Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 94

The Future of Political Parties in Three Movements

No US political leader in recent memory has stirred quite as much concern about the health of the U.S. political system as Donald Trump. Of course, his administration may eventually prove to be just a one-off episode in the United States’ history, a fluky, non-replicable byproduct of populist backlash and the Electoral College. But it is also possible that Trump’s ascent signifies something more fundamental than that, a harbinger of impending party realignment or a major shift in the way politics is conducted. In the words of Buffalo Springfield, “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

Count me as one who is sure that there are deeper issues at play but unsure as to how they will actually play out in the long run. The biggest surprise to me is not Donald Trump the man. He revealed himself to us many years ago. I was more astonished that the Republican Party would acquiesce so meekly to policies that blatantly contradict conservative principles of fiscal restraint, free trade and residual Cold War opposition to Russia.

That they have done so raises lots of TBD questions. Has the Republican Party actually changed its policy orientation, or is it temporarily going along with the President in order to avoid internal strife? To what extent is the weakness of the Republican Congressional leaders a reflection of the strength of the underlying ideological tensions in the party’s coalition? And are the Democrats headed in a similar direction, splitting between progressive and moderate wings and united only in opposition to all things Republican?

Assuming for the moment that the current political situation actually reflects something deeper about our current politics and is not just the temporary chaos caused by one unusual political figure, where might this lead us? I think that it could go in three different directions.

The first is the usual story of American politics in transition: party coalitions are shifting as they have in the past, but the American political party system will retain its same duopolistic form and function. The education, racial and gender divide sharpens over time with women and college grads continuing to migrate towards the Democrats while Republicans solidify their appeal to rural and exurban whites.

Donald Trump gets political credit for spotting the opportunity to garner the support of those who feel left behind by automation, free trade and competition from immigrant labor. But to turn this into a permanent realignment, the Republicans will eventually need to figure out how to deliver some tangible returns to the downwardly mobile segment of Trump’s base constituency.

In this scenario, there is no radical break from two party politics. All the coalitional movement takes place within the existing party structures.

Efforts to create a third party will most likely be quickly extinguished by the single member simple plurality electoral system and the deeply embedded accumulation of other rules that favor the current duopoly (e.g. anti-fusion laws, high ballot access thresholds, sore loser prohibitions, etc.).  The only real hope for a third party to gain a foothold would be if the white nationalist base could become regionally concentrated and therefore dominant in some section of the country such as the interior mountain or plains states. But even then, the odds are against any party that bases its appeal on a population that is dwindling due to prevailing demographic trends.

A second direction our party system could take is a more serious departure from politics as usual based on changes in the way we communicate and organize politically. Perhaps President Trump’s populism is not just about particular economic and racial resentments, but represents a fundamental shift in the way we conduct politics.

There is nothing new about a populist leader whipping up fervor in the base to consolidate political power and pursue a particular policy agenda, but in the past it required capturing, owning or suppressing the traditional media. Now the traditional media are fading and are increasingly replaced by social media and the Internet. Capturing the entire media space is unnecessarily inefficient. It is more expedient to target messages through social media to a winning coalition of supporters. Big data and the internet enable a much greater capacity to communicate directly with the blocs of voters you need support from. Voters can be identified and mobilized much more easily than ever before. Governing coalitions could thus arise and fade more quickly behind emerging political entrepreneurs. The party duopoly would no longer be necessary and would be replaced by a more fluid and responsive politics.

This may seem implausible at first glance, but it is consistent with certain modern trends. In recent decades, referendums and initiatives have been on the rise in mature democracies. The UK made its momentous decision to withdraw from the EU based on a vote of the people. The Five Star Party in Italy has emerged out of nowhere to become a governing party by means of an Internet platform. Perhaps traditional institutionalized parties will fade and be replaced by direct democracy hybrids.

Unlike the first scenario, this second one involves not just movement across coalitional boundaries, but a radical transformation in the form and function of the party system as a whole. While there is some plausibility to this scenario, there are many reasons to think that it could fail to fully develop. Parties arose because it was necessary to coordinate voters and office holders in order to win elections and govern successfully. Time will tell whether the Five Star party can govern and hold itself together. The notion that “the people” have the time, energy, motivation and knowledge to govern effectively has to date proven illusory.

I am more inclined to think that U.S. politics is headed down a third path where we retain the duopoly form and the essential intermediating function of political parties, but the party as organization moves into the largely unregulated Internet space. The history of U.S. political reform is that political activity gravitates into the areas of least legal resistance. This is no clearer example of that principle than campaign finance reform. We imposed stricter restrictions on campaign donations after Watergate, and it eventually gave rise to PACs, independent spending and now Super PACs. We passed disclosure regulations, and big money found safer ground in nonprofit 501c4s. We tried to offset private campaign money with public subsidies, but the restrictions proved too burdensome, and Presidential candidates now avoid the public finance system entirely.

In this third scenario, the Democratic and Republic parties are still dominant and favored in many ways by state and federal laws. But the political parties continue the present trend of morphing into networks of party affiliated groups that spend “independently” on behalf of candidates. Outside groups and social media figures with large followings enforce party discipline rather than Congressional leaders.

This might work effectively strategy for forging a winning electoral coalition, but will it lead to effective government? The latter requires aggregating separate interests into some collective consensus. Log-rolling is the political easiest way to aggregate, but it is not always possible and can lead to disjointed, inconsistent and excessively costly policies in the end. Bargaining to compromise is better, but harder to do unless there are strong pressures to participate and make concessions. If we are headed toward a politics dominated by a loose coalition of affiliated groups, then where will the centripetal forces that can bind the party coalition in office together come from?

The rhetoric of populism focuses on the swamp of inside players and elected officials. The reality of achieving effective governance may increasingly reside with outside groups. Navigating that civil society morass might prove even more difficult than working in the DC swamp.

The post The Future of Political Parties in Three Movements appeared first on The American Interest.

Are Our Politics Really “Tribal”?

Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations

Amy Chua

Penguin Press, 2018, 304 pp. $28

In the West, stories begin: “Once upon a time.” Farther east, they begin: “It was—and it was not.” After engaging with her argument, the reader may wonder which opening would have been more appropriate to the story Amy Chua has to tell.

At first blush Chua’s story appears quite straightforward. From her first sentence, where she says that, “humans are tribal”—indeed (as she later emphasizes) “humans aren’t just a little tribal. We’re very tribal”—her point might seem unobjectionable, even trite. After all, humans gather, gregariously, in all sorts of combinations and, notwithstanding the temptation to be ethnocentric and competitive, “tribe” might simply be a cover term for any of these forms of human association. Chua, a Yale Law School professor, does not, however, leave it at that, since mere groupiness would hardly constitute a causal explanation for the current state of American politics. Instead, she goes on to imply that tribes always need “an enemy to hate and kill,” that at its worst “tribalism desensitizes by dehumanizing,” and that people always see their own tribe as superior to all others.

But what is the source of this prickly and exclusionary tribalism? For Chua the answer is firmly rooted in biology: Human beings, she argues, are the possessors of a biological “instinct”—a tribal instinct—that does not simply propel us into association with others of our kind but into groupings whose identifying features stand in agonistic relationship to other such cohorts. We are, in short, bound up in territorial and pugnacious “tribes” by the ineluctable forces of our psychic structure. Chua never defines “tribe” and is often inconsistent in using it (what does it mean to use the word in quotes when referring to Britain?), but she does reveal her overall orientation by the sources on which she relies.

Chua’s evidence for this biological urge rests initially on the work of two behavioral psychologists, Muzaraf Sharif and Robin Dunbar. Sharif’s 1954 experiment, called the Robber’s Cave, purported to show that groups come into conflict when competing for limited resources. But as Gina Perry in her book The Lost Boys and other scholars have shown, the groups used (consisting only of 12-year-old white boys) were artificial and the sampling biased, the experimenters themselves formed an opposing group, and in later experiments other lines of division showed up beyond those involving resource competition. Dunbar’s claim—that, owing to our inbuilt cognitive limit, 150 is the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships—is equally questionable: Other experiments have produced varied numbers (such as the Bernard-Kilworth number, which is twice as large) and still others have shown the distortions that arise from completely ignoring the role that culture plays in group dynamics.

To these psychological experiments Chua then adds studies that seek human propensities through the use of brain scans. Here she treats the proffered results as proof of our species’ disposition to coalesce into hostile groups when in fact most scientists understand that different regions of the brain may pick up different capabilities, that blood flow and attendant brightening may be inversely related to speed of learning, and that, because responses vary, more than biology is almost certainly involved. As at other moments in her account, Chua confuses contingency with causality. This is evident both in her overarching explanation of human nature and her appraisal of American foreign policies.

Chua’s theory of the tribal instinct informs her view of the present moment in American domestic politics and misguided foreign policy. Her argument has two main branches. First, by not realizing that humans are essentially tribal, policymakers have missed the key lines of association that inform the politics of countries into whose affairs we have intruded in peace and in war. In addition, we have failed to grasp how much inequality exacerbates this tribal instinct. As to the latter, Chua says that “the key to understanding extremism lies . . . in group inequality.”

But like her use of “tribalism,” Chua’s view of inequality is imprecise and inconsistently applied. Does she mean differences in wealth distribution, perceived favoritism for minorities based on other generations’ sins, or the sense of losing one’s prior control over the symbols of national identity? Several recent studies might at least have caught Chua’s attention. Some have demonstrated, for example, that fear of cultural displacement drove more people to vote for Trump than economic anxiety—though others question whether, in a nation in which 35 percent of people have savings of less than a few hundred dollars (and another 34 percent have none at all), culture could really be the source of collective anger. But Chua neither says which type of inequality she thinks is at issue nor precisely how it generates tribal exclusivity rather than useful alliances across other boundaries, such as ethnic differences between minority groups with similarly low incomes.

False premises may still produce true results, so the question is whether certain of Chua’s specific policy examples—her flawed theory of the tribal instinct aside—can nevertheless stand on their own. Yet even here inaccuracies and the questionable selection of facts can suggest quite different interpretations. She says that in Iraq things turned around for American forces when, in connection with the surge, we finally began to pay attention to the tribes. That is so and not so: It was the tribes, fed up with the behavior of foreign Muslim fighters, who, in the Anbar Awakening of 2006-7, began to play a key role. However, whether because of their antipathy to the foreign fighters or as the result of the power vacuum created at the tribal level by al-Qaeda’s ideological universalism, it was the tribes who came to us, not the other way around. More to the point, if tribes are so retrograde, why does Chua favor supporting tribes as a means of advancing political stability?

Similarly, in her account of Vietnam, where she uses the terms “tribal” and “ethnic” interchangeably, she rightly chastises policymakers for failing to appreciate how much the Vietnamese hated the Chinese. Nevertheless, she continues to rely on her underlying explanatory theory, now hedging by saying that brain scans “suggest” that group identification is innate rather than influenced by history. As for Venezuela, she again confutes causality by rightly pointing out Hugo Chávez’s appeal to groups of the poor, but failing to account for the lesser appeal of his successor, Nicolás Maduro, when exactly the same “tribal instincts” should have been at work. Elsewhere, Chua does mention the importance of leadership, yet never addresses its relationship to the primordial instincts to which she otherwise gives causal precedence. Finally, in considering a broader series of examples, Chua attributes many problems in these countries to our failure to see that “market-dominant minorities,” like the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, create opposing “tribes.” But among such examples that she lists Chua strangely includes, without further comment, “Jews in post-Communist Russia.”

Chua’s vision of the United States is also a mix of concise summation and misleading appraisal. While criticizing American claims to uniqueness, Chua characterizes the United States as the only “super group,” by which she seems to mean that we possess some of the same unifying features smaller groups display. But if we are breaking up into hostile identity polities, as she argues, how is it that Barack Obama was twice elected President? And if it is true that elections may actually galvanize mutual antipathy, what forestalls that result in certain instances? In her reference to super-groups and to the United States as a “tribe of tribes,” Chua complicates her own theory of the tribal instinct, without sufficiently explaining how Americans sometimes overcome the tribal loyalties of their various subgroups, and sometimes do not. If we are exceptional, it is only, at best, intermittently.

It is true, in Chua’s approach to politics as in so much of the history of science, that the story we use to fill in the blanks may actually shape what might otherwise seem a factual account that speaks for itself. Whether the theory in question is Jared Diamond’s geographic determinism, Thomas Friedman’s flattened world of technology, or the neurologists’ universals glowing in the light of a brain scan, Americans have a weakness for supposedly holistic, seemingly objective, explanations. We quickly forget that at various times we have been Social Darwinians, then Freudians, then puppets of our DNA. But once one grasps that, in human affairs, contingency reigns over determinism, then globalism begins to seem like “globaloney,” latitude is no longer seen as destiny, and the light at the end of the MRI flickers and grows dim.

Nor is Chua’s tribal instinct thesis an innocuous metaphor. Now used by pundits like David Brooks, scientists like E.O. Wilson, and even the son of an anthropologist, Barack Obama—this metaphor has deleterious effects in at least three very important ways. Actual tribes are not, in fact, exclusionary and prone to violence. To the contrary, they are commonly open to outsiders, apply numerous devices to limit conflict, and constantly intermarry, speak several languages, and experiment with the rituals and trade practices of other groups. Tribes do not like too much power in too few hands for too long a period of time, and hence deploy leveling strategies—ranging from subdividing leadership to employing jokes and avoidance behavior—to limit the potential accumulation of power. In addition, referring to our anger-filled politics as “tribal” continues a stereotype of real tribes that serves to justify their political oppression and the appropriation of many of their lands and resources.

So long as the powerful can portray the nearly 200 million tribal people of the planet living in over 70 countries as clannish, truculent, and anti-democratic, they can continue to deny these peoples a proper degree of sovereignty. And when we fallaciously claim that tribal identity is founded on an inherent human instinct, we perpetuate a vision of our fate as a regression to primordial features, risking precisely that sort of self-justifying and self-fulfilling prophecy that misguided claims to scientific truth have yielded far too often in the past.

But if we accept for a moment that such a thing as a tribal instinct exists and that it is, as the book’s subtitle emphasizes, entwined with “the fate of nations,” what then is to be done? Here, alas, Chua’s epilogue betrays her own thesis twice over. A paean to American idealism, this valediction effectively denies her entire reliance on the tribal by claiming that interpersonal relationships coupled with American idealism can somehow overcome our intergroup hostility—this after arguing so strenuously that American idealism has not been an adequate prophylactic against tribalism. Since, ironically, real tribes engage in considerable face-to-face interaction of the sort she commends, perhaps Chua might have considered that tribalism is, in some sense, the solution more than it is the problem.

There is also a very American bias in Chua’s account of our politics. Americans do not trust collectives: We do not think they are smarter than the individual, more creative than the lone thinker, more liberating than the heroic personality—all this notwithstanding our idealization of community. Herself the successful child of well-educated immigrant parents, a talented woman in a male-dominated world, and a “tiger mother” rigorous in the upbringing of her own daughters, Chua has imbibed the American sense of individualism as well as surrendered to that other very American lure—giving everything a purportedly scientific justification. The result, as for so many pundits of the moment, is a considerable suspicion of groups, a perspective as misleading in its factual claims as it is incomplete in its policy directive.

“Once upon a time…It was and it was not”: Perhaps the combination would not only have served as an appropriate opening to Chua’s arguments but as a fitting summation. Tribes endure but tribalism is not some form of original sin, a human instinct that displaces culture and condemns us to a constant struggle against our basest selves. Indeed, if one were to rely on a more plausible theory, it would be that in the course of evolution humans replaced instinct with the capacity to create categories out of our own experience, which is what most anthropologists now mean by culture. But that theory would ill-suit Chua’s dark interpretation of human nature and the fashionable way of characterizing American politics.

