Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 92

The Alarming Story that Won’t Go Away

In mid-February, the news cycle was saturated with coverage of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russians, the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), and two front companies. The indictment detailed the IRA’s surreptitious, deceptive, and illegal “interference operations” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Here was a major development in what is called the “Russia-Trump investigation,” one that added to public understanding of what the Russia government did, its intentions, and its possible impact on the election. Molly J. McKew, a specialist in information warfare, wrote in Wired that “it is now undeniable” Russia’s intervention affected the election in favor of Donald J. Trump. A Washington Post editorial stated that Mueller had presented “powerful evidence that Moscow staged an attack on the United States’ democratic political process.”

In another time, one might reasonably expect that a criminal indictment detailing a hostile foreign power’s conspiratorial attack on U.S. democracy that affected a presidential election might lead to bipartisan pronouncements to defend the homeland, the appointment of a joint Congressional or independent commission to help craft a national response, and joint legislative and executive branch action to deter such intervention in the future.

None of that happened. Instead, the response took on a predictable pattern of diminishment, denial, and deflection. The President himself issued what amounted to the U.S. government’s response via Twitter: “Russia started their anti-U.S. campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run.The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong—no collusion!” Instead of condemning the “anti-U.S. campaign,” Trump attacked the investigations into the Russian intervention as a “witch hunt.” Conservative media, including the most-watched national cable news channel and the largest broadcaster of local news, largely backed these official statements, as did pro-Trump Republicans. But many anti-Trump stalwarts also pooh-poohed the indictment. Adrian Chen, author of a New York Times Magazine exposé of the IRA in 2015, said it amounted to “90 people shit-posting on Facebook.” An editor at the Never-Trump Commentary magazine wrote that the election could not have been affected by “a few Americans being led around the nose by the Russians for a few months.” Masha Gessen of The New Yorker dismissed the IRA campaign as “cacophony” and rejected the idea that a Russian government conspiracy “to muddle American politics can fundamentally change the fate of this country.”

In the end, the coverage and analysis were sucked into the policy and scandal maelstrom that has typified Trump’s time in office. That now included an escalating barrage of attacks on the Justice Department and Robert Mueller’s investigation, together with a series of contradictory policy messages: expelling diplomats and adopting some long-delayed sanctions to punish Russia for different acts of aggression, while at the same time planning a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin, continuing to seek better relations, and limiting implementation of sanctions that had been imposed.

None of this should distract our attention from the alarming story of Russia’s assault on the U.S. democratic process. Each new development in the Russia investigation over the course of the last 16 months has offered increasing confirmation that there was a Russian government conspiracy to “muddle American politics,” that the Trump campaign was connected to it in myriad ways, and that it did in fact “turn the election” (as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper puts it in his new book). Perhaps McKew is right and Gessen wrong: The “fate of this country” was changed by a hostile foreign power seeking to undermine democracy and alter the course of American events.

Both pro-Trump and anti-Trump arguments against the election impact of the Russian intervention have a common starting point: Russia did not create the political conditions in American politics that allowed candidate Trump the possibility to win the presidency. Those obsessing about Russia’s role in the outcome, the argument goes, are ignoring America’s political reality and blame Trump’s victory on a phantom. American citizens cast their votes freely and alone determined the outcome, good or bad. For Trump and his supporters, those obsessing over “Russia-gate” are seeking to overturn “the will of the people” and even seek “a coup.” For anti-Trump denialists, like Jeet Heer of The New Republic, “The problem is not that American democracy was hacked, but that . . . there was enough fragility in American democracy for a few crude memes to have an outsized influence.”

It is true that the political landscape for 2016 existed with or without outside efforts to influence voting behavior. Russia did not create class resentment, anti-establishment sentiment, racism, misogyny, or other core elements in the American political crust that Trump successfully mined for his presidential bid. Nor did Russia create the weaknesses in President Barack Obama’s presidency or in the candidacy of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, that reduced the Democrats’ appeal in 2016. True, too, trends in American (and European) politics have allowed anti-liberal political appeals to gain success.

If, however, one accepts that the electorate’s divisions were so deep and home-grown, it is precisely for this reason that one should take so seriously the impact that Russia’s intervention had on the election. The divided character of the American electorate had been set over four previous presidential elections. A minimum of 46 percent voted Republican and a minimum 48 percent voted Democratic; the maximum for a Democrat was 52.9 percent; for a Republican, 50.7 percent. Given the Republican Party’s full backing of Trump and the fractured backing by Democrats of Clinton, reasonable analysis of the 2016 race predicted a close outcome and fierce competition in states determining the Electoral College. It was an open opportunity for a foreign power to influence an election and help bring about an outcome serving its interests. That is what the Intelligence Community concluded that Vladimir Putin directed the Russian government to do—in Trump’s favor.

A close race was always likely in such a polarized environment. That only a total of 77,000 votes in three states were the margin for Trump’s Electoral College victory is an indicator that Putin succeeded in tipping the election outcome, not the opposite.

One reason the issue is not squarely confronted is that each media revelation about the Russian operation has been siloed in separate stories. Determined journalists uncovered many small parts over the last 16 months. Yet, as when starting a jigsaw puzzle, each interlocking piece was just an isolated patch.

The Mueller indictment of the Internet Research Agency for the first time put many of the pieces of the puzzle together so that one could see a larger picture emerging. The 13 individuals identified in the IRA’s U.S. operation (there were up to 80 more) engaged in espionage and identity theft, opened and operated illegal bank accounts, created automated and individually managed social media accounts and personas pretending to be Americans, propagated false information and fake news in a massive amount of posts and ads, and directly engaged with U.S. citizens to incite protests. According to the indictment, the operation targeted specific audiences with clear intent: depress the vote for Clinton, support the election of Trump, and sow discord within American society. These are exactly the purposes identified in the Intelligence Community’s assessment on the Russia intervention. All of it, Mueller reminded us, constitutes illegal behavior interfering in an election process.

The indictment, while detailed, was limited in scope. There is a lot more to the picture. Adrian Chen’s initial New York Times Magazine exposé, confirmed by many later reports, revealed that the IRA, although the largest at an estimated 400 workers, is one of many ostensibly private “troll farms” set up to influence—distort—public opinion through the internet, both in Russia and worldwide. It is part of an official strategy of “public consciousness manipulation” devised in the Kremlin and directed by Russian intelligence, security, and military agencies. Simply, the 13 persons named in the indictment are a tiny portion of those engaged in the Russian government’s overall information and cyber warfare operations, a large portion of which has been directed at the United States.

The Russians’ social media campaign—which reached at least 126 million users of Facebook alone—was just one part of a very large and fully integrated “active measures” operation to influence America’s politics, election outcomes, and policies. Here is just some of what American journalists, intelligence assessments, and other investigations, now including two Senate Intelligence Committee reports, have revealed about the extent and scope of Russia’s ongoing operation:

Well-financed foreign broadcast propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik were the source of false information and “fake news” stories propagated on multiple social media networks and even by pro-Trump media and the Trump campaign itself;
There were extensive attempts to hack into election infrastructure, including at least 20 state election systems, a private electronic selection equipment provider, as well as the accounts of thousands ofjournalists, civic activists, and opinion and policy makers (2,400 have been identified by the AP at last count);
Two state election voter roll databases, other local systems, both national political party structures, and a number of the former government officials, policy and opinion makers, and journalists identified as targets, were successfully hacked;
Influence campaigns were carried out to gain alliances with American politicians, opinion leaders, organizations and institutions, including the NRA, the libertarian Ron Paul Institute, the religious Right, the alt-right, and the Green Party;
Russian intelligence assets engaged in multiple attempts to solicit cooperation from and establish communications with Trump aides and associates; and, not least,
Coordinated diplomatic and intelligence operations aimed at changing U.S. foreign policy towards Russia and creating quid pro quos for helping the Trump campaign.

All of this is before consideration of Russia’s stealing and weaponizing of email communications of DNC staffers and Clinton campaign aides for propaganda purposes using “cut-outs” like Guccifer 2.0, DCLeaks, and Wikileaks. Through this means, news organizations became part of an effectively timed and planned effort to spread negative stories about Hillary Clinton, which were then amplified by Trump, his campaign and pro-Trump and social media. This arguably had the most impact by influencing overall media coverage in the last month of the campaign.

With such perspective, a fuller (but still not full) picture of Russia’s operation emerges, and the arguments diminishing the significance of the Mueller indictment or of the Russian intervention generally, become less convincing. No one can measure the exact impact, but a reasonable assessment leads to one conclusion: Russia’s government conspiracy to intervene in the U.S. presidential election was one of the decisive factors that swung the election to Trump.

Donald Trump’s response to Russia’s clear intervention is denial, but of a particular sort: an insistence on false, elastic, and conflicting claims at the same time. Trump won a “landslide” Electoral College victory on his own; there was no Russian intervention, but if Russia did intervene it was no different than other governments; whatever happened, Putin did not order it and it wasn’t to support Trump’s election; Russia could have intervened but it had no effect on the vote; and regardless, the Trump campaign did “nothing wrong” and there was “no collusion.” Investigation of the Russia intervention is part of a “witch hunt,” a position one might note reflective of the official Russian view that Washington, DC is in the throes of “Russia mania.”

Mueller’s indictment of the IRA did not alter the President’s account. And despite the Intelligence Community assessments contradicting these claims, former CIA Director and now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo affirms several of them. The new National Security Adviser John Bolton actively promoted the conspiracy theory that the hacking of the DNC servers may have been a “false flag operation” carried out by U.S. intelligence agencies.

In most polling, Republicans generally have supported Trump’s stated positions, however elastic. In Congress, Republican leadership limited investigation and blocked appointment of an independent commission or bipartisan congressional panel to come up with a unified course of action in response. Investigation was relegated to opaque, inadequately staffed and politically divided Intelligence Committees under Republican control. In the few open hearings and in many public actions, Republicans on both committees consistently attempted to defend and confirm Trump’s main claims. Sixteen months after the election, the Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee closed its investigation and issued a “conclusive” report that exonerated Trump and his campaign but without fully investigating any matter. The less divided Senate committee has issued so far two of six interim reports. Its most recent report, which directly refutes the House Intelligence Committee report and affirms the Intelligence Community Assessment of Russia’s activities and intentions, had minimal impact. Its urgent recommendations related to election security made in its first report lie fallow.

Given the reliance on the assertion that Russian “meddling” had no impact on the vote, it is quite odd that so little effort has been made to investigate Russia’s efforts to hack election infrastructure and whether this resulted in altering votes cast or the vote count. This assertion remains largely a matter of public assurance by officials of both the Obama and Trump Administrations, not anything shown through public hearings and findings. Instead, the focus and investigation has tended to revolve around the claim that Trump or the campaign did “nothing wrong” and that “no collusion” took place. Eighteen months after the election, the argument goes, no “smoking gun” proving explicit cooperation and coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government has been uncovered or revealed by investigation. Finding the “smoking gun” and proving actual “collusion” remains a fixed point of reference, even among Trump skeptics and opponents.

“Collusion” or not, there is abundant evidence that the Trump campaign availed itself of the services Russia was offering. Trump solicited, welcomed, and then eagerly used the email dumps weaponized by Russian intelligence services to help fuel his rebound in the polls during the last month of the campaign. He did so in public and despite the Intelligence Community’s statement warning of the Russian government’s efforts to influence the election through just such means. Republican supporters (including Mike Pompeo) were eager to use private emails stolen by Russian intelligence agencies as political fodder.

There is also ample evidence of campaign connections to the operation at various levels. Right after the election, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov stated that the Russian government had maintained contacts during the campaign with Trump’s “immediate entourage.” At the time, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks denied the Russian boast outright. Trump and his “entourage” repeatedly denied any contacts whenever the issue was raised. But it has now been shown that there were dozens of significant contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russian government officials, agents, and assets through which the latter lobbied on foreign policy issues; offered collaboration and assistance to the campaign; and shared information about Russia’s plans to release emails damaging to the Clinton campaign.

Most are well known, such as top national security adviser to the campaign (and briefly the country), Michael A. Flynn, being paid more than $55,000 by the Russian propaganda arm RT and Kaspersky Labs, an internet security firm suspected of links to Russian intelligence. Or three high officials in the Trump campaign meeting in June 2016 with multiple Russian agents, including one tied to the country’s General Prosecutor, with explicit intent to discuss “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Or one of five named foreign policy advisers being told in April 2016 of the future release of Clinton emails by the Russian government. Or another of those advisers traveling to Moscow in July 2016 and later admitting to meeting with a top Putin deputy. Or the campaign chairman and deputy chairman being financial front men for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, acting as agents for a corrupt pro-Putin Ukrainian dictator, and maintaining contacts with a suspected Russian intelligence agent and a Putin-aligned oligarch during the campaign. Other connections are less well known, such as the case of Richard Burt, a lobbyist for the energy giant Gazprom and a director in an investment firm underwritten by five Putin-connected oligarchs, who helped write Trump’s inaugural foreign policy speech in March 2016 that pledged better relations with Russia as a key goal of the candidate. Burt later wrote policy briefs for Senator Jeff Sessions, who chaired the campaign’s national security team.

At no point were Federal authorities notified of such efforts to impact the election or to lobby directly to change U.S. policy. The details of these and many other interactions, including after the election, were kept secret and have been lied about to the American people even after being uncovered by journalists or when public testimony and indictments revealed them.

The Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the former Republican Senator Dan Coats, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 13. He stated, “There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts [in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections] as successful and views the 2018 midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations.” Coats previously affirmed the assessment of the Intelligence Community regarding the Russian government’s intentions in those efforts. The conclusion of Trump’s own appointed intelligence chief is thus stark: The world’s oldest and most stable modern democracy had a foreign power attack and undermine its political system. That foreign power’s leader believes his efforts to manipulate American democracy were successful and a victory for his country’s strategic interests.

What did Putin achieve in this victory? Some Russia hawks are echoing Trump’s last incredible line of defense, namely that Putin’s gain is not what is stated in the Intelligence Community’s reasoned analysis but “the chaos” created by obsession with the Russia-Trump investigation. This chaos in turn prevents us from recognizing the truth of Trump’s claim that his administration “has been harder on Russia than the Obama administration.”

