Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 88

Erdoğan Tightens His Grip

In a double-barreled victory on June 24, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey won a newly designed strong-man presidency, and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) gained a majority in parliament by combining votes with the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP). The stakes are enormous, as the untried governmental system does away with the Prime Minister position and allows the President to control the cabinet, appoint Vice Presidents, senior judges, and officials, and to a large extent rule by decree. Will parliament be able to stand against Erdogan, who could conceivably govern until 2028? By then, the damage to Turkey’s hard-won democratic system will be difficult to reverse.

A mismatched group of opposition parties joined forces, Musketeer-style, to strategize against an Erdogan/MHP win. The secular Republican People’s Party (CHP), which has suffered for years from lackluster leadership under Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, mustered a relatively unknown presidential candidate, Muharrem İnce, who galvanized the part of the population that wishes to end the Erdogan era, with its corruption and stark repression of society. More than 100,000 people have been forced from their jobs and imprisoned. The continuing wave of arbitrary arrests often relies on anonymous denunciation, creating a suffocating climate of fear and distrust. In the cities, Erdogan has replaced dozens of elected Mayors, including from his own party, with functionaries that do his bidding. He controls the media and has pulled other government institutions like schools, the courts, and the military closer to his chest, upending the rule of law. He has closed down or coopted hundreds of civic organizations.

Millions of citizens came out to hear İnce promise to turn back the authoritarian tide, rewarding him with an impressive 31 percent of the vote to Erdoğan’s 53 percent. In his concession speech, İnce pointed out that, although some votes had been stolen, Erdoğan was unquestionably the victor. However, any hope that a solid win would relax Erdoğan’s iron grip on society faded when, soon after the results were announced, state-run television was already referring to the opposition as traitors and terrorists. In his victory speech, Erdoğan lashed out at the opposition and unspecified traitors and enemies of the nation. He promised to treat all 77 million Turks equally, but the very next day, the Mayor of a district in Ordu province announced that each neighborhood would receive municipal services according to the percentage of votes they gave to Erdoğan. Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of AKP’s partner, the MHP, bought a full-page advertisement in several newspapers in which he listed dozens of names of journalists, writers, and others who he claimed had criticized and slandered his party, in essence putting a target on their backs. Meanwhile, another MHP MP called for the death penalty to be reinstated.

Erdoğan won for several reasons, not least his continued popularity among the conservative, pious part of the population that, under his government, had for the first time tasted upward mobility. He also won because he made sure not to lose. His party redistricted voting boundaries, used state funds and services to campaign, denied the opposition airtime on government controlled television, and discouraged any mention of them in the cowed media. The vast sea of people at İnce’s rallies barely appeared in the Turkish news. Erdoğan trapped the opposition inside a social media bubble where only their supporters heard them. On election night, there were continual reports of irregularities and attacks on election observers. In Turkey’s eastern provinces, the government jailed many Kurdish politicians and civic leaders and moved voting locations for “security reasons,” leading voters to walk many miles, dressed in their Sunday best, to cast their votes. Despite these efforts and the fact that the presidential candidate for the Kurdish HDP, Selahattin Demirtaş, was running his campaign from Silivri prison, his party passed the 10 percent threshold and was able to take its place in parliament in opposition to the AKP.

AKP supporters were also in their own controlled bubble of information—and misinformation. Clearly something is wrong with the economy when people can no longer afford to buy potatoes and onions and the value of the lira is plummeting, but the government has blamed the country’s economic free-fall on outsiders scheming to undermine Turkey’s economy and thereby destroy the nation. It drew on a familiar cast of villains, including the United States and the European Union. Erdoğan promised that he, the powerful and caring patriarch, would fix things for his obedient citizen children if they remained loyal. His election posters insisted that a strong Turkey requires a strong leader and touted all the infrastructural projects and past economic prosperity he had brought to his people.

In many ways, this election was a victory for nationalist vengeance. Citizens were urged to stand up against the outside powers that were trying to destroy Turkey, as well as the enemies, like the Kurds, who worked against Turkey from within. Other scapegoats for economic hardship are close to hand. Three and a half million Syrian refugees now live in Turkey, receiving benefits that jobless Turks resent and doing cheap labor that undermines Turkish labor prices. The ultra-nationalist MHP is notorious for its uncompromising stand against Kurds and its deployment of violent youth groups. The party recently hemorrhaged members when a new party (İyi Party) split off to join the anti-Erdoğan coalition. Yet in the election, MHP gained a surprising number of votes, giving it the heft to nudge AKP into the majority in parliament. As king-maker, MHP will be able to influence government policies. Judging by Bahçeli’s ad and other statements, this will pull Turkey in a disastrous trajectory away from peace and instead deepen Turkey’s violent polarization.

In this highly charged environment, neither side hears the other’s story. Turkish society consists of silos that may change slightly in breadth and outer wrapping but otherwise remain regionally and culturally entrenched—the western cities, the Kurdish east, and the Anatolian heartland—their voting patterns surviving intact generation after generation.

Erdoğan’s victory is a symptom of a culture of hierarchy that pervades Turkish political life, in which a single person dominates those around him, and their relationship is based on loyalty and obedience rather than shared ideology, goals, or even competence and merit. There is no mechanism for sharing power, no mechanism for accommodating values, ideas, lifestyles, and identities that deviate from those represented by the leader. Different leaders can join forces, as they did in this election, but these are outbreaks of unity focused on a single goal—overturning Erdoğan’s presidential ambitions. With that goal now out of reach, can these very different parties retain their oath of unity or will they retreat to their silos and squabble over the small piece of the pie left to them? Already CHP’s leader Kılıçdaroğlu has criticized İnce for not winning and angrily fended off calls to resign from the party leadership. Ince has broached the idea of starting a movement of his own. As the fissures deepen, Turkey seems headed for a period of seismic social and political instability.

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Poroshenko’s Dead End

With less than ten months left before presidential elections in Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, who came to power on the heels of the courageous Revolution of Dignity, is increasingly looking like yet another dead end in Ukraine’s decades-long drive to reform itself.

When he was elected as Ukraine’s President four years ago, very few observers had doubts that radical change in country’s bureaucratic tradition were in the offing. The government of Arseniy Yatsenyuk was bristling with reformers, many of them foreigners. Natalie Jaresko of the United States, Aivaras Abromavičius of Lithuania, and Alexander Kvitashvili of Georgia were all granted Ukrainian citizenship the day they were appointed ministers. Western nations lent their full support to the reformers: Ukraine’s $15 billion in debt was restructured in 2015, and the IMF and the European Union dis­bursed more than $6 billion in new loans. But Jaresko’s ambitious efforts were stymied by the Presidential Administration, and the subsequent fall of Yatsenyuk’s government in April 2016 was seen as a huge setback for Ukraine’s reformers.

In order to calm investors, the new Prime Minister, Volodymyr Groysman, swore in a young UK-based investment banker, Oleksandr Danylyuk, as his Finance Minister, who in the process gave up his British passport upon taking up the post. Danylyuk—a reputed libertarian—managed to retain the trust of Western politicians, despite the fact that both the tax burden and the effective cost of borrowing increased notably on his watch. His other not-quite-libertarian achievements include the introduction of new licensing requirements for Ukrainian businesses, which drove scores of entrepreneurs to abandon Ukraine’s jurisdiction; he also introduced a system for tracking imported goods from the border to retailers’ shelves—a costly and inefficient measure ostensibly meant to combat smuggling. And as the outspoken Ukrainian economist Mykhai­lo Kukhar points out, the Finance Minister did his best to oppose mo­ves both the Ukrainian business community and parliament sup­port, like substituting the country’s profit tax with a corporate income tax, as was done in Estonia. Danylyuk was ousted two weeks ago, and has no chance for returning into Ukrainian politics after all the disappointments that he had caused. (For many Western observers, he somewhat perplexingly remains a trusted liberal figure—a victim rather than a failure.)

Beyond the nuts and bolts of the economy, another huge issue looms over Ukraine: agricultural land reform. Ever since the privatizations of the early 1990s, Ukraine’s various governments have tried to walk back that fateful early decision. In 2001 and in 2002, the deputies that later established Viktor Yanukovych’s “Party of the Regions” introduced a moratorium on selling the land—ostensibly for one year, each time they did it. The moratorium has been reinstated every year since. Today, the moratorium affects 41 million hectares of arable lands, or 96 percent of the country’s total. You may own the land, but you are unable to sell it. (Similar practices remain only in North Korea, Cuba, and, since the early 2000s, in Venezuela.) Western donors have been pushing the Ukrainian government to fundamentally change the rules of the game, but even the activist pro-market First Deputy Minister for Agrarian Policy Maxim Martynyuk has been unable to make it happen: the parliament reinstalled the moratorium four times since the Revolution of Dignity deposed President Yanukovych. Yulia Tymoshenko, now leading the polls in the race for the presidency scheduled for next year, openly declares she supports the status quo.

The foot-dragging around establishing the special anti-corruption court is even more telling. Its creation was one of the main demands both of the popular movement that stood behind the Revolution of Dignity, and of the Western supporters of the Ukrainian cause. Since the National Anti-Corruption Bureau took into custody the director of Ukraine’s State Fiscal Service Roman Nasyrov in March of last year, opposition to this new court became extremely strong. Nasyrov himself remai­ned in office for ten months while out on bail, presumably as a means of ensuring his immunity from prosecution should the court have been put in place. (He was finally fired in January 2018.) And even after the court’s creation was OK’d by parliament in the face of Prime Minister Groysman’s threats to step down, no one was sure whether the court actually becomes fully operational before the upcoming presidential elections.

It’s quite common today to hear that Ukraine still is very corrupt country. That banality doesn’t fully capture what’s happening. A recent World Bank report insist that more than 20 percent of Ukraine’s economy is directly controlled by companies closely associated with the country’s political establishment. These companies appear to be less efficient and productive than an average Ukrainian corporation, and yet get a privileged access to the banking loans and to the priva­tized state assets.

I would argue that in Ukraine nowadays, we are witnessing a very special situation, somewhat resembling the one that evolved in Russia more than a decade ago. While the early post-Communist societies in both Russia and Ukraine were dominated by so-called oligarchs who played the role of political kingmakers (with bureaucrats as their junior partners), today a new system has arisen in which governance itself becomes the most profitable kind of business. Nowadays, political leaders have become major “stakeholders” in their respective nations’ wealth and resources, with a layer of oligarchs serving them, and not vice versa. Ukraine’s system is still more “pluralistic” than Russia’s, and so there is genuine contestation for the ultimate spoils, but underneath, the new dynamic is more similar than not. Western policymakers should take note. There are no ready answers for how to transform a society in this situation. But the first step to progress must be a correct diagnosis.

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Putin 4.0: It’s All in the Family

Since Vladimir Putin began his fourth term as Russia’s President, there have been no substantial appointments or resignations in his Administration or cabinet. All the key officials from Putin’s previous term retained their positions, and even Vladislav Surkov, despite rumors and leaks, has preserved his job as Russia’s special envoy for the Ukraine crisis.

