Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 93

Moscow’s Demons

In 1935, near the height of the Great Terror, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union decided to hold a party “that would compete with anything Moscow had yet experienced, before or after the Revolution.” The theme was “collective farm.” White tulips were delivered from Finland. A dozen birch trees were uprooted and placed under a sun lamp, so the buds opened on the day of the party. Embassy staff went to the Moscow Zoo and brought mountain goats—a half dozen of them were put on a platform at the head of the buffet table. Fishing nets were soaked in gold powder and glue, stretched along the marble walls of the huge ballroom, and filled with hundreds of zebra finches, which fluttered and sang merrily behind the gold mesh.

The 500 guests arrived at midnight, watching in awe as projected images surrounded them. Flowers appeared on the walls, a constellation of stars complete with a bright moon turned up on the high-domed ceiling, and multicolored spotlights shone down on the guests from the balcony. In the dining room there were pens with sheep and bear cubs. Cages with roosters hung on the walls.

“Despite the purges and terror, there was everyone at this American ball who was anyone in Moscow, except Stalin,” writes Alexander Etkind, in his excellent new biography of Ambassador William Bullitt. “The future victims drank, danced, and flirted together with their executioners, many of whom would later also perish. The intellectual Bolsheviks . . . would lose their power and lives in a few months. The high-ranking military commanders . . .  would be executed over the next few years. The towering figures of the Soviet theater . . . all expected to be arrested and tortured at any moment. For some, the wait would be short; for others, painfully long. As if they had a foresight, the finches escaped from the nets and flew around the embassy in a “terrifying panic.”

One of the writers in attendance, Mikhail Bulgakov, would draw on the party in his descriptions of Satan’s Ball in The Master and Margherita, his surreal satire of Stalin’s Moscow, where the devil, in the guise of a dandy foreigner named Woland, visits the city to throw wild parties which are actually sociological experiments: “The Muscovites have changed considerably—outwardly, I mean, as too has the city itself. . . . But naturally I am . . . interested in the much more important question: have the Muscovites changed inwardly?”

Bullitt had arrived as ambassador in 1936. Left-leaning, he still believed that his liberal President, FDR, could build a warm relationship with Moscow. He felt previous Presidents had made a mess of U.S. foreign policy to Russia. In 1919 he had personally visited Lenin and struck a deal whereby the Soviet leadership promised an armistice which would cede most of the former Russian Empire to non-Boshevik forces, leaving Lenin with a rump state of Moscow and St. Petersburg. No one was under any illusions that Lenin would keep the deal when his army was stronger, but it would have set the pattern for a more engaged relationship and potentially constructive compromises. Bullitt wrote to President Wilson: “Today you may still guide the Revolution into peaceful and constructive channels.” Wilson ignored him, too focused on signing a peace treaty at Versailles which was so debilitating for Germany, a treaty that Bullitt and many others believed helped condemn Europe to another war. Overly paranoid of Bolshevism spreading across Europe, Wilson had missed the chance of an early détente with the Soviet leadership.

But after three years as ambassador, Bullitt grew disenchanted with the Soviet Union, convinced it was becoming another Nazi Germany. He loathed the secret police and the surveillance. He fought bitterly for FDR’s attention against pro-Soviet journalists like Walter Duranty who tried to convince the President that Stalin was a man he could do business with. The Soviet leadership, Bullitt argued, was more obsessed with world revolution and sowing chaos in capitalist countries than raising living standards at home. Stalin was intent on dominating his neighbors to establish the Communist Faith as far as possible. Bullitt’s analysis set the tone for his protégé George Kennan, who would go on to formulate the policy of containment, pushing back the Soviet Union at every point possible.

In his final dispatch Bullitt concluded the country hadn’t fundamentally changed from the Russian Empire. He was surprised with how familiar the writings of a mid-19th-century ambassador, Nicholas Brown, seemed in 1937. Speaking about the reign of Nicholas I, Brown wrote about harsh police tactics, censorship, and spies. Brown’s letters also sounded, Bullitt noted, like reports written by British ambassadors to Moscow during the reign of Ivan the Terrible.

Sixty-nine years after Bullitt, Michael McFaul became U.S. Ambassador to Russia. Left-leaning, he still believed that his liberal President, Obama, could build a warm relationship with Moscow. He felt previous Presidents had made a mess of U.S. foreign policy to Russia. Could democracy and curbing corruption have been supported more vigorously in the 1990s? Could NATO expansion have been dealt with more tactfully? Intervention in Yugoslavia done more cooperatively? In 2008 McFaul had helped initiate the Reset, a new policy of cooperation with then President Medevdev, which had shown, he argues in his new must-read memoir From Cold War to Hot Peace, that it was perfectly possible to overcome previous tensions.

This all changed in 2012 with Putin’s return to the Presidency and large protests against his rule. McFaul found himself cast as a comedy foreign devil by Kremlin propaganda trolls, accused of inciting the protests by order of State Department Head Hilary Clinton; smeared as a pedophile; hassled and spied upon. He concludes that Putin’s aggressive foreign policy since 2012 is ultimately not chiefly due to U.S. foreign policy failures, but rather has its roots in internal Russian dynamics.

“Domestically, Russia had had something like a therapy breakthrough: it admitted to itself that it didn’t know how to be a country” writes Michael Idov in his new memoir of of the same period, Dressed up for a Riot. “Shepherding the surrounding nations was the only thing that gave its vastness a point and its citizens an identity. And internationally, it was the bad guy again, which made a certain kind of sense.”

Idov, a Riga-born American journalist turned film director, was editor of Russian GQ during the time McFaul was ambassador, and his book covers current affairs and U.S.-Russian relations through the revealing lens of high-society glamour and fashion: like Bulgakov he knows that politics only really reveals itself at parties, like Wilde that only the superficial has depth.

Some of the most telling parts of Dressed up for a Riot come when Idov tries to put Russian celebrities on the cover of Russian GQ instead of the usual Hollywood stars: isn’t Russia successful enough to look up to its own? Readers and colleagues are appalled: not just obviously pro-Western liberals, but the patriotic Putinoids of show-business too. Sales plummet. Russia’s glossy magazine culture Idov is surrounded by is full of a strange self-loathing, where the only idols that can be venerated are Western. The West is on the one hand the devil through which to motivate domestic cohesion; on the other it is the ideal which you crave. Russian political and popular culture, Idov seems to be arguing, can only gain self-worth and status in an act of performance vis-a-vis a Western gaze; a gaze whose attention, Idov wryly notes, Putin has won in his trolling of the West with the cheap and easy tools of information warfare.

Where does it come from, this need to portray the West as either ideal or demon to be performed in front of? Is it down to a simple sense of inferiority? “No nation,” Ambassador Brown had written back in 1850, “has so much need of foreigners, and so much jealousy of them.” Perhaps. But the Westerner who Russian political and popular culture evokes to gaze at itself is very much a Russian invention. Real Westerners don’t fit the bill. Idov’s problem as editor is that he doesn’t fit the preconceived idea of what a Western glamour editor should look like. He dresses wrong. He wears tweed jackets and jeans. He’s not camp enough. A Western glamour editor should wear Dolce and Gabbana suits and sleek black shoes. He should dress, in short, like a Woland.

It’s almost as if the West that Russian culture conjures is actually not the West at all—but just another way of talking, or rather not talking, about its own demons.

The post Moscow’s Demons appeared first on The American Interest.

How the West Was Saved

In the 250 years since the American colonists began the rebellion that led to their political separation from the British Empire, the post-World War II Marshall Plan, the program of large-scale economic assistance to war-shattered Western Europe, has a good claim to being the most successful international initiative that the independent country they created has ever undertaken. It achieved the immediate goal for which its architects launched it. It also set in motion trends that, in the longer term, changed Europe and the world—and changed them, from the American point of view, very much for the better.

In The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, Benn Steil, senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, retells the story of this landmark initiative in colorful, compelling fashion. Drawing on extensive research, including in Soviet archives that have become available in the past quarter century, he describes clearly and explains persuasively the Plan’s origins, the difficulties the American government encountered in carrying it out, and the ways they were able to overcome the obstacles they faced.

Named for the American Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who announced it in a speech on June 5, 1947, the European Recovery Program, as it was formally titled, emerged from three unanticipated and generally unwelcome postwar developments. First and foremost was the disappointment of the hopes that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other officials had entertained that the wartime cooperation with Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union would continue once the war was won. By 1947 Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, and the rest of the American government understood that this was not to be: Soviet goals in Europe were irreconcilably in conflict with American interests and values.

In the emerging Cold War, the fate of Germany, where the four victorious powers of Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union each had a zone of occupation, became a growing problem. Stalin’s aims were clear: to strip the defeated country of its industrial assets, shipping them to the Soviet Union itself, and to contrive postwar political arrangements that would keep the country united under Moscow’s control. The United States initially lacked such clarity but gradually came to the conclusion that Germany would have to remain divided between the communist and the non-communist sectors for the foreseeable future, and that restoring the Western part as a functioning industrial economy (despite the reservations of its neighbors, based on the uses to which the Nazis had put German industry during World War II) would serve the interests of both the United States and of Western Europe. German economic revival was all the more important because, two years after the end of hostilities on the continent, Europe was destitute, its factories smashed and shuttered and its farms barely producing enough food for the farmers themselves, let alone the urban population.

American officials came to believe that without rapid economic recovery Western Europe would be vulnerable to communist subversion, especially in the two countries with large Communist Parties—France and Italy. Taking advantage of the deep and widespread economic distress, Stalin, who was already well on his way to dominating the countries of Eastern Europe that Soviet troops had occupied while pushing the Nazi armies back to Germany, might be able to extend his dominion all the way to the Atlantic. This would present the United States with what it had gone to war against Hitler to prevent: a Europe united under the auspices of a hostile power.

The Truman Administration therefore decided to launch, on an unprecedented scale, a program of economic assistance, in the form of outright grants rather than loans, to put Western Europe back on its feet. Crucially, it decided to include in the program the Western-occupied zones of Germany, which became the German Federal Republic. The United States offered participation in the Marshall Plan to the Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe as well, confident that Stalin would block this, as he did.

Between June 1947 and April 1948, the Truman Administration proceeded to design a plan for economic aid to Europe and to persuade a Congress hostile to spending taxpayers’ money abroad to authorize it. Simultaneously, the Administration persuaded the European governments, who were jealous of their own sovereign prerogatives and skeptical of cooperating with one another to the extent that the Plan required, to accept it on American terms. The United States established an organization to disburse and monitor the Marshall aid, and furnished a total of $14.3 billion ($130 billion in today’s dollars) by the time the program ended in 1952.

With the receipt of the American grants, Western Europe did begin what became a spectacular economic recovery, especially in Germany. Retrospective studies have found, as Steil recounts in the book’s penultimate chapter, that the Marshall Plan does not deserve all of the credit for the continent’s postwar “economic miracle;” but it certainly contributed to it, not least by helping to create the confidence in the prospects for the the continent’s economic future on the part of European entrepreneurs, farmers, and consumers without which productive economic activity would not have taken place. As the countries of Western Europe recovered and flourished, the popularity of the local communist parties and of the Soviet Union declined. The threat that had animated the Marshall Plan receded. The Plan had another salutary political consequence: It drew the Western countries together in common cause, laying the basis for their coordinated opposition to the Soviet Union in security matters, to which the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in 1949—itself the foundation of the Western military coalition, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—gave expression.

