Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 50

The Pashtuns’ Year of Living Dangerously

Anwar Wazir had a ringside seat for the war that wrecked his homeland.

Before 9/11, Waziristan was Pakistan’s forgotten backyard. Governed by archaic colonial structures, its Pashtun residents denied their full constitutional rights, Waziristan nonetheless was slowly transforming. Despite restricted access to education, a sizable middle class of professionals was being created. Mass employment in the Gulf States, an agricultural revolution, and unregulated cross-border trade with Afghanistan had transformed Waziristan’s economy.

Then came the war in neighboring Afghanistan, and with it the terrorist groups: the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Fleeing U.S. bombs in late 2001, the jihadis moved into Waziristan, which is divided into South and North Waziristan tribal districts. Once in control, they routinely used violence to intimidate and oppress its residents. Yet because residents did not have the strength to oust these groups on their own—and because the Pakistani authorities did nothing to stop their regrouping—Waziristan was often falsely portrayed as a place sympathetic to terrorists. The authorities, meanwhile, stridently denied that terrorists were sheltering there.

Anwar witnessed a different reality on the ground. In 2005, as he settled into a job in the local administration, a volcano of violence was erupting around him. Tribal leaders who served as the glue holding Waziristan’s Wazir, Mehsud, Bhittani, Dawar and Sulaimankhel Pashtun tribes together were being assassinated. Local criminals had transformed into militants, acting as cannon fodder and guards for the foreign fighters. A new generation of jihadis was being recruited from the region’s largely unemployed youth.

“It was the darkest of times because one was not supposed to publicly mourn his own brother if he was killed by the militants,” he told me. “It was because of real fears that you will also be killed by simply being bracketed with whatever he was accused or suspected of [by the jihadis].”

Anwar, then in his mid-20s, was initially dumbstruck by the government’s inability to halt the carnage. Within months, he discerned an underlying logic to the chaos.

Islamabad, he realized, was exploiting the unrest as leverage to further perceived national interests. The government was using Waziristan and other regions in the country’s western Pashtun belt, encompassing the provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and Balochistan—all bordering Afghanistan—to shelter the Taliban.

Islamabad had bankrolled the Taliban after its emergence in the mid-1990s to shape Afghan politics. The mujaheddin factions it hosted and supported against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s had engaged in an endless civil war following the demise of the country’s pro-Moscow regime in 1992. Islamabad seemed keen on returning the Taliban to power in Kabul to pursue its longstanding quest for a friendly regime there. Pakistan wanted to prevent any potential threats from Afghan irredentism or Pashtun ethno-nationalist groups within the country.

Pakistani governments and the military have always denied sheltering or supporting terrorists. Such explanations hold little credibility among Waziristan’s residents. Anwar was an eyewitness to how Pakistan’s powerful military helped Taliban factions control parts of South Waziristan after a 2007 uprising forced the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to flee the regional capital, Wana, home to the Ahmadzai Wazir tribe.

“For more than 11 years, from 2007 to 2018, some Taliban factions that the authorities recognized as Aman, or peace committees, committed innumerable atrocities,” he said. “They were taxing locals, ran private prisons, and had divided the entire territory among themselves for policing. I observed that militants were performing the key functions of the state in the presence of tens of thousands of troops.”

Waziristan’s civilians had nobody to complain to. Anwar says that despite working for the government, he could do little when security forces set fire to his father’s bus in 2010. He claims the bus was torched as a punishment because soldiers had discovered a bag of fertilizer in the vehicle. The military banned the transport of fertilizers into Waziristan because of its potential use in improvised explosive devices. “The government never responded to any of our petitions for compensation,” he said.

[image error]

Anwar Wazir says he lost his government job because of participating in the PTM protests. (Photo courtesy of Anwar Wazir)

Disillusioned, Anwar became one of the first government employees to back the Pashtun Protection Movement when it sprang to life during a protest in Islamabad in February 2018. That sit-in protest, attended mainly by millennials, was provoked by the January murder of an aspiring model, Naqibullah Mehsud, who was killed by police in an allegedly staged gun battle in the southern seaport city of Karachi. The movement, known by its Urdu initials PTM, has since attracted tens of thousands of young people, in a peaceful movement to demand fundamental human rights and security for Pakistan’s estimated 37 million Pashtuns.

In addition to seeking justice for Mehsud, the PTM articulated Pashtun demands for an end to the bloodshed, insecurity, and uncertainty that had overtaken their homeland since the onset of the War on Terror. It demanded that the judiciary probe unlawful killings of Pashtuns. It called on security forces to charge or release thousands of people who had been taken into custody and disappeared. It called for an end to aggressive searches, checkpoints, stereotyping and other forms of collective punishment of Pashtuns. And it demanded that the military launch a robust demining campaign in Waziristan and other regions where the War on Terror had been waged.

Authorities promised to address Pashtun grievances. But after the PTM organized a few large gatherings in the Pashtun cities of Balochistan Province in March, officials reverted to their standard response to dissent from ethnic minorities: labelling them traitors and enemies of the state. The PTM slogan, “The uniform is behind terrorism,” has particularly angered the military leadership. Anwar became one of the first government employees to lose his job because of his role in the PTM.

The Pashtuns’ Plight, and the PTM’s Promise

In less than a year of existence, the PTM has given Waziristanis a reason to hope for a better life. It seeks to reconstruct the image of Pashtuns, long caricatured by outsiders as ignorant, warlike savages, as a dignified people who have paid in blood and money from years of terrorist violence and military sweeps. And it has returned Waziristan, so often dismissed as an extremist backwater, to the forefront of debates about Pakistan’s future.

One face of the movement is Ali Wazir, a firebrand leader who exemplifies resilience in the face of personal suffering. At the turn of the century, his family was the most prominent among the Ahmadzai Wazir in Wana. His late father, Mirzalam Wazir, was their leading tribal chief.

But while Ali was studying law, his family endured its first tragedy when his elder brother, Farooq Wazir, was assassinated in broad daylight in 2003. The young activist became one of the first Pashtun victims of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan. In subsequent years, Ali lost more than a dozen relatives including his father, brothers, uncles, and cousins to terrorist attacks. Their only apparent crime was to demand that authorities ensure peace and get rid of militants.

[image error]

Ali Wazir is a senior PTM leader. (Photo Credit: Anwar Wazir)

His mother, Khwazha Meena, vividly remembers the day in July 2005 when her husband and son were killed. The ambush near their home in Wana also killed two of her brothers-in-law and two of their sons.

“Our whole front yard was red with the blood oozing from our martyrs,” she told journalist Adnan Bhitani. “Our house was eerily silent and empty after their remains were taken to the graveyard for burial. Only the cries of our small children echoed in the blank courtyard.”

While his family was being massacred, Ali languished in a prison under draconian colonial-era regulations. When he was finally briefly released, the funerals had ended.

“I told him not to mourn. They were innocents and were killed while defending their honor,” she recalled. “The tombstones of those who die defending their homeland always shine in the battlefield,” she said, recalling a Pashto couplet she recited to lift his spirits.

Meena sent her orphaned children and grandchildren to the relative safety of Dera Ismail Khan, a dusty city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa near Waziristan. But she herself swore to stay behind at their ancestral home, a large mud house surrounded by apple orchards. Her family says she now lives in a door-less room because she fears the knock of being awakened to tragic news.

“[Over the years], the men killed in our family left behind seven widows. I always tell them not to weep [so our enemies won’t elate in their success],” she said. Ali says his family was not alone in suffering. Almost every family in the region has endured some tragedy.

“Only the Pashtun civilians suffered,” he said. “The Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Pakistani Army had all joined hands against them.”

Ali, in his 40s, refused to give up. He pioneered a peaceful non-violent struggle and participated in parliamentary elections in 2008 and 2013, inspiring youth with his fiery speeches. The insecurity in Waziristan forced him to stay in Dera Ismail Khan, where scores of others had been displaced after a large-scale military operation in 2009.

“It was a long and dark period when our people suffered in every imaginable way,” Ali recalled. “There were several military operations; people were displaced, and markets were demolished. Targeted assassinations and suicide attacks were common.”

Ali, a lawyer, says the state was only interested in protecting its forces. “The Taliban and al-Qaeda were running parallel courts and meting out punishments, but the government forces were largely relegated to military camps,” he said. He says the government’s failure to implement the promises it made in February prompted PTM leaders to continue their protests.

“The PTM helped the Pashtun youth to transform into a force that clearly articulated the grievances about the atrocities and suffering they have endured,” he said. “Our campaigning pushed the military to rethink its actions.”

The military has relaxed stringent security measures at checkpoints that often required civilians to wait for hours to move in and out of Waziristan. It has ended the special biometric IDs for Waziristan residents, the Watan Card, which all Waziristan residents needed to carry to travel.

In the larger scheme of things, Ali argues, the PTM protests have helped absolve Waziristan of its reputation as a headquarters for global terror. “When our youth mobilized in a non-violent struggle for peace, they united Pashtuns everywhere and undid the image of Pashtuns as a warlike, barbaric people,” he said.

Many in Waziristan paid with their blood to achieve this. In June, at least four PTM supporters were killed and dozens more injured when local Taliban attacked Ali. Using their Facebook and Twitter accounts, PTM activists uploaded videos showing militants firing on their comrades and the security forces doing little to take on the militants. These videos broadcast the Taliban’s control to the world, which ultimately forced Islamabad to take back control of Wana’s market from the group of Taliban that officials had called a “peace committee.”

In July, Ali won a grassroots victory in the parliamentary election from a constituency in South Waziristan. The residents of Wana bore his expenses and his campaign didn’t have enough work for the hundreds who volunteered.

He says Waziristan has changed because people are adamant about throwing off the yoke of oppression. “After every atrocity, our people now come out to protest peacefully,” he said. “We are determined to achieve our rights within the laws and constitution of Pakistan.” Ali says the military needs to promptly withdraw from Waziristan and hand over control to the civilian administration. “If the state fails to reconsider its inhumane policy, it will have major repercussions for the future,” he said.

A Millennial Movement

It was in Dera Ismail Khan that Ali met Manzoor Ahmad Pashteen, a veterinary student who would become the youthful face of the PTM. Now 24 years old, Pashteen came of age while his family was displaced from their home in South Waziristan in 2009. His initial activism was limited to helping his Mehsud tribe, who he says suffered the most in Pakistan’s war on terrorism. They lost thousands of members, including hundreds of tribal elders—most of whom were victims of targeted assassination. The Mehsuds also lost tens of thousands of houses in the fighting, which decimated their livelihoods and ultimately forced them to flee their homeland for nearly eight years.

“The extremism was deliberately imposed here. The war fought here in the name of terrorism was fake because both sides terrorized civilians,” he told me. “The change now is that such traumatized people are determined to gain all the rights that the [Pakistani] constitution grants them, but they also want accountability for what happened to them.”

[image error]

PTM leader Manzoor Ahmad Pashteen. (Photo Credit: Adnan Bhittani)

Pashteen says the suffering people have endured in Waziristan has changed their perspective. He says local resistance to the Taliban and the excesses of the military failed in the past because their proponents were swiftly killed, which terrified others into submission. “We now have successfully united the population, and they are capable of uniting in protests,” he noted.

Indeed, unprecedented protests have gripped South and North Waziristan during the past year. In most cases, the sit-ins compelled the authorities to listen to their demands.

“We are now locked in a complex web of problems, but we have the master key to unlock them all,” tribal leader Malik Omar Khan said after a successful sit-in protest in August reportedly prompted the authorities to probe whether the security forces shot protesters near Miran Shah, the administrative headquarters of North Waziristan. In November, the authorities in South Waziristan agreed to all PTM demands before its planned protest could begin.

In January, protests sparked by the alleged harassment of women and children by security forces in North Waziristan’s remote Khaisor village dented the military’s narrative of having cleansed the region of terrorists with a large-scale military operation. Beginning in June 2014, Zarb-e Azab, the official name of the offensive, forced some 1 million North Waziristan residents to flee their homes for more than three years. Several thousand of them still languish at a displacement camp in the stony desert of Bakkakhel at the edge of Waziristan.

Pashteen says the recent activism has forced the military and the Taliban to think before committing atrocities against civilians. He says the residents of Waziristan are now acutely aware of and resisting any collusion between the military and the militants, particularly pro-government and surrendered Taliban. “The society in Waziristan will neither allow nor accept and tolerate any militants or Taliban,” he said. “People in Waziristan do not even like to shake their hands.”

Pashteen says the residents of Waziristan, the rest of FATA, and Pashtuns in general are acutely aware that they were mere pawns in a war fought for the benefits and interests of others.

“Consider whose homeland within Pakistan prospered while who suffered and whose territories were destroyed,” he said in an apparent reference to Pashtun war-hit regions in northwestern Pakistan compared to the prosperous eastern province of Punjab.

Pashteen says their activism has invited the wrath of both the military and the militants. “Beginning with me and the rest of our leadership and our activists everywhere, we are facing constant persecution and harassment,” he said. While the militants have killed and injured scores of PTM activists in Waziristan, many others have been imprisoned or implicated in court cases. Many have lost government and private jobs. Others, including Pashteen and Ali, face foreign travel bans and restrictions on movement within Pakistan. The PTM’s media coverage is under blanket censorship and its activists have been in and out of prisons for most of the year.

“We pose an existential threat to the business our military has benefited from in the name of [fighting] terrorism,” Pashteen said. Since 9/11 Washington has given more than $30 billion in security and economic assistance to Islamabad. U.S. drone strikes have proved to be the most successful weapon against militants: in Waziristan, more than 370 drone strikes have killed leaders from al-Qaeda, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and the East Turkistan Islamic Movements, along with most leaders of the Pakistani Taliban. But civilian casualties from the drone strikes have sparked major protests. While the Pakistani military supported and quietly allowed the drone attacks, a protest campaign in the country, with some encouragement from the military, blamed the drone strikes for violating Pakistani sovereignty. “The international community should investigate the price we have paid for their military aid to Pakistan,” Pashteen told me.

The Military Response

Pakistan’s powerful military, however, has shown little tolerance of criticism. It has resisted civilian oversight and accountability. After imposing the first martial law in 1958, four military dictators have ruled the country for nearly half of its 70-year history. Generals have mostly called the shots over foreign policy even when civilians are nominally in charge. They have also presumed a monopoly over who to declare patriotic Pakistanis and who to certify as traitors and fifth columnists.

The military was unprepared for the PTM’s emergence in February. Its initial response was to accept the movement’s lesser demands by relaxing curfews, ending aggressive searches on check posts, and launching a demining program in Waziristan. By April, hundreds of disappeared Pashtuns, mostly in military custody, were reunited with their families—but they were released without any court proceedings, as the PTM had demanded. There was no apparent movement on illegal killings. Rao Anwar, the police officer accused of killing the model Naqeebullah Mehsud, surrendered to the Supreme Court, but was later granted bail, which the PTM interpreted as the state getting him off the hook.

Meanwhile, the PTM persistently campaigned in an election year when the military establishment went all out to prevent former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from returning to power. Though Sharif’s support base is in Punjab, also home to most of the military brass, he had rebranded himself as an opponent of military rule. The PTM’s protests indirectly strengthened his narrative of establishing civilian supremacy through sanctity of the vote.

The PTM’s campaigning enraged the generals at the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi. “No anti-state agenda in the garb of engineered protests aimed at reversing the gains achieved at the heavy cost in blood and national exchequer succeeds,” Pakistani Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa said in mid-April.

In what would become the military’s standard narrative, Bajwa soon linked the PTM to a hybrid war aimed at weakening Pakistan internally. “Our enemies know they cannot beat us fair and square and have thus subjected us to a cruel, evil, and protracted hybrid war. They are trying to weaken our resolve by weakening us from within,” he told newly graduated officers on April 14. “The very resilience of Pakistan comes not just from our military capacity but from the synergetic mix of people who have come together willingly toward a single purpose.”

The Pashtun protests were under an unspoken media ban from day one. When the PTM emerged from the protest outside the Islamabad Press Club in February 2018, few dared to report on it. Many journalists chose to self-censor in a country considered one of the most dangerous for journalists globally. But the controversies surrounding the June killing of unarmed PTM protesters by former Taliban members—whom officials called a peace committee—prompted the military to once again make its views clear.

“We solved their problems, but how then is there still a campaign on social media? How were 5,000 social media accounts created in Afghanistan in a single day, and how was a cap made outside the country and imported into Pakistan [to become the symbol of the PTM]?” chief military spokesman Asif Ghafoor asked journalists on June 4 as he cast aspersions on the movement.

But in a more telling revelation, he defended the Taliban peace committee. “The peace committee has fought in the war against terrorism for years,” he said. “They fought in the war against terrorism and are now doing their part in the [current] phase of stabilization.”

He implied that the peace committee members shot the PTM supporters for their anti-army and anti-state slogans. “A jirga was called to sort out this issue [through dialogue],” he noted. “While the peace committee waited, they [the PTM supporters] came, and they had an altercation. As is their culture, they had weapons, and they began shooting each other.”

As the military worked overtime to counter the PTM in the streets and online over the past year, it also undertook larger strategic initiatives. The year saw noticeable progress on fencing the Durand Line, the 19th-century border that splits the Pashtuns into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Islamabad wants Kabul to accord de jure recognition to the Durand Line as the recognized international border between the two countries.

Successive governments in Kabul, however, argue that only people from both sides of the Durand Line can decide its future once elusive peace and stability are restored. Some of the fence’s early phases were completed in Waziristan, which hampered the movement of cross-border communities. A more consequential development was the integration of FATA. As its last legislative act in May, the outgoing Pakistani Parliament granted equal rights to millions of FATA Pashtuns and merged their homeland into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a process that will take several years to complete.

