Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 41

Bet on Climate Change, Not the Green New Deal

Will the Earth burn up, or be inundated by floods, or both, unless drastic and immediate action is taken? Several Democratic Members of Congress think so. In February they introduced a proposal for a “Green New Deal,” a hugely ambitious program for a rapid and steep reduction in the emission of the greenhouse gases that cause the Earth’s temperature to rise. The program includes, among other goals, abolishing the domestic use of all carbon-based fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—in ten years. In combination with the beginning of the contest for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, the candidates for which have already begun to compete with one another in their commitment—in principle if not in all of its particulars—to the program, it has vaulted the issue of climate change to the top of the American political agenda.

The program’s proponents have a propensity for calling climate change an “existential threat” to the well-being not only of all Americans but of all the inhabitants of the planet Earth. They thus suggest that it is a danger on a par with, and perhaps even greater than, past and present threats such as fascism, communism, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction.

Even if one of the Green New Deal-promoting Democrats manages to become President, however, he or she will not be able to implement the sweeping policies the program advocates. Three formidable barriers to the political consensus required to take the necessary steps stand in the way, each of them built into the problem of climate change: the uncertainties associated with it; the very long time horizon it involves; and the global scope required for an effective response to it.

Climate change is not a hoax. Its geophysical basis has been known for well over 100 years.  Greenhouse gases form a kind of blanket in the Earth’s atmosphere, trapping heat and raising the temperature not just of the atmosphere but of its surface and oceans as well. The greater the volume of greenhouse gas emitted, the thicker the blanket becomes and therefore the higher the temperature will rise. In recent decades emissions have soared and recorded temperatures have, in an uneven pattern, increased.

Beyond these basic facts, however, lie considerable uncertainties. It is impossible to know how much greenhouse gas will be emitted in the future. It is not clear precisely how great an increase in temperature a given expansion of the atmospheric blanket will produce. It is even less certain what the geophysical effects will be of whatever temperature increases will occur: scientists envision rising sea levels and more frequent extreme events such as droughts and hurricanes but cannot forecast them with confidence or precision. Less certain still are the social, economic, and political consequences of whatever impact on the planet temperature increases turn out to have.

The predictions that scientists do make are based on the models of the climate they they construct; but it is difficult for them to produce wholly reliable models because the climate is so complicated and because their models incorporate assumptions about a range of physical effects that are almost certainly imprecise and might ultimately prove to be entirely erroneous. This limits the value of the predictions.

Combating climate change will require a measure of economic sacrifice, in the form of higher prices for energy and the many products that energy is used to make and perhaps even, as the Green New Deal suggests, through changes of lifestyle. Summoning taxpayers and voters to make sacrifices is not easy under any circumstances and is all the harder when the harms the sacrifices are designed to avoid cannot be precisely defined or measured.

Given so much uncertainty, it is possible that the disruption that climate change causes will be more modest than the most prominent forecasts foretell. This is not, however, a reason for complacency. Uncertainty, after all, cuts both ways. The impact of whatever temperature increases takes place could equally plausibly turn out to be worse than the predictions that the most widely used climate models have yielded.

Scientists believe that the most serious effects of climate change will not occur for decades.  This, too, presents an obstacle to decisive action to curtail it. Prevention requires citizens to make sacrifices now to avoid harm to people they do not and cannot know because the beneficiaries have yet to be born.

It is notoriously difficult to get people to do things in the present that will pay off, even for those same people, in familiar and important ways, in the future: too few save enough for retirement, or get regular medical checkups, or follow healthy diets. It is all the more difficult to persuade them to make what may seem considerable sacrifices in the present on behalf of others not yet living and for vaguer, less familiar purposes.

Moreover, to have a serious impact on climate change, preventive measures must be taken by all the countries that contribute substantially to the Earth’s blanket of greenhouse gas.  Even if the United States were to adopt every one of the initiatives that make up the Green New Deal, climate change would remain a serious problem unless China, India, Russia and Europe were to act along similar lines.

The imposition of limits on climate change is an example of what economists call an “international public good.” A public good is something whose benefits cannot be denied to anybody, such as national defense, clean air, and clean water. Public goods are difficult to produce because everyone has an incentive to be a free rider—to avoid paying for them. If all relevant parties act in this way, of course, there is no public good. Within countries this problem is solved by the existence of government, which uses its coercive power to compel citizens to pay through taxation. Since there is no global government, however, this solution is not available for restraining climate change. True, 195 countries have signed the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, whose goal is to stop the rise in the global temperature—although the United States has since withdrawn; but that accord is merely a statement of good intentions.  It lacks an enforcement mechanism.

So the Green New Deal, whatever its role in the politics of 2020, will not be implemented—which in turn raises the question of what, if anything, can be done to limit what could, in the worst case, be the catastrophic impact of climate change. As it happens, two useful measures are at least possible politically, as the Green New Deal is not.

One is a tax on greenhouse gas emissions, especially from carbon-based fuels. A large number of economists, from all parts of the political spectrum, favor such a tax. On the well established principle that taxing something yields less of it (while subsidizing it produces more) a tax would reduce such emissions. Americans are notoriously tax-averse (Europeans and Japanese tax gasoline far more heavily, for example) but Democratic presidential candidates have proposed tax increases in order to pay for more generous social welfare benefits and reduce economic inequality in the United States. Whatever the merits of their proposals, a carbon tax would do far more than those they propose to combat what these same candidates declare to be an existential threat.

Such a tax would give individuals and businesses the incentive to find ways to conduct their activities using less carbon-based fuel. A second measure would assist in this effort: increased funding for research and development on technologies that save energy, something that Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, has proposed and that a number of Democratic presidential candidates support. To be sure, neither measure individually, nor the two of them taken together, would reduce the volume of greenhouse gas emissions as dramatically as the Green New Deal aspires to do. Unlike that program, however, an actual American government might conceivably adopt them.

All this means that the Earth’s greenhouse-gas blanket will very likely continue to thicken, the Earth’s temperature will correspondingly rise, and this will probably have adverse consequences of some kind for the planet’s inhabitants in the decades to come. If the United States and other countries fail to prevent such consequences they will have to adapt to them. Adaptation could prove very costly. If, for example melting ice should cause sea levels to rise by thirty feet, as some estimates foresee, this would require building a very high protective wall around the island of Manhattan or abandoning it altogether.

Whether circumstances will become this dire cannot be known in advance; but it can be asserted with confidence that if and when it does become necessary, adaptation, unlike prevention, will take place: the three major obstacles to prevention will not block it.  The effects of climate change will be all too real rather than speculative. The impact will be felt by those living at the time, not by distant future generations. And adaptation will not require the participation of other countries. In fact, other countries surely will not participate. If a great wall of Manhattan has to be built, it is safe to predict, it will be Americans, not Russians, Chinese, Indians or Europeans, who will pay for it.

The post Bet on Climate Change, Not the Green New Deal appeared first on The American Interest.

A Triumphant Failure

Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition)

Kurt Vonnegut

Modern Library, 2019, $26, 240 pp.

Fifty years ago, Billy Pilgrim became unstuck in time, and a classic 20th-century novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, was born. Published in 1969, the novel catapulted the 47-year-old Kurt Vonnegut into the popular and literary mainstream by speaking directly and poignantly to the anxieties of the rising countercultural generation about technological progress, the Vietnam War, and nuclear holocaust. But as novelist and Iraq War vet Kevin Powers notes in his excellent foreword gracing Modern Library’s 50th anniversary edition, the book still speaks about the horrors of war in a way that today’s veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the rest of us, can understand and appreciate.

Re-reading it half a century after its publication, I was struck by the fact that in the very pages of the novel that cemented his literary reputation Vonnegut calls the book a big, fat failure.

He tells us as much in the first chapter, which, in fine postmodernist form, isn’t about Dresden, or Billy Pilgrim, or Tralfamadore, but rather about how he came to write the book. Vonnegut says he originally thought writing about his wartime experiences would be an easy way to establish himself as a writer, “since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen.” More than 20 years and thousands of false starts later, in a note of apology to his publisher, he concludes that the book he’s handed over is such a jumbled and jangled failure because “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” Much later on, in chapter eight, he breaks the fourth wall (as he does frequently) to tell us:

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

Vonnegut even chalks it up as a failure as an anti-war novel. “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?” a friend asks him. “What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.”

So how is it exactly that Slaughterhouse-Five—a book the author calls a failure—came to be regarded as one of the finest 20th-century World War II novels? I think we can answer that, first, by understanding and speculating a bit about how Vonnegut’s masterpiece fit into his life, and, second, by looking at Billy, the Tralfamadorians, and their unusual views of time, and considering whether there is actually anything unusual about them at all.

But before we talk about Billy Pilgrim coming unstuck in time, let’s look at how Kurt Vonnegut got stuck in it.

Being glued to a particular time and place seems like the most fitting way to describe the impact of Vonnegut’s wartime experiences. As Powers notes in the foreword, anyone who has fought in a war can understand how the past can be “an irresistible force, particularly in the case of those who have trauma at the center of their experience.”

We don’t need to engage in too much speculation to say that the time to which Vonnegut is glued begins at roughly the same moment Billy comes unglued: just before Christmas 1944 at the start of the Battle of the Bulge, somewhere in the Ardennes Forest. Under-equipped, under-trained, freezing, and near starvation, Private Vonnegut and thousands of his comrades-in-arms were rounded up by the Wehrmacht, crammed into boxcars, and shipped by rail to holding facilities en route to forced labor camps dispersed throughout Germany. He eventually ended up in Dresden, working by day in a factory making malt syrup as a nutritional supplement for pregnant women, and housed at night in a disused slaughterhouse (mostly empty because meat was a scarce commodity by that point in the war). It was in one of the facility’s subterranean meat lockers that Vonnegut, his fellow prisoners, their guards, and several animal carcasses hanging from meat hooks (so it goes) would take shelter overnight as hundreds of Royal Air Force bombers dropped thousands of tons of high explosives and incendiaries on the center of Dresden, creating a firestorm that turned the picturesque city known as the “Florence on the Elbe” into heaps of stone and ash and bodies.

Vonnegut and the other survivors emerged from their shelters on the morning of Valentine’s Day 1945 to find a moonscape. The Germans set Vonnegut and the other POWs to the task of recovering bodies, which he called “a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt.” They dug holes into the ash and rubble, lowered a ladder into the empty space, and began bringing up the remains of those whose shelters had turned into suffocating tombs. “Thus began the first corpse mine in Dresden,” as he puts it in Slaughterhouse-Five. And for the corpse miners, business was booming.

Exactly how many died has been a matter of contentious debate, not least in German politics, and you can see the way in which the horrors he had seen in Dresden exerted a tight grip on Vonnegut throughout his life in the fact that he accepted the inflated casualty counts proffered by controversial historian (and Holocaust denier) David Irving and stuck with them long after they had been discredited. As late as 2005, Vonnegut was still citing 135,000 dead, a number derived from Irving. (A 2010 historical commission—established by the city of Dresden to combat right-wing propaganda—reviewed wartime records to establish the number at somewhere between 22,700 and 25,000 dead.) This made the Dresden firebombing, according to Vonnegut’s reckoning, “the largest massacre in European history”—provided you accept his peculiar definition of a massacre as “something that happens suddenly.” Vonnegut was not a Holocaust denier—far from it. Nor, I think, did he stick to the high number to promote the idea of a moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and the Allies; he just didn’t care to get the number right, on the chance that doing so would mean allowing someone to suggest that a lower number of dead reduced the moral significance of the act he had carried with him his entire life.

After the war, when Vonnegut sought to write about what he had seen in Germany, he found that the words didn’t come to him. He would tell people who asked what he was working on that “the main thing was a book about Dresden,” which reminded him of a song of infinite recursion he includes in Slaughterhouse:

My name is Yon Yonson,

I work in Wisconsin,

I work in a lumbermill there.

