Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 59

To Predict, Not So Divine

At the end of 1999, Joshua Muravchik collected prognosticating from a century earlier for a column in the Wall Street Journal. In 1899, no one predicted intercontinental air travel, but the Detroit News imagined “submarine ships [that] will take us across the ocean without the horror of sea-sickness.” H.G. Wells thought wireless telegraph would force news dailies to compete with “hourly papers”; with the caveat that “no human being wants” that much news. We had at least an inkling of what was to come in science and technology.

In politics and world affairs, Muravchik found us clueless. The Saturday Evening Post was convinced that trade would make war obsolete. The Atlantic foresaw a display of old military equipment as reminder of the “purpose [to which] much of the ingenuity of our people was formerly devoted.” The Boston Globe contended that, of all the nations of the world, Germany at the dawn on the new century was “probably the least corrupted by the lust of conquest.”

Today, we’re tied up in knots trying to figure what comes next. One side sees unraveling in Trumpian turmoil; the other, an opportunity for realignment between out-of-touch elites and an angry public. Across the West, voter ties to establishment parties are fraying. Norms and institutions are being tested.

I’m puzzling this through at year’s end with the help of a piece of history ordinarily dismissed, namely the experience of early 20th-century Germany. Indeed: today’s America is not Weimar, and Trump is not Hitler. We’re not going there. Yet Germany should remind us how God awful we can be in fully assessing a situation and seeing what lies around the corner.

There ought to be a powerful lesson in humility in this.

In early 1933, it was the view of diplomatic circles that, no matter what one thought of Herr Hitler, Germany’s new Chancellor would be contained by checks and balances. President Hindenburg, who commanded the loyalty of the traditional army, the Reichswehr, possessed the constitutional authority to dissolve the cabinet and dismiss Hitler at any time. And Hindenburg was no fan of the Nazis. He detested Adolf Hitler. The retired general field marshal referred in private to the Chancellor as “that Austrian corporal.” Of ten cabinet posts in the new government, only two would be held by National Socialists.

As for the Austrian corporal, he was staffed by inexperienced hacks, went an additional reassuring refrain. The first concentration camp was hardly menacing when it opened. Outside Munich, the internment facility—holding mostly a few hundred communists in protective custody—had been set up by a 32-year-old ex-chicken farmer turned Munich police chief named Heinrich Himmler. On top of all this the Sturmabteilung, the Storm Troopers, were becoming a tricky complication for Hitler. His longtime ally Ernst Röhm was greedily vying for control of the Reichswehr. The man with dreams of being Führer feared Hindenburg might replace the government and declare martial law.

I appreciate Erik Larson’s account of the period. In his 2011 book In the Garden of Beasts, Larson tells the story of William E. Dodd, the Chicago academic dispatched by Roosevelt as U.S. Ambassador to Berlin in 1933. The President apparently thought the presence of an erudite, enlightened American as top diplomat to the Third Reich might have a civilizing effect. “I want an American liberal in Germany as a standing example,” Roosevelt told Dodd.

When he arrived in Berlin, Dodd’s staff seemed lackadaisical. Senior foreign service officers would arrive late to work, or disappear during the day to play golf or hunt. Nor did Dodd himself sound any alarms in those early days. He believed he detected moderate factions in the ranks of the NSDAP. The Ambassador regarded Göring and Goebbels as “adolescents in the great game of international leadership. The Hitler salute had been seen at first as a mere curiosity by Dodd’s diplomats.

Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, a vivid chronicler of the period, misread things, too. Zweig had befriended a general staff officer named Karl Haushofer, whose erudition did not fail to impress. Haushofer had studied Japanese language and literature in Tokyo. His father had been a poet and professor. By 1933, Haushofer himself was a lecturer in political geography at the University of Munich.

In his 1942 memoir, The World of Yesterday, Zweig recalls his own initial sympathy for Haushofer’s ideas of how to restore Germany’s strength and national confidence after World War I. A journal of geopolitics Haushofer edited was thought by Zweig to be “concerned only with the play of forces in the co-operation of nations.” Zweig recounts:

I took the expression Lebensraum of nations, which I think Haushofer coined, in Spengler’s sense, as the relative energy, changing with the ages, which every nation once in its life cycle produces. And Haushofer’s summons to study the individual traits of the nations more closely . . . as calculated to draw nations closer together.

When later the Jewish writer discovered that Haushofer had become Hitler’s friend, he was shocked. “I could see no basis of intellectual relation,” Zweig reflected, “between a highly cultivated, cosmopolitan scholar and a rabid agitator who was mad on the subject of Germanism in its narrowest and most brutal sense.”

Ambassador Dodd turned out to be not half bad in breaking free of his illusions. In May 1935, he reported to State Department superiors that Hitler intended to annex part of Czechoslovakia, and all of Austria. He predicted Hitler’s alliance with Mussolini. In 1937, he resigned in frustration after failing to persuade Washington of how dire the situation was becoming.

In February 1942, Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte committed suicide in their home in the German-colonized town of Petrópolis, 40 miles north of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. “My inner crisis consists in that I am not able to identify myself with the me of my passport, [nor] the self of exile.”

In March 1945, Hitler’s intellectual mentor Karl Haushofer and his wife Martha took their lives—she by hanging, he by arsenic—in a secluded part of their property on a small lake called Ammersee in Bavaria, southwest of Munich.

So what, all this?

Jørgen Møller has warned in these pages that analogies with the weak and underdeveloped democracies of the interwar period are misguided and lead to gloomier conclusions than the evidence warrants. For one thing, “there are no parties of note [today],” writes Møller, “in any of the Western democracies that aim to introduce an alternative system to the democratic one. . . . This is not 1919, 1929, or 1933.” It’s true, and the rest of Møller’s analysis is compelling.

I’m not contesting his fine essay. Nor am I suggesting gloomy conclusions per se. Even after going to lengths here to remind us how lousy our forecasting capabilities tend to be, however, I admit—I’m now trying myself to look ahead just a bit. What I see is establishment parties struggling mightily, voter trust in elites eroding rapidly, and vacuums being created as a result. I smell democracy fatigue.

I’m concerned about the shape of a post-Trump America as much as I am the Trumpian moment itself. At a time when absolutism and certitude seem to carry the day in our political discourse, I’m becoming more interested in the things we do not know, in the questions for which we do not have answers, in those eternal and infernal blind spots that plague us.

How better to check ourselves than to keep thinking carefully of history gone awry?

The post To Predict, Not So Divine appeared first on The American Interest.

The US-Brazil Relationship Must Be More Than Friendship

Are relations between the United States and Brazil about to become closer with the election of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro? Many have speculated about a copycat, “Tropical Trump” who will lead Latin America’s largest country. Bolsonaro upended Brazil’s foreign policy establishment with pronouncements about opening the economy and “turning North;” moving the Brazilian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem; pushing back against the rising influence of China, Brazil’s largest trading partner; increasing business opportunities in the Amazon region; withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords; reevaluating the long-stalled Mercosur project; and implementing stronger measures to address the rapidly deteriorating situation in Venezuela.

Given the foreign policy reorientation Bolsonaro has outlined, it would seem that Brasília and Washington have deep sets of overlapping interests, including an elusive free trade agreement that would boost Brazil’s sluggish economy and address longstanding American frustrations with high Brazilian tariffs. Indeed, Trump and Bolsonaro have already declared their mutual admiration for one another in a post-election courtesy call. This was followed by a visit to the States and a meeting with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner by Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, a popular member of the Federal Chamber of Deputies, and a stopover in Brasília by John Bolton en route to the G20 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

While Bolsonaro’s reformist mandate offers plenty of space for a deeper U.S.-Brazil relationship, cooperation will not come as naturally as either Bolsonaro or Trump may think. The natural revival theory is rooted in the assumption that Bolsonaro is Trump’s Latin doppelgänger, and that camaraderie alone will create the proper conditions for realignment. No doubt, portrayals of Bolsonaro as the “Trump of Brazil” may be all the American president needs to know to be predisposed to like him. To leverage Bolsonaro’s stated desire for a closer relationship, however, Washington will have to proceed with deliberate action and consistent follow-up in a region it frequently neglects. Otherwise, Trump may find himself accepting Bolsonaro’s enthusiastic support while failing to navigate the historic pitfalls that have haunted the U.S.-Brazil relationship, a mistake he commits repeatedly—confusing personal chemistry (with friend and foe alike) for a good diplomatic outcome.

Wide Apart: US-Brazil Relations

U.S.-Brazil relations have long been cooperative but never particularly close. The partnership has suffered deep mistrust and significant differences of opinion, particularly between the U.S. State Department and the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (There have been occasional low points between presidents as well, such as when the Edward Snowden leaks revealed that the National Security Agency had listened to President Dilma Rousseff’s phone calls.) These difficulties have impeded trade, resulted in Brazil’s heavy reliance on multilateralism that purposefully excludes the U.S., and ushered in regional indulgence of dysfunctional states and Bolivarian autocrats in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.

On trade, Brazil is a relatively closed economy influenced by the ideology of “developmentalism,” which holds that companies linked to strategic sectors of the economy ought to be under state control. The military and the diplomatic corps, the two most public-facing institutions in Brazil, are the chief purveyors of this dirigisme. Brazil insists on a reduction in U.S. agricultural subsidies and bristles at U.S. attempts to protect intellectual property rights. And Brazil under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso was the main roadblock scuttling debate on the U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas—a dream whose defeat is still an open wound in some circles.

Bolsonaro claims that Brazil’s foreign policy displays ideological bias and a near obsession with multilateralism. The Foreign Ministry fiercely guards the country’s “independence”—little more than a veiled defiance of U.S. interests—and displays a bizarre reluctance to criticize repressive regimes like Iran, Cuba, and Russia. Brazil has attempted to weaken the OAS, instead favoring institutions like UNASUR and CELAC, which explicitly exclude the United States. The formation of the BRICS organization was the apogee of Brazil’s attempt to box out the U.S. in the Southern Hemisphere.

Lastly, Brazil has been reluctant to sound the warning bell against democratic backsliding in the region. On the contrary, it has cultivated close relations with many leftist regimes. For instance, in 2008 Lula claimed that “Chavez is the best President that Venezuela has had in the past 100 years.” Brazil’s misguided diplomatic initiative ensured Venezuela’s entrance into MERCOSUR, the regional trading block from which it is now suspended. It has also served as an important line of credit, extending subsidized loans via its national development bank to both Venezuela and Cuba. 

Bolsonaro’s promise to turn away from Brazil’s traditional south-south orientation, reduce the leftist bias of the foreign ministry, and embrace win-win relations should arrive as a welcome breath of fresh air for U.S. policymakers. And in even better news, gridlock in Brazil’s Congress may lead Bolsonaro to invest more energy than expected conducting foreign policy, where the power of the Brazilian President is far less circumscribed. Bolsonaro may be obsessed with undoing the foreign policy legacy of the Workers Party—which instinctively views the United States with suspicion for its purported role in the 1964 coup—but fourteen years of uninterrupted control over the direction, policy formation, and training of the foreign ministry is not something Bolsonaro can easily uproot. The U.S. must work to prevent past tensions from muddying the budding Trump-Bolsonaro relationship, while ensuring that Bolsonaro’s stated positions translate into more than just rhetoric.

Outlining a Strategy

Because security—both domestic and international—was at the core of Bolsonaro’s electoral victory, it offers a natural entrée into a bilateral working relationship. Brazil sits in the crosshairs of a significant transnational organized crime (TNOC) zone—a fact that authorities were unwilling to admit under previous governments. Not only does Brazil consume and transit large volumes of cocaine, it also contends with terrorism networks operating in the tri-border area with Argentina and Paraguay. Most dramatically, the largest and most potent criminal organization in the country, the São Paulo-based Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC)—which police implicate in the September 6th assassination attempt on Bolsonaro—has expanded their reach in global organized crime. A U.S.-Brazil regional offensive against illegal drug trafficking and transnational organized crime, concentrated on both the tri-border area and other vulnerable parts of the country, would be an ambitious and mutually beneficial initiative.

Developing a common strategy on Venezuela is one of the biggest opportunities for a reinvigorated relationship with Brazil. As the recipient of nearly 100,000 Venezuelan refugees, Brazil has a strong interest in stanching the flow of refugees to Roraima, already one of the most impoverished states in the country. During the campaign, Bolsonaro made veiled threats of military intervention against Venezuela—all of which he walked back under pressure. With a little nudging from the Trump Administration, though, Brazil may be moved to provide logistical, financial, and moral support to the Venezuelan opposition, as well as impose unilateral sanctions aimed at unraveling the tangled web of organized crime sprouting forth from Venezuela’s current disorder.