Ultimately, Chua’s analysis is at once a fantastical myth of what happened once upon a time in human evolution and an incautious brew of what is so and what is not. At once obvious and misleading, self-evident and distorting, her assessment of our cultural moment, like her governing metaphor, recalls that statement by her fellow lawyer, Benjamin Cardozo, that “metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it.” Factionalism and an unequal access to power may have coarsened our politics. But the present trajectory of group politics neither arises from a tribal instinct nor descends to base animosity. After reading Chua’s account one can only hope that a more accurate and kind-hearted metaphor may yet be slouching toward “our shining city upon a hill.”

The post Are Our Politics Really “Tribal”? appeared first on The American Interest.

Pashtun Power in Pakistan

Never in Pakistan’s 70-year history has a group so directly challenged the powerful military establishment. Never in the country’s recent past has a group been so subjected to curbs, media blackouts, and restrictions on its public activity. And never before has a group been able to mobilize so quickly and massively in spite of these obstacles.

The group in question? The Pashtun Tahafuz (Protection) Movement, or PTM: a four-month-old civil rights movement of Pakistan’s ethnic Pashtuns, the minority group representing roughly 30 million of the country’s 207-million strong population.

PTM’s slogans have already entered the public lexicon. “Da Sanga Azadi Da?” they ask in Pashto: “What kind of freedom is this?” And in Urdu, “Ye Jo Dihshat Gardi Hai, Es Ke Pechay Wardi Hai” has become their rallying cry: “The uniform [army] is behind this terrorism.” The group is gradually expanding its appeal not only to other ethnic and religious minorities, but to cross sections of Pakistani society who recognize the supremacy of the constitution and respect human rights, freedom of expression, peace, and democracy.

This may be the worst nightmare of Pakistan’s generals, who have ruled for nearly 35 years and are still regarded by most less-educated, poor, and middle-class Pakistanis as saviors and defenders of their country. Since Pakistan’s inception in 1947, the military brass has upheld their legitimacy by speaking of a “critical juncture” for the country. It’s part of a carefully tailored state narrative meant to defend their each and every unconstitutional step, from military coups to the use of jihadist proxies, and their slandering of opponents as infidels, traitors, and foreign agents.

Manzoor Pashteen, the charismatic 26-year-old tribal youth leader, has lately endured this treatment. He and his comrades in the PTM are a product of their homeland’s decades-long crisis. Bordering Afghanistan, the federally administered tribal areas (FATA) in Pakistan’s northwest are also called the “lawless land,” because successive Pakistani governments have preferred to administer them under the colonial-era Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) laws, rather than bringing them under the full jurisdiction of the constitution. Under the FCR laws, tribesmen could be arrested and punished under the collective responsibility clause, with no right to appeal. Meanwhile, the authority of the judiciary and the executive are both exercised by the same person: a federally appointed “political agent.”

Pashteen’s forefathers suffered under and struggled against the FCR regime for decades. His own generation endured hellish conditions following the arrival from Afghanistan of various Taliban groups, which quickly mushroomed, and the many subsequent military operations on their territory. The outcome was the destruction of property and businesses, the displacement of millions of tribesmen, the killing and maiming of thousands (including key tribal elders), continuous discriminatory treatment—and a continuous silence, rooted in a deeper legacy of fear.

Pashteen broke the silence, raising his voice against what he claims are injustices meted out to his fellow tribesmen. The killing of a tribal youth, Naqeebullah Mehsud, who aspired to be a male model, in a police encounter in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi in January provided the catalyst. What was planned as a movement for the protection of Mehsud tribesmen soon turned into the broader Pashtun Protection Movement.

Manzoor Pashteen was only five years old when he first came to know about the Taliban. Before the Taliban’s emergence, his tribal land was used by the Pakistani intelligence agencies, with the support of their foreign backers, as a launching pad and training ground for the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s. Before that, the Pakistani authorities sent a lashkar, a militia of tribal volunteers, to capture Kashmir, the Himalayan state with a majority-Muslim population whose Hindu ruler opted to join India soon after the emergence of the two countries as independent states in 1947.

The tribal people and their Pashtun brethren in the settled districts are showered with praise—said to be fiercely independent, a martial race and invincible—whenever they are needed to fight such proxy wars. But this lionization of the tribesmen does not extend to granting them basic rights under the constitution.

The PTM has a host of demands: the clearing of landmines that often kill and maim civilians, an end to body searches and alleged humiliations at security checkpoints, an end to Pashtun racial profiling in other parts of Pakistan, due compensation for the losses suffered by the tribesmen during the anti-Taliban military operations, the arrest and punishment of the police officer(s) allegedly involved in the killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud, and the disclosure of information on all the missing persons held by intelligence agencies over the past 15 years, with each to be punished or released per the findings of the judicial process.

The demand about the missing persons, in particular, has won the support of thousands of people, who hope that the new movement will help bring their loved ones home. Women, children, and old men can be seen everywhere at PTM’s gatherings, holding pictures of their missing relatives inscribed with their names, ages, and date of kidnapping.

At an April 29 gathering in Swat, I saw many participants with tears rolling down their cheeks as an eight-year-old girl took the stage, declaring amid tears that her father has been missing for several years with no clue as to his whereabouts. “My mom woke me up this morning with instructions to go to the meeting and let Manzoor Pashteen know about my father being missing so long,” she said.

Grown-up women rarely participate in political gatherings or protests in most Pashtun areas. However, Basro Bibi from the Khyber tribal district, one of the seven districts constituting FATA, surprised many when she cried for justice at another PTM gathering in Peshawar on April 8. Draped in a full brown burka, Basro Bibi told the gathering that her husband was a factory worker. He was picked up by the military’s security agencies four years ago, and the family does not know his whereabouts, or even whether he is dead or alive. “Stop this cruelty,” the mother of five implored.

The Pakistani military has made no official comment about demands for the return of missing persons. But PTM leaders told me in late April that dozens of people, held in the custody of the security agencies for years, have been returned to their families so far. They were quick to add, however, that they have a long list, running into the thousands, of those still missing. Researchers and tribal journalists whom I spoke to during my April visit told me that they fear many of those missing died during custody and interrogation, which they say the intelligence agencies simply cannot confess publicly.

For decades, FATA residents have endured consistent abuses and infringements on their rights, no matter who was officially in charge. First they suffered decades of repression under FCR rule, followed by the incursion of the Taliban and Pakistani security forces into their areas. While the Taliban brutalities included targeted killings, the beheading of tribal elders, and the bombing of public property, the army and its intelligence agencies are accused of employing equally repressive measures: occupying and destroying private property, arbitrarily expelling the tribal people from their areas, arresting and kidnapping tribesmen, and keeping them under illegal detention for weeks, months, and even years. The Pakistan Army rejects this criticism, saying it fought a hard battle against militants in the tribal areas, where it lost thousands of soldiers.

“People were so terrified that they would not dare to speak inside the four walls of their houses because anyone who tried to raise his voice was kidnapped, killed, or suffered huge material losses,” Manzoor Pashteen told me in an interview in early April. “We broke that silence. We gave courage to the people to speak.”

Yet the fear of criticizing Pakistan’s security establishment still runs deep. Even the leaders of top political parties, journalists, ministers, and senators refrain from mentioning by name the country’s prime intelligence agencies, Military Intelligence (MI) and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Instead they use code phrases like “Khufia Haath,” meaning “hidden hands.” Others are in the habit of touching their shoulders while referring to the army generals instead of mentioning them by name. In a recent statement, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, referring to the country’s intelligence agencies, said he is up against the “Khalai Makhlooq” (“aliens”).

By contrast, the PTM leadership directly mentions the army and its intelligence agencies while accusing them of kidnapping people, destroying their property, and acting in cahoots with the Taliban. In Peshawar on April 8, thousands rose to their feet and cheered as Ali Wazir, PTM’s second most popular leader, took the stage to deliver a speech. Wazir claims to have lost 17 family members and suffered huge material losses in his tribal homeland. Without mincing words, Wazir openly accused the Pakistani army of working hand-in-glove with the Taliban.

The army, of course, denies the charges of propping up the Taliban. But such accusations have clearly struck a nerve. The chief of the Army, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, addressing a ceremony at the headquarters of the Pakistan Army at Rawalpindi on April 12, said “engineered protests” would not be allowed to reverse the gains of counter-terrorism operations. The Pakistani authorities have recently employed countermeasures to arrest, harass, and intimidate PTM activists.

On April 21, the district authorities raided the hotel rooms in Lahore where the PTM leadership was staying overnight ahead of a gathering the next day, and temporarily arrested its activists. Earlier, the local administration flooded a venue chosen by PTM leadership for its public meeting.

Manzoor Pashteen was denied air travel from Islamabad to Karachi on May 12, when his ticket was mysteriously cancelled. As he proceeded by car to Karachi for the May 13 gathering, he had to face body searches and identity checks by security personnel every few miles, with the apparent intention to delay his arrival in the coastal city. The incident generated a huge outcry on social media, especially among youth in Punjab and Sindh provinces.

Just a day before, on May 12, three major political parties—Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf, the Pakistan Peoples Party, and the Awami National Party—held gatherings at three different locations in the same city. However, PTM activists faced detentions under charges of sedition, rioting, and terrorism as they were set to hold their gathering on May 13.

Such pressure tactics have been only partially effective at dampening turnout. While I was in Swat to cover the PTM’s April 29 gathering, many locals told me that village elders, under instruction from army officials, warned them not to join the gathering. Frightened by the threat, many did not turn up. But many others defied the orders, telling me that they can no longer afford to live in an environment of “slavery.” (Many among the “missing persons” that Manzoor Pashteen and his colleagues are advocating for come from Swat—a tourist district that the Taliban took over in 2007, before the Pakistan Army expelled them in 2009, displacing many residents in the process.)

With very few exceptions, none of the 24/7 Urdu-language electronic media or the hundreds of English, Urdu, and other regional-language newspapers cover the PTM gatherings. In contrast, hours of airtime are allotted to public meetings of the less popular Pakistan Zindabad Movement, which many believed is backed by the army and its intelligence agencies to counter PTM. Journalists, editors, and commentators feel severe (if invisible) pressure from the authorities to cover the one and ignore the other.

“They [the army] are scared to the level of paranoia,” one leading journalist told me during an informal interaction in Islamabad. “We did not receive any written instructions, but we know well where our limit ends,” the journalist added, referring to the widespread self-censorship driven by the fear that intelligence officials are closely monitoring PTM’s media coverage. The lackluster media attention has forced PTM activists to turn to social media. Facebook and Twitter have turned out to be key sources of information on PTM gatherings for many, including editors and reporters.

Meanwhile, Manzoor Pashteen and his comrades are accused of getting support from abroad, generally Afghanistan and India. The trend was set by General Bajwa’s April 12 remarks, when he referred to the protests as “engineered.” Since then, views about Pashteen and his struggle for justice have been sharply polarized. Those who accept the army’s viewpoint believe that PTM’s flagrant criticism of the security institutions is detrimental to their morale while fighting a hard battle against militants.

However, others reject the allegations that PTM is made up of “foreign agents” or acting “against the national interest,” on the grounds that Pashteen and his colleagues are simply demanding their constitutional rights. They believe Pashtun grievances are rooted in alienation, discrimination, and the humiliations suffered during the years of the Taliban and the War on Terror. And they dismiss the “foreign agent” allegations as a familiar slander, dating back to the 1970s when popular Baloch, Pashtun, and Sindhi leaders were so termed. More recently, Nobel Laureate Malala Yousufzai and the late human rights activist Asma Jehangir have also faced accusations of being “anti-state” foreign agents.

PTM activists always restrict their demands to the scope of the constitution. When Manzoor Pashteen was recently asked about his negotiations with a military-backed tribal jirga (council), he noted that his group’s grievances could only be addressed by the state. “We are citizens of this country, not rivals who want to settle a dispute,” he said. “We are citizens demanding our constitutional rights.”

Since its emergence in February, PTM has staged public gatherings in Islamabad, Quetta, Peshawar, Lahore, and Karachi, during which observers say all its activists remained peaceful, organized, and well-behaved despite tougher measures from the authorities. Pashteen and a majority of his supporters draw inspiration from the 20th-century Pashtun leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a.k.a. Bacha Khan, who fought a non-violent struggle for independence from the British. Because of his close association with Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle for Pashtuns’ rights, Bacha Khan was also once termed a “Ghaddar” or traitor.

By confronting the army head-on over what they call its gross human rights violations and extra-judicial measures, the PTM leadership is challenging the army’s reputation as the most trustworthy institution in Pakistan, and its officers’ claims to be more honest and upright than the much-maligned political leadership.

Although a majority of the political parties and their leadership have publicly dissociated themselves from PTM, so as not to infuriate the army when parliamentary elections are only a few months away, they happily endorse Pashteen’s criticism of the army in the privacy of their own homes. This young man from the tribal lands is saying and doing what the politicians wish to but dare not.

Another factor scaring the generals is the PTM’s appeal to other progressive and democratic forces. Pashteen has drawn considerable support from the progressive Punjabi youth and intelligentsia, besides attracting activists from the ethnic Baloch minority and the Hazara community, whose members are persecuted by the militants in Quetta and its surroundings. PTM is spurring oppressed minorities to stand up for their constitutionally guaranteed rights, encouraging politicians to challenge the army, and pressuring the intelligence agencies to end their alleged support for proxy terrorists in Indian and Afghanistan in the name of the “national interest.”

The number of PTM’s active supporters may not be more than 15,000 to 20,000, much fewer than the supporters of the political parties. But that is enough to make a difference. These are diehard activists who either suffered themselves during the state’s military operations, or witnessed the suffering of their relatives and neighbors. Their sympathizers across Pakistan run into the millions.

PTM activists differ from loyalists of the political parties in another important sense. Unlike party workers, they care little about personal political gain. They are fighting for their rights and an end to war, not merely angling for a cushy political office. And polls suggest that each repressive measure against PTM—from media blackouts to arbitrary detentions to the denial of permits to hold its gatherings—only increases sympathy for the group in Pakistan.

Whatever happens next, PTM’s peaceful and non-violent protests against the authorities are gradually defusing the stereotypes about the Pashtun people being wild, hard-headed, ill-tempered Taliban supporters. Pashteen has already shown Pakistan and the world another side of his fellow tribesmen, proving that they are neither terrorists nor the supporters of terrorists, but their victims. If his movement can succeed in the long term, they may also become a positive force for change.

The post Pashtun Power in Pakistan appeared first on The American Interest.

The “Libya Model”

Let me give you, dear reader, a piece of free advice (since this blog is on the nice side of the TAI paywall): When something happens that confronts you with the proverbial choice of whether to laugh or cry, choose to laugh.

Case in point: In today’s Washington Post (in an article titled, in print, “President: U.S. won’t seek to force Kim out,” with the telling subtitle, “He contradicts Bolton’s call for ‘Libya model’ in disarming North Korea”), David Nakamura and Philip Rucker are essentially forced to enter into a competition with the President and with Kim Jong-un to see who is the most ignorant of recent history. The result of the competition is, if not an infinite regression, a regression all the same, in which everyone loses.

First let’s straighten out what has just happened, and then we can mess it up again.

