Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 47

The Online Tempest, And How To Tame It

I was sitting in Parliament the other day dreaming of the Tempest and how to save democracy.

Outside the Committee room where I was slouched in reverie, beyond the thick green wallpaper with its paisley prints and the oak paneling with its heraldic signs, the House of Commons was convulsing over Brexit, unable to determine what exactly it was the country had wanted when it voted to leave the European Union in 2016. The words “sovereignty” and “the people’s will” were being thrown around like projectile vomit across the green benches of the Mother of All Parliaments, but no one could reach agreement on what they meant. Had the vote been about migration? The freedom to make trade deals with the rest of the world? Economic inequality? This confusion is the fault, in no little part, of how the campaign to Leave the European Union was run, with targeted, un-transparent dark ads on social media which tapped into utterly different grievances to get people to vote for Brexit. The head of the digital campaign for Vote Leave once told me you need 70 discrete messages for a population of 20 million. And when each little group votes for a different reason the other doesn’t know about, then how can one reach consensus on the meaning of the result?

In our little committee room a gang of MPs and “specialist advisors” (of which I was a very, very minor one) were working on the final drat of the Parliamentary Committee on Fake News and Disinformation, which has made some brave recommendations on how to regulate the internet in an era of bots, trolls, ISIS, information war/the war on information, dark ads, viral deception, and the rest. As the report put it:

We have always experienced propaganda and politically-aligned bias, which purports to be news, but this activity has taken on new forms and has been hugely magnified by information technology and the ubiquity of social media. . . .when these factors are brought to bear directly in election campaigns then the very fabric of our democracy is threatened.

The Parliamentary report had spent two years collecting testimony, including from whistle blowers at the disgraced election campaign company Cambridge Analytica that worked on Facebook data analysis and targeting for the the Trump 2016 campaign, and harrowing stories of how coordinated social media campaigns have successfully fueled hatred and ethnic cleansing in different corners of the world.

The image that I kept on coming back to in my mind during the Committee was how the person online is like Caliban in Shakespeare’s play the Tempest, who was tortured with spells and weird apparitions on an enchanted island by the magician Prospero. Like Caliban we are buffeted by information forces whose provenance we cannot see, made to fear and tremble by the workings of algorithms whose logic we are not allowed to fathom. We have no idea how the reality around us is being shaped, by whom and with what aims.

And this online life of semi-darkness means one can’t engage with the pseudo-reality around one as an equal. There are many definitions of “propaganda” but the one that has always meant the most to me focuses on the relationship between a citizen and information: Slanted, impassioned, even biased material is not so much the problem. The problem is when information is presented in a way that closes off the possibility of discussion with the source on equal terms. Lies do this, of course: If someone is purposefully hiding the real state of affairs from you, then how will you be able to debate them fairly? Certain types of thinking do this too: The more intense conspiracy theories undermine any possibility of reasoned argument by insisting those in the know have secret knowledge, or that all opposing speakers are actually emissaries of hidden powers.

Today, the very nature of behavior on the internet, and the architecture that upholds it, takes away what the philosopher Joseph Pieper once called “the right to our share in reality.”

So what would an empowered citizen online citizen look like?

As the report suggested, the first step is for a person to be able to see how the reality around them is created—how the information meteorology is shaped. At the very least we should be able to understand why a political message is being targeted at us, by whom, and which bits of our personal data are being used to do so. One could go further. When one sees, for example, something online that looks organic, it should be clear if it is actually part of a coordinated campaign; or if something looks popular it should be clear if it has been amplified artificially; if an account is pretending to be something it is not we should know whether it is an avatar.

But while transparency of content is important, even more so is demystifying the workings of the algorithms. There has to be public input into how they work. If the algorithms are structured to promote violent extremism or to spread blatant disinformation, then there must at the very least be public input into how such content can be mitigated. More positively, we need to articulate what a public-spirited algorithm would look like. Back in the day patrician organization like the BBC decided what “public service” was (something or other about balance, tolerance, evidence based discourse, public health, and so on). That top-down approach is no longer possible. So how can we move towards an internet architecture that supports the public good? Can we still agree on what public service is? Or can the process of trying to work out what it means today be the way in which agreement on its meaning is created?

And what about a trope even more tired than public service: “human rights?” How can one make the internet a place where freedom of speech, for example, is safeguarded, while protection from harassment and state-sponsored bullying is enforced? Could quick reaction internet courts be an answer, as I’ve heard at least one senior judge suggest?

As the countries in the thing once known as the West move towards regulating the internet, they need to approach the process so that it doesn’t become a reactive game of trying to catch random and ill-defined bits of “disinformation.” Frame the process of regulation in a positive way, and then instead of being the place where the “fabric of democracy is threatened,” the digital realm becomes where it is regenerated.

The post The Online Tempest, And How To Tame It appeared first on The American Interest.

The Strange Death of a Special Relationship

For American devotees of British comedy, from Monty Python to Ricky Gervais and Boris Johnson, the United Kingdom is a gift that keeps on giving. The long-running “Brexit” farce that began on “Independence Day”—the June 23, 2016 European Union referendum—is nowhere near closure. Whatever the eventual outcome of Phase I—the “withdrawal agreement”—we are not even at the beginning of the end of the omni-shambles.

But one outcome, alas, can be safely ventured: a “special relationship” between America and Britain will erode further. Although non-trivial forces of continuity remain, by accident and design Washington and London have passed an inflection point. U.S. strategic insolvency is well-advanced. The British version is effectively complete. As the Transatlantic alliance increasingly resembles a transactional association, some herald this more mature understanding. But its consequences for Britain’s rapidly collapsing role and influence as a great power, and the West as a cohesive geostrategic entity, are grave.

In his magnum opus on world order, Henry Kissinger approvingly quoted Nehru’s definition of statesmanship: “Whatever policy you may lay down, the art of conducting the foreign affairs of a country lies in finding out what is most advantageous to the country. We may talk about international goodwill and mean what we say. But in the ultimate analysis, a government functions for the good of the country it governs, and no government dare do anything which in the short or long run is manifestly to the disadvantage of that country.”

Indeed. That, at least, is the theory. If a sound strategic principle is to do what your opponent least desires, the response to fraying U.S.-UK ties in Moscow and Beijing must be one of profound satisfaction. That alone should confirm the current moment as one of our least-finest hours. In a world of intensifying great power competition, the immediate task facing policymakers in Washington and London is damage limitation. The puzzle confronting future historians will be to explain how British and American statecraft allowed one of the most effective alliances in history to atrophy when the imperative for its revival was so urgent. What follows is an early accounting of what is being lost, and why.

London Calling

A truth universally unacknowledged by diplomats, but insisted upon by International Relations 101, is that in an anarchic world there exists no such thing as friendship between sovereign nation-states. The United States and United Kingdom nonetheless forged an impressive facsimile after 1941, painstakingly forging trust, respect, and routinized structures of cooperation and consultation that brook few historical or contemporary comparisons. While no “golden age” existed (even FDR and Winston Churchill had fractious moments aplenty), the bilateral withstood inevitable tensions to emerge stronger and deeper.

Until now. With Britain channelling Groucho Marx by leaving a club whose members wish it to stay, the United States too will lose strategic depth. Brexit will damage the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union. As former U.S. ambassador to the EU, Stuart Eizenstat, noted:

The UK has been the United States’ prime supporter and kindred spirit on numerous US-EU issues. . . .With Brexit, the United States would lose a major supporter on a range of important trade and regulatory issues, where the UK’s more free-market approach mirrored ours more closely than most EU member states; on US sanctions regimes against Iran, Russia, and other countries;  on data privacy and anti-trust matters; on counterterrorism, where the United States uniquely has an intimate intelligence-sharing relationship with the UK; and on national security issues, which bridge the EU and NATO, to which the UK also belongs.

Most Americans rarely think of Britain unless prompted by Hollywood villains or royal weddings. That the partnership’s decline has gone under the radar and not instigated five stages of grief is understandable. But complacency should not obscure how rare the peaceful transition of power from Britain to America was. Throughout the 20th century, Washington and London crafted a close, if imperfect, relationship that endured. The UK fought alongside the United States in Korea from 1950-53, Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Afghanistan after 2001, and against ISIS from 2014. Our close diplomatic coordination in the United Nations Security Council, NATO, the G20, and other bodies has had no equal. Intelligence sharing, nuclear cooperation, and defense liaison remain unparalleled. Commerce and culture cement our proximity. For seven decades, Washington and London have been a powerful force for mutual benefit and a more liberal global order—one that has proven an aberration in human history by ensuring the absence of great power war and the flourishing of peace and prosperity.

These invaluable bilateral ties have been neither exclusive nor symmetrical. U.S. power relies on an unprecedented array of allies while Britain has engaged Churchill’s “concentric circles” of the Atlantic, Europe, and Commonwealth. U.S. support was a strategic necessity for post-imperial Britain but a choice for America. The sharp power disparity left Westminster utilizing what limited leverage it possessed in Washington, where the British presence is institutionalized in the Pentagon, National Security Agency, and intelligence community. But that entrenched security dimension permitted successive UK governments to neglect the wider relationships essential to enduring influence in Washington. Not least, Britain still lacks a professional lobbying arm, supportive interest groups, or a reliable media presence to pressure Capitol Hill.

Partly as a result, a stark asymmetry has arisen. British impact on America has been real, but episodic and limited. America’s reciprocal influence has been enduring, profound, and paradoxical—encouraging the UK role in the EU while enticing London into geopolitics that exasperated other EU states, to whom Britain represented an American “Trojan horse.” Britain may now be “first and foremost a European power.” But even with others, in their different ways, America and Britain have remained nations apart. In voting to leave the house but not the neighborhood, Brexit has doubled down on this abiding island identity. “America First” may not mean “America Alone” but Britain must now get accustomed to treating the EU as an object of foreign policy and in turn being a “third country” to Brussels. Thereby, the UK is increasing its reliance on U.S. goodwill even as it diminishes its allure as a partner.

The Odd Couple: R.I.P.

Surveying an alliance increasingly “in jeopardy” in these pages in 2010, Eric Edelman highlighted the strains on its “four pillars”: cultural leaders and political elites “committed to the notion that the English-speaking peoples have a special mission in the world”; a will to wage war together; the British nuclear deterrent; and close intelligence cooperation. Although the notions of “America First” or Britain leaving the European Union were then fringe ideas, the analysis was all too prescient. Britain’s utility to Washington is sharply diminished now that the four pillars are in even more parlous condition on both sides of the Atlantic. Their erosion begins at the top.

Disunited States

Transatlantic elites’ commitment to a shared mission in the wider world was the default setting for decades. Based on the intrinsic, not just instrumental, value of the world order they co-founded, Washington and London acted as its custodians. From enlightened self-interest and at enormous cost in blood and treasure, they committed to policing the global commons to uphold an international system based on the promotion of open societies and markets, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

No more. Both nations are unsure about their place in the world, their identity, and the benefits of deep engagement abroad. In three respects, a malign symmetry of parallel pathologies has eroded elite resolve to advance an expansive rather than narrow definition of the national interest—even if the closing of the British strategic mind is the more advanced.

First, by accident and design, recent Presidents and Prime Ministers have overseen decline. Leaders matter. In setting the diplomatic tone and foreign policy substance, they can sustain healthy cooperation or permit benign neglect. In the United States, Barack Obama’s Administration began a retrenchment that Donald Trump has advanced further. While the former was marketed as seeking to save the liberal order, not wreck it, the outcome has been similar. Allies such as Britain can no longer rely on an unpredictable America that seemingly devalues its strategic partners as, primarily, commercial rivals in a zero-sum economic competition.

As Thomas Wright noted, Trump has pursued a “predatory” policy to exploit London’s new vulnerability. After vocally backing Brexit, repudiating Obama’s comment that Britain would be “at the back of the queue,” and pledging rapid progress on a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), Trumpian reality has been different. The President helped to block an agricultural deal between London and Brussels in the World Trade Organization, sympathized with Putin during the Skripal poisoning, and intervened in domestic British politics. Rather than rolling over EU agreements to which the United Kingdom is a party to ensure an FTA allowing close relations between the UK and EU27, Washington hardball prevails. Nor can London anticipate much improvement. The U.S. foreign policy agenda remains not whether to retrench, but how far. Advocates of traditional American leadership will be on the defensive in 2020 in both parties. The path charted by Obama and Trump resembles more blueprint than interlude.

Matters in Britain are no better. Less James Bond than Downton Abbey, successive Prime Ministers have presided over defense cuts and disinterest in the steps necessary to remain globally relevant. The Iraq War, Great Recession, and tensions over Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iran, Russian money laundering, and more exacted a heavy toll. The botched Libya intervention in 2011 informed Parliament’s refusal to support military action in Syria in 2013. As important, with a new constitutional convention that the House of Commons must approve war, the prospects for UK action are weaker than when the decision was, through royal prerogative, exercised by the PM. David Cameron’s mistaken gambles compounded the insular turn by elevating his party’s welfare over the national interest. Hoping not to have to implement the promise of an EU referendum, the Conservatives won the 2015 general election (and hence could govern alone, rather than in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, whom Cameron relied on to veto a referendum). The miscalculated play then backfired further when a complacent Cameron lead “Remain” to defeat and his own resignation.

Cameron’s hapless successor, May, has played a bad hand poorly, calling an unnecessary general election in 2017 that she mistakenly believed would increase the Tory majority, only to lose it and govern as a minority administration with the support of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. Despite voting to Remain, as PM she has never challenged the wilder Leave illusions that unbridled national sovereignty could return or that it would be easy for the UK to trade on WTO terms in the event of a no-deal exit. Instead, while some Brexiteers resemble Maoists during the Cultural Revolution more than pragmatic Tories, her deal offered continuing adherence to a plethora of EU rules but no say in shaping them. At a juncture when strategy is required, Washington and Westminster are preoccupied by tactics.

Second, in each nation, a parallel but seismic shift has seen the rise of the nationalist Right and cosmopolitan Left. Long inhabiting the fringes of one or the other party, rarely have they achieved a simultaneous mainstream presence in both. The white working class and non-graduates are shifting rightward while big cities, graduates, and higher income brackets underpin the left. Neither bodes well for the U.S.-UK partnership’s long-term health. In the United States, Trump’s combination of vulgar realism and transactional nationalism has elevated short-term economic gains over long-term Transatlantic security. Nor can London expect favors from a Harris, Warren, or Sanders presidency focused on “nation-building at home” and social work abroad.