This past week, however, a rare piece of significant personnel news arrived from the Kremlin. In fitting Orwellian fashion, it both is a new appointment and is not.

An executive order to appoint Valentin Yumashev, Boris Yeltsin’s son-in-law and an informal Putin adviser, appeared on the Kremlin’s website last week. The news made headlines, mostly because it soon turned out that Yumashev, once the head of the Yeltsin Administration, has been occupying this position in an unofficial, voluntary basis for the last 18 years. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained that Putin’s orders on appointing Yumashev “had been signed before,” but were never made public. Peskov didn’t answer why.

More questions linger: why has Yumashev’s position only been publicly revealed now? Who did so? And what message does it carry?

First, it helps to understand who Valentin Yumashev is, and why his position is important in the first place. Yumashev is the core of the so-called Family—one of the most influential and powerful clans in Russia, which led Vladimir Putin to the President’s chair, in exchange for guarantees of personal safety and prosperity. The Family consists of Tatiana Yeltsin, Boris Yeltsin’s daughter; her husband Valentin Yumashev; his daughter Polina Yumasheva; her now-estranged husband, the recently sanctioned oligarch and aluminum king Oleg Deripaska; Aleksandr Voloshin, the former Putin Administration head known as the “grey cardinal” of the Kremlin; the billionaire and Chelsea soccer club owner Roman Abramovich, who recently relocated to Israel; Abramovich’s money handler, the Russian senator Suleiman Kerimov, who is awaiting trial in France for alleged money laundering; Alfa Group’s Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, who visited Washington, DC in May to discuss sanctions in a private dinner at the Atlantic Council; and the billionaire Aleksandr Mamut, who infamously destroyed the independent media outlet lenta.ru in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea.

Others affiliated with the Family include the billionaires Alisher Usmanov, Viktor Vekselberg (recently sanctioned by Washington along with Deripaska), and the U.S. citizen Leonard Blavatnik. Ksenia Sobchak, the daughter of Putin’s former boss and former St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, is a kind of associate member, and received support from the Family for her fake opposition run for President in 2018. And the Family has cultivated other political creatures as well: most notably Vyacheslav Volodin, now the Duma Speaker, and Sergey Kirienko, the current head of the Presidential Administration.

Members of the Family have not merely been untouchable during Putin’s rule. They have prospered and have been repeatedly bailed out by his government when needed, from the early 2000s through the 2008 financial crisis and right up until the present. Today we know officially that Valentin Yumashev still has Putin’s ear, and has even had his own office on Staraya Ploshad all these years.

Citing a source in the Kremlin, BBC Russia reported that the publication of the order was a technical mistake. Mistakes happen, of course, and there is always a slight chance that this is true. But the explanation does not look credible. The source’s leak is more likely part of a bigger game.

The chief editor of Echo of Moscow Radio, Alexey Venediktov, told me that the Yumashev appointment came as no surprise: Yumashev has been advising Putin on a voluntary basis since 2000. But after 2003, when Voloshin left the Administration, Yumashev lost his influence within the Kremlin. Yumashev has kept up personal relations with President Putin, and they occasionally meet to discuss various topics. According to Gleb Pavlovsky, an ex-Putin adviser who has become a vocal critic, Yumashev functions as a middleman, a representative for particular business interests who appeals to Putin on an ad hoc basis when a situation needs to be resolved. But this has happened more rarely in recent years, according to Venediktov.

Former Yukos Vice President Leonid Nevzlin, who knew Yumashev and many of the clan members personally back in his days in Russia, doesn’t believe for a second that the order was published by mistake. Nevzlin says that Yumashev himself has been letting the world know about his close relationship with Putin, even saying that they address each other on a first-name basis and with the informal “you,” while everyone else addresses Putin as Vladimir Vladimirovich. That is why, according to Nevzlin, Yumashev himself has made his position public. Yumashev needs to reaffirm that he can provide a krysha for the clan’s businessmen and to show his rivals that he still has friends in high places. The message is intended for people like Igor Sechin, the powerful Rosenft CEO whose position against the Family Nevzlin describes as an “armed neutrality.” “Yumashev is sending a message: I’m still there, I’m a friend of the President, too, don’t even dare to go after us,” Nevzlin explains. In his telling, it is not so much a fight for power as a fight for the appearance of power.

The Bell reports that for almost ten years after Boris Yeltstin’s resignation, Tatiana and Valentin Yumashev did not appear on the news nor give any interviews. The silence was interrupted only in 2008 when Dmitry Medvedev was chosen by Putin as his successor. That is when the Family had a real chance to come back to big politics. Mikhail Zygar’s book All the Kremlin’s Men tells how Medvedev planned to create a new rightwing party and how Yumashev was part of those failed efforts.

Unfortunately for the Family, Medvedev’s succession didn’t last long. In 2012 Putin retook the office, and Medvedev’s position has only been weakened since then. Although Medvedev is still Prime Minister, he holds no real decision-making authority and enjoys the dubious honor of being blamed for Putin’s unpopular decisions. More significantly, financial groups around Medvedev have recently been under attack. The latest example is the shocking imprisonment of the Magomedov brothers, who are charged with leading a criminal gang under the guise of their investment group Summa. The loss of Arkady Dvorkovich, Ziyavutdin Magomedov’s man in the government, as Vice Prime Minister also hurt Medvedev’s standing.

All this has probably made Valentin Yumashev go public. It turns out that the Family members’ position with respect to Putin is more important for their survival than their reputation in the West. True, anyone in the business world who doesn’t want to be next on the U.S. Treasury sanctions list has rushed to distance themselves from Putin. Oligarchs have tried to escape meetings with Putin or at least avoid being photographed with him. Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven portrayed themselves as international businessmen not connected to the Kremlin, and even criticized Vladimir Putin’s leadership skills at that Atlantic Council dinner.

But sanctions are not easy to escape, even harder to lift, and Igor Sechin, who is credited with sentencing acting federal minister Alexey Ulyukaev for eight years and the prosecution of the Magomedovs, each day becomes more powerful and more ruthless toward his rivals. Survival is at stake, and it’s time to choose sides.

Yumashev’s new-old position within the Kremlin is not the only effort of the Family to reposition itself. Petr Aven recently wrote a book about Boris Berezovsky and the 1990s that was widely criticized for inaccuracy and bias. Alexey Venediktov is the most vocal critic of the book, which he calls “not even fiction, but a fantasy.” According to Venediktov, the book’s only purpose was to portray Berezovsky, who committed suicide in 2013 in London, as a “petty devil” who didn’t play any substantial role in leading Vladimir Putin to power. Venediktov says the book was written at Aleksandr Voloshin and Valentin Yumashev’s dictation.

As a matter of fact, Berezovsky was the mastermind of the operation to make Putin Yeltsin’s successor in 1999. He was part of the Family then, but very soon he regretted his choice as Putin failed to be his puppet and reinstated his own force as President. Berezovsky departed both from the Family and Russia, infamously sued Roman Abramovich in London and lost, went bankrupt, and killed himself.

Another work of fiction came from Ksenia Sobchak, who has just released a documentary film about her father—Sobchak’s Case. One of those interviewed is Vladimir Putin himself. The film presents Saint Petersburg of the 1990s in the most romantic of lights, portraying her father, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, and his deputy Vladimir Putin as idealistic democrats. There is not a single mention of Putin’s connections to the mafia, of drug trafficking through the city’s port and the related murders, and of Putin’s embezzlement of the hungry city’s public resources worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

In short, Yeltsin-era clans, and even Russia’s nominal opposition figures, are making their loyalties to Putin clearer than ever. Under these circumstances, it is hard to conceive of a major political change happening in Russia before 2024. Whatever that change will be we don’t know—but in the meantime, let no one be mistaken about the “liberals” from the 1990s, who have laid the groundwork for today’s authoritarian Russia and still pledge their fealty to its perpetual leader, Vladimir Putin.

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Arms Races to the Bottom

The news in recent weeks juxtaposed two arms races that are seemingly headed in different directions. President Trump’s Singapore meeting with President Kim Jong-un signaled a possible de-escalation of tension over North Korea’s effort to develop nuclear weapons that could target U.S. territory. But in the opposite direction, the Trump Administration has recently escalated its strategy of using malware as a preemptive weapon against future possible cyber and nuclear attacks.

Even if President Trump is ultimately successful on the Korean front, there are many reasons to worry about the wisdom of developing cyber tools as offensive weapons. Not the least of which is that the cyber and nuclear threats are sometimes linked. Cyber weapons can be used to weaken an opponent’s nuclear capability. And as a matter of fact, they have.

There is a basic similarity between nuclear and cyber arms races. They are races to the bottom. Both have the potential of uncontrolled escalation, as each side responds tit for tat to the other’s actions. Two competing states might be more secure collectively without more nuclear and cyber weapons, but the failure to respond to an opponent’s actions can create a fatal power asymmetry. Arms competition escalates when it seems to be the only way for a state to avoid losing to another.

Escalation in both cases can wreak extensive havoc and destruction. Cyber weapons are the opposite of a neutron bomb. A neutron bomb has the capacity to destroy people while leaving the buildings and infrastructure largely intact. An extensive cyber attack can leave the people intact, but disrupt the infrastructure and basic services in a target country, particularly as countries adopt smarter technologies that depend on internet services.

The risk of being severely damaged by a first strike fuels the incentive to have the capacity to undertake a pre-emptive strike. Waiting to absorb a first strike and then responding can be costly at best, and at worst, limit the ability to retaliate effectively. But the more a country prepares for preemption, the higher the risk that conflict could break out based on misinformation and misperception. And the risk is even greater with cyber tools, which unlike nuclear arms are used not only for destruction but also for intelligence, criminal activities, deception, and other strategic effects that can easily lead to misinterpretation.

The differences between nuclear and cyber arms races also matter. With the exception of dirty bombs, nuclear competition has been largely contained to states due to the high technological demands of developing and delivering nuclear weapons. Consequently most of the post-World War II arms control efforts were aimed at preventing additional states from developing nuclear weapons.

With cyber weapons, however, there are numerous non-state actors involved, tremendous challenges in attribution, and more ambiguities about responsibility when they are used harmfully. Individuals, criminal organizations, companies and other groups, not to mention countries with scant scientific capacity, can develop and deploy cyber weapons. And non-state actors can learn from states. Unlike nuclear bombs, cyber tools can be re-engineered and reused. New concepts of attacks can be copied.

Cyber tools can also be stolen more easily than nuclear missiles. For example, the destructive malwareWannaCry and NotPetya used the EternalBlue tool developed by the NSA that exploited a Mircrosoft vulnerability. EternalBlue had been stolen and made publicly available. 

The diffusion problem around state-developed malware has raised thorny accountability and liability problems. Who is ultimately responsible for the security and stability of cyberspace? To be sure, those who steal tools from the government and those who use them are mainly to blame. But what is the responsibility of the NSA, the government agency that looked for and found a vulnerable flaw in Microsoft’s code, and then lost its exploit tool to thieves? Is a company that continues to have vulnerabilities in its code because it races to market to blame as well?

