Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 70

Around the World with Bernard-Henri Lévy

On Friday, September 28, Bernard-Henri Lévy—a member of The American Interest editorial board—sat down with Charles Davidson and a group of TAI authors in Washington, DC for a roundtable discussion on the state of America and the world, followed by a one-on-one interview with Jeffrey Gedmin. The following transcripts have been edited for clarity.

Charles Davidson for The American Interest: Let’s begin with general impressions of your visit to the United States this time around. What have you seen here, and what do you think it means for the rest of the world?

Bernard-Henri Lévy: I don’t know who can pretend today in this crazy world to have wisdom. And it’s a special moment for America these days, to be honest. I’ve been here for a few days in Washington, DC and New York. I know America a little: I wrote a sort of neo-Tocqueville book 15 years ago called American Vertigo, and I visited every single state of this country. I captured, I hope, part of its spirit. By the way, in this old book, I had the feeling of what could happen here, on the Left and on the Right.

But I must confess what I’ve seen these past few days has been unpredictable, and so astonishing. My impression is, number one, that we are facing a serious situation. I say that with all the humility and all the love I have for America. As you know, Adam Gopnik qualified me 20 years ago as the most anti-anti-American of the French intellectuals. So for me anti-Americanism is a sin, it’s a sign of fascism in France. And I love America. I have to say that as a preamble.

Nevertheless, I have an impression that the worst of the Right and the worst of the Left are coming up. I have some friends on the campuses, I have some friends in the Administration, and I read the newspapers. And this country was once so wise, so removed from the hard political games of Europe—where we have an extreme Right and an extreme Left, the two populisms. America once seemed spared from that stupid game, except at the margins. Now, I have the feeling that the two camps have a real force dragging them to something which could look like what happens in Europe.

Number two, I have the impression, as Tom Friedman says, of a strange tornado which is catching and swallowing so many people. I speak of my friends whom I’ve met over the past week. I see them grasping the table, trying not to be swallowed by the tornado. Wise people. Brilliant. This is a country with the best academics, the best scholars, the best think tanks, the best foreign policy experts in all the Western world. But this tornado is swallowing nearly everyone.

Number three, there is a fear. People are afraid in Europe also, but we are accustomed to that. At the worst, we had Nazism, communism, so we are right to be afraid. In America, there was political cold blood. Now I feel a fear.

Number four, if we go to hot actuality: Yesterday, the streets of Washington, DC emptied. There was this hearing on TV all day. I’m not an expert of Roman history, but I think that the last Senate of the time of Romulus Augustulus—the last Roman emperor, a sort of cartoon character—might have had debates of the same sort. The world is burning, Erdogan and China and Putin are pushing their advantage, and the whole Senate is discussing if a man was drinking beer or not, 36 years ago. You may think whatever you want about Mr. Kavanaugh. And I am, myself, convinced that his nomination to the Supreme Court is very bad news for women, their cause and their rights. But, frankly, from an outside perspective, there is something not very sane in the whole situation.

So the tornado, the last Senate of a great empire, this strange feeling of fear—these are my impressions. But what is marvelous in this country is that even when you have reasons to despair there are always reasons to hope.

What I can also observe is that what Erdogan and the President of America call the deep state—which they say is their enemy, plotting their defeat—maybe in fact exists. Maybe it exists for the best, and maybe there is a great resistance of the deep state against the craziness of what is happening all around. By the way, it’s true everywhere, not only in America. I think that we have never seen so many clinically crazy or problematic leaders all over the world. Boris Johnson is really a clinical case, Erdogan is really a clinical case, and you have others. But it’s a new thing and they are right to be afraid of it, this deep state.

I’ve been coming to America for 50 years and I’ve never seen so much energy, so much wisdom among civil servants, academics, and so on. I don’t want to give names, but I saw a lot of people who seem conscious of the strangeness of the situation, of the huge responsibility they have. They are taking it so seriously and are in charge of the best of America—on both sides. I saw some people from the Democratic Party, the head of a think tank for instance, who was willing to have some honest Republicans on board. And the reverse, some Republican think tanks wishing to gather fair Democrats together. There is a sense that the boat is in the middle of a big tempest and that we need more solid and wise captains, a good crew on both sides, forgetting vain partisan quarrels.

So, I’ve never felt in America—and I came here even at the time of Nixon and Watergate, you know—such a wish for wisdom in the elites of America. A wish for bipartisanship and cold blood. So, what fills me with hope is this deep state resisting the cyclone, the tornado. This is my impression of these last days.

I was reading the New York Times and the Washington Post this morning, as I do every day. As Hegel said, “The prayer of the philosopher is the reading of the newspaper.” And in the inside pages, there were such big events happening! Really the world is burning. What is happening in Turkey is huge. What is happening in China, and even with some American companies in the realm of artificial intelligence, is crucial. Putin is not clinically deranged. He has a clear idea of his goal and of his mission.

And in the most powerful country of the world, the Senate spends a whole day on a story that is 36 years old. It can happen in France, too, to be completely honest. We spent not one day but two months transforming the bad misconduct of a bodyguard of President Macron into a state affair. Everybody speaks of it as the French Watergate, but it’s not. It is not a state affair. It’s a bad story, a story of great misconduct, a mistake by the President, but the whole of France is only concerned today with the performance of the actors of this drama. How does he act? How does he react? What is his demeanor when he goes out of the hearing?

The question of the truth is less important today in France than the question of the performance. Politics all over the West has been transformed into a sort of telenovela, as you say in Miami, with actors playing their own parts and being judged with a thumbs up or thumbs down, like in Rome. Today in France, the first question that a big high-ranking politician asks of his crew after a big television meeting is, “Was I good?” The same is true here, I suppose. Not “Did I convince?” Not “Did I say the truth?” No, it’s: “Was I good? How did I look?”

This is the situation of the West, the collapse of politics.

TAI: Can you give us a broader report on France, and in particular Macron? His approval ratings currently are abysmal. What explains that trend?

BHL: What explains it is probably that a lot of French people feel cheated on the merchandise. They believed that they had voted for a sort of Trump. A lot of Frenchmen believed that.

TAI: A sort of Trump?

BHL: Yes—anti-system, anti-parties. There are some people in France who probably made all the difference, who believed that he was anti-system, anti-establishment, anti-elite, wanting to destroy the old world and so on. They discovered that of course (and thank God) this is not the guy. He knows that in the old world there is some good which has to be kept. He knows that not everything in the establishment is to be thrown in the bin. So a real part of his voting bloc believe that they have been cheated. They voted for Macron on the populist agenda and he’s not a populist at all. He is the big adversary of the populists, and the next European election will be played 100 percent on this agenda: Macron versus Orban. The dividing line, the real question in Europe today is who will have the majority of the European Parliament: Macron or Orban?

And Orban, by the way, does not think that he is just a marginal little Eastern player. He has the aspiration to be at the center, to be the tutor and inspirer of others in Europe. A lot of French voters discovered that Macron is the anti-Orban, that Macron is the one who resists Putin and populism, so of course they are disappointed and they feel cheated. This is one of the reasons for his going down in the polls. The other reason is the Benalla story, but the main thing is that they discovered a much wiser man than they thought—someone who was not ready to destroy everything.

Now I would just like to add that it does not have so much importance because one of the differences between France and America, for the good of France, is that we don’t have midterms. We don’t have the sixth of November in France, which means that legitimacy is given once. If you are a populist, you think that legitimacy has to be refreshed every week, every day, every hour, every minute. But for a real democrat, legitimacy is given once and it will be refreshed five years later.

So Macron will continue to act and reform, to stay cold-blooded, until the last minute of the last day of his mandate, whatever the polls say. It’s true that there is a scandal, but it’s false to imagine that it might prevent him from acting. It might if he was like others Presidents in democratic countries who only think of their re-election.

I may be wrong. Macron is not my friend, he is my President, but my feeling is that he does not work this way. He is not obsessed with how to maneuver in order to have employment and the euro in a good position in four years when he runs again. He wants to do great things. He wants to leave a positive mark on the history of France and of Europe. This is why he is a great guy, in my opinion, even if he has some problems.

TAI: You referred earlier to the deep state as a kind of stabilizing factor. In American politics, “deep state” is usually a pejorative term; no one wants to be called a part of the deep state. In your eyes, does a deep state and the stabilization it provides conflict in any way with Tocqueville’s vision of America, which you wrote about 10 years ago? Does Tocqueville still have something to say about American democracy today?

BHL: Of course, I would far prefer for America and for the West in general, for institutions to work fairly, with good balance embedded in the institution. But we are in a really special moment. The new world created by the internet creates a completely new mess. Honestly. The institution that Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant, and other Anglo-Saxon writers invented does not match with the new world of instantaneous, quick reactions and the transparency of the internet. Benjamin Constant, who was one of the founders of modern liberalism, said that one pillar of democracy was the right to secrecy. He had a big quarrel with Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, who preached that you never have to lie, under any circumstances, and that there is no need for secrecy.

There was a famous scenario imagined by Kant. Let’s suppose that you have an innocent taking shelter at your house, and some bad cops come to ask you, “Is the innocent in your home?” Would you deliver him to the bad cops or not? Of course, Benjamin Constant says no and Immanuel Kant said yes, because if he’s there you cannot lie. Liberal thought supposes all these distinctions: the respect of secrecy, of privacy, and so on. Today, privacy is completely blown out. Secrecy is a crime. If you have secrets, it means that you are a criminal.

This moment will not last forever, because institutions will adapt. Probably, the internet masters will themselves correct and tame the monsters that they invented. I don’t know. But at this special moment, what I provocatively call the deep state—which is really just decent civil servants, wise intellectuals, partisans of the two sides who want to work together—is necessary. It’s good that they keep a cool head. And when I read in the Anonymous op-ed of the New York Times the story of the letter that had been stolen from the office of the President, when I read the Woodward book, I say, “Thank God there are some people—Republicans, Democrats, whatever—who are here to try to keep America safe and guard its dignity.” So I call that the deep state by provocation and joke, because it’s the phrase of Trump himself and of Erdogan, but it means something.

We are in an emergency, clearly. America and Europe both, outside our borders, and inside our houses. There is a fire in the house. Our leaders are burning the furniture. When they are gone we might find the house empty of anything good.

TAI: If what’s happening in the western world is now happening here, then, what has changed? Is the United States just catching up with the rest of the world? Is it a problem within America, or something that has come creeping into the American system from outside?

BHL: No, I think that there is a world phenomenon. Craziness at the head of states, for example, is often seen in emerging countries. Distrust in democratic institutions and liberal values becoming normalized, becoming the ordinary belief—it’s like we are in the 1930s. In the 1930s the big tendency all over the world, from Japan to Germany, from France to the Arab world, from Iran to wherever, was the common conviction that liberal values were bad.

When you really look at the time when fascism emerged, the common thread was not that people hated democracy. A lot of them hated it, but even those who loved democracy had to make the observation that it was dead, deprived of flesh, deprived of soul, incapable of defending itself. I could quote so many examples. Even in America, “America First” was not only Lindbergh, there were a lot of wise and good Americans who were in the America First movement in the mid-30s. They thought that liberty, freedom, and democracy were collapsing everywhere, so let’s protect the American fortress from the mess which is prevailing everywhere else. We are in such a moment today. A seminal moment. I don’t know if it is America who created that, or America which is contaminated by what happened outside. It is a general tendency.

And there is a club, which I call sometimes for fun, the club of testosterone: guys like Trump, Putin, and Erdogan. They respect each other. At the G7 in July, Trump said that the one who does his job the best was Erdogan. He praised Erdogan, much in the way that he said before the election that Putin gets an “A” for leadership and not Obama, who was a disgusting, weak man, according to Trump. So you have this world tendency, this club of the so-called strong guys who are in reality probably very weak guys. I dream of a psychologist or a novelist who could make the story of all this time come to life, and show what is really happening in the minds of these guys.

TAI: Earlier you were discussing America being deranged and distracted, focused on how much beer someone consumed 36 years ago. Can you elaborate on the global consequences of an America that’s so inward-looking? Does it matter? Are we still influential in Europe, and what are your concerns if America continues on this way for the foreseeable future?

BHL: It usually matters. Europe is a depressive old lady who attempted suicide twice: once in 1914 and once in 1939. And both times, there was a good guy who came and rescued Europe and prevented her from committing suicide. If today Europe was again tempted to madness and there was no President Roosevelt or an American establishment to prevent it, we would commit suicide. So of course it matters, and it matters everywhere else.

I was in Kurdistan one year ago, on September 25, the day of the referendum. I saw physically, with my naked eye, the result of the American withdrawal. It meant Abrams tanks piloted and conducted by Iranian paramilitary troops, bombing the best allies of the West. It was a disaster. The Abrams tanks delivered by your country, in the hands of hooligans paid by the Iranians and killing the best force for stability—along with Israel— in the Middle East. And America let that happen, dropped these agents of order.

Then again, of course I can understand that Americans could think, why should we be the guardians of the world order? This is not a despicable question. But the reply is, if America is not the guardian of the world, the keeper of its brother, then the world goes to pieces. Europe and the rest.

You are the shining city upon the hill. You billed yourself as a new Jerusalem and a new Rome. I was not on the Mayflower, and perhaps your ancestors were not either. But they claimed that mission and it’s difficult to escape it. There is a great quote of a French writer called Paul Morand who said, “Les américains sont des Romains involontaires”: Americans are involuntary Romans. Involuntary like the kings of Israel who did not want to be kings. They wanted to hide and run away, but they had to be kings. This is the fate, this is the nobility, the highness of America.

TAI: You oppose Brexit, and have said that it was bad for both Britain and Europe. First, can you explain why Brexit will be bad for Europe? And to follow on the earlier question, about the future: If in the near term we have a Europe minus Britain, with America in relative terms less engaged and a Russia in relative terms more engaged, what does that Europe look like five or 10 years from now?

BHL: Collapse. Before ten years’ time. Brexit is a catastrophe for Europe. The economic factor is not the most important. Frankfurt or Paris will be the next hub for finance and you already have some boutiques figuring out how to attract money from London to  Paris and Frankfurt. This is not an unsolvable problem. Finance, economics, trade, all that will be solved, albeit with a few weeks or months of disorder at the border.

The real disaster is the one in the souls. English liberalism made the spirit of Europe. We always say the engine of Europe is France and Germany. It is not true. The real fuel, the real machinery, the real spirit was sparked in London in 1945 between the war cabinet of Churchill and the city of London. Liberalism, liberal values, open society, free markets, rule of law: All these principles are not German or French, they are British. And one of the main founding speeches of the European Union is the 1946 speech of Winston Churchill in Zurich. He was not so much a European, Churchill, but he gave a big part of the inspiration.

So if we lose England, we would lose one of our three legs, and with two legs, you don’t walk when you are a continent.

