Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 84

The End of an Era

“April is the cruelest month” reads the opening line of T.S. Eliot’s celebrated 1922 poem “The Waste Land.” For the literary culture of the United States and much of the rest of the world as well, this year that distinction belongs to the month of May. In that single month four masters of the printed word passed from the scene. Two practiced the craft of history: Bernard Lewis, the most distinguished historian of the Middle East in the years after World War II, and Richard Pipes, the most distinguished historian of Russia and the Soviet Union in that same period. The third, Tom Wolfe, created, in the 1960s, with his exuberant, highly personal exploration of colorful corners of American life, a distinct approach to non-fiction known as the “new journalism.” He went on to write several novels, one of which, The Bonfire of the Vanities, qualifies as an American classic. The fourth literary giant, Philip Roth, was the most productive writer of serious fiction in the post-1945 era and was, with Saul Bellow and John Updike, one of the three leading American novelists of the second half of the 20th century—and in Roth’s case into the 21st.

The loss of these towering figures, with their immense contributions to literary and intellectual life, is sad. It is also alarming, because they have no obvious successors. While fine historians of the world beyond the United States are at work today—Yale’s Paul Kennedy and Princeton’s Stephen Kotkin come to mind—and while the several authors of the multi-volume Oxford History of the United States have given us comprehensive, well-written accounts of American society, the American economy, and American politics in different periods of the nation’s history, writers with the intellectual scope and literary grace that Lewis and Pipes brought to their studies, and capacious bodies of work that they produced, are hard to find. Nor does any journalist or novelist today approach the stature and the impact that Wolfe and Roth had.

May 2018 thus feels like the end of an era in the history of American and Western culture. To the extent that this is so, what accounts for it? At least two features of contemporary society make it difficult for the United States, and other Western countries, to produce 21st-century versions of Lewis, Pipes, Wolfe, and Roth: the state of the university, and the dominant methods of communication.

Lewis and Pipes made their careers in major American research universities, Lewis at Princeton (after moving, in 1974, from the University of London) and Pipes at Harvard. Younger versions of such scholars would not be welcome in institutions of higher education today. For one thing, historical studies now emphasize the everyday lives of marginalized or persecuted groups rather than the sweeping histories of high culture and high politics that Lewis and Pipes wrote. For another, the university has become highly politicized, with the orthodoxy tilting sharply to the left. Lewis and Pipes were politically conservative: Lewis served as an informal advisor to the administration of George W. Bush and Pipes held a position on the National Security Council during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Their political inclinations did not affect their main scholarly works, which were based on extensively gathered and scrupulously marshalled documentary evidence. The two were interested in broad historical questions rather than narrowly political ones: in Lewis’s case why the Arab world, once the most advanced civilization on the planet, had failed to modernize and why, in the contemporary period, religion had come to play a far larger role in public life in the Middle East than in the West; for Pipes, especially in his 1974 classic Russia Under the Old Regime, why Europe’s largest country remained persistently less developed economically and more autocratic politically than its neighbors to the west. Today they would not be forgiven for their political heresies or indeed for failing to infuse their scholarship with a particular set of values drawn from contemporary politics—values that they did not share.

Wolfe and Roth managed to have careers outside the academy, but such independence is now difficult to achieve. Wolfe had a career in journalism, writing for a now-vanished newspaper, The New York Herald Tribune, and for an earlier version of New York magazine. The digital revolution has laid waste to journalism, which would not now support a career such as Wolfe’s. In the 21st century writers must increasingly turn to universities for positions that provide both a living wage and time to write, in the form of sinecures in creative writing programs or English departments. These two novelists would have difficulty finding a home in either. Wolfe was routinely identified as being politically on the Right. In fact his writing wasn’t particularly political, at least not directly. He wrote primarily as a satirist, but the targets of his satire were often groups favored by the campus Left and thus sacrosanct in academic precincts. Roth, by contrast, was a man of the (moderate) Left; but he also made it a point to violate taboos, which is not the route to acceptance in the easily offended academy of the 21st century. The book that made him famous, Portnoy’s Complaint, published in 1969, scandalized much of the country with its sexual explicitness. Today it seems relatively tame, but the attitude toward social convention and literature that lay behind it would cause trouble for the author if he presented himself as a candidate for the role of writer-in-residence, or some similar position, in an institution of higher learning in 2018.

Modern technologies of communication also make the emergence of 21st-century versions of Lewis, Pipes, Wolfe, and Roth unlikely. The present-day social media, which favor very short, attention-getting messages that are nonetheless time-consuming to compose because their creators emit so many every day, scarcely conduce to the creation of long, careful, complicated books, taking years to write, of the kind that the four authors produced in the 20th century. Whatever else may be said about Twitter and Facebook, they are not going to yield successors to Shakespeare and Gibbon, let alone the four departed literary masters. Nor will social media encourage their devoted users to read the literary classics of the past.

Still, none of the four is known to have had a Facebook page or a Twitter feed. Those forms of communication came along when they had reached, or were approaching, the end of their careers. It was another technology, one that arrived in the middle of the 20th century, that separates these men from those who have come after them. The advent of television made for a revolution in communications deeper and broader than the changes social media have caused. It did so by replacing the word with the image at the center of communication. From Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type in 1439 and the Protestant Reformation that, beginning with Martin Luther’s theological rebellion in 1517, encouraged mass literacy, until the worldwide use of the cathode ray tube after 1950, the printed word dominated Western culture.

Born in 1916, 1923, 1930, and 1933 respectively, Lewis, Pipes, Wolfe, and Roth passed their formative years before the age of television. The electronic medium to which they had access was radio, where words—spoken words—dominate even more thoroughly than they do print because, unlike books, newspapers, and magazines, radio does not provide supplementary illustrations. Moreover, as my wife, Anne Mandelbaum, who grew up with radio but not television has noted, radio encourages the cultivation of the skills necessary for vivid writing because it requires the listener to imagine the settings in which the conversations and the narratives to which he or she is listening are taking place. All succeeding generations have grown up, and lived, in a world that not only bombards them with images but sends, in different ways, the implicit message that images matter more than words do.

The passing of Bernard Lewis, Richard Pipes, Tom Wolfe, and Philip Roth thus marks the end of the era—or rather the end of the legacy of the era—in which words reigned supreme. In a sense, the world has returned to a version of the premodern era, in which coins, icons, paintings and other image-bearing artifacts commanded the attention of the then-largely-illiterate public. The potential long-term consequences of this transition go far beyond the contributions to the culture, large as they are, of these four men. Because complicated ideas and the richness of human life, including the way individual human beings experience it, can only be fully conveyed in words, this broad development may portend a crippling loss for civilization itself.

The post The End of an Era appeared first on The American Interest.

A Greek Bearing Grifts

It is hard to understand how the Greek state works without grasping the power held by a small circle of industrialists and financiers in Athens. These are the oligarchs. Many inherited their fortunes or first accumulated them at sea; their fleets collectively comprise the largest merchant marine in the world. Then they moved into new spheres. Some went into construction. Others set up banks. Many own a line of hotels or collect blocs of real estate. Those with ships pay the minimal tax rate in Greece owing to legislation passed by the 1967-74 military junta that allows their capital to be assessed in vessel tonnage rather than profits. Sometimes tying their holdings through Cypriot or Liberian shell companies, oligarchs nevertheless stay based in Greece, where they compound additional advantages—bailouts courtesy of Greek taxpayers, lucrative state contracts—through blackmail.

With every new government that takes power in Athens, the oligarchs threaten to take away the jobs they provide and the cash they flush into the political system should any attempt be made to audit their assets or tax them more effectively. In the past three decades not a single major party in Greece has run for election without vowing to break the power of these men; not a single party has seriously attempted to do so once in office. What is more, oligarchs are able to control the narratives told about them because there hardly exists a newspaper, television channel, or magazine in Greece that is not owned by one of them. Their power is such that press outfits within—and outside—the country have many legal and financial incentives not to call them out by name.

Victor Restis hovers at the fringes of the Greek oligarchy. At 50, he is half a generation younger than most of its members, though his holdings are at least as extensive. His rise has been swift but circuitous, punctuated by scandal and shrouded in obscurity peculiar even by the standards of a Balkan billionaire. Restis calls himself the new Aristotle Onassis but mostly shuns publicity. Shipping forms the backbone of his financial empire, but his real talent is for foraying out to untapped corners of Europe, seizing assets, extracting connections, and then sallying on to new terrain. Restis’s companies stretch across more than a dozen sectors—shipping, tourism, television, mining—and at least as many countries. Born in the Congo, educated in Belgium, in Athens he is an outsider: the Greek shipping magnate who does not descend from a Greek shipping dynasty. Restis’s mother was born into a Jewish family from the island of Rhodes that was almost entirely exterminated at Auschwitz. His father, Stamatis, fled Greece soon after the end of its Civil War and, unlike most Greeks, who headed to South Africa in the 1950s, headed instead for the Congo. In Kinshasa, Stamatis Restis built a modest fortune exporting fruits back to Europe. After Mobutu’s nationalization of businesses in the late 1960s, Stamatis left, returning to Piraeus and divesting his fruit earnings into a shipping company called Enterprises that was licensed two months before the collapse of the Colonels. Enterprises was a fleet of 83 vessels by the time a 36-year-old Victor Restis took control following Stamatis’s death in 2004.

Fourteen years later, Restis remains better known outside of Greece than within it. “He thrives on unpredictability,” I was told by his former business partner, Anastasios Pallis. “I know many ship-owners. Restis does not work like any of them.” Whereas most oligarchs in Greece encircle themselves with a clutch of political worthies and shipping scions, surrounding Restis there is something else: a remarkable constellation of transnational opportunists and drifting profiteers whose interests bear, at first glance, no apparent reason for overlapping.

There is Milo Đukanović, the contraband cigarette baron who has lorded over Montenegro under one title or another since 1990. There is Thaksin Shinawatra, the ex-Thai Prime Minister whose expansion of the electoral franchise (or rampant corruption, depending on your view) led to his 2006 ousting by his own army, and who three years later re-emerged as the richest Montenegrin in the world, awarded citizenship to that country by Đukanović himself. There is Wei Sang “Paul” Phua, the Malaysian card shark and serial match fixer who was taken down by an FBI sting operation in Las Vegas in 2014, only to resurface in the construction of Adriatic resort casinos this past year. There is Claudio Podeschi, former head of the tiny mountain enclave of San Marino, currently on trial for hawking off diplomatic posts to, among others, Paul Phua—appointed San Marino’s Ambassador to Montenegro in early 2011—as well as Victor Restis, appointed San Marino’s Ambassador to Poland three months earlier. Working in conjunction with one another, often taking cues from one another’s schemes, these men have invested, reaped, and transferred large sums of cash from one base of enrichment to the next. Restis is the figure most responsible for tying their operations together.

The story of Victor Restis is worth understanding for two reasons. The first is his personal demonstration of how, recurrently throughout the economic crisis, at a time when their financial arrangements have never appeared more indefensible, the most powerful men of Greece have brazenly violated its laws and walked away effectively unharmed. The second is that Restis’s saga shows how easily such corruption can spread—especially in the wake of the Greek crisis, which encouraged the easy flow of dubious foreign capital into and through the country.

Restis’s scandals within Greece are numerous. In 2013, his family bank, a 16-branch enterprise called First Business Bank, was shut down when he was caught red-handed extracting loans from the state under the names of family members, then siphoning the cash off to his offshores. Restis served four months of the five-year jail sentence after having successfully foisted First Business Bank’s toxic debt off to Greek taxpayers.

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Victor Restis

At the same time came allegations from the American organization United Against Nuclear Iran. Its claim was that Restis was the undisclosed co-owner of a smuggling fleet—its GPS transmitters switched off, its engines turned down—which had been transporting hundreds of millions of euros of oil, bought with First Business Bank loans, from Iran to China. Restis denied the accusation, fought it in American court with a defamation lawsuit, and came away yielding that his ships had merely been moving humanitarian aid—soya beans—through the Persian Gulf. (An intervention by the Obama Administration asserted that American intelligence sources, probably Israeli, would be exposed should all the relevant evidence have been brought out in court; Restis’s suit was subsequently dismissed on national security grounds.) This year legal scandal struck once more, with allegations that for at least five years Restis has been cleaning up his earnings through a storefront laundering racket in Athens that links out to an array of offshores. His alleged co-conspirator, Ioannis Karouzos, is serving a 16-year jail sentence. Restis is appealing the verdict; his lawyer, Konstantinos Karagounis, was picked up off the Greek justice ministry.

This brings us to the second lesson of the Restis affair: that the Greek crisis has turned the country into an outsized depository for foreign capital flows—the result of privatizations, a tourist industry whose needs have doubled in the last decade, and the vast exodus of cash from Greek banks—even while the provenances of that foreign capital, and why it’s coming to Greece, are rarely apparent.

Much of what once seemed innocuous investment in Greece has since proved suspicious. In 2016, the China Ocean Shipping Company acquired the port of Piraeus, the largest cargo container terminal in the Eastern Mediterranean, for the equivalent of two weeks’ worth of debt relief; since then, one instance of purported smuggling or customs evasion by the nascent Chinese mafia in Greece has followed another. Four years earlier, half the Flisvos Marina, Greece’s largest marina, was sold off to Ferit Şahenk, the richest Turk in the world, who in 2016 picked up the Athens Hilton—his fortune aggrandized in the interim by the tightening of his allegiance to Erdoğan following the failed 2015 coup. A parallel array of acquisitions has come by way of a rising tier of crisis oligarchs—men like the cigarette bandit Ivan Savvidis from Georgia, or the construction magnate Christos Kalogritsas with connections to Sicily—who have stripped the state for pittances on behalf of external players.

The moneyed interests channeling through Victor Restis are ostensibly Thai. This past winter, Pan Asia Investments, a consortium of moguls incorporated in Switzerland but originating mostly from Bangkok, began dispatching speculators to Greece. Pending acquisitions include sets of hotels in Mykonos as well as Messenia, the largest foreign investment ever in that part of the country. But Pan Asia’s most curious purchase, to be finalized next month, is its €27 million takeover of Panathinaikos: Greece’s oldest sports team and probably its last major soccer club not buttressed with dirty money.The takeover is fronted by Pairoj Piempongsant, the right-hand man of Thaksin Shinawatra, the ex-Thai Prime Minister who by 2009 had pieced his fortune back together in Montenegro not long after Restis had entered that country to expand his own. Panathinaikos is not the only European soccer club Piempongsant has bought in recent years, but its acquisition has triggered questions in the Athenian press. No foreigner has ever bought a Greek soccer team: What little value they possess comes from their fan bases, readily exploitable in moments of crisis for political influence or legal protection. Thirteen million euros in debt, incapable of paying a handful of its players last season, Panathinaikos is a straggling club in a league that has never made much effort to disprove rumors of its purchasable referees.

