Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 79

A Turbulent Century in the Heart of Europe

The deaths of three Czech soldiers in Afghanistan this month provided both a bracing reminder of the sacrifices being made by our NATO allies in America’s longest-running war, and a counterpoint to disparaging comments about NATO’s supposed “free riders.” After Martin Marcin, Kamil Benes, and Patrik Stepanek died in a suicide attack, the Taliban boasted of their responsibility, saying they had killed or wounded “eight American soldiers” in a “tactical explosion.” It was a grim but unsurprising case of mistaken identity. The white-red-and-blue Czech flags on their uniforms can be easily confused from afar with our own soldiers’ red-white-and-blue, just as our two national stories have long been intertwined. Czechoslovakia, after all, was one of the “small nations” for whose benefit Woodrow Wilson said he brought the U.S. in to the War to End All Wars, and which did emerge at Versailles as a new state. On the long circuitous road to NATO membership—which they finally secured in 1999—the Czechs endured years as a vassal state to Nazi Germany and decades as a totalitarian client state of the Soviet Union.

In this centennial of the birth of Czechoslovakia from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Norman Eisen has written a timely and engaging narrative of the turbulent century that ensued. As xenophobic passions surge across Europe today, and as a malevolent Russian despot again probes for weakness in Western democracies, this book reminds us how the quest for a Europe whole, free and at peace has been a daunting one—and of the central role that America has played, time and again, in determining the outcome.

Whoever and whatever ideas and ideology holds sway in Prague has consistently been a bellwether of larger European developments. Like our own American society through these past hundred years, the Czechs, too, have been visibly torn by conflicting sentiments—in their case variously and simultaneously between affection or deference to Russian interests, Western liberal democratic traditions, and nationalist, xenophobic (and distinctly anti-Semitic) sensibilities. Today, the Czech Prime Minister is a billionaire businessman who has built an anti-establishment political movement with ambiguous (and ever-evolving) policies. The less important post of President is filled by an unambiguously pro-Russian figure who nonetheless narrowly won a hotly contested re-election last January. (Does any of this ring any American bells…?)

The Last Palace: Europe’s Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House is a marvelous and original work of history, thinly disguised as a memoir of Eisen’s time as U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014. But Eisen himself deftly fades into the background as narrator of the tale of the magnificent residence in which he and his family lived during their time in Prague. The result is a very readable, thoroughly researched, and historically interesting narrative about a unique 148-room mansion brought to life by the vivid stories of some of those who lived there—from the visionary who designed and built the palace; the (secretly anti-Nazi) German general who was military overlord of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during the Nazi occupation; and the three American ambassadors and their families that followed.

The palace’s builder, Otto Petschek, was a true Renaissance man, hugely capable in business, music, languages—and architecture, as it turned out. But Petschek also possessed a gift for seeing what others did not. He correctly predicted, early in the Great War, that the U.S. would intervene and prevail, and anticipated the importance of America to the creation and survival of the Czech nation. Born to a wealthy and well-known German-speaking Czech Jewish family, his probing intelligence and stout determination led him to the commanding heights of the Czech economy. Petschek and his businesses were central to the early vibrancy of the Czech economy, which before the Great Depression was the 10th largest in the world, a remarkable feat for a small, landlocked country.

Petschek was also a staunch supporter of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the country’s “Founder Liberator,” and friend to Edvard Beneš, the second President of Czechoslovakia. With them, Petschek sought to tether their new and vulnerable country to an American anchor, though these Czechs’ faith in the West and in liberal democracy was often unrequited. The moral and strategic failures of the British and French that paved the way for the Second World War—epitomized by Neville Chamberlain’s fateful 1938 decision to cede the Sudetenland to Hitler—are matched in Eisen’s telling by General Eisenhower’s fateful instruction to General Patton to halt his fast-moving Third Army 50 miles away, precisely so that Stalin’s armies could capture Prague in April 1945.

During the Nazi occupation, Petschek’s palace had been home to Wehrmacht General Rudolph Toussaint, a frustrated artist who protected the Petscheks’ many treasures until the war’s end while governing the occupied lands. He was also, like many in the professional German military, appalled by the criminality and the unparalleled incompetence of the Nazis and the SS. Among the many fascinating historical anecdotes that dot the book, one of the more riveting is the tale of how several generals preparing to mount a coup against Hitler lost their nerve when the Western democracies failed to press their clear advantage against Nazi Germany’s earliest aggressions. Toussaint and many others kept telling themselves they would stand up when things got just a bit worse, but that red line constantly kept shifting. Toussaint himself cuts a somewhat cowardly figure. Eisen recounts how the good general comforted himself that his own regular army soldiers did not partake in early mass executions in Bohemia, but notes that when he learned that they actually did play key roles he did nothing about it.

After the war, and following a brief period of pillage by the Soviet invaders, the palace was secured by a daring American, Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt, a confidant of FDR who had incurred the wrath of Stalin during his previous posting in Moscow. The story of Steinhardt’s schemes to seize and keep the palace for the United States—outfoxing the Soviets, maneuvering amidst dueling Czech administrations, and foiling deliberate bureaucratic obstruction back at Foggy Bottom—is well told. Steinhardt seems to have been a daring and debonair diplomat, an American James Bond avant la lettre.

The real star of the book, however, turns out to be Shirley Temple Black, the most famous child movie actor ever, who in the prime of her life served as President George H.W. Bush’s Ambassador in Prague from 1989 to 1992. Having personally met her—in the very palace Eisen’s book centers on, when I visited with Madeline Albright in the heady days of the Velvet Revolution in January 1990—I confess I terribly underestimated Ambassador Black’s prowess as a diplomat, and as an activist for human rights. She had been an eyewitness to the brutal crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968, stepping past the bodies of Czechs murdered by Soviet soldiers to personally lead a convoy of Westerners out of the city—a searing experience that galvanized her political instincts. Eisen retells how Black aided Vaclav Havel and other dissidents who endured decades of mistreatment and imprisonment for daring to speak against oppression. Just days after arriving, she invited Havel, recently released from prison, and others to her salon, a safe space where they can discuss and plan—and where she realized both how low key and how influential Havel was with other dissidents. Realizing that the Communist government has surely wiretapped much of the house, Ambassador Black alternates between communicating with her guests, embassy staff, and even her family by passing handwritten notes and occasionally speaking to the hidden microphones to throw the eavesdroppers off guard. After she ordered her embassy staff to stay away from the series of demonstrations that eventually lead to the collapse of the communist regime, but well before the outcome is clear, she and her husband Charlie on multiple occasions walked discretely and directly from their residence to the front lines to observe and to show support for the demonstrators.

The everlasting horror of the Holocaust looming over Prague and the palace is conveyed in Eisen’s narrative in the person of his mother, Frieda, who grew up in the Czech countryside in a devoutly Orthodox Jewish family, as poor and as uneducated as the builders of the mansion were rich and steeped in high European culture. She survived slave labor camps and numerous near-death experiences to make her way eventually as a refugee to California. It is there that she and her husband ran an all-American hamburger stand, and where Norm Eisen was born and raised. In a deft maneuver that is unusual in a memoir—especially for a Washington memoir by a public figure—Ambassador Eisen remains almost invisible in his own narrative; he almost renders himself a literary device for conveying his mother’s life’s story of survival. The enduring wariness and fear that haunts her, even as her son returns to Prague on Air Force One with President Barack Obama, is a testament to the horrors she endured. This narrative element powerfully underscores the perils of backsliding to atavistic hatreds in a part of the world still given to the ugliest aspects of nationalism and violence.

As the best American diplomats do, Ambassador Eisen during his tenure in Prague goes toe-to-toe with rising forces of ugly and emotional nationalism on the one hand, and cynical accommodation to Russian efforts to undermine the West on the other, and he is frank in describing the Czech leaders with whom he engages. Feckless and bombastic politicians are apparently part of the landscape of democratic polities these days, which is why the center of gravity of the Western liberal democratic sensibility has moved outside of official circles these days. Norm Eisen’s terrific book reminds us that unknown people do remarkable things all the time, and that individuals often outperform their governments, notwithstanding all the mayhem in the world. This is as true of three enlisted Czech servicemen on a battlefield in Afghanistan, as it is true of a girl named Frieda from a shtetl in the Czech countryside. This American son of asylum seekers from the carnage of faraway wars has captured the essence of the American idea in this riveting story of a grand old home in Prague.

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The Ironic Irresponsibility of Tuition-Free College Schemes

Because of the leftist ascent in the Maryland Democratic Party, Ben Jealous, the former head of the NAACP, graduate of Columbia University, and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, is running for Governor on a platform in the mold of Senator Bernie Sanders’s socialist promises. As a faculty member of the University of Maryland in College Park, I take a personal as well as an intellectual interest in the consequences of his advocacy of tuition- and debt-free college. As it happens, too, debate over the proposition for tuition-free college here in Maryland will not stay in Maryland, since such proposals are now being mooted in other states. (Jealous’s platform does not clarify what differences there are between “debt free” and “tuition free” college.) If a tuition-free scheme were implemented in Maryland, it would receive massive attention from the Washington Post and thus become an event of national significance.

I hope that does not happen. In all cases, the irony is that these supposedly “progressive” proposals would, if implemented, have a disastrous impact on precisely those public institutions whose main beneficiaries have been the broad-income strata of our society. Jealous has emphatically rejected the idea that he is a socialist but the fact remains that in the name of leftist utopias and “democratic socialism,” supporters of tuition-free university would be responsible for destroying the only universities most people can afford. If these plans were to spread, young people around the country would lose access to educational opportunities that were once within the grasp of their parents and grandparents.

Moreover, if the Democratic Party were to become closely associated in the public mind with tuition-free or debt-free schemes at public universities on the national level and help manage to get such schemes implemented, its candidates could suffer a huge backlash for their unintended but predictable outcomes. The fact that many Democratic advocates for such schemes—including Ben Jealous—have degrees from expensive private universities would certainly become grist for partisan attacks; politicians who rail against our “out of touch elites” would gain a sharp new arrow for their quiver.

Jealous’s gubernatorial platform in Maryland states that he would “end of the era of mass incarceration and use the savings to fund initiatives that will eventually make college tuition free.” Leaving aside for the moment whether “mass incarceration” is an accurate term if extended to include those convicted of violent crimes, not to mention the many other issues wound up in such a complex problem, Jealous’s platform offers no specifics about how much money such a policy would save. It doesn’t persuade that it would save any money at all, since many of those released from prison would continue to require some forms of public assistance.

Jealous proposes that the other, and no doubt the primary, source of funding to replace tuition revenue would come from raising state income taxes on the wealthy. But beyond referring to the “top 1 percent,” no details as to the income levels at which state income taxes would increase, or how much they would increase, are provided. Nor, despite the ready availability of fiscal data about Maryland’s public universities, is there any estimate at all as to how much money would need to be raised to fund higher education at current levels.

In fact, tuition-free college would severely damage the University of Maryland in College Park and other public universities to which it might be applied. The University of Maryland in College Park has approximately 4,600 faculty, 10,600 graduate students, and almost 30,000 undergraduates. The faculty-student ratio is 17 to 1; about 45 percent of classes seat 20 students or less. Some of our ninety degree-granting departments are ranked in the top 25 nationally and many scholars in the natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, and humanities are leaders in their fields. Many have distinguished national and international reputations often comparable to or better than their peers at more expensive private universities. About 75 percent of the students in College Park are Maryland residents; 24 percent are non-residents; about 43 percent are from minority communities both resident and non-resident.

Teaching, research, and other aspects of the University are expensive, and they have gotten more expensive in recent years at nearly every college and university in the country. We can debate the actual sources of cost inflation in education, health care, transportation, and other public services niches of the economy. But education, like health care, is one of those niches where the potential for substituting capital for labor is very limited. In this essay, I do not presume to resolve the issue about why costs have risen. The fact remains that public four-year colleges and universities such at the University of Maryland have tuitions that are about one-fourth to one-fifth as much as those of their private counterparts, while still offering comparable educational opportunities. Continued significant taxpayer support is essential if this long-standing public policy is to continue.

