Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 89

Demolished by Neglect

The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy

Anna Clark

Metropolitan Books, 2018, 286 pp., $30

Invisible people have invisible problems. Though unseen, even if only temporarily, those problems have real consequences for the affected people. At least part of the solution, it follows, is making both people and their plight visible. That is the premise of The Poisoned City, by journalist Anna Clark, who tells “the story of how the City of Flint was poisoned by its own water” while government officials ignored residents’ pleas for action. Clark insists that the Michigan city’s exposure to lead and other toxins ought to be a matter of concern and urgency to all Americans since “[w]e all built our cities out of lead.”

Here’s what happened: In April 2014, Flint, a city of nearly 100,000 people approximately 65 miles northwest of Detroit, changed the source of its drinking water. At the time, the city was under emergency management, meaning the authority of the Mayor and City Council had been suspended and an unelected state-appointed manager had been installed to address the city’s considerable financial strain. The idea behind what Clark calls the “peculiar position” of an emergency manager is that an outsider chosen by the Governor and not up for re-election or otherwise constrained by political considerations would be freer than elected local leaders to make hard choices. Oddly, in the name of self-sufficiency and economy, a city under state control proposed to construct a wholly redundant means of delivering a service it already received.

For nearly half a century, Flint had gotten its water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, a public utility that took water from Lake Huron, treated it, and then delivered it to communities throughout eight counties, with Flint being one of the most distant from the point of origin at the end of the system’s northernmost line. The plan was to switch to a new, yet-to-be built regional system conveying water from the same lake and, in the interim, pull water from the Flint River and treat it at the city’s long-dormant treatment plant. Although the state’s environmental agency had expressed concerns about bacteria and chemicals in the river’s water, the city went ahead with the switch.

The consequences were dire, not least because the city’s new water treatment program failed to include corrosion control, which Clark says violated Federal environmental law. Public water systems providing clean water may be engineering marvels, perhaps even “heroic accomplishments,” as Clark deems them, but they are largely underground and unseen and easy not to think about—until something goes wrong. Lacking treatment, the more corrosive river water caused old pipes to rust and flake, which resulted in lead-laced water. The city’s shrinkage exacerbated the problem. In the 1960s, Flint’s population was nearly double what it was by 2014. “The infrastructure, of course, didn’t shrink along with the population,” Clark notes. The depleted population meant water sat stagnant in its overlarge array of pipes.

The system had been built not only for more people but also for the several General Motors plants and many other factories that had previously made Flint an industrial powerhouse but had mostly since departed. Even after the relocation of many plants, GM remained the largest employer in Flint. It quickly realized that water from the Flint River was more corrosive and had its facilities switch back to the Detroit system. Similarly, government offices began providing bottled water for workers long before official acknowledgment of a problem.

It also meant some people were more affected than others. “People who lived on streets that were pockmarked with the most unoccupied homes and empty storefront—that is, the poorest of them—generally had worse water,” Clark writes. “People who lived in denser areas were less likely to see, taste, or smell the same problems.” In Flint, a predominantly black city with a long history of de facto segregation, those in the poorest areas also tended to be black, which convinced many that racism contributed to residents’ pleas for help going unheeded for as long as they did. Emergency management also has “unmistakable racial overtones” in Michigan, where it usually has been imposed in places where the majority are black.

During the months when Flint residents’ complaints were dismissed amid assurances that the water was safe, the entire city as well as commuters and other visitors and the risk of contracting lead poisoning, for which there is no known cure. Exposure to lead can cause a cascade of catastrophic physical and mental disorders such as anemia, fatigue, kidney damage, memory loss, diminished intelligence, seizures, and even death. The overall impact of the Flint water crisis, including the number of people affected, won’t be known for years (if ever). Furthermore, 90 people were sickened and 12 died from Legionnaires’ disease, which might have been brought on by a change in the water supply that in turn affected the flora in the air-conditioning system at the city’s McLaren Hospital; we’re still not sure.

As news emerged of the myriad missteps—the fudging of test results, the misleading assurances of the water’s safety, the evidence that officials knew more than they had publicly let on—and after the “buck-passing and turf-guarding” among governmental agencies was exposed, anger mounted. Predictably, an “avalanche of lawsuits” ensued. Criminal charges were also brought against six state employees for acts like concealing reports showing elevated blood-lead levels in Flint children after the switch to Flint River water and conspiring to commit misconduct, though the only one to be fired was the official charged with involuntary manslaughter. In 2017, the city switched back to the Detroit system and abandoned the plan for a parallel pipeline from Lake Huron. Even then, the issues with water in Flint did not immediately end, as the damage to the pipes had already been done.

Clark’s underlying conviction—her faith, if you will—is that facts matter, and that if facts are revealed, problems can be resolved, and those responsible for causing them can be held accountable. (This conviction obviously resonates far beyond Flint, but Clark doesn’t stress the point.) She makes her case not only through meticulously documented research—endnotes and a bibliography account for about a quarter of the book’s length—but by explicitly documenting how this sort of thing happens, using Flint as a sort of case study. She points to similarities between what happened in Flint and earlier instances of fatal bureaucratic malfunction, such Love Canal, a community built on a toxic dump on the Niagara River in the 1970s, and the lead crisis in Washington DC in 2004, which might have been even worse than Flint’s in terms of the amount of lead in the water and the number of people exposed. “In the end,” she insists, “people just want to be seen.” Residents of Flint, finding that their concerns about their coffee-colored water and their sick children were being dismissed by local government officials, turned to others, not least journalists, “to make themselves visible.” (Citizens-turned-activists deliberately promoted white residents as spokespeople out of a conviction that they would be more likely to attract media coverage.)

At least in part, then, The Poisoned City is a hearty defense of the Fourth Estate. Clark concedes that early on local media coverage—of independent tests of tainted water, of protests, of public documents revealing what officials actually knew, and when, despite contradictory public statements—had little impact on the state’s response, but that eventually “national attention did lead to some positive changes in Flint.” As the story became more widely known, Flint’s situation could no longer be ignored.

The same idea animates Colson Whitehead’s 2016 literary-prize-magnet of a novel The Underground Railroad, in which a body-snatcher character realizes that it’s easier to steal black corpses than white ones because, when the families of the latter protested, newspapers “took up the cause” and “the law stepped in,” but when black families complained of their deceased relatives’ violation, “[n]o sheriff paid them any mind, no journalist listened to their stories.” (Disclosure: I know Anna Clark. She selected an essay of mine for an anthology she edited concerning another city, Detroit, where we both live and have attended some of the same literary events and parties. Because of this, I know her book had a working title drawn from a Toni Morrison quote—“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was”—that became an epigraph when a more prosaic title was selected.)

When people’s true stories of mistreatment are known and no longer ignored or denied, injustice becomes harder to tolerate. Not unrelatedly, Clark’s earlier work as a freelance journalist regarding the debacle in Flint included analysis of the press coverage of it for publications like the Columbia Journalism Review. Once the story of Flint started being told, construction of new infrastructure began and access to health care improved through expanded Medicaid services, for instance. Clark hopes the narrative of the debacle in Flint, as well as the criminal and civil cases arising from it, prompts a tightening of environmental laws so that similar tragedies do not occur elsewhere. After all, the United States has no shortage of shrinking, mismanaged cities with aging, underfunded infrastructure—and invisible people.

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Reading the South China Sea

Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea & the Strategy of Chinese Expansion

by Humphrey Hawksley

Overlook Press, 2018, 304 pp., $29.95

Great Powers, Grand Strategies: The New Great Game in the South China Sea

edited by Anders Corr

Naval Institute Press, 2018, 336 pp., $34.95

Asian Waters, the new book by veteran Asia journalist Humphrey Hawksley, recently became my ideal travel companion on a long flight to Australia, en route to the South China Sea. For any other reader hoping to navigate those troubled waters, or seeking a broad overview of the geopolitical fault lines in Asia, Hawksley’s book provides an excellent guide.

The book’s journey can admittedly be a digressive one, at times wading way beyond Asian waters and far onto shore. Hawksley’s book touches on North Korea’s illicit nuclear program and much else besides. One chapter describes India’s stunted development, recounting in gruesome detail the slavery-like conditions in its brick kilns. Another chapter on Vietnam finds Hawksley meandering into an argument as to why, in the late 1970s, Vietnam was unnecessarily constrained by Cold War logic from taming the bloody Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia. Such stories are certainly intriguing, flowing from Hawksley’s decades of first-hand reporting from the region.

Yet they aren’t central to the book’s main story, which concerns China’s rise, the contest for control of the South China Sea, and the larger great power game between the United States and China. That is the geopolitical story of the century. China is gradually enacting its own version of the Monroe Doctrine in the South China Sea. The United States is pushing back, including by conducting naval freedom of navigation operations, but has not come up with an effective overall strategic response. Meanwhile, China gradually expands its military reach—using salami-slicing tactics to create new facts on the ground (or rather at sea), building new islands, and coercing smaller neighbors such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

Hawksley notes how the announcement of the U.S. “pivot to Asia” led to a rapid expansion of Chinese activity in the South China Sea, from the deft takeover of Scarborough Shoal close to the Philippines to the rapid move of a Chinese state-controlled oil rig into disputed areas with Vietnam. In these chapters, Hawksley’s on-the-ground reporting blends well with the geopolitics.

Consider, for instance, his meetings with a disgruntled Philippine fisherman, whose fishing grounds near Scarborough were taken over by China. During their initial encounter, the fisherman is visibly angry, exclaiming that “if America supports us, we should go to war with them.” But later, Hawksley visits the same fisherman after his village has been bought up by Chinese economic assistance and finds that his complaints are now subdued. In many ways, the anecdote is a microcosm for the choice made by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Like the fisherman, Duterte opted for Chinese money rather than protecting Philippine sovereignty. He has thus tacitly accepted that China now controls the seas in proximity to the Philippines, which his predecessor Aquino had successfully challenged through an international court ruling based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

In some passages, Hawksley comes out surprisingly starry-eyed about the People’s Republic of China. He repeatedly cites China’s “century of humiliation” as an historical fact without explaining that it is also centrally reinforced nationalistic propaganda employed by the Chinese Communist Party to knit the nation together. He goes overboard in a pointless chapter on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s appearance at the elite Davos gathering in January 2017, where he is described as a “moral torch of world leadership.” Hawksley’s moral compass seems to have gone spinning when he writes, “While Asia and China are talking about tearing down controls and borders, America and Europe are looking to tighten them.” In reality, there can be no comparison between democracies working to balance their humanitarian obligations to a huge global flow of refugees, and authoritarian China’s oppressive treatment of its Muslim-majority province of Xinjiang, including the subjection of its population to conditions resembling concentration camps.

Despite these occasional errors in judgment, though, Hawksley’s book does effectively communicate the stakes of his subject. The South China Sea will be both a test of China’s coming of age as a great power and of the United States’ continued resolve as a Pacific power. And it could end in war, as previous historical experiences testify.

If you want a tougher approach to China, look no further than the edited volume Great Powers, Grand Strategies: The New Great Game in the South China Sea. Editor Anders Corr’s introduction slams China for its expansionism and argues—rightly, in my view—that President Obama’s military posture was too weak to counter the Chinese. It only gets too far-fetched when Corr tenuously attributes symbiotic territorial goals to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

An equally strong-worded contribution comes from retired U.S. Navy Captain James Fanell. He writes of “China’s historically mistaken irredentist claims of sovereignty” in the South China Sea, seeing its efforts there as a building block in a “confrontational grand strategy” whose ultimate goal is “establishing China as a global power that seeks to control the international order.” In his reading, a stronger U.S. and regional military posture is the obvious remedy.

