Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 63

Human Rights Suffers a Major Blow

President Donald Trump’s defense of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, despite the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions that the Prince ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, is shocking on many levels. First, the President seemed to be placing more stock in the Saudi leader’s repeated denials of involvement than in the assessment of his own country’s intelligence agencies—just as he had in July in Helsinki, when Russian President Vladimir Putin denied interfering in the 2016 American election. Second, Trump indicated that arms sales to the Kingdom and supposed Saudi investments in the United States were more important than any human rights problems in the bilateral relationship, including the brutal murder of a U.S. resident (Khashoggi lived in Virginia). Third, and related, Trump did enormous harm to the cause of human rights and the standing of the United States as the leader in this area over the years. America’s record on human rights has never been perfect, but it has never seen its leader essentially show such disdain for the cause until now.

Slightly more than a century ago, seeking Congress’s support for declaring war on Germany on April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared: “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.”

Following the failure of the League of Nations during a period of isolationist retrenchment in the 1920s and 1930s, the United States entered World War II to defend allies against the tyranny of the Axis Powers. Ever since, more or less, American foreign policy has worked to promote self-governance and human rights for others around the world. The establishment of the United Nations and NATO and the launching of the Marshall Plan, together with support for European integration, laid the foundation for democratic expansion in Europe and later in other parts of the world.

After World War II, human rights and democratic governance made great strides around the globe. The “Second Wave” of democracy, as the late Samuel Huntington described it, followed the Allied victory in the war and the transformation of Germany, Japan, and Italy from vanquished powers into thriving democracies. The “Third Wave,” during the 1970s and 1980s, brought democratic movements to Latin America, Europe, and Asia, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and, two years later, the demise of the Soviet Union.

These waves, however, were not automatic. Indeed, Freedom House, in its annual survey Freedom in the World, has documented a decline in political rights and civil liberties for the past 12 years. Nor were these democratic waves always the result of clear American support. During the earlier period of the Cold War, the United States often preferred authoritarian governments as long as they maintained anti-communist credentials. By the 1970s, U.S. policy started to shift, with a greater emphasis on the human rights records in other countries regardless of their political leanings. In the 1980s, the United States even played a role in facilitating the departure from power of right-wing leaders in the Philippines and Panama. It supported the liberation of Warsaw Pact countries from Soviet influence, leading soon after to the fall of the USSR and, as President Ronald Reagan called it, the “evil empire” that it represented.

Soon after, citizens elsewhere around the world, from South Korea to South Africa, demanded better from their governments, respect for human rights, the ability to choose their own leaders, and the right to speak freely. They championed universal values and liberties; democratic societies, especially the United States and those in Europe, played an important role in offering alternative models to communist and/or authoritarian regimes.

In 1983, with strong Congressional backing, the Reagan Administration launched the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its related organizations: the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the Solidarity Center. These organizations formed the core of American efforts to promote democracy around the world. Other organizations—such as Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and Amnesty International—have played a critical role, too. No other country has devoted the resources or personnel to support freedom and human rights worldwide.

Now, 100 years after the end of World War I and some 70 years after the foundation of the liberal international order that emerged from the devastation of World War II, the democratic world confronts great challenges and uncertainty. A dangerous Russia under Putin, a rising China under Xi, a threatening North Korea under Kim, a menacing Iran under the mullahs, a growing populist and nationalist wave in Europe and even Brazil, and doubts about the direction of the United States all combine to paint a picture of a world in turmoil and freedom under duress.

How Did We Get Here?

“There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom,” declared President George W. Bush in his Second Inaugural Address in January 2005. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. . . . It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Few would question Bush’s passion for and commitment to the cause of freedom and human rights around the world. He began discussing the need to reexamine the Middle East, a region that had no experience or history with democracy, but which, he argued, should not be written off as hopeless. As his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote in 2005, “Though the broader Middle East has no history of democracy, this is not an excuse for doing nothing. If every action required a precedent, there would be no firsts. We are confident that democracy will succeed in this region not simply because we have faith in our principles but because the basic human longing for liberty and democratic rights has transformed our world.”

And yet there is no denying that Bush’s Freedom Agenda was irreparably damaged by the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, as well as scandals like Abu Ghraib and renditions. After finding no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq following the invasion of that country in 2003, the Bush Administration sought to bring democracy to Iraq, an effort that has largely failed. Bush’s Freedom Agenda, while admirable in its rhetoric and aspiration, was troubled by inconsistent and unrealistic implementation.

Influenced by that experience, Barack Obama told the Washington Post editorial board five days before his inauguration as President in January 2009 that he did not support promoting democracy “through the barrel of a gun.” Obama’s implicit criticism of the Bush Administration’s efforts to promote democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan evolved into a broader reluctance throughout his two terms to promote democracy and human rights around the world— see, for example, his Administration’s reaction to and handling of the Green Movement in Iran in June 2009, the Arab Spring in 2011 and the Egypt coup of 2013, and the reluctance to meet with the Dalai Lama for fear of offending Beijing. His Administration opposed passage of the Magnitsky Act, which Congress approved by huge bipartisan majorities in 2012 to impose sanctions on Russian officials involved in gross human rights abuses. Unlike Bush, Obama rarely met with human rights and civil society activists either in Washington or during travel overseas.

Bush’s unpopularity in Europe did not prevent the United States from working with allies to advance human rights. It sustained the Community of Democracies, an initiative launched by the Clinton Administration and then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It coordinated with the European Union on sanctions against the regime in Belarus of Aleksandr Lukashenka for his repressive policies. It worked together on pushing back against the military junta in Burma. And even when the United States withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 2008, it forced that entity to reexamine itself, its disproportionate focus on Israel, and its questionable membership (these problems would return, however, leading the Trump Administration to pull out of its successor, the Human Rights Council).

In contrast to Bush, Obama was very popular in Europe (even after announcing his “pivot” to Asia), but, influenced by the war in Iraq, he placed less emphasis on advancing human rights and freedom around the world. Nevertheless, the Obama Administration worked closely with its allies in continuing the pressure on the junta in Burma, now Myanmar. The Community of Democracies has continued—and for the past year has even had an American as its executive director. The United States returned to the UN Human Rights Council under the Obama Administration and worked in supporting various special rapporteurs for challenging human rights situations around the world. And after the Magnitsky Act became law, the Administration, despite its initial opposition to the legislation, encouraged other countries to follow suit, and to date five (Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the United Kingdom) have passed similar legislation, as has the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

At the same time, the 2008 global financial crisis left many people disillusioned with the ability of democracies to deliver. That crisis and the uneven recovery from it, along with increasing migrant and refugee flows, opened the door for populist leaders to walk through in subsequent years. Some would proudly proclaim themselves to be leading “illiberal” democracies,” while others would scapegoat refugees fleeing for their lives, stirring up nationalism and extremism.

Fast forward to the current Administration. President Trump’s clear affinity for strongmen leaders, his failure to fill the position at the State Department responsible for democracy, human rights, and labor two years into his term, his undemocratic rhetoric, and his efforts to cut aid in this field have done enormous harm to the leadership role played by the United States over the years. Despite the problems associated with Bush’s Freedom Agenda and Obama’s seeming lack of interest in the issue, human rights activists and dissidents still turned to the United States for moral, financial, and political support. These days, they are not sure where to turn.

Under the current Administration, human rights simply are not a priority, a position made crystal clear by Trump’s recent comments concerning Saudi Arabia, despite the Kingdom’s abominable treatment of human beings and the murder of Khashoggi. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned that prioritizing American values (human rights) could harm other American interests, a position for which he was roundly criticized. Trump’s admiration for leaders like Egypt’s Sisi, the Philippines’ Duterte, Russia’s Putin, and North Korea’s Kim is demoralizing to human rights advocates everywhere. Despite Kim’s unparalleled brutality in North Korea, Trump at a campaign rally said that he and Kim “fell in love” through their various exchanges; one can only imagine if Obama had said such a thing. There are two positive exceptions to this record: 1) the current Administration has maintained sanctions under the Magnitsky Act on Russian officials and imposed additional sanctions under the global version of it, albeit under Congressional pressure, and 2) the Administration has spoken out on the abuses committed by the Maduro, Castro and Ortega regimes in Latin America.

What Is to Be Done?

Supporting human rights and democratic governance around the world does not and should not mean imposing American values on others or staging military interventions. Each country, if given the opportunity, will develop in its own unique way. But our support does involve peacefully aiding local activists who look to the United States for moral, political, diplomatic, and sometimes material support. These activists often risk prison, torture, and death struggling for a more democratic society; helping them reflects our own highest principles. It is the least we can do.

Today, with the current wave of nationalism and populism, human rights are facing new challenges from some unexpected places, including the United States—but don’t expect advocates to quit. NATO and the European Union, along with the OSCE have played a key role on the European continent in supporting the cause of human rights and freedom; while not a member of the European Union, the United States is a key member of NATO and the OSCE.

In the Western Hemisphere, despite a long history of authoritarian rule, sometimes  aided and abetted by the United States, individuals have challenged human rights abuses. With the support of the Organization of American States (OAS), the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man in 1948 established a vehicle for the investigation of human rights abuses throughout the hemisphere with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which was followed 20 years later by the establishment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Here, too, the United States has played an important role.

Safeguarding the institutionalization of human rights within these organizations is absolutely critical to guarantee that defenders and advocates have a strong voice. As long as they keep on taking the risks to do so, they deserve to have the United States standing with them. But this requires speaking out consistently when abuses occur. It mandates placing human rights and advancing the cause of freedom high on the foreign policy priorities list. It means distancing ourselves from authoritarian regimes, recognizing that the way they treat their own people is often indicative of how they will behave in foreign policy and toward other countries. It means not whitewashing gross human rights abuses.

In his address before the UN General Assembly this past September, President Trump underscored the idea of sovereignty, declaring: “We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy. America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism. And we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.” Trump went on to inform his fellow leaders that “the United States will not tell you how to live or work or worship. We only ask that you honor our sovereignty in return.”

Such a declaration both misrepresents what the United States had sought to do over the past seven-plus decades in maintaining and nurturing the international order—which has largely been a huge net gain for human rights and democracy, albeit with significant exceptions—and telegraphed to authoritarian leaders that they could get away with bloody murder without worrying about repercussions from the United States, either bilaterally or through multilateral organizations. That became even more explicit with the murder of Khashoggi.

“Democracy has spread and endured,” writes Robert Kagan in his most recent book, The Jungle Grows Back, “because it has been nurtured and supported: by the norms of the liberal order, by the membership requirements of liberal institutions like the European Union and NATO, by the fact that the liberal order has been the wealthiest part of the world, and by the security provided by the world’s strongest power, which happens to be a democracy.”

And yet, in 2018, as Patricia O’Toole writes in her book, The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made, “as Woodrow Wilson’s 100 years came to an end, the peaceful world order of his dreams was nowhere in sight. Nationalism and autocracy were on the rise and democracy was under attack in some of the most democratic countries on earth, including the United States.”

President Trump’s latest dismissal of human rights as a matter of interest will be welcomed not only by the Saudi Kingdom but by authoritarian regimes around the world. Buy enough arms and pledge to invest enough in the United States and the Trump Administration will turn a blind eye to gross human rights abuses. Human rights defenders, by contrast, will feel abandoned. They need and deserve the support of the United States and that of other democracies. American leadership, hard to envision right now, must be restored to carry on this indispensable mission.

The post Human Rights Suffers a Major Blow appeared first on The American Interest.

When Milo Wins, So Do SJWs

There’s a certain stripe of conservative—”rightwinger” might be a better term—that quite literally lives off outrage. Writing in The Weekly Standard, Adam Rubenstein has a pretty apt description of the business model deployed by such pundits, whose ranks include Candace Owens, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Charlie Kirk:

[The] model is essentially this: Provoke leftist students; take video of their reactions; send the video clips to donors to solicit contributions. Lather, rinse, repeat. Money flows in, the organization expands, and the culture, the campus, the students are naught for the better.

This racket dates back to the 1990s, when Rush Limbaugh was gaining steam and conservative newsletters were all the rage. But it’s become much more effective in an era of social media, because now charlatans like Milo can reach more people more quickly, and with less effort, than ever before. Conservatism’s identity crisis under Trump has played a role, too; with the old gatekeepers discredited, boundary-pushing now poses comparatively fewer risks from the GOP establishment, and in some cases even earns you a promotion—see Charlie Kirk’s frequent White House sojourns.

The students who invite these firebrands to campus often claim to be exposing their peers to different points of view. “Yes, he’s an asshole, no, we don’t love everything he says, but hey, intellectual diversity!” To which most well-adjusted people reply: seriously? Nobody learns anything when Milo rightsplains feminism to feminists, so why not invite someone who will actually promote real debate—not just engage in performative lib-owning?

Except that performative lib-owning is the point: because without it, conservative students fear they will be steamrolled by a much louder and better organized Left, whose strategic outrage has largely succeeded in ejecting center-Right opinion from campus. Thus they invite professional triggerers as a kind of countermeasure, a way of prying the Overton window wide enough to avoid ideological asphyxiation. This is why lines about “productive debate” often prove unproductive when directed at twentysomething reactionaries—they don’t really address the survivalist impulse driving Miloism.

So let me offer a different argument that does address it: Conservative firebrands create anti-conservative incentive structures.

The thing to see here is that if your revenue stream depends on commodifying leftist tears, it inevitably depends on leftists as well—not the old-school Bernie types, exactly, so much as the Sarah Jeongs and SJWs, dyed-in-the-wool activists who explode at the slightest hint of wrongthink. And that means you have a vested interest in perpetuating the progressive grievance machine—otherwise you might end up with fewer videos, and therefore less money.

Milo’s business model, then, presupposes the existence of a loud, distemperate Left enforcing PC pieties, something he himself has admitted on multiple occasions. By straddling the line between obnoxious and odious, he triggers just enough meltdowns to generate revenue, but not quite enough to be prevented from speaking to—and pissing off—the crowd. Then said crowd spreads the word—watch out for this asshole—ensuring Milo has an angry audience at his next gig, too—and the next one, and the one after that. His strategy, in other words, is not to “own the libs”; it’s to energize and exploit them for profit.

Thus when young conservatives bankroll trigger-mongering, they’re essentially helping their own worst enemy. Raucous, truculent, and in most cases ill-spoken, the trolls confirm every insult and epithet hurled at them by the social justice Left; having been vindicated, the Left uses its newfound credibility to regulate conservative speech; and frustrated by the regulations, conservatives invite ever more frauds and hucksters to campus—which only makes the regulations worse.

All this to say: If you are a right-leaning undergraduate who can’t stand speech codes and special snowflakes, culture wars and cultural Marxists, please, please do not subsidize a multi-million dollar industry that makes money off those things. We adults would appreciate it.

The post When Milo Wins, So Do SJWs appeared first on The American Interest.

Coming Soon to a Hall of Mirrors Near You

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on October 2 has tripped off one of the grandest cascades of news copy, electronic and print, in many weeks, and perhaps even many months. Why is that?

