Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 53

The EU May Have Just Put an End to Russia’s Pipeline Project

Amid much shock and confusion, as of last Friday the EU appears to have decisively moved to put a stop to Gazprom’s long-running pipeline gambit—a series of moves designed to gain pricing leverage over Europe’s energy market while also isolating Ukraine. The Ukrainian element was not incidental, and the strategy had three goals: First, to stop Kyiv having any leverage over Gazprom and Moscow by removing it as major transit country for Russian gas. Second, to strip Kyiv of the accompanying transit fees that amount to approximately 2 percent of Ukrainian GDP. And Third, to make Kyiv, without its own transit leverage or transit fees, more dependent on the Russian Federation. To that end, the Russian state had come up with plans for endless pipeline development, many of which have failed to launch—see South Stream and the Yamal II pipeline—and some of which have succeeded, such as Nord Stream 1.

What Gazprom and the Kremlin feared was that at some point, the EU would bring its open market liberalization rules to bear. If that happened, Gazprom would lose control of the pipeline and be subject to significant regulatory audit and market pricing obligations. This past Friday, Gazprom’s worst fears appear to have been finally realized, when a proposed amendment to the EU’s 2009 Gas Directive passed through the European Council. If the European Parliament, which has already approved a similar proposal, agrees on the terms of the legislation, Gazprom’s entire external pipeline strategy, with Nord Stream 2 at its center, will come under significant pressure.

Nord Stream 2 is by far the most controversial element in Gazprom’s current pipeline strategy. The pipeline was initially proposed in June 2015 and involved placing two 27.5 bcm pipelines through the Baltic Sea to Germany. In this way, the pipelines would avoid the territory of Central and Eastern European (CEE) and Baltic States—all prickly due to being occupied by the Soviet Union—giving Gazprom a direct route to its largest customer, Germany. So much gas would flow via the Nord Stream 2 pipelines that the existing Ukrainian transit network—the so-called Brotherhood pipeline which has been the main conduit of Russian gas to the European Union up until now—would at best be left with extremely low or no gas at all.

In addition, because the existing Brotherhood network brought gas into Western Europe as well as supplying Central and Eastern European states, the CEE states retained a degree of transit security. To put it simply, Gazprom would find it difficult to cut off any CEE states it might want to bully without cutting off its customers in Western Europe. The building of Nord Stream 2 would allow the Kremlin a way around that, giving them more flexibility in targeting recalcitrant European member  states.

The pipeline will also have the effect of dividing the EU’s single market in gas. The Nord Stream 2 pipes will land at Greifswald on the German coast. The connecting pipe, EUGAL, then will take most of the gas in a 55bcm capacity pipeline eastward to Poland and the Czech Republic. The West to East interconnectors would be flooded with Gazprom-controlled Russian gas. No one else’s gas would be able to easily enter CEE markets. In essence the EU will then have two gas markets: a liberalized and diversely supplied gas market in Western Europe, and a Gazprom-dominated and supplied market in Central and Eastern Europe. This is why Poland is busily seeking to increase its Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) gasification capacity, signing contracts with U.S. LNG exporters, and seeking a new Baltic Pipeline bringing non-Russian gas in from Norway. It is also why most EU member states, backed by the European Commission and supported by the United States, have opposed Nord Stream 2.

Notwithstanding all this opposition, Germany has backed Nord Stream 2. It has done so partly due to the Social Democrats (SPD) being in office (albeit in coalition with Angela Merkel’s CDU)—a party still in thrall to the Ostpolitik of former Chancellor Willy Brandt; partly because German industry views European Russia as a huge potential market; partly because the German energy industry has overlapping commercial interests with Gazprom; and partly the sense that direct fixed pipeline gas routes to the Russian market protect German supply security. Despite these interests, a considerable number of voters in Germany—both in the Green Party and within the CDU—question the value of Nord Stream 2 to Germany, and the damage it does to German interests across Europe.

Over the last 18 months, a proposed amendment to the 2009 Gas Directive has hovered over the debates over Nord Stream 2. This amendment has been making its way through the EU legislature, pushed by concerned CEE states and the European Commission. If enacted, it would apply EU energy law in full to all new import pipelines, including Nord Stream 2. Up until now, the amendment has been held up by a loose coalition of member states, including France, that had managed continue keep the amendment in limbo.

On Friday, it became clear that France had moved over to support Poland and the other CEE and Baltic States. In switching sides, France only conceded the most limited face-saving measures to the Germans.

The proposed amendments have only three points of any significance. First, they limit the application of the scope of EU energy law to the territorial sea, rather than the territorial sea and the broader exclusive economic zone. Theoretically the scope of EU jurisdiction is reduced significantly in a geographical sense. Practically, however, it makes no difference. Any offshore pipeline has to go through the territorial sea of a member state, and that section has to fully comply with EU law. If it does not comply with EU open market energy rules, then it cannot operate.

Second, the amendments accepted by France grant initial EU regulatory supervision for the whole pipeline to the member state where the pipeline lands. This means in the case of Nord Stream 2 that the German regulator is responsible for the supervision. Gazprom could take the view that the pipeline is in “safe hands” and the project can proceed. But it is in fact not. The German regulator is applying EU law, which is subject to supervision by the European Commission and the EU courts. In particular, any exemption from the EU liberalization rules is in the hands of the Commission. The German regulator makes the initial decision but it is the Commission that ultimately reviews any national decision and whose approval is vital to any exemption.

Third, the amendment would permit national regulators to seek an agreement with a third country on the operation of a pipeline. This could potentially provide the German regulator and Gazprom with a means to do a deal. However, the provision is again hedged round with obligations to comply with EU law and the need to obtain Commission authorization at every step. It is unlikely to provide a way for Gazprom to protect Nord Stream 2.

The conflicting amendments of the EU Council and the European Parliament will now enter into a reconciliation process known as the Trialogue (the European Commission participates as well). This could begin as soon as today. As the amendments proffered by the Council are only marginal, it is likely that the Parliament will broadly accept the new amendments. If so, the amended legislation is likely to be agreed soon, perhaps before the end of March.

If agreed, Nord Stream 2 will face a range of problems that will at the very least require a complete restructuring of its current business model by Gazprom. EU law requires that the owner and the supplier of gas must be separate. Under the current model, Gazprom will own the pipeline and supply the gas. Nor can Gazprom just hand over the pipeline to another state-controlled energy company. The EU’s concept of “control” for these purposes is very broad and taken from EU antitrust law. Gazprom would have to find an independent owner.

This is also underpinned by Article 11 of the 2009 Gas Directive. Article 11 requires that where there is a non-EU owner, the EU national regulator must make an assessment of whether the owner prejudices the supply security of the member state or the EU as a whole. For Gazprom or a connected company to own the pipeline in such circumstances would be problematic. In addition, Gazprom would have to provide a transparent tariff price regulation regime and be willing to automatically resell at least 10 percent of the gas supplied across the network.

At the very least Gazprom is going to face a very significant delay in restructuring the pipeline programme if the amendment is enacted. It may in fact find it very difficult to find an independent owner of the pipeline and also accept the European supervision of its commercial practices.

And there is likely to be a knock-on effect on any future pipelines. Gazprom will need to find independent owners of any new pipeline, and given the scale of European supervision, Gazprom may not be able to maintain sufficient commercial and political leverage to make the entire operation worthwhile. The issue is likely to affect the next major pipeline project, Turk Stream 2, which will run across the Black Sea with 15.75 bcm capacity to either Bulgaria or Greece, both EU member states. It will at least be quite difficult to sustain the pipeline politics games of old in a situation where all new import pipelines are subject to ownership unbundling and extensive regulatory supervision.

It may be that Germany launches one last furious attempt to block the amendment. As noted above, German economic interests alone are substantial, and even in the public sphere, a lingering sense of anti-Americanism and a desire to balance Russia’s way provides support for politicians who want to make a stink. And yet it’s this exact German domestic political dynamic that suggests a possible explanation for why France has decided to switch sides. After all, why now? The French energy company, Engie, is one of the corporate partners for the Nord Stream 2 project, and stands to lose out if the deal falls apart.

Some are speculating that Angela Merkel, who properly understands the geopolitical stakes underlying Russia’s Nord Stream 2 bid but who has always been stymied by her own domestic political constraints, finally sees an opening. Germans across the board don’t like it when the United States is dictating terms, but in general are more open to Brussels adopting legislation in the European interest, which appears to conflict with some German interests. With her own political career in the sunset phase, she may have decided that it was a good moment to spurn the more rigid pro-business members of her coalition and tacitly nudge the French to take these steps. It’s the right thing to do, and is more politically palatable if coming from the EU rather than the White House.

As for the French themselves, they probably needed little convincing. They were holding the line as a favor for Merkel, but have been concerned about the EU’s energy dependence on Russia for the better part of a decade. A nudge and a wink from the Chancellor may have been all that is necessary.

This story is, of course, far from over. But the plot has certainly taken an interesting new turn—for the much better.

The post The EU May Have Just Put an End to Russia’s Pipeline Project appeared first on The American Interest.

The Crisis of Modern Science

The larger political and philosophic phenomenon that may be called “modernity” was the result of an effort, by and large successful, to bring about a fundamental change in human life—a change as significant as that brought about by the victory of Christianity in the fourth-century Roman Empire. This change was proposed by a group of thinkers in the 16th and 17th centuries, among the most prominent of whom were Niccolò Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke.

This claim is admittedly astounding, and may well seem incredible to some. Indeed many scholars have rejected it. Various scholars have interpreted the thinkers noted above as being much less innovative in their thought than is implied by the notion of a “modern project.” Machiavelli, far from being a founder and promoter of “new modes and orders,” has been understood as striving for the revival of classical republicanism. The English editor of Bacon’s works, Thomas Fowler, saw him as “mid-way, as it were, between Scholasticism, on one side, and Modern Philosophy and Science, on the other.” John Locke has been seen, not as a bold innovator in the theory of natural law, but as a follower of “the judicious Hooker,” an Anglican theologian in the Thomistic tradition. This article won’t enter into this debate. However, regardless of what their intentions and self-understandings may have been, the changes in human life that have come into being since their time reflect much of what they wrote.

What was the modern project? In brief, it involved a new political approach aimed somewhat single-mindedly at security and prosperity, and a reformulation of human life on the basis of a new philosophic/scientific method aimed at increasing man’s power over nature. The latter became the triumph, however beleaguered and uncertain, of liberal democracy as a mode of governance. The former, which is most important for my purposes here, became modern science, with all the advances in technology and medicine it made possible.

The new science of nature can be regarded as new in at least two respects: a new approach, and a new goal. The new approach may be described as dogmatism based on skepticism: in other words, as Descartes explained his Discourse on Method, the proper procedure for science is to discard every idea and notion that can possibly be doubted and then build up a solid structure of knowledge of the basis of what remains—that is, what is indubitably true. Any conclusions that could be reached by means of this method, Descartes claimed, would necessarily be known as confidently as the proofs of geometry.

The comparison to geometry is not accidental: Whereas the philosophic schools of antiquity continued arguing with each other for centuries without reaching any sort of agreement, the truths of geometry were unchallenged. Thus, the geometric method—producing by strictly logical means air-tight conclusions based on seemingly indubitable first principles or axioms—recommended itself as the way out of the “scandal” of the schools, the constant debate among them that seemed to go nowhere.

The radicalism of this approach may be seen in Francis Bacon’s discussion, in The New Organon (henceforth, TNO), of the “idols” which he claims “are now in possession of the human understanding.” Our ordinary ability to understand nature is so deficient that basically nothing we believe can be trusted. We can’t begin with our ordinary notions and then seek to refine them: “the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.”

To understand nature, we must do more than observe it and reflect on what we see. We must question it by means of carefully designed experiments and precisely record the answers it gives us: “all the truer kind of interpretation of nature is effected by instances and experiments fit and apposite; wherein the sense decides touching the experiment only, and the experiment touching the point in nature and the thing itself.”

Instead of relying on our ordinary observations of nature, we must discover a solid basis for founding a reliable structure of knowledge. That basis can’t come from (unreliably perceived) nature; it must be found in ourselves. We need an “Archimedean” point (the justification for using that phrase will become clear below) from which to begin our construction of the scientific edifice. As Hobbes notes, we can know with certainty only what we ourselves make.

As important as this change of approach is—science would no longer be the refinement and correction of common opinion but a humanly constructed structure of logically consistent propositions—the even more important innovation of modern science is its goal. As Bacon emphasizes in The Advancement of Learning (henceforth, AL), the biggest change he is advocating has to do with the purpose of science: Knowledge should be not “a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect,” but rather “a rich storehouse . . . for the relief of man’s estate.” The goal of knowledge is no longer to enhance the good of the individual knower (by, for example, freeing him from superstitious terrors or satisfying his innate desire to know), but to “establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe” (TNO). Ancient philosophy’s failure to adopt this as the goal of its activity represents, according to Bacon, “the greatest error of all the rest” (AL) with which it may be charged.

For Bacon, the goal of human mastery of nature comes down to this: “On a given body, to generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures is the work and aim of human power” (TNO). In other words, humans would be able to change any substance into any other, or, for that matter, into a new, hitherto unknown substances that will have whatever qualities we want.

Although Descartes does not call attention to this point to the extent that Bacon does, he is in agreement with him: In Discours de la méthode he wrote that he felt compelled to publish his ideas once he saw that, as opposed the “speculative philosophy which is taught in the schools,” they could enable us to become “as masters and possessors of nature.”

The key to developing this kind of science is to focus on efficient causes: “Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced . . . that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule” (TNO). By knowing the efficient causes of various effects, humans may be able to produce them—“artificially,” as we would say. This, of course, cannot be guaranteed, but, without knowing the efficient cause of something, it would be sheer luck if humans stumbled across a method of producing it.

Underlying this project is the assertion that “in nature nothing really exists besides individual bodies, performing pure individual acts according to a fixed law . . . the investigation, discovery, and explanation [of this law] is the foundation as well of knowledge as of operation” (TNO). These laws have nothing in common with the notion of “natures” in the Aristotelean sense. Bacon certainly understands the source of the Aristotelean understanding: “when man contemplates nature working freely, he meets with different species of things, of animals, of plants, of minerals; whence he readily passes into the opinion that there are in nature certain primary forms which nature intends to educe” (TNO). However, as Bacon’s goal cited above makes clear, he regards Aristotelean “natures” as superficial; if his scientific project is successful, we will achieve, among other things, the alchemists’ dream of transmuting lead into gold—there is nothing about the “natures” of lead and gold which makes this impossible. (Indeed, from the point of view of modern physics, it is a matter of removing three protons and seven neutrons from each lead atom.)

