Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 61

Two to Tango: Attacking the Demand Side of Bribery

“The United States will continue to target corrupt foreign officials . . . so U.S. companies can compete fairly in transparent business climates.”

– National Security Strategy of the United States of America
– “U.S. Anti-Corruption Efforts,” United States Department of State

Aggressive enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, alongside the U.S. government’s diplomatic efforts to promote the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, have created an atmosphere in which foreign bribery—once considered an appropriate tax deduction—is now universally recognized as a crime, and anti-corruption compliance is essential for multinational companies.

Nevertheless, bribe demands remain a significant problem for many honest companies. Unfortunately, the FCPA, which has proven to be such a valuable tool in combatting corruption, only criminalizes the giving or offering of bribes, not demanding or receiving them. This omission makes it difficult for U.S. authorities to prosecute the foreign kleptocrats who drive so much international corruption, and places U.S. law at odds with the international standards that the United States has itself partly spawned.

Amending U.S. criminal law to cover bribe-receiving would bring the United States closer to international best practices, and would further the U.S. government’s efforts to stamp out transnational corruption. But it would also protect honest businesses, which are increasingly faced with illegal demands from foreign officials in corrupt regimes and unscrupulous competition from companies, including state-owned enterprises in such countries. 

While it is impossible to know who initiates most bribe situations, the giver or the receiver, one thing is clear: No bribe can take place without both. As the OECD has noted, “To have a globally effective overall enforcement system, both the supply-side participants (i.e., the bribers) and the demand-side participants (i.e., the public officials) of bribery transactions must face genuine risks of prosecution and sanctions.” It is for this reason that international anti-corruption conventions frequently encourage state parties to address both sides of bribery through their national legislation. For example, Article 16 of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) states that

Each State Party shall consider adopting such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as a criminal offence, when committed intentionally, the solicitation or acceptance by a foreign public official or an official of a public international organization, directly or indirectly, of an undue advantage, for the official himself or herself or another person or entity, in order that the official act or refrain from acting in the exercise of his or her official duties.

Similarly, UNCAC Article 18(b), entitled “Trading in influence,” states that

Each State Party shall consider adopting such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences, when committed intentionally: […]

(b) The solicitation or acceptance by a public official or any other person, directly or indirectly, of an undue advantage for himself or herself or for another person in order that the public official or the person abuse his or her real or supposed influence with a view to obtaining from an administration or public authority of the State Party an undue advantage.

The Council of Europe Criminal Law Convention on Corruption (COE Convention) has similar requirements. Consistent with these general precepts, and in contrast to the United States, countries including the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Malaysia, Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia and Ukraine have all criminalized foreign bribe receiving. The Council of Europe’s anti-corruption monitoring body, GRECO (Groupe d’Etats Contre la Corruption) has criticized the United States for its failure to adequately address bribe-taking by foreign government officials and, in its 2014 compliance report on the United States, noted that its recommendation that passive bribery be criminalized had not been fully implemented.

In addition to aligning U.S. legislation with international norms, criminalizing foreign passive bribery would serve several other valuable purposes.

First, even if the bribe-takers are never extradited or prosecuted, a U.S. indictment would make it difficult for them to travel (lest they travel to a country that has an extradition treaty with the United States) and to spend their ill-gotten gains.

Second, the fact of an indictment could be used to support other penalties, such as sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act (GMA), which applies to foreign government officials responsible for serious human rights abuses and corruption.

Third, U.S. charges would put pressure on foreign governments to bring domestic charges against the bribe-takers (something that, as explained below, rarely happens now).

Finally, it would help honest companies use the FCPA as a shield to resist bribe demands. Or, to put it another way, the argument that “we can’t pay because we could be prosecuted under the FCPA” would obviously be much more powerful if coupled with the statement “and you too.”

U.S. opponents of criminalizing foreign bribe-taking typically cite (1) the fact that such cases can be prosecuted under other statutes, such as money laundering and wire fraud, (2) the greater interest of the bribe-taker’s government in prosecuting the passive side of the offense, (3) the possible political fallout that could result from criminally charging foreign government officials for bribe-taking, and (4) the jurisdictional challenges of bringing such cases. Examining each of these arguments individually reveals that they are unpersuasive.

The GRECO report cited above notes that in addressing GRECO’s criticisms about passive bribery, the U.S. respondents pointed out that “the United States can and has prosecuted foreign officials based on corruption through (1) money laundering charges (as foreign corruption is a predicate offence to money laundering), (2) wire fraud, and (3) the Travel Act.” Thus, the report noted, “GRECO accepts that the [U.S.] law enforcement authorities in practice may deal with and prosecute in situations involving passive bribery of foreign public officials and others to a large extent; as it appears often as money laundering.”

However, GRECO correctly concluded that this response was only partially satisfactory given the additional elements required to prove a mail or wire fraud case. For example, money laundering requires proof of financial transactions beyond the receipt of a bribe, which may be extremely difficult to prove, especially if a bribe is paid in cash. Mail and wire fraud require proof of an intent to defraud which may not always exist in a bribery case and the Travel Act, which in pertinent part criminalizes “interstate and foreign travel or transportation in aid of racketeering enterprises,” requires proof of travel in, or the use of, interstate or foreign commerce to violate state law.

The DOJ U.S. Attorneys Manual (USAM) is also instructive on this point. Section 9-27.300 of the USAM discusses the situation when a criminal act may be prosecuted under more than one statute. In such situations, the USAM cautions:

[T]he attorney for the government should bear in mind that he/she will have to introduce at trial admissible evidence sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction, or else the government will suffer a dismissal, or a reversal on appeal. For this reason, he/she should not include in an information, or recommend in an indictment, charges that he/she cannot reasonably expect to prove beyond a reasonable doubt by legally sufficient and admissible evidence at trial.

In connection with the evidentiary basis for the charges selected, the prosecutor should also be particularly mindful of the different requirements of proof covering similar conduct. […]

[A] Federal prosecutor should initially charge the most serious, readily provable offense or offenses consistent with the defendant’s conduct. (emphasis added)

The principles set forth in the USAM do not appear to be well served by charging bribe-taking as money laundering, mail/wire fraud, or interstate travel in aid of racketeering. In addition, these non-bribery statutes are unlikely to generate the collateral benefits identified above—foreign governments are less likely to be shamed into prosecuting an official who has been charged with fraud than one who has been charged with extorting a bribe, and the possibility of prosecution for bribery is more likely to deter corrupt government officials than is the threat of prosecution under a convoluted theory of money laundering, fraud, or interstate travel in aid of racketeering.

Finally, many of the countries that criminalize foreign bribery have money laundering statutes that are even broader than the corresponding statutes in the United States. For example, the UK Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) applies to the proceeds of all crimes, not just specified crimes, as in the United States. Nevertheless, the United Kingdom does not consider POCA to be a substitute for a foreign passive bribery statute.

The Global Magnitsky Act is also not an adequate substitute for an appropriate criminal statute. The GMA does not carry criminal penalties and therefore does not create a risk of arrest or extradition to the United States, which means that it does not have the same deterrent effect as criminal charges. In addition, sanctions under the GMA are imposed by the State Department and the Treasury Department without being vetted by a grand jury and are not subject to the same kind of judicial review as a criminal indictment. They therefore tend to be perceived as more political than legal, and for that reason have less credibility in world public opinion than criminal charges. Finally, the majority of designations under the GMA relate to human rights abuses rather than to corruption, which suggests that the main focus of the GMA, in practice, will continue to be human rights rather than anti-corruption.

The GRECO report also cites the statement of the U.S. respondents that “the country where the individual is an official is the most damaged by the acceptance of a bribe and should, if possible, prosecute that official domestically for taking the bribe.” However, the U.S. government’s argument is again undermined by the USAM which, in Section 9-27.240, states:

In determining whether prosecution should be declined because the person is subject to effective prosecution in another jurisdiction, the attorney for the government should weigh all relevant considerations, including . . . [t]he other jurisdiction’s ability and willingness to prosecute effectively.

In this respect, it advises U.S. prosecutors to “be alert to any local conditions, attitudes, relationships or other circumstances that might cast doubt on the likelihood of the other authorities conducting a thorough and successful prosecution.”

Applying these principles makes clear that, as crimes go, foreign bribe-taking is generally not one that should be left to foreign authorities to prosecute. In contrast to ordinary crimes, bribe-taking is necessarily a sensitive matter for foreign governments. Foreign officials who take bribes often share a portion of their illegal proceeds with their superiors, and bribe-taking officials frequently threaten to expose the higher-ups with whom they shared if they are not protected. Even without such a blackmail threat, serious independent investigation and prosecution of such a crime may expose corruption at high levels. Therefore, it is not surprising that FCPA prosecutions so rarely involve corresponding “demand-side” prosecutions of the bribe-takers. Indeed, a recent study by the OECD of demand-side prosecutions found that public officials were sanctioned in only one-fifth of the schemes covered by the survey. In short, applying the USAM criteria, foreign jurisdictions often do not have the “ability and willingness to prosecute effectively,” making such cases inappropriate candidates for deferrals to foreign prosecutors.

Opponents of criminalizing foreign bribery may also argue that indicting foreign government officials is undesirable because it will subject the United States to political fallout, and possibly retaliation. However, the fact that DOJ is already charging foreign government officials under other statutes such as money laundering undermines this argument, and suggests that the government has already decided to accept this risk. For example, in 2014, then-Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell stated:

And now we also are prosecuting the bribe takers, using our money laundering and other laws. And, importantly, we have begun stripping corrupt officials of the proceeds of their corruption involving both bribes and kleptocracy, using both criminal and civil authorities.

The Criminal Division’s FCPA enforcement program and our Kleptocracy Initiative are really two sides of the same anti-corruption coin. We bring those who pay bribes to justice, no matter how rich and powerful they are. But by itself, that is not enough. We also attack corruption at its source – by prosecuting and seizing the assets of the corrupt officials who betray the trust of their people.

In 2018, Assistant Attorney General Trevor McFadden (now a Federal judge) made clear that this policy would continue under the new administration when he stated:

The FCPA has been described as a “supply-side” statute in that it governs only the conduct of the bribe payer, not the government official who receives the bribe. Nevertheless, the department has regularly charged certain “foreign official” bribe recipients with other related crimes, such as money laundering. […]

When we cannot charge a crime under the FCPA, in addition to crimes such as money laundering, false statements, and obstruction of justice, there are multiple legal theories we may use in order to prosecute corruption.  

Similarly, the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy states “the United States will continue to target corrupt foreign officials.”

In any event, any risks of political fallout could be mitigated by imposing a requirement of Attorney General approval for indictments of sitting high-ranking foreign government officials, such as is included in 18 U.S.C. Section 2332, which criminalizes the overseas homicide of U.S. nationals in connection with terrorist offenses. 18 U.S.C. Section 2332(d) provides:

No prosecution for any offense described in this section shall be undertaken by the United States except on written certification of the Attorney General or the highest ranking subordinate of the Attorney General with responsibility for criminal prosecutions that, in the judgment of the certifying official, such offense was intended to coerce, intimidate, or retaliate against a government or civilian population.

Finally, the threat of political fallout has not stopped the U.S. government from imposing visa bans and asset freezes on various foreign government officials including Evgeniy Shkolov, an Aide to the President of the Russian Federation; Nikolai Patrushev, the Secretary of the Russian Federation Security Council; Igor Sergun, the head of Russia’s military intelligence service (GRU); Abdulhamit Gul, the Minister of Justice of Turkey; Suleyman Soylu, the Minister of Interior of Turkey; and Francisco Javier Diaz Madriz, Nicaraguan National Police Commissioner.

Opponents of criminalizing foreign passive bribery may also cite alleged jurisdictional obstacles to prosecuting foreign bribe-takers. However, this does not seem to have been a problem in the wire fraud, mail fraud, and Travel Act cases cited by DOJ. Moreover, DOJ has frequently charged foreign companies that are not publicly traded in the United States with FCPA violations on the theory that they conspired with U.S. companies or that some part of the crime took place on U.S. territory. Furthermore, Congress has passed legislation establishing extra-territorial jurisdiction over certain crimes. For example, 18 U.S.C. Section 2332 makes it a crime to kill, attempt to kill, or engage in a conspiracy to kill, or engage in physical violence with intent to cause, or resulting in, serious bodily injury to a U.S. national outside of the United States if such act is done with the intent of political coercion. Similarly, 18 U.S.C. Section 2332a makes it a crime to use, threaten, or attempt or conspire to use, without lawful authority, a weapon of mass destruction against a national of the United States while such national is outside of the United States. 18 U.S.C. Section 2339 criminalizes harboring or concealing terrorists, regardless of where the act occurs. These statutes are clearly designed for extraordinary national situations arising from terrorist threats. However, the State Department and National Security Council have both defined anti-corruption as a national security priority, and there can be no doubt that corruption props up various regimes that pose serious national security threats to the United States.