Great Powers, Grand Strategies also provides the perspectives of other regional players. Leszek Buszynski has an enlightening chapter on the regional grouping ASEAN, whose internal divisions have hampered its ability to play a meaningful conflict-mediating role in the South China Sea. In recent years, China has managed to use its ASEAN allies such as Cambodia and Laos to block even innocuous-sounding declarations. The depressing conclusion is that the period of China’s “good neighbor policy,” even providing token nods to ASEAN’s relevance, is over. ASEAN, an organization based on multilateralism, was not able to coalesce around full-fledged support for the clear-cut maritime law ruling in the Philippine arbitration case of 2016. The most concerned ASEAN countries like Vietnam now seek alternative hedging options such as increased military cooperation with the United States and Japan. By now, to paraphrase the Chinese Foreign Minister lecturing ASEAN in 2010, there is only one big country in Asia and a lot of small ones.

One regional power who warily watches China’s moves in the South China Sea is Japan. It has its own disputes with China in the East China Sea over the sovereignty of the Senkaku/Diayou Islands. A Chinese-controlled South China Sea would hold negative security implications for Japan, which is the second-largest energy importer in Asia and thus dependent on uninterrupted sea lanes. Accordingly, Japan spoke out publicly in clear terms in defense of freedom of navigation following the arbitrational ruling that the Philippines brought against China in 2016, noting that it was “final and legally binding on the parties . . . under the provisions of UNCLOS.” ASEAN countries individually and as an organization were more hesitant to invoke the “legally binding” language on China. Still, Japan is not among the small group of countries who conduct freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea. Its own sea dispute with China also instills a sense of caution, combined with Japan’s continued restraint to deploy far from its shores even under its ever more “proactively pacifist” stance.

Three more chapters, respectively, cover India, Russia, and the European Union, all marginal players in the South China Sea. A chapter on the Republic of China (Taiwan), the inventor of the nine-dash-line, is conspicuously lacking and would have served the book well.

Gordon Chang describes India’s posture, yet seeks to make more out of India’s grand strategy than there is. In my reading, India’s interests in the South China Sea boil down to one long-delayed, unsuccessful oil exploration project with Vietnam. That project rankles China, and nothing more. Meanwhile China is successfully expanding its presence in the Indian Ocean.

Russia, for its part, desires to be a great power again in Asia, but demonstrates little muscle and consistency in pursuit of that goal. Russia supports China in trying to push the United States out of the region, but conversely hedges against China with continued arms sales to Vietnam, including submarines.

The European Union’s involvement remains aspirational. As a multilateral organization that frequently trumpets international law and peaceful multilateralism, it should in theory have been the first to defend the universal principle of freedom of navigation and the UN Law of the Sea. Unfortunately, the EU declaration on the arbitrational ruling in 2016 was as meek as ASEAN’s. EU member states collectively have large-scale commercial interests in the region, but few means and little political will to enforce them. On the harder edge, France and most recently the United Kingdom have conducted military naval transits through the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. This could become the stepping stone for a stronger EU role, provided the European Union is not too distracted by its own urgent regional challenges.

Finally, the big looming national security question is the power play between the United States and China. China seeks to frame its actions as a counter to expanding U.S. force projection in the region. By contrast, American hawks such as Corr and Fanell find that the current U.S. posture has been a response to China’s provocations—and too timid a response at that. What, then, is the right posture for the United States to effectively counterbalance China?

The chapter by Sean Liedman provides an excellent historical overview of the U.S. role in the South China Sea and outlines three options. The first is a policy of continued gradual concessions, which is the current state of play. A second option would try to freeze the status quo, with the United States, among other things, becoming clearer about its willingness to defend the maritime interests of its treaty ally the Philippines. A third strategy would try to roll back the Chinese advances, including by targeted sanctions on Chinese companies involved in land reclamation. In that regard, the statement of Chinese General Xu Guangyu, quoted in Hawksley’s book, is ominous: “If the Americans try to remove us from the Spratly Islands . . . there will be war.”

The most likely strategy under the current Administration seems to land somewhere between options one and two, although the recent National Security Strategy makes it clear that raw power competition is a possibility for the U.S.-China relationship in the years to come. Trump himself has said little about the South China Sea, and his tweet that he was “surprised” by China’s coercion in the South China Sea, following Defense Secretary Mattis’s speech at Shangri-La on June 3, added little clarity. Perhaps this issue could become a transactional bargaining chip for Trump in a larger deal involving trade and North Korea, currently two higher-ranked U.S. priorities.

If, dear reader, you are in a hurry to read up on the South China Sea, go straight to Bill Hayton’s excellent chapter, which confirms his preeminence among interpreters of the region. It describes the situation from a Chinese and historical perspective, yet in an objective and matter-of-fact tone. Hayton explains how the advances in the South China Sea are not perceived as expansionism by China but a protection of its own territory based on a “nationalist reading of regional history.” Its confidence about its claim is so deeply embedded in Chinese policymaking and national consciousness that the “nine-dash line,” China’s cow tongue-shaped claim protruding more than 1,000 kilometers south into sea, has been added to Chinese passports. Provocatively, Chinese tourists have lately been seen arriving in Vietnam with “cow’s tongue” T-shirts, flaunting the inclusion of the South China Sea and its islands into Chinese territory.

Hayton pokes factual holes in China’s “false memory syndrome” and “imagined history,” which unfortunately is too often regurgitated by gullible Western scholars. In reality, the reefs in the South China Sea were a no-man’s land, home to semi-nomadic fishermen and pirates. In 1933, the French laid claim to the Spratlys through their presence in Indochina, with limited Chinese objections. At the time, the Paracels were perceived as China’s southernmost naval territory. It was only in the 1940s that the Nationalist government created the first maps showing the South China Sea as being Chinese territory, with an imprecise 11-dash line, and it was only in 2009 that China submitted the nine-dash line map as an official claim in the international arena. These historical facts are airbrushed out when Secretary General Xi Jinping says that “the South China Sea islands have been China’s territory since ancient times.” This is part of the triumphalist narrative of the Chinese Communist Party, which credits itself for finally ending the century of national humiliation.

Thus, as Hayton points out, China’s sense of entitlement is the root cause of potential conflict, even though it could spell the end of China’s carefully choreographed “peaceful rise.” In the fitting words of strategist Edward Luttwak, China’s “great-power autism” seems to be increasing. Equally so are the fears of China’s smaller neighbors, who dread what is to come in the South China Sea.

The post Reading the South China Sea appeared first on The American Interest.

Three Glimpses of the Future

In May, the European Union imposed sweeping laws on technology companies that shift control of data to the customers, protect privacy, and require curation to stop libelous and hate content. Facebook, Google and others must from now on obtain informed consent from users that their data can be repurposed or monetized, allow users to opt out of consent immediately, allow them to invoke the right to be forgotten (or expunged from the internet) or to transfer data to another organization, and provide them with the right to transparency regarding use of their data and by whom.

By contrast, America remains devoted to laissez-faire capitalism where technology giants such as Facebook have been able to flout laws protecting privacy for years, and to sell private information to the highest bidders, be they advertisers, cults, or closeted Russian cyber warriors.

The two models represent a clash of cultures: Europe’s concerns are rooted in fear of the type of Big Brother and Stasi-style governments that devastated the continent before and since the Cold War, while Americans and their lawmakers remain mostly oblivious to profiteering, in tech or guns or whatever, even when these provably damage society.

But now there is a third way. In 2020, China will roll out its ubiquitous, and creepy, technological template for the future called the Social Credit System. There are already pilot projects underway, but in two years its government will have access to all the data generated from its 1.4 billion citizens, millions of businesses, and government entities. It is currently building the world’s most extensive surveillance system involving hundreds of millions of cameras, facial recognition software, and trillions of sensors. The system will handily capture crooks, terrorists, and corrupt officials, but is also being designed to modify the behavior of people and businesses to be more honest and trustworthy through a “scoring” system.

Here’s how it will work. By 2020, everyone must be registered, given an ID number, and from then on everything they buy, sell, and do will flow into the national database. Individuals will startwith a baseline of 100 points and scoring will be based on actions and transactions benchmarked against socially redeemable criteria. For example, bonus points of up to 200 can be earned by doing charity work or by volunteering to do tasks such as separating and recycling garbage or taking care of elderly people. One jurisdiction is awarding six points to those who donate a pint of blood.

Already, companies are amplifying these incentives and persons with 600 points will have access to a low interest loan of up to $700 from online retailers to buy their goods. At 650 points, a registrant can rent a car without leaving a deposit or be given fast-track check-ins at hotels or airports. If more than 700 points are racked, the government will waive the need for supporting documents for international travel and accelerate visa approvals. Other noted benefits for high social credit scores include free access to gyms, cheaper public transport, and shorter waiting times in hospitals.

Put simply, China’s Social Credit System is Big Brother meets Air Miles.

This is a nation-state’s “loyalty” program based on doing good works and was the brainchild of the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reform Commission established in 2013 under China’s Politburo. The goal began as a financial credit system then became a means to create a “sincere culture” and raise “the awareness for integrities and the level of credibility within society” to perfect the “socialist market economy”. Now it is a combination of a credit score, to identify deadbeats, and a “national reputational system” in the hopes of making the people and businesses and officials in this gigantic and crowded countrybehave honorably toward one another.

To modify behavior, there must be deterrents, as well as incentives. For instance, an individual’s score will plummet if convicted of a crime, fired from a job, or flunked out of school. Financial information and the scores of family and friends will be included in the mix. Those who don’t pay debts, or have too many, will have points deducted. Those who have friends and family who are low-scorers will also face deductions.

Low scorers cannot hold management jobs in state-owned firms or big banks, and their children cannot get entry to good schools. To date, the Social Credit System has blocked low-scoring Chinese from taking 11 million flights and four million train trips. And 17 people who refused to carry out military service last year were barred from enrolling in higher education, applying for high school, or continuing their studies, Beijing News reported.

Clearly, this is chilling. The Confucian-cloaked goal of building a “sincere culture” is window dressing for building the world’s first Orwellian police state.

To be fair, proponents argue that China’s society needs remediation because traditional values of family and social responsibility are increasingly ignored. Elder neglect, corruption, illegal migrants in cities, consumer fraud, safety issues concerning food, counterfeiting, and regional income disparity are rampant and have resulted in an uneven distribution of prosperity and a rise in social unrest and misbehavior. Across China, cheating on exams has become so commonplace thatcollege entrance exams use facial recognition and fingerprints to ensure that test takers are not impostors. Crime flourishes and childcare centers only unlock doors to faces registered in their systems due to the threat of kidnappings. Theft is so considerable in public washrooms in China that toilet paper dispensers have been installed using recognition technology to limit usage by each person to 2 feet of paper every nine minutes. Culprits are captured on camera and arrested immediately.

It is easy to condemn China for creating such a potentially nightmarish system, but not for coming up with a means of rewarding ethical behavior and punishing errant or unseemly behavior. After all, this is what any responsible parent does, and China is the world’s biggest parent responsible for 20 percent of the humans in the world.

If one accepts that the goal of the Social Credit System is to remove bad players from the economy, bench, and government in order to improve economic and social behavior for the betterment of all—and that criteria and scoring will be ethical too—then the system is invasive but not oppressive. But the danger is evident and China’s track record is blemished.

On the other hand, is any state involvement out of line? The private sector is hardly a paragon of trustworthiness—witness the role of Facebook in the U.S. elections. These concerns, and others such as concentration of ownership, convinced Europe to intervene to protect users and society from tech’s worst excesses and instincts.

These are the three models of governance on offer now as the world hurtles toward a systemically digitized existence. By 2020, there will be China’s gigantic Social Credit System designed to protect society from crime and corruption and to improve human and corporate behavior. There will be Europe’s regulations and commitment to curb the private sector. Or there is the made-in-America Big Brother future that will be owned and operated by a handful of tech trillion-dollar-somethings.

Clearly, the choice is Hobson’s.