Changes in Britain augur equally badly. British party politics is broken. “Europe” has long divided both parties, causing intra-party strains that threaten to overwhelm inter-party tribalism. May will surely follow Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Cameron to become the fourth Tory Prime Minister to fall victim to its lasting toxicity. But the United States also divides opinion. Even among Americanophiles, the imperial legacy survives. Erstwhile pro-American Tories are still apt to suggest in private that the only problem with America is its being populated by Americans. A powerful strain of Little England nationalism informs a party in crisis, the divisions within and between its commercial and nationalist wings leaving it struggling to articulate a serious strategic vision. Some elements crave splendid isolation, but the bulk is not isolationist so much as antipathetic to the fact of U.S. power and EU (read: German) ambition. From Cameron’s decision to join China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to May’s willingness to support the Franco-German “Instrument in Support of Trade Exchange” facility allowing Iran to circumvent U.S. sanctions, the fissures with Washington have grown from tactical differences to core strategic goals.

But if the Tories exhibit disarray, Labour offers an altogether more ominous contrast. George Orwell once wrote of leftists to whom, during WWII, “American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution.” He added, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.” To understate, Jeremy Corbyn is no intellectual. But he does exhibit precisely the demented anti-American animus and conspiracy-thinking to which Orwell referred, while legitimating the vilest anti-Semitism. As Robert Shrimsley noted, “Under his leadership anti-Semitism and misogyny are indulged; brutal anti-western dictators are admired, while internal critics are bullied and abused.” In place of Atlanticist social democrats, unrepentant Marxist zealots with no love for the Labour Party now control it. In leading the racist Left, Corbyn, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, and their thuggish cronies are united by a visceral anti-Americanism that filters every international issue. The Communist Party of Great Britain chose, for the first time, not to field candidates against Labour in 2017’s general election: Corbyn would suffice, comrade.

Americans should be under no illusions. Institutionally anti-Semitic and reflexively anti-American, a Labour government would represent a clear and present danger to U.S.-UK relations. As Mike Gapes—former chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs and one of eight MPs who left the party in February—observed, Corbyn poses “a threat to national security and international alliances.” In 2017, many Labour MPs told voters a Labour vote was safe since Corbyn couldn’t win. Those who recognize he is unfit to be Prime Minister but remain loyal increasingly resemble Republicans who reassured themselves that Trump would change in office. Nor is this a matter of one individual. The far Left controls party organization and moderates are leaving, being re-educated or removed. As one Labour MP privately confided to me, “How the hell did it come to this?”.

Third, it is difficult to uphold a foreign policy based on common interests and values when neither enjoys domestic consensus. Divided against ourselves, oikophobia—repudiation of the home—afflicts us both. Trust in the political class has cratered. We are separated not only by a common language but analogous cultural chasms, an activist Academy in thrall to “Grievance Studies” orthodoxies that scorn liberal democratic capitalism, and the “death of expertise.” As an era of entitlement displaces the age of Enlightenment, identity politics fuels left- and right-wing populisms that share deeply illiberal notions that demography is destiny. While America’s civic nationalism can perhaps withstand the pincer assault, the United Kingdom has no comparable foundation on which to rely. A December 2018 survey found 68 percent of Brits felt no political party “speaks for them.” One third deemed Islam “a threat to the British way of life.” As Brendon O’Neill noted:

Modern Britain is a nation that refuses to state clearly what its values are, and which in fact celebrates being ‘multi-values’. All value systems are fine, and none is superior to any other—that is the rallying cry of the multicultural era. . . .Britain has become divided, disjointed, split into various, often conflicting communities and value systems. Many of the people brought up in this climate come to feel dislocated from any idea of Britishness, and from the British nation itself, and some start to embrace narrow, eccentric and even quite hostile value systems.

Astonishingly, in the 2016 referendum campaign, foreign policy went almost unmentioned. Instead, the key reason for Leave’s victory was immigration, an issue met by the Remain campaign with silence. Myopically focused on economics, the Remainers dared not engage the topic. The vote became a vehicle for the expression of accumulated resentments about changes wrought to British life over decades. After all, if leaving was about “taking back control”, what were the most vivid expressions of its loss? EU subsidies and regulations on cheese? Or cultural shifts encompassing discrete matters from mass immigration to transgenderism? For millions, the Brexit vote was a Primal Scream of repressed rage against the established political class, not a prudential verdict on the utility of non-tariff barriers to trade in services.

It is not to romanticize the past to observe that a public life increasingly inured or actively hostile to its own history cannot long underpin a sense of collective identity and shared national endeavor. In the amoral sphere of international politics, strategic necessity, geographic differences, and asymmetries of power cannot be overcome by history and culture alone. But the latter can assist an alliance to endure. The more shared values wither on the vine, the more definitive other differences appear. Absent consensus on the ultimate purpose of statecraft, its resourcing must also suffer.

Land of False Hope and Former Glory

The inexorable decline of Britain’s operational capacity as a global power after 1945 was never commensurate with London’s reliable willingness to wage war by America’s side (Vietnam was the exception that proved the rule). That is now in question. Neither the British appetite nor capacity to project power is what it was, no matter the desperate PR efforts to pretend otherwise (the UK Defense Secretary recently endorsed “enhancing our mass and increasing our lethality”; Treasury officials described the speech as “idiotic”).

Even if the martial will returned, the British wallet is empty. According to the National Audit Office, the Ministry of Defence faces a £15 billion ($28 billion) black hole in its budget over the coming decade. The Rolling Stones can fill London’s Wembley Stadium; the British army cannot. Already smaller than at any time since the Napoleonic wars, it is struggling to recruit a shrunken target of 82,000 troops. The navy comprises just 19 destroyers and frigates, and six submarines. The resources expended on the Queen Elizabeth, one of two new aircraft carriers, precluded purchasing the necessary adjunct platforms to protect it. London can still offer niche functions, such as special forces. But rising budgetary pressures and future falls in sterling increasingly make defense a luxury good. To the extent the United Kingdom can serve as America’s deputy in policing the global commons, it will be in a desk job capacity: less frequent, more boutique, and often at a computer keyboard.

Moreover, British security remains inextricably tied to Europe while European defense depends heavily on the United Kingdom and France, the continent’s strongest militaries and only nuclear powers. But if Europe’s defense is to be inter-governmental it cannot be optimally developed within an EU framework post-Brexit. Britain is one of eight of NATO’s 29 members to meet the 2 percent of GDP target for defense spending and the second largest spender, after America. But even this is partly the result of creative accounting. British military readiness and interoperability remain unprecedentedly weak.

Brexit also has adverse implications for the U.S.-UK partnership’s third and fourth pillars. The prospects for UK nuclear disarmament look weak. Parliament heavily voted to renew the Trident deterrent in July 2016. May also offered a robust refusal to endorse a no-first-use declaration. But questions remain over the creaking infrastructure, expense, utility, and politics. Although Corbyn has been a lifelong proponent of unilateral disarmament out of step with his own party, the credibility of a British deterrent would cease with him in power. An equally serious threat is the potential breakup of Britain, if Scotland votes for independence in a new referendum that the Scottish Nationalist Party will push—another voluntary act of self-harm that could raise profound logistical issues as to the viability of relocating the nuclear submarine bases.

Finally, Brexit will inhibit UK security cooperation with EU states. The “Five Eyes” consortium remains a vital source of continuity but cannot alone compensate for Britain’s strategic confusion, downsized military, and pending exclusion from key EU data flows. Moreover, Five Eyes is not a foreign policy-making institution or platform for reviving a larger role. And if a Corbyn premiership ever came to pass, all bets are off. One U.S. intelligence expert suggested to me that “deep state” agency-to-agency cooperation would continue apace, with selective denial of information to unreliable superiors. But Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, noted of Seamus Milne, Corbyn’s closest adviser, that “anyone with his sort of background could not be let anywhere near classified information. That means Corbyn could not make the judgments and decisions a PM has to make unless he stopped consulting him.” Denying security clearances to officials in Number Ten Downing Street would be a first. But the Dear Leader may circumvent the problem of intelligence-sharing by acquiring an entirely new set of exotic “anti-imperialist” allies from Tehran to Havana.

Three Futures

Churchill once remarked that, “Sometimes when Fortune scowls most spitefully, she is preparing her most dazzling gifts.” Prior obituaries of the U.S.-UK partnership proved premature. Perhaps the current difficulties too shall pass?

Three possibilities lie ahead.

Strategic estrangement looms if either America or Britain re-embraces an assertive internationalism while the other abandons engagement through necessity or choice. Despite “America First” and its less abrasive Democratic Party echoes, the most likely candidate to downsize is London. As Lawrence Freedman noted, one response to Dean Acheson’s famous jibe about Britain losing an empire but not finding a role is to abandon any pretense of the latter, “to retire from greatness and lead a quieter life.” Rather than resurrect a lost past, we can adopt the Bhutan option of a robust Gross National Happiness index and hope for the best. If the choice lies between becoming a British Dubai or Caracas-on-the-Thames socialist dystopia, a wholesale downscaling of ambition may prove reassuringly bespoke for a quaint nation of no geopolitical consequence.

National pride might reject departing the world stage for life as an understudy. Some Brexiteers embrace “Global Britain” to reclaim a leading role and “independent voice.” But the nations with whom we share values do not necessarily share our interests. Potential strategic partners with large populations, growing economies, and geopolitical heft are not in the “Anglosphere” that Brexiteers reflexively favor: Brazil, China, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. But the Anglosphere, even with India alongside the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is not even an association, still less a trading bloc or alliance. Moreover, multiple bilateralisms do not a genuine multilateralism make. Nor is the United Kingdom equipped to act as some global hub, even were a global orientation the same as global power. Capabilities need to match commitments. In leaving the European Union, London risks a credibility gap and further reputational damage if its aspirations prove fatuous. A slogan is not a policy and an independent voice is of minimal value if it is never heard.

A second possibility, strategic retreat, might see both America and Britain adopt reduced roles regarding their functional and geopolitical interests. Rejecting a forward-leaning role in multilateral institutions or regional power balances might permit tactical marriages of convenience but eschew institutionalized cooperation. “Conscious uncoupling” could envisage a more narrowly geo-economic foreign policy while eschewing interventionism. Such a path of restraint would accept a spheres-of-interest approach, one that conceivably could seek to accommodate Moscow, depart the Middle East, and focus fully on Asia. But mercantilist trends in the United States point to deliberalizing trade. And if Brussels and Washington leave London adrift, necessity may compel seeking a new patron for an economy whose high-value manufacturing and services sectors rely on deeply integrated markets. Just as Paris might offer a superficially attractive new European suitor for the United States, so Beijing might offer a commercial lifeline to cash-strapped, isolated Brits—accompanied by stringent terms and conditions.

A third option could see renewed strategic partnership. To the extent that London and Washington still share a strategic vision and the structural remnants of networked leadership, cooperative rather than conflictual relations remain part of the Transatlantic muscle memory. Diminished utility may spur Britain to a strategic rethink to prove its worth to America. In turn, Washington may exact a price: a clear U.S. alignment rather than a “global” vocation for which London has neither the resources nor a reservoir of international goodwill. The United States is Britain’s single largest national export market. A generous FTA could revitalize our wider engagement.

But two impediments exist.

First, Britain’s trade relationship with the European Union remains to be determined, a matter potentially years in the making. Two-thirds of UK global trade is with the European Union or nations with whom London has a free trade deal through EU membership. As Brits are learning the hard way, trade negotiations are marathons, not sprints—tough, unsentimental endurance tests. Any welcome flexibility to strike trade deals with 65 million Brits is counterbalanced by the lost clout of offering access to a market of 450 million Europeans. Even now, UK efforts to secure agreement for independent tariff schedules at the WTO are being held up by 19 nations, including Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, unhappy with the agricultural quotas they have been offered under a provisional deal.

Second, concerns that Washington will press an unacceptably hard bargain threaten a serious rupture. U.S. trade negotiating guidelines enshrine as major objectives securing access for agricultural products to UK markets and eliminating “practices that unfairly decrease U.S. market access opportunities or distort agricultural markets to the detriment of the United States.” Washington wants a mechanism “to take appropriate action if the UK negotiates a free trade agreement with a non-market country” (i.e. China). It also seeks access to UK government procurement markets while maintaining federal “buy America” programs and ruling out British access to U.S. state procurement markets, an issue that helped doom U.S.-EU trade negotiations in 2015.

If London accedes, it will forfeit substantial UK exports to the EU. Reinforcing scare stories about “chlorinated chicken,” environment secretary Michael Gove has stated that he will not accept “U.S. food standards” for Britain. U.S. demands for non-discriminatory treatment by state-owned enterprises and full market access for pharmaceutical companies stoke popular fears of a rapacious American threat to Britain’s secular religion, the National Health Service. Any FTA would require congressional approval. And even in the area of services, negotiators will need to accommodate the European Union’s regulatory reach. Unable to rule the waves, Britannia may be unable to waive the rules and instead “remain firmly anchored to the old continent.” The EU got the mutiny, but neither London nor Washington will necessarily obtain the bounty.

Without Britain, the EU “project” is ever more a matter for pessimism. But that is cold comfort to anyone concerned about the West’s collective security. Like a dead state walking, Little Britain will require decades to recover from Brexit’s psychodrama—not only the rupture but also the aftershocks on politics, Parliament, the party system, and public life. Redolent of “stab in the back” sentiment during Weimar—when resentful Germans blamed decadent elites for betraying the German army in World War I—one of two new neuralgic influences promises to plunge British politics into post-Brexit purgatory: a nationalist cry of “betrayal” if we remain within the EU’s regulatory orbit; and, if we do not, a cosmopolitan cri de coeur over our lost European promised land. British misfortunes will be attributed to this one decision, not the multiple fissures and strategic myopia to which it gave anguished expression.

Melancholic as it may be, it behoves believers in close U.S.-UK collaboration to be realistic. The alliance has a rich past but no reliable future. America and Britain have aligned closely in times of serious security threats, on joint projects of generational scale. It is a tragic indictment that today’s shared external threats—not just to our states but to the liberal democratic model—are not yielding the renewed coalescence they demand. Whether Britain’s pending geopolitical relocation is a molehill or mountain, marginalizing or liberating, the United Kingdom will be more exposed, with less to offer a restive Washington displaying ever greater leadership fatigue. Rome wasn’t burnt in a day. But the Transatlantic omens are troubling. A strategic partnership of the first order is on life support and dying a strange, untimely death.