Now, corporations are penalized for paying bribes, but the foreign officials who solicit such bribes largely escape U.S. prosecution. While some may contend that changing U.S. law to cover foreign bribe receiving is not possible because of jurisdictional limitations in the FCPA, we believe that this problem can be addressed by amending the passive bribery provisions of Title 18 (rather than the FCPA) to cover foreign officials. Such an amendment could also be supplemented by civil remedies, such as providing a private right of action in U.S. courts for companies that have lost contracts in foreign countries because of local corruption. Current awareness of the geopolitical threat of grand corruption, challenges faced by U.S. businesses operating overseas and connections between kleptocracy, human rights abuses, and national security suggest that now may be a particularly good time for such an important legislative initiative.

The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States (December 2017).

U.S. Department of State, “U.S. Anti-Corruption Efforts.”

OECD, Foreign Bribery Enforcement: What Happens to the Public Officials on the Receiving End? (2018).

Ibid.

Leslie R. Caldwell, Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, “Remarks at the American Conference Institute’s 31st International Conference on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act” (Nov. 19, 2014).

Trevor N. McFadden, Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, “Remarks at the American Conference Institute’s 7th Brazil Summit on Anti-Corruption” (May 24, 2017).

Sanctions were lifted on November 2, 2018.

Sanctions were lifted on November 2, 2018.

United States v. Keppel Offshore & Marine Ltd., No. 17-cr-697 (E.D.N.Y. 2017), available at https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1020711/download (charging Keppel Offshore & Marine Ltd., based in Singapore, with conspiracy to violate the FCPA’s anti-bribery provisions for improper payments to Petrobras officials and other Brazilian officials); United States v. SBM Offshore, N.V., No. 17-CR-00686 (S.D. Tex. 2017), available at https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1014861/download (SBM Offshore N.V. pleading guilty to conspiracy to violate the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA for series of bribery schemes involving officials from state or state-affiliated energy or oil companies in Brazil, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Kazakhstan, and Iraq); U.S. v. JGC Corporation, No. 11-00260 (S.D. Tex. 2011), available at https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-fraud/legacy/2011/04/27/04-6-11jgc-corp-info.pdf (charging JGC Corporation, headquartered in Japan, with one count of conspiracy and one count of aiding and abetting violations of the FCPA for improper payments to Nigerian government officials made by its Nigerian JV).

See notes 1-2.

The post Two to Tango: Attacking the Demand Side of Bribery appeared first on The American Interest.

The Trump Before Trump

He is the “Trump before Trump,” said Steve Bannon. During a presentation in Zurich this past spring, the ex-adviser of the U.S. President was not referring to Silvio Berlusconi or Viktor Orbán, veteran European populists well known on the international stage. Bannon was talking about Christoph Blocher, a man from a small, neutral country in the heart of Europe best known for its banks, cheese, and stability. “Actually everything began in Switzerland in 1992,” added the American populist mastermind.

Bannon was not wrong. Of all places, it was Switzerland that, almost 30 years ago, hosted the dress rehearsal for what is shaking up the Western world right now.

The year 1992 was when Mr. Blocher rose to his first grand victory by preventing Switzerland from entering the European Economic Area—and, at a later stage, prevented it from entering the European Union as well. The billionaire did this alone, against the government, and without the support of the leading political parties or business associations. “Dr. Blocher,” Bannon concluded, had “stood up against the establishment. The Swiss establishment, the European establishment. The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal vilified him.” Blocher’s allies were the people, or rather the 50.3 percent of the people who supported him in the referendum.

The magnitude of this victory is hard to reconstruct today for those who have grown accustomed to a European Union plagued by crisis and bad press. But in the early 1990s, the European Union was still considered one of the most promising political projects ever undertaken by the West. A colossal peace endeavor was being established and a vast economic area constructed with the noble aim of making it possible for Europe to grow close again after the end of the Cold War. And Switzerland seemed well on its way to becoming a part of it all. Despite criticism of the political European Union, it seemed clear that membership in the European Economic Area would be necessary to avoid economic isolation. There was no alternative—or at least that’s what the Swiss establishment thought.

Blocher thought differently. While the old frontiers in Europe were being torn down, he fought hard to build borders around Switzerland. He advocated for national sovereignty, just as the nation-state was being dismissed as obsolete. In his campaigns against the European Union he depicted Brussels as the new Moscow, aiming to subjugate all countries. Switzerland, he feared, would become a colony of the European Union. “We haven’t fought for 700 years against foreign judges to now exchange our rights with those of a foreign law and foreign judges. We want to stay free and independent,” said Blocher in one of his countless speeches before the referendum. This is exactly how EU critics argue today.

With his win, a true right-wing populist was born, and Blocher began to understand the power of direct democracy, initiatives, and referenda to reverse decisions made by government and lawmakers. The people, he believed, were wiser than the elite. Since its founding in 1848, Switzerland had stood, with few exceptions, as a model of democracy. The image of a self-determining people stretches back to Rousseau, who in his time had already waxed lyrical about Switzerland’s cantonal assemblies, a public gathering, where the people voted openly by raising their hands—one of the oldest forms of direct democracy.

Prior to Blocher, being average was considered a virtue. Exceptional men like Alfred Escher, the founder of Credit Suisse and the father of Swiss industrialization, had been mercilessly dressed down after they began to hold too much power. No one, held popular opinion, should soar up above his countrymen, for this could destroy the political balance in a country with 26 cantons and four languages. But Blocher simply ignored conventional wisdom, taking extreme, attention-grabbing positions that made direct democracy fertile for him and his ideas. To the charge of populism, he has only ever had one answer: “They call me a populist, but I don’t even know what that is.” His life goal was to prevent Switzerland from entering the European Union. He didn’t want to do it, he said. He had to. It was his “mission.”

Blocher’s 1992 victory also succeeded in transforming the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) from a centrist, pragmatic party into a right-wing opposition machine. Under Blocher’s leadership, it focused on only a few issues, most having to do with being anti-EU, anti-foreigner, and anti-establishment. This agenda would eventually mold the programs of right-wing populist parties today. Thanks to Blocher, the SVP has increased its share of the vote from around 12 to almost 30 percent, becoming the strongest political force in the country. Furthermore, the party widened its appeal to include not only farmers and tradesmen, but also blue-collar workers who traditionally supported the Liberal and the Social Democratic parties. All this made the SVP one of the most successful right-wing parties in Europe.

Blocher and the People

Like today’s populists—especially U.S. President Donald Trump—Blocher has an extraordinary talent to speak to all people, directly, in a no-frills, sometimes brutal dialectic, one that does not shy away from ruthlessly attacking establishment figures or minorities. Blocher broke free from “political correctness” before that phrase had even entered the discourse. Foreigners were reviled as criminals, the leading liberal party in Switzerland as a bunch of soft, yellow-bellied nepotists. Lawyers didn’t fare much better. Blocher reserved his most fervent invective for the “elites”, especially the classe politique, which the erstwhile industrialist more or less transformed into a four-letter word. As a young man, Christoph had completed an apprenticeship in farming before going on to study law and becoming a manager and later an entrepreneur—he knew how the common man talked. In 1992, Blocher held speeches from atop hay bales and walked through the center of Zürich with traditional cowbells, a cigar stub between his teeth. His inelegant gestures, coarse facial expressions, and slightly oversized suits all made him seem like the quintessential everyman, even though he was anything but.

It doesn’t really matter that Blocher is a billionaire with an impressive art collection, that he earned some of his money on the stock market, or that he has a villa on the Goldküste with a view of lake Zürich, as well as a mountain castle in Rhäzüns. As with Trump, Blocher’s wealth seems to legitimize him somehow, authorizing him to speak on behalf of “the people.” Over the decades he has held bombastic speeches in multipurpose halls and started his own television show, Tele Blocher, where every week he is interviewed by the same journalist.

Blocher is intentionally provocative. For years other political parties did not know how to deal with his agitations and disruptions. Mostly they just attacked him—which only made Blocher more sympathetic in the eyes of his constituents. In the United States, the Democrats are experiencing something similar; like Blocher, Trump often appears invulnerable to criticism.

But unlike Trump, who rarely goes beyond dog-whistles and innuendos, Blocher embraces a much more overt style of xenophobic politics. He caused an international uproar when he ran billboard advertisements that depicted, among other things, a black sheep being kicked out of a map of Switzerland and a pair of dark-skinned hands grabbing at a Swiss passport. Kosovar Albanians in Switzerland were portrayed as knife-brandishing thugs; minarets were depicted as missiles. These SVP posters have now become part of the iconography of right-wing populism, popping up at demonstrations in France, Austria, and Belgium. Even Russian extremists have been known to use them at protests.

Blocher was so controversial that he managed to divide the whole country, as Trump has managed to do today in the United States. You are either for or against him. You see him either as a messiah who understands the fears of the simple man, or as the fomenter who has made xenophobia acceptable. There is no in-between.

As opposed to camera-shy Swiss politicians of times gone by, Blocher has searched for the limelight. The media was drawn to him like a magnet. They clashed with him, criticized him on all fronts, and gave him the attention he wanted and needed to rise to become the most influential politician in the country. Like Trump, Blocher used his war with the media to his advantage, accusing them of being leftist and partisan and therefore not credible. Although he has never reached the ubiquitous media presence of Italy’s Berlusconi, Blocher has tried to build up a quasi-media empire of his own in order to spread his worldview. He tried to influence public opinion through the editor-in-chief and publisher of the weekly magazine Die Weltwoche, who venerates him. Also, he bought the regional newspaper Basler Zeitung (BaZ), placing at its helm a right-leaning editor in chief. Although he had to sell his BaZ-stake as the newspaper lost readers, he made sure to maintain a high media presence by purchasing two dozen small local free newspapers. It is in these that he frequently writes columns, reaching up to 800,000 Swiss people.

Then in 2014, the SVP celebrated a further victory against the European Union when the Swiss people decided to place dramatic limits on immigration. Take back control was the most important argument in Switzerland. The country was not part of the European Union, but bilateral contracts had effectively linked Bern with Brussels for some time. Switzerland belonged to the single market and allowed the free movement of labor and capital across its borders, as if it were an EU member state. Thanks to its access to the European market the Swiss economy had grown stronger. But along with the exchange of goods came immigration. Lured by the hope of higher incomes, almost 80,000 migrants per year crossed the border, ten times the projected figures. And the immigrants weren’t just low-skilled workers from Poland, as was the case in the United Kingdom, but also highly qualified doctors, managers, and academics from Germany. This unsettled the Swiss. Many began to fear for their jobs. However, the elite remained blind to their fears. “We need immigration, we need skilled labor,” was their mantra. The SVP launched an initiative to halt mass immigration. Their mantra echoed the people’s concerns, advocated for stronger immigration controls, and concretized their fears of lost jobs and increased rents.

The SVP won the vote, leaving the establishment perplexed once again. Two years later, take back control became the most important argument in favor of Brexit. In Switzerland, however, the initial reductions in immigration were actually quite small, and for this reason the SVP now plans to introduce a new initiative, which would terminate the free movement of labor with the European Union altogether. This would mean an end to all bilateral contracts with the European Union, which would have disastrous consequences for Switzerland.

Just a few weeks ago came another sobering reminder of how dangerous Blocher is for democracy and its institutions. The SVP was attempting to pass an initiative stipulating that Swiss law always overrides international law—“Switzerland First,” one might say. For Blocher, the main point was that all future initiatives and referenda should be able to be implemented word for word, without constraining discretion from the European Union, even if this contradicted internationally recognized human rights.

Thankfully, the initiative failed, but that it was introduced at all illustrates what is so terrifying about Blocher: He fundamentally believes the people’s decisions should take priority over parliament, the separation of powers, and even the rule of law. Trump has stoked similar fears in the United States by criticizing judges who strike down his executive orders and appointing Federal judges who appear to hew to a partisan line in their decisions.

Include Them

How is it that a small country like Switzerland could birth a political figure that has so many similarities to Donald Trump? How is it possible that Blocher anticipated so many right-wing debates in Europe and became a role model for European populists?

The reason in Switzerland, in any case, is simple: direct democracy. If one can collect 100,000 Swiss signatures in favor of a constitutional amendment, that petition will be sent to a national vote. These initiatives function like a seismograph of the population’s condition and its political preferences. Any resentment they might feel towards the ruling class can quickly be transformed into a concrete set of constitutional demands. In this way, a political party can put new issues on the table and determine the direction of debate.

Blocher knew this only too well. He has been in continuous campaign-mode since 1992. The SVP was astute enough to observe early on that many voters were dissatisfied with the way things were going. This helped them to win votes and change the course of politics—not only in 1992 with the Europe vote, but also in 2009 when Switzerland implemented a ban on the construction of minarets. Then in 2010, Swiss voters approved a referendum to deport criminal immigrants. That vote was followed by the decision to restrict raw immigration flows. Small wonder the AfD and Front National look enviously across their country’s borders to Switzerland.

Nevertheless, despite 30 years of Blocher’s right-wing populism, Switzerland has not become a country of extremes. Democracy functions. Checks and balances work. “Fake news” has little impact. Trust in the Federal Council remains strong, and the economy is still growing. So how do these facts square with the populists’ successes? Do other European states have little to fear from their own populists after all?