The investigations by journalists, Congress, and Mueller’s office have certainly shadowed Trump in the White House, but their work and what they have uncovered about Russia’s large-scale conspiracy to impact the 2016 election are not the cause of political “chaos,” just as they are not the cause of “bad relations with Russia,” as Trump has asserted. Rather, it is Trump himself—his behavior during the campaign and since being elected, including his reliance on lies, distortions, and conspiracy theories—who has been the primary agent of turmoil. In turn, sympathetic media, Republicans in Congress, and most Administration officials have loyally joined in Trump’s attacks on established media, intelligence agencies, and justice officials, including support for the most cockeyed conspiracies. If political “chaos” and weakening American democracy was Putin’s ultimate aim, his preference for Trump was sound.

As to the argument that Trump’s Russia policy has been harsher than his predecessor’s, it is unconvincing. While Trump has been successfully pressured to approve additional sanctions on Russia by Congress and members of his staff, none of the Administration’s actions amount to a consistent policy, particularly in reaction to a direct assault on the United States. Both as a candidate and as President, Trump has not once publicly criticized Russia or Putin for intervening in the U.S. elections. Even when, a month after the indictment, the Administration for the first time responded to the intervention by imposing sanctions, Trump himself was silent and the action was limited to the individuals and entities named in the indictment. Other actions, such as the expulsions of 60 diplomats or sanctions on a handful of oligarchs and 17 government officials, were not formally in response to the election intervention. Yet after each action, and at other points, Trump consistently repeats his goal of improving ties with Russia as a “good thing.” Even UN Ambassador Nikki Haley was obliged to state her support for “better relations with Russia” following Trump’s reversal on her promise of sanctions on Russia related to its support of Syria’s chemical weapons program. Such mixed signals are the Trump Administration’s policy towards Russia. They undercut any hope for maintaining sustained international pressure on Putin to stop and reverse his foreign aggression—the ostensible intent of any sound sanctions policy.

It remains to be determined the extent to which the Trump campaign engaged in a direct conspiracy to collude with a foreign power or even if Trump is tangled in a web of Russian kompromat. Yet, the Russia-gate debates often obscure the key point: Russia’s assault on our electoral system was real, it had a determinative impact, and its effects have amounted to a success for the Kremlin. Facing this reality is the first step.

Putin’s Russia is engaged in a continuing assault not only on U.S democracy but also on Western democracy, its alliances, and the international rules-based world order. Putin’s goals are large: to divide the West, to undermine democratic systems, and to expand Russian power, regional dominance, and world influence. The constant in Moscow’s policies, both towards its neighbors and the West, is aggression. All of this also serves Putin’s interest to maintain his autocratic (and kleptocratic) power. The lack of reaction to a direct assault on U.S. democracy and the mixed signals sent by the Trump Administration towards Russian actions as a whole can only fuel additional aggression and ongoing efforts to sow discord and divide the West.

Despite Dan Coats’s assessment of the 2016 election and his warning about the 2018 elections, there remains no “whole of government approach” uniting legislative and executive branches in a comprehensive effort to defend American democratic processes and institutions and to join with NATO and the European Union in a common defense of Western democracy. Given the President’s resistance to act to protect America’s elections, such a response requires Congress to lead and direct it. And given the congressional leadership’s partisan-driven actions thus far, this is unlikely short of a dramatic political shift resulting from the 2018 elections. Still, pressure can be put to bear on Republican leaders to finally act on (still insufficient) proposals to strengthen the security and validity of the election process, to restrict foreign interference on social media, and to protect the investigation of the Special Counsel.

One area of bipartisan agreement in Congress was on the issue of sanctions as a means of pressuring Russia to stop its aggression in Ukraine and deter further attacks on U.S. democracy. Yet, since passing overwhelmingly the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), Congress has done little to make sure the Administration carries out the serious and comprehensive sanctions envisioned in the law. It needs to do so to demonstrate to Putin that there is a united political will to counter aggression, not, as Trump indicates, continued hope for entente.

One way to do this is through public hearings to present what Russian aggression means in reality: the carving up of neighboring countries; the brutal and systematic oppression of Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians in Crimea; ten thousand killed and a million people uprooted by war in Ukraine’s eastern territories and the annexation of Crimea; atrocities and war crimes carried out in Syria; a chemical weapons attack carried out on foreign soil; and the massive active measures to manipulate Western and U.S. democracies. The more political understanding there is of Russia’s aggression, the less appeal Trump’s solicitation of Putin will have, and the less effect there will be of Russia’s propaganda.

We should also recognize how the Russian assault succeeded by taking advantage of glaring weaknesses in America’s democracy and its institutions. The first institution, of course, is the Electoral College, whose original intent was as a mediating institution between the voters and the office of the presidency but whose sole purpose appears to be to override the national popular vote (now in two of the last five elections). Whether this arcane institution can be reformed, it should at least be acknowledged that the Electoral College was a key element of Russia’s strategy to help Trump to victory.

Social media companies have finally become a focus of inquiry for their role in purveying “fake news” and propaganda. But even established U.S. media, with developed professional practices, became participants in a foreign government’s effort to influence an election. News editors generally defend their daily coverage of the Wikileaks bombardment—the “what else could they do” defense. If, however, established news media won’t reconsider their willingness to report on private communications stolen by foreign intelligence agencies, they will face ever more complex cases of “kompromat” that aim to poison further the atmosphere of America’s already toxic politics. It is incumbent then on American citizens to become much more sophisticated not only in sorting truth from fiction but also seeing the motives of those who are seeking to change public opinion.

Robert Mueller’s indictment of the Internet Research Agency—and the work of the Special Counsel’s Office generally—has helped us understand the nature of the Russian assault on the U.S. democratic process. The question is whether American citizens and the American system of democracy will allow a hostile foreign power to permanently alter the fate of this country.

1 “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the Office of National Director of Intelligence briefing, January 7, 2017, offers a clear enough assessment. According to the Office’s former director, James Clapper, the classified version prepared by the Obama Administration and presented to President-elect Trump contains “staggering” and “specific” evidence of the intervention that was withheld from the public document.

2 See, e.g., “Don’t Blame the Election on Fake News. Blame it on the Media,” Columbia Journalism Review, Dec. 7, 2017. Authors Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild track reporting topics during the campaign and found that “Clinton emails” (including Wikileaks email dumps and the Comey re-opening of the FBI investigation) were by far the dominant story in the last month of the campaign. The authors conclude that the effect was to distort election coverage. Wired offers an analysis of the social media operation, but not a conclusion of its impact.

3 These factors were inter-related, such as reducing the minority turnout for Clinton. Ari Berman of Mother Jones has reported extensively on depressing the minority vote and its relationship to the Russian campaign.

4 In October 2017, Pompeo claimed that the Intelligence Community had determined that Russian “meddling” had not affected the election. This was not the first such claim by him, but remarkably this time the CIA issued a statement refuting its own director. More recently, appearing on Fox News shortly before being named Secretary of State, he repeated some typical and false assertions: “the Russians attempted to interfere” but it was similar to previous efforts; “other actors” also interfered; and “there’s not been a single indication” that Russia succeeded.

5 The HPSCI Minority issued an extensive 21-page report on unfinished aspects of the Committee’s work in response to the closing of the investigation (March 13, 2018).

6 See, for example, “Confessions of a Russia-gate Skeptic” by Blake Hounshell, editor-in-chief of Politico, in an article on February 18, 2018, written in direct response to the Mueller indictment.

7 See, e.g., “Don’t Rehabilitate Obama on Russia,” by Benjamin Haddad and Alina Polyakova, The American Interest, February 28, 2018.

8 Some journalists, on reflection, agree, such as the New York Times’s Amy  Chozick. She writes that she perceives her role as having been “a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”

The post The Alarming Story that Won’t Go Away appeared first on The American Interest.

A Government for Ungovernable Italy

In the end, the Italian people won. Two parties, the Five Star Movement and the Lega (League), together representing a small majority of votes, have agreed on a “contract” of policies and mechanisms of governance and will form the next administration. That which in most democracies would have resulted in an immediate accession to power prompted instead nearly three months of negotiation, false starts, presidential vetoes, and, outside the negotiating chamber, a tumbling in the value of Italian stocks and a sharp rise in interest rates Italy must pay on its vast, €2 trillion-plus debt.

These past months framed a contest between the 76-year-old President, Sergio Mattarella, appointed by the Parliament and desperate to keep Italy strongly engaged in the European Union; and two parties with a popular mandate they interpret as calling for a relaxation of EU rules, with the threat of withdrawal from the Eurozone looming if significant changes are not made.

The leaders of the two parties in the government, Luigi di Maio (31) of the Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini (45) of the Lega, chose Giuseppe Conte (53), a Florentine law professor, to be Prime Minister—chosen since both wished to take the post and neither would give way to the other. Both di Maio and Salvini will be deputy premiers, heading two of the most powerful ministries: di Maio will take the Ministry of Economic Development and Labour, Salvini that of the Interior. It’s hard to imagine that Conte, a neophyte in frontline politics, will have much room to maneuver, or authority to command—all the less so since Giancarlo Giorgetti (51), the closest adviser to Salvini and an independent power within the Lega, will be head of the Prime Minister’s office.

Paolo Savona, the 81-year-old former minister, economist, and businessman, whose earlier nomination by di Maio and Salvini as Economy Minister was vetoed by Mattarella, is retained in cabinet as Minister for European Affairs, charged with conducting all policy toward the European Union. Savona has taken a consistently skeptical line on the euro, and had years ago called for Italy’s exit from it: hence the presidential refusal to countenance him in a post where he had direct authority over the country’s finances. The Economy Minister will instead be the 69-year-old Giovanni Tria, like Conte a professor little-known outside of the academy, and one who will have to fight to limit the much more experienced Savona’s influence.

Otherwise, the cabinet is composed of a mixture of prominent members from both parties: most relatively young and with no governing experience, five of them women. The arguments on policy, legislation, and strategy will be at the top, where the party leaders and the experienced politicians, all Euroskeptics, are committed to electorates who have voted for them in expectation of radical change.

The field, for the moment, is cleared for action. The center-Right grouping of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the center-Left Democratic Party, the outgoing government, are greatly diminished, the latter at war with itself. The small far-Right party, Brothers of Italy, has committed itself to supporting the new Administration, ensuring that it will enjoy comfortable majorities for the time being.

Italian parties are prone to splits, and there is some dissent already in the Five Stars’ ranks among those members who came from the Left and remain leftist in belief. They see joint government with the right-wing Lega as an alliance dangerous to the programs and soul of a party only nine years old, founded in September 2009 by the comedian Beppe Grillo as an anti-establishment web-based movement that would replace what he saw as the archaic structures of a corrupt representative democracy. Instead, under di Maio’s leadership, Five Star looks like a conventional party, if more inchoate than most in settling on a consistent political line, zigzagging between left-wing and right-wing positions.

In their contract, the parties have chosen to pursue changes that will smash through the red lines on public spending laid down by the European Commission. They plan to restore cuts in pensions and to introduce some form of minimum wage, as well as a flat tax. They want to force all unregistered immigrants—whose numbers run into the hundreds of thousands—out of the country, and they pledge to close mosques and Islamic institutions deemed to be radical.

Their success has shocked the European Union, which sees in them the first firmly Euroskeptic administration in a major West European state, and fears that it will find allies in the rightist, similarly Euroskceptic governments of Hungary and Poland. Though di Maio and Salvini have striven to reassure Mattarella, Italian business, and the European Union, they see themselves as radical forces for more than cosmetic change, even as revolutionaries. This is especially true of Salvini, the present winner in this affair, now the most popular politician in the country with a party that is surging in the polls.

They could, of course, bit by bit moderate themselves into cautious reformers, dropping much of their anti-EU rhetoric and engaging with the brute facts of Italy’s still struggling economy. It is growing, but at only 1.4 to 1.5 percent a year, more slowly than every other EU economy except the soon-to-exit United Kingdom. It has kept its budget deficit well within the 3 percent limit, but at the cost of cuts, and it remains burdened with huge interest payments on the debt. The threat of a default is still large enough to cause nervousness among investors. The pressure from business, and the Union, will be toward moderation, keeping their program changes to the minimum, using the influence they have with their electors to teach them the limits of what is possible—as with the once quasi-revolutionary Syriza government in Greece.

But Italy is much bigger than Greece, and its people seem more dissatisfied and impatient. The experience of being on the front line of waves of desperate migrants, and the lack of real support from the European Union, has radicalized much of the working and lower-middle classes toward the Right. The voters deserted the centrist parties to elect parties they hardly knew. As interviews and polls show, they believed that past governments, some of them appointed rather than elected, had been more faithful to the diktats of the European Union and a German government that demanded cuts in public spending and thus living standards than to the people they were supposed to serve and protect. It is on the ability of the new government to serve and protect—which is much more constrained than they have admitted to their electors—that Italy’s political future, whether chaotic or purposeful, depends.

If these new tribunes of a disillusioned and impatient people reveal themselves as interested only in the possession of power rather than its use for the good of the citizenry, then a more extensive radicalization is likely. Italy needs to be treated with great care, both by the Union and by its new government.  That demands a very rapid learning curve, hard, disciplined work, and a steady determination to renounce the temptations of power and money to which previous Italian governments have often succumbed. Italy may squeeze some more concessions from the European Union, but the new government must grasp that only Italians, properly and honestly led, can save this lovely, cultured country from sinking toward ruin.

The post A Government for Ungovernable Italy appeared first on The American Interest.

Pioneers of the Next America

The fact of an insurgent President trashing liberal norms and democratic institutions with every twitch and tweet is but the most obvious symptom of a dysfunction that goes far deeper than mere politics. As fascinating as Donald J. Trump may be in a clinical sense, and as skillful as he may be in attracting attention as the omnidirectional freak show that he is, the proper focus of concerned Americans ought to be on understanding the conditions that enabled a man of his character to become President of the United States—and what we must do about them. That’s been the TAI thesis now for some time, and that focus underlies the institutional health project we are pursuing.

It’s hard to say if we, and some likeminded others, are yet getting through on this point to the strata of American democratic political culture that matter most. One problem is that the mainstream media has long since biographized itself, adopting a who’s up/who’s down approach to nearly everything, because it’s so much easier than grappling with complex issues, and because it’s better than serious journalism at capturing market share in a dumbed-down media market. As my former mentor Owen Harries used to say, in his Welsh-Aussie way, it’s “flaps and chaps” that most people like to read about—translation into American English: scandals and personalities, the wilder and more exotic, the better. By that standard, the current Administration is a media cornucopia to an extent that would have been hard even to imagine just a few years ago. It is seemingly made for, if not also partly created by, the new media environment in which we now live. (That’s why I have several times toyed with the idea of ordering my staff never to illustrate TAI essays with photographs of The Donald. One of these days I might actually do it.)