In the end, while states do not control cyber weapons as well as they do nuclear arms development, they still have enormous advantages in resources and expertise, and a strong obligation to look out for the public interest. This makes the decision to develop offensive weapons all the more problematic. If a nation’s nuclear capacity can survive any initial attack and retain an ample retaliatory capacity, then a would-be attacking state knows that it faces sure destruction and be deprived of any substantial first strike immunity. The balance of power is more complex in cyberspace: Countries with the most advanced capabilities are also the most connected and potentially the most vulnerable to counterattack. Attacks can backfire.

If we concentrate our efforts on defending against attack, disclosing vulnerabilities to software companies in order to better secure information systems, and protecting our critical infrastructure more effectively, then we will not unintentionally propagate more non-state cyber weapons and we will make it harder for any attack to incapacitate our economic and military weapons. If enough states enter into this agreement, then groups that want to develop these cyber weapons will need to amass the considerable resources and manpower necessary to do so.

The critical element of mutually assured destruction was that all those who had nuclear weapons realized that it was madness to use them. This is the position we need to achieve at the national level with respect to cyber weapons. Our societies are too dependent on the internet and technology to allow them to be under the threat of constant attack. This still leaves the threat of groups other than states that might want to hack critical systems and use malware for malicious intent and profit, but they will be more easily defeated if all responsible state and private partners work together, not if they compete in an escalating cyber war. Even in cyberspace, some roads lead to no place we really want to go.

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Why Macron Cannot Integrate Europe

Emmanuel Macron, France’s 25th President, is set to fail in the most momentous of his endeavors: to integrate the European Union and take it a step nearer to becoming, as he calls it, “a sovereign state.” Fail, at the least, to scale the heights of the very high challenges he has set himself; fail, perhaps, to even put in place bases for others to build on to realize his visions. That is in spite of the energy with which he pursues his goals, and also because of it. He has disdained government by small steps in favor of government by great leaps: identifying desirable outcomes which have defied other leaders, then striving to attain them. But in all cases, he runs up against political and social cultures which are, if anything, becoming less amenable to his kind of change and more irritated the more he presses. In his Sisyphean struggle to move boulders up several hills, he now encounters slopes which are turning into cliffs.

The Frenchman’s main mission in his trip to Washington in late April was to persuade the American President not to scrap an accord with Iran, signed by leading European countries, the European Union itself as well as China and Russia. It was a doomed enterprise, as were visits close on Macron’s heels by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. Trump’s dismissal of European pleas was a humiliation for them all, deepened by the understanding that the American President doesn’t give a damn as to what they think because they are unlikely to seriously discomfit him. As Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council for Foreign Affairs wrote in Foreign Affairs,“[L]aments and indignation do not add up to strategy. The real question is whether [the Europeans] will do anything in response to Trump’s actions. The answer is most likely no.”

The latest and largest threat facing Macron’s EU vision is Italy, once its most loyal (and founding) member. The “contract” between the victorious populist parties in the March election is based on a series of policies ostensibly meant to boost the Italian economy and raise living standards. If implemented, it will blow a hole in EU rules, while adding greatly to Italy’s debt (already at over 130 percent of GDP) and imperil the modest growth and stability the previous center-Left government had managed to put in place. Since neither Luigi di Maio, leader of the Five Star Movement, nor Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega, could agree on who would be Prime Minister, they have persuaded a largely unknown law professor at the University of Florence, Giuseppe Conte, to serve as titular head of the government—a man who will both be constantly ignored by them when convenient and inescapably bound to their program.

It’s not yet clear what economic posture the new government will adopt, and how many—if any—compromises it will make from its economic pledges. But it is clear what it will do about immigration. Using his position as Interior Minister Salvini has turned back refugee ships, called for a total closure of Italy’s borders to migrants and aligned Italy with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and hardline German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, president of the Bavarian-based Christian Social Union—the so far permanent, and more conservative, coalition partner to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats—to create what Kurz calls “an axis of the willing” which demands an end to mass immigration.

At a meeting of European leaders on June 24 to discuss the immigration crisis, no agreement on a new system of processing migrants was achieved, and Merkel’s plan for modest tightening of the rules was rejected by Italy, which demands an end to the present rule that makes the country of migrant disembarkation responsible for the migrants.

Macron has taken the lead in condemning Italy for turning away migrants from Italian ports, at one point calling the surge of anger over migration and wage stagnation, which has brought a populist coalition to power, “leprosy.” He argued at the leaders’ meeting that the pressure on Italy had substantially reduced over the past year: Salvini retorted that there had been “650,000 landings in four years, 430,000 applications . . . 170,000 apparent refugees currently housed in hotels, buildings and apartments at a cost exceeding €5 billion. If for the arrogant President Macron this is not a problem we invite him to stop the insults and to demonstrate generosity by opening the many French ports and ceasing to push back women, children and men.”

Macron had returned from his trip to Washington to a France still in the grip of strikes—an ongoing rail strike, punctuated by sporadic action taken by lawyers, air traffic controllers, medical staff, and students. The strikes are a tough test for Macron, although, backed with rising public anger at the strikes and a majority in the assembly which voted by a large margin to turn the state-owned railways into a “commercial venture,” he is likely to prevail against the dwindling numbers of railway workers still on strike.

Still, they are a reminder that, in the first round of the presidential election, many more working and lower-middle class voters chose Marine Le Pen of the far-Right Front National (21.3 percent of the vote) or the far-Left Jean-Luc Mélenchon (19.6 percent) of France Insoumise (France Unbowed), together with Benoît Hamon, the leftist Socialist candidate (6.4 percent). To put it another way, almost half of the votes went to parties which were broadly against privatization, reforms to labor laws, cuts in public service budgets and—in varying degrees—the idea of a more European Union. The platform of the candidate of the center-Right, François Fillon, did include a call for economic reform, but also the intention to repatriate many of the decisions now taken in Brussels: Fillon, though a financial scandal hung over his head, secured just under 20 per cent of the first round vote. Euroskepticism, it could be said, was better represented in France than in the United Kingdom.

Macron won a second round victory against Le Pen—a victory which showed that most French don’t want to give power to a far-Right party, but also that Le Pen has a large constituency. Her father, who in 1972 created and ran the Front National, did get into the second presidential round against the center-Right Jacques Chirac in 2002, but received only 17.8 percent. His daughter doubled that score, winning over large swaths of the country. Still, the moderate Right and most of the Left swung firmly behind Macron, with different degrees of enthusiasm, and gave him a moderate landslide.

The fact remains that underneath the sweeping victory and the subsequent huge vote for Macron’s new party in the general election lies a widespread ambivalence about “more Europe,” a thirst for more social protection and—especially but not only in the working and lower middle class—a continuing resistance to radical economic reform, to privatization and to immigration. Especially Muslim immigration. The editorial director of Le Monde, Sylvie Kaufmann, wrote that, while he had a brief triumph in Washington, “[A]t home (Macron’s) glory is largely gone. The President, who prides himself on talking the talk and walking the walk, has been pushing reforms at a dizzying pace since he arrived in the Élysée Palace. But his fellow countrymen also like to walk their walk—a very different one. True to their reputation, they have taken to the streets to protest and resist changes organized from the top. It has taken a full year for President Macron to meet his moment of truth.”

Both Left and Right wish to imprint on the nation’s consciousness the view that Macron is the “President for the rich” and one whose reforms will see a worsening of conditions for the majority. It was vividly on display in an extraordinary—by usually sedate French standards—interview of the President on April 15 by two journalists, one of the Left (Edwy Plenel) and one of the Right (Jean-Jacque Bourdin). Both scorning to call him “Monsieur le Président,” they told him that “in every area (of society) there is discontent” (Plenel) and “you are searching for cash in the wallets of retirees” (Bourdin—a reference to reductions in pensions). A memoir, Leçons du Pouvoir (Lessons of Power) by the former—and in the end highly unpopular—President François Hollande, for whom Macron had worked as an adviser and as Minister of the Economy, stopped just short of explicitly calling him a traitor and a liar. In a summing up, Hollande described his former protégé as one who “is certain that reality graciously bends to his will as soon as he expresses it.”

The reality which Macron most wishes to bend to his will is the European Union, the reform and energizing of which is his signature and most important project. Hollande’s barbed remark has the most relevance here. It is above all Macron’s will which is driving the effort—though he must by now be under few illusions that the European Union is likely to bend to it simply because he has expressed the urgency with which it should.

The direction of travel of his plan for Europe is towards the center: a greater authority for the Union, deriving from such institutions as an EU Finance Ministry with real powers over Eurozone countries’ policies; a joint budget for Eurozone members; and a permanent commission to oversee Eurozone economic policy. In a speech in Paris this past September, he argued that “a more integrated Europe” is the way to ensure “real sovereignty . . . the only path that assures our future is the rebuilding of a Europe that is sovereign, united and democratic.” To offset the centralization by making the Union both more democratic and more European, he proposed that an initially limited number of pan-European representatives (27) be elected on the basis of their policies and political stance by voters in every member state—that is, these would-be members of parliament should look for votes in all 27 EU countries—thus beginning to break the link between the representatives and their countries of origin. This was, however, voted down heavily in February of this year by the European Parliament. Hans Michelbach, a member of the German Christian Social Union (CSU), Chancellor Merkel’s permanent ally in the Bundestag, was quoted by Reuters as saying that the idea does “not lead to a deepening, but to a deeper split in the EU,” and said that Macron wished to turn the Eurozone into an “unlimited transfer union.”

Michelbach voices the doubts which are most prominent in Germany and which now, led by Interior Minister Seehofer, threaten the coalition. Macron, without Germany’s full-throated backing, will have no success for his more radical proposals. Protective measures which he has pushed—equal pay in all countries for both native workers and for those from other EU states, and a special tax on the (mainly American) digital corporations—have been accepted. But the political balance in Germany is with Michelbach and the CSU on more sweeping EU reform of the economy, and of parliament. The reaction to Merkel’s own recent politically expedient efforts to meet Macron part of the way on his vision was immediately criticized by Merkel’s governing coalition partners.

Suspicion of those countries, especially in Europe’s south, which will make only partial reforms but seek aid from those like Germany which have put their house in order, is high among Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its partner the CSU. Of the opposition parties, the strongly nationalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has suspicion of foreigners as a major theme, while the economically liberal Free Democrats (FDP), historically enthusiasts for the Union, are now cooler towards it. The FDP leader, Christian Lindner, walked out of coalition talks with Merkel this past November because he refused to agree to an extension of the powers of the European Stability Mechanism, the six-year old assistance system for Eurozone countries in financial straits. Merkel accused him of endangering the euro’s future.