Quoted in Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History (Allen Lane, 2014), p. 201.

Christopher Hill, The Future of British Foreign Policy: Security and Diplomacy in a World After Brexit (Polity Press, 2019), p. vii.

George Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism,’ Essays (Penguin Books, 2000), p. 316.

Roger Scruton, Where We Are; The State of Britain Now (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Hill, ibid., p. 174.

Lawrence Freedman, ‘Trump and Brexit,’ Survival 60 (6) 2018-19, p. 15.

The post The Strange Death of a Special Relationship appeared first on The American Interest.

Frustrated Voters Could Elect Comic In Time of War

Ukrainians go to the polls later this week to elect their sixth president, but there’s little to celebrate. Thirty-eight candidates will face off in the first round. A candidate must win at least fifty percent to win outright, so given the large number of candidates and the current polls, a second round is likely to follow.

One could be forgiven for concluding that everything is A-OK in Kyiv after attending just about any think tank event on the election in Washington. Talking heads and experts lavishly praise Ukraine for having “unpredictable” elections, unlike its neighbor Russia.

But “unpredictable” on its own does not boil down to “healthy.” A large field full of green, corrupt, or just plain unelectable candidates isn’t something to celebrate. Only three candidates are truly viable: two well-known politicians—incumbent President Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko—and an inexperienced comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Poroshenko is an oligarch, and the other two likely have oligarchic interests behind them. In December, most analysts were predicting a second round between Poroshenko and Tymoshenko. But Zelenskiy, a satirist who has never held office but has played an incorruptible president on television, has emerged as the frontrunner since he declared his candidacy on New Year’s Eve (a media stunt that would make a talented populist like Donald Trump green with envy).

The two dinosaurs, Tymoshenko and Poroshenko, are struggling to keep up with Zelenskiy, who eschews interviews, prefers to interact with his supporters online, and continues to perform in comedy troupes around the country. Zelenskiy, who plays an ordinary teacher-turned-president gunning down corrupt politicians on his enormously popular television series called “Servant of the People,” appeals to many who are sick and tired of empty promises and sick and tired of corruption. He is brash and crude, but he reflects the public mood. The catch is that his series is shown on the 1+1 channel, which belongs to the notorious oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskiy. Kolomoisky himself has explicitly championed Zelenskiy’s cause.

The fact that the country is seriously considering electing such an inexperienced comedian says it all. Five years after the Euromaidan, when Ukraine was given a historic chance to refashion its rotten state, Ukrainians are once again being presented with the same old faces. The reformist politicians who emerged after the Maidan protests spent most of 2018 negotiating and couldn’t produce a single charismatic candidate who could compete in the presidential election. The closest they got was rock star Slava Vakarchuk, who had the star power but not the stomach for Ukraine’s dirty national politics. Vakarchuk toyed with the idea all year, raising expectations of voters, but ultimately decided to sit out. In a rare moment of unity, two of Ukraine’s reform parties endorsed one candidate, Civic Position chair and former defense minister Anatoliy Hrytsenko, for president in February. But it was too little, too late. Had they merged in 2018, Hrytsenko, who polls fourth or fifth, might have had a chance to make the second round. It’s conceivable, at least, that some of the hunger for change that the comedian Zelenskiy is capitalizing on would have been channeled more constructively.

Others among the reformists who emerged after the Maidan have decided to stay out of the presidential race and concentrate on the fall parliamentary elections. This is a rational strategy. Ukraine, after all, has a presidential-parliamentary system, and parliament chooses the prime minister, who oversees economic policy.

Former U.S. Ambassador Geoff Pyatt was fond of dividing the country into “Old Ukraine” and “New Ukraine.” Poroshenko could have been easily reelected had he embraced the values of New Ukraine. In truth, he continues to represent Old Ukraine, but puts on a good show when the West is watching. Had Poroshenko, known as the “Chocolate King” for his vast confectionery empire, put his own business interests on ice, embraced Ukraine’s anti-corruption agenda, and used the reform energy that permeated Kyiv after the Maidan, he would have been handily reelected this year.

Poroshenko admittedly gets good marks on foreign policy, but mediocre marks on domestic reforms from even his most vocal defenders. In 2014, Poroshenko campaigned on the slogan “Living in a new way.” He won the race outright with 54 percent of the vote. He promised “zero tolerance for corruption” but failed to deliver spectacularly: No high-level crooks went to jail on his watch and experts say that corruption has returned to pre-Maidan levels. He campaigned on an anti-graft platform, but got richer in office while his country became the poorest in Europe. While he has held a variety of offices for more than twenty years, he is a wealthy businessman. Formally, he has put his businesses in a blind trust, but sources say that as president he still spends several hours per day managing his business affairs.

He is prickly with the press and holds only one annual press conference. And even then, he refuses to answer questions from critical outlets like the Kyiv Post. On the campaign trail, he condescends to ordinary people. In January during a campaign stop in Cherkasy Oblast, he told a man who asked how the president would fight corruption, “Go to church, light a candle, for you are a non-believer. And the Lord will soothe you”—a tone-deaf response in the best tradition of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

Analysts have noticed that Poroshenko’s strategy has changed over the years. This year, his slogans have focused on the army, on faith, and on the Ukrainian language, all of which are not-so-coded appeals to central and western Ukrainians, whose support, he is betting, will put him into the second round.

Beyond the clumsy politicking and the broken promises, a recent scandal involving one of Poroshenko’s close friends threatens his reelection bid. A crusading investigative team has alleged that Ihor Hladkovskiy, the son of Poroshenko’s deputy head of the Security and Defense Council, engineered a scheme to sell smuggled Russian parts to Ukrainian defense factories at inflated prices. The elder Hladkovskiy has since been dismissed.

Another recent court decision may also hurt the president. On February 26, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine ruled that an article in its criminal code on illicit enrichment was unconstitutional. Officials with expensive cars and property who didn’t have the official income to purchase these luxury items got off scot-free. At least sixty-five cases against crooked officials were dismissed. It’s not a good look.

Poroshenko’s most ardent boosters have taken to the press to defend him in a tight race. They claim in breathless fashion that the West loves Poroshenko and that he is the only one who can defend Ukraine and stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin. While the second claim is debatable, the first is preposterous. Consider just the most recent examples: On March 4, the G-7’s ambassadors called Ukraine’s decision to revoke illicit enrichment “a serious setback in the fight against corruption.” And on March 5, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine said that “Ukraine’s once-in-a-generation opportunity for change. . . .has not resulted in the anti-corruption or rule of law reforms that Ukrainians expect or deserve.”

On foreign policy, however, there is more of a case to be made. Poroshenko is openly running as a staunch nationalist, and whatever his shortcomings in domestic affairs, he at least does have real experience dealing with Russia on a war footing. Tymoshenko has of course dealt with Putin while she was Prime Minister, but the gas deal that landed her in prison hangs over her reputation. Some even suspect that she might try to cut a deal with the Russians over Crimea and the Donbas. Zelenskiy, for his part, has said he would be open to negotiations with Putin, and has promised to put Ukraine’s NATO membership to a referendum.

In reality, however, the foreign policies of the three main candidates would probably be constrained by public opinion: All three would be forced to pursue EU and NATO membership and vigorously defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity in the east. A country that has lost 13,000 people to Russian aggression and has an enormous number of armed and trained men at the ready won’t tolerate any kind of deal with Russia, and majority support for NATO membership remains a fact of Ukrainian politics.

The real difference between the candidates is on domestic policy. The most urgent issue for the next president is to negotiate a new agreement with the International Monetary Fund or the economy will contract. Ukraine’s crippling Yanukovych-era debt starts to come due in 2019.

A second-term Poroshenko is likely to be more conservative and less reform-minded. “Poroshenko will be much worse in the second term,” former Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk told me. “They [the business community] think Poroshenko is stability but he’s actually stagnation.” The previous IMF agreement, negotiated on Poroshenko’s watch, stopped disbursing funds for almost two years because the country didn’t fulfill its reform pledges. If past performance is anything to go by, most of the legislative gains that were made since the Maidan will be fought over and many will be overturned.

Tymoshenko’s domestic policy is also easy to predict. Her team has put together a thick document called the New Course for Ukraine that economists have analyzed. The reform-minded publication Vox Ukraine has dinged her economic program for its “mix of plagiarism, semi-plagiarism, nonexistent sources, and mistakes.” On substance, the plan is not much better: Tymoshenko favors massive social welfare handouts and wants to cut gas prices in half for consumers, something the International Monetary Fund actively opposes. She says she will fight corruption, but her long public record leaves many doubts.

Zelenskiy’s domestic views are less predictable but given his lead in the polls and the blank slate nature of the candidate, three prominent reformers see him as more of an opportunity than a threat. The above-mentioned former finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk, former Minister of Economic Trade and Development Aivaras Abromavicius, and MP and former investigative journalist Sergiy Leshchenko are bringing him up to speed.

Abromavicius, an investment banker with an impeccable reputation, quit Poroshenko’s administration because he says he was pressured to hire a crooked deputy minister. The banker has pressed for deoligarchization of the economy, massive privatization of state-owned enterprises, and liberalization of the land market. Abromavicius is cautious by nature and not someone to enthusiastically endorse a candidate without experience.

The fact that Danyliuk is considering backing Zelenskiy is also extraordinary. As minister, one of Danyliuk’s greatest foes was oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky who owned Privat Bank. After an independent audit showed that Privat Bank had committed large-scale fraud to the tune of $5.5 billion, Ukraine nationalized it in late 2016. Danyliuk moved his family to London for safety. For Danyliuk, backing Zelenskiy is a big personal risk, but he is convinced enough with what he has heard to continue doing it: “Everyone has relations with oligarchs,” Danyliuk admitted.

The reformists’ influence may be having an effect. Zelenskiy has said a few notable things that hint at his developing views: He wants to strip members of parliament of their immunity; he supports Ukraine’s new anti-corruption institutions; and he has pledged to clean up the notoriously unreformed General Prosecutor’s Office. And in a rare interview, he even explicitly said that he won’t give Privat Bank back to Kolomoisky, and that that everyone is equal before the law.

The problem of oligarch pollution in Ukraine is real and troubling. Kolomoisky and Poroshenko, two of the titans of Ukrainian oligarchy, have become bitter enemies over the past few years, and people have speculated with some cause that Kolomoisky is backing both Tymoshenko and Zelenskiy to get back at Poroshenko. It’s true that Zelenskiy’s television shows and sketches appear on Kolomoisky’s television station, that Tymoshenko gets airtime on the channel, and that Zelenskiy’s show has started to aggressively bash Poroshenko.

The picture is far from perfect, and these elections hardly inspire hope. Ukrainians are angry enough with the status quo that they just may elect an experienced comedian with links to a prominent oligarch. And most analysts expect the next parliament to be made up of a coalition of disparate parties, making it fragile and subject to collapse. There are few reasons to be optimistic about the new government that will form in 2020.

But despite the gloomy outlook, there’s every reason to be optimistic about Ukraine’s long-term prospects. Despite the grim choices before them, Ukrainians repeatedly say they are not satisfied with what’s on offer. They tell pollsters they want new faces.

It’s just that these new faces can’t seem to break through. The medicine is difficult to administer, but obviously necessary: Ukraine needs electoral reform, in needs to remove political immunity for parliamentarians, it needs to get rid of oligarchic ownership of the media, and it needs to build real political parties.

Ukrainians are active in public life and every reform that was put into place since the Maidan is the direct result of pressure from civil society, Western governments, and international financial institutions. The West must continue to vocally support civil society activists who face massive pressure and physical threats, as well as its small but powerful independent media outlets like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Schemes and Bihus.info.

It’s not a satisfying or complete answer, but the fight to free Ukraine will take decades—and then some.

The post Frustrated Voters Could Elect Comic In Time of War appeared first on The American Interest.

The Pakistan Bump for India’s Ruling Party

Foreign policy almost never figures in Indian election campaigns—unless it has to do with Pakistan. So it’s no surprise that the face-off between India and Pakistan over a terror attack on February 14 in Indian-administered Kashmir, which happened days before the schedule for the Indian general election was announced, is casting a long shadow on the campaign. The general election, where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking a second term, will be held in multiple phases over April and May.

The Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government should have been on the defensive after the attack on an Indian convoy by the Pakistan-based terrorist organization, Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), killed 40 troops. However, it quickly turned a serious security breach—one that testified to the failures of the current Indian government in Kashmir—into a public relations coup. Due to the muscular image of the Modi government and the attack’s proximity to the election, it was widely expected that India would hit back. It did so on February 26, when Indian fighter jets bombed a JeM training camp in Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunwa province. This was the first time that Indian fighter aircraft had crossed into Pakistani territory since the 1971 war, which resulted in the creation of Bangladesh.

Soon after the air strike, two versions of the event began circulating. One was the Indian version, articulated by the Indian Foreign Secretary, that the strike had killed a “large number of militants.” The other was Pakistan’s, which admitted that Indian planes had intruded into Pakistani airspace, but upon pursuit had dropped their “payloads in haste” and escaped. In the next few days, the conflict escalated to the point where Pakistan shot down an Indian fighter jet and captured the pilot. A Pakistani F-16 might have also crashed in the dogfight. Pakistan’s much-publicized release of the Indian pilot on March 1 helped cool down tempers and seemed to have averted any immediate further action from India.

It did not, however, take long for the air strike to dominate both Indian media coverage and the BJP’s electoral pitch. The conflict seemed to be have been fought with greater intensity in TV studios and on social media sites than on the India-Pakistan border. Objectivity flew out the window and most news channels engaged in patriotic one-upmanship, with one news anchor donning military fatigues and holding a toy gun. Social media was rife with disinformation and fake images. Fact-checking, too, became a casualty, as the ultra-nationalists and moderates each debunked the other’s claims. Satellite images, many of them doctored, of the strike’s site and the damage done bolstered rival claims.

