Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 78

In Facebook We Trust?

Apple, Google, Spotify, and Facebook recently took steps to remove much of the content posted by the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Many conservatives protested these actions including President Trump, who tweeted: “Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.”

As we get closer to the 2018 Midterm elections, the actions taken by social media companies to deal with fake news, bots, and the like will be closely scrutinized and for good reason. Social media usage has grown dramatically in recent years. A 2018 Pew Study reports that 69 percent of US adults now use some form of social media (excluding YouTube), constituting “a nearly fourteenfold increase” since 2006. Although this usage is still most heavily concentrated in the younger age groups, it is up across the board and now includes 37 percent of those over 65.

This would have little or no political relevance if these companies had not migrated into America’s political space. In addition to providing a forum for friends to exchange political opinions, social media entities like Facebook have become important news sources. Pew claims that online media now rival television as a source of news (50 percent TV to 43 percent online), dwarfing radio (25 percent) and newspapers (18 percent). Facebook is currently the dominant social media player both in terms of the number of US adults who view their site (66 percent) and who rely on it for getting the news (45 percent).

In the current polarized era, political prominence inevitably begets partisan controversy. Pew found that 70 percent of the public believes that social media companies censor political viewpoints.  Not surprisingly, Republicans (62 percent) believe that these platforms favor liberals (despite the role that Facebook’s deal with Cambridge Analytica played in helping Trump win the 2016 election) whereas a majority of Democrats (54 percent) believe that social media are ideologically even-handed. Even so, fewer Republicans than Democrats (44 as opposed to 57 percent) favor more regulation of social media. Presidential mau-mauing apparently suffices for many.

There is no reason to believe that these trends will reverse themselves in the near future. Over 70 percent of Pew’s respondents believe that social media’s impact on them personally and the country as a whole has been net positive. And given that there is not much prospect of meaningful regulation coming out of the Republican Congress and the completely dysfunctional Federal Election Commission, private companies like Facebook are essentially now in charge of monitoring and regulating political conduct. In other words, a job that previously belonged to public, somewhat accountable entities now rests in private, totally unaccountable hands.

What does this portend? Facebook is a business that offers its services to customers in exchange for their information. That business model conflicts with any vigorous interest in protecting user privacy. Moreover, Facebook sells this information to political campaigns, which places parts of the company squarely in the political consultancy universe—a path that rarely leads to impartiality or sincere concern for the public’s best interests. Facebook announced last year that it would hire an additional 3000 staff to supplement the 4500 employees who already monitor its site for inappropriate content. Eventually these people will be displaced by artificial intelligence, but in the meantime, this extensive regulatory effort will eat away at Facebook’s profits.

The track record of private entities pursuing public purposes is not encouraging. Think Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or military contractors fighting in Iraq. To be sure, the delegation of public functions to private entities can sometimes have advantages, but usually at the cost of lower public accountability and some mission distortion. Moreover, with respect to Facebook, there is no detailed contractual language to follow, no supervising agency to watch over them.

In addition, the rules of appropriate political discourse just get fuzzier and more complicated. A globalized world economy encourages cross-national discourse about and interest in what other countries are doing politically. Is it wrong for Europeans or the Russians to try to tell us what they think about our politics or how Americans should vote when the US has such a heavy role in world affairs?

I personally have no problem with foreigners doing so as long as they are transparent about their identity and observe the rules of independent spending (e.g. no coordination with those running for office). But no one, foreign or domestic, should be hacking into emails or stealing material from candidates and their campaigns.

Disclosure is important. People depend as much (or more) on the source of information as they do the content. If the source is trustworthy to them, they accord it more credibility. In addition, transparency provides a check against corruption by revealing who owes what to whom.

But the longstanding bipartisan consensus in the US about disclosure has broken down in recent years. As partisan temperatures have risen, the case for protecting speech through anonymity has garnered more currency, preventing Democrats and Republicans from coming to any agreement about the full disclosure of soft money donors. Even though in theory many social media posts could be construed as in-kind or purchased contributions, it is unlikely that the Congress would impose, or that the Supreme Court would even allow, disclosure requirements on them. We can only hope that disclosure will be incentivized and encouraged by the social media platforms in creative ways.

So what can we expect of this new world of privatized political regulation? Given that Facebook, Google and other social media are interested in profits, they might travel a path similar to the one that large, public corporations followed after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v FEC decision in 2010. Many experts predicted that these companies would rush in to take advantage of their right to make unlimited independent expenditures, but in fact few did for fear of backlash from consumers. It is possible that the social media companies will try to walk a similarly cautious, non-alienating path.

The safest choice for excluding objectionable content is to focus on only that which is clearly subversive of the political system or imposes serious harm on others (like bullying and harassment).  Excluding content that is merely kooky, clearly wrong, or delusional (as opposed to truly subversive or violent) is problematic at best and may not be worth the effort.

It is problematic because many liberals think that conservative doctrine is delusional while many conservatives think the same of liberal doctrine. Drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable content figures to be a never-ending headache for the companies and their monitoring armies. It also may not be worth the effort because the web has many dark corners and alternative pathways. Besides, the best way to expose conspiracy theories and other fantasies is to let others examine and fact check the assertions publicly.

No doubt, there are many who believe that the political system is too entrenched and institutionally corrupt to ever regulate the political process competently. They may also believe that we are better off letting high tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg and his legion of staff make critical decisions about the regulation of our democracy than the Congress, FEC, and the courts.  Time will tell, but count me as skeptical.

Instead, I place my hope in younger generations becoming more skeptical of what they read on the web or in tweets, particularly when the sources are anonymous or mysterious.  In the end, the quality of a democracy rests on the enlightenment and civic commitment of its citizens. That is what we have to trust.

The post In Facebook We Trust? appeared first on The American Interest.

Relocating the Fifth Fleet?

As Bahraini government security services cracked down hard on popular protests against the ruling Al-Khalifa family in February 2011, the U.S. Department of Defense quietly considered alternative basing options for the Fifth Fleet, stationed permanently in Bahrain since 1995.

But those ideas were quickly put on hold with the restoration of order to the tiny Gulf kingdom following the intervention of Saudi and Emirati forces. However, the return to normalcy in Bahrain didn’t prevent a vigorous debate in Washington about the future of U.S. policy toward that key Gulf partner—a debate that continues to this day, although in reduced intensity.

Some, including Elliott Abrams and Toby C. Jones, have been in favor of withdrawing or threatening to withdraw the Fifth Fleet, while others, including Vice Admiral Charles W. Moore have cautioned against such tactics. Both camps agree that the U.S. interest in Bahrain is best served by getting Manama to commit to transitioning to a constitutional monarchy, as its rulers once promised. But they disagree over the U.S. role in this process.

The proponents of relocating and/or disbanding the Fifth Fleet argue that Bahrain is an unsafe home for strategic U.S. assets and thousands of U.S. personnel because its government has failed to address the root causes of the 2011 uprising. It’s only a matter of time before unrest returns to the kingdom, they say, so it’s wise for Washington to leave now in an orderly fashion and with a moral high ground. And preventing a repeat will be difficult, indeed. The fact that we are based there means we have to pull our punches, at least in public, and as the case may be, even in private. That distortion of our priorities also echoes in Saudi Arabia, which on balance is also not a good thing. As for America’s security goals in the area, Washington doesn’t need a huge land base for its navy in Bahrain. It could rely instead on a strategy of offshore balancing, which they argue is more politically sustainable and cost-efficient.

The critics of this line of reasoning maintain that punishing Bahrain by leaving does nothing to push Manama to do the right thing. In fact, it will do the opposite and force its rulers to adopt a bunker mentality. A punitive approach would also deny the United States critical access in a vital part of the world for global commerce and security, damage the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, invite Russia and China to deepen their involvement in the Persian Gulf, and put a huge smile on Iran’s face, which has had territorial claims on Bahrain since Britain’s occupation of the island in 1820.

In the end, of course, those favoring the continuation of the status quo, both inside and outside the U.S. Government, won the debate. The United States not only kept its military presence in Bahrain but decided to double down with expansion plans.

However, should that debate reemerge for any number of reasons or triggers—Bahrain experiences civil conflict again, for example, given that the drivers of instability in the kingdom never disappeared—we need to have a much better understanding of the costs and difficulty of moving the Fifth Fleet. This objective assessment has been sorely missing in the Bahrain conversation in Washington.

Multiple visits to the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama in recent years and regular personal engagement with three former commanders of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) on the issue of U.S. force posture in the Gulf have led me to believe that recreating what the United States has in Bahrain elsewhere would be a structural/logistical nightmare costing tens of billions of dollars.

Moving the base means moving a fleet logistics support center, massive information networks, a communications hub for the entire theater, a fleet headquarters, piers to forward-base mine countermeasures (MCMs) and patrol ships (PCs), and an afloat forward staging base for support to those other forces (PONCE) including all their crews, dependents, and staffing.

The United States would also need to get another base to support a Marine tactical air (TACAIR) Squadron, P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, and P-3 Orion maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) aircraft. In addition, the United States might have to find another location for its missile defense Patriot batteries that not only support Bahrain but also contribute, at least indirectly, to the defense of Saudi Arabia.

The idea of basing as many of these components at sea might sound politically attractive in Washington, but it would not be practically feasible or done at an affordable cost. The truth is that the United States is not close to establishing a sea-basing capacity, at least not one that would allow it to perform all its core strategic and operational functions in the Gulf including deterring adversaries, reassuring partners, and overseeing warships and combat aircraft that carry out long-range missions across Afghanistan and Iraq and conduct antipiracy patrols off the Horn of Africa.

Permanent sea-basing is also not a terribly practical proposition because naval forces require local port visits for parts, fuel, and food on a regular basis. In addition, they require local maintenance (mid-deployment voyage repairs) and port visits to rest, especially after weeks at sea on flight operations for the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (CVN) or over three years at sea poised for crisis response for the Amphibious Ready Group/Marine Expeditionary Unit (ARG-MEU). All of these requirements and functions and many more require a land operating base.

Politically, Bahrain’s support for access, basing, overflight, and willingness to react quickly to grant permission for U.S. forces to conduct military operations is extremely hard to acquire elsewhere, even from our closest partners in the region. To put it simply, Bahrain has gone to the mat to offer us rapid, constant, and unconditional access, which in DoD world is the holy grail of enablers.

Indeed, it’s impossible to overstate how valuable such access is for the U.S. military’s activities overseas, especially in a post-Benghazi environment that elevates politically the issue of protection of U.S. facilities and personnel. We simply cannot afford to wait for host-nation permissions for overflights and access. In Manama, we don’t have to worry about the Bahrainis allowing the U.S. Marines’ Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Teams (FAST) to provide first responses in the event of a terrorist attack against U.S. interests. So, if the United States leaves Bahrain, it would lose all these unique advantages.

More broadly, a U.S. military departure from Bahrain would send shockwaves across the region and convince our other regional partners that even a very high level of political-military support from them might not be sufficient to retain America’s security commitment to them. For example, if the United States pulls out from Bahrain, expect the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia to rapidly deteriorate and possibly change forever. The Saudis see the U.S. military presence in Bahrain as an integral part of their security and their security relationship with Washington.

Last but certainly not least, any drastic changes to America’s footprint in Bahrain will have tremendous effects on its strategy and posture vis-à-vis Iran. Of all the military assets the United States has at its disposal to deter and counter Iran, perhaps none is more relevant than the Fifth Fleet. The U.S. Navy in Bahrain performs various important functions and covers a large area that touches more than twenty countries along the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Oman and parts of the Indian Ocean. But the real-time threat map hanging on the wall in the office of the NAVCENT commander tells you all you need to know about the U.S. Fifth Fleet’s key priority: to incessantly monitor, and if necessary, counter harmful Iranian activities at sea.

If the United States and Iran were ever to clash, the most likely theater of confrontation, at least initially, would not be Syria, Iraq, or Yemen, but rather the waters of the Persian Gulf, where the Iranians have overconfidence in their abilities as well as a habit, which they’ve exercised recently, of threatening to disrupt or block oil shipments in the straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, and provoking U.S. warships through harassment tactics.

None of these political and practical considerations should lead us to think that leaving Bahrain is unthinkable. If President Donald Trump doesn’t win a second term, or even sooner, if the Democrats win big in the midterm elections and tip the balance in their favor in the U.S. Congress, the calls for punishing or at least creating distance with Bahrain (and possibly other Gulf partners) are likely to pop up again. If and when they do, they better first be informed by an objective assessment of the real challenges and risks of relocating or disbanding the Fifth Fleet.

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Turkish Disconnections

Turkey and the U.S.-Turkey bilateral relationship have been much in the news of late. Foreign countries and bilateral relations do not make news here when everything is okay, so the abundance of coverage clearly indicates that things are not okay. And that would be right. Things are very not okay.

Still, it is noteworthy that, while Turkey has made big news, events abroad of equal or perhaps greater significance have not. Two examples out of a bucketful suffice to make the point: the Macron-Benalla “affair” in France, which threatens to tank the presidency of Emmanuel Macron at a very inconvenient time; and so-called Russian military police escorting UNEF forces back onto the Syrian side of the Golan Heights border with Israel. A few years ago, both stories would probably have been front-page news, as they still should be.

Why is this? The answer is so simple that it’s almost embarrassing to have to say it: Donald Trump. Yes, the same mainstream press that helped make Donald Trump’s run for the White House what it was still can’t manage to take its mesmerized eyes off him. Thanks to the media’s shallowness and unjustified self-regard, Trump has become a black hole so dense with political gravity that no other news can escape it. One almost hopes there is a hell.

To be fair, much credit goes to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has helped Trump make a compelling reality-TV drama out of the latest crisis. So a private negotiation that nearly led to a detained U.S. citizen being sprung from house arrest, but didn’t, led “Black Hole” Donald to excoriate Erdogan in public. The pride-pissing contest thus begun, things quickly got wetter. Erdogan made some inflammatory speeches, pounding his fists about arrogant powers and “Zionists”—always good for a happy gut check in Turkey these days. Trump, reportedly furious that the private deal had gone awry, responded with tariffs against Turkish goods that have no economic rationale whatsoever—a case that if ever taken to the WTO would likely result in the U.S. side losing—but that caused an unprecedented tanking of the exposed Turkish currency in an already weakened economy. Then came an Erdogan op-ed in the New York Times; then a suspension of F-35 deliveries to Turkey, despite the fact that Turkey has been from the beginning a program partner. Who knows what next.