Restis has not admitted to any involvement in Panathinaikos’s acquisition. But neither does he counter the heightening speculation that behind Pairoj Piempongsant sits Thaksin Shinawatra, and that behind Thaksin Shinawatra sits Victor Restis—a fringe oligarch whose legal troubles may well benefit from nurturing his reputation as a man with unusually powerful connections.

How Restis forged those connections is the story of what happened after the death of his father Stamatis in 2004. Victor Restis proved a canny successor, picking up 32 bulkers off a Malaysian group that same year and becoming the fifth-largest ship owner in Greece. With the lull in the industry that came three years later, Restis began to diversify across sectors and borders. He acquired resorts in the Peloponnese and a second-tier soccer club in his Athenian suburb of Glyfada. He founded a real estate firm based out of Bulgaria. He bought castles in Umbria, began constructing cruise ships in China, swept up drilling rigs in the North Sea. He licensed MTV across the Balkans. He bought stakes in several online Greek news outlets and a minor daily in Athens. From Moldova to Romania to Turkey he became a double-digit shareholder in banks. In Germany he set up his own, New Generation Bank.

But the most consequential place for Restis would be Montenegro. The first significant Greek businessman to invest in the country had been Vassilis Sarantitis, a reputable maritime lawyer who, with help from a Montenegrin soccer star called Dragan Perovic, set up a telecommunications firm in the country shortly after the disintegration of Yugoslavia; Sarantitis was a joint shareholder of First Business Bank before Restis bought it up entirely in 2006. A year after Restis had taken full control of First Business, he would make his own pivot to Podgorica. By this time Milo Đukanović had not only secured Montenegro’s detachment from Serbia but had also embarked on the privatization of the country that has effectively made Montenegro the Đukanović family firm. The capital that Đukanović borrowed to set up his first private banking enterprise was Greek: In 2007, a London branch of Piraeus Bank lent Đukanović $2 million to buy up shares of Nikšić Bank—subsequently privatized, relocated to Podgorica, renamed First Bank, slushed with cash held by the trio of Đukanović siblings—with the shares of the yet-to-be purchased bank fronted as collateral against the Piraeus Bank loan. 

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Milo Đukanović in 2010, via Wikimedia Commons

Restis arrived to Montenegro just as this financial arrangement had begun to implode. Having haphazardly loaned out cash to a hoard of more distant relatives and friends, Đukanović’s First Bank found itself a hundred million euros in debt and on the brink of seizure by the state. A solution was identified in the same strip of Adriatic coast whose deep-water cigarette smuggling hubs had enriched the Đukanović machine in the first place during the 1990s. Its privatization would give way to new revenue streams through tourism. In 2008, the Montenegrin parliament pushed a law declaring the construction of five-star hotels to be in the national interest, then appointed Đukanović head of a newly-minted Montenegrin Investment Promotion Agency. After an initial stint of mismanagement by Stanko Subotić, a Serbian businessman and alleged cocaine trafficker since indicted by Belgrade on smuggling charges, development of the coastline was largely outsourced to Victor Restis.

With Restis came cash and an entourage of Greek businessmen. As one investigative journalist in Podgorica told me, it was not just the miracle of Restis’s timing or his badly needed capital as it was the jolt of wherewithal—“he was an outsider who appeared to know how to get things done”—he brought to Đukanović’s flagging marketization. The first thing Restis did was put money into the Berane brown coal mine through a new shell company called Adcapital Montenegro; here the first connection to Đukanović, briefly checked out of the political scene, was made. Next he set up a bank, First Capital (not to be confused with First Business, his Greek bank shut down in 2013). Along the coast, he bought up, or leased out on decades-long terms, a string of old Yugoslav state resorts. Into the islet of Sveti Stefan, the touristic jewel of the Adriatic once owned by Subotić but taken over by Aman Resorts, Restis injected some €40 million. This flurry of investments was coupled with the arrival of one of Restis’s old business associates from Greece, a former manager of Athens’s AEK soccer club called Petros Stathis. Stathis worked the ground game, stationing himself permanently in Montenegro and picking up a Serbian top model for a wife. In parallel to Restis, he coordinated his own takeover of the Adriatic coast. He purchased an indebted state-run newspaper in Podgorica, a pair of online portals, and in addition founded his own newspaper. All have become propaganda organs for Đukanović, who reimbursed Stathis with Montenegrin citizenship in 2013, the year after Đukanović had cycled back once more into the Prime Minister’s office.

But more critical than any of these investments was the other Prime Minister whom Restis brought to the scene. This was Shinawatra, whose own saga of self-enrichment—a billion euros made in telecoms through the 1990s, at least a billion more made while in office through Olympian-scale real estate deals that landed him an in absentia jail sentence in 2008—had culminated in catastrophe. Dethroned in Thailand, Shinawatra departed for his Dubai exile with virtually all his capital still frozen in Bangkok. In 2007, with €20 million he had managed to squirrel away, Shinawatra became the majority shareholder of Manchester City Football Club. Here the partnership with Restis, who had himself bought shares in Manchester City that year, began.

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Thaksin Shinawatra in 2005, via Wikimedia Commons

In 2008, officially charged with corruption and out of concerns that Manchester City had become a vehicle for laundering his recovering fortune, Shinawatra was forced to sell the club (which during his year-long tenure had become the most valuable soccer team in the world) to Sheik Mansour of Abu Dhabi. The connection was brokered on the Thai side by Piempongsant, the man currently buying Panathinaikos in Athens and who saw to it that Shinawatra fully doubled his initial investment. Restis then stayed on as the nominal manager of what shares Shinawatra still kept in Manchester City, brokering his own connection with Sheikh Mansour the next year. In 2009, Restis secured a $1.5 billion partnership with the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Investment Company, an arrangement that in turn looped a more distant player into the scene: Mohammed Dahlan, the former Palestinian Minister of Security who, kicked out of Ramallah following the 2007 Hamas coup, had made his way to Abu Dhabi and onto the payroll of the Emirati sheikhs.

Both Dahlan and Shinawatra then re-connected with Restis in Montenegro. Dahlan established himself as the handler of Gulf state fortunes pouring into Podgorica’s real estate and banking sectors; in 2010, he was awarded Montenegrin citizenship for being “one of the most important promoters of our interests in the Middle East”—his pending charges of multimillion-euro fraud and human rights violations all but disregarded. Shinawatra began staying at Restis’s hotels in Montenegro while he brokered the terms of his own alliance with Đukanović. By 2009, the ex-Thai Prime Minister had turned into the biggest financial prop of Montenegro’s first family, cycling €15 million of his Manchester City earnings into First Bank through a Dubai intermediary. Shinawatra in turn was granted Montenegrin citizenship—this, despite legislation prohibiting citizenship from being granted to any foreigner with a pending arrest warrant.

Glamorized in travel columns as the “future Monaco” and “land of fairy tales,” the coast around Budva that once brought $700 million into Montenegro annually through cigarette smuggling was gussied up into a glitzy riviera. (The near-eradication of the illegal tobacco trade and broader marketization of Montenegro helped push the country into NATO in 2016.) Visit the bay bounded by Budva and Sveti Stefan today—ten kilometers of seafront widely considered the most picturesque stretch of the Adriatic—and one encounters a revealing succession of hotels. Heading south from Budva, Petros Stathis owns four resorts. Eight hotels are owned by the Montenegrin state—that is to say, by Milo Đukanović. The island of St. Nikola—formerly owned by Stanko Subotić, the disgraced associate of Đukanović—is owned by Shinawatra, who paid €21 million for the property, no larger than four soccer fields, and who has now outsourced its conversion into a 500-room hotel-marina to a construction firm owned by Aco Đukanović. Further down the coast, Victor Restis owns the island of Sveti Stefan, which now hosts everything from conferences for citizenship commodification firms to celebrity weddings to Restis’s rendezvous with Thai entrepreneurs in lobbies roving with bouncers and fuming with cigar smoke.

The next player to buy into the scene was Paul Phua, the Malaysian czar of a sprawling gambling empire stretching from Hong Kong to London to Melbourne. His turn to Montenegro also followed legal fiasco. In 2014, Phua was caught by the FBI handling $400 million in illegal wagers during the Brazil World Cup, a gig he ran out of Villa 8888 at Las Vegas’s Caesars Palace, decked out by unknowing hotel staff into a wiring room packed with big screen televisions and banks of computer monitors.

Three months later Phua was handed back his $48 million private jet and walked, evidence in his case botched by the FBI and a fumbled search warrant. He headed to Montenegro, where his credit was still good, and where he found a business partner in-waiting in Victor Restis. As he had with Shinawatra, Restis brought in Phua as a joint investor in the Aman Resort on Sveti Stefan; Phua joined Stathis as a partner in Maestral Resort and Casino, where Phua now presides over poker tournaments in which the world’s highest rollers—and the occasional Calabrian gangster—are flown in by chartered jets for weeks at a time. Like Shinawatra, in return for the cash he divested into the country, Phua was afforded legal sanctuary by Đukanović in the form of a Montenegrin passport. (Phua, unlike Shinawatra, was not pending arrest at the time; the FBI’s claim that Phua was head of Hong Kong’s 14K Triad at the time he met Restis in Montenegro has proved unfounded.)

It would take years for investigative journalists in Montenegro to untangle the interconnectedness of these dealings and the piles of cash sluicing from one bank account into another. But by the time these schemes had been registered in full, the circle surrounding Restis had moved the bulk of its operations west. The microstate of San Marino is a strange relic of the world of medieval Italian city-states; the fifth-smallest country on earth, it has claims on being its oldest functioning republic. It also sits confoundingly close to Montenegro: From the coast of Budva, across the same stretch of Adriatic coursing with cigarette runners and yachting tycoons, it can be reached overnight by boat and a brief drive up the Marche. For decades its banking system has been terra benedetta for Italian tax-evaders; more recently it has become a financial haven for Eastern European elites from, among other places, Montenegro.

San Marino proved a redux of Montenegro, albeit in more concentrated form. Shock troops of Greek businessmen, several of whom had arranged Stathis and Restis’s takeovers in Montenegro, brought their know-how to a San Marinese ruling elite which have long acted as a bridge between Italian and Balkan interests. If in Montenegro Shinawatra had been the major provider of capital, in San Marino it proved to be Phua: Throughout 2011, millions of euros were transferred from a Swiss bank account into his company, Black Sea Pearl, for the construction of a seven-star Aman Resort in San Marino, a sister complex to the one which had been built in Sveti Stefan. Construction never began; the money remains unaccounted for.

If Montenegro had granted legal charlatans like Shinawatra, Dahlan, and Phua the protection of its passport, San Marino was able to offer something grander. Because its population is so small at just over 30,000 residents, its ruling council has historically staffed its diplomatic corps with non-citizens, who in turn get the privilege of polishing their biographies with a credibly officious title—“Ambassador of San Marino”—that often grants its bearer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to legal speculation: How could a man with a trail of suspect acquisitions have been entrusted with the diplomatic relations of a foreign state? And yet in the case of San Marino, it turns out that its corps of non-resident diplomats is a roll call of dubious non-diplomats. An Italian national and Berlusconi sprig called Ubaldo Livolsi was caught up in two major money laundering scandals while serving as San Marino’s Ambassador to Serbia; another Italian national, Enrico Maria Pasquini, was the microstate’s Ambassador to Spain when he was overwhelmed by his own laundering scandal. Claims made by Achilleas Kallakis that he had served the Republic as its Ambassador to Brunei were considered so preposterous, they were waved off by the Guardian as just another con typical of the man now serving an 11-year prison sentence for the largest mortgage fraud in UK history. But the Greek shipping scion did indeed serve San Marino as Ambassador to Brunei—later to Greece, later to Thailand.

Restis was the next Greek to take up an ambassadorial post on behalf of San Marino. Within a year of Kallakis’s dismissal, in December 2010, Restis was offered a posting in Poland. A source in San Marino’s judiciary told me that following the appointment two cash installments (€240,00 in late 2012; €500,000 in early 2013) were deposited by First Capital—Restis’s Montenegro bank, later re-christened Universal Bank, with Petros Stathis platooned in as majority shareholder—into a coffee company held in the name of Biljana Baruca, the Slovenia-born fiancée of Claudio Podeschi. Tacked to a handful of Restis-related companies in Montenegro, in San Marino Podeschi has orbited from ministry to ministry, overseeing the dishing out of its diplomatic posts since at least 2004; a trial into his habitual solicitation of kickbacks remains ongoing, the centerpiece of which is his awarding of the Montenegrin ambassadorship to Paul Phua in February 2011, three months after Restis’s appointment.

Both Phua and Restis have since been stripped of their posts. But their dealings in San Marino have proven much too extensive to disband so quickly. Phua remains a major real estate mogul with considerable clout at the highest levels of the state; after the arrest of his son in Macau for working the phones of his father’s betting ring, Petros Stathis offered to “activate” its Prime Minister—San Marino does not have one—to intervene on Phua’s behalf. (Phua did eventually manage his son’s release, allegedly with $500,000 in bribes to Macau police.) And despite being unceremoniously bounced out of its diplomatic corps, Restis now stands poised to become the inaugural head of San Marino’s newly-minted maritime registry, an enterprise—handing out shipping licenses on behalf of a landlocked tax haven—he will purportedly run out of an office in Athens. His saga has swung full circle back to Greece, bringing with it the Montengrin, San Marinese and Thai interests he accrued during his decade spent pin-balling around the Adriatic.

It is worth recalling that the man Victor Restis aspires to become—Aristotle Onassis, who functioned within the group of godfather magnates that included Stavros Niarchos and Stratis Andreadis—was one of the postwar pioneers of tax avoidance. It is for good reason that what is now a globalized phenomenon can trace much of its origins back to the Greek ship-owners who in turn laid the foundations for the Greek oligarchy. The machinery of their profit was offshore and mobile. They grasped ports of call and flags of convenience. Their shipping lanes were inherently borderless.

Restis is the roguish outgrowth of that rotten system. The heirs to men like Onassis contented themselves with slyly ramifying their interests through the Greek state. But Restis is shrewd enough to realize that Greece is distractingly small game. He feels no compulsion to succor its elites or jostle in the operetta of its politics. He has mustered around himself a circle of floating oligarchs who can move from one hub of self-enrichment to another. They co-opt not just the financial structures of each—state tenders, real estate markets, LLCs—but the privileges of their taxpayers—passports, ambassadorial posts—even while they flaunt the laws of each in succession.

The failure of one member of Europe to reign in men like this anywhere only leads to the proliferation of their corruption everywhere: From Montenegro to San Marino to Greece to wherever they set their sights next. Like vipers, oligarchs are better cut off at the head or not at all.