Only the Greens, with the smallest representation in the Bundestag at just under 9 percent and the Social Democrats, junior partners in the coalition government to the CDU/CSU and reduced to 20 percent of the vote in the last elections, will share the bearing of the Macron standard. Yet even the SPD deputies are becoming less committed on this matter. Olaf Scholz, the former SPD mayor of Hamburg, has been given the crucial financial portfolio, but seems unlikely to depart from the strict guardianship of Germany’s finances enforced by his CDU predecessor Wolfgang Schäuble, who lectured more profligate Finance Ministers on their need to show him real reforms before Germany would assent to any kind of a common transfer union. Scholz is likely to lecture less, but relies on a Schäuble-like determination to “only distribute what I have earned.” It is the posture recommended to his son, Laertes, by Polonius in Hamlet—“neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

The German weekly Spiegel reported that opposition to Macron focused on claims that the idea for a euro finance minister lacks any detail as to which level of government that figure would be responsible for; and that a Eurozone budget would require raising taxes, a measure that would surely prompt still more Euroskepticism. The leftist weekly believes that, as it put it in a June 8 editorial, Merkel’s “days of dominance appear to be over.”

Few, in short, in any European state wish to embrace the Macron ideas with the requisite amount of enthusiasm: the common response is effectively “Interesting, but…” In mid-June, the liberal-conservative Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told the European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg that plans for the next EU budget were deeply flawed: “The basic promise of the euro was that it would bring us all greater prosperity—not a redistribution of prosperity. That together we would achieve greater affluence. The pleas now being made to establish a transfer union fly in the face of this promise.”

Macron can hear the sound of European feet shuffling away from him. In a typically long address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg a few days before his U.S. visit, he sought to rally the parliamentarians to at least the general aims of his reformist charge, lauding the energy and inventiveness of civil society, NGOs, and the private sector and saying that to abandon an attachment to democracy in Europe would be a “fausse route”—a wrong turn. But he still argued, albeit less forcefully, that a “new European sovereignty” must be constructed “through which we will provide a clear and firm response to our fellow citizens that, yes, we can protect them and provide a response to this global disorder.”

But the European Union cannot protect its citizens from the world’s disorders. Its security depends very largely on the U.S.-dominated NATO and its legitimacy derives from the nation-states which are its members, and which shy away, even more than in the past, from ceding their sovereignty as President Macron demands. In seeking to create foundations for a United States of Europe at some point in the future, he cuts against more than merely a possibly transient populist mood. He confronts and tries to destroy the political practices and beliefs which Europeans in states more-or-less democratic since at least the collapse of communism (and in many cases, as in his own country, much longer) have been urged to adopt and internalize, and which inform their view of civil society, political accountability, and the space available for civic activities. Citizens in democracies may hold politicians in contempt, but they know who they are, speak the same language, and have the assurance that they can get rid of them in time. The argument that globalization reduces effective national sovereignty cuts little ice with the majority, who wish to retain what power they have to hold their representatives to account.

The vacuum at the heart of Macron’s project is large, and will only get larger. Each step towards greater powers for the center, essential to further more integrated economic and political spheres, will lessen the direct democratic control which nation-states presently offer through parliamentary and presidential elections, and still more fuel the growth of Euroskeptic parties. As often in the past, Italy is a pioneer in seeking to create a new politics, and points to what is likely to happen elsewhere. The other pointer is Brexit, widely seen as a piece of ignorant populism, even racism, by liberals (including, often especially, in the United Kingdom itself). Yet it is in essence a revolt against a European Union which claims more and more decision-making powers, in favor of a parliamentary system which is familiar, comprehensible, and can produce consequential results, including a change in the governing party. Brexit is likely to be negative economically, at least in the short term and likely beyond. But it makes political sense.

Attempts to make the Macron plan succeed will be increasingly dangerous politically. The European Union’s determination to plunge towards “ever closer union”—Macron apart—is now merely rhetorical. Though the new, largely rightist nationalists are the most potent force opposing, it has always had prescient critics from the liberal wing of politics, among the most powerful of whom was the late Tony Judt, especially in his 2011 book A Grand Illusion?, based on a series of lectures he gave in Bologna University. In it, he wrote that “however desirable in principle, an ever-closer bonding of the nations of Europe is, it is impossible in practice, and it is therefore imprudent perhaps to promise it. . . . I don’t wish to suggest that there is something inherently superior about national institutions over others. But we should recognize the reality of nations and states, and note the risk that, when neglected, they become an electoral resource of virulent nationalists.”

That last warning is very much to the present point. In the Central European states of Hungary and Poland, the ruling parties—especially Law and Justice in Poland and Fidesz (an acronym of the League of Young Democrats) in Hungary—have been elected legally and in the latter’s case overwhelmingly. They use their majorities to bolster their own rule by harrying and weakening liberal media and other institutions. Michael Ignatieff, the scholar, journalist, and former leader of the Canadian Liberal Party who now heads the Central European University in Budapest, one of the liberal targets of attacks by the Fidesz Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, told an audience in Oxford in April that “the nationalist counter-revolution is legitimized by democracy. Under majority rule, legislation and other measures against liberal institutions are undertaken in the name of the people. We are accused of exacerbating inequality—and thus any defense we mount of academic freedom is seen as a defense of privilege, and of a caste.” Yet, as Damir Marusic noted, a citizen of one of the Central European former communist states “listens to the incessant complaining coming from democratic determinists in Brussels and bemusedly scratches his head. His legitimately elected leaders are merely protecting values dear to him and his country from a bunch of messianic foreigners preaching an idealistic universalism he’s never signed up for, and that he doubts exists.”

The truth is that liberals everywhere have neglected Judt’s advice, and ignored nationalism and national parliaments’ claim to sovereignty—indeed have often denigrated nation-states as decaying holdovers of a less enlightened era. Instead, they have seen the European Union as a model of the future, pacific and projecting only soft power, and have accepted that it must be integrated by technical means, through extending European power and influence over budgets and economic targets, and by the creation of the euro itself, a financial innovation introduced for the political end of greater integration.

That currency was done prematurely, with the users of the currency at widely different economic levels and with no possible recourse to the mechanism which had helped nations absorb economic shocks: a devaluation of the currency. The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in March 2015 that “it has been obvious for some time that the creation of the euro was a terrible mistake. Europe never had the preconditions for a successful single currency—above all, the kind of fiscal and banking union that, for example, ensures that when a housing bubble in Florida bursts, Washington automatically protects seniors against any threat to their medical care or their bank deposits.” The economic adviser to Pope Francis, Federico Nicolaci, believes that the Eurozone crisis has shown that “a form of unity based on economic utility is highly unstable: with the dwindling of material advantages, nothing remains to keep the EU countries together, thereby paving the way to centrifugal tendencies. What we see today is precisely the lack of political willingness of richer EU countries to share with the poorer not only rules and institutions, but also burdens and benefits.”

The heaviest blow came in a June column from the influential Financial Times economic commentator Martin Wolf (who has supported the currency for years), which began by saying, “The euro has been a failure. This does not mean it will not endure or that it would be better if it disappeared. The costs of a partial or complete break up are far too great. It means that the single currency has failed to deliver economic stability or a greater sense of a European identity. It has become a source of discord.”  Wolf concluded, “Good fences make good neighbours. A currency of one’s own is a good fence. It is such a pity this was forgotten.”

Should the rest of the EU members thus follow Britain out of the institution—to perform a “EURexit” which would return these nations to full national sovereignty, with their own currencies once more? To be sure, the Union has grossly inflated its palliative effects on postwar Europe. It has not, for example, been the only or even the prime reason why war did not again descend on the continent: that is owed much more to the United States, for injecting Marshall Aid into impoverished economies, shouldering the main burden of common defense through NATO and, for the most part, underpinning the values of democracy and liberty.

For all that, a union ought to be preserved, if shorn of its imperial mission and radically reformed—in a quite different direction from that in which the French President wishes to take it. The European Union’s great benefit has been to foster greater cooperation among the European political, business, and academic elites. It allows elected representatives and officials to understand at a depth never before possible the issues and problems, both singular and common, with which all states’ governments must wrestle, and encourages joint actions on the protection of the environment, joint research programs, and joint approaches to terrorism and crime. The Erasmus program allows students from all the members’ universities to study for short periods in other countries’ universities, and is much prized.

Nor are these benefits confined to the elites. Cheap air travel, intra-European tourism, the spread of English as a common language, the almost-weekly staging of European sports contests, the spread of recipes and restaurants drawing on different national and regional cuisines, and the cheesy, immensely enjoyable and popular annual Eurovision song contest have all made Europeans familiar to each other in an unprecedented way, a development which the European Union encourages and for which it provides a framework. The remark made by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the course of a speech in the House of Commons in September 1938—that Britain should avoid becoming involved “in a quarrel in a far-away country (Czechoslovakia) between people (Czechs and Germans) of whom we know nothing”—would be now inconceivable. We can quite easily know a lot about both these countries, even if the knowledge is gained, as it often is, from a laddish beer-fueled jaunt round Prague or a rock concert in the Mercedes Benz Arena in Berlin.

But the positive benefits of the European Union should be sustained by national parliaments, without the constant prod of a Commission dedicated to transforming cooperation into integration. The European Parliament, in this, is largely irrelevant: as the Oxford-based Polish political scientist Jan Zielonka writes, “the system of representation embodied by the European parliament is opaque, probably beyond repair. [It]. . . should probably be allowed to do what it does best, a kind of auditing and monitoring of European institutions with no pretensions to act as a sovereign pan-European representative assembly.”

Zielonka has been among the few scholars to attempt a sketch of what a different European Union could look like—one which, had it been on offer, might have taken the edge off the sharp disaffection in the United Kingdom which prompted Brexit. Though Britain is treated as a chauvinistic pariah which will be given a hard time by the European Union pour encourager les autres, an unease at the remoteness of the EU is sensed by millions. The U.S. economist Dani Rodrik, a liberal who critiques many of the postures taken by liberalism, noted that “even though Britain is not a member of the Eurozone, the Brexiteers’ call to ‘take back control’ captured the frustration many European voters feel.”

Zielonka’s alternative, adumbrated in two short books, Is the EU Doomed? and Counter-Revolution: Can Open Society Survive?, is suggestive rather than detailed. He urges liberals not to continue striving for the nirvana of a United States of Europe but to propose “new visions of democracy, capitalism and integration.” This is, as he recognizes, a tall order, one which he believes will take at least a decade to produce something like a new consensus. Instead of a “sovereign” and more integrated Europe, he sees in the activities of civil society, aided by networks created by social media and the Web, a new form of politics in which sovereign power, for the present, stays with the nation-state. Regional and city councils and civic bodies are often more important than national, certainly than European, governance.

Liberal society should be increasingly underpinned by a “polyphonic Europe” which “embrace(s) the basic principles of effective governance: functional coordination, territorial differentiation and flexibility.” It would cease to attempt to strengthen top-down governance , instead setting standards of openness, fairness, and transparency within which networks of actors develop local democratic centers which have real meaning for people, which they can both influence and from which they can benefit.

The vagueness of these ideas reflects the early stages of thinking about the deployment of a different sort of European Union. They also struggle to be heard from under the remaining large power of the centralized European concept, still drawing its moral force from the idealism of the early pioneers, as Jean Monet and Altiero Spinelli, who saw the creation of a united continent as a prophylactic against future wars produced by national enmities and egoism, these wars likely to be even more hideous than those they had witnessed and lived through.