When John Bolton invoked “the Libya Model” a couple of days ago in reference to North Korea, he clearly meant the model, from 2003-04, in which the U.S. government, in the form of the George W. Bush Administration, persuaded the Libyan government to hand over its WMD program stuff in return for a pledge that the United States would not seek to put Muammar Qaddafi’s head on the wall at the Pentagon or in Langley. We made a deal, using the leverage of the recent rout of the Iraqi Army, to get the Libyans to turn “state’s evidence” in return for a no-regime-change pledge. Something reasonably similar is the obvious deal to be had with the North Koreans now.

Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sealed that particular deal in the spring of 2004. At the time this event did not make front-page Washington Post news, because it was not supposed to. It entered public awareness later. John Bolton knew about it because he was involved in it as Assistant Secretary of State for Non-Proliferation Affairs. I knew about it because my office in Policy Planning (S/P) on the seventh floor of the State Department building was just down the hall from his. We used the same men’s room—that’s how close our offices were to each other.

Apparently, when Kim Jong-un got a load of Bolton’s mention of the phrase “Libya Model,” he mistook it for what happened years later, in 2011, under a different Administration: The Obama Administration’s “betrayal” of the promise of its predecessor, leading to the death of Qaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan regime.

Now of course it was not as simple as that: The Obama Administration did not start out, exactly, to betray a promise and seek regime change in Libya. As was obvious to some even at the time, it merely tried to use military means to achieve declared humanitarian ends—protecting civilians—amid an incipient civil war, which made choosing targets a very slippery slope and rendered the distinction between protecting civilians and tanking the regime essentially impossible to maintain. So regime change happened anyway. Since then, assuming that the Obama Administration was dissembling about its real intentions from the get-go, the Russians, Chinese, and by extension the North Koreans, have conflated all that into their understanding of what the “Libya Model” means.

Of course, the Libya business circa March 2011 raises an interesting question in practical moral philosophy: Is it justifiable to double-cross a bad actor like Muammar Qaddafi—a man with plenty of innocent blood on his hands, including American blood—if the chance arises to do it? Do we have to keep our word, no matter what? It’s a practical question because of the shadow behavior like that casts—just ask Kim Jong-un. But it’s a practical question of a different sort, too, for those who castigate the Trump Administration in exaggerated tropes for “betraying” its predecessor over the Iran deal withdrawal without ever mentioning the equally exaggerated Obama “betrayal” of his predecessor’s Administration.

But back to current reality: It is possible that Kim’s sudden shift on the possibility and content of next month’s now-“maybe” summit in Singapore was touched off by Bolton’s invocation of the original meaning of the phrase “Libya Model.” In any event, President Trump reacted by affirming, essentially, the Russian-Chinese-Nork interpretation of the phrase because, in his encyclopedic ignorance of such matters, he knows nothing of the aforementioned history: “The Libya model isn’t the model that we have at all when we’re thinking of North Korea. In Libya, we decimated that country.” (We, with our British and France allies, did no such thing of course—but never mind.)

Now it gets even better. Having said that, Nakamura and Rucker, or maybe a clueless editor of theirs, thinking that Kim’s understanding of “Libya Model” was what Bolton meant, then concluded that the President contradicted Bolton. No, no, no, no, no! The President affirmed the meaning of what Bolton meant, even as he accepted Kim’s misunderstanding of what Bolton said. Got that? Bolton got it right, but Kim got it wrong, so the President got it wrong (because, again, he obviously doesn’t know any better) and then tried to make it right.

Cry if you want, but to me this is fall-on-the-floor funny. It’s a shame Abbot and Costello aren’t still around: Nothing will ever top their “who’s on first?” routine, but the potential is clearly here for something nearly as good.

My guess is that John Bolton is about as exasperated right now as he ever gets. It could well be that in future years, whenever John hears the phrase “Libya Model,” he will totally lose his shit, cross his left leg slowly toward his right hip, and begin to shout at the source of those two words: “Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…”

As for me, well, do I empathize with John right now? Maybe a little, but he’s the one, after all, who decided he wanted to work for this President. If he’s surprised by what has just happened, it’s the kind of surprise he all but asked for.

And by the way, just because I shared a State Department men’s room with John (and others, to be sure) for a couple of years doesn’t mean we agreed then on all points anymore than we do now. Peeing at adjacent urinals does not imply agreeing on adjunctive principles.

The post The “Libya Model” appeared first on The American Interest.

Malaysia’s Democratic Breakthrough

In an era of authoritarian regression, illiberal populism, and xenophobic nationalism, any faint glimmers of democratic progress are sorely needed. But Malaysia’s parliamentary elections last week gave much more than a glimmer of hope. After 61 years the authoritarian ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional (BN), and its core dominant party, UMNO, were turned out of power. Fed up with staggering corruption and abuse of power, and overcoming countless undemocratic obstacles, Malaysia’s voters delivered a stinging rebuke to the BN, which fell to barely a third of the vote. Since independence in 1957, the ruling alliance had never lost an election. One of Asia’s (and indeed the world’s) most resilient competitive authoritarian regimes has now fallen.

The result evokes the electoral earthquake in Mexico in 2000, when the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost power after seven decades of unbroken hegemony. But in some ways, it is even more extraordinary. In Mexico, President Ernesto Zedillo had enacted significant liberalizing reforms during his six-year presidency, including the establishment of an independent and authoritative electoral administration. This enabled significant opposition gains in the 1997 midterm congressional elections, presaging the historic power alternation three years later.

In Malaysia, by contrast, dominant-party rule had become increasingly venal and oppressive since Najib Razak became Prime Minister in April 2009. The son of Malaysia’s second Prime Minister and nephew of the third, Najib had entered parliament at the age of 23 and went on to serve as minister of education, then defense, then finance, as well as Deputy Prime Minister. A savvy global player, he was said to be President Barack Obama’s favorite Asian leader. But he became one of Asia’s greediest leaders as well, plundering the country’s wealth in a spectacular corruption scandal. Through the vehicle of 1MDB, a government-run development company, billions of dollars in public funds simply disappeared—reportedly, $700 million of them into Prime Minister’s Najib’s own personal accounts. Other embezzled funds reportedly went to fund the effusive patronage that Najib doled out in advance of the 2013 election.

While Zedillo moved Mexico to fairer electoral administration, Najib stacked the rules ever more egregiously in his favor. In 2013, districts were so severely gerrymandered and malapportioned in favor of rural Malays (the UMNO base) that the ruling alliance won 60 percent of the seats with only 47 percent of the vote. Despite massive incumbency advantages—in campaign finance, media coverage, and control of the campaign calendar—and widespread fraud and voter intimidation, Najib’s ruling alliance lost the 2013 popular vote to opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and his alliance, Pakatan Rakyat, but its 51 percent of the vote delivered it only 40 percent of the seats.

The elections on May 9, 2018 were plagued by even more egregious unfairness. After his near-defeat in 2013, Najib was not ready to risk any possibility of a victory by the charismatic Anwar in the next election. So he jailed him. Since the aftermath of the 2008 elections, and for the second time in a decade—what farcically came to be known in Malaysia as “Sodomy II”—the regime had been prosecuting Anwar on trumped-up charges of gay sex, which is illegal in the socially conservative country. The new case proceeded even though earlier charges—for which Anwar had served six years in solitary confinement—had been thoroughly discredited, with witnesses recanting testimony (claiming they had been coerced into falsely testifying), DNA evidence being tossed out after conviction due to tampering, and a federal court finally overturning his conviction in 2004. Although Anwar was acquitted of the “Sodomy II” charges in 2012, the state appealed the acquittal and won a conviction in 2014. The decision came just two weeks before Anwar was to contest a by-election that would have made him the chief minister of Malaysia’s most economically important state, Selangor (roughly akin to becoming Governor of New York). Anwar lost his appeal of that decision, and was imprisoned on a five-year sentence in February 2015.

With its leader in jail, the opposition needed a powerful figure to rally and unify the nation’s disgust with Najib. In desperation, it turned to Anwar’s former tormentor, Mahathir Mohammed. During his 22 years as Prime Minister of Malaysia (1981-2003), Mahathir had transformed Malaysia economically while preserving and deepening authoritarian rule. In 1998, he had sacked Anwar as his deputy when they fell out over Anwar’s refusal (as Finance Minister) to bail out failing Malaysian companies owned by Mahathir’s children and cronies. When Anwar then formed an opposition movement to challenge the regime’s corruption and authoritarianism, Mahathir responded with a heavy hand: “Sodomy I.” In our 2012 documentary film, A Whisper to a Roar, Mahathir all but conceded that Anwar’s prosecution had been political. “Of course, he would succeed me if he had been patient,” Mahathir said on camera in 2011. “Today he would be the Prime Minister.”

But politics makes strange bedfellows. Najib had brought governance in Malaysia to a level of greed and cynical exploitation of religion and ethnicity that offended even Mahathir, the lion of the political establishment. At the age of 90, Mahathir came out of retirement to join nationwide protests over the 1MDB scandal, calling for Najib’s resignation. And at age 92, he was elected again Prime Minister—at the helm of the opposition coalition.

Malaysia’s sudden turn is characteristic of many electoral authoritarian regimes—they seem stable, until they are not. Their strength—their claim to legitimacy through repeated multiparty elections, and their mobilization of support through an invincible party—is also their vulnerability. Lacking the discipline that comes with real risk of electoral defeat, lacking the checks that come with an independent judiciary and a free press and civil society, electoral authoritarian regimes are at chronic risk of a public revolt at the ballot box—or on the streets—when corruption and human rights abuses reach intolerable levels. The familiar tools of control—electoral manipulation and fraud, press censorship, punitive use of the judiciary to intimidate and silence the opposition—work only to a point. When the regime’s abuses grow too extreme, or when the society grows more prosperous and better educated, people become less willing to put up with arrogant, self-serving autocracy. They long increasingly for a voice, accountability, and the rule of law. And they become more willing to take risks to achieve them.

Two factors are common in sending such regimes over the cliff. One is social and economic development that creates a more educated, resourceful, and demanding public. Thus, opposition crystallizes first and foremost in the cities, among the professional classes, and among the young (now the smartphone generation). The second factor is divisions within the regime, fracturing its leadership or support base and opening the way for new working alliances. Both of these factors were crucial in Malaysia.

It’s hard to find a sharper example of a regime split than the former autocrat of 22 years defecting to the opposition, with a chunk of the establishment behind him. But Malaysia’s society had also changed dramatically. In his classic 1991 work on global democratization, The Third Wave, Samuel Huntington identified a range of economic development levels that he called a “zone of transition”—roughly about $3,500 to $14,000 in today’s nominal dollars. With a per capita income of about $11,000, Malaysia today is closer to the upper end of that zone.  Moreover, in purchasing power parity—what income can really buy—Malaysia is much richer, with a per capita income of roughly $30,000, placing it among the top forty non-oil states over one million population. With an adult literacy rate of 95 percent and an average life expectancy of 75 years, Malaysia is starting to look a lot like a developed country. Its overall measure on the UN’s Human Development Index is only marginally lower than that of Romania, Bulgaria—and Russia.

As Michael McFaul argues in his captivating account of his years dealing with Russia in the Obama Administration, From Cold War to Hot Peace, Russia, too, has seen a new generation rise up with economic growth and better access to information. And they, too, want a voice, accountability, and the rule of law—in other words, democracy. These better educated and younger Russians—some, McFaul says, as young as twelve years old—are not going away. Their widespread street demonstrations in December 2011—the largest in Russia since the 1991 revolution—to protest blatant fraud in the parliamentary elections were a key trigger motivating Putin to punish Hillary Clinton and the United States, whom he accused of fomenting them. But with people pouring into the streets once again—in some 26 cities across Russia—to protest Putin’s inauguration to a fourth presidential term, and with Donald Trump in the White House, who does Putin have to blame now? Electoral autocracies look strong—until they’re not. Beneath the surface of domineering calm a new generation of citizens is stirring in Russia, as it did in Malaysia. They are fed up with kelptocracy and are not going to stay silent.

Putin knows this, and that is why he will not allow the level of electoral opposition that has existed in Malaysia. The March 18 presidential election was a meaningless charade in which the only serious opposition candidate, Alexei Navalny, was barred from running. More Russians understand this than is apparent to most Westerners. And compared to Najib—who was a world-class thief of public funds—Putin is a kleptocrat of titanic proportions. If you are looking for lessons from the Malaysian earthquake, here is one: Don’t overestimate the stability of Putin’s kleptocracy. Its control of coercion, money, and propaganda is immense. But so is its insecurity. This is why Putin is unnerved by the fall of every autocracy—why he freaked out over the Arab Spring, and at least one reason why he has dug in defending Assad in Syria. One of the reasons Putin waged a relentless propaganda assault on Michael McFaul during his two years as U.S. ambassador was an article McFaul published in the July 2005 Journal of Democracy analyzing the factors behind the “color revolutions” in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine between 2000 and 2004, which in each case brought down authoritarian rule after electoral rigging. Several of those factors (political space for opposition, an unpopular incumbent, a united opposition, and splits within the regime) were present in Malaysia. Putin’s paranoid fear was that McFaul had come to promote these conditions in Russia. Any autocrat who fears that an American ambassador can bring down a regime as resourceful and ruthless as Russia’s cannot really, deep down, be confident.

There is another factor that is crucial here, and now, after his years in government, McFaul makes more of it than he did it before: Leadership. Putin’s most charismatic and effective opponent, Boris Nemtsov, was shot to death a short distance from the Kremlin in February 2015. Anwar’s reputation was assassinated repeatedly, and he spent nearly half of the last two decades in solitary confinement. But fortunately he survived. At some point in the next year or two, he will become the first democratic Prime Minister of Malaysia.

In November 2014, shortly before he returned to Malaysia to face almost certain imprisonment, Anwar Ibrahim delivered a moving speech at Stanford on the compatibility between Islam and liberal democracy. In closing he quoted an early-20th century Tunisian poet, Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, who had inspired a struggle for freedom in his time and Arab Spring protests a century later. “If the people will to live,” Anwar quoted al-Shabbi prophetically, “the chains are certain to be broken.”

After six decades, Malaysia’s chains are now broken. This will not be the last autocracy to fall in our time.

The post Malaysia’s Democratic Breakthrough appeared first on The American Interest.

Remembering the Past in Northern Ireland

Late last month, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Senator George Mitchell, and a host of local worthies gathered in Belfast to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the deal that brought to an end the 30 years of the Northern Ireland “Troubles” and established a power-sharing executive to govern the post-conflict society. The anniversary, and the high profile of its celebrants, has renewed debate about the Agreement’s achievements. Foremost, of course, is the achievement of peace, but the Agreement also set out to make that peace sustainable. The power-sharing executive that was established to achieve this end, based upon a localized and rather idiosyncratic electoral system, created a political culture that has pushed to the political margins those parties that made the greatest sacrifices to realize their dreams of peace. It was the leaders of the Ulster Unionist Party and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) that did the most to negotiate an end to the 30 years of low-level war that left more than 3,500 dead by bringing to the negotiating table their more radical political cousins and the paramilitary groups with which some of them were associated. But, after the Agreement, it was the leaders of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein who worked most effectively to fashion the new system of government, while drawing voters ever further from the traditional unionist and nationalist mainstream, promoting the dream of a shared future while positioning the other as an ongoing threat to that project, and benefitting from the electoral consequences. The political culture that was enabled by the Agreement built peace at the same time as it eviscerated the parties that had worked hardest to imagine and then to serve the common good, and rewarded those parties that insisted upon the continuing immediacy of danger.

