Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 57

Paddy Ashdown’s Lessons For Multilateralists

Two days after U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis submitted his resignation letter to Donald Trump stressing disagreements on the question of the value of multilateralism and alliances, another champion of multilateralism passed away. Paddy Ashdown, a member of the House of Lords and former leader of the Liberal Democrats in the UK, was buried on January 10 in his village in Somerset.

His life’s work was the product of a unique combination of virtues. He was a Royal Marine who turned himself into a political leader, a skillful strategist who oversaw the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the violent conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1996, an avid reader appreciative of the importance of lessons from history, and a charismatic politician eager to connect to ordinary people. Despite his qualities, he never became a member of the cabinet, let alone Prime Minister. Had he done so, one assumes, he would not have been afraid to take hard decisions. It is for this trait above all that Lord Ashdown is still cherished by many Bosnians.

Yet Ashdown’s approach to state-building in Bosnia has also been heavily criticized. One of the most common criticisms was that he acted like a colonial viceroy—ruling with an iron fist, imposing laws, and sacking officials without accountability. The criticisms often invoked Ashdown’s own background: that he was born in Delhi, India, into an Irish family with a history of service in British colonial administration.

It’s true that Ashdown took advantage of the tools at hand to fulfill his mandate. His critics asserted he abused the so-called Bonn Powers, which did indeed give him wide latitude over imposing legislation and firing officials. But one of the least appreciated aspects of Ashdown’s time in Bosnia is that he achieved progress on building the Bosnian state structures not by imposition, but by the skillful exercise of power. Exploring this misunderstood facet of his role yield important insights for international strategy—in the Western Balkans and beyond.

When Ashdown arrived in Bosnia in 2002 as High Representative, the country’s central government had no source of direct income, and had three de facto armies, intelligence, and customs services. The extreme fragmentation of government in a country with a population the size of Berlin was the result of an imperfect agreement devised to end a violent conflict above all else. The wartime politicians exploited the mistrust inherited from the conflict to deepen the cleavages between three main religious communities—Bosnian Croat (Catholic), Bosnian Serb (Orthodox) and Bosniaks (Muslim)—to justify a heavy devolution of competences. In practice, the devolution produced three sub-states within a state, with multiple layers of government, and muddled division of responsibilities among them. The political leadership of predominantly Bosnian-Serb entity “Republika Srpska” (RS), carved out through ethnic cleansing during the war, was constantly threatening secession and seeking to preserve maximum autonomy without oversight. To a much lesser extent, similar dynamics played out between the Bosnian Croats and the Bosniaks in the Federation “Herzeg-Bosna” territory. This fragmentation facilitated a lucrative smuggling trade, pursued by networks of war profiteers who were linked to wartime political leaders.

It was precisely this aspect of the Dayton Peace Agreement that Ashdown sought to mend. By the time Ashdown arrived in Bosnia, his predecessors had done much to re-establish government’s control over secessionist territories. Bosnia had a single flag, a national anthem, a common passport, a single market, country-wide currency, and uniform license plates. Previous High Representatives did this mostly by using the aforementioned Bonn Powers to unilaterally impose laws and institutions, and in case of local obstruction, remove predominantly low-ranking officials. His predecessor’s efforts, however, didn’t significantly disturb the networks of organized crime, and their affiliated high-level politicians. And, ironically, it was these very politicians who were in a position to challenge the legitimacy of these imposed measures—through attacks in the media, through legal challenges, and through obstruction.

Ashdown was a skilful politician and a military strategist; he was aware that key Bosnian structures had to have domestic legitimacy if they were to persist. He also knew that political power was, as Hans Morgenthau described it, a “psychological relation” between those exercising control and those over whom it is exercised, and that legitimacy is an important aspect of this relation. He arrived in Bosnia with a real strategy for how to use available leverage to move secessionist politicians to actively embrace reforms strengthening Bosnia’s central state structures. Short-cuts through mere imposition were self-defeating in the long run. He also knew how to set the tone when talking in public about politics, subtly defining legitimacy in such a way that local political leaders had to conform to in order to remain in power.

A key initiative of Ashdown’s was to always insist on domestic participation in the adoption of measures building the new state institutions. His agenda focused on centralizing government functions in strategic sectors—customs, military, intelligence—and in parallel, breaking up the networks linking ethno-political oligarchs to war criminals and smuggling networks. Using his personal connections with Chris Patten, EU Commissioner for External Relations and Lord Robertson, NATO Secretary General, Ashdown purposefully created an overlap between “his” agenda and Bosnia’s EU/NATO accession process. He announced that he would not impose any measures that were required for the EU or NATO integration. While he did impose decisions and laws in other areas, he insisted that key reforms had to be adopted by the several levels of government foreseen by the Dayton agreement. Given the previous resistance of nationalist parties to less demanding reforms, it was almost certain that local politicians would use numerous parliamentary and governmental vetoes and procedural roadblocks to block Ashdown’s agenda. A few factors contributed to his ability to overcome resistance.

The first was the aforementioned overlap between the Office of the High Representative (OHR) agenda and EU conditionality: his state-building objectives became conditions for EU membership. Ashdown’s approach differed from that of his predecessors insofar as it cleverly avoided the top-down approach. Instead of imposing measures, he used the Bonn Powers to establish reform commissions in which the reforms would be negotiated. He laid down the principles for the reforms, provided clear benchmarks for compliance, and set specific deadlines for domestic actors. His team closely monitored political negotiations, identifying obstructive parties, and alerting the European Commission and Member States when things were not progressing.

Importantly, Ashdown was the first High Representative to be “double-hatted”, serving not just as the High Representative, but also as the EU Special Representative. This “double identity” allowed him to influence and promote EU policy while relying on non-EU channels for political support. His ability to use the available leverage by pulling all the available multilateral resources in one direction helped him overcome domestic political roadblocks. The reforms promoted under the EU agenda were indirectly supported through the threat of sanctions targeting political leaders enmeshed in a corrupt system of patronage existing between government officials and criminal networks. In the course of security sector reforms, a high number of politicians implicated in criminal activities were sanctioned and removed from their positions. During 2003 and 2004, Ashdown imposed numerous decisions blocking individual or party accounts, and ordered special audits of fraudulent public enterprises and banks suspected of financing war criminals. Jointly with the United States and the EU, he imposed visa bans for and froze the assets of large number of government officials implicated in crime and corruption.

This is precisely the aspect of Ashdown’s strategy for which he has been most heavily criticized. His detractors have nevertheless often failed to effectively recognize how difficult it was—and still remains—to mobilize the necessary political support to impact the behavior of local politician deeply tied to informal criminal networks. Getting the United States and the European Council to support reforms required skillful political lobbying, persuasion, focus and persistence. Many have tried to do this, but few have succeeded. Supporting local actors in adopting reforms while ensuring that the reforms do not produce violent reactions by politicians and their criminal networks is no easy task.

Furthermore, Ashdown well was aware of regional linkages, and that dealing with obstruction in Bosnia required exercising leverage over the leadership in Belgrade and Zagreb. Convincing the leadership in Belgarde, Zagreb, Banja Luka, Mostar and Sarajevo that he would be able to secure political and military backing to implement his measures in case of defiance required a tactician’s sense and skills of persuasion that not many officials possess.

And while Ashdown’s approach had its shortcomings on balance, the outcomes were more positive than negative. For the first time since the end of the war, politicians voted to adopt significant reform legislation, making a 180-degree turn away from their previous commitment to obstruction. The tone of politics changed as well, with fewer and fewer politicians deigning to outright deny the legitimacy of the Bosnian central state. Public appeals to secessionism were no longer accepted in the mainstream. Several leaders also acknowledged the occurrence of war crimes associated with their political and military networks, such as the Srebrenica genocide.

Ashdown was not merely skillful at pushing through reforms. He was also a deft operator when it came to legitimizing his interventions. There were significant normative and practical constraints to the use of the Bonn Powers for removals of local leaders: because they were democratically elected, because their strategies of obstruction were often underpinned by democratic procedures embedded in the Dayton constitution, and because political masters in key capitals generally like to avoid the use of controversial measures which invite local defiance.

The ability of Ashdown to legitimize his interventions relied on two key factors. Given that the EU integration was the only policy objective supported by all constituent groups in Bosnia, the EU “standards” provided an effective tool to legitimize reform proposals, even if the international actors had to stretch their meaning. The policies being promoted as “EU standards” in Bosnia were often of Ashdown’s own making, and did not always replicate the EU approach to constitutional issues in other divided states.

For instance, the EU officials approached the security sector reform very differently during Ashdown’ time in Bosnia and during the negotiations on the Annan Plan in Cyprus, both of which took place during the first half of the 2000’s. In 2001, the President of the European Commission Romano Prodi addressed the parliamentary assembly of the Republic of Cyprus, stating how “the European Union never seeks to determine the constitutional arrangements or the security arrangements of its member states. Such matters are up to them.” By contrast, the External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten and Javier Solana, close associates of Ashdown, supported the centralization of the security structures in Bosnia. Unlike in Cyprus, where kin states—Turkey and Greece—played too powerful a role in blocking a constructive solution of the conflict, in Bosnia, Ashdown and the EU officials insisted on Bosnia’s leaders doing the necessary reforms, and with the exception of the police reform, attained results.

Using the EU to further legitimize his Dayton state-building objectives was not without risk: local politicians could have challenged the EU measures promoted in Bosnia on the grounds that other divided states such as Cyprus had not been exposed to such a demanding state-building program. But the conflict background mattered in this respect. The existence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the past complicity of political leadership of RS in war crimes, and the evidence of breaches of international law during the post-conflict period constituted the basis for the EU and Ashdown insisting on certain models of reform in Bosnia. The same elements also provided the basis for the large number of sanctions and removals carried out throughout 2004 and 2005.

Ashdown’s motto was, “Every crisis is an opportunity,” and he knew how to use the crises to advance his reform agenda.

Another under-appreciated aspect of his approach was the ability to put together the types of operations required to uncover “the crises,” given that many of the civilian and military agencies on the ground were at best non-cooperative and at worst hostile to each other. Ashdown’s contribution lay in the ability to pull together all resources and instruments—civilian and military—towards exposing evidence of the implication of government officials, state-run companies, and security forces in financing and sheltering ICTY fugitives. At his initiative, the NATO and later EUFOR troops, together with the chief ICTY prosecutor Carla del Ponte, Western intelligence agencies, and the representatives of the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Treasury, conducted joint intelligence operations and financial audits that would reveal a number of scandals involving the breaches of international law and obstruction of Bosnia’s international obligations by wartime politicians and their networks.

This was his card in the legitimacy battle: expose the evidence of criminality and the failure of existing institutional structures, then offer EU and NATO reforms as a solution. The evidence from the raids and intelligence operations was generally published after the local officials failed to comply with security sector reforms promoted by the OHR and EU, making the link between the sanctions and compliance implicit and sending clear signals that further penalties would be forthcoming in case of obstruction. 

Another important aspect of Ashdown’s achievement in Bosnia was his ability to mobilize the required political support in the United States as well as in EU capitals. Many factors aligned in his favor. For one, Bosnia certainly ranked higher on the list of foreign policy priorities of decision makers in Washington, London, and Berlin than it does today. But it was also a time when much of the attention went to the Iraq war, and Ashdown had to work overtime to get the attention and backing of American and European decision-makers.

He carried out his mandate in an unorthodox manner, relying on multilateral channels and not always sticking strictly to EU procedures. He used informal channels to set the agenda, to obtain necessary political support, and to overcome the problems of coordination between different international agencies his predecessors faced. In particular, he relied heavily on the Quint, an informal forum involving the United States and the four big EU member states (Germany, UK, France and Italy), to lobby for the political support for many of his measures. The Quint was the key channel where the coordination between key EU member states and the United States would take place before certain initiatives would be presented to the European Council in Brussels. The European Council’s endorsement of controversial sanctions undertaken in 2004, when Ashdown removed over 40 RS government officials, seems to have been secured through this channel.

The use of informal channels also helped Ashdown override some of the objections of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC), whose membership included Russia, to his decisions as the High Representative. Good relations with key decision makers that Ashdown nurtured also mattered: he had a direct phone line to Colin Powell and he capitalized on U.S. counter-terrorism interests to mobilize support for security sector reform. As mentioned above, he relied on personal relations to Lord Robertson, Javier Solana and Chris Patten to shape the NATO and EU agenda and secure prompt interventions from relevant officials. Being of a military background, he maintained close links to the NATO military commander and later the commander of EUFOR troops, whose support was crucial in intelligence operations revealing ICTY-related and other scandals.

Ashdown knew that he could not execute his agenda alone, and that the multilateral presence on the ground, as many obstacles as it sometimes created, provided him with an invaluable amount of civilian and military instruments which needed to be used properly. And yet skill was far more instrumental than the objective size of the multilateral commitment. Measured by active cooperation—say, the rate at which parliament adopted reform laws—the international community achieved were more with 7,000 troops on the ground during Ashdown’s mandate than with 32,000 troops that were there prior to his arrival. These achievements illustrate that achieving certain policy goals—even something as potentially kinetic as preventing secession—is more dependent on the credibility of threats than on the size of the forces at one’s disposal.

Some of the limits of Ashdown’s approach were obvious already during his tenure. Despite his success in obtaining political agreements and establishing new state-level institutions in key sectors, he failed to address some of the core systemic weaknesses of Bosnia’s administration. Insufficient time and resources were devoted to monitor the implementation of the reforms adopted. As a result, the ruling parties continued dividing the key managerial appointments amongst themselves, which automatically meant that lower levels of appointments would be based on political allegiance as well. The failure to tackle core governance problems allowed the ruling parties to continue rent-seeking at all level of government. The new agencies being established under international tutelage were being politicized.

Similar problems occurred in the judiciary sector after Ashdown’s departure. Despite a sweeping judicial reform undertaken during his mandate that included an internationally-vetted process of reappointment of judges and prosecutors, many indictments for corruption and economic crime did not get successfully adjudicated.

Following Ashdown’s departure, a markedly different approach was taken by the OHR/EUSR, the EU, as well as the United States to deal with political obstruction. The new approach reflected an overall disengagement of international actors, driven by a shift of political priorities and supported by a notion that Bosnia was ready for transition from “Bonn to Brussels.” The problem, however, was that neither Bosnia nor “Brussels” were really ready. Despite the large number of new state institutions established, the underlying institutional weaknesses persisted and Bosnia’s administration remained highly corrupt and politicized. At the same time, an important element changed in favor of the RS with the ascendance of Milorad Dodik, a man who did not have the same war-crime record as the SDS.

Dodik openly announced his ambition to reverse the balance of legitimacy in RS’s favor, as he stated that “the authorities in Srpska must be quickly consolidated and must try to secure new legitimacy with the international community in the coming four months. Dodik’s lack of war-crime record put him in a stronger position to challenge the external reforms. However, what ultimately allowed him to proceed with obstruction-as-usual was the dwindling ability and willingness of international actors to use the instruments of hard power after Ashdown’s departure. Being caught by surprise, the international community had no clear strategy for how to deal with renewed obstruction, and was unprepared to confront the anti-Dayton rhetoric and obstruction in various state institutions. And Ashdown’s successors were less adept at leveraging available resources, even as Bosnia received less and less attention from the PIC capitals from 2006 onwards.

So what are some of the takeaways from Ashdown’s story in Bosnia? To what extent can they be useful for diplomats and politicians who still grapple with unresolved conflicts in the Western Balkans, and beyond the region?

Perhaps the key lesson is that while the approach Ashdown pursued in Bosnia is necessary to create conditions for peace and institution building, it is not sufficient. Ashdown successes lay in a successful exercise of political power—which indeed should not be confused with either the exercise of military power, or of crude imposition of preferences. He continued Richard Holbrooke’s approach to pursuing a regional strategy, which accounted for the role of players in Zagreb and Belgrade in fueling Bosnian conflict. He managed to generate an unprecedented level of international unity needed to implement measures often considered controversial yet wholly necessary to deal with the challenging circumstances on the ground, including widespread criminality and corruption.

How the results of such strategy will unfold over the medium and long term varies greatly depending on the context of the specific conflict, as well as the level of international focus and commitment. The universal problem with external approaches to state-building is that the key ingredient for success—focus, political attention, and unity among decision-makers in the broader international community—is a scarce commodity.