A kerfuffle of such magnitude in a bilateral alliance relationship that takes on the appearance of a live-fire ping-pong match will inevitably invite much comment. And the usual suspects have commented in the usual places. Also as usual the commentary on Turkey has been varied in quality, as it tends to be when nearly everyone is rushing to get their two bits in first. But this time around the block there is a change: The more serious and knowledgeable American experts on Turkey have mostly come to a point of exasperation. There are few equities left untrampled by the Erdogan government, they say, so there’s no reason for much regret over the poor state of the bilateral relationship. We will not have a normal, functional alliance relationship as long as Erdogan is there, so there’s no reason to pull punches or resist acerbic reactions to nasty behavior—like Erdogan screwing with American citizens abroad and arresting Turkish nationals who have been U.S. Embassy employees.

Indeed, one commentator actually had the verve to say that compared to its predecessors the Trump Administration had finally gotten Turkey right, even if its policy tactics left much to be desired, such as playing into Erdogan’s stratagem of blaming foreign plotters for the consequences of his economic mismanagement. (But, you interject, Trump went out of his way to befriend and express admiration for Erdogan before the current mess; yes, yes, never mind, pay no attention to the “whether/vain” in the Oval Office.) Another writer agreed, and suggested threatening to remove U.S. nuclear weapons based in Turkey as an additional inducement for the Turkish government to be more reasonable.

As far as I know, in the flood of recent commentary this latter writer has been the only one to mention nuclear weapons, and so we espy an interesting disconnect. Country and area specialists tend not to think in strategic or strategic military terms, and those who do think in strategic military terms either cannot or do not think like regional or country experts. That is why dozens of analyses can be written about the current situation with virtually no one connecting the dots between the two domains—and when a rare connection is made, it’s made myopically. Hold that thought for a moment, please.

Depending on who is doing the writing and who is doing the reading about Turkey and the U.S.-Turkish relationship, other sorts of disconnections tend to appear, as well.

There is, first of all, often a disconnection between recent news and deeper background, leading some readers to think that what is old is actually new. In this case, the Turkish government arresting those who are politically inconvenient—whether an American pastor living in Izmir, former Embassy employees, competent Turkish military professionals, honest Turkish journalists, and others—is not the least bit new. The AKP government has been doing this for years, as recollection of the Ergenekon, Sledgehammer, and Cage Action Plan cases indicate. Its attack on military professionals has been matched and overmatched in recent months by its attack on journalists and others—but again, such harassments and jailings too have been going on for many years.

So has the undermining of the Turkish bureaucracy though vast numbers of senior patronage appointments. The fact that the President appointed his son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, to be Economics Minister comes as a surprise only to those who do not know that Erdogan appointed Hakan Fidan as head of MIT (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı), the Turkish intelligence service. Fiden, an Anatolian bumpkin of but modest capacities, did some pretty crazy and dangerous things after his appointment, not least trying to play games with ISIS in Syria that before long backfired—literally—inside Turkey. If Albeyrak believes, like his father-in-law, that high interest rates cause inflation—which is a little like believing that it rains because the pavement is wet—then more crazy things may be in store.

Now, it is true that since Erdogan shifted from Prime Minister to President, rigged a plebiscite to change the constitution to give the President extraordinary powers, and leveraged a pathetic coup attempt to give him even greater “emergency” authority, his and the AKP’s anti-democratic tendencies have become more pronounced. (Neither they nor their Kemalist predecessors ever displayed much in the way of liberal tendencies, so there was nothing to get worse in that regard.) The coup gave the AKP types a new method to harass its opponents or suspected opponents: label anyone they want to screw a Gülenist, despite the flimsiness of the evidence that the Hizmat had anything to do with the July 15, 2016 coup attempt. So things are worse, but only by degree, not kind.

The same goes for U.S.-Turkish relations as goes for Turkish domestic affairs. If all a reader has to go on is recent newspaper articles, he might think the recent plunge in the bilateral relationship is a new thing. It isn’t. Problems go back a long way—the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the June 1964 “Johnson Letter” over Cyprus being the key historical cases in point.

But there has been plenty of much more recent trouble as well: the failure of the Turkish Grand National Assembly to approve passage of the 4th Infantry Division through Turkey in the run-up to the Iraq War; Erdogan’s confrontation at Davos with Israeli President Shimon Peres and his government’s subsequent role in sanctioning the MV Mavi Marmara flotilla to Gaza; the refusal for well over a year after the U.S. anti-ISIS campaign began on September 22, 2014, to allow use of Incirlik Air Base not only to attack ISIS but even to conduct SAR (search and rescue) operations should a U.S. pilot go down in hostile territory; the Turkish role in negotiating the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) deal with Iran and the subsequent Turkish vote against UN Security Council Resolution 1929 imposing additional sanctions on Iran; the related machinations of connected Turkish banks at helping the Iranian regime evade sanctions, and the related flap over the arrest and conviction of Halkbank’s Mehmet Hakan Atilla in January of this year; the Turkish request for the extradition of Fethullah Gülen from his Pocono Mountains redoubt and the U.S. government’s refusal to accede; the recent announcement that Turkey, a NATO member, would purchase an S-400 anti-aircraft defense system from Russia—and that’s just the short list.

So, again, while the nadir of the bilateral relationship is striking, it is not new or surprising. It’s been an entire decade since Stephen Larrabee stated in a RAND report what seemed obvious to those paying attention at the time: “[I]n the future, Turkey is likely to be an increasingly less predictable and more difficult ally.”

The real question, then and now, is what to do about it. Until recently, the wiser course, adopted pretty much by consensus, was to bide time until Erdogan departs the scene one way or another. Yes, the Cold War glue that held the allies together has disappeared, but Turkey is still an important partner in a critical place. No, post-Erdogan Turkey will not return to the Kemalist Six Arrows contraption of blessed (American) memory, for too much had changed in Turkish society for that to happen. But Turkey’s non-AKP political parties, being less populist, more moderate, and more oriented toward Europe, would suffice to maintain a functional relationship. So the policy essence has been to maintain as many of the institutional relationships as possible that had grown up in the long context of the bilateral relationship and avoid taking Erdogan’s bait in his effort to depict the United States (and of course the Jews and Armenians, always) as part of a foreign conspiracy to destabilize Turkey and shrink it from the borders of the Treaty of Lausanne back to the humiliation of the Treaty of Sèvres.

Above all, advised those who really understood the lay of the land, do not screw around with the extended deterrence infrastructure that binds Turkey to the United States and NATO: namely, the 60-70 or so U.S. nuclear weapons deployed at Incirlik. (Remember that thought I asked you to hold a moment ago? Well, now it is time to turn your attention to it.)

And so of course some people—including very high-ranking U.S. military officers, for reasons of their own—tried to screw around with this infrastructure. Luckily, for better reasons, they failed to change the status quo. And for what is still a very good reason, the recent suggestion from the chatterati that the Trump Administration threaten to remove U.S. nuclear weapons from Turkey as a way to gain leverage over Erdogan is a very bad idea that would very likely accelerate Turkey’s march toward an independent nuclear weapons capability.

Turkey has signed the NPT, and its fledgling nuclear power program has yet to produce a single functional nuclear power plant. But the government has plans so far to build three: Akkuyu, as the result of a May 2010 deal with Russia; Sinop, as the result of a 2013 deal with Japan; and İğneada, as the result of a 2015 deal with Westinghouse, here in the United States.

As an NPT signatory, all of these plants and any others that come about would be subject to IAEA inspection protocols. But the Iranian model has shown what can be accomplished even under NPT/IAEA constraints. If the Turkish leadership decides it needs a nuclear weapons program as a hedge against the end of the U.S. extended deterrence shield, its scientific/engineering capabilities, greater than Iran’s, could probably produce nuclear weapons and airplanes capable of delivering them on its side of the ocean within two to three years.

Is this a development the U.S. government should encourage? If the main problem with an Iranian nuclear weapons capability is ultimately its N+ proliferation potential in and beyond the region—and it is—then a Turkish breakout would have a similar effect as a regional proliferation stimulant. As a certain Head of State is fond of saying, “Not good.” A Turkish breakout would certainly change the Iranian calculus in the event that the Iranian leadership decided to remain below overt breakout status even after the expiration of the current nuclear deal. It would be very hard do so if the Turks go first.

Now, back when these reactor deals were signed, several observers saw the building pattern as an eventual hedge against the deterioration of the U.S.-Turkish strategic partnership. It stood to reason that if the U.S.-Turkish relationship was not long for the world, the Turks would recognize that trajectory as well. The conclusion: Turkey might resort to strategic self-help in a neighborhood in which, no matter which way one looked, one saw states with nuclear weapons or states likely soon to acquire them. The alternative was for Turkey to rely on the tender mercies of the Russian government, but unless one is an aspiring or incompetent comedian, there is nothing funny about that.

And yet, during the past decade the Turkish government under the AKP has not engaged in obvious hedging behavior. It may do so in future, but for the time being the situation is really rather odd. It suggests the mother of all disconnects, this one residing in President Erdogan’s brain.

Turkey’s relations with the United States are terrible, yet Turkey still relies for its ultimate security on a U.S. nuclear guarantee of its safety. It is that guarantee which enables Turkey to cavil about with the Russians, and it is also that guarantee that has allowed the AKP principals to tell us, over and over again, that an Iranian bomb might threaten U.S. and Israeli interests, but not Turkish ones—and anyway diplomacy can solve the problem, even if it really hasn’t and won’t. If we remove our nukes and so trash the credibility of our extended deterrence pledge to Turkey, dots will connect even in Erdogan’s somewhat exotic mind. Ankara’s fooling around with Moscow will look different in a hurry, and so will the prospect of an Iranian bomb, no matter what the Turks pretend still today.

To cavil does not presuppose Turkey’s liking the Russians, and of course we know that. We realize that the Russians have huge leverage over Turkey right now as a result of the war in Syria. The only part of that unhappy country not in regime hands is Idlib province, in the northwest along the Syrian border with Lebanon to the west and Turkey to the north. There are about 3.5 million Sunni Arabs there, most indigenous but many refugees already from Aleppo and other places of old, lost battles. If the Syrian regime goes after Idlib, it will touch off a refugee flow toward the Turkish border that could make previous flows look tame by comparison—and it could also change the vectors of Kurdish politics and power in a way Turkey does not desire.

Will the Syrian regime proceed to Idlib? Syria’s Iranian ally may have an appetite for such a campaign, using Hezbollah and a collection of Shi‘a militias as cannon fodder. But the Russians probably lack a similar appetite, since their basic interests in Syria are more or less satisfied by the status quo. So if they deny air support, they may be able to prevent a regime attack on Idlib. That is what the Turkish leadership wants the Putin government to do, and it is willing to pay a price for that outcome—like, for example, agreeing to buy the S-400s.

Meanwhile, as the Russians have the Turks up against a hard place, the Turks have the Germans in a roughly similar position thanks to the refugee deal the two governments signed a couple of years ago. So we have a kind of triangular diplomatic extortion racket going on here. The Russian leadership may promise the Turks anything, but to trust it to keep its word is foolish—especially since the prospect of again weaponizing a refugee flow into Europe, á la late 2015 and 2016, must be tempting from a Russian perspective, seeing as how it rattled Europe so usefully the first time around. So the Russians may get to screw two NATO member states for the price of one, since Turkey under such duress may simply be unable to honor its promises to Germany.

From a U.S. perspective, Russian leverage over Turkey is a problem, and not just having to do with Syria. It is easy to imagine a situation in which Putin is adventurous enough, given President Trump’s manifest attitude toward NATO, to test the alliance with a feinted hybrid incursion into, say, Latvia. NATO makes decisions to invoke Article V by consensus, and Turkey is a member that the Treaty provides no way to expel. So the Russians pull the trigger, NATO convenes, and Turkey vetoes any response because it fears the Russians will screw them to the wall. The Trump Administration may or may not be secretively appreciative of the Turkish obstacle—one never knows with this bunch. NATO can get around the consensus rule if we really want it to, so a Turkish veto need not spell the collapse of the alliance in strategic paralysis. But do that and it’s no longer the same alliance.

What’s really at stake in the current U.S.-Turkey crisis therefore goes deep into current strategic realities. The European security and proliferation stakes are both high. Compared to such stakes, the exposure of, say, Spanish banks to Turkish economic troubles does not even make it onto the bottom of the anxiety scale—but that’s what you get to read about in the newspaper, don’t you?

I understand the recent advanced exasperation of the Turkey experts, but I do not share its nothing-left-to-lose policy conclusion. Strategic patience still makes the best sense, which does not of course preclude testy ripostes to Turkish misbehavior. But care should be taken, for there is something left to lose. It may be that the Turkish government will decide at some point to kick us out of Incirlik, but we would be foolish to do things that make that more likely. If the Trump Administration wants to further stick it to Turkey, it has better options than dangling the strategic nuclear relationship in the air.

For example, Mr. Atilla remains in jail on a 32-month sentence, but the Treasury and Justice Departments are still considering what sort of fine to levy against Halkbank—which happens to be the second-largest government associated bank in Turkey—for helping Iran to evade sanctions. A fine of, say, $50 billion would not be outrageous given the extensive damage done, but that seems unlikely. A fine of just $20 billion could still kick the knees out from under Halkbank, but probably would not cause significant bank failures in the rest of Europe. Anyway, it’s just money.

Only please, everyone, just shut up about the nukes.

A decent summary of the state of play can be found on the front page of the August 20 Washington Post.

This is a bit complicated. Suffice it to say that the F-35 program is unique in that its business model included a pre-construction export market based on allied countries’ participation in the actual fabrication of the plane. Turkish defense contractors have indeed been responsible for building parts of the aircraft.

See Eric Edelman, “The View from Turkey,” in Perspectives in NATO Nuclear Policy, etudes & debáts, No. 3 (Paris: Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, May 2011), and the notes therein.

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The Useful Errors of Terry Eagleton

Radical Sacrifice

Terry Eagleton

Yale University Press, 2018, 216 pp., $25

Radical Sacrifice (2018) is the newest of Terry Eagleton’s scores of books. He has published close to one a year for about 50 years. This doesn’t rank Eagleton as a presence on Wikipedia’s page of the most prolific writers, but the fact that L. Ron Hubbard holds the Guinness World Record, at 1,084 publications, reminds us that, in this mass-market age, quantity comes cheap. Hubbard’s success as science fiction author-turned-religious guru also shows that many people today, though awash in words, long desperately for meaning. Eagleton’s core thesis is thus apropos: Our culture lacks a sense of sacrifice as transformative and salvific, as a source of meaning.