As the celebrations recognize, a great deal has been achieved in the past 20 years, but also obvious is the failure of the Good Friday Agreement system—or at least the failure of those parties that currently control it. The power-sharing executive has been suspended since January 2017, when the DUP and Sinn Fein fell out over a botched renewable energy grant scheme. They remain at odds, with Sinn Fein now insisting on legislation to support the Irish language as a precondition for their participation in a new power-sharing government. The debate about the Irish language is something of a pretext; it allows both parties to mark out cultural political territory, and hence to shore up electoral support, while providing a mutually convenient excuse to sit out the difficulty of governing Northern Ireland through the likely introduction of same-sex marriage (against which the DUP campaigned) and the negotiations for Brexit (against which Sinn Fein campaigned). But this failure in local government is pushing the “peace dividend” even further into arrears. With the resolution of the Troubles, Northern Ireland has become exceptional for its social failings: The average house price and household disposable income are only half those of the UK; Protestant working-class boys face some of the worst social exclusion and the worst rates of educational underachievement in the UK; the province sustains some of the UK’s worst child poverty rates, the worst child health statistics in Europe, and the UK’s highest rate of suicide. It is not clear why, 20 years after the end of the Troubles, Northern Ireland is still in crisis. Some commentators link these failings to the traumatic effects of the conflict, or to the structures of the society that the conflict created. If these explanations ring true, then the stories that are told about that conflict should be understood as making either a positive or negative contribution to the public health of Northern Ireland and to its social pathology, in which the common good remains at the mercy of a zero-sum electoral culture and the histories that underwrite it. And so, as celebrations continue of 20 years of peace, the elephant in the room is the question of whether, and how, the political culture created by the Agreement can overcome the tit-for-tat that passes for political debate, and the what-about-ery that passes for historical knowledge. Most guns are off the streets (though decommissioning is more of a metaphor than a fact). But history and memory continue to be weaponized. 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement, is it time for history to be decommissioned?

The question of whether controversial histories should be remembered or forgotten has been raised in an expanding scholarly literature that includes Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) and David Rieff’s In Praise of Forgetting (2016). It engages political scientists as much as it does public historians and cultural theorists, and has been highlighted in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, which describes the formation and condition of public remembering and the less or more official cultures of memorialization in such contexts as the United States, Germany, Russia, and China. The problem is obviously complex, and the solutions necessarily relative. In some contexts, a tradition of remembering is giving way to a new preference to forget. The recent controversy that centered upon century-old Confederate monuments in and far beyond the Southern states has highlighted how difficult is the task of forgetting—and how public memory may provide new contexts for the interpretation of these monuments, be energized by new ideologies as a consequence of more recent political debates, and nuance what might once have been an uncritical appreciation of the past. In other contexts, an established preference to forget the past has given way to a more nuanced appropriation of its legacy. Since 1945, influential opinion formers in Western and Central Europe attempted to persuade their audiences to reject their nations’ controversial pasts, but this rejection has been nuanced in new debates about the impact of immigration, as Douglas Murray’s work on The Strange Death of Europe (2017) indicates, and as recent political changes in Austria, Germany and Italy, and the broader resurgence of the Right across Europe, each attest. These political turns—both toward and away from controversial pasts—have been balanced by the election of the new French President, Emmanuel Macron, a banker who as an academic spent time thinking through issues of contested history and controversial memory—not least by means of editing Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, for which he is thanked in the book’s preface. We are all familiar with George Santayana’s worry that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But, across Europe and the United States of America, those who remember the past may be condemned to repeat it, too. Controversial pasts are another country, and we are stuck in its Hotel California: We can check out any time we like, but we can never leave.

The problem of controversial pasts is particularly acute in Northern Ireland, where historical narratives continue to be weaponized in the service of competing political and cultural agendas. Northern Ireland suffers from a surfeit of memory, formed by beguiling images, displayed as gable-end murals and performed in popular culture. But it also suffers from an excess of history. Year on year, documents released under the 30-year rule provide new glimpses into the chaos and maleficence of the Troubles, and the opportunity for a generation that never experienced the horror of prolonged low-level warfare to engage as primary actors with its events. Yet popular memory and documentary history may be more alike that we might expect, for history and memory exist as overlapping and mutually influencing spheres, and neither are they untouched by the changing political contexts in which they are constructed, articulated, and received. For these mythological interpretations of controversial histories become subservient to current political realities: There are reasons in contemporary politics why credit for the ending of conflict is being given the leaders of Sinn Fein rather than to John Hume, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and leader of the now electorally marginal SDLP, whose painstaking work brought the more radical republican party to the table, as Maurice Fitzpatrick’s new book illustrates. But schools and public institutions are unable to dispel these grand reconstructions, through which the concerns of the present powerfully shape the representation of the past. Students may leave school programs with a mythological and often basically factually suspect interpretation of events in which their parents and grandparents may have been actors: The teaching of the Troubles in local schools is not dispelling the widely circulating explanatory frames through which a complex and sometimes chaotic conflict has become reducible to the zero-sum dynamic of the continuing political crisis in the power-sharing executive at Stormont, in which memory and history have become subservient to party political ambitions.

Of course, the politicization of history and memory represents both a challenge and an opportunity for historians. In other contexts, historians may struggle to demonstrate the social relevance and impact of their work. The challenge for historians of Northern Ireland is to prevent discussions of the past from making the wrong kind of impact, from becoming reducible to sectional interests or the goals of party-political propaganda. Politicians are worried about this, too—though perhaps for different reasons. Several of Northern Ireland’s political parties have adopted policies on how history should be researched and taught. The 2017 manifesto of the Ulster Unionist Party, for example, indicated its commitment to “not shy away from tackling the toxic legacy of the past,” while promising that “we will not tolerate the rewriting of history.” These commitments were not balanced by any discussion of academic freedom and did not seem to recognize that the expanding research base, provided by the ongoing release of new documents under the 30-year rule, does often require the revision of existing conclusions. This manifesto claim also ignores the fact that historical writing is never neutral, and nor should it be. Politicians are promoting the ideal of value-free historical enquiry and imagining that some kind of transcendent truth about the past could be politically established and could eradicate contested memory. In so doing, politicians who rightly worry about the subservience of historical writing to wider cultural or political agendas are undermining their own ends. Why should politicians not rather encourage historians to recognize and to be open about their political or cultural presuppositions—if only to allow their readers to say, “Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?” One reason why history is contested is because of this idealization of transcendent truth—because historical narratives are thought to offer redemption or damnation, to provide a moral prism through which we may peer through the troubled, chaotic, unsystematic, conflicted, mundane, and endlessly disappointing character of human existence to identify villains and victims and to populate the past in a moral diorama. But this is another kind of work—for now we see through a glass, darkly—and history doesn’t have the tools for the job.

So can history be decommissioned? Perhaps. One approach may be to remember that history writing is necessarily interpretive. It is a meme in modern theory, popularized by Hayden White, as well as a truism in Calvinist epistemology, following the logic of Cornelius Van Til, that there is no such thing as a “brute fact.” And as there are no brute facts, so there can be no neutral observers of these facts. Every effort to explain—to frame an explanation, to solicit data for that explanation, to adopt a mode of argument for that explanation—is loaded with the baggage of political, cultural, and other kinds of presuppositions. And, if there are no brute facts and no neutral observers of brute facts, there may be much less of a distinction between history and memory than we often assume. While the former may pay more attention to method and other professional standards, history and memory are both narratives about the past. Their relationship may sometimes be contested, but it is never zero-sum, if only because history writing is never hermetically sealed from the practice of memory.

History may be decommissioned when its limits are better known. Historical work allows us to identify the problem. It reminds us that historical narratives, like memory, exist in many drafts, as Gitta Sereny’s Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995) reveals. It provides us with the analytical tools by means of which we can pursue the semiotic archaeology of conflict, disentangling the images, individuals, and incidents that have driven violence and illustrating their change across time. It can help us understand why certain sets of images may retain their compelling and intoxicating power, identifying the mythology of the past that creates stories that become so thoroughly understood that they can assume the bright clarity of transcendent truth.

But history has no redemptive power in addressing the “evils” of the past, which the cover of the recent issue of Foreign Policy describes. History offers no absolution. It makes no promise for the future. It may establish a record of responsibility and guilt, but it defies every effort to establish or resolve the moral binary that supports the zero-sum politics haunting Northern Ireland’s present political crisis, where the perennial temptation is to cast the first historical stone. History may be decommissioned when we remember what it is and where its limits lie. Better historical writing will not save us. Historians will not provide the jury on judgement day.

And so, 20 years after the end of the Troubles, the carefully calibrated considerations of professional historians can make little impact upon popular constructions of history, in which a sequence of powerful images retain a compelling, even visceral, explanatory power. The province remains haunted by the history and memory that has been weaponized in the pursuit of sectional interests. But, representing contested legacies, both history and memory may be the blind guiding the blind. History, like memory, is fraught with the values and preferences of its practitioners. We may not be able to measure the significance for his policies of the fact that Macron edited Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, or whether better theoretical reflection on our habits of memorialization can contribute to a less contested culture. But, in Northern Ireland, history and memory may wait to be decommissioned; for, if the contested past is our Hotel California, we must expect some to write to remember, and others to write to forget.

The post Remembering the Past in Northern Ireland appeared first on The American Interest.

The Top 14 Causes of Political Polarization

Why do Americans increasingly believe that those in the other party are not only misguided, but are also bad people whose views are so dangerously wrong-headed and crazy as to be all but incomprehensible? What has created what Arthur Brooks in his forthcoming book calls a “culture of contempt” in American politics and public life?

I’m glad you asked! Behold a bakers-dozen worth of causes.

1. The end of the Cold War. The West’s victory in the Cold War means that (with the possible exception of jihadi terrorism) there is no longer a global enemy to keep us united as we focus on a powerful and cohesive external threat.

2. The rise of identity-group politics. On both the Left and the Right, the main conceptual frameworks have largely shifted in focus from unifying values to group identities. As Amy Chua puts it in Political Tribes (2018): “The Left believes that right-wing tribalism—bigotry, racism—is tearing the country apart. The Right believes that left-wing tribalism—identity politics, political correctness—is tearing the country apart. They are both right.” (Never mind here what might be problematic use of the terms “tribe” and “tribal.”)

3. Growing religious diversity. Current trends in American religion reflect and well as contribute to political polarization. One trend is growing secularization, including a declining share of Americans who are Christians, less public confidence in organized religion, and rising numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans. One consequence is an increasingly open contestation of Christianity’s once-dominant role in American public and political culture. But another trend is the continuing, and in some respects intensifying, robustness of religious faith and practice in many parts of the society. This growing religious divide helps to explain the rise of several of the most polarizing social issues in our politics, such as gay marriage and abortion. It also contributes to polarizing the two political parties overall, as religious belief becomes an increasingly important predictor of party affiliation. For example, among Democrats and Democratic-leaning U.S. adults, religiously unaffiliated voters (the “nones”) are now more numerous than Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, or members of historically black Protestant traditions, whereas socially and theologically conservative Christians today are overwhelmingly Republican.

4. Growing racial and ethnic diversity. In the long run, increased racial and ethnic diversity is likely a strength. But in the short run—which means now—it contributes to a decline in social trust (the belief that we can understand and count on one another) and a rise in social and political conflict.

5. The passing of the Greatest Generation. We don’t call them the greatest for no reason. Their generational values, forged in the trials of the Great Depression and World War II—including a willingness to sacrifice for country, concern for the general welfare, a mature character structure, and adherence to a shared civic faith—reduced social and political polarization. Thus, note:

I didn’t vote for him but he’s my President, and I hope he does a good job.
—John Wayne (b. 1907) on the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960

I hope he fails.
—Rush Limbaugh (b. 1951) on the election of Barack Obama in 2008

6. Geographical sorting. Americans today are increasingly living in politically like-minded communities. Living only or mainly with like-minded neighbors makes us both more extreme and more certain in our political beliefs. As Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing put it in The Big Sort (2008): “Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.”

Percent of U.S. voters living in counties in which a presidential candidate won by a “landslide” margin of 20 percent or more of the vote:
1976: 25
2016: 60

7. Political party sorting. Once upon a time, there were such creatures as liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. No longer. The parties have sorted philosophically such that today almost all liberals are Democrats and all conservatives are Republicans. One main result is that the partisan gap between the parties is wide and getting wider.

Across 10 measures that Pew Research Center has tracked on the same surveys since 1994, the average partisan gap has increased from 15 percentage points to 36 points.
—Pew Research Center, 2017

8. New rules for Congress. The weakening and in some cases elimination of “regular order”—defined broadly as the rules, customs, and precedents intended to promote orderly and deliberative policymaking—as well as the erosion of traditions such as Senatorial courtesy and social fraternization across party lines—have contributed dramatically to less trust and more animosity in the Congress, thus increasing polarization.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much House Republicans and Democrats dislike each other these days.
—Juliet Eilperin, Fight Club Politics (2006)

9. New rules for political parties. Many reforms in how we nominate, elect, and guide our political leaders—shifting the power of nomination from delegates to primaries, dismantling political machines, replacing closed-door politics with televised politics, and shrinking the influence of career politicians—aimed to democratize the system. But these changes also replaced the “middle men” who helped keep the system together with a political free-for-all in which the loudest and most extreme voices are heard above all others.

As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal both in campaigns and in the government itself.
—Jonathan Rauch, “How American Politics Went Insane,” 2016

10. New political donors. In earlier eras, money in American politics tended to focus on candidates and parties, while money from today’s super-rich donors tends to focus on ideas and ideology—a shift that also tends to advance polarization.

11. New political districts. Widespread gerrymandering—defined as manipulating district boundaries for political advantage—contributes significantly to polarization, most obviously by making candidates in gerrymandered districts worry more about being “primaried” by a more extreme member of their own party than about losing the general election.

12. The spread of media ghettoes. The main features of the old analog media—including editing, fact-checking, professionalization, and the privileging of institutions over individuals—served as a credentialing system for American political expression. The distinguishing feature of the new digital media—the fact that anyone can publish anything that gains views and clicks—is replacing that old system with a non-system that is atomized and largely leaderless. One result made possible by this change is that Americans can now live in media ghettoes. If I wish, I can live all day every day encountering in my media travels only those views with which I already agree. Living in a media ghetto means less that my views are shaped and improved, much less challenged, than that they are hardened and made more extreme; what might’ve been analysis weakens into partisan talking points dispensed by identity-group leaders; moreover, because I’m exposed only to the most cartoonish, exaggerated versions of my opponents’ views, I come to believe that those views are so unhinged and irrational as to be dangerous. More broadly, the new media resemble and reinforce the new politics, such that the most reliable way to succeed in either domain is to be the most noisesome, outrageous, and polarizing.

13. The decline of journalistic responsibility. The dismantling of the old media has been accompanied by, and has probably helped cause, a decline in journalistic standards. These losses to society include journalists who’ll accept poor quality in pursuit of volume and repetition as well as the blurring and even erasure of boundaries between news and opinion, facts and non-facts, and journalism and entertainment. These losses feed polarization.

What have we learned so far from this survey of polarization causes?  I’d say, four things. I’d also say, not enough to get to the heart of the matter.

For starters, we could probably make the list longer. For example, we could plausibly argue that rising income equality should be added (though in my view the evidence on this one is ambiguous). Second, we can see that some of these causes are ones we either can’t do much about or wouldn’t want to even if we could. Third, few if any of these causes contain the quality of intentionality: None of them wake up each morning and say, “Let’s polarize!” Even those coming closest to reflecting the intention to polarize, such as gerrymandering, reflect other and more fundamental intentions, such as winning elections, advancing a political agenda, or gaining clicks or viewers.

The fourth conclusion is the most important. None of these 13 causes directly perpetuate polarization. They are likely what analysts would call distal (ultimate) causes, but they are not proximate (immediate, direct) causes. They seem to have shaped an environment that incentivizes polarization, but they are not themselves the human words and deeds that polarize.