The BJP and Modi, too, were quick to foreground the air strike in their election campaign. Within hours of the air strike, Modi said that India would no longer be “helpless” in the face of terror. In subsequent speeches, Modi has reiterated that his government won’t shirk from entering the home of terrorists and killing them. Some of his party colleagues have been candid about the effect of the strike. One of them, a former chief minister of an Indian province, B.S. Yeddyurappa, predicted that the strike would help the BJP win at least two dozen seats in his home state of Karnataka. Disputes over the impact of the air strike and the number of casualties, too, have become intensely politicized. While the Indian armed forces were wary of coming up with a number, the BJP President and Modi’s confidante, Amit Shah, proudly proclaimed that 250 terrorists had been killed in Balakot. The BJP also put up posters across India with Modi holding a gun and surrounded by militaristic images.

By contrast, after initial reluctance, the opposition parties have begun questioning the credibility and impact of the air strike, demanding to know the extent of the damage caused and the number of terrorists killed. The Congress Party also criticized the Modi government, despite all its courting of China, for failing to enlist Chinese support at the UN for designating JeM chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist. However, these attacks on the government’s official narrative have done little to move the needle on public opinion. The BJP has continued to exploit the attack to shore up its nationalist credentials.

Before the terrorist attack in Kashmir, the BJP’s standing was looking shaky in the face of electoral defeats in late 2018 in three north Indian states. Voters had punished the BJP on several issues, including anaemic job creation, farmer distress, a poorly designed Goods and Services Tax, and the aftershocks of Modi’s most disruptive move—a dramatic demonetization of high-value currency in November 2016. The question now is whether the air strike will swing the vote in favor of the BJP.

A survey done immediately after the air strike showed that the approval ratings for Modi, which were 32 percent at the beginning of 2018, had jumped to 62 percent. At the same time, national security, which was chosen by only 4 percent of the respondents as a key issue in early 2019, climbed to 26 percent and ranked even higher than unemployment. The gap in popularity between Modi and his closest challenger, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress, had also widened considerably following the air strike. Two recent opinion polls have forecast that the BJP will win fewer parliamentary seats than it did in 2014, but the fall won’t be as steep as was widely expected. While opinion polls can be notoriously inaccurate in India, they usually capture the general trend, which seems to indicate a post-air strike bump for the BJP.

If, however, we look at the impact of past India-Pakistan conflicts on elections, the evidence is mixed. The 1965 India-Pakistan war did not have a discernible impact on the 1967 general election, which saw the Congress, without Nehru’s presence for the first time, returning to power. The 1971 war took place after Indira Gandhi had convincingly won the election the same year. The 1999 Kargil war, which saw India score a decisive victory over Pakistan, arguably had an impact on the general elections that were held soon after the war ended. The Kargil war was fought under a shaky coalition government, headed by the BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee as Prime Minister, that had been in power for only a year. A Vajpayee-led coalition was re-elected in 1999 with exactly the same number of seats it had won in 1998, but with an increase in vote share in the seats that it contested. Significantly, the BJP did better in states where it was in a direct contest with the Congress than in states where its main opponent was a regional party—suggesting that the BJP is stronger when focusing on national issues.

If we compare 1999 with 2009 and 2016, the evidence becomes even less conclusive. The 2009 general elections were held soon after the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, widely known as India’s 9/11. In these elections, the Congress-led coalition, which did not take any military action against Pakistan, returned to power with a greater majority than it had five years earlier. The more recent so-called Indian surgical strikes in September 2016, carried out across the Line of Control with Pakistan in response to a terror attack on an army camp, did bring electoral dividends in the critical state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). However, it is unclear whether demonetization, which also happened around the same time, had the greater impact on the UP elections.

During the current 2019 election campaign, the BJP is likely to keep talking up national security and the air strike against Pakistan and duck issues where the Modi government has been less successful, such as mitigating unemployment and farmer distress. How the opposition parties respond to this changed narrative is crucial. Given past history, three things can be said with some certainty. One, the air strike could matter more in states where the BJP is in a direct contest against the Congress. Two, the issue will possibly find more takers in urban India and middle-class homes, who are far more concerned with national security and deeply polarized than rural India. Three, the election campaign is likely to focus less on the substance of the India-Pakistan relationship than it is on scoring political points.

Looking beyond the election campaign, the Balakot air strike signaled the willingness of the Indian government to hit targets inside Pakistan in retaliation against terror attacks. This air strike has thus established a new threshold for India’s response to terror attacks, without changing the fundamental nature of the India-Pakistan relationship. While it has raised the cost of Pakistani meddling in Kashmir, the root causes of the conflict remain very much in place. Unless Pakistan acts against terrorist organizations operating out of its territory, terror attacks on Indian soil will likely continue. From now on, however, Indian governments will find it difficult to exercise restraint when faced with such attacks—leaving the door dangerously open to escalation.

The post The Pakistan Bump for India’s Ruling Party appeared first on The American Interest.

The End of the New Deal Era—and the Coming Realignment

Nearly everyone understands a dangerous and disruptive force is tearing at American politics. There’s the steady increase of anger and contempt seeping into American life. Red and Blue America eagerly hurl bricks at each other’s skulls. There’s our increasingly fanatical political culture in which we toss away more and more longstanding norms. Yet the most alarming development is that we no longer understand how politics in America works.

For as long as all of us can remember, American politics had always meant the same war between Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats were the party of New Deal liberalism, as they had been since Franklin Roosevelt. The Republicans were the party of conservatism, just as William F. Buckley, Jr., announced it in National Review. When America voted Republican or Democrat, national policy might slip a little in one direction or the other, but we always knew more or less what we were going to get. Now we don’t.

Desperate for answers, political observers have naturally latched onto convenient explanations for this disruption. Some fault unruly personalities and politicians. Others blame technologies like social media. Others fear unfamiliar ideas and movements challenging the consensus. In other words, most of us are looking for some irritant or villain in the hope that, if we can identify and eradicate the nuisance, America might go back to its natural order—meaning the 20th-century political world.

But it won’t. The problem isn’t some technology, movement, or institution we can identify and remove. It’s that an entire stale order is crumbling down. The great debate of the 20th century is over. America is heading toward its next realignment.

The idea that American politics is about a “spectrum” of ideas running left to right is a destructive myth. The endless stream of ideas and possibilities flowing out of the human imagination doesn’t stack up neatly in some imaginary line. The only reason we even started talking about politics in terms of directions, left and right, is due to an historical accident from the French Revolution. While debating whether to install a republic in France, the politicians who wanted to dethrone the king happened to sit together on the left side of the meeting room while those favoring a constitutional monarchy sat on the right. Scholars since have repeatedly attempted and failed to divine some principle or value to determine what makes something “left” or “right” outside that original debate over republics and kings. Unlike in that French assembly hall, however, no one today really knows what it means to call some idea “left” or “right” other than the fact that it’s the sort of thing the people we arbitrarily label “left” and “right” at the moment happen to believe.

The Republican and Democratic parties, in other words, aren’t vehicles for some permanent human division. Unless you define left and right in some childlike way—say, based on whether you find a historical figure more oppressive or cruel—there weren’t any “liberals” or “conservatives” as we now define them before the modern era. The political fights of ancient and medieval societies weren’t over the role of markets, providing universal health care to peasants, the political status of women and the disadvantaged, or any of the other major political issues over which modern Americans obsess. Nor can you find these same ideologies in America’s own political parties before our present era. Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists, generally considered the early republic’s “conservative party,” championed a powerful Federal government. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, widely considered “liberals,” stood for a weak Federal government and state’s rights. The pro-business Whigs, often called conservative, championed modernization, national infrastructure spending, education, and reform. The Jacksonian Democrats, sometimes called liberal, were rowdy populists who railed at elites and believed in a powerful national executive and strong states. The most powerful Republican around the turn of the 20th century was Teddy Roosevelt, a pro-business progressive championing a powerful reforming government whose views on international relations were to “speak softly and carry a big stick.” The most important Democrat at the time was William Jennings Bryan, an Evangelical Christian populist who lionized workers, spit venom at elites, and fought against teaching evolution in public schools. None of them were reliably conservative or liberal as we now use those words.

In reality, American parties are temporary coalitions forged as tools to self-govern our republic at specific moments of crisis. They bind fractious collections of people who disagree about many things but agree on how to solve the biggest problem of their age. They rally around a unique ideology forged from sometimes clashing principles important to its different factions. And unbeknownst to them in the moment, they are significantly affected by the waves of moral renewal, called Great Awakenings, that have pulsed through American history. The failure to understand the interweaving of these Awakenings with shifts in the party structure over time is one of the great deficiencies of standard American political history.

Once formed, these new parties wage a great national debate over the problems facing the country. That debate goes on for decades, until Americans almost forget that those parties and their ideologies weren’t always there. With time, however, the country changes and the coalitions and ideologies of its parties decay. Eventually, in another moment of crisis, those parties come tumbling down. Out of the rubble of their ruin, America then scrambles to form two new parties and a new debate begins. As a matter of habit and convenience, we arbitrarily label one the left and the other the right.

America throughout its history has had five distinct sets of parties, which scholars call party systems. Each underwent a similar cycle of birth and collapse. During each party-system era, America had two major parties competing on fairly equal terms for about half the national vote. Those parties ruled for decades, attracting consistent coalitions around stable ideologies that were nothing like the Democrats and the Republicans we know today. After decades of battles, however, America slowly changed. When the issues America designed those parties to debate were resolved or faded away, the parties turned into weak institutions coasting on old ideas. Eventually, they crumbled in what the scholars call a realignment. Realignments are the moments in which we tear an entire old order down and build a fresh new era with new coalitions, new ideologies, and new ideas. In the rubble of the old system’s collapse, the American people then create two new coalitions designed to debate new solutions to the nation’s new problems. Sometimes new people or ideas take over the husk of an old party. Sometimes a party simply dissolves and a new one takes its place. Either way, a new era begins with two new coalitions trumpeting new ideas ready to engage in the next era’s great debate.

That’s why American politics seems so troubled. That’s why there’s increasing disorder and chaos. That’s why the political world we’ve always known seems to be decaying before our eyes. The “conservative” Republican and “liberal” Democratic parties we take for granted are merely temporary coalitions built to contest a great debate that’s no longer relevant to our lives. They’re artifacts from an industrial age world built in the wake of a terrible depression that was followed by horrific global war. That great debate is over, so the parties built around it are naturally fading. At the same time, new problems have risen to which those parties have no ready answers because they were never intended to address them. Our parties are dying because one great debate is passing away and another is being born.

America’s very first party system emerged out of the great debate of the Founding era: an explosive question over the nature of the new republic. When the Founders created their republic—of a kind never before tried in history—they themselves had no experience of how it might actually work. They had lived their entire lives in a world of kings. While they agreed on the importance of creating a republic founded on reason and liberty, they had different ideas about how to achieve it. Washington’s protégé and Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, dreamed of a strong commercial republic that would grow to challenge the Old World’s great powers. Washington’s Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, envisioned a decentralized republic of farmers, who he believed had the virtues necessary to stave off tyranny. Fighting broke out in Washington’s government over issues like Hamilton’s banking and economic plans, and the correct stance on the revolution in France. These questions, however, were aspects of a great and important national debate. Was America meant to grow into a meritocratic world power of commerce, great cities, and standing armies? Or was it to be a nation of independent farmers, wary of such pretensions? That debate created America’s first parties, the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans.

Hamilton and his partisans, who grew into the Federalist Party, favored growth, a strong, national government, and Britain over revolutionary France in foreign affairs. Jefferson and his allies, who formed the Democratic-Republicans, favored a decentralized nation of independent farmers, a weak Federal government, and France over Britain. Each feared the other’s vision would lead the republic to ruin. While we sometimes describe it as a clash between regions or interests—New England and commerce versus the plantation South and agriculture—it was in fact a great philosophical debate about what the American republic was supposed to be. While this debate raged across America, the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans thrived politically. Over time, however, Jefferson and his party, while continuing to denounce the Federalists, effectively embraced most of Hamilton’s Federalist policies. America, it turned out, decided it could be both Hamilton’s meritocratic nation of banks and commerce and Jefferson’s honest republic. The debate resolved, American politics went into decline. Then the Federalists blundered during the War of 1812 by demanding major Constitutional reforms implicitly backed by the threat of succession. Caught looking like traitors, the party imploded and America descended into the corrupt and ineffective era of one-party rule we call the “Era of Good Feelings”—until, in 1824, the next debate began.

For decades, settlers had packed their belongings into Conestoga wagons and moved west, building homesteads in the wilderness. From a small collection of colonies along the eastern coast, America blossomed into a vast nation claiming land on both banks of the Mississippi River and beyond. A new generation of Americans came of age who had never been subjects of a king. This frontier generation was divided over a new question: how to bring the people into the Founding generation’s elite-driven republic. This debate produced the presidency of Andrew Jackson. The hot-tempered Jackson was quite unlike the Presidents of the Founding generation. Orphaned during the American Revolution, he moved west and made his fortune in Tennessee. He rose to notice as a military hero. In a duel he killed a man over a dispute about betting on a horse race. Most important, Jackson loathed corruption, banks, and national elites and wanted to bring common working people into the center of the democracy. Jackson and his partisans became a new party, the Democrats, that celebrated common Americans, handed out government jobs to ordinary supporters not on merit but in a spoils system, and wanted to clear more land (which included “removing” native Americans) so settlers could build fresh starts out west.

Jackson’s presidency alarmed a lot of people, from commercial elites who feared his war to destroy the Bank of the United States (something like the Federal Reserve) to Southern plantation barons who resented his use of Federal power to stamp out state nullification. They rallied around another frontier stateman, Kentucky’s silver-tongued charmer Henry Clay. Clay and his followers became the Whigs, who wanted to build roads and canals as the nation expanded west, to encourage education and modernization, and to grow the nation into a meritocratic republic of national improvement. America launched another great debate. Would America be a rowdy populist republic for the common folk, or a meritocratic republic of modernization and reform? As America moved into the 1840s, the Whigs and Democrats had both built popular machines with parades and bunting and spoils while infrastructure and cities had sprouted further and further west as the nation grew. It turned out again that America could be both.

A new debate, however, had now captured the nation’s attention. When President Polk invaded Mexico, winning vast new territories stretching to the Pacific, America would have to debate whether to admit each new state carved from that territory as a slave state or a free one. America was also in the midst of a great religious revival, the Second Great Awakening, sparking a new fervor for moral reform and for causes like temperance, women’s suffrage, and, most powerfully, for the abolition of slavery. Newly impassioned abolitionists refused to watch slavery spread farther. Slave-state leaders feared the implications of adding more free-state senators. The Whigs and Democrats, both of which had Northern and Southern wings, wanted to get back to normal politics, meaning the dead Jacksonian issues. They made clumsy efforts to push past this national distraction. Instead, in 1852 the issue ripped the Whig Party apart, bringing the Second Party System down with it.