And if America withdraws, if America stops believing in NATO and the automaticity of defense, you have a man, Putin—and what I say is not polemic—who knows what he wants. He has a clear agenda. He is not stupid. His agenda is to dismantle Europe, to provide assistance to anyone who wants to get in trouble with the European Union. Tsipras, at the peak of the crisis between Greece and Europe, made two trips to Russia. One of the proposals Putin made was to print the drachma, the old currency. If you decide to go out of Europe, Putin proposed, we will provide the new banknotes. Orban too made a pact with the devil. There is a real infiltration today of Putinism inside Hungary. Hungary went out of the totalitarian nightmare and now there is a sort of revenge of totalitarianism.

So Putin has this agenda. I don’t know how many violations of European airspace there have been in the last two or three years by Russian planes, but this is a real problem for the Baltic states. He has an agenda, he has a program, he wants to take revenge on the Europe of John Paul II, Lech Wałęsa, maybe François Mittérand, all those who destroyed the great Russia. And if America is in retreat, if the good Popperian and Smithian spirit of England dries up, then I think we will see a strange Europe, Putinized. We already have in all European countries a Putin party. All the extreme Right parties in Europe are pro-Putin. The extreme Left are pro-Putin too and many cohorts in the regular Left or regular Right are pro-Putin too. It makes a lot of people!

TAI: You’ve spoken about Putin, you’ve hinted at but not gone into detail about Erdogan. But the largest and most powerful totalitarian state at this moment is China. And the way the Chinese look at things, in the long term, is that they can work with people like Erdogan, Putin, and smaller actors in Europe and possibly cause the collapse or at least the decline of America.

And of course, in America, China’s seen largely in terms of the Indo-Pacific. But are we headed for something worse than what Europe’s been through, something truly global? Because China’s whole Belt and Road initiative aims at creating a new Eurasia, and they look forward to leading it. And there are people in Putin’s camp who think that Russia should actually ride on China’s back to make America less involved in European matters so that Russia has an advantage. Then there is Erdogan, who is also looking at an old order being restored: an Ottoman-centered order, an Islamic world that is slightly more modern in the sense of technology, resources, and money but at the same time, has all the same pathologies that the Ottoman Empire had.

You’ve been here a few days. Do you find awareness of these global ideological and philosophical challenges here? After the Second World War, it seems there was much more awareness about the need for a new world order.

BHL: I cannot say about America but my feeling is that there is not enough awareness. Because you are right, this is the phenomenon of our time and the topic of my next book. You have five powers who have been great empires that collapsed: Ottoman, Arab, Persian, Russian, and Chinese. And they all dream of a revival. They were big empires with great, flourishing civilizations. They were destroyed by intruders, by the West, whatever, they were destroyed. And now, they are facing a sort of “divine surprise,” as we say in France. Might it be possible that for the first time in human history, an empire that has collapsed can revive? It never happens. When you look at the history of empires, from Montesquieu to Spengler, it never happens. But today, you have five big guys, members of the club of testosterone, who say: What if it were possible?

Among these five, the one which is particularly dangerous is the only one who has money: the Chinese. I think that the Chinese threat has usually been underestimated, even by scholars in America. I remember a program I did 10 years ago on a TV show here. The consensus was to say, “Come on, China, was never a real empire, they were never a military empire, they are pacific,” which is true. As you know, until the 15th or 16th century, there was a law in China that somebody who made a ship more than, say, 100 meters, which was able to go beyond the cape of Madagascar, would be condemned to death. This was the wisdom of the Chinese empire. The admiral Zheng He disobeyed this law because he wanted to make a real fleet able to conquer the world.

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(Danielle Desjardins for TAI)

A lot of scholars in America, like in Europe, were close-minded, trapped in this paradigm of a China that might be a trade empire but never a military one. I think that this is wrong. History has more imagination than men, as Karl Marx said. The time of admiral Zheng He can be passed and we can have a China that is aggressive on all fronts, and with a lot of money to offer to Erdogan and Putin, who are beggars.

But my deep belief is that it will not work, for any of them. It will not work because to really make a durable, lasting empire, you need to have a sense of the universal. This does not happen frequently in the history of mankind. You need to have the ways and the means and the language to address mankind in general. This is what the West did. For the worst, sometimes; for the good, more often, I think. This ability to speak under the cone of universality, none of the five we evoke is able to do that.

The Sunni Muslims tried, you had some in Sudan, a man called Hassan Al-Turabi in the 1990s whose program tried to reconcile Islam with universality. He failed, he lost power. You have some people around Putin, Eurasian theoreticians, who learned their doctrine from the Prague linguistic circle of the 1930s, Roman Jakobson and so on. They tried to find a way to reconcile a sense of the universal with Russian history; it does not work. So my hope, our hope, I feel the last hope for the West, is that nobody today is able to take our place. We have competitors, they are aggressive, but they don’t have the means of their ambition.

TAI: Speaking of ordering principles and how to replace, say, a world order that the United States may no longer be willing to support, what’s the source of your pessimism about Europe itself? If you take the EU, even without Britain, it’s still a bigger economy than the United States, it’s a bigger population, and it’s certainly at the same technological level. So what prevents Europe from becoming a more important factor? Is it just the divisions among the countries?

BHL: In America, the people achieved a very rare thing. It cost a lot, by the way—look at the Civil War—but you built continental patriotism. By the victory of the unionists against the confederates, you built a state where you can come from Texas or from Nebraska, you can be white or not, you can be of any faith there is, and still adhere to a common faith, which is patriotism. I saw that just after September 11, when you could see American flags on every house. This is America, and it’s a credit to America. In Europe, we are not up to this. There is no European patriotism; there is no European spirit. Europe has no flesh, no face, and as General de Gaulle said, no phone number.

So what remains? Look at our bank notes, the euros. Compare them to yours. On a bank note, you’re supposed have to have a grand man or grand woman embodying the spirit of the new patriotism. When the euro was created, we were unable to decide if it would be Goethe, or Dante, or Blaise Pascal or whoever, so what did we put on the currency? We chose broken bridges, or as Martin Heidegger would say, roads that go nowhere. That is crazy. Such a currency says a lot about the country, by the way. I understood a lot about America when I discovered what is written on the dollar, the three Latin verses and why they are there.

In Europe, we have this crazy currency. We don’t know who the President is. We don’t know the bureaucracy in Brussels. This is a point for the adversaries of Europe! So Europe without a face is doomed, and it is so doomed that I make a prediction in my book: If there is not a real wake-up call, if there is not a real saut en avant, a jump ahead, the euro will collapse.

There is no example in modern history of a common currency that works without a common political agenda. If you look at the past three centuries in the West, you have six examples of invention of a common currency. The Swiss franc in 1848 and the Italian lira both worked overnight because there was political unity. No question. All the currencies existing before disappeared instantly. Then there were two currencies, the currency of what was called the Latin Monetary Union and the Scandinavian Monetary Union, created in 1865 and 1873, which collapsed before the crises of 1929 because there was no common policy, no common tax, no common budget, no common law of labor.

And you have two other common currencies that worked. One is the German mark and the other is the dollar. But when you look at the history of the dollar, you can see that the dollar worked so-so until the Civil War. Before the Civil War, a lot of different currencies floated around the country. You had some francs, you had some thalers, you had a lot of currencies coming from Europe. The real victory of the dollar was after the Civil War, when there was federalism, a common policy, and so on.

So the euro could be like the dollar if there is a political leap forward, but it is five minutes to midnight. If not, it will disappear and you will see in the coming days what will happen with Italy. Italy is going to submit its budget for the next year. It will not work. Mr. Salvini and the populists in Italy are suddenly playing with fire, and this could be one of the beginnings of the end for the euro. That’s why I am pessimistic. After that, I continue to believe because I am optimistic, because I’m a fighter, because I’m a devoted European, because I believe that if America retreats, we have to count on Europe. I continue to hope that the spirit of Dante, of Goethe, of Robert Schuman, of Vaclav Havel prevails.

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Danielle Desjardins for TAI

After the group discussion, Bernard-Henri Lévy sat down with Jeffrey Gedmin for a follow-on interview about the crisis of the West.

Jeffrey Gedmin: I wanted to ask you about Donald Trump: Do you think he is more symptom or cause of the current turmoil? How did we get here?

Bernard-Henri Lévy: I think he’s a symptom. First of all, in my next book, which will be released in February, I demonstrate that the retreat of America does not begin with him. It started before with Barack Obama, with Syria, and even before that. Trump might be the beginning of something, but he’s the end of something also.

Number two, he’s a symptom of a world phenomenon, which is the rise of populism everywhere, the despising of the elite, the despising of intelligence, the dismantlement of the multilateral order inherited from the war. Trump does not have enough strength enough to create all that; he is run by the wave, the wave takes him.

JG: What do you say to a hypothetical Trump voter who says, “I think Iraq was not a success, I think the 2008 financial crisis was a big problem, the bankers went free and the little guys did not, and President Obama confused me completely with his transgender bathroom policy, so I just don’t trust the Democratic or Republican Party as much as I did 20 years ago.” That’s shorthand, but how do you respond to that kind of voter?

BHL: I respond to them, alas, that they will be cheated even more. For example, the financial crisis that is to come might be much worse than the one of 2008. At least in 2008, you had on board some women and men who knew how to maneuver, who had some ideas and some command of the situation. We might face a crisis without anyone in command, and these voters you evoke, good-faith voters I’m sure, they might have a very difficult awakening.

JG: When you talk about Brexit and the future of the European Union, specifically, I wonder: if we have Britain out, less America, and more Russia, does this mean a dysfunctional, weak Europe, or does this mean democratic Europe in jeopardy? In other words, is this a crisis of democracy, or is this just a weaker, more dysfunctional continent, which we might not like but can live with?

BHL: No. What I described means a new world, it means the closing of the blessed parentheses of democracy, it means a new sort of order where authority, identity, nationalism, reduction of the human being to his roots, will prevail against liberty, emancipation, and so on. It is a new world, so of course this new world can work, but we will breathe infinitely less well in this new world than in the one we have known since 1945. It will be a bad world to live in, and in Europe, some of us who lived under the boot of communism know exactly what it means. The most lucid of them don’t want to return to that, but we will return.

JG: Under these circumstances, what do you think the shape of a post-Merkel Germany could start looking like? Because we’re talking about structural issues internally and structural issues externally, and the relationship with the United States for the Federal Republic was very important for decades. It’s changed in the past couple decades, but maybe it’s changing more quickly now. Do you have specific apprehensions as a convinced European, as a Frenchman, as a French Jew? What does the shape of Germany look like in the next 10 years?

BHL: A moral “tutorization” of the decent Right by the extreme Right, and the moral “tutorization” of the decent Left by the extreme Left. There will be a polarization on the two sides, which will be a disaster for Germany, a disaster for Europe. It will be a disaster because when the Right does not draw the line with the extreme Right, it is swallowed by the extreme Right. Same on the Left. If you let the line be confused, you are swallowed. There are some laws of political physics which are absolutely unbreakable. If the Right does not put Chinese walls between herself and the extreme Right, the extreme Right wins. This is the history of Europe.

The resistance to fascism in Europe has always been the Right, but only when the Right holds firm, when the Right wages merciless war against the extremes. Today, I have seen the beginning of the contrary in Germany. You see the party, the coalition around Merkel, afraid of PEGIDA, afraid of the AfD. This is suicide.

JG: Now some people in Germany say that Angela Merkel’s mistake was to move the CDU too far to the center or Left on issues like gay marriage or on borders, and that she opened space to the Right. You know this line from Franz Josef Strauss, who said, “Between me and the right is the wall, I occupy this space.” Is there some truth to that tactically?

BHL: I don’t know if I am the most capable person to speak about political tactics. Probably there is some truth to this. I think that Merkel did well personally, on borders and refugees. She did well according to democratic values, she did well for the prosperity of her country, she did well for the economy of Germany and Europe. Maybe it will have some bad consequences in the short term. This isn’t important. What is important is the deeper current: Does it drive Germany back to the old ghosts of the past or not? We’ll see, I cannot predict that.

JG: You said convincingly that Viktor Orban has large ambitions, that he doesn’t see himself just as a man of his country and region. How do you understand his vision of so-called “illiberal democracy”? What does that aspire to, and what would Europe look like if Viktor Orban and his allies had their way?

BHL: Democracy traditionally means the power to the people, plus the rule of law, plus human rights. This was traditional democracy. Today, we are facing the rise of a new concept of democracy, which says that the rule of law is not important, that human rights are out of fashion, and that the only main commandment of democracy is the rule of the people. It’s a conception of democracy which is consistent, but which is the opposite of all that we believed in as democrats in America. It’s a new regime, and it may work, but it keeps only one of the three pillars of the former democracy. So is it still a democracy? Probably not.

JG: The populists per definition attack the establishment, so we’ll finish up and attack elites. Are there any mistakes that you think the establishment and elites have made the last five, 10, 15 years?

BHL: Of course.

JG: What are they? What are the primary mistakes that are legitimate grievances of populist voters?

BHL: To think that Europe would build itself automatically, to think that we could just take a nap on the backseat of the train of history, and that the train will arrive at its destination mechanically by its own motion. This was a big mistake, maybe our worst mistake. We should have told them that there is no automaticity in history, that there is no sense of history, that men and mankind does it itself by efforts, by will, by reason, and so on. We made a huge mistake to forget that.

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Ending the Impasse the Trumpian Way

The Oslo Accords, signed 25 years ago in Washington, held out the promise of an historic breakthrough to Israeli-Palestinian peace. For the first time, the two primary rivals in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the bitterest, who had declared that they would never talk to each other, began intensive negotiations that lasted until 2000, started again in earnest in 2007-08 and sputtered anew in 2013-14. A breakthrough failed to emerge, but the two sides exchanged formal recognition and significantly narrowed the differences between them. They continue to cooperate more or less effectively in security concerns and Oslo helped unlock the door to a formal treaty of peace with Jordan. The many critics of Oslo protest too much. Nevertheless, the remaining gaps between Israelis and Palestinians have proven significant and, so far, insurmountable.

Today, the entire “Oslo peace process” appears to be on life support, hanging by a thread, with prospects for a “two states for two peoples” solution as remote as ever. Some believe that it is actually more of a “rest in peace process” at this point, killed by a lethal combination of the Palestinians’ relentless rejection of every possible proposal for peace, Palestinian terrorism, Israel’s ongoing settlement policy, and the hardline policies adopted by its recent governments. Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu no longer expresses explicit support for a two-state solution, and it took President Trump nearly two years to do so grudgingly. The ongoing split between the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank—the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinians—and Hamas-controlled Gaza means that Palestinian President Abbas could not sign a final peace agreement even if he were so inclined.

The Oslo Accords were a framework agreement that set out the parameters of a negotiating process, not a peace agreement. They were thus intentionally silent regarding the nature of a final agreement, a reflection of the fundamental divides that existed between the sides from the beginning. For the Palestinians, an independent state was the preordained outcome of the Oslo process, something that did not require negotiation; at most some details of implementation remained to be worked out. The decades-long failure to reach a deal to establish a state, accompanied by ongoing occupation and expanded settlements, all undermined Palestinian faith in the possibility of an acceptable negotiated outcome.