Yet U.S.-Brazil cooperation should not end with the Venezuela crisis. The trade relationship, though more painstaking, also offers great upside potential. Bolsonaro is the first Brazilian president to understand that MERCOSUR is too unwieldy as a multilateral institution and too wedded to protectionism to negotiate successful trade deals. For instance, negotiations between MERCOSUR and the European Union over a free trade deal have been ongoing since 1999, with few breakthroughs. Bolsonaro understands that an economy the size of Brazil’s would do well to negotiate trade deals outside of the MERCOSUR framework—a special waiver Brazil will likely receive given the constellation of center-right governments currently comprising the bloc. Brazil’s incoming economy minister, Paulo Guedes, stated that MERCOSUR would not be a top priority, and it would behoove us to ensure he keeps his word.

Greater market integration with developed countries would diversify Brazil’s trading partners, deepen its role in global value chains, and play well for both Brazil’s economy and Trump’s domestic base. According to one study, a U.S.-Brazil free trade agreement would boost Brazilian GDP by $38 billion and U.S. GDP by $24 billion annually. The United States should piggyback on ongoing negotiations between Brazil and Chile, and join forces with Canada as it begins its own negotiations with Brazil. Trump has spoken about seeking a reduction in Brazil’s high tariffs and cost of doing business. Known colloquially as “custo Brasil,” Brazil’s tax system ranks 184th out of 190th in terms of complexity, according to the World Bank. Trump should endorse any movement away from protectionism in a country where we ran a $27 billion trade surplus in 2017. Magnifying the economic opening begun under President Michel Temer would also give us a chance to undercut China’s leading financial role in the region.

Even though the United States does not promise the same cash windfall, it ought to tap Bolsonaro’s strong anticommunist sentiment to prevent China from buying up more strategically important companies in the region, should Bolsonaro move forward with his plan to privatize state-owned companies in key sectors. Another excellent example is the Bi-Oceanic Central Railway Project, connecting Brazil to Peru via Bolivia and closely linked to investment from China’s One Belt One Road program. Because Brazil has the most Chinese debt of any country in the region other than Venezuela, whatever pressure it is able to apply would help the United States in its ongoing trade dispute with China, as China is unlikely to risk getting bogged down on yet another front.

In short, the to-do list in the U.S.-Brazil bilateral relationship is mighty long. Accordingly, it would be a colossal mistake to assume that bonhomie between leaders alone can carry the day. And yet, that is exactly what Trump has assumed time and again with the likes of China, North Korea, and even some of our European allies. With Bolsonaro’s strong mandate for reform in Brasília, the prospect for a renewed relationship with Brazil is looking better than ever. The most assured way to squander this historic opportunity would be to let Trump lapse into thinking his friendships can do all of the heavy lifting.

The post The US-Brazil Relationship Must Be More Than Friendship appeared first on The American Interest.

The U.S.-Brazil Relationship Must Be More Than Friendship

Are relations between the United States and Brazil about to become closer with the election of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro? Many have speculated about a copycat, “Tropical Trump” who will lead Latin America’s largest country. Bolsonaro upended Brazil’s foreign policy establishment with pronouncements about opening the economy and “turning North;” moving the Brazilian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem; pushing back against the rising influence of China, Brazil’s largest trading partner; increasing business opportunities in the Amazon region; withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords; reevaluating the long-stalled Mercosur project; and implementing stronger measures to address the rapidly deteriorating situation in Venezuela.

Given the foreign policy reorientation Bolsonaro has outlined, it would seem that Brasília and Washington have deep sets of overlapping interests, including an elusive free trade agreement that would boost Brazil’s sluggish economy and address longstanding American frustrations with high Brazilian tariffs. Indeed, Trump and Bolsonaro have already declared their mutual admiration for one another in a post-election courtesy call. This was followed by a visit to the States and a meeting with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner by Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, a popular member of the Federal Chamber of Deputies, and a stopover in Brasília by John Bolton en route to the G20 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

While Bolsonaro’s reformist mandate offers plenty of space for a deeper U.S.-Brazil relationship, cooperation will not come as naturally as either Bolsonaro or Trump may think. The natural revival theory is rooted in the assumption that Bolsonaro is Trump’s Latin doppelgänger, and that camaraderie alone will create the proper conditions for realignment. No doubt, portrayals of Bolsonaro as the “Trump of Brazil” may be all the American president needs to know to be predisposed to like him. To leverage Bolsonaro’s stated desire for a closer relationship, however, Washington will have to proceed with deliberate action and consistent follow-up in a region it frequently neglects. Otherwise, Trump may find himself accepting Bolsonaro’s enthusiastic support while failing to navigate the historic pitfalls that have haunted the U.S.-Brazil relationship, a mistake he commits repeatedly—confusing personal chemistry (with friend and foe alike) for a good diplomatic outcome.

Wide Apart: U.S.-Brazil Relations

U.S.-Brazil relations have long been cooperative but never particularly close. The partnership has suffered deep mistrust and significant differences of opinion, particularly between the U.S. State Department and the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (There have been occasional low points between presidents as well, such as when the Edward Snowden leaks revealed that the National Security Agency had listened to President Dilma Rousseff’s phone calls.) These difficulties have impeded trade, resulted in Brazil’s heavy reliance on multilateralism that purposefully excludes the U.S., and ushered in regional indulgence of dysfunctional states and Bolivarian autocrats in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.

On trade, Brazil is a relatively closed economy influenced by the ideology of “developmentalism,” which holds that companies linked to strategic sectors of the economy ought to be under state control. The military and the diplomatic corps, the two most public-facing institutions in Brazil, are the chief purveyors of this dirigisme. Brazil insists on a reduction in U.S. agricultural subsidies and bristles at U.S. attempts to protect intellectual property rights. And Brazil under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso was the main roadblock scuttling debate on the U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas—a dream whose defeat is still an open wound in some circles.

Bolsonaro claims that Brazil’s foreign policy displays ideological bias and a near obsession with multilateralism. The Foreign Ministry fiercely guards the country’s “independence”—little more than a veiled defiance of U.S. interests—and displays a bizarre reluctance to criticize repressive regimes like Iran, Cuba, and Russia. Brazil has attempted to weaken the OAS, instead favoring institutions like UNASUR and CELAC, which explicitly exclude the United States. The formation of the BRICS organization was the apogee of Brazil’s attempt to box out the U.S. in the Southern Hemisphere.

Lastly, Brazil has been reluctant to sound the warning bell against democratic backsliding in the region. On the contrary, it has cultivated close relations with many leftist regimes. For instance, in 2008 Lula claimed that “Chavez is the best President that Venezuela has had in the past 100 years.” Brazil’s misguided diplomatic initiative ensured Venezuela’s entrance into MERCOSUR, the regional trading block from which it is now suspended. It has also served as an important line of credit, extending subsidized loans via its national development bank to both Venezuela and Cuba. 

Bolsonaro’s promise to turn away from Brazil’s traditional south-south orientation, reduce the leftist bias of the foreign ministry, and embrace win-win relations should arrive as a welcome breath of fresh air for U.S. policymakers. And in even better news, gridlock in Brazil’s Congress may lead Bolsonaro to invest more energy than expected conducting foreign policy, where the power of the Brazilian President is far less circumscribed. Bolsonaro may be obsessed with undoing the foreign policy legacy of the Workers Party—which instinctively views the United States with suspicion for its purported role in the 1964 coup—but fourteen years of uninterrupted control over the direction, policy formation, and training of the foreign ministry is not something Bolsonaro can easily uproot. The U.S. must work to prevent past tensions from muddying the budding Trump-Bolsonaro relationship, while ensuring that Bolsonaro’s stated positions translate into more than just rhetoric.

Outlining a Strategy

Because security—both domestic and international—was at the core of Bolsonaro’s electoral victory, it offers a natural entrée into a bilateral working relationship. Brazil sits in the crosshairs of a significant transnational organized crime (TNOC) zone—a fact that authorities were unwilling to admit under previous governments. Not only does Brazil consume and transit large volumes of cocaine, it also contends with terrorism networks operating in the tri-border area with Argentina and Paraguay. Most dramatically, the largest and most potent criminal organization in the country, the São Paulo-based Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC)—which police implicate in the September 6th assassination attempt on Bolsonaro—has expanded their reach in global organized crime. A U.S.-Brazil regional offensive against illegal drug trafficking and transnational organized crime, concentrated on both the tri-border area and other vulnerable parts of the country, would be an ambitious and mutually beneficial initiative.

Developing a common strategy on Venezuela is one of the biggest opportunities for a reinvigorated relationship with Brazil. As the recipient of nearly 100,000 Venezuelan refugees, Brazil has a strong interest in stanching the flow of refugees to Roraima, already one of the most impoverished states in the country. During the campaign, Bolsonaro made veiled threats of military intervention against Venezuela—all of which he walked back under pressure. With a little nudging from the Trump Administration, though, Brazil may be moved to provide logistical, financial, and moral support to the Venezuelan opposition, as well as impose unilateral sanctions aimed at unraveling the tangled web of organized crime sprouting forth from Venezuela’s current disorder.

Yet U.S.-Brazil cooperation should not end with the Venezuela crisis. The trade relationship, though more painstaking, also offers great upside potential. Bolsonaro is the first Brazilian president to understand that MERCOSUR is too unwieldy as a multilateral institution and too wedded to protectionism to negotiate successful trade deals. For instance, negotiations between MERCOSUR and the European Union over a free trade deal have been ongoing since 1999, with few breakthroughs. Bolsonaro understands that an economy the size of Brazil’s would do well to negotiate trade deals outside of the MERCOSUR framework—a special waiver Brazil will likely receive given the constellation of center-right governments currently comprising the bloc. Brazil’s incoming economy minister, Paulo Guedes, stated that MERCOSUR would not be a top priority, and it would behoove us to ensure he keeps his word.

Greater market integration with developed countries would diversify Brazil’s trading partners, deepen its role in global value chains, and play well for both Brazil’s economy and Trump’s domestic base. According to one study, a U.S.-Brazil free trade agreement would boost Brazilian GDP by $38 billion and U.S. GDP by $24 billion annually. The United States should piggyback on ongoing negotiations between Brazil and Chile, and join forces with Canada as it begins its own negotiations with Brazil. Trump has spoken about seeking a reduction in Brazil’s high tariffs and cost of doing business. Known colloquially as “custo Brasil,” Brazil’s tax system ranks 184th out of 190th in terms of complexity, according to the World Bank. Trump should endorse any movement away from protectionism in a country where we ran a $27 billion trade surplus in 2017. Magnifying the economic opening begun under President Michel Temer would also give us a chance to undercut China’s leading financial role in the region.

Even though the United States does not promise the same cash windfall, it ought to tap Bolsonaro’s strong anticommunist sentiment to prevent China from buying up more strategically important companies in the region, should Bolsonaro move forward with his plan to privatize state-owned companies in key sectors. Another excellent example is the Bi-Oceanic Central Railway Project, connecting Brazil to Peru via Bolivia and closely linked to investment from China’s One Belt One Road program. Because Brazil has the most Chinese debt of any country in the region other than Venezuela, whatever pressure it is able to apply would help the United States in its ongoing trade dispute with China, as China is unlikely to risk getting bogged down on yet another front.

In short, the to-do list in the U.S.-Brazil bilateral relationship is mighty long. Accordingly, it would be a colossal mistake to assume that bonhomie between leaders alone can carry the day. And yet, that is exactly what Trump has assumed time and again with the likes of China, North Korea, and even some of our European allies. With Bolsonaro’s strong mandate for reform in Brasília, the prospect for a renewed relationship with Brazil is looking better than ever. The most assured way to squander this historic opportunity would be to let Trump lapse into thinking his friendships can do all of the heavy lifting.

The post The U.S.-Brazil Relationship Must Be More Than Friendship appeared first on The American Interest.

Shoring Up NATO Is in Europe’s Own Interest

The United States is now in the midst of a long overdue strategic redefinition aimed at shifting the country’s focus away from counterterrorism and toward great power competition. Evidence of the opening steps of this shift can be found in the December 2017 National Security Strategy and in the past year’s defense budget increase, which has begun the process of reversing decades of underinvestment in new platforms, capabilities, exercises, and overall readiness to respond to the contingencies of great power conflict. (Indeed, as discussion about the next Department of Defense budget accelerates, there are hopeful signs that last year’s increase may be followed by additional significant budget expenditures in the new year.)

