Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 97

Revisiting Hofstadter’s Populism

Perhaps no work of U.S. history published during the middle years of the 20th century remains more widely read—and more widely maligned—than Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Age of Reform aimed to assess the political lineage of turn-of-the-19th-century radical and reformist impulses that had, as Hofstadter saw it, both presaged and ultimately culminated in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. In particular, Hofstadter was interested in assessing the relative legacies and impact of the so-called Populist movement, led by farmers and centered on the Agrarian Party of the late-19th century, versus the Progressive movement, whose heyday Hofstadter dated to the first two decades of the 20th century, led primarily by urban elites.

The book is perhaps most famous (or notorious) for its depiction of the Populists. In a tone of condescending sympathy Hofstadter represented the Populists as atavistic losers in the process of modernization, quixotically aiming to turn back the clock of history to a simpler time when farmers had supposedly retained a modicum of independence from city life.

As in Arlie Hochschild’s recent sociological account of Trump supporters in rural Louisiana, Hofstadter was not unsympathetic to the socioeconomic plight of those who supported the Populists: “Any account of the fallibility of Populist thinking that does not acknowledge the stress and suffering out of which that thinking emerged will be seriously remiss,” he averred. But if their suffering was real, the Populists were also emblematic of two other, more malign political phenomena that would become Hofstadter’s signature historiographical concepts, namely, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (the title of Hofstadter’s 1963 book that won him his second Pulitzer) and “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (the title of a famous 1964 essay in Harper’s magazine). Hofstadter depicted the agrarian reformers of the Midwest and South as afflicted by irrational resentments, drawn to a politics of Mythos (specifically, what Hofstadter referred to as “the Agrarian myth”) over Logos. “To discuss the broad ideology of the populists does them some injustice,” Hofstadter wrote, explaining that it was “in their more general picture of the world that they were most credulous and vulnerable.” If Hofstadter’s book was subtle enough to recognize the political ambiguities of the original Agrarian Party, in the end there was no doubt where his sympathies lay.

Hofstadter’s representation of the historical Populists emerged out of his own concerns about populism as a general political phenomenon in his own time, as well as the political experiences of the 1930s. For mid-century liberals like Hofstadter, populism meant the street level of mobilizations of Italian fascism, the torch-lit rallies of Nazi Germany, and the malevolent crowds of the anti-New Deal America First movement. While mid-century liberals acknowledged the existence of “Left” versions of populism, like Louisiana’s Huey Long, these were hardly more encouraging from their perspective. Reflecting the deep suspicion of mass politics that pervaded what his good friend Arthur Schlesinger called “vital center” liberalism, Hofstadter and his fellow postwar intellectual elites basically regarded populism as anathema.

If Hofstadter considered the Populists to be a warning about “the ugly potential of frustrated popular revolt,” he looked with favor on the reformers of the Progressive movement, who in his interpretation had taken the best of the ideas of the Populists while rejecting the irrationalism and politics of resentment. Here, too, Hofstadter’s historical interpretation reflected the contemporary political commitments of postwar liberals. If populism as a general political phenomenon was a byword for the wrong sort of politics, anti-Communist liberals at the apogee of their mid-century technocratic self-confidence believed that “the right kind of revolution” would be elite-led and technocratic—precisely what Hofstadter believed he saw foreshadowed in the Progressive movement, with its commitment to scientific management, evidence-based public policy, credentialing and professionalization, education as a mode of social control, and the idea of best practices (then called “one best system”). Progressivism understood thusly had culminated in the New Deal, Hofstadter suggested, and the technocratic form of democracy that had emerged represented a Cold War-ready fighting faith.

To put it mildly, Hofstadter’s thesis about the original American Populists has not fared well among academic historians. Over the past four decades, several alternative interpretations of the historical Populists have emerged. Arguably, however, each of these interpretations has reflected the contemporary political commitments of their authors at least as much as Hofstadter’s did his. Consider three prominent examples in which we see a scholar re-describing the historical Populists as a means for creating a “useable past” for his preferred form of contemporary politics.

The beginning of the revisionist accounts is usually attributed to Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment (1978). Goodwyn argued that the original Populists were not simply resentful losers of the modernization process but instead represented a movement of democratic promise. These were forward-looking radicals seeking a democratized industrial system and a transformation of social values in order to help the individual protect his humanity as his autonomy slipped away from him in a rapidly industrializing society. Like the popular movements of the 1960s, Populism was important less for its programs and organizations than for its “actions” in bringing thousands of ordinary citizens in contact with each other in what Goodwyn described as “a self-generated culture of collective dignity and individual longing.” As a movement “it was expansive, passionate, flawed, creative—above all, enhancing in its assertion of human striving.” Here was an interpretation of Populism suitable for the New Age politics of the 1970s.

Michael Kazin’s Populist Persuasion (1995) extended and generalized Goodwyn’s favorable assessment of the original Populists. Kazin proffered the original Populists as the first salvo in a century-long sequence of historical episodes of “patriotic Americanism” in which a nation of hardworking producers, independent and self-reliant, stood up against an economically parasitic elite forever threatening to exploit them by undermining the democratic system. For Kazin, a former leader of the Harvard Students for a Democratic Society and chastened former member of the Weatherman faction, populism as a transhistorical phenomenon represented above all an authentically American form of democratic leftism, one uniquely capable of holding the feet of feckless, centrist liberals to the fire of economic egalitarianism. Here was a version of the Populists well suited for critiquing the neoliberal inclinations, or compromises, of the Clinton years.

Finally, in The Populist Vision (2007) Charles Postel took direct aim at Hofstadter’s account of the original Populists as resentful, backward-looking losers in the process of modernization, asserting that the Populists were not ignorant, traditionalistic farmers, but well-connected commercially and intellectually to the wider world. Rather than backward-looking yokels, these Populists were simply looking to ensure that as the world changed around them, it would retain a place for their own forms of localism and solidarity. In Postel’s view, writing on the eve of the financial crisis, the original Populists were critics avant la lettre of globalized and financialized capitalism. Here was a version of Populism suitable for contemporary (Left) movements favoring “local and sustainable” forms of economic association. 

Whatever we make of this intramural debate among historians about the original Populist Party, there is no denying the clarity and contemporary relevance of Hofstadter’s understanding of populism as a general political phenomenon. Even if Hofstadter’s interpretation of the historical Populists is debatable, it is clear that he was right about one essential theoretical point regarding populism as a general phenomenon: that it is fundamentally about political style and reaction. Just as some film critics observe that film noir is less a genre in itself than a set of formal techniques and stylistic elements that can attach themselves to genres ranging from comedy to science fiction, so populism is not about a particular ideology as it is a set of political tropes and modes of expression that can attach themselves to a variety of ideologies, from far Left to far Right.

We don’t have to buy into Hofstadter’s modernization theory-driven account of the original Populists as disgruntled losers in the process of modernization to nonetheless recognize that populism as a form of political practice represents something dangerous to the effective functioning of technologically advanced and organizationally complex modes of collective organization. Hofstadter wrote in the wake of fascism, with the memories of Father Coughlin and Huey Long still warm, with communism on the march, and with the then-present example of Joseph McCarthy to hand: All these gave him good reason to defend the small-l liberal values of rationality, scientific inquiry and the ideal of a deliberative politics led by responsible, self-abnegating elites.

Rereading Hofstadter today, we can recognize that our present generation of elites has failed without accepting the populist view that non-elites possess some political virtue or social insight that elites qua elites lack. Today, in the age of Donald Trump and Brexit, in a time of the Italian Five Star Movement, in a moment where we see the repression that flows from populist politics in Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Recip Erdogan’s Turkey, these sunnily positive takes on populism once again see a bit naive. Might it be a time for counter-revisionism?

What defines populism as a general political phenomenon? In my view, three fundamental features are key:

Appeals to the people: Populists invariably point to the wisdom and virtue of the “true” people (while sometimes conceding that the people have been corrupted or enfeebled) as opposed to the perfidy of elites and outsiders. These appeals are almost always anti-institutional, often conflating elites with the institutions that house them. Which elites populists are against can vary dramatically, however.
Grievance rather than program: Populists are generally far more articulate and passionate about what they’re against than what they’re for. It’s not that populists never have programs. It’s just that the programs are not the essence of their appeal. The essence of their appeal is a protest against a system and elites who are failing the people.
Experience over knowledge: There’s no such thing as a populist intellectual, or a populist scientist, or a populist expert. What people see with their own eyes is accorded higher value than whatever the pettifogging facts that the bean-counters may trot out.

Because of these general features, the political significance of populists depends above all on the array of power they position themselves against. The only common feature of populism is a general (and always highly passionate) sense that the masses are more virtuous than “the elites.”

So anti-elitism is the essence of populism, but populists are often mercurial about which “elites” they are angry at. Is it union-busting industrialists? Wall Street bankers? College professors? K-Street lobbyists? Prep school snot-noses? Jews? Other usual suspects? Of course, in a pluralist society—that is, one in which different elite factions are not unified but compete with one another—the political meaning and impact of any given populism varies dramatically depending on which elites are the subject of attack. Thus, to take a U.S. example, an attack on “Jews” feels (to the elite commentariat) like a very different thing than an attack on “bankers.”

The targets that populists choose may shift (often rapidly); they are uncommitted (indeed, often hostile) to intellectual consistency; they have instincts and interests, but no real ideology; and they regard institutionalization and rule-making with suspicion—which is one reason you don’t meet a lot of populist lawyers. This makes populists easily subject to manipulation, and inherently volatile. We only need to look at Trump’s Twitter outbursts in response to Fox and Friends to get a sense of what all this looks like.

This creates strategic communications ambiguities, and demagogic opportunities. Consider the attack on Washington “swamp dwellers”: Some heard in this an attack on K-Street lobbyists and politicians in safely gerrymandered seats, when Trump’s fans understand him to be attacking “the tyranny of so-called government experts.” But that is an elite perspective. From the point of view of a non-elite subscriber to “populism,” all these various elites are noxious in their own ways, and which one hates most at any given moment has mainly to do with which of them seems to be winning most, and most unfairly. Thus, after the 2008 financial crisis/bailout, populist ire turned above all against Wall Street and to a lesser extent corporate elites (something Obama ran on but largely failed to do anything about).

But by now, ten years after the Lehman Brothers meltdown, the most common configuration is for populism and nationalism and the Right to be fairly aligned. The Left-populism of Occupy Wall Street has given way to the Right-populism of the Tea Party, which roiled and then hollowed out the Republican Party sufficiently to enable the Trump hostile takeover. Populist ire has turned against the elites who seem to have thrived even as much of the rest of the country stagnated: The coastal regions whose incomes have skyrocketed amid national stagnation; monopolistic but bien pensant tech companies; and so forth.

Unlike more ideologically rooted political movements and factions—like liberalism, conservatism, or socialism—that have traditionally been defined primarily around distributional issues or the proper relationship between church and state, the forms of politics that get labeled “populism” are what Cas Mudde calls ideologically “thin”—that is, defined more by the fervency of their oppositions and resentments than by the consistency of their programmatic solutions.

This thinness is one reason why voters who support so-called populists often seem particularly likely to “swing” in elections—for example, former strongholds of the French Communist Party swinging to vote for Jean-Marie LePen; AfD’s strength in the former East Germany; Italian ex-fascists joining the Five Star Movement; nearly ten million 2012 Obama voters pulling for Trump in 2016; and if one likes a bit of pre-war history, the avidity with which Left unions in Weimar Germany vaulted overnight into the Nazi camp. In the United States, a registered Democrat in 2016 whose defining political passion was hatred for corrupt self-dealing government insiders could quite naturally swing from voting for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary to Donald Trump in the general election.

To understand populism, one needs to analyze both the form and the content of politics seriously, and not treat one side of this as more “serious” than the other. “Low information voters” are a real thing, and what motivates them politically needs to be taken seriously. This is a difficult thing to grasp for people who consider politics as basically being about “policy” (technocrats, experts, wonks, intellectuals, and the like).

For many people, political choices are less about policy specifics than about expression and identity. When you hear Trump’s most fervent fans explain why they like him, it’s often precisely what makes elites cringe: his style. Aesthetics aside, this explains why Trump doesn’t get held accountable for his failure to deliver on the policy agenda he campaigned on: because that’s not why his fans voted for him, anyways. He may or may not deliver an Obamacare replacement, repeal NAFTA, build the Wall or do anything about the opioid epidemic “carnage”—but you know for sure he agrees with you about Mexicans, and he sure knows how to troll the Libtards!

Generalizing from the Agrarian party, Hofstadter noted that as a general matter populism appeals

to those who have attained only a low level of education, whose access to information is poor, and who are so completely shut out from access to centers of power that they feel themselves completely deprived of self-defense and subjected to unlimited manipulation by those who wield power. . . .  One finds in Populist literature as well as among their agitators the following: the conception of history as conspiracy; an obsessive concern with the fabulous enjoyments deemed to be the lot of the plutocrats; cynicism about the two party system; the notion that the world is moving toward an immense apocalypse; the exclusive attention to the greed and other personal vices of bankers and other selected plutocrats, as opposed to structural analysis of the social system; anti-Semitism and xenophobia; the appeal to the native simplicity and virtue of the folk. . . . There are, moreover, certain types of popular movements of dissent that offer special opportunities to agitators with paranoid tendencies, who are able to make a vocational asset out of the psychic disturbances. Such persons have an opportunity to impose their own style of thought upon the movements they lead . . .

Reading this passage, many of these features bear uncanny resemblances to our own contemporary populists, not least those who believe in the existence of a supposed “Deep State.”

But there is also one crucial exception: A central feature of the older, historical populism that the Trumpian version has dropped (for obvious reasons) is the hatred of plutocrats. For the original Populists, hatred of financial capitalism and big business was axiomatic; by contrast, what is most historically distinctive about today’s American populism is that the movement is led by a playboy New York real estate developer and golf course magnate, who is backed by the wealth of other plutocrats, such as the Kochs, the Mercers, Peter Thiel, and Sheldon Adelson. More than anything, it is this alliance of populism with money that distinguishes (the success of) of our current crop of populists from (the political failures of) the original variety.

But perhaps this also points to an opportunity for those who oppose Trump politically: because in trying to drop the anti-plutocratic dimension of populism, Trump has left open the door for a different sort of populist politics: one rooted in a critique of not just of the lifestyles of plutocrats but of plutocracy as a social and political system. Indeed, we need only look at the surprising appeal that Bernie Sanders had in the 2016 Democratic primary season to understand what such an anti-plutocratic form of populism might look like. Sanders himself may have been an imperfect vehicle for such a message and platform, but the kind of Democrat who can conjure the same sort of fervid popular political passion in the Democratic base as Trump does in the GOP base will very likely be one who extends Sanders’s themes and style.

The post Revisiting Hofstadter’s Populism appeared first on The American Interest.

The EU’s Looming Existential Choice

Recent months have provided no shortage of reasons to worry about the state of liberal democracy in Europe. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán coasted to re-election after a controversial campaign that deployed the full resources of the state—and no small amount of disturbing, dog-whistling rhetoric—to ensure his third consecutive term in power. In Poland, the government is continuing its standoff with the European Commission over the country’s judicial reforms, which are accused of threatening the rule of law. And as Freedom House’s latest survey makes clear, the trend toward illiberalism is hardly confined to Warsaw and Budapest alone: countries across the continent witnessed important gains by far-Right and extremist parties over the past year.

The concern is not merely that illiberal parties can win elections but that they will pursue the constitutional capture of the state once in power—as is happening in Hungary and Poland. This not only makes challenging their policies near impossible, but also skews the playing field to make it harder to remove them from office, or to undo their changes even if they were to lose an election. The rise of illiberal, Euroskeptic forces is also intimately connected to the worldwide resurgence of a kind of nationalism that values sovereignty above all else and rejects any outside influence on domestic politics.

