Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 32

The Protracted Handover

“The one duty we owe to history,” Oscar Wilde said, “is to rewrite it.” Historians are a dutiful lot. Their writings invariably revise what previous historians have written. The historical craft involves, in the words of Pieter Geyl, a 20th century Dutch practitioner of it, an “argument without end.” Successive generations of historians have sometimes uncovered new facts about the past, but even in the absence of new information have always offered interpretations of it different from those their predecessors had proposed.

The history of the Anglo-American relationship in the middle of the last century, a critical period for both countries, fits this pattern. It has given rise to a widely known retrospective narrative. During World War II, the narrative goes, the two came together in a strong partnership based on common interests and common values to thwart the fascist bids to subdue Europe and Asia. After the war the British, exhausted and nearly bankrupted by their heroic wartime exertions, ceded the global leadership they had maintained since the beginning of the 19th century to their now far more powerful American cousins.

This standard account is true, but it is not the whole truth. Historians have long since revised the first part, noting that the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom disagreed sharply during wartime about a number of major issues: the British empire, which Prime Minister Winston Churchill fervently championed and President Franklin Roosevelt believed should be disbanded; the question of where and when an Anglo-American army should return to the European continent; and the shape of the postwar international monetary order, about which the two differed at the 1944 conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire that designed it.

The engaging and provocative book Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945-1957, by Derek Leebaert, the author of several well-received studies of American foreign policy, modifies the picture of the postwar relationship. The United States and Great Britain did, ultimately, in effect trade places, with America becoming the political, economic, and military leader of the Western world and Great Britain assuming a distinctly secondary role. As Leebaert tells the story, however, this did not take place in the immediate wake of the war. Nor, when the war ended, did the leaders of either country envision it taking place or wish it to occur.

In 1945 Britain remained a formidable military power and the world leader in a number of important industries. True, it soon gave up its major imperial possession, British India, but London created an association of former colonies called the British Commonwealth, which, it believed, could serve as an instrument of British power in the postcolonial era. The British government also believed, and not without reason, that its long experience at the summit of international politics and its expertise in the politics and economics of many far-flung countries counted as major assets on the postwar international stage.

As for the Americans, while their international responsibilities increased after the war, especially in Europe, they were not eager for new burdens. They worried particularly about the costs of an expansive foreign policy and the impact on the nation’s economy of raising taxes to pay them: This was an era, unlike our own, in which governments and citizens alike considered deficits economically dangerous. The United States counted on the deployment of British military power and diplomatic skill around the world, especially in the Middle East, South Asia, parts of Southeast Asia, and Africa. As late as 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon referred to his country as “a global leader”—but not as the global leader.

Leebaert designates the Suez affair of 1956, more than a decade after the end of World War II, as the moment when the American rise and British decline became both unmistakable and irreversible. Furious at the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, the British, along with the French, dispatched an expeditionary force to retake it. The Eisenhower administration objected, withheld its support, and the British had to back down. The long era in which Britain was as great as any other power, and sometimes greater than all of them, had ended.

One of the many strengths of Grand Improvisation is the author’s vivid depiction of the major policymakers of the time, and here, too, the book has a revisionist slant. Leebaert portrays Winston Churchill, for example, not as a romantic relic of the Edwardian era in which he was born but rather as a creative figure with a lively curiosity, an entrepreneurial bent, and a fascination with new technology who would be at home in Silicon Valley today.  

He revives the reputations of once-important but now forgotten officials. He describes John Wesley Snyder, an Arkansas banker and friend of Harry Truman’s from their service together in World War I whom the president appointed secretary of the Treasury, as “the department’s first modern secretary—revamping an institution that had far more in common with the Treasury of Albert Gallatin in 1801 than the one we know today.” He considers Snyder to be every bit as consequential in the first postwar American administration as his far better known counterpart at the State Department, Dean Acheson.  

The author also gives major credit for the management of Anglo-American relations, and for the successful Western initiatives at the outset of the Cold War, to Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary in Labor government that took power in Britain in 1945. A former truck driver and trade union official who had served in Churchill’s wartime cabinet, depicted in the book as “visibly a bruiser with a bull neck and a loud voice,” Bevin does remain an important historical figure in Britain. On the other side of the Atlantic, he was once “so familiar that reports of his death (in 1951) appeared throughout the United States,” but today few Americans under the age of 60 have even heard of him.

Leebaert offers revisionist interpretations of events as well as personalities. By 1954, for example, the United States was paying a large share of the costs of France’s war to hold its colony Vietnam against communist forces under the direction of Ho Chi Minh. With French military defeat imminent, pressure mounted on the Eisenhower administration to send American troops to prevent this. By the standard account the president cleverly avoided doing so by making British participation in the rescue effort, which he knew would not be forthcoming, a condition for dispatching American troops.  

Instead, as Leebaert tells the story, the administration was willing to fight in Indochina and disappointed that the British declined to do so and that American Congressional leaders were skeptical. “If [British prime minister] Churchill and [foreign secretary] Eden had offered even one battalion—and if [senate majority leader] Lyndon Johnson hadn’t stood in the way,” he writes, “U.S. marines would by then [the summer of 1954] be arriving in Vietnam.”

In the years that the book covers the Western democracies, led by the United States and Great Britain, constructed a remarkably successful international order. They established a monetary and trade regime, forged a military alliance–the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)–and began the process of European economic integration that produced today’s 28-country European Union. These initiatives brought the West a generation of peace and prosperity and made possible its ultimate triumph in the Cold War. Leebaert’s detailed account of these years shows that for much of the time the American and British governments were not implementing a well-thought out design. They were rather responding, as best they could, often in an ad hoc way, to specific challenges that cropped up. They were improvising; but the results were, and are, sufficiently impressive to make what they did appear, in retrospect, a grand improvisation.

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Announcing a Short Summer Break

After a busy summer, TAI will be taking a one-week hiatus beginning on August 19 to recharge, reset, and relax. No new articles will be posted this week, but we’ll be back in full force on August 26 with new daily content. Thanks for being a loyal reader, and stay tuned this fall for exciting announcements about our public debate series, film series, and TAI salons.

While we’re away, don’t forget to subscribe to our print issue at a discounted rate through September 3, and sign up for TAI Today to get the best of the magazine straight to your inbox. We’ll see you next week!

– The Editors

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Hip Van Winkle Goes to Woodstock

1969 

Whoever has driven north on the New York State Thruway must remember the exit at Harriman, which leads to Route 17 westbound toward the scenic Catskill Mountains. Once famous for providing access to the magnificent Jewish resorts of the area, Route 17 and its offshoot, Route 17B, are now better known for having been impassable on a certain weekend in August 1969—that bucolic season when the Kaatskills, as they were called by the old Dutch settlers, seem half dissolved in the haze.

Among the travelers that weekend was a simple, good-natured fellow of the name Hip Van Winkle. A native of Ulster County, he was descended from the Van Winkles who sailed with the first Dutch patroons supplied by the Dutch West India Company in the 1630s, only to squander that opportunity through an insuperable aversion to productive labor. That same ungodly sloth was inherited through the Van Winkle line for the next three centuries. But not by Hip. Energetic, hard-working, resourceful, he seemed destined to build a business, sustain a farm, or perhaps invent a better way to trap the venomous copperheads that lurked throughout the region. But that destiny was thwarted by his wife, a relentlessly mellow Vassar dropout who, despite calling herself Flower Child, never ceased to find fault with Hip for his “uptight” tinkering, puttering, and fixing of things in their ramshackle farmhouse.

To these struggle sessions Hip had but one reply: Dropping whatever task lay at hand, he would spread his arms in a gesture of peace, and escape to the local head shop. It was there, well toked on Acapulco Gold and attempting to meditate through a blustery spring afternoon, that he first heard about the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, which was being held not in Woodstock, where the townsfolk were already experiencing a surfeit of hippies, but in Bethel, several miles to the west. Hip’s first thought was to skip such a time-wasting event, but he was persuaded otherwise by Nick Veda, the proprietor of the head shop, who embodied the spirit of the times by the way he inhaled the smoke of the fragrant weed, allowed it to fortify his blood, and then emitted a placid stream that slowly coiled up to unite with the earth’s atmosphere.

Returning home, Hip told Flower Child about Woodstock, and for several weeks was able to counter her nagging to “stop doing and be” with the riposte that what he was doing was preparing to be in Bethel in time for the opening act. And so they were: On Friday, August 15, when the traffic on Route 17 was backed up to the Thruway, and thousands of festival-goers were abandoning their cars on Route 17B, the little Winkle family—father, mother, and two small children—were safely ensconced in an army tent on the high ground of Max Yasgur’s sloping pasture. As the sun set and the pasture filled with blissed-out pilgrims, Hip agreed to mind the children while Flower Child sailed forth in tie-dye skirt, crushed velvet tunic, and trinkets of coral and turquoise.

It was a long evening. The baby girl, Stardust, spent hours gazing beatifically at the passing forest of legs, but the toddler, Hip Junior, did not settle until ten o’clock, when Ravi Shankar was playing a hypnotic raga. By then it was raining, and as Hip sat under the flap of the tent, smoking Acapulco Gold and watching the water run down the sides of the tent and into his carefully dug trenches leading down the slope, he silently reminded the absent mother of his dry, sleeping children that there were worse things than being married to “an anal-retentive Boy Scout,” as she frequently called him.

Flower Child did not return until midday Saturday, when Country Joe and the Fish were settling into their groove, and even then, Hip suspected that she had come back by accident. Glassy-eyed, mud-spotted, hair tangled with wildflowers, she wheeled into view with such a loving, all-embracing smile on her face, it was clear she did not recognize him at first. When she did, her expression grew defiant. She needed to crash, she announced. If he was thinking of visiting the stage, he would have to take the kids.

Hip opened his mouth to object, but another struggle session was averted by the unexpected appearance of Esther Van Ruysch, the nurse who had attended the birth of both Winkle children. Helicoptered in to treat festival casualties, Nurse Esther had just learned that, even though she was off duty, she could not be helicoptered out till after midnight. A staid, fortyish member of the Dutch Reformed Church, she was clearly not finding Woodstock her cup of tea, so she was happy to babysit while Flower Child slept and Hip took a much-needed stroll.

Stretching his cramped limbs, Hip found it hard to stay within the festival bounds. For one thing, he felt drawn to the surrounding hills, with their dense forests, sunny knolls, and thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch-hazel. For another, he was more vexed with Flower Child than he cared to admit. Her laid-back lifestyle, which he was expected to emulate while also serving as its main support, was thrown into relief by the kind and sensible Nurse Esther. Feeling rather strongly that Woodstock was not his cup of tea either, he turned his back on the revelry and strode rapidly into the hills.

Hours later, his solitary ramble deposited him on a rocky outcropping, covered with wild grapevine and moss, and overlooking the blue waters of a sizable pond. Resting for a moment, he realized it was too late to get back in time for the groovy, relaxed sounds of Canned Heat. With a sigh at what Flower Child would say if his absence caused her to miss the even groovier and more relaxed Grateful Dead, he fell into a profound slumber.

When he awoke, it was dusk. Hurriedly he tried to stand but was overcome by the stiffness in his joints and a sudden dizziness. Hearing a low voice call his name, he looked up and was astonished to behold an elderly Algonquin woman floating in mid-air. Of stocky build and youthful complexion despite her snow-white braids, dressed in antique buckskin finely worked with wampum beads, the woman narrowed her black eyes and beckoned Hip to follow her. There was no way to do that without stepping off the precipice, but her gesture was so compelling, and the line between earth and sky so indistinct, he obeyed.

Soon they were climbing through clouds that grew thicker and blacker the higher they went, until Hip feared they might enter the legendary vault where the thunderstorms are stored. But instead, they came to a great wigwam with a smooth floor, where the Algonquin woman bade him sit cross-legged and share an elaborately carved wooden pipe whose smoke was so richly flavored, his awe and apprehension subsided. Seeing him at ease, the woman proceeded to tell the tale of how she came to marry Badawk the Thunder Spirit:

As a young girl I was sleeping by the water below when a giant serpent with glittering eyes overcame me and filled my womb with his progeny, causing me to be driven away from my village into this wild place, where sitting and weeping I was found by the Ancient One, who led me to this wigwam and bade me dance. While dancing I birthed three serpent-children, whom the Ancient One killed, one after the other, with his stick. Then the Ancient One summoned Badawk, his son, and said to him, “Take this woman for your wife and be good to her.” We wed, and in time I bore Badawk a child who now flies ahead of the storm with a pair of wings whose grumbling marks the approach of the Thunder Spirit’s roaring crashes and the blinding flashes of his sister, the Lightning Spirit Psaiuk-tankapic. 