This fundamental national security adjustment now coming online is, however, arguably a decade late. A potential balancing coalition against the United States, built by an ascendant China and revisionist Russia, was already coming online in 2008. The import of these signs should have been at least considered, as the global economic crisis of 2008 and the Russian-Georgian war had already overthrown established wisdom about the sustainability of systemic unipolarity built around U.S. supremacy.

The conclusions policymakers arrive at about how to firm up extended deterrence—including on the question of how much of a national security priority counterterrorism really is—will determine how the reinvestment in new capabilities will proceed and, most important of all, what shape this new strategic framework will take. After almost two decades of overly-ambitious U.S. efforts to politically re-engineer the Middle East and a de facto open-ended campaign in Afghanistan, the West stands disunited at a time when China’s ascendance and Russia’s revisionism have become truly global problems. The money spent over the past two decades fighting low-intensity counterinsurgency campaigns, engaging in so-called “nation-building” and “state-building” and other socio-political experiments throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Afghanistan cannot yet be described as economically crippling, but it has certainly been bleeding the nation’s capabilities, using up equipment and starving the military of the investment needed to bring online the next generation of tanks, IFVs, aircraft, missiles, communications, and the like to deter and, if need be defeat, a peer competitor.

So while the damage done to U.S. deterrent power by two decades of  single-minded preoccupation with Islamic jihadism is not negligible, the analysts who predict the inevitable decline of U.S. global supremacy have it wrong. The U.S. still has the fundamental capacity to sustain the sinews of a global order favorable to the West. But to keep this capacity, the United States and Europe—today more than at any time since 1945—need to reaffirm their foundational alliance.

The NATO alliance is not just about shared history and values. Most importantly, it is about shared vital national security interests that will soon be challenged and tested globally to an extent not seen since the end of World War II. It is not hyperbole to say that the reinvigoration of the U.S.-European strategic alliance is the only way to ensure that the West, its values, and institutions survive.

Three decades after the Cold War, the United States and Europe find themselves in a deteriorating geostrategic position with respect to China and Russia. Though some have dubbed this the coming of another “Cold War,” the current round of great power competition is shaping up to be different and more precarious than the conflict that defined the second half of the 20th century. For starters, the United States, Russia, and China today are at different places when it comes their absolute and relative power, and the ongoing information technology revolution is increasingly calling into question old assumptions about what constitutes “balancing.” This is a global contest in which the United States as a quintessentially naval power enjoys the advantages of being a continental island, yet these beneficent circumstances also produce a disadvantage: The United States is distant from its forward-deployed forces in Europe and Asia. Most importantly, both Russia and China can credibly challenge the U.S. military, even if today neither can hope to prevail outright against it. In a conflict where strategic nuclear threshold defines the parameters of the contest, even a limited application or threat of military power can redefine the political equation, as Moscow demonstrated all too clearly in 2014, when it seized Crimea.

But the central factor has been the economic power of China, and the ability to project power and wage war that it has produced. China’s economic heft has been growing exponentially for decades, giving the country its first opportunity in the modern era not only to enter the core of the international system but also to redefine its rules in the process. Cold War-era China was a “balancer” in the international system, moving closer to the weaker superpower at any given time. Hence, in the 1950s during the “golden era of U.S. power,” the Chinese were aligned closely with the Soviet Union. As Soviet military power began to grow relative to that of the United States in the 1960s, and as America’s began to hemorrhage in Vietnam, the Sino-Soviet partnership soured, ending with the Ussuri River clash in 1969 and the emergence of Beijing’s “anti-hegemony” policy directed against Moscow. The Soviet military buildup in the 1960s and 1970s gave it a rough strategic nuclear parity with the United States. By the late 1970s, as the Soviet navy of the Gorshkov era for the first time challenged Western naval power worldwide, Beijing began to distance itself even further from Moscow, and finally shifted gears during the Nixon years to move closer to the United States. Most fundamentally, during the Cold War the United States had only one true peer competitor, and even during the “Soviet golden era” in the 1970s the USSR was a unidimensional power insofar as it could only rival America militarily. And throughout the Cold War China was a quintessentially regional player, too weak either economically or militarily to project power in any significant way beyond its immediate periphery.

Today the situation is fundamentally different. Russia may be relatively weak economically, but it continues to retain outsize military capabilities, which it has effectively modernized over the past decade. Russia’s resources and geography largely ensure that in the foreseeable future it will retain the ability to selectively project power and compete on a global scale. The Chinese are continuing to leverage their exports, accumulating surpluses which are then translated into the acquisition of knowledge, technology, real assets, and military capabilities. This is the existential threat to the West that we ourselves created by offshoring our supply chain to Asia, seemingly laboring under the deadly misapprehension that free trade and market-driven economic modernization were the most certain path to Chinese liberal democracy.

The challenge posed by the rise of two near-peer competitors to the security of the West is grave and growing. The global position of Europe and the United States has been further imperiled by deepening internal polarization in the wake of the anti-establishment rebellions accelerating the reordering of the American and European political landscapes. Though the cleavages in U.S. and European politics are still fluid, it is already clear that there will be no going back to the assumptions that only five years ago were considered baseline.

The Western crisis of political leadership has been building over the past three decades, spurred by generational changes in America and Europe. In the United States, the progressive disconnect between the self-perpetuating establishment and the population at large has been intensified by radical changes in college curricula and the creation of sui generis academic and media cultures. In Europe the resurgence of nationalism in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and, more recently, in the aftermath of the 2015-16 mass immigration wave—the largest such influx of people into Europe since World War II—has remade European politics. The fevers of public discontent that for three post-Cold War decades were managed through a mixture of political compromise and redistributionism have reached a boiling point, shrinking the political center and all but ending the political careers of public luminaries such Angela Merkel, and perhaps soon the self-proclaimed reformer Emmanuel Macron. At the root of the current anti-elite rebellion, both in the United States and Europe, lies a deep seated suspicion that a major cause of today’s divisions and political stagnation is our establishment’s inability to speak directly to the needs and fears of their electorates.

For the West, now confronted with two peer-competitors, the greatest challenge going forward will be to ensure that extended deterrence in Europe and Asia continues to hold so as to prevent an all-out great power war, the ramifications of which are simply impossible to predict on both a human and systemic level. The United States and Europe need to come to terms with the consequences of their flawed decision four decades ago to bring China into their supply chain on a massive scale. Regardless of how one views that decision—and my purpose here is not to re-litigate the past—shifting vast areas of manufacturing, and increasingly research and development, to China transformed the global power distribution. If left unchecked, that ongoing shift will pose a foundational threat to the West.

The era of U.S. unipolarity passed faster than its proponents anticipated. Likewise, a bipolar system with a “balancer” in the middle—a familiar feature of the Cold War era—is a thing of the past. For the foreseeable future we will live in three-pronged power distribution system that will grow increasingly fluid and unstable. While the United States will likely remain the strongest power in the system, it faces near-term deepening political polarization at home. China, meanwhile, will continue its economic and military ascent, so long as globalist “free trade” ideology remains regnant (the Trump Administration, for its part, has put Beijing on notice that the good old times may be coming to an end). Russia will likely continue to leverage its successful ten-year military modernization program to realize continued political gains in the limited application of military power.

In the Cold War, deterrence held because the United States maintained the strategic commitment to engage and prevail in two major theaters, while maintaining the reserves to respond concurrently to a minor crisis. The drainage of resources over two decades of anti-jihadist strategy has left America with a more restrictive menu of choices, while at the same time its principal challenger in Asia has acquired many more options on its own strategic menu. Nevertheless, China remains the runner-up in overall state power, and in many areas critical to modern warfare it continues to trail the United States. An unequivocal decision by the United States and Europe to move decisively to limit the slow bleed of technology to China would leave it with little chance of catching up. Hence, even with the current shift in the balance of power in Asia, a strategy devoid of pieties about the universality of the liberal international order and determined to contend decisively for geostrategic advantage in the Pacific has every chance to succeed, provided NATO is firmed up to the point that its capabilities are sufficient to suppress geostrategic competition for Europe.

The bottom line is this: Should tensions between the United States and China continue to rise, the European NATO members and our European partners must be strong enough to ensure that they can credibly deter Russia from seeing America’s preoccupation with Asia as an irresistible opportunity to press its geostrategic advantage in Europe. Simply put, in the coming years the imperative for Europe to invest significantly in military modernization is not about alleged “transactionalism” or the proverbial “burden-sharing” always being sought in NATO; rather, it is about the vital security interests of the West.

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Just How Cold Is It Outside, Baby?

It seems every holiday season comes with its own salvo in the culture wars: Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas? (or my personal favorite, Merry Christmahanakwaanzica?) Was Jesus blonde?  Is Santa white?

This year’s kerfuffle involved the #MeToo inspired movement to ban the holiday tune “Baby It’s Cold Outside. “ The song drew fire because, by today’s standards, it seems to depict textbook sexual harassment—or worse.  The woman in the song insists “I really must go; the answer is no,” but the man continues to try to seduce her, citing his wounded pride, her alluring lips and, of course, the inclement weather as reasons she should stick around and submit to his advances.  The enduring popularity of Baby runs counter to the idea of affirmative and enthusiastic consent.

For me this posed a serious dilemma: I’m a committed supporter of #MeToo, but Baby It’s Cold Outside is a beloved holiday classic performed by some of the best comic/musical duos in the canon of mid century America pop (Dean Martin and Martina McBride are pitch perfect; Sammy Davis hams it up with Carmen McRae; oddly, it’s one of the only song Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald ever did badly.)  Happily, I think I’ve found a way to let #MeToo and Baby It’s Cold Outside peacefully coexist.

It’s worth pointing out that there are thousands of more objectionable songs from a feminist perspective: for instance roughly 30% of all rock and 50% all rap songs ever written.  Indeed there are even more objectionable holiday songs: for instance, “Santa Baby,”which is sung from the point of view of a stereotypical conniving gold digger who describes her relationship with her paramour in unapologetically transactional terms: think of all the fun I’ve missed; think of the fellas I haven’t kissed; next year I can be just as good; if you check off my Christmas list… (Eartha Kitt’s rendition is the Platonic ideal.)

Defenders of Baby have pointed out that the song’s critics are making a common interpretive error, reading an old text as if it had been written today.  Understood in its original context, Baby depicts an innocent courtship ritual of the kind hook-up culture, “friends with benefits,” and the Tinder dating app have displaced.  It was written in 1944, a time when social mores dictated that unmarried women could never say “yes” to romantic overtures—at least not without feigning resistance. While from today’s perspective, the man’s entreaties might sound overbearing or even sinister, the whole point of the song is that the real coercion that drives the narrative comes from a society that demands sexual innocence from women. The woman’s resistance is based entirely on the potential bad opinion of others (my sister will be suspicious, my father will be pacing the floor, my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious).  She doesn’t really say “no” for her own sake; instead, she says I ought to say no, no, no, sir. At least I’m going to say that I’ve tried.  The man in the song isn’t forcing himself on her; he is helpfully providing her with excuses to do what she wants to do, too. Hence, in the final bars of each verse, the answer and response becomes a harmony sung in unison: ahh but it’s cold outside. 

This is all so apparent that it’s hard to believe the critics ofBaby It’s Cold Outside failed to see it. I suspect the song struck a nerve this time around, not because it depicts sexual harassment, but because it so clearly doesn’t. It rather suggests just the sort of ambiguity about motivation and consent that leads people to question the claims of victims of sexual assault. Rules that require affirmative and enthusiastic consent to sexual encounters insist that “no means no.” The implication of Baby It’s Cold Outside—both when it was written and today—is that a woman’s “no” can also mean, “yes, just give me an excuse.”

So can you be a fan of Baby It’s Cold Outside and of #MeToo?  You can if you recognize that rules requiring affirmative consent are not rules of interpretation, but rules of construction. “No means no” is not based on a presumption that every woman who says “no” really wants the evening to end. Instead, it imposes a duty to treat no as no and not speculate about alternative interpretations, however plausible. The point is to eliminate ambiguity. And this makes perfect sense because the fog of ambiguity often surrounding sexual consent gives sexual predators an excuse: They can later claim they didn’t know their advances were unwelcome.

