Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 7

Don’t Let Putin Whitewash History

President Vladimir Putin recently cleared the penultimate barrier to his staying in power indefinitely, by having Russia’s highest court rule in favor of amending the country’s constitution to remove presidential term limits. Under the new rules, Putin’s tenure could come to exceed that of Joseph Stalin—the dictator he has done so much to rehabilitate. If a nationwide referendum scheduled for next month passes (and who could imagine that it won’t!) we are likely to see Putin in power until 2036, virtually guaranteeing Russia’s continuing pursuit of revisionism, both geopolitical and historical.

As part of this revanchist agenda, Putin had this winter sent out invitations to world leaders for his military extravaganza in May to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Germany’s capitulation in the Second World War. The not-so-thinly veiled subtext of the events: to erase the historical fact that the war was jointly launched in 1939 by Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

Though now, with the coronavirus crisis in full swing, it is difficult to envision that the event will still take place, it is nevertheless important to take a step back and appreciate how brazenly authoritarians are playing with history and collective memory. Most of the popular press focuses on the stories happening in the present: China trying to reshape the coronavirus narrative in real time, for example, and Russia spreading rumors in Eastern Europe that suggest the outbreak is a CIA plot. But rewriting history is no less insidious an activity. Indeed, given how tenuous historical memory can be, especially in present-oriented modern societies, it is potentially far more effective than the disinformation strategies that merely seek to confuse by relativizing everything.

“Hitler and Stalin were allies,” said Russian pro-democracy activist Garry Kasparov at a conference in Toronto on the 80th Anniversary of their Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

They started World War II together with the goal of enslaving Europe between them. The Red Army attacked Poland as eagerly as did Germany, and they met as friends in the middle. On September 22, 1939, conquering Soviet and German forces held a joint victory parade in the Polish city of Brest-Litovsk . . . and less than a year later, the Baltic states were next to be occupied and annexed by the USSR. People who wanted only independence were trapped between two evil superior forces trying to destroy and enslave them.

In 1941, these predators became enemies when Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. The United States supplied Stalin with food, oil, and weapons, allowing the Soviet army to push the Nazis back to Germany. But Stalin never left and enslaved the countries between the two, behind his Iron Curtain, until 1989. This allowed Russia to do alone what the two planned to do together, and the Allies did nothing.

“The Allied betrayal of Eastern Europe at Yalta confirmed to Stalin that the U.S. and UK were too weak to stand up to him. Roosevelt hoped that by making these monstrous concessions, Stalin would join his new brainchild, the United Nations. And Stalin was happy to sign, knowing that he would never be bound by any international organization,” said Kasparov.

Ribbentrop was hanged after the Nuremberg trials for his crime, and the Nazis and their Gestapo were condemned and punished. But Molotov should have hung beside him, and Stalin and his KGB should have met the same fate. “Instead,” Kasparov said, “Molotov lived to the ripe age of 96, dying peacefully in Moscow in 1986. He died unrepentant for his actions under Stalin, and even continued to deny the existence of the secret protocol that he signed, revealed to the world after the war but officially denied in the USSR until 1989.”

It wasn’t until the Gorbachev era that the Russian state actually apologized for the USSR’s role in these atrocities. Then, in 1989, the Soviet Chamber of Deputies declared the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact null and void. But a Nuremberg trial was never staged to punish the Soviets and their KGB for their brutality, ethnic cleansing in the Baltics and Ukraine, wars, or brutal crackdowns in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or Poland. The Allies, once again, failed to hold the Russians accountable, bringing the world to where it is now, afflicted with a former KGB agent called Putin who is a would-be Stalin.

Putin flouts international treaties, laws, and norms as he claws back territories lost in 1989. He targets democracies to sow dissension and elect autocratic or disruptive fellow travelers. He wages violent wars by backing thugs in Syria and Venezuela and by murdering Ukrainians weekly. He wages a propaganda war, which began with his invasion of Ukraine in 2014, to try and sanitize Russia’s image and actions, and to libel and damage enemies or victims. He falsely claims Ukraine abuses its Russian minority and meddled in the 2016 U.S. election, and accuses Poland of starting the war with the Nazis. He is trying to weaponize memory.

Both Ukraine and Poland have pushed back vigorously. After the 80th anniversary of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the Pact, as well as the two totalitarianisms that destroyed so much of Europe in the 20th century. These counterattacks have infuriated Putin.

“Remembering the facts and lessons of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact are more necessary today than ever,” said Kasparov:

There is now a massive Russian misinformation campaign to rehabilitate the Pact as a brilliant strategy by Josef Stalin instead of what it plainly was: criminal collusion between two dictatorships that launched a world war. Stalin is promoted as someone to be admired, even his worst crimes forgotten, even his worst betrayals now celebrated. Step by step, Putin is rehabilitating the motives and actions of one of the worst mass murderers in history.

Ignoring Putin’s fabrications is not an option. No one should honor a country that helped launch the worst calamity in human history and that continues to flout international law at every turn.

Though the May extravaganza is unlikely now to take place, world leaders should, in lieu of RSVPing, issue a blanket condemnation of Russia’s predation and if anything increase sanctions on Putin and his corrupt cronies, who are holding the Russian state hostage. The truth is that lies are lies, murder is murder—and a pariah is a pariah for a reason.

The post Don’t Let Putin Whitewash History appeared first on The American Interest.

The Political Education of a (White) Civil Rights Activist

Touched with Fire: Morris B. Abram and the Battle Against Racial and Religious Discrimination

David E. Lowe

Potomac Books, 2019, 320 pp., $34.95

If a man’s fame could be judged by the company he kept or the causes he supported, Morris B. Abram’s place among the pantheon of the “Greatest Generation” would be secure. He was present at Nuremberg in 1946, assisting Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in the U.S. prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Back home in Georgia, he fought a 14-year legal battle to dismantle the state’s discriminatory voting system, paving the way for the Supreme Court’s “one person, one vote” ruling in Gray v. Sanders (1963). He helped negotiate the release of Martin Luther King, Jr. from a Georgia jail in 1960, playing middleman with the Kennedy campaign; later, Presidents Johnson and Reagan would tap him for major civil rights positions. As President of the American Jewish Committee, he negotiated at the Vatican with Pope Paul VI, seeking warmer ties between Jews and the Catholic Church; at the United Nations in 1991, he helped overturn the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution, under the marching orders of one John Bolton.

Why, then, has the name of Morris B. Abram largely been forgotten? This is the question that runs implicitly through David E. Lowe’s admiring biography Touched with Fire: Morris B. Abram and the Battle Against Racial and Religious Discrimination. In tracing the contours of this remarkable man’s life, several answers present themselves. One is that Abram, for all his proximity to power, was in crucial respects a man apart: a Jew among WASPs, a Southerner among Northerners, whose efforts were applauded by the powers-that-be but rarely rewarded to the extent he deserved. Another answer is that Abram’s career followed an itinerant trajectory, with short stints and odd jobs—as President of Brandeis University, or as General Counsel of the Peace Corps—interrupting his more sustained achievements in law and activism.

Perhaps most of all, though, Abram was forgotten because his thinking developed in ways that made him decidedly unfashionable. A crusading lawyer of the early civil rights period, Abram turned into a critic of affirmative action, bemoaning the “social engineers” who extended civil rights law past its proper domain. An avowed believer in King’s colorblind ideal, he became a vocal critic of the New Left black nationalism that followed in its wake. A true believer in human rights, he ended his career as a pugnacious critic of the institutions that claimed to uphold them, founding UN Watch to monitor the hypocrisies of the UN, particularly its single-minded scrutiny of Israel.

In Lowe’s telling, Abram’s evolution followed naturally from his first principles, consistently held to but refined by experience. In political terms, this amounted to a rightward drift that cost him old allies and complicated his legacy after death. Today, one imagines he would be homeless in either of our major parties. Neither a Democratic Party that now demands purity tests on busing, treating every development of the civil rights revolution as an unqualified good, nor a Donald Trump-led Republican Party, whose leading lights now question the wisdom of the Civil Rights Act in the first place, would confidently command his loyalties.

Yet it is precisely for this reason that Morris Abram deserves our attention. If Abram was “touched with fire” in his youthful pursuit of justice, to borrow the book’s epitaph from Oliver Wendell Holmes, he was also tempered by experience, trained to see how well-intentioned causes can sometimes go off course. For our age of ideological certitude, Abram’s example of principle and prudence is one worth heeding.

Morris Abram was born in 1918 in Fitzgerald, Georgia, a town founded three decades after the Civil War as a conscious monument to reconciliation. With streets conspicuously named for both Confederate and Union officers, and the Lee-Grant Hotel at its center, Fitzgerald was nonetheless typically Southern in its deep segregation. For Abram, it provided an early formation in the promise and limits of America’s melting pot.

Abram’s father had come to America fleeing a pogrom in Chisinau, in present-day Moldova; his mother was descended from one of America’s first Reform rabbis. But growing up in the South, Lowe suggests, Abram suppressed his Jewish identity by both choice and habit. From his mother’s side, Lowe writes, Abram internalized the idea that “Jews are not a distinct people;” a friend of the Abram family recalls that they sought to blend into the town’s Protestant establishment but “were never really accepted.” For Abram, this awareness of his outsider status grew over time, as encounters with prejudice—an anti-Semitic eighth-grade teacher, a “Jews need not apply” attitude from top law firms—gradually moved him to embrace his Jewish identity, not recoil from it.

At times, Touched with Fire traces this development in a perfunctory manner, lacking the psychological texture of the best biographies. Some episodes cry out for deeper treatment: Abram’s legal work at Nuremberg, for example, is granted barely two pages; that this experience shaped him profoundly is more declared than developed. Too often, Touched with Fire resembles a brisk recitation of incidents and accomplishments, rushing through formative events that a more curious biographer might have dwelt on. Lowe writes parenthetically, for instance, of a heated college debate between Abram and Herman Talmadge, son of the staunch segregationist governor of Georgia (and future governor himself), which commenced a lifelong political rivalry that unexpectedly turned to friendship later in life. This latter detail is never developed, their full relationship never explored.

Still, Abram’s own tale gains in gravitas as it is told, alongside the scale of his ambitions. Two turning points in particular bear mention.

The first is Abram’s long legal quest, from 1949 to 1963, to overturn Georgia’s county unit voting system—an electoral regime which disproportionately benefited the state’s small, rural, whiter counties. With a series of lawsuits chipping away at the system, Abram emerged as both a moral crusader and a canny legal operator. He could summon the spirit of his cause with a voice of moral clarity and homespun wisdom, making pleas for common-sense interpretations of the law: “I think a qualified voter is a qualified voter…and a vote, is a vote, is a vote,” he declared before the Supreme Court. At other moments, he reached for Biblical metaphors, comparing Georgia’s wholesale disenfranchisement of black voters to Herod’s slaughter of the innocents— both exercises in group punishment at the expense of individual rights.

At the same time, Abram was a savvy political player, not merely a starry-eyed idealist. Throughout Touched With Fire, Lowe ably shows how legal victories do not happen through mere force of moral suasion, but as campaigns, carefully coordinated and stage-managed with other stakeholders. For Abram, that meant enlisting sympathetic plaintiffs who could appear apolitical, even if the suits’ original sponsors were politicians; it meant working hand-in-hand with Atlanta mayor William Hartsfield, who brought the city’s business community on board; it meant, in one instance, driving fifty miles outside Atlanta on a Saturday to personally serve a lawsuit to a federal judge. Hard-headed in his tactics and acutely aware of how the case could make his own reputation, Abram was ever the happy warrior. “I am a generalist in law, and a specialist only in procedure and drama,” he once declared, citing Machiavelli and Clausewitz as personal inspirations. And his flair for the dramatic paid off: by the time Gray v. Sanders came to the Supreme Court, Bobby Kennedy had taken an interest, even arguing part of the case alongside Abram (who was reluctant to share the spotlight). The Court finally ruled in their favor, building on a precedent from Tennessee the previous year; as Hartsfield put it, it was “the biggest thing to hit Georgia since Sherman.”

The second major turning point for Abram came five years later, when he was inaugurated President of Brandeis University. It was a dream job, for which he had impeccable credentials; in addition to his legal work, Abram had served as President of the American Jewish Committee (1963-1968), co-chair of LBJ’s White House Conference on Civil Rights (1965), and U.S. Representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights. But he left Brandeis less than two years later with his tail between his legs, chased out by activists who dubbed him a “fork-tongued Georgia cracker.”

At the heart of the Brandeis chapter, the book’s most dramatic, is a campus crisis that erupted in January 1969, when a group of black activists seized control of one of the main university buildings. Their demands for greater minority representation would soon ripple across other universities, and Abram had the unenviable task of leading Brandeis’s response after three months on the job. In theory sympathetic to the protesters’ grievances, Abram was nonetheless offended by their violent tactics and the notion of students—accompanied, he thought, by outside Black Panther elements—dictating curriculum changes to the faculty. A few years earlier, in the White House job, Abram had tried to defend Daniel Patrick Moynihan against the criticism of New Left black leaders, who considered his famous report on the black family to be an exercise in condescending white paternalism; at Brandeis, the activists came after Abram in similar terms.

