Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 60

The Left’s Case Against Birthright Citizenship

“On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?” Thus queried Michelle Alexander in Friday’s New York Times, making it quite clear this was rhetorical question:

We are the only nation that advertises itself as “a nation of immigrants” and the “land of the free,” an advertising campaign complete with a Statute of Liberty whose pedestal includes a plaque of a poem that reads in part:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Alexander cites these words in indictment of the “moral quagmire. . . .we’ve created by treating the migration of desperately poor people as a problem that can best be addressed by border walls, tear gas, detention camps, militarized policing and mass deportation”—with one exception, all policies that were pursued under both the Trump and Obama Administrations.

And yes, Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet does “in part” read like a rally cry against such things. . . .but only because Alexander omits the other parts that don’t. Here’s the poem’s full text, absent the usual truncating:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” [Emphasis added.]

As Peter Skerry has explained, Mother of Exiles refers specifically to “victims of anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia”—people who would be considered refugees under current international law. Hence the diasporic language—”refuse,” “homeless”—of Lazarus’s closing peroration: The “ancient lands” she is addressing have already forced some subset of their inhabitants to leave.

By contrast, most undocumented aliens today are migrants who “move not because of a direct threat of persecution or death, but mainly to improve their lives. . . .Unlike refugees who cannot safely return home, migrants face no such impediment to return.” Alexander conflates these groups, implying that there is no moral basis for denying anyone—refugee or immigrant—the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship. But even on Alexander’s cherry-picked evidence, it seems Lady Liberty would beg to differ. Not just because she’s the mother of exiles as opposed to the mother of humanity; not just because she’s welcoming the “wretched,” the “homeless,” the “tempest-tost,” all of whom have special need for a sanctuary; not just because she’s standing besides (checks notes) a literal golden door, which can be opened and closed at will.

No, the main reason this op-ed is incoherent is that it invokes the horrors of statelessness to make what is at core an anti-statist argument. Refugees come into being precisely because they are denied state protection—in the most extreme cases, because they are denied citizenship itself. To be sure, none of the world’s displaced persons ever “earned” the rights, privileges, and opportunities that were eventually taken away from them. Rather, as Alexander puts it, “all of us—no matter where we were born—deserve compassion and basic human rights.” True: But these rights do not float free of existing customs and circumstance; they inhere in particular societies with particular limits—spatial, numerical, cultural—and it is ultimately limits that allow rights to be enforced, compassion to be cultivated.

Thus when Alexander questions the case for limited citizenship (“how can we deny other people something we did not earn ourselves?’), she is really questioning the foundation of everything she claims to value. Financially, open borders would strain our safety net and induce Hobbesian competition within the labor market. Politically, they would polarize our democracy and make efficient governance impossible. And culturally, they would erode the moral consensus and civic fellow-feeling on which our nation, and indeed all nations, depend.

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States. . . .with all of those benefits,” President Trump fumed in October. “It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.” On this, he and Alexander agree.

The post The Left’s Case Against Birthright Citizenship appeared first on The American Interest.

Don’t Play The Russian PR Game

Two recent stories surrounding Russia sanctions—the delisting of the Russian aluminum giant Rusal by Treasury, as well as the re-invitation of three sanctioned Russians to the World Economic Forum in Davos—have led to a minor freak-out among amateur Russia watchers convinced that the Trump Administration has once again folded to Vladimir Putin. Though Trump’s own baffling solicitude towards Putin has justifiably made people suspicious, these two stories are examples of a very different fact of Trump’s time in office: the tenacity of the American bureaucracy to hold a hard line against Russia despite whatever the President might secretly want.

First, to Rusal. On April 6, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added the company to the sanctions list on account of Oleg Deripaska, the real target of the sanctions, being a majority stakeholder. By April 23, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was announcing that Rusal would be temporarily delisted. The reason for the apparent backtrack was that hitting Rusal, the world’s second largest aluminum producer, had sent aluminum prices soaring. Europeans in particular were pleading with the Trump Administration to ease the pain, but the threat to the larger world economy was real.

Rusal was not off the hook, however. As the Atlantic Council’s Brian O’Toole, a former OFAC staffer, explained at the time, this was a standard part of the sanctioning toolkit. To minimize collateral damage, OFAC would often grant these reprieves in order both to give counterparties the opportunity to unwind their deals with the sanctioned company, but also to offer the company a chance to get out from under the sanctions by ridding itself of associations with the actual target.

And that’s precisely what happened: Deripaska’s ownership stake was wound town to under 50 percent, thereby depriving him of control of the company. As O’Toole noted in a recent update, the divestment was done in such a way that Deripaska saw no profits from selling his shares. And the agreement is such that should facts emerge that Deripaska is still somehow controlling or profiting from the enterprise, fresh charges could be brought against Rusal, with no danger of falling afoul of double jeopardy provisions.

As if to underline the point, Treasury reminded investors that Deripaska remains under sanctions, and that “foreign persons will continue to be subject to secondary sanctions should they knowingly facilitate a significant transaction for or on behalf of Deripaska or entities in which he owns a fifty percent or greater interest”. And while it was delisting Rusal, it sanctioned Deripaska’s advisor Viktor Boyarkin, a former GRU officer, for providing Russian financial support to a Montenegrin political party ahead of Montenegro’s 2016 elections.

As David Murray, another former OFAC staffer, wrote, the case was not just important for keeping the heat on Deripaska, but as a proof of concept. “[I]t showed that OFAC could sanction a person whose holdings affect global supply chains for vital industries without capitulating or breaking the global economy.” There is no one who will think themselves “too big to sanction” after this.

True, this is somewhat convoluted stuff, and the major papers didn’t take the bait. But prominent journalists on social media were running with the idea that this was some kind of huge victory for Putin. It emphatically wasn’t. Quite the opposite.

Second, Davos. News broke last week that the organizers of the annual elite confab had decided to give Putin a break and relent in allowing three sanctioned Russians—the aforementioned Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, and Andrei Kostin—to attend this year’s Forum. My dear colleague, one of the most respected Russians of all, Vladimir Kara-Murza called it “a big victory” for the Kremlin in his op-ed in the Washington Post. Kara-Murza argued that initially driven by the fear of secondary sanctions, the organizers changed its mind after a personal chat between Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Swiss President Alain Berset.

It turns out, a very important detail is missing in all of this. The excellent independent Russian news site The Bell, citing Kremlin officials, reported that the Forum organizers stipulated severe preconditions for the invitation to be extended. To wit: no payments by the sanctioned oligarchs with regards to the forum may be made through Americans banks; the Forum would make sure that no U.S. citizen would interact with the sanctioned guests; no American infrastructure could be used by Deripaska, Vekselberg or Kostin during their visit to the Forum, including American cloud services; the Forum managers must not help the three set up any meetings or negotiations; finally, the sanctioned Russians may not attend any panel or event organized by U.S. citizens or authorities.

The story reminded me of an account earlier this year in the New York Times about Mexico’s national soccer team captain, Rafael Márquez, who was blacklisted by Treasury for helping launder drug cartel money ahead of the World Cup tournament in Russia. Being sanctioned prohibited American individuals, businesses, and banks from having anything to do with him. FIFA had to send training money to the team in euros, and in such a way as to avoid the American financial system completely. Rafa did come to Russia but had to live apart from the rest of the team, as he was not allowed to stay in hotels in any way affiliated with American companies. The team’s star couldn’t drink water from branded bottles or give interviews in front of banners with sponsor logos of Visa, Coca-Cola, Budweiser and McDonald’s. And, of course, he could only be interviewed by non-American TV outlets, as American channels were not allowed to interact with the Mexican at all.

To arrange Rafa’s participation in the World Cup, FIFA and the Mexican Football Association had to work closely to obey the letter of Treasury’s rules “We take seriously the actions of the U.S. Treasury Department, and we have structured our World Cup operations so as not to violate U.S. sanctions laws,” FIFA told the Times.

The trip to Davos for the three sanctioned Russians is likely to be ignominious. They will be radioactive there. One can almost imagine American business leaders running into the Russians in a hallway and turning the other way to beat a hasty retreat rather than inadvertently interacting with sanctioned individuals. As the Bell wryly notes, if you strictly abide by the rules, there’s little point in going.

And yet, more than likely, the three will go to Davos, for no other reason than PR. Vladimir Putin is very good at these dark arts. More than likely, the thing is being pushed through because Putin knows that Western heads will explode at the “concession” being offered, and he will be named the winner by a press that’s sure that Putin is much more dexterous and capable than he is.

We shouldn’t play into his hands. I would be the last person to give President Trump himself the benefit of the doubt on Russia policy after everything we have seen so far. But that doesn’t excuse rushing to conclusions. Not everything is a sell-out by Trump; sometimes, the real story is that the U.S. government is in fact doing its job very well. Both the Rusal story and the Davos story are cases of the sanctions policy working as intended. Putin is not winning.

A meme appeared in Russia right after Putin started his military campaign in Syria. The motivation behind it was the set of ridiculous, suicidal responses the Russian government had undertaken in response to Western sanctions, such as banning food imports from Europe, the U.S. and Argentina. The meme features a photo of an imperious-looking Putin; the text reads: “If NATO invades Syria, we will start bombing Voronezh!” (Voronezh is a perpetually poor, provincial Russian city.)

The U.S. press had best try to avoid “bombing its own Voronezh”. It’s no way to win a war.

The post Don’t Play The Russian PR Game appeared first on The American Interest.

Leaving Syria

“History is irony in motion,” wrote E.M. Cioran in his 1949 book A History of Decay. So could the seemingly unanimous verdict of the chatterati and the professional staffs of both the Departments of State and Defense that President Trump’s abrupt decision to pull U.S. military forces from Syria is a mistake be itself a mistake? It it possible, in other words, that President Trump’s decision to remove U.S. forces from Syria will turn out to be a good idea, even if for reasons the President doesn’t understand and can’t possibly be responsible for anticipating?

Before attempting an answer, it is worth our while to review very briefly the arguments made by the distributed system of groupthink that we have witnessed over the past few days. 

Chatterati Groupthink

The main argument is that it is a mistake to think that ISIS has been defeated just because the last town that it held has been liberated. Yesterday’s New York Times made a pretty big deal, on the front page above the fold, of analogizing Trump’s declaration of victory with Obama’s decision to remove troops prematurely from Iraq. There was no mention there of George W. Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” disaster; one supposes that this is a dot much too old to bother connecting in these days of technology-induced memory disorder.

An even older dot makes the same general point: The United States essentially scuttled its army in Europe after the end of World War II, only to have to reinsert very substantial military force into Europe soon thereafter. This is what Americans do, with their very stark Manichean black-and-white way of thinking about war and peace: It is either one or the other, and can never be shades of both at the same time. We don’t do nuance, because nuance has no place in a passion play—which our faith-based way of thinking about foreign policy infuses into every common-man narrative. And Donald Trump epitomizes the common mind, at least in this sense.

No, of course ISIS is not sustainably defeated. Estimates run from about 12,000 to 14,000 fighters and supporters on the ground in Syria and Iraq. Losing its territorial dimension certainly hurts ISIS in terms of reputation and recruiting capability. It also lost a lot of people. But it is capable of recouping territory in a relative vacuum at least temporarily by using swarm techniques, and it is certainly capable of wreaking terrorist havoc all through the Middle East and Europe. Doctors tell you to take all of the antibiotics in a prescription even if you’re feeling better, and they’re right. The same thing applies to rooting out terrorist organizations: You have to finish the medicine, in this case dishing it out instead of taking it yourself.

The second argument is that leaving Syria creates a situation in which Iran and Russia will dominate the political and the military realities of the place, respectively. The argument goes that we have to have “skin in the game,” in the form of military power, in order to gain a place at the table when it comes time to think about a political settlement to the civil war. Beyond that, if the White House means what it says about getting tough with Iran, then leaving the playing field clearly contradicts that objective. The same goes in a slightly different, less direct, way with Russia. If we want to deter the Russians from further mucking about in Eastern Europe, we don’t contribute to that effort by buckling at the knees in the Levant.