Yet it is precisely due to dwindling political attention that outsourcing the task of combating political obstacles to a capable and empowered envoy becomes even more important. As the current EU Special Representative prepares to leave Bosnia, appointing a good strategist with access to decision-makers in both Washington and other EU capitals is crucial in order to forestall the return of the worst kind of political obstruction that threatened Bosnia’s very existence at the end of the 1990s.

In addition, greater attention must be paid to creating conditions on the ground that allow the new institutions to be sustainable. This requires, among other things, recognizing, supporting, and where necessary protecting, local officials, activists, and journalists committed to the rule of law, transparency and accountability. It is often these people who are under immense pressure for promoting the values we preach.

Ashdown himself had a keen interest in making the lessons from Bosnia useful beyond the borders of the Western Balkans. In his view, the messiness of post-conflict interventions such as in Iraq were not inevitable. “It didn’t have to be like this,” he would say, noting that we had to learn from the past and replicate successes rather than repeat failures. One can assume that Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president at the time, blocked Ashdown’s appointment as the UN Special Envoy in Afghanistan, partly because he did not want his approach to Bosnia to be replicated in his own country.

Like General Mattis, Ashdown believed in necessity of multilateralism and working with allies. As he was fond of saying, “If the international community is united, there is absolutely nothing we cannot do in the Balkans. If the international community is divided, there is absolutely nothing we can do in the Balkans.” Obviously, this statement applies well beyond the Western Balkans’ borders.

Only three high ranking politicians were removed between 1996 and 2002.

A number of decisions forming new institutions were challenged before Bosnia’s Constitutional Court. On March 23rd, 2001, twenty-five representatives of the National Assembly of Republika Srpska submitted a request to the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina to evaluate the constitutionality of the Law on the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been imposed by the High Representative.

Hannay, Sir David. Cyprus: The Search for A Solution. London: I.B.Tauris, 2005.

Examples abound: a NATO raid on the state-owned armaments company Orao in Republika Srpska revealed evidence that the company was supplying spare parts to the Iraqi air force, in breach of the UN Security Council resolution 661. This scandal provided Ashdown with an opportunity to initiate the reform of the defense sector. He argued that the lack of central control over security sector undermined the ability of the Bosnian government to respect its international obligations.Another SFOR raid conducted on RS defense facilities in Han Pijesak in December 2004 revealed that the ICTY indicted war criminal Ratko Mladic had been on the payroll of the RS Ministry of Defense, hidden in the Han Pijesak military compound until 2002. In response to these events Ashdown imposed a decision to abolish the entity armed forces and the Ministries of Defense. He also made an explicit link between the unreformed security structures in the RS and the continued ability of the war criminals to evade arrest.

Officially, the EUSR reported to the High Representative for the CFSP / Secretary-General of the Council, Javier Solana.Furthermore, the EUSR was required to meet with the Council’s Political and Security Committee (PSC) on a regular basis and the PSC was to provide the EUSR with political guidance. In practice, however, Ashdown’s interaction with the PIC SB and the Quint was much more intense. The number of meetings is illustrative: the High Representative would meet the PIC SB on a weekly basis. In addition there were regular meetings with the Quint in Sarajevo. By contrast, Ashdown would meet the Political and Security Committee of the Council only once every three months.

Since 2006, Dodik’s legitimacy has dwindled due to his obstruction, denial of war crimes, corruption and secessionism. The United States currently maintains sanctions on Milorad Dodik.

The recommendation for a political EUSR has been made by Bodo Weber in a Democratization Policy Council paper published on 26 April 2018.

The post Paddy Ashdown’s Lessons For Multilateralists appeared first on The American Interest.

Fukuyama Was Right (Mostly)

Thirty years ago, Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the end of the Cold War was “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” When he proclaimed the “End of History” he was not predicting the future; he was proclaiming a verdict: History had shown that liberal democracy was the most successful form of government by virtually every conceivable measure. History had ended in the sense that we had reached an answer to one of the key questions of the purpose (or telos, to be philosophically specific) of human civilization, one that had animated enlightened human curiosity at least since Plato wrote his Republic.

Fukuyama’s argument—not the caricature of it—is as persuasive and powerful as ever. His contention that there is no conceivable ideological rival to liberal democracy still rings true: Despite the rise of China, the rise and fall of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, the return of Russian belligerence, and the waves of populism and nationalism sweeping the globe, there is no alternate, comprehensive set of political and economic ideas poised as a rival to liberal democracy with universal aspirations and global appeal.

If Fukuyama missed anything, it may be that we are witnessing the marriage of all three of the potential challengers to the End of History he identified: the union of historical nostalgia with the forces of religious fundamentalism and nationalism. Some combination of these phenomena seems to be driving a wide array of challenges to the liberal democratic order, including Vladimir Putin’s imperial revanchism and the enduring appeal of jihadi and nationalist dreams. Post-historical ennui fuels and drives these forces. They act as parasites on liberalism: simultaneously dependent on and undermining the liberal order. The solution may be for the liberal state to step back and allow greater room for the pre-political institutions of society—the family, religious institutions, and civil society—to flourish and meet the spiritual needs of human beings. Only institutions like these can defang the natural human impulse toward political and religious fanaticism.

Fukuyama’s Argument

Fukuyama’s seminal essay engaged with the great debates of political theory, not futurism, much to the consternation of critics who wanted to dismiss his essay as a dressed up, secularized version of End Times apocalypticism. Fukuyama was also careful to qualify his argument: the End of History does not mean “there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs‘ yearly summaries of international relations.” He did not suggest that every state would immediately convert to liberal democracy: “At the end of history, it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.”

Nor does the End of History mean the end of war: “This does not by any means imply the end of international conflict per se. . . . terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda.” Conflict would continue and many states would remain within “History.” “Russia and China are not likely to join the developed nations of the West as liberal societies any time in the foreseeable future,” he wrote, while the developing world “remains very much mired in history, and will be a terrain of conflict for many years to come.” Not all states will recognize or welcome the End of History, in large part because liberalism threatens the power and status of illiberal elites, who are almost always rich men from dominant ethnic or religious groups.

Fukyama’s essay, then, left plenty of room for the continuation of geopolitical competition and political rivalry. In 1989, he specifically highlighted two broad social and political movements that might motivate enduring conflict: nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Though Fukuyama’s insight into the future was imperfect, it is striking how familiar the broad outlines look.

Nationalism

Fukuyama was relatively sanguine about nationalism in his original essay: “Since the Second World War, European nationalism has been defanged and shorn of any real relevance to foreign policy, with the consequence that the nineteenth-century model of great power behavior has become a serious anachronism.” His relaxed view came in part from a distinction he drew between nationalism as “mild cultural nostalgia,” which he recognized was still pervasive, and nationalism as a “highly organized” and “elaborately articulated doctrine,” which he believed had been discredited. He also argued that nationalism was not a response to liberalism so much as to liberalism’s failures: If nations were truly independent and self-governing, as both nationalists and liberals wanted them to be, the former would not need recourse to illiberal and dangerous forms of nationalism.

Fukuyama may have been right in 1989, but his view of nationalism does not describe the world of Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and Jair Bolsonaro, much less Marine La Pen. Nationalism is vibrant, and it seems to be far more than “mild cultural nostalgia.” Especially worrying is the return of anti-liberal nationalism in embryonic liberal democracies like Hungary, Poland, and Brazil, which seems to falsify Fukuyama’s belief that liberalism would defang nationalism. Even the more benign (by comparison) nationalism of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, or Xi Jinping is certainly relevant to foreign policy in the 21st century and may yet grow its fangs back.

However, even in 1989 Fukuyama seemed to recognize the potential for a nationalist resurgence. He wrote of Russia, over a decade before the rise of Putin, that, “There has always been a very strong current of great Russian chauvinism in the Soviet Union. . . . [U]ltranationalists in the USSR believe in their Slavophile cause passionately, and one gets the sense that the fascist alternative is not one that has played itself out entirely there.” Putin’s obvious affection for Soviet glory—for example, by resurrecting the musical score from the old Soviet anthem as the new Russian one—is a textbook example of Fukuyama’s historical nostalgia.

If Fukuyama overlooked anything, it is that nationalist nostalgia would not be limited to the Russian case. For example, regarding China, Fukuyama argued that economic liberalism had decisively altered China’s trajectory. Reforms since the late 1970s “have seen an almost total discrediting of Marxism-Leninism as an economic system,” and “the People’s Republic of China can no longer act as a beacon for illiberal forces around the world.” Events around the world seemed to show that “political liberalism has been following economic liberalism, more slowly than many had hoped but with seeming inevitability,” clearly suggesting that China would eventually enter a democratic transition. Yet the actual track record of the past 30 years suggests that as China has grown richer, it has grown more nationalist, not more liberal.

Fukuyama seems not to have recognized the tension between some parts of his argument. He dismisses the idea that post-Soviet Russia would return to a Czarist or imperial foreign policy, but later he describes the power of nostalgia and historical yearning to drive states back into the realm of history. Such nostalgia is exactly what led Putin to adopt a neo-Czarist and neo-imperial foreign policy in Russia’s near-abroad over the past decade. And Putin has periodically tried to turn his authoritarian regime into something more than a crude quest for the glory of Russian arms, approaching an ideology of opposition to liberalism that he seeks to export to the developing world. If successful, the effort has the potential to turn nationalism into a universal alternative to the End of History in the 21st century.

Religious Fundamentalism

The case of “religious fundamentalism”—the second challenge Fukuyama foresaw—is more complex. Fukuyama recognized that religion had a staying power and a relevance to world affairs often overlooked in more traditional analysis:“The revival of religion in some way attests to a broad unhappiness with the impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies.” Fukuyama’s appreciation for religion is part of why he is able to recognize the danger of post-historical ennui and yearning (more on which below).

While he argued that most religions seemed to have made their peace with modernity and were unlikely to pose challenges to liberalism, he correctly noted that, “In the contemporary world, only Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political alternative.” Ultimately, however, the theocratic (or jihadi) alternative “has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance.” He dismissed terrorism, regardless of its motivation: “Our task is not to answer exhaustively the challenges to liberalism promoted by every crackpot messiah around the world, but only those that are embodied in important social or political forces and movements, and which are therefore part of world history.”

Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were indeed crackpot messiahs (more accurately, crackpot sheiks and caliphs). But it seems unsatisfying to dismiss their movements as not a true part of world history just because their appeal was never universal. Fukuyama explained that he was only interested in the “common ideological heritage of mankind,” which is why he could say that religious fundamentalism and terrorism were not part of “world history.”

But the importance of al-Qaeda and the Islamic States lies precisely in the challenge they have posed to the very ideal of universalism: They came close to unifying the world through their opposition to it. Especially given Fukuyama’s insistence that ideological evolution is dialectically driven and dependent in part on opposition to an Other, jihadism deserves recognition as a sort of ultimate Other, an exact nemesis of liberalism, which, like fascism, helped prove and vindicate the superiority of liberalism by holding up a display of its opposite.

The Downside to the End of History

If nationalism and religious fundamentalism fail as competitors to liberalism, then perhaps we can celebrate the End of History after all? Interestingly, Fukuyama appears to have had no such intent. Perhaps the most common misunderstanding of the End of History is that it was meant as a triumphalist celebration of liberalism. Fukuyama’s essay is sometimes remembered as arrogant or unseemly, a deluded fantasy written in the heady atmosphere of the early 1990s. It is thought to be vaguely distasteful, like spiking the ball after the Cold War victory.

In fact, Fukuyama wrote in the late 1980s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, much less the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Gulf War. He had no knowledge of how imminent events would propel his essay, make it famous, and turn the headline (minus the question mark) into a meme. His essay contained no triumphalist language and was riddled with caveats and qualifications. Most importantly, Fukuyama concluded on a profoundly downbeat note, one that, 30 years later, is almost shocking for its pessimism and, unfortunately, for its ring of truth.

“The end of history will be a very sad time,” he wrote, “I have the most ambivalent feelings” about it. He lamented the passing of the heroic age of mankind: “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by. . . the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” History had ended in the prefabricated, conformist lanes of suburbia. “In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”

Fukuyama was echoing the critics of modernity who lamented the rise of the bourgeoisie for its lack of class and culture. A century and a half earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that, “Variety is disappearing from the human race,” because of the rise of liberal democracy, “the men of each country, more and more completely discarding the ideas and feelings peculiar to one caste, profession, or family, are all the same getting closer to what is essential in man, and that is everywhere the same.”

In those conditions of bland sameness, “All those turbulent virtues which sometimes bring glory but more often trouble to society will rank lower,” in liberal society. For Tocqueville, there was a real danger in the loss of those “turbulent virtues”: “What frightens me most is the danger that, amid all the constant trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring.”

The Challenge of the 21st Century

Fukuyama believed Tocqueville’s fear had come to pass, which is why he warned of “a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed,” the third challenge to the End of History. It may be that humanity is incapable of existing without struggle. “Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.” Most presciently, Fukuyama suggested that “this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history going again.”

Indeed, this post-historical ennui is almost certainly a driving force in the perennial appeal of nationalism and religious fanaticism, a connection Fukuyama seems to have missed—though he does not miss it in his most recent book, Identity, where he discusses megalothymia at some length. Post-historical ennui is driven by a yearning for recognition and heroism, a nostalgia for a time when men could do great deeds (and it does seem to be mostly men who dream dangerous dreams of glory and grandeur). The powerful psychological forces Fukuyama identified seem to attach themselves, almost inevitably, to the institutions of religion and the state, giving us the forms of religious and political fanaticism that threaten the end of history.

Nationalism and religious fundamentalism are twin reactions to the conditions of modernity: They are both forms of political theology that seek to subsume all of our loyalties under the umbrella of a single, overarching, organic polity. There is a reason why nationalists, demagogues, and fanatics invoke historical myths and symbols of the past for their cause. Nationalists view liberalism and its extension in “globalism” as a solvent of national identity, a rejection of their unique history, heritage, and culture. Putin reenacts the most resonant of the Soviet and Czarist past. Jihadis see what liberal modernity looks like and reject it as degraded and impure; instead, they strive to resurrect what they suppose (inaccurately) to be the historical epoch of the Prophet Mohammad as the moment when Islam was purest. Even Donald Trump wants to make America great again.

History tells a story of who we are, a story that is universally a story of conflict, striving, and even violence. If you tell people that history has ended and there is little to strive for, you deprive them of a crucial source of identity and sense of purpose. Fukuyama’s pessimistic insight is that humans will reestablish some foundation for identity and purpose, even when that means plunging back into conflict and History, with a capital Hegelian “H.”

We might see the same psychological phenomenon in the United States at the individual level: What else explains scores of young white men who seem driven to commit seemingly senseless mass shootings? Modernity has passed them by and liberal society tells them the martial virtues they grew up learning about in movies and history books, and which they feel vital to their identities, are worse than useless; they are dangerous. The end of history may be threatened as much by the nihilistic Nietzschean anarchist as by nations and religions in the thrall of zealotry.

Was Fukuyama Right?

If liberal democracy is so spiritually empty as to provoke a return to the nationalist and religious fantasies of the past, or the anarchism of the future, in what sense was Fukuyama right? How can we share in the assessment that liberal democracy and market capitalism are the best arrangement of political and economic institutions, that they are “the final form of human government”?

While liberal democracy has experienced setbacks in the past 30 years, it is hard to improve on Winston Churchill’s verdict: Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Nothing in the past 30 years—or 30 centuries—offers a persuasive rebuttal. Every alternative to liberalism amounts to a claim that some humans have an inherent right to rule over other humans, usually because of the supposed superiority of their race, their god, their martial virtue, piety, patriotism, or something else. No matter how the argument is dressed up, it is utter nonsense. That argument has persistently resulted in societies that are less free, less prosperous, less vibrant, and, essentially, less human.

The great insight of liberalism is that human beings—all of them—have inherent dignity and worth by virtue of nothing other than simply being human. It is easy to forget that most societies in most of the world across most of human history disagreed with this insight. And so it bears repeating: No one is inherently superior by virtue of birth, lineage, rank, wealth, or any other attribute to merit special treatment by the government or special access to power or wealth. Liberal political and economic arrangements are built around this insight.

This basic starting point is what distinguishes liberalism from monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, dictatorship, theocracy, and other forms of hierarchical, illiberal government. Even liberalism’s harshest critics, such as Catholic philosopher Patrick Deneen, who recently advanced an argument about Why Liberalism Failed, do not deny these claims or advance an alternate set of ideas about human worth and dignity. In this, Fukuyama was completely correct: Societies founded on the equal and inviolable dignity of all humans are superior to those that are not.