So far, the European Union has been very slow and ineffective in responding to this challenge, but this is gradually changing. Remarkably for a contemporary European leader, French President Emmanuel Macron tackled the issue head on last month in a speech to the European Parliament, where he warned of “a sort of European civil war” over values. Since these trends show no sign of reversing, the European Union should brace itself for more confrontations over the enforcement of its liberal democratic standards in the coming years. These clashes could redefine in a fundamental way what kind of union it really is—and even pose an existential choice for its members.

Liberalism, Democracy, and Sovereignty: The Growing Tension

For most of the 20th century, the existence of a radically different “other” in the form of communism and fascism helped bind Europe’s liberal and democratic instincts. The project that emerged after the Second World War was from its very start a liberal democratic one, born of a war that resulted in part from a failure of liberal institutions to contain the rise to power of Nazi and fascist movements. While the architects of the postwar order wanted to ensure that Europe would remain a continent of democracies, they also sought to constrain political power through the rule of law, impartially applied by independent institutions. As Jan-Werner Müller has put it, “Distrust of unrestrained popular sovereignty…[is] built into the DNA of postwar European politics.” It is not accidental that a potential uncoupling now takes the form of disputes over judicial matters rather than disputes over elections.

In Europe as elsewhere, recent political trends have exposed this fundamental tension between democracy and liberalism. Today’s populists and nationalists pursue politics in which the wishes of the majority are paramount and must not be denied by rules or institutions that protect the rights of the minority. Dissenters or critics of the alleged popular will are, at best, to be tolerated as long as they have little chance of gaining power; at worst, they are to be hounded and repressed. This kind of extreme majoritarianism directly challenges the underpinnings of the European Union, which is rooted in an attempt to make democracy and liberalism inseparable.

The illiberal movement also challenges post-Cold War assumptions about the inevitability of ever-deeper democratization and the impossibility of its reversal once countries become EU members. This is shown by the experience of some newer, post-communist members, which were arguably more vulnerable to backsliding given their decades-long legacy under an undemocratic system. But the trend is not exclusive to them, as the performance of illiberal and authoritarian-leaning parties in countries as diverse as Austria, France, Germany, Greece, or Italy shows.

The EU’s Impotence

The European Union is very poorly equipped to deal with these challenges, and its members are failing to enforce its liberal democratic values among themselves. Those that have publicly acknowledged the problem have so far outsourced it to the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, and the European Parliament. This outsourcing is the easiest, most non-committal course of action, acceptable to those governments that are influenced by solidarity among the European party “families.” The sympathy for Viktor Orbán within the conservative European People’s Party grouping, and especially with the two major German parties of the Right, is the most obvious example, though Europe’s left-wing parties have also tolerated abuses of democracy by their peers in other countries.

The Treaty of the European Union and the Copenhagen Criteria for applicants clearly require members to have liberal democratic systems, yet there are effectively no instruments to enforce this. Only Article 7 offers a path for reacting to a serious breach, culminating in the suspension of certain rights of the offending government. But there are no provisions for lower sanctions or for higher ones in the form of suspension of membership or expulsion. Meanwhile, Article 4.2 requires respecting the “national identities” of members “inherent in their fundamental structures, political and constitutional.” This allows accused governments to demand that EU institutions and members accept their domestic arrangements, and to argue that the EU treaties do not prescribe any single model of democracy.

In truth, however, EU treaties clearly set liberal parameters to the democracy required of members. The separateness of democracy from liberalism is clear in Article 2, which lists the former as just one of the European Union’s foundational values: “The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.”

There is nothing undemocratic about members of a supranational community wanting to change its standards. The problem for the European Union today arises when members refuse to adhere to already agreed-upon standards, before the community has decided to change them. The sovereignty argument is fundamentally disingenuous, as all members have freely and in their sovereign capacity signed up to the liberal democratic standards in EU treaties. Older members may conceivably argue that the community they joined evolved into something not originally intended (though this is not very convincing, since they signed up to each subsequent treaty evolution) but newer members joined in the full knowledge of the explicit requirements.

Although the EU establishment has reacted very slowly to the rise of illiberal and undemocratic forces, this is beginning to change as the threat crosses borders—as when Hungary directs its fire at international targets like the Central European University and George Soros, and the likes of Orbán openly tout their illiberalism as a model for others to emulate.

Consequently, the European Parliament has begun to criticize breaches of liberal democratic standards. In 2014, the European Commission adopted a framework to address systemic threats to democracy and the rule of law. It used this for the first time against the government of Poland for its changes to the judiciary, leading to the triggering of the Article 7 process this past December. Politicians on the Left and the Right have become more vocal in criticizing actions targeting civil society. Since Hungary’s elections, voices within the European People’s Party have taken a more critical position towards Orbán. Germany’s new Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, raised the issue of EU funds in reference to Poland’s judicial reforms during a recent visit there.

Prognosis: More of the Same

In the coming years, the European Union can expect more clashes between illiberal, sovereigntist governments and those that want to defend the liberal democratic status quo. In Hungary the re-elected Fidesz faces an opposition in utter disarray, and in Poland PiS retains strong popular backing. Elsewhere on the continent, recent elections in Italy and Austria hardly paint a picture of liberal values on the ascent. Further economic shocks or migration surges could well spur more support for illiberal, populist, and extremist parties.

Meanwhile, the limited steps taken by the European Union have had no great impact. Hungary’s government has engaged the European Commission in drawn-out dialogues about the legal technicalities of complying with EU standards, making minor concessions while proceeding with its overall concentration of state power. Orbán’s words during and since the elections strongly suggest that he will not change course. The government in Poland seems to have opted for an accelerated version of the Orbán playbook for the de-liberalization of the state, seeking to mollify the European Commission through never-ending dialogue.

At the same time, it is unlikely that the EU stakeholders that care will give up on their pushback. They may even try to step up the pressure on recalcitrant members, especially if violations become more brazen. This could include conditioning the receipt of EU funds on observance of democracy and rule-of-law standards. This year could also see the conclusion of the Article 7 process against the Polish government. Even if a unanimous verdict against Poland is highly unlikely, many members voting for a sanction would be a landmark moment.

The Illiberal Strategy

Despite their rhetoric, there is little to indicate that illiberal governments would seriously consider taking their countries out of the European Union if they are criticized or sanctioned. What they want is to have no limits placed by EU membership on how they choose to re-organize their countries’ politics. Hungary and Poland are already implementing a two-pronged strategy to achieve this end, which will serve as a model for others.

First, given the near impossibility of altering EU standards through treaty changes, illiberal governments will lobby for the rules to be interpreted and applied in a way more to their liking. They will work to change the EU discourse to one upholding sovereignty as the supreme value, while portraying themselves as the true defenders of democracy and interpreters of Europe’s “real” values. The Hungarian and Polish governments are already attempting such a rhetorical reframing. It is accompanied by a push to convince other members that EU unity is vital for dealing with Europe’s economic and security challenges, and thus should be put above any disagreement over political standards. This resonates with many EU members.

Second, the illiberal governments will go beyond relying on their individual veto power in EU decisions that require unanimity to build a non-interference coalition of members to protect themselves. Such a coalition, or even variable ad hoc ones, will be in a position to block any kind of sanctions that would need to be decided by qualified majority voting. The Fidesz and PiS governments are natural champions for such an approach, not only out of short-term self-interest but also because of ideological conviction. As Piotr Buras of the European Council on Foreign Relations argues, “the [PiS] government has sought to shape the future of the Union in a way that fits with its sovereigntist vision for the future.” The same applies for Orbán’s vision of an illiberal state, which requires not only repatriating more powers from Brussels, but also the European Union turning into a community organized along sovereignty principles.

An Existential Choice

If successful, this strategy will make it even less possible to enforce the European Union’s political standards. Those members that still adhere to the vision of a community of liberal democratic values may then be forced to accept that it will evolve toward some kind of “economic NATO” instead. But there is also a worst-case scenario, so far unlikely but not unthinkable, should such a division grow among members.

Since it is not possible to expel a member, and since on current evidence there is no strong prospect of members voting unanimously to sanction a peer under Article 7, a different “nuclear option” exists. This would see those that want a union of liberal democracies leaving so as to re-create a smaller union, more deeply integrated in terms of political standards. While this may appear inconceivable, the so-far fringe talk of a re-founding that sometimes simmers under the discussions about a “core” European Union could become part of the mainstream discussion if there are more years of clashes over liberal democracy.

Ultimately, the governments of Hungary and Poland, and those Europeans that share their views, are confronting EU members with a choice that none of them expected to make. If the trend towards more illiberalism and more sovereignty continues, all EU countries will have to ask themselves the uncomfortable question of whether liberal democratic values are the most important thing about the union, or whether it is more important to have the widest possible union that serves their economic and security purposes, even at the cost of downgrading those values. This is the existential choice that looms for the European Union as a supposed community of values: its members may have to choose what is most important to them—the community or the values.

The post The EU’s Looming Existential Choice appeared first on The American Interest.

The Faces of Cézanne

Cézanne Portraits

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

March 25–July 1, 2018

Paul Cézanne was prematurely bald, and impressively so. In the first room of the National Gallery of Art’s new exhibition “Cézanne Portraits,” the post-Impressionist master has applied his trademark honesty to his own image.

Painted when he was 36, Cézanne’s self-portrait is dominated by a smooth dome on the forward charge. It erupts from a low crown of dark hair, as if to lead his sunken features into battle. Daubs of gold, rose, and gray build momentum across the skull’s expanse, while a solid charcoal outline anchors its august volume. As far as depictions of baldness are concerned, it is strikingly forthright. When Rainer Maria Rilke saw the canvas, he noted that Cézanne had the “unquestioning, matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.”

For the first time since Cézanne’s death, the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC has set out to rehabilitate an often-overlooked corner of the artist’s oeuvre. Painted in the waning years of France’s second empire, the traveling collection of 60 paintings marks the largest grouping of Cézanne portraiture ever assembled, with the NGA the sole American venue. A joint project of the NGA, London’s National Portrait Gallery, and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the exhibition will travel on to Paris after completing its DC run in July. The exhibition’s chief curator is John Elderfield of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with Mary Morton from the NGA, and Xavier Rey, formerly of the Musee d’Orsay. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition, authored by the curators, is exceptionally engaging with a balance of formal analyses and explorations of Cézanne’s personal relationships.

Why has no museum attempted a major exhibition of Cézanne’s self-portraits in the last 108 years? The post-impressionist known for his vibrant fruit and sunbaked hills left a body of portraiture that might charitably be defined as “experimental.” Over a career spanning 44 years, Cézanne pursued many styles and techniques simultaneously. The challenges that plagued him early in his career—including mask-like faces, unseeing eyes, and ill-proportioned figures—are never fully resolved in his later canvases. Yet he did succeed in developing a highly original body of work that is striking in its earnestness. In Cézanne’s hands, portraiture did not enhance the sitter’s personal identity, but instead revealed his human dignity by stripping away all artifice.

While his artist peers were attempting to infuse natural landscapes with human sentiment, Cézanne was concerned with the inverse: how to endow the human form with the absoluteness and permanence of a mountain. At the time, his perspective on the human form made him an outlier. He abhorred the grand nobility of neoclassicists like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (going so far as to paint a mocking tribute to Ingres’ “Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne”), and never fully embraced the Impressionists with their heady celebration of life. Yet the century since his death has strengthened Cézanne’s unique legacy as one of the first painters to distill an object’s mass and volume as its key features. This approach brought a solidity and brilliance to his still lifes and landscapes, yet when applied to the human figure, yielded problematic results. Cézanne divorced his sitter’s physical form from their personality, an uncomfortable compromise for most. But as part of the settlement, the artist was able to focus fully on the physical form of his sitter, imbuing his portraits with an immediacy that is striking to this day.

To modern eyes that are saturated with the Snapchat aesthetic and its over-stylized filters (dog ears, anyone?) the exhibition is a restorative tonic for the senses. With bracing patches of color, minimal ornamentation, and frank honesty, Cézanne brings us back to a fundamental reality that is obscured in our hyper-ornamented and augmented daily lives.

Resolutely conventional in his personal views yet wildly inventive in how he conveyed them, Cézanne was the provincial outsider among the Impressionists. While Emile Zola remained a lifelong friend, Cézanne was less inclined to adopt the socially rebellious mannerisms of his peers. He exhibited in the 1863 Salon des Refuses, established by Napoleon III to exhibit the works rejected by the annual juried exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. And while he participated in several of the early Impressionist shows, later in life he submitted exclusively to the official Salon (a single painting was eventually accepted, a full-length portrait of his father on view at the National Gallery). While his peers catalogued the indulgences of modern life and café society, Cézanne complained of how the newly-installed street lamps ruined dusk. As other painters explored informal group portraits set in dance halls, Cézanne embraced a formal sitting pose in his studio. While Renoir and Monet were focusing their attention on beautiful models in fashionable dress, Cézanne painted his wife in the housedress she would never be caught wearing in public. As he aged, he became more committed to his Catholic faith and moved from Paris to his family estate in socially conservative, rural Provence.

From the beginning of Cézanne’s artistic career, he painted friends and family with a brave helping of indifference. Among the first to be pressed into service was Dominique Aubert, Cézanne’s maternal uncle, whose portraits fill the first room in the exhibition. Painted in 1866 when Cézanne was 27 years old and living with his family near Aix-en-Provence, each of the five portraits features Dominique’s glum visage, occasionally topped with a turban or Phrygian cap. The artist used a loaded painter’s trowel to lay down a thick impasto layer, with unblended streaks of color building a sense of frenzy and fluidity. In a letter to a friend, Cézanne notes that most of the Uncle portraits took him less than a day to complete. The youthful, unburdened energy of his early portraiture would shift to a more deliberate rhythm over his career. Cézanne’s art dealer Ambroise Vollard claimed that Cézanne required 115 portrait sittings, three hours each, to complete his portrait.

The young artist was unsparing in his depictions of Uncle Dominique, invariably pictured with a jutting lower lip and a bulbous nose. The series reveals a trend that is consistent across Cézanne’s portraiture—an objectivity that portraitists often spare their sitters. “Every time he paints one of his friends, it seems as though he were avenging himself for some hidden injury,” his friend Antony Valabrègue observed.

While Cézanne eschewed idealization, neither did he resort to the sharp-edged caricature popularized by Honoré Daumier and common at the time. Cézanne approached his uncle’s strong features as if they were elements of a composition, just as a still life might be composed of a pear, apple, and milk jug. And just as a milk jug rarely invites emotional judgment, Cézanne painted his uncle’s features with a purposeful acceptance that has its own quiet grace.

The raw objectivity of Cézanne’s developing style found a regular focus in his wife, Hortense Fiquet. A bookseller and part-time artist’s model, she was known as “the little dumpling” by Cézanne’s friends and “Queen Hortense” by his family. Theirs was a lifelong yet fraught relationship, resulting in one son and lasting 37 years until Cézanne’s death. A grouping of these portraits at the National Gallery provide an unrivaled opportunity to “read between the canvases” of Cézanne’s artistic method. With narrowed eyes, lips pressed tightly closed, and a body that might have been modeled on a sack of grain, Cézanne’s portraits of Hortense are inelegant at best. Yet Cézanne devoted an extraordinary amount of time to painting her, with 29 portraits over 30 years, nearly one-fifth of his total portraiture output.

