Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 8

Who (or Whom) to Shoot?

Several years ago, after reading some of my writings, an elderly Chinese woman who had lived through both the Japanese occupation and Mao’s regime, told me, “You would have been shot on the second day of the revolution.” I took this as a compliment. Although I am not an important person and therefore not a candidate for execution on the first day, my writings seemed sufficiently interesting and provocative to her to set me in front of a firing squad on the second day. She confirmed this when I asked her, “Are you sure you don’t mean the third day?” And she replied, “Yes. The second day.”

But I also grew uneasy. Communist revolutions were long ago and far away, but we have our own revolution today, called political correctness (P.C.), which people dare not cross. The pride that comes from imagining oneself a martyr of consequence quickly disappears when execution becomes a real possibility. True, P.C.’s victims are not actually shot, but they are ruined in almost every way. If fired from work they find it hard to get another job. Only their closest friends will talk to them. Their accounts are sometimes scrubbed from social media. It is called being “cancelled,” but for all practical purposes they’ve been shot.

The question is, how long will our revolution last? In the past, my answer was ten years, 90 years, or 500 years. Ten years if P.C. was just a fashion. Ninety years if it represented a true political ideology, like Soviet Marxism, which lasted 90 years. Or 500 years if it was the basis for a new civilization, as Catholicism was in the Middle Ages. Because ten years have already passed (P.C. began in the early 1990s), P.C. must be one of the latter two.

P.C. overlaps with much of the Soviet experience. Maxim Gorky, a literary father of the Soviet regime, said, “If the enemy does not surrender, he is wiped out.” P.C. shares this absolutist spirit. People must surrender completely to political correctness or they will be cancelled. Even if they surrender only 99 percent, but still try to hide one percent of their souls from the cause, they are worth destroying. For example, P.C. leaders recently tried to cancel the author J.K. Rowling, a progressive, when she defended a woman who was fired from her job for saying that a man cannot be a woman.

As in Soviet literature, certain ideological codewords are purposely placed throughout P.C. literature to cause readers to nod with approval. Academics, especially, travel the high road of P.C. culture. A recent Hunter College announcement for an art exhibit reads, “We seek a space in the contraction of budgets for generosity and presence. By engaging the ties of a coincidental community, the artists in this show lean into the negotiations of collectivity, production, friendship, and care.” There is not a single living line in this piece of writing, or in other pieces like it. Yet the purpose of such writing is not to enliven thought, but to firm up prescribed attitudes; thus, the writer need only seem to be alive. In the same vein, many academics today attend conferences, deliver long, boring speeches, and from time to time publish ponderous books and articles that no one reads—even the journal editors sometimes don’t bother to read them—for everyone knows in advance that they are bereft of original content and written in exact conformity with P.C. ideology. The writers of these works are zombie writers. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the political point is made.

True, some academics are very fine writers and adapt to the new language requirements to survive, as some Soviet writers did. Some academics simply have no talent for writing; they are the equivalent of Communist Party hacks who wrote tomes as thick as bricks and that no one read. Other academics pretend to have no talent for writing, to avoid trouble. Some pretend so well that they lose their talent forever.

P.C. film operates in the same fashion as Soviet film did. A positive hero is always opposed by a negative figure. In the Soviet case, the negative figure was typically a man with darting eyes and a fake smile who preferred moneymaking to fighting for the Motherland. In P.C. film the figure is usually an insensitive, hyper-masculine white male, lazy from an overabundance of white privilege or, alternatively, aggressive for the same reason.

But in important ways P.C. is not tracking the Soviet experience. All Communist regimes have an arc, just as all fascist regimes probably would have if they had not been destroyed in World War II. An inflection point is reached in a Communist regime’s middle age when the ideology is no longer believed in. People mouth the ideology just to get by. At the peak of the Cultural Revolution, for example, a Red Guard accosted my elderly Chinese friend and told her, “We know you did something wrong, and we know what it was. If you confess we’ll be lenient.” It was a trap. My friend smartly replied, “Yes, I have done something wrong. Can you tell me what it is? Because I want you to teach me how to be better.” The Red Guard was thrown into confusion because, in fact, my friend had done nothing wrong; he had simply been trying to get her to confess to something so he could punish her.

This occurred less than 20 years after the revolution in China, when the fires of zealotry still smoldered. Fifteen years later came the inflection point, and today China believes in capitalism more than in Marxism, although Marxism remains official ideology.

In contrast, in the United States, many zealots still fervently believe in P.C., and with no sign of wavering, 30 years into the revolution. The zealots lay traps for people. They police friends and neighbors—for example, bias response teams at colleges. They punish deviates with hungry conviction.

The case of Stalin is another example of how P.C. ideology has broken with past trends. For the first ten years after the Russian Revolution, Stalin played a major role in killing reactionaries. Twenty years later, after assuming total power, he grew more democratic in his approach, and killed both reactionaries and Communists. Indeed, given that he killed more Communists than reactionaries, he might fairly be called an anti-Communist. But he did his new killing not out of ideology—many of the people he purged were true believing Communists—but to consolidate power, because he enjoyed power for its own sake.

Similarly, P.C. leaders in our revolution’s first decade attacked more Republicans than Democrats. They used P.C. ideology as a partisan weapon—for example, striking Republican Governor George Allen for using the slur “macaca,” although it was unclear whether he even knew what the term meant, while leaving Democrat Jesse Jackson alone, despite his calling NYC “Hymie-town” and knowing full well that “Hymie” was a pejorative term for Jews. Thirty years later, they attack both sides in equal numbers, with Democratic senator Al Franken having been targeted for cancellation because of a boorish joke in which he pretended to grope someone. Other examples of cancellation on the political left include Professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College, who was chased away for having protested a one-day campus ban on white people, and Professors Erika and Nicholas Christakis at Yale, for having suggested that students be free to choose their own Halloween costumes rather than let college administrators decide. Rather than use P.C. as a screen to keep power for power’s sake, P.C. leaders “cancel” people across the political spectrum because they believe more than ever in their ideology’s righteousness. That they wipe out everyone today signifies not an inflection point but a ratcheting up of the fanaticism.

Deviations from the Soviet experience continue. Thirty-six years after the Revolution and immediately after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev initiated the “Thaw,” and condemned Stalin’s excesses. In our P.C. world, no “thaw” is even on the horizon. If anything, America’s major institutions, including big business, are doubling down on a P.C. creed that sweeps both the innocent and the guilty into the same net. Khrushchev also began a process of rehabilitation after Stalin. Almost a million Russians, or a third of the politically repressed, were recognized as innocent and called “comrades who became victims of arbitrariness,” in the effort to restore some semblance of justice. Although the same amount of time has passed since our revolution began, no such rehabilitation is under consideration. Some “cancelled” people have tried to make a comeback, such as the comedians Louis C.K. and Roseanne Barr, but they are very much on their own. Nor is there any apparatus to punish those who too aggressively “canceled” people for the most minor ideological infractions. At least in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, some of the vicious attackers were really punished.

No, it looks as if P.C. ideology signifies the dawn of a new civilization after all, one that may last half a millennium. As in the Middle Ages, and for a long time to come, Americans will remain victims to the persecutions of P.C. authority. They will be badgered by angry thought leaders. Some people will be hunted from place to place. Their books will be banned, and even burnt. In the Middle Ages, it was heretical to say that three, rather than four, nails were used to crucify Christ, or that a Roman soldier pierced Christ with a spear on the left side rather than on the right. So will it be that for hundreds of years, otherwise decent Americans will be cancelled, permanently, for, say, absentmindedly and in a moment of unthinking haste, uttering in place of the phrase “people of color” its…contraction.

Indeed, a TV weatherman was recently cancelled for accidentally mispronouncing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last name. The weatherman protested his innocence; he had pronounced Dr. King’s name correctly thousands of times before, he pleaded; he had simply been tongue-tied for a brief moment; the sound that had accidentally emanated from his mouth approximated a slur that he had never intended, he cried. But his plea fell on deaf ears. Now, his one and only life on this earth is ruined.

P.C. is more than just an ideology. It is establishing the basis for a new and permanent system of existence where all political error is sought out, divined, and punished. In all this, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or to shudder. It is like getting shot for wrongly using the word “who” instead of “whom.”

The post Who (or Whom) to Shoot? appeared first on The American Interest.

Here Comes Trouble

Sometimes it’s possible—even easy—to see trouble coming. And sometimes it’s not.

It was easy a month ago, here in Singapore, to see what the coronavirus would probably do to U.S. and global markets and politics when it showed up for real, because we here on the fringe of Asia were at least a month psychologically advanced over most people in the United States and Europe. When I read U.S. media now, it reminds me of the local Singaporean fare five or six weeks ago. Where to get a surgical mask. How otherwise not to touch your face when you find them all sold out, along with hand sanitizer. What the symptoms are. Who is most at risk. Should we travel, and if so how and where and where not. Panic buying. (And hey, what is it with the runs on toilet paper?) It’s pretty humbling to realize that that for all the instantaneous information technology we have at our disposal and how fast news travels these days, people stateside are just about as slow-witted and deep into their own navels as ever.

But sometimes it’s not so easy to see trouble coming, because it requires dot-connecting—something we have become poor at lately. So everyone knows that there is right now acute mayhem, heartbreak, and worse—Chechen-style deliberate migratory genocide, actually—going on in Idlib province. Everyone knows, too, that the virus is spreading into Europe, and from Iran into the Middle East. So why hasn’t it become obvious and well-understood that if even1 percent of the would-be million refugees likely to soon spill into Turkey are contagious with the coronavirus—all despite Turkish government and military efforts to prevent their flight—and then if even some manage to get into the Balkans from Turkey, and from there elsewhere into the European Union, this will make the public health crisis in Europe vastly worse?

Time matters with this pandemic. China has managed to flatten the infection curve after an admittedly shaky start. That buys time for others to get their testing, quarantine, care, and eventually vaccine house in order. But the explosion of the virus out of Idlib would undo that purchase of time in a trice. Why is no one in the mainstream press even mentioning this, or asking government officials about it?

Of course, if this happens it will double back and bite hard into the Iranian and Russian populations too, populations whose governments have been aiding and abetting the Syrian government’s war crimes. Just as good deeds do not go unpunished, so do bad deeds. The road to hell, once wrote Saul Bellow, is paved by the same contractor who paves all the other roads. But that’s really very little comfort, for the populations of Iran and Russia are as innocent as the refugees of Idlib. Chances are that many Iranians and Russians will become quite angry about this, with what political consequences no one can predict.

There is a special kind of trouble that is hard to see not only because people are distracted or not paying attention. To see trouble coming from a greater distance, you need to step back to get perspective from history. That’s an acquired skill, and few acquire it. That goes for today’s American political class in spades—arguably the most historically oblivious great power political classes of all time.

Some are now worried that globalization itself is at risk and that recovery from the virus and the associated economic swoon will not be a simple V-shaped bounce-back—or maybe not much of a bounce-back at all. They are right to worry. It has happened before.

The first age of globalization—the first Gilded Age some call it—lasted from roughly the late 1870s to August 1914. It was a time of many magnificent technological advances—the telegraph, the electric dynamo, machine-tool advances par excellance, and much more.

It was a time of rapidly expanding global trade, broadly-spread prosperity, and much optimism. But it was also a time of expanding inequality and hardship for some despite the eclipse of acute poverty for many more.

It was a time of both internal and international migration on a large scale, which created new forms of urban landscape creep, gang violence, and a lot of reactionary bigoted politics. It was hence a dislocated time of uncertainty and anxiety, which caused substance abuse epidemics—alcoholism, in particular—and spike in “deaths of despair.”

It was a time of great power competition for resources and prestige, then in the form of colonial territorial expansion in the less-advanced parts of the world.

It was also a time of radical rejection among small minorities of the new trends—a spate of terror assassinations by anarchists, the rise of militant egalitarian movements and radical anti-market ideologies.

And it was a time when vast sudden accumulations of new-technology-driven wealth and power by individuals and corporations—whom Teddy Roosevelt once called “the malefactors of great wealth”—fed the plutocratization of market capitalism and hence justified much of the criticism being thrown at it.

Any of this sound familiar? Now face future-forward, and listen again.

All this taken together started a war, a very large and destructive war. At the end of the war came the Spanish Flu epidemic. After the mere eight-year interlude of the Roaring Twenties, the collapse of the international economic order continued its dive, and with it, the rickety political order assembled after the end of the Great War. The aging architects of the post-Versailles era didn’t understand the new social and political landscape, and many of them, still shell-shocked from the war, took to engaging in magical thinking, epitomized by the fanciful Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928.