Preserving the End of History

If liberal democracy is, for better or for worse, still the best political alternative we have, is there a solution to its failings and its current crisis? Unfortunately, Fukuyama left this question unanswered in his original essay. Thirty years on, the need is all the more pressing to reform liberalism and strengthen it against its challengers. He recognized that the “emptiness at the core of liberalism is most certainly a defect in the ideology,” but admitted that “it is not at all clear that [the emptiness] is remediable through politics.”

There is at least one easy answer: Defending the liberal society from its enemies still requires heroic virtues. War is still common. If the terrorist attacks of 2001 or a war with North Korea could still happen at the End of History, liberal societies will still need to cultivate the martial virtues. The defense of liberal order should be seen as a noble, even heroic pursuit; happily, it is also a safety valve, giving useful employment to those dissatisfied with the mundane opportunities afforded by bourgeois society.

This, however, cannot serve as a complete solution to the spiritual emptiness of liberalism. It does not answer the needs of the great mass of the civilian population. More importantly, it amounts to sustaining liberalism on bloodlust against its enemies—which, if let loose to ramble, will cut a direct pathway to nationalism and zealotry, not to any alternative to them.

The dilemma is that our biggest political problems have pre-political roots. This can be a hard truth for statesmen and voters to accept. As children of the Enlightenment, we are accustomed to moving directly from diagnosing a problem to prescribing a solution, firm in the faith that human reason can understand and ameliorate the world’s ills. Especially when confronting public or political problems, we instinctively look to the state to help fund, coordinate, and administer our solutions because, in the Enlightenment conception, that is what the state is for.

How might this be a problem? If our biggest political problems have pre-political roots, when the Enlightenment state steps in to help solve those problems, the state is no longer merely seeking to uphold order, administer justice, or overcome collective action problems; it is instead seeking to effect permanent change in the human condition. In effect, it becomes a substitute religion—and this is true not only of the obvious political religions of fascism, communism, and jihadism, but also of more benign movements like progressivism and nationalism. Despite their supposedly safer ambitions, both strive to turn the impersonal polity into a personal community of shared values to compensate for the spiritual emptiness of liberalism.

Inevitably, states bent on such a task disappoint, for there are no political solutions to pre-political problems. For some people, their resulting resentment will fuel rededication to defeating their domestic opponents. They fall prey to political zealotry in their quest for ever increasing performance from the government, leading to the sort of polarization and hyper-partisanship now extant in the United States. For others, it leads to the utter rejection of the political sphere in favor of the religious. But in these conditions, religion is drawn to compete with politics and so mimics the state’s aspirations, leading to religious fundamentalism and theocratic ambition. Finally, some few others will violently reject the state’s efforts to meddle in their lives, leading to anarchism and terrorism. In every case, when the state tries to solve pre-political problems—when it seeks to redress psychological and spiritual conditions inherent to human nature—it oversteps its bounds, provokes a backlash by the forces of History, and usually ends up exacerbating the very problems it seeks to solve.

The solution may be for the liberal state to redefine its role. The Enlightenment was wrong to turn the state into a “mortal god,” in Hobbes’s memorable phrase, for mortal gods cannot deliver on their promises of omnipotence. Better for the state to recognize what it is: an instrument for order, justice, and collective action, nothing more. There are institutions capable of speaking to mankind’s spiritual and emotional needs: the family, faith communities, and the civic associations that Tocqueville argued were essential to maintaining the vitality of democratic society. “Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another,” he wrote:

 A government, by itself, is equally incapable of refreshing the circulation of feelings and ideas among a great people, as it is of controlling every industrial undertaking. Once it leaves the sphere of politics to launch out on this new track, it will, even without intending this, exercise an intolerable tyranny.

A liberal government that wants to protect and sustain its achievement at the End of History may need to learn to step back and ensure ample room for these non-political institutions to flourish. Strong families, churches, synagogues, mosques, sports clubs, newspapers, literary societies, bird watching clubs, veterans’ associations, and Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops are what give liberal society the resilience, spiritual maturity, and depth needed to resist the siren calls of nationalism, fundamentalism, and historical nostalgia. Happily, as anyone involved in such organizations knows, this amounts to far more than caretaking the museum of human history. We will not be so bored or spiritually empty as to be tempted to restart History, because we will fill our days caring for family, friends, and loved ones.

The post Fukuyama Was Right (Mostly) appeared first on The American Interest.

The Tourists’ Puzzlement

It’s winter in Washington now, and as Congress reconvenes amid a protracted government shutdown, gray frowning airy visages belching bone-numbing drizzle loom over the chilled Capitol. The weather’s not so great either. But in a few weeks the cherry trees will begin to bud up and softer breezes heralding the advance of springtime will be felt. As always, tourists from around the country and the world will show up as the equinox comes and goes, and probably the majority of them will at one point find themselves in Lafayette Park, right across the street from the White House.

It is many a tourist who has ventured to the very center of Lafayette Park expecting, naturally enough, that the equestrian statue to be found there is a statue of the Marquis de Lafayette. But of course, on a horse! It’s his park after all; what could be more logical?

But this is Washington so, of course, it is not the Marquis at all. As Washington natives know, that’s no Frenchman on that brass horse’s ass. That there is brassy Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory himself. So perhaps, thinks the possibly Japanese gentleman tourist just come down yesterday from New York City, asking who is buried in Grant’s Tomb may not be a joke after all.

So what about that statue, then? How did Jackson end up at the center of Lafayette’s Park? There is an answer, but, as Damon Runyon used to say, a story goes with it.

What is today Lafayette Park, or Square, has a checkered history. During the 18th century the seven-acre plot was used for a variety of purposes, among them a racecourse, a graveyard, an apple orchard, and a slave market. At the end of the century the government bought the square as it planned to build the White House and lay out its grounds. What is today Lafayette Park was used as a construction staging site beginning in 1792, when the White House cornerstone was laid, until the building’s completion in 1800.

During Jefferson’s presidency, what later became known as President’s Park occupied the farmer from Monticello. He took a direct hand in designing the grounds around the new structure. He had the land fenced in, and then directed that Pennsylvania Avenue be extended through the area, thus dividing the parcel in two. The part closest to the building is today joined with the rest of the White House lawn; the park across Pennsylvania Avenue is Lafayette Park.

President’s Park was a pleasant natural area for a few years, but after the British burnt the White House down during the War of 1812—on August 24, 1814, to be precise—the area again became a staging area for rebuilding the Executive Mansion. By 1816 the park had grown lush green again, but nothing special was done with or to it.

In 1824, the name Lafayette Park was attached to the area. The reason was the return of the great man to the United States for a year-long visit. Invited by President James Monroe, Lafayette became an instant celebrity in America. Much later, in the 1890s, four statues to honor non-American Revolutionary War figures were commissioned and erected: Lafayette first, and then Rochambeau, Kosciuszko, and von Steuben.

[image error]

Marquis de Lafayette Statue, 1891 (Wikimedia Commons)

[image error]

Andrew Jackson Downing (Wikimedia Commons)

Then, in 1850, pressed to beautify the city by notables associated with the newly founded Smithsonian Institution, President Millard Fillmore met in November with America’s best-known landscape designer, Andrew Jackson Downing. Fillmore commissioned Downing to develop new plans for the city’s park spaces, including Lafayette Square, which had been left blank in Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1792 master plan. Downing delivered his proposal just after the new year of 1851 had turned.

Downing’s plans were ambitious, extensive, creative, and, for the times, expensive. Fillmore accepted only part of them, and Congress later cut off funding for nearly all of what Fillmore had agreed to. Even so, the development of the parks around the White House more or less followed Downing’s general design. He emphasized a natural horticulture, really an arboretum spread among six parks—a “public museum of living trees and shrubs,” as he termed it—in contrast to the formal geometric patterns of the city’s French-born ur-designer. Downing essentially envisioned a national park before anyone had conceived the idea of such a thing, one that would serve as an influential model of the natural style of landscape gardening for which he was known.

So it was, for a while: The McMillan Plan of 1902 put paid to Downing’s grand concept. Right angles won the day. But Lafayette Park remained.

Now, Fillmore, who had become President upon the death of Zachary Taylor on July 9, 1850, was, like Taylor, a member of the Whig Party. And it is somewhat ironic that a Whig President would chose someone named Andrew Jackson Anybody to do anything anywhere near the White House. The Whigs, as students of American history know, formed their party in the 1830s to oppose Andrew Jackson and the Democrats. Inheritors of the Hamiltonian persuasion, the Whigs, led by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, fought for protective tariffs behind which to build a progressive industrial economy, national banking, national unity, and Federal infrastructure projects to physically knit the expanding country together.

[image error]

Taylor/Fillmore campaign banner for 1848 presidential elections (Wikimedia Commons)

But Fillmore has never been known for possessing either much acumen or ideology. Having begun his political career with the anti-Masonic Party, Taylor had ignored him while President, and he was denied his own Party’s nomination for President in 1852 in favor of Winfield Scott (who lost). Fillmore then joined the “Know Nothings” of the American Party, hardly a Whiggish group.

Besides, Downing’s reputation overshadowed his name. He was an early American celebrity of sorts, a charismatic who had recently encouraged a young Frederick Law Olmsted to develop a plan for Central Park in New York City along the lines of Downing’s own naturalistic model. Besides, Downing and Fillmore were fellow New Yorkers at a time when kindred feeling based on birth state was more important than it is today.

In any event, Downing was not related to Andrew Jackson; his name derived from a typical accident of history. Downing was born in Newburgh, New York on October 31, 1815. That was just over nine months after the Battle of New Orleans, which took place on January 8 of that year. Downing’s parents, apparently reasoning that their son was conceived in the very wake of that great battle, resolved to name him after the war’s hero; and so they did.

Besides, Downing was not responsible for the Jackson statue having been commissioned in the first place. It is not clear that he even knew about it when he met Fillmore in November 1850, nor did he seem to know the artist, Clark Mills, though Mills was also a New Yorker, born in Onondago County in 1810 (quite near, it turns out, to Fillmore’s birthplace in Moravia, New York). The statue had been commissioned in May 1847, a little less than two years after Jackson’s death, during the Democratic Polk Administration. It was cast in 1852 while Fillmore was President, but not dedicated until January 8 (of course) 1853 by Senator Stephen Douglas, after the 1852 election and just as the term of Franklin Pierce, another Democrat, was about to begin.

All Downing did was design a park that offered an obvious place for a Democratic Administration to put a statue of its heroic forbear—a statue that Downing never saw. Alas, he died in a fire with 80 others on the Hudson River when the ship’s boiler exploded, on July 28, 1852. The name of the steamship? The Henry Clay. As it happened, Clay died on July 29, the very next day.

[image error]

Henry Clay (Wikimedia Commons)

Now this is passing strange in a mystical sort of way special to politics. Clay had come this close in 1844 to winning the White House for his home, and had he won it is highly unlikely that he, unlike Polk, would have commissioned a statue of his nemesis. There would probably not have been the Mexican War either, the subsequent rapid expansion of slavery westward across the Mississippi River, and hence maybe there would never have been the calamitous Civil War that Clay did all he could to prevent, so long as he lived. If so the statue would not be there today, looking back across the street to the current resident of the Executive Mansion, who has been, quite absurdly, compared to Jackson.

Perhaps Clay, an intensely religious man, summoned the angel of death from his own deathbed to roam the land, looking to smite anyone associated with planning to put a statue of Jackson across the street from the White House. That the angel would happen upon a ship named the Henry Clay is too obvious to belabor. And though the statue wasn’t Downing’s doing, the park that sited it was. Maybe that was enough to seal his fate; what mortal can know how ethereal beings reason? So boom went the boiler. The angel escaped, and returned to claim Clay on the morrow.

[image error]

The Historic Decatur House, 1822 postcard (Wikimedia Commons)

[image error]

Decatur House, 1937 photo (Wikimedia Commons)

What is less speculative is that, had Clay lived another six months, the sight of the Jackson statue—which he would have been able to see clearly from the window of his Decatur Mansion home at the northwest corner of the Square—would probably have killed him anyway. Perhaps it’s best that he was spared the pain.

It’s just as well that the tourists don’t know such things. Current U.S. political realities are unfathomable enough as it is. Indeed, perhaps the incongruence of Andrew Jackson being at the center of the Marquis de Lafayette’s Park reflects a larger truth about American iconography: Consistency is not its forte.

The post The Tourists’ Puzzlement appeared first on The American Interest.

The Vices of Nationalism

One common narrative about the West’s ongoing predicament is that the current revival of nationalism is a foreseeable and potentially helpful corrective to liberalism’s overreach. Pushing the Euro, gay marriage, permissive immigration policies, and the climate change agenda down the throats of reluctant electorates was bound to provoke a reaction. Among conservatives seeking find a positive path forward from the current situation, Yoram Hazony calls for “conservative democracy” as an alternative to liberal democracy, in order to restore “a balance between the principles of limited government and individual liberties, on the one hand; and the principles of religion, nationalism, and historical empiricism [on the other].”

Perhaps it would be facile to question the wisdom of this narrative on the grounds that it is music to the ears of aspiring autocrats such as Viktor Orbán. Leaders of his ilk rally against liberal democracy and “globalism” under nationalist and socially conservative banners not as a high-minded balancing act but simply to entrench their power and line the pockets of their cronies. Yet a more salient question lingers: What does correcting previous liberal overreach mean in concrete terms? And how far is the correction supposed to go?

In areas such as migration the answer may seem obvious. Yet more restrictive asylum and immigration policy do little to distinguish nationalists from centrist political leaders who have internalized the lesson of the 2015 refugee crisis, such as Emmanuel Macron or Mark Rutte. In other policy domains, the “conservative democratic” agenda simply seems dead in the water, for better and for worse. Good luck using government policies to change the secular outlook of Western societies or to scale back the new social norms regarding gender and sexuality in the era of #MeToo and the Women’s March. Even in Catholic Poland efforts by the Law and Justice Party to outlaw abortion were met with an unprecedented wave of protests and subsequently abandoned.

Perhaps most consequential is the idea of scaling back participation in  transnational institutions. For a long time, conservatives have harbored a deep distrust of bureaucracies such as the EU and UN. As Hazony puts it, “international organizations possess no sound governing traditions and no loyalty to particular national populations that might restrain their spurious theorizing about universal rights. They therefore see such bodies as inevitably tending toward arbitrariness and autocracy.” Now is the time to fix the problem.

But what exactly does a nationalist remedy to liberal, multilateralist overreach consist of, other than cheering for a hard Brexit and downgrading the status of the EU Delegation to Washington? Erratic trade wars, maybe, or withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and Iran Deal, or leaving this or that UN convention unsigned. But why stop there? Like them or not, the moves of the current US administration have barely scratched the surface of the vast ecosystem of international cooperation built after the Second World War, largely through American leadership.

After all, as Margaret Thatcher put it, “almost every major nation has been obliged. . . .to pool significant areas of sovereignty so as to create more effective political units.” Such a pooling occurs in myriad different forms, including within military alliances, where the stakes are much higher than with any intrusive directives the EU has ever come up with. It also takes place within transnational arrangements with little or no government involvement. What ‘demos’ is IATA accountable to? How about organizations producing technical standards, such as ISO, IEC, or CENELEC?

In short, if one accepts ‘retaking control’ as the operating political principle, it is not clear where one stops. And if such a slippery slope sounds farfetched—after all, we haven’t yet witnessed a wholesale collapse of international cooperation—just consider Brexit as an example. The 2016 referendum did not specify the terms under which the UK was going to leave the bloc. Prominent leavers assured the public that Brexit was going to be a free lunch which would not cause disruption or compromise the UK’s access to the European single market. Very soon after the referendum, however, the debate became radicalized. As of now, nothing but the most extreme form of departure will honor the result of the referendum in the eyes of radical Brexiteers. Any compromises or commitments about the future UK-EU relationship—whether over the Irish border, customs procedures, or regulatory alignment—are seen as jeopardizing the referendum result.

Of course, a no-deal Brexit would inflict massive economic damage on the UK and Europe. But it would also pup the UK in an odd position, unlike any other country in Europe. Whether it is Norway, Switzerland, countries across the Balkans, Ukraine, or Turkey, all European non-members have some formal ties to the EU, in many cases very deep ones. The belief that things will be just fine if all the 40-year links are severed overnight is simply wrong.