However, implementing the controversial military-backed merger has been fraught with setbacks. The merger plan outlined a series of political, judicial, economic, and security reforms that have sparked bureaucratic turf wars. In October, the High Court in Peshawar declared the interim law for FATA unconstitutional. Any missteps along the way are bound to add to the PTM’s grievances.

The hot summer months and election campaigning cooled the PTM protests. On a visit to London in October, Ghafoor indicated that the Pakistani military viewed the PTM as a spent force. “We understand that Manzoor Pashteen has no power to organize these protests abroad, but we do know who is behind these protests and the sources of funding,” he told journalists, asking where PTM leaders had been when terror was being unleashed from the tribal areas. “There was no hue and cry then, but now that we have made these areas safe and secure our enemies are doing their best to sow seeds of discord among Pakistanis.”

The PTM responded by organizing a large protest in Bannu. On October 28, tens of thousands of PTM supporters filled a sports stadium. “With your help and support, we have pushed the Pakistani military generals to the extent that they will surrender [to the will of the people],” newly elected North Waziristan lawmaker Mohsin Dawar told the gathering. “If they refuse to surrender to [the popular will], these Pashtuns—the residents of Pakhtunkhwa—will force them to surrender.”

[image error]

A major PTM protest in the western city of Bannu on October 28, 2018. (Photo Credit: Adnan Bhittani)

Cop Killing

Two days before the PTM gathering in Bannu, a police officer who had served in the dusty city mysteriously disappeared. Police Superintendent Tahir Dawar, 50, was abducted late on October 26 as he went out for a stroll after eating dinner at his house in Islamabad. His family was stunned by his sudden disappearance. Tahir, a native of North Waziristan, had earned government medals for valor. His colleagues in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where he was serving, were also mystified. They knew him as a “capable and diligent officer” who had stood against militants and even survived a suicide bombing.

In Bannu, Noor Islam Dawar, a PTM activist, protested the disappearance. “Is this the reward for his honesty, bravery, and professionalism: to be kidnapped?” he asked protesters on October 28. The PTM gathering that day demanded that Tahir be found soon. But the same day, Iftikhar Durrani, a media adviser to the Pakistani Prime Minister, denied that Tahir had been abducted.

“He had come to Islamabad on a short leave, but his cell phone was off for a short while, which worried his family and created an impression that he had been kidnapped,” he told VOA.

His family’s petitions to the authorities during the next two weeks only brought assurances that he was safe and would be recovered soon. Mohsin raised the issue in the parliament. “It will have a demoralizing impact on the police force if one of its officers cannot be traced,” he said. “It will have a devastating impact on the force facing [terrorist] threats.” By November 11, activists and tribal leaders in North Waziristan had announced a sit-in protest for his recovery in Islamabad on November 14.

[image error]

Mohsin Dawar and Ali Wazir (C) participate in a tribal gathering in North Waziristan in February. (Photo Credit: Mohsin Dawar)

But on November 13, alleged photos of his mutilated corpse went viral over the Internet. In a handwritten note reportedly found alongside his body, Islamic State (IS) militants claimed credit for his assassination. The ultra-radical group has carved out a safe haven in eastern Afghanistan since 2015. Shehryar Afridi, junior interior minister, attempted to downplay the news. “It is a matter of national security and someone’s life, and cannot be discussed in an open forum,” he told journalists.

The next day, Tahir’s murder was confirmed, and Pakistani authorities said they were in contact with their Afghan counterparts to bring his body back from the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar. Tahir’s killing spurred great anger, prompting PTM activists to ask why Islamabad failed to protect an officer of the law. The movement’s leaders highlighted it as yet another instance of the atrocities against their people.

When Tahir was buried the following day, his son Amjad Tahir Dawar demanded an international probe. “My father endured a great atrocity. We want an international commission to probe what happened to him because it involves two countries,” he told mourners after a late-night funeral flanked by PTM leaders Pashteen and Mohsin.

Earlier on November 15, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan had ordered an investigation into the murder. Ghafoor, the military spokesman, suggested Kabul’s involvement. Dawar’s “abduction, move to [Afghanistan], murder and follow up behavior of [Afghan] authorities raise questions which indicate involvement or resources more than a terrorist organization in Afghanistan,” he wrote on Twitter. Pakistani authorities have shared few details of the investigation.

One Pakistani journalist has painted a different picture of events. According to Azaz Sayed, Tahir’s brothers told him he had captured a major cache of arms before his disappearance. But his bosses eventually forced Tahir to release the weapons and the suspects he had detained along with their trucks carrying the weapons. Sayed argues that an investigation into the episode might offer clues as to what happened to Dawar.

Tahir’s younger brother Ahmaduddin Dawar says the government’s probe has yet to begin. “We had demanded an international investigation, but now we have agreed on a Joint Investigation Team [of Pakistani security institutions]; we are soon going to announce this formally,” he told Pakistan Hum News TV on November 22.

But the PTM was not optimistic. Pashteen said Islamabad has consistently tried to bury the case. “If these investigations are carried out by the Pakistani authorities then it is unlikely that a government-appointed commission will hold any [individuals or] institutions accountable [for the disappearance and murder], even if they were involved,” he told a journalist. “They cannot even point in that direction.”

Three months later, his family was bitterly disappointed in the lack of progress in the government probe. “We no longer have any trust in the government,” Amjad Tahir Dawar told Pakistan’s DawnNewsTV in late February. “We want an independent body to probe and unmask the faces behind the incident. We will not give up.”

Looking Ahead

Such a lack of confidence, experts on the region say, can only be bridged by swift government action. Ghulam Qadir Daur, a retired Pakistani bureaucrat and author, has a finger on the pulse of Waziristan and the rest of FATA. He says that while the constitutional changes in the status of FATA has changed on paper, little has changed on the ground. He says the relief the residents of FATA witnessed after the emergence of the PTM at the beginning of this year has faded.

“This is the poorest area in Pakistan; its social indicators reflect 70 years of neglect. Militancy wrecked its infrastructure and traumatized its population,” he wrote in October, adding that the once-displaced Pashtuns are returning to destroyed homes and ruined livelihoods. The government’s promised support for rehabilitation is taking too long. “Projects funded by multi-donor trusts are not taking off, so there is no chance of more funds being allocated for existing projects, or of new projects being undertaken.”

Daur’s book Cheegha: The Call captures the despair in his long-suffering homeland. His advice to the government now is to bring reforms and development to Waziristan and the rest of FATA on war footing. “It’s hard to understand why these areas should be left behind, hurt and exposed,” he wrote.

During a visit to North Waziristan on November 26, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan indicated that his administration is willing to address the region’s challenges. “First, we have to remember that we should not let this peace be destroyed that we have achieved in the tribal areas,” he told tribal leaders. “The entire rest of Pakistan is going to stand with you in that. We want to bring the tribal areas on par with the rest of Pakistan, and we are determined to take any steps that will benefit the people of Pakistan.”

Khan, a former cricketer, says the region fascinated him. He wrote a book after touring FATA following his Cricket World Cup victory in 1992. He promised a sizable share for the tribal areas in national resource distributions and announced various schemes for improving health care, education, employment, and reforms.

“We have sacrificed a lot for bringing peace into the tribal areas,” he noted. “We are also trying our best to restore peace to Afghanistan. If there is peace in Afghanistan, it will make a lot of difference in our tribal areas,” he said. Khan has viewed the global war on terrorism as an imposed war. “We shall not fight any such war again inside Pakistan,” he added.

A few days later, however, the military spokesman Ghafoor warned the PTM not to cross undefined lines—an implicit threat to refrain from criticizing the military. “We realize their grief, their hardships,” he told journalists while explaining that the military has so far refrained from using force against the PTM. “But [they] should not cross those lines, where the state has to use its force to control the situation.”

PTM leaders criticized this statement and asked whether demanding security, accountability, and the fundamental human rights guaranteed in the Pakistani Constitution could arbitrarily provoke the military to use force. “If Pakistan is our country, it should address our demands,” Pashteen told the BBC. “But if it is a case of masters and slaves, then they can continue committing atrocities and we will carry on facing them.”

In January the military had an apparent change of heart. Ghafoor offered to join hands with the PTM to bring development and prosperity to former FATA. “The PTM is a non-violent movement, which is campaigning for its demands. We wish that the PTM leaders and other people [supporting them] will join the state in the [rehabilitation] phase, which is aimed at bringing relief and services to them,” he told Pakistan’s private ARY television.

The same month, however, the movement faced an intensified crackdown as its members geared toward marking the PTM’s first year. Scores of members were arrested after holding a large protest in Karachi on January 21. These included Alamzeb Khan Mehsud, a university graduate who had dedicated himself to documenting enforced disappearances and highlighting the plight of victims of landmines. More activists were arrested as they attempted to protest the death of an activist. The PTM alleged that Arman Luni, 35, a college lecturer, was killed by a police officer on February 2. He was protesting a terrorist attack against police in Loralai, a small city in Balochistan. On March 5, the human rights committee in the Pakistani Senate ordered the police to launch a probe into his death.

Meanwhile, PTM activists in Waziristan are not ready to buy Islamabad’s promises or to cave in to its threats. In Wana, Anwar is determined to soldier on.

“Movements originating from Waziristan have always been successful,” he noted. Millions of Pakistani Pashtuns must hope that he is right.

The post The Pashtuns’ Year of Living Dangerously appeared first on The American Interest.

America’s Immigration Ambivalence

In some idealized version of party democracy, candidates campaign in support of policies that can both get them elected and solve real problems. In theory, the goals of winning elections and governing effectively should be symbiotic. But that is not the political universe we live in. Instead, candidates all too often say what they must in order to get elected without worrying much about the consequences for governing.

The disjuncture between campaign rhetoric and governing realities is nowhere starker than in the domain of immigration policy. President Trump ran on a platform of building out the existing wall along the Mexican border and getting Mexico to pay for it. The crowds at his rallies cheered enthusiastically for this even though prominent Mexican politicians made it very clear from the outset that they would never pick up the tab.

Once in office, President Trump had to figure out how to get Americans, not Mexicans, to pay for his wall. When the lengthy government shutdown did not convince the Congress to give the President the funding amount he wanted, Donald Trump invoked the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to redirect money from other authorized programs to pay for his new wall construction. The President now has to hope that he has enough support from his own party to sustain a veto over any Congressional effort to reassert its constitutionally mandated authority over the public purse.

All of this brouhaha is the result of President Trump’s dogged determination to deliver on a promise made in the heat of campaign rallies at a time when he apparently did not think he was going to win. In the meantime, those Central American refugee caravans he warned about repeatedly were effectively stopped at the border without additional barriers, most illicit drugs still come in through legal ports, the flow of Mexican undocumented workers across the border remains historically low, and the troops the President called to duty are only clearing brush. The President wants to fortify the southern but not the northern border even though the number of Canadians who overstay their visas far exceeds all other countries, including Mexico. Who or what will protect us from all those undocumented Canadians?

Despite numerous past efforts, no policy to date has resolved our border issues to the satisfaction of either political party: not the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the Real ID Act of 2005, or Obama’s 2012 DACA executive action. The reason is easy to explain. You cannot solve a problem until you agree on the desired outcome. And Americans cannot do that because they have multiple and conflicting immigration goals.

Our ambivalence about what we want results in policy vacillation. We turn a blind eye to undocumented immigrants when we need their labor, but then crack down on them when the economy cools down. We welcome refugees that fought with or aided us in foreign wars, but lower the refugee quotas drastically when there is no obligation other than humanitarian compassion.

Our differences derive to some degree from partisanship, but more fundamentally, the problem is the tension between the four basic goals of US immigration policy: family considerations, economic value, diversity, and humanitarianism. Immigrants that are brought in under family, diversity or humanitarian programs are not necessarily the particular skill mix we need for our economy. Without the limits we place on legal permanent residents who are admitted for employment reasons, we would have disproportionate numbers of Indian and Chinese tech workers, undermining the diversity goal. And reunifying separated families places compassion ahead of the efficiency gains of a totally merit-based employment orientation. In short, immigration policy is all about the tradeoffs between competing values.

The President himself is not conflicted about what he wants. He would like to get rid of the diversity lottery and lower both family-based admissions and refugee admissions in favor of what he has termed “fair, equitable, merit-based” immigration. This is the classic employer’s vision of good immigration policy. It is also happens to be consistent with one version of the Republican Party’s future political interests.

After losing the 2012 Presidential Election, the Republican party’s postmortem warned that unless the party adopted a broader outreach to nonwhites, the party could find itself in a deep demographic hole. That prescription would have challenged Republican party orthodoxy much more fundamentally than the path Trump ultimately followed: Stay the course of being a predominantly white, Christian party and shape demographic reality to fit that party profile. Step one: Slow the immigration from Africa and Latin America. Step two: Restrict ballot access with new voting rules in the name of preventing in-person voter fraud.

However, the specter that haunts Republican political operatives is the prospect of the national party following the path that California Republican party took two decades ago. Governor Pete Wilson, facing a tough reelection campaign in the middle of a recession, endorsed Proposition 187, a ballot measure that would have denied emergency services and schooling to undocumented immigrants. The campaign featured particularly harsh TV ads that offended many in the Latino community, driving them further into the Democratic camp at a time when it looked as though the Latino community’s record of upward economic mobility and social conservatism might create inroads for the Republicans. Ceding the Latino vote to the Democrats along with the mass migration of college educated workers into California’s high tech and green economy industries put the Republicans in a very deep political hole, leading to complete Democratic dominance in the legislature and statewide offices.

But politics is all about the short term prevailing over the long term. President Trump needs to keep his base happy to have any chance of getting re-elected or even to avoid impeachment. America’s hodgepodge of immigration goals has a lot of inertial force behind it. Priorities of the current administration (e.g. reducing the refugee ceiling from 50,000 to 30,000 in 2019) will eventually be undone when party control shifts once again in the future. Perhaps there is no absolutely “right” solution to the balance of our competing immigration goals. Maybe vacillating between them is the best we can do. If so, we have the perfect political system for that “policy.”

The post America’s Immigration Ambivalence appeared first on The American Interest.

Ignoring Immigration Is Empowering the Far Right

Across the West, apprehension over immigration and national identity are boosting the electoral fortunes—and in some cases, bringing to power—political forces hostile to the liberal world order. Support for such forces has been on the rise for several decades, though in key countries it is reaching a more critical mass for attaining power or blocking business as usual. In the United States, presidential candidate Donald Trump unexpectedly rode to victory by promising to deport millions of illegal immigrants and build a wall along the southern border. Trump’s radical departure from traditional GOP foreign policy nostrums on trade, international alliances, and Russia—that is, his repudiation of key-elements of the American-led liberal world order—has done little to dent enthusiasm among his supporters, who are willing to overlook or endorse his heresies because of his tough position on immigration.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the 2016 decision by the British people to leave the European Union, Marine Le Pen’s doubling of her father’s vote share in the 2017 French presidential election, the entrance of Alternative für Deutschland into the Bundestag and all 16 German state legislatures, and the formation of a populist coalition government in Italy between the far right Northern League and the Five Star Movement are all political expressions of deep frustration with establishments, including a belief by many that borders are too porous, that their countries are accepting too many immigrants (whether legal, illegal, or refugees), and that these newcomers are not assimilating quickly and thoroughly enough into native cultures. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has earned an international profile far out of proportion to that usually afforded the leader of a small, Central European country of just ten million people, and has done so solely due to his fierce criticism of what he characterizes as an elite, cross-partisan, Brussels-based consensus in favor of mass immigration that thwarts the will of national publics across the continent.

The rise of right-wing populism, at least in Europe, is in large part attributable to the nearly two million mostly Muslim, mostly male migrants and refugees who entered the continent over the course of 2015-16 and to the perceived inability of European governments and the European Union to handle the influx. And while the numbers of these entrants to Europe has declined significantly in the time since then, the lingering after-effects of the deluge—namely, the sense that European governments had lost control, combined with a pessimism as to European societies’ ability to integrate so many newcomers—have had a profound effect on the politics of the West. According to the Spring 2018 Eurobarometer poll, Europeans list immigration and terrorism as the two most important issues facing the European Union, issues that have become increasingly intertwined in the minds of ordinary citizens, given the threat of Islamist terrorism and the Islamic faith of the majority of the migrants.

Since the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump in 2016, the world has been inundated with books, think tank reports, films, and media analyses on the subject of populism and the threat it poses to liberal democracy. To the extent that it can be defined as a political tendency that demonizes any and all opposition to it as inherently illegitimate, populism is indeed a menace to liberal democracy, a constitutive element of which is pluralism—the belief that for a society to be decent it must make room for various perspectives, attitudes, and political formations.

But what if the phenomenon that is near-universally described as “populism” is not so much hostility to liberal democracy per se, but an expression of frustration that liberal democracy has not been democratic enough? What if populism is mainly being driven not by some desire to undo liberal democracy and replace it with autocracy, but by frustration with Western political establishments for not heeding the popular will on an issue of major importance to voters—that is, mass immigration? The rise of populist politics in the West is often laid at the feet of the 2008 financial crisis, and a range of economic factors—from the growing gap between rich and poor to declining wage growth—have all surely played a part in fanning the flames of populism on both the Left and Right. But in countries as diverse as Germany, Poland, and Sweden, the rise of populist political tendencies cannot be blamed on the usual suspect of poor economic performance; all three countries have posted impressive growth and low unemployment since the 2008 financial crisis. “The majority of academic studies over the past three decades have found that objective economic indicators such as income have only a weak effect or none at all when it comes to explaining the appeal of national populism,” observes Matthew Goodwin, an expert on European populism and a professor at the University of Kent.