Ultimately, Abram managed to defuse the crisis without calling in the police, although he resented his agreement to grant amnesty to students who had damaged property. In any event, the experience so disillusioned Abram that he made a speedy exit from Brandeis the following year.

And for the final three decades of his life, Abram seemed to embody Irving Kristol’s famous definition of a neoconservative: “a liberal mugged by reality.” Initially supportive of Jimmy Carter, whose entrance into Georgia politics was facilitated by Abram’s own legal achievements, he defected to Ronald Reagan with a public endorsement in 1980. A self-declared “anti-Zionist” in his youth, he spent his final years vocally championing the cause of Israel, tangling with Soviet delegations over the exodus rights of refuseniks, and founding UN Watch in Geneva to blow the whistle on the UN’s human rights hypocrisy. A sparring partner of William F. Buckley in the 1960s, he reappeared on his show in 1982 as a likeminded guest, criticizing affirmative action quotas and lamenting that the civil rights movement “now wants racial preferences.”

By the time of his death in 2000, at the age of 81, Morris Abram had made his mark across the fields of law, politics, human rights, and academe. He died beloved, but not widely known. His achievements defied easy categorization, thanks to both his changing political affiliations and the sheer manifold diversity of the causes he supported—including the scrutiny of New York’s exploitative nursing home industry in the mid-1970s, and a bioethics position under President Carter. Along the way, he defied a serious leukemia diagnosis, emerging cancer-free in 1979 after six years of grueling treatment, and left behind five children, nine grandchildren, and three marriages.

How to take the measure of such a man? It helps, perhaps, to recall some wisdom from Abram himself, delivered at an Emory University commencement in 1972: “Most men are not as good as they pretend to be, nor as bad as their enemies paint them. No man is always truthful, especially to himself, and no man lies all the time to himself.”

Abram had his faults, and Lowe, to his credit as a biographer, is unafraid to mention them. In his private life, he was unfaithful to his first wife; in his public life, he evinced a certain hyperbole and arrogance alongside his considerable achievements. He did not always act on principle: a high-ticket lawyer, he had no compunction in assisting a Big Law firm (Cravath, Swain & Moore) in fighting anti-discrimination law that he had previously fought to implement. (Most incensed at Abram’s apparent hypocrisy in the Cravath case was the other side’s counsel, Alan Dershowitz—who has not lately crowned himself in glory as a paragon of principle.) For Lowe, these are minor faults in the grand sweep of a worthy life. But in today’s polarized climate, there are more sweeping ways of critiquing Abram from right and left.

For the left, of course, he could be just another neocon—a man who drifted rightward because he could not reckon with what was truly needed to equalize racial relations, a squish who retreated to other causes like Israel as soon as he drew fire from activists at the vanguard. Today’s right, meanwhile, could see the young Abram as a naïf—an idealistic crusader for equality, who could not envision how the movement’s internal logic would turn against him in the end. This, one suspects, might be the view of someone like Christopher Caldwell, whose controversial Age of Entitlement traces virtually all the ills of post-60s America to the overreach of the Civil Rights Act, and implicitly gestures toward rejecting it root and branch.

But for those of us unmoved by either of these simplistic narratives, there is another way to look at Abram—one more attuned to the nuances, and virtues, of his political thought.

He believed in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes—and he held fast to this distinction even when it became fashionable to elide it. When he saw the injustice of Jim Crow disenfranchising black voters en masse, he worked to overturn it; when he worried that affirmative action was instituting a countervailing system of racial preference, he sounded the alarm bell.

He believed in subsidiarity, distinguishing between the proper roles of local, state, and national government. “The duty of the Federal government is to help the people do things together that would not be done so well individually,” Abram wrote sensibly, rejecting both the notion that the Federal government had no role to play in guaranteeing fair play and the notion that it was the appropriate actor to remedy every wrong.

He believed in civility, even if it cost him political advantage. As one friend recalled of a failed congressional race, “Morris was used to a certain civility in exchanges. He could not compete in that realm of someone who would lack any courtesy and who would not let him talk without interrupting him.”

He was a pluralist in theory and practice, committed to the expression of opposing views and the free contestation of ideas. In an essay on extremism, he critiqued those on “left and right, [who] are convinced that the end justifies the means”; in his inaugural address at Brandeis, he insisted,  “I do not believe in the academy as well as in society as a whole, the majority has the right to stifle the voice of the minority.”

He did not believe in an arc of history bending inexorably toward justice; he knew that it had to be bent by active effort, and he was conscious, at the same time, that such change could have adverse side effects that were not to be taken lightly.

Morris Abram, in short, was neither a doctrinaire conservative nor a progressive. He was a good liberal, in the old-fashioned sense—a man capable of balancing theory and practice, a man who sought a healthy balance between the free exercise of individual rights and the need to ensure a level playing field. He was strong in his convictions but never smug in the assertion that wisdom was his alone, and he reserved the right to adjust his views based on the evidence. In that regard, it is worth quoting his Brandeis address at greater length:

I know that it has become fashionable in some liberal political circles to downgrade the liberal political creed. I am willing to examine and reexamine every substantive opinion, including those to which I am most committed. However, I am not prepared to reject the liberal methodology of fair play, civil liberty, and due process as the only way in which a civilized society can pursue truth, prevent the encrustation of error, and insure the fulfillment of one’s creative talents and inclinations.

Today, it hardly needs underscoring, Abram’s liberal ethos has become more unfashionable than ever. To read David Lowe’s biography is to wish that it were not so—and to hope that our politics may one day be touched with the fire of his example again.

The post The Political Education of a (White) Civil Rights Activist appeared first on The American Interest.

The Limits of Decadence

The Decadent Society: How We Became The Victims Of Our Own Success

Ross Douthat

Simon & Schuster, 2020, 272 pp., $27.00

Ross Douthat wants to talk about outer space. The New York Times columnist and National Review film critic has plenty of ideas to share about Star Wars and Star Trek and our own species’ prospects for space colonization.

But mostly, he wants to talk about the moon.

In his telling, the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 was both the pinnacle of American achievement and the last gasp of a dynamic society. Though it promised a new beginning of space exploration, “one giant leap for mankind” proved to be an ending. Closing the frontier shuttered our cultural imagination, and since then, contrary to popular assumption, Douthat argues, the story of Western culture has been one of enervation, not innovation.

Following the late cultural critic Jacques Barzun, Douthat calls this “decadence,” by which he implies not just “excess” or “moral depravity” but a broad cultural “falling off.” In The Decadent Society, the author makes his case that this decline, accompanied by the appearance of material success, has defined the last 50 years of Western institutions. Though this terrain overlaps with other post-liberal Christian intellectuals such as Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher, he shares little of their apocalyptic tone. Religious conservatives expecting a polemical lament of the death of Western values will be disappointed, as will progressives eager to dismiss another Chicken Little. Throughout the book, the author’s natural curiosity and willingness to question assumptions make for engaging reading, and direct him close to the heart of our modern malaise.

According to Douthat, we are decadent because of the arenas in which we have grown and diminished in the last half-century. Economically, the top percentile has thrived, while the rest of us have floundered. Though magical hand-held devices have taken over our lives in the last decade, Douthat argues that life appears much the same in 2020 as it did in 1970. Meanwhile, plummeting birthrates in the first world have set the stage for economic and cultural contraction. More than anything else, Douthat’s idea of decadence is underwritten by dissonance—between what is and what appears to be, between the limits of the natural world and our own cocoons of modern comfort.

Our economy highlights this modern incongruity. To start, the milk and honey that flows from Silicon Valley proves to be largely illusory. Three internet-fueled ventures—the ill-fated Frye Festival, the fraudulent Theranos start-up, and the surprisingly fragile Uber—demonstrate how simple it is to market an unreal narrative of success to venture capitalists and consumers alike. Drawing on the work of Tyler Cowen, among others, Douthat argues that after the 1960s, our economy entered a period of deceleration, followed by stagnation since the late 1990s. The stock market has boomed throughout this period, but deceptively so, as more than half of its recent growth amounts to “a reallocation of rents to shareholders,” while actual economic growth remains quite low. He incisively identifies our current malaise to be as much about disappointment as anything else: “[T]wenty-first-century growth and innovation were not at all what we were promised they would be.”

As he admits, part of this problem stems from the unreal expectations generated by the rapid changes of the early 20th century. Though the internet has changed the way we live, the last fifty years have not produced more fundamentally “world-altering” innovations than refrigeration, the electric dynamo, automobile, and air travel. Reluctant to veer into “solutionism,” he acknowledges two main factors for technological stagnation: the natural limits imposed by time, space, and environment, and the consolidation of corporate power, which seeks to preserve the status quo rather than spur the risk-taking necessary for continued progress.

In a similar way that our economy discourages innovation, our formerly dynamic politics have hardened into sclerosis. The constitution’s checks and balances were designed to encourage compromise, but are relatively impotent in the face of ideological gridlock. (Douthat wrote the bodyok before the failed impeachment of Trump, but undoubtedly its display of hyper-partisanship bears out his point.) He devotes several pages to chastising Republicans for their contributions to this situation, largely by “accepting . . . a post-legislative approach to policy making” and running an “interest-group protection racket.” His harshest words come for the Obama-era right-wing populism whose “politics-as-entertainment game” opened the doors to a strongman like Trump: “[T]hey became, in effect, the most decadent part of a decadent system.”

Throughout the book Douthat finds himself in direct dialogue with Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 The End of History and the Last Man. Douthat corrects the misunderstanding of Fukuyama as a “liberal triumphalist” and reads in his dirge for a once-vibrant culture a sentiment congruent with his own. In Fukuyama’s own words:

The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the posthistorical period, there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.

The notion of contemporary culture as a museum features prominently in Douthat’s assessment. From the 1980s onward, he argues, pop culture has grown increasingly repetitive, mining old hits and tropes for maximum profit. Douthat laments that Marvel and sci-fi’s dominance of Hollywood has constricted genres and throttled creativity.

As someone who spends most of his time with high schoolers (I live and teach at a boarding school), I can attest to Douthat’s diagnosis. My students’ generation has no Rocky, no Saving Private Ryan or Home Alone to act as a cultural touchstone. Though they spend more time than ever consuming videos, and nothing seems to have purchase on their imaginations. The same can be said for music—they listen, largely, to remixes upon remixes, and the more they listen, the more Spotify’s algorithms feed them similar non-tunes. Douthat finds himself nostalgic for the “vital culture” of the baby boomers, which, whatever its faults, was preferable to our corporate-fueled post-modern recycling plant.

Douthat’s focus on cultural repetition draws to mind the work of Republican advisor Frank Luntz, whose work with focus groups dramatically altered political messaging in the last several decades. Starting in the 1990s, Luntz analyzed real-time responses to specific terms used by politicians, and then advised them to ditch unsuccessful wording in favor of those phrases that generated the strongest responses in the focus groups. Under his influence, “estate tax” became the scarier-sounding “death tax,” while the ominous “global warming” morphed into “climate change.” The relationship of the phrase to the actual truth it purported to represent was a secondary concern—primary was the desirability of its effect.

By mining consumer-response data to manipulate the fabric of political communication, Luntz’s method encourages the very repetition Douthat bemoans. Though the book does not address him directly, his example proves essential to understanding how decadence functions at all levels of society. In politics as well as in entertainment, we are only sold products that are proven sellers. The internet has greased the rails between parties in these transactions, and the invisible algorithms that drive much of our online lives now (Spotify, Amazon, Twitter) operate under this same premise. The success of everything from a piece of music to a political speech is evaluated by its effect on consumers. The result is a narrowing of culture and civic discourse, and a slow choking of oxygen to any innovation that threatens those in power.

At the same time that we are offered more of the same, culture appears to be expanding, with the proliferation of choice at every turn in our consumer habits. Douthat cites Mike Klee to explain this dissonance: “[T]he Internet promised exponential divergence but congealed into another monoculture.” The internet, though, is not the culprit—all advertising promises paradise while delivering a product designed to fall short of it. Douthat recognizes this—at one point referring to Perry Miller and David Nye’s concept of the “technological sublime” as a kind of progress-worship that has been successfully bottled and sold by Elon Musk—but he fails to consider seriously the implication that his decadent age coincides with the rise to power of the Ad Men.

Though he often laments the effects of decadence and even seems nostalgic for a more dynamic age, Douthat remains true to Barzun’s insistence that “the term is not a slur; it is a technical label.” His attempt to remain objective leads him to conclude that decadence might be sustainable for the foreseeable future, much like the Roman Empire’s decline lasted 400 years. Widespread virtual entertainments like pornography and video games have had a tranquilizing effect on the population, he argues, citing statistics that correlate a reduction in real-world sexual assault and violence with their virtual simulacra. Smartphones and anti-depressants have sedated today’s adolescents, who cause less trouble (and have much less sex) than their parents did at the same age. While acknowledging the horrors of the opioid epidemic, Douthat points to Andrew Sullivan’s observation that the drugs are “downers: they are not the means to engage in life more vividly but to seek a respite from its ordeals.” By rendering its citizens “comfortably numb,” Douthat argues, decadence strengthens its chances of survival.

