Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 75

Radical Politics, Old Ideas

Remember the “libertarian moment?” Not so long ago, commentariat from Reason magazine to the opinion pages of The New York Times noted a resurgence of libertarian ideas, driven by economic and technological fragmentation of power, and by the rise of a new generation of libertarian candidates such as the Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.

Yet the “libertarian moment” has not ushered in a new golden age of free-market thinking and innovative market-based policies. The Tea Party movement, of which the “libertarian moment” now seems an epiphenomenon, radicalized the Republican base into demanding ever-more extreme measures only to create a zombie—Donald Trump—whom nobody could control.

The bourgeoning “democratic socialism” on the Left carries echoes of the Tea Party movement. Both may seem refreshing after decades of groupthink and complacency in the political center. But neither is offering genuinely new ideas or a coherent governing strategy.

The new radicalism on the Left should not be greeted with panic, at least not yet. For better and for worse, the term “socialism,” as championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cynthia Nixon, seems to have returned to U.S. political vocabulary in sanitized form, stripped of the authoritarianism inherent in the socialist experience of large parts of the world, including Eastern Europe and Latin America. “Democratic socialists” are not planning to seize the means of production, build a gulag system, or replicate Venezuela’s catastrophic price controls. Many of their practical proposals—from corporate co-determination to a Federal jobs guarantee to single-payer healthcare—would hardly raise an eyebrow in Europe.

If the emerging movement is not a mortal threat to America’s free enterprise system, neither is it a source of particularly innovative policy ideas. At home, the most intriguing among their recent proposals is the idea of co-determination, outlined by Senator Elizabeth Warren (who, in fairness, does not identify as a “democratic socialist”). Co-determination consists of mandating workers’ representation on executive boards of companies of a certain size—Warren suggests 40 percent of worker-chosen directors for all companies with revenue above $1 billion.

Co-determination seems to work just fine in countries such as Germany, Denmark, or Sweden. If it appears to be a viable model for established, middle-of-the-pack corporations—the VWs and Siemens AG of the world—it is hardly a recipe for innovation at the technological frontier of America’s leading firms, which rely on a much greater degree of corporate risk-taking than workers on an executive board would likely allow.

Nor is it obvious how co-determination would solve the underlying problems that Warren is concerned about—especially low wage growth and labor’s falling share of income—since those are driven by other factors, including sluggish productivity growth and rising costs of living in high-productivity cities.

The excitement about co-determination goes hand in hand with the faith that “democratic socialists” place in increased unionization, which has traditionally been much lower in the United States than in Europe. But unionization seems past its heyday across major industrialized economies on both sides of the Atlantic, including in Nordic countries. Membership remains above 50 percent only in countries where unions play a role in disbursing unemployment benefits (the “Ghent System”) and even there it has come under increased pressure.

What are the other innovative ideas of “democratic socialists”? Instead of strengthening the existing social safety net and expanding its reach among low-income workers, Senator Bernie Sanders is keen to tax large corporations, such as Amazon, to reimburse the government for providing public assistance to its employees—effectively increasing the costs of employing low-earners. As my AEI colleague Angela Rachidi points out, the idea is based on faulty economic logic: “For the argument that safety net programs ‘subsidize’ employers to ring true, wages would be higher in their absence, something I doubt proponents believe.”

Other “new” ideas involve tuition-free college education, single-payer healthcare, and the notion of a Federal jobs guarantee. The latter has been floating around post-Keynesian circles since the end of the Second World War, while the first two have been a longstanding staple of Democratic policy debates for decades.

Of course, all such proposals can be debated on their merits. This Eastern European author is not entirely unsympathetic to the idea of a single-payer healthcare system. But such proposals would require dramatic tax hikes in order to be fiscally sustainable. Introducing a VAT, raising the tax rate on the highest earners, or ending America’s military involvement overseas (“unlimited war,” as Ocasio-Cortez put it) is not going to cut it. Whether or not one believes that America should look more like the Nordic countries in important respects, increasing the tax burden is going to be an unpopular political proposition in the United States.

If at home “democratic socialists” offer ideas that are impractical but hardly novel, it is in foreign policy that they promise a truly radical and disruptive departure from the status quo. That may seem paradoxical, since the movement is built around a domestic political agenda, but it makes sense if one believes that the country’s military commitments have on balance been detrimental to ordinary Americans.

What results is an intellectual convergence of the Intercept Left and of the Breitbart Right on foreign policy. Illustrated by articles on how “progressives can engage Russia,” which repeat the Kremlin’s tired talking points, and by Glenn Greenwald’s appearances on The Tucker Carlson Show, this convergence has been underway for a long time.

In 1997, Senator Bernie Sanders attacked NATO’s expansion to the East, claiming that “it [was] not the time to continue wasting tens of billions of dollars helping to defend Europe” and asking why the United States was “militarily provoking Russia.” The 2016 Green Party candidate for President, Jill Stein, who sat at an RT gala in Moscow with Vladimir Putin and former Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, justified Russian aggression because “NATO has been surrounding Russia with missiles, nuclear weapons, and troops.”

To be sure, “democratic socialists” deserve a fair hearing both on matters of domestic and foreign policy. Particularly when it comes to the latter, at a time when voters have lost their trust in the traditional movers and shakers of U.S. foreign policy, it is important to reckon with the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to have a conversation about burden-sharing within NATO and about Europe’s role in the world.

Yet one should be under no illusion about how such debates are likely to play out within the confines of a democratic politics that is increasingly animated by radicalism. Politics is not a seminar-room environment where policy ideas are discussed on their substantive merits. A conversation about foreign policy initiated by “democratic socialists” will inevitably follow lines similar to conversations initiated by the political Right about the size of government and the debt burden. Instead of substance and a compromise-based, pragmatic way forward, we will see a flurry of emotions and frantic radicalism while the underlying problem of fiscal sustainability lingers unabated.

One key reason is that politics is “not about policy,” as Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, put it a decade ago. Instead it is about collective identities, status competition, and elevating one group at the expense of others. For good or ill, policies come later, as political scientists Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels argue, almost as an afterthought.

Today, political debates are unmoored and unpredictable. Two years after Donald Trump rode to victory on a wave of protectionist sentiments, record numbers of Americans embrace free trade. The Democrats, meanwhile, have become hawkish on Russia, while 40 percent of Republican voters see the Kremlin as an ally or friend of the United States. In recent insightful pieces, Tyler Cowen and Shadi Hamid offer similar messages: The Overton window has not merely shifted, it has expanded to include extreme positions on a number of policy issues.

The newfound radicalism and ideological somersaults do not mean that politics has suddenly become about big and exciting ideas—indeed, it is hard to see any right now that could pass serious intellectual scrutiny. More plausibly, a change in collective identities across Western countries is underway, as described in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, among many others, and the political center has been hopelessly behind the curve in understanding it. The result so far? A de-facto demise of Europe’s center-Left and the entrenchment of the hardline anti-establishment Right on both sides of the Atlantic.

The underlying dynamics are only going to accelerate, whether they concern urbanization, education, or the racial make-up of advanced democracies. Between 2000 and 2016, the proportion of 25-34 year olds in OECD countries who’ve completed tertiary education went up from 26 percent to 43 percent—an extraordinary social change for such a short period. “But by dramatically increasing numbers going to university, we also made it more significant to not have shared in this national narrative. Political consequences are clear,” tweeted the political scientist Sophie Gaston.

“Democratic socialism” is not a way out of the current impasse. Together with an increasingly intolerant identity politics—which also aggravates bigotry on the Right —a left-wing policy outlook detached from reality will add to a flammable mix of radicalism whose one logical consequence is the emergence of a zombie, Trump-like figure on the Democratic Left. And if you think that is farfetched, I’ve got two words for you: Jeremy Corbyn.

Whether one likes it or not, all the cards are on the table. If history teaches us anything, it is that resurgent political radicalism is hardly a reason for intellectual excitement about big and bold ideas. Rather, it is a reliable sign of serious trouble ahead.

The post Radical Politics, Old Ideas appeared first on The American Interest.

Hard to Be a God

Vladimir Putin makes only a single appearance in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film Leviathan: His picture hangs like an Orthodox icon above a roomful of corrupt officials going about their business. The shot portrays one of the many dualities characteristic of modern Russia. Russia’s President, while seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent, is at the same time absent and disinterested. As a political actor, he inhabits a higher plane than the rest of the state. Look no further than his approval ratings: For the past five years, the presidency has enjoyed support some 20 to 30 percentage points higher than Prime Minister Medvedev, the government, and the Duma. Or consider the fact that he is no longer part of the United Russia party, his administration’s policymaking vehicle in the Duma. Kremlin elites do not compete against Putin, they compete for him in terms of access and sway. Angry Russians just as often beg for his intervention against corrupt officials as they agitate for his ouster.

It was his absence from day-to-day politics that helped Putin become and remain as popular as he did in his last term. Seizing on crisis in Ukraine and an increasingly tense geopolitical climate, he was able to deal almost exclusively in a policy realm beyond the grasp of average Russians, benefiting from the perception of a stronger Russia that would not yield any ground to real or perceived enemies at the gates. The country had risen “from its knees,” in local parlance. It was no coincidence that his approval rating rapidly jumped into the neighborhood of 80 percent and remained there until this summer. To a large extent, foreign policy served as domestic policy for the past six years. Putin delegated quotidian matters—the management of the economy and other domestic policy—to others, leaving them to make gaffes and soak up popular dissatisfaction due to the increasing financial costs of an aggressive foreign policy. And through no small effort, the human costs of adventures abroad have been kept hidden as well.

As seen in a recent, highly personalized retreat on pension reform, this dynamic has now appreciably changed. As recession has given way to prolonged economic stagnation, the salience of Crimea’s annexation—and to a lesser extent the intervention in Syria—has diminished in terms of its impact on public opinion. In response, Putin and his team needed to deliver a bold domestic agenda to boost economic growth and jumpstart a sputtering economy. Some agenda items are popular: After being neglected in favor of defense spending, social spending is set to see an influx of cash and the state is taking the lead to boost infrastructure investment. Others, such as pension reform, are less popular. With Russia’s workforce shrinking, the government will need to allocate an increasing slice of budget expenditures as transfers to the pension system. That would mean less money available for growth-generating investment. The problem is that a domestically focused agenda necessarily involves policy far closer to average Russians. And because his absence from the domestic policy realm for the past six years has allowed other institutions (i.e. Dmitri Medvedev and United Russia) to soak up unpopularity, Putin is now the only figure in Russian politics with enough political capital to drive the agenda.

It is not a surprise, then, that as Putin has become more involved in more concrete domestic matters, his approval rating has come back down to earth. 67 percent of Russians now approve of their President’s job performance as measured by the independent Levada Center. That’s the lowest that figure has been since the annexation of Crimea. The fact that Russia’s generous (as measured by retirement age, at least) pension system is a legacy of the Soviet Union, a concept many Russians still associate with “greatness,” further complicates things. Yet none of this seems to have swayed top-ranking officials, who comment that Putin will only take a more active role in selling reform as the Duma prepares for its second vote on the reform bill—usually the one that sees most substantive changes—in September. That should offer little solace to his allies. Indeed, some of Putin’s most uncomfortable moments have come as a result of his interactions with regular Russians, on issues directly impacting them, and particularly when they are angry. His tone-deaf management of the Kursk incident and the more recent Kemerovo mall disaster serve as cautionary tales. Though this rumored political push will be tightly managed, it will also anchor Putin to an unpopular issue.