Spinelli was, of all the early creators of the European Union, the one most often identified as first putting the notion of a united European state squarely before Europeans. A communist (though he resigned from the party after the war), he was imprisoned in 1927 by the fascist regime, first in a mainland prison then on the prison island of Ventotenne, a few miles off the coast of Naples. This second imprisonment offered Spinelli more freedom; he was able to live and work in the open air, associate with fellow prisoners, even grow tomatoes. The manifesto which he and his friend Ernesto Rossi drew up in June 1941, “For a Free and United Europe,” become one of the foundation texts of the federalist movement, which he and others founded once they could leave the island after the allied invasion, in 1943.

In August 2016, a few weeks after the British voted for Brexit, the then-Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi persuaded Chancellor Angela Merkel and the then-French President François Hollande to come with him to Ventotenne, to pay homage to Spinelli. With Britain effectively out of the inner councils of the European Union, Renzi sought to raise Italy’s profile by associating himself publicly with the two leading states which are the traditional axis of European power. The symbolism was powerful. The aircraft carrier which took them to the island was called the Garibaldi, the name of the most popular fighter for Italian Unity in the 1860s. They laid flowers on Spinelli’s grave. Yet to watch the events on television in Italy was to be struck with the awkwardness of the occasion: Merkel and Hollande going through the motions politely but formally, while their host, young and vigorous, bustled about enthusiastically.

Two years later, Renzi had lost his premiership and his party had plunged in the polls; Hollande had decided against seeking re-election, as most French presidents do, so unpopular had he become; meanwhile, Merkel had succeeded in creating another Left-Right coalition, but had presided over a large fall in her party’s support and a shrinkage of the two main parties’ vote to little over 53 percent of the electorate—a dramatic Balkanization of German politics. In both Germany and Italy, Euroskepticism had risen; in Italy itself, it is in power.

In France—where Euroskepticism had also risen—an extraordinarily self-confident, clever and energetic President has set himself to carry forward the spirit of the Ventotenne manifesto, written nearly 80 years ago on cigarette papers, by two Italian prisoners. That he will not succeed need not be a tragedy, though it can be represented as one. Europe will not be a state in the lifetime of everyone alive now. It has lost one ideal, but must find others to sustain and deepen that which it developed over centuries: namely the rule of law, equality before that law, and liberty. And it must hope that the American President whom Emmanuel Macron had called a friend and kissed on the cheek cannot do too much damage to democracy and a liberal society in what remains of his time in office.

 In contradistinction to the relative marginalization of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security, presently occupied by the former Italian Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini, who is routinely cut out of the large issues facing the Union’s international posture by the differing foreign priorities of the member states.

The post Why Macron Cannot Integrate Europe appeared first on The American Interest.

Give the Drummer His Due

The musical, artistic, and cultural impact that Elvis Presley made upon America occurred in about four years, from his Sun recordings in 1954 through his last great clutch of RCA tunes in 1958. Take away this four-year period, and nothing about Elvis much matters musically in terms of shaping an epoch. The intersection of his talent with the rise of a new technology—television—and a new music industry business model based on sales to younger buyers in an affluent age mattered enormously to epoch-shaping, of course, but that has nothing to do with music itself. So if we assume that Elvis’s career would have gone on unchanged, minus those 1,500 days, there would have been some fine gospel albums, decent recordings at the end of the 1960s from Memphis. Elvis would have been someone that your cool uncle who is into original vinyl name-checked from time to time, but you probably wouldn’t know much about him if you were born after about 1955.

Certainly you wouldn’t know much, if anything, about Elvis’s drummer on many of those key recordings of the crucial 1,500 days, D.J. Fontana, who passed away June 13 at age 87. He was with Presley for 14 years, beginning in October of that crucial year of 1954. American musical history is comprised of many under-sung heroes, because that is the nature of American popular recording. The session bass player who turns up on a veritable galaxy of hits, James Jamerson, informed musical culture itself via the low-end sound of four strings. With Fontana, we have a similar achievement, but via percussion.

Rock and roll drummers were not wildly idolized until well into the 1960s, when English players like Keith Moon and Ginger Baker channeled and reformulated American drumming possibilities, making those possibilities their own, before funneling them back stateside. Both channeled the power and finesse of Fontana, and the bands of Moon and Baker—The Who and Cream, respectively—succeeded largely on something Fontana, along with Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass, helped invent in the service of Mr. Presley. And that something, simply—and not so simply at all—is what we might call “bandness.”

The cohesion of the multi-part ensemble becoming a singular yet many-headed sound, is instantly recognizable in one form of music contrasted with other forms, and is recognizable usually within a single bar. Presley had the voice, but the band behind him helped give his portion of that sound a larger identity. You might say, then, that Fontana and crew helped give Elvis to Elvis.

While at Sun Records, Elvis didn’t have a drummer. His was a kind of blusied up country music, as ancient as any hillbilly hill, but music that came on in the night, as if carried on an evening breeze, absorbed back into the atmosphere before the sun rises. It wasn’t daytime music; it wasn’t music grounded in earthen bedrock that you stomped along to; it was a case of spectral sonics. But with Fontana, that sound seemingly from beyond this world gained greater traction as a thing a part of it.

That beat The Beatles came to love and imitate early on? That too starts with Fontana. His style of playing was a cross of the flexibility of rhythm and blues, and the jackhammering power of rock and roll. We can go one step farther: His was the first rock-and-roll beat. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t already rock and roll, or, at the least, nascent strands of it. But Fontana codified with his kit that driving essence; he made a form of musical tribalism something pandemic. He just didn’t get a lot of credit for it.

“Bandness” is among the rarest qualities a performing unit can have. Miles Davis’s first great quintet with John Coltrane had it going on when it cut three marathon sessions in the mid-1950s to fill up four albums’ worth of first takes. The Who achieved a similar unity live on a host of concert stages in 1970. the Beatles got there at times at the BBC, having turned themselves into a human jukebox, performing requests from fans. But it was the Presley unit that poured the mold.

Fontana gave them volume. If you listen to the Sun recordings, they’re light in the decibel area, as they’re supposed to be. They have a greater degree of pliability, but they course over you rather than enter you and turn you into their weathervane for a given day or more. Fontana was there for “Heartbreak Hotel,” a dramatic blues, not what we think of as a big beat number, but the drums are central to everything happening on the record. They are like that percussive call from the wilderness in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. They mark the start and end of each bar in the 12-bar blues cycle, doing so with force but also a Dear John note of restraint, and even solemnity. It’s akin to when you are standing next to your friend and a call comes in giving him bad news. You want to stick around and be there, but not over-assert your presence, so you hang back a bit even while remaining close in multiple other ways.

That’s Fontana’s drumming on one of the most important records in American history, but he could also swing. Listen to the vim and verve of Presley numbers like “All Shook Up,” “I Got Stung,” and “A Big Hunk o’Love.” Those are completely different from “Heartbreak Hotel” so as to almost be another band, and yet you know right away exactly who these players are, and that they could not be any others. Herman Melville was that way as a writer. It’s a long way from Moby Dick to the poems to Pierre to “Bartelby,” but provided with a mere clause, we can tell who we are reading. With Fontana, his drums gave you a tool for reading a song, reading a band, reading a sound, reading a force that shaped music domestically and abroad, so that that later shaping could in turn reshape domestic musical affairs.

Would Elvis have hit his heights without him? Not those particular heights. Different heights, perhaps, but if Elvis had two primary musical periods that are as important as any by any American musical artist, he doesn’t have the second one in quite the same way without Fontana, who allowed him to transition. Fontana also allowed him to transition within mere weeks. Do you know how different the Sun recordings sound from those RCA sides? Elvis was the voice of that ultimate American “borne on the wind of the night” American music, and that “isn’t the daytime glorious” rock of chart-topping late 1950s years. It was the drummer who flipped the lights on.

The post Give the Drummer His Due appeared first on The American Interest.

Saving Democracy From Its Defenders

That one should not take the good things in life—say, a happy marriage—for granted is a sound piece of advice. But imagine being told by your spouse every day that you should not see your marriage as a given. Similarly, since the election of Donald Trump the unending stream of well-intentioned warnings about the imminent danger of populism to Western democracies has become counterproductive.

The chance of a breakdown of democracy within the next four years is an “alarming 11.4 percent,” according to a recent survey of political scientists. Not dramatic enough? Rest assured that “the United States faces a sixty-percent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years,” based on an estimate in a widely shared New Yorker article. Could the National Rifle Association have written more effective advertisements for guns and shelters?

“Anyone who started 2018 by downplaying the threat Trump poses should be ashamed of themselves,” castigates one liberal columnist. “We may be reaching the end of the liberal world order,” warns Anne Applebaum. Last year, Edward Snowden stated that “autocracy. . . is increasingly near [in the United States]”. Portrayals of Mr. Trump as a dark and dangerous figure were used throughout much of the 2016 election campaign; they would help to bring about “a landslide” for Hillary Clinton, some predicted.

The red flags did not work two years ago, and they are no more effective today. The temptation to interpret everything that the President says or tweets as an affront to democracy is akin to being warned constantly by your parents, as some of us were in our childhood years, about the myriad risks that the world posed to your health from climbing trees to drinking iced beverages. Far from achieving the desired effect, the constant sense of panic has likely numbed Americans to dangers posed either by Mr. Trump or by future authoritarians.

Mr. Trump’s leading critics deplore the “post-truth” nature of our political debate, yet they too appear keen to highlight evidence to support the most alarmist of scenarios. Take the oft-repeated finding by Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stan Foa, respectively of Harvard and University of Melbourne, that young people across the world value democracy less than older generations. But Erik Voeten of Georgetown University has shown that in most countries Millennials support democracy no less than other citizens. And other evidence shows over 90 percent of Italians, Germans, Poles, and other Europeans in the 18-to-24-year age cohort believe that “free and fair elections are important for their countries.” The fact that the proportions are virtually indistinguishable from those within other age groups does not lend support to the narrative of a global, generational decline in support for democratic governance.

Or, consider the notion that the internet is facilitating a return of fascism, put forward in a recent opinion piece by the Yale University historian Timothy Snyder. Data from American National Election Study show, however, that “the growth in polarization in recent years is largest for the demographic groups least likely to use the internet and social media.”

And three economists have just circulated a research paper speculating that Americans were manipulated by social media when casting their ballots in 2016, simply because the volume of tweets about Donald Trump was higher in those states where the GOP received a greater share of the vote. The belief in the magical power of tweets and Facebook posts is common, though as with advertising, most critics see themselves immune to such tricks. Yet the consumption of “fake news” has been concentrated in a small subset of the electorate ahead of the last presidential election: “almost 6 in 10 visits to fake news websites came from the 10 percent of people with the most conservative online information diets.”

Other chilling narratives are often entertained by pundits. Some, like the possibility of a hyper-partisan future, are not necessarily far-fetched. But we are not there yet. Polarization has been driven primarily by political elites and should not be confused with a wholesale abandonment of democracy by the voting public.