The people I meet when I walk down the street,

They say, ‘What’s your name?’

And I say,

‘My name is Yon Yonson,

I work in Wisconsin…”

All while he was failing to write “my famous Dresden book,” he did a stint in graduate school at the University of Chicago studying sociology (he left the program without a degree after his thesis was rejected), worked as a reporter, and eventually took a job in public relations at a GE research laboratory in Schenectady, New York.

There at the GE lab in upstate New York, surrounded by machines that were replacing more and more factory jobs by the day, he wondered what would happen to the factory workers these machines were replacing—to their dignity and sense of self-worth? What would our society look like if automation took all the jobs? The result of those musings became his first novel, Player Piano (1952). But the themes—uncritical adoption of technology and vast, uncontrollable forces grinding down those left behind—would find their way into Slaughterhouse-Five. Somewhere along the way the publishers decided that only science fiction fans would be interested in a novel about machines and social change, so the novel gained little traction outside genre circles. Vonnegut had ambivalent feelings, shading toward hostility sometimes, about being pigeonholed as a science fiction writer: “The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city,” he wrote.

Nevertheless his next novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), embraced the conventions of the genre (as a means of satirizing them), with a plot centered around a Martian invasion and time travel. This book, too, introduced characters and settings that would eventually find their way into Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), including the planet Tralfamadore and a wealthy New England aristocrat named Rumfoord. Elements of his next three novels also appear in Slaughterhouse: 1961’s Mother Night gives us American Nazi/OSS agent Howard W. Campbell, Jr., who would take shelter in the meat locker with Billy Pilgrim; 1963’s Cat’s Cradle tells of a scientist whose invention, all too predictably, leads to a global apocalypse; and 1965’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater introduces the man who would share both a hospital room with Billy and stacks of novels by a Vonnegut alter-ego, hack sci-fi novelist Kilgore Trout.

In fact, re-reading Vonnegut’s collected works from the vantage point of 2019, I had the strange experience of believing that all along Slaughterhouse had somehow been reaching its way backward in time into Vonnegut’s literary career. It was as if the book were to Vonnegut what Billy’s wartime experiences became to him: a moment in time, trapped in amber, surfacing randomly in his work, unbidden, frequently unwelcome. Dresden haunted Vonnegut’s life, and Slaughterhouse haunted his career—this “short and jumbled and jangled” book, a “failure.”

So how does an understanding of the three unique temporal perspectives contained in Slaughterhouse-Five—our own, Billy’s, and the Tralfamadorian one—help us appreciate this “failure” of a book?

I don’t think I need to explain how we experience time. You’re doing it right now.

Billy Pilgrim’s view of time starts out like ours, but somewhere in the Ardennes Forest he begins to jump randomly across his own personal timeline. He watches his own life pass by like a streaming movie on Netflix, except a mischievous God has his hands on the toggle, scrubbing Billy’s life forward, backward, fast, or slow, according to His whim—and He’ll be doing it this way forever. Theoretically, Billy could use his knowledge of past, present, and future to make different choices, but—almost inexplicably in the course of the novel—he doesn’t, even to the point of boarding (and not just boarding but actually chartering) an airplane that he knows will crash, killing everyone aboard except himself.

The Tralfamadorians, the green, plunger-shaped aliens who abduct Billy Pilgrim to put him on display in a zoo, have a panoramic view of time. They see past, present, and future all at once, the same way we might behold an entire mountain range, with all the peaks and valleys representing high points and low points in their lives. The lowest point comes at the end of everything, when, they explain to Billy, they will accidentally destroy the entire universe, Earth included, while “experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers.” If you know this, Billy asks, why can’t you stop it? Because, they explain somewhat scornfully, “the moment is structured that way.”

We are, of course, intended to see Billy as pathetic, passive, fatalistic. “Preposterous,” Vonnegut calls him, “six feet and three inches tall, with a chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches. . . . He didn’t look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.” What kind of fool would board an airplane he knew was going to crash? What kind of wimp wouldn’t stand up and say something to save all those people from dying?

We’re also meant to see the Tralfamadorians as impossibly alien, grotesquely aloof. What kind of monsters would conduct a scientific experiment that they knew would destroy them—and not just them, but everyone and everything?

But we are the Tralfamadorians, collectively, creating nuclear weapons because “if we don’t, someone else will.” We did so knowing just as well as they do that, given enough time (and there will be plenty of time, right up until the end of it), someone will eventually push the button that blows up the human race, if pollution or climate change or any number of other eminently predictable man-made calamities don’t finish us off first.

And we are Billy, each of us as individuals. We could stand up and yell, “Don’t get on that plane! It’s going to crash!” But Billy “didn’t want to make a fool of himself by saying so,” and we don’t want to sound like fools either.

What makes Slaughterhouse both a failure and a masterpiece is the fact that it’s an anti-war book that knows it’s engaged in a hopeless quest: “an anti-glacier book.” And despite it all, it laughs, and makes us laugh too. That laughter is, to be sure, a defense mechanism in the face of unspeakable trauma and loss, but one that is palliative rather than panicked. Vonnegut’s black humor is dedicated, as Powers says in the foreword, “to the alleviation and prevention of human suffering in the face of its inevitability, and I can think of no braver moral position to take than that one.”

At the end of the first chapter Vonnegut calls to mind the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and in particular the fate of Lot’s wife. She knows the people back there behind her were bad, that the world is better off without them. She knows that God himself has warned her not to look back. Likewise the godlike Tralfamadorians counsel Billy to “concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones—to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.” But trauma doesn’t work like that, for Billy or for us. We can’t help looking back. Nor could Lot’s wife, “and I love her for that, because it was so human,” writes Vonnegut. “This one is a failure,” he says of Slaughterhouse, “and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.” So the book is simultaneously an indictment of our failures as individuals and collectively, a recognition of their inevitability, and an act of contrition and consolation for them. Slaughterhouse is a failure because it yearns for, even demands, something that it knows is impossible. That ineffable desire in the face of inevitable loss is a quintessentially human act.

All in all not bad, as failures go.

The post A Triumphant Failure appeared first on The American Interest.

Sudan on the Cusp of Democratic Change

As the world sinks deeper into a global recession of democracy, the prevailing assumption is that popular aspirations for freedom have had their day. The Arab Spring has come and gone, leaving behind crushed hopes, failed states, and more brutal autocracies (along with the single but challenged success story of Tunisia). The “Second Liberation” that brought a new burst of democracy in Africa in the 1990s has lost steam as autocrats feel increasingly emboldened to manipulate elections, ravage opponents, and loot their societies. With the authoritarian juggernauts of China and Russia on the rise globally—and clearly resurgent in these two regions—the democratic West seems no longer to be a model, or in a position to influence other countries’ political future.

But events in Sudan belie these assumptions. Since mid-December, when Sudanese women and men first took to the streets outside Khartoum to protest skyrocketing prices and shortages of basic food items, an extraordinary cross-section of Sudanese civil society has pressed demands not only for economic justice but for an to end thirty years of brutally repressive—and economically ruinous—rule by Omar Bashir’s regime. Women have remained defiantly in the forefront of these protests, but the movement encompasses a broad coalition of Sudan’s disparate opposition parties, trade unions, youth movements, and civil society organizations. Crucially, middle-class professionals who stayed on the sidelines of previous uprisings have played a coordinating role in the movement, under the banner of the Sudan Professionals Association. This disciplined civic mobilization—which has drawn hundreds of thousands of Sudanese into the streets over the past five months— builds upon Sudan’s traditions of community engagement and the compassionate responses of its people to local crises, including the horror of violent repression in Darfur over the past sixteen years.

On April 11, the protests achieved what many thought to be impossible when Sudan’s military removed Omar Bashir from power in an effort to end the unrest. The 75-year-old Bashir, whose nearly three decades in power spanned nearly half of Sudan’s total history as an independent country, has faced a decade-old indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. On Monday, Sudan’s prosecutor, who had already interrogated Bashir on charges of money laundering and financing terrorism, charged him with “inciting and participating” in the killing of protestors who rose up peacefully to demand his removal.

However, Sudan’s army, which had long backed Bashir and now rules through a ten-member Transitional Military Council (TMC), has been in no hurry to surrender power. It insists on controlling the transition and preserving Islamic Sharia law, and under its transitional rule state violence has continued. On Wednesday, security officials opened fire on demonstrators, and the military suspended talks over plan for transition to democratic rule. Since the demonstrations began last December civic groups estimate that over 90 protestors have been killed (including several this week). Yet the protesting public has remained not only courageously defiant but also committed to non-violence. Massive numbers of demonstrators are still peacefully camping out in front of the military headquarters demanding an immediate transition to civilian rule.

The leaders of Sudan’s democracy movement know that this may be the best opportunity for freedom in their lifetime. They have been realistic about the challenges and risks they face and careful and deliberate in their approach. They expected brutal blowback, and they knew that they had to be ready to communicate internally to avoid it as far as possible, to mobilize international support, to hold out for more than a few days in support of their bottom line—a completely civilian-led transition to democracy—and to be prepared to participate in such a transition effectively.

Glad to be rid of one of the world’s most murderous and irresponsible rulers, the United States is aligning itself with the forces of democratic change. In a May 8 phone call with TMC Chairman General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan “expressed support for the Sudanese people’s aspirations for a free, democratic and prosperous future” and “urged the TMC to move expeditiously toward a civilian-led interim government.” Sullivan pressed Sudan’s military leaders to reach agreement with the protestors’ Alliance for Freedom and Change, based on the will of the Sudanese people. Important official messages of support for the safety and aspirations of Sudan’s democracy movement have come as well from the African Union, the UK, Canada, Norway and others.

After at least five more protesters were killed in Khartoum this week, the chief U.S. diplomat in Khartoum, Chargé d’Affaires Steven Koutsis, called out Sudan’s military leaders rather than the disgruntled “saboteurs” that the military sought to blame. With pressure mounting, the TMC announced on Wednesday that it had reached agreement with the civilian democracy alliance on a three-year transition to democratic elections. Democracy leaders had sought a four-year transition managed by a fully civilian-led interim government to ensure effective preparation; the TMC sought a two-year transition with a military-majority in the interim government executive branch. Reportedly, the two sides reached agreement that the civilian alliance would have two-thirds of the 300 seats on an interim legislative council. Alliance members are also expected to appoint the interim cabinet – and they have a roster of skilled and credible candidates in mind. But that tentative agreement now hangs in suspension as a result of the TMC’s latest maneuver.

U.S. lawmakers have just sent a clear, bipartisan message urging U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to take strong steps to strengthen international support for a rapid transfer of power in Sudan to a civilian-led transitional government, and to help stop the TMC’s clear threats to democracy. Some 92 U.S. lawmakers from both the House and Senate called upon Pompeo and Mnuchin to “use all mechanisms and leverage to facilitate, as quickly as possible, an inclusive civilian-led transition to democratic governance.” The powerful letter outlines specific steps they would like the administration to take.

While the prospect of a civilian-led legislature and cabinet in Sudan represents remarkable progress on the path to democratic governance in Sudan, unfortunately, it is still far from clear that the military is prepared to allow civilian forces to lead the transitional process. Both sides are still fighting for the majority of positions on the proposed 11-member sovereign council that is to be the interim executive authority. Although the TMC has promised an agreement that meets popular aspirations, they have raised new barriers to agreement, and the pro-democracy forces remain in the streets, determined to ensure civilian-led change is assured. They demand, for example, that Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagolo, who ran the murderous janjaweed militias in Darfur, Sudan, cannot be allowed to have any role in the transition to democracy.

