Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 91

America’s Pivot from the West

After the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Europeans are said to have turned their eyes away from the starry sky of Revolution to the world as it was. Europe was at last an idea grounded in physical reality—one could do something with it and respond to its challenges and complexities. Something similar is now happening with the United States. Bruised and disillusioned with the idea of “the West,” American thinkers and decision-makers are looking for something less ideal, something they can work with.

The West was an ideal point. One could approach it, but it would always recede the closer one seemed to get to the goal. For a century at least, American foreign policy has been based on a “double world” view. The world is divided in two halves, separated by a civilizational barrier; one of the halves is continuously expanding and is meant, in the ripeness of time and perhaps after a great battle, to subsume the other and become universal. The United States saw itself as leading this process, leading the West in its expansive movement. Relations with the other half—the dark side—were always relations with a civilizational “other,” even when relations were stable and peaceful.

What we have now is different. The expansive movement came to a sudden halt, disappeared. The two halves are combined, and the barrier between them has collapsed. American foreign policy now deals with Europe, Russia, China, and India as all part of the same system, defending its interests in a system of relations where it strives to occupy the center. The critical difference is that the system is no longer dynamic; it is not in the process of approaching an ideal state.

Like Europeans after 1815, we need a word to refer to the world as it is rather than the world as it aspires to be. And there is a word which promises to do that for us—what “Europe” did for Europeans after 1815. That word is “Eurasia,” the vast supercontinent where economic, political, and cultural power is concentrated. It is a place of conflict and contradictions, divided between different cultures and offering the biggest prizes to those that manage to assert control over it. Curiously, just as Europe in the nineteenth century lived in a precarious relation of distance and proximity to a powerful island-kingdom on its shores, so does Eurasia exert its appeal and attraction over the United States, a powerful state just across the sea from Greenland or Siberia. American foreign policy now exists in relation, and by reference to, Eurasia, which in this sense at least has replaced the ideal concept of “the West.”

A pithier way way to put it is that the United States is becoming a realist power in a world of many idealisms: EU values, Belt-and-Road, Hindutva, Russian “spirituality,” and so on.

The collective sense in Washington—by no means limited to Trump—is that Western idealism has become unmanageable. From the Left comes the admonition against trying to export a Western model to the rest of the world, often by means of war. On the Right (or most often on the Right), the desire for a world where the United States can free itself from the shackles of a rules-based order and genuinely exercise its rights as the most powerful country in the world still exerts a pull. Even those of a more cautious and objective temperament, who note that a “liberal world order” would no doubt be in America’s interest, wonder if there really is such a thing. Mahatma Gandhi, on being asked, “What do you think of Western civilization?” was reported to have answered, “I think it would be a good idea.” Many liberals today nod their assent. A liberal world order would be a good idea, but what we have today is a shadow play: the United States accepts the restrictions implied by a rules-based order, while China, Russia, and Iran break all the rules. In such a game, the player who voluntarily ties his own hands is destined to lose. No surprise that many in Washington want to put an end to what they see as a charade.

Trump heads to the G7 summit in Quebec as tensions—economic and political—between the Western partners rise to a crescendo. The conflict reminds me of the dynamics leading to Brexit. Just as Britain grew convinced that the European Union could no longer work in its present form and called for deep reforms, the United States is at the very least convinced that the West—as an idea and as a set of agreements and institutions—needs to be changed in order to face a radically new world, a world where China poses a distinct and growing threat. Business as usual will not do, particularly in the economic sphere.

On both occasions, the European Union has reacted with shock, showing itself unable to countenance any debate on fundamentals and, if anything, becoming ever more rigid and dogmatic in how it sees its own political model and the future of the West.

None of this bodes well for the future of Transatlantic relations. As they get embroiled in a serious discussion on the future of the West, the United States and Europe are bound to expose vast differences in their respective visions of the world order. The European Union continues to believe in some version of the myth of convergence: The world is moving in a certain direction, as more and more regions and countries embrace Western values and common institutions. The United States, by contrast, is returning to a world where balance of power, not convergence, is responsible for guaranteeing order, and it sees itself as the holder of the balance. In such a system, the holder of the balance is by necessity alone, but it is a splendid isolation, born of power and promising many degrees of freedom.

The world order is increasingly one where the critical division is not that between the West and the rest, but rather that between the idealist powers, trying to change the world in their image—Brussels, Moscow, Beijing, and increasingly Delhi—and the realist power across the seas, whose main goal is to hold them all back, while preserving the sources of its own power.

There is balance too in the relations between the United States and each of the idealist powers. Needless to say, the United States has much to lose in its relationship with China, where differences in the respective political concepts and increasing parity in economic power pose distinct threats. But then there is also much to gain, as shifts in position from Beijing can help the United States solve many of its security and economic challenges. With Europe, there is little to lose and little to gain.

Each day the United States is being asked to choose between the West as an ideal and its position as the most powerful country in the world. To enjoy that status was entirely compatible with defending Western values and institutions. To fight for it—to fight tooth and nail—might not be. There is much in this choice that deserves to be called a Faustian bargain, but there is also very little doubt what the final decision will be.

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Iran’s Options in Southern Syria

From the Arab uprisings to the birth of the Islamic State, and from the eruption of four civil wars to the Gulf Crisis, the Middle East has never been more turbulent in its modern history. That the region has escaped a large-scale conventional war during such a volatile period in which U.S. diplomacy has been virtually absent is nothing short of a miracle.

But this streak of good fortune may not last long. With the Islamic State militarily defeated since last year, the Syrian civil war has transitioned into a battleground for regional powers, raising the risk of inter-state war. Southern Syria is where things are most combustible. Arch-rivals Israel and Iran operate in close proximity in that part of the country and are locked in a military crisis that could easily escalate.

Israel wants Iran far away from its northeast corner and ultimately out of all of Syria. Iran, on the other hand, has no interest in leaving, having spent considerable blood and treasure to save the Assad regime and pursue a set of strategic interests in Syria and across the region.

To compel Tehran to cooperate, Israel has resorted to military force, bombing Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria repeatedly. But Iran has not budged, licking its wounds after every hit, and recently even shooting back at Israeli positions in the Golan Heights, to which Israel retaliated by launching the most extensive strike on Syria since the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Russia, the most powerful player in Syria, has stepped in with a diplomatic compromise to prevent things from spiraling out of control: Israel would allow Assad’s army to take control of the south unhindered, in return for Iran removing its forces from the area. Moscow has even proposed that except for its own security personnel, all foreign forces including Iran, Hezbollah, Turkey, and the United States would later withdraw from Syria.

Russia’s initiative has benefits, as it could temporarily pacify the most explosive dynamic in the Syrian conflict—that between Iran and Israel. But it seems to be missing one key ingredient: Iran’s buy-in.

It’s not at all clear that Moscow consulted with Tehran prior to allegedly reaching an understanding with Israel. But even assuming that it did, it’s hard to imagine that Tehran’s response was positive. Israel knows that Russia cannot impose its preferences on Iran, whose military units and proxies are widespread, numerous, and the strongest forces on the ground in Syria. And even if Russia manages to persuade Iran to pull back forces under its control to a distance of 60 to 70 kilometers east of the ceasefire line in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Israel would still have doubts about Russia’s ability to enforce compliance in the event of an Iranian violation or change of heart. At the end of the day, as valuable as Russia’s mediation is, Tehran’s decision is what matters the most.

Iran has three main options, and each has pros and cons: One, ignore Russia’s proposal and preserve the status quo; two, remove all forces under its command in southern Syria, but beef up its presence elsewhere; and three, dismantle its own military infrastructure in Syria, but copy the Lebanese Hezbollah model, as it did in Iraq, by working through Syrian proxies.

The first option frees Iran from any obligations, but it runs the risk of alienating Russia and triggering a major clash with Israel, which could lead to the military involvement of Washington, who under President Donald Trump is looking for any excuse to punish Iran. Under these circumstances, Iran could still try to avoid war by absorbing any further Israeli attacks against its forces in Syria and hope that its Hezbollah and Hamas military deterrents in Lebanon and Gaza, respectively, would prevent Israeli escalation. But deterrence could fail, and if Israel starts upping the tempo, scope, and lethality of its strikes, it’s quite unlikely that the IRGC leadership would watch Israel crush all its assets in Syria and do nothing about it.

The second option could avert the wrath of Israel for now, but it would weaken Iran’s bargaining hand and might not solve the problem anyway, from Israel’s perspective. After all, Israel has said that it will not tolerate any Iranian military build-up in Syria, which could mean that its strikes won’t stop until Iran and its proxies are no longer operating in Syria. Why concede to an enemy who won’t be satisfied until all its goals are met, Tehran would probably wonder. If Israel’s objectives are maximalist and non-negotiable then Tehran might calculate that it would be better off standing firm and forcing Israel to reach some kind of a compromise.

The third option would virtually eliminate the risk of war with Israel, since it would fulfill all of Israel’s demands, but it would also end all hopes of Iran building hard power in Syria and reaping all the attendant benefits, including added strategic deterrence. Iran would still seek to develop its soft power in Syria as a means to sustain its influence, but without boots on the ground, this would be much more challenging.

With Iran bereft of military leverage in Syria, Assad, being the dictator that he is, would more easily block Tehran’s efforts to establish a proxy that would operate outside the confines of the Syrian state, like Hezbollah does in Lebanon. Also, creating a Shi‘a constituency in a Sunni-majority Syria under Alawi rule (assuming Assad stays in power) without Iranian operatives and clergymen funding, training, arming, and proselytizing would be near impossible. Finally, without military power in Syria, Iran would be less able to force its way into economic deals with the Syrian regime that would help it finance such an ambitious sectarian project in Syria.

We don’t know which option Iran will pick because we have no clue how much strategic value Iran places on its military presence in southern Syria. Tehran is nothing if not pragmatic, but sometimes ideology trumps rationality in Iranian foreign policy, as various examples of Iranian behavior in the Iran-Iraq War attest. Perhaps the struggle with Israel will top all other considerations.

Iran’s decision will also depend on the existence (or not) of positive incentives. If Iran is offered nothing in return for its cooperation, expect it, logically, to stick to its guns. If, on the other hand, there’s room for negotiation, possibly over the fate of America’s military base in al-Tanf, then Iran might be more amenable to making concessions.

Israel seems to have shut the door to bargaining given its red lines in Syria, all of which forbid Iran and Hezbollah from having any type of military presence. To be sure, that’s a legitimate Israeli request, since Iran has no business deploying troops and long-range missiles outside its own territory and right at Israel’s northeastern frontier, but these are the facts. Israel’s refusal to adhere to more realistic goals in Syria has reduced the prospects of a peaceful negotiated settlement.

In a few days, Assad will order his 4th and 5th armored divisions to recapture the city of Dara’a and its environs, along with the region bordering Israel. If Iran goes against Israeli and Russian wishes and embeds its men in the Syrian army, it might mean that Tehran has decided to reject Russia’s offer. If it stays away, it’s a sign, albeit not a definitive one, that it is open to a resolution. But even then, the devil would still be in the details, and Russia would still have to show Israel, the United States, and Jordan that it is not only willing but also able to turn its diplomatic initiative into reality.

The post Iran’s Options in Southern Syria appeared first on The American Interest.

Will Washington Support the Libyan Electoral Process?

At last, Libyans have reason to hope for the better, if not the best: After years of turmoil, blood, and venom, rival Libyan factions last Tuesday in Paris agreed to an electoral timetable for presidential elections. Although ambitious, this process, which calls for constitutional mending by September and a ballot by December, constitutes the first time since the collapse of the Qaddafi regime under Western military pressure that the country has had a clear roadmap to political stabilization.

All key internal actors of the Libyan crisis have committed themselves to accepting the results of these elections, a critical step in the country’s rise to a democratic normalcy that it has never known. As such, it is a development of historical importance and a political landmark both for Libya and for the plan’s main architect, French President Emmanuel Macron. Working with the UN Special Representative, Macron has invested significant political capital in this stabilization initiative since his May 2017 election, holding a first gathering at La Celle Saint Cloud this past July, and then gently nudging each faction leader and their supporting countries toward an agreeable framework leading to a presidential election. To put matters into useful perspective, a little less than two years ago the Libyan situation was considered intractable, faction leaders were seemingly irreconcilable, and the country was believed to be on the verge of fracturing permanently under pressure from ISIS and rival efforts to control the territory and its oil reserves.