The Marshall Plan also triggered two long-term trends that transformed Europe. The American government insisted that the governments of the recipient countries devise plans for economic cooperation in order to qualify for Marshall aid. The spirit and practice of cooperation led France and Germany to merge their coal and steel industries in 1950 to form the European Coal and Steel Community, the direct ancestor of the six-country European Economic Community established by the Treaty of Rome in 1958. The ongoing process of European economic integration had led, by 2018, to the 28-member European Union.

Furthermore, the Marshall Plan, the economic recovery to which it contributed, and the Western European economic integration that followed, helped to determine the ultimate outcome of the Cold War. That global rivalry became, among other things, an economic competition, with each side claiming that its own distinctive method of economic organization could deliver higher economic growth and greater public welfare than that of its adversary. Divided between one state practicing free-market economics and another operating by central planning, Germany offered a clear test of the two systems’ relative merits. Fueled in part by the benefits conferred by the Marshall Plan and European integration, the Western, capitalist German Federal Republic became an economic dynamo, far outpacing the communist-controlled German Democratic Republic to its east. The superior Western economic performance in Germany and elsewhere contributed to the collapse, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of orthodox communism across Eurasia, from the eastern part of Germany to the Pacific coast of the Soviet Union.

From the perspective of seven decades, the Marshall Plan stands out as the kind of large-scale, important, successful initiative that the government of the United States, now much larger, less agile, and far more polarized than it was then, is no longer capable of carrying out. This steep, unfortunate, and possibly dangerous decline surely has multiple causes.

One of them has to do with personnel. The caliber of the government officials who conceived, designed, sold, and implemented the program was unusually high. Steil supplies brief, vivid portraits of the leading figures: Truman, the machine politician from Kansas City who unexpectedly succeeded Roosevelt in April 1945 and rose to meet the challenges the circumstances of the day presented, and the man Dean Acheson, Secretary of State in his second term, called, in dedicating his memoir to him, “the captain with the mighty heart;” Marshall, an architect of victory in World War II as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first American general to be awarded a fifth star and a man of extraordinary integrity and dedication to public service; and Acheson himself, a patrician, acerbic, Anglophile lawyer who relished verbal combat with any adversary, whether Soviet, European, or American. The author also depicts figures less well known today but very important at the time, notably Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican Senator from Michigan whose active support for the Marshall Plan gave it an indispensable bipartisan imprimatur in the Congress and the country, and Will Clayton, a Southern cotton broker who, as an official in both the State and Treasury Departments, energetically pressed for an active American economic role in Europe and European economic integration.

Together these Americans and their colleagues bear comparison with the late 18th-century revolutionary generation that founded the United States. The post-World War II generation founded the international order that brought peace, prosperity, and victory over European communism and, in many of its essentials, persists in the second decade of the 21st century.

In partial defense of subsequent generations of policymakers, however, including the current one, it is important to note that in establishing the Marshall Plan, and especially in persuading reluctant and skeptical Americans and Europeans to support and take part in it, the men of the 1940s had an asset that their counterparts in the present day—women as well as men—lack, and fortunately so: a sense of extreme urgency. That sense, in turn, stemmed from the all-too-powerful memory of the war that had just ended. Measured by the number of lives lost and the property destroyed, World War II qualifies as the worst conflict in human history. Those who had survived it were, not surprisingly, willing to go to great lengths, make major sacrifices, and discard long-established ideas and policies in order to prevent another one.

The makers of the Marshall Plan were convinced that the combination of a hostile Soviet Union and an immiserated Europe would, if unaddressed, lead to another great war. They persuaded American and European officials and citizens that this was so and that American economic assistance to Europe was the way to address these problems and thus avoid another catastrophic conflict. In 2018 the American government, whatever it wishes to do, cannot claim that it is responding to a comparable danger.

In the Bertolt Brecht play Life of Galileo, one of Galileo’s students says “Unhappy the land that has no heroes,” to which the great scientist replies, “No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.” Similarly, great emergencies, which is what the senior officials of the American government believed they were facing in Europe in 1947, can produce heroic deeds, and Benn Steil’s account demonstrates that the Marshall Plan qualifies as one. But that is not sufficient reason to wish for such an emergency. Even with all of its problems, the United States is better off without the need for such heroism.

The post How the West Was Saved appeared first on The American Interest.

Putin, the European

“Never interrupt an enemy while he is making a mistake.” Vladimir Putin might not hold Napoleon in reverence, but these days he could surely relate to perhaps his most famous dictum. Just a few weeks back, the United States, most of the European Union, and several other states united in a common front to expel more than 100 Russian diplomats (or, shall we say, diplomatic officers) in response to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the English town of Salisbury. The Transatlantic bond looked as firm as ever, never mind Brexit, Trump, and the rest—that is, until the White House changed it all, at a stroke, by pulling the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, despite the Europeans’ entreaties. Neither French President Emmanuel Macron nor German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who both pleaded their case in Washington, succeeded in changing Trump’s mind—not to speak of Boris Johnson, who made his plea on Fox and Friends, the President’s favorite talk show. Now as a result of Trump’s decision, Europe’s big three are on one side of the barricade together with Russia, and the United States on the other. Even though European companies are pulling out from Iran in order to avoid being penalized by the American authorities, France, Britain, and Germany are vowing they are going to adhere to the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Russia appears to be game. Sergei Ryabkov, the Deputy Foreign Minister, called for “cooperation [between] Europeans, Russia, and China” to keep the Iran deal afloat.

There is another storm looming over trade, too. While the Trump team has directed most of its fire against China, it has singled out Europe as a bad actor as well. The European Union’s temporary exemptions from U.S. tariffs on aluminum and steel might be lifted, prompting another Transatlantic brawl at the World Trade Organization. The automotive sector is another bone of contention, with the United States complaining about the European import duties that keep American carmakers at bay. The Administration has an axe to grind against Germany, in particular, which happens to run a trade surplus with America to the tune of nearly $60 billion, according to Germany’s Federal Statistical Office (FSO). Luxury brands such as Mercedes Benz and BMW are going to take a hit if Washington slaps a 25 percent tariff on imports, as many expect. In addition, the State Department is giving Berlin heat over Nord Stream 2. They want Merkel to abandon the pipeline crossing the Baltic Sea, frowned upon by many in Eastern Europe, and to threaten sanctions against German and European firms doing business with Gazprom. The U.S. Department of Energy wants Germany to commit to buying more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from across the Atlantic. Whether it is a genuine demand or a ploy to gain leverage on other trade issues, the push from Washington puts Germany in the same basket with Russia once again. Berlin’s position has always been that Nord Stream 2, as well as Nord Stream 1 which is already in operation, is a purely commercial venture. But not many buy this line, it seems.

Vladimir Putin, for one, definitely wouldn’t. The Kremlin’s master is now seeing a host of European leaders come a-courting. First, Angela Merkel decamped to Sochi; then Emmanuel Macron appeared at Putin’s side at this year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, with a retinue of top-level French companies in tow. His visit resulted in the signature of a gas deal between Novatek, a company owned by Putin’s billionaire friend Gennady Timchenko (on the West’s sanction list), and France’s Total. The French energy firm has recently pulled out from a $2 billion gas venture in Iran, due to the U.S. sanctions.

Russia’s economy is bouncing back after several years of recession resulting from the sanctions and low oil prices. The Eurozone is doing relatively well, too, though it is not out of the woods. In 2017, Gazprom’s deliveries to Europe reached a peak, with Germany in its traditional role as leader in terms of consumption. The U.S. decision on Iran is leading to a spike in oil prices, which in turn drives up Russian profits from trade with Europe. And lastly, Russia is hosting this year’s World Cup (it’s football, not soccer, as Europeans would surely like to remind their American friends), which is expected to give a boost to both the economy and Moscow’s international prestige. Freshly inaugurated as President, Vladimir Vladimirovich seems to be heading for a relaxed summer.

Both Merkel and Macron believe that the time is ripe to engage Russia on Iran too. Macron, who stood firmly by Trump’s side during April’s strikes in Syria targeting both regime and Iranian assets, went to St Petersburg to discuss the JCPOA with Putin. Vladimir Vladimirovich seized on the opportunity to snipe at the United States: After the talks with Macron he warned America its decision carried “lamentable consequences.” However, it is not immediately clear what outcome the “difficult but necessary” meeting (Macron’s own characterization) yielded, if any. But the mere appearance of a Western split will suffice for the Kremlin.

This does not mean that the European Union and Russia are in full rapprochement mode, however. The real test will be the sanctions against Moscow over the war in Ukraine, but these are without doubt coming under discussion again. Italy’s newly installed government, a coalition between the populist Five Star Movement and the right-wing, xenophobic Northern League, whose leader Matteo Salvini has posed for photos while wearing a Putin T-shirt, would like to see them lifted. Other member states, from Greece and Bulgaria to Austria and Slovakia, share the same view. But without a shift in position by Macron and Merkel, no move is likely. Meanwhile Italy has bigger fish to fry, as it prepares to challenge EU rules mandating fiscal discipline. In a gesture towards Moscow, Germany and France might increase (symbolic) pressure on Ukraine to implement its part of the Minsk 2 agreement, but that’s about it. Well-informed observers in Moscow believe that the discussions over sanctions are essentially at a dead end. Prospects for the European Union striking a deal with Russia behind America’s back are negligible. Another obstacle to rapprochement between Russia and the European Union as a whole is yesterday’s official statement by the Dutch government naming Russia as the culprit for the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014.

Putin has made a series of tactical gains, but at the end of the day Europe’s preference is to make sure the disputes with the United States don’t get out of hand. As a seasoned commentator on German and European affairs noted, Berlin might simply wait out the Trump Administration in the hope that what comes next will be more open to accommodation. Those hopes might be dashed, of course—if American voters choose again Trump and his version of the GOP come 2020.

One thing is for sure: Putin will be waiting patiently to cash in on any rifts opening up between the United States and Europe. A St. Petersburg native, Putin is surely familiar with the history of his home town, originally built by Peter the Great to showcase Russia’s newly chosen European vocation. Who knows? Putin might even start singing the praises of the Old Continent’s unity.

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Atonement as Activism

By the age of 50, you have lived long enough to remember being a mature adult in what is now a distant era. I recently recalled a conversation I had as a graduate student in 1991 that demonstrates a key change in America’s “conversation” on race over the past 30 years.

A white humanities graduate student was a member of a campus organization that had brought black activist and filmmaker Marlon Riggs to campus to give a talk. The student recounted that in his critique of racism, Riggs had leveled some potshots at the students themselves. This surprised and hurt her, as she had supposed that Riggs would consider her and her friends on his side in having invited him to speak.

Today, that same graduate student would be much less likely to take remarks like Riggs’s that way. Rather, today’s “woke,” educated white people would quite often lap up being apprised of the racism inside of them by a black speaker they paid, lodged, and fed. That speaker as often as not today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, who charismatically limns America as a cesspool of bigotry in his writing and in talks nationwide, and is joyously celebrated for it by the very people he is insulting.