For Israel, an independent Palestinian state was one possible outcome of Oslo, maybe even a likely one; but it was one that could only emerge as a result of negotiations involving significant Palestinian concessions on several important issues. More generally, from Israel’s perspective this possible outcome was predicated on the Palestinians’ ability to meet two crucial conditions outside of any negotiating table: the establishment of an effective government in both the West Bank and Gaza; and a proven ability to prevent terrorism against Israel. The Palestinians have failed royally on both accounts. Indeed, the horrific terrorism of the second intifada, closely following PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat’s rejection of dramatic Israeli peace proposals, decimated Israel’s peace camp. It has yet to recover.

With the negotiations stymied for years by the sides’ contending claims, the Trump Administration is seeking a way out of the impasse—as it is wont to do in a variety of areas—by breaking things. As an overall approach to foreign policy, breaking things is fundamentally misguided and usually untenable. It also tends to reflect a lack of professional sophistication and an inability to identify and process complex realities. Sometimes, however, when frozen orthodoxies become obstacles to any possibility of progress, it may be necessary to break things. But they have to be broken properly, and the problem with the Administration’s actions to date is that they do not appear to be part of a coherent strategic approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

The breakage so far is best described as a series of isolated steps designed to undermine fundamental Palestinian positions. Each of the Administration’s actions may have been appropriate in its own right, but they were taken without having established an appropriate diplomatic context or any indication of an impending need for countervailing concessions by Israel. It still remains unclear if any pressures on Israel to produce concessions in due course will be forthcoming, leading some to speculate that the Administration thinks that only a thorough crushing of the Palestinian position will produce peace. If that is the Administration’s view, it is highly unlikely to produce an outcome it desires.

The recent breakage began with Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the transfer of the U.S. embassy there. This was little more than a much belated recognition of a decades-long reality; Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital for 70 years, and everyone knows it. But the diplomatic symbolism is nevertheless of enormous importance. Had the Administration been pursuing a coherent strategy for promoting peace, it would have granted Israel this victory as part of a negotiating process in exchange for significant concessions. Conversely, some would argue—correctly in my view—that the necessary progress in the peace process would probably not have been forthcoming, as had been the case in the more than two decades since Congress first passed the legislation mandating the embassy move, thus aborting the move. Even in the absence of a balancing concession from Israel, the recognition move was simply the right thing to do. Moreover, balance in an ongoing negotiation need not be achieved in lockstep.

The Administration’s actions did not, however, end there. Trump claimed that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital took the issue off the negotiating table, a patently specious statement, but one which, if true, would have constituted a further severe blow to the Palestinian claim to a capital in East Jerusalem. But then Trump himself, along with other senior Administration officials, gave the lie to the President’s own claim, repeatedly stating that U.S. recognition did not prejudge the final status of Jerusalem. Palestinian concerns about what appeared to be a totally one-sided dismissal of their position on one of the core issues were not allayed, however. The result was that the Administration’s conflicting messages demonstrated once again the lack of a coherent strategy, letting each side nurse grudges or engage in wishful thinking, as the case may have been.

The Administration then began trying to break two other deeply entrenched Palestinian positions: their unique definition of refugee status; and the related claim that the refugees enjoy a “right of return” to all of Israel, including areas that the Palestinians themselves acknowledge will remain on Israel’s side of the border in a final agreement.

By way of background, the Palestinians and the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) define refugees not just as original persons displaced, the internationally accepted standard, but all of their descendants ad infinitum. Only a few tens of thousands of the original refugees from the conflict in 1948-49 remain alive today, but this novel definition serves to increase their numbers to over five million and to strengthen the Palestinian claim to a “right of return.” Diplomatically, this “right” is based on a creative interpretation of UN Resolution 194 from December 11, 1948, which merely states that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors, should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.”

UNRWA is the only UN agency ever created to deal with a specific refugee issue, marking a huge Arab and Palestinian diplomatic success. All other refugee issues worldwide are dealt with by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. At a time when there are many millions of recent refugees around the world, including Syria, where over half of its pre-civil war population of some 23 million people has been displaced, UNRWA is a corrupt and ossified organization whose very existence perpetuates the refugee problem it was designed to resolve seventy years ago.

To upend these Palestinian orthodoxies, the Administration announced an end to American financial support for UNRWA, its primary source of funding, as well as of all direct assistance to the Palestinians. The problem, yet again, was that the Administration did not appear to have a comprehensive policy in place that included proposing alternative mechanisms for providing assistance to the Palestinians. For all of its myriad faults, UNRWA does provide vitally important services, including education, healthcare, and food, and the cutoff in aid is likely to result both in a humanitarian crisis and heightened hostilities. Large numbers of young Palestinians, who may no longer have schools to attend and ever grimmer prospects of meaningful employment, and whose families are increasingly impoverished and hungry, will have even less to lose. It remains to be seen whether the European Union and some Arab states fulfill their pledges to make up for lost American aid. Their record to date is not encouraging.

The Administration then decided to challenge the ultimate Palestinian orthodoxy: the inevitability of a fully independent state as the sole possible outcome of negotiations. To this end, it raised the long dormant idea of a Palestinian-Jordanian confederation: two essentially, but not quite, independent states. Jordan is an established state, with a citizenry that is approximately 70 percent Palestinian by origin. A Jordanian-Palestinian confederation is therefore not beyond imagination, but few experts believe that it has any prospects of happening until after an independent Palestinian state has emerged and the two countries then decide to form a confederation out of enlightened self-interest. Be that as it may, the very fact that the Administration raised an alternative to a fully independent state constituted a severe blow to the Palestinians, setting them back decades in terms of U.S. policy.

The final blow to the Palestinian position, at the time of this writing, was the Administration’s decision to enforce longstanding Congressional legislation and close the Washington office of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The ostensible reason was the Palestinians’ refusal to engage in meaningful peace talks and their stated intention to turn to the International Criminal Court to charge Israel with alleged war crimes. The closure has few practical consequences for the Palestinians, whose relations with the U.S. government are conducted through a variety of more important channels. It does, however, symbolize the dramatic downturn in Palestinian fortunes in the United States following the Oslo breakthrough. It may be hard to recall today, but the Palestinians had struggled for decades to achieve any American recognition of their cause, even a willingness to talk with the PLO, long considered a heinous terrorist organization. The opening of the office was part of an historic breakthrough in U.S.-Palestinian relations, as successive Administrations increasingly came to recognize the legitimacy of at least some Palestinian positions. U.S. recognition turned the PLO, and subsequently the PA, into legitimate actors both in the international arena and the negotiating process.

Taken together, the Trump Administration’s actions constitute a rout for the Palestinians, the near complete collapse of a decades-long strategy designed to promote relations with the United States, which they have viewed as a prerequisite for achieving the greater goal of an independent state. In effect, the Administration has decided to play power politics, coercing them into returning to the negotiating table on more realistic terms. In so doing, it should be pressing the Palestinians to face up to the biggest question of all, which few have been willing to confront honestly since the Oslo process began: Are the Palestinians willing to accept any solution whatsoever that requires dividing the land and living in peace alongside a Jewish Israel? In other words, are the Palestinians determined to achieve territorial redress based on 1967, or are they still fighting the war over Israel’s very existence that began in 1948?

So far so good, actually. If a two-state solution is to be achieved, breaking rejectionist and self-defeating Palestinian positions is essential and long overdue. Two critical questions remain unanswered, however. First, is the Trump Administration congenitally capable of successfully waging a coherent policy of diplomatic coercion? And second, as already mooted, does Trump wish only to break Palestinian things, or does he intend to upend some long existing Israeli orthodoxies as well? We still don’t know.

Diplomatic coercion is a legitimate approach. To be successful, however, it must be part of a coherent and concerted strategy, based on a sustained, determined, and intensive effort, attributes not normally considered to be the Trump Administration’s primary forte. It must also include positive inducements for the other side, “carrots” as well as “sticks.” It is not possible in the real world to just beat people over the head and hope thereby to achieve one’s ends. It is far more likely to generate rage, resistance, violence and counter-violence, and so be on balance counterproductive.

Furthermore, although the overall U.S.-Palestinian power equation is, of course, very lopsided, this is not necessarily the case in terms of their relative resolve. Very often in international politics, the balance of resolve outweighs the balance of power. For the Palestinians, the issues in dispute engage their most fundamental interests and beliefs, ones they have pursued with uncompromising zeal for decades. For Trump, they are just one more set of foreign policy issues competing for his very short attention span. A relentlessly determined Lilliputian may only have to outwait a distracted giant, in this case for maybe just over two years.

The Palestinians claim that Administration actions reflect an absence of American evenhandedness. They are correct, of course, if ingenuous. Israel is a close ally; they are not. But that is precisely why establishing and maintaining a constructive and ongoing dialogue with the U.S. government has been so important for the Palestinians. As was the case in earlier negotiations between Israel and Egypt and even Israel and Jordan, the Arab side knew that the road to Jerusalem lay through Washington. Only if the U.S. government credibly promised to insure Israel against the risks it faced would Israel in the end agree to take the risks required to seal a deal. The Palestinians well understood the dynamic and, following Oslo, achieved changes in Israeli positions through the framework of U.S. mediation. That remains the case today: Without a good working relationship with the U.S. government, not despite but because of close U.S.-Israeli ties, Palestinians’ chances of achieving their objectives are nil.

It might thus might have behooved the Palestinians to rethink at least some of their orthodoxies and negotiating positions, consider where they may have erred and what changes they might make. In typical form, however, the Palestinians responded with wounded fury by digging in even further, denouncing the Administration’s actions, besmirching its motives, and even seeking to delegitimize it. They also announced a cessation of all contact with the Administration, seemingly forgetting who the superpower is and who is a small and increasingly isolated actor, even in the Arab world.

Despite the cessation of contact, for the first time the Palestinians recently heard prospective good news out of Washington. Trump stated that it is now the Palestinians’ turn to “get something very good,” presumably from Israel—the seemingly logical next step in his transactional approach to foreign policy. To sweeten the intimation, Trump even expressed some support for a two-state solution. He has, however, elaborated no further and Administration spokespeople have since “walked back” both statements—leaving all of us still in doubt about what the strategy is, or even if there is one worthy of the term.

Whatever its thinking, if it can be called that, one thing remains clear: If the Administration truly wishes to achieve progress, not just break things, it must shake things up on the Israeli side as well. There need not be complete symmetry in the Administration’s actions toward the two sides, but much as its recent actions addressed frozen Palestinian orthodoxies regarding Jerusalem and refugees, so it might now wish to address some of Israel’s frozen orthodoxies, both in regard to these and other issues.

The following are three possible options for doing so. What they have in common is that they all upend the longstanding presumption that the issues addressed can only be resolved following a final peace agreement; these options, by contrast, provide partial solutions today. Still, all three would have a dramatic impact on Israeli public opinion, especially coming from a U.S. Administration perceived to be unusually pro-Israel. In offering the Palestinians the prospects of immediate and concrete achievements—less than they seek, but important nonetheless—the proposal seeks to create solid Palestinian buy-in to the negotiating process.

Option I: The first such option, already highly controversial but less so than the next two, has to do with the establishment of a Palestinian state. Past Administrations have stated U.S. government support for this outcome, but have deliberately refrained from committing to specific borders so as not to prejudge negotiations between the parties. If the Trump Administration wishes to stir things up on the Israeli side, it could partly change this long-standing approach and state that it does not recognize Israeli sovereignty—and call upon Israel to renounce any such claims—over the approximately 90 percent of the West Bank that lies east of the separation barrier, with possible reservations regarding specific locations (all sides accept that Gaza would be part of a Palestinian state).

Although such an American declaration would not meet Palestinian demands, it would constitute an important indication of the seriousness of the U.S. commitment to a viable two-state solution. At the same time it would still leave Israel sufficient room for negotiations on final borders, necessary both for substantive and tactical purposes. No less importantly, it would constitute a moment of reckoning for Israel’s right-wing, forcing it to begin thinking about actual borders and lines of separation from the Palestinians.

Option II: A second, more controversial, option would be an explicit statement by the Administration that it supports the establishment of a Palestinian capital in at least parts of East Jerusalem. The Administration could also call upon Israel to make a similar statement.

Jerusalem is a uniquely complicated and sensitive issue for the entire Jewish and Muslim worlds, and much of the Christian one as well. A declaration such as this would shock Israel’s right-wing. Indeed, it would shock Israelis of nearly all stripes, and would force them to confront a bitter truth: that the Muslim world cannot live with sole Israeli control over Jerusalem and that some division of the city—to address Palestinian political demands, as well as accommodations regarding Muslim holy sites—will be necessary. Prime Ministers Barak and Olmert already recognized the need for such wrenching concessions and made dramatic proposals to that end. The Muslim world, similarly, will have to recognize that Israel and the Jewish people, having regained sovereignty over all of Jerusalem for the first time since Second Temple times, must retain control over much of the city. Various press reports indicate that some Arab leaders, including the current Saudi Crown Prince, are ready to accept this reality.

Option III: A third possibility, arguably the most controversial, would upend the existing orthodoxy regarding the timing and sequencing of the refugees issue and “right of return.” Instead of having to await implementation of the final agreement, the Trump Administration could propose that Israel begin allowing a small and controlled return of refugees to those areas of the West Bank that it already does not control today, and will not control in any permanent agreement: areas “A” and “B” (some 40 percent of the territory), mutually agreed parts of “area C,” and an unlimited return to Gaza.

An American proposal along these lines would have a dramatic impact on Israeli public discourse, forcing it for the first time to come to grips with the refugee issue. If there is one issue in Israel on which there is a wall-to-wall consensus, it is opposition to the “right of return,” which the public considers a formula for Israel’s national demise. In practice, both Barak and Olmert were willing to accept a limited return as part of a final agreement, reportedly up to 10,000 a year for ten years. Getting the Israeli public to accept even such limited numbers today, following the second intifada and ongoing violence over the years, would be extraordinarily difficult.

To make this proposal minimally palatable for Israel, it would have to be made contingent on three major Palestinian concessions: renunciation of the principle of unlimited “right of return,” restoration of PA rule in Gaza, and an end to violence. As a first step, returnees could be limited to refugees currently residing in Jordan, and might then be expanded to additional countries over time should the process prove successful. Jordan has a particular stake in resolving the refugee issue, and its effective security services could vet the returnees and help ensure their peaceful intentions. Any returnee found in areas of the West Bank other than those designated would be in violation of the plan and could be deported.

Israel’s consensus in opposition to the “right of return” is matched only by the Palestinian consensus in favor of it. To date, no Palestinian leader has been willing to publicly forgo this “right” defined in unlimited terms, even while Palestinian negotiators have quietly recognized that a complete return is unrealistic. This proposal would thus force the Palestinians to confront a long overdue and truly agonizing dilemma, whether to accept a concrete proposal for a limited return of refugees today, or continue adhering, probably forever, to the impossible demand for an unlimited return. It would provide the PA with an immediate and tangible achievement, which it could “sell” to its public and which would show, contrary to the popular image, that the PA can achieve Palestinian objectives.