After years of turmoil, two new party coalitions emerged. These parties, a new Republican Party and a changed Democratic Party, launched another great debate pitting North against South. After a horrific civil war, those parties fought over the aftermath of post-war Reconstruction. America passed the Constitution’s civil rights amendments, created a Freedman’s Bureau to help former slaves adapt to their new life as citizens, and sought to create new regimes across the Old Confederacy. Eventually, through a combination of politics and violence, one Southern state after another restored local and Democratic Party control. After an economic crash and a destabilizing election marred by charges of fraud, the Democratic Party agreed to acquiesce to a Republican President in exchange for a promise to end Reconstruction. An exhausted America fell into the corrupt Gilded Age, and American politics once again went into decline. Although America’s parties fought over issues like tariffs and civil service reforms, often within their own coalitions instead of between them, old war resentments still defined them, as many American continued to “vote as they shot.”

America, however, was changing once more. Now industrialization was disrupting everything. For those savvy enough to seize wild new opportunities, like Rockefeller and Carnegie, the Gilded Age was a truly golden one. For the family farmers who made up America’s great middle class, along with those living in the small towns that supported them, it meant the unraveling of everything they had known. A generation of Americans had grown up believing that if they worked hard and played by the rules their parent had followed—get up early, toil all day on the farm, take care of your family and community—everything would be all right. Now they discovered those rules no longer applied. Little towns across America were emptying, while cities offering jobs for a wage swelled. Railroads sprouted everywhere, and railroad companies had a stranglehold on farmers’ access to markets. New immigrants flooded into the country. Each year, farm prices fell, and farmers found themselves deeper in debt to eastern banks. America’s two major parties, still obsessing over the Civil War, had nothing useful to say. As their livelihoods unraveled, the family farmers of America’s middle-class got angry. Then the economy crashed, sparking a great populist revolt.

In 1896, a 36-year-old former Democratic Congressman from Nebraska named William Jennings Bryan walked into the Democratic National Convention in a longshot bid for the presidency. Few took it seriously. Securing the speaking slot at the close of debate, Bryan delivered a powerful speech on the biggest populist issue of the moment, free silver—moving America away from the gold standard to spur inflation that would eat away the growing debt of farmers while sticking it to the banks. In reality, it was a populist anthem. Bryan lionized farmers and working people, hurled invective at elites and cities, and ended in silence like a religious figure with his arms outstretched as if in crucifixion. The next day, the Democrats nominated him for President. Then Bryan pushed out his party’s leadership and threw out its playbook. He replaced them with the ideas and agenda of a populist third party movement then sweeping the American plains called the People’s Party. As Bryan campaigned on a whirlwind national tour to wild and adoring crowds, America’s elites, terrified at a man they saw as an ignorant bumpkin and demagogue stirring up populist fury, rallied to Republican William McKinley. Bryan lost the election—McKinley’s better organization and money ultimately chipped away at his early lead—but by the end the campaign, Bryan had changed the Democratic Party irrevocably.

Then another movement seeking to address the disruption of industrialization took hold of the Republican Party. Another religious revival was underway; this one preached a Social Gospel that held that it was Christian duty to reform America into God’s Kingdom. As the ideas of this revival spread among the middle and professional classes, it made common cause with secular reformers who were also eager to launch moral crusades for reform. Together they became a Progressive Movement that flourished inside a more Protestant, middle class, and moralistic Republican Party. These Progressives embarked on great projects to solve the problems of industrialization through a staggering array of charitable works and social causes—maximum work hour laws, abolishing child labor, building public parks, purifying the supply of food and medicine through new agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, taming the growing industrial monopolies, eradicating intoxicating drinks, and winning the vote for women, among many more. Aligned with this movement, Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt transformed the Republican Party into a pro-business progressive party that sought to address the disruption of industrialization through progressive social reform. Another great debate had begun, this one over how to address the disruption of industrialization.

By the 1920s, that debate was over too. America had implemented its reforms and emerged as a wealthy and powerful world power in the hedonistic throes of the Jazz Age. Its politics once again went into decline. Then, in 1929, America plunged into the shock of the Great Depression. By the end of Republican Herbert Hoover’s first term, unemployment was about 25 percent, and in some places worse. Many Americans now lived in tented refugee camps, dependent on soup kitchens to eat. Most alarming, many Americans turned their gaze longingly at the dictatorships abroad, which seemed to be thriving, and began to lose faith in the American republic. In 1932, America threw Hoover and his party out of office in disgust, electing Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had promised them a New Deal. It was time for a new debate, one over how to update America’s institutions in light of the devastation. Roosevelt, however, had no idea yet what his New Deal would even be.

Roosevelt assembled a group of academics and advisers, empowering this “brain trust” to do whatever they thought might work to mitigate the Depression, no matter how radical or bold. What’s more, Roosevelt, in assembling these advisers, welcomed many with progressive and Republican backgrounds. This brain trust, believing higher prices would lead to healthier firms and thus more jobs, implemented a flurry of programs and policies intended to bring more coordination to the economy. The hallmarks of their First New Deal were the creation of the powerful National Recovery Administration, which tasked industry and labor leaders to draw up uniform rules that each industry had to follow, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which limited agricultural production by paying farmers to leave land fallow and destroy crops. The aim was to impose rational planning across the economy, eliminating “overproduction” and limiting the ability of low-cost competitors to put downward pressure on prices.

By 1935, however, Roosevelt faced a profound populist backlash to this First New Deal. Large portions of his party’s traditional base believed the programs were a betrayal of traditional Democratic principles. The First New Deal was ultimately a progressive program that placed confidence in experts and empowered elites and business. Democrats traditionally favored a weak Federal government and distrusted bigness, both in government and in the private economy. The populist boss of Louisiana, Senator Huey Long, began attacking Roosevelt as a rich man selling out working Americans. He touted a plan he called Share Our Wealth, which promised to make “every man a king” by capping the income of millionaires and showering resources on the common people. Fearing that Long planned to challenge him for the presidency in 1936, Roosevelt pivoted to a Second New Deal that included a Works Progress Administration charged with putting people directly to work, a Soak the Rich Tax of 79 percent specifically targeting John Rockefeller, and an old age pension plan called Social Security. When the dust settled over his presidency, a new Democratic ideology had emerged, one combining the traditionally Republican progressivism of the First New Deal with the traditionally Democratic populism of the Second. This ideology, which we call New Deal liberalism, held that the Democratic Party could employ expertise and planning to design a better America that would directly benefit working people and the least well off.

Roosevelt’s New Deal was broadly popular, but not everyone agreed. Many, for example, worried that powerful business people could abuse their delegated powers under the National Industrial Recovery Act to harass smaller competitors. They worried about farmers destroying desperately needed food supplies to raise prices that people already couldn’t afford. They worried about the punitive intent of the Soak the Rich Tax. Most of all, they worried about Roosevelt’s scheme to pack the Supreme Court with new appointees after the Court struck down as unconstitutional several New Deal programs. Critics argued that the rapid expansion in Federal power under Roosevelt’s New Deal threatened American liberty. They also argued that its radical changes to American society might change the nation’s character, undercutting what we sometimes call the republican or national virtues necessary for a republic to thrive. Over time, these New Deal opponents—some Republicans but also many former Roosevelt Democrats—drifted into the Republican Party. They combined their criticisms into a new ideology holding that New Deal liberalism was creating a dangerous “big government” that trampled on American liberty and degraded national virtue. This is the ideology we call modern conservatism.

That’s what the “liberalism” and “conservatism” we now take for granted as two poles of a political spectrum are really all about. They’re ad hoc coalitions for a specific moment in history: the catastrophe of the Depression and the aftermath of the global war that followed it. Like every American party system, our Fifth Party System isn’t a permanent battleground between rival dispositions of humanity. It’s part of one era’s great debate. That debate, like the debates that created each of America’s previous party systems, was an argument over a specific collection of problems important at a unique moment in America’s history. For the better part of a century, American politics has revolved around this same fight over Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. That debate, however, is over. Which is why our parties are now in the process of falling apart.

American party systems always decline when the debate that created them fades away. The Federalist Party’s demise, the Whig collapse, the Bryan revolt, and the launch of the New Deal were all the result of the decline of the great debate that defined the previous era. Nor is it reasonable to expect parties to address problems we never designed them to address. The parties of the early republic simply weren’t equipped for the problems raised by the American frontier. The Jacksonian parties weren’t prepared for the intensification of the debate over slavery. The Civil War parties couldn’t grapple with the problems of industrialization. The Populist and Progressive Era parties weren’t designed to navigate through the shoals of the Great Depression. When just the right kind of force comes along to strike parties obsessed by irrelevant debates, those parties naturally collapse.

For the better part of a century, the story of American politics has been one of our debate over the New Deal playing out over time. In the early decades of this debate, what we call the post-war consensus, America gave the Democrats license to implement their ideals. From Dewey to Eisenhower to Rockefeller, Republicans understood that while they opposed the New Deal state in principle they would have to live with it in practice, offering both to slow its advance and to administer it better than the Democrats. By the mid-20th century, as the postwar consensus began to break, an intellectual band centered around William F. Buckley Jr., consolidated the New Deal’s opponents into a united conservative movement, one dedicated to actually rolling back the New Deal. That led to the explosive Goldwater campaign, which energized a growing grassroots conservative movement that eventually overthrew the old Republican establishment in the Reagan Revolution. During the 1960 and 1970s, a new generation of Americans also came of age, one motivated less by pragmatic concerns than by a moral revival. A counterculture and a New Left emerged that sought to apply New Deal liberalism to new issues like protecting the environment, fighting poverty, feminism, ending war, and continuing the fight for civil rights. Others got swept up in a new religious revival, and Evangelicals emerged as a new powerful political block that sought to apply conservative principles to new moral issues. Over time, as new issues gained prominence, the demographic coalitions of the parties shifted. The Democratic Solid South became a Republican bastion, and the formerly Republican Northeast became a Democratic stronghold. Yet through it all, the ideological basis for our politics, and the ideological factions of our parties, didn’t budge.

Down through the years, the issues over which America fought changed and shifted. We debated taxes, regulations, the role of government, the environment, and civil rights among countless others. Yet Democrats have always continued to unite the same ideological factions around advancing their ideology of government: New Deal liberalism. Republicans have united the same ideological factions pushing back against what it saw as big government. Democrats have framed their ideas around the same idea, that we should employ national planning and expertise to serve working people and the least well off. Republicans have always framed theirs around the idea that Democratic excesses threaten liberty and undercut the nation’s virtue. Through everything that has happened over the many decades since 1932, the Democrats have continued to be a party of populists and progressives dedicated to the ideology of New Deal liberalism. The Republicans have remained a party dedicated to protecting liberty and virtue according to the ideology of modern conservatism.

This New Deal debate continues to drive our parties today. Democrats continue to think in terms of New Deal liberalism. Republicans continue to fight against big government. Yet that debate, notwithstanding all the sound and fury of our politics, is essentially over and has been for many years. America resolved it decades ago, sometime in the 1990s, and everybody knows it. The American people reached a consensus. As in every party system, neither party won the debate outright. America adopted some of what the Democrats proposed but agreed to some of the limits that Republicans proposed. It agreed that government would indeed take responsibility for many matters of health, safety, and welfare. It would have Social Security, Medicare, and an Environmental Protection Agency. America also agreed that those responsibilities shouldn’t be unlimited in scope, and that national planning isn’t always the best way to meet them. There will be no more Great Societies.

America has always taken something from both camps. It accepts Hamiltonian policies wrapped in Jeffersonian ideals. It brings the people into the center of politics as Jackson wanted, while modernizing and reforming as the Whigs hoped. It reunites North and South. It takes reforms from both the Populists and the Progressives. Despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, both parties accept this resolution and have for years. No matter what they say, Democrats wouldn’t really attempt to implement a new Great Society even if they could. Nor would Republicans really abolish Medicare, or any of the other New Deal programs Americans like. All of American politics is organized around a dead debate.

However, the country now faces an onslaught of new problems our parties were never designed to address. Our national debate is still built around a fading mirage of industrial-age America. We no longer live in the America in which a single high school-educated worker can support a middle-class family with an industrial job. America is no longer a beacon of the “free world” in a cold war, exporting its bounty to the world—cars, appliances, movies, and music—as the only untouched economy after a devastating war. We stand at the cusp of a global social and economic transformation—from an industrial to a global information economy—as significant as the transformation from the agricultural world to the industrial. The new economy is fast, mobile, disruptive. Competition comes from all corners of the globe. We live differently. Cultural rules and customs are changing constantly. What’s more, we’re still only at the beginning—whether the future will be defined by robotic workers, artificial intelligence, gene splicing, new information networks, or something else entirely. We’re all like 19th-century farmers looking at a cotton gin, unable to see the legions of factories, motor cars, and urban metropolises about to spring up from the fields. The Democratic and Republican parties have nothing important to say about the next set of problems facing America. They lack even the language to think about them. We won’t find the solution to our problems in either the New Deal or the fight against the excesses of big government.

All that remains is the right disruptive force to knock these decaying party coalitions apart. As we know all too well, there are plenty such forces swirling all around us. The question isn’t whether America’s Fifth Party System is going to come flying apart. The question is when.

America is facing a realignment whether we want one or not. However, this isn’t necessarily something we need to fear. We need parties actually designed to debate the problems of the still-emerging new world. If we’re going to start to solve our new problems, we need new parties prepared to do it. The question therefore isn’t whether we’re ready for a realignment. It’s what sort of transition this will be. We know from hard experience that American party systems inevitably end in one of two ways. Some crash hard in a collapse, like the ones that took down the Federalists and the Whigs. Other, fortunately, are much easier, like the party renewals that created the Populist and Progressive Era and our own New Deal party system.

A party collapse is a national tragedy. When the Whig Party imploded, the collapse created a vacuum that the most noxious voices sought to fill. Hot passions over slavery in a disintegrating national politics unleashed years of political violence. A bloody undeclared war broke out in Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery activists. A Congressman beat a senator nearly to death on the Senate floor, while another Congressman held spectators at gunpoint. Many Americans turned to the American Party, also known as the Know-Nothings—a conspiratorial party obsessed with Catholic immigrants. It took years before a new Republican Party emerged, became a new national party, and then established the next party system—which promptly unleashed a civil war that killed more than half a million Americans.