Several reasons come to mind. First, the deed itself was both gruesome and spectacular, surprising and utterly beyond the pale of civilized diplomatic protocol. Mainstream media markets in the United States—and, to a lesser extent, in the West generally—love that sort of thing because it registers high on the all-critical shock meter. The fact that Khashoggi allegedly entered the Consulate in order to secure a document necessary to enable his marriage to a Turkish woman, knowingly putting himself at some risk as she tells the tale, just makes the plot line juicier for an audience that has become increasingly challenged by the task of untangling reality from fiction. Then there ensued for several days an undulating uncertainty about what actually happened, revelations of the existence of surreptitious Turkish tapes promising to reveal the Truth, and the subsequent lateral entry of the CIA into the investigatory mix, amid howls of righteous indignation from assorted congressmen and journalists. So the plot thickened, the decibel level rose, and the drama intensified. Think of it: murder and much blood courtesy of a bone saw; love and certainly sex implied; Oriental intrigue, jet-set hit squads, and high-tech eavesdropping in diplomatic inner sancta. This is market share manna from entertainment heaven for mainstream media. No wonder they played it to the hilt.

Second and related, there was as well an unmistakable comedic element to the story as it quickly developed, giving the entire affair the flavor of an old Pink Panther farce. In the early days, when we were not sure what really happened to Khashoggi, we had a choice as to whether to believe Turkish state spokesmen or Saudi state spokesmen. This is roughly akin to having to choose between believing Oliver Stone or Pinocchio on one of his bad, particularly wooden, days. Most observers chose to believe the Turks because they wanted to, even before knowing that the Turks had tapes revealing much, or enough, of what had gone on inside the Consulate.

That was pretty funny, but not nearly as hilarious as watching the Saudis change their story about what supposedly happened a half dozen times, in mostly mutually contradictory ways, within about as many days. It was to say the least hard to reconcile how Khashoggi could have walked out the back door of the Consulate on October 2—those darned security cameras being on the blink, wouldn’t you know it?—only to be declared indeed dead two days later….only to have a pathetic looking double walking around after that! Saudi public relations craft obviously needs work, seeing as how these folks lie about as persuasively as a typical nine-year old boy caught red-faced in some naughty act. But in the meantime, anyone who cannot appreciate the entertainment value in the bottomless mediocrity of Saudi mendacity has to constitute a really tough audience.

Third, to the extent that responsibility for Khashoggi’s murder pointed to the Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman (MbS)—as it increasingly did—it constituted a line of indirect attack on President Trump and his son-in-law, who, as is well known, has held several wee-hours conversations with MbS in Riyadh. The American mainstream media is schizophrenic on this score, but not at all in a humorous way.

On the one hand, Donald Trump sells media, which is why during the 2016 primary season and campaign it showered Trump with free exposure. Who can forget Leslie Moonves’s infamous February 2016 remark that the campaign was a “circus” and that, while Trump’s candidacy might not be good for America, “it’s damn good for CBS.” Moonves could have stopped there, but he didn’t:

Donald’s place in this election is a good thing. . . . Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? . . . The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.

It’s the sort of remark, redolent of the sort of behavior, that makes one wish there really was such a thing as eternal damnation, even if just for those senior journalists who set aside their most solemn professional responsibilities to turn the news into spectacle in pursuit of lucre.

Then, on the other hand, having been partly responsible for electing Trump to the presidency—and vaguely coming to realize that—the same media moghuls then reasoned that opposing him was now the best formula to compete for market share, because far more “never Trumpers” try to follow actual news than Trump supporters. But the whole push me-pull me thing—first “bring it on, Donald, keep going” and then the Donald-the-Devil tilt—has had the combinate effect of implicitly focusing critical thinking in the American body politic on the man rather than on the deeper political and cultural factors that allowed him to become President in the first place. That constitutes a massive and deeply unhelpful category error, but it is a virtually inevitable error since the dumbing down of the long since electronically driven mainstream press is one of those factors.

So Khashoggi’s murder becomes big news in part because he is an appendage of the never-ending Trump story, which now resembles a mélange of The Apprentice, West Wing, and Pee Wee’s Playhouse. But truly major stories—for example the Benalla-Macron Affair in France—are barely noted in the U.S. press because no connection to Trump is evident. The mainstream press, in short, is afflicted with the DTs—the delirium trempers, let’s call them—because it can’t stop drinking in the toxins he exudes.

Fourth, at the time of his murder Khashoggi lived in the Washington area, and, among other activities, wrote for the Washington Post. For publishers and journalists of national and near-national stature, Khashoggi was “one of us,” or could be so construed for practical emotional purposes. It’s not the least surprising that Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post emoted so vigorously over the murder, because he knew Khashoggi personally and, an alleged Muslim Brotherhood affinity aside, he was by all accounts a jovial, knowledgeable, and personable fellow. But it was easier for those of this guild who did not know Khashoggi personally to feel a “one of us”-toned sympathy as well. And of course it is nasty that autocratic governments—Russian, Chinese, North Korean, Turkish, and now Saudi—feel ever less restrained these days in reaching out and whacking some of their own nationals they find annoying who happen to be abroad. The ambient level of thuggishness in the international theater has grown, and the normative decay it both reflects and probably presages is unfortunate.

All true; but Khashoggi himself, and hence his murder, was and is not really all that important—certainly not so intrinsically important as to warrant the abundance of media coverage. If the murder persuaded some Western observers that MbS really is the accident-prone, out-of-control spoiled brat that he has been ever since he grew out of his thobe knickers, fine. Most of us paying attention already knew that from the lengthening list of outrageous, random, and mostly stupid MbS behaviors—except maybe for some single-issue obsessives who saw only the illusory prospect of a region- and history-altering public Saudi-Israeli alliance against Iran.

And so in this particular regard the flood of coverage points up an uncomfortable truth, one that a few seasoned U.S. Middle East hands, Ambassador Ryan Crocker notably included, have already commented upon: For all the anguish over Khashoggi from the usual mainstream media types, where is the comparable anguish over roughly a half-million Syrian civilians murdered by their own government over the past seven years, or over the bloody mayhem in Yemen to which MbS and the Saudis have contributed much? Celebrity journalist, English-speaking Arabs from prominent families they care about and write about; all the rest, not so much. Alas, Arab blood sells very cheap in Washington, DC when it is merely faceless and ordinary.

….And Then Came the Politics

By now, nearly two months on, it is time that even the Khashoggi affair would have faded from the front pages. But it hasn’t to the extent one would have expected, and that is because it has caught a second (ill) wind thanks to the rancid partisan politics whose stench fills the air around us. The tail end of the Khashoggi media coverage merged with the recent midterm elections in such a way as to furnish the Democrats with a bludgeon to smash down Republicans. And the President has made an excellent target by standing utterly and starkly alone, even amid his own Administration (such as it is), by defending and exonerating MbS. Indeed, the President’s apparent credulity in this case is approached only by his repeated determination to take Vladimir Putin’s denials of involvement in hacking the November 2016 U.S. elections at face value. In both cases he appears to normal people, in the United States and beyond, as a gullible fool—which would seem, on balance, a poor way to shape others’ future behaviors in ways we would like.

For some Democrats, this leaping upon the Khashoggi affair with all four paws is conscious payback for the Benghazigate nonsense of 2012-16. For other Democrats it’s just a normal “tribal” reflex. Republican politicos seized on the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, which killed the American Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and one other U.S. diplomat, as a way mainly to pummel then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, already at the time the presumed Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. The accusation was ludicrous, and at least some of those responsible for the political weaponization of the Benghazi tragedy had to know that. The idea that a cable from the security office of a U.S. consulate would have ended up square on the desk of the Secretary of State is so risible that no serious or experienced person could possibly credit it. But the audience to which this accusation was aimed was on the whole neither serious nor experienced.

But the ploy was necessary as well as opportunistic, because it deflected any lingering memory of the real issues involved in the Libya War. The March 2011 decision to start a war against the Qadaffi regime, a decision opposed by the Secretary of Defense and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the ur-error.1 But, alas, most senior Republican congressmen had been more enthusiastic about making that error even than President Obama, who demanded a series of onerous conditions before he would commit the U.S. government to the use of force, only to have his demands unexpectedly met. Obviously, no war, no failed state; no failed state, no terrorist haven bathed in weapons loosed from Libyan stockpiles; no terrorist haven, no deadly attack a year later on the Benghazi Consulate. This isn’t rocket science. So to make sure the American people in politically significant numbers would not connect these dots, some kind of smoke-and-mirrors deflection became necessary. And so we got the Benghazigate witch hunt.

But it’s obviously not just Democrats when a Republican-majority Senate votes 63-37 to end U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia in the Yemen War. And last Thursday, too, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2A (ANC), an advisory body to the Washington, DC City Council, 6-0 to rename the street in front of the Saudi Embassy “Jamal Khashoggi Way.” The circus is in town. So here we go again, this time with Khashoggigate.

Whether the Democrats will demand hearings about what the President and Jared Kushner knew and when they knew it remains to be seen, but if they do, it looks now that at least some non-trivial number of Republicans will not oppose it. We should not be surprised if hearings are demanded in an era when investigating one’s political adversaries is vastly more popular than tackling public policy issues, but in this case it may be a matter less of Democrats versus Republicans than Congress against the White House, with the CIA and the heads of other Executive Departments stretched uncomfortably in between. But hearings or no, the silly battlelines have already been drawn at least in dotted form, and already serve as an invitation for myriad others to screw around in the trenches.

So it was that on November 16 both the New York Times and the Washington Post bore headlines, above the fold on the right, that the CIA had determined that Mohammed bin Salman had ordered Khashoggi’s murder. Save for readers with exotic personalities, the copy under these headlines offered little to nothing in the way of new information for those who had been following the story. It had been a few days already since the CIA had been able to access the Turkish tapes, and everyone’s body language had been pointing in the same direction—toward MbS’s culpability. So why, asked my youngest son at the breakfast table, the bold headline?

That is when I had to explain to him, as I have done over the years to students, how to actually read a newspaper, to wit: Usually the information in a news story explains why the story is in the paper; but sometimes a supposed news story getting into the paper in the first place is the story. That was the case on November 16. Competitive leaking being a time-honored Washington tradition, in this instance someone out in Langley fed this story to the papers in order to undermine the White House’s line of talk that MbS was not the evildoer. This was a sign, another one in by now a long series, that parts of the U.S. government are more or less at (cold) war with other parts of the U.S. government, and that normal interagency processes are not working well, or at all.

There is, as always, a history here. The President’s insinuations about a “deep state” centered in the intelligence community—a belief that led him to dismiss unredacted signals intelligence about Russian election hacking, shown to him in the Oval Office by high IC officials, as fabricated documents—clearly annoys and at times alarms senior members of the IC, even some of the ones appointed to their posts by this President. (Exactly how Gina Haspel feels about all this is an interesting question….talk about being stretched uncomfortably.) They generally suffer in silence as they do their important work, but every so often they feel compelled to make a noise. This was one of those times.

Not long after, on November 22, a long and detailed analysis by two senior journalists appeared in the New York Times concerning the supposed dangers of a pending nuclear energy infrastructure sale to Saudi Arabia. Same thing. Again, the news was not really news to those paying attention. Save for some details about recent negotiations, observers have known about Saudi interest going back deep into the Obama Administration period, and even before that. The banal truth is that a lot of money is involved over a fair number of years, and that, as the article points out, if the U.S. government does not midwife a deal another government probably will. That would dramatically reduce U.S. leverage over what a future Saudi government might do with whatever stuff it may procure. Even a sizable nuclear infrastructure in Saudi Arabia represents only a modest weapons proliferation risk for several reasons (the same cannot be said about a reportedly longstanding Saudi-Pakistani understanding2), but the risk is most modest to the extent that the U.S. government maintains failsafe control over it at a respectable distance. As a Thanksgiving Day feature, the article was fine; but what it really represented, from the editor’s point of view, was another volley against the Trump White House’s overly cozy relationship with MbS. Again, the fact of the article’s appearance was its own point; its mostly anodyne content was not.

As with Benghazigate, a thickening political overlay obscures the policy realities beneath the inchoate obfuscations of Khashoggigate. The fact of the matter is that the U.S. government has no better and available options in Saudi Arabia than the Al-Saud, and if that were not depressing enough, it has no significant or reliable leverage to influence the staying power of Mohammed bin Salman as Crown Prince and presumptive King. It is not as though hordes of eager liberal democrats are waiting with baited breath to transform the Kingdom into an Arabian version of Denmark; the most likely actual alternatives to the current regime are more hidebound, not less. Bloviating in public about Saudi human rights violations and the like may make some U.S. officials feel better, and it may appeal to some U.S. domestic audiences—which readily enough explains why some politicians do it. But it won’t change anything on the ground in the Kingdom, and it won’t make parsing reality in the bilateral relationship any easier as the future intrudes upon the emotions of the moment. It is just as Secretary of Defense Mattis said: “We are seldom free to work with unblemished partners.”3

That is precisely what is at issue in Wednesday’s highly unusual Senate vote—essentially a new twist to an old dilemma: the “friendly tyrants“ problem. It is all well and good for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to write in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that what we are witnessing is “Capitol Hill caterwauling and media pile-on.” It also happens to be spot-on accurate. But so what? It doesn’t make the Administration’s problem go away, and it probably makes it worse. It’s also spot-on accurate for Senator Corker to say that, “There’s (sic) ways that the administration, even rhetorically, can help change the dynamic”4—translation: If the President stops insisting publicly on the absurd, then at least Republican supporters of the initiative to screw with the mil-mil dimension of U.S.-Saudi relations will adjust their postures. But will the President take the hint and defuse the dumb gravity bomb about to drop on U.S. Middle East policy? If I knew, I’d quit my day job and start studying to be a psychiatrist.

The politicization of foreign policy judgments and debates is of course nothing new. Politicos end up in the room where the National Security Council makes consequential foreign policy/national security decisions for a good reason: because political weakness undermines the authority of the office of the President in whatever it seeks to do. The pristine notion that politics should not enter at all into such decisions is just that—pristine and hence both impractical and impossible.

But there are, or at least there need to be, limits. The Iran nuclear deal, in addition to Benghazigate and a potential Khashoggigate, illustrates through two administrations what can happen when prudent limits are not respected. Trump’s opposition to and eventual withdrawal from the Iran deal was ill advised despite flaws in the agreement, but the political message, meant mainly for a domestic audience, took pride of place. Similarly, the Obama Administration arguably cared more about the political optic of the deal than it did about specific terms or regional consequences. So, for example, the President was loath to show any backbone over the civil war in Syria partly out of concern that it might undermine the effort to bring Iran “in from the cold” via a nuclear deal. That same concern, incidentally, led the White House to exhibit a strange and anxious detachment from quiet but promising efforts to advance the Israel-Syria axis of the peace process that were ongoing from late 2009 into the first third of 2011.

The Obama White House exhibited a naïvely feckless realism, for being tougher with a regime allied to Iran was more likely on balance to result in a better deal with Tehran than the one agreed to. That said, evidence since surfaced suggests that the Iranian leadership, which sought the deal for its own reasons (mainly sanctions relief), discounted any link between U.S. policy in Syria and the nuclear deal negotiations. Still, a White House that never really lost the vibe of a Senate office in permanent next-campaign mode, and hence that too often cared more about optics and rhetoric than about policy and outcomes, overthought the matter. As with the Trump decision to withdrawal from the deal, here too politics intruded overly much on the policy that took us into the deal.

