Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 40

De-Aeschylation

The Oresteia

Directed by Michael Kahn

Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, DC, through June 2

Their favorite bonding activity is murder. Parents kill children, children kill parents, and vengeance is always on somebody’s to-do list. It can only be one family: the blighted House of Atreus, transmitted to us by Aeschylus in his Oresteia. They and their misery are now appearing at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC, through June 2.

It’s a production that would be worth attending for rarity value alone. The play is a “free” adaptation by Ellen McLaughlin commissioned by the Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC), but opportunities to see the Oresteia in any form are scarce. And this one, fortunately, is ably performed, eye-catching and suitably tragic. For those with a taste for classics, I have no hesitation in saying: go.

It’s also an adaptation that earns that “freely adapted” label—for better and worse.

The basic story of the Oresteia is familiar. Triumphant King Agamemnon comes home from the Trojan War, only to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. Argument for the defense: in order to appease an angry god who wouldn’t let his fleet sail for war, Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. (This isn’t even the most gruesome child murder in the family; Agamemnon’s father Atreus killed his brother Thyestes’s sons and fed them to their unwitting father at a feast.) Later, Orestes, the couple’s son, avenges his father by murdering his mother. Then, pursued by spirits of vengeance, the Erinyes, Orestes seeks help from Athena, who convenes a court of humans to decide his guilt. Civilization puts an end to the blood feud.

That’s Aeschylus, but not quite McLaughlin. But before I get to the adaptation’s twists, let me say that the theater’s departing artistic director, Michael Kahn, does right by them. The adaptation’s poetry is nicely balanced by a selection of laugh lines—all of them delivered perfectly. (My favorite: Orestes, returned home for revenge, bangs on the door of the family house. A servant emerges: “Are you trying to wake the dead?” “Yes.”) Sitting in the middle of the theater, I could feel the audience’s suspense, which might be the highest recommendation of all. The set, a single house, is all that’s needed for this family drama, and the burial of Agamemnon is a superb use of the stage (I won’t spoil it for you).

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Photo of Kelley Curran by Scott Suchman

As Clytemnestra, Kelley Curran lights up when she pretends to welcome her husband home, while Kelcey Watson as Agamemnon is regal, weary, and somehow sympathetic at times. That’s tough to pull off, since Agamemnon comes across as a vindictive cold fish in ancient sources. My favorite actor was chorus member Franchelle Stewart Dorn, an affiliated artist with the STC—though all the cast had moments of magnetism, she alone was at home onstage the whole time. Josiah Bania as Orestes is a lost puppy and Rad Pereira as Electra a surly, sanctimonious teenager—both updates on the original characterizations, and both well performed. Pereira has a gift for mildly irritating zeal. She’d do beautifully in a play about modern politics.

The production makes a few minor missteps, admittedly; the unified gesturing of the chorus is a tad silly, and the playwright overindulges on the ghostly visitations. But the most interesting question here is: does an update of Aeschylus actually work?

In McLaughlin’s first act, a restless Clytemnestra awaits Agamemnon’s return, remembering her daughter Iphigenia. As she reminisces, both Iphigenia and Agamemnon appear to act out that terrible story. Nothing like this happens in the play Agamemnon, the first in Aeschylus’s trilogy; the chorus tells the audience of the sacrifice early on, but Clytemnestra herself mentions it only after slaying her husband and Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess he enslaved and brought home. (As Cassandra, Zoë Sophia Garcia delivers a grippingly strange performance.)

I liked this change best, if not entirely; it makes the story more symmetrical, while showing the little girl in person raises the pathos. (Though this version also lets her dad off easier than Aeschylus does, as Iphigenia seems to forgive him for her death.) In this simplification, too, Clytemnestra’s lover Aegisthus, who later supplants Agamemnon as king, goes entirely missing. In Aeschylus’s original Clytemnestra doesn’t just avenge her daughter; she overthrows her king to empower her lover, and that’s a large part of why her children revile her. In this play, she and Agamemnon are more equal in evil, and she’s more sympathetic as a grieving mother instead of a treacherous queen.

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Photo of Josiah Bania by Scott Suchman

Indeed, the entire balance of this play favors Clytemnestra; her dreams and memories begin it, and it centers on how she hurts her own children. But this family is, inescapably, a ruling family of Greece. Aeschylus’s play deals at length with the war—recounting the experience of the suffering soldiers, their triumph, and the relief of finally returning home to Greece. In McLaughlin’s play, the war and the politics are a distant second in importance.

The second two plays in Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides, are combined by McLaughlin to form a second act. Electra becomes much more the dominant sibling, urging Orestes to do right and avenge their father; in Aeschylus he is less tentative. Again, Agamemnon’s role as ruler matters little; in Aeschylus, the children lament that he had no kingly death, being ambushed in the bath, while the chorus informs them that his body was mutilated. Here, the kids are merely cleaning the family house.

There’s a case to be made for this dramatic choice; the family killing spree is, after all, what most of us remember, and it makes for great theater. The mechanics of the plot would still work even if Agamemnon was, well, a mechanic—blood feuds aren’t restricted to royalty. But the play seems lesser for the omissions. This story is a foundational lesson about sick systems and bad rule; Agamemnon is a warning, while Odysseus, with his faithful wife and reclaimable kingdom, is an example. Stripping them of much of their context makes them more approachable, yes, but also less important.

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Photo of the cast of The Oresteia by Scott Suchman

The choice to downplay politics would make for a workable, if smaller-scale, retelling of Aeschylus . . . if not for the ending, which fails to satisfy. (Spoiler alert.) To review, The Eumenides, Aeschylus’s third play, turns into Athenian propaganda. Invoked by his dead mother, the vengeful Erinyes chase Orestes, seeking his death for the unparalleled crime of matricide (their opinion). Apollo, who commanded him to avenge his father, sends Orestes off to Athena, who can administer justice. She convenes a human court, breaks their tie vote, rules that Orestes acted justly, and ends the cycle of violence. The Erinyes agree to become nice, local deities, now called Eumenides, and everyone goes home happy except Clytemnestra’s ghost.

In McLaughlin’s version, what happens instead is something like “humanism ex machina.” After Orestes kills his mother, the chorus of household servants develops, immediately and inexplicably, into a fledgling democracy. They argue the merits of Orestes’s case among themselves, saying that this is no matter for the gods. Dramatically, this is a neat solution; you have a group of people on hand, so why not make them a polity? But it does a disservice to the original play.

To oversimplify greatly, Athenian democracy didn’t rest on principles of universal equality, nor did we move immediately from primitive blood feuds to modern, human-centered, “enlightened” liberal democracy. As in Aeschylus, Athenian democracy rested on the guarantee of Athena, but modern democracy is hardly “no business for God”; as we all know, Americans’ “inalienable rights” were “endowed by their creator.” Tacking humanism onto an Athenian play elides all the Judeo-Christian developments in between, not to mention the sheer difficulty with which human institutions and governing norms develop. Why doesn’t one chorus member shout down the others or play the strongman? Why are civil debate and unanimous juries the obvious options for people who have known only hierarchy and subjugation? Why would the aristocratic Orestes submit to the judgment of unarmed servants with no god or other force behind them? This is wish fulfillment.

McLaughlin wants this story to be one of misguided humans spurred by vengeful gods, who eventually rescue themselves solely out of innate goodness—with no help from culture, religion, norms, or power. It’s a comforting ending, but Aeschylus had the more realistic view of human nature. It takes real effort to stop a cycle of bloodshed: Athena must go head-to-head against the ancient goddesses, the Erinyes, which is a pretty good metaphor for the difficulty involved. The grandeur and strangeness of the Oresteia captured the magnitude of this struggle; without it, you’re simplifying Aeschylus and humanity along with him.

The post De-Aeschylation appeared first on The American Interest.

Huawei, Hollywood, and the Battle for 5G

“I keep telling them what nice people you are, but they won’t listen!” The speaker was a gangly Englishman with prominent ears, sharing breakfast tea with an attractive Chinese woman in a mid-priced hotel near Paddington Station in London. The date was May 17, 2019, and the headlines were full of stories about the belated American effort to persuade its allies, including the United Kingdom, not to adopt the Chinese version of 5G wireless technology. The Englishman’s ears grew red as he struggled to persuade the woman that the deal they had been working on was not about to fall through.

I was sitting at a nearby table, and while I am not in the habit of eavesdropping on business conversations, this one caught my attention because of the way the woman was dressed. I don’t know for sure, but my general impression is that female office attire in London does not normally consist of Nasty Gal platform heels, sheer black stockings, leather hot pants, see-through silk blouses, garish rhinestone earrings, and theatrical makeup.

Then the Englishman uttered the word “Huawei.” At the time of this writing, Huawei is practically a household word among newspaper readers. But only a few weeks ago, this Chinese manufacturer of 5G wireless networks had a low enough profile that the closed-caption service of CNN made one of its typical orthographic errors, transcribing “Huawei” as “Yahweh.” This was weirdly apt, because the Chinese Communist Party does in fact aspire to be all-seeing and all-powerful, like the God of the Hebrew Bible—the only difference being that the latter is also infinitely merciful and just.

Back to my eavesdropping. At the mention of Huawei, the Chinese woman frowned, scooped up her phone, and exited the room. Then, as if on cue, a grim-faced Chinese man entered and began to press the Englishman for more detail about why his bosses were being recalcitrant about the deal. At this point, I was trying to control my own facial expression so as not to be mistaken for an American spy—or perhaps a colleague of the poor young fellow, who at this point was floundering badly and, I suspect, wondering desperately where his Chinese lady friend had gone.

At length she returned, and, standing behind the Englishman, she leaned over his shoulder to peer at his laptop and place a gentle hand on his back, while her grim-faced comrade delivered what sounded like a well-rehearsed harangue. I could only catch a few phrases: “amazing 5G speeds,” “zero latency,” “brilliant connectivity,” “autonomous vehicles,” “millions of jobs,” “trillions of pounds.” When the harangue was over, the Englishman sat silently while his two interlocutors spoke to each other, and to unseen parties on their phones, in rapid, agitated Mandarin.

At this point, we were all pretty breathless: the Englishman for reasons that should be obvious, the two Chinese because it appeared they were getting chewed out by their bosses for not closing the deal, and me because I was witnessing history in the making.

Either that or a bad movie. I say “bad” because the casting was so clichéd: clueless young Brit falls for Asian Mata Hari, then falls prey to thuggish operative who refuses to take no for an answer. This is not to suggest that a good movie or TV series could not be made about the long-running saga of Sino-Western competition in any number of fields, including wireless technology. Indeed, this saga is currently entering an especially intense and dramatic phase, because while many of the current headlines focus on accusations of intellectual property theft by Huawei, the graver concern is with the threat 5G poses to privacy, liberty, and security.

As noted recently by Harold Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute, there are four main companies that manufacture complete suites of cellular network equipment. None of them are American—the other three are Samsung (Korean), Ericsson (Swedish), and Nokia (Finnish)—but Huawei is the biggest and most aggressive.

The problem with this state of affairs was ably captured by U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding (ret.), one of the few analysts sober enough to be quoted across the political spectrum. “Data is a strategic resource,” Spalding said at the same Hudson Institute event, “and to the extent that you allow the hardware that carries that data to be manufactured in a totalitarian state that has values and principles that are inimical to yours, you’re essentially putting yourself at their whims.” He went on:

Europe dominated 2G, 3G; the U.S. dominated 4G; and the Chinese essentially decided that they’re going to dominate 5G. Well, when you build out most of the world’s infrastructure . . . . then you have enormous power to do surveillance, you have enormous power to use the machines that are connected in ways that aren’t intended by their owners, and you have a huge ability, specifically with big data and artificial intelligence, to begin to influence populations . . . . There is enormous influence going on in the world today, and that [is] with 4G technology. Imagine what that will be like when there is such pervasive amount of data and understanding and the ability to implement that at a very fine level—it’s staggering.