Without doubt, many pitfalls lay between the agreement and a credible and inclusive Libyan presidential election. Not least, the security situation, not yet under firm control, may deteriorate severely without prior notice. The situation is a spoiler’s paradise. Some of the factions’ heavy-handed fighting tactics were on display in the Cyrenaican city of Derna even as talks were under way in the Palais de l’Elysée. Faction leaders on each side also need to refrain from acting on their worst instincts and to continue supporting and enabling the French roadmap under UN supervision. This is only natural and normal because, ultimately, it will be up to Libyans and their leaders to redeem the promise in the French initiative. Outsiders can do only so much, and of course, as the Libya case teaches, it is far easier for them to create a mess than to clean one up.

The presidential statement adopted on June 6 by the UN Security Council has already shown an important degree of international consensus in support of this election roadmap. Key countries now need to bring this effort further forward. A broader, more integrated UN mission closely interweaved with other international support should be considered; the current UNSMIL format needs to evolve in anticipation of the constitutional and electoral processes. The UN’s various financial and technical instruments could benefit from a more unified approach and focus in support of the new roadmap.

The European Union, for its part, should consider an increase in its financial and technical support, both in the electoral and in the CSDP-related fields. Elections are extremely complex and costly by nature, technical expertise is essential to their success, and security imperatives add an extra layer of expenses and skills.

The U.S. government, whose chargé d’affaires and AFRICOM commander met Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj right after the Paris conference, should increase its financial commitment to the stabilization of Libya, both directly and through the various international stability funds already set up. But Washington should also support the process politically by rallying critical additional international support around the tight calendar adopted as part of the Paris Conference.

Clearly, the Libyan electoral roadmap now needs to be actively supported by all state actors who wish to see a stable Libya emerge, and the reasons for the necessary exertions are obvious. At the forefront of this effort should be the EU member states, all of which share a deep interest in stopping the uncontrolled flow of economic migrants, too often jettisoned to their doom from the Libyan shore by unscrupulous criminal networks. While some EU members may entertain divergences of opinion with France on the Libyan situation and may be tempted to jockey for influence with various faction leaders, they would be wiser to help build an international consensus in order to support actively the electoral process. They would be wise to do so in political terms of course, but also in terms of technical and financial assistance, as in countries such as Afghanistan.

Further south, Sub-Saharan African countries have a vested interest in stabilizing their troublesome northern neighbor. The flow of drugs and weapons back and forth from Libya throughout the Sahel sub-region, while benefiting some local economic and political actors, is chiefly a boon for terrorism, economic inequality, and political instability.

Russia, too, which has exhibited a keen interest, among other things, in supporting Khalifa Haftar—who is, perhaps ironically, a former CIA partner and Langley, Virginia neighbor—also can play a constructive role in the stabilization process alongside EU member states, and thus act upon its professed foreign policy principles.

As for the U.S. government, it shares a particularly weighty responsibility for the current condition of the country, having furnished the tip of the spear that struck the Qaddafi regime in March 2011. Any normal U.S. administration would be concerned with all of the aforementioned political and security equities, not least because they affect the security of key allies. It would also have an interest in deterring the Russians from playing spoiler from the outside. It would want to help the European Union to regulate the flow of migrants legal and illegal alike, which it is hard-pressed to do with Libya in “gray zone” chaos. It would also realize that as the main contributor to the international security commons, the stability of Libya is essential for Sub-Saharan Africa to focus peacefully on its sustainable growth and poverty reduction. And it would understand that the United States cannot afford another deteriorating security situation in the Mediterranean/Levant zone as it focuses on other parts of the world, not least because it affects U.S. counterterrorism efforts in and beyond Libya.

The question is, will the current U.S. Administration act normally in this case? It is time for all interested and capable actors, the United States above all, to step up their commitment and to actively support the Libyan political roadmap. Certainly, Washington’s response will be read, not least in Europe, as indicating policy preferences that go far beyond Libya.

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The Case for Russia Sanctions

One of the main critiques Karina Orlova and I received in the course of writing our recent piece had to do with sanctions. “So do you really think it’s good policy to sanction all these Russians?” our editor Adam Garfinkle asked me after reading through an early draft. “And isn’t there a meaningful difference between Putin’s real cronies and these ‘second order’ tycoons you’re describing?”

Those were both good questions. We answered the second one by explicitly acknowledging the distinction, and the first by punting. The essay, after all, was not about the sanctions themselves, but about the role Yeltsin-era oligarchs continue to play in Putin’s Russia, and the tendency among some Russianists in Washington to see these wolves as lambs. Yes, not all people “playing ball” with Putin are easily lumped together into a homogeneous mess of bad actors. But given that we in the West have accepted sanctions as our policy of deterrence against the Kremlin, we argued in our piece that most of these supposedly-blameless billionaires are valid and deserving targets. To add a nuanced argument about whether sanctions themselves represent good policy would have overcomplicated an already complex argument, and perhaps overstretched the patience of our readers.

But with our original points made, it’s time to now tackle that which we punted on: Is our targeted Russia sanctions policy a good idea? The answer is “it depends.” It depends on what we think the goal of sanctions is. And it depends on what the available alternatives are.

Have sanctions had an effect on the Russian economy? Undoubtedly they have, but the extent of the impact is hard to quantify. Their imposition coincided with a slide in the price of oil in 2014 that sent Russia into recession for the first time since 2009. Estimates vary, with some saying that the cumulative effect of both import/export restrictions and limits on financing are knocking off about a point of GDP annually. Restrictions on technology transfers may also be impacting the long-term success of the country’s aging oil sector—Putin’s golden egg-laying goose. The gigantic companies that monopolize Russia’s vast mineral resources will need to modernize in the coming decades as the country’s reserves start to require more unconventional methods for exploitation.

Damage, perhaps even lasting damage, has therefore been done to Russia’s economy. But one would be hard-pressed to say that the imposition of sanctions has modified Russian behavior very much.

Shortly after the bulk of the “third round” of Western sanctions were imposed in the second half of 2014, Russia carried out its boldest and most brazen incursion into Ukrainian territory of the entire war. That offensive, culminating in the humiliating rout of Ukrainian armed forces at Debaltseve in January 2015, led to the signing of the Minsk II accords, the terms of which were virtually dictated by Moscow.
Some nine months later, Russia was sending troops to Syria to prop up a weakened President Bashar al-Assad and has not flinched once from providing diplomatic cover for his regime’s repeated use of chemical weapons against civilians.
In November of 2015, a cooperating witness and former adviser of Vladimir Putin was murdered in the middle of Washington D.C. by what appear to have been Russian assassins.
By 2016, Russian adventurism was in full swing: an American spy was violently accosted inches outside the American Embassy in Moscow; various efforts were made to try to sway the U.S. presidential elections throughout the year. And a Russia-backed coup was attempted in then-NATO-aspirant Montenegro in November.
2017 saw no letup in the steady violence in eastern Ukraine despite the threats of a whole new round of sanctions being readied with the signing of the Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) into law in August. The attempted murder of former spy Sergei Skripal outside London with highly toxic chemicals in early 2018 was as brazen a move as any since sanctions were first implemented.

As a deterrent, then, sanctions are clearly not having their desired effect. Why might that be? It’s not simply that they are not painful enough. Rather, it’s that the Kremlin has correctly calculated that they represent the strongest response the West can collectively muster, and has determined that even at their highest level, they are survivable.

Sanctions are a source of abiding conceptual confusion in the West. Though many colloquially refer to them as a strategy, they are in fact a stand-in, a cheap means of telling ourselves that we’re “doing something”—that we are containing Russia, in this case. They are such a feel-good proxy, especially for American politicians in the executive branch, that we rarely realize how poorly we reason about them.

The West’s approach to Ukraine serves as a good case study. What would a real strategy look like? For starters, it should have well-defined goals. Here is one possible, if somewhat controversial, set, just for the sake of argument: We should be trying to grind down Russian proxies in Ukraine’s east in order to compel the Kremlin to a negotiating table at which Crimea’s future status would be hammered out.1

President Obama was of course right to point out that there is no appetite anywhere in the West for sacrificing the life of a single Pomeranian (or for that matter Kansan) grenadier on the Pontic steppe for Ukraine’s territorial integrity—and that the Russians understand this fact intuitively. He was wrong, however, not to see that an escalatory ladder exists even if committing our own troops is off the table.

Given a sufficient population in Ukraine willing to fight and die for its country—admittedly, a question-mark—a policy of arming, training, and advising the country’s armed forces might compel Russia to commit more resources to the fight. If calibrated correctly, the fight would slowly, over time, force Moscow into further mobilization, an unpopular move domestically. And any overreaction—a Debaltseve-like attempt to strike further into Ukraine with superior forces—would only draw the Russian mastodon deeper into the tar pits. In this context, a sanctions regime would make sense, both as a pain-multiplier and as a demoralizer—an additional hit to the economy as the government fights a low-grade, messy war on its doorstep, and a vivid demonstration of Western solidarity-in-hostility.

But instead of thinking strategically—applying means over time to achieve desired ends—we sanction because it’s an easy thing to build consensus around. And instead of serving as the start of a policy of escalation meant to bring Russia to the negotiating table, “arming the Ukrainians” has instead come to represent a discrete, single step—a check-box that indicates a “tougher approach” than sanctions alone. After a lot of hemming and hawing, the Trump Administration has opted to check that box. This does not, however, mean that we should expect Russia to be more deterred than by sanctions alone. Our problem remains: there is no strategy, and the Kremlin knows it. Their response is in effect, “And if we don’t comply with your demands, what will you do then?” We have no credible answer.

And not only are threats devoid of strategy broadly not credible, but our demands themselves are no longer clear. What do we want to see happen, exactly? Up through the end of Obama’s term in office, sanctions were primarily about changing Moscow’s behavior in Ukraine. Obama’s outgoing retaliatory move for meddling in the 2016 elections—the seizure of Russian diplomatic properties in Maryland and the expulsion of embassy staff—was not sanctions-based. But with the passage of CAATSA, sanctions have become a generic tool, a means of “countering America’s adversaries.” The latest round of sanctions were officially put in place due to Russia’s “brazen pattern of malign activity” worldwide. There is no longer any off-ramp.2 Sanctions have become purely punitive—a means of expressing our displeasure, and not much more.

Finally, this conceptual muddle coupled with the very nature of targeted sanctions has put policymakers in an unhealthy position of getting to pick political winners and losers within Russia. Ideally this is not something we should be doing—in Russia or anywhere else—if for no other reason than our appalling track record.

Additionally, it invites the potential sanctionees, wealthy and powerful figures all, to come and throw their money around the West’s capitals, suborning its intellectuals and institutions, in a bid to avoid getting clipped. For reasons Karina and I laid out in our essay, on Russia in particular, an entire generation of experts is ill-equipped to make sound judgments on these matters, all considerations of corrupting influences aside.3

Given all this, why do I still defend Russia sanctions? For one, given both the state of the world today and the priorities of both the United States and Europe, it’s hard to imagine anything like a more coherent strategy on Russia emerging. Existing sanctions are very much a second-best approach, but the alternative is, I fear, nothing much at all.4 And a deterrent policy that ultimately fails to deter does not mean it is useless. Russia should continue to bear costs for the policy choices it makes, even if it decides that it can bear them.

But more broadly, there is a case for Russia sanctions that has nothing to do with deterring the Kremlin’s aggressive behavior. It was most elegantly expressed by Dr. Mark Galeotti, testifying to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs committee this past April. He was asked by MP Royston Smith whether targeting these “second order” oligarchs was potentially playing into Putin’s hands. Galeotti’s reply is worth quoting at length:

With sanctions, in some ways we encourage de-offshorisation. We encourage people to move money back into Russia and also these rich people to become more dependent upon Putin because, basically, they will remain rich from the opportunities that he throws in their direction. Conversely, if we think that what we are looking for is to cleanse Britain of dodgy money, which we might think is a good thing in its own right, then we want to get in his way. Even if in the short term it seems to be playing into Putin’s hands, in the long term it helps cleanse the British system.

Galeotti sets it up as an even trade-off: empowering Putin on the margins and in the short-to-medium term by letting him further consolidate control at home as the cost of lessening the influence of dirty money at home.

Me, I’d put my finger on these scales. On the one hand, the fear of Putin “consolidating” is overstated, because any of the oligarchs supposedly being pushed into his arms—the Yeltsin-era oligarchs we have been writing about in particular—aren’t terribly independent anyway. They are not plausible centers of resistance to Putinism.

And on the other hand, whatever benefits Putin reaps from the policy are bound to be short-lived. Russia’s economy is not in great shape, and Putin’s new government is not set to enact the difficult reforms that would be necessary to set it on a better course. Some analysts have privately said that even $100/barrel oil won’t help given the deep structural issues in play. Consolidating control over a slowly sinking ship? Have at it, Captain Putin.