My aim here is not to weigh the merits or morality of the liberal and restrictionist approaches to immigration. Immigration is ultimately a national competency, a realm best left to individual governments in consultation with their citizenries. While one can oppose restrictive immigration policies on an economic or humanitarian basis, there is nothing inherently illiberal in reducing immigration levels. The specific matter of asylum excepted, a liberal democracy does not have an obligation to open its doors to foreigners in the same way that it is obliged to protect the basic freedoms of its own citizens. What should concern all of us with a stake in upholding the liberal international order, however, is how opposition to mass immigration across the Western world is politically channeled. For what all of the aforementioned populist political leaders and movements share, in addition to their anti-immigration fervor, is skepticism if not outright opposition to that order, as well as a positive disposition to its chief external threat: the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin.

In Europe, it is becoming increasingly apparent that mass immigration and the liberal order (and maybe even liberal democracy itself) are incompatible. So opposed to mass immigration are they that a large and growing number of citizens are voting for parties that, in addition to espousing anti-immigration views, also threaten to dismantle democratic institutions and their nations’ roles in upholding the liberal democratic order.

When it comes to immigration, European policy, on both the national and supranational levels, has for years been engaged in a game of catch up with public opinion. In no case has this inability of the political class to meet the demands of the public had more momentous consequence than Brexit. Between 2000 and the vote for Brexit 16 years later, the percentage of voters who viewed immigration as a major problem increased from 7 percent to 49 percent, making it the voters’ most important issue. Yet this growing concern was not reflected in the formulation of public policy, providing an opening for someone like Nigel Farage and his United Kingdom Independence Party to advocate for the wholesale departure of the UK from the European Union. After the EU welcomed ten new member states from Central and Eastern Europe in 2004, the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Tony Blair was one of only three EU member states that chose not to avail itself of temporary immigration controls it could have placed on citizens from those countries. This decision may have made economic sense at the time, but, in retrospect, it was also decisive in pushing public opinion in the direction of leaving the European Union. Seven years later, a YouGov poll found that 67 percent of the British public believed that immigration over the previous decade had been “a bad thing for Britain.” Cognizant of these worries, the Conservative-led coalition government of Prime Minister David Cameron promised to reduce immigration but proved either unwilling or unable to slow it down, to the point that immigration actually increased to a high of 330,000 people annually. It was in this context of repeatedly thwarted expectations that the Leave campaign’s mantra, “Take Back Control,” was so effective.

It is not just Britain where public and elite opinion on immigration have been out of sync. A 2017 Chatham House survey found that, in eight out of ten European countries, majorities opposed any further immigration from Muslim countries, precisely the same position Donald Trump announced, to great controversy, during his successful presidential campaign. Fifty-three percent of Germans, whose country was so widely lauded for its humanitarianism during the 2015 refugee crisis, agreed with Trump on this question. Divergence between public and elite opinion on immigration is a phenomenon noticeable across Europe, according to political scientists Markus Wagner and Thomas M. Meyer, as “voter positions are generally to the right of mainstream party consensus, so that shifts to the right on immigration and on law and order are in fact shifts towards the median voter.” According to Chatham House, in no country polled did more than 32 percent disagree with a complete ban on Muslim immigration.

Such statistics are no doubt dispiriting to those who believe in the inherent virtue and workability of multiculturalism. But if preservation of the liberal international order is the foremost concern of policymakers, more important than the morality of public attitudes about Muslim immigration is how politicians handle this undeniably widespread skepticism towards immigration’s alleged benefits. Voters, simply put, want and expect stricter immigration policies. In an electoral democracy, they will get them either from mainstream political leaders (who support NATO, the European Union, market economies, an alliance with the United States, and other elements of the liberal order) or from far Right demagogues who support none of these things. “It would be a major political mistake if liberals simply ignore or ridicule these fears,” writes Ivan Krastev of the anti-immigration sentiment rising across the West. His sentiment is echoed by European Council President Donald Tusk, whose native Poland is one of the European countries most hostile to immigration. Speaking of controversial efforts to partner with non-EU governments to limit immigration to Europe, Tusk put it bluntly: “If we don’t agree on them then you will see some really tough proposals from some really tough guys.”

Despite the best intentions of its proponents, mass immigration is having a destabilizing effect on European democracy by abetting populist parties hostile to both liberal democracy and the liberal world order. As these parties exploit the gap between public opinion and public policy, European political leaders increasingly face a dilemma: Should they sacrifice the stability of the liberal international order on the altar of a liberal immigration regime? To save liberal democracy from its illiberal antagonists, they will need to decouple the highly charged subject of immigration from those metrics—respect for checks and balances, adherence to the rule of law, protection of minorities, pluralism, freedom of the press, support for democratic alliances, a values-based foreign policy, and so on—that truly determine whether a nation is a liberal democracy and a contributor to the liberal world order. Japan is one example of a nation that has a highly restrictive (one might even say xenophobic) immigration policy but is nonetheless a liberal democracy and plays a productive role in maintaining liberal order. It is my contention that, if leaders who are genuinely committed to preserving this order ignore or dismiss popular opinion on immigration, they will lose ground to far Right movements committed to neither.

A compelling illustration of how not to handle the issue of immigration is Sweden, which touts itself as a “humanitarian superpower” and has accepted more migrants and refugees per capita than any nation in the world. This intake reached its height during the refugee crisis of 2015-16, when the Scandinavian country accepted more than 160,000 people, second only to Germany in terms of absolute numbers. Over the past five years, Sweden has taken in 600,000, an enormous number for a country of fewer than ten million.

Yet in recent years, migrants have been disproportionately involved in certain types of high-profile crimes, namely sexual assault, gang violence, grenade attacks, and car bombings. In addition, the unemployment gap between native Swedes and the foreign born is the second highest among members of the OECD, with immigrants three times as likely to be unemployed—a disparity due to the low educational achievement of most migrants and a lack of unskilled jobs in the highly advanced Swedish economy. “Sweden is statistically one of the worst countries at the integration of foreigners,” Aje Carlbom, a professor in social anthropology at Malmo University tells the Financial Times. “Why? Mainly because this is a highly complex country where you can’t get a job without education. Many of those who come are uneducated—that is the main problem.”

Sweden’s approach to immigration and assimilation has been the subject of criticism among its neighbors. “I often use Sweden as a deterring example” of how not to deal with these issues, the former Danish Prime Minister and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in an interview on Swedish television. Many Swedes would agree. In 2014, a year before the refugee crisis, 44 percent of Swedes supported cuts in the country’s generously high annual intake of immigrants and refugees. Three years later, after the government was forced to announce the deportation of 80,000 people (half the number it admitted during the brunt of the crisis), 48 percent of Swedes expressed agreement with the sentiment that “there are too many immigrants in our country,” and 44 percent endorsed the statement that “immigration is causing my country to change in ways that I don’t like.”

Despite the problems presented by mass immigration and the large portion of the public opposed to it, no mainstream political party in Sweden broached the subject. This unfortunately left a massive vacuum to be filled by fringe actors. When it first entered parliament in 2010, the Sweden Democrats (SD) barely passed the electoral threshold with 5.7 percent of the vote. The party has its origins in the neo-Nazi movement, and while it has certainly moderated its message and expelled some of its more visibly extremist members over the years, it nonetheless opposes Swedish membership in the European Union, argues against joining NATO, and seeks better relations with Russia. In the most recent national election, the SD scored nearly 18 percent of the vote, its best result ever and enough to constitute the balance of power between the main center-left and center-right blocs. Due to the mainstream parties’ refusal to form coalitions with the SD, however, Sweden has been without a government for the longest time in its history.

The rising popularity of the SD is a lamentable development that would likely have never occurred had Sweden’s mainstream parties deigned to represent the views of nearly half the population. Support for the SD and its anti-establishment message has coincided with the longest economic expansion in Sweden in four decades, a trend visible among populist candidates and parties across the world and an indication that issues related to national identity and immigration transcend the vicissitudes of economic cycles. (In France, as the immigration issue has gained salience over the past 15 years, the proportion of French who see Marine Le Pen’s Front National—now the National Rally—as a threat to democracy has fallen from 70 percent in 2002 to 58 percent last year.)

Belatedly, the Swedish center-right is acknowledging that it has failed to represent the sizable portion of the public in favor of reducing immigration levels, and that condescending to voters by dismissing their concerns has only emboldened the far Right. “When voters are discontent, don’t blame them,” the recently elected leader of the center-right Moderate Party, Ulf Kristersson, says. Over the past two decades, Swedish governments of both the Right and Left have pursued “very unsuccessful integration policies.” The Moderates’ 2018 election manifesto called for a “strict migration policy” which reduces the number of people granted asylum, “faster integration” with a greater emphasis placed on language acquisition, and tying welfare benefits to employment.

Neighboring Denmark’s approach to immigration provides an instructive contrast with Sweden. The countries are more similar to one another (linguistically, culturally, socially, and economically) than they are to any other European nation, and so a comparison is instructive. Unlike Sweden, Denmark has adopted a restrictive immigration policy focused less on gauzy humanitarian ideals than on domestic economic need, and one that also places a premium on integrating the immigrants it does accept. It has enforced symbolic policies aimed at discouraging irregular migration (like confiscating valuables over a certain monetary amount and placing advertisements in newspapers to dissuade prospective migrants from making the long and arduous journey to Europe), which some have derided as inhumane.

Yet by restricting newcomers to a volume acceptable to a broad swath of Danish society, Denmark has avoided the negative consequences Sweden has incurred by taking in so many people. Denmark’s right-populist party, the Danish People’s Party, is not as extreme as the SD, and its tacit inclusion in various Center-Right governments has not adversely affected Denmark’s liberal democratic bona fides or its vital contributions to the liberal world order. Denmark remains a staunch American ally and one of the most robust (on a per capita basis) contributors to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, for example.

Adopting tougher policies on immigration, to the point of actually inviting a far Right party into government, is the strategy currently underway in Austria. There, the young Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of the Christian Democratic Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) has been governing since 2017 in coalition with the Freedom Party (FPÖ), founded by former SS officers and the impetus for European Union sanctions when it last formed a coalition government in the early 2000s. Many criticized Kurz for agreeing to work with the FPÖ rather than prolonging a coalition with the Social Democrats, yet a poll taken before the 2017 parliamentary election found only 15 percent public support for continuation of such a “grand coalition” government. While establishing a cordon sanitaire around the far Right might make it seem like its influence is being constrained, such maneuvering is not without its costs. Many voters view these frequent pacts between the country’s two main political parties, which have been the norm in postwar Austria, as a form of elite collusion, thus discrediting democracy and contributing to the rise of the far Right as a protest vote.

Though it’s far too early to draw any categorical conclusions, initial signs indicate that what the Austrian journalist Franz-Stefan Gady calls “Kurz’s populism lite” may be working. Addressing popular concerns about immigration and integration “not only helped him gain voters who previously cast their ballot for the FPÖ (168,000) as well as for two other far-right, populist parties (158,000), but also managed to attract 84,000 votes from former Green Party supporters, 60,000 votes from the New Austria and Liberal Forum (a liberal party), and 121,000 nonvoters, including first-time voters, from the previous election.” Taking a harder line on these issues has not led Austria towards the “illiberal democracy” of its neighbor Hungary; nor has it encouraged Kurz to adopt the anti-pluralist rhetoric which is the hallmark of populists Left and Right. “Unlike most populists,” observes Gady, Kurz “has never tried to delegitimize his political opposition.” When the European Parliament voted to censure the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán for its anti-democratic drift, a move that divided the center-right European People’s Party of which both Kurz’s ÖVP and Orbán’s Fidesz are members, Kurz directed his MEPs to vote against Orbán. This move was all the more significant given the warm, personal ties Kurz has developed with his Hungarian counterpart.

The Austrian government’s turn away from liberal immigration policies, crackdown on Islamism, and emphasis on integration has inspired something close to hysteria in Germany, where liberal elites see signs of incipient fascism in any deviation from the Wilkommenskultur (Welcome Culture) elucidated by Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015. “What we are talking about here is the question of whether Germany’s neighbor is, bit by bit, bidding farewell to the democratic way of life,” warned Der Spiegel. “Whether its society still wants pluralism and if it is capable of enduring the thousand varieties of multiculturalism and the processes of migration despite all the difficulties they present.” But there is nothing in the writings of John Stuart Mill, John Locke, the documents of the American founding, or any of the other foundational texts of Western liberalism mandating that a country must “endure the thousand varieties of multiculturalism” in order to classify as a liberal democracy. Reducing non-EU immigration will not adversely affect the quality of European democracy (on the contrary, by reducing the number of entrants from the non-democratic world to more manageable numbers, it might increase it). We may not be able to say the same thing should (more) populist parties come to power as a consequence of elite snubbing public opinion on immigration.

The inability—real or perceived—of mainstream European political leaders and parties to control immigration and alleviate its negative consequences has simultaneously decreased popular backing for the European project and increased support for parties once deemed extremist. Neither of these developments bodes well for the future health of the liberal world order, which depends upon a strong, coherent European Union governed by mainstream parties committed to the Transatlantic alliance with the United States and a values-based foreign policy. Opposition to immigration correlates strongly with opposition to European integration, as membership in the European Union is increasingly perceived as entailing the opening up of a country’s borders to migrants not just from within the bloc but from outside Europe as well. In turn, voters are increasingly willing to overlook the illiberal tendencies of anti-immigration parties, a dangerous development.

Across Europe, the failure to control external immigration and the inability to fully integrate newcomers risk elevating into power parties that are not only nativist but also opposed to the liberal world order. To be sure, populist parties often exaggerate the downsides of immigration and scapegoat immigrants as terrorists and criminals. But to echo Ivan Krastev’s warning, “In democratic politics, perceptions are the only reality that matters.” If a perception exists among European voters that mainstream political leaders are unable or unwilling to control immigration, and if this perception festers, then political forces that would upset Europe’s postwar political, economic, and security settlement will gain strength.

Unfortunately, many European elites and commentators are taking the opposite tack, establishing a totalizing, and false, dichotomy between proponents and opponents of liberal immigration policies that correlates perfectly with a dichotomy between proponents and opponents of liberal democracy itself. According to Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman, because “mass migration into Europe is unstoppable,” there today exists a “battle between nativists and liberals,” with the former waging an “all-out war on democracy and on migration”—as if a “war” on migration (by which Rachman presumably means a reduction in the numbers of immigrants) were in any way akin to dismantling democracy. A Politico op-ed by the Swedish Moderate Party MEP Anna Maria Corazza-Bildt that called upon the EPP to expel Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party was consumed almost entirely with complaints about his migration policies—policies which, however upsetting they are to Corazza-Bildt, are democratically legitimate and popular with the vast majority of Europeans, never mind Hungarians.

The conflation of the liberal world order with a liberal immigration regime is nowhere more an article of bien pensant faith than in Germany, recently lauded as “the ideological anchor of the European experiment, maybe of the entire liberal Western order” in an obsequious New York Times piece. There, Chancellor Angela Merkel and her sympathizers in the domestic and international media have framed the debate in such a way as to depict criticism of her position on immigration as nothing less than attack on liberal democracy itself. “This isn’t a debate about the future of the Chancellor, it’s about the future of Europe,” the editor of Handelsblatt warned after a dust-up between Merkel and her more conservative allies in the Bavarian Christian Social Union over migration.

But the conflation of liberal immigration policy with the liberal world order is becoming a disaster for both. One risk of associating liberal immigration policies with both the liberal world order and its component parts (of which the European Union is a major one) is that it can taint the latter in the minds of voters. It also plays right into the hands of proto-authoritarians like Orbán, who has instrumentalized widespread anti-migration sentiment into hostility against liberal democracy writ large. “Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration,” he said in the summer of 2018, as the European Union debated various migration policy proposals. Contra Orbán, liberal democracy is not inherently “pro-immigration.” But given the rhetoric and behavior of many of its leading practitioners, it’s not hard to see why many voters would fall for this simplistic rendering.

If the European debate over migration is framed as one between the Willkommenskultur of Angela Merkel and the harsher position adopted by Viktor Orbán and his ilk, then it is the latter, unfortunately, who will win. The optimal immigration and refugee policy—one that balances a commitment to humanitarian concerns with an alertness towards the negative consequences that high numbers of poorly educated migrants from vastly different societies can bring—lies somewhere in between. But for that policy to be achieved, the terms of the immigration debate have to change. In the words of Ahmed Mansour, an immigrant to Germany, the conversation in his adopted land has become one between the “overly tolerant and panic-mongers.” Out of a desire not to aid the far Right, many Germans choose to ignore issues like migrant criminality and attack anyone who does draw attention to them as crypto-fascist. “I would like to hear criticism of Ms. Merkel’s refugee policies from places other than the AfD. I want to hear it from the center of society, too. Differentiated. What did Germany get right in 2015? What did we get wrong? Differentiation has eluded us because the fear of serving those on the Right has become so great that we wind up doing so anyway by making the issue taboo.”

The task for Europe’s centrist parties on matters of national identity and immigration, then, must be to better represent the views of their constituents. This is a particular duty of Center-Right and Christian Democratic parties, whose traditional role in postwar Europe has been the articulation of a healthy patriotism and national sentiment. In many European nations, large pluralities or even majorities believe that most immigrants coming to their country are not refugees or asylum seekers fleeing violence and persecution (in which case Europe has a legal duty to shelter them) but rather economic migrants. Considering the 2016 statement by EU Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans that 60 percent of the people entering the bloc at the time were indeed economic migrants, they are not wrong in this assumption. Political leaders must therefore be more discriminating in how they apply the terms “refugee” and “economic migrant,” as a continued blurring of the clear, legal distinction between the two will only play into the hands of populists who would completely deny entrance to both.

