Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 37

The Fight for the Poorest Country in Europe

It’s not often that the United States and Russia find common ground in Eastern Europe, and it’s even rarer that one of Europe’s poorest countries inspires cautious optimism. Yet that is just what has happened in tiny, landlocked Moldova last month, as popular unrest against oligarchic rule and the outside mediation of American, Russian, and EU diplomats forced a resolution to a simmering constitutional crisis. On June 14, Moldova’s former Prime Minister stepped aside to make way for an untested new coalition government, after a week of recalcitrant refusal to do so.

Yet this seemingly favorable resolution leaves in its wake a long list of questions. Can Moldova continue to split the difference on its geopolitical orientation? Can the country’s Western forces hope for meaningful cooperation with Russia? And can Moldova overcome its sorry track record of oligarchic mismanagement to make real economic progress? The answers to these questions will reverberate far beyond Moldova’s borders.

How Did We Get Here?

Moldova—widely known as Europe’s poorest country, although the IMF technically designates Ukraine—has suffered a series of self-inflicted blows over the past five years. In November 2014, against the backdrop of national elections, news broke of a banking scandal that quickly became known as the “Theft of the Century.” In three days, approximately $1 billion was stolen from three Moldovan banks and laundered abroad, in a coordinated action that shocked the country and produced bitter recriminations, protests, and financial instability. Vladimir Plahotniuc, the country’s richest oligarch, managed to persuade, bribe, and coerce enough deputies to install a controversial government led by his Democratic Party of Moldova (PDM) in early 2016. Though formally just head of his party, Plahotniuc extended his personal domination over Moldova’s courts, police, security, and anti-corruption agencies to exercise near-complete control over its governing institutions.

This control did not translate into broad popular support, however. For a time Plahotniuc and the PDM professed a pro-EU orientation in a country often divided between pro-Western and pro-Russian sentiment. But the banking scandal, which saw the equivalent of an eighth of Moldova’s annual GDP disappear, helped to discredit the pro-Western leadership. Meanwhile, the European Union began to treat Moldova less as a model of EU integration than as a major corruption threat. Eventually, anti-corruption and anti-Plahotniuc demonstrations in the winter of 2015-2016 gave birth to two new pro-Western parties, Action and Solidarity (PAS) and Dignity and Truth (DA).

In the 2016 presidential election, the PDM-backed candidate trailed far behind the PAS candidate Maia Sandu (now the new coalition Prime Minister) and the winning candidate from the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova (PSRM), President Igor Dodon. Crucially, however, Plahotniuc obtained support from PSRM for changing the electoral system from a national proportional regime to one in which half of the parliament’s 101 deputies would be elected in single-mandate districts. This 2017 electoral “reform” clearly favored the PDM, which could use its deep pockets and control of local administrations to offset its national unpopularity. The OSCE, EU, and Venice Commission all strongly argued against the change. When Plahotniuc’s government proved adamant, Brussels cut off most of its economic assistance to Moldova.

In the February 2019 national elections, Moldovan voters were split almost equally into three camps. The largest of these supported the PSRM, which campaigned on an explicitly pro-Russian platform. ACUM (NOW in English), an electoral bloc of the pro-Western PAS and DA, came in second in the national popular vote, with Plahotniuc’s PDM trailing in third. However, the single-mandate district results gave the PDM a total of 30 deputies, four more than ACUM.

In the scramble that followed to form a government, ACUM and PSRM leaders refused to entertain a coalition with Plahotniuc and the PDM. Negotiations went down to the end of the three-month deadline, and by early June most observers and participants expected repeat elections later in the year.

Instead, PSRM and ACUM struck a surprise coalition agreement at the last minute. Interestingly, the coalition won the support of Russia, the European Union, and—somewhat belatedly—the United States. The ACUM-PSRM alliance, no matter how fleeting or lasting, reflects a deep and widespread public reaction against oligarchic rule, against Plahotniuc specifically, and against the pervasive corruption, stubborn poverty, and failed promises of both pro-West and pro-East governments.

The results of the election do not portend a shift in Moldova’s geopolitical orientation. The two coalition parties have significantly different orientations, and the Moldovan electorate remains almost evenly split between pro-Western and pro-Russian voters. Past Moldovan governments have run into popular resistance when they have tried to move too rapidly to the East or the West. This pattern may change, but not anytime soon. The main lesson of the 2019 elections is that over two-thirds of voters opted for an end to corruption and oligarchic rule. This is a hopeful development, notwithstanding the deep geopolitical divisions that remain.

What Should Moldova Do Now?

The most important task facing Moldova’s new coalition is to cleanse and reform the country’s law enforcement and judicial institutions. The rot from the Plahotniuc years is pervasive. For example, the PDM packed the Constitutional Court with loyalists, who reciprocated with a series of dubious decisions from 2016 onward which clearly favored Plahotniuc’s political interests. Lower courts were apparently willing participants in gigantic, long-running money laundering operations. The police, under the Interior Ministry, and the Anti-Corruption Agency were packed with Plahotniuc loyalists and used for reprisals and coercion against political opponents.

Along with a thoroughgoing overhaul of the courts and police, the new Moldovan government needs to demonstrate a real dedication to the rule of law in practice. The best way to do this is to make public the results of the international investigation of the 2014 banking fraud, followed by a demonstrable attempt to bring those responsible to justice. This will be a delicate task, given that many members of Moldova’s political elite were involved, but the government should attempt to make the process fair and transparent, and not simply an exercise in reprisals. Movement on this high-profile case may instill popular confidence in the bona fides of the coalition.

The new government has already taken one of the most important steps needed in reversing the 2017 electoral reforms and returning to the nationwide proportional representation system. However, electoral reform should not stop there. The ACUM-PSRM alliance should seize the opportunity to update and improve Moldova’s electoral lists. Electoral law and practices should also be changed to permit easier, verifiable registration and voting by the hundreds of thousands of Moldovans who live and work abroad, both in the West and in the region.

On anti-corruption, the most important guiding principle should be transparency. Steps to achieve greater openness in Moldovan government and economic affairs could also have salutary side effects with respect to freedom of the press and improvement of the business and investment climate. More stringent laws and regulations governing information about the sources of capital and real owners of property and enterprises can help both root out existing corruption and encourage non-corrupt practices in the future. This is essential in a country suffering from massive brain drain due to rampant bribery and lack of economic opportunity.

Moldova will not be fixed overnight. Over the past two decades Moldova has been severely depopulated, and the personnel resources are not available to deal with more than the highest priority problems. The new government’s best course is to set in motion positive, hard-to-reverse processes to deal with the priorities it has identified, and to maintain progress on those.

The Transnistrian Question

Moldova has been a divided country since it gained independence in 1991. The Transnistria region, a narrow strip on the left bank of the Nistru River, broke away while the Soviet Union was in the process of disintegrating, in a dispute more about elite competition than the ostensible issues of language and nationality. Russian military forces remaining in the region from Soviet times intervened to halt a brief war in 1992 between Chisinau and Tiraspol. Since that time Russia has used its status as a mediator in the political settlement negotiations and the presence of small detachments of its troops to offer de facto support for the separatist authorities in Tiraspol and to exert political pressure on Chisinau. Despite a couple of near successes, the political settlement talks have been basically deadlocked since they began in 1993.

Ironically, the past few years have seen some practical progress in dealing with Transnistria, albeit as the result of improved relations between oligarchs: Plahotniuc, the Transnistrian Sherrif conglomerate head Viktor Gushan, and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Irrespective of how it came about, the progress in the Transnistrian settlement process has been real, welcome, and of genuine benefit to the population on both sides of the Nistru River. People, goods, and services move more easily between the two banks and across borders. Experts from Chisinau and Tiraspol in diverse fields such as public health, environmental protection, transportation, and telecommunications work cooperatively and professionally together. One hopes that this situation will continue.

This practical progress in the Transnistrian settlement process, however, has not produced movement toward agreement on a final status for the Transnistrian region within the Republic of Moldova. While acting cooperatively on most other questions, Tiraspol has steadfastly refused to abandon its insistence on independence and international recognition. Moscow has worked surprisingly cooperatively with its partners in the “Five Plus Two” negotiation mechanism—albeit after decades of obstruction on a conflict it has helped to prolong—but it has refrained from pushing Tiraspol to agree on, or even discuss proposals for a final status. There are no firm indications of any real change in Moscow’s or Tiraspol’s positions.

Managing relations between Chisinau and Tiraspol and the Transnistrian settlement process requires the cooperation of the United States, the EU, Russia, Ukraine, and the OSCE. Thus developments on the Transnistrian issue could foretell broader political movements in the region and in Europe as a whole.

The recent changes in government in Chisinau and Kyiv bring some uncertainty into the Transnistrian question. Moldova’s relationship with Ukraine since 1991 has vacillated frequently and markedly between warmth and extreme irritation. Under Poroshenko, Ukraine was supportive of Moldova but wary of upsetting the relative stability that has prevailed in and around Transnistria in recent years.  A Zelenskiy government is likely to be more militantly anti-Russian than the divided government in Chisinau. Kyiv’s hostility toward and distrust of Moscow could carry over into its attitude toward the separatist authorities in Tiraspol.

Russia: Real Change or Tactical Moves?

Perhaps the most striking action by Russia during the course of the Moldovan crisis was the statement of Deputy Prime Minister and Special Representative for Economic Relations with Moldova Dmitry Kozak that Moldova should revert to its old, proportional representation electoral system as part of a PSRM-ACUM coalition. Throughout the crisis, Kozak and Putin himself took a resolutely anti-Plahotniuc line and supported the incongruous coalition in Moldova. Was this really a change of heart and a sign of a more cooperative posture from the Kremlin on this and other “frozen conflicts”?

Large numbers of Moldovans are dubious of the Kremlin’s motives, and for good reason. Russia soured on Plahotniuc years ago. The reasons are obscure, and rumors abound. In any case, since late 2017 Russia has filed criminal charges against Plahotniuc for commissioning an attempted murder, and more recently, for money laundering. Some rumors suggest that Moscow was uncomfortable with the extent of Plahotniuc’s cooperation with Sherrif in Transnistria, which reduced the Kremlin’s influence on both banks of the Nistru.

Since 2014 Putin and the Kremlin have steadfastly supported the PSRM and Igor Dodon, and most observers in Moldova interpret Moscow’s recent actions as designed to ensure PSRM dominance and thus Russian influence in Moldova over the long run. What is not clear is the extent to which Putin and his colleagues are prepared to tolerate a Moldovan government that seeks good relations with the West as well as with Russia. Dodon has said publicly and privately that this is his aim; many of his Moldovan critics and opponents do not believe him.

Kozak is active in both Chisinau and Tiraspol, though it is not yet clear in what direction he is pushing. An early indication of Russia’s intentions in Moldova may come in the course of the Transnistrian settlement process and upcoming Five plus Two events. Direct engagement with Moscow is necessary to test whether there has been real change in its approach, but caution is warranted. Russia’s long-run policy has been one of obstruction, not cooperation.

Can the West Help?

Western governments and assistance agencies have provided vast sums to assist Moldova, and much of this aid seems to have vanished into a black hole. Individual successful projects exist, but Western assistance has hardly made a dent in addressing Moldova’s most significant problems—persistent poverty, corruption, depopulation, and failings in rule of law. The emergence of the coalition government may offer the United States and the European Union an opportunity to rethink their approaches. It would be a mistake to concentrate primarily on economic and financial assistance.

What Moldova needs most desperately is people—capable, educated people of all ages to make government and private institutions work at all levels. There is no way to induce the hundreds of thousands of Moldovans who have left the country over the past decades to come back immediately. However, Western donors can help provide incentives, and—more important—they can provide their own people to advise Moldovans to rebuild a working government and economy. Moldovan law prohibits political parties from hiring foreigners, but foreign experts can be embedded in Executive Branch agencies, and within the NGO community. The most important areas for immediate attention are justice and law enforcement, but Western assistance need not be confined to these fields. The EU deserves credit for having reached agreement with Moldova in 2014 on an Association Agreement, a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement, and visa liberalization.

It is publicly unknown whether any sort of private deal was reached with Plahotniuc and PDM leaders to induce them to relinquish power. Nonetheless, the U.S. government should consider applying Global Magnitsky sanctions to Plahotniuc and his senior colleagues. The aim here is not criminal prosecution, so much as to lessen the oligarch’s ability to use his wealth to dabble in Moldovan politics from abroad or to lobby in Western capitals. Keeping Plahotniuc physically out of Moldova would also reduce tensions.

Above all, U.S. and EU assistance to Moldova should be characterized by conditionality, based upon transparency and honest effort. Not every specific initiative will work, but Western donors should strive to ensure that Moldova’s population perceives their efforts as genuine and consistent with their professed ideals. The United States’ and European Union’s reputations suffered during the Plahotniuc years because of the widespread perception in Moldova that their acceptance of the outwardly pro-Western Filip government was rooted in geopolitical cynicism. Real conditionality is essential to restoring and maintaining public confidence, and could ultimately help state performance, too.

Where Does It All Lead?

Moldova has come through a political battle with a positive result, but the country will not be transformed instantly. The immediate outcome, however, offers possibilities for constructive change both in the country and beyond it.

First of all, the Left-Right, East-West coalition in Moldova demonstrates that it is possible for citizen groups, political activists, and leaders across the political spectrum to unite in opposition to corruption and in support of the rule of law and democratic norms. Moldova’s anti-oligarchic upheaval follows on similar developments in Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Civic activists and reformers around Europe can be heartened that they are not fighting a losing battle.

The outcome in Moldova could also contribute to positive movement in regional and European geopolitics. At a time when Moscow and the West rarely see eye-to-eye on issues, understanding why and how the two both supported the coalition is worth exploring. Russia has worked more constructively than usual for several years within the framework of the Five Plus Two; perhaps this dynamic can be extended to cooperation in addressing Moldova as a whole.

Given Moldova’s domestic politics, the country is likely to retain the basic political divisions present since it achieved independence in 1991. Therefore, a geopolitical struggle between East and West inside Moldova is unlikely to be resolved, and more likely to simply prolong conflict within the country. But Moldova is, as recent events show, a promising field for progress in rule of law and the fight against corruption.

The most important thing is to begin action to address these issues now. There is political momentum and popular desire for change within Moldova. However, the campaign for local elections will start August 20, and the ACUM-PSRM coalition was explicitly temporary. It is crucial now to put in place measures and programs supported by both coalition members which can endure even as the expected political competition between ACUM and the PSRM returns.

That renewed competition will not be the end of the world. Moldova has had left-wing and right-wing governments before. The Communist Party ruled from 2001 to 2009, but ultimately relinquished power peacefully to a pro-Western coalition. The real tragedy in Moldova has been the failure of just about all its governments—pro-West and pro-East, Left and Right—to make real progress in addressing its most pressing needs and problems. The political crisis of 2019 offers an opportunity to change that pattern, if its leaders only have the boldness to seize it.

The post The Fight for the Poorest Country in Europe appeared first on The American Interest.

Hong Kong Deserves U.S. Support

The people of Hong Kong have done the world a great service. In stunning protests last month that brought as much as a quarter of Hong Kong’s 7.3 million people into the streets over the course of a single day, they defeated, at least temporarily, a proposed law that would allow extraditions to the mainland. In doing so, they also dealt a setback to one of the insidious tactics in Beijing’s global agenda to undermine democratic values and the rule of law. Today, the annual pro-democracy march marking the anniversary of Hong Kong’s July 1, 1997 return to mainland rule was overshadowed by protests at the Hong Kong Legislative Council building. Despite pro-democracy leaders’ efforts to dissuade them, protesters occupied and vandalized the chamber.