The UK arrived at the current junction by embracing the delusion that a country can separate itself completely from a bloc like the EU, yet still reap the benefits associated with membership, most prominently market access. But it is equally delusional to think that the world can somehow return to an international system organized purely around sovereign, self-governing nation-states without foregoing some benefits of globalization.

As an aside, there is also something profoundly ahistoric about the invocation of the nation-state as a somehow natural, pre-ordained form of government from which the world has dangerously strayed. The historic norm, especially across continental Europe, is one of covenantal arrangements, such as the Holy Roman Empire, the Hanseatic League, or the gold standard, which tied diverse polities in loose quasi-federal systems. Even the notion of a “Westphalian system” that supposedly governed the international system since the mid-17th century is an odd one, especially when it refers to the idea of Europe parceled into politically autarchic states. The treaties concluded at Münster and Osnabrück did not usher in the age of national sovereignty as the common myth suggests. Instead, they provided a new constitution for the Holy Roman Empire, a federation that governed much of Europe for a millennium.

It should give one pause that the true heyday of a sovereign nation-state only comes with its most disruptive manifestations in the 19th and the early 20th century, which gave us two world wars and a Great Depression. If the sovereign nation-state is the form of governance that the world needs to urgently embrace, its proponents owe the rest of us an explanation of just how similar catastrophes would be avoided in an international environment free of formal institutions.

Furthermore, to be credible, that explanation needs to take seriously the economic and social reality of our time. One may dismiss Thomas Friedman’s idea of a “flat” world, but the falling costs of transport and communication—and the resulting social complexities—are a reality that transcends national borders. In the past, the legal scholar Gillian Hadfield argues, most corporations acted as self-contained “boxes,” in which decisions were taken by fiat and whose operations were mostly confined to individual countries. Today, companies span vast distances and numerous jurisdictions to such an extent that it is effectively impossible to identify them as “American” or “German.” General Electric operates in 170 countries, IKEA has stores in 37 countries, and the supply and assembly of Apple products occurs in 30 countries.

Toyota famously pioneered the new approach to managing supply chains: Instead of micromanaging every step of the production process, as was necessary in the old corporate boxes, it defined the essential characteristics of components it was buying and allowed its international suppliers to make autonomous production decisions. Today, the production of Boeing’s Dreamliner relies on a network of some 1000 suppliers around the world, organized through highly intricate contract relationships. The emerging economic relationships in this flat global economy are “as difficult to nail down as jelly,” Hadfield writes, especially with a growing number of them existing only in cyberspace. Their complexity, fluidity, and disregard for national borders are already putting a strain on national legal systems which were designed to deal with simpler business models and contractual relationships taking place within the territory of one country.

Doing away with this flattening would make the world dramatically poorer. Segmenting the increasingly fluid and interconnected world into the cocoons of nation-states may not even be technologically feasible in the era of the internet and instantaneous capital flows. Hence instead of yearning for a simpler past, we need our institutions to adapt to the new reality, while preserving mechanisms of democratic accountability.

Finally, how do sovereigntists plan to respond to the curveballs that are bound to be thrown at humankind in the coming decades? In a recent paper, the philosopher Nick Bostrom discusses the various technological vulnerabilities facing the world. Imagine the invention of a cheap and easy way to produce nuclear weapons, or other tools of mass destruction. Alternatively, it is possible that a technology will be developed that will make it impossible to effectively deliver a retaliatory nuclear strike upon warning of an impending attack. Unlike the strategic stability of the Cold War, the incentives would become stacked in favor of a first strike, making the world much less stable. Other scenarios might involve truly catastrophic climate change or a technology that is by default devastating for humankind. A common concern during the Manhattan Project, for example, was that that nuclear explosives could ignite the atmosphere—a risk that was fortunately not borne out.

If such scenarios sound like products of wild imagination, rest assure there is plenty more to worry about, from proliferation and pandemics to international terrorist networks and cybersecurity, from supervolcanoes to asteroid impact. No matter how many walls countries erect, the number of cross-border challenges is going to go up, not down, in the coming years, simply as a result of existing technology and rising incomes in the developing world. Of course, it is not enough to wish, as Bostrom does, for more effective “global governance” to address those problems.

At the same time, however, those who want to correct supposed liberal overreach seem to have even fewer useful things to say, whether it is about providing effective rules to a globalized economy or addressing humankind’s common risks. Unless that changes, the nationalist remedies for liberal and technocratic overreach are bound to be much worse than the underlying disease.

The post The Vices of Nationalism appeared first on The American Interest.

Getting the China Challenge Right

American and other Western observers often cast the China challenge in primarily material terms, as an inevitable byproduct of the country’s growing wealth and power. The basic premise here is that rising states naturally seek to expand the sphere of their influence, and dominant powers, seeking to defend their privileges, naturally oppose them.

While not flatly wrong, this view is incomplete and, insofar as it understates the severity and complexity of the problem, misleading too. China’s rise represents a test for the United States and other democratic countries, not solely or even primarily because of its growing power, but because of the uses to which that power is being put. These, in turn, reflect its repressive, authoritarian domestic political system. The internal dynamics of the Chinese Communist Party regime and its prevailing ideology shape how its leaders perceive threats, define goals, and select policies to attain them. And it is these perceptions, policies, and objectives that put Beijing fundamentally at odds with Washington, raise the stakes of their expanding rivalry, and diminish the likelihood of a lasting, stable entente between them.

Of course, for the better part of three decades, the ultimate aim of American policy has been precisely to bring about a change in the character of the Chinese regime. From the end of the Cold War onward, with a brief interlude in the early 1990s following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, U.S. policy in both Democratic and Republican administrations sought to engage China across all fronts: diplomatically, through deepening scientific, cultural, and educational ties, and above all through trade and investment. Successive administrations believed that engagement would encourage China to become a satisfied power or a “responsible stakeholder” in the existing international system, accelerating the process of market reform and promoting forces that would lead eventually to political as well as economic liberalization. It was assumed that trade would fuel growth, growth would lead to the emergence of a middle class, and, as had happened elsewhere in both Asia and Europe, the middle class would act as the standard bearer for democracy.

These beliefs, bolstered by liberal ideology and modern social science theory, were widely shared on both sides of the American political divide and quickly became the single most important facet of the public rationale for engagement. As candidate George W. Bush explained during the 2000 presidential campaign: “Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy. . . .Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.”

From the start, China’s Communist Party rulers had very different ideas. The CCP leadership recognized early on that engaging with the outside world would pose risks to their continued rule. As Deng Xiaoping famously warned: Opening the windows would let in flies as well as fresh air. Deng believed that economic reform was essential to China’s return to great power status. But he was also keenly aware that subversive ideas and outside influences could encourage dissent and produce unwanted pressures for political change. In other words, he feared that the Americans might be right.

In the wake of Tiananmen, those atop the CCP who might have been willing to contemplate eventual liberalization were purged. Deng and his remaining colleagues then launched a three-pronged program to counteract and contain the potentially destabilizing political effects of continued economic reform. By allowing the Chinese people to enjoy more of the fruits of their labors, the regime hoped to win their loyalty, or at least their acquiescence. In addition, Beijing began greatly to expand its investments in the tools of surveillance and repression, including multiple domestic security forces. Finally, the CCP began to implement an intensive, nationwide program of ideological indoctrination, or “patriotic education.” The aim of this program was to bolster popular support by promulgating a substitute for Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in the form of a distinctive variant of nationalism which, rather than emphasizing the great achievements of Chinese civilization, stressed instead the “century of humiliation” and the vital and as yet unfinished role of the Communist Party in restoring national dignity.

All of these elements have remained in place to this day, although their relative weights have shifted over time. As economic growth has slowed, China’s leaders have cracked down even harder while stepping up their use of nationalist appeals. These tendencies first became evident during the second half of Hu Jintao’s reign, following the global financial crisis of 2008 and the 2011 “Arab Spring.” But they have been especially visible since Xi Jinping assumed leadership of the Party-state six years ago.

The expanded resources available to the CCP regime have given it a widening array of options for crushing dissent. In addition to strengthening its “Great Firewall” to block unwanted internet content, the government is moving toward implementing a nationwide “social credit” system that will use facial recognition software and big data analytics to monitor the activities, track the movements, and assess the political reliability of virtually every man, woman, and child in China. This is a capability of which the 20th century’s totalitarian dictators could only dream.

Some means of repression are more old-fashioned. There is growing evidence of an extensive network of “detention facilities,” or concentration camps, that may hold as many as one million members of China’s Uighur Muslim minority—nearly 10 percent of the total Uighur population—whom the regime fears may be susceptible to Islamist radicalism. Prisoners are reportedly subjected to intense psychological pressure intended to “re-educate” them; many have not been heard from since being detained.  CCP policy appears to constitute a violation of human rights on a truly massive scale; but to date, Western governments, including those which profess to care about human rights most, have been wary about commenting on it publicly, presumably because they fear damaging valuable economic relationships with China.

Thirty years ago there may have been a case for downplaying the CCP regime’s mistreatment of its own people in the belief that continued engagement would catalyze faster political reform. Indeed, for a time, the regime seems to have encouraged such hopes, experimenting with “village elections” that some saw as precursors to wider reforms, and talking of the need for more democracy (albeit “democracy within the Party”). But, especially in the past decade, things have changed. Chinese officials are increasingly open in their dismissal of Western-style democracy and contemptuous of what they refer to as “so-called universal values.” What Xi Jinping and his colleagues have in mind is not a transitional phase of authoritarian rule to be followed by eventual liberalization, but an efficient, technologically empowered, and permanent one-party dictatorship: an illiberal version of “the end of history.”

What is happening inside China should shock the conscience of democratic citizens and their governments, and give pause to those who continue to believe in the transformative effects of engagement. But the harmful consequences of these developments extend well beyond China’s borders. The surveillance technologies and social control techniques being perfected by Beijing have already begun to spread, as Chinese companies build out telecommunication networks around the world and provide support to like-minded regimes. China’s increasing wealth and the growing importance of its market have also enhanced the regime’s ability to exert leverage over foreigners, including both governments and private actors, who dare criticize its human rights policies or otherwise incur its wrath. To take a few recent examples: When the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2010, Beijing responded by freezing relations and imposing unofficial economic sanctions for six years, relenting only after the Norwegian government issued an abject apology, saying that it would “do its best to avoid any future damage to bilateral relations.” When the University of San Diego invited Tibet’s exiled Dalai Lama to deliver a commencement address in 2017, Chinese authorities responded by cutting aid for visiting scholars and implicitly threatening to do the same for the much larger number of Chinese students studying at UCSD. Last year, when an employee of the Marriott Hotel chain “liked” a social media tweet posted by an organization called “the Friends of Tibet,” Beijing demanded that Marriott fire the man and issue an apology, both of which it did.

Even as they seek to silence foreign critics, China’s leaders have intensified their use of impassioned patriotism, including by courting confrontations with other countries in an attempt to rally domestic support. Beijing’s increasingly forceful prosecution of long-standing disputes with its maritime neighbors is one example of this trend; its stiffening stance toward the United States, even before the advent of Donald Trump, is another. The CCP regime may not want war, but it needs enemies and an atmosphere of crisis to justify its tightening grip on political power.

Developments in the economic sphere parallel and reflect those in the political domain. From the early 1990s onwards a widespread expectation in the West that economic and political reform would go hand in hand and that a greater Chinese reliance on markets would encourage, and indeed require, a steady reduction in the power of the Party-state. But this is not what has happened. Beyond a certain point the CCP has proven unwilling to relinquish its grip. This is partly a reflection of ideology: Although they have learned to talk the talk of “free trade” and “globalization,” China’s rulers are not liberals—economic or otherwise. They do not regard growth and prosperity as ends in themselves, nor do they expect them to emerge from the workings of free markets. Like the mercantilists of earlier eras, they believe that national wealth begets national power, national power begets national wealth and that the pursuit of both is a zero sum game, in which one nation’s gain is another’s loss.

Resistance to thoroughgoing market reforms is also a result of the incentives embedded in the structure of China’s opaque, hierarchical political system, in which Party members and their families benefit from privileged access to power. Increasingly, too, the CCP leadership’s determination to continue on the path of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” also reflects the conviction that these policies are working.

The pace of economic reform began to slow shortly after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and, in certain respects, it has shifted into reverse under Xi Jinping. Despite its WTO commitments, Beijing is continuing to use a mix of subsidies, tariffs, non-tariff barriers, and other measures to protect domestically based companies and to promote them in global markets. Its latest trade and industrial programs are designed to catapult it from perennial follower to a position of leadership across an array of cutting-edge technologies, including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robots, and new materials.

Because they continue to lag behind in many of these sectors, Chinese firms, at the direction and with the assistance of the Party-state, have for some time been using a variety of techniques for acquiring the necessary technology from the advanced industrial countries. In addition to buying up foreign companies and compelling foreign firms to transfer core technologies in return for access to the Chinese market, Chinese actors have used cyber intrusions and other more traditional methods of industrial espionage to steal intellectual property in massive quantities from research labs and universities around the world.

The problems with all of this are threefold. Some of the methods just described represent severe distortions or outright violations of existing rules and international understandings. Despite Beijing’s attempts to cast itself as the leading advocate of open global markets, there is a growing recognition, not only in the United States but also in Europe and Asia, that China has been gaming the system to its own advantage and the disadvantage of its trading partners.

Aside from the means it uses, Beijing’s stated goals, as recorded in official planning documents like “Made in China 2025,” contribute to this sense of concern.The regime has declared its intention not only to promote the fortunes of Chinese firms in a general way, but to help them achieve a dominant position—including specified market shares—in a variety of high-tech sectors, first in its heavily protected domestic market and then overseas. If successful these efforts would jeopardize the prosperity and future growth prospects of many other advanced industrial countries, including the United States.

Finally, because virtually all of the technologies involved have both commercial and military applications, Beijing’s policies could help it achieve a meaningful edge in the development of future weapons systems, reducing or perhaps eliminating a longstanding source of strategic advantage for the United States. Indeed, given its worldview, this is likely an even more important objective for the CCP regime than simply promoting national economic welfare.

China’s rulers have long been dissatisfied with the status quo in East Asia, especially in the maritime domain off their eastern coasts. Among their objectives there are taking control of Taiwan, which the CCP regards not only as a rebellious province but also a dangerous example of a successful Chinese democracy, and thus an ideological threat, and asserting dominance over virtually all of the waters, surface features, and resources in the South China Sea, as well as portions of the East China Sea.

Beijing also seeks an end to America’s regional alliances and the removal of U.S. military bases from Japan and South Korea. It regards these as temporary artifacts of historical accident, the byproduct of “unequal treaties” that followed the end of World War II and are now sustained by what the Chinese describe as an outdated “Cold War mentality.” The CCP leadership believes that Washington has long sought to encircle it from without with democratic allies, while subverting its rule from within with liberal propaganda. Weakening and ultimately breaking up America’s alliances is therefore seen as essential to regime survival and to regaining China’s rightful place as the preponderant power in East Asia.

What has changed in recent years are not the CCP’s goals, but rather the means available to achieve them, as well as Beijing’s willingness to exercise its growing power in order to do so. Since the mid-1990s, China’s rapid economic growth has enabled it to fund a wide-ranging and sustained modernization of its armed forces. Among other things, the regime has invested heavily in so-called anti-access/area denial capabilities—precision conventional-strike systems capable of hitting fixed and mobile targets throughout the Western Pacific, including U.S. bases and aircraft carriers. Beijing has also begun to improve its intercontinental-range nuclear strike forces in ways that could eventually call into question the credibility of America’s extended nuclear guarantee to its allies. (One reason for Beijing’s evident reluctance to help stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs is that it believes these too will contribute to the eventual decoupling of the United States from its regional partners.) At the other end of the spectrum, China has developed and put to use “grey zone” capabilities—coast guard, paramilitary, and maritime construction forces that it has used to build and now to fortify a set of artificial islands in the South China Sea.

The purpose of China’s military buildup is not primarily to fight and win a war with the United States but rather, if possible, to “win without fighting.” Beijing hopes to deter U.S. intervention by raising its prospective costs, to demonstrate Washington’s inability to prevent the systematic expansion of China’s own power and influence, and in the process to weaken U.S. alliances by undermining confidence in the long-term viability of American security commitments.