This is not to downplay the continuing significance of Russia, especially a weakened and weakening Russia, on the world stage. Like the Ottoman Empire before it, a Russia in decline will be an enduring source of instability and headaches along Europe’s periphery for the foreseeable future. That reality, however, is I fear already baked in, and is not likely to be reversed. It can only be managed. Sanctions cannot be the whole answer, but they’re the best one we have at hand.

1. Many would no doubt object that the immediate return of Crimea is not among the policy goals. That’s an unrealistic ask up front, and not just in my opinion: Mikhail Khodorkovsky said as much when we interviewed him in late 2016. The specifics of the theoretical strategy shouldn’t distract us here though. They’re beside the point for our purposes.

2. Not only is there no clear way for Russia to comply with our demands because the demands have become so nebulous, it’s also unlikely that we can ever lift the sanctions for domestic political reasons: doing so is a sign of weakness.

3. This last problem is far from fatal, but it’s worth paying attention to. It’s the reason we wrote our essay in the first place.

4. Perhaps I am mistaken on this point. I suspect, though, that we will soon find out, as the European consensus on Russia sanctions starts to collapse under the strains of a fracturing Transatlantic relationship.

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The Champion of Little Plans

The well-known American architect Daniel Burnham once urged his fellow architects, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Big ideas attract big money and big power, argued Burnham. They hold sway over the imaginations of future generations, even when the idea is not realized within the lifetime of its originator. Burnham practiced what he preached, too, making a name for himself as the lead architect of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and later the author of the 1909 Plan for Chicago, both of which exemplified the big City Beautiful ideas of the time that sought to rebuild the messy, mixed-up city along monumental lines.

But Burnham was neither the first nor the last to champion Big Plans for remaking the city. In his Plan for Chicago, Burnham expresses admiration for Baron Haussmann, who in the mid-1800s replaced the medieval street network of Paris with the city’s distinctive long, straight boulevards (never mind the forced displacement or public debt involved). Meanwhile, many of Burnham’s contemporaries considered such big messy cities as Chicago unsalvageable and brought their Big Plans to the countryside instead. Ebenezer Howard and his followers believed that newly built Garden Cities could alleviate the crowding, poverty, crime, and disease of cities by syphoning their population off into comprehensively planned, low-density communities. Perhaps no utopian took Burnham’s doctrine of Big Plans as far as Le Corbusier, the Modernist architect whose unbuilt 1925 plan for Paris imagined a Haussmannization of sorts for the 20th century, wiping away a few square miles of the central city and replacing it with 18 identical cross-shaped skyscrapers surrounded by parkland and crisscrossed by freeways. Under the title of the “Radiant City,” Le Corbusier elaborated and promoted the principles that guided his Paris plan around the world through the International Congresses of Modern Architecture.

While none of these schemes were built exactly to plan after that of Haussmann—who had the will of an Emperor behind him—their spirit continued to animate orthodox city planning in America from the late 19th century onward. By 1961, with the advent of the New Frontier, the cult of Big Planning had not only grown, but American technology, bureaucracy, and political will had finally caught up with the dreams of Burnham, Howard, and Le Corbusier. In the early 1900s, the Federal government had extended the police power of local governments to planning and zoning their land for specific uses, and in 1926 the Supreme Court upheld their right to do so. The creation of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934 and the home-ownership program of the postwar GI Bill induced the mass construction of new suburban communities, radically transforming American transportation and land-use patterns. Concurrently, cities around the country began to raze and rebuild their most run-down and troubled districts, and this only accelerated after the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, which incentivized private developers to get in on the action. Finally, the Highway Act of 1956 provided funds for interstate highway construction, not only across the land but through the downtowns and neighborhoods of many American cities. Perhaps nowhere embraced the combined power of this “urban renewal” regime more enthusiastically than New York City, where power broker Robert Moses funneled Federal funds into razing great swaths of the urban fabric for new highways, parks, public housing, and private developments.

It was also in 1961 that Jane Jacobs thought otherwise.

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Jane Jacobs. Photo by Peter Holt.

Jane Jacobs grew up alongside all of these changes to the American urban landscape. Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1916, she moved to New York City at the height of the Great Depression to “find her fortune.” There she worked as a secretary in factories, a writer for a metallurgy trade journal, a propagandist for the U.S. government during and after World War II, and as a freelance writer for all sorts of magazines and newspapers, before finally taking a position as editor of schools and hospitals for Architectural Forum, one of the best-known architecture magazines of the day. There she was given an assignment that would set her on the path to upending much of American city planning and becoming one of the most influential urban thinkers of the 20th century.

When the urban renewal regime hit its stride in the mid-1950s, Jacobs was tasked with covering its implementation in cities around the country. Though initially optimistic about these Big Plans, the more she saw, the more doubts she harbored. These new districts put the assumptions of “Radiant Garden City Beautiful” planning to the test, and Jacobs found the results lacking. In particular, they failed to create a functional public realm—the most important organ of the city—and thus failed to make people’s lives safer, more convenient, more social, and full of opportunity. Worse, their construction required dispossessing hundreds of thousands of people of their property and tenancy, their communities, and their livelihoods. In short, Jacobs found that the hubris of urban renewers had led them to trust their own utopian orthodoxy more than the centuries of wisdom embodied in the real, existing city in front of them, run-down though it may be.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jacobs brought together her observations of the failures of urban renewal along with the criticisms of many others into what she describes in its opening lines as “an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” Taking down the Big Plans of Burnham, Howard, Le Corbusier, and their ilk in the very first chapter, she went on to reveal how they ignored the most important role a city must play: as a platform for the countless little plans of countless people. “Classified telephone directories tell us the greatest single fact about cities,” she explains, “the immense numbers of parts that make up a city, and the immense diversity of those parts.” The very density, the street life, the mixtures of uses, and states of repair that urban renewers sought to eliminate from cities, in fact, are part of what enables ordinary people to fill the pages of the phone book with their many plans. Those basic ingredients provide a medium for city dwellers to pursue their ambitions and to live their everyday lives.

How does this density and diversity enable urban life? Consider the neighborhood bodega in a big city. Its lifeblood is the constant flow of foot traffic generated by the surrounding urban fabric—the many overlapping entrances and exits of the “ballet of the sidewalk,” as Jacobs famously described it. Large concentrations of both residential and working uses, connected by a walkable network of streets, draw people out at different times of the day, allowing the shop to open earlier and stay open later, thus reaping more profit and providing more convenience to customers. In other words, just like a bee pollinates flowers as it collects food for its young, the many customers that shop at the bodega unknowingly collaborate to create more choice, convenience and opportunity in the urban environment, simply by living their daily lives. Meanwhile, this virtuous cycle between pedestrian and shopkeeper also adds more watchful sets of “eyes on the street” to keep it safe from crimes of opportunity, and builds up a loose network of casual relationships between neighbors, a fund of “social capital” to be used in times of need.

As Jacobs argues in the concluding chapter of Death and Life, such thickets of complex relationships between diverse actors and actions are the modus operandi of cities. Cities are “problems of organized complexity,” where the success of every park, every street corner, every business is determined by multiple interrelated processes, and any intervention requires feeling out a tangled web of causes and effects. No single mind—no matter how educated or naturally talented—can grasp, control, or manufacture all of the details and relationships of a city. As Jacobs put it in a 1981 speech, “Genuine, rich diversity of the built environment is always the product of many, many different minds, and at its richest is also the product of different periods of time with their different aims and fashions.” Almost by definition, Big Plans leave no room for the open-ended, multifaceted evolution that makes a city a city.

Death and Life marked a turning point in the history of urban renewal, and, along with many scandals, protests, and a turn toward fiscal conservatism in the decades following its publication, Jacobs helped topple the prevailing Radiant Garden City Beautiful paradigm of city building. But she did not stop there. In six more major books, as well as a lifetime of speeches, articles, and essays recently collected in Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs, she extended her ideas on the self-organization of cities to the realms of economics, ethics, and the rise and fall of civilizations.

While she was writing Death and Life, Jacobs came to a couple of conclusions that would lead her to write her next book, The Economy of Cities. The first was that a city cannot survive on good urbanism alone. As she would later tell an interviewer, “It doesn’t matter what else cities have, what grand temples they have, what beautiful scenery, wonderful people, anything else—if their economy doesn’t work.” The second realization was that the impetus behind the efforts of the Big Planners was in some ways an economic one: to rein in the unruly, explosive growth of cities that almost always accompanies a developing, expanding economy. Urban growth overwhelms infrastructure, crowds out established people and uses, obliterates old customs and institutions, and tramples over nearby agricultural land—all issues that city planning sought to address. “City growth patterns, in sum, are messy and leave messes in their wake,” Jacobs wrote near the end of her life. “They insult trust in order and offend authority of all kinds; perhaps that is their most unpardonable perversity.” In other words, beneath many of the issues of physical form that Jacobs took up in Death and Life, mysteries of economics remained unresolved.

As Jacobs pursued these loose ends, she began to believe that the birthrate of new local enterprises—new items in the phonebook—lay at the heart of economic life in cities. The large companies of her day began small, and if they did not themselves begin in the local economy, then they depended directly upon it for ideas, skills, and suppliers. Likewise, the big cities of her day began small, and when they grew, they did so through the proliferation of little plans, not the growth of a single big plan. Most cities start with a handful of major exports as their economic base, Jacobs observed, but as they grow, their internal economy serving local consumers and producers becomes larger and more diverse than their export economies. Furthermore, the cities with the most durable economies do not survive only by retaining their initial export businesses, but rather by cultivating the replacement of exporting companies as they inevitably fold or leave with new locally grown exports. Thus, Jacobs concluded, local entrepreneurship and the conditions that enable those many little plans to take root are of the essence.

So she read business history after business history until she literally became so bored of the repeating storylines that she could identify many of the recurring economic ingredients that successful companies require to thrive. Some of these ideas have become commonplace today, like the importance of spinoffs and venture capital. Likewise, it has now become nearly a truism that the fund of “human capital” in a city—the skills, talents, and education of individuals—plays a vital role in its economy. As Jacobs put it, “The greater the sheer numbers and varieties of divisions of labor already achieved in an economy, the greater the economy’s inherent capacity for adding still more kinds of goods and services.”

Yet Jacobs also found that economists, economic development agencies, and government programs of the time had a dismal track record when it came to identifying and nurturing these conditions. In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she notes that the vast majority of funds spent on ostensible economic development are in fact “transactions of decline” that have historically led nations into ruin. She argues that the millions of dollars spent on luring factories and corporate headquarters, subsidies and infrastructure schemes for rural areas, unremitting war work, and foreign aid are all primarily political means of holding together a decaying empire—not genuine productive investments that lead to long-term, sustainable growth.

Meanwhile, how are such schemes funded? Tax revenue diverted away from the nation’s most productive cities, money which could keep the entrepreneurial engines of the national economy revving. Without continuous reinvestment in little plans, Jacobs argued, urban economies gradually decline, or when natural or economic disaster strikes, they have difficulty recovering. No additional cities spring into life in the places that most sorely need them, either, not without thriving older sibling cities to use as springboards. And eventually, even the milch cows themselves run dry, and the many transactions of decline along with them.

Today, this situation has not much improved. On the surface, places like Silicon Valley seem to exemplify Jacobs’s emphasis on entrepreneurship, but the digital economy of the Bay Area is actually closer to middle-aged than we like to admit. As Jacobs argues, the genuine innovations of tomorrow are more likely to come out of some obscure corner of a local urban economy than from the economic giants of today. Meanwhile, the emphasis on this entrepreneurial approach to economic development has been mostly confined by industry, geography, and demography. Too many people, places, and sectors have been left out. At the very moment that popular culture has begun to fetishize entrepreneurship, America is at a 30-year low in new business starts. As recently as 2015 nearly two-thirds of U.S. metro areas lost more firms than they created. Meanwhile, the majority of economic development agencies are stuck in the same old paradigm Jacobs describes (best exemplified by the obscene contest for Amazon’s HQ2) in which cities compete to lure mature corporations to relocate with tax incentives. This paradigm continues despite its proven ineffectiveness and its bloated price tag: more than $65 billion in public funds from 2000 to 2015.

There are a few glimmers of hope here and there, like the refocus of some rural states on diversifying their economies, emerging philosophies like “economic gardening,” and efforts to extend the tech industry beyond the usual (coastal) suspects through programs like Rise of the Rest, but in general I suspect Jacobs would be appalled by how slowly we have responded to this wasteful state of affairs, and by our continued failure to effectively support the entrepreneurial life of cities.