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Ukraine’s Most Dangerous Profession

Green slime drips from the face of Ukraine’s most famous anti-corruption activist. On July 17, Vitaliy Shabunin and a merry band of 20 companions were peacefully protesting a grand old tradition in Ukraine: The child of a powerfully connected person commits a crime, the parents make a few calls, and the charges magically disappear. In this case, the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office dropped embezzlement charges against Oleksandr Avakov, the son of Ukraine’s Interior Minister. Counter-protesters doused Shabunin in green medical fluid, which resulted in a chemical burn, and hurled cakes at him as the police stood by.

It’s too early to say if the thugs will be brought to justice, but it’s a good reminder of the daily risks Kyiv’s whistleblowers face. Activists without Shabunin’s name recognition are in even greater danger: A month ago, an activist was stabbed in Odesa.

And it’s a good reminder of the trumped-up charges that hang over Shabunin.

The trial against him began on January 30. Shabunin, 33, is accused of beating a journalist and faces up to five years in jail if convicted. Shabunin is the head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, the loudest and most effective non-governmental organization leading the fight against graft in Ukraine.

More than a year ago, on June 8, 2017, Shabunin punched video blogger Vsevolod FilimonenkoafterFilimonenkohad showed up at his house at least twice, followed him in Kyiv with a video camera, and then turned up again at an appointment to provoke him.

Shabunin was originally charged with assault, which carries up to three years in prison. On January 15, the charge was changed to assault against a journalist, a change Shabunin and leading civil society organizations say was politically motivated—Filimonenko is a well-known provocateur, not a journalist. A majority of journalists have cried foul and resent that Filimonenkois being charged under a crime they say the police don’t use to protect them.

Shabunin is little-known in the West, but he’s a minor celebrity in Ukraine, where he poses a threat to entrenched interests. With his white blond hair, large facial mole, and pugnacious character, he has become the face of the anti-corruption movement. He’s also charismatic, articulate, and a brilliant organizer.

The government has done its best to discredit him. He’s been portrayed as a weird Protestant Christian. (Largely true.) He’s also been accused of corruption for building a home that cost far more than his salary. (He says that it cost $80,000 and that he sold an apartment to pay for it.) I’ve seen his home, and it’s modest. His neighbors have chickens. His family of four has only one inexpensive car.

The fact is, Shabunin is tough to discredit. A father of two, Shabunin doesn’t drink and seems every bit the decent family man.

With an easy and unaffected laugh, Shabunin is likeable and real. He’s great fun to talk politics with. He’s got an instinctual feel for people, for political opportunities, and an ability to explain complex ideas simply.

Plus, he’s got real influence, both online and in the flesh. In 2016, the influential Ukrainian magazine Novoe Vremya recognized him as one of Ukraine’s top 25 movers and shakers for the intense pressure he’s put on corrupt officials.  Online, he’s got 31,000 followers on Twitter and nearly 76,000 followers on Facebook.  When he speaks, the international financial institutions and Western embassies listen.

One reason the authorities have gone after Shabunin may be that the administration of President Petro Poroshenko sees him as a potential political challenger and hopes that putting him in jail will shut him up for a while. Shabunin is not quite a household name yet, but his reputation is only growing. In a 2016 poll, 10 percent of voters said they had a very favorable or favorable opinion of him. Shabunin ran for parliament in 2014 and lost. He told me that he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of running in 2019, but for him, it’s “a question of where to have the most efficacy.” For the time being, he has more influence outside of the system.

The awful part of the whole ordeal is that Poroshenko may be taking a page out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s playbook.

As the Russian anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny gained greater popularity during the massive anti-government street protests that swept Moscow and St. Petersburg from December 2011 to March 2012, the Kremlin’s pliant courts put Navalny in jail for two 15-day prison stints on nonsensical charges. Alexei Venediktov, editor of the Echo of Moscow radio station, called Navalny’s arrest “a political mistake: jailing Navalny transforms him from an online leader into an offline one.”

If the case gains momentum and Shabunin is convicted, we may write the same thing about Shabunin.

Former journalist turned politician Sergiy Leshchenko agrees with the Navalny comparison and says that the case against Shabunin is meant “to discredit the anti-corruption movement, to send a message to other fighters,” and to demonstrate Poroshenko’s power before the elections.

“I think it will be a bigger problem for [the presidential administration] than for me,” Shabunin predicts. “Even if I go to jail, my team will work,” he warns. “They will work even harder.”

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Plainting by the Numbers

President Donald Trump’s recent journey to a NATO summit in Brussels and to a summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki turns the page on an epoch of American foreign policy that traces back to Harry Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, and the other founders of the post-World War II U.S.-created international security order. The grand strategy that dates from roughly 1947-48 is no more; all that’s left is eroding institutional habit and some optical detritus that takes the form of what will prove to be akin to the ephemeral lingering images one sees on occasions of flash photography.

One aspect of that detritus has to do with numbers, specifically the kind of numbers that supposedly demonstrate the will of NATO member states to defend themselves: defense budget numbers reckoned by percentages of pledged increased spending from the present. Numbers are mesmerizing to many people. As Nietzsche wisely wrote, presumably before he went mad, “Were it not for the constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, men could not live.” In this case, the form of mesmerization induces a “same ol’-same ol’” sensation, giving the false sense that beyond all the media hype and rapid shallow breathing in Europe, everything is pretty much the same as it was before the recent summits, and before Donald Trump became President of the United States.

Some Americans, at least, have been complaining almost from the postwar get-go that the Europeans were not pulling their weight. Those old enough will remember the Mansfield Amendment, from 1972, which threatened to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe unless the Europeans came up with more cash, and more besides. And it was true; the pre-expansion Allies, save for special-relationship Britain and sometimes France, have never spent robustly on defense in the postwar era, either during the Cold War or especially since.

This led pretty much every President since 1972 to complain in one way or another that the Allies needed to do more, though it was invariably done more in sorrow than in anger and usually in private. This was certainly true during the Cold War, but after a great swoon in post-Cold War defense spending throughout the Alliance, including in the United States, it became true again in the post-Cold War era for essentially three reasons: the swoon went too deep and lasted too long; NATO had refashioned itself as a more broadly functional alliance, and so had plenty of agreed obligations in which to invest; and the security threat to member states from the east began slowly, and then not so slowly, to increase—in different ways going under the headings “cyber” and “hybrid” but eventually also in potentially the “same ol’” way. Go back and read the Alliance-related speeches of post-Cold War Defense Secretaries Les Aspin, Harold Brown, William Cohen, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, and Ash Carter: in significant ways, they all sound the same on this point, and for the same reason. Their Presidents did, too. Barack Obama also referred to the European Allies as “free riders”; Donald Trump is not original in that.

Even during the Cold War, U.S. policymakers toyed with the idea of forging allied agreement on defense spending levels as a means to get traction on increased investment levels. Staffers tossed about such ideas at summit preparation meetings, and some informal “understood” targets did form from time to time among senior policymakers. European defense professionals found the method useful in their own intra-governmental plaints to their political masters, for whom an added defense burden was almost invariably unpopular. From time to time, the informal targets did some good in that regard.

But this method defined as a binding pledge, including binding on the United States, did not prevail as high-level public policy until 1979. That is when the U.S. policy habit of plainting by the numbers to NATO’s European members really got started. As to how that happened, as Damon Runyon used to say, “A story goes with it.” It is a story I happen to know a little bit about.

In the late winter of 1977, I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, interested in U.S. foreign policy generally, but especially at the intersection of strategic arms analysis and the geopolitics of the Middle East. I was working part-time at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, for that was the source of some of the fellowship support that paid Penn for my presence. To keep this story as short as it can reasonably be, at one point I was shipped off to Washington to work as a temporary adjunct to the staff of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. The occasion was President Carter’s nomination of Paul Warnke to be Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and chief negotiator in the then on-going SALT II negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

There, in the bowels of the Russell Senate Office Building—in a suite “lent” to Scoop by Senator Sam Nunn—I encountered the formidable Dorothy Fosdick, Scoop’s chief of staff, and Richard Perle, his legislative assistant, with whom I was to work. I slept in the evening on a couch in the Georgetown townhouse of an FPRI alumnus, John Lehman. My ancillary expenses were paid by a setup known as the Abington Corporation.

Scoop was not fond of the Warnke nomination, and he was suspicious of the new Carter Administration’s approach to the Soviet Union and U.S. foreign policy generally. It will be recalled that Scoop had run for the Democratic nomination in 1976, and had experienced some frustration, not least at the hands of upstart outsider Jimmy Carter, who had captivated the press. Example: Scoop won the Pennsylvania primary, but the banner headline the next day in the Philadelphia Inquirer read: “Carter Takes Second in Pennsylvania.” When Carter got to Washington with his Georgia mafia, he and they made a point of ignoring Scoop and most of the rest of the senior Democratic Party leadership in the Senate and House. But the rankled relationship wasn’t mainly about political or personal issues, at least from Scoop’s perspective. It was about policy.

My job was to research everything Warnke, a former senior DOD staffer and Vietnam War dissenter, had ever written or said about arms control and the strategic nuclear competition—and to feed crispy kernels of Warnke language to the rest of the staff for Scoop’s hearings preparation. I found plenty of kernels. The point of the effort was not to defeat the Warnke nomination, because that was not a practical objective at the time. The point was to lay down a marker for the future, and the marker had a very specific aim: that Warnke’s role as chief negotiator be approved by a less than two-thirds vote. The message: If Warnke and his senior associates brought to the Senate a SALT II Treaty that reflected Warnke’s views on the issues, it would not win Senate confirmation. The vote approving Warnke as chief negotiator was 58-40.

We thought we had achieved our stated objective. Only later did we entertain the possibility that the message was not understood at the White House. In 1979, it turned out that Warnke and company did submit to the Senate a SALT II Treaty that broadly reflected Warnke’s views. Scoop was determined either to defeat Senate confirmation of the treaty, or to force a renegotiation of it, or, if necessary, to attach conditions to confirmation that would ameliorate some of the deficiencies he saw in it.

By this point, at the advanced age of 28 and on the cusp of receiving my Ph.D., I was once again dispatched to Senator Jackson’s staff to work as an adjunct in preparation for Senate Hearings on the SALT II Treaty. I was there in Washington during the summer of 1979 and into early fall, for the most part liberated from John Lehman’s couch: I was instructed instead to stay at the Jackson residence on Rockwood Parkway, near American University, while Scoop was back in Everett, Washington and in China for much of that recess period. I was to look after the place, not to throw parties or make a mess, close the curtains at sunset since Scoop had been informed that he was a PLO target, and to start Scoop’s 1961 Chevy and drive it around the block once a week so the battery wouldn’t die from disuse in his absence. Scoop and I shared the house for about a week before he left for Everett to collect his family and head off to China; that’s how I first met Daniel Patrick Moynihan and James Schlesinger—at the front door.

Meanwhile, Alexander M. Haig, Jr., had returned from being Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR). He had ideas about running for President in 1980. But he was also enlisted to testify on the SALT II Treaty before the Senate Arms Services Committee by the bipartisan informal grouping in the Senate devoted to putting the SALT II Treaty draft to the test—led by Senator Jackson and Senator John Tower, aided respectively by Richard Perle and Bud McFarlane, and advised overall by Paul Nitze. Upon return from Europe and retirement from the U.S. Army, Haig became director of the Western Security Studies program at FPRI and, not incidentally, president of United Technologies.

Upon return from Europe via Brussels, where he was nearly the victim of a terrorist bomb, Haig had not yet read the Treaty text. Having sat through all the Armed Services Committee and Foreign Relations Committee hearings, I was delegated to brief Haig on the Treaty, including the implications for Haig’s presumed special expertise: the impact of the Treaty on the security of the Western Allies. (There are more stories about those particulars, but I won’t go into them now, except to note that part of my briefing took place at a barbershop on K Street, and so with a small accidental audience!)

A day or two later, at the Hearing, I was joined by my senior FPRI colleague and friend, Harvey Sicherman, the two of us sitting just behind General Haig in the Capitol’s Senate Caucus Room. The upshot, for the purpose at hand, is that Haig enthusiastically affirmed the idea, mooted a few days earlier by Senator Jackson as he questioned Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, that all the NATO Allies should commit to an increase of 3 percent in their current defense spending levels to compensate somewhat for the risks to Western security posed by imperfections in the Treaty.

Scoop’s grilling of Vance had been masterful. He got him to commit to a 3 percent U.S. defense spending increase, presumably in return for which Scoop would relent on his opposition to the Treaty’s Senate confirmation. We didn’t know if Vance had pulled that remark out of his trouser pocket under duress, or if it had been an option previously discussed with the President, Defense Secretary Harold Brown, and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. (Years later Zbig told me that the affirmation of the May 1977 guideline had indeed come in a moment of pressure from Vance’s trouser pocket, but that he had been delighted to hear it all the same, and had recommended to President Carter that he stand by it.)

And that is how the “3 percent solution” as a supposedly binding pledge was born. A few weeks later, back now in Philadelphia, Harvey Sicherman gathered the troops for the book project The Three Per Cent Solution and the Future of NATO. We had some useful input from Haig, FPRI president William Kintner, FPRI founder and former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Robert Strausz-Hupé, and a few others. But basically Harvey wrote the book with my assistance, and my main job was the detailed budget analysis of what a 3 percent increase in U.S. defense spending really meant, or might mean. It was then that I first began to understand what Lord Palmerston meant when he wrote that there were three kinds of liars: big liars, little liars, and statisticians. I added a fourth category: people who screw around with budgets.

In the course of my research, I learned a simple truth: Budget numbers are very elastically fungible. Depending on what baseline is chosen, and what assumptions are made about inflation and other variables, a 3 percent increase in a defense budget can mean buying a lot of new capacity, a little, or none at all. That’s why when Michael Boskin and Alan Greenspan screwed with the calculation of the consumer price index in 1999 in order to reduce payouts for yearly CPI adjustments, I understood what they were doing. That’s why when my German friends confide in me that, despite what’s on paper, the German military today cannot muster a single combat-capable division, I understand how that discrepancy can be. It’s all about reverse alchemy. In “real” alchemy the aim is to combine and manipulate common ingredients to get precious ones; in reverse alchemy, the aim is to take precious resources and make them more or less disappear.

That is, again more or less, what the Carter Administration tried to do, or was about to try to do . . . until the Red Army invaded Afghanistan about three months later. That is when Jimmy Carter suddenly began to understand the Soviets. That is when Zbigniew Brzezinski began to smile more, and Andrew Young to smile less. President Carter claimed that he was withdrawing the SALT II Treaty from Senate consideration because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and that claim has stuck as truth in common knowledge. But as with a lot of common knowledge it is not so: Carter withdrew the Treaty because his head counter in the Senate, Senator Alan Cranston, told him that a vote would not achieve the necessary two-thirds for passage. The vote, Cranston told his Executive Branch colleagues, would be about nine votes short, about 58-40.