China’s economic growth has also given its leaders an expanding array of non-military tools with which to achieve their objectives. The increasing size and centrality of the Chinese market and its rapidly expanding role as a provider of aid and investment is helping Beijing draw others toward it. In addition to attracting clients with the promise of profits, the regime now has the ability to use economic instruments to threaten—and if necessary to punish—those who would defy it. It has done so repeatedly in recent years, most recently by imposing brief but still painful “informal” sanctions in retaliation for Seoul’s 2017 decision to allow the basing of an American missile defense radar system on South Korean soil.

The ultimate objective of CCP strategy appears to be the creation of a new regional order in eastern Eurasia, formed from a group of countries joined together by trade, transportation, and communication infrastructure with Beijing at the center. With America’s alliances dismantled or drained of significance, the United States would be pushed to the margins, if not out of the region altogether.

It is perhaps unsurprising that a rising power should want to reshape the region surrounding it in ways that better serve its interests. This is, after all, what the United States did in the Western Hemisphere in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and what imperial Germany and imperial Japan tried to do in Europe and East Asia, respectively, at around the same time. As these examples suggest, however, the fact that something is predictable, and even in a sense “natural,” does not make it any less of a challenge for those on the receiving end of such ambitions.

In this case, a weakening of the U.S. position and the emergence of a Sino-centric regional order would entail the subordination of America’s democratic friends and allies to their overpowering authoritarian neighbor; restricted commercial, physical, and perhaps virtual access to and through the world’s most dynamic region; and the consolidation of a group of nations that might support, or at a minimum would be reluctant to oppose, Beijing on issues like trade and human rights. Regional hegemony would also give China a secure base from which it could more easily project power into areas closer to the United States, including the Western Hemisphere. Since the start of the 20th century a central objective of American grand strategy has been to forestall just such a threat by preventing a hostile power or coalition from dominating either end of the Eurasian landmass.

The ambitions of China’s CCP regime are no longer limited to its immediate neighborhood but extend to the global stage. Here too, Beijing’s activities have a distinctive ideological purpose. China’s CCP rulers have long felt surrounded and threatened by a structure of international institutions, norms, and rules that—at least in theory—embody liberal principles inimical to their own. They regard these as reflecting American interests and Western preferences rather than “so-called universal values.” Now they are in a position to push back, counteracting and if possible neutralizing what they see as a potential existential threat to regime survival by reshaping elements of the contemporary international system.

Chinese strategists have never accepted the Western vision of a liberal order, a world made up of states that share a commitment to certain principles, including representative government, the rule of law, and protection of individual rights. What they say they seek instead is a “community of common destiny,” a live-and-let-live world united only by the shared pursuit of material prosperity, in which every state can govern as it sees fit, free from outside criticism or interference.

Rather than trying to overturn the existing structure of global institutions, Beijing thus seeks for the moment to exploit those parts that can be turned to its advantage (like the World Trade Organization and the UN Security Council), ignoring those that challenge its interests (like the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea), and subverting or weakening others (like the UN Commission on Human Rights) that might threaten its legitimacy.

The CCP regime has also begun to develop some new institutions that bypass those favored by the West, including mechanisms that enable cross-border financial transactions beyond the reach of U.S. surveillance or sanctions, and development banks that offer capital without Western-style conditions for good governance or transparency. Finally, Beijing is attempting to win acceptance for new norms (like the notion of “internet sovereignty” as opposed to the ideal of “internet freedom” favored by many in the West) designed to reinforce its own efforts to block what it regards as subversive and dangerous ideas.

It is sometimes said that Beijing has no interest in spreading its own system of government or engaging in ideological rivalry with the United States and its democratic allies. Even if once true, this is not still the case. China’s rulers no longer see themselves as operating entirely on the defensive in the ongoing clash of ideas with the West. They now feel emboldened not only to attack the inequities and inefficiencies of liberal democracy, but to advance their own distinctive mix of market-driven economics and authoritarian politics as, in Xi Jinping’s words, a “new option for other countries.”

Whatever the philosophical appeal of the Chinese model, the outflow of Chinese money, most notably under the auspices of Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, is influencing the policies and shaping the institutions of countries in many parts of the developing world. Beijing’s largesse tends to strengthen the hand of the authoritarian rulers with whom it generally prefers to do business, but it is also fueling corruption and weakening democratic practices in places where authoritarian norms have yet to take firm root.

Despite China’s loudly proclaimed commitment to “non-interference,” in the past five years the CCP has stepped up its use of political warfare or so-called United Front influence operations. These involve a combination of techniques, including bribery and cooptation, that are intended to shape the perceptions and attitudes of foreign business, academic, media, and political elites in ways that reduce criticism of the CCP regime or opposition to its policies. This is a global phenomenon, but it has recently begun to attract particular attention in Australia and New Zealand, as well as in the United States.

Unlike Moscow, Beijing is not trying to destabilize the advanced industrial democracies, but it does seek to exploit their openness for its own ever more clear strategic ends. Just as American policymakers set out to “make the world safe for democracy” at the start of the 20th century, so Chinese leaders are using every means at their disposal to make it safe for authoritarianism, or at least for continued CCP rule, at the start of the 21st.

In keeping with the President’s own predilections, the Trump Administration has chosen for the most part to eschew the language of values and beliefs, casting China not so much as an ideological rival but rather as America’s main opponent in a “new era of great power competition.” This is both inadequate and unwise. What is at stake in the emerging contest between Washington and Beijing is not just the delineation of spheres of influence, or some marginal readjustment in the balance of power, but the future prosperity and security of free societies in Asia and around the world.

An accurate appreciation of this fact, and of the ambitions, compulsions, and insecurities of the CCP regime, make clear why a lasting “grand bargain” is extremely unlikely. For all their talk of “win-win solutions,” China’s current rulers regard the escalating rivalry with the United States as a zero-sum game from which only one power can emerge triumphant.

Last and perhaps most important: Downplaying the differences between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes risks overlooking the vulnerability and potential frailty of CCP-ruled China while underestimating the dynamism and resilience of the United States and its allies. Sun Tzu’s ancient aphorism is still apt: To achieve strategic success it is necessary to know the enemy, but also to know yourself.

The post Getting the China Challenge Right appeared first on The American Interest.

How China Could Step Back from a Trade War

With less than 90 days to go in the current round of U.S.-China trade negotiations, will President Trump’s China policy yield meaningful results?

First let’s look at the issues from China’s perspective. On one level, it is difficult not to have some sympathy for China’s President Xi Jinping. The Trump Administration has set a 90-day deadline for action on trade issues, but there is no clear consensus on the U.S. side defining an acceptable outcome. And some of the stated U.S. goals fall outside the scope of trade policy, such as correcting the trade balance or adjusting China’s national industrial policy. These are fair questions about Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” industrial policy, but do Administration negotiators expect China to abandon its high-speed rail network or to restructure its steel industry in a 90-day timeframe?

Even where feasible goals exist, U.S. stagecraft potentially makes these more difficult to attain. No Chinese President can appear to be caving to U.S. demands. Xi must be seen foremost as a defender of current Chinese policies and institutions. When U.S. power pushes, a domestic political requirement in China demands a push back. Trump signals his awareness of this danger when he offers public praise of Xi, because that gives Xi some maneuvering room.

Now let’s look at these issues from a U.S. perspective. Some sympathy for Xi is understandable, but only some. The trade issues that raise hackles in the United States and around the world are substantially of China’s own making. China’s tariffs are out of step with world norms. China has closed entire segments of its economy to competition. It is weak on a range of intellectual property issues from compulsory licensing to lax enforcement. Its industrial policy is a mish-mash of nationalism, mercantilism, and protectionism. And all of these problems have gained in saliency simply because of the heft of China’s economy.

In short, while China has benefited significantly from the growth and liberalization of the world economy over the past 30 years, its own economic liberalization has lagged. That amounts to something between cherry picking and beggar-thy-neighbor rules arbitrage. It’s good work if a state can get it, but there is no reason any state should expect to keep it.

Compare the Big Four economies: China, the United States, Japan, and the European Union. These four economies account for over 80 percent of world GDP and over 90 percent of world trade. A look at their tariffs rates illustrates the problem:

Economy               MFN applied tariff (Simple average)

EU                              5.1%

Japan                         4.0%

US                              3.4%

China                        9.8%

Source: WTO (2017)

So even with the points of sympathy noted above, China is the most protectionist of the leading economies, and the burden is on President Xi to deliver some material improvements in trade policy in this 90-day window, enough to forestall a hike in U.S. tariffs to 25 percent and to keep the U.S. side at the negotiating table.

Xi has already laid the groundwork for some improvements: China hosted its first International Import Exposition in November, Xi has issued public pronouncements about the need for import reform, there have been substantive moves such as liberalizing the free trade zones, and, on Christmas Eve, China announced a tariff reduction on some 700 items—although most of these adjustments were promulgated as “provisional.” Translation: They can be undone on command.

Still, China has shown itself capable of tackling trade issues. Here are a few more steps Xi can take to help China reform, all within the 90-day timetable:

Eliminate nuisance tariffs. A nuisance tariff is defined as a tariff that is 2 percent or less. At this level, the tariff can remain an impediment to trade, but the cost of administering the tariff can exceed any revenue benefit. Nuisance tariffs are typically the arithmetic residue of successive rounds of tariff cuts. The WTO reports that only 3 percent of Chinese tariff lines are subject to these nuisance tariffs, which would make this a modest but readily obtainable victory for trade.
Eliminate outlier tariffs. An outlier tariff is a tariff that is the worst of the Big Four. In other words, Xi can commit that for each tariff line China will not be the worst of the group. For example, auto tariffs in the European Union are 10 percent, in the Japan they are zero, in the United States they are 2.5 percent, and in China they are 15 percent (reduced recently from 25 percent). Xi could reduce China’s auto tariffs to match the 10 percent of the European Union and he will have eliminated an outlier tariff on China’s docket. To put this in the clearest case: If there are tariff line items that are at zero for the United States, Japan, and the European Union, then China should also move its tariff to zero for that line item.
Enforce WTO Rulings. The WTO ruled in 2012 that China was in violation of its agreements to allow competition in payment networks, so that Visa, Mastercard, and American Express could compete with China Union Pay for RMB-denominated business. But China has yet to enforce this ruling. China could dispel its reputation for disregarding the law by enforcing outstanding rulings. What better way to send a signal to the world that China is playing fair exists than by enforcing rulings that allow foreign businesses to compete.
Set guardrails for industrial policy. China has begun to downplay its “China 2025” initiative, but it is unclear if that is a result of a de-emphasis of the program or simply a recognition that it is an irritant in trade relations. Xi could clear up this confusion by promulgating some general principles regarding industrial policy. For example, that China will begin to corporatize state-owned enterprises so that they are not indefinitely subsidized. Similarly, he could direct all such subsidies to be publicly listed and require government bodies not to discriminate against foreign suppliers.

These four steps will not solve the universe of China trade issues, but they would represent a material improvement. They might close half the gap between China’s tariffs and those of the other “Big Four.” All of these moves would also benefit the Chinese economy by allowing for less expensive inputs, moderating inflationary pressure, providing some budget discipline, and showing the world that China and the United States can work together and responsibly step back from a trade war. Critically, Xi can present these as plurilateral initiatives, ones that apply to all WTO members, and not simply a response to U.S. policy.

President Trump can take certain steps as well. He could keep the pressure on Beijing by removing the steel and aluminum tariffs from all trading partners except China. Trump could also re-initiate discussions with other Asian nations regarding the former Trans-Pacific Partnership, which, without U.S. participation, is now in effect as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. If Xi is shrewd, he would realize that Trump is presenting him with an opportunity to clean up China’s market distortions and inefficiencies. But Xi would have to proceed in a fashion that would allow Trump to take credit for these moves. Perhaps the 90-day framework could result in a win-win outcome after all.

The post How China Could Step Back from a Trade War appeared first on The American Interest.

An Idea Whose Time Has Not Yet Come

Editor’s Note: As U.S.-Israeli negotiations intensify over a range of related issues—the implications of U.S. policy in Syria for Israeli security, the vaunted American peace plan reported to be in preparation, and other matters—history alerts us to the likelihood that a range of tradeoffs might attend resolution of any or all of these matters. One tradeoff that reportedly has been raised recently by the Israeli side concerns American acceptance of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Back on July 17, the Subcommittee on National Security of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings on this matter. Then-Congressman Ron DeSantis presided over what was essentially a sham. The Republican majority invited four witnesses, including Dore Gold, a former Israeli official, and Mort Klein, head of the ZOA, as well as two supportive academics; the Democrats invited Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, currently a professor at Princeton University. The Republicans on the subcommittee addressed no questions to Ambassador Kurtzer, and DeSantis refused to recognize him when he sought to comment on a question directed to others. Note: The Republicans no longer hold a majority in the House; we will soon learn if the Democrats return the “favor.”

Here follows Ambassador Kurtzer’s prepared statement, unedited.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony and respond to questions regarding the issue of whether the United States should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Drawing on my three decades of experience in the United States Foreign Service, almost entirely focused on the Middle East, and including more than four years as President George W. Bush’s Ambassador to Israel, my analysis and recommendation on this issue is rooted in two questions: First, is there a compelling American interest that is advanced by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights? Second, would recognition of Israeli sovereignty materially enhance Israeli security?

Let me start with the bottom line: I do not believe that there is an American interest at this time; and I do not believe this would enhance Israeli security. Rather, I believe that our national security interests counsel in favor of maintaining our existing policy with respect to Israel, Syria, and the Golan Heights. That policy includes strong and determined support for Israel’s serious and legitimate security concerns; support for Israel’s humanitarian assistance to victims of the conflict in Syria; and maintenance of the status quo with respect to the Golan Heights themselves.

First, as to Israel’s serious and legitimate security concerns, we cannot forget that Syria used its commanding position on the Heights before 1967 to shell Israel and to try to disrupt Israel’s efforts to build a national water carrier. Syrian aggression played a major role in the run-up to the 1967 war.  Israel has also faced a significant security threat from Syria since the start of the civil war in 2011, where groups aligned with the Syrian regime—especially Iranian forces, Iranian proxies and Hezbollah—have threatened Israel’s security from across the 1974 Separation of Forces line that was agreed between Israel and Syria.

In the face of these threats, Israel’s policy has been clear, restrained, and nuanced. Israel made clear from the outset that it had no intention to interfere in Syria’s internal struggles, but it made equally clear that it would act as necessary to safeguard its security in response to threats emanating from Syrian territory. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated this clearly last week during his visit to Russia: “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime for 40 years, not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights,” Netanyahu said. He continued, “I have set a clear policy that we do not intervene and we have not intervened. This has not changed.”

The Prime Minister also reiterated Israel’s determination to act to protect Israel against threats to its security emanating from Syria. Attacks against Israel have been constant, including artillery and rocket fire, as well as Iran’s ongoing effort to resupply Hezbollah and to establish bases in areas from which it or its proxies could operate against Israel. Israel has acted to counter these threats by intercepting Iranian arms shipments to Hezbollah via Syria, attacking Iranian arms depots and military installations, and disrupting the efforts by Iran and its proxies to establish a permanent military presence in Syria. The United States has wisely supported Israel’s right to defend its security and its people.

The United States should continue to support these Israeli security actions. Prime Minister Netanyahu reportedly told the Israeli Cabinet before departing for Moscow last week that he would “reiterate the two basic principles of Israel’s policy: First, we will not tolerate the establishment of a military presence by Iran and its proxies anywhere in Syria—not close to the border and not far away from it. Second, we will demand that Syria, and the Syrian military, strictly uphold the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement.”

The United States should support this policy and exert efforts diplomatically to constrain and ultimately remove Iranian forces, Iranian proxies, and Hezbollah from Syria. The United States should also continue to provide Israel with the necessary means to ensure its security vis-à-vis the Syrian internal chaos.

In this respect, it is important to emphasize the bipartisan nature of American support for Israel and for Israeli actions taken to ensure its security. Every administration—Republican and Democrat—can proudly share in the longstanding policy of support for the security, well-being and health of the State of Israel.

Second, as to Israel’s humanitarian assistance to victims of the conflict in Syria—this salient factor does not get sufficient attention. Notwithstanding the threats it faces from malign elements in Syria, Israel has become a destination for wounded Syrian civilians and a source of humanitarian aid to Syrian communities across the line. The Syrian regime under Bashar Assad has conducted a brutal, horrific seven-year war against its own people that has left more than half a million dead and millions homeless, either displaced within Syria or as refugees. Israel is one of the few countries to extend meaningful humanitarian assistance to the Syrian people. The United States should support—and indeed applaud—Israel’s continuing humanitarian activities, providing aid to the suffering victims of a violent conflict.