The University’s total operating budget for 2018 was just over $2 billion, about twice what it was in 2003. The number of undergraduate and graduate students attending has just increased from slightly more than 33,000 in 2000 to 39,000 today. Of that $2 billion, about $1.6 billion comes from “unrestricted revenue,” that is, money which can be used as chosen by the University administration, rather than as directed by government or private contracts. In a February Washington Post interview, Wallace Loh, the President of the University, pointed out that twenty years ago 60 percent of the University budget came from state funding. Today, mirroring a trend of declining state funding for higher education around the country, that figure stands at 45 percent. State funding for the University of Maryland at College Park for fiscal year 2018 is just over $514 million; revenue from tuition and fees from undergraduates and graduates, both resident and non-resident, is about $621.7 million. State funding thus amounts to about 25 percent while tuition and fees provide about 30 percent of the University’s total operating budget. But as Loh explained to the editors of the Post, tuition and fees now account for more than 40 percent of the University’s unrestricted revenue stream. As state funding has declined, pressure to increase tuition has grown.

According to figures provided by the Office of the Provost using FY 2018 end-of-fiscal-year financial reports, the tuition from undergraduates and graduates, both resident and non-resident, came to $436,723,286. Students at Maryland and other universities must also pay mandatory fees not included in tuition covering items such as technology (internet access), athletics, shuttle bus service, student union, student activities, recreation services, performance arts, and the health center. Hence, if advocates of “tuition-free college” were to find a substitute source of revenue, they would have to come up with either $436.7 million to cover lost tuition revenue, or $621.7 million if they also wanted to cover expenses for mandatory fees. This is a huge amount of money in either case to find on an annual basis to keep the University’s budget from sinking into the red.

Undergraduate in-state tuition and fees in 2018 at the University of Maryland (UMD) is $10,595; out-of-state tuition is $35,216. (Jealous’s platform does not indicate if he is also advocating tuition or debt free college for non-resident undergraduates and graduates. It is hard to imagine that he would ask Maryland taxpayers to cover those costs. The absence of resident tuition would likely lead to pressure to increase non-resident tuition which in turn would probably lead to a reduction in students from out of state and with that a reduction in the significant revenue that comes from non-resident tuition, thus compounding the revenue loss.) Tuition rates at the University of Maryland are higher than they were in real dollars twenty years ago, but they are lower than those at many of our peer public research and teaching institutions. The relatively low cost of tuition in College Park continues to give it a well-deserved reputation of being one of the national “bargains” in American higher education. Here are a few pertinent comparisons: University of Virginia in-state tuition in 2018 is $13,348, while out-of-state is $43,194; Rutgers, New Brunswick, $14,974 and $31,282; Penn State, $18,436 and $33,664; and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, $14,934 and $49,022.

Costs at private universities average about five times as much as College Park. For example, tuition for 2018 at Johns Hopkins, the leading private university in Maryland, is $53,740. My colleagues at the History Department at Johns Hopkins are an excellent group, but many of my peers in the History Department in College Park are just as excellent. No one familiar with the two Departments would claim that the History Department at Hopkins is five times better than ours. What is true of the Department of History is true of the other departments in comparable fields in both institutions. In the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland taxpayers get a very good return on their money. And by the way, Maryland taxpayers may be surprised to learn that the state ranks 25th in the country, behind not just California and New York but also Iowa and Nebraska, in state income tax rates. That makes the bargain even more impressive. Maryland’s comparatively modest state income taxes compared to other affluent states creates the possibility for a modest income tax increase to expand funding for education.

Maryland is a comparatively wealthy state. According to Census figures, the median family annual income in Maryland in 2016 was $76,596, the highest in the nation. Maryland median family income adjusted for the cost of living ($69,205) is also the highest in the nation. As quoted in the Washington Post interview cited above, President Loh stressed the key implication of Marylander’s high median income and relatively modest student tuition at its public universities: “Maryland is one of the wealthiest states in the union . . . with one of the lowest tuitions. It is a case of the state subsidizing the upper middle class.”

Loh estimated the actual cost of an undergraduate education in College Park to be around $32,000. Thus our students, including those from middle and upper-middle class families, benefit greatly from a public good financed by all taxpayers. Loh understands that no politician wants to run for office on a platform of raising tuition, but there is nevertheless a good case to be made for a modest increase in tuition, both because it would help restore previous cuts and because it would diminish economic inequality in the state by transferring less wealth upwards than is now the case.

One of the arguments for tuition-free public universities is that more first-generation college graduates promise broad economic benefits statewide and beyond. It is unfortunate when qualified applicants do not attend college because of cost or the inability to secure loans. But the economic benefits of having more college-educated citizens would be still stronger if more vocational-track programs were available to match labor market needs. As is well known, community colleges furnish a great deal of available vocational education, and here proposals for free or deeply subsidized tuition make a lot more sense. Jealous supports this idea, but so does Maryland’s incumbent Republican Governor Larry Hogan.

What exactly, then, constitutes the destructive potential of tuition-free or debt-free university schemes? The case for a modest income tax increase, both to restore cuts in public funding for the state’s public universities and to mitigate the state’s subsidies to the upper middle class, might past muster. It would have even more appeal if it were joined to a plan to expand and subsidize community college capacity. Wallace Lon’s reasonable case for a modest increase in tuition is an example of the unpopularity of fiscal realism. But a tuition-free or debt-free college scheme—which would require an additional $400-600 million annually—would require a massive tax increase that, even if passed by the State Assembly, would only make up for lost tuition revenue; it would not restore past annual reductions in state funding, and it would not expand vocational training capacities in the state. So Maryland taxpayers might suffer the pain of significantly increased taxes without the pleasure of seeing the restoration of the cuts in funding to our public universities of recent decades.

In reality, however, if the University of Maryland in College Park lost more than 40 percent of its unrestricted revenue—between $436 and $621 million—those funds would probably not be replaced with increased taxes. After all, it’s one thing to make irresponsible promises to win an election, but quite another to get the Maryland State House to vote to spend that money. It won’t: Most Democrats as well as nearly all Republicans would oppose massive property and income tax increases on the scale that would be needed to replace tuition revenue. Instead, as a result, the University of Maryland in College Park would be devastated by forced program and service cuts.

Advocates of tuition-free college never discuss what draconian cuts they would advocate if they were unable to get the large tax increases that their plans would require. What degree programs and departments would they eliminate? How many faculty and staff would be laid off? Which research programs would end? How would the university retain excellent faculty who were tempted to flee the sinking ship? How many graduate student teaching assistants would they want to disappear? While the excellence of the University would be shredded, tuition-free college policies would have no impact on private universities such as Johns Hopkins, or on public universities in other states that maintained tuition as a source of revenue.

As an historian of modern European, especially modern German history, I have traveled regularly to Europe and Germany over the past four decades for research, teaching, lectures, and conferences. I know Germany’s system of publicly funded, tuition-free universities very well. It includes many fine scholars, superb students, and impressive universities. However, in Germany and in Europe’s public universities in general, faculties are smaller, classes are bigger, teaching loads are heavier, and the ability of the faculty to combine research with teaching is significantly less than it is in U.S. public state research and teaching universities. Moreover, the fact that the European universities do not have the financial support that comes from tuition means smaller faculties and thus that many of their finest PhDs cannot get positions in their own countries. Europe’s brain drain is our gain, evident in the many European scholars now teaching at American universities and colleges.

The invention of public universities funded with a taxpayer contributions and modest student tuition is one of the greatest accomplishments of American public life in the past 150 years. It has enabled millions of Americans and thousands of Marylanders to enjoy what had previously been the privilege of a small elite. An essential component of American democracy has been the effort to make an excellent college education accessible to broader and broader strata of our society. The University of Maryland in College Park and the flagship research and teaching universities all over the United States are jewels of this democratic aspiration. Preservation, not destruction, of these historically unique and remarkably successful public institutions should be our goal.

University of Maryland total operation budget in fiscal year 2003.

The literature on the causes and consequences of declining state funding for higher education around the country is extensive. On the connection between such decline and increases in student tuition see Rick Seltzer, “State Funding Cuts Matter,” Inside Higher Education, July 24, 2017.

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The Bibi Paradox

Who is the most successful leader of a democracy in the world today? The President of the United States would surely nominate himself, but polls suggest that the majority of his countrymen would disagree. Prime Minister Theresa May of Great Britain has a precarious hold on her office as she tries to find a formula for leaving the European Union acceptable to her Conservative Party, the House of Commons as a whole, the British people, and EU member states. French President Emmanuel Macron has put forward a bold program of reform but his popularity has plummeted since his election in 2017. For most of the last decade Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany would have been the obvious nominee, but the wave of immigration that she welcomed in 2015 and her Christian Democratic Party’s poor performance in the 2017 elections have weakened her substantially. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has held power in Japan since 2012 but the Japanese political system affords him less power than his Western counterparts have. Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, combines electoral strength with the passage of some major legislation. But the leading candidate for the heavyweight championship of the democracies is Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, widely known as Bibi.

He has achieved political longevity: Next year, if he remains in office, he will become his country’s longest-serving Prime Minister, surpassing the record of the first and greatest of his predecessors, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father. Since he assumed the position for the second time in 2009, in the midst of the global recession triggered by the 2008 financial crisis in the United States, his country has registered the best economic performance of all the democracies; and for this he deserves some credit, both for his stewardship as Prime Minister and for the reforms he implemented during his tenure as Finance Minister from 2003 to 2005. He has managed the difficult diplomatic feat of forging effective working relationships with both Donald Trump and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. He strenuously opposed the Obama Administration’s 2015 deal with Iran concerning its nuclear program, and this year President Trump withdrew the United States from it.

Located as they are in a region filled with people, organizations, and governments that at best do not want them there and in many cases are actively trying to kill them, Israelis value security above all else. This the Prime Minister has delivered. As Anshell Pfeffer notes in his new biography Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, “Netanyahu has had by far the lowest number of deaths annually from warfare and terrorist attacks, on average, during his premiership than any other elected Israeli prime minister.”

Yet for all his accomplishments he is unusually unpopular. In Israel the political party that he leads, the Likud, has won less than one-quarter of the popular vote in the last three general elections, forcing him to assemble parliamentary coalitions in order to govern. Even many who vote for him, as anyone with a circle of Israeli acquaintances can attest, express serious reservations about him personally. Those on the Left of the country’s political spectrum despise him.

Pfeffer, a reporter for Ha’aretz, the flagship newspaper of the Israeli Left, reports that during the writing of the book its subject said that he, Pfeffer, “doesn’t know anything about me” and that what he produced would be “a cartoon.” That prediction has turned out to be inaccurate: Pfeffer has not written a partisan assault and indeed defends Netanyahu against the charge that he incited the 1995 assassination of his political rival, the then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Bibi does make clear, however, that, like most of the readers of his newspaper, Pfeffer does not count himself a political supporter of the Prime Minister.

Beyond Israel, Netanyahu’s unpopularity soars. Other democratic leaders dislike him. In 2011 French President Nicolas Sarkozy was overheard saying of him to the American President Barack Obama, “I cannot bear him, he’s a liar,” to which Obama replied “You’re fed up with him? I have to deal with him every day.” Obama’s administration, and that of his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, worked actively to promote Netanyahu’s political opponents and keep him from winning elections.

The career of Israel’s Prime Minister thus presents a paradox: He is a very successful statesman who is nonetheless widely disliked. What accounts for this?

The sources of Netanyahu’s mastery of policy are not difficult to trace. He is exceptionally intelligent, widely read, has a firm grasp of the issues with which he has to deal and a large capacity for hard work. He has also proven himself to be a skillful political operator. Part of his skill stems from his long experience in the United States, where he received his education and where he spent several years representing Israel at the United Nations. There he became an accomplished television performer, learned approaches to campaigning that served him well in Israel, and established friendships with wealthy American Jews who later helped to subsidize his political career. He also possesses a personal quality closely tied to political success: resilience. After his first term as Prime Minister, between 1996 and 1999, he suffered several major political setbacks. Yet he persevered, regained the office in 2009, and has held it ever since.