The purpose of affirmative consent laws is to change the social norms reflected in Baby It’s Cold Outside, in which one might imply yes while saying no. The goal is to ensure that no one—man or woman, pursuer or pursued—relies on insinuation. Affirmative consent means men hoping to coax sex from reluctant women will have to wait for an unambiguous “yes,” and that women who want sex won’t be able to say they tried to resist.  The objective is to put an end to the typical dance of seduction depicted in Baby It’s Cold Outside—not because it was always a sexual assault in disguise, but because the coyness and ambiguity underlying it makes it easier for predators to disguise sexual assaults as misunderstandings.

Of course this means a certain innocent playfulness in seduction will be lost: there is always a cost in changing long standing norms around which rituals and expectations have developed. But for the most part, the tug of war between social expectations and individual desire that drives Baby It’s Cold Outside is rapidly becoming as anachronistic as the social rituals of France’s ancien regime. But just as it wouldn’t make sense to object to Les Liasons Dangereuses as a protest snobbery and classism, I won’t stop enjoying Dean-O and Martina singing Baby It’s Cold Outside just because it reflects—and comments on—the outdated sexual mores of a bygone era. At the same time, just as we’ve rejected the aristocratic affectations of our ancestors, we should also reject the repressive sexual moralism and masculine aggression that have long made the courtship rituals of the past a minefield of shame and physical risk for women.

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The Top Books of 2018

Recording our Favorite Books of the Year podcast with staff and columnists from The American Interest, something we all agreed on is that these “interesting times” have certainly not been a curse for writers and readers. The best book title of the year goes to Sue Prideaux’s impressive biography of Nietzsche, I Am Dynamite! (Tim Duggan Books). It’s a good leitmotif for the year in books given how many of them raise the question of whether the entire liberal democratic project might be in danger of blowing itself up.

Patrick Deneen’s brilliant Why Liberalism Failed (Yale) asked whether liberalism might in the end be its own worst enemy, creating a culture dominated by loneliness, disassociation, isolation, and dislocation. Part of the attraction of the book is not just the answers it suggests but the questions it raises. In doing so, Deneen has opened up a genuine dialogue across political traditions, including some fascinating exchanges with the likes of Samuel Moyn, Bryan Garsten, and Matthew Sitman.

Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger & How To Save It (Harvard) is an angrier book than Deneen’s, but this reflects the way he sees politics in the West, where citizens long disillusioned with politics are restless, angry, and even disdainful of the democratic process. Like Deneen’s, the book has sparked some fascinating dialogues, not least a brilliant counterblast from Shadi Hamid for this magazine.

Other books this year have focused on particular elements of why democracy may be in decay. Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton) helpfully reminds us what the word “liberalism” has actually meant over the centuries. At the TAI podcast we like ideas-merchants who put on their hard hats to draw out the practical implications of their work. In Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (FSG) our own Francis Fukuyama admirably leads the way with a section boldly entitled “What is to be done?” in which he makes suggestions about forging a national identity, including the potentially contentious one of reintroducing a form of national service. The quality of democracy depends on more than the acceptance of the basic rules, he argues: Democracies need their own culture to function.

Someone else who put on the hard hat this year is Reihan Salam in Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders (Sentinel)—one of the most brilliantly provocative books I read all year. He does not duck the hard choices—amnesty, a points-based immigration system—but with so much posturing from all sides on immigration, here at last is a book that is consciously trying to offer a blueprint for an immigration compromise that liberals and conservatives can debate and take seriously. Yale professors Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro argue in Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself (Yale) that one of the ways in which Salam’s kind of compromise might be achieved is through the return of stronger political parties. Elites need to have more self-confidence, they argue. The best political reforms are those that “strengthen parties, weaken local selection mechanisms such as primaries and caucuses, and push back against referendums, direct elections of leaders, and other illusory instruments of popular control.”

It’s not only established powers that have problems; rising ones do too. Sulmaan Wasif Khan’s fine survey of Chinese grand strategy Haunted By Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy from Mao to Xi (Harvard) outlines the challenges facing China today, not least an aging population, government corruption, escalating tension with its neighbors, a trade war with the United States, and a choking environmental disaster. Chinese elites, Khan concludes, remain terrified the country will “fall apart again.”

Much of our time this year has been spent on questions of leadership, and a slew of fine books take on figures who continue to fascinate and sometimes perplex us. Andrew Roberts gives us the best single-volume life of Churchill (Viking). David Cannadine’s lavish Churchill: The Statesman as Artist (Bloomsbury) elegantly makes the link between statecraft and the imagination. Ramachandra Guha completes his magnificent biography of Gandhi (Knopf). Karen Sullivan vividly shows why the stories of King Arthur and Camelot have lost none of their old power in The Danger of Romance (Chicago). Joseph Ellis, always so subtle on the Founders, puts them in conversation with us in American Dialogue (Penguin Random House).

Finally, we spend so much time talking about systems, strategy and high politics that we can sometimes forget that these factors impinge on real people with real lives. Zora Neal Hurston’s posthumous Barracoon (Amistad) gives her account of a 1927 visit to meet Oluale Kossula, a survivor of the last known ship of the Transatlantic slave trade route. It’s an astonishing, heartbreaking story, brilliantly told, and full of cruelty and injustice. Yet standing his ground in the middle of everything is the 86-year-old Kossula, who remains a man “full of gleaming, good will.” The fortitude of the human spirit is an amazing thing, and we all benefit from reading about it.

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Flag Pins and Shoulder Patches

War creates political opportunities for those who fight them. This is meant as an observation of fact, not a remark intended to cheapen the sacrifices made by soldier-politicians whose military service draws the voting public’s attention and praise. Indeed it is a fact that, historically, some soldiers’ motivation for military service has rested on its perceived value for capturing later electoral dividends. Long before Napoleon Bonaparte strategized how to rule Europe from horseback, and even before Julius Caesar rode his military successes across the Rubicon to occupy Rome, soldiers have leveraged their military prowess for political ends. Sometimes they’ve accomplished this peacefully. Often, they’ve employed their martial skills more directly. The ties that bind war and the political do not necessarily mean that those who wage war will become those who rule, but the historical magnetism between the two expressions of leadership is hard to deny.

The formal exception to this historic trend—the United States—only seems to confirm how deep-seated the attraction is. The framers of the American republic intentionally erected barriers between the military and the political realms. Wary of the dangers that “standing armies” posed to individual liberty, and conscious of the threat that a “man on horseback” could pose to a self-governing people, the framers subordinated military power under layers of civilian control and stripped any political power from the military as an institution. In the final Federalist Papers entry, Publius concludes his pitch for ratifying the Constitution by identifying it as a bulwark to prevent “the military despotism of a victorious demagogue.”

And yet since 1789, Americans have overwhelmingly elected former soldiers to be the nation’s chief executive. Of the first 25 Presidents, 21 had military experience, beginning famously with George Washington, whose chief cabinet officers during his two terms (Henry Knox, Edmund Randolph, Timothy Pickering, and Alexander Hamilton) had served with him as Continental officers. Of the presidential contests from 1789 to 2016, military veterans have been nominated by their parties 65 times, compared to nonveterans’ 58 times. About two-thirds of elected Presidents have been veterans. Mitt Romney in 2012 was the Republican Party’s first presidential nominee to be a nonveteran since Thomas Dewey in 1944. The 2016 presidential election was only the 14th time that both of the two main parties have fielded candidates without military experience.

To be sure, we might see more of this in the future, as a downstream effect of conscription-era politicians dying or retiring and decreasing percentages of Americans choosing to serve. Nevertheless, it remains true today that American veterans like to run for political office, and American citizens like to vote veterans into political office. One of the more frequent stories of the 2018 midterm election cycle, for instance, has been the number of veterans, specifically female veterans, seeking congressional office.

So many veterans run for political office, and our political parties so frequently nominate them as presidential candidates, that it seems a truism to observe that this must be so because veterans make for winning candidates. One might find some evidence suggestive of this in the fact that, while about 15 percent of all American males have served under arms according to the Department of Veteran Affairs (out of the roughly 545 million cumulative Americans), 60 percent of presidential candidates have had some military service.

Of course, the veterans don’t always win: Neither John McCain, John Glenn, nor George McClellan ever became President, despite their prominent military biographies and ambitions. “Old Tippecanoe,” William Henry Harrison, was every inch the frontier military hero in 1836, when he lost his presidential bid to non-veteran Martin Van Buren. (Then again, in 1840, when Harrison very much tied his political campaign to his military laurels, he defeated the incumbent van Buren.)

Getting a better understanding of the nexus between veterans and presidential politics is an important exercise not just because of modern vexations over the civil-military relationship. As Ramapo College professor of political science Jeremy Teigen notes in his recently published book, Why Veterans Run: Military Service in American Presidential Elections, 1789-2016: “The potential implications of military veterans in presidential elections extends to how parties enjoy advantages on defense issues, gender politics, distinctive foreign policy views, and even levels of presidential success.”

To sketch out these latter implications, Teigen treats the veteran component of the presidential selection process as a “set of outcomes” shaped by a series of factors but influenced by wars, military institutions, and basic politics. The outcomes include the number of veterans who run for President, the various kinds of veterans who do so, and the measurement of just how salient a candidate’s prior service is during a campaign.

Teigen notes that different wars require dissimilar recruitment methods, producing different types of veterans—and therefore different candidate “molds.” He identifies six eras of “veteran emergence:” George Washington served as the prototype for veteran candidates between 1789-1820; partisan generals dominated elections between 1824-64; Union generals “waving the bloody flag” were common between 1868-1900; 1952-1990 saw a pattern of low-ranking World War II officers climbing the political ladder; and candidates from the 1990s to the present have all had to deal with the question not just of their service or lack thereof but also of the war they served in and the nature of their service, because of the particularities of the social upheaval surrounding the Vietnam War and the draft.

Meanwhile, there was something of a “veteran hiatus” between 1904 and 1948. The political parties rarely nominated the veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I. While there was conscription during World War I, it was on a much smaller scale than World War II, which saw 16 million soldiers take part. The Spanish-American war was fought by a volunteer army that was small even by contemporary standards. On the other hand, the Dick Act of 1903 set in motion the professionalization of the American military, and along with it the American soldier.

While there were fewer veterans on the whole during this era (from 1866–98, the U.S. Army had only about 40,000 men on active duty year to year), Teigen notes a clear “war-hero fatigue” among the political class. His finding is bolstered by a Warren Harding observation: “We made Presidents out of military men for more than 30 years after the Civil War but there doesn’t seem to be any sentiment for a military candidate at the present time.” Only Theodore Roosevelt, the famous Rough Rider officer who became president during this era, seemed to gain by suffusing his public persona with his military experience.

Like Teddy Roosevelt, some veteran presidential candidates have run on the strength of their military biography (Andrew Jackson, William H. Harrison). Others, however, don’t much mention it (James Monroe, Wendell Willkie). Some have been career generals (Winfield Scott), others battlefield ones (James Frémont). Some have been enlisted men (William McKinley, Walter Mondale), and some have had short but meteoric ascents up the ranks (Benjamin Harrison). Some have disavowed the war in which they fought (John Kerry). Not all veteran presidential candidacies are created equal. Teigen’s point is that they shouldn’t be measured as such either.

One case in illustration: Civil War presidential veterans vs. World War II presidential veterans. Both wars involved a high proportion of the population and produced sizable shifts in public opinion about the role of government in society, the technologies of warfare, and even the role of men and women. But both conflicts differed in substantial ways related to the armies that fought them: “Structure, professionalism, officer recruitment, centralized soldier induction, geographic origins . . . dramatically differed. . . . Among the keenest distinctions is the reliance on regionally based units.” Teigen reminds us that, whereas World War II veterans largely served in federalized 20th-century military machines with professionalized junior officers, the Boys in Blue mostly served in state-based units. They marched under their state flag (along with Union colors), but with officers “who were elected more often because of political cunning than drill and weapons knowledge.”

The state-based units gave the politically-minded Civil War veterans a vast electoral advantage. But the conflict itself had been a highly partisan and domestic affair that blurred many political and military lines (“Reconstruction . . . had to be carried out by the military.”) At the war’s end, everyone knew that George McClellan, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Winfield Scott Hancock, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley had each participated in Lincoln’s martial efforts to reunify the states. But also at war’s end were two additional electoral factors: The geographically homogeneous regiments that had duplicated already existing civic and political networks when the soldiers mustered in also remained generally geographically close when the soldiers mustered out. This arrangement tended to fortify the electoral appeal of former regiment colonels and generals who had led men from their home state or community.