Amazed, Hip asked the woman why the Ancient One killed the serpent-children. She replied:

Their bodies died but their spirits flew to three different tunnels in human time, all of which can be reached from this wigwam. At the bidding of the Ancient One, each serpent-child wears a mask of peace and love while conjuring a festival for the descendants of the invaders, but beneath each mask the fangs of the serpent-child are heavy with the venom of revenge. You are an invader, but because you turned your back on the first festival, you have been chosen by the Ancient One to witness the other two, so that you may live to tell the tale of your tribe’s destruction.

The woman now fixed Hip with gaze so steady and statue-like, his heart turned within him and his knees smote together. Then she took a long, silent drag on the pipe, and bade him do the same. One toke provoked another, and before long his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head, and he passed out on the floor of the wigwam.

1994 

Upon waking, Hip’s first thought was to lay off the Acapulco Gold: That dream was so vivid, he must have sleepwalked all the way back to Max Yasgur’s pasture. But wait—this was not Max Yasgur’s pasture. The terrain was flatter, the music louder, the crowd ruder. He wondered at the connection between the deafening guitar distortion and hoarse screaming emanating from the stage, and the pale, bitter faces of the crowd—men and women dressed in black, with tattoos, piercings, and heads either shaved or crested with spiky hair the colors of Kool-Aid. At the sight of Hip a group of them called out, “Peace and love, brother,” “Far out,” and “Groovy” in such a mocking tone that he sidled away with eyes downcast, only to notice, looking down, that his beard was flecked with grey and had grown so long, it covered his Zuni belt buckle.

There was trash everywhere: plastic bottles, beer cans, food wrappers, all emblazoned with the slogan “Woodstock ’94, Saugerties NY.” Could it be? Had he really jumped ahead 25 years? He thought of asking someone, but the music was so deafening he could barely think, much less talk. As night was falling, he wandered aimlessly, gaping at the circus-sized tents, the five-story speakers, and the stage wider than a cow barn, weirdly flanked by what looked like a pair of outdoor movie screens. He was hungry and thirsty, but, lacking any cash for the concession stands, he collapsed on a pile of pizza boxes.

“What have we here? A bad trip from ‘69?” Leaning over him was a young woman in a festival T-shirt and a badge saying Jennifer Van Ruysch: Volunteer Medical Assistant. Her harried expression suggested she was in no mood to deal with some middle-aged dude who should have been home watching TV. But she did her duty, helping Hip to his feet and escorting him to the medical tent.

On the way, she asked his name. When he told her, she gave him a clinical look and said, “I don’t think so. Hip Van Winkle is one of the hot-shots running this fiasco. You must have heard about him on the news. Somebody dug up the story of how his dad took off during the first Woodstock and never came back. They interviewed my mom, who was the last person to see him. She told them he must have been murdered or something, because he was such a good guy, very hard-working. But that’s my mom. She never says a bad word about any—”

Hip interrupted her in sudden excitement. “Your mother is Nurse Esther? Is she here?” 

“Yes, as a matter of fact. She’s in the medical tent.”

It took just a moment for Nurse Esther to recognize Hip and ask what on earth had happened to him back in ’69. Eyes misting, he started to tell her about the Algonquin woman but then stopped himself, realizing how crazy that sounded—especially to Jennifer, who was making it pretty clear that he was wasting her mother’s time. She had a point: The medical tent was full of young people with head injuries, broken bones, and worse. When Nurse Esther was called away to attend a young man who had broken his back in what someone referred to as “the mosh pit,” Hip took his leave, thanking Jennifer for her help and mumbling something about catching up with her mother after the festival.

Weary and dispirited, he plunged back into the crowd and was borne helplessly toward the stage, which was empty except for billowing smoke, raking searchlights, and a clanking, throbbing racket like a factory gone berserk. Hearing the name Nine Inch Nails, he watched in stupefaction as the band members emerged filthy and wraithlike from the darkness onto the stage. It was all so nightmarish, he began to feel faint, and would likely have keeled over and been trampled, had he not at that moment felt a steadying hand on his arm, and the voice of Nurse Esther shouting in his ear: “There you are! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. You’re not leaving here without seeing your kids!”

Leading Hip to a mercifully soundproofed trailer behind the stage, Nurse Esther introduced him to Hip Junior, all grown up and wearing a black T-shirt and white skull earring. He was carrying a walkie-talkie, and after greeting his long-lost father with an air of suppressed impatience, walked to the other end of the trailer and began talking into it. Even less welcoming was Stardust, who, according to Nurse Esther, had changed her name to Vomit. Instead of greeting her long-lost father, Vomit trained on him the same indifferent gaze that had seemed so beatific when she was a baby. Only now it was blank as ice. Prodded by Nurse Esther to be civil, at least, she said, “I’d rather blow my fuckin’ brains out.”

“Don’t speak to me like that,” Nurse Esther rebuked her. “I’ve taken care of you and Hip Junior ever since your mother OD’ed.”

“Right,” spat Vomit. “But that fuckin’ hippie totally abandoned us.”

“You’re wrong,” said Nurse Esther in a firm voice. “Your father did not abandon you. He hiked into the hills and met a spirit who cast a spell on him. Basically, he’s been asleep for 25 years.”

Coming from anyone else, the story would have provoked laughter. But coming from Nurse Esther, who was descended from one of the oldest Dutch families in the region and steeped in the local lore, it rang true—even before she fortified it with logic: “Look at his clothes, they’re the same. I know, because I was the one who described them to the police. Stardust, you can see for yourself. Is that tie-dye vest retro or real?”

Peering closely at Hip’s vest, Vomit frowned. She did know the difference between retro and real, so she whispered, “Fuck, man. Too bizarre.” This caught Hip Junior’s attention. Setting down his walkie-talkie, he made his way back through the trailer and, with a suspicious glance at Hip, asked Nurse Esther what the hell was going on. She told him to ask Hip, which he did. But before Hip could reply, his two children and kindly Nurse Esther vanished like the mist over the Catskills when the sun burns it off.

1999 

 

Griffiss Air Force Base is a recently decommissioned installation in Rome, New York, a city to which all roads do not lead. It was there, on a vast sunbaked tarmac enclosed by barbed wire, that Hip regained consciousness. Glancing up at a shabby airplane hangar painted in psychedelic style, he noticed that the name WOODSTOCK ’99 was painted in large block letters above the elevated stage. Again he wondered, Could it be? Had five more years gone by in the blink of an eye? At that moment a heavyset young man slammed directly into him, almost knocking him over and depositing a smear of what looked like mud but smelled like something worse. Cursing and calling Hip an “old fart,” the man reeled back into the sea of mostly male revelers, who to judge by their bellowing were growing drunker, angrier, and hornier by the minute:

“Shit, we paid $150 a ticket and these motherfuckers are ripping us off for everything else!” … “What the fuck, man? I’m crappin’ in my shorts and these fuckin’ Port-A-Potties are totally fucked!” … … “Hey, bitches! Show us your titties!” … “Where’s the fuckin’ water?” … “I paid eight dollars for one fuckin’ bottle and they’re already fuckin’ out!” … “Why do these motherfuckin’ stages have to be ten miles apart?” … “Grab the cute blonde! I want to see her tits!” … “Fuck you, frat boy!” … “Dick-face redneck!” … “Sheryl Crowe sucks!” … “Nü Metal rocks!” … “Thank your fuckin’ stars they don’t charge you eight dollars to take a shit!” … “Give me the fuckin’ camera!” … “That’s gross, asshole!” …  “Don’t puke on me, do it in the fuckin’ beer garden!” … 

For the next few hours, Hip maneuvered through the crowd, finding temporary respite in the places where at least some of the young men were accompanied by young women they knew. But even there, the crudity of the language assaulted his ears. Noting that the lyrics from the stage, to the extent that he understood them, were even more assaultive, he began to wonder what the hell had happened over the past 30 years. Did the music get meaner and nastier and the fans follow suit? Or was it the other way around?

Sunset brought slightly cooler air but no other relief, as the male revelers in the crowd waiting to hear a band called Limp Bizkit amused themselves by hoisting females onto their shoulders and commanding them to bare their breasts. A surprising number of women complied, some even fondling their own flesh in what struck Hip as a pitiful attempt to excite even more male attention. Whenever one of these toppled from her perch, she was swarmed by a pack of gropers. A few disappeared underneath them, there to suffer an unknown fate. 

At length Limp Bizkit appeared: five muscular tattooed white dudes, one in spooky face paint, who spent the next hour toggling between ridiculously pissed-off rhyming speech and ridiculously pissed-off hard rock. The only departure from this monotony was when the lead singer, who did not sing, bent double and shrieked in a banshee voice that most human beings use only a few times in their lives. Unlike Hip, the mob did not find this boring. On the contrary, taking their cues from the stage, they switched from groping to aggression, and began to hurl projectiles at the stage and rip the plywood sheathing off the sound relay towers, which any fool could see was there to protect people from high-voltage equipment.

Time to split, thought Hip. After an exhausting half-hour extricating himself from the surging mass, he searched in vain for the exit. He would have asked for directions, but the behavior of the crowd was so ugly, he refrained from doing so until he spied a passing journalist, a woman around 30 with a notebook in one hand and a camera slung round her neck, striding past with a cool composure that set her apart from the rest. When Hip hailed her, she neither looked at him nor stopped walking, but she did gesture over her shoulder and say, “Back there.”

“Thank you,” called Hip as she passed by. Then he caught a glimpse of her face, and his heart would have stopped, had a sudden rush of adrenalin not filled his blood. “Stardust!” he cried, “Vomit! Whatever your name is, wait for me! I’m your father!”

It was almost as if she were expecting him. They embraced, somewhat awkwardly, and she informed him with a wry smile that she had gone back to being called Stardust, which was so retro nowadays, it was cool. Seeing how bedraggled he was, she took him to the press tent, where, as a stringer for MTV News, she was eligible for cold drinks and snacks. It was there, over 7-Up and corn chips, that father and daughter formed their first affectionate bond. Stardust had to work the next day, which was Sunday, but she allowed Hip to rest in her snug, well-furnished hotel room, with a stout cheery bellboy to deliver room service. Upon her urging, he ventured forth that evening to witness the closing act, a band called Red Hot Chili Peppers.

That band had a better rhythm section than the others, though nowhere as good as Santana’s. But the lyrics were puerile, and even though Stardust was a grown woman, or perhaps because she was, Hip found it embarrassing to watch the band in her company, because the bass player was totally naked, and at the end of the set flung his guitar to one side, causing the audience to scream as though the sight of his schlong was the high point of the festival.

Perhaps it was the whiteness of Hip’s beard, or some lingering trace of Calvinism in his blood, but he could not help imagining this was not a festival at all but rather a scene of torment, in which 200,000 young people were condemned to writhe perpetually in unquenchable thirst, lust, and rage. A little while later, watching the mob ignite the fiery inferno that eventually destroyed the site, he knew for sure that the serpent-child’s mask of peace and love had been lifted, and the venom of revenge was doing its work.

Present Day

To his great relief, Hip awoke from that nightmare on a pleasant summer day in the familiar environs of his home village in Ulster County. Or at least somewhat familiar. As he approached the village center, he encountered a great many people whom he did not recognize. This was odd, because he thought himself well acquainted with his neighbors. Even odder was the villagers’ manner of dress, which consisted chiefly of skin-tight jeans that flattered no one, and—oddest of all—small illuminated rectangles that seemed surgically attached to each and every palm. Trying in vain to catch someone’s eye, Hip speculated that this item of jewelry (for that was the best he could surmise) had such hypnotic power, the Ancient One himself could pass by and no one would notice.

Full of misgiving, Hip made his way to the corner where Nick Veda’s head shop once stood. In its place was a glass-fronted “Urgent Care Center,” marked with the logo of a Kingston hospital and the name of the managing physician: Dr. Jennifer Van Ruysch. Seized by sudden hope, Hip threw open the door and demanded to see the doctor. His voice was so loud, the half-dozen patients waiting in plastic chairs actually looked up from their rectangles.

The receptionist was reaching for the telephone when a middle-aged woman in a white coat emerged from the examining room, saying, “Please remain calm, everything’s under control.” Peering at Hip over half-moon glasses, the woman, who was not quite the spitting image of Esther Van Ruysch but close enough to be her daughter, broke into a smile: “I know this gentleman. He has a habit of popping up every 25 years.”

And so we arrive at the conclusion of our Tale. Reunited with his offspring, Hip declined their offer to join the team organizing the 50th anniversary of Woodstock. “That event has stolen enough of my life,” he said. But he did allow Hip Junior to bankroll a modest home repair business that eventually reached discriminating customers as far away as Poughkeepsie. Today, every time a pessimist pronounces the death of true craftsmanship, an optimist praises the honesty, skill, and remarkable work ethic of the really old dude who can fix anything.