A renewal, like the 1896 realignment under William Jennings Bryan, is more hopeful. The realignment of 1896 was disruptive and frightening for many Americans, but it also managed to reform American politics in the span of just one presidential election cycle—without violence, a party collapse, a constitutional crisis, or the ascent of a troubling movement like the Know-Nothings. In one spirited campaign, America abandoned the old and ushered in the most productive era of reform in its history.

The difference between a collapse and a renewal lies in how we respond when a realignment looms. If we do nothing, seeking to ignore the challenges before us, some disruptive force will eventually strike our weakened parties provoking their collapse. A period of turmoil will follow, as all the factions and interests of America stumble about in the dark, possibly for years, while they search for new allies to create new majorities. Worse, since party collapses are uncontrolled, once our parties fall apart, we have to simply hope whatever new alliances and ideologies emerge from the rubble are ones we like, instead of ones that divide us in troubling ways around destructive ideas. If we act, however, we can seize the moment instead. We can renew our politics first before our parties collapse on their own. This way, we not only avoid the crises and the turmoil. We get to choose the shape we want our next parties to take.

We therefore face a choice. We ought to renew our parties now, while we can. We shouldn’t cede our future to forces outside our control, left to hope whatever happens to emerge are parties that channel our differences in healthy ways in a useful debate about our future. With an eye on history’s lessons, we should act first, now, to renew our politics around a new debate we choose. Moreover, one debate in particular cries out. All the problems that loom ahead come back in some way to one issue: the perceived decline of the American Dream. Although we often talk about the American Dream as a dream of prosperity—a house in the suburbs, a good job, and a middle-class lifestyle, if not a chance at great wealth—it’s actually something more. The American Dream is a promise of social equality. America throughout its history has always made an implicit promise to its people: that America will offer all its citizens equal dignity and a level playing field to achieve their dreams, whatever they may be. Our transforming world provides new opportunities for some Americans. For others, however, who worked hard and played by the rules as they understood them, the rewards they believe were promised won’t come. It’s no surprise they believe that they were cheated, that the game is rigged, that people in control aren’t honest, and, most critically, that people like them no longer have a fair shot. There’s a growing fear across America, one felt by very different groups of people who disagree on many other things, that the American Dream is fading away, if not entirely gone.

The American Dream isn’t a promise that everyone in America will achieve everything they’ve always hoped for. It is, however, a promise that, with hard work, grit, and a bit of luck, everyone in America has a fair shot at doing anything they want to do and becoming anything they want to become. America has never perfectly kept that promise—and the imperfections have hit some groups more than others. Yet that doesn’t mean the American Dream is merely aspirational. Americans have always believed in the American Dream’s promise, and it’s important they believe America is always working hard to ensure we keep it. That’s the next debate America needs to have. We need to rally our parties around new visions for preserving and protecting the promise that so many Americans now fear is disappearing. We should rebuild our parties around America’s national promise, the American Dream.

The post The End of the New Deal Era—and the Coming Realignment appeared first on The American Interest.

A Ukrainian Oligarch Waits in the Wings

Ukraine’s international reputation is not to be envied. Despite years of strong budget discipline, three years of growth now averaging 3 percent, reforms that have resulted in a reduction in corruption flows amounting to 6 percent of GDP, and the stymying of Russia’s advance in eastern Ukraine in part through the building of a strong military, most people still see the country as a failing state in thrall to a small group of kleptocratic oligarchs.

In truth, the picture is far more complicated, and the battle over Ukraine’s future is too important to be understood in such simplistic terms.

To be sure, Ukraine has its inordinate share of billionaires, and the super-rich control proportionally more of their country’s wealth than their Western counterparts. Some of them trace their origins to the rough and tumble days of post-Communist privatization, when vast fortunes were acquired by former black-marketeers, young communist league officials, and mobsters. But in the nearly three decades of Ukraine’s independence, the country has also seen significant wealth creation through individual entrepreneurship, intelligent management, and innovation.

When people typically invoke the title “oligarch” in the context of Ukraine, they often do so in relation to all of the above phenomena, both good and bad. That said, Ukraine’s oligarchs (even the bad ones) differ fundamentally from their Russian counterparts. In Russia, oligarchs all march to the beat of Vladimir Putin’s drum (especially after he destroyed the fortune of uppity oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, imprisoning him for more than a decade).

Unlike in Russia, where billionaires are required to walk in lockstep with Vladimir Putin and the ruling security service elite, in Ukraine oligarchs are powerful but usually act on their own, and often in competition with one another over rents, including tariffs, subsidies, and tax incentives. Happily this competition—as well as a strong civil society—has meant that Ukraine has retained a high degree of political pluralism.

Naturally, Russia has sometimes sought to disrupt this delicate balance by establishing economic footholds in Ukraine and seducing Ukrainian billionaires with the promise of easy and corrupt transactions. And occasionally, as was the case with disgraced former President Viktor Yanukovych (now in protected exile in Russia), someone in Ukraine seeks to use the state to disrupt this balance by concentrating inordinate wealth and power in his or her own hands.

Petro Poroshenko, the incumbent President, came into power in 2014 with 54 percent of the first-round vote. He arrived in the aftermath of a national tragedy that was the outcome of the disintegration of Yanukovych’s corrupted regime. In power, he was confronted by the outsized influence of big business and the oligarchs—in particular their influence over large numbers of legislators and their media holdings. Television stations owned by the richest Ukrainians control approximately 60 percent of the daily primetime audience and also wield significant influence through online news sites.

At first, Poroshenko needed the help of these oligarchs in stabilizing Ukraine, which was faced with the takeover of Crimea, Russian-supported violence, and a Russian military occupation of parts of eastern and southern Ukraine. Indeed, in the early stages of the conflict, Poroshenko was forced to rely on the patriotism of several power-broker oligarchs in stabilizing the regions in which Russia was using subversion as a prelude to open military operations. One such man was Ihor Kolomoysky, a powerful oligarch with vast business interests in banking, non-ferrous metals, and, of course, media.

Over time, Poroshenko began to rebuild Ukraine’s military capabilities. And it was then, sometimes at his own initiative and sometimes with the insistent prodding and backing of the West, that he began to take on some of these magnates—haltingly at times, earning the wrath of an impatient civil society and electorate that wanted him to go after everyone with wealth all at once. To take on all oligarchs in a time of Russian aggression, given their media and parliamentary influence, would have been political suicide. Indeed, it would have doomed the possibility of drumming up the votes necessary for the very reforms the West demanded. Thus Poroshenko acted slowly.

First, he went after the gas oligarchs’ cash cows. He and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk implemented price reforms and empowered an innovative team of young managers headed by Andriy Kobolyev to begin the clean-up of Naftogaz, the country’s oil and gas monopoly, which was sucking at least $3 billion annually out of the state’s coffers. That reform attacked the interests of exiled oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who is currently living in Vienna and fighting extradition to the United States, where he is wanted on corruption charges unrelated to Ukraine. It also ensured the enduring hostility of Firtash’s powerful television holding, Inter.

Poroshenko’s second target was Ihor Kolomoisky. First, his government successfully attacked Kolomoisky’s grip on UkrNafta, the state oil and natural gas extraction company, a key firm that had for years been delinquent in paying out dividends to the government. On March 25,  2015, Kolomoisky was called into President Poroshenko’s office late at night and removed as Governor of Dnipropetrovsk as the battle over his hold on the company intensified. Days later, his business associate Ihor Palytsia was removed as Governor of Ukraine’s sixth-most-populous province, Odessa.

Then, in 2016, Poroshenko authorized the nationalization of PrivatBank after an audit uncovered billions in allegedly dodgy lending to supposed shell companies related to Kolomoisky and his partner Gennadiy Bogolyubov. After a subsequent assessment conducted by the investigative group Kroll, the National Bank of Ukraine alleged that PrivatBank had been subjected to “a large scale and coordinated fraud over at least a ten-year period ending December 2016, which resulted in the Bank suffering a loss of at least USD 5.5 billion.” Ninety-five percent of the lending had been made to “parties related to [former] shareholders and their affiliates.”

Attacking Kolomoisky was a risky move. As Governor, the oligarch had genuinely helped stabilize the populous Dnipropetrovsk region in eastern Ukraine. Kolomoisky’s major media empire included Ukraine’s highest-rated television channel. And by attacking the owner of Ukraine’s largest bank and the financial institution through which as many as half of Ukraine’s businesses conducted their credit card and payment transactions, Poroshenko ran the risk of vast disruptions to the national banking system. Yet he willingly took on all these risks.

Kolomoisky has long touted his reputation for having sharp elbows and a sharp tongue to match. He is highly litigious and a clever political tactician. A major donor to Jewish religious and cultural causes in Ukraine, as well as cultivating a close friendship with Ukraine’s Lubavitcher rabbinate, Kolomoisky also likes to project an image of bravado. He loves trash-talking like a gangster and goes by the nickname of “Benya,” invoking the famous criminal reprobate from Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales.

Within weeks of his dismissal as Governor, it was clear Kolomoisky would live up to his take-no-prisoners image. His media holdings went on the attack against the government and the President. And most importantly, he and his business partner, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, began planning a television series that was developed to be an instrument for an attack against the political establishment.

Eight months after his dismissal, Zelensky appeared on Kolomoisky’s 1+1 channel in a new comedy series playing Vasyl Holoborodko, an everyman high school history teacher who is accidentally elected President following a viral video of his rant about how everything is wrong in Ukraine. (The first season is available in the United States on Netflix.) The show clearly struck a nerve, becoming the foundation of a new political party that early this year helped launch Zelensky’s campaign for Ukraine’s presidency.

Since the government froze many of his assets and launched lawsuits to recover allegedly stolen bank funds, Kolomoisky has stopped traveling to Ukraine. But his influence over Zelensky remains strong, through a coterie of trusted advisors. Just a year ago, Kolomoisky trotted out Zelensky at his birthday party and presented him as “our President.” This year, at Kolomoisky’s birthday-in-exile in Tel Aviv, according to one attendee, the mood was one of ebullient self-satisfaction at the electoral support for Zelensky.

Polls from late March show Zelensky running a strong first in Ukraine’s March 31 presidential race, polling more than 30 percent. He leads both President Poroshenko, hovering around 17 percent, and left-leaning former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whom Kolomoysky’s media assets have generally handled with kid gloves (close to 13 percent). Significantly, in a runoff Zelensky is projected to beat both his challengers handily, with overwhelming support from young voters who see him as an honest fighter against corruption, long-standing links to Kolomoisky notwithstanding. A three-week interval before an expected second round, however, is ample time for a shift in public sentiments.

If the idea of a country under partial Russian occupation being run by a political neophyte linked to a powerful oligarch concerns you, well, it should. That is, unless you’re Vladimir Putin, in which case you must be licking your chops at the thought of squaring off against a counterpart who has never engaged in politics, run a complex business, served as an officer in the military, occupied a top management position in the private sector or government, or expressed a single thought about geopolitics.

But that outcome is now a very real possibility—as is the successful political revenge of one of Ukraine’s most powerful oligarchs.

The post A Ukrainian Oligarch Waits in the Wings appeared first on The American Interest.

Germany: The Pacifist Menace

After Brexit, continental Europe will have to deal with the German problem again. The main problem of Europe is not the fiscal profligacy of the Mediterranean states or the reluctance of Central Europeans to accept the progressive uniformity of Brussels, but Germany’s rising dominance.

Located at the center of the Eurasian peninsula, throughout its history Germany was either too feeble to oppose other powers sweeping through the continent or too powerful to be contained by its neighbors. As the historian AJP Taylor described it at the end of World War II:

The history of Germany is a history of extremes. It contains everything except moderation, and in the course of a thousand years the Germans have experienced everything except normality. . . .Geographically the people of the centre, the Germans have never found a middle way of life, either in their thought or least of all in their politics.

The problem of Germany and of its “extremes” could never be solved within the country, and required a careful balancing by the other powers of Europe. The solution found after World War II was to rivet Germany into a Europe-wide architecture, first limited to Western Europe and then, after the annus mirabilis 1989, extended to Central Europe.

The cornerstone of this architecture was a grand Franco-German friendship, meant originally to stiffen up the fragile Western European area facing the aggressive Soviet tyrants. German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer wrote in 1962 that these two states, locked in friendship, would “form a political dam. . . .[against the] atheistic forces of Communism, [which] while pretending to create a paradise on earth, are set on robbing people of their dignity and freedom and degrading them into will-less elements of a termite-state.” (Incidentally, how rare it is now to have a Western politician speak about the danger of “atheistic forces”!)

The expectation, or perhaps only a hope, was that, through the years, the project of European integration would both contain a growing Germany and strengthen it to withstand the pressures from, or the lures of, Russia. The European Union, that is, was meant to be a mechanism of balancing as well as propping up Germany. The goal was a stable and strong but not hegemonic and aggressive (nor weak and fragile) Germany at the heart of Europe. And in the last decades of the 20th century Germany was indeed a key engine of European integration rather than a destabilizing force. It was part of the solution rather than a problem.

But this geopolitical blessing may be coming to an end. Germany is becoming untethered from Europe.

First, Germany is no longer an engine of integration but a source of fear and resentment.  For instance, in 2008 the fiscal demands imposed on the Southern European states (Greece in particular) as a result of the euro crisis were seen less as rightful obligations of responsible members of “Europe” and more as diktats of an economically dominant Germany. Similarly, the unfortunate statement of Chancellor Merkel welcoming migrants to Europe without any apparent limit was not the result of a coordinated European policy but, again, the willful decision of a German leader that Berlin expected would be accepted by all.

Second, Germany may pay lip service to being “for Europe,” but it is pursuing a foreign policy that is undermining the security of most of the continent. By building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline with Russia, it leaves Central European states open to Moscow’s energy blackmail while increasing Europe’s dependency on Russian gas. EU members are clearly the big losers, while Germany pursues short-term business profits.

Germany is militarily supine but with hegemonic tendencies. It is too weak to lead Europe by supplying security to it, and thus it seeks to appease European enemies such as Russia and China by letting them extend increasingly greater influence over the continent. Germany is a dangerous pacifist.