But of course contradiction is one of the things that this President does best. On Wednesday he tweeted that we had won in Syria: ISIS is defeated. Less than 24 hours later he tweeted that the Russians, Iranians, and Syrians were upset by his decision because now they would have to fight against ISIS without us. Even a nine-year-old can detect the surreality in this pair of remarks. But of course a narcissist with the attention span of a ferret on speed can’t.

The third argument of the common wisdom is that the decision to leave Syria jeopardizes Israeli equities, and also those of Jordan and Lebanon—all three countries being affected by the centrifugal collateral damage of the civil war. Great powers are basically in the protection business. A slightly less crude way to put it is that local allies are reassured to know that a great power patron has their back in case their security liabilities grow beyond their capacity to manage them. That reassurance frees them to take useful risks than can redound to the advantage of the greater power. The absence of that reassurance does not necessarily mitigate any risk-taking; it can just as easily result in their taking excessive or foolish risks in the panic-driven interest of self-help (think the origins of recent Saudi policy in Yemen). These non-kinetic elements of alliance relationships go far to define how they actually work, but these elements are matters of nuance, and this very American President doesn’t do nuance. He does not understand the concept of non-zero sum relationships, of which alliances are a prime example.

The fourth argument is less a directly strategic one than a moral one, namely that leaving creates a massive vulnerability for the Kurdish allies who have helped destroy ISIS on the ground. It seems improbable, but the fact is that just 2,000 U.S. ground forces have managed, along with the Kurds and, of course, a formidable canopy of U.S. air power, to control about 40 percent of Syrian territory. That 40 percent is sparsely populated, true, but a look at a map shows that it is not of trivial strategic significance. It is not yet clear if the air power canopy will be withdrawn along with the 2,000 troops, but if it is, then the Syrian Kurdish militias will likely be toast before any onslaught of Turkish military power.

If that happens, it ought to be about as surprising to Kurds as wind damage in a storm. All sentient adult Kurds know that in 1975 and then again in 1991 U.S. policy betrayed Kurdish allies. There were even a few minor episodes of betrayal in between these two major ones. Why any Kurdish patriot should ever again trust a promise made by an American government I cannot imagine.

Those are the four major arguments as to why President Trump’s decision is a mistake. A few other common observations decorate these arguments, however. One is that the decision suggests the waning of Defense Secretary Mattis’s influence over the White House. That suspicion has been quickly validated by Mattis’s letter of resignation. Chatterati groupthink doesn’t like that; no sentient person should like that. But it also suggests the ultimate inability of National Security Advisor John Bolton to control the President’s judgment on key foreign policy issues. Chatterati groupthink can’t make up its mind what it thinks about that. It has admired Mattis but disparaged Bolton. But now that Mattis is leaving, it is this latter matter that may be the most frightening. It’s come down to that.

The other decorative observation is that what has happened shows the almost complete lack of a coherent policy process in the foreign policy domain of this Administration. Now, we like to think that policy outcomes are likely to be improved when the process that produces decisions enhances rationality and deliberation. And that’s generally true. But sometimes the system works and the policy fails anyway—that being the theme of the justly famous book by Richard Betts and Les Gelb on The Irony of Vietnam. And sometimes the system fails and the policy succeeds anyway. That can be because the President actually knows better than the blob-like bureaucracy, the abiding assumption of President Obama. Or it can be more like a Mr. Magoo episode: For example, President Trump’s trade war against China almost certainly did not include an intention to shift supply chains away from China; but that is one of the policy’s side effects so far, and it is both a non-trivial and, in general, a good thing.

Either way, there is no question that the decision-making process in the Trump Administration remains anything but tightly wrapped, at least most of the time. There were no reported NSC Principal Committee meetings between April and July, and PC meetings since July have been few. And those followed a highly unusual written complaint by the Secretary of Defense that NSA Bolton’s cards-close-to-chest methods were staggering the government with self-inflicted opacity. Allies didn’t know what the policy was because most members of the Administration, even at senior levels, didn’t know what it was either.

Alas, not much has changed, except that this time it appears that even Bolton has had to wear the blindfold and earplugs. The President has once again exhibited the monkey-in-the-machine-room phenomenon, which I predicted even before the Inauguration.

This particular antic has been a bit less surprising than most others, for the simple reason that the President sought to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria a few months ago, only apparently to be talked out of it by his senior advisers. That has probably contributed to the tight character of the groupthink this time around, simply because everyone remembers the earlier incident and so is well rehearsed for its second coming.

But Is It True?

Is the almost universal condemnation of the President’s decision justified? Without even trying to be witty, Dean Acheson once said that “things are not always as they seem, but sometimes they are.” This is probably one of those occasions when they are.

I tend to credit the critique; I can hardly do otherwise, since I have made all these arguments and kindred others besides for nearly the past seven years as regards Syria. I argued during the first year of the civil war that benign neglect was going to be anything but benign. I urged consideration of using U.S. military power to influence battlefield dynamics at certain pregnant points in the fight, and of coordinating the use of Turkish power to similar ends. I made as clear as possible my view that Iran was a bigger and longer-term problem than ISIS, and that Iranian-driven sectarian-motivated ambition was the catalyst for the rise of ISIS in the face of the passivity and fecklessness of the Sunni Arab states. Obvious conclusion: If we want to get rid of ISIS we must treat the source of its origin—Iranian policy as manifested in the Syrian cauldron.

So when President Trump claims that U.S. troops were in the region just to fight ISIS, and not to “play” on the slippery slopes of Syria’s militarized misery, he is repeating the body language if not the exact words of the Obama Administration. But this was always a delusion. One cannot affect the position of a shadow by doing things to the shadow, and ISIS was and remains the shadow of the core reality in Syria, which is a Shi‘a sectarian onslaught against the majority civilian Sunni population of the Levant, and which in Syria has taken on characteristics of migratory genocide. ISIS or likeminded successors cannot be sustainably defeated or prevented unless and until their raison d’être is removed.

If one were to judge merely from the evidence before us, the Trump Administration acknowledges the severity of the Iranian threat, but seems to think that it can handle it best by means of economic sanctions. This is reminiscent of the Democratic fantasy after August 1990 that the best way to get the Iraqi army out of Kuwait was to “let sanctions work.” Kuwait would today be the 19th province of Iraq had that advice been taken. Trump doesn’t think that the pen is mightier than the sword, as Edward Bulwer-Lytton put it in his 1839 play Richelieu: Or the Conspiracy, but that the trade dollar is mightier than the sword. (Ha, and you thought mercantilist thinking went the way of the dodo centuries ago.) Sanctions will not moderate Iranian foreign policy in the region unless a sanctions regime becomes regime threatening, and sanctions cannot bite that hard even were U.S. relations with its allies much better than they are now. Trump’s misalignment of policy intentions with policy means reminds us of the Obama Administration’s presumption that it could demand that Assad “step aside” and thus position itself on the “right side of history” without having to do anything to operationalize its demand. And both postures remind of Walter Lippmann’s maxim that if you will the end you must will the means—and his warning about what happens when you don’t.

The removal of U.S. troops from Syria, especially if the air canopy is removed with them, will encourage the Syrian and Iranian regimes in their murderous ways, and it will tell the Russian government all it needs to know about U.S. verve generally. It will indeed discomfit the Israelis some, the Jordanians more, and although Lebanon does not share a partnership relations with the United States as do Israel and Jordan, it will smother longer-term hope of freeing its political system from the plague of Hezbollah. It might even deflate the hopes of Iraqi Sunnis, as well, who have looked upon all residual U.S. military presence in the region as a token of a commitment not to let the Shi‘a-dominated government in Baghdad run amok with sectarian hubris.

All that granted, the common wisdom has its flaws, exaggerations, and omissions. First, a flaw.

If “skin in the game” means an ante that gets the U.S. government a seat at the table in some future negotiation over post-Assad Syria, then 2,000 soldiers parked out in the middle of the desert east of the Euphrates is not a remotely serious number. Worse, the assumption that there eventually has to be a negotiation of that sort is simply wrong. The Syrian regime, with its Russian and Iranian allies, means to win the war, not discuss it with its adversaries. Its notion of a negotiation is a diktat following a surrender. Anyone who doesn’t get that by now really ought to be opining on less Hobbesian matters, like Brexit and other such ennui-inducing subjects.

Second, an exaggeration. The presumption that just 2,000 U.S. soldiers amount to “skin in the game” in any actual military sense is a vast exaggeration. The earlier posture, that U.S. soldiers would not leave Syria until other foreign forces, including pointedly Iranian al-Quds units and Iranian-supported Shi’a militias imported from other countries, also left was something of a bluff. Just 2,000 troops have worked to secure a sparsely populated corner of Syria in partnership with Syrian Kurdish forces, but no one ever explained how such a small force was supposed to leverage other foreign forces out of the country in places where Kurdish power is much less relevant. A force of that size can work well militarily in a limited area for limited purposes, and it can be a symbol of a potentially larger commitment. But otherwise it is a number suitable only for taking shock casualties, not for fighting serious forces or coercing them into doing things their masters do not wish them to do.

And third, an omission: The conventional wisdom sharply discounts the implications of a clash between U.S. and Turkish military forces.

It could well be that when the full background to the President’s decision emerges, private discussions between United States and Turkey will be seen to have played a large role in the outcome. It has been no secret that the Turkish government has been planning an incursion into the Kurdish sections of Syria. That would have placed U.S. troops squarely between an enmity composed of two allies: a NATO ally and a non-state ally of convenience.

Now, there are those who believe that the U.S.-Turkish bilateral relationship is essentially dead and gone for all practical purposes, so that there would be rather little left to lose even should U.S. and Turkish troops start shooting at each other. This is a very shortsighted attitude. It is never a good idea to equate a person with a nation, or a bilateral relationship dominated by a personality with the longer-term benefits and quality of that relationship. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will one day pass the way of all mortals—God be praised. And then things will look different.

That does not mean that Turkish politics will return to the Kemalist Six Arrows norm of the pre-AK Party era, for Turkish society has changed. Specifically, a large chunk of Turkish society has entered the maw of modernity, which, contrary to the flawed imagination of Western modernization theorists of the century past, has made the society as a whole less secular if objectively more pluralist and even modular. But what comes after Erdoğan will offer an opportunity for the natural coincidence of geostrategic interests between Turkey and the United States to reassert itself. It would therefore be very foolish to dismiss the longer-term legacy of a military dustup in northeastern Syria.

Inherited Mistakes

And that brings us to a point that has largely been overlooked in the commentary of recent days: The context that has given rise to the decision point under discussion formed during the Obama Administration. Specifically, the Obama Administration made three key mistakes that shaped the problem that President Trump’s decision presumably hopes to solve. Let’s take them in turn.

First, as already noted, the idea that it was possible to fight ISIS successfully without really tackling the mess in Syria was delusional. When the U.S. military begin to bomb ISIS after the telegenic beheading of two American journalists, the question was, “where is the strategy that tells us what this bombing is supposed to achieve?” We never got an answer. And in the absence of a strategy that made sense for the actual problem set, properly defined, it seemed to me that the bombing could turn out to be counterproductive.

It was always difficult for Americans to understand how the members of ISIS understood what was happening at the time, because Americans have difficulty in general crediting the genuine otherness of the other. But let’s just start with some facts.

When the U.S. bombing began, ISIS had not attacked the United States, nor had it threatened to do so. It not unnaturally assumed that the two journalists it had captured inside its territory of control were spies. That is how tribal people with a keen sense of in-group/out-group distinctions tend to think. From their point of view, a foreign tribe with no interests or claim in the territory under dispute then attacked it from afar without provocation. ISIS leaders did not comprehend how the execution of two spies, amid so very many executions for various and sundry reasons, could possibly justify the aggression of the greatest military power on earth against them. So they reasoned that somehow the United States (and Israel) had to be secretly in league with their Shi‘a enemies.