And every time old Esther Van Ruysch sees Hip in the village cemetery, trimming the grass on Flower Child’s grave, she smiles in memory of a dusty leather-bound book on her grandfather’s shelf: Charles G. Leland’s The Algonquin Legends of New England, published in 1884. Long since discredited by modern historians for its failure to give a full accounting of the destruction of the local Algonquins by the land-hungry Dutch, the book nevertheless contained some marvelous stories, such as “Of the Woman Who Married the Thunder,” about the young girl impregnated by a serpent, whose offspring were killed by the Old One of the Hills, who then wed the woman to his son, Badawk, who brews clouds black as ink and bristling with the fiery bolts of his sister, Psaiuk-tankapic. When those clouds break, woe betide the valleys.

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Stupid Is As Stupid Does

What do China and Germany have in common? For decades, both have been beneficiaries of American largesse, which Donald Trump is now trying to end in the most uncouth way. Start with China. The goodies began to roll in under Richard Nixon. He thought that the “opening to China” would alienate Beijing from Moscow, inducting the giant into America’s orbit during the Vietnam War. So he promoted China to superpower status in the multipolar world-to-come. As we know, flattery plus a seat at the table of the heavyweights did not turn the trick. By 1975, the North had conquered the South.

Nixon’s successors tried another gambit. They thought they could “socialize” China by flinging U.S. markets wide open, hoping that a rich and respected China would join the American-made world. China took the perks—the markets and the intellectual property—and chose the road rising powers always take. Today, China is America’s most dangerous strategic rival. Xi Jinping is signaling Washington: “The Pacific is our lake, roll over—at least as far as Guam.”

The trade deficit with China has risen to $420 billion, the world’s largest, and Donald Trump is escalating the trade war. If he makes true on his most recent threat, almost all of Chinese exports will suffer punitive duties after September 1. Alas, it’s tit-for-tat and not a given that Beijing will blink first—or yield before both will have inflicted irreparable damage on the global economy.

So much for America’s worst strategic rival. Though Germany is an ally of 70 years, the structural issues across the Atlantic are comparable. And not to put too fine a point on it, Europe’s richest and largest nation has essentially outsourced its security to America since WWII, with the U.S. stationing nukes and troops as a mighty deterrent against Moscow. Last year, the Germans devoted 1.23 percent of GDP to defense—as much as Albania. It is now up to 1.36, same as that great power, Denmark. Europe as a whole has actually increased defense outlays in recent years. But the rate of growth will actually shrink as of 2020 for NATO-Europe as a whole.

Enters Trump’s point man in Berlin, Ambassador Richard Grenell. He told the German news agency DPA: “It is offensive to assume that the U.S. taxpayers continue topay for more than 50,000 Americans in Germany, but the Germans get to spend their [budget] surplus on domestic programs.”

The talk in Berlin now is that the U.S. might pull all the GI’s out and station forces in Poland instead. The Polish ambassador to Germany has issued a hearty welcome. Ambassador Grenell is wrong on the numbers: U.S. troops in Germany number around 35,000. But a couple of brigades more or less do not change the basic point, which is that Germany and Europe cannot take care of their own security in an age of Russian and Iranian expansionism, just to list two obvious vulnerabilities.

Britain, which once ruled the waves, could not deter the seizure of a UK-flagged tanker in the Straits of Hormuz. It has dispatched two warships to the Gulf. London’s then-foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt condemned the grab as “piracy,” yet stressed London’s wish to “de-escalate the situation.” The reason was obvious, with Britain’s then-defense secretary conceding that it is “impossible to escort each individual vessel.” In August, the UK joined the U.S.-led naval mission in the Gulf—a realistic move for the nation than once boasted the mightiest fleet in the world. Today it has 22 major surface combatants. At the outbreak of WWII, it had around 300.

As goes Britain, so goes the rest. The French are down to 24. Last year all of Germany’s six U-boats were inoperative. Out of 244 panzers, only 99 were combat-ready. All Tiger combat helicopters are currently grounded. Useable projection forces are around 10,000 (plus another 20,000 in training and rotation). This is what 25 years of cashing in post-Cold War peace dividends have wrought.

With his incessant threats and insults to the Europeans—and the Germans above all—Donald Trump seems to posture like a capo of a protection racket: “Pay up, or we pull out!” This is no way to treat America’s longest-lived alliance. But there are three general points to ponder as we enlarge the framework to bring in China.

First, American largesse has only marginally lowered China’s market barriers and its theft of U.S. intellectual property. If they are not carried out, threats are discounted and ignored. Thus decades of American entreaties directed to Germany/Europe have not boosted defense expenditures. China has basically stuck to an exploitative trade policy. Kids know this game: please your parents just enough to keep them from grounding you, let alone sending you to reform school.

Second, free-riding is irresistible, shifting resources into self-serving pursuits. America’s generosity has helped to increase China’s wealth by orders of magnitude, but previous administrations should have hearkened history instead of hope. Ambitious nations get rich, then rowdy. Beijing is now the greatest threat to American primacy. As long as Europe was safe under the American umbrella, it could oppose U.S. interests at various points. Even now, France and Germany will not join the American naval posse in the Gulf. Stay out of harm’s way and don’t provoke Tehran, seems to be the impetus.

Third, a lifetime of security at a steep discount has tempted Germany/Europe to ignore its own best interests. Never mind Trump’s insufferable hauteur. Germany is Number 1 in the EU, and the bloc is the world’s largest exporter. Freedom of navigation should be a primary goal, especially in the Gulf, the most critical conduit of global oil supplies. So for Europe to deter Iran is not to kowtow to Trump; it is indispensable realpolitik.

To keep Vladimir Putin’s grasping hands off Eastern Europe is another vital interest. NATO-Europe is neither willing nor able to impress the new tsar with the right mix of resources and resolve. Turkey is de facto no longer a member, and in Germany, voices on the Left sound quite pleased with Trump’s withdrawal threats. So let him go and take his nukes (about 200) with him, runs the counsel. In truth, it would exchange “our” tyrant (Trump) for the one in the Kremlin. Historically, this is known as “appeasement”—or more politely, as “propitiation.”

“Stupid is as stupid does,” taught Forrest Gump. But such folly does not excuse Donald Trump. It is a permanent American interest to keep its great-power rivals out of Europe, and especially its linchpin Germany. On a practical level, think Ramstein, America’s air force hub in Germany whence it can sally forth into critical neighborhoods east and south, as it has done during various Middle East wars. Without Ramstein’s vast surveillance capacities, the USAF would be struck deaf and blind from the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of Africa.

The larger point is about the use of threats and trade war. True, unexecuted threats lose credibility. But real threats spin out of control when met by retaliation. Trump thinks that brutality pays because the U.S. supposedly retains escalation dominance. Even when he riles most of the rest, friends as well as foes? The odds are that he will tear the fabric of world order, both the political and the economic part, and so damage American authority as well as its interests.

What’s the use of threatening another round of tariffs on China when the stock market drops 500 points each time? When American farmers, workers and are victimized by retaliation and consumers lose real income as a result of riising prices for imported goods? The toll is high, and yet the trade deficit doesn’t decline because imports from Vietnam et al. substitute for Made in China stuff. Direct investment and joint venture deals between China and the U.S. have shrunk to their lowest level in five years, the economist Irwin Stelzer reports in these pages. When Trump keeps dissing and intimidating big players like Germany, he delivers ammunition to the country’s anti-American forces that are by no means concentrated on the Left only.

If you try to impose your will by exploiting the “Madman Theory” (do my bidding, or I am going to hurt myself), you have to be sure that your adversary stays sane. But what if he—individual or nation—is also ready to go off the deep end? At best, it produces a standoff, at worst an escalation of irrationality that maximizes losses all-round.

Good luck, Mr. President.

The post Stupid Is As Stupid Does appeared first on The American Interest.

Islam, Terrorism, and Environmental Jihad

As climate change threatens countries from Malaysia to Mauritania, environmentalists across the Muslim world are wrestling with how to respond. A growing number are looking to Islam itself for an answer to what is now being called a “climate crisis.” Some of the region’s activists and intellectuals have argued that Muslims, the stewards of what the Quran defines as God’s creation, have a responsibility to care for the Earth and promote environmental protection. And given that Indonesians and Iranians alike have embraced this idea, the concept of a religious obligation to the natural environment appears to transcend Islam’s geographic and theological divides. 

Even Muslim militants are talking about environmentalism.

In Somalia and Afghanistan, longtime allies of al-Qaeda have begun to portray environmental conservation as an Islamic duty. Militants in Iraq and Yemen are taking steps toward copying this model, a sign that—at least in the Greater Middle East—environmentalism is far from the exclusive domain of progressives. Whether out of sincere theological conviction or just for the sake of their propaganda, several American-designated terrorist groups are trying to co-opt the environmental movement by aping the message of their traditional adversaries in the Muslim world: Western-friendly Muslim philosophers and scholars.

If Muslim proponents of eco-theology, the fast-spreading belief that religious texts can inform an approach to environmental protection, want to stop militants from polluting a philosophy that has potential to become a social movement, eco-theologians must refrain from making the mistake of ignoring them. Though al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS) have failed to influence even the margins of political theory in the Muslim world, both umbrella organizations have proved adept at exploiting social issues that divide religious communities and encourage sectarian strife. Only the handful of Muslim intellectuals pioneering an eco-friendly interpretation of Islam can reverse what some militants are trying to turn into an extra-regional trend.

Like Muslim eco-theologians, the Taliban and al-Shabaab assert that Islam tasks humans with protecting the natural environment from all manner of threats, including humans themselves. The Quran has become the most reliable resource for Muslim environmentalists across the political spectrum, who cite a variety of Quranic verses about the importance of environmental protection. “Corruption has appeared on land and sea caused by the hands of people so that they may taste the consequences of their actions and turn back,” recites the website of the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Science (IFEES), a British non-profit that has held workshops in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Zanzibar and published a pamphlet highlighting “the ethical foundations of Islamic environmentalism.” Muslim environmentalists interpret that Quranic quotation as an ancient but timeless warning against soil contamination and water pollution.

While IFEES operates out of London, one of Europe’s many secularist bastions, the ideas behind eco-theology have proved popular in even the most conservative corners of the Muslim world. Dr. Mohammad Ali Shomali, founding director of the International Institute for Islamic Studies in Qom, began his 2008 article “Aspects of Environmental Ethics: An Islamic Perspective” with a quotation from the Muslim prophet Mohammad: “If Resurrection is starting and one of you has a sapling in his hand that he can plant before he stands up, he must do so.” In the article, Shomali noted how “in Islam, the environment is sacred and has an intrinsic value,” adding that “as the vicegerent of God, [Muslims] have to channel the mercy of God to everything within [their] reach.” An idea championed by Muslims in the liberal democracy of Britain has a following in the Shi‘a theocracy of Iran. Across the Persian Gulf in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which adhere to a traditional interpretation of Sunni Islam often hostile to Shi‘a practices, officials have hosted conferences and research institutes dedicated to studying the intersection of ecology and Islam. Eco-theology has managed to appeal to Islamic schools of thought across the world.

Eco-theology’s distinguished Muslim voices include Dr. Odeh Rashid al-Jayyousi, chairman of the Innovation and Technology Management Department at Arabian Gulf University and author of Islam and Sustainable Development, and Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor emeritus of religious studies at the George Washington University. An outspoken member of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel at the United Nations, al-Jayyousi has pressed Muslims to reframe jihad as a struggle against climate change and urged the international community to establish an Islamic financial endowment dedicated to sustainable development. Nasr, who started writing about Islam and environmentalism in the 1960s, has lamented Muslim clerics’ failure to take a greater role in the environmental movement. Dr. Akhtar Mahmood at Panjab University in India, Dr. Md Saidul Islam at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and Dr. Mustafa Abu Sway at Quds University in Palestine echo these sentiments in their writings.

Muslim eco-theologians found their most conspicuous platform in 2015, when supporters of an Islamic commitment to the natural environment traveled from countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America to Istanbul to release the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change. The landmark document sought to reinforce the message that, because “Islamic environmentalism is embedded in the matrix of Islamic teachings,” Muslims must fight on the front lines of the war against climate change. Dr. İbrahim Özdemir, founding president of Hasan Kalyoncu University and a contributor to the document, has stressed Islam’s potential place in environmental policy: “Muslim countries must use the Islamic perspective in environmental protection and sustainable development, taking into consideration religious texts and the practices of Islamic heritage.”

No country embodies Özdemir’s ideal better than Indonesia, where activists, clerics, and officials have led grassroots and top-down efforts to incorporate Islam into the environmental movement. Indonesian environmentalists have launched several madrasas that focus on environmentalism as one of Islam’s foremost principles, and the Indonesian government has partnered with two of the country’s most influential religious organizations to campaign against plastic pollution. For its part, the Indonesian Ulema Council, Indonesia’s top faith-based organization and a government agency, issued the world’s first fatwa against wildlife trafficking in 2014.