And so our bakers-dozen list ultimately doesn’t satisfy. We need a 14th cause, arguably the most important one. It’s certainly the most direct and immediate, the most proximate, cause of polarization.

14. The growing influence of certain ways of thinking about each other. These polarizing habits of mind and heart include:

Favoring binary (either/or) thinking.
Absolutizing one’s preferred values.
Viewing uncertainty as a mark of weakness or sin.
Indulging in motivated reasoning (always and only looking for evidence that supports your side).
Relying on deductive logic (believing that general premises justify specific conclusions).
Assuming that one’s opponents are motivated by bad faith.
Permitting the desire for approval from an in-group (“my side”) to guide one’s thinking.
Succumbing intellectually and spiritually to the desire to dominate others (what Saint Augustine called libido dominandi).
Declining for oppositional reasons to agree on basic facts and on the meaning of evidence.

These ways of thinking constitute the actual precipitation of polarization—the direct and immediate causes of holding exaggerated and stereotyped views of each other, treating our political opponent as enemies, exhibiting growing rancor and aggression in public life, and acting as if common ground does not exist.

What’s the lesson here? Although we didn’t think our way into polarization – larger and more distal forces shaped the prospects for it – we’ll need largely to think our way out. At this point in the process, unless some cataclysmic social change (economic collapse, another world war) does it for us, the first thing to change to get out of this mess is our minds.

One final consideration. It would be nice to make a straightforward “us versus them” enemies list when it comes to who’s to blame for polarization. But the fact is, none of us is pure—besides which the impulse to create an enemies list is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Some of us are more inclined to polarizing habits than others; some of us when we foster polarization are more aware of what we’re doing than others; and some of us (more and more of us, it seems) make a pretty good living these days out of encouraging and participating in polarization. But the habits and temptations of polarization are always with all of us. That includes you and me, by the way. The fault, dear reader, is not just in our 13 stars, but also in ourselves.

The post The Top 14 Causes of Political Polarization appeared first on The American Interest.

Getting Tribes: A Corrective

Open any national newspaper these days or scroll down a list of recently released books, and you will soon see that it is all but impossible to avoid the word “tribe.” This is true whether we’re talking about book titles—Political Tribes (Amy Chua), Tribe (Sebastian Junger), or It Takes A Tribe (Will Dean)—or headlines—“Can Our Democracy Survive Tribalism?” (Andrew Sullivan), “The Retreat to Tribalism” (David Brooks), or “How to Get Beyond Our Tribal Politics” (Jonathan Haidt and Ravi Iyer)—or texts: “We are tribal primates. . . . We love tribal living so much that we invented sports, fraternities, street gangs, fan clubs, and tattoos. Tribalism is in our hearts and minds” (Jonathan Haidt again).

Some authors contend that we Americans need to foster more tribal feeling as a balm for our increasingly uncivil divides. Others seek the opposite and want us to somehow jettison or ignore our tribal minds. Unfortunately, the more everyone throws around this particular term, the more wrong they get tribes’ inner workings. Yes, we have divides in the United States. But our splits are nothing like those where tribes are the pervasive unit of account, where people’s moral existence, not just their political life, is determined by who they belong to and who they are presumed to belong to. Without question, too, though we Americans would benefit from cultivating (or re-cultivating) a deeper and more enduring sense of fellow-feeling, the kind of tribalism that exists in bona fide tribal societies would never work for us. But then again, our political system, based as it is on electoral democracy, chronically fails them.

In and of itself, “tribe” is a tricky term. Its use is acceptable in reference to American Indians and to people in and about the Middle East; it offends neither those it describes nor the academics who write about them. However, apply “tribe” to Africans and most academics, some journalists, and many aid workers will flinch. One reason self-described progressives balk is because “tribe” used to be synonymous with primitive people; savages, for instance, lived in tribes. So, presumably, did we before we became “enlightened.” Of course, settled people the world over—from ancient Egypt to Greece to Rome to China—have always looked down their noses at nomadic and tribal peoples, though for their part and to this day, nomads pity all of us who stay tethered to particular places, stuck, as the great majority of us are, working for other people.

Tribes endure for a host of reasons. But if we don’t understand what those reasons are, we will not only continue to make major category errors whenever we over- or under-valorize tribal life, but we will continue to err in more substantive ways as well. For instance, consider the places where the United States and other Western allied militaries have been waging or helping others to wage war in recent years: tribal shatter zones. From Afghanistan, through Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, to Somalia, Libya, Niger, and beyond, we have been directly or indirectly tangling with tribes. How effective have we been? The Pentagon has spent ungodly sums on procuring and developing all manner of computational modeling tools, as if analysts can peer at social network splatter graphs and link-analysis displays and see what constitutes tribal allegiance. Software might be able to paint pictures of who seems to be tribally related to whom, who transacts with whom, and who worships with whom, but none of this tells us anything about the content of human relationships or the depth and shape of social commitments.

One reason for our cluelessness is obvious: We Americans don’t connect to one another in anything remotely like a tribal fashion. There are a handful of exceptions: American Indians; recent immigrants who hail from tribal societies and haven’t yet shed their tribal bonds; certain self-contained religious communities; and some cults. Otherwise, not even members of closely knit combat units share the same kind of bonds members of tribes do, which are before-cradle-to-beyond-grave.

Our ignorance about the nature of tribal allegiance is especially costly along two dimensions. First, no matter how precise the U.S. military tries to be when it applies force abroad, it still wreaks the havoc that is inherent to the use of force. Though the damage might seem collateral to us, it is not the least bit collateral to those whose lives we are upending. We discount the fact that payback is imperative as far as many survivors are concerned, to include those who can now witness the havoc several steps removed from the situation, on television, computer, and cell-phone screens. No doubt it is too discomfiting for us to acknowledge that we are seeding future security risks in perpetuity. Better to instead believe that people resort to terrorism out of desperation or derangement. But this is clearly not the whole story, as future generations of Americans will end up having to learn the hard way should we serially persist in attacking them “over there” so that we can presumably stay safe here at home. The impetus for revenge for all the havoc we have wreaked will not just magically evaporate.

As for the second dimension along which we are sowing future problems, consider our deepening misperceptions of one another. It is patently absurd to treat attitudes, convictions, heritage, skin color, and class—or political, cultural, socio-economic, racial, and religious differences—as equally immutable characteristics. Some things we can readily change about ourselves; others we can’t, though the attributes we can’t change rarely bind us together in inescapable ways. Race doesn’t. Nor does our biological sex. The same can also be said for being a Democrat or a Republican, though we aren’t either of these by birth, never mind for all time.

In the United States, ascription might help shape, but it never dictates, who we end up becoming, let alone who we are drawn to in terms of our associations. This is in stark contrast to the imperative in tribal societies, where everyone’s most salient identity is a function of birth, not choice.

If anything, we Americans live in a country that offers too many choices—as in too many freedoms to self-sort according to who we think we want to be around, and who we think we want to become. This much liberty can prove paralyzing or, worse, alienating, which helps explain why some social commentators suggest that we should make greater efforts to become more communitarian. Of course, the idea that we could use more solidarity is hardly new. One need only think back to the hippies of the 1960s or the transcendentalists of the 1800s, or settler communities in the 1700s, or Puritans and Pilgrims in the 1600s: The reaction to too much self-involvement, or self-absorption, has always been to retreat or escape into more intense togetherness. Yet few of our “all for one, one for all” arrangements have ever lasted long. Few American movements do. Instead, they morph, dissolve, or get subsumed. In part this is because true solidarity demands levels of commitment to the group and within-group loyalty that we Americans seem unable to stick with very well. But if you look at tribes, they last for generations. How do they manage this?

What a Tribe Is—and Isn’t

One difficulty with trying to generalize about tribes or tribalism is that every tribe is unique. Even on the surface, the differences are impossible to miss. In some cases, tribes make themselves distinguishable via permanent markers (such as circumcision); others use changeable markers (such as dress), or somewhat concealable markers (such as accent), or hard-to-disguise markers (such as language), or any combination of these. But beyond these surface-level phenomena, the most important set of differences among tribes remains invisible: Every tribe constitutes its own moral and social universe. Each is an entity unto itself, and what its members wear or what they sound like is an epiphenomenon of this. Tribes, in other words, share very few features.

Nevertheless, two features are definitional. First, members marry each other far more often than they marry non-members. Second, members are bound to each other in morally inescapable ways.

Together these two features enmesh members of tribes in a web of obligations. Let someone along one thread transgress, and misfortune will strike, but it won’t necessarily strike the sinner. Not only does this mean people are connected in very different ways than we are, but individual behavior matters in ways that are collectively meaningful. It is this combination—of how and to whom people belong, along with why they must stay connected—that describes the essence of tribes.

Sometimes we can even see the effects of this stamped right into people’s faces. I remember learning how to figure out who belonged to which tribe in a small crossroads town in northern Kenya by first paying attention to distinctive dress. But then, after a few days, the friend who was with me and I discovered we could also tell people apart by looking at their faces, since it was evident from the neck up that “down country” Kenyans looked different from northerners. It was even possible to tell Luo apart from Kikuyu (or Meru and Embu), and Turkana from Samburu (or Ariaal). However, Somalis, Borana, and Rendille posed a challenge, and we would have been sunk had it not been for beads (or lack of beads) and dress. In contrast, the local Kenyans we were with were confident that, even if the Somalis, Borana, and Rendille walked by in each other’s outfits, they still would have been able to tell who was who.

Maybe. But as we all know, pigeonholing people according to their “looks” is both dicey and dangerous; it can cause us to get identity badly wrong. Even so, we still pay attention to family resemblances, don’t we? We can’t seem to help it. No doubt that’s because there is such a thing as family resemblance.

Or to state the (politically incorrect) obvious: When people engage in fairly circumscribed mating for multiple consecutive generations, their progeny are bound to share certain physical similarities. This might be facial structure, hair type, build, or something else. Or to re-phrase the point somewhat more socio-logically: So long as people marry among the same broad group of families over and over, the group is likely to remain a group; conversely, where we see marriages across families begin to peter out is exactly where the outer bounds of the group (and discernible differences) begin. Or to restate this in still another way: Who people do and don’t marry, where they draw these lines, and how consistently they do so over successive generations explain how a group bound by kinship ties persists, and also help explain why groups use kinship: so as to persist.

But here two critical caveats are in order. First, just because people engage in assortative mating does not mean that all people who share similar attributes (like brown eyes and dark hair or astigmatism and freckles) constitute a tribe, any more than it means that Bernese Mountain Dogs or Great Danes do. Indeed, one reason why it is categorically wrong to lump together similar-looking people—all “white” people or all “black” people, say—and call them a tribe is because doing so ignores the even more seminal feature of what transforms a group of related people into a tribe: namely, morally freighted belonging. In other words (caveat number two), kinship is critical, but it is not everything.

Culture and Trust

Yes, tribal bonds have genealogical roots, and typically family ties stretch far beyond anything we are familiar with, to include second cousins, third cousins, and categories of relatives for whom we do not even have names. Essentially, extended families keep extending—not just laterally and diagonally but also vertically. They connect the living with the dead, as well as with the not-yet-born.

Already this should hint at one major difference between tribal conceptions of who might owe what to whom and our conceptions of fealty, especially since, according to our Western (and monotheistic) worldview, certain very clear distinctions exist between the living and the dead and between the natural and the supernatural. In contrast, to most tribal peoples there is nothing hard and fast (or even real) about such separations. One might even go so far as to say that nothing is more credible than the fact that unseen things can affect the living.

Of course, in theory we Westerners don’t entirely disagree. Think: germs, electricity, or gravity. We are also the ones who like to insist that “history lives.” Yet among the many ironies that flow from our radically different conceptions of the universe is that, although we Westerners say “history lives,” we treat the past as though it is both impersonal and dead. Tribal peoples don’t.

Likewise, we Westerners make fairly sharp distinctions between psychic security, social welfare security, and physical security. Not so tribal peoples for whom health, well-being, fertility, and safety co-depend. Consequently, though we don’t live in a system that encourages us to believe that the dead can interfere with us, that ill feeling or the “evil eye” can cause misfortune, or that engaging in taboo behavior imperils the collective, tribal peoples do. This is not to say that all Americans are immune to such beliefs (if they were, psychics would be out of business); but as a society we refuse to countenance this kind of thinking, except as entertainment.

Meanwhile, tribal peoples make at least one separation that we do not. Because every tribe comprises its own moral universe, most of its rules (and its protections) apply to it and its members alone. Tribe members’ sense of moral obligation does not extend to anyone else (except, sometimes, confederated or allied peoples). As for who a tribe’s moral universe does include, this would seem to bring us back to biology and marriages, mating and births. But, again, simply sharing blood is not what charges ties with social meaning. People do that via socialization and the transmission of culture—which also helps explain how non-kin can be adopted into tribes under the right conditions.

It is largely thanks to how children are raised—what they see, hear, and are steeped in—that a sense of belonging gets engrained before individuals are fully aware and in ways that adults find extremely hard to articulate. As the French sociologist Emile Durkheim pointed out more than a century ago, participating in large religious or celebratory events—harvests, weddings, funerals, and other rites of passage—further instills and then reinforces what belonging means and why it matters. Often such occasions are the only time when significant numbers of tribespeople assemble. Thus, participating in ritually binding events doesn’t just reveal to and remind individuals to whom they belong, but with whom they belong as well.

Durkheim’s further critical insight was that, once people participate in something sacred, something that makes them feel like they are part of a collective that is greater and more enduring than themselves, they carry this feeling of solidarity away with them no matter where they go. Tweaking Durkheim just a bit, we could say that, once internalized, this collective consciousness (also referred to as a collective conscience) doubles as a moral compass. With what people now know they share, individuals can gauge who they should be able to count on (and for what), no matter where they wind up.

What tribe members implicitly recognize in one another gets us closer to the content of tribal relations in several ways. The first way has to do with how belonging reinforces trust, and trust reinforces belonging. Essentially: If you are a member of my tribe, I consider you trustworthy until you prove yourself untrustworthy; if you are not a member of my tribe, I consider you untrustworthy until you prove yourself worth trusting, and because I am scrutinizing your every move, chances are good I will find reasons not to trust you.

Second is the degree to which tribes, though they might seem (or even feel) closed, remain open. Warfare and trade—or the need to engage in exchange—preclude total closure, as do time-honored practices like “we marry our enemies.” As for how tribes square the circle of inclusion, they do so based on inclusivity rather than exclusivity. This too is somewhat tautologous, since who determines who can be a member? The group. Who makes up the group? Its members do.

Not surprisingly, the ways tribes constantly renew themselves is of a piece with what they prize: social harmony. Again, thanks to the fact that anyone’s and everyone’s well-being can be affected by others’ behavior means social relations are laden with moral (not just “feel good”) significance. Academics who teach about Durkheim often cite football games or rock concerts as venues where we Americans momentarily lose ourselves in a greater whole and experience the collective effervescence Durkheim described. But this isn’t true, since nothing that occurs during a sporting event or a concert reminds spectators that they now and forever have inescapable moral obligations to everyone else present. Not even the players on the field or in the band connect to one another in before-birth-to-beyond-grave ways.

As for who among us might come closest to attaining tribal levels of trust, how about co-religionists or, better still, co-congregants? Presumably, people who share the same religious beliefs abide by the same moral code, and thus should be able to implicitly consider one another trustworthy—except, as Bernard Madoff and numerous other con men have recognized, no one is easier to cheat than co-religionists precisely because they are so trusting.