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Europeans in Search of Themselves

Five years ago, few anticipated that in such a short time Europe would move from a state of relative optimism about the future to the current state of flux. Today levels of uncertainty and instability are the greatest they have been since the end of the Cold War, and undercurrents of populist rebellion are getting stronger, remaking the political map in country after country. In Germany the future of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government remains shaky, with the Bavarian CSU threatening to walk away over immigration policy. France’s Emanuel Macron continues to exude youthful enthusiasm for change, but his ability to affect the status quo is limited at best. The United Kingdom, ever-more inward-looking as it struggles to consummate Brexit, has already put enough daylight between itself and the European Union to make it increasingly an external player. In Scandinavia, the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania, the preeminent concern is security in light of Russia’s continued military buildup along the eastern flank. Most of all, the prospect that the Italian economy may implode is casting an ever-longer shadow over Europe.

The progressive instability in Europe is fueled by the continuing immigration flows from across MENA, impacting the continent well beyond the initial stresses on the infrastructure and organizational capacity of the receiving countries. In Europe the immigration wave has been going strong since 2015, notwithstanding ebbs, flows, and redirections, as routes change and governments seek to harden the European Union’s external borders (including the Italian government’s recent decision to close its harbors to boats bringing immigrants into the country). This wave constitutes the single most powerful driver of the changes that are remaking Europe on levels ranging from its ethnic and religious composition to its politics—challenging the ideas that are at the very core of reciprocity and the mutuality of societal obligation.

Today Europe is split down the middle on immigration: post-communist democracies, especially Hungary and Poland, oppose any scheme that would allow for the entry and resettlement of immigrants in their countries, while immigrants continue to come to Western Europe, where initial public acceptance of the influx has generated a rising wave of resentment and anger, because of the cost, increased risk of terrorism, and anxiety about how largely Muslim immigration is remaking the Continent. According to a Pew poll from last May, 42 percent of Europeans across 15 countries believe Islam is incompatible with their national culture and values, and 53 percent believe that having a family background from their national culture is essential to be considered a part of the nation. In short, the residual and, in some countries, still dominant Christian identity remains Europe’s religious, social, and cultural marker.

Notwithstanding decades of multicultural policies at the elite level and the broadly liberal tenor of the social compacts across Europe’s democracies, the historically Christian heritage of Europe—even if at times abstracted—remains important to shaping national identity across the continent. Since Germany and its political evolution going forward will be decisive to the future of the European project, it is worth considering the deepening realignment in German public attitudes and politics. Well before the latest and largest immigration wave hit Germany, already in 2010 Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) national polling showed a rapidly growing resentment of foreigners, the same year Angela Merkel declared that multiculturalism had “utterly failed” and that it was incumbent on new arrivals to integrate more into society. The poll found that 58 percent across Germany wanted restrictions on Muslims practicing their religion, with the sentiment standing in Eastern Germany at 75 percent. In this context, the shock delivered to the German public by the 2015-16 immigration wave has dramatically reordered the country’s politics: the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a single-issue anti-immigration party which did not exist six years ago, is today the third-largest party in the Bundestag. Moreover, should the current Merkel government fall and snap elections be held, it is not inconceivable that the AfD moves up into second place.

Europe’s policy elites are increasingly aware of the urgency of the immigration debate, and its tenor has all but ensured that the conversation has become one of “fixing” the problem (empowering and transforming Frontex to defend the EU’s external borders; cutting welfare benefits to immigrants to reduce pull factors; and investing in economic development in poor countries). What is missing is a discussion of the larger question of what constitute the “in-criteria” to establish a national bond within EU member states across Europe. The neo-Marxian ideology that has informed most of the policy and media debates over the past four decades—which touts “contextual identities,” cultural relativism, and multiculturalism—is ultimately helpless in the face of the resurgent public demand to re-affirm national markers. A growing number of Europeans are rejecting the belief among liberal elites that over time institutions will trump culture—namely, that cultural differences between citizens and newcomers can be smoothed out by institutions. This rejection appears to be grounded in the desire to defend the argument that in the end a national culture experienced viscerally as a way of life matters most when it is seen as being at risk. The binary and, at its core, existential nature of the conflict over Europe’s future gives the current political crisis its seminal urgency. As a result, governments across the West, especially those with a long history of consolidated democracy, find themselves largely disempowered when it comes to stemming the flow of immigration, and also paralyzed when it comes to speaking directly to the concerns of the growing numbers of angry voters.

The continuing inroads that group identity politics has been making into the educational systems and media, and the absorption of identity politics into actual policies across the West, make it ever-more difficult to frame the debate over Europe’s future around classical notions of individual citizenship, with its duties and rights. This in turn makes a broader consensus on what modern day national identity should mean in Western democracies ever-harder to reach.

For decades a civic identity distinct from its national and cultural contexts has been the holy grail of elites across the West. The change in European politics wrought by immigration has shown that the idea of democracy cannot be “abstracted” to the point that it becomes completely unmoored from its national and historical context. Confronted with the hard reality of mass immigration, with discernible developmental differences between societies in full view literally next door, Europeans have been forced to put the issue of how to define the nation front and center. It is not simply that multiculturalism as an end state has always been a lark; rather, the price for the politics of cultural relativism has now become painfully quantifiable.

To begin to address the problem of immigration, Europe needs a two-pronged strategy. First, it needs to stem the flow, in keeping with the cliché that if the bathtub overflows you turn off the faucet before you begin to debate what steps to take next; second, Europe’s leaders and the media need to replace finger-pointing and name-calling with a reasoned conversation about the non-negotiable public expectations for citizenship that reflect the national identity, and then craft policy accordingly. All cultures evolve, but it is up to the members of a community to determine the speed and conditions of change, and to mark what key cultural foundations constitute the shared sense of national identity. No amount of political engineering, however well intentioned, can get around this key principle: that the nation is what the people believe it to be. Even in postmodern Europe, where constructivism and critical theory seep into an ever-growing number of academic disciplines, the sense of belonging to a larger national community remains the foundation of the polis.

There can be no substitute for a national consensus that citizenship requires more than accepting the principle of democracy in the abstract. Without it, parallel societies will emerge, ultimately fracturing the state along ethnic and religious lines. With immigration reordering Western societies, the “nationalizing” function of the state remains more relevant today than at any time since the end of the Cold War. To think otherwise is to allow for the current dissolution of the public-elite compact to continue, with the risk that the foundational bonds of reciprocity that have defined Western democracies will begin to decompose.

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The Discreet Charm of the Interior Ministry

In the last 12 months two EU populist parties that have formal cooperation agreements with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party have entered governing coalitions: the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the Lega in Italy. Both parties control their respective interior ministries. In early June Matteo Salvini was appointed as Italy’s interior minister, while Austria’s interior minister is Herbert Kickl, a longstanding FPÖ party official.

That both parties manoeuvred themselves into control of their interior is probably not a coincidence—and the reason they may have done so is worthy of attention. The classic Russian definition of “power ministries” comprises those which control uniformed, armed personnel. In Western Europe this means the interior, defence, and justice ministries. Importantly, intelligence organizations also fall into this category.

In Austria, the FPÖ now controls the defence and foreign ministries in addition to the interior—and it has wasted no time in exploiting its power. In March a special unit of the Austrian police raided the domestic security service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und Terrorismusbekämpfung (BVT). They also carried out raids on the homes of five BVT officials, including its director, Peter Gridling. The action was supposedly triggered by the BVT’s alleged mishandling of secret information and improper monitoring of the far Right. As Reuters reported, “The case has caused a political uproar amid fears the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), which became the junior partner in the governing coalition in December, sought to secure intelligence on right-wing groups or sideline political opponents within the BVT—accusations it denies.”

There is every likelihood that these motives were in play. But what Reuters perhaps overlooks is the possibility that the raids were also intended to take possession of intelligence material provided by Austria’s partners, particularly the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Whether such material was then passed on to a third party is hard to know; the point is that once prised out of the hands of the BVT, its fate is obscure. This will have had a chilling effect on cooperation with the Western services. Indeed, in the wake of the raid Germany’s security service has already publicly questioned the reliability of its Austrian partner under the new government, saying Berlin may need to reassess bilateral intelligence ties.

According to one senior former intelligence officer, “in cases like this the cooperation rarely shuts down completely, but sometimes it goes into ‘preserve and protect’ mode. Sharing continues on a case-by-case basis and sometimes you might rely more on trusted individuals than the service as a whole. But intelligence sharing does fall off.” This of course creates a dilemma for friendly services: either risk intelligence falling into the hands of the opposition, or allow the relationship to atrophy. In the former case, hostile powers can seize the opportunity to read Western reporting, while in the latter they can deny access and try to present themselves as a replacement partner.

A further, less successful aim of the raids was to purge the senior ranks. In the wake of the raids the BVT’s director Peter Gridling was suspended pending an effort to replace him. Gridling’s suspension was struck down by the courts in late May, and he returned to his post.

Vienna occupies a unique and ambiguous position in European security. Espionage is legal on the territory of Austria, as long as Austria itself is not the target of the activity. This has made the city a favorite of intelligence services, who use it as a regional playground. Between Athens, Tallinn, and Vladivostok, practically everyone in public and business life has cause to pass through Vienna from time to time. It makes the city a perfect place to pitch, debrief, and reward agents without the unwelcome attention of state security. All of the major intelligence agencies maintain outsized stations in Vienna for this reason, as well as the presence of the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Since Austria is neutral and not a NATO member, there is no treaty obligation to collaborate with specific services. Tipping the Austrian security apparatus yet further towards Russia amounts to a major coup.

Salvini’s appointment as Italian interior minister is too recent to draw any conclusions from. However, the special status of interior ministries in the minds of KGB-trained personnel—who of course inhabit the Kremlin and control United Russia—suggests that every effort will be made to exploit the opportunity. The crucial question is whether or not Salvini is open to blandishments from the Lega’s Russian partners, and what leverage (if any) they possess; he may yet decide to assert his independence.

This is not a new phenomenon. In the late 1940s the Soviets used interior ministries as tools to undermine democracy in Central Europe as preparation for a wider power grab. The circumstances today are of course quite different, but the underlying struggle is much the same: Russia seeks to draw Southern, Central and Eastern European states away from Western Europe and the United States and to convert them into friendly satellites.

Following the defeat of the Third Reich, the Allies agreed that the USSR would exert the strongest influence in Central and Eastern Europe according to a percentage formula, and not to the complete exclusion of the Western powers. Moreover, there was no agreement for the communist system to be imposed; the polite formulation was that “socialist democracies” would emerge. Stalin, understanding his relative weakness at this point, opted to give the appearance of honoring this agreement, while actually infiltrating his Moscow-trained local cadres into the interior ministries, police, and secret police in each country. By the time the Allies realized that democratic opposition to communism had been throttled, it would be too late. As Robert Service writes in Comrades!, his history of communism:

A degree of political sobriety was called for. To this end [Stalin] stipulated that communist parties should advance behind the shield of multi-party democratic coalitions. He was willing to consider a ‘bloc’ even between communists and the Catholic Church. Such manoeuvres would get the Western Allies off his back as well as diffuse responsibility for the difficulties of post-war rule. With a modicum of cunning the communist ministers could secure portfolios enabling them to deal ruthlessly with political enemies. Wherever possible, they were told to take posts in the security and police forces.

Similarly, in Iron Curtain, Anne Applebaum writes:

To put it bluntly, the structure of the new secret police force was never left up to chance, circumstance or local politicians to determine. And although there were some differences in timing and style, the creation of the new secret police forces followed remarkably similar patterns across eastern Europe.

In Marxist-Leninist terms, what still matters in this view of the world is “structural power,” the ability to control an institution from the inside via nomenklatura. Even when the political masters have gone, they can leave cadres behind in the bureaucracy, the institutional equivalent of entryism. This forms one of the most powerful arguments for a depoliticized, professional civil service. But even Britain is starting to diverge from that principle as the state machinery is colonized by “special advisers” and politically appointed “czars.” Populist rhetoric about “the will of the people” and the stubbornness of legal and government institutions threatens to further erode their independence and commitment to the law, particularly in the case of security and law enforcement. This can be seen in the relentless political attacks on the FBI and the “deep state” by Trump and his supporters.