We will never know for sure, but the U.S. bombing, which began on September 22, 2014, probably helped ISIS by stimulating recruitment and burnishing its image in the Sunni world as a noble fighting force against American imperialism. My own sense at the time was that the decision was a rushed one designed mainly to respond politically to the two highly telegenic beheadings. Since no actual coherent strategic rationale for the bombing ever emerged, my initial impression has not changed.

Second, an earlier error, already mentioned as well, set the stage for the one just described: the decision to avoid any engagement in the Syrian civil war. Maybe one day archives and memoirs will clear up the matter, but in my view the decision not to engage turned on three interrelated factors: the belief that Assad would fall anyway; the centrality of normalizing relations with Iran via a nuclear deal, which in the President’s mind obviated any pressure against the Assad regime; and the view that the revolt against Assad was a bad thing that should not be encouraged. This latter factor deserves a bit of elaboration.

The President and other White House decision-makers worried during late 2011 and into 2012 that any arms supplied to the Free Syrian Army might end up in the hands of terrorists. They were transfixed by the supposed mistake of having given arms to the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, the supposed origin of al-Qaeda (alas, not true). They also worried that giving support would eventually pull the United States into a combat role, and here the historical analogy was Vietnam—the President’s seminal experience. And getting involved in another Middle Eastern war was the last thing that Barack Obama wanted to do. At the time, remember, he was already smarting from the decision to go to war in Libya in March 2011, which he made most reluctantly and which had not proceeded as cleanly or as quickly as he had been led to expect.

It was in that context that the FSA rebellion against the Assad regime posed a problem: If it seemed to hold the promise of overthrowing Assad, pressure would build for the Administration to help it, which it did not really want to do. Some also predicted that a robust rebellion would end up drawing more Iranian and Russian power and influence into Syria, as in fact happened. There was besides a higher-order question: Were any vital American interests involved in the political future of Syria, and if not, why risk involvement in an open-ended escalation?

So the Administration pretended to help the FSA with a Potemkin Village-like training program that ended up qualifying only a tiny number of soldiers for a huge amount of money. The brass ring it cared about was bringing the Iranian regime “in from the cold,” and any Syria involvement was viewed as running contrary to that aim.

Some Administration policymakers believed, too, that if the U.S. government did not encourage the rebellion, it would not congeal. But they radically underestimated the power of the Assad regime’s murderous ways to spark the rebellion no matter what the U.S. government did, and hence they underestimated the likelihood of that rebellion’s Islamist radicalization over time. Had the Administration aided the rebellion robustly early on, it stood a chance of making it successful and of heading off radicalization over a protracted period.

Granted, any decision with respect to Syria was bound to be very hard. Nevertheless, the Obama White House underestimated what the cost of passivity was likely to be. The longer the war went on the more likely that it would militarize the country’s sectarian makeup beyond hope of reconciliation, radicalize the opposition, draw in external parties, and lead to mass murder on a scale not seen since World War II. All of this was predicted at the time inside and outside of government (not that it matters, but even by me). But the President did not credit the analysis.

The third error, the one key to the present moment, was to rely on a proxy militia to deal with ISIS after it had become clear that air power alone would be unable to do the job. One option was to try to organize the key Sunni Arab states to do the ground fighting by establishing an expeditionary force from their regular armies. There is no evidence that this option was ever seriously considered; instead, the Saudis and the Emiratis elected to fight a war to their west, in Yemen, which instead of meeting and deterring Iranian power in Yemen only encouraged and attracted more of it. The best option would have been to use the U.S. military itself.

Consider that the order of battle in the Syrian civil war at every level may be fairly described as unimpressive, certainly in comparison to what the U.S. military can do. We are talking about relatively small numbers of soldiers with relatively ineffectual equipment and substandard training. Quite possibly the LAPD, suitably armed and motivated, could have taken care of the Islamic State, such as it was. For U.S. Army Rangers or Marines the task would have been fairly easy. It would also have been quick, and arguably that might have headed off a number of ISIS terrorist attacks in Europe. Had U.S. ground forces been used, and Kurdish militias relegated to a minor rear-echelon role, we would not have faced the dilemma of having to choose between two allies. But President Obama elected a “cheap hawk” option, to borrow a term from Newt Gingrich, and cheap hawkery usually delivers the worst of all worlds: a reputation for cowardice combined with a less-than-satisfying battlefield outcome.

When a Decision is Not a Decision

Last I heard, both the State Department and the Pentagon still hold out hope of either slow-rolling or reversing the President’s decision. After all, that worked a few months ago. And as already indicated, we don’t know if the withdrawal order includes the air canopy. If it does, our Kurdish allies are toast. If it doesn’t, then the prospect of a U.S.-Turkish clash remains, just not a clash on the ground. So some salient uncertainties remain at this early point in the drama.

My guess is that President Trump’s main motive is political, as with virtually all of the foreign policy decisions he makes. He wants to boast that he defeated the terrorists, and he wants to play to the deeply isolationist impulse among his core base by “bringing home the troops.” Next in that regard, we have just gotten word, is Afghanistan. George McGovern would be proud, and mistaken. But of course he would also be disgusted, and correct.

We like to say in situations like this that “what’s done is done.” But in this Administration what’s done isn’t necessarily done. It’s usually just half-baked, and sometimes it’s altogether raw. We cannot rule out, as well, the possibility of burnt to a crisp. I suppose we’re bound to find out what’s really on this particular menu—crow or champagne. Don’t touch that dial.

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Wiseman in the Heartland

Monrovia, Indiana

Directed by Frederick Wiseman

Zipporah Films (2018), 143 minutes

When the title of 88-year-old documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s newest movie, Monrovia, Indiana, was announced earlier this year, it was greeted with some predictable assumptions on the part of his admirers in the world of film. After spending this decade shooting movies in cities that double as bastions of art, politics, and culture—Paris, New York, London, Berkeley—it seemed that Wiseman, in turning his attention to the American heartland, was now ready to take on one of his most overtly political subjects yet. In other words, many thought, this was going to be Wiseman’s movie about Trump’s America.

In reality, the subject of Wiseman’s latest film is the same one that has preoccupied him since he started making movies 50 years ago: human behavior, in all of its forms, and the institutions that place limitations on it wherever two or three or three thousand of us are gathered. It was to my great relief to read after Monrovia’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival this fall that not once does Wiseman’s movie make reference to Trump, or whether or not anyone in the film would call themselves a Trump supporter. There’s a brief cutaway shot to a comely Morgan County Republican Party booth at a street festival, and that’s all you get.

As Wiseman tells it, Monrovia became the object of his fascination much more serendipitously. A friend introduced him to a University of Indiana law professor with six generations of history in Monrovia. Wiseman, interested in the idea of making a movie about the Midwest and already in the area to screen some of his movies in Bloomington, met the professor’s cousin—an undertaker who knew everybody in Monrovia, as “everybody was a potential client”—and soon after got to work.

Monrovia, like all of Wiseman’s movies, is constructed from observational shots of people and places more or less as Wiseman found them. Wiseman adheres to a rigorous filmmaking ethic. Recognizing that his perspective as a filmmaker while on location will necessarily be subjective, he assembles scenes in the editing room to preserve as best he can what he judges to be the atmosphere of the place he was filming. Since he conducts no scripted interviews and uses no B-roll footage that was not filmed during the shoot, Wiseman’s editorializing only emerges in edits and juxtapositions between scenes.

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Frederick Wiseman, photograph by John Ewing (Courtesy of Zipporah Films)

Starting with a series of establishing shots of saturated blue skies over tranquil pastures and a sound mix of gentle interruptions—squealing livestock, wind rustling the grass, a distant car—Wiseman cuts to a Bible study at one of the town’s two churches (more on the second one later). The leader of this class of a half-dozen middle-aged participants is talking about tribulation. “God provides for our care in tribulations,” he says before asking, “is [tribulation] a single event in time and space, or something that will be with us our entire lives?” An odd question to pose of a place that seems, on the surface, quite placid.

If there’s much tribulation besetting Monrovia, Wiseman prefers to imply it indirectly, showing us as much of the caregivers and institutions that are trying to sustain this community through its collective ills as the ills themselves. A few signs of brokenness and pain stand out, like the population’s trend toward obesity and a local cuisine that’s uncomfortably far removed from its supply chain, given how easily one might expect a community of this size (1,036 people as of the 2010 U.S. census) to be able to feed itself on local farming practices. Some poor dog is subject to a rather excruciating tail surgery at the local veterinary clinic; an audience of parents and friends is subject to the differently painful trial of enduring a mediocre high school band performance of a medley of television sitcom theme songs. There’s a brief cutaway to a shot of a polluted waterway; seems like somebody might want to do something about that.

As for the structures that are sustaining the community through its trials both petty and grievous, we visit a main street diner where seniors citizens gather to chat about their health ailments and recent medical procedures over coffee and unappetizing fare. We pay a quick visit to a Crossfit session at a makeshift gym that someone has set up in their garage. We even get to pull back the curtain on the local chapter of the Freemasons, who are performing (with some uncertainty and much fumbling of lines) a rite to honor one of the elders of their community for 50 years of service.

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Courtesy of Zipporah Films

Wiseman returns most frequently to a town hall meeting with representatives of local government and a small audience of community members. These are the architects of the community (when convening their meeting, they invoke the “grand architect of the universe”), and they struggle to reach a consensus on the future of Monrovia. One contingent thinks the town ought to prioritize population growth: build more housing, more people will move in, and business will follow. Another counters that business should come first to attract anyone to move to Monrovia in the first place. And then there’s the holdout, the woman who opposes increasing the town’s population at all. You wouldn’t want to change the character of Monrovia by inviting outsiders in, now would you?

The obvious implication of this attitude is that getting comfortable with the status quo in Monrovia will lead to nothing except the community’s eventual demise. (One critic on social media pointed out that Wiseman cuts from this woman’s pitch for not doing anything at all to the embers of a dying fire.) Yet it isn’t so much the lack of young blood or fresh ideas that poses a threat to Monrovia’s future as the decaying understanding across the community of why it has the traditions it does, and how to maintain them. Or, in some cases, what the point of passing on tradition is in the first place.

An earlier scene takes us to a high school classroom where a teacher is droning on about how basketball player Branch McCracken, born in Monrovia, would dedicate high school gymnasiums around the county after achieving hoops stardom in the NCAA (we get a cutaway to the Branch McCracken Memorial Gymnasium some 20 minutes later). I’m all for knowing the history of your community, but an English classroom—where, as Wiseman clarified to an audience member at the New York Film Festival, this scene was shot—seems like the wrong time and place for telling this particular history. (To judge by the stares of the bored onlookers Wiseman cuts to across the room, the students would agree.)

In Monrovia’s houses of worship, too, those in charge seem to be losing the thread. The movie ends on a prolonged funeral at the larger of Monrovia’s two churches. The pastor delivers a gratingly sunny sermon, heaping praise upon praise on the deceased in remembrance of all the good she did in life. As the preacher rattled on, I started to wonder if he wasn’t actually trying to assuage his own fears of the unknown. In any case, he seems so preoccupied with whitewashing suffering and the inevitability of death through the power of positivity that he doesn’t leave much room for God to factor into death and the hope of life to come.

Should this be Wiseman’s final film, as some have suggested, this funeral scene—topped off by a burial, a teary round of “Amazing Grace,” and an abrupt sequence of shots of dirt getting dumptrucked over the grave—would complete a circle that Wiseman began in his first, 1967’s Titicut Follies. Toward the end of that film, inmates from Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts attend the burial of a fellow patient who died, the film’s editing leads us to assume, after a horrifically routinized episode of torture by feeding tube. The priest presiding is the opposite of Monrovia’s resident preacher: once the casket has been lowered his only words, brusque and grim, are, “remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return. That’s all.”

Titicut Follies, like Monrovia, Indiana, depicts a system operating more or less as it always has, with most of its constituents going about their lives without asking questions of or thinking too hard about the established order of the community. The unethical treatment of patients in Titicut Follies was obvious (“you’d have to be an absolute idiot to make a film about Bridgewater as it was in 1966 and not show how horrible it is,” Wiseman says in an interview this year), but Wiseman doesn’t consider that film or any of his others to be intentional exposés.