The extradition law (more precisely, amendments to existing Hong Kong ordinances on fugitives and mutual legal assistance) stewarded by Carrie Lam, Beijing’s appointed Chief Executive, would have given a veneer of legitimacy to the kinds of extrajudicial, state-sponsored kidnappings that Beijing has already carried out not only in the territory but also in other countries too weak or craven to prevent them.

In 2015, Chinese security agents seized five men associated with a Hong Kong publishing house and bookstore that sold books banned on the mainland, including critical and even scurrilous ones about Party leaders. In connection with Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive, the Party is conducting “Operation Fox Hunt” to bring wealthy businessmen or officials who have fallen out of favor—and their assets—back to the mainland. In 2017, one of these, Xiao Jianhua, was reportedly captured on videotape being rolled out of Hong Kong’s Four Seasons Hotel by security agents in a wheelchair with a sheet over his head. Others reportedly returned to Hong Kong in the hopes that it would offer them protection and even joined the anti-extradition marches.

Beijing has successfully coerced the return of dissidents, asylum seekers, and fugitives from countries where it commands extraordinary influence, particularly in Southeast Asia. In powerful democracies, however, it has encountered resistance.

Lam’s stated reason for the legislation, allowing extradition to Taiwan of a Hong Kong man who confessed to killing his girlfriend there in 2018, doesn’t explain why in the process the firewall between Hong Kong’s judicial system and the mainland’s should be breached. A more plausible, proximate cause was the American request in January this year for the extradition from Canada of Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive arrested there last December on charges related to Iran sanctions violations. The extradition legislation appeared in Hong Kong in February. Even the threat of legalized extradition against either the large expatriate American business community or visitors to Hong Kong would provide leverage Beijing could use against the United States regarding Huawei, Taiwan, or other matters. (Beijing has retaliated against Canada by charging two of its citizens with espionage, and the Canadian Foreign Ministry has acknowledged an even larger number of detentions.) If the law were adopted as drafted by the government, it would make virtually anyone in Hong Kong, whether a long-term resident or a traveler passing through, vulnerable to extradition to the mainland, where the party, not law, rules supreme.

For now, the extradition effort in Hong Kong is stuck in limbo. Lam has suspended proceedings on it and reluctantly apologized for introducing it. With Beijing backing Lam, the protestors’ calls for her resignation have been superseded by demands for an independent inquiry into the police and for dropping all charges against protesters, such as those arrested at hospitals when they sought treatment for wounds and illness incurred by rubber bullets and tear gas. Pierre Chan, a Hong Kong doctor who represents the medical profession in the Hong Kong Legislative Council, revealed evidence that the Hospital Authority collaborated with the police to identify patients suffering from injuries caused by rubber bullets.

As an entrepôt, Hong Kong retains an unusually intimate political culture, with politicians frequently known by nicknames. Carrie Lam’s nickname is “777” for the number of votes she received in the Beijing directed “Election Committee” of 1,200 that chooses the chief executive. (The number also lends itself to a vulgar homophonous pun in Cantonese, to the delight of some of Lam’s critics.)

Analysis of Lam’s actions and her fate have the quality of a parlor game. Is her political career in Hong Kong finished now? Was she acting on her own in pushing the extradition proposal or at Beijing’s behest? According to Steve Tsang, an historian of China and Hong Kong at the University of London, the answer is a little of both. “Beijing really just wanted to make sure that all the people subject to Operation Fox Hunt could be brought back to China without going to the trouble of kidnapping them. If it worked, Beijing would have been fine with it, but it didn’t work.” As June 4, the 30th anniversary of the massacre of democracy protesters in and around Tiananmen Square, inched closer, and trade talks with the United States grew more intense, the timing of the legislation became a problem, despite its being endorsed by two Politburo standing committee members.

Whatever Lam’s ultimate political fate, she will at the very least enjoy the generous pension of a Hong Kong civil servant, and if she remains loyal to the end, perhaps also a sinecure in one of Beijing’s united front organizations. Such perks and plum jobs keep Hong Kong’s Beijing loyalists in line. Hundreds of Hong Kong pro-Beijing grandees have been summoned to the Central Liaison Office (CLO), which coordinates the Party’s media and united front efforts in the territory, over the past few weeks to get their marching orders, dutifully emerging afterward to parrot the Communist Party line. The CLO is the successor to the Xinhua office in Hong Kong. Tung Chee-hwa—the first Beijing-appointed Hong Kong Chief Executive, under whom the first of Hong Kong’s mass protests broke out in opposition to plans to implement an anti-subversion law—is a delegate to a major CCP united front organization. Tung currently chairs the U.S. China Exchange Foundation, which has funded American think tanks and university projects and journalism.

“One county, two systems”—the notion that Hong Kong could exercise “a high degree of autonomy” except in defense and foreign affairs—never meant what the West believed it did, but things have gotten worse under Xi Jinping as he has launched an ambitious bid for global leadership.

The Umbrella movement protests of 2014 were a turning point. Protesters occupied Hong Kong’s downtown business district for 11 weeks in response to Beijing’s refusal to allow democratic elections for Hong Kong Chief Executive. Beijing was willing to open up voting for the top job to all Hong Kong people but would only allow candidates who had been approved by the Party.

The demonstrations laid bare the change that has taken place under PRC rule. According to Tsang, the British colonial government and the Beijing-appointed government drew different lessons from their lack of accountability. The British, aware of their democratic legitimacy deficit, approached the task of managing demonstrations by trying to win cooperation. “It would have been unthinkable in the last two or three decades of colonial rule for the police to be sent out in riot gear in the first instance,” but, says Tsang, “since 1997, Hong Kong police officers mostly coordinated their training and experience and exchanges not with the British police forces, but with the Chinese. And that would cause a significant change in how the mindset works.” The result was the opposite of what the government sought: “Once the people saw the footage of police using force, you have hundreds of thousands going out in the streets.” And all of this merely describes what was going on in public view. Much more goes on behind the scenes. In 2017, Reuters reported on the recruitment of retired Hong Kong police to carry out mainland security agency operations in the territory.

Other once-unthinkable developments followed: politically motivated trials of protest leaders, ideological litmus tests for the legislature and public university posts, a ban on a tiny pro-independence party on national security grounds, and expulsion of a foreign journalist for hosting a talk by its leader. This year, Beijing began enforcing mainland law inside a portion of the West Kowloon terminal for the high-speed train to Guangzhou.

In ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the return to Chinese rule, on July 1, 2017, Xi stressed the role of Hong Kong as “part and parcel” of his ambitious plan for the national rejuvenation and the achievement of the China dream, a “pregnant concept that fuses the struggle for success, the recovery of past glory, and the erasure of historic humiliation in order to prepare for China’s return to centrality not just in Asia but globally.” Xi spoke of the “suffering,” “humiliation,” and “sorrow” brought about by China’s defeat at the hands of foreign powers in the 19th century. The ritual rubbing of salt in old wounds is a predictable prelude to the extolling of the Party’s achievements. Indeed, Xi went on to claim, “It was not until the Communist Party of China led the Chinese people to victory in a dauntless and tenacious struggle for national independence and liberation and founded New China that the Chinese people truly stood up and blazed a bright path of socialism with distinctive Chinese features.”

PRC leaders regularly nurse grievances over the colonization of Hong Kong and the loss, during the self-proclaimed “century of humiliation,” of other large swaths of territory under the last dynasty. Recovering former domains has been a top priority policy since the PRC’s establishment in 1949. Xinjiang and Tibet, which the PLA invaded in the late 1940s and 1950s, were the first targets.

Rather than be satisfied with the territory’s return, the Party is pressing Hong Kong into the service of its assault on democracy beyond China’s borders. Last year, not for the first time, Hong Kong security officials traveled to Xinjiang to study counterterror methods. John Lee, the Secretary for Security, reported that the delegation saw only “humane” treatment and nothing “untoward” in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, where more than a million Uighurs have been incarcerated in detention and reeducation camps. He said that his bureau cannot be “selective” in its study of methods, but also that they did not visit the camps.

Beijing has also put forward a former Hong Kong Commissioner of Police, Andy Tsang, as its choice to run the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. If Tsang takes over UNODC, he can play a part in the Party’s efforts, catalogued by Human Rights Watch, to extend its influence at the UN, including the advance of alternative norms, and co-opt and coerce governments to adopt Beijing’s litmus tests on Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan. This might help the PRC compensate for the strange fall of Meng Hongwei, a former top public security official, whose appointment as president of Interpol was intended to help Beijing normalize a growing role in the leadership of international organizations. Meng was detained in China in 2018 and this year was arrested, and plead guilty to taking bribes.

If the June protests present a problem for Xi’s plans to project power and influence in such ways, it is an even bigger blow to Beijing’s Taiwan strategy. The “one country, two systems” model was originally designed with Taiwan in mind, and Beijing expected that Taiwan would return to the motherland before Hong Kong. In 1978, PRC leaders saw their chance. President Carter abruptly broke ties with Taipei, revoking the defense pact and withdrawing troops. PRC leaders were delighted. “If Taiwan would only bow to Beijing’s sovereignty,” writes Robert Cottrell, “then the Beijing government would promise to concede a very high degree of administrative autonomy to the Taipei authorities.” Instead, the U.S. Congress rebuked Carter and passed the Taiwan Relations Act, establishing unofficial ties and committing the United States to peace and stability in the western Pacific region.

It is at present inconceivable that Taiwan’s people would voluntarily come under PRC rule. They have developed a distinct Taiwanese national identity, rooted in democracy and increasingly divorced from the ethnic divisions between mainlanders and islanders that long marked Taiwan’s politics. Instead, the protests in Hong Kong have become a factor in Taiwan’s upcoming presidential election, which the unification-leaning Kuomintang (KMT) had been seen as likely to win. The incumbent, Tsai Ing-wen, whose Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) favors independence, has repeatedly expressed support for Hong Kong’s protesters. No candidate wants to be seen as willing to contemplate a similar fate for Taiwan. PRC authorities are keen to block ties between Taiwanese and Hong Kong democracy activists, writes Brian Hioe, who reported on the protests this month: “Perhaps Hong Kong, in seeking to save itself, has saved Taiwan. This would be another instance in which Hong Kong and Taiwan’s destinies remain interlinked. But what I want to avoid at all costs is Taiwan advancing forward on the basis of Hong Kong’s demise.”

Like Taiwan’s people, Hong Kong’s are developing a distinct civic identity. Last week, a polling project based at the University of Hong Kong released a survey showing a record high number of people identifying as “Hong Kongers,” and a record low identifying themselves as Chinese. However, Hong Kong has neither the Taiwan Strait nor the U.S. Seventh Fleet to protect it. Instead, it relies on an American law: the U.S. Hong Kong Policy Act, which was adopted in 1992 well before the handover and hasn’t been updated since, despite Beijing’s encroachments. At the time, its drafters hoped that Beijing would value Hong Kong’s rule of law and be deterred by the prospect of Hong Kong’s loss of special status in U.S. law if it were not judged “sufficiently autonomous.” Despite the obvious erosion of Hong Kong’s freedoms and Beijing’s increasingly overt interference, the United States has been understandably reluctant to make that finding, because the sanctions it would trigger would hurt the people of Hong Kong rather than the responsible officials in both the Hong Kong government and central government. Some members of Congress are considering how to shift the penalties to those responsible.

That’s a promising start, and any revision of Hong Kong policy must reflect the PRC’s evolution from an economically weak, inward looking country deferential to American leadership to an aggressive, wealthy nation mounting a direct challenge to the U.S.-led liberal-democratic order.

Hong Kong’s people have no illusions about the future. “They may retreat for the moment, but the CCP is not going to forget or forgive,” says Lee Cheuk Yan, a free trade union leader and longtime pro-democracy politician. “The Hong Kong people will be made to pay, but the fight will go on.”

Beijing may bide its time before retaliating, as it has in the past. In the meantime, it faces a new, even younger group of citizens committed to the survival of Hong Kong as a free society. The “leaderless” style of the protests—a necessity given that several leaders of the 2014 protests were in jail—marks a new, fluid style and a security savviness. The anti-extradition protests have again changed the complexion of democracy activism, leading to greater cooperation, self-effacement, and solidarity than before. Charles Mok, a pro-democracy legislator, told me of a new saying among the protesters: “Brother, we are all going to climb the hill, you climb your way, I’ll climb my way.” It means, he said, “We do not criticize each other, we know we still depend on each other’s support. Common goal, common enemies, different tactics.”

The G-20 meetings in Osaka passed with no sign of support for Hong Kong from the United States. While Beijing readies its response, Washington should make it clear that the survival of the rule of law in Hong Kong is part and parcel of answering the PRC’s challenge to liberal democracy around the world.

Ashley J. Tellis, “Pursuing Global Reach: China’s Not So Long March Toward Preeminence,”

in China’s expanding Strategic Ambitions, Ashley J. Tellis, Alison Szalwinski, and Michael Wills, eds. (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2019), p. 29.

Brian Hioe, “After the Tear Gas,” Popula, June 15, 2019.

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Focus on Eurasia, Invest in Allies, Rethink Globalization

For 20 years now the United States seems to have been caught in a state of strategic inertia, with the regnant ideology of globalization and open-ended small wars having all but overpowered our ability to redefine our national security priorities. It’s as though victory in the Cold War—and the subsequent commingling of the heady liberal internationalism of the first post-Cold War decade with the nation’s justifiable quest for retribution after 9/11—has stunted our capacity for strategic thought. For two decades now the United States has been bleeding military power in secondary theaters, while China and Russia have continued to develop and expand theirs. Likewise, the almost dogmatic adherence to the ideology of globalization and export-driven modernization as a pathway to bringing China and Russia into the larger liberal international order, and ultimately some sort of “Kantian peace,” has all but eclipsed traditional geopolitical considerations.

The past couple of years have witnessed a growing awareness in the West of the impending tectonic shifts in global power distribution. In the United States, the 2017 National Security Strategy and the 2018 National Defense Strategy have been the fundamental first steps towards strategic realignment, refocusing our priorities away from counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and toward great power competition. Still, we are not yet at a point where we can speak of a new overarching strategy going forward, and time is running out to reorient the West’s core security priorities. The next 15 years will determine whether the United States and its allies can develop a larger strategic consensus to assume enough shared risk so as to ensure that deterrence in the Indo-Pacific theater and in Europe holds. If not, communist China and authoritarian Russia will continue to undermine the foundations of the existing international system, in the process reordering the power distribution between maritime versus continental states that for the past five centuries has favored the West.

We need to take a hard look at what parts of the world are critical to the security of the West and rethink how to make its alliances work again. The following geopolitical reality is still true today: The United States has to ensure that no power hostile to its interests can assert exclusive control over Eurasia, including the European rimland. Today preventing China’s domination of Eurasia should be our overarching strategic objective, and to achieve this we need to focus on three fundamentals: 1) Prioritize Eurasia and stop draining our military resources in secondary theaters; 2) invest in allies who see their interests directly aligned with ours and are willing to assume the attendant risk; and 3) decouple U.S. strategic industries from China’s and redefine the rules of international trade to ensure equitable competition.

The power equation in the Indo-Pacific and European theaters will define the outcome of America’s global competition with the newly aligned China and Russia. In the Indo-Pacific, the key allies whom we can reasonably expect to meaningfully contribute to deterring and containing China are Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and, in extremis, India, as they are determined to prevent China’s domination of the region and to resist the attendant abridgment of their sovereignty. Other states in Asia-Pacific, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and perhaps Vietnam and the Philippines, are also likely to buttress U.S. efforts to strengthen deterrence in the theater, especially as they recognize America’s continued determination to enforce the principle of the freedom of navigation and the region’s security writ large. The United States also needs to be able to count on contributions to deterrence in the Indo-Pacific from its key European allies. Indeed, of late the United Kingdom and France have sent their naval assets, though limited in number, to buttress the principle of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.