All three of the proposals would be electrifying for both sides and would likely be rejected today outright. In Israel, however, an overwhelming majority, in excess of 90 percent, staunchly opposes a bi-national “one-state solution,” even though this is precisely what the policies of Israel’s right-wing governments are leading to. A small majority still supports various versions of the classic two-state solution, despite a nearly all-pervasive despair over the prospects of it ever happening; its numbers would swell rapidly, probably reaching the approximately two-thirds level it has enjoyed in the past, if the public believed once again that prospects for peace were realistic.

Much of Israel’s public already lives in a psychological state of de facto separation from the Palestinians, has never visited the West Bank (and certainly not Gaza), and has rarely, if ever, even had a significant personal exchange with a Palestinian. A declaration that Israel does not claim sovereignty over the parts of the West Bank that lie east of the security barrier is therefore something that large majorities of Israelis could support.

Jerusalem and especially the refugee issue are far more sensitive. Although a large majority of Israelis oppose a division of Jerusalem, the taboo was broken in the negotiations in 2000 and 2008; most Israelis today rarely visit East Jerusalem. But the proposal regarding the refugee issue would only grow legs if it were tied tightly to the tough Palestinian counter-concessions mentioned above.

The Palestinians’ self-defeating fear of interim measures turning into permanent ones has left them paralyzed, incapable of moving forward, so they will undoubtedly find reasons to oppose these proposals, too, even though they clearly serve their interests. With Mahmoud Abbas, the last of the founding PLO fathers, now well into his 80s and with no clear heir apparent, the Palestinians are rapidly approaching the end of an era. A power struggle, which may be violent and prolonged, is likely. The more than decade-long split between the West Bank and Gaza is a Palestinian nightmare that has resisted numerous attempts at reconciliation and reunification, but a leadership transition may hold the key to resolving it. Projecting bold initiatives into a time of leadership transition among the Palestinians may well be more than the traffic can bear, but if done properly it would shape the outcome of that process in such a way as to make genuine progress more likely.

That would be extremely useful, for after decades of inconclusive diplomacy, many despair of the two-state solution ever becoming a reality. There is, however, no other known solution to the conflict that realistically achieves the two sides’ primary national objectives: for Israel a predominantly Jewish and democratic state, for the Palestinians an independent state of their own.

Nevertheless, supporters of the two-state solution must acknowledge a difficult reality, one that some would argue challenges the two-state solution paradigm altogether: namely, the likelihood that a Palestinian state will prove no more successful, moderate, democratic, or peaceful than any of the some two-dozen other Arab states already in existence. To the contrary, decades of experience with the corrupt and feckless Palestinian dictatorship in the West Bank, the PA, and the extremist, murderous Hamas theocracy in Gaza, give reason to believe that a Palestinian state is far more likely to be an impoverished, radical, and irredentist one, engaged in some degree of ongoing conflict with Israel long after peace is formally contracted. A Palestinian state is vital not because it is a panacea, but because every other alternative to the two-state paradigm is even worse.

Critics typically make the argument that a two-state solution is essential for Israel because demography would otherwise present it with an unacceptable binary choice. Israel, according to this mantra, can accept a binational “one-state solution” in which an almost immediate Arab majority ensures that it loses its Jewish character; or it can continue to deny Palestinians the right to vote for Israeli institutions and lose its democratic character.

Reality, as usual, is more complex. In real life, gradations of democracy and discrimination characterize all democratic polities. Millions of Americans, residents of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam, for example, territories that have been part of the United States for over a century, cannot vote in Federal elections, yet few would seriously charge that the United States is not a democracy on that account. Nine European countries are officially Christian, including the United Kingdom, in which only a Protestant can inherit the British throne. In all Western countries, Sunday is the official day off, and Christmas is a national holiday. Even if a two-state solution is not achieved, Palestinians would continue to vote for their own institutions, as they already can today—when their leaders are so good as to actually hold elections—and to enjoy far greater freedom of expression than their brethren anywhere else in the Arab world. The quality of Israeli democracy would suffer in the long run, as it already has, but the binary choice is simplistic.

Israel cannot, however, win the demographic race, no matter how the figures are stacked. Already today, some 40 percent of the combined populations of Israel and the West Bank are not Jewish, a ratio that holds nearly constant projected out to 2060. If one includes Gaza, there either already has been a Palestinian majority for some years, or depending on the data, there will be by 2025. The Zionist movement never identified the percentage of Israel’s population that must be Jewish for it to constitute the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” but no imaginable definition meets this objective if 40 percent of Israel’s population is not Jewish.

Israel is now entering an electoral year. For the Israeli public, in many ways, things have never been so good. The economy is humming and the overall security situation is satisfactory, at least for the immediate future. Israel is a global center of high-tech innovation and, impressions to the contrary notwithstanding, has relations today with more countries than ever before. In the absence of what the public perceives to be any realistic prospects for peace with the Palestinians, regardless of Israel’s government or its positions, it is focused on domestic quality of life issues. Moreover, the opposition parties lack a charismatic leader with any realistic prospects of victory, as well as a practical peace-related platform on which to campaign.

The foregoing proposals would have a dramatic impact on Israel’s electorate and turn the upcoming elections into what they may be anyway: one of the last opportunities to elect a government committed to a two-state solution before the current reality truly becomes irreversible. If the Trump Administration adds a concerted effort to break Israeli orthodoxies to its efforts to do so regarding the Palestinians, progress may be possible. Sometimes you just have to break things; but always you must have a knack for putting them back together again. 

For a detailed account of the benefits of the Oslo Accords and the peace process from the U.S. perspective, see Robert Satloff, “Oslo at 25: Looking Ahead,” The American Interest (November-December 2018).

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Sailing Across a Room

When we discuss art forms indigenous to America, we usually meant to name some genre or sub-genre: jazz, the Western, film noir. Obviously, jazz did not just fall out of a box one day in New Orleans or St. Louis; African musical streams influenced it. But there is nothing like a proper jazz work in Africa’s musical history, so jazz becomes an American conceit despite its far-flung antecedents.

When it comes to American painting, influences are far flung as well, in this case with a pronounced European flavor. They were doing it first; we were doing it later. And then we were both doing it in such a way, mutually aware of the others’ efforts, that even the mid-century Abstract Expressionist era, when America was in the driver’s seat in the art world, was a time when European post-Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Spanish Cubism held a lot of sway. Just by looking at a painting one could not, most of the time, readily identify where it was painted. Except, that is, for the work of Edward Hopper, who was painting 75 years ago as no American was—really, as no one anywhere in the world was. Hopper became a kind of genre unto himself, offering unique if perhaps accidental insight all of these years later into a disconnected world.

Hopper was not a prolific painter; he left us fewer than 400 works in a lengthy career. Born in Nyack, New York, in the summer of 1882, he lived to be 84, with success taking a long time to come, the bulk of it arriving in his 50s. His stuff was simply so different that it took critics a long time to learn how to “see” it. Hopper himself cared enormously about techniques of seeing that were preludes to painting. He was, for example, a movie buff who enjoyed sitting in the balcony for the perspective it gave him.

The long wait for recognition did not amuse the artist. Consequently, as the awards rolled in later in life, Hopper often turned them down to show his resentment over a system that had caused his undue neglect for decades. He had no particular need for critical buzz anyway and no problems with silence. Not surprisingly, then, he loved Ralph Waldo Emerson. The silence proved useful with the subject matter of his work, which flowed in part from his having grown up studying the sea and its rhythms in Nyack, where yachts were built. People in such places come to understand notions of fluidity, movement, pitch, and roll in ways that the non-seafaring do not. For a painter who was going to still movement, if you will, in so many famous canvases, understanding what was being stilled, and how to still it, was crucial.

[image error]Nighthawks (1942) is the most famous Hopper painting, the basis for his original meme, if one wishes to be waggish about it. Looking at it now, it doesn’t appear nearly the portrait of loneliness and isolation that it was generally taken to be at the time. We don’t know, for instance, that nothing is being said between these people at this late night diner scene; indeed, the employee seems to be saying something to the man with the woman in the red dress. But there is no question that in 1942, before the momentum of the war had shifted for the better, Nighthawks communicated a kind of dark weariness and quiet compared to normal social interactions.

Arguably, both the people in Nighthawks and those who saw the painting when it was new are far healthier socially than people are today. We don’t sense the same contrast between an abundance of face-to-face normalcy and a scene like the one Hopper painted in Nighthawks. Social media displaces the real with the mediated, and the anonymous. Nowadays emotional schizophrenia reigns for many, who think in terms of Facebook photo-ops instead of spontaneous experience. There is no growth from real human connections, only a photo facsimile of it slapped up, passed around, and above all judged—and presumed judged. It’s all a lot closer to how those four people in Nighthawks seem to relate to one another.

Perhaps one of these diner habitués is killing a couple of hours before getting a morning boat to somewhere. Perhaps the couple talked long after a theater date and need to cap it off over a hot coffee. Maybe the employee felt near to liberation from his shift and looked forward to a piece of breakfast apple pie at sunrise as a reward. These people might not be dancing a quadrille with each other, but this is no depiction of societal fragmentation either.

Hopper’s 1943 Hotel Lobby, on the other hand, does suggest a kind of fragmentation—or rather several kinds. It is therefore more a painting for our times.

There is an episode of the original British version of The Office that is centered on a training day for the workers of the Wernham Hogg Paper Company. These are people who do not find fulfillment in their jobs, in large part because they do not find fulfillment in their lives at all, whether in their friendships, romantic relationships, or career choices. They are imprisoned by a fear of pushing away parameters that they’ve had a hand in erecting. Hence, for this episode, the characters are shot framed within hard lines: the frames of a door, or a window’s edges. And that, precisely, is what Hopper seems to have had in mind with Hotel Lobby.

Painting was becoming ever more nonrepresentational in the United States at the time. Hopper could seem an anachronism with his ever so slightly rigged realism. He exhibited some traits of European portraiture, of a certain vivid scene-catching, but with washed out colors, his anchoring solid lines acting as dividing marks between people in a work like Hotel Lobby.

Hopper loved his windows, and yet none are present here. The viewer is situated in an open door space, or perhaps a porch or foyer that leads into the lobby room depicted. A thin baize carpet directs our eye toward a couple who immediately give us pause, in more ways than one. An older woman is seated in a ruby-red dress, with a black fur wrap and black hat, as if she’s been caught mid-change between a funeral and a night out on the town. Her feet intrude upon the baize rug, which feels like an intrusion upon visual flow, kicking our perspective up to the man standing beside her, presumably her husband, in a suit, coat draped over his arm like someone wishing to go somewhere. There are stairs behind him. They could be waiting for their daughter to come down—who knows?

A still life painting hangs above the woman, mirroring what we perceive—or think we perceive—as the status of this relationship. But the devil—and he’s a good one, in this case—is in the details between these two, which Hopper uses to undercut our first impressions. The woman’s head is cocked in such a way that even from the lower perspective, her gaze is as close to parallel as possible with the man’s. She’s not just sitting in the chair, she’s leaning back in it. They have to wait to leave, for some reason we’re not aware of; they clearly have not been waiting for a long time and seem to be enjoying a nice conversation. How often now do we go to a café or restaurant, look up, and see two people seated at a table together, each staring at their phone? If you’ve never stopped to gauge how common this is, try it. The numbers are staggering.

In a study for the painting, Hopper had included two wall paintings at one point, but the second would have detracted from our focus on this couple, so he dropped it. Their coloring has a certain indefinite smudginess, like the covers of a well-loved, well-thumbed book—a friendly roundness.

Contrastingly, there is the more angular figure of a woman on the other side of the baize carpet, reading her book in a chair placed next to an open chair. Hopper makes her rather sinewy. Her pose is rigid, her muscles tense despite her extended legs, which would normally suggest a degree of relaxation, of being carefree. It is as if she is trying extra hard not to have to look up at the people across from her, or at anything else.

Maybe they were being loud and so were annoying her, but that doesn’t seem to fit with our couple. Hopper has the man standing in part on that baize carpet, too, and it’s obvious that with the verdant color—a very flora-esque color—that the carpet represents some degree of life and its flow. Meanwhile, the woman with her book has a small tile mosaic floor pattern to her right, hugging the shape of the vacant hotel desk. It’s less free and flowing than the carpet, and thus is she associated with that notion of compactness, with a sense of formal rigidity.

The empty chair at her side has been pushed squarely up against hers, too, with no separation between the two, unlike with the chairs on the other side of the lobby. There’s an emptiness present in the unused chair, but a controlled emptiness, sad but not sullen. This is an individual who is making do in her life until she can find that right person to someday have a version of what the two people on the other side of the lobby have. In the meantime, it’s not worth romanticizing them for her. She keeps her head down, reading her book, but as Hopper is gently suggesting here, too much of that leads to losing out on too much else. There is distance in that shading of blue of the woman’s dress. There’s almost too much shouty extroversion in the red of the older woman’s dress, perhaps an overcompensating attempt to appear happier than she is.

Hopper probably served as the model for the man, and the older woman’s fur coat is based on one owned by his wife, Josephine. Not that Hopper was a leering, affair-loving guy, but she insisted anyway on being the female model for all of his relevant paintings. Hopper isn’t judging these people so much as perhaps casting some gentle warning our way: There is a big disconnect between what we often aim to project and what we really are, and if we spend too much energy on the former, we only going segment ourselves—both within, in our relationships, and without, in our place in the wider world.

Hopper could paint electric light with the best of them, but he was even better with natural light. With his urban-scapes you don’t get it quite as often, given their noirish, nighttime settings. But when Hopper was struggling to find himself as a painter, he broke free of some restrictions in his own way, leaving the burgeoning post-Modernist strains behind early in his career to study natural light and the sea in Gloucester, Massachusetts, harkening back to those Nyack days. We see that study here in the coppery, large-hearted light Hopper deploys in Hotel Lobby. It is light that is akin to a caring wave of the hand, rather than a grim finger pointing. It also illuminates the whole, reminding us that a hotel is a stop for us in a place that is not ours alone or ours at all, merely a temporary destination from which we return.

Maybe that’s what Hotel Lobby does for us today: It offers an opportunity to pull up a chair besides yesterday’s self and have a new conversation, one that makes it easier to connect with the people on the other side of the room.

The post Sailing Across a Room appeared first on The American Interest.

Don’t Call It a Reset

“The EU needs to tell us clearly: does it want us or not?” Recep Tayyip Erdogan smirked. “If they don’t, we go our way, they go theirs.” The audience at the TRT World Forum, a gathering hosted by the Turkish public broadcaster’s international TV channel at a swanky Istanbul hotel, exploded in applause. Several rows from the stage, I couldn’t help but remember the first time I saw the President speaking live. It was 2004 and he had come to St. John’s College at Oxford to make a passionate case for why Turkey belonged to Europe. Back then, Erdogan’s plea was met with a standing ovation, too. Oxford dons and students cheered at the prospect of the European Union guiding democratic changes inside a large Muslim-majority country whose growth rates were impressive. “Turkey is Europe’s Viagra,” a dear friend of mine, who also happened to be a professor at the university’s politics department, mused to me.