In a series completed in the years before Cézanne’s first solo exhibition, Hortense is shown in a formal, seated pose, upright in a yellow chair with her hands resting in her lap. While her pose is the same in each portrait, her appearance varies, as if Cézanne emancipated her features from her personal identity. In a portrait on loan from the Fondation Beyeler, Hortense’s features are a patchwork of black, blue, and vermillion invoking the raw Fauvist style of generations of artists after Cézanne. In another portrait from that same period, on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, Cézanne uses a wildly different approach. Using subdued tones and brushwork, Cézanne gave Hortense the smooth features of a Noh mask, with narrowed eyes set into an oval form. In these portraits, Cézanne is experimenting with physicality and establishing a path that would lead future artists out of the tinted haze of Impressionism.

Cézanne depiction of Hortense’s rosacea, the most homely of details, provides a key to understanding his motivations. The skin condition endures across Cézanne’s many portraits of his wife. It’s a curious feature, one the artist could have omitted in favor of unblemished skin. Instead, Cézanne seems preoccupied with the challenge of cataloguing its many forms: a splash of vermillion on her cheek bone, or a crimson dash across her jawline. It was an elemental feature to study and to understand, not unlike the blush of an apple or the planes of his own bald head. In Cézanne’s hands, the rosacea adds a lively, beguiling element to the portraits, balancing the blue and yellow tones of her skin while echoing the rosy hue of her lips.

Like a dour Mona Lisa, Hortense’s enigmatic features reveal little to gallery viewers trying to understand Cézanne’s personal life. Art historian Susan Sidlauskas points out that Hortense’s “absence of beauty is matched by a pointed lack of [Cézanne’s] painterly virtuosity.” While the portraits may not be characterized by empathy, there is acceptance. Cézanne painted Hortense more frequently than any other individual, including himself. Despite the estrangement that marked the couple’s relationship, it is hard to deny the attentive focus and fascination with which Cézanne viewed his favorite sitter.

Cézanne embraced Hortense’s imperfections without the need to recast her as a paradigm of beauty, seduction, or morality. A rebellion against the strict conventions that governed female portraiture at the time, Cézanne’s “slipping away from conventional terrain was, and remains, quite radical,” notes co-curator Mary Morton. Cézanne insisted on painting his own family with the bluntness and rigor that he levels at himself. Yet in the process of refining his double-edged talent, he gave Hortense something more precious than false beauty, a sense of vitality and authenticity. While it’s easy to dismiss the flattering portraits of yesterday’s court royalty and today’s selfie culture, Cézanne’s portraits of Hortense will endure.

As opposed to today’s carefully composed self-imagery, Cézanne eschewed the impulse to condense one’s family and friends in a series of publicity stills. He might scoff at the state of self-representation today. Any glimpse of social media will convince us that our friends spend their lives in a perpetual state of farmers’ markets, scenic vineyards, and uncrowded beaches. Instead, Cézanne depicts Hortense as we might see our own partner in the midst of a Sunday afternoon, excising the leaf muck from the gutters. Reality, and its occasional lack of charms, is sanctified through Cézanne’s devoted attention.

Cézanne painted his portraits with an expansiveness of spirit missing in our modern self-conceptions. In life, Cézanne embraced his own contradictory impulses. In art, he never forced the mantles of politics, culture, and class on his subjects. The inherent humanity and physicality of Cézanne’s subjects (himself included) provided more than enough material to keep him satisfied. By contrast, the modern self-image doesn’t seem to exist unless its manipulated, staged, or steeped in personal manifesto. Fueled by our current protest culture, we mistake personal styling for political participation, and begin to interpret others by the same criterion.

For the modern museum-goer, Cézanne’s portraits offer a refreshing foil to the hyper-stylization that dominates self-imagery today. Cézanne achieved this level of candor, in part, by avoiding the financial pressures of commissioned portraiture. He painted whomever he pleased, at one point abandoning a portrait of George Clemenceau after two sittings on account of finding the gossiping politician “as malicious as a wasp.” Yet Cézanne made time, again and again, to paint his elderly gardener. He had no patron, no one to please beyond himself, and took full advantage of that freedom to create distinct and rich depictions. When a large percentage of social media posts revolve around pricy products or experiences, we can only envy his independence from commercialism.

Cézanne felt that he could “paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.” One hundred years later, we are still learning from the portraiture left to us. Johnathan Elderfield’s curatorial gamble has paid off, with an exhibition that re-humanizes one of Western culture’s most lionized artists.

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Voices from Afghanistan

“Invisible threads are the strongest ties.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

Nearly a decade ago I sat, together with Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, in the office of the Librarian of Congress, James Billington. Novak had brought us together—he was a longtime friend of Billington—and I was there to pitch an idea. I wanted the Library of Congress to host an exhibit of letters to Radio Azadi, the local branch in Afghanistan of the taxpayer-funded company I led at the time, the modernized Cold War media group called Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Billington—joined by a couple of his division experts—was skeptical, to put it mildly. A station’s fan mail in the coveted space of the Library of Congress? Was I mad? Such was the tenor and tone. As any opportunity looked to be slipping away, Novak nudged me: “The letters, show him the letters.”

I had a couple bags of them in tow, and so I let Azadi’s faithful make the case. These were not just any letters. These were scrolls: 10, 20, 30 feet long; even one 70-foot-long doozy. Once unfurled, these “letters” exploded in script and color. They were replete with poems, prayers, songs, tributes, drawings, paintings, and endless commentary. They included digressions of all manner. A young boy opined, “we must respect and honor our women, as only they can tame us men, lest we behave otherwise like wild horses.” Billington’s specialists pored over the documents, soon able to discern regions, tribes, and dialects. People might walk for miles to a village scribe, I had learned, to tell their story so that their thoughts would be eventually conveyed to their beloved Radio Azadi.

Anyone who knows Afghanistan knows how vibrant and exquisite the country can be. Anyone who is familiar with RFE/RL knows how devoted its audiences become. It’s a far-flung operation, with 18 bureaus, reaching 23 countries in 26 languages—by television, radio, video, social networks, websites, and podcasts. And RFE/RL is a tight-knit group. The news this week that three of their own had been killed in an early morning suicide bombing in Kabul was devastating. “Never such a huge loss in one day,” a former colleague emailed me.

On April 30, journalist Abadullah Hananzai and video producer Sabawoon Kakar died in a bombing on the main road behind the RFE/RL Kabul bureau in the Shash Darak area of the capital. Maharram Durrani, a 28-year-old female university student training to become a journalist at the Kabul bureau, was also killed in the attack. The three, all in their 20s, were among at least 25 people who perished in a pair of coordinated suicide bombings in central Kabul on Monday. The Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the blasts.

Maybe it’s sacrifice that makes the heart grow stronger.

In Afghanistan journalists risk their lives daily in a war waged for decency, tolerance, and peace. Radio Azadi broadcasts in Dari and Pashto, with stringers in all 34 of the country’s provinces. Azadi—the word comes originally from Persian and means freedom or liberty—reports on everything from security and politics to public services, education, and farming. Call-in programs on health are especially popular, and the following is diverse. I recall meeting with a group of tribal leaders in Kabul, older men with long grey beards, wearing long white tunics. One told me that, while indeed they prayed five times a day, they occasionally adjusted the prayer schedule so as not to miss a particularly important airing on Azadi.

Michael Novak felt connected to RFE/RL. It was Novak’s idea—after a visit with our Afghan colleagues—to pitch Billington and the Library of Congress on the Azadi letters. Novak, who passed away in February 2017, had been a member of the RFE/RL board in the 1980s. After communism’s demise and the end of the Cold War, he played a key role in moving the company’s headquarters from Munich to Prague. Václav Havel, the whimsical playwright-dissident turned President—the man who raced in a red scooter down the corridors of Prague Castle and adored the music of rocker Frank Zappa—fell in love with the idea from the get-go. In 1995, he gave RFE/RL the old communist parliament building at the top of Wenceslaus Square, for a Czech crown a year. A decade and a half later, RFE/RL was to move again, relocating its headquarters in winter 2010 to a new, more secure facility on the outskirts of the city.

The move took place during my tenure as CEO and, for the first editorial meeting in the new building, senior editors invited Havel to chair the proceedings. Havel accepted, but insisted, with characteristic charm, that this would not be a purely ceremonial affair. He wanted to be part of a working meeting. And so on that day there sat the great anti-communist dissident and former Czech President, exchanging and arguing ideas with Iranians and Iraqis, Ukrainians and Moldavians, Pakistanis and Afghans, and other freedom-fighting journalists from around the world. I sat next to Havel in the meeting and noticed throughout that he was doodling, with a red pen: squiggles and small hearts, the latter usually part of his trademark signature.

Do they still get letters, the RFE/RL Afghans? I wanted to know in the midst of tragedy this week. A former colleague replied:

Yes, bags full of them. Some, tens of meters and rolled like a scroll. From school children who dream of becoming a scientist. From peasants who pray for rain and better irrigation. Some are love poems from shepherds who spend their days chasing flocks of sheep and herds of goats. Or from soldiers on front lines. From teachers who want better buildings, or any buildings. Many women and girls thank the radio for being their window to the world. They write from remote mountain hamlets, teeming cities and refugee camps in neighboring Iran and in parts of Afghanistan where there is no electricity, and thus no television. Most letters tell stories of suffering, resilience and survival against all odds. Letters from nomads, farmers, shopkeepers, drivers, expatriate workers and village elders. […] Many letters close with a prayer for peace.

Back then James Billington ended up mesmerized. In winter 2010, an exhibit titled “Voices of Afghanistan”opened in a room adjacent to the main reading room of the Library of Congress. RFE/RL gifted at the time 15,000 pieces of “fan mail” for the exhibit, and for the Library’s archives.

Mourning and grieving take place. The war goes on. It’s hard to imagine, though, that these voices of Afghanistan will be silenced.

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The National Security State of the Future

It’s all well and good to perseverate about the national security dangers the Trump presidency poses to the United States, and some at least are real enough. But it’s a mistake to allow our time horizons to be constricted by the presumably fleeting periodicity of those dangers. When we analyze the future security environment, as the U.S. intelligence community is obliged to do from time to time, we look out beyond three, five, or eight years. When we do that, what post-Trumpian challenges can we detect? 

In my view, the most serious of these challenges is not strictly an exogenous threat, whether from a state or clot of non-state actors, but rather the combination of a key challenge with how the very act of managing it could change American governance frameworks in ways we might come to regret. More specifically, my fear is that a protracted geo-economic competition with China could usher in the American national security state of the future. I will come in a moment to my meaning and reasons, but we need a little history as prelude.

The phrase “national security state” was a Cold War-era meme devised mainly by members of the American adversary culture (to employ Lionel Trilling’s perfect phrase) for use in defaming the “containment”-framed foreign and national security strategies of Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Peddled prominently by the founders, fellows, “senior scholars,” and lateral associates of the Institute for Policy Studies—Marcus Raskin, Richard Barnet, Saul Landau, Richard Falk, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Robert Jay Lifton, and others—the phrase was deployed to argue, among other things, that the short-of-war mobilization of the United States during the Cold War was distorting the American economy, militarizing American culture, and undermining American democracy by dint of a new subculture of secrecy lorded over by shadow elites connected indelibly to the “military-industrial complex.” 

The arguments, such as it was, took several forms. Some stressed sober Marxian economic projections; some recycled gob-eyed Hobsonian-Leninist theories of imperialism; still others chose mystical psychobabble propositions holding that the very existence of U.S. nuclear weapons was turning the United States in a Nazi-like state. The core of it all was the revisionist insistence that U.S. Cold War policy was not a response to a national security threat but rather the cause of international insecurity, and hence that everything other regimes and parties did to resist, oppose, undermine, and subvert U.S. policy was on balance benign. IPS never saw an adversary of the United States it could not praise, support, excuse, or at least “understand.”

Of course the whole concept of the United States as a “national security state” belied a mammoth irony: There was a national security state engaged in the Cold War—the Soviet Union. It was the Soviet Union that commanded an economy for the sake of maximizing aggregate military might. It was the Soviet system that bulldozed any concern for average citizens in the name of an all-encompassing industrial policy. It was the Soviet Union that empowered unaccountable bureaucrats to override any and all forms of governmental accountability. IPS ideologues therefore might sensibly have invoked Bernard Williams’s warning to “beware who you take for an enemy, for you will grow more like him,” but to the best of my knowledge they never did.

Back in the day, all of this struck me as nefarious and insidious bullshit. IPS succeeded in spreading these and related ideas far and wide—and they are all still out there in abundance, having by now spread in lowest-common-denominator form deep into an American mass culture that has always looked upon core governmental authority with a jaundiced eye. But of course none of these shrill warnings came to pass. The United States did not morph into a Nazi-like state because of nuclear weapons; American democracy was none the worse for the wear of the Cold War experience; and the American economy was not captured by defense industry behemoths and their cadres of stealthy lobbyists. Indeed, if you had wanted to make a decidedly mediocre investment in the stock market over the past thirty or so years, buying defense industry stocks was perhaps the most reliable way to have done that. We have problems with our democracy and with rentier “capture” in the economy, to be sure, but these problems pretty plainly have other sources, many of which have arisen since 1989.

And yet—it is highly implausible to assert that the experience of the Cold War changed nothing important about American society, and downright foolish to assert that it changed nothing at all. Change is inevitable, except, of course, from a vending machine. But sorting out the causal strands is something else again. The mobilization of that era was not strictly military; it was institutionally syncretic, involving government, industry, universities, and more besides. Some of that syncretism had its origin in World War II, and some of the evolved institutional webbing of Cold War days seems in retrospect to have been benign, for example in the way that R&D investments for military purposes fertilized the general economy and contributed to the broad-based economic growth of that era. 

But surely the way the United States mobilized for the Cold War changed something beyond what was inchoate in earlier patterns, and not all of those changes were benign. The world just doesn’t work that way, and it’s no strain to see an example in the transformation of the Roman Republic into an Empire by dint of the military exigencies of that time. The militarization of American culture is certainly real, but where it came from is not obvious—anymore than one can identify the water in a river from the many streams that feed it. Separating out the sources of social change over a forty-year period in a society as capacious and complex as that of the United States is a mug’s game. 

I’ve little patience for mug’s games; looking forward concerns me more. Let me then get to the gist. China, like the Soviet Union, integrates its institutions in ways that enable, if not mandate, state industrial policy in the service of developing military power. But unlike the Soviet Union, China has not sought autarkic development, at least not since Deng Xiaoping de-Maoified the Middle Kingdom. The Chinese leadership has sought to integrate China into the global economy, even as it has lately identified five key first-rank technological innovation priorities judged critical to military/security development: cybernetic technology, nanotechnology, brain science, quantum communications and computation, and robotics.

Part of the reason for China’s engagement in the global trading system has been, to put it plainly, to conduct a systematic program of industrial espionage and theft focused on its strategic technological priorities—or, to put it less brusquely, a set of arrangements conducive to accelerated technology transfer. The terms the Chinese government has set to allow U.S. tech companies to invest and do business in China clearly attest to this design. There is nothing uniquely Chinese about this, however. Japanese postwar industrial policy strategy bore some similar features despite its lack of military focus, and indeed throughout much of the 19th century an ambitiously industrializing United States stole from Britain, Germany, and other European countries anything valuable that its travelling businessmen and diplomats could get their hands on. 

But something new is going on that makes the Chinese case more unlike than like its historical predecessors. During the Cold War the flow of innovation was most often from government labs focused on defense-related matters into the general economy—everything from microwave ovens to the internet started out as a DARPA or NASA-origin project. Now, as is widely known, the key generative innovations come not from within government labs but from places like Silicon Valley, and the government has strained to find models of cooperation with the private sector that can keep the U.S. technological edge in defense systems. The R&D enterprise is still one big ecosystem that stretches across many social-institutional borders, but the balances and connectivity hubs have shifted around a lot.