He has won elections through a now-familiar populist tactic, by mobilizing a coalition of Israelis who feel themselves to be outsiders: Jews who had to flee from Arab countries and their descendants, religiously observant Jews, and immigrants from the former Soviet Union, all of whom have resented the largely secular Israelis of Eastern European origin descent who controlled the government for the country’s first three decades of independence. That coalition was first assembled long before populism emerged as a political force in the United States and Europe. It was Menachem Begin, the founder of Likud, who rode it to victory in 1977. It is a testimony to Netanyahu’s skills as well as to the enduring cleavages in Israeli society that, four decades later, he is still able to rely on it.

Further evidence of his political shrewdness is the bill his coalition recently passed declaring Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people—as it is and always has been. The bill changes nothing and endangers the rights of no Israeli, Jew or non-Jew. Yet members of the main left-wing opposition party voted against it in the Israeli parliament. They thereby put themselves on record as opposing the basic principle of Zionism, a misstep that Netanyahu will surely exploit in the next national election.

Why, then, has someone with such achievements in both policy and politics earned the scorn, indeed, the hatred, of so many? Part of the answer lies in his longevity. Anyone in office, especially at the highest level, accumulates adversaries over the years: That is an occupational hazard of the political trade.

In addition, Netanyahu and his wife Sara have a displayed a penchant for luxurious living in a country founded on spartan ideals. They both stand accused, moreover, of using political power and trading political favors for financial reward—that is, of corruption. Mrs. Netanyahu has been indicted for misusing public funds and her husband is the subject of several investigations for similar misdeeds, which in the worst case scenario could put an end to his political career.

While important to Israelis, these personal matters do not explain the low regard in which the Prime Minister is held in other countries. For this there is one major reason, which also has a great deal to do with the dislike Israelis on the Left have for him as well as the willingness of their non-left-wing compatriots to keep him in office: the peace process.

In the quarter-century since Yitzhak Rabin and the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yasir Arafat, signed the Oslo Accords that were supposed to lead to a settlement between them, Israelis and Palestinians have failed to make peace. The responsibility for that failure belongs to the Palestinians. The Palestinian entity in control of Gaza, the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas, says explicitly that it will never accept Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East and devotes its resources not to promoting the welfare of those it governs but to terrorism against Israel. Its putatively moderate counterpart in the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Palestinian Authority headed by Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas, has refused all offers to settle the conflict, which have included substantial territorial concessions, that Israeli governments have made. It has never put forward a counteroffer of its own or indicated the kind of settlement it envisions. It has done nothing to build the institutions of statehood other than deploying multiple police forces that repress political opposition. It has generated vile anti-Jewish propaganda that harks back to Europe in the 1930s and has sponsored the murder of Jews by publicly praising and paying the murderers.

The Palestinians have thus clearly demonstrated that they are not, to use the common phrase, “a partner for peace.” Pfeffer acknowledges this in a backhanded way when he writes that “While nearly all the other Israeli prime ministers over the past three decades—Rabin, Peres, Barack, Sharon, and Olmert—had looked for ways to achieve a breakthrough with the Palestinians, Netanyahu . . . is intent on preserving the status quo.” If the efforts of his predecessors came to naught, it is odd, to say the least, to blame Netanyahu for not following in their footsteps. Yet the Israeli Left and Western governments do blame him; and from that blame comes their disdain for him.

The wider Israeli public, however, living as it does next to the Palestinians and well aware of their 25-year record, knows where the responsibility for the persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies. It also knows that, whatever his shortcomings, Netanyahu understands this basic fact of Middle Eastern life while his opponents at home and abroad do not. The public has confidence that he will not launch naive and perhaps dangerous initiatives in an effort to please his domestic and foreign critics. That is why it has voted to keep him in power.

The evidence that the Palestinians, or at least their leaders, do not aspire to their own state living peacefully side-by-side with the Jewish state compares favorably, in volume and credibility, with the evidence that the Earth is round. Just why so many in the West have become the equivalents, for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of flat-Earthers, and why they remain obsessed with a dispute that now has no significance for the world beyond the two parties to it, are questions that would require a separate book to answer. (Adam Garfinkle’s 2009 classic Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Just About Everything offers some useful clues, especially in Part Three.)

The fact that this belief is widely and tenaciously held, however, has had two consequences. First, it has helped to perpetuate the conflict by assuring the Palestinians that they will pay no price—indeed that they will continue to receive generous Western political and financial support—for their unyielding and indeed violent refusal to accept the legitimacy and permanence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. Second, it has underwritten the career of the Israeli politician who has most forcefully and consistently opposed the fantasy that Israeli concessions will bring peace, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Putin’s Perfect Storm

A new round of sanctions against Russia, issued by the State Department for the poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, and a bill introduced in Congress for Russia’s meddling in the elections could create a perfect storm for Vladimir Putin. Though this is hardly the last nail in his coffin, a confluence of economic woes within and without Russia have left the Russian President in a far more precarious position than usual—and emboldened criticism from both the Russian elite and the public at large.

Not only does Vladimir Putin’s regime now face some of the toughest sanctions ever imposed on Russia, he also has to struggle with highly unpopular pension reform inside the country and find the money to pay for his campaign promises. The latter effort touches the interests of Russia’s richest men, which could further complicate Putin’s travails.

The sanctions for the Skripal poisoning, announced last week, will be imposed in two rounds under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination act of 1991. First, by August 22 the U.S. government will ban exports of so-called dual-use technologies to Russia except for those intended for the International Space Station. After that, within 90 days the U.S. government would require Russia to prove it no longer uses chemical and biological weapons, allowing on-site inspectors into the country to verify compliance.

If Russia doesn’t comply, as is almost certain, the Trump Administration may impose a second tranche of sanctions. A refusal to comply would lead to a possible ban of any loans to Russian state-owned banks, trade suspension, and the downgrading of diplomatic relations.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators including Lindsey Graham, Bob Menendez, Cory Gardner, Ben Cardin, John McCain and Jeanne Shaheen recently introduced the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act of 2018. The full text of the bill was first published not on the Senate’s website but by the Russian newspaper Kommersant. (The Senators’ press offices later confirmed its authenticity). The bill’s toughest measures include banning seven major Russian banks from all operations in dollars, prohibiting transactions relating to new sovereign debt of Russia, and sanctioning Russian energy projects supported by Russian state-owned or parastatal entities.

The Kommersant story sent the ruble crashing the very next day to its lowest value since the fall of 2016. When the State Department announcement followed, Russia’s national airline Aeroflot’s market value dropped 8 percent on news that its U.S.-bound flights might be banned, too. The Russian financial markets have registered high volatility, and Russian politicians have been struggling to get on message.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, as usual, issued a flat-out lie: the reason for the ruble’s fall was not only the upcoming sanctions, but “also an unstable situation in emerging markets.” Later he doubled down, saying sanctions against Russian banks “won’t create serious problems for the country’s economy” and musing that Russia might switch to national currencies in oil and gas trade as a counter-measure against the United States. The head of the Central Bank of Russia called the fall of ruble “natural.” The Russian Embassy in the United States, on the contrary, was uncharacteristically honest when it called the State Department sanctions “draconian.”

But the most candid reaction with respect to acknowledging the possible damage came from Prime Minister Medvedev, who said that new sanctions would be perceived as a declaration of war against Russia. However, this unprecedented honesty was only the pretext for a typical series of vague threats: “And such a war would have to be reacted to—with economic methods, political methods, and if necessary with other methods, too. And our American friends should understand that,” threatened Russia’s Prime Minister.

All of this is par for the course—the desperate “sanctions don’t hurt” reassurances and the promise of a “devastating response” are both familiar propaganda ploys whenever the Kremlin gets hit by new sanctions. But there are reasons to believe that this time may be different.

As of Monday, the ruble has kept up its free fall. But, as Konstantin Eggert argued in a recent column, the Kremlin has precious few tools in its arsenal to respond with. Russia might ban Californian wine imports, it might prohibit U.S. flights over the country if Aeroflot is sanctioned, or it might stop selling RD-180 engines for U.S. air space programs. But that’s about it.

Moreover, Eggert points out, Putin’s elites are far more vulnerable than the Soviet elites of old. It is impossible to imagine the U.S. Congress requiring the FBI and CIA to publish information on the finances of Leonid Brezhnev or Yury Andropov, because no such assets existed. Soviet party commanders certainly had their privileges—dachas, cars, and health retreats in Sochi—but they kept their money in Russia and thus remained invincible. They subscribed to the ruling ideology and tried to stay in power.

Putin’s elites don’t believe in anything, says Eggert. They pay lip service to the Orthodox Church but would profess any belief that was necessary to survive. They live off income from global energy markets and keep their assets in the West. That leaves them vulnerable as Congress instructs the intelligence agencies to dig up dirt on their wealth. “Paradoxically, the Politburo was stronger in the face of American pressure,” Eggert plausibly concludes.

The last time Moscow “punished” the West for sanctions was three years ago, when the Kremlin banned food imports from Europe and the United States. For American farmers the measure passed unnoticed, while Europeans got bailed out by the EU government. Russian consumers, meanwhile, were deprived of both quality and quantity, having to pay double or triple prices for what was left in their grocery stores. (Russia doesn’t produce enough to cover its needs.)

And of course, the Kremlin’s most notorious “tit-for-tat” was the ban on the adoptions of Russian orphans, first by Americans and later by Europeans, it enacted in response to the Magnitsky Act. In other words, Putin’s Administration knows well how to punish its own people, and it probably will again in this instance.

Simultaneously, fresh Levada polls show that support for Putin’s foreign policy has dropped 6 percent compared to two years ago. Only 16 percent of respondents approve of the Russian leader’s foreign agenda today, according to a poll that came before the news on new U.S. sanctions had broken. Levada sociologists attest that people have grown weary of foreign policy and want to see the government spend money at home rather than abroad. Instead, the government is seeking a reform of the pension system, which has led to a major drop in Putin’s approval ratings, even bigger than the one following the Moscow protests of 2011-2012.

Even worse for Vladimir Putin, big business has spoken up. After Putin became Russia’s President for the fourth time, he signed his economic program, the so-called May decree, which would require 8 trillion rubles ($120 billion) from the budget to achieve new economic goals. The only problem is that there is no money in the Russian budget for covering existing retirement payments, let alone ambitious new spending programs. In addition to the retirement reforms, therefore, the financial bloc of the government is looking for creative new ways to generate revenue. First, it raised VAT rates from 18 percent to 20 percent.

Now the new Economic Development Minister Andrey Belousov, the replacement for the sentenced-for-bribery Alexey Ulukayev, has proposed a measure that is shocking in its brazenness: taking 514 billion rubles ($7.5 billion) away from big businesses with a targeted tax on 14 leading metal and chemical companies. Belousov says that because oil and gas companies in Russia have to pay mineral extraction taxes, their profits are less than those of large metal, mining, chemical, and petrochemical companies. This is unfair, concludes Minister Belousov, and thus the latter should pay more to the federal government.

Belousov has submitted an official proposal to Putin, who conditionally endorsed the offer. The measure would hit 14 companies, whose owners are all among the top 20 richest Russians. The ostensible criteria for calculating the tax hike is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), a controversial accounting metric that is sometimes used to assess profitability. But in this case the formula seems to have been applied inconsistently and arbitrarily, to shake down leading tycoons. The government may have simply looked at the balance on the companies’ bank deposits (which are all kept in state-owned banks) and figured out how much might be taken away, in what the document euphemistically terms annual “withdrawals.”

Under the table drafted by Belousov, for instance, NLMK—a steel company owned by Russia’s richest man, Vladimir Lisin—would have 20.98 billion rubles ($300 million) expropriated. Lisin has since publicly criticized Belousov’s idea, in a rare rebuke of a top government official. In a statement to the press on behalf of the Russian Steel Association, Lisin said the measure “looks like the encouraging of inefficiency” and that taxes should be calculated on the basis of profit, not income. On Monday, the 14 companies singled out by the proposal cumulatively lost $3.1 billion in just one day, as news of the tax hike proposal hit their shareholders. Lisin alone lost $832 million, equivalent to 4 percent of his net worth.

However, those losses may not presage a full-fledged rebellion from Russia’s business class. When Putin’s regime tries to rip off wealthy businessmen, they bargain, not fight. Тhe Yeltsin-era oligarchs are more asset holders than owners; at any moment, they might be imprisoned or have their business taken away. For Vladimir Lisin and others in his position, it’s not a question of whether to pay or not, but of how much they will pay. More to the point, even if Lisin were to start a public fight with the Kremlin, he most certainly wouldn’t be joined by his wealthy compatriots. Instead, the latter would use such a great opportunity to circle around the remains of his business like vultures.