A decade and a half later, how things have changed! There are some Europhiles left in Turkey, to be sure, but even they are jaundiced. Europe, they would say, has lost its shine, having failed to censure authoritarian behavior in Ankara. The government bears grudges too. At the TRT event, Erdogan deplored Europe’s double standards. How dare Brussels bigwigs lecture Turkey about democracy given rampant Islamophobia across the European Union and the harsh treatment of refugees and asylum seekers? Turkey, the champion of the downtrodden across the globe, from Palestine to Myanmar to Somalia, could claim the higher moral ground. Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavusoglu didn’t hold back: “All of the EU’s policies have failed: enlargement, neighborhood, integration policy,” he intoned.

He might have a point. Yet it is also true that Turkey’s star doesn’t shine as bright these days. Without even bringing up the balance sheet of Ankara’s foreign policy in Syria and beyond, it is hard to overlook the fact that the Turkish lira has been in free fall for months. It has lost 40 percent of its value since the start of 2018, and we probably haven’t seen the bottom yet. Saddled with debt denominated in foreign currency, Turkish banks, along with much of the private sector, are vulnerable to further depreciation. Erdogan, who officially accrued extensive executive powers as President after the June 24 elections, has not done a great job of staving off the crisis. Turkey-watchers quip that the lira fell more sharply the day Erdogan appointed his son-in-law Berat Albayrak as Finance Minister than it did on the night of the attempted military coup on July 15, 2016. The European Union might be battered and bruised, but so is Turkey. And the Europeans’ capacity to muddle through has at least been proven.

The crisis has seen Erdogan re-engaging with his European counterparts. The Turkish President went on a three-day state visit to Germany last month, and Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok headlined the TRT World Forum along with Cavusoglu. Turkey has been sending up trial balloons to see whether Europeans might offer a bailout package. That may not be highly likely at the moment, but the game of footsie continues. Erdogan knows, after all, that German, French, and Dutch companies are active in the Turkish market, and could face a real downside in case of a total meltdown.

Overlapping interests drive cooperation in other areas too. In June, the European Union and Turkey renewed the 2016 refugee deal, in which Ankara agrees to continue taking back asylum-seekers crowding neighboring Greece. In exchange, the Turkish government received a new €3 billion grant. Erdogan is hoping for more. He is pushing for a four-way summit on Syria in Istanbul, to be attended by Russia, France, and Germany. Putin and Erdogan secured a ceasefire deal concerning the region of Idlib in north-western Syria, the site of the last remaining rebel stronghold. There are serious questions as to whether the deal will stick; with momentum on his side, Assad’s forces might be tempted to overrun the enclave, which is currently home to 3 million people, many of whom have been displaced from other parts of the country. Still, Moscow and Ankara hope their deal will not only survive but also prove a stepping stone to a political settlement of the conflict—underwritten by billions in reconstruction aid from Europe. The message is clear: “Fund our effort to rebuild Syria and you won’t see a new wave of refugees streaming in across your borders,” to put it crudely.

As far as Turks are concerned, the true villain is the United States, not Europe. The lira’s hardship is blamed on economic warfare waged by the Trump Administration. And that’s only one grudge in a long list, which stretches from America’s alliance with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Syria to the ongoing legal case against Turkish lender’s Halkbank for violating Iran sanctions. In some of those disputes, the European Union is on the same side of the barricade. For instance, Ankara and Brussels are working together at the World Trade Organization to challenge the Trump Administration’s steel and aluminum tariffs. Turkey’s reluctance to seek a loan from the Washington, DC-based IMF is the reason it is probing Europe as an alternative. Trump should get part of the credit for the EU-Turkey reset which included Erdogan getting the red carpet treatment in Berlin—the fact that the Turkish strongman called the Germans Nazis last year is fast fading from memory.

Perhaps reset is too ambitious a word, though. EU-Turkish relations are improving but they are still transactional. In Germany, Merkel has taken fire from across the political spectrum, from the Christian Social Union to die Linke, for cozying up too much to Erdogan. Emmanuel Macron is calling for a strategic partnership with Turkey, presumably a remake of the “privileged partnership” the European center-right advocated in the 2000s as an alternative to full EU membership. But even that proposal is getting a lukewarm reception across the continent, except for maybe by Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, who never misses an opportunity to drop a flattering mention about  “[his] friend Tayyip.”

Concessions to Erdogan, such as an update to the 1996 Customs Union tying Turkey to the European Union (side-note: a possible model for post-Brexit UK?) are impossible unless the government stops infringing on basic rights and freedoms of its citizens. And Erdogan does not seem to be in the mood to compromise. In Berlin, he demanded the extradition of Can Dündar, a leading critic and former editor-in-chief of the daily Cumhuriyet. The sentences of three prominent journalists, accused of being complicit in 2016’s failed coup, have been upheld. In Berlin, Erdogan restated his demand that the Fethullah Gülen movement be listed as a terrorist organization. The answer was a resounding nein.

The tone in Turkey itself is similarly an indicator that the opening to Europe is, at best tentative. One of the questions TRT forum debated was whether the European Union would survive. Former dignitaries such as Stefan Füle, enlargement commissioner in 2009-14, Croatia’s ex-President Ivo Josipović, and Franco Frattini, a former Italian foreign minister, said it would. Turkey’s top brass, predictably, sang a different tune, the same old song and dance: the European Union is in decline, Turkey is rising…

But don’t let the obligatory swagger and the accusations of double standards leveled against the West deceive you. Erdogan is well aware his country needs Europe.

The post Don’t Call It a Reset appeared first on The American Interest.

Target the Generals, Not “The Lady”

The Nobel Foundation got it right.

The Foundation announced this month that it will not withdraw its 1991 Peace Prize award to Aung San Suu Kyi, despite the stampede by other groups to cancel the honors that they heaped on her when she was campaigning for democracy in Myanmar.

As the Nobel Foundation put it, it is “regrettable” that the laureate has not done more, now that she is the civilian leader of her country, to stop the violence against the Muslim Rohingya population in Myanmar. But her prize will not be withdrawn for two good reasons.

First and foremost, the committee’s rules do not allow the withdrawal of awards. Second, even if the Peace Prize could be revoked, doing so would trigger questions about the conduct of other recipients since they received the prize, leading to a revisionist slippery slope. Did President Barack Obama do enough to stop the use of chemical weapons in Syria? Did Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat siphon off millions intended to help the Palestinian people?  Was Henry Kissinger a great statesman or a war criminal for prolonging bombing in Cambodia and Vietnam?

A third reason could well be added: The real blame for the continuing violence against ethnic groups in Myanmar should be heaped on Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, not Aung San Suu Kyi. He is the head of the army, known as the Tatmadaw, which still retains the lion’s share of power in Myanmar.

It is the Tatmadaw that has forced more than 700,000 Muslim Rohingya to flee into neighboring Bangladesh, and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of them in squalid detention camps. It is the Tatmadaw that has herded villagers into houses only to burn them down. It is the Tatmadaw that has gang-raped hundreds of women, with soldiers reportedly going door to door looking for the prettiest young women to rape. And it is the Tatmadaw that has tortured unarmed civilians and murdered children.

The blame for these horrors should be should be laid at the door of General Min Aung Hlaing, who has indeed carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Facebook rightly has cancelled Min Aung Hlaing’s Facebook pages, which have been used to rally support for the military campaigns. The United States has targeted sanctions against him.  That should be just the beginning of efforts to publicly call out and pressure the baby-faced general, who is sensitive to criticism. He can rein in the military; Aung San Suu Kyi can’t.

Too often, what many commentators and outside interest groups fail to recognize is that the military still controls three of the most powerful cabinet positions in Myanmar (Defense, Interior, and Border Affairs), which gives them a lock on security matters.  In addition, most of the civil service workers tasked with running the country’s bureaucracy are former military members or their appointees. And thanks to the military-written constitution, the army is guaranteed 25 percent of the seats in Parliament for uniformed officers, plus more seats held by their political party, giving them a veto over any changes to the constitution that would reduce their power. The Sisyphean task of convincing the military to share more power continues to hobble Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD).

This is not to say Aung San Suu Kyi is blameless. She has not handled the violence against minority groups with the same grace and verbal dexterity as when she was a political prisoner and inspired the democracy effort. She lost global support when she dismissed some reports of human rights abuses as fake.  She lost credibility when she said the three generals in her cabinet were “rather sweet.”

In recent months, she has seemed either uninformed or willfully blind when she claimed that two Reuters journalists, who were sentenced to seven years in prison for reporting about a Rohingya massacre, had been tried fairly under the rule of law. In fact, during the investigative stage of the legal proceeding, a police captain testified that the journalists had been deliberately set up by security forces with planted information to justify their arrest under the Official Secrets Act. The police captain was immediately arrested himself and not allowed to give further testimony. This is not the kind of due process that rule of law should guarantee, nor the kind of freedom of the press that Aung San Suu Kyi used to support. She was wrong to say their case “had nothing to do with freedom of expression.” The new reports that three more journalists have been arrested this week are troubling.

Still, it is not true, as some persist in reporting, that Suu Kyi has never spoken out about the persecution of the Rohingya and has not used her position as civilian leader of the country to stop the bloodshed. She has said repeatedly that she is against violence and for equal treatment of all minorities. One of her first acts after her party won a majority in the 2015 elections was to name a blue-ribbon commission headed by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations Secretary General, to examine the Rohingya situation and make recommendations. “Be bold,” she told Annan, and he was. She sent the commission report to Parliament with the instruction that the recommendations be approved. Yet barely a day later, Islamic radicals attacked Burmese police stations and the Tatmadaw responded in force, heaping horror after horror on the Rohingya population in Rakhine state.

Could Aung San Suu Kyi have stopped the slaughter as critics suggest? No, because she has no control over the armed forces, who report directly to Senior General Min Aung Hlaing rather than the civilian government. Should she have condemned the military in stronger terms than saying the Rohingya issue “could have been handled better”?  Yes—and no. She certainly could have articulated the issues more adroitly, but condemning the military would have been political suicide—or worse—in the current imbalance of power.

Dark forces and corruption are constant, invidious challenges. Radical monks continue to inflame anti-Muslim anger in the country, which has stirred up tribal identities and nationalism, strengthening the military’s claim that its strong hand is necessary to keep the country stable. The assassination of constitutional lawyer Ko Ni last year, in public view at the Yangon airport no less, was a not-so-subtle message to Aung San Suu Kyi and her party. It was Ko Ni who came up with the suggestion that a little-known provision in the constitution be used to name Suu Kyi “State Counselor” since Article 59 bars her from serving as President. The provision had originally been inserted in case the former senior general, Than Shwe, wanted a position in the new government. The military was not pleased when Suu Kyi’s National League of Democracy beat them at their own game by granting the position to her.  Many observers took the killing of Ko Ni as a warning: “We can get you at any time.”

Suu Kyi has responded by playing a long game, saying that progress toward greater democracy must come a step at a time.  Away from the headlines, she has recruited some talented economists to further reforms in finance, no easy task considering the economic mess the military had left during 50 years of misrule.  She announced plans for a civilian effort to deliver humanitarian aid and help resettle the Rohingya Muslims, though that initiative has been stalled.  Most of the Annan commission recommendations have been implemented by Parliament.   Dialogue continues in Parliament on possible reforms in the Constitution that would reduce military control, one difficult tweak at a time. Progress remains fragile.

On a recent trip to Japan, Suu Kyi acknowledged that there are many who would like a “quick fix” to the situation in Rakhine state, who want everything “done immediately and quickly.”  But, she said, “we can’t afford to do that, because we have to cope with the consequences in the long run.”

Which brings us back to the debate over Aung San Suu Kyi and her role going forward. As a Nobel Prize-winning activist, Suu Kyi had the right patriotic pedigree, photogenic looks, and language skills to rally public opinion to the democracy struggle.  As an elected leader, she is still learning how to govern in a restrictive environment and has not yet found an effective voice. She will need to explain the present difficulties to the world with much more clarity.

Those who have known and watched Suu Kyi for many years are not surprised by some of the mistakes she has made. They know her stubbornness, her temper, and her longtime respect for the military founded by her father, General Aung San. They know she is not a perfect person, but they realize she is still a necessary person.

At the age of 73, Suu Kyi may have another five years to keep nudging internal reforms forward.  Her party, which also has had difficulty learning to lead in such a fraught environment, may be able to eke out enough votes in 2020 to keep chipping away at military reforms while a new generation of elected leaders and military leaders moves up.

In the meantime, measures supporting wider sanctions are floating around Congress in response to the Rohingya tragedy.  The U.S. government should move as judiciously as the Nobel Commission when considering appropriate penalties. The goal should be to punish the military leaders perpetuating violence, not the people of Myanmar who have endured so much.

As Priscilla Clapp, the former U.S. Chief of Mission in Myanmar, has pointed out, many of the current disputes in the country are the result of centuries-old ethnic animosities and resentment of foreign influence in Myanmar, primarily during the colonial period of British control. Reducing American economic ties and aid, along with the U.S. ability to work with the government, could prove counter-productive. As she put it to me, “We need to be in there working as hard as we can to change popular attitudes and help them build the institutions that underpin sustainable democracy. We won’t be able to do that if we isolate ourselves.”

Now is not the right time for the U.S. government to be seen dictating to the new leaders, or sanctioning them merely to satisfy its sense of righteousness. Now is the time for the U.S. government to reinforce people-to-people programs that build up the kind of economy and civil society that can counter military influence in the long term.

The post Target the Generals, Not “The Lady” appeared first on The American Interest.

The Benefits of Having an Enemy

The age of great power rivalry and competition is back. We now recognize, as clearly stated in the 2017 National Security Strategy, that the United States faces competitors and rivals, and that the world is not on an inevitable path toward harmony. To be even more blunt, the United States has enemies of different stripes and along a long frontier, and the coming decades will demand a lot from American citizens and U.S. allies if they want to maintain the political equilibrium that underwrites their liberty.

The existence of enemies should not be cause for despair, however. To start with, their presence is not an anomaly but a constant throughout history; enemies and rivals will never disappear. The defeat of one enemy is likely to give rise to another, of different type and power but no less dangerous. Social interactions inevitably generate friction and rivalries; blissful isolation invites envy; and friendships and alliances are both a response to, and a source of, enmity. Regardless of how hard we try to live in harmonious relations with others, enemies are an inescapable and enduring reality of political life.

The question is what should we do about them. Compete with them and defeat them—yes, of course. But even before doing that, perhaps we can benefit from them. This is, in a nutshell, what Plutarch suggests in a short essay entitled “How to Profit by One’s Enemies.”