Staggering enough, surely, to inspire any number of brilliant and terrifying films and TV series. But apart from one or two episodes of the British series Black Mirror, is anyone working on this? Not in Hollywood, certainly. For the last several years Hollywood has been gradually compromising its hard-won artistic freedom at the behest of the Chinese, a process that is now close to abject surrender.

There was a time when Hollywood dared to criticize China. In a 1997 film from MGM titled Red Corner, Richard Gere plays a U.S. businessman, in Beijing to negotiate a satellite communications deal, who is framed by a rival company for the murder of a woman he picks up in a hotel bar, who happens to be the daughter of a prominent Chinese general. Panned in America for its “contrived” plot and presumed ethnic stereotypes, the film was denounced in China on rather different grounds—namely, its unflattering but accurate portrayal of the Chinese criminal justice system.

Red Corner was nearly forgotten in 2012, when MGM decided to remake a 1987 film called Red Dawn, about a group of hapless American teenagers fighting a guerrilla war against a Soviet invasion. Part of the update was to make the invaders Chinese instead of Russian. But when Red Dawn was in post-production, someone at MGM recalled how Beijing’s outrage over Red Corner had led to a Chinese boycott of MGM films and put a lasting damper on Gere’s acting career. At that point the studio decided to reverse-engineer the film, adding new footage, special effects, and dialogue to make the invaders North Korean instead of Chinese. The rationale was summed up for me by a friend who works as a talent agent in Los Angeles: “Nobody cares what the North Koreans think. They don’t buy movie tickets!”

Like most private-sector industries in the West, America’s film studios have long dealt with China in a way that places economic self-interest above all other considerations, from domestic prosperity to human rights to national security. Initially, this misplaced priority led Hollywood to alter films in order to get them approved by Chinese authorities who enforce not just a quota on the number of imported films but also a list of do’s and don’ts with regard to content.

To be sure, every country except the United States has a government “film classification board” that certifies all films, domestic and foreign, for public exhibition. So Hollywood is well accustomed to making minor tweaks to get into major markets. But China is a special case, because unlike most countries, it has in recent years aspired to becoming a cultural hegemon on the same global scale as America.

The first step in pursuing this aspiration was to require Hollywood studios to work with Chinese partners that are ostensibly private but in fact under the control of the Communist Party. The second was to offer the studios an increased share of the revenue earned in China, in exchange for increased oversight of the production process, from casting to screenplays to plot elements favorable to the Party’s version of Chinese values and tradition. And the third step, taken in the last few years, was to lavish generous subsidies and other inducements on studios willing to invest in, and produce films in, shiny new production facilities on Chinese soil—despite the fact that doing so entails handing all creative decision-making over to the Chinese authorities.

These more recent developments have run parallel to a drastic consolidation of the entire Chinese media system under the direct control of an oversight body within the State Council—effectively the cabinet of President Xi Jinping. And now, in a turn of events that has stayed well beneath the radar of the mainstream American media, this oversight body has quite drastically altered the terms of the Hollywood-Beijing relationship.

The turning point was the box-office failure, in early 2017, of the most ambitious Sino-American co-production ever: The Great Wall. This special-effects extravaganza starring Matt Damon and set in 11th-century China was backed by NBCUniversal and three Chinese partners; produced at a shiny new facility in the thriving port city of Qingdao; and directed by Zhang Yimou, arguably the most famous filmmaker in China. With a budget of $150 million, it had all the ingredients of a colossal hit: big-name stars such as Damon, Willem Dafoe, Andy Lau, and Jing Tian; eye-popping CG images such as a Great Wall metastasized to 30 times its actual height; and an unlimited supply of scaly monsters, handsomely armored Song dynasty troops, and a female special-ops unit skilled in the ancient martial art of hurling spears while bungee-jumping into the abyss.

Peering through their politically correct lens, a few U.S. critics objected to the film’s seeming neglect of Asian characters in favor of Damon and his band of European mercenaries. But as explained by film scholar Ying Zhu, the decision to foreground these greedy, hirsute foreigners was no accident: “Dwarfed by the gigantic Great Wall, the gunpowder-crazed European mercenaries appear captivated literally and figuratively by the enormity of China and Chinese culture. They are, in time, taught a moral lesson, chiefly by the righteous Chinese female Commander, on fighting for trust and honor instead of gunpowder.”

Released to great fanfare, The Great Wall was a resounding flop, grossing a mere $171 million in China and performing just as poorly elsewhere. The biggest loser was NBCUniversal, which had contributed not just $10 million to the production but also the entire marketing budget of $80 million. But that was only the beginning. The repercussions since then have become quite disturbing. In a nutshell, Beijing seems to have abandoned its hopes of becoming a global hegemon in favor of enlisting Hollywood talent and know-how in the production of domestic propaganda.

This may sound outlandish, but consider: in August 2017 the Party ordered a crackdown on independent-minded Chinese businessmen with major investments in Hollywood. State-owned banks were told to deny loans to people like Wang Jianlin, founder and CEO of the real-estate conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group, which had recently acquired two U.S. companies, Legendary Pictures and AMC Theatres. Not surprisingly, this sudden cut-off of funds caused consternation in the movie colony. The trade paper Deadline Hollywood quoted one industry China-watcher warning that “with no alternatives for risk-tolerant investors on the horizon ready to put money into the traditional film studio business model, Hollywood will be forced to take every overture from China seriously.” (emphasis added)

Prescient words. As I wrote in a previous column, the business model of the U.S. film industry is shifting away from the conventional two-hour movie and toward the long-form TV series and other streaming entertainment. Most Americans are dimly aware that this shift is prompting an exodus of movie talent from the large to the small screen. But very few Americans realize that in response to the changed priorities in China, a similar exodus is flowing across the Pacific to China. In the last two years, this exodus has included not just actors like Michael Douglas, Bruce Willis, and Adrian Brody, but also hundreds of producers, cinematographers, composers, visual effects supervisors, action coordinators, and other professionals.

I am reluctant to blame these people. Most are highly skilled individuals seeking employment and advancement in a situation where, to repeat the phrase quoted above, they are “forced to take every overture from China seriously.” But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that the situation is a good one, either for them or for America. For most of its history, Hollywood prided itself on offering a taste of freedom and prosperity to people all over the world who could only dream of these things. Indeed, in my last column I described the long struggle to win First Amendment protection for film as a medium of artistic expression.

This makes it all the more distressing to see how little this history matters to the Americans who are now lending their talents to an industry firmly in the grip of the Chinese Communist Party. Not only that, but the films these Americans are helping to make are not, for the most part, intended for a global audience. Rather they are aimed at the domestic audience, which means their purpose is either to distract the Chinese masses or to propagandize them. In either case, they will serve no larger purpose than keeping 1.4 billion people in line with the stifling ideology of Xi Jinping.

As long as humanity has an appetite for gigantic superheroes fighting gigantic supervillains, Hollywood will survive. But when it comes to film as a subtle, humane art form that can move the emotions and elevate the sensibilities of ordinary men and women, that battle is lost. America is no longer in that business, and neither is China. 

Which brings us back to the battle over 5G wireless technology. Important as the movies are, that older battle pales by comparison to this newer one. Pessimistic pundits are now given to predicting a world with two internet systems: one open and free within a firewall erected by the world’s liberal democracies, and another closed and controlled within barriers enforced by authoritarian regimes. In light of what we’ve been hearing about the capacities of 5G, this scenario seems too optimistic. How will that work? What will that firewall and barriers be made of?

In a recent New Yorker article, Sue Halpern reports that “In China, which has installed three hundred and fifty thousand 5G relays—about ten times more than the United States—enhanced geolocation, coupled with an expansive network of surveillance cameras, each equipped with facial-recognition technology, has enabled authorities to track and subordinate the country’s eleven million Uighur Muslims.” She cites Paul Mozur of the New York Times on how this makes China “a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism,” and closes with Robert Spalding’s warning of an “existential” threat to democracy posed by any government gaining “full knowledge of everything you do at all times. Because the tendency is always going to be to want to regulate how you think, how you act, what you do. The problem is that most people don’t think very hard about what that world would look like.” (emphasis added)

What would that world look like? To imagine this, we urgently need a gripping drama that, like a Greek tragedy, forces large numbers of citizens to confront the thing we fear most, in order to summon the fortitude to keep it at bay. If Hollywood cannot create this drama, then somebody else should create it. And soon.

Zhang’s finest achievement, a 1994 film called To Live, traces the life of a Chinese family from the period just before the Communist Revolution to the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. This honest, humane, beautiful film was immediately banned by the Party and has never been exhibited in China. Zhang’s punishment for making such a film was an enforced eight-year hiatus from working, which may explain his willingness to led his talents to such Party-approved spectacles as the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and—regrettably—The Great Wall.

The post Huawei, Hollywood, and the Battle for 5G appeared first on The American Interest.

When Solidarity Prevailed

Thirty years ago this June 4, Poland held its first honest election since the country was subjugated by Stalin and communism was imposed on an unwilling society. The election results were an across-the-board sweep for the anti-communist forces led by the Solidarity trade union movement. Communist power was shattered. Poland qualified as the first in a series of Soviet puppet state dominoes to topple throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Six months later, nothing remained of the archipelago of satellite regimes that the Red Army had imposed after World War II, and shortly thereafter, Western-style democracies prevailed throughout the region.

That seminal moment is worth remembering and reassessing today, as we are living through a period in which democracy is in retreat around the world, modern dictatorships have armored themselves against similar breakthroughs, and many American elites on both the Left and the Right show little interest in supporting struggles for freedom abroad.

In retrospect, the 1989 election results seem inevitable. Poles had a visceral hatred of communism and an intense antipathy towards Russia, their historical adversary. Under President Reagan, the United States had maintained (sometimes wavering) support for Poland’s democratic opposition. In the Vatican, Pope John Paul II, the former Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, pursued a shrewd campaign for Polish freedom. The Polish economy—an obsolete heavy industry model imposed by the Kremlin—was in tatters.

Yet decades of repression, foreign control, and impoverishment were not enough to convince officials in Washington and Warsaw that communism’s time had run out. In both capitals, political leaders and diplomats anticipated a victory for the communists as the party of stability. After nearly a decade of inconclusive strikes and protests, the Polish United Workers’ Party, as the communists were formally known, seemed to hold the upper hand. The leadership had been challenged in the streets and had not succumbed. Communist self-assurance was reinforced by the party’s control over election mechanics. In negotiations between Solidarity and the leadership, the regime extracted important concessions, including the right to a share of power no matter the outcome and a stipulation that opposition candidates would run not under the Solidarity banner but as unaffiliated independents. Furthermore, the communists enjoyed the many advantages of four decades of total state domination and boasted a sizable cadre of active members who, if no longer true believers in socialism, had powerful career stakes in continued Party rule. In Washington, State Department officials, some of whom were weary of Poland’s state of permanent economic disarray and Solidarity’s defiance, were convinced that Poles would opt for economic security and order.

The pessimism that dominated diplomatic thinking reflected a conviction that Moscow retained a level of control over its empire that could resist the challenge of a popular movement like Solidarity. Belief in the enduring nature of the Cold War division of the world was not limited to the diplomatic corps. Scholars with stellar reputations as experts on East European affairs were nearly unanimous in dismissing iconoclastic scenarios of an impending breakup of the Soviet empire, much less of the USSR itself.