On this particular question, it’s important to understand that the Swiss political system differs in key ways from most other European countries. Switzerland is a Konkordanzdemokratie, meaning that the four main political parties are present in the national government, also known as the Federal Council. It is therefore not a parliamentary system with a government versus an opposition, the more common model in Europe. In Switzerland, the two parliamentary chambers elect seven representatives to the Federal Council, which then governs as a collegial body—it must remain unanimous when presenting cabinet decisions to the public. Today, for example, the Federal Council consists of two representatives from the SVP, two representatives from the Liberal Party, two representatives from the Social Democrats, and one representative from the Swiss Democratic Party, all of whom must compromise and work together in order to achieve consensus.

SVP, then, has almost always been part of the government and therefore had government responsibilities. Because of this, the SVP could influence politics in Switzerland and push it to the right. By the same token, however, this incorporation into the government has also moderated the party, as it ultimately has to bear responsibility for its political decisions. So while the SVP’s own government representatives would find it difficult to implement their party’s more extreme proposals, it would also be unthinkable for Switzerland’s right-wing populists to be locked out of government as a matter of principle, as is the case today in Sweden.

In fact, the Swiss parliament haven’t even shied away from betting big on the populists, electing Blocher to the Federal Council in 2003, for instance, which effectively placed him at the head of the very classe politique that despised him. As it happened, Blocher was largely inept in this new role. In Switzerland every Federal councilor is bound to defend the decisions of the government externally, even if he does not stand by them himself. Blocher did this badly but remained the leader of his party, even in the Federal Council. After four difficult years, the parliament, in a kind of political coup hitherto unseen in Switzerland, voted Blocher out. Instead they elected a more moderate member of the SVP into the Federal Council.

Nevertheless, the political inclusion of the SVP has shifted Swiss politics, and perhaps Swiss society as well, to the right. Critics are concerned that the SVP has normalized a destructive xenophobic discourse. They feel that including the party in the Federal Council was wrong. Notwithstanding the strengths of this argument, it does not take into consideration the fact that the SVP has 30 percent of the population behind it. To fail to respect the concerns and wishes of these voters would lead to serious consequences. It would stifle open debate, drive the deplorable further in their hatred of the elite, and lead them gradually to turn their back on politics. The inclusion of the SVP has thus averted the polarization of the country. When one contrasts this with the experience of polarization in the United States, the value of this accomplishment cannot be overstated.

The 78-year-old Blocher has stepped back from the party leadership. He remains its mastermind, however, and will continue to pursue his mission of keeping Switzerland out of the European Union until the bitter end. So far, he seems to be succeeding: Negotiations for bilateral contracts have been stalled for years, and the SVP is threatening even more anti-EU initiatives.

So Switzerland is doing well despite almost 30 years of populism. If we were to draw one lesson out of these three decades, it would be that the SVP was only ever successful when a significant part of the population found itself disgruntled or insecure. Populism is not an ideology in any conventional sense; rather, it’s an instrument to gain power—and its basis is always widespread discontent. The best course for Europe and the United States is therefore not to fight right-wing populists like the SVP, but instead to fight against the discontent that fuels their power.

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American Interests—Then and Now

It is an honor to assume the editorship of The American Interest. Publisher Charles Davidson and chairman Frank Fukuyama remain an unbeatable combination in leading our efforts. I also have the good fortune to work with Adam Garfinkle in transition—and hope to continue our collaboration long into the future. TAI is, after all, the house that Adam built. As writer, public intellectual, and editor, my predecessor—TAI’s founding editor—is the gold standard.

Nearly a decade and a half ago TAI was born of conflict, albeit a constructive one. In the beginning there was The National Interest, a publication to which many of us turned in the 1990s for illuminating counterpoint between foreign policy realists and neoconservatives. But then the realists took control of the journal, while the neocons—together with a handful of robust realists—took control of the levers of U.S. foreign policy. America and key parts of Europe split—over the Iraq War chiefly, but also over issues like Guantanamo, Kyoto, and the International Criminal Court. As The National Interest defined itself in clearer terms, a more eclectic splinter group went off to establish The American Interest in 2005.

It’s fitting today, in this time of Trumpism, that we push ourselves to think clearly about purpose—the nation’s, and our magazine’s—as we endeavor to shape crucial debates. From its inception, TAI was never a magazine of foreign policy alone. Rightfully so. The days are long gone when foreign policy experts could huddle in one room, while economists and domestic policy pundits would neatly convene in another. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine any sensible and sustainable foreign policy today—properly aligned with voters in today’s hyper-connected circumstances—without relevant linkages to matters of migration and citizenship, religion and race, ethnicity and gender. The late Sam Huntington’s final work was the 2004 book about America titled Who Are We? Francis Fukuyama’s latest book focuses on identity. Should we be surprised that across the West debates about sovereignty are back? Did they ever disappear?

It may well be cultural conflicts—issues of community and cohesion, identity and purpose—that pull hardest now at the threads of the American fabric, and at the unity of the West as a whole. If this is right, how do we manage foundational problems, without getting lost in high-minded principles? With so much broken, how do we identify priorities among all those things to fix? It seems to have become part of the American zeitgeist that we destroy our opponents; merely defeating them seems no longer to suffice. Where does this take us? How will deepening cultural clashes at home affect America’s role and responsibility in the world?

I’m writing my first letter as editor-in-chief from Europe, a trip covering Belgrade, Berlin, and Prague—all places with tragic experience in lethal fragmentation. Belgrade is the capital of a nation that got stuck after communism. Amidst the malign nationalists and kleptocrats that rule much of Serbia today there’s a group of pro-West stalwarts fighting mightily to pull their country westward. Which West do they seek to join, though?

The sparkle of Vaclav Havel’s Czech Republic is gone. Establishment parties have become depleted and frail. In a country of ten million, billionaire Prime Minister Andrej Babis—a man who owns media and parts of the economy—has stepped up to fill the vacuum. Next door, I’m trying to get a handle on change for a book I’m writing, The Next Germany. Here, too, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats are in trouble. Something structural seems to be afoot. As with the Czech Republic, in Germany the economy grows, and discontent swells nevertheless.

Can rhymes of history help us to navigate today’s change? Comparison and case studies from then, and today, are useful; serious analysis, indispensable.

In this vein, a word about the current print issue.

Read Oren Cass on gigantic errors in our economic policy thinking, and Isabel Sawhill on helping those left behind. Allen C. Lynch wants us to find new ways to puzzle through old enigmas of Russia, that great spoiler of the West’s efforts to repair and renew. My colleague Aaron Sibarium reviews Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Coddling of the American Mind—and urges deeper digging into the roots of our culture wars.

We’ll keep digging. And peering ahead. Nearly a decade ago a free market economist friend said to me, “If capitalism is to save itself, capitalists must show restraint.” In the meantime it seems clear: If democracy is to heal itself, America must discover new rigor and perspective, and make room for greater empathy, and imagination.

We remain determined to do our part. Stay tuned!

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Rouhani’s Threat to Shut the Strait of Hormuz—More Than Bluster?

Last week, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani threatened that if the United States blocks Iran’s oil exports then “no oil will be exported from the Persian Gulf.” This may be nothing more than hot air, but as tensions mount over the re-imposition of U.S. sanctions against Iran and Iran’s increasing malign activities around the world— in Europe, fomenting instability in the region, ballistic missile tests, and more—Iranian threats against its Gulf neighbors cannot be ignored.

In fact, one could make the argument that this week marks the unhappy anniversary of three and a half decades of Iranian terrorist proxy warfare in the region. Thirty-five years ago this week, on December 12, 1983, Iran sent Lebanese and Iraqi Shi‘a terrorist proxies to carry out a series of coordinated bombings over the course of two hours. The attacks targeted Western interests in Kuwait, including the U.S. and French embassies, the Kuwaiti airport, a site near the Raytheon Corporation’s grounds, at a Kuwait National Petroleum Company oil rig, and a government-owned power station. The seventh attack, outside a post office, was defused. Six people were killed and some 87 wounded in the attacks.

The bombings took Kuwaiti officials by surprise, but the damage could have been much worse—perhaps worse than that in the Beirut bombings—had the bombs been properly wired. As it happened, faulty engineering prevented three quarters of the explosives planted at the American Embassy compound from detonating, saving many lives. Shoddy planning also reduced the destructiveness of the attacks: a truck carrying two hundred gas cylinders primed to explode at the National Petroleum Company site went off 150 yards from a refinery and just a few yards shy of a pile of flammable chemicals. Had the truck been better placed, some commented, the oilfield might have burned for months. More adept operational planning might also have resulted in the destruction of Kuwait’s primary water-desalination plant, located within the premises.

Over the course of the next few years, Iran would continue to dispatch operatives from Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Dawa, and a variety of local Shi‘a militants from Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia to carry out attacks on Tehran’s behalf across the region. As early as 1985, the CIA would note that “Iran generally employs radical Lebanese or Iraqi Shi‘a groups in its terrorist operations.” More than three decades later, Tehran has perfected the use of what it now describes as a “Shi‘a Liberation Army,” under the command of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—Qods Force, to foment regional instability and project Iranian power beyond its borders.

Seventeen operatives were convicted and jailed in Kuwait for their roles in the December 1983 plots, including three Lebanese Hezbollah operatives. One was a cousin of Hezbollah leader Husein al-Musawi, while another was Mustafa Badredinne, brother-in-law and cousin of Hezbollah terrorist mastermind Imad Mughniyeh. Their incarceration led to many more terrorist plots around the world aimed, at least in part, in securing their freedom.

For example, on December 3, 1984, Hezbollah operatives hijacked Kuwait Airways flight 221, killed two Americans, and demanded the release of the so-called “Kuwait 17.” Hezbollah operatives hijacked Kuwait Airways flight 422 in April 1988, killing a Kuwaiti citizen and again demanding the release of the Kuwait 17.

But the most brazen plot occurred in May 1985, when a car filled with explosives rammed the royal motorcade of the Emir of Kuwait, killing three people and injuring 12, including the Emir, who suffered minor lacerations. “We hope the Emir has received our message,” an anonymous caller warned on behalf of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization, “we ask one more time for the release of those held or all the thrones of the Gulf will be shaken.” Just ten days earlier, Hezbollah issued another warning to the United States, France, and Kuwait demanding the release of the Kuwait 17. American and French hostages were being held to force Washington and Paris into pressuring Kuwait to release the 17 jailed terrorists, according to a note that accompanied the photos of four American and two French hostages. The note threatened “horrible catastrophe” for the hostages if the Kuwait 17 were not released. An anonymous caller told a French news agency that “the U.S. government should await the largest military operation it has ever known,” adding, “[We have] been preparing this surprise for a long time.” The caller also threatened to target Kuwaiti diplomats worldwide. Iranian proxy agents struck ten days later, but instead of targeting American or French interests, or Kuwaiti diplomats, it came very close to assassinating the Kuwaiti emir in his own backyard. Once more, the plot was carried out by a combination of Lebanese Hezbollah and Iraqi Dawa operatives.

In these and other attacks, Lebanese and Iraqi operatives acted in the explicit service of Iran. In 1986, the CIA assessed in a now-declassified report that, while Iran’s support for terrorism was meant to further its national interests, including dissuading Kuwait from supporting Iraq militarily in the Iran-Iraq War, this support also stemmed from the clerical regime’s perception “that it has a religious duty to export its Islamic revolution and to wage, by whatever means, a constant struggle against the perceived oppressor states.”

Iran increased its involvement in international terrorism in 1987, the CIA noted in a February 1988 report, including terrorist plots well beyond Lebanon’s borders in Europe and the Gulf. For Kuwait, these included bombings targeting Kuwaiti oil installations in January, April, and May. In July, two Kuwaiti brothers who underwent sabotage training in Iran died when the bomb they were placing in front of the building housing the Air France ticket office detonated prematurely. As the year closed out, Iranian proxy operatives carried out arson and bombing attacks at Kuwait University, the Pan American ticket office, the Ministry of Interior, and the office of a U.S.-owned insurance company. “Iranian leaders view terrorism as an important instrument of foreign policy,” the report assessed, “which in 1987 they were willing to use to advance national goals and to export the regime’s Islamic revolutionary ideals.” Describing what Iran did in 1987 and could well be planning again today, the report noted that “Tehran used the threat of terrorism, along with attacks on Gulf shipping, to discourage Kuwait and the other moderate Arab Gulf states from supporting the U.S. reflagging effort.”

Even back in the 1980s, Iran understood the utility of having non-Iranian Shi‘a forces at its disposal to carry out attacks that provide Tehran with a measure of reasonable deniability. Together, Tehran already understood, Iran and its allied Shi‘a militants could achieve asymmetric victories of larger, more powerful adversaries. The CIA assessed in early 1988 that “in the Iranian view, Tehran and its Shi‘a allies forced the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Lebanon, humiliating the United States and bringing into question the idea that Washington could use its military forces to influence political developments in the Middle East.” Iranian leaders drew parallels between what Iran and its militants Shi‘a allies achieved with the 1983 and 1984 U.S. Embassy and Marine Barracks bombings in Beirut and what they could do then, in 1987, to disrupt U.S. plans to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers in the Gulf.