Thousands of miles away from Indonesia, the Taliban and al-Shabaab have announced their own bids to combat environmental issues. Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s latest leader, called on Afghans to “plant one or several fruit or non-fruit trees for the beautification of Earth and the benefit of almighty God’s creations” in 2017. Just a year later, clerics tied to al-Shabaab outlawed plastic bags as “a threat to the health of humans and livestock.” Though experts on the Taliban and al-Shabaab debate the sincerity of these edicts, the pronouncements imply that some insurgents have adopted the methods of eco-theologians. The Taliban’s and al-Shabaab’s rhetoric also fits the wider pattern of militants taking advantage of environmental issues.

In the most obvious example of a Western-labeled terrorist group benefiting from environmental degradation, ISIS recruited Iraqis in rural areas by blaming the beleaguered central government of Iraq for water scarcity. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), often considered the most dangerous franchise of the umbrella organization that Osama bin Laden founded, attempted to improve its poor reputation in Yemen’s hinterland by refurbishing some of the drought-plagued country’s water mains and wells. Even bin Laden himself demonstrated a bizarre fascination with environmental issues, at one point recommending that Americans undertake “a great revolution for freedom” to bolster Barack Obama’s campaign against environmental degradation and global warming. Unlike the Taliban and al-Shabaab, ISIS, AQAP, and bin Laden never seemed to link these actions to the tenets of eco-theology or any other overarching religious themes. How long that divergence between al-Qaeda’s allies and offshoots will persist remains another story.

Anti-Western militants expressing support for the environmental movement and trying to rebrand themselves with an eco-friendly image may seem entertaining. Even so, this phenomenon could create further challenges for Muslim eco-theologians already struggling to spread their message beyond academia. If the concept of an Islamic approach to environmentalism becomes associated with the reactionary ideologues of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, not the liberal activists and scholars who have dedicated their careers to devising an Islamic interpretation of environmentalism, the Muslim and Western worlds will prove that much more reluctant to embrace eco-theology.

Nothing suggests that the Taliban and al-Shabaab got inspiration for their nascent environmental policies from mainstream eco-theologians, nor have leading Muslim advocates of eco-theology responded to extremists’ attempts to frame banning plastic bags and planting trees as an Islamic obligation. In fact, neither side of the extraordinary political spectrum that spans eco-theology in the Muslim world—from Somali guerrillas to eco-friendly philosophers—seems to have acknowledged the other’s existence. This appears all the more striking in light of the widespread, well-publicized ridicule that has greeted the Taliban’s call for reforestation and al-Shabaab’s ban on plastic pollution over the past two years. While a staffer at the Daily Caller took a moment to lampoon the Somali militants’ strange announcement as “giving them at least one thing in common with U.S. states California and Hawaii,” eco-theologians missed a chance to denounce al-Shabaab’s half-baked attempt at environmentalism and distinguish the innovative field of eco-theology from the insurgents’ ultraconservative interpretation of Islam.

Eco-theology has the potential to revolutionize how the Muslim world confronts global warming. Given that summer temperatures are predicted to rise twice as fast in North Africa and Western Asia as in the rest of the world—and that, according to scientists, “prolonged heat waves and desert dust storms can render some regions uninhabitable”—the need for a sociopolitical philosophy that can unite Muslim-majority countries behind the environmental movement has become more urgent than ever. Still, the longevity of any Islamic approach to environmentalism will depend not only on the ability of eco-theologians to mobilize peoples and governments but also on whether they can prevent extremists from co-opting and corrupting eco-theology.

Muslim eco-theologians have yet to ignite the kind of viral, country-spanning social movement sparked by the world-famous teenage Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg. This problem likely stems from the intellectualization of their field: With the promising exception of Indonesia and a handful of limited initiatives sponsored by Arab governments, eco-theology has remained the domain of academics and philosophers. The public-facing work of scholars such as Özdemir and al-Jayyousi has failed to translate into the type of attention from the international community and the news media that the Taliban and al-Shabaab’s strange edicts received.

To build a political movement and keep extremists from dominating the already-scant coverage of eco-theology in the Muslim world, advocates of an Islamic approach to environmentalism will have to employ a multi-pronged strategy. First, eco-theologians must highlight al-Shabaab and the Taliban’s hypocrisy: Just as the Council on American-Islamic Relations has condemned actions that ISIS has undertaken in the name of Islam as “anti-Islamic,” supporters of eco-theology can draw attention to the Taliban and al-Shabaab’s involvement in illegal logging, which contravenes the militants’ eco-friendly propaganda. Emphasizing the disparity between militants’ halfhearted environmental policies and eco-theology will not only preempt any cynical attempts to conflate eco-theology with extremism but also undermine militants’ hopes of hijacking the environmental movement. Eco-theologians can no longer ignore extremists’ forays into environmentalism.

In addition to combating the rhetorical threat of extremists’ propaganda, Muslim eco-theologians will have to overcome the much larger challenge of rallying a coalition of their faith’s disparate ideologies and religious denominations behind an Islamic approach to environmentalism. Even if eco-theology appears confined to seminaries and universities for the time being, the geographic and theological breadth of its supporters—ranging from a Shi‘a scholar in the United States to a Sunni academic in Singapore—indicate that the up-and-coming philosophy can bridge this gap. Despite eco-theology’s promising future, its proponents have a lot of work ahead of them.

As Islam has evolved into a rallying cry for militants, reformists, and revolutionaries alike, few analysts have doubted its potency as a tool for exciting social movements and structural changes. If Muslim eco-theologians hope to capitalize on this centuries-old trend, they will have to stop extremists from exploiting their ideas, transform their philosophy from an arcane academic field into a call to battle for Muslim environmentalists, and win the race against the dangerous effects of global warming. As climate change devastates the Global South and the Greater Middle East in particular, the importance of the eco-theologians’ mission becomes all the more apparent. In fact, the fate of the environmental movement in the Muslim world may rest on their success.

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Russia After Putin Is Not a Solved Problem

Tyrannies are fragile things and when the fear upon which they are based crumbles, they collapse. The protests in Russia over the past weeks may be a sign of the growing fearlessness of some Russian citizens and the resulting weakness of Putin and his gang. There is good reason, therefore, to be hopeful that the Putinist kleptocracy may end. Who, or what type of regime, will follow the two decades of Putin’s rule is another matter. We can hope that it will be more lenient and less authoritarian, but the future of Russia’s domestic system is anyone’s guess.

In any case, the inevitable end of Putin—after all, sooner or later through elections, revolt, or their own death, all political leaders lose power—will not bring a solution to the security problems Russia creates. The Kremlin can change its occupants, but there is more continuity than change in Russian foreign policy. Putin will leave and Russia will remain.

Geography imposes a consistent simplicity of conception on Russian foreign policy. In a nutshell, Russia wants to be in Europe, but not of Europe. While it cannot be an Asian great power, Russia has sought in the past (as it is seeking now) to be the key European potentate.

A massive continental power, with lengthy land frontiers, Russia is physically more in Asia than in Europe. But in Asia, it has never had the possibility to play a pivotal role. The Central Asian steppes and the Siberian lands proved difficult to conquer in the 19thcentury, in no small part due to the sheer distances involved. Once conquered, they were not easy to rule, and in the end they could never bring Russia the geopolitical heft it needed to be a global power. Being a potentate in the Caucasus or in Central Asia makes Russia only that: an important player in the Caucasus or Central Asia.

Moreover, China blocks Russian influence in Asia. Chinese growth over the past decades has shrunk the reach of Russia in much of Central Asia, clearly showing Moscow that there is little to be gained from opposing Chinese interests there (and elsewhere). Russia has been forced to acquiesce to the new situation in that region simply out of economic weakness. This is why, incidentally, Russia will never be a partner for the United States in its efforts to balance Chinese power. To expand in Asia, or even to counter China’s imperial ambitions, presents too many risks and insufficient rewards for Russia. In Asia, Russia is a second-rate power at best. It cannot compete with China, and all things being equal, it prefers to have a stable Asian frontier.

The relative stability on Russia’s southern and eastern frontiers allows Russia to destabilize its western one. Like any other state with multiple frontiers, Russia cannot afford to treat them as separate strategic challenges. Frontiers are linked, and in order to expand on one it is necessary to stabilize the others. Hence, Russia’s ability to expand on its western frontier was is dependent on the stability along the other frontiers.

It is only in Europe that Russia can strive to be a great power. Russia is a westward-leaning power, but not in the liberal sense of that phrase; namely, the idea of the rule of law as independent from the will of its ruler has never taken root in Russia. It is westward-leaning in the geopolitical sense: It pushes its frontiers toward Europe. It is there that it can disrupt and intervene and shape political life.

To be a European great power, Russia needs three things. First, a geographic foothold. Russia obviously is already present in the European theater but, in the past as right now, is on the geopolitical margins. To obviate this, it needs to control internal seas (the Black, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean) and the Central European continental core. This imperative explains in part Putin’s war in Ukraine and the military intervention in Syria: These are attempts to insert Russia into the European power dynamics, making it more capable of shaping the decisions in European capitals.

Second, Russia needs to have a divided Europe in order to function as a mediator of sorts. European unity has always been exceedingly delicate, and no supranational institution has succeeded in overcoming fundamental differences in economic and security interests among Europe’s states. Moscow has been very adept at exploiting these differences, in particular splitting Germany from its allies through economic means (e.g., Nord Stream gas pipelines) and corruption (e.g., former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has been working for the Russian energy industry).

Third, Russia needs the United States out of Europe. Without the Americans, Europe is a geographically small peninsula in Eurasia torn by internal tensions and incapable of countering Russian imperial advances. The modicum of unity that Europe has achieved—and can continue to sustain—is fully dependent on continued U.S. presence and leadership. At least in part, anti-American sentiments in some European capitals arise because the United States forces European states to do what is in the best interest of all of Europe, and not just in their own narrowly conceived interest. Again, the current opposition in Washington to the Russo-German Nord Stream 2 project is a case in point: Greater dependence on Russian gas will make Berlin even more friendly toward Moscow to the detriment of Central European states (fellow EU and NATO members).

The simplicity of Russian foreign policy is matched by its persistent implementation. These goals—and in particular the three geopolitical requirements for Russia to be a European great power—have been the guiding lights of Russian foreign policy for a long time and are not the product of Putin’s imagination. Putin is not pursuing new foreign policy goals; he has merely implemented them with greater vigor and a keen sense of opportunism. His foreign policy is not a historical anomaly.

Putin’s successor may alter the timing, tweak the priorities, and adopt a different mix of means, but rest assured Russia will continue to be a competitor in the European theater.

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National Conservatism: A Guide for the Perplexed

Editor’s Note: This is the second essay in a multi-author series on “Our Nationalist Moment.” The first essay, by William A. Galston, can be found here.

“You throw out Christianity, you throw out the Torah, you throw out God—and within two generations people can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman.”

Thus thundered Yoram Hazony in remarks delivered at last month’s National Conservatism Conference, of which he was a principal organizer. It wasn’t the first slab of red meat thrown to the crowd—earlier that day Mary Eberstadt had all but blamed Europe’s migration crisis on the sexual revolution—but it may have been the reddest on a pure decibel scale: Attendees whooped and clapped and cheered, and Hazony paused for breath atop his perch in the Ritz Carlton Ballroom, looking slightly punch-drunk. “Between a foreigner and a citizen,” he continued, once folks had quieted down.

Jabs at the post-pronoun Left were so frequent it sometimes felt as though the conference should have been called “social” instead of “national.” A group becomes a nation, First Things’ Rusty Reno declared, when it is united by “shared loves.” Maybe, but after two days of keynotes, plenaries, and panels, one sensed that national conservatism is united mostly by shared hates: big tech, higher ed, opioids, pornography, China, and—everyone seemed at pains to make clear—libertarians, who had supposedly ignored these problems while chasing tax cuts for woke capital. 

Just what “nationalism” meant, and why the Right needed to recover it, remained opaque. As Yuval Levin noted in an insightful speech, the term can pick out different things in different contexts, all of which tend to get conflated by conservative discourse. For Levin, nationalist “sentiment” was “a form of patriotism”—love of country—“if maybe with harder edges sometimes.” But for David Brog, patriotism wasn’t “enough”; “we [also] need to love our fellow citizens” within our country, to feel a “deep” connection that motivates mutual sacrifice. The charitable reading of Brog’s statement is that while patriotism implies loyalty to a state, nationalism implies loyalty to a people; the uncharitable and objectively more plausible reading is that patriotism connotes both bonds just fine, but Brog was trying to legitimize the nationalist moniker.

Muddled language can reflect muddled thought, of course—and so it was at this event. The 45-plus speakers all fell into one of three camps, each with its own aims and agenda. In many cases those aims were congruent—a bigger state and fewer immigrants, say—but in some they were not, and barring an unlikely coincidence won’t be anytime soon. The groups are as follows.