Even so, there are visible signs of discontent among Russia’s ruling class. Even the generally pro-Kremlin political expert Alexey Makarkin has registered rising conflicts within the elite, and an increase in their public airing of grievances. Apart from Lisin’s reaction, Makarkin mentions two other cases.

One is the surprising criticism of the criminal prosecution of 18-year old Anna Pavlikova which came from the RT head and top Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan. Pavlikova, who suffers from heart disease, was charged with creating an extremist group and put in jail, all for exchanging anti-Putin messages with friends in social media chats and gathering in McDonalds, where they were joined by an undercover FSB agent who had staged a sting operation. Meanwhile, the pro-Kremlin lenta.ru news outlet published a damning report on the Russian Orthodox Church’s abuse of children: a usually taboo subject that reflects poorly on the powers that be.

All of this, concludes Makarkin, signals “the erosion of the ‘besieged fortress’ effect, when all other interests back off in the face of a national idea of standing against a foreign enemy.” A large part of the elites are not happy with the growing powers of the siloviki, Makarkin notices.

I would add that even Putin’s loyalists are finally coming to realize that the uncontrolled, arbitrary, often barbaric power of the siloviki means they could be the next to be targeted—which of course must frighten them. Unfortunately for the regime functionaries, the times of authoritarian stability have passed, and now loyalists and servants are endangered along with the usual suspects (the liberal media, political opposition, and human rights advocates).

Of course, the best indicator of loyalty is money. And on that front, the news for Putin is grim indeed: the net cash flow from Russia between January and June 2018 has more than doubled, to $21.5 billion, compared to the same period last year. Businessmen are voting with their wallets, as the United States shows no signs of slowing down its sanctions drive. As Konsantin Eggert fairly puts it, “the sanction war” is like a long-distance run, “where the one who is objectively stronger and more patient wins. And this, however you look at it, is the United States.”

The post Putin’s Perfect Storm appeared first on The American Interest.

Beijing’s “National Security” Gambit for Hong Kong

The pro-independence Hong Kong National Party has been given until September 4 to justify why it should not be banned. With no elected office holders and few members, the party has little prospect of success, but the ban would give Beijing a vehicle to advance a “national security” test for the city, a development whose consequences will reach far beyond Hong Kong itself.

The Hong Kong National Party emerged from the pro-democracy demonstrations of 2014. Although the protests didn’t achieve their goal—democratic election of the territory’s top official—the 79-day Umbrella demonstrations reinvigorated the democracy movement and elevated a younger generation to its leadership.

These new politicians and activists were promptly targeted for retaliation: prosecutions for some and disqualification for others who won election to the legislature. Andy Chan, the head of HKNP, was among those prevented even from running for office in 2016.

Chan’s view on independence comes from the conclusion that the “one country, two systems” arrangement which ostensibly protects Hong Kong’s autonomy and domestic freedoms from Beijing is not working. It’s hard to argue with that. In addition, shutting off any hope of democratic home rule, China’s increasingly heavy-handed role in Hong Kong includes kidnappings of Hong Kong residents for political reasons, squeezing the once-vibrant free press and gaining increasing control over the city’s universities and its judicial system.

Even so, the idea of true independence has few supporters. As political analyst Suzanne Pepper writes, “Most Hong Kong democrats already understand and accept that red line as a basic fact of local political life.” The problem is that Beijing’s red line continues to move and encompass more and more subjects.

For now, life in Hong Kong remains freer than on the mainland—an easy bar to meet. However, the use of a national security litmus test, which Beijing had inserted in to a local law, will bring Hong Kong’s politics more in line with Beijing’s. Once established, it’s not far-fetched to imagine “national security” concerns being used to outlaw public protests, including the annual march to commemorate the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of democracy protesters. Eventually, even a private gathering to discuss democracy could be out of bounds, as it is on the mainland. Indeed, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has threatened to take action against the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club for hosting a talk by Mr. Chan on August 14. Using familiar communist rhetoric, it urged the club to “reflect on itself . . . fix [its] mistakes” and threatened that “[a]ny words and deeds to split Hong Kong from China will be punished in accordance with the law.”

Beijing’s “national security” agenda in Hong Kong has roots in the mainland, but its implications extend much farther afield. In 2015, China adopted a law linking its national security to China’s “core interests.” These interests used to be few, discrete, and defensive, referring to areas where China’s claims of sovereignty were suspect: Tibet, Taiwan and Xinjiang. Now Beijing defines them more broadly to justify projection of power and dictatorial rule abroad. Core interests, Edward Wong of the New York Times reported, “refers to what Chinese leaders see as three sacrosanct rights of the nation: maintaining the political system, with unquestioned rule by the Communist Party; defending sovereignty claims and territorial integrity; and economic development.” The law, according to legal scholar Jerome Cohen is “an ideological platform that guides domestic and foreign policies.”

The Trump Administration has embarked on a free and open Indo-Pacific Initiative. As it gets underway, the initiative has been criticized for a lack of detail and a relatively small amount of aid and investment compared to China’s ambitious One Belt, One Road investment and infrastructure initiative. A direct comparison between the U.S. and Chinese economic roles in Asia would be difficult. Unquestionably, the basis for America’s leadership in the region is its commitment to democratic principles. If the Administration’s initiative is to be credible, it must confront Beijing’s projection of ideological influence around its periphery and farther afield. That includes Hong Kong.

While that doesn’t mean support for Hong Kong’s independence, it does require including support for the freedoms of association and speech, and peaceful political activity. It should also explicitly reject Beijing’s crafting of a “national security” rationale for extending control over people who seek to preserve their own freedoms. That’s what the struggle over a tiny political party in Hong Kong is all about.

The post Beijing’s “National Security” Gambit for Hong Kong appeared first on The American Interest.

To Love Confederate Monuments and Civil Rights

Possibly alone among God’s creatures, we humans saturate the physical landscape with intentional displays of moral meaning. These constructed moral declarations are part of how we name ourselves. They cry out to the living and the unborn: “This is who we are, where we stand, and how we aim to be remembered.” Examples of these physical prayers include monuments, museums, flags, memorial windows, murals, roadside and other historical markers, and of course the names we choose and re-choose over time for our streets and highways, schools and universities, parks, libraries, government buildings, sports teams and mascots, lakes and reservoirs, bridges, airports, and much else.

I recently spent ten days driving around the Deep South—Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia—looking at these moral markers and talking to people about them. My tour was anything but scientific, but anecdotes are to scientific data what piers are to bridges: sometimes they develop from the former into the latter. We’ll focus first on the Lost Cause and then on the Beloved Community, so we’ll move in time from the Civil War of the 1860s to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Let’s start with Confederate monuments. Particularly after this past August’s violent protest and counter-protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, ostensibly about city’s plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from the recently re-christened Emancipation Park—the former name was Lee Park—many pundits across the nation weighed in on the subject of Confederate monuments. Most commentators took one stance or its opposite in a simple choice between “keep them” and “get rid of them.” It took me several days of driving around to abandon this way of thinking.

Goodness knows these memorials to the Lost Cause seem to be nearly everywhere in the South. This ubiquity itself creates cultural meaning. A college professor in Johnson City, Tennessee, usefully put it to me this way:

The sheer number of monuments is such a forceful presence, forming a public identity that can negate other identities. So consideration of individual monuments can’t be separated from the meaning of the aggregate.

As a nearly life-long Civil War buff, I’ve studied and loved Civil War monuments for decades, including those in my native South. Growing up in Mississippi, it was and (I admit) remains curiously moving to know that in nearly every county seat in the state on can find, usually less than a block from the First Baptist Church, a county courthouse in the lawn of which is a stately Confederate statue. It is usually a lone Confederate soldier atop a tall shaft, frequently displaying a florid inscription in praise of those who served and died for the Confederate States of America.

Here’s one of the tributes (the words come from Jefferson Davis) inscribed on the Monument to Women of the Confederacy in Jackson, Mississippi, honoring the women:

Whose pious ministrations to our wounded soldiers soothed the last hours of those who died far from the objects of their tenderest love, whose domestic labors contributed much to supply the wants of our defenders in the field, whose zealous faith in our cause shone a guiding star undimmed by the darkest clouds of war, whose fortitude sustained them under all the privations to which they were subjected, whose floral tribute annually expresses their enduring love and reverence for our sacred dead; and whose patriotism will teach their children to emulate the deeds of our revolutionary sires.

As an historian, this language fascinates me. As a Southerner, it both attracts and dismays me. As a human being, it moves me deeply.

At the same time, my recent drive-around changed my thinking about these memorials. I’m now more doubtful of their worth, for three reasons.

First, as my friend from Tennessee notes, there are simply too many of them saying too many confrontational things in too many prominent places. As the centerpieces of what was, from the 1870s through the 1910s, an astonishingly comprehensive and successful South-wide campaign to memorialize the Lost Cause, Confederate monuments as a group convey an essentially state-endorsed creed: “This is who we are.” But of course, that’s not true.

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Confederate monument, Greenville, South Carolina.

Confederate monuments are not who “we” are. There have always been what the historian Charles Reagan Wilson of the University of Mississippi calls “many Souths,” not just one, and certainly not just one Southern “we” consisting of white citizens wishing to glorify the Lost Cause. No one group or cause or memory, no matter how significant, can define the South. Here, too, in my Father’s house are many rooms.

The second cause of my growing doubt about the monuments concerns one of the main defenses mounted on their behalf. These monuments, their defenders say, are primarily ways for (white) Southerners to honor their dead and remember their history and heritage. But of course, that’s not quite right.

The great majority of early Confederate monuments, unveiled from the 1870s through the early 1880s were located in cemeteries. Usually sponsored by local ladies memorial associations, they were more about mourning the dead than perpetuating a cause. Their emotional appeal is typically more somber and private than aggressive and political. An inscription on the Monument to the Gettysburg Dead (unveiled 1875) located in the Laurel Grove Cemetery of Savannah, Georgia, says:

On Fame’s eternal camping ground,

Their silent tents are spread,

And glory guards, with silence round,

The bivouac of the Dead.

But by the 1890s, owing largely to the labors of the new patriotic groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the location of new monuments had shifted largely from cemeteries to courthouses, state houses, and public thoroughfares and parks, just as the new monuments’ emotional appeal—their aesthetics and poetic inscriptions—had shifted from funerary feelings of grief to political myth-making expressed with nearly religious fervor.

Most of all, these later monuments insist on the moral rightness of the Southern cause. The message is not subtle. A Confederate monument I visited in Greenville, South Carolina, says:

All lost, but by the graves where martyred heroes rest, he wins the most who honor saves. Success is not the test. The world shall yet decide in truth’s clear far off light, that the soldiers who wore the gray and died with Lee were in the right.

You want vigilance ever-lasting? The same monument proclaims that the fallen soldiers of Greenville County are “resting at last in that glorious land, where the white flag of peace is never furled.” Any questions about what these words mean?

If so, perhaps they can be answered by Mrs. Lizzie Pollard, the first president of the Southern Memorial Association of Fayetteville, Arkansas. In 1904, she stated:

These monuments we build will speak their message to unborn generations. These voiceless marbles in their majesty will stand as vindicators of the Confederate soldier. They will lift from these brave men the opprobrium of rebel, and stand them in the line of patriots. This is not alone a labor love, it is a work of duty as well. We are correcting history.

The third cause of my change of heart concerns a difficult moral question: Can there be beauty in devotion to a flawed cause? For me, the answer is yes. I believe that slavery was morally unacceptable. I believe that Southern leaders in the 1850s were foolish, arrogant, and irrationally aggrieved. I believe that attempting to secede from the Union was a tragic mistake. I’m glad the North won that terrible war.

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Statue of Robert E. Lee, Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia.

But do I see beauty in Robert E. Lee, who led an army whose purpose I detest? I do. Do I see nobleness in Southern women who (as one monument tells it) “loved their land because it was their own, and scorned to seek another reason why”? I do, even as I believe that loving my land because it’s mine, and scorning to seek another reason why, is morally wrong and dangerous. I believe that it’s possible and can be part of a good life to honor one’s forbears’ bravery, stamina, and commitment without favoring their political ideology.