For Jacobs’s insights and passionate defense of the bottom-up nature of cities and economies, libertarians have often celebrated her as a kind of “anti-planner” who tore down the failed attempts of government to plan on behalf of the people, and who argued for the infallible, spontaneous order of markets and cities. Some have therefore compared her to Hayek, but that’s not quite right. It would be truer to say that Jacobs was a champion of little plans rather than of no plans at all. There is no doubt that Jacobs argued for the justice and wisdom of enabling individuals, communities, and businesses to make their own plans. But Jacobs also reserved an active yet subtle role for governments in preserving and cultivating an environment where these little plans can come to fruition, and even in making their own “collections of little plans.”

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St. Lawrence, Toronto. Photo by Nate Storring.

In the realm of city building, Jacobs once gave the example of Toronto’s St. Lawrence neighborhood, which was built from the ground-up in the 1970s to the 1990s. Although the effort was led by city planners, they had no final product in mind. Instead, they let the neighborhood make itself up as it went along within a loose framework of streets, density limits, and public amenities. When it came to uses and design, much was left up to the individual developers of each parcel, leading to a surprisingly urban end result.

When it came to the economic roles of government, Jacobs put forth a similar approach of limited but active interventions. First and foremost, Jacobs emphasized the importance of the widely accepted role of government in detecting, punishing and preventing crimes that affect small businesses. While violent crime per 100,000 people has plummeted by half since the 1990s, one only need observe how we handled the 2008 housing crash to know how serious we are about punishing white collar crimes. To Jacobs’s point, some analysts have suggested that one underappreciated impact of the crash has been to suppress entrepreneurship, as would-be entrepreneurs lost the equity held in their now foreclosed homes.

Secondly, and perhaps more controversially, Jacobs believed that big business could be as corrosive to the long-term health of the economy as big government, and she suggested that government must act as a “third force” protecting the still incipient interests of young firms from established ones. Echoing a recent op-ed in the Washington Post by American Conservative executive director John A. Burtka, Jacobs argued that the monocultures of big business undermine our local communities and economies (including the next generation of big business, she might have added). The efficient, self-contained conditions that large corporations need to survive are opposed in most ways to those that new businesses need. Breakaway employees, independent suppliers, small-scale investment, even a fine-grain built environment rarely serve the needs of corporations. However, whereas established interests have the political and economic power to shape environments to their ends, emerging interests generally do not. Unless, that is, government makes a point of listening to what bubbles up from below.

One important tool Jacobs underlined for protecting the interests of young firms is Federal antitrust law. For example, in The Question of Separatism, she recounts the well-known antitrust case against Standard Oil, wherein the Supreme Court dissolved the monopoly into more than 30 different companies in 1911. She observes that this action did not kill the oil industry. On the contrary, many of the new companies grew to become larger than Standard Oil itself, including Exxon, Mobil, and Standard Oil of California. Likewise, the breakup of the Bell Telephone System and the American electric utilities quickly paved the way for new innovations and small suppliers around the country. Jacobs held government monopolies to the same standard as well, advocating for the privatization—though also the effective regulation—of public utilities, transportation, waste disposal, and mail. Thus, Jacobs ironically found these limits on big business to be crucial to building a business-friendly climate in the long term.

Finally, Jacobs believed that regulation needed to evolve. Like many conservatives, she saw how onerous regulation could be, especially to small businesses without the knowledge or resources to navigate the red tape maze properly. But she also believed regulation was sometimes necessary. As Jacobs once told an interviewer at The New Colonist, “I never said that government was messing around too much in our lives. I said it was doing stupid things. That’s not the same thing at all. It may be doing too little in our lives and still be doing stupid things.” The point for Jacobs was to recognize where the market excels, where it fails, and where it does outright harm. For that reason, she was a particular advocated of open-ended performance standards, like fuel economy standards, which gave government a way to challenge established players to do better, while taking advantage of the diversity, competition, and creativity of the market.

Likewise, Jacobs advocated for reconsidering regulations more frequently. Governments at all levels excel at adding legislation but generally fail to remove outdated legislation. For example, up until last year New York City had a Prohibition era “cabaret law” on the books that forbade dancing, eating, and drinking in the same establishment without a license. Needless to say, its original intent had long been resolved, and its enforcement had become arbitrary. City Councillor Rafael Espinal, a Democrat, led the successful fight to have the regulation removed and since then has helped institute an Office of Nightlife to support the city’s nightlife businesses, while reducing noise complaints and crime. Jacobs argued that we need more such responsive, pragmatic politicians to review the original intent of our laws, to listen carefully to how they affect businesses and individuals, and to respond quickly and appropriately.

While cities and economies have a life of their own, Jacobs argued that we cannot take that life for granted. It is not automatic. It requires continual observation, cultivation and pruning, and government has a role to play in keeping these systems open to new growth and new directions, not stuck in the Big Plans of yesterday.

If we believe Jacobs that the greatest good in city building and economic development is to create an environment where little plans can thrive, it cuts through many of our tired political formulations. No single bogeyman, whether big business or big government, billionaires or unions, can take full blame for our nation’s everyday injustices, failures, and follies. In fact, all too often their interests intertwine in maintaining the dysfunctional status quo. Instead, Jacobs observed, the devil is in the details. It all depends on how the complex interactions of competition and regulation, real estate development, and city planning add up to an environment that serves or squelches the many little plans of many people.

Daniel Burnham was right that Big Plans capture the imaginations of people with money and power. But Big Plans are all too often squelchers, not servants, of little plans, whether they come from the public sector or the private sector. So if we want to revive the dynamism of our national economy, to diversify our local economies, or to kickstart the ballet of the sidewalk just outside our doors, perhaps we should recall Jane Jacobs’s rebuttal instead: “Make no plan bigger than it must be.”

The post The Champion of Little Plans appeared first on The American Interest.

A Color Revolution Russia Can Live With

Since the beginning of anti-government protests in Armenia in April, international observers have fixated, often with perplexity, on Moscow’s reaction to the events in Yerevan. Considering the Russian government’s general stance on mass protests, especially in its “near abroad,” it was only natural to expect a negative reaction from the world’s leading opponent of “color revolutions.” Moreover, if one looks at the nature of the protests in Armenia—centered on an opposition figure who had built his reputation on anti-corruption and anti-oligarchy rhetoric, going against the head of state who had already been in power for a decade and opted for prolonging his rule—the parallels with Russia’s own political situation were eerie.

Indeed, many observers compared Nikol Pashinyan to Russia’s leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny, and Armenian mass rallies against Serzh Sargsyan’s attempt to stay in power beyond ten years to the protests against Putin’s more than 18 years in power. Some Russian observers went so far as to compare the events in Armenia to the early stages of Ukraine’s Maidan, explicitly trying to frame the protests as anti-Russian. Russian state television, in its usual manner, accused the protestors of possible “Western connections.” Combined with Pashinyan’s previous criticism of Eurasian integration, the Velvet Revolution seemed to contain all the ingredients for a harsh reaction from Moscow—even if in stylistics and intensity the criticism would lag behind that unleashed previously against the main actors of Georgia’s Rose Revolution (2003) and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004) and Euromaidan (2014).

Despite the odds, however, Moscow welcomed the peaceful transition of power in Armenia and welcomed Pashinyan as the new leader of one of Russia’s closest allies—indeed, its last ally in the strategically important South Caucasus. Russia’s foreign policy community, and by all appearances its leadership, concluded with near unanimity that the events in Yerevan did not pose a major threat to Moscow. A look at their commentary, and at Pashinyan’s careful positioning in the aftermath of the revolution, helps reveal why.

First and by far most importantly, the Russian expert community noted the impossibility of any radical pivot away from Moscow due to Yerevan’s high dependence on Russia. As Sergey Markedonov, one of Russia’s leading Caucasus experts, put it in late April, “Divergence from Russia is fraught with huge risks for the country; therefore, if successful, the supporters of the ‘Eurasian skeptic’ Pashinyan will most likely have to change his position by 180 degrees.”

Armenia is indeed highly dependent on Russia, first of all for security reasons. Russia continues to play a crucial role in Nagorno-Karabakh conflict resolution and, most importantly, in helping Yerevan hold its ground against Ankara-backed Azerbaijani revisionism. In the sphere of economics, Russia accounts for roughly a quarter of Armenia’s trade turnover; in 2017, 26.7 percent of Armenia’s exports went to Russia. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians working in Russia have periodically sent remittances back home, with their total share amounting to nearly $900 million in 2016, a huge amount given Russia’s weakening currency and Armenia’s stagnant economy. According to some estimates, around two-thirds of Armenian industry is controlled by Russian capital; the country is almost totally dependent on imports of Russian energy.* Armenia also hosts Russian military bases on its soil, which many in Armenia consider their only warranty against prospective Turkish invasion. Thus, even the theoretical possibility of an anti-Russian policy being implemented was dismissed as highly unlikely.

Part of Moscow’s calmness can be explained by Armenia’s recent adoption of the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with the European Union, which it signed in November 2017. In political terms, this agreement compensated for Armenia’s refusal to sign the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) with the European Union back in 2013 and its reversion to joining the Eurasian Economic Union with Moscow. Symbolically speaking, CEPA allowed Yerevan to accomplish its promise to diversify Armenia’s foreign policy, having direct engagement (if not integration) with both Moscow and the European Union. But practically speaking, CEPA is viewed as a rather shallow agreement by Western-leaning experts in Armenia, due to its lack of a free trade clause as a result of restraints that participation in the EEU had put on Armenia. CEPA is thus a symbolic move that Moscow has officially allowed, depriving any Eurasian skeptics of arguments against “Moscow’s rigid stance.” Thus, in the eyes of the Russian government, Armenia was pre-emptively pacified in terms of a potential pro-European pivot.

The second factor affecting Pashinyan’s reception in Moscow was his carefully crafted messaging about future relations. He went to great lengths to signal both internally and externally his plans to continue Armenia’s strategic ally relations with Russia. That message was heard loud and clear. In his analysis for Valdai Club, Alexander Markarov writes: “Over the past few days Pashinyan has repeatedly stated and stressed, both at rallies and during meetings with State Duma deputies who arrived in Yerevan, that Armenia will not change its foreign policy course within his premiership, withdrawing from the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Union.” After repeating this message consistently in various venues throughout late April and early May, all Russian think tanks from the rather moderate Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) to the conservative Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS) concluded that Pashinyan was safe for Russia.

Any final doubts that Moscow might have harbored were cast away after Pashinyan’s talks with President Putin in Sochi, where he reaffirmed his commitment to strengthening Armenia-Russia relations. Despite satisfaction with how Pashinyan is handling the transition for now, though, a few cautious voices from Moscow have pointed out that Russia must watch closely how the West approaches Armenia’s new leader. As Markarov writes: “From the Russian point of view, it is important to ensure that, in the context of a deepening conflict with the West, the latter does not seize the initiative in relations with Armenia, which signed an agreement with the EU this past November.”

Some Armenian experts conclude that Russia had learned its lessons with Ukraine and thus acted much more calmly with Armenia. The logic behind this explanation is that in the case of a more assertive Russian stance toward the protestors, the Sargsyan regime would have been involved in violent clashes that might have left dozens killed and injured. And this might have compromised Sargsyan’s friendly regime and made Russia’s involvement, and Armenia’s unequivocal orientation toward Moscow, problematic.

But although the Ukrainian experience may have played some role in Moscow’s calculation, the key factor was Armenia’s cornered position: its continued dependence on Russia in terms of security, economy, and energy. Moscow, knowing all too well how dependent Yerevan remains, swiftly concluded that no considerable pivot away from Russia was feasible—even before Pashinyan went all out to prove that he seeks only domestic transformation and not to change Armenia’s foreign policy orientation.

Even if Pashinyan himself, or his liberal pro-Western support base, wanted to navigate the country closer to Western standards of democracy, a major foreign policy change would remain highly unlikely. And given how marginal the South Caucasus is for EU and U.S. policymakers, they are unlikely to make courting Armenia a priority any time soon. For all the changes at the top in Yerevan, Putin is still sitting pretty.

* Correction: An earlier version of this article here suggested that Armenia and Russia were geographic neighbors. We regret the error.

The post A Color Revolution Russia Can Live With appeared first on The American Interest.

