George Packer's Blog, page 125

World War Three, by Mistake

On June 3, 1980, at about two-thirty in the morning, computers at the National Military Command Center, beneath the Pentagon, at the headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), deep within Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, and at Site R, the Pentagon’s alternate command post center hidden inside Raven Rock Mountain, Pennsylvania, issued an urgent warning: the Soviet Union had just launched a nuclear attack on the United States. The Soviets had recently invaded Afghanistan, and the animosity between the two superpowers was greater than at any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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Will Putin Unite the European and American Right?

For several years now, Vladimir Putin has been offering himself up as a helpful big brother to the parties of the European far right, and they’ve responded with expressions of warm family feeling. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s anti-immigrant, anti-European Union National Front, has praised Putin’s strong leadership and defended Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Le Pen sees allies in both Putin and Donald Trump, as well as in parties on the right in Europe, all united in a worldwide fight to reinforce national borders and resist globalization. “The forces at work in these various elections are ideas, forces which could bring about my election as the President of France next May,” she said last month. Among the forces she may have in mind are the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has said that he sees Putin’s Russia as a model of the “illiberal democracy” he’s installing at home. A former leader of Germany’s National Democratic Party, Udo Voigt, said recently, “We need a chancellor like Putin, someone who is working for Germany and Europe like Putin works for Russia.” And just this week Austria’s xenophobic Freedom Party, which was founded in the nineteen-fifties by former Nazis, signed a five-year “coöperation agreement” with Putin’s party, United Russia. The two parties will be partners in business development, the agreement promises, but also in “the education of the young generation in the spirit of patriotism and arbeitsfreude”—that is, “joy in work,” a term that dates to the nineteenth century but enjoyed a revival under the Nazis. Pyotr Tolstoy, the deputy speaker of the Duma, said that this bold coöperation between Russia’s ruling party and Europe’s anti-establishment conservatives would be a counterweight—this might sound familiar—to the “politically correct world, when everyone is hiding their real thoughts and feelings.” All in all, it has been an upbeat moment for Le Pen and her friends, with the potential, according to Lawrence Rosenthal, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who heads a center on right-wing studies, for an “international comity that the right has not historically had.”

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Curious George Learns About Brand Recognition

In June, 1940, hours before the Nazis occupied Paris, Hans and Margret Rey fled the city on homemade bicycles. They carried with them little more than their winter coats and an illustrated manuscript about an inquisitive monkey named Fifi. The Reys made their way to Lisbon, then to Brazil, and, finally, the United States. In 1941, Houghton Mifflin published their manuscript and gave the monkey a new moniker: Curious George.

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The Trump Team’s Holy War and the Remaking of the World Order

In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former five-star general and the Supreme Allied Commander in the Second World War, inaugurated the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C. “I should like to assure you, my Islamic friends, that, under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts, this center, this place of worship, is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other religion,” Eisenhower said. “Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience. This concept is indeed a part of America, and without that concept we would be something else than what we are. . . . I am convinced that our common goals are both right and promising.”

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Will Putin Unite the European and American Right?
Ayn Rand and Corporate Tax Cuts Won’t Mend the Economy
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Aleppo’s “Evacuation” Is a Crime Against Humanity

Last Thursday, as forces loyal to the Syrian government advanced through eastern Aleppo and despondent civilians there wondered whether they would be massacred, Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, stood in a sunlit courtyard in Damascus, dressed in a crisp blue suit, and compared his victory to the births of Jesus Christ and the prophet Muhammad. Just as our calendars count the years before and after those events, he explained, “I believe that we will talk about history—and not just the history of Syria, but of the entire world—as before and after the liberation of Aleppo.” He rocked back and forth on his heels, waving his arms and raising his eyebrows, unable to conceal his excitement.

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Ayn Rand and Corporate Tax Cuts Won’t Mend the Economy

In a post on LinkedIn the other day, Ray Dalio, one of the world’s richest and most successful hedge-fund managers, offered some thoughts on the incoming Trump Administration. If “you haven’t read Ayn Rand lately, I suggest that you do as her books pretty well capture the mindset,” Dalio, the founder and chief executive of Bridgewater Associates, wrote. “This new administration hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies, and it admires strong, can-do, profit makers. It wants to, and probably will, shift the environment from one that makes profit makers villains with limited power to one that makes them heroes with significant power.”

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Will Trump Be Reaganesque in All the Wrong Ways?

If autocrats wrote management books—the kind displayed on stands at airport bookstores—they would have titles like “I Alone Can Fix It” or “I’m My Own Strategist.” “I’m, Like, a Smart Person” would make a good subtitle. The autocratic impulse is best expressed in the first-person singular, a point of view that President-elect Donald Trump—the man who made each of these pronouncements—uses with relish. Trump’s inner autocrat is further apparent in his man crushes on despots, chiefly Vladimir Putin; in his threats to silence and jail his opponents; in his cruelty and vindictiveness; on his walls lined with portraits of himself wearing a well-practiced, ruthless squint; and in the cult of fervent reverence that prevails among his relatives and retainers.

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What We Would Miss in an All-Amazon-Shopping World

A few Saturdays back, I stopped to visit my friends John and Miriam at Mellah, a Moroccan rug shop they opened last spring in Toronto. Mellah is a small store in the city’s West End, set in a neighborhood that’s rich in coffee shops, young families, and dive bars, but not home to a lot of high-end home retailers. Still, the space they leased has one big advantage: a huge south-facing window, which allows pedestrians to glance in and pretty much see every single rug and textile for sale.

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Holy Rage: Lessons from Standing Rock

The snow-scoured hills and buttes of the Missouri Breaks are dotted with isolated houses, until the sudden appearance of the Oceti Sakowin encampment on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The presence of so many people catches at the heart. Snow-dusted tepees, neon pup tents, dark-olive military tents, brightly painted metal campers, and round solid yurts shelter hundreds on the floodplain where the Cannonball River meets the Missouri. Flags of Native Nations whip in the cutting wind, each speaking of solidarity with the Standing Rock tribe’s opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, or D.A.P.L., owned by Energy Transfer Partners and Sunoco Logistics. This pipeline would pass beneath the Missouri River and imperil drinking water not only for the tribe but for farmers, ranchers, and townspeople all along the river’s course.

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The Trouble with Trump’s Dangerous Instincts on China

There must have been a moment, in the first weeks after Chinese leaders learned that a TV star would be America’s next President, when the more optimistic among President Xi Jinping’s advisers pondered the upsides of a Trump Administration. Sure, Trump has few convictions, fewer principles, and no experience to speak of, but the ideological vacuum and his singular focus on isolationism might just play to China’s expansionist vision; his ignorance might even manifest itself as China’s greatest asset. Trump’s unprecedented (in certain respects, they were also “unpresidented”) missives over the past two weeks have likely upended such hopes. Instead, the President-elect has shown that his instinct is to turn the world’s significant bilateral relationships into frighteningly spectacular reality TV, even if doing so means the casual use of the most lethal gambits.

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