The Rubble Heap

As noted, it is not good when the President of the United States acts like a mark, gullibly swallowing obvious lies in plain sight of more than 190 governments worldwide. It could tempt some of them to think that they, too, can lie to us for fun and profit. But maybe President Trump is not the fool he appears to be in all cases. Maybe he simply reasons that to call out a boldfaced lie would obligate him to act publicly in ways that would end up, under the circumstances, as mere posturing, and hence make both him and us look weaker in the end.

So, call MbS a liar and create a rupture in the bilateral relationship to what end, given the paucity of alternative Saudi interlocutors? Call Vladimir Putin a liar, sow even worse U.S.-Russian relations by so doing, and then what happens when a Sea of Azov incident occurs? We can mainly shut up in public about that right now, and hence not tease World War III any closer; had we been leading with our chin all these months, it would be harder now to speak in moderation, and we might also be deeper in riskier efforts to make the Russians pay a price for their taunts and lies.

I rarely incline to give Donald Trump the benefit of any doubt. I don’t know what he thinks, or if he thinks. But a Randian, who is advised by another Randian, who believes that the world is an unmitigatedly nasty and brutish place is not above, or below, such ways of reasoning—and such ways of reasoning are not always wrong. But they often are. His squirt of a remark during Tuesday’s news conference that he would like to remove U.S. troops from the Middle East because we don’t need to import its oil anymore is yet another vivid example of the man’s inability to wrap his strangely colored head around positive-sum relationships. It has been many decades since the United States relied on oil imports from the Middle East; even before the re-advent of self-sufficiency half a dozen or so years ago, most imports into the United States came from Mexico, Venezuela, and other non-Middle Eastern sources. Previous Administrations cared about the security of Middle Eastern sources for the sake of allied needs and because of the benchmark price, which in an integrated global oil market affects all countries. But Trump doesn’t care about allies, and he evidently hasn’t a clue about how the international oil market works.

What is really at issue here is neither the President’s ignorance nor his mendacity, however—nor even his destructive allergy to fact-based thought. It is, rather, why he feels a need to repeatedly display his own universally presumed gullibility in public, a need that has now got him in deep dutch with the Senate.

It owes, probably, to the man’s narcissistic inability to resist attracting attention to himself. Trump is at the same time unvarnished in his authenticity compared to previous Presidents, but he is also embedded as if by an acquired second-nature in a world of crass reality-TV entertainment. He is the quintessential embodiment of the by now nearly complete mash-up of news, entertainment, and advertising that most Americans expose themselves to nearly without respite.

So is the Khashoggi story, which is now apparently in the process of being transformed from mere garden-variety spin to policy whirlwind, just news? Or is it also entertainment? Or is it as well a platform for competing forms of political advertisement? In the age of Trump, it is all three, blurred into one huge increasingly unmanageable mess.

Not so long ago we recognized and appreciated these three distinct forms for what they were. News was fact-based, objective as far as professional journalism could make it, and it rested in a continuum of unfolding events—in other words, a line of connected dots enabling contextualized understanding for those set on achieving it. Entertainment was fictive, imaginative, and rested in its capacity to excite, shape, and cultivate our emotions. Advertisements were explicit attempts to sell us something, in return, usually, for either useful information about products and services or for the programming they brought us—as in sitting through myriad beer and razorblade commercials to see a ballgame on television, for example.

These forms are no longer distinct. As media business models struggle and mutate thanks in part to the technological tsunami we are now experiencing, news has become in effect a form of entertainment, with an eye ever on both the shock meter and the salacity scale. What used to contain lines of interpretive continuity has been mostly reduced to mere dots that don’t connect as images largely displace text. It has been so to some degree ever since electronic media overtook print journalism as the gold standard and pacemaker of the genre, and now with Facebook having become the main source of news for many Americans any pretense of objectivity or balance has become a bad joke. But media must follow the leader to stay solvent, wherever that leader may gallop.

Mass-market entertainment, too, has long since politicized itself, obscuring the dividing line between reality and make-believe, between documentaries and dramas. The bellwether moment, in the swoon of Watergate and the fall of Saigon, was the 1975 release of the Hollywood hit “Three Days of the Condor”; ever since, the meme of the U.S. government, in whole or in part, being the seat of conspiracy and evil has proliferated beyond recall.5 And that is not even the half of the generic obscurantism now afoot, because Hollywood wages culture war, too.

As for advertising, its language has colonized American political discourse, bent entertainment in ways that render it, too, into subtle forms of advertising, and now works via internet algorithms to colonize consciousness itself—even to the point that people are part product as well as consumer. How so? Consider what it really means that Facebook is basically an advertising platform in which users in effect create content for each other. And consider that internet/social media news platforms now so finely segment their audiences based on data collected from them that, in effect, the audiences are defining what is news as much or more than the providers of the product.

The Khashoggi affair illustrates how these once distinct forms have now collided, the resultant explosion blowing off the roof and collapsing most of the walls of our edifice of understanding. That explosion has left most of us with a smoldering rubble heap to sift through, if we dare—a rubble heap that represents the profound disorganization of our stock of knowledge about how foreign and national security policy works, and even what it is.

U.S. foreign and national security policymaking has always been an elite, professionalized affair for the most part, and except perhaps in wartime it didn’t matter much whether typical citizens understood how it was done. Now that this once-cloistered domain has entered the age of Trump, the chasm of comprehension between those responsible for this business as their day job and nearly everybody else has widened beyond hope of measurement. And the mainstream media, which once felt some responsibility for narrowing that chasm, has switched sides. It has all but abandoned the burden of making calm distinctions, and has instead mostly resigned itself to decorating the blur. For Americans at least, that, ultimately, is what the Khashoggi affair means.

1. It was possibly even at the time to predict many of the dire consequences of this error. See, for example, my “Down the Rabbit Hole” The American Interest Online, March 22, 2011.

2.  See Christopher Clary and Mara E. Karlin, “The Pak-Saudi Nuke, and How to Stop It,” The American Interest VII:6 (July-August 2012).

3. Mattis quoted in Karoun Demirjian, Carol Morello, and John Hudson, “Senate confronts Trump over Saudis,” Washington Post, November 29, 2018, p. A4.

4. Corker quoted in “Senate confronts Trump over Saudis,” p. A4.

5. For just one example, see my “Hollywood Argonistes (with Apologies to John Milton),” The American Interest Online, February 28, 2013.

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When Oligarchs Buy Media: A Central European Tale

“Maybe I will buy something tomorrow,” tweeted Andrej Babis, the second richest Czech businessman at the time, on the evening of June 25, 2013. The frenzied media speculation that followed predicted the acquisition of the Czech branch of the Swiss media house Ringier, then the number two media group on the Czech market. But Babis, at the time only a freshman in politics with his recently launched Association of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) movement and anticorruption crusades, surprised everyone—not least the journalists at Ringier—by purchasing a different media house: the Mafra group, the market leader with two quality dailies, the biggest news web portal, and several local radio stations.

Only a few months later, Babis achieved extraordinary political success when his newly formed party gained almost 19 percent of the vote and ended up as junior partner in a three-party coalition government. At that time, it was too early to say whether he had bought media explicitly in order to advance his political interests. But with hindsight—and with the sight of Babis in the Prime Minister’s seat after his party swept the 2017 elections—we can be certain that this was a carefully premeditated move, one that fit within a larger trend in Central Europe of local entrepreneurs investing in media for political and economic influence rather than for financial profit.

Babis’s purchase of the Mafra group came at the peak of an exodus of foreign investors, mostly from Germany, Switzerland or Scandinavia, who were all selling their media assets in Central and Eastern Europe. The dual effects of the financial crisis and the long-term decline of revenues due to the Internet led many media owners to leave this long-prosperous region and concentrate on their domestic markets instead—or at least that was the official explanation.

It should come as no surprise that the only buyers willing to take over money-losing media organizations were local oligarchs, who considered media a protective shield against their opponents. For these billionaires, having a prestigious news organization in their portfolio also bore a positive symbolic value, much like owning a successful football club.

In the case of Mafra, the former owner was Rheinisch-Bergische Verlags-und Druckereigesellschaft (RBVG), the regional German publishing house that had managed the Czech publisher since 1994, when it bought a majority stake from the Czech founders. RBVG built two new modern printing houses, which today still process the majority of Czech print dailies, and it introduced the famous German efficiency to the post-communist media business. Its flagship daily Mlada fronta Dnes was for many years considered the pillar of quality Czech journalism.

Mafra’s history shows that media in Central Europe were a very lucrative business in the period before the crisis. According to its annual report, the company made 304 million Czech crowns in 2007: about $12.6 million in current prices. But a year later profits went down to 220.5 million crowns, and by 2011 to 88.6 million ($4 million), a mere third of its pre-crisis profits. Mafra responded by repeatedly changing its management, adopting a more tabloid style of journalism, and lowering its standards. But it was all in vain: Two years later, Karl Hans Arnold, the CEO of RBVG, pulled the plug.

Obviously, this was a symptom of a much bigger problem. From the start of the crisis in 2008 until 2013, when Babis made his famous purchase, revenues of the biggest Czech publishing houses, together representing 80 percent of the market, dropped by 20 percent. That pushed other big players to sell their assets. Ringier, the publisher of the best-selling Czech tabloid Blesk, sold its media holdings in 2014 to another rich Czech businessman, Daniel Kretinsky, in partnership with the Slovak finance group J&T. Only a year later, Vltava Labe Media, owned by the German group Verlagsgruppe Passau (which had a monopoly on Czech regional daily newspapers) was sold into the hands of the Czech-Slovak financial group Penta.

Even in the hands of those powerful businessmen, Czech journalists could feel relatively lucky compared to their colleagues from other Central European countries. In general, most of these new owners have not used their media holdings as a political tool; at worst they have employed them more as a protective shield than an active weapon. But Andrej Babis is a horse of another color: he has entered politics, refused to admit any conflict of interest, and despite having been forced in 2017 to (nominally) put his companies in a trust, continues to influence them while presiding over the Czech government.

Hungary and Poland: Tightening the Grip

In Hungary, foreign owners came under the pressure of a political crisis as well as a financial one. The government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been systematically pushing them to sell stakes to friendly Hungarian or Austrian businessmen, who have then either completely changed these outlets’ editorial lines—substantially toning down their criticism of the government—or shut them down entirely. The latter fate befell the biggest left-liberal daily Nepszabadsag, which had been majority-owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann after the 1990s privatization and was later acquired by Ringier.

In case of foreign owners’ resistance, the government has applied different types of pressure, as illustrated by the story of Hungary’s biggest private TV channel, RTL Klub. Owned by the Luxembourg-based RTL Group (whose parent company is Bertelsmann), it is the most watched channel in Hungary, commercial or state-owned. When its news became too critical of the governing Fidesz party in 2014, the government proposed a special law aimed at taxing media advertisements, a measure designed specifically to hurt RTL Klub and the larger RTL Hungary group. The situation was so severe that it was even rumored that Chancellor Angela Merkel had to intervene in the conflict between the Hungarian government and the channel’s German owners.

Another worrying story of mounting government pressure on foreign investors is unfolding in Poland, concerning an American investor who has played an important role in the media market and in upholding media freedom. While the print and online world is still dominated by big Germany-based groups, the biggest private television network TVN, originally founded by two Polish businessmen, is now in the hands of America’s Discovery Inc. (Another American company, SNI Media Group, had acquired 52.7 percent of TVN shares in 2015 and became part of Discovery in 2018.) The revenues of TVN in 2016 were 1.6 billion złoty: approximately $427 million.

The flagship of TVN is TVN24, an influential news channel whose reporting is perceived as counterbalance to the disproportionate and overwhelmingly pro-government bias of the state Televizja Polska (TVP) channels. This has naturally caused much friction with the governing Law and Justice party, which has been stealthily seeking to bring TVN to heel. Behind the scenes, lawmakers have prepared a bill comparable to the aforementioned special tax in Hungary to target the channel. However, it has (for now) been abandoned for political reasons: The governing conservatives do not want to provoke a conflict with their valuable American ally.

Golden Times Gone, but Hope Glimmers

While oligarchs grabbing up media outlets generally pose a threat to journalistic freedom and independence, their actions can in some cases have the opposite effect. The changing of hands in the media market often pushes journalists to start their own business ventures. This was the effect of Babis’s purchase of Mafra in the Czech Republic. Shortly after the acquisition, a few former editors launched small, independent media outlets that—defying the odds and general expectations—still survive today. Some of them have even brought new advertising models to the market, such as the magazine Reporter founded by the former Mlada fronta Dnes editor-in-chief Robert Casensky.

Slovakia also provides an interesting case study in this regard. When the German company RBVG was leaving Slovakia in 2014, the Czech-Slovak financial group Penta bought a 45 percent minority stake in Petit Press, the publishing house responsible for Slovakia’s biggest non-tabloid daily, SME. Penta had become infamous for its close ties to the governing party Smer and for influencing many shadowy deals of the state, which investigative journalists from SME had uncovered. Penta’s decision to invest in Petit Press was thus considered an attempt to silence those journalists. Many of them instead left and founded a brand new daily, Dennik N, building on their prior experience developing novel formats and paywalls for SME. This allowed them to establish Dennik N on a new business model, independent from oligarchs (aside from some starting money from the ESET IT company). Less than four years later, the paper has become almost entirely financially self-sustaining.

The departure of foreign investors and clashes with oligarchs can thus lead to either the destruction of quality journalism or to its renaissance. But the market fundamentals for media remain shaky, and it is fair to say that the “golden years” of the late 1990s and early 2000s will never return. The days when foreign investors could derive huge profits from the Central European media market are over.

On balance, then, we can conclude that foreign ownership can play a positive role in shielding independent journalism, as the TVN example in Poland shows. But when bad economic times hit, the same foreign owner will care only about making a quick and painless exit from the market. Prevailing foreign ownership has also meant, historically, that profits have been channelled out of Central European countries without contributing to the broadening of the base of independent media. This has ultimately left media in Central Europe weak, easy prey for oligarchs and vulnerable to external pressures.

Thus, after almost thirty years of democratic development, free and independent journalism in Central Europe has never been as endangered as it now—not least because of the lack of strong domestic players able to weather economic and political storms.

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America, Heal Thyself

With the 2018 mid-term elections receding in the rearview mirror, there is an argument to be made that this time around demonstrated that the American political system broadly “works.” The pendulum that swung sharply toward nativism and xenophobia has swung back toward inclusion and pluralism. Or, put more neutrally, the underdog party reclaimed some lost ground.

The rise of Donald Trump in the Republican Party may have been the product of ongoing partisan sorting, now along urban-rural lines and educational levels, rather than more broadly geographical or economic ones. But overall, Trump’s fearmongering and divisive rhetoric, which got him a surprise win in 2016, seems to have gone on to alienate and energize a sizable centrist suburban constituency, and thus cost the GOP scores of House seats, several governorships, and multiple state legislatures. Democracy’s moderating effects appeared to have been on full display this month.