Even a job approval rating of 60 percent would be high by international standards; despite reports to the contrary, Russia’s President is not on the verge of being toppled, not least because there is by design no credible alternative to him in Russian politics. However, he will also find it increasingly difficult to operate with his characteristic distance from politics, which he has used to protect his political capital. The Kremlin will cite sanctions as a means of building cohesion, but it is difficult to think of messaging that could credibly pin pension reform on the West. While not in immediate jeopardy, Putin will be operating in uncomfortable territory. He’ll have to dirty himself in conversations with commoners about unpopular policy in which he has little personal interest. His agenda, and his necessary participation in it, will also draw protests—as witnessed across the country on Sunday—that increasingly blur the line between political and economic grievances, a distinction that has insulated him in the past.

Barring a miraculous economic recovery in the coming years, Putin will face an even greater potential challenge: elevating a deity to replace himself. As he is learning all too well, it’s hard to be a god.

The post Hard to Be a God appeared first on The American Interest.

A Strategic Alliance in the Making?

Among the most prominent features of the 21st century is the realignment in the distribution of global political, economic, and military power. Many scholars and observers of international relations argue that the United States and China in some configuration will likely dominate the geopolitical landscape this century. Certainly, the United States will remain a great power in the international system, despite the diminishing gap between American power and that of the rest of the world. However, a rising China is pressing for a world order more favorable to its interests, arguing that it was absent when Washington led the fashioning of the existing rules forming the Western-dominated international system today.

Where does Russia sit in the 21st-century realignment? Right in the middle. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has been struggling to hang on to its great power status. Many of its traditional sources of power—political, economic, and military—have eroded over the past nearly three decades. U.S. and Chinese leaders know this, and they view Russia through the prism of their own country’s geopolitical interests.

To that end, Beijing and Moscow see a Sino-Russo strategic partnership as a counter to America’s global influence. In fact, the most recent signal of strengthening ties between China and Russia is unfolding this week with the participation of roughly 3,200 Chinese military personnel in the Russian military exercise “Vostok”, an exercise dating back to the Cold War that was designed, ironically, to aid Moscow in a ground war with China along its eastern front. Although the number of participating Chinese pales in comparison to the estimated 300,000 Russian troops involved, the joint exercise nevertheless indicates a deepening of Chinese-Russian military-to-military cooperation. Vostok is among several recent joint military exercises.

Ahead of the military exercise, the countries’ two leaders, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, will meet in the Russian far-east city of Vladivostok, the 26th time the two leaders will meet. Xi will be attending the Russian-hosted Eastern Economic Forum, the first time a Chinese leader has done so. Their latest meeting and the upcoming exercise have heightened concerns that a real Sino-Russian alliance is emerging. How warranted are those concerns? The answer is mixed: There are several considerations driving China and Russia together, but at the same time a Sino-Russian alliance would require overcoming deep historical, political, economic, and cultural divisions.

Considerations Driving China and Russia Closer

Several forces driving China and Russia closer together include: U.S. primacy and the desire in Beijing and Moscow to challenge that primacy; increasing American rhetoric projecting China and Russia as threats; China’s rise and need to mitigate U.S. efforts to contain or confront it; and Russia’s limited economic, political, and military power combined with its desire to remain a great power. Furthermore, both China and Russia have a common desire to undermine the allure of democracy relative to authoritarian models. Finally, both are feeling the impact of Western-led economic efforts, most notably the U.S. and EU sanctions that have forced Russia to explore other markets, as well as the U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods and Russian steel and aluminum, which have driven them to cooperate economically against the United States.

As articulated in the U.S. national security and defense strategies, Russia and China are considered direct threats to America’s primacy. President Trump’s National Security Strategy released in December 2017, paints both Russia and China as “revisionist powers . . . that use technology, propaganda, and coercion to shape a world antithetical to our interests and values . . . .” According to the National Defense Strategy released by the Pentagon in January, China and Russia are lumped into the same category.

“The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the re-emergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers,” the document declares. “It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.”

Russia, not surprisingly, does not share this assessment of China (nor of itself, for that matter). Indeed, Moscow virtually never describes China in negative terms, to say nothing of being a threat, in contrast to how it views the United States, which is often cited as Russia’s chief threat. Russian propagandists on Kremlin-controlled television frequently bash the United States. This was certainly the case in the second half of the Obama Administration; in the days after Russia illegally annexed Crimea, television presenter Dmitry Kiselyov famously threatened, “Russia is the only country in the world that is realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash.” While such rhetoric was toned down at the start of the Trump Administration, rhetoric against the United States continues. Similar talk about China coming out of Moscow is simply unimaginable.

As U.S.-Russian relations deteriorated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russian-Chinese relations deepened. Some in the think tank and analytical community have argued that the tensions in relations between Moscow and Washington are driving Moscow and Beijing closer together. In May of 2014, soon after Europe and the United States imposed sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Crimea and widening aggression in Ukraine, Putin traveled to Shanghai to sign a long-awaited $400 billion gas deal with China involving a costly and much-discussed pipeline. President Xi exercised leverage in signing the deal, knowing that Putin was under pressure from the West and was looking for other, eastern options. “This is the biggest contract in the history of the gas sector of the former USSR,” said Putin, after the agreement was signed between state-controlled entities Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC).

Even though China got the better deal through a reduced price for the gas, Putin’s supporters argued that the deal demonstrated that Russia had the “China card” to play. “Obama should abandon the policy of isolating Russia: it will not work,” Putin loyalist and senior parliamentarian Alexei Pushkov, tweeted at the time.

The Russian-Chinese military relationship has significantly deepened over the years, with arms sales of advanced aircraft and missiles such as the Su-35 combat aircraft and S-400 SAM systems between the two (mostly going from Russia to China), totaling some $7 billion. Russia needs the currency earned from such sales, especially in light of Western sanctions and the drop in the price of oil. Nevertheless, the arrangement, which includes some of Russia’s leading military equipment, reminds one of the old Lenin quote: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” In this case, some in Moscow must wonder whether Russia is selling the Chinese the means by which Beijing could threaten Russia militarily.

There is common ground between China and Russia when it comes to the United States. Both resent efforts by the United States over decades to establish and maintain American unipolarity around the world. Both are interested in a multi-polar world as a way to vitiate American primacy. Beijing and Moscow seek to undermine and discredit the very concept of Western-style democracy. Both have been eager to hold up their systems of government, which combine authoritarianism with a market economy as viable and desirable alternatives to the United States model. Both tap into populist movements around the world, including the United States, challenging the efficacy of democratic systems and highlighting their failures to deliver to average citizens.

Both bristle at American-led sanctions and a military build-up in Europe in the case of Russia and military maneuvers and economic pressure to contain a muscle-flexing, growing China. Those sanctions against Russia have forced Moscow to look east for new markets. Recent American tariffs on China may impel Beijing to look toward Russia.

Both use their veto power in the United Nations Security Council to block U.S.-led efforts to sanction and target countries such as Syria and Iran, even more recently Nicaragua, with Russia usually taking the lead in this forum and China closely following behind. One time when they abstained, in the case of Libya in 2011, the Qaddafi regime was overthrown and Qaddafi was killed, leading authorities in Moscow and Beijing to vow never to let that happen again. We see this playing out in North Korea. Although Moscow and Beijing oppose North Korean nuclearization efforts, neither are interested in seeing the Kim regime toppled. China especially, but Russia, too, have helped undermine the effectiveness of international sanctions against the regime in Pyongyang in a challenge to the United States.

Factors Working Against a Sino-Russian Alliance

For all those common interests, there is much keeping Moscow and Beijing apart. There are deep historical, political, cultural and economic differences as well as diverging global interests. They compete for influence in Central Asia and beyond; China has greater wherewithal to pursue an aggressive agenda. Both countries have radically different demographic projections.

China is struggling to manage its still growing population with respect to the anticipated socioeconomic demands of an aging population in the latter part of this century, hence its efforts to move away from the One Child Policy and ongoing debates over eliminating the Two Child Policy. Russia, meanwhile, suffers from a declining population, with worst-case predictions calling for a dramatic fall from its current 143 million to 100 million in a few decades. This will bring with it huge economic, labor, social security, and other implications for Russia. Roughly five million Russians live in the country’s Far East, among the least-populated stretches in the world; more than 100 million, live across the border in the three Chinese regions adjacent to Russia, where some 5-7 million Russians reside. China views Russia’s bountiful natural resources, space, and opportunity with envy. An influx of Chinese into the Russian Far East to fill employment opportunities, including into the two largest cities of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, risks significantly changing regional dynamics and is the source of significant resentment among many Siberians.

The two countries have different economic outlooks: China’s economy continues to rise—albeit at a slower rate than the previous decade—whereas Russia’s economy remains stagnant. China attaches more importance to its relationship with the United States than to that with Russia. China aspires to be on equal footing with the United States, not Russia, which Beijing recognizes as a declining power. China is catching up to the United States in GDP terms, $19.5 trillion versus $12.2 trillion, though it still has quite a way to go. Russia’s GDP, by contrast, does not even break the $2 trillion level.

The United States remains a global power, even with a push starting in the Obama Administration and continuing under Trump to pull back on some of America’s commitments overseas. China, through military muscle-flexing and economic means, is expanding its global reach regularly. Beijing has devoted $1 trillion to its Belt and Road Initiative to extend its influence in developing countries through financing for infrastructure; Russia can’t even dream of such an initiative.

Trade between China and the United States came close to $650 billion in 2016, dwarfing trade between Russia and the United States, which was barely more than $27 billion in 2016, according to USTR statistics. Recent tariff wars, rising wages in China, and Chinese indigenization efforts will likely affect those numbers especially with China, but even then, Russia is not going to fill any void created. Trade between Russia and China, by comparison, was only $84 billion in 2017. China is an important, albeit not decisive, player in the American economy, holding more than $1 trillion in U.S. national debt; Russia isn’t even an important economic partner.

Russia is an equal with the United States when it comes to nuclear weapons and significantly outpaces China in this area. However, Russia is a wannabe global power; while it is capable of making trouble beyond its borders (see Syria in particular) the bulk of its influence lies with the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. But even there the United States (albeit less so in recent years) and especially China are competing for influence in that region.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional grouping created in 2001, has not dampened the push and pull that countries in Central Asia and elsewhere feel in the competition for influence between Moscow and Beijing. As Russian analyst Dmitri Trenin acknowledged, “For the first time in their history, Russians have to deal with a China which is more powerful and more dynamic than their own country.”

The passage of time has largely erased memories of actual clashes between the Soviet Union and China in the late 1960s, but it has not eliminated lingering distrust between the two countries. This distrust has existed for decades, exacerbated after the Chinese Revolution in 1949 by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign in the 1950s and continuing throughout the next several decades. Nixon’s play of the “China card” in the 1970s heightened the distrust between Moscow and Beijing. In the United States, some wonder whether we should be doing something similar, this time with the “Russia card.”

Where Does That Leave the United States?

Amid the controversies swirling around the July 2018 meeting between President Trump and President Putin in Helsinki, one comment made by Trump at the very beginning of his one-on-one meeting, just before the joint press conference, went virtually unnoticed. In listing a series of topics he planned to discuss with Putin, Trump said, “we’ll be talking a little bit about China, our mutual friend President Xi.” Nothing more was said during the press conference or in follow-on coverage of the Trump-Putin meeting. What might the two leaders have discussed regarding China?

Some argue that former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger is advising the Trump Administration to consider Russia as a partner in its strategy to contain a rising China; after all, Kissinger pushed U.S. alignment with China in an effort to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The logic behind this is clear: Russia has few traditional sources of national power that threaten U.S. long term interests. However, Moscow does present near-term challenges in undermining democratic values and exacerbating social and political divisions in the U.S. through its efforts to weaponize information. If the United States can compel Russia to layoff attacking U.S. interests (and there’s little to indicate that it can), then it can focus its efforts on managing its interests with respect to a rising China.