At the same time, Germany is the most powerful economy in Europe, and one that has benefited the most from the euro. The European Union, and the euro, are the tools of its continued expansion, rather than mechanisms to mitigate the negative effects of its size. The result is that Germany dictates the terms to Europe.

Brexit will only exacerbate the German problem because it removes the second largest economy and the top military from the European Union, leaving Germany even more unchecked. The UK was a crucial ballast within the EU and the continental European states will now face the German problem alone—unless they strengthen their anchor with the United States. So far, however, France is preoccupied with its own domestic woes, Italy seems to be chasing after Chinese investments in infrastructure, and EU leaders are myopically savoring the difficult decisions facing the UK. But European statesmen should remember, and quickly, that the course of German history rarely leads to Europe’s stability.

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Harm Reduction as a Viable Public Policy Aim

There is an old Platonic conceit that, since the advent of technocratic administration, has been blissfully forgotten: Prior to office, statesmen should develop an appreciation of the need for philosophic approaches to governance. The prescriptions we have grown so accustomed to, striking only in their formulaic sameness, as if our civil servants all graduated from the same GE training program, would have struck our ancient counterparts as insufficiently nuanced to deal with present social ills. Of course, another modern innovation is the “caring hand” of the free market, which, by some accounts, suffices to correct—or affirm—social dynamics, be they base or noble.

Each of these approaches—the caretaker approach of Big Government and the unfettered free-market approach favored by Big Industry—is incomplete; each fails society, usually by way of unintended consequences, which can sometimes cause widespread harm. Nowhere are these miscarriages more evident—or more destructive—than in the healthcare policy space, where (and all due apologies to Cass Sunstein) even paternalistic “nudges” can jeopardize the health and lives of large populations.

So let’s take a little time to reflect on the genuine difficulty faced by policymakers when deciding what government should and should not do in public health interventions, through the lens of one particular healthcare problem: smoking. We are not so much interested in solving this particular issue as we are in reorienting the way policymakers think about and address these kinds of problems in the future. Still, the example is a useful a place to start.

Cigarette addiction is complex in ways not unlike many other policy quandaries. There exists, whether policymakers wish to acknowledge it or not, a fundamental tension between the liberty we are each granted to purchase and consume a legal product and the reality that the product we are ingesting is deadly and addictive. Recall Michael Bloomberg’s so-called Soda Ban, which would have limited soft drink sizes in New York City in an effort to curb harmful calorie consumption. Cigarettes, like soda or alcohol, are here to stay, and, within certain restrictions, we are free to consume them.

But cigarettes won’t be facing legal extinction anytime soon, so legislators find themselves at an impasse. How best to stamp out the scourge? Higher taxes? Flavor bans? Higher age requirements? More robust verification systems? Education and cessation campaigns? Class-action lawsuits? Smoking bans? E-cigarette bans? We can go on and on. What is important to see is that behind each of these “solutions” lies a belief that, given the correct adjustment, it is only a matter of time before we legislate a smoke-free world into existence.

To which we ask: “How’s that working out?” Smoking rates are declining, yes. For now. Will they fall much further? How long to wait before attempting another tweak to the system? Instead—and this involves the reorientation alluded to above—perhaps it would be best to take the world as it is and embrace a different approach to our smoking crisis: one that does not aim for the impossible but seeks rather to tailor solutions to individuals and communities, abstaining from one-size-fits-all prescriptions.

This approach is called harm reduction. It’s intended to decrease the negative consequences associated with risky or dangerous behaviors, automobile safety being an obvious example. Driving is inherently risky and seat belts and air bags make it safer. They don’t do anything to reduce the frequency of car crashes, but they do reduce their lethality. Perhaps we should apply this logic to other behaviors, even if we don’t like or agree with them?

Just as policymakers would be well-advised to take the world as it is, public health functions best when it takes people as they are. This is one of the main pillars of harm reduction—that people are, whether the government likes it or not, in charge of their destiny, and thus will simply decide what is “right” for them, irrespective of external forces. Harm reduction uses our natural egoism by working with, instead of against, habits or prejudices. It recognizes there is no one-size-fits-all, abstinence-only solution that works for everybody, and that the stigma associated with risky behaviors are a major barrier to care. Agree with the behavior or not, public health goals are more achievable when harm reduction approaches complement prevention and treatment. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

That harm reduction policies work is clear. One only has to point to the many studies demonstrating the benefits associated with, say, safe injection sites to notice a decrease in infectious disease transmission, reductions in overdose deaths, and improvements in overall health. Between 1991 and 2001, seven government studies concluded that syringe access programs had decreased HIV transmission without increasing illicit drug use. Today, users who utilize clean syringe services are more likely to access treatment programs, pointing to another overlooked benefit of harm reduction services: providing another point of intervention for people who might not otherwise connect with health services.

Time has shown these approaches are not only wildly successful in their primary objective but also enormously cost-effective. In 2008, Washington, DC allocated $650,000 to increase harm reduction services, including syringe access. It was estimated this investment has already averted 120 cases of HIV, saving $44 million. As of 2014, there are over 200 syringe access programs (SAPs) operating in 33 states and the District of Columbia. Tellingly, in 2016, the Federal ban on providing funds for SAPs was partially lifted. Money can now be used to pay for salaries and overhead costs associated with distribution of sterile syringes, but cannot be used to directly pay for them.

Still, focusing too much on numbers can obscure important questions. For instance: Under a policy of harm reduction, when is coercion an appropriate tactic for moving people to safer behaviors? Who benefits from harm reduction? In what way is this policy strategy better or worse than the competing alternatives? Finally, should it matter if corporations profit off the relevant interventions?

History

To answer these questions, it is helpful to examine programs aimed at opioid harm reduction, first pioneered in Europe. Following an outbreak of Hepatitis B Virus in Edinburgh a pharmacist believed that providing sterile syringes could help stop the spread of infection by reducing needle sharing. Around the same time, in 1982, the first official syringe access program opened in Amsterdam.

Here in the United States, the first pioneer of needle distribution, Jon Parker, risked jail time and high fines to reduce the risk of infectious disease transmission among injection drug users in New Haven and Boston. Making such programs accessible was not an easy thing to do, but was considered well-worth the effort among public health activists who witnessed the positive effects. Soon, underground SAPs cropped up in Tacoma, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, all with some degree of public acceptance. Three years after Jon Parker went rogue, the country’s first legal SAP opened with endorsement from the New Haven Department of Health in 1989. Soon, syringe exchange access would expand across America and Europe.

Of course, none of this was easy, and there were many legitimate reasons to be wary of harm reduction as applied to drug use. Would this be viewed by segments of the public as a tacit approval of drug use? Would it encourage experimentation among those who had never tried drugs? Most importantly, would it discourage people from seeking treatment for addiction?

Fortunately, there is little evidence to support the fears that stalled the initial programs. Indeed, decades of evidence now allow us to conclude that the scary outcomes of harm reduction approaches to illicit drug use were unfounded. Today, harm reduction services intended to reduce transmission of HIV among injection drug users and reduce overdose deaths among opioid users are often executed at the blessing of public health officials and agencies.

Cigarettes: Old Battles, Same Results

First introduced in 2006 by a pharmacist in China, e-cigarettes evolved over the last decade or so to give smokers an alternative to the deadly cigarettes to which we have all grown so accustomed. The first-generation e-cigarettes, however, weren’t so effective, delivering too little nicotine to prove satisfying to the average smoker. But today, just as the quality and utility of cell phones have finally allowed us to ditch their inconvenient predecessors, e-cigarettes are finally good enough to relegate combustibles to landline status. Sure, some people will continue to ride with the Marlboro Man. But at last count, 68 percent of people who smoke expressed a desire or intention to quit within one year. Unfortunately, this desire is a difficult one to achieve, with one-year success rates consistently below 10 percent. Couple that with the boredom, loss of work breaks, and even the loss of identity that accompanies quitting (let’s please acknowledge there are some things about smoking that people like), and it seems obvious that harm reduction policies should be allowed to succeed where alternatives like patches and outright bans have failed.

E-cigarettes are undeniably safer than combustible cigarettes and there is robust evidence of improved health outcomes for those who switch. In its comprehensive report, Public Health England stated that e-cigarettes are unlikely to exceed 5 percent of the risk associated with combustible cigarettes; the American Cancer Society has conceded that vaping is better than smoking cigarettes; and the Office of the Surgeon General has recognized nicotine products exist on a continuum of risk, with e-cigarettes, Snus and heat-not-burn technologies at the lower end of the spectrum. The reason these products present a reduced risk is because they don’t employ the traditional cigarette combustion process that release 7,000 chemicals—some of which are highly carcinogenic—into the lungs of the smoker.

Moreover, it has been demonstrated that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients who switch to e-cigarettes have improved COPD symptoms demonstrated by decreased exacerbations and improved exercise capacity. In addition, e-cigarettes have positive effects on hypertension. Switching from combustible cigarettes to e-cigarettes is associated with a significant reduction in blood pressure. It is therefore no surprise that e-cigarettes are estimated to have the potential to save up to 6 million lives by 2100 if only 10 percent of current smokers switch to e-cigarettes over the next 10 years.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has taken notice of their potential and once upon a time there was promise that e-cigarettes and other “reduced-risk” products such as heat-not-burn technology and certain oral smokeless products would be able to displace our beloved smokes. In 2017, then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb made reduced-risk products like e-cigarettes central to the FDA’s roadmap, shifting the focus from cigarettes to what can be done with nicotine. Here is Gottlieb explaining the agency’s thinking last year:

While it’s the addiction to nicotine that keeps people smoking, it’s primarily the combustion, which releases thousands of harmful constituents into the body at dangerous levels that kills people. This fact represents both the biggest challenge to curtailing cigarette addiction—and also holds the seeds of an opportunity that’s a central construct for our actions. E-cigarettes may present an important opportunity for adult smokers to transition off combustible tobacco products.

This promise of a new future of tobacco encouraged those who believed in it to consider a flurry of nudges to encourage people to switch. But now, in response to a youth epidemic of nicotine use, the FDA has proposed a series of restrictions that will almost certainly lead to the demise of the e-cigarette industry. Gottlieb’s surprise resignation as FDA Commissioner in March may change that trajectory; his proposed regulations have attracted their share of blowback from industry lobbying groups and Republicans in Congress. But for now, the proposed rules are still on a glide path to policy.

Under the new regulations, any store accessible to all ages, like your local 7-11, must have a sectioned-off, age-restricted area for flavors if they intend to sell e-cigarettes (or just age-restrict the entire store). Moreover, the FDA has slowed down the approval process for flavored products, such that it will be much harder to find fruit and dessert flavors in stores. This might sound like great news to a parent who worries about their child experimenting with tutti frutti or mango tango, but adult vapers overwhelming prefer those flavors to tobacco as well. That will reduce the appeal of e-cigarettes relative to tobacco, which means more people—adults and children—will end up smoking the latter.

We should be very clear on this last point. If the FDA, state legislators, or any other governing body with power to excessively tax or ameliorate e-cigarettes has their way, and e-cigarettes go the way of the dodo, or flavor-restrictions are popularized, we will see a corresponding rise in combustible cigarette use. With nowhere to turn, smokers who can’t quit will be forced to stick with what is accessible. And if the “nudging” turns to shoving and cigarette bans begin to crop up, get ready for a corresponding rise in black markets.

However, if legislators and the public are seriously interested in affecting positive, lasting health outcomes, methodical, empirically measured harm reduction strategies should at least be given a chance to work. We hope, like clean syringe use initiatives in their infancy, the scare-mongering about e-cigarettes and the willful ignorance about tobacco harm reduction will eventually abate. Until that time—until leaders embrace rational, fair policies grounded in a realistic understanding of human nature rather than utopian schemes—people will stay hooked and continue to die.

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Golan: A Diplomatic Meditation

After meetings with the President of Syria and Prime Minister of Israel in late February and early March 2011 I was, for the first time, hopeful about the prospects for peace between those bitterest of enemies. Since the autumn of 2010, after my colleague Dennis Ross had opened direct contact for me to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I had been shuttling between Jerusalem and Damascus with a draft treaty of peace I had written with Dennis’ assistance. Now Assad (with whom I met privately) was agreeing with great specificity to remove from Syria and erase from Syria’s relationships all threats to the security of Israel; this in return for the phased recovery of all land lost during the June 1967 War and the gradual lifting of American sanctions. An understandably skeptical Bibi Netanyahu, briefed two days later, sensed real opportunity to change Syria’s strategic orientation decisively. Much work remained, but by the end of the first week of March 2011 much had been accomplished.

Indeed, the discussion in Jerusalem with Netanyahu and his small, hand-selected team, was followed immediately in Washington by Ross and I engaging senior Israelis to draft a U.S.-Israel memorandum of understanding; one that would have taken effect once a treaty of peace was signed. Although neither Dennis nor I could not predict whether Assad and Netanyahu—one, or the other, or both—would see matters through to formal peace (or falter along the way), a leak-free process brought to life initially by an informal statement of intent obtained from Assad by Senator John Kerry and shared with Ross gave every indication of being taken seriously by all concerned, and was producing positive results. If it had all held together, Iran and its Lebanese franchise (Hezbollah) would be the biggest losers: something I believed to be a major rationale for an effort I had been making since April 2009 as a deputy to Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell in the State Department.

And then, with alarming suddenness, all was in peril. Peaceful Syrian demonstrators in Deraa and Damascus, protesting police brutality and child abuse, were set upon by regime security thugs shooting to kill. Teenagers spray-painting anti-regime slogans in Deraa had aroused the ire of regime enforcers, who rounded them up, beat them, and denied their panicking parents access to them. The parents, their neighbors, and Syrians everywhere thought this would be a perfect opportunity for their promising (if underperforming) young President to crack down on brazen official lawlessness. They thought it was the least he could do, given the chronic unemployment and underemployment over which he presided.

It was, in fact, a situation tailor-made for Assad to demonstrate leadership to a patient citizenry sorely tried by assaults on their dignity. He and his first lady could have defused matters quickly and bloodlessly by traveling to Deraa, meeting with terrified parents, delivering to them their children, and promising protection while demanding law and order. He might have been crowned emperor of Syria had he behaved with dignity, humility, justice, and firmness. Instead he defaulted to state terror. Images of government gunmen running amok shooting protestors dominated social media in Syria and around the world, sparking a nationwide uprising. How could the former head of Syria’s computer society think that images of mass murder in one place could be hidden elsewhere, as it was in Hama in 1982?