More than that, the range of private sector-reared technologies deemed to have national security relevance has multiplied. During the Cold War, military acquisition and design chiefs did not have to look far beyond their own labs and a few time-tested partners in the defense-industrial sector for what they needed for next generation military systems. The rest of the U.S. economy was considered national-security relevant only in general terms. That is no longer the case. Particularly because of the vast applicability of innovations in information technology to the management of integrated combat system operability, whole new domains of “the private sector” can be rationally construed as having national security relevance. And it is precisely here that the asymmetry between the U.S. and Chinese ways of organizing the nexus between the state and economy start to matter.

Traditionally and philosophically, we prefer that relationship to be loose. We don’t like industrial policy, we don’t go in for command economies, and we don’t want government telling private citizens and partnerships (otherwise known as corporations) what to do or how to do it—except as proves necessary. We accept government support of infrastructural development as a natural role and have done so since at least since the canal-building projects of the Monroe Administration. And we increasingly, if still imperfectly, require corporations to take responsibility for remediating the negative externalities that they cause, like pollution. But that’s about it.

China, on the other hand, exemplifies the concept and practice of eminent domain in just about every way imaginable. First of all, the Chinese government has been so assiduous about developing eavesdropping and hacking applications of IT to first and foremost monitor its own population. The same is true of Russia. These state’s abilities to penetrate U.S. and other communications systems have their origin, then, in something the U.S. government doesn’t do at all. Such is the burden of regimes fearful of their own legitimacy deficits.

Second, in post-Mao China there are such things as private enterprises. Indeed, some large Chinese corporations are among the richest and most powerful in the world. But they are independent and private only at the margin. No serious person doubts that if the CCP Politburo decides to “attach” some economic asset or process to state control for state purposes, that decision will be carried out. Corporate independence in China is contingent for not being embedded in a framework of rule of law. It can be selectively reversed at imperial—I mean, governmental—will.   

This is why, at base, the CFIUS has banned Huawei products, why the FCC has pressured U.S. companies not to partner with Huawei, and why the heads of the IC have been unanimous in recommending to Congress that it pass legislation officially banning Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications companies from operating in the United States. The reason is that these and other companies are in effect arms of the Chinese government, and can be “asked” to hack, subvert, and otherwise compromise critical American telecommunications infrastructure.

The U.S. IC has good reason for concern, and in particular the NSA for very specific reasons. The NSA has two main traditional objectives (and for all the narcissistic idiots out there affected downstream by old IPS agitprop, no, tracking and reading your personal emails is not one of them): surreptitiously acquiring signals intelligence on foreign governments (but not foreign businesses); and ensuring the security and fidelity of U.S. information systems, especially ones constructed to aid U.S. warfighters, against efforts by outsiders to penetrate them. NSA has been almost surreally effective at the former objective. Until fairly recently, it was also quite proficient at the latter objective—until NSA itself became the victim of internal security breakdowns.

The main reason NSA has been so good at what the law mandates it to do is that virtually all of the technology involved has been of U.S.-origin, and a fair bit of that has been designed and developed under U.S. government aegis. Knowing our own systems intimately provided a kind of superhighway when it came to penetrating foreigners who used essentially the same technology. Same with would-be hackers trying to use basically our stuff to penetrate our systems: We play B-team exercises with ourselves in order to anticipate what bad actors might do to get into our intelligence underwear, so to speak. It has helped us mightily to defend the integrity of our government/military systems (OPM excepted, of course, along with much of the private sector).

But what if in five, ten, or twenty years the telecommunications technology out there is not exclusively or predominantly made-in-the-USA? What if the best technology out there is Chinese in origin? What if Chinese IT stuff becomes the world standard? Wouldn’t Chinese intelligence efforts be as vastly aided in that kind of environment, as U.S efforts have been aided in the past? 

This is no joke. In the race to 5G (fifth generation wireless network technologies), Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE are significantly ahead of Qualcomm and other American companies, not least because the Chinese government has been pouring huge sums of R&D money into them while U.S. government R&D expenditures have languished under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. International rules of the technological road are already being laid down for a 5G world, and not long ago the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) accepted a Chinese protocol rule over a competing American one in what amounts to the re-construction of a global utility. This is an ominous indicator, notwithstanding the fact that it attracted almost no attention from mainstream U.S. media.

For NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to have to operate in a world in which someone else’s IT “stuff” occupies center position imposes simultaneously higher costs, greater uncertainties, and longer time lags in getting things done to standards. This is unacceptable to a state whose security primacy depends on technological superiority in all core areas of security competition. As a result, there will be some amalgam of temptations and pressures to somehow gather U.S. industrial IT assets closer to governmental control. 

Such straws are already in the wind. Note for example that the odious Don Blakenship, now running for Governor in West Virginia as a Trump clone, has expressed admiration for China’s state-controlled economy and even, according to the New York Times, “expressed interest in gaining Chinese citizenship.”

This sort of thing, in general at least, should surprise no one. Plenty of Westerners admired Mussolini’s Italy in the 1920s, or how Hitler made Germany’s trains run on time in the mid-1930s. Most infamously, we recall how Lincoln Steffens visited the Soviet Union in 1919 and returned to proclaim that he had “seen the future, and it works.” Western intellectuals have been utter suckers for any political system that seemed capable of obviating the noise and clutter of democracy, because Western intellectuals tend to chafe at any kind of noise and clutter they deem beneath their own superior capacity to point the way forward. Blankenship is no intellectual, to be sure, which only proves that you don’t really have to be an intellectual to be a fool.

As it happens, there are plenty of fools everywhere, highly educated ones and others—not to exclude the United States. The same fears about a monolithically organized Soviet Union that were rife during the Cold War will doubtless return in the course of a protracted U.S. competition with China. And there will be plenty of grist for the anxiety mill on that account. Does it bother me, for example, that the Chinese have been able to build three brand spanking-new international airports from scratch in the time that it has taken us to extend a single rail line from downtown Washington to Dulles Airport, a line that still remains unfinished and has faced major setbacks? Damned right, it does. 

But the decentralized system powered by the verve of freedom won out in the Cold War, didn’t it? My guess is that it would win out again in due course, all else equal (which of course it never is), in a competition with China—particularly in an age that rewards net-centric flexibility and punishes excessive centralization. 

The question is, then, will the American political class be confident enough to let it win out? Will it listen to Bernard Williams, and be sure to avoid America’s coming to resemble the adversary it chooses? I suppose we’ll find out by and by.

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Curzio Malaparte, Mon Amour

I found Curzio Malaparte on my father’s bookshelf, between the volumes on Kosovo and Srebrenica. I was drawn in by the name, Kaputt, and when I turned it over, I was drawn even further in by the cover—the grin of devilish fake teeth floating in darkness on the New York Review of Books edition. This was where I found him, and where I quickly fell in love.

Malaparte was an Italian F. Scott Fitzgerald character on the frontlines. Mussolini’s foreign correspondent on the Eastern Front; the failed propagandist, Italian diplomat and francophile dandy, whose morbid dispatches behind Nazi lines, were gruesomely outclassed by recounting invading his own country as the Italian Liaison Officer of American High Command. The repentant fascist, whose twin masterpieces—Kaputt behind Nazis lines, The Skin on the Allied side—make him the impossible literary genius of the Second World War. 

Infamous then, Leon Trotsky called him “a pseudo-theorist of fascism,” less than little known now.

“I would lose at Austerlitz,” Malaparte used to joke, “but win at Waterloo.” But even this writer’s name was a concotion. Malaparte, “the bad side,” is an egotistical pun on what Bonaparte, “the good side,” means in Italian. Bad, because Kurt Erich Suckert, the son of a German immigrant, was a convinced fabulist. His accounts of the German and American campaigns are a kind of surrealist autofiction that steals the power of reporting by fabulising his actual life. “Everybody almost thought I was telling the truth,” is how Malaparte remembered when he first started to lie. “Just like I thought so myself.”

For months I couldn’t stop thinking about Malaparte. But for a while, I wasn’t sure why. He seemed to be everything I thought was despicable: a seedy social climber, an amoralist, a casual anti-Semite, an obscene narcissist. Only watching how the media works in Washington, was when it finally dawned on me: What is so urgent about Malaparte is that he is constantly telling you he can’t be objective because of the power wielded—over him.

Mussolini demands his audience because he insulted his tie (“Is this one tied correctly, then, Malaparte… in the English style?”); Nazi commanders keep summoning him for dinner (“‘It seems like a dream, doesn’t it,’ said Governor-General Frank”); Rommel turns up at his house (“I suffer from the heat, and in Africa it’s too hot”); Himmler invites him up to his hotel room for punch (“Himmler, what did he want with me?”). Malaparte literally ends up in a surplus British uniform working for the U.S. Army:

They were, as a matter of fact, uniforms taken from the British soldiers who had fallen at El Alamein and Tobruk. In my tunic three holes made by machine-gun bullets were visible. My vest, shirt and pants were stained with blood. Even my shoes had been taken from the body of a British soldier. The first time I had put them on I had felt something pricking the sole of my foot. I had thought at first that a tiny bone belonging to the dead man had remained stuck in the shoe. It was a nail. It would have been better, perhaps, if it really had been from the dead man: it would have been much easier to remove it.

Malaparte keeps telling us, “I am a whore of power.”

This is the writer to rediscover for the Washington of Fox and Friends.

What you find in Kaputt is what the Sunday Shows don’t show you: the constant abusive phone calls, threatening emails, troll threats, and implicit bargains that those covering Trumpland have to put up with. And this is what the staid voice of The New Yorker (with its identical ledes and studious tone) is missing: just how pea-brained, just how grotesque, this all really is.

“Dictatorship is not only a form of government,” is how Malaparte described Hitler. “But the most complete form of jealousy.”

I read one Malaparte after another. I hunted those untranslated down in French. Journal d’un étranger à Paris, where, between brushes with Andre Malraux and drinks with Albert Camus, he realizes the cultural icons of postpower wants zero to do with him—with Malaparte—that filthy collaborator.

For the whole evening Camus glared like someone so utterly offended […] It became clear to me that Camus wanted to execute me […] And I asked myself what did Camus do, to have the right to execute people?

I was awed. Awed by the draftsmanship, by the composition and by the portraiture. By the emotion he could conjure. Awed, how he tied together vignettes of dying Americans, tortured dogs and the cavalry of the Italian Expeditionary Corps on the Ukrainian steppe. Awed, that writing about the war, after a year of Dunkirk and Darkest Hour, could still grip, shock, revulse, even terrify.  

This is why. Because sometimes you need a fabulist to capture the mania of something. Only a phantasmagoria, where desperate Neapolitans serve Americans conquerors a “siren”—a manatee, or is it child?—could show what fascism had done to Italy in all its humiliating, maniacal, scale.

“I looked at that poor boiled child, and I trembled inwardly with pity and pride. A wonderful country, Italy! I thought.

What other people in the world can permit itself the luxury of offering Siren mayonnaise with a border of coral to a foreign army that has destroyed and invaded its country?  Ah! It was worth losing the war just to see those American officers that proud American woman sitting pale and horror-stricken round the table of an American general, on which, in a silvery tray reposed the body of a Siren, a sea-goddess!  

“Disgusting!” exclaimed Mrs. Flat, covering her eyes with her hands.

“Yes… I mean… yes,” stammered General Cork, pale and trembling.

“Take it away! Take this horrible thing away!” cried Mrs. Flat.

“Why?” I said. “It’s an excellent fish.”

Only a writer like Malaparte could truly show what Mussolini had done to the elites; to the men like Malaparte, who had willed him into being.  

“I understand you very well. You have taken to playing the harlot in desperation, because of your grief at losing the war. Isn’t that right?”

Sometimes you need a treacherous, unreliable monster to show another one up. Just like only a writer as unscrupulous as Michael Wolff has come closest to capturing Trump. The difference is, whereas what is really in Fire And Fury was summed up in just one juicy piece for the New York Times, Kaputt is richer than a renaissance mural. This fabulist is more than Mussolini’s Michael Wolff.

Malaparte is the Hieronymus Bosch of the Second World War. Here Nazis officers on BMW R75s quote Hölderlin in ice killing fields. Telling us again and again, art, culture, the artist himself, belongs to the gun.

I was swallowed by his fresco. Instead of Bosch’s fornicating birdheads, the clanging instruments and the sodomizing beastials, the only way to describe reading Kaputt and The Skin is a series of similarly unspeakable vignettes. Nazi scarecrows of frozen Soviets, fastened to stumps to scare away the partisans; booze soaked dinners with Hitler’s Governor-General of Poland; frozen Russian lakes bursting with the heads of frozen horses; a Neopolitan father selling American servicemen the chance to touch his daughter’s hymen; Himmler pink and sweating in an SS sauna orgy in Finland. Entering into this sinister spiral is to feel the full collapse of civilised Europe like never before.

The German soldiers were returning from the front line, when I saw the white stain of fear growing in the dull eyes of the officers and soldiers. The Blitzkrieg was over. The winning war was over.

I saw it spreading little by little, gnawing at the pupils, singeing the roots of the eyelashes and making the eyelashes drop one by one, like the long yellow eyelashes of the sunflowers. When Germans become afraid, when that mysterious German fear begins to creep into their bones, they always arouse a special horror and pity. Their appearance is miserable, their cruelty sad, their courage silent and hopeless. That is when the Germans become wicked.

I felt ashamed. I felt ashamed to be a Christian.

Everything he had seen—in Operation Barbarossa, on the Finnish Front, in Naples—everything that had happened, the facts of it hardly mattered to him. Everything, was being pumped into aesthetics. Everything was about creating and sustaining the purest and the most lyrical mania.

On the day on which we entered Milan we ran into a yelling crowd which was rioting in a square. I stood up in the jeep and saw Mussolini hanging by his feet from a hook. He was bloated, white, enormous. I started to be sick on the seat of the jeep: the war was over now, and I could do nothing more for others, nothing more for my country—nothing except be sick.

And I didn’t care whether or not Malaparte had vomited.

And then, abruptly, I fell out of love. For months, I had been so enthralled with Malaparte, I was willing to forgive him for anything. His fascism. (In 1922 he marched on Rome.) His racism. (Again and again, the fact Italian women are servicing black American soldiers, even buying little blonde “pussy wigs” to please them, is regaled). His disgust towards gays. (Pederast sex cults preying on the stray little boys of wartime.) His ridicule and contempt towards Jews. (He buys little sweeties to pop in the mouths of murdered Jewish children he finds outside the Italian consulate after a pogrom.) His times, I said, his times, pretending not to see that Malaparte would have stuck a little bonbon in my mouth had he passed my little dead body in Iași.

I told myself, these two books are to the Second World War what the black paintings of Francisco Goya (the horror of Saturn Devouring His Son, the nightmare of The Witches Sabbath) are to the Napoleonic Wars. Grotesque, real, alive; unlike reading Herman Wouk or Albert Camus. That we needed to read Kaputt and The Skin because Dunkirk and Darkest Hour has turned the breakdown of Europe civilization into a cuddly Churchillian fairytale.

I told myself we had to read Malaparte to hear the voice of Europe, the real Europe, not of the resistance myth, but the millions of defeated collaborators.

Everything was forgiven. The same way I had forgiven all the others writers that I loved: T.S. Eliot, Gregor Von Rezzori, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. I was in love with Malaparte, with the idea of Malaparte, and the way he could write, with the way he created mania. I was in love and we all know that true love is blind.

Until it isn’t.

I was leaving for Washington again, leaving my parents’ house, and my father asked me what I was reading. The walls lined with books, the framed maps of the Ottoman Empire and the lilac calligraphy of my great-grandmother’s Ketubah.

I was holding his copy of Kaputt.

“His name would come up a lot in the Balkans,” he said.

“Oh really?” I said, feigning a little ignorance. Feigning it just a little because I knew exactly what passage he was referring to. I could remember it almost word for word. The passage in Zagreb where Malaparte meets the tinpot führer of fascist Croatia.

