Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 49

Emmanuel Macron: The Man Who Would Be King of Europe

As early as 1949, Charles de Gaulle orated: “Europe shall not come into being, unless there is a direct agreement between the Germanic and Gallic peoples.” That obiter dictum spawned a slew of metaphors: France and Germany as “tandem,” “couple” or “engine” of Europe. To squeeze the last ounce out of these parallels, we should note that this “engine” never ran on all cylinders, starting to stutter from day one.

Recall the fabled Friendship Treaty of 1963. Hoping to harness Germany as a force multiplier in order to make France great again, De Gaulle soon realized that Bonn was not going to do France’s bidding. With the brief exception of the immediate postwar period, Germany was always the stronger partner in this tandem, given its population and economic size. Accordingly, Germany did not submit to its neighbor across the Rhine. The lever De Gaulle hoped to grasp for the sake of French grandeur forever slipped out of French hands. So De Gaulle mused only a few months after the 1963 marriage vows: “Treaties are like girls and roses; they last while they last.” Not very long, in other words.

This set the pattern some 50 years ago, and it explains why the twain never met, no matter how grandiose the visions French and German leaders batted back and forth across the Rhine—all the way to Emmanuel Macron’s recent attempt to jumpstart the “engine” for the umpteenth time. In a letter to Europe’s citizens published in a dozen European papers, the French President proclaimed yet another “New Beginning” for the European Union.

There is a lot of unexceptionable boilerplate in Macron’s appeal. Start with a whiff of European nationalism, hence the appeal to Europe’s “self-assertion” in a world of “aggressive great powers,” by which he presumably means the United States, Russia and China. Continue with helping Africa, saving the climate, equal pay for equal work, better border protection. Who would want to rail against Macron’s new trinity—“freedom, protection, progress?”

Anybody can sign on to such an agenda. So what is the problem that triggered a sharp response from Berlin, as articulated by Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (“AKK,” as she is known by her initials)? She was hand-picked by Angela Merkel as chairperson of the ruling Christian Democratic Party, and she is first in line for the chancellorship once Merkel steps down. So remember that unwieldy name.

Softly-softly, Macron had done the traditional French thing, laying out a program that would have pleased Louis XIV, the Sun King, who ruled France from 1643 to 1715. It is statist, protectionist, redistributionist and top-down with a slew of yet more centralist European institutions. The market is “useful,” Macron averred, but “it must not ignore the need for protective borders.” This is code for managed trade joined to the preference for European suppliers in public procurement competitions. Corporate taxes must be set European-wide so as to nix a race the bottom. Add minimum wages from Portugal to Poland.

This reflects a time-honored French tradition, but runs straight into the classic German dispensation. For AKK, the generation of wealth comes first, “redistribution” later. That set the tone. Then she launched into a number of no-nos, no matter how dear they are to Macron’s heart: “European centralism, and statism, the Europeanization of national debts and social support systems, and minimum wages.” All these, according to AKK, “would be the wrong way.”

Nor would a “European superstate” help. European institutions are good, but cooperation among national governments is better, according to AKK. The magic German code word here is “subsidiarity”—let local and regional institutions decide rather than Brussels. Austria’s chancellor Sebastian Kurz put it tout court in a separate response to Macron: “Subsidiarity means doing less more efficiently.”

Finally, another blow to the European orthodoxy: “A new beginning for Europe,” AKK lectured, “will not work without its nation-states. These underwrite democratic legitimacy and national identification.” The last leader to speak thus was Charles de Gaulle preaching a “Europe of the Fatherlands.”

At the core of it all are two very different national histories. Emerging from centuries of absolutist rule, the French are wedded to the all-providing state, distrusting the market and preferring top-down rule. German memories go back to the Holy Roman Empire where power was diffused among a plethora of kingdoms, duchies and statelets.

Under the Nazis, they experienced the deadly grip of the Behemoth state. Naturally, they are attached to local power and states’ rights as distributed among the 16 Länder of the Federal Republic. And they certainly don’t want Macron’s hands in the till, given the classic French interest in spreading the wealth from uber-rich Germany to “Club Med,” the southern tier of the European Union.

So no grand dessein for Europe. Indeed, the European Union will do well if it lassoes the centrifugal forces cutting across the Continent. How shall we count the ways? Brexit nationalist authoritarianism in Eastern Europe, Italy tottering on the brink of bankruptcy, a bizarre government in Rome uniting left- and right-wing demagogues, anti-European populists ensconced in almost every parliament. The good news? Europe has suffered many such blows in the past, and yet it did expand from the original Six to 28. There is no chance that others will follow Britain into not-so-splendid isolation.

The post Emmanuel Macron: The Man Who Would Be King of Europe appeared first on The American Interest.

The Coming Demographic Disruptions

Twelve years into a persistent and deepening global democratic recession, it is increasingly clear that the challenges confronting governance in the world are not a passing storm.  As revealed in an eye-opening project on “Governance in an Emerging World,” based at the Hoover Institution and led by former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, profound long-term changes are testing all forms of government.

Most of these transformations have been prominently analyzed. Globalization, with its dizzying accelerations in the movement of people, goods, capital, and ideas, has challenged traditional notions of sovereignty and put a premium on what Shultz has long stressed as a key imperative for national success in our time:  the ability to “govern over diversity.”  Technological change, involving rapid advances in automation, social media, and now artificial intelligence, is profoundly disrupting everything from politics to dating to manufacturing and the workplace.  And climate change is straining the comfort, health, stability, and even viability of many human settlements, to a degree that will increase exponentially in the decades ahead.  These, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been arguing, are the “three giant transformations” that pause for no one and put a premium on what Friedman called, in his 2018 Compton Lecture at MIT, “learning faster, and governing and operating smarter.”

But as the Shultz project on governance is showing, there is a fourth transformation interacting with these three, one that is no less daunting and, in the short run, little more amenable to alteration: demographic change. To maintain the overall population at its existing size, a society needs an average fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman—what is called “replacement fertility.”  The story of the second half of the twentieth century was astonishingly rapid growth in population throughout the developing world due to improvements in health care but a lag in declining fertility. As a result, according to UN estimates, world population increased from 2.5 billion people in 1950 to 6.1 billion in the year 2000 and about 7.5 billion today.

Global population growth is continuing, but it is slowing and unevenly distributed. Many major countries are now well below the 2.1 level of “replacement fertility.” These include not only most of the advanced industrial democracies—in Asia as well as Europe—but also, stunningly, Russia (1.8) and China (1.6).  The economic and geopolitical ambitions of these two countries will, in the decades to come, run up against hard demographic realities of aging societies and dwindling workforces.  Many industrialized countries now face a similar scenario, never before encountered by human society in an era of peace and abundance: markedly shrinking—and therefore aging—populations. Italy, Japan, Germany, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are now among the more than twenty countries with fertility rates below 1.5 per woman.

Shrinking populations—especially among the richest countries that use the most resources and therefore emit the most pollution—may sound like a blessing for Mother Nature. And maybe in one sense they will be a blessing for social stability, in that labor forces will be shrinking at just the time that automation will be displacing more and more traditional forms of work. But these demographic transformations will sorely challenge governance in other ways, as there will be fewer and fewer workers to support the rapidly aging populations—while life expectancy continues to lengthen, in some societies (with the revolutions in medicine and biotechnology) quite dramatically.

As Hoover Institution economist and demographer Adele Hayutin has shown in recent research, Japan and Germany already have shrinking workforces, and many other countries are set to follow, including all of the ones with fertility well below replacement. Over the next 20 years, Hayutin estimates, the workforces in Japan and South Korea will shrink by some 15 percent, Germany by 13 percent, and the EU overall by 10 percent (producing 30 million fewer workers in Europe). Part of the shortfall can be made up by increasing employment for women and the elderly (those over age 65). But these societies are all likely to face significant labor shortages.  And it is not just labor as such that is needed. Youth brings innovation and dynamism to a country. There is no social model for societies that will be as old as these industrialized countries will be unless one of two things happens: They dramatically increase fertility, or they import people. Even with economic and social incentives to encourage more births, these societies cannot escape the imperative to welcome precisely the phenomenon against which many advanced democracies now seem to be rebelling: immigration.

One of the fascinating aspects of the global demographic trends is that the United States and Britain face a much more manageable demographic future than most of their industrialized peers. Unlike Germany, Italy, Japan and others, the U.S. workforce, Hayutin finds, will continue to grow in pretty steady fashion for decades to come. In Europe, three countries—Britain, France, and Sweden—defy the larger EU trend. One reason is that they (like the United States) have fertility rates much closer to replacement. Yet their rates are still below it. So how are they making up the difference, and then some?  Immigration.

It is immigration that will give these four societies (and Canada and Australia) economic dynamism, cultural vitality, and greater fiscal sustainability—if they can “govern over diversity.”  The key lies in the traditional American formula, e pluribus unum, out of many one. The imperfect, at times shamefully disappointing, but still remarkable success of the United States in assimilating immigrants while forging the most diverse nation in world history has been an indispensable key to America’s economic and political vibrancy. Will we now squander it in an atavistic and misplaced fear of the “other”, stimulated by demagogues seeking to manufacture fear in order to ride to power? That is one of the key questions confronting the future of the United States and its global leadership.

Yet it is not the whole story. The United States is surprisingly well positioned to absorb and manage immigration. For one thing, we are a nation of immigrants with a history of assimilating successive waves of immigrants. For another, the principal source of immigration across our land border, from Latin America, is expected to decline sharply in the decades ahead. Fertility in Mexico (and in El Salvador) has already fallen to replacement levels, and the undocumented Mexican population in the U.S. has been trending downward since 2008. With planning and rational policy (such as keeping highly educated workers in the United States once they finish their science and engineering degrees), the United States could continue to dominate all its competitors in the new global economy of high technology. Industrialized Asia—Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore—needs this immigration even more, but save for Singapore, these countries lack a strategy for recruiting and absorbing it.

However, it is Europe that faces the stiffest challenge. Barring some miraculous reversal in fertility trends, the EU will need to import significantly more young workers if it is going to be able to support its burgeoning population of elderly. Where will these young workers come from?  In theory, the source could be any number of emerging market countries where the working age population (15-64) is slated to grow in the next twenty years, including India (whose labor force stands to growth by a quarter in the next two decades). Egypt, Pakistan, and the Philippines will also see continued rapid growth in their working age populations. But far and away the largest share of population growth will come in sub-Saharan Africa, where the labor force will nearly double in the next twenty years, adding over 400 million people.

The juxtaposition of Europe’s population implosion and Africa’s population explosion will make for one of the most important social and political trends of the coming decades. The problem goes far beyond the simple arithmetic logic of migration. As James Kirchick writes in an essay for the 2019 “Great Decisions” program of the Foreign Policy Association, current levels of immigration to Europe, especially from Africa and the Middle East, have fed the rapid growth of right-wing, nativist populism even in healthy economic performers like Germany, Poland, and Sweden. In the past five years, Sweden (a country of ten million) has welcomed over half a million (mostly less well educated) migrants, who, Kirchick reports, have been disproportionately involved in a rising tide of violent crimes. As a result, political support for the Sweden Democrats, a right-wing, anti-EU party with neo-Nazi origins, has more than doubled since it first entered parliament in 2010, making it the country’s third largest party (as is the far-right Alternative for Germany in that country). Even liberal and tolerant societies have a limited capacity to absorb new people from diverse places and cultures. As has historically been the case in the United States, the warning signs of political reaction start flashing red when the percentage of foreign born reaches well above ten percent.

So the EU—and Japan, and other industrialized countries—are going to need a much more strategic and intentional strategy for encouraging, screening, training, placing, and absorbing more highly educated immigrants at a manageable pace over an extended period of time. But tell that to poor young men with limited education from Africa and the Middle East who feel trapped by poverty, joblessness, and violent conflict, and who—like many Mexicans historically—are determined to head north for a better life. The numbers are staggering. Africa is set to add over a billion people between 2015 and 2050, with its total population increasing to over 2 billion. Many African countries, sociologist Jack Goldstone has shown for the Shultz project, will reach staggering numbers by 2050: over 400 million Nigerians, nearly 200 million Ethiopians, over 100 million Ugandans. And these increases will come at the same time that climate change (and population growth itself) increasingly disrupt agriculture, water supplies, disease vectors, wildlife habitats, and thus the increasingly lucrative tourism industry.

There is a way out of impending disaster: vigorous and broadly distributed economic development, which lifts the skill levels of African populations and enables them to contribute productively to economic growth both in their own countries and in the aging societies to which they emigrate. This could generate something of a virtuous cycle, because nothing brings down the fertility rate like rising levels of education and employment for women.

“If by 2050,” Goldstone concludes, “Africa can turn the corner on fertility and reduce its population growth,” while investing in human capital and physical infrastructure, “then in the second half of this century Africa could be the main motor of global economic growth, much as China has been for the last thirty years and India could be for the next thirty.” But that won’t be possible without dramatic improvements in the quality of African governance to stem corruption, strengthen the rule of law, and create an enabling environment for investment and innovation.  Today, there is no regional or global strategy to support and induce these improvements in governance. Rather, there is a new great power scramble for Africa’s resources and markets, with China—which couldn’t care less about the rule of law in Africa—the most audacious player.  This picture must change, dramatically and soon, or the world will lose a historic opportunity to bring demography into balance with a minimum of conflict.

The post The Coming Demographic Disruptions appeared first on The American Interest.

The Lost History of Democratic Support for Israel

The denunciation of anti-Semitism in House Resolution 183 is a welcome and necessary response to the anti-Semitic statements of Congressperson Ilhan Omar. However, it did not address the issue of how that hatred has been linked over the past half century to attacks on the state of Israel. Omar’s comments about Jews and money, dual loyalty and Israel’s ability to “hypnotize the world” went far beyond the criticism of the policy of the government of Israel—criticism that occurs regularly in the Israeli parliament. Rather, her comments, along with support for efforts to boycott, divest and sanction Israel that have been a defining element of leftist politics in recent years, point to a more ambitious agenda: replacement of the state of Israel entirely. Indeed, this antagonism to the existence of the state of Israel—and the accompanying, misleading arguments about that state’s origins—has become a defining feature of the radical left around the world since the 1960s.

For many decades, the anti-Semitism question has been an Israel question. The ideological assault on the Jewish state attributes to Israel the combination of power and evil intent that anti-Semites once attributed to Jews or “world Jewry.” Again, not all criticism of Israel is motivated by anti-Semitism. For example, the settlements policy remains highly disputed both within Israeli society and among Israel’s strong supporters around the world. On the other hand, efforts to call the basic legitimacy of the state into question, to spread the lie that it is a form of apartheid, to thus isolate the Jewish state in order to destroy it, leaving its six million citizens at the mercy of the likes of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, are now the most politically consequential forms in which anti-Semitism appears. When Omar wrote that Israel had “hypnotized the world” she used language that only those who attribute such power and evil to the Jewish state have frequently used in the past.

The real historical novelty of Omar’s comments, therefore, lies not in their substance but in the fact that they are being voiced by a Democratic member of Congress appointed to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Her stance stands in contrast to a long and storied tradition of support for Israel within the Democratic Party. Given where we are today, it’s useful to recall both the mentalities and the politics that undergirded this stance. In brief, the Democratic Party supported the founding of the state of Israel in the name of anti-fascism and in opposition to racism and anti-Semitism. In 1948, this stance was in harmony with the broad consensus on the global Left. But the Democratic Party and the global Left have never walked in lockstep, and as time went on their views on Israel diverged.

In Europe, in the crucial years of 1947-48 when the issue hung in the balance, Israel’s strongest supporters came from Communists, Socialists, liberals, and moderate conservatives who had fought in the anti-Nazi resistance organizations. At the United Nations the strong support for the Partition Plan by its Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko stood in striking contrast to the halting support, legalisms, and ambiguities of the U.S. Ambassador, Warren Austin.

And it wasn’t just the Ambassador. It may come as a surprise to Israel’s leftist critics of recent years to learn that the establishment of the state of Israel on May 15, 1948 was fiercely opposed by the leadership of the foreign policy and defense establishment of the United States government. All the leaders of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the American intelligence agencies, including Secretary of State George Marshall and Director of Policy Planning George Kennan, argued that a Jewish state in Palestine would undermine American national interests. They asserted that it would meet with such Arab antagonism that Western access to Middle East oil would be put at risk, thereby undermining the economic recovery of Western Europe and the policy of containment of communism with which it was associated. American diplomats, intelligence officials and military leaders were convinced that Israel would facilitate Soviet penetration of the Middle East, both by antagonizing the Arab and Muslim populations, who then might turn to the Soviets, and by allowing Communist agents into Israel posing as European refugees. Odd as it may sound in 2019, in the years following World War II the association of Jews with the Left caused unease and suspicion in the generally conservative corridors of power in Washington.

Following its recognition of the new state of Israel, the United States imposed an arms embargo on material destined for Israel and the Arab states. In Europe (and at the UN) support for Israel came from the Soviet Union and the Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia and Poland, veterans of the French Resistance, and from Socialist members of the French government. Political leaders and informed citizens in Europe and the United States remembered that the leader of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had been a propagandist for Nazi Germany during World War II and the Holocaust, that his own interpretation of Islam inspired a deep hatred of Jews and Judaism, that this hatred was the foundation for his collaboration with the Nazis as well as for his rejection of the Partition Plan, and that the Muslim Brotherhood and others in Arab societies also expressed support for the Axis as allies in their battle against Zionism.

In those years, discussions of racism focused on the racism and anti-Semitism of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee and the refusal of the Arab League to tolerate a Jewish state amidst many Arab states. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that has come to dominate the global Left, the state of Israel did not come into existence with the support of Western imperialism, nor did racism play a role in its origins and self-definition. On the contrary, it was the product of movements that fought against both anti-Semitism and racism. In a sense, its establishment was the last act of the anti-Hitler coalition, even as that alliance was crumbling as the Cold War was in its early months.