But here’s the catch: As we’ve seen, the most visible and important of the Confederate monuments do not purport to honor brave people who fought for a doubtful cause. Quite the opposite: The builders of these monuments, along with those who controlled the prominent sites on which they are located, created a style of public memorialization blending remembrance and sacralized political defiance such that the two feelings become inseparably one.

For me, that’s a source of both curiosity and, increasingly, remorse. I am eager to remember those who died with compassion and understanding. But I resist with all the powers available to me being complicit in a public endorsement of the cause for which they died.

No nation rose so pure and fair,

None fell, so pure of crime.

– Inscription on a Confederate monument in Augusta, Georgia

The white South’s intense memorialization of the Lost Cause occurred more than a century ago.  And no memorialization, not even this one, can become frozen in time. Memorialization happens, but so does de-memorialization.

Consider one window through which to observe these processes. The United Daughters of the Confederacy is more responsible than any other group for the Confederate monuments we see today. A century ago, the group reportedly had about 70,000 members. A perusal of the minutes of their 1917 national convention, held in Chattanooga, Tennessee, suggests a highly energetic, grassroots, volunteer-led organization dedicated to waging a comprehensive campaign to honor the Confederate dead, support Confederate veterans, vindicate Confederate history, and defend and advance the Confederate cause.

The scope of the Daughters’ 1917-18 activities is breathtaking. They are completing Confederate monuments, including an unveiling in Shiloh, Tennessee—“I wish every one of you could have attended the unveiling. The day was as perfect a day as ever dawned. . . .  It was the greatest day in the history of the park. Conservative estimates placed the crowd at 12,000 . . .”—and raising funds for the recently deceased artist who created the Confederate monument in Arlington, Virginia, to be buried there. They are sponsoring a memorial window honoring women of the Confederacy—“the noble mothers of the ‘sixties . . . [who] gave their gallant sons to their country”—to be placed in the Capitol in Washington, D.C. They are petitioning for highways to be renamed for Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, and supporting the creation of a school to be named for Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy.

They are also successfully lobbying publishers and public schools to replace current history textbooks with “histories that are fair to the South.” They are sending photographs of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee for display in public schools. They are nurturing a national auxiliary group for young people called Children of the Confederacy. They are lobbying the U.S. Congress to refund to the Southern states the taxes on cotton collected by the Federal Government from 1862 to 1868, on the grounds that the taxes were collected illegally. They are passing resolutions to condemn the “hate song” called “Marching Through Georgia,” urging the song’s “suppression and elimination in all schools on all occasions, both public and private.”

In convention plenary sessions they are singing “Dixie” (a song Abraham Lincoln loved) and “Old Black Mammy’s Comin’ Home.” They are collecting books for a Confederate Library. They are creating a poetry and a literature of the Confederacy, including a “Catechism for Children” focusing on the war and Reconstruction. They are sponsoring children’s and university-level essay contests on the Confederacy. They are awarding Southern Crosses of Honor (the award’s motto is Fortes Creantur Fortibus / “The Brave Beget the Brave”) to worthy Confederate veterans. They are lobbying for the term “Civil War” to be replaced by “War Between the States,” since, as one UDC leader put it, “calling it a ‘Civil War’ is a complete surrender of the basic principle upon which that war was waged, the right of self-government . . .”

And much more. Through it all runs great ambition and remarkably intense devotion to the Cause. One of the convention’s opening addresses, delivered by Mrs. A. A. Campbell of Wytheville, Virginia, reports that “after more than half a century of reflection, [we] are still convinced that the men who followed Lee, Jackson, Johnston and our other immortals, fought for the liberties secured to them by the Federal Constitution.”

Today the United Daughters of the Confederacy has about 20,000 members. Compared to a century ago, it’s not doing much, and what it does seems more quaint and anachronistic than fiery and revisionist. Their long-term decline in both membership and zeal is probably as good a marker as any for what Charles Reagan Wilson calls “the de-memorialization of the Lost Cause.”

In the twelve months since the Charlottesville violence alone, about thirty Confederate monuments, mostly in the South, have been removed or relocated, and many more have become subjects of controversy. The day before I visited Richmond, Virginia, in part to see the massive Confederate statues along Monument Avenue, the statue of Robert E. Lee on the Avenue had been spray-painted with the letters “BLM,” for Black Lives Matter. In Greenville, South Carolina, I visited the Museum and Library of Confederate History, operated by the local Sons of Confederate Veterans, and during the hour or so my family and I were there, we were the only visitors. In short, with each passing year, Confederate memorialization occupies a less dominant and less secure portion of the Southern landscape.

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Four Spirits Memorial, Ingram Park, Birmingham, Alabama.

And what’s replacing it? The memorialization of the Beloved Community. Across the South, with an intensity that resembles the intensity of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in their heyday, the sons and daughters of the 1960s civil rights movement are remaking the landscape to honor their (now mostly fallen) heroes and endorse the moral rightness of their cause.

Today in Birmingham, Alabama, you can visit, as I did, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument (unveiled 1905) in a park near the Jefferson County Courthouse. But you can also visit, as I did, beautiful civil rights memorials located in the four-acre Kelly Ingram Park (repurposed 1992) adjacent to the 16thStreet Baptist Church. The church was bombed in 1963 by Ku Klux Klan members, resulting in the deaths of four African-American children and the injury of many other church members. The proposal to repurpose Ingram Park came from Richard Arrington, Jr., Birmingham’s first African-American mayor. (Today in Birmingham you can drive down Richard Arrington, Jr. Boulevard.)

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“Foot soldiers of the Birmingham civil rights movement,” Ingram Park, Birmingham, Alabama.

Christened “A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation,” the park features a statue memorializing the four children (“Four Spirits”) killed in the church bombing. It also features statues of Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth, and other local pastors who were active in the movement.  Additional monuments and plaques commemorate two anonymous African-American young people (the inscription says “I Ain’t Afraid”) and the students who, as civil rights demonstrators in 1963, were assaulted by the Birmingham police using dogs and firehoses. Across the street from the park is the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (dedicated 1992) whose mission is “to enlighten each generation about civil and human rights.”

This same trend is present across the South. In Richmond, on the grounds of the State Capitol, you can visit a statue of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, the famous Confederate general (unveiled in 1875 before an estimated crowd of 40-50,000). But on those same grounds you can also visit the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial (unveiled in 2008) featuring eighteen statues of African-American high school students and others who fought to desegregate Virginia’s public schools in the 1950s (“It seemed like reaching for the moon”). Fittingly enough, perhaps, the memorial is located within yards of a statue of Harry F. Byrd, Sr., (unveiled in 1976), the former state governor and U.S. senator who led the political and grassroots effort (under the slogan “Massive Resistance”) to prevent the desegregation of Virginia’s schools in the 1950s.

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Statue of Maggie L. Walker, Richmond, Virginia.

Also in Richmond, you can also visit a prominently located statue honoring Maggie L. Walker (unveiled in 2017) who for decades led Richmond’s Independent Order of Saint Luke, a self-help society (their motto was “Succor and Employment for the Negro Woman”) and was the first African-American woman to serve as president of a bank. You can visit the nearby Maggie L. Walker High School. Several blocks away from the Walker statue, the latest statue to be erected on Monument Avenue, and the first to memorialize someone other than a Confederate hero, honors Arthur Ashe, the first world-famous African-American tennis player.

In Jackson, Mississippi, where I grew up, children for decades attended the Jefferson Davis Elementary School. No longer. Starting next year, the name will be the Barack Obama School.

When I was a child, Jackson’s airport was named after Allen C. Thompson, a former mayor whose views on racial issues were, shall we say, not advanced. Some years back, as African Americans began assuming political power (and as whites left the city), the name was changed to the Thompson-Evers Airport, curiously pairing Thompson’s name with that of Medgar W. Evers, the civil rights leader murdered in 1963 by a member of the White Citizen’s Council. But by 2004, the re-memorialization had been completed: Today the airport is called Jackson–Medgar W. Evers International Airport. Also, part of Highway 49 near Jackson is now called Medgar Evers Boulevard, along which you can find a library and statue memorializing Ever’s life.

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Fannie Lou Hamer Museum and Memorial Garden, Ruleville, Mississippi.

Civil rights museums and Civil Rights Trails in the South are steadily multiplying. In Jackson, you can visit the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum (opened 2017). In Ruleville, Mississippi, you can visit the Fannie Lou Hamer Museum and Memorial Garden (dedicated 2008) (“She fought racism, injustice, and poverty”). Two of the most recent and important of these new institutions, the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both in Montgomery, Alabama, and both dedicated in 2018, remember African Americans killed by lynching (the memorial) and victimized by enslavement and mass incarceration. (the museum).

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Goodman, Mississippi.

Driving north on Highway 51 near Goodman, Mississippi, I noticed that the name of that portion of the highway had been changed to Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Highway. The next day, driving into Atlanta from the south, the first three boulevards I saw were named for Martin Luther King, Jr., Joseph E. Lowery (who succeeded Dr. King as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference), and Ralph David Abernathy (who succeeded Lowery). The next day, near Fredericksburg, Virginia, headed toward Jefferson Davis Highway, I drove across the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Bridge.

A 2015 survey published in the New York Times reports that, in the 11 former Confederate states, the name “Martin Luther King, Jr.” is associated 1,183 miles of roadway. The name “Jefferson Davis” is associated with 468 miles. For Robert E. Lee, the figure is 60 miles.

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Confederate monument, Fredericksburg, Virginia, cemetery.

There are similarities between the memorialization of the Lost Cause and the memorialization of the Beloved Community. Both of these campaigns honor their fallen. Both glorify their heroes. Both are suffused with moral and religious fervor. And both declare that their cause is right.

There are also dissimilarities. One movement occurred more than a century ago and peaked in the 1910s. The other is occurring today and seems not to have peaked yet. A second difference concerns political influence. The ideology of the Lost Cause achieved regional hegemony, occupying the commanding heights of Southern government and society. The ideology of the Beloved Community has not (at least yet) achieved anywhere near that level of influence.

The most important difference concerns divergent understandings of race. Both movements are deeply connected to racial issues—in one case, the enslavement of African Americans, and in the other, African Americans’ struggle for equal rights. At the same time, partisans of the Lost Cause addressed race primarily by ignoring it in favor of a focus on states’ rights and regional loyalty, while often augmenting that approach with overt displays of racism, whereas commitment to racial equality is the very essence of what animates partisans of the Beloved Community.

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Grave of an unknown Confederate soldier, Springwood Cemetery, Greenville, South Carolina.

I ended my tour heartened and chastened. I’m heartened that more and more of the Southern landscape now memorializes the 1960s civil rights movement. It’s overdue, it’s a matter of simple justice, it reflects what’s best in our nation, and it makes me more hopeful about the region’s future. May this effort continue, as there’s much more to do.

I’m chastened because I now see that the Civil War monuments I grew up with should be removed from Southern courthouses, Capitol grounds, and public parks and thoroughfares. I’d like to see them relocated to cemeteries, those places of remembrance and honor initially chosen as sites for them by the ladies memorial associations of the 1870s and 1880s. Reuniting these physical tributes to the dead with the graves of the soldiers themselves and their descendants seems honorable, reverential, fitting for a multi-racial South, and properly public.

On my trip, one of my most cherished experiences was visiting a cemetery in Fredericksburg, Virginia. In 1866, the Ladies Memorial Association of Fredericksburg, seeking (in their words) to “rescue from oblivion the memory of the brave,” began amid the privations of the war’s aftermath to raise funds for the cemetery. After much effort and sacrifice, the cemetery was dedicated in 1870. It contains the graves of Confederate veterans who died in nearby battles (many “Unknown”) and others. In the middle of the cemetery, atop a grassy mound, is a 20-foot high monument (unveiled in 1884) featuring a standing Confederate soldier. The monument’s inscription is simple and moving:“To the Confederate Dead.” Visiting there, I remembered.

Charles Reagan Wilson, “Whose South?” Southern Cultures22, no. 4 (Winter 2016). Wilson also sheds light on the questions raised in this essay in Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (The University of Georgia Press, 1980).