The lid was raised and the basket seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters, as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly in London. My companion looked at me and winked, “Wouldn’t you like a good oyster stew?”

“Are they Dalmatian oysters?” I asked.

Ante Pavelic removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jelly-like mass, and he said smiling, with that tired good-natured smile of his, “It is a present from my loyal Ustashas. Forty pounds of human eyes.”

My father, I felt, knew exactly the page number in Kaputt, too.

“His name would come up a lot in the Balkans,” he said. There, where he had reported on for almost thirty years.

“Oh, why?” I said, bowing my head.

“Because he fabricated that the Ustashas served up Serbian eyes.”

The books on Srebrenica were glaring down on me.

“Because Serbian propaganda never let the Croats forget it.”

I found myself repeating what Milan Kundera had said. That Malaparte is not reportage but something else. That Malaparte is a writer where the aesthetic intention is so strong, the writing so strange, that sensitive readers knows automatically he is not a historian, a journalist, or a memoirist. But a chimera of all three and a novelist.

To listen to but not to trust.

“Well that didn’t matter in wartime,” he said.  “And I bet you could still find people who believe it.”

I was still holding Kaputt.

And I put it away, slightly ashamed.

The post Curzio Malaparte, Mon Amour appeared first on The American Interest.

The Fragility Spectrum

Countries in transition from war or a change in regime have posed repeated challenges to policymakers in recent years—and, repeatedly, the policymakers have come up short. Few have lived up to the expectations of their populations; more often than not, the transitions have stagnated or failed outright. Some countries—including Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan—have descended into war and are now at the threshold of complete state collapse.

The policymakers’ failures of analysis in these cases have many causes, to be sure, but a major one is the lack of a widely accepted analytical framework that takes into account the great differences in starting conditions across countries. Instead, policymakers have tended to use a one-size-fits-all set of tools and timelines that ignore societal and institutional dynamics and assume that similar sets of policies will achieve similar results, no matter the country. Such methods are atavistic holdovers derived from long-discredited Western modernization theories.

Our policymakers’ rigidness of thinking is surprising given the progress scholars have made in recent years in understanding the unique challenges fragile states face and the broad measures necessary to overcome them. These repeatedly argue for the need to focus much more sharply on issues like inclusive politics, societal dynamics, and local solutions. Nevertheless, several factors have hampered the process of translating knowledge into policy: ideological blinkers, organizational constraints, and the fragmented nature of the international community. No mechanism exists for bringing together national and international actors to rethink basic assumptions or strategies for achieving peace and improved governance.

Meanwhile, path dependence, distortive and often inconsistent aid flows, fragmentation, weak capacity, and the state-centric nature of the Westphalian system all combine to reduce the ability of national leaders to change course, even when they wish to do so.

We need a new approach to managing transitions in fragile contexts. Such an approach would begin by plotting where countries lie on the fragility continuum. That plotting exercise suggests four broad categories for grouping countries based on starting conditions. Each category warrants a different strategy and policy mix, as does, at a lower level of abstraction, each country within the four groups.

We can see how this more incisive way of analyzing the problem set works by showing how the framework applies to conditions in the so-called Arab Spring countries. Starkly different starting conditions should require starkly different approaches. Organizations such as the U.S. State Department and the World Bank—both of which have sought to develop such an actionable framework—can benefit from examining this exercise.

Starting Conditions for Political Transition

While transitions offer an opportunity for a well-led society to chart a new path forward, that path is inevitably strewn with obstacles. Leaders and the groups they represent can cooperate in ways that build trust or compete in ways that undermine it; share power and resources in a way that nurtures social cohesion or fight to monopolize them in ways that undermine it; establish or strengthen institutions to operate impartially or try to corrupt them for parochial ends. Reform-oriented political, social, and business leaders face an uphill struggle, especially if a country has a history of exclusion, violence, and weak institutions.

Although experiences vary greatly, success was more common in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s than after the turn of the millennium. Whereas Spain (1975), Northern Ireland (1998), Chile (1989), Brazil (1985), Poland (1989), the Czech Republic (1989, 1993), South Africa (1994), Ghana (1992-2001), South Korea (1987), and Indonesia (1998) all achieved something substantial from their transitions, places such as Somalia (1991-), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC; 2002), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Yemen (2012), Myanmar (2011-), Egypt (2011), Afghanistan (2001), and the Central African Republic (2013) all have struggled to make progress or collapsed into war.

The reasons for the mixed outcomes are many, but starting conditions play a major role. All else equal, a country that enters a transition with a high degree of social cohesion is likely to do better than one that doesn’t (Poland versus the DRC); one that has a relatively large and stable middle class is likely to do better than one without (Uruguay versus Guatemala); one that meets Weberian standards as a modern, post-patrimonial rule-of-law state will do better than one that does not (Spain versus Syria); and so on. In recent years, the countries entering a transition have, in general, been saddled with more difficult starting conditions—and thus more fragility—than in the past. Although demands for better governance and a more dignified life are spreading globally, some countries are not as well positioned to meet these expectations as their forebears.

Differences across countries include:

Strength of social cohesion and/or political settlement: Even if key actors come together to end a war or overthrow an authoritarian regime, they may quickly deadlock, as groups may have starkly contrasting views of how the state should be organized and key resources distributed. Such divisions often stem from ethnic or religious identities in fractured societies; these are harder to overcome.

Institutions: The strength of the state and a society’s bridging social institutions has enormous impact on whether a country has the capacity to manage conflict, equitably adjudicate differences, and distribute resources in a way that is widely seen as fair. While traditional mechanisms can play these roles in some contexts, some form of Weberian state institutions that can ensure equal treatment across different segments of a population are essential to creating a legitimate political order in more diverse polities. Patrimonial institutions, in contrast, are likely to yield a more zero-sum competition for power. The stronger the downward, upward, and horizontal accountability mechanisms, the more likely it is that these institutions will be responsive to rising expectations.

Role of the military: Although only one of many institutions that matter in any country, the security forces’ unique access to violence makes them especially important in weak states. Where they are also the only reasonably strong institution, their influence is that much greater.

Security: Any threat to security may drive key actors or groups apart, hurting any political process, and reduce investment, hurting the economy. Extremists, sectarian groups, and leaders of a former regime may use threats and acts of violence to gain or regain power and influence, or at least to disrupt tenuous political agreements.

Economic fundamentals: Poor living conditions and limited access to vital goods can help ignite the public anger that sparks a transition, and they constitute a crucial barometer for citizens to judge how well a new regime is functioning. If these don’t improve—possibly because of weak economic foundations (for example, the poor quality of the education system, infrastructure, financial system, legal regime, and business community)—many other problems will be or appear to be worse than they are, giving leaders less scope to compromise with opponents and to advance reforms.

Education: The more literate a population is, the more likely it is to have the human resources to fill key positions in the government, and the more likely it is to have the wherewithal to organize in ways that build wealth and hold leaders accountable. Although there are some exceptions (India), few countries have been able to democratize or industrialize without sufficient educational achievement.

Neighborhood: Countries are strongly influenced by their neighbors. The more robust the states, the more constructive the norms (related to coups, changing power, corruption, and so forth), and the more dynamic the economies, the more likely a country in transition will set itself on a positive trajectory.

Foreign Powers: Important foreign powers can either play a highly constructive role (for example, the European Union in Eastern Europe) or stand in the way of progress and even fund or arm local groups opposed to change (for example, Russia in the former Soviet states).

Even though societal and institutional dynamics (the first two elements above) are generally the most important, all of these factors interact, influencing one another in sometimes hard to disentangle ways. Change in one area will usually lead to change in another, even if the specifics remain mostly unknown to us.

While differences in starting conditions matter most during a transition—when a power vacuum emerges just as competing political identities surge in importance—they also strongly influence a country’s capacity to navigate any shock (for example, elections, the discovery of oil, the beginning or end of regional conflict, and dramatic change in food or export prices) or buildup of stress (such as demographic change, climate change, youth bulge, or economic stagnation). Differences in structural factors, institutions, and actors, as well as international context, mean that completely different political dynamics may be at play, necessitating vastly different strategies.

Fragility Continuum

The fragility continuum sorts countries based on their starting conditions. It plots states on a spectrum from most to least fragile (see diagram below) depending on their particular combination of the factors described above, and focusing especially their societal and institutional dynamics (which affect everything else). 

On the right side of the continuum sit those with more cohesion, more robust institutions, better neighbors, stronger economic fundamentals, and so forth (category 1). These include almost all developed and developing countries such as Poland, South Korea, and Chile. This group is the most resilient. It has the best prospects for democratization and economic development.

On the left side sit the countries with highly fragmented political cultures, weakly institutionalized state structures, fragile neighbors, poor economic fundamentals, potentially high levels of negative foreign intervention, and so forth (category 3). The latter are more easily controlled, corrupted, or influenced to favor a particular (ruling or powerful) group at the expense of everyone else. This category, which includes Somalia, Libya, Yemen, the DRC, and Afghanistan, is comprised of fundamentally weak and unstable states. Even if such countries happen to be free from violence for a time, the prospects for any transition are still poor.

Naturally, category 2 lies in-between categories 1 and 3. States with weak but functioning institutions and less severe social fractures are more likely to remain stable even if they are held back by weak or nonexistent political settlements, severe disagreements about the nature of the state, limited capacity, mixed economic conditions, and the inability of institutions to constrain elites and security forces. Sri Lanka, which has been plagued by Sinhala-Tamil tensions since before its independence, and which suffered a bloody civil war from 1983-2009, typifies category 2 countries. Despite spurts of violence and a war, the state has functioned continuously and with reasonable efficiency in most of the country. Although a formula for a political settlement between the two groups exists, the Sinhala majority does not support it, and political leaders have been unwilling or unable to make the case. Meanwhile, the country’s weak institutions have proven unable to hold officials and security forces accountable for their actions, leading to significant bouts of corruption and human rights violations. Other countries in this middle category include Colombia (which is ending a half-century-old civil war), Kenya (which continues to suffer from ethnic divisions but has generally managed to limit violence), and the Philippines (which confronts a long-standing insurgency and deep class divisions).

Although all countries fit within one of the three categories, the template as a whole is best understood as a continuum; no two places have the same starting conditions or level of fragility. Many fall along the right side (in the case of category 1 and 2) or left side (in the case of categories 2 and 3) of their groups and thus come relatively close to straddling two categories. These boundary-dwellers share some similarities with countries on the other side of the dividing line.

Those that fall on the left side of category 2, or are fully in category 3, are the countries we typically associate with fragility. Some, such as Nigeria and Syria, have a chance to shift completely into category 3 because their fragmentation is severe and their capacity and legitimacy are limited. Syria would already have gone down the same road taken by places such as Yemen if not for the robust support it has received from Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah. Others, such as Guatemala, Uganda, and Liberia, have a history of violence, and, while they are unlikely to break down today, they still suffer from elevated levels of risk. They have made some progress strengthening their institutions and cohesion, but much work is necessary before they can enter into the middle range of category 2.

The developing countries on the right side of category 2 or in category 1—such as Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, Bangladesh, and Cambodia—are cohesive enough to avoid most of the problems associated with fragility. They may suffer from various governance problems and underdevelopment, but they are free from severe identity-based divisions and existential questions about the nature of the state and society.

Category 4, the last one, is a special case. Countries in this category have one major institution (usually the military but sometimes an overbearing political party) that dominates the rest, playing an outsized role in every aspect of national life. This one very capable institution typically both builds some form of unity by agglomerating different groups and interests together and ensures a minimal level of stability through its capacity for coercion. A charismatic individual can play a similar function to a strong institution but is less likely to pass that strength onward when he passes from the scene, as was the case, for example, with Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Côte d’Ivoire.

Category 4 countries are plotted somewhere from the left to the middle of the continuum; they mostly, but not exclusively, overlap with category 2. In highly fragile contexts (category 3 and the left side of category 2), the one institution could play a crucial stabilizing role even if governance is lopsided. If it gradually builds cohesion and institutions and reduces its role in society, it could leave a lasting positive legacy. 

In Indonesia, for instance, the military has played a crucial if violent role in unifying and strengthening the diverse country since independence and now is much less important than it once was. In Tanzania, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (and its predecessor parties) has helped make what is a highly diverse country one of the more cohesive polities in sub-Saharan Africa. In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the military forces that remained committed to his legacy after his death in 1938 played a crucial role building up and steering the state for generations. Myanmar’s military, on the other hand, has achieved much less for its half-century of dominance. In Pakistan, the armed forces’ role is, at best, mixed: It may have stabilized a weak state and introduced economic reform at times, but at the least it has stood in the way of improving relations with India, enhancing the rule of law, and creating more accountable government. 

In better contexts, such as those on the right side of category 2 or just inside category 1, an overbearing institution is more likely to block change in ways that are counterproductive. For instance, even though Egypt arguably already has reasonably functioning institutions and sufficient cohesion to enact ambitious reforms, the military’s domination of the state makes major progress unlikely.[image error]

The Policy Continuum

These four different types of states face different challenges and therefore require different policies in order to successfully transition to a more inclusive and stable political order after a conflict or fall of government.

The more robust states from category 1 have the easiest time because their starting conditions are favorable. They can handle the traditional playbook emphasizing a rapid move toward elections and the introduction of robust economic reforms. Most category 1 countries in fact have already successfully navigated the changeover to democracy in one of the democratization waves that took place before 2000. There are thus few category 1 countries left, unless they are regions that will someday secede from a larger state (such as, Kurdistan and Somaliland). Transitions in recent years have mostly come from the other three categories, with the increased difficulties that their starting conditions bring.

Category 2 countries facing transition can move forward, albeit more cautiously, assuming that they introduce policies from the peacemaking or conflict management toolkit that take into account their fragmentation. Existing or potential social cleavages need to be actively managed and, ideally, ameliorated. This means focusing on reducing inequalities between ethnic, religious, and clan groups and regions, possibly through substantial decentralization and the reallocation of funds such that historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups feel that they have a greater stake in the country. 

Such reforms must be done carefully, so as to avoid a backlash from historically dominant groups. These changes should be accompanied by attempts to strengthen national social cohesion and bridging social institutions, such that a society has greater capacity to manage conflict. In Sri Lanka, for example, more decentralization and empowerment of the Tamil region, accompanied by steps to create a more inclusive national identity, are essential. But weak institutions may hinder many transitions from countries in this group: Even if new policies are introduced, change on the ground may be limited; powerful actors may not be held to account; and attempts to make the state more equitable and inclusive may come up short or fail altogether.

Category 3 countries, on the other hand, can easily be imperiled by any transition because the glue—whether social or institutional—that holds them together is brittle. In the worst cases, the lack of any autonomous institution robust enough to equitably adjudicate between groups makes a repressive state the only route to stability, as Syria shows. This is where monarchies have certain advantage: If they have a long enough history, they can make up with legitimacy what they lack in strength, as was the case in Afghanistan and Libya before their kings were overthrown. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the Arab Spring protests occurred almost exclusively in countries without monarchies (Bahrain being the sole exception). A place like Saudi Arabia would be much more vulnerable if it lacked a king (and oil).

In category 3 countries, transitions need to be undertaken with extreme caution because the risks are great. It is better to attempt incremental progress—for example, to improve opportunity, decentralize decision-making, reallocate resources, and strengthen the rule of law—than to completely overturn a regime or rapidly introduce elections. Syria, for example, would have fared better with reform than it has with revolution.