However, the real causes of the phenomena we see are not visible to us unless we approach the problem methodically. Until we understand these real causes, we won’t be able to effect the changes we want: “For seeing that every natural action depends on things infinitely small, or at least too small to strike the sense, no one can hope to govern or change nature until he has duly comprehended and observed them” (TNO). In most cases, such “observation” can only be done by means of experiments, including the use of instruments which can detect these sub-microscopic events and reveal the results to us via counters, dials, and so forth.

Evolution of Modern Science

Despite Bacon’s importance for the development of modern science, it took several centuries before his vision began to take shape in reality. The first major development in science following the publication of Bacon’s works—Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, which effectively did away with the notion that terrestrial and celestial objects were essentially different—didn’t require any investigation or understanding of the “infinitely small” bits of matter whose behavior, according to Bacon, underlie the observable phenomena. Similarly, it took a while before any technological innovations arose which depended on Baconian science—for example, the steam engines developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, which played such a big role in the industrial revolution, could be understood on the basis of pre-scientific common sense.

In the 19th century, however, with developments in areas such as electro-magnetism and chemistry, we began to enter a Baconian world in which the “secret springs” of nature were being understood and then harnessed by man for useful purposes, to produce effects of which common sense and naive observation would never have given us the smallest inkling. Bacon’s prediction, made centuries earlier, had been vindicated: After discussing the fortuitous discoveries of gunpowder, silk, and the magnet (he claimed no amount of speculation based on naive observation would have led men to suspect the existence of these items), he concluded: “There is therefore much ground for hoping that there are still laid up in the womb of nature many secrets of excellent use, having no affinity or parallelism with anything that is now known, but lying entirely out of the beat of the imagination, which have not yet been found out” (TNO).

Since those discoveries of the 19th century, the pace of scientific and technological progress has only accelerated. There is no need to catalogue all the ways in which scientific progress made possible the technologies that have changed our lives so much in the 20th and 21st centuries. While we can expect that this scientific progress will continue, in ways that will make real all sorts of technological possibilities, including some that we might regard today as redolent of science fiction, I believe we are at a point where we can fruitfully take stock of the modern scientific project and probe the challenges and paradoxes into which it is running—difficulties which, in hindsight at least, we can see were inherent in its initial structure and intention.

Divorce of Science from Philosophy

It is a commonplace to say that science became divorced (or, perhaps, emancipated) from philosophy in the modern period. From the scientific perspective, it is fair to say that philosophy is seen as a “handmaiden,” whose job it is to clear away any linguistic misunderstandings or puzzles, so that scientific progress can continue. At most, it can explain and justify the procedures scientists actually use, such as Karl Popper’s theory of falsification, which sought to “solve” the “problem of induction” as discussed by writers such as David Hume.

From the philosophic perspective, however, science may be characterized by its constrained ambition: It explicitly renounces any attempt to understand why we, or other beings, exist. As Bacon explained in his discussion of the “idols of the tribe,” the “human understanding” restlessly seeks for ultimate answers. We aren’t satisfied with “general principles in nature” (such as the laws of nature as science discovers them) but wish to attribute them to “something prior in the order of nature.” However, according to Bacon, we should treat the “general principles in nature” as “merely positive” (TNO); they cannot be referred to another or higher cause. In other words, according to Bacon, modern science begins with a “self-denying ordinance”—it cannot ask “ultimate” questions of the sort why we (or anything else) are here. That must be left to religion or philosophy, although Bacon himself admonishes that only an “unskilled and shallow philosopher [would] seek causes of that which is most general” (TNO).

This self-restraint of science need not, in itself, be the cause of a crisis. Most scientists probably accept the view that since science doesn’t deal with “ultimate” questions, it cannot opine on questions of religious belief—at least core religious beliefs such as the existence of God and an afterlife, the notion of God as the ultimate creator of all that is, and so forth.

It is true that some scientists—the “new atheists”—now claim that a refutation of religion is scientifically possible. To some extent, they produce arguments that religion is highly improbably and seek to conclude from that that it is impossible. But what religious believer ever thought that revelation was anything but miraculous—and thus improbable? In addition, they seek to give a “naturalistic,”—that is, evolutionary—account of the development of religious belief to counter the view that religious belief originated in revelation. We need not consider how compelling their accounts really are; of much greater theoretical importance is the argument that, if religious belief is the product of an evolutionary development process, it is hard to see why the same process does not explain philosophic beliefs as well, and ultimately their development of modern science. Thus science (despite what the new atheists assume) would have to allow that beliefs which evolve under evolutionary pressures can nevertheless be true.

Aside from the “new atheists,” many thoughtful scientists have looked to the very orderliness of nature—the fact that it obeys laws that can be expressed compactly and elegantly in mathematical formulae—for evidence that science has reached a level of fundamental truth. One of the 20th century’s leading physicists, Richard Feynman said in a lecture on the law of gravitation that he was “interested not so much in the human mind as in the marvel of a nature which can obey such an elegant and simple law as this law of gravitation.” This (mathematically) elegant and simple law allows the scientist to predict how hitherto unobserved phenomena will play themselves out. Feynman asks: “What is it about nature that lets this happen, that it is possible to guess from one part what the rest is going to do? That is an unscientific question: I do not know how to answer it, and therefore I am going to give an unscientific answer. I think it is because nature has a simplicity and therefore a great beauty.” Somehow, Feynman is able to understand the results of modern science as pointing to a truth, albeit an “unscientific” one.

Divorce from the World of Experience

In his famous Gifford lectures of 1927, the atomic physicist Arthur Eddington began by distinguishing between the “familiar” table, which is reassuringly solid and substantial, and the “scientific” table, which is “mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself.”

According to Eddington, this divorce between the humanly perceived world and the world according to science was a new development, due to scientific progress in delving into the composition of the atom:

Until recently there was a much closer linkage; the physicist used to borrow the raw material of his world from the familiar world, but he does so no longer. His raw materials are aether, electrons, quanta, potentials, Hamiltonian functions, etc., . . . There is a familiar table parallel to the scientific table, but there is no familiar electron, quantum, or potential parallel to the scientific electron, quantum, or potential. . . . Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience. It is not at all necessary that every individual symbol that is used should represent something in common experience or even something explicable in terms of common experience.

As we have seen, this development was “baked into the cake” from the Baconian beginnings of the modern scientific effort. But contemporary science does much more than question our ordinary understanding of the character of the objects that we encounter in daily life. Due to developments such as relativity and quantum mechanics, science also questions our most basic understanding of space and time, not to say logic.

This is much more disconcerting. It is one thing to say that the “real” characteristics of external objects (that is, their characteristics as science describes them) may be distorted in the process of our perceiving them, so that what we perceive is not necessarily what is “really” there. After all, we are familiar with examples of this in daily life: We know that, for example, what appears to us as water far off in the desert is in fact a mirage. However, our concepts of space and time don’t come from the external world but rather are those we use to understand it. When science tells us that these concepts (Euclidean geometry, the three-dimensional character of space, the “absolute” character of time) are wrong, we are at a loss. How can we imagine—as special relativity tells us—that space and time are part of a single space-time continuum, such that two simultaneous events separated by a given distance (as it appears to us) can be equally validly described by another observer as sequential events separated by a different distance? Or that space itself can be distorted, compressed or expanded, as general relativity tells us? Or, perhaps even more strangely, that a measurement made on a particle at one point can “instantaneously” affect the characteristics of another particle indefinitely far away—that is, that “non-locality,” which Einstein derided as “spooky action at a distance,” not only exists but has been experimentally verified.

As a result, the details of what, according to science, is “really” going on at any time bear no relation to the world with which we are familiar. Ultimately, just as Bacon suggested, the point of contact between the “real” world of science and the world with which we are acquainted is that the visible results of experiments agree with the predictions made on the basis of the scientific theories, regardless of the fact that the scientific theories themselves appear to describe physical situations that we cannot even imagine. Indeed, Feynman has gone so far as to assert: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” As the flippant version of the reigning (“Copenhagen”) interpretation of quantum mechanics puts it: “Shut up and calculate.” The “real” world has indeed become, as Friedrich Nietzsche said, a fable.

None of this, however, need constitute a “crisis” of modern science, since none of this affects the intellectual and practical core of the enterprise. As long as the science progresses, throwing off new technological benefits as it does, it can maintain its intellectual credibility and the necessary material support. Bacon had already predicted that the science he was proposing would be comprehensible only to a scientific elite: “It cannot be brought down to common apprehension save by effects and works only” (TNO). Now, as the Feynman quip indicates, it may be only partially comprehensible even to that elite.

Modern “Dualism”

So if the increasing divorce of science from “truth” and “experience” is not an impediment to its further progress, what then is the issue? The assertion of this article is that there are two looming theoretical, if not practical, crises: one having to do with the goals of science, the other with its means. They both stem from an issue that was present at the birth of modern science but that is only now on the cusp of making itself felt: the fact that modern science regards man as having two roles. As a scientist, man is the analyzer (and hence potential or actual manipulator) of nature, whereas, as a member of the animal kingdom, he is as much a part of nature as any animate or, for that matter, inanimate object, to be understood (and even manipulated) according to the same principles and processes.

Although man’s dual role as the manipulator and the manipulated was evident at the beginning of modern science, it was originally a purely speculative matter. For all practical purposes, “human nature” could be taken as a given. Man was only theoretically, not practically, able to manipulate his own nature.

This began to change in the late 19th and 20th centuries, when movements such as eugenics proposed to “improve” human beings as a species, using supposed scientific knowledge to identify those who should be encouraged to reproduce, and those who should be discouraged or even prevented. The “scientific” basis of this movement rested on some very simplistic notions about genetics: For example, Charles Davenport, the biologist who founded the American eugenics movement in 1898, “believed that complex human traits were controlled by single genes and therefore inherited in a predictable pattern.”

In the mid-20th century, American psychologist B. F. Skinner proposed the science of behavioralism, or operant conditioning, as a means of improving human nature. In his novel Walden Two, Skinner described a utopian society in which operant conditioning has successfully molded citizens’ behavior. In the Soviet Union, the even more ambitious task of creating a “new Soviet man” was proposed. In an extreme statement, Leon Trotsky wrote that, under socialism, man

will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, . . . in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training.

This ambition was subsequently bolstered by the Soviet adoption of the pseudo-science of Lysenkoism, according to which acquired characteristics (which do not affect an individual’s genetic make-up) could nevertheless be transmitted to progeny. This, according to one scholar, was “the essential magic key that would open up the possibility of reshaping man and creating the New [Soviet] Man.”

These 20th-century attempts to manipulate human nature rested on scientific bases that can now easily be seen as laughably inadequate. The technologies underlying the society of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—the “fine-tuning” of in vitro fertilization so as to produce castes of human beings with predictably different mental and physical abilities, as well as the existence of a drug that produced temporary euphoria with no “hangover” or other negative consequences—remained safely in the realm of science fiction.

However, one has to wonder whether, given the tremendous recent progress in genetics and neuroscience, we can be confident that this will remain the case in the present century. If not, then the ability to manipulate “human nature”—sought in vain by the visionaries of the past—may become thinkable.

This is not the place for a review of the status of genetics and neuroscience, and what their prospects are for the remainder of this century and beyond. Progress in practical aspects of genetics has been very rapid, and it is becoming possible to “personalize” medical procedures and cures according to a patient’s genetic make-up. Using a new genetic engineering technique (CRISPR-Cas9), “researchers have already reversed mutations that cause blindness, stopped cancer cells from multiplying, and made cells impervious to the virus that causes AIDS.” At the same time, it has become clear that almost all relevant human characteristics, as well as susceptibility to most diseases, depends on the complex interaction of many different genes and environmental factors; in other words, we are a long way from knowing which genes should be altered, and how, in order to produce “designer” babies with increased intelligence, athletic or artistic virtuosity, or whatever characteristics their rich parents may desire.

Progress in neuroscience has been equally rapid. New imaging techniques have increased our knowledge of how the brain functions and which of its parts are responsible for specific mental activities. The discovery of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, and the increased understanding of how they function in the brain, has enabled the development of such psychotherapeutic drugs as Zoloft, Paxil, and Prozac. Nevertheless, as one British researcher has concluded, “modern neuroscience research has, as yet, had minimal impact on mental health practice” although he goes on to predict that “we are on the brink of an exciting period.”

In short, in both these crucial areas, it appears that we have, in the past decades, been accumulating basic knowledge and improving techniques at a rapid pace, but that the major pay-offs are still, by and large, in the future. Of course, we cannot be certain that even these recent advances will be enough to support the ambitious objectives that have been posited. Perhaps, to scientists of the 22nd century genetics and neuroscience will appear as inadequate to the task of manipulating human nature as eugenics and Lysenkoism do to us now.

But what if genetics and neuroscience really do have the potential that their advocates believe? Under this assumption, the consequences may show up in at least two ways: with respect to the goals of the scientific enterprise, and with respect how it understands its own functioning.

Science and the Human Good

As for the goals of science, we have noted the statements of Bacon and Descartes to the effect that the goal of science is to increase man’s power over nature. But these famous formulae are less precise about man himself and what constitutes his good. In particular, what are the good things for man that science will enable us to procure?

To some extent, of course, this question can be dismissed as unimportant. The abolition of hunger, the improvement of health, the invention or discovery of new and improved products for our convenience, comfort and amusement—all these things can be easily accepted as good for man without any need to philosophize about them. Underlying this easy acceptance is, however, our belief that we know what man is, and that we can accept as given our notion of what is good for him. Thus, regardless of the adoption of the “fact-value” distinction by contemporary social science, one might think that the modern natural scientific enterprise—in its role as the ultimate source of technological advances—would be justifiable only if it knew something about the human good.

However, it explicitly denies that it possesses any such knowledge. It contents itself with producing new technological possibilities and then is silent about whether these possibilities will be used for good, to say nothing of how to increase the chances that they might be. Thus when science gives rise to inventions, the potential of which for evil is manifest (nuclear weapons being the standard example), it has nothing, as science, to say. Given the division of humanity into competing nations, weapons can be developed even if everyone believes that their development is bad for mankind as a whole.

However, the advances on the horizon, which will increase human power over human “nature” itself, raise a much more fundamental question. How can science be for the good of man if it can change man and his “nature”? Would not a change in human “nature” change what is good for him? More fundamentally, is there any clear standard by which one could judge which changes in human “nature” are beneficial for human beings?