Austria is now part of a contiguous block of four states that Western services no longer fully trust and share intelligence with, alongside Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Italy, if it goes the same way, would join that sorry company, along with the likes of Cyprus and Malta.

At the political level both the Italian and Austrian governments are open in their pro-Russian orientation. Putin chose Austria for his first post-election foreign visit, while Italy is the only G7 state to join Trump in his call for Russia to be readmitted to the grouping. Both countries are also rolling out simultaneous interior-led measures against immigrants and Muslim minorities, and both oppose sanctions on Russia. In recent days Salvini has ordered a “census” of Italy’s Roma with the aim of expelling “illegals.” He added, “Unfortunately we will have to keep the Italian Roma because we can’t expel them.” One can only wonder what other solutions might be in store for them.

We are not living in the late 1940s, and the construction of police states is not imminent (although it should not be dismissed entirely; Salvini’s Roma decision and rhetoric has obvious fascist overtones). Europe is experiencing a sustained and determined Russian campaign to fracture NATO, the European Union, and the Transatlantic alliance. Undermining security cooperation and intelligence sharing among allies may yet prove to be one of the most effective, and overlooked, tools in the subversion kit. It is worth watching closely.

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The Grid of the Future

There is no shortage of predictions about the electricity industry. Every week, it seems, experts excitedly announce the coming of another grid transformation. These are electric times.

Yet every energy prognosticator should maintain a sense of humility—forecasts about the future of energy are notoriously inaccurate. In the past decade alone, we’ve heard over-inflated promises of a nuclear renaissance and persistent underestimations of how much the costs of solar, battery storage, oil, and natural gas would decline. Indeed, energy prognosticators have a talent for just one thing: being wrong.

These prognosticators often predict a glorious future for a flashy technology. What they overlook, however, is that the success of a new technology depends on a number of underlying economic factors. Only once we understand these conditions can we seek to smooth the path of innovations to market. In the case of the electricity market, it is the regulatory environment (state and national) that largely determines its openness to innovation. But we should not imagine a zero-sum battle, with regulation on one side and free markets on the other: Rather, the key question is whether regulation should facilitate or substitute for competition.

A century ago, government policy said the answer was “substitute.” State and local governments treated electricity as a “natural monopoly,” granting a single company exclusive rights to a service territory. In exchange, monopoly utilities let governments fix prices based on their estimation of prudent costs and a reasonable rate of return on capital.

This “regulatory compact” incentivized utilities to accumulate assets like facilities and equipment, and to develop business models that relied on favorable regulatory treatment. Travis Kavulla, vice chairman of the Montana Public Service Commission, notes that this “so-called cost-of-service regulation suggest[ed] to the utility that it should spend as much as possible, even when less might do.” He continues, “The barometer for whether an investment [was] wise for a utility [was] not capital productivity, but whether expenditures [would] be disallowed by the regulator. This seldom occur[red].”

Like most monopolies, the utility companies had an allergy to change. Harvard economist William Hogan sums up the situation nicely: “The more innovative the idea, the less likely it would [have been] adopted.” Furthermore, since monopolies “socialize” risks by saddling captive ratepayers—not investors—with any costs associated with their investments, the utilities did little to reduce those risks. The monopolies had no reason to develop economic discipline, so they did not, and thus they also did not pursue the technologies that would have cut costs or improved service.

By the late 1980s, monopoly utilities around the world were imposing high costs on customers and had accumulated unnecessary assets, in large part due to errors in technology choice. Thanks to a political backlash, governments began regulatory reforms in the 1990s that overhauled incentives, changed the locus of investment decisions, and shifted the allocation of risk from captive customers to private investors. These reforms, in effect, split up the grid into regulated monopoly and competitive parts. They created competitive wholesale markets for power generation and retail markets for services supplied directly to customers. However, transmission and distribution services (which refer to the transmission of power from plants to electric substations, and the distribution of power from substations to customers, respectively) remained under the regulated cost-of-service model.

These restructured markets—sometimes referred to as “deregulated” markets—are hardly free from regulation. Indeed, thanks to the unique physical characteristics of electricity, it is impossible to free the market entirely from regulation. Though this may one day change, producers cannot store electricity in bulk in a cost-effective manner, and so have no backup supply in case of shortages. Meanwhile, most end-use customers cannot respond to real-time conditions on the grid, such as by reducing consumption when a shortage occurs. Regulators have thus treated the reliability of transmission as a “public good,” creating regional grid operators to direct the operation of power plants to match changes in consumer demand.

Such regulations result in highly designed markets that are less organic than most commercial environments. In these markets, the “visible hand” of regulation facilitates competition by enabling the “invisible hand” to go to work. Admittedly, natural gas prices rose after the market reforms of the 1990s and 2000s, causing electricity prices to increase. Critics pointed to the increase as proof that restructuring was not cost-effective. But over the course of the past decade, the cost of gas and of various technologies has declined, unleashing a wave of new investment and renewed faith in markets.

Although a far cry from laissez faire, restructured markets have been an immense improvement over the monopolies of the past. The markets of the future, however, will be better still.

Contemporary Developments

Not all states pursued restructured markets, leaving the United States with a patchwork quilt of local regulatory environments—which today vary widely in effectiveness.

In the states that retain the monopoly model, utilities have built expensive new plants premised on inaccurate economic projections, passing the costs on to captive ratepayers. A particularly egregious example is South Carolina’s abandoned nuclear project: The state poured $9 billion in total into the facility, expecting customers to foot the bill. But South Carolina was not alone in doubling down on wastefulness; monopoly utilities in many states have kept old, expensive plants open when it increased their regulated returns. (The value of a regulated utility’s assets determines the utility’s profitability.) Predictably, this has stifled innovation.

Meanwhile, energy producers in competitive states have built innovative plants to take advantage of the fracking revolution, siting these plants where they have the lowest fuel costs and provide the most value. These low-cost additions allow competitive states to retire old, dirty, and inefficient power plants. In a quest to make plants more profitable still, merchants have worked to boost output and labor productivity while lowering fuel and other operating costs. Markets in these states also reduced the costs of integrating renewables and complying with environmental rules. (In the latter case, for instance, merchants have used cleaner fuels instead of installing the expensive air pollution controls that monopoly utilities prefer—because those controls boost regulated returns.) Meanwhile, market incentives made consumers more responsive to grid conditions, rewarding them financially for adjusting their consumption based on the fluctuating cost of supply.

However, even in “deregulated” states, most market rules are based on conventional technologies. Regulation has yet to catch up with the recent wave of innovation. At times, the “visible hand” of market design inhibits competition, such as by creating barriers to entry. Excessive eligibility requirements, for instance, have slowed the adoption of energy storage technologies. In addition, the architects of the old “visible hand” assumed a one-way flow of power, from centralized power plants to relatively passive consumers. They didn’t expect the advent of distributed resources (production technologies, like solar panels or wind turbines, sited close to customers or even on their property), which provide two-way flows of power—meaning some energy flows forward to the consumer and some flows back into the grid. We need to adjust the “visible hand” to accommodate new technologies, or else its vise grip will suffocate the market.

Meanwhile, other factors have interfered with the success of markets: legislative interventions and regulatory decisions that increasingly track the political preferences of governors and other key officials. Although the Federal government regulates wholesale electricity in 47 states, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) typically defers to regional grid-operators and their stakeholders. (These stakeholders include representatives of states, public power companies, private companies, industries, environmental organizations, and more). The stakeholders make decisions in quasi-legislative processes that often favor the incumbent owners of power plants and transmission facilities, and disfavor new entrants. Grid operators also tend to prioritize the wishes of key stakeholders or state political interests, sometimes at the expense of market-design quality. These influences occasionally hamper reforms that would improve efficiency. The more market design reflects political preferences and the influence of entrenched interests, the less well the “visible hand” can do its job.

The intrusion of politics into market design can change the public’s perception of electricity markets, to damaging effect. The influence of interventionist green advocacy and rent-seeking incumbents has particularly distorted public understanding of how the market works. The Right often succumbs to alarmism about the retirement of “baseload” power plants, while the Left underestimates the costs of mandating high levels of renewables. Predictably, the result is a maze of government interventions that work at cross-purposes, with customers left to foot the bill. As Brookings scholar David Victor has noted, “When the politics of serious energy policy become impossible to manage . . . a torrent of symbolic actions fills the space.”

What electricity markets need is a commitment by politicians to stay out of it, letting the markets operate on their own and restoring investor confidence. Yet governments often bail out legacy power plants and subsidize new resources. This will be a key question for the future of markets: Can government regulators make sound technocratic decisions, even as more voices call for politicized intervention? Texas is the lone state that seems to have avoided the problem; its politicians and regulators are deeply committed to market-driven outcomes. And the Texas model is outperforming the field.

The Grid in Flux

By the early 2020s, we will see a landscape of different energy markets across the United States, with far more variation than we see today. Monopoly states will continue to lag behind in adopting lower-cost technologies. Customers in these states will have to fight hard for unusual supply arrangements and compensation for customer-sited distributed resources, like rooftop solar.

Yet customers in monopoly states with intervention-prone legislators will have it even worse. Goaded by the green agenda, legislators will interfere more drastically in investment decisions, circumventing the regulatory process that weighs the public interest. Monopolies have proven to be willing enablers of green symbolism, provided that it increases capital expenditures. The cost: As political connections increasingly determine investments, those decisions get worse and customers get hammered. Meanwhile, the regulatory process itself becomes less transparent and accountable, and people no longer trust it.

For example, green industrial policy—including subsidies for offshore wind and nuclear bailouts—has plagued electricity markets in the Northeast, driving up costs for customers with little or no emissions benefit. Beyond market distortions, such pervasive intervention will undermine grid governance. Most notably, FERC recently made a decision that compromised the quality of market design, apparently to accommodate state interventions in New England. In an effort to prevent state-subsidized resources from depressing market prices, the decision introduces a “substitution” auction wherein existing power plants may sell their obligations to new, subsidized clean energy facilities. In other words, more economic plants can be bought out by less economic ones, per the discretion of technocrats. This decision will further distort market incentives, harm customers, and keep market prices high. It will also not prove politically durable, which could lead voters to call either for further erosion of competitive markets, or the reverse—taking a leaf from Texas’s book.

Texas, which boasts the least-intrusive “visible hand” and most competition-friendly retail policies, will become the envy of customers, free-marketeers, and pragmatic greens alike. Ironically, though it lacks a climate policy, the state will demonstrate the green benefits of competitive markets, thanks to its policy of not interfering in the markets for political reasons. It will proceed with de-carbonization more effectively and affordably than any other state. In recent months, Texas has already retired a large number of fossil-fuel plants, and brought online efficient natural gas, wind, solar, and energy storage resources.

However, despite these variations in design, what will really transform marketplaces across the country will be the emergence of new technologies. These will do more than just make electricity cheaper; they will change the entire economic calculus of the energy market. One such game-changer will be the proliferation of economical bulk storage: The cost of batteries is slated to fall 50 percent by the early 2020s. Indeed, Bain & Company estimates that by 2025, battery storage “could be cost-competitive with peaking power plants” (plants that operate only during periods of highest demand). As renewables take over a greater part of the market, these batteries will have even more value—battery storage can solve a persistent problem with solar and wind, which is that you can’t count on these sources to produce consistent power supply.

Renewables, especially solar, will see a precipitous fall in installation costs. Customers will gradually learn to respond to grid conditions, such as by switching electricity consumption from low-supply to high-supply periods. This will further reduce the costs of integrating renewables into the market, as they are the most variable sources of power. We will also see improvements in the market thanks to advances in “smart grid” technologies, which enable the exchange of electricity and information between customers and suppliers Companies will be able to manage their customers’ demand in real time (with their consent), saving consumers money without hassle, in response to price signals at the wholesale level.

The deployment of smart meters and advanced monitoring technologies will allow grid operators to curtail service to individual customers who cause supply shortfalls, such as by consuming more than what they contracted for. While an adequate supply of electricity is now considered a “common good,” with this technology, individual customers will be able to pay more for reliable service if they value it highly. But first, the “visible hand” must permit retail suppliers to pay for different grades of wholesale grid services (with different degrees of reliability), rather than one-size-fits-all. Texas is the closest to this vision; markets with a more paternalistic “visible hand” will fail to unleash these benefits without reform.