Probably an extempore oration that Plutarch later wrote down, its main focus is on self-improvement, on the individual’s path toward a virtuous life. It is neither a treatise of strategy nor a letter of advice to a statesman, and it does not address questions of national security or geopolitical rivalry. Nonetheless, it is about social relations and consequently it has some applicability to the wider realm of political interactions, including those among states. The ancients did not separate neatly the various levels of human action, from the individual to the polity, allowing therefore an easy transfer of lessons from the life of a man to the life of a city. States are not “black boxes” that act in ways that are fundamentally different from those of individual human beings. Therefore, the dynamics that characterize interpersonal relations (for example, friendships and enmities) are akin to those that shape strategic interactions among polities (for example, alliances and geopolitical rivalries).

Plutarch begins by recognizing that enemies will always exist for two related reasons. First, rivalries arise because of the acquisitive impulse of men, which spurs us to desire what we do not possess, leading to a clash with others. It is thus naive to expect that enmities can wither away and the harmony of friendship can spread throughout the world. Plutarch notes that a “government which has not had to bear with envy or jealous rivalry or contention—emotions most productive of enmity—has not hitherto existed.”

The second reason for the continuing presence of enemies is the praiseworthy and necessary search for friends. “For our very friendships, if nothing else, involve us in enmities.” To have friends is ipso facto to have enemies. A slight suggestion is present here of the risk of entrapment, namely, of the danger of becoming involved in squabbles of friends or allies in which we have less interest than they do. In other words, the enemy of our ally is not necessarily our enemy—or at least, it should not be. A logical consequence of this reasoning is that friendships or alliances are risky propositions because they create enemies that we may not have had beforehand. Plutarch’s point, however, is that as enemies are always present so is the necessity of friends. We seek allies to balance against existing rivals but also to improve our welfare (and thus we would seek them even in the absence of enemies). Asking whether friendships create new enemies is fruitless. Enemies and allies will continue to exist because of the eternal competition in social interactions at every level. (As Evelyn Waugh put it: “It’s going to be a long war. The great thing is to spend it among friends.”)

The question then becomes whether we can turn this tragic reality—the presence of enemies—into an opportunity. It is obvious that enemies are dangerous because they seek to damage us in some way, and consequently life would be easier without them. But a sign of the intelligence proper to wise individuals is the ability to figure out how to benefit from otherwise undesirable situations. “Fools spoil even their friendships,” Plutarch writes, “while wise men are able to make a fitting use even of their enemies.”

Plutarch suggests three benefits of having an enemy:

The existence of enemies is an incentive for good governance.

The first benefit is that the mere recognition of the enemy’s presence alters how we behave. This is not yet a strategic interaction in which the actions of one side generate the reaction of the other. It precedes the active part of a rivalry. The simple existence of an enemy, even of one that has not acted yet, provokes (or at least, ought to provoke) a change in our posture. Once we acknowledge that a particular enemy exists, we face incentives to modify our outlook for the future, how we prepare for it, and how we organize ourselves.

Naturally, we will be more attuned to the need to develop defensive measures or even, in the direst circumstances, plans to eliminate the enemy. But that is not a way of benefiting from the enemy; it is simply an instinctive reaction spurred by the desire of self-preservation. The beneficial change stems from the fact that the enemy is like a mirror to us, or a critic who points out the foibles and weaknesses we may possess. The enemy is constantly watching us, seeking our weak spots in order to undermine our safety, well-being, or reputation. Plutarch notes, “Your enemy, wide awake, is constantly lying in wait to take advantage of your actions, and seeking to gain some hold on you, keeping up a constant patrol about your life.” An enemy, he continues, “plays the detective on your actions and digs his way into your plans and searches them through and through.”

The presence of a rival that is relentlessly watching us, seeking to damage us through our own faults, is an incentive to improve. In our private lives, the motivation may be the shame of our vices that we hide in order to be able to criticize or take the higher moral ground in front of potential enemies. It is “a peculiar mark of vice that we feel more ashamed of our faults before our enemies than before our friends.” We want to consider our rivals as morally inferior and thus we worry that they may find something for which we can be reproached. Quoting Antisthenes, a pupil of Socrates, Plutarch stresses this point: “Men have need of true friends or else of ardent enemies; for the first by admonition, and the second by reviling, turn them from error.” Enemies make us more virtuous.

But this logic is applicable to more than personal moral self-improvement. Plutarch compares the path of virtue of an individual to that of a state. He writes:

For just as states which are chastened by border warfare and continual campaigning become well content with good order and a sound government, so persons who have been compelled on account of enmities to practice soberness of living, to guard against indolence and contemptuousness . . . are insensibly led by force of habit to make no mistakes, and are made orderly in their behavior, even if reason co-operate but slightly.

This mechanism is unlikely to lead every state to become more virtuous—by, for instance, becoming more respectful of human life or gaining a greater appreciation for liberty. The particular political leadership of a state (for example, a Putin or an Assad) may be immune to the reproaching posture of other states. More broadly, there is little global agreement on what a virtuous political regime may be: Western democracies have one view (and even within them there are marked differences on matters such as the meaning and list of “human rights”) that is not fully shared by many non-Western states. This is not to affirm that no objective standards exist and we should accept moral equivalency, but only that the attainment of moral superiority may be a very small incentive for states. As long as a regime or a political leader is firmly in control, or the state is sufficiently powerful to achieve some of its ends, the pursuit of a “life beyond reproach” is not high on the list.

Nonetheless, in the first part of the paragraph cited above, Plutarch suggests a direct relation between international rivalries and internal order. An enemy on the frontier makes the citizens of the threatened state more appreciative of political order and good governance. The most basic aspiration of people is security and, when reminded of the risks to it, they seek to improve their chances of survival. One way to do that is to alter their own behavior: less infighting among themselves, more appreciation for unity. This is Plutarch’s version of a “rally around the flag.”

Enemies spur us to be more coordinated and efficient.

The second benefit of having enemies is that people who are engaged in a competition with others seek more effective political leaders, more efficient political regimes, and in general try to improve their capabilities and skills. Plutarch notes that actors or instrument players, “when there is rivalry and competition with another company, . . . apply not only themselves but their instruments more attentively, picking their strings and tuning them and playing their flutes in more exact harmony.” Competition that arises out of rivalry pushes us to work together and to improve the outcome, be it music in the case of an orchestra or the security provision in the case of a polity.

The enemy provides an organizing principle for our strategy. Without enemies, one lets oneself go, so to speak. The state leadership and institutions become careless in their behavior because there is limited risk for mismanagement, for a mistaken decision or even for a poorly thought out strategy. Plutarch quotes the Roman Nasica who, after the Romans defeated the Carthaginians and Achaeans, argued that Rome was in greater danger now than before the victory: “Now is our position really dangerous, since we have left for ourselves none to make us either afraid or ashamed.” The absence of an enemy who tries to use our weaknesses for his benefit and to our detriment is blissful and dangerous at the same time.

The danger of having no enemy is that it becomes more difficult to think strategically. Policies become agendas, rather than strategies. The absence of an enemy—or the perception that there is no enemy—results in political leaders thinking that the achievement of a particular objective depends merely on a plan and a proper utilization of the necessary resources. With no competition from another actor, no shooting back so to speak, policies are thought to be molding a passive material, akin to chiseling a human form out of a block of marble. What is required then are not strategists, individuals capable of understanding the enemy and endowed with great intuition and skills of adaptation, but managers, individuals calculating the resources needed to implement a scripted agenda.

This is not a hypothetical temptation. It is sufficient to witness the efforts of the EU political leadership to open Europe’s doors to Ukraine in 2014. The EU approach was grounded in the conceit that there were no enemies to the set of principles espoused by Brussels: the benefits of an integrated market, a borderless area, diluted (or “pooled”) sovereignty, and transnational rules were self-evident and appealing to everyone. The opponents, whether in Kiev or in Moscow, were not enemies or rivals; they simply did not comprehend yet the inevitability of this larger trend away from nation states, territorial control, and brute force. Hence, the extension of the European Union’s rules-based order required managerial stamina and not military prowess—a detailed agenda for negotiations, not a strategy for competition. The outcome is well known.

An additional danger of having no enemies is a splintering of the various institutions and individuals within a state. Lacking the organizing principle that the clear presence of an enemy supplies, it becomes more difficult to harness the many actors inside a state toward a common purpose. Narrow bureaucratic interests and the individuals’ search for prestige take over as the primary motivations of state institutions and leaders.

It is difficult to have a grand strategy for a state in any conditions, but perhaps more so in the absence of an enemy when institutional strategies pursued for their narrowly defined benefit and survival become predominant. The preferred bureaucratic option overshadows a larger strategic purpose of the various state institutions and branches. As Emily Goodman notes, “Without clearly established strategic priorities set by civilian leaders, military strategy is likely to become ‘decentralized’ with each service focusing on its ‘preferred’ threats, preparing to fight the type of war most amenable to that service and most likely to provide an autonomous and dominant role for that service.” In such circumstances we can expect “less integration across the services, and less willingness for services to devote resources to supporting missions, like combat air support or strategic lift.”

The “fog of peace” presents peculiar challenges that may make the state unprepared for future competition and conflict. As institutional selfishness takes over, each organization within the state becomes less capable of coordination and of working together toward the common objective of providing security. To use Plutarch’s analogy mentioned earlier, in the absence of competition, each player plays to his own tune in order to showcase his virtuosity and skills, to attract attention and fame for himself. The orchestra becomes a cacophonous group of glory seeking players.

The presence of enemies releases pressures.

Finally, the third broad benefit of having an enemy is, according to Plutarch, the ability to vent emotions. The enemy serves as a punching bag to release pent up passions that otherwise may create discord among friends. As Plutarch puts it, a “man would profit in no moderate degree by venting these emotions upon his enemies, and turning the course of such discharges, so to speak, as far away as possible from his associates and relatives.” Even more, Plutarch writes that “ . . . your enemy, by taking up and diverting to himself your malice and jealousy, will render you more kindly and less disagreeable to your friends in their prosperity.”

As with the previous arguments, this one can also be extended to the political life of a state. Plutarch mentions an example of how the achievement of accord in domestic politics is illusory at best and conducive to even greater strife at worst. A political leader named Demus, “when he found himself on the winning side in a civic strife in Chios, . . . advised his party associates not to banish all their opponents, but to leave some of them behind, ‘in order,’ he said, ‘that we may not begin to quarrel with our friends, though being completely rid of our enemies.’” The claim of a harmonious consensus only leads to new and perhaps more vicious conflicts.

This logic applies also to foreign enemies. The absence of external enemies—or, worse, the naive belief that there are no enemies—is dangerous because it elevates the naturally discordant interests and agendas of the various leaders and political groupings inside the state. The primary concern of the state is then fractured into the pursuit of the narrow interests of factions and individual leaders. It is preferable, Plutarch seems to suggest, to have an enemy so as to release these internal tensions, or at least to subdue them by focusing the attention and the resources of the polity away from itself. Focusing on the differences of opinions or of worldviews is a luxury good that we pursue when no enemies exist—or when we think that there are no enemies because we see the world as a harmonious global community.

The flip side of this last benefit in particular—but of all of them in general—is that enmity can generate hatred. In part the risk is that hatred will prevent a more calculating posture, blinding us to the necessity of prudence. Hatred can lead to unnecessary conflicts with the enemy and to a certain strategic rigidity that does not allow for prudential changes, temporary realignments, or pauses. And as a wise Roman slave, Publilius Syrus, (1st century BCE), pithily put it: “It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.”

More importantly, a long-standing enemy and the hatred this may engender is dangerous because it degrades us. Plutarch writes:

enmity introduces envy along with hatred, and leaves as a residue jealousy, joy over others’ misfortunes, and vindictiveness. Moreover, knavery, deceit, and intrigue, which seem not bad or unjust when employed against an enemy, if once they find a lodgment, acquire a permanent tenure, and are hard to eject. The next thing is that men of themselves employ these against their friends through force of habit, unless they are on their guard against using them against their enemies.

In other words, we have to guard ourselves from a posture that is overly mistrustful, undermining the ability to develop and hold allies.

Plutarch concludes his essay with brief advice on what to study in an enemy. Four variables are key according to him: “life, character, words, and deeds.” Interestingly, Plutarch does not include in this list the strength or resources of the enemy. He does not exclude them, and in fact the success of the enemy (or of ourselves) results from “bending all energies” in the chosen direction. But by observing capabilities, we may miss the nature and the intent of the enemy; we focus on what he has as opposed to who he is.

If the question is how to defeat the enemy—or whether the rival presents a clear and present danger—then, presumably, the study of capabilities increases in importance. How we study the enemy depends therefore on the question we ask, and on the level of threat that we expect. The more menacing the enemy, the more important an assessment of his capabilities becomes. But Plutarch does not go this far.

We spent the last few decades in a blissful insouciance of the enduring realities of international politics. The progressive power of globalization would inevitably turn enemies and rivals into friends and partners—and national sovereignty and citizenry would be elevated to a global community and global citizenry. This belief was wrong, and we are slowly waking up to the fact that enemies, from China to Russia and Iran, have spent these years planning how to subvert the international order we built and maintained. We have to compete with them, deter them from further aggressive moves, and preserve the liberty at home that gives us reason to oppose them. And above all, as Plutarch put it, we can turn these enemies to our benefit by strengthening our political order, founded on the recognition of self-evident truths that are independent from the prevailing fashion of the day. Whether we can do that remains to be seen.

Plutarch, “How to Profit by One’s Enemies,” in Moralia, Vol. 2 (Harvard University Press, 1928) LCL 222, p. 3-44.

#1, p. 5.

#1, p. 5.

#2, p. 9.

#3, p. 11.

#3, p. 13.

#6, p. 21.

#3, p. 13.

#3, p. 13.

#3, p. 15.

Emily O. Goldman, “Thinking About Strategy Absent the Enemy,” Security Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1994), p. 49.

#10, p. 35.

#10, p. 37.

#10, p. 35–7.

Publilius Syrus, Maxim #469.

#9, p. 33.

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The Presumption of Credence

In the run-up to the Senate confirmation vote on Justice Brett Kavanaugh, those opposing the nominee soon developed the following argument:

“If Brett Kavanaugh assaulted Christine Blasey Ford, he should disqualified.”
“Seeing as this is a job interview and not a criminal trial, a more-likely-than-not standard is appropriate.”
“Probabilistically speaking, given that an accusation has been leveled, Brett Kavanaugh is more likely than not to have assaulted Christine Blasey Ford.”

Therefore:

     4. “Brett Kavanaugh should be disqualified.”

The argument was rarely presented in such stark terms, but it or something very close seemed to undergird a lot of the anti-Kavanaugh animus on display these past few weeks. Over at Vogue, for instance, Michelle Ruize insinuated the pivotal third premise with her assertion that Christine Blasley Ford was unlikely to be “mixed up” because “only 2 to 10 percent of sexual assault reports are false.” And, she concluded:

Sexual assault is disqualifying regardless of the age of the perpetrator. A person with that little regard for another should not be able to rule over the law that governs our whole country and chart its course for decades. While the hammer has yet to drop on the president, Kavanaugh should indeed join the scroll of men who are forced to confront the consequences of their sexual misconduct.

Ruize didn’t directly express the second premise, but many others did, including Senator Dianne Feinstein, who became a #resistance icon almost overnight.