Above all, they did not understand what it meant to have been born in Europe in the 1880s, to have grown to maturity in one of the most optimistic times in history, only to have the rug pulled out from under that generation’s feet, creating a whole continent-wide cohort of frustrated and angry young declassé men and women. Benito Mussolini was born in 1883. Adolf Hitler was born in 1889. The famous Davies J-Curve theory of revolutionary upheaval could not have been more spot-on; too bad Davies and most others thought to apply it mainly to near-term and future leftist upheavals, not to those of the reactionary, romantic fascist kinds that had gone before.

History does not repeat itself, but, as many have suggested, it does rhyme. The markets will recover, one way or another, from the coronavirus pandemic. Maybe it won’t be a sharp V-recovery, but it will recover, for a while at least.

But if the democratic statesmen of the next twenty years do not take the full measure of the plutocratic distortions of the American and global economy and fix them; and if they do not grasp the political implications of the ugly, scarred mindsets of a frustrated and abused generation once come into maturity, they will not see the real trouble that may be coming, yet again, to a planet very near all of us.

The post Here Comes Trouble appeared first on The American Interest.

Wars of Religion

“We are ready to die for our church and that is what we are demonstrating tonight.” This provocative statement was given by Andrija Mandić, the leader of the opposition in the Montenegrin Parliament, on the eve of the recent passage of a controversial law on religious property in the country. This law stipulates that the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC), the largest religious institution in Montenegro, must be able to prove ownership of the properties that it currently holds dating back to the pre-1918 era of Montenegrin independence in order to avoid these properties potentially being seized by the Montenegrin government.

Mandić’s seemingly hyperbolic statement was accompanied by forceful action. On the night of the vote, Mandić and legislators from his pro-Serb political bloc Democratic Front (DF) hurled firecrackers and tear gas canisters at their colleagues while the vote was taking place, and attempted to destroy the microphones that were being used during the proceedings. This incident resulted in the arrests of 22 people, including Mandić and 17 other DF members of parliament. 

The dramatic events surrounding the passage of this law prefigured the slew of protests, many of them organized and led by Serbian Orthodox clergy, that would soon occur. Since the law’s passage in late December, tens of thousands of SOC supporters have been gathering at least twice a week throughout Montenegro to demonstrate against the law. The fact that so many people have taken to the streets in support of the SOC is no small feat given that Montenegro is a small country with a population of just under 630,000.

On a surface level, the politics of the opposition to this law are fairly straightforward. DF as a political bloc is comprised of four parties, three of which are Serb-dominated parties that advocate for Serbo-Montenegrin unionism and work to actively undermine the Montenegrin state. Additionally, the SOC’s interests in seeing this law rescinded are also understandable, given that it stands to lose property and potentially financial resources and parishioners in turn. 

However, things become more complicated when attempting to understand the motivations behind the Serbian government’s role in this crisis. Serbian state-run media outlets have been actively promoting a narrative claiming that Montenegro’s Serbian population is under attack and being discriminated against. This narrative has been embraced by many Serbian nationalists, exemplified by the burning of the Montenegrin flag during an attack on the country’s embassy in Belgrade. 

This incident is one of several examples of Serb nationalists across the Balkans adopting the cause of the Serbian Orthodox Church against the Montenegrin state. Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb member of Bosnia’s presidential body and an avid Serb secessionist, stated that without the SOC “there is no freedom for the Serbian people.” Backing up his words of support for the SOC with action, Dodik recently went so far as to block a state visit to Bosnia from Montenegrin President Milo Đukanović over the church dispute. It is clear that this matter is not solely about religion, but has also become a proxy issue for a wider cultural and geopolitical conflict.

The close ties between the SOC and the Serbian government provide some context for the intervention. In a recent interview with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Irinej said that “the church looks after its affairs and the state too. In our history, it has always been best when symphony ruled between the state and the church.” He also went on to say that the church has a “full understanding” of the state’s needs and that many of the church’s issues are “resolved by the state.” 

The SOC’s concern about the religious property law is not solely that it may lose property, but also that if the Montenegrin government seizes SOC property it will then give that property to the SOC’s ecclesiastical rival, the Montenegrin Orthodox Church (MOC). The MOC was established in 1993 and mirrors the SOC in almost every way, except for the fact that it is largely unrecognized by the wider Orthodox Christian community. 

Despite this non-recognition, the SOC views the MOC as a direct challenge to its authority. The most recent data indicate that a little over 70 percent of Montenegro’s population identifies as Orthodox Christian, with roughly two-thirds identifying with the SOC and the rest with the MOC. Irinej has made the Serbian church’s feelings about its Montenegrin counterpart abundantly clear, having gone so far as to the call it “a parasynagogue or a sect devoid of divine grace.”

There are striking similarities between this case and the formal schism between the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) that occurred in late 2018. The months leading up to this event were marked by significant tension, exemplified by Russian President Vladimir Putin claiming that this divorce could turn into “heavy conflict, if not bloodshed.” This thinly-veiled threat followed several years of armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine, specifically Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war in the Donbas, which has resulted in around 13,000 deaths to date. 

Similar to the church-state dynamic in Serbia, the close ties between the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church are evident. The Putin regime has become notorious for its use of Orthodox Christianity as a tool for projecting its soft power abroad and has framed itself as the defender of Christianity and traditional values. Additionally, while the Serbian Patriarch claims that it has never enjoyed greater symphony with the Serbian state than it does currently, the Russian Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Kirill has stated that for the first time in its history the Russian government treats the ROC as “an equal partner.”

Also, like the conflict in the Balkans, the schism between the ROC and OCU sparked demonstrations and provoked nationalistic sentiments. During a December 2018 rally leading up to his unsuccessful reelection campaign, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko promised his supporters that they would have a church “without Putin . . . without Kirill . . . a church that doesn’t pray to the Russian state and the Russian army.” As with the Serbia-Montenegro ecclesiastical dispute, this one between Russia and Ukraine is part of a wider cultural and geopolitical conflict.

While it is apparent that religion can play a significant role in geopolitical conflicts and promote intense reactions from nationalists regardless of their country of origin, the question still remains: Why does it play such a role? The scholarship of the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm sheds some light on this matter. In his seminal work, Hobsbawm called religion “an ancient and well-tried method of establishing communion through common practice and a sort of brotherhood between people.” This sentiment echoes the work of his late colleague Benedict Anderson, who emphasized the crucial role that the so-called “religious community” plays in national identity formation. 

Notably, Hobsbawm specifically references the roles of the SOC and the ROC in their respective national contexts as exemplars of this phenomenon. He discussed how the former preserved the historical memory of the old Serbian kingdom “in daily liturgy of the Serbian church which had canonized most of its kings,” and how historically belonging to the Russian nation was understood as being synonymous “with being a ‘true believer’ or Orthodox.” 

It is worth clarifying that while Eastern Orthodoxy is the particular Christian sect being discussed here, it is not the only one that has been appropriated by political elites. For example, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban consistently invokes the country’s Roman Catholic roots to justify his conservative social and immigration policies, and the important role that evangelical Protestantism has played in modern American politics is well-documented. 

However, Eastern Orthodoxy is uniquely suited to have a fundamental role in national identity formation due to its autocephalic governance structures and the fact that each country has its own ecclesiastical institution. These institutions are governed exclusively at the national level by patriarchs at the head and tend to dominate a country’s religious landscape. This system stands in stark contrast with Roman Catholicism, which has a completely centralized and universal governance structure with the Pope as its leader, and Protestantism, which has no single centralized authority but rather numerous separate denominations that are institutionally disparate. 

The historically important role that both the SOC and ROC have played for the Serbian and Russian people respectively provides at least a partial explanation for the close ties that both of these institutions have with their national governments. Following the collapse of both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the political elites of newly-independent Serbia and Russia needed a compelling national narrative upon which to legitimize their statehood. 

The national churches of these countries filled that void. They were symbols of independence that predated communism, and were thus thought to have preserved the true essence of the nation throughout the communist era—hence their contemporary ties with their national governments. 

Such relationships work to confer moral legitimacy on the regime. A clear example from the Serbian Orthodox Church occurred this past October when it bestowed President Vučić with the Order of St. Sava, its highest honor, for “his active love for the mother church, unwavering commitment to the unity of the Serbian people, and the tireless struggle for the integrity of Serbia.” This mirrors when the Russian Orthodox Church presented President Putin with an award in May 2013 for supposedly making Russia “a powerful and strong country that has self-respect and is respected by others.”

The key role that religion plays in national identity formation and legitimizing political elites, along with Eastern Orthodoxy’s unique effectiveness in this process, makes it clear why the leaders of Montenegro and Ukraine desire the full autonomy of their own national churches. Đukanović has explicitly made this point, stating that “we are driven . . . by an indisputable need to complete the spiritual, state, and social infrastructure that will strengthen citizens’ awareness of their own identity.” 

The full independence of the Montenegrin and Ukrainian churches is not only understood to be a means of cementing the national identities of their respective countries’ citizens, but also as a way to counter the irredentism espoused by foreign ecclesiastical bodies. Again, Đukanović has explicitly made this point, calling the Serbian Orthodox Church “among the most important instruments used by the ideologists of a ‘Greater Serbia’ nationalism against Montenegro, against Montenegrin independence, against its national, cultural, and religious identity.” In fact, Đukanović has framed this entire ordeal as “a continuity of the (attempted) destruction of Montenegro and obstruction of its intentions to continue its path to . . . European and Euro-Atlantic integrations.” 

Likewise, Poroshenko framed the importance of the independence of the OCU as an element of Ukraine’s ongoing conflict with Russia: “Unity is our main weapon in the fight against the Russian aggressor. This question goes far beyond the ecclesiastical. It is about our finally acquiring independence from Moscow.” While treating ecclesiastical disputes as matters of national security may seem extreme to some observers, it is only logical given that the influence of the SOC and ROC are part and parcel with Serbia and Russia’s programs of irredentism against their neighbors. 

The obvious similarities between the SOC-MOC and ROC-OCU disputes, which until now had been confined to the remarks of observers, have begun to inspire action by some of the parties involved. Metropolitan Onufriy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate—a constituent part of the Russian Orthodox Church—recently led a mass demonstration in Podgorica against the religious property law in support of the “persecuted” Serbian Orthodox Church. Onufriy going to Montenegro in order to lead this protest is a clear indication of the Russian church siding with the Serbian one.

The Russian Orthodox Church’s decision to make common cause with its Serbian counterpart has significant implications. On the one hand, it reveals a certain level of anxiety and vulnerability. This decision is a recognition of the precedent that would be cemented if the Montenegrin church was to in fact become the dominant spiritual force within Montenegro and eventually gain wide recognition within the Orthodox world. The Russian church took a blow to its legitimacy as the de-facto leader of Orthodoxy when the Patriarch of Constantinople decided to grant autocephaly to the OCU, an episode that it does not want to see repeated by another breakaway church.

Despite the defensive posture that the ROC seems to be taking with Onufriy’s trip to Montenegro, it can also be seen as a geopolitical maneuver in multiple ways. For one, it builds upon the already strong ties between the Russian and Serbian governments, and further plays into Russia’s narrative as the leader of the Slavic Orthodox nations. Moreover, it is a continuation of Russia’s effective soft power strategy in the Balkans, central to which is a strong affinity for Russia amongst the Serbian people.

The geopolitics of this move are even more evident when looking beyond the Russian-Serbian relationship and putting it in the context of Russia’s recent history in Montenegro. The relationship between the Montenegrin and Russian governments has been frayed ever since Russia supported a coup in Montenegro in 2016 in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the country from joining NATO, for which two GRU agents and two Montenegrin opposition politicians were recently found guilty by a Montenegrin court.

While this failed coup attempt is undoubtedly the most outlandish example of Russian malign influence in Montenegro, it is hardly the only one. For the past several years, Montenegro has been a hub of illicit finance from Russian oligarchs and various money laundering schemes at the hands of their patronage networks. Additionally, Montenegro to this day is a target of Russian disinformation campaigns aimed at creating public disorder, weakening trust in the country’s institutions, and sowing chaos, the latter of which is the hallmark of the Kremlin’s strategy in the region.

None of the above should be understood as an endorsement of the utilization of religion by political elites to cement national identity. On the contrary, anytime that a single identity marker, such as religion, ethnicity, or language, is promoted as the defining feature of a citizenry, it risks alienating and implicitly condoning mistreatment of any minority groups within the polity that do not share the identity marker. In general, civic national identities are preferable as they tend to be more inclusive.