Other, perhaps more startling technologies are also on the horizon. As blockchain reduces the costs of transactions, we will have the opportunity to make decentralized transactions common across the electricity ecosystem, creating greater flexibility as well as savings. But to do so, further reforms are needed. In the 2020s, regulation may catch up to the “internet of things,” but will they catch up to the blockchain of things?

The market-based systems that allow permission-less innovation will unleash rapid investment in emerging technologies. These will drive down emissions and costs while increasing customers’ options. Customers and environmental interests will form a powerful alliance and call for even more regulatory reform. Indeed, by the late 2020s, political forces will start to converge around a market-based agenda.

The Grid of the Future

Customer empowerment will be the theme of the grid of the future. Thanks to open markets, customers will be able to control the nature and quality of their own service. They will have far more options, and they will be much better equipped to evaluate them. If a customer wishes, she will be able to pay more for enhanced service reliability, green power, or various contractual terms—or all three.

Large customers will become particularly creative in exploring their options. They will make better investments in infrastructure—energy efficiency upgrades to buildings and on-site generation to meet some of their own needs—as well as customized financial arrangements with retail suppliers. As they generate some of their own power, these consumer-producers will interact with the transmission system in new ways. For example, commercial electric-vehicle fleet owners and data centers with on-site backup power may consume more energy from the centralized transmission system during times of excess supply, then provide services back to the central grid during shortages.

Meanwhile, automated customer-facing platforms will revolutionize the experience of small customers. Robo-energy advisers, not unlike those that are currently transforming the financial industry, will simplify sophisticated energy decisions for customers of all stripes. For example, advanced algorithms can instantly evaluate retail supply plans and energy service companies. With such apps at their fingertips, even once-passive customers will likely find it worth their while to shop around.

As mentioned earlier, blockchain and other advanced digital technologies will reduce coordination costs and unlock the economic potential of energy exchanges outside the traditional market. We will see the rise of private and community networks that can sequester themselves on microgrids when power from the central system is unavailable. Such decentralization, however, will not replace the central grid anytime soon.

Thanks to economies of scale, the centralized system will still take care of most of our bulk power production for at least the next couple of decades. In the long term, however, there’s no way of telling when, where, or how centralized systems will triumph over decentralized systems (or vice versa). Breakthroughs in modular nuclear reactors could secure the dominance of the centralized system for the rest of the century, or massive advances in photovoltaics and storage could usher in the age of distributed enlightenment. Uncertainty about future technology choices is truly at an all-time high.

At the very least, we can say that distributed resources will play a more dynamic role in conjunction with the centralized system. Customers will increasingly be able to self-supply with on-site generation, or contract with local resources to hedge against service disruptions in the central system. This, in turn, will lower demand for reliable service from the centralized system. Instead of the expensive, excess supply we have now on the central system, we could see the rise of inexpensive plants with lower reserves that periodically oversupply and undersupply local networks. These distributed resources will absorb excess energy when the central system is oversupplied, and self-generate when it is undersupplied. Customers will be able to find a reliable supply from a mix of sources—and pay for the degree of reliability they value, of course. Some manufacturers will pay extra for reliable service to avoid equipment damage due to power outages, while families will save money by using automated systems that shift the times at which their dishwashers operate.

Beyond self-supply, new technologies and evolving consumer preferences will do more to promote green energy than government intervention ever could. Customers will be able to use home energy-management services (like the aforementioned dishwasher system), as well as unconventional mechanisms like crowdsourcing, which could provide additional revenue for popular projects like community solar farms. The latter will allow customers to finance projects that institutional investors deem uneconomic. Together, such mechanisms ensure that only those individuals and companies willing to pay a premium for green energy do so. Over time, competition will make green energy more affordable, and we will see a marked rise in decarbonization.

Ultimately, we should expect open markets to triumph, providing incentives for private investment and customer participation. As markets provide superior incentives for risk management, they will have a particular advantage in an era when technology choice is so uncertain. Energy monopolies may eventually become a thing of the past (though regulation will always be with us).

Preparing for the Future

The prognosis for the grid of the future is as uncertain as ever. Rather than pretending we “know” what’s best and relying on central planning, we should embrace policies that respond best to uncertainty. Indeed, the less we know, the more we should realize that the best system relies on the judgement of the many, not the few.

Just as merchant generators drove innovation and managed risk better than monopolies over the past two decades, a freer electricity system will empower all private actors to make better investment decisions for themselves and the environment. To deal with the uncertainty we now face, politicians and institutions should create a durable and adaptive framework to drive innovation. Nothing is more adaptive than free-flowing private capital. If politicians and regulators commit to an open, competitive grid, it will bring about a revolution in the electricity industry, making it dynamic, innovative, and customer-centric. If we limit government and unleash market forces, the grid of the future, whatever it looks like, will bring with it an era of prosperity and environmental health.

For more examples of political influence, see this piece, which I co-wrote with Josiah Neeley of R Street. See also the writings of Scott Hempling on the regulatory capture of public utility commissions. Most commissioners I know acknowledge that politics influences big decisions. For an analysis of the nuanced regional politics of stakeholders, see this paper commissioned by R Street last year.

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A More-Than-Minimal Democracy

According to the sports writer Art Spander, democracy gives every voter a chance to do something stupid. But that is not the main reason why most prefer it to other political regimes. First, with its ideals of freedom, political equality, and accountability, democracy can be seen as intrinsically valuable. Second, self-governance, or democracy, might be associated with better political, economic, and social outcomes than its alternatives.

In his recent article about the Malaysian election in The Atlantic, Brookings’ Shadi Hamid reminds us that the latter, consequentialist case for democracy is often overstated. Democracy is not primarily about providing “well-paying jobs, better schools, or improved living standards.” Instead, it exists to give people the option (however remote) of deposing bad leaders and ensuring that “political outcomes are not permanent.” As a result, Hamid wants us to stop arguing that democracies produce economic growth or better governance.

Democracy certainly provides no guarantee of good policies. Because of cycling and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, democratic decision-making might not even generate coherent decisions, since no unproblematic way of aggregating people’s choices exists. Furthermore, democratic societies face problems of collective action: voters face weak incentives to be informed about policies because an individual vote exercises only a miniscule impact on the electoral outcome, whereas interest groups are well-organized in the pursuit of their economic rents and privileges. Democratic policymaking will thus disperse the costs and concentrate the benefits of its policies towards the well-organized groups.

But does that mean that the case for democracy should be boiled down to Hamid’s minimalistic proposition, namely the “feeling that you, as a citizen, can actually alter the course of your own country, and that your nation, at least in theory?”

Well, no.

For one, a common complaint about democracies is that elections have little effect on adopted policies. In the case of Italy over the past decade, even the link between elections and choice of the person heading the executive has been largely severed. People, furthermore, have recourse in autocracies too. They can emigrate, which is often easier than to organize themselves politically, even in a well-functioning democracy. Or they can try, perhaps naively, to join the ruling elite in order to change things from the inside, as many idealistic communists tried to do in countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The point is not to defend authoritarian regimes but merely to point out that the feedback from citizens to the government is not uniquely powerful under democracy.

More importantly, as my AEI colleague Clay Fuller notes, “the entire world now has elections and half of them occur in dictatorships.” Not all of such regimes need to rely on outright electoral fraud to ensure that people’s ability to alter the course of their own countries is never effectively exercised. A combination of an uneven playing field, demoralized opposition, and a reliable electoral base produces desired outcomes, although a theoretical chance of deposing leaders through elections exists also in Russia and Turkey.

The experience of many ethnically fractionalized countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, or Iraq, shows that elections alone can result in a divisive, patronage-driven politics or in a continuation of pre-existing conflicts through other means. Successful self-governance requires other things as well: rule of law, constraints placed on the executive, mechanisms that enable voters to verify whether politicians are delivering on their promises, and a shared civic culture. Without those, the sole ability to cast a vote for various candidates in an election will ring hollow.

On a different note, contrary to Hamid’s minimalistic argument, genuinely democratic societies are in fact associated with better economic and social outcomes. It is not a coincidence, as Amartya Sen noted, that one does not see famines in democracies, or that democracy and media freedom are associated with lower rates of children’s mortality.

Triumphalism of the 1990s aside, there is no reason to be shy about the merits of democratic governance when the weight of evidence is on its side. As far economic prosperity is concerned, little suggests that autocracies can outperform democratic societies, notwithstanding anecdotes about the “Chinese model.” True, the literature trying to capture effects of democracy on growth has been voluminous and is sometimes contradictory, but the best recent research seems clear: “[D]emocracy does cause growth, and its effect is significant and sizable,” MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and his co-authors conclude. (See also Knutsen 2015, Madsen et al. 2015, Papaioannou and Siourounis 2008, Persson and Tabellini 2006, Rodrik and Wacziarg 2005, or meta-review by Doucouliagos and Ulubasoglu 2008.)

Voting in elections is not the only, or the most important, channel through which democracy matters. The diffusion of power in democracy puts a check on anti-competitive entry barriers. An independent judiciary provides a guarantee that property rights will be respected and encourages investment. But whatever the precise causal mechanisms, if democracy is to lead to good results, it cannot be boiled down to just regular votes. It needs to be part of a broader institutional package, which is not easily divisible. As Acemoglu and co-authors have been arguing for years, strong complementarities exist between state capacity, broad distribution of power in society, and rules of the game that underpin the competitive and innovative market economy. If one of the elements disappears, other will follow suit.

In Venezuela, unchecked economic populism helped entrench an oppressive political regime. In Hungary and Poland, political takeover of the state by Fidesz and Law and Justice, respectively, has been accompanied by economic policies that undermine the two countries’ long-term growth prospects: nationalizations, levies targeted at foreign investors, and various privileges distributed to party cronies. Half of all bank assets in Poland are now in the hands of a government which is keen to actively channel loans to domestic (arguably politically connected) businesses. Similar policies produced catastrophic results in the 1990s both in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic.

What that means is that Hungary’s and Poland’s current illiberal set-up is not stable. Rather, it is either the beginning of a long slide to authoritarianism and dysfunction, or, with any luck, a temporary aberration waiting to be corrected. Likewise, in the long run, the authoritarian capitalism of China or Russia cannot offer a lasting alternative to the civilizational model that combines “good” economic institutions with self-governance. Innovation at the technological frontier requires freedom—intellectual and otherwise—which is incompatible with political systems that suppress dissent.

Of course, there are many ways in which the West can botch things in the meantime. The combination of America’s polarized politics, declining levels of trust in political institutions, and the idiosyncrasies of the current occupant of the White House can be corrosive to the rule of law. Likewise, President Donald Trump’s protectionist instincts could lead the world to a genuine trade war, especially if we witness an economic downturn, with similar consequences to the collapse of the global trading system in the 1930s. And although driven by good intentions, the zealous enforcement of intellectual orthodoxies at universities and in large corporations is bound to do damage to most important driver of the West’s economic prosperity: a competitive marketplace of ideas.

The non-negotiable package of formal and informal institutions that embed successful democracies is certainly narrower than the long list of liberal pieties that have characterized our political life in the past decades. To be sure, a number of those, such as the growing tolerance of alternative lifestyles, are genuine achievements that ought to be celebrated. But many, such as immigration, multiculturalism, or a commitment to a strictly multilateral international order, are subjects of genuine disagreements within electorates in the United States and in other Western societies. An eventual pushback against liberalism in those areas is not a threat to democracy itself but evidence of democracy’s responsiveness.

Of course, one of the disconcerting features of ongoing political changes in Western democracies is the pervasive sense that, unlike in the past, everything seems up for grabs. But defending a vision of democracy stripped to its electoral bones is of little practical value. After all, elections are one of the few components of the democratic institutional package that nobody is suggesting to do away with, not even in genuine autocracies. And elections alone do not turn democracy into a desirable political regime.