Since its 1979 birth, the idea of formal and binding numerical targets for NATO defense spending has been kept alive in one way or another. It works as a kind of political symbol, useful, as already noted, for discussions within European governments, and useful too to satiate narrowly minded Americans, our green eyeshade types, into believing that some effort is in train to get the Europeans to pull more of their weight. But the targets have rarely if ever been met on the European side, and that includes the agreed 2014 target of reaching 2 percent of GDP by 2024. As of this past year, seven NATO states were at 1 percent or less, and only about five were even remotely on target to meet the 2024 goal.

Numerical targets that state projected increases as a percentage of GDP, or GNP for that matter, are different from those that state projected increases as a percentage of an existing defense budget. They are worse—even more fungible—because they allow for manipulation of GDP projections as well as the defense-related numbers. Moreover, GNP is not a very useful number in the first place. Invented during the Great Depression as a rough metric for calculating the velocity of money, it is completely agnostic about actual economic productivity. GNP rises when there is a car crash, or when elderly women, for some reason I have never been able to understand, dye their gray hair a bluish hue that reminds one of dried fish skins.

More important, different Alliance members have different defense-related obligations. Britain and France have nuclear weapons arsenals, and they, as well as some other NATO members, have accepted NATO’s out-of-area redefinition post-Cold War with more alacrity than others—Germany, say. So when France sends troops to Mali, it costs money that adds toward the 2 percent target. The United States has assumed global common security goods obligations, so that its array of military assets and their physical reach is not comparable to that of any other Alliance member.

For all these reasons, defense spending targets predicated on a percentage of GNP leave a good deal to be desired. But it’s just simpler for politicians to understand a one-digit number than it is to explain to them the complexities of interoperability protocols, doctrinal and training coordination, and export-dependent business models for new major weapons platforms. When DOD officials try to do the latter up on the Hill, they have been known to return to the Pentagon in a stupor, mumbling about cretinism and other rare psychological conditions.

But nothing about the 2014 targets was as bizarre as Donald Trump’s post-summit press conference this past week. As is by now well known, he suddenly demanded that the 2 percent target not wait until 2024 but be accomplished this year, or maybe next—it was not entirely clear. And why stop at 2 percent? He demanded 4 percent. This performance may be likened to a jack-in-the-box popping out at the end of a funeral service. Somber and sad as was nearly all that preceded it, the President closed the summit on a surreal note, leaving observers wondering what it all meant.

Trump doubtless does not know that U.S. defense spending only tips out at 4 percent of GNP when one includes the rather large budget of the Veterans Administration—which is of course separate from the DOD budget and the defense-related parts of the DOE budget. But this is a man who never lets a fact get in the way of an insult or a provocation. And so while the topic was an old one—European defense spending dereliction—the tone and actual substance of the remarks could not have been more different, which brings us back to where we started: This was not your father’s, or even your elder sister’s, NATO Summit.

Already during Donald Trump’s first attendance at a NATO summit in 2017 it was clear to those without scales on their eyelids that he detested the European Union and considered NATO obsolete and its European members feckless. He failed to affirm Article 5 despite numerous opportunities to do so, and the Europeans who matter—and the Russians—understood the body language very well indeed. A few months later Trump gave a 180-degree reversal speech in Warsaw, a speech he read without emotion and that any postwar President might have delivered, leading some observers to hope that Trump was being “handled” properly and that, indeed, policy in all regards was regressing to the mean.

Meanwhile, with such hopes in hand, the platoons of NATO pros focused on their endless quotidian struggles to make the Alliance work better, and with more money for the purpose dating back to the Obama Administration’s last few years, they were happy. There were trips and BOGSATs. There were exercises and new equipment. There were studies and seminars. The Marshall Center in Garmisch was saved from the budgeteer’s chopping block, albeit at the cost of adopting a new focus. The Americans were urging their European counterparts to take the 2 percent target from 2014 seriously, and they were assured that, yes, they did take it seriously. Happy, happy.

But in the White House sat a man who did not know or care about such details and, more important, did not share the overarching purpose of the Alliance. Don’t look now, but the original strategy assumed that the European Allies, with the partial exceptions of Britain and France, would not remilitarize their national security policies to prewar levels. It assumed that to some extent they would be perpetual free riders, and that on balance this was in the U.S. national interest.

The aim of postwar U.S. grand strategy was to suppress security competitions in Europe, as it was to suppress security competitions in East Asia and later the Middle East. U.S. power would substitute, and in so doing render impossible the internecine disasters of the 20th century’s world wars that had been so dangerous and costly to the United States. U.S. support across every postwar administration for integrative economic institutions in Europe, first the Coal and Steel Community and later the European Economic Community, were designed and supported as denationalizing accompaniments to the demilitarizing core of the strategy. And so was the broader pursuit of a liberalized trading regime designed to support the core strategy, in two ways: to help the Allies recover from the war and grow strong as liberal democracies; and insofar as trade arrangements tipped to their benefit, to compensate them for their willingness to nest more or less compliantly beneath the American wing.

These aspects of U.S. strategy were as important in the original design as deterring would-be hegemons in Europe and Asia—the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China—and indeed were understood as ingredients of statecraft supporting that deterrence. As time passed, and allied economies grew strongly, U.S. policy desired levels of defense spending sufficient to allow the U.S. military to plug-in to Europe in the event of a military crisis or a war. But it never sought levels of defense spending in Europe that amounted to the remilitarization of those countries’ foreign policies—not that that was ever in prospect such that U.S. officials had to worry about it.

This strategy worked, even despite occasional Transatlantic crisis—like Suez in 1956, for example. The Soviets on several occasions tried to drive wedges into the Alliance, for example with the development and deployment of the SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear-capable missiles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The fear was something then called Finlandization—albeit unfairly so to the Finns—and a manifestation of it was a trend in Germany, associated with a man named Egon Bahr, to seek German reunification as a neutral country apart from NATO. None of this worked. The U.S. effort to militarily counter the SS-20s was fraught but ultimately succeeded, testifying to the strength of underlying Alliance bonds, and it was parleyed into real arms control: the INF Treaty, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear-armed missiles. It was an effort that vindicated the old wisdom: Si vis pacem, para bellum, a statement you can see on buildings in contemporary Poland (but not in Germany).

The point of this historical recital is to drive home the truth that alliances are not effective by dint of capabilities alone. They are ultimately dependent on shared perceptions of threat and, in enduring alliances of democracies, ultimately on shared principles about civic life. It matters not what capabilities exist, or what mid- and lower-ranking NATO defense officials do together on a daily basis, if there is no will, no trust, and no convergence of principles on the political level. Events this past weekend in Brussels and Helsinki make it clear, to anyone who has heretofore refused to see, that such will, trust, and convergence no longer exist. What else can we make of a man who, speaking on behalf of the U.S. government, insults his alliance hosts in their own country and continent, and stands with a mendacious authoritarian Russian leader against his own Allies and indeed his own intelligence services? As Acheson once said, “Things are not always as they seem, but sometimes they are.” Well, this is one of those times when they are. You watch this spectacle in Helsinki and can’t help thinking: Putin is Edgar Bergen, and Trump is Charlie McCarthy.

Truth to tell, the shift in U.S. thinking about Europe began before Donald Trump became President. The post-Cold War disappearance of the Soviet Union, the diffusion of threats, the rise of dangerous non-state actors and a concomitant rise in ambient uncertainty, the seeming stability of the NATO-Europe states after the perturbations of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, and straitened economic conditions all in turn undermined the argument for NATO. Mixed experience in out-of-area operations, notably in Afghanistan, did not help either. But Barack Obama, he of the anti-blob persuasion, was content to affirm the basic strategy even if he felt no particular affinity for it, or for Europe. He wanted to do it on the cheap if he could, but he could not—or at any rate did not—think of a better way.

In a sense, the diffidence of the Obama White House with regard to Europe provided an on-ramp for the Trump volte face. But only those who had tracked Donald Trump’s views for years before November 2016 had a clue as to what his presidency would really mean for NATO—and why would anyone bother to do that? Well, thanks to Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman’s 2017 compendium on Trump’s views on a range of subjects, anyone can go back retrospectively and track. And what we find is consistent with Trump’s voyeur form of Randian nihilism—voyeur because he certainly never read her long and odious books, just watched a movie or two.

On NATO, we find—a coincidence?—a concern mainly with numbers. Trump is the perfect example of Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic: someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. He thinks in flat zero-sum commercial terms, which is why he can label Germany, Russia, and China equally as “competitors.” That is also how the new U.S. Ambassador in Berlin talks. In his office on June 28, he explained his pitch to the Germans: “You have a budget surplus, so why wait until 2024 to hit the 2 percent target?” Germany has a generous welfare state, with good schools, decent day care and healthcare facilities, he said, and we in the United States can’t afford these things because we spend so much money to keep troops in Germany. And I thought only Democrats were bad at policy math.

There is a shard of justification for lumping Germany in with Russia and China as competitors, both because of its Nord Stream 2 shortsighted selfishness and its willingness to let German banks help Iranians evade sanctions. But just as there is more to humanity than its commerce, there is more to relations among nations than trade. Trump seems unable to comprehend that, but is he perhaps in some transcendent way correct? How could that be?

Perhaps the President’s great-power geoeconomics worldview is the right form of realism for the 21stcentury. Perhaps the older geopolitical realism we all learned about in school and with which we have grown up is obsolete for imagining actual conflict and even war still a possibility. Put more specifically, if, as Trump seems to prefer, European politics are both renationalized and remilitarized in the absence of U.S. troops and commitments, would there eventually be war in Europe? Or is the European post-bellicist ethos so deeply entrenched that war will remain unthinkable, impossible at least among current NATO states, for as long as anyone can imagine?

It might be. But even if no war is in prospect from within Europe, could the same be said about the future behavior of a revanchist regime without that has attacked two neighbors within the past decade and seized territory from them, and which is even now engaged in the systematic bombing of hospitals, schools, and other civilian targets in Syria? That’s not a trick question.

The 3 percent solution. The 2 percent or the 4 percent of GDP solution. We can plaint by the numbers until we fall down from exhaustion or boredom. There is no such solution for an alliance whose key state is led by a man, followed docilely by a brain-dead party he has hijacked with but pathetic lingering resistance, who is a self-proclaimed geoeconomic realist and a clueless geostrategic naïf. Trump’s boast that his bullying in Brussels has made NATO stronger resembles the dissimulations of a costumed wolf trying to reassure a nervous little girl dressed in a red pullover of his best intentions. Said Lord Vansittart, “There are moments which unmistakably portend slaughter.”

I fear this may be one of them.

The “three percent solution” was mooted first in NATO ministerial meetings in 1976, and featured as a general guideline—but not as a binding pledge—in the May 1977 London NATO summit.

Note that Niall Ferguson’s biography of Henry Kissinger credits Kintner, who was present at the creation of the CIA, as being the man who brought Kissinger into the political arena. See Kissinger: 1923-1968, The Idealist (Penguin Press, 2015), p. 355.

See my `Finlandization’: A Map to a Metaphor (Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1978).

 The Mist Procession (London: Hutchinson, 1958), p. 119.

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Cold War II?

There are many layers underpinning the Putinist assertion that Russia is endangered by hostile powers, the United States above all, and that it has the right in the national interest to build up a zone beyond its borders in self-defense whether those living there like it or not. A surprising number of Western observers is inclined to accept this conviction as valid, along with the belief that the West has played a formative and arguably leading part in stoking what is often currently presented as Cold War II. Judging by President Trump’s statements at the time of his July 16 meeting with President Putin in Helsinki that the United States’ stupid policies over the years were responsible for the seriously troubled relationship between his country and Putin’s, Trump appears to share this belief. It needs examination.

The Widely Shared Explanation

The supporting narrative for these contentions is too familiar to require great elaboration. A recent version was for instance set out in an article by Eugene Rumer, Dmitri Trenin, and Andrew S. Weiss: “Can the Trump-Putin Summit Restore Guardrails to the US-Russian Relationship?” The authors described a disagreement about their respective approaches to the conduct of foreign affairs as being at the heart of the “long-standing conflict” between the United States and Russia, the American one being in favor of an international liberal order, and the Russian one, realpolitik. The report states as a plain fact that “Moscow’s vision has been deeply affected by its experience at the end of the Cold War and guided by a firm resolve to prevent it from being repeated.”

This familiar mantra of the West’s humiliation of Russia is habitually argued, with little elaboration, as the justification for Russia needing to rise again from its knees under Putin, and to re-establish its international authority. Factions in post-Soviet Russia did indeed feel themselves humiliated by Moscow’s loss of control over former Soviet territory and, for that matter, central and eastern European states once held under the control of the Kremlin within the Warsaw Pact. But the truth is not that the West treacherously pried them from Moscow’s control, but that Moscow lost control of events, and they left of their own free will. Such states now established, and internationally recognized, have the right to point out that however much some Russians may mourn the outcome of the Cold War, they too have a compelling interest in not repeating past experiences, meaning in their cases those suffered at Moscow’s hands. It is also a fact that the United States, its allies, and international agencies numbered among those that still play a major part in the “international liberal order” gave substantial help to Russia both before and after it emerged as a separate entity on the collapse of the Soviet Union, as witness, for example, the account recently given to the Institute of Modern Russia by Andrei Kozyrev, Russian Foreign Minister for the first years of Yeltsin’s presidency.

The narrative as to a “long-standing conflict” between Washington and Moscow is also open to dispute and, like the humiliation saga, serves as a buttress for the Kremlin’s domestic and foreign public line. It takes special thinking to suggest that the United States has from the start of Russia’s emergence as a separate state pursued conflict with Russia. On the contrary, “resets” have been a standing U.S. temptation. West European powers have also in general been forgiving if not naive as to where Russia has been heading in the face of the ups and downs of its political evolution. There are those even now ready to overlook Russia’s seizure of foreign territory in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine, as well as its destruction of cities in Syria, in the hope that a some unspecified kind of exit ramp can still be found to return to “normality.”

None of this is to argue that European or North American policies have been consistently wise. Many have argued that the enlargement of NATO fueled Russian fears and resentment. The Russians themselves have pressed this idea with growing insistence in recent years, claiming against the evidence that it had been in breach of promises made in the West around the time of the reunification of Germany. The present Kremlin line also ignores repeated contemporary Russian statements recognizing the right of all independent nations to decide what alliances, if any, they might want to join. It is, too, to ignore the reality of states formerly under Kremlin control wanting reliable security against a return to that fold. It is, on the other hand, also the case that it would always have been difficult for Western policymakers to work through an emerging sense of Russian humiliation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That feeling of loss particularly affected groups opposed to the reform programs put forward by liberally minded Yeltsin supporters, but not only them. Russian analysts like Yegor Gaidar were already by the middle 1990s voicing fears of the  possibility, even probability, of Russia going through a Weimar period, with the development of an equivalent to the Nazi-era “stab in the back” legend to explain their country’s loss of imperial sway. The establishment of an authoritarian regime in the 2000s with KGB-descended elements at its heart inevitably fed into an instinctive search in Russia for domestic and foreign enemies, and a belief in Russia’s betrayal by them.