Moreover, as advocate and analyst Kevin Johnson wrote recently, a good number of nonpartisan election reforms were adopted by statewide referenda—providing variously for non-partisan commissions to draw legislative boundaries, or to reinstate the vote for felons who have done their time—and many of these initiatives were endorsed by voters in counties that Trump carried two years earlier. This suggests that the Trump voters’ obvious disdain for politics-as-usual carried over to support for practical steps to limit the self-dealing of incumbent politicians at various levels and in both major parties.

So does our election system work? Not so fast. The jury is still out, and there is reason to be pessimistic. After all, Donald J. Trump himself says the system is broken, that it is “rigged.” Indeed, this was one of his closing arguments in the 2016 campaign: that the American political system was rigged, against him and his supporters. Even after he won, he couldn’t stop complaining that imaginary “millions” of illegal immigrants voted, presumably against him—which is notable because it is usually, around the world and historically in the United states, that the losing side complains that the system isn’t fair.

Trump has decried and exaggerated “voter fraud” to a fare thee well. Even when the bizarre and chaotic Presidential Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity failed to find any evidence of voter fraud, Trump and his wingman—soon to be former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach—insisted that the American system is crooked. The curious thing about this is that a lot of Americans believe the election system is broken, but these are mainly Democrats and left-leaning voters, not Republicans. Winning is enough to persuade most conservatives that the system works.

And there are real problems in our system to be sure. America does not really have political parties. Every candidate, at virtually every level, has to raise her own money and develop a profile—and often must campaign against an incumbent of the same party. So coherent governing platforms are generally hard to propound. (Neither “conservative judges” nor “universal healthcare” is a governing program; these are slogans.) This in turn means that candidates depend on funding from private sources of increasingly curious provenance, like billionaires and Super-PACs (which increasingly are flush with “dark money” thanks to the infamous Citizens United 2010 Supreme Court decision I wrote about in these pages). Then there is the shameless gerrymandering in which legislative district boundaries skew results to protect incumbents for a decade at a time.  And then there are the determined efforts by some elected officials, including those responsible for managing the elections, to exclude large blocks of voters when those officials assess that those voters—think African-Americans or university students or Hispanics—are likely to vote for the other side. This is then called addressing voter fraud. Which doesn’t really exist. Though the disenfranchisement is real.

Just about every country in the world with problematic elections has a group of independent nonpartisan volunteer election monitors who provide a neutral public judgement on whether the government of the day (and its election administrators) have conducted elections in a manner consistent with the laws of the land. They often also provide commentary about whether those rules are fundamentally fair. The United States, however, does not have such nonpartisan monitors, because we have traditionally relied on the contestants themselves to police one another, deploying political party or candidate-chosen poll watchers to ensure that the other side does not fiddle with the process and the tabulation. So challenges and complaints when they come are always tinged with self-interestedness. Wouldn’t it be better if we had neutral referees, without a horse in the race, to monitor the proceedings, like so many other countries do?

After all, it has been Americans—mainly at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI)—who have taken the concept of nonpartisan election monitoring on the road, around the world, training people on best practices in this. The goal of these efforts has always been simply to document shortcomings in the process so they may be improved in future elections. Maybe it’s time we took some of our own medicine?

Though Americans have been the principal proselytizers, the idea was first hatched in the Philippines, where a citizens’ movement led by Catholic clergy and local businesspeople emerged in the mid-1980s to limit the ability of dictator Ferdinand Marcos to manipulate elections, as he had then been doing for a quarter century.

And it worked! When Marcos called the infamous “snap election” of 1986—giving his opposition just twelve weeks notice that an early presidential election would be held on February 7 that year—the National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) was ready with more than 100,000 volunteers trained in the details of the election law and procedures. The official Commission on Elections declared Marcos the winner, but NAMFREL’s volunteers had compiled the precinct-by-precinct vote totals and reported that opposition leader Cory Aquino had actually won with 7,835,070 votes to Marcos’ 7,053,068. A sit-in by nuns and students and tens of thousands of others around the election commission eventually persuaded the military to turn their tanks around, from defending the government to defending the citizens in the streets. Within days, Marcos was on his way to Hawaii and permanent exile.

Today, thirty years later, there is now a formal Global Network of Domestic Election Monitors (GNDEM), with over 250 member organizations in 89 countries, founded in 2009 with support from NDI, supporting the critical work of citizen election monitors throughout the world through solidarity and resource-sharing.

No one will be surprised to learn that some governments do not like independent civic election monitors, especially those that depend on fraudulent elections to stay in power.

When I visited the Republic of Georgia last month with a delegation from the German Marshall Fund of the United States to observe the first round of the presidential election, we met with independent observers from three national civic groups who were monitoring the process (before, during and after election day itself)—the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA) and the national chapter of the global anti-corruption network, Transparency International (TI). Some of these groups perform other kinds of watchdog functions, as well. Indeed, it has been TI’s high quality reporting on a range of corruption issues and shortcomings in rule-of-law that has provoked the de facto ruler of Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, to single out for consistent personal attacks the charismatic young leader of TI, Eka Gigauri, as he was doing in the run-up to last month’s voting.

Or consider the case of Russia, where a network of election observers known as GOLOS (an acronym which in Russian also means “vote” or “voice”) has worked for most of the past two decades. During the pivotal 2011 Russian legislative elections, when the governing United Russia party failed to win half the vote despite various shenanigans, GOLOS mobilized more than 2,000 monitors. During the campaign, GOLOS created an interactive map to which citizens across the vast country could submit reports, video evidence, audio recordings and photographs of election rules violations. Over 4,500 reports came in alleging illegal campaign tactics, including stories of employers threatening workers with pay cuts and local officials ordering business leaders to pressure subordinates to vote for candidates of United Russia.

But it was not those who committed these campaign law violations who were prosecuted; it was GOLOS that was charged and fined for publicizing the violations. Russian prosecutors accused GOLOS of “dissemination of rumors under the guise of trustworthy reports, with the goal of defaming a party as well as its individual members.” This led directly to the enactment of the infamous Foreign Agents Registration law requiring NGOs that receive financial support from abroad to describe themselves as “foreign agents” in all their printed or broadcast materials—essentially to self-identify as traitors to their country, when they were actually trying to help strengthen their country’s democratic character. Because the leaders of GOLOS declined to label themselves as enemies of the Russian people, a court in July 2016 ordered the liquidation of the organization due to “serious irremediable breaches of law”.

Independent observers in other countries have similarly been hounded, harassed and legislated out of existence, from Azerbaijan to Egypt to Venezuela. All of which makes one think that independent nonpartisan citizen monitors of elections are serious, if these kinds of governments are so neuralgic about their reports.

Sometimes, government with sketchy records on election management enlist dubious international observers to provide a veneer of legitimacy to elections that otherwise would not pass muster. Thus Moscow deployed dubious political personalities from the European equivalent of the Land of Misfit Toys to praise the conduct of phony election in the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine last year. Common sense and experience enable most analysts and citizens to tell the difference between legit observes and phony ones.

More credible international observers can and often do provide sober dispassionate assessments that can calm turbulent waters and show the way forward to ever better election management. For instance, our recent mid-terms were visited by a delegation of Europeans deployed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the 57-member body in which the United States is a full member and historically a leader in its efforts to strengthen democratic practice “from Vancouver to Vladivostok” (moving eastward from Vancouver). In a professional and serious and well-informed statement by friendly foreigners, the delegation noted this month that in the American elections “fundamental deficiencies remain in law, particularly in respect of disenfranchisement of citizens on various grounds.”

The experts also reported

Legislation and practice effectively disenfranchised around 11 million otherwise eligible voters. Some 4.7 million citizens residing in the District of Columbia and in US territories lack full representation in Congress. An estimated 6.1 million persons with criminal convictions are disenfranchised, with a disproportionate impact on racial minorities… These restrictions breach OSCE commitments and international standards with regard to universal and equal suffrage.

While international commentary on U.S. elections is not likely to have much persuasive value stateside (recall the snide remarks from Fidel Castro after the 2000 Florida recount hanging chad debacle that Cuba would be glad to monitor future elections), it does show that informed independent nonpartisan assessment is possible. And I would posit that it can and ought to be done by Americans, too.

There has lately been a lot of talk about strengthening the civic fabric of the nation – through better civic education , media literacy training and calls for mandatory or voluntary national service. Retired 4-star Army General Stanley McChrystal, for instance, has waged a campaign for this, noting in Time magazine that the legal structure to do so exists in the under-funded AmeriCorps program. Voluntary civic service need not be a year-long commitment; it could be done over a few weeks on a part-time basis to provide a dispassionate perspective on the conduct of our own elections.

NDI and the OSCE could bring their technical expertise to AmeriCorps, to recruit and train an appropriate number of citizen monitors to help us know the ways in which our elections are actually working or not working. To create a factual baseline of information as a foundation for the political and policy discussion. It could be done, if we want to make Americans confident in our elections again.

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China’s Trojan Ports

As China continues to project its presence, money, and influence into Western Europe, long-forgotten histories are resurfacing by way of analogy to the present challenge. According to one such narrative, Chinese strategy resembles that of the ancient Sea Peoples—a mysterious confederation that attacked territories in the East Mediterranean largely controlled by the Egyptian empire between 1200 and 900 B.C.E. The metaphor is an imperfect one. Not traditionally of the sea, China has long been a continental power, only now attempting to make the difficult transition to a maritime superpower. Its militaries are not making a beeline for Europe. Beijing is promising greater trade and economic cooperation, not threatening war.

A more appropriate metaphor from ancient history, however, can be used to describe Chinese economic activities. Beijing’s offerings resemble the Trojan Horse that the Greeks used to enter and lay waste to the independent city of Troy. This is especially true when it comes to the buying up of European ports.

It is estimated that state-backed Chinese investors state own at least 10 percent of all equity in ports in Europe, with deals inked in Greece, Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. This is in addition to a growing investment portfolio of at least 40 ports in North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, Australia and the Pacific.

China’s interest in European ports is defined and driven by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While the BRI has both strategic and economic objectives, there is little prospect of a Chinese-invested port in Europe being turned into a military base for the People’s Liberation Army Navy in the foreseeable future. Neither a 35 percent stake in the Euromax terminal at Rotterdam, a 20 percent stake in the Port of Antwerp (Europe’s two busiest ports), nor even full ownership of Zeebrugge in Belgium is a precursor to Chinese militarism in Europe.

The more immediate concern is that Chinese interests in European ports represent but one component of a much more ambitious strategy—one designed to unfairly tilt the regional and global economic playing field in China’s favor, introduce into Europe commercial processes and standards preferred by China rather than Western liberal democracies, enhance Beijing’s leverage over certain European states to support policies favored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and prevent any intra-EU consensus that might be critical of China’s economic policies and authoritarian values.

Europe – The Final Frontier

The BRI is widely and accurately described as President Xi Jinping’s flagship policy and China’s most ambitious, comprehensive economic strategy since the Deng Xiaoping era. Promoted to the world in economic rather than strategic terms, and formally introduced by Xi in 2013, the BRI encompasses the “Silk Road Economic Belt” through the Eurasian continent and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road,” which links China with Southeast Asia, Oceania, the Indian Ocean Rim, Africa, and the Mediterranean. With respect to Europe, the plan is to link China with railways that go through Central Asia, Russia, and Eastern Europe and onward to Spain. The Maritime Silk Road extends from China to Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the east coast of Africa, then through the Suez Canal and into the East Mediterranean Sea.

In the March 2015 white paper entitled “Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road,” the most comprehensive official document yet issued on the BRI, China described its five goals as being policy coordination, facilities connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration and people-to-people bonds.

In practice, the BRI has no formal institutional structure or set of guidelines. Unlike the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which is a multilateral entity with established rules and processes, BRI terms for countries and individual firms are negotiated directly with either the Chinese government or with state-owned or state-sanctioned firms. Memorandum of Understanding agreements between China and other countries and commercial terms between firms under the BRI banner are not generally available to the public.

Moreover, many projects involving Chinese firms in the 65 or more countries along the BRI are often counted as BRI projects even if that project was not conceived with the BRI in mind, or preceded its formal announcement. Claims that the BRI could be a $4 trillion scheme should be understood with this caveat in mind. In this sense, the BRI is both a hugely ambitious, consequential concept and a significantly inflated one.

Even so, gaining designation as a BRI-designated project can be meaningful. Funding mechanisms for BRI projects have been established, including the AIIB and the $40 billion New Silk Road Fund. Joint ventures with Chinese firms under the BRI banner can open up funding from Chinese financial entities such as the China Development Bank, the New Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China, and the China Investment Corporation sovereign wealth fund. Funding from these sources for BRI projects are frequently less restrictive in initial phases of investment and are given on non-commercial terms. Chinese firms can also gain fast-tracked financial and regulatory approvals from domestic authorities when partnering with foreign firms on BRI-designated projects.

In the aforementioned white paper, China tells us its economic aim in funding and building infrastructure along the Eurasian continental belt is threefold: to export excess industrial capacity arising out of the fixed-investment explosion which occurred after the 2008 global financial crisis to overseas markets; to spur development in its impoverished western regions by connecting these regions to economies and markets to the west; and to form physical, digital, and financial networks with new and existing markets in Central Asia and Europe.

The BRI’s so-called Eurasia Land Bridge Corridor concept extends from the east coast of China through to Western Europe. While Europe is at the far edges of the BRI in geographical terms, the former is essential for China. One purpose of the BRI is to bind consumer markets to Chinese exporters through the BRI’s physical, financial, and digital networks, which lead back to China. In nominal terms, the European Union is the largest economy in the world and constitutes about 22 percent of global GDP. Importantly, it is also the second largest consumer market in the world and almost double China’s size by that measure. Although the size of consumer markets in Southeast Asia and India are predicted to grow rapidly, Europe will remain the most important destination for finished goods throughout the BRI in the foreseeable future.

Moreover, Xi Jinping’s “Made in China 2025” policy involves government subsidies and massive investment in research and innovation in sectors that fuse the physical, digital, and biological worlds, such as advanced manufacturing and materials. The aim is to lead in these future-oriented sectors and dominate global exports. For the moment, China cannot achieve this on its own and needs the technology transfers that come from joint ventures with advanced economy firms, especially from Europe. In Beijing’s blueprint, advanced European markets will be major buyers of Chinese exports in these sectors. Without bringing Europe into the Chinese economic orbit through the BRI, “Made in China 2025” cannot succeed.

Why Worry

The European Union is China’s largest trading partner, but China accounted for only 2 percent of total foreign direct investment (FDI) stock by the end of 2015 and 5 percent of the value of recorded projects in 2016, according to Eurostat and Ernst & Young figures. With respect to Chinese investment in European ports, a benign commercial logic is frequently put forward to pacify growing concern.