But even if we as a society could mange to take our eyes off the 24/7 freak show spinning out of control here in Washington, gaining an understanding of our predicament, and writing about it with skill and empathy, is no longer enough. Evidence that others have come to a similar conclusion abides in the stirring of social movement beneath the ether of the country’s two major, mainly brain-dead, political parties. The Modern Whig Party, founded in 2009, recently received a major membership boost thanks to a May 14 column by David Brooks, who declared: “I’m a Whig. If progressives generally believe in expanding government to enhance equality, and libertarians try to reduce government to expand freedom, Whigs seek to use limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility.” Amen to that.

The Serve America Movement (SAM) that has recently burst on the scene—and that expects a major call-out in August by a former Republican Secretary of State—is another indicator. So is the thriving Better Angels project, which hits the road in an effort to get Americans of different views talking civilly to one another again. The Aspen Institute has gotten into the mix too, soliciting proposals as to what a vibrant social movement tuned to the moment might look like.

Despite somewhat different political orientations, these and many other examples of budding social innovation are less competitive than ultimately cumulative, for they are all leading toward new and hopeful energies for reform and renewal. They are all based outside government, and need to be for a reason (see below). Some are actual third parties, others conceive of themselves as social movements; some have an explicit philosophy of government, like the Whigs, while others have more limited agendas—like SAM’s so-far basically transactional demands about fair access to the electoral system. So membership is not necessarily mutually exclusive: I can be a member of the Whig Party (I am) and can join SAM as well (I did) with no concern about any conflict—yet.

Ultimately, however, a major force for reform in American politics will need to tell a convincing story about our problems and prospects if it to gain real torque in the wide middle of the American body politic. It will have to tell that story in different ways, with different cadences, for difference constituencies in the society, because a core goal has to be the restoration of national unity, and attendant social trust, even amid the kaleidoscope of educational levels and orientations that ever define our E Pluribus Unum nation. But the story itself must have a steady and consistent core. What might its core themes come to be? Three, I think, will be central.

First, Americans will need to focus on the specter that technological innovation, unleavened by much elite concern for its social implications, has raised before our future. That specter can be evoked with a simple question: What are ordinary people supposed to do with their lives when a combination of technovelty-driven outsourcing (perhaps mostly in the past) and technovelty-driven automation (probably mostly in the future) stands to make large percentages of the workforce essentially superfluous?

There are spiritual as well as economic consequences of mass uselessness. Work provides not just a paycheck but dignity and, often enough, a significant form of community as well—which is why massive “guaranteed income” schemes that would likely turn vast masses of Americans into dazed Eloi are beside the real point, even if they were not also economically ruinous.

Of course, no one should rue the death of rote, numbing work or oppose, Luddite-like, automation in principle; as a nation with an aging demographic, we’re going to need plenty of both creative work and selected automation to achieve productivity levels that can sustain the current standard of living.1 In that regard, too, we will need to find something useful for the growing legions of healthy and experienced post-70 year olds to do—and do it without clogging up the moving line of younger folks into responsibility and achievement.

But as a nation we seem to be suffering a pervasive failure of imagination as to how we might manage a problem that combines technological “push” with demographic “pull”—a problem that, if allowed to spiral out without control or remediation, could put our entire constitutional order at risk. It would be unfortunate if we were to come up with poor solutions to this key problem, but it would be calamitous if we were to come up with none at all. My own tastes run to turning America into the most productive, beautiful, and sustainable garden in the history of the planet. But that’s just my imagination generating a stretch goal; how about you and yours?

Second, Americans will need to discipline themselves to reverse society’s escape into “virtual” reality at the expense of engagement with the real thing. Over the past several decades, an odd confluence has come upon us. As Brink Lindsey of the Niskanen Center has helped me to understand, on the one hand, we as a civilization have gone far toward deifying nature by spiritualizing environmental concerns, giving rise to a new pantheism; but on the other and at the same time, despite a manifest “return to nature” sensibility among the more affluent and educated among us, most Americans are ever more alienated and isolated from nature thanks to the virtual-world “devices” that permeate our lives with mediated images and sounds.

Here is how Diane Francis summarizes the numbers:

The adoption of mobile phones has become a form of social autism. On average, Americans check their phone 80 times a day, and millennials, 150 times daily. About 98 percent of millennials own a cell phone and one survey, by Bank of America, revealed that they engage with their phone more than with actual humans. Of those surveyed, 39 percent said they interact more with their smartphones than with lovers, parents, friends, children, or co-workers.

That is to say, 39 percent of American millennials realize and admit that they interact more with their smartphones—and through them the internet—than with human beings. At least that percentage act similarly but are in a form of denial aided and abetted by…their smartphones.

Beyond the cognitive-neurological impact of these devices, especially on the young (and which may come to include a significant decline in rates of deep literacy, and all that that implies about the ability to think abstractly and conceptually2), the combination has all but destroyed American society’s ability to get big things done. So, anyway, Neal Stephenson has argued—and persuasively—on what he calls “innovation starvation.”

Indeed, this combination—let’s call it ecovirtualism for short—seems to be gnawing away the ability even to imagine doing big things in the real world, as exaggerations of the precautionary principle join with the hemorrhaging of our touch skills to produce successive generations of voyeur humans. I’ll never forget my father saying—I think in 1963 or 1964—upon the switching on of the first color television set to enter our humble home, “This is great; I’ll never look at reality again!” He was kidding, of course; 50-plus years on, however, the memory of his sarcastic witticism makes me cringe more than it makes me smile.

Indeed, America’s famed innovativeness now seems to be nonexistent outside of IT, an observation that excites a question: Is what we’re now best at creating a nation at its worst?—which is another way of asking, as well, whether fears about artificial intelligence may not be entirely over-hyped.

There really is a “world beyond your head,” just as Matthew Crawford says. There really is, as David Stine insists, a relationship between engaging with that world and the habits of mind that shape our sense of value. If the transitory and the apparent displace our appreciation for the enduring and the real, then we risk ultimately becoming the junk we buy. But ever more Americans seem to be having a hard time finding that world.

One peripheral but hardly inconsequential result of the widening plague of social autism mooted above can be witnessed in Santa Fe, Texas, Parkland, Florida, and elsewhere. Colin Fleming has speculated, in trying to come to terms with the shooters rather than the victims, about how

a child gets to that point so early in life. How does a child get there now, when a child did not get there 30 years ago? When do we see this age of fragmentation, of digital platforms disconnecting us not only from each other, but ourselves, for what it is? It is a virtual world, not a reality-based world, where people less frequently need to assess what is real and adapt to it. . . . Every high school kid with a brain and a soul experiences angst. But angst doesn’t explain shooting your peers. . . . What explains it, in part, is the head-long internalization of reality, where reality is privatized, corrupted, turned from a bright beam of light into something emanating from behind many carpetings of dirty gauze deployed to stop a kind of internal emotional hemorrhaging from spilling out. . . .

Fleming continues, again focusing on the rare extreme case of the shooter. Once inside, “that once-external reality gets worked on. Distended. It becomes compromised. Broken down.” The shooter sees not so much, or just, what he wants to see but what he has to see as a survival mechanism, because now his wiring suggests that confronting the truth out there in the real world would be too much. “People are in howling pain in this world of disconnection where everyone pretends, on social media, to be the paragon of happiness,” and the massive fiction that everyone else is angst-free becomes, for the would-be shooter, simply unbearable.

Away from extreme manifestations of ecovirtualism there are the banal ones, not as bloody but ultimately just as deadly. Is it really all that surprising that our hollow political class is fixated on appearances and images at the expense of reality and substance. That, after all, is the medium in which so many of us, often unwittingly and even addictively, now exist. It is not surprising even that the highbrow fantasies of postmodernism have managed to spread from their origins on the “progressive” Left to the flaky, fact-free hubris of the post-conservative Right, which has manufactured the boogeyman of “faked news.” So then the necessary but increasingly futile efforts to call out “faked news,” which is in turn labeled fake news, and so the demobilizing, near-infinite regress that comes with it.

Third, the indeterminate future of work and the insensate disorientation caused by alienation from the real world combine to create what we might call telos deprivation—a condition that is, among other misanthropies, taking a heavy toll on national unity.

America is at its best when it conceives and pursues some kind of pioneering project, a collective striving with a purpose. We share but marginally the sort of bloodline nationalism characteristic of other Western nations. Hence—like it or not—we have always had a smaller social idea than that of our European allies, which goes far to explain their greater affinity for social democratic welfare states. Our creedal founding as a child of the Enlightenment, too, has bequeathed a more abstract national ethos, which has meant that America’s national unity has tended to inhere as much or more in a sense of common purpose than in a “creed”: It has always been more verb than noun, so to speak. But that has made it more fragile, and so more vulnerable to disruption, too.

Now it is disrupted, for we live in a relatively rare moment in our history when we have no clear common pioneering vocation to bring us together, even as the stories we tell about ourselves have lost traction, thanks to elite embarrassment with the toil of necessary myth maintenance. Indeed, the pessimism stalking the land arises mostly from a pervasive sense of collective purposelessness. And so the nation seems to be disintegrating into identity groups defined partly by class, partly by educational levels, partly by ethno-racial criteria, and partly by ideology—all reinforced by the now-well-understood echo-chamber effects of designer media.

Worse and still but dimly recognized, our routine political dynamics now exacerbate instead of ameliorate this disintegrative tendency. Political entrepreneurs both Left and Right prey on economic insecurity focused on the dubious future of work, and seek to leverage the growing scarcity of ontological common sense to create partisan enclaves defined by contending us-versus-them atavisms that function, however inadvertently in most cases, to disorganize our stock of knowledge about public life. “We the People” are shrinking, if not disappearing.

One result is that, caught in this protracted partisan crossfire, our institutions of government have ossified. We cannot now expect social/institutional innovation from the Federal government, as we experienced in our history with a variety of infrastructure projects, the Homestead and Morrill Acts, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the GI Bill, and other examples of top-down social-trust building. Reform dynamism must therefore start from outside of government, and it must renovate government as it moves toward success.

So that is the story Americans must tell each other in the onrushing future—a story about work and dignity, about mastering technology before it masters us, and about finding new unity in a new purpose that wrestles with both, and that in turn will defrost our government from its present immobility. There is revolution in our future, and the pioneers of the next America now rising among us will be the vanguard of it. But mark well: We can read and we can write, we can speak and we can listen, but no revolution will come unless we get off our asses and do something.

Do what? Join the Whigs, join SAM, get involved with Better Angels—you have these choices and many more. They will all one day flow together into a river of reform and renewal. As for me, my imagination draws me along the lines of a lyric that rides Dm-Am-Dm-C-G-Asus2: “We are stardust, we are golden; we are billion-year old carbon; and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Thanks again, Joni.

1Note both Brink Lindsey, “The End of the Working Class,” The American Interest (January/February 2018), and William Bonvillian & Peter L. Singer, “What Economists Don’t Know About Manufacturing,” The American Interest (May/June 2018).

2Note Maryanne Wolf, Tales of Literacy in the 21st Century (Oxford, 2016), and also Richard Cytowic, “Your Brain on Screens,” The American Interest (July/August 2015) and Sven Birkerts, “You Are What You Click,” The American Interest (September/October 2010).

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Spanish Lawmakers Say ¡Basta! To Corruption

It was a revolutionary day in Spain, but you couldn’t tell it from the streets of Madrid. Tourists and retirees sipped cool beers and munched on bocadillos while, only a few blocks away, the Spanish Congress of Deputies voted 180-169 to oust the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. The vote marks a watershed moment for Spanish democracy—the first successful vote of no confidence under Spain’s 1978 post-Franco constitution.

Closer to the legislature, the scene was more exciting. Spanish and international media set up their cameras in front of the chamber’s gates. Across the street, a dense crowd of some 200 onlookers gathered on the sidewalk. A Valencian nationalist marched up and down the street, carrying a sign and chanting slogans through a megaphone. Television journalists conducted man-on-the-street interviews; near me, in front of the cameras, a man declined to give his personal opinion on the vote: “My opinion is…my opinion.” Double-decker tour buses passed, eager tourists standing up and snapping photographs on smartphones to capture the moment.

When the opposition secured the 176 votes needed to jettison Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) minority government, the crowd broke out in polite applause. Friends hugged. Couples kissed. A vanguard of about a dozen politically engaged observers started chanting, “¡Sí, se pudo!” (“Yes we could!”) As black sedans with tinted windows pulled out of the underground parking deck, the chanting turned more accusatory: “Fuera, corruptos, de las instituciones” (“Get out, corrupt ones, from the institutions.”) Others were more succinct. “¡Vergüenza!” (“Shame!”) was the jeer greeting PP lawmakers unlucky enough to be recognized by the crowd.

Just over a week ago, when the Spanish judiciary formally rebuked the PP in the verdict of the Gürtel corruption case, few were predicting Spain’s quiet political revolution. Under the Spanish constitution, for a vote of no confidence to succeed, deputies must agree not only to topple the existing government, but also to install a new government in its place. Last year, a vote of no confidence initiated by Podemos, a leftist opposition party, failed to gain enough support precisely because opposition lawmakers could not agree on the composition of a new government. That Spain’s incoming Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez of the Socialist Party (PSOE), was able to cobble together enough votes to carry out a successful vote in Spain’s deeply divided political landscape speaks both to the extraordinary nature of the Gürtel case and to Sánchez’s political acumen.

On May 24, Spain’s High Court handed down sentences for 29 businesspeople and PP officials implicated in operating and benefiting from a sophisticated slush fund that ran from 1999 to 2005, while Mr. Rajoy served in several ministerial positions. Rajoy himself was not sentenced, but the Court did call into question the “credibility” of the testimony he gave last year. The verdict was notable for pointing the finger at the Popular Party as an institution. According to Politico, justices found that the “authentic and efficient system of institutional corruption…produced quantifiable economic benefits for the Popular Party, consisting in the illegal financing of political activities and different events organized for their candidates during electoral and pre-electoral campaigns.” In laying the blame for the corruption scandal on the PP itself, the Court gave opposition parties a strong justification for the no-confidence vote.

Spain’s royal family, several of its multinational corporations, and both of its historic political parties have been rocked by corruption scandals in recent years. Thanks to these scandals, Spain now ranks 42nd out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)—on par with Georgia and Cyprus, and 30 places behind Germany. If Pedro Sánchez’s new government can unite behind any one issue, it should be anti-corruption. Increasing transparency in the treasury and depoliticizing the Prosecutor General’s Office would be wise reforms, as the Spanish chapter of Transparency International has already suggested.