Preserving NATO as a premier collective defense organization in Europe remains in America’s national interest, and we need to continue to do everything possible to strengthen the alliance. However, five years into the alliance’s uneven transformation, the continued failure of a number of European allies to spend on real military power has left the United States with little choice but to invest in deeper bilateral security relationships with those European states that see their security interests aligned directly with ours. Here, building a closely knit network of bilateral U.S. security relationships across the Baltic-to-Black Sea Intermarium countries would allow the United States to strengthen deterrence, reduce the burden of defending the eastern flank, and ultimately enhance NATO’s real military assets. The current deepening U.S. security relationship with Poland and Romania in particular offers a valuable framework to achieve this goal, with our support for Ukraine being an important aspect of this realignment.

While NATO remains the core framework of Transatlantic security, without genuine European reinvestment in real usable military power, the alliance runs an increasing risk of becoming hollowed out, and potentially ineffective in a crisis. This is an urgent issue for the Euro-Atlantic community as a whole, especially with the United States being drawn further into the Indo-Pacific theater, because—simply put—if deterrence is to hold on the Continent, our European allies need to rearm. The United Kingdom, notwithstanding its internal political contortions in the wake of Brexit, remains closely aligned with the United States, as do Norway and a number of other NATO and non-NATO allies in Scandinavia and along Europe’s northeastern and southeastern flanks. Likewise, France is committed to working with the United States at the strategic level, even though its security optics have been increasingly defined by developments closer to home in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Still, while Paris yet again—and perhaps predictably—speaks of “European autonomy” on defense, it clearly understands the larger strategic calculus that makes America’s strategic connection to Europe indispensable to its security. U.S.-German relations, which are vital to NATO’s continued success, are likely to present a challenge, for Washington and Berlin have thus far proved unable to insulate the German-American strategic conversation on shared security and defense priorities from domestic political constraints. Still, Washington should continue to make every effort to work closely with Berlin; as a key member of the NATO alliance and the main entry point for U.S. forces into Europe, Germany remains a vital American ally.

Finally, the United States needs to jettison the ideology of globalism and complex interdependence as a path to security. No other policy decision has done more damage to America’s relative power position than our elites’ quasi-dogmatic commitment to globalization as a means of effecting the liberalization of authoritarian states and buttressing the liberal international order. The issue is not whether market capitalism and international trade are good for the United States; on the contrary, American power has been built on over a century of rapid industrialization, innovation, and market competition. However, the last 30 years have witnessed the ascendency of the misguided conviction that a “post-industrial service-based economy” will suffice to ensure America’s growth and prosperity. To put it in 1990s parlance, “software was going to replace hardware.” The hopeful faith in international trade as a panacea that would maximize growth and lower the cost of consumption morphed during the three subsequent post-Cold War decades into dogma, as corporation after corporation offshored American industries and “xeroxed” American blue collar employment across the globe, while entire communities in the United States imploded. The consequences of the decline in investment in U.S. manufacturing capacity and the outflow of key technologies to China and elsewhere were not hard to predict: For decades the United States has run trade deficits, while pundits dismissed as irrelevant the argument that the country’s trade account is a valid measure of the success or failure of its trade policy. Likewise, advocates of continued “globalization” insist even today that the U.S. trade deficit is not a problem that requires a solution. This is akin to believing that there is no difference between assets and liabilities.

In reality, globalization has not rewritten the rules of great power competition or national security. Sovereign economic strength, including a vibrant manufacturing base, is as important to great power status today as it has been for centuries. Just ask the denizens of Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul, or Berlin. It is also the essential prerequisite of military strength. We cannot have it both ways, pretending that the deindustrialization of the United States does not really matter while at the same time noting with growing concern the continued rise of the People’s Republic of China, today the world’s premier supplier of high-value manufactured goods. Should war come, it will not be enough to write software, for to run even the most basic app one needs also to be able to assemble a silicon chip.

In today’s world of protected markets, extorted intellectual property, and government subsidies, to continue to argue that for the past four decades we have been engaged in anything resembling the ideal of free trade is to deny reality. It is time to abandon globalist mantras that a national manufacturing base no longer matters, or that the traditional export-import calculus no longer applies. Otherwise America’s decline as a global power will proceed apace, and the United States will run the increasing risk of being unable to maintain those elements of our supply chain that are vital to the national security. It is imperative for the United States to onshore the critical segments of our supply chain, and to implement stringent export controls and the rudiments of national economic policy, especially in areas impacting our military strength. In short, our core strategic priority should be to disentangle our economy from China’s, to stop educating China’s future weapons designers in our premier science and engineering colleges and universities, and to restore at least a semblance of a level playing field when it comes to international trade and investment.

The professed era of unipolarity built around the United States passed faster than its proponents anticipated, while a bipolar system with a “balancer” in the middle, a familiar feature from the Cold War era, remains a thing of the past. The coming decade will be decisive for power distribution across the globe. America will either remain the most powerful and innovative economy and the leader of democracies, or it will lose out in the system-transforming competition with China and, by extension, Russia.

A new power alignment is poised to emerge, one in which the idea of traditional systemic polarity will be replaced with a new form of fractured polarity rooted in coalescing parallel economic systems, increasingly disconnected in key areas of technology and supply chains—in effect, “two worlds,” in which the U.S.-led West, if it continues to cling to the reigning globalist dogma, will run the risk of being eclipsed and displaced.

Resurgent great power competition has already redefined how states across the globe see their national security priorities going forward, and it is poised to reach a crescendo. This competition is geopolitical, geo-economic, and military in nature, and it continues to spill into new domains, including cyber and space, bringing home the foundational cold reality that a system-transforming state-on-state war, should it come to that, would test the calculus of an absolute and relative power differential between America and its allies against the increasingly aligned China and Russia. Decisions we make today, whether on economic policy or defense spending allocations, will determine the options available to the United States in the not-so-distant future, when the current round of state-on-state competition reaches its denouement. The clock is ticking. Each year that passes without the West’s building an overarching strategic consensus to confront its rising competitors shifts the odds against us.

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The Urgent Need for Educational Equality

Few scandals have upset the public as much as has the university admission bribery case involving 33 movie stars, hedge fund managers, and other privileged parents who shoe-horned their under-performing or dim offspring into top schools. They were charged with bribing university officials and coaches, and (in some cases) of paying imposters to take SAT and other exams for their kids.

The FBI is investigating hundreds more parent-perpetrators.

Such misconduct by people who have already won life’s sweepstakes represents a sucker punch to those who believe that America is a meritocracy and that anyone can get to the top by dint of hard work or talent or smarts. Of course, the existence of Ivanka and Jared in the White House should have disabused anyone of that belief. Clearly the American Dream—the idea that equality of opportunity is available to anyone—has seen better days.

The United States has become a gigantic country club where membership is controlled by elites who restrict slots to the wealthy, to heirs like Ivanka or Jared or George W. Bush, or to Ivy League graduates with connected parents. Arguably, nepotism has always been around, but it is surprisingly commonplace, according to a 2014 Census Bureau report, “Fathers, Children, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Employers”. Its analysis showed that by age 30, about 22 percent of sons will be working for the same employer at the same time as did their fathers. This survey was not about children working for fathers in family-owned enterprises, but about fathers getting their bosses to hire their kids.

Entry into posh schools doesn’t require bribery if applicants are members of the “lucky sperm club”: More than 36 percent of students enrolled in Harvard University’s class of 2022 are “legacies” or the offspring of graduates, according to the Harvard Crimson. Admission is also available to those, like Jared Kushner, whose father bequeathed $2.5 million to the school.

But the bigger issue is that underlying this patronage-addled society is educational injustice. It’s hardly news that the American model of educational funding has created an unequal playing field, propagating a disparity of educational expenditure per student as vast as the country’s increasing income disparity. But it should be. One Presidential candidate this year is attempting to make sagging teachers’ salaries an issue. That’s certainly a symptom of the problem, but not the root.

Most funding for public schools comes from local property taxes. This has meant that children in affluent neighborhoods get a better education than do those in poorer communities. This model stunts public schooling, and is not present in other developed nations. European and Canadian public schools provide equitable educational opportunities irrespective of geography, property tax revenues, parental income, religion, or race. The result is better educational outcomes.

In 2016, for example, an average of $11,762 per student was spent by American public elementary and secondary schools. But one state spent more than $20,000 per student on average, while a handful of others spent a third as much, according to the Census Bureau. There are also wide gaps in spending within states.

Differences are caused by factors such as the local cost of living, class sizes, teachers’ pay, and property taxes, but the spending gaps—even within states—are so significant that they point to a form of regional stinginess, or discrimination, that stratifies and disenfranchises millions of children. The range is dramatic: The highest per pupil expenditures are New York at $22,366; Connecticut, $18,858; DC, $15,951; New Jersey, $18,402; and Vermont, $17,873. The lowest are Florida at $8,920; Mississippi, $8,702; Utah, $6,953; Arizona, $7,613; and Idaho, $7,157.

In Canada, public education is managed by the ten provinces and entirely funded by tax revenues. Distributions are allocated based strictly on the number of students and on the cost of providing special needs, common specialty and enrichment programs, and additional language or other help for new immigrants or refugees. Teachers are provincially certified and paid the same, irrespective of the neighborhood or community where they teach. Such a fiscal and regulatory equalization mechanism, within provinces and nationally by the federal government, ensures that rich and poor alike have access to a good education from qualified teachers.

A 2013 study by the Center for American Progress suggested Canada’s system would work well in the United States. “The most significant takeaway from the Canadian experience is that a provincial- or state-level funding system can work successfully to create equity and not just in small states such as Hawaii. Ontario has a very large student population—more than two million—and has successfully implemented such a system,” said the report. “Provinces were able to successfully transition from funding systems that looked more like those of U.S. states—where local boards set tax rates and raised some portion of funds locally—to a system funded at the provincial level with greater equality, if not total equity. This conversion debunks the idea that systematic change in school funding is not possible and that we are simply stuck with the status quo.” Canada’s outcomes are superior to America’s despite a higher proportion of immigrant children without language skills in some provinces. “In Ontario, which educates 40% of Canada’s students, nearly 30% of the province’s population are immigrants. According to the 2015 PISA [the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment] Ontario scored fifth in the world in reading. Children of immigrants perform compatibly with their peers with Canadian-born parents in educational achievement.”

Nationally, the story is the same. PISA ranks are determined by measuring 15-year-old school pupils’ scholastic performance in mathematics, science, and reading. Canada ranks 10th—behind Singapore at 1st; Hong Kong at 2nd; Macau at 3rd; Taiwan at 4th; Japan at 5th; China at 6th; South Korea at 7th; Switzerland at 8th; and Estonia at 9th. The United States ranks 40th.

American teachers are also paid less. A 2017 OECD comparison in U.S. dollars showed that the average salary of an American secondary school teacher with 15 years’ experience is $63,006; a Canadian teacher is $65,474; a Dutch teacher is $72,778; a German teacher is $81,260; and a Luxembourg teacher is $109,734.

But that tells only part of the story. Teachers’ salaries in the United States vary greatly from state to state, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. In 2017, the blended national average of elementary and secondary teacher salaries was $58,950, but as high as $79,637 in New York and as low as $42,668 in South Dakota and $42,925 in Mississippi. The Economic Policy Institute noted that professionals with comparable education and skills earn 19 percent more than do the country’s educators. The result of relatively poor pay is declining enrollment in teachers’ colleges, and a high turnover among those employed, both of which are, in turn, creating worrisome teacher shortages in poor areas.

It’s telling that the quality of public high school diplomas is so disparate that American universities require applicants to sit for a standardized SAT exam. One college official suggested that an A average in an impoverished school is equivalent to a C plus in a public school located in a wealthy suburb. This is not the case in Canada. Canadians applying to Canadian universities are not required to take the SAT because secondary school diplomas are equivalent, as are curricula and grading procedures.

But, as one wag recently joked, in the United States the SATs are supposed to be about measuring aptitude. Instead, they have also become a measurement of your parents’ bank account.

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Who Are the Greeks?

Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation

Roderick Beaton

University of Chicago Press, 2019, $35, 488 pp.

The Greek revolt against the Ottomans was supposed to start on March 25, 1821, but the Maniots had different ideas.

The Mani is the middle finger of land that extends out from the southern Peloponnese, terminating at Cape Tainaron, the southernmost point of mainland Europe. It looks like the surface of the moon, and even today many of its inhabitants dwell in their traditional castle-houses, forbidding piles of rock which rise from the rock of the landscape like geological formations. It was one of the last regions of Europe to be Christianized, after distant Britain.

The Maniots rose up more than a week ahead of schedule, led by their ruthless warlord Petrobey Mavromichalis, whose name means “Black Michael.” The rest of Greece followed suit.

In his sweeping, sympathetic history of modern Greece, which ought immediately to become the standard history of the modern nation, Roderick Beaton describes how factions soon emerged among the rebellious Greeks. On one side were warlords like Mavromichalis, who represented the old, lawless kind of freedom; on the other were educated men who looked to Europe for a model of centralized order for their fledgling nation.

Once the revolution had been won, it was Ioannis Kapodistrias, the erstwhile Foreign Minister of Russia, who assumed the task of governing Greece. Being a veteran of czarist administration, he took a somewhat autocratic approach to the task, locking up Mavromichalis over a tax dispute. In retaliation the old warlord’s son and brother shot Kapodistrias dead, plunging Greece into chaos until the imposition of monarchy by the Great Powers.

Comparisons were made at the time between Kapodistrias’s assassins and Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the lovers who killed the last of the Peisistratid tyrants in ancient Athens, opening the way for the world’s first democracy. The question of whether the Greeks were willing to give up their old freedom for a new kind of order did not die with Kapodistrias. Nor was this tragic classical parallel to be the last of its kind.

It is easy to laugh, and many do, at the idea that modern Greece, with its financial woes and only partially merited reputation for tax evasion, is in any meaningful sense an inheritor of the classical Greeks—those builders of the Parthenon, originators of tragedy, rhetoric, philosophy. But part of the tragedy of modern Greece is that it was the Great Powers who, having inhaled the heady vapors of philhellenism during the early decades of the 19th century, intervened against the Ottomans to guarantee the victory of the Greek rebels—in keeping with the theory that modern Greece, freed from the Ottoman yoke, would take up the mantle of its ancient predecessor.

Western Europe, as it is prone to do, soon became bored of this theory. Before the dust had even settled from the Greek Revolution, an Austrian named Fallmerayer was writing that the modern Greeks were not descended from the ancients at all, but rather from Slavic invaders. In due course his view was discredited, and thankfully we have grown less credulous of arguments that tie national identity so obsessively to a bloodline (especially when they come from the mouths of Austrians). But the disillusionment with the idea of modern Greece as characteristically of a piece with the ancients remained. Since the end of the Second World War, Europe has been understandably allergic to ethnic narratives about ancient legacies.

This is heartbreaking for the Greeks, who never lost this idea of their national history—an idea which the Great Powers affirmed all those years ago during Greece’s war of independence. See, as an example, the longstanding dispute over the name of the former Yugoslav country now called North Macedonia. Europe found Greece’s refusal to accept the name “Macedonia” baffling. Who cared what this insignificant country wanted to call itself? To the Greeks, however, the question was existential: Are we the carriers of an ancient legacy, or not? To allow this other nation, this bunch of non-Greek-speakers, to stake a competing claim to Alexander the Great would be to strike at the very heart of the idea of Greece. Of course they opposed it with all their strength.

For those of us who are not Greek, the question remains open: Is there a characteristic “Greekness”—not a racial lineage; we are best advised to avoid that fever swamp—that has survived from the classical period intact through the long years of Roman domination, Byzantine rule, medieval chaos, and Ottoman tyranny? Beaton notes that the only cultural institution to survive intact from the dawn of antiquity to the modern day is the Greek language. The language was enough for the ancients—a barbarian, after all, was simply someone who did not speak Greek—and it should be enough for us. No one who has been greeted on a city street with the word chairete, the very same greeting as you will find in the dialogues of Plato, can deny the Greeks their Greekness.