For example, many shipping companies tend to invest in ports around the world because ports offer far superior margins and better return on investment than the related container and freight business. Chinese companies can also point to significant commercial achievements associated with their European port investments. When China’s COSCO Shipping Corporation took over the Greek container and passenger port of Piraeus in 2008, fewer than 900,000 containers passed through its facilities. In 2016, the figure reached 3.7 million containers. Piraeus has climbed up the world rankings of container ports: from 93rd in 2010, to 44th in 2015, to 38th in 2017.

Chinese firms are promising to achieve similarly impressive commercial outcomes for ports such as Venice. Importantly, China is offering Europe a package deal of benefits under the BRI brand. Chinese-invested ports will eventually be connected to the Maritime Silk Road and have direct networks to freight lines belonging to the Eurasian Land Bridge Economic corridor. This will offer European economies the opportunity to be linked to the entire BRI economic ecosystem, which begins in China and ends at the Mediterranean. The point is that Chinese investments in European ports are explicitly linked to the BRI and all that the Initiative seeks to achieve.

It is a good pitch, but there are reasons to be concerned.

First, the Chinese promises to build and expand the infrastructure around ports are made less attractive by the reality that Chinese projects tend to exclude local and international participation. According to the CSIS Reconnecting Asia database, 89 percent of contractors participating in Chinese-funded projects are Chinese companies. Only 7.6 percent are local companies, with 3.4 percent non-Chinese foreign companies. For projects funded by multilateral development banks, by contrast, 29 percent of contractors are Chinese, 41 percent are local firms, and 30 percent are non-Chinese foreign firms. Port investments and upgrades involve finance, design, construction and servicing, which are all activities Chinese firms provide at lower prices given the domestic advantages and assistance offered to them by Beijing. Understandably, Europeans feel uncomfortable with selling highly valuable assets if the spoils of development of those assets go to Chinese entities.

Second, there is growing discomfort with the close funding arrangements between Chinese firms and government-controlled financial entities. This is at odds with the European Union’s relatively liberal notion of political economy, which depends on there being significant distance between the political and strategic objectives of the government on the one hand, and the objectives of commercial enterprises on the other.

A case in point is COSCO Shipping Corporation, which was given over $26 billion by the China Development Bank to invest in BRI-sanctioned projects in 2017. These firms are given loose lines of credit to advance government policies and not just to maximize their commercial success. Even if one counters with the argument that European countries can dictate the laws and regulations that apply to assets in their sovereignty territories, the suspicion is that such assets can be used to benefit the Chinese economy disproportionately.

For example, investment by the Chinese company COSCO Shipping in, and control of, Piraeus means the Greek port will cooperate with Chinese ports to boost synergies, as evidenced by a June 2017 agreement with Shanghai International Port Group to cooperate in project planning, staff training, and information exchange. As a complement to the Chinese purchase of Piraeus, Chinese banks provided loans to Greek shipping companies to build additional commercial vessels in Chinese shipyards.

Furthermore, it would not be lost on Europeans that China’s “Made in China 2025” blueprint, and its associated industrial policies, are fundamentally mercantilist in nature: They are designed to enhance Chinese self-sufficiency in important strategic sectors and secure Chinese export dominance in the international market for these sectors. BRI networks promise to enhance the flow of goods, services, and information between China and BRI countries. In doing so, they serve to facilitate Chinese economic and industrial dominance. It is telling that China is promoting increased connectivity without undertaking significant domestic measures to remove what the European Union terms “significant market distortions.” These include CCP control over the financial system and policies offering preferential treatment of domestic companies over foreign competitors. Chinese businesses in BRI-related sectors receive land at artificially low prices along with access to cheap energy, preferential access to capital, suppressed borrowing costs, and beneficial pricing for raw materials and commodities.

In terms of access to the Chinese market, it is worth noting that foreign investment in the most important and lucrative sectors of the Chinese economy is heavily restricted and restricted entry is via joint ventures—which leads to the new problem of large scale and state-sponsored intellectual property and trade secret theft. In addition to its still-closed capital account and discriminatory regulatory and antitrust laws, it is extremely difficult for foreign firms to gain permanent and meaningful footholds to thrive in Chinese industrial and consumption sectors, even as China is laying the ground for ever greater access to European markets.

Indeed, Beijing has not made a convincing case that improved networks throughout Eurasia exist to evenly spread the opportunity of globalization and share the spoils of greater economic integration. The BRI and China’s interest in assets such as ports remain China-centric. China is paving the way to sell and buy what it wants, according to economic and strategic policies produced by the CCP. When Chinese firms negotiate opaque deals with European ones, the former begin with the largesse and non-commercial advantages that come from state assistance. The exchange is rigged from the start.

Third, Chinese firms must ultimately obey directives from Beijing. The network of ports and other logistical facilities in Europe, Africa, and Asia provides China with a high degree of operational self-reliance and capacity. Control of international supply lines and logistical processes gives a country political leverage if that country is prepared to use these capabilities for political ends. While there are restrictions on European countries and other liberal democracies against using commercial and civilian assets to achieve political ends, no such limitations exist in China. Indeed, it is a crucial part of the CCP’s toolkit to use economic leverage to achieve both economic and non-economic ends.

China’s official Blue Book of Non-Traditional Security (2014-2015), an annual volume produced by state-sanctioned academics and researchers, states that two of the purposes of the BRI are to mitigate American-led geopolitical machinations and ideas, and to promote a new international discourse and order that enhances China’s national power and soft power. Investment in ports and other assets should be considered in the context of the concept of “strategic support states,” which came to prominence amongst Chinese strategists earlier this decade. In a 2015 consensus of 50 Chinese scholars on China’s periphery diplomacy in the Xi Jinping era, cultivating “strategic support states” is achieved through regional cooperation and providing economic and public goods as China expands westward. According to analysis by the Washington, DC research organization C4ADS, one of the principles of cultivating a “strategic support state” is ensuring “China has the ability and resources to guide the actions of the country so that they fit into [China’s] strategic needs.”

There is ample evidence to suggest this is not abstract strategizing by academic thinkers. In Pakistan, enormous Chinese investments, such as in the Port of Gwardar, have given the Pakistani economy an instant economic sugar high. But they have also burdened that country with debt that it cannot repay, and turned Pakistan into a long-term client state of China’s. A similar situation is occurring in Sri Lanka. Unprofitable and debt-heavy projects such as the Hambantota Port has forced Sri Lanka into a $1.1 billion debt-for-equity swap with China, giving the latter long-term control of a military-capable port and considerable leverage over Colombo’s foreign policy. Over the past five years, China has invested over $5 billion in Cambodia, a sum equivalent to about one quarter of the country’s GDP, in return for Phnom Penh pushing China’s interests in organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). This includes a 100 percent ownership of the Koh Kong New Port. Like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Cambodia cannot change course while it is caught in a Chinese-created “debt trap.”

With respect to Europe, it is more difficult to purchase direct influence given that many European countries are better able to access diverse sources of capital, in addition to the presence of robust liberal-democratic institutions which are more difficult to corrupt. Even so, there have been opportunities. Unlike other Western European countries, Greece has openly welcomed Chinese investment, and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras boasts of China’s investment in the Port of Piraeus as the opening for “China’s gateway into Europe.” In 2017, Greece blocked an EU statement on Chinese human rights violations to the United Nations Human Rights Council, with a Greek official calling it “unconstructive criticism of China.” This marked the first time the European Union has failed to make a statement to the UNHRC.

Another case is Hungary, which is seeking to position itself as Eastern Europe’s “gateway to China,” and is welcoming BRI-linked investment, including for the $3 billion Hungary-Serbia railway project that would connect the Chinese-run Port of Piraeus with the European heartland. Realizing that political obeisance is one pathway to receiving immediate financial largesse, Hungary has emerged as China’s most enthusiastic spokesperson in Eastern Europe. For example, Budapest has strongly argued that the European Union should grant China’s economy “market status.” In 2017, Budapest derailed the EU consensus when it refused to sign a joint letter denouncing the torture of detained lawyers in China. Both Hungary and Greece remain unwilling to criticize Chinese actions in the South China Sea, thereby preventing the European Union from presenting a unified voice on this issue.

The concern here is not Chinese investments in ports per se, but rather China’s tendency to link investment with political demands and expectations. This applies regardless of whether such investment is BRI-designated or not. However, BRI projects have become the sweetener for countries desperately needing an injection of capital and economic activity when it is not pouring in from other sources. For less economically competitive and less commercially attractive European countries like Greece and Hungary, dependence on Chinese capital can be subsequently used to create significant pressure on governments to alter policies that favor Chinese interests.

Fourth, China has used the lure of enormous infrastructure investments, including development of Greek ports, as gateways for economic development into the Balkans to divide and conquer the European Union. The main mechanism is the China-initiated 16+1 grouping, which includes sixteen Central and Eastern European states plus China. Eleven members of this grouping are also EU members.

In late 2016, China announced it had established a $11.1 billion Central and Eastern European (CEE) Fund to finance projects in the group-of-sixteen economies to support the BRI. An ulterior motive is to create an economic investment zone that will decide on investments according to China’s rules and processes rather than the more stringent and transparent EU standards preferred by Western European states such as France and Germany.

Consider the case of Slovenia, which was promised a $1.5 billion financing package for a railway in exchange for a 99-year lease of the Port of Koper. In 2018, and in spite of raised eyebrows by Western EU countries, China and Slovenia signed a memorandum of understanding on cooperation in transport and infrastructure, which focused on integrating sea transport with the development of railways, motorways, and logistics as part of the BRI concept. This includes a cooperative agreement between the Port of Koper and China’s Port of Ningbo-Zhoushan to increase trade between China and the CEE economies.

Although the CCE Fund remains underwhelming due to lack of confirmed funding and agreed projects, it indicates China’s intention to circumvent EU rules and standards, or undermine broad support for them, by getting potentially recalcitrant EU members such as Greece and Hungary on its side. Serbia, a likely future EU member, has accepted large amounts of Chinese capital and in return is supportive of China’s stance on issues such as Taiwan, the South China Sea, and human rights in Tibet and Xinjiang. Once again, and in this context, it is not the investment in port or other facilities per se which is of concern, but China’s use of big spending promises to alter established EU norms and commercial standards for investment.

Not Quite the Sea Peoples, but Beware Chinese Bearing Gifts

China is now applying its well-tested South China Sea approach—gradually asserting de facto control and dominance through incremental actions, each of which will not provoke a robust counter response—in Europe. Similarly, China is using a divide-and-conquer strategy to prevent the European Union from taking a common stance against Beijing, much as it has done by offering largesse to Cambodia and Laos to prevent ASEAN from speaking with one voice.

However, unlike in the South China Sea, Chinese economic and investment policies toward Europe are not militarily threatening, are mostly legal (even if they undermine important commercial rules of the road,) and create some economic benefits for European partners, even if China will be the primary beneficiary. For these reasons, there is a legitimate economic role for Chinese firms, but with conditions.

In crafting a response, the European Union should remember that its leverage is more considerable than China cares to acknowledge. Even as a concept, the BRI would be greatly diminished without full European participation. China requires European cooperation to achieve Xi’s goal of China becoming a “moderately prosperous society” by 2021, when the country celebrates the 100th anniversary of the formation of the CCP, and to become a “fully developed, rich and powerful nation” by 2049, when China celebrates its 100th anniversary as the People’s Republic of China. At the least, EU leaders should demand economic “reciprocity’” in terms of equal access and opportunity with respect to economic interaction with China.

It is essential that the European Union respond to China’s divide-and-conquer approach and put pressure on countries such as Greece and Hungary to agree to a common set of guidelines with respect to screening investments (in ports and other assets) and how foreign-owned assets are run and operated. The contractual and financial terms of any sale or lease of a port must follow a set of guidelines adhered to by all EU states. Negotiations with foreign entities should adhere to the same levels of transparency as occurs between EU states. “Special” deals that include political and other commercially irregular terms must be rejected. Tendering processes must adhere to market-driven and commercial principles with respect to services rendered to third parties and the pricing of those services.

More broadly, all EU member states should take responsibility for protecting European interests, European rules, and international law, and the preservation of a regional and economic system which does not prioritize a China-centric view of globalization and entrench special advantages for China. While the European Union cannot alone alter Beijing’s hierarchical view of the world and its perception of itself at the apex of that order, it can ensure Europe does not unwittingly help advance an alternative Chinese vision of economic globalization. Realization of that latter vision would have political, strategic and normative ramifications which would not be in Europe’s own interest.

Finally, and although not part of Eurasia, the United States should not be a disinterested observer. Chinese port operators are likely obligated to collect and pass on important information to Beijing about the movement of American naval vessels, their maintenance activities and requirements, and may even monitor communications between these ships. The Chinese thus could access important details that could include the combat readiness of the ships, their munition stores, the logistics networks used by these vessels, and even clues with respect to tactics for naval patrols. This should surely concern the U.S. Navy, which regularly calls to ports such as Piraeus in Greece, Zeebruge in Belgium, and Valencia in Spain which are 100 percent, 85 percent, and 51 percent majority-owned by COSCO, respectively.

Ultimately, as the Blue Book of Non-Traditional Security suggests, the BRI is attempting to create an Eurasian and Indo-Pacific region that takes a China-centric view when it comes to economic practices and political norms, and which excludes the United States. Just as its regional strategic and military approach is to weaken existing alliances and ease the United States out of Asia, the BRI seeks to weaken economic links between the liberal democracies on either side of the Atlantic Ocean and to coax Europe toward acquiescence of Chinese standards and approaches. If the United States were to let that happen, it would be losing without even entering the fight.

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Change in Post-Putin Russia?

Russia has reverted to a condition comparable to that which led in the end to the fall of the USSR. Today’s Kremlin, like its Soviet predecessor, has proved unable adequately to address the linked questions of how to secure beneficial relationships with the outside world, responsible governance, and stable economic and social development. “Putin’s Russia is ruled by an opaque and shifting power structure centered on the Kremlin. It is now devoid of authoritative institutions beyond that framework that would enable Russia to develop into a fully functional or accountable state.” Can this change?

Some Assumptions

It is not of course a given that Putin will last in office until 2024, or that he will give controlling way to some form of succession regime thereafter if he does. Russia’s present fears are focused on that unknown and unpredictable post-Putin future. Foreign actors and powers will also be guided over the next few years by what they suppose may or may not happen in that same uncertain future.

Yesterday’s Kremlinologists have been criticized for their failure to forewarn the outside world of the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. Later critics always have the advantage of hindsight over their predecessors. Trying to look into the future nevertheless remains a necessary exercise. The risk of such attempts relying too much on extrapolating from what is seen to be the present norm is to be guarded against. There was in the 1980s a general understanding in the West, and certainly within the USSR, that Brezhnev’s rule had run its course by the time of his death. But very few expected radical systemic change in the then-predictable future. It was generally supposed that Andropov as Brezhnev’s successor would somehow reinvigorate the Soviet system. Gorbachev’s advent after Andropov’s early passing and the death of the hapless Chernenko rightly signaled some new possibilities, but not at first the wider implications of the new General Secretary’s burgeoning belief that fundamental reforms were necessary: “We cannot go on like this.”

