allow him to function as a kind of spiritual everyman for an internet-addled, post-truth age. Prin wants to be a good Catholic, but amid the cacophony of voices in his life—his family, his colleagues, his ex-girlfriend, his smartphone—he struggles to discern how God is speaking to him.

The story begins on New Year’s Day in the Toronto Zoo, where Prin, after scouring internet forums for advice, has decided to take his daughters to reveal that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. A storm derails their plans, however, trapping them in the lemur house for several hours. Chaos ensues: A branch crashes through the ceiling, a lemur is electrocuted, and a well-meaning father whose family has been trapped with Prin’s blurts out the secret which Prin had so gingerly been preparing to convey to his daughters. From the onset, Boyagoda readies his readers—and his protagonist—to expect the absurd.

While Prin recovers from surgery, he learns that his university is on the verge of closing. School administrators have a plan, however—start an exchange program in Dragomans, a fledgling (and fictional) Middle Eastern country. They need a faculty member to travel there to give an inaugural lecture, along with the consultant hired by the school, which, to Prin’s shock, turns out to be Wende, his beautiful ex-girlfriend from grad school. She invites Prin to give the lecture. Does he want to go?

Of course he does. But what does God want him to do? As a married man, is his attraction to her still sinful even though he is pretty sure that removing his prostate has rendered him impotent? Is Wende’s cryptic message that her seat for the flight is 34C “meant to remind him of something?” Prin wants answers, but he doesn’t get any. That is, until a Skype meeting with the Dragomans officials, where Prin hears a clear message: “a rushing in his ears. . . . a sudden pulling at his chest, a reaching in, a telling he knew not how to tell.” God has spoken to him, over the internet, no less. Prin must go.

Throughout the story, Boyagoda deftly pokes fun at the banality of modern culture, no more so than in his depiction of Prin’s college, which is struggling through twin crises of enrollment and religious identity. Formerly called the University of the Holy Family, the school changed its name to the more relevant-sounding University of the Family Universal, or UFU (say it out loud). Now the letters literally stand for nothing—as its banners proclaim, “UFU stands for UFU.” They even have an app: “iTouchUFU.” The school’s original medieval manuscript room has been converted to a bookable function space; what once was a chapel is now a lecture hall, flanked by “a scent-free study space and prayer room for Muslim students,” though its century-old stained glass windows featuring Christ as an Irish immigrant in Toronto remain.

To call this dark satire in the vein of Evelyn Waugh, however, would be a mistake. A different author, intent on lamenting the decline of Christendom, would have used the religious emptiness of UFU to ridicule our secular, desacralized age. But Boyagoda’s mocking, which is closer to parody than straight satire, pokes fun without casting too much judgment, and the school comes across as an endearingly inept institution which nonetheless serves as the only functioning community in the novel. In the end, Boyagoda is more concerned with highlighting Prin’s efforts at listening to God than in critiquing the environment in which he listens.

The difficulty of discernment is an ancient religious problem—perhaps the ancient religious problem—no doubt complicated by the different cultural milieu in which God has spoken. Stories of fiery chariots and ecstatic visions of saints seem quite distant to inhabitants of our disenchanted world. Prin is one of them, raised in a recognizably bourgeois Toronto suburb, “a paradise of flavoured coffee and televisions in every bedroom and streets named for fruit and kings and there were no other brown people.” To thwart this banal uniformity, Prin resorts to a quasi-superstitious method to hear God’s voice: Whenever he is in a church he dares God to make the candles flicker, if he is in fact listening. Prin knows it’s silly, and is afraid he might be acting blasphemously in testing God, but he can’t help himself. His faith tells him God is always there, but his flattened surroundings seem to suggest otherwise.

Against the desires of his wife, Prin travels to Dragomans, whose transitional government bears a striking resemblance to an internet start-up. “DRAGOMANS 2.0” is plastered on the wall of the hall in the government building where Prin delivers his lecture on Kafka’s Metamorphosis. “Hashtag Insha’Allah,” exclaims a civil service worker as she wishes him luck. Before Prin begins, the smiling Minister announces that “Kafka absolutely crushed a story about metamorphosis,” and after Prin’s lecture on the grotesque modern fable, delivered to a sleeping audience, the Minister returns to pump up the crowd: “We need to ask ourselves one question . . . Who wants to be a butterfly?” In a situation sure to put a knowing smile (or look of horror) on English professors’ faces, it’s clear no one in the room besides the teacher has read the book.

Dragomans is rife with profit-seeking hucksters, and Prin doesn’t know whom to trust. This includes Wende. Though Prin initially rejects her advances, she persists, and Prin, in a moment of weakness, kisses her passionately at an afterparty. Though he does not commit adultery, he knows he has betrayed his wife. “Surely this wasn’t why God had told him to come to Dragomans,” he muses. “What kind of God would do that? No God.” Later, we are led to suspect that Wende seduced Prin for blackmail. But does that mean that her feelings were disingenuous? In keeping with our post-truth milieu, Boyagoda leaves us to decipher this for ourselves.

Boyagoda’s light satire gives way to a gripping, violent denouement in the Dragomans airport. Without giving too much away, as the opening lines predict, Prin does become a suicide bomber, but without losing his identity as a Christian. In one of the novel’s most poignant scenes, Prin speaks with a recently radicalized terrorist, Dawud, who grew up as a full-fledged American named Dave in an “anti-Muslim Muslim” household in Nashua, New Hampshire, “kuffar capital of the world.” After a few years of researching Islam and interacting with radical sheiks online, Dawud came to Dragomans to wage jihad.