The allegation that Russia was deliberately humiliated by the West, and of course the United States in particular, does not have to be supported by persuasive facts to have become over time a comforting untruth—better that than to accept the more difficult reality of Russia’s own responsibility for its tribulations. With repetition, that myth has acquired a considerable hold on Russia today. Putin’s close associate Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Security Council, has been one of several Russians to describe American purpose over the years as being the destruction of the USSR and the continuation of the evil work in Russia today. The beliefs that the Americans were behind the Rose Revolution of 2003 in Georgia, the 2003-04 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the overthrow of Yanukovych in Kiev in February 2014, as well as the 2011-12 street protests over electoral manipulation in Russia, remain ensconced in the Putinist system of thought. Putin and his followers indeed go further: It was the United States again which toppled the leaders of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt, leaving Russia to rescue Assad from the same fate in Syria. How cunning and wicked of the Americans to do so much and yet leave so little evidence.

Post-Soviet Russia

The Russian Federation, as it emerged within its internationally agreed borders in 1992, lacked the sense of being or becoming a separate and natural historically based national territorial unit—a sense that other parts of the former Soviet Union could claim or invent as theirs by right. Ethnic Russians were dominant within the Federation, as they had been within the USSR, but millions of other ethnic Russians were included in what were now, officially at least, foreign governments. Russia’s idea of itself was imbued with its Soviet and Tsarist past. Other formerly Soviet entities could choose to see themselves as liberated from it, to a greater or lesser extent. The failed 1991 putsch against Gorbachev, the immediate result of which was the establishment a few months later of an independent Russia, was also the seed bed for enduring divisions within Russia over what sort of country it wished to become. The story of the 1990s was one of struggle between a small group of economic reformers around Yeltsin and a determined set of opponents—dominating the Duma but with increasingly substantial popular backing—of an essentially Soviet cast of mind.

That opposition mindset embraced the idea of a natural and inevitable conflict of interest between Russia and the West—with the United States as Russia’s international peer, as it had been over the previous 40 years or more. Those supporting change in Russia designed to bring it closer to wider European values—and to working with the United States, the European Union, and international institutions like the IMF and the Council of Europe—were also affected by doubts stirred by the degree of dependence on Western benevolence and the condescension that they believed to be implied by that. The Russian foreign policy establishment never worked through understandings that might have supported a longer-term view of Russia as a newly independent state in a wider European context. The appointment of Primakov as Russian Foreign Minister in 1996 crystallized instead an emerging conviction within Russia’s foreign policy circles that a supposed American construction of a unipolar authority had been established, and needed to be replaced by other centers of influence, in Russia as well. These ideas, while intellectually disputable (was Washington ever in truth a single power able to dictate terms to the rest of the world?), were reinforced by NATO military action against Serbia over Kosovo. They have since hardened into Russian doctrine, a process that accompanied the degradation of Russian political structures independent of the Kremlin, together with the suppression of internal debate over the years since Putin succeeded Yeltsin.

Russia’s National Interest

In referring to Russia’s national interests both Russian and foreign analysts often take it pretty much for granted that the Kremlin’s ambition to be recognized as a Great Power with the concomitant right to hegemony over an accepted sphere of influence in Eurasia is to be expected, even justified. The unspoken assumption is that Russia is in the fullest sense the successor state to the USSR, and that, as such, it may be understood to have encapsulated within its truncated borders, so far as may be possible, the rights and ambitions of the Soviet Union. The Cold War analytical framework fits this approach well, with Russia seen as its essential component requiring particular treatment, as opposed to being part of a complex pattern of regional forces.

Russia is said in this context to need “Respect” from the West. Great Power status in this sense is indeed pursued by the Kremlin with determination in the belief that Russia has both the strength and the right to inspire obedience by others. Putin was openly referring to the Yalta settlement as a desirable European precedent by 2014. It was not entirely clear what the Rumer/Trenin/Weiss article referred to in the second paragraph of this account had in mind as a way to change the course of U.S.-Russia relations and thereby to overcome the conflict the authors find to be inherent in each party’s current approach. It appeared however to have something in common with recommendations by others looking for a way to make a fresh start, in the absence of indications that the Kremlin might itself be looking to think again. The implications of that would, it seems, mean somehow turning the page on Russian interventions in Ukraine, Syria, and the United States, which would appear in its turn to mean both Washington and Moscow accepting Russia’s paradigm of ”realism” as the way forward. It was not clear in the run-up to President Trump’s meeting with Putin on July 16 how far he intended now or in the future to move in this sort of direction, and the U.S. President must, unlike the Russian President, take account of the independent forces of democracy. However, it was plain that he hoped that a fresh start in U.S.-Russia relations could be achieved in due course, and that he believed he had made a good start in this direction.

It is nevertheless an open question how far the pursuit of Great Power status is, in reality, in Russia’s national interest. It may be late for Putin himself to moderate his approach, given the public support he has relied upon as the resolute defender of Fortress Russia. But the status sought is indefinable. Another way of looking at what Russia’s true interests might be would be to ask whether its actions in support of the Kremlin’s pursuit of regional hegemony have been to the benefit of Russia’s peoples? And if it is held that the ordinary people of Russia have benefitted, how secure are their gains? Might not more lasting benefits have been realized while improving the domestic fortunes of Russia’s peoples and earning the confidence of the country’s neighbors in place of the fear that Moscow has inspired instead? Why in any case should we or anyone else accept Russia’s present view of what its interests might be as deserving of our acceptance or even respect?

A Personal Note

The deeper roots of a country’s outlook on the rest of the world lie beyond abstract analysis. While these need exploration for a credible account of why states act as they do, that examination cannot be done without one’s own subjective ideas and experiences affecting it. It is particularly difficult reliably to interpret the subjective forces now at work in present day states, like Russia or those in the Western Balkans, with histories of having survived the collapse of wider entities like the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia. Ideas and attitudes change or may evolve over time, but the power of historical memory, often transfigured by mythologies built around it, remains a determining and retarding factor in deciding what international policies particular countries may adopt and how they determine what their national interests may be.

The Trenches of History

Russia has always had a singular conceit of itself as a Third Rome, an expanding imperial power, and then as the center of world revolution. The West has over the centuries been the object of both fascination and resentment for Russia. Russia’s borders have enlarged and contracted over the centuries. The proposition that other Slavs, like the Ukrainians, are somehow really Russian has a long history. The beliefs that, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, Russia is best ruled from the top by strong leaders, and that the general population’s duty is to obey, not question, have deep roots.

Putin’s Russia has sought a renewed claim to eminence whether by virtue of Moscow’s victory in 1945, or by at various times asserting its guardianship of traditional morals and/or its geo-political position at the center of Eurasia. All these claims rest on Russia’s effectiveness as a centralized and militarily powerful state covering a major part of the world’s land mass. Putin has made that last requirement his principal objective. Outside criticism of the way that progress has been achieved is equated with Russophobia, as though foreigners have had no regard for what the peoples of Russia have achieved in fields beyond the exercise of force. It has, too, depended on the enforcement within Russia of an ahistorical version of both the Soviet and post-Soviet record over much of the last century, and the condign punishment of those who might appear to question it.

Russians are not alone in wishing to forget, deny, or sacralize their past. The Kremlin has however pursued that objective more deliberately and thoroughly than any others over this century. The deaths of millions at Stalin’s hand have been eased out of the historical frame in place of the assertion that he was, after all, a capable and creative manager that Russia needed to face the challenge of Nazi Germany. The cult of victory in 1945 has been nurtured devotedly. The way it was achieved may not be questioned. Even the KGB has tried to have its record polished into one of selfless service, to the conviction or comfort of those now serving the FSB, at least. These mendacious streams feed into a wider current of patriotism as a bulwark against foreign danger, and a view of events in the outside world if beyond Russian control as being directed against Russia.  Russia’s consequent felt needs are for a strong leader (like Stalin); domestic as well as external vigilance; and a great foreign rival like the United States.

A nation however unable to face its past is unable to learn from it. There is a strain of doubt, even fear, behind this general narrative and its emotional consequences. It is surely not the case that the West as a whole or the United States in particular has somehow forced Putin’s Russia into defending itself by attacking others, notably Ukraine. The real threat from the West is not military. It rests on the need for Russia to renew and reinvent itself, just as it needed to do in Brezhnev’s time, also a time when the propaganda machine had run out of effect. The Soviet Union collapsed in truth because it was an economic and political failure, and because the comparative success of Western countries, together with their own traditions and cultural assumptions, spoke to the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe of viable alternatives to the model they had been forced to adopt. Suppressed strands of national identities within the USSR itself as well as beyond its borders were a principal factor too. And Russian civilization was then and is now far richer than one of top-down rule reliant on the suppression of dissent.

Some Implications

It is in the first place up to Russia to work its way out of the isolated cul-de-sac it now finds itself to be in. That will not be by the logic of Moscow forcing its way toward regional hegemony as a sort of reprise of the Cold War.

No one can be sure of how Russia will change or adapt over the latest Putin term in office. But the immediate omens are discouraging in the face of the determination of the Kremlin and its FSB-associated core to cling to power by enforcing narrowly based centralized and corrupted authoritarian control. The longer Russia takes to deal with its internal disharmonies, the greater the risk of future internal trouble, and perhaps international unrest too.

No doubt the United States and its allies have made and will continue to make mistakes in dealing with Russia. But to see the relationship in binary terms, with each party bearing a similar degree of responsibility for tensions or military confrontation of one kind or another, as was habitual during the Cold War, is inadequate. The countries in-between have their rights and responsibilities to exercise for themselves. All the better for them to do so in harmony with generally recognized and law-based international practices.

And in the end, all the better for Russia too. The proposition that there is inbuilt rivalry between that country and the United States not unlike that during the Cold War is, from the wider point of view of the West, neither true nor helpful. Even if true, it could not be bargained away in terms of mutual concessions. That would in practice cement it into place as Cold War II, and restrict Russia’s ability to renew itself. Russia needs the rule of law both internally so as to make its leaders accountable and externally in the interests of rescuing it from its self-imposed isolation. The “international liberal order” is essential to that, and is an order that has and will evolve over time. The “realism” that has been contrasted with it elsewhere is surely a cover for the older and unstable practice of might over right.

Andrew Wood, “Putin and Russia in 2018-2024-What Next?” Chatham House (March 2018).

Most of my career abroad was spent in the British Embassies in Moscow—1964-66, 1979-82, and 1995-2000—and Belgrade—1975-79 and 1985-89.

A telling phrase used on July 10 at Chatham House by the Foreign Minister of what is now agreed to be called Northern Macedonia.

The post Cold War II? appeared first on The American Interest.

Terrorism and Fear

When people express fear they typically think they know the source of what makes them afraid. In simple, direct cases, the alignment is usually determined accurately: If a large, stray dog is growling at you menacingly as you stroll through some park and you become afraid of the dog, you are probably right about the source of your fear. But where the case is neither simple nor direct nor time-focused, but complex and abstract and temporally indistinct—and where relevant information is mediated rather than sensed through direct experience—aligning fear with its actual source is much harder to achieve.

That is certainly the case with the ambient social fear generated by terrorism. People who live in places where telegenic, gruesome terrorism has in recent times become stamped into collective consciousness (say, Paris, London, Berlin, Jerusalem) are naturally more afraid that they, or friends and loved ones, will become victims of the next random outrage than they were before. Many people know how to take such fears in stride, maintaining their routines, goals, and political views. But some are less stoical by temperament than others, and that goes for nations as well as individuals. This matters because terrorism does its real, long-lasting damage not through body counts but through the insidious undermining of the foundations of trust and normalcy that define all healthy, functional societies, by infesting rational deliberation with incipient panic and by sowing disunity within a diverse population.

More important, some general living circumstances generate more basal angst than others. Those who live in broken or otherwise difficult family settings, those who face economic insecurity or think they face downward social mobility for themselves or their children, and those who live as members of marginal—immigrant or otherwise minority—populations among less-than-completely-hospitable hosts often live day to day with more objective ambient fear than do others.

But fears tend to bundle and pool together, suddenly coalescing around vivid shocks, a bit like how water vapor coalesces around floating particles to form rain. Underlying sources of angst often go unrecognized, unarticulated, denied, or are merely assimilated into some layer below wide-awake consciousness. They then can cling together, losing touch with their sources, when terrorism focuses those fears on a specific cognitive gestalt: the terror attack. So people think they are afraid of terrorism, and they are; but the depth of their fear typically draws on myriad other insecurities. So already shaky people, and relatively insecure nations, tend—all else equal—to be shaken more by terrorist atrocities than those not so shaky.

Shaky societies develop markets of a sort for fear abatement. The most effective way for political entrepreneurs to take advantage of such markets is to focus on what or, better, who to blame for what makes people afraid. The simpler the depiction of fear’s source the better for the interests of the would-be political hustler. No matter how varied and interactively complex the real sources of fear and insecurity may be, rattled people are easily manipulated by those offering parsimonious, emotion-driven conflations—especially so, perhaps, in our age of technologically disintermediated individuation.

Usually, blame is affixed to society’s most prominent “other.” That’s the history of such matters in Europe as it is everywhere else, not least during the odious second quarter of the past century when Europe’s oldest and most prominent “other” were the Jews. America’s most prominent “other” has been Africans/Negroes/Colored/Blacks, the labels shifting over time. Now, in a world awash with immigrants and refugees further flung than ever before, anxieties about alien ethno-linguistic and sectarian communities get mixed up with anxieties about older marginal groups, like the Roma in several European countries, to form a new, more multicultural target for illiberal scapegoating.

One way to think of this is to imagine every person and every society as having a reservoir of insecurity that can be activated by any number of experiences. A terrorist attack is one such experience. So a confident, forward-looking, pragmatic person, or society, will more likely resist reacting to news of a terror attack by pouring that reservoir into consciousness, and from there into public space with blame falling variously on foreign plotters and whole immigrant communities, depending on the case.

Every nation has its more or less effective coping mechanisms for dealing with danger and the fears they let loose to roam, and every set of mechanisms is shaped by history and culture such that some are more resilient than others. That is why terrorism and the threat of terrorism play differently in different places, and why political entrepreneurs who try to use the fear created by terrorism are more successful in some places than in others, and at some times rather than others in the same places.

Here in the United States lately, Americans have developed ever-deeper reservoirs of insecurity from a range of sources, a development that sits uneasily with the relatively placid security experience of the country. Before September 11, 2001, there had been no direct foreign military attack on the continental United States since the War of 1812. All of the nation’s wars thereafter, including the Civil War, were in truth wars of choice rather than necessity, whatever people came to believe; and before Vietnam all those wars were either won or almost universally believed to have been won.