Eagleton is adept at explaining meanings. His 1991 book Ideology, for instance, acquaints the reader with 20 different definitions of the book’s titular term but fails to endorse any of them as true. Cultured, charming, and well read, Eagleton wrote the textbook on Literary Theory (1983) as well as an attack on it, After Theory (2003). He slings frequent potshots at capitalism and quotes chic French philosophers while using literature to suggest vaguely Marxist interpretations of culture. He occasionally pens sentences like, “Only the fertile dissolution of non-being can reclaim powers oblivious of their own finitude.” In other words, he is the very model of the modern, or postmodern, English professor.

Yet—and this is what allows Radical Sacrifice to be interesting—Eagleton casts himself as a radical contrarian, dissenting from both modernity and postmodernity. Exploring sacrifice through chapters on the crucifixion, martyrdom and death, gift-giving, and scapegoating, the book identifies an important idea and, in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, “plays gracefully” with it. But his posture—kind-of Marxist, kind-of Christian—is mostly a pose, veiling a deeper postmodernism. And postmodernists, by definition, will never be able to articulate a view of the human person as something worth sacrificing for. Eagleton has thus underlined the central problem of postmodernity: meanings, meanings everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

“The practice of sacrifice nurtures a wisdom beyond the rationality of the modern,” Eagleton asserts. In the name of the autonomous self who exercises an exchange-based rationality, the liberalism of the moderns rejects sacrifice and thus overlooks its redemptive and transfigurative powers. “For conventional liberal wisdom,” Eagleton writes, “self-fulfillment and self-dispossession are essentially at odds. This is not the case for a more radical outlook. One must take a remarkably indulgent view of humankind, as many liberals do, to assume that the self can come into its own without that fundamental breaking and refashioning of which sacrifice has been one traditional sign.”

Here Eagleton argues, rightly, that sacrifice escapes the logic of calculated self-interest. An American baseball analogy might summarize the Irishman’s point: A “sacrifice fly” is not a sacrifice, but a strategy. Its mode of thinking cannot transform a life, sustain a culture, or give either of them meaning.

Eagleton also critiques the “callow postmodern cult of options” that too facilely celebrates inclusion and mocks as naive and oppressive the idea of Truth or Reality or Human Nature. Postmodernists, despite their radical posture, are ultra-capitalists, he claims, because they dissolve all real meaning and substantial difference into a supermarket of shallow diversity and ever multiplying micro-meanings.

Eagleton is on solid ground here, again. Words are said to be signifiers breeding without substance, images reflecting images in a hall of mirrors with no original object anywhere in sight. Postmodernists sometimes critique, sometimes commend, this loss of value, depending on whether it serves their political purposes of the moment—but they offer no alternative. By debunking meaning as a mask of raw power, they are left with no meaning with which to combat injustice and so are left with nothing to sacrifice for. If we wish for significant lives and a decent society, postmodernism is a bad investment. Sell while you can.

Eagleton’s angle can be explained pretty quickly, simply by explaining his title. As sacrificed, a thing is “sacred,” both holy and cursed (from the Latin). Eagleton could have appealed also to the etymology of “blessing:” to be blessed is to be bloodied, wounded. Though it is religious people who most easily recognize how these apparent opposites are actually complementary, the link between blessedness and suffering is a universal feature of human experience. True sacrifice, self-sacrifice, is always radical and transformative.

The point is worth developing a bit more. Sacrifice entails some degree of suffering. While not all suffering is salvific, it is our most profound teacher. And people who see the other side of deep suffering often understand their wounds as blessings, as the experiences by which they have become more fully human. In hindsight, an adult can wish that awful thing (insert your own tragedy here) didn’t happen, while also being grateful for having learned its lessons, having been sculpted inwardly, engraved—however brutally—with deeper meaning.

Suffering and sacrifice, however, are not equivalents. Suffering is something that happens to us, while sacrifice is something we choose to do. We can turn suffering into sacrifice by consenting to our hardships, but it’s still not the same as an act of choice. In sacrifice, we show an openness to this unavoidable human process that can move us from lower to higher, from superficial to deeper, from brutish to more elevated. Of course, a noble readiness to suffer can be exploited; Eagleton should have emphasized the fact more clearly (it is perhaps too modern a point for him to explore). Still, in the true sacrificial attitude we do not seek suffering but expose ourselves to life for the sake of something worthy, consenting to become something new, something we can neither will ourselves into nor even foresee.

Eagleton rightly emphasizes that, for sacrifice to work its magic, one cannot approach it transactionally. Pagan burnt offerings were often understood as deals, exchanges with the gods for goodies or bribes to obviate evil. The great monotheistic religions reject this quid pro quo attitude, even if some followers still fall into it. It is an impious form of piety, as Socrates points out in the Euthyphro.

Eagleton suggests that, in order to unleash the transfigurative powers of sacrificial suffering, we must approach it as an ultimate act—worth doing even if we were in no way recompensed. Unless it is unconditional, the sacrifice is nullified, reduced to a self-serving strategy. Eagleton here endorses the ethics of the crucifixion while rejecting, or remaining agnostic, about its promise of an afterlife: “Only if the cross is lived in tragic resignation as final and absolute may it cease to be either. Only by living one’s death to the full, rather than treating it as springboard to eternity, might it prove possible to transcend it.”

By reading the resurrection metaphorically, as a hoped-for transformation in time rather than as guaranteed reward in heaven, Eagleton manages to reject the crucial doctrine of Christianity while still taking it seriously. In other words, he expertly uses Christian scriptures but rejects the religion for which they are central, leaving the reader to wonder where any meaning occurs worthy of making a sacrifice.

So: a sacrifice for what? Eagleton doesn’t seem to believe in souls, so his aim, and his object of analysis, is clearly not spiritual. In the end, it all comes down to what we knew it would from most of the previous 49 books: political transformation, sketched in Marxist fashion, if only rather vaguely.

In Eagleton’s concluding chapter, he applies the idea of the sacred scapegoat to victims of political and economic dehumanization, suggesting—as he does also in Why Marx Was Right (2011)—that the proletariat is the true image of Christ’s sacrifice. “The transition from Christianity to Marxism is among other things one from a vision of the poor as prefiguring the future to a faith in them as the prime means of its attainment.” Eagleton’s blending of Christianity with Marxism reminds us of an older style leftism, and also a Latin American style, before the obsession with race and gender displaced concern about the proletariat. What we are left with, pardon the pun, is a leftism plain-faced about attaining a collective unity with what amounts to religious meaning by way of economic prophecy and political activism.

Instead of hoping for an afterlife, or for lives of personal and interpersonal significance, we are to hope for a political afterlife: a world after capitalism. And this will be achieved through capitalism’s metaphorical crucifixion of the proletariat, the image of which should move the rest of us to repentance and conversion. About the “impending upheaval which Marx calls communism and the Christian Gospel calls the kingdom of God,” Eagleton concludes the book with the exciting, deep-sounding, but obscure sentence, “revolution is a modern version of what the ancient world knew as sacrifice.” And why not? In postmodernist fantasyland, anything can mean anything, so long as it is sounds the right political note.

Attempts to find the font of meaning in political life are not the monopoly of the Left, whether positivist, para-modern or postmodern. The Right has been at it too, albeit with less alacrity over the years. Note Michael Walsh’s best-selling books The Devil’s Pleasure Palace (2015) and Fiery Angel (2018), which frame contemporary culture wars within an “Ur-Narrative” of hero versus villain, in which the Right’s enemy is no less than the Devil and his minions among “the Satanic Left.” Only in this narrative context, Walsh claims, can we individually and culturally recover the meaning we need to survive. Other recent (and more serious) conservative books—like Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option (2017)—also critique our modern liberal order as insufficiently meaningful, urging us toward a post-liberal order where our lives together might be infused by a thicker, collective significance.

The problem isn’t that modern liberalism has failed, but that it has succeeded rather well at its goal of providing, however imperfectly, a balance of prosperity, security, and liberty on a massive scale. It does not attempt to make our lives meaningful, but it never promised to do so. Its very success has proven Aristotle right: The key question is, what should one do with leisure? And as Aristotle also notes, when aware of their own ignorance about the point of life, people are vulnerable to various forms of baloney telling them that it is something grand and high above them. It is in this context that we should understand Scientology, Marxism, and other ideologies.

People long for meaning. It’s just one of the things we do. To borrow a phrase from Michael Oakeshott, one can recognize “the politics of faith” as a permanent and necessary feature of public life while also recognizing that it wants to find more meaning in the collective than a decent liberal politics can bear. To be modern about it, a decent politics largely leaves people to their own private devices to satisfy their longing for meaning, even if this means some people will make a mess of it.

But we mustn’t be too thoroughly modern about it: Of course politics is ultimately going to be meaningful for many if not most people, and in a big way. Even this liberal order, which tries to privatize the search for meaning, is neither neutral nor self-supporting; it requires people willing to make sacrifices for it without turning to it as the wellspring of meaning. That is a fine needle to thread, for we ask people—soldiers, for example—to make ultimate sacrifices for the sake of a procedural order. It requires a self-effacing, rather unsatisfying faith, one pushing us to focus on something smaller-seeming than it should: the responsibility that, in daily life, we take for ourselves and our civic companions.

Thus I would rewrite Eagleton’s concluding sentence as “personal responsibility is a modern version of what the ancient world knew as sacrifice”—if only “responsibility” sounded as exciting as “revolution.”

Eagleton’s recourse in the end to a political and economic resurrection implies that he has lost sight of the concrete human being, for whom the activities of personal responsibility are the primary site of meaning and sacrifice. Neither his postmodern nor his Marxist self can allow him to accept such a bourgeois view of human identity.

In the postmodernist view, our identities disintegrate into various images, each one a socially constructed narrative. This debunks both the premodern concept of the soul, the set of capacities and drives that comprise each person’s essence, as well as the modern self, the rational, self-interested ego. In contrast, the postmodernists tell us that a self is a hodgepodge of images and stories given to it and absorbed in false consciousness. You only think you exist as a unitary self, we are told.

The physicalistic reductionists say much the same thing. Perhaps you think you exist because your brain is doing something or other, or because the Disney movies you saw as a kid convinced you that you did. In either case, the trendy position in the academy for a few decades now, in the sciences as well as in the humanities, wants to convince you that you don’t really exist. “You” are actually a biochemical or a cultural epiphenomenon of one sort or another, and the same goes for others.

In his fine 2007 book The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction, Eagleton successfully avoids the moderns’ selfish self, the postmodernists’ non-self, and the materialists’ brain pretending to be a self by endorsing an Aristotelianism supplemented by a Christian sense of caritas. In that view of the person—despite the obvious, superficial tensions between the parts—true self-love is not cast as an enemy of love of others. Sacrifice can be affirmed while avoiding the naive readiness to sacrifice that can be so easily exploited.

But in Radical Sacrifice, Eagleton adopts a different view. Here, he wants too much “self-dispossession,” urging a “selfless” ethics, based on a postmodern non-self mixed with a revolutionary Marxist materialistic reduction of the person. It is homo sapiens stripped of all meaning that shows us the ground of solidarity: “Our common susceptibility to political murder constitutes a potent egalitarian bond.” But that sense of self—as potential victim in solidarity with other victims who probably don’t exist as free agents in the first place—is hardly enough to make someone want to live through life’s inevitable moments of terrible suffering.

The abstract humanitarian caritas he hopes will transform the world is not aimed at the good of the specific people we encounter, but is anonymous—“an impersonal (which is to say, political or institutional) love.” Worse, throughout the book Eagleton emphasizes the “nothingness” and “lack” that, for him in this book at least, constitute the core of humanity:

‘In love,’ writes Slavoj Žižek, ‘I am nothing, but as it were a Nothing aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack.’ He might have added that to acknowledge the self as nothing is to transcend the self-serving illusions of the ego in order to be open to the reality of other selves.

Notice the contradictions: You are nothing, but capable of being aware of yourself and of serving either yourself or others, and “the Other” is presumably also nothing, but somehow also a reality worthy of your attention, love, and suffering. We will create our meaning out of nothing, it seems, when political institutions, loving humanity anonymously and impersonally, end capitalist dehumanization. But mustn’t persons be something significant already for there to be something wrong with de-humanization and right with love?

Lucky for us, human lives—enjoyed and suffered by intrinsically relational individuals in contact with other concrete individuals—have inherent meaning. The contemporary German philosopher Robert Spaemann critiques the revolutionary fanatic who “thinks that it is only through his actions that any sense can come into the world at all.” This is where we should place Eagleton in his Marxist moods. “Every moral point of view by contrast,” Spaemann writes, “starts with the position that there is already sense in the world, and that this sense results from the existence of each individual person.” Let’s hope that liberalism can sustain a faith in that.

Eagleton is able to play gracefully with ideas. This proves yet again, for anyone who still needs proof, that it is often better to be usefully wrong than to be trivially right. For all this we should be grateful, even if we, personally and politically, must look for the meaning we long for elsewhere—namely, wherever each of us happens to be.

The post The Useful Errors of Terry Eagleton appeared first on The American Interest.

Trump’s Pivot to Eurasia

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When President Obama and Secretary Clinton launched what quickly came to be known as the Pivot to Asia, they had a number of different ideas in mind. First, there was the feeling that the United States was stuck in the Middle East quagmire and needed a sharp change of direction to escape. Second, there was the fear that America’s role in other parts of the world had been neglected, sometimes with destabilizing consequences. Finally, and perhaps more fundamentally, the Pivot was anchored in a particular philosophy of history. As Clinton and her Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Kurt Campbell, never tired of proclaiming, Asia was where the history of the next century would be written. The United States needed to share in the action.

For such a formidable claim a lot was left unexplained, but in his famous interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama contrasted the Middle East with Asia in the following terms: The latter “is filled with striving, ambitious, energetic people who are every single day scratching and clawing to build businesses and get education and find jobs and build infrastructure. The contrast [with the Middle East] is pretty stark.” In Asia, Obama saw young people yearning for self-improvement, modernity, education, and material wealth. “They are not thinking about how to kill Americans,” he said in a moment of uncharacteristic bluntness.

Obama, in brief, thought that Asia was the most salient part of the world for America’s future, and that no U.S. President could afford to take his eye off this brute fact. But even if Clinton had won the 2016 election, the Pivot was ill-conceived from the beginning and would almost certainly have ended in failure. Its architects correctly recognized that Asia’s extraordinary success in the last two decades derived from the continent’s increasing interconnectedness with the wider world; China, they argued, had to be understood within a much more inclusive regional framework, not just studied in isolation. The problem was that the Pivot then attempted to construct this framework around an ill-defined Asian continent, whose borders remain unsteady (was Pakistan part of Asia for the purposes of the Pivot?) and whose relevance to contemporary realities is unclear. “Context matters” is of little use as a policy heuristic if nobody can agree on what the relevant context is—and such agreement is made all the more elusive by contested borders and shifting trade routes.