Still, among the many problems with pursuing such an approach is the fact that the United States and Russia share no common values and share fewer and fewer interests. Given the current state of relations, even with Trump’s efforts to “reset” in his own way his ties with Putin, it is hard to imagine such a strategy would succeed in pitting Russia and the United States together against China. Moreover, there are no indications that Putin would risk antagonizing his relationship with Xi and China by agreeing to team up with the United States to contain Beijing. Putin and the Kremlin believe they have reason to doubt the reliability of the United States: They thought Trump was going to lift sanctions and instead have seen the U.S. Administration ramp them up instead. The same is true in Washington: There is little reason for them to think officials in Moscow would reliably partner against China.

Given the yawning gap between the Russia and the United States, an alignment between them would likely require some sort of grand bargain. What would the United States sacrifice to garner Russian favor with respect to China? Silence on Russia’s human rights situation? No more sanctions? Abandonment of Ukraine, Georgia, and other countries in Eurasia to a Russian sphere of influence? It is doubtful that any of these sacrifices would be worth the return. Even if one assumes that Russia will one day align with the West, the costs to American interests and values required to strike a deal with Moscow in the short-term, if such a deal were even possible, overwhelm any potential benefits. A Russo-American alliance against China seems as unlikely and unwise in certain respects as a Russo-Chinese Alliance against the United States.

Furthermore, even amid rising tensions over tariffs and North Korea, Sino-American relations seem in better shape than those between Moscow and Washington. Indeed, Trump’s pursuit of better relations with Putin is making little headway. The White House has delayed an invitation for Putin to visit the United States until next year, meaning that Trump and Putin so far have only met in third countries. President Xi, by contrast, visited Trump at Mar-a-Largo in April 2017, and Trump traveled to Beijing for an elaborate visit there last November.

The U.S.-China relationship, in other words, is much deeper and more productive than the one between Russia and the United States—or the one between Russia and China. For the time being, that will act, along with other factors, as a drag on the hope some have of seeing a Russian-American rapprochement aimed at jointly containing China. That leaves many scratching their heads in wonderment as to what Trump and Putin might have discussed about China in Helsinki. Nor does it clarify where the Russia-China relationship is headed with respect to the United States. For the United States, Russia is not an ally, and China is not an enemy—for now. But the coming reconfiguration of the international system will force these countries to reconsider alliances in an effort maximize their own interests and preserve, if not carve out, their place in the world. The U.S. should engage Russia and China when and where it makes the most sense to its strategic interests, but it should also remain cautious about Moscow and Beijing’s intentions and stay agile enough to react to the changes taking place in both countries. The outlook, in other words, is very gray, not black-and-white, and likely to stay that way for years to come.

The post A Strategic Alliance in the Making? appeared first on The American Interest.

The Serve America Movement

American politics is at an historic inflection point. We all know it. We all feel it. While the turbulent 1960s, with its spate of assassinations and unrest, shook our democracy and politics to the bone, those times did not cause large numbers of us to question the fitness of the two major parties to be the custodians of our democracy. Today is different. At SAM, the Serve America Movement, we believe that we are in the midst of what will be the most significant political realignment in this country since 1854, when the two then-dominant parties began to splinter and, less than six years later, had re-constituted themselves into the two parties that have since dominated our politics.

The Core Political Problem

In our view, the core problem with our politics today is how what can only be described as the “two-party monopoly” has corrupted our democratic system, encrusted the machinery of government for the principal purpose of strengthening the parties’ own dominant positions, and done everything in its power to stifle competition. The two major parties have effectively silenced the voice of the American majority.

These dynamics precede the Trump era; the self-interested extremism of both parties has been worsening for decades. Instead of governing in the best interest of the country, the two incumbent parties remain locked in “tribal” hyper-partisanship. Beholden to extremists in their respective parties and the power of special interests, legislators from both parties find partisan advantage in blocking legislative progress without regard to the actual needs of the nation as a whole or the common good.

The two-party monopoly has proven unwilling and unable to forthrightly address the massive technological and global shifts (and their economic consequences) of the post-Cold War era. Neither party and few, if any, politicians today address or even acknowledge some of the hardest questions we as a nation must ask and try to answer.

The two dominant parties insidiously collude to use their power to ensure that voters have few viable alternatives on election day. They abuse their legislative power to enact barriers and exempt themselves from troublesome rules. They consistently resist reforms designed to open up the system. The technical and arcane tools used to limit choices at the ballot box are deeply problematic to American democracy, and yet these tools are beyond the awareness of most citizens.

A once-functioning set of processes, traditions, and norms has given way to chaotic stasis; a stationary, rotating political slow-motion hurricane. The resulting distortion and disillusion has created disorder and disease in America’s political system. Surrounded by the dark clouds of what Michael Porter and Katherine Gehl, authors of a recent Harvard Business School study entitled Why Competition in the Politics Industry Is Failing America, dub a vast “political industrial complex” of donors, consultants, and interest groups, the two entrenched parties and their cohorts will remain locked in narrow hyper-partisanship—and America’s democracy will progressively deteriorate—unless and until the dominance of the two major parties is effectively challenged.

Who Is SAM?

SAM was founded in the aftermath of the 2016 election. In one sense, the bitterness and rancor of the 2016 presidential election was only the most recent reflection of an ongoing deterioration in our political culture. But the election itself was also an extraordinary political inflection point. In the main, voters held extremely negative views of both candidates. That fact, coupled with the polarizing races they ran, exacerbated disdain for the entire political system and have indelibly changed how Americans see one another. The tangible results of the toxic environment brought to the surface in the election include a widespread recognition that something is fundamentally wrong.

SAM is a coalition of patriotic but deeply concerned citizens from across the country and the political spectrum who cannot and will not stand by and simply watch what is happening to our country. With the Republican Party’s march toward anger, isolationism, and racially toned nationalism, and the Democrats’ reactive swerve toward an explicit embrace of socialism, neither major American party adequately represents the will, ethos, or needs of those they claim to represent. SAM is determined to disrupt the stranglehold that these two corrupt and ideologically dangerous parties have on our political system.

SAM is building a new political party for those who are disillusioned with their current options. Our goal is nothing less than to disrupt the two-party monopoly by creating a new national party from the ground up: a New Party for a New Majority.

We are building this new political party by gaining ballot access as a party in each state, and we are building the human, financial, and political infrastructure necessary to grow locally. Where we can form alliances with pre-existing parties and groups, we will do so. In some places we can identify pioneers—like former Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner (D) and Pelham Mayor Michael Volpe (R)—to run as SAM candidates with the goal of reforming their state governments, bringing national attention to the cause, and getting ballot access for SAM as a party. In other states, where there are different avenues to ballot access, we will progress over time and in a thoughtful and methodical way based on local conditions and the resonance of our message.

SAM’s solution is to put a new team on the field—not a red team or a blue team, but a red, white, and blue team. America needs a team with the willingness and ability to move the ball down the field; achieving progress on such topics as the health of our democracy, addressing the Federal debt, and creating an environment in which Americans can flourish.

We are committed to ensuring that this new team will also change the rules of the game, so that those in power can never again rig the system as the two-party monopoly has done. We agree with former Congressman Mickey Edwards’s sentiments in his book, The Parties vs. the People:

Having political parties—that is having Americans—gather together to support common goals is an essential ingredient of the democratic process, but allowing them to also dictate how we elect our officials and how we govern our nation is an unfathomable surrender of our rights as a people to decide how we will be governed.

The Challenges Ahead

For SAM, this past year has been one of examination, exploration, and experimentation. What most ails American politics? What are the clearest, most direct ways to provide solutions to our most pressing problems? Is there yet a critical mass of Americans tired of our old, noxious politics who are ready to build a new movement and ultimately a new party? How will we ensure SAM is different? Is now the time to take on the entrenched two-party monopoly?

We know we are not alone in believing that a new party is the best path forward. A September 2017 Gallup poll found that 61 percent of Americans support the idea of new major political party, “the highest level of support Gallup has ever recorded,” according to a Washington Post column by Juleanna Glover. The New York Times recently reported that over 60 percent of adults in California think that, “both parties [are] doing such a poor job that another party [is] needed.” The youngest generation of voters is perhaps the most hungry for change: An NBC News/GenForward Survey in November 2017 found that 71 percent of millennials say a new major party is needed.

SAM’s most pressing challenge—and most promising opportunity—is to translate the preference of a majority of voters into electoral reality. Moving from poll results toward tangible success in building a party requires SAM to address three discrete issues.

First, SAM must make the case that creating a new political party is necessary, feasible, and wise. Among other things, we need to explain how our approach differs from the approaches of others who are trying to improve our politics, and why disrupting the two-party monopoly is a better strategy than more incremental efforts to improve the current system.

Second, SAM candidates must take on the issues that are most pressing to America’s centrist majority—the issues on which the two major parties have been silent at best and divisive and destructive at worst.

Finally, we need to create energy and intensity sufficient to persuade potential supporters that a vote for “third party” candidate is not a wasted vote, that helping a “new” party is not a waste of time, energy, and resources, and that the risk of being a “spoiler” and perhaps helping electing the candidate a voter least likes is worth the risk.

Why We Need a New Party for a New Majority

Over the past year and a half, we have spent significant amounts of time talking to voters, experts, and others who are deeply concerned about the state of our politics. Many have spent lifetimes thinking about and observing our political system, and we have learned much from them. Others have committed their time and vast resources to a variety of approaches to reform our democratic process and culture.

Some work hard to improve the system from the inside. This may take the form of supporting so-called moderate members of the Republican or Democratic caucuses in Congress or attempting to achieve administrative or legislative reform with the current players. But the political system has little desire to change and certainly will not do so from within. While we share with the system-reformers the hope for a better, more democratic future, the sad fact is that our democratic systems and norms have continued to unravel despite the efforts of reformers.

There are also those working outside the traditional party system by attempting to recruit, support, and elect independent candidates to office. These efforts recognize the two-party monopoly as a core problem but do little to combat the structural dynamics that keep it in place.

During campaigns, independent candidates carry no party label or identifier and often have little-to-no infrastructure, and most must overcome overwhelming skepticism by the political elite, media, and most voters alike. Further, because of the way ballot access laws work in each state, every time an independent candidate wants to run for office (including re-election) the individual must go through the difficult and expensive process of gathering voter signatures on a so-called ballot petition. After every election, all the work that was done to gather signatures prior to the election is thrown away.

Finally, continually running candidates for office as independents and not as representatives of an officially recognized party ignores the fact that official parties enjoy significant advantages under the campaign finance laws as compared to those who are merely seeking and obtaining access to the ballot as individuals.

A new party for a new majority is necessary to address what ails America’s political system: The only way to disrupt the two-party monopoly is to challenge it. The only argument against the ambitious but necessary work of party building is that building a new party is hard. We agree, and we know from firsthand experience: It is hard. But it is not impossible; at least two parties in the recent past (the Libertarians and the Greens) have become national parties by doing exactly what we are proposing to do: building their parties from the ground up, state by state, focusing on ballot access, people, and local infrastructure.

We’re rolling up our sleeves and doing the enormously hard but necessary work of recruiting leaders and members, building infrastructure throughout the country, and achieving state-by-state ballot access. We are building a sustainable new party that represents the majority of Americans, in order to give voters the choices they deserve.