The vast majority of Europeans want drastic decreases in immigration. Eventually, they are going to get it. (Indeed, the British people already have, and did so via a political means in a way that was once considered inconceivable—voting to leave the European Union.) Who will deliver this policy goal to them? To ensure that the answer to this question is not the far Right, the Center-Right will need to find solutions that are both workable and humane. Supporting economic development in Africa, the Middle East, and other regions of the world that are sending migrants toward Europe is one way to reduce migratory pressures over the long term. Throwing aid money at governments is not a solution, but opening up markets to producers in these countries is. Additionally, pushing the asylum process outside the continent, perhaps via the creation of “regional disembarkation platforms” where potential asylees will have their claims processed (a proposal the Commission has endorsed) is one that Center-Right parties should consider. Increased funding for the body’s Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, is a cause around which the vast majority of the European public could rally. This agency need not be fully autonomous; more important is that it fill the gaps in national border protection capacities.

Voters intuitively (and correctly) realize that, once a migrant makes his way into the European Union, there is little chance of deportation if his or her asylum claim fails. When a Swedish court overturned a decision to deport a Palestinian refugee who firebombed a synagogue on the grounds that he would be in danger from Israel if he were sent back to Palestine, it sent different messages to different constituencies. Potential migrants to Sweden were told that even committing a violent hate crime would not be a grave enough offense to risk deportation. Meanwhile, Jewish Swedes were told that the comfort of anti-Semitic criminal refugees is more important than their own safety. According to European Commission data, just 36.6 percent of failed asylum claimants are sent back to their home countries. In Germany, some 233,000 rejected asylum seekers remain in the country, and in 2017 German authorities only carried out about 24,000 deportations. The low deportation rate isn’t necessarily a result of political obstacles; rather, the cost of removing a failed asylum seeker can be prohibitively high.

The experience of another failed asylum seeker, a Tunisian named Anis Amri, who killed 12 people in a December 2016 truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market, demonstrates the weaknesses and potential dangers of the current system, and why increasing numbers of European voters are falling into the arms of the far Right. Denied an Italian residence permit in 2011, Amri was imprisoned after setting fire to a government shelter. Upon his release, he moved to Germany, where his applications for asylum (under several false identities) were rejected. Though he was subject to deportation, the German government lost track of his whereabouts; moreover, the Tunisian government refused to accept him back. It was in the midst of this bureaucratic confusion and incompetence that he was radicalized and carried out his deadly attack. Preventing such cases from occurring by making it harder to enter Europe illegally is a way both to protect against terrorism and to earn back the trust of European publics.

In exchange for these measures aimed at reducing external immigration into the European Union, Europe’s Center-Right should work to convince their more recalcitrant ideological brethren among the body’s newer members to help share the burden of finding homes for those migrants whose asylum claims have been successfully processed. Taking part in the European project—which substantial majorities in Hungary and Poland, whose governments have fought the European Union on its migrant distribution efforts, continue to support—entails solidarity. In the context of external migration, solidarity means that those countries which, by dint of geography, receive more migrants (namely, the Mediterranean states) should not have to bear the burden of future migratory flows.

However, no state should be forced to take refugees it does not want (and, as events over the past four years demonstrate, there is no means by which the European Commission can forced recalcitrant members to do so). One proposal to alleviate the problem of refugee disbursement is a “Tradable Refugee-Admission Quota” regime, whereby nations that do not wish to accept refugees can pay others to bear their share of the burden. Another proposal is an “international refugee match system,” in which nations and refugees can effectively “choose” each other. Such a program is also likely to result in better integration, in contrast to systems where countries accept migrants without the appropriate level of public “buy-in.”

Regardless of how the challenge of future irregular migration to Europe is handled, its continued existence as a specter haunting Europe is one that demagogues will use to bash the European Union as a whole, attack mainstream political leaders, and draw public support for their illiberal political programs. The danger here is that voters, tempted by a simple yet seductive message on immigration, will overlook a party’s hostility to NATO, the Transatlantic relationship, judicial independence, media freedom, political pluralism, and other markers of adherence to liberal order so as to achieve more restrictive immigration policies. The neutralization of irregular migration as a matter of serious ideological contestation should therefore be a priority for European leaders.

As Axios described following an early August poll with SurveyMonkey, “The fact that [Trump’s] job approval rating (44 percent) is so closely aligned with his immigration numbers suggests that Trump’s immigration policies play a huge role in how the public sees his presidency. If they’re with him on immigration, they’re with him on everything . . . [though] more than half of voters disapprove of Trump’s immigration policies, support DACA, and oppose building a border wall along the southwest border.”

This has been the case for some time. A 2008 study of five European countries found “questions of community and identity (the defense of national identity against outsiders and the upholding of an exclusive form of community) to be more consequential for [right-wing populist party] support than economic grievances in all five countries.”

The problem is hardly exclusive to the Right, and it may even be more pertinent for the European Center-Left, which has been decimated across the continent as its traditional voters flock to far Right parties, largely over disagreements on cultural issues, not least immigration.

The post Ignoring Immigration Is Empowering the Far Right appeared first on The American Interest.

The Peaceful Democratic Transition That Wasn’t

To those paying attention, the elections held in late 2018 and early 2019 in Congo played out like a full season of Game of Thrones, complete with violent subplots, betrayals, high court drama, last-minute twists and turns, and outcomes having nothing to do with the will of the people or the good of the country.

Joseph Kabila had been President since his father Laurent was assassinated in 2001, and after a fair electoral victory in 2006 approved by international observers and a highly disputed 2011 victory full of irregularities, he was constitutionally prevented from running again in 2016. Instead, he repeatedly delayed the vote over two years in an effort to change the constitution and stay in power. When that effort failed, he tried to pull “a Putin” circa 2008 by propping up a puppet candidate, Emmanual Shadary, to nominally take his place. But that failed too; according to an assessment of leaked data from CENI (the electoral commission in Congo) obtained by the Congo Research Group and independent corroborating evidence from 40,000 Catholic Church observers throughout the country, Shadary only received 19 percent of the vote. The two main opposition candidates, Felix Tshisekedi and Martin Faluyu, received 19 percent and 60 percent, respectively.

The official electoral results, however, told a much different story. Released after a 10-day delay during which the internet was shut down across the country, CENI announced that Tshisekedi received 38 percent of the vote, Faluyu 34 percent, and Shadary 25 percent, with Tshisekedi winning outright in the first-past-the-post system. Faluyu unsuccessfully challenged the results in the constitutional court (which is populated with Kabila loyalists), where they ironically ruled Faluyu’s claims of electoral fraud to be “absurd.” The political scientist Pierre Englebert calculates that the likelihood Tshisekedi won 38 percent of the vote is basically zero, and most assume that Tshisekedi made a backroom deal with Kabila for the presidency. As one prominent Congolese civil society leader told me, “in Congo there is no justice.”

Clearly, Kabila has not relinquished control, but many questions remain: Can Tshisekedi deftly wrestle power away from Kabila and create the change the Congolese have clearly demanded? What is the nature of the deal they made? Is it simply to provide amnesty to Kabila from his multitude of crimes? Many in Congo and around the world are optimistically taking a “wait-and-see” approach.

Others are not willing to be so patient. Some are saying both privately and publicly that political violence looms in the east, with recent shootings in Goma while Faluyu traveled nearby an early sign of things to come. One of the multitudes of armed groups could capitalize on the political discontent and further destabilize the country, perhaps repeating the history of the late 1990s and unseating the regime in Kinshasa itself. But a closer look—at the overlooked parliamentary results, historical precedent, and the state of play regionally and internationally—indicates that the most likely scenario is Tshisekedi and Kabila maintaining some kind of power sharing arrangement until 2023, when Kabila may very well run again.

The Legislative Elections as a Tell

While most observers have focused on the controversial presidential elections, the largely overlooked National Assembly results are more telling of Kabila’s designs for the future. The Congolese system was designed in the early 2000s to prevent politicians from replicating the demi-god status of Mobutu, Congo’s former military dictator; this is one reason Kabila has ruled through fragmentation and weakness. In principle, the Congolese system is “semi-presidential” with the National Assembly electing the cabinet and Prime Minister, who runs the government on a day-to-day basis.

Despite all evidence suggesting that the elections were a referendum on Kabila, which he lost in overwhelming fashion, his Front Commun pour le Congo (FCC) coalition somehow won 337 of the 500 seats in the National assembly and 70 percent of the seats at the provincial level. These results, though surely just as fraudulent as the presidential election, have gone unchallenged. Kabila and the FCC now control not only the assemblies and governorships in all 26 provinces but also the upper house of parliament in Kinshasa. By contrast, Tshisekedi’s party won a mere 32 seats in the National Assembly: a result that either reflects his true support, compared to the inflated presidential numbers, or one that was rigged to deny him the ability to control the levers of government.

Furthermore, events in recent weeks shed more light on the importance of the legislative elections and Kabila’s likely strategy. As Tshisekedi and Kabila met in mid-February to “strike a deal,” reports leaked that Kabila would be guaranteed immunity from prosecution from any alleged crimes occurring over the past 18 years, which has long been expected. What wasn’t expected was that they reportedly also agreed to a constitutional amendment that would result in future presidents being elected through parliament. If confirmed, this would pave an easy path for Kabila to regain the presidency in 2023.

History as a Guide

If political change is unlikely after this election, what can history tell us about alternative paths? After the brutal sufferings of the colonial period, Congo has experienced only two notable periods of political change. The first came during the 1960s, and the second during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Unfortunately, independence from Belgium in 1960 did not improve conditions for much of the population. After Congo’s first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated with the help, or at least consent, of the Belgians and Americans, Mobutu Sese Seko, the former head of the army, took control. Mobutu managed to stay in power for more than 30 years—partially due to his tactics of patronage and brutal repression at home, and partially thanks to his reputation in the West as a cold warrior. During his rule, the country experienced a slow but catastrophic economic decline.

Mobutu was overthrown in 1996 by Laurent Kabila, a rebel leader with a checkered past who had been based in eastern Congo for decades. Laurent Kabila’s rise to power was supported and directed by Rwanda (and Uganda), who felt threatened by the multitude of armed groups that had fled into eastern Congo in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. After two years, in the eyes of the Rwandans, Laurent Kabila had done no better in quelling the problem, and another war erupted in 1998. This second war became the deadliest conflict in the world since World War II and involved at least eight African nations (DR Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Chad, and Burundi). Although the war officially ended through a power-sharing agreement reached in 2002 between the top rebel groups and Laurent’s son Joseph Kabila, conflict has remained throughout the east of the country.

Although initially popular for his role in ending “Africa’s World War,” Joseph Kabila has spent the last 15 years enriching himself and his family in alleged illicit activities, much of it in the mining sector. For example, the family owns at least 80 companies and 450 miles of diamond concessions along the Angolan border—this while GDP per capita hovers at $800, 85 percent of the population lives on less than $1.50 per day, and the economy endures slowed growth rates and high inflation. It is no wonder the population has routinely expressed an overwhelming desire for political change to solve these problems; many Congo watchers undervalue the sophistication of the Congolese electorate, particularly in rural areas.

In sum, political transitions in Congo have historically happened under three conditions. First, there was a significant collapse in the economic, political, and security factors that loosely stitch the country together. Second, as Samuel Huntington asserted was critical in other historical cases, there was a schism among political elites in the capital and with the military. And third and most importantly, massive external expertise, military backing, and financial support were needed from outside Congo to force political change.

In current-day Congo, the ravages of an Ebola outbreak and economic and political crises suggest the first condition. Evidence of the second condition is mixed: although powerful opposition leaders Jean-Pierre Bemba and Moise Katumbi have railed against Kabila, both have been kept out of Kinshasa for some time; there is still enough coalescing among the political and military elite to create and manage political outcomes. And finally, the critical third factor—so far, there is no sign of a major international or regional push for change.

International Apathy, Regional Caution

After spending billions of dollars to create and support a democracy in Congo in the early 2000s, donor fatigue has set in and international interest has waned significantly. The U.S. government’s sometimes schizophrenic engagement in Congo over the last several years has reflected this sentiment. After suffering through a slow start, Africa policy is picking up steam within the Trump Administration as critical positions are filled in Washington and Kinshasa. The U.S. government had been active in Congo in the run-up to the election, offering to help fund CENI to do its work. But after initially disapproving of the results, the State Department eventually recognized Tshisekedi and controversially congratulated Congo on the “peaceful and democratic transfer of power.” As one senior U.S. government official told me a few years ago, the United States is “more likely to do something positive on the moon than we are in Congo.”

Regionally, Angola and Rwanda remain the most important players with the capacity to decide Congo’s political fate, and both have had their frustrations with Kabila. But there is too much risk in either playing an active role in the full ouster of a regime next door, and they both suffer and benefit from a weak Congo state. For Angola, the crisis in Kasai and refugees flowing over the border has been a significant cause for concern and President Joao Lourneco likely played a role in convincing Kabila to step down in 2018. In Rwanda, international pressure has pushed Paul Kagame to retreat from his support of various rebel leaders in eastern Congo. Also, few leaders in Africa care to enforce free and fair elections in other countries when so many have rigged their own. In fact, urged by Kabila’s advisors, the African Union (AU) recently named Tshisekedi its new 2nd Vice President, meaning his term to become the rotational President would be in 2021. Conditions would have to get much worse for any regional player to enter the fray with significant military action or support.

Kabila Holds the Cards

Despite his weakness relative to other leaders in the region, Kabila’s mastery of manipulation is hard to deny. After a 2011 re-election that lacked credibility, Kabila was undeterred and continued to amass wealth and political capital. Since 2015, despite calls for him to step down and sanctions by the United States and the European Union against his innermost circle, he skillfully manipulated events to find a resolution that best benefited him and his cronies and minimized backlash domestically and abroad. The regime and its enablers intimidated, detained, and killed protestors, burned down opposition headquarters, broke into Catholic churches, and shut down the internet for three weeks after the election—all without fundamentally upsetting the scales of power inside of Congo or provoking outside intervention. Kabila has also retained hard power: In addition to the parliament, he still controls the military and the presidential guard.

Meanwhile, Kabila continues to reside in the presidential palace while Tshisekedi has moved into a modest complex used for ministers’ meetings: a clear sign of who is really in charge. We still do not know the full extent of what the two men agreed to in their “peaceful transfer of power,” but there is no doubt who is holding the cards.

The post The Peaceful Democratic Transition That Wasn’t appeared first on The American Interest.

The Eastern Blind Spot in German Leadership

“To exclude Russia is the wrong strategic signal” Chancellor Merkel said as she defended the Nord Stream 2 project at the recent Munich Security Conference. As I watched her from my vantage in Berlin, it dawned on me that the controversial project marks an inflection point for European security. For years the world has urged Germany to become “normalized.” Perhaps Berlin’s position on the pipeline is what this looks like.

As a Romanian growing up between Germany and Romania, I have a kind of split-screen vision when it comes to Transatlantic security. I grew up between “deep” Southern Germany in Freiburg and Ulm and transitioning Bucharest and learned to embrace both German and Romanian cultures as part of my identity. I spent my formative undergrad years studying political science and international relations at the American-founded West Berlin Free University and as an exchange student in Bucharest. I currently work here in Berlin at a research center of the German military, where I focus as a post-doc fellow on Germany’s strategic culture and its impact the European level.

My split-screen view—from the vantage of both Berlin and Bucharest—thus makes me see Nord Stream 2 as a litmus test for Germany’s commitment to European security. Berlin finds itself pulled in mutually exclusive directions by various Transatlantic actors, with Eastern Europe and the United States opposing it and German voters and the business community for it.

At the Munich Consensus of 2014, German leaders made a collective promise to step up Germany’s leadership role in European security. It was a watershed moment and not just in terms of rhetoric; Chancellor Merkel has led and held together a European consensus against Russian aggression in Ukraine. Yet five years after Crimea, the international context has radically changed, and the very fabric of Western policy has been called into question. Germany has struggled to hold the line on sanctions against Russia in the face of opposition from EU members like Hungary and Italy, and voices from Austria, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain, and the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, the strategic community here in Berlin voices increasingly loud complaints regarding the mounting pressure it feels from all sides: from Republicans dismayed by Europe’s persistent reluctance to invest in hard security, and from Western Europeans fed up with the cajoling and impulsive behavior from the White House.

Having worked over the last six months exclusively on German security policy, I can discern a pattern: Berlin, as the reluctant European leader, finds itself in the middle of a re-arrangement of Transatlantic relations without a clear strategy; it seems to tactically approach each security issue. Germany has ambitions to beef up European security in the context of the European Union, but it needs to find a way to do so that placates everyone: Republicans, ambitious French, Brexiting Brits, and increasingly dissatisfied Central and Eastern Europeans.

European Security?

In the wake of American retrenchment from Europe and Brexit, Berlin, together with Paris, is trying to revitalize the security and defense dimension of the European Union. The 2018 coalition agreement reflects its focus on the EU to the detriment of NATO. Two entire pages are dedicated to Germany’s vision for EU security consolidation, while NATO—along with the feeble Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe—gets two paragraphs. From an Eastern European perspective, this is alarming.

Called the “European Defense Union,” the new Paris-Berlin initiative within the framework of the Common Foreign and Security Policy remains, despite lengthy speeches by European leaders, an abstract notion. Does the idea imply a “European Army,” or an “Army for the Europeans?” Who should lead it? Who should its soldiers be? How should the project link up with the 34 new common European military capability projects, which not all EU member states have chosen to participate in? Even as someone who focuses her work on these issues, I have no answer to these questions.