One bewitching figure in Beaton’s history is Rigas Velestinlis, the grandfather of the Greek Revolution who was executed in Vienna in 1797 for plotting to free Greece from Ottoman rule. In his 1793 book New Civil Government, Rigas imagined a Greek identity not defined by genetic inheritance but “shared culture and a shared geographic space, as well as voluntary commitment.” In Rigas’s vision, a Greek is simply “someone who speaks either modern or ancient Greek, and aids Greece, even if he lives in the Antipodes (because the Hellenic yeast has spread into both hemispheres).”

This lofty, generous sense of the Greek nation was pliable enough to accommodate not just the future citizens of the Greek state diaspora but also their sympathizers abroad, the philhellenes and classicists, as well as the members of the Greek diaspora—those followers in the footsteps of Herodotus.

But it never caught on. The vision of the Greek nation that has prevailed over much of the course of its history was a different one, that suggested by the “Grand Idea.” The idea was a Greek state for ethnic Greeks, or rather for all of them. This required either expanding the borders of Greece to include the Greeks initially outside it—or, less optimistically, uprooting those Greeks and relocating them to within the borders of the Greek state.

This Grand Idea brought modern Greece its most ringing accomplishments and its most bitter sorrows. The victories came in the form of Thessaly, taken from the Ottomans in 1881; Macedonia and Crete, claimed after the first Balkan War; and part of Thrace, after the second.

Then came 1922. The classical parallels to modern Greek history always present themselves most insistently when the Greeks are in the direst of straits, and the Greco-Turkish War is no exception. In talks after the end of the First World War Eleftherios Venizelos, the cunning Greek Prime Minister and standard-bearer for the Grand Idea, had secured great swaths of the Ottoman Empire for Greece—on paper. But when the newly reconstituted Turks began to fight back, the Greeks had to go and get the territory themselves. Venizelos lost the election and the faction that was against territorial expansion took power.

Just like the Athenians in Sicily some 2,500 years earlier, the war hawk who had set an invasion into motion—Alcibiades for the Athenians, Venizelos for the Greeks—was out of power before he could lead it. Like the Athenians, the invasion of Anatolia went ahead anyway, led by men who were dead set against it but could not abandon it without committing political suicide. And like the Athenians, the invasion was a disaster. What had begun so promisingly for the Greeks, with the Turks falling back across the Anatolian hinterland, ended with the great Ionian city of Smyrna in flames, its Greek inhabitants fleeing for their lives before the Turkish advance.

The population exchanges between the Greeks and Turks after the war accomplished the Grand Idea in a melancholy fashion, with the Greeks of Asia Minor reduced to refugees in the suburbs of Athens and its port, the Piraeus. The generals held responsible for the failure of the expedition were tried and six of them executed—another classical touch. (After the Battle of Arginusae in 406 B.C.E., six Athenian generals were jointly tried and executed for failing to pick up the survivors from sunk Athenian warships.)

It is not, of course, entirely the Greeks’ fault that so many bids for the greater glory of the Greeks in Greece ended badly for the Greeks outside Greece. There is also the zero-sum brutality of competing national projects, and before that, the viciousness of a dying empire to blame—for the reprisals against the Phanariot Greeks in the Ottoman Empire after the start of the Greek Revolution, for the ouster of the Black Sea Greeks after Lausanne, for the exodus of most of what remained of the Greeks of Istanbul, when the Cyprus conflict motivated Turkish attacks on them in 1955. But there is something undeniably dangerous about Grand Idea–style nationalism, about a national self-understanding that sees any sizable quantity of members of the national group abroad as a kind of threat, or at least a sign that the national process of self-becoming is incomplete.

The picture looks much different now, of course. There are few Greeks left on the Black Sea or in Istanbul, but now there are British Greeks, American Greeks, Australian Greeks. The Hellenic yeast has indeed spread even into the Antipodes, as Rigas had it. There are also new figures in Greece, refugees and immigrants. The flexibility of Greekness is being tested again. There are men like Samuel Akinola, an actor born in Greece to Kenyan and Nigerian migrant parents, but who is not a citizen. As Schumpeter says, it is up to every nation to define itself, and so must Greece—but it is hard not to feel a pang for men like Akinola, who speak Greek as fluently as anyone, but who remain metics in their native land.

Since independence from the Ottomans, the Greek nation was supposed to be ancient, but it was also supposed to be modern and European. The European project of domesticating the Greeks, which in one form involved envisioning ancient Greece as the forerunner to modern Europe, also involved the political and cultural assimilation of modern Greece into Europe. The warlords, Petrobey and his ilk, were supposed to be confined to the pages of novels, to be replaced with the rule of law.

The warlords are gone, but the project is still incomplete, and may ever be. Greek accession to the European Union brought with it money and works, the euro and the yoke of European central monetary policy. The Greeks are not yet willing to give up their old freedom, not quite, and they have suffered for it. Wondering why Alexis Tsipras went to the people in 2015 to reject the bailout conditions Greece had been offered by the “troika” of European banking authorities, only to accept a worse set of conditions just ten days later, Beaton suggests that the hundred-billion-euro toll to the Greek economy caused by Tsipras’s reluctance to accept the terms on offer was simply the cost required to convince all the Greeks that—like Athens before Macedon—there really were no alternatives to submission.

Greek freedom, then, is not a liberal kind of freedom, though it has become more so. It is older than that, and it has never been codified. All that can be said for sure is that it has something to do with Petrobey Mavromichalis, warrior-king of the Mani, that desolate land where the people live in castles, where Europe ends and the dark blue of the Aegean stretches unbroken to the African coast.

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Putin, Unclassified

We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West Gets Him Wrong

Mark Galeotti

Ebury Press, 2019, $19.95, 160 pp.

Editor’s Note: This is the first essay in a multi-author series on “Getting Russia Right”. Coming next week: Carla Anne Robbins.

Mark Galeotti’s new book, We Need to Talk About Putin—subtitled “How the West Gets Him Wrong”—is a sharp, short effort that gets Putin (mostly) right. Galeotti stresses that his book—more of a long essay, really—is not an academic study. In fact, it’s a rather playful work as a whole. At the start, Galeotti lists a “cast of characters” with short descriptions of each one of them, as if he were starting a Shakespearean tragedy, or, in some places, a farce. Indeed, Galeotti himself appears as a minor character in the play, sitting at dinner at a famous Moscow restaurant and listening to an unnamed Russian official explain Putin to him. It’s a clever narrative device that nevertheless sets up a mystery of its own. But more on that later.

Overall, Galeotti’s main argument is simple: Not everything that is going on in the world plays into Putin’s hands, or is even to be blamed on (or credited to) him. Not every Western setback is part of some complex Russian strategy. Indeed, the Kremlin draws psychological strength from the misunderstanding of its enemies. “By acting as if Russia is a great power, Putin hopes to persuade everyone else either that this is true, or at least that it’s not worth trying to challenge the idea,” Galeotti writes. As David Kramer noted in our pages recently, this is exactly how Putin manages to do as much as he does, largely unchallenged.

The bluster alone is not sufficient to be effective. The hot rhetoric must be matched with the illusion of strategic genius. Galeotti points out that, on the contrary, both in his personal life and on the world stage, Putin is a judo black belt but not a chess grandmaster. “He has a sense of what constitutes a win, but has not predetermined a path towards it. He relies on quickly seizing any advantage he sees, rather than on a careful strategy,” Galeotti says. “[T]his helps explain why we are so often unable to predict Putin’s moves in advance—he himself doesn’t know what he’ll do next.”

It’s also important to remember that the bolder geopolitical moves, like the annexation of Crimea, often belie a different tendency in the Russian President. Putin, Galeotti notes, usually “wants clarity, he wants safe choices and guaranteed successes.” He literally hid from public view for ten days after Boris Nemtsov was killed in front of the Kremlin in 2015, emerging to deliver only a slap on the wrist to the Chechen strongman who had in all likelihood directly ordered the killing. And when faced with tough choices on committing resources to Ukraine and to Syria, he has eschewed making a decision, opting instead to muddle through. “Time and again, Putin either backs away from a tough decision, ducks out while he agonizes, or hopes that with time, the need to make a decision will disappear.”

Galeotti is also excellent on the question of what constitutes what one might call “Putinism”—the ideology behind the man. There’s not much to it, he argues. He ably demolishes the narrative that has arisen around Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian fascist philosopher who is regularly described in Western accounts as “Putin’s brain,” and he dismisses the influence of the writings of people like the anti-Bolshevik émigré Ivan Ilyin. There is little evidence that Putin actually reads these people, Galeotti asserts. I might add that there is little evidence that Putin reads much philosophy at all.

Putin’s nihilistic pragmatism extends far and wide. Putin supports right-wing populists in Europe and the socialists led by Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. The only thing that unites these two parties is their stand against Europe and the United States. If Putin ever quotes someone, or some ideologies seem to emerge as driving forces in Russia, it is only because they are “politically convenient, and when they become liability they fade from view.” Putin is not an Islamophobe, for example, nor is he a frothing homophobe, but he readily reaches for any of these poses if they give him a means of skewering Western norms. There are millions of Central Asian immigrants in Moscow alone—most of them Muslims—but it is Europe that is “falling apart” under the immigrant flows from Middle East, Russian propaganda insists. Top positions in Putin’s administration, as well as in Medvedev’s cabinet and the Duma, are held by people widely known to be gay, and Putin himself has publicly said that he has gay friends, but it is Europe that is regularly mocked as “Gayropa” in the media.

Tellingly, Putin goes through the motions of religious piety, but unlike most truly conservative Orthodox Christians in Russia, he hasn’t ever said anything against abortion or the role of women in society. It might come as a shock to Bannonites who see in Putin some kind of guardian of traditional values, but everything suggests that in his personal life, Putin is far more liberal and progressive than most white rural Christian Americans. If tomorrow Europe were to start executing gay people and throwing out Muslim immigrants for some reason, Russia could easily morph into a gay haven that welcomes Syrian refugees. There is no moral core here. It’s pure cynicism.

But just because Putin doesn’t read philosophy, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t read. The country’s three intelligence agencies each put together a folder with briefings that goes on Putin’s table daily—“the FSB’s report on domestic affairs, the SVR’s on developments around the world, and the FSO’s on what is going on within the Russian elite.” Galeotti notes that a foreign service officer bitterly complained to him that Putin regularly ignores his agency’s analysis in favor of that of the spooks.

All that reading is not necessarily conducive to good decision-making. For his part, Putin is not the intelligence insider he makes himself out to be. Though he served in the KGB, he never distinguished himself on the job, and he never rose through the ranks enough to be able to properly understand how these bureaucracies think and work. For their part, the spy agencies are busy competing amongst themselves for favor before the eager tsar, both in coming up with the most attention-grabbing analyses that might nevertheless be questionably grounded in fact, and in hiding the worst news from their increasingly cantankerous authoritarian boss. Putin, Galeotti quips, “is King Lear to his ambitious daughters, apportioning his kingdom based on how well they flatter him.”

Despite the list in the beginning, Galeotti’s book doesn’t actually spend much time on the cast of characters surrounding Putin. Paranoids like the head of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev and ruthless bullies like Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin—both key players in Putin’s inner circle—only get glancing mention. Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov is looked at closely only once, in an episode quoted from Mikhail Zygar’s All the Kremlin’s Men, on how he helped oligarch Vladimir Potanin manipulate Putin into getting into the Sochi Olympics bid. It is an amusing interlude in Galeotti’s narrative, but there are many more like it circulating out there, many instructive.

I was witness to another telling episode. At the end of 2014, Echo of Moscow, the liberal radio station I work for, was under pressure by its major stakeholder Gazprom Media. Echo’s editor-in-chief Alexey Venediktov was feuding with Gazprom Media’s newly appointed CEO Mikhail Lesin—a man who would several years later end up mysteriously dead in a Washington, DC hotel room. Lesin wanted to remove Venediktov, but was finding it difficult to do so, given Echo’s carefully worded governing statutes about editorial non-interference. Venediktov, a smart operator, turned to Peskov and asked him to put news about the fight—a printout from a state-run news agency—on top of Putin’s daily news folder. That’s all it apparently took: Venediktov kept his job and Lesin backed down, and by the end of 2015 he had been fired from Gazprom Media (presumably for other reasons).

The theory of the “collective Putin”—that Putinism is the sum of the characters that surround and influence the man at the center—has fallen out of favor with Western analysts as Putin himself has cycled through his flunkies. And in truth, it never was a satisfying explanation of how things really worked. Still, it’s a pity Galeotti spends so little time on the bizarre people that surround and influence the isolated Russian President. Understanding the paranoid mindset inside the Kremlin is important, even if it doesn’t explain absolutely everything about the Russian state.

Galeotti is also too indulgent on Putin’s own background. On how he came to be an intelligence officer, Galeotti regurgitates Putin’s own stylized account from the “authorized” volume of interviews titled First Person, a book that was used to introduce Putin to the broader Russian public in 2000. Putin claims that as a teenager, inspired by literature and movies about the derring-do of spies, he decided he wanted to serve in the KGB and approached the service’s recruitment office. Considering the rough background he came from and the street toughs he associated with, it’s more likely Putin was himself approached. Spies are heroic action heroes only in the movies; in reality, most intelligence officers, especially in authoritarian countries, are gray, weak, and dependent specters, and recruiters know what they are looking for. Just as sports can be a way for underprivileged kids to transcend their origins, so the KGB represented a way out for Putin, and for that he is clearly grateful. But Putin didn’t excel as a spy, and the job was anything but glamorous. There’s no reason to follow Putin’s own lead in romanticizing his own beginnings.

Nor would I romanticize the nature of his relationships with his friends from childhood—men like the Rothenberg brothers whom Putin helped turn into some of the richest men in Russia. Putin was put into power by a powerful clan of individuals surrounding the increasingly senile Boris Yeltsin—the so-called “Family” of relatives and related oligarchs who came up in the turbulent 1990s. They relied on Putin to help protect them once Yeltsin was out of power, but they had made their fortunes before him and as such did not feel they owed him anything. The most logical thing for Putin to do in response was to grow and groom his own clan of oligarchs—a set of people who would owe him everything, whose whole status would depend on him. One plugged-in Russian told Galeotti that “Putin is sentimental.” I think “ruthlessly pragmatic” is a better description.

Galeotti’s read of Putin’s relationship to money is also off. “It is clear that it is power, not money that is his thing,” Galeotti says at one point. “Putin doesn’t go looking for money, money goes looking for him,” he quotes a Russian official as saying. Yes, as the most powerful man in Russia, it’s true that money can seem incidental to the bigger business at hand. But it’s a mistake to think that Putin is not motivated by greed, or that targeting his wealth is not going to be effective.

The man likes living in luxury. Just the other week, well after Galeotti’s book had already been published, investigative journalists in Russia identified a brand new palace being built on the outskirts of Moscow, watched over by Presidential guards, wired with a secure line to the Kremlin, and registered to an offshore company based in the British Virgin Islands. The Magnitsky Act-related sanctions that were passed in response for embezzling and laundering vast sums of money from Russia’s budget—$2 billion of which ended up in offshore accounts registered to a close cellist friend of Putin’s—infuriated the Russian President. He has been hounding Bill Browder, the financier turned human rights activists responsible for getting the relevant sanctions laws adopted in the United States. He has tried to discredit the Magnitsky Act in Congress by trying to muddy the waters surrounding the case that spawned the bill. And his flunkies have even approached the Trump campaign to try to have the sanctions removed. Galeotti writes that “we shouldn’t assume that targeting Putin’s money . . . is some sort of magic weapon.” The evidence suggests otherwise.