The SAM Plan

Americans understandably want to know what their political party stands for. “Centrist” or “moderate” labels can be perceived as meaningless: standing against the extremism of the two parties can be mistaken for standing for nothing. But this is far from true in SAM’s case. The two parties benefit from focusing on the most polarizing issues, not the issues that matter most to current and future generations of Americans. A polarized and angry electorate entrenches the dominance of the ideologically extreme parties—but the result is that opportunities to move America forward on most critical issues are lost.

The two political parties have dropped the ball on the issues that matter to voters: SAM wants to pick up that ball and move it down the field. This means taking on core issues that matter to the health of our democracy and tackling the big problems that face American society.

Fixing Our System

In today’s unique environment, the charges of self-interested and anti-competitive abuse of power at the heart of our movement have resonance with an American public tired of being denied any meaningful choices. This is a core element of SAM’s mission, one that we will pursue with vigor. As Gehl and Porter write, “The politics industry is different from virtually all other industries in the economy because the participants, themselves, control the rules of competition.”

A significant number of credible and worthy groups such as the Brennan Center, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and others have been working on these issues for years; SAM hopes to partner with many of them. We all face the same hurdle of overcoming the rules in 50 different states, rules that were specifically designed by the incumbent parties to limit, deter, and belittle credible competition to their electoral majorities and governing power.

We are therefore joining forces with these groups and working on the following six core reforms:

1. End Partisan Gerrymandering. In states where one political party dominates both the legislature and the Governor’s office, the redistricting process—designed to address changes in population and ensure equal representation—has been employed as a tool to reinforce the control of the incumbent party to “gerrymander.” The result of this process is that (a) politicians end up choosing their own voters, and (b) polarization is increased as fewer and fewer differing viewpoints are adequately represented.

SAM is actively supporting efforts, many of them as a result of citizens initiatives that appear on the ballot before voters, to create non-partisan redistricting commissions like those currently in use in California and Arizona. This takes the power to draw district lines away from the politicians and puts them in the hands of voters. SAM expects to support the redistricting reform measures that will appear on the November ballot in Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, and Utah.

2. Repeal “Sore-Loser” Laws. Forty-four states employ “sore-loser” laws to enforce discipline in the major parties and prevent breakaway third-party movements. These laws provide that, if a candidate has participated and lost in a partisan primary, they are barred from running as an independent on the General Election ballot. Given the hyper-partisan nature of today’s party primary system, this means that general election candidates tend to be far more extreme than the electorate writ large.

SAM supports efforts to repeal these laws, which serve as barriers to ideologically moderate candidates, and which drive the extremism of the two major parties.

3.Remove the Unnecessarily High Barriers to Ballot Access by Independents and New Parties. The two dominant parties use their historic dominance over Federal and state legislatures to systematically protect their monopoly position. They erect virtually insurmountable barriers to competition such as steep filing fees; difficult, expensive, and often arcane signature-gathering requirements; and filing deadlines that purposefully eliminate independent candidates and the establishment of challenger parties.

SAM believes that overly burdensome barriers to entry should be eliminated. We must expand voter choice and encourage participation by independent parties and by candidates who otherwise fulfill the legal and constitutional requirements for the office for which they intend to run.

4. Give Voters More General Election Choices. In most elections today, the candidates who appear on the General Election ballot are limited to two candidates—one from each of the two major parties—and those candidates often represent the extremes. This is because those candidates are chosen in low-turnout partisan primaries conducted by the parties themselves that tend to attract only the most activist and often most extreme voters. It is also a product of our outdated plurality voting method, which strongly tends to limit competition to two major parties and puts independent or third parties into the undeserved role of “spoilers.” The combination of these factors inevitably results in ideologically extreme elected officials who take hardline positions when in office and demonstrate a total unwillingness to compromise.

SAM believes that all voters should have the ability to participate in the selection of the candidates who appear on the General Election ballot. Voters should not be limited to participating in a primary held by one of the two dominant parties under rules set by the party. This could be accomplished through adopting a “top four” primary system and ranked choice voting, as suggested by Gehl and Porter.

5. Reform and Strengthen Enforcement of Campaign Finance Laws. Today our politics are infected with enormous amounts of “dark money” injected into the system by undisclosed groups.

SAM believes in requiring the immediate, online disclosure of all political contributions (as is required in Oregon), and in strict, fully resourced enforcement of state and Federal laws designed to ensure that what purport to be lawful “independent” expenditures are not, in fact, the result of coordination with the candidate and therefore illegal campaign contributions.

6. Expand Voter Registration and Access. Nothing is more fundamental to a democracy than the right to vote. Yet for too many Americans, the act of registering to vote and casting a ballot is far too difficult. Calls to simplify the process and make it more flexible are too often resisted for partisan reasons based on exaggerated claims about the prevalence of voter fraud.

It is time for all eligible Americans to be able to register to vote easily, and for unnecessary obstacles to lawful voting to be removed in favor of increasing turnout. SAM therefore supports efforts in a rapidly growing number of states to use technology to simplify the process of registering and voting, allowing automatic online registration through the use of existing driver’s licenses and similar systems. We also support increasing flexibility in the time and manner of voting, including allowing more voters to cast their vote prior to and on Election Day without physically appearing at the poll or physically showing specified government issued photo identification.

Enacting the electoral reforms we (and many others) advocate is far easier said than done. It is absolutely clear that the two entrenched political parties will not voluntarily relinquish their favored position or cooperate in repealing the laws they have jointly enacted over the last century to keep their grip on the power.

Moving America Forward

SAM’s proposed governing philosophy is not limited to the structural reform of the electoral system and ousting from power both parts of the “two-party monopoly.” SAM was formed around a set of Founding Principles and, at the Federal level, espouses specific policy priorities. As reflected in our Candidate Criteria, we seek a set of qualities in candidates who carry the SAM banner. SAM’s beliefs reflect a perspective that is socially tolerant and inclusive, modern and forward looking, free-market oriented, and fiscally and environmentally responsible to future generations.

That perspective provides guardrails to those who are running and will run as SAM candidates. Our priorities are designed to be broad enough to allow candidates to develop their own policy positions, consistent with their own personal beliefs and the needs of their communities—and yet narrow enough to guard against the ideological extremism prevailing in both of the two major parties.

SAM’s priorities are as follows:

Bringing our country’s debt and fiscal policy under control, setting up future generations for success;
Focusing public and private resources on ensuring the health of America’s people and the vitality of local communities by innovating in education, healthcare, and infrastructure;
Creating jobs and growing the economy in a sustainable way by embracing free enterprise, free markets, free trade, and measured immigration across secure borders;
Pursuing criminal justice reform and ending the era of mass incarceration;
Making the election process truly democratic and ensuring access for all voters;
Rejecting retreat from the world and committing to America’s role as a strong, clear-eyed, values-based leader on the world stage.

Overcoming “Wasted Vote” and “Spoiler” Concerns

Americans consistently tell pollsters that they are broadly unhappy with both the Republican and Democratic parties. More voters identify as “independent” or “unaffiliated” every year. In California this year, voters registering as “No Party Preference” became the second largest constituency, outpacing Republican registrants for the first time.

Last summer, we asked voters in two states how they felt about independent candidates. More than 70 percent of respondents in both states viewed non-aligned candidates favorably. When asked later in the survey if they would vote for an independent candidate, however, about 70 percent of those same respondents said they would not.

What explains this difference between preference and willingness to act? Voters’ hope for independent and new party candidates to improve our politics trades off against fear. When a voter goes to the ballot box and is presented with only two bad choices, what should be a decision of which candidate is best qualified to lead America forward is reduced to weighing which option is “the lesser of two evils.” While voters dislike both the Republican and Democratic parties, most voters have a party they dislike more.

Voters carry some fear that candidates outside the two major parties could act as “spoilers,” propelling the greater of two evils to office. But this way of thinking concedes the proposition that the two dominant parties have already spoiled the system and that the current electoral system is not producing the results our citizens want.

Introducing more options into this mix is the only way to change the calculus, and to ensure that our options at the ballot box are more than variations of “evil.” As SAM grows, and voters see not only more options but, more importantly, that significant numbers of other votes (like themselves) also want a new and different option, we believe they will see the power in their own numbers and begin to shed the fear that their vote won’t carry weight—and instead understand that their choice is the path to real change.

Is there a risk in the short term that additional choices will result in the election of non-SAM candidates who may be more rather than less partisan? SAM will do its best to select races and candidates where our candidate has a reasonable and demonstrable chance of success against major party candidates whose views are fundamentally inconsistent with our Founding Principles and Priorities.

Fighting the Fight

Since the Civil War, the Republican and Democratic parties have dominated our electoral, policymaking and governmental systems. After those 16 decades, SAM believes now is the time for a new, political party to take the stage.

The process of building a new party will not be easy, nor will it be fast.

SAM will be methodical, focused, and dedicated to achieving ballot access in states across the country. Starting this year, in 2018, we will create a number of state-level SAM affiliates that, once qualified, will immediately begin the party-building process in earnest: registering voters, engaging volunteers, creating a self-sustaining fundraising operation, and recruiting candidates for state and Federal offices.

To complement our ballot access efforts, we will endorse and support independent candidates for office. These candidates will be screened and ultimately selected for SAM’s support: Do they embody the principles and priorities SAM believes are necessary to put America back on the right track?

Lastly, we will support ballot measures across America that specifically focus on electoral reforms such as ending partisan gerrymandering, voter ID, and voter access. These electoral reform measures are a key component of SAM’s overall strategy of leveling the playing field and putting voters’ voices first, and politicians and their parties second.

As SAM accomplishes objectives and achieves more success, we know that resistance from the two dominant parties will only grow. This could take the form of attempting to co-opt SAM into a wing of the Republican or Democratic Party, or more likely, blatant and ceaseless attacks on SAM’s members, leaders, and candidates. Our ability to have substantive political debates in this country has deteriorated and, as SAM gains traction, we know the two-party monopoly will likely prove that sad fact time and again.

None of these hurdles will deter SAM in its efforts. As an organization, we are nothing if not optimistic. Optimism is a key ingredient of the work SAM does every day: Without it, the daunting tasks ahead would be almost too much to contemplate. SAM is ready for the challenges, because we know the benefits: A political system that serves its people is one worth fighting for. We’re ready. Will you join us?

The post The Serve America Movement appeared first on The American Interest.

Barbarians, Then and Now

Return of the Barbarians: Confronting Non-State Actors from Ancient Rome to the Present

Jakub J. Grygiel

Cambridge University Press, 2018, 230 pp., $28.99

Americans have always had mixed feelings about history. The Founders were students of history, including ancient history. Indeed, they believed that the history of the Roman Republic shed as much light on their enterprise as did the history of England. They considered King George III a tyrant in the mold of Julius Caesar. Ever since, in every generation some Americans have criticized one U.S. President or another as a new Caesar. Such sloganeering, however, does not mean that the study of history is in the national DNA. The Founders’ classical education was soon as out of date as their powdered wigs.

When Harvard philosopher George Santayana said in 1905, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” he presumably meant this as a warning to those who did in fact not study history. If so, he had no shortage of examples. His contemporary Henry Ford put it bluntly about a decade later: “History is more or less bunk.” Ford went on to say: “We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history that we make today.”

That same year, 1916, a national educational association recommended that American high-school curricula offer less history and more of the new field of social studies in order to promote what they called “social efficiency.” A century later, our don’t-know-much-about-history society is the result. Or was it already there? True, in 2017 it was noted that half a dozen recent national surveys portrayed a declining knowledge of history and civics. Yet as Diane Ravitch once put it, there was probably never a golden age when students were knowledgeable about American history. Our national character is just too pragmatic and forward-looking for that. One sign of the times: History continues to flourish in American universities, but with an increasing bent toward the modern period. There are some important and honorable exceptions (turning to the social sciences, think, for example, of the work of Douglass North and the new institutional economics), but there is little doubt about the general trend.