But the meaning and resonance of “anti-fascism” as a rallying cry began to change on the Left as early as 1949. The Soviet Union had reversed its previous support for the United Nations Partition Plan in November 1947, and then had opposed the establishment of the Jewish state in May 1948. With the beginning of the “anti-cosmopolitan purges” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1949, the Soviet Union adopted a four decades-long policy of diplomatic and military antagonism that associated Israel with “American imperialism.” We owe it in part to the Soviet Union that the word “Zionism” became a term of abuse in world politics in those decades.

A second shift in the history of leftist antagonism to Israel took place during and after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967. The Western left displaced its commitment to anti-fascism in the 1940s with the bizarre view that the small Jewish state had become part of the “first world” that was exploiting and oppressing the “third world.” In those years, the successor organizations of the New Left in Europe supported the terrorist campaigns—euphemistically renamed “armed struggle”—of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1976, these redefinitions found legitimation in the UN, when a huge Soviet, Arab, Muslim, and third world majority passed the “Zionism is racism” resolution. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the American Ambassador to the UN, famously denounced that resolution as an example of anti-Semitism.

The result was what I have called the “undeclared war” waged by the Soviet bloc against Israel. Throughout these years, anti-Israel passion in the Middle East thrived on arms deliveries, military training, and state-supported propaganda campaigns generously provided by the Soviet Union and its East European allies. With the collapse of Communism, these forms of support ended, thereby severely weakening the ability of the Palestine Liberation Organization to make war on Israel. But the anti-Zionist arguments of the Communists and the radical left lived on in more genteel forms in the universities. Since 1989, opposition to Israel’s existence as Jewish state, the conviction that Israel is not a legitimate entity and should be replaced with something else, has found academic adherents who in recent years supported efforts to persuade both student and professional groups to boycott, sanction and divest from the Jewish state (BDS). Most of those efforts have failed as scholars have rejected both their factual assertions and the animus that inspires them. Yet they persist, bolstered as well by the emergence of Islamist anti-Zionism to global prominence following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the writing of the Hamas Charter in 1988, and the emergence of other Islamist groups and ideologues in recent decades, groups that almost uniformly make no distinction between hatred of Jews, Judaism, and the state of Israel. In the blend of leftism and Islamism of recent decades, the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism becomes a distinction without a difference.

President Truman, with the support of the Democratic Party, made the crucial and brave decision to support the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 and recognize the new state of Israel in 1948, in the face of stiff bureaucratic opposition at home. In the United States, strong support for establishing the state of Israel came from a broad array of leftist and liberal organizations who saw doing so as a logical outcome of the anti-fascism that had inspired the Allies to fight the war against Nazi Germany. The facts of the Holocaust that came to full light in summer 1945 only deepened this conviction. And through the years, the Democratic Party has by and large stood by Israel, despite the shifts in the intellectual winds on the Left. After the establishment of the state of Israel, the State Department and U.S. military leadership gradually adapted to its existence.

Representative Omar’s remarks didn’t exactly emerge as a thunderclap in the party. They were foreshadowings of where things were heading. President Obama had already refused to speak frankly about the link between Islamism, terror, and anti-Semitism. In negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama Administration said far too little about the anti-Semitism at the core of the Iranian regime’s ideology. Furthermore, when Benjamin Netanyahu linked his fate closely to the Republican Party and then to Trump, Israel became a partisan issue. Its support among younger liberals has declined.

Most Democratic members of Congress do not share Omar’s views. Whatever criticisms they have of the current Likud government, they accept the fundamental legitimacy of the Jewish state. Yet now that anti-Semitic arguments that are linked to criticisms of the American alliance with Israel have been voiced in the halls of Congress, it is important that the Democratic Party recall the very different political coordinates and mentalities of 1947 and 1948 that gave rise to Israel. Those coordinates and mentalities were central to the identity of the Democratic Party as one that has been at the forefront of effort to overcome the scourges of racism and anti-Semitism. At this moment, historical awareness about the mentalities of 1948 should serve to counter the resurgence of very old and long discredited falsehoods about Zionism, the state of Israel, and its supporters in the United States.

The post The Lost History of Democratic Support for Israel appeared first on The American Interest.

Getting a Bead on Greed

Financial Exposure: Carl Levin’s Senate Investigations into Finance and Tax Abuse

Elise J. Bean

Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 449 pp., $49.99

Donald Trump has, as of the moment I write this, made 8,158 false or misleading claims since becoming President. He began by averaging five a day, but his daily score is now into the double figures and accelerating. Anyone who started out thinking he was just over-exuberant has had to reconsider. Falsehoods are a deliberate weapon in his political arsenal, and he has inspired a surge in fabrications from other leaders all over the world.

Politicians have always lied, but it has been generations since any did it like this. Glenn Kessler, who runs the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog, has documented untruths for the best part of a decade, and says he is being challenged like never before.

In the United Kingdom where I live, Boris Johnson—a leading Brexit supporter who served as perhaps the worst Foreign Secretary in British history for two long years until last July—famously whipped up anti-immigration suspicion in the days before the referendum vote by spreading the false claim that Turkey was due to join the European Union. In January, he denied ever having done so, thus lying about having lied, and did so as brazenly as ever. He has not yet lied about having lied about having lied, but it is surely just a matter of time.

Vladimir Putin has turned lying into something of an art form, a denial of reality that is so brazen that it is almost impossible to tackle. There are no Russian troops in Crimea—“but, but those are Russian troops and they’re in Crimea”—there are no Russian troops in Crimea. A child has his hand in the cookie jar, is surrounded by crumbs, is smeared in chocolate, and yet denies having ever been in the kitchen. Even the most level-headed parent would be flummoxed.

Journalists who are accustomed to providing balance by reporting both sides of a debate—“he says taxes should be 20 percent to boost growth; she says taxes should be 70 percent to fund healthcare”—have always relied on the assumption that everyone is speaking in good faith. That assumption was always questionable, but now it’s downright dangerous. So, how does public discourse survive the phenomenon of politicians who lie strategically, who insist an inauguration crowd was the biggest ever, and who keep insisting that it was, when anyone with eyes can see that it wasn’t?

It is a tough question. As Peter Pomerantsev observed in his book on how the Kremlin has undermined the very concept of truth, when “nothing is true, everything is possible.” Political power increasingly belongs to the persuasive, not to the accurate. Voters prefer what they want to what they need, and lavishly reward those who will give it to them.

This is not a sustainable long-term strategy for government, to say the least. No matter how much liars bluster or charm, two plus two will always equal four; gravity will eventually catch up with Humpty-Dumpty. But by the time the egg hits the floor, the men who pushed him will be long gone. They are to society what pre-2007 bankers were to the economy.

There is much debate about what can be done about this. Should Facebook invest in fact-checkers? Should web apps flag websites known to propagate falsehoods? Should media interviewers call out politicians more robustly when they state something false? Should everyone subscribe to more news organizations, so journalists can be employed, rather than laid off? Yes, of course, to all of those things—but it still isn’t enough.

This is why it is so interesting to read Elise Bean’s argument for “robust, bipartisan congressional investigations” in her book Financial Exposure. Such investigations may not save the world, but they can give profound assistance to whoever eventually does. She knows this to be true because she’s been there, seen it, done it, and written it up in a book that details her time working for Senator Carl Levin at the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI).

The power of Congress to investigate arises from the magnificently named Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s. The then-Interior Secretary had taken bribes in exchange for transferring valuable oil reserves to private companies, and Attorney General Harry Daugherty had failed to investigate. When Senators took that task upon themselves, Daugherty’s brother refused to appear before them to give evidence. They issued a subpoena, which he ignored. The case over whether he could be compelled to appear before them went to the Supreme Court, where justices sided with the Senators by 8-0, ruling that “the power of inquiry—with process to enforce it—is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function.”

This case, McGrain v. Daugherty, gives members of the two Houses of Congress powers that are the envy of their international peers. These powers are not unlimited (Congress cannot look into individuals’ “private affairs” if there is no legislative purpose), but they are extraordinarily broad.

Sometimes those powers have been abused, such as with the unhinged hunt for Communists conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Sometimes those powers have been used irresponsibly, such as when Republicans and Democrats dueled over whose party had behaved worse in the 1996 presidential election, a contest with remarkable resonance today. (“Questions included whether foreign money had influenced the outcome, whether the White House had broken any laws by selling political access to big campaign contributors, and whether loopholes in federal campaign finance laws were allowing campaign contributions to corrupt American politics,” Bean notes.) That inquiry produced two different reports, totaling 9,000 pages, with radically different conclusions that did little but confirm public frustration with politicians.

Even so, when congressional investigative powers are used correctly, proportionately and with due care for the considerations and concerns of both political parties, they have unearthed more secrets of the powerful and unscrupulous than almost anything else on earth.

PSI has an honorable history of investigating complex financial issues, including organized crime, fraud, offshore banking and other skulduggery. Investigations by the PSI helped bring about the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) legislation of 1970, and the world’s first laws on money laundering in 1986.

Financial Exposure is structured chronologically, and is not so much a story as a narrative. Each investigation took up months or years of Bean’s time, and each chapter is devoted to a single investigation. The book is well indexed, clearly written, and will be an extremely useful resource for future historians looking into the causes of the remarkable dysfunction that has afflicted Congress over the past few decades. They will perhaps be most struck by the contrast between how Congress works now and how it worked then, when PSI staffers from both parties would routinely get together after hours for drinks. “PSI managed to create an island of sanity, bipartisanship and mutual respect where we could conduct meaningful oversight,” Bean writes.

The publications that PSI has produced over the years constitute a priceless resource for anyone investigating the seamier side of the world economy. When I was researching my book Moneyland and wanted to know how the worst offshore banks had operated in the 1990s, I could turn to a PSI report into the Cayman Islands and find all the details I needed. When I wanted to see how Citibank had helped a succession of politicians from poor countries steal billions, again, it was all detailed by PSI. U.S. prosecutors have a long, rich and distinguished tradition of prosecuting fraud and corruption offenses, so these probes are not taking the place of criminal proceedings. Instead, they are complementing them, providing the context against which the crimes took place, and doing so in a way that anyone can rely on.

The hope of course was that the investigations would expose wrongdoing, inform legislators and inspire new bills that would close the relevant loopholes. Things did not always work out that way: After the Citibank report, Senator Levin co-sponsored a bill to toughen anti-money laundering regulations, but it died in the Banking Committee chaired by a Senator from Texas, which was home to many banks that had no intention of revealing the origin of their capital. The same thing happened, dispiritingly, to proposals to impose transparency on the ownership of U.S. corporate structures, with Levin’s efforts dying in the Homeland Security and Government Affairs committees. When the products of PSI’s work did turn into legislation, however, the impact could be stunning.

For example, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it became clear how open the U.S. financial system had been to money laundering by terrorists. This generated support for an anti-money laundering bill Levin had proposed months earlier, which passed as part of the Patriot Act despite strong opposition from the banking industry. “It addressed virtually every one of the problems identified in our three-year money laundering investigation. It was an oversight triumph,” Bean writes.

Sometimes investigations also led to criminal probes, such as those into accountancy giant KPMG’s “tax shelters” that allowed companies to minimize their taxes. KPMG had ignored PSI’s subpoena, after a whistleblower brought evidence that it had been breaking the law, but gave in when news of its stonewalling leaked. KPMG’s auditors had sold tax shelters to the very companies they audited—in essence, they were marking their own homework—and the greater a tax loss the product created, the more KPMG got paid. It was a scandal of the most sordid kind. There was always an aspect of theater to PSI’s proceedings, since they culminated in witnesses being grilled live on television, and that was certainly true here. Levin asked one KPMG partner the same question repeatedly until he finally admitted the firm had sold tax shelters to its clients, producing incendiary news headlines.

It was a clear example of corporate criminality, so PSI passed the file to the Department of Justice, which eventually forced KPMG to admit to helping its clients dodge $2.5 billion worth of taxes, and to pay a then-record fine of $456 million. Investigations also helped lead to criminal proceedings against the businessmen Sam and Charles Wyly, who also ended up handing over millions in dollars in fines, and against the Swiss banking giant UBS. Whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld brought PSI evidence of UBS’s misdeeds from his own spell at the bank, and the ensuing report helped lead to DoJ action that cracked open the fortress of Swiss banking secrecy.

Financial Exposure is full of insights into the huge financial impact of tiny quirks of banking legislation—“Subpart F” alone cost the Treasury billions upon billions of dollars—and the lobbying industry that springs up to defend them if they’re threatened. Multinationals went to great lengths to deny PSI the information it needed to probe their affairs, and often won the support of Levin’s fellow Senators in doing so.

Perhaps the most important lesson from the book, however, is the evolution in how Senators responded to corporations, and the subjects they therefore chose to investigate. In Bean’s telling, Levin himself was indifferent to the political consequences of his investigations, and happy to probe wrongdoing wherever it took place. But other Senators were not so indifferent.

This was seen first with Apple, when PSI looked into its tax arrangements. As a supporter of many Democrats, Apple was well networked in Washington. It was “cagey and slippery” in its dealings with PSI staff, Bean notes, while working as hard as it could to get Levin—and ranking Republican John McCain—to back off. McCain and Levin were independent-minded enough for the deflections not to work, but only in this instance. When it was time to investigate Caterpillar, times had changed.

“Our Republican counterparts had taken an internal drubbing after the Apple hearing. The McCain staff let us know that multiple Republican offices had contacted them to complain about their boss’s pro-tax stance and his working so closely with Senator Levin . . . they did become notably less enthusiastic about investigating corporate tax dodging,” Bean notes. When PSI functioned correctly, it was because everyone had the same interests—holding the powerful to account, and exposing their wrongdoing—even if they differed in their views about what to do about it. But with an increasing number of Senators more interested in helping the powerful than in upholding the law, that calculation came under increasing strain.

When Levin left the Senate in 2015, after more than three decades in office, he had overseen some of the most important investigations in congressional history, and worked as hard as anyone to maintain trust and respect across the aisle. But even fortnightly Manhattans and mutual goodwill could not hold back the tide of rancor and hostility that has spread through Washington. With ever more investigative effort focussed on the misdeeds of President Trump’s inner circle, and with even Republicans as outspoken as McCain unwilling to stand up for their principles in the face of corporate lobbying, the golden age of bipartisan oversight may be behind us.

Bean’s book is written carefully and cogently, in a style that could barely be more different than Trump’s ill-tempered, ill-considered, ill-spelt tweets. She stands for a different approach to running Washington, one that I sincerely hope will return in my lifetime. “Robust, bipartisan congressional investigations [are a] . . .  precious American heritage that should be respected, nurtured and celebrated,” she concludes.

From the perspective of an outsider, congressional oversight hearings are a remarkable expression of U.S. democracy, and one that I am delighted to have seen spread to Britain and other democratic countries. The British politician Margaret Hodge was inspired by Levin to expose tax dodging by Starbucks and other multinationals, and, although, committees in the UK Parliament lack the resources of their counterparts in Washington, they have managed to conjure up some of the theatrical appeal of the originals.

At a time when the influence of money in politics is reaching proportions unprecedented in living memory, it is crucial that politicians act as tribunes of the people in the way that Levin did. This is particularly true since so many members of the new generation of populist leaders hide their wealth using the same kind of tricks that Levin went to so much trouble to expose. When a street hustler does something amazing with his right hand, you can be pretty sure he’s robbing you with his left.

Careful investigation combined with publicly holding the powerful to account will be a crucial component of all future efforts to push back against the declension of democracies into oligarchies, and our legislatures into rubber stamps for the wealthy. Bean’s book is a primer for anyone keen to join that fight.

The post Getting a Bead on Greed appeared first on The American Interest.

Sharp Power and Stock Villains

It’s hard to coin a new term, but the National Endowment for Democracy did just that in a report released two years ago. Co-authored by Chris Walker and Jessica Ludwig of NED, along with four regional experts,  “Sharp Power and Rising Authoritarian Influence” makes a compelling case that Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China have turned away from “soft power,” which works through “attraction and persuasion,” and toward “sharp power,” which “pierces, penetrates, or perforates the political and information environments in the targeted countries.”

The report offers a case-by-case analysis of how Russian and Chinese sharp power is being used to undermine four fragile democracies: Argentina, Peru, Poland, and Slovakia. It also clarifies some key differences between the two regimes. Russia is mainly a spoiler: Instead of trying “to convince the world that [its] autocratic system [is] appealing in its own right,” it seeks “to level the playing field largely by dragging down its democratic adversaries.” China is more ambitious: It strives to expand its economic and political power by engaging in “aggressive investment, co-optation, and dishonest salesmanship,” while at the same time “masking its policies and suppressing . . . any voices beyond China’s borders that are critical.”

Historians may someday regard 2017 as a turning point in the world’s awareness of sharp power wielded to exploit what the NED report calls the “glaring asymmetry” between free and unfree, open and closed. In the United States, the wake-up call was the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. An even louder wake-up call was heard in New Zealand and Australia, where the “United Front” operations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have reached deeply into a wide range of institutions, from political parties to media, corporations to universities.

The warning signs have been sounded for a while, not least by Anne-Marie Brady, a New Zealand scholar who has spent years researching internal and external Chinese propaganda (euphemistically translated as “publicity”) and “thought work” (a phrase that does not lend itself to euphemism). An example of her work is “Magic Weapons,” a sobering monograph written in 2017 that summarizes her research as a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

In Australia, the cudgels were taken up in 2015 and 2016 by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) and the office of the Prime Minister, which launched inquiries into Chinese influence operations; and by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Sydney Morning Herald, which did major investigative reporting on the same topic. Then a pair of savvy Australian political reporters, Steve Lewis and Chris Uhlman, published two best-selling novels with subplots about Chinese influence at the highest levels of government. And last but not least, the novels were adapted for a six-part TV series called Secret City, which premiered on Australia’s Foxtel network in June 2016 and is now available on Netflix.