There are several reasons to be concerned that Iran may be making similar calculations today and that Rouhani’s threat to shut the Strait of Hormuz might be something more than bluster. The sanctions re-imposed by the United States are tremendously impactful, even without full European cooperation. And Europe appears willing to consider some more sanctions on Iran in the wake of Iranian assassination plots in Europe and an escalation in Iranian ballistic missile testing in violation of existing UN security resolutions. If Iran feels cornered, it may lash out. And it would have the means to do so through its allies—whether that means rocket attacks against Israel from Hamas and Hezbollah, attacks on coalition forces in Iraq, or attacks targeting Gulf states. In fact, some of the people leading Iran’s most capable proxy forces today first cut their teeth in the Kuwait operations back in the 1980s. Consider people like Lebanese Hezbollah leaders Fuad Shukr and Talal Hamiyeh, both of whom played key roles in Hezbollah attacks in the 1980s and are senior operational leaders today. Perhaps it should not surprise that under their leadership Hezbollah has not only dispatched terrorist operatives around the world but also maintained large caches of weapons in places in Nigeria and Kuwait.

But the most prominent example involves Jamal Jafar Muhammad Ali, better known as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, one of the operatives convicted in absentia for his role in the 1983 Kuwait bombings and the 1985 plot to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait. Back then, Muhandis was a young Iraqi Dawa operative who worked hand-in-glove with Lebanese Hezbollah operatives. Muhandis went on to lead the Badr Corps, the militant wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). As head of the Badr Corps, Muhandis worked directly with the Qods Force, became an Iranian citizen, and served as a senior advisor to Qods Force leader General Qassem Suleimani. Today, Muhandis leads Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most extreme Iraqi Shi‘a militant groups and a key part of Iran’s network of Shi‘a militant allies.

“Export of the revolution is a central tenet of the clerical regime in Iran, and terrorism has been a primary instrument in advancing this objective,” the CIA assessed in 1986. Even after all these years, exporting the revolution remains the prime directive of the Qods Force and its Shi‘a militant allies. Retired IRGC commander Brigadier General Mohammad Ali Falaki explained in 2016 that Tehran’s proxy forces—from Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond—together form “a Shi‘a Liberation Army whose commander is [Qods Force leader] Hajj Qassem Soleimani.” Iranians may lead some of these units, but “Iranian forces are not meant to comprise all of this army,” he explained.

Today, Iran provides weapons, training, funding, and intelligence support to component elements of this Shi‘a Liberation Army. On display in a hangar at Joint Base Anacostia—Bolling in Washington, DC, is a collection of Iranian weapons—from small arms and grenades to short range ballistic missiles, surface to air missiles, anti-tank guided missiles, and drones—which Iran supplied to proxies in Afghanistan, Bahrain, and Yemen.

Among the other weapons systems on display at the so-called Iran Material Display were unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of carrying explosive payloads and a remote controlled Shark-33 boat of the type that was filled with explosives and targeted the Saudi frigate HMS al-Madinah in January 2017. Technicians collected ninety sets of GPS coordinates from the boat’s remote control computer system, including locations in the Red Sea, in Yemen, in the Strait of Hormuz, and in Iran. GPS coordinates for one of two locations in Tehran corresponds to the Self-Sufficiency Jihad Organization, which is responsible for the research and development of Iran’s ballistic missiles, among other things. In fact, images found on the Shark-33 computer guidance system show the likely production, assembly, or testing of at least seven additional such computers at this IRGC facility in eastern Tehran. In one picture, an IRGC hat sits on top of one of the boxes. Iran, it appears, is actively producing and providing to its proxies weapons systems specifically intended to threaten freedom of navigation—which explains why officials take seriously the Iranian President’s threats to prevent the export of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.

This new evidence of Iran’s missile proliferation is compelling, and represents evidence of clear violations of several UN Security Council resolutions banning Iran from exporting weapons. But it is only the latest manifestation of Iran’s support for terrorist activities targeting its neighbors in the Gulf and beyond—something that can be traced back to events in Kuwait that took place 35 years ago this week.

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Macron’s Malaise Speech

An embattled president addresses the nation in a primetime address after weeks of mounting public anger about the cost of fuel. He has been notably absent from the public eye during the crisis; critics say that his attention has been wrongly focused elsewhere, that he has misread the mood of the country, that in terms of leadership style he is “aloof,” “overly technocratic,” “too reliant on a small circle of advisors,” and “arrogant.” His approval ratings have been declining for months; his re-election prospects look dire. Then, one night, he breaks his silence. He speaks from his office, flags furled behind him, hands resting calmly on the desk in front of him. He addresses the crisis at hand, but the speech touches on deeper, almost spiritual themes: an upwelling of public anger, the loss of faith in institutions, worries that national identity is changing, the sense that political elites just don’t listen anymore. He issues a call to action with an appeal to the nation’s exceptionalism: “It has been our calling throughout History to open pathways heretofore unexplored for ourselves and for the world.”

It sounds like an account of Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech, but the setting for this scene is the Élysée Palace in 2018, not the White House in 1979, and the speaker is an investment banker from Amiens, not a peanut farmer from Plains.

Setting the Scene: The “Gilets Jaunes”

For four successive Saturdays, yellow-vested protesters numbering in the hundreds of thousands have turned out in force across France, notably along the Champs-Élysées in Paris, where their eye-catching rioting—smashing storefronts, setting cars ablaze, defacing the Arc de Triomphe—has captivated international media. All agree that the initial spark for the protests was the government’s planned increase in the fuel tax. As angry motorists donned their yellow emergency vests—French law requires such vests be kept in every car—they brilliantly transformed a ubiquitous and low-cost clothing item into the visual glue of an unprecedented protest movement. Yellow safety jackets scream “EMERGENCY.” Marching in them is the sartorial equivalent of pulling the fire alarm.

The gilets jaunes, as the Yellow Jackets are known in France, have already achieved their initial objective. Under immense pressure, President Emmanuel Macron’s government first postponed, then scrapped entirely, its plan to raise the fuel tax. The protesters won. Yet the protests continued for another Saturday, prompting Macron’s address to the nation the following Monday.

Who are the gilets jaunes and what do they want? The protests draw mostly from la France périphérique, outside Paris and other urban centers, where employment is scarcer. They are leaderless, geographically dispersed, and largely organized on social media. One of my French friends, an engineering student from Brittany, explained the protesters’ situation to me this way: “What you have to understand is that people in rural France have been hurting for some time now. Taxes have risen; incomes haven’t. Rail lines servicing remote areas have been closed in recent years, leaving the rural French more reliant than ever on their cars. Now the fuel tax would make driving more expensive, and many already run out of money before the end of the month. We call what’s been happening précarisation,” a word without an exact English translation, but which roughly means “a process rendering something more and more precarious.” In this case, that something is everyday life.

The trouble is, it’s not clear what unites the gilets jaunes beyond a generalized economic anxiety and a visceral hatred of France’s political and business elite—perfectly personified by Macron, whose CV includes a stint as an investment banker at Rothschild & Co. and degrees from two of France’s prestigious Grandes Écoles. If the gilets jaunes have a rallying cry, it is surely “MACRON DÉMISSION!” (“Macron Resignation!”). As the movement has matured, its base of support has remained murky, its reputation has been tarnished by its more destructive elements, its demands have grown less and less focused, and its vitriol has been increasingly directed against one man—the President of the Republic.

Macron’s High-stakes Performance

Before he was a politician—nay, before he could legally purchase un verre de vin rouge— Emmanuel Macron was an actor. It was in his high school drama class that Macron met the love of his life, Brigitte—his teacher at the time—and she has coached him ever since. In Monday night’s monologue, the old training made itself known.

Twenty-three million tuned in for Macron’s speech. And the former drama student delivered what can charitably be described as a polished but not entirely convincing performance. Yes, he nailed the script’s anaphora with appropriate panache. He paused dramatically. He spoke softly, almost tenderly at times. And he closed with a soaring peroration: “My one concern, it’s you; my only fight, it’s for you. Our only battle, for France. Vive la République! Vive la France!“

But a speech is judged not only by the elements of its delivery, but also by the magnitude of its effects, and after the widely viewed broadcast the French have mostly failed to rally to Macron’s side. According to a poll reported in Le Figaro, 59 percent of respondents did not find the speech convincing. And 54 percent said that the gilets jaunes should continue their protests, down from 66 percent supporting the protests on November 22, but still a solid majority.

The measures Macron announced in the speech—no taxes on overtime pay, a monthly bonus for workers earning the minimum wage, tax-free end-of-year bonuses for workers, tax relief for retirees earning less than 2,000 euros a month—each earned the support of a majority of respondents, according to the same poll. But taken as a package, they appear to placate neither the French public nor the gilets jaunes movement. Macron may have conceded too much at once not to appear weak and too little to fully satisfy the protesters. In rattling off these specific, targeted, euro-denominated figures, he ran the risk of being perceived as penny-pinching, technocratic, and transactional. He tried to thread the needle, but he may have pierced his hand instead.

Perils of the “Jupiterian” Presidency

Macron began his presidency with more political capital than any French President in recent memory. He had defeated Marine Le Pen in the second round of the 2017 presidential election with 66 percent of the vote. His party’s largely unknown and untested candidates had won a resounding majority in the National Assembly. He had assembled an impressive, competent Cabinet and embarked on an ambitious reform agenda.

In pursuit of this agenda, Macron promised to usher in a “Jupiterian” presidency. “Jupiterian” was an adjective of Macron’s own choosing, in keeping with the French fascination with classical antiquity. The word evokes the god-like power vested in the French executive ever since 1958, when de Gaulle proclaimed the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. In contrast to former President François Hollande’s transparently phony “man of the people” style, Macron pledged to govern at a remove. The President in the mold of Jove would only make pronouncements on occasion, with great ceremony. He would consider the great issues from a lofty height, delegating the minutiae of governing to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. In principle, a reasonable if somewhat conceited way to conceive of managing a sprawling state apparatus. In practice, a slow-rolling political disaster.

Macron’s presidency has not proved Jupiterian in the ways he once described. Far from channeling the dutiful public servant quietly crafting a strategy to tackle France’s deep-seated problems, Macron has taken to auditioning for the role of “Leader of the Free World.” His toothy smile could be seen gleaming like a thunderbolt at his One Planet Summit, Paris Peace Forum, and State of the Union-style speeches. Unlike the fearsome deity whose occasional rumblings from the cloud, legend has it, inspired faith and submission in wayward Greeks, Macron has maintained a busy public schedule, with unscripted moments earning him ridicule and growing resentment.

Unforced errors have created the impression that Macron is arrogant and lacking in empathy. At a meet-and-greet with young Parisians in June 2018, for instance, Macron told off a teenager for calling him by a nickname. The boy’s casual “Ça va, Manu?” was met with finger-wagging disapproval and a civics lesson. In September 2018, Macron told a job seeker he could find a job if he only crossed the street. (France’s unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent, nearly triple that of neighboring Germany.) Hardly the political genius of “I feel your pain.” Few have benefited more from the French meritocracy than Macron, and he can’t seem to empathize with those who haven’t succeeded as staggeringly as he has.

Speeches Are Not Enough

Macron knew from the outset that some of his reforms would be unpopular; he would be forced to spend his hard-earned political capital. He also knew the pressure of the French street, and he vowed never to bow to it. In September 2017 and again in April 2018, he faced down union protests against his labor market and rail sector reforms and refused to blink. But since the summer, Macron’s approval ratings have been plummeting. There were the gaffes. Then Macron’s former bodyguard was caught on video beating up protesters. Two prominent and respected Cabinet ministers, Nicolas Hulot and Gérard Collomb, resigned their posts. And a year after the repeal of Mitterrand’s tax on wealth, it is clear that the French Left’s moniker for Macron—”President of the Rich”—has stuck.

Clearly, Macron’s political problems run deeper than the gilets jaunes movement, but the events of recent weeks have put them in sharp relief.

From the beginning of the protests, Macron’s tone deafness and gaffe proneness have been roundly mocked by students at his alma mater, Sciences Po. In a Facebook group where students post memes, one student re-posted an image with Macron’s face photoshopped onto a portrait of Marie Antoinette, accompanied by the caption: “S’ils n’ont pas de Diesel, ils n’ont qu’à rouler en Tesla” (“If they don’t have any diesel, let them drive Teslas!”). As of this writing, the post had more than 1,900 “likes.” The ancien régime refused to comment.

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Courtesy of Author

Distant, unfeeling, self-absorbed, ridiculous, and cruel—these are the adjectives that best describe how Macron is viewed by the 73 percent of French voters who now disapprove of his job performance. And while his speech on Monday may give his approval rating a modest bump, Macron will need to make substantial changes to stand a chance of regaining the ground he has lost. Modest changes in policy and major changes in style are in order if Macron wishes to live up to the promise of his presidency.