Coates is a symptom of a larger mood. Over the past several years, for instance, whites across the country have been taught that it isn’t enough to understand that racism exists. Rather, the good white person views themselves as the bearer of an unearned “privilege” because of their color. Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down. The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.

This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness. After the black man I mentioned above spoke, the next speaker was a middle-aged white man who spoke of having a coach come to his office each week to talk to him about his white privilege. The audience, of course, applauded warmly at this man’s description of having what an anthropologist observer would recognize not as a “coach” but as a pastor.

I have seen whites owning up to their white privilege using the hand-in-the-air-palm-out gesture typically associated with testifying in church. After the event I have been describing, all concerned deemed it “wonderful” even though nothing new had been learned. The purpose of the event was to remind the parishioners of the prevalence of the racist sin and its reflection in themselves, and to offer a kind of forgiveness, this latter being essentially the function of the black people on the panel and in the audience. Amen.

Some might see all of this as a healthy sign of moral advance. And I suppose if I had to choose between this performativity and the utter contempt most whites had for any discussion of discrimination 50 years ago and before, I’d choose our current moment. But goodness, it piles high and deep, this—well, I’ll call it fakeness. The degree of fantasy and exaggeration that smart people currently let pass in the name of higher-order thought on race parallels, again, Biblical tales.

Coates, for example, argues in one article after another that America’s progress on race has been minimal, despite pretty window dressing here and there, and that there is no reason to hope things will get any better. Yet one can be quite aware of the prevalence and nature of racism in America while also understanding that the recreational pessimism of views like Coates’s is melodramatic and even unempirical. To insist that Starbucks or even Dylan Roof define America’s progress on race is as flimsy as treating certain young black men’s misbehavior as embodying the black essence. Perfection is ever a dream; we are, as always, in transition. Everybody knows that.

The very fact that the modern equivalent of the graduate student I knew reveres Coates’s writing is a sterling indication that America has grown up quite a bit on race even in the past quarter of a century. The fact that this brand of enlightenment has not made it to every barstool and kitchen table in the country hardly disqualifies it as influential. Anyone who really thinks that on race America has merely rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic isn’t old enough to realize that most smart white people as late as 1978 would have found The Wire about as interesting as Chinese opera.

Also, views like Coates’s qualify more as performance art than thought in their disconnection from activism and pragmatism. If the government is not doing enough to help black people, precisely what would a Coates offer as counsel? Coates argues for reparations, ignoring decades of careful argumentation that has shown the impracticality of the idea. Who would the money go to? And for exactly what? And whence the sense many have that to ask such questions is to miss some larger point? Is the larger point to provide fodder for personal atonement? It would seem that for some, bemoaning that reparations aren’t happening is as active, vital, and self-affirming as making them happen, or, better, moving on and considering realistic strategies for forging change.

The self-affirming part is the rub. This new cult of atonement is less about black people than white people. Fifty years ago, a white person learning about the race problem came away asking “How can I help?” Today the same person too often comes away asking, “How can I show that I’m a moral person?” That isn’t what the Civil Rights revolution was about; it is the product of decades of mission creep aided by the emergence of social media.

What gets lost is that all of this awareness was supposed to be about helping black people, especially poor ones. We are too often distracted from this by a race awareness that has come to be largely about white people seeking grace. For example, one reads often of studies showing that black boys are punished and suspended in school more often than other kids. But then one reads equally often that poverty makes boys, in particular, more likely to be aggressive and have a harder time concentrating. We are taught to assume that the punishments and suspensions are due to racism, and to somehow ignore the data showing that the conditions too many black boys grow up in unfortunately makes them indeed more likely to act up in school. Might the poverty be the key problem to address? But, try this purely logical reasoning in polite company only at the risk of being treated as a moral reprobate. Our conversation is to be solely about racism, not solutions—other than looking to a vaguely defined future time when racism somehow disappears, America having “come to terms” with it: i.e. Judgment Day. As to what exactly this coming to terms would consist of, I suppose only our Pastor of White Privilege knows.

Another problem is that I am not sure that today’s educated whites quite understand how unattainable the absolution they are seeking is. There is an idleness in this cult of atonement, in that it cannot get whites what they want. I wonder if today’s atoners quite understand that “getting it” will not, for example, make Ta-Nehisi Coates like them any more than Marlon Riggs liked the graduate student and her friends despite their leftist politics. There is an Old Testament quality to the Coates preachings, for example. He is unmoved by the deaths of white firefighters during 9/11, uncomfortable seeing his son as a tot playing comfortably with white kids, and sees young white parents with their big strollers as white people taking up too much space as always. The degree of self-hatred—if sincere—is staggering in whites proclaiming how much they “love” this kind of scripture.

And all of this, ultimately, is often as condescending as nakedly dismissive views of blacks were in the bad old days. I doubt most whites truly think racism is so acridly pervasive and persistent in this country that a middle-class black man ought to fear his children playing with theirs, or look upon firefighters barbecued on 9/11 as mere racists getting their just desserts. Pretending to believe this sort of thing is insincere and insulting. It’s a pat on the head.

Mendacious, even. I recently attended a read-through of a play written by a black man about himself travelling back in time and viewing plantation slavery. The leader of the discussion afterwards was a white woman of a certain age who attested to how taken unawares she had been to learn that slave families were often separated and that slaves were sometimes whipped to death. However, this woman’s age, occupation, and demographic were such that the chances are infinitesimal that she did not see Roots and 12 Years a Slave, has not read Beloved, and has not read the New York Times daily and The New Yorker weekly for at least 30 years. In other words, she was, in all of her good intentions, lying.

It is not 1960, and a person like her is quite aware of the horrors of slavery. This was testifying again—she felt it her job to declare herself hip to the horrors of racism. The problem was that the point of the play concerned the protagonist’s psychology. Having taken in her time’s directive to internalize and parrot the proper “woke” message, she missed the essence of the play and reduced it to a school auditorium civics lesson. This isn’t woke, it’s weak.

We have gone from most whites being unaware that racism was a problem for black people at all to whites being chilled to their bones at the possibility of harboring racism in their souls, terrified at the prospect of being singled out as a heretic, and forgetting that the indulgences they purchase and the praying they do for their souls has more to do with them than with anyone black and their problems. This is a white America in which the message has become garbled. Among too many, the activist impulse has stuttered, faded, and jelled into a therapeutic one somewhere between “I Have a Dream” and Between the World and Me.

Whites today are in a hard place on this, I know. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You’re taught that on race issues you are morally obliged to suspend your usual standards of logic. Faced with a choice between some benign mendacity and being mauled, few human beings choose the latter.

But it all makes me miss 1991 in some ways. I think that graduate student had it about right in being insulted by Riggs that night. She needed to understand that the hurt of racism can make its victims act out at times, but not to pretend to think she actually deserved the potshots. Yet I wouldn’t be surprised if she today has learned to enjoy being told what a moral reprobate she is on race no matter what she does or thinks, and considers herself the wiser for it.

Let us pray?

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Is Imran Khan the Change Pakistan Needs?

Late last month, along Lahore’s leafy Mall Road, with its Edwardian landscape and magnificent Mughal architecture, upwards of a hundred thousand men, women, and children had assembled for a political rally. The crowds were uncontrollable and the excitement was palpable, as people shrugged off the mounting humidity, waiting for the man of the hour. It was nearly time for Maghreb prayers; the sun went down over the white dome of the great Aurangzeb Alamgir mosque. Cars honked, flags waved, men danced to folk tunes, women blushed under layers of foundation, and the loudspeakers were tuned to a deafening volume. All avenues leading to the venue were choked off.

Pandemonium reigned until, finally, Imran Khan arrived on the scene. Perched on his swanky black Land Cruiser, with bodyguards dangling on either side of his convoy, Khan apologetically evaded the milling crowds and fought his way to the elevated stage. Once the hum of his followers had subsided, he began, as usual, by reading brief excerpts from the Quran, before switching to tell of his earlier life as a cricketer, his feats in charity, and his loathing of corruption and fiscally dishonest Pakistani leaders. Khan’s rhetoric toward his political contemporaries has become increasingly bitter over the years. It’s hard to blame him. He’s had a long, arduous struggle in Pakistan’s politics: 23 years, to be precise.

To say that Imran Khan, Pakistan’s biggest crossover sports celebrity, is now a political sensation would be an understatement. His political program is novel, and his claim to be a tonic for Pakistan’s broken democracy appeals to the country’s disenchanted, opportunity-starved youth. With national elections looming this summer, it’s about time that the world takes this serious politician a bit more seriously.

Famed as an international cricket star and arguably one of the finest sportsmen South Asia has ever produced, Imran Khan was never clearly cut out for politics. With his vast, sturdy shoulders, his blend of Mongolian and Afghan features, and his long, flowing hair, he made his reputation as a globe-trotting ladies’ man. Tabloids in both England and Pakistan were rife with stories of his romances with high-society English girls. First there was Emma Seargent, the daughter of the affluent financial journalist Sir Patrick Seargent, and already an award-winning painter when she was introduced to Imran at a dinner party in 1982. Their paths diverged in 1986. Then he went out with the writer, columnist, and calligrapher Lady Liza Campbell, daughter of Hugh Campbell, the 6th Earl of Cawdor, followed by Susannah Constantine, a blonde fashion journalist who wrote the bestseller What Not to Wear. None of these relationships turned into a marriage, as Khan was too bounded by a hectic cricket schedule.

At almost 40, Khan retired from competitive cricket, following Pakistan’s brilliant victory in the 1992 Cricket World Cup in Australia. He soon supplanted cricket with social activism, of a kind that Pakistan had never experienced before. Khan established the country’s first-ever cancer hospital: an institution endowed with state-of-the-art equipment, where free treatment was promised for the underprivileged. For a country that was home to over 100 million people, and whose health and education sectors were thoughtlessly neglected by successive military and democratic regimes, this was an important development.

Both Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s leading political figures, began to suspect Khan was a potential opponent, and even went as far as offering him a major political role in their respective cabinets. But Khan, until the winter of 1994, was unconvinced that politics was an arena where he could flourish. He doubted that he had the right temperament, and the thought of addressing a sea of people was enervating. Moreover, even if he had decided to pursue politics as a serious career, aligning himself with either the Bhuttos or the Sharifs was completely out of the question. He had seen them rule irresponsibly and judged Pakistan’s leaders to be morally bankrupt.

The fundraisers for his cancer hospital proved to be an eye-opener. People turned to Khan in droves, and lent whatever their pockets could allow, encouraging his belief that politics was the way he could expand his public reach and deliver justice and good governance. Throughout the course of 1994, he met secretly with General Hamid Gul, an Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) frontman, to create a “pressure group” with a mandate to serve as a civil society watchdog and advocate for the interests of the middle class. But the partnership soon ended as Khan had a bitter falling out with the General. Khan did not want to be a doormat but to lead a political party that would threaten the status quo and bring about real social change in the country.

After nearly two years of deliberations with well-meaning generals, diplomats, senior journalists, members of civil society, amateur politicians, lawyers, technocrats, and supporters of the cancer hospital, Khan founded his political party on April 25, 1996. He named it the Pakistan Movement for Justice Party, or PTI, with an aim to transform it into a nationalist political party that espoused justice for all, quality education, affordable medical facilities, equal job opportunities, and zero tolerance for corruption. But despite Khan’s incessant campaigning to solicit public support, his party initially made no real progress.