Sudan is on a knife’s edge. What happens in the coming days and weeks could shape the political future of its 40 million people for years to come. Sudan’s indefatigable democracy movement has moved the country farther and faster towards a real transition to civilian-led democracy than anyone would have predicted even three months ago. But Sudan’s brave democratic forces need help. The United States and its G7 allies (Canada, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and the EU) must keep the pressure on the generals in Khartoum and continue to press publicly for a civilian-led transition, at all levels of the interim government, including the sovereign council. Together, they could make a difference at this crucial moment by committing to an explicit, multi-year package of bilateral and multilateral support (both financial and political) for Sudan’s transition to democratic governance—provided that the military allows a real transition. To drive the latter point home, the G7 democracies should make clear to the generals that their own personal interests could be placed at risk through targeted sanctions if they seek to obstruct the transition and use violence against peaceful protestors.

What U.S. and Europe should not stand for is some version of Myanmar or Pakistan—where the military retains the decisive power behind a façade of very partial elected civilian authority. Neither should the world’s leading democracies tolerate a replay of the Egyptian debacle, where the military subverts the transitional process and then stages a coup to “rescue” the country from “chaos.”

Coming summits provide an opportunity for the high-profile launch of multilateral initiatives to support a civilian-led transition to democracy in Sudan. When the G7 leaders meet in France in late August, they should establish a Friends of Sudan Group and commit to a multilateral conference (with the World Bank, African Development Bank, IMF, UN and other national and multilateral actors) to engage a civilian-led Sudanese interim government on how best to assist the political transition and revive Sudan’s ravaged economy. While the more diverse G20 group of countries may be a heavier lift, the U.S. and its allies can take advantage of the late June Summit in Osaka to urge support from others, and to warn against malign international interference to subvert Sudan’s transition.

There is much more at stake than the fate of a strategic and long-suffering but resilient country. At this dispiriting moment of a deepening global recession of democracy, Sudan is a rare but clear example of the irrepressibility of human aspirations for freedom and dignity. Even after decades of authoritarian repression and isolation from the West, Sudan’s people continued dreaming of freedom, and they also prepared themselves for the moment when they could use their skills, creativity and networks of support to create a tipping point in favor of democratic change. Pro-democracy protestors have made impressive use of social media tools that were not widely available even a decade ago, but they have also been rigorous, inclusive and realistic. They have made effective use of non-violent civic activism, creative communication and organizing, policy development and organized governance approaches.

These tools and tactics of democratic change are not unique to Sudan. They are quietly being promoted and imparted to young leaders through international civic efforts like the African Middle Eastern Leadership Project (AMEL), with which we are all associated. AMEL also reflects a tenacious popular belief—which autocrats in the two regions have tried but failed to extinguish—that democracy and the rule of law represent a better way to govern. For the people of Africa and the Middle East, well-governed democracies offer a better path to peace, prosperity, and individual dignity. And for the United States and its allies, they offer the prospect of sustainable alliances based on shared values and not a cynical convergence of short-term interests.

If a country that had sunk as deeply into tyranny as Sudan could negotiate a peaceful transition to democracy, then so can many others of the world’s entrenched autocracies. A transitional drama is also unfolding nearby in Ethiopia, and the beleaguered people of Venezuela continue to protest peacefully for democracy on a similarly massive scale. If Sudan is able to negotiate a genuine democratic transition, it will give hope and inspiration to people everywhere struggling for freedom—at a time when the world very much needs a victory for democracy.

The post Sudan on the Cusp of Democratic Change appeared first on The American Interest.

Your Roots Shall Make Ye Free

My Father Left Me Ireland

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Sentinel, 2019, $24.00, 240 pp.

In the opening pages of My Father Left Me Ireland, Michael Brendan Dougherty’s epistolary memoir, he remembers a visit to his Irish father, on his native soil, when he was six. His father had neither married his mother, nor come back to America with her. Which leaves that “his” in “his native soil” strained—it cannot cover both Dougherty and his father, no matter how much either man might regret his division from the other.

What Dougherty remembers is, “the way you ended your sentences with a suggestive ‘you know.’ To this boy’s ears, it was an invitation to be with you in every story.” My Father Left Me Ireland is his attempt, as a new father himself, to look back over his life and see to what extent he and his father could or do share a story, a language, a home.

Dougherty’s fatherlessness was obvious, to him and to everyone around him. But the more he tried to prepare an accounting of himself for his impending daughter (“It occurred to me that in a few months I would have this life wriggling across my lap. I would have to tell her who she is.”) the more he noticed that the spaces his father left unfilled weren’t the only ways he’d been orphaned.

There wasn’t just an absence in his immediate family, but in the whole village that allegedly raises a child. Dougherty writes, “The adult world that I encountered was plainly terrified of having authority over children and tried to exercise as little of it as practicable. […] The constant message of authority figures was that I should be true to myself. I should do what I loved, and I could love whatever I liked. I was the authority.”

He could write to his father, he could order Gaelic books, but there was no clear way to regain what had been given up by the generations that came before. Dougherty’s book is full of a coiled fury. His anger is not against his father, who he comes to understand longed for him as well. His forgiveness doesn’t lessen the wound he, his father, and his mother all sustained from his family’s fracturing, but it allows him to reach across the gap to offer and receive love now.

Rather, his rage is directed at the eunuchizing modern mindset that sees us as most free when we can be stripped of all the ties we have to others. A father can leave his children, provided the financial pain is assuaged by child support or governmental subsidy. A citizen cannot have too great a love for their own nation, lest they imply any other is lesser. A believer cannot bring their beliefs to bear in the public square, where all visions of the good need to have free access to the marketplace of ideas, provided they are not normative visions of a common good.

In Dougherty’s words,

This myth of liberalism was like a solvent that had slowly and inexorably dissolved any sense of obligation in life. It dissolved the bonds that held together past, present, and future. It dissolved the social bonds that hold together a community, and that make up a home. And, here, at the end of the process, I was alone. An atom that becomes separated from a larger chemical structure is called a free radical.

The pledge this leveling liberalism demands is that we never mourn for what we have lost. Never acknowledge it as a loss at all. And then, as sufficiently similar people, we can live together in peace.

When Dougherty turns back to Ireland, he doesn’t just look for the elements of nationality that my school would have celebrated in its Intercultural Unity Day—the food served in the cafeteria, the dances performed at the assembly, the traditional garb worn in the costume parade. He wants to find the hot-blooded tie to nation that goes beyond kitsch. He turns to the writings of Irish nationalists.

Dougherty begins arguing in his letters to his father about the Easter Rising, and Patrick Pearse, the teacher and nationalist who gave the order for the Irish Volunteers to mobilize in 1916. Dougherty’s letters are one-sided, so he begins defending Pearse against the implied affable disinterest of his father, the embarrassment Dougherty believes modern Ireland feels about the extreme moments of its history.

It’s not that Dougherty is in favor of blood and violence, but he becomes suspicious of a kind of love that wouldn’t ultimately resort to violence to defend the beloved. To love in this way is a habit he’s trying to learn, and he struggles with it as he does with his language lessons.

At a Gaelic language retreat, he has a breakthrough on both fronts. Near the end of their time together, he and the other participants find themselves disarmed, and lapsing into sincerity. Dougherty reflects that, in most contexts, he has been trained to suppress this vulnerability, or to cloak it in irony. As he gives himself over to poetry and song, and genuine revelry, he wonders if sincerity is suspect, not because, as he had felt, it makes him appear weak, but because it represents a threatening strength. Dougherty writes, “I suppose we do this for safety somehow, as if unwrapped passion itself is so flammable, it would consume our little worlds at the instant we exposed it to open air.”

This passion is what Dougherty has found, and he is right that it both gives life and provokes the kind of love that leads men to lay down their lives or take the lives of others. He has not simply found his roots in a blandly heartwarming, appealing-to-all kind of way. The hint of violence was there from the beginning, when he and his mother went to Gaelic language events, and the hat was passed “for the widows and orphans” as cover for contributions to the IRA.

What can be the check on such a love? G.K. Chesterton proposed that a true love of country can’t be a mindless show of patriotism, any more than a love for a parent requires us to blind ourselves to her faults. Chesterton explains, “‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”

But a relationship to one’s parent is clearer, more natural than one’s relationship to a nation. One’s mother and father are always one’s original parents, even if they are absent or dead. When Dougherty and his father bring together both their families, everyone delights in pointing out the resemblances between the two men—similarities of gesture that Dougherty was unlikely to have learned by example. Dougherty writes, “It began to dawn on me that our relationship wasn’t a series of events, but an unalterable and primordial fact. The events were just the record of how we coped with this truth.”

But, although he argues that nations have souls, it is harder to believe that, for many people, belonging to a nation is as primordial as belonging to a family. Ireland is a small country, an island country, and one whose identity was electrified by repeated efforts to squelch it.

Can other nations, borders drawn in a careless way by retreating imperial powers, make this kind of claim? Can America, which slowly expanded to reach the sea, annexing land that had previously been Indian, Mexican, Spanish, French, and only sometimes accepting the people who already lived on that land? If, as Dougherty argues, “A nation cannot live its life as a mere administrative district,” how can a soul be grafted into a consortium of peoples corralled by others?

Ireland is not Dougherty’s only loyalty. He is a revert to his Catholic faith, a religion that makes the kind of “unalterable and primordial” claim that parenthood does. Catholicism is a story of family, but not of a purely natural family, one of lineage. That is the claim of the nation of Israel, and the Christian claim is that everyone else was grafted on to this promise, without any natural right to the covenant, but as a pure gift of grace.

It is a universal claim and a universal promise, which cannot be disrupted by the semi-arbitrariness of natural borders or by the confusion about what level of a polity we should claim as our home. Catholicism’s “both-and” blends the transcendent and the personal, with Christ as the one who knits these two scales together.

Dougherty’s book doesn’t make this claim to the reader explicitly. But, in his own telling of how he came back to being Irish, there is another biblical claim undergirding the book. In the prophecy of Isaiah that Christians read as prefiguring the birth of Christ, Isaiah foretells a radical peace, where “the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,” and that when this whole menagerie of enemies comes together, “a little child shall lead them.”

Dougherty picks up Pearse and is moved by his willingness to sacrifice everything, but it is not the fierce revolutionary who originally caught his attention. It is his daughter’s naked need, the “unalterable and primordial fact” that others must sacrifice for her that spurs him to study and to seek to become the man he must be to be her father.

His father’s family is caught by the same pull of her need. They are suspicious or dismissive of Dougherty’s attempts to learn Gaelic, for the most part, and they won’t use the words they know to help him practice. But, when they come to his house, he catches them picking up the Gaelic children’s books he’s bought and settling down to read them to his daughter. He writes, “My intention was that my daughter learn Irish, but through her, I’m beginning to think all of you have a chance.”

The radical need of a baby is galvanizing—they exist entirely in the present, and need that present filled. But a different kind of dependency also jars Dougherty out of his own sense of place. He and his mother care for his maternal grandmother, whose Alzheimer’s “caused her to misplace herself in the timeline of her own life.” Although neither he nor his mother drift back with her, he finds that their own place in time shifts without their willing it. “This disease of the mind also misplaced us in time and history. The moments of anger and bewilderment my mother and I experienced then were the grief and bereavement of the future visiting us in our present.”

Our vulnerability and our weakness is a testament to the fact we are part of a tradition, not just an independent “free radical.” Someone had to hold Dougherty as a child, just as he now holds his children. Someone will have to care for him when he is old and feeble, just as he and his mother did for his grandmother. (Someone, the Catholics add, will have to set right the sins we have committed that are beyond our ability to atone for.) No amount of money, deracination, or hard work can erase the “unalterable and primordial fact” of our neediness.

So then, we must belong to others. Our lives are premised on some community outside ourselves. And, if that community is to be a good one, one that channels the kind of love Dougherty sees in Pearse, but tempers it so that it doesn’t fester into violent ethnonationalism, the fact of our need must be at the heart of what the community values.

The weak—babies, the elderly, the disabled—must be the first ones we point to when we explain who we are. We are all dependent—our periods of seeming independence momentary flickers or illusions. Rejecting the aim of atomizing liberalism as not just undesirable but untrue, we explain our community by saying, “We are the ones who are not our own.” Dougherty’s father gave him Ireland. All that we have is similarly gifted.