Even an agenda as seemingly anodyne as anti-corruption will face an uphill battle in Spain’s fragmented political landscape. Sánchez’s PSOE has only 84 seats in the Congress of Deputies, relying on support from the far-Left Podemos party and a handful of regional and nationalist parties, including Catalan separatists with whom Sánchez has promised dialogue. The defenestrated PP, the largest party in parliament with 134 seats, will now sit in the opposition with its upstart center-Right rival, the Ciudadanos party. Sánchez has made a vague promise to call elections at some future date, reassuring voters that his will be only a transitional government. But if he fails to revive his flagging socialist party, his greatest legacy may well have been to answer the chants of the crowd. The no-confidence vote he orchestrated did indeed drive corrupt politicians from Spain’s institutions. Without substantial reform, however, this will be only a Pyrrhic victory.

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Terraforming Ourselves

Science Fiction: A Literary History

edited by Roger Luckhurst

British Library Publishing, 2018, 256 pp., $27.95

In 1903, the aging Jules Verne—famed French author of the 54 adventure novels in the Voyages extraordinaires series—was asked to compare his body of work to that of his upstart English competitor, H.G. Wells. Verne, who prided himself on the strict scientific accuracy of his tales of exploration and discovery, found the question offensive. “No, there is no rapport between his work and mine,” Verne snapped. “I make use of physics. He invents.” Verne cited his From the Earth to the Moon, which featured characters travelling to the Moon in an aluminum bullet fired from a giant cannon, contrasting it with Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, in which the lunar-bound spaceship is made of gravity-defying “cavorite.” Verne had based his space cannon on the latest technological discoveries of the time, even doing rough calculations on the necessary dimensions of the muzzle. He explained in an interview:

I go to the moon in a cannonball discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to Mars [sic] in an airship which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Ça c’est très joli…. But show me this metal. Let him produce it.

In this put-down of one of the “Fathers of Science Fiction” by another, we see the future of the field. Long before anyone coined the terms “hard sci-fi” and “soft sci-fi” or used them as badges of pride or disparaging slurs, long before the “holy war” between old school pulp and the ’60s era New Wave, we have this demand from the cranky old school to the squishy new school: “Show me this metal.” Wells, whose social activism permeated his fiction, would no doubt claim that Verne was rather missing the point. But what becomes clear from a survey of science fiction’s history is that, if there’s one thing these authors love more than cosmic wonder and terror, it’s petty fights about what constitutes “real” science fiction.

Not, of course, that these science fiction fights aren’t proxies for fights about science or society itself. Science Fiction: A Literary History, recently published by the British Library and edited by Roger Luckhurst, chooses to forego defining the genre in order to discuss the sociopolitical stakes behind some of those “Whose Science? Which Fiction?” debates. Each of its contributors seems to have his or her own position on that definitional question, anyway. The eight chapters by different sci-fi scholars cover topics from “The Beginning, Early Forms of Science Fiction” to “New Paradigms, After 2001.”

I have my own heretical position on this, as I don’t believe science fiction is a genre at all. Reading Science Fiction: A Literary History didn’t convert me, as the authors languidly gesture toward a generic definition with phrases like: “The SF genre cannot be defined as a single, fixed conceptual object; it is a continually shifting matrix of megatexts . . . .” It all depends on what one means by genre, of course, but if categories like “comedy” and “tragedy” are genres, then it has something to do with how the story unfolds. Will it end in marriage? In death? Knowing that a given story is sci-fi doesn’t tell you much about its plot, only what sort of things might appear in it: alien beings, travels in time, world-shaking technology, and so forth. There are sci-fi subgenres, like the robot mysteries perfected by Isaac Asimov, but those are, generically, detective stories, for which Asimov’s puzzle-box robot ethics merely provide a complication. Science fiction is a category of universe in which stories can happen, not a category of story.

The best definitions of science fiction are evocative rather than exhaustive. Ray Bradbury, in the introduction to the 1974 collection Science Fact/Fiction, wrote, “Science fiction then is the fiction of revolutions. Revolutions in time, space, medicine, travel, and thought. . . . Above all, science fiction is the fiction of warm-blooded human men and women sometimes elevated and sometimes crushed by their machines.” Bradbury is onto something here: Revolutionary change, often but not exclusively technological, is one of the most vital subjects for science fiction. Confronting that change might be the core of the story, as in first-contact narratives from Wells’s War of the Worlds to Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (the basis of the film Arrival). Or the revolution might have occurred in the narrative’s past, with the story examining how and if people can live in their brave new world. This is often the set-up for novels of utopia and dystopia.

One of the most interesting things Science Fiction: A Literary History reveals is how difficult it is to write utopias. Surely the point of the exercise is to paint a picture of a world readers might want to live in. And yet for every author’s utopia, there’s a coterminous dystopia for the reader with eyes to see. H.G. Wells painted a parallel world called Utopia in Men Like Gods, in which enlightened and technologically advanced humans live in harmony with one another and the natural world, whose climate they have adjusted to a uniform Mediterranean tranquility. The Utopians are intrigued to discover our Earth, in a sister universe “a little retarded in time” compared to theirs. Utopia’s many advances include a eugenics program, for Utopian science can “discriminate among births” to weed out the “defective people” such as the disabled, the criminally inclined, and even “the melancholic type” and those of “lethargic dispositions and weak imaginations.” In contrast to the marvelous moon-faring metal that Verne objected to, this program represents Wells’s practical rather than merely speculative ideas about getting to the world he imagined. Wells had an affair with American eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who shared his Utopians’ aim of culling undesirable populations. The protagonist of Men Like Gods, an Earthling named Mr. Barnstaple, leaves Utopia with a new-fired political imagination: “And suddenly it was borne in upon Mr. Barnstaple that he belonged now soul and body to the Revolution, to the Great Revolution that is afoot on earth; that marches and will never desist nor rest again until Old Earth is one city and Utopia set up therein.” Other visitors have been less inspired. Aldous Huxley was so frustrated by Wells’s book that he began planning a parody. This idea evolved into his 1932 novel Brave New World, a classic dystopia about a eugenic technocracy.

Not every science fiction writer is working out an explicit political dream or nightmare. But the conflicts within the science fiction scene tend to take on political casts. One of the best chapters in the book is “The New Wave ‘Revolution,’ 1960–1976.” Rob Latham recounts how Harlan Ellison rebelled against the restrictive tastes of sci-fi magazine editors, setting out to revolutionize the field with an anthology called Dangerous Visions, “geared to smash every taboo inherited from the pulps.” Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, and even R .A. Lafferty contributed stories, and Ellison trumpeted the collection as a vanguard of the “New Wave” of science fiction. More conservative sci-fi fans were appalled by the sexually explicit and atheistic content of the anthology. Maybe they were right to be: Could any parodist of lame shock-value stories come up with something dumber than Theodore Sturgeon’s contribution, “a chatty brief for an incestuous utopia, ‘If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?’”

Some detractors excoriated the movement in censorious reviews and fiery speeches at sci-fi conventions. Sci-fi author Algis Budrys set himself up as the voice of the old guard when he condemned New Wave author Thomas Disch’s novel The Genocides as nihilistic, fatalistic, and derivative. Budrys objected to Disch’s portrayal of a band of post-apocalyptic survivors as “dumb, resigned victims,” calling the book an insult to the redoubtable spirit of Golden Age science fiction, “the school of science fiction which takes hope in science and in Man.” Budrys likely had politics in the back of his mind as he wrote this: His family had survived a kind of apocalypse by leaving Eastern Europe in the ’30s, when his father became the Consul-General for Lithuania stationed in New York. He would later become Consul-General for the Lithuanian government-in-exile as their homeland was occupied by first Nazi and then Soviet regimes. Budrys didn’t want to read bleak science fiction about abjection and victimization, but stories about keeping the flame of human achievement alive. Foes of the New Wave established a counter-movement to uphold “genuine,” hard sci-fi. They named it the Second Foundation, after an Asimovian secret society that carries the torch of civilization through a galactic era of barbarism. Ellison, never one to pass up a punch-up in print, greeted the challenge from the reactionary “old farts” of the Second Foundation with “You want a Holy War? Then get it on, baby, get it on!”

It seems easy to put the New Wave and the old school pulp adherents into political boxes: the upstart progressives vs. the nationalist old boys’ club. And the combatants sometimes framed their conflict in those terms, as when Ellison linked his sci-fi New Wave with the broader anti-establishment youth culture of the ’60s. But the debate has more interesting resonances in 2018. I often hear liberals of the Silicon Valley persuasion profess a pulp-worthy faith in the synchronicity of technological and social progress. Whereas social conservative commentators like Ross Douthat and Sonny Bunch echo New Wave anxieties about the fragility of human community in the face of social and technological engineering by megacorporations. The social science fiction of a New Wave-adjacent figure, Ursula Le Guin, brought anthropology, environmentalism, and questions of gender to the fore in works like The Left Hand of Darkness. Progressive sci-fi fans love her, for obvious reasons. But the crunchier brand of conservative also embodies a Le Guinian vision of integral systems imperiled by reckless exploitation. Erika Bachiochi, a legal scholar who argues for the importance of dependency and care in the human experience over unbridled self-assertion, in some ways channels Le Guin’s essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” a feminist rebuttal to the “Techno-Heroic” ideal. Bachiochi’s pro-life writing warns that technocratic, utilitarian culture tends to victimize women and marginalized groups like the disabled and the unborn.

Science Fiction: A Literary History is, at its best, a wonderful jumping off point for more exciting journeys. You’ll ultimately get more out of the books it points you toward than the volume itself. Follow the authors’ references and go read C. S. Lewis’s allegorically psychedelic Space Trilogy, or Connie Willis’s meticulously researched and life-affirming World War II time travel novel in two parts, Black Out/All Clear. Sadly, Science Fiction only nods toward the global reach of science fiction, spending most of its time and space on the United Kingdom and the United States. Russian utopias and dystopias that comment on the Soviet Union, like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, get the most attention of all non-Anglophone literature. And the fact that it is a “Literary History” leads it to present a science fiction realm that’s whiter and maler than the multimedia reality. Afrofuturism, for instance, gets short shrift, since visual and musical works (like Janelle Monáe’s oeuvre) fall outside the book’s purview. This highlights a broader concern: How useful can a literary history of science fiction be, when science fiction hasn’t been a primarily literary form for almost a century? Fritz Lang’s Metropolis came out in 1927. Monáe has positioned many of her songs and music videos, including her acclaimed 2010 debut The ArchAndroid, as part of an extended reinterpretation of Metropolis’s concepts. Her alter ego is an android liberator similar to the robotic Maria of Metropolis, except she is a hero rather than a deceiver. Science fiction is a huge part of contemporary culture, but no longer via the written word alone.

The final chapter, “New Paradigms, After 2001,” is an exception to the rule that these chapters are less interesting than the works they survey. I don’t want to read all of the depressing ecological fiction that Gerry Canvan profiles in this chapter, but his opening is a barnstormer:

We live in an era of obsolete futures and junked dreams. It has now been over fifteen years since 2001 with nary a monolith in sight, much less manned missions to Jupiter or increasingly malevolent computer superintelligences refusing to open the pod bay doors…. A century of science fiction predicted space missions, first contacts, robot uprisings, and nuclear wars that were all dated before now. To live in the twenty-first century is thus in a very real sense to live after the future—after the future we invented together, the one that never happened.

There is, indeed, a poignant belatedness to our present. We have more technology than we know what to do with, but no convenient cataclysm has plunged us into the rugged wish-fulfillment of the post-apocalyptic subgenre. Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy, posits that the way forward for a decadent Earth is analogous to the process of taming Mars. One of his characters says it is absurd to be “twenty-first century scientists on Mars . . . living within nineteenth-century social systems, based on seventeenth-century ideologies . . . we must terraform not only Mars, but ourselves.” Even stories primarily concerned with technology offer a vision of what humans can or should be. We’re always terraforming ourselves. But into what? I don’t want to live in Wells’s Utopia, from which humans deemed “defective” have been purged.

If I’m right that science fiction is a category of universe in which particular stories can happen, and Asimov is right that those are the stories that deal with revolutions and their human costs, then we now live in a science fictional universe. Technological progress multiplies our possibilities, but also entrenches existing hierarchies and strip-mines our world of ecological, social, and spiritual resources. Mark Zuckerberg, the wunderkind who rose from the designer of an app for ranking women by attractiveness into the autocrat of the parallel world through which we receive all our news, is gearing up for new technological initiatives to reshape education and dating. Do you feel cyberpunk yet? Good. If we must terraform ourselves, let’s demand a say in what we become, and make it something warmer and humbler than anyone’s utopian dreams of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

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Rights Talk, Redux

Nearly three decades ago, legal scholar and former U.S. Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon identified a big problem with our politics: the way we talk about them. Noting in 1991’s Rights Talk that “cynicism, indifference, and ignorance concerning government appear to be pervasive,” she worried that it was becoming “increasingly difficult to define critical questions, let alone debate and resolve them.” One principal reason, she argued, was our political language—a distinctly American dialect noteworthy for “its starkness and simplicity, its prodigality in bestowing the [individual] rights label, its legalistic character, its exaggerated absoluteness, its hyper-individualism, its insularity, and its silence with respect to personal, civic, and collective responsibilities.” Because of the powerful channeling effect careless language has on thought, Glendon soberly wondered whether American leaders had the will, ability, or imagination to speak candidly, moderately, and in complex terms about the shared public challenges we face.

The problem Glendon identified 27 years ago has since undergone a metamorphosis, and its evolution in some ways explains the wide divergence of opinion regarding our current President, as well routine discontent with other branches and perhaps all levels of government. Today, a sense of helpless frustration and moral panic abounds—one that is despairing in tone, and, in its ugliest form, resembles hatred. Our politics certainly haven’t improved since 1991. One reason is that the words citizens and government officials deploy to describe and participate in public affairs remain redolent, as Glendon put it, with starkness and simplicity, absoluteness, insularity, and silence with respect to responsibilities.

“Rights” are still very much en vogue, but new ones have appeared since 1991. In the Left’s identity politics, the concept of rights is weaponized to wage social campaigns that, according to its standard simplified narrative, “really” boil down to discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or sexual orientation. Conservatives are not immune either: The rights of white working class voters, or the rights of corporations to hire, fire, and automate, are narratively invoked and often pitted against or paired with, for example, the needs of minorities and immigrants to make a living.