At the National Elections in 1997, the party’s performance was dreadful: Out of a total of 207 National Assembly seats, PTI failed to win a single one. The drubbing was hardly a surprise as Khan’s party at the time had no meaningful grassroots presence. The thousands who turned up at his rallies came either to take a snapshot with him or to get his autograph; they found his political speeches both unconvincing and vague.

Five years later, at the 2002 National Elections held under General Musharraf, PTI was subjected to another routing, despite initial claims of a groundswell of support. Ayaz Amir, one of Pakistan’s leading columnists and opinion makers, blithely dismissed Khan’s aspirations to national political office: “Imran was a great cricketer, a great playboy, and a charismatic charmer. But he doesn’t have that political thing which sets bellies on fire. People respond to him with great admiration but they just don’t react to his politics.” All that bleak commentary on Khan’s sinking political career dramatically reversed over the next decade, as he kept his chances alive by hammering home a number of anti-government themes. His public speeches were no longer bromidic, and his anti-dictatorship drive struck a chord, as did his campaigns against U.S. drone strikes.

But it was Asif Ali Zardari’s rise to the presidency in 2008 that provided Khan with his first real breakthrough. The sinister Zardari earned a reputation for notorious corruption, and his Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) between 2008 and 2013 led one of the most unpopular governments in the country’s history. Economically, the country was crippled: GDP growth statistics were grim; inflation was in the double digits; exports plunged steeply and widespread energy shortages incentivized capital flight. Worse, suicide bombers were on a honeymoon, targeting ordinary civilians. That feeling of perpetual gloom and despondency worked in Khan’s favour, with his party securing 35 seats and a majority in the war-ravaged Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province at the National Polls in 2013: a convincing performance, vastly improved from the party’s electorally paralyzed position a decade earlier.

Yet despite all the success of this former paparazzi king, ladies’ man, and headline grabber, the country stands divided over his suitability for the premiership. His explosive temper, erratic decision-making, vitriolic language, and knack for picking fights with political contemporaries suggest that he could possibly be another dictator-in-waiting. That, at least, is the view held by a majority of Pakistan’s English-speaking, globe-trotting liberals. Meanwhile, Khan’s growth on Twitter is phenomenal; his tweets can trigger a commotion across the country, and are panned and venerated in almost equal measure. “He is rude and surly,” says one supporter who is no longer on the Imran Khan bandwagon. “He is no different from the others, equally hungry for power,” says another.

Such commentary has gained momentum of late, because PTI has started to recruit candidates with tainted reputations, simply because they have the vote bank and are adept at the game of constituency-based politics. The recent inclusion of Amir Liaquat, a popular yet controversial TV personality who hosts a grand religious show during the month of Ramadan, has led to an outcry within the PTI camp. The religious scholar boasts of a huge following in Karachi but is widely regarded as an imposter across the country, even fighting allegations of holding a fake degree in Islamic Studies from the Trinity College and University in Spain. Tweets calling Khan power hungry began to surface soon after Liaquat’s induction.

In addition to Liaquat, there have been a number of other turncoats that PTI has absorbed without a twinge of guilt. For example, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a former Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif loyalist, and a known land baron from Multan, was graciously made the Vice Chairman of PTI by Khan prior to the elections of 2013. Qureshi claims to stem from a saintly lineage in Multan and is also accused of using his religion for political gain.

Khan’s expedient embrace of such figures has been regarded by many as treason, a breach of faith and a clear drift from his unforgiving stance against corruption. Many PTI workers who supported Khan in his years of obscurity have therefore grown increasingly disillusioned. More disillusionment followed when, earlier this year, Ayesha Gulalai, an attractive young MP from the PTI government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, accused Khan of sending her inappropriate text messages, and demanded a parliamentary investigation into the matter. Khan, however, has repeatedly denied the allegations.

These encumbrances seem to have bothered Khan little, as he continues to feel upbeat about his prospects at the next elections, possibly slated for this July. His optimism is not out of place. The ruling PML-N, Khan’s biggest rival, is battling for its survival. Their leader Nawaz Sharif and a few of his leading Ministers were disgracefully given the axe by an emboldened Supreme Court of Pakistan, on charges of corruption, shielding of private assets, and money laundering. Furthermore, Nawaz Sharif is presently being roasted in both social media and the press for maligning the judiciary and the army. In a recent interview given to Cyril Almeida, Pakistan’s in-demand political commentator, Sharif admitted that the 2008 Mumbai attacks were carried out by terrorists from Pakistani soil, contradicting the official stance of Pakistan’s army. These anti-establishment statements have taken the nation by storm, further deteriorating Sharif’s public position at a time when the elections are only a few months away. Khan, as usual, has wasted little time in lashing out at Sharif, declaring the ousted Prime Minister clumsy and incapable of ruling the country again. He even demanded that Sharif be tried for treason.

Khan’s unrelenting onslaught against Sharif is widely suspected by local analysts to be a plot backed by the country’s leading generals. But anyone who has worked closely with Khan (or played cricket with him) knows that he only follows his own instincts, and has a reputation for stubbornness and obstinacy to boot. Khan’s rhetorical broadsides against Sharif are consistent with his longstanding animus against the former Prime Minister. They have proven politically useful, too: While harping on Sharif for alleged corruption and treason, Khan can simultaneously point to his own vindication by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. In December 2017, after hearing a case that probed the funds Khan used to purchase his palatial residence in Islamabad, the Court declared the PTI leader to be honest.

Consequently, these developments have hugely revived Khan’s electoral prospects. With nearly half of Pakistan’s total electoral population falling between the ages of 18 and 40, he has a clear advantage given his popularity among young people. The country’s top generals might also lean towards the PTI, seeing Khan as the only convincing alternative to Sharif. Unlike his chief opponent, Khan is doing his best to avoid any confrontation with the military establishment. At the same time, it would be inappropriate to say that Khan is the ladla, the blue-eyed boy of the men in khakis. Khan’s mounting popularity at present is genuine, and unprecedented. He has been at his enterprising, charismatic best at most of his recent rallies, and he knows full well that a defeat in the 2018 polls will put a permanent end to the political ambitions he has been determinedly pursuing for the past 23 years.

The winds of change are currently blowing in Khan’s favour, but the real test will begin if he is elected. Will a crusading populist like Khan, who ran on combating corruption, be able to effect meaningful reform in face of all Pakistan’s entrenched interests: the intelligence agencies, the landed aristocracy, the moneyed industrialists? Or will he be co-opted by the same system he has spent his entire political career railing against? No one genuinely knows, but the answer will determine whether he can be a truly transformative figure. As Khan would know from cricket, it’s not over until the last ball is bowled.

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Time to Move the American ICT Supply Chain Out of China

The Trump Administration is continuing to work on a possible trade deal with China that would result in China purchasing more U.S. goods and making it easier for U.S. companies to operate in China, while at the same time averting major tariffs. But some voices within the Administration, including Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, believe that the discussions are not taking into account sufficiently the threat posed by China’s activities in the information and communication technology (ICT) arena. These voices are right. The Trump Administration must continue aggressively prioritizing that threat over virtually all other aspects of U.S.-China trade. In fact, for economic and national security reasons, it is time for the United States to begin taking aggressive steps to move its highly vulnerable ICT supply chain out of China.

Approximately 40 percent of Chinese exports to the United States (the equivalent of almost $200 billion) are ICT-related. Some of those exports are from Chinese firms, such as Huawei, ZTE, or Lenovo. But the vast majority are from household U.S. brands like Apple, Microsoft, and Hewlett Packard, that assemble their products, or source components, in China. A recent study by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission examined the supply chains of America’s top seven ICT companies and found that each one had a substantial portion of its supply chain in China—an average of 51 percent, with one top U.S. company originating a whopping 73 percent of its shipments in China.

In many instances, Chinese companies (in some cases partly owned by the Chinese government) are manufacturing and assembling on behalf of American companies. In cases where the American company wants greater control over its supply chain, the Chinese government still requires that the American company establish a joint venture with a local Chinese entity under which it willingly or unwillingly ends up transferring significant know-how along with sensitive, proprietary information to the local Chinese partner. And in recent years, the Chinese government has been pressuring U.S. companies to make source code available for review and to store some of their data on servers in China.

As a result, U.S. companies have effectively been building up China’s ICT sector. It is estimated that the transfer of U.S. know-how and technology to China, together with the outright theft of U.S. intellectual property through Chinese corporate espionage, totals up to $500 billion in value per year. Put differently, over the past decade China has appropriated trillions of dollars of ICT-related value without paying for it.

As shocking as this is from a commercial perspective, the national security implications are even more disconcerting. ICT forms the backbone of the U.S. economy and underpins other key sectors—financial services, energy, and transportation, all of which are heavily reliant on ICT systems. China, meanwhile, is actively trying to breach U.S. government databases and has successfully done so on several occasions, in one case resulting in the theft of more than 20 million Social Security numbers. It has been trying to identify vulnerabilities at American power plants and other critical infrastructure installations. China would happily install backdoors on technology products destined for the U.S. market, and it has likely requested access to source code precisely in order to better discover weaknesses. Telephones, computers, routers, switches, cables, flash cards, and many other ICT products could be exposed to backdoors and malware, putting at risk American consumers, American companies, and the American government itself.

Thankfully, the United States has finally woken up to the ICT threat posed by China—and the Trump Administration deserves credit for drawing attention to the issue in a way that previous administrations have not. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has stepped up its actions, preventing Chinese companies from acquiring businesses in the United States that would result in China accessing sensitive know-how or technology. There is legislation in Congress right now to expand the scope of CFIUS that would provide added authority to block non-control transactions, which is good. And the government recently completed an investigation under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 that reached damning conclusions about China’s forced technology transfers and IP theft.

But despite these efforts, it remains unclear whether the Trump Administration truly is prioritizing ICT over other aspects of the U.S.-China trade relationship. Earlier this month President Trump floated the idea that he would relax sanctions on ZTE, a Chinese telecommunications company that has evaded North Korea sanctions and may be spying on U.S. citizens. Furthermore, to this day nobody has put forward a serious proposal for moving the American ICT supply chain out of China. There is little point in spending so much effort scrutinizing and in some cases blocking inbound transactions, while at the same time turning a blind eye to the fact that American companies continue to operate in a country where their supply chains are compromised, and where they are forced to transfer sensitive know-how and technology.

The U.S. government has a wide range of tools it can use to get American ICT companies to move their supply chains out of China. The key challenge is to use those tools creatively and aggressively.

For sensitive technologies that have a dual-use application or otherwise provide China with capabilities that the United States does not want it to have, the Commerce Department could apply its expansive export control powers. It would need to develop a list of specific items that may no longer be exported to China. The scope of the authority is very broad; Commerce would have significant discretion in drawing up the list of items. American companies would then be prohibited from exporting those items to China or manufacturing them there.

