Number 133 • Sept/Oct 2014 • $8.95

Paul J. Saunders Obama’s No Realist David A. Bell Hobsbawm’s Elitism Tim Montgomerie Britain’s Tea Party Fixing Fragile States www.nationalinterest.org Dennis Blair, Ronald Neumann and Eric Olson

KISSINGER’S VISION How to Restore World Order by Jacob Heilbrunn

Number 133 . September/October 2014

The Realist

5 The Wanderer by Paul J. Saunders Is President Obama truly a realist? Not a chance. In the absence of an overarching strategy, his pragmatism in isolated cases doesn’t build toward any larger objectives.

Articles

11 Fixing Fragile States by Dennis Blair, Ronald Neumann and Eric Olson Despite thirteen years of American operations in fragile states, there have been few changes in our cumbersome, inefficient and ineffective approach to interagency operations in the field. The time for reform is now.

21 The Eternal Collapse of Russia by Paul Starobin Despite centuries of dire predictions, Russia isn’t going anywhere. Critics tend to exaggerate its ailments or fail to place them in proper context.

30 Britain’s Tea Party by Tim Montgomerie United Kingdom Independence Party leader Nigel Farage poses a dire threat to the British establishment. He’s gaining support by arguing that native, patriotic Britons are victims of a smug political class that has surrendered the nation to immigrants, rule by Brussels and self-serving elites.

37 Limited War Is Back by Jakub Grygiel and A. Wess Mitchell nato needs to rearm and defend itself to cope with a new military threat. For Europe to rely on the American security umbrella—in both its conventional and nuclear forms—is no longer tenable.

45 Europe’s Peripheral Vision by Milton Ezrati If France and the nations of Europe’s beleaguered periphery fail to enact fundamental fiscalreform, they will remain economic basket cases, dependent on Germany and subject to its demands. 53 The New Interventionism by David C. Hendrickson From a self-consciously conservative power in the early years of the Cold War, the United States has now fully emerged as a revolutionary actor in the twenty-first century.

59 A Tale of Two AUMFs by Robert Golan-Vilella The force authorizations behind the Iraq War and the “war on terror” have both evolved in ways their authors never envisioned. Congress should repeal the former and significantly revise the latter.

Reviews & Essays

67 Kissinger’s Counsel by Jacob Heilbrunn In his new book World Order, Henry Kissinger offers a sweeping guide to the rise of the modern state system. Establishing a stable balance of power remains as imperative today as it was in the era of Westphalia.

76 Bourgeois Hobsbawm by David A. Bell The famous British historian Eric Hobsbawm attracted notoriety for his attachment to international Communism. But he was also profoundly, if paradoxically, bourgeois, and in a distinctly Jewish way.

83 Rebels Who Had a Cause by Barry Gewen Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik fought totalitarianism. After the Iron Curtain fell, however, post-Communist Eastern Europe, with its Hieronymus Bosch panorama of greed, corruption, hedonism and cynicism, gave these former revolutionaries much to be disillusioned about.

89 Perlstein’s Bridge to Nowhere by Geoffrey Kabaservice Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge seeks to provide a definitive account of the transition from Richard M. Nixon to Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, his suspicion-versus-innocence framework is too simplistic to explain the rise of modern conservatism.

Images Flickr: page 8; Ford Library: page 68; Shutterstock: pages 23, 26, 49, 78, 87; Wikimedia Commons: pages 16, 36, 40, 58, 63, 72, 91, 96 Published by The Center for the National Interest

Charles G. Boyd Chairman Maurice R. Greenberg Chairman Emeritus Henry A. Kissinger Honorary Chairman

Jacob Heilbrunn Editor Dimitri K. Simes Publisher & CEO Harry J. Kazianis Managing Editor Paul J. Saunders Associate Publisher Robert Golan-Vilella Associate Managing Editor John Allen Gay Assistant Managing Editor Advisory Council Rebecca M. Miller Assistant Editor Richard Burt Chairman Morton Abramowitz Political Editor Graham Allison Robert W. Merry Conrad Black Ahmed Charai Contributing Editors Leslie H. Gelb Aram Bakshian Jr. Evan G. Greenberg Ian Bremmer Gary Hart Ted Galen Carpenter Zalmay Khalilzad Christian Caryl Kishore Mahbubani Amitai Etzioni John J. Mearsheimer Nikolas K. Gvosdev Richard Plepler Bruce Hoffman Alexey Pushkov Michael Lind Brent Scowcroft Paul R. Pillar Ruth Wedgwood Kenneth M. Pollack J. Robinson West David Rieff Dov S. Zakheim