Secret City was a hit for three reasons: because it has a terrific cast; because it makes the capital city of Canberra look squeaky-clean, stylish, and ominous all at once; and because it features Chinese agents of influence as the villains. This third reason is the most important, because no matter how timely and relevant it might be to produce a political thriller about Chinese sharp power, it almost never happens. After all, what self-respecting media conglomerate would sacrifice access to a potential market of 1.4 billion viewers for the sake of mere timeliness and relevance?

This question is rarely asked, because the vast majority of Western analysts, strategists, and policymakers concerned with Chinese sharp power do not think about its use in connection to popular culture. For many of these people, paying attention to popular culture is either infra dig or a waste of time. For others, the products of the entertainment industry are best understood as soft power, lucrative exports whose impact on audiences is generally benign, and whose importance to geopolitics is negligible.

This is not the case in China, needless to say. From its earliest days the CCP has embraced Lenin’s 1925 dictum that “of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema.” Unlike their counterparts in liberal democracies, Chinese analysts, strategists, and policy-makers pay extremely close attention to the narratives being purveyed to the masses by popular culture. Under the “core leadership” of Xi Jinping, the correct “guidance” of the newly consolidated media, publishing, and cultural industries of China is an urgent priority. Those slated to be brought into “alignment” with the “China Dream” include not just the apparatchiki who work in the domestic entertainment industry but their more or less useful counterparts overseas—especially in the world’s biggest Dream Factory across the Pacific.

In November the New York Times ran a brief article sketching the recent history of Chinese influence in Hollywood. These efforts include changes in content dictated by the censors in Beijing; major financing of Hollywood films; investments in and outright purchases of studios and theater chains; and co-productions of blockbuster films combining Hollywood excitement with positive messages about Chinese culture and beneficence. The Times also noted that between 1997 and 2013, the average number of top-grossing Hollywood movies co-financed by China was 12 out of 100. Between 2014 and 2018 that number rose to 41. But then the relationship changed, because, as the Times continues,

The 2016 film The Great Wall, a $150 million China-Hollywood co-production starring Matt Damon, was China’s highest-profile attempt to make a crossover hit. It was, by most measures, an international flop. Since then, China has stepped away from the big-budget co-production model, focusing instead on making features that cater to its large and still-expanding domestic market. To do that, it has enlisted Hollywood talent—producers, technical experts and even top celebrities. But they have had to walk a fine line.

Not surprisingly, some Hollywood figures have crossed that line and begun taking all their cues from the Party.  In a previous column I mentioned Wolf Warrior 2, an action film released in the summer of 2017 that has to date grossed over $870 million, 99 percent of it in China. This makes it the most profitable film ever shown in China, and the second-most profitable film ever shown in a single market. (Only Star Wars: The Force Awakens earned more, with $936.7 million in North America.) That’s pretty stunning for a film whose main purpose is to stoke nationalist pride in China as the world’s rising power and contempt for America as the declining one. The message is not subtle: a band of Chinese soldiers behaves with courage, honor, and generosity in a place called “Africa,” while the Americans they meet behave with cowardice, dishonor, and greed.

In keeping with this message, Wu Jung, the Chinese-born writer/director/star of Wolf Warrior 2, boasts openly of having proved that China can make an action flick as exciting as any made in Hollywood. This boast rings a little hollow, given how heavily Wu relied on imported American talent. The chief villain, a sadistic mercenary called Big Daddy, is played by Frank Grillo, one of many journeymen performers in the Hollywood action genre; the filmmakers also consulted the Russo Brothers, part of the Marvel Studios roster, and brought on the renowned stunt team of Sam Hargrave to choreograph the film’s action sequences.

Not all of China’s imported talent is American. Operation Red Sea (2018), the next action flick to strike gold at the Chinese box office, was directed by Dante Lam, one of several Hong Kong directors to seize their chance on the mainland, where the budgets for jingoistic movies are very generous.

Operation Red Sea is an ultra-violent fantasy version of the Chinese navy’s 2015 evacuation of several hundred Chinese and non-Chinese civilians from war-torn Yemen. I say “fantasy” because it features not just a fake special-ops unit (the “Dragon Commandos” do not exist) but also a fake war (the real operation consisted of three Chinese navy vessels sailing into Aden, picking up the evacuees, and ferrying them to safety in Djibouti). Another word might be “propaganda,” because after two solid hours of graphic bloodletting, Operation Red Sea closes with uplifting music, blue sky and sea, and the glorious sight of the homeward bound fleet plying the South China Sea. Then comes the final scene: an encounter with a U.S. Navy patrol. The Chinese commander radios: “Attention! This is the Chinese navy! You’re about to enter Chinese waters! Please turn around immediately!“ As the Yanks retreat, the music swells and a Chinese passport appears on the screen with this superimposed message:

Citizen of the People’s Republic of China:

Whenever you are in danger overseas,

don’t give up!

Please remember:

Behind you

stands the powerful motherland!

As an American, I am in no position to criticize the Chinese film industry for waving the flag and showcasing a ton of military hardware. Some of the busiest places in Hollywood are the liaison offices of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force. But I do find it troubling that China has been finding it so easy to lure talented people from Hollywood, Hong Kong, and other places long accustomed to artistic freedom, into a system of consolidated state power that, instead of paying too little attention to the narratives being conveyed by popular culture, pays far too much.

Is Australia the exception? It might appear so, given the contrast between Hollywood’s collective kowtowing and the bold relief of Secret City’s Season 1. Unfortunately, there is no such bold relief in Season 2, which debuted on Netflix earlier this month. According to a puff piece in the Canberra Times, this second season picks up where the first left off, with the heroine, an investigative journalist named Harriet, being released from prison, where she was sent at the end of Season 1 for publishing classified material. No longer welcome at the newspaper where she once worked, Harriet takes a new job as media advisor to a maverick politician. But her true calling being sleuthing, she is immediately drawn into a new and dangerous investigation of a mysterious drone strike, a murdered Foreign Minister, and other shadowy events.

Here is where Season 2 does not pick up where Season 1 left off. Instead of continuing the storyline about Chinese sharp power, it reverts to the usual suspects—the Yanks, up to their usual mischief of starting new wars in order to test their latest weapons. The novels and news reports that inspired the first season have disappeared from the credits, along with their authors. And when the Canberra Times asked the producers about their inspiration for the new season, one of them said, “One day as we were working on ideas for the second series of Secret City, we watched President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address. His warning to the world, now even more relevant than ever, gave us the unsettling story we were looking for.”

Ike’s speech contained a warning about the need for vigilant oversight of what he called “the military-industrial complex.” That gave rise to one of Hollywood’s favorite stock villains: the gimlet-eyed defense contractor willing to blow away half the women and children in remote places like North Waziristan, if that’s what it takes to increase his profits. This villain is also a favorite among foreign producers whose view of the world includes a healthy (or not so healthy) strain of anti-Americanism.

So when Harriet cracks the case in Season 2, this stock villain is rolled to center stage, along with the obligatory African-American senior officer whose stony expression is even stonier than that of his white comrades. And in case we didn’t get the message, the penultimate scene is of Ike himself, delivering that same speech on the computer screen of the peace-loving Prime Minister, who has just fallen on his political sword to save Australia from getting dragged into a trumped-up war between America and Pakistan.

Far be it from me to suggest that Ike’s warning is out of date. The American military-industrial complex is always in need of vigilant oversight. But to judge by the latest headlines about Chinese penetration of U.S. naval contractors and wholesale theft of national security secrets, at least some of that vigilance needs to be directed outward, toward those who seek to erode the foundations of our democratic freedoms. By dramatizing this need, by daring to enter these forbidden waters, the first season of Secret City comes alive with the spark, the jolt, the frisson of real danger and hope. In the second season, which returns to the safe harbor of entertainment clichés, that spark has been extinguished.

It might be worth asking who extinguished it—and why. 

I thank Charles Edel, a regular contributor to TAI, for steering me onto these sources.

This scene bears a close resemblance to a real-life video clip included in China Rising, a 40-minute TV documentary from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which, after probing several different dimensions of Chinese sharp power, ends with a real-life video clip of a confrontation between a Chinese naval vessel and an American military aircraft.

The post Sharp Power and Stock Villains appeared first on The American Interest.

Fixing Congress, Fighting China: An Interview with Rep. Mike Gallagher

Mike Gallagher is the U.S. Representative for Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional District. First elected in 2016 at the age of 33, he previously served for seven years as a Marine Corps counterintelligence officer, including two deployments to Iraq. Since assuming office, Gallagher has emerged as one of the Republican Party’s youngest foreign policy wonks, an outspoken advocate for Congressional reform, and a conservative with an independent streak. He was recently one of only 13 House Republicans to vote against President Trump’s declaration of an emergency on the southern border.

TAI recently invited Colin Dueck, Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and the author of Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II, to interview the Congressman in his office on Capitol Hill. The following interview has been lightly edited and is also available as an episode of our podcast.

Colin Dueck (TAI): The first question I’ve got for you is this: There’s a sense today that the temperature in Congress and American politics more generally is a little overheated. Others think it’s just healthy competition between and within the parties. Where do you come down on this? Where do you think the rhetoric is right now?

Mike Gallagher: On the scale of healthy to unhealthy I think we are leaning towards unhealthy. Now, that being said, I know we share a mutual love of history. To quote one of our favorite movies, True Romance, I read a lot of history, I find that stuff fascinating. Obviously, there have been times that have been more intense. Right behind me is a picture of Wisconsin’s most famous politician then or since, Bob La Follette. This is an old cartoon during World War I where the German Kaiser is pinning medals on him because he had led the opposition to World War I—he very much did not want us to get involved.

He led a filibuster of Wilson’s bill to arm merchant vessels, which he thought, correctly, was a prelude to war, and at one point there was a rumor going around that one of his colleagues was actually going to shoot him on the Senate floor. He called his son, who subsequently became a senator from Wisconsin, as well, and told him to go bring a shiv to the House floor. The whole thing was very intense. Perhaps that was because what happened on the House and the Senate floor back then actually mattered, whereas in the present day we just do political theater.

But I do think the rhetoric fueled by social media is getting out of hand and it’s not actually resulting in better debate. It’s very rare that we have actual meaningful debate on ideas here in Congress. To the extent that we do, it happens in the committees that still function. I’m lucky to be on the Armed Services Committee, which I think is the exception that proves the rule. Every year we pass an authorizing bill. We’re one of the few authorizing committees that do that. We go through a very laborious process of oversight of the Pentagon, of debating things. We have an all-day, all-night debating committee, but I do think that doesn’t happen enough here in Congress.

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Prof. Colin Dueck

TAI: I know that Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. once beat a pacifist on the steps of the U.S. Senate, so this isn’t the first era where we’ve had heated disagreement! Now, you’ve been outspoken the last few weeks, particularly as a number of your colleagues have been on foreign policy issues in relation to the President. Is Congress sort of reasserting itself right now? What’s going on?

MG: I was struck at one of these defense conferences recently. There seemed to be a bipartisan and uncritical acceptance of the premises laid out in the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. On the one hand, Trump gets criticism from the other side for everything he does, but on the other hand I don’t see anyone on the Left right now saying, “No, the National Security Strategy actually got it wrong. We’re not in a period of great power competition with Russia.”

As we’ve talked about before, when it comes to Russia, which has been a source of a lot of criticism and controversy, the actual policy that the administration has been pursuing has been one that is quite strong and quite tough on Russia. I actually think there’s more consensus than dissensus right now on foreign policy in Congress. I do think, however, that you are seeing younger, newer members, particularly those with foreign policy backgrounds, engaging in this question of “How can Congress reclaim some of its foreign policy authority?” How can we restore the role of Article I in the foreign policy process, for example, by clawing back our constitutional authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations and pushing back on some of the things that the administration wants to do on Section 232 national security tariffs?

There’s an interesting debate happening right now on Yemen as to whether we’ve actually triggered the War Powers Resolution, whether what we’re doing in providing support to the Saudis constitutes engaging in hostilities. I do think there’s a weird thing going on—or a healthy thing going on, let me say—where there’s a bipartisan group of foreign policy-interested members in the House that are trying to reassert Congress’s role in foreign policy.

TAI: You listed a number of regional issues. Functional ones too. Let’s go down the list. You’ve been outspoken about the notion that the U.S. might withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan. What’s your reason for this and where do you think things stand at the moment?

MG: Well, on a personal level when I was in the Marine Corps I deployed to Iraq in 2007, and in 2008 I was on the tail end of the surge in the westernmost part of the country. I was stationed on the Syrian border. The town that I was deployed to, Al-Qa’im, subsequently came after we had sort of systematically destroyed ISIS’s forbear, al-Qaeda in Iraq, after we had provided some semblance of civility in the town. When I was leaving in 2008, if you had told me that a few years later that that town would be occupied by ISIS I would have told you that’s absolutely crazy, because from where I stood at the time, it seemed like we won.

Then when I was a civilian watching President Obama precipitously withdraw from Iraq for what I viewed to be political reasons, I was very distraught, and I think all the predictions we made at the time about creating a vacuum and how dangerous that was proved to be true. And I think the broader regional policy in the Obama Administration of seeking accommodation with the Iranian regime in the hopes that this would produce what the President referred to as a new equilibrium in the region produced exactly the opposite: disequilibrium. For me in the present day, I just worry that by precipitously withdrawing from Syria after having to go back into certain parts of eastern Syria and western Iraq because of the Obama decision, we’d recapitulate that same mistake, we’d create another vacuum on the ground, and we would throw our allies under the bus.

The Syrian Democratic Forces are primarily comprised of our Kurdish allies on the ground, who would be at the mercy of the Turks, or they’d have to strike a deal with Assad in order to survive, and I think that would send a signal that would undermine our credibility globally.

I actually think after bouncing between two extremes of all-out Bush 43-style aggressive involvement and Obama-style retrenchment, we’ve arrived at a Moneyball approach in the middle right now, whereby with a modest investment of resources, 2,000 special operators on the ground working by, with, and through local forces who are doing the majority of the fighting, and with us providing them the things they don’t have, be it air support or intelligence, we can achieve our limited objectives without a massive infusion of U.S. troops. This is the Moneyball approach in the Middle East, or at least I haven’t figured out another way to operate without falling into the Obama trap on the one hand or the nation building trap on the other.

TAI: As Brad Pitt says in Moneyball, “It’s a process. It’s a process. It’s a process.” Are you worried about the possible outcomes of the negotiations with the Taliban? How do you see those proceeding?

MG: Yeah, which is another reason why I think the White House’s recent announcement that it’s going to withdraw was ill-advised, because I think it’s going to affect the negotiations in a negative way. You’re sitting down with the Taliban and attempting to sue for peace without asking the broader question as to whether that’s even advisable. You don’t want to be sending the signal that you want to get out as quickly as possible, because you surrender all your leverage in the moment.

I don’t know what’s going to come out of those negotiations. I confess I’m extremely skeptical. I do think, though, the President has asked some very useful questions about Afghanistan. “What are our interests? Why are we still there? What’s our theory of victory?”

I went there last year and I just had this feeling as I was getting all the briefings from all the generals and all the intelligence professionals that this is the same briefing people have been getting for years and years. I do think we need to be a bit disciplined in how we define our interests and the resources we’re willing to spend in pursuit of those interests, but announcing withdrawal prematurely undermines our ability to get a negotiated outcome.

TAI: You mentioned the President’s foreign policy style: Some people love it and some don’t. But what do you think are the strengths and the weaknesses of that approach?

MG: I think the primary strength is that the President understands the source of American strength; in other words, that we need a strong military in order to have any hope of diplomatic success on the world stage. And I think the fact that we have been able to invest more in the military over the last two years, and are continuing this process of modernizing the U.S. military, is important, particularly when it comes to our ability to push back against China and Russia. That’s something the President consistently said throughout the campaign.

I would also say his willingness to act in certain instances where his predecessor would not has been a huge asset, and I think again of Syria. I think of that moment when he was having dinner with General Secretary Xi, and he steps out of the room and he approves a strike on the Syrian regime and then he comes back to the dinner. I can’t help but believe that that enhanced our credibility across the world, whereas Obama’s decision not to strike in Syria undermined our credibility. I give the administration enormous credit for that.

As I’ve said before, notwithstanding all the hysteria over Russia, if you examine the policy on the ground it’s been strong in pushing back against Russia, whether it’s authorizing lethal assistance to the Ukrainians, whether it’s approving Montenegro’s succession to NATO, whether it’s sanctioning a lot of oligarchs in Russia, sanctioning a lot of individuals that have been called out in the Mueller report, whether it’s exploring the development of low-yield nuclear weapons that the Pentagon has talked about, the list goes on and on and on. Oh, and by the way, killing 200 Russian mercenaries in Syria. That probably sent a message.

Then I think that Trump has gotten one huge thing right and it could be the biggest thing, which is to say that China is the biggest threat we face. It is the biggest long-term threat we face. The National Security Strategy has this great recognition that the last three decades of bipartisan policy vis-à-vis China has failed. This big bet we made that integrating China into the global economy would moderate their behavior turns out not to have worked at all, and the administration has recognized that and they are attempting to change course, and I give them enormous credit for that.

That said, I don’t support using Section 232 tariffs to punish our allies, primarily because I think what they’re trying to do economically on China is the right thing, and I see it as the only hope we have of uniting the free world in opposition to China. So to simultaneously pick an economic fight with the EU, with Canada and Mexico, on the grounds that we face a national security threat from Canadian steel or Mexican steel—no offense to your motherland, and the evil Canadian steel that could destroy us all—strikes me as counterproductive.

Then I think in the Middle East the administration has done a lot of good things in terms of moving the embassy to Jerusalem, but more importantly, getting out of the Iran deal. Its stated policy is that we need to roll back Iran’s malign influence, but I think we still haven’t seen that policy taking shape on the ground. I think there’s a lot of holes that need to be filled in the Middle East right now.

Again, the only way you can actually put more resources in the Indo-Pacific region is if you find a way to play Moneyball in the Middle East. And the only way you can do that in my mind is if you take advantage of the natural alliances that are forming on the ground right now, and that’s the historic level of cooperation we’re seeing between the Israelis and the Sunni Arab Gulf states. But that means you have to work with some unsavory people that do some dumb things, and clearly some of our closest allies have done some pretty dumb things right now that make our cooperation with them very difficult.