Though generally correct about the tranquilizing effect of our entertainment, Douthat’s emphasis on its quantifiable effects forces him to downplay its invisible ones. My teaching career has coincided almost exactly with the proliferation of smartphones, and I have witnessed firsthand big-tech’s deleterious effects on adolescent well-being. Their behavior may be outwardly cautious, but that’s because they feel inwardly isolated, wracked by anxiety and insecurity. Douthat does acknowledge their unhappiness, but seems not to realize the tell-tale signs that something is deeply amiss: “[T]he only violence such misery seems to be definitively encouraging is suicide attempts, the one form of old-fashioned teenage folly that’s increasing in the age of the iPhone.” There’s nothing old-fashioned about the reasons today’s teens kill themselves, or the reason that the rate at which they do so has skyrocketed since 2007. Here, and elsewhere, Douthat succumbs to the data-journalist’s inclination to flatten the world by assuming that his observations differ only in degree, not kind.

In order to emphasize the sustainability of decadence, Douthat has to keep insisting that things really aren’t that bad . . . yet. Trump, he claims, is weak, not strong, “his incipient authoritarianism most manifest . . . on his Twitter feed.” Understandably, he wrote the book before some of the worst of Trump’s abuses came to light, but his assessment itself seems borne from a kind of decadent privilege. Surely a migrant seeking refuge in our country might have more to say about the real-world ramifications of Trump’s policies. To his credit, he admits his own limitations: “[C]omplaining about decadence is, almost by definition, a luxury good.” As his regular readers have come to expect, Douthat is more interested in seeking truth than scoring points, and his willingness to question his own assumptions proves refreshing.

For a world dealing with its worst viral outbreak in living memory, he may yet prove to be a prophet. Despite his insistence on Trump’s fecklessness, he admits that “if he accidentally stumbles into a global war or mismanages a pandemic, there will be nothing virtual about it and nothing decadent about the aftermath.” As the book considers ways in which decadence might end, a catastrophe like the coronavirus looms large, as does political upheaval—in one thought experiment Douthat imagines a neo-medieval future of “a thousand Brexits”—and the effects of global warming. In the last case, decadence may not dissolve all at once, but slowly. As populations migrate away from the equator in search of relief from extreme temperatures, decadence may still be sustained in “the fortresses of the wealthy.” One might argue that, environmental factors aside, the yawning gap between rich and poor has already placed us in such a situation.

Like Rod Dreher, whose 2017 The Benedict Option advocated for forming small religious communities to renew Western culture, Douthat hopes that decadence might give way to a religious renaissance, just as Christian communities sprung up amid the ruins of the Roman empire. His own 2018 To Change the Church established him as the most prominent American critic of Pope Francis, and, not surprisingly, he draws our attention to the man seen by many as Pope Francis’ nemesis, African Cardinal Robert Sarah. Douthat suggests that Sarah, or someone like him, might lead a renaissance in the form of a “vigorously traditional Eurafrican Roman Catholicism.” African birthrates are strong, and Douthat imagines a “Eurafrica in which black Christians fill the Gothic churches of the Old Continent . . . and then gain enough power and influence to build new ones, in new-old styles, in both Nantes and Nairobi.” If you look closely enough, he claims, something like this is already happening, and, given the below-replacement birthrates and dying religious practice in Europe, the phenomenon will only accelerate.

In his imagined marriage of African fecundity with high-European Catholicism, Douthat follows the path of Dreher and others on the religious right who, in an effort to combat various cultural ills, come to view religion primarily in terms of its desirable social effects. Though perhaps unintended, the result is a reduction of faith to a kind of brand advertised on the basis of its profitable outcomes (strong rates of birth, high church attendance) and discussed no differently than any other political or cultural phenomenon. Though Douthat cites W.H. Auden to understand the “endless autumn” of the decadent Roman Empire, he fails here to heed the poet’s warning, given in the context of the Christian rule of Theodosius in the waning days of the empire, against “using Christianity as a spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city.”

Early in the book, Douthat writes of his own grandfather’s final years, which he spent happily “puttering around his Maine farmhouse.” His freedom was enabled by the proximity of his own adult children, who were able to care for him. As birthrates in the West keep plummeting, Douthat rightly fears that his grandfather’s generation will be the last to have this option in their old age. Another way to contextualize this example is to recognize that a decadent culture thrives by discouraging interpersonal bonds (familial or otherwise) in favor of transactional ones. Surely dwindling fertility rates enable the situation Douthat describes. But why are fertility rates so low in the first place? To answer that question would be to interrogate the notion of the frontier itself.

Refreshingly, Douthat ends by turning inward and doing so. Equating our desire to exert power over nature with a corruption of the biblical imperative to dominion, he claims that “we can’t morally justify the expansion of that power . . . unless we become better stewards of our planet, our societies, ourselves.” Throughout the book he compares our situation to the last four hundred years of the Roman Empire, and here, more than anywhere else, his voice echoes that of the desert fathers, the forerunners of St. Benedict, who took to the wilderness during that decadent time. Yet they did so not to escape the world but to renew themselves, by focusing on the only frontier that matters in Christian spirituality—the one within.

Whether a similar movement will bring an end to our modern decadence remains to be seen. While we are waiting, Douthat’s engaging and thought-provoking book gives us reason to ponder our own frontiers, and how they shape our notions of progress.

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The Wuhan Virus and the Imperative of Hard Decoupling

I flew back from Washington DC to Munich just a day before the travel embargo from the Schengen zone to the United States came into effect. As I watched anxious gate agents, tense flight attendants, and passengers eyeing each other with suspicion, I could not help but think that what I was witnessing was the beginning of a radical recompilation of the mistaken notions that for the past three decades have shaped U.S. and European economic policy, and indirectly, international security. The idea that the People’s Republic of China can become a responsible stakeholder in the international community—that it can “be like us”—is being laid to rest behind the masked faces of petrified Westerners scurrying through airports to get home.

Amidst the 24/7 breathless media coverage and calls for politicians to “do something,” one fundamental question still needs to be addressed forthrightly and in the open: Who did this to us and what to do to prevent it from happening again?

The question about assigning agency and blame is pretty straightforward to answer: The communist Chinese state, which for more than three decades has been draining capital and knowledge from the West, benefiting from our greed and myopia, has just let loose a virus that in the coming months is about to effectively paralyze Europe and the United States and bring severe pain, both human and economic on the world. The “eruption at a wet market” explanation for the virus has to be questioned until we know the full story, if for no other reason than the fact that Beijing suppressed data for two months when the coronavirus first appeared, and even to this day refuses to come clean as to exactly what happened. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now spinning propaganda stories that both seek to somehow pin the blame on the United States, and that try to frame their bungling, denial-ridden, heavy-handed reaction as some kind of model for the world.

As a result of all this, the West is now shutting down, at least for a while. The ultimate cost to the world, in terms of new government debt, failed businesses, and human lives and suffering, is difficult to quantify at this point. But there are indications that the fallout from the Wuhan Virus could be transformative.

We must acknowledge our own complicity in what is now unfolding. The belief that globalization, through the radical centralization of market networks, was the unavoidable path forward has been exposed as a grave, near-delusional miscalculation. The offshoring by corporations of supply chains to China has not only eviscerated communities that were previously reliant on manufacturing jobs, but has also brought with it an unprecedented level of vulnerability and fragility to our economies. The populist revolts that have wracked Western democracies for the past several years are in part rooted in the pain that these dislocations have caused. Worse yet, for the past three decades, this offshoring process has favored an adversary that is determined to replace us as the hub of global economic and military power and place itself at the new normative center of the world.

Should the fallout from the Wuhan Virus prove to be as damaging as it looks like it might be, the first casualty should be China’s quest to become the premier manufacturing center for the world. Few corporations will want to again risk being caught in a situation where their entire supply chain has been locked into one country—much less a palpably hostile dictatorship. The subsequent era will, I hope, be one of strategic reconsolidation, with a special focus on onshoring critical supply chains that have been moved to China. Even the siren song of potentially-vast consumer markets in China may end up being more than offset by the trauma we are about to face.

As the dust settles, the United States should be taking a hard look at streamlining our federal and state regulatory framework, tax structure, and all other outstanding obstacles in order to encourage U.S. businesses to come back home. If, once this crisis is over, we do not have at least a blueprint for rebuilding America’s manufacturing base and restoring our ability to provide critical supplies to the country regardless of the actions of our adversary, a decisive opportunity will have been squandered. Such a plan ought to be accompanied by other measures, including ending China’s unfettered access to our research centers and universities, putting restrictions on technology exports to, and manufacturing in, China going forward, and using the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) more aggressively to prevent Chinese takeover of key industries and corporations.

The status quo ante should have never been an option for a free people to accept.

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On Coronavirus, Beware the Totalitarian Temptation

Totalitarianism is Stalin and Hitler, the NKVD and the Gestapo, the Gulag and the death camp. Correct, but take another look. It is also an eternal temptation that has infected Western minds great and small—from Martin “Sieg Heil!” Heidegger to Jean-Paul Sartre, who pitched for Communism until the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. Among the lesser minds, Charles Lindbergh cozied up to Hitler, and Joseph Davies, the U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, penned a ringing apologia for Stalin’s Great Terror in Mission to Moscow. The book was turned into an even more awful movie. Add a herd of Western devotees and camp followers who cheered Mussolini, Mao, Castro, Che, and, lately, Hugo Chávez—this Stalinist caudillo attracted effusive praise from the actor Sean Penn.

Which takes us to China’s President Xi Jinping and an up-to-date example of cheerleading for the almighty state. While in Beijing, the WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom extolled China as a model in the war against SARS-CoV-2, better known as “coronavirus.” According to China’s state media, he gushed that “China’s speed . . . and efficiency . . . is the advantage of China’s system.” The country deserved “praise” and “admiration” for its methods in routing the silent enemy that has spread the COVID-19 epidemic from Wuhan to Milan, from Alberta to Auckland.

Such an éloge needs to be tempered. First of all, the world owes the most recent iteration of the coronavirus to China, more precisely to Wuhan and its “wet markets” whence it sprang forth from bats, a delicacy of the local cuisine. That calamity may be ascribed to Chinese culture. But what followed was owed to the very system cheered by the WHO boss. 

By the end of December, health workers warned that something was afoot. Yet totalitarians hate bad news, that’s in their DNA. Suppressing the reports, they blamed the messengers and detained them. There was “speed,” but the wrong kind. Instead of locking up the doctors, the regime might have closed down Wuhan Airport, which serves 32 cities around the world, including Paris, London, Rome, Seoul, Tokyo, and Sidney. With flights operating into February, the virus forged ahead while precious time was lost. In mid-March, the regime tried fake news, a classic agitprop tool, with the foreign ministry insinuating that the “U.S. army had brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” 

So, why would the WHO director (and plenty of others) applaud the Communist emperor Xi? Because of political expediency, for one. You don’t bite the hand you need to feed in order to contain the Wuhan Virus. But China seems to be making up for its sins. Apparently, new cases have plummeted from 2,400 during the last week in February to single digits in mid-March. So, three cheers for the superiority of a totalitarian system?

But South Korea is the world’s number one when it comes to testing, which is critical for controlling the virus. Taiwan has slowed its spread. In Iran, though, a harsh theocracy whose tentacles reach deeply into society, new infections are on a steep rise. So totalitarian systems aren’t necessarily super-efficient, while supposedly chaotic democracies are hardly doomed.

The price of what Xi calls a “people’s war” is horrendous. To boot, Beijing’s strategy can be pursued only by a totalitarian state, but not by a democracy. Essentially, the state has locked up half a billion people, most harshly in and around Wuhan. It dispatched armies of enforcers to guard the access to residential compounds and to restrict movement within. 

The regime deployed digital surveillance systems no liberal polity would or could countenance, and rightly so. The government tapped into data from state-run mobile companies as well as from payment apps that record “who, when, and where,” so that fugitives can be traced and collared. Regime minions intrude on what is known in the West as “my home is my castle” to record body temperatures, presumably hauling suspects off to detention facilities—for their own good, of course. Tech companies have developed apps with a kind of traffic light. “Green” is good, “yellow” is a warning, “red” is bad. Guards use the color coding to block movement at railroad stations and traffic nodes.

The darkest side of the “people’s war” is sheer repression. Ren Zhiqiang, a prominent Beijing tycoon, had been blasting Xi for extinguishing free speech. Too bad for him that he now ran afoul of an all-out Party campaign to quash criticism about the government’s fake- or no-news strategy. Ren accused the state of having accelerated the epidemic that had claimed innumerable lives. He might as well have committed treason. So, Ren has suddenly disappeared, which is a swift way to silence “enemies of the people.”

State control of information is a bridge to oppression democracies must never cross. Freedom of expression is among the holiest of holies in a liberal polity. An indispensable check on arbitrary power, free media also happen to be eminently useful in national emergencies, exposing error, mismanagement, and falsehood. It was the absence of free media in China that enabled the regime to muzzle the whistleblowers of Wuhan at such a murderous price.

How are those bungling democracies doing? Italy has virtually copycatted China’s anti-virus warfare, practically locking down the entire country. Spain has followed, as has France—though with a 15-day limit for the time being. Other EU members will surely go the same route. They are successively dismantling “Schengenland,” the EU’s borderless realm, reasserting national control. Yet such constraints are being imposed without the totalitarian tools of the Chinese. In deploying the powers of the state, Western governments have illuminated a peculiar advantage of democracies. To combat crises, they need not resort to police-state tactics. 