Rhetorical Nationalists. That’s how I would characterize Chris DeMuth, Amity Shlaes, Rich Lowry, and John Bolton, who together made up a fairly representative cross-section of the pre-Trump GOP. On substance, 2016 didn’t seem to have changed them. Shlaes extolled enterprise, DeMuth blasted bureaucracy, and Bolton bashed isolationism, which he pegged as untenable in the 21st century. Lowry was the most chastened of the bunch, calling himself a “recovering Never Trumper.” But even he stopped short of impugning establishment conservatism, or of endorsing its populist opponents. 

Rhetorically, however, the ball had clearly moved toward Trump. You could support free markets and “forever wars” without getting booed (if without getting much applause either)—provided you justified them in terms of the national interest. “The nationalist claim,” DeMuth remarked, “is that the federal government has. . . .broken trust with large numbers” of Americans by “delegat[ing] lawmaking to. . . .bureaucracies” with “scant regard for [their] interests and values.” This expansion of executive power, and corresponding diminution of Congress, are familiar right-wing boogeymen; movement conservatives have been complaining about them for over half a century. 

What Trump has done is shift the rhetorical grounding for these complaints. In June 2016, DeMuth had claimed that the administrative state “weaken[s]. . . .checks and balances,” erodes “limited government,” and opens the door to “executive lawmaking.” Now, three years later, he appears to have ditched constitutionalism for populism. His argument was not that policy delegation threatens liberty by concentrating power in the hands of would-be tyrants; it was that policy delegation takes power away from the people, thus undermining national self-rule. 

A similar shift could be seen on markets. Ever since Cold War conservatism decided to adopt Hayek as its economic czar, the Right’s main critique of central planning has been that it undermines the “spontaneous order” whereby markets coordinate information across diverse actors. Part of what made this critique appealing was the way it squared (or appeared to square) freedom and fraternity—you could pursue your own ends while also serving someone else’s, such that each agent was in effect cooperating with every other, part of a grand, integrated market umma. 

But that logic had no limiting principle; it did not stop at, or even recognize, national boundaries or distinctives, making it ill-suited to today’s populist moment. 

So rather than defend laissez faire as a source of cosmopolitan freedom, speakers emphasized a free market tradition that accounts for American prosperity, American strength—a tradition whose roots predate (and put to shame) “neoliberalism,” the slur du jour of the conference. Their reasons may have changed, but their views—for better or worse—had not. 

Which brings us to the other, less conventional blocs of national conservatism.

Statist Conservatives. Excluding transgender bathrooms, the most common complaint at the conference by far was that conservatives had developed an irrational fear of the state—and an unhealthy love of the rich—despite government being one of the few things conservatives actually control. Among those complainers was J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy; Julius Krein, the editor-in-chief of American Affairs; Oren Cass, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute; and Patrick Deneen, whose sharp critiques of liberalism have generated significant debate on the Right as well as parts of the Left.

“Statist” doesn’t mean “socialist,” obviously. No one was calling for the nationalization of major industries, though Krein came close, asserting that “the invisible hand is no longer just invisible” but “increasingly non-existent.” 

Yet on this much, everybody seemed to agree: libertarian economics had been a disaster for the working class. Our labor market “has made it much harder for us to replace ourselves,” J.D. Vance said, because “we made a political choice that freedom to consume pornography was more important than public goods like marriage, freedom, and happiness.” Libertarians know these are problems, he continued, and they know the market caused them. But they’re unwilling to take the logical next step of market regulation, as that would involve picking winners and losers. 

Several speeches also highlighted the connection between domestic manufacturing and domestic security. If “Silicon Valley cranks out apps but makes no progress in the realm of atoms,” Cass warned, other countries will begin to overtake us—especially countries that subsidize R&D more aggressively than we do. 

Implicit in all this was a premise long resisted by movement conservatism: that it is legitimate, and perhaps even necessary, for government to promote the good at some cost to individual freedom. As Krein’s own journal has argued, “this may mean learning to advise on the use of the administrative state, rather than. . . . counterproductive calls for its abolition.” One use might be reverse IP theft against China; another could be regulating businesses that shut down speech, or, more cynically, punishing businesses that punish conservatives—Disney, Netflix, and Warner Bros, to name just three. 

The decision by these and other firms to boycott states with restrictive abortion laws prompted Deneen to praise government as an essential check on corporate power, and as a much-needed boon to struggling families. But “government,” not “nation,” was the operative word. In an ironic twist, Deneen’s speech was primarily about nationalism’s close link with progressivism in the early 20th century, born out of a common centralizing impulse that tended to disrupt local associations and attachments. But the goal of conservatism, Deneen made clear, should be conserving those attachments and the tangible goods they embody—which meant that conservatives should support the nation only insofar as it assisted its constitutive parts, not as an end unto itself. 

Furthermore, the goods in question don’t presuppose national unity or sovereignty; in principle you could achieve them without the nation-state, via some pre- or postmodern political form. Granted, nobody went out of their way to disclaim nationalism, and I suspect Cass and Vance do think national identity has some inherent value, their economic emphasis notwithstanding. The point is that they could think otherwise without contradicting themselves. Even immigration restriction, a traditionally “nationalist” aim, doesn’t require a belief in American nationhood over and above its constitutive parts. One could just say that immigration has negative effects on small, sub-national communities for which the American state is responsible, and so citizens may legitimately demand tighter border control from government—whether or not these communities form a transcendent, singular “people.” 

Indeed, it’s far from clear Deneen would have any principled objection to replacing the nation-state with something else, assuming it governed conservatively and allowed mediating institutions to flourish. And it’s telling that several attendees never defended nationalism in more than instrumentalist terms, if they defended it at all. Their question was not, pace Huntington, “who are we?”; it was “what should we do?” 

To which a third and final group responded: “Depends who we are.” 

Enter national conservatives, who made up the plurality of speakers at the conference. Like Vance, they were anti-libertarian, and in some cases anti-liberal, disenchanted by the establishment GOP. 

But they also made a further claim: For national conservatives, the nation was not merely a central means to local ends, but also, as Reno put it, “an end in itself,” a community that transcends clan or kin. On this view, it is perfectly coherent to speak of an American “people,” an American “culture,” an American heritage, the preservation of which should be a core duty of the American state. Just where does people-hood come from? A shared past, for starters: Andre Archie and David Brog both invoked the “mystic chords of memory” posited by Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural, with Archie going the extra step of saying that “local narratives” must be integrated into national ones. Common mores, too—Anglo-Protestant in America, Gallo-Roman in France. A key assumption here is that, outward appearances aside, there are certain cultural traits that most Americans share. These traits entitle them to national sovereignty, and form the basis for a critique of globalism: It doesn’t just weaken local attachments, as Deneen charged, but infringes on the nation’s right to control its fate and conserve its culture—singular, not plural. 

And that means national conservatives face a dilemma their statist counterparts do not: What happens when local and national imperatives conflict? What if, for instance, a large influx of African Catholics would reverse family breakdown and undermine our Anglo-Protestant heritage? If national cohesion only has value insofar as it promotes tangible attachments, this might seem like a worthwhile trade all else being equal. But if the nation is an end in itself, the good of national unity might outweigh the good of social conservatism. 

Notice I said “might,” not “will.” No one offered a principle by which to adjudicate such conflicts, or even acknowledged their potential, presumably because national conservatives have bigger fish to fry right now. The cosmopolitan Left is almost as allergic to nationalism as it is to Catholic social teaching, after all, so there’s some logic in an ardent Zionist like Hazony teaming up with somebody like Deneen. 

Yet this new fusionism—statist-cum-nationalist, Protestant-cum-Catholic—may have more in common with the old than its cheerleaders are letting on. 

Just as free market Hayekians joined forces with religious conservatives to defeat communism, post-liberal reactionaries have allied with nationalists to defeat progressivism, a threat both regard as existential. Assuming that assessment doesn’t change, their alliance could prove more durable than pre-Trump conservatism, because while markets nearly always undermine tradition, the nation-state does not, at least after a period of initial upheaval. And assuming the nation-state has already been established, social conservatism tautologically tends to promote it, yielding a stable equilibrium.

Except that American national culture has never been especially conservative or especially statist—which means the synergy between national and social conservatism will be weaker here than elsewhere. As Tablet’s Aris Russinos notes, the “legal and political philosophy and public discourse of the United States are all deeply intertwined with liberalism, in a way those of. . . .Poland are not. . . .Liberalism can be understood as America’s civic religion. . . .whose precise interpretation is as. . . .bitterly disputed as any divine commandment.” In other words, Demuth, Shlaes, and Lowry may actually have come closest to capturing America’s true identity, or at least a core part of it, when they glossed small-government fusionism with populist patois, even if their substantive agenda was rather conventional.

Thus the most likely outcome of all this might be a conservatism that remains faithful to our civic religion, but interprets it in a less fundamentalist way. We’ll see some industrial policy and perhaps some trust-busting; if we’re lucky, a greater openness to taxing rich people as well. My hunch is that the current distribution of right-wing enthusiasms will produce a less libertarian GOP in the long run—how long and how much less aren’t yet clear. No doubt some will see this as the first step down the road to serfdom, and others the first step toward renewal.

But as for national conservatism’s post-liberal coquetry, I think Josh Hawley put it best: “America is not going to become the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is not going to become America.” 

Amen.

The post National Conservatism: A Guide for the Perplexed appeared first on The American Interest.

Witnessing the Tiananmen Massacre

As the Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post in 1989, I covered the Tiananmen massacre and stayed on in China for more than a year afterward to report on the Communist Party’s crackdown on supporters of the student-led uprising. So as the world marked the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre earlier this year, I was reminded of how the student-led protests there brought out the best in the people of Beijing.

It had been my view, prior to the protests, as China was beginning to open up to some aspects of capitalism, that many of the local citizens were mostly interested in making money. They seemed to have little time for small kindnesses. But the actions of so many people in June 1989 caused me to change my mind. Tragically, hundreds of ordinary citizens from Beijing and surrounding areas died trying to protect the students when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) opened fire as it advanced toward Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, 1989.

The movement began on a modest scale when students from the prestigious Beijing University put up hand-written posters honoring Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party leader and outspoken reformer who died in Beijing on April 15, 1989. Hu was admired for being incorruptible, but elderly leaders who still guided events from behind the scenes had accused him of engaging in “bourgeois liberalism.” They ousted him from the Party leadership because they believed he had dealt too leniently with earlier student protests in 1986 and 1987.

I recall from my coverage of the 1986 protests that the students took note of then-Communist Party chief Hu’s talk about democracy. Hu had once declared that there could be no modernization without democracy. I got to see Hu several times on public occasions both in China and during a visit that he made to Australia, but I met him only once, during a visit to China in the fall of 1986 by Katherine Graham, chairman of the board of the Washington Post Company. During the meeting, Hu struck me as being open to new ideas, and he didn’t blame foreigners for China’s problems.

In 1989, Deng Xiaoping ended up accusing the United States of “manipulating” the student protesters from behind the scenes. But while the students were clearly open to Western ideas, I saw no evidence that any foreign power had manipulated them.

In the spring of 1989, the students at first engaged in poster-writing and spontaneous speeches about Hu that couldn’t be taken as a direct challenge to the Communist Party. But within days they organized demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and called not only for the rehabilitation of Hu but also for an end to corruption among high-level officials and their families.

The students were much better organized than they had been in 1986 and 1987, partly because they had been planning to mark the 70th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, when large numbers of Chinese students first mobilized to call for freedom and democracy.

In 1989, the students soon began demanding freedom of speech and the press, more money for education, and, perhaps most significantly, public disclosure of the incomes of government leaders and their families. “Hu Yaobang didn’t have a foreign bank account,” said one of the students’ posters.

As the crowds supporting the students grew close to a million people, I knew that this would be one of the biggest stories that I had ever covered. But I didn’t expect that it would end in gunfire.

Like many others, I didn’t realize that the government would take stronger action until an editorial in the People’s Daily, the Party’s official mouthpiece, denounced the students. The editorial, published on April 26, 1989, accused the students of aiming to “overthrow the government and Party.” The editorial angered the students and tended to galvanize them, but when I read the editorial, I remember thinking, This is it. This comes from Deng Xiaoping. A crackdown is coming.

Communist Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang had lost out to hardliners in the Politburo. Zhao was faulted because he openly favored a dialogue with the students and defended the students’ right to criticize the government. Deng rejected the idea of a dialogue. He was influenced by Beijing city officials who told him that the students were engaged in a “counter-revolutionary rebellion.”

But while the government alleged that the student protesters had created “turmoil,” I had never seen Beijing citizens in such a friendly mood. The crime rate appeared to go down. A group of pickpockets proudly announced that they would halt their activities and support the students.

The first time I recall reporting any violence was on May 20, when the Chinese government imposed martial law in the center of Beijing and moved soldiers toward Tiananmen Square to prepare for a crackdown on thousands of student protesters. The police attacked students lying on the road to halt army trucks heading into the city from the south. Ten of the students were seriously wounded.