Indeed, China is developing a foreign policy aimed at transcending these artificial boundaries. The corridors composing the Belt and Road initiative stretch from the Atlantic to the South Pacific, with important stations in the Horn of Africa and the Arctic. The scope of this initiative allows Beijing to detect opportunities going much beyond existing realities. To give but two examples, the Belt and Road will attempt to move the center of gravity of European shipping from Northern to Southern Europe—the Chinese acquisition and expansion of the Port of Piraeus significantly cuts the shipping distance from Asia to Europe—and to build industrial value chains spanning from Congo to Shanghai by way of Kazakhstan.

The fatal flaw with the Pivot to Asia was not that it could be construed as a provocation to China, or even that it neglected opportunities and commitments in other regions. Rather, it was that it encouraged a way of looking at the world as divided between self-contained geographies. Obama may have kept his engagement in Syria at a minimum so that resources could be concentrated in Asia. In reality, though, his reluctance to act in Syria had a very detrimental impact in the South China Sea, where China felt increasingly comfortable to adopt a more aggressive posture. Europe, Middle East, South Asia, and Asia Pacific are concepts that today have a meaning only for historians, and even they are having second thoughts. Why would a global superpower voluntarily limit its sphere of action? If you read Campbell’s recent book, it is obvious that the motivating principle behind the Pivot is the gradual expansion of the Western world. The Middle East, once seen as a privileged area for Westernization, now appears difficult and recalcitrant. As Obama put it, it is a disappointing part of the world. It might have to be left to the end of the process, like those pockets of resistance you leave behind in order to win the battle as quickly as possible. But Campbell sees Asia as doting impatiently on the arc of the moral universe, bending it towards freedom—and by extension towards America.

Enter Trump. Now, when trying to make sense of what might be called the Trump doctrine, every commentator faces a very unsettling predicament. On the one hand, there is a strong unwillingness to identify any particular theory of international politics as the basis for Trump’s foreign policy because we all know that he does not do theory. Even his supporters will argue that he follows his instincts rather than a developed doctrine. On the other hand, can it seriously be argued that Trump is entirely beyond reason, that everything he does lacks strategy or sense? Moreover, even if Trump does in fact have no idea of what he is doing, it doesn’t follow that there is no underlying pattern to his decision-making.

I make these remarks more as a cautionary note than as a serious starting point. As a matter of fact, it seems clear to me that Trump and some of his advisors have voiced a number of coherent thoughts about the world order. More often than not, these are expressed as a rejection of existing ideas. The Trump Administration has argued, for example, that the world order is not and will never become a community of values. It has argued that the West will always remain confined to a particular geography, commanding no universal allegiance. It has argued that how countries act matters more than the way they are organized.

The point about the limited geographic expansion of the Western world is critical. Many liberals seem to think the whole world is in the process of becoming “like us,” and thus all countries must be treated as candidates for membership in the Western order. But for Trump and his advisors, the world remains an arena for action rather than an expanded home for a future global community.

The Trump Administration shares with its predecessor a healthy skepticism towards the old Cold War notion that Europe holds the key to the world order, but unlike Obama, it has not replaced that belief with a quixotic universalism. It looks at the world and sees a number of powerful players and privileged locations—actors and geographies where important resources have accumulated or where important questions about the global distribution of power will be decided. It does not draw deep divisions between the civilized and the uncivilized, since it lacks a strong idea of civilization, but it does draw distinctions between the powerful and the powerless. And much like a multinational company, the Trump Administration prioritizes certain geographic regions as the main prizes for state competition.

Outside the immediate neighborhood—Mexico and Canada have required sustained attention—the White House and the State Department under Secretary Pompeo have identified a number of zones of involvement and drawn increasingly defined links between them. The picture they have been developing bears a remarkable similarity to China’s Belt and Road initiative: on one end, the crisis point of North Korea, the relation with Japan, and the increasingly aggressive confrontation with China on trade; on the other end, the relations with Europe, which turned out to be a lot more eventful than anticipated—an incipient clash with Germany, a new relationship with post-Brexit Britain and doubts about NATO. The Middle East has not disappeared from the radar either, with an entente cordiale with Israel and Saudi Arabia opening the way for new hostilities with Iran, and with the old alliance with Turkey at a breaking point. But there is a new focus on the sea routes between Asia and Europe, the new strategic theater of the Indo-Pacific that Washington wants to build in close cooperation with Delhi. The U.S. military, for example, has just renamed its Pacific Command the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command—an attempt to counter Chinese political and economic power along the sea lanes holding the vast Eurasian supercontinent together.

If Obama pivoted to Asia, then, Trump has pivoted to Eurasia. That is hardly surprising: the supercontinent stretching from Lisbon to Jakarta is increasingly connected and interdependent, containing about two thirds of the world population and global economic output. Certain regions of the supercontinent are dense areas of technological innovation. Others are enormously rich in natural resources. More importantly, perhaps, it is here and only here that the United States finds state actors rivalling its own power and wealth: China, Russia, the European Union, perhaps India in the future, as well as smaller states it nonetheless regards as security threats. Even in the limit case of a world war, it is highly unlikely that a generalized conflict between, for example, China and the United States, could take place in the Pacific. It would be conducted where important allies and enemies can be regimented, where natural resources and large populations exist and where industry is concentrated.

Trump’s Pivot to Eurasia has two practical implications for American grand strategy. The first regards Russia’s role in American foreign policy. Traditionally, Washington strategists saw Russia as an external threat to be contained, perhaps eliminated at some point, or festively brought into the Western bloc—but always in reference to the borderlands separating it from Europe. The Pivot to Eurasia changes that by opening a second, eastern front where Russia appears less as a threat and more as an opportunity. Not by chance, public reports have informed us that Henry Kissinger has quietly suggested to Trump that the United States should work with Russia to contain a rising China. This strategy would use closer relations with Russia to limit China’s growing power and influence.

The second implication has to do with Europe. Just as Russia must be understood from both directions at once—west and east—so must Europe be placed in a larger Eurasian framework going beyond its Atlantic ties. Trump’s effort here is not only to get European NATO countries to take up their defense against the Russian threat, but also to temper the growing economic links between the European Union and China and, if possible, reorient Europe back towards the United States. These figures may come as a surprise to some, but the transatlantic alliance is increasingly peripheral in economic terms. In 2017 the European Union imported 375 billion euros in goods from China, corresponding to 20 percent of total imports. The volume imported from the United States was only 256 billion. To flip this around is the core of Trump’s Europe strategy.

In his review of my new book, Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times argued that the biggest strategic question facing a rising China is not the development of the Eurasian landmass but instead the struggle for power in the seas and economies of the Pacific region, where China faces direct opposition from its great rival across the ocean. To this Philip Stephens, also of the Financial Times, responded that the Pacific is mostly water. American decision makers seem increasingly aware that the new center of gravity in world politics is not the Pacific and not the Atlantic, but the Old World between the two. Whether he knows it or not, Trump is pivoting to Eurasia.

This is the third piece in a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.

The post Trump’s Pivot to Eurasia appeared first on The American Interest.

Jupiter and Rambo

Most Americans have not heard the name Benalla, and if they have, they haven’t a clue why it should concern them. How could they? The White House is a region of spacetime exerting such a strong pull on our attention that no one can escape; a scandal in France that sounds inscrutable and insignificant will not be the exception to the rule, even if it is neither.

The manifest content of this scandal, as thus far reported in the highbrow press, is indeed a scandal. But as French scandals go, it is a tremblor on the French Presidential Scandal scale. The latent content is what matters—and it matters because of the larger geopolitical context.

France will soon be the only nuclear power in the European Union. The U.S. commitment to Article V of the NATO treaty is widely in doubt. Macron’s lucky streak has allowed some in Europe to envision the germ of a solution to the massive security and economic dilemmas it confronts: an intimate Franco-German economic and security entente, one that would use Germany’s wealth and France’s military to forge a stable, liberal, and democratic power center at the heart of Europe.

Given this context, it is hard to understand why the French would allow themselves to become consumed by a scandal that on its face is a scandal, yes, but no earth-shattering one. Nonetheless, Macron’s popularity has plummeted. Since Le Monde broke the story on July 18, he has tumbled in the polls by some ten percentage points, leaving a number of observers reaching for elaborate explanations: “The Benalla Affair,” writes Alexandra Schwartz in the New Yorker, “is not about Alexandre Benalla. It is about the French President, and the brash, self-confident manner with which he has blasted through his first year in office.” The story runs the “Culture Desk” section, which is usually reserved for “conversations about movies, television, theatre, music, and other cultural events.”

Not about Benalla? Perhaps it is true that had Macron not been so brash and self-confident, no one in France would have found the news that his intimate friend and adviser likes to dress up like one of the Village People and beat the snot out of anyone in his path especially notable. But this seems a tortured explanation.

The affair takes place against a restive backdrop. On May Day 2018, a year after Macron’s election and half a century after May ’68, the unions took to the street to protest Macron’s economic reforms. These included loosening France’s growth-strangling labor regulations, so rigid that desperate companies with an incompetent employee were known to hire a second one without firing the incompetent one, for it would be so expensive, time-consuming, and bureaucratically arduous to get rid the incompetent that it was easier to keep him on the payroll.

In September last year, Macron pushed through a package of labor law reforms, then turned his attention to the debt-ridden state railways. His proposal to end the guarantee of jobs for life—not, note, for those already employed, but for new recruits, prompted crippling, rolling strikes meant to galvanize France with the rejuvenating spirit of ‘68, but which in reality just irritated the hell out of us—so much so that, for once, people on the street told me, “I’ve had it with these spoiled little shits. Just fire them all.”

You may remember “May Day in Paris Marred by Violence” headlines, accompanied by the clichéd stock photo of a burning car in Paris. The malefactors were the Black Bloc, a kin to Antifa. Some 1,200 Black Bloc thugs infiltrated an otherwise peaceful march of leftists and trade unionists and went wilding, throwing Molotov Cocktails, smashing windows, torching cars, ransacking shops, brandishing Soviet flags (seriously), tearing up pavement stones, and desecrating the holy symbol of capitalism (a McDonald’s). This happened near the Gare d’Austerlitz, in central southeast Paris. The news made it sound more dramatic than it was: I live about ten blocks away but had no idea it was happening until I received e-mails from concerned Americans telling me to flee for my life.

That evening, another scrap broke out at the Place de la Contrescarpe, which guidebooks describe as “a small, intimate, and pleasantly shaded square, lined by lively cafés, one of the most attractive in Paris.” The cops were in a crappy mood after dealing with 1,200 ravening anarchists, and another passel of drunken reds was the last thing they wanted to see. But with one notable exception, the cops were perfectly professional, if, obviously, not a bit in the mood.

Here is the video, recorded on May 1, that started it all. Look for the cop in the helmet who’s not like the others. He’s incompetent. He’s untrained. He’s neither in control of himself nor the suspect. He smashes him in the head in a way no professional ever would. You could give someone a concussion or brain damage that way. You could even hurt your hand. The video was released immediately, but only became a national scandal when the public learned that the cop in question was not a cop. He was 26-year-old Alexandre Benalla, a swarthy young man from the other side of the tracks, impersonating a police officer.

And who exactly is Benalla? On July 18, Le Monde identified him, triggering the firestorm. He is a man who has had seemingly unlimited access to the President of the Republic of France. But he shouldn’t have.

Other amateur videos of the May 1 incident have since surfaced. By now everyone in France has seen Benalla mashing his fist into a protestor and stomping on his stomach; they have watched him wrestle to the ground and drag off an unarmed woman; they have seen him flee the scene. We have seen the assault from every angle, in slow motion, captioned, illustrated with arrows and diagrams, or playing on a loop, in the background, as excited television presenters narrate the blow-by-blow.

We have since learned, too, that Benalla was granted gifts and favors exceedingly unsuited to his official role. And what was that role? It changes by the day, but in press accounts he has been described variously as “bodyguard,” “the President’s close collaborator,” “deputy chief of staff,” “assistant director of the cabinet of the President of the Republic, “top aide,” and “adviser to the President.” One thing is perfectly clear: Nothing could keep them apart. France has seen photo after photo of Macron and Benalla skiing together in the Pyrénées and cycling in matching pastels at the seaside. Benalla had the keys to the presidential couple’s home. He was installed in a sumptuous apartment on the Quai Branly with a certain historic significance—it once housed President Mitterrand’s illegitimate family—and paid a salary grossly disproportionate to his role, whatever it was. He was given an official vehicle, with flashing lights and sirens, which perhaps a bodyguard might need, yes, but why then was he also given a chauffeur? He had no training as a bodyguard, but under Macron’s employ, in what Libération termed “the fastest promotion in French military history,” this retired former grunt in the gendarmerie became a five-bar lieutenant colonel with “expert” status. He had free range of the National Assembly, a diplomatic passport, and a security clearance.

This would all have escaped widespread notice if the far Left had not tipped off Le Monde. Note, though, that someone had to know Benalla was not who he appeared to be to grasp that the video would cripple President Emmanuel Macron’s presidency.

Benalla’s nickname was “Rambo.” His intimates say he has hot blood, or sang chaud, the opposite of the quality usually ascribed to heroic Frenchmen—sangfroid. He was granted a license to carry, even though his earlier applications had repeatedly been denied by the Interior Ministry; police officers considered his dossier “dubious.” Sources tell journalists that the Elysée would have had to intervene directly to overrule that judgement.

He had been offering his services as a bodyguard to Socialist Party luminaries since 2008, but in 2012, only days into a new job as Arnaud Montebourg’s chauffeur, he was fired “with utmost force, for severe misconduct,” as Montebourg told Le Monde. “He caused a car accident, in my presence, and sought to flee the scene.” In 2015, a woman filed a complaint with the police accusing Benalla of “willingly and violently” assaulting her so seriously that she couldn’t work for more than eight days. In March 2016, shortly before Benalla entered Macron’s employ, these charges were dismissed. Unusually, no legal explanation for the verdict was offered.

Directly before the 2017 election, hackers broke into Macron’s campaign and dumped a massive trove of documents onto the internet. No one paid them much mind, assuming the Russians had mingled with the real documents so many fake and scurrilous ones that none could be trusted. The documents about Benalla, however, appear to have been real: They note his fondness for riot shields and non-lethal weapons. It does seem he had quite the collection: When he wanted to play policeman, he had all the gear—the helmet, the armband, the walkie-talkie. But how could he have assumed he would get away with that in the era of the smartphone? Impersonating a police officer is, needless to say, illegal as hell. Clearly, he felt he was immune—and indeed, members of police unions have since testified under oath that Benalla “terrified” them, that he felt free to curse and threaten with impunity high-ranking officers of the police and gendarmerie.