Looking at this tangled morass of European security efforts, two issues arise. On the first there is broad consensus: Europe needs to bolster its security and become less dependent on Washington. On the second issue, however, there is profound disagreement: How do we define European security in the first place? Viewed from outside Europe, the answer seems simple: keep the continent at peace. But viewed within Europe, there’s no simple answer to that question that suits everyone. The East has a radically different answer than the West.

Here in Germany, strategic voices insist Europe should speak “with one voice,” and the majority of Europeans agree in principle with that statement. But if Berlin wants to be the lead singer in the choir of European security, it has to address the broad array of Europeans’ security concerns. After Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, Western leaders dismissed East European worries about Russia as Cold War relics. And again in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Brussels struggled in vain to get Europe speaking with one voice. Eastern Europeans feeling threatened by Russia had to conclude that the High Representative of the European Union was nowhere to be found during negotiations with Russia.

From my German perspective, the country’s Ostpolitik was a win: Chancellor Merkel managed to rally both German voters and Europe more broadly around several rounds of sanctions against Russia and spearheaded peace negotiations in Ukraine on Europe’s behalf. Yet from my Eastern vantage, Germany’s security contributions on Europe’s Eastern flank remain limited. Berlin sent a single battalion under NATO auspices to the Baltic countries and has no military presence whatsoever in the Black Sea, despite this area being the focal point of Russian-fueled conflicts. Furthermore, Berlin opposes both a stronger military defense on Europe’s Eastern flank, as well as arming Ukraine. Meanwhile, to the satisfaction of the Eastern flank, the United States has raised its funding for the European Deterrence Initiative from $3.4 billion to $5.6 billion in 2017 and has a comprehensive military presence across Europe’s Eastern flank.

At the same time, Germany also needs to turn its attention to Eastern Europe. Ten years after the creation of the first security strategy of the European Union in 2003, it was high time to issue a new one to take into account the radical changes to the European security environment, including the addition of ten new EU countries. While I was an adviser to the Romanian Presidential Administration, Romania partnered up with Poland in launching a process to create a new and much needed strategy with Eastern input. Germany showed no support for such a strategy. It was only in the context of Brexit that a new EU strategy was finally issued, which, though more pragmatic than the first one, still failed to address European security issues on the ground.

Germany’s Voice in Europe

It certainly is a tricky endeavor to get 28 member states speaking with one voice on any state’s most sensitive policy issue, security. Though it runs the risk of gutting the effectiveness of EU foreign policy, no common ground is often better than a forced common ground. If Germany is to “assume greater responsibility” and lead European security, at times it will have to make room for its partners’ visions.

Take the Iraq war. Europe’s lesson from the Iraq intervention in 2003 should have been that the view adopted by Berlin and Paris was openly opposed by 19 other European countries, which backed the United States. But Europe instead pushed for consensus and issued an inaugural security strategy that was unrealistic and grasped at straws. When the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017, EU members Slovakia, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Romania controversially considered following the U.S. lead, and three of them attempted to block an EU statement condemning Washington’s recognition. Germany, along with other EU members and the High Representative, also issued warnings to the White House about moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Despite the fact that there was no European consensus on the Jerusalem issue, the European Union’s High Representative issued a statement stressing that all EU member states condemned U.S. policy.

This wasn’t the last time EU member states were pushed into a foreign policy position they were reluctant to assume because of their strategic partnership with the United States. In the wake of Vice President Pence’s pressure campaign on the European Union to withdraw from the Iran deal, European officials have accused the United States of “trying to break up Europe.” Meanwhile, Eastern flank countries Poland and Romania have signaled their ambivalence toward the deal and have stressed their intent to find “common ground” with Washington. Pushing Europeans to speak with one voice its members don’t share will only generate further fault lines among them.

Nord Stream 2 and Germany First

At the Munich Security Conference Merkel said: “The times today are not so much worse [than they were in the Cold War] for Russia not to remain a partner. . . . We do not want to make Russia entirely dependent on China. It is not in our European interest.” Sitting in the first row, listening to Merkel and perhaps wondering which “we” and whose “European interest” she meant, were the Presidents of both Ukraine and Romania, neither of whom applauded this statement.

From their vantage and that of other East European states, far from being a partner Russia has been their premier security threat—one that has repeatedly used gas as a political weapon and restricted fuel flows through Ukraine. Nord Stream 2 threatens an already fragile security situation in Ukraine and Poland; with the pipeline, Kiev and to a lesser extent Warsaw would receive less transit income and would have their geopolitical leverage as transit countries reduced. As for broader European interests, the pipeline also makes no sense. There is no risk of a gas shortage in the foreseeable future, and in fact the pipeline undermines the primary goal of European energy strategy: supply diversification. Berlin’s insistence on Nord Stream 2 also complicates Europe’s relationship with the United States. Moreover, it is showing us a side of Germany we are unaccustomed to: one that puts national economic interests before European security.

When Germany’s Transatlantic allies and partners argued for years for Berlin to “normalize,” what they had in mind was that it would match its outsized economic power with a greater leadership role in European security, broadly speaking. What they’ve discovered is that Berlin has a sizable blind spot when it looks east.

The post The Eastern Blind Spot in German Leadership appeared first on The American Interest.

The Tragedy of Our Tech-Besotted Age

Not long ago the New York Times ran a major, front-page story on the military-strategic implications of “fifth generation” information technology—the so-called 5G network. Specialists probably found little new in the article, but for a general reader it both provided a useful summary and carried a judicious tone of stolid concern short of alarm. We at TAI have been focused on this subject as well, employing a similar tone (note our essay coauthored by a former DNI making similar points, published about four and half months before the NYT piece).

What caught my attention in this New York Times feature was less the main lines of the story than the matter-of-fact way the piece was set up. Inadvertency often signals submerged assumptions, rather like Freudian slips but without their supposed psycho-diagnostic value. Even before the page jump in the print edition, the reader is informed as follows:

It is the first network built to serve the sensors, robots, autonomous vehicles and other devices that will continuously feed each other vast amounts of data, allowing factories, construction sites and even the whole cities to be run with less moment-to-moment human intervention. It will also enable greater use of virtual reality and artificial intelligence tools.

But what is good for consumers is also good for intelligence services and cyberattackers….

So, good for consumers as well as for cyberattackers, with the latter long-since neologized as a single word—which tells us how deeply the focus of our language pioneers is sunk in the wonders of technovelty. But where does this bivalent choice leave me? I’m not a cyberattacker. Even if I wanted to be one, I wouldn’t know how. And I take umbrage at the notion that, here in the presumably post-Skinnerian 21st-century, “consumer” is a synonym for human being—and not just on Eighth Avenue in New York City.

To be a consumer, preferably a discerning consumer, has become by default the apogee of what it means to be a human being, at least among those on the dull cutting edge of lapsing Western modernity. No one has ever formally argued the point as such, as far as I am aware. As Oren Cass has argued brilliantly, it has rather oozed over us slowly and silently thanks to the seemingly antiseptic “scientific” ministrations of garden-variety macroeconomists, whose accrued authority beyond their data and competence has become a plague of our times.

So it is that, as older, religiously infused ways of comprehending human purposes and character have eroded, we are left with forms of materialism alone—in our case one that exalts consumption and satiety over production and work, the corpulent and demobilized over the sleek and creative. It’s ironic when you think about it, given the ubiquitous marquee presentation of Cold War ideologies not that long ago: The bad buys were the rank materialists, remember? (Some would, possibly, be reminded of the Civil War, Tilden-Hayes, and all that: The North won the war but in many non-trivial ways the South won the peace; mutatis mutandis, the West won the Cold War but the Soviet Union had to die to make Marxoid caricatures of social realities safe for Western academics, other intellectual poseurs, and Wall Street mavens.)

And so we have come to worship at the altar of GNP, as if most Americans knew where that metric came from or what it actually measures. We minister to the god of aggregate demand, whose proverbial apostle is Henry Ford—as in, pay the workers more so they can buy more stuff, and around we all go, and how much made-to-break garbage this routine dumps into the environment, nobody knows. We counterfeit the world by means of numbers, obsessing over employment, labor force participation, trade balance, and interest rate statistics, none of which existed in a ponderable format before around 1913—and yet somehow the nation persisted and even thrived.

What is beneath this proclivity to enthrone the consumer as the paragon of human virtue? As usual, it’s not any one thing alone. The power of the stripped down, secularized Calvinist premise—that material affluence is a sign of a moral and worthy people—should not be underestimated, and anyone wanting to understand its improbable origins should consult Max Weber’s still-standing 1905 stab at an explanation. But if I had to place my bet on one major driving cause, it would be our abiding technological optimism.

Technological optimism is hardwired into the American psyche, a psyche born in the womb of the Enlightenment and suckled by the astonishments of the Industrial Revolution. As a variant of developmentalist ideology, it is so strongly present in our presumptions about the connections between material and spiritual progress—presumptions that display the twinned Calvinist and Whiggish aspects of our inheritance—that no amount of disconfirming evidence can budge it.

That optimism walks hand in hand with visions of an endless parade of Horatio Algers going from rags to riches by dint of having been in on the commercialization of some new technological marvel, whether real or just snake oil made of metal. The American Dream may be unfettered equality of opportunity, but the zenith of the theologically denatured Calvinist business plan is to do well by doing good. Make it, market it, consume it, smile broadly at it, and don’t look back—at least until something or other bites us in the ass.

The only major technological breakthrough in American history that our leaders did not bid be taken to market immediately was nuclear energy. For that they created the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946 (and good thing they did). But the apparent motto for everything else—from electrification to mechanized agriculture, from television to the automobile and the highway system birthed in its wake, from the birth control pill to the iPhone—has been let ’er rip. And why not? A lot of people made a whole lot of money, and the almost unimaginable affluence we now experience as a society is unthinkable save in the context of general technological advancement.

So regular exposure to artificial lighting causes precocious puberty, especially in females. So what? So mechanized agriculture has inclined to corporate ownership of land and the food supply, as well as the rise of monoculture and all the environmental implications thereof. So what? So television has contributed mightily to the decline of deep literacy and the loss of both touch skills and integral community. So what? So cars and the highway system enabled the suburbs, which have eroded social capital and exacted major environmental costs. So what? The birth control pill, in tandem with other factors, has had dramatic effects on social structure, the labor profile, marriage and family norms, including child raising, not all of them unalloyed joys. So what? Indeed, our unprecedented and broadly shared level of affluence itself has turned out to be a mixed blessing, contributing both to burgeoning social isolation and an array of “lifestyle” diseases. That’s what.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no Luddite. If I had a time machine I wouldn’t go back into history and negate these developments, or thousands of lesser others. I wouldn’t relish our standard of living being cut in half. I’m not sorry the genome has been decoded, despite the many ethical dilemmas that achievement already poses, to say nothing of the dilemmas to come. It is dangerous when man plays God, yes. But to be created in the image of God means to be endowed with creativity. We are, I believe, meant to use that creativity, but also to struggle with its ethical implications. That is what being human is really about, and somehow just being a “consumer” doesn’t quite match up to the challenge.

The struggle of which I speak is not, it seems to me, best executed solely by dint of post hoc regrets—DDT, thalidomide, and Love Canal come to mind, but there are many others. Of course it is impossible to anticipate all the ramifications of major technological advancements, and knee-jerk application of the so-called precautionary principle has always struck me as evidence of psychiatric need. But the degree of difficulty we have in anticipating the effects of technological change is to some extent a function of the quality attention we devote to trying. We don’t try too hard. Case in point: We once had an arm of Congress called the Office of Technology Assessment. It did some good work, so we abolished it.

Which brings me back to the point: The 5G network, effuses the NYT, “is likely to be more revolutionary then evolutionary. What consumers will notice first is that the network is faster—data should download almost instantly, even over cellphone networks.” Ah, our insatiable need for speed. Would it really be too much of a nuisance to just briefly review the known effects, so far, of third- and fourth-generation mobile communications technology on human cognitive functioning, and the various social implications flowing therefrom, before we run pell-mell through door number five?

Of course it’s too much. We as a society won’t do it. But here is just a short, raw list of what some of the downside implications may be, notwithstanding the upsides that comingle with them. We haven’t room here to argue and explain, merely to assert—and hope the perspicacious reader feels the thrill of verisimilitude.

First, the way we read has already changed profoundly. As a society we are progressively losing our capacity for deep literacy. We skim and jump around as we rush through materials, exchanging a fine sense of sequence, time, and logic for the getting of many gists, albeit poorly. Our attention spans have been shot to hell, and that already affects not only what we read but what we write, how we write it, and how publishers publish it. A collective dumbing down is unmistakable.

The growing inability to dwell with a text, whether fiction or non-fiction, is truncating our capacity for empathy, diminishing our facility for conceptual and syncretic thought, and discounting our orientation to genuinely difficult subjects. If it takes a longer time than we’re willing to invest to scope out a problem, then suddenly it’s not a problem to grapple with but a mystery to be warehoused like the Ark of the Covenant in the famous closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Second are the physiological effects of marinating ourselves in mediated images (sight and sound, mainly) at the expense of direct ones. And ironically, this at a time when many of us increasingly credit the need to reconnect with nature—even as we retreat further from it despite ourselves.

Mediated images are counterfeit images. Mediated images are dis-embedded from tactile and social realities, lack full dimensionality, and so are more vulnerable to manipulation than direct images. Mediated images juice the cognitive demand to feed our novelty bias, tripping off micro-endorphin rushes and thus literally exhausting us. Hence the mass migration of media to shock-bar business calculations and the dominance of clickbait, and so the ease with which entrepreneurs of social division market political polarization via “fake” news and cacophonous accusations of fake news. Result: the more information we can access the dumber we get.

Then there is the social isolation and sheer loneliness abetted by the technology, as well as the artificially acquired social autism afflicting so many young people. Our youth are less emotionally mature than they used to be at comparable ages, and that partly accounts for the proliferation of campus safe spaces and trigger warnings to spare our precious snowflakes from any untoward encounters with reality. It’s probably also part of what is behind the enormity of student-on-student gun violence.

So yes, indeed, let’s keep doing all this, and let’s do it even faster! Great idea that 5G…and so much money involved.

One almost hopes the Chinese win the race.

The post The Tragedy of Our Tech-Besotted Age appeared first on The American Interest.

The INF Treaty Was Built on Fantasy—But It Was Useful Fantasy

Word of the demise of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces reawakened many happy memories for me. I was in the UK in 1982 as principal diplomatic representative for the deployment of Pershing and Ground Launch Cruise Missiles, and back in Washington in 1988-89 chairing the interagency group backstopping the negotiations that removed the missiles I had worked to deploy. I helped get them in, and I helped get them out.

I was a minor player, of course, as were all of us on the American side both great and small—save one man: The INF Treaty was Ronald Reagan’s baby. Caricatured as a nuclear bomb-happy hawk, Reagan turned out to be the most anti-nuclear President we’ve ever had. He wasn’t the first President the grasp the folly of the nuclear arms race. But unlike his predecessors, he went all-in on eliminating certain categories of weapons and drastically reducing others. First on the list for elimination: intermediate range nuclear missiles.

But there was a catch: The Soviets had them and we didn’t, at least not in Europe. Beginning in 1970s, the Soviets began deployment of an intermediate range missile called the SS-20. One of them now stands in the great hall of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, but in the late 1970s we had never seen one, even in satellite photography. (This was still true when the INF Treaty was signed. At our insistence, the package that accompanied the treaty included pictures of the SS-20 to ensure we knew what one looked like). We did know that it could send its three nuclear warheads anywhere in Europe, and—because it was mounted on mobile launchers—we could do nothing to prevent it. Eventually, 600 or so SS-20s were deployed with 1,800 warheads, give or take—enough to make the rubble bounce in major European cities and crossroad hamlets alike.

According to the then-prevailing ideology, this Soviet deployment removed a “link” from the Western “chain” of deterrence. There was no chain, of course, still less a link, but metaphors like that have a lot more power than arcane studies or even reality itself, so suddenly there existed in Washington the conviction that SS-20s constituted an existential threat.

The reasons were rooted in Cold War theology. The central fact was the imbalance in Europe between the conventional forces of the Soviet Union and NATO. So great was this imbalance that it might tempt the Soviets to launch a conventional strike across the inner German border. How could such an attack be deterred short of escalation to an all out suicidal nuclear war? And could that even work, since threatening it lacked a certain credibility?

So the West made a great show of possessing conventional strength enough to throw the Soviets back through the Fulda gap, but the show, being very much off-Broadway, lacked much conviction. Soviet tank divisions were poised on or near the inner-German border. Most of ours were garrisoned in the United States. I was witness in the port of Antwerp to one of the massive annual “Reforger” exercises, meant to prove that all this weight of metal could be deployed quickly to Europe in the event of a crisis. It proved the opposite. I remember a bedlam of diesel smoke, broken down tanks, and swearing drivers all crowding through port facilities that in an actual war would have been destroyed by an opening missile salvo. I recall thinking that a Soviet agent or three was probably watching this, too, and drawing the same conclusions.

But if conventional forces weren’t up to the job, how could a Soviet attack be deterred? As already intimated, the answer involved two bits of joined strategic jargon. The first was “flexible response”—the notion that our first response to a Soviet attack would be conventional; the second was “linkage,” sometimes known as the U.S. “nuclear umbrella”—a guarantee that if a conventional response failed, the U.S. government would resort to nuclear weapons. The Soviets would be deterred by the knowledge that their conventional success would lead to our nuclear response, triggering a nuclear war and bringing great and perhaps terminal destruction to everyone concerned.