In contrast, tribes have a built-in mechanism for deterring those who would cheat fellow tribe members (leaving everyone else as fair game): Do something bad and harm will befall someone you care about. Transgressions will boomerang, victimless crimes don’t exist, and there is no statute of limitations on punishment. As with a curse, punishment can skip a generation, and can land anywhere along the skein of your relations; disaster can affect your livestock, the fertility of your fields, the fertility or sanity of your offspring, or the health and well-being of who-knows-who, who will then point their accusatory finger at you and yours. In fact, because this is how cycles of ill will often begin, thereby jeopardizing not just the integrity of the community but subsistence and even survival, a great deal of emphasis is placed on preventing enmity and competition from getting out of hand. As important as not rocking the boat is, even more important is that all parties reconcile after a breach. Either that or the tribe schisms.

This is about as different from our system of law, order, and justice as it is possible to get. Once we turn 18, our system treats us as interchangeable singletons and metes out punishment accordingly. Moreover, we draw our morality from an increasingly attenuated set of sources: religion, whose purview these days is individual souls; and government, which could care less about us as specific individuals. For all intents and purposes this means we have both de-collectivized and de-personalized what we use to maintain comity, law, and order. For us, morality is little more than a means by which to ensure individual well-being in the here and now, as well as the welfare of select family members. Maintaining (or restoring) harmonious social relations across the entire social collective (which we don’t have anyway) is hardly an end in and of itself, as it is for tribes.

To be sure, no tribe can police all of its members all of the time any more than it can make any one individual live up to his or her moral obligations. Tribes are also becoming increasingly diffuse, with members scattered around the world. Even where tribes remain regnant, urbanization and inter-tribal marriages are further diluting tribalism’s pull. However, just because people might like to think they have left tribalism “behind” doesn’t mean others agree, or will let them escape being identified as belonging to this or that tribe. We see this especially clearly during eruptions of ethnic violence. Then, individuals’ identity will get them raped, maimed, killed, or spared. Also, during times of personal crisis people can find themselves with little choice but to fall back on “familial” connections; they may also do so when the prospect of gaining certain advantages proves too hard to resist.

The point here is not to catalog all the ways in which tribal ties remain instrumentally useful. Instead, it is to highlight that anyone raised with these ties, who then tries to divest him or herself of them, can never really be sure their choices won’t affect others, any more than they can be sure others’ choices won’t eventually affect them. Given such uncertainty, the most prudent course of action becomes to hedge one’s bets—particularly when one realizes the universe is full of forces beyond any one individual’s control, be these political, economic, moral, or spiritual.

Consider Africa

And to think, our caricature of tribalism has been that it is inflexible.

To further underscore how shallow our understanding and wrongheaded our assessments have been, let us a look at sub-Saharan Africa, where politics is nominally democratic but inescapably tribal. Why Africa? Because more different forms of representative government existed there prior to colonialism than anywhere else in the world, yet today more states are dysfunctional there than anywhere else in the world.

Three sets of factors help explain what has transpired in Africa to politicize tribes and tribalize politics. First, neither missionaries nor European imperial powers ever fully dismantled indigenous social structures. They simply overlaid them with imported bureaucratic institutions. Basically, in taking advantage of the multiplicity of separate societies (many of which also sought to take advantage of them), Europeans aligned themselves with certain tribes over others. By dividing, conquering, and then stitching together spaces-qua-colonies, Europeans constructed entities that they ensured (wittingly or not) would remain ungovernable by anyone but themselves.

Second, they drew borders in such a way as to slice through and weaken various peoples. Sometimes they did this deliberately and split numerically large tribes among multiple countries, thereby relegating them to minority status in marginal areas remote from capital cities—like the Tuareg, divided among five-plus countries today. But even more pernicious than how borders were used to divide people is how borders came to contain peoples, plural.

Most of Africa’s 54 countries are home to multiple tribes, in each one of which members remain duty-bound to preferentially look out for one another. Again, colonialism didn’t create these divisions any more than Christianity or Islam dissolved them. What colonialism did was turbo-charge them, especially since virtually every former colony inherited a Western-style government, complete with a capital city and an overarching (not decentralized) administration. The soon-to-be-independent states were also bequeathed the trappings of “electoral democracy,” which further guaranteed that governance—and who might gain control over the levers of power and government coffers—would be a zero-sum contest.

Because democracy asks voters to elect the candidates who we think will best represent us (as in those who will most closely promote our interests), it should come as no surprise that tribal ties were easily repurposed in Africa, particularly once it became clear who wouldn’t look out for voters’ interests: namely, politicians from other tribes at the national level, and from other clans or lineages more locally.

To this day, tribal demographics make it easy to predict who is likely to win in a national contest or, if not win outright, who is destined to lose. Separately, this helps explain the frequency of coups as an alternative means of attaining power, and why authoritarian leaders invest so much energy in rigging the system when they come from minority groups. But then, combine with demographic realities the unshakeable moral imperative that you are either in my moral universe or you are not, and electoral democracy becomes not just a charade but an obstruction. We see instances of evenly sized tribes (or coalitions) swapping power on occasion, but systemic change will never be forthcoming from within the electoral framework itself.

This observation has huge practical implications. The moral imperative of tribes means that anything that threatens to atomize tribes and turn individuated members into independent citizens is bound to lead to conflict, not only because it poses a direct threat to those in power but because any such effort will be construed and received as tribally (and thus both individually and collectively) morally imperiling.

As for those rare individuals who try to buck the system, who seek to behave more nationally and less tribally, they face a different impossible challenge: to somehow earn trust from those they aren’t related to while still fulfilling the moral imperative of keeping faith with kin.

In other words, the decks are totally stacked. If we were honest, this should lead us to admit that it is democracy that is locking citizens into a system that is incapable of providing them with security (in all senses of that word). Nor does this only hold for sub-Saharan Africa. The same can be said for numerous places where tribes persist.

Back to Us

We, on the other hand, have been spared having to worry about the integrity of whatever groups we belong to. Our system of governance has also been constructed in such a way as to liberate us from having to worry about preserving social harmony among ourselves. This, after all, is what we have a justice system for. We have courts, lawyers, police, and jails, which we need, for better or worse, since virtually all parts of our collective life are predicated on competition, the antithesis of harmony.

Think about it: We cooperate in the face of crisis; otherwise, we contend. Even in disasters, as soon as the triage phase begins to subside, we quibble and engage in finger-pointing. Truth be told, there isn’t much that we don’t turn into a contest: from box office receipts to beauty pageants to sporting events to politics.

One might think, when it comes to politics, that at least principles would offer us something steadfast to latch onto. But it turns out that everything having to do with politics is mutable. Take President Trump. His election demonstrates this in spades. His candidacy cross cut all sorts of affiliations, and his presidency continues to scramble ideological alignments. Thus, no matter how divided we think we are, red versus blue is not all that meaningful. It turns out our labels really don’t lock us in, certainly not in ways that resemble “identity politics” elsewhere.

The truth is that virtually nothing snares us in identities or obligations we can’t escape. Without question, some Americans end up more trapped than others—namely, the poor. But the fact that the poor often marry (and/or have children) across racial, religious, ethnic, political, and other lines means class is not congealing with other identities. Again, for us to tribalize, this would have to happen. Then, our fused identities would have to stay fused. Then, they would need to be reproduced in their entirety over the course of several generations.

This most definitely does not describe us, with our ever-shifting, endlessly expansive means of defining and re-defining ourselves. Or, to cite two final sets of attributes that should put to rest the notion that we Americans are tribalizing in the ways so many pundits suggest: Look at how wedded we are to change, impermanence, and individual autonomy. Everything about our system makes flightiness and dissociation easy (arguably too easy). Moreover, our social contract is with a welter of bureaucracies, not with specific other people.

Of course, what should be equally obvious when we look at tribes and then iteratively at ourselves is that the very institutions that prevent tribalism from taking root in the United States are exactly the structures that prevent our system from working effectively where the underlay is tribal. In countries where webs of social relations are paramount, and where people need them to remain paramount, something other than our brand of “one man/one vote” democracy, or our version of bureaucracy, is required.

Unfortunately, because no one thought hard enough more than half a century ago about the kinds of political arrangements or forms of representative government that might best accommodate tribes, it will take hard thinking and a radical reset now both to come up with formulations that can help repair the damage done and to prevent further injury. And though it should not be up to us in the West to weigh in on what these new socio-political forms might be, nothing we attempt to assist with where tribes exist will improve life sufficiently for those we say we care about—or mitigate threats to us—until more people in Washington and other donor capitals “get” tribes. Again, this is true not just across Africa, but also the Middle East, Central Asia, and beyond. And it is also true regardless of whatever forms of power we apply: hard, sweet, soft, or so-called smart power.

This is because the challenges tribes raise are moral. And while none of the incompatibilities identified here prevent us from being able to co-exist—after all, tribes have co-existed with each other and with the West for millennia—moral differences do run deeper than others. We need to understand this, too.

The post Getting Tribes: A Corrective appeared first on The American Interest.

Getting Tribal

Open any national newspaper these days or scroll down a list of recently released books, and you will soon see that it is all but impossible to avoid the word “tribe.” This is true whether we’re talking about book titles—Political Tribes (Amy Chua), Tribe (Sebastian Junger), or It Takes A Tribe (Will Dean)—or headlines—“Can Our Democracy Survive Tribalism?” (Andrew Sullivan), “The Retreat to Tribalism” (David Brooks), or “How to Get Beyond Our Tribal Politics” (Jonathan Haidt and Ravi Iyer)—or texts: “We are tribal primates. . . . We love tribal living so much that we invented sports, fraternities, street gangs, fan clubs, and tattoos. Tribalism is in our hearts and minds” (Jonathan Haidt again).

Some authors contend that we Americans need to foster more tribal feeling as a balm for our increasingly uncivil divides. Others seek the opposite and want us to somehow jettison or ignore our tribal minds. Unfortunately, the more everyone throws around this particular term, the more wrong they get tribes’ inner workings. Yes, we have divides in the United States. But our splits are nothing like those where tribes are the pervasive unit of account, where people’s moral existence, not just their political life, is determined by who they belong to and who they are presumed to belong to. Without question, too, though we Americans would benefit from cultivating (or re-cultivating) a deeper and more enduring sense of fellow-feeling, the kind of tribalism that exists in bona fide tribal societies would never work for us. But then again, our political system, based as it is on electoral democracy, chronically fails them.

In and of itself, “tribe” is a tricky term. Its use is acceptable in reference to American Indians and to people in and about the Middle East; it offends neither those it describes nor the academics who write about them. However, apply “tribe” to Africans and most academics, some journalists, and many aid workers will flinch. One reason self-described progressives balk is because “tribe” used to be synonymous with primitive people; savages, for instance, lived in tribes. So, presumably, did we before we became “enlightened.” Of course, settled people the world over—from ancient Egypt to Greece to Rome to China—have always looked down their noses at nomadic and tribal peoples, though for their part and to this day, nomads pity all of us who stay tethered to particular places, stuck, as the great majority of us are, working for other people.

Tribes endure for a host of reasons. But if we don’t understand what those reasons are, we will not only continue to make major category errors whenever we over- or under-valorize tribal life, but we will continue to err in more substantive ways as well. For instance, consider the places where the United States and other Western allied militaries have been waging or helping others to wage war in recent years: tribal shatter zones. From Afghanistan, through Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, to Somalia, Libya, Niger, and beyond, we have been directly or indirectly tangling with tribes. How effective have we been? The Pentagon has spent ungodly sums on procuring and developing all manner of computational modeling tools, as if analysts can peer at social network splatter graphs and link-analysis displays and see what constitutes tribal allegiance. Software might be able to paint pictures of who seems to be tribally related to whom, who transacts with whom, and who worships with whom, but none of this tells us anything about the content of human relationships or the depth and shape of social commitments.

One reason for our cluelessness is obvious: We Americans don’t connect to one another in anything remotely like a tribal fashion. There are a handful of exceptions: American Indians; recent immigrants who hail from tribal societies and haven’t yet shed their tribal bonds; certain self-contained religious communities; and some cults. Otherwise, not even members of closely knit combat units share the same kind of bonds members of tribes do, which are before-cradle-to-beyond-grave.

Our ignorance about the nature of tribal allegiance is especially costly along two dimensions. First, no matter how precise the U.S. military tries to be when it applies force abroad, it still wreaks the havoc that is inherent to the use of force. Though the damage might seem collateral to us, it is not the least bit collateral to those whose lives we are upending. We discount the fact that payback is imperative as far as many survivors are concerned, to include those who can now witness the havoc several steps removed from the situation, on television, computer, and cell-phone screens. No doubt it is too discomfiting for us to acknowledge that we are seeding future security risks in perpetuity. Better to instead believe that people resort to terrorism out of desperation or derangement. But this is clearly not the whole story, as future generations of Americans will end up having to learn the hard way should we serially persist in attacking them “over there” so that we can presumably stay safe here at home. The impetus for revenge for all the havoc we have wreaked will not just magically evaporate.

As for the second dimension along which we are sowing future problems, consider our deepening misperceptions of one another. It is patently absurd to treat attitudes, convictions, heritage, skin color, and class—or political, cultural, socio-economic, racial, and religious differences—as equally immutable characteristics. Some things we can readily change about ourselves; others we can’t, though the attributes we can’t change rarely bind us together in inescapable ways. Race doesn’t. Nor does our biological sex. The same can also be said for being a Democrat or a Republican, though we aren’t either of these by birth, never mind for all time.

In the United States, ascription might help shape, but it never dictates, who we end up becoming, let alone who we are drawn to in terms of our associations. This is in stark contrast to the imperative in tribal societies, where everyone’s most salient identity is a function of birth, not choice.

If anything, we Americans live in a country that offers too many choices—as in too many freedoms to self-sort according to who we think we want to be around, and who we think we want to become. This much liberty can prove paralyzing or, worse, alienating, which helps explain why some social commentators suggest that we should make greater efforts to become more communitarian. Of course, the idea that we could use more solidarity is hardly new. One need only think back to the hippies of the 1960s or the transcendentalists of the 1800s, or settler communities in the 1700s, or Puritans and Pilgrims in the 1600s: The reaction to too much self-involvement, or self-absorption, has always been to retreat or escape into more intense togetherness. Yet few of our “all for one, one for all” arrangements have ever lasted long. Few American movements do. Instead, they morph, dissolve, or get subsumed. In part this is because true solidarity demands levels of commitment to the group and within-group loyalty that we Americans seem unable to stick with very well. But if you look at tribes, they last for generations. How do they manage this?

What a Tribe Is—and Isn’t

One difficulty with trying to generalize about tribes or tribalism is that every tribe is unique. Even on the surface, the differences are impossible to miss. In some cases, tribes make themselves distinguishable via permanent markers (such as circumcision); others use changeable markers (such as dress), or somewhat concealable markers (such as accent), or hard-to-disguise markers (such as language), or any combination of these. But beyond these surface-level phenomena, the most important set of differences among tribes remains invisible: Every tribe constitutes its own moral and social universe. Each is an entity unto itself, and what its members wear or what they sound like is an epiphenomenon of this. Tribes, in other words, share very few features.

Nevertheless, two features are definitional. First, members marry each other far more often than they marry non-members. Second, members are bound to each other in morally inescapable ways.

Together these two features enmesh members of tribes in a web of obligations. Let someone along one thread transgress, and misfortune will strike, but it won’t necessarily strike the sinner. Not only does this mean people are connected in very different ways than we are, but individual behavior matters in ways that are collectively meaningful. It is this combination—of how and to whom people belong, along with why they must stay connected—that describes the essence of tribes.