The police had their reasons. In this video, shot in March 2017 and published by Public Sénat the day after after Le Monde identified Benalla as the rogue cop, we see Benalla manhandling a journalist, then stealing his badge. The incident was “so serious and so incomprehensible,” Public Sénat reported, “that the director of the channel sent a letter to then-candidate Macron’s team, noting that there was no threat whatsoever to the candidate and protesting this arbitrary interference with the press in in its normal duties.” It was a warning, Public Sénat wrote, “that should have been heeded, and should have prevented Benalla from following Macron into the Elysée Palace.”

We learned from sworn testimony before the French parliament that the President and the Interior Ministry had been aware of the incident as soon as it happened. Neither alerted the public prosecutor, as required by law, nor did they do so until the story was on the front page of every newspaper in France. Instead, they suspended Benalla without salary for 15 days, but for a “technical reason” he received his salary anyway and immediately reappeared, accompanying the President as if he had not been suspended at all. They knew Benalla had done something psychopathic on May Day, but not one of the people officially responsible for ensuring the security of the President insisted that his access to him be cut off.

The cover-up has been clumsier than the crime. After the story broke, no one could get the alibi straight. Neither Interior Minister Gérard Collomb nor the Paris Prefect of Police Michel Delpuech were willing to take the fall; both pointed the finger at Macron. On July 23, Delpuech contradicted the Elysée’s declarations that the police had authorized Benalla to attend the demonstration.

All of this is scandalous, yes. The corruption, the favoritism, and the carelessness with state security warrant stern condemnation. But none of it merits the unrelenting fever it has generated in France. It does not warrant the obsession, and it can be described no other way.

Why? As French scandals go, writes Arthur Goldhammer, “nothing here rises to the level of past presidential misdeeds.” He recalls the barbouzes of de Gaulle’s Service d’Action Civique, the Greenpeace Affair, Mitterrand’s private eavesdroppers. “These were affairs of state. Benalla is a choirboy by comparison.”

Benalla has since been indicted for assault, impersonating a police officer, gang violence, interference in public service, illegally wearing of a police badge, and conspiracy to abuse police surveillance footage. The three high-ranking police officers who allegedly gave Benalla the footage of the incident have been indicted for misappropriating the images and violating professional secrecy. The judiciary is conducting an investigation into “cronyism.” Five have so far been indicted. The National Police and the Inspector General are conducting simultaneous administrative investigations.

Macron has taken responsibility. The buck stops with him, he says. He has assured us that Benalla was never given the nuclear codes. He has assured us, too, that Benalla has never been his lover. So that, at least, is settled.

So why, then, isn’t it settled? Why did the leaked video first force Macron into hiding—he went silent for days, completely aberrant for the normally voluble Jupiter—and why, when at last he emerged, did he stand before the flashing lightbulbs and say, “Benalla has never been my lover?” Any competent brand manager would tell you those are not the words to utter if you aim never to associate in the public mind the words “Macron,” “Benalla,” and “lover.”

Because, of course, everyone suspects Benalla is his lover. It takes quite a conspiracy theory to account for this any other way, doesn’t it? But that is not the heart of the matter. France isn’t anti-homosexual in the Russian manner. Marine Le Pen, for example, surrounds herself with gay advisers and insists that, far from being homophobic, her animosity to Islamic immigration stems from her homophilia. Homosexuality in France is now at best mildly transgressive. Few would have thought the worse of Macron had he come out of the closet. His taste for men was rumored before the election, and since nearly everyone had heard about it, not much of a secret.

Macron might have been better off saying, “Yes, he’s my lover, and it’s none of your business.” That’s an answer France might have understood. It is the reflex response here to any question about a public figure’s private life. An American (in all innocence, presumably) once asked Quora whether Macron was gay, and was taken to the woodshed by his French interlocutors. “I am not politically in favor of Macron, but this question is inappropriate. To say the least,” remarked one.

Unfortunately, this obvious retort was unavailable to him, because Macron had spent months of his campaign saying, “Yes, she’s my wife, and it’s none of your business.” In his 2016 memoir, the candidate described his “love often clandestine, often hidden, misunderstood by many before imposing itself.” But this love that dared not speak its name was to Brigitte, whom he met when he was a 15-year-old student at a Jesuit high school. She was 25 years his senior, married, and a mother of three. She divorced her husband when Macron turned 18. When Macron began his political career, in 2007, they married, and Macron became a grandfather of seven before his 40th birthday.

Their relationship has mostly struck the French as weird or romantic, but none of their business. Rumors that Brigitte was Macron’s beard were stilled by good manners, discretion, and respect for the beauty of their love story, the will to believe in their love story—especially among middle-aged women with a taste for le fruit vert. When the far Right—and Russia—had the bad taste to cast aspersions on the authenticity of their marriage, Macron won the round by calling such intimations odious: “Saying that it is not possible for a man to live with an older woman without being anything other than a homosexual or a hidden gigolo is misogynous. And it’s also homophobic.”

Were it not for this, Macron could have said, “Yes, he’s my lover, and that is none of your business.” It would have been met, probably, with a great round of public applause for his bravery. But precisely because he had so vigorously denounced anyone who suggested such a thing as a homophobe or a misogynist, the get-out-of-jail-free card was unavailable to him when he possibly needed it most.

Still, his presumptive hypocrisy is not the heart of this matter either. No one in France cared that Mitterrand had two families, or that Hollande had three mistresses. A touch of hypocrisy would have been easily understood. He’s a politician, after all.

So what is this really about? As is often the case in French theater, the action is onstage, but the meaning is offstage. The first clue is in the political correctness Macron deftly wielded as a weapon on the campaign trail. This scandal is political correctness in action, and it displays political correctness for what we all know it to be: a sinister system of internal constraints that serves simultaneously to highlight and to hide forbidden thoughts. It also serves as a signal of class status: It is the vernacular of the aspiring upper-middle classes, and deploying it is a sign of class anxiety. The aristocracy sees no need for it. We speak plainly, but only to each other.

Thus it is impossible for the French middle class to articulate, or even consciously to identify, the truly transgressive element of this drama. None can say plainly that yes, France was ready for a President who married his high school drama teacher; France was ready for a closeted gay President, if that’s in fact what he was, or even an openly gay President. But no, France was not ready for a closeted gay President with a taste for S&M.

That is the heart of the scandal. Benalla is a sadist. Homosexuality is tolerated, but Benalla is different. He is not, for one thing, obviously homosexual. He has a long history of heterosexual liaisons. Perhaps he is an intermittent homosexual, but that is not particularly interesting these days, either. What is interesting, because it is something else entirely, is that Benalla obviously enjoys inflicting pain, and in his elevated disposition in the Macron era, he has been out of control. Thus the reaction to this scandal in France owes much to the hidden image of Macron as a willing victim of Benalla’s baton. There cannot be two sadists in a sado-masochistic affair. If Benalla and Macron were lovers, and Benalla is the dominant half of a sado-masochistic couple, where does that leave Macron? It leaves him where no one wishes to see a French President.

But this is only one thread in a complicated weave. The French press has gone out of its way to affirm that Benalla is French; he was born here; he is one of our own. This is not just political correctness: It is so. This is an important part of France’s conception of itself, made manifest in the law. And it is not so. The forbidden thought—and the obvious one—is that Benalla is not a French name. Benalla was born in France, but he is from a French-Moroccan family. He is part of the great wave of post-colonial immigration from the Maghreb.

For Macron to have gotten himself involved in this sort of debauchery smells of Rassenschande. There is to this affair a distinct air of racial defilement. No one wishes in the least to say this, but it is true anyway. If Benalla is an intermittent homosexual and not entirely French by blood—ah, that word does have a way of returning, doesn’t it—the fact that he is also a sadist means he has been showing the clubbing end of the baton to Macron, and in doing this, screwing over France.

Screwing over France in whose name, one might ask, if only because the question is always pertinent. Four or five million French Maghrebis—that is one answer. Go to any suburb around Paris or Marseilles and ask the locals whether they appreciate the fact that someone named Benalla is busy kicking the shit out of the President of the Republic, and, unbidden they would say they enjoy it very much. It is about time that someone did so. This has little to do with Islam and nothing to do with terrorism, it is a matter of redressing an old, old feeling of humiliation.

If in doubt, take a walk through my neighborhood. Try asking, at random, “What do you make of this Benalla business?” The responses are entirely predictable along class and ethnic lines. The waiter in the bobo café will say, “Lovers? Why, that hadn’t occurred to me. Or to anyone I know. What a strange thought.” But go exactly ten meters down the street and talk to the Maghrebi garbage collectors: All smirks and chortles. Their Ivoirian comrades? They’ve honestly got no idea what you’re talking about. Then try a high-ranking civil servant (in strictest confidence and utmost discretion, bien sûr—and only after you’ve established your aristocratic bona fides)—oh yes, the rumors get lewder. I would hardly be surprised if in the upper echelons of the Palace the word now involves Brigitte and a horse.

But in screwing over France by screwing over Macron, Benalla has made a symbolic concord with another constituency altogether: the police. Now, it is a simple and observable fact that no trivial number of police are, by psychological type, sadistic. This is hardly to impugn the police. Every polity needs its protective thugs; no society can long do without them. As it happens, Benalla loved the police. He wished to be one of them, and if not one of them, one of them in spirit. (This type is well known in the United States, too. Think Steven Seagal.) Even though no one in France is so stupid as to wish the police to disappear, the police are widely despised for their gratuitous brutality, their clan loyalty, and their flagrant dishonesty. The socio-economic class they represent lies between the edges of the working and lower-middle class. As they are despised, so they despise their betters: The attorneys, whom they loathe; the clever criminals, whom they sometimes admire; the politicians; and the press. In a country with fascist tendencies, they would represent a barely controlled Freikorps, a clan expressing their resentment in violence, first because violence does very well in expressing something, and second because violence has a latent psychosexual aspect. It is relieving to go beat people up.

These, then, are the first clues to the concealed drama of this affair. Macron has allowed himself to be used both by the Maghreb community and by the police in order to relieve them of their frustrations and resentments. To the French who can sense things happening, but not think about them or forthrightly discuss them, this is bound to provoke a shiver of discontent. Many in France dislike the Maghreb population because they fear, with some reason, that their allegiance is not to France at all—at least not yet. Many dislike the police because the police are not likable (nor should they be). The last thing they wish is for these groups to have their way with the President, and so with France. But this would seem to be what happened. One wonders how many French commentators and writers fully understand the meaning of the Ernst Röhm scandal in Germany? At some level, they all do. And at some level, this is a far deeper source of anxiety, for Röhm was Hitler’s Benalla.

Here is the another clue: The French delight in devouring the powerful and executing monarchs, even when it is not in their interest, and this to a degree unexcelled in any other Western country. They will re-enact the spectacle of destroying the monarchy every time in preference to asking whether it is the right moment to do that.

And a last clue: French libel laws are no joke, and any journalist who says in plain language what everyone is thinking will get his ass sued off. Thus all of this is happening between the lines. Look for the double-entendres. Such an event could be described in many ways in both French and English: the May Day scandal, the Benalla scandal, or even Benalla-gate—in both languages. The press has landed firmly on l’affaire Macron-Benalla, which in both languages means what you think it does.

Another one: “Might this be compared,” journalists are asking one other, entirely straight-faced, on television, “to the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior?” No, actually. The aptly codenamed Opération Satanique—more often known as the Greenpeace scandal—took place in 1985, years before the word “Rainbow” would evoke anything but a polychromatic optical illusion. The Rainbow Warrior was the flagship of Greenpeace’s fleet, en route to protest a French nuclear test in the Tuamotu Archipelago, when the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) bombed and sunk her in the Port of Auckland, killing a photographer on board. The New Zealand police captured two operatives and charged them with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, willful damage, and murder. Mitterrand managed to survive by denying everything, vowing to get to the heart of it, whitewashing all the evidence, accusing MI6 of sinking the ship to discredit France, forcing his Defense Minister to take the fall, sacking the head of the DGSE, and launching a trade war against New Zealand’s sheep. In the end, France was forced to confess, apologize, and pay massive reparations, and to this day, the French must ritually apologize for it every time they set foot in the antipodes.

Now that was a scandal.

This is far less—on the face of it—than Opération Satanique, but far more unspeakable in its subtext. The result is something delicious in its clever malice but horrifying to watch. As Bernard-Henri Lévy rightly put it, the press, like piranhas, have run clips of Benalla smashing protesters in a loop while simultaneously making “grotesque speculations about the private life of the presidential couple.” Photos of Macron and Benalla staring into each other’s eyes have been on the front page of every newspaper and magazine in every news kiosk in Paris for weeks. You can’t miss the billboard-sized advertisements for magazines like Le Point and Le Parisien, with headlines like, “A Too-special Advisor,” illustrated everywhere by those photos.

For the subtler, there are the French public intellectuals who have gone savagely intellectual on Macron’s sorry ass. Michel Onfray, a self-declared hedonist, atheist, and anarchist, has been especially vicious. He begins with an apt observation: A republican believes himself at the service of the state; a monarch holds the state to be at his service; and “in a monarchical republic such as ours, the president of the Republic is at less risk of republicanism than becoming a monarch.” But this risk, he argues, was overlooked by the naïfs who brought Macron to power. They thought “a man crowned while yet in his thirties (le trentenaire couronné) could wrench destiny in the other direction, oblivious to the qualities required to resist the monarchical temptation: a temperament of iron, a character of steel, and above all an impeccable moral compass,” none of which, he adds, were in evidence in Macron to begin with, and without which French Presidents inevitably “come to view the world through the eyes of their retinue of fawning courtiers.” Thus it is clear that Benalla was “the King’s favorite,”

for we can no longer count the photos in which we see Monsieur Benalla in the closest physical proximity to Emmanuel Macron—in official situations, of course, but just as often in private ones . . . by his side in the chairlift on the ski slopes, in the cocoon of the family residence at Le Touquet, bicycling . . .