In matters of policy, Macron has tried to be all things to all people and to do all things at once. He cannot possibly succeed in this manner. Strategy dictates that he should abandon some goals, postpone others, and subordinate yet others to his core objectives: serving the French people, reviving the French economy, and reforming the French state. The fuel tax hike was not essential to Macron’s larger reform effort, and he was right to scrap it. To the extent that leading the global effort against climate change and pushing for closer EU integration detract from his responsibilities at home, Macron would be wise to postpone or abandon these goals as well. The gilets jaunes have also shown the importance of tempering an exacting reform agenda with measures to make working-class life less precarious. The steps Macron announced may be a start, but he and his team should continue gathering ideas that could be implemented with economy and speed. Some combination of cutting consumption taxes, offering more targeted wage subsidies, and investing in rural broadband might help. While further labor market reforms might be initially unpopular, last year’s measures appear to be working, and more jobs would improve living conditions for families in need.

To change his leadership style, Macron will need more self-control, a sincere change of heart, or more convincing acting skills than he currently displays. Where he is petty, he needs to be magnanimous; where he is arrogant, he needs to humble himself. He should give fewer speeches. (Politicians everywhere need to be disabused of the notion that speeches change the world. A few do, but most are quickly forgotten.) He should immediately carry out the promise he made in his speech to meet with France’s mayors, as they are the elected officials closest to the people, but he shouldn’t stop with mayors. He has to show that he cares about ordinary people. He has to listen to them. A 60-day “listening tour” would allow Macron and his Cabinet to seize the initiative after the gilets jaunes protests, take the pulse of popular anger, and better reconcile their reform agenda with measures to insulate France’s vulnerable populations from dramatic changes. In his occasional remarks and, more importantly, in the public interactions he has all too often flubbed, Macron must find a new, less technical, and more heartfelt vocabulary. Without it, he’ll never succeed in reminding people that his reforms have a higher purpose, and that they too have a place in the effort to transform France.

“Forty Years of Malaise”

There is another striking parallel between Carter’s Oval Office address and Macron’s speech from the Élysée Palace—the word “malaise.” Carter never actually included the word in his remarks, but critics succeeded in dubbing the solemn broadcast “The Malaise Speech,” and the name stuck. Macron’s speech, by way of contrast, mentioned “malaise” no fewer than five times:

It is forty years of malaise that is resurfacing: the malaise of workers who can’t make ends meet anymore; malaise of territories, villages, and neighborhoods where one sees public services waning and quality of life diminishing; democratic malaise where the feeling of not being heard is spreading; malaise in the face of changes to our society, an unsettled secularism, and ways of life that create barriers and distance.

France has indeed endured four decades of malaise. While Germany and the Scandinavian states have trimmed government spending and embraced reforms to boost competitiveness, France still spends 56 percent of its GDP on government—more than any other state in Europe. The tax burden is 45.4 percent of GDP. Unemployment stands at more than 9 percent today, and it has not dipped below 7 percent in decades. Reform is sorely needed to make the French state more efficient and the French economy more competitive.

But lost in these technocratic abstractions—”efficient,” “competitive”—is the human face of reform. If Macron manages, as he said on Monday, “to make of this anger an opportunity,” and clear away the clouds of malaise that have darkened France for four decades, the human consequences will be profound. More children from underprivileged backgrounds will read at grade-level. Families will have more savings to set aside for tutoring, vacations, and retirement. The unemployed will find work again.

All of these aspirations are contingent on the political acumen of one man. Macron must descend from the snow-capped peaks of Olympus and feel what mortals feel. Through listening, and tailoring his agenda to people’s needs, he could win back public support after a raft of gaffes and the severe challenge of the gilets jaunes protests. Otherwise, Macron’s reform efforts—like Jupiter’s son Hercules—risk being throttled in the cradle.

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Will China Rule The World?

No bilateral relationship in the world is more important than that between the United States and China, and it is now undergoing an epochal transformation. For three and half decades after Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nightmare and opened up China to markets and modernization in the late 1970s, American policymakers and scholars believed that engagement with China would lead that system to become at least a little more like us. Economically, China would become more of an open, market economy. Politically, China would become more of an open and pluralistic (if not democratic) society. Internationally, China would become what Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick urged it to be in a famous 2005 speech: a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs.

However, as China has continued its inexorable rise to global superpower status, none of this has come about. State-owned enterprises, in the words of the Tokyo-based online magazine, The Diplomat, continue to “dominate China’s strategic sectors and pillar industries.” Despite the high-profile anti-corruption campaign of Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, banking, commerce, construction and other key sectors of the economy remain riddled with bribery and graft. A “predatory, pervasive, and entrenched” form of what the Claremont McKenna political scientist Minxin Pei calls (in his 2016 book) “China’s crony capitalism” continues to eat away at property rights, social justice, and the rule of law. And the political system has become more, not less, authoritarian, as Xi has erased the two-term limit on his presidency while the party has raced toward the construction of what it hopes will be the world’s first comprehensive, total surveillance state. In this dystopian vision, the endless digital clouds and high-speed supercomputers of the Chinese Communist Party-State will store and access everything there is to know about Chinese citizens (and eventually many of the rest of us)—from our digital footprints in commerce, social media, and politics to our genetic structures.

As if this were not worrisome enough, China is now more and more boldly emerging from the long period of patient global restraint that attended its miraculous economic rise. Now, China means to be a global player, and it may fairly be asked—though few have the temerity to do so—whether its real aim is not just regional but global hegemony. Rolling out across the globe with astonishing speed, scope, and audacity, its Belt and Road Initiative has become the most important engine of global infrastructure construction in the world, while leaving many developing countries in a quagmire of debt (at commercial rates) that they can only repay by handing over strategically important facilities (like Sri Lanka’s port of Hanbantota) or bartering away much of their natural resource wealth deep into the future. In Asia, China has been forcefully backing up its unilateral claims to control of the South China Sea by going on a “military building spree,” creating artificial islands out of former reefs, atop which they are building air bases and other military facilities. In countless international forums, defining the rules of everything from internet infrastructure to trade and development, China is challenging pluralistic norms with the aim, in Pei’s more recent words, of “undermining the Western liberal order.”

A crucial instrument of China’s superpower ascent has been the massive, rapidly expanding, lavishly funded nexus of Leninist institutions through which it projects its propaganda, cultivates “friendships”, forges influence, and penetrates deeply into the politics and civil society of democratic societies. As the Working Group on Chinese Influence Activities in the United States, which I co-chaired, recently documented in a new report released by the Hoover Institution, this vast “influence operations bureaucracy” is controlled by the highest levels of the party and state, with the aim of controlling the global narrative about China and preempting criticism of its domestic practices and international policies.

A good portion of what China is doing today to win friends and influence people is within the range of what other countries do to exert “soft power,” through such transparent efforts at persuasion and cooperation as cultural exchanges, conferences, speeches, and paid advertisements that are (more or less) identified as such. But no small share of its activities takes a more disturbing form, exploiting the openness of democratic societies to, in the words of our report, “challenge, and sometimes even undermine, core American freedoms, norms, and laws.” These are not legitimate expressions of soft power. They constitute “sharp power” in that they seek to burrow into and compromise the integrity of key institutions in a democratic society, such as universities and the mass media. They do not meet democratic institutions on an open level and reciprocal playing field. Rather they are, as Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull characterized them in his speech one year ago introducing new national security legislation to meet the challenge, “covert, coercive, or corrupting.”

As we document in the appendix to our working group report, these activities have gone much further in compromising politics and society in Australia and New Zealand than they have in the United States. But we find in the United States mounting signs of inappropriate influence-seeking by China’s Communist party-state, and these require a more informed, coordinated, and vigorous response from American institutions. For example:

Through both cooptation and new investment, “China has all but eliminated the plethora of independent Chinese-language media outlets that once served Chinese American communities.” These days in America, if you get your news in the Chinese language (whether from cable TV, radio, or print), it is likely to echo China’s official media and therefore (literally) the party line.
On more than 100 U.S. university campuses, Chinese state-funded Confucius Institutes import Chinese language curricula and instructors from Chinese universities under contract terms that are not generally known to or vetted by the recipient university faculty. At a minimum, we argue, transparency and full faculty review are essential. Chinese Students and Scholars Associations on American college campuses have been known to take funding and instruction from the Chinese embassy and consulates. And Chinese overseas students are subject to monitoring and reporting by other students, and to intimidation if they criticize China’s authoritarian practices or its stances on sensitive issues like the status of Tibet, Xinjiang Province, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Many American state universities have become so dependent on the revenue from Chinese students (who pay the prized full, out-of-state tuition fees) that they are hard-pressed to defend—not to mention promote—the intellectual freedom of their foreign students. For example, about one in eight of the roughly 44,000 students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is from China. The roughly 5,600 Chinese students there represent a fivefold increase since 2008, account for half of all foreign students on the campus, and contribute several hundred million dollars to the local economy.
Think tanks, we find, “report regular attempts by Chinese diplomats and other intermediaries to influence their activities” in the United States and to vet who is an acceptable participant for a joint conference or workshop. Moreover, the lure of Chinese funding (both from official and unofficial sources) is causing some American think tanks to weigh carefully what they say, host, and endorse with respect to China.
Chinese American voices critical of the PRC or supportive of Taiwan are sometimes subject to pressure and intimidation, including where they are most vulnerable—via pressure on their family members in China. We warn strongly—and with deep conviction—against any reflex that would question the loyalty of or cast generalized suspicion on the Chinese American community in the United States. What we do not need is a new era of McCarthyism or ethnic stereotyping. But as some of my colleagues who are longtime China experts have noted, it is the Chinese Communist Party that has put a target on the backs of these community members, expecting them to maintain “a loosely defined cultural, and even political, allegiance to the so-called Motherland.”
American businesses find themselves caught in the crosshairs of the increasingly fraught bilateral relationship, with Beijing pressing them not only to comply with its rhetorical stances on issues like Taiwan and Tibet but to convey China’s policy concerns back to Washington, DC as well. Meanwhile, China has supported the formation of dozens of local Chinese chambers of commerce in the United States that appear to have ties to the Chinese government, with the potential to serve as vectors of foreign influence. Then there is the rapidly growing role of Chinese investment and market power in the American film industry, which now largely portrays China in a positive light rather than depicting, for example, the rising levels of repression or the historical atrocities of the Chinese Communist Party.
Among U.S. state and local governments, China is actively cultivating current friendly ties and future national leaders, often without disclosing the linkages to the Chinese Communist Party of host and partnership groups.
And most alarmingly, China continues to wage an aggressive campaign to steal, hack into, coerce the corporate transfer of, and otherwise misappropriate American cutting-edge technologies. Many of these technologies—such as supercomputing, artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductors, drones, hypersonics, and 3D printing—will determine not only global economic leadership but military supremacy as well.  As we observe in our report, “the economic and strategic losses for the United States are increasingly unsustainable,” threatening “to undermine America’s commercial and military advantages.”

We need to get smarter and tougher in the face of this offensive. What we call “the era of engagement”—when we believed that deepening ties would bring a more open, pluralistic, and law-based society in China—is over. What we need now is engagement without illusions: engagement that demands greater transparency, fairness and reciprocity in the relationship; and engagement with a resolve to defend the integrity of our democratic institutions. We call this approach “constructive vigilance.”

This is now a historic juncture not only in the U.S.-China relationship but also in the domestic politics of how to think about the relationship. While there remain many advocates of the old unconditional approach, an emerging bipartisan consensus now sees this stance as dangerously naïve.  This opens the possibility that, even amid our sad levels of polarization, Left and Right can work together on some of the key policy steps that will be needed. These include demanding more reciprocal and fair treatment for our journalists and scholars who wish to visit, research, and report in China; toughening export controls on (and therefore access to research labs developing) critical dual-use technologies, as the Department of Commerce has recently proposed to do; enhancing government resources that can track Chinese influence operations and help provide information to American civil society; and launching a new, innovative generation of public diplomacy efforts to level the information playing field by getting more independent news and information to the Chinese public.

Congress and the American public must recognize the scope of what is at stake and what is needed.  We face a critical shortage of people in law enforcement, public diplomacy, and national security with the requisite command of Chinese language. Six decades after we passed the National Defense Education Act to rise to the Soviet’s global challenge, we need a new Act for the 21st century that will raise federal government investment in research and development back to the peak levels of 2 percent of GDP from the 1960s, while also massively supporting the teaching of critical languages—especially Chinese, but also Russia, Arabic, and Farsi. We need much better coordination across U.S. government departments and agencies of efforts to monitor Chinese influence and technology capture activities in the United States. We need an office that American organizations can voluntarily approach for advice when they seek to become informed about the Chinese actors who are offering partnerships, exchanges, investments, gifts, and grants.