Third, and without diminishing the force of either of the two preceding points: Is there a compelling United States national interest today in recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights? Here, I submit that there is not. The question of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan is not pressing, nor anywhere near the top of the Middle East’s over-burdened agenda.

I speak to this issue based on extensive relevant experience in enhancing U.S.-Israeli relations and strengthening Israeli security capabilities. Throughout my diplomatic career, I was proud to play an instrumental role in deepening and strengthening our bilateral relations. This included helping to develop the architecture of strategic relations in the 1980s, including beginning bilateral fora related to political-military relations, economic ties, regional political threats, and security assistance. Subsequently as a member of Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s Policy Planning Staff, we worked closely with Israel on peace process issues. During the George H.W. Bush Administration, I served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, a period marked by significant expansion of Israel’s diplomatic ties. As the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research, I supported efforts to enhance intelligence sharing and cooperation. And as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, I worked closely with the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to strengthen further our security and political cooperation and to cement the ties between our two peoples.

It was also my privilege to serve on the “peace team” of Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Secretary of State Warren Christopher. I traveled with Secretary Baker on his numerous trips to the region that culminated in the convening of the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991. Both Syria and Israel participated in that conference, and they launched bilateral peace negotiations shortly thereafter. During the years that followed, Syria and Israel engaged in often intense talks to resolve the core issues that divided them: security, territory, normal relations, and the like.

My responsibilities on the peace team included serving as the United States liaison to the Israel‑Syria track. Both Secretary Baker and Secretary Christopher asked me to monitor these talks closely and report on their progress. I met frequently with Israeli Ambassador and chief negotiator Itamar Rabinovich and with the chief Syrian negotiator, Ambassador Muwafiq ‘Allaf and/or the Syrian Ambassador to the United States, Walid Mualam, to discuss the progress and obstacles in the talks and to report to the Secretary and the rest of the peace team.

Although these talks ultimately failed to achieve the desired outcome of a comprehensive peace treaty, the two sides narrowed some differences, including related to the Golan Heights. The most significant diplomatic opening occurred in August 1993 when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin presented Secretary Christopher with what became known as “the deposit”—a hypothetical formula indicating Israel’s readiness to meet Syria’s requirements regarding territory if Syria were ready to meet Israel’s requirements on security and the nature of peace. Prime Minister Rabin subsequently elaborated this “deposit” to indicate that Israel understood Syria’s territorial requirement to be the return of Israel to the June 4, 1967 lines.

Notably, Prime Minister Rabin’s statement of Israel’s policy came more than a decade after the Israeli Knesset passed legislation that extended Israeli “law, jurisdiction and administration” to the Golan Heights. President Reagan’s administration strongly objected to that legislation, but even that law passed by the Knesset, which stopped short of annexation, effectively left the door open to an ultimate deal with Syria that was generally understood would necessarily involve the Golan Heights.

After the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, four of his five successors—Prime Ministers Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert—followed largely the same approach. Each conducted open or secret talks with Syria that were based essentially on the same “deposit” first articulated by Prime Minister Rabin. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, with whom I developed a particularly close relationship while serving as Ambassador to Israel, had no interest in trying to talk peace with the Syrians, but he also did not take any actions to expressly withdraw from the policy positions put forth by his predecessors Prime Ministers Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, and Barak.

Throughout this period, therefore, it was understood and accepted by the Government of Israel itself that the Golan Heights was territory whose future status was subject to the conclusion of Israeli-Syrian negotiations. As far as United States policy, every administration since 1967 has similarly considered the Golan Heights to be occupied territory, covered under the provisions of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. At the same time, the United States has been sensitive to Israel’s legitimate security needs with respect to the Golan Heights. In 1975, President Gerald Ford stated in a letter to Prime Minister Rabin: “The U.S. will support the position that an overall settlement with Syria in the framework of a peace agreement must assure Israel’s security from attack from the Golan Heights. The U.S. further supports the position that a just and lasting peace, which remains our objective, must be acceptable to both sides. The U.S. has not developed a final position on the borders. Should it do so it will give great weight to Israel’s position that any peace agreement with Syria must be predicated on Israel remaining on the Golan Heights.”

Thus, the questions that animate today’s hearing: Is there a compelling national interest of the United States, today, to change that policy through the unilateral recognition of Israeli sovereignty over territory occupied since 1967? And would such recognition enhance Israeli security? I believe the answer to both questions is “no.”

First, Israel’s policy vis-à-vis Syria today has the tremendous advantage of being on the high ground—diplomatically and morally. A decision now by the United States to raise the issue of Israeli sovereignty would have the effect of putting Israel squarely into the center of Syrian internal politics, something Israel has assiduously avoided since 2011. It would put the focus on Israeli and American policy, instead of where it belongs—on the murderous actions of the Syrian regime and the support provided to Syria by Iran and Russia.

Some may claim that recognition of Israeli sovereignty would enhance the effort to contain Iran. I do not see the connection. Israel already occupies the Golan Heights and from that platform has taken, as I have noted above, the actions it has deemed necessary in its security interest to contain Iran’s activities in Syria and in Lebanon. Recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights would have zero effects on Israel’s ability to maneuver in that respect.

Nor do I see any basis to conclude that recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights would bolster Israel’s security in any other way. To the contrary, it might force some in the Arab world—who are not presently questioning or opposing Israel’s security actions there—to oppose this move publicly. This could potentially damage the positive, burgeoning relations between Israel and some Arab neighbors.

Equally importantly, the United States has a fundamental, longstanding interest in supporting the territorial integrity of states, even those we do not like. Syria has a long way to go before it can reconstruct its politics, society, and economy and take its place among the civilized nations of the world. But the Syrian case does not offer a justification for changing American policy on this crucial principle. If the United States were to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, on what principled basis would we oppose annexation of territory by other countries, whether by aggressive action as in the case of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, or even as a result of an essentially defensive war, as in the case of Israel in 1967?

I want to emphasize again that I support Israel’s security actions designed to protect its citizens from attacks emanating from Syria. I do not support any effort now to press for the resumption of peace talks between Israel and Syria. The Syrian crisis is far from over, and the security impact of Syrian actions against its own people will be felt regionally for many years to come. The Syrian regime has invited help from Iran and Russia, both of which have participated actively in the killing and brutality inflicted on the Syrian people. Syria has also invited help from Hezbollah, a Lebanese terrorist organization responsible for launching attacks against Israel and causing significant casualties and property damage. Today, Israel needs security from Syria and its erstwhile allies, not a peace process with Syria. Should a moment arrive in the future when, under a different Syrian regime the possibility of peace emerges, Israel will be in a position to take its decision regarding the ultimate status of the Golan Heights.

Nor is there reason to divert attention to a current non-issue—the legal status of the Golan Heights—where Israeli security needs and actions there are presently a matter of widespread consensus. Instead, we should work with Israel and like-minded allies on a strategy to help secure Israel and advance American and Israeli national security interests in that troubled region.

The post An Idea Whose Time Has Not Yet Come appeared first on The American Interest.

Justice for Journalists and Russian Revanchism

Jeffrey Gedmin, the editor-in-chief of The American Interest, recently sat down with Mikhail Khodorkovsky in London to discuss his new foundation, Justice for Journalists. (Full disclosure: Jeff is a board member.) Read on to learn how three suspicious killings in the Central African Republic served as the genesis for his new foundation, why Khodorkovsky values independent journalism in the first place, and what lessons he draws from his decade in prison.

Jeffrey Gedmin: Why is journalism a priority for you? Why did you undertake this new foundation?

Mikhail Khodorkovsky: I personally encountered a situation where journalists executing their job were killed. I had heard a lot about stories like this, but this was the first time when I personally encountered one. And I started to ask questions, I got interested in how often does this happen. As it turns out, it happens a lot. So I was curious to find out how often the investigation yields results—and even how often the case is investigated, to start with. As I found out, this happens quite rarely. And I thought it’s really important to demonstrate that investigations of journalist killings should take place, because if they do take place, they raise the cost for the killers. If we cannot completely protect the journalist in the first place, then at least we could raise the cost.

JG: Can you say a word now about the incident in the Central African Republic? As has been publicly reported, three Russian journalists employed by your Investigation Control Centre—Orkhan Dzhemal, Alexander Rastorguev and Kirill Radchenko—were working on an investigative documentary there when they were ambushed and killed. What happened, and why does that pose a political problem?

MK: The Central African Republic is controlled by people from Putin’s circle in significant ways, ranging from control of the airport of the Central African Republic, to paying bribes to various government officials, to even delivering weapons. So these three journalists who came to visit the Central African Republic to record the presence of Russian private military contractors in the country were killed.

We will reveal the further information we have on January 10.

JG: What was the name of the private military contractor?

MK: There are several of those companies present in the Central African Republic. They have many different names. In Russia, we refer to this group of companies as the Wagner Group, and it’s been proven that these companies are collectively controlled by Mr. Evgeny Prigozhin. After the killing of these three journalists, there’s been an official version given that this was just a simple, ordinary robbery. We consider it proven that this is not so. We consider it proven that the connection between the killing, government officials in the Central African Republic, and certain citizens of Russia are greater than people want us to believe.

For the Russian authorities and the authorities of the Central African Republic, of course, it would be beneficial to write off the murder as a banal robbery. But we are sure that this was not merely a robbery.

JG: Can you say a word about the relationship between the gentleman you mentioned, Mr. Prigozhin, and Vladimir Putin? I understand Prigozhin is a man of many hats—known as “Putin’s cook” for his origins as a restaurant entrepreneur; allegedly the supervisor of the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, better known as the Russian troll farm, and so on. Can you explain how he found his way into Putin’s inner circle, and how his work with the Wagner Group relates to his other roles?

MK: Mr. Prigozhin is included in the closest circle of Mr. Putin, and has been for the course of more than 10 years. During his work in Saint Petersburg, Putin mediated between local criminal groups, local corrupt police, and other security agencies. Prigozhin was deeply involved in these communities and the two shared many mutual friends.

Wagner and the troll farm, Olgino, represent different forms of the work carried out by the same intelligence services.

JG: Help me to understand the structure and purposes of the Wagner Group, then. Is this a front for Russian army troops? A group of volunteer mercenaries that fight for the Kremlin’s cause? Is it meaningfully separate from Russian military command structures, or directly supervised by the GRU?

MK: Prigozhin’s Wagner Group is now in conflict with Shoigu [the Defense Minister]. This is what we know. Recruitment of Wagner employees falls under the control of the FSB. We know this as well. The rest is still speculation.

JG: The Wagner Group has also been implicated in Russia’s military activity in Syria. Can you discuss its role there? And with U.S. troops apparently set to withdraw, what role do you foresee Wagner playing in the future?

MK:  To some extent, the role of private military contractors in Syria in the future will depend on the development of relations between Prigozhin, Shoigu, the GRU, and the FSB. We will follow the development of this situation. But if all goes well, such companies will corrupt the locals and will seize anything that will help them get money or their “cut” from the Russian budget.

JG: Let’s get back to the Central African Republic. What’s the motive in a place like that? Is it political? Is it strategic? Is it commercial—whether for the Russian government or for a small circle of private and rich men?

MK: We believe the Russian government doesn’t have a commercial interest in this. I personally believe that this is not about the interests of Russia, but about the interests of private individuals from the president’s circle, who want to make money off of funds from the Russian budget that have been allocated to supply weapons and aid to African countries. In exchange, those involved received personal privileges.

And we are very concerned that one reason for the broad involvement of these paramilitary groups could be the preparation of killers for hire, or mercenaries, to resolve certain political issues. Our political interest in the matter is to legalize this paramilitary group inside Russia so that they step out of the shadows. We consider it very important that these groups and their actions are being regulated by the law and therefore they fall under control of society.

JG: As you know, President Putin was asked about the Wagner Group at his year-end press conference on December 20. He seemed to feign ignorance about its activities in Donbas and Syria, while stating that such private military companies should operate within the law. I quote: “If this Wagner group is violating anything, the Prosecutor General’s Office should provide a legal assessment. Regarding their presence abroad, if they don’t violate Russian law, they have the right to work and push their business interests anywhere in the world.” How do you respond?

MK: Putin is, as always, cunning. We do not have any laws on private military contractors, but there are punishments for mercenaries. It seems beneficial to Putin to have illegal armed groups under the control of the “inner circle.” There are many of these groups, not only Prigozhin’s. And it would be dangerous for a country to turn thousands of armed and trained killers into outlaws.

JG: Apart from the specifics of this case, you have a broader interest in independent journalism. Why is that so important for you? You’re a businessman.

MK: I don’t trust any government. I believe that any government without checks and balances from the part of society will only work in its own interest, by which I mean the interest of a group of bureaucrats. Society has different mechanisms for checking power; in some countries, there are more and in some there are fewer.

In Russia, apart from independent journalism, there are almost no other checks and balances. And as a result, independent journalism is very important worldwide, but in Russia even more so.

JG: So how did you come to this conclusion that the primary function of independent journalism isn’t to educate or inform but to hold government accountable?

MK: Every person looks at a problem from their own point of view. If I lived in America and felt that I needed more stories about wonders of the world—because in my household I have everything I need but in my city, it’s quite boring—then I would be talking about journalism as if its purpose was to inform or tell me about things. All my life I lived in a country where the most dangerous people are not the bandits or the criminals but the government. And that’s why I see the most important role of journalism is to balance the government.

From my childhood, I saw even during Soviet times that when people had problems with bureaucrats or with government officials, they would write to the newspaper, and if they were lucky enough to interest the newspaper in that story, then they would achieve a result that would have been unachievable without the help of the media.

JG: Okay. I’ve three broader sets of questions now, about Europe, America, and Vladimir Putin.

Last month in Hamburg, there was a CDU party conference in Germany that begin plotting out the future after Angela Merkel. How important do you think Merkel has been in keeping Europe on a course of opposition to Vladimir Putin? She’s an East German, and in many cases she’s been stronger on sanctions than other Europeans, maybe even sometimes the Americans. Do you have concerns about post-Merkel Germany?

MK: I believe that today when America has distanced itself from the situation in Europe, the only person who is significantly influencing Europe is Angela Merkel. This is relevant in many ways, but specifically as regards relations with Putin. No doubt, her departure will put forth the question as to how the relationship between Russia and Europe will change. I don’t have an answer to the question of how they will change. But it raises serious questions, very serious questions.

JG: So then the companion question is about United States and our President, Donald Trump. Americans are interested in the Mueller investigation, as well as the Trump business and its possible past financial links to the Russian government. Do you have anything to say about speculations about Donald Trump’s relationship to Russia, past and present, and how he best understands his relationship to Vladimir Putin?

MK: Unlike you, I’m a Russian citizen. I don’t like publicly—and this is a matter of principle for me—to talk about internal political issues in the United States. Of course, I have my personal opinion on this and it’s just that—my personal opinion. As a Russian citizen, what I can say is that it appeared the Kremlin has been demonstrating in Russia that it had influence over elections in the United States. It was between the lines. It wasn’t directly pronounced but it could be read between the lines that this was what the Kremlin wanted the Russian people to understand.

So it’s just sufficient to give you one example, and that is the applause in the State Duma after the news broke that Trump won, and the entire Duma gave a standing ovation. And because the Russian State Duma is not in any way the equivalent of the U.S. Congress—it’s more like a theater which includes Putin’s marionettes—well, these marionettes were displayed on Russian public television channels for the performance, standing up in ovation to celebrate the victory of Trump.

And the second thing that was also projected on Russian TV was when Mr. Trump met with Mr. Putin in Helsinki. It was demonstrated that Mr. Putin was putting Trump on a lower level—that Trump was playing second fiddle to Putin. This is how it looks from the point of view of a Russian citizen.

JG: One more question. It was about 15 years ago that you went to prison, and a little over five years ago that you were released. And we all learn things from deeply dramatic and painful experiences. What do you think about this time? How do you reflect on it? How did this large part of your life that you spent in prison change you?

MK: So I spent time in jail between the ages of 40 and 50, and any person would change during this period of life. So it’s hard for me to say what specifically prison added to the change that any normal person would undergo anyway. The fact that I have softened in my approach in dealing with people, it could be the result of me being in prison or maybe it’s just a matter of me being older.

The fact that I’m not interested at all in business, this is probably the result of me being in prison because I realized that business occupies so very little of one’s human life. And in my previous, prior-to-prison life, I overvalued that part of my life.

Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited and re-arranged for clarity.

The post Justice for Journalists and Russian Revanchism appeared first on The American Interest.

Dancing Around the Caravan

Over the past several weeks, whenever my thoughts turned to the caravan of Central Americans making its way up through Mexico toward the U.S. border, I recalled a Jesuit religious I encountered in Manhattan in the fall of 2001. Brother Joel Magallan had arrived there a few years earlier at the invitation of the archdiocese to work with the region’s growing Mexican immigrant population. Brother Joel soon developed a reputation as an aggressive, rather opportunistic advocate who managed to alienate many of his colleagues in the Catholic social service bureaucracy. He was perhaps most notorious for loudly criticizing the archdiocese’s inadequate response to the ever-increasing numbers of undocumented Mexicans arriving in the region, even as he hosted a weekly radio program broadcast back in his native Mexico that advised those contemplating the journey to make their way north and enter the United States illegally.

I “met” Brother Joel shortly after 9/11. Out of an old convent on West 14th Street, he was running an impromptu shelter and social service agency for the many Spanish-speaking migrants who had lost either loved ones or jobs when the World Trade Center Towers fell. I say “met” because as I walked into the building and extended my hand to him, I was summarily told to leave. My presence as an uninvited outsider asking questions was not welcome. Not much Christian charity or love was forthcoming from Brother Joel that day.

Recently, however, such sentiments have been much in evidence—at least among the well-meaning and the well-off—toward the several thousand men, women, and children who undertook the arduous, even dangerous journey from Central America and now await their fate in Tijuana. Yet these sentiments, especially on the part of the media, have left little room for curiosity, never mind skepticism, about how such an extraordinary event came about. In part, this negligence reflects the bias of journalists whose professional milieu discourages viewing migrants as anything other than men and woman in pursuit of the American Dream. Not unimportantly, this pursuit typically involves toil in the service sector upon which not only employers but affluent consumers have become dependent. This bias (to which this writer is not immune) has been reinforced by the mean-spirited and alarmist tone of restrictionist commentary on recent events.

Also at work here has been the media’s aversion to exploring the roles of two critical actors in these events. The first is the somewhat shadowy outfit that calls itself Pueblo Sin Fronteras (PSF: People Without Borders). I say “somewhat shadowy” because PSF does maintain a website as well as a Facebook page. And its activists and leaders have been visibly involved in this most recent as well as earlier such caravans. Nevertheless, the media—at least the mainstream media—have been reluctant to explore not only PSF’s precise role here but also its intriguing origins and history. A bit of digging reveals these to be Marxist-Leninist, which is presumably inconvenient or embarrassing to those sympathetic to the Caravan and its participants.

The other actor whose role in these events has been overlooked, not only by the media but also by the rest of us, is the Catholic Church. Indeed, the Church’s position in our decades-old immigration debate has been hidden in plain sight. In part this is because the media’s bias has led it to regard the Church as a sympathetic ally in the political debate, whose religious views can be discounted or simply ignored—not unlike the way liberals and progressives have dealt with black Protestant churches. Yet what everyone has overlooked and must now ponder more seriously is the Catholic Church’s revived role as a transnational, global organization whose interests and ideology are becoming a distinct force in the post-Cold War world, especially when it comes to migration issues.

Among these three elements—the mainstream media, leftist activists, and the Catholic Church—there is now a synergy that has both facilitated recent events on the ground and contributed to the general lack of insight into what has been driving those events. In what follows, I want to focus on the interplay among these three actors in the context of the Caravan and what this portends for the future.

Reporters Without Questions

Not least among the issues that have been scrupulously underplayed by the media is the degree of corruption and violence immediately south of the border; Mexico is not merely a major trading partner but a source of social chaos, violent crime, and mayhem. Another neglected story is the consternation of Tijuana’s Mayor and many of its citizens, who, when the Caravan began arriving there, strenuously objected to being overwhelmed by what they view as outsiders, non-citizens, and criminals. Apparently, such “racist” responses to migrants are worthy of attention only when traceable to the privilege of middle-class, white Americans.

To the many people in both the United States and Mexico who have wondered who is responsible for organizing the Caravan, the media’s answer has been loud and clear: not George Soros! To be sure, I have seen no evidence that Soros’s billions have helped to plan, initiate, or sustain the Caravan. Yet it does not seem unreasonable to believe that some funds from his various Open Society Foundations have found their way into the accounts of individuals and organizations sustaining this undertaking. After all, Soros’s foundations declare on their joint website that their mission is to build “vibrant and tolerant societies whose governments are accountable and open to the participation of all people,” as well as “addressing inequalities that cut across multiple lines, including race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and citizenship.” (my emphasis). And given the media’s biases in this realm, I am dubious of their exempting Soros from any role in recent events. But neither do I believe that he can or should be held responsible for orchestrating them. Indeed, my focus here is on what I consider more important and much overlooked factors.

Nor have the media completely avoided these. But their curiosity has been sharply delimited. For example, we have been repeatedly reminded that PSF, which openly claims credit for last spring’s Central American caravan—as well as other such efforts over the past 15 years—has not “organized” this one. Nevertheless, it has been widely reported that individuals with PSF have been “accompanying,” “guiding,” or “traveling with” the current caravan, though not in any “official” capacity. In a recent article, the Washington Post manages to conclude that PSF “clearly plays an essential role” with the Caravan, though its headline meekly asserts: “Group that escorts migrant caravans draws more scrutiny.” (my emphasis) Whatever evasive word-games the media have been engaging in, it strains credulity to suggest that PSF has not been playing some kind of critical role in this on-going drama. Meanwhile, on its Facebook page PSF almost exclusively features the Caravan, including images of its activists directly on the scene.

As to why journalists—with the notable and predictable exception of Fox News—avoid exploring these topics more forthrightly, one can only speculate. Instinctive partiality toward anything or anyone condemned by Donald Trump is certainly a factor. So, too, is a virtually institutionalized sympathy toward migrants, especially “people of color” from less developed countries. Indeed, this frame long ago rendered all but the most hard-headed, and hard-hearted, observers incapable of viewing migrants as human beings making rational but nevertheless difficult and, at times, tragic choices. Instead, migrants are consistently depicted as passive victims of forces far beyond their control.

In this instance, however, thousands of such “passive victims” have apparently mounted a stunning logistical feat, providing themselves with food, shelter, medical care, and transportation during a journey across 2,000 miles of difficult, often dangerous terrain. This suggests that these individuals are perhaps not so helpless and desperate as to merit the asylum status that many will claim when they finally get to make their case to U.S. officials. On the other hand, if these thousands have been aided by an organization ideologically committed to delegitimizing national boundaries, that might also threaten to undercut their claims to asylum. Hence the bind that sympathetic journalists have found themselves in.

Journalists’ curious lack of curiosity about PSF may also involve its hard-left ideological provenance. As the name might suggest, its origins can be traced back to efforts to organize Mexican workers in Chicago and Southern California in the 1970’s. At that time, Cesar Chavez was still struggling to establish the United Farm Workers as a trade union, which meant focusing narrowly on organizing field hands in U.S. agriculture. By contrast, a small group of Marxist-Leninists sought to develop “transnational class consciousness” and “international solidarity” among workers on both sides of the border. This group attempted campaigns among Mexican immigrants more or less settled here, as well as among more transient undocumented workers. But they failed to organize workers in Mexico. Despite the fact that very few activists were advancing such an explicitly transnational agenda at the time, the masthead on the Marxists’ bilingual newspaper, Sin Fronteras/Without Borders, declared: “We are One Because America [referring to the continent] Is One.”

Out of the mouths of Marxists 30 years after the defeat of communism, such rhetoric rings embarrassingly anachronistic and naive. Out of the mouths of globalists during the heady 1990s, however, similar rhetoric rang surprisingly plausible. With history declared at an end and the world deemed flat, capitalist triumphalism led to talk of “an American Common Market” and “a borderless world.” And dazzled by images of Germans joyously celebrating their nation’s unification, many Americans persuaded themselves that effective, secure barriers at our southern border constituted a resurrected “Berlin Wall.”

Today, disruptive populist movements in Europe and the United States make it increasingly inconvenient for elites to acknowledge how global capitalism has undermined national sovereignty in ways too numerous—and too subtle—for Cold War Marxists to have envisioned.

The Catholic Church Weighs In

The final story, overlooked not just by the media but by the rest of us as well, is an older but still relevant challenge to national sovereignty, one relating to religion. It began to surface during the 1980s, when violent civil wars raged in Central America. In response to the Reagan Administration’s resistance to granting refugee status to those fleeing right-wing violence in Guatemala and El Salvador (as opposed to those fleeing leftist-repression in Nicaragua), religiously motivated human rights activists began opening up churches as sanctuaries. Over time, the sanctuary movement shifted its focus from political asylees to the growing numbers of undocumented migrants at risk, as U.S. border control policies forced such migrants into increasingly inhospitable, deadly terrain. And as the Cold War receded into the past, religious activists took a page from the playbook of the capitalists toward whom they had expressed either disdain or suspicion and embraced the emergent reality of a borderless globe.

This perspective found a welcome home with many Roman Catholics, whose church has a long, complicated history as a transnational institution. Thus it was not exactly a surprise when on January 23, 1999, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, Pope John Paul II delivered Ecclesia in America. As the title of this “apostolic exhortation” suggests, John Paul, still enveloped in the aura of his triumphant defiance of Soviet communism, sought to impress upon the faithful that all of the Americas are one.

Addressed to all of “the bishops, priests and deacons, men and women religious, and all the lay faithful . . . in America,” the papal document reminds “the peoples of the continent” that they comprise “a single entity.” Accordingly, it declared Our Lady of Guadalupe, hitherto the patron saint of Mexico, as the “Patroness of all America.” Appraising such developments, Georgetown sociologist Jose Casanova affirms: “Throughout the [20th] century one can observe an amazing resurgence of the transnational dimensions of medieval Catholicism which for centuries had been recessive or dormant.”

Four years later, on the anniversary of Ecclesia in America, the Catholic bishops of the United States and Mexico issued an unprecedented joint statement, Strangers No Longer: A Pastoral Letter Concerning Migration. That historic document is addressed “to public officials in both nations” and reminds them of their respective responsibilities to provide opportunities for their citizens to work and provide for their families without having to migrate: “All persons have the right to find in their own countries the economic, political, and social opportunities to live in dignity and achieve a full life.” (my emphasis) The bishops also specifically cite Mexico’s corruption and human rights abuses, particularly along its southern border with Guatemala. And they stipulate that “the Church recognizes the right of a sovereign state to control its borders in furtherance of the common good.”

Yet despite these affirmations of both governments’ responsibilities, the burden of the bishops’ argument falls most clearly and heavily on the United States. Declaring that “more powerful economic nations, which have the ability to protect and feed their residents, have a stronger obligation to accommodate migration flows,” they state that “we, the Catholic Bishops of the United States and Mexico, pledge ourselves to defend the migrant” and “the right of human persons to migrate so that they can realize their God-given rights.” Indeed, the bishops end up accepting mass migration as inevitable: “In the current condition of the world, in which global poverty and persecution are rampant, the presumption is that persons must migrate in order to support and protect themselves and that nations who are able to receive them should do so whenever possible.”

Most striking about this document is its clear contradiction of the evidence, both historical and contemporary, that migrants (that is, individuals departing freely, as opposed to refugees) seldom come from the most destitute strata of sending societies. Desperate poverty is not a major driver of migration; on the contrary, migrants are typically men and women with aspirations and the means to plan for and embark on a journey to a foreign country far from home.

To be sure, as migration streams become known and networks get established, costs and risks diminish, and less well-situated individuals and families get drawn into the current. But the bishops’ sentimentalized view of migrants as the poorest of the poor is fundamentally flawed. In their hands, the “preferential option for the poor,” intended to challenge entrenched elites in Latin and South America, has transmogrified into “a preferential option for migrants,” affording those same elites a safety value that reinforces the status quo in their countries.

Summing up their position, the bishops affirm that “we recognize the phenomenon of migration as an authentic sign of the times.” Indeed they do. Yet they neglect to explain why this particular “sign of the times” merits more deference than others. What if the bishops were to approach issues of human sexuality in the same spirit of ethical realism that animates their posture on migration? Wouldn’t they have to regard people’s motives in matters ranging from birth control to premarital sex and perhaps even to early-term abortion as shaped by societal forces beyond the control of any one individual or institution? And having done so, wouldn’t they have to accept people’s choices as regrettable, perhaps, and leading to problematic outcomes, perhaps, but nevertheless inevitable? Indeed, under such assumptions the Catholic Church would have long ago reconciled itself to birth control, premarital sex, and perhaps even early-term abortion.

An Ecumenical Effort

Such speculation aside, it is important to consider the impact the Church’s teachings have had on both the migrants on the ground and policymakers. Sociologist Jacqueline Maria Hagan, a careful student of such matters, has concluded: “Although largely unsuccessful in their attempts to reform U.S. and Mexican border policies, religious leaders have been quite effective in delivering their plea to local clergy, lay workers, and parishioners who counsel and provide for the poor and potential migrant.” Hagan is referring here not just to Catholics but to other denominations and religious groups with whom the Church has often worked on these issues. These include Quakers, who have long maintained a presence along the U.S.-Mexican border, as well as mainstream Protestant denominations in both the United States and Mexico—for example, the Mexican National Episcopal Conference. The roster also includes various Evangelical and Pentecostal sects, a growing presence in Mexico and Central America.

But as Hagan makes clear, in terms of resources and commitment, the Catholic Church is the prime mover. Indeed, she highlights a critical difference in orientation toward migration between sectarian Protestant ministers in the region and their Catholic counterparts:

Most ministers of small evangelical Pentecostal churches or independent ministries in Central America reluctantly endorse the migration of their members. Recognizing the devastating effects migration could have on family left behind, and also the financial loss to an independent church itself, many evangelical pastors first attempt to discourage the migration of their members before granting approval and providing a blessing. In contrast, most Catholic priests, while counseling the potential migrant on the consequences of family separation, rarely discourage the migration itself, recognizing that the need to migrate to feed and provide for one’s family is a fundamental right.

Without greater familiarity with the specific circumstances confronting individuals and families, it is impossible to judge the relative merits of these divergent pastoral perspectives. It is nonetheless evident, though widely blinked at, that the Catholic Church has a particular institutional bias in favor of migration. But because this bias is at work on both sides of the border, the dynamic here is more subtle than American bishops filling emptying churches with Latino immigrants. After all, migration leads to the opposite outcome for their Mexican counterparts. Perhaps the latter, not unlike Mexican political elites, view migration as a kind of safety-valve.

The larger point is that Catholic priests and other religious in Mexico, Central America, the United States, and other nations around the globe see themselves as part of a centuries-old transnational institution that affords them access to financial, organizational, and intellectual resources that self-sustaining Protestant congregations simply lack. And as Hagan reminds us, such considerations have significant implications for how different religious actors and institutions respond to migration.

This is especially true for Catholic religious communities such as the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) or the Maryknoll Congregation (Maryknollers) that routinely operate across national boundaries. Of particular interest with regard to migrants is the Saint Charles Missionaries of the Scalabrini Congregation. Founded in 1886 to minister to the needs of Italian migrants dispersing around the globe, the Scalabrini today work with all variety of migrants in over 20 countries, including Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States. For Catholics and non-Catholics alike, they publish prayer books meditating on the travail of migrants, and a magazine, Migrante, providing news and information on migration trends. Both are distributed to churches and parishes along migration routes.

Further, the Scalabrini maintain a network of migrant shelters, Casas del Migrante, along the Guatemala-Mexico and Mexico-US borders. As University of Southern California sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo notes, these and similar efforts constitute “a panoply of mostly Catholic but also Protestant-affiliated organizations, congregations, and NGOs, clergy and budding faith-based movements . . . actively addressing the spiritual and practical needs of undocumented migrants in transit. Their offerings include shelters, shrines, know-your-rights booklets, water stations, and blessings.”

Caravan, Pilgrimage, or Protest?

Along with overlooking the critical role of this religious infrastructure in migrant caravans past and present, the media have paid precious little attention to the religious frame through which migrants themselves make sense of this arduous, often dangerous journey. For many, it is viewed as a kind of pilgrimage. This is especially true in the spring around Easter, when Latin Catholics perform vivid re-enactments of Christ’s Passion, beginning with his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and culminating in his Crucifixion. Around Christmas, other religious themes and traditions are drawn on. For Catholics and Protestants in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, Las Posadas (the Inns) is the annual reenactment of Joseph and Mary’s search for shelter in Bethlehem. Over the course of nine evenings, culminating with Christmas Eve, a procession of the faithful—typically in costume and often accompanied by musicians—prays, sings, and eventually rejoices as it wanders from house to house in pursuit of refuge.