The second factor tended to maximize the first: the political innovation of the interest group, in this case organized along veteran lines, with local members and chapters, but also with a national orientation. Post-Civil War presidential politics, if not all postbellum politics, can’t be rightly understood without acknowledging the political power wielded by the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). The GAR was the first truly national veterans’ organization. Mary Dearing reveals the whole complex and compelling story in Veterans in Politics: The Story of the GAR, pointing out that while companionship, solidarity, and charity were GAR ends for sure, politics was an equally important end. The struggle among Radicals, conservative Republicans, and Democrats over the Reconstruction issue formed the background for the founding of the GAR, while the ambitions of several Illinois politicians (General John A. Logan and Governor Richard Oglesby in particular) ushered it into existence. By keeping in view a very tangible legislative purpose—cash benefits for veterans—over several decades, it maintained a considerable political presence until President Benjamin Harrison signed the generous 1890 pension law into effect.

The GAR was instrumental in electing five Civil War and GAR members to the presidency. And, according to the Senate Historical Office, all told, 87 Union veterans eventually served in the U.S. Senate, joined by 72 ex-Confederates.

The GAR expired with its last member in 1956, but by then a multiplicity of other veterans organizations were flourishing. Teigen doesn’t focus overmuch on the political influence of the various VSOs after World War II, but to be fair, that is subject enough for its own volume. Rather, in keeping with the compare-and-contrast of veteran presidential electoral politics after the Civil War and World War II, he highlights how the “Greatest Generation” presidential candidates served in a diversified (geographically, socially, and economically) large-scale conscripted force, in their youth, and generally as lower-ranking navy or army officers. Between Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower in 1952 and Bob Dole in 1996, only Hubert Humphrey, who had been denied entry into the service on medical grounds, and Bill Clinton weren’t military veterans.

Perhaps because of the nature of the war they fought, World War II veterans were looked up to more as civic leaders than as political partisans. The American public’s sense that the conflict was “a moral crusade to liberate countries overrun by the Axis powers rather than to expand America’s borders,” Teigen writes, cast a certain ameliorating glow over the political aspirations of its veterans. No doubt it facilitated the public perception that the armed forces had long ago discouraged the more overt partisan practices of the 19th century—a time which saw active duty generals such as Zachary Taylor and George McClellan campaigning in uniform (by 1930 even the wives of officers were discouraged from voting). But party politics had also changed substantially over this same period. Parties after World War II tended to reward candidates who had worked their way up the political ladder rather than simply coronate famous generals who were newcomers to politics, as they had done in the Antebellum era. Out of the entire World War II veteran presidential candidate cohort, only Eisenhower mimicked those earlier generals and skipped the partisan ladder climb.

Teigen does a valuable service here in reminding us that, however intuitive it might seem to think that veterans play an outsize role in presidential politics, in truth veterans have actually operated within the organic development of political parties, their changing presidential nominating process, and the crescive development of presidential power in the American political nation. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Zachery Taylor, and George Bush were all veterans. But the McGovern-Fraser reforms of the 1970s meant that Bush first had to face an enormous number of state primaries requiring a much different kind of political campaigning than practiced by, for example: Taylor, who faced only the Whig Party convention; Jackson, who railed against “King Caucus” but probably owed his presidency to Martin Van Buren’s revival of political parties; or Washington, who (it can be argued) did virtually no campaigning, remaining outside and above political parties, but set the precedent for Presidents (and generals) to step aside from power.

What does this mean for Gulf War and post-9/11 era veterans with presidential-sized thoughts in the 21st century? Why do veterans run for President, or any other political office, for that matter? And why does the voting public continue to welcome them? These questions, I believe, are linked. Answering the first may shed some light on how to think more deeply about the second and third.

Teigen observes that, alongside the social, economic, and ideological questions that fueled the “mixed legacy” of Vietnam, the military veteran status of presidential candidates has taken on such a predominant role in electoral politics because of the confluence of the Cold War and the large cohort of Presidents who were veterans of World War II. The public has come to view the presidency through the eyes of the Commander-in-Chief role, even if fewer American adults these days are actually exposed to military service. This is intensified both by the global status which America continues to assume, and, I would add, by a Congress that has been only too happy to cede the responsibility of decision-making to the Executive Branch for reasons having to do with changing institutional norms and electoral politics.

The optics of a hardened martial experience and the emotional crutch of reassurance that this experience gives in a world constantly described as dangerous seem obviously to favor veteran presidential candidates. Surely that explains why the majority of fictitious cinematic presidents, from Independence Day to Madame Secretary, have military experience. And there’s evidence to believe that candidates’ pre-presidential experiences influence subsequent perceptions about their success as president, and that military experience in particular drives a president towards higher performance in public persuasion. Scholarship shows that substantial differences exist between political leaders with and without experience in the armed forces.

In the “Overinformation Age,” this all translates to a handy biographical shortcut for the time-pressed average voter. Veterans accordingly will continue to run for President, and for other elected positions. As Teigen and, more recently, General Stanley McChrystal in the Wall Street Journal remind us, a uniform is no guarantee of character or political competence.

This still sets aside the (very large) question of the institutional effects that increasingly politically active veterans might have on both the military and the political process, in an increasingly partisan world in which veterans are thought of as a “tribe apart.” But here, too, it’s arguable that the long shadow of the Vietnam War has skewed perceptions of the partisan identity of those who enter and exit the military. Since the Vietnam War, the Republican Party has generally owned defense and national security issues in the eyes of the electorate. A disproportionate number of veterans are older, white, and male—proxy factors that are typically associated with GOP support. This leads many to assume all veterans are Republicans too. But the increasing numbers of Democratic veterans running for office indicate that it may be time to reevaluate who politically our veterans really are.

That larger question appears in the title of Professor Teigen’s book: Why Veterans Run. Teigen gives us, in blessedly jargon-free prose, a much needed taxonomy of military veterans in presidential election politics. He tells us when they run, how they run, and what happens when they do. He gives us clarifying charts and graphs; a straightforward roadmap which he faithfully follows; case studies; and a wealth of well-researched insights that will illuminate and enlarge the knowledge of academic, veteran, and layperson alike. He shows how veterans have always responded to larger social and political currents, and how underneath it all, veteran identity is entwined with a perceived patriotic identity thanks to the inseparable role the military played in the formation of the American nation.

His title is a statement, for which the book is the explanation. But I had approached it as a question, and I’m not satisfied that it was answered. To me, answering the question of “why veterans run” requires moving beyond the quantitative data that Teigen has gathered and organized so well. But here we move into the arena of character, both high and low—a subject that is far more difficult to know and certainly quantify, even if no less important for finding an answer.

For the inscription to his monograph on soldiers and politics, Samuel Finer chose a musical notation from a Mozart opera about an epically seductive albeit thoroughly wicked man. “In testa egli ha un cappello . . . E spade al fianco egli hà,” a disguised Don Giovanni sings about himself. The soldier’s panache is unmistakable and powerful, Finer suggests.

He’ll be wearing a special hat

With white plumes on his head;

A great, big cloak is on his back,

And at his side he has a sword.

Soldiering and politics make for a seductive match.

That encapsulates sentiments very much in the timbre of the civil-military community’s discussions as the electoral clock wound down in 2018. In late September, Mara Karlin and Alice Hunt Friend wrote against the “myt[h] . . . that battlefield experience is the most authoritative source of military policy expertise.” A few days later Kathy Roth-Douquet of Blue Star Families argued: “Military service fosters connections that transcend the era of bitter partisanship.” Jim Golby responded with a (wonderfully informative, concise) 25-tweet thread of scholarship about why “we should be careful to think that vets can save politics.” Meanwhile, the nonpartisan “super PAC” With Honor celebrated the fact that nearly 200 veterans were running for Congress in November, as did VoteVets.org.

Largely missing from this discussion: Why do veterans run for office? And why does the American public seem to like that they do?

Why veterans seek public office is a question that my AEI colleague Gary Schmitt and I have been researching. We took up this question because we were curious about the rising numbers of post-9/11 veterans running in, and winning, political races. We’ve wondered whether veterans ran for Congress or against it; to “fix” a “broken Congress;” or to change Washington. We wondered what policies they typically advocated, if any, or whether they mostly ran against a particular incumbent, or his or her policies. We also wondered about the level of civic knowledge of congressional candidates and what their rhetoric on the campaign trail suggested about their institutional knowledge—as well as, more narrowly, whether military veterans had a deeper or different understanding of government and the state. Individuals in the armed forces do take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, after all.

The juxtaposition of individuals affiliated with America’s most-trusted institution campaigning to become members of the least-trusted institution especially caught our attention. It’s sparked a range of Congress-heavy questions. How would veterans of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) affect the Legislature’s performance—and especially public perception of that performance? Veterans arguably have a heightened civic awareness and, by the nature of their service, an equally heightened awareness of the consequences of decisions made in Washington. Can their increased participation in the electoral process help turn Congress’s dismal approval numbers around?

On the other hand, veterans are former members of an institution that is by necessity organized along illiberal lines and relies on hierarchy and (in extremis) the achievement of objectives through non-democratic, decisive action and the use of force. The “can do” attitude inculcated as a part of military service may pose a stumbling block to veterans-turned-legislators as they respond to the dynamics of representation and legislative deliberation. Indeed, in running for office, will they—and the segment of the population that supports their election—contribute to a dynamic whereby it comes to be seen that Congress’s problems can only be fixed by members who see themselves as standing outside of the necessarily complicated and politicized character of politics today?

What They Say & What’s Been Said

Most treatments of veterans in politics don’t tackle these questions. Of course, questions about how veterans have shaped, or are shaped by, American politics pre-date the Constitutional Convention, but relatively few contemporary scholars have studied their political opinions. There’s been some movement in the field since Armed Forces and Society published a 2007 literature review revealing that much of the existing literature related to the draft era and might not apply to our all-volunteer military. Jason Dempsey’s Our Army, Donald Inbody’s The Soldier Vote, Jeremy Teigen’s scholarship, J. Tyson Chatagnier and Jonathan Klingler’s 2015 Survey of American Veterans, and the Hoover Institution’s recent Warriors & Citizens volume, among others, do yeoman’s service here in exploring themes raised by Peter Feaver and Richard Kohn about the “civil-military gap.”

That these questions are not more explored is surprising, given the anxieties of civil-military observers since the 1990s about the military becoming partisan or acquiring too much influence in areas of American society. Outside of this particular community, it’s entirely possible that the dearth of research is the product of academic neglect. This supposition is reinforced by Federal laws that prohibit polling members of the armed forces on their past or future voting preferences.

That’s among the reasons why, for our forthcoming report, Schmitt and I concentrate on the publicly available campaign rhetoric of veterans running in the 2016 election—as Democrats, Republicans, Third Partiers, or Independents. This includes campaign websites and literature, interviews, and video recordings. We’re juxtaposing what we see across veteran candidacies with the academic literature on the motivating factors of running for public office generally. If it’s true that there’s been a net decrease in political ambition in the “candidate eligibility pool,” indicating that serving in office has become less appealing, we hoped to discover in veterans’ own words why increasing numbers of them clearly did find it palatable.

The two Wordle graphics below, culled from the data we collected from 232 veterans running for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016, provide some insight. These represent what veterans said was their motivation for running for office (Figure 1) and what top policies that motivation was directed toward (Figure 2).

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Figure 1: Principal Motivation to Run for Elected Office, Veteran Candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, 2016

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Figure 2: Principal Policy Proposals of Veteran Candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, 2016

Neither of the graphics are earth-shattering in their revelations. Initial analysis tends to confirm the thesis that Republican veterans and Democratic veterans run for reasons and causes similar to their non-veteran peers. Out of the 232 veterans represented here, 133 ran as Republicans and 67 ran as Democrats, and the enlarged phrases reflect this breakdown. Both Republican and Democratic veterans most commonly emphasized the need to represent their state and district’s values in Washington as a reason for running. Democrats were more likely to emphasize social justice issues; Republicans, economic security and growth. Republicans were more likely to discuss national security, foreign policy, and the military than Democrats were, but virtually all veteran candidates emphasized the need to address veterans’ affairs. Importantly, Democrats and Republicans alike invoked a dedication to public service and a sense of civic duty.