If governments communicate truthfully with the people, the ruled do what needs to be done voluntarily. Look around the democratic world. People self-quarantine at home and stay away from large crowds. They accept curbs on their freedom such as closed bars, restaurants, theaters, and stores except those establishments that sustain life in deadly times: food, drug, and pet stores (animals have to eat, too). They keep social distance and walk alone rather than in pairs.

Competitive sports unfold in empty stadiums whence games are broadcast. Operas and concerts are streamed. Companies shift to home office work and video-conferencing on their own. Schools close according to local determination, and the government provides emergency day care so that parents can continue to work in critical places like hospitals. It isn’t all voluntary, of course. But there is still a difference between Wuhan and Milan. Carabinieri don’t act as prison guards, but ask for cash receipts that prove a trip to the pharmacy. When venturing outside, the choice is still yours; this is the critical difference. You are not manhandled or dragged off to jail. Instead you pay a fine of 200 euros ($224). 

If you feel mistreated, you can appeal to the courts. The rule of law does not yield to unchecked power. It is “gentle persuasion” that comes with incentives. In Munich, for instance, stores that must lock up for a while enjoy the benefits of the welfare state. Rules on short-time work kick in. The social security system makes up for reduced wages.

Beyond such anecdotes, there is a larger point: the irreducible trade-off between freedom and safety. Despots don’t have to deal with such conflicts. For them, the security of the state—and their regime—is über alles. Let the people pay the price. Authoritarians love crises—or regularly manufacture them—because these justify untrammeled power. The logic is all too familiar. Posit a supreme evil, and all other values must be betrayed: freedom of expression and movement, property rights, judicial review, individual autonomy, political competition, due process. Rule of Law? Not when the enemy is at the gate, and certainly not when he is already roaming the land.

Liberal polities, alas, are not immune to the temptation. Listen to the prophets of planetary doom who want an all-powerful state that would do away with constitutional restraints and unfettered politics for the sake of the earth. Don’t quibble when the house is on fire; seek salvation in “eco dictatorship.” On a less cosmic level, there is Benjamin Netanyahu, who was first in the democratic world to impose a draconian regimen in the corona crisis. Why Israel of all places? Unable to cobble together a coalition, the Prime Minister faces a virus of his own: his criminal indictment and looming loss of office. And lo, he invoked the epidemic to demand an emergency government headed by him for six or even 24 months. A scoundrel who thinks evil of it.

It could happen here, too—which is all the more reason to resist the authoritarian temptation. What are the antidotes? All emergency measures must come with a sunset clause. Protect the freedom of the press at all costs. Set new dates for postponed elections now. Keep holding officials accountable. Secure the separation of powers. The rule is to persuade, not to impose. Defy the pied papers who stoke panic and hysteria in order to deconstruct the liberal state. 

Do not forget that three viruses are in play. One infects the human body, the other the body politic, and the third the economy. Close it down, and the enemy passes from the human bloodstream into the vulnerable creature called “supply and demand.” This is not a financial crisis as in 2008, which is why infusing trillions of liquidity is not working. As a result of sequestration and insulation, production is plunging, and so are consumption and jobs—the life forces of the economy. These are real, not virtual phenomena like stock market busts.

Disease and death are real, too. But if the economy grinds to a halt as consequence of a progressive shutdown, material misery creeps forward. Its relentless advance will also cause sorrow and distress, unleashing a kind of epidemic not seen since the Great Depression when people could no no longer pay their bills or keep their homes. Thus the imperative is to balance not only freedom and safety, but also anti-virus warfare and economic well-being. There is no either-or, damn the consequences.

A system based on the consent of the governed is messy. But it is working throughout the West. The democracies are far better equipped to strike the right balance between health, wealth, and liberty. China’s Xi need not lose any sleep over this three-cornered conflict of values. Yet Western leaders must crack the trilemma for a simple but compelling reason, which is to keep the state of emergency from escalating into a panic and then jelling into a New Normal. Let China be China, but take a daily dose of vaccine against the virus of state supremacy. As seductive as the authoritarian therapy may look, it may cripple the patient known as “Liberal Democracy.”

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Why We Need a Constitutional Age Limit for President

As virtually everyone covering this year’s run for the presidency has noted, the three remaining candidates of note are older than 70. If elected, Donald Trump will be 74 when sworn in for a second term. If Joe Biden were elected, he would be 78 upon becoming President. And if Bernie Sanders were to somehow resurrect his campaign and go on to win in November, he would be 79. It was 40 years ago that, at the age of 69, Ronald Reagan was elected President and one month later would turn 70. At the time, he was the oldest person ever to claim the Oval Office, and many wondered then whether he was too old.

It’s obvious that we are living longer and are generally healthier as we age than previous generations. But it’s also true that the vast majority of us slow down, both mentally and physically, as we head into our seventh decade. Why this fact of life should not be a matter of constitutional concern given the incredible sway, authorities, and importance of the American President is unclear. Age, after all, is already a factor in who can be sworn in as President. An individual has to be at least 35 years old to hold the office. Presumably, the Constitution’s drafters thought a certain level of maturity were more likely to be present with someone 35 than, say, 25.

Of course, there are always exceptions—as there is in any large group. However, common sense suggested to the Founders that exceptions should not be expected to be the rule. So, too, with individuals running for office who are well into their 70s. We all know individuals who are far more vigorous than their age would suggest. But we note their uniqueness precisely because it’s not to be expected. Genes and one’s lifestyle obviously matter. But in the absence of extensive gene testing and invasive lifestyle background checks, the rule of thumb probably should be that “older” means precisely that. If it’s reasonable to discriminate against youth, it does not seem out of bounds to put a cap on how old one can be and still be elected President.

One might object to this idea based on the fact that America’s longish presidential campaign seasons should be sufficient for voters to make an assessment about a candidate’s health and mental acuity. Yet, as we know, most Americans don’t actually pay as much attention as perhaps they should until the nominees have been chosen and November’s election closes in. Plus, those who do pay attention, who are the most engaged, are just as likely to overlook signs of serious aging—even senility—in their desire to see their favorite candidate win. Finally, even if a candidate’s medical records were totally open and exhaustive—which has never been the case—those records cannot guarantee a President’s future mental and physical health. Of course, this is true of younger Presidents as well. But electing individuals in their mid- to late 70s, with all the demands and pressures of today’s office, is more a roll of the dice than we ought to be comfortable with.

Currently, the failsafe to protect the country from a failing Chief Executive is the 25th Amendment, which allows a President, if he is self-aware enough, to step aside in favor of the Vice President. The amendment also allows the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet to sidestep the President and go directly to the leadership in Congress to assume the powers and duties of the office—in effect, a soft coup. As yet, this has path has never been taken. However, if it ever should happen, it is easy to imagine just how contested and volatile such a step would be if the President was not clearly disabled in the public’s eye and was contesting his removal. His staff might well know he needs to go, but one can bet that they would have kept that information largely from the public. Constitutions should be constructed to avoid such disputes to the degree possible. Setting age limits might have a downside but, compared to the uproar resulting from a cabinet “revolt” led by the Vice President, it might be a less costly path when it comes to regime stability.

As with many issues, drawing an exact line as to when a person is too old to be elected President can’t help but be somewhat arbitrary. However, given the realities of aging, it’s not simply arbitrary. My own guess, and it’s only that, is that 70 might well be the upper limit. Regardless, as the country heads toward November, it is inevitable that we will hear more and more about how, this time, the choice of a Vice President is more important than ever. That certainly will be true. The questions we should be asking ourselves are: Why is that true—and should it still be true in 2024?

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Furtwängler and Shostakovich, Bearing Witness in Wartime

Books continue to be written about what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler. I wonder if any of the authors have listened to Wilhelm Furtwängler’s wartime broadcasts with the Berlin Philharmonic. They should, and also ponder a kindred question: the function of culture in the life of a nation.

The online products of the Berlin Philharmonic include a $230 box set containing 22 CDs and a 184-page booklet. The contents comprise the orchestra’s complete surviving wartime broadcasts (1939-1945), in the best possible sound, as conducted by a performing artist as controversial as he is legendary. Though other eminent German musicians chose (or were compelled) to emigrate, Furtwängler stayed.

Consider, as a specimen, the finale of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1—the last work on Furtwängler’s last wartime broadcast (January 1945). This astounding document opens an audio window on life in Berlin when the city lay in rubbles. Since the orchestra’s historic home had been destroyed one year before, the venue was a faded operetta theater making do as a concert hall. The program had begun with Mozart’s Symphony No. 40—interrupted midway through when the lights went out. The audience remained. An hour later, the concert resumed. Rather than returning to Mozart, Furtwängler skipped to the concert’s final scheduled work: the Brahms.

What was it like performing and hearing Brahms’s First under such dire circumstances? It becomes quite possible to find out.

Brahms would not have recognized Furtwängler’s 1945 reading as Brahmsian. With its radical extremes of tempo and mood, it is not “true to the score.” Rather, it is true to the moment. What I glean is something I could not have predicted: not terror, but pride and defiance. The music itself references the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, with its epochal call to humanity. Brahms, in turn, fashions a clarion C major horn call, banishing the dark—which on this singular occasion becomes an iteration of “the real Germany,” stalwart in the face of barbarism and insanity.

So potent is Furtwängler’s enduring mystique that the debate over his legacy rages unabated. Certainly his presence in Nazi Germany lent prestige to Hitler’s regime. And yet he insisted that he was preserving a precious inheritance. To my ears, his 1945 Brahms broadcast makes these best intentions wholly tangible and intelligible.

Richard Taruskin, in one of three valuable essays in the Berlin Philharmonic booklet, contributes the most empathetic writing I can recall from this prolific music historian. Taruskin writes of Furtwängler:

His definition of Deutschtum (Germanness) was elastic enough to encompass his Jewish countrymen. In an address commemorating Mendelssohn’s centenary in 1947, which was coincidentally the year of his denazification, Furtwängler ended with the explicit declaration that “Mendelssohn, Joachim, Schenker, Mahler—they are both Jews and German,” and then added heartbreakingly: “They testify that we German[s] have every reason to see ourselves as a great and noble people. How tragic that this has to be emphasized today.”

As Taruskin stresses, Furtwängler’s notion of Werktreue—textual fidelity—was not that of Arturo Toscanini or Igor Stravinsky. Rather, it was Richard Wagner’s: not literal adherence to the composer’s notated instructions, but an act of extrapolation discovering the “idea” of the piece. And, I would add, that idea could prove malleable accordingly to time and place: conditions Furtwängler channeled with uncanny sensitivity and communicative force.

Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony was a Furtwängler specialty. The work itself is polyvalent, both demonic and—as the Viennese term their notion of charmed well-being—gemütlich. Its second movement, marked “Andante con moto,” is and is not a “slow movement.” Rather, it is a march with trumpet tattoos in alternation with intimations of the sublime.

Furtwängler’s December 1942 broadcast performance is never gemütlich. When I had occasion to audition this wartime reading on the radio, my studio colleague Bill McGlaughlin memorably characterized its massive climax as “a firestorm.” Here Schubert’s march is a juggernaut hurtling toward an abyss. The abyss is a silence of three beats. In Furtwangler’s performance, the silence lasts eight seconds: an eternity. Reacting in the moment, Bill’s voice quavered when he said: “This time we really broke it; we really broke civilization.” And he characterized the music finally lifting the silence—the tenuous pizzicatos, the tender cello song—as an act of dazed consolation.

Something awful is conveyed in Furtwangler’s wartime reading of Schubert’s climax. It is, I suppose, something Schubert—a seer—may have distantly or subliminally glimpsed. But it is Furtwängler, channeling the moment, who has uncovered it. This terrifying interpretation no more conforms to our notions of “Schubert” than Furtwängler’s 1945 Brahms First supports received wisdom. It instead affirms that music has no fixed meaning, that great works of art are so profoundly imagined that their intent and expression forever mold to changing human circumstances.

In his potent little book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind, Stephen Johnson tells a relevant story. He travelled to St. Petersburg in 2006 to meet an elderly clarinetist named Viktor Kozlov. Kozlov was a rare survivor of a famous symphonic performance: the Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony on August 18, 1942. The city was in the grips of a murderous Nazi siege. Only 15 members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra remained alive. Rations were procured. Additional instrumentalists arrived in armed convoys. The 75-minute symphony, newly composed, was somehow performed. During the last movement, members of the audience began to stand. Shostakovich had born witness.

“One woman even gave the conductor flowers—imagine, there was nothing in the city!” Kozlov recalled. “And yet this one woman found flowers somewhere. It was wonderful! The music touched people because it reflected the Siege. . . . People were thrilled and astounded that such music was played, even during the Siege of Leningrad!”

Johnson next writes:

“When you hear this music today,” I asked hesitantly, “does it still have the same effect?” Despite all I had heard, nothing prepared me for what happened next. It was as though a huge wave of emotion struck that apartment, and instantly both Kozlov and his wife were sobbing convulsively. He grasped my forearm tightly—I can feel it again as I’m writing—and just about managed to speak: “It’s not possible to say. It’s not possible to say.”