When Steve Bannon was fired from his position in the White House, 90 percent of Republicans surveyed by YouGov either thought that it was the right decision, or said they had no opinion. Among those who had an opinion on Bannon, a majority of Republicans said that Bannon’s departure was a “good thing for the country.” 89 percent of Democrats expressed the same position. Would you expect to see such data highlighted in the press? It does not paint the American public as deeply divided, so don’t count on it.

On some policies, Americans are in greater agreement over policies than meets the eye. Even before the Parkland tragedy, for example, 86 percent of Americans said they supported a rule requiring all gun sellers to run background checks on anyone who buys a gun. The near-consensus indicates that gridlock in Washington does not reflect everyday life as most Americans experience it. When Pew Research Center approached more than two thousand Americans, six in ten respondents said that when two people disagree about politics, it “generally doesn’t say a lot about how much they’ll agree on other topics.” Perhaps open minds have not gone out of fashion after all. When an American sets up an appointment with a teacher, a banker, a landlord, or a regulator, questions of partisan identity do not come up in people’s interactions.

Work by political scientist Morris Fiorina and others suggests that America’s polarized politics is to a large extent a consequence of the transformation of political parties into more homogenous voting blocs further away from each other, rather than of fundamental shifts in attitudes of the electorate. On top of that, add the breakdown of norms in the U.S. Congress, particularly of the role played by committees in facilitating legislative bargains, and the permanent political campaigning as well as the “sound-bite culture” deplored by Ben Sasse in his maiden speech in the Senate becomes a logical consequence.

No wonder that the public’s trust in politics in the United States has declined significantly since the 1960s. But other institutions of public life, such as universities and churches, have faced a similar decline. We do not know which “influencers”—if any—will inspire confidence in the future, and whether these new actors will be constructively involved in politics.

For instance, more and more celebrities are taking clear political positions in America, although that development might be self-limiting as political activism could reduce their popular appeal. It is possible that the future looks like a commercial marketplace, where large shares of the population will choose not to pay attention to politics, unless celebrity candidates make political contests entertaining.

Besides, there are institutional reforms that would restore Congress’ role as an effective decision-making body. Contrary to what many commentators suggest, those have little do with making the legislature more “democratic” or “responsive”— or with stricter regulation of campaign finances. Rather they involve the strengthening of norms that enable it to reach compromises: reintroducing earmarks, filibuster reform, ensuring concurrent consideration of appropriations in House and Senate, among other things.

While no dispassionate observer can claim that the United States has become Trump’s fiefdom, democracy has weakened in several countries, leaders of some countries are certainly following a competitive authoritarian’s playbook, and there is no doubt that politics on both sides of the Atlantic is undergoing a major transformation. It is easy to point to countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia where state resources are used to reward cronies, bully the opposition, and maintain a semblance of a level playing field. But don’t mistake such events for a “populist wave” that is predestined to somehow sweep and ruin Western democracies.

No one can know how societies will change, but there is a distinct possibility that American democracy will be fine, even if it might look different from the version we long took for granted. And neither should the fact that democracy no longer generates policies some of us wish for be seen as evidence that we are “past the breaking point.” Not every departure from the status quo, objectionable as it may be, is necessarily a step towards tyranny.

The post Saving Democracy From Its Defenders appeared first on The American Interest.

It Could Be Worse

Agitated late night tweets from the Oval Office are evidence of a President under stress as the Special Counsel’s investigation grinds ever close to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Whatever the outcome of the Mueller investigation and the subsequent political theater, President Trump can take some consolation from the fact that the Founding Fathers did not import British impeachment wholesale into the U.S. Constitution. The British system allows for the defendant to a House of Commons bill of impeachment to be imprisoned in the Tower of London until trial. Penalties were also not limited to removal from office; they could include being placed in the stocks or public pillory, flogging, fines, forfeiture of assets, imprisonment, and even death. Furthermore under Section 4 of the Act of Settlement 1701, the Crown’s power to pardon under the Great Seal of England was removed for all cases of impeachment. If the House of Lords convicted on a bill of indictment from the Commons, there was no “get out of the Tower free” card that could be played by the Monarch.

U.S. impeachment was derived from the British procedure; as the Federalist papers say, “American impeachments stand on English feet.” The terminology is the same. So for example, the impeachment charge for much of the last five hundred years on any bill of indictment, as in the United States, was for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” And the outlines of the procedure are similarly bicameral: indictment in the Commons, and then trial in the Lords. However, the purpose, scope of application and penalties were (and are) very different. American impeachment, for one, cannot lead to flogging, asset forfeiture, or death by beheading. Under Article I, Section 3, paragraph 7 of the Constitution, the power of impeachment only applies to removal from office—though once removed, a former President could be subject to normal civil and criminal procedure, as any other citizen. Clearly in comparison to British impeachment, impeachment under the 1789 U.S. Constitution is a modernizing and liberalized measure, ensuring accountability but with appropriate due process safeguards.

The impeachment process grew out of Parliamentary frustration with the inability of its members to control Ministers of the Crown. Prior to the establishment of effective parliamentary government, parliamentary power was limited to the (the admittedly not inconsiderable) leverage of its consent to taxation. Impeachment was developed to further advance the control of Parliament over the Crown by holding its ministers, and potentially a broader set of executive and legislative officers, to account. It could be used to bring a particularly badly-behaved Minister personally to heel; be deployed symbolically pour encourager les autres to respect Parliament; or used to make a point about parliamentary opposition to Crown policy.

Some monarchs however went to reckless lengths to protect their ministers from the wrath of Parliament. In 1628 Charles I even suspended Parliament when his chief minister, the Duke of Buckingham, George Villiers, was subject to an indictment on a bill of impeachment in the Commons. The peremptory suspension of Parliament to protect an incompetent minister twice threatened with impeachment was a further step to civil war, and ultimately to the execution of Charles himself. Villiers benefited little from such monarchical protection. A few weeks later he was assassinated (to much public joy).

Although 72 individuals were impeached between 1372 and 1806 (when the last Commons bill of indictment failed to result in a conviction in the Lords), most impeachments took place in two historic phases. First, in the 14th and 15th centuries, in a period of dynastic disruption to the Crown, and second, during the period in the run up the civil war and execution of Charles I. Approximately one-quarter of all bills of impeachment in British history were tabled between 1620 and 1649. Frequent recourse to impeachment was an indication of English, then British, political crisis and a failure of the political system to develop effective means of political accountability.

After the English Civil War and the growth of Parliamentary control over the Crown’s ministers, the use of impeachment declined. It tended to be used in cases of rebellion (principally against treacherous Jacobite peers) and corruption, most notably in the case of Warren Hastings, Governor General of India, who was ultimately acquitted. The Founding Fathers would have been reading reports of Hastings’ trial in Westminster Hall, which began in 1788, while attending the Constitutional Convention. The details of the charges against Hastings—of bribery, corruption, and abuse of power—are likely to have had an impact on the members of the Convention when they were drafting the Constitution. No one has actually been convicted on a bill of impeachment since the middle of the 18th century, and the last bill of indictment to reach the Lords was in 1806, when the defendant was Lord Melville, Secretary of State for War, for misappropriation of public money. (He, too, was acquitted.) Later cases, such as the attempt in 1846 to lay a bill of indictment against Lord Palmerston for allegedly agreeing a secret treaty with Russia (which may have a modern ring) also failed.

Impeachment is not governed by statute but is rather a common law process, contained in at least the earlier editions of the bible of British parliamentary procedure, Erskine May. What amounts in U.S. terms to a bill of indictment is drawn up by the Commons, and, as in the House of Representatives, a bill is carried by simple majority. Thereafter the procedure differs. Once indicted, the defendant has to appear before the bar of the House of Lords, where the Lord Chancellor, as Speaker of the Lords, would decide whether bail should be granted or the defendant should be placed in custody.

Trial in the Lords is similar to the one in the United States: a quasi-criminal procedure involving prosecution and defence counsel, the tendering of evidence, and cross-examination. However, unlike the Senate, the Lords may appoint a judge to run the procedure. Both houses sit as a jury, with two major differences. First, whilst the Senate has 100 members, the Lords have approximately 800, including 26 bishops. Second, conviction is not by two-thirds as in the Senate, but by simple majority.

The object of the British impeachment is not just removal from office, but punishment. The Lords can inflict any punishment known to law. Nor is impeachment limited to ministers of the Crown. All persons, including legislators, can be impeached. Even overzealous sermonizing London clerics in the 17th and 18th centuries occasionally found themselves on the wrong end of a bill of indictment. Only members of the royal family are immune from impeachment (no doubt a great relief to the Duchess of Sussex).

Various British parliamentary reform committees in the 1960s and 1970s had taken the view that the impeachment process was obsolete and should be expressly repealed. However, in 2004, a motion was laid before the House of Commons to set up a committee to draft a bill of indictment against then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair over his handling of the Iraq invasion. This was accepted by the Speaker, though it failed to gain sufficient support to be carried. It is therefore likely that British impeachment remains a dusty but potent legal weapon.

Again, President Trump can feel relieved—that he only has a Scottish mother, was born in the United States, and did not in fact lead the Brexit campaign and instead ran for the U.S. Presidency.

The post It Could Be Worse appeared first on The American Interest.

The World Is Still a Dangerous Place

There is a lot to like in what Ambassador Nikki Haley has done since arriving at the United Nations last year, especially her outspokenness on human rights issues.  At times, she has seemed to be implementing a different foreign policy than the president’s—in a good way.  From her very first appearance in the UN Security Council in February 2017 until last month’s, Haley has been tenacious in standing up to the Russians over their ongoing military intervention in Ukraine, and their illegal seizure of Crimea and its 2.3 million people, all while President Trump seemed confused or conflicted about how to address these Russian aggressions, and while her other boss, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, seemed just plain confused.  She has been so far out front on this theme, in fact, one wonders if President Trump—who reportedly told his G7 counterparts over dinner that Crimea belongs to Russia—even knows what his UN Ambassador is up to.

Haley has also been tireless on behalf of Myanmar’s Rohingya people, in no uncertain terms criticizing the near-genocidal atrocities being committed by the country’s hybrid civilian/military regime against its long-oppressed minority. She pressed for the appointment of a special envoy and got a very good one installed in the position; she urged a Security Council mission to the affected regions of Myanmar and Bangladesh, and dispatched her very able deputy, Ambassador Kelley Eckels Currie, who has real expertise, to be part of that delegation.

She and her team at USUN have doggedly pressed in the underbelly of the UN bureaucracy on behalf of human rights NGOs, whose credentials to attend UN meetings were being blocked by various dictatorships, and succeeded in getting their access restored. Nikki Haley appears to have become adept at public diplomacy and insider bare-knuckle maneuvers both.

Haley arrived in New York as a diplomatic novice; one might have thought choosing a South Carolina governor with little international experience for the post was yet another misbegotten appointment by Trump. Yet she has often been marching in the footsteps of previous human rights giants like Madeline Albright and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who both made names for themselves calling out the governments of tin-pot dictators and serious despotisms alike, as facts and events required.