Onfray proceeds to work himself into a regicidal frenzy, but rather than shouting, “Off with his head!” he launches into a glorious paragraph that serves the same function:

It is no longer General de Gaulle’s Pléiades displayed ostentatiously on the desktop in the official photo with a large reinforcement of spokesmen to explain what they signify, but the Memoires of Saint-Simon, which relates in detail the mud in which these self-indulgent regimes wallowed. But I digress: The young man who would be president had also chosen for his office Gide and his Nathanaël, for whom he had been taught a passion, and Stendhal, whose doctrine of egotism is a school of narcissism, self-pleasuring, and happiness without others, or against, or in spite of himself. . . . Side-by-side, the author of Memoirs of War and the author of Corydon. Understand if you can. For my part, I have understood.

Have you understood? Of course you have.

Onfray says the obvious because he can do so in a dialect that places him above those who mark their status by means of political correctness. Just slightly below in class stature—but still publicly intellectual—are those who cannot discuss it at all, for it would be—what, exactly? Never mind, we just know better. Thus, otherwise perceptive intellectuals have insisted earnestly that this non-scandal has become such a scandal only because the press is bored—“It’s the dog days of summer and the World Cup is over, what else is the media going to do,” they shrug. “Especially at a time when half the French population has little to do but sit in the sun addle-brained, read the hysterical papers, and gossip.”

This is a threat to sane French politics in a tumultuous time. But it is also much more dangerous.

The nether reaches of French society, from which Macron’s most dangerous political enemies come, can and will continue to insinuate every one of these unspeakable thoughts, skirting the very limits of outright libel. It is an unfair fight: Were Macron’s allies to do the same, they would lose by definition.

Macron represents a class well described here by Pascale Emmanuel Gobry, one loathed by the have-nots. This means Macron must deliver the goods quickly or he’ll end up like Louis XVI. He has probably been taking the right economic measures, but the results have yet to oblige him: The latest growth figures are below the hoped-for 2 percent, and unemployment is again edging up. This makes him vulnerable—and thus these “grotesque speculations about the private life of the presidential couple” will matter, whether or not people think they should.

Macron’s political crucifixion would be fine, amusing even to those with a malicious sense of humor, were there an alternative to Macron. But there is not. France’s traditional political parties have been destroyed. The radical-Right Rassemblement national (formerly the National Front) and the radical-Left La France Insoumise have seized upon this affair in the hope of destroying Macron and the centrist coalition he cobbled together from the ruins of France’s traditional parties. This is the horseshoe in action. Those profiting from Macron’s humiliation represent the worst of France—on the one hand its reactionary neo-Vichy wing; on the other, its stupid and vainglorious communists.

What’s more: Europe and the United States need Macron as much as France needs him. The timing of this affaire is rotten for France, rotten for Europe and the West, and just rotten, period. Why? Because Europe’s fate is now in the hands of Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, and both pairs of hands are growing weaker. Franco-German cooperation is Europe’s only and perhaps last hope. Otherwise, it’s only too easy to see what will happen with the Americans out, the Russians in, and vile bodies such as Salvini, Orbàn, and Corbyn gaining ground and closing in.

Germany’s willingness to cooperate fully with France depends upon its belief that France has—mirabile dictu—achieved fiscal responsibility. Macron’s success is essential to convincing German taxpayers that France can get its own house in order. Thus far, under Macron, it has been doing that. Ridding France of its absurd labor laws, taking on the unions—and winning—have been significant achievements. Macron’s victory over the cheminots was reminiscent of Thatcher’s victory over Scargill. No French President has been able to do that before.

Only Macron has a hope of getting Germany to do what it must do to redress the damage caused by the premature introduction of the euro: Activate the June 19 Meseberg Declaration. Only Macron can keep Germany securely anchored in a multinational Europe. If he succeeds, he will be an important historic figure. If he fails, an endless succession of unimaginable nightmares are now imaginable, the cascade of potential triggers countless: right-wing populism on the Continent and left-wing populism in Britain; the end of the European Union with the mothballing of NATO; the re-nationalization of European economies after a trade war; the re-militarization of European foreign policies.

Fanciful? No. Germany is now in all seriousness privately debating its need for an independent nuclear deterrent. At least one public indication has appeared. More likely is something like the Treaty of Rapallo redux, toward which Germany is already headed. It is hard to know which is worse, but clearly either will transform German domestic politics in ways with no roadmap or happy precedent. We need a strong and popular Macron right now, one who can prove France will be a reliable economic and security partner to Germany, not a country lashed to the mast by the President’s bodyguard. Macron has survived two censure motions, but the damage is done. The next group of lunatic strikers will not fold as easily as the cheminots.

The speculations about Macron private tastes are inappropriate. To say the least. But Onfray is correct to say that France has an ancient monarchical reflex, and it has been looking over and over again at photos of the Roi de Jupiter staring moistly into Benalla’s eyes. Once you see it, you can’t un-see it.

The scandal is a sinister omen. It is a sign of a lucky streak coming to an end. And this we cannot afford, for Macron is France’s best hope of entering the 21st century—and Europe’s best hope of not returning to the 20th.

The YouTube user who uploaded the video mislabeled the date as 01/04/2018.

Think of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.

One may argue perhaps that France should not have been quite so ready for that. Perhaps taboos against molesting your students, betraying your husband, and breaking up your family exist for good reasons. But that is a different question.

I write here about the significance of the French conception of citizenship.

He uses the idiom “tordre le bâton,” literally “twist the stick.” Meaningless in English, but a play on words in French, for as in English, a bâton may refer to a police baton (the scandal was exposed precisely because Benalla was too enthralled with them), and the word is richer still: Beyond being a metonym for authority, it is also a symbol of dignity in governance and, of course, a vulgar synonym for what Rabelais called “Le membre viril.”

Laurent Wauquiez is desperately trying to rehabilitate Les Républicains, but doing so by imitating the National Front, a fatal mistake, for if voters decide that’s what they want, they will vote for the echt item, not him. I have no idea what happened to Le Parti socialiste. Last I heard it was putting its hopes in a Belgian.

The post Jupiter and Rambo appeared first on The American Interest.

The Great Middle Eastern War of 2019

Growing tensions on Israel’s northern border have raised concerns about yet another Israel-Hezbollah confrontation or a war between Israel and Iran in Syria. Such a war may not be limited to the original participants, but could involve an array of Shi‘a militias and even the Assad regime, and could span the region—thereby affecting vital U.S. interests.

Two factors are driving these tensions: efforts by Hezbollah and Syria—with Iran’s help—to produce highly accurate missiles in Lebanon and Syria that could cripple Israel’s critical infrastructure and make life there intolerable; and Iran’s efforts to transform Syria into a springboard for military operations against Israel and a platform for projecting power in the Levant.

Iran, however, while pursuing an anti-status quo agenda that has often brought it into conflict with Israel and the United States, has shown that it seeks to avoid conventional wars and consequent heavy losses to its own forces. Instead, it relies on proxy operations, terrorism, and non-lethal shaping activities. Yet it has occasionally been willing to venture high-risk activities that entail a potential for escalation. (Example: Iranian forces in Syria launched an explosives-laden UAV into Israeli airspace in February; it was shot down, but the incident sparked a round of clashes.)

Israel also seems intent on avoiding war, though its actions show that it is willing to accept the risk of escalation to counter these emerging threats. Indeed, since 2013 it has carried out more than 130 strikes in Syria on arms shipments destined for Hezbollah, and since late 2017 it has expanded this “campaign between the wars” to target Iranian military facilities in Syria—without, thus far, sparking a wider confrontation.

Complacency is, however, unwarranted. The two major Arab-Israeli confrontations of the recent past (Lebanon 2006, Gaza 2014) resulted from unintended escalation. The emerging dynamic between Israel, Iran, and the “axis of resistance” is a formula for a third major “accident,” and so deserves careful analysis.

Multiple Actors, Fronts, and Domains

The potential for yet another war—one of unprecedented scope and complexity—is an outcome of the Syrian civil war, which has enabled Iran to build a military infrastructure in Syria and to deploy its Shi‘a “foreign legion” to Israel’s borders. War is now possible on multiple fronts and in far-flung theaters, fought on land, in the air, at sea, and in information and cyber domains by fighters from Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and even Yemen. The widened scope of a possible war will create new military options for Iran and Hezbollah, and stretch Israeli capabilities to their limits.

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah said as much, though perhaps with some exaggeration, when he warned in June 2017 that “if an Israeli war is launched against Syria or Lebanon it is not known that the fighting will remain Lebanese-Israeli, or Syrian-Israeli,” and “this could open the way for thousands, even hundreds of thousands of fighters from all over the Arab and Islamic world to participate.” Likewise, IRGC Commander Mohammad Ali Jafari stated in November 2017 that, “The fate of the resistance front is interwoven and they all stand united, and if Israel attacks a part of it, the other component of the front will help it.”

Such a war is most likely to occur as a result of unintended escalation, after another Iranian action against Israel from Syria, or after an Israeli strike in Lebanon or Syria (for example, against missile production facilities). It could start as a result of a U.S. and/or Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program. It might even come about as a result of a conflict that starts in the Gulf but that reaches Israel’s borders—perhaps as a result of Iranian diversionary moves (much as Saddam Hussein tried in 1991 to derail the U.S. military campaign to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait by launching missiles at Israel).

A new northern war could resemble one of several scenarios:

Lebanon War Plus. A war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, in which Iranians, thousands of foreign Shi‘a fighters, and even Hamas (which has established a limited military presence in southern Lebanon) also participate. The Syrian front remains relatively quiet, with Israel acting there on a limited basis to interdict the movement of fighters and capabilities into Lebanon.

War in Syria. A war between Israeli and Iranian forces, Shi‘a militias (including Hezbollah fighters), and perhaps even elements of the Syrian military, fought on Syrian territory. The Lebanese front remains relatively quiet. Should Syrian ground forces get drawn into combat, however, Russia might intervene to protect its client.

A Two-Front War. A war in Lebanon and Syria between Israeli and Iranian troops, Hezbollah, Shi‘a militias, and perhaps even elements of the Syrian military, in which both sides treat Lebanon and Syria as a single, unified theater of operations.

All three of these scenarios entail a potential for escalation or spillover into secondary fronts or theaters, and the involvement of additional actors:

Additional Fronts/Theaters. A war in Lebanon and/or Syria might prompt: attacks on Israel from Gaza, unrest in the West Bank, or terrorist attacks in Israel; Houthi attacks on Israeli interests (such as Israeli maritime traffic in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait), or Israeli strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen; missile attacks on Israel by Shi‘a militias in Iraq, and Israeli counterstrikes. Some of these militias have already warned that the latter could trigger attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq.

Israel vs. Iran. During fighting in Syria or Lebanon, Israel attacks Iran to strike a blow against the central pillar of the enemy coalition, and to thereby influence the course of the war. Alternatively, Iran augments attacks on Israel from Syria or Lebanon with attacks from its own territory, perhaps after suffering heavy losses in Syria. These could take the form of air or missile strikes and/or destructive cyberattacks on military targets and critical infrastructure.

A Regional War? A low-probability/high-impact scenario in which a conflict in the Levant morphs into a regional war involving Saudi Arabia and perhaps the United Arab Emirates, as well. Israel responds to attacks on its critical infrastructure with air strikes or cyberattacks on Iran’s oil industry or even its nuclear facilities—with the encouragement and perhaps logistical assistance of Gulf Arab states. Iran retaliates against Israel, but also conducts missile strikes, sabotage, or cyberattacks on Arab oil facilities across the Gulf, leading to escalation there, and perhaps even military intervention by the United States.

Campaign Design Considerations

For Israel, planning for and fighting the next northern war will entail unprecedented challenges, due to uncertainties regarding the number of actors involved, the potential for combat on multiple fronts, theaters, and domains (including cyber), and the role of the great powers. Moreover, because the military capabilities of both sides and the geopolitical environment are rapidly evolving, and because Iran began its entrenchment in Syria only recently, the character of a future war will be greatly influenced by its timing. A war in 2019 might be very different than a war in 2025.

Despite these uncertainties, recent experience and current trends permit several generalizations. Israel’s next northern war will be far more wide-ranging than prior conflicts. Israel may start with an intense air campaign to counter the threat of enemy rocket and missile forces and militias, but effectively dealing with this threat will require large-scale ground operations. Israel’s enemies will not be satisfied only with launching rockets and missiles at Israeli military facilities, population centers, and critical infrastructure, but they will try to use ground forces to infiltrate Israeli lines and to capture Israeli villages and small military outposts. They will also likely employ cyber warfare in support of conventional military operations (for instance, to disrupt Israeli missile defenses), and perhaps against critical infrastructure, to achieve strategic effects.

In past conflicts with Hezbollah, Israel focused on the organization’s military forces, its leadership, military specialists, and elements of the Lebanese infrastructure that facilitated its operations. In the next northern war, the dilemma of whether to prioritize action against immediate threats or enemy centers of gravity and critical enablers will be acute; substantial effort needs to be invested in identifying centers of gravity that can be targeted to hasten war termination on favorable terms.

Russia is a key actor in Syria and could be a key factor in a future war: Will Moscow stand aside, or will it constrain Israel’s ability to strike pro-regime forces in Syria, to prevent the unraveling of the Assad regime’s post-2015 civil war gains? And will Washington remain militarily uninvolved—beyond perhaps augmenting Israeli missile defenses—or will it play a more active role, seeing this as an opportunity to strike a blow against Iran, and thereby advance its goal of undermining the latter’s influence in the region? Depending on how events play out, Israel could face a disquieting possibility: Russian efforts to thwart its use of decisive force, U.S. reticence, and ineffectual great power diplomacy could prevent Israel from achieving its full military aims—not entirely unlike the denouement of the October 1973 war. That could ensure a protracted war, and perhaps a war that ends without Israel fulfilling its aims. 

Challenges of Complexity

The next northern war will require new operational concepts and a rethinking of Israel’s “way of war,” especially its approach to attaining military decision via defeat mechanisms tailored to its adversaries. The challenge for planners is great because they are dealing with a complex emerging threat consisting of many actors, operating on multiple fronts, with no single, well-defined center of gravity. In addition, there will be many other factors that Israeli military planners will have to consider when grappling with this complex operational environment:

Ends, Ways, and Means. Israel’s war aims would likely be shaped by how a war begins and its geopolitical context. Would Israel aim to degrade enemy forces and to demoralize them? Disrupt the cohesion of the axis of resistance? Discredit the enemy’s “resistance doctrine”? Destabilize Syria and/or Iran? Or simply reestablish deterrence and bring about a prolonged period of quiet? How many of these goals are attainable? Should Israel focus on Hezbollah and Nasrallah? On Lebanese infrastructure that facilitates Hezbollah’s activities? On Iran and IRGC head Soleimani? On the Shi‘a militias? Or on the Assad regime? How much emphasis should be placed on targeting the enemy’s field forces, military infrastructure, leadership, and motivation/morale, and how should Israel prioritize and phase these efforts? Finally, how will Israel resolve the tension between the imperative to end its wars quickly in a way that restores deterrence—which will require it to inflict heavy damage on enemy forces that in many cases will be embedded among civilians—and its desire to avoid unnecessary escalation, as well as fulfill its obligations under the law of armed conflict?