Few serious observers like what they see. Mark Lilla laments in his recent book, The Once and Future Liberal, that the Left’s political ethos is now one in which “those issues that don’t touch on [a person’s individual] identity are not even perceived. Nor are the people affected by them.” Political interests, according to Lilla, are insipidly self-centered and far too narrowly circumscribed—in other words, there’s a “silence with respect to personal, civic, and collective responsibilities.”

But it’s not just “rights” that remain a problem. As Glendon pointed out, political rhetoric is often framed in absolute terms: It’s my way or the highway, “the winner takes all and the loser has to get out of town. The conversation is over.” Specific contexts reinforce this intractability—with the Masterpiece Bakeshop case recently heard by the U.S. Supreme Court being a recent example. Whatever one’s views on religious freedom and state-sanctioned marriage between individuals of the same sex, the eventual judicial outcome will be a rather Pyrrhic victory for the winning side. Courts are not particularly well suited to persuade non-litigants, much less resolve strongly held, extra-legal differences in values. When it comes to a Christian baker’s refusal to provide a cake for a same-sex ceremony, competing visions of history, morality, and human intimacy are implicated—making genuine public discussion difficult, and court opinions imperfect conduits for it. As Greg Weiner noted in the Washington Post, when the Supreme Court ultimately decides the case in favor of petitioner or respondent, it won’t change the fact that, in some deeper sense, “everybody loses.”

And so it goes in endless arguments regarding presidential comportment, too—which now seems like the only topic people talk about, ever, at least in Washington. There’s much moral peacocking on both sides, but, again, no one really “wins.” Public controversy often stems from our current President’s words, which citizens interpret as revealing his character: one that’s either authentically pugnacious or corruptly vulgarian, depending on whom you ask. Those words, though, deserve a closer look and suggest that the present officeholder’s rhetorical style is part and parcel of broader cultural trends.

For the sake of analysis, categories help. There appear to be three kinds of presidential speech that have elicited outrage—two relate to specific content, while the third is a general mode of speaking.

First is the so-called locker-room talk, sexually explicit banter regarding women. The infamous Access Hollywood recording dates back to 2005, long before the current executive was in office. But the topic of sexual impropriety, of course, has reared its ugly head amid the wave of payoff and assault allegations sweeping Washington, Hollywood, the news media, the fashion industry, Olympic sports, the tech elite, and America writ large. There has been much criticism of the President, and much praise of victims willing to come forward and unmask the Lotharios and abusers in positions of power. But even with all this testimony and scorn, our national conversation feels lacking.

Enter Glendon, who in Rights Talk repeatedly drew attention to what she deemed to be our country’s “near-aphasia regarding responsibilities.” This aphasia has never been properly treated and is the reason why the #MeToo movement may be unable—acting on its own—to fix the problems it has exposed. In public discourse today, sexual liberty is frequently claimed or demanded as a fundamental right in a variety of contexts. But the only talk about duty or responsibility hovers around the need to obtain “consent” before embarking upon sexual activity—a term of which, if a recent New York Times exposé of college students is any indication, no one is quite sure about the meaning.

When it comes to individual decision-making, a cultural overemphasis on sexual liberty (at the expense of responsibility) may inadvertently facilitate sexual license. And it is precisely that blurred boundary, along with our reverence for privacy (the “right to be let alone”), that for years impeded our ability to condemn any kind of over-the-top sexual behavior. Hopefully we’ve made some progress in recent months. But lacking a sufficiently developed, widely agreed-upon language regarding responsibility in sexual interactions, it’s hard to see how we’ll make much more. Without that language, people often end up tongue-tied, confused, pressured, hurt, and emotionally scarred.

Perhaps a wiser politics can play a role in teaching people such a language. But it certainly won’t be as easy as electing a new President with a less checkered past. Indeed, reaching some modest consensus will remain difficult so long as public conversation fails to account for certain aspects of culture. As Mark Regnerus points out in Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, dating apps, the widespread availability of online pornography, rising incomes among certain demographics, and evolving social norms have reshaped the pairing and mating “market” into one in which sex in many cases is cheap and transactional. When seriousness and social ramifications no longer attach to personal conduct, when American culture preaches a hedonist gospel and relationships matter mostly insofar as they provide physical and emotional satisfaction to individual parties, our talk will continue to reflect this debased attitude about what is, after all, a matter of love.

And politics will ineluctably reflect this talk, as the public officeholders who have recently resigned in disgrace clearly show. For those of us who grew up during the Clinton-Lewinsky years, it has kind of “always” been this way. Politics has never seemed particularly pure, so recent accusations are not as shocking, perhaps, as they should be. That’s why sex-related criticism directed at the President rings a little hollow; he’s just a stand-in for what have been persistent concerns.

There’s a second type of political language that seems markedly different from the time of Glendon’s writing of Rights Talk. This one is more intentional than coarseness caught-on-camera: It’s the President’s name-calling, the insults and insinuations lobbed on air (or online) regarding core democratic institutions, foreign dignitaries and nations, and occasionally members of his own party.

There are reasons to find such statements at turns funny, warranted, inappropriate, and appalling. There’s also a serious concern, identified by Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith in the pages of The Atlantic, that the President’s legacy could well be one of norm-breaking—in essence, de-legitimizing the Executive Branch in the minds of the American citizenry, which becomes accustomed to the leader of the Free World running roughshod over traditions and decorum. Nevertheless, as with the social media issues discussed above, the name-calling problem is more widespread than the White House. The real issue is a blurring of lines: What used to be private, insider talk has now become public.

Anyone who has worked in Washington (or in politics on the state and local level) will tell you that, while public service can at times feel like a noble calling, some government employees are jaded. Some also curse a whole lot. As in almost any job, gossip is ubiquitous. Anyone who doesn’t join in the fun risks being written off as a prig or wimp. These days, casual slights are often offered behind the scenes by the same people who excoriate the President for his name-calling. It’s as if we’re all saying, “It’s okay when we do it, but not when you do it.”

That’s understandable: The President holds high office and so must be held to a high standard. He influences impressionable youth. In global diplomatic missions, he represents not only himself but the entire nation. Nevertheless, it is incontrovertible that his occasional words resemble things that have long been uttered both within and beyond the Beltway—and therein lies part of his appeal. He speaks to us in our own language, and his barbs are a rejection of the anodyne script that, at least up until the 2016 election campaign, was rote in politics. In other words, to many he seems authentic, and his detractors seem wooden, false, and dissembling.

Sometimes because of time constraints, and other times because political officials are risk averse, they must choose messages that are tried and true rather than ones that are new, unique, and risk rocking the boat. Because of the ever-lurking “gotcha” media, it’s almost never advisable to admit uncertainty or weaknesses in one’s policy positions. Decision-making about what to say on a particular issue, and how to say it, is delicate because so many eyes are watching, negotiations are often ongoing, and available routes to satisfactory outcomes are multiple. Ideas have to be “socialized,” or auditioned, before they’re formally introduced. Messages are polled. Complex negotiations must be summarized in talking points. Shorthand and acronyms in various forms of communication are common, as are stock phrases.

Thus, part of the President’s appeal may be that even if he’s a cantankerous New Yorker, his supporters feel that he’s someone we recognize. Unpolished, sure, but with a seemingly unselfconscious sense of humor—like an overserved uncle at a family gathering: likeable to many even after he clearly crosses the line. At least, his supporters claim, he plays offense, instead of just defense, with his words. At least who he is in public seems a lot like who we suppose him to be in private. If his good guys/bad guys narratives are contrived, at least he’s willing to box a little bit. The fact that he doesn’t always tailor his speech to formal, staged public settings has gotten the President in trouble, but it’s also what many people secretly enjoy.

Last but certainly not least is the President’s Twitter account. It illustrates perhaps the most prominent feature of our political discourse that has changed since Rights Talk was first printed: our communicative means, the public way in which citizens and politicians make their points.

Social media outlets online have revolutionized the practice of politics and, at least among certain demographics, have supplanted town-halls and television as the primary avenues by which we receive, evaluate, and share political information. As many others have noted, the President’s tweets reflects an impulse to bypass news media middlemen and communicate directly with voters on his own terms. He frequently uses ALL CAPS to drive home his point, and he condemns news outlets perceived—rightly or wrongly—as mischaracterizing Executive Branch actions, distorting the content of legislation or policy documents, and maligning government officials’ true purpose or intent.

Then comes the quick response by the rest of us. Our hot takes are spurred by news outlets which—to borrow terms coined by Matthew Crawford in The World Beyond Your Head—are hell-bent on colonizing our “attentional commons,” and hijacking our “right to not be addressed.” They never let us go. We’re inundated with information daily and even hourly, and the fractured media market, in conjunction with cleverly designed algorithms, cause us to see and read some stories but not most others. And the things we do see are often short, simplified accounts, written with click-bait headlines framed to highlight, exaggerate, and exacerbate discord in order to sell. (Media outlets don’t just report facts, after all; they also create narrative arcs.) In this way, journalism—as disseminated on social media—veers toward tabloidism and unalloyed gossip, and we (along with the President) are tempted to respond in the same sort of debased argot: Politics becomes National Enquirer-speak.

Here’s an example: In a typical Facebook post, an Ivy League-educated acquaintance of mine we’ll call Clueless, recently responded to news about the GOP’s tax reform package. In the post (which included a linked article and picture), Clueless called the Senate Majority Leader “McTurtle,” and in comments below, friends insinuated a need to break the neck of this elected official—who happens to be a survivor of polio and triple-bypass heart surgery. The online interaction between a few dozen parties wasn’t meant to be profound. It signified nothing more than virtual high-fiving—just a little bonding-through-insults, poking fun at a white male’s aging anatomy—par for the swampy course. No big deal, right?

Maybe. But even if one assumes that the violence urged was crass and ironic rather than in earnest, indulging in this coarsening of political language nevertheless has consequences. It protects people’s sense of self-righteousness and inoculates their political allegiances and orthodoxies from any real outside scrutiny. It also evades genuine discussions of the issues—in this case tax policy, the complexities of which entail a high level of technical detail, competing priorities, large personalities, and legal and budgetary restraints.

I’m deliberately choosing an example that doesn’t involve the President in order to show the social media problem is greater than “just” him. When we’re frustrated with political figures, we—Republicans, Democrats, and all those in between—share in the culpability. We often feel comfortable responding to limited amounts of information by assuming the worst and then transmitting this doomsdayism to others, fostering the same controversy and cynicism we simultaneously claim to deride in others.

That doesn’t mean the President is off the hook, necessarily—certainly, there’s no moral carte blanche for the POTUS on Twitter. But it does mean we’re sometimes complicit in what’s largely a modern-day speech problem. We’re complicit when our responses to what we perceive to be politically inappropriate are themselves petty, inaccurate, uninformed, or worse.

Our overall situation—let’s call it Rights Talk 2.0—therefore is this: Cheap sex, casual slights, and social media have infiltrated our politics, and our discourse reflects that reality. People across the country intuitively recognize this and rightly fret over it. The public scratches and shakes its head, as it sees and hears “how bad” our situation is over and over again. The press wonders why elected officials are ignoring “the problem(s),” why they’re holding back explanations and verbal censure of the President. Commentators go further still. Rod Dreher wonders why anyone would ever want to work in Washington. David Brooks contends the GOP is “rotting” and “doing harm to every cause it purports to serve.”

Almost three decades after Rights Talk, our political speech problem is worse than ever. Ambassador Glendon, who will turn 80 years old in October, would not be surprised, for she herself was not naive enough to think that there was some abracadabra fix for the problems she described. Part of the thorniness, as fleshed out above, is attributable to the fact that political disorders often reflect deeper, cultural ones. One more complicating factor is that the people we look to for inspiration—public officials—do not always have the luxury of time that thoughtfulness often requires. They always face a multitude of detailed, competing considerations: a constant barrage of emails, long meetings and complicated strategy sessions, angry calls and letters from constituents with a myriad of intelligible and unintelligible concerns, personalities that must be managed inside and across offices, tenuous alliances, difficult tradeoffs involving conflicting principles, extensive travel, frequent fundraising and campaigning for reelection, the reading and study of difficult subject matter, occasional interviews and constant press hounding, speeches, shaking hands, and, of course, the core job of drafting, amending, and voting on legislation. And then there are family and personal obligations on top of all that.

Finally, there’s the issue of context—the settings and venues where political rhetoric is being offered. Rarely if ever does context afford public figures the opportunity to offer sociological critiques or philosophically grounded arguments. Their audience is just too wide, and the allotted time too brief, for that sort of thing. “Like the basic patter we routinely deploy in dealing with strangers,” Glendon noted in Rights Talk, “political speech has to be intelligible to a wide assortment of individuals who increasingly share few referents in the form of common customs, literature, religion, or history” (my emphasis).

In hindsight, that last phrase seems prophetic, for it is precisely the lack of common “referents” that the Age of Trump has so damningly exposed. If this sounds really bad, that’s because it is. But maybe the fact that our national fissures are now erupting tells us something. Maybe it’s a sign we’re waking up, not cracking up. For political regeneration to occur, as George Orwell once wrote, the first step is to think clearly—or at least notice closely. It’s only then that we can talk carefully, hoping that someone out there is listening.

In politics, words can be dangerous. Even when they’re not taken out of context or misconstrued deliberately, they have the potential to trick and confuse people into believing that matters are far simpler—far better, perhaps, or far worse—than they really are. Care and precision are how we push back against both ignorance and indolence. Again, Orwell put it best: “The worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.”

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Pierre Hassner, 1933-2018

It is no accident that modern international relations was essentially invented in the United States after World War II. Suddenly, a global power needed a global map to make sense of two revolutionary transformations: nuclear weapons and bipolarity. For students of the discipline, the roster is familiar: Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Henry Kissinger, Stanley Hoffmann, Thomas Schelling…

They were flanked by Britons, hailing from the former hegemonic power: Hedley Bull, Michael Howard, Herbert Butterfield… Continental Europe, no longer beholden to a strategic vocation, made only a modest contribution. But two figures stand out as towers of the craft: Pierre Hassner, who just died in Paris at the age of 85, and his mentor Raymond Aron, who was also a sociologist, philosopher and intellectual historian.