But we also need a transformation in how American societal actors—from universities and think tanks to corporations and media enterprises—think about their own roles and responsibilities. Much of what they need to learn about potential Chinese partners is waiting to be discovered—even in English, on Google—if they make the minimal effort to inform themselves and practice due diligence. We urge in our report that institutional sectors—especially think tanks and universities—draw together to develop shared codes of conduct and best practices so that they cannot be played off one against another, and so that they can guard in common against having their integrity unwittingly compromised.

In any free society, the first line of defense of democratic liberties and values must be the people and their associations, not the government. In the end, it is we, the American people, who will determine whether our freedom and national security will be preserved in the face of China’s muscular rise, or whether that ascendance will also mean the eclipse of what remains, to paraphrase Lincoln, the “last best hope” of freedom on this earth.

The post Will China Rule The World? appeared first on The American Interest.

France Doesn’t Have Enough Cops

Violent uprisings are a sign of public unhappiness. They are also a sign of state failure. France is hardly a failed state, nor will it be one. But it is exhibiting symptoms associated with state failure. It is struggling to maintain practical control of its territory. It is failing to provide security to its citizens and their property. Its authority to make collective decisions has eroded, as has its monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

While it’s important to ask what has caused such despair here that French citizens wish to inflict violence upon other French citizens, it is just as important to ask why they have succeeded.

As I’ve written elsewhere, officials at first misjudged the nature of so-called Yellow Jacket protests and used the wrong security strategy. The police at first assumed the Yellow Jackets would conform to France’s customs and unwritten rules. These rules emerge from the central event of modern history: France was born in a violent revolution. The French view themselves as children of the Revolution. France does not merely tolerate street protests: It valorizes them. They are widely seen as legitimate by virtue of their existence. If a complaint is serious enough to cause so many people to get off their asses and take to the streets, it is, by definition, to be taken seriously. No one in France—and certainly not a French President—could possibly forget how sinister the lyrics of the French national anthem really are. Before the attack in Strasbourg reminded them that the police have urgent things to do, 80 percent of the French, when polled, said they supported the protesters. The number is still above 50 percent. There is an ancestral caution about the street. If you don’t respect it, you could be separated from your head.

To sense what the French really feel about the Gilets Jaunes, see how they respond when asked whether Macron should declare a State of Emergency. This too is above 50 percent. So the French support the protests, yes, of course, but they’d like the army to be called in and the protesters to be arrested without judicial oversight and detained without charge.

According to France’s unwritten rules, protesting is not only a right, but a critical aspect of what it means to be French. The state must protect and facilitate the exercise of this right. In exchange, protesters must be civilized, and they must accept the authority of the state by, for example, coordinating their protest routes with the police. Broken windows, flaming cars, looted shops, and the desecration of the Arc de Triomphe attest to the rugged contingent of Yellow Jackets who have no interest in these or any other rules. Those committing the violence are the minority, but they are numerous enough to do enormous damage: On Monday, the Bank of France slashed its fourth quarter growth forecast in half.

The casseurs, as the French call them, comprise both opportunistic vandals—men who commit violence simply because they think no one will stop them—and ideologues who seek to tear down France’s entire political and economic structure and see violence itself as purifying and exhilarating. Both are intolerable in a democratic society.

So why aren’t they all behind bars?

On December 1, the undermanned police were ambushed by 5,000 violent casseurs and left, all day, to battle in hand-to-hand combat for control of the area around the Charles de Gaulle Étoile. How could that have happened? How could they have been left without reinforcement?

The answer is that France doesn’t have enough cops, and those they have are organized inappropriately for a crisis of this nature. The protests may now fizzle out, but if they continue at this tempo, Macron will have little choice but to declare a State of Emergency and call in the army. God knows what the political consequences of that would be; it would be an unprecedented admission of political defeat. But if you would be a state, you must ensure domestic peace. That is what a state is for.

On the face of it, France has no shortage of police manpower. To maintain security in peacetime, the United Nations recommends a ratio of 2.2 policemen per 1,000 citizens. According to Eurostat’s most recent statistics, France has 3.26 police per 1,000 citizens, slightly less than Spain (3.61) and slightly more than Germany (2.97). The police have modern equipment and training. France is a leading manufacturer and exporter of high-quality police gear. Its police forces are in regular contact with their counterparts in Europe and the United States. Occasionally, they visit and train with them. So why have they been unable to control the violence?

Because the police-to-citizen ratio is misleading. First, it doesn’t tell us to what’s going on locally. (If you double the number of cops in Los Angeles, for example, that doesn’t do anything for policing in New York.) Second, the word “police” means something different in every country. Third, it doesn’t tell us how many cops France needs. Finland has fewer than half the police per capita of France, but this doesn’t mean it’s twice as lawless as France. There is obviously some relationship between the numbers, but it’s not linear.

The right questions to ask are these: “How many teams of experienced cops who are trained in crowd and riot control can France deploy? Can they deploy in many cities at the same time? How many does it need to control violence in every region of France? How fast can they get where they’re needed?”

The French police have more responsibilities than most countries’ law enforcement bodies. They’re responsible for jobs that Americans have assigned to functionally distinct, even sometimes overlapping, federal, state, county, and city bureaucracies. In France, all of these jobs are counted as “police”—including administration.

French policing, like everything in France, is centralized. There are municipal police, yes, but their forces are small: about 18,000 men and women in total. Their funding comes from local budgets, and they’re often unarmed (the decision is up to the local mayor). Since the 2015 terrorist attacks, mayors have been “strongly encouraged,” but not mandated, to arm their municipal police. If you’re the mayor of a town of 170 retirees, deep in the Auvergne, you might have to choose between sending your police to the range for gun training, sending them to a riot-control class, or fixing the potholes on Rue Oùriennesepasse. Riot control is probably not your first choice. Municipal police also lack key authorities the National Police possess, such as the ability to investigate crimes. They don’t have the manpower, equipment, or training to handle riots.

What about the Paris municipal police? The Paris Préfecture, called the PP, is funded by Paris and the smaller cities around it. Administratively, it’s under the Interior Ministry. The PP employs 45,860 people, of whom 30,000 are police (most of the others are firefighters). These are the dedicated forces for the greater Paris region—6.4 million people spread over two-thirds of the Île de France, or about 314 square miles. Washington, DC is a bit more than 68 square miles; Greater London, 607 square miles. It’s a big region.

This force is very busy. Its responsibilities include preventing traffic accidents, ensuring those who violate traffic laws are prosecuted, servicing their cars and motorcycles, and moving the Justice Department to its new location in Batignolles. They’re the city’s criminal brigade, the regional directorate of the judicial police (given France’s administrative centralization, that’s almost synonymous with being all of France’s judicial police), its information technology and fraud brigade, its narcotics brigade, and its intelligence directorate. They’ve got a central police laboratory. They teach First Aid courses for the public. Its directorate of public transportation is responsible for the security of the Paris Métro, Europe’s largest (1.5 billion riders annually). They’ve got a river brigade, as they must: Someone has to fish out people who throw themselves in the Seine and make sure no one sails up to the Palais de Justice with a bomb.

Still, as friends from New York have written to me recently, “New York City has 38,433 officers, and this wouldn’t have happened in New York.”

True. But imagine New York and Washington merged into a single city, with the nation’s cultural, tourist, and political capitals in one place—and now imagine the NYPD’s budget isn’t $5.6 billion but $1.7 billion.

The PP isn’t designed for riot control. France’s two national police forces—the Gendarmerie and the Police Nationale—are meant to handle that task.

So why can’t they handle it?

There are 105,000 men and women in the Gendarmerie, the French military police. It polices the military, domestically and overseas, and is charged with airport security, maritime port security, and combatting cybercrime. It is also chiefly responsible for policing small towns and rural areas, meaning its area of responsibility includes about 96 percent of French territory and half of France’s population. If you have a rural uprising on your hands, call the gendarmes.

But how many of them are at the ready? Only the 12,000-strong Gendarmerie Mobile is trained in crowd and riot control. The Gendarmerie Mobile is also responsible for policing military and defense missions, counterterrorism patrols, escorting high-risk convoys, and protecting high-risk sites such as the U.S. Embassy. What’s more, France is involved in major military missions abroad, including Operations Barkhane and Chammal. When French troops go overseas, gendarmes accompany them. It’s possible that no more than 5,000 experienced gendarmes with training in riot control are truly free to deploy in France, especially because one out of five are permanently stationed in France’s overseas departments and territories.

In a pinch, couldn’t the rest of the Gendarmerie be called in? They were, last Saturday, but it’s not so easy to do. Some units just can’t be used: It takes years to train a member of GIGN—the elite tactical unit—and their identities are so sensitive they can’t be photographed. You can’t waste them on a riot. And no, you can’t call up the Air Transport Gendarmerie; do you want to be the Minister who gives the order to leave civilian airports unguarded? Likewise, you can’t just call in the Nuclear Ordnance Security Gendarmerie.

What about the civilian Police Nationale? (Fans of Georges Simenon novels will recognize the Police Nationale by its former name, the Sûreté.) It’s a bigger force: 148,000. It’s under the control of the Interior Ministry and it’s charged with urban policing.

But if you look at its mission statement, you’ll see that its responsibilities are vast. They include combatting petty crime and urban violence, ensuring road safety, controlling irregular immigration, making sure no one hires illegal immigrants, fighting drugs and organized crime, solving serious economic and financial crimes, protecting the country against terrorism and other attacks on “the nation’s fundamental interests,” and maintaining public order. The Police Nationale is CHiPs, ICE, DEA, and the FBI all in one—and much more besides.

This is a massive mission, especially in a Mediterranean country of more than 65 million people in the heart of a Europe groaning under the weight of the worst global refugee crisis since World War II—a country where an unknown and serious percentage of its Muslim population is radicalized and violent, but the large majority are not (and they want to keep it that way).

The subdivisions of the Police Nationale include the Border Police, the Judicial Police, the Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence, VIP Protection, the Directorate of International Cooperation, the General Inspectorate, and the RAID counterterrorism unit. None of these jobs are unnecessary busywork. Furthermore, only one division—the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, or CRS—is specifically trained to respond to riots. There are only 13,000 CRS.

I stress “training” because you cannot do this safely with inexperienced traffic cops who have never seen a riot before. Riot control requires teams of specialized professionals, with appropriate equipment, who train together regularly. If an inexperienced novice loses his sang-froid and kills a protester, it is, inherently, a disaster—and guaranteed to make the problem ten times worse. No liberal democracy can kill its way out of a riot, however tempting that thought might seem to a young, frightened, injured, inexperienced, overwhelmed, and undertrained cop.

Why are there so few French cops who can do this? Because there’s not enough money. The economic crisis has had a devastating effect on both of France’s national police services, particularly on the Police Nationale. Between 2005 and 2011, the government cut the police budget by 3 percent, the equivalent of 7,236 full-time employees. Between 2015 and 2018, the PP was reduced from 35,000 to 29,000. Between 2009 and 2011, 400 of Paris’s 6,400 police stations disappeared.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis caused an upsurge of every kind of crime and social malaise, including political violence. Casseurs—violent far-right, far-left, and anarchist thugs—began showing up at demonstrations determined to commit vandalism and violence to prove that the state was unable to contain them.

Then came the Syrian war, ISIS, and the refugee crisis. Boatloads of refugees—coming from every part of the destabilized world, from Afghanistan to Libya—began drowning in the Mediterranean. This unspeakable and unprecedented humanitarian crisis coincided with a wave of terrorism inspired by the Syrian jihad. More than 250 people have been killed in France, and almost 1,000 wounded, in the wave of atrocities that began when Mohamed Merah killed three French soldiers and four Jews, three of them children, in southwestern France in 2012. As many as 1,300 French citizens have inserted themselves into Syrian and Iraqi conflict zones. Several hundred, including minors, have returned. The police have been charged with combatting this threat, and the police, in particular, have been its targets. When France re-imposed its European borders, it didn’t hire a border patrol: The police were told to do the job. Counterterrorism and border control are not make-work jobs. According to the local news, 720 French law enforcement officers are now tracking the terrorist who attacked a Christmas market in Strasbourg two days ago, killing three. RAID has secured the perimeter of Strasbourg’s Neudorf quarter, where it is conducting an operation. The chief can’t say, “Let’s put this Neudorf thing on the back burner for now and re-deploy to Puy-en-Velay, because some folks out there are setting the police station on fire. Yeah, they say they won’t stop until we leave NATO and ban plastic. Let’s go.”

In 2012, the budget for the Police Nationale was raised again, but manpower still remains below 2007 levels. Policing is a skilled profession: You can’t ramp up the numbers instantly. Candidates must pass the police exam, spend 18 months at the police academy, then do their internships. It can take more than two years to put a skilled cop on the street. The salary for a police trainee in Paris is €1,318 a month (housing is included). On Monday, in response to the Gilets Jaunes’ demands, Macron announced that the SMIC—akin to the minimum wage—would be increased to €1,598.