Into our historically challenged society comes Jakub J. Grygiel with an opportune reminder that premodern history still matters. In Return of the Barbarians he offers parallels and comparisons between the barbarian challenge that ultimately brought down the Roman Empire in the West and the threat of non-state actors today. As a political scientist with a deep knowledge of history, he is an ideal practitioner of comparative analysis. As one who has served in the U.S. Department of State, Grygiel is well informed on contemporary international affairs. And he offers an impressively wide perspective through a series of case studies. With a look back to the Greeks, the author focuses on the Romans and then takes the story forward to the 17th century and occasionally beyond. Although the focus is mainly European, he glances at the Spanish Empire in North America, the Ottomans, and the Chinese. Grygiel offers a fascinating, thoughtful, and incisive analysis—and one backed up with remarkable erudition.

Grygiel understands well how little attention students of politics today tend to pay to premodern states. Recognizing the predominant role that states played in international relations in the 20th century, scholars see little need to look at the pre-state world. As Grygiel astutely notes, underlying this position is one of two assumptions. The progressive assumption argues that the norms of international relations have grown so gentle in the era of liberalism and the democratic peace that earlier history and its savagery have little relevance. The realist assumption says that human nature is unchanging and is little different today from what it was in Athens or Warring States China, so there is no need to go to the trouble of searching for arcane and ancient examples of interstate behavior when equally enlightening but more familiar cases are at hand. Why study the Peloponnesian War when you can study World War II?

One answer to this last question, we might say, is that the similarity between the two cases is less real than apparent, and that the differences are more instructive. Americans, for example, tend to identify with Athens, the leading democratic state in the Peloponnesian War, but in some ways America in World War II was more like Persia, a neutral power that, by entering into the war late, tipped the balance and decided the outcome at relatively little cost in blood and treasure compared to what other participants paid.

To take a second point, Greek city-states (poleis) were much less unified or centralized than modern states. Civil war, slave revolt, and fifth columns played a central role in the Peloponnesian War but not in the 20th-century conflict. Greeks in the Peloponnesian War died for honor and glory. Americans in World War II told social-science investigators that they fought for the much more homely motive of helping their buddies in their unit. We could go on and on about the differences between the allegedly unchanging realities of the interstate system in classical antiquity and today and how realists underestimate them, but that is a subject for another day.

Grygiel makes a separate and indispensable point. Like Herodotus, Ibn Khaldun, or Vico, he argues that history is cyclical. In Grygiel’s view, “some strategic realities and actors, which are particular to premodern history,” may be “making a resurgence.” These factors are not much present in the interstate competition of the past several centuries, but they were present in premodern times. In particular, he points to the rise of non-state, alternative sources of allegiance and authority; the possibility of being a player in international affairs without actually being a state; and the accessibility of modern military technology to groups without their own industrial base. And so, we have barbarians.

Grygiel defines barbarians as small highly mobile groups that often were not settled in a fixed place. Perhaps the term that best describes them is warrior bands. They played a continual and important role in premodern history. Scythians, Gauls, Cherusci, Numidians, Huns, Goths, Vandals, Comanches, Saxons, Bulgars, Normans (at least the armed bands that conquered Sicily without a state to support them), and Oirat Mongol tribes are among the peoples whom the author references. Grygiel paints with a broad brush and at times one remembers differences among these groups. Many of them eventually moved from carrying out raids to fighting set battles—and sometimes winning. A prime example is the Goths, who crushed a Roman army and killed the Emperor at the Battle of Adrianople in 378, thereby inflicting on the Romans one of the worst defeats in their long history. Grygiel is aware of such differences, but he rightly focuses on the broader pattern.

In his analysis, barbarians arise in territories not under the effective control of any state. He calls these places ungoverned spaces and argues that they are proliferating today, with the result that new non-state actors are proliferating. He points to destabilization in sub-Saharan and East Africa as well as in Southeastern Europe and Central Asia. As he puts it, failed states are becoming the modern equivalent of barbarian lands in Roman Central Europe or premodern Central Asia, or the North American Plains for the Spanish Empire or the early United States. They offer space for alternate forms of social organization to the state, such as tribes, clans, or religious affiliation. Sometimes they are states within a state, availing themselves of state protection, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan or Pakistan. They use modern technologies, both digital and military. They sometimes have new objectives, whether creating an offshore hegemony (Somali pirates) or a globalized community (al-Qaeda). They are relatively uninterested in diplomacy and, because they are hard to pin down, difficult to deter.

In his study of non-state actors today Grygiel is primarily interested in Islamists and their violent tactics. His use of the term barbarian to describe them is bound to be controversial, but it is defensible.

The term “barbarian” has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it is offensive, with denigrating connotations of cultural inferiority and brutal behavior. It is also dangerous because it might encourage a state to underestimate the seriousness of the threat posed by supposed inferiors. On the other hand, the term is respectful, because it appreciates the enemy’s military prowess. Barbarians, after all, conquered Rome. The term also captures a state’s ignorance of the nature of the foe. The ancient Greeks invented the term barbarian, which originally referred to peoples whose language they couldn’t comprehend. Grygiel writes: “The term ‘barbarian’ meant that the user of it did not fully understand his strategic interlocutor, the enemy.”

Grygiel concedes differences between ancient and modern barbarians. The latter are more lethal than their predecessors and have a global reach. Nor is there any ancient counterpart to Islamism. But he notes some parallels: localized, individually small, geographically diffuse threats; the preference for raids over invasions; the inclination for terrorizing rather than holding land and administering populations. And of course both groups are violent.

Grygiel sees the barbarian threat in perspective. As he points out, the greatest threat to a state is not the attacks of non-violent state actors but of another state. For the Romans, barbarians on the frontiers were more of an annoyance than a mortal danger until they became organized in quasi-states of their own. In some cases it took centuries for Roman discipline and technique to seep across the frontier before barbarians were able to pose real challenges. By then the empire had suffered enough other challenges to be unable to defend itself. The Romans endured epidemics, currency inflation, political instability, population decline, and de-urbanization. Italy’s population turned away from war to pursue the pleasures of prosperity, and a new military elite from the Balkans replaced it. The new elite tended to prioritize challenges in the east, especially after the creation of a second capital in Constantinople in 330. And they faced a serious challenge indeed: not barbarians but a peer polity.

That challenger arose on Rome’s eastern frontier. The Parthian Empire was an Iranian kingdom that competed with Rome for centuries, sometimes in war, sometimes through negotiations. Then, in the third century, the Parthian dynasty fell and was replaced by a new Iranian kingdom, the Sassanian Empire. The Sassanians were stronger and more effective militarily than their predecessors and represented a major problem for Rome. In fact, the challenge continued past the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476. The Byzantines inherited the problem and were continually at war with the Sassanians until the Islamic conquest of the seventh century put an end to the Sassanian Empire.

Grygiel sees an important lesson for today in premodern responses to barbarian attacks: the need to go local. In both ancient and modern cases the threat was a long-term one, “more a condition to manage rather than a problem to solve.” Like ancient barbarians, modern terrorists shrewdly exploit weaknesses in a state’s security system. They often attack local targets and hence force populations to find local solutions. The Romans created frontier troops called limitanei to police the border and respond to raids, and they built networks of border forts. A thousand years later, the Habsburgs used the Uskoks, originally refugees from Ottoman attacks, to defend the border fiercely while acting largely on their own initiative without close supervision from the central government. Grygiel sees such cases as examples of what is needed to stop terrorist attacks today, that is, examples of a principle that he calls security subsidiarity: the work of local police forces, first responders, and, last but not least, an aroused citizenry. The current catch phrase, “If you see something, say something,” comes to mind, but an older saying seems even more apposite: The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

In Return of the Barbarians Grygiel focuses on violent non-state actors as modern barbarians, but one might extend his analysis to non-violent groups on the move as well: to migrants, for example. After all, some of the ancient barbarians who bedeviled Rome were migrants who sought the security of the Roman Empire from attacks by violent raiders from the steppes. Note that the German term for what English-speakers call the Barbarian Invasions at the end of the Roman Empire is Völkerwanderung, “the migration of peoples,” a rather neutral description. Today migrants to the developed world come, for example, from Central America, sub-Saharan Africa, Syria, and South and Central Asia, and seek entry, legally or illegally, into the security of established states. They want entry to such places as the European Union, Turkey, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Tens of millions of people are on the move these days because of varying admixtures of war, political repression, economic misery, and environmental catastrophe. In future years, perhaps, climate change might lead to even larger numbers of such migrants.

When faced with raiders or migrants, states sometimes build walls. Frontier defenses, from the Roman limes to the Great Wall of China, are examples. These systems can provide a degree of help but never complete security. Often they are just monuments to Ozymandian vanity or strategic exhaustion (think of the Maginot Line). Or consider Athens in 480 B.C.E. Faced with a looming Persian invasion, the Athenians consulted the Oracle of Delphi. The response was to trust in “the wooden walls.” The leadership understood this to mean: build a fleet of wooden ships, and they did. A few diehards holed up on the Acropolis instead behind a wooden palisade. The invaders overwhelmed the palisade and slaughtered the defenders while the new Athenian fleet saved Greece at the Battle of Salamis. The Oracle’s wooden walls weren’t walls at all.

Defense is essential but a defensive mentality is never enough. Instead, prudent states always look outward. They peer beyond the frontier and pay attention to developments in “ungoverned spaces.” Diplomacy, intelligence-gathering, cultural missions, alliances, financial aid, technical assistance, espionage, raids, and sometimes war must always be part of a wise statesman’s toolkit.

Terrorism is part of today’s scene, and a modern Völkerwanderung seems to be in full swing. Both will be with us for the foreseeable future. Let’s hope that we can respond with wisdom and success. First, however, we have to display the humility and the perspective to look back at events from the distant past for some guidance. We have to realize that we are neither as unique nor as progressive as we might think. Grygiel’s insightful analysis, rooted in his profound knowledge of history, offers a precious starting point.

The post Barbarians, Then and Now appeared first on The American Interest.

Pakistan’s Bogeyman in Afghanistan

On the eve of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s stopover in Pakistan en route to India, Pakistan’s Information Minister repeated the old refrain that Pakistan would make sure “India has no role to play in Afghanistan.” Outsiders might find it surprising that one country (Pakistan) is asserting the right to decide who “plays” a role in another country (Afghanistan). Shouldn’t the right to decide what kinds of relations Afghanistan will have with other countries lie with the Afghans?

Not so for Pakistan, whose leaders often cite imaginary misgivings about India’s presence across its northwestern border as the reason Pakistan supports the Taliban and hinders American goals in Afghanistan. Had India stationed troops or created a military base there, Pakistan would have good reason to protest. But Pakistan’s knee-jerk opposition to economic, cultural, or even educational ties between India and Afghanistan is not easy for Americans to comprehend.

Pakistan’s policy has its origins in the policy of the British Raj toward Afghanistan. The British saw Afghanistan as a buffer between Russia’s Central Asian empire and their own empire in the subcontinent. Afghanistan’s foreign policy was, for all practical purposes, subject to a British veto. In an earlier era, civil servants and generals in British India even determined who would sit on the throne in Kabul.

Since independence in 1947, Pakistan’s leaders have sought influence over Afghanistan similar to that enjoyed by the erstwhile colonial power that partitioned India and devolved power to Pakistan. Officials in Islamabad wish to arrogate to themselves the right to decide who wields power in Afghanistan, and want their smaller neighbor to the west to subordinate its decision-making to Pakistan’s preferences.