Veterans demonstrate a willingness to run more frequently in general, and in long-shot races in particular, where other high-quality candidates choose to sit out a potential losing candidacy. This suggests that a civic sense of duty—one might even say patriotism—may well be the obvious but overlooked element in explaining why veterans run and why, in turn, we have to probe more deeply than an analysis of their campaign talking points.

Weighing in with Philosophy

Veterans enter politics because they have a profound, perhaps even primal, connection to the political. This is different from saying that veterans enter politics because they’re existentially connected to the nation or nation-state by virtue of defending it from foreign enemies. It’s also different from saying that (American) veterans have a unique bond with their country because of the indispensable role the military played in forming the American nation. While these aren’t invertebrate statements, they don’t capture the bedrock phenomenon. In spite of some purplish prose, the words of sociologist Willard Waller may come closer to the mark: “The veteran is always a powerful force, for good or evil. . . . He has fought for the flag and has absorbed some of its mana. He is sacred. He is covered with pathos[.]”

This is a grand claim. But it’s one that political science is ill-equipped to prove or disprove on its own. To appropriate Carnes Lord’s observation about political science and the art of statecraft, political science is too preoccupied with identifying lawlike regularities in behavior to be able to handle the often intangible, and therefore unmeasurable, dynamics of the same. Although necessarily less exact, it’s political philosophy and even poetry (literature) that can better describe the dynamics between veterans and politics. Even here it’s a struggle, though. We’ve long since lost the ability to talk this way in the realm of public policy.

At bottom, what’s really in question is spiritedness. It’s a concept tied to what Socrates and Plato termed thymos or thymoedies. Alongside desire and reason, spiritedness (thymos) is one of Socrates’ three elements of the soul. Operating in a pre-Marxian world that doesn’t take a narrow, economizing view of politics, Socrates describes political order as emerging indirectly from the need people experience to defend their lives, lands, and liberty from the dominating designs of others. In Plato’s Republic, it’s spiritedness that answers this challenge: As a form of anger, spiritedness seeks to overcome all obstacles in its way. It lends itself toward a willingness to kill and be killed, and is the essential quality of human beings who would live free from the oppression of others. In this way it’s also associated with a sense of justice and injustice; it leads an individual to strike back at those who have harmed him. Spiritedness is thus attached to a concern for honor.

Homer’s Achilles demonstrates these dynamics. Homer’s muse sings about the anger of Achilles, because the thumotic rage with which he kills and desecrates Hector’s body in revenge for his friend’s death differs nowhere in kind from his rage at the injustice of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army facing Troy. Agamemnon has affronted Achilles’ honor, as well as undermined the accepted system of spoils distribution to warriors. Not surprisingly, it’s against the backdrop of Achilles that Socrates identifies thymos as the psychic origin of distinctively political action.

Spiritedness as the political passion shows itself as a yearning for victory, superiority, rule, honor, and glory. It’s not desire simply, nor desire for just any goal; it’s a yearning toward goals that are the most difficult to attain. That’s why, when it comes to honor, spiritedness translates into the desire for recognition by free individuals, and so gets tied to political liberty, and hence to law, and hence to justice. Spiritedness expresses itself positively as a zeal for justice, and negatively as moral indignation when the latter is threatened. In Plato’s Republic, the dialogue on justice shows how under these circumstances spiritedness is the connective tissue through which diverse human beings can become, and remain, a unified community. Suffused throughout this platonic discussion is the overt role of the guardian or warrior or soldier in accomplishing and maintaining these ends.

But the guardian or soldier can also destroy his community, through an excess or misdirection of thymos, as seen in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. The nature of spiritedness, it turns out, is inherently equivocal. Like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the spirited individual is always on the lookout for something—anything—that is larger than himself, that will test his mettle. While unacknowledged, some recognition of the ambiguity of thymos arguably undergirds the caution some within the military-civilian relations community urge about veterans as political candidates.

Democratic Politics and the Veteran Candidate’s Panache

Despite the historical and philosophical distance between Plato and today, his observations about the origins of politics are helpful in understanding what the ties are that link veterans and politics. It might be less the fact that the veteran is “wrapped in the flag” than that his character has what the ancients would describe as an affinity to justice that makes him attractive as a political candidate. That affinity might also partially explain why veteran candidates of all political stripes emphasize their sense of civic duty and public service, and the electorate typically accepts that motivation with little cynicism.

However, as Samuel Finer’s inclusion of that Mozart quotation about a soldier’s seductive panache reminds, the philosophic insight about the instability of spiritedness suggests that a tad of cynicism about veterans as politicians may be in order. Nathaniel Hawthorne exhibited something like this in a famous essay for The Atlantic Monthly. A year into the Civil War he predicted that future political candidates would attempt to outdo one another in claiming the veteran’s mantle. (“One terrible idea occurs. . . . Military merit, or rather, since that is not so readily estimated, military notoriety, will be the measure of all claims to civil distinction.”) He understood that in a world of democratic politics, the electorate will continually be searching for distinguishing factors of candidates that appear to confirm superior character, leadership ability, and concern for the common good. Then, as now, military service fits the bill in the public eye.

In more recent years, veterans on the campaign trail and in Congress have been taken to task for embellishing their service record or otherwise falling short of the “White Knight” image. This does suggest that voters, after all, do pay attention to the person behind the uniform. At the same time, this has not seemed to have had an adverse effect on either the amount of veterans running for political office or the number of veterans elected into office. Nor does it seem likely to in the immediate future, if the history of the veteran and politics is any guide. Given that deep-seated dynamic, a better response to the phenomenon than simply castigating veterans for becoming political, or voters for admiring veteran candidates, would seem to involve a civic education of veterans and the electorate: That the qualities a veteran might bring to government can be significant, but are not enough in themselves for sound governance, let alone statesmanship.

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The Death of the Auteur

The Other Side of the Wind

Directed by Orson Welles

Netflix (2018), 122 minutes

There is a fitting irony to the fact that Orson Welles’s final film, The Other Side of the Wind, has now found its posthumous home on Netflix. The movie, which Welles began in 1970 and spent 15 years failing to finish, has long been an object of fascination among diehard cinephiles: notorious precisely for its status as an unfinished film, a final masterwork that would never see the light of day. Entangled in decades-long rights disputes, its negatives locked away in a Paris vault by court order, The Other Side of the Wind seemed likely to be another Welles project lost to time.

Now, thanks to the deep pockets at Netflix and the valiant efforts of a team led by Peter Bogdanovich and producer Frank Marshall, the film has at last been recovered, reconstructed, and completed in line with Welles’s wishes (or the best approximation thereof). This experimental and deeply personal film, which would have befuddled small arthouse audiences in its time, is now widely accessible to the streaming masses—on a platform that usually tends to privilege the popular, the digestible, the new.

The Other Side of the Wind is none of those things, which accounts for the strangeness of seeing Welles’s magnum opus officially labelled “A Netflix Film.” But at the same time, the peculiar circumstances of its completion parallel the subject of the film itself.

For one, just as streaming services like Netflix are now disrupting old business paradigms in the film industry, so is this film about a similar transition point: the moment when Old Hollywood met New, when the strictures of the Hays Code and the old studio system had broken down and the possibility of greater artistic liberty loomed. “The chance to make my films in America has been very hard, but I think it’s becoming easier,” said Welles in explaining why he had returned from his European exile to make this movie. “Pictures are becoming more adventurous.” Subsequent events would prove him wrong, but The Other Side of the Wind is alive with that sense of possibility.

Second, the film’s piecemeal reconstruction by collaborators past and present vindicates the participatory vision Welles had all along. “Everything else I’ve ever done has been controlled, every frame is controlled,” said Welles in explaining what set this film apart. “But I would like to take a whole story and make the picture as though it were a documentary. The actors are going to be improvising…” More than that, Welles conceived of the film as a kind of composite document, cobbled together from various sources after the death of its protagonist. That Welles himself died before finishing it, leaving his collaborators to put it all together, only completes the circle.

We like to think of Welles as an uncompromising genius, a perfectionist who sought complete artistic control and only rarely attained it. But for The Other Side of the Wind he was, on some level, consciously surrendering that control.

The end result is a paradox. On the one hand, The Other Side of the Wind may be Welles’s most personal film, verging on the navel-gazing in its obsession with his perennial themes and the self-awareness of its subject matter. But in another sense, it doesn’t really belong to him at all.

All well and good, but what is it about? This, too, is complicated.

In the simplest terms, The Other Side of the Wind chronicles the last night of J.J. Hannaford (John Huston), an aging Hollywood director who is working on a new film entitled—you guessed it—The Other Side of the Wind. The bulk of the movie proper unfolds at Hannaford’s 70th birthday party, which is attended by a gaggle of actors, studio honchos, eager reporters, and various hangers-on. Some seek the director’s ear or a juicy scoop, others litigate past grievances and gossip, others are just along for the ride. Chief among the guests is Brooks Otterlake, a successful young director and Hannaford protégé played by Peter Bogdanovich (an acolyte of Welles in real life). As the night wears on, the partygoers attempt to watch rushes of Hannaford’s film only to have the projector repeatedly break down. Hannaford gets drunker, the journalists more aggressive in their questioning, and the ties that bind Hannaford and Otterlake fray, as the older filmmaker sours on the younger, who refuses to bankroll his mentor’s meandering latest film. By the end of the night, Hannaford will die in a car crash, an unseen fate we are told of via Otterlake’s opening narration.

As this summary suggests, this is an aggressively metatextual movie. The sprawling cast includes old Hollywood veterans (Huston, Lilli Palmer, Edmond O’Brien), the up-and-comers of New Hollywood (Bogdanovich, Dennis Hopper,), and a few French New Wave types (Claude Chabrol, Stéphane Audran). Some explicitly play themselves, others play thinly veiled alter egos. Hannaford, the self-destructive director launching a comeback bid, is a clear stand-in for Welles himself. (Welles denied this, unconvincingly.)

If the film’s conceptual layers are knotty, its technique is dizzying. The party scenes play like home movies, crowdsourced from the cameramen at the party. Some of the footage is in color, some in black and white; some is overexposed, some is underlit. The film stocks vary. All of this is cut together in rapid-fire fashion, with shots typically lasting just a few seconds. The result, apart from the occasional feeling of whiplash, is a kind of Panopticon effect: We are witnessing the night’s events from a multitude of perspectives, but almost always trained on Hannaford, who is unable to escape the invasive glare of the spotlight.

Then there is the film within the film. Early on, Welles gives us an amusing scene of studio execs in a screening room, tearing their hair out trying to make sense of Hannaford’s daily rushes. The snippets we see hardly illuminate matters. The movie seems mainly a piece of kinky arthouse erotica, in which a leggy brunette (played by Welles’s mistress Oja Kodar) is pursued across a series of desolate, grungy landscapes by a wide-eyed hippie (the aptly named Bob Random), both in varying states of undress. There is some arcane drama about his gift to her of a doll; also some briefly glimpsed trysts in a bathroom stall; another sordid encounter in the back of a car; still another on what appears to be on an abandoned studio backlot. All of this is wordless, and basically senseless.

By most accounts, Welles was trying to parody the arthouse pretense of films where immaculately composed shots of naked people stand in for vague commentary on societal ennui. Michelangelo Antonioni, the famed Italian director, was his primary target. But the parody seems partly an excuse for Welles to parade his nude muse before the audience’s eyes. The line between knowing mockery and self-indulgence is a thin one.

The same could be said for The Other Side of the Wind more broadly. Attempts to pin a simple value judgment on it may induce whiplash in the viewer. Is this a savvy and self-aware work of genius, an ahead-of-its-time exercise in formal experimentation? Or is the joke on those of us who want to believe it is so? The movie’s cryptic closing narration, delivered by Huston, seems to shrug at attempts to parse its meaning: “Who knows? Maybe you can stare too hard at something, huh? Drain out the virtue, suck out the living juice.”

There is certainly plenty of virtue in The Other Side of the Wind, and lots to stare at. Welles the director may be best remembered as a master of composition and camerawork—think of those deep-focus shots in Citizen Kane, or the virtuosic opening long take in Touch of Evil—but here he is playing in a different cinematic register. Artfully drawn individual shots matter less than the collage-like whole; the rapid editing rhythms and shifting perspectives approximate a kind of cinematic jazz. (The actual jazz score, commissioned in 2017 by the famed French composer Michel Legrand, certainly helps.) In many ways Welles is extending the free-form editing style of his last completed film, F for Fake (1973): a sly rumination on trickery and authorship that now stands as a companion piece to this one.