For example, liberal democracies hold that the opportunity freely to express one’s opinions and espouse one’s religious beliefs is something most men want and is, in fact, good for them. Thus political (and to some extent, technological) arrangements that facilitate this are to be favored. But could one not imagine the development of human beings, by genetic or other means, who would not feel such wants? Indeed Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World explicitly imagines this possibility. Of course, we citizens of liberal democracies are horrified at the thought of such things. But, in other regimes, the powers-that-be might find it an extremely attractive prospect, and they could argue that human beings who did not strongly care about their opinions and beliefs would be less likely to fight over them, making for a more harmonious society. They would argue that the liberal democratic position was just based on an unreasoning conservatism, a mindless preference for the way things have been rather than the way they could be.

Is this a problem for science itself? One result of this is that the goal for science could no longer be said to be the achievement of dominion over nature for the good of man, but instead the achievement of dominion over nature simply. To the extent that this power is used to manipulate man himself, the question would be, to whom are the scientists and technologists responsible? This has been a vexed question, in any case. But for the past several centuries, certain aspects of human nature have tended to favor the victory of liberal democracy over the course of the centuries. Briefly, despite its weaknesses, liberal democracy has given most of the people most of what they want most of time, which accounts for its relative strength and stability. But this also rests on certain other characteristics of human nature that on occasion motivate people to run great risks in the fight for freedom. If those characteristics can be manipulated, who is to say that other forms of government cannot be made stronger and more stable? We would not regard a science that serves to strengthen tyrannical forms of government—no matter how benevolent (along the lines of Brave New World) they could claim to be—as operating for the “relief of man’s estate.” But if human nature were suitably altered—that is, tamed—it is not clear why anyone would object to such a tyranny.

Furthermore, the “good of man” would have always been understood in the past to be the good of the human species, including those members yet to be born. Indeed, one could argue that science saw itself as more in the interest of future generations than of the present one, since the notion of scientific progress (the accumulation of new knowledge and hence new power) implies that future generations will have more technology at their disposal than we do. Genetic engineering, however, carried to an unlikely but not unimaginable extreme, would imply that the current generation is in a position to determine the characteristics of future generations.

We could perhaps, for example, make them like Nietzsche’s “last men”—essentially contented beings with no ambition or longing. Presumably, this would be done on the basis that this would make future generations happier than we are—or at least more contented. It could also be argued that the existence of weapons that could destroy all human life implies a need to make human beings massively less bellicose: as Bertrand Russell wrote, even before the development of nuclear weapons,

Science increases our power to do both good and harm, and therefore enhances the need for restraining destructive impulses. If a scientific world is to survive, it is therefore necessary that men should become tamer than they have been.

Alternatively, if science should clear the way to the fulfillment of perhaps our fondest wish—indefinite continuance in life—we might decide to dispense with future generations altogether, or to create them with characteristics that we prefer but that might hinder their ability to live autonomous lives (for example, we might engineer them to be content to cater to our needs and desires ahead of their own).

Science and Reason

Notwithstanding all of the above discussion, it seems clear that the scientific enterprise can continue to function even if it is no longer able to show that it functions for the sake of the human good, or even if we no longer understand what that might mean. What it cannot dispense with is reasoning or, more to the point, its reliance on the human ability to reason. As long as science knew basically nothing about the human brain and its functioning, this dependency was unproblematic. One could simply assume, as the early modern writers did, that human beings somehow had the ability in general to reason correctly (and to recognize and correct any errors in reasoning that they might make).

The more we know about how the brain functions, the more we are able to correlate the subjective experience of reasoning with chemical and electrical activity in specific parts of the brain. At this point, however, we come across certain conundrums that are difficult to understand, let alone resolve.

Unlike a computer, which is designed and programmed from the start to accomplish a certain set of tasks, the human brain (as understood by modern science) presumably developed gradually in response to evolutionary pressures over the long pre-agricultural period during which current-day Homo sapiens came into being; it had to enable its possessor to acquire sustenance via hunting and gathering and to navigate the inter-personal relationships of the troop to which he or she belonged.

Evolutionary theory recognizes that certain characteristics may develop, not because they contribute to the survival and reproduction of the organism in question, but rather as chance byproducts of characteristics that do. Presumably, the human ability to engage in abstract mathematical reasoning (for example, about prime numbers) would have to fit into this category; it is difficult to see how our ability to discover and understand a proof of the theorem that there are an infinite number of prime numbers could have enhanced our fitness to survive and reproduce during the period in which we evolved into our present state. (Indeed, it is hard to see why evolution would select for such a characteristic even now.)

This, in itself, may not be a difficulty. We could simply accept our ability to engage in mathematics and modern science as a whole as an inexplicable “gift” of nature. However, there is a deeper problem lurking here. If we knew that some object superficially resembling an adding machine had been developed for a different purpose, but that, as a byproduct of it serving that purpose, it turned out to be possible to enter a group of numbers into the machine and get another number back as an output, why would we ever trust that the output number represented the actual sum of the numbers we entered? Indeed, the situation is even worse than that. While our brains allow us to add up numbers, we sometimes make mistakes. When that happens, we are able—if we make the effort—to check our work and correct our mistake. Despite our vulnerability to making mistakes in arithmetic, we are somehow able to correct them and arrive at an answer that we can know with certainty to be correct.

Science currently possesses no clear explanation for how this is possible, and a strong case can be made that, on a materialist/Darwinian basis, it will never be able to. In Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel points to three human phenomena which he claims cannot be explained within the modern scientific framework: consciousness, reasoning, and morality. But whereas modern science can view consciousness as epiphenomenal and morality as a cultural artifact with no scientific validity (for example, the fact-value distinction), it cannot dispense with reasoning; our ability to reason correctly for the most part, and, more importantly, to recognize with certainty correct reasoning when it is pointed out to us, is essential for the scientific enterprise.

As long as this human ability could be taken as a given, this didn’t pose any problems. As we begin to understand the brain and its functioning in greater and greater detail, and hence, presumably, begin to acquire the capability of affecting its functioning in ways that we chose, the paradox becomes more evident. Can we alter the human brain so as to give it new ways of “reasoning” of which it is currently incapable? Should we trust those new methods if we could?

The modern project, with respect to both politics and science, is prospering as never before, but its philosophical underpinnings appear weak. Liberal democracy, the Enlightenment’s most successful (but not only) political child, has proven able to satisfy sufficient human wants to give it the strength to combat successfully (so far, at least) the challenges that constantly arise against it. Modern science goes from triumph to triumph. To the extent that it can no longer claim to be unambiguously good for humanity (the development of nuclear weapons made that point clear to all), its practical position has been bolstered by the fact that no society can afford to fall far behind the scientific frontier if it wishes to safeguard its independence. Thus, as the recent detection of gravitational waves reminds us, science is still able to command vast resources necessary for its work, regardless of the absence of any prospect of near-term benefit to society as a whole.

Nevertheless, the rapid progress in areas such as genetics and neuroscience, which promise an increase in the scientific understanding of human beings and, among other things, their cognitive functions, means that the perplexities resulting from the initial dualism between man as the subject of study and man as the studier are likely to become more prominent.

The notion of nature “working freely” is an important one for Bacon; it refers to the phenomena we meet with in the course of our lives, as opposed to what we can observe by a carefully constructed and instrumented experiment. It is only the latter, according to Bacon (and to modern science) that can reveal to us the “secret springs.” Bacon would have understood the notion of “phenomenology” as the observation of nature “working freely”: he rejected it avant la lettre, as it were.

See, for example, the long discussion of the “struggle for recognition” in Frank Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (The Free Press, 1992), pp. 143ff. Or consider the closing words of the American Declaration of Independence in which the signers “mutually pledge to each other [their] lives, [their] fortunes and [their] sacred honor.” Thus, to secure a government based on the protection of individual rights, they were willing to risk their lives and fortunes; but they intended to preserve their “sacred honor.”

Strictly speaking, our brains, assuming, as science does, that they are natural objects working according to the laws of nature, cannot be said to make mistakes, any more than a watch which does not keep time accurately makes mistakes—such a watch operates according to the laws of nature, just as a “good” watch does. But “we” make mistakes all the time.

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Blackface, Call Out Culture, and the Evolution of Norms

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam was undone by a medical school yearbook photo depicting a Klansman and a person in blackface. . . .which turned out to be him. Attorney General Mark Herring, third in line to be Governor, confessed that he, too, dressed in blackface while an undergraduate at UVA. Of the two, Northam may be the most vulnerable because his misdeeds are captured in an image that allows no rebuttal or equivocation. In this sense, he resembles Senator Al Franken, whose name now immediately brings to mind an image of a boor about to grope a sleeping woman.

These images exist in a depthless present; they invite evaluation in the here and now. But the transgressions underlying them happened in a different time and social context. Should we judge them according to today’s values, the norms of the era in which they misbehaved, or by some timeless moral-temporal criteria yet to be defined and articulated? To overcome the wrongs of the past, or merely their downstream inanities, must we ostracize everyone who was complicit in them? Or does the rush to call out and judge individuals for evils in which an entire society was complicit to one extent or another turn them into scapegoats for wider spread and unattributable wrongs?

It’s reasonable to think that these past misdeeds tell us something about the present-day character of the men involved. Someone who dressed in blackface is probably a racist; someone who joked about a sexual assault is probably a serial harasser. Ultimately, Franken’s case seems to have vindicated this kind of reasoning: Several other accounts of groping surfaced after the photo went viral. And it makes sense to hold people accountable for the harm their past actions have caused: People who have humiliated or exploited other people don’t deserve the honor of high office. Most of the time these two considerations lead us to the same conclusion: People of bad character do bad things, not once but often enough, that injure others.

But this is not as certain the more time that has elapsed between crime and punishment. For instance, Franken became famous at a time when crude, vaguely misogynistic humor was a staple of late-night television. Sadly, the image in the photo was representative of his usual schtick and that of hundreds of other comedians in the 1990s and early 2000s. Before other women came forward with stories of harassment, it seemed that Franken didn’t actually grope the woman in question—she was asleep when the photo was taken and Franken insisted it was just a bad joke. Franken’s defenders saw the photo as evidence of poor taste and poor judgment, but not necessarily of assault or deep-seated sexism. Withholding judgment at that point wasn’t naïve or complicit in injustice, as some have argued—it was judicious.

Similarly, Northam’s yearbook photo—while it certainly could be evidence of deep seated racial animus—was characteristic of a sort of casual racism that was still all too common in the 1980s. It could have just been a lousy joke, reflecting ignorance and insensitivity more than deliberate contempt. For perspective, recall the infamous sequence in the film Silver Streak, in which Richard Pryor convinces Gene Wilder to disguise himself by wearing blackface.

To be sure, both images are vivid examples of a widespread, thoughtless contempt that demands our condemnation. And in a sense, the fact that they were widely tolerated—even celebrated as daring taboo breaking—only makes it worse: As Lili Loufbourow writes in Slate, the type of lazy humor that involves humiliating women and minorities is really a way of celebrating the unearned privileges of patriarchy and white supremacy. Indeed, the harm caused by widespread and socially accepted moral wrongs is often greater than that caused by wrongdoing that is widely condemned.  Before heightened public awareness about its prevalence, sexual harassment left women powerless and stigmatized; by contrast, in the #MeToo era, the victims of harassment have powerful allies ready to come to their defense. Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s, blacks were expected to laugh along with or at least tolerate blackface and the racial stereotypes and contempt it perpetuated—as Pryor’s role in Silver Streak demonstrates. Today, blackface reflects poorly not on black people, but on the white people wearing it.

But past transgressions that were widely tolerated at the time might not reflect the individual character flaws that similar transgressions would today. Over a decade ago, when it was taken, the Al Franken photo might have reflected the lazy humor of a comedian past his prime—something similar in the era of #MeToo could only be the deliberate provocation of a defiant misogynist. Similarly, blackface in the 1980s might reflect the cavalier, ill-considered racism that was pretty much in the water in the 1970s and 1980s; today it would undoubtedly reflect a belligerent assertion of white supremacy. In other words, the same behavior need not reflect the same motives or presuppositions. One need not excuse the former examples to admit that they are not as blameworthy as the former. While there is no respectable argument in favor of allowing an unrepentant bigot or sexist to occupy public office (though many do!), reasonable people may differ as to whether the crude, insensitive frat boy antics common in the recent past are grounds for exclusion from public service.

This time of evolving social norms presents a tension. We must unequivocally condemn the kind of habitual thoughtless prejudice revealed in the Franken and Northam photos, without rushing to unequivocally condemn everyone involved. But unless we get corroborating evidence that Northam is a bigot—as we did of Franken’s sexual harassment—it’s premature to demand that he resign. Since the blame for the culture of racism and sexism that these images exemplify is ultimately a collective blame, we must separate the magnitude of the social injury from our assessment of individual character. Changing deep-seated, hierarchical cultural norms requires more than just attacking individual bigots, predators, and the shamefully insensitive. Sometimes, it will also require less.

Understandably perhaps, such distinctions often get lost in the moral fervor surrounding a social justice movement, which is not always easily distinguishable from a moral panic, where such distinctions are by definition impossible. But they are indispensable to any sustainable change in social norms or durable movement for social justice. In what’s become known as “Call Out” culture, righteous indignation can give rise to an unforgiving, even cruel punitiveness. That in turn fuels a backlash that can turn the long overdue reckoning with institutionalized racism and sexism into yet another flash point of ideological polarization. If consistent and forceful condemnation of casual bigotry can be leavened with sympathy, charity, and the possibility of forgiveness, perhaps a needed change in norms can come without a culture war.

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Sebastian Kurz and the Fate of Europe

For years it has been an open question who will be the informal “leader of Europe.” Over the last few years, it has been assumed that only Angela Merkel or Emanuel Macron could be serious contenders for the job—only natural given that Germany and France are the biggest countries within the European Union.

But the European project is in crisis once again. Angela Merkel is out, and the clout of her younger successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (AKK) has yet to be proven. Meanwhile, Macron’s support has dried up and Paris is burning, as a leaderless mob vents its frustrations at a President and his movement that have not delivered on admittedly vague promises of renewal.

The dynamic on the continent has always largely been determined by the dynamic between Germany and France, and today is no different. The European Union, and especially the Eurozone, is facing major economic challenges. Whereas large parts of Germany’s governing CDU and its Bavarian sister party the CSU are still insisting on financial stability and a not over-regulated market, France, following an economic tradition that has been well-entrenched in the French psyche since the days of Colbert, wants to take a different path.