And in their own sometimes irresponsible rush to proceed with the confirmation, conservatives attacked all three premises with abandon. The first was dismissed as “nihilistic nonsense” by Dennis Prager, who argued that “the charges against Judge Kavanaugh should be ignored.” The second was dismissed as “no mere job interview” by Alan Dershowitz, who argued that “even in the court of public opinion, basic fairness should preclude conviction without clear evidence.”

And the third was given a thoughtful but ultimately unpersuasive rebuttal by National Review’s David French, who argued that because 45 percent of rape cases never go to trial due to insufficient evidence, there may be far more false accusations than official statistics reveal. “If you believe this data,” French concedes, “it’s easy to see why people are so outraged when a skeptic says that an alleged victim hasn’t come forward with compelling evidence. After all, it’s a statistical fact. Women are almost always telling the truth. It’s science.” But the data is unreliable because we don’t really know how many false allegations get made, therefore “there should be no default presumption that anyone is telling the truth.”

It’s obvious why the burden of proof should be lower in a Senate confirmation hearing than a criminal trial, and really, really obvious why attempted rape should preclude someone from sitting on the highest court in the land. But French’s argument deserves more scrutiny, for it ends up validating one of the core assumptions underlying #CancelKavanaugh: the idea that statistical evidence should play any role whatsoever when adjudicating sexual assault claims.

“Reality. . . .is complex,” French says, “and that complex reality demands individual adjudication and individual assessments.” Alright, but suppose the statistical reality were less complex. Suppose we knew for sure that at least 51 percent of rape allegations were true absent specific information. Would it still make sense to bracket this data point, using only the individualized assessments to which French refers?

On one way of thinking, the answer is clearly No. “Preponderance of evidence” is often interpreted to mean “more likely than not” or “over a 50 percent chance,” so since statistics tell us the overall likelihood that a particular event occurred, they should of course factor into our decision about whom to believe.

In particular, statistics can give us a baseline estimate of how likely the relevant parties are to be telling the truth—a “default presumption,” in French’s words—which can then be revised as new facts come to light. This process is sometimes called Bayesian updating, and throughout the Kavanaugh drama several commentators found it useful for framing their arguments. “Did Kavanaugh do it? Math helps us decide,” declared Eric Saund, enlisting Bayes’ Rule to show how different people could come to different conclusions with the same evidence depending on their “prior assumptions”—for example, the assumption that women rarely make false accusations.

Quillette’s Coleman Hughes took this reasoning a step further, arguing that we should in fact have a presumptive bias in favor of Ford:

In order to form a prior credence [that Ford is telling the truth] we should ask: Of all rape allegations that are made, what percentage are false? According to Snopes, that number is between 5 percent and 33 percent, with a greater number of studies showing the 5 percent figure. In order to steelman Kavanaugh’s defenders, let’s take the 33 percent figure. This means that, knowing nothing at all except the fact that Ford is an American woman making a sexual assault accusation, we should believe that there is a 67 percent chance that her accusation is accurate (granted sexual assault accusations are different than rape accusations, but there is better data on rape, so I’ll use it as a proxy.) Note that we should already think that she is more likely to be telling the truth than lying or misremembering, without knowing anything else.

That “without” caveat is a big one, but before examining the non-statistical evidence against Ford’s claims, let’s zoom in on the numbers Hughes cites. Their range illustrates part of the problem with French’s earlier naysaying: Even if rape statistics do have a huge margin of error, it doesn’t follow that we should be totally agnostic about who is more likely to be telling the truth. Supposing (implausibly!) that one third of accusations are false, the odds still favor Ford by quite a lot. Add the fact that Ford must have known she would face blowback for coming forward with the fact that rape is notoriously underreported, and her story becomes extremely credible. To be sure, there were several case-specific details that pushed its credibility down, especially Leland Keyser’s denial that she ever knew Brett Kavanaugh. But memories are fallible, not least memories 36 years old, and for all intents and purposes, this remained a “he said, she said” case from the beginning.

As a result, the “prior assumptions” described by Saund were really all anybody had to go on—which meant the percentage of true accusations was bound to be a deciding factor for many Americans. And because that number almost certainly exceeded 50 percent, it made perfect sense to believe Ford and disbelieve Kavanaugh—going by the available data, he probably did assault her.

But notice, these statistics would have been the same even if the alleged incident had never occurred. Stipulate for the moment that Kavanaugh is in fact telling the truth, and Ford is misremembering what took place at that summertime soirée. It would still be the case that most women who allege sexual assault are telling the truth. Indeed, the only way statistics could fail to vindicate Ford would be if we somehow knew that the majority of rape accusations that lack corroborating evidence are false. But we don’t know that, and given how many cultural and legal barriers exist to reporting sexual assault, there’s not much reason to assume it either.

And that’s the problem: Once an accusation was made, it became impossible for Kavanaugh to overcome the presumption of credence on which his prosecution soon hinged. If the majority of unsubstantiated rape allegations are true—and to be clear, they probably are—“believe all women” is not just a catchy slogan but a rational imperative: In each such case, believing the accuser maximizes your chances of being right regardless of the accusation’s truth value. But if justified belief was enough to derail a SCOTUS confirmation, politically motivated actors would have had a strong incentive to gin up lies about every potential nominee they dislike, precisely because the odds always tilt in the accuser’s favor. “This is going to destroy the ability of good people to come forward,” Lindsey Graham warned in his fiery soliloquy to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Had a majority of Senators accepted such probabilistic logic, he would have certainly been right.

In other words, statistical evidence incentivizes false accusations because its presence only depends on the accuser coming forward, not on the accused individual committing a crime. By contrast, things like DNA forensics and eyewitness testimony do depend on the actions of the accused. If you weren’t at the bank when it was robbed, chances are your hair won’t turn up in a forensics report. And if you weren’t at the party Christine Blasey Ford described, chances are nobody would remember seeing you there. Whereas statistical evidence does not vary in response to choices made by individual agents (in the sense that no single act of wrongdoing will change that wrongdoing’s overall frequency), this second sort of evidence varies directly with such choices—meaning it doesn’t automatically materialize whenever an accusation gets made.

Therein lies the importance of corroborating before convicting, in both public opinion and the law. If allegations are never taken seriously on statistical grounds alone, partisans can’t use them as an immediate veto, which suggests a strong consequentialist case for bracketing our priors and evaluating sexual assault claims only on their individual merits. The question is not, pace French, whether rape statistics are reliable; it’s whether rape statistics should be allowed to resolve every he-said-she-said dispute in the accuser’s favor, thereby entrenching all such accusations—true and false—as tools of political warfare.

To which 50 U.S Senators correctly replied: Not on my watch.

But we should be clear about why they’re correct. The reason is not, as Trump asserted Monday, that Kavanaugh was proven innocent, or that Ford was proven wrong. Nor is it that the totality of the evidence discredited the allegations against Kavanaugh; statistically speaking they were more likely than not to be true even without corroboration.

No, the reason the Senators were correct is that while total evidence is always the right standard for deciding what to believe, it’s not always the right standard for deciding what to do. Think of evidence obtained in a wrongful search and seizure. Juries are instructed to disregard such evidence not because it’s false or misleading (in many cases it’s neither), but because letting it influence the trial would encourage more misconduct in the future. A similar problem applied with Kavanaugh: Statistics really did bolster his accuser’s credibility, but letting them influence the confirmation process would have established such a horrible precedent that the lack of corroboration had to spell the end of her case. The alternative was complete chaos, a scenario in which merely uttering j’accuse could tank a SCOTUS nominee—and quite a bit else, if the precedent kept metastasizing.

Thus when Susan Collins stated that she did not believe the “more likely than not” standard had been met, she was implicitly advancing a particular interpretation of that standard. For her, “preponderance of evidence” meant case-specific, non-statistical evidence, of which there was very little. It did not mean what it apparently meant to many liberals, whose more holistic view included facts about probability in addition to facts about Ford and Kavanaugh. Failure to distinguish between these interpretations—and the competing rationales behind them—is part of what made the controversy so intractable, with each side talking past the other as Saturday’s vote drew near.

It wasn’t all language games, of course. Some argued that in the #MeToo era confirming Kavanaugh would effectively delegitimize the Supreme Court unless he could prove his innocence beyond all shadow of a doubt. The concern was understandable, but the conclusion was not, for the simple reason that not confirming Kavanaugh was every bit as likely to induce Dreyfusian polarization and undermine the Court’s legitimacy. By the time Collins announced her vote, conservatives had already closed ranks around Kavanaugh, whose perceived mistreatment at the hands of Democrats seems to have caused widespread “radicalization” among the GOP base. In this opaque evidentiary climate, both outcomes were guaranteed to enrage half the country—but only one avoided a system-smashing incentive structure.

If the goal was to minimize damage, mission accomplished.

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Russia’s Intelligence Failures

The supposedly hyper-competent Russian intelligence services have been thrust into the spotlight recently, and the look has not been flattering to the Putin regime. Indeed, what the Kremlin meant to be a demonstration of its might and ability to act with impunity has instead signaled its growing weakness.

It all started with a now-infamous video clip of National Guard head Viktor Zolotov berating Alexey Navalny, the opposition leader who has been in jail under administrative arrest since August. Taunting him with low-brow street slang, Zolotov promised “to make mincemeat” of Navalny and asked him to choose a weapon for their duel. Navalny had made General Zolotov mad by publishing investigations about corruption within the National Guard, and specifically revealing the expensive mansions allegedly belonging to the general’s son.

Zolotov’s address instantly became an Internet meme in Russia. At the same time, his performance also drew rebuke from the commentariat, especially considering the National Guard’s harsh crackdown on protestors complaining about pension reforms in the preceding days. Two prominent Russian media outlets published powerful opinion pieces condemning Zolotov, something that doesn’t happen often in the heavily censored media space in late Putinist Russia.

In Vedomosti, Vladimir Ruvinsky and Maria Zheleznova wrote that Zolotov had forsaken all notions of civility by choosing to speak so crudely. The official reaction to his remarks speaks volumes too, the article says. “Words that in any other country would be grounds for immediate dismissal have not been condemned—on the contrary, the spokesman to the President, who is Zolotov’s direct boss, found it possible to say that ‘sometimes, shameless libel might be fought against with any methods.’” The calls “for physical assault in political disputes shows very clearly what direction the country is heading—not forward, to the future, but backwards, to the backstreets,” the piece concludes.

Republic put its strong argument in the very headline of its editorial: “We need to admit: the country is being ruled by horrible people.” The editorial starts by recalling the recent fire in a shopping mall in Kemerovo that killed dozens, including children. After the fire, the Kemerovo Governor apologized to Vladimir Putin, but never to the families. And the head of the Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, castigated the mall owners for relentlessly pursuing profits, which he seemed to suggest was a kind of crime. There is no longer any division in Russia between state officials and the siloviki, the Republic editorial says, and there can be no economic development with the likes of Zolotov and Bastrykin calling the shots. Most of the country has not suffered from the siloviki yet, the authors acknowledge: If you don’t go to a rally, you won’t be beaten by the National Guard; if your business does not cross the interests of a silovik’s family, you will not be put in jail. But it is counterproductive to pretend not to notice this “parallel reality ruled by horrible people with a crass vision of the world.”

A day after Zolotov’s performance, another face of the siloviki intelligence apparatus revealed itself to the world. The two GRU officers who tried to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury appeared on Russia’s RT channel. What at first seemed merely a shambolic performance by two poorly prepared intelligence officers turned out to be a disgrace for the entire Russian intelligence community. Journalists quickly established the real name of one of the culprits: “Ruslan Boshirov” is in fact the GRU colonel Anatoly Chepiga. Kommersant took to the village where Chepiga was raised and spoke to his former neighbors. Over a hundred people recognized him and told stories about the future GRU officer. The exposure of the second officer came on Monday: “Aleksandr Petrov” is Aleksandr Mishkin, a military doctor.

The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service within the Defense Ministry, has until now been considered the most elite spy agency in Russia, home to only the best and brightest. The Skripal screwups were far from the only recent instance of the GRU’s imposing image being brought down to earth.

Earlier this month, Dutch authorities announced that they had expelled four GRU officers in April for an attempt to hack the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague. The same four, plus an additional three officers, were indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice the very same day. Some of the GRU officers indicted in October had also been indicted in July for election meddling by Robert Muller.

Recall that in response to Muller’s indictment, Russian officials claimed that Mueller couldn’t have possibly established the names of the listed operatives. It turns out, given the amateurish nature of the GRU’s tradecraft, it really wasn’t that much of a challenge for American investigators.

When Dutch authorities arrested the four expelled officers, they found that one of them, Alexei Moronets, was carrying a taxi receipt for a ride from GRU headquarters in Moscow to Sheremetyevo Airport. Let that sink in: a military intelligence officer called a taxi in his own name to GRU headquarters, and kept the receipt, presumably in order to be reimbursed upon his return. The online investigative collective Bellingcat and The Insider magazine checked for the Moronets name in a motor vehicle department database, copies of which freely circulate on Russian black markets. Moronets’s name was there, along with his passport number, and his car was registered at an address known to correspond to GRU department #26165—the same unit named in the July Mueller indictment. Plugging that address back into the database revealed 305 other vehicles registered there, along with cell phone and passport numbers for associated individuals. This is not exactly the stuff of James Bond movies.

Meanwhile, General Viktor Zolotov, perhaps wounded by earlier unfavorable coverage, rushed to put himself back in the spotlight. Last week, a story emerged that he had personally disarmed a man who had threatened to explode a gas cylinder in Red Square. A businessman from Primorsky Krai reportedly drove his SUV onto Red Square and demanded to speak to either Vladimir Putin or Viktor Zolotov, threatening to set off an explosive device if his demands were not met. Zolotov is said to have strolled up to the car, unarmed, to have gotten in, and to have talked the man down, getting him to finally give up to the authorities. Video of the incident has now surfaced.

Given the violence with which the National Guard has put down completely nonviolent protests in the past, the Zolotov episode was roundly mocked by the Russian commentariat as a transparent publicity stunt. But the mockery should not distract us from the significance of Zolotov’s move. The narrative frame, as presented by Zolotov’s boosters, clearly puts their big man on the same level as Putin—the disgruntled terrorist was supposedly content to talk to either strongman. And though Zolotov is often seen as a loyal attack dog for Putin, he seems to increasingly be harboring delusions of grandeur himself: see, for instance, the giant, Stalin-esque portraits of himself that he regularly places in front of marching National Guard officers.

Who does General Viktor Zolotov think he is? What power does he have, and what does he aspire to? And why has one of the more obscure figures in Putin’s inner circle (though not that obscure to our regular readers) suddenly sought publicity? These questions are already stirring speculation on who will come after Putin—or, put another way, who would be the first to dare to grab rule from a faltering President. The question is especially relevant considering the latest drop in Putin’s approval ratings: Fresh Levada polls show that trust in Russia’s leader has fallen to 39 percent, 20 percentage points down from a year ago and the lowest level since before the Crimean annexation.