The movie within the movie offers a different kind of Wellesian showmanship. These scenes are filmed in colorful 35mm widescreen, on elaborate sets or expansive landscapes, in contrast to the scrappy aesthetic elsewhere. And though the subject matter borders on the pornographic, the craftsmanship is undeniable. One scene at a nightclub, scored to a psychedelic blues jam, is a compelling piece of light-and-shadow play: a layered haze of writhing bodies, trick reflections, film projections, and neon lights. This leads into a brightly lit bathroom debauch, and then into a backseat sexual encounter amid a torrential downpour. It all adds up to a lurid, erotic fever dream, of a kind that Welles never attempted elsewhere.

The movie is best when its various strands connect, when its dizzying technique and nesting-doll structure are not just superficially impressive but actually serve the needs of the story. This particularly happens in the last half-hour, as Hannaford’s party builds to a crescendo of humiliation and bad behavior. As the drinks flow along with the bad blood, the mercurial director lashes out repeatedly: coming on to the too-young girlfriend of his friend; physically attacking a female journalist who is grilling him on his sexual proclivities; taking up his rifle to fire pot shots at a group of dummies arranged in his backyard. The film’s frenetic cutting and scattershot rhythms come to mirror the breakdown of Hannaford himself.

This is also where the film acquires real pathos, largely because of what it may imply about Welles himself. In watching the downward spiral of the onscreen director, it is hard not to think of the one behind the camera. The picture that emerges is not a flattering one: Hannaford is a man whose boozing, bullying, and sexual predations summon thoughts of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. It’s a portrait of the artist as an old rake.

Welles claimed to have modeled Hannaford on Ernest Hemingway, not himself, and there’s a plausible case that the film is an “attack on machoism,” as Welles described it. The film also repeatedly intimates that Hannaford is a closet case, passing as a womanizer to mask predatory designs on his leading men. But the film’s solipsistic qualities also suggest that this is Welles’s critique of his own pathologies. The man was, after all, notorious for his own exploits; his affair with Oja Kodar, his mistress and muse in this film, came in the midst of his third marriage. And Welles would often channel his own demons into his protagonists, his dissolute Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight being perhaps the best example.

There are shades of Falstaff here, too, in the themes of betrayal and abandonment that characterize the ending. As dawn rises, Hannaford and Otterlake exchange a few bitter parting words that confirm their estrangement. (In real life, Welles and Bogdanovich would have a falling out too). Soon, Hannaford is speeding off alone in a sports car to the death we know awaits him. Meanwhile, the final scene of his unfinished art film spools out at a nearly empty drive-in. Hannaford’s leading lady watches herself on the big screen, in the nude, stabbing and slashing a giant inflatable phallic symbol, which then collapses all around her.

It’s easy to laugh at the absurdity of that final imagery; as with much of this movie, Welles films it with a wink. But the connotation is bleak, and the aftertaste bitter. It’s an ending suggestive of collapsed ambitions, of Welles’s own romantic and artistic demons driving him to self-destruction. One is reminded of an elderly Charles Foster Kane, abandoned by his wife and brought low by scandal, furiously trashing his room at Xanadu.

So what are we left with at the end of all this—just sound and fury, signifying nothing, to quote another Welles protagonist?

I think not. This movie is no Rosebud, some skeleton key that perfectly unlocks the mysteries of its maker. But perhaps that expectation is the error in the first place. For all that it says about Welles, what most distinguishes The Other Side of the Wind is how it points beyond its creator, offering a prescient glimpse into our own time.

The party scenes in this movie are a funhouse mirror version of our own age of distraction. We live in a world that is drowning in images: fleeting Snapchat stories, carefully filtered Instagrams, streaming videos. These can be summoned and dispensed with at a moment’s notice; indeed, the very platform hosting this film encourages such behavior. (Don’t like this? Watch that!) To see this film’s disparate, crowdsourced images flitting before your eyes is to glimpse our own media-saturated present.

It is also to see our modern, performative culture of self laid bare. Intentionally or no, Welles anticipated the blurring of public and private lives—and the allure of self-absorption—that characterizes so much of social media. His filmic alter ego opens his home to strangers armed with cameras to record him acting out his petty vanities. Today, this behavior transpires on a daily basis across the globe, beamed into our phones via Livestreams, YouTube channels, Facebook feeds, and Instagram stories.

The film’s self-critical qualities are likewise prescient. The movie seems in part a therapeutic exercise for Welles, an attempt to acknowledge and atone for his faults even as he (partially) indulges in them. The film’s intimations of sexual predation, its implications about the lead’s closeted homosexuality, and its inconsistent reckoning with his sexual transgressions all resonate with the confusions of our #MeToo era.

The truth is, there will never be a fixed, agreed-upon meaning to this movie—and never, if we’re being honest, a definitive form of it either. The very act of “completing” this film is by necessity an imprecise one, involving the mind-reading of an artist on the other side of the grave. But that’s a fitting fate for a film that was conceived as a radically collaborative project all along: an exercise in “divine accidents,” as Welles put it.

In his penultimate film, F for Fake, Welles delivers a monologue that anticipates the lesson of this one. Standing before the magnificence of Chartres Cathedral, Welles marvels at a work of art that is all the more beautiful, and enduring, for being anonymous: “The premier work of man perhaps in the whole Western world, and it’s without a signature.” He goes on:

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. The triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life. We’re going to die. “Be of good heart,” cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced — but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much. 

Welles’s name will matter for as long as movies do. But perhaps his final lesson in The Other Side of the Wind is to abandon the unthinking valorization of the singular artist, the notion that any artwork can be the exclusive domain of one individual.

In its proliferation of meanings, its strange straddling of past and present, and the radically inclusive process that defined its making, The Other Side of the Wind does not belong to Welles alone. His collaborators and the latecomers at Netflix have done their best to reconstitute the master’s pieces, and the rest is up to us. Join the party.

This quote is featured in They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, an accompanying Netflix documentary about the film’s making.

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The Trump Presidency, Year Two

The reality television show with Donald J. Trump at its center has completed its second season. From the standpoint of ratings, all that matters in television, this past season was a roaring success. Once again the star commanded the rapt, widespread, and sustained attention of the United States and much of the rest of the world. Once again President Trump’s tweets and off-the-cuff remarks, often issued in pursuit of personal feuds, and the frequently angry responses to them, dominated the news coverage. The cable television channels that are devoted to public affairs, in particular, but also newspapers, magazines, and websites, were divided sharply in their attitudes toward the 45th president but had one fundamental feature in common: all found themselves in the Trump business.

The New York Times captured the President’s impact in a quotation in a news story about the efforts of the American Catholic bishops to cope with the backlash triggered by the scandals involving some of the Church’s priests. Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami said, “We should be grateful that Donald Trump is president because he dominates the news cycle. If he didn’t, we would have a lot more bad press.” Proving the Archbishop’s point, The Times buried the story deep inside its news section, on page A18.

The Trump Presidency, closely related but not identical to the Trump persona as expressed on television and via Twitter, and likely to have a greater and longer-lasting impact on the United States and the world, also completed its second year. That year exhibited some continuities with the previous one, but also brought some changes.

A Republican President

To his major achievements in year one—a tax cut, the easing or removal of regulations governing business, and the appointment of conservative judges to the federal bench, one to the Supreme Court—Trump added, in 2018, more deregulation and more judicial appointments, including of another Supreme Court justice.

These achievements amount to a classic Republican program of governance. Donald Trump captured the Republican presidential nomination as an outsider, at odds with the party’s establishment. In office, however, he has presided over the enactment of an agenda favored by that selfsame establishment. What he did, any Republican president would have done.

For this, the Republican Party embraced him. It had good reason to do so. He delivered what two of its most important constituencies desired. Businesses received tax cuts friendly to them, greater freedom to operate without government restraints, and, at least until the last months of 2018, a booming stock market. Social conservatives welcomed two Supreme Court justices unlikely to support—and perhaps willing actively to oppose—what they have come to see as a judicial attack on their values, beginning with the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade.

Because of this record, although Trump is the first president since the origins of modern polling not to reach a 50 percent approval rating during his first two years in office, he did become very popular with Republicans. Roughly nine in 10 believed he was doing a good job in office. His popularity in the ranks of his own party immunized him against against a serious challenge for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020. As things stood at the end of 2018—and like everything else in politics they have the potential to change rapidly—if he chooses to run, the nation will have the opportunity to decide whether to award him a second term as president.

A Weak President

Judged by the attention he commanded Donald Trump was, during the first two years of his presidency, a towering figure. Measured by his actual accomplishments in government, however, he qualifies as a weak president. Those accomplishments were by historical standards modest, and due as much to the Republican Congressional majorities as to the president himself, if not more so. He did not manage to shepherd to fruition the repeal of Obamacare, which he had promised to do during his campaign. Nor did he make appreciable progress in fulfilling another hallmark promise, to build a wall along the Mexican border.

To be sure, presidential achievements, when they require legislation, never come easily. The framers of the American Constitution feared concentrated power above all else and designed the American political system to prevent this, separating powers among three equal branches at the national level and adding a federal system that distributes authority to states and localities. The Constitution intends the president to be weak; but that is what makes a chief executive’s capacity to overcome the Constitutionally-imposed restraints a test of of his or her strength. True, in a sharply partisan political era Trump could not expect Democratic assistance in enacting any program; but he didn’t need it, since Republicans controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

In addition, three particular features of this presidency weakened Donald Trump as president.

His lack of experience in government and his shaky grasp of the issues with which government must deal were handicaps. The presidency is not a test of knowledge—many other qualities contribute to effectiveness in the office—but ignorance is not an asset.

Furthermore, Trump did not enter the presidency accompanied by a group of loyalists adept at working the levers of government and dedicated to doing so for the purpose of carrying out his program. Successful presidents seed the federal departments and agencies with such people, who form the layer of personnel that connects the president and his senior officials with the permanent bureaucracy. Loyalists of this kind make the great, clanging machinery of government work on behalf of the president’s goals.

Finally, the senior officials Trump initially appointed often did not share his policy preferences and resisted implementing them. By the end of 2018 many of these officials—National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Economic Council Chairman Gary Cohn, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis had left or were about to leave the Trump Administration. In politics and government personnel is policy, and these changes in personnel increased the chances that in 2019, for better or for worse, the policies of the federal government will reflect the wishes of the President.

In 2017 and 2018, however, the Trump Administration often functioned like a car whose steering wheel is unconnected to its chassis. It had difficulty, to choose a different vehicular metaphor, in steering the ship of state where the captain wanted it to go.

Trade

To the patterns of Republican orthodoxy and a weak presidency the year 2018 brought a major exception: the Trump trade policy, which included a threat to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement (it was ultimately renegotiated) and the imposition of tariffs on products from Europe, Japan, and particularly China. These measures counted as both a major departure from the historic preferences of the Republican Party (they received a warmer welcome from Democratic legislators) and a major change in an important area of American public policy. Three things made them possible.

First, the President has the legal authority to act unilaterally on trade when the national security is threatened. Trade with Europe, Japan, Canada and Mexico posed no such threat, but Trump exploited the provision for his own purposes. Second, trade is one issue about which the 45th president seems genuinely to care. He has complained about the international commercial disadvantages that he believes burden the United States for three decades. Third, he appointed as United States Trade Representative the Washington lawyer Robert Lighthizer, who had worked on trade issues in and out of government for the better part of four decades and who, unlike many Trump officials without Washington experience, knew how to get what he wanted.

By shielding selected American industries from foreign competition through tariffs, Trump was, in a sense, reviving an old American tradition. From the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the New Deal the United States practiced a trade policy of protection, putting up barriers to imported goods. Yet Trump acted, in 2018, not simply as a protectionist. He professed a broader goal than merely helping particular firms and industries. He made it clear that he regarded the country’s deficit in trade as harmful and that he was seeking to reverse it. This made him a mercantilist.

Mercantilism governed the foreign policies of the major European powers between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Its chief aim was to achieve a trade surplus, and for logical, indeed compelling reasons. The medium of exchange for trade in that era was gold and other precious metals, which the monarchs of Europe used to recruit armies to fight on their behalf. The larger the supply of these metals in their possession, the larger would be the armies they could employ and the better able they would be to conquer more territory and fend off their rivals.