The Real Viktor Orbán

As a small boy working in the fields in his native village of Felscut, Viktor Orbán learned an important lesson: When you spot a rat, kill it immediately before it can bite. Given that the Hungarian Prime Minister has become seemingly unassailable, expert at putting down threats to his authority before they can credibly challenge him, this would seem to be a lesson that has served him well.

Nor is this the only way in which Hungary’s system of government is a reflection of Orbán’s personal history. Critics as well as admirers have acknowledged Orbán’s charm and intelligence, but as a boy Hungary’s future Prime Minister displayed the same pugnacity that today bedevils his opponents. He was, in his own words, “an unbelievably bad child. Badly misbehaved, cheeky, violent. Not at all likeable. I was thrown out of all the schools.” Although small for his years, he gained a reputation for fiercely retaliating if provoked. This tendency has not deserted him: “If I’m hit once, I hit back twice,” he has said. Talking to students at the high school that he attended as a youth, he added: “Politics is a battle . . . If I stand in a field with a sword in my hand and three people attack me, I can’t start arguing or moralizing; then there is only one task: slaughter all three of them.”

However, as his biographer Paul Lendvai has recognized, Orbán does not depend on naked force like Vladimir Putin, with whom he is often mistakenly compared. Through the distribution of patronage Orbán has assembled around himself a great army of devotees—one that extends far beyond his Administration, the military, the police, and the intelligence services into the courts, universities, broadcasting, the press, business, and even sports administration. To be sure, this process of stacking the decks with Orbán loyalists is not complete. But it is one that looks set to continue during his fourth term of office, and which has led to the emergence of a new privileged class, similar in significant respects to the nomenklatura that existed under communism and from whose depredations Orbán once pledged to rescue Hungary.

At an early stage, Orbán discovered that his natural combativeness and desire for victory—preferably by an overwhelming margin—play well with a nation that has experienced more than its share of crushing national defeats and humiliations. His longstanding campaign against the Hungarian-born American financier and philanthropist George Soros is a reflection of Orbán’s need for an enemy—and of the fact that there is no one in Hungarian politics or society remotely worthy of the role. By putting Soros’s support for immigration at the center of the Hungarian election campaign, Orbán turned his former benefactor, now number one enemy, into an unwitting election aide. The strategy paid off: On April 8, the 58-year-old Orbán won a third consecutive term as Prime Minister (having previously filled the role from 1998 to 2002), and secured a two-thirds supermajority that gives Fidesz, the ruling party, the power to alter the constitution. In all, Fidesz won 133 of the 199 parliamentary seats by picking up 49.6 percent of the vote. The extreme nationalist Jobbik party (19.2 percent) won 26 seats and the Social Democrats (12 percent) won 20 seats.

As his supporters were quick to point out, this was as clear an endorsement as any European leader has achieved in recent times. And since Fidesz won almost half the popular vote, it cannot be explained away as the result of gerrymandering: Almost any imaginable electoral system would have given Orbán a substantial victory. That the 2018 election was free, in the sense that a near-majority got the outcome they voted for, there can be no doubt.

This highly combative and supremely self-confident leader now promises to punish his enemies within Hungary and to directly challenge the European Union, not just over immigration quotas and post-Brexit funding arrangements, but over plans for Europe’s political future. His aim is to reverse the direction of the European project, abandoning the goal of an ever closer union in favor of restoring the power of member states. Whatever Orbán’s faults, he cannot be accused of lacking ambition.

In the past some conservative commentators, myself included, have been reluctant or slow to criticize Orbán. We share his distaste for political correctness and his dislike of the transnational progressive agenda, and admire his determination to stand up to the EU bureaucracy in Brussels, as well as his considerable political skills. But the fact that many conservatives share his dislikes does not make him a conservative; he neither describes himself as such nor behaves like one. Nor should Orbán’s conservative sympathizers conclude that the election was fair as well as free. Since his surprise defeat in 2002, which caused him to rethink his approach to key political issues, nothing in Orbán’s history has suggested that he favors a level playing field; in fact, quite the reverse is true. There is no good reason to doubt the finding of the election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who declared that the vote was characterized by “intimidating and xenophobic rhetoric, media bias, and opaque campaign financing” as well as “a pervasive overlap between state and ruling party resources.”

Some may object that in isolating one election and seeking to impose a single standard of “fairness” irrespective of context, the OSCE obscures the political direction of travel in Hungary. But if one examines the findings of its reports on the 2010 and 2014 elections, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Hungary under Orbán has become increasingly centralized, that media bias has become decidedly more marked, and that policies with the nominal aim of creating a civic-minded middle class—without which no democratic society can long prosper—have in fact been used to reward loyalists. Not surprisingly, Hungary performs worse in the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators today than it did a decade ago, while the Heritage Foundation’s most recent Index of Economic Freedom reports a decline in government integrity, classing Hungary as “repressed.”

Despite these trends and Hungary’s lackluster economic performance, Orbán has undoubtedly given many thousands of Hungarians, especially those living in rural areas and in cities other than Budapest, a greater sense of identity and national self-confidence, while satisfying their obvious desire for international attention—even if much recent comment has been critical. Indeed, few contemporary leaders have faced as fierce a barrage of international criticism as Orbán has. In the U.S. media Orbán is routinely described as belonging to the far Right. John McCain once described him as a neo-fascist; others have dispensed with the “neo.” There appears to be broad agreement that that he is a leading proponent of a new wave of populism that is sweeping the Western world, a claim that is advanced by those who regard populism as the political equivalent of an infectious disease. He is also accused of anti-Semitism. But to truly understand Orbán requires looking beyond the clichés, to work out which of the accusations leveled against him have merit and which do not.

It is true that Orbán no longer aspires to play a leading role in integrating the Central European states into a wider Atlantic community based on the market economy, democracy, and the rule of law. By this point, he has entirely abandoned his former commitment to that cause. But the “far Right” label does as much to mislead as to inform. It is doubtful, for instance, whether Orbán’s highly interventionist and increasingly centralized economic policy can be so described. This has included bank nationalization combined with anti-banker rhetoric; the near-complete state monopolization of energy utilities, reversing previous governments’ encouragement of foreign private investment in the sector; and the banning of private majority shareholding, both foreign and domestic, in environmental utilities.

If Orbán’s economic policy cannot sensibly be described as right-wing, neither can his foreign policy be placed on the usual Left/Right spectrum. For example, his warm embrace of Putin is not the reflection of political ideology or principle. It may simply be a sign that Orbán, having become disenchanted with the European and U.S. political establishments, has concluded that there is no reason why he should not play Russia and the West off against one another. Orbán’s friend, the novelist Tibor Fischer, who has put up spirited defenses of the Hungarian Prime Minister in the British media, has put the matter succinctly: “Orbán isn’t about Right or Left. Orbán is all about Orbán. Orbán is about winning.”

Though he lacks a defining philosophy, Orbán does employ certain ingrained political habits familiar to Hungary. He does not resemble Putin so much as János Kádár, the Hungarian communist chief who helped the Russians crush the 1956 revolution but who subsequently enjoyed a considerable degree of popularity during his three decades in office. As during the Kádár era, the authority of the leader remains unquestioned within a highly disciplined party whose members seldom, if ever, stray off message. Like Kádár, Orbán tends to regard those who oppose the leader as enemies of the people and nation, and treats them accordingly. “There’s a legally elected and sovereign government,” said Zoltan Kovacs, Orbán’s spokesman following the election. “When unelected people or organizations lobby or speak out against the government, that is basically against the country.”

Orbán, who has an unrivaled grasp of the fears and anxieties of his complex countrymen, understands well their yearning for the stability and continuity of the Kadar years of goulash communism. At the same time, he recognizes the enduring public regard for Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian regent from 1920 to 1944 who struggled to restore Hungarian pride and land after the Treaty of Trianon, but who formed an alliance with Hitler after the failure to reach an alliance with the Western powers. Orbán’s repeated praise for Horthy may have puzzled outsiders, but his exploitation of the public’s enduring regard for these two figures is one of the keys to his political success. As the late Tibor Pethő, a distinguished Hungarian journalist, put it: “The feelings for Horthy and Kadar are not mutually exclusive. . .they splendidly coexist in the average Hungarian soul.”

The term “fascist” has become increasingly a term of abuse used by those on the Left to describe those on the Right, and consequently lacks precision. But if the term is intended to signify adherence to a distinctive political philosophy, he may be acquitted of the charge. Orbán may well have a superficial interest in political ideas, but they do not form the basis of his approach to policy. Orbán is not about principle or ideology of any kind.

A great deal of the animus directed towards Orbán internationally is the result of his opposition to immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, and his decision to build a high-tech wall along the borders with Serbia and Croatia to prevent the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants beginning in 2015. He has since asked the European Union to pay half of the $1 billion cost. Such are Hungary’s deep historic fears of invasion and foreign interference: Had Orbán not acted swiftly and decisively to oppose Merkel’s initial open-door policy, his party would have been almost certainly swept aside, and Hungary’s political institutions with it. The consequences for Central Europe, where majority opinion strongly favors Orbán’s approach on the issue, would have been calamitous—and the resultant shock waves sufficient to produce a greater crisis in the European Union than any it has known.

The Western journalists who poured into Budapest in the late summer of 2015 concentrated on the often pitiable plight of some migrants, ignoring the physical and administrative problems their huge surge presented and the government’s determined attempt to uphold the Dublin Regulation. They largely ignored, too, the unreasonable demands of the migrants in seeking to use Hungary as a conduit to the country of their choice, as well as instances of violence and lawlessness. They failed utterly to grasp the enormity of what was at stake.

None of this, however, is to justify Orbán’s vilification campaign against George Soros, the man who once provided Orbán with a scholarship to Oxford—to study grassroots democracy, ironically enough—and who symbolizes the liberal internationalism that Orbán so despises. This campaign, which began in 2016 and intensified with moves to close Soros’s Central European University (whose future remains uncertain), became the central element of the Fidesz election drive in 2018. The party created hundreds of giant posters displaying a grinning Mr. Soros besides the words, “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh” followed in smaller letters by the message “99 percent reject illegal immigration.”

The campaign inevitably strengthened the accusations of anti-Semitism often leveled against Orbán. Until this year, it was possible to defend the Hungarian Prime Minister against the charge, since it was difficult to find instances where he had done or said anything explicitly anti-Semitic. Moreover, it could be pointed out that he had inaugurated Holocaust Memorial Day, passed a Holocaust denial law, and had announced a zero-tolerance policy on anti-Semitism. Orbán’s defenders have at times conceded that he is willing to cynically exploit the anti-Semitism of others for political advantage—hence the invariable descriptions of Soros as an “international financier” and the awarding of state prizes to a journalist and a broadcaster with rabid anti-Semitic views—even while insisting he did not harbor such sentiments himself.

The anti-Soros posters have made such a defense less credible. And in a speech delivered shortly before the election, Orbán stooped lower than ever before:

 I know that this struggle is difficult for all of us. I understand if some of us are even scared. It is understandable because our opponent is different than we are. Not straightforward, but hiding, not direct but crafty, not honest but base, not national but international, doesn’t believe in labor [but] rather speculates with money, has no country of its own because he feels the world is his in its entirety. Not generous but an avenger and always attacks the heart, especially, if the heart is colored red-white-and-green [Hungary’s national colors]. . .Now we are sending home uncle Gyuri [a nickname for “George”] together with his network. We ask you to go back to America, make the Americans happy, not us!

Jewish organizations were not the only ones shocked by the crude, unambiguously anti-Semitic nature of these remarks, which have left a permanent stain on Orbán’s reputation. Meanwhile Antal Rogán, the minister in charge of Orbán’s cabinet office who heads up his propaganda efforts, has since been rewarded for his role in the election with additional powers, despite past involvement in financial scandals that would have destroyed the careers of ministers in most democratic countries. Janos Lazar, Rogan’s longstanding rival as aspiring heir apparent, the one Minister who appeared to have a license to dissent from the party line, has announced his withdrawal from national politics, but is rumored to have been sacked.

Corruption and cronyism go hand in hand in Orbán’s soft authoritarian state. Direkt36, a popular online news portal specializing in the subject, has exposed graft in Budapest’s municipal government, published embarrassing details of state contracts won by companies owned by members of Orbán’s family, and reported on a prostitution ring that allegedly catered to legislators and senior government officials. Corruption, of course, is a serious problem throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and certainly did not begin with Orbán. But anecdotal evidence, as well as Hungary’s falling position in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, suggests that the problem is worsening, and may even have become institutionalized.