For non-sensitive technologies—such as basic routers, telephones, and televisions—export controls would be too blunt an instrument. American companies should still be allowed to sell these items into the Chinese market, and even manufacture them in China for local sales. But because of the concerns around a compromised supply chain for goods that end up in the United States, non-sensitive technologies that are intended for the U.S. market (and all related components) ought to be manufactured and assembled outside of China. To accomplish this goal, the United States could gradually phase in tariffs and quotas, ultimately moving towards an effective ban on technology imports from China. In addition, the Federal government can use its procurement authority (which it already does to a large extent), and the leverage that it has over state governments and academic institutions that receive federal grants, to ban all purchases of ICT products for which any element of the supply chain touched mainland China.

American ICT companies will surely balk at such a proposal. China has become the linchpin of the American ICT supply chain; moving that supply chain out of China would present significant financial and logistical complexities. But of course that is exactly why this is so urgent as a matter of U.S. national security. Unfortunately, China has turned out to be America’s top adversary in the realm of cybersecurity and cyberespionage. On top of that, it has become the supplier-of-choice of technology products for authoritarian governments around the world, including Iran and North Korea, that pose an ideological and strategic threat to the United States. It is nothing short of flabbergasting that the United States has placed its entire ICT sector within the jurisdiction of a country with such intentions and such a track-record.

Phasing in these new restrictions gradually will help ease the burden on American companies and enable them to plan strategically on how to best achieve compliance; but in addition the U.S. government will need to provide affirmative assistance to American companies in moving their manufacturing into alternative markets that present some of the same advantages as China but that do not pose the threat that China does. There are many countries that have an equally low-cost labor force, as well as interests more closely aligned with those of the United States: Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia, among many others.

Rather than roll back free trade initiatives across Asia (such as by pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership), the United States should instead put in place high-standard free trade agreements with other countries that could take over China’s role in America’s ICT supply chain. These trade agreements would include best-in-class IP protections, ironclad investment dispute resolution mechanisms, and the elimination of other tariff and non-tariff barriers that might otherwise present hurdles for the two-way commerce necessary for an ICT manufacturing supply chain. If countries knew that it was America’s stated desire to move its ICT supply chain out of China and into other markets, they would have a strong incentive to make meaningful trade concessions. The possibility of landing an Apple or Hewlett Packard manufacturing facility would prove a powerful motivator for, say, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, or the Philippines—all of which, incidentally, will only become more valuable for America’s strategic interests across the Asian continent over the coming years.

At the same time, America’s financing agencies—including OPIC and EXIM—would need to be mobilized to help offset the costs that American companies will incur in establishing new manufacturing facilities. These agencies can provide lower-cost, longer-term financing. Once the specific alternative countries are identified, and free trade agreements are in place, it would be important for the Administration to give these agencies explicit instructions to provide as much support as possible to U.S. firms to ease their relocation burden.

In the end, such a strategy would yield many simultaneous benefits. First, the U.S. ICT supply chain would become far more secure and diversified—located in friendly countries over which the United States in many instances also has far more influence than it does over China, an important consideration in case any problems arise. Second, it would reduce the theft of IP and reduce the annual trade deficit with China, thereby stemming the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars annually into the coffers of a country that is fast becoming America’s most potent economic rival. Third, it would deny China valuable know-how that it has been using to America’s detriment—which would be done even more effectively if the United States can get Europe, Australia, Japan, and other technologically advanced allies to take similar steps to move sensitive technology out of China. And fourth, it would boost the economies of, and stimulate America’s strategic relationships with, other key countries throughout Asia.

The United States must take a nimble and differentiated view toward its trade relationship with China. In many areas, there is room for strong cooperation—and China can still play an important role in America’s non-ICT supply chain. But in the ICT sector the national security implications of America’s over-reliance on China have become too significant to ignore any longer. It will take coordination across various U.S. agencies and strong determination in the face of what will surely be initial pushback from some corners of the business community. But moving the ICT supply chain into friendlier countries—and in some cases even back onshore to the United States—is an urgent priority.

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Cell Phones as Cigarettes

Cell phone usage is becoming the new smoking. These devices are every bit as annoying, addictive, and dangerous to our health as are cigarettes. People now remain glued to their smartphones as they walk their children to school, as they work, and as they eat. The result is widespread second-hand cell damage for the rest of us in public spaces, as others talk within earshot on buses, at airports, on playgrounds, in lobbies, and on park benches. Such cognitive interruption is now pervasive, as are the pings that routinely break up conversations, drawing attention from social interactions to a text, email, or news flash.

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.

This fall, France will become the first government to aggressively address the issue by prohibiting every student between 6 and 15 years old, and their teachers, from using cell phones in public schools. This draconian action is not about education alone but is also a matter of “public health,” according to France’s Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer.

“We must come up with a way of protecting pupils from loss of concentration via screens and phones. These days the children don’t play at break time anymore, they are just all in front of their smartphones and from an educational [and health] point of view, that’s a problem,” he said at the press conference this winter.

French children will be allowed to bring their phones to school, but not to take them out at any time until they leave, even during breaks. Some parents and educators are upset, but social engineering in schools is a given in France: Witness the controversial “headscarf” ban in 2004 that prohibited the wearing of Islamic coverings and other religious apparel such as crosses or kippahs in public schools.

But a ban against cell phones is not a civil rights matter, and prohibitions by schools, workplaces, and public spaces are gaining popularity in Europe and North America. Many schools forbid phones, and more may follow, as evidence mounts that phones are the chosen tool of cyberbullies. Following two suicides by victims of such bullying, New York City banned cell phones in schools in 2011. But in 2015 the city lifted the ban and left it up to schools to formulate their own policies. Since then, however, the annual incidence of cell phone bullying—often involving fat-shaming and harassment over race, gender, and sexual orientation—has jumped. For these and educational reasons, the issue remains a hot topic amongst politicians and educators. And it should.

Besides attention and abuse issues, there are other health concerns. The use of smartphones, especially near bedtime, is associated with worse quality of sleep, according to a recent study. Media celebrity Ariana Huffington wrote a book about wellness that suggests that everyone should take a rest from devices during the day, and at night “tuck his or her cell into bed.” Only if your phone is removed and recharging in another room, she said, can you recharge yourself by getting a good night’s sleep.

For many years, concerns about cell phones have mostly concentrated on exposure to radiation from excessive use. These connections remain unproven, but last year the California Department of Public Health issued a warning about exposure along with guidelines for users. Hands-free or speaker phone usage is safest, according to the guidelines, and keeping your phone away from your body is best, preferably in a purse or briefcase instead of a pocket. Keeping it away from your bed at night is also recommended.

The jury is still out as to whether these devices can cause cancer, sleep deprivation, or a lower sperm count, but there is no doubt that texting or using a cell phone while driving a vehicle can be fatal. Governments first realized a few years ago the hazards that cell phones present when used by drivers. Now “distracted driving” legislation is in place across Canada, in 16 U.S. states, and in all states for novice drivers. Text messaging by drivers is banned virtually everywhere. This is because using your phone while driving increases the risk of having an accident three-fold.

The cell phone debate now involves workplaces, and the most famous one, the White House, has banned the use of personal cell phones in the West Wing. Of course, this was designed to deter leaks to the press, which obviously failed because news of the ban itself was leaked. Even so, many other employers are imposing restrictions due to cell-related productivity declines. A survey of more than 2,000 employers showed that a majority blame the phone for major problems. “One in 5 employers (19 percent) think workers are productive less than five hours a day. When looking for a culprit, more than half of employers (55 percent) say that workers’ mobile phones/texting are to blame,” concluded the survey.

Some businesses have replaced smartphones with basic handsets if instant communication is needed on the job. Increasingly, cell phones, and even smart watches or laptops, are frowned upon or prohibited in meetings. Some companies ask attendees to leave their phones turned off and in a basket during meetings.

Cell phones’ long-term effects on society are profound. Phones are killing conversation, and face-to-face relationships are becoming less prevalent in families and workplaces. The phone has become another utensil at mealtimes. The result is that essential social communication skills are disappearing before our eyes.

The French are also leading the charge against phones beyond schools. There is a movement among restaurants to ban mobile phone usage at the table. One establishment has a two-strikes-and-you’re-out rule. “People accept having to turn their phones off when they go to the cinema or the theatre so why not restaurants?” explained the proprietor to a newspaper. By contrast, a restaurant in Los Angeles even offered patrons a 5 percent discount if they left their phone at the door, but closed its doors three years later.

Maybe it was the food. Or maybe it is already too late to separate human beings from their addiction to screens.

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About Us

Since its founding in 2005, The American Interest has been one of the leading sources for understanding American policy, politics, and culture. Launched in the wake of the crisis triggered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, TAI sought to bridge the gulf of misunderstanding separating Americans and their counterparts in other democratic countries. In that time, it has evolved from a bimonthly print journal into a unique multiplatform media organization featuring analysis, opinion, reviews, and podcasts.

Understanding America and its role in the world means focusing not only on U.S. foreign and domestic policy, but also uncovering the sources from which those policies arise, in American politics, culture, and society.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States and the global populist surge, our mission—“to explain America to the world, and the world to Americans”—has grown even more urgent. While many media sources today have built business models around catering to popular appetites for outrage and hyper-partisanship, TAI remains committed to hosting evidence-based arguments and open contestation over values. As TAI founder and Chairman Francis Fukuyama has said, “Viable democracies require deliberation and disagreement. It is our hope that reestablishing a vital center will reconnect America with itself, and America with the world as we confront similar challenges.”

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All Under Heaven?

What Is China? Territory, Ethnicity, Culture and History

Ge Zhaoguang

Translated by Michael Gibbs Hill

Belknap, Harvard, 2018, 201 pp., $39.95

Under repressive regimes political disputes are often fought out under the cloak of historical studies replete with subtle pointed allusions or poisoned innuendo. Peering at hairline cracks in the Sino-Soviet relationship as a diplomat in the early 1960s I recall my antennae tingling when an article in an obscure Soviet historical journal took sudden and vicious exception to the career of Genghis Khan; a stand-in, it quickly emerged, for Chairman Mao.

Five years later, when I worked in Beijing during the earliest years of the Cultural Revolution, I found myself reading vicious attacks in Red Guard wall posters on Wu Han, the author of an abstruse-sounding play called The Dismissal of Hai Rui from Office. The play was about a brave Ming dynasty official who dared criticize the Emperor. Peng Dehuai, the Defense Minister fired for criticizing the Great Leap Forward of 1958-62, was the righteous official, and the emperor of course, Mao. Wu Han, it nearly goes without saying, perished in prison.

Though he deals with the entire sweep of China’s history from the earliest times to the present, in a book with no lack of messages for the present—some of which will likely rile other Chinese scholars—I suspect Ge Zhaoguang will be safe. The times are not good for candid analysts who dare to go public, though not as bad as they were, and apart from the final chapter, “Practical Questions,” the surface of his work is unruffled by contemporary politics. Xi Jinping is not mentioned at all, and there is a single innocuous mention of Mao. More than that, Ge is also protected in these more normal times by his prominence as a professor at the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies and the Department of History at Fudan University in Shanghai. He is also well known abroad, having since 1997 been a visiting professor in Japan, Belgium, Taiwan, and the United States (Princeton University, from 2010-13.) That is no doubt why his book rates an English translation under the imprimatur of Harvard University Press. (The first edition in Chinese was published in 2014 by Hong Kong Oxford University Press.)