For many viewers, the urge to treat Monrovia, Indiana as documentation of a certain kind of American voter’s way of life will be strong, but it should be resisted. If the folly and imperfect attempts at governance, education, town planning, farming, and spiritual care on display in this movie reveal anything about the residents of Monrovia, they do so insofar as they are human, not insofar as they are Monrovians. We would do well to use this movie to reflect on our own failings and not to judge the lives of others. Wiseman’s consistent, ethical, and provocative filmmaking enjoins us to do precisely that.

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Maria Butina and the Mortal Threat to Liberal Democracy

Like it or not, we are engaged in a long-term conflict with Russia. It has aptly been labeled the Hybrid War, and its principal novelty is radical asymmetry. Notwithstanding the frantic commentary one often hears on both sides, an Armageddon-like military conflagration is improbable. We are unlikely to see either a Russian blitzkrieg against the Baltic States or a NATO carrier group steaming into the Black Sea to bombard Sochi, Novorossiysk, and Rostov. Neither does the Hybrid War portend nuclear winter as an unintended prophylaxis against global warming. While the Kremlin’s propaganda image of Russia as a besieged fortress is overblown, the metaphor is entirely apposite. The Hybrid War will be a lengthy standoff, perhaps decades in duration, that principally involves probing and exploiting the opponent’s economic, political, and societal weaknesses. There will be no knockout blow, and unconditional surrender is neither required nor sought; it will be quite sufficient simply to outlast the other side until it tires of the conflict and backs down. There are Russian medals from World War I bearing the Bible verse “He who endures to the end will be saved.” It would be an eminently fitting motto for the Hybrid War.

Asymmetry is the key to both understanding and winning the Hybrid War. For example, Russia has been tormenting various recalcitrant neighbors because it can do so with impunity. More or less at will, the Russians can harass Ukrainian shipping on the Sea of Azov or surreptitiously move forward the fences that mark their zone of occupation in Georgia, nibbling away at Georgian territory a few bites at a time. Russia enjoys unchallenged predominance in these two areas, and neither Russia’s neighbors nor the West can challenge Russia there directly. Therefore, if we ultimately want to avoid seeing Ukraine’s Black Sea ports blockaded and the Russian occupation of Georgia stretch to the suburbs of Tbilisi, we need to respond indirectly—by seeking the pressure points where Russia itself is vulnerable.

In any event, it would be senseless, by and large, for either side in the Hybrid War to act with strict mirror-image reciprocity. There is no point in the West trying to blanket the Russian internet with incendiary political messages or blogs written in stilted Russian by geeky teenage Western trolls. Neither should we prepare a polonium tea party for Edward Snowden. And Moscow, insofar as it has threatened possible countersanctions against Western companies, has only succeeded in increasing the perceived political risk to foreigners in doing business in Russia, thereby further discouraging investment.

Indeed, the disparity in economic power is arguably Russia’s greatest vulnerability in the Hybrid War. Globally, Russian-style crony capitalism has many practitioners, but few ideologically committed devotees. Compelled to choose between doing business with the West or with Russia, most economic actors, both state and private, would choose the former. Moreover, to a degree scarcely imagined by most Russians, their country’s robust economic growth from 2000-08 was predicated on Western trade, financing, and investment. The withholding of these benefits will not cause a near-term Russian economic meltdown, but it will hurt, and the cumulative pain will only grow more acute with time.

It is quite possible to survive for a long time in a besieged fortress—but it’s not a lot of fun. A decade or so of economic stagnation while the rest of the world generally prospers just might induce the inhabitants of the fortress to decide that survival, after all, is not enough, and that it behooves them to reach a modus vivendi with their neighbors.

I have therefore been a strong supporter of sanctions against Russia since 2014. Above all, the sanctions regime must, as the saying goes, combine strategic certainty with operational surprise. The Russians need to be convinced that the sanctions will not be lifted until Moscow has concluded mutually acceptable settlements with its aggrieved neighbors. In addition, the West should always have additional arrows in its sanctions quiver, both as a deterrent to further misbehavior and for use tactically to wrong-foot the Kremlin from time to time as appropriate.

Those who argue that sanctions “haven’t worked” simply haven’t grasped the nature of the Hybrid War. Sanctions are not a quick fix, but the central element in a long-term, asymmetrical strategy for dealing with the challenges that an irredentist Russia poses to European security.

It is in the context of sanctions that people might usefully ponder the recent Statement of Offense against Maria Butina compiled by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

Much of the American press has proclaimed Butina a Russian spy and an agent of the Kremlin. A seductive Mata Hari on par with the notorious Anna Chapman, Butina leveraged her history as a gun-rights advocate in Russia to insinuate herself into the National Rifle Association, there to build contacts and presumably subvert American foreign policy and democracy. One can readily visualize Butina using a copy of the U.S. Constitution for her target practice.

In fact, the Statement of Offense says nothing about espionage; rather, her crime was conspiracy to avoid registering as a foreign agent. Her patron in Russia and alleged co-conspirator, Aleksandr Torshin, was a longtime Russian legislator and recently retired as a Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Russia. While he is alleged to have links to organized crime, he is not known to have intelligence connections, is not a Kremlin insider, and is not an oligarch.

Moreover, it is clear that Butina is no Anna Chapman. Her interest in guns dates back to 2011, and her studies in the United States (she is in the country on a student visa) are by all accounts genuine, not a cover. All of her communications and activities were evidently conducted completely in the open; there were no secret codes, false identities, surreptitious meetings, dead drops, or other elements of spycraft.

What were the policy goals that Butina hoped to achieve by infiltrating the NRA? What changes in U.S. policy did she hope to secure? The Statement of Offense is strangely silent on this rather crucial point. However, much of the media has highlighted the fact that Butina posed a question on Russia sanctions to candidate Donald Trump at a campaign event in July 2015, and sanctions relief is generally assumed to have been high on her agenda.

Butina has reportedly agreed to cooperate with investigators, so further revelations remain a possibility. Perhaps she will divulge that hobnobbing with NRA types along with Torshin was not their personal pet project but was in fact directed by “higher authorities” with a specific nefarious goal in mind. Perhaps she will have something to say regarding the long-standing accusations that the Russians used the NRA to funnel money to the Trump campaign.

But perhaps not. What if Butina turns out to be, in fact, just a vivacious young Russian gun enthusiast intoxicated by the ego boost from moving in circles wealthier and more influential than she could possibly have dreamed of in her Siberian childhood? What if she self-importantly fancied herself a shaker and mover in establishing “unofficial channels” between Russians and Americans in the long tradition of “citizen diplomacy?”

In the latter case, the decision to treat Butina’s activities as illicit lobbying rather than ordinary networking and run-of-the-mill self-promotion has potentially far-reaching consequences. Given the current tension in U.S.-Russian relations and the paucity of official contacts, there has been an interest in encouraging some modicum of bilateral dialogue by reviving Cold-War-era Track-II diplomacy involving non-official contacts and activities among private citizens of the two countries. The Butina case can only send an icy chill through such efforts. Many of Butina’s activities described in the Statement of Offense—organizing “friendship dinners,” arranging for delegations to visit one another’s countries, participation in various conferences and conventions—fall squarely within traditional Track-II diplomacy. The Statement’s allegation that “Butina sought to establish unofficial lines of communication with Americans having power and influence in U.S. politics … for the benefit of the Russian Federation” could easily describe the efforts of any Russian citizen engaged in Track-II diplomacy and making an honest intellectual case for a change in U.S. policy. How many Russians would consider participating in Track-II diplomacy with the apprehension that they could potentially face criminal charges for unregistered lobbying on behalf of a foreign power?

But it gets worse. Any American arguing for sanctions relief could, by the logic of the Butina Statement of Offense, be construed as an unregistered lobbyist “for the benefit of the Russian Federation.” And if that American has discussed his thinking with a Russian friend or contact, then we would have prima facie evidence of a conspiracy. Perhaps the prosecutor could throw in a charge of violating the Logan Act for good measure.

In the Hybrid War, overkill appears to be less of a danger in the nuclear realm than on the civil liberties front. Personally, I am quite prepared to debate logically and on a level playing field with American critics of Russia sanctions. I neither need nor want the U.S. criminal justice system to muzzle my adversaries for me.

Desperate times, we are told, call for desperate measures. In the 1950s the West faced an existential threat from Soviet Communism, which had rapidly industrialized a backward, agrarian country and whose fatal economic shortcomings were not yet undeniably obvious. Soviet propagandists were having a field day with America’s institutionalized racism and the colonial policies of our European allies. The Communist Party, directed from the Kremlin, was a mass movement in many parts of Europe. In our own country millions of people, radicalized by racial injustice and the economic hardships of the Depression, had gravitated toward Communism during at least some period of their lives. The overreaction to this very genuine menace was McCarthyism—the search for Communists under every bed, guilt by association, and the blaming of unrest on outside agitators.

By contrast, our faceoff with the Russians in the Hybrid War is of a qualitatively different kind. Alarmists warn that democracy itself is in danger, but it is risible to suppose that the Kremlin’s aim is to replace America’s free-market democracy with its own kleptocratic authoritarianism. The Russians are happy to exploit our divisions, but they really could not care less what system of government we have—as long as we don’t try to spread it to their “sphere of privileged interests.” While we no longer search under beds for Communists, we are quick to espy a Russian hand in all sorts of unsettling events—Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the push for Catalonia’s independence, France’s recent gilets jaunes disturbances—where Russian causality is by no means intuitive or self-evident.

Will American (and Western) elites confront the root causes of widespread popular anger in many democratic countries, or will we continue to get a threadbare 21st-century version of the old “outside agitators” excuse, with Butina held up as a supposedly frightening example of the lengths to which Moscow is prepared to go to infiltrate and destroy our institutions?

If American democracy is so endangered by the likes of Maria Butina that we must come down on her with the full force of the law in order to save it, then the situation is evidently very much grimmer than I would ever have imagined.

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Making the Case for Tibet

Forty-nine days of Tibetan Buddhist rites for Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari ended this past Monday, December 17 in a monastery in Dehradun, India. Lodi, who died on October 29, was a public servant of Tibet, a country denied its sovereignty, and an envoy of the Dalai Lama, regarded by Tibetans as the 14th reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Lodi’s unique and daunting mandate was to build support for Tibet in the United States and to represent the Dalai Lama in nine rounds of “dialogue” with Chinese officials about Tibet’s predicament.

The first task was easier than the second, but despite the level of prominence Lodi achieved for Tibet in the United States, American policy made his second mission inestimably more difficult.

After contacts between representatives of the Dalai Lama and the Chinese leadership in the early 1980s failed to progress, the Tibetan leader turned to building international support.

It’s hard to imagine now how little-known Tibet was at the time. It had always been isolated and remote, but since the 1950s, it has been under occupation, and is frequently off limits to travelers and journalists. Nonetheless, efforts by Lodi, and other Tibetan officials, including Tenzin Tethong, helped Tibet gain bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. It took a little longer for Tibet to gain sympathy in the Executive Branch. As an Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights in the early 1980s, Elliott Abrams met Lodi and Tenzin Tethong in the Watergate Hotel coffee shop because the East Asia Bureau objected to their entering the State Department building. Lodi “came in many ways to personify rather than simply to represent the cause of Tibet,” according to Abrams. “The power of the argument he was making was immensely magnified by his dignity and depth as an individual. He was patient, upright, soft-spoken, but never even slightly apologetic in stating the case for Tibet. He knew the relative political, economic, and of course military strength of the two sides, but he also knew that his side—the cause of Tibet, and of religious freedom—had much greater moral strength.”

Eventually, George H.W. Bush, became the first American President to meet the Dalai Lama, which, along with humanitarian aid, scholarships, and other support, boosted Tibetans’ morale and became almost routine, even as European leaders began succumbing to Chinese pressure not to meet the Dalai Lama. In 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright created a senior State Department post dedicated to Tibetan affairs, which was later codified in law.