Putin’s reading of what happened as Gorbachev tried to liberalize Brezhnev’s “real socialism” is that the folly of the latter’s attempt led in and of itself to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Empire. The assumption behind this belief is that the Soviet system, including its Yalta counterpart, was in principle sustainable, and should have been sustained. It is not now possible to prove beyond question that the manifold problems facing the Kremlin in the early 1980s, not least the parlous state of the Soviet economy, meant that the eventual collapse of the USSR was inevitable. It is however beyond doubt that Gorbachev’s efforts to reform its structures and relationship with the outside world in the way that he and his contemporary directors of events struggled to do led to disintegration at the time and in the way that it did. By the time Gorbachev gave way to Yeltsin, Russia itself was dangerously divided between those who would restore central control along traditional lines if they could, and those who believed that deeper changes based on Western models were essential. One could argue that what Yeltsin did was to provide a temporary but needed corrective to the tensions that had been building up in the USSR before Gorbachev as well as during his time, but that, as President, Yeltsin was unable, or maybe also too tired or too unconvinced, to establish a viable start to a solid transition towards a functioning law-based democracy. Putin’s mission was from the beginning to re-establish “order,” with the recipe of a centralized KGB/FSB as its mandatory magic ingredient. Maintaining such order is still his central purpose, within Russia and beyond it.

Present Perceptions in Russia

Putinist authoritarian rule has thereby returned Russia to the dilemma confronting the Soviet Union at the end of the Brezhnev era: whether it can rethink or reformulate its fundamental purposes without unleashing forces that its rulers cannot control. Putin’s Kremlin has in consequence become increasingly determined to centralize decision making and to preserve its hold on power. Rethinking Russia’s options as to its international relations, system of governance, and economic and social policies has thereby over time become more difficult and more risky than it once might have been. The objective case for changes may by 2024 or later have become more pressing, but also harder to achieve. The fact that there are parallels to be drawn between now and the immediate post-Brezhnev period does not mean that another Time of Troubles is inevitable as the uncertainties inherent in the transition from Putin’s rule to some form of succession government take deeper hold, but there are suggestive parallels to be drawn nonetheless. The prevailing assumption in the West is still that Putin’s successor will be drawn from within the group around him, that he/she/they will be cut from much the same cloth, and that significant change is therefore improbable. In Russia itself no one knows whether there is a peaceable way out from Russia’s present international isolation and internal stagnation.

Some Brezhnevite/Putinist Parallels in External Relations

The Soviet Union had an official ideology to chart its future direction, together with an endlessly repeated set of words meant to imbue that doctrine in its citizens. It had lost both its meaning and its past potential for creativity as the Brezhnev era reached its end. It nevertheless continued to provide the framework within which the Soviet government and Soviet citizens were obliged to work, and to pretend to respect. It set the parameters of the Soviet Union’s relations with the West and determined the nature of its grip on the Warsaw Pact countries. It is small wonder that once this ideological bondage was loosened, other ideas both foreign and domestic were set free and argued over vigorously—all the more so for having been suppressed for so long. Putin has no compelling view as to what new domestic policies he can or should offer his public. That has made the myth of defending a besieged Fortress Russia an essential buttress for his regime.

Restoring Russia’s Great Power status, which the Kremlin sees as Russia’s primary national interest, has considerable emotive power. Russia is understood within its present borders as inheriting and remaining to be the responsible inheritor of the whole of Soviet history. “Terrible things happened, but we built a great and powerful country, so the price was justified” is a fair summary of a widespread attitude, with less and less attention being given to horrors Russians prefer to forget. Stalin is now presented as a great hero of Russia, and the victory of 1945 elaborated into a festival of combined self-worship and defiance on a still greater scale than it was in Brezhnev’s time. The whole fits into a story of Russia’s “gathering of the lands” over the centuries, coupled with memories of the resulting structures collapsing, most recently in 1991. It also feeds into, and nurtures, the Russian obsession with the United States as its natural counterpart but also as its inveterate enemy and/or sometimes injuriously dismissive rival. Today’s Fortress Russia has its roots in yesterday’s Soviet Union, whose leaders also believed themselves to be under constant U.S. threat.

The Kremlin’s proclaimed aim of establishing a sphere of special interest around Russia is, too, based on a wish in some form to re-establish a remembered Soviet past. The Soviet Union under Brezhnev’s rule was threatened by Czechoslovakia’s and later Poland’s attempts to set out differing political models from the Soviet norm, with implications in both cases for the cohesion of the Soviet bloc as well as potential repercussions in the USSR itself. Czechoslovakia was quashed. Gradual change in Hungary was less of a threat, and Romania could be more or less ignored. But Poland, like Ukraine today, was a different matter. Putinist authoritarian Russia can now never establish the internationally recognized and reliably secure sphere of interest around itself that it desires without forcing Ukraine into obedience. It would take more than possible spineless acquiescence by the United States and its allies to achieve that; Ukrainians too would have to endorse it and remain tolerably content with it over time.

There are parallels, lastly, to be drawn in this general area between Russia’s military buildup today and the long and exhausting Soviet armament program which went before it. Russia’s Armed Forces were pretty much ignored in Yeltsin’s time. It was then generally accepted that there was no military threat from the West, despite NATO enlargement. That perception began to shift during Yeltsin’s last four years, with NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia giving a particular stimulus to Russian nationalist feeling. Russia’s striking economic growth between 2000 and 2008, coupled with Putin’s success in concentrating power in the Kremlin, stoked the belief that Russia had risen from its knees and was therefore entitled, even bound by destiny, to compel others like, for instance, Georgia to obey. The Russian 2014 seizure of Crimea in response to the fall of then-Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, who had appeared to the Kremlin to be their key to Russia’s long term control over Ukraine, was a defining moment. The resulting hasty logic of might is right, and of military rivalry with the United States, which dominates Putin’s thinking, has pointed to increased military spending, to a greater role for the military in Russia’s political decision-making, and to a widening range of aggressive policies. Their fruits have not been as beneficial to the Kremlin either in terms of international rewards or lasting domestic profit as expected or hoped for.

An End to Confrontation?

President Putin himself determines Russian external policies and is seen to do so more immediately than he does in managing or arbitrating his country’s domestic choices. It might in principle be to a successor’s profit therefore to carve out a different role as a new and independent leader by looking for ways, however difficult, to ease Russia’s relationships with the West. That would be welcome in principle to the Russian people. The euphoria over the seizure of Crimea in 2014 has faded. The Russian adventure in eastern Ukraine has brought scant reward. It is not obvious how either of these conditions will change over the next four or five years. The cost of repairing the destruction in Ukraine that the Russians have delivered cannot comfortably be met by Russia itself, and it is at present unlikely that the Western powers will agree to pay for it, not least without a Russian retreat from the areas it has invaded. Repairing the destruction of Syria and protecting Assad over the years will be expensive too. As Brezhnev found, in his case in Afghanistan, getting into a military operation to preserve or promote a valued regime in difficulty is far easier than getting out of it.

It may of course be that the Western powers will come over time to be reconciled to what Putin and his colleagues have done in Ukraine, as they did quickly enough in 2008 after Russia invaded Georgia. There are those in the West who are inclined to acknowledge Russia’s right to behave as it wishes towards lesser powers, Ukraine among them. Putinist policies are directed towards the division of the West, the confusion of its publics, and the intimidation of its citizens, with this goal in mind. There is no present sign of a will in the West to outspend Russia militarily in such a way as decisively to reduce Moscow’s military advantages in its immediate neighborhood. Russia’s security spending is substantial, and burdensome, but not yet of an order like that which preyed on the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who is widely supposed to be able to speak truth to Putin, has argued consistently that the much increased expenditure of recent years on the Russian armed forces makes the country’s satisfactory economic growth impossible. Kudrin went further in mid October by publicly arguing for an effort to improve Russia’s relationship with the West so that sanctions could be eased, and thereby giving the 4 percent growth rate Putin has declared to be his aim for his 2018-24 term of office a chance of success. There is no sign that Putin has listened. There are, on the contrary, indications that he may be upping the ante over Ukraine and that he hopes to revive Russian engagement in Afghanistan in competition with the United States and other Western powers.

If Russia’s relations with the West remain tense, as seems probable at least until 2024, Putin’s immediate successors will very likely feel compelled to continue his anti-Western policies, at least at first. That will all the more be the case if he/she/they succeed Putin from within his present coterie. Such successors would after all have already subscribed to his Great Power ambitions, and the rivalry with the United States which necessarily goes with them. It would take time for any succession, whether in effect a simulacrum of the present regime or something fresher, with potential for change, to develop the independent authority to rethink its approach to international affairs and its view of Russia’s fundamental international interests. Gorbachev in his time was unable to rethink the foreign policies of the USSR, and its relationship with Reagan’s United States in particular, immediately on his accession to power. But as it became clearer to him and his close advisers that the confrontation with the West that he had inherited was incompatible with the changes in the Soviet Union he needed to explore, he began to look for ways to deal with the Soviet military burden he had also inherited. While the dilemma confronting the present Kremlin is not yet so sharp as the one its leaders faced in the early 1980s, it remains the case that the longer confrontation with the West, and the United States in particular, may last, the more difficult it will become for Russia’s rulers to address the country’s domestic problems. Failure to do so would be dangerous.

State Structures Then and Now

Russia’s governing structures differ significantly from those inherited by Gorbachev. On the face of it, the “vertical of power” built up during the Putin years should enable his successors—or of course he himself if he were so minded—to take decisive and innovative action to address shortcomings in the country’s economic and social fortunes, as well as its foreign policies. Putin is however hemmed in by his past choices, as in time are “strong men” in general. It is an open question whether his eventual successors will, once bedded in, be better placed to act, or whether on the contrary Russia’s top-down governing structures are already too hollowed out to make that as practicable as it may intuitively sound.

Gorbachev started his search for improvement with an organized party with effective power across the Soviet Union, and in significant degree beyond it. He was accountable to the Politburo, and beyond that to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He had therefore to persuade these bodies of the need for the changes he wanted to pursue. The CPSU did not stay the course with him, but nonetheless was the instrument which determined the start of structural change in the USSR as a whole. It was the CPSU which drew up the nomenklatura, the list of those eligible for office and/or promotion in Brezhnev’s time. These persons were also well placed in Gorbachev’s time especially in the earlier years of his rule. As the Soviet Union disintegrated into its present component parts, the nomenklatura migrated into various branches of the evolving systems of government, political, and economic decision-making, international affairs, and law enforcement agencies. They took inherited Soviet habits of mind along with them, reinvigorated by enrichment in many cases. The CPSU lost its power to direct their ambitions as they did so, and as the Soviet Union disintegrated.

Russia no longer has a comparable structured capacity to discipline its wider executive apparatus or to reach an argued and considered political consensus as to its future orientation. Both Yeltsin and Putin have attempted building party structures in Russia over the past quarter of a century, aiming in principle at a two-party system for the Duma (Parliament), with one in government and the other in opposition. This has, not surprisingly, been a complete failure. Its latest incarnation has its “opposition” component, A Just Russia, fading to nothing, and the “government” party, (United Russia) headed by Prime Minister Medvedev, leaching blood. The Communists and the Liberal Democrats are represented in today’s Duma but have neither the wish nor the ability to direct national policy. Putin is arguably an authoritarian ruler, but he has nothing comparable for instance to what China’s Xi Jinping can manipulate in the shape of the Chinese Communist Party to determine, change, or reinvent policy. His successor(s) will be no better placed.

Russia’s governing structures have become predominantly staffed and directed by law-enforcement and security agencies (siloviki). The KGB was never in overall political charge in Brezhnev’s time, or even Andropov’s. It occupied a much reduced place under Yeltsin. But the FSB is in its various guises now at the undisciplined heart of government under Putin, expressed in a variety of security organs under differing acronyms and troubled by internal rivalries. The link between the Russian security organs and Putin’s preoccupation with Russian nationalism is an essential element in that dominance, a preoccupation naturally shared with Russia’s military organizations. The siloviki, broadly defined, also have parallel interests in the opportunities for enrichment opened up to them by their role. Those interests extend to cooperation with organized crime groups and working with illegitimate but tolerated vigilante forces.

Siloviki will have their say in determining whoever or whatever succeeds Putin. There may well be divisions among them but it would take a stubborn courage to suppose that any of their leaders might perhaps favor liberalizing reform in urging their probably competing choices. The desirability of replacing the present system of personalized rule based on understandings rather than one based on clear and binding laws if a smooth transition toward better governance is to be achieved in or after 2024 is surely evident in principle. But the present system suits those now in power. To begin to change it would require not just the constant and long term endeavor of a committed new set of political leaders able to force the siloviki to submit to their will, but also a major and, again, long term effort to reconstruct Russia’s court and penitential systems, together with the laws that are supposed to govern their conduct. Nothing of that nature is in prospect, nor is any apparent thought being given to the wider but daunting possibility of improving and cleansing the operations of Russia’s bureaucracy as a whole.

Economic and Political Reforms?

The economic position of the USSR in 1985 was dire, and the one Yeltsin inherited in Russia by 1992 was disastrous. Putin had better fortune when he became President in 2000, and used it to settle Russia’s debts, to improve its fiscal structures and policies, and to fund a rewarding growth in living standards in his country. The global economic crisis beginning in 2008, and the subsequent fall in hydrocarbon prices led however to a considerable change in Russia, and to the widespread perception that the country needed a more diversified economy, one less dependent on oil, gas, and other natural resources. The connection between that and government based on clear and binding laws independently and accountably administered was widely understood. But the need for politically charged reforms was neither stated nor explicitly implied in the recommendations for action to improve Russia’s performance by 2020 issued after officially endorsed expert committees had met before the presidential elections predictably returned Putin to the Kremlin in 2012. Putin rejected the reforms recommended, opting instead for greater state control and silencing debate.

Putin’s successors, absent a change of direction over the next few years, will inherit a Russia weakened by an economy and society troubled in the meantime by low growth, secured in place by the politically determined structures imposed upon it. The Russian shorthand for that is neo-stagnation, a conscious echo of the term used to characterize the Brezhnev era. Putin has recognized the popular desire for better attention to be given to social necessities like education health and infrastructure. The problems of federal regions short of the resources they need have been forced on his attention, including by the failure of the accustomed “administrative measures” to ensure the return to office of the Kremlin’s choices in recent elections. He and the government that answers to his dictates, headed by Prime Minister (and ex-President) Medvedev, look for partial and temporary solutions to these sorts of problem, but have shown neither sign nor will of preparing or considering changes in the debilitating system which governs the pattern of Russia’s future development. It is not reasonable to expect that a major part of the economy remaining in corrupted state hands or under state direction will under present conditions deliver radically improved performance.

Putin’s successors, again assuming that there are no radical changes in the near future, will also need to consider just how disruptive structural economic reforms might prove to be. They would, if they were to be effective, necessarily include radical disciplining of the FSB and its related organs, cutting their numbers, revisiting the laws that underpin their power to sustain widespread corruption, and establishing an independent and trusted judicial system. Pursuing such objectives would take time and dedication by powerfully motivated forces. Making a start would be strongly resisted. If market-oriented reforms were, second, to prove effective at least in some initial degree the interests of those at the top of the pyramid would be compromised. The Russian people as a whole might not be sorry for that, but those relying on state supported loss-making or relatively unprofitable enterprises would suffer. There is, third, no political machinery in place or in present prospect to decide on what changes there should be, in what order, how a controlled process of change might be managed, or how the Russian people might have a persuasive long term program presented to them.