In fact, Poland had changed in ways that those schooled in the idea of a permanent East-West divide had failed to grasp. The opposition operated within a parallel society. Solidarity could communicate with its own media, influence the course of events through a respected national leadership and regional structures led by Solidarity officials, convey an alternate interpretation of history through a network of educational projects, and deal as an independent force with foreign governments. It had survived martial law and the arrest of Lech Walesa and other top officials. By 1989, Solidarity had demonstrated that, while it could be checked, it could not be beaten.

Solidarity also stood as inspiration for democratic movements elsewhere in the world, not only in the Soviet sphere, but in countries as diverse as South Korea, the Philippines, and Chile. The elements that made possible the peaceful overthrow of a communist regime were dissected and identified as the elements that could bring down dictatorships in other settings, whether the system was totalitarian or just an old-fashioned military junta.

Solidarity was a national movement which had traditional ambitions for freedom, independence, and sovereignty. Its success depended on a leadership that was at once courageous and prudent, especially in holding to a strategy of non-violence in the face of regime provocation. It also depended on allies—both powerful states and a network of independent trade unions across the democratic world which had resources, influence, and a tradition of international solidarity.

Among the keys to Solidarity’s success, the following were crucial:

Solidarity’s status as a national movement. While it was popular among industrial workers, it also enjoyed the support of the democratic intelligentsia, a group which ranged from Catholic thinkers to former communists to liberals to aspiring entrepreneurs. Even under martial law, the authorities could only do so much to counter this resistance.
An opposition media of unusual diversity and reach. The Solidarity underground press included regional and local publications, nationwide bulletins, and journals aimed at targeted audiences—Catholics, members of the security forces, the military, even communist functionaries.
International labor solidarity. While some democratic governments, West Germany most notably, regarded Solidarity as an annoying obstacle to improved relations with Moscow and kept it at arm’s length, the trade union movements of Europe and especially the United States were generous with material and moral support throughout Poland’s time of troubles. Lane Kirkland, the president of the AFL-CIO, was the most stalwart advocate within the democratic labor movement—indeed, he stood as Solidarity’s most vocal supporter in the free world. American and foreign labor movements gave millions of dollars for the underground press and to support imprisoned activists. In the United States, organized labor maintained pressure on political leaders when hints of irresoluteness rose to the surface.
International broadcasting. Since the 1950s, Radio Free Europe, the BBC, and other international broadcasting stations had exerted a powerful influence on political life in Poland. Indeed, RFE functioned as a kind of opposition press, more credible and with a greater audience than any of the communist propaganda organs. RFE’s Polish language service was regarded as “our media” by the opposition. It earned this status through coverage that balanced a message about the superiority of democracy, Polish patriotism, and the idea that Polish problems must ultimately be resolved by Poles themselves. Once Solidarity was in business, RFE devoted hours of coverage to its actions and statements, and to the reactions of the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States. The combined appeal of international broadcasters and the underground press ensured that Solidarity, and not the communists, prevailed in the information war.
American diplomacy. The strikes that triggered Solidarity’s formal existence took place in the waning months of the Carter presidency. The initial response of the American foreign policy community was marked by apprehension and ambivalence. Commentators fretted over the AFL-CIO for its full-throated declarations of support, arguing that if American unions felt it necessary to assist besieged Polish workers, they should do so quietly, without drawing parallels between free labor unions and broader democratic freedoms. Under Reagan, American support was more forthcoming. Throughout the crisis the Administration held to a policy of modulated support, calibrated sanctions, covert and open assistance to the union, and presidential statements calling on Moscow to “tear down this wall” and give the satellites their independence. With the 1983 creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Administration sent an important signal that as a matter of national policy democracy promotion was to be integrated into American diplomacy.

The Solidarity revolution was among a series of upheavals that took place in the period from the mid-1980s to 2004 in which pro-democracy movements pushed aside dictatorships and ushered in elections and civilian government. Democratic change swept through South America, most notably in Chile, where the Pinochet regime failed in a referendum that would have meant the prolongation of dictatorship for years. In Asia, South Korea and Taiwan shed long standing military rule while in the Philippines the Marcos regime collapsed after the Reagan Administration gave it a final push.

At the time, the abject collapse of dictatorships across the globe seemed to validate the preeminence of democratic capitalism and signal a repudiation of the once-dominant faith in statism as a driver of economic advancement in the less-developed world. Optimists could also point to two relatively new phenomena, the internet and global civil society, to bolster their expectations of further gains for democracy and a consolidation of democratic government in the new wave of free states. With the introduction of the internet, many believed that technology had given birth to an information instrument that could render any kind of state control impossible. Likewise, many experts came to regard global civil society as an unstoppable force for liberalism, more powerful than the nation state itself. Eventually, civil society was put to the test and played critical roles in bringing down strongmen or corrupt leaderships in Serbia, where student activists organized a campaign that triggered the downfall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, and in Ukraine, where reformers played a pivotal role in ensuring that the 2004 elections were not stolen through fraud, in one of the first color revolutions.

The proposition that authoritarian methods were destined for history’s dustbin also represented confidence in the broad appeal of liberal values. The optimism of the 1990s, however, appears naive when viewed through the lens of recent developments. Freedom House has identified a decline in global democracy that has extended over the past 13 years. While the decline has affected every region, it has been especially pronounced in Central Europe and the Balkans, including in countries like Hungary and Poland—success stories of post-Cold War democracy.

In a number of societies, democracy has been supplanted by what has been called modern authoritarianism. Modern authoritarianism can be summed up as effective political control with minimal bloodshed and overt repression, or as an illusion of pluralism that masks state domination of key political institutions.

Modern authoritarianism is durable. A trend of the 21st century is for new democracies—and some older democracies as well—to become progressively less free and repressive regimes to become more repressive. Once the slide towards autocracy gets underway, reversals are rare, and the trajectory is typically towards more control, more repression, fewer independent voices, and more kleptocracy and cronyism.

Modern authoritarians—Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Xi Jinping—are focused on retaining power. They are careful students of recent history, and are especially interested in the dynamics of the Solidarity revolution and the color revolutions in Serbia and Ukraine. In China, cadres are indoctrinated in the lessons of the Soviet system’s collapse. Putin is fixated on Western schemes to foment a copycat version of the Polish or Ukrainian upheavals in Russia. His military has incorporated plans against color revolution as part of its overall defense strategy and his regime has sponsored international conferences at which China, Iran, and other repressive governments discuss strategies to forestall such threats.

Modern authoritarians, in other words, are determined that there be no Solidarity-esque movements in their territory, no romantic figures like Lech Walesa, no significant opposition media. Putin has appropriated Russian nationalism as a central governing idea and has worked tirelessly to identify his government with Christian values and the Russian Orthodox Church. Likewise, Viktor Orban has embraced “Christian values” as a core governing idea while Erdogan calls his regime Islamist, has championed the Muslim Brotherhood, and identifies his rule with the Ottomans. Putin, Orban, Erdogan, and Chavez have all made media control a centerpiece through the marginalization of opposition outlets, the forced nationalization of foreign-owned media, and absolute control over the commanding heights of television and, increasingly, the internet. For Solidarity, the underground press was an instrument to inform people of one region about protests taking place in another—in other words, to be the connecting link in a national movement of resistance.  For Beijing, an overriding goal is the prevention of strikes or industrial protest movements from migrating beyond the local level. Even before Xi Jinping, information strategy was designed to forestall a national workers’ movement.

Putin and others like him have also worked diligently to destroy civil society as an incubator of citizen-driven reform. In Russia, Putin has imposed wave after wave of laws that choke off funding for civil society organizations, limit their sphere of operation, and criminalize protest rallies and opposition assemblies—all in the name of countering color revolutions and “reinforcing sovereignty.” Viktor Orban has treated civil society—not the political opposition—as enemy number one through his ongoing Stop Soros campaign. As for trade unions, today’s autocrats have ensured that they are weak or led by regime loyalists. One of Hugo Chavez’s first orders of business upon assuming power was to replace independent unions with his own pliant entities.

The erosion of faith in liberal democracy as the ideal governing system is not limited to authoritarian-minded political leaders in Italy and Hungary; it’s also happening in the United States. Despite its status as a movement of the industrial working class, Solidarity received overwhelming support from American conservatives, especially the Reagan Administration. In the 21st century, however, U.S. faith in democracy has been declining—first under the Obama Administration and more so under Trump. Furthermore, as Gabe Schoenfeld has noted in these pages, there is now a group of vocal intellectuals who prefer various forms of autocracy and champion illiberal leaders like Orban.

This means that authoritarians face less opposition from abroad than they used to—and that relative lack of opposition seems to have had an emboldening effect. Until recently, a distinguishing feature of modern authoritarianism was the ruling group’s ability to consolidate political power without resorting to the brutal tactics that defined the mainstream dictatorships of the 20th century. Yet over the past few years, we have seen a reemergence of older methods of social control. The most extreme example is the establishment of concentration camps in Western China for the reeducation of Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups. In Russia, the roster of political prisoners grows steadily, as does the list of journalists and political dissidents who have been threatened, attacked, killed, or forced into exile. In Hungary, the Fidesz government has passed new laws that weaken judicial independence and consolidate the ruling party’s control over the media. In Turkey, Erdogan has imprisoned journalists and overruled the results of a democratic election. And in Venezuela, the Maduro regime has created something akin to an old-style Latin American military dictatorship.

Thus regimes that previously rationed violations of democratic norms are increasingly baring their fangs to their own people and the rest of world. Given the wavering commitment to freedom in Europe and the United States, there is not much comfort in the fact that repressive regimes are fundamentally more unstable and vulnerable to breakdowns than democracies. The Solidarity experiment was a noble success. And today, people are in the streets seeking democratic change in countries as different as Venezuela, Sudan, and Algeria. Major authoritarian governments may collapse in the face of economic crises, popular protests, or succession battles. But in the absence of international pressure and support, and a will to win equal to what we see in Russia, China, and Hungary, a democratic outcome in the near future is in serious doubt.

The post When Solidarity Prevailed appeared first on The American Interest.

India’s Pollution Problem—And Ours

Nigambodh Ghat is the place where the Hindu god Brahma bathed in the Yamuna River and regained his memory. Today the river runs thick as snot. Nigambodh is one of the busiest outdoor crematoriums in Delhi. Fifty pyres a day, every day. The ashes are dumped in the river.

Despite India being badly overcrowded, many Hindus still favor the traditional funeral pyre. This is noteworthy since there will soon be more people than trees in India. The ratio is 1:3, and falling.

This winter day, Nigambodh Ghat reminds me of the abandoned Pripyat amusement park just outside Chernobyl. The large idols in fiberglass look faded, the reflective pools are empty, as are the collection plates. The government is trying to persuade Indians to exit in the Western way: gas fire, and ashes in a jar.

The Hindu Antyesti, or burial rites, vary with caste, age, gender, and region. I look at a dozen men sitting in a row and chanting from the Vedas. It is so strangely timeless that I lose track of time—until a young man sits down next to me.

“Do you see? I don’t know how to sit there without getting bored?” Vihab Kumar is spending a gap year away from Canada. He says he has been sent to India to connect with family, but his stay has so far been a mixed experience.

Pyre-side Chat

“My grandfather wants me up at five o’clock every morning to meditate.” I grin and ask if vacations are different in Canada. Kumar continues: “And the ridiculous thing is that my grandfather isn’t very religious; he’s a banker. It is only when I came over that he became very religious.”

Kumar is a millennial and shares this generation’s self-confidence in finding faults with the world he is to inherit: “Religion has the wrong answer. In Hinduism, the gods intervene to save the creation from human abuse, but Delhi is choking on pollution without any sign of divine intervention.”

He believes Hinduism creates a cultural resistance to prioritizing the environment over economics, because “Hinduism is more important as a cultural identity than as genuine belief.” The man who is next on the pyre is a relative of Kumar’s. “Who?” I ask. “Don’t know”, he answers—an unknown uncle.