But Galeotti is not wrong to focus on the question of how Putin perceives these things. It’s not only about the money. As Peter Baker wrote in a revealing 2013 essay, Putin was genuinely astonished when the Bush Administration confronted him about the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003. The at-the-time-much-younger Russian President believed that the West was just as corrupt as Russia, hiding its true nature beneath happy talk of democracy and human rights. He believed that as long as he cooperated with the West, the West would not intervene into his internal affairs. That is where the rage about the Magnitsky Act comes from. The murder of Russian lawyer Sergey Magnitsky in a Russian jail is his—Putin’s—domestic issue. Tax revenue service officials who steal money from the federal budget and launder it in the West—this too is his internal affair. For Putin, l’état, c’est moi, and there is little distinction between going after his money and attacking the Russian state.

But these are ultimately quibbles; overall, Galeotti reads Putin very well. His book is an excellent corrective to the kind of lazy analyses that have recently inflated Russia’s petty tyrant into some kind of Machiavellian genius. Putin is nothing of the sort.

And yet there was something nagging at me as I put down the book. It has to do with how the whole thing is framed. In focusing on Putin the man, Galeotti misses something important about today’s Russia more broadly considered.

The hint comes when Galeotti says that the election of Putin was the result of “people looking for a credible (and sober) defender of the nation.” It’s a commonplace among Russia analysts to say things like this, but the truth is that Putin’s rise to power was predetermined. It was a carefully orchestrated operation managed by a coterie of powerful people close to the ailing President Yeltsin who needed someone to guarantee their position. The book elides the fact that in 1999 Putin was mostly a cypher to the public, with ratings close to zero, and that only a massive parliamentary election campaign orchestrated by Boris Berezovsky (at that time a friend to the Yeltsin “Family”) actually made Putin recognizable to the general public. Galeotti has a chapter on Putin being loyal to the oligarchs he created, but he fails to mention how loyal Putin has actually been to The Family as a whole. The newly minted President’s promises went far beyond his first presidential decree, titled “On guarantees for former President of the Russian Federation and members of his family.” Once the parameters of Russian politics going forward were established—“businessmen” needed to refrain from challenging Putin’s rule (a message Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky didn’t properly internalize)—all of The Family were kept fat and comfortable. Bailouts were offered when needed (Oleg Deripaska in 2008) and questionable opportunities for self-enrichment were common (as with the sale of the Alfa Bank-owned TNK-BP oil company to the state-owned Rosneft at a 40 percent premium).

And here we get to the mystery I alluded to at the start of this essay. The book begins and ends with a conversation over dinner with a former Russian official from Putin’s presidential administration in a lavish Moscow restaurant called White Rabbit. The man’s identity is never revealed, but given the location, a Muscovite who follows such things might immediately think of either Vladislav Surkov or Aleksander Voloshin, two regulars at the restaurant who are generally eager to talk to foreign journalists critical of the regime. Surkov still manages the Ukraine portfolio for Putin, while Voloshin is mostly retired. Both are highly intelligent, both cut their political teeth as members of Yeltsin’s Family, and both are prone to spinning. And lately that spin has been that the Family wanted a more democratic Russia, that its members were and are liberals at heart, and that they just miscalculated by backing Putin.

This is self-serving stuff being offered up by a group of people who are starting to glimpse a future after Putin and are eager to position themselves well with the West once change comes. Galeotti is too seasoned a Russia hand to have simply relied on the words of someone as notoriously manipulative as Surkov or Voloshin—if he spoke to them at all. But intentionally or not, the frame of Galeotti’s story serves these people’s preferred narrative: There are good guys among Russia’s oligarchs, and smart Western policy should distinguish between them and the really rotten bunch that Putin created. (Suffice it to say, I think this is all wrong.)

The book ends with a snippet of the conversation over that dinner at White Rabbit. Galeotti’s host recalls a well-known story Putin told about himself—about how as a child growing up in St. Petersburg, Putin ended up cornering a rat in the basement, and how the cornered rat in turn attacked Putin. And then the mood gets philosophical:

“Russia thinks it’s Putin, out hunting rats, but we’re actually the rat. Everyone fears us, but we’re just doing what comes naturally. Corner us, though, and we’ll turn.” He paused, and then added, “Actually, that’s Putin—the big rat, the one willing to turn. But there’s always another one, somewhere in the shadows.”

“There could be another Putin, an even bigger one, waiting in the stairwell,” Galeotti adds, this flourish being the book’s last sentence.

That there are other Putins out there in today’s Russia, there’s no doubt. But the alternative to them should not be anyone who was responsible for Putin’s rise. Because these people not only knew what they were doing; they are as responsible for what has happened to Russia as Putin and his dreaded siloviki.

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Facing Big Brother’s Stare

Legislative action at the municipal, state, and federal levels is accelerating on the issue of whether facial recognition technology, and the proliferating use of it by law enforcement agencies across the country, represents an unconstitutional violation of individual rights.

On June 4, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform held the second of three planned hearings on the potential dangers posed to Americans’ constitutional liberties and privacy rights when facial recognition is used improperly, or without adequate oversight, by government agencies. Happily—and strikingly given the degree of political polarization rampant today—one of the most important things to emerge during this second hearing was the widespread bipartisan consensus that this technology needs to be brought under stricter control to protect civil liberties. Where else would the very liberal chair of the committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and the very conservative chair of the so-called Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows (R-NC), agree on much of anything?

This federal effort to identify the possible misuses of this technology coincides with recent state and local conversations echoing similar concerns. San Francisco passed an absolute ban on the use of facial recognition by the police and other government authorities, and similar bans are being considered by Oakland, CA and Somerville, MA. Democratic state legislators in Massachusetts and California have introduced bills banning facial recognition, or at use of it by the police, at a statewide level. And Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) introduced a bill banning uses of facial recognition in certain commercial contexts.

Facial recognition technology, as a category, is best described as any system that algorithmically and automatically “analyze[s] video, photos, thermal captures, or other imaging inputs to identify or verify a unique individual,” according to testimony provided to the Committee by Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The negative implications are easy to grasp: the misuse of this technology could inhibit or chill the free expression rights of Americans who may decide not to show their support for one cause or another if they believe their attendance at a meeting or speech is being recorded by the government.

Neema Singh Giuliani of the American Civil Liberties Union testified that the government could acquire the kind of “sensitive information” about an individual, including with whom they associate or whether they attend a political rally, that Supreme Court precedent suggests must only be obtained with a warrant. However, the ACLU states that, “in most cases,” the government use of facial recognition lacks “judicial scrutiny of any kind.” And this abnegation of due process does not occur only occasionally or in scattered circumstances. Indeed, the utility of the technology actually depends on mass collection of information about many people. The ACLU estimates that “[f]ederal, state, and local law enforcement agencies have used face recognition hundreds of thousands of times,” in clear violation of Americans’ constitutional rights. And while there haven’t been any definitive rulings on this emerging set of technologies, several cases—including a landmark judgment that law enforcement agencies need a warrant to make use of thermal imaging technology—indicate a legal path forward for more oversight.

But facial recognition technology is not only potentially infringing on our constitutional protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures” (Fourth Amendment), and chilling people’s exercise of their freedom to express themselves (First Amendment). It also runs afoul of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in breathtaking fashion when it fails to work as intended. And fail it does: the ACLU notes that facial recognition “is disproportionately inaccurate on certain subgroups,” including individuals with darker skin pigmentation, meaning that over-policed communities of color could be subjected to the additional burden of misidentification. When the ACLU tested official congressional portraits against a facial recognition algorithm, 40 percent of the false matches were Representatives of color, even though just over 20 percent of congressional seats are held by people of color.

Already widespread, the use of facial recognition continues to grow. The Georgetown Center for Privacy and Technology testified to the House committee that more than half of Americans have already had their identities recorded in one of many extant facial recognition databases. Police forces in Chicago and Detroit already have the capacity to use facial recognition, while New York City, Orlando, and Washington, DC are all exploring pilot programs to “identify people in real-time, remotely and in secret, from video feeds that keep a constant eye on these cities’ streets,” according to the Center for Privacy and Technology. Sure, providing law enforcement with effective tools to identify and convict perpetrators of crime in a changing technological landscape is a worthwhile goal, especially with state and local budgets groaning under strain. But we ought not let these agencies, however badly stretched they may be, trample over our most basic constitutional protections through the unrestricted use of powerful new tools.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform is doing important work. The investigation itself is important as an awareness-raising measure, but it is also trying to push through meaningful changes. For example, the Committee has demanded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation return for another hearing to confirm that it is implementing the recommendations made earlier this year by the Government Accountability Office regarding the appropriate use of facial recognition. At the time of the latest hearing on June 4, the FBI had fully implemented only one of six recommendations.

Representative Carol Miller (R-WV) explicitly drew a connection between the use of facial recognition in the United States and its use in China. The ruling Chinese Communist Party uses facial recognition as part of a widespread and growing surveillance system often deployed to suppress political dissent. Mrs. Miller stated that her recent trip to China provided “a stark contrast to what our privacy and our liberty is in America” and “poses many questions to the United States” about facial recognition’s “appropriate use.” We’re not at Beijing levels yet, not by a long shot. But the possibility of stumbling into the terrifying reality that’s emerging in China, even by mistake, should give us plenty of pause, and give momentum for reform. If Republicans and Democrats can work together to rein in this emerging danger, then that may also open up possibilities for cooperation on other fronts as well. And that would be a good thing, too.

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From Inertia to Integration: Getting Serious About U.S.-India Defense Cooperation

The relationship between the United States and India is excellent proof that the dominant theory of international relations—nations form partnerships and alliances based on mutual interests or common values—is wrong. If this theory were true, America and India—the world’s oldest and largest democracy, respectively, united by a common English language, increasingly connected through trade and investment flows, targeted by the same terrorist groups, and confronting Chinese expansion—would be far more closely aligned than they are today.

More illuminating in this context is the law of inertia: In the absence of a major crisis, don’t expect major change from large democracies. Secretary of State Pompeo will soon arrive in New Delhi for his first exchange with Prime Minister Modi since his re-election victory. Mutual words of affirmation will surely be uttered, and the specter of growing Chinese military power will be a silent presence during the dialogue. But it remains to be seen if this common concern can compel both governments to move toward meaningful cooperation.

In 2016, the United States Congress declared India a “Major Defense Partner”—a designation uniquely crafted for India. I had the opportunity to play a modest role in the conceptualization of this policy during my time in the Pentagon, and later advocated its adoption before Congress. This designation sought to address Indian suspicion of America’s reliability. Indians have long chafed at what they call “technology denial regimes,” the set of interlocking U.S. sanctions and policies that denied India technology in the name of non-proliferation. This is not an abstraction for Indian leaders, many of whom served as junior officials in 1998 when the U.S. government cut off resupplies to the Indian military after India’s nuclear test. In addition to addressing this challenge, Major Defense Partner (MDP) status also aimed at a target far closer to home—U.S. Executive Branch officials who needed political justification to treat India on par with America’s partners and allies in the context of defense technology trade and cooperation. Reaffirmation of MDP has since been a feature of nearly every major speech on U.S.-India relations.

And it has been more than rhetoric. The MDP designation institutionalized a prioritization of India that resulted in the release of advanced defense technologies and increased staffing resources for Indian requests. Particularly welcomed by New Delhi was the coveted “Strategic Trade Authorization 1 Status,” which streamlines exports of sensitive goods from the United States and facilitates the integration of both nations’ supply chains in defense manufacturing. (Not even Israel has STA-1.) This was a rare joint victory of the Obama and Trump Administrations, agreed to in principle by Obama’s team but implemented in 2018 by Trump’s Secretary of Commerce. New Delhi also welcomed the Pentagon’s nod to India’s centrality to Asia. While the Indian navy cannot match the Chinese navy’s power projection capabilities, the U.S. Department of Defense bestowed on India titular dominion over a vast maritime domain by renaming U.S. Pacific Command the “Indo-Pacific Command.”

The U.S. government’s traditional approach to India, going back to 1947, aspired to balance relations with Islamabad and New Delhi. But as Washington’s relations with Pakistan soured over its support for insurgents in Afghanistan and China became an urgent concern, India decisively won this policy battle. Then a new contest emerged that effectively pitted India against Indifference—and Indifference commands a dedicated constituency.

Progress with India always requires time-consuming exceptions and workarounds to typical U.S. government policies and procedures. Indian “exceptionalism,” defense officials learned long ago, is a time suck. And the feeling is often mutual among skeptics of America in New Delhi, who believe dealing with Washington on issues like export and technology controls is unacceptably difficult.

Yet the advocates of the partnership have won important victories of late. In 2016, after more than a decade of negotiations, the Modi government signed a “foundational” agreement governing military logistics cooperation with the United States, a prerequisite to true operational level cooperation. Two years later a second foundational agreement governing advanced communications security was sealed. These agreements came despite hysterical heckles from India’s old guard foreign policy hands warning of Western imperial entrapment and the loss of Indian sovereignty. In reality, the agreements are important but far from intrusive, and their greatest significance may be to demonstrate the ability of both governments to show flexibility in setting the terms of practical partnership. Foundational agreements are boilerplate documents that the U.S. bureaucracy resists revising and political appointments generally avoid fiddling with. Yet, under former Secretary of Defense James Mattis and his India lead Dr. Joe Felter, the U.S. government did just that by renaming these agreements to make them unique to India. Indian exceptionalism won the policy battle that day.

This kind of progress is not exactly “low-hanging fruit,” but it bears emphasizing that these developments do not a meaningful defense partnership make. Easing export restrictions and technology controls is essential. Developing and vocalizing American and Indian political alignment is important. But these are first steps. The chief imperative of the U.S.-India defense partnership is to maintain multipolarity in Asia in the face of the most transformational development of our age: the rise of China’s economic and military power.

The Chinese are well on their way to dominating the security architecture of the Asia-Pacific, which will put severe strain on neighboring countries’ autonomy and freedom of decision-making. If not deterred by a countervailing coalition of hard power, the asymmetry in military capability risks causing a bandwagoning of support behind Beijing that poses not only a threat to the freedom of countries in the region but a global challenge to the postwar U.S.-led order. The recent progress in U.S.-India defense ties doesn’t come close to addressing the problem.

And this is not a theoretical problem—it’s a math problem. As U.S and Indian alignment has increased at the rhetorical level, a gap has grown between commitments and capabilities. Admittedly, assessing military power balances by comparing military spending totals is misleading for several reasons—it takes fewer resources to deny an adversary access to local territory than to project power across vast distances; not all countries’ defense acquisition procedures are equally efficient; and there is no universally accepted standard for measuring defense spending. Nonetheless, contrasting India’s military budget with that of China reveals a dangerous chasm.

This year India’s budget had the lowest defense allocation since 1962, the year China defeated an ill-equipped Indian military—and this in the midst of what Indian observes describe as a “readiness crisis” caused by shortfalls ranging from depleted fighter aircraft to lack of basic ammunition. By contrast, China’s defense budget has doubled during the past decade at an annual average of 8 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, propelling the country to become the second largest military spender in the world. And by most accounts China’s gotten good value for its money, in contrast to consistent criticism of the efficiency of India’s defense acquisition system. Looking purely at the budget numbers, former Indian military officers note that the nominal increases in India’s defense budgets have been neutralized by inflation and rupee depreciation. The allocation of funds also doesn’t support modernization. Manpower costs have grown from 44 percent in 2011 to 56 percent in 2019 while capital procurement expenditure dropped from 26 percent to 18 percent, according to the Indian Ministry of Defence’s in-house think tank. The Indian way of war has always privileged low costs and quantity over high-cost technologies of quality, but the universal trend in military modernization goes in the opposite direction.