To be sure, this religious folk tradition has no necessary connection to migrant caravans. But neither has it been difficult for political activists to appropriate it for their own ends. This is what emerged in San Diego in 1994, when “La Posada Sin Fronteras” was organized on both sides of the border. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo describes this as “a hybrid political and religious event that condemns violence at the border and commemorates those who died at the border crossing.” This year, the 25th annual event was advertised on the website of the Catholic Diocese of San Diego, one of many sponsors. And Las Posadas processions were replicated in communities along the border, in Southwestern communities further inland, and even among Latinos in Boston—all with special intensity, in light of recent events. Indeed, the event in San Diego was held at Border Field State Park, not far from where, a few weeks earlier, Border Patrol agents had fired tear gas at members of the Caravan who were charging the border fence.

As mentioned earlier, such religiously inflected protests have been nurtured by networks going back to the sanctuary movement of the 1980s. These got reactivated and new ones initiated in the spring of 2006, when undocumented immigrants and their supporters flooded in protest onto the streets of cities across the United States. The object of their outrage was legislation passed by the Republican-dominated House that would have cracked down on illegal immigrants, including criminalization of any efforts to help them remain here. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops took this as a direct challenge to its mission and vociferously denounced “the Sensenbrenner bill,” which never became law.

This history suggests that when Pope Francis celebrated Mass along the U.S.-Mexico border in February 2016, it was hardly a one-off event. For many Catholics, as well as their religious and secular allies, that mass was an unmistakable symbol of the Church’s rejection of the legitimacy of claims by sovereign nations to determine membership in their political communities. For many such individuals, the emotional impact of that event might be compared to what millions around the globe experienced when in June 1987 Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and demanded “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” However flawed, this symmetry was surely not lost on Vatican planners.

The Catholic Church and Its Fellow Travelers

By highlighting the critical but overlooked role of the Catholic Church in sustaining the recent Caravan and its predecessors, I am not suggesting that the Church merits exclusive or even primary responsibility for the developing crisis at the border. In this regard the Church has important political allies on the left. And when it comes to committed individuals such as those within PSF, the Church shares not only principled opposition to border enforcement but a physical presence on the ground with the migrants. This affords considerable credibility and legitimacy to the efforts of such religious and political activists—especially those working with the Church, which will of course remain there long after youthful leftists have moved on.

The same cannot be said of the other advocacy groups that have opportunistically hitched their wagons to the Caravan. These include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other organizations whose legal and political skills, however helpful to those in the trenches, are typically not well informed by on-the-ground commitments or knowledge. Indeed, the further one gets physically and emotionally from the controversy and the directly interested parties, the more one focuses on broader, more abstract considerations. Such perspective and distance can be an asset to those on the ground, but these come at a price, including for the advocates themselves. Georgetown law professor, public interest lawyer, and refugee advocate Philip Schrag puts it well:

For the [refugee] advocates, the most difficult moments of the legislative battle involved the development , timing, and exposure of fallback positions. Part of the problem is the sense of stewardship that public interest advocates feel for the interests or constituents they represent, most of whom did not choose their representatives, even in the fictitious sense that stockholders choose their boards of directors and through them, the lobbyists on a corporate payroll. Public interest advocates perpetually doubt their right to take less than an absolutist position, even when it is clear that advocating an absolutist position will result in worse legislation than seeking a compromise. (my emphasis)

In this same vein, we cannot ignore the fact that such advocates—whether activist lawyers in Washington or committed religious along the border—depend on media attention to nurture and sustain their causes. As Neil Komesar and Burton Weisbrod noted back at the beginning of the public interest movement in the 1970s, such efforts seek not to maximize profit but “favorable publicity.” This is, after all, how advocacy groups—so-called checkbook organizations—raise money. Generally speaking, the more controversy, the more money. In this regard, immigrant and refugee activists and advocates have as much interest in generating controversy and media attention as does Donald Trump.

Yet in fairness to these organizations, fundraising and media attention are hardly their only or even highest priorities. Their raison d’être is to push, and push hard, for larger political and policy objectives, using tactics that are sometimes deliberately disruptive. For example, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the template for much of contemporary advocacy politics was forged, welfare rights organizers encouraged recipients to file for special benefits whose processing would overwhelm government bureaucrats and cause the system to collapse. Toward this end, organizers in cities around the nation descended on the offices of welfare case-workers with scores of angry welfare mothers and their crying children, demanding the supplementary grants the welfare recipients had been coached to believe were owed to them. Out of the ensuing chaos, welfare reform was supposed to emerge. And it did, eventually—although not necessarily along the lines anticipated by the activists.

A similar stratagem can be discerned today amidst the chaos in Tijuana. Aside from provoking the current occupant of the White House, another goal is clearly to overwhelm the capacity of the system to process asylum applications, which was already imperiled during the Obama administration. Crucially, this objective is being pursued amid a global refugee crisis that is straining the regime established in the wake of World War II and overseen ever since by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). For not only are the numbers of individuals at risk skyrocketing, but the criteria for granting them relief are also being challenged as excessively narrow and rigid.

The 1951 Geneva Convention stipulates the grounds for refugee status to be a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” In 2002, the UNHCR issued guidelines that effectively enlarged these grounds to include gender-based persecution. Then in 2015, UNHCR published Women on the Run, a study of women fleeing domestic violence in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. This document strongly suggests that domestic violence ought to be grounds for refugee status.

Such proposals have portentous implications for the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the American media, including elite print media, have all but given up on addressing such larger questions in any serious manner. On the political right, there have been incessant charges that the Caravan consists not of legitimate asylum claimants but of individuals seeking social welfare benefits or perhaps work. Others have made unfounded (though not entirely implausible) claims that gang members, criminals, and terrorists are in the mix. In response, the mainstream media have invariably opted for the simplistic—and evasive—characterization that the men, women, and children in the Caravan are “fleeing poverty and violence,” as if this formulation resolves all questions and, in addition, constitutes adequate grounds for admission to the United States.

To be sure, U.S. responsibility for the chaos in Central America is not inconsiderable. The impacts of our economic and military involvements in the region have hardly been uniformly benign. And the consequences of our national drug habit have been enormous. Whether these constitute a legitimate basis for admitting any and all migrants as refugees is another matter. Yet the media’s coverage of these issues has been so lackadaisical that, to my knowledge, no major outlet bothered to unearth what General John F. Kelly asserted in 2014—long before he became Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security or his White House Chief of Staff. As the Miami-based commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Kelly published an article in the Military Times on the chaos in Central America and concluded that “all this corruption and violence is directly or indirectly due to the insatiable U.S. demand for drugs.”

Even the most mundane and obvious questions about the goals and motives of those caught up in the Caravan have gone unexamined. For instance, why did this most recent assemblage, like its immediate predecessor last spring, choose the longer route to the California border instead of heading for the closer destination of Texas? One of the very few journalists to consider these questions is Nick Miroff of the Washington Post, who has suggested that the “simplest explanation” is that the drug lords controlling the eastern route toward Texas are more ruthless and dangerous than those controlling the western route toward California. On the basis of the arguments presented here, I would highlight two additional factors: the more liberal jurisprudence of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and California’s larger and more sympathetic media market.

Similarly neglected have been the specific inducements that persuaded large numbers of people to undertake such an arduous and dangerous journey north, especially at a time of year when migrant laborers in this region typically head south, once the U.S. growing season has ended and the Christmas holidays approach. To be sure, the decision to join such a venture is facilitated by the economies of scale that arise when a critical mass of migrants reduces the per person costs and risks associated with hiring smugglers, whose character and motives are never easy to judge. But then questions arise about one’s fellow caravan members, not to mention the character and judgment of those organizing and leading the caravan. It seems likely that trust in clerics and other religious workers plays an important role in the myriad considerations involved. But since the media and other analysts, including those on the restrictionist right, have not seen fit even to broach such topics, we know virtually nothing about these matters.

Restrictionist commentators see the Caravan as the result of the machinations of left-wing activists like PSF, whose presence and role are undeniable. So, too, is the support, either ideological or material, of globalist elites—whether George Soros, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the media, or NGOs and advocacy groups—who still refuse to acknowledge that there are limits to the generosity and beneficence of Western publics. Meanwhile, those segments of the public that sympathize with the Caravan assume its participants simply have no alternative but to set out on such an arduous and potentially dangerous journey.

What both perspectives ignore is the role that religion has played in motivating and sustaining the men and women who choose to join such caravans, or pilgrimages, not to mention the religious motives of those who feel called to aid and support them. In this regard, it is difficult to see how such a mass of humanity would venture forth without the critical material and spiritual support of the Catholic Church. And on this side of the border, the Church has been nurturing a social movement among immigrants and non-immigrants alike that could help counter its negative image as an unsympathetic, authoritarian institution in denial and decline. If that possibility is realized, and large numbers of people embrace a revived, transnational church envisioning a borderless world, this will be one more challenge that a troubled America will have to confront.

Myrna Garcia, Sin Fronteras: Activism, Immigration, and the Politics of Belonging in Mexican Chicago (Ph.D. dissertation; University of California, San Diego, 2013).

Arnoldo García, “Toward a Left Without Borders,” Monthly Review (July/August 2002).

Hagan, “Making Theological Sense of the Migration Journey From Latin America: Catholic, Protestant, and Interfaith Perspectives,” American Behavioral Scientist (July 2006).

Hagan, “The Church vs. the State: Borders, Migrants, and Human Rights,” in Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, ed., Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants (Rutgers University Press, 2006), p. 97.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Religion and a Standpoint Theory of Immigrant Social Justice,” in Hondagneu-Sotelo, ed., Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants, p. 13.

Hondagneu-Sotello, “Religion and a Standpoint Theory of Immigrant Social Justice,” p. 13.

Schrag, A Well-Founded Fear: The Congressional Battle to Save Political Asylum in America (Routledge, 2000), p. 259.

Kelly, “Central America Drug War A Dire Threat to U.S. National Security,” Military Times (July 8, 2014). Note that General Kelly’s views on this topic did get mentioned in a Los Angeles Times interview days before his White House tenure was to end.

The post Dancing Around the Caravan appeared first on The American Interest.

China’s Gulf Connection

China’s Relations with the Gulf Monarchies

Jonathan Fulton

Routledge, 2018, 212 pp., $149.95

Saudi Arabia made plenty of front-page news in 2018, from the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul to the bloody ongoing war in Yemen. These developments have strained its ties with the United States—at least with Congress—and with some European countries, who have since cut arms sales to the Kingdom. But the Chinese government has yet to utter any negative words about Saudi Arabia. And beyond the headlines, cooperation between the Middle Kingdom and the Oil Kingdom has been quietly taking off.

China’s gluttonous need for fuel makes the Gulf indispensable. Chinese oil imports are expected to reach 80 percent of total consumption by 2030, and more than 35 percent is already imported from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries—all while the United States is reducing its imports and becoming self-reliant through fracking. The trading relationship goes beyond oil, too: In 2016, China became the Saudis’ largest trading partner, with $45 billion in annual trade. This is a consequential relationship, and one worth exploring.

Jonathan Fulton’s new book China’s Relations with the Gulf Monarchies does just that by diving into China’s historical and present relations with the nations of the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia. It is an academic book, so readers get their necessary chapter-length dose of International Relations (IR) theory and discussions of whether Neoclassical realism offers the right framework for China in the Gulf. Luckily, the IR conclusion remains as simple as it should be: China’s approach is fundamentally interest-based and focused on power politics.

The book’s main argument is that China-Gulf relations are no longer just about oil. For one, Beijing has added the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to the equation. The countries are also on the cusp of broader security cooperation. For the Gulf states, China represents a welcome opportunity to diversify its diplomacy and gain a less complicated partner on questions of internal governance and human rights. China offers a strict non-interference policy on such matters, which amounts to no pesky questions asked. The Gulf countries, led by Saudi Arabia, reciprocate with bland (if any) comments on China’s tough policies toward Muslims in Xinjiang.

One of the book’s telling quotes is from Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Ambassador to the United States. “China is not necessarily a better friend than the U.S.,” he says, “but it is a less complicated friend.” As the U.S. government withdraws from the Middle East and its partnership with Saudi Arabia comes under attack from Congress, it could easily be China filling the void.

China’s growing role as a global power necessitates a better understanding of its bilateral relations with countries around the globe. There are few detailed current studies of China-Gulf relations, so this book fills a needed gap. It provides a historical overview starting from the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. It also insightfully covers the somewhat forgotten period of hostility from 1965 to 1971, when the PRC was at the height of revolutionary fervor and supplied the Dhofari rebels in Oman with military support. That decision stunted relations with all the Gulf countries, and provided the backdrop for Saudi Arabia voting against admitting PRC to the United Nations in 1971. The two countries only established full diplomatic relations in 1990. The period from 1990 to 2012 is labelled interdependence and is characterized by the growth in China’s oil imports. Tellingly, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin went to Saudi Arabia in 1999, in the first such visit by a Chinese head of state, to sign a Strategic Oil Cooperation Agreement. No need to search for a diplomatic deeper meaning there.

The period from 2013 onwards is fittingly called the Belt and Road era. The Gulf has become an important hub for China in its global expansion of the BRI, Xi Jinping’s project to ensure all roads and waterways lead to Beijing. In accordance with the BRI plan, Chinese companies have ramped up their construction and infrastructure engagement in the Gulf. In Saudi Arabia, China built a railway connecting the holy shrines in Mecca, the very heart of Islam. But its construction projects go far beyond that, extending to the Middle East’s largest power plant north of Jeddah and the Yanbu refinery.

China’s BRI strategy fits with the Gulf countries’ emphasis on moving beyond oil. It compliments both the Saudis’ Vision 2030 plan and the Emiratis’ short-term boom in construction ahead of the Expo 2020 in Dubai. One project planned would expand the Jebel Ali Free Zone in Dubai, which links with Tianjin and is the busiest trade route between the Gulf and East Asia. Likewise, in Oman, the establishment of a multipurpose port in the Duqm Special Economic Zone Authority has been highlighted as a flagship BRI project. The Gulf countries aren’t squeamish about the BRI, unlike the United States. UAE Foreign Minister Al Jaber has said that BRI is “a bridge to our common future” and has voiced strong support for the initiative.

The UAE has the largest concentration of Chinese nationals in the Gulf, around 200,000. Tourism from China is also picking up, and Dubai caters to Chinese tastes with its “China-Ready” program, which makes Chinese television and newspapers available locally, not to mention two Confucius Institutes. The Chinese influx, of course, also brings Chinese state-run propaganda into countries which, like China itself, lack a strong civil society and free press.

Inevitably, the importation of a large Chinese workforce and the implementation of huge construction projects gives the Chinese state a strong stake in the stability of these countries. This is one way that China’s security interests in the Gulf are increasing. The Chinese navy (PLAN) is also increasing its presence with port calls in the United Arab Emirates and in Oman, complementing its larger presence in the Indian Ocean and basing agreement in Djibouti. Add to that Chinese arms sales, from ballistic missiles to howitzers, and the extent of deepening military ties becomes all the clearer. When Saudi Crown Prince Mohamad bin Salman (MbS) went to China in 2016, Minister of Defense Chang Wanquan described China’s willingness “to push military relations with Saudi Arabia to a new level.” And in China, needless to say, there are no NGOs or an independent Congress trying to put the brakes on such sales.

Fulton’s book is a good primer on China’s relations with the Gulf countries, though it might have dug deeper on some of the current pressure points. In particular, a chapter on how China balances its relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran would be useful. China imports large quantities of oil from Iran, too, which is complicated by renewed U.S. sanctions and by Riyadh and Tehran’s zero-sum approach to the regional power game. This stands in marked contrast to China’s trade-with-all and nominally “win-win” approach.

If Trump’s Syria withdrawal becomes emblematic of a larger U.S. policy shift in the Middle East, there is no doubt that China will seize its opportunity. As one Gulf official presciently states in the book, “we need a dependable relationship with a major power. If the United States can’t be counted on, then we will have to turn elsewhere.”

The post China’s Gulf Connection appeared first on The American Interest.