The country’s public procurement system clearly suffers from endemic corruption, discouraging the foreign investment that the country still badly needs if its sorry wage levels—among the lowest in the European Union—are to rise. Between 65 and 70 percent of public tenders are believed to involve corrupt transactions, with the government handing out public funds to those with close links to the ruling party. More than half of companies expect to give “gifts” to procurement officials to secure contracts. This is par for the course, and hardly a shock to ordinary Hungarians; according to a recent opinion poll, 60 percent of voters believe their government to be corrupt.

Cronyism and the need to reward loyalists explains the abysmal quality of some of those appointed to high office. Tibor Fischer may be Orbán’s friend, but this has not stopped him from complaining about the incompetence and dishonesty of those in Orbán’s entourage: “Pure suits and dullards abound . . . There are a lot of people close to Orbán who I wouldn’t trust with a ten-pound note to go to the shop to buy a bar of chocolate. And I am questioning their probity and their competence. If I know about the dodginess of some of his entourage, most of Budapest must know, let alone Orbán. So why does he keep them on?”

András Lánczi, a long-time Orbán adviser and Rector of Corvinus University in Budapest, has suggested that what critics describe as corruption is not really corruption at all but a policy of rewarding entrepreneurs in order to build a strong Hungary and a prosperous middle class: “If something is done in the national interest, then it is not corruption.” What others term corruption is in fact the “supreme policy” of the ruling party, he has said. Since risk-taking is at the core of entrepreneurship—and handing out favors to business cronies reduces or even eliminates risk—Lanczi’s defense rests on a poor understanding of economics and of the means by which a civically conscious middle class comes into being.

At present, the Hungarian government is moving forward with an “anti-Soros law” that would force non-governmental organizations dealing with migration to seek licenses from Hungary’s interior ministry, involving vetting by security services. If granted a license, an NGO would potentially have to pay a 25 percent tax on foreign funding. Soros has responded by announcing that he will withdraw his staff from Hungary.

Orbán is not alone in being irritated by George Soros’s claim to have captured the moral high ground on immigration, and his Open Society Foundations’ tendency to treat opposing arguments as illegitimate or racially motivated. Like other populists, Orbán grasps that a division has opened up between large swathes of the population and liberal elites on this and related issues. But that should not stay conservatives’ criticism of measures that will further stifle the growth of civil society. Thanks to 45 years of communism, there is scarcely a tradition of private patronage in Hungary. Apart from the ones backed by Soros, non-governmental organizations are either very small or poorly funded—or turn out on closer inspection not to be independent at all, but rather funded by the government and available to do its bidding.

This state of affairs is presumably what Orbán meant when he talked of creating an “illiberal democracy.” But when Orbán has slain all his enemies, liberal or otherwise, his country will have to find a better way forward—or Hungary will have no democracy worthy of the name.

 József Debreczeni, a former adviser, has written: “From that point on, he spent his time preparing so that if he ever won power again, he wouldn’t lose it.”

The post The Real Viktor Orbán appeared first on The American Interest.

Russia and Egypt are Growing Closer

As Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi begins his second term, a new chapter in Egyptian-Russian relations is being written. Disappointed by U.S. policy, Cairo has strengthened its ties with Moscow. The new trajectory stems in part from the lack of robust American engagement, which has left an open door for Russia to make inroads at Washington’s expense.

Last month, Egypt and Russia signed a 50-year agreement in Moscow to establish a Russian Industrial Zone (RIZ) in the Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZone), an ambitious economic development project initially launched by al-Sisi in 2014. Egypt hopes that the RIZ project, signed during the 11th meeting of the joint Egyptian-Russian commission, will attract up to $70 billion in investments and create 35,000 jobs. The Russians plan to use the RIZ to manufacture a vast array of goods including heavy trucks and engines. For Moscow, which faces continued U.S. and EU sanctions, the project would provide an access point for exporting goods to overseas markets—especially to the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

The RIZ is not the first sign of deepening ties between Russia and Egypt. In his second visit to Cairo since Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power this past December, Russian President Vladimir Putin presided over the signing of a nuclear power plant deal that includes a $25 billion loan from Moscow. The Dabaa nuclear plant, with four reactors and a capacity of five gigawatts, is scheduled for completion by 2029, according to Russia’s state-owned nuclear operator Rosatom.

In April, Moscow also resumed civilian flights to Egypt after an Islamic State affiliate bombed a Russian Metrojet flight in 2015, killing 224 people. The flow of Russian tourists to Egypt had subsequently stopped, damaging Egypt’s struggling tourism industry. Direct flights from Russia to Egypt’s main tourist resorts—Hurghada and Sharm el-Sheikh—have yet to resume. However, after talks on May 14 with his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shoukry, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that continuing close cooperation with Egypt on security issues was hastening the resumption of direct air link to the Red Sea resorts.

These specific developments reflect the general warming trend in a relationship between Cairo and Moscow that has deepened over the past few years. Egyptian exports to Russia rose by some 26 percent in 2017, reaching a record $3.8 billion, and the Russia-Egyptian Business Council claims bilateral trade could increase from $6 billion to $10 billion in 2018. In the energy sector, Russian oil giant Rosneft bought a 30-percent stake in Egypt’s Zohr gas field for $1.125 billion last year, becoming a key player in developing one of the largest gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea. Further, Rosneft and Fleet Energy signed a framework agreement in late May to explore a joint venture for providing gas supplies to Egypt.

Since 2014, Egypt has been increasingly turning to Russia for arms sales. The decision to do so was initially triggered by al-Sisi’s disappointment with Washington after the 2013 removal of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi’s regime. When the Obama Administration halted the delivery of previously contracted weapons systems including F-16 fighter jets and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, and canceled joint military exercises between Egyptian and American armed forces, al-Sisi and Putin started to talk. And the disappointment did not end with Obama’s term in office. Despite apparently warm personal relations between al-Sisi and President Donald Trump, in August 2017 the Trump Administration decided to condition economic and military aid over Cairo’s track record towards human rights, democracy, and rule of law. With all that as a backdrop, Russia has stepped up to fill the void, with several arms deals worth billions of dollars signed during al-Sisi’s presidency. 50 MiG-29 fighter jets were purchased in 2014 and delivery started late last year. Egypt also purchased 46 of a naval version of the Kamov Ka-52 Alligator helicopter, intended for the two French Mistral helicopter carriers that Cairo bought from Paris in September 2015. (France originally built the two ships for Russia, but canceled the sale after Moscow’s invasion and annexation of Crimea.)

The military developments go beyond arms sales, with strategic cooperation increasing as well. In November 2017, the two countries inked an agreement during a visit by the Russian Defense Minister to Cairo that allows for the joint use of each other’s airspace and military airbases. The five-year deal, which could be extended further if both parties agree, has raised eyebrows in Washington. If implemented, it would reinforce Russia’s military presence in the Middle East and create a potential launching pad for wider Russian operations in North Africa.

The countries’ militaries have also held several joint exercises in that time period. In 2015, Russia and Egypt held joint naval drills off the Mediterranean Egyptian port of Alexandria. In 2016, Egyptian and Russian paratroopers participated in a joint military exercise titled “Defenders of Friendship,” the first of its kind in Africa, which was followed by a similar exercise in Russia in 2017. Egypt will again host Russian and Egyptian paratroopers in 2018, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.

And finally, Egypt and Russia increasingly share common views on regional issues. On Syria, both countries have been calling for preserving the country’s territorial integrity and its national army. In October 2017, the two countries brokered a ceasefire deal in southern Damascus. In Libya, the two countries support the Libyan National Army, which is led by Khalifa Haftar, the military commander who dominates eastern Libya. In addition, the airspace deal with Egypt could bring Russia closer to Libya and raise the likelihood of greater Russian military involvement there.

With the election of President Donald Trump, al-Sisi hoped for better relations with Washington to maintain stability and address the country’s economic challenges. Clearly this has not yet materialized. On the one hand, visible warming of ties with a geopolitical rival of the United States is a game that Egypt is well versed in. The Trump Administration should proceed carefully and unemotionally.

But given the deteriorating situation in the broader Middle East and Russia’s rush to capitalize on it to cement itself as a stakeholder in the region, there is no excuse for the United States passively sitting on the sidelines. The Trump Administration should ramp up engagement with the Egyptians to address lingering concerns and try to move the relationship forward where possible. The Senate should take up the nomination of David Schenker as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and the Trump Administration ought to nominate a U.S. Ambassador to Egypt as soon as possible. Without diplomatic talent on the ground, Washington risks ceding hard-won influence in the region without putting up the slightest resistance.

The post Russia and Egypt are Growing Closer appeared first on The American Interest.

The Trump Effect in Europe

While nurturing relations with some allies in Asia and the Middle East, President Donald Trump has treated our European allies, the countries that we are most clearly sworn to defend with our own lives, more cavalierly than has any President since World War II. True, the Cold War crucible in which these links were forged is now a relic, but Russian dictator Vladimir Putin strives to restore Russia’s status as a great power rival to the United States. This lends new urgency to Transatlantic relations, since Europe is the foremost theater in which Putin bids to transform the balance of power, mining opportunities presented by Trump’s manifest ambivalence.

Polls tell us that Europeans reciprocate Trump’s scorn. A Pew poll last year asking how many trust Trump to “do the right thing” in world affairs recorded positive responses from 25 percent of Italians, 22 percent of Britons, 14 percent of French, 11 percent of Germans, and all of 7 percent of Spaniards. For the latter three countries, Putin recorded higher scores than Trump; in Germany, more than twice as high.

We worry that this mutual disdain could send Atlantic relations into a downward spiral. To gain a closer feeling for European reactions to Trump and assess where they might lead, we have visited half a dozen European countries over the past six months and interviewed dozens of European opinion leaders. The good news was how little anti-Americanism we encountered, compared to, say, 25 years ago, when Europeans were chafing to break free of their Cold War dependence on the United States, or 15 years ago, when Europeans were aghast at Washington’s decision to invade Iraq without the authorization of the UN Security Council.

In other words, our interlocutors were willing to draw distinctions between America and Trump. About him, for the most part, the views we encountered were unsparing. The French defense intellectual Bruno Tertrais captured the general view, judging him “unfit for office, not in any legal sense—I have no judgment on that—but unfit to govern a major Western liberal democracy.” Yet, though harsh, the criticisms we heard were for the most part more substantive and less visceral than much of the anti-Trump rhetoric that abounds on this side of the ocean.

“The thing people are most alarmed about is the unpredictability,” said British author and former think tank head David Goodhart. Many of our conversations substantiated that assessment. Alain Frachon, a columnist and editorial writer for Le Monde, offered this example: “After [his] extraordinarily anti-Chinese campaign, Trump receives Xi Jinping in Florida [and comes away saying], ‘He is a fantastic guy. He is my friend.’ Even a cynical French Foreign Minister would never say something like that.”

A Polish diplomat serving as an official of the European Commission damned with faint praise, allowing, “Things are much better than we feared,” before qualifying, “We are worried about the unpredictability of the U.S. Administration.” The prominent French intellectual, Nicolas Tenzer, lamented, “Inconsistency [makes] it difficult to understand what Trump’s policies are.” Reinhard Bütikofer, Member of the European Parliament, was blunter. “Trump wants out of Syria until he wants to bomb Assad. He’s inexplicably soft on Vladimir Putin until suddenly he’s tough.” Roman Eichinger, a commentator for the German newspaper Bild, expressed his exasperation to us in terms that later seemed prescient: “Every day he does something else. He says NATO is obsolete; then he says NATO is a great organization. He could start a war against North Korea tomorrow. Or he could start negotiations with Kim himself tomorrow.”

None of our interlocutors credited the idea that there is some method to the madness of Trump’s unpredictability. A French official put it: “There’s no deep calculation or strategy . . . That’s what people like Xi Jinping and us and the Indians and the others know. There’s no deeper interior strategy hidden by the apparent chaos. What you see is what you get.”

Those we spoke to took only limited comfort from the so-called “grownups in the room.” We heard expressions of respect for the generals at the top of the Trump Administration. And we were told that they and Vice President Michael Pence are not the only Americans to have traveled to Europe to offer reassurance to their respective counterparts. A senior U.S. official observed also that “an extraordinary number of Senators and Representatives have visited EU headquarters” on similar missions.

But the “grownups” can wield a two-edged sword. Some of our interlocutors spoke bitterly about last summer’s op-ed by then-National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster and National Economic Council director Gary D. Cohn. “America first,” they wrote, means using “the diplomatic, economic, and military resources of the U.S. to enhance American security, promote American prosperity, and extend American influence.” What consideration, then, might be given to allies? The most McMaster and Cohn would offer was that America is “open to working together.” Thus, these “grownups” only confirmed the dismay of Europeans that Trump views international relations, including with allies, as a zero-sum game.