TAI: You mentioned in each one of those cases the importance of U.S. allies. Why bother to have allies? Trump asks very basic questions that for some Americans seem valid. Why do we have these bases? Why do we have these alliances? What good are they?

MG: Again, I view most things right now through the prism of our long-term competition with the Chinese Communist Party. What you’re seeing now is certain Chinese academics are recognizing this basic reality. I forget the name of the gentleman, the Chinese economist [Yan Xuetong] who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in 2011. He said something that I thought was very true at the time and has become even more true since, and that’s that the core of competition between the U.S. and China will come down to who has better friends. This is our most natural advantage besides our founding values, which attract a lot of countries to us that want to be part of the U.S.-led global order. Because it’s a benign order and one in which they benefit and no one’s going to dictate outcomes to them, in contrast to China, which doesn’t want allies. It wants vassals and tributary states.

The most natural advantage we have over countries like China and Russia is this network of alliances that we’ve built since World War II, and I think our formal allies alone comprise something like 40 to 50 percent of the world’s GDP, and unless we want to do everything by ourselves—which I would submit to you that we don’t because we don’t have infinite resources—we’re going to have to work with allies, partners, and friends on the ground to share the burden.

Now, I get it. We’ve always wanted our allies to do more. But to paraphrase Churchill, and I know this is an overused expression, the only thing harder than fighting with allies is fighting without them. I think burden-sharing is in our interest, and that comes with a little bit of free riding at times, but our allies do bring enormous capabilities to the table—and ultimately we offer an alternative vision of what we want the world to look like than our enemies in Beijing and Moscow do.

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Courtesy of the Office of Rep. Mike Gallagher

TAI: In a case like Saudi Arabia, how do you strike that balance? On the one hand the administration clearly believes that you can’t be too hard on the Saudis because that undermines the effort against Iran. In a way, they’re doing what you would recommend; they’re working with allies. But these are not lovable allies in the case of the Saudis. Then on the other hand in Congress, there are a lot of voices speaking out on the human rights issues. Where do you come down on this?

MG: I spent my most formative years in my early and mid-20s as a young Marine officer working with Anbari tribal leaders in western Iraq. I know full well that there is no easy way to do this. There’s no silver bullet approach. As my first professor in the Middle East said, rule number one is that things can always get worse. But I do think it requires you to prioritize, painfully at times, your first-order national security interests in the region. That often ends up being just basic security and stability concerns. Yes, we should take advantage of every opportunity we have to advance human rights, but part of the benefit of having close relationships—even with problematic partners—is that you can shift their behavior in a better direction. It is the bear hug approach. It is an act of love but it also fundamentally constricts their movement so they don’t go too far off the reservation.

Now, clearly in the Saudi case, they did go beyond the bounds of what we would consider acceptable. The answer to that isn’t to ignore it completely and say “We are okay with the Crown Prince ordering the execution of a journalist,” but nor is it to jettison the relationship entirely, because as problematic as you might think that partnership is, I can guarantee you that whatever would come in the wake of the collapse of the Saudi state or a hot war or an even hotter war between the Saudis and the Iranians right now would be far worse, would require far more U.S. resources, and would inevitably drag us into that conflict. You have to find a way to prioritize what’s most important in the relationship while also slowly getting them, behind closed doors, to take action on human rights.

What’s interesting is that Mohammed bin Salman was doing this sort of publicity tour prior to the [Khashoggi] controversy. He was saying all the things that we had wanted someone in the Saudi royal family to say for a long time: He was diversifying the economy and weaning it off its reliance on fossil fuels, but he was also doing the things that are most visible in terms of human rights, like allowing women to drive, greater participation for women in the political system, and so on. Those are all good impulses that we should seek to nurture, but I just don’t see how you can do that if you cut off ties completely, because these countries do have other options at the end of the day.

They want to partner with us but we’ve seen in the Middle East time and again that when we cut off a weapons sale, for example, because we’re pissed off at something someone did, they’ll go and buy that weapon from the Russians or the Chinese. So we’ve lost influence, we’ve lost the economic benefits of the military sale, and we haven’t actually improved the human rights situation.

TAI: You are in favor of the tariffs in relation to China but not in relation to U.S. allies. Do you view this as a constitutional issue or is it just a prudential one, where the tariffs make sense in one case and not the other?

MG: Well, I think tariffs are taxes that distort the free market, so I’m not in favor of tariffs, all other things being equal. All other things are not equal. When it comes to China it’s really their non-tariff barriers that are of the most concern to us. Yes, their average applied tariffs are higher than ours, but not by a wide margin. But tackling things like intellectual property theft is far more important. Cyber espionage, how they give their state-owned enterprises an unfair advantage, how we don’t have economic reciprocity, what they demand in return for market access—all of those things are more problematic than their tariffs. I am willing however to allow the administration to explore the use of tariffs as a tool to strike a bigger deal.

The problem with the 232 tariffs in my mind is that Congress has ceded far too much authority to the Executive Branch. This is just a fact. Over time, Congress has surrendered its power to regulate commerce with foreign nations to the Executive Branch. Ironically, and you’d need to check my history on this, I believe this was part of a trade liberalizing measure. The theory was that the Executive Branch as a unitary actor would be less prone to parochialization. In Congress, I’m going to be arguing for dairy because I’m from the dairy district. You have 535 people that are all going to be arguing for different things, going to make it harder to advance the cause of free and fair trade. Whereas if you give that authority to the Executive Branch there’s a better chance that they can advance that cause.

Now, the opposite is happening. With 232 tariffs, the problem is that they’re saying we face a national security threat from Canadian steel, Mexican steel, and aluminum. We face a lot of national security threats, and certainly I can make a national security argument for having some domestic steel production in America. But this is not a national security threat. It strikes me that they’ve stretched the bounds of the statute beyond recognition. Moreover, we have recent examples under Obama and Bush where they’ve attempted to do something similar and it hasn’t actually worked, if for no other reason than that there are far more people that work in steel-consuming or using industries than there are in steel-making industries.

And then you get to the broader level where I do think there’s a difference. I am all in favor of getting tough on China’s predatory economic practices, and I understand that our allies may not be perfect in that regard, but there is a difference here, because if you actually examine the economic data, what they suggest is that “Wow. The Canadians have a supply management system that effectively prevents our dairy producers from getting into their market.”

We have similar programs for example with sugar. We have bizarre sugar programs to subsidize our domestic industry. When you average tariffs across different goods, applied tariffs are actually higher in the U.S. than they are in the EU or Canada by a tiny margin. They’re very low to begin with. I do think there are different things going on here, if that makes sense.

TAI: But Canada’s looming really large right over Wisconsin. Is that a national security threat?

MG: That’s true, and as you know, I do not trust Trudeau, and I’ve gone on record as saying I want to box him.

TAI: I was not aware of that. All right. Well, on the constitutional issue, you were one of I think only 13 House Republicans who voted against the national emergency. Is that right?

MG: I had forgotten about that.

TAI: You have already forgotten?

MG: Just kidding. My grassroots has reminded me every single day about that.

TAI: Well, that was quite a vote. Tell us what your motives were.

MG: I have supported the President’s efforts on border security for the last two years. I voted for the $5.7 billion. I voted against every Democratic proposal that I thought would not actually solve the problem. When I was in uniform I worked for a year at the Drug Enforcement Agency.

I’ve been down to the southern border in that capacity. It’s not secure. It’s a problem. It’s a crisis. I could even call it an emergency. But the question is, what was intended under the 1976 National Emergencies Act and what precedent is this setting? While I would very much like it if we were able to wave a magic wand and solve this problem, how we solve this problem actually matters. Because I’m old enough to remember when Republicans were up in arms about Obama doing everything through executive fiat, and if we surrender that principle then we will not have a leg to stand on when a President Warren or a President Sanders or an eight years of President Ocasio-Cortez declares a national emergency on climate change or gun control to do a whole host of things that we view to be stupid and destructive to individual rights and private property. I firmly believe that we have to stand our ground on the principle of resisting the expansion of executive order, and I do that fully supporting what the President is trying to do, and fully recognizing that his critics are hypocritical.

It pains me to watch Schumer and Pelosi make these absurd arguments when ten years ago they were voting for this stuff, and I know that they’re playing politics with this. But I would be full of it if I had spent the last two years talking about the fact that the cancer at the heart of our Constitution is the expansion of executive authority because Congress is surrendering all its power, and then said I was cool with it just because it’s my guy is doing something that I happen to support.

TAI: Do you think that what it means to be a conservative or a Republican on foreign policy has changed a lot over the years or had it been fairly continuous?

MG: I once read a brilliant book called Hard Line that explored the history of Republican foreign policy. I don’t think you went back to Alf Landon. I think it was from [Robert] Taft to the present.

TAI: That’s right.

MG: If I’m remembering the argument you made, there is a consistent theme of—maybe not peace through strength, but some basic appreciation for the role of American military power and the need to be strong on the world stage. I view that as one of the foundations of Republican foreign policy. It was perhaps best expressed by Ronald Reagan, but I think it remains relevant today.

Now, we’ve also always had a more isolationist streak within the party. That was the whole reason Eisenhower ran for President in ‘52, in order to make sure that the Taft wing of the party didn’t prevail on foreign policy matters. That tension has always been there but I think luckily, more often than not, the peace through strength camp has won out over the isolationist camp. But I do think this tension is a healthy impulse and I think this gets to conservative philosophy more broadly, to have a healthy respect for unintended consequences, because it’s easy to get carried away on the world stage, and things that look neat and tidy in air conditioned offices in Washington, DC get extremely messy and dangerous when you’re at the tip of the spear actually trying to implement them.

I saw that firsthand in the military. I think that tension between wanting to be strong on the world stage, wanting to solve problems before they devolve into major crises—recognizing that we have friends and enemies on the world stage and being distrustful of utopian world government schemes—I think that the tension between that and doing nothing and retreating into Fortress America is a healthy tension that the party’s always had to grapple with.

TAI: When you talk to your constituents in Wisconsin, insofar as foreign policy or national security policy comes up at all, what do they tell you? What are their concerns?

MG: I think most of the political science literature and polling data would suggest that foreign policy rarely matters. “It’s the economy, stupid” was certainly my assumption going into my first campaign ever in 2016. For someone whose background was all foreign policy and national security that wasn’t exactly a great place to be in, but I was always amazed at how many people came up to me to ask about foreign policy. Think about where we were at that time.

The first joint appearance Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were supposed to do together was going to be in Green Bay, Wisconsin, which is where I live. My hometown’s the heart of my district. I was freaking out because I didn’t want them to come to my district, but it got canceled and she never came back, infamously, because of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.

That was the latest in a string of incidents from San Bernardino to the downing of the Russian airliner to Nice to all of our various European capitals that created this sense that something was going wrong, and particularly when it comes to the threat of ISIS or Salafi jihadism more broadly, that whatever we were doing wasn’t working and it was no longer just an “over there” problem. It was quickly becoming a right-here-at-home problem, including in places like the Midwest. I would have people come up to me and say, “Is it safe to go to a Packers game?” I would submit to you that if American leadership had languished to the point where it affects Lambeau Field, then we truly have a problem.

I actually thought foreign policy mattered a lot in that election, and I think foreign policy is not just a matter of abstract things like “How do you feel?” No one’s asking me about the nuances of Section 301 tariffs versus 232. But it’s also a way to communicate respect for basic American values. Respect for the troops, respect for American leadership, a sense that we are a force for good in this world, and I think there are some dangerous ideas on the Left right now that suggest the opposite. I’ve come to believe that foreign policy does matter. It may not be the most important issue, but how you talk about it does matter politically.

TAI: It sounds like in 2016 ISIS terrorism was a real issue. In 2018 did you get the sense from voters that tariffs were a concern or were most voters willing to give the President a chance?

MG: I think it was starting to turn. For example, I think Trump won my district by 18 points. A lot of ag[ricultural] areas. We’re America’s dairyland. A lot of cows in my district. I think that demographic are largely people that voted for the President, wanted to give him a chance, but tariffs are hurting Wisconsin dairy farmers right now. They’re caught in the crossfire of this low-grade competition between us and the EU and Canada and Mexico, particularly as we sell a lot of dairy to Mexico right now too. I think there’s a sense that they want the President to be successful in striking a deal that results in a fairer playing field for them, but not at the expense of their bottom line, their farm, their family.

TAI: Something that’s come up a couple of times already is the way the President talks about foreign policy. For example, on Russia you mentioned that on the ground it’s pretty solid. What do you think about the rhetoric or the language of the tweets? Is it irrelevant? Does it matter?

MG: I think it matters. Certainly whenever the President says something it matters, whether it’s in a tweet or in a formal speech. I guess I will never get comfortable with the President tweeting at 5 a.m. It’s certainly an unusual and an unorthodox style of communication. There are a lot of people that like it in particular because it bypasses a media complex they view to be biased. And it is biased. I also think that even where I might disagree with the President, he’s usefully forcing Republicans to question certain assumptions. In foreign policy, it’s easy for DC to fall victim to groupthink. So to the extent we’re forced to show our work with “What’s the case for being in Afghanistan? What’s the case for being in Syria? Have we gotten our priorities right?,” I think that’s a healthy thing.

Where I think it actually undermines the President’s own cause is where the tweets are at odds with his policy on the ground. I just don’t believe that directly bashing allies is useful, but again, I try and stay focused on the actual policy. On the big picture stuff, I think the President’s gotten a lot of big things right, particularly when it comes to great power competition with China and Russia. And NATO. For all the concern about “Oh, the President hates NATO. The President’s going to get out of NATO,” I don’t think the last two years suggest that’s going to happen. Our NATO allies have actually responded to the President’s rhetoric by increasing their commitments in many cases. The administration has reaffirmed its commitment to NATO, including in speeches that Trump himself has given.

I was at the Munich Security Conference where I thought Pence gave a great speech, and he pointed out something quite true to our allies which they may not want to hear. He had a great phrase where he said, “We cannot ensure the defense of the West if our allies become dependent on the East.” What he’s talking about is you have countries like Germany right now that are considering what their 5G architecture’s going to look like and they’re considering striking deals with companies like Huawei and ZTE that we know are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Chinese Communist Party. He was talking tough to our allies, which I’m sure is not something they’d like to hear to their face, but he’s right. He’s totally, totally right.

So I think we can have those disagreements among friends, but I don’t know. Back to your original question, I think Twitter’s making everyone look stupid, and I put myself in that category too.

TAI: You’ve alluded to the fact that your experience in the Marines gave you firsthand experience for what it means when the U.S. is there and when it isn’t there.

MG: Yeah, when I was bravely writing intelligence reports and correcting spelling errors on the front lines.

TAI: What else do you think you learned from your time overseas, your time in the U.S. armed forces and in the Marines that’s relevant for U.S. foreign policy and informed your approach to it?

MG: I think beyond a healthy respect for unintended consequences, one of the reasons I’m so excited about young veterans on both sides of the aisle coming into Congress and serving at this particular time is not only because they bring that firsthand, tactical real-world experience with these issues to the National Security committees here in the House, but they bring that basic military ethos of “Here’s a hard problem. Let’s work together to solve it.”

At the end of the day, that’s what’s most remarkable about the military. It takes people from all over the country, different backgrounds, different levels of competency. It puts them through a tough crucible and it forces them to work together to get a difficult job done. It’s not always pretty. It’s not always perfect, but usually it works out, and that’s a remarkable thing. I was lucky to be a part of that, and I hope that we, i.e. the 9/11 generation veterans in Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, can bring that same ethos to our work here in Congress. And if nothing else, recognize that we can have knock-down, drag-out debates about policy issues without questioning each other’s motives.

I don’t look at a Democratic colleague who has served and think, “Yeah, that person hates America and wants to destroy America,” because I know it’s not true. Now, I may think they have dumb ideas when it comes to socialized medicine or some other things, but I want to have a transparent and open and robust debate with them without it devolving into mean-tweeting about how we hate each other.

I would also say that one of the promises of veterans serving in Congress or people that have foreign policy experience is that they can conduct more effective oversight of the military in particular. Kennedy has this great phrase in the wake of the Bay of Pigs where he says, “If someone comes to me talking about the minimum wage or something else, I have no problem arguing with them or overruling them.” But I always assume the military and intelligence folks have some knowledge not available to ordinary mortals, and I do think there’s a tendency to be awed by anyone who has a bunch of stars on their shoulder. But people who have served in the military I think can ask the right questions to get at “Is what we’re doing in Syria working? Is what we’re doing in Afghanistan working?” That I think is a useful skill that people in the military bring to Congress.

TAI: Finally, are there any top concerns or foreign policy priorities that we haven’t talked about and you think should be mentioned or discussed? Or to put it another way, what are the leading foreign policy challenges for the United States today in your view?

MG: Again, I think the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy have gotten the basic conceptual shift right, which is to say China is the pacing threat and Russia is maybe a distant second. I think we are at a moment right now that is similar, though not identical, to where we were with the Soviet Union in the period roughly from 1948 to 1953. What makes it more difficult is that we haven’t yet had something like the Soviets setting in a new nuclear weapon in ‘49 or the invasion of Korea the year after that galvanizes public opinion to recognize that we need to wake up and change some things if we want to prevail in this competition.

I see no reason why what some people have called an emerging Cold War with China needs to be as hostile as what we had with the Soviet Union, but I think it’s going to require a similar level of attention by America’s best and brightest.

For example, it’s important that the best and brightest programmers working at Google don’t have a hostile view of the Pentagon and therefore don’t cooperate in a way that allows our AI to be better than Chinese AI; and we need a way to fix our immigration system so that we can get the best and brightest from the rest of the world to come here, stay here, build companies here that give us an economic advantage and that in turn allows us to turn that economic growth into military investments; and we need to do so in a way where we don’t become the thing we’re trying to contain.