Officially, rhetorically, the Soviets accepted none of this. They refused to be deterred by logic, in other words. They may have had nuclear weapons, but they lacked think tanks; they had no equivalent to the RAND Corporation. So they argued that once the nuclear threshold was crossed, hostilities would soon escalate to an all-out nuclear exchange. Inconveniently enough, our war gaming tended to show the same thing. If so, then the Soviet conventional advantage was significantly real: It may not have been able or even intended to win a war of choice, but its very existence might work as a wedge to undermine nervous Germans on the western side of the line, thus driving a wedge between NATO and its most importantly situated European ally.

And indeed, the Ostpolitik leanings of some West German governments seemed to validate the political implications of the Soviet advantage. But we, officially, rhetorically, accepted none of that. We held tightly to our ideological mummery. Taken together, the Soviet refusal to admit the possibility that we might use nuclear weapons to stave off defeat in the Cold War, and our refusal to admit that, all else equal, the Soviet conventional imbalance might undermine the political solidarity of NATO, eventually came to structure the whole of the Cold War strategic conversation in the 1960s and 1970s. Though it took two to tango, no one planned this dance. No one could possibly have planned it.

Through this prism of mutually assured rational denial, the deployment of SS-20s tipped the scale. Now the Soviets could launch a sudden nuclear attack in Europe with missiles that lacked the range to reach the United States, keeping in reserve those that did to deter us in case we were tempted to retaliate on Europe’s behalf. Thus linkage would be weakened—unless, that is, we deployed nuclear missiles of our own in Western Europe to fill the theoretical gap. If we did, then we could hit nearly every significant target in the Soviet Union from territory not part of our country, and the Soviets would lack a corresponding capacity.

More basic to the logic of strategic interaction, we could then choose to respond at any given “rung” of the nuclear “ladder”; battlefield nuclear weapons would match battlefield weapons, intermediate range missiles would respond to intermediate range missiles, and so on until either the Soviets lost their nerve to continue, or they didn’t, in which case both of the superpowers would be reduced to radioactive wastelands. Or not, because the uber-logic of mutual assured destruction suggested that, some residual uncertainties necessarily left on the street, the whole business would have been deterred before it started. Which was good. Which was the whole point of mutual assured destruction. Which, when you worked it out, meant that all those Soviet tanks and soldiers were of no avail to Moscow, militarily or politically. So we had deterrence, the Soviets did not threaten Western Europe, our allies were safe, and the alliance worked…sort of.

Put another way, “linkage,” like Tinker Bell, could only exist as long as all sides believed in it, or could be presumed to believe it, whatever they actually said. But that was neither unusual nor a big problem, since a lot of human behavior works that way: paper money, the arbitrary symbolic construction of language, love, and so much more. But by the 1970s, the faith needed to sustain linkage had begun to erode, especially in Western Europe. And one of possibly several reasons for that erosion was the Soviet attainment of strategic nuclear parity with United States.

Was the United States really willing to put its cities on the line to protect German cities we ourselves had all but destroyed not 30 years before? That question had been posed since the early 1950s, but it was posed more piquantly by the early 1970s. And didn’t the linkage argument cut both ways? Perhaps the purpose of deploying U.S. nuclear missiles in Europe was not to link, but to de-link—to ensure, in other words, that any future nuclear war would be fought in Europe, leaving U.S. territory a sanctuary, as it had been in both world wars. And then there were the millions of Europeans who opposed nuclear weapons as the terrible instruments of destruction they are, whether linked or not.

Great Britain was the key to the NATO counter-deployment. If we couldn’t deploy there, we wouldn’t be able to deploy anywhere in Europe. The anti-nuclear forces realized this too, of course, and began to mobilize. The Committee on Nuclear Disarmament (CND), moribund since the 1950s, sprang back to robust life, mustering 300,000 protestors in Hyde Park in 1991 just as Parliament was deciding whether to accept our missiles. Several thousand protestors marched from London to Greenham Common, where some of the missiles were to be stationed, and camps sprung up around the gates. Then it rained, and the men went home. When the weather improved, the men came back, but the women weren’t interested in sunshine protestors, so the men were turned away and the Women of Greenham Common were born. Some of the Women were still there when the last missile was removed nine years later.

The Executive Director of CND was Monsignor Bruce Kent, a mild mannered cleric who presided from a storefront office in the decidedly unfashionable London suburb of Finsbury. The first time I called—it was 1982 and CND was at its height—he was surprised but welcoming. No one purporting to represent the U.S. government had ever shown interest in a dialogue with CND, and—to tell the truth—nobody had authorized me to start one. I went several times after that. We would invariably drink tea and rehearse our arguments, mine based on the prevalent theology about deterrence and linkage and the rest of it.

I’m embarrassed now to remember how earnestly I repeated the nuclear narrative. I may even have accepted it as fact in those days, through a fact of a rather phenomenological kind. I preached to university audiences, too, sometimes smuggled in through dank basements to meet a handful of young Tories in out-of-the-way lecture halls while much larger crowds waved placards outside.

The Women of Greenham persevered, pouring super glue into the locks on gates surrounding the base, and taunting the guards who chased them away. But in in the end only one woman mattered, and her name was Margaret Thatcher. She held firm. She always held firm. That became more politically palatable, and took the initiative from groups like CND, when President Reagan proposed the “zero option”—a stroke of negotiating genius. Instead of the two sides agreeing on equal levels of intermediate range weapons, why not abolish that category of weapons altogether?

Since this would mean the destruction of Soviet missiles in return for missiles we hadn’t deployed yet, it seemed a one-sided bargain the Soviets would never accept. Meanwhile, however, it would give the United States the negotiating initiative and defang the anti-deployment forces in Western Europe; in short, zero would become a classic poison pill. That’s what its original proponents, led by Richard Perle, expected, and that’s what would have happened had not Ronald Reagan taken “zero” seriously and, with his unique combination of charm and persistence, persuaded Mikhail Gorbachev to go along.

The INF Treaty laid the groundwork for agreements on reductions in strategic nuclear weapons, and that led in turn to the qualitative denaturing of the Cold War, and, along with other factors, to the end of the Cold War on terms quite splendid for our side. So the Treaty, all told, made the world a better and safer place. The supposed nuclear hawk turned out to be the decisive nuclear dove. Credit goes as well to Gorbachev, who agreed to dismantle his already tested and deployed SS-20s despite strong pushback from his military advisers.

When the weapons were gone, linkage was neither stronger nor weaker than before, but a new and more positive chapter had opened in the nuclear arms race. That was the important thing. The SS-20s, GLCMs, and Pershings had turned out to be pieces in an elaborate diplomatic game to see whether the unity of the Western Alliance could be breached, and whether the Soviet Union—already conscious of its political weakness and technological inferiority—could steal a march on the West in the nuclear confrontation. Answers: It couldn’t, or at any rate didn’t; and it couldn’t, but at any rate didn’t. Of course, contingency being what it is, things might have turned out otherwise.

Eliminating the missiles didn’t change the ultimate military balance, but it did move the world a little bit back from the nuclear brink. The prevailing narrative had been all about launchers and warhead numbers and first-strike options. Now it was about reductions and verification and missile defense. New fantasies were invented around these themes, no more realistic, as it turned out, than those that had come before, but on the whole they were much more hopeful fantasies. That has to count for something.

That was then, and this is now. In recent years the Russians have developed and deployed a ground-launched cruise missile that violates the INF Treaty. They tried to disguise what they were doing, then denied they were doing it, and then said we were doing it too. (Might the Saudis in the Khashoggi episode have taken their public relations strategy from Moscow?) In any case, lately the Russians have taken to parading those missiles as part of a new and impressive nuclear capability, many elements of which are far more threatening than ground-launched cruise missiles, whatever their range. But it is a strange way to persuade observers that the missile doesn’t exist.

The United States has its own trillion-dollar nuclear modernization program, which includes the development of small, maneuverable nuclear warheads that critics and supporters alike see as warfighting weapons. The Chinese are doing the same. Thus the major nuclear powers have—or will soon have—nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles enough to place them precisely on target anywhere in the world with little or no warning. Hypersonic glide vehicles, long-range drones, zombie submarines doubling as nuclear bombs, and new generations of nuclear bombers both manned and unmanned have rendered the narrow proscriptions agreed to in the INF Treaty of purely historical interest.

In this new environment, the United States will be free once again to develop and deploy whatever land-based intermediate range nuclear missiles it wants. But the Administration has already said it won’t take advantage. That’s good, because there would be no place on land to base them. The theoretical and political basis for deployment anywhere in Europe or Asia has disappeared, along with confidence in our responsible use of power. There could be no talk of linkage now; the Europeans seem less threatened by the new Russian missiles than by our erratic and often hostile Chief Executive.

Perhaps nuclear deterrence in Europe was always an elaborate bluff. Thankfully it was never called, and now, for practical purposes, it has been taken off the table. A purely transactional world in which military engagement is seen in terms of profit and loss may seem an abomination to a generation like mine who thought in terms of American principles and American leadership. It may seem a tragedy that Ronald Reagan would be the last of our Presidents who might with justification claim the title “Leader of the Free World.” But the election of Donald Trump signaled the end to all that.

The demise of the INF Treaty—in many ways President Reagan’s proudest achievement—merely underlines this new reality. It was a symbol within a system of symbols at the outset, and it’s again a similar kind of symbol now. It could not prevent nuclear weapons from becoming more versatile, smaller, easier, and more tempting to use; nor could it stop a new generation of academics from conjuring new narratives for using them. If we suppose, as President Reagan did, that the multiplication of nuclear weapons itself is a threat to civilization, then troubling and dangerous times lie ahead.

Still, for those of us who like to look on the bright side of life whenever remotely possible, there’s this: As long as the narrative about assured second strike, escalatory dominance, flexible response, linkage, and the rest of it held a grip on the public mind, there was the danger that powerful people would treat the metaphors as reality and blow the whole of our species to dust. Daniel Boorstin once wrote that when God wants to curse men, he makes them believe their own propaganda.

Powerful people may still blow up the world, of course. But in the new age of transactional security, we are far less likely to risk nuclear war in defense of bumper sticker jargon produced by clueless intellectuals. Tinker Bell is not just merely dead; she’s truly and sincerely dead. We see the world from a businessman’s perspective now. And whatever else can be said about nuclear war, this much is beyond dispute: It’s no way to make a buck.

That leaves us with a curiosity straining to become a paradox. After the Chinese, the Russians, we Americans, and too many others have finished current deployment programs within the next seven to ten years, there will likely be many more deployed nuclear weapons than there are now, but also significantly fewer hair triggers for nuclear war than there were fifty years ago. Most likely.

The post The INF Treaty Was Built on Fantasy—But It Was Useful Fantasy appeared first on The American Interest.

Sweden’s New Government: Something Rotten in Utopia?

After the September 9 election last year, Sweden confronted a predicament familiar to other Europeans: Elected politicians seemed unable to form a government. This was a new situation for Swedes, who have benefited from political stability and a predictable Left-Right scale in their politics. It was also peculiar: Voters returned the most anti-socialist parliament ever, with 57 percent of voters choosing right-of-center parties. But when a government was eventually formed four months after the election, the socialist-green coalition that had ruled the country since 2014 remained in place, with Stefan Löfvén staying on as Prime Minister. This happened because the country’s two liberal parties defected from the Center-Right alliance formed in 2006, and instead negotiated an agreement that allowed the government to remain in place.

Voters have defected in droves from established parties to the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, who gained close to 18 percent of the vote. That is five percentage points more than in 2014, and fully three times their share in 2010. Because the Sweden Democrats draw heavily on working class, formerly reliably socialist voters, the traditional leftist domination of Swedish politics is being dismantled. Thus, for the first time ever, a decisive majority—57 percent—voted for political parties that are right of center. Sweden now has a right-wing populist party as sizable as the Danish People’s party or the Norwegian Progress party. This decisively cracked one of the most treasured myths of Sweden’s left-liberal political establishment: the notion that the country was somehow different from (and superior to) its neighbors and did not harbor the bigotry found in other European countries.

Because of such Swedish exceptionalism, the establishment has had noticeably more trouble than its neighbors adjusting to this new political reality. Across Europe, politicians have begun to come to terms with shifts in the popular mood. They have been forced to recognize that right-wing populists must be treated like other political forces. In Finland, for example, the establishment has discovered that the best way to puncture the populist balloon is to include them in coalition governments. Because this forces populists to accept real responsibility for running the country and make hard choices, they promptly see their votes fall in the next election. Similarly, governments in Denmark and Norway have been formed with the support of populist parties.

Not so in Sweden, where the establishment has taken a moralistic approach bent on stigmatizing the Sweden Democrats and making any interaction with them “indecent.” The political and media elite continue to depict them as evil incarnate, and all established parties have refused so much as to talk to the Sweden Democrats. If we don’t give them the time of day, the thinking goes, they might go away. But this strategy has clearly failed to stem the growth of the Sweden Democrats. In fact, it may well have boosted their meteoric rise.

Yet, faced with the election results, the establishment stubbornly doubled down on its haughty approach. Over the summer, the leading liberal newspaper Dagens Nyheter ran a number of ominous stories about 1930s Germany, and its editorial pages worked to sow fears that Swedish democracy was in existential danger. Only a total rejection of the Sweden Democrats, they argued, could save democracy—and therefore, all other parties should band together in a unity government, just as they had during World War II. Meanwhile, the conservative parties that floated the idea of forming a government with Sweden Democrat support were compared to Franz von Papen, the German Conservative who facilitated the rise of Adolf Hitler. Of course, well aware that the Left and Greens now controlled only 40 percent of the vote, the socialist government fanned these fears. Its only chance to stay in power was to continue to brand the Sweden Democrats as untouchable.

This only had a limited effect on voters. A slight majority actually see nothing wrong with established parties negotiating with the Sweden Democrats.

But among the political elite, the strategy worked beyond all expectations. Given the election results, the Center-Right alliance of four parties that had governed the country from 2006 to 2014 could have formed a government with Sweden Democrat support. That is exactly what the two more conservative parties—the Moderates and the Christian Democrats—advocated. And to support a government, the Sweden Democrats required only continued strict immigration policies, significant investments in law and order, and healthcare reforms to reduce long waiting times. But the two liberal parties refused to even consider this option. Instead, they negotiated a 73-point agreement with the socialist-led government. This bewildering agreement commits the socialist government to a set of neoliberal reforms that it strongly opposes, particularly in the housing and labor markets. But to pass a confidence vote, the government needed passive support from the former communist Left party. Amazingly, following what the Left party leader called a “secret deal” with the socialist Prime Minister, it allowed the government to be formed. Meanwhile, although the four-party agreement binds the liberal parties to negotiate budgets with the government on a yearly basis, they claimed they are actually opposition parties, not part of the government’s support base. This leaves an obvious accountability issue.

But aside from the political theater, do the 73-point agreement’s priorities rhyme with those of voters? Ahead of the elections, poll after poll showed voters saw healthcare, immigration, and crime as their top three priorities. And while the agreement does introduce meaningful healthcare reforms, it is essentially silent on crime while liberalizing immigration policy—making it easier for asylum seekers to bring family members even if they are unable to support them financially.

Furthermore, only 16 of the agreement’s 5,413 words address the decline of law and order. It promises 10,000 more police officers by 2024 but is otherwise silent on what has now become an epidemic. Violent crime is out of control, particularly in the exurbs, and Sweden has the highest rate of young people killed by gun violence in Europe, double the EU average. The use of hand grenades by criminals has reached levels only seen in Mexico. Most troubling, cases of sexual assault have grown rapidly: Official statistics indicate the percentage of women that reported having been exposed to sexual assault has grown from three percent in 2012 to 10.7 percent in 2017. Among women aged 16-24, the increase is even more remarkable: from 7.3 percent to 34.4 percent.

The rapid deterioration of law and order, and of the state’s delivery of services, has fed anger at the establishment’s failure and boosted support for the Sweden Democrats, who, unsurprisingly, have pointed to immigration from countries with radically different perceptions of gender roles as the cause of this rapid shift. Yet for the longest time, the establishment sought to stymie even discussion of such a link, terming it “racist.” Yet belatedly, even Swedish official statistics now acknowledge that 58 percent of convicted rapists are foreign-born, overwhelmingly from Middle Eastern countries. Government efforts to seriously deal with these sources of popular discontent have been underwhelming.

Why has the establishment refused to tackle immigration and crime head-on? Some point to the far-right origins of the Sweden Democrats. While this is true, party leaders have spent the past 20 years ridding themselves of fascist and racist elements. The real reason is more likely what expatriate Swedish writer Kajsa Norman has called the “Unimind.” In her book “Sweden’s Dark Soul,” she bores deeply into the instinctive conformism that has been hegemonic in Swedish society, and that she attributes to a population that social democratic social engineers from the 1930s onward worked to mold into a coherent, homogenous utopia. This, incidentally, is what British writer Roland Huntford in a scathing 1973 book termed the “New Totalitarians.” And as Norman puts it, “The combination of uniformity of language, experience, and social engineering helped ensure that Swedes even thought as one collective Unimind.” Under the influence of New Left ideology from the 1970s onward, this Unimind came to embrace open borders immigration policy and a self-proclaimed role for Sweden as a “moral superpower.” Any deviation from this catechism soon came to be stigmatized as heretical and evil.

The problem is that things did not work out quite like the Unimind expected. In fact, the Unimind ignored, and suppressed, the fact that the Swedish population has been consistently and increasingly skeptical of large-scale immigration, especially when it became clear the country was actually rather poor at integrating new arrivals. Scarcity of housing has reached critical proportions, forcing migrants to congregate in cramped apartments in housing projects on the increasingly crime-ridden outskirts of cities. Healthcare and schools have struggled to cope with the challenges brought by large cohorts of new arrivals with considerable needs and low literacy levels. And while Swedish businesses complain they can’t find qualified labor, young immigrants can’t find jobs: Sweden has (next to the Netherlands) Europe’s largest discrepancy in labor participation between natives and immigrants.