Shostakovich the composer, and Furtwängler the conductor, possessed a genius for channeling the moment. On opposite sides of a devastating conflict, both served a great city facing extinction. A sincerely Soviet artist, Shostakovich practiced attunement to a mass of listeners: Spurning art for art’s sake, he prioritized his audience. Furtwängler pertinently insisted that he could only make music in the presence of sympathetic hearers. Equally significant was his baton technique: He notoriously eschewed clear downbeats. Rather than imposing a detailed interpretive blueprint, he bonded with his players in a transporting communal rite. Shostakovich’s symphonies say “we,” not “I.” It is the same with Furtwängler’s performances. This is what makes them feel empowering.

Of course there is a problem with such galvanizing strategies of shared expression. They are susceptible to evil intent. It is a problem inherent to culture itself, and to the protean adaptability of enduring artworks.

Another wartime Furtwängler performance I would call “terrifying” is of the closing moments of Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger, as given September 5, 1938, in Nuremberg. Rudolf Bockelmann sings Wagner’s apotheosis to German art—in which Hans Sachs warns of “evil tricks” should Germany one day “decay under false, foreign rule.” Bockelmann’s blood-curdling delivery of “Habt acht!” (“Beware!”) is plainly a product of 1938, when Germany was already a nation apart—not 1862, when the opera was premiered. One can argue about Wagner’s intentions here—and many have—but, indisputably, he has created a moment dynamically susceptible to changing times. In fact, I cannot think of a creative artist who so revealingly holds up a mirror to any given time or place. Wagnerism in the United States, peaking around 1890, was fundamentally meliorist, not remotely racist or anti-Semitic. At Wagner’s Bayreuth Theater in Hitler’s time, the Festspielhaus was festooned with swastikas and Die Meistersinger excited Nazi salutes.

Thomas Mann, who could never wholly escape his infatuation with Wagner, was a peerless authority on the Germany of Wagner and Furtwängler. He once wrote:

Art will never be moral or virtuous in any ­political sense: and progress will never be able to put its trust in art. It has a fundamental ­tendency to unreliability and treachery; its . . . predilection for the “barbarism’’ that begets beauty [is] indestructible; and although some may call this predilection . . . immoral to the point of endangering the world, yet it is an imperishable fact of life, and if one wanted to eradicate this aspect of art . . . then one might well have freed the world from a serious ­danger; but in the process one would almost certainly have freed it from art itself.

That is from Mann’s Reflections of a Non-Political Man (1919). With the coming of Hitler, Mann became a “political man.” He wrenched himself apart from the Germany he endorsed and embodied, and moved to California. “Everything else would have meant too narrow and specific an alienation of my existence,” he told a 1945 audience at the Library of Congress. “As an American I am a citizen of the world.” Seven years later, having witnessed the onset of the Cold War and the Red Scare, Mann deserted the United States for Switzerland; as early as 1951 he wrote to a friend: “I have no desire to rest my bones in this soulless soil to which I owe nothing, and which knows nothing of me.”

Like Furtwängler, Shostakovich was urged to emigrate and escape a monstrous master. Like Furtwängler, he would not. Custodians of a nation’s culture, oppressed by Hitler and by Stalin, Furtwängler and Shostakovich both were denounced for serving the devil—or derogated as mere stooges. Furtwängler did not join the Party. Shostakovich did. But Shostakovich was no Stalinist. As for Furtwängler, Arnold Schoenberg credibly attested:

I am sure he was never a Nazi. He was one of those old-fashioned Deutschnationale from the time of Turnvater Jahn, when you were national because of those Western states who went with Napoleon. This is more an affair of Studentennationalismus, and it differs very much from that of Bismarck’s time and later on, when Germany was not a defender, but a conqueror. Also I am sure that he was no anti-Semite—or at least no more than any non-Jew. And he is certainly a better musician than all those Toscaninis, Ormandys, Kussevitskis, and the whole rest.

Furtwängler died in 1954, Shostakovich in 1975. Both outlived the tyrants who oppressed yet paradoxically empowered them.

Processing that Berlin Philharmonic Pandora box, I am finally directed to my own nation and its cultural possessions—and led to ponder a poverty of opportunity and risk.

When 9/11 happened—when, again, a great city was assaulted and wounded— America’s orchestras responded with the requiems of Mozart and Brahms, or with Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. We had and have no Brahms, Schubert, or Shostakovich symphony of our own.

What comes closest, I would say, is the Second Symphony of Charles Ives, completed around 1909. It is redolent of Connecticut porches and bandstands, of New England holidays and Transcendental climes. Every one of the symphony’s melodies—a dense potpourri—is an American tune, secular or religious. It is also a Civil War symphony, surging to a patriotic peroration combining “Reveille” and the Civil War song “Wake Nicodemus” with “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” In a letter to the conductor Artur Rodzinski, Ives added that he had expressed “sadness for the slaves” by citing the Stephen Foster song “Old Black Joe.” And Ives’s appropriation of this tune, assigned to a solo cello or horn, is in truth his symphony’s most eloquent refrain.

That is: A song once sung in blackface, adapting a dialect caricaturing African-American speech, becomes the symphony’s lyric high point. So it is with America, a nation unfinished and unresolved, whose most popular entertainment for half a century featured white performers masquerading as blacks. The attendant complexities are manifold. Without blackface minstrelsy, there would be no American popular music as we know it. Before the Civil War, blackface was not necessarily racist. And Foster, once America’s most popular composer, was an empathetic observer of the enslaved Americans whose talents and energies he absorbed. As for Ives, he came from Abolitionist stock.

If Ives conceived the tapestry of his Symphony No. 2 as a knit fabric, if the symphony equally betrays American tears and schisms, it remains a work resilient enough to tell us truths about ourselves. Leonard Bernstein, whose knack for channeling the moment may have been his highest calling as a musical artist, belatedly premiered Ives’s Second in 1951. He also broadcast it and recorded it and proudly took it abroad, where in 1987 he recorded it again in Munich with a German orchestra. It all should have become a lesson and an inspiration.

But like Furtwängler and Shostakovich, Bernstein is unreplaced. American orchestras play Brahms and Schubert and Shostakovich. So far as American music goes, an opportunity to bear witness lies fallow. Or has the American experience simply not inspired concert music that binds a nation?

The post Furtwängler and Shostakovich, Bearing Witness in Wartime appeared first on The American Interest.

Is a New Kirkpatrick Doctrine the Answer?

Editor’s Note: This is the latest essay in our ongoing series, “The Foreign Policy Debate We Need.” Today: Giselle Donnelly, Michele Dunne, Shadi Hamid, Mark P. Lagon, and Gary J. Schmitt respond to Svante E. Cornell’s essay, “How Should America Deal with Authoritarian States?” Read Cornell’s original essay here.

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Giselle Donnelly

No Doctrine Before Strategy—Giselle Donnelly

Any evaluation of the wisdom of a revived “Kirkpatrick Doctrine” demands an answer to a fundamental prior question: How should the United States achieve its geopolitical goals in the 21st century?

And even that question presumes that the desired ends of American policy remain the same. Since 1941, the United States has striven to build a global, liberal order that protects the “homeland” and secures the lives of its citizens by preserving a favorable balance of power across the critical regions of the Eurasian continent, unconstrained access to the seas, skies, near-earth space, and  information domain, while fostering the growth and resilience of representative forms of governance—in George W. Bush’s summary, “a balance of power that favors freedom.” This was the approach outlined in Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” address, in the Truman Administration’s National Security Council Directive 68, and in most important statements of America’s role in the world since then. It was both the plan and rationale for U.S. global leadership. Yet is not clear that the Obama and Trump administrations—at least in practice—have adhered to this canonical policy. It is even less clear what is to come after the 2020 election.

This is to say that the original Kirkpatrick Doctrine, with its distinctions between “totalitarian” and “authoritarian” dictatorships, was a response to the problems of a particular moment, but, more importantly, embedded within a clearly understood geopolitical paradigm and a relatively robust domestic political consensus. These last two conditions are missing, still, three decades after the collapse of the Soviet empire and two decades after the attacks of September 11. Not only are we unsure who our adversaries are, we are unsure what victory looks like.

Augusto Pinochet’s Chile was ever the poster child for the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, its serial brutalities excused both by the need for an alliance in the Cold War struggle against Russian communism and by the prospect of an eventual democratic transition. American policy contributed much toward the “roll-back” of Soviet-aligned governments and movements in South America, but the book is still open on Chile’s transition, as recent protests indicate. The United States has welcomed and celebrated Chile’s turn to market capitalism—also coincident with the end of the Cold War—but that has done little to mitigate the class and racial structures that Pinochet represented. A return to authoritarianism is hardly out of the question; a new Kirkpatrick Doctrine must place more emphasis on democratic consolidation.

Moreover, the China-Russia-Iran-Turkey “Axis of Weevils”—to steal Walter Russell Mead’s snappy formulation—presents a more complex (if also less existentially frightening) geopolitical conundrum than did the Soviet Union. Today’s “non-aligned” autocrats have many more opportunities to play both sides of the fence, as indeed do even America’s best allies—one thinks of Great Britain’s dalliance with the Chinese on Huawei, very “unflattering” strategic behavior indeed. A 21st-century version of Kirkpatrick probably will require a more flexible set of benchmarks.

In refashioning the Kirkpatrick Doctrine for a new era, it is most critical to think through how to apply its measures to a world increasingly defined by China’s quest to be a “rule-making” great power. This is the critical test of the time. If Beijing is to be constrained by the American-made “liberal international order”—which is finally coming to be accepted wisdom—we will need a lot of help from problematic and authoritarian partners. And Beijing will hold much appeal for the corrupt elites of such states, both economically, in the form of plentiful Chinese investment, and ideologically, in the form of promotion of national sovereignty over democratic legitimacy. What’s needed is not so much a Kirkpatrick revival as a Kirkpatrick remix—once the DJ establishes a strategic playlist.

 

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Michele Dunne

Democracies (Still) Make the Best Partners—Michele Dunne

An American diplomat surprised me recently when we were discussing the U.S. “partnership” with an Arab state. “Democracies can only have real partnerships with other democracies,” she said; “relations with authoritarian states are tactical at best.” Her statement struck me as possessing a clarity that those of U.S. officials and foreign policy analysts often lack.

Svante Cornell’s essay on how America should deal with authoritarian states, drawing on Jeane Kirkpatrick’s seminal 1979 article, observes that too many policymakers and analysts put on ideological blinders when observing authoritarians. He rejects the stale values-versus-interests paradigm, pointing out that U.S. foreign policy often has tried to advance freedom and protect national interests simultaneously. Cornell is correct in arguing, like Kirkpatrick, that authoritarian regimes are not all equally odious. He proposes to judge how to deal with a government by three criteria: how it treats its population, what ideology motivates it, and its approach to the outside world.

What Cornell proceeds to do, however, is privilege ideology strongly over the other two criteria, landing him squarely in the very trap that he (and Kirkpatrick before him) identified. While Kirkpatrick railed against President Carter’s failure to see the evils of communism, Cornell proposes a new bogeyman in political Islam. His examples from the Arab countries show the same credulity he condemns in others, a willingness to ignore or excuse the outrageous and dangerous brutality of certain Arab regimes if they claim a superficial ideological affinity with the West against political Islam

Regarding Egypt, for example, Cornell accepts the claims of strongman President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi that he is effectively fighting jihadism, “normalizing” relations with Israel, protecting Christians, and playing a “constructive role” in Libya,” every single one of which can be strongly disputed. He ignores the massive brutality of Sisi’s regime—tens of thousands of political prisoners, hundreds of extrajudicial killings, rampant torture including sexual abuse, and thousands of disappearances—the very abuses he claims characterize egregious authoritarianism, and which also create perfect conditions for extremism. While deposed President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was far from an ideal democrat, the claim that he adopted a “one man, one vote, one time” approach is simply untrue.

Cornell’s determination to see Islamists as the new ideological enemy also applies to Morocco and Jordan, which he correctly notes are among the less brutal authoritarian governments. He fails to note that Islamist political parties play a major role in both countries, with one leading government in Morocco since 2011. He does not mention Tunisia, the sole success story of the 2011 Arab uprisings, in which the strongest political party is Islamist and has played a critical role in safeguarding the country’s nascent democracy.

Rather than using ideological affinity to determine how America should deal with authoritarian governments, I suggest adopting the American diplomat’s simpler idea. The United States is likely to have full, robust, and enduring partnerships only with states that are democracies. Democracies (including our own) have many flaws and will disagree with each other on many issues, but they share the basic assumption that government should be by and for the people. Authoritarian governments operate on completely different and nontransparent premises, making it more difficult to find common ground. With authoritarian states, the United States can have limited, tactical relationships that should vary in strength, warmth, and durability depending on how that state behaves in the world (including, of course, toward the United States) as well as how it treats its citizens.

Americans should by no means make unnecessary enemies of authoritarian states, particularly those that are relatively benign domestically and internationally. At the same time, Americans should not delude themselves about the motivations and actions of those regimes—and even worse, become complicit in them—out of the false hope that ideological affinity makes them true partners.

 

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Shadi Hamid

The False Promise of “Pro-American” Autocrats—Shadi Hamid

U.S. efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East have long been paralyzed by a unique “Islamist dilemma”: We want democracy in theory but fear its outcomes in practice. In this case, the outcomes that we fear are Islamist parties either doing well in elections or winning them outright. If we would like to (finally) get serious about democratic reform in the region, then we have to resolve this dilemma one way or the other.