France’s approach has long been to secure the competitiveness of its industry by devaluating its currency. From the year the Deutschmark entered the markets in 1948 until the introduction of the euro, the French Franc had lost much of its value against the German currency. It has become quite obvious that the French claim to being on equal economic footing with Germany is not really credible. French President Francois Mitterrand, who pressed hard for the euro, did so calculating that the Germans would never dare to endanger the new common currency and that they would, at the end of the day, always vouch for the debts of others. So far, the French gamble has paid off.

The past, however, is not always a reliable guide to the future. In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before German voters’ tolerance for redistribution would come to an end. That moment has not yet completely arrived, but the signs of its approach are everywhere apparent. The openly euro-skeptic party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has not only entered parliament but is now the biggest opposition party in the German Bundestag, is one such harbinger. It has become increasingly difficult to persuade the Germans to bail out others when some of these people are more wealthy than the Germans themselves. That seems surprising given that salaries in Germany are among the highest in Europe. But when it comes to average household wealth the picture looks quite different. The rate of property ownership in Germany is far lower than in France, Italy or even in Greece. Furthermore, the average Italian is retiring earlier than the average German does.

Macron’s pitch for European leadership was in a way an extension of Mitterand’s game: talk up ever-closer union at the cost of promising serious domestic reforms in France. The recent violent protests have called into question his ability to deliver on those promises, and may have crippled him fatally, so it’s hard to imagine the European project being led by Macron from here on out. And Merkel, for her part, has been damaged goods since her fateful decision to embrace the migrants flowing into Germany. Her successor AKK may end up free of her predecessor’s taint, but she will find herself limited on European questions for the same reasons outlined above: The average German is in no mood to take on the debts of others.

The weakness of both Macron and Merkel, of both France and Germany, opens the door to another player on the European chessboard: the Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

At first glance it seems controversial to claim that the Prime Minister of a country with less than nine million inhabitants can become the key European leader. But Kurz has proved he has more vision than any of his peers, and that he understands better than anyone how politics on the European level is going to work going forward.

On the key question of migration, Kurz was already positioning himself as a guy who can get things done while media mandarins from the West were celebrating Angela Merkel for her “bravery” in doing nothing. “I said that this is a big mistake,” the 32 year old Chancellor recently reminisced to the Financial Times. “If I look back to 2015 and the position of the European Union in those days, I would say there has been a dramatic change of position.” He is right.

In February of 2016, Kurz, then still Foreign Secretary of Austria, invited his colleagues from the Western Balkans to Vienna in order to negotiate closing down the migrant “corridor” leading to Hungary, Austria, and Germany. He did this in the face of loud protestations from the head of the EU Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, and from Merkel herself. As if to deliberately heighten the differences in approach, no one from either the EU Commission nor from Germany was invited to the meeting.

Whereas the euro crisis was mainly a north-south affair, the migrant crisis revealed a new east-west rift in Europe. The rift manifested itself most vividly in the founding of the so-called Visegard Group of countries—the coming together of Hungary, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia—who all favored a drastically different approach to migration. But not only to migration! For these countries, an ever closer union within Europe is not a self-evidently desirable outcome. On the contrary, all of these states were part of the Warsaw Pact, dominated by Moscow, and rightly or wrongly, they feel neuralgic pains when being lectured and bullied by Brussels.

Austria is not a formal member of this grouping, but it is highly respected among them, and under Kurz’s leadership is successfully playing the role of a mediator between east and west. History is part of the reason for the easy relationships. All members of the Visegrad Group were either part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or have kept historically close relations with Vienna. Before World War I, Austria was the dominant Western power in the Balkans, and as a result still has a deep understanding of the culture, history, and languages of this region. And during the Cold War, Austria, due to its neutrality, maintained special relations with all these states.

On migration, Kurz has been instrumental in obtaining European acquiescence to, if not outright unanimous support for, the Visegrad line. The informal ministerial meeting that took place in Salzburg this past September is a good case study. The meeting was closely watched for how Theresa May would fare. And indeed, she was the headline loser at the time, with the Europeans loudly rebuking her Brexit proposals. A Brexit deal would however emerge with time (and create problems for May at home), and so the Salzburg meeting has receded in memory.

But the meeting also marked another reversal that was much less reported: a split between Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker on migration. Juncker gave an interview to the Austrian media that said it all: “I made a proposal that I do not like myself: Countries that do not accept refugees should become more involved in other areas, such as funding border protection. Those who do not take refugees should at least provide for unaccompanied minors. I don’t believe that this would lead to protests on the streets in Hungary or Poland.” He may not have liked it, but this was a pivot to the Visegrad line on “flexible solidarity,” and it was what Kurz was assiduously pushing for in Salzburg. It was a stunning U-turn for the Commission president, and it left both Merkel and Macron not only stunned but isolated.

Kurz has not let up since. In October, he joined Hungary in publicly refusing to sign up to a UN migration pact. “We view some points of the migration pact very critically, such as the mixing up of seeking protection with labor migration,” he said at the time. The pact was a nonbinding, symbolic measure, the rejection of which ended up being equally symbolically powerful. Austria held the EU presidency through the end of 2018, and Kurz’s decision to speak out provided cover for several other European countries to come out in opposition. The final vote at the UN in December saw Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland voting no explicitly, with Austria, Bulgaria, Italy, Latvia, Romania, and Slovakia abstaining. Belgium voted for the pact, but its government fell over the issue.

The appearance of the so-called “New Hanseatic League,” a group of eight northern and Baltic states within the EU, trade-friendly and fiscally conservative, presents another example of Merkel’s grip on Europe slipping. With Britain apparently set to leave the EU, these states have clubbed together to ensure that they are not crushed by a Franco-German juggernaut. Instead of more French-style political integration, they are rallying behind goals like national responsibility and sticking to spending rules. In the past, it was Germany’s role to speak out for these states—and then to seek compromises with France, which in turn represented the so called “Club Med” group of southern states. But at the last summit of European finance ministers, it was the Dutch who watered down the high-flying ideas of Macron on a European budget, whereas Germany remained silent.

If Kurz can forge some kind of alliance between the “Hanseatic League” and the Visegrad States, it would be a gamechanger for the political dynamics of the continent. In that case, Germany will find itself in a highly inconvenient position: sitting between all chairs.

Fredrick the Great once said that the most important precondition for any good foreign policy is a good domestic policy, since “no one will be respected by others if he is weak at home.“ Kurz probably knows that dictum.

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The China Dream: Their Goals and Ours

America’s ties with China are now centuries old. The first ship to fly under the United States flag, the merchant ship Empress of China, left New York’s harbor in 1784 bound for Canton to swap American-grown ginseng and silver for Chinese tea. Since then, as U.S. journalist and author John Pomfret has noted, Americans and Chinese have been enchanting each other and disappointing each other in seemingly perpetual cycles.
But expectations on both sides of the Pacific have never fully been met. China has never developed into the nation Americans hoped it would become, and, from Beijing’s perspective, the United States has never fully backed China’s attempt to reclaim its once great standing on the world stage.

This cycle of hope and disappointment was seemingly broken for good when Mao Zedong’s Communists drove Chiang Kai-shek’s forces off the Chinese mainland in 1949 and Mao established the People’s Republic of China (PRC). With China’s entry into the Korean War in 1950 and years of support for insurgencies aimed at American “imperialism,” relations were virtually nonexistent. The United States was the PRC’s implacable foe, and, for Washington, the PRC was an enemy only slightly less threatening than the Soviet Union.

America’s Modern China Dream

Yet as bad as relations were between Beijing and Washington, there remained a number of Americans among the foreign policy elite who believed that China should be treated less as part of the Communist bloc and more as a separate civilization. By the late 1960s, as the harshness of the Korean War faded from American minds, the contest between Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China and Mao’s PRC settled into a standoff, and the Sino-Soviet split hardened into a fact, there were calls within American policymaking circles to develop a new relationship with the PRC. Even the ardent anti-Communist Richard Nixon, writing a year before being elected U.S. president, argued that the United States needed to “urgently” come “to grips with the reality of China,” pull it back within “the family of nations,” and “induce change” to alter its “imperial ambitions.”
The program was to address, in Deng’s words, the “worst omission” the party had made in ideological matters—insufficiently guarding against bourgeois sentiments infecting not only the party but also Chinese society.

Countering Western liberalism became all the more pressing following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. With communism as a governing theory lacking legitimacy at this point, the “education” would focus on generating a heightened sense of Chinese nationalism. The party’s new mandate would be reclaiming China’s place in the world—a place outside powers, it was said, previously denied it. This China dream was not only ambitious, indeed imperial, but also was to be sustained on the basis of resentments aimed at the United States and the West.

From Beijing’s point of view, America’s underlying hostility toward China was confirmed by the American government’s decision in the wake of Tiananmen Square to ban, among other things, arms sales and further nuclear cooperation. Despite the Bush White House’s effort to keep ties between the two countries on an even keel, and the subsequent waiver of most of the imposed sanctions, China’s leaders already read the United States as an ideological threat and as a democratic power that could not be trusted not to resist China’s rise.

Accordingly, one of Beijing’s first moves after Tiananmen was to reduce tensions with Moscow and buy advanced Russian weaponry. This new relationship took on even greater urgency following the surprisingly easy American military victory over Saddam Hussein’s forces in the First Gulf War and China’s own internal assessment of its military weakness.

Having to deal with both the repercussions resulting from Tiananmen Square and the new, post–Soviet Union hegemonic position of the United States, Deng’s immediate strategy was to concentrate on increasing China’s “comprehensive national power” by further opening up the Chinese economy to stimulate economic growth. Given the PRC’s relative weakness at that point, Deng’s advice for the country was to be cautious—that is, to “hide its capabilities and bide its time.” Given the untapped potential within China—high personal savings rate, a vast pool of labor, and an untapped domestic market—it was thought that even partial economic liberalization could produce substantial growth, which it did. From 1992 to 1997, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) doubled.

But Deng’s advice only went so far and was itself bounded by the party’s increasing reliance on Chinese nationalism for popular legitimacy. As the Republic of China (Taiwan) moved away from being a state ruled by one party (the Kuomintang) and prepared for the first democratic election of a president, Beijing reacted by conducting a series of missile “tests” off Taiwan in the summer of 1995 and the following spring. The Chinese leadership understood the change in Taiwan to be a challenge to both its nationalist vision of “one China” and the CCP’s own legitimacy as the ethnically Chinese population of Taiwan moved toward self-rule. The Clinton Administration responded by sending two aircraft carrier groups to the surrounding waters, including sailing one through the Taiwan Strait. Struck by its inability to influence Taiwan’s voters or respond in any serious way to the American naval challenge, the Chinese government accelerated its military modernization effort, buying new ships, submarines, and planes from Russia and laying down specific plans to challenge America’s dominant air and naval power in the region.

Given that the United States justified economic engagement with China on the grounds that it would become more politically liberal as it grew more prosperous, Beijing increasingly believed that Washington would not accept China’s rise to great power status if it remained a country governed by the CCP. However benign Americans believed their intentions were toward China, and no matter how often the Chinese spoke over the next decade about theirs being a “peaceful rise,” expectations about China’s future were inevitably diverging.

The next decade began with China joining the WTO. Taking full advantage of the opening to the world’s markets to become an export powerhouse, China saw a new burst in economic growth. Nevertheless, while economic liberalization had proved immensely beneficial in raising living standards and providing the government with new resources, there was the ever-present concern that continued liberalization would jeopardize the party’s control over the country.

Accordingly, keeping control over key sectors of the economy through state-owned enterprises (SOEs) was necessary for noneconomic reasons. SOEs’ continued existence gave the party’s claim that China was still socialist a patina of credibility, it gave the government an institutional foundation from which to moderate unemployment and implement industrial strategies, and it provided a ready resource for a vast patronage system that kept party members and their families loyal to the regime. In any case, the growth in government resources provided by the economic reform decisions made in the 1990s and China’s increased access to U.S. and global markets reduced pressure to push for further reforms as Hu Jintao’s new leadership team came into power in 2002.

But the halt in reforms would have consequences. President Hu’s 2006 call for China to become a “harmonious society” was a signal that China increasingly was not. Large-scale protests were far more numerous than just a decade prior. There were growing problems involving the environment, income inequality, and poor governance and associated corruption. Plus, there was a growing recognition that the existing Chinese economic model was, in the words of then-Premier Wen Jiabao, “unsteady,” “unbalanced,” and “unsustainable.” China was becoming, in the words of Sinologist and former U.S. national security official Susan Shirk, a “fragile superpower,” whose leaders were feeling increasingly insecure about the present and the future.

Even after the Great Recession in 2008, during which China initially gained global prestige in contrast to the performance of states in the West, there was a sense that this gain was something of a Potemkin village. China was facing a tightening global market for its goods, and, to keep the recession at bay within China, had doubled down on its debt to finance an array of costly domestic projects of marginal benefit. Overall growth slowed, and individual income still lagged behind. Given Chinese demographics, it was becoming clear that China would, unlike an earlier generation of Asian Tigers, become old before it became rich. Also clouding China’s future was the continuing unrest in Tibet, Xinjiang, and the fall of autocratic governments in the Middle East (the Arab Spring). By the end of Hu’s term in office, many Chinese elites were moving more of their personal wealth out of the country.

Capturing the country’s mood before the leadership change in late 2012 was the news that some members of the Politburo were reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution, an analysis of the causes of the French Revolution. Chinese readers were presumably most interested in Tocqueville’s thesis of “rising expectations,” in which a population, freed from the worst abuses by its rulers and having begun to prosper economically, will come to expect a continuing rise in incomes and, failing that, resent even more the inequalities and government burdens that remain. Readers, especially among the governing elite, would have taken note that France’s failure to address this issue led to the overthrow of the government and a violent revolution.

As Xi Jinping took control of both the party and the Chinese government in late 2012 and early 2013, he faced a fundamental question of which road to take with China’s future. He could choose greater liberalization to get the economy moving again but risk the party’s control, or he could double down on the party’s control over the country in the name of stability. Xi picked the latter—consolidating not only his own power but also strengthening the party’s sway over key elements of China’s economy and society. Universities, think tanks, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the media, and the internet have all seen a significant ideological tightening in what they can teach, say, do, or be used for. Coupled with Xi’s directive to eliminate the discussion of Western ideas of press and political freedom domestically, this has resulted in a substantial increase in internal repression.

On the economic front, the country under Xi has scaled up its mercantilism. Xi’s “Made in China 2025” involves government subsidies, local content mandates, and restricted access for foreign companies unless and until they share technology. As for the SOEs, instead of being divided into smaller, more competitive companies they have actually grown larger through consolidation, remained tied to the party through cross-level appointments at the highest management levels, retained privileged access to state banks for below-market credit, and, according to Xi, been understood as “national champions” (a.k.a., effective monopolies) in their key industrial sectors. To help legitimate this sharp turn with the broader Chinese public, Xi has, on the foreign policy front, pushed an agenda that is more aggressive and nationalistic. On the domestic side, he has engaged in an extensive and popular anti-corruption campaign against government and party officials.