Lodi’s other mission may have been impossible: to make concrete the empty provisions for Tibetan autonomy under the PRC’s laws and constitution and thus achieve “genuine autonomy.” That position, of course, already represented a huge concession. Tibet had asserted its independence in 1912—and had been de facto independent throughout much of a long relationship with imperial China that both parties often left ambiguous.

Despite their disadvantage, the Tibetans had leverage. The Party seeks legitimacy of its rule in Tibet less from world opinion, which already accepts China’s control, than from Tibetans themselves. The Dalai Lama, Lodi said, had always been “ready to lend his moral authority to endow an autonomy agreement, once reached, with the legitimacy it will need to gain the support of the Tibetan people and be properly implemented.” This might calm the instability Beijing’s own policies have created and avoid, particularly at the time of the Dalai Lama’s death, unrest like that which spread across the Tibetan Plateau in 2008.

Nevertheless, the Party’s insincerity was reflected in the designation of officials from the United Front Work Department as the Tibetans’ counterpart in the dialogue. The United Front bureaucracy, which has recently received long-overdue attention for its role as an instrument of China’s “sharp power,” is assigned to enlist the aid of minorities and religious and non-communist groups in achieving the Party’s agenda. The UFWD carries out China’s efforts to control Buddhism internally and exploit it internationally for the Party’s own purposes. Under Xi Jinping it has become more powerful.

Chinese tactics included insulting the Dalai Lama and denying his repeatedly stated willingness to accept Chinese rule. As time passed, the Party’s objective became unmistakable: wait for the Dalai Lama, now 83, to pass away and install an imposter, as they have with other Tibetan Buddhist incarnations. At the same time, Beijing has become aggressive toward India, claiming a large swath of northeast India as “South Tibet.”  PLA incursions across the long and disputed border between Chinese-occupied Tibet and India have increased, possibly presaging military force timed to interfere with the selection of the Dalai Lama’s successor (which he has said will take place outside of Chinese-held territory) or India’s longstanding and admirable hospitality to Tibetans.

The Party has demanded yet another concession—that the Dalai Lama agree that Tibet has been a part of China, “since antiquity.” This, Lodi explained, the Tibetan leader could do, saying, “History is a past event, and it cannot be altered.”

It can, however, be elided. The U.S. government considers Tibet a part of China and insists that it has never held otherwise—a statement which is true as far as it goes. Washington had scant relationship to Tibet until World War II, when America was allied with Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader struggling, unsuccessfully, to recover a disintegrated empire. Chiang’s government never asserted control over Tibet, yet Washington largely deferred to its claims, albeit cagily. “China claims sovereignty over Tibet, and the Government has never questioned that claim,” read a State Department dispatch in 1947.” For 30 years after the communists took power, Washington held off from recognizing Chinese sovereignty by any Chinese government, Nationalist or communist, over Tibet, supporting Tibetan rebels and even advancing the idea of self-determination during the 1960s. Stapleton Roy, a distinguished diplomat who participated in the normalization of U.S.-PRC ties and later served as Ambassador to Beijing told me he believes that, but for relations with Chiang, the United States would have recognized Tibet’s independence.

When Washington at last formalized its ties with Beijing and broke with Taipei, the U.S. government effectively transferred its deference over Tibet from the cultish KMT authoritarian regime that had never exerted authority there to the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship that had invaded it. This was a shift made quietly, unilaterally, and without consulting Congress. At the time, the Carter Administration was hurriedly completing the normalization of U.S.-China ties and breaking abruptly with Taiwan at the end of 1978. As soon as the United States set its sights on relations with the PRC, writes Melvyn Goldstein, Tibet became, in the view of American policymakers, “an embarrassment. . . . no longer relevant to the U.S. national interests—in fact, it was potentially harmful. By the 1970s, therefore, shifting world alignments placed the Tibetan exiles in a much-weakened position.”

Lodi studied as a monk, having been recognized as the reincarnation of a Tibetan master, before leaving Tibet at the age of ten. Those who knew of his religious background and his quiet navigation of Washington’s corridors of power might be amused by his reputation as a firebrand during his younger days in exile in India. John Avedon’s book, In Exile from the Land of Snows, recounts Lodi and other young colleagues outflanking more conservative Tibetan officials to lobby Indian politicians for stronger support of Tibet. Like the Dalai Lama, he drew lessons from India’s democracy, which he brought to his service in the Tibetan exile government in Dharamsala as the speaker of its parliament and as a cabinet minister.

Despite his democratic principles, Lodi retained respect, and even nostalgia, for Chinese officials from an earlier generation, like Hu Yaobang, who was shocked by devastation he saw on a tour of Tibet after the Cultural Revolution, and Xi Zhongxun, the father of current General Secretary Xi Jinping. The elder Xi was friendly with the Dalai Lama during the 1950s while the Tibetan leader was trying to reach accommodation with the communists. When the younger Xi ascended to Party leadership, some, including Lodi, hoped that Xi’s family’s association with the Dalai Lama might lead him to moderate the Party’s policies in Tibet. Lodi lived to see that it didn’t, as well as the transfer of tactics and personnel from Tibet to Xinjiang. But he also lived—just—to see the emerging backlash to its challenge to democratic norms

Testifying before a Congressional committee in 2008, Lodi sought to explain the Tibetan commitment to non-violence. “You just can’t say that, oh, I have become nonviolent, as if it is kind of declaration, and from that day on you are nonviolent. No. Every moment it is a new dedication that we have to make to remain nonviolent.” He illustrated his point by recounting, with restrained emotion, a visit he made to his birthplace in eastern Tibet, in 2004, accompanied by his Chinese dialogue counterparts.

If you see some of the footages of my visit, you see me . . . with a smile, trying to be nice, but I will tell you today that the pain that I was going through—I was visiting a monastery that I grew up [in] . . . 70 percent of it in total ruins now.

I also visited the site where I know my grandmother was tortured to death. I also visited the site—(pauses)—where my elder brother—(pauses)—was starved to death. . . .

I’m sharing this with you because you understand and appreciate more the path of struggle that His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] has led us. So please help us stay on this course, because this is not only important for us; this is also important for China.

Indeed, there are signs of a departure in popular and intellectual Chinese attitudes from those of the Party. Many Chinese follow Tibetan Buddhism and are concerned about the degradation of Tibet’s environment. They admire the Dalai Lama not only as a religious leader, but as someone who has democratized the formerly theocratic government-in-exile. Increasingly, Chinese dissidents like Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in jail in 2017, see China’s rule in Tibet as a problem of democratic legitimacy rather than ethnicity and territory. International kowtowing to the Party’s isolation of the Dalai Lama and officials of the Tibet government-in-exile undermines the Chinese people most vital to a change in Tibet’s condition.

Lodi was cremated on November 18, a clear and sunny day at Mindrolling Monastery in Dehradun, a town in India’s Himalayan foothills. The ceremony included prayers and offerings by monks from Tibetan Buddhism’s different traditions, including Lodi’s son, Tulku Penam, reflecting, it was explained to me, an unusual lack of hierarchy and sectarianism that was in keeping with Lodi’s convictions. Others attending included representatives of the Tibetan government-in-exile, officials from India, Nepal, and Bhutan, and friends and colleagues from Europe and the United States. Looking on were his wife, Dawa Chokyi, his daughters Tenzing Dechen, Tenzing Choyang, Norbu Wangmo, and Tashi Chodon, who are raising families in the free Tibetan Buddhist communities of the Himalayas, and his youngest daughter, Tenzing Tsering, who helped her father complete before his death a forthcoming memoir about his extraordinary and worthy life.

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The Downside of Highly Contested Elections

In political reform, as in life generally, too much of a good thing can be bad. What is necessary for good government can be problematic when it is taken to excess. A true democracy requires meaningful opportunities to contest for political power. But how much contestation is necessary for a well-functioning modern democracy? American political reformers generally assume that the more contestation the better, but recent experience suggests otherwise.

Democratic accountability requires that voters must be able to hold office-holders responsible for their actions by rewarding them with reelection or voting them out of office when they fail. Over the years, this has fueled reform debates over whether incumbency advantages, partisan gerrymandering, lobbying, and campaign practices have undermined competition and responsiveness.

These are legitimate concerns but contestation also has its drawbacks. In contemporary American politics, a prolonged period of highly polarized competition between the Democrats and Republicans for control of the Federal and state governments has eroded our commitment to fair play in politics. This problem is playing out prominently in recent controversies over voting procedures controversies and efforts to limit the power of incoming governments.

It is no secret that U.S. voting procedures have been manipulated throughout U.S. history for partisan advantage. Literacy tests and poll taxes were used in the Jim Crow era to exclude blacks and poor whites in the South. This perpetuated southern, white, Democratic Party dominance until civil rights legislation and judicial interpretation made these practices illegal.

Contemporary forms of election rule manipulation are subtler, but just as before, political interests define which side of the ballot disputes a political party finds itself on. Republicans, citing concerns about in-person voter fraud, have taken steps to impose stricter voter identification requirements and other steps to make it more onerous to register and vote. Democrats, when they can, have made it easier to vote in order to expand the electorate. Ballot security and broader political participation are legitimate goals. In both cases, however, the “principled” positions Republicans and Democrats take also coincide with their partisan interests.

The most recent example of this is the controversy over the “harvesting” of absentee ballots in the 2018 midterm election.  California is one of 28 states plus DC that allows no excuse absentee voting. But California has gone the extra mile in recent years to ensure that these votes are not wasted by extending the period that absentee ballots can arrive and be counted, allowing eight days to reconcile any signature disparities and permitting third parties to collect and deliver absentee ballots for the voters. Contrast that with 19 other states that require a valid excuse (i.e. not mere convenience) to apply for an absentee ballot, or states like Florida and Mississippi that permit no excuse absentee voting but have stricter deadlines for filing or that require notarized ballots.

California adopted its permissive measures because the state discovered that younger, first time, and disadvantaged voters were more prone to make mistakes and miss deadlines, and wanted to lessen the number of absentee votes they would have to be discarded. It was widely expected that this would help the Democrats who controlled the Governor and houses of the state legislature.

At one level, California Democrats have a principled commitment to fuller participation, but to be honest, their efforts to ease the burdens associated with absentee ballot voting are conveniently consistent with the majority party’s political incentives.  The Republican coalition usually consists of older, better-educated voters who were more able to navigate the absentee voting process successfully on their own. Democrats, on the other hand, have long known that absentee ballot campaigns for their voters required more GOTV follow-up in order to be successful. Ironically, because President Trump appeals to many less well-educated first time or sporadic voters, Republican incentives in North Carolina were apparently similar in 2018 to Democrats in California. Hence, the Republican candidate for North Carolina’s tightly contested 9th CD allegedly authorized an illegal absentee vote harvesting effort on his behalf in 2018.

Whatever the merits of allowing extensive absentee balloting (and I have long had my doubts), the point is that closely contested races exacerbate the win at all costs mentality. Candidates and their operatives will look for any tactical edge they can get, leading to more illegal, unethical or unwise attempts to bend the rules for political gain. If fair play means setting rules in advance on the basis of the common good and observing them throughout the election, that is definitely not the state of play in America at the moment.

The pressures of close contestation undermined fair play in Wisconsin in a different way. There the Republican state legislature decided to curb the powers of the incoming Democratic Governor and Attorney General to prevent them from withdrawing from Republican litigation against the ACA or changing the work or drug testing requirements for public assistance programs. While this has been widely condemned as an outrageous abridgement of electoral accountability, it is not really that much of a departure from the many past efforts by politicians at all levels of government to lock in their policy achievements as they rotate out of power.

Presidents routinely use executive actions in their lame duck year to advance policy agendas that they could not get through the Congress, recognizing that it is harder to dismantle an existing program than to block a proposed one. In direct democracy states, proponents regularly lock budgetary commitments and policies into the state constitution by popular initiatives to prevent cuts or reversals in policy direction. Democrats have used the courts to block refugee and immigration policies they oppose, and Republicans followed the same path to obstruct the implementation of the ACA.