Last summer, prompted by a rash of protests and police suicides, two Senators from France’s Les Républicains conducted an inquiry into the state of France’s security forces. Anyone who read their report would be unsurprised that the police have been unable to control a national uprising. The police, they concluded, were “at a crisis point.” The Senators called on the President to act quickly, warning that they were “on the verge of implosion.”

Witnesses, in sworn testimony, repeatedly called the dire condition of the police “unprecedented,” noting the “shocking” lack of investment in equipment, the old and substandard police buildings, the aged vehicles. (The average age of a police vehicle is almost eight years old; this is supposed to be the maximum age for a law-enforcement vehicle.) The security forces, they said, lacked basic supplies. “Equipment and premises are degraded,” one said, “the pace of work unstructured, and the personal life of the agents is often affected.” Two-thirds of the force’s working hours were devoted to administrative and judicial proceedings, rather than policing. The suicide rate among members of the force was 36 percent higher than the national average.

Police delegates told the Senate that they felt they had been committed to serve impossible political aims. In Calais, the police had been told to “make sure the migrants aren’t visible anymore.” The result, in the field, was that “these police have the impression, day after day, that they are being asked to empty the sea with a teaspoon.” As one delegate testified:

It is clear that the security forces, faced with migrants, whether under the Paris Métro or in Calais, have been left to their own devices for lack of firm or clear instructions. This task is particularly difficult because it goes against the normal protection missions assumed by the Police and the Gendarmerie. In France, these migrants are the most vulnerable people. Today, however, [the police’s] essential role of protection is largely overshadowed by calls for repression, following the instructions of the Interior Minister to ensure these people don’t settle anywhere.

The report stressed that police were intensely frustrated by the sense that they were working at cross purposes with the judiciary. They arrested criminals, at great risk, only to see them back on the streets within days. The judiciary released them, they felt, with no real understanding of the threat they posed. (France’s prison system is one of Europe’s most overcrowded.) The public, they complained, didn’t respect the work they did. Like cops everywhere, they had come to live in fear of a viral video clip, taken out of context, that would cost them their jobs. (The French police do have a reputation for starring in videos that no amount of context could put right: another serious problem.)

These complaints are typical of police around the world, but unusually acute in France. Part of the problem is a historic estrangement between France and its police that may be traced back to Napoleon, who used the Gendarmerie as agents of the Mission Civilatrice. The imperial conquest began with what we now call France, large areas of which were considered backward and insufficiently subordinated to central rule. The avid collaboration between the police and the Nazis, as well as the 1961 Paris massacre, further diminished the public’s trust.

The Senate report is a political document. But its findings have been corroborated by police and politicians across the spectrum, and as we’ve recently been seeing, the witnesses were correct. Between 2009 and 2015, police injuries on mission increased by 29 percent. Last June, the General Inspectorate found that the use of service weapons had risen by 54 percent in the past year. These are harbingers of dangerous burnout. Recently, the Benalla Affair further eroded police morale.

One of the Senators who called for the investigation, François Grosdidier, warned in September that France was “running the risk of seeing the security services becoming inoperable. Many of [its employees] are at the breaking point. The police are being forced to operate with fewer resources in the face of ever more violent threats.”

This is why, on December 1, they were unable to reinforce the police at the Étoile and prevent the desecration of the Arc de Triomphe. There weren’t enough cops. Only a third of the forces France counts as “police” were deployed: 65,000 officers. That’s close to the limit of how many could be. Last Saturday, they deployed 89,000. That’s the limit. Few among them have extensive training in crowd and riot control, and most have never done it before. This is not enough to cope with a national, violent, and leaderless insurrection, organized on social media, taking place over all of France and its territories overseas. The Yellow Jackets communicate on small, decentralized Facebook pages. They can make plans quickly and adapt to local circumstances; they are not constrained by the demands of hierarchy or the law. The police are under the command of two massive, competing, rigidly hierarchical bureaucracies—the Interior Ministry and the military. Both must follow the law and respond to politicians’ demands.

France doesn’t have the police manpower to quell an ongoing domestic insurrection. Why would it? Who needs that in a democracy? No one needs to have an insurrection: France just had an election. It will have another soon. The point of being a democracy is that you don’t need to seize power by force, so why would France be prepared for something that never happens?

The French police have been coping with this now for four weekends straight. They are exhausted. John Lichfield of the Local reported that, even before the riots, the police were owed one million hours of overtime. The police unions have been begging Macron to declare a state of emergency and call in the army.

There’s no obvious way to end this. If the protests don’t fizzle out by themselves, no one knows what to do. You can’t negotiate with the Yellow Jackets, because they have no leader. Macron has met all of their demands he could possibly meet. There’s no way to meet the rest, because they’re incoherent and contradictory. The jackals are waiting in the wings: Mélenchon and Le Pen have been egging the protests on. Even as Macron’s Interior Minister asked “reasonable” people to stay home last Saturday, trade unions loyal to Mélenchon offered to bus them into Paris. The heads of both extremist parties—which together took nearly 40 percent of the votes in the last presidential election—are calling for parliament to be dissolved. Neither have calculated the disaster that would come upon them were the other to win an election. When these people spot a chance to grasp the golden ring, they just lose their minds.

It seems to me that the police unions are right. State failure is not an option. If this continues, Macron will have to declare a State of Emergency and call in the army. It’s the only way to give these exhausted cops a chance to recover. They’re just too tired.

So far, incredibly, the police haven’t killed a single protester. But if this continues, they’re going to screw up—or mutiny.

Many of the protesters are peaceful. Many have legitimate complaints. But enough of the protesters are violent enough to do tremendous harm. The French Finance Minister has described the economic effects of the protests as “a catastrophe.” People here will be poorer because of them. Their lives will be more fearful and insecure.

Some of the violent protesters are just thugs. But a cohort are determined ideological enemies of the French Republic. Among them are outright fascists who cannot wait to kill the Jews and committed communists who slobber openly at the thought of killing cops.

The President of the United States is confused. He thinks the French people have risen up against the Paris Climate Accord. He believes people on the streets here are chanting, “We want Trump.” The French Foreign Minister has replied by asking Trump to stay out of French politics.

The overworked French security services are looking into Russia’s role in this unrest. A cursory glance at social media suggests it is playing its usual role: If there’s a fire in the West, the Kremlin shows up to spray kerosene. A cohort of idiotic Americans have joined the Kremlin’s  pyromania: The Gilets Jaunes are objects of a virulent propaganda campaign from the Kremlin and the American alt-right. The Kremlin has an intelligible strategy: divide and conquer. What the alt-right thinks it’s doing is beyond me. Our far-left is fantasizing into existence cheery French revolutionaries seizing power from the capitalist octopus. They’re wrong.

No one here really cares what Trump tweets. He’s obviously an old gaga. But Americans who still support him should know that no one in Paris, but no one, is chanting “We want Trump.” Communist and fascists alike hate Trump because he is the American President and they hate America. That’s baked into the ideological cake. They feel the same way about our homegrown alt-right nitwits. Bannon and his army of incels are egging on people who like it when Americans die. That’s idiotic. Nor are the Gilet Jaunes saying, “We want Trump.” To the extent their demands are coherent, pulling out of NATO is high on the list. Why would Americans think it a good idea to encourage people who detest them? This isn’t a game. They’re pissing on the graves of the 766,000 American men who died in the Atlantic theater to liberate Europe.

Meanwhile, our allies in France—including France’s elected government—cannot but feel contempt for Trump. As for Americans who dabble in keyboard insurgencies, well, if they want a revolution in France so badly, they should come here in person, like men, and tell it to the cops.

The post France Doesn’t Have Enough Cops appeared first on The American Interest.

Time to Push Back Against the Revisionists

Three decades after the end of the Cold War, the parameters of the next round of global state-on-state security competition are now in full view. Long after history was declared to be at an end and America’s “unipolar moment” was so lyrically heralded, the world today looks nothing like such post-Cold War projections. The rules-based liberal global order has proved to be a chimera while  the fundamentals of economic power as the foundation of military strength have once again been reaffirmed. Despite decades spent cajoling people to believe that they owe a higher allegiance to institutions transcending the nation-state, all too many remain stubbornly unconvinced. This new era of great power competition will likely remain with us for the rest of our lives; rapid escalation and, ultimately, war are no longer merely a theoretical possibility.

This is not to say that the changes wrought during the preceding decades were all for naught. Although the core principles of great power competition are as true today as they have always been, over the past three post-Cold War decades the distribution of power has shifted significantly across the globe, and in some regions quite dramatically. The world has become more complex both in terms of technology and social cleavages, but also more rudimentary: For America and the West more broadly, questions of national power, national sovereignty, and ultimately national survival are now more urgent than they have been since 1945. The lesson here is not that timing is everything, but rather that strategic vision—along with the capacity to expect the unexpected—is what matters most when nations approach systemic inflection points such as those we are at today.

The United States and Europe come to this current round of great power competition burdened by several serious handicaps. The confrontation between the United States and its competitors China and Russia is increasingly global, posing a dilemma akin to that of a two-front war. Even if one does not fall prey to the exaggerations of China’s wealth and technological progress commonly afflicting accounts of that country’s rise, it is nevertheless clear that the United States needs to move beyond the “status quo power” handicap—namely, the reluctance to take risks by pushing back against revisionist states, and the attendant desire to seek accommodation. For almost half a century, analysts have labored under the delusion that China can be brought into the liberal international system through economic development, in the process morphing into an approximation of a Western democracy. The belief that economic access will somehow “domesticate” the Chinese communist regime has always been lacking in empirical foundation. Indeed, the examples invoked by many in political science, such as the political evolution of South Korea  and Taiwan, have been misapplied; in both cases the strategic imperative of remaining close to the United States shaped their domestic politics. The fundamental change in our view of China as a power hostile to the United States, intent on replacing America in the international order, should be the underlying assumption of any debate about U.S. global strategy going forward.

This means that in the near term we must make every effort to “onshore” the critical elements of our supply chain that we have so ill-advisedly farmed out to Asia. We need to recall the Cold War lesson that technological superiority rests not only in design but, more importantly, in processes, alloys, composites, and so on—namely, in our technological culture writ large. During the Cold War the Soviets could steal Western designs for weapons systems, but they had to rely on their own technological culture to produce their versions. In contrast, we have transferred the crown jewels of American technological know-how to China, the devastating consequences of which become clear when we compare the parameters of our systems with theirs, and measure the shift in the balance of power. “If you are in a hole, stop digging,” goes the old American adage. This applies in spades to our decades-long trade policy, which has allowed China to enter the WTO, to claim “developing country” status, and to continue to extort American corporations for their most treasured economic secrets in exchange for market access. Enough already.

Putin’s Russia presents a different challenge to U.S. global supremacy. Russia is a revisionist power intent on creating a sphere of privileged interest along its periphery, including in Europe, but it lacks the resources to mount a frontal challenge to the United States. However, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demonstrated his thorough understanding of full-spectrum statecraft, including the application of military force to achieve clearly defined political objectives. Putin’s ability to selectively invest his country’s limited resources, whether in new military hardware or in campaigns such as in Syria and Ukraine, has yielded outsized results. The key to Russia’s successful challenge to the rules-based order in Europe has been Putin’s ability to anticipate the deeply ingrained risk aversion of key powers in Europe. Hence, despite having kicked over the table on which the leading states in the European Union sought to set the future of the European order, Putin still continues to dangle before them visions of a “grand deal” that would address Russia’s “legitimate security concerns.” His gamble in Ukraine, meanwhile, has polarized the European Union, and especially has widened the rift over differing threat perceptions between countries like Germany and France, on the one hand, and the former Soviet satellites and the Scandinavians on the northeastern flank on the other. The growing discord within the European Union and NATO has yielded a debate over what, during the Cold War, would have been considered a mortal threat to the unity of the West, as seen in today’s rather loose talk about the need for European “strategic autonomy”—as though some of NATO’s most vital European allies were now tracking toward an emancipatory policy that could ultimately leave the United States outside. In short, the challenge to the United States posed by Russia, notwithstanding the country’s relatively weak economic position when compared to China’s, is much more intricate and insidious, for it threatens to undermine and dismantle the foundations of the Transatlantic security system.

The United States is at an inflection point, one in which our choices going forward will have a transformative impact on our security and that of our allies. This is a “late 1940s moment”—one that requires a massive adjustment in how we view and interact with other key players in the international system and what priorities we set going forward. Today Washington appears to have finally awakened to the reality that long-cherished assumptions about what the world would look like after the Cold War were fundamentally flawed. It is almost uncanny that this most profound redefinition of U.S. foreign and security policy has been produced during the Donald J. Trump presidency—at a time when American politics have become polarized to a point few thought possible only a decade ago. And yet, through its National Security Strategy and its National Defense Strategy, the Trump Administration has produced arguably the first coherent articulation since the fall of the Berlin Wall of the world as it is rather than as we wish it to be, free of pious shibboleths and expressing a determination to redress past mistakes. What needs to happen now is the translation of these key strategic documents into guidance that will shape the restoration of our military capabilities and those of our allies. This is our “late 1940s moment,” a latter-day version of the reorientation that yielded our present defense infrastructure and ultimately led to the creation of NATO. The West needs to pull together yet again. The clock is ticking.