Nor is any of the above an endorsement of the use of religion by political elites to give their regimes moral legitimacy. All the leaders I’ve discussed have presided over notoriously corrupt regimes with little regard for civil society or the rule of law. Such leaders often use religion as a cudgel to sure up support within their countries, even as they operate sophisticated and corrupt patronage networks at the expense of the very citizens to whom they use religion to appeal.

Despite all of this, the fact remains that both Montenegro and Ukraine should be entitled to have their own independent and recognized national churches as a matter of territorial sovereignty. That is not to give carte blanche approval to however Montenegrin and Ukrainian leaders may use these national churches in support of their respective regimes, but it is to say that these countries are just as entitled to their own national ecumenical institutions as Serbia and Russia are. Montenegro and Ukraine are facing significant threats to their national security from irredentist forces either internally, in the case of the DF in Montenegro, or externally, in the case of Russia’s ongoing illegal occupation of Ukrainian territory. As long as this status quo persists, the geopolitical role of their ecumenical disputes will only grow in importance.

The post Wars of Religion appeared first on The American Interest.

An Unorthodox Partnership

Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy

Dmitry Adamsky

Stanford University Press, 2019, 376 pp., $30

During communist times, Orthodox churches collaborated across their institutional hierarchies with communist intelligence services. The declassification of files over the past three decades has revealed how stunningly close ties were between Church leadership and secret police in Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. This was the case too, of course, in Mother Russia itself, where Stalin himself established the Moscow Patriarchate in 1943 after executing tens of thousands of clergymen during the Great Purge of 1936-1938. All key positions in the Moscow Patriarchate were blessed by the Communist Party and controlled by the KGB, making the Russian Orthodox clergy into first-class collaborators with the secret police. Even though Orthodox churches across Eastern Europe never admitted to having collaborated on an institutional level, individual confessions by high-level clergy after 1989, along with declassified files, paint a different picture. The Romanian Council for the Study of the Archives of the Securitate—dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s notorious secret police—revealed that 89 clergy members of the Orthodox Church, including several archbishops, were active official collaborators.

That was then.

Today, across the entire region, Orthodox churches are on the rise. They are shaping societal narratives and national identities, involving themselves in state affairs and government policymaking. The Church’s climb up the new power ladder is taking place in fragile and emerging democracies, where corruption is often widespread, social capital scarce, and trust in public institutions slight. In Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia, for instance, the various national Orthodox churches rank among the top three most trusted institutions in their respective countries.

A cornerstone of liberal democracy—and for citizens of the European Union in particular—is an arm’s length separation of church and state. But what happens when the church becomes the state—or vice versa? The rise of the Orthodox churches as political actors thus raises a number of important questions about democratic development in key parts of transitioning Europe.

This is why Dmitry Adamsky’s book, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy, is important. Using Russia as a case study, Adamsky digs deep into the complex state of play between church and state. With roughly 120 million Orthodox adherents and influence extending far beyond its borders, Russia is the natural choice for such a study. Adamsky’s narrower focus on, of all things, the relationship of the Church to the nuclear weapons industry and forces in Russia takes us on an unexpected, mind-bending, yet highly illuminating ride through 30 years of post-Soviet military-church relations. The Russian Orthodox Church’s expansion into and integration with Russia’s nuclear forces have given it a unique role in formulating and shaping narratives of Russian history, faith, and patriotism in the post-Cold War era.

Adamsky’s story begins in the late 1980s, where he shows us how economic decline, ideological exhaustion, and a populace predisposed toward religiosity laid the groundwork for the rise of the Orthodox Church. This context allowed the Church to penetrate—arguably more deeply than at any time in the past century—the social and political spheres of Russia. Today, following an agenda articulated by the current leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, the Church defines itself as loyal to the state, regardless of political regime, in exchange for which the state grants it the right to weigh in on economic issues and other domestic and foreign affairs.

The currency that forms the basis for this church-state exchange is ideology. Traditional values are the cornerstone of what the Church promotes, which in effect emphasizes collective interests over individual rights, intolerance of religious minorities, women, and non-heterosexuals, and state intrusion into private life. Western liberal values, by and large, are anathema. Adamsky notes that “the Russian Orthodox Church [has long] defined the essence of Russian Civilization by contrasting it to the West. . . . Russia is presented as seeking peace and cooperation, the West as reluctant to accept its uniqueness and respect its needs.” Although Adamsky’s book focuses on the post-Soviet era, the traditional values narrative is something the Russian Church promoted throughout the Cold War period. It is a narrative promoted energetically today by former KGB man and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Adamsky argues that “the quest of the Russian people and of the Russian strategic community to reinvent themselves ideologically following the Soviet collapse resulted in . . . the phenomenon of national and professional myth making.” The Church makes use of its power to imprint itself onto Russian national identity and history. By positing the alignment of divine intentions with all Russian state actions, the Church demonstrates to the faithful “that throughout Russian history no battle had been waged without the participation of the church.” The narrative of church-state communion offers a popular way out of the sense of defeat Russians experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thus, the Church emerges “as the main custodian of Russian culture, history, and values.”

Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy explores this church-state dynamic by means of a deep read of the history of the Russian nuclear forces. The vignettes in this book are colorful, compelling, and at times almost mystical in character. Perhaps most vivid of all is the tale of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, the most popular elder monk of Russia in the 19th century. Almost all Orthodox countries have figures like this in their recent history—ascetic monks who become revered spiritual leaders due to popular belief in their miraculous healing powers and prophecies. Prayers to Saint Seraphim were said to have the power to enable women to conceive sons. Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and the Czarina tested this proposition, ordering his canonization in 1903. During the ceremony, writes Adamsky, “the tsar carried a reliquary containing Seraphim’s bones, while the tsarina stood and prayed.” A year later, the Czarina miraculously gave birth to their first heir.

Less than two decades later the Soviets made monumental efforts to erase Saint Seraphim from public memory. The saint’s remains were taken and most likely thrown away by the Soviets. The Sarov monastery built over Seraphim’s cell became first a political prison, then a factory for the production of missiles, later the site of the fabrication of the first Soviet nuclear bomb, and finally the core of what would become the first and most important of the Soviet Union’s top-secret nuclear towns.

By 1991, this backbone of the Soviet nuclear capacities, built over the rubble of the Sarov monastery, was itself falling apart. The end of the Cold War brought euphoria in the West but a sense of desperation in Russia, while the poverty and sense of irrelevance hit the nuclear forces perhaps hardest of all. It was at this point that the Church stepped in to save the nukes. Then-Metropolitan, now Patriarch Kirill “miraculously” discovered St. Seraphim’s remains and paraded them through Russia in a series of “ecstatic ceremonies” that resonated in a spectacular way with the public. The pilgrimage of Saint Seraphim ended in the Church’s (carefully preplanned) return to the secret nuclear town. For the public, the Church’s grand entrance into the secret city—once the symbolic heart of the power of the Communist Party and KGB—was nothing short of a miracle. Meanwhile the Church took upon itself the burden of restoring the centrality of Russia’s nuclear weapons community. Saint Seraphim thus became the patron saint of Russia’s nuclear triad. Ever since, his iconography can be found on virtually every office wall, nuclear-tipped missile, nuclear-capable jet, and ballistic missile submarine.

As Saint Seraphim became the face of nuclear Orthodoxy, the Church has become the strongest supporter of a foreign policy backed by nuclear threat. Today, Russia’s official nuclear strategy is first strike; Moscow now reserves the right to respond to a conventional attack with a nuclear one and is readying constitutional changes to assert the supremacy of national law over all international regulations or obligations. According to Adamsky, many of these changes can be traced directly to policies promoted by the Church: the centrality of the nuclear forces, the primacy of Russian interests above those of other countries, and the narrative of war between Western and traditional values.

The Church has popularized its narrative by publishing a book-length catalogue’s worth of works ranging from histories to hagiographies to novels and by producing expensive films that flagrantly falsify history and build myths. Russian schools have introduced religious education. And through educational programs targeting both youth and adults, the “Russian World” has come to be defined not simply as a place where people are Russian, but a larger space in which people “speak Russian, think Russian, and act Russian”—that is, in sync with traditional values. Though this concept has evolved and grown over time, it has reached its zenith in President Putin’s statements to the effect that the clash between the United States and Russia emanates not just from different views of geopolitics, but also from contrasting cultures and values, with America’s “individualism and materialism” set against Russia’s “collectivism and spirituality.”

For the Russian state, the Church provides an important tool for supporting the state’s initiatives in the realm of family, motherhood, education, and social issues. Hence, the Church has become an alternative to—and will eventually become a replacement for—an independent Russian civil society. Adamsky traces this evolution through key meetings, interactions with, and statements by Russian leaders showing their evolution from committed young atheist socialists to pious senior officials and thinkers. He demonstrates how key Russian political figures have adopted religion as part of their public and private lives. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has publicly praised religious activity in Central and Eastern Europe and Syria as a useful foreign and security policy tool. Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has made the religious education of the military a policy priority and for the first time in 2015 made the sign of the cross when commanding Russia’s annual Victory Parade. Political and intellectual figures ranging from Kremlin adviser Vladislav Surkov to intellectuals Sergey Filatov and Yegor Kholmogorov to former nuclear industry minister Victor Mikhailov have become devout Christians. The Kremlin has adopted Ivan Ilyin’s and Alexander Dugin’s ideology, rejection of democracy, and advocacy of national authoritarianism and the merging of church and state.

In exchange for individual and collective affirmations of the role of the Church in the Russian state, the Russian Orthodox Church has rewritten history, turning Yuri Gagarin (the first human to travel to outer space) into a profound Orthodox believer and replacing criticism of Stalin’s prosecution of the Church with talk of his “sacred aura.” The Church has also brought new players into Russia’s political sphere: Prince and Saint Vladimir the Great (parallels with Vladimir Putin notwithstanding), the aforementioned Saint Seraphim (who approves of nuclear weapons from his heavenly vantage), and Saint Anastasiade (Russia’s patron saint of outer space).

By 2014, Patriarch Kirill was speaking of Russia’s past war efforts in religious tones. On the occasion of the centenary of the beginning of World War I, the Patriarch compared support for the “brotherly Serbian” people to the annexation of Crimea and the involvement of Russia in the Donbas war. Adamsky describes how the Church used local churches and clergy affiliated with Moscow across Central and Eastern Europe to “preach sympathy” for Kremlin policies and hostility to the Western liberal order. A year later, the Church participated in the Russian military’s activities in Syria. Today, Patriarch Kirill has called Russia’s involvement in the Syrian war “holy.”

Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy’s represents a valuable, albeit partial, analysis of Russian religion after the Soviet Union. The nuclear-church nexus is, as Adamsky freely admits, as unlikely as it is significant: significant in that Russia is by far the largest Orthodox country that went through a post-communist transition; and unlikely, arguably, because of the outcast status of the Church before the Soviet dissolution. Unfortunately, this is also where some of the shortcomings of the book lie.

Regional context is lacking. The Russian Orthodox Church, after suffering through decades of persecution and endless executions, had improved its relationship with the Soviet state by the late 1960s, lauded socialism, and collaborated with the KGB. It is also far from clear that the Church’s evolution after the Soviet breakup was in fact an unlikely one. Orthodox churches throughout Central and Eastern Europe had their own histories of persecution and collaboration with intelligence services prior to 1989. Furthermore, their rise from obscurity and deep relationship with their respective states is a pattern that has repeated across Eastern Europe. What makes the Russian case different is its scale, not its basic shape.

Indeed, the strategy adopted by the Russian Orthodox Church was common to all Orthodox churches in the Eastern space after 1989. By failing to contextualize the Russian case, Adamsky misses a key point: that national Orthodox churches in countries like Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Romania and Bulgaria have all undergone similar evolutions.

Nevertheless, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy offers rare view into a key power relationship in one of the biggest countries in the world: how the marriage of state and institutional religion has shaped a nation’s identity and worldview. Though its intended audience is small and its narrative dry at times, one can draw from its abundant detail a deep understanding of the rise of the world’s largest Orthodox church from the depths of official persecution to the heights of political power.

The post An Unorthodox Partnership appeared first on The American Interest.

Russia’s Battle for Memory and Justice

On the last weekend of February, more than 20,000 people marched in downtown Moscow to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of Boris Nemtsov, Russia’s former deputy prime minister and Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent. Chanting “Russia will be free” and “murderer out of the Kremlin,” demonstrators walked down the same path Nemtsov took for his last-ever march against Putin’s war on Ukraine in September 2014. The mood was somber but defiant, and the rally drew activists across the political spectrum: People who may not share much in ideology but believe in the right to voice one’s opinions free from intimidation, imprisonment—or murder. Nemtsov was one of the few leaders in Russia’s notoriously fragmented opposition who was able to bring squabbling factions to the table. He continues to do so, even in death.