Pakistan’s stated rationale for insisting that Afghanistan remain in its sphere of influence is that it fears Afghanistan joining India to encircle Pakistan. Some Pakistanis claim that India has not accepted Partition and seeks to undo Pakistan by supporting irredentist demands within the country, whether Bengali, Muhajir, Pashtun, or Baluch.

The real fear motivating Pakistani leaders is that overlapping ethnicities might lead some Pakistanis to feel greater affinity with Indians or Afghans across the border than with co-religionists of other ethnicities within Pakistan. This is more a psychological fear than a serious likelihood, which is why no substantive policy concession or internationally backed negotiation has ever been able to address it.

Pakistanis claim that they cannot forget Afghanistan’s vote at the United Nations in 1947 against Pakistan’s membership. Few of them acknowledge that Afghanistan later withdrew its objection, recognized Pakistan, and established full diplomatic relations with the new country. Similarly, there is no admission that Afghanistan supported Pakistan, not India, during several India-Pakistan wars and never took advantage of Pakistan’s vulnerabilities.

Pakistani arguments about past Afghan behavior are less cause than pretext for an agenda of subordinating Afghanistan to Pakistan. Using one rationale or another, Pakistan has consistently sought a pro-Pakistan regime in Kabul, insisting that Afghanistan should not have close ties with India. This explains Pakistan’s support for Afghan Islamist groups during the 1970s, the anti-Soviet mujaheddin during the 1980s, and for the Taliban from the 1990s onwards.

Pakistani leaders have sometimes even voiced the belief that they should have the right to decide who wields power in Kabul. Immediately after the end of the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad of the 1980s, then-military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq stated that “We have earned the right to have [in Kabul] a power which is very friendly toward us.”

This belief, rather than any action on India’s part, is at the heart of Pakistan’s Afghan policy. Pakistani strategists seem blind to the notion that any government in Kabul would, after initial bonhomie, start resenting interference from Islamabad-Rawalpindi and look to Delhi to provide some balance.

Pakistan’s security establishment has also attempted to convince Americans of Indian perfidy in Afghanistan. Hoping to mediate their differences, President George W. Bush arranged a meeting between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf, only to discover that Pakistan’s fears were not backed by facts. For example, Pakistan alleged in 2006 that India’s external intelligence agency (R&AW) was training Baluch insurgents inside Afghanistan using its “24 consulates,” even though the number of India’s consulates in Afghanistan is the same as that for Pakistan –four.

After years of accepting Pakistani falsehoods regarding Indian’s role in Afghanistan at face value, even otherwise pro-Pakistan Americans have started to push back. In 2016, then-Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Olson, noted that India was a “supportive partner” that provided “limited” but “important military assistance” to Afghanistan. Affirming that India only had four consulates, Olson stated that Pakistan “overestimated” Indian influence.

India and Afghanistan signed a treaty of friendship in 1950, and have ever since built strategic and economic relations on the foundations of historical and civilizational ties. Unlike Pakistan, India has avoided taking sides in intra-Afghan disputes. During the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad of the 1980s, India did not support any of the mujaheddin groups.

It was only during the civil war that broke out in 1992 that India built ties with leaders in the Northern Alliance, including Ahmad Shah Massoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani—and that came in response to Pakistan’s backing first of Gulbeddin Hekmatyar and later of the Taliban.

Immediately after 9/11, New Delhi offered assistance to the U.S.-led international efforts in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s then-military dictator General Pervez Musharraf and his advisors demanded that Indian presence and influence be limited if the U.S. government wanted Pakistan’s help in Afghanistan.

With India now a “natural ally” of the United States, and Kabul-Delhi ties restored after the fall of the Taliban regime, it is clear that any balancing act between India and Pakistan envisioned by Washington has not panned out. Meanwhile, India has become the largest regional donor to Afghanistan, providing over $2 billion in aid since 2002. But, sensitive to Pakistan’s concerns, India has limited its Afghan aid and assistance to three key areas: infrastructure, healthcare, and education.

India’s influence in Afghanistan comes from soft power. Indian engineers build highways, roads, and government buildings; Indian doctors and nurses run clinics across the country; and India provides scholarships for Afghan students to study in India’s first-grade schools. For decades Afghans have studied in India, including former President Hamid Karzai. Pakistan, on the other hand, seeks dominance over Afghanistan through hard power.

After signing a strategic partnership agreement India started training Afghan military and security officers and provided four military helicopters. But India is not about to send troops to Afghanistan any time soon, no matter what the Pakistanis may believe.

States can only deal with realities, not paranoia. If Pakistan identified specific concerns, then India and Afghanistan could be persuaded to address them. But so far it seems that Pakistan’s anxieties about Afghanistan’s ties with India either cover up its ambitions of dominance or are a function of Pakistan’s ideological hatred of India. U.S. policymakers should bear this in mind when fielding their Pakistani counterparts’ inevitable complaints about India and Afghanistan.

The post Pakistan’s Bogeyman in Afghanistan appeared first on The American Interest.

Pakistan’s Bogeyman in Afghanistan

On the eve of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s stopover in Pakistan en route to India, Pakistan’s Information Minister repeated the old refrain that Pakistan would make sure “India has no role to play in Afghanistan.” Outsiders might find it surprising that one country (Pakistan) is asserting the right to decide who “plays” a role in another country (Afghanistan). Shouldn’t the right to decide what kinds of relations Afghanistan will have with other countries lie with the Afghans?

Not so for Pakistan, whose leaders often cite imaginary misgivings about India’s presence across its northwestern border as the reason Pakistan supports the Taliban and hinders American goals in Afghanistan. Had India stationed troops or created a military base there, Pakistan would have good reason to protest. But Pakistan’s knee-jerk opposition to economic, cultural, or even educational ties between India and Afghanistan is not easy for Americans to comprehend.

Pakistan’s policy has its origins in the policy of the British Raj toward Afghanistan. The British saw Afghanistan as a buffer between Russia’s Central Asian empire and their own empire in the subcontinent. Afghanistan’s foreign policy was, for all practical purposes, subject to a British veto. In an earlier era, civil servants and generals in British India even determined who would sit on the throne in Kabul.

Since independence in 1947, Pakistan’s leaders have sought influence over Afghanistan similar to that enjoyed by the erstwhile colonial power that partitioned India and devolved power to Pakistan. Officials in Islamabad wish to arrogate to themselves the right to decide who wields power in Afghanistan, and want their smaller neighbor to the west to subordinate its decision-making to Pakistan’s preferences.

Pakistan’s stated rationale for insisting that Afghanistan remain in its sphere of influence is that it fears Afghanistan joining India to encircle Pakistan. Some Pakistanis claim that India has not accepted Partition and seeks to undo Pakistan by supporting irredentist demands within the country, whether Bengali, Muhajir, Pashtun, or Baluch.

The real fear motivating Pakistani leaders is that overlapping ethnicities might lead some Pakistanis to feel greater affinity with Indians or Afghans across the border than with co-religionists of other ethnicities within Pakistan. This is more a psychological fear than a serious likelihood, which is why no substantive policy concession or internationally backed negotiation has ever been able to address it.

Pakistanis claim that they cannot forget Afghanistan’s vote at the United Nations in 1947 against Pakistan’s membership. Few of them acknowledge that Afghanistan later withdrew its objection, recognized Pakistan, and established full diplomatic relations with the new country. Similarly, there is no admission that Afghanistan supported Pakistan, not India, during several India-Pakistan wars and never took advantage of Pakistan’s vulnerabilities.

Pakistani arguments about past Afghan behavior are less cause than pretext for an agenda of subordinating Afghanistan to Pakistan. Using one rationale or another, Pakistan has consistently sought a pro-Pakistan regime in Kabul, insisting that Afghanistan should not have close ties with India. This explains Pakistan’s support for Afghan Islamist groups during the 1970s, the anti-Soviet mujaheddin during the 1980s, and for the Taliban from the 1990s onwards.

Pakistani leaders have sometimes even voiced the belief that they should have the right to decide who wields power in Kabul. Immediately after the end of the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad of the 1980s, then-military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq stated that “We have earned the right to have [in Kabul] a power which is very friendly toward us.”

This belief, rather than any action on India’s part, is at the heart of Pakistan’s Afghan policy. Pakistani strategists seem blind to the notion that any government in Kabul would, after initial bonhomie, start resenting interference from Islamabad-Rawalpindi and look to Delhi to provide some balance.

Pakistan’s security establishment has also attempted to convince Americans of Indian perfidy in Afghanistan. Hoping to mediate their differences, President George W. Bush arranged a meeting between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf, only to discover that Pakistan’s fears were not backed by facts. For example, Pakistan alleged in 2006 that India’s external intelligence agency (R&AW) was training Baluch insurgents inside Afghanistan using its “24 consulates,” even though the number of India’s consulates in Afghanistan is the same as that for Pakistan –four.

After years of accepting Pakistani falsehoods regarding Indian’s role in Afghanistan at face value, even otherwise pro-Pakistan Americans have started to push back. In 2016, then-Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Olson, noted that India was a “supportive partner” that provided “limited” but “important military assistance” to Afghanistan. Affirming that India only had four consulates, Olson stated that Pakistan “overestimated” Indian influence.

India and Afghanistan signed a treaty of friendship in 1950, and have ever since built strategic and economic relations on the foundations of historical and civilizational ties. Unlike Pakistan, India has avoided taking sides in intra-Afghan disputes. During the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad of the 1980s, India did not support any of the mujaheddin groups.

It was only during the civil war that broke out in 1992 that India built ties with leaders in the Northern Alliance, including Ahmad Shah Massoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani—and that came in response to Pakistan’s backing first of Gulbeddin Hekmatyar and later of the Taliban.

Immediately after 9/11, New Delhi offered assistance to the U.S.-led international efforts in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s then-military dictator General Pervez Musharraf and his advisors demanded that Indian presence and influence be limited if the U.S. government wanted Pakistan’s help in Afghanistan.

With India now a “natural ally” of the United States, and Kabul-Delhi ties restored after the fall of the Taliban regime, it is clear that any balancing act between India and Pakistan envisioned by Washington has not panned out. Meanwhile, India has become the largest regional donor to Afghanistan, providing over $2 billion in aid since 2002. But, sensitive to Pakistan’s concerns, India has limited its Afghan aid and assistance to three key areas: infrastructure, healthcare, and education.

India’s influence in Afghanistan comes from soft power. Indian engineers build highways, roads, and government buildings; Indian doctors and nurses run clinics across the country; and India provides scholarships for Afghan students to study in India’s first-grade schools. For decades Afghans have studied in India, including former President Hamid Karzai. Pakistan, on the other hand, seeks dominance over Afghanistan through hard power.

After signing a strategic partnership agreement India started training Afghan military and security officers and provided four military helicopters. But India is not about to send troops to Afghanistan any time soon, no matter what the Pakistanis may believe.

States can only deal with realities, not paranoia. If Pakistan identified specific concerns, then India and Afghanistan could be persuaded to address them. But so far it seems that Pakistan’s anxieties about Afghanistan’s ties with India either cover up its ambitions of dominance or are a function of Pakistan’s ideological hatred of India. U.S. policymakers should bear this in mind when fielding their Pakistani counterparts’ inevitable complaints about India and Afghanistan.

The post Pakistan’s Bogeyman in Afghanistan appeared first on The American Interest.

The Clash of Civilizations at 25

Huntington’s Legacy

Francis Fukuyama

Samuel Huntington’s greatness didn’t lie in the fact that he was right about everything. Rather, it lay in his ability to conceptualize big ideas in a wide variety of fields.