As a result, the challenge of our time is not to learn to appreciate free elections but to distinguish essential components of the democratic institutional package from policies and institutions that are legitimate subjects of political contestation. The former, of course, have to be defended vigorously. At the same time, it is time re-learn how to have a civil debate about the latter, without slipping into hysteria and alarmism.

The post A More-Than-Minimal Democracy appeared first on The American Interest.

Singapore Slinging

It is a comforting notion many people have that good outcomes arise from good intentions, and that positive achievements flow from sound reasons. Sometimes this is true. Jonas Salk set out to create a life-saving vaccine against polio, and he knew his science well enough to reason himself to success. On the other hand, at the time—from the first onset of epidemic polio levels in the United States at the end of the 19th century to the heights of the disease in the 1940s and 1950s—no one knew that our best intentions in cleaning up our water supply by introducing better sewage treatment and overall hygiene reduced natural exposure to the virus and hence crashed immunity to it, creating the conditions for epidemic disease. And thus the aphorism that the road to hell is, often enough at least, paved with good intentions.

So, too, the inverted version of the same logic. Bad people doing genuinely bad things sometimes lead to unanticipatable good outcomes, in due course. The Nazis built the paradigm of modern evil, although of course they fantasized that they were doing noble things in desperate defense of German corporate identity. But the Nazi social revolution destroyed the Junker class and so inadvertently paved the way for genuine liberal democracy to arise in its wake. So it is true, often enough at least, as Emil Cioran said in A Short History of Decay (1949): “History is irony in motion.”

What has the history of polio, or of Germany for that matter, to do with the Singapore Summit between the leaders of the United States (henceforth “us”) and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (henceforth “the Norks”)? Potentially everything.

Donald Trump’s idea of diplomacy as a projection of his personality is exactly what it appears to be. He is selfish to and well beyond a fault, so that what mattered to him most in Tuesday’s Summit was the appearance of success, even at the expense of national and global security interests. That is characteristic of this reality TV presidency1, and of his abiding narcissism. Trump’s craving for attention is so bottomless that his behavior often resembles that of an emotionally fragile four-year old, who will throw a controlled tantrum at the sight of good food just to seize modicum of control over her parents—a trait vividly on display at this past weekend’s G7 conclave in La Malbaie.

Trump clearly doesn’t understand complicated issues like East Asian geopolitics or Korean, Chinese, and Japanese history and psychology, and he doesn’t care to understand them. That is because he doesn’t really care about them, or for that matter about the U.S. equities bound up in the current U.S.-DPRK engagement. His insecurities are so enormous that he refuses to be briefed or to get experienced others to help him plan and prepare, so his style is the bravado of an outwardly confident know-it-all who improvises out of contempt for earned expertise of all kinds. He lives by the seat of his pants, utterly present-oriented, as a man who is proudly on record as being dismissive of history and of reading as well. This is a connect-no-dots, stream of semi-consciousness presidency that never looks back at the rubble left in its wake. The President himself could not have said it better: “I think, honestly, I think he’s going to do these things. I may be wrong. I mean, I may stand before you in six months and say ‘Hey, I was wrong.’ I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that, but I’ll find some kind of excuse.”

Is this a wildly irresponsible attitude for a leader of a state that designed and still supplies common security goods in a dangerous world? Damned sure it is. But could it lead to a positive outcome anyway, in ways our encyclopedically ignorant President can’t begin to imagine? Actually, yes.

Upon rising and reading the news from Singapore, I was stunned to see the under-headline in the New York Times: “Trump Agrees to End War Games with South Korea.” All the rest of it—vague and rather short formal statements, photo ops, incessant ego preening on the part of both principals, mediocre questions from reporters—could hardly raise a pulse for being all too common. But learning that Trump had promised to end the most critical practical connectivity that defines the U.S.-Republic of Korea (hereafter “ROK”) security alliance—and that he reportedly did so without the foreknowledge of either the ROKs or his own Secretary of Defense—was a bit of a surprise. That was the real slinging that burst forth from Singapore.

(Did National Security Advisor John Bolton know the President was about to do this? Given that one of John’s favorite witticisms about the Norks goes like this—“How do you know when the Norks are lying? Their lips move.”—my guess is that he did not. What he’s actually thinking about this whole business of trusting Kim Jong-un’s good intentions is anyone’s guess. Most likely he just enjoys the rarified air that comes with being National Security Advisor, and probably sees his role, at least with respect to the Korea portfolio, as being akin to that of a deep safety in the fourth quarter, playing back to guard against breakaways in order to protect a lead.)

The more germane question is, did Trump understand the importance of these military exercises before he gave them away? One is tempted to quickly answer “no, of course not.” But that’s not so clear, as becomes evident from looking at the actual statement in the transcript—the first line of which is as revealing as it is amazing coming out of the mouth of an American President—of the post-summit press conference:

At some point I have to be honest. . . . . I want to get our soldiers out. I want to bring our soldiers back home. We have 32,000 soldiers in South Korea. I would like to be able to bring them back home. That’s not part of the equation. At some point, I hope it would be. We will stop the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money. Unless and until we see the future negotiations is [sic] not going along like it should. We will be saving a tremendous amount of money. Plus, it is very provocative.

In other words, Trump’s ultimate intention is to get U.S. troops out of South Korea, and likely other places as well. He does not have conventional policies, but like it or not (I don’t) he does have a more or less coherent strategic vision.2 Note, too, that the “war games” are more accurately suspended, not ended, because he clearly makes the promise contingent on the negotiation “going along like it should”—so this is not the irresponsible, irreversible giveaway it may first seem to be. As for who has been provoking whom all these years, only someone with Trump’s mindset could possibly get that as completely ass-backwards as he did.

But here, exactly, is where historical irony smirks from the mist that eternally hovers over the political present. Trump is right to want to remove U.S. forces from South Korea, even if his reasons are not right. This ambition has outraged experienced U.S. Asia hands, but as Trump has pointed out, these experts and their former political masters in previous administrations have not exactly draped themselves in honor in dealing with North Korea. Every once in a while, we must admit, the man says something that is true.

Now, what are the right reasons for wanting to withdraw U.S. ground forces from South Korea, and what are Donald Trump’s reasons?

The right reasons, as I have explained before3, concern two critical changes that have come about during the tenure of the U.S.-ROK security treaty: the end of the Cold War, and the advancement of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program to the point that, in a year or two, it will likely possess the capability of attacking the continental United States with nuclear weapons. These changes are critical to the logic of both the security treaty and the manner in which it can be made credible. And it is just shy of astonishing that nearly all of our so-called experts on this subject have failed to understand the meaning of these changes—which only shows, yet again, that it is possible to become so inured to a situation that habit can overpower actual thought, just as the band on the Titanic reportedly continued to play even as the ship was sinking.

Since North Korea invaded South Korea once, in June 1950, and nearly succeeded in conquering it before the Inchon Landing saved the day, it stood to reason that a defense alliance was mainly created to prevent a second occurrence. It was designed not only to deter North Korea from another attack, but also to influence the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China away from encouraging another attack. So much for the military rationale. On the political side, the arrangement was designed to protect the hoped-for evolution of South Korean democracy, and with that evolution to strengthen democratic political cultures throughout Asia—a goal for which Japan was of course the linchpin.

All of that worked, and with the end of the Cold War it beggars imagination to contemplate Russian or Chinese support for a Nork invasion of the ROK. Would an unhinged North Korean leader perhaps do that anyway? Only if he were suicidal. And besides, even if such a very improbable thing were to occur, U.S. ground forces would not be instrumental in defeating an attack. U.S. air power would matter a lot more, and no one is talking about sterilizing the Korean Peninsula from the reach of U.S. airpower, as if an agreement of that sort could possibly be created given the inherent mobility of air power.

Not only is the original purpose of deploying U.S. ground troops in South Korea obsolete, those troops actually function as an impediment to U.S. security interest because of the other major change noted above. If U.S. mainland comes under threat of North Korean nuclear attack, it is the beginning of wisdom, if not also of standard prudence, to want to manage that challenge without shackles on one’s options. So take careful note: Every time, earlier in his presidency, that Donald Trump tried to threaten North Korea so as to deter it, it tripped off what it is fair to call “the sunshine effect.” North Korea simply turns on the charm temporarily, aimed at South Korea, in order to in effect undermine U.S. declaratory policy. The ROKs fall for it every time, because politically they must. The way this relationship is set up, any South Korean government essentially has a veto over what the United States may do militarily in the peninsula. The “in together, out together” arrangement essentially mutes the signaling aspect of any independent U.S. effort to manage the North Korean threat.

And it is even worse than that. Short of a very improbable future nuclear exchange between the United States and the Norks, the presence of U.S. troops in South Korea gives the Norks a convenient target to hit or threaten in the event of severe pressure being brought to bear against them. Unless the Norks are crazy enough to attack U.S. forces in Okinawa, or elsewhere in Japan, the troops on the ground in South Korea are by far the softest target set. They are therefore, in effect, hostages more than they are useful tripwires—they are, in other words, a tie that binds. They deter us as much or more than they deter the Norks.

Removing them, and presumably their dependent families with them, would not entirely eliminate the hostage problem because there are lots of other Americans living in South Korea, largely for business-related purposes. But it would help a lot in terms of numbers, and in the obvious fact that non-military American targets have low symbolic value and the Norks cannot hit them without also hitting large numbers of South Korean civilians, which they have no reason to do.

Removing U.S. ground forces from South Korea, and turning over the ground component entirely to the South Koreans, is well within the capability of South Korea. And doing so need not imply the abrogation of the treaty relationship itself. U.S. air power and a nuclear deterrence umbrella both could and should remain in effect at least for the foreseeable future. This is not peculiar; other examples exist of security relationships in which the United States extends its power without need for expeditionary ground forces (Australia, for example), and in at least one case (Saudi Arabia) it exists tacitly even after a ground contingent was removed.

The treaty itself does not need amendment, because it says nothing about troops; rather it is the relationship itself that needs some adjustment. Additionally, because of the optics involved, new energies must be invested in the U.S.-Japanese relationship, and in building up a stronger strategic posture elsewhere in Asia, in order to manage impressions of U.S. intentions and credibility. Those who argue that any change in the status quo in the U.S.-ROK relationship will amount to decoupling are therefore not only wrong, but they are implicitly making a breathtaking assertion: namely, that contingent arrangements for security may never be adjusted despite changes in the environment.

This is easy to demonstrate. The Soviet Cold War deployment of SS-20s in Europe did not lead to decoupling within NATO, because we had ways to prevent it, including an offsetting deployment of our own missiles; and the cancellation of the deployment with the success of the INF Treaty did not lead to decoupling either. Those who make mechanistic arguments—rising powers always pose a Thucydides Trap; North Korean ICBMs that can reach the U.S. mainland must lead to decoupling—lack respect for history and logic alike. We have choices, plenty of good ones among them.

That’s the good news. Then there are Donald Trump’s reasons for wanting to remove U.S. ground forces from South Korea.

Trump by now may or may not understand something of the foregoing rationale, but even if he does it plays a weak second fiddle to more fundamental beliefs that he apparently holds. Trump is a dyed-in-the-wool unilateralist, which is not the same thing as an isolationist, but frequently looks like it. He does not believe in the very concept of allies, because an alliance is a form of a positive-sum relationship. Trump can only wrap his mind around zero-sum relationships. His is an adolescent two-dimensional kind of realism that feels heroic when it is merely immature. We saw his attitude in full form in Canada this past weekend.

So he never sees the cooperative aspect of human nature inherent in these kinds of relationships, but only the competitive aspects. That is why the very existence of such institutions as the European Union and the United Nations constitutes existential irritants to him (and to John Bolton). That is also why he cares much more about strategically trivial trade imbalances than he cares about, or can even seem to understand, the benefits to U.S. security of our supplying common global security goods. He sees only price tags, never what we get for our money, because the former is expressed in a simple number and the latter cannot be. He looks only at the bottom line of a calculation, without understanding in the slightest the equation that produces it.