A larger and different allocation of Indian defense spending is part of the solution, and expected to occur under the new Indian government, but India won’t match China’s military spending any time soon. Nor would such an increase necessarily be in India’s interest. After all, India is still a developing country, and issues like malnutrition, pollution, and employment rank far higher on the priority list for the average Indian than matching China’s military spending. Despite ambitious statements that suggest India is preparing for simultaneous full-scale land wars against Pakistan and China, Indian war plans—and the budget—are based largely on the country’s historical experience, which doesn’t include a full-spectrum war with China. The solution to the math problem has been apparent for some time.  Indian military power combined with U.S. military power can match and deter Chinese military power (India + U.S. ≥ China). Forging new defense alliances is the time-tested answer to the problem of a rising revisionist power. Yet the culture and history of the United States and India make this concept difficult to implement in practice.

The dominant tradition in Indian foreign policy is “non-alignment,” an approach that India’s first Prime Minister devised to protect Indian independence during the Cold War. The non-aligned approach largely endures to this day because old habits die hard and because this approach emanates from India’s particular geopolitical predicament. Indian diplomats frequently point out that they “live in a difficult neighborhood.” It isn’t hard to recognize that India is located between two countries—China and Pakistan—with which it has gone to war and may well do so again. Nor is it lost on a casual observer that Pakistan continues to sponsor and direct a violent campaign of irregular warfare and terrorism against India. In this sense, this statement seems to mimic the well-known Israeli retort to American government officials: “Don’t preach to us about our security. You live in Chevy Chase, Maryland. We’re sitting on top of a volcano.”

But after years of hearing this phrase from Indian diplomats, I came to understand that its meaning is quite different from the Hebrew-accented version. India’s message carries a different connotation: “Our neighborhood doesn’t afford us the luxury of directly confronting our foes.”

An irony at the core of Indian foreign policy is that autonomy is heralded to be its central principle but in practice Indian policies are often guided by foreign coercion. For example, India’s military equipment is overwhelmingly of Soviet origin and without the resupply of Russian spares and maintenance, India’s ground forces would literally come to a grinding halt. There is widespread disdain within the Indian military toward Russia for this state of affairs and a sincere desire to diversify away from Russia. Yet India keeps purchasing new Russia defense systems. Why?

The official answer is that Indian defense procurement is based on value for money and the Russian systems serve Indian military requirements at the best price. While this is true in some instances, such as a Russian partnership in nuclear submarines, there is also an unofficial second answer: India has little choice. Moscow will cut off the sustainment support the Indian military needs and retaliate by selling more advanced systems to China and Pakistan unless India buys new Russian systems. This is the cold logic of India’s “difficult neighborhood,” and it encourages an Indian approach to foreign relations that manifests in placation of foreign powers. India offers energy deals to Moscow, foundational agreements to the United States, and buys fighter aircraft from the French, all in an effort to keep such powers happy enough to respect Indian interests. But such hedging also forestalls the kind of deep partnerships that could truly empower the country.

The non-aligned mentality in the context of U.S.- India ties is sustained by two beliefs in particular. One is that “India doesn’t need America.” In recent years it has become clear that Indian elites have a vision of India rising in global influence in the midst of a “multipolar world.” The weakening of the “superpowers” in relative influence is a welcome sight for a generation that lived under international conditions designed and often dictated by denizens of Washington and Moscow. At Singapore’s Shangri-La Dialogue, Prime Minster Modi said: “President Putin and I shared our views on the need for a strong multipolar world order for dealing with the challenges of our times.” He continued by emphasizing that India’s “friendships are not alliances of containment. We choose the side of principles and values. . . not one side of a divide over the other.” This hedging stands in contrast to Washington’s vision of “A geopolitical competition between free and oppressive visions taking place in the Indo-Pacific,” in the words of Admiral Harry Harris. In January 2019, in a public exchange that brilliantly captures the divergence in American and Indian perspectives, General David Petraeus declared that India had to “take a side in this competition” to which India’s recently appointed Foreign Minister Dr. S Jaishankar retorted: “Yes, India will take a side, India’s side.”

The corollary of “India doesn’t need America” is “India doesn’t trust America.” On this point, Indian diplomats have reasonable grounds for suspicion. Governments can never be fully trusted, but consistency and predictability are very important considerations and by these criteria the United States has fallen short. In one breath the U.S. government declares India to be a Major Defense Partner and in another threatens to impose new sanctions on the Indian Ministry of Defense as part of the Countering America Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). Passed in retaliation for Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, CAATSA aims to deter foreign governments from transferring hard currency to Russia by threatening secondary sanctions on individuals or entities that buy significant equipment from the Russian military.

Yet in the context of India this legislation is entirely counterproductive because threatening sanctions exacerbates pre-existing concerns about the reliability of America’s defense industry and pushes the government closer to its time-tested supplier: Russia. No wonder that the number of announced defense deals between Russia and India have increased significantly since CAATSA was signed into law, with prospective orders including 750,000 AK-203 Kalashnikov assault rifles, four Krivak III-class frigates, five units of the S-400 Triumf air defense missile system and the ten-year lease of a nuclear-powered attack submarine from Russia. The absurdity of CAATSA in the Indian context was taken on by former Secretary of Defense Mattis, who successfully lobbied Congress to create a flexible waiver provision in 2018, but to utilize this waiver the Trump Administration will need to overcome a bureaucratic reflex for a uniform sanctions policy on all sales of specific Russian weapons systems. It’s far from certain that the Administration is able and willing to operate with such nuance.

Such self-inflicted wounds undermine arguably the most important component of the relationship: Defense industrial integration in the context of technology security vulnerability. If the U.S. government could flip a switch and make the Indian armed forces more capable than they are today, it would have every interest in doing so. Yet this American interest does not supersede the imperative of ensuring America’s crown jewel military technologies aren’t compromised and acquired by its adversaries, including the Russians. The issue of Indian funds being transferred to Russia and used to bolster Putin’s coffers (the problem CAATSA took aimed at and missed) is real but a fleeting concern driven largely by U.S. domestic politics. No reasonably informed person can conclude India plays a significant role in enabling Russian aggression. The far larger and more enduring problem is the ramifications of India’s continued defense relationship with the Russians (and others) on the security of advanced defense technologies that must be at the center of meaningful U.S.-India defense cooperation.

The strength of the U.S. armed forces derives from what’s called the “defense industrial base,” which is the product of innovation and investment made by America and its closest partners including Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Today, this allied industrial base faces multiple threats, most notably technology theft. The Department of Defense estimates that in recent years the United States has lost between $250 and $340 billion annually due to intellectual property theft and cybercrime. Congress and the Trump Administration are now in the process of constructing new walls in the form of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) restrictions and defense export restrictions to arrest this trend. The location of India with respect to these regulatory walls will set the parameters of the bilateral defense partnership for at least a generation. Will India be inside the camp with the United States and its close partners or on the other side with Russia and China?

This is the reason India’s pending acquisition of a Russia S-400 anti-aircraft system may be so consequential. Much has been made in public of the Turkish government’s pursuit of this system and the ramifications for NATO and the F-35 fighter aircraft partnership. India’s time in the spotlight of this issue is not far off. Due in part to the refusal of the United States to offer an alternative capability until India’s deal with Russia was effectively concluded, and due in part to the value for money the system provides in managing the risks associated with India’s depleted fighter aircraft fleet, the S-400s appear to be a done deal for India. While the threat of CAATSA sanctions for this purchase remains, the bigger problem is the sale’s implications on industrial collaboration. The S-400 is a giant radar and locating a Russian radar (and Russian technicians) in close proximity to advanced American stealth aircraft is a great way to compromise that stealth. As one Pentagon official put it, “The S-400 is a computer. The F-35 is a computer. You don’t hook your computer to your adversary’s computer and that’s basically what we would be doing.” This kind of transaction flies in the face of India’s most vocal defense priority: attracting FDI along with cutting-edge new technologies.

Fixing this problem—the challenge of defense manufacturing integration—needs to be the central focus of Indian and U.S. government efforts for there to be any hope of building a truly major defense partnership. This in turn requires the U.S. and Indian governments to reach understanding and agreement on the actions needed to create safe spaces for advanced defense technology work. This began years ago with Boeing and Lockheed’s establishment of joint production plants with Indian companies like TATA and Dynamatic Technologies that build components for platforms like the Apache attack helicopter and the C-130 military transportation aircraft. Yet there is a glass ceiling to such cooperation if India doubts American reliability and the U.S. government suspects that critical technology sent to India could be compromised. These are manageable problems—they aren’t zero-sum negotiations—but they require focus at a time when both democracies are distracted. It’s a question yet again of the urgent pushing out the important.

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The Neo-Nationalist Danger

There is such a thing as a benign—even a salutary—nationalism. Within the framework of a liberal democracy, cultivation and celebration of a common history, traditions, folkways, language, and religion can foster ties of pride and patriotism and bind a people together for common purposes.

But there is also such a thing as malignant nationalism, which easily metastasizes into fascism. Its hallmarks are the celebration of racial unity, the glorification of authoritarianism, and the institutionalization of bigotry. In the 1930s, it took root in two world powers, Germany and Japan. A decade into their nationalist fever, the two nations attacked the liberal democracies of the West, igniting a global conflagration. By the end of the war, some 60 million people were dead and much of civilization lay in ruins. The concept of nationalism, inextricably tied to the most terrible war in human history, elicited revulsion among thinking people around the world. Nationalism, wrote George Orwell in May 1945 just as Germany surrendered, was the “habit of identifying oneself with a single nation, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”

Today, three quarters of a century later, the great tide of democracy that was swept in by the Allied victory in World War II has begun to recede from its high-water mark in the first decade of this century. Nationalist and populist movements are renascent in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Major powers like Russia and China are fanning nationalist sentiment and harnessing it for their own ends. Is the resurgence we are witnessing of the benign or the malignant sort? The question arises here in the United States for an obvious reason: the ascent of Donald Trump.

In the White House, one finds a revolving door full of self-proclaimed nationalists who have been advising the President, which includes the now departed Michael Flynn, Stephen Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Michael Anton, along with the still-serving and highly influential Stephen Miller and John Bolton. At the grassroots, a bloc of MAGA voters—approximately 35 percent of the American electorate—follows their leader unwaveringly. For his part, Trump’s slogan of “America First,” and his pledge that his “foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people and American security above all else,” are both perfectly congruent with Orwell’s definition.

Donald Trump has proved amply capable of activating atavistic emotions among his followers, but he is not an orator of note, a war hero, or a thinker, deficiencies that put in doubt his ability to lead anything more ambitious than a cult of his own personality. When expounding a doctrine that has always been inchoate, we have already seen the best he can do, that is, the best he can do when he is not reading fine words written by others for his teleprompter:

You know, they have a word—it’s sort of became old-fashioned—it’s called a “nationalist.” And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, okay? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word.

Into the breach have stepped the intellectuals. If Trump lacks a framework for his policies, they are happy to supply one. One group, comprised largely of conservative Catholics associated with the journal First Things, has produced a manifesto titled “Against the Dead Consensus” that blasts a conservatism that has only “paid lip service to traditional values,” decries “tyrannical liberalism” and its globalist agents, and welcomes the nationalist resurgence:

For those who enjoy the upsides, a borderless world brings intoxicating new liberties. They can go anywhere, work anywhere. They can call themselves “citizens” of the world. But the jet-setters’ vision clashes with the human need for a common life. And it has bred resentments that are only beginning to surface. We embrace the new nationalism insofar as it stands against the utopian ideal of a borderless world that, in practice, leads to universal tyranny.

This is puerile. A number of signers of the declaration recently exercised their “intoxicating new liberties” to travel by jet on well-publicized book tours to distant points, including Australia and Chile. “Sail with us on a remarkable journey to the cosmopolitan elegance of Monte Carlo,” is how one conservative-nationalist publication is advertising its fundraising cruise. Apparently, globalism is so insidious that even conservative nationalists “go anywhere” and “work anywhere” these days.

Other more serious efforts are gathering steam. Under the auspices of a new organization called the Edmund Burke Foundation, a group of “nationalist conservative” thinkers is scheduled to assemble in Washington in mid-July with the purpose of bringing together those who grasp that “the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation.” The conference features such speakers as the aforementioned Bolton and Anton, as well as Fox’s Tucker Carlson. It is to be the “kick off for a protracted effort to recover and reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought as an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.”

Is this the stirring of a malign nationalism or something else? The chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation is Yoram Hazony, an Israeli student of political philosophy, who is the neo-nationalist movement’s leading theoretician. To obtain a glimpse into what nationalist thought consists of today, Hazony’s influential 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, is worth an extended look.

Given the horrors of 20th-century history, the case for nationalism carries some heavy burdens. Hazony begins his effort by attempting to lift them away. The idea that nationalism provoked two world wars and the Holocaust, he writes, is a “simplistic narrative, ceaselessly repeated,” with the repetition only serving to highlight the fact that nationalism has been badly mischaracterized and misunderstood. Nationalism, to Hazony, is the “best political order,” a “principled standpoint” rooted in the experience of the ancient Israelites of escaping from Egypt and building a homeland of their own. It regards the world as governed best “when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference.” It stands in contradistinction to “imperialism,” a political order or system that seeks to unite mankind, “as much as possible, under a single political regime.”

Imperialist movements, in Hazony’s idiosyncratic use of the term, tend to travel under the banner of a universal creed. He cites Christian anti-Semitism as the most famous example of the “hatred generated by imperialist or universalist ideologies,” but others have been little better: Islam, Marxism, globalism and liberalism “have proved themselves quite capable of inflaming similarly vicious hatreds against groups that are determined to resist the universal doctrines they propose.”

The dichotomy between imperialism and nationalism is the major theme of Hazony’s book. It is, he writes, “the fault line that has been uncovered at the heart of Western public life.” One stands on one or the other side of it; there is no middle ground: “Either you support, in principle, the ideal of an international government or a regime that imposes its will on subject nations when its officials regard this as necessary; or you believe that nations should be free to set their own course in the absence of such an international government or regime.”

Attempting to make good on the promise of his book’s title, Hazony identifies a number of “virtues of nationalism” that make it superior to “imperialist” political orders. Of these we shall consider the two most important.

“Individual liberties” is the first of these. Independent national states are the locus, according to Hazony, of the tradition of individual rights and freedom. The bonds of mutual loyalty that one finds in independent nation states permit the ruler and the strongest factions to limit their own powers, thereby enabling individual freedom. Only where such mutual loyalty is found can toleration take root. Dissenting voices can be experienced not only as a challenge, but also as “advancing the cause of the nation because they are expressions of free institutions that are the strength and glory of their nation.”

“Disdain for imperial conquest” is the second. Because nation-states exist on a limited scale, Hazony reasons, their rulers “inherit a political tradition that recognizes the boundaries of the nation and its defensive needs as placing natural limits upon its extension, and so tend to disdain the idea of conquering foreign nations.”

Although Nazi Germany is ritually held up as a counter case with respect to both individual freedom and disdain for imperial conquest, this, Hazony argues, is a misreading of the past. Despite the word “national” in the name of the Nazi Party, “Hitler was no advocate of nationalism,” states Hazony bluntly. Hitler’s model for the Third Reich, he maintains, was not the nation-state, “which he saw as an effete contrivance of the English and French,” but rather the First Reich, the Holy Roman Empire. In effect, Hitler was anti-nationalist and pro-empire and Nazi Germany was “an imperial state in every sense.” Germany went to war not for, but against, nationalism, to put an end to “the principle of the national independence and the self-determination of peoples once and for all.” By the same token, the Holocaust, the Nazi extermination of the Jews, was not part of a nationalist project, but something that “could not have been conceived or attempted outside the context of Hitler’s effort to revive and perfect long-standing German aspirations to universal empire.”