My point is not to condone this, or to diminish the effect that all of this has on accountability, but only to point out that these actions are the consequences of expected shifts in political control. The more power shifts, the more we should expect activity of this sort. Periods of close contestation will produce more policy instability. This generates more uncertainty for the citizens, interest groups and businesses that have to cope with these reversals. It is the downside of a highly competitive party system.

So I return to my initial point that too much of a good thing can be bad. Races in competitive seats are more expensive.  Policies in contested eras are more uncertain. The incentive to violate norms of fair play by changing rules to gain tactical advantage or to limit the ability of the other side to fully exercise their electoral mandate are inevitably stronger when political control is closely contested.

Contestation is a core principle of democracy, but high levels of contestation can weaken the commitment to other democratic principles like fair play. In matters of political reform, more of one democratic norm can lead to less of others.

The post The Downside of Highly Contested Elections appeared first on The American Interest.

The Universal Declaration Turns 70

As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70 this month, there is much to celebrate—and question. The Declaration helped transform the post-World War II political order, bringing outside scrutiny to states that mistreat their people and strengthening movements that ended colonialism, apartheid, and communist rule behind the Iron Curtain.

Looming over this year’s celebrations, however, is a gathering storm of discontent. Once a unifying force that brought together different cultural and political groups, human rights ideals are now too often a source of division, used to attack opponents in domestic and international disputes. The questions that the drafters of the Universal Declaration grappled with decades ago seem more urgent than ever: What happens when one fundamental right clashes with another? How can any rights be deemed universal in a world of great cultural and political diversity? What role should society, the state, and international bodies play in enforcing rights?

Good intentions, honest mistakes, power politics, and plain old opportunism have all helped set the stage for growing skepticism, and even a backlash. “All signs point to a crisis not just for human rights, but for the human rights movement,” Samuel Moyn, a law and history professor at Yale University, told the Guardian earlier this year. Indeed, Stephen Hopgood of the University of London has called this era the “endtimes of human rights.”

The crisis is evident in conflicts big and small, in far-flung countries and in the United States. Human rights advocates may praise the Universal Declaration, but few actually understand its core principles, explained in just 30 cogent articles. Instead, they invented scores of new rights and selectively used them to promote particular causes.

In Europe, for instance, circumcision is being attacked under the guise of human rights. The so-called “intactivist movement” has strengthened over the past decade, arguing that children’s bodily integrity be considered a human right while religious freedom be narrowed to essentially mean only worship and association. In 2012, a German court ruled that circumcision could be prosecuted as physical assault. In 2013, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) passed the “Children’s Right to Physical Integrity” resolution, based on a report declaring circumcision as “clearly a human-rights violation.” And just this year, a Progressive Party parliamentarian in Iceland introduced a bill banning non-medical circumcisions, punishable by six years in prison. The lawmaker insisted that the central issue was that “the rights of children come above the right to believe.” The bill was withdrawn this spring, after an international furor.

All these efforts feel like an assault to devout Jews and Muslims, who consider the ritual integral to their faiths. Many believe that a circumcision ban is tantamount to a ban on their religious practices. No wonder they feel that human rights are no longer universal.

Similar sentiments were echoed among Christians in the United States this year, when a Federal District Court ruled that Philadelphia could ban Catholic Social Services from foster care work because it refused to place children with same-sex couples. With the freedom of sexual expression pitted against freedom of religion, the agency was denied the right to serve at-risk children unless it sacrificed its religious beliefs, beliefs that were mainstream less than ten years ago.

Israel, meanwhile, has clearly become a victim of human rights politics run amok. The United Nations Human Rights Council, created in 2006, has focused on Israel so much that roughly half of its resolutions have targeted the country. More than one-fourth of the council’s special sessions have criticized Israel—more than have condemned Syria, which has killed hundreds of thousands of its own civilians. The U.S. government became so disgusted by the Council’s bias that it withdrew from the organization this past June.

All of this is a vast departure from what the framers of the Universal Declaration envisioned 70 years ago. The Declaration, written by a United Nations committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, aimed to help create societies where all “human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want.” By recognizing what it called the “inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” it sought to set minimum standards for how societies should operate—not dictate any particular paths for bringing those rights to life.

While the Universal Declaration clearly established a number of specific rights, including freedom from slavery, equality before the law, and freedom of religion, it purposely kept the total small. Moreover, these rights were never meant to be viewed in isolation. Instead, the document explicitly stated that every right has limitations “for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights of others.” Some provisions of the Declaration focus on the individual, others on family and community. Some focus on freedom, others on solidarity and duty. The vision of liberty and the call for social responsibility are inextricably linked.

But over the years, certain rights were promoted over others, with rights protecting individual autonomy favored over any smacking of religion or community. This approach clashed with African countries’ emphasis on restorative justice after violent conflicts, and its focus on repairing the social fabric rather than punishing offenders. It also disregarded East Asian countries’ emphasis on social cohesion over individual needs, as well as Middle Eastern countries’ desire to honor the role of religion in their cultures.

As human rights gained importance, champions of various causes began calling for new rights for everything from internet access to free employment counseling. Sadly, human rights leaders often supported such additions. So many new rights have been invented that there are now more than a thousand so-called human rights provisions in government agreements.

Meanwhile, international bodies charged with human rights responsibilities were losing respect, which fueled skepticism about the human rights idea. These bodies seemed susceptible to political influence and often out of touch, promoting top-down solutions that didn’t consider local needs. They discounted comprehensive approaches that took context into account, insisting, for example, on international justice to resolve internal conflicts in Uganda, Sudan, and Libya when a more multi-faceted approach would likely have been more effective. In many countries, they disregarded the power of incentives, like amnesty, when trying to convince rights violators to change their behavior. Often, they failed to understand the importance of building local institutions to improve countries’ futures. In Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they rushed too quickly into elections after brutal wars. So, weak institutions continued to flourish, and elites continued to corrupt the state.

International bodies also lost credibility due to mounting evidence of bias. The International Criminal Court, for instance, focused on African countries while Syria committed atrocities with little fear of prosecution.

In many cases, Western governments seemed to use human rights to advance their own interests, with the United States and European states criticizing such rivals as Russia and Iran more often than such allies as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

Partly as a consequence, no doubt, cynicism about international human rights is growing in the West. Attempts to frame complicated issues such as immigration in terms of human rights just makes many practically minded people angry, making it even harder to find workable solutions to promote the common good. With human rights invoked in so many political battles, it’s almost impossible to take some so-called rights seriously.

Something similar has happened here in the United States. In those many disputes that involve conflicts of rights, a winner-take-all attitude has emerged at the expense of tolerance and compromise. Such dynamics are clear in the fight over abortion. When courts take decision-making away from the ordinary democratic processes of bargaining, persuasion, and voting, many people feel disenfranchised—and politics becomes ever more divisive.

Despite such enormous challenges, the human rights movement at home and abroad could regain its original authority, if it drew upon its roots.

Facing remarkably similar difficulties to what we face today, the Universal Declaration’s drafters established a framework for human rights that was both universal and flexible. Their realistic approach helped ensure that the Declaration would garner deep support across vastly different cultures and political ideologies already represented in the 1948 United Nations General Assembly—and around the world in the years since.

Rejecting any attempt to include every conceivable right, the drafters developed a set of basic minimum standards that no group would openly reject. They deliberately left room for states to experiment with different modes of implementation—to allow “different kinds of music” to be “played on the same keyboard,” as Jacques Maritain, French philosopher and UN supporter, once put it. Communist states would promote a greater role for government than capitalist ones. Countries with limited resources would implement social and economic rights more slowly than more affluent states. Muslim states’ priorities would vary from those of Western states. The goal: Be flexible enough to respond to different needs, but not so malleable that any basic right could be completely ignored.

Except for a few tightly drawn rights dealing with torture, slavery, presumption of innocence and the like, the framers never wanted to treat clashes of rights as winner-take-all contests. Instead, they expected conflicts to be opportunities to discover ways to protect each right as much as possible, while never subordinating any right completely to another. Practically forgotten are the Declaration’s sections which emphasize that each person’s rights depend on respect for the others’ rights, on the rule of law, and on a healthy civil society.

The framers of the Universal Declaration hoped to maximize the chance that the document’s minimum standards would penetrate every society. In that spirit, today’s human rights advocates shouldn’t declare: “Here is how you need to change to join us,” but instead ask: “What does human flourishing look like in your society or community, and how can we help you encourage it?” This shift in perspective would reduce resistance and resentment, and be more productive. But it would also require making the field far more inclusive of different viewpoints than it has now become.

Openness to diversity is especially important in today’s changing geopolitical landscape. Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries are expanding their economic and political power. China, India, Brazil, and other countries already have as least as much influence as the West in their regions—and often different priorities they want to promote.

Within the West, growing political polarization makes it more essential than ever to return to the region’s hallmarks of accepting differences and honoring dissent.

The international human rights movement would do well to recall that consensus was achieved in 1948 only because the framers settled on a small core of rights so fundamental that no nation would openly oppose them. The international human rights movement would be far more effective if it emphasized a “return to basics” and used the modest approach outlined in the original Declaration.

In the Philadelphia case, this would mean focusing on the public interest, that is, the needs of children and society. Religious groups’ rights would never be discounted. Instead, there would be substantial efforts to seek practical solutions that people with diverse outlooks could support. Legislation that allows diverse child-placement agencies to maximize opportunities for children would accomplish this and has been passed in many states. Such an approach would not end the inevitable debates over rights, but it would strengthen the legitimacy of the human rights idea.

Internationally, the back-to-basics approach could create successes similar to the end of white rule in South Africa. Apartheid leaders were never threatened with international justice. Instead, they were first sanctioned and then offered incentives to transfer power. Reconciliation and truth commissions played prominent roles; retribution was limited. The country crafted a new, inclusive national identity and developed a constitution around existing institutions, a stark contrast to efforts in Iraq and Libya that tried to replace institutions and exclude members of the previous regime.

For China and Saudi Arabia, it could be far more effective to avoid harping on governance issues and focus instead on specific human rights violations of signed agreements, such as torture, religious persecution, or locking up citizens without due process.

Ultimately, promoting human rights depends on deep support across cultural and ideological divides. This is what Eleanor Roosevelt envisioned, when she declared that documents expressing ideals “carry no weight unless the people know them, unless the people understand them, unless the people demand that they be lived.”

The post The Universal Declaration Turns 70 appeared first on The American Interest.

Georgian Dream’s Pyrrhic Victory

On Tbilisi’s central square, activists backing ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili have camped out in protest of the outcome of the recent presidential elections in Georgia. There is a strange sense of déjà vu from the time Saakashvili himself was in power, when protesters—among them Georgia’s new President, Salome Zurabishvili—blocked the main thoroughfare of Tbilisi with tents to protest his leadership.

Zurabishvili, a French-born ex-diplomat of Georgian descent, was inaugurated on Sunday. The presidency has been reduced to a largely symbolic role in Georgia, so the election itself was not terribly consequential. But the vote was seen as a referendum on the ruling Georgian Dream party, and a test of Georgia’s democracy. The results were mixed on both counts.

Western headlines quickly highlighted that Zurabishvili would be the first woman to serve as President. While the statement is factually accurate, the election had nothing to do with gender. Indeed, the elections had little to do with Zurabishvili at all.

Zurabishvili registered as an independent candidate for the elections, but soon received the tacit backing of the ruling Georgian Dream party. At the beginning of her campaign, she made waves by blaming the 2008 war with Russia on Georgia and ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government. She accused Georgia of “bombing its own population.” Previously, she also questioned Georgia cooperating with the U.S. military, including its participation in an ongoing training mission on Georgian soil, saying she didn’t understand “what purpose it serves.” This was too much even for the Russia-accommodating Georgian Dream, which clearly pushed her to walk back her statements.