The Missing Dynamic

The present government of Russia is in extraordinarily few hands, even by comparison with its Soviet ancestor. Putin sits alone at the top. No one knows if he has close confidantes, as Gorbachev did—or Yeltsin for that matter, to a lesser extent. Both of them had wives they trusted, too, as well as close professional colleagues. Those working for Putin or dependent on him must to some extent at least temper their messages or recommendations to him to reflect what they suppose he wants or thinks. The effect on Putin himself can only be guessed at, but it must by now include a paradoxical combination of confidence in his right and ability to decide in the best interests of his country and a fear of his country betraying him in the end. He has until comparatively recently been able to punish others for mistakes or failures of policy that he has in fact previously endorsed. That armor has been weakened by the twin factors of continued poor economic results after the luxury of high and mounting oil and gas prices during his first two terms, and the waning public enthusiasm for his pursuit of international great power status. His decision to approve of the much resented increases in the age at which men and women should receive their pensions could not be blamed on the Medvedev government. Putin’s foreign policies have isolated Russia in pursuit of an aim—Great Power status—that cannot be defined or demonstratively achieved.

Those below Putin with effective power are equally few, as well as subject to ready dismissal or financial loss. The analytical game of describing individuals close to the Sun or far away from it in complex ellipses is popular enough, but there is no Politburo able or willing to consider what issues the regime should pursue in the longer term or what the right order of tackling them might be. Below that level a large number of those in federal or local power act with notable arrogance towards the population at large. It is scarcely surprising that the level of public trust in the Russian authorities is low and getting lower. Nor is it surprising that the striking gap between the wealth of the few and the vast bulk of the population is resented, particularly now that the incomes of the lower sort have diminished.

Those with ideas about structural reform once the Putin era has passed have slight ability to put them across. Vladimir Milov, a former Russian Minister of Energy, recently presented a Free Russia roadmap at Chatham House, setting out what a new Russia’s constitution and economy should be. He spoke as an accredited representative of Alexei Navalny, the well-known critic and a would be successor to Putin. He, like others, advocated transferring some powers of the President to the Duma, policy changes to address Russia’s faltering status in the global economy, increased spending on health and education, revision of the criminal code, and the restoration of free media. He believed that the demand for such changes, and for the reconciliation with the West that would necessarily accompany them, was now rising in Russia. What he could not say was how these changes would come about. He said Putin was, however, under mounting pressure to give way to public aspirations, and possible street unrest if it came to that, which might force him or another sooner or later to implement serious reforms.

The missing dynamic in a possible and in principle desirable process of change is not however public unrest sufficient to force the Kremlin and whoever is in charge there to surrender, but to engender some form of dialogue between the rulers and the ruled. Without that, the results of change would be chaotic, and in the end imposed by the victors, if there were any. It would take time for instance for the party structures needed to make a reformed Duma work as the non-government opposition groups would like. It would take time for ways to re-establish free media and for them to develop, or for an adequate legal system to begin to emerge. The suffocation of the media, the persecution of “extremists,” and the suppression of debate in Russia today have made dialogue between Russia’s rulers and their associated predators on the one hand and the bulk of the population on the other close to impossible. That is arguably Putin’s greatest fault since he returned to the Kremlin in May 2012. The contrast with the lively, and often quarrelsome, debate during the times of Gorbachev and Yeltsin is telling. Russia needs a conversation with itself to find ways to change. Enforced silence is to divide and impoverish.

Leadership Changes?

Putin’s present term is constitutionally due to end in 2024, with elections to determine the next President concluding in March/April that year. Speculation as to possible changes ahead of that time has followed remarks by the President of the Constitutional Court as to the need to adjust some unspecified elements of Russia’s Constitution. Some have supposed that he may have been hinting at providing ways to enable Putin to remain in effective charge beyond 2024. That is in line with the proposition by analysts both Russian and non-Russian to the effect that Putin cannot safely step aside both for his own sake and for that of his closer associates.

There would however be dangers for Putin if he remained in effective power, let alone if he ran once more for the presidency in 2024. It would be difficult if either course were pursued to make it fully legitimate, and however assuredly his success in either capacity might be pushed through by “administrative means”, his essential message would be that no one else could manage to lead Russia. That message is losing its force already, except insofar as no other candidates are allowed to appear on the stage, making the choice look like Putin or chaos. If the polls are to be believed, Putin’s personal appeal has already been damaged. Putin in any case cannot be invulnerable to a universal law of life: Age can wither him, and comfort already stales his distinctly finite variety. Keeping him in power after 2024 could provoke protests reminiscent of those that shook Russia in 2011-12.

The need for some clarity about who or what will come after Putin will grow as time passes, and with it some indication of what that person’s or group’s intentions might perhaps be. There has been speculation for some time as to who from among the ranks of Putin’s present supporters the leading candidate might prove to be, it being taken for granted that no one outside that circle will be allowed to run. That guessing game is pretty much a waste of time for now. What is clear is that the threat Putin refuses to name, Navalny, will be ruled out as a candidate by all means possible. His attacks on the corruption that pervades Putinist Russia and the public appeal he has developed in consequence, while not decisive, is too considerable. Putin will in any case want to delay the choice of possible candidates as long as he can, which will mean that the eventual official candidate will not be given the opportunity to develop his/her own priorities, or to develop an adequate personal following, before acceding if all goes as planned to the presidency. In that case, different approaches to policy questions or to the future structure of government in Russia from those espoused by Putin will hardly be considered, running the risk for his successor of appearing to be no more than Putin writ small, and of lacking his/her own fresh program to offer. It is tempting to recall that change in the Soviet Union only came after the ineffective terms of Brezhnev’s immediate successors, Andropov and Chernenko.

It follows from the above account that Russia will not in the predictable future find a way to address the linked questions of how to secure beneficial relations with the outside world, responsible governance, and stable economic and social development. Those Russians who fear that a car crash is inevitable sooner or later, and possibly even before 2024, have a persuasive case to make. There are a number who judge that only such a catastrophe will enable Russia to escape from its present travails. If the fear of an imminent internal crisis while Putin is still in charge proves justified, its implications for the West could well prove troubling. That would also be the case if, as seems more plausible, the next Russian leadership proves unable to establish and legitimate its authority. Russia’s internal problems are not yet comparable to those that Gorbachev had to address, which included inter-ethnic tensions that were such a significant factor in the disintegration of the USSR. But the country’s domestic problems are nonetheless serious enough to demand answers, and for the Russian people to require them. None have been given them.

The analysis in what follows is developed from the ideas set forth in the report of March 2018, Putin and Russia in 2018-2024: What Next?

Andrei Amalrik for instance wrote in 1970 that “if . . . one views the present ‘liberalization’ as the growing decrepitude of the regime rather than its regeneration, then the logical result will be its death, which will be followed by anarchy.” (“Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?”)

Andropov’s deeply held belief that the United States and NATO as a whole were preparing a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union (see for instance Chapter 8 of Ben Macintyre’s newly published book about Gordievsky, The Spy and the Traitor) was not publicly known at the time. Andropov was not the new man that some supposed him to be as he took power in 1982. He has however been and still is a role model for Putin.

The turbulent interregnum between the death of the last Russian Tsar of the Rurik Dynasty, Feodor Ivanovich, in 1598, and the establishment of the Romanov Dynasty in 1613.

Tsar Ivan III.

I am indebted, as are many others, here and elsewhere to William Taubman’s insightful book Gorbachev, His Life and Times.

See for instance Peter Reddaway, Russia’s Domestic Security Wars, published this year by Palgrave Macmillan

See for instance the case of Prigozhin (aka Putin’s chef) sketched out in Mark Galeotti, “Putin’s Needy Little Helpers Are Ruining Russia,” Moscow Times, October 23, 2018.

A comprehensive account of the intense and continuing efforts to shut down freedom of speech in Russia is available here.

Not even Cleopatra managed it.

The probability that it will be “he” not “she” is of course extraordinarily high.

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Defending Journalists in an Era of “Destroyed Rights”

When things got desperate my parents signed letters. Letters which could cost them their safety and freedom. But they felt that not to sign was to acquiesce to the immorality of the regime when it arrested people for simply speaking their mind.

This was in the Soviet Union, during the late 1970s, in the frosty years of the Cold War. Public letters addressed to the West were a desperate form of resistance: If one could raise enough noise among the powerful perhaps they could lobby for a political prisoner’s release; if there was enough public outcry, maybe the Soviet leadership could be shamed into softening a sentence.

Forty years later, as I sat down to write a similar letter in the face of a regime’s intimidation, I found myself at a loss. Though I face none of the dangers that my parents did, I also had no idea who and what to appeal to—or how. Who was I to address the letter to? Which powerful people will help a dissident? Are the rights fought for so bitterly in the 20th century still meaningful? What can a letter ever hope to achieve?

The letter I wanted to write was in support of the journalist Maria Ressa and her pioneering news site “Rappler,” which has won millions of readers in the Philippines since it started up in 2011. Rappler have been attacked for their thorough reporting on the extrajudicial killings carried out by the government of President Rodrigo Duterte.

As punishment for doing her job well, Maria now faces trumped up charges of tax evasion. She risks imprisonment. Rappler may vanish entirely. We have seen this pattern repeated worldwide: The regime picks a victim, makes an example of them, and thus breaks the whole industry.

As I looked for guidance on how to write a letter in support of Maria I dug out one of the most famous letters by a Soviet dissident: Andrei Sakharov’s, published in the New York Times in 1977. Sakharov addressed his letter directly to then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter:

Dear Mr Carter, it’s very important to defend those who suffer because of their nonviolent struggle, for openness, for justice, for destroyed rights….our and your duty is to fight for them. I think a great deal depends on this struggle—trust between the people, trust in high promises and the final result—international security.

It was not an empty appeal. The letter was written in the run-up to a U.S.-Soviet summit in Belgrade, organized to assess the USSR’s implementation of human rights accords it had signed up to the previous year in Helsinki. American leaders sometimes raised human rights concerns at the highest level, which at the very least could be used to show that the U.S. system was superior to the Soviet. Individual political prisoners could be released in exchanges. In the 1970s an increasing number were allowed to leave the USSR. The United States built trade deals with the USSR which factored in an improvement in human rights as part of the negotiation.

And today? The blatant murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside his own country’s consulate in Turkey has been shrugged off as an irrelevance by Donald Trump. Not only does this U.S. President no longer regard it as important to fight for “destroyed rights,” he presides over a climate where attacks on journalists have become commonplace. Last year, Freedom House—an organization originally set up to help the U.S. promote democracy in unfree societies—downgraded America’s  “freedom of expression” ranking, citing: “Fake news and aggressive trolling of journalists. . .[that] contributed to a score decline in the United States’ otherwise generally free environment.”

As the United States becomes more like the governments it used to censure, so they become emboldened to continue on the same path. This is especially true in the Philippines, a country with which the United States has clout.

Sakharov saw the “struggle” for rights and freedoms as intrinsically connected to something larger—“international security.” Today, we see political black holes emerging across the world, where there are no values anymore, where the powerful only observe rules that suit them, indeed where a sign of being powerful is the ability to impose any norms you want.

The Donetsk People’s Republic, the ISIS caliphate, the bombing of civilians in Aleppo and Yemen, and the persecution of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar are all such black holes, spaces where regimes revel in rejecting the idea that there are universal ideals to adhere to in the first place.

The murder of Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul is a black hole opening up in the middle of a diplomatic mission. Human rights and humanitarian norms have been undermined many times before, but now no one seems to even care if they are caught, as if their very notion is non-existent. In 1977 the Soviet Union had at least notionally made a commitment to them and would be upbraided for failing on to uphold them. “Respect your own laws” was the clarion call of the dissident movement. Now disrespecting laws is the point.

Alongside the question of who to address a letter to, there is also the issue of what exactly one is defending. Sakharov’s letter assumed the rights and freedoms he invokes to be self-evident. At one point in the letter he begins to list them, citing “freedom of belief, and information, freedom of conscience, freedom of the choice of the country of living.” And then, he adds a casual “etc.”—assuming everyone understands what he means.

Today those “rights” can be harder to define. Rappler, for instance, was first targeted by a vicious online mob that smeared their reporters with false accusations of bias and said they were acting for covert interests. Next, staff were intimidated with death and rape threats, and there were calls for Maria, the editor, to be arrested. At one point, Rappler was being hit with 90 negative online messages every minute. The timing and structure of the attacks suggests they were not organic but organized, channeled through coordinated fake accounts.

The playbook is similar across the world: These digital mobs first attempt to destroy journalists’ credibility to turn people against them. This paves the way for an arrest. But while the aims are old, to intimidate and silence critics, the method is new. Online mobs allow the government to claim a degree of deniability. Before the KGB used to come for you. Now it’s anonymous accounts on Twitter. Who is responsible? If before it was oppressive regimes censoring critics fighting for freedom of speech, now it is the online mobs who claim they are the ones exercising the right to freedom of speech themselves. Democrats have always campaigned for uncensored expression, they argue: Well here it is!

“Do you know the truth about the plight of religions in the USSR?” Sakharov writes towards the end of his letter. This “do you know the truth” question is indicative: In the 20th century it was assumed that if the facts came out, they would have an impact. What is so striking today is that we have more facts than ever before about the blatant abuse of humanitarian norms, from Syria to Yemen. We can even observe, on social media, the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar. Yet this knowledge does not even ensure outrage, let alone a response. But if getting the truth out doesn’t mean anything, what is the point of writing letters in the New York Times?

But even as the old architecture of power and meaning has dissolved, there are new ways to try and make a letter matter.

First of all: There are new loci of power to lobby. In the case of Maria Ressa they are most obviously the social media and tech giants, on whose platforms these coordinated hate campaigns are being waged. Users of Facebook, Twitter, and Google are entitled to security. It is the duty of these platforms to protect their users against harassment, threats of violence, and coordinated smears affecting their fundamental rights.

For state-sponsored trolling needs to be seen for what it is: a new form of human rights abuse. As the brilliant human and digital rights researcher Camille Francois has laid out in a study she led on the subject, state-sponsored trolling is an attack on freedom of expression, silencing the victim through harassment, abuse, hate speech and purposeful disinformation. It is censorship though noise. “We observe the tactical move by states from an ideology of information scarcity to one of information abundance,” writes the philosopher Tim Wu, “which sees speech itself as a censorial weapon.”

States who in any way empower such campaigns are responsible, under their international human rights obligations. Even if they do not run them directly, if they instigate, encourage and fan the flames, they are to blame. The Magnitsky Act, originally drawn up in the United States to penalize Russian human rights abusers with financial sanctions, is increasingly being adopted by other countries, and with a wider target list. Could this be a model for targeting those responsible for assailing human rights online?

Indeed, the more one looks at it, today’s interconnected world has far more levers with which to influence a government such as Duterte’s than were available during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was all but hermetically sealed off from the outside world. Compare that to the Philippines today, which has the highest social media usage in the world, and is closely integrated into global markets.