In other words, if we sacrifice our founding values, if we change the system of government in a fundamental way where it’s no longer American because we feel like we need to do so in order to survive, well then we will have defeated ourselves.

I do think there’s a risk right now in trying to out-China China. We may be going down the road of socialism-lite that would ultimately be a disaster, because we need to draw a hard contrast between the system that China’s offering and the American system, which are two fundamentally different things.

It’s also going to require us to rediscover certain muscles that we haven’t flexed in a while, whether it’s political warfare, ideological warfare, looking back at some of Reagan’s best speeches such as his speech at Moscow State. They were masterpieces of ideological warfare. That’s a long way of saying I do think that the administration is right to suggest that is the biggest threat we face. That is a generational threat and we are in a competition for global supremacy that’s probably going to play out for the next three decades, and it’s not foreordained that America’s going to win by any stretch.

Other issues that relate to that that we’re taking a hard look at here in Congress right now. . .one is the question of foreign investment in the United States. Do we have the tools necessary to understand some of the investments that the Chinese Communist Party is making? We just did an entire reworking of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States last year in the National Defense Authorization Act.

But the final thing I’d say in relation to an earlier strain of conversation we had is I do think in order to be successful Congress will have to demand a bigger seat at the table at all these discussions. Going further down this path of allowing everything to be done through executive fiat, it just continues this trend where politics becomes solely about the presidency, and every four years we await the coming of a messianic presidential figure who’s going to solve all our problems. That person inevitably fails and then we’re either bummed out or we just convince ourselves that the other side is so terrible that we need to go further down the path of executive fiat.

The Framers wanted Congress to be the preeminent branch of government. This phrase “coequal branch of government” is a fiction that crept into our lexicon in the ‘60s. If you read the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, the Framers were indeed worried that the legislative power would necessarily predominate. They never would have predicted that we would have surrendered all our power to the Executive Branch. I think if we find a way on matters domestic and foreign to claw back some of that authority, our politics would be far more boring, but boring is good. A Congress that just went about doing its business with boring diligence and wasn’t mired in constant crisis or controversy or scandal would actually start to regain the trust of the American people, and if the American people don’t trust their government or the people that represent them, that’s a bad place to be in.

I know I’m droning on, but I want to say this finally, because it relates to the last question you asked about “What do you learn in the military and what does that mean for Congress?”

Growing up I took everything for granted. I had a great family in Northeast Wisconsin. I didn’t know anything about the world outside of Wisconsin. It wasn’t until I left the United States of America, and it wasn’t until I went to some countries like Iraq that don’t have what we have here that I truly realized how lucky we are to be Americans. It wasn’t until I saw people in other countries that were willing to fight with us, sacrifice their lives just to have a fraction of what we have that I truly realized how lucky we are to be Americans. And for all our problems, for all the dysfunction in DC, we are still a force for good in this world. We’re not perfect but we are the good guys, and I think recognizing that, being grateful for that, and recognizing that we need to pass it on to the next generation is a profound responsibility all of us have, particularly those who serve in public office.

The post Fixing Congress, Fighting China: An Interview with Rep. Mike Gallagher appeared first on The American Interest.

A Conversation with Antje Hermenau

Born in the East German city of Leipzig, Antje Hermenau entered German national politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall three decades ago. She became a member of “Alliance 90/The Greens” and served in the Bundestag for a decade (1994-2004). Her outreach to voters for Germany’s right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has stirred controversy and broken friendships. The 54-year-old entrepreneur, author, and political iconoclast—based today in Dresden—shares with TAI views from her new book, Views from the Center of Europe: How Saxony Sees the World, out this month.

TAI Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Gedmin and Peter Skerry—TAI contributor and political science professor at Boston College—recently spoke with Hermenau by phone. The following interview has been edited for clarity.

TAI: This November marks 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a native of Leipzig in East Germany, how do you feel about the changes and progress that have happened since unification? Where are we today?

Antje Hermenau: We are in the middle of a new debate about Ossi and Wessi, Easterners and Westerners. We had overlooked over the years the need to give people the chance to express themselves. Still today, there remains a difference in mentality between East and West.

Recent studies show that more than 90 percent of all the top jobs in eastern Germany—be they in media, culture and arts, higher education, or politics—go to people who had been born and raised in western Germany. They are Westerners, and so people in eastern Germany tend to think that those in power are those from over there, and that makes people here revert to identifying as Easterners. This has brought forth a very difficult and harsh discussion. National institutions are not broadly accepted in the eastern part of Germany, because they are in the hands of the Westerners.

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Antje Hermenau

TAI: Did you imagine in 1989 that there would be still be a significant divide between Ossi and Wessi, 30 years later?

AH: No, I was struck by that myself. It started with the financial crisis of 2008. The idea for how to deal with the crisis was very different in Eastern Europe and Western Europe, especially regarding Greece. It was at this time that many people started to feel anxious and uncertain about the future. In the eastern part of Europe, and this holds true for my home state of Saxony as well, people think you have to work hard and get what you earn. For instance, Slovenians don’t understand why they have to pay into the pot to save the poor in southern states like Greece and Portugal, while Greece, for example, is paying off an average pension that is double what the Slovenian government can pay. So this has caused a stir. Here, the debate between Westerners and Easterners has reignited. A few years earlier, in 2005 or 2006, I thought we were through with it. Now the gap has opened again. The money question in 2008 was the first big one, and the immigration question in 2015 was the second.

TAI: When these questions get talked about, some analysts impose a rigid divide between economic and cultural dimensions of the problem. How would you address that?

AH: It has of course an economic and cultural dimension. It always has. As I explained with the Greek pension example, there is of course a feeling of injustice as the Slovenes are paying in and the Greeks are taking out. But there is an issue of identity as well, which resurfaced in 2015 as people said they were not going to give in to mass migration.

The West European countries had their colonial history, people coming in from former colonies. But they proved too much to assimilate: think of the British Empire, or look at the banlieues around Paris, for instance. The eastern Germans think that western Germans consider themselves to be West Europeans, because they were on the side of the West during the Cold War. But the West Germans were cut off from their centuries of historical understanding as being part of Mitteleuropa, Central Europe. They made themselves believe they were West Europeans, which they are not. This is why the intra-German debate is so crucial, from my point of view.

At the same time, many East Europeans are having a discussion about material wealth in their countries. Levels of prosperity in the East are not as high as they are in the West, so the economic question is less of a priority for West Europeans.

Remember also, the communist system always tried to minimize the individual ego, so that everybody would function like a little cog in the machine. This was all-important. The Western attitude is totally contrary, and they sometimes overdo it with emphasizing individualism and the ego. More and more people in the West are now giving up on the idea of social justice, a “solidarity system” for everybody. People can feel that, even if they cannot explain it.

TAI: It makes perfect sense why somebody who’s 50 or 60 years old would be mindful of that difference between having been raised in the East and the West. But how does that apply to a 20-year-old growing up in Leipzig? Would that person feel differently about the West?

AH: They have done polls of younger people and it was a surprise. It turned out that in eastern Germany, there are more conservatives under 30 than in western Germany. I think this is due to what they saw when they were children in the 90s and 2000s. They saw their parents, their aunts and uncles, their grandparents struggle to get back on their feet again because times were harsh.

Whereas young people in the western part, they have had a rather cozy life. Many expect to have a good inheritance, a flat in the big city. Their future looks much more prosperous at first glance. There’s a difference in their awareness of life’s difficulties, and that makes eastern German youth a bit more conservative.

There was another interesting finding: about a quarter of young people in both west and east would prefer to have a strong leader instead of democracy. Twenty-five percent, on both sides.

If you have a look at people under 30 who believe this, in western Germany 40 or 45 percent of them have a migrant background. In the eastern part, it’s nearly all Ossi. If that’s true, then you have a lot of Turkish people in the western part who are voting for Erdogan, for instance, and a lot of eastern Germans actually thinking the same way as them about family, and not trusting the state, not obeying police, and so on. It’s interesting. They’re from totally different backgrounds, but neither is fond of democratic principles. They want to have a strong leader.

TAI: As a politician and a former member of the Bundestag, how do you respond to that? Does it concern you?

AH: I watch these trends with great interest. I think they show the need for a new balance in a new society. The easterners could bring to the conversation a healthy appreciation of the need for solidarity within society. That shouldn’t go away within one generation. It’s a value. It has to be delivered by a social market economy, one still based on competition and individual freedoms. People left communism of their own volition. They don’t want it back. But turbo-capitalism doesn’t match with Central European traditions.

These trends also show a growing gap between big cities and smaller, rural towns. This is seen throughout Europe, as we know from Brexit and from the Yellow Vests in France. This is new because it’s not a divide about money only; it’s about the place you live.

TAI: Does that mean that stronger governments are needed, or stronger communal norms? Because when many Americans look at these trends in Europe, they worry about a move toward more authoritarian governments, or “illiberal democracies” like Hungary and Poland. How do you see that playing out?

AH: Well, I think that democracy doesn’t work if you overstretch the territory it is applied to. This is my wisdom about it. Democracy has to do with trust. Trust has to do with knowing one another and trusting one another. This is not a question of race or racism, by the way. The larger the group and the larger the territory, the more democracy loses its grip, because trust is lacking.

If you look at Germany, people come here because they think they can work here with a blue card if they are well-educated; they come because of our highly functioning welfare state and rule of law. They want to live in a society like ours.

In many ways this dynamic has been shattered, beginning with the financial market crisis in 2008. Then the migration wave in 2015 was like an earthquake to the social welfare system and to the rule of law, because Merkel made the decision herself, like a queen. If you have a social welfare system and rule of law, that keeps society together, even if it is 80 million people. But if this starts to come apart, then you need other glue.

This could be religion, in theory, but this is not a huge factor in the east; only 20 or 25 percent of the people are religious. So you are left with nationalism. Of course some people take advantage of this nationalist idea. Hungary, for instance, is a country that was three times larger just a century ago, but which lost territories after the First World War and now feels like it’s had its limbs cut off. It was a country, too, that had worked hard to be worth inviting into Europe’s first-class club by having low debts and a well-run treasury.

This is actually what has bothered nearly everybody in Eastern Europe—that the rules of the first-class club had supposedly been chiseled in stone, but were broken so easily when it came to the southwestern countries and their problems. So this was perceived as a double standard: The rules applied to the Easterners were not applied to the Southerners. This not only created a sense of injustice, but also raised the question of whether it was even worth aiming at being a member of the first-class club.

TAI: You made a point about how the bonds of trust can get too stretched too thin, perhaps under the influx of a large number of refugees. Does your analysis lead you to conclude that there should be no immigration to Germany?

AH: No, not at all.

TAI: So where do you draw the line?

AH: There are some people in the rural areas who say, “We are fed up with it, stop it, nobody else! We just want to die in dignity.” But generally in small towns, villages, and big towns alike, you can easily discuss migration for skilled work. No problem at all, as long as they assimilate to our way of life and work.

This is a very Protestant attitude: Work is a central part of your life. If you join that model of society and pay your taxes, then you are accepted. It’s not a question of color. The smaller the town is, and the more people see that newcomers are working and don’t want to just take benefits and misbehave, then the more they are accepted. I know some black people, for instance, in a tiny town called Freital who are accepted. Everybody knows them. They may not look like everyone else, but everybody says, well, they’re hard workers at the local factory. So this is fine.

The point is that Saxony is a place with a long and proud history of work. The Saxons were known for making high-quality products and selling them everywhere. Our way of living has been tested by war; the Prussians came over, as did others, for our money and our gold. But in the end we have a system that works. Why should we give it up for something else?

TAI: Antje, related to all this, who are you? Are you a German? Are you an East German? A Saxon? A Central European? A European?

AH: Well, there is a line of affiliations. First and foremost, I am Saxon. I am Saxon by history, by culture, by language, by dialect, and by way of life. Second, I am German. Third, I’m European. As David Goodhart might put it, I have both “anywhere” and “somewhere” qualities.

I love my home region, Saxony. I feel absolutely at home here. I don’t have to be shy about unwritten rules. I understand everybody. We speak the same dialect. We feel a sense of belonging together. I’ve noticed that even at the supermarket and in daily life, people still speak Saxon dialect with each other. They are much more polite with each other than with outsiders.

Something is happening at the moment. The Saxons are coming together. I don’t know whether it’s good or bad yet, but I see that the Saxons give themselves signals that they belong together. If I’m taking a vacation in Turkey, and there is another Saxon in the hotel, we notice that we are Saxons even if we’re speaking English, because the dialect is so strong. Then we say to each other say, “come on, let’s have a coffee.” The feeling of belonging is strong.

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Adrian Ludwig Richter, “Mein Nest ist das Best” (“My Nest is the Best”), via Wikimedia Commons

TAI: If I read the German national press— take Der Spiegel, for example—there’s a different portrait painted of Saxony.

AH: Yeah, the Saxons are those who are loudly defending their being Saxons, their being Germans. Some of us even use the phrase “east German” to identify ourselves. For some well-off people in the West, unfortunately, it is easy to avoid a serious debate on this topic of identity by just calling their opponents Nazis.

I think this is relevant to the cultural struggle between AfD and the Greens at the moment. It has something to do with the divide between “anywheres” and “somewheres.” Throughout Eastern and Western Europe, everybody is discussing identity, territory, regional belonging. Think of Catalonia, and now the Scottish and the Irish because of Brexit. Everybody is discussing this because everybody wants to know where he is at home. They understand the inner nature of globalization.

TAI: What do you make of AfD?

AH: They are very clever. These are smart people. They come from all professions. There are scientists, there are lawyers—these are not people with a low education level. They understand that the social welfare system and the rule of law will be damaged if globalization, or Europeanization, continues to be pushed through.

The Green leader Robert Habeck was recently quoted in Der Spiegel saying that if there is some Heimat [a German term for “homeland” suggestive of community and belonging –ed.], if there is some nation, it should be a European one. The Greens are not able to accept that Germans are a nation and that Germany has a lot of regions with a strong cultural identity. AfD understood that perfectly well. Then they made a different agenda out of it, not about celebrating identity but about rejecting migration. They put it in plain terms for everybody to understand—that they were simply against migration. But I think this is not good.

AfD has different agendas in east and west. In the west it’s actually a more conservative agenda. They want to bring back the conservatism of the 1960s and 70s. The eastern AfD supporters are more often people who want to be among themselves and are perhaps more racist than in the western part.

TAI: Could you differentiate a bit more between the focus on identity and the racist strain in the AfD? Many people would see those as very similar and I know you don’t.

AH: No, it’s definitely not the case. If you look at Central European history, you will see that it’s always been a tale of little tiny territories belonging to a local king, or an archbishop perhaps. They developed independently. Everybody wanted to have a little library and an opera house. Everybody wanted to be ahead of the curve with skills and innovation. The competition of little tiny entities made Central Europe great.

All of these statelets were competing to be the best, the most glorious, and the richest. Innovation developed rapidly because of that high degree of competition. This is the stuff Germany has been made of for the past 300 or 400 years. This was the secret of its development. German Mittelstand [small, locally owned and deeply rooted businesses – ed.] for instance, are a result of this: small entities with an understanding of themselves, who they are, and how they belong together, and everybody is supposed to give his best. There is social control because everyone knows each other. That limits moral hazard.

That’s the identity part. And the AfD now is turning that into a racist thing. Not everywhere, and not everybody, but as a general trend. But on the other hand, they are being called racists by the Left so that the Left can stay in its comfort zone and not question its own assumptions. The Left cannot deliver anymore because it cannot decide what it wants. You can either have totally open borders or a high-quality social welfare system, but you can’t have both at the same time. This is pure mathematics. They are getting brutally nasty about this dilemma, blaming others helplessly. Thus, people in the middle are pushed more and more to the right.

TAI: What would you say to people in the West who say that you can’t return to those values from Mitteleuropa’s past without leading to anti-immigrant sentiment and racism? You obviously see a different path.

AH: Well, the point is that we should have a strict immigration law. There has been one such proposal developed by the government on a federal level. This migration law would, first of all, make sure that we have a system to estimate the skills of people coming in, because we need a skilled labor force to keep our highly developed economy going. The second thing is to be strict with those who don’t behave like guests when they come here. Something has to be done about it, because a lot of Germans feel exploited by migrants, even if they initially have a positive attitude toward them. Migrants have occupied streets in some neighborhoods in western German towns, and the police are underequipped to deal with the problem. So this has to be stopped.

If the state is able to regain power over people who think that they can behave however they want, then people will regain trust in our institutions, including the police. But if the politicians in Berlin try to explain to us that we have to learn Arabic if we don’t understand what is spoken on the streets, that’s another story.

So, there has to be a change in immigration law. There’s no point in not having immigration. The point is to make it smart.

TAI: How will history remember Angela Merkel?

AH: Well, she hasn’t given something to the people like Gerhard Schroeder with Agenda 2010 [a series of labor market reforms widely regarded as necessary and successful – ed.] or Helmut Kohl with reunification. For quite a while people thought she was handling the situation well enough; they thought she had things under control and we didn’t have to take care. This worked for the first years of her chancellorship. But when the financial market crisis came in 2008, that trust was a little shaken. After the migration decision in 2015, it was shaken severely. I think Merkel will be remembered as the chancellor who was not able to understand what had changed within and around Europe during her time in office.

TAI: What about European parliamentary elections this spring? Will those be important as a signal of political trends in Europe?

AH: Well, we will have a slightly more conservative Europe than we’ve had so far. Leftist and Green activists understand that very well. Some have made sweeping predictions about what this means for the future of Europe. This is a bit overstated. People don’t really know what the future of Europe will be in the next 20 or 30 years. Politicians seem unable to explain to the people what is going to happen or even what good options the Europeans have. As long as mainstream politicians are not able to explain complexity, strong leaders will be preferred.

TAI: You’ve now mentioned the Greens a few times. As a former member of Alliance 90, the proto-Green Party in East Germany, and then as a former Green in the Bundestag, how do you see them today? Where are they going?