Lizzie Pollard, “Southern Memorial Association, Fayetteville, Arkansas,” in History of the Confederate Memorial Associations of the South (Confederate Southern Memorial Association, 1904), 68.

 Minutes of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (Richmond: Richmond Press, Inc., 1918), 298 (Shiloh unveiling), 328 (memorial window), 317 (history books), 82 (“Marching Through Georgia” and “Black Mammy’s Comin’ Home”), 320 (“Civil War”), 6 (“men who followed Lee”). See also (on cotton tax), Confederate Veteran 23, no. 5 (May 1915). For UDC membership, see Thomas H. Appleton, Jr. and Angela Boswell (eds.), Searching for their Place (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 187.

“Honors for Confederates, for Thousands of Miles,” New York Times, June 25, 2015.

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The Decline of American Public Administration

The current crisis in the teaching of public policy, which I have chronicled in previous posts here and here, is closely related to the decline of a related field, that of public administration. If you want some notion of the problem, just try uttering the words “public administration” before a roomful of students and watch them look at their phones or start to fall asleep. Nonetheless, the classic field of public administration is one of the most important today, and its decline (at least in the United States) is one of the reasons why we get poor service from government.

The father of the academic field of public administration is generally held to be Woodrow Wilson, whose 1887 article “The Study of Administration” argued that “it is the object of administrative study to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or of energy.” Wilson distinguished between politics and administration, and consigned the latter to the efficient implementation of policies that have been determined by a country’s political authorities. According to him, public administration was a critically important but nonetheless understudied field in the United States.

The American state expanded dramatically during the Progressive Era and World War I, which led to a sense of urgency about the need to improve the government’s human capacity. The Training School for Public Service (parts of which were later absorbed by Columbia University) was founded in 1911 by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse in 1924, and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton in 1930. Law schools also played a very important part in the training of officials who would staff the American government during the New Deal and World War II. By the middle of the 20th century, public administration reached its peak as one of the four major subdisciplines recognized by the American Political Science Association.

The prestige of public administration as a field began to wane beginning in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of larger changes in the social sciences, and particularly with the rise of economics as the queen of the social sciences. Many of the classics of mid-20th century public administration scholarship were context-rich single agency studies like Philip Selznick’s work on the Tennessee Valley Authority or Herbert Kaufman’s book The Forest Ranger about the U.S. Forest Service. They had little external validity and were unconnected to theory. Theory was provided by writers like Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, but it generally did not meet the mathematized standards of the emerging discipline of modern neoclassical economics. The social sciences in general moved towards empirical studies that could demonstrate causal relationships regarding human behavior in statistically rigorous ways. Public administration training, by contrast, remained focused on giving future public officials practical skills, much like a law or medical school, that would help them do their jobs as bureaucrats. The field of public administration hence gave birth to the field of public policy that focused on policy analysis, a child that grew up to completely overshadow its parent.

There was a different critique of classic public administration that emerged at the time of the Vietnam War, which grew out of discomfort with Wilson’s separation of politics and administration. Like Max Weber’s fact-value distinction, the effort to consign public administration to a politics-free box freed its practitioners from concern over the ends they were pursuing: Concentration camp guards could be taught how to do their jobs more effectively in a public administration program.

Moreover, with the growth of the post-New Deal administrative state, it was clear that bureaucrats did not simply implement directives from the political principals; rather, they had the discretion to actually make policy. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 was a quasi-constitutional settlement that in effect recognized the new powers that bureaucrats had come to hold. With passage of sweeping legislation during the 1970s like the Environmental Protection Act or the Occupation Health and Safety Act, bureaucrats themselves became the targets of the ire of many conservatives, who saw them as the unaccountable agents of an ever-expanding administrative state. The hostility of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump to the administrative (a.k.a. “deep”) state is simply a continuation of this tradition.

(To be fair to the bureaucrats, it is really the legislature that is the source of much of this problem: Congress often cannot figure out what it really wants to do in a particular piece of legislation, and then delegates responsibility for fleshing this out either to administrative agencies or to the courts. The Dodd-Frank Act on banking regulation, for example, mandated the writing of thousands of pages of detailed implementing rules by Federal agencies.)

Over the past two generations, theorizing about public administration (defined in Wilson’s terms as the science of administration) has been largely taken over by economists. The dominant paradigm for thinking about administrative dysfunctions (like corruption) is principal-agent theory, in which the principal (the people, acting through elected representatives) delegates authority to various layers of agents to carry out its wishes. Corruption occurs when the agent follows his or her own private interest at the expense of the wishes of the principal. The problem, then, is how to align the incentives of the agents with that of the principal.

The 1990s saw a revival of interest in public administration (under the heading of good governance or anti-corruption) as people realized that free markets were not a solution to all problems and that effective states mattered. There was a plethora of reforms, mostly designed by economists, to make the public sector more efficient by imitating the private sector. These included introducing competition and an exit option inside the public sector through innovations like school vouchers (an idea first articulated by Milton Friedman), better measurement and benchmarking of performance to incentivize public officials, outsourcing government functions to the private sector or to public-private partnerships, and New Public Management, which sought to treat public officials like private sector executives by setting explicit performance criteria in their employment contracts.

Public administration reforms were most vigorously undertaken in Commonwealth countries like Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada; the United States attempted its own version with Al Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative during the Clinton presidency. These new approaches enjoyed success in cities like New York, where Bill Bratton during his first term as police commissioner instituted a rigorous system to monitor the performance of his precinct captains and hold them accountable.

But elsewhere results were mixed. There were problems both in practice and with the underlying theory. Vouchers and greater flexibility in hiring and firing public officials met huge resistance from the bureaucrats themselves, who were often organized into powerful unions; it proved very difficult to measure performance in many parts of the public sector; legislatures were unwilling to provide sufficient resources or authority to incentivize their agents. The economists’ theory was also defective: Real world governments often entailed multiple principals of equal legitimacy giving contradictory mandates to their agents; authority in many bureaucracies necessarily flowed from knowledgeable agents upwards towards their clueless principals (as Herbert Simon pointed out many years ago). Don Kettl and John DiIulio have argued that the outsourcing craze has been carried too far, with government services being provided by layers of contractors less accountable than their public sector counterparts. Finally, there is a big problem with a theory that assumes that public officials are primarily motivated by material incentives: Many do what they do out of a dedication to public service and are, in DiIulio’s phrase, “principled agents.”

In the United States, however, the biggest factor blocking serious public administration reform is the country’s underlying anti-statist political culture, and what I regard as America’s pathological distrust of government. Because they tend to regard government more as a threat to their liberties than an executor of their wishes, Americans persistently fail to provide the government with adequate resources or authority to do its job properly. This stands in sharp contrast to other wealthy liberal democracies in Europe and Asia, where the state receives far more trust as a protector of public interest than in the United States. Although distrust of government is particularly pronounced today on the Right, it is something shared by progressives as well. Because the government is starved of resources and authority, it fails to do its job properly. There are a legion of recent fiascoes, from the response to Hurricane Katrina to the Army 21 reforms to the rollout of healthcare.gov, documented in great detail by scholars like Peter Schuck and Elaine Kamarck. Because the public regards government as wasteful and ineffective, voters are reluctant to provide it with more resources or authority, locking us into a low-level equilibrium of bad outcomes.

This then brings us back to the crisis in public administration as a field. After a period of innovation and creativity driven by the economists, the field seems to have lost its way again. Since the heyday of principal-agent theory (which was largely driven by scholars outside traditional public administration) there has been no dominant approach to public sector reform generated by administrative scholars. Public administration programs have either disappeared or have been folded into public policy programs, with increasing focus on policy analysis rather than practical skill-building. The field has relatively little interchange with the other discipline that provides training for government, administrative law, and it is increasingly hard to get tenure as a public administration scholar.  There is no clear path from a public administration school to a job in the Federal government.

One individual who is trying to push against this tide is former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who established the Volcker Alliance to push back against these trends. Volcker, whose background is in public administration, likes to tell the story of a conversation with a very prominent Princeton economist. Volcker lamented the decline of teaching in public administration, to which the economist replied, “But public administration isn’t even a field!” Volcker went on to point out that some prominent public administration scholars have gone on to great prominence, even rising to be presidents of major universities. The economist professed not to believe this, and wanted an example. The example Volcker gave was Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton University.

References:

John J. DiIulio, Jr., Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government (Templeton Press, 2014).

John J. DiIulio, Jr., “Principled Agents: The Cultural Bases of Behavior in a Federal Government Bureaucracy,” Jnl of Pub Admin Research & Theory 4: 277-320 (1994).

Francis Fukuyama, “Governance: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?,” Annual Review of Political Science 19: 89-105 (May 2016).

Elaine C. Kamarck, Why Presidents Fail and How They Can Succeed Again (Brookings Institution, 2016).

Donald F. Kettl, The Transformation of Governance: Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

Herbert Kaufman, The Forest Ranger: A Study in Administrative Behavior (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960).

Peter H. Schuck, Why Government Fails So Often And How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2014).

Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organizations (McGraw-Hill, 1951).

Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization (Free Press, 1957).

Woodrow Wilson, “The Study of Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 2: 197-222 (June, 1887).

Philip Zelikow, “Recovering Competence: The Software of American Statecraft” (unpublished paper).

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Central Europe’s Identity Crisis

A version of Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics modified for Central Europe could go as follows: Any country or political organization that is not explicitly pro-Western will sooner or later end up doing the Kremlin’s bidding. To avoid that fate, the countries’ foreign policies need either constant tending or a strong geopolitical compass grounded in historic experience, such as that of the Baltic states or Poland. No matter how disgruntled voters of Poland’s Law and Justice Party may be with Brussels or with Angela Merkel’s Wilkommenskultur, few of them would seriously question the country’s loyalties to the European Union, much less to the Transatlantic alliance.

Yet others in the region are losing that compass. In a recent poll conducted by Globsec, a Bratislava-based think tank, only 21 percent of Slovaks said that they believed that their country belonged to the West. Instead, 56 percent stated that they wanted their country to be “somewhere between the West and the East.” The result is striking not only because for many that question was already answered in November 1989 and when Slovakia joined NATO and the European Union, but also because it echoes an earlier idea that was common in Czechoslovakia immediately after the end of the Second World War. The notion that the Slavic nation was not fully Western but should have acted as a bridge between the USSR and Western Europe paved the way for the communist takeover in February 1948.

Slovaks have been more eager than their neighbors to embrace all aspects of European integration since joining the bloc in 2004. Slovakia is the only Visegrád country to have joined the Eurozone. Even the former Prime Minister Robert Fico—who was compared at times to Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński—emphasized that being part of the European Union’s integration core was one of the country’s vital interests. Slovakia’s most popular politician, President Andrej Kiska, is a staunch internationalist, who at the peak of the EU refugee crisis emphasized the need for a compassionate, humane response.

Yet the unambiguously pro-European and Atlanticist allegiances of the country, embodied by figures like Kiska and reflected in its official foreign policy line, seem increasingly out of sync with large parts of public opinion.

A case in point: retrospective optimism. 81 percent of Slovaks told pollsters that bonds between people had been stronger under the communist regime than today. A majority of 71 percent claimed that the quality of food was higher before 1989 (nonsense), 79 percent that crime rates were lower (disputed, but not likely, at least not in the 1980s), and 63 percent believed that people lived longer and were less prone to die of preventable causes during the communist era (between 1990 and 2016, life expectancy increased by six years, to over 77 years).

Politicians across the political spectrum have long catered to such nostalgia. Fico’s party, Smer, built its popularity by denouncing the neoliberal reforms of its predecessors and whitewashing the communist regime by pointing to the comprehensive welfare schemes it had enacted. As he put it in a 2000 interview, “let’s not pretend everything was bad and that we were living in a black hole.” Other politicians have pandered to different sources of nostalgia. On Slovakia’s nationalist Right, the wartime Slovak State, during which over 70,000 Slovak Jewish citizens perished in concentration camps, is usually treated with veneration.