In imperial orders as they have appeared across history, one power typically dominates all the others. The ruling class and the armed forces are loyal not to the entire constellation of nations under their dominion but only to “the ruling nation around which the imperial state is constructed.” For this reason, “[a]n imperial state cannot be a free state. It is always a despotic state.” Failing to grasp that imperialism inevitably leads to despotism was a cardinal sin of those “Western liberals” who, in the aftermath of World War II, mistakenly pointed to German nationalism as the fuel that had ignited the global conflagration.

To prevent Germany from rising again and precipitating yet another world war after having already precipitated two, these liberals took the profoundly mistaken step of “dismantl[ing] the system of independent nations that had given Germany the right to make decisions for itself.” In its place, they erected a super-state, the European Union, with the objective of chaining Germany down. This, to Hazony, was a historic blunder, replacing one despotism with another in the heart of Europe. The West European nations, writes Hazony, “had not feared the Germans because of their nationalism, but because of their universalism and imperialism.” Unwittingly, the proponents of European unity were actually doing Germany’s bidding: fulfilling a longstanding aspiration by creating a “renewed ‘German empire.’”

The European Union is one of “two great imperialist projects” on which Hazony trains his fire. The second is the “American empire,” in which nations that do not abide by American interpretations of international law are “coerced into doing so, principally by means of American military might.” The EU in Hazony’s schema is a kind of sub-empire, a “protectorate” of the American empire with the American President playing “the role of the emperor in today’s Europe.” The true nature of these imperial arrangements has been effectively hidden from the public. Europeans, for their part, avert their gaze because they “might not relish the prospect of a renewed German empire,” while Americans look away because they have often “balked at the idea of an ‘American empire.’”

But Hazony locates a deeper cause for the “blindness” about the liberal empires, which can be found in the very nature of liberalism itself. John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government—“modernity’s most famous liberal manifesto”—he argues, is fundamentally flawed, elevating a false individualism, and a fictitious act of consent to an imaginary social contract, above the tangible attachments that “bind human beings into families, tribes, and nations.” With borderlessness exalted by Locke’s liberalism, transnational empires have become so widely accepted as to become invisible, the background to ordinary life. Locke’s “dream world” and “utopian vision” have become “the virtually unquestioned framework for what an educated person needs to know about the political world.”

So thoroughly has the doctrine been inculcated into elites that a veritable army of Lockean liberals has been engaged in a war against dissenters, with the opponents of liberalism, according to Hazony, “vanquished one by one.” Their victories have left a “dogmatic imperialism as the dominant voice within the liberal camp.” Increasingly, the self-proclaimed partisans of liberty have been transformed into their antithesis, becoming “among the most powerful agents fomenting intolerance and hate in the Western world today.”

What are we to make of all this?

Hazony is obviously correct that some measure of national unity is essential if individual freedom is to thrive. A country riven by tribal warfare or factionalism and hatred is not fertile soil for liberty. And Hazony is also correct that, historically, the growth of individual freedom has developed within the protective confines of the nation-state. But if national unity is necessary for liberty, it is hardly sufficient.

To illustrate this, one need neither theorize nor delve into the past; empirical observation of the contemporary record alone tells a convincing story. According to Freedom House’s 2018 global survey, among the 195 independent nation-states of the world, only 45 percent are free. Fifty-five percent are either “not free” or only “partly free.” To be sure, some of the not-free countries are in the grip of what Hazony would call imperialist domination, like the various Communist and Islamic countries on the Freedom House list. But for every truly independent nation-state in which individual freedom thrives, there are three times as many independent nation-states where strongmen rule, democratic institutions are weak or absent, the rule of law is shaky or worse, and civil rights are denied. Interestingly, among the 28 countries that are living under what Hazony calls the “despotism” of the European Union, Freedom House rates every one of them as free. Overall, however, the data considerably darken Hazony’s rose-tinted picture of nation-states as incubators of individual freedom. It is not the nation-state per se that nurtures individual freedom, as Hazony would have it, but only a particular type of nation-state: namely, liberal democracy.

How about “disdain for imperial conquest”? Is that the disposition of the average nation-state, today or in the past?

Hazony devotes an extended segment of his book to the Westphalian treaties of the 17th century that, among other things, established a general recognition of exclusive sovereignty among their signatories, ushering in the modern international system. Hazony traces this order to biblical precepts and calls it “the Protestant Construction of the West,” a collection of independent nation-states all pursuing their own interests, which is his ideal ordering of the world. Indeed, Hazony waxes rhapsodically about its character: “the “diverse forms of self-government, religion and culture” it allowed to thrive, the “storm of dormant energies” it unleashed, the “unique dynamism” it brought to the nations of Europe, the “stunning degree” of experimentation in government, economics, theology, and science, and the “significant advances” it produced “in finance, industry, medicine, philosophy, music and art.”

It sounds like an idyll. But did this order of independent national states promote individual liberty and did it disdain conquest? In other words, were Hazony’s supposed virtues of nationalism in evidence? On the evidence offered in his own book, the free and independent nation-states of the era “were constantly resorting to war over territories and trade.” And despite the Westphalian belief in inviolate sovereignty, and the supposed “disdain for imperial conquest,” even as they warred with each other they also avidly engaged in the colonial project of “conquest and subjugation of foreign peoples” across the globe, all the while maintaining “unconscionable racialist arrangements and institutions” on their home territories.

One senses not a minor contradiction in Hazony’s argument: In the “order of independent states” that he calls the best regime, the supposed virtues of his preferred nationalist order are absent, and all the vices of evil imperialism are present. Struggling to stuff his theoretical propositions into a historical box in which they do not fit, the only exit from the contradiction Hazony can find is that the Protestant Construction imparted “a form that provided a basis for the eventual remediation of many of its deficiencies.” But of course, one must ask, was it the form of independent nation-state that provided for such “eventual remediation,” or was it the rise and growing acceptance of liberal democratic ideas and institutions? These are not questions Hazony pauses to entertain.

The Westphalian peace aside, Nazism would seem to put Hazony’s vision of a freedom-supporting and largely pacific nationalism to an even more stringent test.

Of course, it is incontrovertible that Hitler, as Hazony argues, had grand imperialist aspirations that included conquest of the world and domination and/or extermination of all non-“Aryan” races, and was therefore not “nationalist” as Hazony defines that term. But the social force that created Nazism, that propelled Hitler to the leadership of the most powerful country in Europe, and that fostered an idea of German world domination was indeed nationalism. “People of the same blood should be in the same REICH. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State”—those are Adolf Hitler’s own words. In denying the obvious, Hazony is proceeding precisely according to the flawed reasoning of what is known as the No True Scotsman fallacy. Positing nationalism as “the best political order,” Hazony removes villainous nationalists from his favored category, letting Nazi “nationalism” off the hook while the “imperialist” EU is arraigned as a criminally autocratic regime, fomenting intolerance and spewing hatred.

Today’s EU can indeed be faulted for many things. As George Weigel has summed it up in a judicious survey of democracy’s discontents in National Affairs, its “bureaucracy is often overbearing, impervious to criticism, dismissive of traditional national mores, and hostile to religious conviction in the public square.” But those serious deficiencies are by no means the entire story of European integration. Weigel reminds us that

EU funds have rebuilt much of the infrastructure of the new democracies of central and eastern Europe. They have helped to recover and restore much of the cultural patrimony in architecture and art that was severely damaged by six years of war and 45 years of communist neglect and worse. Moreover, transnational institutions like NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have preserved the peace after a century in which Europe was twice on the verge of destroying itself — and taking much of the world with it, had the second round had a different outcome. So “transnational” does not always equal “bad.”

But to Hazony, transnational does always equal bad, an absolute evil that should never be accepted: “We should not let a hairbreadth of our freedom be given over to foreign bodies under any name whatsoever.” To him the EU is a despotism pure and simple and the historic accomplishments of the EU cited by Weigel do not figure into his calculations. In crude fashion, he calls the thinking behind European integration “closer to being a good joke than competent political analysis.” But it was not “Western liberals” alone who understood that Nazi Germany had been infected by the nationalist disease, and it was not those same liberals alone who were the prime movers behind European integration.

It was none other than the most preeminent conservative of the 20th century, Winston Churchill, who in Zurich in September 1946 spoke of the “frightful nationalistic quarrels, originated by the Teutonic nations in their rise to power, which we have seen in this 20th century, and even in our own lifetime, wreck the peace and mar the prospects of all mankind.” And it was Churchill who saw a path forward in European integration:

There is a remedy which, if it were generally and spontaneously adopted by the great majority of people in many lands, would as if by a miracle transform the whole scene and would in a few years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and as happy as Switzerland is today. What is this sovereign remedy? It is to recreate the European fabric, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom.

“We must build a kind of United States of Europe” is how Churchill concluded. The idea that Churchill sought to establish an American or German empire on the continent is ridiculous.

We can only speculate what Europe would look like today if the West had followed Hazony’s retrospective recommendation to allow post-war Germany to have “retained the right to make decisions for itself.” Considering Germany’s habit of igniting devastating world wars, it would have been an unthinkably foolish gamble for statesmen to take in 1945. We do not need to speculate about what Europe would be like if the United States had not spilled blood and treasure to impose the “American world order” that Hazony insouciantly condemns, an effort that aimed not at establishing empire but rescuing Europe from Nazi occupation, ensuring its reconstruction from the devastation of war, and protecting it over decades from the very real prospect of Soviet aggression.

Sounding every bit like a Cold War revisionist historian in the mode of William Appleman Williams, Hazony lambastes the United States for its “hunger to control other nations” and likens American investment in the defense of Europe to a kind of resource curse, akin to Saudi “oil gushing from the ground,” which has had the effect of lulling Europeans into “a condition of perpetual childhood,” a people blithely and blindly “smitten with the love of liberal empire.” It is a reflection of the diseased condition of contemporary conservatism that quite a few American conservatives have uncritically accepted a work with such a pronounced anti-American tenor, so dismissive of America’s historic contribution to the peace of the world, and which denigrates an alliance of liberal democracies as a form of despotism.

Space does not permit a full response to Hazony’s cartoon version of John Locke’s social contract theory. Suffice it to say, both Locke’s political thought and the larger foundations of liberalism are much richer than the straw version that Hazony holds up to pull apart. The philosopher who wrote that God made “man such a Creature, that, in his own Judgment, it was not good for him to be alone” is not recognizable in Hazony’s caricature of Locke as the prophet of unbridled individualism. One point demands further comment here: Hazony’s suggestion that Lockean liberalism has evolved into a doctrine of intolerance. He complains that “the scope of legitimate disagreements” has been “progressively reduced” while the penalties for dissent have grown “more and more onerous,” and he warns about “[i]ncreasing demands for conformity to a single universal standard in speech and religion.” With great indignation, he declares that liberalism has embraced “the worst features of the medieval Catholic empire upon which it is unwittingly modeled, including a doctrine of infallibility, as well as a taste for the inquisition and the index.”

Like Patrick Deneen in his Why Liberalism Failed?, in drawing this picture of liberal democracy as repressive system, Hazony is borrowing a leaf from the leftist intellectuals pointed to by Jean-Francois Revel in his The Totalitarian Temptation for whom “the faults of free societies are so magnified that freedom appears to mask a totalitarian reality.” The political correctness about which Hazony is complaining is a poisonous disease that needs to be—and can be, and is being—combated. The more important point is that it is enforced not by officialdom, as in the Spain of the inquisition, but almost entirely either by social pressure to conform or by private agents, typically university administrators. The fact of the matter is that no one is compelling Hazony and his neo-nationalist colleagues to adhere “to a single universal standard in speech and religion,” let alone threatening to burn them at the stake. Freedom of speech does not come with a certificate of exemption from criticism, which appears to be Hazony’s underlying complaint.

One of the nationalist principles Hazony emphatically propounds is “non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.” This, of course, leaves open the problem of what to do about genocidal dictators like Hitler, a figure who seems to bedevil Hazony’s analysis at every turn. As is well known, in the course of the 1930s, as Hitler tightened the noose around the Jews of Germany, there was a significant number of Americans who believed passionately in something very much like Hazony’s principle of non-interference. Like Hazony, they regarded themselves as nationalists. Some were admirers of Mussolini and Hitler. Most were proponents of the slogan Trump has resurrected from that era, “America First.” To these America Firsters, Germany’s persecution of the Jews was simply the trouble of a wretched people in a faraway land and of no concern whatsoever to the United States.

Some of Hazony’s nationalist compatriots like Patrick Buchanan insist to this day that American intervention in Europe in World War II was a historic error. Such a stance is evidently an embarrassment to Hazony, who identifies himself as a “Jewish nationalist, a Zionist, all my life.” Confronted with the problem of a Hitler, Hazony jettisons his principle of non-interference and shifts into reverse. In some instances, Hazony avers, independent nation-states “have no choice but to interfere.” Hazony’s rationale for this 180-degree turnabout is that the crimes Hitler committed against his own people “were only a prelude to the attempt to destroy all the neighboring national states and to annex their populations to a universal empire.” But as Suzanne Schneider asked in a pointed review in Foreign Policy, “How is one to know for sure when crimes committed internally are a prelude to those of outward aggression?” The answer, of course, is that one cannot know. But even if one could know, what course of action would Hazony recommend if the internal crimes were not a prelude to aggression, as in the wholesale slaughter of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 or if Hitler had confined his genocidal ethnic cleansing to within German borders? Would Hazony, like Buchanan, recommend that the United States remain a bystander under the banner of America First? The return of a 1930s-style isolationism is where Hazony’s principles appear to lead.

Closely related to the problem of ethnic cleansing is the question of the homogeneity of the nation-state. Although Hazony does not include it in his enumeration of virtues, in the course of his argument it emerges that he regards homogeneity as a significant strength for an independent nation-state. The unwelcome “diversity” that one finds in empires or other agglomerations of peoples, he writes, makes them “more difficult to govern, weakening the mutual loyalties that had held it together, dissipating the attention and resources in the effort to suppress internal conflicts and violence that had previously been unknown to it.” For Hazony, what is required for the establishment of a free state is “a majority nation whose cultural dominance” is so “overwhelming” that “resistance appears to be futile.” He approvingly quotes Johann Gottfried Herder, the 18th-century father of German nationalism, who warns against “the wild mixing of races and nationalities under one scepter.”

The United States thus poses a special challenge to the nationalist idea, for ours is a land where there has long been just such “wild mixing of races and nationalities.” Rooted in the involuntary influx of the slave trade and the voluntary influx of immigration, our diversity in the 19th century brought us the bloody strife of a civil war, but in the 20th century it contributed to our remarkable success. Yet diversity is disquieting to Hazony and his fellow neo-nationalists; it is regarded not a strength but a weakness. Many of America’s nationalist conservatives, it emerges on inspection, harbor a pronounced strand of nativism.

To Tucker Carlson, a keynote speaker at the Washington conference, immigration is something that “makes our own country poor and dirtier and more divided.” Michael Anton warns that “a republic that opens its doors to immigrants must choose carefully whom and how many to accept.” He cautions darkly against “ongoing mass immigration that. . . .‘fundamentally transforms’ one American community after the next.” He inveighs against “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.” As for Stephen Bannon, at a rightist rally in France, he was the most explicit. He told the crowd, “Let them call you racist, let them call you xenophobes, let them call you nativist. Wear it as a badge of honor.” The racialist tenor of such alarums is as transparent as Donald Trump’s comments about the “very fine people” among the white supremacists carrying tiki torches as they marched in Charlottesville.