What Is China? is a short book on vast topics. In what can at times come across as abstract and opaque notions of culture, the nation-state, or national identity, Ge spans 5,000 years of history. The most basic concepts are questioned so dutifully that both “China” and its “rise” can find themselves in inverted commas. The author’s impatience with much foreign historiography of China, whether Japanese or Western—including postmodern critiques of the nation-state—accounts for some of the book’s didactic nature. But that nature mainly springs from Ge’s conviction that seemingly straightforward questions about China’s territories, peoples, faiths, and historical development are far more complex than for other countries. At pains to stress both the uniqueness and capacious nature of Chinese culture as a whole, along with that culture’s apparent insularity, he seeks to show that a simultaneous awareness of the outside world never lapsed in China’s long history.

Central to Ge’s argument is the concept of All-Under-Heaven (Tianxia), the core of the Chinese mentality since the earliest times. Best thought of as a vast inverted basket atop a chessboard of territories (the geometrical improbability underscores the imprecision of the notion), All-Under-Heaven extended in four directions and comprised three circles: the capital and the ruler, the land of the Han, and those occupied by barbarians. The idea of The Middle Kingdom was inherited by the Qin and Western Han dynasties (221 BCE to 9 CE), yet in the first of many authorial qualifications we are assured that it was far less restrictive than it appears, denoting in practice a space comprising a wide variety of intermingled races, ideas, cultures, and religions: “All-Under-Heaven is actually a self-centered cultural imagining . . . It was this cultural vision that, by placing China at the center of the world, produced distinctions between Chinese and barbarians.”

On the other hand, the national identity, state ideology, and cultural orientation of Han China grew from these mixed elements during the period of unification under the Qin and Han. So it is wrong to see the country as self-enclosed or uninterested in the surrounding world: As early as 138 BCE an explorer, Zhang Qian, travelled to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan, stimulating other explorations, followed by the opening of the Silk Road.

Ge sees the root elements of Chinese culture as the use of Chinese characters, the structure of family, the clan and the state, and the “three teachings in one”: the Buddhism that cultivated the mind, the Taoism that extended life, and the Confucianism that served as a practical system for governing. Then there was the unity of heaven and man in the universe, and the study of yin and yang and the five elements, which influenced everything from medicine to building, and even politics.

The self-conscious exclusivity that much of this implied was contradicted most flagrantly under the Tang dynasty (618-907). During this period (and especially the eighth century) foreigners, including Turkic peoples, Persians, and Indians, arrived in large numbers and appear to have been assimilated without great difficulty. They did not necessarily see themselves as foreign, and the Hans did not always see themselves as superior. The immigrants could rise to high rank, their fashions were often adopted, and they were seen as an energizing presence who could blend with the Hans.

Yet toward the end of the Tang a reaction set in, and the Song Taizu Emperor was to complain, “Beyond the four posts of my bed the rest of my house belongs to other people.” The practice of bestowing the status of tributary states on the countries surrounding China was discontinued, and a sharper consciousness arose about neighboring peoples and the borders that divided them. Critics of the country’s former openness denounced attempts to meld Chinese and foreigners together in a limitless expanse of empire for fear that the power of the nation and state alike would be diminished by so doing. There is nothing especially Chinese about the notion, of course; some Romans under the Republic reputedly felt it, and so did so-called Little Englanders a century or so ago. But what Ge describes had uniquely Chinese characteristics.

It was this gap between the All-Under-Heaven delusion and the reality of connections between states, Ge suggests, that brought about suspicions of foreign cultures. The southern Song especially developed traditionalist and socially reactionary attitudes. Its consciousness of borders and the need for formal links between states led to defensive measures to regularize the country’s loose and permeable frontiers. Border surveys, control of crossings, and limitations on where foreigners could reside followed. To prevent the outflow of knowledge and technology, controls were also imposed on Chinese leaving the country.

Afraid of absorbing too many foreigners and losing its national essence, the Song did its best to spread Han culture forcibly. The slogan of “Glorifying the throne and casting out barbarians” carries foretastes of later reactions against foreign contacts and incursions, such as the ban on teaching foreigners Chinese in the 19th century, the Boxer rebellion of 1901 in response to colonial inroads, and the enforced worship of the Great Helmsman and the chauvinism of his 1966 Cultural Revolution in the Communist period. In the Tang-Song transformation, as in late-1960s Maoist China, efforts to curb ostentatious wealth, drinking, sex, and aesthetic pursuits were couched as foreign sins. (Later, as the Mongolians and the Manchu Qing dynasty were superimposed on or interwoven with Han culture, things were to change again.)

The Song period marks another Chinese paradox. Ge believes that it was China’s awareness of its international context that encouraged the development of the early modern state sooner than in Europe. Though dating back millennia, China until the Song dynasty did not have a real sense of foreign lands (waiguo), nor was it fully conscious of itself as a nation-state. At the same time countries on its borders, such as Japan, Korea, and Annam (Vietnam), began to pull away from the tribute system and see themselves as having separate cultural statuses.

At the turn of the 14th century came another startling development. Equipped with a fleet of ships in advance of those of contemporary Europe, the Chinese mariner, explorer, diplomat, fleet admiral, court eunuch, and Muslim Zheng He (1371–1433) made voyages reaching as far as the Persian Gulf and East Africa. In a decision whose consequences for China are in retrospect extraordinary, forty years before Columbus set sail on his first expedition, the Emperor debarred its outstanding admiral from further explorations. The Chinese, it seemed, were uninterested in colonial ventures beyond their immediate frontiers.

To this day explanations of China’s failure to capitalize on its naval prowess are inadequate, and unfortunately Ge does not provide any advance. It has been suggested that China took the view that Zheng He’s discoveries merely confirmed that the outer world was peopled by barbarians who posed no challenge to a superior civilization, so that there was little point in pursuing wider explorations. Already, over some 300 years the Chinese had developed seaborne commerce in the Far East to meet the taste for spices and need for raw materials, and that was deemed enough.

Then, in the mid-Ming dynasty (1516) came Rafael Perestrello, a Portuguese adventurer and harbinger of what was to become early globalization, with all its challenges to Chinese customs and thinking. Not long after came the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci, who is thought to have brought with him a painting he had made of a world map with its five great continents and four oceans. Ge believes the map made a big impression on the Chinese, though not big enough to persuade them to resume their exploration of distant lands.

Next, in 1644 the national territory was greatly expanded with the Great Qing dynasty. China then became what Ge calls a super-empire, pulling together Mongols, Manchus, Uighur, Tibetan, and Han peoples, with the tensions that were to follow. After the 19th-century Western incursions, predatory post-Meiji Japanese historiographers began claiming that the real Han China was confined to the area south of the Great Wall and east of Xinjiang and Tibet, arguing in effect that the rest was up for grabs. In the ferocious conflicts that followed embattled Chinese historians came to their country’s defense, arguing that a culturally unified China already existed, within whose changing borders the central region had always remained stable, and that the Han and other cultures had melded into a civilization.

As the modern world approaches Ge comes clean—or cleaner—about his agenda. After some bland or contradictory pages, designed, one suspects, to present a balanced enough view to avoid controversy, now he argues increasingly forcefully against excessive nationalism and, more unusually, state power—not something lightly done in contemporary China.

Calling on his fellow citizens to remember the less benign periods of its history, he points out that although, unlike Europe, China has been spared religious wars, this was largely because all religions were under state control, owing to high levels of centralism. Then he chastises the “excessive pride” of a culture shored up by a tribute system, whose leader saw himself not just as the son of heaven but above all alien peoples. Anyone who has witnessed the reception of Third World communist leaders or sympathizers in Beijing during the Mao period, as Ge must have done by the dozen, will conclude that he can hardly be unaware of the parallels.

Tipping the balance the other way, as if afraid he has gone too far, our author then asserts that China today must not go to the other extreme and apologize too much for its past. China’s modern community, he insists, is not the product of an imagined history, as postmodernists claim in order to deconstruct the country, and for all its excesses it cannot be denied that the centralized Chinese world of the past fostered a distinct national culture.

Waxing bold again, in allusive but unambiguous language he then makes clear his fear that China’s rise and growing confidence could lead historians and others to a narrow focus on Han culture. To do this would be dangerous and extreme, he stresses, turning respect for traditional culture, whether Confucianism or a fashion for traditional Han clothes, in a nationalistic direction. “The plural nature of Chinese culture is also the complexity, tolerance and openness of Chinese culture.”

This passage brought to mind a strikingly bombastic recent editorial in the semi-official China Daily, in which the nationalist chutzpah Ge fears emerged in raw form. Criticizing the assumption by Francis Fukuyama that Western democracy would triumph the world over and reminding us of how it had failed to resolve its own problems (this was after the election of President Trump), it went on:

In contrast, socialism with Chinese characteristics is propelling China toward realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. China’s democratic system under the leadership of the Communist Party of China is perfectly suited to the country’s present conditions and cultural traditions. Unlike Western political parties that represent the interests of only part of the people, the CPC represents the working class along with the rest of the Chinese people.

China is the only ancient civilization that has continued to evolve without a break for more than 5,000 years. And the CPC has inherited, and has been promoting, the cultural traditions of that civilization with the aim of serving the nation and its people. And contrary to some Western scholars’ prophecy during the Cold War, China is rising steadily while the West remains mired in all kinds of troubles.

Later, Ge echoes approvingly a living Chinese historian who warned that for millennia China’s conviction that it was the center of the world had prevented it from adjusting to the idea of equal coexistence with other states. He adds that in a globalized era the ancient worldview based on a tribute system lost its validity some time ago; a statement of the obvious, perhaps, but countries like Vietnam and South Korea will be glad to hear a Chinese historian of Ge’s repute repeat it.

The twists and turns of his argument, however, are not over. Inclining yet again in another direction, he reminds us that the first priority of his country has been to escape the grip that Western culture had on its ideas and institutions in the early modern period and return to the traditional culture in search of a foundation for rebuilding modern Chinese values. This search for identity was essential:

This means working, in an era when faith is all but absent, to re-establish cohesion among “Chinese” citizens in their views on history, culture, values, and especially the state. . . . As China rises, then, it becomes essential in the eyes of many to show the world that our vast country has not only taken its place amongst the so-called great nations of the world but also should have a commanding position, specifically in terms of culture.

One can understand such an aspiration in a resurgent power of China’s extraordinary historical achievements. Though now that Ge is writing specifically about modern China one is bound to add that a commanding position in the world of culture is unlikely to be forthcoming in a country whose current semi-dictator has just proclaimed himself leader for life, tightened the grip of his Party on culture, and renewed the stultifying, tedious, and mind-numbing Maoist practice of obliging his people, notably students and officials, to study his speeches. To be fair, Ge cannot have known of Xi Jinping’s self-promotion to lifelong leadership when he wrote, but the trends were already there to be discerned.

Back on the attack, Ge goes on to denounce the idea that since at a philosophical level the Confucian world is one without borders, the All-Under-Heaven order should replace the current world order. Ge will have none of it, calling the notion arrogant, self-centered, slapdash thinking that could only lead to chauvinism. The rest of us may reflect what Ge feels unable to point out: namely, that until forty years ago the Chinese regime’s philosophy was based on a not-dissimilar belief in globally valid doctrines, this time stemming from Marxism-Leninism, fused with Mao Zedong’s highly nationalistic thinking, ultimately destined, we were assured, to replace the world order, too.