But instead of addressing these problems head-on, Sweden’s left-liberal establishment allowed its actions to be determined solely by the GAL-TAN scale—which pits Green, Alternative, Liberal against Traditional, Authoritarian, Nationalist. That brings leftists and liberals together and allows them to suppress their significant disagreements on economic policy that not long ago formed the core of Swedish politics.

But the January agreement might well be the left-liberal establishment’s swan song. Polls show that both the liberal and green parties would fail to clear the threshold to parliament if elections were held today. And the liberals may end up leaving their former conservative brothers-in-arms with no option but to strike a deal with the Sweden Democrats. Indeed, a constellation composed of the Moderate party, the Christian Democrats, and the Sweden Democrats could well command a majority of their own. They differ on many issues, but the lines of agreement are also obvious. If the government proves unable to deal with the country’s pressing problems, as seems likely, Sweden may very well be governed by a conservative government resting on Sweden Democrat support after the next election. That would be a testament to the unintended consequences of the Unimind.

Democrats in the United States are fond of pointing to Sweden as an exemplar of democratic socialism. But they should look closer, and take heed. Left-liberal rule has turned Sweden’s population rapidly to the Right. The elites may have delayed the impact of this shift for a few years. But they are unlikely to stem the tide.

The post Sweden’s New Government: Something Rotten in Utopia? appeared first on The American Interest.

Fixing Our Self-Defeating Immigration Policy

As I arrive at the end of a decade heading the International Organization on Migration (IOM), I am more persuaded than ever that migration is one of the most important mega-trends of our time. Both the scale and nature of the movement of peoples across borders and within them are unprecedented. One of every seven human beings today is a migrant, which comes to a billion migrants out of a global population of about seven billion. The world began to approach these ratios around the end of the 19th century, and the wars of the first part of the 20th century kept those numbers high for a while. But the sheer numbers, diversity, and global character of migratory flows today are like nothing we’ve ever seen.

Migrants are old and young, rich and poor, religious and secular. Most seek better economic circumstances, but some are fleeing from violence and persecution. Some are organized (and sometimes exploited) by entrepreneurs of various descriptions, but many are more or less on their own as families and individuals. These differences matter because the laws in most “receiving” countries make them matter. Race, religion, education, health, and many other things divide migrants, and migrant groups, from one another, but they are united with each other, and united with non-migrants, by their common humanity. And more than that, those who are today part of “stay-put” humanity are often descended from family members just a generation or two before who were migrants themselves.

What should we call this still-emerging mega-trend: human mobility, migration, the clash of civilizations—or the gradual if often involuntary assimilation of an entire planet’s peoples into one globalized society? The name we choose matters. Some names emphasize the challenges inherent in migration. Others emphasize the opportunities.

Whatever we call it, it’s time to acknowledge the magnitude of what awaits us, and time to plot a more coherent strategy to manage it.

I say “manage,” not “overcome,” “defeat,” or “prevail against” because we can’t do any of those things. How do you “defeat” demography? How do you “overcome” proximity, or increased life expectancy? What would it mean to “prevail” in the integration of cultures and peoples? We live in a world of deep contrasts that can alienate or attract, or switch from doing one to the other.

However, wise policies can manage the contrasts better than unwise ones, and better than no real policies at all. For example, as the median age of most developed West European countries races toward 50, the median age of most West African countries has already dropped below 15. Elderly and declining European populations will need workers, both less and more skilled, to help care for them. Someone will also have to teach those skills. And many of those who are today teens in sub-Saharan Africa are desperate to live fulfilling and useful lives in safety and dignity—anywhere. Neither Europeans nor Africans can “win” unless they win together. But how?

The Central Med Route

To illustrate the complexities involved in answering that “how” question, let’s describe in some detail the world’s most deadly migration passage at present: the passage between Libya and Italy that IOM refers to as the Central Mediterranean migration route. For five years now, we have counted a rising, and then slightly ebbing, tide of death by drowning—3,283 in 2014; 3,783 in 2015; 5,143 in 2016; 3,139 in 2017, and 1,524 (so far) this year. That adds to about 17,000, more if we add the 636 who drowned off the coast of Lampedusa in October 2013. As many as 50,000 or more may have drowned since the year 2000, for the migration preceded the 2011 war in Libya.

In this aspect of the migration story, deaths are among the few “knowns” in a sea of unknowns. We don’t know nearly as well, for example, how many migrants today are still waiting in Libya, hoping to get to Europe. Nor do we know how many have died in the sands of the Sahara, or lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean—deaths never counted for lack of witnesses. Nor do we know how many count themselves as “stranded” in Libya, hoping now to get back home if not to Europe, or how many are still making their way toward Libya from somewhere else. And among those in this last group, how many have already died? We don’t know, and probably never will.

In the days following the Lampedusa tragedy, IOM and other humanitarian agencies grappled with a great many practical unknowns that had nothing to do with numbers. For many of us an early unknown in Libya was “who’s in charge?” And were they also in charge of dealing with migrants? Were distressed migrants only the ones in “official” detention centers? What about those “unofficial” detention centers (for a while, one was rumored to be within the confines of Tripoli’s municipal zoo) that may have been controlled by warring militias who dabbled in smuggling on the side. Or were more or less independent smugglers helping tribally kindred militias finance their firepower by sharing profits with them? Few could tell for sure, and those who knew weren’t telling us.

Data on deaths by drowning, however sketchy they often were, were nonetheless useful, and IOM became adept at compiling them. The more data we crunched, the closer we came to devising coping strategies. Thus, daily arrival numbers from authorities in Greece, Italy, and Spain helped us determine the breakdown of the migrants by gender, age, and nationality. Those data, beginning in 2015, gave us an entry point to sort the many unknown puzzle pieces into separate piles. We then hoped to assemble these pieces into plans to tackle what has been a nightmare for the migrants and an enormous management headache for European and Libyan authorities, as well as for the international humanitarian community.

For example, the data indicated that thousands of Senegalese already had entered Italy by sea from Libya. We knew of hundreds living precariously in Tripoli, and probably at least as many already in detention as undocumented migrants rousted by Libyan police. Because IOM has a large presence in Dakar, it proved relatively easy to enlist Senegalese diplomats in the rescue effort. What wasn’t so easy was everything else. Yes, there were Senegalese in Tripoli—many hundreds of them, just as we thought. Senegalese had been crossing the desert via ancient trade routes, at first looking for work in Libya but increasingly seeing Tripoli as a trampoline for jumping to Europe.

As long as there were still jobs to be had in Libya—in construction, food service, cleaning services, or simply begging for “jobs” like watching cars outside a shopping mall—most Senegalese preferred that to leaving for Europe. But by early 2015, internecine violence, militia fighting, and overall street crime had made a good job a liability. Africans complained they were being singled out and robbed by street gangs. With no remittance services to send their earnings home, many carried wads of cash with them—something the thugs noticed very quickly. Senegalese complained of the “Hamza boys” who roamed Tripoli’s streets, heavily armed with AK-47s and other weaponry. Others complained of police raids, particularly on compounds comprised of adjoining homes in various African enclaves throughout the capital. Money you were chary of carrying on your person you might try to hide in the compound. But, of course, others knew that too.

The threat of violence and robbery was so constant by March 2015 that Senegalese migrants were faced with a choice: attempt a jump to Europe or head home. We located almost 500 Senegalese in one of the government’s “official” detention centers who were eager to return home. Senegalese diplomats in Tunis worked with IOM staffers to verify that all seeking return were truly citizens of Senegal, and that all were doing so voluntarily. Since none had travel documents, IOM needed Senegalese diplomats to provide new ones.

There were other obstacles. For one, our preferred method of return would have been by airplane. But no charter company we talked to could be bonded to land in Tripoli, because no aircraft insurer was willing to underwrite even a temporary insurance policy for aircraft in or over the country. We could fly out of southern Tunisia, however, so in early 2015 we began a series of weekly bus shuttles out of Tripoli with about 230 passengers each: detention center to the Libya-Tunisia border, then up to Djerba, Tunisia, where our charter would take them to Dakar, Senegal.

On our second charter that spring, an IOM team raced down to the border crossing to greet several buses due by mid-morning. Instead they waited until almost midnight for the buses to arrive. We learned earlier that day that, after preparing some 200 men for their trip home, our team in Tripoli was told that the single official in charge of releasing men from the migrant detention center could not be found. No one else had authorization to release the men to IOM, and no one knew when this particular officer would surface to do his job.

Turns out the answer was “never”; he had been killed that morning, reportedly in a traffic accident on his way to the lock-up. It took many more hours before the buses rolled toward Tunisia, and still more time before our charter left Djerba en route to Dakar. One of IOM’s press officers, Joel Millman, accompanied the flight to Senegal. He reported back on who the passengers were, where they came from, and what their hopes had been when leaving Senegal months (and in some cases, years) before:

[T]he clear majority of these men come from the Casamance region of eastern Senegal, a remote area on the edge of the Sahel, the ‘shoreline’ that begins the vast Sahara Desert. Remarkably, when I asked for a show of hands, only two passengers on our flight had ever been to Dakar, Senegal’s capital, or anywhere else along the country’s Atlantic seacoast—although some had already been to Europe a few times, and others had worked in other African capitals. A second show of hands—for who had ever before been on an airplane—got a slightly bigger response, perhaps a dozen or so. The most common destination for these migrants had been Equatorial Guinea, like Libya, another petro-economy where work was abundant for Africans willing to travel long distances to get there.

Millman further reported that most of the men on the journey (and they were all men) were well educated, including many who had completed university. Virtually all could read and write and speak multiple languages—French, English, Arabic, and several of Senegal’s ethnic languages. Virtually all crossed the Sahara in months’ long journeys to Libya. Many said they had personally seen fellow migrants perish, either from dehydration, exhaustion, or, more commonly, road accidents. Few would renounce the notion of migrating again. Many had families with small businesses; others owned farms. Migration, they explained, was a way to accumulate the capital needed to seize the opportunities their education had prepared them for, but that their country could not yet provide them. None of them wanted to risk their lives, but no one knew of a better way to bridge this personal resources “gap.”

In other words, these migrants were not the poorest of the poor in their home country, nor were they the least well educated. They were, on balance, educated, ambitious, and capable of both long-term planning and sacrifice on behalf of their families. They were also computer literate, displaying a notable situational awareness of opportunities around the globe. In this the Senegalese contingent in Libya was little if any different from others IOM encountered—and little different, it is worth emphasizing, from the dominant pattern of economically motivated migration to America at the end of the 19th century.

As of about a month ago, the number of voluntary returnees from Libya assisted by IOM topped 32,000, who have returned home to 32 different countries. We now not only fly daily from Tripoli; we’ve also added flights from Benghazi and Zirtan. Of course, the migration emergency on the Mediterranean has not ended, but it is being managed. This year, for example—for the first time in four years—sea arrivals to Europe are on track to fall below 110,000 combined to Italy, Greece, and Spain. In 2015 the number was more than a million.

Circular Migration

For all the complexity of ground-level migration policy management, I’ve learned over ten years running the IOM that economically motivated migration itself is quite simple. In essence, the world wants two main things from most migrants—two halves of a single coin of human endeavor.

If you ask most people what these two things are, they’ll give you an answer like “stay out of trouble,” “learn the language,” or “pay taxes.” All true, but none of them is the first thing asked of migrants, which is to “show up”: Get here and do the job we need you to do.

Nowadays such a flat statement often elicits howls of protest: “No, that’s not what we want! We want them to stay away from us.” But the truth is that not a single country in Western Europe hasn’t spent some of the past 80 years relying on foreign labor to harvest and process the output of its agriculture sector. And in the United States and Canada there is barely a state or province that hasn’t relied on just-in-time farm labor for the past 60 years.

Countless other industries all over the world are in the same position: hospitality, health care, property maintenance, waste recycling, elder care. The list goes on and on. Increasingly, too, even some essential government jobs—in the military, public education, among the technicians who operate complex information or transportation hubs—today require regular infusions of foreign talent. And we’ve not even mentioned the “glamour” sector: actors, athletes, scholars—all of whom are encouraged to ply their trades globally for the benefit they bring to publics wherever they land.

Nor is it solely the rich, “developed” nations that seek skilled and even unskilled labor from beyond their borders. More and more “developing” countries are experiencing labor and skill shortages. If they are not overtly tailoring immigration regulations to accommodate these arrivals, they are often quietly tolerating them because they realize how much their societies need them. For example, Mexican farmers now rely on foreign workers, mostly from nearby Central America, just as Chile, Brazil, and Argentina draw ever more labor from the neighborhood, including Venezuela, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians toil in the Middle East, and not just in the petro-emirates. Jordan has a growing population of Filipinos and Bangladeshis, two nationalities that, even now, continue to travel for work to two of the region’s most dangerous locations: Syria and Libya.

So the first thing the world wants from migrants is not for them to “stay home” but to “show up.” But there’s no mistaking the second thing the world wants from migrants: “Finish the job. Then go home.” This is what we mean when we speak of “circular migration.”

Circular migration is as old as humankind, if you count among their ranks the hunters and gatherers, who “migrated” with the seasons in search of game or to harvest wild fruits and grains. While business school professors may prefer fancy phrases like “just-in-time labor” for “a global supply chain,” migrants today are doing what they have always done: foraging the global landscape for a chance at a better life. Think of the thousands of Dutch, German, and Italian workers who crossed for centuries back and forth across Europe to dig a latticework of navigable canals and waterways; or the thousands of South Asian workers today building the football stadiums and skyscrapers of the petro-emirates. These enduring patterns are now enjoying a grand revival partly because it’s now quicker and cheaper than ever to get around.

Whether it’s just for a single, seasonal harvest or to find employment in a massive, decades-long construction project, a supply of imported labor always responds to someone’s demand for sweat and grit. For some, such labor may last a lifetime: soldiers signing on for years to join foreign armies, or seafarers undertaking lifelong journeys at the behest of another country’s enterprise.

It’s easy to forget how fluid this circular migration was historically, and how self-correcting it is during lean times and fat ones. And we forget how easily countries have resorted to welcoming outsiders whenever shortfalls of manpower surfaced. We forget, too, how well those workers responded when it was time for them to leave. Take just one example from the 1970s.

As Tony Judt described in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, when a recession hit Europe following the sharp run-up of world oil prices, German industry almost immediately shed its foreign “guest workers”—at least a half a million—as soon as they were shown the door. “In 1975,” Judt wrote, “290,000 immigrant workers and their families left West Germany for Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy. In that same year, 200,000 Spaniards returned to Spain . . . returnees to Italy now outnumbered emigrants for the first time in modern memory, as they were shortly to do in Greece and Portugal.”

Of course, we know what happened: The recession passed and many of those workers came back. Judt pointed out that, “if published unemployment rates in West Germany (close to zero in 1970) did not climb above 8 percent of the labor force despite a slump in demand for manufactured goods, it was because most of the unemployed workers in Germany were not German—and thus not officially recorded.” A 1977 government study Judt referred to put the matter succinctly: “Germany is not an immigrant country. Germany is a place of residence for foreigners who will eventually return home voluntarily.”

Nor do we stop often enough to reflect on the great global “sorting” that is now taking place across frontiers and labor markets. During my ten years in Geneva, I was struck by how seamlessly outsiders had slipped into the Swiss mainstream, no matter whether they had been born in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.

We know that Switzerland, with about 27 percent of its residents born abroad, trails only Luxembourg as the European state with the highest proportion of its inhabitants born beyond its borders. Of course, about half of those come from neighboring Germany, Austria, France, and Italy—countries whose languages and customs already thrive in Switzerland. Nonetheless, the other half of that far-flung group comes from much further abroad.

An IOM colleague told me of a recent flight home from Madrid that was packed with Ecuadorans bound for Lausanne, a city close to Geneva with a large Latin American colony. It is one of five Swiss cities where Ecuador keeps a diplomatic mission (the others are Berne, Basel, Geneva, and Zurich). Many were returning from summer holidays as the start of the Swiss school year was just days away. My colleague was struck by how many of the students were Swiss-born, but almost all their parents were born in South America. One of them explained to my colleague, “We all got here through Spain,” referring to a longstanding labor agreement between Quito and Madrid that lasted until 2003, which allowed any Ecuadorian seeking a job in Spain to come without prior authorization. While the scheme worked for labor-hungry Spain, it also worked for Ecuadorians, and especially their children, who quickly acquired status as EU citizens allowed to work in almost any of the many cities across the Schengen Zone.

This has triggered a “euro rush” of labor migrants from Latin America, as a new generation of Spanish and Portuguese-speakers replace the aging Iberians who began arriving in Switzerland (and France, Germany, and Scandinavia) after World War II. Just as Brazilians have carved out a niche with their suburban home cleaners across the United States, many do the same work now across Ireland and Switzerland, two places where it’s easy to start a business out of one’s home, especially if it involves soliciting gigs cleaning someone else’s home.

We see a different kind of sorting in jobs requiring higher skills, too. Caribbean states, especially former British colonies, dominate the healthcare sector of richer English-speaking societies such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Meanwhile, in the Caribbean many of these doctors, nurses, lab technicians, and other hospital aides are being replaced by other English-speaking healthcare workers from Africa. Most making this new Atlantic passage from Africa to the Caribbean come from Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, whose medical diaspora has been extending across the globe for decades. In Nigeria itself, the labor of this diaspora is being replaced by others schooled in English—notably Ghanaians, Zimbabweans, Kenyans, and Liberians.