Dawud’s story highlights the ease with which radicalization occurs in the age of the cloud. It matters little whether one grows up in Nashua or Riyadh—religion is no longer primarily tied to place and culture. In fact, Nashua might be more dangerous, as the spiritual vacuum of the late-modern West encourages purpose-seeking individuals to find solace in fanaticism—as many real-life examples have tragically demonstrated. Dawud’s background also reveals an underlying connection to Prin. Both men find it difficult to listen to God in the midst of the spiritual deserts of Nashua and suburban Toronto. The difference is that while Dawud cannot fathom that God speaks in such a desert, Prin strains to hear his voice in the midst of it.

Why does Prin’s Christianity lead him to search for meaning in the detritus of secularism, rather than flee from it? Because, as his mother reminds him, recalling a convent-school lesson, status naturae lapsae simul ac redemptae—we are fallen and redeemed at the same time. Put another way, by John Paul II, “the mystery of the redemption of the body takes root in the historical soil of human sinfulness.” What this means, in Boyagoda’s novel, is that while taking a stand against the evils of secularism may result from one’s Christian beliefs, it does not lie at the root of the faith. Contrary to appearances, Christianity and the culture war are circumstantial, not definitional, bedfellows.

In one of the novel’s most memorable, and hilarious, episodes, Prin and his father earn a hard-fought victory over an Australian duo in a father-son Pickleball tournament (Pickleball is a kind of full-court ping-pong popular in senior communities). To mock the Aussies, who have been hurling convenience-store insults at the Sri Lankans all game, the family decides to celebrate with a meal at Outback Steakhouse. The only problem is that it’s Good Friday, and Prin’s been fasting all day, per Catholic rules. But his parents, who are divorced, haven’t shared a meal together in years, and he feels that he would do an injustice to them, and the occasion, by declining to partake. Judging that “it was 3 o’clock on Good Friday, but it was already Easter Sunday, always,” he decides to “take up a cross made of charbroiled strip loins and accept a crispy crown of Bloomin Onion.” Immediately following he heads to the confessional. In this scene and many others, Prin emerges as a fumbling but well-meaning Catholic who knows that the spirit of the law supersedes the letter, which is better than believing the opposite. Sin does not have the final world; in one of the great paradoxes of the Christian faith, it is necessary for salvation. It’s not a coincidence that a scandalous selfie sent by Wende ends up saving Prin’s life.

In the novel’s world, as in our own, it is nearly impossible to distinguish between the high and low. On this count, one is tempted to call Original Prin a postmodern Catholic novel. Such a category seems impossible, until one recognizes that Christianity, too, conflates the sacred and profane. Christ declared the unclean clean, anointed the foot as well as the head, and his death rent the veil of the temple in two. This dynamic is most obvious in the Church of The Holy Seat, a pilgrimage site which Prin visits in Dragomans. According to legend, it is where the naked man in Mark’s gospel who fled the Garden of Gethsemane sat until his death, overcome with grief at his betrayal of Christ. Rival monastic orders both claim the site as their own, hocking pamphlets and cheap trinkets to pilgrims who enter. The “holy seat” itself, which the pilgrims revere, is a boulder with the imprint of the man’s buttocks. Ribald humor aside, Boyagoda is up to something. Even here, in this tourist trap where people must navigate the belligerent monks to kiss the ass of a betrayer, God is still present. As it does in every church, a red candle flickers next to the tabernacle, where the body of Christ rests, and here Prin feels God’s fullness, the “trilling chord” from “his heart to his mind.” The high exists in the midst of the low—nothing is insignificant.

Boyagoda’s polyphony of sacred and profane doesn’t always resonate. A gag with Prin’s teenage nephews and a gorgeous public-pool lifeguard feels ripped off from The Sandlot. A mock shooting at an American mall—the assailants use paintball guns instead of real ones—strikes an off-key chord. As a whole, though, Prin’s adventures are knee-slapping, and the humor works. The world is absurd, and laughter at times seems the only antidote to general despair.

Paul Elie wrote in 2012 that it was now possible “to speak of Christianity matter-of-factly as one religion among many; for the first time it is possible to leave it out of the conversation altogether.” Rather than lament this state of affairs, however, Elie saw it as a challenge that “place[d] the believer on a frontier again, at the beginning of a new adventure.” In his novel Boyagoda has most certainly situated Prin as such a believer. His frontier is our own—the internet-addled, flattened world to which we half-give our attention, which keeps our minds and hearts in a state of perpetual unrest. But, as St. Augustine made clear, it is only in our unrest that we come to know the giver of rest, and Boyoagoda’s novel is distinctly Catholic is its warm embrace of the absurdity of our modern restlessness. Christians have always considered themselves, while on earth, to be denizens of an absurd world, and therefore are called to live with foolish joy in the midst of the secular, the godless, the kuffar. Because, as Prin’s mother reminds him, we are fallen and redeemed at the same time.

Must modern Catholic fiction necessarily be a hilarious venture into the absurd? Perhaps not, but no other contemporary writer has so deftly situated a novel of belief in the here and now as Boyagoda has. He has planned a trilogy for Prin, with the second installment to take place in a Dante theme park in Indiana. Stay tuned.

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