In the statement announcing the Washington gathering, nationalist political theories grounded in race are specifically disavowed. But race, in many contexts, is intrinsic to the nationalist idea, as, for example, in homogeneous Japan, or in China, where the majority Han are today brutally suppressing the minority Uighurs, putting millions into “re-education” camps to suppress their Muslim faith. In Central Europe a similar dynamic is at work in a far milder form. Illiberal governments like those of Poland and Hungary are both striving to make ethnic and religious homogeneity central to their country’s national identity, seriously discomfiting minority groups within their populations. To Hazony, the illiberal drift and the ethnocentrism are just fine. Indeed, he singles out Poland and Hungary—along with unnamed anti-liberal forces in a number of other countries—for praise as “holdouts against universal liberalism.” All they desire is “to defend their own unique cause and perspective.” For “wishing to chart an independent course that is their own” they will soon “be hated as the Jews have been hated.”

This is a repugnant amalgamation of past horrors with present ugliness in the service of a whitewash. In Hungary, Jews were indeed hated; during World War II, Hungary’s Arrow Cross and Nazi forces operating in concert murdered some 568,000 of them. Today, Hungary’s avowedly illiberal government under Viktor Orban’s ruling Fidesz party has been engaged in incursions against tolerance and a free press and has conducted a thinly veiled anti-Semitic campaign using the Jewish financier George Soros as a bogeyman. Hazony takes Orban’s side, hailing Hungary as one of a number of “dissident” nations gamely standing up to the autocracy that is the European Union.

The Poland that Hazony is praising for holding out against universal liberalism has equally bloody hands from World War II, and evidently also a continuing guilty collective conscience. That is precisely why its ruling Law and Justice Party recently passed a law, subsequently repealed in the face of a global outcry, criminalizing references to the extensive Polish complicity in the mass murder of Jews during and after World War II. What Hazony calls the Polish’s government’s “unique cause and perspective” is, in pertinent part, nothing more than a sub-branch of Holocaust denial. “I cannot defend all of the particular movements that will arise from [the] desire for national freedom,” Hazony disingenuously writes, even as he praises Poland and Hungary for their resistance to the EU and declines to criticize any aspect of their behavior, save for the insipid pronouncement that “we will not be enamored with what every nation does with [its] freedom.”

In actual fact, what every nation does with its freedom cannot be a matter of indifference to Europe and the rest of the world. Marc Plattner, editor of the Journal of Democracy, makes a critical point: “The fact that contemporary liberal democracies do not fear that force will be used against them by their fellow liberal democracies makes possible a previously unprecedented degree of integration among them.” The inverse corollary is that if one or more of the EU member states uses its “freedom” to cease being a liberal democracy—in other words, uses its freedom to cease being free—the future of integration is the least of what is at stake. We are enjoying one of the longest bloodless intervals (with the peripheral case of the Balkan wars aside) in Europe’s endless history of slaughter. That is not the result of happenstance and it is certainly not an accomplishment of nationalists pushing their particularistic agendas. Credit goes overwhelmingly to European integration and the “universal liberalism” that Hazony, dispensing with all essential moral and political distinctions, lumps together with Marxism and Nazism as a potentially “genocidal” ideology that fuels “the desire for imperial conquest.” This is egregious. An outlook that regards liberalism, Nazism, and Communism as equally aggressive movements, equally capable of generating intolerance and spewing hatred, is both detached from historical reality and morally reprehensible.

The statement announcing the Washington conference of conservative nationalists calls for the “revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing” (emphasis added). This is an unsubtle assertion that attachment to the ideas adumbrated in our sacred documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is insufficient to unite Americans in a common polity. It is a truism that America is not just an idea but also a place. But Hazony writes disparagingly that “a love of the founding documents” and of “the ‘American creed’ that they supposedly contain” (emphasis added) is now regularly invoked “as a substitute for an attachment to the American nation itself.” In other words, the fact that the United States is “supposedly” a creedal nation, founded on a belief in liberty and self-government, is less significant to our cohesion than our ties of blood and soil. When Hazony insists that the United States “is still a nation like all others,” that is precisely what he has in mind.

As I noted at the outset, in the framework of a liberal democracy, celebration of a common history, traditions, folkways, language, and religion can help to foster ties of loyalty and patriotism and bind a people together. But the philosopher Roger Scruton is surely right that “we must distinguish national loyalty, which is the sine qua non of consensual government in the modern world, from nationalism, which is a belligerent ideology that looks for a source of government higher than the routines of settlement and neighborhood.” One does not need Hazony’s highly elaborate yet rickety superstructure to defend national loyalty, be it of the American or Israeli or any other liberal-democratic kind. But America’s neo-nationalists are after something else. Those willing to give an intellectual thug like Tucker Carson a premier platform and appear on a dais beside him are, if not trying to ride the populist-nationalist wave, at the very least giving intellectual respectability to its unsavory side. By no means all but more than a few of the featured speakers at the Washington gathering are avid Trump supporters who wrap themselves in lofty words about the revival of our unique national traditions, while traducing those very traditions.

For all the high-sounding talk about how nationalism can “bind a people together and bring about their flourishing,” they say not a word about the cruelty, the misogyny, the race-baiting, the overpowering moral stench emanating from the White House. When they are not busy applauding, they remain scrupulously silent in the face of policies that wrench children from their parents’ arms at the border and thrust them into cages, that deport the spouses of men and women serving in our armed forces, that demonize refugees and immigrants. They ignore the words that encourage police brutality, mock the disabled, spread falsehoods about American Muslims cheering by the thousands the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. They wink and nod at the nepotism, the corruption, the self-dealing, the incitement of violence, the incessant and compulsive lying, the open invitation to foreign powers to intervene in U.S. elections. On the mentality of the nationalist, Orwell is pertinent yet again: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it.”

Even if it is not yet metastatic, a malignant form of nationalism is being injected into the American body politic. A set of profoundly illiberal ideas are being propounded at a moment when the fragility of liberal democracy has been exposed. We are drawing to the end of a low, dishonest decade, in which the odor of the 1930s has been filling the air. One can never know in advance what events await us, but we have arrived at a juncture in which another terrible chapter of history might well get written. This is not the hour in which intellectuals should be tossing matches into the kindling. Yet so they are. It is astonishing that Hazony’s contention that liberalism promotes “vicious hatred” while nationalism tends to be benign—a bizarre inversion of the historical record—has gained currency in some quarters of the Right. The neo-nationalists who are providing an intellectual cover for Trumpism and aspiring authoritarians around the world need to be mercilessly defeated on the battlefield of ideas as if September 1, 1939 were approaching.

Sir William Wallace sprinkled cinnamon in his porridge.

Sir William Wallace is not a true Scotsman.

No nationalist would engage in conquest and genocide.

Hitler engaged in conquest and genocide.

Hitler is not a true nationalist.

Democracy Without Borders: Global Challenges to Liberal Democracy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), p. 110.

See, for example, pages 11, 191, and 229 in The Virtue of Nationalism.

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A New Birth of Freedom

“We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.”

—Ronald Reagan, Address to the British Parliament, June 8, 1982

Thirty-seven years ago, in one of his most visionary and enduringly influential speeches, President Ronald Reagan declared democracy to be the wave of the future, and committed the United States of America to a campaign to advance its cause worldwide. In what came to be known simply as the “Westminster Speech,” Reagan embraced a vision for fostering, through peaceful means, “the infrastructure of democracy—the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities—which allows a people to choose their own way.” The speech accelerated momentum for the establishment, the following year, of the National Endowment for Democracy, and ignited a new generation of efforts by the U.S. and European democracies to assist struggles for freedom around the world.

The rich democracies did not generate the growing pace of transitions to democracy—what the late Samuel Huntington would dub the “third wave of global democratization.” But Western democratic assistance, normative embrace, and diplomatic support helped to tip the balance against dictatorship time and again: first in Portugal in the mid-1970s, then in Latin America in the late ’70s and early ’80s, then in East Asia through the mobilization of people power in the Philippines and Korea, and finally through the big bang of democratic expansion in Eastern Europe and Africa after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the mid-1990s, the world had been transformed. For the first time in history, a majority of states in the world were democracies, a majority of people in the world lived in democracies, and there was a critical mass of democracies (at least about a quarter) in every region of the world except the Middle East.

Those were heady and inspiring days, and maybe we can be forgiven if we thought that they would go on forever. As Francis Fukuyama observed in his famous work, The End of History and the Last Man, the big ideological battle seemed to be over: There was no foreseeable rival on the horizon to the basic model of democracy and market capitalism. And through the rest of the 1990s and the early years of this century, democracy was the only broadly legitimate form of government in the world. New democracies kept being born—for example with the “Color Revolutions” in Yugoslavia, Georgia, and Ukraine. And democracy had so much momentum that even some of the world’s poorest and most brutalized states—such as Liberia and Sierra Leone—were adopting representative government, with considerable international assistance, as a way of exiting from the deadly cycle of civil war and economic implosion. For the first six years of the new century, levels of freedom and democracy continued to rise.

Then, around 2006, this progress ground to a halt. The following year, 2007, was the first in what Freedom House has since identified as a trend of 13 consecutive years in which more countries declined in freedom than gained (usually by a considerable margin, in stark contrast to the preceding post-Cold War pattern). Democracy was failing in big and strategically important states, like Russia, Venezuela, and then, with worrisome signs of corruption, political decay, and illiberal ambitions of elected rulers, in Turkey, Kenya, Bangladesh, and much of Central America.

As I note in my new book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, what began more than a decade as a modest democratic recession has now mutated into something much more perilous. Every category of regime in the world is slipping backwards. Many of the world’s “illiberal” democracies—which have free and fair elections to decide who governs but lack a strong rule of law to contain abuse of power and protect civil liberties—are not only becoming less liberal, they are breaking down altogether. This has typically happened through a gradual process of strangulation by elected executives like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.

These incipient autocrats start by demonizing the media as enemies of the people, trashing the opposition as worthless and unpatriotic, and purging the judiciary and the civil service of independent-minded professionals who might check their ambitions for total and arbitrary power. Then they continue by ruthlessly politicizing all these independent institutions and bending them to their will. Civil society organizations and universities are targeted for attacks and retribution for their “disloyalty.” Gradually the media, the business community, and the military and intelligence agencies fall into line, or they pay the price. The Brazilian autocrat of the 1930s, Getulio Vargas, had a concise philosophy to encompass this creeping assault on democracy: “For my friends everything, for my enemies, the law!”

But the decline does not end with the transition to “pseudo-democracy.” The noose has also been tightening around the necks of political oppositions and civil society in this category of regimes, places that were not democracies but at least had some surviving beachheads of political pluralism and freedom. Cambodia’s parliament has gone from a forum where opposition legislators could at least question and challenge President Hun Sen to an empty vessel with no opposition at all—a rubber stamp for a republic of fear. In 2017, Uganda’s parliament was beaten into retreat—literally, physically, by military thugs—in order to expedite the passage of a constitutional amendment that would permit the corrupt and autocratic President, Yoweri Musevini (already in power for some three decades), to have as many more terms in office as he would like.

The worst category of regimes, the deeply authoritarian ones, have become more ruthlessly so. Egypt’s cynical and brutal military dictator, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has not only completely crushed the opposition and independent civil society but has done so with a level of vengeful violence that has left the society traumatized. It would be hard to conjure a more fitting metaphor for this cruel campaign than the elected President whom the general toppled, Mohammed Morsi, collapsing in a courtroom and then dying soon after as a result of the pitiless treatment meted out to him in prison. Venezuela’s dictator has shown his willingness to starve and ruin his nation if necessary to hang on to power. Russia under Putin bans and purges an ever-widening circle of civil society and political opposition. China’s Communist regime detains well more than a million minority Uighur Muslims in political “reeducation” (translation: concentration) camps, while deploying stunning advances in facial recognition and other digital and genetic technologies to create the first truly Orwellian surveillance state—in fact a neo-totalitarian system in which Orwell finally meets Huxley.

Added to all of this has been the alarming decline of democracy in the very same democracies of Europe and the United States that played such a vital supporting role in democracy’s third wave. Buffeted by years of destabilizing erosion of liberal democracy’s political and social contract—the decline of economic security and opportunity for much of the middle and working class, the displacing and disorienting pace of globalization and automation, and the surge of unfamiliar or accelerating flows of immigration—liberal democracies now confront a growing illiberal, xenophobic, populist backlash against established elites, traditional parties, and even hallowed democratic norms of tolerance and willingness to compromise. This is not only pushing deeply illiberal and polarizing parties into the front ranks of parliament, it has also produced the shocks of Viktor Orbán and the death of Hungarian democracy, the Law and Justice Party and the assault on judicial independence in Poland, Brexit and the unraveling of the British party system, and now in the United States the presidency of Donald Trump, with its contempt for norms of truth, tolerance, and transparency, and its escalating assaults on the checks and balances that sustain our liberal democracy.

Moreover, this decay is happening in (and to some degree because of) a new international context that is inverting the democratic resolve and energy immortalized in Reagan’s Westminster Speech. Now the international momentum lies with a Russian kleptocracy that is intervening in democratic media and elections to try discredit democracy—and the very notion of truth; and with a Chinese Communist party-state that is pouring money and manpower into a vast and rapidly expanding global propaganda machinery, the world’s most ambitious program for building physical infrastructure, a concerted campaign to corner control of many of the world’s most strategic ports and sea lanes, and a rising ambition to achieve regional domination (at least) by pushing the United States out of Asia and the Western Pacific.

These ill winds of authoritarian populism, Russian rage, Chinese ambition, and American complacency are now gathering gale force, and threaten to converge into what Winston Churchill would call “a gathering storm.” This is the sense in which we are at a hinge point in history, where the world’s leading democracies must either restore their democratic vigor at home and resolve internationally, or resign themselves to a new and frightening era of surging, emboldened, and aggressive dictatorship. Even a casual acquaintance with the history of the last century clearly points to the path we must take.

It is important to recognize not only the danger but also the opportunity. True, established democratic institutions may be performing poorly and losing public confidence. But democracies offer their citizens the means to reform and correct them without overthrowing them. Dictatorships do not. Hence, they are always a step away from a whopping legitimacy crisis. That is the fear that now grips Vladimir Putin every time tens of thousands of young Russians pour into urban streets protesting corruption, administrative abuse, and electoral fraud. That is the fear that grips Xi Jinping as he proves unable to get a serious grip on intractable corruption in the Chinese system—intractable because only an independent judiciary, truly separated from the Communist Party, is capable of controlling corruption, and no dictatorship can tolerate an independent judiciary, and thus a true rule of law. This is the quandary that Xi and his fellow communist rulers of China find themselves in, as two million people from every age and walk of life in Hong Kong show their readiness to take to the streets, again and again, to defend their last vestiges of freedom and the rule of law in that small piece of liberalism that Beijing promised to preserve in 1997 but instead has squeezed and intimidated with growing arrogance. This is the passion—not simply the anger over 30 years of corruption and repression, but the positive aspiration for freedom—that mobilized waves of protest from an impressively broad and peaceful cross-section of civil society in Sudan, finally bringing down the genocidal tyrant, Omar al-Bashir, and now aiming for something more daring, a military regime committed to real democratization.

The truth is, people want to be free, and international law gives them broad rights to civil and political freedom. No military coup, no authoritarian playbook, no election fraud, no party ideology, no system of surveillance can extinguish those realities. The great question now is whether we in the wealthy Western democracies will recommit to our own constitutional norms and founding ideals. Ronald Reagan understood, as did Jimmy Carter before him and every American President since—until Donald Trump—that our own freedom is bound up inextricably with the fate of freedom in the world, and that we have the power, through our own example and through our tools of assistance, diplomacy, and sanctions on dictators, to help inspire and empower other peoples to realize their rights under international law.

The inspiring and indefatigable protests in Hong Kong and Khartoum, and in a host of other places from Kinshasa to Kazakhstan, remind us that oppressed people will take risks to press for freedom whenever the opportunity arises, and that tactics of non-violent civil resistance can work to challenge the mightiest bastions of tyranny. For all the current flaws of American democracy, we retain the power and imagination to help launch what Lincoln called a new birth of freedom, if we can rejuvenate our will.

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