It may have been no accident that both were Jews (though Hassner’s family had converted to Catholicism in order to escape death at the hands of Hitler’s Romanian henchmen) who had experienced in their own lives the terrible toll of an international order destroyed—what murderous energies are unleashed when the balance of power fails and deterrence collapses. Hassner, born in 1933, survived the war in Bucharest, escaping from Communism by emigrating to Paris in 1948. Both were polyglot and peripatetic, lecturing, writing, and working in the United States, Britain, and Europe, easily moving across national perspectives.

I cannot recall anymore when I first met Pierre. But he was a constant presence in my professional life ever since I came across his legendary Adelphi Paper, “Change and Security in Europe,” Part I, 1968. A mere student then, I fell for the author (intellectually, that is). I had never read anything so perspicacious, indeed, brilliant about the nature of the European international system—certainly not by Continental academics who had been taught to eschew the grand sweep of history and philosophy in favor of footnote-studded policy studies.

In his memoirs, Aron recalls the “charisma” of the young scholar from Romania. After listening to Pierre’s disquisition on Thucydides, he wrote: “I had never heard such a brilliant exposition, whether from a student or a professor.” That’s quite an éloge, as the French say when they mean “maximal praise.”

Apart from lecturing as visiting professor at Harvard, Chicago, and Johns Hopkins, he taught international relations at Sciences Po in Paris for 40 years. Whenever I met Pierre at one of those conferences on the future of East-West relations or great-power arms control, I looked forward to “The Sentence.” Pierre would always begin almost hesitantly. Then he started revving up like an eight-cylinder Testarossa at the starting line, surging forward through the laps at breathtaking speed. Technically speaking, it was only one sentence without commas and breaks. Pierre would shift down only for a fraction of a second to pump up his lungs with oxygen. But that one sentence encompassed the world, dropping unique insights left and right, drawing the subtlest distinctions and alternating between “on the one hand, on the other”—his favorite conceptual tool.

It was dialectics and not dogma. I don’t know anybody in my profession who could range as effortlessly over missile throw-weights and counterforce strategies as over Thucydides, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. A polymath and public intellectual, he could punch elegant holes into the discourse of his contemporaries, even of such giants as Samuel Huntington. He despised intellectual preening and never saw a cliché he didn’t want to puncture, yet he did so always with respect or a chuckle. He might demolish a theory, but never its author. Like most of us, he loved professional gossip, but you would never hear him slight anybody—face to face, let alone behind his back.

He could converse as easily with American neocons as with left-wing Democrats. His brain may have been on the Right, on the side of realism and politics-as-power. But his heart was on the Left, as manifested by his belief in the transcendence of conflict between tribes, nations, and ideologies.

An avid author who could write at the same speed as he talked, Hassner has left dozens of scholarly articles in English, not to speak of the French output. I wish that he had written his books in English, the lingua franca of our craft. But the French titles will give you a feel for the enormous breadth of his mind:

·       La Revanche des passions: métamorphoses de la violence et crises du politique, 2015

·       Justifier la guerre? De l’humanitaire au contre-terrorisme, 2005.

·       La Terreur et l’Empire,  2003.

·       Guerre et sociétés. États et violence après la guerre froide, 2003.

·       Washington et le Monde. Dilemmes d’une superpuissance  2003.

·       La Violence et la Paix: De la bombe atomique au nettoyage ethnique,  2000

It goes without saying that Pierre was a wit in any language. My favorite is this one: “If you agree with me, you are brilliant. If I agree with you, you are a genius.” He died in Paris on May 26, 2018. Obituaries have appeared in all the major papers of France.

1Read his essays for The American Interest here.

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The Great Oligarch Whitewash

Ever since the United States sanctioned 17 Russian government officials, seven oligarchs and the 12 companies they own or control in early April to punish Moscow for its meddling in the U.S. presidential elections, a debate of sorts has sprung up about the wisdom of including two of the most prominent targets, Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg, in the roster. Arguments against doing so have appeared in straightforward news stories in major Western papers, as well as in a few op-eds.

For example, a recent Financial Times profile of Deripaska cited a member of Rusal’s board in describing the sanctions as “unfair”: “Deripaska has been good at playing by Putin’s rules, yes,” the individual told the FT. “But to be a billionaire in Russia, you have to be close to the Kremlin.” Similarly, the Washington Post, writing about Vekselberg last week, tracked down Ambassador Mike McFaul, Obama’s main Russia adviser, and asked him his opinion. “I was shocked when I saw [Vekselberg’s] name there,” McFaul told the paper. “I think generally sanctions are the right thing to do. But I know lots of people who work with him. He would not make my top 10, top 20 or top 30.”

Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky has been one of the most outspoken critics making the case that the wrong people are being sanctioned. For example, he tried to explain away the singling out of Deripaska—an aluminum magnate—as part of the Trump Administration’s trade and tariff strategy: “An example is being made of a billionaire who isn’t part of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle,” he wrote, “but whose business is unpopular with the administration of President Donald Trump.” As to Vekselberg, Bershidsky described the relationship between a certain class of Russian billionaires and the Kremlin in clinical, psychological terms—almost as if talking about Stockholm Syndrome. “Even the wealthiest business owner serves at the president’s pleasure,” he wrote. “It’s not really a game but an abusive relationship with elements of codependency.“

Bershidsky is echoing an argument that first appeared in a policy brief published last November by the Atlantic Council. The document sets out criteria by which the U.S. government ought to consider adding Russian individuals to its sanctions rosters. “Russia’s wealthy businessmen should not be presumed to warrant listing simply by virtue of their wealth,” the document argues. “Many made their fortunes before Putin [emphasis added] and, to survive, are forced to pay large tributes to the Kremlin.”

In one sense, the Atlantic Council brief is correct: A distinction should be made between the genuine entrepreneurs in today’s Russia and Putin’s kleptocratic cronies. But that distinction is now being applied to people like Deripaska and Vekselberg, and by extension casts an entire subset of genuinely bad actors—the hyper-rich “businessmen” who profited from the violent, lawless, mafia-ridden privatizations of the 1990s—as being among Putin’s victims.

Has our sanctions policy thus far been overly broad? In a word: “no.” And the fact that other Western countries—especially the United Kingdom—may be following in our footsteps by digging into the finances and connections of people like Roman Abramovich is welcome news. Moralistic revanchism ought not drive Western policy; the sordid and often murderous provenance of these vast fortunes is not what’s at issue here. Rather, we should be sober about just who these people are, and the roles they play in Putin’s Russia.

It’s true that some of these Yeltsin-era tycoons have spent the last 20 or so years trying to diversify their holdings in a bid to gain some independence from the Kremlin. As Bershidsky notes in his defense of Vekselberg, the sanctioned billionaire has moved some 79 percent of his assets outside of Russia. And it may even be true that many of these people’s financial affairs are now clean—their assets transparent enough for the highest auditing standards Western firms can offer.

That’s all very nice. But what matters is that in continuing to “play by the rules”—which is indeed a necessity to remain a billionaire under Putin—these people remain an integral part of Putin’s system. These are no innocent hostages, nor are they vassals forced to pay tribute to a rapacious czar. These are opportunists who now find themselves on the wrong side of escalating hostilities between sovereign nations. As such, they are legitimate targets of a policy meant to deter the Russian state from a range of harmful behaviors.

Has this policy been successful? That’s a question beyond the scope of this essay. But insofar as we have committed ourselves to an approach that draws thick lines between victims and predators in Putin’s Russia, it’s clear on which side of the line these people lie.

There’s an argument, usually made subtly, especially by a certain kind of Russianist in DC, that while Yeltsin-era oligarchs may not be angels, they are sure to play a constructive role in a post-Putin Russia. In trying to shield these people from measures meant to wound the current Russian regime, there is an element of trying to retain influence in whatever follows it. As a matter of principle, the United States should avoid the temptation of picking or creating political winners in Russia (or anywhere else, for that matter). The current sanctions policy, effective or not, should be thought of only as a deterrent.

But as a simple analytical matter, these Russianists are badly mistaken. If Russia is to have any kind of decent future in our lifetimes, it will be built by a generation that manages to transcend the sordid legacy of the Yeltsin years, not by those that thrived in them.

On January 30 of this year, the U.S. Treasury released the public version of the so-called “oligarch list”—a list of “significant” wealthy Russian people and political actors “as determined by their closeness to the Russian regime and their net worth.” The list, mandated by a bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in the summer of 2017—the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA)—was devised as a clever “pre-sanction” device that would put not just the potential targets on notice, but more importantly alert their would-be business partners of U.S. hostile intent. If you were considering doing business with one of these people, the implied message from the U.S. government was that you might want to reconsider. The people identified by Treasury were to be made “radioactive,” in the memorable phrasing of former U.S. diplomat Dan Fried.

When it landed, the list was widely met with derision. The 96 wealthy people on the list appeared to be cut-and-pasted from Forbes’ annual “Billionaire list,” with the cutoff being a net worth of $1 billion or more; the government functionaries, meanwhile, seemed to be directly lifted from the personnel websites of the Presidential Administration and the Prime Minister’s office. Even though its release was accompanied by Treasury assurances that a detailed “classified annex,” both expanding and justifying the public list, had been sent to Congress, most of the coverage remained negative. Leonid Bershidsky’s initial criticism of the list as a whole was on point: The public list was over-broad insofar as it included real entrepreneurs. Any expansion of the list through the classified annex wouldn’t address that fact.

But as we saw, by the time actual sanctions rolled around in April, the criticism subtly shifted, with Yeltsin-era oligarchs now transformed into Putin’s victims. It’s hard to say definitively why this happened; those pushing this line are a diverse bunch. We know nothing, for example, of Deripaska’s unnamed defenders at Rusal, except that they are probably self-interested. And Bershidsky, a successful financial journalist, editor, and publisher in Russia who self-exiled to Berlin in 2014, appears to be on a lonely mission to push back against what he perceives is excessive Russophobia driven by Americans convinced that Putin installed Donald Trump in the White House.

In DC, however, something else is at play—a kind of interpretation of history you detect if you spend time with the generation of people who worked on Russia in the 1990s. Some were friendly with operators like Anatoly Chubais and Petr Aven, members of the young group of reformers-turned-tycoons whose economic policies exacerbated a difficult transition to capitalism. Others, serving in Bill Clinton’s Administration, had doubled and tripled down on the erratic alcoholic Yeltsin, in some cases colluding outright in his desperate bid to cling to power in 1996.

The reckless liberalization policies of the 1990s helped create a generation of gangster-billionaires—the storied class of larger-than-life “Russian oligarchs.” All swindled their way to their riches, and most relied on connections to organized crime to prevail. And yet, for a certain generation of Russia hands, these same people came to represent a credible path to a decent future for a country just getting its footing with capitalism. The late Karen Dawisha, one of the best authorities on the corrupt regime that sprung up under Putin, elegantly described this thinking: “Mancur Olson was right to posit that in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, ‘roving bandits’ will over time gain an interest in laws to vouchsafe their gains and will settle down, and from this interest in the stability and predictability of gains, democracy will emerge.”1 To Dawisha and many other Russianists of that generation, Putin’s emergence in 2000 represents a kind of coup—a derailment of a country that was progressing, albeit on a bumpy road, toward the inevitable end-point of capitalist, and perhaps liberal, democracy.

That Putin has created a revisionist, expansionist, and increasingly autocratic kleptocracy on his watch is obvious to anyone with eyes. That he strangled an emerging democratic opposition to his rule in 2011/2012 is beyond dispute. But that the Yeltsin-era oligarchs in any way still represent a hope for Russia’s future is a bizarre, if persistent, idea born of a certain kind of dumbed down democratization theory. It seems to lie at the heart of the attempts to whitewash the reputations of the two oligarchs already mentioned, as well as the attempts to keep other supposedly “good oligarchs” found on the pre-sanction list out of Treasury’s crosshairs.

No less bizarre than the concept of a “good oligarch” is the idea that those tycoons cooperating with Putin should be seen as hostages rather than opportunistic collaborators. But the provenance of this idea is also not hard to discern: It is tied to the unhappy fate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

In July of 2000, shortly after assuming power, Putin called together the Yeltsin-era billionaires and promised them that their ill-gotten gains would be preserved as long as they stayed out of politics. Putin was already feuding with Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, two men with massive media empires who were emerging as vocal critics and rivals to his rule. Neither were budding democrats; both were exiled by the end of the year. Most of the rest of the wealthy businessmen opted to keep their heads down and cooperate.

Most, but not all: Khodorkovsky, who by 2003 was the wealthiest man in Russia due to the runaway success of his oil company Yukos, started asserting his political independence. And he genuinely did seem more earnest than any of his peers. Russia’s financial crash in 1998 appears to have shaken him. He started to confront Putin about the cronyism and corruption flowering under his watch. Putin’s furious response, accusing Khodorkovsky’s Yukos of a vast tax-evasion scheme before a gathered press gaggle, sealed Khodorkovsky’s fate: He was jailed for 10 years, and his oil company was picked apart, with its most profitable assets going to the state firm Rosneft, headed by Putin’s ruthless crony, Igor Sechin.

For many Russia experts, the destruction of Khodorkovsky represented the moment that the Putin regime showed its true face. The brazenness of the act, and the fact that Khodorkovsky was giving sizable sums of money to civil society and making reformist noises before he was jailed, has helped cement the myth that Russia’s robber-barons were on the cusp of transforming themselves into responsible stakeholders in a liberal democratic society. But a quick look at how people like Deripaska and Vekselberg have handled themselves since Khodorkovsky’s fall gives lie not only to the “roving/stationary bandit” theory (at least as applied to Russia), but also to any claims of victimhood espoused by these people’s defenders.

“More than any other oligarch, Mr. Deripaska wedded his fortunes to those of Russia’s ruling class,” the Financial Times wrote in a profile of the man in 2010. He married Polina Yumasheva, the daughter of Valentin Yumashev, one of Yeltsin’s senior aides and husband to Yeltsin’s own daughter. Deripaska thereby wormed his way into “the Family,” the group responsible for bringing Putin to power and negotiating their immunity under his regime. Putin’s 2000 meeting could be seen as a codification of that “understanding”—ponyatiye in Russian, business slang with its roots in the Soviet underworld.

According to Konstantin Gaaze at Carnegie, Deripaska is not so much an entrepreneur as he is a networker—his skills are not managerial but political. He has asked for help from the Russian government, both under Medvedev and Putin, no less than 50 times in the past 15 years, and has received it almost every time. It’s true that he was rebuffed in 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis, when he proposed to sell the Russian state three million tons of aluminum at a steep premium in order to help bail out his over-leveraged firm Rusal. But that doesn’t tell us all that much: Around that same time, Putin’s darling Igor Sechin was also having trouble clawing money from the Kremlin’s clutches.