The elections were full of hate, mudslinging, and general ugliness, and ended up deeply polarizing voters. The campaign turned into a proxy war between Saakashvili and Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s mysterious billionaire kingmaker. Saakashvili stepped down as President in 2013 and subsequently left the country under a cloud of allegations of criminal wrongdoing that he claims were politically motivated. He has, however, remained actively involved in Georgian politics, even while pursuing a political career in Ukraine. Ivanishvili, a fabulously wealthy businessman who made his fortune in Russia and has created and bankrolled the Georgian Dream party, similarly stepped down from the Prime Minister’s post in 2013 after only spending a year in power. He is widely seen to be still pulling the strings behind the scenes.

The first round put two candidates neck-and-neck: Zurabishvili, technically an “independent,” stood for Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream, while Grigol Vashadze represented Saakashvili’s United National Movement (UNM). David Bakradze, representing European Georgia (a new party that split from UNM in 2017), gathered 10.9 percent of vote. The “opposition” vote against Zurabishvili in total comprised some 61 percent. This rattled the Georgian Dream leadership. They were clearly in trouble.

Between the first and the second round, Georgian Dream’s political machine sprung into action, mobilizing all resources under its control in order to win. The lines between party and the state—already blurry to begin with—almost disappeared. Zurabishvili herself also all but disappeared from the campaign—from television and from billboards—to be replaced by Georgian Dream leaders. The independent candidate suddenly didn’t seem so independent after all. Her campaign was transformed into a defense of the Georgian Dream status quo, and, perhaps more importantly, into a ritualized demonization of Saakashvili himself. Georgian ultra-conservatives and pro-Russian forces rallied in support of Zurabishvili. Protests against Saakashvili’s rule sprung up even though his party has been in the wilderness for years. At the same time, Ivanishvili promised to pay off the personal debts of around half a million voters through his private Cartu bank—a move that was characterized as vote-buying by his opponents.

As a result, the turnout in the second round surpassed the first round, and Zurabishvili won by a large margin. International observers pointed out that the elections were free and competitive, but full of irregularities, and ultimately not fair—one of the harshest assessments since the time of Eduard Shevardnadze’s rule.

Demonizing Saakashvili’s legacy is Georgian Dream’s bread-and-butter. It brought them victory in both 2012 and 2016, when they campaigned against the so-called “bloody nine years.” The phrase was resonant in 2012 after Saakashvili had been in power for almost a decade, and his increasingly erratic rule had started to wear on voters. These days, however, it has an empty ring to it. The fear tactic still clearly works—the election results are in part a testament to that—but with the memory of the bogeyman receding into history, one wonders for how long it can succeed given Georgian Dream’s unremarkable record in governing.

And despite the heavy-handedness towards the end of his time in power, Saakashvili’s record is largely positive. Together with a reform-minded young team, Saakashvili transformed Georgia, eradicating corruption and building state institutions at a dizzying pace. Lives were transformed dramatically for the better in the course of those nine years. The mafia virtually disappeared, the traffic police started working for citizens instead of extorting bribes from them, and young people got into universities based on merit, without having to pay off officials. Georgia’s tiny economy experienced double-digit growth, and living standards improved drastically.

But as good things become a new normal, democratic electorates ask for more: more jobs, more prosperity, more freedoms. Saakashvili, however, wasn’t ready to deliver. By 2012, his government seemed stuck on self-aggrandizement to the point of bizarreness. One campaign jingle that fateful election went, “No matter what the weather, good or bad, Misha is the best!” Reforms had slowed and the government seemed to be more focused on staying in power than delivering.

By 2012, the scene was set for a change. Georgia for the first time in its history celebrated a peaceful transfer of power. Bidzina Ivanishvili became Prime Minister. Ivanishvili’s victory came amid a  scandal surrounding the maltreatment of detainees in prisons. The alleged torture videos were crucial to his victory.

Some feared that the rise of Georgian Dream, the brainchild of a man who had made his fortune in Russia, would coincide with a geopolitical reorientation for the country. Those fears were rooted in the rhetoric that his government had used in 2012. Georgian Dream capitalized on the widespread disappointment many Georgians felt at the slow pace of Western integration. They accused Saakashvili of overpromising, and even blamed him for the 2008 war with Russia.  (These are all themes Zurabishvili echoed in her campaign.)

European and Euro-Atlantic integration were seen as key political objectives of the Saakashvili Administration. Joining NATO was understood to be the only path to securing meaningful independence in the face of an aggressive Russia just across the border to the north. But the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 dashed people’s hopes. There was a widespread feeling that America would push through a Membership Action Plan for Georgia. It could not. European powers, especially those that had opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, blocked Washington in Bucharest. When Russia invaded Georgia a few months later, the palpable lack of international support really drove the point home.

Ivanishvili’s government kept Georgia on a Western path, in large part because overwhelming support for Western integration made any alternative a nonstarter. As a result, Georgian Dream signed an association agreement with Europe and secured visa-free travel for Georgia’s citizens (the groundwork for which was laid by Saakashvili’s government).

Nevertheless, Georgian Dream has sought to bring more “balance” to the country’s relationship with Russia. They opened direct talks with Moscow, freed Russian spies, and refrained from criticizing the Kremlin openly. All this appeasement has not yielded tangible results, however. Russia, which occupies South Ossetia and Abkhazia, has continued its policy of creeping annexation (moving fences demarcating the occupation line, gobbling up Georgian territory), and “border” guards regularly kidnap Georgian citizens. In 2016, Giga Otkhozoria was shot and killed at the occupation line near Abkhazia. Earlier this year, a former soldier named Archil Tatunashvili was abducted and murdered in South Ossetia. Despite public outcry, the Georgian Dream government has downplayed the significance of these crimes, and hasn’t raised the issue much on the international level.

Georgian Dream has also developed relationships with fringe parties such as Alliance of Patriots of Georgia, and Georgian March—groups that receive Russian financial support and help mainstream pro-Kremlin, anti-EU, xenophobic views. Various smaller nationalist groups have also sprung up, in part as a reaction to the modernizing project of Saakashvili’s government. These groups, too, have been embraced. One such group openly describes itself as fascist, and brandishes a swastika-like symbol. They even boast of having established militias.

Georgian Dream makes use of these people, seeing them as allies when interests coincide. And when these groups resort to violence, the party turns a blind eye. This has fostered a sense of impunity among these groups, and has only encouraged more brazen behavior. Thugs have attacked everyone from protesters demonstrating against homophobia to young people protesting heavy-handed police raids of nightclubs. A young human rights defender named Vitali Safarov was killed in September in what appears to be a hate crime by the members of one of these groups.

Saakashvili himself shares part of the blame for playing into Ivanishvili’s hands. His presence haunted the campaign. His promise to return to the country should UNM win only gave Georgian Dream ammunition, allowing them to ominously intone about possible instability. And that rhetoric resonated. Beyond the trauma of the 2008 war, Georgians are generally sensitive to threats of disorder. It brings back memories of the 1990s, a time at which the country was wracked by a deep economic, political, and social crisis. The civil war between President Zviad Gamsakhuria and militia groups opposed to his rule left much of central Tbilisi in ruins.

Saakashvili’s approach this time around has been to mirror Georgian Dream’s tactics: to double down on populist rhetoric, to cozy up to the Orthodox Church, and now to set up tents in the city center. The elections showed the limits of that strategy: It’s hard to out-populist a populist.  

At the same time, Georgian Dream achieved a pyrrhic victory in this election. By choosing go all-in on demonization and almost completely ignore policy discussion, Ivanishvili has set the tone for the next two years leading up to parliamentary elections.

But according to polls, 62 percent of the population thinks that the country is going in the wrong direction. The majority of Georgians are concerned about the economy and unemployment, and are dissatisfied by the political options on offer. It’s hard to say how much longer Saakashvili can serve as a scarecrow. After all, the Georgian Dream has been in charge for six years, and at some point will have to stand on its record.

There is a space in the political middle for a new force to occupy. European Georgia, the party that split from UNM in 2017, has sought to cater to those voters. They came away disappointed this time, but are redoubling their efforts. Their goal for now is to push Georgian Dream to move the country towards proportional representation and away from a winner-take-all mixed system that benefits the ruling party and empowers local landlords.

With concerns about political influence over the judiciary, rampant nepotism, and clampdowns on the media, Georgian Dream is coming to resemble the Saakashvili government in its waning years: all self-preservation tactics, with not much success to point to. Those who do not learn from history are perhaps doomed to repeat it. The question for the next to years is: Can the opposition capitalize?

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How to Make Sanctions on Russia Work

Even proponents of sanctions against Russia (and I count myself among them) have to admit that they have failed to change the Kremlin’s aggressive behavior. Russia continues to wage a brutal war in eastern Ukraine. It continues its military campaign to obliterate the opposition to the Assad regime in Syria. And it continues to subvert Western democracies with cyberattacks, disinformation, and dark money. On none of these fronts is the Kremlin seeking to scale back its ambitions or moderate its behavior. Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukrainian ships in the Black Sea in late November underscores this fact and belies the notion that the Putin regime is worn down by sanctions and looking for an “off ramp.” If anything, President Putin seems to be doubling down on confrontation with the West. Why else, after more than four years of mounting sanctions, would the Kremlin authorize an assassination in the heart of a major NATO country using a signature chemical agent that can be traced back to Russia?

Some have argued that while sanctions have not reversed Putin’s aggressive policies, they have at least deterred him from pursuing more ambitious aims, such as the creation of a new state of “Novorossiya” in eastern Ukraine or a land bridge between Crimea and Russian troops stationed in eastern Moldova. This too is wishful thinking. During the peak fighting in Ukraine in the summer of 2014, Russian forces certainly could have tried to occupy more territory, but it seems highly unlikely that the threat of sanctions stopped them cold in their tracks and no hard evidence supports this view.

A far more compelling argument is that the Russian advance was stopped when Ukrainian society mobilized against it by helping law enforcement root out Russian provocateurs and by forming volunteer battalions to fight back against invading Russian forces. This organic resistance movement guaranteed that any foray deeper into Ukraine would be met with a bloody insurgency, and Russian intelligence agents in Ukraine surely communicated this back to Moscow. Although counterfactual scenarios are inherently unprovable, it seems far more likely that mass casualties and body bags, not restrictions on debt and equity financing, are what ultimately deterred the Kremlin’s maximalist ambitions from being realized.

This is not to argue that sanctions have had no effect on Russia, only that they have been ineffective at changing Russian behavior. In 2015, the International Monetary Fund estimated that sanctions shaved between 1.0 to 1.5 percent off Russia’s GDP, and the Kremlin has certainly reacted angrily to their imposition. Over time, it is even possible that the Kremlin might come to see the cost of sanctions as greater than the perceived benefits of its aggressive policies. But we have not reached that tipping point yet, and with current sanctions alone we may never reach it.

This is because Western governments have consistently confused symbolic measures with the types of significant costs that would compel the Kremlin to re-evaluate its policies. To make sanctions against Russia work, the United States and its allies need to dispense with symbolic gestures and impose stronger sanctions that will have an immediate economic impact. At the same time, they must avoid the temptation to look to sanctions as the answer to every problem emanating from Russia and embed their sanctions policy within a broader cost-imposition strategy that makes better use of diplomatic, military, economic, and communications tools.  Such a strategy would focus on trying to change the Kremlin’s behavior in one or two discreet areas (such as its aggression in Ukraine and/or its attacks on Western democracies), but not across the board.

This strategy also has to be consistent. The West’s current approach to Russia is schizophrenic: some of the countries most vocal about imposing sanctions have also pursued economic development projects with the Russian state, rendering their policies incoherent and ineffective. If a more consistent strategy were implemented to push back on Russian aggression across multiple domains, economic sanctions could be harnessed to provide enormous asymmetric leverage to that end. For that to work, however, we need to overhaul our current sanctions policy.

Packing a Stronger Punch

To be effective, sanctions need to have a serious impact. Over the past several years, the United States and other Western countries have repeatedly conflated symbolic measures against Russia with impactful ones. For example, in 2016 when options were considered in response to the Kremlin’s interference in the U.S. presidential election, some senior officials referred informally to the planned expulsion of 35 Russian intelligence officers as a “nuclear option”—as if this measure were so incredibly powerful that it would cow Moscow and bring it immediately to heel. In reality, intelligence billets are easily backfilled and declarations of persona non grata almost always result in tit-for-tat expulsions by the other side. It should have been easy to foresee therefore that the net effect of such diplomatic expulsions would be negligible.