It is tempting, of course, to read Xi’s ascendancy and program as a distinct version of the China dream. And arguably there are unique aspects to his rule. But it is also the case that key fundamentals—such as keeping the party ascendant, never seeing economic liberalization as an end in itself, not allowing political reforms to truly take hold, desiring to see China rise once again to its previous imperial preeminence, and believing this ultimately means butting heads with the United States—have long existed within the upper echelons of the Communist Party and Chinese government. Xi’s policies are different less because they are a fundamental change in course but rather because they have made far more explicit what has always been there. Even the abandonment of Deng’s “bide” and “hide” advice in foreign policy is a recognition that Deng’s advice was tied to China’s then relative weakness and, accordingly, could be put aside when China achieved its dream of becoming a great power once again.

The existing tension between China and the United States was largely inevitable. It would perhaps have been less inevitable if reformist voices within China had had more influence, but they did not. Nor is this to deny that, during the 1980s and 1990s, Beijing experimented with various reforms, such as allowing village elections and the creation of NGOs to work in society. But, as these examples also show, Beijing set limits on their expansion nationally and, in the end, did not allow them to grow in such a way as to challenge the party’s primacy. Similarly, when Jiang Zemin spoke of expanding the party’s ranks to include private entrepreneurs and rich individuals, it was read as a sign of his desire to reform party thinking along more pragmatic lines. No doubt this was true, but, implicitly, it was also a way of reaffirming the party’s leadership over a growing Chinese commercial elite.

Of course, given how little we actually know about what is happening within China’s ruling circles, it is always possible that voices of reform could come to the fore at some point in the future. But, so far, that does not appear likely. China’s dream has been imperial in scope, and the party has never wavered in its intent to be in control when China realizes that dream. The combination of those two ambitions meant that the PRC’s understanding of its interests, history, and security were virtually certain to run afoul of American hopes and expectations.

In turn, America’s expectations about China were driven initially by a desire to help China rise as a counterweight to Russia, but there was always more than a seed of hope that it would become more of a partner than just a strategic piece on the global chessboard. But for that to happen, Americans had to convince themselves that China would progress beyond one-party rule and, failing that, somehow behave as though its authoritarian nature would not prevent it from becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in an international order designed by the West and consistent with its values. Neither of the American expectations was particularly realistic.

President Trump and President Xi have undoubtedly put in place policies that have intensified the competition between the two countries. But, as was noted above, this strategic competition was well underway before either came to office. Given a state’s natural desire to establish, when it can, an international environment that helps support the security and prosperity of its own particular regime and given the fundamental differences between the U.S. and Chinese regimes, it should come as no surprise in either Beijing or Washington that the current relationship is where it is today.

John Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present (Picador, 2017), pp. 6–7.

Lyon Sharman, Sun Yat-sen: His Life and its Meaning, a Critical Biography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1934), pp. 94, 271.

Richard M. Nixon, “Asia After Viet Nam,” Foreign Affairs 46, no. 1 (October 1967): pp. 121–22.

Pomfret, The Beautiful Country, pp. 462, 466.

Pomfret, The Beautiful Country, p. 479.

Pomfret, The Beautiful Country, p. 486.

George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 156.

For Deng’s quote and China’s view that 2008 was “an inflection point in world history” and “the moment” to right “China’s one hundred years of humiliation,” see Elizabeth C. Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 188–89.

Pomfret, The Beautiful Country, p. 481.

Pomfret, The Beautiful Country, p. 504–05.

Joseph Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 21–43.

Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 49.

Pomfret, The Beautiful Country, p. 519.

Pomfret, The Beautiful Country, p. 535.

Suisheng Zhao, “A State-Led Nationalism: The Patriotic Education Campaign in Post-Tiananmen China,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 1, no. 3 (1998): p. 297.

Ashley J. Tellis, “China’s Grand Strategy: The Quest for Comprehensive National Power and Its Consequences,” in The Rise of China: Essays on the Future Competition, ed. Gary J. Schmitt (Encounter Books, 2009), pp. 25–52.

Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 49.

Nicholas Eberstadt, “Will China (Continue) to Rise?,” in The Rise of China: Essays on the Future Competition, ed. Gary J. Schmitt (Encounter Books, 2009), XX.

Economy, The Third Revolution, 32.

Economy, The Third Revolution, 10, 33, 186–230.

The post The China Dream: Their Goals and Ours appeared first on The American Interest.

Why the Robert Mueller Fandom Misses the Point

“It’s Mueller Time.”

Few phrases I overhear in Washington depress me as much as this. And this is not at all because I’m a Sean Hannity fan or a Chapo Trap House bro who thinks investigating Russian electoral interference is for globalist shills. Don’t get me wrong: I want crimes to be punished and action to be taken against Russian electoral interference. This is certainly no hoax.

But “Mueller Time,” the Mueller merch, the #Resistance—what Katherine Miller writing for BuzzFeed News has called “the Robert Mueller Fanclub”—really gets me down. Because what I think it shows is that, when it comes to thinking about the most important story of our time, analysis has failed.

This is something systemic, not personal. And yet the #Resistance, and too many Democrats in Congress, keep talking about Trump-Russia naively like a story about heroes and villains, where a few bad apples need to be tossed out; where all we need is  “Mueller Time” for everything to be alright. Believe me, it won’t be. This is systemic. And it’s about money.

Call it America’s laundromat.

The Trump-Russia story is a corruption story. It’s a story about dark money—money that both operates within the system and determines its contours.

Few people realize how central America is to global money laundering. Fewer people realize how becoming central to global money laundering has not only brought billions in dirty money to the United States, but has also created a billions-strong shadow economy servicing foreign kleptocrats. And even fewer people still realize that this system is a byproduct of decades-long efforts by American billionaires, American corporations, and various other American vested interests hell-bent on eliminating transparency efforts that would impinge on their ways of doing business or influencing politics.

It needs to be more widely known that the United States is the world’s number one manufacturer of the shell companies used to launder and conceal dark money. Not only does the United States produce more than 2 million corporate entities annually—by some estimates pumping out 10 times more shell companies than the world’s 41 other tax havens combined—U.S. firms were also the most willing to set up untraceable shell companies in a study where researchers posed as money launderers, corrupt officials and terrorist financiers. And shell companies themselves are not a harmless phenomenon. A 2011 World Bank forensic study of grand corruption cases found that the United States was the leading jurisdiction for the incorporation of entities involved in foreign money laundering schemes.

The scale of the American laundromat is huge. The Department of the Treasury estimates that $300 billion is laundered annually in the United States. This is roughly equivalent to the U.S. mining sector—or 2 percent of American GDP. These shocking statistics expose by themselves the complete failure of the existing U.S. anti-money laundering (AML) system.

Worse still, few realize how important defending the interests of this system has become to the Washington lobbying industry. Whether it is certain U.S. states defending their rights to produce anonymous shell companies, or kleptocratic governments such as Equatorial Guinea and Uzbekistan that have spent hundreds of millions on dollars to hire U.S. lobbying firms, or lawyers and real estate agents fighting to ensure that anti-money laundering legislation continues not to apply to sectors known to function as money laundering conduits, the rot runs deep.

Only by thinking of those convicted of charges filed by the Special Counsel as products of a deeply corrupt system can we begin to properly analyze the Trump-Russia story—not as some unfortunate gathering of a particularly rotten set of apples, but as the consequences of the American laundromat.

It is the system that produced these people and their sordid connections. And it is the system that continues to produce what amounts to a national security threat. None of this can be properly addressed without fundamental structural changes. We don’t need “Mueller Time.” We need something far more boring and technical: systematic legal, financial and political reform making America’s financial system much more transparent and much less corrupt.

Congress should stop waiting for Mueller and begin dismantling the American laundromat immediately. One doesn’t need the results of a particular investigation to grasp the outlines of the bigger picture.

Ending the mass production of anonymous shell companies could be done quickly by authorizing the creation of a federally administered register of beneficial ownership of all new and existing corporate entities owning assets in the United States.

A different anti-money laundering approach is also needed. Congress should pass a new Money Laundering Act, recasting the U.S. AML system as an investigative rather than reporting regime. This should extend AML requirements to high-risk sectors not covered by the existing regime, especially to lawyers and real estate professionals. It should also extend new powers to U.S. law enforcement—for example, a mechanism based on the United Kingdom’s Unexplained Wealth Order.

Ending the access foreign kleptocrats have to Washington pay-to-play politics could also be done quickly. Systemic reform of the sector would begin with Congress passing legislation fortifying the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Ambiguities in the existing legislation need to be clarified and any remaining loopholes should be closed, for example whether lobbyists register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) instead of FARA. In any case, there should be zero tolerance for late filing.

FARA 2.0 will not work without enforcement, which admittedly has been ramped up in recent months. Congress should provide the Department of Justice with greater investigative powers for cases of suspected non-compliance. New civil penalties for non-compliance should complement criminal punishments. There should be an awareness campaign and training exercise to educate lobbyists. Ultimately, given the stigma attached to being a “foreign agent,” legislation should be prepared replacing the existing LDA and FARA regimes with a single system that avoids such labels.

Dismantling the American laundromat means facing up to an unnerving truth: The whole system did not arise due to the importation of something “foreign” but is rather the result of kleptocrats exploiting the tools and structures honed over the decades by homegrown corporations and billionaires to protect their own wealth and influence politics.

Senators Marco Rubio, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Ron Wyden among others have proposed bipartisan legislation to clamp down on anonymous shell companies and money laundering in real estate. The House Financial Services Committee came very close to passing such a bill in the form of the Counter Terrorism and Illicit Finance Act at the end of the last Congress, and should do so now as an immediate bipartisan priority. Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Anti-Corruption And Public Integrity Act includes a lifetime ban on lobbying for presidents, vice presidents, members of congress, federal judges and cabinet secretaries; provides for a new independent U.S. Office of Public Integrity; and attempts to change the rulemaking process of federal agencies to restrict lobbyist influence on lawmaking. These measures would enhance national security more than a new round of fighter jets.

It’s a good start. This is what the Robert Mueller fanclub should be cheering for—seeking to change structures, not turning everything into a morality play about good Americans, bad Americans, and bad foreigners.

The problem runs much deeper than that.

The post Why the Robert Mueller Fandom Misses the Point appeared first on The American Interest.

Shining a Light on “Dark Commerce”

TAI Publisher Charles Davidson recently sat down with Louise Shelley, University Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and a leading expert on transnational crime and corruption, to discuss her new book Dark Commerce: How A New Illicit Economy is Threatening Our Future. (Full disclosure: Charles and Louise are colleagues and have collaborated in the past.) The following interview has been edited for clarity.

Charles Davidson: You’re known as an expert in international crime and illicit commerce, and now you’ve pulled all of the pieces together in a book that’s targeted at a broad public. How did you get interested in “dark commerce” in the first place?

Louise Shelley: Well, it goes back to my childhood in Manhattan, where my father basically had two occupations: He was in the real estate business, and he was a large-scale stamp collector. At that time, the Mafia was one of the larger real estate owners in New York. His discussions at the dinner table helped me understand how organized crime was involved in real estate. As for the stamp collecting, that also gave me insights into money laundering. In the days before there were wire transfers of money, people needed to find ways to move money with high-value items.

In the 1950s and 1960s, my father would say at dinner: “Guess what emissary of what Latin American dictator came to me today to move stamps to Switzerland? I would never do this, because I don’t want to facilitate the draining of resources out of these poor countries.” My father was also a legal advisor to the American Philatelic Society, which was then smaller, as the trade in stamps was often a cover for many different forms of illicit activity.

Therefore, these discussions we had in the evening were important moral lessons from my childhood that foreshadowed what I’m writing about—the facilitation of illicit trade and money laundering into real estate on a large scale from organized crime and corruption. These problems were deeply disturbing to my father and had an important impact on my intellectual and activist agenda in my life.

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(Photo: Romain Lafabrègue/AFP/Getty Images)

CD: Then in terms of your education and schooling, how did that lead to your current specialization?

LS: I went to college to study physics, and I was told I should do two languages. I already had enough French, and they said choose Russian or German. I chose Russian. Then I wasn’t doing that well in Russian, so I went to the Soviet Union to improve my language skills and I got totally fascinated by the country. I was not doing well in the large physics classes where there were almost no women, therefore I decided to major in Russian. It was also the activist 1970s and I was fascinated by issues of crime in the United States and crackdowns on dissidents in the Soviet Union. I decided to combine my interests and did my honors thesis at Cornell on Russian prison literature.

But I was not a literary type. That was not me. So when I thought about what I would do in graduate school, my advisor suggested that I go study criminology. I went to graduate school in criminology, and the first day I was in grad school, the person who would be my thesis advisor said, “I have a whole bunch of books in Russian, it’s too bad I’ve never had a student who can read Russian.” That’s how I got started, and there was a lot of graduate funding to go into underfunded areas in Russian studies, including sociology.

So I focused on Russian crime. But already in my early days of graduate school, I was working on issues of transnational crime and migration, laying out an intellectual agenda. I had one class with a very famous professor, Sir Leon Radzinowicz, then at Cambridge University, who was knighted for his work on criminology. I did an outline for a term paper, and he said to me, “This isn’t an outline for a class paper. This is an outline for a life’s work.” Most of the issues that I wrote about in my outline—urbanization, migration, organized crime, transnational crime and the illicit economy—have been my intellectual agenda for the last 40 years. For my dissertation, I went to study in the Soviet Union between 1974 and 1976. At that time, I couldn’t be working overtly on issues of contemporary crime. Instead, I worked on what sounded like a nice safe topic, “The theoretical development of Soviet criminology.”

But that didn’t turn out to be such a safe topic, because as I got into it, I was looking at how criminologists became the justifiers of purges in the Stalinist era. Academics justified Stalin’s repression and this became the intellectual justification for an increasingly authoritarian regime. That’s what my dissertation was on.

CD: I look forward to seeing the dissertation, if there’s still a copy floating around somewhere.

LS: You do not need to read the whole thesis. You can get the whole idea in a 20-page article. But when I gave my final report at the Moscow Law School, I was told that they should have burned the sources I found. That, together with my association with “anti-Soviet elements” (dissidents), got me kicked out of the Soviet Union. I found ways to keep writing on justice and crime from afar, but only got back to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s when the late dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva— she just died recently—got me off the black list at the time the Soviet Union was opening up. When I came back, what struck me in this period of glasnost was the enormous rise of organized crime.