The simple fact is that there is no way to both support democracy in the Middle East and oppose the participation of Islamist parties. If Islamist parties—most of which are nonviolent, accept the nation-state, and participate in the parliamentary process if allowed—are among the largest in their respective countries, then a democracy that excludes them is no democracy at all. A policy that views all Islamists as the problem can only end up justifying permanent autocracy. And there is nothing new about such an approach: America has consistently, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, stood by “pro-American” authoritarian allies. And as New York Times correspondent David Kirkpatrick documents in a recent book, even the supposedly Islamist-friendly Obama Administration gave the Egyptian army what amounted to a wink ahead of the 2013 military coup against a democratically elected Islamist government. 

Are we, as Americans, comfortable with consigning hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims to such a fate in the guise of anti-Islamism, which is essentially another way of saying they can’t be trusted to vote correctly? This is a moral question, but it is also a question of what’s in America’s long-term interests.

In his piece, Svante Cornell is admirably forthright about his premises. One such premise, drawing on Jeane Kirkpatrick’s classic if controversial essay, is that there is a fundamental difference between authoritarian and totalitarian states. But Cornell mistakes President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s regime for the former rather than the latter. Kirkpatrick characterized traditional autocracies as those that “do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations.” The Sisi regime and it supporters, however, do all these things, including encouraging citizens to inform on one another.

Totalitarian regimes, writes Cornell, are “murderous and predatory,” and indeed the Egyptian regime is unusually “murderous” even by autocratic standards; under Sisi, Egypt experienced one of the worst single-day massacres of the past century, with more than 1,000 killed. Cornell argues that Sisi has protected the Coptic minority. He hasn’t, as National Review’s Marlo Safi explains in considerable detail. Nor has Sisi embarked on religious reform or been the foe of extremism that he claims to be.

Sisi, in fact, has relied on the country’s clerical class to justify in explicitly religious terms the killing of protesters in a way his Islamist predecessor, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, could have never dreamed of. As former Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa put it, speaking after the aforementioned Rabaa massacre, “When someone tries to divide you, then kill them. . . . Blessed are those who kill them. . . . We must cleanse our Egypt of this trash.” That Gomaa and other pro-regime clerics would employ the kind of takfirist reasoning associated with ISIS—arguing that Morsi supporters were akin to heretics and therefore their blood was licit—belies Sisi’s self-styled portrayal as a beacon of “moderation.”

Cornell also cites the United Arab Emirates as one of the more promising Arab countries, in part because it is more secular. Yet this isn’t quite correct. What the UAE embodies is not “political Islam” in the traditional sense, but it is certainly a politicized Islam. As the leading American scholar of the Gulf, Gregory Gause, describes it, the UAE “represents a third trend in political Islam. Official Islam in the Emirates is tightly tied to state authority and subservient to it.” In short, seemingly liberal Arab regimes offer the false promise that repression can be wielded in the service of liberalism. But because politics and religion are inevitably intertwined in Muslim-majority countries, it is impossible to have religious freedom in the absence of political freedom. An authoritarian state will only be willing to allow religious expression that does not threaten the state. This should never be confused with “religious freedom” or “religious pluralism.”

What about authoritarian allies’ conduct abroad? Even the more “liberal” authoritarian states are “predatory” beyond their own borders. Take the UAE’s destructive role (along with Saudi Arabia) in the ongoing Yemen war, or that regime’s dogged support for a would-be dictator, Khalifa Heftar, in Libya. Or consider the fact that the UAE worked to undermineWashington’s (halfhearted) efforts to mediate between Sisi and the Muslim Brotherhood in an attempt to forestall an outbreak of violence after the Egyptian coup.

The notion that “pro-American” autocrats can be counted on to further American interests has been a mainstay of bipartisan foreign policy thinking, even though it’s been contradicted by actual events time and time again. Even the most casual observer can see that our reliance on authoritarian allies has not led to a more peaceful, stable region—if anything, the opposite is true. Authoritarian regimes are only good at providing an illusion of stability, and even then the illusion is a decidedly of a short-term nature.

Regime type matters. If regimes do not share our values, then it is difficult for them to be aligned with American interests over time, since values and interests are not, and should never be treated as, entirely separate. In other words, if liberal authoritarians are the answer to the question, then there is no answer. This doesn’t mean that U.S. policymakers should support Islamist parties, but it does mean that they should avoid taking sides in other countries’ electoral contests or buying into regimes’ self-serving claims that even nonviolent Islamist parties must be excluded by any means necessary. The maxim of “one man, one vote, one time”— that Islamist parties will cancel democracy after being elected to power—has never actually happened. (The one arguable exception is Hamas’s rise to power in 2016, but even that isn’t a clear-cut case, as Khaled Elgindy has argued).

If Americans believe in democracy at home, we should ask ourselves why. Some of those reasons are “procedural:” Democracy allows for peaceful transfer of power, particularly in ideologically polarized contexts; democracy regulates conflict and therefore contributes to peace and stability; democracy offers predictability, since losers of elections have the chance to fight, peacefully, another day. Such “minimalist” objectives of regulating conflict are even more important in a region like the Middle East defined by increasing levels of civil conflict.

Does this mean we should pay more attention to the faults of our autocratic allies then to adversaries like Iran or Venezuela? No. We should take both seriously. The reason, however, that many democracy promotion advocates focus on the former is one of practicality. Because they are our allies, and because they depend on the United States for security as well as economic and military support, we have more leverage over their behavior. And if we can use that leverage not in the naïve wish that they become democracies overnight but that they at least become less repressive, then we should, because we can. Doing so isn’t “just” in line with our ideals; it is also, ultimately, in our interests.

 

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Mark P. Lagon

Ideals Are U.S. Interests: Assessing Kirkpatrick—Mark P. Lagon

Our times merit reconsidering Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards” of four decades ago. Since 9/11, the wars on terrorism have succeeded the Cold War in offering a sweeping rationale for exempting autocratic regimes from U.S. shunning, based on their ostensible strategic value. Svante Cornell takes on a plausible exercise: an updated, sophisticated form of U.S. realpolitik—which would compare well with a President offering admiration for autocrats and populists, including those who align with great power threats to the United States.

Cornell aptly highlights Kirkpatrick’s most marked contribution: subtle insights into how totalitarian regimes, long after Hitler and Stalin, represent a distinct breed of autocracy—one more dangerous at home and abroad, in both aims and methods, than the traditional sort. Today the type is manifest in China’s use of facial recognition technology, social credit scores, and concentration camps for Uighurs. Cornell is also right that subtle statecraft should of course account for differences between various non-totalitarian autocracies.

Yet Kirkpatrick’s 1979 article is best known not for its apt subtleties, but for what it came to justify—the so-called “Kirkpatrick Doctrine.” To assess a doctrine of working with illiberal allies, just take “constructive engagement” with U.S. Cold War ally South Africa in the 1980s (about which I was wrong at the time, and I won’t blame youth). Far more than quiet diplomacy, of the sort Kirkpatrick advocated, the end of apartheid was advanced by comprehensive sanctions embraced even by Margaret Thatcher and the U.S. Congress under Reagan.

From its very opening, Cornell’s essay falls into the trap of suggesting U.S. ideals and interests are at odds, requiring working with authoritarians to fight more imminent dangers to America (like Iran or terrorists). Yet our ideals not only serve our interests. They are our interests. The problem is not an unsophisticated realpolitik, but realpolitik itself. Given its creedal nature, if the United States fails to stand for free expression, equal access to justice, and pluralism for all in the societies of its allies, its legitimacy to wield its power in the world is sapped. The President I served also fell into this trap, admirably calling for a world without tyrannies in his Second Inaugural of 2005—and then contradicting himself by close alignment with Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

On a personal level, I owe Jeane a great deal. As a mentor at Georgetown University and the American Enterprise Institute, she helped me start a career focused on human rights and international institutions. On topics for which she was known, and on those where only a closer circle knew her views, she was right about so much. She was right to be skeptical of the United Nations, including of its male chauvinism. She was right that the UN is like a legislature in which the U.S. government must engage and lobby. Unlike most fellow neoconservatives, she was right to oppose the invasion of Iraq, if privately.

Honoring her with her signature candor, she wasn’t always right. A nationalist, she felt a nation that couldn’t control immigration was hardly a nation—admiring Governor Pete Wilson, who did to the Republican Party of California what the current Trump posture will likely do to its long-term prospects nationally. She felt nationalism was the essential element of a strong democracy, like the United States and Israel. But what about when nationalist majoritarianism overtakes pluralism in such systems? Conservative intellects like Rich Lowry at National Review and Colin Dueck of George Mason University undervalue that concern.

For the thing she is best known—patience with friendly autocrats—she wasn’t on the mark. They aren’t meaningfully or sustainably friendly to U.S. interests, undercutting U.S. credibility as much as they inhibit their own people’s freedom to thrive. President Reagan’s own foreign policy evolved toward that realization—embracing democracy promotion as its core, and applying it to U.S. allies like Chile, Taiwan, South Korea, and Philippines. American interests and ideals remain inexorably bound together—whether at home, at our borders, or abroad.

 

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Gary J. Schmitt

Getting Realistic—Gary J. Schmitt

Svante Cornell’s essay makes the important points that “the nature of regimes’ ideologies matters, and American policymakers need to spend more time trying to understand them,” and that, with respect to policymaking toward these regimes, there are three key criteria: “how a regime treats its population, what ideology motivates that regime, and the regime’s approach to the world around it.” All true enough.

But for an essay that clearly understands itself to be more hardheaded about living in a world where liberal democracies are not simply the norm and authoritarian regimes of various stripes still exist, it falls short about what it means to be realistic in practice.

Take, for example, the short shrift the essay gives to the George W. Bush Administration’s view that promoting democracy would create a safer world for America—a policy, says Cornell, whose “results were not encouraging.” But is that the case? For all its problems, is democratic Iraq, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, determined to build weapons of mass destruction? Is democratic Iraq warring with neighbors? Was Iraq, after “the Surge,” relatively stable until the Obama Administration decided to pull out all U.S. forces? Or, is democratic Afghanistan, for all its flaws, the open training ground for terrorism it was before 9/11? Aren’t vastly more women and children receiving the education and opportunities that we associate with basic human rights than during the reign of the Taliban in the 1990s? One can rightly complain about the state of both Iraq and Afghanistan today, but it’s demonstrably and objectively the case that we are safer with both now being democratic.

Using Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards” as the underlying framework for much of his analysis, Cornell states that drawing a distinction between benign or even friendly authoritarian regimes and ambitious, hyper-nationalistic regimes is essential for sound statecraft. Broadly put, the former are essentially to be left alone, while the latter confronted as need be. It’s a policy distinction, he writes, that in its time “became known as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, and it profoundly influenced the Reagan Administration’s foreign policy.” And, indeed, Reagan did seem initially taken with Kirkpatrick’s thesis, arguing in a speech at the 1980 GOP Convention that: “[O]ne takes the world as it is, and seeks to change it by leadership and example; not by harangue, harassment, or wishful thinking.” But, of course, Reagan didn’t stick to that view, with his administration taking a rather direct hand in pushing out friendly autocrats in Asia and Latin America—not just “nudging,” as this essay has it. The point is, if the Administration had kept to the Kirkpatrick stance, it’s unlikely that any change for the better would have happened, with officials taking what they perceived to be the safe path of the status quo.

Such decisions are always judgment calls, of course, and mistakes will be made. But there will be an inevitable tendency under Kirkpatrick’s and Cornell’s view to see “national interests” as trumping “democratic promotion” in most cases, without assessing whether continuing ties with an authoritarian regime are truly necessary, partially necessary, or just a convenience. Moreover, there is always the question of what lies ahead. Policymakers, if they are being realistic, have to factor in just how reliable ties with autocrats will be given their uncertain claims to rule. According to Cornell, for many of today’s “traditional” autocrats, “Over time, they are likely to gradually develop in a more pluralistic direction.” Maybe. But as history suggests, when popular desires finally turn to political pluralism, as they inevitably do when reforms have been put in place that are inadequate to meet rising expectations, can or should American elected officials and policymakers ignore those ambitions so as not to risk U.S. ties to the leadership?

The answer, Cornell argues, has traditionally fallen between “two poles,” where “some believe it is America’s mission to promote freedom in the world . . . [and] others claim that foreign policy should be about national interest alone.” He then notes, “In reality, U.S. foreign policy has frequently tried to both advance freedom and protect the national interest.” As a factual proposition, this last sentence is more or less accurate. But the question is why. And the answer is that they are not totally distinct goals—or poles. As I have noted elsewhere, “there is plenty of fact-based scholarship that shows liberal democracies are more peaceful toward each other, more likely to be better trade partners, and less likely to adopt policies that create the internal distortions that lead to civil wars, coups, and mass migrations.”

To the extent a Kirkpatrick-informed analysis revives attention to the notion that “it’s the regime, stupid,” it’s to the good. But to the extent it leads to a too formulaic understanding of what in fact is in the national interest, it isn’t.

The post Is a New Kirkpatrick Doctrine the Answer? appeared first on The American Interest.