Behind the cremation spots, I meet a resident holy man, Aghori Baba. In spite of their frightening appearance, which the sadhus encourage by smearing themselves in funeral ashes, Aghori Baba is a gentle soul, full of humour. He smokes hash from a clay pipe in giant lungfuls and giggles when I ask if it is wise to burn corpses when the air in Delhi is so foul. “Just as fire turns wood into ash, the fire of insight consumes the tribulations of karma.” I don’t understand, I relayed. He bobs his head and hiccups: “Neither do I.”

The Aghorahs renounce sectarian identities and common sense. Their wild lifestyle, which includes eating human flesh from the pyres, is supposed to obliterate the divide between the sacred and the unholy, the mother of all dichotomies, because dualism is believed to stand in the way of realization.

But not all contradictions are imagined. The Yamuna River flows into the sacred Ganges where Hindus drink and bathe. Yamuna water tests have found 1.5 million fecal bacteria per 100 milliliters—hundreds of thousands times more than the recommended limit for swimming.

An Austrian woman I met a few years ago was so smitten by Indian spirituality that she waded into the Ganges. After weeks in hospital in Delhi, Frau Warta was flown to Vienna where her abdomen became part of the medical record books. She had apparently contracted the worst urinary tract infection in Austrian history.

The river is still considered cleansing. Travel writer Eric Newby wrote in the book Slowly Down the Ganges (1966): “To bathe in it is to wash away guilt. To drink the water, having bathed in it, and to carry it away in bottles for those who have not had the good fortune to make the pilgrimage to it is meritorious.”

In 2014 Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to clean up the Ganges as part of the Swachh Bharat initiative for a cleaner India. Much has been done, especially in reducing open air defecation, but the promise that Ganges will be clean by October 2, 2020, seems unrealistic.

Nigambodh Ghat shows why there is reason to worry about India. The populous country has made a plunge into modernity with appalling environmental consequences. The Ashogis shock worshipers more by the fact that they drink water from Yamuna than that they are drinking it from a human skull.

City of Smokers

My local fixer, Surash Beriya, is studying information technology in the Karol Bagh part of Delhi, but he cannot afford a laptop. He takes me to the family home in the slum, where five live in a shed. The family migrated to Delhi when life as smallholders in Uttar Pradesh became too difficult.

The father’s chai stand sustains the family, but Surash is working to pay for private lessons for the younger sisters. He knows that education is the way out of poverty, but the 9- and 12-year-old sisters struggle with recurring lung infections and need the extra lessons just to keep up.

Of the world’s ten most polluted cities, nine are located in India. Much of the year, Delhi is a health hazard. One day in the streets is equivalent to smoking 44 cigarettes, according to the Berkeley Earth Science Research Group model. What is certain is that when you blow your nose in Delhi the handkerchief turns black.

In spite of the fact that Surash’s family home is in an alley, it is very clean. We drink tea and swap jokes with the mother who, with a matron’s dignity, ensures that everyone is served in the right order and that the little girls behave. But she asks me to listen to their lungs. They are wheezing.

According to a new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia and the Health Effects Institute, Indian children have shortened their lives by an average of 30 months due to a combination of outdoor air pollution and the use of fires for cooking indoors.

The authorities’ environmental measures are implemented slowly. India is a democracy, something Surash believes makes it difficult to take obvious steps such as getting rid of the exhaust-belching rickshaws. “This is not China. The authorities regulate, and Indians find new ways to abrogate.”

He points out that this is a country where the Internet is governed by the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885. “There is no such thing as steered development in India; no one controls the development.” This is an important point. Many assume that India is centrally governed, a false premise.

Growth means emissions. There are only a few countries that can affect global climate on their own. First is the United States, then China, and lastly India. India’s greenhouse gas emissions doubled from 1980 to 1995 and doubled again to 2019. Climate researcher Navroz K. Dubash predicts that today’s figures will double again by 2030 at the latest. India is currently ranked fourth in the world in CO2 emissions, right behind the European Union. With an economic output roughly equal to that of the United Kingdom alone, the country’s emissions are higher than the whole of Africa and South America combined.

In relation to the country’s population size, emissions of carbon dioxide are still relatively small: 1.6 tons of carbon per person per year is about the same as China’s emissions in 1980, when the hyper-growth of free market communists took off. Also like China, India in practice chooses fossil fuels for fast and predictable energy. Heavy industry and generators are growing. Most vehicles run on gas. In much of the country, biomass (cow dung and trash) is used for cooking.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set a growth target of 8 per cent annually. If India uses the same amount of energy per unit of GDP in 2035 as it does today, it will become the world’s biggest contributor to the growth of greenhouse gases. Unlike other major polluters, India refuses to set any date for when the country’s emissions would peak and begin to fall.

This reluctance to commit to lower emissions comes from the fact that economic growth is needed to combat poverty. More than 250 million Indians live under the World Bank’s extreme poverty limit, and a similar number lack power. But there is little to suggest that the West can reduce its emissions adequately to compensate for growth in India.

The Juggernaut

It is remarkable how little the highly developed Indian civilization has affected Western civilization. Pankash Mishra claims in the book Age of Anger that the Hindu nationalists borrowed a Western growth model and its “notion of painless improvement.” Mishra’s story is one where India, since independence, has put an Indian varnish on Western ideologies such as nationalism and communism, but is nonetheless moving inexorably away from its distinctive civilizational path and toward globalization, meaning Westernization.

This helps explain how a continent that so long seemed to be held back by its culture, traditions, and history suddenly no longer seems to appreciate what was previously regarded as sacred. The temples fall into disrepair, the rivers are poisoned, and the old is bulldozed to make room for the new.

“Juggernaut” is one of the few Hindi words that have found their way into English. The word is used to describe a merciless and unstoppable destructive force that demands submission. Originally, the juggernaut was a giant ceremonial wagon used at festivals to honor the god Vishnu. Vishnu was the one who said “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The first European description of the Juggernaut was written down in the 15th century by the Franciscan monk Odoric of Pordenone, who described Hindus throwing themselves under the wheels of the carts to be crushed to death as a religious sacrifice. The Juggernauts of old have not been preserved, but the name adorns the bar at the hotel where I meet Samir Saran, head of the Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think tank based in Delhi. It is mid-day but the reddish-hued sun is unable to break through the smog, so the lamps are lit.

“India is the crux,” he says. “Three quarters of the country has not yet been developed. 1.3 billion people will seek a Western lifestyle. If it can be achieved in a climate-neutral way, we save the planet. If we do not, we will destroy India and perhaps even the planet.”

Saran says he has tried to create engagement among the student community, but with little luck: “Young Indians are committed to progress. They believe the environment is something that can be fixed later.” I ask him whether the poor air quality might motivate them.

“Less than you should think,” replied Saran. “The authorities are trying,” he says, listing a series of environmental measures, but development is proceeding independently of the regulations. India is in danger of being crushed under the wheels of globalization, the modern Juggernaut.

India recently concluded a series of parliamentary elections which the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA coalition won handily. Over the course of the campaign, the two major candidates for Prime Minister, the BJP’s Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress, talked only a little about the environment and more about growth, work, and security. Lord Nicholas Stern, a leading expert on climate and India, told the Guardian that if action is not taken India will account for much of the world’s future emissions and make it “very difficult” to meet the international goal of keeping temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius.

In 2018 a UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warned that a 1.5-degree increase in global temperatures could “disproportionately affect disadvantaged and vulnerable populations through food and water insecurity, higher food prices, income losses, lost livelihood opportunities, adverse health impacts, and population displacements.” India would be among the nations most affected by these problems. The report concludes that global carbon pollution should be cut in half by 2030 and reduced to zero by 2050 to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. To meet these goals, India will need to find a new development model based entirely on clean energy rather than just adding green energy measures to coal, which currently generates more than half of the country’s electricity.

And that will not happen by itself in one of the world’s fastest-growing and fastest-urbanizing economies. India is investing heavily in solar energy. It had committed to achieving 40 percent of solar electricity production by 2030, and that target has now been sharpened to 60 percent renewable energy by 2027. The World Bank has made $625 million available for this shift—far too little.

Ester Boserup (1910–99) was a Danish economist who specialized in the economics of development. Her experience, including from India, helped shape her theory that the relationship between population growth and food production is impacted by innovation.

People, like all populations of plants and animals, compete with each other for the resources of the earth. But what happens when the resources are insufficient? For a long time, the agreed answer was the one Thomas Malthus arrived at in “An Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798). In ecological terms, Malthus claimed that the human population was in danger of growing beyond the capacity of nature to sustain it. The result, he warned, would be man-made disasters that would kill a great many people.

Boserup challenged the belief that a population’s size is kept down by the amount of food. She claimed human ingenuity would cause the food supply to keep pace with the needs of the population. Over the years Boserup has been proven right on this point time and again. We are an innovative species.

Does the same apply to the global climate? Will man’s ingenuity save us from the forewarned crisis? The answer lies, to no small extent, in India.

The post India’s Pollution Problem—And Ours appeared first on The American Interest.

China’s Long Game

After decades of placing a heavy bet that the People’s Republic of China would peacefully rise to take its rightful place in the global system, the Washington policy community has finally awakened to the dangers of that brash wager. This inversion of the consensus on Beijing’s strategic objectives has been tectonic in scope. Barely a decade ago China’s steady gains against the West in the economic and military realms were seen as signs of a relatively benign transitional phase, after which the country’s export-driven modernization strategy would yield a democratic transformation. If only…

In reality, over the past four decades the Chinese party-state has leveraged its access to open democratic market economies, as well as our knowledge base and educational systems, to drive its own grand strategic project aimed at regrowing the sinews of global economic, military, and political power. The immediate impact of Chinese mercantilism has been felt across the West, reflected in the progressive deindustrialization of the United States, inroads by Chinese capital into European markets, and the narrowing of the technological gap between China and the U.S. in both civilian and military sectors. Most recently, Beijing’s heavy investment into the Belt and Road Initiative—a land-cum-maritime trade infrastructure that, once completed and in combination with Beijing’s effort to build a world-class blue-water navy—reflects China’s strategy to achieve a “grand disconnect”—that is, to finalize the current phase of globalization by ending its dependence on Western technology. China’s goals include establishing an alternative supply chain that is insulated from the current global maritime routes and has the potential of reversing core assumptions about what constitutes the core and the periphery in relations between Eurasia, Europe, and the United States.

For close to half a millennium, the ascendency of the West has rested on the primacy of naval power over land power. The West’s ability to leverage its supremacy in the maritime domain—by Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, and, since the last century, the United States—has been the sine qua non of both the colonial and post-colonial eras, undergirding the seemingly unstoppable worldwide expansion of democracy and market capitalism after the Cold War. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s core argument—that having a great navy is a precondition for national prosperity, as it ensures military and economic expansion while sea power arbitrates contests between nations—is still taught in strategy courses at our War Colleges today. Indeed, 15th-century improvements in the seaworthiness of naval vessels and the attendant reliance on cross-ocean shipping as the cheapest way to move goods between continents lay at the foundation of the Era of Discovery, which ensured the rapid economic growth of maritime powers and, ultimately, the rise of the West as the dominant global civilization.

Beijing’s current strategy aims to weaken America’s traditional advantage as the dominant naval power not only by building a blue-water navy of its own (something which the Soviet Union also accomplished during the Gorshkov navy of the 1970s), but also, perhaps more importantly, by seeking to transform its vulnerability as a land power into a strategic asset by creating an alternative supply chain across Eurasia and into Europe through its Belt and Road Initiative. China’s accumulation of capital, coupled with a massive transfer of knowledge from the United States over the past 50 years, has allowed it to pursue a two-pronged, long-term approach in which the Chinese navy will seek to draw the United States into a maritime contest for control of the Indo-Pacific theater while, in a potential game-changer, Beijing continues to develop its “Big Eurasia” project across the continent.