So it is puzzling that she has taken the lead on the U.S. withdrawal mid-term from the UN’s Human Rights Council this week, ceding on an important, highly visible field of diplomatic battle, apparently on grounds that it is too hard to prevail in meetings with thuggish governments, and on grounds they are consistently too mean toward Israel. This departure means that the U.S. now joins Iran, North Korea and Eritrea as the only countries in the world that refuse to have anything to do with the Council. Leaving aside the obvious preferences of her boss, President Trump, for doing deals with the very worst human rights abusing governments in the world today, it is worth a closer look at what Haley and the new Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said this week in explaining this retreat.

Haley complained that the Council this year has adopted “five resolutions against Israel—more than the number passed against North Korea, Iran and Syria combined.” Last year, in her first appearance at the Council, she questioned whether it “is merely a showcase for dictatorships that use their membership to whitewash their brutality.” Does anyone really think murderous regimes have successfully burnished their grisly reputations by not having a resolution against them adopted? Or for that matter, does Haley think the Council will now become more active on those fronts with the U.S. absenting itself from the proceedings? Russia has already spoken up for the soon-to-be-vacated American seat on the Council.  And there is this: Israeli diplomats say they want the U.S. to stay, because things for them will be worse without the Americans, even though their blustering Prime Minister has applauded the Trump Administration’s announcement.

Stranger still were the comments from Secretary Pompeo, who said continued U.S. participation in the Human Rights Council would constitute a threat to American security. “When organizations undermine our national interests and our allies, we will not be complicit,” he said. “When they seek to infringe on our national sovereignty, we will not be silent.” Could this have had something to do with the recent statement by the UN’s Commissioner on Human Rights, the highly-regarded Jordanian, Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, decrying the Trump Administration’s rancid debacle of a policy separating children from parents seeking to legally apply for asylum in the U.S.? To declare that a resolution or a statement opining on events or policies in UN member states “infringes on sovereignty” sounds eerily like what repressive governments everywhere say when called out on their bad behavior. This suggests, moreover, that the Human Rights Council is very consequential indeed—which further begs the question of why the U.S. would walk out of it.

There is no doubt that the HRC is obsessed with Israel. The Council debates and adopts more resolutions decrying Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians than all other situations and countries combined. But this is not a new development; it has ever been thus. Indeed, while all UN institutions have built-in hostility toward Israel—and the United States, too, to be sure—it has at times been much, much worse than it is today.

In 1975, during Moynihan’s time at the UN, the General Assembly—which includes the UN’s entire global membership—adopted the infamous Resolution 3379, equating Zionism with racism. Two of the most resonant, powerful speeches in diplomatic history were delivered on the occasion: one by Israeli ambassador (and subsequently president) Chaim Herzog, and the other by Ambassador Moynihan. In remarks that echo powerfully today in Trump’s America, Moynihan said:

There appears to have developed in the United Nations the practice for a number of countries to combine for the purpose of doing something outrageous, and thereafter, the outrageous thing having been done, to profess themselves outraged by those who have the temerity to point it out, and subsequently to declare themselves innocent of any wrong-doing in consequence of its having been brought about wholly in reaction to the “insufferable” acts of those who pointed the wrong-doing out in the first place. Out of deference to these curious sensibilities, the United States chose not to speak in advance of this vote: we speak in its aftermath and in tones of the utmost concern.

His voice rising in righteous anger, Moynihan shouted,

The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.

The vote was 72 to 35. The United States never did acquiesce. Nor did it forget.

The U.S. did not leave the General Assembly then—and certainly not the Security Council, nor even the dismal Human Rights Commission of the day.  Moynihan had foretold that this moment would come, describing in Commentary well before his appointment what the United States ought to do, in a quasi-parliamentary world body, with a hostile majority of non-democratic, even totalitarian states.

The United States goes into opposition. This is our circumstance. We are a minority. We are outvoted. This is neither an unprecedented nor an intolerable situation. The question is what do we make of it. So far we have made little—nothing—of what is in fact an opportunity. We go about dazed that the world has changed. We toy with the idea of stopping it and getting off. We rebound with the thought that if only we are more reasonable perhaps “they” will be. … But “they” do not grow reasonable. Instead, we grow unreasonable.

Going into opposition requires first of all that we recognize that there is a distinctive ideology at work . . . [and] once we perceive the coherence in the majority, we will be in a position to reach for a certain coherence of opposition.

This was at the height of the Cold War, shortly after the ignominious defeat in Vietnam, when the Soviet Union was on the march. Cuban troops were in Africa, proxy fighters for Moscow.   The People’s Republic of China was stirring. At the UN, where a cocky Soviet delegation had spurred on the Zionism resolution, Moynihan said: stay and fight; do not cut and run. His subsequent memoir of his time at the UN was entitled A Dangerous Place. What sailors know about the sea, he wrote, diplomats should know about the world; not to shy from it, or be fearful, but to better prepare themselves to navigate their way.

Fifteen years later, when American steadfastness paid off and the communist world imploded, Moynihan was in the U.S. Senate and his contemporary, George H.W. Bush, was President—our last war hero President and a man seasoned in both high-stakes diplomacy and fraught American politics.  At that point, while a new world order was being constructed on the fly, and it could have been put off for another day, a Republican administration embarked on a full-court diplomatic press to right a lingering wrong. The United States secured a reversal of the vote on the ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution. It did so with quiet and forceful and principled diplomacy.

As The New York Times reported in December 1991 when Resolution 3379 was overturned by vote of 111 to 25 (there being many more member states with the breakup of the communist empire):

For the United States, the heavy vote in favor of repeal was a demonstration of its diplomatic power. After President Bush called for the repeal in September in a speech to the General Assembly, United States embassies around the world were instructed to put maximum pressure to secure the repeal. The 111 votes recorded today were about 11 more than the United States mission to the United Nations had predicted last week.

The Times also noted:

Many Asian and African nations, including India, Nigeria, Singapore and the Philippines, which voted for the Zionism resolution in 1975, reversed themselves.

That was how a great America once used its influence in the world: it built coalitions and alliances, it persuaded, enticed and cajoled and made improving the world, and correcting the public record to erase at least some of the most outrageous lies, the nation’s business. Diplomacy it was called, which in its heyday was a participatory sport:  you had to play to win.

After a sustained surge of democratic advancement after 1989, the world has now seen a dozen years of annual decline globally in overall democratic performance, as Freedom House has well documented. If the U.S. is going to keep the democracy and human rights flags flying during this global democratic recession, then our government is going to have to show up and speak up at the meetings—and enlist the cooperation of the like-minded that remain. That is how the minority party begins to build toward a majority.

The post The World Is Still a Dangerous Place appeared first on The American Interest.

A Road to Understanding in Syria?

In early June, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Çavuşoğlu announced an agreement on a “roadmap” for the departure of Syrian Kurdish forces from the north Syrian town of Manbij. This agreement, which appears to call for joint U.S.-Turkish management of the area, ameliorates one of the major irritants in Turkish-American relations. Given the depth of disagreement and distrust between Washington and Ankara, it will not return the relationship to any real or imagined glory days. What it will do is help alleviate the compact sentiment in Turkey that the U.S. is conspiring against it. It makes it possible for the U.S. to begin to re-engage Turkey—which, perhaps counter-intuitively, may make it easier, not harder, to check some of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s worst instincts.

This February, the Turkish-American relationship reached rock bottom. Turkish troops had moved into the town of Afrin in northern Syria, and threatened to carry their military mission into Manbij, where U.S. troops were located, supporting the very Syrian Kurdish forces that Turkey sought to dislodge from its border. A top U.S. general stated the U.S. would “respond aggressively” to any Turkish attack on Manbij. This led President Erdoğan to threaten its NATO ally with an “Ottoman slap.” The prospect of a direct military confrontation between the U.S. and Turkey, unthinkable only a few years ago, now seemed a distinct possibility. The situation was somewhat defused in mid-February by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s diplomacy, which laid the groundwork for the “roadmap” announced by Pompeo.

The February standoff raised the very real prospect of a total breakdown in America’s alliance with Turkey. It has been long since the two sides behaved like allies. Only recently, President Erdoğan defined his country’s stance as “anti-imperialist,” while a mouthpiece for his government put the matter more succinctly: “Turkey is emerging as a new power center opposing the United States.” Given this attitude, some Americans might say “good riddance.” But the total loss of Turkey would be similar in strategic terms to America’s loss of Iran as an ally in 1979; it would further reduce America’s influence across the Middle East and beyond. This, no doubt, is what has led Moscow to work overtime to accelerate the breakdown of Turkish-American relations: in order to reap the benefits thereof.

What makes Turkey crucial is its geographic position: it lies at the confluence of the Balkans, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, Iran, the Middle East, and the Eastern Mediterranean. By definition, given the size of Turkey’s population, economy, and military, its stance is key to U.S. interests in all these theaters. Cooperation with it could amplify and reinforce U.S. goals; its opposition would make achieving these all the more difficult. The simple fact is there are no good alternatives to Turkey. The U.S. military base in Incirlik could conceivably be moved to facilities in Romania, Jordan, Georgia, and/or Iraqi Kurdistan; perhaps it should. But the U.S.-Turkish relationship is deeper than simply a matter of military bases, and no country, or combination of countries, could readily compensate for a loss of Turkey as an ally.

This is not to say that the U.S. should follow a policy of appeasement. Quite to the contrary: for far too long, the U.S. has operated under the assumption that it needs Turkey more than Turkey needs America—a notion that is true only if Washington allows that to be the case, and which ignores the immense leverage the U.S. has on Turkey in the military, security, and economic fields. Turkey’s slide into increasingly authoritarian and Islamist governance, and its pursuit of policies at odds with American interests across the Middle East, is a matter to be taken very seriously. Its hostility to America and its allies—particularly Israel—which Turkish leadership frequently exhibits, needs to be checked, and American leverage applied when needed. But America needs to play a long game in Turkey, looking beyond the current political leadership.

Whether or not anything beyond a tactical accommodation can be reached with Erdoğan’s government, it is in the U.S. interest to restore its relationship with Turkey as a country. This will not be easy: Turkey is more nationalistic than ever, and perceptions of the U.S. as a hostile actor are deeply engrained. But there is a key distinction: Turkey’s Islamists, Erdoğan included, are ideologically predisposed to see America as an enemy. Other political forces in the country, Turkish nationalists included, are not immune from anti-Americanism. Yet it is not hard-wired into their identity. Seeking a common language and common interests with Turkey’s Islamists is a lost cause and foolhardy at best; doing so with Turkish nationalists has worked in the past, and could work again.

In order to devise a policy along these lines, it is imperative to distinguish among the various problems in the bilateral relationship. While there are numerous contentious issues, the serious problems can be boiled down to three distinct sets of issues. In some of these, the controversy is between the U.S. and Turkey as a whole; in others, it is between the U.S. and Erdoğan’s government. In a long-term policy, the U.S. would accordingly need to apply different tactics. The first area of disagreement concerns Syria and the Kurds, issues that can hardly be distinguished from one another. The second area relates to the role of U.S.-based preacher Fethullah Gülen, whom Erdoğan accuses of staging a coup attempt in 2016. And finally, the third set of contentious issues stems from Erdoğan’s Islamism and anti-Western approach.