If a transition fails, it might be easier to restore political order piecemeal—building region by region around cohesive pockets and local institutions—rather than attempting what might be an impossible national settlement. Libya, Somalia, the DRC, and Yemen would have had a better chance at stabilizing if such a strategy had been adopted; the current attempts to establish national political settlements around national elections provide excellent examples of how the one-size-fits-all approach works against stability and the people’s best interests. Afghanistan would be in the same boat without foreign troops to strengthen the center. But its stability will ultimately depend on a similar piecemeal approach: Its institutions are stronger locally than they are nationally, and that is where the emphasis in reform should be. In many category 3 countries, only a weak center and radical decentralization can bring stability.

Category 4 countries require a combination of policies, some emanating from the above category 2 and 3 policies, and some specially designed to take into account the importance of the one dominating institution. For the more fragile states (situated well to the left of the continuum), the one institution provides an essential element in stability and therefore must play an essential role in reform; eliminating it, however essential due to its historical failures, could be devastating (note Iraq after March 2003). Instead, a program that gradually reduces the institution’s role in the economy and politics and expands the rule of law should be attempted in parallel with other changes empowering other groups. This may be easier written than wrought if the strength of the institution is so much greater than any other entity. Even though the military in Pakistan has handed over power to civilians and allowed them to make many decisions unheeded, it still maintains a tight leash on various policy domains (such as internal security and foreign policy) and significant influence on many key institutions (for example, parts of the judicial system).

In less fragile category 4 states, greater cohesion and a larger web of institutions provide greater scope for reform. The focus can be on more ambitious reforms that are implemented in a way that keeps the dominant entity reasonably happy, at least in the short- to medium-term. In Venezuela, for instance, reform is possible, but the Chavistas stand in the way. If a transition is to begin, any bargain needs to protect some of their core interests, offering, for example, conditional amnesties, a welfare plan for members of the military and police, and commitments to maintain core elements of the Chavista socioeconomic program. Such agreements—whether formal or informal—are not ideal, but they enable progress. And their importance often diminishes over time.

[image error]Less fragile places can move faster than more fragile places. Political order is more robust, less dependent on a particular constellation of actors and institutions, and more inherent to the system itself. These places have more leeway, though other factors (such as lack of administrative capacity, infrastructure, education) may still constrain the effectiveness of changes. In the more fragile places, political order needs to be prioritized more—and that prioritization only increases the more to the left on the continuum a country is situated. Change is possible, but only cautiously. Western-style elections, for example, can be more disruptive and polarizing without a significant preparation period and if the new system does not take into account the local context. Forced coalitions and clear rules on the distribution of resources may be better than majoritarian rule and economically based resource allocation.

In all these cases, actors need to build broad coalitions to ensure that support for change is wide and deep enough to keep opponents from derailing the transition. This is especially true in categories 2-4, all of which face more spoilers than places with better starting conditions—places where a common identity makes a defeat at the polls more acceptable. 

Non-state actors are gaining importance, too, and so political coalitions need to not just take into account traditional political actors such as parties, but also religious groups, ethnic leaders, civil society leaders, the business sector, and so forth—any potentially important actor that can commit to constructive change. The more cohesive and inclusive (within certain limits—including everyone can stall progress too) the alliance, the better it will withstand the inevitable disappointments and failures that all transitions experience in one form or another.

Applying the Continuum

This framework can be used to strategize policy for any country entering or potentially on the verge of a transition after a regime change or war. This includes movement both toward (which much of the above discussion assumes) as well as away from democratic, authoritarian, or other forms of government as well as any case where significant changes to government take place due to the end of a war or the onset of a major crisis. As such, it includes transitions triggered by military coup (as in Nigeria, Thailand), death of a ruler (as in Spain, Côte d’Ivoire), leadership succession (as with elite battles following death of a leader), violent overthrow of the government (as in Rwanda, Ethiopia, China, Cuba), a popular uprising that successfully pushes for reform (as in Tunisia, Ukraine, Gambia), a breakup of a country or secession (as with Slovenia, South Sudan), economic crisis (Indonesia and Brazil, for example), reform initiated by an authoritarian ruler (as in Ghana and Taiwan), withdrawal of foreign support (Eastern Europe, many African countries in the early 1990s), peace agreement (Mozambique, Nepal), referendum (Chile), settlement of an ethnic dispute (Macedonia), military victory (Sri Lanka), establishment of a new constitution (Colombia in 1991), and regime breakdown via defections (as happened with the Soviet Union). Each of these brings varying risks for instability and U.S. interests in the country. The better policies are configured according to local starting conditions, the more likely they will succeed.

So let’s turn the clock back to early 2011. How would a fragility continuum approach have applied to American policies when the Arab Spring commenced?

In Tunisia, the choices were easy. The country is relatively cohesive, and has a large middle class with significant exposure to European norms. Its government may be bureaucratic and slow, but it works. The military may have initially protected the old regime, but it was quick both to turn against it and to pledge to stay out of politics after the post-Ben Ali transition began. As a category 1 country, the traditional policy toolkit should mostly work—and it has. Some customization to local conditions is required, but not to the fundamental set of tools. Tunisia’s main fault lines—between religious and secular groups and between inland and coastal regions—should have been worked on earlier than they have, but they are not serious enough to threaten the country’s trajectory. Its economic and institutional weaknesses have produced disappointment and anger and need to be addressed, but these have not held the country back. Even though Tunisia has faced many problems, it has achieved remarkable progress compared to other Arab countries.

Egypt has decent cohesion (except for Sinai) and institutions, the products of its long history as a state, but it has a relatively much smaller middle class than Tunisia, much less exposure to and experience with democratic norms, and a much less developed civil society. Moreover, it has an organization—the military—that has suffocated opponents, intervened to profit from the economy, and leveraged the country’s geopolitical importance to build a strong set of international backers. 

There is also a greater religious-secular divide in Egypt than in Tunisia, partly because the country is inherently more religious and the strongest non-state institutions before 2011 were religious in nature (which caused friction with other groups that were less organized after 2011). The country is in category 4, with characteristics of countries situated on the right side of category 2. Reform is possible but only in a way that does not directly threaten the military’s interests and that allows a significant period of adjustment so that democratic norms can take root and state and non-state institutions can be strengthened. The best case might have been similar in some respects to what has happened in Pakistan since 2008, which now has regular elections and changes in ruling parties despite the military not relinquishing much power. Instead of erroneously assuming that the military had vacated the scene and that the sequencing of events would not have serious consequences, the U.S. government should have focused its efforts from the very start of the transition in 2011 on a strategy that combined a much longer transition period with a much clearer set of rules and mechanisms to protect the military’s interests and improve the rule of law and non-state institutions. The ad hoc and rushed nature of many aspects of the transition was not in the country’s long-term interests.

Libya is a category 3 state, with little national cohesion and no national institution capable of arbitrating between the country’s many ethnic and tribal groups. It has few civil society organizations and its social institutions are bonding (at the subnational group level), not bridging (at the national level). There is no history of democracy. Given these conditions, any transition was going to be treacherous; and a violent civil war that left its myriad actors armed outright dangerous. 

The U.S. government should have seen this reality more clearly in 2011. Moving to oust Qaddafi was not wrong, but it was not a strategy for stability going forward. Instead, when the U.S. government provided military support to the opposition, it should have accompanied this with greater effort to negotiate a way forward—one trip to Tunis to meet with Libyan representatives was not enough. It could have more clearly offered Qaddafi and his henchman asylum and a role in the new government for officials who worked for him but had no blood on their hands. A peacekeeping force and a long transition period should have been built into the plan on the assumption that the transition would fail otherwise. In addition, the U.S. administration should have played a stronger role after the fall of Qaddafi, among other things, forcefully opposing any policy that exacerbated domestic divisions—such as the 2013 lustration law, which prevented anyone from the previous regime from working in the new government.

Despite a very different sociopolitical makeup, Yemen has the same basic ingredients as Libya: weak national cohesion, few national institutions capable of arbitrating differences between groups, little exposure to democratic norms, and a civil society that has actually regressed from historic norms. Moreover, it has a very thin middle class and very poor economic conditions. The previous ruler—Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s president for three decades—remained active after his fall from power until his assassination, albeit in a weakened position. The dispersion of weapons and outside intervention on opposing sides of the conflict exacerbates divisions, especially around religion, which historically meant much less than tribal and regional differences in Yemen. 

Yemen’s transition was always going to be fraught. The best that could have been hoped for was some form of confederacy around relatively robust regional institutions. The central government’s role would have needed to depend on consensus and compromise among the regional groupings. But this would have required a more forceful effort to keep outside intervention and threats from terrorist groups (namely al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—AQAP) minimal and to ensure that some basic rules about the limits of each group’s extension of authority were kept. But that might have required more effort than any gains from success given Yemen’s relatively marginal importance to the United States.

Syria, splintered ethnically, regionally, religiously, and ideologically into many competing groups and with a weakly institutionalized government but a loyal security force, is a mixture of a category 3 and 4 country—possibly the worst conditions for any attempt at a rapid transition. 

Syria is relatively poor, with little exposure to international norms and little experience with democracy or statehood. Institutions are plagued by patronage and corruption, and rarely apolitical. The army has served one sect at the expense of everyone else. Even the opposition forces have great difficulty working together because of their own numerous divisions. Any reform that threatened the minority Alawis and the government’s loyal security forces would be a recipe for disaster, as the events of 1982 in Hama should have made clear (when an uprising led to the massacre of at least 25,000 mostly unarmed civilians). The only way forward was to accept the need to work with the existing regime—however distasteful—in a way that expanded opportunity and the rights of citizens (such as the Kurds, many of which were stateless) and built a more inclusive, legitimate political settlement at the national level. 

The challenges to this approach were many—the Assad regime’s bad behavior at home and abroad; the great distaste and distrust of many opponents; the difficulty in crafting some arrangement that might please enough actors; and, possibly above all else, the country’s weak economy and institutions, which provided few spoils to share and made corruption a menace that was hard to combat. Previous attempts at reform have mostly enriched insiders; any change would thus have had to formulate a way for reform to spread gains more widely in order for them to generate greater legitimacy and support for the political order. U.S. policy could have taken a more active role making such proposals and offering incentives for the myriad actors to cooperate. It would not have been easy, but the alternative was either the unsustainable status quo or something much more violent.

Any policy for Bahrain, whose revolt garnered the least attention and ended the quickest, was complicated by the U.S. dependence on the country: Naval Forces Central Command and the Fifth Fleet are both headquartered in a base within the country. Small, religiously divided with national institutions and security forces that depend on the monarchy, with only a limited history of democratic politics, and geographically located between Saudi Arabia (its traditional patron) and Iran, the country was highly vulnerable to the rising Shi’a-Sunni tensions that engulfed the region. 

It is a borderline category 4 country situated in the center-left part of the continuum. This means that change must be undertaken cautiously and in a way that neither weakens its dominant institutions (centered on the monarchy) nor threatens their interests in such a way that they begin a backlash (which is what ultimately occurred). Leaders should have instituted, with American support, reforms that gradually empowered the historically disadvantaged groups (Shi’a and some Sunnis) but only in a gradual way that did not undermine the delicate status quo (as Morocco and Jordan have done successfully to some extent). Calls for democracy, which would have completely overturned the existing state of affairs, would have been foolishly risky.

It is imperative going forward that national leaders and international actors better assess local conditions in countries transitioning after a war or regime change and design strategies to fit local realities. The international default framework of how countries are supposed to work can only cause problems for states—and American interests—when applied to categories 2 through 4, with increasing problems the further to the left on the fragility continuum the country.

Instead of a narrow focus on elections, the U.S. and other governments need to develop a broader set of criteria to measure progress. Indeed, many countries regularly hold elections but do not necessary work inclusively, accountably, and responsively for their citizens. It is better to take a broad perspective on transitions and progress, and consider how lives can be improved, rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all approach.

This does not mean giving authoritarian regimes a blank check. Instead, by using a wider set of criteria—measuring, among other things, whether institutions are getting stronger, power and resources are being equitably distributed, cohesion is increasing, bridging non-state social institutions are developing, and the economy is advancing in an inclusive manner—all rulers can be better evaluated and held to account. The current narrow focus on elections, in contrast, gives many underserving autocrats a free pass while providing few tools other than regime change to pressure one-party states and authoritarian regimes. 

As is true for all sorts of political analysis, using many criteria is harder than simply examining one—in this case, whether a country has elections or not—but it is far more constructive for countries with complex sociopolitical dynamics. And that happens to be all countries.

The post The Fragility Spectrum appeared first on The American Interest.

Bracing for an Israel-Iran Confrontation in Syria

Israel and Iran are on course for a collision in the near future. Indeed, a military clash that could expand well beyond Syrian territory appears almost inevitable. In particular, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is determined to transform Syria into a platform for a future war against Israel, whereas leaders of the Jewish state have sworn to prevent what they often describe as the tightening of a noose around Israel’s neck.

The past five years have already seen a series of direct clashes between the two powers. These include more than 120 Israeli Air Force (IAF) strikes against weapons shipments to Hezbollah, Iranian attempts to instigate cross-border incidents along the Golan Heights, and Israeli targeting of arms-production facilities introduced by Iran. In early 2018, these exchanges have escalated to include Israeli airstrikes on Iranian UAV facilities established deep in the Syrian desert, at the T-4 Air Base, and a first Iranian attempt to stage an armed drone attack in Israel.

Iran has committed publicly to conducting a forceful retaliation for the Israeli strike in January that killed eight Iranian officers, including UAV unit commander Colonel Mehdi Dehghani. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has threatened vaguely that a confrontation in Syria could prompt Israel to target Iranian territory. He has also presented an ultimatum of sorts to Bashar al-Assad, suggesting that continued acquiescence by the Syrian President to the establishment of Iranian military bases across his country would compel an end to the Israeli policy of noninterference in the Syrian war. This switch would entail direct military hits on the regime, the preservation of which has been Tehran’s prime objective in the region. Such a shift in Israel’s policy would of course carry the risk of drawing Russian intervention to prevent Assad’s removal. Relatedly, Moscow has already hinted that it may supply Syria with the advanced S-300 air-defense system—probably manned with Russian personnel—which would complicate IAF sorties over the country. In recent weeks, neither Israel nor Iran has signaled an intention to reassess its position, and combative rhetoric from both sides has become an almost daily occurrence.

Outside powers, too, have yet to undertake serious efforts to stop the escalation. The United States is quietly backing Israeli preemptive operations against Iranian forces in Syria, while Russia has restricted itself to advising both parties to refrain from widening the scope of the clashes. President Vladimir Putin, although in close contact with both Netanyahu and President Hassan Rouhani, has never offered to mediate. Moreover, he has not directed his pilots, based mainly near Latakia, to interfere with Israeli strikes or to stop Iran from expanding its military infrastructure in Syria. Putin appears to believe he can still exploit the Israel-Iran rivalry to his own benefit.

Since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in March 2011, Israel and Iran have been on opposing sides of the conflict. Despite harboring deep suspicions about the plethora of Sunni rebel groups conducting the uprising against Assad, Israel nevertheless yearned to see Assad’s downfall. In this view, the removal of the Assad regime would deprive Iran of what Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has called “the golden ring in the chain of resistance” against Israel. The Iranian loss of Syria—following an investment of no less than $20 billion to prop up the regime—could reduce a mighty Hezbollah proxy force to an isolated actor in Lebanon, delinked from its Syria-based sources of support and equipment. Iran would thus be blocked from implementing its regional plan, based on surrounding Israel with Iranian allies and forging land corridors from its borders all the way west to the Mediterranean. Still, the Israeli leadership—with consistent backing from IDF generals—has opted not to act to speed the collapse of the Assad regime, often on the strength of an implied “devil we know” argument.