The vigil was national; commemorative events marking the anniversary were held across Russia. In some places, including St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, the authorities tried to prevent the rallies from going ahead by initially denying permits, but perseverance from local organizers, and a realization that people would go anyway, forced them to compromise.

The Kremlin marked the anniversary in its own way. On February 27, five years to the day Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge in front of the Kremlin, Putin awarded the Order of Merit for the Motherland to Suleiman Geremeyev, a senator from Chechnya and the uncle of Ruslan Geremeyev, a suspected co-organizer of Nemtsov’s murder who was sanctioned last year by the U.S. government over his role in the crime. The keys to Senator Geremeyev’s hotel room were found in the apartment where the now-convicted gunmen had been staying. Lawyers for the Nemtsov family requested that he be questioned as part of the investigation, but just as with other high-ranking persons of interest—including Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Putin’s longtime security chief General Viktor Zolotov—the request was denied. Officially Geremeyev was decorated for his “legislative efforts.” According to the Russian parliament’s database, since 2015 he has not sponsored a single bill.

The impunity of the organizers and masterminds of Nemtsov’s murder was the focus of a long-awaited report delivered last month in Vienna by Margareta Cederfelt, vice president and special rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The 43-page document details various ways in which Russian authorities stonewalled the investigation and ensured that it did not go beyond the immediate perpetrators—including by preventing discussion of motive, refusing to release key evidence, and protecting high-level masterminds.

The OSCE’s conclusion was clear-cut: “[T]he main issue for addressing impunity is not the capabilities of Russian law enforcement, but political will.” In other words, it is not that Russian investigators are unable to find those culpable, it is that Russian authorities are not letting them. On two occasions, investigators tried to indict the junior Geremeyev in absentia for his role in the murder; both times, they were blocked on the personal orders of General Alexander Bastrykin, Putin’s university friend who now heads the Russian Investigative Committee.

One particular line of inquiry may explain such high-level interest. The OSCE report quotes extensively from the sworn testimony of Akhmed Zakayev, a former deputy prime minister of Chechnya whose sources in Kadyrov’s entourage had told him that Putin personally ordered the killing of Nemtsov while in Chechnya in December 2011. Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer for the Nemtsov family, delivered Zakayev’s testimony to the Investigative Committee. Unsurprisingly, not even a formal probe, was initiated.

What was surprising—revealing, even—was the response Cederfelt received from Russian authorities to her request for cooperation. Through an embassy cable, Russia’s foreign ministry informed the OSCE rapporteur that she will not get access to the case files on the Nemtsov murder because they contain information protected by the law “On State Secrets.” “There can only be one state secret here: the mastermind either lives in the Kremlin or visits there regularly,” tweeted Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled former oil magnate and Putin opponent.

International involvement is important not only for scrutinizing the Kremlin’s ongoing cover-up in the investigation, but also for countering its continuing attempts to erase the memory of Russia’s opposition leader. Last month, Prague became the fourth world capital—after Washington, Vilnius, and Kyiv—to designate a square for Boris Nemtsov in front of the Russian embassy. “Together we honor our collective Czech tradition of humanitarian justice,” Prague Mayor Zdeněk Hřib as he unveiled the new plaque. “Boris Nemtsov Square is also a reminder that human rights can’t be taken for granted . . . and that we must continuously work for them.”

One day, there will be a Nemtsov Square in Moscow—and the OSCE recommendation for “a new and full investigation into the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, clarifying what took place . . . and on whose orders” will be carried out by a Russian government interested in serving justice, not protecting the murderers. No one can say when that day will come. But the thousands of Russians who went to the streets last month are helping to bring that day a little closer.

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Europe’s Dying Center-Right

Last month, I ran as a candidate in the parliamentary election in Slovakia on the joint list of SPOLU, a center-right party of which I am a founding member, and the left-liberal Progressive Slovakia (PS). Both groups, members respectively of the European People’s Party (EPP) and Emmanuel Macron’s Renew Europe, are recent creations, founded in the fall and winter of 2017. We scored some successes last year when the coalition of the two won the European election with over 20 percent of the popular vote. PS’s nominee, the lawyer Zuzana Čaputová, also won the presidential race with a platform stressing rule of law and fairness. In the aftermath of the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírova, that agenda resonated strongly.

Since last summer, however, our support in the polls slowly declined, notwithstanding several resets to our campaign strategy. And in the parliamentary election in February, our coalition failed to cross the required 7 percent threshold needed to enter parliament. Slovaks did vote overwhelmingly against the ruling left-populist Smer, associated with the corruption and stasis of the past decade, and also rejected the lure of the growing neo-Nazi party of Marian Kotleba. Although we ran the most expensive and volunteer-heavy campaign in living memory, voters were equally uninspired by us. To understand the magnitude of the failure, note that we received essentially the same number of votes in this election (200,000) as we did in the European election last year (198,000). Yet the turnout in the European election was roughly a third of the turnout in the general election.

The disappointment prompted immediate post-mortems about the failures of our campaign. (Whether I was ever cut out for electoral politics is a separate question!) But there is another, more interesting side to the story, relevant to Europe’s center-right. As this election highlights, the space for moderate center-right politics is getting so narrow that there might be very little or no path forward for politics built around the traditional tenets of EPP parties that dominated Europe’s political landscape for decades.

It was not just us, SPOLU and Progressive Slovakia, that performed poorly in this election. Slovakia’s Christian Democrats (KDH), a long-time fixture of Slovak politics, failed to enter parliament for the second consecutive time. The newly built center-right party of former president Andrej Kiska, For the People, barely made it into parliament, in spite of the recognition that the party enjoyed by virtue of being headed by a former head of state.

The clear winner of the election was Igor Matovič and his anti-corruption movement Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO). Part Italy’s Cinque Stelle, part Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS), OĽaNO lacks formal party structures, a wide membership base, or a coherent ideology. Since its inception in 2010, its haphazard candidate lists included Catholic conservatives, anti-corruption activists, and B-list celebrities, many of whom went their own way once in parliament.

This time might be different since power is an effective glue. The mandate that Matovič received is large and gives him a lot of leeway to let the various factions pursue their agendas, from “locking thieves up,” to direct democracy, to restricting access to abortion. How exactly he will govern remains an open question. An effective crackdown on corruption would be welcome, even if OĽaNO’s platform has been mostly silent on policy details (unlike our peer-reviewed 244-page election manifesto). Also, the leader of the second party in the emerging governing coalition, the populist We Are Family, had prior and well-documented contacts with Slovakia’s mafia.

A pessimistic but plausible scenario for Slovakia involves heavy-handed attacks on the judiciary, law enforcement, and other independent institutions, much like in Poland. While there is an acute need to act to restore trust in the ability of government to deliver basic justice and fairness, the devil is in the detail. After all, the path of both Poland and Hungary toward authoritarianism was also paved by a partly genuine desire for a reckoning with the injustices and corruption of the past. Moreover, questions will inevitably be raised about Slovakia’s geopolitical allegiances. While SPOLU, KDH, and For the People—the three EPP parties that seemed recently the core of the future governing coalition—had unabashedly pro-EU and Atlanticist credentials, those who hold the cards after the election seem more ambivalent.

One of OĽaNO’s MPs accused the United States of seeking to “divide Slavic nations” and compared the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw-Pact armies to the post-1989 “invasion by the West.” We Are Family, meanwhile, campaigned jointly with Matteo Salvini’s Lega and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National ahead of the European election last year.

While Slovakia’s future trajectory under Matovič’s leadership is uncertain, one thing is not. This election was not kind to traditional center-right parties with broad memberships, detailed policy platforms, and clear commitments to Western alliances and the European project. To be sure, it came as a sore disappointment for our left-liberal coalition partner, Progressive Slovakia, too. Yet, their absence from parliament might provide a rallying cry for their natural constituency of highly educated voters in large cities, mobilized by environmental issues and questions of social and cultural liberalism, such as gay rights or abortion, which might come under scrutiny in coming months. In the Slovak context, it’s unclear if this elite liberal constituency will ever be large. Yet with clear goals and a degree of ideological coherence, it will be easier to maintain that constituency energized and united in the coming years than to nurture the looser coalition needed to keep a pluralistic and ecumenical center-right party afloat.

The prospects for the moderate center-right are no more encouraging in other European countries. In the Czech Republic, our partner party TOP09 is barely surviving. Hungary’s Fidesz has suffocated not only its competitors on the far right but also the possibility of any serious center-right challenger. Even in Poland, the large Civic Platform has been struggling, consistently trailing behind PiS by over 15 percentage points in the polls. On my recent trip to Sweden, I spoke to members of the Moderate Party, which I had long seen as a model for SPOLU, who saw no alternative other than abandoning the old tenets of free markets, internationalism, and a relatively open immigration policy in favor of a far more parochial and statist outlook. Otherwise, the argument went, the populist Sweden Democrats would continue to grow.

But seeking to steal the far right’s agenda is not without its risks, as France’s Les Républicains would attest. It seems to take a lot of luck and political skill to accommodate demands for tighter immigration controls and a “retaking of control” from supposedly unaccountable international bodies without resigning oneself to the more irresponsible versions of far-right politics. Austria’s Sebastian Kurz has proven adept at such balancing acts. Similarly, Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement with the EU suggested, at least for a moment, that nationalist impulses could be tamed. But whether those two examples are durable and provide lessons to center-right politicians elsewhere in Europe remains to be seen.

As of now, however, it is fair to say that the space between the cosmopolitan and progressive politics of the left, with its excesses, and the vulgar nationalism of the populist right is shrinking. That leaves those who want to preserve and defend globalization and Western alliances, without buying wholesale into the left’s agenda on economic or cultural issues, in an uncomfortable spot.

It is certainly possible that there is not much of an appetite for center-right policies among the voting public, and that people like me are simply on the wrong side of history. My own electoral defeat is certainly consistent with that hypothesis. But that makes the question of what the future holds for EPP, Europe’s largest family of political parties, all the more urgent. If it becomes increasingly impossible to lead broad and moderate tents of conservatives, classical liberals, rural voters, and businesspeople into winning elections, what will European politics look like in a decade or two? And it is equally reasonable to ask about the consequences of new policies being embraced on the center-right for electoral reasons—policies that are sometimes in tension with fiscal probity, economic liberalization, and internationalism. In the four years to come, Slovakia will become an interesting laboratory for such inquiries.

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Five Questions to Seven Women Who Inspire Us

[image error]The Judge. Camelia Bogdan.

Bogdan was the first judge in Romania to issue criminal sentences against corrupt politicians and business leaders, seizing proceeds of crime worth tens of millions of euros. But the success of her anti-corruption work has come at significant personal cost. In February 2017, she was expelled from the Romanian Magistracy on charges of conflict of interest following a seminar she gave to public servants on anti-corruption issues.

The charges hinged on the fact that Bogdan was trying a high-profile corruption case against a Romanian media mogul at the time she gave the seminar to civil servants. Although the conflict of interest accusation was rejected, the Superior Council of Magistrates in Romania found that teaching the seminar in exchange for a nominal fee was incompatible with the office of magistrate. The decision was devastating, of course, for a judge, but also a blow to the growing anti-corruption movement in Romania—and a move seen by many as an effort to intimidate others.

What drives you? What are you fighting for? Was there one defining experience or one particular source of inspiration in your life?

Ever since my early childhood, I have always felt a need to stand up for those fighting injustice and demanding respect for the rule of law. All this is embedded in my inner nature. Fighting for justice in fragile democracies confronted with endemic corruption both as judge and victim is what drives me. The collapse of communism three decades ago created opportunity for kleptocracy. There is no democracy without rule of law, independent courts, and accountable government. I’m passionate about these things.

Under Donald Trump, in particular, America seems to be losing its interest in supporting and promoting human rights and democracy abroad. Have you felt a change? Is there any impact on you and your work?

Donald Trump nominated an excellent Ambassador to Romania, Adrian Zuckerman. His Romanian background allows him to build his personal relationships. I am convinced Zuckerman is determined to defend the rule of law. I am hopeful he will stick with us in delivering the clear message: Crime does not pay.

What do you think of when you hear the words “Democracy in America”?

Commitment to the rule of law, sticking to one’s principles. The United States has its flaws; the country makes mistakes. But there always seems to be a compass, a determination to correct and self-correct.