Nostalgia has eclipsed even the memory of Soviet invasion of 1968, which killed at least 108 people across Czechoslovakia, left many others wounded, and ushered in a period of military occupation that lasted over 20 years. Typically, NATO’s bombing of Serbia and the Iraq War are invoked as evidence of an equivalence between Moscow and Washington. As a result, on both sides of the Czecho-Slovak border, being openly pro-Russian is not disqualifying for political leaders. In Prague, the second-term President Miloš Zeman has built a reputation for being Vladimir Putin’s most reliable ally in Europe, much to the Czechs’ indifference. In Slovakia, Fico has been more restrained but consistent in his criticisms of sanctions against Russia.

Lately, things have been escalating. Halfway through last year, one of the country’s most high-profile politicians, Andrej Danko, who serves as speaker of parliament and leader of the soft-nationalist Slovak National Party (SNS), has started to wear his pro-Kremlin allegiances as a badge of honor. “World peace is impossible without a strong Russia,” he affirmed at a June conference on “Development of Parliamentarism” in Moscow, hosted by Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia’s Duma. “It is my wish to see [President Putin] visit Bratislava. Hopefully, after the next election,” he added.

A combination of nostalgia, geopolitical blindness, and weak institutions leaves Slovakia vulnerable. A group of Slovak parliamentarians visited Crimea at the end of July, in direct contradiction of Slovakia’s official position on the matter.

Such publicity stunts are only the tip of the iceberg. For over six years, a paramilitary organization that calls itself “Slovak Conscripts” (SB) has been training young men from the age of 15 for combat. While preserving a veneer of plausible deniability about its goals, necessary for it to operate legally, the organization hides neither its pan-Slavic ideology nor its ties to Russia.

It was recently reported that the Night Wolves, a Russian bikers’ club close to Vladimir Putin, operates a military-like base in Slovakia, which is used as a training ground by the SB, utilizing old military equipment provided by Slovakia’s Ministry of Defense. The Night Wolves claim that the structure compound built on grounds owned by a close friend of the former Interior Minister Robert Kaliňák, is meant to serve as a military museum—even if it remains closed to the public and is surrounded by razor wire.

In some Slovak circles, such initiatives are met with applause. In an op-ed responding to the revelations, Ján Čarnogurský, a former Christian Democratic Prime Minister and a dissident imprisoned during the communist era, writes that “the rule of the West is probably ending”—and that this is a good thing. “Putin has stabilized the space from Ukraine to the Pacific. He supplies Europe with oil and gas and the entire world with wheat. He defeated terrorists in the Middle East, stopping them from cutting people’s throats and chasing out hundreds of thousands, particularly Christians, to Europe.”

Under Mr. Kaliňák’s leadership, the Interior Ministry  assistance to Vietnam’s intelligence services (including the use of a Slovak government airplane with an altered passenger manifest) in the  of Trinh Xuan Thanh, a high-profile businessman and politician, from Germany. The investigation by German police showed that Thanh was flown as part of a Vietnamese delegation by Slovak authorities to Moscow. Upon his arrival home, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

To outside observers, the country is full of paradoxes. Recently, the Defense Ministry, led by a pro-Russian SNS nominee, splurged and purchased 14 of the latest generation of U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to replace Slovakia’s dilapidated MiGs, even though their price tag of €1.6 billion was dramatically higher than the proposal put forward by Sweden’s Saab for its JAS-39s, used also by the neighboring Czech Republic. Cynics say that the decision was not motivated by SNS’s newly found love for the United States. Rather, because the first of the F-16s will only be delivered in 2022, whereas the JAS-39s were available now, the ministry is in a position to extend the existing contract with Russia for the servicing of the MiGs.

Earlier this year, the country saw an extraordinary mobilization of its civil society following the murder of the journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, with protests that were similar in size to those that took place in November 1989. So far, their impact has been minor—a government reshuffle—and Slovaks eventually got tired of coming to the streets. Yet there is a palpable sense that everything is up for grabs. A total of four elections are scheduled for the coming months: local ones (November 2018), presidential (2019), European (May 2019), and parliamentary (March 2020). Adding to the uncertainty, President Kiska announced that he would not run for re-election (which he would have easily achieved) but would rather seek to remain active in some other role, possibly by leading a broad centrist, pro-Western coalition in the parliamentary election in 2020. With political realignments happening across the political spectrum, predictions are difficult. It is obvious, however, that the cluster of elections occurring at a fraught moment will shape the country’s fate for the next generation, if not for longer.

What pro-Western leaders and activists have to realize is that things have changed since the defeat of the country’s authoritarian Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar. The strong pull of the European Union and NATO is not going to work its magic like it did in 1998. Traditional funders of civil society and political activism, from Western embassies to George Soros, have either moved on or have other, bigger fish to fry. In a strange paradox of its post-communist existence, Slovakia is now more deeply embedded in the Western international order than at any point in its history—yet also completely on its own in facing the doubts about its identity and the slow rot spread by the Kremlin.

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“Flaming Kites,” Hezbollah, and Iranian Nukes

To many foreign observers, Israel appears to be engaged in never-ending conflict, external and domestic. There is terrorism and diplomatic isolation. There are peripheral military clashes with Iran in and around Syria and Lebanon. Inside the country there are aggressive settlers, an increasingly powerful and arrogant ultra-Orthodox rabbinate, scandal, and convoluted politics. Taken together, external and the internal woes pose existential threats to Israel’s long-term future as a Jewish and democratic state.

From within Israel today, a somewhat different picture emerges.

Militarily, Israel has never been stronger and more secure. The Arab states are all in deep disarray and preoccupied with internal crises. Egypt and Jordan made peace long ago, and the other Arab states are either no longer capable of, or intent on, military conflict. Israel no longer faces serious conventional threats or, crucially, existential ones. Israel’s national security strategy has been a resounding success, achieving its primary goal of ensuring the state’s existence.

Israel still does, of course, face a threat from Hamas, a more severe one from Hezbollah, and a potentially existential threat should Iran succeed in going nuclear. But all this has to be viewed in perspective. Israel has contained Hamas: Israel’s anti-rocket system has essentially reduced the Hamas rocket threat to a nuisance for much of the country. The underground barrier currently being built has already prevented Hamas tunnel attacks and should do so fully upon completion next year. Hamas has been reduced to “flaming kites,” which can be lethal—one landed in a nursery school while the kids were out in the yard—but so far no one has been injured. The scorched brush and nature preserves are a painful sight, especially in this desert region, but the burned-out agricultural fields are plowed under.

Hezbollah is a different story. Its mammoth arsenal of approximately 130,000 rockets will cause unprecedented destruction to Israel’s home front in a future conflict, with up to 1,500 rockets raining down each day for weeks, including tens daily on Tel Aviv. Plans call for the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from border areas. The psychological impact, if this happens, will be severe, but in the end such experiences tend to tighten the “we” feeling within Israel, and, contrary to Arab hopes and predictions, such stresses have not undermined the resilience of Israeli society.

Besides, the Hezbollah threat lies in the future, and Israelis have long grown accustomed to living in the shadow of such threats. Moreover, experience has shown that, one way or another, Israel somehow always gets through the various threats, no matter how dire. “Yehiye tov” (“it’ll be good”) has long been the standard Israeli response to all external threats. It should probably be the national motto.

Iran is the big threat, but the current U.S. administration is now at least as hawkish on Iran as Israel. Through deft use of the media, Prime Minister Netanyahu succeeded in convincing an overwhelming majority of the Israeli public that the Iran nuclear deal was terrible for Israel and even posed an existential threat, this despite the fact that most of Israel’s defense establishment believed it to be the better of the bad options available. Indeed, Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the deal this past May affirmed everything Netanyahu has fought for in recent years. Israelis are now eagerly watching for signs of Iran’s economic collapse now that U.S. sanctions have been reimposed and most allies are knuckling under, hoping that this will lead either to regime change or to Iranian willingness to renegotiate a “better” deal. Moreover, there is now even some possibility, evidently absent during the Obama years, that the U.S. military will launch a strike and thereby resolve the problem in a different, perhaps more effective way.

As to the Palestinians, an overwhelming majority of Israelis—something very close to a national consensus—opposes a binational one-state solution to the conflict, even a clear majority of right-wing voters who fail to recognize that this is precisely what the current settlement policy will ultimately lead to. A large majority across party lines believes that there is simply no possibility of an agreement with the Palestinians for the foreseeable future, regardless of who is in office in Israel, because the Palestinians are either uninterested in peace or incapable of making the necessary concessions to reach it. A small majority continues to favor an active pursuit of a two-state solution, even today, despite their own manifest despair over decades of failed attempts to reach an agreement.

Most Israelis are not blind to the long-term threat to the nation’s character. This is not a case of hubris or willful shortsightedness. But if there is nothing Israel can do to change Palestinian rejectionism, why worry about it now? Israel will deal with the problem as it has with all others in the past, by crossing any bridge that looms down the road as and when it reaches it. Kvetchers abroad can get themselves exercised over the issue, but in the meantime, “yehiye tov.”

And in many ways things really are good. Despite media coverage seemingly to the contrary, for most Israelis the Palestinian issue has no bearing on the reality of their daily lives but only appears far away, on the borders or in “settler-land” in the West Bank, an area most Israelis have never visited. Israel’s economy is booming and has become an established global high-tech center, including in the currently hot area of cyber-security, with plans underway to ensure its future leadership in areas such as artificial intelligence. Foreign investors, in search of cutting-edge tech innovation, visit Israel in droves. Israelis have always been avid tourists, but a combination of a new “open skies” policy, which has drastically reduced the price of air tickets for Israelis, and rising disposable income for large parts of the population, has yielded a huge increase in foreign travel.

For Prime Minister Netanyahu, the political arithmetic is simple: A sense of military and economic security plus frequent travel equals happy voters. Surprisingly, perhaps, international surveys of comparative national happiness have repeatedly shown Israelis to be among the happiest people in the world.

What about diplomatic isolation because of the impasse with the Palestinians? Israel has relations today with more nations than ever before, often including close military ties. Several African and Latin American nations have restored relations, and security ties with Egypt and Jordan are closer than ever. Most importantly, a number of Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, are now engaged in extensive contacts with Israel, a result of a shared fear of Iran, Arab weariness with the Palestinian issue, and their recognition of the potential benefits of having ties to the region’s economic dynamo. Israel’s growing delegitimization around the world, the fact that its standing in international polls is near rock bottom, and that young people, including young Jews, are increasingly alienated from it, are medium-to-long term threats, are uncertain, and are anyway far less tangible.

As for Israel’s convoluted politics, it just is what it is. The disconnect between voters’ interests and actual voting patterns, electoral outcomes skewed by the vagaries of political systems, fake news, public discourse in which facts are no longer facts and expertise discounted, and ongoing attacks on fundamental pillars of democracy such as the judiciary and free press didn’t begin with the United States with Trump, but long before in Israel. No one has better mastered the art of political theater and pageantry, of playing to voters’ fears and insecurities, and of using this to rally the base, than Benyamin Netanyahu. Even Israelis who don’t like him acknowledge his bare-knuckles political skills.

Barring truly glaring indictments for corruption, which are not expected before the spring if at all, Netanyahu will be re-elected handily next year. Indeed, the charges against him are a further catalyst for rallying the base. It is not his allegedly criminal actions that are the problem, of course, as far as his base is concerned, but the “stinking leftists”—leftist and stinking are synonymous in Israel today, and the term is meant to include the judiciary and media. They are, his base believes, out to get Netanyahu personally and to deny the Right its electoral victory. All of this should sound familiar.

Repeated legislation in recent years, most recently the “Nation Law,” appears to many abroad, and to Israel’s Left, like an ongoing attack on Israeli democracy. In reality, most of this legislation dies in the Knesset and the little that is actually approved, including the Nation Law, has been so watered down as to have little practical consequence, other than its offensive symbolic nature. This, however, is intentional and is part of Netanyahu’s political playbook. He creates a sense among his voters, especially now in an election year, that it is “them,” the leftists, against “us,” the patriotic right, and that he is the only leader in Israel today capable of addressing the nation’s challenges.