In this new freedom, I was seeing organized crime stepping in just as the economy was opening up. Just as you had prohibition in the United States leading to the rise of organized crime in the 1930s, this was happening on a massive scale as the Soviet Union was beginning to privatize its economy. Who got a foothold in this new privatizing economy but organized crime groups and their handmaidens—corrupt government officials.

I’d never seen this before, because this wasn’t what I’d studied in the United States on crime. Therefore, in the early 1990s I studied in Mexico and in Italy, places where organized crime was really prominent, to understand how organized crime was different in the post-Soviet space. That’s when I started writing on post-Soviet organized crime and came to the conclusion that the rise of this form of criminality was going to undermine democracy and the transition to a free market.

I also wrote that this organized crime was not only going to stem democracy in Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet successor states, but was going to lead to the rise of authoritarianism elsewhere in the world. This insight has been quoted in Seth Hettena’s book Trump/Russia: A Definitive History.

CD: Can you tell us more about that? How does organized crime undermine democracy, and what were these impacts on authoritarianism that you were thinking of? It sounds like you were pretty prescient on this.

LS: I was vilified, literally vilified when I started writing this. I wrote that with organized crime there would be a decline of social protections, organized crime would reduce labor rights, undermine the democratic process and freedom of the press. In one article, on organized crime as a new form of authoritarianism, I was discussing how oligarchs, who worked with organized crime, were buying newspapers. Therefore they were contributing to a decline in freedom of the press. There was much more freedom of the press during the final years of the Soviet period, and that was beginning to be curtailed. The people who were buying up these factories, and the workers not being paid, were leading to authoritarian labor policies.

CD: Who vilified you?

LS: At one time, I spoke at a meeting of U.S. government officials and told them that the methods of privatization that they were promoting would have a dramatic negative impact on Russia and would lead to a backlash against us. I said that if they continued to promote privatization without any safeguards, and citizens did not get access to property, then they were going to lead a transfer from the Communist leadership to the rise of what you would call an oligarchic corrupt elite. And that people were being screwed because they were not having an opportunity to participate in the privatization process. Their reaction was so hostile that I had the only migraine I’ve ever had in my life.

This privatization process had effects that also shaped my thinking and led to Dark Commerce. People in Russia were privatizing and controlling resources in the environment, their cutting of trees and illicit trade in fish were leading to drastic and damaging impacts on the environment. Seeing these elements of privatization marked the first time I became alert to these issues. If people don’t have property—and this is what happened in authoritarian states—they have no security blanket and no way of resisting authoritarianism because the social welfare system was collapsing at the time that they were getting no property to support themselves in their new lives.

So they can’t be participating in democratic party structures, and you end up going from one type of authoritarianism to another. Those were the first things I was writing. Then Soviet organized crime started going global, and they were moving across borders and moving their money. They went global and so did I.

CD: And how did you go global, Louise?

LS: One of the things that I noticed is that in most parts of the world, like in Mexico or Colombia, organized crime was based on the drug trade. Organized crime in the former Soviet Union was not based on the drug trade. It was based in part on human trafficking, but mostly on the privatization of state resources and the looting of natural resources. Not only were the resources shipped overseas but the profits of their sale were deposited outside the country, leading to the draining of both natural and financial resources.

Human trafficking was the visible sign of the transnational crime coming from the former USSR. You couldn’t go anywhere in the world and not see trafficked Slavic women. They were in South Africa, Latin America, Japan and elsewhere in Asia.

Russian organized crime has also globalized on a large scale through its criminals’ extensive involvement in the cyber world. Russians, with their superb educations in math and science and technology, should be at the forefront of the technological revolution we’ve had in the last three decades. But because there’s been so much corruption, so much exodus of capital, and so much corporate raiding that deprives people who have legitimate businesses of their enterprises, there is a lack of legitimate tech entrepreneurs in the Soviet successor states. Therefore, talented techies go to the dark side.

CD: Why don’t we take a little detour into Russia as a security threat, because you’ve alluded to all of these issues. And certainly Russia is very much on our minds these days. How would you answer someone who says, “Oh well, Russia is an economy the size of Italy. What is there to worry about?” Why are they having so much influence? How are they able to do so much damage?

LS: One thing to remember when you think about transnational crime is that it’s an asymmetric threat. That’s something we increasingly talk about in security studies today. We’re not dealing with the days of armies, or navies, where you’re counting ships and you’re counting people. Russia’s been really good at using new technology and leveraging the poor economic hand it has with its comparative advantage in technology.

CD: All those darn chess players and rocket scientists, I guess.

LS: And also computer scientists. Oleg Deripaska studied physics at Moscow State University. He and other highly trained scientific minds are now oligarchs who have been placed under sanctions.

CD: The best minds are going into crime?

LS: Yes. Our paramount concern should not be the thugs of organized crime, which is what the U.S. government was focusing on a lot in the 1990s as it pursued gangsters and thieves-in-law, the elite of the organized crime world similar in stature to the made men of the mafia. It’s the people with highly technical educations and skills who should be the central concern of Western governments. What has been so disruptive in the United States and in Europe has been the dissemination of fake news, the hacking, the stealing of data, the stealing of individuals’ personal information, the freezing of computer systems through ransomware. These are things that you do not need a large economy for. These are criminal acts that can cause great harm, but a country does not need a large economy to succeed at this activity. It only needs a select and highly educated group of people to carry out such disruptive behavior.

That’s how I understand the critical importance and transformation of technology through my Russia lens. One of the things that we find here is that, because we have an active law enforcement in the United States, a lot of our illicit activity is going into the dark web. But in Russia, a lot of illicit trade has been operating on the surface web because law enforcement has not been bringing it down. One of the stories that I tell in my book is the case of PharmaLeaks. That’s a popular name for a group of criminals with very sophisticated technology skills who began to be studied by a group of top-level American computer scientists.

The computer scientists decided to study this online pharmaceutical network selling Viagra because they were interested in understanding spam and this network was the largest propagator of spam in the world. The study revealed the network, its operations, its financial operations but also its use of spam. As they did this research, they found that the criminals were using a credit card system that was tied to Western financial institutions, and they managed to get those financial institutions to cut the criminals off from their ability to use credit card payments.

What’s interesting is that when these criminals were forced to move on as they were cut off from their payment system, they began to curse online the people who were attacking them. They had to find a new criminal arena as they were serial criminal entrepreneurs in cyber space. They’d been in child pornography before, and then they went into criminal antiviruses subsequently. But one of them got into trouble later because he used his skills and offended some powerful oligarch who got him arrested. Then when he got arrested, like many other criminals in Russia who had been identified by Western law enforcement, the Russians then knew that they had a super cybercriminal in confinement.

So they gave a choice to this cybercriminal of what I would call the Monopoly “Get Out of Jail Free” card. The prison officials advised him that he would be freed if he agreed to work for the Russian state. Now, one of the people who ran this major spam operation selling Viagra has a new job now. He is head of the national payment system of Russia. This is convenient for the Russian state, because the state needs to pay its hackers.

But this guy has a dual utility, because what else do you need to be running a spam operation? You need a bank of botnets. Spam is driven by botnets. That’s the same way that you also drive fake news. So now Russia has an identified criminal in the critical payment position but who also has links to the whole underbelly of the criminal world and the people who operate botnets.

CD: Fascinating. We tend to think of social capital as always referring to something positive in a society. It sounds from the way you’re describing Russia, that social capital there is in fact negative and has been effectively criminalized, and has created a criminal organization out of the whole country.

LS: I can’t say the whole country, but it has limited honest entrepreneurship in the mold of Silicon Valley, where many Russians have gone with their skillset to be successful entrepreneurs. But the problems of illicit entrepreneurship is not just a problem of Russia. One of the cases that I discuss in the book took place in the Czech Republic and illustrates how one form of illicit activity can provide the venture capital for larger-scale illicit activity. One example I give is in my chapter on the rhino trade that analyzes the extermination of the rhino through the transnational illicit trade in its horns.

In the Czech Republic, Vietnamese criminals used the trade in counterfeits and cigarettes as venture capital for a more lucrative trade—that in rhino horn. Moreover, they exploited their traditional routes. Counterfeits came one way from Asia and then the illicit rhino horn went back in the other direction to Vietnam. All this illicit trade is working in market terms that we understand. One type of illicit entrepreneurship can help support another. And as you were saying, social capital is not always a positive phenomenon.

CD: You were talking earlier about organized crime and how you saw very early on in your career how this was a threat to democracy, and could encourage authoritarianism. But when we look at the complete story you lay out in Dark Commerce, some of what you talk about is just normal crime and things that are perhaps marginal to a society. How do we parse out the elements in this that are governance-threatening, as opposed to illicit activities and the sort of crime that’s just part of the human condition?

LS: We’ve always had crime. It’s part of the human condition.

CD: So what are the specific things we need to attack in terms of the democracy threat you referred to?

LS: What we need to particularly understand is how this illicit trade is funding and prolonging conflicts, and how destabilizing it is. How the corruption that is linked to this illicit trade, which has gotten so enormous, is undermining governance. Just last week, we’ve been hearing of the evidence presented at the trial of the Mexican drug kingpin, El Chapo, who reportedly paid $100 million to the former President of Mexico. Whether this is true or not, large payments to politicians have been paid for decades in countries like Mexico and Italy, where I’ve spent a lot of time.

The corruption that has come with the drug trade in Mexico has been so incredibly corrosive and undermined the successful transition away from the one-party rule of the PRI. Instead of having democracy and free markets, we’re observing enormous corruption in Mexico related to the drug trade that threatens human security. There’s enormous violence, it helps encourage migration as people are fleeing this violence. The domestic situation in Mexico and the politicization of the migration debate is threatening our democracy.

The same problem is going on in Italy, in which the large numbers of migrants that are arriving from North Africa are facilitated by organized crime with payoffs to government officials. Look at the impact this has had on Italian politics and on the politics of other societies in Europe that are becoming more populist. These forces of organized crime are very, very destabilizing. As I wrote in my book, Human Trafficking, which came out a decade ago, the growth of human smuggling and trafficking was going to be a defining issue in the 21st century.

CD: Right. What about the weaponization of this? You talk about the Opium Wars and that the Chinese may be in a sense extracting some kind of metaphorical revenge on us, in terms of shipping us fentanyl now. If one thinks of this in very basic human terms, some might even say it is a just revenge, because what was done to the Chinese in those wars. It’s inexcusable if we look at the sort of morals that we try to champion in the world, what was done there was the exact opposite, and the sort of thing that we in the West now fight.

LS: When we think about the Opium Wars, we generally think about them as being a tool of the British. But that was true in Opium War number one. Opium War number two, the British were joined by the Americans and the French, who were all participants. This is the state sponsoring transnational crime. Yet what is interesting is that when we keep talking about organized crime being responsible for transnational crime. Yet there are many places in the world where it’s the national leader that’s involved in the drug trade, where the corruption is absolutely essential for the drug organizations to operate. So it’s not just criminals that are engaging in transnational crime today.

It takes high-status individuals to propagate this drug trade. You know who was one of the largest American drug traffickers in China? It was Warren Delano, a name you should recognize if you think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s his maternal grandfather who was one of the large opium traders that was illicitly moving drugs into China. There are precedents as we go back into the history of the drug trade of the participation of high-status individuals. Mr. Delano’s participation in the drug trade did not diminish his daughter’s opportunity to become a debutante and enter into high society.

As long as we’ve had the highly destructive drug trade, it has not been just a criminal activity. It has supported states and state interests. I think that’s really important to understand. So when you think about fentanyl and why the Chinese are not cracking down on it, it also serves state interests if you’re thinking about our conflict over trade now with China. This fentanyl trade is not affecting China, because the drugs are all being sold through English-language websites that reach foreign and not domestic consumers.

CD: If we jump back to Russia, then, we have seen certainly the weaponization of a lot of these things. Now that we’re the target—I don’t want to get into sort of leftist revisionist history à la Howard Zinn—but we’re on the defensive now. We’ve been talking the good talk, and trying to promote democracy and freedom around the world, but we now find ourselves under attack using a lot of the same methods and tools that we’ve been talking about.

In the case of Russia we see organized crime has been weaponized at the state level. There’s been a sort of state capture. So how do we defend ourselves from all of this? What do we need to do as a society, and what does our government need to do to defend ourselves?

LS: I don’t like the term state capture, because it suggests that when you had a king and he was captured, or the state, you could pay a ransom and get him back. This is now a much more complicated process than getting your king or your pawn released. Part of this is a question of how we use and deploy technology. Part of it is doing an analysis of who is behind this technology, which we’re not doing enough of. We’re going after the physical presence of fentanyl, rather than understanding the corporate producers who are behind the production of the fentanyl. We’re not doing enough analysis of how this operates as a business.

When you weaponize dark commerce, you’re dealing with a very negative business competitor that is having an impact on your commerce and on your society. When corporations face a pernicious competitor, they do incredible market analysis of how they need to address this. We are not doing enough of that. What are the kinds of tools that we need? How do we counter this? We’re not thinking enough about this as a business. Fake news is one thing. Selling pharma is another. We stovepipe these negative phenomena without understanding that it’s often the same people behind it, the same operators. We’re not thinking in an integrated fashion about how all of this operates.

CD: And if we did?

LS: We could be much more effective, because the criminals, whether they are criminal states or criminal groups, don’t think in this fashion. They switch from activity A to activity B. They combine A and C. They use the same actors. And we’re sitting around looking at one problem without understanding their flexibility and innovation.

CD: And if we did understand that, and we had a complete picture, how would that affect policy? What would we do?

LS: For example, we would be doing an investigation of how fake news is disseminated. We’d be integrating fake news with our understanding that the person who is involved with PharmaLeaks is part of the payment system of Russia, who has access to botnets. We would be looking at something that combines a criminal activity with a political activity. But we have two sets of things, and we close down one and we don’t look at the actors and how they are integrated.

CD: They’re integrated. And if we did look at it that way, and we had all that knowledge, what would that enable us to do?

LS: We could be thinking much more flexibly about how we cut people off from the financial system of the world. We could be using tools that target technology in different ways. We could be developing more ways to go after illicit activity on the web, the deep web and the dark net. We could be deploying the resources that we have to focus on earlier links in the supply chain, and the key facilitators, rather than just the end results. To do some of this, we need to be working much more with the corporate world. Our commercial code has been giving an enormous free pass to the online platforms and to social media, which are not being responsible.