It is possible to summarize how the President thinks about such matters by recourse to an old musical comedy lyric. Thus Yul Brynner, singing Oscar Hammerstein’s rhymes, in the 1956 movie “The King and I”:

Shall I join with other nations in alliance?

If allies are weak, am I not best alone?

If allies are strong with power to protect me

Might they not protect me out of all I own?

Is a danger to be trusting one another

One will seldom want to do what other wishes

But unless someday somebody trust somebody

There’ll be nothing left on earth excepting fishes.

We may hope, at least, that one day the President will take the final couplet as much to heart as he does the dour spirit of the first three. But the G7 event in Canada tells us that he has not yet done so. That also explains the difference between the sound logic of adjusting the U.S.-ROK relationship in a careful and cooperative manner so as to obviate the danger of decoupling, and the underlying objectively pro-decoupling attitude that seems to be driving Trump’s North Korea strategy.

We are thus at a key hinge point in a process predictable even before the inauguration: the movement from “same world” to “lonely world” and, ultimately, to “cold world.” Widespread predictions that the arc of Trump’s foreign policy would in time regress toward the mean have proven quite wrong. As of this past week, we have definitively moved from “same world” to “lonely world”— and unless the Trumpian trampling of what benign order remains in the world is not stopped, it is only a matter of time before “lonely world” turns into “cold world.”4

The Arabs have a saying, equal parts witty and wise, that “everything starts small except calamity.” We’ll see. If the good reasons for talking to North Korea (and for ending U.S.-ROK military exercises as a step toward getting U.S. troops out of there) prevail in time—and these things do take time, generally more time than the duration of a single presidential term—then good outcomes will have been produced from not-so-good motives. And there is a good outcome to be had here: a deal in which the Norks get a no-regime-change pledge, the end of the Korean War, and some economic goodies, and we and our allies get a diminished prospect of a war crisis, and a Nork nuclear weapons program surge frozen and possibly reversed—even if full denuclearization as we define it remains, in my view, extremely unlikely.

That possible good outcome is why the idea of a U.S.-DPRK summit did not deserve the widespread ridicule to which it was subjected when it first surfaced just over a year ago.5 It wasn’t as though the status quo—gussied up by the Obama Administration as “strategic patience”—was working, or that it was even a status quo with the North Korean program advancing apace. Calamity is still possible, although futility is ultimately more likely when the long-time North Korean interpretation of “full denuclearization” again becomes too clear for the Administration to ignore. But it is at least possible that something good can come out of all this, though it probably will need to wait for consummation in the post-Trump era.

If it happens at all, this will require patience, luck, and a tolerance for some interim white knuckles. These days a situation thusly described has to count as a small mercy.

1. Please see my “The Television Presidency,” The American Interest Online, February 21, 2017, and “The Television Presidency: An Epilogue,” The American Interest Online, March 13, 2017.

2. Here is how I put it in “The Meaning of Withdrawal” The American Interest Online, May 11, 2018: “President Trump is engaged in a political insurgency designed, in effect, to bring about global regime change, despite the fact that the regime he wants to change is one of mainly American design, construction, and maintenance. His war plan has two fronts: the attack on the so-called administrative and “deep” state domestically; and the attack on the institutional framework of the so-called liberal international order. So Trump may not have policies as they are conventionally understood, but he may well have a strategy of statecraft, however idiosyncratic and illiberal it may be, that combines domestic and foreign aspects into a whole. He may not know or much care what withdrawing the United States from the Iran deal will lead to in the Middle East, but he does seem to know at least in broad outline what the skein of that and related decisions, taken together, are leading to.”

3. “ROK, Paper, Scissors: Cut the Tie that Binds,” The American Interest Online, January 10, 2018.

4. Please see “Same World, Lonely World, Cold World,” The American Interest(March-April 2017) for a more detailed treatment of what I’m alluding to here.

5. See “Chalk Un Up: The President’s Possibly Shrewd Idea on North Korea,” The American Interest Online, May 4, 2017, and “Seriously: A U.S.-Nork Summit Revisited,” The American Interest Online, March 14, 2018.

The post Singapore Slinging appeared first on The American Interest.

Can Reagan Show Trump How to Save the INF Treaty?

Suddenly comparisons between Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan are everywhere. Whether we measure by how they used summits to schmooze up dictators or rile up allies, how they strengthened free trade or talked about democracy (or even how they managed chaos and discord among their own advisers), there are many things in Reagan’s record that make the current President look really bad—and others that argue for cutting Trump a little slack.

One policy-relevant comparison has not, however, gotten enough attention: how to use an arms build-up to advance arms control. That’s what President Trump is proposing to do in an effort to save the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, one of Reagan’s great achievements. It’s painfully clear our President needs some pointers.

Like its predecessor, the Trump Administration accuses Russia of deploying a missile that violates the INF Treaty. Because, says Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, he wants to make sure “our negotiators have something to negotiate with,” the Pentagon has asked Congress to approve two new weapons that it hopes will bring Moscow back into compliance. It wants a low-yield nuclear warhead that will be deployed on existing submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and a new sea-launched cruise missile that has not yet been developed.

It was, of course, by deploying new weapons that Ronald Reagan was able to conclude the INF Treaty in the first place. But the bargaining-chip approach to arms control has been little used by U.S. negotiators in the thirty years since—and it shows. If policymakers want the strategy to succeed the second time around, they need to know how it worked before and adapt the lessons to today’s circumstances. (Trump may find these lessons help him even with Kim Jong-un, not just Vladimir Putin.)

The Reagan Record

The INF Treaty can sound like a near-effortless success: After a late 1970s Soviet build-up, NATO responded with its own deployments in the early 1980s, followed by a breakthrough arms-control agreement. Even so, the outcome was far from automatic. To understand the Reagan Administration’s “dual-track” strategy, we have to unpack its key elements. There were seven of them, and all played a part in the favorable result.

First was clear public perception of a significant threat. U.S. officials had worried about the Soviet edge in medium-range missiles targeting Europe since the 1950s but without doing much about it. What energized Western policy was a new and more capable missile, the SS-20. This modern weapon, deployed in large numbers, was easy to portray as a tool to intimidate and divide the United States and its European allies.

The second element of American strategy was its scale: Moscow could hardly ignore the countermeasures that NATO authorized. Arms controllers on both sides of the Atlantic warned that the Pershing II ballistic missiles to be stationed in West Germany, though neither as large nor as numerous as the SS-20s, might be capable of a decapitating strike on Moscow. Soviet leaders, as their harsh and relentless propaganda campaign made clear, were determined to prevent deployment.

Third, Washington challenged Moscow with a bold negotiating proposal. The Reagan Administration offered to cancel U.S. deployments if—but only if—the Soviet Union scrapped all its ground-based medium-range missiles, in Europe and beyond. This “zero option” cast Reagan as the arms-control visionary, and Soviet leaders as reactionary defenders of the nuclear status quo.

A fourth element of U.S. strategy—strong alliance solidarity—was fundamental. The INF negotiations were a multi-year struggle for European opinion. Both the public and major parties were sharply divided, and the West German government actually collapsed halfway through the story. When U.S. missiles arrived at European bases in late 1983, the Soviets walked out of the talks, further heightening tensions. Yet NATO unity held. Every alliance member that had agreed to accept deployments did so on schedule.

American policymakers sustained this solidarity with a fifth feature of their strategy: enough flexibility to keep negotiations going. After the Soviet walkout, talks were suspended for more than a year. To restart them, the United States agreed to a broader agenda that encompassed both intermediate- and long-range missiles as well as space-based weapons. (Reagan’s enthusiasm for anti-missile technology made the last of these a special Soviet concern.) The wider menu of possibilities did not make U.S. negotiators any less stubborn, but it encouraged both Gorbachev and European governments to believe agreement was possible.

A sixth element of U.S. policy was equally important: Washington was ready to take yes for an answer. Most Western strategists and political figures felt Moscow would never agree to the zero option. When it became clear that Gorbachev would do so, some of these figures (Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger among them) reconsidered their support. Deterrence, they argued, depended on bolstering NATO capabilities. Reagan was unswayed by their critique, seeing the deal as an opportunity to exploit faltering Soviet resolve and put nuclear policy on a new track.

Finally, Reagan established a credible link between arms control and political relations overall. Both Washington and Moscow saw the INF Treaty as an investment in the future. Gorbachev signed it as the only available ticket to true détente and to an international climate favorable to his reforms. His gamble paid off. The three summits held in the last year-plus of Reagan’s presidency began the unravelling of the Cold War.

Trump’s Approach

So how does current U.S. policy match up with this record? Not well at all. The Trump Administration has failed to check a single one of the seven boxes on the Reagan to-do list.

Take the first item: public awareness. Alleged Russian violations of the INF Treaty have been little discussed except by experts, largely because the claims rest on sensitive intelligence. American officials will need to be more open and convincing about the threat to Europe posed by Russian nuclear forces.

The Trump Administration has done little better on the second test—the scale of its response. It remains unclear how many of the new systems that the Pentagon wants will be deployed, and when they will materialize. To get Moscow’s attention, Washington has to say more about its bargaining chips. Marginal enhancements of the U.S. military posture in Europe will not produce real Russian rethinking.

Without a proposal that puts pressure on Moscow to deal, U.S. officials will be unable to check the third Reagan box. For all the opposition it generated, the zero-option positioned the United States against a nuclear arms race. The Pentagon’s current proposals make it seem an advocate.

Even if Washington puts an attractive plan on the table, Russian policymakers will carefully watch the fourth box: alliance solidarity. They may not negotiate seriously until they see that Washington can generate and hold support for its approach. The Trump Administration needs to persuade NATO members to do something they will surely find distasteful: endorse a nuclear build-up. But letting allies stand aside gives Moscow a chance—an incentive, even—to peel away support for U.S. policy.

In the 1980s, the INF talks made progress in part by being bundled with other issues, including missile defenses. This should be item five on the Administration’s list: making the agenda broad enough to draw the Russians in, without giving away too much. Reagan solved this problem thirty years ago, but it required an unusual combination of blue-sky flexibility and red lines that he would not cross. Washington has no comparable formula today.

The sixth box—taking yes for an answer—may also be difficult. After decades of declining budgets, Europe’s defenses do need bolstering. Will the U.S. President and his advisors—once they get the buy-in of Congress, the military services, the alliance, and the public—actually sacrifice their new weapons? If Putin proves ready to negotiate, Trump will have to decide whether his bargaining chips were meant for bargaining, should fortify a much-needed NATO build-up, or can be replaced with other measures that serve the same end. (In a sign that the Pentagon will want to hold on to the warheads, Secretary Mattis is now justifying their deployment without referring to the INF Treaty at all.)

The final test suggested by the Reagan record may be the most important of all: what kind of payoff will the two sides expect from an agreement?  Right now, both U.S. and Russian policymakers probably doubt that solving their INF dispute will generate diplomatic rewards broad enough to justify the effort. Russian leaders will look for hints that an arms control deal will lead in some fashion to relief from the sanctions imposed by Western governments in the past five years. American and European policymakers will want to know whether Russia will change direction on the issues—from cyber-hacking to Ukraine—that led to sanctions in the first place.

Alternatives to Reagan?

The Trump Administration’s bargaining-chip strategy should be measured against these seven tests from the 1980s: public awareness of the problem, potent counter-measures, a bold proposal, NATO unity, a broad agenda, readiness to close a deal if the Russians are ready, and a credible path to improved relations.

It’s a demanding list—so demanding, in fact, that U.S. policymakers will be tempted to look for alternatives. There are other ways to react to Russia’s violation of the INF Treaty, but they involve obvious risks and will not serve U.S. interests better than the Reagan model.