AH: They still have a very strong leftish attitude. And this leftism is not a wing of the party anymore, or a factional tendency, it’s an inner, dominant attitude. So all of the proletarians and workers have been drawn to the AfD because they didn’t feel that the Greens would take care of their social situation, and it has become a daily struggle with migrants coming in for flats and low-paying jobs. The Greens don’t seem to understand that. Or if they do they just don’t care.

Being a leftist is supposed to mean you take care of the proletarians, but the Greens’ leftism is something else. The proletarians didn’t want to be taken care of by the Greens, so the Greens found someone else to take care of. These are the migrants—not those who can earn their money themselves, but poor migrants who have such a hard life. This is something that people here understand as an offense against them: they’ve been exchanged, so to speak, as the object of political activity.

To be sure, the Greens have had huge results in the polls and even in some elections—have a look at Bavaria last autumn. They are able to represent a certain lifestyle that is more urban, more female, and more well-off. It looks nice, it sounds nice, it smells nice, but I don’t know whether it is fit for many Germans.

The western Germans are living on an island, whereas the whole of Europe is at sea, besieged by the high waves. The Wessis just don’t get the message because they are still on the island and unshaken.

The irony is that because of Germany’s particular economic model, rooted in the Mittelstand, the gap between poor and rich has not opened as widely as it has in countries like France, Great Britain, or Russia. And now spoiled Germans are sawing off the branch they are sitting on by demanding too much from the Mittelstand in the form of high taxes and red tape. The Greens, meanwhile, have embraced the idea that German history was the womb the Nazis came out of, thus discrediting all Germany’s rich cultural heritage, like Beethoven or Goethe. Astonishingly, the communists in the GDR tried to do the same thing: cut off the East Germans from their centuries-long history and culture, with utopian promises of a new time and a “new man.” This way of thinking is quasi-religious, and you see a similar attitude in the Greens’ catastrophic alarmism regarding global warming. This is an important issue, but I no longer believe in the simplistic framework the Greens offer. Life is more complex.

TAI: When the Greens emerged out of a social movement in the 70s and 80s, they were marginalized by the established parties. Do you see parallels between the way the political elites tried to marginalize the Greens back then, and the way the elites are responding to the AfD, or the Freie Wähler [Free Voters, locally organized groups of voters who are not officially registered political parties –ed.] today?

AH: Of course I do. I remember how the Greens were treated like that when the Iron Curtain was still up. I remember how the PDS—now Die Linke, formerly SED, the East German Communist Party—was treated like that. Frankly, I was nasty to them myself because we were on opposite sides during the communist era. But I now detect this attitude in the response to Freie Wähler and the AfD.

There are racists in the AfD, it’s true. If the AfD were a clear-cut conservative party, it would take over the CDU. But since there are neo-fascists and racists among its ranks, including in leading positions in the party, the AfD cannot be taken seriously. The party has been unable to get rid of those people. Formerly they had been part of the NPD, the National Democratic Party, but they never did well at the polls. And then they just slipped into the AfD, as if by osmosis. This is the AfD’s big problem.

On the other hand, there have been violent leftists within the Green Party and Die Linke, and now there are violent people in the AfD. So I think this is actually the same phenomenon. Meanwhile, if you look at the oldest party in Germany, the Social Democrats, they are losing support every day. They behave like children, not adults. They betray people while looking straight into the camera. They aren’t taken seriously anymore by people who understand what’s going on.

TAI: Do you believe there has to be an alternative to the AfD and the SPD, then?

AH: Yes. The Greens have chosen a path that will not lead to them taking over the Social Democrats or even Die Linke. Maybe their idea of an unconditional basic income without any taxes will do the trick, but I’m not sure that will work. The Greens are taking care of migrants while neglecting proletarians. Those who live here—the taxpayers who pay into the social welfare system and who pay for politicians’ salaries in the Bundestag—feel betrayed by them. Twenty percent of the people may look at the world like the Greens do: “We are cosmopolitan, and we don’t have a nation, and we don’t have a Heimat.” But this is not the majority in Germany. And it’s not the majority in Europe in general.

TAI: What’s the political vehicle that can articulate the concerns and interests of these people who are being left out?

AH: Well, I mean, go back to the roots. Take care of the social welfare of the people you are surrounded by. That’s why I’m supporting the Freie Wähler. This is not exactly a party but, in Saxony for instance, a loose association of 10,000 people organized in 900 different tiny groups, each one responsible for the particular place they live in. We have 100 people from all over Saxony forming a little quasi-party for one goal: to be electable to the Landtag, which is the regional parliament here in Saxony.

This is just a vehicle to get the Freie Wähler into the Landtag, since there is a law saying you have to form a party if you want to run. We have strong support from a lot of mayors. The business community is stepping up, too. The Mittelstand in rural areas, craftsmen, architects, and engineers are joining and helping with the platform, because they understand that the important thing is to make democracy work in the territory you are living in.

The people don’t trust the elites on top anymore. This occurs from time to time in history if some people are too long at the golden table. The point is that we need other people you can trust. Brussels and Berlin are telling people in little tiny towns what they have to think. We turn it around and say to people in those towns: you say what you think, and you say what you need, and you say what you want and don’t want.

We try to achieve smart political solutions on the Länder [state – ed.] level. If we have to discuss it on the federal level, we will do it in the Bundesrat [Federal Council, Germany’s second legislative chamber – ed.], where the Länder work together, and seek support from others. This is actually the Bavarian solution, with a local conservative party (the CSU) and Freie Wähler. Something like Freie Wähler is a necessity. Communities and municipalities should have a say. They should be given more money, and more decision-making authority. Municipalities have to be strengthened as the world is shackled by globalization. People need a home, or what we call here a Heimat.

TAI: It sounds like you’re talking about what we in the United States might call decentralized democracy: bringing democratic decision-making down to a much more local level.

AH: Yes, and it has to happen. This is inevitable. If people get a feeling that they don’t have a say, they will just say no.

TAI: Any final thoughts for us?

AH: It’s important to remember that Germany has a different economic model than most places. It’s the Mittelstand model. This means that you have a lot of skilled workers, and bosses taking care of tiny firms with fewer than 10 employees. They have a sense of self-awareness and self-reliance. They want to be full citizens in their community.

Now Germany has turned out to be the economic backbone of Europe because of its Mittelstand. It is an economic giant but a political dwarf. This was the case about 100 years ago as well, when the other powers were strong colony holders, and Germany seemed so weak after having formed as a nation only a few years prior.

Now the critical question is whether Germany can reach the status of adulthood as a serious, competent, and smart leader of Europe without putting others down. We have an overload of fallen empires in this little continent: the British, the French, the Russians. This is a very difficult situation.

The post A Conversation with Antje Hermenau appeared first on The American Interest.

How Businesses Master Disaster

Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

Condoleezza Rice and Amy B. Zegart

Twelve Books, 2018, 336 pp., $30

 

Mastering Catastrophic Risk: How Companies Are Coping with Disruption

Howard Kunreuther and Michael Useem

Oxford University Press, 2018, 248 pp., $29.95

The quest to conquer chance of loss, injury, or failure to secure a reward has been an abiding primum mobile of Western civilization. So, anyway, argued, Peter Bernstein in his seminal 1996 book, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Bernstein claimed that understanding risk, measuring it, and weighing its consequences has been one of the prime catalysts driving modern Western society.

It could be. As societies became more complex, new and more complex risks arose, necessitating the development of ever more complex risk management tools. Better measurement of risk allowed for a more rational process of risk-taking than that furnished by a vague conviction of fate or destiny. Risk management now guides us in making a wide range of decisions—whether at the personal level (buying life insurance, wearing a seatbelt), at the corporate level (making capital investments, developing new products and services), and at the national level (developing defense and disaster management strategies). To the extent that risks are becoming more complex and, in an increasingly connected world, more integrated, there is arguably a greater chance of catastrophic failures, with consequences extending well beyond the bounds of the narrow field in which they originated.

Writing about risk requires one not just to know mathematics and statistics, but also psychology, economics, politics, and history. In different ways, two new books on the topic recognize the fundamental shift taking place in both the nature of the risks corporations now face and how they prepare (or fail to prepare) for them.

Political Risk arose from a course that Condoleezza Rice and Amy Zegart have taught to Stanford MBA students. Their books shares what they have learned from their extensive experience in government and the private sector; from interviews with investors, CEOs, and risk managers; and from their academic research in psychology, organization theory, and political science into the reasons for the decisions individuals and organizations make about political risk. Their stated hope is that the book “will expand our classroom and help business leaders at all levels, in all industries” to better manage political risks.

The authors range well beyond the business world to draw from an eclectic array of risk management successes and failures: nuclear force posture, aircraft carrier operations, Space Shuttle program, evidence-based medicine, and football. Their framework is meant to be “simple yet powerful”: “Understand—>Analyze—>Mitigate—>Respond.”

Twenty-first century political risk is defined in “the most elementary terms” as the “probability that a political action could significantly affect a company’s business.” This exceptionally broad definition supposedly encompasses no less than ten types of political risk: geopolitics; internal conflict; laws, regulations, and policies; breaches of contract; corruption; extraterritorial reach; natural resource manipulation; social activism; terrorism; and cyberthreats. Rice and Zegart acknowledge that these risks originate from a wide variety of actors, not just national governments but also transnational groups, individuals, interest groups, and even international organizations.

The ambitious scope of the book as laid out in its first 50 pages doesn’t leave enough room in the remaining 200 pages for in depth coverage of all ten topics. But an easy and engaging writing style, interesting vignettes, and many useful illustrations and insights make up for the less-than-comprehensive treatment.

After identifying the important mega-trends (globalization, supply-chain innovations, connective technologies, and social activism), in their third chapter the authors address key trends in post-Cold War politics. To cover all of these topics (and the growth of populism and protectionism) in a mere 20 pages requires one to paint with a very broad brush. After reviewing these complex phenomena—and their interaction—the authors offer the reasonable (albeit banal) observation that understanding and managing political risk is a notoriously difficult task for companies.

This chapter segues into a useful discussion of why many firms find managing risk, widely recognized as an essential task, so hard to master. The section dealing with the “The Five Hards” of political risk management (hard to reward, to understand, to measure, to update, and to communicate) is particularly original. Drawing on both academic research and their own experiences, this section highlights some of the significant barriers to developing effective risk assessment and management. Succeeding chapters explore how these hard barriers might be overcome; key takeaways conclude each section. While some are not particularly original (“Prepare for the Unexpected”), others, especially those related to the importance of both tailoring and institutionalizing risk assessment/management functions within the firm, are well argued and quite insightful.

The middle chapters of the book flesh out the aforementioned framework. Appropriately, they start by stressing the importance of knowing your firm and its risk appetite. Here the key is the extent to which the firm as a whole shares an understanding of risk and knows its blind spots. In a chapter imaginatively entitled “Thinking Like a Physicist,” the authors address several key questions: “How can we get good information about the risks we face?”; and “How can we ensure rigorous analysis and integrate the results into our business decisions?” The chapter includes a short but useful discussion of the benefits of scenario planning.

The authors then turn to addressing ways to mitigate risk. Firms are advised: to know what assets are most valuable and most vulnerable; to know how to reduce exposure of those assets to loss; to have protocols and a system for timely warning and action; to limit damage when something bad happens; and to develop contingency plans. Illustrative vignettes from FEDEX, Walmart, the Defense Department, and other organizations are deployed to describe different aspects of various risk mitigation efforts. But alas, this section seems to overlook the old adage that knowing what to do is not the same as knowing how or when to do it.

The last component of the framework is responding to crises. Using wide-ranging vignettes from Marriott Hotels/Indonesia, Apple’s launch of the iPhone 4, the Challenger disaster, BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Tylenol tampering episode, and Jim Harbaugh’s football coaching prowess, the authors outline rules for effective crisis response. Not the least of these is the importance of continuous learning and implementation of proven best practices.

Political Risk’s stated purpose “to expand our classroom and help business leaders at all levels, in all industries” is at least partially fulfilled. Graduate students at schools beyond Rice and Zegart’s Stanford will likely benefit from reading it. Indeed, I have added it to the syllabus of a course I’ve taught since 1984, “International Political Risk Assessment and Management.” That said, its prospective utility to an international business executive is not so clear.

A serious challenge faced by all authors trying to communicate to a business audience is the heterogeneity of the international business community. Seeking to address “business leaders at all levels in all industries” is a daunting task, as is relating wisdom about political and social phenomena in a state of continuous change. Presuming that North American, Asian, European, and Latin American business executives are all concerned with the same “political” risks may be a convenient stance for an author but not for every potential reader. Moreover, aside from geographic and national differences, there are enormous industry differences as well.

There are several more challenges involved in communicating to a business audience. The first is that you must have great empathy for wide variety of risks that senior corporate officials need to address these days. Executives are managing complex organizations with heterogeneous resources and capabilities, operating in multiple economic, political, and legal environments, buffeted by many global political, economic, and financial changes, and forced with making time-limited decisions with less than perfect information about and understanding of the complex environments in which they operate.

It is particularly challenging for many senior corporate officials to understand political and social phenomena. Many of them ascended to senior corporate positions because of their technical or entrepreneurial competence in finance, engineering, business, law, medicine, science, or software development. Understanding such phenomena was often a peripheral concern throughout their careers. They may be aware of how important such things are, but being aware of these things isn’t the same as having deep experience with them or knowing how to integrate that knowledge into a corporate context.

The most serious shortcoming of the Rice/Zegart book is the relative dearth of attention to political risk management (which is not the same as “preparedness”). In the immense risk literature, risk is usually defined either in relation to its probability or to its degree of uncertainty, but the word “uncertainty” does not even appear in the index to this book. “Uncertainty” and “risk,” of course, are far from being synonyms. Risk is a stochastic concept having to do with assessing probabilities of known variables; uncertainty is a structural concept describing situations in which one cannot account for all relevant variables. Woe to the executive who doesn’t know the difference. Thus for Rice and Zegart, evidently, “risk” means either too much, or too little.

The book is replete with anecdotes about failures and successes in political risk assessment, but there is a dearth of discussion of political risk management. Consider the following metaphor: Imagine a well-written book on the risk of loss due to fire. The book examines in detail the causes, types, and varieties of fires (both accidental and non-accidental) and also covers prospective management actions, preparedness efforts, and education of staff. Such a book can be valuable, but it would be thought a serious oversight if it left out even a mention of the existence of fire insurance.

Rice and Zegart’s failure to acknowledge that insurance is available to help mitigate some of the financial impacts of the ten “political risks” is thus regrettable. For example, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2018 that many businesses and municipalities have bought insurance against cyberattacks, and that the majority of the 25 largest U.S. cities had or are looking into buying cyber insurance. It would have been useful to explore the advantages and the shortcomings of such coverage.

Indeed, the authors might have considered using insurance terminology and refer to the “ten political risks” as hazards—namely, things that may cause injury, loss, or destruction. Risk can then be defined as the probability that one’s exposure to a hazard will lead to negative consequences of a certain type or magnitude. A hazard poses no risk if there is no exposure to that hazard. One can only discuss probabilities in a classical fashion when there is a measured risk.

And further, with respect to the political risks of expropriation, currency convertibility and transfer, breach of contract, war, revolution, terrorism, and insurrection, Political Risk completely disregards the large and vibrant insurance market covering these risks. Multiple private, public, and multilateral insurers have been providing billions of dollars of coverage against these risks for decades. The book’s index contains no entries for Lloyds’, AIG, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (or its national counterparts in 20 other countries), the World Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Corporation, or other political risk investment insurers. Indeed, the very word “insurance” is nowhere to be found in book’s index. This would ill serve any business executive looking for a comprehensive treatment of political risk management. In a similar vein, the authors are silent on a whole host of financial guarantees available from many private, national, and multilateral entities that can effectively deter (or mitigate) certain political risks from materializing and causing actual loss to a corporation.

Nonetheless Rice and Zegart’s book is well-written, engaging, and insightful for a variety of educational purposes and for broadening the knowledge of junior corporate officials. For directors and senior corporate officials, however, it is perhaps most useful as a reminder of the ever-shifting range of non-traditional risk challenges and might best be read in conjunction with Kunreuther and Useem’s book, Mastering Catastrophic Risk.

Kunreuther and Useem are two senior Wharton professors who have extensively researched and written about business management of catastrophic risk, insurance, and risk management. Klaus Schwab has referred to them as “two of the world’s most influential risk and strategy luminaries.” Five years in the making, with a research team of 12 persons who conducted scores of interviews with senior executives of more than 100 firms on the S&P 500, overseen by an 11-member senior external advisory board, and financed by generous grants from several insurance companies, Mastering Catastrophic Risk is a “heavy” book. It is fundamentally an inductive work that seeks to capture what firms have done, are doing, and hope to do about managing catastrophic risk. In scope, terminology, and conceptual structure, it is designed for corporate directors, senior corporate executives, insurers, and financiers. It is certainly not for light bedtime or beach reading.

Kunreuther and Useem’s book focuses on the catastrophic risks—whether physical, financial, reputational, political, or business—that threaten a firm’s performance, or even its existence. The authors’ aim is to prepare senior executives for massive disruptions. They argue that firms can strengthen their ability to manage such risks by learning from others’ successes and failures in dealing with catastrophe.

In some respects this book is broader than Rice and Zegart’s in that it covers a wider range of risks (including natural risks), but in other respects it is narrower in that it is not concerned with many risks of lesser impact. Both books draw on recent work from the social sciences to better understand the importance of preparing for the long run even in the face of short-term pressures.

Mastering Catastrophic Risk is logically organized. Part One explores the new risk environment in which firms now operate. Part Two presents a framework for how firms make decisions for managing low-probability/high-impact events by highlighting how companies can recognize their own systematic biases and behave more deliberatively in assessing and managing risks. Part Three contains accounts of U.S. and German companies that have dealt with catastrophes. Part Four deals with how companies’ management of catastrophic risks affects their stakeholders, both internal and external. Finally, the book concludes with a checklist for managing potentially disruptive events before they occur to mitigate their impacts and facilitate recovery.