The post Your Roots Shall Make Ye Free appeared first on The American Interest.

Why Germany Coddles Iran

Like most Germans, I am no admirer of the current American president. Donald Trump is wrong about the value of alliances, wrong about the utility of tariffs and trade wars, and wrong in his fondness for “alternative facts.” But on at least one issue, President Trump has gotten it right: namely, his decision to take the United States out of the nuclear deal with Iran just over one year ago.

In withdrawing from the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), however, Trump has also triggered an immense crisis in the Transatlantic relationship. Chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken openly of a “split between the United States and the Europeans on Iran.” How is this split to be explained? And how can it be overcome?

Nuclear blackmail—the threat that, without the deal, Iran would go ahead and build a bomb—shaped the dynamic of negotiations from the start. Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif proved himself a master of wielding these threats. At the beginning of the negotiations, he warned on the regime-affiliated Press TV: “You only have one way to ensure that the Iranian nuclear program remains peaceful. You must allow the nuclear program to be able to develop in a peaceful international context.”

Intimidated, the P5+1 negotiators—led by Secretary of State John Kerry and an overeager Obama Administration, which seemed desperate to secure a deal—abandoned one position after another. Concerns voiced by the French delegation, that the deal’s provisions were too generous and that the talks were being rushed, were brushed aside. Finally, negotiators arrived at the current deal, which permits nuclear enrichment and its further development, prevents IAEA inspectors from examining military sites, allows the regime to continue its missile programs, and will expire a mere decade after its signature.

The deal was unpopular with Republicans from the moment it was cobbled together, and Donald Trump didn’t stray from party orthodoxy on the campaign trail. When in office, he proceeded to dismantle it rather than prevaricate. In explaining his decision to ditch the deal, Donald Trump railed against the idea of the United States being blackmailed by a second-rate power. But he also correctly noted that the deal itself had not brought peace to the Middle East, as many of the deal’s boosters had claimed it would. On the contrary, Iranian regional meddling increased, in turn causing a mass exodus from Syria and Iraq—and all this without Iran having to abandon the pursuit of its uranium and rocket programs.

Trump’s decision is not without risk. Given the nature of the Iranian regime, irrational responses and war scenarios can’t be ruled out. Exactly one year after the United States left the deal, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced a partial withdrawal, saying Iran would keep excess enriched uranium and heavy water instead of selling it. Continuing the policy of nuclear blackmail, he threatens to resume higher uranium enrichment after 60 days. However, at least for the time being, Tehran seems not to be interested in a massive escalation.

Trump’s alternative approach—to put sufficient economic and political pressure on the Iranian leadership to compel it to sign a new agreement that would address not only Iran‘s nuclear ambitions but also its missile program and regional warmongering—may be a long shot, but it is worth trying. Effective sanctions, however, require the cooperation of Iran’s most important trade partners, Germany and the European Union. And that is where the problem starts.

Immediately after President Trump left the nuclear deal and imposed new sanctions, the German Chancellor announced her opposition to his decision, declaring “that the current European sanctions relief should of course remain in force.”

Over the following months, the E-3—France, Great Britain, and Germany—conceived of a new payment mechanism (christened the “Special Purpose Vehicle”) aimed at undermining new sanctions imposed by the United States. At the end of January 2019, a new company called Instex (shortened from “Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges”), run by a German banker, has been registered in France “with a view to providing a positive impact on trade and economic relations with Iran,” according to an EU statement.

Then in February, key European leaders demonstratively boycotted a U.S.-organized security conference in Warsaw that focused on Iran’s malign behavior in the Middle East. Although 60 nations participated, the foreign ministers of France and Germany and the EU foreign policy chief preferred to stay away. In so doing, they seemed to prioritize snubbing the Trump Administration over countering Tehran’s aggressive ambitions in the Middle East.

True, there have been some European measures against Iran. In January of this year, the EU sanctioned Iran in response to its alleged carrying out of targeted killings on European soil. In addition, the German government withdrew the operating permit of the Iranian airline Mahan Air in connection with its use in the Syrian conflict. France followed with a similar action in March. However, these were small moves that have not altered Europe’s broader effort to save the nuclear deal.

European observers have pinned the blame for this Transatlantic rift on the American side—on Trump’s belligerent megaphone diplomacy. But that is an ahistorical analysis. The divergence on Iran goes back a long way, with a more conciliatory posture being most pronounced among the Germans.

As early as 1995, when President Bill Clinton prohibited American firms from trading with Iran because of the regime’s nuclear ambitions, it was Germany that systematically counteracted the American efforts to impose international sanctions. Hossain Mousavian, then the Iranian Ambassador in Germany, wrote that Tehran was “aware in the 1990s of Germany’s significant role in breaking the economic chains, with which the USA had wrapped Iran . . . Iran viewed its dialogue and relations with Germany as an important means toward the circumvention of the anti-Iranian policies of the United States.”

Washington, however, persisted in its efforts. As former Secretary of State Warren Christopher detailed in his memoirs, “We constantly prodded them [the Germans] to distance themselves from Iran and to suspend trade, as we had done . . . Unfortunately, the struggle to stop our allies from doing business with Iran has not yet succeeded.”

In September 2004, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer explained the thrust of his approach bluntly: “We Europeans have constantly advised our Iranian partners in their own well-founded interest to view us as their protective shield,” he stated in a speech disseminated by the German government. Yes, you read that right: Europe was to be as a shield for Iran, defending it from a dangerous America. Though Berlin later adhered to the Iran sanctions decided by the United Nations, the goal of German diplomacy was to impose as few sanctions as possible—and only as many as were strictly necessary to keep the United States doing diplomacy rather than resorting to force.

The current split between the United States and Germany on Iran is nothing new. It has been affecting bilateral relations for decades. The question remains: What drives Germany to stubbornly defend the nuclear deal and maintain good relations with the world’s only country that denies the Holocaust and wants to eradicate the state of Israel?

It’s easy to believe that German authorities are simply trying to protect trade interests. But this explanation doesn’t quite clear the bar. Big companies have left Iran in droves over the last few months despite the rollout of the above-mentioned SPV, and the hit that those companies will take as a result will be limited. In 2017, German exports to Iran comprised only about 0.2 percent of total German exports. That same year, Iran was 33rd among recipients of Europeans exports, behind countries such as Kazakhstan and Serbia.

No, it’s more complicated than that. There are at least two other factors that play into the dynamic.

Factor One: The Traditional Link

Germany’s relationship toward Iran is based, first of all, on “historically shaped strategic preferences,” to quote Peter Rudolf, a researcher from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Or, as the current website of the German Ambassador in Tehran states: “German-Iranian relations have a long tradition and great potential. Let us work together to further deepen the good relationship.”

In the mid-1920s, Germany was the founder of Persian industry, providing Iran with the backbone of its industrial infrastructure and the trained personnel needed to run it. Between 1933 and 1941, according to the scholar Yair P. Hirschfeld, the Nazi share of Iranian imports rose from 11 to 43 percent while the German share of Iranian exports rose from 19 to 47 percent. (Another aspect of the Nazi period, which continues to be important in Iran, was pointed out in 1996 by Iranian President Rafsanjani: “Our relations have always been good. Both [peoples] are of the Aryan race.”)

In 1952 West Germany again became Iran’s leading trading partner, a position it held almost continuously until 1979. After the Islamic revolution, West Germany’s trade with Khomeini’s Iran rebounded from 2.8 billion Deutsche Marks in 1980 to 7.7 billion in 1983. “It is striking to see how Persia’s new rulers are specially favoring German firms with orders, given that German business leaders and politicians had kowtowed to the Shah with special fervor,” wrote Der Spiegel at the time.

In the following years, Germany remained not only Iran’s most important high-tech partner but also its most trusted one. “The only people whose image is incredibly positive are the Germans,” recalled a former German ambassador to Iran in 2013. “What is good must be German.”

Old habits die hard. In order to maintain this special relationship and this positive attitude, Berlin is predisposed to favor “engagement” over bullying. In practice, they are downplaying the brutal reality of the Iranian regime.

Factor Two: Pride

For Germany, the nuclear deal with Iran is more than just any agreement. It was one that Berlin had a huge hand in crafting. The P5+1 talks enhanced Germany’s status: For the first time in the postwar period, Berlin was invited to shape world policy together with the five veto powers of the United Nations. And Germany actually achieved something approaching double representation at these talks—through both its national representative and the EU’s lead negotiator, Helga Schmid. Schmid, a former office manager of Joschka Fischer who has good contacts with Merkel, established herself as an authoritative figure in the talks with the Iranian side. As a deputy to Catherine Ashton and Federica Mogherini, the EU’s official foreign policy representatives, she led subgroups of the P5+1 and prepared talks with chief negotiators. Germany put in the hard work to try to make it work.

And if it doesn’t work, Germany has emotional reservations about any alternatives. As an economic giant and military dwarf, the country would certainly be out of the game in the event of military operations. This fear of being sidelined is, as always, celebrated as a moral triumph. The Iran nuclear deal is held up as yet another example of the righteousness of German insistence that diplomacy always be preferred to force—a choice that was vindicated during the Iraq War and they think will be vindicated again.

The most important goal of German Iran policy remains to keep dialogue channels open. Little thought is given what exactly 40 years of engagement have actually achieved. Iran remains an aggressive and illiberal theocracy which continues to menace both its own population and its neighbors.

The reality understood in Washington is that America can’t change Iranian behavior alone. This goal can only be achieved together with Washington’s European allies. As long as Europe creates loopholes, the pressure will be insufficient.

That said, the Trump Administration’s bullying rhetoric has at times been counterproductive. Vice President Mike Pence’s hectoring speech at the last Munich Security Conference merely hardened positions—which only helps Tehran. The Iranian leadership is determined to deepen divisions between Europe and the United States. Washington should emphasize unity. All too often, Trump’s calls for “America first” sounds like he’s actually saying “America alone.”

American diplomacy with Europeans should concentrate on Tehran’s amply documented crimes. Iran’s illegal nuclear archive, its murderous incitement against Israel, Hezbollah’s rearmament, the Revolutionary Guard warfare in the region—all of these offenses fly in the face of shared Western values.

The Americans might also appeal to the historical conscience of Germans. As Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of the Jews in Germany, put it:

It seems paradoxical that Germany, as a country that is said to have learned from its horrendous past and which has a strong commitment to fighting antisemitism, is one of the strongest economic partners of a regime that is blatantly denying the Holocaust and abusing human rights on a daily basis. I endorse an immediate stop to any economic relations with Iran. Any trade with Iran benefits radical and terrorist forces and presents a danger and destabilizing factor for the region.

For the time being, Schuster’s statement has not triggered any discussions in Germany. His approach, however, provides the best basis for overcoming the U.S.-European split on Iran.

The post Why Germany Coddles Iran appeared first on The American Interest.

Germany’s Russia Lobby

In Germany, prominent Russia advocates abound. Most recently, Horst Teltschik accuses the West of being “obsessed” with blaming Vladimir Putin for all the evils in world politics, thus “alienating” him from cooperation. Jürgen Todenhöfer denounces the “demonization” of Russia, which, according to him, gets a bad rap. And in a collection of essays titled Why We Need Peace and Friendship with Russia, prominent ex-politicians of different stripes—including conservatives—call for warmer ties with Putin’s regime.

This pro-Russian sentiment can be alarmingly bipartisan, especially with respect to Ukraine. Left-wing politicians often justify the Russian annexation of Crimea in much the same way as the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD). German nationalism has always tended to view the nations of Eastern Europe as mere nuisances to be dealt with by Great Powers—Russia and Germany in this case.