The American Interest During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This magazine has made clear that we see President Trump as unfit for office. Yet we take no solace in the current state of play. The President’s early minimizing of the danger and his disappointing address to the nation earlier this week—replete with jabs at allies, half-baked initiatives, and reference to that “foreign virus”—underscore the self-absorption and shortsightedness he has stamped on this administration.

Still, at times like these, it’s worth recalling the letter left in the Oval Office by George Herbert Walker Bush for the new President Bill Clinton in 1992. Bush’s handwritten note to Clinton included the lines: “Dear Bill . . . you will be our President when you read this note. . . . Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.”

Today, we should all be rooting hard for President Trump. We need him to succeed. The prospect of failure is jarring—that millions of Americans could become infected, that some hundreds of thousands could die. And this is a global pandemic; we need other countries to succeed as well. Reports of mass graves being dug in Iran, heart-wrenching accounts from front-line doctors in Italy—all of these stories focus the mind.

The role of expertise is fundamental. Many of us at TAI have been following Scott Gottlieb on Twitter. He’s the medical doctor and Trump appointee, now back at the American Enterprise Institute, who served for two years as head of the Food and Drug Administration. Gottlieb was informing us early on about the importance of social distancing, of how the costs of the Coronavirus will almost certainly be high. He also reassured us that with calm and resolve and good decisions we can get through this—and save lives.

In that context, we have been asking ourselves, “What can TAI, as a magazine of ideas, do to help?” None of us are experts in epidemiology or public health, and chasing the headlines has never been our comparative advantage. We have come up with three answers.

We can offer perspective. As our own Adam Garfinkle wrote earlier this week, to step back in order to get perspective from history is an acquired skill—and one that requires constant upkeep. And it’s not just historical perspective. TAI has always been on the lookout for the bigger picture; a global pandemic doesn’t change this. The coronavirus story is massive, and it could well transform many things from here on out—geopolitics and the global economy are just two that come to mind. But even a moment so grave and uncertain as this shouldn’t cause us to lose sight of the problems that existed before and may be with us long after. Our task, therefore, is to contextualize the new problems in terms of the old ones, and vice versa, in order to help us properly understand the challenges ahead.

We can also offer an oasis. Between Twitter rumors, private chat groups, 24-7 cable news, and an increasingly partisan and polarized press, we are witnessing a complex crisis being weaponized by factions in real time. This is exhausting, dehumanizing, and indeed dangerous. As the former French Ambassador to the United States Gerard Araud noted (on Twitter!), “Art is the only way out . . . when everything else—decency, compassion, common sense, dignity—is missing.” What we seek to provide with our culture writing is not so much diversion as nourishment.

Finally, we hope to provide a compass. TAI tries not to merely admire problems but to offer constructive solutions as well. Trying to rebuild and re-center our politics in decent, traditionally liberal principles remains our core mission. The problems revealed by the crisis point us to where work remains to be done. We will keep our eyes focused on this aspect of our mission.

More broadly, as individuals, we have to realize that there are moments that we all need to play our parts, as leaders and as citizens of all political persuasions and from all walks of life. While everyone should heed advice from the CDC, take all necessary precautions, and broadly engage in social distancing, we must not lose sight that we are all part of a broader social fabric. In Washington DC, for example, SOME (So Others Might Eat), the group that helps feed the homeless in the nation’s capital—a group that has a surplus of volunteers at Thanksgiving and Christmas—now has a shortage of helpers to make sandwiches and serve soup. Perhaps an elderly neighbor could use help with groceries in the weeks ahead. Opportunities to serve abound.

Two decades ago, 9/11 was a moment that put our nation to the test. Today, it’s the coronavirus. We all have to step up.

— The TAI Team

The post The American Interest During the COVID-19 Pandemic appeared first on The American Interest.

How Should America Deal with Authoritarian States?

Editor’s Note: This is the latest essay in our ongoing series, “The Foreign Policy Debate We Need.” Responses to this essay from Giselle Donnelly, Michele Dunne, Shadi Hamid, Mark P. Lagon, and Gary J. Schmitt will follow tomorrow. Read the first essay in the series by Ivan Krastev & Leonard Benardo here.

How should democracies deal with authoritarian states? This is a bipartisan problem that has confronted every American administration without exception. Answers vary widely, falling between two poles of a spectrum. Some believe it is America’s mission to promote freedom in the world in a principled manner; others claim that foreign policy should be about national interests alone, and that policymakers should deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it to be.

In reality, U.S. foreign policy has frequently tried to both advance freedom and protect the national interest. Foreign policy, after all, is largely driven by responses to events, where beggars can seldom be choosers. After 9/11, even the most principled democracy promoters realized the need to cooperate with authoritarian states to safeguard the American homeland. Conversely, President Donald Trump’s response to the Bashir al-Asad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria indicates that moral principles come into play even for the most dyed-in-the-wool realist. The George W. Bush Administration, for its part, tried to square the circle by claiming that the promotion of democracy would create a safer world for America. The results were not encouraging. Nor did President Obama’s approach—to “extend a hand” to avowed authoritarian rivals, while chiding allies for their democratic failings—improve the situation. Today, scholars and watchdog groups both point with alarm to a demonstrable backtracking of democracy around the world.

When and how, then, should America cooperate with authoritarian states, and how should it discriminate among them?  Neither traditional academics nor the think tank community have developed any helpful guidelines of late. But a classic essay does offer some clues.

In 1979, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick wrote “Dictatorships & Double Standards” for Commentary magazine, wherein she denounced the foreign policy of the Carter Administration. Her main criticism was, simply put, that Carter took too harsh a line on right-wing authoritarian regimes that sought partnership with the United States, while adopting a soft approach to left-wing revolutionary regimes. Carter, Kirkpatrick argued, had it backwards: America needed to differentiate between “totalitarian” and “authoritarian” regimes.

The regimes she called authoritarian certainly violated human rights and sought to cling to power—but they did not spew anti-American ideology, nor did they educate young generations to hate America. By contrast, the regimes she termed “totalitarian”—at the time, mainly of a communist persuasion and backed by the Soviet Union—did exactly that. Not only were totalitarian regimes America’s adversaries, but their policies in both education and the information space made their countries’ road to democratic development much more challenging. Authoritarian governments, she argued, could gradually evolve into democratic states over time; totalitarian ones might never do so. Thus, she argued, America should engage with authoritarian regimes, while confronting the totalitarian ones. This became known as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, and it profoundly influenced the Reagan Administration’s foreign policy, which Kirkpatrick later helped implement as UN Ambassador.

Forty years later, the Soviet Union is no more, and communism has been dispatched to the dustbin of history. Kirkpatrick’s doctrine has also been criticized for legitimizing polices, particularly in Central America, that undermined democracy to protect right-wing leaders. But how do her ideas hold up four decades later? Many authoritarian regimes that were allied with the United States largely did evolve into democracies, as countries as disparate as Chile and South Korea show. (The Reagan Administration did its part in nudging these allied countries toward democracy without sacrificing the relationship.) By contrast, those that fell into the totalitarian category, as defined by Kirkpatrick, have been notably slow to develop democratic institutions. This is true for Russia and the successor states of the Soviet Union, for China, and for communist-aligned states in the developing world like Angola, Ethiopia, or Cuba.

More importantly, Kirkpatrick’s crucial insight was that there are deep and policy-relevant distinctions between authoritarian regimes. Today, U.S. policymakers still cannot agree on what these guidelines might be. The distinctions that political scientists have identified within the literature on “hybrid regimes” are of little relevance to policymakers. What remains are democracy rankings like Freedom House’s annual “Freedom in the World” report. But even assuming such indices provide an accurate rendering of reality (a separate and important matter), they are not meant to be translated directly into policy.

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Jeane Kirkpatrick (Wikimedia Commons)

A concrete example: How should America approach Turkmenistan and North Korea? Both countries receive among the lowest rankings for political freedom in the Freedom House index. But there are crucial differences between the two countries. One constantly spews anti-American propaganda, operates labor camps, starves its population, builds nuclear weapons, engages in systematic smuggling, and lobs missiles over its neighbors. The other is a reclusive but neutral country, a secular state on Iran’s northern border that has good relations with the United States and occasionally cooperates with U.S. interests in the heart of Asia.

Another example: on the latest Freedom House Index, U.S. allies like Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates are ranked lower or on par with Iran and Venezuela. Even assuming this reflects reality, should America take a softer approach to Caracas or Tehran, and downplay these regimes’ systematic entanglement with terrorism and drug trafficking? Conversely, if freedom indices were to guide policy, should America take a harder stance on two pro-American states that actually help counter extremist Islamists? Only the most single-minded democracy activists would argue that U.S. policy should be determined on the basis of freedom levels alone. Yet democracy promoters frequently do argue that America should take a harder stance against authoritarian practices in pro-American states, while advocating greater engagement with hostile actors. This approach certainly informed the Obama Administration’s approach to the world, especially Iran, with dubious success.

A Kirkpatrick doctrine for the 21st century must begin by observing that authoritarian states vary greatly among each other, and then determine exactly which criteria should factor in policymaking. I propose three key criteria: how a regime treats its population; what ideology motivates that regime; and the regime’s approach to the world around it.

By definition, authoritarian states do not treat all their citizens alike. Some rule, and others are ruled. Such regimes can never be fully meritocratic, and they will inevitably apply restrictions on political speech and activity to maintain their own survival.  But beyond that, authoritarian states come in many shades and differ in how they approach their population. Some are quite simply murderous and predatory, but there are also more benign forms of authoritarian rule: sometimes called “soft” or “liberal” autocracies.

The former category is what first comes to mind when the word “authoritarian” is used: It conjures up images of Kim Jong-un, Bashir al-Asad, or Saddam Hussein. These most egregious authoritarian regimes lack widespread public legitimacy and are often built around, and serve the interests of, a minority constituency. Such regimes go far beyond targeting political challengers; they resort to repression to generate a climate of fear in large circles of the population. Opposition is scarcely tolerated and the threat of violence abounds. Political dissidents suddenly disappear or die. When push comes to shove, these regimes do not hesitate to kill their citizens by the thousands. While the Kim dynasty’s North Korea, Asad’s Syria, and Hussein’s Iraq are the most egregious modern examples, Iran and Vladimir Putin’s Russia also fit the bill: Witness their systematic killing of political opponents at home and abroad, and the fate of perhaps a 100,000 Chechens in the past two decades.

On the other side of the spectrum are what we might call the liberal autocracies. These are non-democratic governments that, while not permitting their citizens to elect their leaders, provide some protection for the rule of law and individual freedoms (as in 19th-century European monarchies). Twenty-five years ago, Francis Fukyama identified a “soft authoritarian” model in East Asia, and more recently, Fareed Zakaria contrasted liberal autocracies favorably to “illiberal” democracies, observing that rapid transitions to electoral democracy without a basis in strong institutions often degenerate into populist, divisive regimes.

The term “liberal autocracy,” of course, is only useful as an ideal type. Few such regimes fully live up to the “liberal” part of the term—but they still stand in strong contrast to the murderous regimes of the North Korean or Syrian type. More liberal authoritarian states often rest upon considerable public legitimacy, albeit derived not from elections but from dynastic lineage, tradition, or the charismatic authority of a leader. Legitimacy could even be a result of financial largesse and the provision of stability, which explains why so few oil producers experience revolutions. The point is that many authoritarian regimes focus considerable energies on ensuring they are supported by key constituencies. They may offer limited forms of political participation, and they often keep divisive ideologies like nationalism or religious extremism in check, garnering the support of minority constituencies.

It goes without saying that even the most benign autocrat will apply pressure on political challengers, the press, and civil society organizations when they pose a danger to the regime. Yet crucially, liberal autocracies do allow a limited civil society distinct from the state. Regular citizens, as long as they do not engage in politics, largely go about their lives normally. Challengers may be intimidated, muzzled, or even jailed, but they are seldom “disappeared” or outright killed as in the harshest regimes. Liberal autocracies often provide considerable public goods, too, and many have a decent record of helping to lift their population out of poverty.

Of course, in all authoritarian systems, the well-connected dominate business life and have privileged access to resources and state contracts. Political and economic power are frequently interconnected, if not altogether merged. Still, because more benign authoritarians have a vested interest in maintaining public legitimacy, they seek to establish a business climate conducive to foreign investment and to ensure that corruption does not spiral out of control. In short, the more benign authoritarian states endeavor to build efficient state institutions.

Of direct importance to American policymakers, the Middle East and Central Asia are home to a number of liberal autocracies, with regimes that prioritize stability and keep extremism in check while gradually, though not always successfully, seeking to facilitate economic development and build functioning state institutions. Examples include countries like the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Morocco in the Middle East, and Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Still farther east, China embarked on such a path under Deng Xiaoping, building a meritocratic bureaucracy and a state that succeeded in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Under Xi Jinping, however, the Chinese system appears to be reverting to a harder authoritarian system based on one-man rule, while forcibly interning hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities in “re-education camps.”

Some regimes, thus, cut across neat analytic categories. Take Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy that is aligned with America and sits on some of the world’s largest energy resources, but has simultaneously played a key role in boosting the Salafist ideology that gave birth to the violent, anti-American extremism plaguing the Muslim world today. More recently, the incoherence has been compounded: The new Saudi leadership under Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman is responsible for the bloody murder of a dissident in a consulate abroad, while also embarking on a project of authoritarian modernization that includes loosening some stifling limitations on civil rights. While regular Saudis have experienced greater freedoms, the crackdown on political dissidents has actually gotten worse. Saudi Arabia combines elements of the malign and (relatively) benign forms of authoritarianism.