But even if the 2008 aluminum deal fell through, Deripaska got preferential financing from the famously opaque Vneshekonombank (VEB), a former Soviet foreign trade bank with longstanding links to the security services that in 2007 was re-established as a “state corporation.” VEB served as the key government vehicle for bailouts through the recent financial crisis. A cap on bailouts was set by law at $2.5 billion per company, but Deripaska received $4.5 billion anyway. He got the money in order to make good on a loan he had recently taken out with a consortium of foreign banks. Nominally, his bailout was approved so that the collateral Deripaska had put up—shares in the palladium mining concern Nornickel—would not end up in foreign hands in case of default. But practically speaking, the Kremlin simply helped preserve Deripaska’s personal wealth.

Deripaska always knew the game he was playing, and at times he has been candid about it. “I don’t separate myself from the state,” he told the FT in 2007. “I have no other interests.” And indeed, while he did well by Putin, he has also been quite useful to him. Shortly after the Bush Administration revoked Deripaska’s visa in 2006, allegedly due to his ties to organized crime, he was granted a diplomatic passport by Russia, not just for his own business purposes, but also so that he could represent Russia in the international arena. A U.S. diplomatic cable sent in 2006 noted the dynamic: Deripaska was “among the two to three oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis” and “a more or less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad.” The conversation unearthed by anti-corruption activist and opposition politician Alexei Navalny last year between Deripaska and Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Prikhodko, a top foreign policy advisor to Putin, suggests that Deripaska’s role as a kind of unofficial intermediary remains unchanged.

Like Deripaska, Vekselberg made his initial fortune in the 1990s in the scramble for Soviet mineral assets—the so-called “aluminum wars”—which were among the bloodiest struggles of the period. He founded his holding company, Renova, in 1991 with Leonard Blavatnik, a Soviet emigré to the United States. Renova still serves as Vekselberg’s main vehicle for conducting business, and as a result it was among the firms sanctioned last month. His Siberian-Urals Aluminium Company (SUAL), founded in 1996, amassed stakes in various mines around the country. The story of how SUAL got control over the Severouralsk Bauxite Mine (SUBR) is a murky case in point. One version of events had the mine’s owner sign over his rights to Vekselberg after his daughter and husband were found murdered in their apartment.

Unlike Deripaska, Vekselberg has been less brazen with his “asks” of the Kremlin, and more ostentatious in his pious displays of patriotism. Shortly after the fall of Khodorkovsky, he famously repatriated the Forbes family’s Fabergé egg collection to Russia at a cost of $100 million, as well as restored the imperial palace in which the eggs were to be displayed for an additional $40 million—a gesture that earned him public praise from Putin and the ponyatiye that they were on the same side.

Though no pauper in Yeltsin’s time, Vekselberg has done well since. The Skolkovo Project—the so-called Russian Silicon Valley, a brainchild of then-President Dmitry Medvedev—was given to Vekselberg to steward in 2010. Vekselberg himself likes to play a martyr, telling journalists that the project is a financial burden for him—a burden he proudly carries for the sake of Russia’s future. That’s a stretch. Skolkovo was designed to be a private-public partnership, and the Russian government initially announced it would invest around $4 billion on the project through 2020. Vekselberg promised to attract three times more in private funds. As of now, however, the biggest visible achievement of Skolkovo has been a cascade of corruption scandals, with allegations that as much as $2 billion has been misused or embezzled.

But all that is peanuts compared to the big cash-out Vekselberg received as a result of his dealings with the Tyumen Oil Company (TNK). He bought into TNK during its privatization in the 1990s, alongside Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven’s Alfa Group, a bank that was guaranteed a controlling stake in the oil company by Yeltsin’s government at the time. In 2003, when TNK merged with BP, the Russian consortium that held 50 percent of the resulting company was made up of Vekselberg, Blavatnik, Fridman, Aven, and German Khan. Nine years later, BP decided to sell its share in TNK-BP after a bruising, bare-knuckled fight with its Russian partners, who were openly leveraging their connections with Kremlin-connected security services to make trouble for the Brits.

As chance would have it, none other than the state-owned Rosneft emerged as the buyer willing to swallow the whole company—both the British and the Russian halves—once the Brits opted to sell. The Russian shareholders received $28 billion in cash—a record-breaking payout. As Forbes noted, the payment was inflated by some 40 to 60 percent above market valuation, equaling some $8-10 billion in free money for the lucky Russian stakeholders. The deal was reportedly finalized in an all-night round-table session that included Rosneft’s CEO Sechin and Putin himself.

The deal has been criticized as deeply corrupt by former TNK-BP managers, as well as by the late reformist politician Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down in front of the Kremlin in 2015. It bumped Vekselberg’s net worth up to $19 billion in 2013, putting him in the top spot on Forbes’ Russian billionaire list that year, and made Blavatnik the wealthiest person in Britain. As for Rosneft, the deal saddled the company with huge debt loads, and its capitalization today is still lower than it was before the acquisition.

What was the steep premium “for”? It’s impossible to say, of course. Some of that state largesse presumably ended up as a kickback, held in mysterious trust by someone like Sergey Roldugin. But the important thing to keep in mind is that Vekselberg, along with Fridman, Aven, Khan, and Blavatnik, are complicit in this scheme. They are hardly held hostage to a predatory Putinism.

As if to underline the point, Vekselberg quickly got a bailout from the Russian government after sanctions were imposed. He had asked the Kremlin to refinance a set of loans totaling $950 million through state banks, to let a private bank (whose beneficiaries are his partners) provide loans to his business in violation of counter-party risk assessment laws, to make state companies buy metals from his Yekaterinburg metals factory, and even to ban mineral water imports from Europe in order to bolster the domestic market position of his beverage firm. “Support has already been provided, last week,” the Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in mid-May. “As to the sum, I’d rather not talk about it.”

Deripaska’s holding company EN+, which last week proposed that energy prices for Siberian citizens be raised to help offset the pain of U.S. sanctions, is still awaiting a decision.

Is there no distinction to be made between people “truly” inside Putin’s inner circle—people like Sechin, Gennady Timchenko, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, Yuri Kovalchuk—and the Yeltsin-era “businessmen” that still control some of the largest companies in Russia? Of course there is. The former are largely personal friends of the Russian President, dependent sycophants from his time in St. Petersburg whom he has handsomely rewarded with plum jobs at state firms and with fat procurement contracts for white elephant construction projects. The latter, having read the moment correctly in 2000, have used the time to spread their amassed wealth beyond Russia’s shores, investing in Western companies and charities, and procuring second or third passports for themselves in the process. Fridman has perhaps gone the furthest, supporting causes in Ukraine and maintaining an open friendship with the late Boris Nemtsov.

Still, these people have continued to “play ball” with Putin, and have done so not merely transactionally and at arms’ length. They are not captive captains of industry trying to steer healthy companies through a nasty but hopefully brief period of statist authoritarianism, merely doing what they must to stay alive. They are collaborators. To be a billionaire in today’s Russia is to be a regime loyalist: There is no such thing as a free lunch with Vladimir Putin.

Early last week, the Atlantic Council hosted a closed-door private event with Fridman and Aven to discuss the state of the Russian economy. A group of transparency and democracy activists protested the meeting, saying that while in principle there was nothing wrong with talking to such people, the real purpose of their visit to DC—to discourage further sanctions—should not be overlooked.

On the one hand, as heads of Alfa Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in Russia, the two billionaires doubtless had important insights to share with DC’s policy community. If Putin himself agreed to sit down with scholars behind closed doors, the same logic would apply: Understanding what is actually going on inside an adversary’s mind is valuable information. And having the discussion occur in private is often the price of candor.

On the other hand, if Putin was speaking, whatever candor he might display ought to be viewed with skepticism. The same goes for Fridman and Aven, who had been lobbying to not end up on Treasury’s pre-sanction list since well before January. Rumor has it they still retain the services of BGR Group, which helped set up a whole raft of meetings around town for them last week.2 Perhaps they criticized Putin at the Atlantic Council, giving off the impression that they were independent actors. We were not at the meeting, but we hope those present were deeply suspicious of their posturing.

It’s a common piety among Russia analysts to say that U.S. policy is directed at the Kremlin, not at the Russian people. But in the gray morass that is today’s Russia, the Yeltsin-era oligarchs are more aligned with the former than with the latter. They have chosen to remain involved with a regime that is increasingly hostile to the interests of the United States, and they have done so for personal gain. If they end up chewed up in the ensuing conflict, that’s on them.

1. Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (Simon & Schuster, 2014)

2. We inquired with BGR Group if Fridman and Aven were in fact clients. We have not received a reply at time of writing.

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Do High Oil Prices Mean More International Conflict?

When asked in a recent interview about his famously sympathetic gaze into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s soul in 2001, former President George W. Bush argued that rising oil prices had fundamentally changed his interlocutor: “When I looked into his eyes and saw his soul, Russia was broke . . . [t]he price of oil goes up and Putin changed.”

Does the relationship between oil prices and Russian behavior to which Bush alluded hold true? The higher the price of oil, the more aggressive Russia becomes? And what about other petrostates? Might it be true for those as well?

We may soon have more evidence for the proposition. Oil prices are brushing off 2016 lows and hitting three-year highs. Brent crude has been hovering above $70 a barrel since April, up from lows of around $30 in early 2016, fueled by OPEC production cuts and rising geopolitical tensions (over issues like the Iran deal). Though nuances, complications, and exceptions abound, the academic and historical evidence on balance tells us that, as we transition from a lower to a higher oil price regime, we can generally expect a darker geopolitical outlook. As rising oil revenues gives Russia, Saudi, Iran, and other oil-exporters an added sense of confidence, it may at least selectively inflame interstate tensions and lead to more aggressive behavior. That possibility, alongside an increasingly hawkish U.S. national security team and a President who appears to feel rather “unchained” of late, points to a potentially combustible mix just ahead.

It is generally taken for granted that aspects of geopolitics can function as a key input into oil prices. Trump’s mere threat of a U.S. strike in Syria, for example, caused oil to spike by 2 percent on April 11. In addition to short-term effects, geopolitical competition can influence prices in other ways. To give just one general example, as Soviet power spread into parts of the Third World after the independence era, some states felt safer nationalizing their oil industries to escape Western company control (Iraq in 1961, for example), and prices rose as a consequence.

But the relationship may also work the other way around: Oil prices can also be a key input into geopolitics. Many studies have demonstrated that oil prices have a direct effect on the domestic stability of petrostates. This makes ample intuitive sense: Higher prices fill public coffers, allowing governments to palliate needy populations and potential elite opposition groups by dispensing more largesse. Some regime elites may reason that a firmer grip on power may free them to carry out more assertive foreign policies without fear of being undermined at home.

There are, however, several complications to this general intuition. Some states already have sufficiently buoyant revenues relative to their small populations to satisfy their publics and feed clientelistic networks. Providing largesse can also backfire if prices drop; taking away something valuable that people have grown used to is a dangerous game, especially when elites aren’t ready to play it. And then of course there is the famed “oil curse”: For all sorts of reasons, from “Dutch disease” economic distortions to the derangement of normal citizen-state relationships, oil riches can in time undermine regimes, weakening and even destroying them.

That said, a more recent body of research has empirically demonstrated the intuitive twin of this conclusion: Higher prices cause greater interstate aggression by oil-producing countries. Why would this be the case? Greater oil revenue flushes petrostates with confidence and also cash that they can put toward military spending or foreign adventures. To take one obvious example, we need only look to Iran’s using its oil revenue to fund proxy groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Furthermore, military spending by one regional oil producer can beget spending by others, fueling regional arms races that can make aggression and conflict by miscalculation more likely. The onset of the Iran-Iraq War in September 1980 may be a prime example of that dynamic.

Most prominent among the empirical studies is Cullen S. Hendrix’s 2014 paper, which shows a statistically significant relationship between higher oil prices and “dispute behavior” (military actions short of actual war) by oil-exporters. (Hendrix also summed it up nicely in this Washington Post piece.) He found that “all things being equal, a one standard deviation ($18.60) increase in the price per barrel of oil from the sample mean ($33.81) is associated with a 13 percent increase in the frequency of [dispute behavior]” in oil-exporting states. He also found that, above $77 a barrel, oil-exporters are significantly more dispute prone than non-oil exporters.

Hendrix also explores the potential complication of reverse causality: Could dispute behavior by oil-exporting countries be driving prices higher, rather than the other way around? A key analytical consideration here is timing. We can all agree that geopolitical activity affects prices in the short-term (such as the Syria example mentioned above), but is this reverse causality true on a sustained basis? Parsing out long-term signal from short-term noise, Hendrix examines whether elevated aggregate dispute behavior affects oil prices at the yearly—rather than daily or weekly—level, and finds that this relationship does not hold. His explanation here is that other players typically step in to redress markets: “While dispute behavior may drive prices changes in the short term . . . the strategic significance of oil prices and oil-exporting states encourages major powers to act in ways that stabilize markets, either through market intervention . . . or direct, armed intervention.”

Jeff Colgan of Brown University has also touched on this topic, finding through his research that oil has fueled—in some way—one quarter to one half of interstate wars since 1973. He also notes that oil-producers are 50 percent more likely to engage in conflict than non-oil producers. Colgan identifies eight, non-mutually exclusive causal mechanisms for how oil fuels international conflict, most of which are implicitly exacerbated by higher prices. They are: “(1) resource wars, in which states try to acquire oil reserves by force; (2) petro-aggression, whereby oil insulates aggressive leaders such as Saddam Hussein or Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from domestic opposition and therefore makes them more willing to engage in risky foreign policy adventurism; (3) the externalization of civil wars in oil-producing states (“petrostates”); (4) financing for insurgencies—for instance, Iran funneling oil money to Hezbollah; (5) conflicts triggered by the prospect of oil-market domination, such as the U.S. war with Iraq over Kuwait in 1991; (6) clashes over control of oil transit routes, such as shipping lanes and pipelines; (7) oil-related grievances, whereby the presence of foreign workers in petrostates helps extremist groups such as al-Qaeda recruit locals; and (8) oil-related obstacles to multilateral cooperation, such as when an importer’s attempt to curry favor with a petrostate prevents multilateral cooperation on security issues.”

Though he doesn’t substantiate statistically that higher prices lead to more conflict through these channels, he implies it heavily. For example, he writes that, “the low oil prices of the 1990s have given way to higher and more volatile prices, increasing the magnitude of the consequences one can expect from oil-conflict linkages.”