There’s a name for this modern brand of Russian accommodationist: They are called the Putinversteher, or Putin-explainers. Bribery and blackmail are probably involved in some cases, and there is massive Russian propaganda and disinformation, which contributes to the success of the Putinversteher in Germany. But it’s not just that. There is also a kind of German compulsion that just won’t go away, and that inspires Kremlin apologists to depict Putin’s authoritarian rule as an authentic expression of Russian uniqueness. “We must not impose western values on Russia,” we are told. “Russian culture must be respected for what it is.”

None of this is new.

Beginning in the 19th century, a number of prominent German thinkers developed a mythical image of, and fascination with, Russia that vacillated between fear and admiration. On the one hand, Russia was perceived as uncanny and threatening because the vast country was “uncivilized,” driven by primeval instincts. At the same time, it was precisely this alleged roughness and irrationality that was often seen as an expression of the undiluted spiritual and moral purity of “the Russian people.” Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the philosophical progenitor of a right-wing intellectual current called the “Conservative Revolution,” saw in both the Russians and Germans at the beginning of the 20th century a healthy contrast to the rationalist, materialist-oriented West. For him, both Russia and Germany were ideologically fresh and emotionally resonant civilizational forces.

Some of the greatest minds of German intellectual life contributed to this idealizing mystification of Russia. In 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche called Russia “the only power that has endurance in its body today, that can wait, that can promise something.” Russia for Nietzsche represented the antithesis to “the pathetic European particularism and nervousness”; the “West as a whole” no longer had “those instincts from which institutions grow, from which the future grows.” In 1920, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that Russia “made me what I am.” Rilke found his “inner origin” in Russia, “the land of the unfinished God, and from all gestures of the people, the warmth of his becoming flows out like an infinite blessing.”

Thomas Mann, in his 1918 book Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, had actually come to a cultural-historical counter-schema of sorts, with Germans and Russians on the one side and Western democracies on the other. Because both German and Russian “culture” resisted the “imperialism” and the spiritless, rationalist “civilization” of the West, both peoples joined in a deep relationship of the soul. And that is why they were constantly misunderstood and harassed by the West. To be sure, Mann later modified his negative attitude towards democracy and Western values. But the early seeds of a habit of mind are obviously on display.

What’s more, large parts of the German nationalist Right during the Weimar Republic believed that Germany and Russia were united in the struggle against the West. “National Bolsheviks” such as Moeller van den Bruck and journalist Ernst Niekisch, who moved from the extreme Left to the extreme Right and later back again, saw in the October Revolution a “folkish” (“völkisch”) uprising of the Russian people against Western civilization and therefore a kind of role model for their own “national Revolution” to come. Similarly, Joseph Goebbels in his early years celebrated Lenin as a great Russian nationalist leader. After the First World War, the Red army and the Reichswehr were cooperating with the secret rearmament of Germany. Hitler’s racist hatred against all Slavs made it impossible to implement the vision of a Russo-Germanic alliance against the West in National Socialist ideology. But with the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939-41, this concept momentarily became vibrant once again.

The dream of a German-Russian counterweight to the overpowering West continued after the end of the Nazi regime, this time in the form of neutralist aspirations from both Left and Right. It was present, for example, in the German “peace movement,” which mobilized hundreds of thousands protesters against NATO’s nuclear rearmament in the early 1980s. And it did not disappear after the end of the Cold War. In the German mindset there is an inclination today to primarily credit Mikhail Gorbachev—and not so much the strength and attractiveness of Western democracies—with reunification.

Indeed, one has to wonder whether Germany’s integration into the West has ever been fully accepted by parts of German society.

These historical tendencies are sometimes reflected in the thinly concealed anti-Americanism that has persisted in the Federal Republic since its inception, not only at the ideological extremes but also in the political and social center. The legitimate fear of the expansionist ambitions of Soviet communism and the concomitant dependence on the United States for protection has curbed the worst of this. But during the Cold War anti-Americanism had also expressed itself indirectly, as a sense of cultural disdain for the “superficial” and “soulless” United States, with its supposedly unrestrained devotion to money and consumption. In Russia, many Germans think, one finds the opposite: a cultural nation that values the ideals of poets, artists, and intellectuals.

A glorified memory of the détente politics of the 1970s and 1980s nurtures the conviction in Germany that Russia is basically a peace-loving power, indispensable for securing stability in Europe. Particularly for the SPD, the call for partnership with Moscow seems to have an almost religious appeal. Among Social Democrats, the yearning for harmony in German-Russian relations remains strong in spite of the aggressively destructive role Putin’s neo-imperialist Mafia state plays in Europe today. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas cuts against the grain, advocating among the ranks of the SPD for a “new Ostpolitik” that is geared primarily to protecting the interests of Eastern European partners and not those of Russia. He has found little support in his party, however.

The current German government’s policy toward Russia is deeply ambivalent. Thanks to Angela Merkel, the European Union cracked down on Russian aggression in Ukraine with a unified sanctions regime. At the same time, Berlin has always made it clear that its “dialogue” with the Kremlin should remain a priority on its agenda, and that measures such as arms deliveries to Ukraine—measures that could jeopardize German-Russian ties—are a complete non-starter. What’s more, at the Munich Security Conference in February Merkel reaffirmed her support for the gas pipeline project Nord Stream 2 against strong opposition not only from the United States but also from Brussels and a number of EU partner countries. She justified her stance with the imperative not to “exclude” Russia from European affairs altogether.

One of the most paradoxical aspects of the German situation today is that the sympathy for Putin is concentrated in the eastern parts of the country that once languished under Soviet totalitarianism. This can only be explained by something like a phantom Stockholm Syndrome—an affinity for a captor who expired long ago. The greater the disappointments of real existing capitalism, the more rosy the authoritarianism of the past appears.

Which means that, although Berlin has been sticking to sanctions against the Kremlin, pro-Russian pressures are mounting. German businesses and banks—with the support of the federal government—are doing everything possible to minimize the impact of sanctions by expanding German-Russian economic relations. The grand opening of a new Daimler automobile plant near Moscow featured German Economics Minister Peter Altmaier standing alongside Putin, memorably declaring that no one should talk about “forcing Russia to its knees economically.” A “successful Russia,” he emphasized, would also be in “in the interest of Germany.” Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche added, “We believe in Russia!”

The federal government stubbornly clings to Nord Stream 2, even though the renowned German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) has predicted that this project will not be economically viable. It persists in its policy despite the fact that the Kremlin has long ago made it clear that it does not intend to maintain Ukraine as a transit country for Russian gas to Western Europe, even though Berlin demands this. Germany soldiers on, choosing to isolate itself in Europe and to alienate EU partners such as Poland and the Baltic states, who feel directly threatened by Putin’s neo-imperialism. With its stubborn attachment to its single-handed energy policy, Germany not only presents a roadblock to the EU’s plans to reduce dependence on fossil fuels but also undermines its own claim to be a consistent advocate of the principle of multilateralism in world politics.

This shows that rational considerations do not always play the first role when it comes to relations with Russia, both in German politics and the German economy. Russia acts in German consciousness as a kind of imagined, subliminal, ever-present “Option” that can be exercised if various disputes with Western allies become too great. Yes, economic, political, and social ties with the United States are still too strong to allow Germany to drift away—for now. But you can’t rule it out forever.

A final split is unlikely to take place after Angela Merkel leaves the Chancellery, especially since her likely successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, like Merkel herself, keeps expressing her commitment to the Transatlantic alliance and its common values. Nevertheless, the pressure of the Putin lobby will almost certainly increase, and might well lead to a further softening of attitudes toward the Russian autocracy. If the European Union continues disintegrating, it’s even possible that Germany’s nationalist demons, which most had thought vanquished, could surface once again and become virulent.

The presidency of Donald Trump, with its cry of “America First” and its aggressive approach to European partners, enhances the tendency toward drift in the Transatlantic partnership. And Trump’s own bewildering admiration and affection for Vladimir Putin doesn’t help things: The idea that Trump’s Washington could eventually find a modus vivendi with Moscow over the Europeans’ heads amplifies the impulse to engage with Russia before others do.

One wonders whether all this could lead to Moscow winning the Cold War after the fact: gaining a durable sphere of influence in the East, and submission from the West, with a concomitant weakening of Transatlantic ties.

It’s not unthinkable.

The post Germany’s Russia Lobby appeared first on The American Interest.

The Magnificent Ambersons and the Age of Disruption

The Magnificent Ambersons

Criterion Collection, Blu-ray, $39.95

By 1942, Orson Welles was a young man on quite a run. After turning Broadway upside-down with his innovative Shakespeare adaptations and terrifying radio listeners with his infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, Welles had taken Hollywood by storm. Fresh off the release of his controversial magnum opus Citizen Kane, Welles decided to scale it down for his next film: an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1918 novel The Magnificent Ambersons. Going from dramatizing a powerful media tycoon’s public downfall to a quietly observed family drama was as risky an artistic choice as any Welles had ever made.

Unfortunately, the exasperated studio honchos agreed. After disappointing feedback from a misinterpreted test screening, they unilaterally decided to slash major parts of the film, including Welles’s intended ending. The original version is permanently lost, but the remaining one has been reissued in a splendid and thorough new edition by the Criterion Collection. This is a cause for celebration, and not just for cinephiles. Even in its truncated form, The Magnificent Ambersons manages to be both a sensitively observed family chronicle and a visionary social prophecy that still has much to say about how we live now, more than 75 years after its initial release.

The Ambersons are a wealthy Indianapolis family who rose to prominence during Reconstruction by acquiring vast plots of land through financial speculation. As the film opens at the turn of the century, it is clear that they set the social pecking order for the rest of the townsfolk. Every eligible bachelor competes for the hand of the lovely Isabel Amberson, and the ambitious Eugene Morgan (played with worldly bemusement by the great Joseph Cotten) seems her ideal suitor—until a painfully public faux pas irrevocably derails their courtship and causes him to leave town. Instead, Isabel reluctantly marries a stuffed shirt named Wilbur Minafer. Their only son, Georgie, is a spoiled brat consisting of equal parts petulance and naivety. As Georgie grows older, everybody in town murmurs among themselves like a Greek chorus, looking forward to the day when the little jerk will finally get his “comeuppance.”

The Ambersons pass their blasé days shuffling around their opulent but gloomy mansion, as their emotionally repressed aunt (played with self-effacing gravitas by Agnes Moorehead) selflessly tends to the family business. Years pass like silhouettes until one Christmas celebration, elegantly brought to life in a bravura feat of nimble camerawork and intricate mise-en-scène, Eugene returns—now with a fortune all his own through investing in a newfangled contraption called the automobile. Georgie can’t possibly imagine why anyone would be interested in this “horseless carriage.” Sensing Eugene’s nascent threat to his elite status—and resenting his affections for his mother—Georgie rudely scolds him about the foolishness of this new machine during a formal dinner.

In a masterful portrayal of tightly controlled emotion, methodically squeezing a spoon with his thumb, Eugene eloquently explains that even he has doubts about the automobile’s true social value: “With all their speed forward, they may be a step backward in civilization. It may be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of men’s souls,” he predicts. Yet if Eugene isn’t necessarily optimistic about what this new invention will bring, he is certain that it’s too late to turn back the clock: “Automobiles have come,” he concludes, and their effects will be felt for good or ill. Matters of war and peace will be conducted differently, he muses, because people’s minds will suddenly work differently.

Given his grand new fortune, Eugene’s ambivalence about his prized investment testifies to his thoughtfulness. Unlike privileged Georgie, he seriously considers the social consequences of his newfound fortune and doesn’t assume that whatever makes him wealthy must be self-evidently good for the world. Georgie, by contrast, is a study in self-regarding naivety, reinforced by lifelong entitlement and the freedom from having to suffer the repercussions of his actions.

Eugene’s concerns prove prophetic. Welles’s all-knowing narration describes how over the next few years the quaint town of Indianapolis gradually “spreads and darkens into a city.” Georgie eventually doesn’t even recognize the streets he grew up on as the elite status he’s taken for granted all his life begins to erode. The investments that his doddering grandfather carefully tended over a lifetime lose value. A different form of commerce gradually takes over. And the Ambersons are too caught up in the emotional and economic traps they’ve set for themselves over years of posh isolation to learn how to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Georgie does ultimately get his comeuppance, but not in a way that any of the townspeople ever expected: a world that he barely understands has left him behind and doesn’t even bother to notice as it runs him over.