Sometimes we can even see the effects of this stamped right into people’s faces. I remember learning how to figure out who belonged to which tribe in a small crossroads town in northern Kenya by first paying attention to distinctive dress. But then, after a few days, the friend who was with me and I discovered we could also tell people apart by looking at their faces, since it was evident from the neck up that “down country” Kenyans looked different from northerners. It was even possible to tell Luo apart from Kikuyu (or Meru and Embu), and Turkana from Samburu (or Ariaal). However, Somalis, Borana, and Rendille posed a challenge, and we would have been sunk had it not been for beads (or lack of beads) and dress. In contrast, the local Kenyans we were with were confident that, even if the Somalis, Borana, and Rendille walked by in each other’s outfits, they still would have been able to tell who was who.

Maybe. But as we all know, pigeonholing people according to their “looks” is both dicey and dangerous; it can cause us to get identity badly wrong. Even so, we still pay attention to family resemblances, don’t we? We can’t seem to help it. No doubt that’s because there is such a thing as family resemblance.

Or to state the (politically incorrect) obvious: When people engage in fairly circumscribed mating for multiple consecutive generations, their progeny are bound to share certain physical similarities. This might be facial structure, hair type, build, or something else. Or to re-phrase the point somewhat more socio-logically: So long as people marry among the same broad group of families over and over, the group is likely to remain a group; conversely, where we see marriages across families begin to peter out is exactly where the outer bounds of the group (and discernible differences) begin. Or to restate this in still another way: Who people do and don’t marry, where they draw these lines, and how consistently they do so over successive generations explain how a group bound by kinship ties persists, and also help explain why groups use kinship: so as to persist.

But here two critical caveats are in order. First, just because people engage in assortative mating does not mean that all people who share similar attributes (like brown eyes and dark hair or astigmatism and freckles) constitute a tribe, any more than it means that Bernese Mountain Dogs or Great Danes do. Indeed, one reason why it is categorically wrong to lump together similar-looking people—all “white” people or all “black” people, say—and call them a tribe is because doing so ignores the even more seminal feature of what transforms a group of related people into a tribe: namely, morally freighted belonging. In other words (caveat number two), kinship is critical, but it is not everything.

Culture and Trust

Yes, tribal bonds have genealogical roots, and typically family ties stretch far beyond anything we are familiar with, to include second cousins, third cousins, and categories of relatives for whom we do not even have names. Essentially, extended families keep extending—not just laterally and diagonally but also vertically. They connect the living with the dead, as well as with the not-yet-born.

Already this should hint at one major difference between tribal conceptions of who might owe what to whom and our conceptions of fealty, especially since, according to our Western (and monotheistic) worldview, certain very clear distinctions exist between the living and the dead and between the natural and the supernatural. In contrast, to most tribal peoples there is nothing hard and fast (or even real) about such separations. One might even go so far as to say that nothing is more credible than the fact that unseen things can affect the living.

Of course, in theory we Westerners don’t entirely disagree. Think: germs, electricity, or gravity. We are also the ones who like to insist that “history lives.” Yet among the many ironies that flow from our radically different conceptions of the universe is that, although we Westerners say “history lives,” we treat the past as though it is both impersonal and dead. Tribal peoples don’t.

Likewise, we Westerners make fairly sharp distinctions between psychic security, social welfare security, and physical security. Not so tribal peoples for whom health, well-being, fertility, and safety co-depend. Consequently, though we don’t live in a system that encourages us to believe that the dead can interfere with us, that ill feeling or the “evil eye” can cause misfortune, or that engaging in taboo behavior imperils the collective, tribal peoples do. This is not to say that all Americans are immune to such beliefs (if they were, psychics would be out of business); but as a society we refuse to countenance this kind of thinking, except as entertainment.

Meanwhile, tribal peoples make at least one separation that we do not. Because every tribe comprises its own moral universe, most of its rules (and its protections) apply to it and its members alone. Tribe members’ sense of moral obligation does not extend to anyone else (except, sometimes, confederated or allied peoples). As for who a tribe’s moral universe does include, this would seem to bring us back to biology and marriages, mating and births. But, again, simply sharing blood is not what charges ties with social meaning. People do that via socialization and the transmission of culture—which also helps explain how non-kin can be adopted into tribes under the right conditions.

It is largely thanks to how children are raised—what they see, hear, and are steeped in—that a sense of belonging gets engrained before individuals are fully aware and in ways that adults find extremely hard to articulate. As the French sociologist Emile Durkheim pointed out more than a century ago, participating in large religious or celebratory events—harvests, weddings, funerals, and other rites of passage—further instills and then reinforces what belonging means and why it matters. Often such occasions are the only time when significant numbers of tribespeople assemble. Thus, participating in ritually binding events doesn’t just reveal to and remind individuals to whom they belong, but with whom they belong as well.

Durkheim’s further critical insight was that, once people participate in something sacred, something that makes them feel like they are part of a collective that is greater and more enduring than themselves, they carry this feeling of solidarity away with them no matter where they go. Tweaking Durkheim just a bit, we could say that, once internalized, this collective consciousness (also referred to as a collective conscience) doubles as a moral compass. With what people now know they share, individuals can gauge who they should be able to count on (and for what), no matter where they wind up.

What tribe members implicitly recognize in one another gets us closer to the content of tribal relations in several ways. The first way has to do with how belonging reinforces trust, and trust reinforces belonging. Essentially: If you are a member of my tribe, I consider you trustworthy until you prove yourself untrustworthy; if you are not a member of my tribe, I consider you untrustworthy until you prove yourself worth trusting, and because I am scrutinizing your every move, chances are good I will find reasons not to trust you.

Second is the degree to which tribes, though they might seem (or even feel) closed, remain open. Warfare and trade—or the need to engage in exchange—preclude total closure, as do time-honored practices like “we marry our enemies.” As for how tribes square the circle of inclusion, they do so based on inclusivity rather than exclusivity. This too is somewhat tautologous, since who determines who can be a member? The group. Who makes up the group? Its members do.

Not surprisingly, the ways tribes constantly renew themselves is of a piece with what they prize: social harmony. Again, thanks to the fact that anyone’s and everyone’s well-being can be affected by others’ behavior means social relations are laden with moral (not just “feel good”) significance. Academics who teach about Durkheim often cite football games or rock concerts as venues where we Americans momentarily lose ourselves in a greater whole and experience the collective effervescence Durkheim described. But this isn’t true, since nothing that occurs during a sporting event or a concert reminds spectators that they now and forever have inescapable moral obligations to everyone else present. Not even the players on the field or in the band connect to one another in before-birth-to-beyond-grave ways.

As for who among us might come closest to attaining tribal levels of trust, how about co-religionists or, better still, co-congregants? Presumably, people who share the same religious beliefs abide by the same moral code, and thus should be able to implicitly consider one another trustworthy—except, as Bernard Madoff and numerous other con men have recognized, no one is easier to cheat than co-religionists precisely because they are so trusting.

In contrast, tribes have a built-in mechanism for deterring those who would cheat fellow tribe members (leaving everyone else as fair game): Do something bad and harm will befall someone you care about. Transgressions will boomerang, victimless crimes don’t exist, and there is no statute of limitations on punishment. As with a curse, punishment can skip a generation, and can land anywhere along the skein of your relations; disaster can affect your livestock, the fertility of your fields, the fertility or sanity of your offspring, or the health and well-being of who-knows-who, who will then point their accusatory finger at you and yours. In fact, because this is how cycles of ill will often begin, thereby jeopardizing not just the integrity of the community but subsistence and even survival, a great deal of emphasis is placed on preventing enmity and competition from getting out of hand. As important as not rocking the boat is, even more important is that all parties reconcile after a breach. Either that or the tribe schisms.

This is about as different from our system of law, order, and justice as it is possible to get. Once we turn 18, our system treats us as interchangeable singletons and metes out punishment accordingly. Moreover, we draw our morality from an increasingly attenuated set of sources: religion, whose purview these days is individual souls; and government, which could care less about us as specific individuals. For all intents and purposes this means we have both de-collectivized and de-personalized what we use to maintain comity, law, and order. For us, morality is little more than a means by which to ensure individual well-being in the here and now, as well as the welfare of select family members. Maintaining (or restoring) harmonious social relations across the entire social collective (which we don’t have anyway) is hardly an end in and of itself, as it is for tribes.

To be sure, no tribe can police all of its members all of the time any more than it can make any one individual live up to his or her moral obligations. Tribes are also becoming increasingly diffuse, with members scattered around the world. Even where tribes remain regnant, urbanization and inter-tribal marriages are further diluting tribalism’s pull. However, just because people might like to think they have left tribalism “behind” doesn’t mean others agree, or will let them escape being identified as belonging to this or that tribe. We see this especially clearly during eruptions of ethnic violence. Then, individuals’ identity will get them raped, maimed, killed, or spared. Also, during times of personal crisis people can find themselves with little choice but to fall back on “familial” connections; they may also do so when the prospect of gaining certain advantages proves too hard to resist.

The point here is not to catalog all the ways in which tribal ties remain instrumentally useful. Instead, it is to highlight that anyone raised with these ties, who then tries to divest him or herself of them, can never really be sure their choices won’t affect others, any more than they can be sure others’ choices won’t eventually affect them. Given such uncertainty, the most prudent course of action becomes to hedge one’s bets—particularly when one realizes the universe is full of forces beyond any one individual’s control, be these political, economic, moral, or spiritual.

Consider Africa

And to think, our caricature of tribalism has been that it is inflexible.

To further underscore how shallow our understanding and wrongheaded our assessments have been, let us a look at sub-Saharan Africa, where politics is nominally democratic but inescapably tribal. Why Africa? Because more different forms of representative government existed there prior to colonialism than anywhere else in the world, yet today more states are dysfunctional there than anywhere else in the world.

Three sets of factors help explain what has transpired in Africa to politicize tribes and tribalize politics. First, neither missionaries nor European imperial powers ever fully dismantled indigenous social structures. They simply overlaid them with imported bureaucratic institutions. Basically, in taking advantage of the multiplicity of separate societies (many of which also sought to take advantage of them), Europeans aligned themselves with certain tribes over others. By dividing, conquering, and then stitching together spaces-qua-colonies, Europeans constructed entities that they ensured (wittingly or not) would remain ungovernable by anyone but themselves.

Second, they drew borders in such a way as to slice through and weaken various peoples. Sometimes they did this deliberately and split numerically large tribes among multiple countries, thereby relegating them to minority status in marginal areas remote from capital cities—like the Tuareg, divided among five-plus countries today. But even more pernicious than how borders were used to divide people is how borders came to contain peoples, plural.

Most of Africa’s 54 countries are home to multiple tribes, in each one of which members remain duty-bound to preferentially look out for one another. Again, colonialism didn’t create these divisions any more than Christianity or Islam dissolved them. What colonialism did was turbo-charge them, especially since virtually every former colony inherited a Western-style government, complete with a capital city and an overarching (not decentralized) administration. The soon-to-be-independent states were also bequeathed the trappings of “electoral democracy,” which further guaranteed that governance—and who might gain control over the levers of power and government coffers—would be a zero-sum contest.

Because democracy asks voters to elect the candidates who we think will best represent us (as in those who will most closely promote our interests), it should come as no surprise that tribal ties were easily repurposed in Africa, particularly once it became clear who wouldn’t look out for voters’ interests: namely, politicians from other tribes at the national level, and from other clans or lineages more locally.

To this day, tribal demographics make it easy to predict who is likely to win in a national contest or, if not win outright, who is destined to lose. Separately, this helps explain the frequency of coups as an alternative means of attaining power, and why authoritarian leaders invest so much energy in rigging the system when they come from minority groups. But then, combine with demographic realities the unshakeable moral imperative that you are either in my moral universe or you are not, and electoral democracy becomes not just a charade but an obstruction. We see instances of evenly sized tribes (or coalitions) swapping power on occasion, but systemic change will never be forthcoming from within the electoral framework itself.

This observation has huge practical implications. The moral imperative of tribes means that anything that threatens to atomize tribes and turn individuated members into independent citizens is bound to lead to conflict, not only because it poses a direct threat to those in power but because any such effort will be construed and received as tribally (and thus both individually and collectively) morally imperiling.

As for those rare individuals who try to buck the system, who seek to behave more nationally and less tribally, they face a different impossible challenge: to somehow earn trust from those they aren’t related to while still fulfilling the moral imperative of keeping faith with kin.

In other words, the decks are totally stacked. If we were honest, this should lead us to admit that it is democracy that is locking citizens into a system that is incapable of providing them with security (in all senses of that word). Nor does this only hold for sub-Saharan Africa. The same can be said for numerous places where tribes persist.

Back to Us

We, on the other hand, have been spared having to worry about the integrity of whatever groups we belong to. Our system of governance has also been constructed in such a way as to liberate us from having to worry about preserving social harmony among ourselves. This, after all, is what we have a justice system for. We have courts, lawyers, police, and jails, which we need, for better or worse, since virtually all parts of our collective life are predicated on competition, the antithesis of harmony.

Think about it: We cooperate in the face of crisis; otherwise, we contend. Even in disasters, as soon as the triage phase begins to subside, we quibble and engage in finger-pointing. Truth be told, there isn’t much that we don’t turn into a contest: from box office receipts to beauty pageants to sporting events to politics.

One might think, when it comes to politics, that at least principles would offer us something steadfast to latch onto. But it turns out that everything having to do with politics is mutable. Take President Trump. His election demonstrates this in spades. His candidacy cross cut all sorts of affiliations, and his presidency continues to scramble ideological alignments. Thus, no matter how divided we think we are, red versus blue is not all that meaningful. It turns out our labels really don’t lock us in, certainly not in ways that resemble “identity politics” elsewhere.

The truth is that virtually nothing snares us in identities or obligations we can’t escape. Without question, some Americans end up more trapped than others—namely, the poor. But the fact that the poor often marry (and/or have children) across racial, religious, ethnic, political, and other lines means class is not congealing with other identities. Again, for us to tribalize, this would have to happen. Then, our fused identities would have to stay fused. Then, they would need to be reproduced in their entirety over the course of several generations.

This most definitely does not describe us, with our ever-shifting, endlessly expansive means of defining and re-defining ourselves. Or, to cite two final sets of attributes that should put to rest the notion that we Americans are tribalizing in the ways so many pundits suggest: Look at how wedded we are to change, impermanence, and individual autonomy. Everything about our system makes flightiness and dissociation easy (arguably too easy). Moreover, our social contract is with a welter of bureaucracies, not with specific other people.

Of course, what should be equally obvious when we look at tribes and then iteratively at ourselves is that the very institutions that prevent tribalism from taking root in the United States are exactly the structures that prevent our system from working effectively where the underlay is tribal. In countries where webs of social relations are paramount, and where people need them to remain paramount, something other than our brand of “one man/one vote” democracy, or our version of bureaucracy, is required.

Unfortunately, because no one thought hard enough more than half a century ago about the kinds of political arrangements or forms of representative government that might best accommodate tribes, it will take hard thinking and a radical reset now both to come up with formulations that can help repair the damage done and to prevent further injury. And though it should not be up to us in the West to weigh in on what these new socio-political forms might be, nothing we attempt to assist with where tribes exist will improve life sufficiently for those we say we care about—or mitigate threats to us—until more people in Washington and other donor capitals “get” tribes. Again, this is true not just across Africa, but also the Middle East, Central Asia, and beyond. And it is also true regardless of whatever forms of power we apply: hard, sweet, soft, or so-called smart power.

This is because the challenges tribes raise are moral. And while none of the incompatibilities identified here prevent us from being able to co-exist—after all, tribes have co-existed with each other and with the West for millennia—moral differences do run deeper than others. We need to understand this, too.