What do you think of when you hear the names Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr.?

Solidarity, resilience. We all need inspiration. Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice is paved in my soul. I am totally committed to his legacy.

What is the biggest mistake we in the West have made in the past 30 years? And can we repair the damage?

Taking the rule of law for granted. We needed even more support in transitional democracies for training and supporting competent and independent judges and prosecutors. One cannot do enough in this area. One cannot underestimate the role played by organized crime, corruption, and kleptocracy in impeding the development of healthy, stable democracies in Eastern Europe. Communism was a nightmare, but democracy is not a gift. The fight for democracy has in some ways only just begun.

 

[image error]The Historian. Ladan Boroumand.

Boroumand is the co-founder (with her sister Roya) of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. The group’s online library documents human rights abuses committed by the Islamic Republic and memorializes its victims.

A historian by training, Boroumand is the author of La Guerre des Principes (1999), a book that examines tensions between human rights and national sovereignty during the French Revolution. She has published numerous articles on the French Revolution, the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the nature of Islamist terrorism. She is a leading analyst of the history of secular ideas in Iran, of contemporary debates within the Iranian intelligentsia as well as within the Shi‘a clergy.

In 1991, Boroumand’s father—a Social Democrat involved in opposition activity—was murdered by agents of the Iranian regime in his Paris apartment.

[Read: Our recent interview with Ladan Boroumand]

What drives you? What are you fighting for? Was there one defining experience or one particular source of inspiration in your life?

I fight for human dignity and freedom. They constitute the sine qua non of both love and the quest for understanding the world in which we live. Soul-searching and freeing myself from my own fears and prejudices have been a constant preoccupation—my way of safeguarding the integrity of my freedom and my capacity to love.

Fighting for universal human rights of all human beings is for me an injunction of love. I am focused on Iran because it is my country, but universal human rights matter for me—in China, Russia, Venezuela, and all other countries in the world.

The Islamic revolution of Iran has been a defining experience in my life. It was a firsthand experience of the crucial importance of ideas in history. Ayatollah Khomeini was able to impose an idea alien to the vast majority of his society. There were circumstances that facilitated his ascension to power, which could be explained by historical, cultural, sociological, and economic factors. But had he had a vision; he was able to implement it.

I also learned about politics and discourse. Going through a revolution is also learning about the complexity of human behavior. In a matter of 24 hours, your long-term friends become your foes. Those you thought brave suddenly act cowardly, and ordinary people behave heroically.

For me, the Islamic revolution meant exile, and exile was the opportunity to reinvent myself. Exile was also the beginning of a journey through the fascinating intellectual and political history of the West. Exile taught me how questioning, learning, and understanding a culture can create a sense of belonging much stronger than the sense of belonging to a culture by birth. My quest for understanding the West has shaped my quest for understanding Iran.

Under Donald Trump, in particular, America seems to be losing its interest in supporting and promoting human rights and democracy abroad. Have you felt a change? Is there any impact on you and your work?

The “America First” slogan heralds an isolationist era. But Iran constitutes a particular focus of Donald Trump’s Administration. The President’s tweets in Farsi mention human rights for the Iranian people.

Trump’s actual policy regarding pro-democracy forces in Iran is no worse than President Obama’s policy. The impact of the Trump Administration regarding Iran as far as we, the Iranian human rights community, are concerned, is rather positive. Many officials guilty of gross human rights violations have been sanctioned by the U.S. government precisely because they violated Iranians’ human rights, and this is what we have been always asking for. We also approve of the sanctions imposed on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as an institution sponsoring terror.

What do you think of when you hear the words “Democracy in America”?

Tocqueville first. But in two words I would say “needs fixing.” The electoral system, the lobbying power of big corporations, and the influence of economic powers over politics are concerning to me. Larry Diamond’s latest book, Ill Winds, helped me better understand where reforms are needed in U.S. political institutions. As a person used to French politics, the sums of money poured into election campaigns in America seem insane and democratically very problematic.

What do you think of when you hear the names Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr.?

I admire Martin Luther King Jr. for using love, non-violence, and civil disobedience as a means to establish African Americans’ equal rights and dignity in the United States. I admire his steadfastness and his capacity to fight without hatred.

Nelson Mandela is for me a leader who succeeded in a peaceful transition from a very oppressive and violent regime of racial domination to democracy; he is in my view a shrewd statesman from whom we Iranians need to learn—in particular from his leadership and extraordinary achievement in containing violence during the transition. But he is also the statesman who laid a wreath on Ayatollah Khomeini’s tomb, and that is what distinguishes him from the one I consider my moral, intellectual, and political guide: Vaclav Havel.

I received The Power of the Powerless in late 2004, and though I knew and admired Vaclav Havel as an illustrious dissident, I must confess I had not read him. I was impressed by Havel’s understanding and clear way of spelling out the truth through the fictitious layers of totalitarian ideology—an achievement that requires a rare intellectual strength and self-confidence. But more importantly, speaking truth to the multitudes is a far more intimidating task than speaking truth to a tyrant. And that is precisely what Havel did in The Power of the Powerless.

Havel set out to write an open letter to the leader of his country, Gustáv Husák, when all hopes were crushed and the Czechoslovak Communist Party had declared complete victory over the reform movement. The situation appeared to be hopeless in Czechoslovakia, and any attempt to react was dismissed with skepticism and cynicism. That is precisely when, instead of submitting to the rules established by the oppressor, Havel takes his pen and redefines the rules of the game.

The subversive nature of those 30 pages addressed to the almighty leader of his country! With a pen and an amazing strength of mind, in one stroke the powerless dissident dismisses the ideological postulates of his adversary and replaces them with the only valid one: that of human dignity and freedom. Then, based on this new postulate, in line after line, paragraph after paragraph, he transforms into utter defeat what appeared, to the world, to the government, and to the Czech people, a spectacular victory for the regime. By expressing his thoughts in the form of a letter, Havel calls upon the leadership to face its responsibility, as he as a citizen assumes his share of responsibility.

He then addresses his fellow citizens on the basis of their responsibility, and he demonstrates with the same rigorous analysis how, by their acquiescence in living a lie, they have become accomplices in their own oppression. And instead of seeking victory in the fall of the regime, he points to a different victory, one that depends only on each individual’s will and decision to live in truth. Thus, from Havel’s standpoint, there is no defeat in engaging in the struggle for human rights. At worst, one restores one’s own dignity and free will and reconnects to history and to the human community; at best, one contributes to the establishment of free institutions in one’s homeland.

With Havel’s permission, we at the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center translated both “Dear Doctor Husák” and The Power of the Powerless into Farsi. Thousands of eager Iranian citizens have read and discussed Havel’s writings, and I was particularly pleased to hear Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian filmmaker, laureate of the Berlin film festival, refer to the “Power of the Powerless” as a source of inspiration for his film There Is No Evil.

What is the biggest mistake we in the West have made in the past 30 years? And can we repair the damage?

The West’s biggest mistake was to misunderstand the nature of the Islamist phenomenon. The West did not realize that Islamism is a new form of totalitarianism whose raison d’être is to fight the liberal democratic worldview. No matter how appeasing Western diplomacy and policies are, they will not succeed in establishing a stable peace with Islamism, for Islamism feels endangered by the very existence of liberal democracies, and will be in a latent state of war with them as long as they exist. Just listen to what Iran’s Supreme Leader says about the West in his speeches. To repair the damage, the West needs to change its paradigms, revise its strategy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran, and wage the ideological war Islamism has declared against it since 1979.

 

[image error]Legal Advocate for the Poor and Disenfranchised. Cassie Chambers.

Chambers grew up in one of the poorest parts of the United States: the Appalachian hills of eastern Kentucky. She graduated Yale College, the Yale School of Public Health, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School, where she was president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, a student-run law firm that represents low-income clients.

She was instrumental in helping pass “Jeanette’s Law” in Kentucky, a law that eliminated the requirement that a victim of domestic violence pay the legal fees of an abusive spouse in a divorce action when the spouse is incarcerated for crimes against the petitioner. Her recent book on women’s experiences in Appalachia is in some ways in dialogue with J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.

Today, Chambers works with low-income women in Kentucky and is the vice chair of the state’s Democratic Party.

What drives you? What are you fighting for? Was there one defining experience or one particular source of inspiration in your life?

I feel passionately about sharing the stories of women in Appalachia. Those voices aren’t heard often enough, and I think it’s so important that people understand the strength of women in the mountains. That’s why I wrote the book Hill Women to tell those stories and magnify those voices. And the reason it’s important to share those stories is because communities in Appalachia are struggling, and I believe telling those stories is how change happens. I think individual narratives are a powerful tool to drive policy that can lift up communities. It was inspiring to see this power firsthand when I worked with a former client of mine, Jeanette, to change a law that required survivors of domestic violence to pay the legal fees of their incarcerated spouses. Jeanette was a domestic violence survivor, and I believe it was the power of her story that changed the law.

Under Donald Trump, in particular, America seems to be losing its interest in supporting and promoting human rights and democracy. Have you felt a change? Is there any impact on you and your work?

I continue to advocate for access to court systems for low-income individuals, and I think in many ways this work has been unchanged. Our court systems are so local, and the problems that plague them seem separate from politics in many ways. I like to try to frame the access to justice work as a problem that really shouldn’t be political—we should all want this branch of government to be open to every citizen. But I do recognize that folks who practice in certain legal fields—such as immigration law—have felt a huge change in the way they do their work under the current Administration. Although a lot of the change has been bad and made it harder for them to do their work, I think it’s also important to recognize the huge outpouring of support from people all over America in direct response to some of the actions by the current Administration.

What do you think of when you hear the words “Democracy in America”?

For me, I think about all of the ways we can still improve our democracy. In Kentucky, we still have laws that permanently take away the right to vote from people convicted of felonies. And over-policing of communities of color in our state means that we disproportionately disenfranchise these communities. There is some hope—our new Governor recently issued an executive order that restored the voting rights of 150,000 Kentuckians—but there are still so many people in our state that cannot vote, for one reason or another.

What do you think of when you hear the names Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr.? 

I think it’s amazing to remember the way an individual can make a tangible difference. For Martin Luther King Jr., in particular, I’m always struck by how young he was. It makes me feel like there’s no excuse not to be dreaming big and trying to work for large-scale change.

What is the biggest mistake we in the West have made in the past 30 years? And can we repair the damage?

Given the work I do, I spend the most time thinking about the ways America hasn’t taken care of our own at the level we should. I look at everything from income disparity to our lack of paid parental leave, and it strikes me that we have a long way to go. I think as a country we need to remember the importance of investing in people, both in our own backyard and abroad. Our country and world are so connected, and we have to find ways to tap into the potential of people.

 

[image error]The Investigative Reporter. Khadija Ismayilova.

Ismayilova has been a journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is a member of the Organized Crime and Corruption Project. In January 2013, she was among dozens of peaceful protesters who were detained for participating in a demonstration in Baku.

In June 2013, the Binagadi District Court sentenced her to 220 hours of community service, sweeping streets. Ismayilova told the court she was content with the verdict, as “clearing this country of rubbish” is something she was used to. Many of her supporters expressed their wish to join her in sweeping the streets—at which point, the district court changed the order, saying the court would replace the sweeping with indoor service options.

Her work reporting on state-level corruption in Azerbaijan resulted in her receiving a seven-and-a-half-year prison term in September 2015. Ismayilova’s research discovered, among other things, that the 11-year-old son of the country’s President owned real estate in the United Arab Emirates worth roughly $44 million. Since then, she has been released from prison but is not permitted to leave Azerbaijan.

[Read: Editor in Chief Jeffrey Gedmin’s profile of Khadija Ismayilova]

What drives you? What are you fighting for? Was there one defining experience or one particular source of inspiration in your life?

I believe in the power of questioning and in everyone’s right to know. What I am doing is normal; it is not something extraordinary. It is a journalist’s job to search for facts and to make them public. The problem is that those who have unlimited power prefer to break the mirror instead of correcting what is wrong.

The assassination of Elmar Huseynov was a turning point in my career. He was the only journalist who was investigating the family in power and openly criticizing them, while we all were keeping ourselves busy with easier reporting subjects. When he was murdered in March 2005, I felt guilty for leaving him alone in the field, because this made the masterminds think that by eliminating him, they would ensure his silence. This was the key point.

As for a personality, Salatin Askerova, an Azerbaijani war reporter from the early stage of the conflict in Karabakh, is the main person who taught me that my gender is not an obstacle for this job. She taught us that being a woman should not prevent us from facing difficulties. She was killed during one of her reporting trips.