A similar kind of unease is widespread in today’s world. Automation and its discontents loom large in the public imagination. The uncertainty about how rapid technological advances will change our society is palpable. As Eugene understood, there is and has always been an incalculable social price to pay for relentless innovation.

According to the nonprofit research organization Institute for the Future, it’s estimated that 85 percent of the jobs that today’s students will do in 2030 don’t exist yet. The industrial robotics market is expected to increase by 118 percent over the next ten years. And no one knows whether there will be enough access to the kind of specialized education (the kind that oblivious Georgie merely scoffs at) that will enable the next generation of workers to master the ever-evolving requirements of the brave new technology.

Roughly a century later, too, the genteel social status that the land-rich, old-money Ambersons embodied has been usurped by the casually dressed tech savants who have become immensely wealthy through a combination of ingenuity, tenacity, and savvy self-promotion. In many ways Silicon Valley’s innovations have been quite useful in our daily lives, but one look at the dehumanizing way that Amazon treats its workers—as ill-paid human cogs in a perpetual conveyor belt—reminds us how Eugene is wise to be nervous about what the future holds. Technology giveth as much as it taketh away.

Meanwhile, our pace of life is constantly increasing. Food, information, text, images, and sounds are constantly being delivered from one place to the next. It isn’t being alarmist to consider, as Eugene does, how this relentless forward motion quickens the ways we think, talk, and act. “I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles,” says Eugene. The same holds true of our minds in the internet age—when the ephemeral nature of written content has made it harder than ever for the average person to discriminate between true and false information; when the instant dissemination of personal data creates a newfound potential for surveillance and theft; when previously anonymous groups exploit the internet’s openness by rallying around all kinds of shared grievances. There’s a widespread anxiety about the pressures of modern life that has metabolized in the body politic in the form of mass political unrest and deepening individual angst. It’s enough to make you wonder what the mentality of Eugene Morgan’s great grandchildren might be, coming of age on the cusp of the self-driving car—and enough to make his concerns about the automobile seem almost quaint by comparison.

Welles was no Luddite, but he understood the insights of Tarkington’s tale both intellectually and on a deeper personal level. His free-wheeling father was an acquaintance of Tarkington, and he had made a fortune from investing in new technologies, including a special lamp specifically designed for bicycles. He was also something of a playboy, and eventually squandered that fortune. Welles thus knew from experience both what it was like to have money and to lose it. His father’s profligate spending caused his precocious young son to grow up largely in hotel rooms, and in his later years Welles joked that it was an open question who raised whom.

Critics have speculated about the recurring themes of parental fecklessness and neglect in both Kane and Ambersons. David Thomson, a Welles biographer, has suggested that the key scene in Kane is the ominous one in the beginning where the parents quietly barter him off to boarding school while innocent little Charles Kane romps around in the snowy backyard with his beloved sled. In Ambersons, Georgie’s naivety is clearly a result of his Oedipal coddling—not only is he rude to Eugene at dinner, ignoring his mature, measured reflections about the future, but as his prominence steadily declines he compulsively over-relies on his spinster aunt’s devotion to the point of emotional cruelty. Welles usually preferred not to speak of his early life, probably enjoying the born storyteller’s delight in self-mythologizing, but themes of generational conflict do tend to reappear in his films.

In a sense, Orson Welles was his own greatest creation, at least as far as the public was concerned. This suggests another way in which he anticipated the self-obsessed direction in which modern life was headed. Welles had seen firsthand the persuasive power of mass communication from his involvement with radio and the new world of cinema. A talented amateur magician, he knew how to hold an audience’s attention. Welles had been studying theatre and memorizing Shakespeare since childhood, and it was his mastery of storytelling, tone, and performance that helped him thrive in new media. But he also knew how dangerously seductive it could be. (The fact that he briefly considered running for political office only underscores this point.)

As Welles’s narrator ruefully remarks toward the beginning of the film, the staid life the Ambersons knew is paradoxically “too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare.” This isn’t as paradoxical as it might sound: Having more information at our fingertips necessarily shortens our attention spans, which makes our experience of time much quicker than we might realize. It then becomes harder to pay attention, to retain facts and chronology, and thus to concentrate. The faster life moves, the harder it is to slow down and really see it in great depth.

The original ending of the film was much bleaker than the existing one, with the sanity of the remaining Ambersons on the line. Having lost everything, Georgie visits his now decrepit aunt in her boardinghouse and they can barely speak to one another. The two find themselves, as critic Molly Haskell writes in her accompanying essay, “in a kind of entombed silence.” As Welles later explained, their worlds have been “buried under parking lots and cars.”

Clearly, Welles intended to challenge his audience’s assumptions about the future. Instead of providing easy entertainment for the masses, with the usual Hollywood preference for an upbeat ending and likable characters, Welles put the tension and anxiety of modern life on the big screen for all to see. In retrospect, it’s not so hard to see why the movie failed with test audiences. There are drawbacks to being that far ahead of your time.

Aside from its unique place in Welles’ career and film history, The Magnificent Ambersons has much to tell us about the march of progress and its discontents. Rewatching it, especially in Criterion’s splendidly crisp new edition, offers a useful break from the hurly-burly of 21st-century life, with its incessant beeps, alerts, and updates. Even in our age of distraction, the film’s subtle poetry and prophetic insights still shine through. If there was one thing Welles knew better than anyone else, it was how to keep you watching.

The post The Magnificent Ambersons and the Age of Disruption appeared first on The American Interest.

The Burden of Debt

A spectre is haunting the world. No, not communism, which can’t even find a home in Russia. The spectre is debt. The creditor class has nothing to lose but its Kapital, and the bourgeoisie nothing to lose except the value of all that it owns. As Vladimir Lenin once said, “the best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency”—subject it to an unsustainable level of government debt, then increase the money supply such that the value of the currency drops sharply. Think Weimar Germany, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Maduro’s Venezuela, where carts replaced wallets and purses as shoppers’ means of transporting paper money.

In America, the government’s outstanding debt tops $22 trillion and is rising at close to $1 trillion per year, soon to exceed even that level. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the federal debt held by the public, now at 78 percent of GDP, will rise to 92 percent in 2029. And that statistic assumes that Congress, in an unusual display of fiscal responsibility and political heroism, does not extend the Trump tax cuts that are due to expire in 2025. More likely, tax-cutters will be on as thin on the ground in 2025 as they are now, and government debt will exceed 100 percent of GDP. Harvard economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart studied data on the relation of growth to debt in 44 countries spanning about 200 years and concluded that when the ratio reaches 90 percent, growth significantly declines.

America is not alone in choosing profligacy over prudence. Between 2008 and 2017 global financial debt rose from $97 trillion to $169 trillion according to McKinsey & Company. Stephen Jen, CEO of hedge fund Eurison SLJ Capital, believes “the debt load in the world is so high now that it can’t withstand any historically normal size of interest-rate increases anymore.” David Malpass, the president of the World Bank, agrees. “There is too much debt floating around the world,” he told the media upon taking office. Much of that debt consists of loans by China to countries unable to carry their debt load and forced to turn over collateral—ports and other infrastructure—to the People’s Republic, much to its delight.

The International Monetary Fund warns that the high level of global debt threatens to amplify any economic downturn. That would cause pain not only to the parties to the loans, but to innocent bystanders, the collateral damage of any downturn.

If investors come to see the nation’s debt load as unsustainable, they will demand higher interest rates to finance ongoing deficits. And, warns CBO director Keith Hall, “It is hard to imagine this is sustainable.” But Hall is an old-fashioned deficit hawk, a species close to extinction in our politics. These hawks believe that government borrowing drives up interest rates, making it more costly for private sector borrowers to finance mortgages and business investment. The result is slower growth and, if things get out of hand, stagflation, a combination of no growth and high inflation.

This belief is now under siege. From the far left of the Democratic Party to “respectable” academic economists, a reappraisal of the role of debt and deficits is underway. Enthusiasts for Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT, have varying definitions of what it might mean in practice: Broadly stated, they claim that so long as a country has its own currency, it can run deficits almost indefinitely. All it must do is print money to cover the gap between spending and tax revenues. That policy needs to be reversed only if inflation rears its dangerous head. For obvious reasons this appeals mightily to Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, the socialist vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, the man whose academic advisers rescued the theory from the dustbin of history and coined its name. And charismatic, self-styled Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is popularizing her own version of MMT, which she believes would make the printing presses available to fund her Green New Deal, Medicare-for-All, student loan forgiveness, and—well, you get the idea.

Republicans, meanwhile, are crying that these “socialists” will bankrupt the country. Trump sees no inconsistency between his attacks on profligate spenders and his own plan for still more tax cuts, coupled with a $2 trillion, “not typically Republican” infrastructure program. Soaring deficits, it is argued, are not inconsistent with budget probity. Tax cuts and spending plans will so increase the rate of economic growth that tax revenues will rise sufficiently to offset any revenues surrendered by cutting taxes, and then some. This theory has not been validated by actual experience, or by scholars. But MIT professor and president of the American Economic Association Olivier Blanchard claims the U.S. situation, in which interest rates are below the rate of economic growth (not adjusted for inflation), “is more the historical norm than the exception. If the future is like the past. . . .the issuance of debt without a later increase in taxes may well be feasible.”

Keynesians have always held that deficit financing is appropriate in cases of high unemployment. Neo-Keynesians such as Harvard’s Larry Summers go one step further: Even at full employment, if interest rates are so low that the payoff from public investment in infrastructure and social projects is higher than what the government pays to borrow the necessary funds, the borrowing makes sense.

But Summers and Harvard colleague Jason Furman cannot take the next leap to MMT: Although “the deficit dismissers have a point. . . .the deficit fundamentalists are right that the debt cannot be allowed to grow forever.” Of course not, forever being a very long time.

The U.S. government is not the only institution rattling its begging bowl because it spends more than it takes in—“earns” is not quite the right word. Between the end of the financial crisis and 2017, the total global debt of non-financial corporations, including bonds and loans, more than doubled, growing by $37 trillion to $66 trillion. Business debt grew faster than GDP in that period, according to the Fed’s latest Financial Stability Report, issued earlier this month.

This was an understandable response to low interest rates, or, in the vernacular, cheap money. But if interest rates start to rise, meaning bond prices start to fall, the holders of these IOUs might start to dump them, creating a downward price spiral. The government might find interest payments sopping up so much cash that it has difficulty meeting its security and social-policy obligations without printing the necessary money. Companies with strong balance sheets—relatively low debt—might survive the pressure of higher rates. Unfortunately, the most rapid growth in debt over recent years was concentrated among the riskiest firms, the most indebted of all. They benefitted not only from low interest rates, but from declining credit standards. Former Fed chair Janet Yellen warns, “If the economy encounters a downturn, we could see a good deal of corporate distress. If corporations are in distress, they fire workers and cut back on investment spending…. That’s something that could make the next recession a deeper recession.”

Finally, the aggregate debt of developing countries is near its highest level in over a decade. If the dollar rises relative to their own currencies, they will have to pay more for the cash they need to cover their interest payments and essential imports. That is the stuff of which defaults are made.

So far, the music of growth, low interest rates, and deficits plays on. When it stops, one astute observer of the financial scene told me, there may be no chairs at all on which a weary policymaker can take a moment’s rest. Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, estimates that this year the government will spend $35,148 per household and collect only $26,677—nice for us, not so nice for our children and grandchildren. That $8,471 gap must be paid back somehow, some day. Summers and Furman, not ones to obsess about budget deficits in the here and now, concede that “running budget deficits does not replace the need to raise revenue or cut spending. It merely defers it. Sooner or later, government spending has to be paid for.” Sooner if by your children, later if by your grandchildren. Herbert Hoover had it right when he told the Nebraska Republican Conference in 1936: “Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.”