To his supporters, only “stinking leftists” could possibly oppose the Nation Law, which enshrines in statute what everyone has long known, that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. To oppose it, as Netanyahu knew the Left would have to do, is to be placed in the position of appearing to deny Israel’s raison d’être, the very essence of Zionism, and is, as he obliquely indicates, semi-traitorous. The law may rile some abroad, including the Jewish community, and this is unfortunate from his perspective, but  since it does not change anything in practice, and diaspora Jews do not vote anyway, he believes that the price is acceptable. Conversely, the law rallies his base, which is why he knowingly pressed for its passage now, as a winning issue for the upcoming elections. Nothing is to stand in the way of Netanyahu’s re-election for a fifth term, which will make him Israel’s longest-serving premier ever.

Israel’s national culture has always been geared to the short-term, the immediate future, and so far it has worked for the most part. So though it may seem almost unimaginable to most foreign observers, the reality is that life in Israel today is good. As to the future, “yehiye tov.” Hey, why not?

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After Union, the Deluge

Collapse: Europe After the European Union

by Ian Kearns

Biteback Publishing, 2018, 320pp., $18.95

The British policy expert Ian Kearns, a founder of the European Leadership Network and erstwhile advisor to the Secretary General of NATO, couldn’t be much more of a European. His shockingly pessimistic book, Collapse: Europe After the European Union, begins by running a large flag of Euro-patriotism up a tall mast: “The EU, it has always seemed to me, is a gift from one generation of Europeans to another and a signpost we ignore at our peril. . . .the path to a better life runs through European unity. To head in the other direction is to flirt with hell.” The rest of the book endeavors to prove, insistently and with escalating horror, how hellish that will be.

Kearns thinks the European Union will collapse, hence the title. A great deal has to go right for it to survive—and thus, very little has to go wrong for it to fall, its structures brought down in a domino effect of economic and political contagion. In an interview with me, he says that he’s “75 percent convinced that the euro will collapse in the next ten years” and that the euro is “a sitting duck waiting for the next crisis.” And if the euro collapses, the European Union will follow suit—bereft of purpose, its central mechanism for integration destroyed.

For a Europhile, this prospect is a powerfully painful one. His book reflects that, for though Kearns has been an academic, this book is more polemical than even-handed. It is an urgent, bracing, and at times angry catalogue of the European Union’s weaknesses: of its promises left unfulfilled, like the European army promised 60 years ago; of measures pledged to save the euro after its near-death experience in 2009 but left underdeveloped; of a political class too constrained by electoral considerations and partisan dogma to deal with the rise of populist challengers in Hungary, Poland, and now Italy. And of course, there is the Union’s inability to deal with the most visible cause of anger: mass, uncontrolled migration from Africa and the Middle East.

Kearns rightly sees economic mismanagement as the primary driver of anti-EU skepticism. Considering the bank shocks that shook the continent, he writes that the “politicians in charge at the time like to describe what happened as a banking crisis pure and simple. They are duplicitous in doing so. It was a banking crisis that took place in a regulatory context for which the political class, collectively, was responsible. Many banking executives and board members also behaved appallingly, either turning a blind eye to what they knew were deeply flawed lending practices or, worse, not understanding what they were in the first place.”

When reading Kearns’s strictures, it’s important to grasp what a prison the euro can be for some EU member states. As the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik writes, “it represents a treaty commitment from which there is no clear exit within prevailing rules of the game.” The Financial Times chief economic commentator Martin Wolf wrote in June that “the euro has been a failure. This does not mean it will not endure or that it would be better if it disappeared. The costs of a partial or complete break up are far too great. It means that the single currency has failed to deliver economic stability or a greater sense of a European identity. It has become a source of discord.” That is, it shouldn’t have been created, but now that it’s here you can’t escape without making matters worse.

The European Union’s richer states, notably Germany, with the European Central Bank (ECB) and with some help from the IMF, did give life support to the worst-hit state, Greece. But, writes Kearns, the debt repayment schedule dictated by Germany was widely thought to be impossible. He sees Germany, then and now, as in the grip of an “ordoliberal” ideology which privileges austerity and balanced budgets, striving to avoid the moral hazard it associates with a looser monetary stance.

The ECB initially took the same line as Germany. Kearns writes that “it totally overstepped the mark in terms of the legitimate role of a central bank and insisted on telling elected European governments what to do with taxpayer funds, while implicitly threatening to expel them from the single currency if they did not comply. In doing so, it was supported by pretty much the whole Eurozone policymaking elite, which insisted there was no alternative.” It is here—in the foreclosing of domestic politics, the rendering of any economic debate among parties of the Left and Right futile—that Kearns locates the great danger to the Union’s states.

Using Ireland as an example, Kearns explains how on the morning of November 18, 2010, the governor of the Irish Central Bank, Patrick Honohan, claimed on an interview with the Morning Ireland radio program that outflows of foreign funds from Irish banks had made large-scale support essential—and that a rescue loan from the European Financial Stability Fund would be available. The Irish finance minister Brian Lenihan had balked at asking for a loan “to avoid what he described as a Greek-style humiliation.” But once Honohan had gone public about a possible banking collapse, rejecting assistance would have sparked panic and a bank run. So Ireland applied for the loan and “was subjected to the same troika treatment as Greece.” A central banker, in concert with the “European Union elite,” had forced the hand of an elected government.

Kearns worries that a banking crisis—in 60-million population Italy, not in 5-million population Ireland—is one of several “triggers” which could cause an EU-wide breakdown. Italy’s banks had shed some of their debt under the previous center-left government, which more or less faithfully conformed to an imposed regime of austerity, and suffered for it by losing half its vote share in this March’s elections. But those reforms are not enough.  Were a banking crisis to develop, Italy would require urgent support from other European states to avoid serious economic turmoil, but that support may be hard to come by: “Taxpayers elsewhere in Europe, and their political leaders, would not want to stump up additional support to help resolve and recapitalize Italian or other banks they consider to have been badly, irresponsibly or in some cases corruptly managed.”  The Italian state would be the only backstop, and could only assist by taking on even more debt, adding to its enormous GDP-to-debt ratio of 130 percent, and raising the spectre of a default.

Italy supplies another of Kearns’s “triggers”—though he did not know it at the time he wrote the book. Between printing and publication, his fear that the government of a core EU member state would fall to populists came true: the Five Star Movement and the Lega (League), two very different parties that nonetheless agreed on populist economic programs and stopping immigration, came together to form a coalition.

The most powerful figure, the Lega’s leader Matteo Salvini, who took the post of Interior Minister, is among those—like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the former adviser to President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon—with a strong interest in building an “Illiberal International.” He has long predicted the collapse of the euro, and is skeptical about Italy’s EU membership. In late July, he welcomed Britain’s plan to leave the Union, saying that Britain could rely on Italy to be a “friend” during talks with the European Union, and that Prime Minister Theresa May needed to “impose herself” on the European Parliament: “My experience in the European parliament tells me you either impose yourself or they swindle you.”

The greatest external enemy to the Union is a Russia led by Vladimir Putin, who sees the West as intent on destabilizing his regime and thus is dedicated to getting his punches in first. Kearns sees Russia as committed to the European Union’s destruction, a commitment that’s been bolstered by the Kremlin’s grasp of social media and all the damage it can do. Drawing on his experience at NATO, he claims that “Putin understands the use of these media better than many in the west”:

Russian strategy seems to be informed by a very acute understanding of the European Union’s own weaknesses. Putin knows that the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent sovereign debt crisis in the euro area caused economic chaos across the EU. He knows that that crisis contributed to the biggest questioning of the viability, credibility and legitimacy of the liberal order and Western market economies since the 1930s. He knows it weakened the ability of European states to invest in their own defence. . . Putin has seen an opportunity. Illiberal forces have come to the fore and Russian policy has been designed to help, encourage and profit from them. If they can be encouraged and even financed to disrupt EU and NATO unity, then the EU and NATO can be weakened and perhaps even brought to the point of disintegration, empowering Russia in the process and possibly delivering to it the sphere of influence in eastern Europe it has long desired.

The largest threat to NATO now, incredibly and still inconceivably for some, is from the President of the United States. He presents such a threat in substantial part because of the Europeans themselves. All, with the partial exceptions of the United Kingdom and France, have relied on the United States for protection at very little cost to themselves. Trump is correct to observe that Germany, with a budget surplus last year of €36.6 billion (over one percent of its €3.26-trillion GDP), could easily afford to take its defence expenditure from 1.2 percent of GDP to the 2 percent NATO target. Kearns writes that “without firm U.S. support, a destabilised Europe that has underinvested in its own defence capability for decades will lie dangerously vulnerable and unable to act even when circumstances demand it.”

Still, even if Germany and other states did up their defense spending as promised, Trump may not be satisfied. All U.S. Presidents have tried to make the case for more spending, usually in vain, but Trump is another piece of work.  As Adam Garfinkle has asked, “What. . . .can we make of a man who, speaking on behalf of the U.S. government, insults his alliance hosts in their own country and continent, and stands with a mendacious authoritarian Russian leader against his own allies and indeed his own intelligence services?”

What Kearns makes of him is this: “Trump’s world is a world of raw power politics unconstrained by rules, and of transactional bilateral deals wherever they can deliver narrow advantage. There is no concept of wider American leadership responsibility, no sense of global leadership in defence of a more enlightened sense of self-interest. From the economic sphere to efforts to avoid major power conflicts, Trump rejects the ideas and institutions developed at the mid-point of the twentieth century as an answer to protectionism and devastating war.” Kearns believes that, while Putin must be resisted by a counter display of credible force and a closer focus on his use of media and propaganda tools, Trump must be dealt with through appeals to reason—and if that fails, as seems likely, then through discussions and lobbying with other parts of the U.S. establishment: the military and Congress among others.

Kearns goes so far as to say that, should the breakdown in the Union happen as he foresees it, “even peace cannot be taken for granted”: a very grand statement, but one which, when pressed in an interview, he repeats. “When you have nation-states, hard-pressed, a multipolar world with no agreement on spheres of influence, then the traditional European problem of how to manage the balance of power returns. We should hope for peaceful resolution. But historically, Europe has a bad record.”

Advice for how to deal with the frightening dystopia Kearns imagines is, by contrast, scanty—a few pages on Purgatory after a long treatment of Inferno. His recommendations include cracking down on the tax evasion and corruption rife in many parts of the Union, including the Commission; strengthening external borders against migrants; dropping any plans for a fiscal union and making clear that these are matters for national governments; completing the banking union; and greatly increasing aid to and involvement in the poorer countries of Africa—a case most strongly made by the Oxford economist Paul Collier. A European Monetary Fund should be established, but one which doesn’t order the recipients of its assistance to follow rigidly austere rules; NATO should be further strengthened, sanctions on Russia kept in place and democratic practice in the European Union deepened, so that it might “fight more forcefully for the values it is supposed to embody.”

If the hour for such measures has come (or is overdue), cometh also the man, or woman? “What the moment actually requires,” Kearns writes, “is a set of politicians who can make the reforms that are necessary and politically possible.” I asked him over the phone if he thought these leaders existed, or were in the wings. “Europe needs politicians who can understand what’s required,” he said. “I believe in politics and in the capacities of politicians. But the politicians now don’t seem able to articulate the challenges we face. They are not engaged with the trend of current events.”

So that’s a no. Kearns believes the euro will fail, and that its failure will cause the Union to crumble. The book recalls an old New Yorker cartoon, where one man is saying to another at a cocktail party, “Of course I don’t go all the way with him, but his logic is impeccable.” I do go much of the way with him, but cannot share his belief that French President Emmanuel Macron has the right strategy for the European Union—that is, much closer integration. Very few EU members now want that; indeed, the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, explicitly rejected it earlier this year.

The European Union can only now continue as a two-speed entity, with those few states that wish to proceed, through integration, to something like a federal state allowed to follow that path. For the rest, as Rutte emphasized, the better bet is to retain sovereignty in the national legislatures and governments within a common market and a structure in which a myriad of bilateral agreements (as on climate change and defense) are encouraged. It’s an approach which might have obviated the need for Brexit, a process damaging to both the United Kingdom and the rest of the European Union.

Kearns’s reasoning, impeccable or not, carries weight, based as it is on his experience of working in EU and NATO forums, and his clear-eyed observations of the events and movements that have reshaped the continent’s politics. His book is an unsparing account of the bleak state Europe is in—and it carries conviction.

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