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Bumbling Russian Spies and Clumsy Russian Spy Services

Maria Butina, a Russian national accused of being a spy, has agreed to cooperate with federal, state and local authorities as part of a deal. She withdrew her not-guilty plea and is expected to plead guilty to conspiracy on Thursday.

The news on Butina agreeing to cooperate with the investigation came out just days after Special Counsel Robert Mueller had filed documents on Michael Cohen and Michael Flynn with new revelations as to what lengths Russia’s intelligence services went to meddle in American affairs. While Butina’s case is not being prosecuted by Mueller’s office, her looming conspiracy plea suggests there are now at least two Kremlin plots that so far have been established with a high degree of certainty: Russia meddled in the U.S. elections by hacking Democratic National Committee servers and running deceptive campaigns on social media, and Russia that tried to penetrate the National Rifle Association, and through it, the wider Republican establishment.

Maria Butina was being run by her one-time boss, a former Russian Senator and Central Bank deputy Aleksandr Torshin, who will more than likely emerge as a central figure in Butina’s testimony under the plea deal. The rest of the meddling was carried out by the GRU, the notorious Russian foreign military intelligence service.

It’s worth noting that both the head of the GRU and Butina’s boss have departed from their posts. The GRU director died three weeks days ago after “a long and serious illness”—which no reporter had gotten wind of before. And Aleksandr Torshin? As of November 30, he was no longer at the Central Bank: he retired three days after turning 65. The very next day, news leaked that Butina was in negotiations with U.S. attorneys.

Aleksandr Torshin had a high-flying career not only in Russia, but overseas as well. His name first popped up internationally in 2013 as of a key figure—”The Godfather,” they called him—in a high profile money-laundering case in Spain. Spanish authorities decided to arrest the Russian Senator during a trip to Mallorca. Apparently tipped off, Torshin abruptly canceled his trip, and was neither arrested nor charged.

None of this prevented Torshin from traveling to the United States in 2015 and 2016, where he and his protégé Maria Butina met with representatives from the NRA, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and many other Republican operatives. U.S. authorities are now investigating whether Torshin funneled money to the NRA. Whether he did or not, Torshin does have valuable experience in moving money: he helped Russian mafia to launder money abroad, the Spanish investigation has shown.

Torshin got hit by a batch of bad luck for the first time in April of this year, when he ended up on a U.S. sanctions list. Three months later, Maria Butina was arrested, and despite exertions by the Russian Foreign Ministry, placed in jail.

However, on the eve of his 65th birthday, Torshin was in good spirits. “A good age!” he tweeted. “I wish you all good health and good night! Life goes on!” Days later, the Russian Central Bank announced Torshin’s retirement, and an unidentified Central Bank official told BBC Russia that Torshin’s gun hobby had come as a very bad surprise to them, and further disavowed his activities. 

After Butina was officially announced to cooperate with the authorities, both she and her boss were thrown under the bus by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin called Butina a “poor girl,” but said he knew nothing about her and would inquire with his special services. “She worked for someone at the Federation Council, for some deputy,” he said. Torshin of course was no mere deputy, and Putin knew him well. Torshin’s star had fallen. Life will go on for him (Putin’s favorites tend to find ways to do well while in government service) but not any longer in government—certainly not after Putin’s statement.

Indeed, Aleksandr Torshin may go down in history to become the first high-profile official in Russia to retire at the new mandated retirement age of 65, raised by five years a few months ago in a round of unpopular belt-tightening undertaken by Putin—an age just one year shy of the average age of death for men in Russia.

By contrast, Lt. Colonel Igor Korobov, the aforementioned head of the GRU, was 62 when he was found dead. Russian officials didn’t bother to name the “long, serious” illness that had felled the good Colonel. One source reported that Lt. Col. Korobov first felt unwell in September, after having been reprimanded by Russia’s President. Notably, the previous GRU director, General Igor Sergun also died while at the office. He was 58 years old when suffered a “sudden death” of a heart attack in his house in Moscow region on January 3, 2016. The death was no less mysterious than that of his successor.

Sergun was said to be responsible for the revival of the GRU’s fortunes—especially in its rivalry with Putin’s alma mater, the FSB—during his tenure as its leader. But the GRU truly gained international renown and publicity under Lt. Col. Korobov. Not only were the GRU’s attempts at meddling in the U.S. elections detected, the individuals responsible were identified, and the individuals were indicted. The two geniuses charged with poisoning Sergey and Yulia Skripal used a dangerous chemical weapon on the soil of a key NATO ally, accidentally murdered a homeless woman, and were also quickly identified by British authorities. Putin played dumb, and insisted the two suspects tell their side of the story. By the time the two men appeared on RT to supposedly defend themselves, however, their real identities had been exposed by online sleuths. The real names and addresses of 300 other GRU agents were similarly exposed earlier this year due to sloppy tradecraft. Beyond the comic spectacle of a supposedly highly-trained intelligence service stumbling so clumsily into the spotlight, the screwups had meaningful consequences. The U.S. State Department imposed new sanctions on Russia under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991, with more sanctions expected to follow.

If Sergun was the gray cardinal—a behind-the-scenes man at the GRU—Korobov’s star shined brightly. All too brightly, perhaps, and as a result, briefly.

As with most things in Russia these days, there’s no way to be sure what is happening behind the curtain. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that Putin is not terribly happy with how his intelligence services have been performing of late. If the events I’ve described above are related to his displeasure, look for much more juicy stuff coming out of U.S. law enforcement in the coming weeks. Whether there was outright collusion or not, clumsy Russian spies appear to have given prosecutors a whole lot to look into.

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Magical Thinking in Paris

Are President Emmanuel Macron’s days numbered after the riots in Paris, reportedly the worst since 1968? “Facing what increasingly resembles a state of insurrection, the president and his government are looking increasingly precarious,” The Daily Telegraph claimed last week. A “beleaguered president,” “politically tone deaf,” “the youngest lame-duck president of the Fifth Republic,” goes the mix of bombast and schadenfreude in British and American right-of-center press.

Setting aside the striking oddity of conservatives proclaiming their support of violent thuggery as a means of changing public policy, the reports of Emmanuel Macron’s impending political death are greatly exaggerated. Given the president’s reformist agenda, it would have been surprising if the French, with their commitment to the status quo and a penchant for violent protests, had just quietly gone along.

This is not to downplay the seriousness of the situation. As Claire Berlinski reports, the police are understaffed and exhausted. Calling in the military was the right step, she argues, but it is also fraught with danger: “[Soldiers] are not trained to be cops; they’re trained to kill people.” The optics of military equipment in the streets are terrible too but if violence continues, it could result in deaths. And regardless of who’d be at fault in such a case, Macron would get all the blame—and understandably so.

Yet, where most accounts get it wrong is that they posit a dichotomy between an out-of-touch, establishment President enamored with globalism and environmental causes, and the righteously angry ordinary people. In fact, it is Macon who is forcing far-reaching but necessary economic changes on a reluctant population, knowing that this might be France’s last chance to reform itself. And it is the gilets jaunes, though undoubtedly reflecting the anger of those experiencing genuine economic hardship, who are an expression of efforts not only to preserve but to double down on a fundamentally broken and unsustainable status quo.

One has to wonder whether British and American conservatives who expressed sympathies for the movement are also ready to endorse one of the self-styled spokespeople of the gilets jaunes, Jean-François Barnaba. The man remains a paid official with the Departmental Council of Indre, but hasn’t held a job since December 31, 2008. As a result, he is de facto unemployed yet entitled under his contract to a substantial fraction of his salary. Barnaba, a former director of a music conservatory, was the Department’s head of culture, cultural heritage, and tourism, and headed several projects that placed heavy financial burdens on the Department’s resources. A few years ago, the outspoken, media-savvy activist hinted at his political ambitions in a self-published book. His is hardly a story of genuine economic hardship and insecurity—rather, it is a story of how the dysfunctional system of public administration can be abused by insiders.

Consider also the 25 demands associated with the movement—which incidentally make no mention of the relatively trivial changes to the diesel levy, supposedly the main factor behind the protest movement. The specific policies proposed include France’s exit from the European Union and NATO, cutting immigration, and other populist staples. But the thrust of the document is not one of radical change. Instead, it is one of doubling down on unsustainable acquis sociaux—roughly translated as social entitlements—even if those come at the cost of defying economic sense or basic logic. The gilets jaunes propose capping government revenue at 25 percent of people’s earnings and simultaneously “hiring massively” new civil servants and building five million new housing units with controlled rent, defaulting on government debt, “reindustrializing France to reduce imports and therefore also pollution,” and so on and so forth. This is an exercise in magical thinking about how nothing needs to change and about how everyone can enjoy economic security of the kind promised by the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. If anyone takes such policy ideas even remotely seriously, it is them, and not Macron, who is out of touch and living in a bubble.

Lest France move down the path of relative, and perhaps also absolute, decline, it needs to break with that kind of magical thinking, which was long shared, in a less unhinged way, by most of France’s mainstream leaders and political parties. In short, it needs precisely the kind of reforms that Macron has already introduced.

Just a few months into his mandate, Macron pushed through a number of unprecedented changes to the labor code, with only a muted response from opposition and organized labor. Redundancies have become easier and less costly, and the traditional monopoly of large trade unions over collective bargaining, especially in smaller companies, has ended.

True, the changes could have gone further, but the new law is an important step in the right direction—a step that, for example, former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi never took in Italy. France’s employment rate has since fallen somewhat, as has youth unemployment, but it remains above 9 percent. The full effects of the changes might take years to fully reverberate through the economy in the form of new labor contracts.

This year, Macron took on the state-own railway company, SNCF, burdened by massive explicit and implicit debt driven by unsustainable pension liabilities. Those are due to a number of “special regimes” that have allowed SNCF employees to retire much earlier than any other category of private- or public-sector workers. Besides transforming the company into a publicly traded (though still government-owned) corporation, the reform opens regional services to competition, and eliminates excessive employment privileges for new hires.

France’s debt-to-GDP ratio hovers around 100 percent, far above the limit of 60 percent set originally by the Maastricht Treaty. Macron’s ambition is to bring it down, along with the overall fiscal footprint of government. That is a necessary precondition for selling any form of debt mutualization in the Eurozone, or a common Eurozone budget, to any German government.

The now-abandoned increases of taxes on diesel fuels were as much an attempt at fiscal consolidation as they are a reflection of Macron’s ambition for France to be at the forefront of global efforts to address climate change. Diesel is still undertaxed in France and is therefore cheaper relative to gasoline (unlike, say, in the United Kingdom), in spite of being more environmentally damaging. It is understandable that some oppose the hikes. But the burden should be on the critics to explain what the preferable alternative is. Is it higher tax rates imposed on labor or investment, or deeper cuts to public spending? If the latter, in what area?

The President’s woes reflect the fact that the domestic reforms he is introducing rub strongly against the grain of the country’s complacent immobilisme. Is it really a wonder that Macron’s popularity has thus collapsed from above 60 percent at the time of his election to barely 30 percent, and perhaps even lower?

Macron “will go down in history not as the president who switched off public fury but who intensified it,” predicts The Spectator’s Brendan O’Neill. But if Macron fails, he will fail because his reforms have not gone far enough, just like Russia’s “shock therapy” of the early 1990s failed because it was prepared and implemented half-heartedly. Still, how reasonable is it to use the current wave of protests as the basis for wild extrapolations about his political future? If stories of successful economic reforms around the world teach us anything, it is that short-term political losses are unavoidable. Sometimes, those mean an electoral defeat and unjust vilification of those who in fact deserve credit for turning their countries around, as both Hungary’s Lajos Bokros and Poland’s Leszek Balcerowicz could attest. With enough time between the onset of reforms and the next election, deep economic reforms can generate not only economic but also political pay-offs. Slovakia’s Christian Democrats (SDKU), who revolutionized the country’s tax and pension systems and opened the country up to foreign investment, received more seats in parliament in 2006, after they introduced the widely unpopular reforms, than in the 2002 election.

Many in the English-speaking world view Macron with suspicion. True, behind the façade of technocratic market liberalism and conspicuous displays of cosmopolitanism carefully calibrated to troll supporters of Brexit and Donald Trump, a dose of the traditionally self-interested French realpolitik lingers. But that should not detract from the fact that the President has made meaningful, if still incomplete, strides to open up France’s economy to competition.

The protests of the gilets jaunes might reflect real grievances, but they cannot change the fact that France is overdue for exactly those reforms that Macron is introducing. The very worst thing the French President could do is to further cave in to the pressure, beyond the already costly concessions announced on Monday. That way, he would be guaranteed to join a long list of his predecessors who tried and failed at turning France into an economic success. It does not seem to be a stretch to think that perhaps, just maybe, it is precisely that prospect that makes some of Macron’s British and American detractors cheer for the protesters and the thugs who are trying to set Paris on fire.

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