Syria

The controversy over Syria is, to Turkey, not primarily about Syria. It relates to Turkey’s own Kurdish problem, the most serious issue the country has faced since the republic’s creation in 1923, which in turn intersects with America’s engagements in the Middle East since the 1990 Gulf War. As detailed in a February 2018 article in TAI, Turkish and American interests in the Middle East began to diverge just as the Cold War ended. America’s interventions in Iraq, both in 1990 and 2003, had the effect of significantly worsening the threat posed by the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), an organization both the U.S. and EU classify as a terrorist organization. Matters are even worse in Syria: there, the U.S. directly cooperates with the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a militia force that the U.S. Director of National Intelligence describes as “the Syrian militia of the PKK.”

America’s approach to the Kurdish issue has been ambivalent. On one hand, the U.S. was once a strong supporter’s of Turkey’s efforts to counter the PKK, a murderous Marxist-Leninist organization built around the personality cult of its leader, Abdullah Öcalan. The U.S. played a key role in helping Turkey apprehend Öcalan in 1999, and used to put significant pressure on European states to crack down on PKK activities on their soil. But from 2003 onward, the U.S. came to view the Kurds of northern Iraq—themselves opponents of the PKK—as America’s most reliable allies there. This was not an insurmountable problem for Ankara, especially since Erdoğan himself embarked on an effort to court the leadership of Iraqi Kurdistan. In Syria, the logic of U.S. policy was similar to that in Iraq: the Syrian Kurds appeared to be the only reliable fighting force that could be used on the ground to confront ISIS.

The key difference was that the YPG was, as America acknowledges, a subsidiary of the PKK. Even this proved tolerable to Ankara because, as former U.S. Ambassador to Ankara and Baghdad James Jeffrey puts it, “We told the Turks that the Kurds were temporary, tactical, and transactional to defeat ISIS.” But once ISIS was on the ropes, the Pentagon this January doubled down on its relationship with the YPG and announced its intention to create a “Border Security Force” consisting mainly of YPG fighters.

This may have made sense to U.S. Central Command, which is preoccupied with the situation in Syria and Iraq, and in securing America’s role on the ground without having to commit thousands of troops that America’s domestic opinion would scarcely permit. And Centcom, in any case, has little love lost for Turkey: memories of the Turkish refusal to allow U.S. troops to open a northern front against Saddam Hussein in 2003 have not faded, and many senior U.S. officials continue to blame Ankara for some of what went wrong in Iraq. But this mixed messaging on Syria’s Kurds comes at a high price. Hatred for the PKK, whose campaign of terror has killed thousands since 1984, is near-universal in Turkey. The notion that America is in cahoots with a PKK subsidiary infuriates Turks of every political persuasion, with the possible exception of the pro-Kurdish HDP, itself not devoid of PKK linkages. And why would America set up a border force in Syria? To Turks, the only conclusion is that the U.S. is seeking to contain and undermine Turkey.

By inadvertently fueling such suspicions, the U.S. is effectively helping Erdoğan shore up support among otherwise skeptical Turks, who rally around the flag and leader against this perceived foreign threat. Pompeo’s roadmap begins to address this problem.

The Gülen Factor

Why, are so many Turks so suspicious of America? Part of the answer lies in Erdoğan’s promotion of conspiracy theories, which we will get to shortly. But an equally important reason is the Gülen factor. Since 1999, this reclusive preacher has resided in self-imposed exile in the Poconos mountains of Pennsylvania, from where he directs a large and opaque global network of schools and civic associations. His disciples have been focused on infiltrating the Turkish state since the 1970s, a fact that led Erdoğan to strike a tactical alliance with Gülen in the early days of his tenure, which helped him tremendously in consolidating power. Erdoğan fancies himself the embodiment of Turkey’s Sunni Muslims. Since Gülen, too, is a Sunni Muslim, Erdoğan assumed the Gülenists would remain loyal to him. But over time, it became clear that Gülenists were pursuing their own power and influence, and were not going to defer to Erdoğan. This led to an overt power struggle between the two—in effect, an Islamist civil war for control over the Turkish state. Not without reason, Erdoğan blames Gülen for orchestrating the July 2016 coup attempt which led to the death of over 200 people and to the bombing of the country’s parliament.

The notion that Gülen is a CIA creation has been widespread in Turkey for decades now. How else, Turks wonder, would such an obscure network be able to spread globally, so that it at one point operated schools in 160 countries? And why would an Islamist cleric choose the United States as his residence? Seeking to rebut such conspiracies is a fool’s errand. But again, these are not fringe beliefs among Turkey’s Islamists. They are held compactly across almost every political and social strata in Turkey. Thus, any sign that the U.S. is protecting Gülen serves the purpose of shoring up support for Erdoğan. Particularly following the failed 2016 coup, even die-hard secularist opponents of Erdoğan have rallied to his support, with a simple logic: Erdoğan is the only person who has the strength and force to root out the Gülenists from Turkey’s state institutions, and make sure they could never again get close to power.

Does this mean the U.S. should simply hand Gülen over to Erdoğan and close down all his activities in America? The U.S. is a nation of laws, and Gülen a Permanent Resident of the United States. Leaving aside the question whether Gülen could be expected to receive a fair trial in Turkey—a doubtful proposition at best—Turkey’s extradition request does not appear to have provided enough evidence to tie Gülen to the coup attempt or any other criminal offenses. Erdoğan’s government considers the Gülen Network a terrorist organization, and applies collective punishment to everyone it considers part of the network, and would like the U.S. and Europe to do the same. But as EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove noted, “You need not only circumstantial evidence . . . but concrete substantive data which shows that they were involved.” Similarly, the U.S. cannot take legal action unless evidence shows the individual involvement of a particular person in coup planning.

Circumstantial evidence can, however, lead the U.S. to re-evaluate its approach to the Gülen network. It does have redeeming qualities—few Islamic clerics have taken out full-page ads to condemn ISIS and jihadi terrorism, for example. But given the amount of evidence linking the network to the coup, and its involvement in the jailing of secularist Turks on fraudulent grounds, this network can hardly be considered an asset to U.S. interests. Not staying at that, there are serious allegations that the many Gülen-affiliated charter schools in the United States have engaged in systematic fraud that is under FBI investigation.

Any sign that the U.S. is taking accusations against the Gülen network seriously, and investigating its activities in the United States, would go a long way toward managing the widespread perception that the U.S. is protecting what most Turks consider a terrorist organization. That, in turn, would play an important role in rebuilding trust for the United States in Turkish society—and rob Erdoğan of a tool to whip up anti-American hatred.

Islamism

The final, and deepest, bone of contention between the U.S. and Turkey is the increasingly Islamist direction of President Erdoğan’s tenure. Erdoğan started out as a politician who parted with the Islamism of his predecessors, even setting up a new party that split off from the old-school Islamists of the past. But as he consolidated power, he gradually returned to the Islamist rhetoric of his youth, and adopted an increasingly autocratic approach to ruling the country. By necessity, U.S. foreign policy must deal with autocrats everywhere; but in Turkey’s case, the authoritarian tendency has been coupled with a growing anti-American posture in Turkish foreign policy, coupled with a decidedly anti-Zionist, and frequently anti-Semitic rhetoric and approach to Middle Eastern affairs.

Erdoğan’s tendencies were visible already in the early days of his tenure, as he embraced Hamas following its power grab in 2006. No wonder: Turkey’s Islamist movement, from which Erdoğan stems, is heavily colored by the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a branch. After the Arab upheavals of 2011, Turkey increasingly adopted an ideological, sectarian foreign policy that sought to assist the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamist organizations, in securing power across the Middle East and North Africa. This put Turkey directly at odds with U.S. interests, as it egged on Muhammad Morsi in his ill-fated attempt to grab power through unconstitutional means in Egypt, and supported extremist groups in the Syrian civil war. Of even more concern, perhaps, has been Ankara’s naked hostility to the State of Israel, and Erdoğan’s recurrent promotion of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, also a legacy of the ideological environment that formed him as a politician. In recent months, Erdoğan has even lashed out at the reforms being carried out in Saudi Arabia, decrying the very notion of “moderate” Islam, while his party’s mouthpiece drums up conspiracy theories of American attempts to rob Muslims of their hold on the holy sites of Mecca and Medina.

Syria and Gülen are important issues, but they are just that—concrete issues where state interests may diverge, and where it is possible, through diplomacy and other means of statecraft, to overcome differences. By contrast, Erdoğan’s ideology is a much deeper impediment, an existential challenge to the Turkish-American alliance. If this ideology becomes hegemonic in Turkey, the alliance is doomed.

Happily, this is not destined to happen. Erdoğan has, without doubt, made Turkish public opinion more anti-Western and anti-Semitic than it was before he assumed power. But the societal resistance to Erdoğan’s Islamization efforts is remarkable, not least in the field of education, as Turkish parents stubbornly refuse to send their children to the underperforming religious schools that Erdoğan’s education ministry favors. Erdoğan also finds it increasingly difficult to obtain the support of more than just shy of half of the population. In spite of his control of administrative resources, superior funding, and near-saturation level of supportive media coverage, it is a testament to society’s resistance that in the current election campaign, his victory is not a foregone conclusion. The main opposition candidate, Muharrem Ince, could well win a second round, if the election is conducted fairly—a big if.

Indeed, within the Turkish state—whose institutions have begun to reassert their influence, particularly over foreign policy—there is considerable reluctance to embrace Erdoğan’s Islamist ideology. In other words, both within state and society, Erdoğan’s ideology is polarizing, in sharp contrast to society’s strong support for his stance on Syria and on the Gülen movement.

This has obvious implications for the United States. First, the U.S. should take Turkey’s interests on Syria and on the Gülen issue into account. This does not mean meeting every Turkish demand. But it does mean seeking accommodation on these issues, where Erdoğan enjoys the support of a near-consensus of Turkey. By contrast, on issues where his position is most polarizing—which happens to be the issues that in the long term will matter most to the United States—that is where the U.S. should push back assertively.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has to do a much better job at reaching beyond Erdoğan, and finding ways to talk to other actors and institutions in Turkish society. The Roadmap in Syria provides such an opportunity: it could help Centcom develop relations with Turkey’s military, as European Command has done for decades. This won’t be easy at first, but could prove crucial in the long term. The U.S. must also reach out to nationalist political parties and organizations in Turkey, which all too often get swept up in anti-American rhetoric—which Americans have hardly tried to mitigate.

But just as Syria was the most acute crisis that threatened a direct confrontation between Turkey and the U.S., it is also in Syria that the restoration of a relationship with Turkey, and of American influence in the country, could begin. This will only succeed if the Trump Administration takes a long-term and strategic approach that centers on Turkey, the country, as opposed to Erdoğan, the person. Pompeo’s roadmap could be the start of such an approach.

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