Analysts differ as to the actual investment in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), with current estimates ranging between $1 to $8 trillion and some 70 countries involved, but there can be no debate that the new infrastructure network, once completed, has the potential to fundamentally alter the global supply chain. In the event of a military conflict in the Indo-Pacific, China’s strategy aims to insulate its supply and manufacturing chain across “Big Eurasia” into Russia and Europe, giving it a potentially decisive advantage in war. Launched in 2013, the combination of the overland “belt” across Eurasia, Eastern Europe, and into Russia, and the maritime “road” across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean and deep into Europe—and in the future also heading into the High North and across the Arctic—is likely the single most important strategic enterprise in world politics since 1945. As envisioned by President Xi during its unveiling in 2013, the BRI involves the creation of a vast network of railroads, highways, communication networks, and energy pipelines cutting west and south/southwest. The planned 50 new special economic zones to emerge, modeled after the Shenzen Special Economic Zone, would allow China to manufacture in place for both local, European, and Eurasian markets. Further corridors for the BRI are envisioned moving north; Beijing’s investment in a new crop of nuclear-powered icebreakers are clear evidence that China is eyeing the Arctic trade route, passing Scandinavia into northern Europe.

Once completed, the BRI will allow the PRC to challenge U.S. global maritime supremacy without courting a direct confrontation with U.S. naval power. It will ensure Chinese domination of Eurasia and allow Beijing to make ever-deeper inroads into Europe. BRI projects are built with low-interest loans, not aid grants, giving Beijing the option to “collect on the debt” through forfeiture of land assets if the government is unable to repay the loan—as has been the case in a number of African countries. Once finished, this “New Silk Road” will fundamentally change our assumptions about the global hubs of growth, innovation, and ultimately military might. The long-term impact of China’s expansion into Eurasia and its growing influence in Europe—not just along the Mediterranean but further North, including the Continent’s most developed economies—threatens to flip the global polarity of the past 500 years. To quote Nicholas John Spykman, “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”

If the West does not mount an all-out push against China’s predatory behavior on trade and intellectual property rights, our core assumptions about whose rule book will determine the future of the international system will begin to come undone. In the realm of global power distribution, as in any area where human agency remains paramount, trends need not become outcomes. China’s rise to global preeminence is not a forgone conclusion. It is time we stop contemplating the consequences of our past misguided policy decisions, as though they were now a force of nature, bound to prejudge the outcome. The West must come up with a coordinated response.

The United States, Europe, and our democratic allies in Asia have on balance assets that all but ensure a winning hand, given a modicum of coordination and resolve. We need to rewrite the rules to ensure that market access does not continue to favor Beijing’s predatory policies, that China’s access to our educational and research institutions does not give it an unfair advantage, and that our values and our intellectual property laws are respected. The West has ample resources to stop China’s rise. What has been missing is a clear-headed diagnosis of the problem and the political will to craft and implement a solution.

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Artificial Intelligence: The Next Nuke?

On July 16, 1945, the world mutated when the first atomic bomb was detonated. Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Oppenheimer and his team of scientists spent four years on the Manhattan Project, codename for the development of the super weapon that would help end the Second World War. Just weeks later, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both cities were destroyed and hundreds of thousands were killed or maimed. On August 17, Oppenheimer hand-delivered a letter to the U.S. Secretary of War expressing his revulsion and his wish to see nuclear weapons banned. In September, Japan surrendered.

During the war, Oppenheimer was recruited to become a technocrat, wedged between science and the military, and pulled off the impossible. But his remorse at creating a bomb of such stupefying destructiveness led him to spearhead lobbying efforts to bring about international control of nuclear power. He convinced world leaders and scientists alike that security was only possible through the newly formed United Nations. By 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was created, and in 1970 the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was signed by 189 states; it has served as a cornerstone of global nuclear controls ever since.

Oppenheimer foresaw a nuclear holocaust and enlisted the world’s most famous physicists, such as Einstein or Bertrand, for his crusade. His Jeremiad landed him cover stories in major magazines around the world, but his past dalliances with communist front organizations in academia cost him his security clearance. But the controversy he stirred up, and his dedication, became the face of a movement that eventually pulled the world away from the brink.

Today, the world needs another Oppenheimer because transformative technologies are being developed at such a pace that they could soon represent a graver threat than the atomic bomb. The main concerns involve artificial intelligence (AI). According to some projections, AI-driven machines will be smarter than humans and capable of designing machines of their own within a couple years. This specter, sometimes called General AI or the “intelligence explosion,” represents a bigger threat to humanity than a nuclear winter, pandemic, or climate change.

Unfortunately, there is no single crusader devoted to sounding alarm bells. But the good news is that many people—including famous scientists and technologists—are voicing concerns at conferences, through petitions, and in academic papers while scary research and risky projects continue apace.

Still, it took a mass murder for Oppenheimer to realize his science could destroy the world. If history is to repeat itself, there will have to be a major mishap before the world’s leaders focus on the very real possibility of oblivion—and some fear that mishap will not be reversible.

“Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb,” writes futurist Nick Bostrom in his 2014 bestseller Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. He is an acknowledged expert on dystopian scenarios as the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. “We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound.”

Elon Musk, too, has been vocal about the risk of AI. He has estimated that diabolical general intelligence is just a few years away and that efforts must be stepped up to preemptively remove the possibility of a catastrophe. But such spokesmen are juggling many other entrepreneurial balls in the air and don’t have time to save the world. No tech tycoon of any stature is single-mindedly pursuing remedies.

It took 25 years to iron out a global non-proliferation treaty. But today’s challenge is more difficult. The development of nuclear weaponry relied on finite, traceable resources and demanded investment from large governments. No one could develop a nuclear weapon in their garage. By contrast, tomorrow’s cataclysm may just be one mad computer scientist away. The Internet has dispersed knowledge across the globe, allowing anyone to access bomb-making recipes, dangerous code, or diabolical networks.

Calamity is likely because development and research into the world’s transformative technologies have not been ring-fenced with moral, ethical, or security frameworks. This heightens the probability that disaster will occur, whether by deliberate malfeasance or by accident. Enforceable global standards exist for everything from engineering and accounting to medicine and nuclear power. But none exist for research, software development, synthetic biology, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, or robots, even if individual countries have begun regulating these technologies independently.

The late, legendary physicist Stephen Hawking pulled no punches when outlining the hazards of artificial intelligence. “Success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So, we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it,” he said in 2017. “Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid, the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization. It brings dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It could bring great disruption to our economy.”

To date, the great and good have contented themselves with petitions and open letters signed by important scientists. But their recommendations have not captured global attention, nor have they provoked a political movement.

Still, there have been some successes. In 1975, the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA led to guidelines about bio-safety that included a halt to experiments that combined DNA from different organisms. In 2015, an open letter concerning the convergence of AI with nuclear weapons was signed by more than 1,000 luminaries, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk. It called for a ban on AI warfare and autonomous weapons, and eventually led to a United Nations initiative. But in March, the United Nations Secretary General was still urging all member nations to agree to the ban. Only 125 have signed thus far.

And in 2017, Bostrom published a set of AI restrictions called the Asilomar AI Principles that outlined values, research restrictions, ethics, safety, and risk mitigation strategies for AI. The Future of Life Institute in Boston also profferred recommendations: “With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and future strong artificial intelligence, planning ahead is a better strategy than learning from mistakes.”

But without robust ethical and legal frameworks there have already been lapses. In November 2018, for instance, a rogue geneticist, He Jiankui, broke longstanding biotech guidelines and announced that he had used technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 to alter the embryonic genes of twin girls to protect them from the HIV virus. He was fired from his research job in Shenzhen, after an investigation showed that he had intentionally dodged oversight committees and used potentially unsafe techniques. Since then he has disappeared from public view, and is possibly under house arrest or in hiding. Clearly genetics labs as well as those developing AI must be monitored and policed. At present, they are not.

Whether the world is five, ten, or 20 years away from the “intelligence explosion” is irrelevant. There is no question it is coming. Hopefully we’ll wake up before it’s too late.

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Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Zelensky Era

If Moscow felt a warm sense of schadenfreude at the electoral trouncing of Ukraine’s incumbent President Poroshenko in the second round of the April 21 presidential elections, celebrations were outwardly subdued. Largely absent was the open, vindictive gloating that had accompanied Viktor Yushchenko’s record-breaking humiliation in the first round of Ukraine’s 2010 presidential elections. All the same, Putin declined even to congratulate the victor, comedian and political neophyte Volodymyr Zelensky, notwithstanding the widespread impression that Zelensky seeks a less contentious relationship with Ukraine’s great northern neighbor. Indeed, Moscow “greeted” Zelensky with a double whammy, announcing both the virtual end of Russian hydrocarbon exports to Ukraine, and a policy of facilitating the issuance of Russian passports, ostensibly as a humanitarian gesture, to Ukrainian citizens in the Russian-controlled Donbas.

Is Putin simply making these provocative moves in order to take the measure of the new, untested Ukrainian President, whose last name literally means “green?” Is the Kremlin being cagey, concealing its underlying affinity for Ukraine’s new President under a mantle of tepid rhetoric and hostile actions? Is Putin playing the part of the cool, calculating master of the situation, or, to the contrary, is the Kremlin exuding a palpable sense of unease, perhaps even a whiff of alarm, at the prospect of a Zelensky Administration in fraternal Ukraine?

While Russian liberals celebrated the salutary example of Ukrainians unseating an incumbent President in free and fair elections, the Kremlin is probably not overly anxious about any democratic contagion. After all, elections are no guarantee of honest or capable governance, as Ukrainians know better than anyone else. The past three Ukrainian Presidents legitimately won elections, only to be chased out in ignominy—two via massive electoral repudiations and one by a howling mob. This seemingly regular cycle of democratic elections followed by kleptocratic and incompetent governance solidifies the popular Russian perception of Ukraine as shambolic and chronically incapable of managing its own affairs properly. (All the more reason those affairs should be managed by someone else, no?) Far from presenting a temptation to Russians, the example of independent Ukraine, with all its poverty, inequality and deep-seated corruption, is grist for the mill of Kremlin apologists warning about the futility, even harmfulness, of Western-style democracy on the alien cultural soil of the supposed “Russian world.”

What, then, might make Moscow apprehensive about a Zelensky presidency? I believe there are two factors in play.

First, while democratic elections and the crushing defeat of an incumbent in Ukraine will not by themselves impress many Russians, they point to something potentially highly subversive for the Putin model of governance and for Russian policy in the post-Soviet space.

Poroshenko ran for reelection on the record of his first term and could boast of some formidable accomplishments: consolidating the Ukrainian national identity, halting (if not reversing) the Russian-cum-separatist erosion of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, building up the country’s military capabilities, and securing ecclesiastical independence for a Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, he richly deserved the trouncing he received at the polls because of his abject failure to tackle Ukraine’s chronic injustice, exemplified by the power of the oligarchs and the country’s endemic corruption.

Zelensky now has an opportunity to make good on the thus-far unrealized promise of the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity—to curb the power of the oligarchs, to reduce pervasive corruption, and to level the economic playing field in Ukraine. Russians might actually sit up and take notice if Kyiv managed to cut Ukraine’s oligarchs down to size, remediate the ubiquitous bribery and bureaucratism that plague everyday life, reduce the country’s obscene income disparities, and create the conditions for broadly based economic growth and rising incomes. If Ukraine’s relative freedom became associated in popular Russian thought not with anarchy and arbitrariness but with a modicum of justice and prosperity, the repercussions for Russia could be earth-shaking—or at least regime-shaking. Considering Ukraine’s rampant corruption and injustice, it should take only modest effort on Zelensky’s part to show some improvement—and his daring inaugural announcement to dissolve the Rada and hold snap parliamentary elections suggests a determination to take the corruption bull by the horns.