For all these medical markets, circular migration is popular with patients and governments alike. It basically allows supply and demand to level out according to varying skill sets and salary expectations. It’s non-controversial, and Americans hear little about it because, for the most part, these laborers are free to come and go as they wish—as long as U.S. territory is not involved.

Breaking the Circle

Circular migration of various kinds was the norm across the planet for centuries before the world faced a migration “crisis.” What used to work reasonably well most of the time somehow no longer does, at least much of the time. What happened?

Despite the general desirability of circular migration, many wealthier countries now treat the safety, prosperity, and transparency enjoyed by their citizens as a limited resource that will be depleted if too many outsiders arrive in search of a share. Our way of life, in this view, has become a kind of collective “luxury good” that is depleted when a foreigner comes to toil in a high-performing economy, or to walk safe streets, or to enjoy a legal system that protects entrepreneurs trying to launch businesses.

We need not discuss here where this philosophy comes from, or the electoral appeal of politicians who promise to keep outsiders off our lawns. But the question is this: If we know what we want from migration, do we believe the systems now in place are providing the results we desire? Just about everyone would answer “no.”

But fewer, perhaps, understand the real reason why our system isn’t giving us what we want: Namely, the harder you make it for migrants to come, the harder you make it for them to leave. Circular migration suffers when workers can’t circulate. We now make it so hard for a Filipino woman to travel to a rich country to work as a nurse (or a nanny, or cruise ship attendant), that the lucky few who succeed usually do so only after paying exorbitant fees to labor brokers, so then they have to stay abroad even longer than they planned, both to pay off their travel debts and to earn a reasonable payoff for their efforts.

And those are legal guest workers. It’s even tougher for those inside national borders without legal residency status. In the United States we now make it so hard for a Central American to travel to Florida to pick produce or clean bathrooms that those “lucky” few who survive kidnappings, beatings, dangerous train rides, and extortion from their “guides” can scarcely contemplate making another trip. So they stay, growing the “underground” population that is now much larger than the one that alarmed us 32 years ago, the last time Congress tackled immigration reform, giving us more and more border “security” even as we grew less and less satisfied with the results.

In short, tightening restrictions on importing labor on the front end has almost ended what used to be a rather robust migration return flow.

Let’s consider what used to be mainly a seasonal workforce, but which increasingly appears to be a permanent (mostly) Latino population, at the lower-end of the skill chain. This segment, according to a recent Yale-MIT study, has grown from about three million undocumented foreign-born workers in 1986 to perhaps as many as 22 million today. Moreover, these migrants are now more dispersed around the country than was the case three or four decades ago, helping to spread anti-immigrant sentiment throughout American politics.

One question both so-called “restrictionists” as well as “open borders” advocates each must address is this: Is it even logical to consider “circular” migration for this population, when the rewards of coming and staying are greater now than ever before? On that, in many ways the jury is still out. Here differences between countries, and remedies designed to soften those differences, are instructive.

The 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, largely was sold on the promise that modernizing Mexico’s economy via free trade would depress Mexicans’ urge to migrate. For NAFTA’s first 15 years, there was little evidence that was happening. True, NAFTA raised wages in Mexico. But that also meant raising Mexicans’ expectations, and giving many the means to migrate that they may have lacked before. NAFTA also increased cross-border recruitment for certain types of skills, particularly in agriculture. Like many aspects of globalism, there were unintended consequences, not the least of which was the tendency to put farmworkers within easy grasp of other low-end jobs—in restaurant kitchens, on construction sites, in suburban homes as cleaners or babysitters—all of which breeds skepticism that any scheme to aid Latin America by spurring job creation south of the border will have the added benefit of slowing migration.

As it happens, migration from Mexico has slowed dramatically, starting in 2015, just around the time many demographers predicted it would. Smaller family size in Mexico has been the primary reason for such a downturn, so that, even if NAFTA didn’t produce the job numbers promised by its boosters, so many fewer Mexicans than expected are now entering the workforce these days that a certain equilibrium has been found.

Nonetheless, millions more additional Latino job-seekers are rising (from Central America, Venezuela, Brazil, the Caribbean) and they, too, are discovering the relentless lure of an economy that provides better rewards for staying in the United States rather than “circulating” home every year. Circular migration is indeed an asset that works for many industries, but we can’t rely solely on a going-home strategy. We must also plan strategically for ways to integrate an evolving workforce.

What can we do to get circular migration back on track?

First, we need to determine where in the world patterns of migration have hardened into enduring, successful, market-based solutions that match opportunity with the labor at hand. We must also concede, finally, that in today’s world “at hand” means the right worker will often travel half-way across the globe if he or she is the best fit for the job.

Some governments today spend a fortune trying to “crack down” on migrants who fail to acquire the proper documentation to work. Many of these enforcement efforts are ineffective, if not comic. An all-too-typical example would be raids on U.S. chicken-processing plants that have to shut down entirely (and often only temporarily) after the existing workforce is chased underground.

Some of these crackdowns are more tragic. For the past few years, some oil-producing countries have been evicting migrants from the Horn of Africa, many back to places such as Ethiopia and Somalia, where a severe drought has produced dismal job prospects. Many of these Africans do jobs that locals won’t do: cleaning toilets, sweeping streets, washing cars. The tragedy comes when these former employees try to sneak back to their old jobs. Some die walking across Red Sea beaches, where smugglers wait to take them back to the Middle East. Some die on the voyage. Many more die by violence, especially those trying to cross back to their former jobs through war-torn Yemen.

Embracing circular migration would not only relieve the dangers many migrants face; it would work for both sending and receiving countries. And make no mistake: We now have the ability to analyze the job-sorting that is happening all around us, making the matching process between jobs and job-seekers both more efficient and safer than before.

Mass Irregular Migration

A far more urgent issue and opportunity than “circular migration” has emerged in the form of large-scale irregular migration. Unlike circular migration, irregular migration is not nearly as often the result of planning by ambitious and well-educated migrants. Rather, these are people who are either desperate or on the edge of desperation. Their psychological profile is more like that of a refugee than an economic migrant.

The phenomenon of irregular migration is already a major part of the “mega-trend” of our time. It is driven by factors such as: the demographic divide between an ageing Global North, with a negative replacement rate and declining population, and a youthful, largely unemployed Global South, with a high birth rate and burgeoning population; humanitarian disasters brought on by an unprecedented number of protracted armed conflicts from the western bulge of Africa to Southeast Asia; and the migratory effects of climate change and environmental degradation, which will increasingly come into play as major drivers of irregular or forced migration. Still other drivers include sudden and unpredictable economic collapse in failed states and major natural disasters having nothing to do with climate change. Over time, these drivers of irregular migration are such that many, perhaps most, societies on earth are destined to become increasingly multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-lingual.

Many governments’ migration policies have not kept up with these changing realities. Indeed, in several cases policies have turned inward, reflecting a widening degree of anti-migrant sentiment throughout much of the world. The effects are proving catastrophic in at least two senses: first, by endangering the lives of human beings who will be on the move because they sense little or no choice; and, second, by denying these very governments, societies, and economies the contributions that migrants, historically, have always made.

Migrant integration is thus perhaps the largest challenge we will face in the years ahead—a policy imperative that must be accomplished in an increasingly toxic environment of hostility toward the “other.” Educating and preparing the citizenry for the inevitable will be highly sensitive politically. This is not the sort of issue that wins elections, so political courage will be required. Nonetheless, IOM has demonstrated that the right programs, managed properly, can erode political resistance to doing what is both necessary and right.

One pilot program from my time at IOM links migrant women from Myanmar with elder-care centers in Thailand. Thailand has one of the fastest-ageing societies in the world: The proportion of people aged 65 years and above is projected to increase from 7.5 million to 17 million between 2016 and 2040—more than a quarter of the population. This demographic shift will happen against the background of an 11 percent decline in the working-age population, the fastest contraction in the region.

Migrant workers are projected to fill the labor gap, particularly as caregivers for elder family members in Thai households. In anticipation of this, IOM partnered with HomeNet Thailand and the National Catholic Commission on Migration to provide, beginning in 2017, elderly caregiving skills-training for female migrants. The first class for an 80-hour training program was conducted by a Thai academy specializing in child and elderly care. The first matriculants were 32 migrant domestic workers from Myanmar who were taught how to meet the daily needs of the elderly and how to provide basic medical training such as first aid, chronic disease management, and nasogastric intubation (feeding someone through a tube)—not glamorous work, but essential.

We all want to win, but to do so we must understand the field we’re playing on, match our players to the best opportunities, and then recognize which roles we need to import players to fill.

In the end each society will do these things in their own way. Europe, now in its eighth decade of importing massive numbers of low-skilled laborers to clean their streets and cook their meals, is not going suddenly to decide to “protect” those jobs for locals who, in any case, are not eager to do them. On the other hand, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia appear unlikely to replace their legions of Egyptian, Yemeni, Sudanese, and Syrian guest workers with their own citizens. If anything, they’re primed to look even further afield for workers—to Indonesia, Cambodia, or Sri Lanka. Some Gulf countries are even starting to replace highly skilled imports from the region, like teachers and surgeons, with non-Arabic speaking employees. One remarkable example: The Hamad Medical Corporation of Qatar today employees 450 Cuban doctors, nurses, and medical technicians in the town of Dukhan, west of Doha. Last year it served nearly 80,000 patients—up from about 18,000 the year its facility opened in 2012. The clinic’s official name is The Cuban Hospital.

One place where we can look to see the future is in sports. Professional athletes tend nowadays to toil in a globalized industry that not only is popular across class lines, but often functions as the social “glue” that replaces one form of tribalism—ethnic competition—with the usually more benign form of fandom. Most countries would no sooner restrict entry of talented soccer players than they would talented scientists. But it goes much further: All over the world states are tweaking laws to attract athletes, whether Europeans looking to former colonies to strengthen their World Cup squads or Gulf emirates naturalizing other countries’ former Olympians in search of gold medals.

In many countries this has become routine. Consider the 2007 U.S. legislation called the Creating Opportunities for Minor League Professionals, Entertainers, and Teams Act, known as the “Compete” Act.

Before this law, only top performers—reliable stars who already had competed their way onto Major League rosters—would garner the coveted “green cards” needed to work in the United States. Foreign-born minor leaguers mostly had to learn their craft offshore, or else be among the anointed few already deemed destined for Big League success to get one of their teams’ precious passes. For U.S.-born players, this was a form of job protection. Typically, MLB teams incubate hundreds of players in the minor leagues and consider themselves successful if even a handful of those prospects graduate to the game’s top level. Wages for those young professionals are substantial, mainly because professional clubs have competition: university teams, who can offer scholarships annually worth tens of thousands of dollars to players they seek to recruit. Organizations had to commit millions of dollars each year to minor leaguers just to fill rosters to develop their prospects.

But with the Compete Act, the economics changed: Instead of having minor league teams with practically no imported players, farm systems could stockpile foreigners, doling out an unlimited number of green cards without having to worry that their few big bets might not pay off. One beneficiary of the legislation was a Chicago Cubs farmhand, the shortstop Hak-ju Lee.

Lee spent parts of six summers in the United States playing minor league baseball after the Compete Act lifted the quota on the number of work visas professional sports teams were able to dole out to their star performers. In the end Hak-ju Lee never made it to the Show. He was traded to the Tampa Bay Rays and came within spitting distance of baseball’s top-tier when an injury ended his career. He didn’t make it to his ultimate goal, but he didn’t leave the game empty-handed either, earning more than a million dollars over the course of his short professional career in the United States. During that eight-year span, Lee was one of about 5,000 imported players shuffled on and off professional rosters.

It could be argued that about half of those 5,000 “displaced” Americans from the game. But no one in the United States makes that argument, any more than British fans claim that a Jamaican sprinter in the Olympics displaces a UK athlete, or that a Bulgarian weightlifter bumps a Bahraini. In part that’s because we recognize the specialization involved in something as challenging as athletics, and in part it’s because we prize merit over all else as an aesthetic matter. But of course it’s also because we like to win.

So here is an embarrassing question: If ordinary people can set aside their ethnic and racial sensitivities in professional sports, all in the name of the sheer art of performance, why do people seem to have a hard time doing the same when it comes to the art of living, working, and taking care of one’s family?

The current U.S. immigration system is not giving us the results we want. We can do a much better job of dealing with circular immigration, and if we do that then the more difficult challenge of dealing with mass irregular migration will become somewhat easier politically. Happily, few American, even today, oppose the nation lifting its lamp beside the golden door for genuine refugees fleeing persecution and oppression. Those opponents’ numbers will grow fewer still if we can rationalize our approach to the “large-number” challenges.

Neither the United States nor any other government need embrace utopian visions of “open borders” in order to vastly improve our legal immigration systems. It is still the case that most migrants simply want to succeed by their own lights and then return home to their families. We can help them, and help ourselves, if we’re willing and wise.

For example, at least one Pacific island nation, Kiribati, is already purchasing property in a neighboring island state so it will have a place to relocate its people when the sea rises high enough to force inhabitants to flee.

The post Fixing Our Self-Defeating Immigration Policy appeared first on The American Interest.

Trump Is Deranging Cable News—and Keeping It Alive

The British Broadcasting Corporation produces great, global newscasts for tens of millions of viewers. In February, for instance, its all-news channel broadcast stories about the threat to Britain of returning ISIS soldiers, riots in Haiti, clips from the Munich Security Conference, a short item on President Trump’s “wall” tangle with Congress, the Kashmir suicide bomb, an exclusive interview with Afghanistan’s President, a brief feature on life inside Ukraine’s no-go nuclear zone, and a contest between towns in Canada and Norway as to who has the tallest moose sculpture.

That month, by contrast, America’s three all-news cable channels—Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN—blathered on mostly about Donald Trump’s latest antics as though nothing else existed. Their shows were neither pure news outlets nor journalism, and consisted of opinionated hosts who debriefed hand-picked “Greek choruses” of mostly partisan panelists who endlessly parsed the U.S. President’s every word and Tweet. They offer mostly political views, not news, and ignore coverage of America (except sizeable hurricanes and mass shootings), world events, popular issues like gun control, universal healthcare, or the economy. They are disappointing, journalistically, and have served the public poorly by offering opinions focused inordinately on Trump.

In 2017, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation tracked the content of Fox, MSNBC, and CNN for 19 days and found that on two of the three networks Trump was the topic 50 per cent of the time. There was, the analysis found, “more Trump than all the other news put together. It is left-leaning MSNBC that is most obsessed with the President and right-leaning Fox News that mentions him the least.”

The Trump obsession probably worsened in 2018, and news coverage has steadily deteriorated as American television networks have closed expensive foreign and domestic bureaus and laid off journalists. In 1996, Fox became rabidly Republican and opinionated, thanks to its CEO, the late Roger Ailes, who had been a media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. The other stations soon adopted Fox’s opinion chat show format and it paid off.

Once the also-ran of the three, the fiercely opinionated MSNBC is now beating CNN and is a serious rival to Fox for the first time in nearly 20 years. In 2018, the fiercely pro-Trump Fox News led the ratings with 2.4 million viewers; the fiercely anti-Trump MSNBC came in second with 1.8 million, while the slightly anti-Trump CNN garnered just 988,000.

Some point out the irony of MSNBC’s success. “If NBC [MSNBC’s parent] didn’t make The Apprentice, there would be no President Donald Trump. And if there was no President Donald Trump, there would be no MSNBC ratings jump,” wrote Michael Schneider, Editor-at-Large for Variety.

The Apprentice fictionalized Trump as a highly successful businessman, with flawless judgment about people, who was worth $10 billion. In reality, Trump was often unprepared, inarticulate, and impulsive, said Apprentice producers in interviews. “Most of us knew he was a fake, but made him out to be the most important person in the world, like turning a court jester into a king,” said Jonathan Braun, editor for the first six seasons of the show.

Trump remains a reality TV star who wins ratings by being outrageous and vilifying critics. Now the media is his villain, or “enemy of the people,” which in turn nets him even more media attention, including from other broadcasts such as the country’s three 30-minute nightly newscasts with four times the audiences of news cable channels. Media critic Jon Stewart, the retired anchor of The Daily Show—a “fake newscast” that satirized television coverage as well as politicians—blamed all television broadcasters for being as narcissistic as the President. “He baits them and they dive in, and what he’s done well, I thought, is appeal to their own narcissism, to their own ego.”

Trump manipulates the media in another way, too: using news networks to spread the message that news networks are unreliable. In 2018, the President’s press secretary blamed the media for dividing the country politically and spreading falsehoods. “You guys have a huge responsibility to play in the divisive nature of this country, when 90 percent of the coverage of everything this President does is negative, despite the fact that the country is doing extremely well, despite the fact that the President is delivering on exactly what he said he was going to do if elected.”

Fortunately, manipulation of America’s mass media will be less of a danger in future. Some 56 percent of Americans don’t watch TV news shows, and virtually all those under 40 don’t watch traditional television at all but rely on their smartphones for information and video content. Beginning in 2019 and 2020, broadcast TV advertising revenues are expected to drop a disastrous 20 percent in revenues to reflect this, then collapse by 2023 when major U.S. sports teams are expected to bypass networks and broadcast their games online.

Viewers will pay to watch the Super Bowl or a package of sports games, just as they pay for Netflix. For journalism and news, this represents another challenge, as it does for democracies. Will people pay for factual, curated, unvarnished newscasts, information, and analysis? Unfortunately, in recent years, warring megaphones on television, expropriated by a reality star, have not served Americans well. But a future of unverified digital information and propaganda, disguised as news, will be far, far worse unless regulated. We are what we watch and read and hear.

The post Trump Is Deranging Cable News—and Keeping It Alive appeared first on The American Interest.