Images of Victory. Israel has a much higher bar for success than its enemies. If the axis of resistance can disseminate images of its flags flying over captured Israeli military outposts or villages (even if subsequently retaken), land blows to Israel’s critical infrastructure, and continue to launch rockets against Israel on the final day of combat, they will claim victory. It may not be possible, however, for the axis of resistance to preserve the luster of these putative achievements in the face of significant combat losses and widespread devastation in Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran.

Scope of Operations. Israel has always tried to avoid multi-front wars that require it to split its forces. A key unknown is whether Hezbollah or Iran would try to limit or expand a conflict with Israel. Would Hezbollah eschew a fight in Lebanon to preserve its military assets there, avoid widespread destruction to the country’s infrastructure, and avert a political backlash? Would Syrian forces actively participate in such a war? Would Iran encourage the Houthis to attack Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, or would the Houthis do so without being asked? Would Hezbollah and Iran launch terrorist attacks against Israeli interests from the outset of a war, or might they try to de-escalate a potentially devastating conventional conflict in the Levant in order to launch a less risky, low-intensity terrorist “war in the shadows” against Israeli interests worldwide? And might Israel threaten to bring the war to Lebanon or Iran in order to prevent further escalation and bolster deterrence?

Hezbollah’s Dilemma. Hezbollah has more than 100,000 rockets and missiles in Lebanon—sufficient to overwhelm Israeli defenses—though most are not very accurate. Iran has thousands more—though most cannot reach Israel. After seven years of civil war, Syria has relatively few missiles left—though it is trying to rebuild this capability. Hezbollah’s Lebanon-based rocket and missile force is the key to achieving truly strategic effects against Israel, and a basic assumption over the past decade is that in the next war on Israel’s north, Hezbollah will be the main participant. But this may not be the case, because that would invite massive Israeli air strikes and ground operations and lead to widespread devastation in Lebanon—an outcome Hezbollah will presumably want to avoid. And so its dilemma: how to exploit the potential of its rocket and missile force without destroying Lebanon or jeopardizing this strategic asset, which may be needed later in the war to counter Israeli escalatory moves. This may be why Hezbollah (with Iran’s help) is creating its own Syrian and Iraqi proxies to fight for it in the Golan—and why Israel is trying to disrupt some of these efforts.

Mobilization Potential. Only a fraction of Iran’s Shi‘a foreign legion is based in Syria (perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 of the nearly 200,000 foreign fighters it claims to have trained). In the event of an unanticipated war with Israel, it could take weeks for Iran to deploy available militia forces based outside of Syria, and Israel would undoubtedly interdict them en route to the front. Due to attrition and their relatively low level of training, these forces may not add much to the war effort.

Axis of Overreach? Axis of resistance members have frequently overreached (for example, Hezbollah vs. Israel in 2006, Iran vs. Israel in Syria in 2018) and they might do so again by goading Israel into yet another devastating war. This could narrow their postwar military options, unravel recent hard-won military gains of pro-regime forces in Syria, and further destabilize Lebanon and even Iran. Washington should use the specter of such outcomes to induce Russia to restrain its axis of resistance partners in wartime.

Implications

The next war on Israel’s northern front, whether it starts in Lebanon or Syria, will not be just a more extensive and destructive replay of the 2006 Lebanon War. Developments since then ensure that such a war will likely involve many more actors, a much larger theater of operations, unprecedented challenges for escalation management, warfighting, and war termination—and the possibility of a regional conflagration.

The complexity of the emerging operational environment demands detailed analysis of its implications for the United States and Israel through wargaming, red-teaming, and joint planning efforts; the development of new Israeli operational concepts; the proper prioritization and phasing of military operations and the identification and targeting of enemy centers of gravity; and an active U.S. diplomatic and military posture to ensure that a potentially devastating local war does not become a destabilizing and destructive regional conflict.

That said, the foregoing assessment suggests several ways that the United States and Israel can shape the operational environment to enhance the odds of an outcome compatible with their shared interests with respect to Iran and its axis of resistance, should war come:

Play on Iran’s Escalation Aversion. Iran generally seeks to avoid or deter conventional wars, and is sensitive to threats to the regime and the homeland. Accordingly, U.S. and Israeli decision-makers should use the potential for escalation inherent in a possible northern war to deter Iran from actions that could lead to such a conflict in the first place, or its spread to Iran—which could jeopardize Iran’s vital economic interests (if, for example, its oil infrastructure were to be hit), and the stability of the Assad regime in Syria.

Support Israel’s “Campaign Between the Wars” in Syria. Israeli attempts to disrupt Iran’s military build-up in Syria have already sparked clashes there. Yet such efforts might reduce the need for Israeli preventive action in a crisis, the potential for escalation in wartime, and the amount of damage wrought in a future war. The U.S. government should support these efforts, and reinforce Israeli diplomacy with Russia to preserve Israeli military freedom of action in Syria. It should also quietly indicate to Russia that a war in Syria might jeopardize Moscow’s recent military achievements there, by encouraging surviving Syrian rebel groups to resume their fight against an enfeebled Assad regime. 

Keep Hezbollah “Out.” Because of the size of its rocket and missile arsenal and its ground forces, keeping the bulk of Hezbollah’s forces out of a northern war and preventing such a war from spreading to Lebanon may greatly facilitate efforts to prevent a limited local war from becoming a much bigger war, and from perhaps sparking a regional conflagration.

Keep U.S. Forces “In” Syria. The presence of even a small U.S. military contingent in northeastern Syria might discourage pro-Iranian Shi‘a militias from moving through these areas to the front with Israel during wartime, and limit their movement to a few roads in southeastern Syria—thereby facilitating their interdiction by Israel. For this and a host of other reasons, the U.S. military should retain a limited ground presence in northeastern Syria.

Foster Arab-Israeli Cooperation. The possibility of war between Israel, Iran, and its axis of resistance, raises questions about covert or tacit contributions by various Arab states to a common war effort. Washington should encourage quiet military coordination and cooperation between Israel and these states, which could greatly complicate war-planning and warfighting for Iran and its proxies. 

Ending the War. Conflict termination has posed challenges in recent Arab-Israeli conflicts, and the multiplicity of actors with diverse interests involved in a northern front war will make this even more complicated than before. After the Cold War, the great powers no longer felt a need to intervene to prevent the defeat of their clients or to avoid a superpower confrontation. Russia is back in Syria, however, and it might or might not decide to constrain Israel or its partners in the axis of resistance. Russian behavior, even if somewhat ambiguous in practice, could ensure that the next war will be a long one. The challenge for U.S. and Israeli diplomacy is to arrive at sustainable understandings with Russia to ensure that it plays a constructive role during the next war, and in efforts to end it. Russia may prove neither willing nor able to do so, but it would be irresponsible not to explore the possibilities.

This reality further underscores the need for Israel to develop viable operational concepts, new “ways of war,” and credible defeat mechanisms, so that it can decide and terminate future wars on its own terms. And it highlights the need for the United States to remain engaged in the region so that if war comes, it can ensure that Israel has the freedom of action to achieve its war aims, and thereby advance U.S. interests in countering and curtailing Iranian influence in the region.

The post The Great Middle Eastern War of 2019 appeared first on The American Interest.

The Costs of Policing Ideas

To say that free speech has received much attention of late is a tremendous understatement. The New York Times, for instance, recently published an article entitled “How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment.” The gist of the piece, whose title comes from a recent dissent by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, is that free speech has become a tool used by the Right to justify an anti-progressive agenda. However, the article doesn’t address why free speech might have been “weaponized” by conservatives. Perhaps this is a new strategy to discount the Left and sneakily advance a conservative agenda in the courts, or perhaps it is in response to an actual increase in attacks on conservative speech or ideas. Given the increasing willingness of people to speak out about their own experiences being on the receiving end of hostility for non-progressive ideas, the second explanation seems more than plausible. If the increased invocation of the First Amendment is in response to more frequent threats, it’s difficult to substantiate the claim of weaponization—invoking the First Amendment has simply become a rational response.

But focusing narrowly on the way the First Amendment has been invoked in the courts, as the New York Times article does, risks missing the more damaging forces that are corroding our current discourse, pushing partisanship further to the extremes, and increasing polarization.

Free speech is not simply about the words one is legally allowed to utter. A more holistic view consists of the broad freedom to express, to question, and to criticize ideas. Richard Reeves and Jonathan Haidt summarize this tradition well when they say of John Stuart Mill, “[his] main concern was not government censorship. It was the stultifying consequences of social conformity, of a culture where deviation from a prescribed set of opinions is punished through peer pressure and a fear of ostracism.”

The health of a society depends on the ability of its members to debate a wide range of topics without fear of reprisal, from the state or from other citizens. As a professor of sociology, one of the more ideologically captured disciplines in academia, I’ve seen firsthand how speech can be subtly constricted even absent formal censorship. For instance, I recall talking to a colleague about another scholar’s work on microaggressions. At the time, I was expressing my confusion about how microaggressions were defined and also about the broader claims being made. I asked my colleague whether he thought I could question the other scholar about it. I was told no, probably not—if I were black, yes, he said, but as is, no. I was frustrated and wondered why some topics should apparently be exempt from criticism, but in the end I remained silent. My free speech wasn’t violated—I chose to stay quiet, as Mill predicted, because my colleague had voiced out loud what I already suspected to be true.

Almost everyone can agree that certain ideas should lie outside the lines of socially permissible speech. But we have drifted alarmingly far from the recognition that those lines should be drawn broadly, determined through a coercion-free process aimed at finding consensus. When we winnow the parameters of acceptable opinion, questions, and criticisms by manipulating incentives to self-censor, hostility and polarization often follow. Shaming and the use of outrage to assert power are two of the most common tactics that, intentionally or not, draw boundary lines where they shouldn’t be drawn.  

Shaming

Shaming can be an effective way to apply pressure so people adhere to social norms. However, it is a tool that has been extended to topics that only a subset of people, usually those on the Left, believe are unacceptable. Consider a recent article in The Nation entitled “The Social Shaming of Racists is Working,” in which the author talks about the social costs now linked to “the assertion of private authority over public space.” The focus is on a small number of well-publicized, video-recorded events in which (generally white) people are seen harassing minority group members.

Prominent among them is Aaron Schlossberg, a New York lawyer who loudly and publicly berated employees at a restaurant for not speaking English, then threatened to call ICE on them. If public shaming were restricted to such extreme examples of bad behavior, it’s unlikely that anyone would be worried about it. However, the Nation article makes no distinction between this sort of behavior and the underlying concerns that may be motivating it.

A charitable view of the purpose of shaming might suggest the goal is to prevent racists from taking over—to show that racism won’t be tolerated. A less charitable interpretation might suggest that the goal is to cultivate a culture of fear among those who would otherwise deviate from the dominant progressive narrative. To go with the charitable assessment, one might ask: Is Aaron Schlossberg racist or “just” horribly behaved? Even asking this question may strike some as profoundly offensive. But it is useful to do so to think through the effects of shaming.

In the Nation article, the judgment is clear: “Schlossberg’s rant doesn’t amount to a civilized difference of opinion; it’s racism, pure and simple, followed by threats.” And perhaps that is right—Schlossberg could just be an unrepentant racist. But we should nonetheless be careful about painting with broad brushstrokes, and conflating one person’s deplorable behavior with concerns that may be more sensible.

Consider a 2017 article in which the author argues for a recognition by the Left of certain concerns raised by immigration, while continuing to support immigration as a goal. The author writes:

Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.

He continues:

Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat.

These legitimate concerns about assimilation and social cohesion may well underlie Schlossberg’s inexcusable outburst. Yet because the stigmatization covers both the behavior and the unrevealed motives, it taints any person who might have a similar sense of unease, including people who are much more reasonable than Schlossberg.  

Public Outrage

Another way to police ideas is to use the power of public outrage. Similar to shaming, public outrage has its place in righting wrongs. However, when it comes to controversial issues— issues, by definition, on which there is no consensus—outrage is sometimes given the power to shut down the conversation entirely, creating a chilling effect not just for the people directly targeted, but also for everyone who aligns with or is merely curious about the target’s perspective. And while shaming is primarily a strategy used by the Left, the Right does it too. Shaming and public outrage are bipartisan, as the following pair of examples shows.

Case One: Mayor of Durham, NC vs. Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson has risen to a stratospheric level of fame lately, in part due to his arguments for freedom of speech. He first gained attention for his objections to Canadian legislation regarding the mandated use of alternative transgender pronouns. Such views have now gotten him in hot water with a progressive politician in North Carolina, in a free speech scandal that neatly proves many of his own points.

At the time of this writing, Peterson is still scheduled to speak at the Durham Performing Arts Center in September. However, on July 6, Durham’s mayor issued this statement (to which Peterson has already responded) decrying his ideas and attempting to deny him use of the facility:

(W)e wish to emphasize that a person’s right to free speech does not include the right to a platform or an audience. As many in our community have been disturbed and angered by Mr. Peterson’s racist, misogynist, and transphobic views, we would like to use this opportunity to reiterate our commitments and values to all of you as your elected representatives.

The statement ended with an exhortation:

We invite the Durham community to recommit ourselves to these values as a city and a community and to reject and resist bigotry wherever we encounter it.

While speaking out against racism seems, in principle, an appropriate mayoral task, applying the label “racist” to topics and opinions that many don’t see as meriting the charge has the unavoidable effect of alienating—and even radicalizing—those who feel unjustly attacked. In this case, the mayor’s office is stigmatizing anyone who might be interested in what Peterson has to say—most of whom do not agree that those labels (racist, misogynist, transphobic) are being applied appropriately. Further, because the list of criteria used by the Left to assign allegations of racism and sexism appears to be constantly expanding, the range of acceptable speech is contracting.

Case Two: Texas A&M vs. Tommy Curry

The Right has its own blind spots on free speech, as seen in the saga of Texas A&M Professor Tommy Curry. The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an article in July 2017 about Curry’s travails: In early 2017, a video interview he had done on race and violence five years prior resurfaced and went viral, with the assistance of a conservative blogger. In the 2012 video, Curry said, “White conservatives speak reverently of gun rights. . .But when we turn the conversation back and say, ‘Does the black community ever need to own guns? Does the black community have a need to protect itself? Does the black individual have a need to protect himself from police officers?’ We don’t have that conversation at all.”