The government also imposed a news blackout on Chinese media, and foreign correspondents were told not to go out on the streets. As it turned out, I knew of no correspondent who followed that order. But the government did succeed in halting live CNN broadcasts from Beijing. And the police beat up one of my colleagues when he returned to Tiananmen Square after the crackdown.

But when you think of martial law, you imagine soldiers everywhere, with the police locking people up. It didn’t work that way, however, in Beijing—at least not at first. In a book titled Black Hands of Beijing by George Black and Robin Munro, the authors describe a moment when students and a madcap group of motorcyclists “virtually took over the running of the city.”

The regular police and traffic police had disappeared from view. In the center of the city, I saw students directing traffic. After martial law was declared, I spent part of my days on Tiananmen Square and my evenings trying to follow the motorcyclists, who were nicknamed “The Flying Tiger Brigade,” or “feihudui.” They seemed to know what was happening everywhere around Beijing and relayed information about troop movements back to the students at the square. Meanwhile, in some parts of the city, despite martial law, a nearly festive atmosphere seemed to prevail.

The bikers, most of them older than the students, became overnight heroes. With the roar of their engines and beams from their headlights heralding their approach, the bikers gave many in Beijing a sense of fun and spontaneity.

In order to confront troop convoys, protesting civilians mustered a ragtag cavalcade of vehicles made up of buses, horn-honking cars, trucks, taxis, minivans, dump trucks and garbage trucks, and even some cement mixers.

One evening my wife Muriel and I followed the Flying Tiger motorcyclists to a suburb east of Tiananmen Square. We found a man sitting on a cement-block wall playing the “Socialist Internationale” on a trumpet to cheers from a crowd. Hundreds of citizens had surrounded army trucks loaded with troops and vehicles carrying water cannons. The trucks couldn’t move. At that moment, many in the crowd seemed to be confident that they and the students they supported would prevail. It was so peaceful, in fact, that Muriel was able to go out each day and shoot video of the protesters, often pushing along our 15-month old daughter Shauna in a baby carriage.

Those peaceful moments lasted up until the evening of June 3, when the army was blocked by crowds of civilians at several gateways to the city. That included an intersection outside our apartment complex in Beijing.

In the early evening, Muriel went with a friend to speak with the protesters who were blocking the troops. She brought along Shauna in a stroller. The protesters were urging the troops not to open fire. A pregnant woman sat on the hood of one truck. Another woman held up her child, who saluted a soldier. But then the protesters seemed to sense that the worst was about to come. They urged Muriel to return home with our baby, which she did.

The first death that we knew of occurred not long afterward, when the panicky driver of an armored personnel carrier ran over a soldier at the intersection.

I thought that I had the perfect plan for dealing with the impending attack on Tiananmen Square. I then had working for me three Chinese-speaking American students who had studied in China. They were such good reporters that one of my colleagues called them “Southerland’s Army.” One was to cover Tiananmen Square and the approaching People’s Liberation Army. The second was stationed in a room in the Beijing Hotel overlooking the square. And the third was on standby several miles east of the square. But this became much like a war, and plans, as they say, rarely survive the opening of hostilities. I had no Plan B.

When the attack came, my man on the square stopped communicating. As I recall, he had one of those Motorola phones as big as a brick that were popular at the time. But all that I got from him was silence. Our man simply disappeared for three days. I later learned from him that plainclothes Chinese policemen on the square had dragged him off the square, repeatedly kicked him in the head, threw him in an unmarked car, and detained him. They took him to a barber shop, blindfolded him, and spoke about killing him. In the end, they drove him out to a rural area miles away from Beijing and dumped him there. Their aim obviously was to get him to stop reporting. That didn’t work. When he returned to Beijing he chose to continue reporting. And we still had many places to send him in and around Beijing.

Our reporter in the Beijing Hotel became our man on the square. But with the army closing in, I decided that it was too dangerous for him to remain on location. I moved him back to the Beijing Hotel, where he reported on civilians being killed and wounded outside the hotel by soldiers in tanks and armored personnel carriers. Some of the civilians who were killed were simply trying to find sons and daughters who had remained on the square till the end. This was the scene that provided the setting for the iconic “tank man,” who stopped a line of tanks by standing in front of them. It was a moment symbolizing an unarmed people standing up to heavily armed power.

To this day, we still don’t know how many people died in the Tiananmen massacre. My own estimate, based on an informal survey of colleagues, was that at least 700 to 800 people were killed but possibly between 1,000 and 2,000. One credible source said that the death toll in Beijing came to more than 2,600 dead. Many other civilian deaths occurred in numerous cities outside Beijing.

The Chinese Red Cross was cited in one report as saying that some 10,000 people were killed in Beijing alone. But if that figure had been accurate, I think that we would have seen many more bodies.

Many more students and the civilians protecting them might have been killed had it not been for the actions of three Chinese intellectuals and a pop music singer named Hou Dejian. Among the “four men of honor,” as they were later named, was Liu Xiaobo, who was imprisoned in 2009 on charges of “inciting subversion” and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. With student leaders arguing among themselves whether to leave Tiananmen or die there, the four colleagues maintained a semblance of order and negotiated a truce with two PLA officers that allowed hundreds of students to escape safely through the southwest corner of the square.

One thing that I can never forget were the bodies that I saw in a makeshift morgue at a hospital near Tiananmen Square after the shooting had mostly stopped on June 4. I’ll never forget the doctor who got me into the hospital despite several unidentified people who tried to block me. The bodies that I saw piled up on a cement floor in the hospital appeared to be those of men in their late 20s or early 30s. They were too old to be students. I guessed that they had been killed while trying to protect the students and hold back the troops as they approached the northwest side of the square. They had nothing but bricks and rocks to throw in order to defend themselves against armored vehicles.

Another moment which I can never forget: As the PLA troops approached Beijing, I heard that villagers had halted a line of military trucks and armored personnel carriers (APCs) northwest of Beijing. I drove there in my office car. The villagers told me how a woman had lain down in front of the lead APC and dared the soldiers to drive over her. In the end, the heavy vehicles got around the woman, but the villagers had slowed them down.

On June 5, I decided that things were still dangerous enough that I had to evacuate my family from Beijing to Hong Kong. I’m grateful that we did that because of what happened next. As the People’s Liberation Army withdrew from Tiananmen Square, soldiers opened fire into an apartment building facing the main avenue leading east from the square.

I lived in the same apartment complex but in another building. I was far enough away to avoid being struck with bullets but close enough to hear the shooting. I hit the floor and called an editor on the foreign desk at the Washington Post to tell him that my apartment complex was under attack and that I had no idea what was going on but would call him back when I found out.

A colleague who had been sent in by the Post to assist me was on the scene. He reported that soldiers firing AK-47s shot out windows in several apartments facing the avenue, including one residence in which two American children were watching television. When the shooting started, a Chinese maid had pushed the children to the floor and lay on top of them to protect them. They weren’t injured. I later learned that not many people were in the most heavily damaged apartment building because the Chinese-speaking military attaché of the U.S. Embassy, Larry Wortzel, had been alerted by a contact that an attack was coming.

According to James Lilley, the U.S. Ambassador in Beijing at the time, the Embassy was able to get some people out of the building ahead of time, but the word didn’t get out to some others who were living there. The soldiers claimed that a sniper had shot at them from the top of one of the buildings in the compound. Moving down the avenue on foot and in trucks, the soldiers also raked other buildings along the way with gunfire. Ambassador Lilley said that the soldiers’ claim about a sniper was “ridiculous” and they knew it. He concluded that the PLA wanted to get all of the foreigners out of the diplomatic compound, and in fact it appeared that they wanted to get all of us out Beijing.

In today’s Chinese police state run by President Xi Jinping, no such series of events, kicked off by a student-led movement, is likely to recur. As Wortzel wrote on June 23 of this year for the Washington, D.C.-based Jamestown Foundation, “Today the Chinese Communist Party leadership would prefer not to use the PLA again in case of riots or unrest.” But with surveillance cameras placed nearly everywhere, any sizable gathering of students would be immediately picked up, and the Chinese leadership has “strengthened and enlarged” the People’s Armed Police (PAP) and created PAP and Public Security Bureau anti-riot units.

“But if the Party center felt threatened again, it is unlikely that Xi Jinping would vacillate and debate: He would not hesitate to crush widespread unrest,” says Wortzel. “The CCP leadership remains as determined as ever to maintain their ruling position, and armed force remains the ultimate guarantor of the Party’s grip on power.”

After the crackdown at Tiananmen Square I traveled to several provinces to assess what had happened outside Beijing. But reporting became more difficult. In Beijing, I found myself being followed by plainclothes policemen nearly everywhere I went. I had to visit one of my contacts after midnight, when it seemed safer to move around. I broke off contact with my best Chinese friend because I feared for his safety. At a meeting of foreign correspondents to discuss the situation, a few reporters expressed their anger at what was happening. I advised against confronting individual policemen who were following us, which in my view would have only made matters worse.

I was also the target of disinformation. A Chinese journalist whom I considered a friend argued that the death toll of civilians at Tiananmen was well below 300, which was the official position. Another Chinese journalist later warned me that my friend worked for state security. Yet another Chinese who claimed to be related to a formerly high-level official offered to provide me with state secrets. Suspecting entrapment, I turned him down and told him that I was too busy to meet with him again.

I still had a few sources whom I could rely on. One was a disillusioned but well connected former Communist Party member who provided details on how many people had been arrested or detained in the government crackdown that followed the Tiananmen massacre. The official Chinese news agency quoted a Chinese judge who denounced my report, saying that it was inaccurate. But nothing further came of it.

Not long after my return to the United States in 1990 after working in China for five and a half years, I appeared on a panel at Harvard to reflect on Tiananmen and its aftermath. A questioner in the audience asked me if in the spring of 1989 we reporters were able to maintain our objectivity when covering the student-led protests. In other words, did we side with the students?

I answered that at certain times some of us probably did lose our objectivity. The student protesters were young and idealistic. They enjoyed respect and popular support throughout Beijing and in dozens of cities outside the capital. One can argue that the students turned out to be hopelessly naive about what they could achieve in a Communist-ruled state. But it’s important to remember how young they were. I did maintain objectivity and distance from the student leaders to the extent that I never made friends with any of them. I never invited any of them to my apartment or to a meal. I also tried to understand the government’s thinking as well as paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s underlying fears of possible chaos. Deng had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution when Mao Zedong’s Red Guards devastated China. As Black and Munro described it, Deng was unable to distinguish “between peaceful dissent and the last years of Mao’s rule.” But for Chinese citizens who cared about corruption among officials but dared not speak out about it, the students were admired for their courage. For many Chinese, as mentioned earlier, they represented “China’s future.”

Finally, when a massacre occurs, it’s difficult to talk about objectivity. As part of an investigative series that I did for the Post on the deaths caused by Mao’s various campaigns, I had visited a village in China once where all of the men—all of them farmers—had been killed by Red Guards, who accused them of being “capitalists.” There was no “other side of the story” in this case. This was simply madness.

I would like to close out these recollections of Tiananmen with a few words of remembrance for Roderick MacFarquhar, a British journalist, parliamentarian, and a Harvard University professor who died early this year at the age of 88. MacFarquhar (who had invited me to appear at the Harvard panel) was perhaps best known for his three-volume study of Maoist China, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution.

I had gotten to know MacFarquhar during my tour in Beijing. Rod, who would visit Beijing to renew contacts and collect research materials, would stop by my office to chat and photocopy some of the materials that he had gathered. He provided me with useful perspective at a time when China appeared to be opening up to the outside world but still remained under the control of the Communist Party.

In the end, when Deng Xiaoping, China’s supreme leader, decided to send in the PLA to crush the unarmed demonstrators on Tiananmen Square, it didn’t surprise Rod. As he wrote in the New York Review of Books on September 26, 1991, “Deng’s authority was just sufficient to overcome divisions in the military and to engineer the bloody crackdown in the Tiananmen Square.” China’s aged leaders, he wrote, “were offered a peaceful resolution by the students in the uprising of 1989, but they feared the emergence of an independent workers movement like Solidarity” in Poland. The leaders wanted to avoid at all costs what they called “the Polish Disease.” When workers at factories near Beijing began arriving at Tiananmen Square, it marked a turning point. The leaders appeared to feel that it was one thing to have to deal with university students but another to deal with brawny factory workers.

But for some, Rod was also known for welcoming to Harvard leaders of the Chinese student protest movement who fled China following the Tiananmen massacre of early June 1989.

“Rod said that it was incumbent on the community of China scholars to provide support for intellectuals, students, and professors, who were being persecuted,” said Michael A. Szonyi, a professor of Chinese Studies and director of John King Fairbank Center at Harvard. “He made a home for them at Harvard,” Szonyi told editors at the Harvard Crimson.