Irrational exuberance, Ge almost calls this line of thinking, a world away from what he calls the “rational strategy [for China] to keep a low profile and bide its time” (such is Ge’s apolitical presentation that he doesn’t even attribute the quote to Deng Xiaoping). All this he attributes to an urge to play power politics, excusable only insofar as it can reflect feelings in a country so long engaged in a struggle against humiliation and oppression, at a moment in world history when the West now has burgeoning problems. Now is China’s time, is the message (or, as we might put it, the feeling that “we are the masters now”). Such ideas, Ge insists, could “lead to ambitions to gain hegemony over All-Under-Heaven with the wealth and military power gained through modernization. These ambitions, in turn, can become barriers that use culture to divide inner and outer—you and me.”

Again All-Under-Heaven comes back like a nagging tooth, though not always in a negative context. He is indignant with “a scholar with a government position” who says that the state should be a “cultural and civilizational” body that reconstructs the country in the spirit of an All-Under-Heaven philosophy rooted in the Confucian classics, and with those who speak of a new China “remaking the world.” At the same time, he agrees that some of this “Celestial dynasty” mentality could morph into a more positive globalism, one open to universal values within a framework of unity and diversity. He ends, however, with a salutary warning:

When All-Under-Heaven is brought to life, when imagined versions of the tribute system are taken for real, and memories of the Celestial Empire are unearthed, then it is likely that Chinese culture and national sentiment will turn to nationalism (or statism) that resists both global modern civilization and regional cooperation. Such a turn of events would truly lead to a clash of civilizations.

The sentiment seems clear enough. Clarity at last, we think; yet Ge’s scrupulous lack of specificity leaves important questions open. Is this an oblique criticism of Xi Jinping’s growing appeals to national sentiment and more forward policies, whether in the South China Sea or moves toward a tribute-like relationship with smaller neighbors? Or is he sounding a historically coded note of warning: “So far and no further.”

Either way, What Is China? serves to alert us to tensions within China’s academic community, and to an extent perhaps within Ge Zhaoguang himself, at a time when his country’s sudden and massive advances run the risk of inducing dizziness from success. The temptations of triumphalism, after all, come in many flavors.

The post All Under Heaven? appeared first on The American Interest.

The Francis Resistance

To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism

Ross Douthat

Simon & Schuster, 2018, 256 pp., $26

To understand the Francis papacy—its promise, its perils, and the profound divisions it has caused—it helps to look at a recent exchange between the Pope and a young boy named Emanuele on the outskirts of Rome.

The encounter in question occurred two weeks after Easter, during a papal visit to St. Paul of the Cross Parish. After touring a ramshackle public housing complex and ministering to the parish’s poor and elderly, Francis fielded questions from parishioners—a common-enough feature of such visits. But when young Emanuele stepped to the microphone and broke down in sobs, unable to articulate his question, there followed the kind of unscripted, inclusive moral gesture that has been a hallmark of this papacy.

“Come, come to me, Emanuele,” the Pope beckoned the boy. “Come and whisper it in my ear.” After hearing the boy’s plea in private, Francis relayed the essence to the crowd: Emanuele was crying for his deceased father, a non-believer but a “good man” whose four children had all been baptized. “Is dad in heaven?” he wanted to know.

The Pope responded with a message of mercy and compassion, albeit tinged with ambiguity. Praising the boy’s “beautiful witness” and courage, Francis demurred on his own ability to make such pronouncements: “God is the one who says who goes to heaven.” Yet his subsequent call-and-response with the crowd left no doubt about Francis’s leanings: “What do you think? . . . God has a dad’s heart. And with a dad who was not a believer, but who baptized his children . . . do you think God would be able to leave him far from himself? […] Does God abandon his children?” No, the crowd shouted back. “There, Emanuele, that is the answer. God surely was proud of your father,” the pontiff responded, before encouraging Emanuele to pray for his father’s soul.

In many ways, this story is the Francis papacy in miniature. For the Pope’s many supporters, both within and outside the Church, it distills the essence of his appeal: his visible, Christ-like demonstrations of mercy and comfort; his pastoral focus on ministering to the complex human needs of those he encounters; his elevation of “discernment” over rigidly applied doctrine; and his evangelizing impulse in traveling to the peripheries of society to spread the good news. For many admirers of Francis, such gestures hold the long-term promise of a healthier and more inclusive Church: more open, less insular, less judgmental, more attuned to the complexities of modern life.

To Francis’s traditionalist critics, on the other hand, the episode might look less benign. In this view, Francis’s appeals to mercy mask a dangerous flirtation with heresy: the suggestion, however tentative, that salvation can be attained without belief in Christ. True, Francis may not have officially contradicted Church teaching; the “no salvation outside the Church” principle has been qualified and re-interpreted over the years to reject strictly literalist interpretations. Yet Francis’s reassuring answer to Emanuele, with its strategic hedging and use of rhetorical questions, nonetheless illustrates a tendency often viewed with alarm by Francis’s critics: a propensity for doctrinal confusion, and a preference for easy comfort over hard truths.

In the United States, there has perhaps been no critic more prominent than Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist. In a series of dispatches over the five years of Francis’s papacy—and now in his new book, To Change the Church—Douthat has been a lonely voice of dissent against a pope treated by much of the press as a heroic figure. At the core of Douthat’s critique are the Pope’s controversial efforts to re-shape Church doctrine on the family, and specifically to open communion to divorced and remarried Catholics. In this seemingly abstruse sacramental debate Douthat sees a larger story, and a greater threat: that Pope Francis will bend Church teaching to its breaking point, ultimately producing a schism.

The stakes, Douthat tells us, could not be higher: not just for Catholics, whose leader he claims risks breaking faith with the Gospel, but for Christians and theological conservatives more broadly, who should care about what kind of precedent the Catholic Church sets in its engagement with the modern world. Douthat depicts the current moment as a crucial turning point for the Church, set against a broader political crisis of liberalism in the West. And the course of action he advises is one familiar to our political moment as well: resistance.

From the outset, Douthat claims that his subject “cannot be written about neutrally,” beginning a personal preface that explains his own strange path to faith. In his telling, he is the “little-known third category” of Catholic: neither a cradle Catholic, baptized at birth and born into the Church’s traditions, nor an adult convert who took the plunge entirely on his own. A child of divorce exposed to various Protestant churches early on, Douthat converted as a teenager, but did so in large part at his mother’s urging, making his a “half-chosen and half-inherited faith.”

Douthat writes eloquently about how this upbringing informs his present faith. He describes himself as “the good bad Catholic or the bad good one”: the kind who takes his religion seriously, aspires to adhere to it, and attends mass every Sunday, but who also questions whether he would have joined the Church of his own accord, who second-guesses his belief, who internally debates Pascal’s Wager ad nauseam even as he drags himself to the nearest mass that suits his schedule. In truth, this angst is hardly unique to Douthat: Speaking for myself, the youngest in a practicing Irish Catholic family and the product of Catholic education from kindergarten through college, it was familiar enough to register as a self-portrait.

For Douthat, the upshot is that he wants a Church that imposes strict doctrine, that demands he uphold a more rigorous form of the faith than he can sometimes muster, rather than one that changes the rules to make his practice easier. This perspective informs the critical view of Francis that runs through the book. Yet Douthat’s confessional disclosure is also an effective credibility-building exercise for readers of the opposite persuasion.

In that spirit of that disclosure, I should confess that I am one such reader. Unlike Douthat, my political sympathies tend more left than right; my theological sympathies, more toward Francis’s vivid displays of mercy than Benedict XVI’s pious disquisitions on doctrine. Yet I found myself disarmed by his admirably frank opening, complete with its mea culpas. Douthat establishes himself early on as both even-handed and intellectually honest. He is a reluctant critic of Francis, not a reflexive one; he is firm in his convictions but not possessed of unyielding certitude; above all, he is more interested in persuading than scolding. His book is ultimately a polemic, but it’s one that gives a fair hearing to opposing views.

His early chapter on Vatican II, which Douthat rightly identifies as the source of the Church’s present divides, is a case in point. Douthat offers “three stories” about its uncertain legacy: one, the “master narrative” of liberal Catholics, who believe that the council’s reformist, modernizing spirit was betrayed by the reactionary doctrinal backlash of John Paul II and Benedict XVI; another, the master narrative of conservative Catholics, who believe the council’s limited reforms were willfully hijacked by those pushing ever-greater concessions to modernity, before John Paul II and Benedict righted the ship. He then attempts a synthesis, tilted toward the conservative view but crediting arguments on both sides, to argue that Vatican II resulted above all in an “uneasy truce,” promising renewal but in practice prolonging the Church’s divisions.

According to Douthat, the Francis papacy began with a genuine opportunity to transcend these divides: “Indeed,” he writes, “it promised to highlight, usefully, the ways in which those divides aren’t necessarily as binary as the language of ‘left’ and ‘right’ suggests.” Unlike many conservative Catholics, Douthat seems essentially untroubled by the pope’s critiques of unfettered capitalism, or his prioritization of climate change as developed in the 2015 encyclical Laudato Si. He suggests that Francis’s embrace of figures like Archbishop Oscar Romero and Dorothy Day—much beloved on the Catholic Left—could facilitate a newfound appreciation of their contributions to Catholic social teaching on the Right, leading to a healthy depolarization in the Church. And in probing Bergoglio’s biography, he eschews the caricature of Francis the radical leftist, explaining how he fought against extreme versions of Marxist liberation theology as Jesuit provincial in Argentina.

In short, Douthat concedes that Francis had the makings of a moderate pope—or at least, one who could have productively challenged the limitations of both factions. Had Francis rigorously upheld doctrinal orthodoxy while still maintaining his focus on social justice and his countercultural critiques of modernity, he might have fulfilled “the promise of a new Catholic center.”

Instead, Douthat argues, Francis’s leadership has left the Church dangerously uncentered, and uncertain of its own teaching. The heart of his critique concerns the Pope’s two synods on the family, convened in 2014 and 2015, which considered whether the Church might allow, under certain circumstances, Catholics who had divorced and remarried to receive Communion without obtaining an annulment. Douthat deftly sketches the stakes of the theological debate, tracing the Church’s teaching on marriage back to the Marcan passage where Jesus challenges the Pharisees’ understanding of marriage to uphold a more rigorous rule: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” For Douthat this teaching is central, not incidental, to Catholic theology, and an instance where the Church has rightly adhered to the plain meaning of the Gospel even as more lax denominations have found reason to soften it. Inviting divorced and remarried Catholics back to Communion because the former teaching was too hard, Douthat argues, would mean contradicting Jesus’ own clear moral instructions. And if such a fundamental moral teaching can be changed, then in theory any Church teaching can.

Douthat’s slippery-slope argument has been challenged by more credentialed, Francis-friendly theologians, but his reasoning is sound enough. The problem is that his theological convictions inevitably seep into, and prejudice, his accounts of the worldly debate. Douthat’s treatment of the marriage controversy doubles as a story of hardball Vatican politics: a battle of wills between Cardinal Walter Kasper, the liberal German newly ascendant under Francis, and Cardinal Raymond Burke, the American traditionalist who has led the resistance against his family agenda. As secondhand palace intrigue, this section is compelling enough.