The post Getting Tribal appeared first on The American Interest.

Has the Assad Regime “Won” Syria’s Civil War?

President Bashar al-Assad has said about Syria’s bloody civil war that “things now are moving in the right direction” and that “the worst is behind us.” Senior officials from Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and the UN and former U.S. diplomats have gone even further, proclaiming Assad the victor and urging rebel groups and the U.S. government to reconcile with this unpalatable “reality.” An analysis of regional conflict dynamics, however, reveals a more complicated picture, which indicates that Syria’s agony may be far from over, and that its military gains may be more tenuous than they appear.

Consolidating Victory with Insufficient Forces

Pro-regime forces now control more than 50 percent of Syria’s territory and between one-half and two-thirds of its population. Yet the regime’s hold on many areas remains uncertain due to a lack of loyal and competent troops and institutional capacity. While pro-regime forces have been able to “clear” many areas they have retaken, they are overstretched, so it remains to be seen whether they can “hold” them. (Indeed, ISIS has recently mounted stinging attacks in areas—like Palmyra and Deir al-Zor—that have been repeatedly “cleared” by pro-regime forces.) The transfer of rebel fighters and their families from recaptured areas to Idlib or Deraa provinces—as part of so-called reconciliation agreements that are in fact anything but—will facilitate this clearing task, but pro-regime forces could still face renewed armed resistance in these areas from a new generation of oppositionists. And as long as U.S. forces remain in and over northeastern Syria, they can veto the regime’s reconquest of that part of the country—which includes some of its most productive oil-producing and agricultural regions.

The Syrian Army has perhaps 10,000-20,000 troops available for offensive operations throughout the country. These are drawn mainly from the 4th Armored Division, the Republican Guard, the Tiger Force, and elements of the National Defense Forces (NDF). The rest of the Syrian Army—including the remnants of several regular Army divisions, most of the NDF, the recently formed IVth and Vth Corps, the Local Defense Forces (consisting of various pro-regime militias), and the regime’s intelligence services—totals perhaps 100,000-150,000 men under arms. Many are poorly trained conscripts and volunteers of all ages, as well as militia auxiliaries responsible for local security in regime-controlled areas. They cannot be relied on for operations outside their home regions.

Much of the regime’s offensive combat power is provided by fighters from the Lebanese Hezbollah (6,000-8,000 fighters), Iran (2,000 fighters), Shi‘a fighters from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (10,000-20,000 fighters), and a relatively small Russian ground and air contingent. Pro-regime forces have been able to tap large reserves of Shi‘a foreign fighters to support their efforts—while the flow of anti-regime Sunni foreign fighters has been reduced to a trickle as the result of tighter border controls and ISIS’s battlefield defeats. Moreover, many areas are currently controlled by foreign pro-regime forces, as well as “reconciled” rebel groups and tribes whose loyalty to the regime is conditional. Should these foreign pro-regime forces and fighters need to return to their places of origin, or should reconciled rebel groups and tribes switch sides once again, the regime would be hard pressed to hold on to many of the areas it currently controls. Moreover, Lebanese Hezbollah must balance its desire to draw down its presence in Syria and return its fighters to Lebanon with the ongoing need for them to remain in Syria.

A rule of thumb used by military planners states that 20 troops per 1,000 civilians are required for stability operations. This would equate to a force of 200,000-240,000 for the regime to dominate the 10-12 million people now reportedly living in areas it more or less controls. That is considerably more than pro-regime forces currently have at their disposal. But after seven years of war, rebel forces are depleted and exhausted too—and about as divided among themselves as ever. Indeed in most places they may no longer be capable of sustained resistance.

Moreover, pro-regime forces have consistently acted with greater unity of purpose. They have benefitted from the intense asabiyya (in-group solidarity) of the Alawi community and its allies—including Shi‘a, Christian, and a smattering of Sunni supporters of the regime—as well as from the degree to which the interests of Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia in Syria have been aligned. By contrast, the diverse local asabiyyas of the opposition and the competing agendas of their various foreign supporters have deepened the opposition’s fragmentation. These tendencies have been further exacerbated by the predatory and fratricidal inclinations of the salafi and jihadi groups fighting the regime, which have frequently led to internecine bloodletting in opposition ranks. Pro-regime forces may therefore be able to hold on to most of what they have retaken from the rebels—at least for now.

Iran, moreover, has never committed more than a fraction of a percent of its 450,000-man ground force to the fight in Syria (this total includes 100,000 in the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, or IRGC, and 350,000 in the Artesh, or regular Army). Likewise, it has never dispatched more than the minimum necessary number of fighters to keep Assad in power—so it is far from “tapped out” in terms of its ability to assist the regime.

Furthermore, IRGC advisers and fighters in Syria have been fairly risk tolerant, while decision-makers in Tehran have been consistently risk averse. If the IRGC were to gain a bigger say in decision-making in Tehran, Iran might send additional forces to Syria to enable the Assad regime to finish off its domestic enemies—although that, in turn, might generate backlash by Iranians opposed to their country’s role in Syria. The U.S. government should therefore not be surprised if Iran further reinforces its position in Syria—as it did in September 2015, when it conducted a brief military surge in conjunction with Russia’s intervention there to help repel a rebel offensive that threatened the Assad regime’s survival.

Civil War Dynamics

The Assad regime will face several additional challenges that have been identified in the academic literature on civil wars. First, countries that have endured civil war are much more likely to suffer a relapse. Syria is a case in point: It experienced a protracted antiregime insurrection by the Muslim Brotherhood from 1976-1982, so it is now enduring its second civil war. Other regional states have endured serial insurgencies, uprisings, and civil wars as well, including Yemen (1962-70, 1994, 2004-present) and Iraq (1961-70, 1974-1975, 2006-2010, 2014-2017). Other regional states that have experienced civil wars include Jordan (1970-71), Lebanon (1975-1990), and Algeria (1991-2002). Many Lebanese and Jordanians worry that regional tensions will again destabilize their countries.

Second, civil wars that end in an outright military victory by one side are less likely to lead to renewed conflict than settlements that leave significant military capabilities intact. It is not clear whether the Assad regime can achieve an outright victory; rebel enclaves remain in Idlib and Deraa provinces and in Kurdish-controlled areas in the country’s northeast, and some of these areas are protected by foreign powers. Moreover, it is not clear whether the regime’s victories will bring about a period of prolonged quiet, as occurred after the scorched-earth victories scored by Syria in Hama (1982) and Russia in Grozny (1999-2000), or whether it will resemble Iraq’s unconsummated victory over al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) from 2007-11, which paved the way for its return as ISIS in 2013-14 in response to heavy-handed regime policies.

The outcome in Syria, as elsewhere, will depend in part on the degree to which the Syrian people are exhausted and accept defeat, and on the effectiveness of the regime’s internal security apparatus. Even in areas controlled by the regime, its “victory” may be incomplete; while some areas may be quiescent, others may remain troublesome. Moreover, the Turkish government’s use of elements of the anti-regime Free Syrian Army in its fight against the Syrian Kurdish PYD (Democratic Union Party) in northwest Syria ensures the survival of at least part of the anti-Assad opposition.

Finally, experience has shown that it is much harder to stabilize a fragile state if its neighbors work to thwart these efforts. The best proof of this is the American inability to stabilize Afghanistan since November 2001 as a result of support and safe haven provided by Pakistan to the Afghan Taliban, and the difficulty the U.S. military had in stabilizing Iraq after 2003 in the face of Syrian and Iranian efforts to the contrary. At present, none of Syria’s neighbors are actively working to destabilize it; should this change, it could greatly complicate regime efforts to pacify the country. Conversely, a deterioration in the security situation in any of Syria’s neighbors could have adverse consequences for it, as well; for instance, the revival of ISIS in Iraq could catalyze its return in strength to Syria.

Regional Conflict Dynamics

The future of Syria’s civil war is likely to be shaped by the action-reaction dynamic that has often led to pendulum-like swings of the regional balance-of-power, as well as the kind of great power interventions that have shaped other recent Middle Eastern conflicts. These have ensured that: 1) military victories are often ephemeral and are frequently undone by the very socio-political forces they unleash; 2) wars have often produced unintended consequences as vexing as the problems they were meant to resolve, and; 3) wars are rarely definitive; more often than not, one conflagration sooner or later leads to another.

Thus, following Israel’s stunning victory in the June 1967 war, Egypt—which was rapidly rearmed by the Soviet Union—launched the 1968-70 Egypt-Israel War of Attrition. The 1967 war also spurred the rise of the Palestinian guerilla organizations, paving the way for civil wars in Jordan (1970–71) and Lebanon (1975–90). The October 1973 Arab-Israeli war—launched to undo the consequences of the 1967 war—made the Egypt-Israel peace treaty (1979) possible, but it also led to a petrodollar-fueled Iraqi military buildup that enabled its invasion of Iran in 1980 and the costly eight-year war that followed.

The Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) ended in a draw, but with Iraq claiming victory. Iraq tried to deal with the more than $100 billion in external debt it racked up during the war by invading Kuwait (1990) and seizing its oil reserves, putting it on a collision course with the United States. The 1991 liberation of Kuwait by a U.S.-led coalition marked the high point in U.S. fortunes in the Middle East, but within a few short years U.S. sanctions on and containment of Iraq engendered an anti-American backlash in much of the region. Moreover, the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia to enforce the southern no-fly zone in Iraq helped stimulate the rise of al-Qaeda, which later carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, leading in turn to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003).

The botched aftermath of the invasion of Iraq gave rise to AQI and a Sunni-Shi‘a civil war, contributing to the sectarian polarization of Iraq, and then the region. Ironically, the support network that the Assad regime established in Syria to support Sunni jihadis fighting U.S. forces in Iraq subsequently joined, and then led, the rebellion against the regime. Moreover, America’s post-2011 disengagement from the region led its Turkish and Gulf allies to support some of the extremist groups fighting the Assad regime, and facilitated the emergence of ISIS. It also opened the door for Russia’s return to the region.

Syria’s civil war has already spun off a host of destabilizing consequences for the region and beyond, and it may yet give rise to additional conflicts. Indeed, while Syria’s civil war is still not over, the “wars after the war” have already begun, with Turks fighting Syrian Kurds, the U.S. clashing intermittently with pro-regime and Syrian forces, and Israel involved in an escalating if still peripheral conflict with Iran. Clashes between Turks and Syrian Kurds would likely expand and intensify if the United States withdrew its 2,000 troops from northeastern Syria. And the return of pro-regime forces to Sunni majority regions, especially in tandem with a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, could catalyze a comeback by ISIS.

The potential for conflict is further increased by the newfound confidence of the Assad regime and its Hezbollah and Iranian allies. Syria is likely to once again use chemical weapons, perhaps prompting new U.S. strikes to enforce its red line. And just as the defeat of the Soviets by the Afghan mujaheddin spawned a generation of Sunni jihadis in search of additional victories, the victories of the Shi‘a jihadists of the “Axis of Resistance” in Lebanon (2000), Iraq (2011), and Syria (2015-present) may lead Hezbollah and Iran—intent on transforming Syria into a platform for projecting power in the Levant, and for continuing the struggle against Israel—to overreach in their interactions with Israel or the United States. Finally, in a part of the world that is 75 percent Sunni Arab, it is hard to believe that this expanded Iranian role will be accepted forever; rather, it is a formula for enduring instability.

Regime Dynamics

Believing that the worst of Syria’s civil war is behind them, tensions and divisions within the regime could also come to the fore. The civil war has created new regime security counter-elites in the Tiger Force, the National Defense Forces, and the Local Defense Forces, and commanders in these organizations may demand a greater share of the spoils of war and of governing what is left of Syria. The ever-present potential for internecine violence among the regime’s thuggish security elite could intensify —especially if Assad and Iran drag Syria into a ruinous war with Israel that results in heavy losses to pro-regime forces.

Syria’s security elite has closed ranks and generally avoided self-destructive violence throughout the civil war, though this group has always been riven by personal, family, tribal, and regional tensions and rivalries. Perhaps the most relevant precedent was the crisis that followed Syria’s previous civil war, which occurred after former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad suffered a heart attack in late 1983. Fearing a coup by the President’s younger brother Rifaat, who commanded the regime’s premier praetorian unit—which had played a central role in suppressing the 1976-82 insurrection—key army officers ordered their units to occupy blocking positions in and around Damascus to thwart a power grab. The resulting military standoff was defused only when the elder Assad recovered, leading to Rifaat’s exile and the disbanding of the military units and militias under his command.

This brief assessment of Syria’s civil war yields several conclusions.

First, Syria’s civil war is probably not over. The return of pro-regime forces to Sunni-majority areas may spur renewed resistance, while ongoing conflicts between Turks and Kurds, Israel and Iran, and the United States and the Assad regime may interact or escalate in unforeseeable ways. Thus, the Turkish invasion of the town of Afrin in northwestern Syria has drawn Kurdish fighters away from the fight against ISIS in the east, hobbling military operations there. Likewise, a war between Israel and Iran (and perhaps Hezbollah) might inflict major damage on pro-regime forces, loosening their grip over territories retaken from rebel forces, thus granting the opposition a new lease on life.

The factors that have often made it so difficult for the United States and its allies to consolidate military victories in the Middle East may also make it difficult for America’s adversaries to do so, presenting Washington with opportunities to work with allies to undermine or roll back these military gains. Such coalitions are not self-organizing, however: To do this, the United States would need to work with local partners against their common adversaries, just as it did with respect to the Soviet Union in the Middle East in the 1970s and in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Thus, in Syria, overstretched pro-regime forces reliant on exposed lines of communication that run through majority-Sunni regions are vulnerable to a covert, cost-imposing strategy using guerilla proxies to prevent the Assad regime from consolidating its gains. And now that Tehran’s entanglement in Syria has become a political issue in Iran, it is a source of Iranian regime vulnerability—especially if the costs of its intervention were to rise, and if a deteriorating economic situation back home were to force Tehran to cut back on the billions of dollars in annual economic aid that helps keep the Assad regime afloat.

Such a strategy might also tie down pro-regime forces in Syria, limiting their ability to threaten areas that remain outside of regime control, to produce new destabilizing mass refugee flows, and to make trouble elsewhere in the region. This strategy’s appeal is that the bar for success is relatively low: It is much easier to be a spoiler than it is to create a stable, sustainable political order (as the United States has learned, to its chagrin, in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Renewed resistance to pro-regime forces in areas retaken by the latter could also provide additional opportunities for the United States to shape developments in Syria and to pursue a proxy strategy there. Indeed, relatively modest past programs to arm rebel forces with antitank missiles and other forms of military assistance succeeded in blunting regime offensives and fueling rebel offensives (though current conditions may not favor a revitalized effort). Should the U.S. government eschew this option, the next generation of rebels will likely once again gravitate toward extremist groups like ISIS and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an outgrowth of al-Qaeda’s former local affiliate. In this way, fighting ISIS and countering Iranian influence are complementary rather than conflicting goals.

While efforts to shape the conflict and impose costs on pro-regime forces may lack the appeal of international diplomacy to end Syria’s civil war, negotiations will not bear fruit as long as pro-regime forces believe there is a military solution to the conflict and Washington lacks military leverage over the regime. The evolving dynamic in Syria provides the Trump Administration with new opportunities—if it will only seize them—to deter or prevent additional regime offensives, mass refugee flows, and destabilizing regional wars in a part of the world that, like it or not, is still of critical importance to the United States.

The post Has the Assad Regime “Won” Syria’s Civil War? appeared first on The American Interest.