While the emerging academic evidence may validate the claim that higher oil prices lead to more aggression, the historical and anecdotal evidence is somewhat mixed, and understandably so. Oil price is clearly only one of many inputs into foreign policy decision-making, and an indirect one at that. No leader thinks, “Now that oil is at $X, I’m going to invade my neighbor.” Context obviously matters, too: No one imagines that Ecuador or Norway is going to invade or try to blackmail a neighbor just because spot prices rise 15 or 30 percent in a given six-month period. Price levels seep into decision-making more subtly, affecting interlocking beliefs about strategic behavior generally and specific cases more particularly; they may fuel self-confidence by shoring up budget outlooks and funding the tools of more aggressive behavior in contexts where such behavior could conceivably make sense.

Moreover, there are many contravening (and occasionally countervailing) complications. Prominent among these is the fact that low oil prices can incentivize states to “wave the flag” in order to distract from domestic difficulties—so the impact of low oil prices might lead to more aggressive behavior in some cases. That suggests that neither high nor low prices per se may be the trigger affecting behavior, but rather notable changes in price that become politically salient in one way or another.

And there’s also the tricky issue of timing: Over what timeframe does increased oil revenue fuel aggression? Is it in anticipation of higher prices, in direct response to the current pricing levels, or is there more of a lag in effect as oil revenue slowly shores up—or is expected to shore up—budgets and military spending over time? The answer might depend on specific cases and leadership cadres.

There is also a scaling problem. If a 20 percent rise in oil prices makes a more assertive foreign policy more likely in a given country, does a 40 percent rise make it twice as likely? Or put differently, how much of a difference in price, and presumably in expected revenues, does it take to cross a threshold where it might have an impact on decision-making? Are there multiple thresholds?

Russia exemplifies these issues. Taking the same long view as George W. Bush in his interview, it seems self-evident that rising oil prices and higher government revenues over the course of the 2000s gave Putin confidence, funded military expansion and modernization, and helped enable Russia’s most revanchist tendencies. Between 2003 and 2013, Russian military expenditure doubled as the price of Brent crude rose from a low of around $20 a barrel in 2001 to a high of more than $140 a barrel in 2008. Russia, as the saying goes, is a gas station with nuclear weapons; a higher pump price thus means more weapons, nuclear and otherwise.

But when you cross reference this conclusion with specific acts of Russian aggression over the past roughly twenty years, the picture gets much more complicated. When Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008, oil was above $100 a barrel. Same with Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. But Russia also dramatically intervened in Syria in September 2015, when oil had dropped to around $50 a barrel and the economy was sputtering due to both low energy prices and Western sanctions. Here, many analysts plausibly described these interventions as a way of rallying Russians to the flag and distracting them from domestic hardship. More likely, Putin saw an emergency in Syria that simply had to be dealt with, no matter the cost or risk; the Assad regime was in danger of collapsing, and Syria is Russia’s only ally offering ports and bases in the Mediterranean basin. So Russia is a bit of a mixed bag, but on balance its behavior—especially over a long timeframe—appears to support the thesis.

Saudi Arabia’s role in the 1973 Yom Kippur war also illustrates the tricky question of timing. Saudi funding of the effort was enabled by a financial buffer created by a rise in revenues from the late 1960s, and was likely justified by an expected rise in revenues due to an oil price increase that was anticipated, in part, because of the very war it was in the process of financing. Its reserves had already grown so large that, for the first time, Saudi Arabia could ride out a supply (and revenue) disruption and still finance a war. But the Saudis helped finance a war that they themselves did not participate in. So if rising oil prices led to greater interstate aggression, it did so in this case in a particularly indirect way.

These are all interesting and important nuances that attenuate any direct causal connection one might be tempted to draw between oil prices and conflict. So it would be nice to know if historical studies have shown any significant statistical relationship between fluctuations in key sources of government revenue (and what memoirs and archives tell us about how those situations were perceived) and interstate behavior. It would be even nicer to drill down into such studies to find cases where specific lucrative commodities—for example, European colonial profits such as from British opium sales in China, or cotton grown in Egypt—made any difference in the behavior of the relevant governments. Alas, such studies do not exist.

But regardless of the timeframe and mechanism, academic and historical studies alike do suggest that higher oil prices have generally lead to more aggressive, or at least riskier, behavior in recent decades—whether in anticipation of higher prices, immediately in their wake, or only after sufficient revenue stores are built up.

So are we at a point in the energy price cycle where, all else equal, we should expect greater interstate conflict? We’re close to Hendrix’s $77 a barrel threshold, above which oil-exporters are significantly more dispute-prone than non-oil exporters. But given the nuances just described, this specific price threshold is probably too cute. The more realistic argument to make is about the effect of a higher-price vs. lower-price paradigm over a multi-year horizon (particularly in light of the timing issue and potential lag). And if the period of the past two years (when Brent largely hovered between $40 and $60) was a lower-price paradigm, 2018-19 is potentially gearing up to be a higher-price paradigm driven by continued supply cuts by OPEC, tight global inventories, and—in a coincidental way—heightened geopolitical risks. We’ll see how these factors play out, but if oil prices remain elevated we may begin to subtly feel their effects on behavior by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and perhaps others.

None of this is to say that oil prices are the most important factor in the geopolitical outlook over the near, medium, or long-term. The reputed hawkishness of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, the effect of the upcoming mid-term elections on Trump’s decision-making, and reactions to potential exogenous shocks (for example, a major clash in Syria between U.S. or Israeli and Iranian or Russian forces) will play a much more direct and important role in shaping the geopolitical landscape. But a higher oil price regime (if it holds) could well make petrostates like Iran, Saudi, and Russia more aggressive—either in challenging the United States and Europe in the case of Russia, or by exacerbating ongoing proxy conflicts in and around the Middle East in the cases of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Given these and other dynamics, we should expect a bumpy ride ahead.

The post Do High Oil Prices Mean More International Conflict? appeared first on The American Interest.

American Crazy

I’m not a zealous follower of the news cycle. I hear a lot (how could you not?) and much scrolls past my face (how could it not?), but clicking on “trending” links isn’t what I do because it rots the soul, winnows away our humanity, pushes us into an airless world where the same words, phrases, and tired arguments are sounded and re-sounded.

Anything that we comment on requires that that thing be put constantly in front of our faces. You don’t have to look for them. It’s not like reading about what Faulkner’s life was like, or how to bake French bread, or what state the trails Lewis and Clark once blazed are in today. If Windex were made a staple of the news cycle we would argue about shades of blue, if something were too blue, too diluted, and so on—like simple-minded obsessives in ranty, half-cocked arguments that might as well be banged out on social media in all caps.

There are advantages to not burying your eyeballs in trending links. You learn things other people busy frothing at the mouth don’t. You have a different perspective. Fresh eyes, to mix a metaphor, but tell a truth. These things can grow your soul, help you understand who you are, are not, should be, could be. Note that verb “be”—can be a very active verb. It’s not an “I’ll-just-wait-for-the-topic-of-the-day-to-trend-on-Facebook” kind of verb. It’s a go-out-and-get-or-make-yourself-some-meaning verb.

Lately that active way of being has produced in me a dual-level lesson on the subject of guns. The idea of going to school to learn, to meet with friends and make new friends, to fall out with your friends, and then perhaps be hunted as you do so, is as crazy an idea as exists in American society. The craziness shows in how people choose to express themselves. So it was with the reports of the Santa Fe shooting that I became horrified by language as an indicator of where we are.

When you see a construction like, “The Santa Fe shooting was the deadliest in American history since . . . ,” that construction works such that the tail end of it will read something like “Burbank, 1923.” That’s just how the constructs of language operate. It’s like a chord in music: A certain resolution, within a fairly narrow range of possibilities, follows. It’s not that the ear predicts what will happen, but rather that what the ear hears makes sense to it, and to the mind beyond.

The Parkland, Florida shooting was, of course, in February of this year, which is how that aforementioned construction resolved. What one might then have noted was that the Santa Fe, Texas shooting was down the news cycle in many sources. It wasn’t the story of the day or the weekend, just one of a handful of “top trenders.” And I thought, “Is everyone freaking insane now?” There’s a 1932 movie called The Most Dangerous Game, in which this crazy guy living on an island around which lots of shipwrecks happen rounds up the people who drift in, puts them in what should be a safe environment, and then says to them: “Okay, get out in the woods, I’m going to hunt all of you; I’ll give you a head start.”

Nutso idea for a movie, but it has a real-life variation in the public schools of America, and the language with which we treat these horrors has become frighteningly banal. Evil at its worst—as Hannah Arendt insisted—is evil at its most banal, because when it loses its ability to shock it gains an ability to ingratiate, to seep into everything as it becomes a part of the status quo. The new normal arrives by gradual enough degrees that no one notes the transformation, even in how we talk about it. We now talk about it, often enough, like we talk about kids eating detergent pods. Some of the kids in Santa Fe were not even surprised that a shooter turned up in their school. It’s now become just something that happens. It’s just a matter of whether it happens in your zip code, on your floor, in your classroom, and if it’s you, rather than someone else, who ends up inside of crosshairs.

I think of the shooters, too. How a child gets to that point so early in life. How does a child get there now, when a child did not get there 30 years ago? When do we see this age of fragmentation, of digital platforms disconnecting us not only from each other, but ourselves, for what it is? It is a virtual world, not a reality-based world, where people less frequently need to assess what is real and adapt to it, but rather say, “Nah, I’m good, I’m growing my own narrative, and what’s real to me is going to be my new reality.”

I didn’t have many friends in high school; I did have a few close friends. I never needed more than a handful, since a true friend is a true rarity and a false friend is only a slight upgrade over an unctuous enemy. Every high school kid with a brain and a soul experiences angst. But angst doesn’t explain shooting your peers. Even out-of-control, super-sized, melodramatic high school angst doesn’t explain it. What explains it, in part, is the head-long internalization of reality, where reality is privatized, corrupted, turned from a bright beam of light into something emanating from behind many carpetings of dirty gauze deployed to stop a kind of internal emotional hemorrhaging from spilling out, so that parents, teachers, and others might see.

Inside of us, that once-external reality gets worked on. Distended. It becomes compromised. Broken down. It retains some elements of what is real—which allows that individual to pass through the world as someone who would surprise us by doing this, but at the same time, most of us are doing our version of the same thing. We see not so much what we want to see, but what we have to see as a survival mechanism, because now a part of our wiring suggests that the truth would be too much for us. We are less vigilant observers. People are in howling pain in this world of disconnection where everyone pretends, on social media, to be the paragon of happiness, each one of us Strawberry Shortcake in the brightest pink dress of unfettered joy.

As I was reading about Santa Fe, mulling all of this, I was also watching a newly released Blu-ray of one of the finest films I’ve ever seen. It’s called Gun Crazy, from 1950, directed by Joseph H. Lewis. It’s a film noir about Bart Tare, played by John Dall, who has a troubled youth. He robs a store but is helped out by a sympathetic judge with a mild reform school stint. Bart is also a whiz with a gun, a virtuosic marksman. But he accidentally kills a young chick in a flashback sequence, and remorse transforms his face as if a torch had been taken to a lump of soft clay. Bart has a few good friends and retains them, one of whom becomes a police officer. After Bart gets out of the Army, where he had been teaching marksmanship, he goes with his friends to a carnival where he meets Annie Laurie Starr (played by the excellent and recently deceased Peggy Cummins), a trick shooter who is nearly as good as Bart is.

You need to see the joint-seduction scene that ensues, among the most erotic in all of cinema even though—maybe because—it’s not trying to be. It is erotic in large part because these two virile individuals are bound to deeply love each other, but they only suspect it; they don’t yet know it. Love is hard to depict on screen. When you move towards something you are going to love someday, it just hits you a certain way the first time you encounter it, and Lewis makes that kind of hit—for Bart, Annie, and us—register in the first scene where we all come together.

Annie is upfront about how she views her moral standing, telling Bart that she’s bad, but she’ll try to reform for him. Lewis knew the mood he was looking for and was quite the charmer in describing it after the fact: “I told John, ‘Your cock’s never been so hard,’ and I told Peggy, ‘You’re a female dog in heat, and you want him. But don’t let him have it in a hurry. Keep him waiting.’” Masterpiece Theatre this isn’t. We are much too quick to lead with the flesh in this age of sexts and genitalia pics, and while Gun Crazy isn’t that overt, for all of the real connection between these two, we see that disconnection is bound to follow. He is something, and she wants to be something she is not, which makes him try to be something he is not, because their bond is real, and some form of tragedy can be the only result.

The car sequence, shot from the inside in a single take with Lewis having ripped out the back seat, mounting a special camera on a swivel, is bravura filmmaking. This would be one of Orson Welles’s greatest shots. By then, these people have done some bad things. They didn’t set out to do bad things, but they have done bad things with guns. As I watched this film for perhaps the 30th time, I thought about its resonance now. Could people even watch this today?

You don’t want the lives of these two people to end badly. Every time I’ve seen it after that first time, I almost want the film to be some surprise, unreleased edition, a different cut with a different ending. I don’t mean some homespun renouncing of guns. No one in Gun Crazy is using automatic weapons. I wrestle with the idea that Bart and Annie would have had the problems they had anyway, even on a deadly level, even without guns. Bart saves his two friends from childhood in the end. I guess one might say he saves himself as well and, in doing so, he saves something of the woman who loved him. A lot of the saving comes via guns, too: The literal saving, the metaphorical saving.

The gun is such a potent symbol in a film like this in part because of its phallic nature, which Lewis plays up. He had censors to get around, after all. The penis-shaped device that has something emerge from its tip was useful. And with the physical organ, life, in a fashion, comes out, and so much waste comes out, too, depending on what its user is up to in that moment. But it’s more the language of Gun Crazy that is so telling. There is passion in it, and ardor when it describes Bart’s better qualities. Annie is anything but status quo, too, and again the language used to speak about her shows it. The friendships between Bart and his buddies cut deep and these men, too, talk about them in terms that reflect that depth. Nothing is ever banal, nothing is ever viewed as “well, what can you do, nothing to see here.”

This is why you know, when the film ends, that what happened here began and ended with two people who also loved each other. A tragedy has been completed; an epidemic is not about to follow. You watch Gun Crazy, and then you remember Santa Fe, Texas and yearn for a completed tragedy. You want it to be “the end,” not “tune in next week.”

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