Netanyahu has nevertheless articulated a set of red lines: the transfer via Syria to Hezbollah of game-changing weapons, specifically precision-guided missiles; and any attempt to open a new front in terrorist operations along the Golan Line of Separation, where Israel intends to maintain calm. Outside these red lines, however, Israel has taken no actions to degrade Assad’s power or threaten regime assets separate from the Iran-Hezbollah deployment in Syria. Both the Israeli security cabinet and the IDF General Staff have repeatedly rejected suggestions to equip certain non-jihadist rebel factions with the weapons they desperately need to fight the remnants of the Syrian army and the Iran-sponsored militias, at some 40,000 strong. This is despite pleas by rebel commanders for anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, heavy mortars, and light artillery. In the minority, a handful of Israeli security officials felt early on that by extending modest military assistance to vetted rebel groups in the Quneitra and Deraa provinces, they could help these fighters overcome the depleted units of the Syrian army’s First Corps, stationed at the nexus of Syria’s borders with Israel and Jordan, with Damascus to the north. The five Syrian army divisions traditionally posted in this area had suffered substantial casualties, defections, and a collapse in recruitment. For those Israeli officials who favored arming the rebels, the idea was to encourage their capture of this space and holding of the line along the southern approaches to the Syrian capital, areas that include the Assad strongholds of al-Kiswah, Qatana, and Kanaker. A strong rebel line in this territory would relieve pressure from rebel brigades active in other sectors surrounding Damascus and force Assad to split his much-weakened forces. Capture of southern Syria by the rebels, some suggested, would create a wide buffer zone between Israel and Iran-sponsored forces. Such a plan, however, never materialized owing to Netanyahu’s reluctance to get drawn into the Syrian quagmire and expose Israelis to retaliatory fire from across the border.

In retrospect, this hesitance by the Israeli security establishment can be traced all the way back to the first Lebanon war in 1982, when Israel failed to facilitate regime change in Beirut and later had to relinquish the security belt established along the border and abandon the local militia operating there—the South Lebanon Army (SLA). From that experience, most Israeli officials absorbed the lesson that adventures outside Israel’s borders must be averted, as well as a skepticism of the effectiveness of investing in proxy foreign militias.

Whatever their resistance to actually funding the Syrian rebels, Israeli officers maintained a continuous dialogue with various such groups and mostly assessed that they were too fragmented and, to varying degrees, also inclined toward jihadist ideology. The bottom line for Israel was that, even in cases where rebel groups from different towns joined together in coalitions such as the Southern Front, they did not warrant the investment.

Still, in an effort to keep the Golan front calm and avoid a flood of refugees, Israel has since 2013 gradually developed a humanitarian-aid program for rebel-held villages close to the border. The program has slowly been expanded so that today it reaches approximately 300,000 inhabitants of the Quneitra and, to a lesser extent, Deraa provinces. This program—clearly the most successful of all similar humanitarian efforts in Syria—consists of medical treatment of thousands in hospitals inside Israel and large cross-border deliveries of food, fuel, clothes, and other supplies. In June 2016, this program was consolidated under a special unit named “Good Neighborhood,” which itself is part of Territorial Division 420, in charge of the border. Both the entry of Syrians seeking medical care and the aid deliveries across the border occur at night and are coordinated by Israeli intelligence officials with an array of rebel commanders and community leaders on the other side. 

This effort has helped maintain quiet on the Israeli side of the border, even during periods of intense fighting very close to the front lines. But lacking significant military assistance, the rebels have proven unable to win any important battles against the Syrian army over the past four years, and control of southern Syria hasn’t changed hands during that same period. The governorate capitals—Quneitra and Deraa—are in Assad’s hands, whereas the rural areas are split. The western parts adjacent to the Israeli Golan have become a de facto Israeli zone of influence where the Syrian army and its allied militias avoid embarking upon major offensives and the Russian air force does not fly its planes. The small enclave held by the Islamic State in the southernmost sector of the Golan border, along the western section of the Yarmouk River, remains largely isolated and does not yet constitute a real threat for Israel or the neighboring rebel factions.

The cautious policy pursued by Israel also resulted, to a certain degree, from the understanding in Jerusalem that former U.S. President Barack Obama was adamant in his refusal to adopt recommendations by some of his top advisors to intensify support of rebel groups and adopt a firm anti-Assad stance. The Israelis felt at the time that without U.S. leadership, the objective of toppling the Assad regime was untenable. The Israelis were also aware of Jordan’s halfhearted assistance to tribal rebels in the Hawran area, which has traditional ties to the Hashemite throne. On top of that, funding from the Gulf states to a string of rebel coalitions tended to prioritize those active in central and northern Syria, whereas the modest financing extended to rebel factions south of Damascus was badly coordinated and often had Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar backing rival factions.

Whatever the root causes, Israel has now suffered a major strategic failure with far-reaching implications. Instead of watching the demise of the Assad regime, Israel must cope with the presence of a formidable Russian air force contingent next door and a steady encroachment of Iran toward its border.

By mid-2012, the Iranian General Hossein Hamedani had managed to convince Assad, who was then contemplating going into exile, to stay in office and keep fighting. In the first phase, Iran helped Assad defend Damascus and some other parts of “useful Syria” by operating an air bridge that brought military equipment and munitions, by introducing Hezbollah units to the battlefield, and by deploying hastily recruited militias consisting both of local loyalists and foreign fighters from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. At one point, IRGC Qods Force commander General Qasem Soleimani led 4,000 IRGC troops to the battle for eastern Aleppo, but he ultimately had to send them back to Iran at the insistence of Khamenei, who indicated a low tolerance for Iranian fatalities in Syria. Then, in 2015, came the masterstroke: Soleimani struck a deal with Putin, and the arrival of the Russian air force on the scene since September 2015 has slowly enabled Iran to secure Assad’s control over 60 percent of the country.

Not only has Iran managed to stabilize the Assad regime and pacify much of his territory, it has also obtained a great degree of influence over decision-making in Damascus, become a dominant actor in the war, and begun to solidify its military presence in Syria. It has achieved the latter two ends by acquiring bases and deploying advanced facilities, constructing myriad militias outside the framework of the Syrian Arab Army and its irregular auxiliary forces, and establishing plants for production of missiles, precision guidance systems, and ammunition.

Israel is faced not only with a preserved Assad regime—a vital ally to Iran and Hezbollah—but also with the emergence of Iranian military power next door. In short, Israeli caution has opened the door to future adventures, after all. Israeli inaction came face-to-face with Iranian proactivity, and Israel now finds itself counting its losses even as the Syrian war winds down. Particularly, the Golan Heights, kept calm for decades by father and son Assad, is now, in the view of the regime’s Iranian patrons, a new front for resistance forces. Furthermore, at least five Syrian air bases already accommodate Iranian units, along with their UAVs, missiles, and intelligence facilities. The number of militiamen—Shi‘a and others—at Iran’s disposal in Syria is steadily growing, and their training and equipment are improving.

The future scheme envisaged by Soleimani involves at least one land bridge, and likely two, through Iraqi territory, over which reinforcements and supply convoys could be moved. Several leaders of major Iraqi Popular Mobilization Unit (PMU) militias have already announced their wish to join a battle against Israel on the Golan. Moreover, once the Iranians modernize their outdated army, they may consider deploying combat aircraft and navy units (for example, submarines) in Syria. This, of course, comes on top of Iran’s impressive arsenal of long-range missiles capable of hitting Israel and its massive—currently dormant—global terrorist network, which can be activated on very short notice.

Iran is in no hurry to have a confrontation. Soleimani, his boss Khamenei, and his lieutenants seem to have abandoned for the moment their earlier plans to deploy Hezbollah and other militias close to the Golan frontier. Prompting this reassessment was a series of pinpoint Israeli strikes against Iran-sponsored groups that had prepared the grounds for terrorist attacks from Syrian-army-controlled areas near Quneitra, including by planting explosive charges and firing Katyusha rockets. In 2015, the commanders entrusted with these missions, including the Lebanese Samir Kuntar and Jihad Mughniyah, as well as Mohammad Ali Allahdadi, the IRGC general in charge, were killed by the IDF. Later that same year, the IDF killed an additional three operatives who were on their way to the border fence, prompting Iran to suspend such attempts. Iran and its proxies still hold a half-dozen or so positions between the slopes of Mount Hermon and the Damascus-Deraa highway, but they have refrained from further provoking Israel.

Since August 2015, Iran has instead focused on its long-term campaign to deepen its offensive capabilities within Syrian territory. From their headquarters at Damascus Airport, known as the “Glasshouse,” Iranian forces, currently led by IRGC General Hussein Kaani, control, among other sites, the al-Kiswah camp, south of the capital, from which operations closer to the Israeli border are supervised. From this headquarters, the Iranians hope to direct, when the opportunity arises, an attack on the rebels in Deraa, with the goal of capturing the entire province and encircling the rebel factions in Quneitra province in a pocket adjacent to the Israeli border.

An Iran-directed offensive toward the south, however, would require Russian consent given Moscow’s 2017 declaration—joined by Washington and Amman—of a de-escalation zone in this region. An offensive would constitute a violation of this agreement, and would likewise probably require Russian air support in order to uproot the rebels from their strongholds. Putin has not in the past hesitated to flout his deconfliction arrangements, but so far he has approved only sporadic strikes by Russian planes around Deraa, where both sides have for months been preparing for an eventual showdown.

Israel will face a difficult dilemma once an Iran-led assault toward Deraa begins. Sending the air force and employing land-based missiles to stop the advance may well compel Assad and his Iranian patrons to retaliate, thus increasing the danger of a general flare-up. On the other hand, clinging to the current Israeli policy of nonintervention in Syria would enable the Iranians to consolidate their dominance over hilltops along the border, from which they could threaten the Israeli Golan with short-range rockets and mortars. Furthermore, the capture of Deraa province would position Iranian proxy forces on the border with Jordan. Israeli officials believe Soleimani may be planning an effort to subvert the Hashemite regime in Amman, in the expectation that one way or another Jordan will finally join the Axis of Resistance. It is important to remember that for many decades, Israeli governments have regarded foreign intervention with their neighbor to the east as a casus belli. Russian air force participation in such an attack on Deraa would, of course, further complicate Israel’s calculations. The hotline between the IAF and the Russian-operated Hmeimim Air Base in Syria has so far successfully prevented any clash between Russian and Israeli pilots, and the top-of-the-line Russian air defense systems in Syria have not locked their radars on Israeli planes, even while the latter attacked Iranian depots located near Russian military units. Israel would certainly be extremely prudent if faced with the risk of dogfights with the Russians. Putin, as implied thus far, has proven disinclined to get involved in skirmishes with Israel over Syria, although at times he has expressed annoyance at Israeli strikes.

In view of the currently rising tension between Israel and Iran, what measures could be taken to prevent a confrontation, or at least limit its scope?

Contacts between Israel and Iran through a variety of Track II channels, quietly organized in past years, have failed to produce any prospect for near-term tacit understandings. Messages exchanged via European diplomats have likewise resulted once again in deadlock. The Iranian representatives simply refuse to consider any restriction on their activities in Syria or toning down of their calls for the destruction of the “Zionist regime.”

The same goes for the few futile attempts by some Arab and European states to set up a communication channel between Israel and the Assad regime. Syria may be inclined at some future point to curtail Iran’s entrenchment on its soil, but at present the government in Damascus does not feel at liberty to stop the construction of Iranian military infrastructure. Netanyahu’s warning that Israel may be compelled to take direct action against Assad has not had the desired effect on Assad’s conduct.

A more promising option would be a dialogue with Putin, who has privately told Western interlocutors that he does not want Syria to become a “Persian colony” and that he has no interest in watching a war erupt between Iran and Israel. However, the Kremlin still requires the Iran-sponsored militias to complete the destruction of the remaining rebel bastions, especially in Idlib province and some other smaller enclaves. Therefore, it may take time before Putin is willing to rein in his Iranian allies.

The most sensible way to address Iran’s expansion into Syria would be to establish a comprehensive set of understandings between Moscow and Washington on how to shape Syria’s future. Unfortunately, under the existing circumstances, such an agreement does not seem possible for the foreseeable future. Therefore, the 2017 de-escalation agreement reached by the two parties in relation to southern Syria can be further elaborated to consolidate a stable ceasefire in the areas lying between Damascus and the borders with Israel and Jordan. In turn, an upgraded de-escalation deal could prevent an offensive against the rebels in Deraa and then Quneitra provinces. And a ceasefire could potentially allow the rebels to bolster their defensive capabilities. Since both the United States and Russia prefer to avert an Israel-Iran clash and its associated risks, expanded understandings over the south could contain a prohibition on entry to the area of non-Syrian forces, such as Hezbollah, thus diminishing the danger of an eruption along the border. Curtailing IRGC acquisition of a network of bases in Syria also requires that Assad and his mentors be thwarted from capturing the areas east of the Euphrates River—roughly a quarter of Syria’s territory—currently held by the U.S.-sponsored Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), aided by the presence of 2,000 U.S. soldiers. Control of this region has prevented Iran from activating their two planned land corridors into Syria. One corridor would run through Anbar province in western Iraq and the other through the Kirkuk-Sinjar roads. The IRGC aspires to gain the ability to direct more militiamen and supplies to Syria through friendly areas along these routes in order to accelerate the military buildup inside the country. Experience has taught them that reliance on airlifts is quite vulnerable to Israeli strikes.

To keep districts east of the Euphrates outside the reach of Iran-sponsored forces, the United States must continue its role there so that the SDF, consisting mainly of fighters from the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG), remains confident of continuous U.S. air cover, assistance, and training. Such an arrangement, however, does not necessarily preclude a reduction in the U.S. force count on the ground.

Other elements of a strategy to disrupt Iran’s attempted transformation of Syria into a military platform for a future campaign against Israel should include strengthening the Druze community—with its traditional ties to Jordan and Israel—to resist any Iranian attempt to penetrate Suwayda province, northeast of Deraa governorate. The complicated situation of the Druze during the civil war is beyond the scope of this article, but ambivalent Druze relations with the Assad regime do not in any way suggest an inclination to welcome an IRGC or other Shia presence in their midst. Depriving Iran of the temptation to deploy medium-range missile bases in Druze Mountain should be viewed as an indispensable component of a policy aimed at foiling the Iranian scheme.

Setting aside the United States and Israel, quite a few regional players have a stake in preventing Iran from effectively taking over Syria. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan share the same distaste for what has been termed the “Shia Crescent,” with Syria as its center of gravity. Each of these countries can be induced to contribute in different ways to a “stop-Iran” effort. Whether by extending funds, military assistance, or aid for reconstruction, these states can help deter Assad from total surrender to Iran’s wishes, and reinforce the rebels’ hold in southern Syria and the regions east of the Euphrates.

But, above all, to prevent an all-out Israel-Iran war, which could easily expand to Lebanon and Gaza, the United States must lend its support to a sustained Israeli campaign to destroy—when necessary and possible—Iranian facilities in Syria and continuously raise the cost of the IRGC effort, to the point that both Tehran and Damascus will have to reconsider the viability of Soleimani’s project.

The post Bracing for an Israel-Iran Confrontation in Syria appeared first on The American Interest.

The Fracturing of the Transatlantic Community

It has been 25 years since Samuel Huntington published in Foreign Affairs his first warning about civilization and culture rapidly superseding ideology and economics as the principal drivers of conflict in the world. Since then the key tenets of Huntington’s analysis have held; the forces of the anticipated civilizational clash have accelerated their remaking of the international system. They also continue to reshape the Western democracies from within and without. Looking back just a generation, one can discern an important undercurrent of the Huntingtonian inter-civilizational struggle: the progressive fracturing of the foundational cultural bonds that once defined the larger idea of the West and gave the NATO alliance its requisite resilience and national cohesion, indispensable at times of crisis. As NATO prepares for the next summit in Brussels, the agenda should go beyond a discussion of defense spending, deterrence, or cyber security. This time there needs also to be deeper reflection on how to sustain and revitalize the larger bonds that for close to seven decades have maintained the indispensable foundation of allied security. 