Among the students Rod welcomed to Harvard was Wang Dan, a student leader whom I, as a reporter, had often observed holding a megaphone at Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. Wang spent five years in prison in China in the 1990s before being released and allowed to travel abroad, later earning a master’s and a doctorate in history at Harvard. Wuer Kaixi, another student leader at Tiananmen Square, studied at Harvard and then went on to get a master’s at Dominican University in California.

Unlike many scholars, who feared that talking publicly about Tiananmen might damage their chances of getting access to China, Rod endorsed a university course on Tiananmen and provided suggestions on how to teach such a course. Harvard students who attended the course, which was taught by the scholar Rowena Xiaoqing He, helped to organize a symposium on April 26, 2014, marking the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. I attended the event as a panelist together with a former student leader named Shen Tong, two old journalist colleagues, and Jeff Widener, the AP photographer who took the famous picture of “tank man” at Tiananmen Square.

Rod will be remembered by many of his former students for his lively teaching style and his ability to explain the Cultural Revolution as a form of madness. According to the Harvard Crimson, his undergraduate course on the Cultural Revolution attracted 600 to 700 students per semester. This made it one of the best-attended courses seen in recent memory at Harvard. It was held at Sanders Theatre, the biggest lecture hall on the campus.

According to Michael G. Forsythe, a former teaching fellow for the course, MacFarquhar would have the fellows dress as Red Guards for the course. They carried copies of The Little Red Book, a collection of writings by Mao Zedong that was widely distributed in China at the time.

“Rod . . . would go up to the lectern and lecture for an hour without any notes, just holding the class spellbound,” Steven M. Goldstein, a professor emeritus of government at Smith College and longtime friend of McFarquhar, told the Crimson. “He was trying to get people to understand the Cultural Revolution, but also understand how a society can go mad.”

The post Witnessing the Tiananmen Massacre appeared first on The American Interest.

Don’t Call It a Trade War

To talk of a trade war between the United States and China is to misunderstand the magnitude of what the world economic order is confronting. Think of it as Brexit on a global scale. Just as Britain is struggling to separate itself from the European Union, America and China are struggling to separate their huge economies from one another. Not only are the economies involved in this latter separation much larger and much more consequential for innocent bystanders, there is also the added feature of a geopolitical rivalry between a dominant and a rising power, the sort of rivalry that Harvard’s Graham Allison argues has often resulted in military conflict. So replace “trade war,” which is only one aspect of the current conflict, with “decoupling.” America has decided to end its reliance on China as a pool of cheap labor and goods, which has brought with it the decimation of many of its industries and communities and the filching of its intellectual property. China, in its turn, wants to end its dependence for economic growth on the vast American market, a vulnerability Trump or a successor can exploit to prevent China from realizing its goal of displacing the United States as the dominant economic and military world power.

As you read this, Xi Jinping, China’s warlord-in-chief, is closeted with his subordinates, developing a strategy to cope with Trump’s tariffs and other barriers to China’s goods. With his southeastern flank in Hong Kong under threat from protesters, Xi must demonstrate his ability to restore order there while at the same time keeping his state-run economy on course to dominate the industries of the 21st century and eventually displacing America as the leading power in the Asia-Pacific region and, eventually, in the world.

Tariffs are only one weapon in this battle, and a tariff war is one America cannot lose unless it lacks the political will to bear the costs that every victor in every war must tolerate. After all, China needs the massive U.S. market more than the United States needs China’s much smaller one. Another weapon is placing limits on purchases of the adversary’s products. Trump is limiting government purchases of Huawei products, partly for reasons of national security, partly as a bargaining chip in the tariff battle.

China has banned all purchases of American agricultural products, most notably pork and soybeans. The aim is to inflict so much pain on farmers, an important component of the Trump core, that they will abandon the President next year and elect someone who will be willing to strike a deal that allows China to continue the unfair trading practices that our elites found acceptable for so many decades. Zippy Duvall, the Georgia farmer who heads the American Farm Bureau Federation, describes the ban as “a body blow” to America’s farmers. In 2017 their sales to China totaled about $20 billion. Those sales fell to $9 billion in 2018 and were running at an annual rate of about $7 billion in the first half of this year before the ban was instituted.

Another weapon is currencies. Because it cannot win a tariff war, China is using a managed decline in its currency to neutralize the effect of U.S. tariffs. Peter Navarro, the hardest hardliner by far of all the President’s lieutenants, estimates that devaluation of the yuan has just about offset any sales-depressing increase in the price of Chinese goods caused by Trump’s tariffs. Perhaps more important, by first allowing its currency to fall and then stabilizing it, China demonstrated the powerful effect that weaponizing its currency—the U.S. Treasury has labeled the People’s Republic a “currency manipulator”—can have on the U.S. economy, especially share prices and interest rates.

From President Trump’s point of view a currency war—competitive tit-for-tat devaluation—has one advantage: Control of the currency weapon is siloed in the White House. Unfortunately for the President, his Exchange Stabilization Fund has little firepower: about $100 billion with which to buy currencies in a market in which $4 trillion in dollar trades occurs every day. China’s central bank commands $3 trillion, with more available if needed.

The power of China’s devaluation weapon is clear: Allowing the yuan to fall roiled stock markets and forced other nations to follow suit. But it is not without fallout in China itself. When the yuan was allowed to plunge in 2015-16, capital flight required China’s central bank to draw $1 trillion from its reserves to stabilize the yuan. Although the central bank expresses confidence that it can prevent a repetition with more sophisticated controls, Xi cannot rule out the possibility of significant leakage. China will also be forced to pay more for the dollars it will need to buy oil and other commodities that are traded in dollars, and to pay contractors on Xi’s globe-girdling “Belt and Road Initiative,” most of whom will not accept yuan. And its heavily indebted companies, the largest of which have loans denominated in dollars, will find it more expensive to pay interest and principal due on those borrowings.

Many observers do not see the decline in the yuan relative to the dollar as evidence of “manipulation.” They see it as a normal adjustment, reflecting the relative strengths of the two economies, and in part the effect of Trump’s tariffs. They point out that several other currencies have recorded similar currency devaluations as a response to the greater strength of the American economy. The fact that Trump believes he can have a strong economy—the strongest in the world—and a weak dollar reflects the fundamental ignorance of economics that rears its ugly head when he claims that China, not the American consumer, is bearing the cost of his tariffs. Trump’s defenders deny that he is ignorant of how economies work, and instead attribute his statements to considered mendacity, or to bad advice from Navarro. As is often the case, The Lindsey Group consultancy summarized the danger best in a note to its clients:

The world economy could enter a kind of death spiral if a world leader [unnamed], perhaps advised by someone [unnamed] who does not understand  . . . basic economics . . . imposes a tariff, sees the currency adjust, and then gets angry because of a mistaken belief that the currency movement is “manipulation,” at which point the angry leader imposes another tariff, and the targeted country’s currency declines again, at which point the world leader gets even angrier. . . .

The President rejects the idea that the yuan’s fall is a natural result of the greater strength of the U.S. economy and of his own tariffs, even though he claims that our economy is very strong and China’s is seriously battered by his tariffs. And, ignoring or unaware of the danger described by The Lindsey Group, and unlike Presidents of the past, he says he wants a weaker dollar. “As your President, one would think that I would be thrilled with our very strong dollar. I am not!” Trump tweeted last week. He believes a weaker dollar would stimulate exports, and raise the cost of imports. He might be right. But it would also

raise the cost to businesses of imported supplies,
make Americans poorer when they shop for foreign-made goods,
raise the interest rate investors will charge the government when it borrows to finance the trillion-dollar deficits it is running, and
produce the currency realignment he finds so offensive.

The list of countries that have enriched themselves by forced devaluations is somewhere between very short and non-existent.

Meanwhile, decoupling proceeds.

Once America’s top trading partner, China dropped to third place, behind Mexico and Canada, in the first half of the year.
The value of foreign direct investment and venture-capital deals between the two countries has shriveled to its lowest level in five years.
China, which has exhausted its tariff arsenal because it was buying so little from the United States, is considering widening its ban on purchases of American products, further curtailing the already-constrained operations of American firms in its country, and refusing to sell the United States minerals crucial to the manufacture of smartphones and missiles.
Trump, who has threatened to impose 10 percent tariffs (25 percent might appeal to him on a bad day) on imports from China not yet subject to tariffs, is also extending the list of Chinese firms that are non grata in America, and making it more difficult for Chinese students to obtain visas to develop skills they can put at the service of the People’s Republic.

To borrow from Frank Sinatra, if that ain’t decoupling, it will have to do until the real thing comes along.

Both Presidents have their eyes on the calendar. October 1 marks the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, a date which Xi does not want to also mark a Tiananmen-style put-down of the Hong Kong protests and a major recession in the PRC. One year and a month later, America’s voters will decide whether to grant Xi his wish for a different adversary or endorse Trump’s plan to re-order U.S.-Chinese economic relations. A possibility is a Mar-a-Lago currency accord, modeled after the 1985 Plaza Accord, pursuant to which leading trading countries manipulated the dollar down. Even if such a truce is struck, the decoupling sought by both men will continue apace. Neither Trump nor Xi can retreat without losing his grip on his constituency: voters in the case of Trump, the powerful Communist elite in the case of Xi. Oh yes—and without abandoning his vision of his country’s future as the dominant player in a new world order.

The post Don’t Call It a Trade War appeared first on The American Interest.

Will China’s Next Crisis Be in Tibet?

In April of this year, the Dalai Lama was admitted to a hospital in New Delhi for a chest infection. He was discharged three days later, reassuring the world that he felt “normal” again. But the words of the Tibetan spiritual leader did little to quell the anxieties of those who have tracked Tibet’s plight over the years. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the future of Tibet hinges on the question of who will succeed the Dalai Lama, and on the reaction to his death by Tibetans in exile, by Tibetans in Tibet—and most of all by the Chinese government. We could soon see another hot zone of instability erupt along China’s periphery.

This year the 84-year-old spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism celebrated the 60th anniversary of his exile from his homeland of Tibet, occupied by the People’s Republic of China, to Dharamshala, India. For most of its history, Tibet was an obscure and inward-looking country. But for the past sixty years, the Dalai Lama has worked assiduously to bring the cause of Tibet to international attention, gaining, as a side effect, global celebrity status. He has managed to unite a disparate group of refugees under a common banner and to establish the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) as a means both of governing the roughly 100,000 exiled Tibetans in India and of serving as a voice for the six million Tibetans still living in Tibet, who have been silenced by China’s crackdown on dissent. As the final phase of his leadership approaches, the Dalai Lama’s legacy is in jeopardy.

The Dalai Lama’s Middle-Way Approach has frustrated those Tibetans who have advocated for a harder line on China. Some of these people may be inclined to adopt more extreme approaches—even violent ones—after his passing. Disenchanted Tibetans living in Tibet under Chinese rule may start to question the legitimacy of the India-based CTA to speak on their behalf. For its part, China will undoubtedly assert itself and seek to muddy these waters by pushing for international support for its own hand-picked 15th Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama has served as the universal figurehead and a moderating force for Tibetans. If his passing is followed by political fracturing and/or violence in the absence of clear leadership, the resulting confusion will lead the West to pay even less attention, opening the way for China to take a freer hand in bringing Tibet’s population to heel. It probably will not be pretty.

One of the biggest contributing factors to the uncertainty is the fact that the Dalai Lama has yet to make a decision about his succession. This is a decision that carries not only theological but also political ramifications. In Tibetan Buddhist theology, the Dalai Lama is considered an incarnation of a Bodhisattva of Compassion, who is able to attain enlightenment but delays doing so in order to remain on earth and help suffering beings. Traditionally there is a ritualistic process of identifying a Tibetan youth and then training him from a young age, but the Dalai Lama can also choose to emanate into one or multiple bodies of those already living. He may even decide not to reincarnate at all, thus putting an end to the 600-year-old institution of the Dalai Lama. Indeed, he has raised this possibility, though he has also suggested that he might be reborn in India. He plans not to consult the high lamas on the matter of succession until he is 90 (he predicts that he will live to the ripe age of 113).

The Central Tibetan Administration vows to maintain the Dalai Lama’s Middle-Way Approach to diplomacy. Since the 1980s, after realizing the impossibility of full Tibetan independence, the Dalai Lama switched to advocating a solution that lay between full independence and the current state of disenfranchisement and oppression. This solution would entail genuine Tibetan autonomy under a Chinese constitution, whereby Tibetans could govern the region democratically and preserve their cultural identity while still under the People’s Republic of China, which would maintain a military presence in the region and handle international relations and defense. The conception of this approach, or at least the naming of it, seems to have a religious dimension to it, as Buddhism styles itself as the religion of the “middle-way” between extreme asceticism and sensual indulgence. And indeed, the Dalai Lama has done a remarkable job of drawing on the Buddhist value of pacifism to restrain discontented Tibetans from nearly all forms of violent resistance. He has guided the Tibetans instead to wait for Chinese authorities to accept the Central Tibetan Administration’s offer for peaceful negotiations. As Ngodup Tsering, the Dalai Lama’s official representative of North America, told me, “We [the CTA] are ready every time, but it is up to the Chinese government. As we say, you cannot clap with one hand.”