So we go after one problem, and we say, “Okay, you’ve got to do something about hate speech. You’ve got to be responsible that you’re not propagating hate speech.” Or this summer legislation was passed requiring that, “Online platforms cannot be propagating human trafficking.” But we’re not saying, “Online platforms have to take a collective conceptual approach to be seeing and addressing the ways that our society is vulnerable and undermining our security.” We need to be looking at businesses and making demands on them to be responsible corporate citizens. We’re not making this requirement. In its absence, corporations are not doing enough to address their facilitating role in dark commerce.

CD: What would this look like at the government level? Do we need a new structure for this, or some new sort of Department of Homeland Security devoted just to this?

LS: No. First of all, we need to change some of our commercial code. I’m not saying that regulation is the answer, but if you’re totally exempted from regulation, then things can go amok. We regulate many aspects of our society, for example, mining and utilities. We regulate who can register to vote in elections and what kind of identifications they must have. We regulate lots of things to make sure that we do not have abuses of our economy and abuses of our democratic process. We’ve taken this new technology and acted as if it’s some brave new world that doesn’t need the regulation that we have applied to the old world.

But our criminals have taken enormous and disproportionate advantage of this, and have gone into this cyber world, and have enormous competitive advantage because the rules don’t operate there. I give examples in the book about illicit trade in the online world: Silk Road, which was the first large online dark web marketplace. It was not a hygienic world. You have corruption and violence that also went into the online marketplace. Online marketplaces are unregulated. And you say, “Well how do you regulate the dark web, because it’s dark?”

As I point out in the book, since there’s no indexes that help you search the dark web, you have to get pointers to what you’re going to find in the dark web, often from social media. There are links between the two of them, but we’re making no requirements that social media has to be responsible for policing drug sales, weapon sales, or anything else. They continue to post messages that help steer customers to dark web sites. They do not focus on cleaning up online marketplaces or social media posts sufficiently.

It would cut down on corporate profits, but a lot could be done by constructing algorithms and making sure that these new forms of technology are being much more careful in what they are making available and knowable to a public audience.

CD: Well, I think there’s broad public outrage at some of these issues you just raised. And certainly ripe terrain for further discussion. Louise, thank you.

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Is It Really RIP for the LIO?

The alarmists have a point. The Liberal International Order (LIO) has many enemies. One is populism, the insurgency against the institutions of representative democracy, flanked by the revolt against fourth estate—the “fake news” media. Donald Trump, the Populist-in-Chief, wants to outflank Congress by invoking emergency powers. He blasts out his tweets to speak directly to the masses. Communing with the great unwashed has been a classic of populism since ancient Rome; today, it ranges across the Western world from Stockton to Stockholm.

Another foe is surging nationalism. Its targets are immigration and the free movement of goods and capital, a mainstay of the LIO.

And the populists are forging ahead. In Europe; they sit in every parliament except Spain’s and Britain’s. They govern in Poland, Hungary, and Italy. Strutting onstage as savior, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro has captured the presidency in a free election.

But more is at stake than the LIO. Add the ComDem—the Community of the Democracies—to the list of endangered species. Authoritarianism seems to be on a roll as well. In Russia and China, Putin and Xi are amassing ever more personal power. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the despots are back from Damascus to Cairo. Hundreds of thousands have died, and millions have fled. A killer president rules the Philippines.

So say good-bye not only to the LIO, but also the liberal state and constitutionalism that define the ComDem? These trends are certainly worrisome. But reality is, as always, more complex.

The LIO is a Western invention that has spread across the world. It is anchored in global institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. The WTO is well-nigh universal, encompassing 164 members, from totalitarian China to ultra-democratic Switzerland.

The ComDem, the core of the LIO, is more exclusive. This is the Atlantic world and its outliers, from India via Oceania to Israel.  A large chunk of the world’s population remains outside: Russia, China, the ex-Soviet Republics, Africa, the Middle East, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

The LIO is under stress. The mightiest challenge comes from the United States and China, the world’s two giants. They wield their clout to skew the terms of trade in their favor—the U.S. blatantly with trade wars, China more subtly with the appropriation of intellectual property, massive subsidies for state-owned enterprises, and barriers to market entry.

The threat to the LIO is the shift from a non-zero-sum to a zero-sum game, from “we all win” to “your losses are my gains.” As economists have argued forever, victory in trade wars is an illusion. Punitive tariffs merely serve the interests of privileged producers like the steel manufacturers in the United States. They can raises prices while the nation as a whole loses real income. When other nations retaliate, exports fall and jobs vanish.

The ComDem is also under siege. Populism and nationalism feed polarization, radicalization and xenophobia, favoring strongmen of the Right and the Left. These forces undermine the liberal state. Worse, they spill over into the LIO that was founded and nurtured by liberal states. After all, it takes liberal states to uphold the Liberal International Order.

For the evidence, go back in history. Fascists and communists have despised such an order. Universalism is not in their DNA. They seek control over their citizens and their intercourse with the outside. Today’s authoritarians cherish not interdependence, but power. They like foreign investment, but loathe freedom for ideas and people. Thus, Beijing obsessively controls the internet while expanding surveillance over 1.3 billion people.

The Arab autocracies have never integrated into the world economy.  They haven’t even opened their economies to one another. Inter-Arab trade accounts for 9 percent of total trade. For the E.U., the ratio is 62 percent.

At first blush, China looks like the great exception. It trades with the entire world. Yet at home, the regime has the last word, telling its people, “Enrich yourselves, but leave the driving to us.” Conversely, take the UK. The LIO of the 19th century was “Made in Britain.” This liberal state believed in freedom at home and abroad—for trade, capital and navigation. This is no accident; a free economy demands freedom beyond borders. By contrast, the absolutists of the 17th and 18th centuries insisted on royal monopolies and state manufactures, mercantilism, and protectionism.

Today, Hungary’s Viktor Orban crows: “The era of the liberal state is over.” The 2019 Report of Freedom House warned that 2018 marked “the 13th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.” Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright has fumed about a new “era of fascism.”

But the facts do not bear out Chicken Little. So let’s give Pollyanna a chance.

For one, the new nationalism is different from the old. Beyond Russia and China, it does not seek to expand and subjugate. It is not aggressive, but defensive. It does not clamor for empire, but snarls “leave us alone!” Imperialism is made from nastier stuff.

Second, let’s set aside the dramatic headlines and look at the long run. Are Putin and XI really the harbingers of tyranny triumphant? They are not the avant-garde of history, but old hat. Russia and China have always been despotisms. So have the Arab states. Cuba was a dictatorship under Battista and then under Castro. Nicaragua, oppression merely changed from Somoza on the right to the Sandinistas on the left.

Nor is Erdogan’s Turkey a sign of things to come. Modern Turkey was never a solid democracy. It was founded by an autocrat, Kemal Attatürk, in 1923. After 1960, the military routinely grabbed power up until 1997. So the would-be sultan is not an omen, but the old normal. In the Middle East and in Africa, violence and repression are also a dreary continuity.

For perspective, consult Samuel Huntington’s The Third Wave of Democratization. Democracy comes in waves, he shows. The first one rose in the early 19th century, the second after World War II. The most recent one rise started in Iberia in the Seventies, rolled east to Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines, then splashed back to Eastern Europe in the Nineties. Democracy is like a balloon. It soars and sinks, contracts and expands. It is a jagged curve, but in the long term, it slopes upward.

Today, the number of democracies has grown to 122, the largest number of all time. Nearly 70 percent of countries are democracies if we apply the minimalist criterion of “genuinely contested elections.” Adding “fundamental rights” and “checks on government” yields a slow rise from 1975 to the present.

Nowhere has an established democracy collapsed, not even in Poland or Hungary. Conversely, where is Croatia’s operetta dictator Franjo Tudjman? He is gone, as is Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic. Last May, ten million Iraqis went to the polls in a competitive election marred by little violence, and this after decades of war and the advance of ISIS to the gates of Baghdad.

Poland gets top billing in the authoritarian revival. Yet in May 2018, 50,000 demonstrators marched through Warsaw. By year’s end, he opposition swept the cities, capturing local power. If general elections were held today, it would be do widzenia to Kaczynski. In the New York Times, a Polish scholar noted: “With its large population, Poland is a swing state that can turn the tide across Eastern Europe.”

True, illiberal parties have entered into almost all parliaments of the EU. On the other hand, their democratic rivals in the EU have retained 80 percent of the votes. Compare that figure to the triumph of Fascism and Bolshevism in the interwar years. None of the conditions favoring their rise is present in Europe today: the fall of empires from Berlin to St. Petersburg, the humiliation of Germany and Austria, their built-in revanchism, the Great Depression. Unlike the Weimar Republic, which had no democratic roots, the Federal Republic has flourished for 70 years.

Such a rosy perspective raises the question: What has unleashed the forces of illiberalism? A major cause is the loss of control over borders and million-fold migration. The trend can be turned, if Europe manages to reconcile two vexing paradoxes.

On the one hand, the liberal principle of open borders threatens the liberal state, as the rise of extremist tendencies shows. On the other, the liberal state has to resort to illiberal means by drawing its walls higher to defang populism and secure the domestic liberal order.

This is the price, but if Europe continues to narrow the stream of uncontrolled immigration, it may leave the neo-nationalists high and dry. The Weimar analogy is misleading. Communists and Nazis pocketed a majority of the votes in the 1932 elections. In today’s Germany, the democratic parties haul in 87 percent.

In the 1920s and 1930s, we did not know what towering tariffs, brutal austerity measures, and competitive devaluations would wreak. They brought on the collapse of world trade and the triumph of totalitarianism. Pluralist democracies are better learners than systems where The Truth is decreed from above. The crisis of 2008 did not degenerate into a depression precisely because central banks remembered the past, pouring trillions of liquidity into the economy.

To boot, Europe’s institutions are a lot stronger than the infant democracies of the interwar period. A mighty welfare state has reduced class differences, protecting the victims of globalization from the misery of the 1930s.

Alas, a large question mark remains. The United States used to be the housekeeper of the LIO. As the mightiest player, it can now inflict the gravest danger on the LIO, emboldening nationalists and protectionists everywhere. As goes the U.S., so goes the world.

This contribution is based on a talk the author gave at MIT’s Seminar XXI.

Integration into the global market seems to be shrinking. Chinese exports as share of GDP have dropped from 35 to 18 percent in the last decade, imports from 27 to 18 percent.

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In Israel, the Return of the Strong, Silent Type

Whatever else he is, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is indisputably amongst the most loquacious politicians in his country’s history. Bombastic speeches at the UN, campaign speeches in historically significant locations around Israel, and televised “addresses to the nation” are the hallmark of his tenure in the Prime Minister’s office.

Since his second tenure has now lasted almost ten years, it is easy to forget that many or even most Israeli political figures have disliked talking as well as talkers. A stark reminder of this side of the Israeli character has emerged with the candidacy of Benny Gantz, 59, a former chief of staff and political neophyte, who having only entered politics a few months ago has catapulted himself and his new party, Hosen Israel (“Mighty Israel”), within striking distance of Netanyahu’s Likud in most major polls. Even if Gantz doesn’t manage to close the gap before the April 11 election, or if he does but fails to navigate the treacherous waters of coalition building in Israel’s proportionally divided Knesset, he has turned himself overnight into Netanyahu’s chief rival.

Who is Benny Gantz? Most Israelis, perhaps even many of his supporters, couldn’t recite more than a few lines of stock biography. A career soldier, he originally enlisted as a paratrooper and worked his way up through various branches of the IDF. Eventually, he served the mandated four-year term as Chief of Staff between 2011-2015 under none other than Benjamin Netanyahu. Gantz was notably in charge of the army during the 2014 conflict in Gaza, when Israel attacked Gaza to deter missile attacks and tunnel infiltrations by Hamas into Israel.

There has been considerable mystery about Gantz’s political opinions. Is he left-wing or right-wing? Would he consider a spot in a government led by Netanyahu or he is an implacable foe? For the first few weeks of the campaign, Gantz studiously refused to say more than a few words, except, in a nod to the Trump campaign, that he would always put “Israel before all else.” Finally, on Tuesday night, Gantz gave his first major speech, in which he claimed that staying quiet was not merely style but substance. “Security is created by deeds and not by words,” he told supporters in Tel Aviv, “in the harsh and violent Middle East surrounding us, there is no mercy for the weak. Only the strong survive!” Promising strength and threatening Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran, Gantz went on to indict the current government for corruption and bemoaned the alleged descent of the country into partisan politics. In a manner reminiscent of Charles de Gaulle, he pledged to stand above parties and work as a “patriot” on behalf of Israel.

Noting his almost comically exaggerated bellicosity toward Israel’s enemies, Israeli commentators have argued that Gantz is a throwback right-winger from the days before Netanyahu. For while Bibi had been an elite soldier as well, his genuine political education came through diplomatic service and business, as well as his study of classic works of political economy. The “Old Likud,” the argument goes, was the home to the real firebrands.

Actually, Gantz seems to represent the return of an Israeli character type never totally absent but long repressed under the Netanyahu regime: the silent general. This figure, often bred on the kibbutz and politically more at home with the Labor Party, thinks talk is cheap and detests the deal-making and prideful clucking of civilian politicians. He values simplicity, even austerity, in personal style. He is the kind of person who naturally cringes when he hears details about the Netanyahu family’s luxurious life in the seaside town of Caesarea. (Gantz alluded to this in his big campaign speech). It was with such kibbutznik-warriors in mind that the late French historian François Furet memorably dubbed Israel “a new Sparta, agrarian and military.”

If there is any Israeli political figure Gantz recalls, it is not a figure from the Right but the late Yitzhak Rabin, himself a war hero and chief of staff who then went into politics. Though now remembered for his impassioned but rather convoluted pleas for peace before his assassination in 1995, Rabin actually detested political rhetoric and never bothered to articulate a policy agenda. Much like Gantz, Rabin did not hesitate to threaten enemies with brutality. Benjamin Netanyahu, by contrast, prefers to argue against Iran through reasoned speeches on television and addresses in international forums.

Silent generals have done much to protect Israel since 1948. Yet, given recent history, there are good reasons to be skeptical about this approach to politics. Rabin’s inability or unwillingness to articulate, in concrete terms, his approach to the peace process with the Palestinians led to much bewilderment, leaving Israelis unprepared for the diplomatic and military challenges that ensued. The late Ariel Sharon, another “strong silent” general/Prime Minister, refused to tell even his closest advisers his reasoning behind removing all Israeli settlements and troops from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Was it so that Israel would be under less pressure to leave the West Bank, or was it the first stage in a planned withdrawal from the West Bank? No one knows for sure what Sharon thought. He thus failed to mobilize the country toward any specific objective with respect to the Palestinians in Gaza. Other than releasing a television ad bragging about prior damage he inflicted on Hamas, Gantz has so far been extremely short on specifics about his views of the Palestinian question, Iran, and other challenges. To his credit, he has said concretely that he aims to improve the overburdened hospital system. But can such vagueness lead to victory? And will it lead to successful government?