One obvious alternative will be to accept the treaty’s collapse and to pursue a new U.S. military posture in Europe that incorporates weapons now prohibited. (Congress has already taken a step in this direction, making funds available for a new ground-launched cruise missile, which, unlike the systems proposed by the Pentagon, would clearly violate the INF Treaty.) The main selling point of this approach will be its seeming realism: The United States cannot long abide by rules that Russia is openly breaking. For its part, Moscow may decide to live within the treaty only when it sees that the U.S. side is prepared to move beyond it.

Yet scrapping the INF Treaty is not the right response, certainly not the right first one. The treaty confers enormous advantages on the United States in defending its European allies. Complying with its terms is easy for U.S. forces and difficult for Russia. Such a favorable arrangement should not be lightly discarded. If the treaty ultimately does collapse, NATO will find it easier to agree on a follow-on strategy if it has first sought to preserve the treaty by negotiation.

A second alternative is to pursue an even broader treaty, this time with universal reach. A global ban on medium-range ground-launched missiles would address Russia’s core complaint—that its neighbors are, under the current treaty, allowed to deploy weapons that Russia is not. National Security Advisor John Bolton once proposed such a global ban, and he may do so again.

It’s a great idea, in theory: A universalized INF Treaty would definitely serve the interests of the United States, which relies on air- and sea-launched missiles for most military missions. (At least at intermediate ranges, ground-launched missiles add little to U.S. capabilities.) Unfortunately, few other countries would accept a global ban: trying to universalize the INF Treaty will almost certainly lead to its collapse.

The Trump Administration’s current policy represents a third alternative to the Reagan-style strategy described here—a tentative build-up of new weapons, but without the other elements of policy that might enable it to succeed. Its prospects are extremely dubious.

That Russia may have decided to break out of the INF Treaty is one sign of what U.S. officials call a “deteriorating strategic environment.” In both Washington and Moscow, there is growing anxiety that a new and dangerous—and enduring—strategic rivalry has begun. If it continues, Russian-American cooperation will give way on many fronts, and the INF Treaty is certain to be among the victims. But for now, and for the foreseeable future, it serves U.S interests better than any alternative. To preserve the treaty, policymakers should learn from the diplomacy that produced it thirty years ago. The Reagan record gives them an excellent checklist for the job ahead.

The post Can Reagan Show Trump How to Save the INF Treaty? appeared first on The American Interest.

A Victory For Democratic Reform

In what may be looked back upon as the most important election in the United States in 2018, the voters of Maine rejected political cynicism on Tuesday and preserved ranked-choice voting (RCV) for its future elections. To appreciate the historic significance of this vote for greater democratic choice, it’s important to understand what Mainers were up against—a two-party duopoly in which “all the levers of power” (in the words of one grassroots activist) were overtly or covertly working to block political reform.

This was not the first time the state’s electorate had voted on RCV. In November 2016, by a 52-48 percent margin, Maine’s voters approved an initiative to implement RCV for all future state and federal elections (save for President). They did what a growing number of U.S. cities have done—opt for more open electoral competition and increased political civility. But Maine’s establishment politicians, particularly in the Republican Party, then set out to negate the will of the voters. There ensued an epic 19-month struggle about much more than voting rules. It became a crucial test case for grassroots political reform. Against all odds, the people prevailed over the politicians on Tuesday, and this time by double the margin (eight percentage points). That margin was aided (and possibly enabled) by tens of thousands of Maine independents, who came out to vote in the primary election even though the referendum on RCV was the only item on the ballot for which they were eligible to vote.

On the surface, it’s hard to see why RCV causes such a storm among party die-hards. It is perfectly compatible with both political parties and party primaries. Indeed, under the initiative passed in 2016, RCV was used on Tuesday—for the first time in U.S. history, and to apparently considerable voter enthusiasm—in Maine’s gubernatorial primary elections. Under RCV, voters can weigh the merits of several candidates, and candidates may need to appeal for the second- or third-preference votes of their rivals’ supporters.  If no candidate wins an outright majority, the candidate with the lowest number of first-place votes is eliminated, and the second-preference votes of his or her supporters are redistributed to the remaining candidates. The process continues until someone wins a majority.

But here’s the rub—and the hope. By requiring a candidate to win a majority, and by implementing if necessary a series of “instant run-offs” until that happens, RCV opens up the electoral process to independents and third-party candidates. In the general election, voters no longer need to worry about “wasting” their votes on fresh, unconventional and long-shot options. They can “vote with their hearts” in casting their first-choice votes and then rank second or third the candidates who stir them less but are still preferable to the candidate or party they most oppose. When used to fill individual seats, RCV still requires a candidate to emerge with a majority. So it is far from a death blow to the two-party system. In fact, it would figure to enhance the legitimacy of the governor in Maine, where nine of the past 11 victors have failed to win a majority of the vote. But given that Maine has elected independents in the past—including Angus King as governor and then U.S. Senator—and that independent Eliot Cutler almost won the governorship in 2010, the two parties were not eager to open this reformist can of worms.

Opposition was particularly intense among Maine’s Republicans, whose current governor, Paul LePage, only narrowly beat Cutler (with a mere 38 percent of the vote) in 2010. Under RCV, LePage would probably not have been nominated in 2010, and he certainly would have lost the general election (and possibly his re-election bid, too). A “belligerent, foul-mouthed and polarizing governor” who told the NAACP to “kiss my butt” and compared the IRS to the Nazi Gestapo, LePage is a big part of the reason why Mainers came to feel the need for an “instant run-off” system to produce a more consensual majority winner. In 2016, he drove outrage to new levels when he alleged that black drug dealers “come up here” from Connecticut and New York to “sell their heroin” and “half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave.” Such attitudes and comments have made him one of America’s .

Nevertheless, Maine’s Republican Party has waged a relentless political and legal campaign to bury RCV. Along the way, many of the state’s Democrats also publicly or surreptitiously joined the effort, not wanting to risk losing a future governor’s race to an independent. Initially, the party establishments argued that the new voting method would be confusing to the voters and costly to implement and administer, or even (somehow) undemocratic. Some warned that voter confusion would diminish turnout. When none of this proved consistent with the available evidence—which has seen RCV work well in roughly a dozen U.S. municipalities, for over a century to elect the house of Australia’s parliament, and successfully to nominate and select Hollywood’s Oscar winners as well—and when Maine’s voters adopted RCV in 2016, the opponents switched tacks. They charged that RCV violated Maine’s state constitution, which requires that state general elections be decided by plurality vote. In a May 2017 advisory opinion, Maine’s State Supreme Court agreed, but it left intact the use of RCV for all primary elections and for general elections for U.S. Senate and House seats. Rather than amend the state constitution to comply with the voters’ will, or just let the court’s mixed outcome stand, the legislature then seized the opportunity to kill RCV altogether. In October, it passed a law suspending implementation of RCV and giving Maine’s voters until December 2021 to amend the constitution. Since that requires two-thirds of each legislative house (before it even goes to Maine’s voters), this was a thinly veiled way of terminating RCV for all elections in Maine, forever.

But the people of Maine did not go quietly into that good night. Unique among American states, Maine’s constitution provides for something called “the people’s veto referendum.” It enables any six registered voters to submit a proposed veto of a legislative bill to the Secretary of State, who then has ten working days to certify it. After that, advocates have 90 days from the end of the legislative session (in this instance, the same day the bill was passed) to gather the requisite number of signatures of registered voters (over 61,000) to place the referendum on the ballot. The state legislature passed the poison bill on October 23 in the middle of the night, in a special one-day session called for that lone purpose. That ensured the vote would take place in a primary election, when independents (who would be most likely to support RCV) would have no candidates to vote for. The timing was also nearly ideal for undermining a grassroots signature drive, which would have to wrestle with the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and the depths of a harsh Maine winter.

But there was one potential silver lining. Ten working days from October 24—when the request to circulate petitions was filed with Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap—was a municipal election day in Maine, November 6, 2017. This still provided an opportunity to stand outside polling stations and collect signatures for the new petitions—if the Secretary of State released them in time. But Dunlap waited until 4:30 p.m. the day before to release the ballot question, and then with a wording of the proposition so convoluted that an ordinary voter could hardly determine from the text alone whether restoring RCV meant a “yes” or “no” vote. Nevertheless, instantly, within three minutes of Dunlap’s release and with just 14 hours until the opening of the polls, the grassroots campaign for the people’s veto began electronically sending out the petitions across the state to copy shops for duplication and then drove them to volunteer gatherers throughout the night. On Election Day, due to superior organization and determination, they obtained 33,000 voter signatures.

Some 1,800 volunteers continued to gather signatures through brutally cold days in December and January—with Portland’s highs hovering at or mercilessly well below freezing. “Every week it was another blizzard, and there was even a weather phenomenon called a bomb cyclone,” said Cara McCormick, whose Chamberlain Project managed the campaign along with Kyle Bailey and the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting. “Our fingers were frozen to the bone; we had to go into our cars to warm up.” Voters asked, “Didn’t we already vote for this a year ago? Why do we have to sign this again?” The political shenanigans of the establishment frustrated people, but it also fired them up. Even people and opinion leaders who hadn’t voted for RCV the first time signed up for the second round. It had become not just a question of electoral method but of whether a bunch of politicians could simply trash the popular will.

When the petitions were due on February 2 of this year, the campaign handed in over 77,000 signatures. As momentum gathered during the signature drive and the advocacy campaign that followed, the campaign drew the support of Phish drummer Jon Fishman, who lives in Lincolnville and staged a supporting concert, and in the final days, the actress, Jennifer Lawrence, the New York Times editorial board, and two Nobel-prize-winning economists. It also raised over a million dollars in funding, much of it from national philanthropists seeking democratic reform. National political reform activist Peter Ackerman chaired the Chamberlain Project.

Once the signatures were certified, the state was obligated to suspend the legislature’s repeal and implement RCV in this past Tuesday’s primary election. Through their vote on the people’s veto referendum, Maine’s voters would then decide if RCV would ever be used again. Yet even for its first conditional use in the primary election, the opposition to RCV would not die. The Committee for Ranked Choice Voting had to keep going back to court to compel the Secretary of State and the state government to implement RCV in the primary. Opponents of RCV said funding was lacking and the legal basis for moving forward was conflicting. In an opinion on April 4, Superior Court Judge Michaela Murphy rejected those arguments and ordered the state to proceed with RCV, declaring, “Clarity, stability and public confidence are essential to ensure the legitimacy of Maine elections.”

When the Republican Party failed to get Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court to stop the use of RCV in the primary, it voted at its May 4 convention to change its rules to require a plurality vote to choose its nominees. Then it filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming its First Amendment right of free association entitled it to reject the use of RCV in the primary. That bid failed, too. In a May 24 editorial, the Portland Press Herald noted the absurdity of this supposedly principled claim, given that “the Maine Republican Party selects its own state officers with a series of runoffs that is a functional twin to the same ranked-choice voting law that the party charges would violate its members’ rights.” Finally, as Maine’s voters headed to the polls on Tuesday, Governor LePage declared ranked-choice voting—not terrorism, poverty, the opioid crisis, the ballooning deficit, or North Korea’s nuclear weapons—but RCV “the most horrific thing in the world,” and he threatened not to certify the election—an option he legally does not have.

Along with a growing number of municipalities, political scientists, thoughtful media, and democratic reformers, I have come to think that ranked-choice voting is the single most promising achievable reform for making our politics more open, more civil, more democratic, and more amenable to compromise. But I am a social scientist and a pragmatist, not a religious devotee of this one reform. Let’s try it and see how it works—as we have tried the “top two” system in California and discovered its many unpleasant side effects. Let’s try variations of RCV, even in multi-member districts for state legislature (though I have my serious reservations about that).

But here is what we should not do. We should not let a narrow, out-of-touch political class block a promising reform with half-truths and cynical maneuvers, simply so they can hold on to the continued prospect of victory with thin pluralities or half-hearted majorities of the vote, due to artificial barriers to competition. We are entering a new era of political reform in the United States, driven, like the last big one of a century ago, from the bottom up. And the voters of Maine have just given this movement its most courageous and inspiring victory.

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