Under Donald Trump, in particular, America seems to be losing its interest in supporting and promoting human rights and democracy. Have you felt a change? Is there any impact on you and your work?

I would say we didn’t feel commitment to values for a longer time than Donald Trump’s tenure. The United States had other “more important” interests in the region for many years. Azerbaijan had become an important ally serving as a transport link during operations in Afghanistan and Iran, and this made the regime in Baku feel too important to listen to advice from Western democracies. There was a time when a letter from Secretary Albright would rattle its recipients and shift political processes in Azerbaijan. Then there was a time when Condoleezza Rice was mocked by officials in Azerbaijan’s presidential administration. Either the regime in Baku has become stronger, or the United States has become weaker.

We have witnessed how corruption has affected American diplomats. Three former Ambassadors of the United States got directly or indirectly employed by the Azerbaijani regime after their tenure. They have been instrumental in undermining any democracy dialogue between the two countries. They have whitewashed the image of the Aliyev regime.

We have witnessed hostile actions of the Azerbaijani regime towards U.S. entities—a crackdown on American NGOs, the closure of congressionally-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty—while Russian propaganda tools freely operate in Azerbaijan.

Donald Trump’s presidency has come with its own surprises. When Azerbaijan’s President was criticized for appointing his wife as Vice President, regime supporters pointed their fingers at the White House employing Trump family members. And President Trump’s attacks on journalists—Mr. Trump’s example helps regimes like Aliyev’s to portray authoritarian practices as something normal.

What do you think of when you hear the words “Democracy in America”?

I think democracy in America is being challenged now as never before. At some point, I was offering to help colleagues from the United States in coping with difficulties of living in a country with a thin-skinned President. The most important and tragic challenge is the cultural change coming with the current leader of the United States—an advanced Western democracy employing Byzantine mores for doing business, undermining its own moral standards.

In 2017 I wrote a post on Facebook. Here is part of it:

In 2006 I went to the U.S. to work for Voice of America. I spent 18 months there. I found it amazing how important truth was in this country. Politicians being tried for lying, parents trying hard to tell only truth to their children, false testimonies in the court having consequences. All this was so different from what we had back in my country, Azerbaijan.

[…]

America was not ideal. There were lies in the U.S. too, but I had the impression that it is not cool to lie in this country. When American people found out about Clinton, it had consequences. When they believed that Bush had lied to them about WMD, they cast their votes for the opposing party.

But now? Every day there is a lie coming directly from the president, and it is becoming routine. I wonder if Americans understand the risk.

What do you think of when you hear the names Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr.?

They were dreamers and their consistent fight for their values helped make their dreams true. They taught us never to give up, and that justice, while it might be delayed, will prevail. They taught us to dream big and overcome the obstacles. When we face troubles, I think of them, as the founding fathers, the sacrifices they gave—and then I think, who am I to complain about the minor troubles we have? They inspired generations and changed the path of history.

What is the biggest mistake we in the West have made in the past 30 years? And can we repair the damage?

I think the biggest mistake is that Western democracies do not accept the fact of globalization. Making progress without ensuring prosperity and peace worldwide is no longer possible. Poverty, corruption, environmental crises—these are dangers for your own countries, too, even if it is happening too far away from your borders. Evils like corruption are contagious. They recognize no borders. Hazards to the environment can’t be local. Even the proxy wars in other continents are able to affect your own stability.

In the past 60 years, world politics has increasingly become a subject for investigative journalists to tackle—a task for people who follow the money and corruption behind big political decisions of world leaders. Diplomatic corruption and commercial interests in arms proliferation are now scrutinized more frequently, and the dark side of world politics is becoming more transparent. It is time to learn how to build a real friendship with other nations, without ulterior motives.

 

[image error]The Journalist. Gordana Knezević.

Knezević, deputy editor-in-chief of Oslobođenje, was forced to take the helm when her boss was injured by sniper fire in the early days of the siege of Sarajevo. The paper was printed at night under battlefield conditions and distributed at dawn. The independent newspaper both chronicled the fighting and provided a manual for survival. It became a source of information and a symbol of defiance in a city of 400,000 trapped, hungry, and embattled people. The Serbian-born Knezević was one of the most active writers-editors-organizers at Oslobođenje. She fought both for the survival of the paper and for free journalism.

The siege of Sarajevo lasted from 1992 to 1996. In 1996, Gordana moved with her family to Canada, where she became the target of protests by fellow Serbs because she had supported the NATO bombing in Yugoslavia.

[Read: Contributing Editor Martha Bayles’s profile of Gordana Knezević]

What drives you? What have you been fighting for in your professional life? Was there one defining experience or one particular source of inspiration for you?

To get the news right. That was not so easy before Google. We had to do a lot of work and a lot of talk before we knew we got it right. It was important in peacetime and even more important during wartime. But this did not mean being merely a conduit for raw information. We were also gatekeepers. We were expected to know more, to be better informed, so that we could inform the public by separating fact from fiction, but also communicating what was essential.

I remember one incident in particular which helped shape my destiny. My son was 13 years old and he was angry with me on the way back from school. We were in Cairo at the time, the first Gulf War was dominating the news and refugees from Kuwait were flooding in. I was even more absorbed in my work than usual, and my son scolded me: “News, News, News! Is there anything more important than news for you?” I told him that if he could think of one single thing that was more important, I would immediately apologize. After giving it some thought, he started to laugh: He couldn’t think of anything more important than the news. I laughed too, and we moved on.

Not long after, back in Sarajevo and with our own war looming on the horizon, it was clear to me from the start that two things above all would be essential for the survival of the city: food supplies, and news—and indeed the municipal bakery and my newspaper were the only two enterprises that continued to function throughout the war. It was that sense of duty and the role of the journalist that also led to some painful personal choices—above all the decision to stay behind in wartime Sarajevo while two of my children were alone abroad.

Under Donald Trump, in particular, America seems to be losing its interest in supporting and promoting human rights and democracy. Have you felt a change? Is there any impact on you and your work?

Since Donald Trump became President, America’s relationship with the rest of the world has changed in many obvious and not-so-obvious ways. One subtle but important change that I have observed in the Balkans is the loss of a standard (of politics and democracy) that the United States used to represent. It’s as if the mirror has been broken. We’ve lost the basis of comparison and the standard against which to judge our local politicians. It is now hard to say who has less respect for democratic norms, for the freedom of the press, etc.—our own politicians or (some of) their American counterparts. The United States used to be a model, but that is no longer the case. That is a new development.

At the level of political ideology and rhetoric, radical nationalism or even racism is no longer proscribed; it cannot be thought of as some local anachronism or a measure of the distance between us (in the Balkans) and the Western Democracies (and the United States in particular)—it is merely another, “legitimate” opinion, and even seems (or can be plausibly presented as being) very much in tune with trends in more “advanced” countries. In a more general sense, we are in the age of competing “opinions,” unmoored from any universal ethical, moral, and democratic standards against which they are to be judged. This is very dangerous to democracy, especially in regions where its roots are not very deep.

What do you think of when you hear the words “Democracy in America”?

The first thing that used to come to mind is a network of institutions, the “system” of government, with its checks and balances—the idea that ultimately it did not matter greatly who the President was, because the system was robust, and could not fall prey to a charismatic demagogue. Also that U.S. foreign policy was guided by certain principles and goals that were more or less unchanging regardless of who held the presidency, not least the commitment to the defense of democracy against authoritarianism. This is not to say that the United States did not have its strategic alliances and biases, based on other criteria and interests, or that it did not make mistakes. But relative to any other power it was seen as an honest broker. Again, all that has changed as the power of the presidency is wielded to override traditions and norms, and policy seems to be determined by volatile individual whims of a person, who also sees foreign policy almost exclusively as a tool for shoring up his power domestically.

What do you think of when you hear the names Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr.?

Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. are symbols of moral integrity, and of the time in which they were active. I can speak about Havel in particular as he used to be a contributor to RFE prior to becoming the first President of the new democratic Czech state. He was a tiny little man, a man of culture, who ultimately triumphed over the Warsaw Pact. Havel, Mandela, and King all had something in common: All three of them were able to envisage a more just, a more free, and truly democratic society. But they were also more attuned than most to sensing the dangers ahead, and looming threats to freedom and democracy. Havel was no longer in power when the U.S. Administration was about to press the “reset button” with Russia. He wrote a letter cautioning against this, warning that the fall of the Soviet Union had not fundamentally changed Russia’s ambitions and the nature of Russian politics. But the message was never received on the other side of the Atlantic.

What is the biggest mistake we in the West have made in the past 30 years? And can we repair the damage?

The biggest mistake was the second Gulf War. It was already clear at the time that Iraq didn’t have anything to do with September 11. The world is undoubtedly a better place without Saddam Hussein but that alone cannot be the basis for waging war. And the cost of Saddam’s removal has been enormous. The war started a chain of events that has seen the Middle East engulfed in war and political unrest up to the present day. The region is more unstable than at any time in modern history, and the cause of democracy has been set back rather than advanced, as the short-lived Arab Spring gave way to what seems like an endless winter. Moreover, public trust in Western governments was undermined at home and abroad, and the current lack of trust not only in individual politicians, but the system of government as a whole is partly a consequence of that misguided military adventure.

Whether the damage can be repaired is not easy to say, but it must begin with a renewed engagement by the United States—in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in Eastern Europe—as a leader, as a defender of democratic values, and not merely another power jockeying for regional influence alongside Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, and China.

 

[image error]The Human Rights Activist. Nadia Murad.

Murad was 19 years old when Islamic State (ISIS) members attacked her village of Kojo in northern Iraq. A member of the Yazidi minority group, Murad witnessed ISIS slaughtering hundreds of Kojo’s inhabitants, including her mother and six brothers. Captured in August 2014 and held in captivity in Mosul where, along with thousands of other Yazidi women, she was abused, Murad managed to escape to Germany later that year.

Murad has since emerged as one of the world’s leading activists fighting for the survivors of sexual violence. She founded Nadia’s Initiative in order to assist victims in Iraq. In 2018, Murad was co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work.

What drives you? What are you fighting for? Was there one defining experience or one particular source of inspiration in your life?

I am fighting to help my community recover from the genocide ISIS carried out in 2014. Our continued fight is an existential one—the effects of the aftermath of genocide still weigh on the Yazidi community. ISIS came to kill, destroy, and enslave Yazidi men, women, and children. My organization fights to counter what ISIS did, by rebuilding the Yazidis’ ancestral homeland, exposing the crimes of sexual violence ISIS carried out against Yazidi women and children, and bringing ISIS to justice in a court of law.

Under Donald Trump, in particular, America seems to be losing its interest in supporting and promoting human rights and democracy. Have you felt a change? Is there any impact on you and your work?

Since 2003, there has been a rise in radical terrorist groups in Iraq. Yazidis have been targeted by different groups, including al-Qaeda and ISIS. As a small religious minority, Yazidis will not be able to recover from this genocide without international support. America holds a lot of power in the international community. I have asked the American government to support the redevelopment of the Yazidi community and to pursue justice for survivors, so the community can heal. The international community has a moral responsibility to protect minority groups like the Yazidis from ethnic cleansing and genocide. The fight for justice and peace in Iraq is connected to the fight for justice and peace in America and Europe.

What do you think of when you hear the words “Democracy in America”?

I think the existing democratic societies in the world are far from perfect, but that does not mean that democracy should be taken for granted. Today, our world is more connected than ever. Those who enjoy a democratic system like the one in America have avenues to fight for their rights. And they can use those avenues to become a voice for communities like Yazidis in remote corners of the world where those democratic systems don’t exist.

What do you think of when you hear the names Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr.?

These men gave their lives to fight for equality and human rights in different parts of the world. They often did so during times when speaking out against injustice was seen as a crime. But they persevered against all odds. I greatly admire them, their defense of their fellow human beings, and their sacrifice to make the world a better place for everyone.

What is the biggest mistake we in the West have made in the past 30 years? And can we repair the damage?

War leaves lasting effects on generations. War should not be a solution to all problems. Powerful nations in the West must take into consideration that small communities like Yazidis are not able to survive in conflict areas. The West shouldn’t have abandoned religious minorities in a fragile country like Iraq. We as a small community didn’t have the resources and power to protect our community from ISIS. The result was a genocide and widespread sexual violence against Yazidi women.

 

[image error]The Foreign Correspondent. Dionne Searcey.