Americans thus came to feel entitled to “perfect security,” which is why first defeat in Vietnam and then the terror attacks of September 11 had such high shock values. The former convulsed American politics for more than a decade, adding to the river of disorientation caused by vast domestic cultural changes; the latter resulted in both near-term panic and the sowed the seeds for the bureaucratized paranoia Americans have inflicted on themselves ever since. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously told Americans, in March 1933, that, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” it’s not clear if FDR had fully diagnosed the nation’s high propensity for fear—and his remark spoke to the pangs of Depression, not yet to the crucible of another World War. But it’s a piece of advice that America as a nation, strong and wealthy as it is, should still take to heart.

There is, however, another factor or two at work, and how they work bears some on the character of contemporary American politics. Fear is not only fungible and prone to being bundled and evoked by catalytic events, it is also contagious and exportable. The capacity for fear to be contagious is to a large degree a media technology function. The capacity for fear to be exportable depends on the vicissitudes of political goals and character, and the extent to which people in different countries feel civilizational kinship with people in other countries.

As to contagion, the growth and nature of social media and the internet have only made the emotional power of terrorism to undermine social foundations greater—all the more reason that we must double down to understand how this field is evolving. The fact that images and sentence fragments dominate this media, and that images and the use of words as presentational condensation symbols are more prone to evoke emotion from the older parts of our brains than to evoke rational deliberation in the frontal cortex, is a core part of the phenomenon. That is why many years ago Yelena Bonner noted that “fear gives bad advice.” Ask yourself: After a terror attack somewhere, how much of what shows up almost immediately on the media technology we have to hand tends to calm people down and reassure them, and how much of it tends to magnify and spread fear and insecurity? You don’t need to be a proverbial rocket scientist to know the answer.

All this is well known. It’s the propensity of fear to be exported by certain kinds of political actors that has become more interesting of late. Let me get to the relevant case at hand: the attitude and behavior of the Trump Administration toward the roiled politics of immigration in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe.

The political drama playing out in Germany, against the background of the burgeoning of immigrant-fed populism across the continent especially over the past three years, has been front-page news not only in Germany. Horst Seehofer, Angela Merkel’s Bavarian-born CSU-affiliated Interior Minister, led an effort to tighten Germany’s asylum and immigration policies. And everyone understands that immigration from Muslim-majority societies—especially from Arab countries like Syria in the current German case—is tightly associated in the public mind with the risks of importing terrorists and terrorism. Seehofer’s efforts threatened to bring down the only recently patched together German governing coalition, to what political consequence no one can predict with any clarity. Merkel and Seehofer reached a kind of ceasefire in their disagreement last month, but no one expected it to last long or the difference of views to evaporate. And it didn’t: After about two weeks of white knuckle waiting, Merkel gave in, for political reasons she intimated, and agreed to change Germany’s asylum policies.

Some of the world was last month also misunderstanding what was happening, for this was no simple passion play pitting the angel Merkel against the demon Seehofer. The American elite media tended to portray Seehofer as a right-wing populist like the populists recently ascendant in Italy and Slovenia, joining predecessors in Austria, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere. In “look-at-the-Germans” terms, this kind of portrayal is a dog whistle for “neo-Nazi” or just plain “Nazi.” Merkel, meanwhile, is invariably described as a “centrist.” This is not quite right.

As for Seehofer, he may or may not be a genuinely illiberal person, but he doesn’t need to be to have taken the approach he has chosen. He hears the AfD types breathing down the CDU/CSU’s neck, and he is doing more or less the same thing that the Bundeskanzler did during the recent election season—tack right—in order to coopt their popularity. Only Seehofer, being from Bavaria, is doing it more and faster in light of an approaching Länder election in Bavaria, and that was too much and too fast for Merkel and most of her other ministers.

Moreover, worrying about the social disruptions of massive and sudden immigration from culturally alien places does not make ordinary people racists or bigots, even if racists and bigots try to capitalize on those worries. So Merkel is not usefully described as a “centrist” here. As I put it on September 12, 2015, writing from Berlin literally within days of that famous train full of Syrian migrants arriving in Munich from Budapest: “The Left’s normative seizure of Germany is truly amazing. Even the Chancellor, who by German standards is far from a raving leftist, appears to firmly believe that everyone must be a multiculturalist for moral reasons, and that all people who want to preserve the ethno-linguistic integrity of their communities—whether in Germany or in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere—are acting out of base motives.”

This was, and still is, simply untrue. As I put it then:

There is a moral basis, too, for a community’s own sense of self-determination, which presumes the right of self-definition and self-composition. That is not racism in Europe any more than nervousness about immigrants is racism here in the United States. Wanting one’s own community to be a certain way is not aggressively or actively prejudicial against others, any more than declining to give money to a beggar on a city street is morally equivalent to hitting him in the head with a crowbar. . . . It is simply preferring the constituency of a high-social trust society, from which, social science suggests, many good things come: widespread security, prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity being prominent among them. . . . [W]hat we see in Western Europe is not a case of what is moral versus what is base, but two kinds of rights, incommensurate (à la Isaiah Berlin) as they are, clashing.

Moreover, the German leadership’s understanding of its moral obligation was at the time without qualification against contingency. It took the deontological form of a Kantian categorical imperative, which made it easy to predict that what the Europeans were doing, under the aegis of the European Union but really at the instigation of Germany, would have “two basic political effects. First it will split the EU east and west, possibly even more bitterly than the economic woes of the past five years have split it north and south. . . . . Second, it will reshape politics within most, if not all, West European countries.” Merkel and Seehofer, among many others, have been lately swimming in the scalding cauldron of the consequences.

What is going on now in Europe, largely as a result of the sudden and massive Muslim-heavy immigration of especially the past three to four years, shows that democracy cannot be abstracted into a purely civic form, totally detached from its historical national-cultural context, and still work satisfactorily. The Germans, in particular, have been reassessing their own concept of a Leitkultur, with most on the Left believing that the nation has transcended the traditional form it took. But a nation cannot jump out of its history any more than a person can jump out of his skin.

Thus the problem facing Horst Seehofer, and Angela Merkel too, is that if decent people do not respond effectively to the real fears of ordinary people, coalescing in substantial part around fears of future terrorism—no matter the actual conglomerated deeper sources of those fears or their inability to understand their origins—then indecent people willing to run roughshod over democratic norms will vie to lead them. And people who think that their own elites have made common cause with alien intruders at the expense of their security and identity will follow them.

We know the basic pattern well: Confusion over disorienting change leads to multivalent, seemingly free-floating fear; that fear congeals around a particular perceived danger (in this case terrorism) and its presumed agents; left unrelieved, fear turns to anger; and anger, when channeled by illiberal leadership, leads to disruptive political behavior—not to exclude extra-parliamentary violence. And so the strategy of terrorism succeeds through irony, by evoking self-destructive reactions to the dangers it wields in the target society.

So we come to the matter of exporting fear among nations that share the same civilizational zone, more or less.

Here is what the President of the United States tweeted just the other week, before the recent NATO and Helsinki summits: “The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition.” Obviously, some minor proto-fascist factotum working in the White House wrote that for Trump; it was far too clear and elegant to be his own writing. And then he lied, saying that crime in Germany was “way up” when in fact it is mainly down, as is the rate of immigration.

Did Trump know that what he claimed was inaccurate? It is impossible to say, but at least in one sense it doesn’t matter: Trump and his accomplices take an entirely instrumental attitude toward truth. Their approach is to discredit actual facts with accusations of “fake news” so that can they insert their own desired, often invented, facts. It’s a rather Soviet approach really, which, for all anyone knows, partly explains some of the President’s warm affinity for the Russian leadership.

Germany is at ground zero in a political maelstrom that echoes “terrorism” in subtle tones, but that’s hardly all there is to note. Trump also tweeted warmly last month about Giuseppe Conte, the new Italian Premier: “He will do a great job—the people of Italy got it right!” When this past month the new Italian Interior Minister turned away a ship with 600 refugees, sending it on to Valencia, Trump saw that as parallel to and supportive of his willingness (since dropped for political reasons, certainly not reasons of conscience) to separate children from their parents in order to force new policies that will sharply reduce immigration to the United States. Almost no one wants to talk about it, but there was a time when separating children from their parents was fairly common, not at the border, but well within a large part of the United States itself: It was a regular feature of chattel slavery. And the kinds of people who did such things then were not significantly different in basic attitude from the Trump self-clone who is now the Republican candidate for the Senate in Virginia: Corey Stewart.

And more: The new U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, said about a month ago, newly arrived to his post, that he wants to “empower” right-wing politicians in Europe, and the common theme in the effort is of course immigration, with all the implied connections to terrorism. Obviously (I hope), Europeans understand that when Trump exaggerates and lies about the “carnage” caused by Hispanic migrants to the United States who, in his telling, run rampant across the country murdering, raping, and mugging people, he is borrowing by allusion the angst created by the fear of terrorism—the 9/11 type and especially the rare but vivid domestic kind perpetrated by salafi Muslims indoctrinated via the internet. But even the wholly homegrown sort of domestic terrorism that aims at schoolchildren, church attendees, and concertgoers in Las Vegas adds to the reservoir of ambient fear. That is one reason beyond NRA lobbying that Trump will never support real gun control in the United States: The gun violence that creates such intense anxiety is the raw material for his type of fear-borne political appeal, his effort to be parasitic, in effect, on ambient fear. Why would he want to reduce the supply of that raw material?

In short, Trump and company—not to exclude Steve Bannon, despite his not being back in the Administration at present—are trying to export their anti-immigration attitudes into Europe to help likeminded illiberal political forces. They seek to undermine the European Union itself, and see splitting European opinion as starkly as possible along the immigration/terrorism seam as an excellent means to that end. Trump is trying to build another “nationalist internationale”, like that of the 1930s, and so sees Orban, Kaczyński, Erdogan, Putin, and others as objective allies. If NATO is destroyed in the process, Trump would not regret it, because his capacity for understanding positive-sum relationships appears to be non-existent. In other words, as astonishing as it seems, the President of the United States and his Administration are, in the main, behaving toward Europe in ways indistinguishable from how one would expect the Russian leadership to behave. If that was unclear before Helsinki, it should be clear now.

None of this should be terribly surprising. During the campaign Trump was supportive of Marine Le Penn, Nigel Farage, and other such figures. (He also lied about not knowing who David Duke was, but that’s a domestic matter.) Most observers figured that this was typical campaign signaling, and that anyway the arc of his actual governing behavior, if he won, would “regress to the mean.” It seemed like it might for a while, but that is definitely not what has occurred: the opposite, as time passes, is more like it. As I put it a different context recently, here is what Donald Trump is actually up to:

President Trump is engaged in a political insurgency designed, in effect, to bring about global regime change, despite the fact that the regime he wants to change is one of mainly American design, construction, and maintenance. His war plan has two fronts: the attack on the so-called administrative and “deep” state domestically; and the attack on the institutional framework of the so-called liberal international order. So Trump may not have policies as they are conventionally understood, but he may well have a strategy of statecraft, however idiosyncratic and illiberal it may be, that combines domestic and foreign aspects into a whole. He may not know or much care what withdrawing the United States from the Iran deal will lead to in the Middle East, but he does seem to know at least in broad outline what the skein of that and related decisions, taken together, are leading to.

The very same conclusion applies to the now accelerating attempt to export anti-immigrant sentiments to Europe in the post-G7 meeting context.

Let’s be clear what this means: It is a U.S. government effort to export fear to Europe by supporting local forces that traffic politically in it. It aims to enlarge the scope of polarization within individual European countries as well as among them, and between Europe and Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa as well. Trump would like nothing more than to see European countries adopt anti-Muslim travel bans like the one he eventually managed to impose in the United States.

To the extent this fear-exporting initiative succeeds, it will magnify the political and social impact of terrorism in the importing countries and it will help indecent people as opposed to decent ones to take advantage of current anxieties about the nexus between immigration and terrorism. In time it could therefore make European countries an even more appealing target for terrorists to strike at, since fearful, divided societies are far more prone to the strategy of terrorism succeeding. And, if so, it may well increase body counts as well.

It is painful to conclude it, but it cannot be avoided: The current attitudes and behavior of the U.S. government make the European dilemma of dealing with terrorism within its borders worse, even as routine anti-terrorism cooperation, mostly having to do with intelligence sharing, will probably continue uninterrupted as applied to domains outside Europe. The downside of the former will surely overwhelm the benefits of the latter in due course, and if Trump ever gets around to really dismantling the “deep state”—with which he closely associates the entire U.S. intelligence community, its foreign as well as its domestic components—that intelligence cooperation could end as well.

Any set of political tactics that deliberately uses fear, let alone manufactures and exports it, describe the antithesis of genuine leadership in a democratic polity. Leadership’s burden is to build trust and confidence, not to destroy it with divisiveness and a general meanness of spirit. It is supposed to point to a better way forward, not to grouse over what is past or what is petty. Alas, it takes a special kind of coward to hate the most those whom he fears the least.

This essay appeared in earlier form in European Eye on Radicalization, June 25, 2018.

1See Sara Brzuszkiewicz, “TerrorSpeak”, The American Interest (July-August 2018), and the literature reviewed therein.

2I am combining here insights from Susanne K. Langer (presentational symbol) and Doris Graebner (condensation symbol) for those who wish to track back the paper trail of the idea.

3New York Times, December 6, 1991.

4“Insane Asylum,” The American Interest, September 12, 2015.

5“The Meaning of Withdrawal,” The American Interest, May 11, 2018.

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To Think or Not to Think?

How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

Alan Jacobs

157 pages, Currency Books, $23.

“Thinking for yourself” is an anomaly.

Or so argues Alan Jacobs in his recent book How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds. “Thinking,” he argues, “is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social.” For Jacobs, a cultural critic and professor at Baylor University, thinking well involves navigating the often bumpy terrain of other people’s lives and ideas. We learn through dialogue, and we begin to think as individuals only in relation to the communities which shape us. The Greeks had a word for this process, paideia, and in their view each citizen, educated in this way, distills the habits and vision of the entire community.

What happens to individuals raised not on books and conversation but on an unholy amalgam of YouTube videos, Snapchat streaks, and clickbait? What happens to good thinking when a community threatens every moment to splinter into a thousand shouting tribes? Attempting to make sense of it all often seems like so much wandering in a dark wilderness. Jacobs’s tidy book, as portable as a field manual and only 157 pages long, attempts to lead us out of the briars.

As an academic and a Christian (he is Anglican), Jacobs is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between some of the most entrenched tribes in our country. He has consciously chosen a modern and diverse range of thinkers to include in this book. Hipsters and evangelicals alike will recognize the cast of How to Think: We encounter Megan Phelps-Roper, whose public departure from the Westboro Baptist Church in 2012 landed her spots on NPR, the New York Times, and, eventually, a TED talk. Shortly thereafter we hear from Roger Scruton, the Anglican intellectual steeped in the classical tradition whose writing often appears in culturally conservative journals. Young Catholic convert and writer Leah Libresco makes an appearance, as do Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ursula K. LeGuin. And this is just in the first two chapters of the book.