The question remains how to get the message out? Letters have lost their dramatic value. In 1977, it was a heroic achievement for Sakharov just to make himself heard in the outside world from his exile in the Russian provinces. “Telephone communications with the West are blocked completely, and no telephone conversations reach me,” he wrote to the Times. Today, communication is so easy it can be meaningless. A letter in a mainstream newspaper no longer has the same unique status.

But there are social media campaigns. Automated fake accounts can be countered with persistence and genuine enthusiasm by real people. The secret is for movements and individuals around the world to start seeing that a crisis far away is also their problem: A journalist trolled and terrorized in Manila is attacked with the same methods and the same technology that is used in the United States.

As Maria Ressa herself put it: “Our problems are fast becoming your problems. Boundaries around the world collapse and we can begin to see a kind of global playbook.”

The campaign to support Maria Ressa started off using the hashtag “Hold the Line.” The question is: which line?

For Sakharov, the line between democracy and authoritarian politics was drawn along the borders of human rights. Digital rights can be a similar line today. For that to happen, democracies need to overhaul our information space with the same boldness that was shown in drawing up the Helsinki Human Rights Accords in the 1970s. Clear norms are needed, establishing people’s rights online. Protecting them against online abuse is the first step.

It is also important to clarify how data is used, so that when a citizen logs on, their personal information is not used to covertly manipulate them, secretly playing on their fears or fueling anger. To be empowered digital citizens people need to know how and why they are being targeted with content and by whom, and why algorithms provide them with some content and not others.  

This new social contract around digital rights can become the standard for real democracy, the “line” between different systems. In that sense Sakharov’s words are as true as ever: “I think that a great deal depends on this struggle—trust between the people, trust in high promises and the final result—international security.”

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Facing Up To Frozen Conflicts

Russia’s invasion and long occupation of parts of my country Georgia, as well as Ukraine, inevitably spawn discussions of “gray zones” and “frozen conflicts” among Western observers. These terms are meant to describe a world in which politics has ceased to operate effectively, or where efforts to unfreeze things have failed—in all cases due to Russian intransigence.

The problem with these terms is that they actively shape a kind of reality, and in doing so result in failures of imagination or true commitment to effecting change. In short, conflicts that are relegated to “frozen” status recede into the background, which is where they all too often remain.

Recent events in Ukraine, however, remind us that “frozen conflicts” rarely stay that way. Rather, they are problems that lie dormant for only as long as it is convenient for Russia that they do so. Not recognizing this fact, and not being proactive about them, cedes enormous advantage to Moscow.

From our perspective in Georgia, there has never been anything “gray” about Russia’s occupation of our territories—except perhaps the color of Russia’s tanks and artillery. Ten years ago, Russia’s armed forces took possession of two regions of Georgia, equivalent to 20 percent of Georgia’s sovereign territory. In percentage terms, this is comparable to the Russians occupying Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota—the entire American Midwest—as well as Florida and Texas.

The humanitarian crisis Russia’s invasion has caused in the regions it invaded is horrifically vivid—a nightmare in technicolor: Russia’s occupation has ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of people from the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia. Russia continues to isolate both regions from the rest of the country by closing crossing points, putting in place physical barriers along the administrative boundary line and conducting a campaign aimed at eradicating Georgian culture. Basic human rights, including the right to freedom of movement and residence, to property, and of access to native-language education, are being violated in the occupied regions of Georgia; illegal detentions and kidnappings are a regular occurrence.

Not only is there nothing “gray” about all this, but the conflict itself is also far from “frozen.” Since the invasion, Russia has implemented a “creeping annexation” strategy, wherein its troops move fences overnight to quietly gobble up more and more territory. Families and properties have been divided. This process of silent expansionism in some places comes very close to critical infrastructure, such as pipelines supplying gas to Europe from the Caspian region.

Russia continually reinforces its illegal military presence in Georgia’s occupied territories by constructing new bases, bringing in new troops and equipment, and conducting military exercises. Georgia’s government has made clear its desire to find a workable and fair solution to Russia’s occupation. But Russia has not cooperated in addressing the conflict through international accords and dialogue, such as the Geneva International Discussions, the multilateral mediation forum co-chaired by the UN, EU, and OSCE to address the security and humanitarian consequences of the war. It has flouted resolutions in support of Georgia’s territorial integrity from the U.S. Congress, the UN, and the EU Parliament. Russia continues to be in breach of its international obligations and refuses to implement the EU-mediated ceasefire agreement of August 12, 2008.

Allowing the Georgia-Russia conflict to continue will perpetuate imperial stereotypes that will drive an irreversible wedge between the next generation of the Russian and Georgian people. This is as unnecessary as it is counterproductive. Georgia is no threat to Russia. To the contrary, a stable, strong Georgia as part of NATO and the EU along Russia’s southern flank only enhances the latter’s stability and security. The proof of this is to simply imagine the opposite.

In Georgia, Russia is still being intransigent, so the conflict has fallen from view. But the West ought not let this be an excuse for delaying action.

The primary goal should be to get Russia to the negotiating table. This should be a priority for simple humanitarian reasons: just because these conflicts seem invisible or quiescent does not mean they are not inflicting daily harm on innocent people. The people of Tskhinvali and Abkhazia deserve relief, and their problems can only be addressed with Russia negotiating its withdrawal from the area.

At the same time, Georgia’s accession to both the European Union and NATO should be accelerated. Georgia is nowhere near a crossroads between the West and Russia. Indeed, we are well beyond the intersection; we have positioned ourselves firmly in the Western camp.

The current government, and all Georgian governments before this one, have insisted on Georgia’s historic European identity, and have strived to create both the policies and the momentum to integrate Georgia into the political, economic, and security structures that undergird the transatlantic alliance. This commitment is supported by the overwhelming majority of Georgian people. The Association Agreement and Visa Liberalization process with the European Union that Georgia fought for and won was not an act of political serendipity. It was willed and worked at.

We have learned through experience to keep our friends close and to pay our dues. Our culture demands intense loyalty to our families and friends. America is such a friend. Georgia resides at an intersection of many American vital geopolitical interests.  As National Security Advisor John Bolton forcefully asserted during a recent visit to Tbilisi, “We consider [the U.S.–Georgia relationship] one of our highest priorities. It is in a strategic area of interest for the United States.” In turn, our debt to America for supporting our freedom and independence by taking sometimes unpopular political decisions, as well as with existential economic support and security assistance, cannot be overstated. Every Georgian feels this in his or her bones.

The United States has valued both our contributions to peace and our example to others. Georgia has become an example of a small but responsible partner, punching above its weight. We volunteer our soldiers at the highest per-capita rate to serve shoulder-to-shoulder with our American and NATO compatriots in Iraq and Afghanistan. No nonsense, and no “caveats.” When your friends fight for you, you fight for them. Period.

As an aspirant to full NATO membership with America’s unwavering backing, we have met our obligations and even raised the bar. For over a decade, and despite the global economic downturns Georgia, we spent more than 2 percent of GDP on defense, including more than 20 percent on equipment—just as NATO has mandated and President Trump has insisted. With strong American support, we anticipate full NATO membership in the future.

Of course, Georgia has advanced further and faster in some areas of integration—with both NATO and the EU—than in others. But this is to be expected. No one has ever believed that some kind of silver bullet remedy exists that would transform Georgia overnight from a country held in the imperial captivity for over two centuries to a fully integrated member of the European Union or NATO. But joining these institutions is our civilizational choice, and no one should underestimate our resolve at achieving it. The United States and the Transatlantic community can ensure that this existential decision is never threatened by championing Georgia’s full membership in both the European Union and NATO. A strong Georgia, properly integrated into the West, is the best hedge against Russian-engineered instability.

Finally, we must work together to foster economic growth. A free trade agreement with the United States would help furthering what is already well underway. Georgia is the overwhelming success story of its region. Georgians currently enjoy a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the European Union, and visa free travel in the Schengen Zone. We have preferential trade agreements around the globe, including with the European Free Trade Association, the CIS countries including Russia, Turkey, and China. We currently are exploring an FTA with India and Israel.

Georgia is a favored investment venue for OPIC (now USIDFC), the IMF, the EBRD, the Asian Development Bank. We are home to more than 190 American companies, including many of the leaders of their industries. Foreign direct investment has reached historically high levels for the past 3 years, with cumulative total of more than $10 billion since 2012. Georgia’s actual growth in 2018 is running above 5 percent. It is broadly seen as an attractive place to invest. For example, the World Bank ranks us 6th out of 189 economies for “ease of doing business.” The World Economic Forum ranks Georgia as the 8th least burdensome tax regime in the world. The Heritage Foundation’s index ranks Georgia as 16th best in the world in “Freedom of Economy.” This is better than all but six countries in the European Union itself.

And Georgia is a global economy with global reach and global ambitions. Our new ports at Poti and Anaklia, owned and operated by American companies, make Georgia a major gateway to eight landlocked countries in the middle of Eurasia. Georgia and its partners can access markets from Europe to Asia of over 2 billion people.

Trade and development foster security. A full trade agreement with the United States, which we now seek, would advance the political, economic, and security prospects for both the United States and Georgia.

Russia has made a sport of creating disasters all along its periphery since the fall of the Soviet Union, and has been using these so-called “frozen conflicts” for leverage when they are needed. The West should not let Moscow get away with this behavior. It may seem easier to ignore these issues when they are not in your face, but doing so is just kicking a problem down the road for a time when it will only be more difficult to confront.

As Ambassador, I am of course making a specific case for my country, but the template I have outlined is broadly applicable elsewhere. The West should: 1) Regularly bring up the conflicts with Russia, and force it to negotiate with its neighbors; 2) Integrate Russia’s neighbors into Western institutions as a means of broadly fostering stability; and 3) Encourage trade as a means of bringing widespread prosperity.

In short, be proactive. Not doing so will only embolden Russia.

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How To “Normalize” Relations With Russia

Russia’s aggressive moves against Ukraine, in particular the recent closing of the Sea of Azov and the capture of three Ukrainian vessels, are a good reminder that the only way to normalize relations with Moscow is by deterring it. Russia will continue its predatory behavior whenever and wherever it sees an opening, a weakness that it can exploit to enlarge its imperial project. The promise of a harmonious partnership between Russia and the U.S. (and the Western alliance writ large), so hoped for by many in Washington and in Europe since the early 1990s, remains just that: a promise in the minds of the most naïve or the most interested in striking short term business deals with Putin’s regime.

Russia will not become a peaceful European state on its own; it has to be forced to abandon its aggressive behavior. Its westward thrusts—from its war in Ukraine to disinformation and subversion farther out—have to be countered and deterred. And a successful deterrence of Russia will carry benefits outside of the European theater. Only by firmly deterring Russia, in fact, the U.S. will be able to compete with China more effectively in the long run.

In a nutshell, then, let’s “normalize” relations with an imperialist Russia by deterring it. Let’s deter it by unequivocally demonstrating the permanence of the existing geopolitical order. And let’s demonstrate it by establishing permanent military bases in Central Europe.

To understand Russian behavior—and hence, to “normalize” relations with Russia—we should look at Russia first, not at the U.S. or NATO or the EU, or, for that matter, at Ukraine. Its behavior is not a reaction to some perceived slight or offense (e.g., the enlargement of NATO, or, as in the case of the recent Kerch episode, some Ukrainian provocation alleged by the disinformation experts at the Russian ministry of foreign affairs), but it arises from motivations internal to Putin’s regime and from a particular notion of Russian interests and identity. Putin’s Russia is engaged in an imperialist project that, first, aims to weaken the existing order on its western frontiers, and, second, hopes to restore some form of Russian influence over a large swath of Europe.

Three points are worth recalling here. First, Putin’s regime has never rejected the Soviet past; on the contrary, it is glorifying some aspects of it, in particular the imperial power extending over the ring of now independent states in Europe and Central Asia. Second, Russia has never accepted the post-Cold War settlement and, led by Putin, has gradually broken all agreements that underwrote stable relations with the West (the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, for example, guaranteed Ukrainian sovereignty). Third, Russia does not want to be an Asian polity, focused on the Caucasus and Asia. As an Asian power, Russia will play second fiddle to the growing Chinese behemoth; Moscow cannot compete with Beijing. As a European power, however, it can play a decisive role in the political life of that continent, especially if the U.S. retreats.

In Asia, Russia is a weak state; in Europe, Russia is potentially a great power.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Russia has pushed and will continue to push westward, using the whole panoply of its capabilities: subversion, corruption, cyber attacks, gas supplies, and old fashioned hard military power are all vectored toward the West. As it has done throughout history, Russia is exploiting and exacerbating divisions within and between European states. Targeted disinformation and generous cash aim to increase political instability and to weaken the political will to oppose Russian interests. Gas pipeline politics (e.g., Nord Stream 2) isolate Central and Eastern Europe, increasing its vulnerability to Russian pressures. And large scale military exercises clearly and regularly signal the capabilities that Russia can bring to bear, while, of course, daily Russian attacks in Ukraine keep a bloody war alight in Europe.

Long ago, Tocqueville brilliantly summed up the difference between the U.S. and Russia, when he wrote at the end of the first volume of Democracy in America that the “conquests of the American are . . . gained by the plowshare; those of the Russian by the sword.” The pattern of expansion set the pattern of behavior. Russia continues to wield its sword. There is no reason to believe that Russia, under Putin or his successor, will suddenly transform itself into a calm power radiating stability around it. Russia is seeking dominions, not partners and allies.

Any attempt to “normalize” relations with Russia has to start from the recognition that the interests of Russia and the U.S.—and of its allies—are not in harmony but in a long-lasting clash. And no Western concession to neo-Muscovite imperial aspirations will lead to a discovery of a Russian interest in peaceful partnership.

To have “normal” relations with Russia, therefore, the U.S. and its allies have to deter Moscow. That means to increase the costs, existing and future, for Russian aggressive behavior, and to do it for the long haul. There is a lot that has already been done. Sanctions are a useful tool, and the Trump administration has continued to implement them to impose costs on Russia for its war in Ukraine as well as its interference in U.S. elections. Earlier this year, a rapid and decisive U.S. military response to an attack on U.S. forces in Syria in which large numbers of Russian mercenaries participated was also helpful to punish Russian belligerence. And the continued European Deterrence Initiative, supporting training, infrastructure, prepositioned equipment and building partner capacity, contributes to shoring up deterrence along Europe’s eastern frontier.

While all these tools employed by the U.S. and its alliance are necessary and useful, they are also insufficient because they are only response to Russian actions rather than a means to shape the strategic environment. They are reactive, playing catch up with Russia.

To deter Russia for the long run, Moscow has to be convinced of the permanence of the geopolitical order on its western frontier. Nothing conveys that message of permanence as military bases with U.S. and allied forces continually located in them. While NATO took new members after the end of the Cold War, it has not adjusted the military posture to back it up, considering the Russian threat to be on the wane. This is no longer the case: Russia is clearly a threat, a force of great instability in Europe (and in the Middle East too). Time for the West to act accordingly.

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