But it’s also where Douthat’s prejudices show up most plainly, where he seems most susceptible to confirmation bias, and where his depiction of Francis becomes less than charitable. He relies heavily on cherry-picked quotations and sweeping summaries of the synod proceedings to depict the traditionalists as a besieged minority, blindsided by the machinations of a shadowy liberal cabal seeking to rig the synod in its favor. Douthat acknowledges that the synod did not ultimately change Church teaching, but gestures at vague “rumors” and “talk” that it could have been much worse, that “the pope’s collaborators” had planned to pre-write the synod’s documents to fit their own conclusions, and would have, were it not for the vocal resistance they met.

Tellingly, Douthat’s previous acknowledgments of Francis’ virtues seem to go out the window in this section, in favor of an isolated, angry, and manipulative figure, a man “boiling with anger” and railing Lear-like against the traditionalists who resist his edicts or do not flatter his beliefs. This is a feature, not a bug, of his narrative: In some sense Douthat needs this sinister image of Francis to sustain his portrait of the Pope as a doctrinal revolutionary, and to justify his own reaction against him.

It is not a portrait constructed entirely out of whole cloth, admittedly: Pope Francis has been known to inveigh against traditionalists in harsh terms, likening them to latter-day Pharisees, and he has made full use of his papal prerogatives to sideline rivals. But Douthat fails to consider how the Pope has not pushed his authority as far as he might. “His Holiness Declines to Comment” is the title of one chapter, its implication being that Francis prefers to stay deliberately silent on controversial matters of doctrine, allowing wiggle room for liberal bishops to interpret his true agenda in the most progressive way possible. It’s a plausible reading, to be sure—that the pope might settle for a studied ambiguity on such matters for now, tacitly giving a permission slip to the Church’s liberals until, after enough time, the weight of Catholic practice allows for a fuller doctrinal revolution down the line.

Left unexplored by Douthat, though, is the extent to which Francis’s silence is also a refusal to explicitly change Catholic doctrine, even if his most liberal acolytes might prefer that he do so. In other words, the Pope may care more about continuity than Douthat gives him credit for. And in harping on the Communion issue specifically, Douthat neglects the many other areas where Francis has unambiguously upheld orthodox teachings, to the disappointment of the Church’s liberalizers. His denunciation of the teaching of transgender ideas in school (which he has called “ideological colonization”) is one example; so too is his firm stance against euthanasia, which he has denounced as “always wrong.”

The book’s doctrinal critique culminates with a discussion of Amoris Laetitia, the lengthy papal exhortation that came out of the family debates. Amoris did not explicitly alter Church teaching; among other things, it unambiguously affirmed Church teaching on homosexuality, stating that same-sex unions were not “even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.” But on the Communion question, Douthat sees it as a muddled statement, altering the spirit of the law if not the letter, while engaging in a confused dialectic with John Paul II’s teaching on the family in order to do an end run around it. (One discursive footnote in Amoris arguably refutes his teaching that remarried Catholics should live “as brother and sister” if they are to receive Communion; another vaguely hints at opening up Communion to couples in non-marital relationships). The practical consequences are that different dioceses have interpreted Amoris in different ways, with some liberal Europeans rushing to give Communion to the remarried, while traditionalists fight a rearguard action to resist those interpretations and clarify that the practice remains prohibited. It is in these internecine splits that Douthat sees the seeds of schism.

Perhaps—and yet for all his concern over that prospect, Douthat ultimately hedges about where the Francis papacy is heading. Late in the book, he offers two historical parallels from church history that could clarify the present moment. First, there is the comparison to Arianism: a fourth-century heresy, accommodated for a time but ultimately rejected, which denied Jesus’ full divinity. This is Douthat’s scenario for how traditionalists could still “win” in the long term: by resisting Francis’s changes, even at the risk of exile or censure, just as past Church fathers like Athanasius resisted the Arian heresy before the rest of the Church came around. But then, Douthat says the current controversy may be more like the Jansenist-Jesuit debates of the 17th and 18th centuries. This suggests how the traditionalists could lose, just as the Jansenists—an ascetic semi-Calvinist sect that taught predestination and justification by faith alone—were ultimately kicked out of the Church, their arguments discredited.

Here, Douthat’s penchant for equivocation gets the better of him, and his admirable tendency to hear all sides only papers over the uncertainties in his own conclusions. In the second scenario, Douthat initially expresses some admiration for the Jansenists’ moral rigor, writing that the Jesuits did not “necessarily have the more theologically decisive argument” over them. But he then casts them as “theological rebels,” noting that the analogy to today’s traditionalists is an imperfect one. He then further muddies his meaning, saying that, actually, today’s progressives share similar premises as the heretical Jansenists, in their understanding that God’s law is impossible to live up to in the modern world. In sum, the chapter reads less as a thorough elaboration of the parallel than as a hesitant, overqualified testing out of various contradictory theses.

Douthat saves his most provocative comparison for last. In a final chapter placing the Francis era in the context of the West’s populist moment, he likens Pope Francis to Donald Trump. This is a fraught analogy, he acknowledges, given all their ideological differences, and it has already provoked much outrage among the pope’s admirers. But perhaps it is worth taking seriously. Both men have a penchant for shocking, off-the-cuff statements, which their advisers have to qualify or walk back. Both are beset by rival factions trying to get their ear, scheming and leaking to shape their narrative. Both are populists, after a fashion: focused on the masses while scornful of hierarchies and traditional norms about how to carry out the duties of their office. “Francis’s opponents, like Trump’s,” writes Douthat, “feel that they’re resisting an abnormal leader, a man who does not respect the rules that are supposed to bind his office.”

Yet if the Trump comparison is worth pondering, so too are the ways in which Douthat at times resembles Trump’s most hysterical critics. For one there is his tendency to rely on thinly sourced hearsay that’s just too good to pass up. Second, there is his celebration of those who stand in Francis’s way, a tendency to turn the papacy into a simplistic heroes-and-villains story with those who resist the pope (the Deep Church?) firmly in the former camp. Like Trump’s critics, he depicts his subject in somewhat inconsistent terms, given the needs of the moment: At times he is a careless bumbler, unintentionally sowing confusion; at times he is a master manipulator, implementing a devious agenda. Like them, too, he occasionally indulges in fanciful scenarios about a successor who can roll back all of the populist’s changes and restore the status quo ante.

And like Trump’s critics, he is sometimes prone to over-reaction, oblivious to the risks of endorsing the breaking of norms in an effort to correct a perceived norm-breaker in high office. Douthat seems to tacitly approve the bold moves of Cardinal Raymond Burke, the Francis foil and radical traditionalist who has all but accused the Pope of heresy, and publicly challenged the orthodoxy of his teachings in Amoris Laetitia. If the Francis resistance has a natural leader, it is Cardinal Burke—and Douthat says, only half joking, that he could one day be canonized and remembered as a “lion of orthodoxy” for his trouble.

But there is, I might suggest, a more prudent course than the outright resistance embodied by Burke. Indeed, it is one suggested by Benedict XVI himself. Late in the book, Douthat quotes the words of the Pope Emeritus, spoken last year at the eulogy for the traditionalist Cardinal Joachim Meisner:

What particularly impressed me from my last conversations with the now passed Cardinal was the relaxed cheerfulness, the inner joy and the confidence at which he had arrived. We know that this passionate shepherd and pastor found it difficult to leave his post, especially at a time in which the Church stands in particularly pressing need of convincing shepherds who can resist the dictatorship of the spirit of the age and who live and think the faith with determination. However, what moved me all the more was that, in this last period of his life, he learned to let go and to live out of a deep conviction that the Lord does not abandon His Church, even if the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing.

This passage has been widely, and plausibly, interpreted as an attack on Francis’s doctrinal agenda by the former Pope. Yet as Douthat also notes, it did not “call for rebellion or resistance” or suggest that Benedict regretted his resignation. “If it implied a message to Francis’s open critics,” he goes on, “it was one of patience, trust and prayer. If the conservatives were ultimately right about the controversies of the Francis era, then by their own premises their vindication was already somehow prepared—in God’s time, not man’s.”

Perhaps this message, and the example set by Francis’s predecessor, is one that Douthat himself might heed. Instead of mounting the barricades and rallying the troops to rebuke the Pope, he might take a cue from Benedict: to uphold Church teaching faithfully and live it “with determination,” yes—but also to walk humbly, to trust that “the Lord does not abandon his Church.” He might also take comfort that Benedict has taken pains to emphasize continuity in the Church, recently praising Francis’s “profound philosophical and theological education” and noting the “interior continuity between the two pontificates, notwithstanding all the differences in style and temperament.”

This is not to say that Douthat’s critique is without merit, or his concerns invalid. He is right to say that the Church cannot be “a ship of Theseus in which every single part can be changed,” and he is right to reject a Hegelian notion of a Church evolving into ever-more enlightened positions over time. Yet he is also right to note that the Church has made many accommodations to modernity already: “We are almost all adaptationists…in contemporary Catholic debates,” he concedes at one point. This granted, the question then becomes where to draw the line, and whether a provisional, discretionary opening of Communion to some remarried Catholics really is the orthodoxy-shattering, Church-rupturing event that Douthat claims it is.

I remain unconvinced. And for all his dire, hour-is-late warnings, Douthat himself is honest enough to admit that he could be wrong about it all. That’s a sign of his admirable intellectual humility, which combined with his erudition and eloquence, makes To Change the Church a book worth reading and wrestling with. But it’s also an expression of doubt that makes his unflinching opposition all the more dubious—a risky gamble that could precipitate exactly the outcome he wants to avoid. This is a danger to which Douthat and his fellow Francis critics ultimately remain blind: that in pressing for resistance where it is not warranted, they could heighten the Church’s divisions and make a schism more likely, not less.

Listen to Ross Douthat discuss the book on The American Interest Podcast.

In the Catholic tradition, the Eucharist is believed to be the “real presence” of Christ, and the Church has guidelines about the proper conditions under which it can be received. Anyone who has committed a mortal sin and not confessed it—which would include a divorced Catholic in a second marriage—commits another sin by receiving it. Practically speaking, there are essentially no obstacles to such a person stepping forward to receive Communion at mass—but theologically speaking, as Douthat explains, the debate gets to the crux of fundamental Church teachings.

Michael Sean Winters, in a too-scathing pan for the liberal National Catholic Reporter, does usefully point out some of the limitations of Douthat’s sourcing, and his apparent mischaracterizations of the synod proceedings.

The wrinkle here, discussed in the book, is that a group of Canadian bishops have actually cited Francis’s focus on pastoral care to justify euthanasia in some cases. But Francis himself has not endorsed that interpretation, and indeed has pushed back against it, publicly siding with the opposing view and demanding, at risk of excommunication, that a group of Belgian brothers cease assisting suicides at their hospitals.

Douthat is hardly the first to make this comparison: Matthew Schmitz, Rod Dreher, Alan Jacobs, and Jonathan V. Last have all made a version of the argument.

Douthat cites the HBO series The Young Pope, for instance, and notes that its depiction of an ultra-orthodox pope has a certain appeal among traditionalists in the Francis era, who long for a restoration.

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