The problem with our thinking, Jacob argues, is not a problem of overcoming our biases, as some critics would have it, but of overcoming our discomfort. Thinking deeply exhausts us, and we instinctively avoid considering ideas that might complicate our lives and our relationships. “The person who wants to think,” Jacobs claims, “will have to practice patience and master fear.” He cites Marilynne Robinson to explain the agita of our frantic life in the cloud, which accelerates our “hypertrophic instinct for consensus.” We are hard-wired to be clannish, and our online habits exacerbate these penchants—for inclusion, for status, for affirmation—and strengthen their hold on us.

Jacobs coins several terms to explain how this works. Whenever we hear something we disagree with we are tempted to enter “Refutation Mode,” in which we stop listening because we have determined that “no further information or reflection is required” on that subject. He draws our attention to what he calls the “RCO,” short for “Repugnant Cultural Other.” This phenomenon is so familiar to us as to be instinctive—Evangelical Christians are the RCO of secular academics and vice versa—and life online has enabled RCOs to shout at each other “from two rooms away.” Other mental gymnastics include “lumping” and “splitting” people and ideas into “Instant Taxonomies,” and “in-other-wordsing” our RCO’s statements into reductive parodies that suit our purposes. Jacobs quotes psychologist Jonathan Haidt to argue that our tribes function as “moral matrices” that “bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices.” Altogether, our instincts and our habits work to ensure that good thinking remains difficult.

As the above paragraph makes clear, Jacobs loads the reader with a great deal of verbal luggage throughout the book. Keeping track of all of his terms and phrases can be exhausting. He uses many more than those already mentioned, and they don’t seem to fall into any logical sequence. Different terms do the same work. We have “system 1” and “system 2,” which explain the distinction between “intuitive thinking” and “conscious reflection,” only to learn that another metaphorical pair, “the elephant” and “the rider,” serves the same purpose. Jacobs explains them in the book’s introduction, only to forget about them for 70 pages, when he picks them up for a few sentences and then abandons them once more.

The many figures Jacobs chooses to illustrate his points also clutter the pages unnecessarily. Marilynne Robinson and Megan Phelps-Roper give way to Malcolm Gladwell, David Foster Wallace, George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Henry James, Eric Hoffer, and countless others. Granted, Jacobs aims to cast a wide net—most readers will find someone whom they claim as a member of their own tribe—but the sheer volume of thinkers he includes leaves him unable to address their ideas for longer than a paragraph or two. The fact that the book is even readable is a testament to Jacobs’s felicity of language. He writes well, and clearly, but, to steal a metaphor from Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” his accumulation of names and phrases and examples “chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink.”

Good advice can still be found among the clutter. One of Jacobs’s most successful examples involves what debating societies call “breaking on the floor,” which happens when one debater changes his mind in the middle of the debate, won over by the argument of his opponent. Jacobs, following the Yale Political Union’s lead, praises not the debater who breaks his opponent but the one who himself is broken, as it indicates a healthy intellectual humility and a “willingness not just to accept but to live out the values of the community.”

Good thinking requires patience. As David Foster Wallace knew, it requires sticking with one thought for a long enough time to encounter boredom and breakthrough. It requires “waiting five minutes,” as Jacobs points out, quoting Jason Fried, a popular entrepreneur and blogger. Slow thinking is foreign to online communication, and Jacobs himself describes some of the online habits he has changed in hopes of preserving his intellect (and his reputation): creating a private Twitter account (though he still maintains his public one) and cutting out his habit of posting on Anglican blogs. Since the book is intended as a “survival guide” addressing the problems of our online lives, readers may long for more of this kind of practical advice for how to sustain the life of the mind while navigating the cloud.

How much should a book on good thinking actually engage its readers in the process of good thinking itself? The structure of Jacobs’s book encourages the very distraction that he critiques. Keyword-like phrases litter each page and the narrative jumps quickly, and rather randomly, from one example to the next. The experience of reading Jacobs’s book is not that far removed from toggling among browser tabs, flitting from TED Talks to podcasts to blog posts in random fashion, stumbling upon a few good insights but following no clear path. Perhaps this is intentional on Jacobs’s part, his attempt to reach an internet-addled audience bred to expect a new, glittering thing on every page. If so, however, his effort to cut through the noise comes dangerously close to getting lost in it. He tacks on a “thinking person’s checklist,” but it feels less like an afterword and more like an afterthought.

This doesn’t render Jacob’s book a failure. Even if it doesn’t demonstrate the habits of good thinking, How to Think identifies them with uncanny accuracy. Thinking well means thinking slowly, patiently, and humbly. Above all, as Jacobs points out, it amounts to a proper “orientation of the will” (emphasis in original). This is advice our age desperately needs to hear—as my own experience in the classroom attests.

I have spent the past ten years teaching English literature to high schoolers, a period which has coincided almost exactly with the proliferation of the smartphone. My students are eager to learn and a joy to teach, but through no fault of their own they have been raised on the intellectual equivalent of a soda-and-candy diet. When it comes to literature, they expect the instant answers found in online guides like SparkNotes, not the difficult work of arguing for a certain interpretation of Hamlet. In class discussion their first instinct is to recoil from uncertainty. They are habituated to searching in the frictionless cloud, not in the dark woods of the self. More than anything, they need to heed Jacobs’s advice to “practice patience and master fear.” If they do, they will find that they, like the rest of us, are made for the kind of searching modeled by Socrates, Dante, and other great minds of the past.

I want to give them this book, but I’m torn. How to Think is helpful, insofar as it serves as a gateway to real thinking and can lead us out of our distraction in search of something that requires more patience to digest, perhaps to the writing of a Lewis or Orwell or Foster Wallace. If not, though, How to Think will prove as ephemeral as a blog post, a blip in the morning newsfeed—a symptom of the age of distraction rather than an antidote to it.

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Why the Red Hen Is Different from Masterpiece Cakeshop

My good friend David Blankenhorn is one of the most admirable people I know, a man who has worked to strengthen the American polity and nurture social peace and progress. I have eagerly followed his work and participated in some of his projects. But there is one subject upon which we disagree sharply: religious liberty.

David looks at the furor over the Red Hen denying service to Sarah Huckabee Sanders and compares it to Jack Phillips’s decision not to make a cake for a gay wedding. As a social media participant, I saw many folks make the same comparison going in both directions: Those who favored Jack Phillips complained about the hypocrisy of secular liberals cheering on the Red Hen; those who favored the Red Hen castigated the lack of consistency they saw in the views of those who supported Jack Phillips.

In my view, being in business doesn’t mean that we throw out all of our convictions to become soulless creatures of commerce. If freedom means anything, it means freedom to choose the way we meld our deepest beliefs with the lives we lead among many others of diverse views. But to say that is, of course, to be forced to deal with the problem of Southern segregation—and indeed, facing that problem is key here because civil rights and gay rights are generally construed as being in the same category of rights unjustly denied.

But we need to carefully distinguish Southern segregation from controversies such as the Red Hen and Masterpiece Cakeshop. Segregation wasn’t something that individual merchants dreamed up as a system. It was public policy. Given the power of that system and its ruthless implementation, one should not be surprised that it required the sweeping action of a larger entity, the Federal government, to take it down. Social bias against homosexuality of course has existed for a very long time, and there were legal ramifications to the bias; but homosexuals did not face anything comparable legally to the vast, diabolical system of segregation. It should be clear, then, that such a plan of reform to end segregation is not a suitable template for application to our many social disagreements. It would be one thing if we lived in a nation of government-backed Republican or Democratic restaurants and hotels, or if Christians were attempting to impose some kind of gay apartheid. But neither of those things is even remotely true. Just as some Jews have recently complained that comparing Donald Trump’s policies to the Holocaust mocks and cheapens the tragedies their people suffered, we could say the same of generalizing the Red Hen and Masterpiece Cakeshop in any way to compare them with Southern segregation.

But let me try to be scrupulously fair. David is probably not arguing in that vein so much as he is trying to illustrate a specific point. I’m not sure David is really trying to curtail freedom through a national policy of serving all comers at every commercial entity. It seems to me that he is really talking instead about the general theme of virtue. So perhaps the claim is really that the operators of the Red Hen and Masterpiece Cakeshop lacked virtue. Even in that case, it is important to understand something about religious liberty that makes it different from an excise of virtue.

Not everyone is religious, but many are. Of that group, a subset practices their faith with sufficient seriousness as to see major life decisions influenced by their beliefs about God. So note that Jack Phillips and Barronnelle Stutzman (of Arlene’s Flowers) both had a history of serving gay clients. They saw nothing about their Christian faith that required them to refuse service. Indeed, they probably concluded the opposite in terms of the Christian virtues of loving one’s neighbor, being glad in service, and so forth. In each case, the controversy only arose because of their unwillingness to participate (by making a cake or arranging flowers) in a same-sex wedding. They did not refuse out of animus for gays or lesbians; they refused because of their scripture-based beliefs about marriage. The objection was highly specific, and neither Phillips nor Stutzman felt at liberty to do otherwise. It wasn’t a matter of doing what felt right or wrong; it involved committing an act in defiance of God’s law, as they understood it. They would have mocked their own beliefs had they acted differently.

They are therefore very different from the Southern segregationists of old. When the law changed, so did (most of) the segregationists. The restaurants opened up, and so did the hotels, stores, busses, swimming pools, and so on. But Phillips and Stutzman acted as they did even though the law provided painful penalties. Both could have lost their businesses and been ruined financially. It wasn’t a matter of good character or virtue; as it was a matter of faith and of obedience to a larger system of moral reasoning to which they were committed. (By the way, the operator of the Red Hen could throw Sarah Sanders out without any of the threat of the legally enforced ruin that Phillips and Stutzman faced.)

Now, we can live in a society that views such faith commitments as inherently dangerous, and refuse to accommodate them. But up until recently we have tended to want to make it possible for people of many faiths to live in our country, and to do so with respect for the differences in a free society. That is why John Courtney Murray called the religion clauses of the First Amendment “articles of peace.” David doesn’t seem to understand how Phillips and Stutzman could choose as they did without being somehow hostile or unvirtuous, but that likely was not at all the case. I’m confident that both Phillips and Stutzman would rather have just made the cake or provided the flowers and avoided the power of the state being directed against them. But they were faithful to their beliefs, which in the political form that the Founders raised to the highest level of civic virtue means they followed their conscience. There is integrity in that decision that deserves respect.

Some will object that if we protect religious dissenters we will have chaos. Some have believed that about conscientious objectors (often religious) to military service, too. But the general evidence from American life indicates that we have more peace and order rather than less from our accommodation of religious liberty.

The disagreement I have with David Blankenhorn indicates to me just how important the mission of Better Angels is, and really all efforts that aim to get Americans talking with one another civilly over their differences. We can trade barbs and slogans about bigotry on Facebook and Twitter and stir up a lot of self-satisfaction and hostility. The better course is to listen to people and think about their real situations. Phillips and Stutzman deserve a lot better than they receive from many folks. Better Angels could help.

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The Hot Peace We Have

From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia

Michael McFaul

506 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.

America has dispatched a wide variety of diplomats to Moscow over the years, from Joseph E. Davies in the late 1930s, with his tragicomic level of credulity, to George F. Kennan and his far-sighted wisdom after the war. Davies, who took Stalin’s show trials at face value, was later to write of the dictator: “He gives the impression of a strong mind which is composed and wise. His brown eye is exceedingly kindly—and gentle. A child would like to sit in his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”

With Trump the history of American delusions about Russia has come full circle. But fortunately, we have the legacy of Kennan’s wisdom on containment, still pertinent in our day.

The term of Michael McFaul, Ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, was more modest but nonetheless worthy. Unlike many U.S. envoys to Russia, the one President Obama sent was someone who knew the country, not just glancingly but well. McFaul began his acquaintance with Russia as an idealistic academic, saw it both before and after communism, and was involved with Moscow democratic activists early in the new regime.

As a White House adviser he was also a powerful intellectual force behind the “reset” program. Thereafter he was a victim of events. As Ambassador, to his immense frustration he was to witness at first hand the crumbling of that policy under Putin and the birth of the venomously anti-Western Kremlin we see today.

At the start of his time in Russia there was something in him of the missionary spirit previously displayed by Americans in early 20th-century China. By the end, 25 years of intensive contact with Russians at many levels, including with Putin himself, had taken care of that. When he left Moscow in 2014 prematurely and of his own volition, an enlightened Russian said of him: “They hated him not because he was an enemy of Russia but because he had become a friend.” What this meant was that McFaul was someone who knew the country and who minded when, after a decade or so of Russia’s emerging into the world with an expanding mindset, it began withering back, snail-like, into the murk and mendacity of Putin’s Russia.

His account of that dismal progress is detailed and persuasive, with two exceptions. He underestimates the continuity in the intelligence/military community’s reaction to the communist debacle. The new book The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia by Mark Galeotti reminds us of how intimate power and criminality had already become by the Gorbachev years, and of how the transfer to the oligarchic mafia state was effected.

To be a “vor v zakone” (thief within the law, or recognized, semi-official crook) was seen in the later Soviet years as an almost dignified position, with its own rights and customs—and in the Russian mafia today the situation is not dissimilar. Add to that Putin’s hankering after neo-Soviet mind controls and the end of communism begins to resemble, like war for Clausewitz, the continuation of Soviet politics by other means.

Under Yeltsin’s presidency efforts were certainly made, including by McFaul himself, to secure a transfer to representative government and a civil society. But as postwar Iraq and the rise of ISIS were to remind us, in nation-building political cultures can only work with what they have inherited. Russia’s legacy included the residue of seventy years of totalitarian lies, a country steeped in cynicism, and a spy sickness already evident in czarist times.

So when with determined optimism McFaul writes that, “Innate, structural forces did not produce Putin”—maybe because my fifty years of on and off engagement with Russia began earlier—I don’t believe him. Not just that, but my guess is that same inherited strand of resignation, chauvinism, “big man” culture, and inferiority complex will help keep him in power for the foreseeable future.

In McFaul’s favor, I recognize that, unlike me, he was close to the anti-Putin demonstrations of 2011-12, knew some of the leaders, and drew optimism from this period. Yet as Chairman of the Russian Booker Prize for Fiction for years before that period, while I was encouraged by the free-thinking I encountered among intellectuals, the rise of Putinism was severely curtailing any hopes I retained of progress. I doubted whether the reformer Boris Nemtsov, later to be murdered outside the Kremlin walls and whom McFaul knew well, ever stood much of a chance in government. Today we all can see that the 2011-12 protests were a false dawn.