In the world of the twenty-first century, however, with its nationalism, military conscription, and industrial and high-tech warfare, the trade balance has nothing to do with national strength. Nor does a mercantilist policy hold the key to national economic well-being, a point at the center of Adam Smith’s classic work The Wealth of Nations. That book, widely regarded as the founding text of modern economics, appeared in 1776, which means that the definitive refutation of the 45th president’s main economic idea is almost 250 years old.

All apart from the fundamental soundness, or lack of it, of the Trump approach to international commerce, his trade policy is likely to prove disappointing. It is unlikely to bring much in the way of benefits to an important constituency on behalf of which it is ostensibly being implemented: blue collar workers. During his campaign Trump traveled to western Pennsylvania and declared that he would revive the steel industry there. The disappearance of well-paying jobs, in steel and other industries, does owe something to the expansion, over the last three decades, of American trade with lower-wage countries such as China. Virtually all studies show, however, that technological change contributes more to job loss than does trade. Donald Trump could not hold back the march of technology if he tried; nor could any president. Moreover, blue-collar workers are also consumers. Tariffs raise prices for them, along with everyone else, thereby reducing their standard of living.

Nor will the Trump tariffs substantially reduce the American trade deficit, which is largely determined by other economic forces. Even as he was erecting his trade barriers, the nation’s overall trade deficit was widening.

One of the countries on whose products the president has imposed tariffs—China—is indeed guilty of economic misconduct; and Trump’s willingness to confront the People’s Republic has the potential to bring economic benefits not only to the United States but to many other countries as well. Unfortunately, he has taken aim at the wrong target and employed the wrong tactics. China’s trade surplus with the United States is among the least of its economic sins, if it counts as a sin at all. More egregious, and costly, violations of global economic rules are its restrictions on foreign investment, its subsidies to favored industries, and its theft of intellectual property. To their credit, Trump trade officials do recognize the importance of these practices and are trying to use the tariffs to change them. To achieve this goal, however, requires the kind of leverage that only a broad coalition of like-minded countries demanding them can wield. Far from building such a coalition, Trump has offended and alienated its potential members by imposing, or threatening to impose, tariffs on them. This is not a winning strategy.

Errors of Omission

Donald Trump’s many critics believe that he has done serious damage to the United States, chiefly by violating the norms of conduct that have grown up around the presidency and that more broadly have come to govern American public life. The President has certainly not unfailingly behaved in a dignified, well-mannered fashion. He is hardly alone in this regard, however, as was evident in the ugly Democratic campaign against Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Nor has the conduct of public life in the United States always proceeded decorously. The Trump era, whatever its shortcomings, has not, for example, produced the kind of violence in the chambers of the Congress that occurred prior to the Civil War.

Trump’s critics have gone farther and accused him of subscribing to, embodying, and encouraging two of the most toxic political ideas of the modern era: racism and fascism. These accusations are inaccurate.

Anyone who believes that Donald Trump is a racist either has forgotten or, happily for him or her, never knew what real racism looks like. Real racism—systematic discrimination and serious oppression on the basis of race—was an all-too-prominent feature of American life through the first half of the twentieth century but since then has become, fortunately, dramatically weaker and not at all respectable. Donald Trump is, at his worst, a barstool loudmouth. America’s genuinely racist presidents—and there have been a number—would never have dreamed of appointing an African-American such as Ben Carson, Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, to their cabinets. A boor he may be, but Trump is no more inclined to try to restore legal segregation, let alone chattel slavery, than he is to climb to the roof of the White House, flap his arms, and fly to the moon; and he would have no better chance of succeeding if he tried.

As for the second charge, if Donald Trump aspires to be a fascist he is going about it in an odd way, for he has neglected to recruit a paramilitary force that operates outside the law on his behalf to visit violence on his political adversaries. The chant directed at Hillary Clinton that still punctuates his political rallies—“lock her up”—may be unedifying, but under a genuinely fascist regime she and others like her would long since have suffered far worse fates.

Instead, such harm as Trump will inflict on the country that freely and democratically chose him to be its president is likely to come not from what he does but rather from what he fails to do. The most costly such failure would come in a military or financial crisis that the Trump Administration mishandled through inexperience, incompetence, or both. Even if the country is spared such an event, the United States has an agenda of problems and unmet needs to which this president is not attending. It includes a social safety net that needs revision to take account of fiscal and demographic changes, a slower-than-desirable shift away from reliance on fossil fuels, and an ever-increasing national debt.

Beyond America’s borders, the nation’s major challenges include three aggressive foreign powers seeking dominance in their respective regions and ready to use force to achieve it: Russia in Europe, China in East Asia, and Iran in the Middle East. While Trump has displayed an affection for Vladimir Putin that does not, to say the least, advance the American national interest, in dealing with the other two disturbers of the peace he has made some improvements on the policies of his predecessor. He has been willing, as Obama was loath to do, explicitly to call China a rival, which is how the Chinese government sees the United States. He has withdrawn from the Obama-negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, which had dismal long-term prospects for preventing the disaster of Iranian nuclear weapons.

Each of these challenges, domestic and international, will become more serious over time. None will be simple or easy to meet. None is susceptible to solution in a single presidency, and Trump’s predecessors did not compile sterling records in dealing with them. Nor does the responsibility for coping with them fall entirely on the federal government, or indeed on government at any level, or even, for some of them, on the United States alone. Still, Washington does have an important role to play in each, and for such a role, in the twenty-first century, there is no substitute for presidential leadership.

The Next Year

In the 2018 midterm elections the President and his party suffered a setback, from which a lesson for him about the next two years emerges. The Republicans fared poorly in the nation’s suburbs, the voters in which have a major and often decisive influence in presidential contests. Suburbanites, especially women, were, it appears, put off by Mr. Trump’s public manner and either stayed home on Election Day or voted for Democratic candidates. For that reason the President would be well advised, in 2019, to moderate his deportment, tone down his belligerency, and adhere more closely to the familiar norms of presidential conduct.

That is advice that, in the weeks following the midterms, Mr. Trump showed no sign of taking. He displayed more interest in rousing the enthusiasm of the supporters who populate his rallies than in trying to ingratiate himself with Americans who wouldn’t dream of attending them but who might consider voting for him in 2020.

As for the Democrats, the same lesson applies to them. Candidates who were politically conservative by the Democratic Party’s standards won Republican-held seats in the House of Representatives, which gave the Democrats control of that body. That result argues for the wisdom of a sober, programmatic approach to the next two years rather than an all-out assault on Donald Trump.

Like the President, however, the Democrats appear unlikely to act on that lesson. If the voters prefer to elect a president located somewhere near the middle of the American political spectrum, the energy of the Democratic Party resides on its left wing; and in pursuit of its 2020 presidential nomination the aspirants to that prize will court these activists, not the swing voters who ultimately decide general elections. The subpoena power that comes with control of the House of Representatives, as well, perhaps—depending on its contents—as the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the association, if any, between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, will likely encourage, on the part of Congressional Democrats as well as the Republican president, the escalating, mutually reinforcing and overheated tweets, feuds, and accusations of 2017 and 2018. The Donald Trump reality show seems set to run for at least another year. If it does, during the next twelve months American politics will give new meaning to the term “race to the bottom.”

The post The Trump Presidency, Year Two appeared first on The American Interest.

Brexit Watch: Nasty Normal Europe

The big Brexit game is fast approaching its final phase, and no one has done a better job in describing the enormous exercise in unseriousness it remains than former UK Ambassador to the European Union Sir Ivan Rogers. In his recent “Nine Lessons” lecture in Liverpool, Rogers has not quite called Brexit that, but utter unseriousness at the highest level is what his verdict amounts to. “The debate of the last 30 months has suffered from opacity, delusion-mongering and mendacity on all sides,” Rogers said, and it must count as the understatement of the year.

Apart from dissecting the technical, political, personal, and policy details—describing the remaining options until March 29, and the tactical schemes of the Prime Minister, her party, and her opponents—Rogers helps us see that the Brexit endgame also raises a question about the bigger lesson of it all. Brexit is big, but it is, of course, a part of something bigger still. So if this is the verse, what is the chapter?

Brexit is a glimpse into nasty normal Europe. Europe’s history of two millennia is one of coming to terms with too much politics in too confined a space. It is the story of frantic but futile—and frequently horrifying—attempts to stabilize an inherently unstable continent. It is the story of deep distrust among European tribes, peoples, and nations. It is, to use a more recent term from Bob Kagan, a continent that revels in the “narcissism of small differences” at the expense of its own prosperity, security, and greatness.

Brexit in its banal futility reminds us of this normal Europe, a Europe just waking up from a 70-year hiatus of borrowed stability paid for by America. It is a Europe that has enjoyed a by-and-large jolly good two-and-a-half generations of unparalleled stability, prosperity, and security. It is a Europe that, at the very moment it gets relegated to being a second-tier strategic consideration on the global level, loses its collective nerve and wants back a past that can never be repeated.

Brexit is not alone, but it stands out as the wildly improbable unforced error it is. Hungarian niche nationalism, Austrian provincial narrowness, Le Pen’s revolt against the centralized system of the republican Sun Kings, the religiously infused particularism of Poland, True Finns up north, xenophobes in sunny Italy—they are all explicable, in their own way. A mix of fear of globalization, economic pressure, threatened identity, government incompetence, ultra-fast technological change, a global changing of the guard, an irredentist Russia, and by now more than a decade of de facto American absence does not fail to instill fear and loathing in the Old World.

And yet this is Britain we are talking about, and the British—an ultra-pragmatic people, as we Germans learned in school. They are a nation of shopkeepers whose main merchandise are the various flavors of common sense. They are shielded from self-doubt because, as Robert S. Vansittart wrote in The Mist Procession (1958), “the strength of the British lies in their inability to know when they are making fools of themselves.” They are a people prone to eccentricity but not to massive ideological imprudence, and that is because, again Vansittart: “It is un-British to wonder whether we can afford our eccentricities.”

It is a country with a strategic mindset and an eye for the bigger world picture, with an open-market kind of DNA, a world-class financial industry and global soft power in abundance. It is a country that had receded from an Empire mindset gracefully and had installed itself nicely in the center of that new European thing that needed to be ruled, the European Union. And it is a country that was actually really, really good at doing just that. The European Union as we know it today is arguably more the product of the United Kingdom than it is the product of France or Germany. Nobody quite played the Brussels EU game as good as London did, until now.

Why has a country of this pedigree lost its plot on a story of this magnitude? In that question lies the answer to what it all means at a grander scale. It is not just about the all too relevant drivers listed above. This is about a mindset lost all across Europe. This is about getting used to having it too good. This is about failing to recognize how brittle Europe’s situation already is in a changed world order, and about a misunderstanding of what’s still at stake. This is about strategic frivolity and geopolitical haplessness. This is about feeling insulted by being demoted to global sideshow. This is about cultural (and ethnic) snobbishness colliding with the market forces of Asia, the mobile labor reserves of Africa, and the power of the used-car-dealer brutality of Donald Trump. This is about the inability to recognize that the European Union in Brussels is not a sinister Kraken but a cleaning mechanism, a conflict vaporizer that looks unattractive but helps you get the nasty stuff out of your system by means of that horrible thing, procedurally generated compromise. This is the story of Europeans having enough of the shabby stuff that made them rich and free: bland compromise, bland middle-of-the-road politics, bland summits (and more summits), bland treaties, bland reforms, bland institutions.

And in all of that lies that other factor that cannot be overestimated: the boredom. Nothing explains the meanness of some of the Brexit rhetoric (especially on the Irish question) better than the utter boredom and ennui of its main protagonists. Only boredom and ennui breed callousness of this kind. Stale blandness is not for these folks. Only a great game suffices, the playful banter with other people’s lives and livelihoods. And it needs to sound abstractly principled but be devoid of anything tangible. It needs to be gloriously harsh and it needs to make clear who is rightfully entitled to call the shots. Not only in Britain has upper-class entitlement married well into populist entitlement, forming a grand coalition of those who claim “only we represent the real people.”

Europe has always been a nasty continent politically, if not also in other ways. We had forgotten all about it because we had it so good. Now, with America distracted, with Russia reaching deep into Europe, with the INF Treaty gone and Europe tired of the constitution it gave itself, Europe will not just be nasty—it will also be very much alone with its nastiness.

This can happen very quickly, and all the signs are nicely in place. And then one thing is for sure: Europe will no longer be a boring place. That is perhaps the worst news of all.

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