Such ambiguous cases do not obviate the need for these distinctions, however. For ethical reasons as well as for the sake of national interests, America cannot and should not ignore how governments treat their populations. It should be wary of dealing too closely with predatory and murderous regimes, making exceptions only when the national interest overwhelmingly compels it to do so. By contrast, U.S. policymakers should be open to cooperating with more liberal autocracies, and identify ways to strengthen the liberal elements in their systems of government. But the way a regime treats its population cannot be the sole criteria determining U.S. policy. Only at our peril do we ignore the ideological nature of authoritarian regimes.

Kirkpatrick famously distinguished between authoritarian and totalitarian systems. The regimes she called traditional autocracies “do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations.” By contrast, totalitarian ones, such as revolutionary regimes motivated by an all-encompassing ideology, “claim jurisdiction over the whole life of the society and make demands for change that . . . violate internalized values and habits.” Kirkpatrick rejected the Carter Administration’s tendency to “accept at face value the claim of revolutionary groups to represent ‘popular’ aspirations and ‘progressive’ forces.” In the end, she argued convincingly, such revolutions tend to bring to power regimes that are equally if not more repressive than their predecessors, and motivated by an ideology hostile to the United States.

Kirkpatrick’s observation is as valid today as it was four decades ago. Too often, American policymakers have focused on the perceived repressiveness of a given regime, accepting at face value the claims of a regime’s opponents that they represent a democratic force. If a regime is authoritarian, the logic goes, its opponents must represent democracy. But that is frequently not true. America has repeatedly ignored the ideology behind political forces only to see it manifest itself fully only after they secure and consolidate power—with serious consequences both for American interests and local populations. If she were with us today, Kirkpatrick would no doubt have found the American embrace of “moderate Islamism” eerily similar to (and equally disastrous as) the Carter Administration’s approach to that day’s “progressive” and “popular” forces.

In Kirkpatrick’s day, communism was the totalitarian ideology that chiefly threatened America’s security and national interests. Today, that role has been taken over by the equally totalitarian ideology of radical Islamism. This is not to say that Islamism is monolithic, any more than communism was. But in all its manifestations, Islamism challenges America in the realm of ideas and seeks to undermine American interests and allies.

In a throwback to the Carter years, however, U.S. policy has treated these anti-American regimes and movements quite favorably. The Obama Administration refused to take sides in the 2009 “Green Revolution” in Iran, but was perfectly willing to express support for protesters against Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak two years later. Similarly, it embraced Turkey’s Justice and Development Party under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan even as it purged and jailed hundreds of secularist opponents from 2010 onward, but publicly chastised neighboring secular Azerbaijan over its restrictions on media and civil society. The Trump Administration has tried to reverse this embrace of Islamism, adopting a more hostile approach to Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, while showing more understanding for secular regimes, as in Egypt. But its internal incoherence undermines its policies: Whereas many in the Administration favor a harder line on Turkey, the President himself appears to disregard this and prize his personal relationship with President Erdoğan.

The election of Hamas in 2006 shows how totalitarian ideologues can use the democratic system to their advantage, only to abolish democracy once they are ensconced in power. Given Hamas’s record in Gaza and the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology, it should have surprised no one that Mohamed Morsi would seek to do exactly that in Egypt in 2012, following the maxim “one man, one vote, one time.” But in the spirit of the “Freedom Agenda,” the George W. Bush Administration had downplayed the Brotherhood’s deeply anti-American and anti-Semitic ideology to cultivate the organization. The Obama Administration then embraced it: Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper even went so far as to calling it a “largely secular” organization.

Going forward, America can hardly afford to repeat such errors. It must look beyond a procedural understanding of democracy, and take into account the ideology of regimes and political forces. As Kirkpatrick observed, political forces that “describe the United States as the scourge of the 20th century, the enemy of freedom-loving people, the perpetrator of imperialism . . . are not authentic democrats or, to put it mildly, friends.” This was true for the communists of her era; it is equally true for Islamists today.

Similarly, today Americans must consider whether a given regime or political force’s worldview is compatible with Western Enlightenment values. Do they promote a perspective of the world comfortable with the primacy of reason and experience? Or do they derive their views from a hateful ideology—whether a secular one like communism or ethnic nationalism, or a distorted interpretation of divine revelation, as in radical Islamism?

In the former camp are what Kirkpatrick defined as “traditional autocracies,” exemplified by regimes such as the monarchies of the Middle East or the secular states of Central Asia mentioned above. For too long, America has failed to fully value the states of the Muslim world that reject a role for radical religious ideology in their societies, and whose laws and education systems continue to be based on secular principles. Such states tend to be eager to participate in the world economy, and to look favorably toward engagement with the United States. Over time, they are likely to gradually develop in a more pluralistic direction.

Thus, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have made the promotion of harmony among religious communities a cornerstone of their government policies. Both states maintain a commitment to secular governance and have created national universities inspired by the American model. Uzbekistan, which is undergoing important reforms since 2017, has touted the concept of “Enlightened Islam.” Morocco and Jordan, monarchies with strong Islamic legitimacy, are not fully secular but do play an important role in promoting religious moderation. As for the UAE, its government has implemented important education reforms that have put women on an equal footing. Similarly, Saudi Arabia’s reversal of its earlier support for radical Islamism carries considerable importance, not least given the Kingdom’s role as the custodian of the holiest places in Islam. Whether the Saudi reform agenda can be sustained and ultimately create the conditions for modernization remains to be seen.

What is clear is that regimes motivated by Islamist ideology do not create such conditions, and do not tend to democratize. Even in “moderate” form, they continue to be driven by anti-American and anti-Semitic persuasions. Turkey, for example, may be more pluralistic than either Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, or the UAE. Yet President Erdoğan’s ideology means that Turkey poses a challenge of a fundamentally different character to America than those states do. While that does not mean America should sever relations with this NATO ally, the fact remains that it overtly peddles anti-American conspiracy theories and fills the airwaves with hostility to the West, something that must have consequences for U.S. policy. Meanwhile, countries like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, or the UAE may rank lower than Turkey in international democracy ratings. Yet they are countries in a hostile neighborhood that welcome American engagement, actively pursue cooperation with Israel, and encourage their citizens’ constructive interaction with the modern world. This difference matters.

Aggressive nationalism poses a slightly different challenge than millenarian ideologies like fascism, communism, and radical Islamism. Anti-American nationalism is increasingly a motivating force for both the Chinese and Russian regimes, as well as an ideology that helps their elites maintain power. This ideology makes a positive relationship with these states difficult—but not impossible—to achieve. Secular nationalists are generally less immune to reason than religious zealots are; thus, U.S. policymakers can at least try to negotiate rationally with Chinese or Russian nationalists, and seek to contain them if talks fail.

In short, the nature of regimes’ ideologies matters, and American policymakers need to spend more time trying to understand them.

The way authoritarian states engage on the international scene is a further point of divergence. It is true that democratic states rarely pose a threat to the international order, and that most countries that do are authoritarian. But it is crucial to distinguish between authoritarian powers that are revisionist or expansionist in nature, and those that accept the status quo in their neighborhood.

A number of larger authoritarian regimes—such as Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey—fall in the former category, pursuing foreign policies that have a destabilizing effect on their neighbors and on international security. As Robert Kaplan puts it in The Return of Marco Polo’s World, they increasingly behave like empires of yore, not nation-states in a rule-based international system. Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, and has been working hard for over a decade to expand its influence across the Middle East, from Yemen to the Mediterranean coast. Its designs have generated alarm and caused some of its neighbors to retaliate by sponsoring armed clients of their own, with devastating and protracted conflict as a result. Russia, similarly, has a revisionist and expansionist agenda, seeking not only to subdue the states that were part of the former Soviet Union, but to sow division and undermine Western states and institutions.

As for China, the picture is more blurred: On the one hand, China’s rise to international prominence has been based on its economic development and dependence on trade with the industrialized world. This has made Beijing considerably more interested in committing to international rules than Russia, for example, particularly if it can have a seat at the table to define them. But on the other hand, China’s rise has also been accomplished through systematic breaches of international norms, not least through the theft of industrial secrets and manipulation of currency. China is also assertively moving to establish its military predominance along its maritime perimeter, most obviously in the South China Sea. This has brought profoundly destabilizing consequences for its neighbors, from South Korea and Japan to the Philippines, Indonesia, and even Australia. China thus seems to be turning into an increasingly problematic and aggressive force.

Similarly, Turkey, traditionally a U.S. ally and a force for stability in its region, has lately displayed a more adventurist approach—sponsoring Islamist militias in the Syrian civil war, undermining the security of Israel, and bolstering the Muslim Brotherhood’s power grab in Egypt. Its policies in Syria brought it into direct confrontation with the United States.

By contrast, many equally authoritarian but less ambitious states have established themselves as constructive international citizens. Morocco, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and the Central Asian states all cooperate with Washington to counter radical Islamism. Kazakhstan, which has taken on an activist international role since independence, stands out for advancing initiatives for confidence-building in Asia, hosting the international Atomic Energy Agency’s Low Enriched Uranium Bank, and facilitating the Astana talks on Syria. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan actively work to help stabilize Afghanistan. Similarly, across the Caspian and on Iran’s northern border, Shi‘a-majority Azerbaijan plays a crucial role as the corridor for Western access to the heart of the Eurasian continent, while promoting religious tolerance and maintaining the strongest ties to Israel of any Muslim-majority country.

Similarly, Jordan and the UAE have proven key partners for NATO and America, contributing both to the conflict in Afghanistan and to military operations in the Mediterranean. Dubai, an important UAE financial center, has made serious efforts to ensure that its financial regulations help prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.

Even the controversial case of Egypt deserves mention. After the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt has not necessarily become more democratic than it was under Morsi; indeed by some metrics it has regressed. Yet Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has sought to fight the jihadi challenge in the Sinai, normalized relations with Israel, defended and protected the Coptic minority, and played a constructive role in the Libyan crisis. Moreover, he has sought to address the root causes of extremism by demanding change to the curriculum of Al-Azhar University, the Muslim world’s most prestigious establishment of higher education, which has increasingly been captured by radical ideology. On the international scene, Egypt under al-Sisi is a more reliable and more predictable actor than under Morsi. That does not mean America should ignore Egypt’s internal deficiencies. But neither should it fail to register the areas in which Egypt’s current regime is a positive change from its predecessor.

What, ultimately, are the policy implications of these distinctions between authoritarian regimes?

Regimes that tend toward liberal autocracies, are not motivated by anti-American ideologies, and play a positive role internationally should be viewed as partners that the United States can and should cooperate with. To the extent that such states welcome partnership with America, the U.S. government should reciprocate that engagement and build long-term partnerships that include security ties, economic and trade relations, and a dialogue on matters of good governance and human rights. The United States should not adopt antagonistic democracy promotion strategies or support regime change in such states; rather, it should seek to identify areas where U.S. assistance can promote good governance, improved accountability, and long-term liberalization in partnership with the government. In other words, U.S. policymakers should work with the government, not against it.

Of course, this is neither feasible nor desirable in the case of violent, predatory regimes that are motivated by anti-American ideology and play a destabilizing role in the world. With such regimes, it may be necessary to adopt policies of containment or rollback (to use Cold War terminology). But even here, support for regime change may be unrealistic or unwise. America may well need to apply antagonistic instruments of statecraft, such as targeted sanctions or support for regime opponents, toward such countries. And in cases like Venezuela, where a regime’s repressiveness combines with utter incompetence and criminalization to produce a failed state, regime change may in fact be the least worst option. But it should always be a matter of last resort.

The vast majority of regimes America deals with will fall somewhere in between these extreme ideal-types. They are likely to have unflattering as well as redeeming qualities. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are perhaps the most obvious examples. One is a NATO ally that is rapidly turning antagonistic toward the United States, while retaining some elements of pluralism and democratic governance. The other is a central actor in international energy politics, whose government is aggressively targeting dissidents while simultaneously correcting some of its past foreign policy misdeeds. Neither presents easy choices, suggesting that a cautious mix of sticks and carrots is in order, which is in turn only possible through a well-conceived engagement strategy. In the final analysis, America’s national interests should determine how it engages with a particular non-democratic state—and it is difficult to see how a policy resting solely on sticks rather than carrots would benefit U.S. interests in either of these two cases.

But, a skeptic might retort, doesn’t U.S. foreign policy already do this kind of reasoning? Perhaps, but all too often such assessments are done implicitly rather than explicitly, and on an ad hoc basis. It is not apparent to either Americans or foreigners how different calculations or criteria factor into policymaking. The result is an American policy that lacks transparency, and that applies different yardsticks to different countries. Large powers often get off the hook, whereas smaller states get slammed for democratic deficiencies of which larger U.S. partners are equally culpable. Moreover, because there is no single yardstick, domestic lobbies can have improper influence on policy. Therefore, some basic typology for differentiating among authoritarian states is necessary for U.S. policy to be consistent and predictable.

Post-Cold War dreams aside, authoritarian government remains the norm in large parts of the world, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon. The sooner American policymakers make peace with this reality, and devise constructive policies to deal with it, the better.

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