Right Book, Wrong TitleDaniel E. Burns

The Clash paradigm was obsolete before the book was published, but the insights into politics that gave rise to it remain as relevant as ever.

Clash of Civilizations—or Clash Within Civilizations?Seth Cropsey & Harry Halem

As parlous as the clash of civilizations might be, the implosion of our own is much more to be feared.

The post The Clash of Civilizations at 25 appeared first on The American Interest.

The Machiavellian VIRTUs

Two weeks before Turkey’s Black Friday, the August 10 meltdown of the lira, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in Johannesburg attending a summit of the BRICS countries. Taking its name from the initials of its member states—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—BRICS is a club for five major emerging national economies. Erdogan attended their summit to promote Turkey as the newest member of the club. “If you take us in, the name of the platform would become BRICST,” the President told reporters.

Since then, Erdogan has found himself in a currency crisis of his own making. Having eschewed conventional monetary policy, appointed his son-in-law as the Minister of Finance and Treasury, and declared interest rates the “mother and father of all evil,” Erdogan can only explain the plunging lira in the context of an “economic war” against the nation. Just weeks after Erdogan lifted the state of emergency he had declared after a bloody coup attempt in 2016, Ankara is back in crisis mode, ready to fight the nefarious foreign forces that, in Erdogan’s imagination, conspire to prevent his New Turkey from becoming a reality.

In terms of its leader’s behavior and tone, Turkey is looking a lot more like a rogue state than a responsible member of NATO. Investors worry that capital controls may be right around the corner, while some analysts predict a massive IMF bailout. The country is becoming effectively “uninvestable.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury has imposed sanctions on two Turkish cabinet ministers and Erdogan is threatening that Ankara will “start looking for new friends and allies.”

Erdogan is indeed reaching out to new friends: Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. Like the Turkish President, Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei, and Nicolas Maduro all see themselves as underdogs on the world stage, fighting against American imperialism and its dollar hegemony.

These leaders claim to seek a new, multipolar world consisting of regional power brokers “benevolently” ruling over their respective spheres of influence. In practice, they subscribe to Machiavelli’s maxim that princes ought “to disregard the reputation of cruelty,” and that “to be feared is better than to be loved.” Erdogan fits this mold so precisely that he and his new friends might form their own acronymic club: the Machiavellian VIRTUs of Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and Turkey.

To be sure, these four countries are allies of convenience rather than permanent partners, and their grouping is unlikely to be institutionalized any time soon. But their warming ties are already bearing fruit.

Maduro and Erdogan’s budding friendship, for instance, has resulted in a burgeoning trade in gold. Caracas, eager to avoid potential asset freezes in Switzerland, is now refining gold in Turkey. Against a backdrop of intensifying U.S. sanctions, Maduro sees Turkey as the most secure place to park $779 million of the precious metal. Venezuelan Mining Minister Victor Cano explained, “It’s being done by allied countries because imagine what would happen if we sent gold to Switzerland and we are told it has to stay there because of sanctions.”

Istanbul and Caracas have also inked several deals to boost economic relations, including plans to open up a Turkish Airlines base in Venezuela. Turkey has even promised to build a mosque and cultural center in Caracas.

Maduro, for his part, has declared Erdogan to be leader of a “new multipolar world.” Hyperbole notwithstanding, both men believe they are fighting on the same side of an economic war that has caused high inflation, plummeting currencies, and in the case of Venezuela, drastic food shortages. Following an assassination attempt on Maduro on August 4, Turkey’s Foreign Ministry was quick to issue a statement that “the continuation of stability, prosperity, peace and security in Venezuela is Turkey’s greatest wish.” One would be hard pressed to find other governments willing to describe Venezuela as stable or prosperous, especially not after last month’s overnight devaluation of its currency, the bolivar, by 96 percent.

Turkey’s pivot to Russia has been in the making for some time. Ankara’s move to purchase Russia’s S-400 air defense system has caused significant alarm in Washington, not least because the system is incompatible with America’s F-35s and could betray the jets’ stealth technology to Russian spying. Beyond the income from S-400 sales, Moscow is already reaping dividends from the wedge the S-400 deal has driven between NATO and Turkey. For the Kremlin, this may be a once-in-a-generation chance to “flip” Ankara. Then again, as one former Russian diplomat put it, “it serves our interests better to have an offended Turkey inside NATO to undermine the alliance’s capabilities.”

Economic ties between Russia and Turkey run deep, which Moscow is leveraging to build its hybrid warfare capacity. Behind the scenes, the Kremlin seeks to build a powerful pro-Russia lobby through increased business ties and lucrative contracts. At the state level, Moscow shows compassion for Turkey’s plight, decrying U.S. sanctions “based on the desire to dominate everywhere and everything.” Ultimately, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, “with such abuse, the role of the American dollar as the world reserve currency will weaken.”

That prediction may well be a pipe dream; in any case, the dollar faces a stronger long-term challenge from the Chinese renminbi than any of the VIRTU countries. But they are nonetheless collaborating in the short term to find creative new ways to evade the effect of sanctions.

Under renewed sanctions from the Trump Administration, Tehran again needs to find sources of hard currency. Last time around, Halkbank, Turkey’s second-largest public lender, was complicit in the largest sanctions-busting scheme on record, netting tens of billions of dollars for the Islamic Republic. A massive fine from the U.S. Treasury is likely in the works. Meanwhile, Ankara has recently vowed to defy once again U.S. sanctions against Iran.

As American pressure against all four VIRTU states continues to bite, expect increased friendly rhetoric and economic cooperation. As one analyst notes, U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and Turkey could coalesce an “axis of anger” among the sanctioned four.

One area in which the VIRTUs are already cooperating is cryptocurrency. Venezuela, Iran, and Turkey are all in the process of creating their own cryptocurrencies to mitigate the need for dollar-denominated transactions. Venezuela has even taken the bold and misguided step of issuing a new fiat currency, the “sovereign bolivar,” pegged to its national cryptocurrency, the petro. The Russian government and Russian entrepreneurs helped both the Iranians and Venezuelans develop their cryptocurrencies, likely in an attempt to build a more robust alternative system for financial transactions.

A crypto-VIRTU currency is unlikely to prove sustainable given the radically different political systems and economies involved, much like the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) failed to bring the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc, Cuba, and Vietnam closer together economically despite significant investment. But such efforts nonetheless bear monitoring—given their track records, the VIRTU countries will likely use such mechanisms in an attempt to evade U.S. sanctions, launder money, and finance terrorism.

Ultimately, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and Turkey will remain oblivious to the warnings renowned Turkish economist Daron Acemoglu presents in his seminal work Why Nations Fail about “vicious cycles” triggered by extractive economic and political institutions. The renegade four will continue to be caught in a very un-VIRTUous cycle of currency depreciation, hyperinflation, unemployment, and increased populist attacks on America and the West. And as the Machiavellians hunker down, they must not forget that a prince “must only endeavor to escape being hated.”

The post The Machiavellian VIRTUs appeared first on The American Interest.

Stalking the Wild Trump Voter

Сытый голодного не разумеет (Someone whose stomach is full doesn’t understand a person who’s hungry)

—Russian proverb

As we head into the high season of the midterm election campaign, hope is building for a “blue wave” that will sweep away the Republican majorities in Congress and set the stage for the long-anticipated (since at least January 2017, if not November 2016) impeachment of President Trump. But will it be enough for the Democrats simply to rally their base, or must a sizable chunk of the 2016 Trump electorate express belated voter’s remorse by sending their local Republican officials packing? What might it take to flip enough Trump voters to generate a blue wave massive enough to engulf the White House?

The shocking upset in the 2016 U.S. presidential election prompted many puzzled souls to seek out Trump voters, to the extent they could locate any, to discover what had motivated their support of a candidate who seemed to go beyond all bounds of human decency. Some researchers paid a call on the oddball fellow with the Trump sign on his front lawn in their otherwise deep-blue neighborhood. Others undertook the hazardous journey into deepest, darkest Red America to observe masses of Trump voters in their natural habitat. Many of the subsequent reports had the air of popular anthropological studies, analyzing the savages and explaining their queer customs and predilections in terms comprehensible to civilized people. Some authors latched onto remarks by the subjects of their study that hinted darkly at underlying xenophobia, misogyny, or other primordial evils. Other analysts expressed pleasant surprise at the unexpected decency of their subjects, finding them to be, when all is said and done, folks very much like you and me.

Whatever the findings of this post-election research, the current stereotypical image of a Trump voter is an angry, ignorant white guy wearing a dingy “wife beater.” A senior FBI official captured the spirit when he derided Trump voters as “uneducated, lazy [pieces of shit].”1

In pondering the question of why anyone would vote for Trump, I quickly realized that I am at a decided psychological/cognitive disadvantage, as I lack nearly all of the usual “markers.” I have an undergraduate degree from a prestigious university and a Master’s degree from one of the top programs in my field of study. Globalization has been good to me. I’ve traveled extensively, including 15 years living overseas. I’m a quintessential “anywhere.” My wife is an immigrant, and my bilingual children have dual citizenship. My government job ensured that I was never at risk of unemployment, even during the Great Recession.

Yet for all my cosmopolitan transience, I retain tentative roots in southwestern Pennsylvania, where my grandfather was a steelworker and the majority of my mostly blue-collar relatives still reside. I know or suspect that my relatives there pretty much all voted for Trump. They live in a traditionally “blue” part of the rust belt inundated by the red tide that swept Donald Trump into the White House. The dislocations in the region occasioned by the collapse of the steel industry since the 1970s have been amplified by the continuous outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, with China the most likely destination. The city of Pittsburgh has managed to reinvent itself rather nicely, but the gritty mill town in the Monongahela Valley where my parents grew up remains economically and socially devastated.

How very different are my situation and perspective. I live in an area of northern Virginia that takes self-conscious pride in its Wilkommenskultur. My neighborhood is sprinkled liberally with signs proclaiming “Hate Has No Home Here.” Aside from a considerable number of legal immigrants, primarily white-collar professionals, we also have a visible population of presumably undocumented workers who tend our lawns, mind our children, and clean our homes. By a happy coincidence, the latter group is not numerous enough to besmirch the lofty reputation of our public school system or overwhelm our social services.2 Illegal immigration is a boon for us. How else would our high-powered, two-income professional families find the abundant, cheap unskilled labor they need to keep their households in working order?

One often hears how honest and hardworking undocumented workers are. It should come as no surprise. They have no recourse. The crooked and lazy ones don’t last long, getting deported after the first run-in with their employer or the law. How much easier than dealing with surly American-born workers, with their vexatious insistence on compliance with the minimum wage, Social Security, and other nettlesome labor laws! The only problem is that “undocumented” doesn’t last forever. Some illegal migrants work a while and return to Central America.3 Others eventually adjust status and move up the employment ladder, where they encounter the lowest rung of the legal immigrants who never had to work in the shadow economy in the first place. Certainly, the American-born children of undocumented workers aspire to do more with their lives than mow suburban lawns and wash dishes in tony restaurants. Thus, there is a constant need to replenish the supply of undocumented workers, and a built-in incentive to keep the illegal-immigration spigot open.

Consider, however, the point of view of people such as my blue-collar cousins, one of whom works in a middle-school cafeteria and another of whom cleans houses. Illegal immigrants simply compete for their jobs, depress their wages, and push up the cost of low-end housing.4 Such working-class Americans are singularly unmoved by the plight of suburban professionals casting about for a reliable lawn-care service or the most affordable child-care option.