With the notable exception of Dennis Ross, the prospect of diplomatic failure on the Israel-Syria peace track seemed to disturb none of the Obama White House denizens. Perhaps they thought that Netanyahu coming to closure with Syria (perhaps followed by Lebanon) would avoid dealing creatively and flexibly with the Israel-Palestine track: the centerpiece of the Arab-Israeli dispute and George Mitchell’s efforts. Perhaps they thought it would be politically damaging to be seen reaching out to an Arab leader who had reacted violently to peaceful protests. Whatever their fears, they would not authorize me to fly to Damascus to try to rein in Assad: a low-percentage play for sure, but surely one worth trying if Syrian-Israeli peace was desired. Not even Robert Ford, the capable American Ambassador to Syria, was authorized or directed to warn Assad that state terror would end the peace mediation and perhaps lead to widespread insurrection. Ross tried hard but could not get the green light to engage Assad with a tough, blunt message on the consequences of state violence.

That was then. Donald Trump’s recent decision to intervene in Israel’s national election by trying to gift the occupied Golan officially to Bibi Netanyahu inevitably inspires memories of opportunity lost eight years ago: a sadly perennial theme of Arab-Israeli interactions. As short-sighted, ill-considered, and potentially damaging as Trump’s gesture is, it does not herald the apocalypse. Indeed, as Syria descended into unfathomable chaos and humanitarian abomination beginning in March 2011, I concluded that Bashar al-Assad had completed the ceding to Israel of the Golan Heights initiated 44 years earlier by his father.

In June 1967, when the heavily fortified Golan Heights fell quickly (though not effortlessly) to Israeli forces, Hafiz al-Assad was Syria’s minister of defense. An air force officer with a taste for politics and little grounding in military science, Assad had demonstrated his worth to his Ba‘athi superiors by purging Syria’s army of capable professionals not deemed politically correct. He gutted the Golan’s defenses. In 1973, as Syria’s President, he tried but failed to retake the plateau during the Yom Kippur assault. The decision of his son and successor in March 2011 to trade a promising peace mediation for a career in war crimes and crimes against humanity probably sealed for all time the question of who would possess the Golan Heights.

If Hafiz never cared enough about the Golan to defend it and Bashar preferred to destroy all of Syria rather than negotiate its return, this beautiful and largely undeveloped tract of rolling, once volcanic plateau appeals greatly to Israelis. Although it is hardly Colorado, the Golan gives the citizens of a cramped country the feeling of wide, open spaces. That many of these spaces remain littered with land mines reminds Israelis also that their country’s 1949-1967 struggle with Syria to dominate militarily a Jordan Valley 1949 armistice demilitarized zone sometimes drew Syrian artillery fire down from the Heights upon Israelis living in or near the disputed acreage. Given that peace with Syria these days is somewhere between remote and illusory—especially considering Assad’s staying power and his dependence on Iran—most Israelis are strongly and understandably disposed to hold the Heights forever.

Still, it is off-putting to hear Trump’s decision justified by the specter of Iranian and Hezbollah terrorists perched atop the Golan preparing to lay waste to Israeli towns and cities below, as if that outlandish scenario is the alternative to formal annexation. Annexation would not increase the defensive capabilities of the Israel Defense Forces; and no one of any seriousness suggests that Israel abandon the Heights under current circumstances. Continued, open-ended occupation—fully justified by Assad’s subordination to an Iranian regime committed to Israel’s destruction—more than suffices for defensive purposes. Land for peace and security in the Syrian context would require a stable, legitimate government in Damascus breaking military ties with enemies of Israel and agreeing to the long-term, supervised demilitarization of the Golan. It was this very prospect that attracted the interest of Bibi Netanyahu in 2010 and 2011.

Syrians hoping to be rid of the Assads, Iran, and Hezbollah may, in the fullness of time, be able to produce a government and a political system strongly inclined toward peace with Israel. Indeed, Israel’s humanitarian aid for Syrian civilians and its willingness periodically to smack Iran and Hezbollah have changed for the better the attitudes of millions of Syrians toward the Jewish State. If there is nothing of substance—nothing militarily, economically, or socially—to be had by declaring the Golan to be part of Israel proper, why risk alienating those Syrians who have resisted Iranian hegemony, opposed Assad, and welcomed Israeli help in doing so? Indeed, why force Arab leaders not questioning Israel’s control of the Golan with Iran and Hezbollah operating in Syria to take public positions that inevitably will oppose the formal transfer of territory they deem Arab?

If the alienation of freedom-seeking Syrians and other Arabs is bad, the encouragement annexation would provide to Israel’s enemies is worse. Iran and Hezbollah, seeking popular Syrian support for the opening of a new ‘resistance front’ at the base of the Golan, will welcome gratuitous annexation declarations; they will help them make their case. Changing the subject from drug running, money laundering, and war crimes to an annexation violating UN Security Council decisions will also gratify Iran’s supreme leader and Hezbollah’s secretary-general. Indeed, no one will welcome a subject change more than Bashar al-Assad. Chemical warfare, Nazi-like detention practices, mass homicide, starvation sieges, and a nation’s ruin: these are the usual word-association phrases prompted by the name “Assad.” Aggrieved nationalist appealing to the Security Council to defend and enforce its own resolutions has a better ring to it.

Still, the end of days is not upon us. An American President who knows something about foreign interference in the elections of others has tried to help a friend, albeit with a blunt instrument not at all shaped by input from his Departments of State and Defense, his intelligence community, or his national security staff. They will now scramble, as they have done on other occasions, to salvage what they can of America’s reputation and credibility.

In the end it will be up to Israel’s next Prime Minister and Knesset to decide what to do about the Golan Heights. They may well decide that upending a satisfactory status quo would be risky, counterproductive, and profitless. They may elect to keep faith with those of their Syrian neighbors open to peace with Israel and dedicated to achieving self-government notwithstanding the determination of Iran and Russia to keep in place a client who has betrayed and destroyed his own country. On the other hand, they may stir up a hornets’ nest by following the lead of Donald Trump. One way or the other, the Assad family has done its best to make the Golan Heights Israeli forever.

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Corruption Is the New Communism

Corruption has always existed. In Deuteronomy 16:19 the Bible says, “You must not accept bribes, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.” Corruption’s insidious effects have grown to alarming dimensions, however, in the twenty-first century. Grand corruption—the use of state power by the power-holders to appropriate to themselves and their friends resources on a very large scale—affects the politics of countries where it exists by encouraging dictatorship: those in power have a strong incentive to stay there indefinitely so as to keep stealing while using part of what they steal to bribe and repress those they govern in order to retain their power. Grand corruption also distorts the economies of the countries that suffer from it, by directing capital away from productive channels to the bank accounts of corrupt elites and by making the distribution of wealth more unequal than it would otherwise be.

In its political and economic consequences, in fact, large-scale corruption has the same effects as communism, which, in the last century, fostered repressive governments and sub-optimal economic performances where communists gained power. Moreover, twenty-first-century corruption resembles twentieth-century communism in yet another important way: as a cause of international conflict. Just as the aggressive global communist movement, spearheaded by the Soviet Union, posed the chief threat to world peace from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War, so grand corruption lies at the heart of the greatest challenge to global peace and stability today. It follows that fighting such corruption is a way of making the world a more peaceful place.

Today’s challenge comes from the aspirations of three major countries to dominate their home regions and their willingness to use force to do so. In Europe, Russia has seized Crimea and invaded and occupied eastern Ukraine. In East Asia, China has claimed ownership of most of the western Pacific and built artificial islands there on which it has constructed military installations. In the Middle East, Iran has created armed forces that act on its behalf in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The aggressive foreign policies of all three threaten their neighbors, and therefore the international interests of the United States.

These aggressive policies have several causes in each case but one particular motive in common: regime protection. Vladimir Putin’s government in Russia, the rule of the Communist Party led by Xi Jinping in China, and the clerical autocrats of the Islamic Republic of Iran all lead dictatorships that operate in what remains, despite democracy’s current troubles, a predominantly democratic world. Their democratic surroundings engender feelings of insecurity in all three regimes. While all three depend ultimately on coercion to retain power, each feels the need for popular support and political legitimacy as well; and that need connects corruption to the threat of war.

None of the three has the option of gaining legitimacy by governing in democratic fashion, for democracy would dislodge each of them from power. In the 20th century the governments of Russia and China claimed the right to rule on the basis of ideology: they were carrying out the precepts of Marxism-Leninism (and in China of Maoism as well). Their 21st-century successors, however, have abandoned communist ideology, either formally, as in Russia, or effectively, as China’s Communist Party has done.  The Iranian regime does have an official ideology, resting on the Persian and Shia version of Islamic fundamentalism, but few Iranians outside the governing elite believe in it.

The dictatorships of post-communist Russia and post-Maoist China have relied on economic growth to win such popularity as they enjoy. The formula for economic success in both cases, however—a rising price of oil for Russia, the combination of the large-scale movement of people from the countryside to the cities, high levels of government investment, especially in infrastructure, and ever-increasing exports for China—no longer yield the desired results. The Iranian economy has performed poorly since the founding of the Islamic Republic, which enhances the public’s discontent with the mullahs.

Unable to use democracy, ideology, or economic growth, the governments of Russia, China, and Iran have turned to aggressive nationalism to bolster their positions at home. The aim of generating public support is not the only reason for their foreign policies but it is, in each case, an important one. To those they govern the regimes have depicted their military activities beyond their borders as measures to assure their countries’ rightful positions of primacy in their respective regions. The rulers have also portrayed these policies as necessary responses to the nefarious efforts of jealous rivals—above all the United States—to weaken and subvert their countries. The tactic seems to have achieved some success in each case; and to the extent that the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian regimes believe that this is so, they have an incentive to launch further risky initiatives. This incentive thus creates the most dangerous ongoing threat to global order, and it is tied to corruption.

When Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and the Iranian mullahs conduct their aggressive foreign policies they are, among other things, defending their regimes; and the regimes they are defending are corrupt. All three, in fact, practice grand corruption.

Russia and China qualify as kleptocracies. That is, the large-scale theft of resources by the government and its friends is the essence, the defining activity, of the two regimes. It is the main business of the power-holders. The purpose of gaining public power is to accumulate private wealth. People join the Putin regime and the Chinese Communist Party, and seek to rise within their ranks, in order to get rich; and for the most part they do. In Iran, which remains nominally (and for some officials no doubt actually) devoted to the propagation of a particular variant of Islam, corruption is rampant. The rulers use their power to enrich themselves and their friends, as do the leaders of the regime’s powerful paramilitary organization, the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Grand corruption makes the diversion of public attention afforded by aggressive nationalism all the more important to the three regimes because corruption is deeply and almost universally unpopular. No one except its beneficiaries approves of it, and the beneficiaries do not dare declare their approval publicly: to the contrary, these kleptocratic regimes officially oppose corruption.

The Soviet Union and Maoist China could justify their rule by their ideological missions. Their heirs cannot do that with what has taken ideology’s place: theft on a large scale. In the era of orthodox communism the Russian and Chinese people could be asked to sacrifice for, or at least to show forbearance toward, the regime for the sake of the radiant future it was building. (That is still the case, up to a point, for Iranians.) The current rulers, by contrast, cannot ask for sacrifice and forbearance so that the autocrats can become plutocrats as well, although that is their actual goal.

The end of communism made many of the countries that discarded it freer, richer, and more peaceful. An end to the kleptocratic regimes that govern Russia China, and Iran would have similarly salutary consequences. Their demise would remove a powerful motive for political repression, would free resources for productive economic use, and, most important of all for the rest of the world, would eliminate a major cause of international aggression. The fall of communism provides, however, a cautionary lesson about the future of large-scale corruption. Just as other countries did not bring down the Soviet Union—that was the work of the Russian people and the other peoples of the communist empire—so it is not within the power of non-Russians and non-Chinese to dislodge the regimes that govern these continent-sized, nuclear-armed countries. While it is feasible to remove the mullahs from power by force in not-yet-nuclear-armed Iran, the world will be extremely reluctant to undertake such a campaign. Moreover, the end of the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian kleptocracies would not guarantee stable, well-governed, democratic successors.  Communism in Russia gave way, after all, to Putin rather than to democracy.

Still, the world can take steps to weaken the kleptocratic hold on power in these three countries and thereby increase the chances for a more peaceful world. The Cold-War battle against communism offers two useful precedents.

The 1975 Helsinki Accords, signed by the Soviet Union and its communist satellites as well as the democratic countries of Western Europe and North America, committed the signatories to the protection of human rights and fundamental liberties. The communist authorities never intended to honor this promise and in fact they did not. But the Accords gave increased prominence and importance to the issue of rights and liberties—and the communist denial of them—and contributed to the peaceful movements that overthrew communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989.

Similarly, greater global public attention to the problem of grand corruption would emphasize to the people of Russia, China, and Iran, who are its principal victims, that they are not alone in recognizing and objecting to it and that kleptocracy violates what the world considers to be an important global norm. The establishment of an International Anti-Corruption Court, proposed by the American federal judge Mark L. Wolf, could help to accomplish this by shining a brighter international spotlight on kleptocratic regimes.

Also during the Cold War, although the democratic West did not attempt to defeat the Soviet Union militarily, it could and did take steps to avoid strengthening the communists, for example by restricting the transfer of sensitive and militarily useful technology. In the same spirit the West can and should adopt measures to reduce the assistance the democracies give to the kleptocracies. Russian and Chinese kleptocrats and their friends take as much of their ill-gotten gains as possible out of Russia and China, and place them in the West, often in expensive real estate in the United States and Great Britain. Stiffer laws to compel the disclosure of the origins of such financial transactions, and, where possible, to prevent the dirty money from being parked in the West, as suggested by the Washington D.C.-based Kleptocracy Initiative would penalize those who now benefit from grand corruption.

An International Anti-Corruption Court and stricter laws governing the flow of money of corrupt origin in the West will not, in and of themselves, bring down the kleptocratic regimes of Russia, China, or Iran. Nor will all corruption, grand and especially petty, ever be eliminated everywhere—including in the relatively honest West: the impulse to profit by less-than-honest dealing, including the illicit use of state power, is present everywhere and won’t disappear. But it is possible to weaken regimes for which large-scale corruption is not merely an incidental feature but rather their reason for being; and doing so would make the world a far less dangerous place.

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