Early on, the book takes up four linked questions:

WHY is preparing for disruption an essential element of corporate management today—and what are the major drivers leading firms to take action?
WHAT are directors and executives doing about potentially catastrophic risk- and how can they learn from their past failures and successes as well as others?
WHEN do other interested parties become involved after a firm has been disrupted by an adverse event?
HOW can firm improve their mastery of adverse events by being better prepared for them and better managing them when they occur?

Primarily using interviews with senior corporate officials, Kunreuther and Useem take up these questions in detail, finding that these officials are now devoting much more attention to these matters. Officials report being much more likely to be held responsible—and much more likely to take responsibility—for ensuring that their firms are ready to survive and recover from such catastrophes. The authors note that disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Japanese earthquake of 2011 often prompt firms to ratchet up their risk-appraisal and risk-management capabilities.

Kunreuther and Useem then describe a risk analysis cycle that has emerged from the experience of many enterprises. Building on a shared understanding, executives identify and assess the potential risks faced by the firm, determine the firm’s risk appetite and tolerance for such hazards, and develop the firm’s risk management strategy—and then bring it to life. Considerable attention is paid to specific methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative, that have been developed for risk appraisal. The authors report that virtually all of the companies that they interviewed have moved toward more comprehensive and systematic analysis.

As companies have added enterprise risk management to their operations over the past decade, they have developed several specific practices. These include systematic learning from near misses, sophisticated risk modeling and advanced analytics (for example, reinsurance of natural disaster risks), systematically reducing exposure to certain risks, improving internal communications about a firm’s risk management practices, strengthening suppliers against hazards, networking with competitors, business continuity planning, and exercises imagining the next major disruption. The authors illustrate these practices with several examples from recent years.

Part Three of the book focuses on what firms, including Lufthansa and Deutsche Bank, have actually done when coping with major setbacks. There is extensive discussion of how corporate boards have moved from primarily reactive to proactive risk management strategies, helping their firms to define risk appetite, tolerance, and readiness. The growth of board risk management committees is a leading indicator of this change.

In an insightful chapter the authors also cover how businesses have increasingly used their own catastrophic risk management capabilities to assist others dealing with calamities. The authors note that, by one estimation, the fraction of the largest 500 U.S. corporations engaged in some form of disaster giving worldwide has risen from less than 20 percent in 1990 to more than 95 percent by 2014. Corporate capabilities for delivering assistance (FedEx, UPS), emergency communications (AT&T, Vodaphone), transportation (airlines), and food (Walmart) are increasingly being utilized. For example, in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina, Walmart mobilized more than 60 staff members from its emergency operations center to pre-position more than $5 million of supplies in the affected area. Working with local authorities, they delivered 1,500 truck loads of products and 100,000 free meals at a time when government provisions were scarce.

Part Four, the capstone of the book, categorizes the eight pitfalls one encounters when dealing with catastrophic risk, 15 steps to master catastrophic risk, and a ten-item mission critical checklist. They write that firms need to:

recognize that the potential for catastrophic losses is rising;
identify and appraise the risks they face;
define your firm’s risk appetite and risk tolerance;
invest now in taking protective measures;
learn from your own adverse events and those of others;
involve personnel at all levels in designing risk management and crisis-response strategies;
recognize your firm’s behavioral biases and weaknesses;
strategize for recovery after the loss occurs;
protect against extremes through risk transfer (such as insurance); and
prepare the next generation of the firm’s risk managers.

If the greatest strength of Rice and Zegart’s book is risk identification, Kunreuther and Useem’s greatest strength is in risk management practices. Although their approaches vary, the resulting analyses are complementary, which serves to enhance the credibility of both works.

Both sets of authors have sought to capture the dynamism of the mega-risks that have arisen in the past decade. Within firms, the need to learn to manage such risks, to become more resilient if not perfectly secure, never ends. Tomorrow will bring new and probably even more complex challenges. Albeit in different ways, both books will help firms cope with the enterprise risk challenges they face today, and those they will face tomorrow as well.

*                                    *                                    *

On Risk and Uncertainty

In 1921, Frank Knight made a classical and useful distinction between risk and uncertainty in his famous book, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Risk, he argued, can be priced in financial markets because it depends on known distributions of events to which investors can assign probabilities, and thus price things accordingly. Uncertainty can’t be priced—it relates to structural possibilities that cannot be predicted, measured, or modeled.

To better appreciate the value of Knight’s distinction, there is an insightful metaphor about a man playing Russian roulette. He takes a standard revolver with room for six bullets, puts one in the chamber, spins it, places it next to his head, and pulls the trigger. He understands the risk and knows that he has a one in six chance of blowing his brains out. He can make an informed decision about whether to play.

Imagine, however, the game played by a man given a mystery gun prepared by someone else. The gun could have no bullets in it, six dummy bullets, or anywhere from one to six real bullets or blanks. That is uncertainty; he has no idea how to assess the risk of shooting himself.

Even partial information, however, can serve to reduce uncertainty and improve his ability to assess risk. If he knows for a fact that one of the chambers is empty and two of the bullets are blanks, then he is in a different position: He knows there is at least a 50 percent chance of surviving. While uncertainty still exists, it is reduced. He can now make a partially informed decision.

Why is this distinction between risk and uncertainty important? Whether in politics, economics, or business, the gathering and analysis of relevant information can serve both to reduce uncertainty and to improve the estimation of risk. Better estimation of risk, in turn, allows for better management of that risk.

High uncertainty tends to paralyze decision-making. Hence the incentive to reduce uncertainty and better estimate the risk is a constant in many human endeavors. Although the terminology changes over time (“the known, the unknown, and the unknown unknowns,” for example), what has not changed since Frank Knight’s time is that conflating risk and uncertainty and using the terms interchangeably is evidence of muddled thinking.

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A Rebuke for Populism?

One of Europe’s most interesting political stories is currently unfolding in Slovakia as the country readies itself for a presidential election later this month. Defying the common view of Central Europe as a backward region captivated by charismatic nationalist leaders with a soft spot for Russia, Slovaks are about to elect a squarely pro-Western, liberal figure—and a woman, no less!—to their highest office. Zuzana Čaputová is backed by a coalition of new reformist center-right and center-left parties which stand a good chance of taking over the government after next year’s parliamentary election.

Thanks to its small size and a relatively fluid party system, the post-communist country has become a small laboratory of how centrist politics can respond to challenges of the populist era. Slovakia has been in the midst of all the major debates animating the Western world: from the question of immigration and asylum policy in 2015, to the apparent corruption of political elites, to the pressing geopolitical challenges driven by the country’s proximity to Ukraine and Russia.

Yet the ongoing political realignment and the rise of an aggressive moderate reformism have been catalyzed by the murders of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová in February last year. After years of corruption scandals under the watch of the ruling, left-populist Smer party, the country saw protests on a scale comparable to the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Smer’s leader and then-Prime Minister Robert Fico tried to dismiss those as organized and funded by George Soros. That strategy backfired since the mobilization cut across demographics and geography, and reflected a genuine sense of discontent with the country’s status thirty years removed from the fall of communism.

The wobbly coalition of Smer, Slovak nationalists, and a small Hungarian party went through a government reshuffle, forcing Mr. Fico out last spring. But that was only the beginning. New political parties emerged, one on the center-Left (Progressive Slovakia) and another on the center-Right (SPOLU-Civic Democracy), both backing Ms. Čaputová in her run for president.

Ms. Čaputová is an attorney who built her career fighting state-connected mafia bosses in courts. Although recognized as Slovakia’s version of Erin Brockovich, her campaign initially struggled to take off. At the end of January, she was trailing in the polls behind three or four other candidates, making Slovaks wonder (this writer included) whether her candidacy was viable at all. What has happened since is nothing short of spectacular: Her support skyrocketed from around 10 percent to over 50 percent in some polls, prompting speculation that she could outright win in the first round scheduled for March 16.

While that is unlikely, the election is hers to lose, regardless of whom she faces in the second round. In retrospect, the key to her success seems simple: She is a very strong candidate. Articulate, charismatic, and exuding warm-heartedness, her career path pits her against Slovakia’s corrupt status quo, without having to resort to the rhetoric of elite vs. ordinary people that is emblematic of populism. As a result, the attacks against her appear more and more desperate. Because Ms. Čaputová received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2016 for her activism, Smer resorted to a vile anti-Semitic conspiracy theory picturing her as a puppet of international Zionism.

These smears indicate that Slovakia is still very much divided. The decline of Mr. Fico’s Smer and the rise of the moderates has not eroded the support of Slovakia’s Neo-Nazi party, whose leader, Marián Kotleba, is also running for president. Another, more promising nationalist candidate in the race is Štefan Harabin, former Justice Minister and a current Supreme Court justice. Echoing Donald Trump’s bombastic, larger-than-life style and lack of scruples, Mr. Harabin took months of medical leave from the court to kick off his campaign, without damaging his standing among voters. He promises to stretch the powers of the office (normally quite constrained) to their limits, in part by ending the EU’s sanctions against Russia.

It is quite likely that Ms. Čaputová will face Mr. Harabin in the run-off, instead of Smer’s more respectable and polished candidate, Maroš Šefčovič, the current Vice President of European Commission for Energy Union. But Mr. Harabin’s populism risks ringing hollow in a political environment sensitized to questions of the rule of law and fairness. No matter how much he depicts himself as an angry outsider, for decades he was among the most powerful men in Slovakia’s judiciary and bears direct responsibility for its current malaise.

And the presidential election is likely only the beginning. Far more consequential will be the parliamentary election next year, and, specifically, what forces will replace the declining Smer. In addition to the two new parties, polling jointly at almost 10 percent, the departing president, Andrej Kiska—a widely popular figure and a staunch Atlanticist—is rumored to be considering party politics, either as a leader of a moderate, pro-Western coalition of existing parties or as a founder of a new reformist party of his own.

The Guardian’s Natalie Nougarède was among the first Western observers to note the potential of these events for a broader turning point in central Europe. If the current political reshuffling ushers in a stable, reformist government next year, “the children of those who successfully fought for democracy in 1989 will have demonstrated that ‘truth’ and ‘decency’ (key slogans they use) can yet again be victorious.”

While nothing is preordained, there are reasons for optimism. Unlike in wealthier, better functioning democracies such as the neighboring Czech Republic, Slovaks understand that they have no time for complacency. The country’s small size, tight social connections, and lack of rigid party structures facilitates political realignments and mobilization. And, unlike in, say, Hungary, Slovakia’s politics is not defined primarily by the traumas of its past but by the promise of the future.

These dynamics are not just interesting in their own right or because of their implications for the strength of the transatlantic partnership. Most importantly, they illustrate the broader political changes currently underway in the Western world. The divide between Ms. Čaputová and Mr. Harabin is one between “open” and “closed” society, forward-looking dynamism and nostalgia, or between cosmopolitanism and ethnic particularism. The trap that Smer’s Mr. Šefčovič has fallen into is that he is trying to be both. His personal sensibilities and style, as a Brussels technocrat in good standing, are as worldly and serious as anybody’s. Yet Smer’s electoral base, which he is trying to reach, is more rooted than cosmopolitan, responding well to messages of nostalgia and stability.

In contrast to U.S. millennials’ supposed love affair with socialism and the rhetoric heard recently at CPAC, Slovakia’s example suggests that the polarity between “socialism” and the “free market” is largely dead in a country that experienced actual socialism first hand. As the centrist coalition behind Ms. Čaputová illustrates, the abstract dichotomy between “small” and “big” government does not apply much anymore, both in terms of substance and electoral appeal.

That is not to say that there is no disagreement over specific policies. Rather, the importance of such differences pales in comparison with the question of whether Slovakia can become a normal European country. Furthermore, the possible solutions to economic and social challenges facing Slovakia—from aging to low levels of R&D to a large and poorly integrated Roma population—do not map neatly into the Left/Right dichotomy.

By contrast, cultural divides, including on questions of cultural and social conservatism, are not going anywhere, even if they seem somewhat muted at the moment. Ms. Nougarède was right to observe that last year’s protests cut across such divides, as organizers “reached out to—rather than shunned—socially conservative parts of the population.” Yet, Ms. Čaputová has been far more outspoken about her liberal positions on same-sex marriage and adoptions by same-sex couples than most candidates before her. That is bound to deter some of the more conservative Catholic voters who would otherwise stand on the “open” side of the divide with her. At the same time—and herein lies a lesson for social liberals in the West – she has never flaunted her views simply to “own” socially conservative audiences. Quite the contrary.

It was not a long ago that I wrote in these pages about Slovakia’s wobbly geopolitical allegiances and its emboldened, Kremlin-loving nationalists. While those have yet to be defeated, for the first time in years it feels like it is not them but the country’s pro-Western, reformist forces that have wind in their sails. We will see soon whether this momentum can be sustained beyond the current presidential race.

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Ilhan Omar and the Jews

The other day New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman slugged his opinion piece on Ilhan Omar with the statement: “The congresswoman and I have a lot in common—but not her stance on Israel.” The commonality reference was mainly to the congressional distinct in Minneapolis that Omar represents and where Friedman grew up, and which now as then is home to a large number of politically liberal Jews.

That’s right: Omar won election because a lot, or enough, Jewish Democrats favored her over a more centrist candidate in the Democratic primary, and then over her Republican challenger this past November. Any buyers’ remorse yet, do you suppose?

But I can beat that, Tom: What do Ilhan Omar and Spiro Agnew share in common, and which includes their views on Israel?

Spiro who? For those who are too young to remember, Spiro Agnew was born in Baltimore, got elected Governor of Maryland in 1966, and then became Richard Nixon’s Vice-President until he resigned under pressure of (fully justified) financial impropriety accusations in October 1973. He died in well-deserved obscurity in September 1996 at the age of 77.

Ilhan Omar was born in Mogadishu on October 4, 1981—the same day as my eldest son, as it happens. That makes her 37 and, as is apparent, very much alive.

So what do the two have in common? They are both captives of the brain-addling condition of Jewcentricity, the tendency to exaggerate the role of Jews and all things pertaining to them—in one of four ways.

Stripped down to its skivvies, the thesis of Jewcentricity is that four modes of exaggerating the importance of Jews exist, and that to understand fully any one mode requires a grasp of the other three. That is because the four interact, each type often goading others on.

The four modes derive from a simple two-by-two matrix: Jews do it and non-Jews do it; some do it with positive affect and others with negative affect. So there are Jews who do it with a positive affect: chauvinists. There are Jews who do it with a negative affect: self-hating Jews. There are non-Jews who do it with a positive affect: philo-Semites. And, infamously, there are non-Jews who do it with a negative affect: anti-Semites.

Agnew and Omar fall into this last category, it being understood that anti-Semitism comes in a variety of shades, from eliminationist/genocidal all the way to “country club” preppy bigotry, and everything—including anti-Zionism when it masks anti-Semitism—in between.

Most people are not Jewcentric. They have better things to do with their time and energy. But when it comes to stereotyped exaggerations, it’s hard to think of a group that has been more subject for a longer time to funhouse mirror distortions than Jews. Of course, Jewcentrics don’t realize that they are in the throes of Jewcentricity. They think they’re being rational and objective. But others can detect the malady with ease if they know the telltale signs, all of which elide on aspects of obsession. There are basically three such signs.

First, the exaggerations of true dyed-in-the-wool Jewcentrics manifest only with regard to Jews, despite the obvious fact that the general impact profile of any group of people can be exaggerated. Second, Jews are singled out for having specific characteristics, abilities, or powers even though lots of other group actors have them, too. And third, conspiracy theory logic, with presumptions of monolithic actors and “hidden hand” connections, is always present to one degree or another—even in examples of positive-affect Jewcentricity. This explains the Jewcentric tendency to leap from the specific to the general in one bounding lurch, ascribing to all Jews what motivates some or a few or even one Jew.

With this basic framework in mind, we can now proceed to tell two stories whose inner themes intertwine despite being separated by more than forty years in time.

The Spiro-Fahd Story

For a reason I don’t care enough about to untangle, Rachel Maddow recently decided to investigate the sordid history of Spiro Agnew. I found out about her interest when friends brought to my attention her on-the-air revelation of documents showing a connection circa 1980 between the disgraced Vice President and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

Also aired on her February 21 show was a document written by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1988 as he was campaigning for the presidency. In a handwritten note, the elder Bush thanked Agnew for his willingness to consult on Bush’s Dan Quayle problem. The purpose of showing this document, presumably, was to besmirch the reputation of the recently deceased former President, and the Republican establishment with him, for having had anything to do with a character like Agnew, even in private, so many years after his disgrace.

The truth could’ve been rather different: Bush could have been merely brushing off the pesky and needy Agnew in the polite manner in which he was accomplished. The text of the brief note allows for several interpretations of motive.

There is irony in Maddow’s accusatory interest in Agnew. Born in 1973, the year of Agnew’s resignation, Maddow can’t possibly remember the 1966 Governor’s race in Maryland, or the conditions that preceded it.

But I do.

During the 1950s, slot machine gambling was legal in Maryland, at least in a few counties. Out along route 301, around Waldorf on the Eastern shore, a long string of gambling establishments existed on both sides of the road, which at the time was something well short of a highway. I remember one of these establishments well: It was called the Wigwam, and was constructed to look like a wigwam, except of course made out of metal and steel. It occupied the space of about half a basketball court. In the center was a barbecued-ribs dispensing operation, and against one wall was a Wurlitzer jukebox. The rest of the place was packed with slot machines cheek by jowl.

My parents used to drag me to this place when I was a kid once or twice a summer. The two of them would start shoving coins into these machines, stopping only to light another cigarette, and pretty soon forgot all about me. I was bored and the noise was deafening, so I figured out how to get small change from my parents so that I could play the jukebox, sitting on the floor right in front of the speaker to drown out the slot noise. I heard Connie Francis sing “Lipstick on Your Collar” about 5,000 times over those years.

Anyway, the slot-machine business, which was supposed to provide resources for Maryland’s public schools, ended up being the source of massive corruption. The mafia came down from New Jersey and New York, and before long some locals were paying their mortgages with multiple rolls of coins. Honest merchants who disliked gambling were hard put not to allow machines in their establishments, and most of them took to just shutting up lest bricks get mysteriously heaved through their storefront windows.