Israel’s elections are still two months away. The public will inevitably learn at least a bit more about Gantz, however silent he remains. It is undeniable that Netanyahu now has the most formidable challenger on his hand in many years. And Israelis, by now used to if never quite enamored with the speechifying Netanyahu, will have to decide whether a healthy politics requires a good dose of rhetoric about the opportunities and challenges the country faces.

 

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The Unquiet American

From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia

Michael McFaul

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018, 528 pp., $30

During a press conference at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport on September 19, 1952, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, remarked that his isolation in Moscow was worse than what he had endured as an interned diplomat in Nazi Germany following the onset of World War II. Two weeks later, Kennan was expelled from Moscow, becoming the first American Ambassador to be thrown out of Russia in the 230 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Sixty years after that, in May 2012, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Barack Obama’s national security advisor that Russian-American relations were on the road to ruin under America’s Ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul. McFaul wouldn’t have been wrong to have assumed that he might become the second U.S. Ambassador to be summarily ejected from Russia. Instead, McFaul underwent something worse: A ghastly and at times harrowing experience as America’s top diplomat in Moscow, chronicled in his recent memoir, From Cold War to Hot Peace. Sharing Kennan’s fate might have saved McFaul and his family more than a few sleepless nights.   

Kennan permeates McFaul’s memoir. McFaul is convinced that no one would have better understood Obama’s approach to policy than the esteemed Cold War diplomat. For McFaul, the highly-touted “Reset” of relations between Russia and America that commenced at the start of Obama’s first term could have played the same role in post-Cold War American foreign policy that Kennan’s focus on “Containment” played during the Cold War itself. The Reset should have been, like Kennan’s famous “X” article in Foreign Affairs, the defining approach for a new century. This of course never came to pass. Why that is so is a recurrent theme coursing through McFaul’s book.

George Kennan and Michael McFaul are both policy intellectuals who were thrust into a position of actually shaping policy. Each had been conditioned to concentrate on the bigger picture, and both perceived themselves as representing a new course of thinking. Each of them also felt that the policies they authored were badly misunderstood. Nevertheless, Kennan and McFaul are two vastly different thinkers. Kennan, we might say, is the intellectual as historian. Gloomy, often skeptical about democracy, Kennan was a realist by inclination. According to his biographer, John Lewis Gaddis, he was also an elitist, with frustration his default state of mind.

McFaul, by contrast, is a policy intellectual qua social scientist. His competencies are rooted not in history but in comparative politics. He is an optimist, a democratic determinist. In Whiggish fashion, he believes that history has a direction, and that this direction, despite twists and turns, finds its way to democracy. His long-standing relationship with the National Democratic Institute, the U.S. government-funded democracy-promoting outfit of which he writes about with particular affection, is a case in point.

George Kennan is an observer. Michael McFaul is an activist. Kennan is temperamentally ambivalent about what America could and should do. McFaul sees inaction as the major sin of any American policy. These distinctions in their intellectual profiles reflect the difference between someone molded by the dour experience of the 1930s and someone shaped by the triumphalism of the 1990s. It also demonstrates the instability and tension between liberal idealism and foreign policy realism.

A Montana-raised political science professor at Stanford University, McFaul was invited by President Barack Obama to direct the Russia and Eurasia shop at the National Security Council. McFaul’s academic work on democracy-related themes— teleologically called “transitions to democracy” or, infelicitously, “transitology”— provided him a useful perspective to navigate foreign policy alongside career policy practitioners.

Eager to trumpet his scholarly bona fides and ivory tower comparative advantage against career DC policy wonks, McFaul repeatedly references his academic pedigree. He writes that he is “an academic specialist on democratic transitions;” that he is “one of the few professors at the NSC;” that his “aspirations for how Russia might change are supported by social science research;” and that he “got to do what every academic dreams of: walk the president of the United States through every argument of [my] book.” The Stanford academic at the NSC is at pains to show that Obama’s White House policy team was advantaged by their new colleague’s rigorous application of political science theory.

McFaul’s scholarly mien and Russian language facility (unlike other U.S. Ambassadors of yore, though not Kennan) made him a seemingly convincing political appointee to the NSC. After U.S.-Russian relations reached their nadir in the George W. Bush years, the Reset aimed to get relations back on course—and McFaul with his deep well of experience had the apparent legitimacy to make that a reality. His aims were hardly burdened by modesty: “Not since Kissinger’s détente,” McFaul writes, “had one word come to represent an entire mood and moment in U.S.-Russia relations.”

Renewed U.S. legitimacy in the international arena under Barack Obama, a commitment by Hillary Clinton to engage Russia as Secretary of State, and McFaul’s intimate familiarity with Russian politics and society made a leavening of U.S.-Russia relations during Obama’s first-term a good bet. And with McFaul’s claim of having “hundreds of close friends and thousands of acquaintances” in Russia, what could go wrong?

McFaul is quick to suggest that “improved relations” were never the actual ambition of the Reset. Instead, and with Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy realism as an archetype, McFaul asserts that the Reset policy focused on engagement as a means to advance the economic and security objectives of the United States. He goes into exhaustive detail on the minutiae of the policy streams, and seeks to persuade readers that they represented the administration’s hard-nosed approach to the Russian Federation—to fend off, one imagines, foolish taunts about being “soft on Russia.” But he doth protest too much: It is impossible to believe that the career Russia-hand was not smitten by the possibility of quarterbacking improved relations.

The Reset’s launch in Geneva in March 2009 was—regrettably—unforgettable. The humiliating mistranslation into Russian of the actual word “reset”—the cock-up heard around the world—created an agonizing moment for Secretary Clinton and McFaul. Eager to improve America’s frayed relations with Russia, Clinton had hoped the metaphor would reflect a new set of policy relations and be an easy communications payoff. Instead it invited scorn. McFaul concedes that it was he who was responsible for mistaking “reset” (perezagruzka) for “overload” (peregruzka). It might have been dismissed as an honest mistake had McFaul been less brazen about his Russian language facility, but as things stood, it created an institutional birth defect from which he and others would never recover.

Linguistic mistakes are one thing, political naivete something else entirely. Michael McFaul was hardly alone in assuming that Dmitri Medvedev was a Khruschevian figure, especially after eight increasingly hard-nosed years under Vladimir Putin. But McFaul’s expertise should have been able to interpret Russian politics with a longer time-horizon. The absence of any longue-duree lens would trip up those like McFaul who were hopeful that, in the jargon of the time, another Russia was possible. Ultimately, such present-mindedness lead him to deploy a reductive polarity when assessing Russia’s leadership under Dmitri Medvedev (the good cop) and Vladimir Putin (the not-good cop).

McFaul was buoyed by Dmitri Medvedev’s election as President in 2008 and saw in him someone with whom the United States could do business. A lawyer, a modernizer, a Silicon Valley enthusiast, a Deep Purple fan even, McFaul perceived Medvedev to be a more sympathetic partner to the new U.S. administration, someone inclined to roll back the authoritarian carapace of Putin’s prior eight years.

After moving toward a more benevolent Russian regime, McFaul believed, the Reset would receive the credibility it needed. Putin, however, chose not to follow McFaul’s hopeful script and only superficially took a back seat to power. As prime minister in a presidential system Putin’s power may have been constitutionally curtailed, but Russian history has never involved much devotion to formal authority. McFaul’s neglect of that reality, or perhaps his wishful thinking, set him up for failure in his new role. Actual power was to remain in the hands of the bad cop.

Despite the Reset’s rocky road during his tenure in Obama’s White House, McFaul was generally excited at his nomination to be Ambassador to Moscow in 2011. Though his family pined for the leafy precincts of Palo Alto, California, McFaul couldn’t pass up the job of a lifetime. Holding out hope that the Reset was not yet kaput, McFaul moved into Spaso House, the manorial residence for the sitting U.S. Ambassador, and got down to work. After having his confirmation held up for months, he was eager to use his new perch to particular advantage. What he didn’t accomplish from within the NSC he would now take on from Moscow. His intimacy with the Russian condition, McFaul believed, could still save the day.

Viktor Chernomyrdin, once Russia’s Prime Minister himself, aphoristically encapsulated the country’s often tragic past by saying, “We hoped for the best yet things turned out as usual.” McFaul’s tenure as Ambassador might be understood as an American variation on this perennial Russian theme. The new Ambassador had the best of intentions: He sought to offer a corrective to the anti-Western fulminations in the Russian Federation by communicating openly with the Russian people, showing what was “best about America,” and doing so via social media. What he hadn’t fully grasped, however, was that relations between Russia and the United States had soured beyond repair and that his folksiness would fall on deaf ears to a determinedly unyielding populace. Approval ratings of the United States during McFaul’s tenure in Russia had bottomed out.

Why did things go so awry under McFaul’s leadership, someone who on paper was distinctly qualified to restore relations? Part of the problem was his surprising misreading of a still conservative Russia. McFaul discusses at some length the debacle of the Libyan intervention, a UN resolution that the Russians abstained from but that tacitly allowed for invasion. Cries of hypocrisy in the Russian leadership and across Russian media that U.S. forces pressed for regime change instead of no-fly zones torpedoed any remaining chance McFaul had of rebuilding relations. Libya, in fact, had sealed Medvedev’s departure from the Kremlin.

The good-natured Montanan surmised that his ambassadorship, were it to make any constructive inroads against the headwinds of Russian society, would need to present a new kind of diplomat in chief. Unwittingly taking a page from Russia’s 19th century peredvizhniki, those cultural figures who took to the provinces to perform or display their wares, the Ambassador believed that he would have to reach the Russian people directly to make his case.

In a country in which nearly all non-internet media was controlled, in one fashion or another, by the state, McFaul’s use of Twitter helped him reach beyond the strictures of state media organs. He gushes: “I embraced digital diplomacy with enthusiasm.”

Misinformation had not reached the global meme as would later happen during the election of 2016 but McFaul was fully aware of the discord and dystopia Russia sowed to defend its version of reality. Countering what he saw as a stifling media environment and the need for empirical content, McFaul writes, “I’m an academic. . . .and in my professional world, data matter.”  Furthermore, “I always believed that transparency served our interests.” “I wanted to offer snapshots of American life—our history, our traditions, and our concerns.” In this vein, McFaul asserts, “I wrote blogs [he means blogposts] on… the role of NGOs in the American political system, the evolution of LGBTQ rights in America, and my favorite vacation sports in the United States.”

This steady barrage of Americana did nothing to change the perception that behind his folksy social media presence, McFaul was really only interested in one thing: fomenting a colored revolution in Russia. The revolutionary events in Ukraine and Georgia had so spooked the Kremlin that McFaul would have had to become the second coming of FDR to have the Russian establishment think at all differently about him.

In fact, soon after his entrée to Russia, McFaul walked into a diplomatic faux pas. While the new Ambassador’s social media passions may have irritated Russia’s establishment, it was McFaul’s impassioned outreach to human rights actors and civil society in general that truly got the Kremlin’s goat. In an early meeting at Spaso House, McFaul invited a select group of rights activists to show that, despite everything, the Ambassador had their back. Although well-intentioned, it reinforced the Russian political elite’s greatest anxiety: that McFaul and his American compatriots were interested in little more than drumming up social discontent. Human rights actors in the Kremlin’s worldview were, tout court, political actors hell-bent on regime change. Nothing would change that idée-fixe.

It would be churlish to critique McFaul for trying his hand at what he was ostensibly in Moscow to do: diplomacy. Aspects of the reactionary Russian firmament, in the first instance the Kremlin-funded youth group Nashi (“Ours”), would give McFaul ( and his family) no quarter. In what can only be described as a nightmarish period, McFaul and his family were persistently followed (goons even sitting behind them at church), harassed repeatedly, and made to feel deeply anxious by those who had the worst of intentions. Throughout his time in Russia, the aggression never let up.

By 2013 McFaul was committed to his egress and eventually, after the Edward Snowden imbroglio, would leave Russia to return to his Valhalla, Palo Alto, California, in the winter of 2014. McFaul perhaps assumed that the Silicon Valley precincts would allow him safe harbor from the long nightmare now behind him. Instead, this past July, Vladimir Putin asked Donald Trump that the Russian government be allowed to question the former ambassador on issues related to McFaul’s tenure in Russia. Rightly, the Senate voted unanimously to keep him on U.S. soil.

At the start of his memoir, McFaul explains that he visited Moscow in 1987 while working on a dissertation devoted to revolution in South Africa. He was interested in how the Soviet Union, at one time a revolutionary power, approached these transformative events when its own appetite for revolutions was long gone and its economic survival depended on a modus vivendi with the West. In a way, McFaul became a protagonist in his own dissertation. Obama’s White House may have been markedly different from its predecessor in that the United States was no longer a global advocate of democratic change. Yet it made sure to claim every popular uprising as a success of its soft power.

At present, America witnesses a failure in its two approaches to Russia. Democratizers failed to establish a Western-style democracy, while realists never made an ally out of Russia at the expense of China. McFaul’s memoir helps to explain the origins of this double failure.

The democratization of Russia was pre-conditioned on two things that did not happen. Yeltsin’s opening to the West never delivered economic prosperity to ordinary Russians, and it did not preserve the illusion of Russia as an important global power.  The financial crisis of 2008 savaged the hopes of an emerging middle class, while the Kremlin’s impotence to prevent NATO’s military intervention in Yugoslavia exposed Russia’s global irrelevance. In the beginning of the twenty-first century Russians were on the hunt for a political leader committed to restoring its status.

McFaul is now back at Stanford, Donald Trump is in the White House, but America continues to lack a coherent policy on Russia. Clearly, the Kremlin’s meddling in the U.S. elections has shaped America’s views of Russia. But while those who insist on the Russian threat are not wrong, and it is clear that the Kremlin has its own policy of regime change in the West, the real threat from Russia is two-fold. America’s obsession with the country and the attempt to explain everything that goes wrong by Moscow’s interference may have a short-term mobilization effect, but it blinds Americans to the internal problems of its own political system and its foreign policy. And such a laser-like focus on the Kremlin’s every move distracts Washington from the actual strategic challenge it faces—how to deal with the rise of China. If Putin’s Russia has been a hurricane, China under Xi is nothing less than climate change.

 

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