On the whole, these recent episodes suggest a paradox of sorts emerging in Putin’s Russia. On the one hand, corruption and incompetence is so rife, even among the most elite cadres of the spy services, that the regime can’t help but shoot itself in the foot, repeatedly, in what ought to be matters of the highest importance to Russian national security. On the other hand, none of these screwups really seem to matter. The siloviki are just getting stronger and more entrenched, and remain largely impervious to criticism. One might be tempted to conclude from all of this that the system overall is more brittle. But that would be a misreading. As I wrote several years ago in these pages, the most likely outcome is a replacement of Putin’s “soft” authoritarianism with a harder, more brazen kind. As things stand now, I have little reason to revise my expectations.

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Democracy’s Ugly Brother

Populism is the “ugly brother” of a beautiful girl named “democracy.”

  – Werner J. Patzelt, Dresden Technical University

At the time of this writing, Americans have just spent two weeks watching the principles, institutions, and social norms that are supposed to hold our country together being trashed by the very people we expect to uphold them. And apart from the tiny number of us who were physically present for the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh, we watched the entire sordid spectacle through a medium, commercial television, whose overriding priority is to maximize audience size in order to maximize advertising revenue.

To be sure, many Americans no longer watch television on a TV set but rather on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. We also read voraciously on those same digital devices. But when it comes to a mega-spectacle like the Kavanaugh hearings, our devices, and the print media they deliver to us, serve mainly as magnifiers, multipliers, and amplifiers of the reality show unfolding on—and being shaped by—commercial television. As reported by Reuters on September 28, the Nielsen rating for the combined coverage of the hearings by the six major broadcast and cable networks came to 20.4 million viewers. This may not sound like a lot, but as Reuters continues, the Nielsen count “does not include millions more who streamed the event on phones or computers or crowds that watched in bars and other public places.”

The Kavanaugh spectacle was hardly the first political drama to be televised to a mass audience, but it was certainly the most shrill, vulgar, and shameless. And the queasy feeling it left in our stomachs has a lot to do with the expectation that the shrillness, vulgarity, and shamelessness will only get worse—because it is in the self-interest of our bottom-feeding, bottom-line-obsessed media to let it get worse. Leslie Moonves, the former CEO and president of CBS, spoke candidly back in February 2016, when he crowed to a group of investors that Donald Trump’s campaign for President “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. . . . The money’s rolling in!” Personally, I took no pleasure in watching Mr. Moonves get caught in the #MeToo crosshairs and suffer the distinctly un-American fate of being presumed guilty until proven innocent. But I wouldn’t mind seeing him, and his peers, held to account for the media’s role in turning the presidential nomination process, not to mention the presidency, into a grotesque form of entertainment that has nothing to do with responsible political reporting.

It might be objected that when it comes to political reporting, “responsible” means “boring.” I do not deny this. Since time immemorial, the hard work of putting together accurate, fair, comprehensive, and proportionate accounts of the day-to-day workings of representative government has not exactly caused the money to roll in. In the pre-digital age, America’s privately owned media supported the news side of their business with revenue from the more profitable non-news side. These arrangements worked so well for so long, it is easy to forget that the government also played a role. In the case of newspapers, which typically cross-funded their newsrooms with advertising money earned chiefly by the sports, gossip, crime, and fashion pages, the government’s role consisted mainly in upholding press freedom. In the case of the broadcast networks, which sustained their relatively small news divisions with earnings from their much larger entertainment divisions, the government’s role was more tangible: regulation.

Starting in 1934, every radio and TV station in the country had to apply for a license from the Federal Communications Commission, and included in the application process was a requirement to submit evidence that the station was providing enough news to “serve community needs.” Broadcasters also had to abide by the Fairness Doctrine, which required coverage of controversial public affairs in a way that included “contrasting views.” This setup lasted till the 1980s, when the licensing requirements were drastically reduced, and the Fairness Doctrine repealed, by the FCC under President Reagan.

Part of the unspoken rationale for these reforms was the perceived liberal bias of the mainstream media, and there’s no denying that the changes proved liberating for conservatives. In 1988, the year Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial comparing the Fairness Doctrine to the Berlin Wall, praising President Reagan for tearing it down, and calling Mr. Limbaugh “the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination.”

Today we are all liberated. But like some of the cultural liberties won by the Left, the Right’s freedom to flood the public airwaves with one-sided political rhetoric has proved a mixed blessing. Indeed, while there is still plenty of one-sided political rhetoric out there, we have now reached a place where political rhetoric is beside the point, and we are floundering in a tsunami of populist culture, which unlike popular culture is dangerously entangled with the actual wielding of government power.

That buzzing sound you hear is not a drone, it is the word “populist.” Where did this buzzword come from? What does it mean? How does it differ from the pleasanter-sounding “popular”? I ask because, as a writer, editor, and teacher, I am fascinated by the connotations of words—and also because, in all my years of appreciating and criticizing American popular culture, it never occurred to me to call it “populist.” Until now.

The root of both “popular” and “populist” is, of course, populus, Latin for “people.” In ancient Rome populus was used in two different ways: 1) to refer to all the inhabitants of a city, province, or territory; and 2) to refer to the common people (plebeians), as opposed to the nobility (patricians). The resulting ambiguity—the “people” as everybody or, depending on the context, not quite everybody—has persisted over the centuries, no doubt because politicians found it very useful.

In the 1890s the plot thickened with the coining of “populism” to label a protest movement arising in the Southern and Western United States against the plutocratic machinations of banks, monopolistic railroads, and corruption at all levels of government. American populism had its flaws, notably the racism that surfaced after the Southern leader Tom Watson quit trying to build a black-white coalition. But the grievances it raised were real, and despite the electoral failure of the Populist Party, the movement itself succeeded in forcing some crucial issues onto the national agenda.

At the height of its influence, American populism was disdained by the Eastern establishment as an attempt by ignorant, backward hicks to thwart progress. In the 1950s it was condemned as form of proto-fascism by several prominent historians, notably Richard Hofstadter. Twenty years later, a new generation of historians, including Christopher Lasch, took a revisionist view, arguing that American populism was a legitimate political movement of rational citizens whose interests and concerns were being neglected by a political class that was corrupt, arrogant, and out of touch.

This revisionist view is echoed by Werner J. Patzelt, a professor of political science at Dresden Technical University and one of the few European intellectuals willing to admit that “the established political-media class often refer to people as ‘populists’ who frustrate them due to their style of behavior, or because of their political positions.” In a recent essay, Dr. Patzelt interprets the populist surge in Europe as a “warning signal” that a dangerous “gap of representation” has opened between “a significant part of the population” and “their elected politicians.” Describing populism as “the ‘ugly brother’ of a beautiful girl named ‘democracy,’” he lists its four key elements:

Demagogic Simplification. When a dumbed-down version of reality is used not to educate people but to manipulate them.1
Selfish Political Entrepreneurship. When elected officials seek mainly to enhance their own power and partake of its spoils.
Anti-Representative Confrontation of “Below” and “Above.” When politicians display seeming contempt for voters, and voters come to reject not just particular officeholders but the basic principles of representative democracy.
Assertion of a Clear and Uniform “Will of the People.” When one party or leader persuades one part of the population that they are the only part that counts.2

If this sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because we’ve been watching it on TV for the past two-and-a-half years. It is now something of a cliché to describe the Trump Administration as a reality show, but the topic bears revisiting, because there are two kinds of reality show, and the difference between them bears a marked resemblance to the difference between democracy and populism.

The first type of reality show is the talent-based competition, whether in singing, dancing, cooking, or (in Muslim-majority countries) reciting poetry. These shows, which do well in every media market, are characterized by certain practices that resonate with democratic values. For example, they begin with open auditions, a practice that reflects the ideal of equal opportunity. The winners in each round are selected by a “mixed regime” of popular voting by viewers and a panel of experienced judges. The performances respect norms of propriety and decorum, drawing a connection between public morality and the integrity of the contest. And in the final round the losers are, if anything, more gracious than the winners. In short, this type of reality show focuses on talent, hard work, and achievement, fairly judged and rewarded.

The same cannot be said of the second type of reality show, which is based not on talent but on the willingness of participants to be degraded and humiliated. These shows are characterized by practices that jibe all too well with the uglier tendencies of populism. For example, they do not start with open auditions but with an opaque and manipulative recruitment process. The winners of each round are voted for by viewers for reasons that have little to do with talent, much less propriety or decorum. The competition is often unfair, because the producers unapologetically change the rules. And the final round typically involves a display of cruelty and arbitrary power exercised for their own sake.

But you needn’t take my word for it. Allow me to share with you this anonymous online review by a disillusioned fan of one such degrading reality show:

For the first couple of seasons, I thought [Program X] was engaging and exciting. . . .But season 6 is a big joke. . . .It has absolutely nothing to do with business …  The tasks are, at most, boring and mostly a showcase for the companies who are dumb enough to pay [the network] for the publicity. . . .The main focus is mostly in the boardroom where the contestants are expected to do everything to stay on the show (that means lying, trash-talking, backstabbing, etc.). This is entertainment at its low point. . . .In earlier seasons at least some of the contestants had a bit of integrity, now it seems they would kill their own mother. . . .It also seems like ‘the host’s] massive ego becomes bigger and bigger. . . .To be honest, I can’t see why anyone with common sense would want to work for him. . . .He just likes to trash people.

Surely you have guessed that the reality show in question is The Apprentice, which ran for fourteen seasons on NBC under the same host: Donald J. Trump.

Amid the heated debates over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison wrote: “Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.” Words to ponder the next time we tune in.

1 The brief summaries are mine.

2  Patzelt, “Populism—and How To Handle It,” in Claudia Crawford, Boris Makarenko, and Nikolay Petrov, eds., Populism as a Common Challenge (Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2018), pp. 16-21.

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Brazil on the Brink

Almost five years ago I wrote about the wave of protests then sweeping Brazil. I argued that because people were protesting everything, they were ultimately protesting nothing.

Three years ago, Brazilians found a sense of direction, and a new wave of protests ended with the ousting of the corrupt and incompetent government of Dilma Rousseff. But then things got worse (again), and now Brazil finds itself back in dire straits.

The anti-corruption campaign, nicknamed Lava Jato (Car wash), destroyed politics in Brazil, with the happy support of some of the country’s most important media outlets. On the one hand, several “bad guys” were justifiably investigated, prosecuted, and condemned, former President Lula being the best example. On the other, Lava Jato essentially told Brazilians that all politicians are the same: Left to their own devices, they would legislate for their own benefit and perpetuate corruption, bad management, inequality—you name it. This effectively allowed Lula and his party to reestablish themselves after being kicked out. After all, if every politician is the same, why was Lula the only one who got jailed? At least when he was in charge things were running better. Very few realize that it was Lula’s policies that brought Brazil to its worst recession in more than a generation and severely compromised the prospects of recovery (due mainly, but not only, to a monstrously large fiscal deficit). A widespread sense of illegitimacy made it difficult to distinguish between various candidates—and that in turn made it easier for demagogues to capture public support. Yes, we’re corrupt, we’re incompetent, we’re selfish, Lula’s cronies seemed to say. But have you seen the other guy?

There are institutional problems as well. Brazil’s system of government is notoriously dysfunctional: The President is elected by a majority vote and faces a House of Deputies chosen by a very complex system of proportional representation that guarantees that political parties will be weak and members of Parliament will be un-representative. Since the President needs a strong majority to approve almost any piece of meaningful legislation, he or she will immediately try to “buy” representatives by whatever means available.

And since Brazilians today believe that the most pressing problem in the country is corruption, they want to see the system “cleansed” of corrupt politicians. This is a naive and dangerous trap. Defenestrating bad actors will not change the electoral laws that make reform difficult, or revivify weak and disintegrated parties who appropriate public funds to stay afloat. Nor will it arrest the ongoing politicization of Brazil’s Supreme Courts—a phenomenon known in Brazil as the “judicialization of politics”—because that politicization emerged in response to legislative impotence. Supreme Court judges now decide important questions on the basis of what they call “public outcry.” At least since Dilma Rousseff’s ousting, judges have been issuing contradictory votes on crucial constitutional issues. The general sense in the country is that there’s an acute lack of juridical reason and coherence, which might explain why the new President of the Supreme Court started his two-year mandate on September 13 by appointing the former Army chief of staff as a special adviser—all in the name of stability and predictability.

Fed up with politics, with politicians, and with the worst recession in living memory, Brazilians are turning against the establishment. That turn has manifested in two ways: in a sense of revulsion directed at the PT or Worker’s Party, whose policies are associated with identity politics and “leftism”; and in a belief that an authoritarian and hitherto obscure politician, former Army Captain Jair Bolsonaro, can magically solve the nation’s problems, starting with corruption. Bolsonaro sees himself as a kind of “Brazilian Trump,” at least in the sense that he is challenging conventional political wisdom by making outrageous statements and taking on media empires. Like Trump, Bolsonaro says he is a victim of a biased media establishment, which in Bolsonaro’s view is tied to elite interests and a “globalist” agenda. I doubt most Brazilians understand exactly what “globalism” means, but Bolsonaro’s cleaver of social media has helped to propel him to the top of the polls in Monday’s general election, despite stiff opposition from the Brazilian elite. That means round two will be between Bolsonaro and Fernando Haddad, with the former commanding a steep lead over the latter.

Is Bolsonaro a threat to democratic institutions? Is his obsessive endorsement of military dictatorships from the 1970s and 1980s a taste of what is to come if he wins the elections? I do not think the insurgent candidate will be the cause of democratic decay. He’s better understood as a symptom of it. Brazil’s dysfunctional politics are already undemocratic; political parties are (with good reason) despised. The press, particularly the mainstream media, has experienced a devastating loss in credibility and standing. Violence is widespread, and fear explains much of the former Army captain’s popularity.

Will all this lead to some sort of military regime, or to control of the civilian regime by generals? Bolsonaro’s ideas are essentially a confused blend of the Chicago Boys’ fiscal hawkishness coupled with a Trump-like disdain for identity politics, plus the usual populist rhetoric about rooting out corruption—which, in Brazil’s dysfunctional political system is a recipe for more turbulence and instability. In short, Brazil under Bolsonaro does not run the risk of devolving into authoritarianism so much as prolonging an already long period of stagnation.

There is no doubt that the elements of polarization and “cultural war” familiar to Americans are already in place in Brazil. The next President, whether it’s Bolsonaro or Haddad, will need a superhuman ability to juggle several different constituencies that all stand to suffer under the necessary fiscal adjustment, a task made all the more daunting by the regionalization and subdivisions of different interests. Moreover, Brazilians have showed a remarkable degree of complacency in the face of horrible crime rates and unheard of levels of corruption, and they have embraced leftist “solutions” to problems like wealth inequality—despite the obvious fact that fiscal irresponsibility will only make things worse. Now, faced with very difficult choices, they find themselves confronted with a choice between the sure path to disaster (Lula’s way) or the uncertain path of popular discontent. Though they don’t yet realize it, Brazilians are protesting against themselves.

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