Aside from casting the Putin model of governance in a negative light, a serious Ukrainian reform policy would undermine the Russian goal of perpetuating and maximizing Ukraine’s isolation from Europe. Various Russian (and some Western) analysts have lauded Russia’s military interventions in Crimea and the Donbas for supposedly preventing Ukrainian accession to Euro-Atlantic organizations, particularly NATO, both in the short and long terms. There was, of course, no short-term prospect of Ukraine joining NATO in 2014, and arguably the biggest impediment to Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration has not been the reality or threat of Russian military action but the country’s unreformed, oligarch-ridden legal, social, and economic framework. Under current conditions, it is difficult to imagine any country ratifying Ukraine’s accession to either NATO or the European Union. Therefore, a comprehensive reform effort by Zelensky would give prospective Ukrainian membership in Euro-Atlantic organizations a plausibility that it has heretofore lacked. Moreover, a sustained Ukrainian-Western rapprochement on the basis of root-and-branch reform, laying a solid foundation for eventual accession to Euro-Atlantic organizations, would not only undermine the conceit that Russia can thwart Ukraine’s European vocation (which ultimately can only be thwarted by Ukrainians themselves), but also devalue the occupied Donbas as an instrument of Russian policy with respect to Kyiv.

Second, regardless of the success of Ukrainian reform under Zelensky, the election of a Russophone President will probably prove—once again—to be a bitter disappointment for Moscow, changing at best the tone and the pace but not the overall trajectory of the Russo-Ukrainian “long goodbye.”

Zelensky has not repudiated his predecessor’s legacy when it comes to consolidating the Ukrainian national identity, nor does he have any domestic political reason to do so. He might ratchet down nationalist rhetoric and relax the pace of linguistic Ukrainianization, but he will not reverse the inexorable improvement in the population’s overall Ukrainian-language facility, nor the increased use of Ukrainian in public discourse at the expense of Russian. While some expansion of Russo-Ukrainian economic ties might be feasible, it remains to be seen how much either Moscow or the Ukrainian parliament would permit the restoration of trade or investment. Indeed, the announced restrictions on Russian hydrocarbon sales to Ukraine suggest a tightening rather than a loosening of the economic screws.

With regard to the simmering conflict in the Donbas, Zelensky inherits the same set of unpalatable options that Poroshenko faced. He can: recognize the independence of the Russian-controlled separatist entities and let them go; accept terms for their reintegration into Ukraine that would leave them under Moscow’s effective control and give them a veto over national policy; or continue the desultory shelling and positional maneuvering that have characterized the stalemated conflict since 2015. Other theoretical options—Russian abandonment of the separatists or a Ukrainian Reconquista of the Donbas—are completely unrealistic within the timeframe of Zelensky’s term of office. His default option is therefore likely to be further strengthening of the Ukrainian army, military cooperation with Western partners, and maintenance of the status quo along the line of contact. Tinkering with the negotiating format will have no effect whatsoever.

In sum, under Zelensky we might anticipate some easing of Russo-Ukrainian tensions without, however, any change to positions of principle, much as in Georgia following the 2012 change of regime—what Vladimir Socor has dubbed “coexistence without real normalization.”

This outcome should surprise no one, since Zelensky’s election in no way alters the underlying dynamic of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. In his public pronouncements since the Ukrainian elections, Putin has doubled down on his flawed notion that Russians and Ukrainians are “really” one nation—which is to say that Ukrainians are really just Russians. The denigration implicit in Putin’s thinking is exemplified in widespread Russian ridicule of all things Ukrainian, particularly the language. While deprecating Ukraine is a tried-and-true method for pandering to the sense of Russian superiority, this overbearing “older brother” complex sits rather badly with Ukrainians, even Russophone ones. Ukrainians, by and large, remain well-disposed toward Russians, if not necessarily toward Kremlin policies. Most of them would warmly welcome a normalization of Russo-Ukrainian ties, but few seem prepared to accept the loss of their national identity as the price for doing so.

The conferring of autocephaly on the Orthodox Church of Ukraine by the Patriarch of Constantinople in January is emblematic of the conundrum facing the Kremlin. The creation of a canonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine independent of Moscow unfolded over a period of many months, during which the vociferous and increasingly frantic objections of the Russian government and the Moscow Patriarchate abjectly failed to derail the process.

Subsequently very little has changed outwardly in Ukraine. The new Orthodox Church of Ukraine has absorbed most of the Orthodox parishes that had previously declined to accept the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarch. Some 500 parishes have reportedly switched allegiance from the Moscow Patriarchate to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, but they represent only about 4 percent of the Moscow Patriarchate’s 12,000 parishes in the country. A stampede of parishes from the Moscow Patriarchate to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine is unlikely.

The cumulative psychological impact over time, however, is likely to be profound. Ukrainian Orthodox believers can now worship in a national church that is fully canonical. It is no longer possible to imagine that the heretofore-schismatic Ukrainian Orthodox churches could be nudged, gently or more forcefully, back into the bosom of the Moscow Patriarchate. The latter will retain a substantial footprint in Ukraine, with sizeable congregations of ethnic Russians as well as non-Russians who prefer the liturgy in Church Slavonic rather than Ukrainian. However, the supposition that Orthodoxy in Ukraine is merely and exclusively a branch of the Russian Orthodox Church has been demolished forever. The umbilical cord has been cut and cannot be rejoined.

Even for non-Orthodox Ukrainians, the battle for autocephaly was a gratifying opportunity to cock a snook at Moscow. It was a prime example of an all-too-frequent experience for Putin in the post-Soviet space: failing to get his way no matter how high the priority or how hard he tries. For Westerners inclined to view Putin as an evil genius manipulating our political systems in frightening and unfavorable ways, his inability to block autocephaly for the Orthodox Church in Ukraine—a country where the Kremlin has a vast array of levers at its disposal and where the stakes could hardly be higher—is a stunning and salutary display of impotence.

Hence, Moscow’s dyspeptic and even spiteful reaction to Zelensky’s election is a token of business as usual in post-Soviet Russo-Ukrainian relations. After an unbroken string of Ukrainian leaders—even avowedly pro-Russian ones—who failed to meet Russian expectations, the Kremlin is understandably reluctant to indulge in wishful thinking. Unfortunately, this clear-eyed, even praiseworthy realism about the short-term possibilities for relations with Ukraine is undermined by the illusions that appear to cloud longer-term Russian thinking about “Little Russia.” This fantasizing includes: nostalgia for an Eastern Slavic unity that arguably never was, and that certainly hasn’t existed for centuries; a pious belief that the persistent Russophilia of so many Ukrainians provides a promising basis for their assimilation and absorption by the Russians; and the sullen conviction that the Ukrainian nation and state are artificial entities created and sustained by malevolent Westerners.

Alas, Russian maximalism with regard to Ukraine will always bump up against the awkward conviction of most Ukrainians, even Russophone ones, that they constitute a separate nation—one that possesses its own cherished linguistic and cultural attributes, and has national interests that do not necessarily coincide with Russia’s. Because there is probably little he can or would even want to do to change this dynamic, Zelensky will inevitably disappoint and frustrate Moscow. More alarmingly, far-reaching reforms could create a Ukraine perceived not only as more democratic than Russia but also as more just. In this regard, Zelensky the Russophone populist, much more so than Poroshenko the oligarchic nationalist, threatens to wreak serious havoc on Putinism.

No wonder the Kremlin has given Zelensky such a chilly reception. However, the comedian just might have the last laugh.

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How Film Can Shake Up the Debate About War

The debate about military interventions has been trapped in amber for years now. Where, when, and why we should intervene in conflicts—whether in Central Africa, Eastern Europe or the Middle East, whether for regime change, for the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), or for humanitarian aid—are almost forgotten topics. The debate has been stuck in place because the lingering engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq have produced little in the way of results that voters can understand or appreciate, discrediting for many even the idea of an interventionist foreign policy. Not even ongoing humanitarian crises in places like Syria and Yemen have managed to shift the debate out of its present stalemate.

Part of the reason the debate has frozen in place is that the media and our political leaders all too often have done a poor job reporting on conflicts and explaining the costs and benefits of intervening in them. It’s on this note that we might consider looking to film. Two recent productions, in particular—War Machine (2017) and A Private War (2018)—offer fresh perspectives on conflicts and why we choose to get involved with them. Both are clear-eyed in their assessments of the mistakes intervening powers have made in recent years, but perhaps most importantly both offer portraits of war that are much more complex than one finds in the crowd-pleasing battlefield epics that have long been Hollywood’s standard fare when it comes to depictions of war.

To be sure, neither of these films were particularly acclaimed at the time of their release. War Machine received spectacularly low ratings, and film reviewers almost unanimously considered it a disaster. A Netflix production launched in only a few select cinemas, War Machine is a political satire based on The Operators, Michael Hastings’ book, expanded from his famous Rolling Stone article, about General Stanley McChrystal’s mandate as commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. With a generous budget of $60 million, the film was produced and financed through a multiyear partnership between New Regency and Brad Pitt’s Plan B after their rousingly successful partnership in the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave.

Loosely hewing to the Hastings account, War Machine follows four-star general Glen McMahon—a thinly fictionalized version of McChrystal whose name was chosen to sound macho (“McMan”)—from his successful rescue of the Iraq counter-insurgency mission to his selection by President Obama to manage the U.S. withdrawal, with as much political grace as possible, from Afghanistan. As the film shows of McMahon, McChrystal viewed Afghanistan as the defining moment of his career and requested a troop surge. The lack of political support he subsequently received from the Obama Administration motivated him to agree to the infamous Rolling Stone interview that abruptly torpedoed his career.

Helmed by the young and acclaimed Australian director David Michôd, War Machine received bad reviews mainly because, as Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian noted, it “doesn’t know what it wants to be.” A war movie? A satire? Or something else entirely? He also faulted it for having a hero who “learns nothing,” portrayed by Pitt in a way that “leaves you unsure whether he is being celebrated or satirized.”

But far from being an “irrelevant, alpha-male misfire,” as another reviewer put it, War Machine’s value stems precisely from the complexity of its portrait. Michôd’s intention wasn’t to make a film that could be easily slotted in to a pre-defined film category or genre. It is a satire based on a realistic and contemporary war scenario, something that has not been so far tried in quite this way. It shows the ISAF mission through an unflattering but honest lens. Pitt’s General McMahon fits the stereotype of an American general: stiff in appearance, narrow in thinking, and deliberately ignorant of cultural differences. He frequently vents his frustrations with his Western alliance partners: “The entire base is rolling with Eurosexuals who are so drunk they can’t even stand up.” Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the de jure ruler of a de facto foreign-ruled country, hits all the right comedic notes. McMahon tells him all about the “new” direction he wants to take the ISAF mission, consisting of “building Afghanistan.” “I see. I see… Sounds a lot like the old direction,” Kingsley deadpans. Michôd likewise hits all the right notes in the portrayal of other aspects of the war: European coalition forces are shown as cooperative and compliant but also deeply skeptical about the purpose of their mission on the ground. Tilda Swinton offers a beautiful performance as a German politician who questions the very spirit of the ISAF mission and puts the over-confident American general on the spot.