China has clearly signaled its unwillingness to reciprocate the clap—to accept Tibetan overtures for dialogue. The most recent negotiations, which occurred in eight rounds between 2002 and 2008, accomplished nothing substantial; they turned out to be merely a Chinese ploy to win international favor before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The ninth and last round of negotiations occurred in 2010.

Since 2010, China has ignored all Tibetan overtures, and the conditions in Tibet have remained virtually static. Policy analysts now broadly agree that China will refuse negotiations indefinitely. Todd Stein, a former Senior State Department official with the Tibet brief, was blunt: “Anyone who follows [the Tibetan cause] even remotely is uniformly dismissive of the Chinese having any interest in accommodating on anything—I mean on anything!” Instead, China’s strategy is to wait eagerly for the death of the Dalai Lama, in the meantime stoking Tibetan disunity by making the situation seem hopeless. Tencho Gyatso, a former MP in the CTA’s parliament who also happens to be the niece of the Dalai Lama, assured me that for now at least the majority of Tibetans remain fully committed to the Middle-Way Approach.

Among U.S. government officials as well as some activists, a common complaint is that the CTA is bereft of any long-term strategic thinking. Stein observed that when CTA diplomats visit Washington, they stand out from other foreign diplomats in that they show less interest in an iterative discussion for devising strategy than they do in a photo-op for social media. It is hard to pinpoint exactly why the CTA has made so few attempts to think creatively about its predicament, but one possible explanation is the Dalai Lama himself. He abdicated all political power in 2011 to the democratically elected leadership of the CTA; yet, in Stein’s words, “there is still a lot of influence being exerted through various channels, so that elected officials on paper who he’s turned over power to don’t actually have a lot of freedom of movement.” The CTA’s elected leadership has no say in the selection of the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, even though it will define the future of the Tibetan cause. Given the influence that, in his nominally apolitical role, the Dalai Lama still exerts on policy, Tibetans will undoubtedly commit unwaveringly to his Middle-Way Approach while he is alive. Once his top-down influence is gone, however, perhaps some may feel inclined to other approaches.

And violence is a real possibility. Ellen Bork, a human rights activist and policy analyst, said that his charismatic leadership has played a key role in restraining violence. Without the Dalai Lama’s nonviolent message, Tibetans may succumb to the frustration that he has been holding in check for decades. Even Gyatso fretted over whether, in the post-Dalai Lama period, his message will no longer be able to guide Tibetans: “There will be a lot of frustrated people.” In Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama’s presence in Tibet is considered a fundamental part of his death journey, easing his transition into the next life. Once Tibetans realize that the Dalai Lama will never return home—that for the past six decades their unwavering faith in his optimism has been misplaced—their discontent could be profound. If it manifests in wide-scale demonstrations throughout Tibet, the Chinese crackdown on them could well be vicious—certainly far more deadly than it has been in the past.

The Obama Administration, a few months before leaving office, warned China to adopt policies to avoid the almost inevitable “instability” that will follow if the Dalai Lama dies before a resolution. What is meant by this euphemism “instability”? Spurred by desperation and anger, certain Tibetans both in Tibet and in exile believe that focused efforts of violence are now necessary—what Tibet scholar Melvyn Goldstein fears could be “a Tibetan-style intifada.” In Blessings from Beijing, journalist Greg Bruno recounts his conversations with a monk living in a meditation cave near the Dalai Lama’s residence at Dharamshala. The monk went into years of silent retreat in order to overcome his rage against the Chinese, but his rage was only inflamed: “I’m not totally devoted to Buddhism. War? I [am] ready to [go to] war. . . . younger generation of Tibetan people . . . they all want war.”

This younger generation of Tibetans is restless. The Central Tibetan Administration may serve as a sounding board for the Tibetans in exile, but, in Stein’s analysis, it does not accurately represent their desires. More so than the older generations, these young Tibetans thirst for identity. They are enraged that Tibet has made no progress toward freedom. They form radical groups such as the Tibetan Youth Conference, which instructs its members to be prepared to sacrifice their lives for the struggle of Tibet. If such groups came to power in Dharamshala through the vacuum created by the death of the Dalai Lama, then they would, as Chinese activist Wang Lixiong writes, “sharply increase the violence and destruction, [and therefore] put Tibet in danger of becoming a Palestine or even a Chechnya.”

Sectarianism, moreover, may pose a threat to the goals of the exile community. The Dalai Lama saw the need for a unified community of Tibetans in Dharamshala and was able to construct a full parliament out of disparate groups of refugees. One of its purposes was to maintain the unity of the Tibetans in exile into the future, even after his death. This unity was especially fragile because it was ahistorical: throughout a lot of Tibetan history, the four sects of Tibetan Buddhism have vied for dominance. But the Dalai Lama has made a priority of uniting them in common cause. Gyatso assured me that since each has representation in parliament and close ties to the others, sectarianism will not be an issue. But she also acknowledged that, though there are many candidates among the Tibetans in exile, no leader has yet emerged to take on the Dalai Lama’s role. Other experts to whom I spoke were not so optimistic. They fear that the religious leaders might see the power vacuum created by the Dalai Lama’s death as an opportunity to promote themselves and their particular sects. Another division that may grow in the coming years is between those Tibetans in exile who stand by the Dalai Lama’s Middle-Way Approach—the official approach of the CTA—and those who think that it does not go far enough, instead advocating the full independence of Tibet. The latter of those two groups may become emboldened in the Dalai Lama’s absence, further fracturing the unity of the Tibetan cause.

It is also uncertain whether the Tibetans living in Tibet will continue to feel a connection to the CTA in India. The Central Tibetan Administration claims to speak on behalf of those six million Tibetans, but it has virtually no contact with them (journalists have called Tibet more difficult to access than North Korea). Those Tibetans have had to maintain their identity through China’s extreme policies of cultural assimilation, which compel them to practice a “Sinicized” version of their religion and to speak Mandarin a lot of the time; monks are forced to denounce the Dalai Lama’s “separatism,” and poorer Tibetans must replace private images of His Holiness for worship with images of Xi Jinping and other party leaders. Through all this, an anchor for Tibetan identity has been a deeply embedded cultural connection to the person of the Dalai Lama—a connection that, in the words of Gyatso, “is almost deeper than one has with a family member.” This connection was evident in the statements of many of the self-immolating protestors, who cried for the Dalai Lama’s return home before setting themselves ablaze. Without the Dalai Lama, and under immense pressure to assimilate, it is difficult to imagine that they will maintain the same zeal for the Tibetans outside of Tibet into the future.

China has already announced its intention to appoint its own 15th Dalai Lama. In 1991, a directive from Beijing authorized the Chinese Communist Party to select tulkus—reincarnated lamas with high spiritual authority—and to control the number of reincarnations. Included in this category is the Dalai Lama. In his 2011 statement on reincarnation, the Dalai Lama warned against “the obvious risk of vested political interests misusing the reincarnation system to fulfill their own political agenda.” Indeed, we can expect to see two Dalai Lamas in competition with each other: one selected by the Tibetan Buddhist leaders in India, and one by the CCP, who will serve the Party’s agenda by asserting that Tibet is historically a part of China. Tibetans can be expected not to accept China’s Dalai Lama, except those who are forced by China to show outward support. They will probably reject him as they reject China’s Tenth Panchen Lama (the second highest spiritual authority in Tibetan Buddhism); the Panchen Lama selected directly by the Dalai Lama has not been seen since 1995, when, at the age of six, he was kidnapped by Chinese authorities.

But China does not need Tibetan acceptance of its own Dalai Lama. It just needs international acceptance, which will help to legitimize its claim to Tibet. Rinzin Dorjee, a research fellow at the Tibet Policy Institute in Dharamshala, told me his prediction that China’s Dalai Lama will be acknowledged only by countries economically dependent on China, and will be rejected by all free countries. Yet China has been increasingly getting its way. It has taken punitive economic measures against countries that acknowledge the Dalai Lama, and nowadays no European heads of state will meet with him. Still, it is important to remember that, for the appearance of authenticity, China has committed itself to the traditional process of selecting a Dalai Lama, which entails identifying and training a very young child. It could be a decade and a half before he is old enough to play any sort of useful political role. China’s selection of a Dalai Lama, therefore, is not as worrisome as it might seem, at least for the immediate future.

Still, the spectacle of atheistic China’s leveraging Buddhism for its own political purposes is breathtaking. Beijing officially describes the religion founded in India as an “ancient Chinese religion,” thereby justifying its meddling in all aspects of religious life in Tibet. Through Orwellian surveillance of monasteries, China identifies monks who dissent from the Party or express outward support of the Dalai Lama to abduct them for imprisonment and torture. It has taken over Buddhist institutes of higher education, making loyalty to the Party an integral part of Buddhist training. The State Administration of Religious Affairs publishes a “living Buddha database,” which identifies the fake reincarnations from the authentic—that is, high ranking Buddhists who are loyal to the Party: One who wishes to identify an authentic reincarnation must enter the “living-Buddha registration number.”

And China’s efforts abroad to portray itself as the home of Buddhism enhance its soft power. It hosts the International Buddhist Confederation, run by its own Panchen Lama. For its Belt and Road initiative—a global development strategy for economic dominance of Asia, the Middle East, and beyond—it is dumping money into Buddhist countries, in efforts such as the Lumbini project, a $3 billion development plan in Nepal to turn the birthplace of the Buddha into a massive tourist destination and pilgrimage site. China has also been discovered to be behind the protests against the Dalai Lama by Western practitioners of the New Kadampa Tradition. The New Kadampa Tradition is a religious movement that embraces Shugden—a deity in Tibetan lore whose worship the Dalai Lama has banned—and therefore instills in its members an animosity toward the Dalai Lama. This movement is extremely useful to China, which promotes and funds Shugden worshipers around the world in an attempt to divide Tibetans and to undermine the Dalai Lama’s message of unity.

As always, U.S. policy on Tibet will be driven by a maddening and often contradictory mix of pragmatism and idealism. President Trump signed the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act into law on December 20, 2018. This act addresses the fact that China bars almost all international media from entry into Tibet, though liberal democracies such as the United States allow Chinese state media unfettered access. By identifying the top CCP officials who are responsible for restrictions on Tibet and barring them from entry into the United States, the law seeks to rectify this asymmetry and to compel China to ease its restrictions. In July 2019, similar bills for reciprocal access were introduced in the parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada, and the International Campaign for Tibet is pushing legislation in other countries as well. Time will tell whether this unified front will be successful in effecting change in Chinese policy. And the Tibetan cause has picked up steam in other ways. On May 30, Members of Congress under the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission signed a letter to Secretary of State Pompeo, urging him to implement current legislation on Tibet. And more recently, Congressmen Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China have led discussion on updating the 2002 Tibet Policy Act, which shapes all U.S. policy on Tibet, to include provisions for elevating CTA’s status and for the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.

More pragmatically, as the United States seeks to find allies in its ongoing tussles with China, it could find common cause with India on the issue of Tibet. In Indian politics, support for Tibetan exiles is a nonpartisan issue: Indian politicians have a mistrust of China; they see the Dalai Lama as a strategic asset; and they have an affinity for Buddhism, which they see as a subsect of Hinduism. Indeed, India’s Narendra Modi has engaged in a kind of Great Game with China over Buddhism, hosting rival Buddhist conferences and developing pilgrimage sites. Its efforts, however, have not been nearly as successful as China’s, and Chinese investment in Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh is starting to worry India. China is also engaged in disputes with India over the border settlement in Arunachal Pradesh, which China is now calling “South Tibet,” and its military presence there is menacing. Broadly put, Indian strategic interests—promoting Buddhism and fending off the encroachments of China—align with those of the Tibetans. The enduring goal of U.S. policy should be to avert bloodshed and to improve the situation of Tibetans. In doing so, it will likely find India a partner in these efforts.

Tibet, then, is an issue to watch. Morally, the picture is grim. China remains a force to be reckoned with in international relations—deep-pocketed, nuclear-armed, and with increasingly sharp elbows. And Tibet is, comparatively, a tiny issue. Like it or not, its fate could easily get subsumed in the greater geopolitical contests of the 21st century—especially if the situation inside Tibet gets messy.

But seen with a wider lens, Tibet takes on a different look. As with both Hong Kong and Xinjiang, Tibet’s potential for instability is emblematic of a periphery that is posing a serious challenge to Beijing’s ability to enforce its writ inside its claimed borders. As our era of Great Power competition dawns, this reality cannot be lost on analysts: China is neither as coherent nor as stable as Beijing would like the outside world to believe.

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