Was it partly our own fault? On the “Western guilt” side of the equation—the puritanical self-flagellation we have seen as European and American writers have fought to pin the blame for Russia’s lost promise on ourselves—McFaul, while remaining sober overall, is less clear than some will like. He is right to reject the idea that Russia’s failures came from outside, but again fails to stress how far corruption, ideological and material, was deep in the blood. One lament is that the West ought to have come up with a Marshall Plan to help Russia through its chaotic Yeltsin period, but what the country’s “thieves within the law” would have made of a deluge of Western cash does not bear thinking about. At any rate, McFaul gives no sign of having thought about it.

That said, there were huge failings of the Western imagination. The U.S. and other governments seriously underestimated the damage to the Russian psyche of its sudden and massive loss of territory, status, and self-respect, with the obvious danger of the revanchist mentality which now dominates both the regime and public opinion. I hate to say anything that risks justifying Putin paranoia, but he had reason to be aggrieved at the duplicitous way NATO expansion was handled under President Clinton, and McFaul should have been more candid about this. I am not sure this was a primary reason for Putin’s abrupt turn from West to East in 2012, when, as McFaul shows, his half-crazed fear of Western-inspired regime change was the defining factor. But give a man like Putin an excuse for feeling aggrieved and you will never hear the end of it.

Where McFaul has a sparklingly clean bill of health is in his warnings about Putin himself. On him, he had no illusions. On his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, he is more opaque. Lavrov could be sly, he admits, but also bonhomous. In McFaul’s years and since, Lavrov has complained bitterly and in public about the years in which Russia was ignored or disrespected. Ignoring Russia, to the extent that we did, was never wise, though disrespect for the Putin team was another matter. The truth is that these were never respectable people.

Lavrov is not just his master’s voice but on occasion a fantastical liar, far more so than his most famous predecessor, the dour and bureaucratically prudent Andrei Gromyko (grim Grom he was called), whom I saw in action as a diplomat in Soviet times. For all Lavrov’s veneer of competence and professionalism, when things get rough, whether on the Syrian or Salisbury poisonings, or the murder of the passengers on the Dutch plane shot down by Russia over Ukraine, a startling brutalism emerges: a shameless mendacity, sarcasm, and vicious innuendo more in the tradition of Andrei Vishinski, chief prosecutor at the Moscow trials. Here is a man who said publicly and with a straight face that after rigging the so-called assassination attempt in Salisbury the British went on to rig the Syrian chemical attacks. Putin himself never quite went that far, but Lavrov had no scruples.

Where McFaul is fascinating is on the period of cohabitation between Medvedev as President with Putin as Prime Minister. Previously inclined to believe that their duet was no more than a put-up job, I see now that things were more complex. There was a real rapport between the U.S. Ambassador and the Russian lawyer President, as well as a mutual determination to make the “reset” work, and not just in arms control. Where I remain puzzled is why Putin did not exercise more of the overall political control he undoubtedly retained, notably over the intelligence and military sectors, to restrain his over-eager temporary President from excessive friendliness with the U.S. Ambassador and Obama himself.

Now that Medvedev has reverted to his role as acolyte and inferior, like Zhou Enlai with Mao Zedong, he dutifully repeats his boss’s falsehoods, notably over the invasion of Ukraine, Syria, and the rest. The contrast between the more civilized operator McFaul and Obama dealt with and the little-sir-echo Medvedev has become today is one more reason for gloom about the future.

McFaul’s descriptions of his first and subsequent meetings with Putin are revealing of the depth of Russia’s problems. Fixing the American with a hard stare, in a few harsh words he made clear that he disliked him as a specialist in the organization of “color” (Maidan-type) revolutions. As Ambassador this dislike was to take the form of gross or petty harassment of McFaul himself and his staff, extending even to children and wives. From the day of his arrival the official media denounced him as an agent of regime change and never let up. “Propaganda works,” McFaul observes. And among conspiracy-minded Russians, he might have added, in thrall to their latest “big man,” it works distressingly well.

Another time, in a summit with Obama, McFaul captures very well indeed Putin’s almost pathological resentment against the West. Almost the entire meeting was taken up with the Russian leader’s complaints: “For each vignette of disrespect or confrontation he told the President [Obama] the date, the place and who was at the meeting.” These obsessions convey better than anything the insecurities and dangerous smallness of the man whom Time magazine, with its kooky media perspective, had named its Person of the Year. Small enough to take satisfaction in keeping the leader of the Western world waiting, including the time he turned up 45 minutes late for a session with Obama in Mexico. “This was a guy with a chip on his shoulder,” McFaul observes.

McFaul rightly underlines the importance of the strategic shift that occurred once Putin returned to power: “Putin blamed America for everything bad in the world and in Russia,” and an obedient media flooded the air with a “barrage of lies,” later hugely amplified on the internet. Weirdly, and with surreal, Gogolian levels of hypocrisy, Putin’s Russia was proclaiming itself spiritually superior to a decadent West, while running a foreign policy based on deceit and cynicism for the benefit of a mafia state.

Relations galloped downhill all through the Ambassador’s two-year tenure in Moscow. The 2011-12 disturbances had embedded themselves in Putin’s psyche and together with the Maidan revolution would never be dislodged. The KGB man’s barroom verity that the United States was behind both, and that next in line was Red Square, lies behind everything he does today.

There are plenty of instructive vignettes in From Cold War to Hot Peace, one of which recounts the attempt by the brand new U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to get on instant terms with the wily old dog Lavrov, by means of a man-to-man, official-free meeting. The result was that Kerry was hung out to dry by Lavrov in a later press conference. I once saw Edmund Muskie make exactly the same mistake with the even older dog, Gromyko, in 1980, and as I write President Trump, God help us, is doing it with Putin too.

That McFaul’s brief and ill-starred stay in Moscow was ended prematurely and at his own request was perhaps for the best: The invasion of Ukraine happened the day he came home. His old hopes for a “reset” he now saw as “illusory and unworkable at least for the foreseeable future.” His sensible recommendations for future policy are not to lunge the other way into across-the-board hostility, but for selective containment plus selective engagement, bolstered where necessary by sanctions and isolation, together with a boosting of NATO’s power. Missing from his discussion, but necessary it seems to me as sanctions bite and Putin gets nowhere with the economy, is a reprise of the old debate on whether a thin or fat Russia (then the USSR) is more dangerous. Personally I am unsure.

Looking back, McFaul asks if it was wrong of the U.S. government to contribute to Russian aggressive defensiveness by its overtly democratizing objectives in Russia. McFaul dismisses the accusation, and so do I. Resentment and paranoia are there all right, though mostly for reasons the Russians have only themselves to blame. Defending himself against charges of naivety, McFaul recalls his prediction of a strong man emerging if reform failed, which in my opinion it was destined to do. Whether this proves to be a return to history or an interregnum he sees as too early to judge. Meanwhile, he claims to remain optimistic, as you feel he must.

McFaul’s analysis of Russia’s changing psychology under Putin is well done, but he could have taken it further. Some thirty years after the end of communism it is bad enough for the country to find itself viewed as a gangsterish state with a GDP half that of the United Kingdom and a population more than double, but that is not the full measure of the country’s tragedy. To that must be added its dwarfing by its formerly indigent eastern neighbor. To think that Chinese students in Moscow University were called “little lemons” (small and bitter) during my time there as a postgraduate in 1962. I don’t think the Russians call them that now, and not for reasons of political correctness.

Little wonder the country to which McFaul has devoted much of his life has relapsed into dangerously atavistic states of mind, whether delusions of grandeur-to-come as a mythological Eurasian colossus, or a mystical Dostoyevskian world spirit. To read of the fascistic lucubrations of the pro-Putin guru Alexander Dugin, or of the postmodern games of Vladislav Surkov, a Kremlin strategist and political playboy for whom truth is definitively dead and cynicism a rightly controlling force, is to understand the seriousness of Russia’s malady. These dark and increasingly powerful forces have been wonderfully portrayed in Black Wind White Snow by Charles Clover, or more recently Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin by a Frenchman, Michel Eltchaninoff.

In any new “reset” in U.S. relations we shall need people like McFaul, who know Russia and Russians. Just how ill-fated the first version was from the word go is symbolized by the mistake over the translation: The word selected by Mrs. Clinton’s team (not McFaul) meant overloaded, an apt description, it turns out, of the West’s post-communist hopes.

While Putin is in power trust, as well as truth, has no meaning. A situation in which Russia is lost in a self-generated cloud of lies and the United States is led by an ignorant braggart lost in his own puerile low cunning leaves little room for hope. All I can add is that to find a way out of the new Hot Peace with Russia we must begin by recognizing that we are in one.

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Politics and Control

Hurricane Katrina is remembered as the low point of George W. Bush’s presidency. Natural disasters can happen under any administration, but what turned that one into a political catastrophe was not so much its intensity as the failure of the state and federal government to even pretend to be in control of events.

Exactly ten years later, Europe experienced its own Katrina moment, not triggered by a natural disaster but rather by regional instability. During the summer of 2015, Europeans watched hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and migrants from North Africa and Middle East march across their continent. The fact that for weeks and months no one was visibly in control is the main reason why the memory of the refugee crisis animates European political debates until the present day, when numbers of new asylum seekers are the lowest in years. It’s also why Angela Merkel’s political existence has been hanging by a thread for a good part of this year.

Of course, the terror attacks perpetrated by Jihadists on European soil in 2015 and 2016 added to the trauma, as did vivid pictures of ISIS’s atrocities and its propaganda. But Europe already had experience with terrorism and lived through decades of immigration from Muslim-majority countries. Although European public opinion had been long opposed to mass migration, especially from Muslim-majority countries, there were few reasons to doubt the ability of Western governments to effectively regulate immigration, should they decide to do so.

That belief was shaken to its core during the summer of 2015 and that memory continues to cast a shadow on European politics. Notwithstanding the attention that it received, Ms. Merkel’s “invitation” in early September, after some 700 hundred thousand had already arrived in Europe, is only a footnote to the story. The real issue was the powerlessness and exasperation of mainstream European governments, laid bare for everyone to see.

The premium placed on control is rooted deeply in human psychology. In an experiment in the 1970s, depressed and non-depressed students were told that pressing a button might, or might not, turn on the green light. For each appearance of a green light, a small financial reward was offered. Although in reality pressing the button had no effect on turning on the light, which had been prearranged, non-depressed students systematically overestimated the degree to which their actions brought about the desired outcome whereas depressed ones correctly understood that their actions had no bearing on outcomes.

A more recent experiment instructed 40 students to react to small 6-second long electric shocks. After 10 iterations, half of the subjects were told that if they reacted more rapidly, the shock duration would be reduced. In the second half of the experiment, all participants received shorter, 3-second shocks. However, those who were told that they were in control of the shocks’ length reported significantly smaller, less painful responses.

Just like those two experiments, control often tends to be an illusion in political life, too. An individual vote has a negligible impact on the outcome of any election. Elections, furthermore, do not provide a choice between specific policy ideas but only between individual politicians. And when those arrive in power, they often finds themselves quite powerless because of necessary compromises, checks and balances, and the stasis of government bureaucracy. Most fundamentally, however, because of the world’s complexity, policymakers themselves tend to have only a faint idea of the effects that their policies produce. As the 18th-century Scottish moral philosopher Adam Ferguson famously observed,

“[e]very step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

The notion that the social world is too complicated to allow for effective control over social or economic outcomes is the central insight of the classical liberal tradition, illustrated notably by the work of Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. Hayek argued that a successful functioning of a modern society relies on the use of local knowledge that is not available to anybody in its entirety but is dispersed amongst many actors and impossible to convey to any single center of decision-making. Attempts to replace the functioning of decentralized coordination mechanisms, such as market prices, by political fiat or planning, are bound to produce unintended consequences. Taken to an extreme, “control” is incompatible with the existence of a modern, prosperous society relying on international division of labor and Schumpeterian creative destruction.

In fact, effectiveness of anything the government does depends on factors beyond national borders. Any government’s ability to conduct an autonomous fiscal policy hinges on its ability to borrow on international financial markets. The same is true of migration. In coming years, the rise of economies of Sub-Saharan Africa will enable more of their citizens to travel and pay traffickers for their services. That phenomenon, unrelated to anything Europeans do or don’t do, will severely constrain the West’s ability to limit migration. Even then, perhaps the EU and it member states should be doing much more to promote political stability and economic opportunity in the migrants’ countries of origin to incentivize them to stay. But if European and U.S. governments are unable to boost growth rates of their own economies, can one expect them to do so successfully overseas?

Illusory as “control” may be, it still remains an imperative of political life. A social contract depends on the government’s ability to get things done, or “government capacity”. Different people may harbor different views of what that capacity entails and how it should be used. But lose that capacity in eyes of the public—as European and U.S. policymakers did in the summers of 2015 and 2005, respectively—and you break the bond between the people and their government.

Figures such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, as well as President Donald Trump, grasp the salience of control better than others. Though criticized internationally, the border fence and Hungary’s austere treatment of incoming asylum-seekers, oftentimes in violation of the non-refoulement principle, only helped Mr. Orbán in the court of domestic public opinion. The same logic was behind Austria’s border drills last month, even though the country faces no discernible inflows of refugees at the moment. Finally, it also explains why Mr. Trump’s gratuitously cruel policy of child separation does not seem to have hurt him in the eyes of his base. In fact, its purpose was to signal to that base that, unlike other politicians, he will stop at nothing to restore control over U.S. borders.

The Hayekian logic of unintended consequences suggests that heavy-handed attempts by demagogues to create the illusion of control may lead to ever more chaos. That may not be bad for such politicians as it gives them even more opportunities to signal their “toughness”. Mr. Trump, for instance, would hardly benefit if America’s problem of illegal immigration were miraculously solved. On the opposite end of the spectrum, those who choose to ignore or ridicule the voters’ desire for control, unwittingly bolster support for demagogues. Responsible political leadership is about avoiding both extremes, recognizing the popular demand for control and satisfying it in ways that are neither counterproductive nor cruel.

A visible concession to immigration hawks, the emerging European consensus is an opportunity to charter that path for the EU’s asylum policy, albeit with a significant delay. Besides stopping illegal entry and returning ships to “disembarkation platforms” in North Africa, however, a lasting solution will also have to enlarge the possibilities for legal entry, including by creating new forms of international protection that will not grant the full, open-ended status provided by asylum.

There will have to be some form of burden sharing—something that a number of EU countries continue to reject. Yet policy innovations such as tradable quotas or matching markets that would allocate refugees to countries and regions where they are most likely to thrive can go a long way towards blunting the sharp edges of today’s conversations, especially if accompanied by the sense that the EU is in control of its borders.

The problem of control is a perennial one and nobody knows when or where the next Katrina moment is going to hit. From off-shoring, through international financial flows, to environmental challenges, the world offers any number of areas where no government is fully, if at all, in control. Before they next ask their elected representatives to demonstrate control, whatever the cost, voters across the Western world ought to remember that the world’s complexity and uncontrolled nature are not only sources of risk to be mitigated but also an inextricable feature of humankind’s progress and prosperity.

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