War Machine is thus both funny and tragic, realistic and overstated. If it comes across as contradictory and uncertain of the kind of film it’s supposed to be, that’s only because Afghanistan is uncertain of the kind of war it’s supposed to be. The reason for the film’s bad reviews stem from the fact that it was too niche for the critics. Coming at the film as someone who not only worked in NATO with American soldiers and Western European partners, but also in the presidential administration of one of the countries that contributed to Afghanistan mission at the time of McChrystal’s mandate, I found the film’s farcical presentation of ISAF uncomfortably, even painfully, true to life. Its reflection of the complexities in understanding contemporary conflict is symbolized in Pitt’s depiction of McMahon as thoughtlessly saluting Käthe Kollwitz’s pietà sculpture of a mother holding her dying soldier son (controversial in Germany because it could be interpreted as glorifying the military).

War Machine’s critical left-wing narrator, Sean Cullen, a Rolling Stone journalist based on Hastings, confronts the general’s attempts to explain counterinsurgency to both political audiences and soldiers on the ground. McMahon struggles to explain the paradoxes and intricacies of counter-insurgency—the art of winning over a population while not getting killed by insurgents—to a wide audience. The film doesn’t shy away from confronting the American military leader’s clichés. “You boys are the only thing that counts. If it doesn’t happen here it doesn’t happen,” McMahon tells some assembled U.S. troops. “What doesn’t happen?” asks a beleaguered young soldier. “It, son,” says Pitt, menacingly. “Okay, thank you sir,” says the soldier as he shrinks back into the ranks. German politicians sharply question McMahon’s motives: “As an elected representative of the people of Germany it is my job to ensure that the personal ambitions of those who serve those people are kept in check.”

To their credit, Michôd and Pitt aren’t afraid to be blunt about Washington and its foibles and double standards. A U.S. Embassy official tells General McMahon that they suspect Karzai is “a drug addict” who “eliminated his chief opponent in this election by spreading a pretty vicious homosexual rumor,” and whose “brother is a straight-up criminal warlord.” McMahon yells: “Oh come on, Pat. . . . How is Washington any different?” The General is also critical of the U.S. media: “Let’s lose Fox News. Won’t do as any good to have a bunch of angry perverts yelling at us all day.” The allies and the absurdities that come with multi-coalition operations come in for their fair share of criticism as well: “Austria has only two guys here. . . . This country won’t fight at night. That country won’t fight in the snow” is a statement that sums up coalition operational problems. “The good news is Berlin will give us the troops,” says McMahon while touring Berlin in search of additional support for the mission. “The bad news is they won’t be able to leave the base.”

Perhaps War Machine was just too hard a pill for critics and audiences to swallow. It is a movie about a soldier who talks about fighting in a war but never actually does it—a soldier who is forced by civilian leaders to take over a civilian leadership role. (In two hours of runtime, less than ten minutes are devoted to battle scenes or action set pieces.) Moreover, it spreads itself thin ideologically, in that it criticizes everyone: the U.S. military, U.S. and allied civilian leadership, the local population, and the meta-narrative of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism itself. War Machine just challenges too many of our cherished preconceptions about war and interventionism to please anyone, much less everyone.

While War Machine is a film about a warrior forced to operate in civilian settings, A Private War is a drama about a civilian operating in the midst of a harrowing war. The film is based on a 2012 Vanity Fair profile of Marie Colvin, the renowned combat journalist who died in the Homs siege in Syria. A Private War also contrasts War Machine in that it conveys Colvin’s case for the ongoing need for humanitarian intervention. It was thanks to her heroic efforts that the world had proof of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s attacks on civilians in 2011. With a screenplay by Arash Amel (Grace of Monaco), the film was directed by Matthew Heinemann, who has had prior success as a director of documentary films. Heinemann’s past works also focused on international conflict: Cartel Land (2015) offers a dizzying account of the Mexican drug trade; City of Ghosts (2017) tells the story of the Syrian media activist group Raqqa Is Being Silently Slaughtered.

A Private War received far better reviews than War Machine, despite being ostentatiously conventional and having little of the subtlety or complexity of the latter. It is yet another entry in the catalogue of films like Zero Dark Thirty and Testament of Truth, depicting women making heroic and magnificent contributions to peace and security. (Better late than never, I guess.) It also focuses too much on her personality, attributing Colvin’s actions to her addiction to thrill-seeking rather than her boundless courage to document conflicts in places even Western militaries fear to tread. A Private War takes us briefly through the journalist’s experiences in Sri Lanka and more extensively through Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Heinemann’s shots of Colvin’s in shattered buildings and among dying civilians are offered without moralistic commentary, letting viewers see for themselves how the elderly, women, and children are being slaughtered every day.

The value of A Private War is inherent in its subject: a war journalist who had the courage to go where no one else dared to go, who dedicated her life to showing the world that the “national interest” is not truly served when human rights are violated and civilians are not protected. This is vital work in a time when isolationist and populist tendencies in the Western world will hide humanitarian catastrophes behind a veil of ignorance. While statistics may show us that the world is becoming safer by the decade, and that fewer and fewer people are dying as a result of violence, conflicts like those in Syria and Yemen are ongoing and won’t be the last to generate dilemmas surrounding humanitarian interventions.

Western voters’ aversion to military action for humanitarian reasons has in large part been driven by their governments’ failure both to provide accurate and comprehensive analyses of humanitarian crises and to explain reasons for and costs of intervening in them. In opinion polls, majorities of German voters oppose military intervention to defend not just Ukraine but fellow NATO members as well, and they favor the use of troops in humanitarian interventions—but only as long as there’s no chance that they will either shoot or be shot at. This paradoxical notion—that the only situations in which Germans would approve of the use of force are situations in which the use of force is unnecessary—is but one of many examples of Western governments’ failures to honestly and prudently make the case for interventions. While pacifist sentiments run less strongly in other Western countries, it should surprise no one that no coalition arose even after Syria’s chemical weapons attacks. Even in France, whose forces are currently present in Syria, the majority disagree with the intervention and only 36 percent were in favor of the Libyan intervention. Overall, only 22 percent Europeans are in favor of a Syrian intervention. As for Yemen, the media have neither the resources nor the inclination to cover that war, leaving dramatic presentations and documentary films as one of the few ways Western publics are exposed to news about that conflict.

Meanwhile, when news media do cover such conflicts, they tend to focus, to the exclusion of all else, on stories of civilian suffering or the trauma experienced by returning soldiers. Recently, a high-level Bundeswehr staff lamented this fact, encouraging me to watch the Norwegian television drama Nobel (available on Netflix), which provides a much more balanced and multi-dimensional portrayal of soldiers’ homecomings.

This blind spot, perhaps, is why film reviewers failed to appreciate the complex portrait presented by these two films. A Private War shows us the dark side of humanity to which Western governments, publics, and media all too often turn a blind eye. War Machine shows us the enormous gulf between Western military capabilities and the need to win over hearts and minds in war-torn societies. Both films challenge our preconceptions about conflicts and our reasons for intervening in them, and invite us to renew a moribund debate.

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Whitewashing Art, and History

Among the many delights of San Francisco are its many historically important murals. The city boasts an impressive collection commissioned by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, including several painted by the renowned Diego Rivera.

Most of these WPA murals celebrate some aspect of the Golden State: industry, agriculture, nature, urban life. Many of the artists who created the murals also smuggled in some pointed political commentary: fields of produce and rolling hills planted with grapes symbolize California’s agricultural abundance, but so do dark skinned laborers, their backs arched in pain, their eyes, downcast. Clean cut men in lab coats and business suits stand beside productive factories, which belch smoke that fouls the air that gasping children breathe in a neighboring panel.

This tradition of mural painting became part of San Francisco’s culturally and politically progressive identity. The necessarily subtle criticism of the WPA murals yielded to more overt politics themes in murals painted throughout the 20th century. Today the city’s historically Mexican-American Mission District is famous for its many striking murals depicting scenes of local life, often with powerful countercultural, revolutionary and protest themes. Because the murals are integral parts of buildings, gentrification and insensitive redevelopment pose a constant threat to this legacy. But now some of San Francisco’s finest murals face an unlikely enemy: self-consciously—one might even say conspicuously—progressive politicians.

The George Washington High School in San Francisco is home to one of the largest collections of WPA murals on the West Coast, including 13 frescoes depicting the life of George Washington, painted as part of a WPA commission by Victor Arnautoff, a Russian immigrant and communist intellectual. True to his political commitments and to the tradition of subtly subversive WPA art, Arnautoff’s frescoes appear at first glance to celebrate Washington’s virtues and accomplishments but include subversive themes. A closer look reveals slaves working the fields outside Mount Vernon; Washington oversees the westward expansion while standing over the lifeless body of a Native-American.

One might worry that a politically conservative city would object to this less-than-flattering depiction of the father of our country. But San Francisco’s liberal politics, its reputation for cultural sophistication, and its many world class museums, should guarantee a receptive audience for the challenging, critical message the frescoes contain. Yet, the President of the San Francisco Board of Education, Stevon Cook, complains that the murals depict “violent images that are offensive to certain communities” and so wants to “remove” them from the school. He is joined by Paloma Flores, coordinator of the school’s Indian Education Program, who claims that the murals, “glorify the white man’s role and dismiss the humanity of other people…” Anticipating the obvious rejoinder that the murals in fact do precisely the opposite, she insists that the artist’s “intent no longer matters.” Matt Haney, a former school board member and current member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors condemns the murals as “dehumanizing.” Joely Proudfit of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center insisted that the art should be destroyed if even one Native American student is “triggered” by it. The school district formed a group with the somewhat Orwellian name “The Reflections and Action Committee” to decide the fate of the murals. It voted 8-1 to do “remove” them (to be clear, this is euphemism for destroying them—the committee dissembles with the suggestion that they can be photographed and digitally archived) asserting, against all available evidence, that the art “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization . . . white supremacy, oppression . . .”

Does this willful misreading tell us anything about the current trend to rename or remove monuments associated with historical injustices? Yes and no. On the one hand, in cases of monuments to Confederate officers and the architects of imperial conquest, the contested monuments and laudatory names were in fact intended to celebrate imperialists and the defenders of slavery. They, unlike Arnautoff’s murals, arguably do glorify slavery and genocide. There may be no better way to repudiate the malignant ideology that justified these atrocities than to repudiate the symbols. Moreover, in most cases, there is no need to destroy a work of art in the process: flags can be redesigned and older versions archived, street and building names can be changed and monuments removed from places of honor and relocated to museums where they still can be viewed in the full historical context of the people they depict. There is sometimes reason to worry that in repudiating important figures of the past we ignore lost virtues as well as reject outdated prejudices. But the repudiation of malignant icons and old heroes who we now know to have been villains can be an indispensable part of the ongoing reimagination of the national community and revitalization of its shared values.

On the other hand, sometimes removing a monument or changing a street name is a cheap form of virtue signaling. Consider the frustrating dilemma of the San Francisco officials. Across the nation, the leaders of cities and colleges that are home to monuments that do indeed glorify slavery, genocide and oppression demonstrate their virtue and commitment to social justice by taking them down. But in San Francisco, where, given the political climate, such a demonstration would be irresistibly advantageous, there is no such low hanging fruit left—no monument to a Confederate General or building named after a slave trader. So our intrepid leaders must go where no one has gone before in search of less obvious opportunities for conspicuous righteous indignation. This is how a radically subversive work of art that retells the nation’s founding mythology by incorporating the cruelty of slavery and the brutality of genocide can somehow be apprehended as its opposite: a work that “glorifies slavery and genocide.” Those engaged in this misdirection must insist that the artist’s intent “no longer matters” because, ultimately, the art itself doesn’t matter either: the murals are simply an excuse for opportunistic virtue signaling by a gang of Philistines (no doubt I should expect indignant missives from San Francisco public officials on behalf of the Philistine-American community) in need of a ritual demonstration of ideological purity.