One should therefore forgive working-class Americans for questioning the degree to which the sanctuary city movement is inspired by humanitarian concerns, and how much it is driven by fear that a serious crackdown on illegal immigration would cause the collapse of the low-end service economy in various upscale areas. Speaking for myself, I always find it easier to embrace altruism when it happens to dovetail with my personal best interests. I therefore consider it unseemly for people who benefit materially from an abundance of undocumented workers to sling epithets like “racist” and “xenophobe” at working-class Americans whose economic interests are manifestly harmed by illegal immigration.

If immigration is a hot-button issue inclining millions of voters to continue backing Trump, government regulation is a less-recognized concern that nevertheless exercises a similar effect. The mainstream media portray Trump’s deregulation measures as a ploy to subject the country to wholesale plunder by the President’s rapacious corporate backers. Comfortable suburban professionals like me tend to regard regulation instinctively as an unblemished good—largely, I suspect, because we almost never experience it personally as a burden. In my socio-economic milieu, where the consumption of organic, locally grown produce is a token not so much of health-consciousness as of virtue, I detect precious little appreciation of the regulatory hurdles that attend agriculture, not to mention small business, the extractive industries, small-scale manufacturing, or rural life in general. And the problem is not even so much ill-considered regulations as the unforeseen consequences of well-intentioned ones.

For example, a relative of mine was involved in the opening of a new restaurant. Although their architect had already submitted plans and the city had approved them, a knowledgeable person warned them that the restaurant nevertheless did not comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on a number of counts. They therefore hired an expert to review the premises. Among other shortcomings, the expert cited the fact that the grade of the wheelchair access ramp was a tiny fraction of an inch too steep—a deviation well within construction tolerances, and one based solely on a reading from the expert’s iPhone level. The fact that their plans had already been approved did not spare the restaurant from needing about $20,000 in retrofits to bring everything—including the wheelchair ramp—into compliance. Quite apart from legitimate enforcement of the ADA, there are also scammers who go around to businesses, identify real or fictitious regulatory violations, and demand payment lest the proprietors be reported to the authorities. Thus, the regulatory burden created even by noble legislation such as the ADA is a serious one compounded by overzealous implementation, lack of knowledge (in this case, on the part of the architect and city planners), and the possibilities for abuse by unscrupulous individuals.

Globalization, illegal immigration, and regulatory overreach do not exhaust the factors confirming millions of voters in their support of President Trump. For instance, it became apparent during Obama’s second term that the losers in America’s Culture Wars would not be allowed to withdraw in good order from the battlefield to live their private lives undisturbed in accordance with their own values and principles. Instead, the victors have pursued their vanquished foes into their convents, hobby shops, and bakeries to ensure the losers’ unconditional obeisance to progressive social doctrine. How many people as a consequence are prepared to support Trump, often holding their noses, over the issue of appointments to the Supreme Court?

In addition, much of our recent foreign and security policy appears to be disconnected from the wellbeing and interests of ordinary Americans. The working classes, who contribute the bulk of our enlisted soldiers, have struggled to make sense of resource-intensive, open-ended wars in distant locales where U.S. equities would seem to be minimal. More than 20 years ago Michael Mandelbaum described the policy of nation-building and democracy-promotion using the apt term “foreign policy as social work.” Decades later, foreign policy as social work has become further trivialized, and largely amounts to U.S. attempts to micromanage the social policies of other countries in pursuit of causes such as religious liberty, property restitution, gender equality, or LGBTQ rights. However worthy these causes might be, they are arguably more the purview of NGOs than of the State Department. They are also largely niche concerns dear to much of the American elites, but distant from the day-to-day lives of people in the heartland.

A big blue wave in November becomes problematic to the degree that people in flyover territory perceive the country’s elites to be suffering from a socio-political variant of Bicoastal Disorder. It is not even just a function of the disconnect in perspectives, but of a largely class-based enmity that has reached alarming proportions. Some months ago an older gentleman of my acquaintance, an erudite man with a Ph.D. in history, remarked that he has cut off all contact with an old friend who is a Trump supporter. He proceeded to vent against the disadvantaged, struggling rust-belt voters who put Trump into office: “I used to feel sorry for those people, but I don’t any more. As far as I’m concerned, all of West Virginia can rot in hell!”

We, the sated, not only fail to understand those with empty stomachs, but we even reproach them for their hunger.

If xenophobia is the fear/hatred of people different from oneself, then the problem in our country runs far deeper than some mere aversion toward immigrants. How many people sporting “Hate Has No Home Here” signs are actually seething with animosity toward the half of their fellow citizens who vote differently from them? And why the utter lack of sympathy for the other guy’s problems? Do we reflexively snuff out any budding empathy for the travails of people in the heartland lest we appear to validate opinions that we regard as racist, sexist, homophobic, and so forth? Do we feel a sense of righteous satisfaction at the thought of all those dreadful people rotting in hell?

After all, we bien pensants have been well-socialized. When we pass by a person with spiky purple hair and multiple body piercings, we instinctively think warm thoughts about tolerance and diversity. We have an altogether different reaction when we encounter a good old boy in a red MAGA cap blaring country music from the cab of his pickup truck.

The cover of the August 20 issue of the New Yorker, mischievously entitled “Safe Travels,” captures the point perfectly. A nice suburban family has arrived at a wooded lakeside for a boating vacation. As mom helps the kids with their life vests, dad glances over his shoulder at the car parked next to them—a rusty red Ford pickup truck with a gun rack and a variety of God-and-country bumper stickers. Dad’s expression is a mixture of unease and disdain. It says, “Gad, are we going to have to spend our vacation rubbing elbows with those people? Are my kids even going to be safe here?” I would add that this rustic vacation might be such a family’s only occasion for a close encounter with real, live Trump supporters. It is clearly an unpalatable prospect for dad, whose horror is no doubt compounded by a lurking suspicion that his guileless children might actually end up making friends with the kids from the pickup truck.

It is staggeringly ironic that a plutocratic New York real-estate tycoon should receive the mantle of rust-belt working-class hero, or that a self-absorbed, libidinous serial philanderer should emerge as the standard-bearer for Judeo-Christian values. However, rather than ponder the deep social and psychological reasons for this astonishing and utterly counterintuitive phenomenon, we blithely seize on it as further proof of the innate stupidity and gullibility of the Trump electorate.

As one of the few Trump supporters I know put it, in 2008 and 2012 the Republicans nominated two of the most upright and decent politicians in their party as their candidates for president, only to see them ruthlessly maligned and slandered en route to crushing electoral defeat.5 Having learned the lesson that nice guys finish last, in 2016 they chose as their candidate an unprincipled, take-no-prisoners street-fighter who could dish it out as well as he could take it. Indeed, I think my friend has grasped an important truth. For voters feeling helpless in the face of massive illegal immigration, regulatory imposition by unelected bureaucrats, and the seemingly unstoppable loss of manufacturing jobs, playing nice seems pointless, even counterproductive. There is a temptation to have someone like Trump go in and simply smash everything, like sans-culottes sacking the Cathedral of Notre Dame during the French Revolution. A bull in a china shop is a disturbing spectacle, but it’s precisely what you need if your goal is to break china. Or to break China.

Is it possible the uncouth working-class bubbas whom we love to lampoon detect a trace of self-righteousness in our attitude? Is there no small element of entitlement in our bleating about the direction that Trump and his deplorables have taken our country? The American working classes might not be credentialed, but they are clever enough to gauge their own best interests, and they understand when they are being patronized and belittled. Dealing with the Trump electorate by a combination of shaming, shunning, and ridicule might be psychologically satisfying, but it is unlikely to secure much working-class buy-in to the elite’s electoral agenda. In fact, to the extent that Trump drives presumptuous elites to paroxysms of irrational rage,6 voters in the heartland have an added incentive to double down on their support for the President.

Nevertheless, various analysts persist in assuring us that Trump owes his 2016 election solely to Russian meddling. However, Trump’s upset victory was merely the crest of a larger wave that has cost the Democrats more than 1,000 legislative and gubernatorial seats nationwide over the last four election cycles.7 While Russian “active measures” in 2016 were genuine (and nothing new), the amount of money spent on them was miniscule in comparison to the war chests of the Clinton and Trump campaigns, and the quality of the material was risible. To the best of my knowledge, no one has produced even a single voter who could point to a Russian-origin message that swayed his/her vote—or triggered a decision not to vote. With all the obvious reasons for working-class voters to plump for change, are there really any grounds to suppose that Trump is President because 70,000 voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were hornswoggled by Russian disinformation? Is it not far more likely that Hillary Clinton lost because, say, 70,000 working-class Catholics in those states were outraged at how the Obama Administration treated the Little Sisters of the Poor?

In any event, contemplating the tsunami of our own self-generated political vitriol, I can’t believe it would make the slightest difference if the Russians gleefully threw on an additional bucket or two.

As the saying goes, in a democracy people get the government they deserve. But have we taken full and honest account of whose merits, precisely, have brought the scourge of Trump down upon our heads? And if not, are we doomed to suffer recurring nightmares from that 2016 grade-B horror flick entitled Revenge of the Flyover States?

1I wonder if the FBI official in question is the same one who coined the phrase “Viva le resistance,” which any high-school language student would recognize as an illiterate bastardization of Spanish and French. Uneducated and lazy, indeed!

2But if the academic or security environment in our exemplary public-school system should deteriorate, how many of us would quietly move our children into private schools—an option not available to working-class families maligned for their supposed unwillingness to mingle with immigrants?

3Some years ago I was touring the Ukrainian town of Kamianets-Podilskyi with its imposing medieval fortress. Our guide, a middle-aged man with excellent English, explained how he had made a little money on the side in Soviet times by helping would-be Jewish emigrants fabricate tales of discrimination on their petitions for refugee status in the United States. The tricky part, he vouchsafed, was to vary the stories sufficiently, lest the American immigration authorities spot a pattern and come to suspect that they were being scammed. I was taken aback, since the pervasiveness of Soviet anti-Semitism had always been an article of faith for me. Arguably, Moscow had no business forcing Jews to remain in the USSR, even if they had not all been victims of persecution. However, my tour guide’s unsettling tale has given me a more nuanced perspective on the current flow of purported refugees to the United States, particularly in light of the two-way human traffic between here and Central America. If victimization by gang violence proves to be the ticket for admission to the United States, rest assured that every aspiring Central American immigrant will be prepared to recite the requisite tale.

4In the August 6, 2018 Washington Post, Jeff Stein observed that a recent dip in surging rents “is being driven primarily by decreasing prices for high-end rentals,” while “[p]eople in low-end housing, the apartments and other units that house working-class residents, are still paying more than ever.” The subsequent, politically correct analysis in the article casts about for an explanation in faulty public policy and never even hints that illegal immigration might be an important—indeed, probably the major—factor in driving up the price of working-class housing.

5It has been distasteful to see so many of the media outlets that trashed John McCain in 2008 suddenly discover that he is a war hero and a man of scruples—and to recognize that they do so not principally in posthumous recognition of McCain’s qualities but to use the late Senator shamelessly as yet another stick with which to beat Trump.

6A sad recent example of sheer, mind-blowing irrationality is the August 28 Newsweek opinion piece by Robert Reich, who in all apparent seriousness argues for simply annulling the entire Trump presidency, as if such a measure were somehow constitutional or even feasible. Speechless, I am left pondering whether there might be some way to weaponize this Trump Effect and put it to better use against our country’s enemies.

7I expect it is only a matter of time before some enterprising investigative journalist reports “evidence” that Russian efforts to hijack American democracy actually date back to 2010 and account for all the Democrats’ electoral losses since then. Of course, the stage has already been set for such a claim with regard to 2018 should the election results fail to meet expectations.

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