Dionne grew up in Wymore, Nebraska. She attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and graduated with a degree in journalism and French. She began working as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. In due course, she would work for Newsday, the Seattle Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal. Today she is the politics reporter for the New York Times.

What drives you? What are you fighting for? Was there one defining experience or one particular source of inspiration in your life?

Journalism drives me—the ability to work for an independent press that allows me to tell the truth in my reporting, regardless of what that truth may reveal. My most inspiring reporting was done as West Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, a job that introduced me to a set of incredible women who found clever ways to overcome patriarchy in all its forms. I detail their experiences, including those of suicide bombers who found ways to dodge militants, women who wanted out of loveless marriages and others, in my new book, In Pursuit of Disobedient Women, which comes out March 10 from Random House.

Under Donald Trump, in particular, America seems to be losing its interest in supporting and promoting human rights and democracy. Have you felt a change? Is there any impact on you and your work?

While I was in West Africa, President Trump issued visa bans on certain countries and called some African nations “shithole countries.” Government officials complained America had no foreign policy in Africa. It was an awkward time to be working on the continent for an American newspaper. But the Times, fortunately, has a stellar reputation for its reporting, and I didn’t experience anyone who didn’t want to speak with me because I was an American. Some people did want to complain about President Trump, but others, surprisingly even in countries he had insulted, supported him for his bluntness.

What do you think of when you hear the words “Democracy in America”?

Because I’m a journalist, my mind turns to free speech. That means not only a free press but also the freedom to protest and speak out about policies and practices we don’t like.

What do you think of when you hear the names Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr?

I think of champions of justice and freedom and see them as leaders who pushed for what they thought was right at great cost to them.

What is the biggest mistake we in the West have made in the past 30 years? And can we repair the damage?

As I return now to the West, I see racism as a dangerous undercurrent that has and still is impacting so much in society from our criminal laws to our housing policies and even to which artists’ and professionals’ voices are elevated to the top echelons of their fields. I’m not sure what the solution is but it’s obvious we should have been thinking and talking more openly about this.

The post Five Questions to Seven Women Who Inspire Us appeared first on The American Interest.

In Search of Sparta

Thucydides has long been heralded as the father of realism, owing to his classic account of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404/3 BCE. For Thucydides, the ultimate cause of the war was not the ideological differences between the two city-states but simply “the growth of Athenian power and Spartan fear of it.” Athens had refused to abdicate its leadership of the Greek alliance after the Greco-Persian Wars, and its imperial ambitions made Sparta increasingly uneasy. Thucydides’ realist mode of analysis has been applied to countless conflicts between states throughout history (most recently in a 2017 book asking whether the U.S. and China are inevitably stuck in the “Thucydides trap”).

In his five-volume series on the history of classical Sparta, historian Paul Rahe takes direct aim at the application of this realist paradigm to interpreting Greek history. He proposes a paradigm of “grand strategy” instead. States, he argues, are motivated not merely by narrow security concerns but by a combination of domestic policy, cultural idiosyncrasies, and moral imperatives. In the third and latest volume in this series, Sparta’s First Attic War, Rahe covers Sparta’s grand strategy from the aftermath of the Greco-Persian Wars in 478 to the end of the first Peloponnesian War—or the Attic War, as Rahe has renamed it—in 446 BCE (Thucydides wrote only briefly about this war as precursor to the second one in 431 BCE). In doing so, Rahe faces two challenges with the source material, which he has to address in a way that satisfies his grand strategy paradigm.

The first challenge Rahe faces is inherent in his focus on Sparta: the lack of any extant writing from Spartans themselves. Most of the surviving writing is from Athenians, who were often biased and wrote well after the events they described, making it difficult to avoid casting Greek history in an Atheno-centric light. Rahe does his best to squeeze out as much as he can about Sparta in this period, but he cannot help but focus on Athens and other states just as much, because there is simply not enough information on Sparta. This should not be counted as a fatal flaw: The book still offers non-classicists a thoughtful and detailed narrative of this oft-neglected period of Greek history, even as it struggles against the odds in its mission to reenvisage Greek history from a Spartan perspective.

The second challenge is that this volume covers a portion of the Pentecontaetia, the 50 years between the Persian War and the second Peloponnesian War, a period for which the historical record is spotty. Thucydides briefly covers the period as a prelude to his main narrative of the second Peloponnesian War, carefully selecting events that illustrate the growth of Athenian power and ignoring much else. Thus, the picture he paints is incomplete. Unfortunately, Thucydides is still the only fifth-century writer from whom we have a continuous narrative of this period. To reconstruct his narrative, Rahe supplements Thucydides with other, much later writers such as Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, as well as a lot of his own conjecture.

Rahe manages to turn the scant source material to his advantage. He is at his best when he supplements the often-brief accounts of events found in the sources with his own geopolitical analysis, drawing on his long career in political and military history. He begins his volume in 479 BCE with the disbanding of the Hellenic army at the close of the Greco-Persian Wars. The Greek city-states had managed to coalesce with unprecedented unity and to defeat the more powerful Persian Empire. Rahe sets the scene of the new geopolitical environment with a quotation from Churchill: “[G]reat battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new mood, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.”

In this new post-war environment, the Athenians came out on top. They took command of the Greek alliance that became known as the Delian League. The purpose of the league, according to Thucydides, was to bring the war to Persian territory to avenge the suffering of the Greeks, although Rahe speculates that its “unspoken” purpose was to defend against future Persian invasions. To manage the alliance, the Athenians constructed a powerful navy. The general Themistocles contrived to rebuild the defensive walls around Athens, despite strong objections from the Spartans. With their new maritime supremacy, they were able to defeat the resurgent force of Persians at the Battle of Eurymedon.

This is followed by the “cease-fire” between the Athenians and the Persians, the historically contentious Peace of Callias. In departure from most historians, Rahe dates the Peace to 468/7 BCE. Many argue that, if it took place at all, it must have occurred in 449 BCE (Rahe deals with this conundrum by arguing that it must have been renewed in 449 BCE). Moreover, some historians go so far as to doubt whether the Peace actually existed, since it is not mentioned by any fifth-century authors. In defending its existence, Rahe argues that the Peace must have been more of an executive agreement that both sides wanted to keep secret, hence the lack of mention in contemporary sources. In moments such as this, when the historical record is particularly scant, Rahe employs the grand strategy paradigm to fill the gaps. He contemplates the distinct political and cultural motives the Athenians and Persians would have to conceal the Peace. In the case of Athenians, Rahe gives plausible motives: They needed the semblance of a looming Persian threat to justify maintaining the Delian League, on which they depended for tribute and manpower. But in the case of the Persians, Rahe stretches the source material too thin. He makes an uncomfortable comparison of the Achaemenid Persian Emperor Xerxes to Muslim caliphates in order to illustrate some sort of metaphorical, if not literal, continuity in this Near Eastern “political theology.” In this “holy war,” Xerxes could never publicly admit to treating with another power. Here one wonders why Rahe has not heeded his own sage advice not to impose modern ideologies onto the political struggles of the ancient world.

Whether or not the Peace of Callias existed, it is clear from Rahe’s analysis that in the early and mid 460s, the Persian threat temporarily subsided (though only to return by the end of the decade). In its absence, we already begin to see tensions building between Athens and Sparta. Themistocles, who had been ostracized, took refuge at Argos, the arch-rival of Sparta, and there he probably encouraged an alliance between Argos and Tegea that was hostile to Sparta. And in 465 BCE, the island of Thasos rebelled against the Athenians, whose leadership no longer seemed necessary now that Greece no longer faced an external threat. According to Thucydides, the Spartans secretly promised to support the Thasians and invade Attica.

The Spartans, however, never followed up on this promise, tied down by their own domestic problems. In 464 BCE, Laconia was struck with an earthquake. This was devastating in its own right, but it also gave the Helots, Sparta’s enslaved population, an opportunity to revolt. The revolt, known as the Third Messenian War, became an existential crisis for Sparta, since the Helot underclass was an integral part of its political and economic structure.

The events following the earthquake are especially hard to reconstruct because of discrepancies across the available sources. These differences offer a case study in the difficulties of Rahe’s approach, as he tends to accept what the ancient historical sources say at face value. Classicists use the term “positivist” for those who assume the perfect veracity of sources, and many of them today emphasize the literary and rhetorical intentions of authors like Thucydides and Plutarch, who often spun events—and in the case of some authors, confabulated them—to fit the goals of their narrative. Non-classicist readers should at least be aware of this trend in classics, lest they fail to appreciate how unreliable certain authors can be. Rahe vividly describes the event and its consequences, but he does not acknowledge how, in all the surviving accounts, the authors have shaped the event to fit their particular rhetorical purposes. For comparison, in the 2017 monograph The Lame Hegemony, which covers the same historical period, classicist Matteo Zaccarini shows how different traditions of recounting the Ithome revolt circulated throughout the late fifth century BCE. Thucydides describes how the Spartans refused help from the Athenians under the leadership of Cimon; in doing so, he is projecting the enmity between Athens and Spartans that was manifest in his own time onto an event that had occurred 50 years earlier. Aristophanes, meanwhile, says that the Spartans did accept Cimon’s help, emphasizing the friendship between the two polities characteristic of his own time. The various agendas of the authors from these periods greatly complicate the historical reconstruction of this period, especially when it comes to Rahe’s goal of ascertaining the grand strategies of Sparta and Athens.

However hostile the two city-states were at the time of the Third Messenian War, there is no doubt that in the following years, Athens’ relationship with Sparta deteriorated. Cimon, who had advocated a policy of cooperation with Sparta, was ostracized from Athens, which was subsequently subsumed by anti-Spartan sentiment. Fighting broke out between them in 461 BCE (according to Rahe’s dating) at the alleged Battle of Oenoe, in which the Athenians and the Argives together defeated the Spartans. The occurrence of this battle, too, is contested by modern scholars, who point out that it is mentioned only by the geographer Pausanias, writing half a millennium later. Rahe nevertheless takes Pausanias at his word, and dates that point as the beginning of the First Peloponnesian (Attic) War.

Occupying the last two of the book’s chapters, fighting occurs in two theaters—mainland Greece and the Aegean Sea on the one hand, and the Eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt and Cyprus, on the other. In the former theater, the Athenians made a strategic alliance with the Megarians, which prompted the Corinthians, allies of Sparta, to invade Megara. The Spartans themselves made their first aggressive move in 457 BCE, leading up to the Battle of Tanagra, where they indecisively defeated an Athenian-Argive coalition. At the same time, the Athenians sent a sizable force to Egypt to aid the Libyan Prince Inaros in his rebellion against the Persian Empire. This proved disastrous to the Athenians, who, in 454 BCE, lost much of their navy and manpower there. Too much happens in the 450s BCE to mention everything, but Rahe does a great job painting a coherent picture of what might otherwise be a confusing array of battles spread across time and space, even when, on occasion, the average reader might struggle to keep track of all the details.

After the debacle in Egypt, the Athenians could no longer maintain the war against Sparta, and they feared a resurgent Persia. They entered into a five-year truce with the Spartans, who in return demanded that they break their alliance with Argos. A large part of the subsequent narrative focuses on Athens and its Delian League, which fought Persia at Cyprus and underwent its own internal changes. After making an enduring peace with Persia in 449 BCE —a renewal of the Peace of Callias, according to Rahe—Athens resumed fighting with Sparta. It took a serious blow to its power when the Boeotians successfully revolted from the Delian League at the Battle of Coronea in 447 BCE. This triggered other revolts, which weakened Athens to the point of needing to seek a truce with Sparta. Known as the Thirty Years Peace, this truce, in Rahe’s words, “reflected the enduring balance of power. It acknowledged the facts and left the Spartans and their allies supreme on land and the Athenians supreme at sea. In the aftermath, neither was in the position to strike the other.”

With a tremendous number of pages devoted to Athens, one walks away from Sparta’s First Attic War still unsure what Sparta’s grand strategy actually was. Rahe offers a brief recapitulation at the end, characterizing Spartan policy with the Greek phrase mēdèn ágan—“nothing too much.” This refers to Sparta’s stance of moderation, first formulated by the ephor Chilon in the sixth century BCE, in being content with maintaining hegemony in the Peloponnese instead of embarking on new imperial conquests. But these two paragraphs are hardly enough to justify the framing of the book. Given how little we know about the inner-workings of Spartan society and politics—and the difficulty in separating the historical Sparta from the idealized, semi-mythological one described by later non-Spartan authors—we simply lack the evidence for how each of Sparta’s actions contributed to its grand strategy in this period.