To make the destruction of challenging art appear to be virtuous, these would-be Savonarolas pose as the saviors of a class of oppressed students traumatized by the original sin their ancestors suffered. But this trauma, if that is what it is (the students themselves seem overwhelmingly to favor keeping the murals intact) is unavoidable if we are ever to reckon with our past. It is no more justifiable to destroy art and whitewash history in order to spare the feelings of black and brown children than it is to do so to spare the feelings of white children, as, to their discredit, schools have done for generations by offering a sanitized version of history, where the agricultural bounty of the American south is extolled without reference to the stolen labor of kidnapped Africans and in which the settlement of the North American continent is referred to as a bloodless “pushing back” of the indigenous population.

Harvard Law School professor Annette Gordon Reed—the celebrated historian who discovered the sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemmings—has argued forcefully against this kind of therapeutic amnesia. When Harvard Law School discovered that its shield was modeled on the family crest of Isaac Royall, a slaveowner who helped establish the school in 1817, many demanded that the school abandon the shield—as it did in 2016. Reed was one of the few who argued that Harvard should keep the shield—not to lionize Royall but to acknowledge the people who truly helped build Harvard Law School: “the enslaved at the Royall Plantation and the graduates of Harvard Law School should always be tied together . . . [we should be] constantly reminded of from whence that money came. . .” Reed proposed a more challenging and uncomfortable approach to symbols of historical injustice; she insisted that we have a duty to confront our history rather than to repudiate it. She addressed the problem of trauma head on and with admirable moral clarity: “It is clear that, for many, there is great discomfort—disgust even—at the thought of looking at the Harvard shield and having to think of slavery . . . [but] people should have to think of slavery when they think of the Harvard shield . . . [although] being required to do that will provoke strong and unpleasant feelings . . . it is vital to learn how to govern strong and unpleasant feelings [for] purposes outside of . . . (and even more important than) one’s personal feelings.”

One can sympathize with the desire to ensure that people of color are comfortable in institutions that have not always welcomed them. And one might object that grade school children are too young for the severe discipline Professor Reed advocates, that they should be sheltered from the ugliness that the Arnautoff’s murals powerfully depict. But the San Francisco Board of Education—like Harvard Law School—should at least be honest about what they are keeping students from seeing and why. If San Francisco destroys the Arnautoff murals, it is not to protect children from work that “glorifies slavery” or that “dehumanizes” the oppressed but from art that unflinchingly confronts slavery and oppression—art that is designed to make us uncomfortable. They are hiding the unvarnished truth about how this country acquired its wealth and territory—a truth that all Americans, regardless of race, have a responsibility to reckon with; wealth and territory that all Americans now enjoy.

Avoiding this truth may help some students feel better about their school and their country and it may help some public officials feel better about themselves. But it will repudiate, not the injustices of the past, but a powerful act of resistance to those injustices. One wonders what the San Francisco officials would do if the similarly disturbing art of Diego Rivera graced the halls of one of its schools. Would they destroy it? Or does a narrowminded and regimented identity politics account for their refusal to acknowledge and celebrate the contribution of a depression era Russian immigrant to the struggle for American racial and social justice—as if only black and brown people have a stake in repudiating the evils of slavery and racist imperialism? Ironically, erasing Arnautoff’s murals—done in the name of multicultural sensitivity—will rob today’s students and future generations of a vivid example of multicultural politics at its best: an expression of collective responsibility for our shared history.

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The Man Who Hates Macron

Francois Ruffin hates President Emmanuel Macron. He hates him so much, he wrote two articles and a book about his hatred.

Ruffin isn’t alone. The past eight months of protests have made clear that, while Macron was lauded as an outsider hero who would sweep the French economy off its feet and restore the stagnating country to its former glory, he may not have been the hero France, or Europe, wanted.

But Francois Ruffin’s opinion matters more than the average person’s. An outspoken, media-savvy deputy for the far-Left party “La France Insoumise”, he has developed a loyal following and has thrust himself into the public arena as a voice of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement. Most importantly, he seems to be unintentionally positioning himself as a challenger to the long-standing face of “La France Insoumise,” Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and by extension as a potential challenger to Macron.

His manifesto, “Ce Pays que Tu ne Connais Pas,” published in February 2019, remains in the list of the top 20 best-selling books in France more than three months later. On April 3, his highly anticipated documentary on the Yellow Vests, J’veux du soleil, was released in theaters. The documentary was no blockbuster, totaling a modest 74,619 views throughout its first week, but it serves as an ideal complement to the greater narrative Ruffin has been building. While reviews of both pieces have been mixed, there is no doubt that they have had a significant cultural impact.

There are many things to dislike about Ruffin’s book. His tone is petulant, and he often portrays himself as a martyr of the people in a theatrical, eye-roll-inducing manner. His more substantial arguments, detailing the extensive network of wealth which he claims helped propel Macron to political stardom, are undermined by ad hominem attacks against Macron that vary from a “visceral hatred of his face” to gratuitous commentary on his lack of wrinkles and mannerisms.

Ruffin also spends much of his time defending his own legitimacy. He begins his “letter” in Amiens, where he and Macron both attended the same Catholic school, Lycée la Providence. While neither politician knew each other back then, Ruffin believes that this coincidence is an essential starting point for his story. Indeed, Ruffin’s disgust with Macron is almost a form of self-flagellation: He is constantly torn between his unwavering commitment to serving as a voice for the downtrodden and his blatantly bourgeois roots.

A career journalist, Ruffin has dedicated his life to shedding light on corruption and defending the “little people” of France. His book is filled with anecdotes depicting his time traveling across the country, meeting disenfranchised workers, single mothers, immigrants, and young people who all serve to illustrate the suffering that Macron, or rather the “oligarchical system” that he represents, has enabled in France.

He is particularly focused on Macron’s friendships with the rich. Bernard Arnault, the owner of LVMH Moet Henessy and the wealthiest man in France, is Ruffin’s favorite target. In truth, Ruffin’s disdain for Arnault predates his disdain for Macron: His first documentary, Merci Patron!, which earned him a César, was centered on Arnault and the treatment of laborers in France.

J’veux du soleil, his most recent documentary, was filmed in six days in December 2018 and details François Ruffin’s experience in the “France of roundabouts” as he interviews various Gilets Jaunes. Filmed in his car by Gilles Peret, a French film producer whose last documentary focused on Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Ruffin seeks above all to humanize the protesters and honor their suffering. Yet the documentary quickly veers into reality-TV-like dramatizations: a slow camera shot zooming into the face of a crying woman in Montpellier, clips of factory workers cut with shots of luxury yachts and jet skis. As with his book, the dramatic emphasis and populist messaging undercuts the substance of the film. Despite the opportune timing of the documentary, one month prior to the European Parliamentary elections, Ruffin’s office emphasized that this was mere coincidence; it was “imperative to the team to be able to present J’veux du soleil while the movement was still alive so that it did not serve as an epitaph but rather as a fighting tool.”

As Ruffin accumulates cultural and political capital, his presence becomes all the more important in France. The traditional Left-Right dichotomy has crumbled, as best exemplified by Macron’s election in 2017, and the only other politician who seems to have survived this collapse is Marine Le Pen, the face of the far-Right National Rally (previously the National Front). While Ruffin often flirts with populist rhetoric and claims no real political affiliations, at its core his messaging remains within the French tradition of leftist politics. That is, while he is a savvy strategist who has benefitted from the recent surge in populist sentiment, he remains anti-capitalist and pro-immigration, unlike characters such as Italy’s Beppe Grillo.

Perhaps the most poignant passage in his book defends just this: Ruffin is deeply contemptuous of Macron’s claims to leftist ideology—he believes that la gauche is earned, not claimed. It is earned by “suffering by the sides of the defeated, of the outraged, the downtrodden”—something he believes Macron has never understood, nor experienced. Ruffin truly thinks he has a calling to help the disenfranchised in France. He does not resort to anti-immigrant rhetoric, Islamophobic discourse, or anti-EU propaganda. He simply tells the stories of the ordinary French people he has met along the way.

Despite the Gilets Jaunes, neither the traditional right nor the traditional left in France has been able to capitalize on the unrest. The inability of these parties to regain traction amidst such political upheaval should be seen as a sign that their existence is increasingly irrelevant within the political landscape. In effect, the Left-Right system has been displaced by a system in which the center faces off with the extremes.

This first became evident in 2017, when France’s establishment parties dramatically underperformed in the election: The center-right Les Républicains captured 20.1 percent. At the extremes, the far-Left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, came in just under 20 percent and the far-Right National Rally emerged as the front-runner against Macron with 21.3 percent.  In the center, Macron’s En Marche! (LREM) Party came out with 24.01 percent, eventually moving on to clinch the election against Marine Le Pen. The traditional French Left, represented by Benoît Hamon from the Socialist Party (PS), garnered a mere 6.36 percent of the vote. As this shift in French politics becomes more ingrained, a character like Ruffin, who claims no real political affiliation but the will of the people, becomes all the more interesting, and all the more dangerous as 2022 approaches.

And this trend is by no means unique to France. It seems that the traditional Left-Right divide has been replaced by an open-closed, or global-national, divide across Europe. The issues at the center of this new political divide, namely immigration, climate change, and the European Union, are polarizing in a manner that transcends the politics of old. While the clear example of this mutation is the newfound élan of the populist far-Right, the Left and far-Left have also experienced profound, destabilizing mutations that will have long-lasting effects on European politics. In France, the PS essentially died with its dismal showing in 2017. Centrist Macron and populist Le Pen have not only come to define the French landscape, but also serve as a symbol of the greater political struggle emerging across Europe.

The upcoming European elections further reflect this reality, as Macron’s party competes closely with the National Rally. Current predictions see LREM (whose European election campaign has been rebranded Renaissance) falling behind the National Rally, and by Macron’s top candidate Nathalie Loiseau have done little to assuage the competition. Poor results in the European elections would not only be an enormous blow to Macron, who has defined himself as the pro-Europe, liberal reformer, but also a tremendous setback for the European Parliament’s liberal coalition, ALDE, which seeks to join forces with LREM to create a whole new post-election group within the Parliament.

While Le Pen has been able to take advantage of the anti-establishment wave on the far-Right, the French Left has largely failed to do so. Le Pen has even taken her campaign tactics beyond the French borders, and urged Belgian voters to support far-Right Vlaams Belang at a campaign stop last week. If Ruffin is truly a challenger to Mélenchon as the next leader of “la France Insoumise,” or perhaps as the leader of a new, independent, radical leftist party, he could be the gauche’s answer to the National Rally’s recent success. While this could simply lead to further fragmentation and polarization of the political landscape, it could also be the solution to the rampant disorganization seen on the Left, and thus pose a serious challenge to Macron as he seeks re-election. When pressed about Ruffin’s electoral aspirations, both within the ranks of “La France Insoumise” and at the presidential level, Ruffin’s office declined to comment.

To be sure, Ruffin is in many ways a caricature: He refuses to wear a tie when summoned to the National Assembly, he refuses his full salary from the French government and only claims the minimum wage (though he has other sources of income), he believes the presidency should be abolished (though he started his own micro-party that could serve as a springboard to the Presidency), and he likens himself to Robin Hood, a veritable man of the people—at least the people who despise the elite.

None of this means Ruffin is dishonest, or acting in bad faith. But perhaps, like his Jupiterian nemesis, he isn’t quite so down to earth either.

Whether Ruffin’s increasing media presence will be enough to propel him to the forefront of national politics remains uncertain. However, there is no doubt his voice will continue to echo among the anti-Macron French. And as the Gilets Jaunes lose steam, and the European elections loom, Ruffin’s presence will continue to reverberate within the National Assembly and across France.

The post The Man Who Hates Macron appeared first on The American Interest.