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Ideas in Search of Authors

Not long ago TAI featured a Brookings-based piece on the U.S. rural/urban divide called “the geography of discontent.” Our board member Bill Galston was part of the authorial committee, as was his colleague, Mark Muro. I subsequently asked Dr. Muro to write a follow up that would internationalize the observations in their study. He declined; claimed he was too busy. Not unusual as replies go.

Why did I ask him to do this? It had dawned on me long before that the urban/rural divide in the United States, which is based on a mix of economic and cultural sources, and which has major national political implications that ought to have been vividly clear even before the recent midterm elections, is matched in many other countries around the world. Obviously France, with its Yellow Vests, is a prime example, and Cristophe Guilluy has written insightfully on it, and become something of a celebrity in the process thanks to his ideological edge and gift for cutting phraseology. Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland, Hungary, and many other countries furnish more examples, and in almost all of them someone has noticed the rural/urban divide and seen its political significance in an age of populist political insurgency. Jeff Gedmin, TAI’s editor-in-chief, is writing a book about this with Germany as the focus. But with the partial exception of Guilluy and a few others (more on them below) everyone who writes about this does so from the perspective of a one-country one-off. In the United States it sometimes goes state by state, as with this essay about North Carolina. Few see the phenomenon as a general one, as part of the substructure, so to speak, of globalization’s afterwash.

Each case does bear unique elements, of course. For example, the German economy is doing well compared to many others, but there is still a rural/urban divide, and in Germany a West/East divide overlays and magnifies it. So the sources of the divide there have to be relatively more cultural and political than economic compared to the situation in, say Poland or the United States. But there is still a unity in the manifold, as Kant would have put it. Regional differences can and do evince similar patterns because nearly all regions are affected by transactional dynamics that are global. Indeed, I think it safe to say that the basic dynamic of what I call segmented economies is pretty much the same, at least in modern Western societies, with local variations. What do I mean by that?

Countries bear many kinds of internal diversity. Rural economies have rural commodity and food price levels, production levels, housing costs, and so on that are lower than what we might call national or global price levels. It’s more expensive to do or get virtually everything in Paris than it is in rural Provence, just as New York City prices and wage levels are significantly higher than those in, say, Corning.

But who cares? Insofar as these economies live more or less separately, there is no problem since low wage levels correspond to low prices; the basic standard of living is therefore little affected. As far as national economic statistics and policy go, too, it all levels out in a macro sense.

And of course this sort of thing has been going on ever since urban areas came into existence. Historians and especially economic historians know it well. Anyone can pick up the late William H. McNeill’s brilliant analysis of cities in The Rise of the West (1963) and see, among many other things, that population density is an uncanny predictor of transactional metabolisms. And transactional metabolism in commerce has price consequences, partly due to a kind of demonstration effect—a sort of generic “keeping up with the Joneses” phenomenon. Seeing lots of hot new doorknockers make people want to buy a hot new doorknocker, but if you live out in the country and you don’t ever see one, you don’t want one. That translates into greater demand in urban areas, and demand chases prices upward.

But there is a problem, through not one for economists, statisticians, historians, and policy wonks. The problem affects “only” ordinary people. What happens when national prices intrude upon or are imported into rural economies, with obvious examples including prices for electricity, transportation fuel, medical care and pharmaceuticals, telecommunications equipment and service, higher education in many cases, intercity transportation, and more? As national prices come to take up an ever-growing share of the whole for the rural family budget, that being the price for inclusion in advanced modernity, we end up with local ends unable to meet. So quite aside from well recognized culprits like offshoring/outsourcing to lower-cost production platforms and automation, segmented economies take a toll of rural serenity and basic fairness.

Occasionally, there is some humor in this. Here is how Claire Berlinski a funny tale:

In a satirical treatment filmed at a Carrefour supermarket, a Gilet Jaune marches stolidly before the camera, then unburdens himself of his discontent. “At the end of the month,” he says, his wife by his side, “I have to pay the rent, and the gas, and the electricity, and the insurance, and the food, and the car”—his wife begins to look uneasy—“and my wife’s car, and the iPhone, and my children’s iPhone, and gifts for Noël, and the contractor for the renovations,” whereupon his wife says: “Jean, shut up.”

But usually there’s nothing the least bit funny about this.

Urban elites, which include nearly the entire political class in most countries, have tended to have little idea about such problems—until the problems bite them in the arse. Case in point: The political class of both parties in United States appeared before the last presidential election to be almost completely clueless about the downdrafts of segmented economics, but Donald Trump was not. The rural source of much of Trump’s early support is part of what I meant when, in March 2016, I tried “to point out a few of the deeper and more remote sources for the Trumpenproletariat.” “Trump is for real, like it or not,” I wrote, “because the people who are attracted to him have real problems, and for the most part they are problems not of their own making. Both major political parties have failed for different reasons to deal effectively with the sources of mostly uncreative destruction, and both have therefore become the butt of much resentment—justifiably in my view.”

Nor have most garden-variety macroeconomists, apparently, focused in on rural circumstances. When Dr. Muro declined my invitation, I asked Tyler Cowen, another of our board members and a confessed economist, “Who studies this sort of thing among economists?” His answer was that hardly anyone does. Academic economics is so specialized nowadays, he said, that this kind of big-picture comparative analysis almost never gets done because it doesn’t get rewarded. It is not tenure-useful.

Tyler’s answer initially shocked me, but I soon realized it shouldn’t have. Standard-issue economists in United States have caused even more problems, possibly, than lawyers—although, admittedly, that’s because politicians have given them policy-pride-of-place thanks to the historically bizarre assumption that the only thing that really matters is ever-increasing material well-being. Bernard Williams once said that we should beware whom we take for an enemy because we will grow more like him. We took the positivist, materialist Soviet Union for an enemy, and look what happened? We relegated our native Calvinism to a secondary status.

I then decided to put the question to Oren Cass, a lawyer, not an economist, who has written brilliantly, in this magazine and elsewhere, about work in the broadest sociological and political sense. His answer helped me, some.

Oren told me that my observation about the urban/rural divide is a fascinating one and that he too had been thinking about it. But he defined the problem differently. It’s not so much that national prices intrude upon rural economies as it is that “affluent prices invade working class economies”—urban as well as rural. Those capturing the gains of recent decades, who happen to be relatively more urban, dictate society’s economic terms without regard to those who have missed out on such gains. Or, put bluntly, “inequality matters” not just as an abstract moral issue about fairness, but because it has complex, interactive consequences for very non-abstract flesh-and-blood human beings and their families.

A quintessential example of this, he noted, is health care, where the cost to participate in the risk pool is driven by the quality of care that the upper-middle class demands and will pay for ($20,000/year premiums). The same goes for the cost of a new, entry-level family vehicle, which can hardly be had anymore for less than $35,000, with all sorts of cost-driving safety features and electronic doodads. Or education, where the alternatives-to-teaching available to college-educated professionals continue to score salary increases, leaving every working-class community, which translates into virtually every rural community, with the problem of finding a way to pay those salaries to attract teachers, or choose not to and see the quality of education decline. A working class family with two kids in public schools now requires about $30,000 of taxpayer support for that education, but in rural areas household income might average only $40,000. How is that supposed to work when the tax bases for middle and upper middle class schools and those for schools in working-class areas are kept separate?

Why do I say that Oren Cass helped me only some? Because he told me that he needed to do at least two more years of research before he could write anything. So my author search continued.

Before long I came upon Michael Storper, an LSE professor not of economics, but of “economic geography,” which seems to correspond to the French concept of human geography—and which is something that academic organization in the United States appears more or less to lack. I put the issue to him, and added that the solution to the problem is theoretically simple, although politically (probably) impossible. Either the government needs to subsidize the differential between local wage/salary rates and national/global pricing, according to the proportion of the difference in price levels, or local residents should get a proportionate discount on all national prices set by government—which in Europe are quite a few prices. The basic idea is akin to that of countercyclical policy in the integrated U.S. economy, wherein distributional devices ease the pain and spread the shortfall when some region isn’t doing so well—only understood in terms of population density differentials rather than regional disparities. And if that kind of solution is not available, I asked, what kind of solution is? Because doing nothing is not appealing as a matter of basic fairness, or politically wise, for democratic systems.

As with Oren Cass, Professor Storper helped me, some. He averred that it was an interesting issue I raised. In economic geography and regional economics, he told me, it is framed as the “real income” issue.

He explained it to me by noting that there is a consensus in his field that rural areas compare to urban areas through a combination of lower nominal (money) wages and lower housing prices, the question being how this nets out. His research on the United States found that urban real incomes, after this correction, on average are about 15 percent higher than in other areas, because the wage effect more than compensates for the housing price effect.1 “However, as you say,” he added, “there are other costs and, in Europe, some of these are smoothed out geographically or lowered through policy, whereas they are less likely to be smoothed out/lowered” from market dynamics. He added that he did not know “of good research that quantifies this issue in a comparative way” or that looks as comparative baskets of goods and services beyond housing. “But,” he concluded, “I think the question is interesting and intriguing, especially given the politics of the urban/rural divide that you mention.” He proffered no solution.

This was useful, but I still lacked an author. So I kept looking. In the end, I didn’t find one. I found a comparative approach in Jon Emont’s “The Growing Urban-Rural Divide Around the World,” in The Atlantic. But Emont is a journalist whose short essay cites no data and mostly just quotes garden-variety academics from hither and yon. I found another in political economist Mark Blyth’s “Global Trumpism” in Foreign Affairs. This essay lived at the right level, but, to me at least, Blyth’s ideological shrillness discounted his appeal. I still hold, with the late Dick Gregory, that one should start with the truth before tampering with it.

My editor’s form of due diligence on this puzzle (and others) came to a halt when I stopped being an editor. Why am I telling you this? I am telling you because, first of all, the issue of segmented economies is both interesting and important. But I am also telling you because I feel compelled to explain to readers of this magazine just what the hell I have been doing for nearly the past 14 years.

The editor of a thought magazine like The American Interest does not just spend time fixing other people’s English, which in truth amounts often enough to fixing people’s thinking. The editor of a thought magazine is also something of an intellectual impresario, creating balances of several sorts, in and among issues, that bear meaningful design beyond the literal content of the essays within.

And above all, the editor of magazines like The American Interest must be a generator of good questions, and concomitantly a seeker after talent to provide answers. Sometimes an engagement with an author produces a result that neither could have generated alone. There is, or can be, genuine creativity in all of these functions. And as is the case in all other domains in which creativity plays a major role, the job involves a fair bit of frustration, and the need for both patience and humility. But the challenges are redeemed, with any luck at all, by the occasional brilliance of the outcomes, and by the learning enabled by the generation of good questions even when no answer makes it into “print.”

So respect your editors. They do things for you that you don’t even realize. Now that I no longer work as one, I feel no compunction against saying that in this essay, the first written in post-editor life. I feel better already.

1The most illuminating essay is Michael Storper, “Separate Worlds? Explaining the current wave of regional economic polarization,” Journal of Economic Geography (March 2018).

The post Ideas in Search of Authors appeared first on The American Interest.

Jared Kushner’s Peace Plan Would Be a Disaster

Last week, I interviewed White House adviser Jared Kushner on the Middle East peace process at The Washington Institute’s annual conference, an event broadcast live on C-SPAN. Given that I had recently written an article calling his forthcoming peace plan a “lose-lose-lose proposition” that President Trump should shelve in order to avoid facing embarrassing failure, Kushner was a good sport for agreeing to the interview. For 45 minutes, we jousted—I thrust, he parried—and throughout the discussion, he was poised, personable, and disciplined. While he clarified key aspects of his thinking about Middle East diplomacy, he kept major revelations to a minimum.