Texas A&M initially declared a modicum of support for Curry, saying:

While professors have a First Amendment right of course to offer personal views on their own time, university policy prohibits them [from doing] so in a way that creates an appearance that they are speaking for the University.

However, buckling under pressure from alumni and donors, the university ultimately distanced itself from Curry with reference to his views as “reprehensible.” An alternate response, and a more charitable interpretation of Curry’s ideas, might have included the following statement that Curry had offered the administration on his own behalf:

Dr. Curry, drawing from the Second Amendment tradition, suggests that the law’s failure to protect the lives of Black, Latino, and Muslim Americans requires new conversations which may require self-defense and more radical options than protest. In no way does his work promote or incite violence toward whites or any other racial group.

While no one is violating Curry’s right to free speech, the professional penalties associated with the university’s statement (to say nothing of the usually concurrent threats that go along with outrage) aim to silence him.

The Social and Political Costs of Policing Ideas

The damage that can be done without a single legal infraction on free speech is far broader than that which comes from tangible limitations on the First Amendment. Shaming, outrage mobs, and other techniques to restrict speech via social pressure have a poisonous effect on the public discourse as a whole. As one author stated, citing the work of Lilliana Mason:

“‘The more sorted we become, the more emotionally we react to normal political events.” And when emotions are heightened, everything becomes a threat to status. Politics becomes more about anger. . .The angrier the electorate, the less capable we are of finding common ground on policies, or even of treating our opponents like human beings. (emphasis added)

Policing ideas makes people more curious and more righteous about the ideas that are being policed—just ask any parent what happens when they tell their child that they can’t have something. Does the child quietly accept this decision and walk away, moving quickly on to a different topic? Certainly not in my house.

Shaming Schlossberg may be an example of social pressure working as it should. However, shaming the concerns that lie beneath the invective is shallow and short-sighted. While the suppression of ideas does not create the screaming lawyer, it is naive to ignore the fact that, for every Aaron Schlossberg, there are many more who sympathize with his (likely) concerns, if not his mode of expression. Even in the face of dangerous claims that words are violence, there is no shortcut around allowing people to express and criticize ideas respectfully on a wide range of topics and from a wide range of perspectives free from social penalty.

It may be that the singular benefit of a Trump Administration is that it acts as a pressure release valve for the segment of this country that has felt stifled for years. To learn nothing from this experience and to continue creating an environment where ideas are constricted and anger and polarization flourish is an irrational, emotional response that will not lead to better outcomes by any metric.

Many on the Left look hopefully for Trump supporters who show regret for their voting choice—in large enough numbers, this could signify the possibility of a shift in coming elections. However, relinquishing one’s support for Trump is not the same as aligning oneself with the Left. Further, many on the Left willfully ignore the former leftist allies who have been chased away by the approach described here—a point that is relevant as we move forward into upcoming elections.

If the Left isn’t persuaded by arguments centering on the importance of open public discourse and the reduction of anger and polarization, maybe the reality of another four years of a Trump Administration will bring them to their senses. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that.

The post The Costs of Policing Ideas appeared first on The American Interest.

Standing Up to China

Anyone who thinks Donald Trump must be reviled around the world for his bigotry, ignorance, and simplistic hyper-nationalism might be surprised to visit Asia. Here, in eight days of intensive conversations in India, Hong Kong, and now Taiwan, from where I’m writing, I find—as I expect I would encounter in other conversations, from Japan to Singapore—surprisingly frequent gratitude for one simple thing: Finally, there is an American President who is standing up to China.

Briefly set aside the damage that Trump’s self-declared trade war may do to many American farmers and to some American manufacturers, if not to the American economy as a whole. Suspend for a moment the natural liberal instinct to assume that people elsewhere around the world who value equality, civility, and the rule of law must be just as appalled by Trump’s antics and impulses as so many Americans are. And just view the world through worried Asian eyes.

Look at Southeast Asia, which is living under the growing shadow of Chinese military expansion, economic domination, and political penetration. Look at the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia, which have seen their logical (just look at the map) and legal claims to sovereignty over portions of the South China Sea flicked away by a People’s Republic of China that is bound and determined to dominate the whole maritime zone, is overfishing it with abandon, and is brazenly creating new militarized islands to create “facts on the sea.” Look at India, whose 2,100-mile land border with China remains in dispute, and which sees China projecting its naval power and economic hegemony deep into the Indian Ocean—most spectacularly, by using the classic neo-colonial method of debt diplomacy to pressure Sri Lanka into granting it a 99-year lease over the strategic port of Hambantota.

Or look at Australia, which has recently woken up to the alarming scope of China’s covert intrusions into its politics, media, and civil society in order to mute Australian criticism of (not to mention resistance to) Beijing’s geopolitical ambitions. In late June, the Australian parliament passed a bill—hailed as “the most significant counter-espionage reforms in Australia since the 1970s”—that strengthens the state’s ability to prosecute covert foreign influence operations in politics and civil society and another that creates an American-style registry of foreign lobbyists.

Australia has been on the front lines of China’s projection of “sharp power,” which uses covert, coercive, and corrupt methods to burrow into the political, civic, and economic life of democracies. But many democrats view Hong Kong as the real canary in the coal mine. Pointing to China’s relentless, multifaceted efforts to penetrate and subvert the politics, media, and organizational life of an open society, a veteran Hong Kong democratic politician warned me, “Our past is your present, and our present is your future.”

The warning was obviously melodramatic; since 1997, Hong Kong has been part of the People’s Republic of China, giving Beijing degrees of access and control well beyond what it can achieve in any sovereign country.  But under the terms of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, Beijing committed to a system of “one country, two systems,” in which Hongkongers’ basic “rights and freedoms, including those of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, . . . [and] of academic research,” would be respected and ensured for at least 50 years after the 1997 handover. It is those basic rights that are under growing pressure as the Beijing authorities threaten and punish freedom of expression.

A critical juncture in Hong Kong’s downward spiral came with Beijing’s 2014 pronouncement—what came to be known as the “31 August Decision”—closing the door on democratic aspirations in Hong Kong. The people of Hong Kong had been waiting since 1997 for the right to choose their chief executive in a reasonably free, fair and open election, and for the right to directly elect all of the seats in their parliament, the Legislative Council or “LegCo”. Since 1997, they had been stuck with a system in which half of the seats in parliament are filled through more or less narrow “functional constituencies”, and in which the chief executive is chosen not through universal suffrage but by a narrow “selection committee,” dominated by Beijing loyalists.

Article 45 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law—the constitutional document which sets forth the rules of authority in Hong Kong and its relationship to the central government in Beijing—states that “the ultimate aim” of Hong Kong’s political development is “the selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.” Hong Kong’s pan-democrats—who have consistently won a majority of the democratically elected LegCo—believe that article promised a democratic election for executive authority, even if its corollary embrace of “the principle of gradual and orderly progress” required a waiting period.

After Beijing rebuffed their aspirations for democratic change in 2007, claiming Hong Kong was not yet “ready” for democracy, Hongkongers looked to 2017. After all, how could anyone reasonably claim that twenty years after the handover of power, Hong Kong—one of the richest and most highly educated societies in Asia—would not be “ready” for democracy?

When Beijing cavalierly rejected democracy then as well—making, in its 31 August 2014 Decision, a take-it-or-leave-it offer of a chief executive election in which only two or three Beijing-friendly candidates would be allowed to contest—the society erupted. In what came to be known as the Umbrella Movement, tens of thousands of young people and other Hong Kong citizens took to the streets to demand a free election with universal suffrage. For 79 days they occupied key streets and public places, pressing their political demands. But as so often happens in prolonged street demonstrations, the movement split between radical and moderate forces, and the public grew weary of the disruption. Several movement leaders, including youth activists Joshua Wong and Nathan Law and Hong Kong University Law Professor, Benny Tai, were prosecuted. The prison authorities tried to break and humiliate the slender 20-year-old Wong, along with other detainees, but they utterly failed.

Wong and Law, along with Agnes Chow and other student activists, then turned to electoral politics, forming a political party, Demosistō, that advocated for a referendum on Hong Kong’s sovereignty after 2047, and electing the 23-year-old Law to the LegCo in 2016. Soon thereafter, however, Law and five other newly elected LegCo members were disqualified for allegedly not taking the oath of office properly and respectfully. In this way, and through numerous other means, Hong Kong’s government and the Communist Party authorities in Beijing are trying to whittle down the ranks of opposition in the LegCo, grind down the resolve of Hong Kong’s democrats, and bury aspirations for freedom in Hong Kong.

Gradually, Hong Kong’s democrats feel the noose of Chinese Communist repression slowly tightening. In late 2015, five staff members of a dissident Hong Kong bookstore went missing, only to surface in China and elsewhere, the apparent victims of abduction and coercion by agents of Chinese authority. The abductions, which, according to the South China Morning Post, “raised fears for the city’s autonomy and concerns over the potential loss of freedoms,” continue to cast a chilling pall over civic life in Hong Kong. Increasingly, academics associated with the democratic cause find their careers threatened and journalists watch with alarm as their media enterprises are acquired by pro-Beijing tycoons.

On Tuesday, Beijing’s office in Hong Kong lambasted the Foreign Correspondents Club for hosting a speech that day by Andy Chan, leader of the pro-independence Hong Kong National Party, which the authorities are moving to ban. By continuing its relentless bullying of views it does not like, Xi Jinping’s government is only confirming a central theme of Chan’s speech: that China’s increasingly authoritarian communist party-state now constitutes “a threat to all free peoples in the world.”

Democratic forces in Hong Kong are in the eye of the storm, but Taiwan, which is one of Asia’s most liberal democracies, has the most to lose. As China’s military modernization speeds forward, along with its continuing efforts to deprive Taiwan of the ability to participate in international affairs, there is keen awareness here of the gathering danger. Hence, President Tsai Ing-wen is carefully avoiding provoking the PRC government, at the same time that she increases defense spending and pushes a “Go South” policy to expand trade and investment with Southeast Asian nations and thereby reduce economic dependence on Beijing. Increasingly, though often discreetly, she is getting a sympathetic reception in the region and beyond. For it is not only Asia’s democracies that are alarmed. From Singapore to Vietnam, authoritarian regimes as well feel their sovereignty under pressure and their national security at risk.

All of this serves to explain Donald Trump’s strange appeal in Asia today—even to progressives, gay rights activists, and leftwing intellectuals who would be appalled by his politics in any other context. Those who value democracy in this region—and even many who don’t—are desperate for a counterweight to the rise of a new authoritarian superpower, and they know that can only come from the world’s other superpower.

The post Standing Up to China appeared first on The American Interest.

The Fallout of Qatar’s Bailout

Turkey’s economy has been in a dramatic tailspin, with its currency plunging more than 40 percent in the past 12 months. Qatar stepped in Wednesday to stanch Turkey’s bleeding, albeit not as soon as Ankara would have liked. In the process, Doha also inserted itself in the middle of a major U.S.-Turkish dispute, by taking sides with a Turkish government that holds U.S. citizens and State Department employees hostage. Washington should remind Doha that this move will undermine its recent efforts to mend its strained ties with the United States.

While visiting Ankara, Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani pledged a whopping $15 billion in investment to Turkey to mitigate its economic decline. Doha’s pledge is “the equivalent of $420,000 per Qatari family,” and “money very badly spent,” warned the director of a London-based consulting firm. To put that in perspective, Turkey’s total inflow of foreign direct investment was $10.8 billion in 2017. The emir’s announcement wasn’t entirely unexpected, given warming Turkish-Qatari ties. But it runs directly contrary to U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent efforts to increase political and economic pressure on Ankara and convince Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to release U.S. citizens and employees whom Turkey has unjustly detained.

Qatar is Turkey’s most natural ally these days: Their governments share a similar worldview rooted in political Islam and champion the Muslim Brotherhood and its regional affiliates. Between the two of them, Ankara and Doha have played host to several figures from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood branch and senior Hamas leaders. But the Doha-Ankara partnership deepened into a military alliance last year, when Qatar’s Gulf neighbors enacted a land, sea, and air blockade against the emirate. In response, Turkey deployed troops to Qatar, after fast-tracking legislation to do so, and sent food aid to the import-dependent emirate.

Some in Ankara expected that Doha would come to Turkey’s aid just as quickly if the need arose. Turkish media was rife with such sentiments, as the pro-government tabloid Takvim lambasted Qatar for its silence in the face of Turkey’s woes as “the great betrayal” of an ally that had sprung immediately to Doha’s defense last year.

Qatar’s investment pledge will certainly help smooth ruffled feathers. Takvim deleted the story right after Doha’s pledge, which has also had a positive impact on markets, enabling the lira to regain a bit of lost ground. The move is not entirely altruistic, given that the Turkish economic crisis could also hit Qatar’s banking sector. With around 15 percent of the assets and loans of Qatar National Bank exposed to Turkey, fears of contagion may have fueled Doha’s announcement as much as geopolitics did.

Furthermore, the Emir played it smart by keeping his pledge ambiguous. The details of Qatar’s $15-billion package remain murky and will likely include swap lines for liquidity and other forms of investment. It is not clear how much of this will be direct investment in Turkey. Thus, Doha may now take its time with investments, and even take advantage of bargain prices once Turkish companies and assets hit rock bottom. In the end, Qatar killed two birds with one stone, as it appears to have saved the day for Turkey’s volatile markets while also positioning itself to reap the rewards in the months to come—without coming off as a crisis profiteer.

Coming in the middle of a major showdown between Trump and Erdogan over Turkey’s detention of U.S. persons, the Qatari bailout is a jarring reminder of how significantly its interests diverge from those of the United States, as has also been evident in its ties to Tehran and malign activity in Libya. The emirate’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood is no secret, nor is its permissive attitude toward the financing of terrorism. Doha has made some progress on the latter front in the past year, signing several memoranda of understanding with the United States to curb illicit financing. It even began work to expand al-Udeid Air Base last month, with a hope of making the American presence there permanent. But Doha’s investment pledge to Erdogan, which directly undercuts Washington’s sustained pressure campaign against the Turkish strongman, should raise eyebrows about Doha’s conduct—and could even call into question the future of the U.S. presence at al-Udeid.

When the crisis between Qatar and its Arab neighbors erupted in the summer of 2017, President Trump initially appeared to side against Qatar. But Doha worked assiduously over the past year and gradually succeeded in bringing the Trump Administration to a more neutral position. Its decision to side so blatantly with Erdogan against the United States on a matter directly affecting the wellbeing of American citizens could put much of that progress at risk.

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