That McMaster and Cohn are already both gone from their jobs, as is Rex Tillerson from the State Department, can hardly be reassuring, nor can the recurrent reports of the possible dismissal of John Kelly as chief of staff. Moreover, whatever balm is or was provided by the presence of the “grownups” could not make up for the dearth of personnel filling other vital policy positions.

Matthew Kaminski, the Brussels-based executive editor of Politico, described the situation this way: “When Europeans go to Washington they have to meet with the interns. There’s no one on the seventh floor [i.e., the top level of the State Department]. There are no ambassadors in most of these countries. There is no regular day-to-day relationship with the United States.”

And a French official told us: “There’s not only disorganization. There are not only tensions and disputes. There’s no one [to deal with]. The State Department is lacking a lot of people, including an Ambassador here. The pretext is that there is a big reorganization coming. But, month after month after month, it looks a bit more like the ‘deconstruction of the Administrative State.’”

In Berlin we heard constant complaints about the absence of an American Ambassador. Now that a new top diplomat has finally arrived, in the form of U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell, we hear anxiety that he will carry instructions to bully Germans into buying American cars, and to help blow up the Iran nuclear deal. Grenell’s recent controversial assertion to Breitbart that he wants to “empower” insurgent conservative politicians across Europe has done nothing to assuage those concerns.

Those we spoke to took less solace from the “grownups” than from ongoing American military and intelligence cooperation, which was mentioned by several. Le Monde’s Frachon explained: “There is more continuity than people may think. Take three security topics that are important to us and there is much more continuity with Obama and even with Bush than one can imagine reading about Trump. These are Ukraine, jihad in sub-Saharan Africa, and the war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.”

Others mentioned, in addition to these, the measures taken to strengthen NATO’s eastern flank against threats and pressure from Russia. “My understanding is that the working relationship between the two defense ministries is very good, as it was under Obama,” said Tertrais.

Still, the argument advanced by some American representatives—“look at what we do, not what we say”—was not bought by many. As Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, a former German government official who now heads the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, put it:

“Words matter. It’s the American President. Other countries respond to words and make their calculation based on words. Therefore, words change things. And by the way, you want to tell me that nothing has changed? Do you want to tell me that withdrawing from TPP, doubting NATO, redefining NATO, decertifying the Iran deal, leaving the Paris climate accord, leaving UNESCO—that’s as if something isn’t happening? And that that something doesn’t have a direction?”

The “direction” he meant was toward isolation. The prospect of American isolationism frightens Europeans, including even French leaders. For all that France at moments has treated America as a competitor, much of the French elite today recognizes that America is France’s most important ally. Thus, a French official conveyed his worry that, regardless of the medium, reckless words from an American President can weaken America. Citing Trump’s bombastic threats against North Korea, he said: “He can do ten tweets about that, or 15, but after that, how much does the [risk] of completely losing [credibility] matter to him? Can he just drop the subject and say, ‘Yeah, I said that, but that was just a negotiating position?’”

Beyond Trump’s volatility and his itchy Twitter finger, we also heard alarm about substantive policies and deeper matters. To some extent, policy differences that the Europeans cited might arise with any Republican, or at least many of them. The political spectrum in Europe is pitched to the left of the American spectrum, as evidenced by the fact that the public sector accounts for about half of the economy in most European countries as compared to about one-third in the United States. This makes Europeans often more comfortable with Democrats, a predilection compounded by the inclination of Democrats to give more deference to globalist ideas or rhetoric.

Thus we heard many complaints about Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate accord and his refusal to recertify the Iran nuclear deal and especially about the threat of new Iran sanctions that would be extraterritorial, thus hitting European companies. We asked some of our interlocutors whether these objections to Trump might not arise toward any Republican President. Kleine-Brockhoff answered:

“If you have a consensus on first order issues—a cooperative world order based on multilateralism and long-term treaties, alliances, norms, values—you can have policy differences below that that don’t rise to first order, that don’t challenge the whole system. If you don’t have that, then other issues become first-order. We would have been able to deal with a Republican Administration of Marco Rubio with his critique on Iran because Rubio wouldn’t have challenged the system as such. He wouldn’t have doubted NATO. He wouldn’t have doubted the multilateral system. He wouldn’t have doubted treaties of that nature per se. In a Trump context, that’s just one piece in a long list of the destruction.”

One issue on which it is unlikely any other Republican would be acting like Trump is in launching tariff wars. Frachon told us, “We French are not natural free traders, but is he really going to destroy the free trading system?” He elaborated on his concern: “A bloc of the United States, Europe, and Asian countries sharing the same norms [will assure that] these Western norms will be global norms in twenty-five years. If not, the [global] norms will be Chinese norms.”

The sense recurred in our conversations that differences with Trump are larger than disagreements about policy but rather go to basic values and images of the kind of world in which we want to live. An aide to Angela Merkel mentioned her reaction in May 2017 to the McMaster/Cohn op-ed, which was intended to make Trump’s “America First” idea comprehensible and presumably less offensive to outsiders. It may have achieved the first but not the second of these purposes. “The Chancellor read it and thought, ‘this is not the way I perceive international politics.’”

A manifesto issued by a dozen prominent Germans appealing for Germans to stick with America despite Trump put it this way: “The United States, inventor and—until recently—guardian of the liberal order, currently does not see itself as system guarantor. Donald Trump is the first U.S. President since World War II to fundamentally question the ideas and institutions of the liberal international order.”

Said one of the signers in an interview: “There’s a lot of concern that the U.S. is no longer willing to be the guarantor of the democratic values that made Europe strong again and brought peace to Europe.”

In a speech late last year, then-Secretary of State Tillerson declared, “one of the advantages the U.S. takes into all of our various foreign policy arenas [is] that we have many, many allies . . . which are a great strength of U.S. policy around the world.” But speaking to various opinion leaders in the countries that have been traditionally our most important partners, we heard that our allies feel little valued by Trump, and sometimes deserted. Frachon told us:

“The ideological battle has been abandoned by the U.S., by Trump, the battle for human rights, freedom, the UN Charter, liberal democratic values. . . The Brits, the French, the Germans are alone; the U.S. is not there anymore. Trump is leaving this battlefield when he gives the impression that actually he admires these autocrats more than the mediocrity of democracy. . . In this ideological battle against autocrats, and [those] seduced by autocrats, we have the impression sometimes that Trump is on the other side.”

Not all Europeans feel deserted by Trump, since he has cultivated relations with Nigel Farage, Member of the European Parliament and former leader of the UK Independence Party, and Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France. Laure Mandeville, a leading correspondent for Le Figaro, told us “a lot of [European populists] saw the election of Trump as confirmation of the justness of their diagnosis, that sovereignty is important, borders are important.”

There is peril in this, though. Unlike the United States, most European countries have in their past seen democracy collapse into dictatorship and several have brutal memories of living under fascism. The 2017 electoral defeats of populist candidates for President of France and Prime Minister of Holland assuaged fears of an unstoppable populist rise. But we heard cautions against saying “Le Pen didn’t win, Wilders didn’t win, we’re through.” Robin Niblett, leader of the think tank Chatham House, argued: “No, we’re not through. All of the messages we’re issuing say, ‘This is not over, this is not over.’ Take it seriously. There is a lot more listening and a lot more learning to be done, and there are more waves to come.”

Trump’s affinity with Europe’s populists may blunt their own wonted antagonism toward the United States, but he evokes that prejudice elsewhere on the political spectrum. “He is a perfect foil for [Jeremy] Corbyn’s anti-Americanism,” observed Niblett. Trump’s scheduled state visit to the United Kingdom was canceled after some two million Britons signed a petition against it, while hard-Left Labour MPs had a field day in parliamentary debate ridiculing a President whose “power is enormous [while] his intellectual capacity is protozoan.”

In Germany, two prominent journalists in Die Zeit rebutted a manifesto by German Atlanticists in part by reeling off a litany of “all the craziness [of the United States]” thus: “epidemic arms ownership, the gap between rich and poor, the death penalty, the asocial health system, the elitist educational system, the democracy-crippling dominance of Wall Street, widespread racism, exaggerated nationalism, horrendous energy consumption, religions sectarianism—to name but a few.”

But such talk seemed much less in the air today than we can recall in previous decades. What has caused anti-Americanism to recede? The answer, in a word, is Putin. “We’ve seen a step-change in how we tackle the question of European defense,” said the group’s ambassador to the United States, David O’Sullivan, in a clear allusion to Russia. “The nature of the threats we face has evolved radically, and so has our response.” Thomas Greminger, the Secretary-General of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said of Russia’s aggressive behavior, “The rule-based European order has been put in question. Long-time norms of non-aggression in Europe have been violated.”

This alarm about Russia reminds Europeans of the value of their ties to America. Paradoxically, Trump’s strangeness and his coolness toward Europe seems to have generated a sense of wistfulness about pre-Trump America, which our interlocutors hoped will return post-Trump. “A lot of people in Europe are thinking the storm will pass. Just keep our heads down,” said Goodhart. A French official echoed those words: “Quite a few people take the view that it’s just a bad time and we should just duck and cover for four years and then things will be re-established.” An official of the European Parliament exemplified this view, telling us: “Trump is like hurricane season. You know it will do damage and also that it will blow over.”

However, several of our interlocutors worried that it will not “blow over,” but rather that some deeper change is occurring in the American body politic. They noted that the spirit of pulling back from engagement with the world and especially with Europe was evident first during the presidency of Barack Obama even though he was far more appealing to Europeans than Trump.

Bild’s Eichinger put it: “I don’t think it’s so easy to say [that America will revert to internationalism after Trump]. Look at Obama’s policy. He was the first who said: Let’s orient more to the Pacific. Let’s focus on America. The difference was almost all Europeans loved Obama, and almost all hate Trump. But there’s a development in the United States to focus on America, to end the wars.”

Jörg Lau, one of the journalists who rebutted the Atlanticist manifesto in Die Zeit, told us: “The retrenchment began under Obama. It’s ultimately [a question] whether Europe can depend on America going forward. We think it’s wishful thinking to believe we can.”

Ironically, while fear of Russia is engendering warmer feelings toward America and even perhaps a willingness to endure Trump, we also encountered anxiety about Trump’s own attitude toward Russia, even if it has not yet expressed itself in concrete policies. Frachon put it: “Trump is not able to conduct his Russian policy because of the involvement of the Russians in the elections. So there is no Russian policy. It’s not bad; it’s not good. It doesn’t exist. Still, he has portrayed Putin, if you’re German or French, let alone if you are Polish or if you are from Tallinn or Riga, in a way that makes you say something is different. The music is different. So maybe we realized that this music was important.”

Despite Trump’s resilient friendliness toward Putin, his Administration had devoted resources to strengthening NATO’s defenses in Eastern Europe with the result that, as we were told, he is liked better there than in Western Europe. We also encountered differences from country to country within Western Europe. In Britain, we heard that the country was so absorbed in Brexit as to mute feelings about other issues notwithstanding the intense campaign for cancellation of Trump’s visit. Moreover, a number of Britons seemed to hope that Trump, who appears to favor bilateral trade agreements over multilateral ones, would welcome some kind of deal with the United Kingdom that would mitigate the costs of leaving the European Union.

On the other hand, as Goodhart told us, “Germany is the epicenter of the continent’s anti-Trump feelings. [He] is a living negation of modern Germany’s liberal cosmopolitanism.” Everything we heard in Germany confirmed that. A dozen prominent German intellectuals signed the aforementioned manifesto urging preservation of Germany’s special ties to America in spite of Trump. In other words, they represent the pro-American camp in German discourse. Yet, while arguing in favor of America, they were withering toward the current U.S. Administration. “Germany sees the current international order as a cornerstone of its foreign policy,” they declared, but Trump pursues a “strategy of undermining the international order.” Ergo, “for Germany, Donald Trump’s foreign policy creates a previously unknown conflict of interest with its most important ally.”

France seems to have taken Trump more in stride than Germany thanks to its young charismatic new President, Emmanuel Macron, who has adopted an upbeat attitude toward the American President, hosting him on Bastille Day. Jacques Rupnik, research director at the Sorbonne’s Sciences Po, explained it this way: “People were kind of baffled by Macron’s efforts to ingratiate himself with Trump, but the answer was, since this guy is so vain and the personal thing matters so much, if you persuade him that the French do military parades and they can bring you to the Eiffel Tower, you can influence him on issues of importance to France such as the climate change agreement or Syria or, above all, Iran.” Said Le Figaro’s Mandeville: “Trump has to be educated. He discovered—because probably he didn’t know—that France is an old nation with a military tradition.” Indeed, the show apparently impressed the President so much that he returned home to direct the Defense Department to stage a military parade in Washington.