Similarly, sanctions against the Russian military intelligence agency (GRU) and Federal Security Service (FSB) have been touted as tough measures aimed at the key perpetrators of Russia’s aggressive policies. In reality, these sanctions do next to nothing. Russian intelligence organizations have virtually no tangible assets in the West and sanctions have had almost no impact on these agencies’ finances or operations.

Finally, sanctions on individuals—oligarchs, government officials, and so-called “cronies” of President Putin—have had much less impact than is often claimed. Because Russia is a patronage state in which economic resources are distributed through a system of patron-client ties, sanctioned individuals are easily compensated with insider contracts, subsidies, and other forms of economic rents. Sanctioned “cronies” and senior officials are in fact the last people who would ever put pressure on the regime because their wealth and power depend entirely on demonstrated loyalty to the Kremlin. This does not mean Russian kleptocrats and human rights abusers should be allowed to invest their wealth in the West or be given visas to travel to Western countries. Taking away such access is both morally responsible and a necessary prophylactic against the corrupt influence of foreign dark money. Nevertheless, the policy impact of individual sanctions on Kremlin decision-making is grossly exaggerated.

To have real impact, sanctions must target the Russian economy. While current sanctions have impacted economic growth, the Kremlin has been able to manage the economy without experiencing an acute crisis. With approximately $460 billion in financial reserves, Russia can easily afford to bail out sanctioned companies and oligarchs for the foreseeable future. As a reference point, it is worth recalling that Mr. Putin was willing to spend $50 billion on the Sochi Winter Olympics, a Kremlin vanity project. He is almost certainly willing to spend a much larger sum to bail out his closest friends and trusted lieutenants.

Targeting the Russian economy obviously has consequences for Russian society. This is one of the central challenges of trying to deter or halt Russia’s unconventional war against Ukraine and its subversive attacks on Western democracies. Narrowly targeted measures that focus only on the perpetrators—Russia’s intelligence services and the top political elite—have less impact, while broader measures impact Russian society. But in other cases where the United States has wanted to compel a change in behavior for reasons of national security, it has not shied away from imposing tough measures that affect the target country’s population.

Consider the difference between sanctions on Russia and Iran. To bring Iran to the negotiating table, the Obama Administration imposed powerful economic sanctions. During their peak strength from 2012-2015, Iran’s GDP declined by 9 percent annually, crude oil exports shrank from 2.5 to 1.1 million barrels per day, and $120 billion in Iranian reserves were frozen abroad. This was accomplished by sanctioning Iran’s oil exports and by freezing transactions by Iranian financial institutions.

With Russia, the United States has adopted a far more timid approach. In the energy sector, only upstream and unconventional energy projects—deepwater, Arctic offshore, and shale—were sanctioned. Unlike sanctions on Iranian oil exports, these measures affect revenue streams that are only years, if not decades, away. Furthermore, they lead to deferred investments and unrealized opportunities, which rarely motivate political leaders to act. To force leaders to rethink policy, sanctions need to have an immediate impact, not one that will be felt five to ten years into the future.

In Russia’s financial sector, the United States has steered clear of asset freezes—in sharp contrast to Iran. To date, only one small Russian bank—the 26th largest at the time it was sanctioned—has had its assets frozen. All other Russian banks are restricted only in terms of financing new equity or debt with a maturity of more than 30 days. These anemic measures have had only a minor effect on Russia’s financial sector, particularly given Moscow’s sizable cushion of hard currency reserves.

In the defense sector, while the U.S. government has sanctioned a number of Russian companies, it has failed to put in place secondary sanctions on major third-party buyers of Russian equipment, like China, Egypt, or India. While there are legitimate reasons why the United States might not want to pick a fight with some of these countries, the result is that sanctions have done little to hamper Russia’s growing defense exports, which last year stood at a record $15 billion.

In short, the U.S. government’s much-ballyhooed “sectoral sanctions” policy against Russia is highly circumscribed and packs a weak punch. It is weak not because the administration lacks the authorities to impose impactful sanctions, but because it has chosen not to do so.

Focus on Results 

To provide real leverage over Russia, sanctions have to be tied to concrete behavior. It also helps to tie sanctions to a single issue and not muddy the waters by imposing multiple sets of sanctions for different reasons. The U.S. approach to date, however, has been to slap sanctions on Russia for every conceivable offense. U.S. sanctions have been applied under a patchwork of different authorities relating to the invasion of Ukraine, support for the Assad regime in Syria, assistance to North Korea, interference in U.S. elections, use of chemical weapons, nonproliferation infractions, human rights violations, and several other reasons.

This profusion of justifications does not create an incentive structure for Russia to change its behavior. U.S. sanctions policy should therefore be overhauled to focus on only one or two priority areas where the U.S. most wants to change Russia’s behavior. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and its election interference in the United States are good candidates for sanctions because both can be assessed or measured by the U.S. intelligence community and are reversible. On the other hand, sanctions imposed for Russia’s use of chemical weapons (a one-off event that cannot be reversed) or its previous assistance to the North Korean regime (which cannot be reversed) are less appropriate justifications that only muddy the waters and make it less likely the Kremlin will change its behavior.

Sanctions should also be reversible if they are to serve as an incentive for behavioral change.  In the event that the Kremlin did change its policies (as Iran did by agreeing to put checks on its nuclear program), then the United States should be prepared to waive or remove the relevant sanctions. If there is no clear pathway to sanctions relief, then sanctions risk entrenching the behavior we seek to change.

Part of a Broader Toolkit

To be effective, sanctions should also be part of a broader toolkit of measures that are applied consistently. In the case of Iran, economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation were combined to great effect. In the Russian case, by contrast, Western states have been remarkably inconsistent, often applying sanctions on Russia and seeking to expand economic ties at the same time.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is one of the European Union’s most ardent supporters of sanctions against Russia, has for example supported the construction of a massive natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, whose key aim is to bypass Ukraine as a transit country for Russian natural gas exports. Similarly, French President Emmanuel Macron has cultivated trade and investment with Russia even as he has called for tough sanctions for Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Finally, U.S. President Donald Trump has called for Russia to be readmitted to the G8 and invited President Putin to visit Washington at the same time as his administration has imposed new sanctions. It is little wonder that this schizophrenic approach by all three Western leaders has been unsuccessful.

To be effective, sanctions must be coordinated with other foreign policy instruments—diplomatic, trade, military, and strategic communications. In the economic arena, sanctions should be buttressed with a “no business as usual” approach that, at a minimum, refrains from promoting new trade and investment with Russia. In the energy domain, European leaders should invest in infrastructure that will diversify European sources of energy, for example by promoting the Southern Gas Corridor and more north-south energy interconnectors, and steer clear of Kremlin projects designed to create greater dependence on Russia.

Diplomatically, Western countries should impose stiffer consequences on Moscow for its egregious violations of international norms, including its use of chemical weapons, and stop attending sporting or business events in Russia. Militarily, Western leaders should continue to build up NATO’s defensive capabilities and strengthen the resilience of Russia’s neighbors both because these are necessary defensive precautions but also because they impose consequences on Russia for its malign behavior. Finally, in terms of strategic communications, Western leaders must make clear that the Kremlin is forgoing opportunities for a mutually beneficial relationship with the West as a result of its aggressive actions. Until Western countries align military, economic, energy, diplomatic and communications policies, they will be undercutting the effectiveness of their own sanctions and all but guaranteeing that they fail to achieve their stated goals.

The Goldilocks Dilemma

Sanctions are usually most effective when they are coordinated with other countries. This helps address the collective action problem that comes from spoilers “backfilling” contracts and exploiting sanctions loopholes. The Obama Administration’s approach to both Iran and Russia made an imperative of coordinating sanctions with our European allies and likeminded Asian partners. Unfortunately, however, this sometimes leads to a “least common denominator” policy that reduces the impact of the agreed measures. For this reason, it is sometimes necessary to apply unilateral measures that are coordinated with, but not necessarily matched by, our partners and allies.

In the energy and defense sectors, unilateral measures against Russia would be largely counter-productive because European or Asian companies could simply backfill contracts voided by their U.S. competitors. Secondary sanctions could help address this problem but would have significant geopolitical consequences. The financial sector, however, is another matter.  Because of the unparalleled reach of U.S. financial markets, U.S. asset freezes—so-called “blocking sanctions” that freeze all transactions via the U.S. financial system—pack an enormously powerful punch.

The danger with financial sanctions is that they can have second- or third-order effects on our European allies, whose economies are more closely integrated with Russia’s than our own. This is why the suggestion that Russia be cut off entirely from the international financial clearinghouse known as “SWIFT” is impractical and dangerous. Cutting Russia off from SWIFT would be tantamount to forcing Russia to default on its loans to European creditors, which would hurt our European allies as much as it would hurt Russia.

Any sanction so powerful that it would create a significant risk of financial contagion would not only be opposed by EU member states but would go against U.S. strategic interests. The aim of any sanctions policy, therefore, should be to avoid the “Goldilocks extremes”: it should pack enough of a punch to force the Kremlin to re-evaluate its policies but without creating a recession in Europe.

Crafting More Effective Sanctions

An effective sanctions policy against Russia would start by answering the question of what we are trying to achieve. If the goal is to have Russian troops withdraw from Ukraine, an objective measure of this goal would need to be written into any new sanctions legislation or executive order. One possibility would be to tie sanctions relief to a certification by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) that Russian troops were no longer present on the territory of Ukraine (perhaps with separate requirements for the Donbas and Crimea to incentivize a near-term withdrawal from the Donbas). If an additional goal was for Russia to stop interfering in our elections, then a separate tranche of sanctions could be tied to a certification by the DNI that no significant interference had occurred or been attempted over, say, a six-month period.

Next, an incentive structure would need to be created to compel the Kremlin to re-evaluate its policy. One option would be to prohibit financing of Russia’s sovereign debt. An even better option that allows for calibrating costs would impose asset freezes on Russian banks. Freezing bank assets allows for calibration because it can be done iteratively, starting with some of the smaller banks and moving towards progressively larger targets (e.g. VTB, Gazprombank, Sberbank) over a period of time. Every set period—for example, every three or six months—a new bank would be designated by the Treasury Department until Russia was finally compelled to negotiate in good faith or cease and desist from its aggressive behavior.

To be sure, freezing the assets of all of Russia’s banks would carry significant risks of financial spillover. However, an iterative approach helps mitigate against this risk because the initial asset freezes on smaller banks would be unlikely to roil European financial markets on their own. This would put the ball squarely in Russia’s court and all stakeholders would understand what would happen and when it would happen.

One of the advantages of financial sanctions is that the Kremlin lacks a symmetric countermove. Certainly, Russia could respond by freezing the assets of U.S. companies in Russia, but this would likely hurt Russia as much as it would hurt the United States. Russia is the 30th-largest trading partner of the United States, and Russia depends on U.S. foreign investments to sustain jobs. Shutting down U.S. companies would also be a surefire way to kill off any future Western investment in Russia for a long time to come.

In terms of asymmetric retaliation, Russia could of course do any number of things. Few would have predicted that in response to the Magnitsky Act the Kremlin would halt the adoption of Russian orphans by American citizens. There is obviously little the United States can do if Russia decides on a course of action that hurts its own citizens. However, it is important to remember that the sanctions outlined here are a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its subversion of our democracy. If we do not react to this aggression for fear of unknown counter-reactions, we will forever be paralyzed and only invite more aggression in the future.

A policy to compel the Kremlin to curtail its aggression against Western democracies needs to pack a powerful punch, and financial sector sanctions provide an asymmetric tool to achieve that end. To be effective, these sanctions also have to backed up with more consistent diplomatic, military, and economic policies—and messaged as part of a broader strategy of countering Russian aggression. This might not immediately change the Kremlin behavior, but it would finally start the ball rolling on a re-evaluation of its current collision course with the West.

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