In July in Brussels, NATO will take up the urgent business of how to deal with the continued deficit in defense spending in Europe, arrive at more equitable burden sharing, strengthen defense and deterrence along the eastern flank, and address cross-domain threats. But what has been missing from the larger debate about NATO’s adaptation is the extent to which national resilience has been failed by decades of postmodern ideological deconstruction, with group identity politics, multiculturalism, and, more recently, the surge in immigration into Europe and the United States, which is redefining the meaning of national communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

At the NATO summit, state-on-state competition, which is fast eclipsing the almost two decades of strategic focus on terrorism and non-state actors, will be front and center. And yet the progressive balkanization of Western nations at the intersection of ideology and demographics is fast becoming a key internal security variable and, when considering the overall effectiveness of the Transatlantic alliance going forward, does not seem to factor into the resilience of the West. The increasingly serious national security consequences of ideologically polarized and increasingly tribal publics do not seem to register in today’s debate about the collective defense of the West. 

Half a century after the 1960s revolutions in Europe and the United States, Western societies are now on the threshold of internal decomposition, as the political and societal bonds that were the precondition of the Transatlantic age after 1945 fade with each passing year. The internationalization of manufacturing and the benefits of free trade that formed the baseline for elite consensus after the Cold War have in the past decade morphed into a crude but growing belief in globalism as a panacea for national decline. Calls for de facto open borders abound, as well as questioning about the inherent value of Western culture as the framing of modern democratic states. Decline of the sense of a larger community across Western democracies, rooted in cohesive nation-states, is increasingly the norm. 

Driven by deepening class polarization and the emergence of unintegrated “suspended communities” embedded within increasingly tenuous national cultures, internally polarized democratic nations themselves are fast becoming the weakest links of the Transatlantic security system, for they raise legitimate concerns about the overall resilience of NATO member-states at times of crisis or war. Less than three years ago a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center delivered the devastating message that majorities across Europe would not support fulfilling the Article 5 commitment if one of the allies were attacked. Only in the United States and Canada did clear majorities (56 percent for the U.S. and 53 percent for Canada) support military action to defend the allies. The Germans were the most opposed, with 58 percent against their country taking military action. Judging by the inward-looking public debate in the wake of the recent wave of mass migration, these numbers, especially in Western Europe, likely to be even more discouraging today. 

The challenge NATO confronts as it prepares for the Brussels summit is as much internal as it is external, defined by a manifest weakening of public consensus about the essential mutuality of security commitments embodied in NATO. The West is more affluent today than at any time in its history, with wealth, technology, and innovation that could easily be melded into the world’s most powerful militaries. And yet NATO continues to struggle to meet the 2 percent GDP defense commitment articulated at the Wales summit and reaffirmed in Warsaw. The gap between the official rhetoric about the scope of the threat confronting the alliance and the actual monetary commitments made to rebuild the armed forces remains an urgent problem for leaders in Europe. 

As a result of immigration, countries that were once the proud lynchpins of Western civilization are increasingly in turmoil, with deepening ethnic and religious divisions and possibly at risk of fracturing. If unaddressed by governments, the progressive loss of cohesion, and with it the declining sense of national solidarity, will ultimately result in Western European states becoming hollowed out and bereft of national solidarity. The security risks posed by the progressive fragmentation of the mainstream culture and common identifiers can no longer be charmed away by claims that “our diversity is our strength.” Europe is at risk of becoming a continent of torn countries—a phenomenon not so long ago seemingly limited to the Balkans. 

An entirely new generation has grown since Huntington’s seminal essay was first published. Today we can determine to some extent where the civilizational battlefield has been: within the now rapidly fragmenting Western democracies, which have been fractured by the combination of postmodernism, re-transformed Marxism, and group identity politics, against the backdrop of mass immigration and the ideology of multicultural diversity. The most potent factors in this war have been playing out less along the geostrategic fault lines between the West, the Muslim world, and the Asian civilizations, and instead increasingly inside Western democracies themselves. The Western concept of modernity, with its emphasis on individual political and economic freedom—which appeared to have triumphed after the Cold War and was supposed to mark the “unburdening of history”—is no longer the object of national aspirations. More troublingly, the rising generation of Westerners is increasingly less willing to embrace that vision. 

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Inside Armenia’s Improbable “Velvet Revolution”

For the first months of 2018, observers of Armenian politics quietly wondered what would happen in April, when the nation was set to officially transition from a presidential to a parliamentary republic. Would Serzh Sargsyan, President since 2008, stay on as Prime Minister? Or would he stand down in favor of someone new? He kept quiet about his intentions until just days before the transition was set to occur—when the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) endorsed him for the premiership.

Serzh, as he is known in Armenia, was widely unpopular, and stood for the status quo: oligarchic control over much of the economy, endemic corruption, and—most frustratingly of all—a government that seemed entirely content with these realities. In the face of 20 percent unemployment, almost 30 percent of the population living on less than $3 a day, an extremely tight credit market, crumbling infrastructure, a dangerously low birth rate, and staggering emigration, the HHK insisted that everything was going smoothly.

Many Armenians had hoped that Karen Karapetyan, Prime Minister since 2016, would stay on after the shift to a parliamentary system. Though a nominal member of the HHK, Karapetyan had won a reputation as a maverick during his tenure as mayor of Yerevan, and brought a relatively dynamic, business-minded spirit to the premiership. But by opting for Sargsyan over Karapetyan, the HHK signaled that real power would remain in the hands of the old guard, and that no meaningful reforms would be forthcoming.

Nobody—least of all the ruling elites—anticipated that a major popular challenge would emerge against Sargsyan. At most, citizens were expected to “let off steam” in minor protests, just as they had in seemingly every year of Sargsyan’s rule.

The first protests appeared to confirm this belief. The only major opposition initiative was organized by Nikol Pashinyan, a 42-year-old Member of Parliament who had been jailed for anti-Sargsyan activities from 2009 to 2011. One of just nine MPs definitively oriented against the HHK, Pashinyan organized a march from the northern city of Gyumri to Yerevan, arriving in the capital on April 13. There, he delivered a fiery speech condemning the government—specifically criticizing embezzlement of military funds, which he argued nullified security-based arguments in favor of Sargsyan. But just a few thousand, predominantly middle-aged and elderly supporters attended the rally.

Pashinyan and a small group of these supporters then blocked a central intersection with benches, tents, and dumpsters. For the next two days, though the protesters made headlines and drew casually friendly onlookers, they did not gather significant crowds. The police, seemingly keeping with their “letting off steam” strategy, kept far away.

On Monday, April 16, the day before Sargsyan’s planned election as Prime Minster, large groups of students joined the protest movement, succeeding in completely closing several of Yerevan’s most important avenues and halting subway service. They then gathered outside the National Assembly, led by Pashinyan, where they confronted police for the first time. A confused melee ensued, in which around a dozen protesters—including Pashinyan—were lightly injured by stun grenades, tear gas, and barbed wire.

On Tuesday, Sargsyan was officially elected Prime Minister, and Pashinyan began holding nightly rallies in Republic Square—the capital’s largest open space—and calling for a non-violent “velvet revolution.” Throughout the week, the rallies grew, Pashinyan held marches in various suburbs, and Armenians in villages and small cities also began to protest. However, life continued as usual in most areas of Yerevan, and most observers still expected demonstrations to die down just as in years before.

But on Friday, April 20, the situation in Yerevan suddenly changed dramatically. Seemingly unbidden, tens of thousands of flag-waving protestors poured into the streets, blocking almost all traffic in vast areas of the capital; truck drivers and computer programmers went on strike; and thousands of drivers across the city began blaring their horns in support of the demonstrations.

Even the protesters themselves seemed taken aback by the rapid developments. But their momentum was undeniable, and when massive demonstrations continued on Saturday, the mood shifted to one of jubilation, with loud cheers, patriotic music, and fireworks joining the endless sound of car horns.

Sunday, April 22 was a pivotal day. In the early morning, Pashinyan announced that he would meet with Sargsyan to discuss the terms of the latter’s resignation. The two indeed met, but their conversation, which was broadcast live, lasted just three minutes. Rather than resigning, Sargsyan appeared to threaten deadly violence against protesters, whom he dismissed as “7 percent of the electorate,” and then stormed out of the meeting.

About an hour later, Pashinyan was arrested, along with two other MPs who had helped lead the protests—despite their constitutional immunity as members of parliament. The police then announced that all further demonstrations would be forcibly dispersed. Hundreds of grassroots organizers, as well as ordinary participants, were arrested, and many were injured. For a brief moment, it appeared that the government had retaken control.

However, Sargsyan’s conduct during the abortive negotiations, Pashinyan’s arrest, and the authorities’ seemingly total disregard for popular will ignited massive resistance. Close to 200,000 people took to the major avenues of Yerevan, including thousands who had traveled from other parts of Armenia. One major march surrounded the prison where Pashinyan was being held. Eventually, all the marches converged on Republic Square, and the enormous, leaderless crowd held a defiant rally. Despite their earlier threats, the police retreated, seemingly overwhelmed by the size of the demonstration.

On Monday morning, most workplaces, schools, and universities were closed, and student-led demonstrators filled virtually every street in Yerevan. Just before noon, news began to circulate that hundreds of uniformed soldiers had joined a major march, and shortly thereafter Pashinyan and the other MPs were released. By then, close to 500,000 demonstrators had packed Republic Square and the surrounding streets. Shortly after 4 p.m., Sargsyan abruptly resigned, admitting: “Pashinyan was right. I was wrong.”

What factors prompted such a sudden, unforeseen turn of events? How did Nikol Pashinyan—mostly unknown in Armenia until two weeks ago—manage to break Sargsyan’s decade-long deadlock on power?

First, Pashinyan and his co-organizers employed innovative tactics to expose the near-unanimity of popular opposition to Sargsyan. By holding daily marches in far-flung suburbs of Yerevan, they gave previously ignored constituencies a chance to participate in demonstrations, gradually mobilizing tens of thousands of first-time protesters. And by asking motorists passing marches to “beep if you’re against Serzh”—which, according to videos and eyewitness accounts, nearly all of them did—they created powerful illustrations of the shallowness of the regime’s support. Meanwhile, the government was unable to mobilize even a semblance of a counter-movement, either on the streets or on social media, effectively ending any illusions that might have been harbored regarding its popular legitimacy.

The second factor that helped topple Serzh Sargsyan was timely intervention from clergy and soldiers. The Armenian government had long relied on the Armenian Church hierarchy for legitimacy, and during Sunday’s pivotal events there were reports of policemen appealing to clergy to help disperse “illegal” protests. However, far from sending demonstrators home, a group of priests instead led a march to Republic Square, shielding participants from arrest or police violence. A photograph of the priests went viral on social media, largely destroying the government’s claim to speak for the Church.

Even more important was the fact that several hundred uniformed soldiers joined the protesters on Monday, which demonstrated that the government could no longer rely on its own security services. Less than four hours after the soldiers appeared, Sargsyan abruptly resigned.

Third, the “Velvet Revolution” succeeded because—despite repeated attempts to do so—the government was unable to credibly paint Pashinyan or his supporters as dangerous. At each of his rallies, Pashinyan called for total nonviolence, insisting that his supporters must “turn the other cheek” if attacked, and that anyone who so much as cursed at a police officer could have no place in the movement. The crowds seemed to accept this guideline, cheering loudly and raising their open hands whenever a speaker reiterated non-violent principles.

Additionally, given Armenia’s ethnic and religious homogeneity, there was never a threat that the protests would trigger communal violence. Though government officials attempted to draw parallels to the bloody aftermaths of revolutions in Ukraine and the Arab world, these comparisons held little currency in the absence of irredentist minorities, Islamists, or similarly polarizing groups.

Fourth, and finally, the impending date of April 24—Armenian Genocide Commemoration Day—played a vital role in the denouement of the demonstrations. The authorities feared that April 24, when Armenians traditionally walk en masse to memorial sites, would turn into a massive anti-government demonstration, which would be impossible to forcefully disperse.

In the aftermath of Sargsyan’s shock resignation, questions remain about the broader goals of the “Velvet Revolution.” Though “Reject Serzh” was the protesters’ original slogan, their demonstrations always had self-evident implications reaching far beyond Sargsyan himself. From the beginning, Pashinyan and his co-organizers demanded an end to oligarchy and corruption, emphasized their support for rule of law, and called for elections unmarred by allegations of fraud. Protesters’ homemade signs, social media posts, and even boycotts of oligarch-led businesses showed that vast numbers of them agreed: They were marching against Armenia’s entire political-economic status quo, not just Serzh. In this regard, the “Velvet Revolution” is a classic pro-democracy uprising, similar to the movements that accompanied the collapse of the USSR 30 years ago.

Unlike those uprisings, however, the Armenian protests have not, in any discernable way, been directed against Moscow. Neither Pashinyan, his co-organizers, nor any other faction has criticized Russia—or, for that matter, even discussed foreign policy—during the protests.

Nevertheless, many in the Western press have forced a “Russia angle” into their reporting and analysis, suggesting that the Armenian protests represent a reproach against Moscow. These suggestions are not just inaccurate; they also reflect a long-standing Western tendency to overemphasize Russia’s importance in Armenian affairs, forgetting the fact that the two countries do not share a border, a language, an alphabet, a church, or even a common history dating to before the 19th century.

Rather than belonging to Russia’s “camp,” as many Western strategic analyses assume, Armenia has since independence sought allies wherever possible, attempting to simultaneously maintain warm relations with the United States, the European Union, Russia, and Iran—all as bulwarks against Azerbaijan and Turkey. This was the strategy Sargsyan pursued, and it will almost certainly be the strategy pursued by his successor.

Whatever comes next, the past two weeks constitute a historic milestone for Armenia. The country has not seen demonstrations on such a scale since the independence movement against the USSR, and for the first time since independence, a sitting leader has been forced out by popular demand. Having realized and asserted their power, Armenian citizens seem primed to enter a new phase of engagement, activism, and optimism.

Nikol Pashinyan has gained an enormous constituency, and his speeches and press conferences make clear that he believes the job of the “Velvet Revolution” is just beginning. He and his supporters believe that the entire HHK must be swept from power, and hold that no HHK figure can remain even as interim Prime Minister.

Late on Tuesday, acting Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan cancelled planned negotiations with Pashinyan, accusing the latter of heavy-handedness. Pashinyan responded by calling for renewed demonstrations, and overnight it was unclear how the situation would develop.

Karapetyan seemed to be making two gambles: First, he calculated that he had emerged from the revolution with his popularity relatively intact. Second, following 11 days of protests, Monday’s victory celebrations, and Tuesday’s solemn commemoration of the Genocide, he may have expected that Armenians were unlikely to pour back into the streets in overwhelming numbers.

However, he appears to have been wrong on both counts. Throughout Wednesday, hundreds of thousands once again shut down most of Yerevan, this time calling for a total rejection of the entire HHK. The demonstrators were joined by dozens of MPs who had opposed or remained on the sidelines of the “Reject Serzh” movement, and by evening, the HHK’s coalition partner, the ARF-Dashnaktsutyun, pulled out of the government and threw its support to Pashinyan. This left the protest leader just six votes shy of the threshold needed to be elected interim Prime Minister in elections on May 1.

Many now expect that this gap will be filled by defecting HHK MPs, especially after a Thursday announcement by Armenia’s President—like Karapetyan, a nominal member of the HHK—lauding the “organized and civilized” protests and urging parliamentarians to respect the will of the people. The coming days will show whether they heed his call—and whether the “Velvet Revolution” can sustain itself beyond its early, improbable success.

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