Still, we learned a lot. Specifically:

The U.S. plan will provide detailed proposals to answer all core issues on the Israeli-Palestinian agenda, including suggestions for the final borders of Israel, the disposition of the disputed city of Jerusalem, the future of Palestinian refugees, the security arrangements that will protect the peace agreement, and the ultimate political relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. This will not be a plan about how to create a new negotiating process; rather, he boldly declared that its goal is to offer “solutions.”
The U.S. plan will highlight the equation of security for Israelis and enhanced quality of life for Palestinians, with less emphasis on the “political aspirations” of the Palestinians. When he was given the opportunity of endorsing the idea of demilitarized statehood—“state-minus”—that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself once proposed, Kushner said he was eschewing the term “state” altogether: “If you say ‘two-states’ it means one thing to the Israelis, it means one thing to the Palestinians, and we said, let’s just not say it,” he explained—although why he would propose answers to all peace process issues but punt on providing a U.S. definition of “statehood” was left unclear. Indeed, it was like pulling teeth to extract from Kushner much empathy for Palestinian political aspirations, however defined. (At one point, he did use the word “countries” when referring to Israel and the Palestinian entity-to-be, but it seemed more of a slip of the tongue than a politically laden reference.)
The U.S. plan will focus heavily on making the Palestinian area a magnet for investment as a way to improve Palestinian lives. But sequencing here is critical: Kushner noted that achieving that goal will require delineation of borders followed by fundamental political reform of the Palestinian Authority, a thorough anti-corruption effort, and the establishment of effective rule of law, including property rights. In other words, in addition to money—“other people’s money,” he noted, implying only a modest American contribution—it will take a lot of time before Palestinians see living standards improve.

If those three points constituted the lyrics of the Kushner plan, the melody was in line with his father-in-law’s trademark brashness and bluster, though with more charm and affability than the family patriarch normally musters. Speaking to a room full of Middle East experts, Kushner was boldly dismissive of the concept of expertise. Asked about his definition of success and the potential implications of failure, he brushed it off as a “Washington question”—though he then went on to concede that failure was the most likely option, calling it the “smart money bet”—while offering various definitions of diplomatic success: “Success can look like a lot of different things. It can look like an agreement, it can look like a discussion, it could lead to closer cooperation, maybe resolve a couple of issues,” he said. He even seemed impatient with the idea that history—historical memory, historical legacy, historical grievance—might play a role in a conflict most observers believe is laden with history.

Rather, he made the case for himself as a cross between truth-teller and practical problem-solver by citing his unexpected achievements—trade deals with Mexico and Canada, a legislative breakthrough on criminal justice reform—and he extolled the business pedigree of the trio of real estate and bankruptcy attorneys responsible for the “peace process” portfolio in the Trump Administration: himself, his top aide Jason Greenblatt, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman. And, in a bit of news, Kushner admitted that the President himself had not yet read the draft peace plan, which he said is still going through revisions. “When you work for a President, you try hard not to disappoint, but you can disappoint.” He continued, “When you work for your father-in-law, you can’t disappoint.”

Add it all up and Kushner presented a novel, though not wholly unprecedented, approach to Middle East peacemaking. The Kushner Plan—if it is endorsed and proposed by Trump—would be the first since the abortive Reagan Plan of 1982 in which the United States issued its own ideas for the permanent resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unconnected to ongoing peace talks. In so doing, it would run against the longstanding U.S. policy of favoring direct negotiations between the parties as the best way to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement. Moreover, the exclusion of statehood from the U.S. formula would itself be a major step away from the bipartisan consensus that emerged following President George W. Bush’s endorsement of the goal of Palestinian statehood in 2002.

Ironically, in terms of form, Kushner’s emphasis on defining a final outcome and then working with the parties on the best way to implement it mirrors the traditional Arab approach to peacemaking. This is best reflected in the Arab Peace Initiative, an idea put forward by Saudi Arabia in 2002 that called for full Israeli withdrawal from all territory occupied in 1967 in exchange for full recognition by all Arab states. The API was criticized by Israel—and rightly so—because it offered no room for negotiation, just discussion on implementation. On substance, however, Kushner’s proposal seems designed to avoid political minefields that could complicate Netanyahu’s life, such as the legitimacy of Israeli settlements deep in the heart of the West Bank, to sidestep longstanding Palestinian demands such as statehood, and to incorporate Israeli-centric ideas on security arrangements. The result is a case of diplomatic cognitive dissonance—a proposal that the current Israeli government should reject on form but is likely to welcome on substance.

But any attempt to view the Kushner plan through the prism of past diplomacy misses its real innovation. In my view, it is far more instructive to view Kushner and his colleagues as developers applying to the Middle East lessons from the New York real estate market than as diplomats trying to solve a thorny, longstanding international dispute. Reading between the lines, it seems as though they view the peace process as the functional equivalent of turning a rent-controlled apartment building in midtown Manhattan into luxury condominiums. For the Kushner team, a key element of the strategy is to lower Palestinian expectations about what they will receive in the American plan, especially after rejecting so many previous proposals from Israel. While there are sound reasons for Trump to have repaired ties with Israel after the strains of the Obama years, one cannot fault Palestinians for seeing the Administration’s approach to them—from cutting aid to shuttering the representational office in Washington—as punitive; it seems to have been lifted from the playbook of a bankruptcy lawyer reacting to an adversary’s recalcitrance by offering 30 cents on the dollar today and only 20 cents on the dollar tomorrow.

Anyone who knows the Middle East knows that the analogy between the peace process and a New York real estate transaction quickly breaks down. If past is prologue, most Palestinians—and certainly their leaders—would prefer to wait out the developers rather than accept a lowball offer; after all, they rejected far more attractive offers before, which is what Abba Eban’s quip about “never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity” was all about. Ultimately, Palestinians know they have an extremely valuable asset to offer Israel—psychological and political acceptance—and are confident that the Israelis will eventually come around to offering a lot more for a final resolution to their century-old conflict than the Kushner Plan apparently envisions.

Moreover, unlike a real estate transaction in which one party gets the property and the other party gets the cash, a Middle East peace deal starts and ends with the two parties as neighbors, stuck with each other sharing a duplex for eternity. And whereas New York presents boundless possibilities, a place where there is always another plot to develop, another building to buy, another apartment complex to go condo, there is only one piece of land at stake in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, and Palestinians have nowhere else to go. This doesn’t mean Israel has to accede to 100 percent of Palestinian demands, but it does mean the conflict will never truly end unless each side believes the other has made good-faith effort to reconcile its needs to the desires of the other side—a situation which certainly does not obtain in the current circumstances.

A key fact that seems missing from the Kushner formula is that Israelis and Palestinians are not starting from zero. They are currently 25 years into their own contractual relationship, the Oslo process, and, despite periods of conflict and tension, neither side has found the status quo so objectionable that it has decided to blow it up. Indeed, for all its faults, the Palestinian Authority has evolved over this time into something akin to a normal Arab state—less corrupt, dysfunctional, violent, and authoritarian than some; more corrupt, dysfunctional, violent, and authoritarian than others. And since Israel’s suppression of the second intifada 15 years ago and the loss of Gaza to the extremists of Hamas three years later, the post-Arafat Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, has more-or-less kept the peace with Israel, maintained security cooperation with the Israeli army, and ensured that the West Bank did not fall into the hands of Islamist radicals.

Any intelligent U.S. peace proposal should begin with how to build upon the existing edifice, taking pains to ensure that nothing is done to risk the fragile status quo. But Kushner’s remarks lacked any appreciation for this gray reality. At one point during our conversation, Kushner used a medical metaphor to boldly assert his plan will “cure the disease” fueling Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but his real challenge will be to ensure his proposal doesn’t violate the Hippocratic Oath—do no harm.

This indifference to the potential implications of failure is why I not only believe that his plan poses a danger to U.S. interests but that it is reckless for the Administration to even give it a try. While the United States should certainly be prepared to offer its own ideas to help the parties close the final gap in negotiations—as Jimmy Carter did at Camp David in 1979, after Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, and their teams had already spent 17 months in intensive bargaining—the chasm between Israelis and Palestinians today is so wide that no conceivable bridging formula exists. Viewed this way, the specific details of what Kushner and Co. are preparing to put on the table don’t really matter because, in the current political environment, there is no possible overlap between the most Israel will offer and the least the Palestinians will accept (and vice versa). Giving it the ol’ college try—which is essentially what Trump has empowered Kushner to do—is not admirable; it is irresponsible.

If failure is the “smart money bet,” there is still another reason why friends of Israel—including friends of the current Israeli government—should think twice before urging President Trump to formally pursue his son-in-law’s peace plan: the risk that failure will delegitimize Kushner’s best ideas. Indeed, Kushner may think that his plan will survive as the new reference point for future negotiations even if it fails to achieve a peace breakthrough, but it is at least as likely that those ideas—even if they are solid, worthy, valuable ideas—get tossed in the diplomatic dung-heap by Trump’s successors. Given America’s deeply tribal political partisanship, it is not difficult to imagine a future administration—especially a Democratic one—refusing to reconsider proposals on such issues as security arrangements, refugee resettlement, Palestinian political reform, and regional economic development if they bore the Trumpian stamp. And because the Kushner team approaches these issues with a deep affinity for Israel, this is likely to harm ideas that seem especially friendly to the Jewish state. This is why I hope that Netanyahu comes to his senses and does what he can to scuttle the “deal of the century” before it becomes formal U.S. policy.

Of all the characters in this emerging tragicomedy, the most puzzling is not Kushner, who seems genuine in wanting to craft a plan that would satisfy his father-in-law’s desire to be a Middle East peacemaker. Nor is it Abbas, who seems to be playing to script, preferring to tread the tired path of seeking meaningless UN resolutions and applause in European capitals. (If only Abbas had Sadat’s imagination and backbone, he would realize that the best way to torpedo a U.S. plan that threatens his interests is by boldly proposing direct talks with Israel.) Rather, the most confounding character is Netanyahu.

Soon to become Israel’s longest serving Prime Minister, Netanyahu’s longevity owes to a combination of ruthless political skill and innate aversion to risk. No democratic leader today matches his natural talent for figuring out how to win elections, even if victory involves skating perilously close to the political, legal, and moral edge. And no leader on the world stage today has registered his success in combining bold, creative diplomacy with restrained, judicious use of military power to improve his country’s strategic position.

Under normal circumstances, the last thing Netanyahu would want is for the President of the United States to propose a detailed plan for the permanent resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is a champion of incrementalism, step-by-step diplomacy that tests both the other side’s true intentions and the political flexibility of his own core supporters—and he has been right to shy away from big, “Made in America” ideas about what’s best for Israel.

Why, then, does Netanyahu appear sanguine about the coming peace plan? Why does he seem willing to legitimize a dangerous strain of know-it-all American solutionism and welcome, even encourage, Trump to propose precisely what he has long opposed?

There are many possible explanations. After Trump’s decisions to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, to scuttle the detested Iran nuclear deal, and to recognize Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights, perhaps Netanyahu views the Trump presidency as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enshrine the Administration’s pro-Israel inclination as official U.S. government policy. Perhaps Netanyahu is confident that Abbas will flub the leadership test and that Palestinian miscues will open the door for Israel to annex key parcels of West Bank territory without triggering either outrage in Washington or much opposition in the wider Arab world. Perhaps Netanyahu is so deeply burdened by his own legal woes that he views the “deal of the century” as a political life preserver.

Whatever the rationale, I hope that “Bibi the strategic thinker” wins out over “Bibi the political tactician,” and that he uses whatever tools at his disposal to abort the Kushner plan in the few weeks left before Trump releases it as his own. This may demand a direct appeal to the President. Alternatively, it may require enlisting the support of someone the President respects—prominent Republican donor Sheldon Adelson or Trump-whisperer Lindsey Graham come to mind—to make an appeal on his behalf. For Israel and its friends, the key point remains: The only way to protect the long-term viability of the best aspects of the Kushner plan is to kill the plan.

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