Still, other historians have had success in describing Sparta’s actions without recourse to the grand strategy paradigm. For example, in his classic article “Sparta’s Role in the First Peloponnesian War,” A.J. Holliday argues that Sparta was not really committed to the First Peloponnesian War. In his view, Sparta’s primary motive during these years was to maintain a co-hegemony with Athens over Greece, but it was reluctantly dragged into various conflicts by Athenian aggression. Rahe’s mēdèn ágan seems to be getting at this point, but that is hardly a coherent policy—it is more a lack of policy. What is certain, however, is that Sparta and Athens, despite their cultural differences, were allies in the face of the common Persian threat. Once this threat receded, the primary security concern that the two states faced was one another. This motivated Athens to take increasingly aggressive stances against Sparta, eventually leading to the outbreak of the first Peloponnesian War. Without any further sources in the historical record, there is a paradigm that adequately explains this kind of behavior: realism.

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Our Own Norma Desmond

Recently, President Trump was giving another one of his amateur stand-up routines when he decided to weigh in on the recent Academy Awards. “How bad were the Oscars this year?” is a perennial (and often justified) question from cinephiles, but in this case the President was operating in his usual culture war mode. In his Cranky Uncle voice, he bemoaned the fact that the South Korean film Parasite won a host of awards, including Best Picture, and hinted at some kind of ongoing trade war with South Korea. Warming to his theme, Trump harkened back to the golden age of cinema, wondering whatever happened to good old movies like Gone With The Wind and Sunset Boulevard.

Given that the President reportedly responds solely to visual media, his idea of what constitutes a “good movie” might be indicative of more than just his taste in film. It’s not an overstatement to suggest that one can tell something about a person’s character based on their favorite movies, who their favorite characters are, and why. And the issues with name-checking Gone with the Wind—a movie that valorizes the old Southern aristocracy and indulges in fairly blatant stereotypes about African-Americans—as a symbol of the Good Old Days are almost too obvious.

But referencing Sunset Boulevard, which happens to turn 70 this year, is telling for reasons that Trump himself might not consciously realize.

The first is that he probably assumes that Norma Desmond, a former grand dame of the silent era now lost in delusions of grandeur, is the hero instead of the villain. It isn’t hard to imagine Trump nodding along with her immortal declaration: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” And the similarities between these two wealthy, image-obsessed egomaniacs don’t end there. Desmond’s world, as with Trump’s, is built on wealth accumulated in the entertainment industry, coming mostly from name recognition rather than distinctive talent.

Desmond’s exile in Tinseltown does illuminate a particular contrast with Trump’s previous claim to fame, which is that Hollywood is actually more unforgiving than reality TV. The movies may abandon you unless you’re still young and beautiful, but reality TV will happily milk your brand as long as you’re still freaky enough to attract an audience. The bigger you get, the smaller the pictures tend to be.

Gloria Swanson, whose Hollywood career eerily overlaps her character’s, imbues Desmond with a world-weariness that alternates between glamorous and creepy. Because Desmond’s exalted self-image craves constant flattery to sustain itself, her whole world is almost entirely transactional in nature. Joe Gillis is a hack screenwriter, played by William Holden, who winds up in Desmond’s forlorn estate. Desmond’s shabby genteel residence is all decked out in faux Italian grandeur, reminiscent of Trump’s gold-infested Tower or his chintzy Florida getaway, Mar-a-Lago. Gillis becomes a kept man, watching Desmond’s old movies on an endless loop (which are, rather poignantly, Swanson’s own films from the 1920s), knowingly keeping the wheels of her delusion running so that he doesn’t lose his meal ticket. It’s reminiscent of the captive nature of the current GOP, which is often all too happy to turn a blind eye to the President’s flagrant disregard for the rule of law. If everything in life is ultimately transactional, why ruin a good thing?

Arguably the only truly human character in Sunset Boulevard is Max Von Mayerling, played by famed director Erich Von Stroheim (best known for his lost seven-hour film Greed). Max is Norma’s butler and former husband, who faithfully writes and hand-delivers hundreds of fan letters every night so that Desmond can keep feeling like a star whose audience hasn’t abandoned her. Stroheim’s Max is a deeply poignant portrayal; he knows full well how utterly, hopelessly bonkers Desmond is, but nevertheless is so captivated by her that he dutifully supports her fantasy. It’s a dynamic that would be familiar to our current President, as Bill Maher pointed out a few years ago. Trump, like Desmond, is surrounded by enablers like Max who will tell him whatever he wants to hear and who perpetuate the illusion that he is all-knowing and omni-competent.

Desmond and Trump share one more important trait, which may suggest something about his downfall. They are each in their own way media creations, existentially reliant on others seeing them in a certain light. This is because of vanity, certainly, but it also masks a deeper anxiety. Without the crucial support of the audience, the claim to authority disintegrates. Once the celebrity’s image gets effectively challenged, criticized, and torn down, all that remains is anger, desperation, and paranoia. In the film, Desmond’s impulsive self-destructiveness leaves a dead man floating in the pool, wearily narrating the tale of his demise, with the cops on the way. As the narrator puts it, “the dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her.”

Desmond comes slinking down the staircase like Medusa, having conclusively lost whatever grip on sanity she previously had, convinced that she’s ready for her greatest closeup with Cecil B. DeMille. An actress to the last, she delivers one of the greatest closing monologues in movie history, uttered directly into the camera. Implicating the viewer with gritted teeth and a dramatically curled hand, she declares that she will keep making pictures because “you see, this is my life. It always will be. There’s nothing else. Just us. And those cameras. And all those wonderful people out there in the dark.” There’s a little snarl of contempt in her voice; even in her madness she knows who is at least partially to blame for her fate.

Desmond’s whole life has been defined by holding an audience’s collective attention; now that she’s lost it, there’s nothing left. The audience ultimately takes as much as it gives. Considering how popular entertainment and political life have now fatally overlapped to the point of indistinguishability, maybe someday we’ll see the President in a similar position, once the crowds stop cheering and the votes aren’t coming in. Then it won’t be DeMille who’s ready to give the final closeup, but Sean Hannity.

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Clawing Back Constitutional War Powers

Washington is in the early innings of what has the potential to become the most significant congressional claw-back of constitutional war powers authority since Vietnam. Following the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Qods Force leader Qassim Suleimani on January 3, the Republican-led Senate recently voted 55-45 last month to block funding for the use of military force against Tehran, absent explicit approval by Capitol Hill. While President Trump has vowed to veto the legislation—a version of which separately passed the House of Representatives earlier in February—this flare-up is likely a preview of bigger battles to come, regardless of who wins the November election.

The attempt by Congress to restrict the White House’s freedom of maneuver on Iran has been characterized as a backlash against its shifting justifications for the Suleimani drone strike or as a proxy for wider discontent with the Trump Administration’s unorthodox foreign policy. Such explanations, however, fail to situate the vote within its proper historical context.

The great legal scholar Edwin Corwin famously described the U.S. Constitution as “an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing foreign policy,” and indeed, from the earliest days of American democracy, Presidents and Congresses have wrestled with each other on the appropriate balance of power between their respective branches of government when it comes to military decision-making. In contrast to other subjects of constitutional dispute that have been refereed by the judiciary, furthermore, the question of war powers has largely been left to the executive and legislature to sort out among themselves.

Today’s tensions are squarely in keeping with that tradition. In particular, as in the 1970s, today’s congressional assertiveness takes place after a period in which a succession of Presidents of both parties made expansive war powers claims with minimal resistance, and sometimes active support, from Capitol Hill. Thus, in March 1999 President Bill Clinton intervened to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo without a congressional vote of approval, while the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force—or AUMF in wonk-speak—handed a sweeping, open-ended grant to the Bush Administration to wage the war on terrorism as it saw fit.

Later, Democrats began to challenge the Bush Administration’s assertion it could target any terrorist, anywhere in the world, indefinitely—that is, until the Obama Administration came to office and made essentially the same claim. Obama then went to war in Libya in 2011 against Muammar Qaddafi’s regime without congressional authorization, claiming that a seven-month air campaign by a multinational coalition did not amount to hostilities under the 1973 War Powers Resolution. In a small irony, the Trump Administration drew on the same legal analysis to justify not going to Congress before launching a more limited set of airstrikes against Bashir al-Asad’s regime for its use of chemical weapons in 2017.

Both Obama and Trump, furthermore, prosecuted a years-long campaign against the Islamic State without formal congressional approval. Rather, they argued inter alia that they had inherent authority to do so as commanders-in-chief and that Congress had already blessed the war implicitly through the 2001 post-9/11 AUMF and 2002 Iraq War AUMF—even though ISIS did not come into existence until more than a decade after these measures were passed.

Now it seems the pendulum has begun to swing in the opposite direction, with signs of a growing bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill that it is time to flex congressional muscles and rein in the White House. In addition to the Iran vote earlier this month, a similar coalition of Democrats and Republicans came together in both chambers last year to pass a resolution that would have forced the United States to end its involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, provoking Trump’s second-ever veto. And the House of Representatives recently voted, 236 to 155, to revoke the 2002 AUMF that approved the war in Iraq—another signal of growing congressional determination to pare back the permissions that it previously handed to the White House.

As former Senate staffers, we agree that American national security can be well-served through an engaged and energetic legislative branch. However, the difficulty with much of the new congressional activism is that it frequently seeks to restrain the executive as a foreign policy end unto itself. That is an understandable instinct, given how poorly many of the military endeavors undertaken by Presidents over the past 20 years have turned out, especially relative to hopeful predictions going in. And at times, putting the brakes on the White House is indeed an appropriate and legitimate role for Capitol Hill, whether opposing an ill-considered war or curtailing U.S. involvement in a misbegotten one.

But when it comes to matters of war, there is much more that an assertive Congress should be doing. In particular, Congress has unique capacity and responsibility to exercise robust and substantive oversight of America’s increasingly complex array of worldwide military operations—both current and prospective. This includes investigating, identifying, and challenging flawed or failing assumptions in U.S. plans, examining alternative strategies, and cultivating innovative ideas that challenge the status quo.

This is especially important given that it is Congress alone that can peer through the secrecy that necessarily cloaks much of U.S. military planning and national security strategy, as well as the natural tendency of the Executive Branch, under every Administration, to convince itself that whatever it is doing is working.

This requires individual Members of Congress who are willing to devote the time and energy necessary to develop deep knowledge and expertise about the U.S. military, the conflicts and competitions in which it is engaged, and the future fights it may be called upon to undertake. It also means representatives personally traveling to war zones and combatant commands, consulting regularly with both U.S. officials and outside policy experts, and engaging with key allies and partners, as well as building up the strongest possible professional committee and personal staffs to aid them in these efforts.

How will the Trump Administration’s agreement with the Taliban verify that the group is in fact no longer permitting international terrorists to operate on Afghan territory under its control—and how will it respond if they renege? Should the U.S. military footprint in Africa be slashed in order to devote greater resources to great-power competition with China and Russia? Is the Defense Department acquiring the right mix of capabilities in the face of disruptive technological advances by Beijing and Moscow? On each these vital national security questions and more, rigorous and expert congressional scrutiny is vital.

Moreover, while the recent spate of activism on Capitol Hill has tended to be formalistic—invoking the 1973 War Powers Resolution, attempting to revoke old AUMFs or pass new ones, using the power of the purse—Congress has subtler tools that are available to influence national security decision-making.

Hearings, speeches, op-eds, congressional delegations, informal discussions with Administration officials, engagement with foreign government and civil society representatives, the congressional bully pulpit—all of these informal instruments can often do more to shape American defense policy for the better than an up-or-down AUMF vote.

In the past, Congress has also exerted influence over U.S. foreign policy by reordering the national security apparatus itself. In the 1970s, for instance, in response to what it regarded as insufficient consideration of human rights considerations under the Nixon Administration, Capitol Hill legislated the creation of new offices and reporting requirements inside the executive branch to elevate the issue, which persist to this day. The current Defense Department structure—with its emphasis on joint operations—is the product of the transformational 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act.

Needless to say, not every foreign policy idea to bubble up from Capitol Hill is a good one. Nor is it the place of Congress to try to micromanage the military battlefield through legislation. Rather, it should be the mission of the Congress to pose tough, well-informed questions to the Executive Branch, illuminate and demand accountability for failures, and encourage fresh thinking.

With power comes responsibility—and as members of Congress seek to reassert greater sway over military matters, they must be ready for the heightened obligations that will come with it. Ultimately, congressional activism is likely to be judged less by its ability to stop the executive branch from using American power in the world than by its capacity to guide smarter, more effective expressions of it.

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