Eventually, the slime grew so large that a backlash developed, and the up and coming Spiro Agnew opposed gambling. When he later ran as a Republican for Governor in 1966—herein the irony—he was the more liberal candidate. He ran against George P. Mahoney, an old-fashioned Dixiecrat racist whose campaign slogan was, “A man’s home is his castle.” Translation in the context of those times: If a person wants to be a bigot, it’s no one’s business but his own. Agnew campaigned on integrating the schools, pledged that schools would be properly funded from other revenue streams, and promised a statewide non-discrimination law. Once he was elected, he actually did all those things.

Richard Nixon, who had run in 1968 on a dog-whistle racist law-and-order platform, picked Agnew as his running mate because Agnew was usefully to his left at a time before liberal Republicans became extinct, and he was governor of a swing state to boot.

Once Nixon won the election and wished then to appear more presidential, however, Agnew became the Administration’s designated attack dog to the President’s right. It helped Agnew to do this job that H. Rap Brown had staged a riot in Salisbury, Maryland in 1967, during his time as governor. Armed with speeches written by Pat Buchanan, and later by William Safire, Agnew performed his role with aplomb. It was a pioneering effort of sorts. It is perhaps not too much to say that Agnew was Trump before Trump was Trump. And it was during that period that the Agnew-Saudi connection first formed. That connection, revealed on Maddow’s show, concerns events that took place in 1980. Khalid was the Saudi King and Fahd the Crown Prince. But the connection went back at least nine years before.

Agnew first met King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in 1971 when he was in Iran representing the United States at the celebration of the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire. Often called “the most expensive party ever,” the Shah set up tents in the Iranian desert. Agnew, who loved to play pool, brought along a pool table on a military transport plane and had it set up in his lavish tent. In the tent next to him was King Faisal, who heard the noises of colliding billiard balls and came over Agnew’s tent to see what was going on. Agnew and Faisal struck up a friendship that night, and that is how Agnew formed his first contacts in Saudi Arabia. Agnew then traveled to Saudi Arabia, where Faisal presented him with a golden dagger.

After Agnew resigned, he used his connections in Saudi Arabia to land contracts for his business selling military uniforms. In one of history’s ironies, Agnew was in Saudi Arabia on the day, in August 1974, that Nixon resigned.

That, then, is background for the 1980 events described by Maddow: Agnew pleaded with Crown Prince Fahd to give him fairly substantial sums of money, $200,000 for a six-month period to start, so that he could continue his intrepid effort to oppose Zionist schemes to pervert U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Agnew had come to believe a somewhat distended version of the standard traditional State Department Arabist plaint: that the Jewish lobby had bent U.S. policy in a way that harmed U.S. interests with the Arabs.

There had been hints of this thinking in a 1976 novel that Agnew published, a novel that in turn evoked a classic New York Times column from the aforementioned Bill Safire, entitled “Agnew and the Jews.” In the column, Safire argued that Agnew turned against all the Jews because some few Jewish associates in Maryland had turned state’s evidence against him, plea bargaining in essence, in the real estate developers’ kick-back scheme that got Agnew booted out of office three years earlier. Jewcentricity at work…

The Arabist argument is not rare, even today. John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt made it in book form not that long ago, and the argument in and of itself does not make one an anti-Zionist, let alone an anti-Semite. If Zionists want to be Zionists, fine, so the defense goes; only they shouldn’t do it at the expense of a sound American policy.

Against the long pull of history, however, the Arabist argument does not hold up. The U.S.-Israeli special relationship has not prevented very good working U.S. relationships with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Oman, Egypt (after 1972), Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia. On the contrary, long before Iran concentrated Arab minds, the closeness of U.S.-Israeli relations actually acted as an incentive for those Arab leaders seeking U.S. friendship and/or mediation with regard to Israel. The additional irony is that this insight became the basis for U.S. policy during the time Agnew was Vice President, specifically, after the War of Attrition and the Jordanian Civil War in the 1969-71 period.

But Agnew, disgraced, marginalized, and without hale income in the years after his resignation, adopted a particularly conspiratorial version of the Arabist cant. What is not ironic is that Agnew’s plea to Crown Prince Fahd was not in vain. A subsequent message from Agnew to Fahd thanks him for turning over the money. Yes, the Saudi royal family, at the pinnacle of the regime, was in those days not above funding efforts internal to the United States to harm U.S.-Israeli relations.

Saudi (and Emirati) dog-whistle anti-Semitism is not entirely a thing of the past. For example, whenever the regime’s publicists want to attack the Al-Thanis in Qatar, which they want to do very regularly lately, one of their methods is to show high-ranking Qataris smiling and shaking hands with Jews of various sorts. And of course, the Qataris return the favor to the Al-Saud in precisely the same way. That said, it is hard to imagine the current Saudi Crown Prince secretly financing explicitly anti-Israel activities inside the United States, using a U.S. citizen as a vehicle, as was the case in 1980. We should perhaps be grateful for small mercies.

That Agnew was murderously anti-Semitic as opposed to self-interestedly and delusionally anti-Zionist seems unlikely. But that he became Jewcentric over time, after his fall, is clear. He apparently didn’t care that Armenian and Greek lobbies tried to influence U.S. policy toward Turkey, or that the Taiwan lobby tried to derail the normalization of relations with China. He only cared about the Zionists. It was all a unified secret plot, as his novel had it. The Zionists had all this money that gave them entrée to inner circles; what, and the oil lobby on the other side of the issue didn’t?! This is Jewcentric obsession right out of central casting.

A final note on the Agnew saga: In all of his correspondence with Crown Prince Fahd, Agnew never mentions the word Jews; he always and only uses the word Zionists. Rachel Maddow, on the other hand, never referred to Zionists during the February 21 show—only to the Jews. She, in effect, makes the two proper nouns synonymous, strongly implying that Agnew was an anti-Semite. As if Democrats by definition cannot be anti-Semitic because Republicans can be and often are?

How somebody with a doctorate in politics from Oxford University could be so sloppy with language is a little hard to figure. So this is probably not sloppiness but deliberate insinuation of a particularly nasty and defensivist [see: Ilhan Omar] kind. Alas, I am not an expert on Dr. Maddow. I watch very little television, and watch her show basically never. Having to sit through the February 21 show twice via YouTube, so as not to miss any details, reminded me of a trip to the dentist. I can’t understand why anybody watches her, except perhaps as a form of tedium therapy.

The Ilhan Omar Story

Spiro Agnew’s Saudi connection is very old news compared to the volcanic flow caused lately by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. This flow is multilayered. The obvious, top layer is about U.S. Middle East policy, and specifically policy toward Israel. The less obvious but probably more important explanatory layer is the deliberate attempt by self-styled “progressives”—more accurately, “social justice” warriors peddling a para-Marxist, anti-Enlightenment theory of all politics as inherently and only conflictual—to seize control of the Democratic Party. And what issue has become the vanguard of that effort? Israel and the Jews. Jewcentricity lives, and comes in oh so handy.

Things did not start out quite this way. The other Muslim woman newly elected to Congress, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan’s 13th District, distinguished herself right out of the gate, on January 3, by saying: “We’re gonna go in there and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.” That, of course, was music to the ears of the President and his supporters, and to anyone wishing to caricature and denigrate Muslim women. Ms. Tlaib apparently lacks much impulse control, the presence of which enables most normal people to reserve such language with respect to Donald Trump to exclusively private use.

Ilhan Omar, on the other hand, has all the impulse control she needs. When she says things guaranteed to start a fight, she says them with staff assistance—which she plainly needs—and with full deliberation. She is, in short, a designated provocateur.

So it doesn’t really matter what she says or thinks, prevaricating this way and that over BDS and the two-state solution, because the foreign policy aspects of this spectacle are not what her minders most care about right now. They care about seizing control of the Democratic Party by polarizing opinion over everything Jewish, and wagering that the younger insurgent set, which includes plenty of anti-Israel Jews, will in due course defeat the forces of the status quo—in due course meaning before primary season gets going in earnest.

And that is what set the stage for yesterday’s anti-hate resolution passed by the Congress. This was the Democratic leadership’s way of clubbing to death, with a huge wet ecumenical all-ethnicity mop, the problem that Omar et al. had created. The result, aside from the waste of time it occasioned? A resolution so ridiculously anodyne that only Torquemada could have objected to it in principle.

This all started in Minnesota, but it has not stayed there. Omar was chosen to run against an outstanding and popular centrist Democrat who had been Speaker of the Minnesota House, Margaret Kelliher. Charged up by that upset win, the focus has now shifted to the national level. All energy is being focused on the “near enemy,” the Hillary remnant of tired, aging conventionalists. The “far enemy,” the Republican Party or what remains of it, can wait until November 2020.

When Ms. Omar made her initial mid-February comment about it being “all about the Benjamins, baby,” I confess I wasn’t really paying attention. I thought she was referring to the upcoming April 9 Israeli election between two Benjamins: Gantz and Netanyahu. Once I figured out what she was actually talking about, it had a very familiar ring. It was just the old Israel lobby argument, with anti-Semitic money tropes draped over it, the same argument (without the drapes) that Spiro Agnew made years ago, but this time coming out of the mouth of a 37-year-old Somali woman.

Then, more recently, came the dual-loyalty accusation. A pattern was forming. But between the two statements something else became clear: This woman is almost encyclopedically ignorant about everything concerned with her new job. She has no idea what she’s talking about most of the time. Perhaps her BA from North Dakota State University didn’t prepare her adequately for the intricacies of national-level policy debates.

Why do I say that? In mid-February, Elliott Abrams, the recently appointed State Department special envoy for Venezuela policy, appeared before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Ms. Omar improbably sits on that Committee, and began her questioning by calling Abrams “Mr. Adams,” which she never corrected. She then read a statement in which she mispronounced many words, including most of the proper nouns. The statement was a potted history of Mr. Abrams’s supposed perfidies in office, and offered the following declaration: “I don’t understand why members of this committee should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.” She refused to let Abrams respond.

Ms. Omar then asked Abrams whether he would “support crimes against humanity or genocide if you would believe they were serving U.S. interests as you did in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua,” implying that, just as the Maduro government claims, any U.S. attempts to defend Venezuelan democracy would by definition be a “U.S. backed coup.” She then told Abrams that she wanted to know if “a genocide will take place and you will look the other way because American interests were being upheld.” There followed a few more “have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife” style questions, including one in which Omar asked if Abrams saw a massacre in Salvador that took place in 1982, before Omar was out of diapers, as “a fabulous achievement.” Abrams answered, “I don’t believe this line of questioning is meant to be real questions and so I will not reply.”

Now, I have known Elliott Abrams for many years, and he would be the second to tell you, after me, that the two of us disagree about many things. But we agree here: No U.S. government official, even in a degraded Administration like this one, should swallow such deliberate disrespect without comment.

Clearly, Ms. Omar had no idea who Elliot Abrams was, or what offices he held years ago, or had even the slightest grasp of any of those issues. It was equally clear that she knows nothing about Venezuela, and that she could not possibly have written the statement she read—seeing as how she could barely manage even to read it. I doubt that Ms. Omar knows enough about any of these subjects to be effectively malicious; the same cannot be said for her handlers and scriptwriters.

And then came the dual-loyalty provocation, when she tweeted that she wanted to “talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” The reaction was furious and immediate, as intended by the taunt.

One reason for its fury is that the accusation is not entirely baseless. Some American Jews, who are not dual citizens and have never considered becoming dual citizens, do basically take the view “not my country right or wrong.” There are American Jews whose politics are single-issue pro-Israel politics, and who tend to be well to the right within both the American and Israeli political universes. For decades, too, a cottage industry has operated among American Jews designed to reconcile the Enlightenment universalism that Jews both appreciate and need about America with the particularist pride they feel in being Jews. The jujitsu act this involves has at times created difficult choices even for those with centrist and leftist views amid the nerve-wracking fluctuations of U.S.-Israeli relations. And sometimes those choices have produced procrustean rationales for the sake of avoiding the appearance of dual loyalty.

But it is almost too easy to see the Jewcentric character of Omar’s remark. She criticizes Israel and Israel’s supporters, but she never raises the matter of the Palestinian Authority’s incitement, corruption, and mismanagement. How can someone who (sometimes) claims to support a two-state solution do that? She never doubts that Israel’s behavior is the cause of all that is wrong with the region, the most hearty of all Jewcentric delusions over the years. She therefore has not a word to say about the de facto Iranian occupation of several Arab capitals, about its support for the use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, about its willful crushing of Lebanese democracy. Not one word because, as with Venezuela and as was always the case amid the adversary culture during the Cold War, all sins of foreign governments are automatically forgiven, overlooked, or explained away so long as the government in question is an anti-American authoritarian government.

Moreover, as others have noted, it is beyond foolish for a Muslim-American politician, a member of a minority religion regularly attacked for a supposed lack of loyalty to the United States, to say such things. It is astonishing that she doesn’t recognize the blindingly self-incriminating character of her comments. Ms. Omar needs to invest in some mirrors, and perhaps get better tactical advice.

And, of course, the use of classic anti-Semitic tropes and inflammatory tweets will have exactly the opposite effect on the subject that Ms. Omar claims to be protesting about. They will polarize a debate over U.S. policies toward Israel that arguably needs to happen, and they will polarize it to the extent that it cannot happen rationally or constructively. This could turn out to be a genuine wasted opportunity particularly if Benyamin Gantz becomes the next Israeli Prime Minister.

Some want to give Ms. Omar the benefit of the doubt, calling her naïve and inexperienced. Maybe. But what if her enemy, and more importantly the enemy of her handlers, is really folks like Representatives Lowry, Engel, Nadler, and Pelosi? That changes things, doesn’t it?

A larger context gives the present fury its deeper meaning. Let me be blunt as to what that context is: The “Golden Age” of American Jewry, such as it is or was, is over. But, thanks to Jewish forms of Jewcentricity, most American Jews cannot bring themselves even to think such a thing. This twice-chosen group of people—equally proud of American universalism and Jewish particularism, grateful for standing at the nexus of two cosmic exceptionalisms—is all but paralyzed intellectually by its own special concoction of hubris and escrowed fear.

The Golden Age is over for three interlocking, or better cascading, reasons. The first, most recent, and least important involves the shortsighted, selfish actions that undermined the tradition of bipartisan U.S. support for Israel. Between Bibi Netanyahu, John Boehner, and AIPAC as a shadhan (matchmaker), the Israeli Prime Minister managed to use a Congressional end run to blindside the President of the United States from the dais of the Capitol. This took place, just over four years ago, at the height of both the Iran nuclear deal negotiations and Netanyahu’s previous re-election campaign.

The joint short-term purpose of this scheme was to help re-elect Netanyahu and to make it appear that Republicans were more supportive of Israeli security than Democrats. The price has been to politicize U.S. support for Israel, first between the parties and now within the one that has been political home to most American Jews for more than a century.

So second down the cascade, support for Israel among Democrats has been waning anyway; the antics of February 2015 just accelerated the trend. One reason, obvious to everyone, has been a growing disjunction between the policies of the current Likud-dominated Israeli government and the core political sentiments of most American Jews. But a more important reason, especially in recent years, has to do with the identity politics focus that has overtaken the Democrats. As American demographic change brings nearer a population characterized by a majority of minorities, the Democrats’ political strategy has been to amalgamate these minority communities as such into a winning coalition.

The consequence of the shift was already in evidence during the Democratic National Convention in 2012, when a proposal—uncontroversial politically in earlier years—for Democrats to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital elicited loud howls of “no” from the convention floor. By the 2016 convention, the Black Lives Matter movement had all but become a part of the Democratic Party—at least no one in the Party leadership dared risk telling it that it was not wanted within. But the Black Lives Matter platform contains the following language:

The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people. . . . Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people.

The fact that mainstream Democratic Party politicians did not disown this by-now standard-on-the-Left but still outrageous statement paved the way for the so-called progressive caucus to lock in and amplify these sentiments within the party. I have little doubt that Ms. Omar affirms this view, and little doubt that we will hear much more of it from Democratic politicians in the future. The anti-Zionism of the American Left will grow loud, and the noise it will make as it joins the anti-Semitism of alt-Right pro-Trump Republicans will be deafening.

Third in the cascade, and most important, is the self-inflicted demographic holocaust of the American Jewish community. Both the unusual educational-professional characteristics and the political clout of American Jews are diminishing as serious Jewish education and practice remain in near free fall. Intermarriage rates for non-Orthodox American Jews, by far still the majority of those who affiliate as Jews, are somewhere around 72 percent according to the latest data. Most of those families will instill either trivial or no Jewish content at all in the education of their children. You need not be a mathematical genius to calculate the cumulative effects two to three generations out.

Anti-Semitism has not and does not cause this in America, contrary to some delusional and self-interested claims. Anti-Semitism, historically, has more often served as a solution for assimilation—to the point of mass murder, but obviously not beyond. So no, some combination of selfishness and indiscipline nurtured by the novelty of affluence has caused it; but it is so much more convenient to blame others.

In sum, Jews will become less important politically as their numbers shrink and they likely become less distinct from other Americans in terms of educational achievement and income levels; the Democratic Party is growing increasingly antipathetic to their interests and resentful of their legacy claims on party positions; and Israel is becoming more closely tied to Republican politics—a place where most American Jews in the age of Trump simply will not go. They are not interested in making common cause with “some good people” the President saw mustering around a Nazi flag in Charlottesville the summer before last.

As a politically homeless, smaller, and less influential community, the future of American Jewry is grim—especially so if the trajectory of our shock-inflected political rhetoric jumps the violence threshold. At least some older, intelligent, politically savvy, and experienced Jews privately know all this, or suspect it. They know, too, that the main trend lines are not reversible. That is why the tweets of Ilham Omar resonate so loudly in their heads.

It’s more than enough to make you miss Spiro Agnew.

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