A French official told us the question facing Paris was whether to “confront the President or, given his personality, try to make friends with him and influence him marginally, to keep a line open rather than ostracize him.” Tertrais shared a more cynical version: “Macron, when he hosted Trump, reportedly said something along the lines of, ‘I like to buy a stock when it’s low.’”

For France, Trump is a wonderful opportunity. Several of our interviewees made this point in different ways. “Trump for us, like Obama in his own way, vindicates a traditional French narrative, one that you’ve seen since 1958,” when Charles de Gaulle returned to power, with his conviction that “the Americans will not always be involved in European security.” Thus, an official of the European Commission told us that his colleagues joked that Trump should be awarded the Charlemagne Prize, which is given for outstanding contributions to European integration.

The first practical step in this direction has been the initiation of something called PESCO, which stands for Permanent Structured Cooperation. PESCO was foreseen in the EU treaty of 2009 but only brought into existence at the end of 2017. It envisions a variety of joint operations, the creation of some joint units, and the attempt to eliminate some of the European Union’s debilitating duplication of military production.

A former EU official explained: “The [EU] members see we cannot rely on the U.S. anymore so the motivation is there to move ahead with an EU foreign and defense policy. This is good, but not having the United States with us is tragic and dangerous. Despite Trump, we need to preserve a strong Atlantic alliance.”

Thanks no doubt to Putin and perhaps as well to Islamic terrorists, and despite Trump and the perennial anti-American currents in European culture, the sense of needing the United States seems widespread. The twelve German intellectuals whose manifesto we have already mentioned put it, “The West, even today, does not exist without the United States.” And a French journalist said, “People understand that in terms of security we need the United States. They criticize the United States, but they’re still happy to rely on it.”

In an interview during his presidential campaign, Macron spoke of recapturing the thread of De Gaulle-Mitterand foreign policy—two French leaders who were decidedly chilly toward the United States. Whatever Macron intended by invoking those two names, he has reprised none of that chilliness. And his project of enhancing dramatically Europe’s ability to act in the security arena poses no necessary threat to Atlantic cooperation. A European Commission official said, “We need strategic autonomy in order to be meaningful partners.”

This image of a vastly stronger Europe still firmly linked to America is greatly appealing. But whether Macron will succeed remains very much an open question. The centrifugal forces within the European Union that led to Brexit and recently to Catalonia’s attempt to secede from Spain could scotch this plan, as could domestic challenges to Macron as he pushes controversial reforms of the French economy. And America’s relations with Europe could be disrupted by the volatility of President Trump. As Niblett expressed it, “We’ve dodged the bullet in the first year [of Trump’s presidency], but we’re not out of the woods.”

If the image of Europe enhancing its own strength while preserving a tight connection with the United States proves a pipe dream, then what? This is where our conversations grew unsettling. The alternative would seem to be a Europe that allows itself to be drawn closer to Putin’s Russia, re-enacting in a more modest way the tragic episode of appeasement.

Putin has supported, financially and otherwise, populist parties across Europe, almost all of which are on the far Right, while also retaining the loyalty of leftist parties comprising the remnants of communist movements once beholden to the USSR. Already, Hungary’s populist Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, has drawn close to Russia, as have leading Czech and Slovak politicians. More alarmingly, the recent national election in Italy, the third-largest country in the European Union, leaves the populist and pro-Russian Five Star Movement poised to take power in coalition with the far-Right and even more pro-Russian League party.

In France and Germany, the core of the European Union, similar dynamics are evident. The right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany and National Front in France are pro-Russian, as are the main leftist party in Germany, Die Linke, and the main leftist candidate in France’s presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who drew 20 percent of the vote.

Still more troubling, pro-Russian sentiment is not found only on the two extremes. Former German Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder was made chairman of the board of Rosneft, Russia’s state-controlled giant energy corporation, and has adopted a pro-Russian stance echoed by a substantial minority among the Social Democrats. Christian Lindner, the head of the Free Democrats, broke with Prime Minister Merkel over Ukraine, saying Germany should accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea. And even in Merkel’s own ranks, Horst Seehofer, Minister of the Interior since mid-March and the head of the Christian Social Union, which is the Bavarian counterpart of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, traveled to Moscow with an entourage of 60 to meet Putin as if to establish a parallel diplomatic connection, declaring “many trouble spots in the world will not be resolved without Moscow.” Toting this up, Kleine-Brockhoff commented to us:

“The jet fuel for the Russophile camp is supplied by Donald Trump. One wonders whether he is aware of the second-order effects of his open hostility towards Germany. The more he displays contempt and treats Germany like a client state, the more people will like the idea of balancing America with Russia.”

According to a recent ZDF poll, a majority of Germans—82 percent—do not see the United States as a reliable partner. That puts the United States behind Russia, which isn’t trusted by 58 percent of the German population.

In France, apart from the far Left and Right, former Prime Minister Francois Fillon, the candidate of the moderate-Right Republican Party and the early favorite in last year’s presidential race until he was brought low by scandal, was friendly to Putin or, in the words of one of our interviewees, “really a Russian guy.” He ended up with 20 percent in the first round of voting, the same as Mélenchon and a point behind Le Pen. Taken together the votes for those three, plus the 5 percent cast for Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, a breakaway from Le Pen’s National Front, mean that fully two-thirds of the ballots in the first round were cast for candidates sympathetic to Putin’s Russia.

Le Pen, who ran second overall, and her breakaway disciple, Dupont-Aignan, between them polled more than Macron in the first round. Little wonder that Moritz Koch of the newspaper Handelsblatt told us, “Germany must support Macron. He is the firewall between order and right-wing populism—and the end of the EU.”

An alternative scenario to the disintegration of the European Union is the emergence of pro-Russian majorities or pro-Russian policies within it. Poland and the Baltic states would be the only ones sure to resist. The United Kingdom would have been a weighty partner in their camp. But Brexit has removed Britain from that equation. President Trump said during his campaign that NATO was obsolete. Later he declared it “no longer obsolete.” But his high-handed treatment of allies as expressed in that original epithet could make it a self-fulfilling prophecy as our long-time partners feel impelled to adopt alternative security strategies. Europe uncoupled from the United States and under the sway of Russia could be Trump’s most important legacy, a strategic nightmare left for his successors.

The post The Trump Effect in Europe appeared first on The American Interest.

A South China Sea Change?

June 2018 may turn out to be a critical month for the Indo-Pacific. In addition to the upcoming U.S.-North Korea summit, this month has already seen the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, where U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Japan’s Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and other dignitaries reiterated their shared commitment to the region. Modi, during his first Shangri-La speech on June 1, spoke of the need for a “free, open, inclusive” Indo-Pacific, a “rules-based order,” equal and open access to resources and common spaces, and freedom of navigation. Secretary Mattis, for his part, emphasized that the Indo-Pacific was America’s “priority theater,” stating: “Make no mistake: America is in the Indo-Pacific to stay.” Just a few days ahead of the summit, Mattis had even the U.S. Pacific Command as the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, “in recognition of the increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.”

Mattis also used his Shangri-La speech to criticize China in no uncertain terms. He noted that China’s policy in the South China Sea “stands in stark contrast to the openness our strategy promotes.” A few days earlier, on May 28, Secretary Mattis had informed reporters that the United States will continue its policy of using naval exercises to send a message to Beijing: that the United States and its allies do not accept China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and will push back against China’s militarization of the contested waters.

These comments from the U.S. Defense Secretary come just a few days after two U.S. warships sailed within 12 nautical miles of four artificial islands created by China in the disputed Paracel island chain, off Vietnam’s eastern coast. They also come on the heels of Washington’s decision to rescind an invitation to the Chinese military to participate in the RIMPAC exercises, the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercises, which involve more than 20 countries from across the Pacific.

American grand strategy for Asia and the Pacific, since the end of the Second World War, has centered on creating an Asian diplomatic and security architecture that rests on American economic and military might, combined with a network of partners and allies across the region. The economic and military rise of China over the past two decades has posed an increasing challenge to this American preeminence.

Starting with the East and South China Sea, China’s strategy has been to change the status quo gradually, building bases and ports and creating artificial islands to present the world with a new reality. At the same time Beijing claims its goals are peaceful and benevolent, encompassing activities like helping countries build highways and ports—even though both of these are dual-use and financed by high-interest loans that leave countries indebted to Beijing for decades.

In the past few months Washington has been steadily pushing back against Chinese expansionism. In April 2018, China conducted two days of naval drills in the South China Sea personally presided over by President Xi Jinping. According to reports, more than 10,000 military personnel participated in the drills and more than 48 naval vessels and 76 fighter jets were involved. American and Japanese reports suggest that in addition to fighter jets China also deployed anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to its three artificial islands in the South China Sea during these naval exercises.

Beijing has asserted that the deployment of these “necessary national defense facilities” had “nothing to do with militarization” and was within its rights. Yet as former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stated in October 2017, China has consistently undermined “the international, rules-based order” by its “provocative actions” in the South China Sea that “directly challenge the international law and norms.”

Echoing those words this past week, Secretary Mattis stated that there is “a very steady drumbeat of freedom of navigation operations” in the South China Sea and “there is only one country that seems to take active steps to rebuff them or state their resentment of them.”

The U.S. strategy of pushback is being supported by its allies and partners in the region. With a population of more than one billion, India is the other country with sufficient manpower to match China’s. India has also consistently viewed China’s expanding influence with suspicion.

While the Indian Ocean region is critical to India, the country’s leadership is increasingly focused on the Pacific. In late May 2018, Indonesia and India signed an agreement whereby Indonesia has given India access to the strategically located island of Sabang, at the northern tip of Sumatra and less than 300 miles from the Strait of Malacca. India will invest in the dual-use port and economic zone of Sabang and build a hospital there. Indian naval ships and submarines will also visit the deep-water port.

In early May 2018, for the first time since World War II, India has decided to station fighter planes in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands with the aim to strengthen India’s hold over the crucial Malacca, Sunda, and Lumbok Straits and the Straits of Ombai Wetar and the eastern Indian Ocean Region. The Indian Navy has positioned warships in the region and also deployed two floating docks to repair and refurbish warships.

Japan and the United Kingdom have also increased their visible presence and activities in the South China Sea. In June 2017, in another first since World War II, Japan’s largest warship, Izumo, conducted its maiden overseas deployment and sailed into the South China Sea to participate in the International Maritime Review held in Singapore. The Izumo’s three-month South China Sea cruise is part of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s military and diplomatic push against Chinese assertiveness.

The United Kingdom plans on deploying two brand new aircraft carriers, the HMS Queen Elizabeth and the HMS Prince of Wales, to the South China Sea for freedom of navigation exercises. According to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the first assignments of these two new aircraft carriers will be to “vindicate our belief in the rules-based international system and in the freedom of navigation through those waterways which are absolutely vital for world trade.”

Australia, Canada, France, the Philippines, and Vietnam have also condemned China’s moves and recently deployed their naval assets in the South China Sea. On May 29, the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte asserted that the Philippines had its own red lines in opposition to Beijing’s red lines, warning against any unilateral Chinese effort to mine the sea’s resources. If “anyone gets the natural resources in the Western Philippines Sea, South China Sea,” Duterte would be ready to “go to war,” according to his Foreign Minister Alan Peter Cayetano. Ever since President Duterte took power in June 2016, Manila has come under heavy criticism for taking a soft line towards China. But with increasing tensions in the South China Sea and rising Chinese militarization, it is not surprising that even Manila is changing its tune.

In April 2018, China unveiled a monument on Fiery Cross Reef on the Spratly Islands as a “message about China’s determination to protect its territory and maritime rights.” Over the past few years China has built artificial islands, attempted to establish a no-fly zone, and deployed anti-aircraft missiles to the South China Sea. The Chinese appear to be adopting the famous principle from the Melian Dialogue: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

If the United States and its partners and allies around the world want to send a message, it needs to be in a language Beijing will understand. A steady drumbeat of warships, aircraft carriers, naval exercises, and drills is important to balance China’s militarization in the region. However, if the aim is to contain Chinese activity, then there must also be some mechanism to prevent China from establishing hegemony over the region by deploying nuclear-capable bombers, ballistic missile submarines, and nuclear missiles. The recent pushback in the South China Sea is a welcome development, but much more needs to be done to counter China’s actions—before it is too late.

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