Cover Design: Emma Hansen Owen Harries Editor Emeritus Cover Image: ©Roman Märzinger/

Robert W. Tucker Editor Emeritus Westend61/Corbis

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in the White House Emergency Public The Wanderer Relations Bunker that one can too easily imagine the administration building By Paul J. Saunders immediately beneath the Situation Room for its most important decision making. Still, it is not difficult to see how the image s President Barack Obama a foreign- of foreign-policy realism could appeal to the policy realist? For most of his time president and his communications team—it in office, both his supporters and his has provided superficial intellectual and detractors have said that he is—and political legitimacy to Obama’s frequently Iuntil very recently, Obama did not dispute expressed desire to concentrate on “nation it. On the contrary, the White House often building at home.” It likewise helped aggressively cultivated the image of the pres- the administration to justify avoiding ident as a steely-eyed pragmatist judiciously undue involvement in complex and making tough calls on both international time-consuming international problems, and domestic policy. Nevertheless, in his especially those inherited from former May commencement speech at West Point, president George W. Bush, whose legacy the Obama finally distanced himself from this, White House has publicly repudiated but saying that “according to self-described re- quietly continued in many respects. alists, conflicts in Syria or Ukraine or the Want to get out of Iraq? Pivot to Asia Central African Republic are not ours to instead—it’s more strategically important. solve” and that this view is inadequate to Need to withdraw from Afghanistan? “the demands of this moment.” We’ve done all we can there. Hope to stay If we take President Obama at his word out of further wars in the Middle East? that he is not a realist—and there are good Negotiate with Iran and use Congress as reasons to do so—his administration’s an excuse to stay out of Syria. Americans long flirtation with foreign-policy realism frustrated with Bush’s expensive choices and especially with the Left’s “progressive were understandably tempted. realists” raises two important questions. In the end, however, the White House First, why were the president and his public-relations operation was too clever advisers comfortable with longtime and by half. The administration could not widely held perceptions that he was a really explain why it was prepared to use realist? Second, what changed their minds? force in Libya but not Syria, especially Answering these questions with any after President Bashar al-Assad appeared to certainty would require a front-row seat cross Obama’s “red line” by using chemical weapons. More recently, Obama’s carefully Paul J. Saunders is executive director of the Center built reputation for caution became a for the National Interest and associate publisher of growing liability after his oratorically The National Interest. strong but factually weak response to

The Realist September/October 2014 5 Realism is much more than pragmatism; confusing the two is one of the most fundamental and enduring errors in America’s foreign-policy debates.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Iraq’s with a deep understanding of American sudden vulnerability to the militant group power and in service of a strategy based on branding itself the Islamic State—and the American national interests. Obama is not administration’s struggle to respond—made a realist because his policies typically start matters worse by simultaneously calling and stop with the pragmatic and even the into question the abrupt U.S. withdrawal in opportunistic. He appears to have excessive 2011 and the bizarre policy of undermining faith in international norms, little real stability on one side of the Iraq-Syria appreciation of power’s uses and limits, and border while trying to preserve it on the minimal interest in foreign policy, much other. The president and his team needed less American international strategy. to come up with a new rationale for his Obama’s repeated efforts to contrast the policies that would sound reasonable, twenty-first century with the nineteenth explain when his administration would century highlight his inordinate attachment use force and when it wouldn’t, and rebut to rules and norms in an environment of interventionist criticism of his purportedly international anarchy where there is no “realist” approach. Hence the West Point supreme enforcement authority (and he is speech, with its dismissiveness toward “self- unwilling to seize the role of judge, jury and described realists” and its contorted attempt executioner for the United States, as many to establish retroactively useful criteria for neoconservatives seek). International rules using military and other foreign-policy and norms have indeed evolved over the last tools. two centuries, but have not advanced in a linear and progressive manner—far from ut did the Obama administration it. In a fundamentally anarchic system, actually ever pursue a realist foreign rules and norms are meaningful only to the B policy? This question is more com- extent that they are widely observed by key plicated, because it requires a definition of players. They are therefore inherently fragile realism, but also easier, because unlike its and subject to constant interpretation and motives (and with the exception of classi- reinterpretation. They are not “laws” and fied programs), the administration’s actions can only shape state behavior, not regulate have been open and visible to all. or restrict it. (The United States itself has The principal reason that Obama’s critics been unwilling to accept such limits.) and defenders considered him a realist At the same time, global rules and norms for so long has been his administration’s are in flux. America, the European Union, generally pragmatic policies. But realism some components of the un bureaucracy is much more than pragmatism; confusing and progressive ngos have attempted to the two is one of the most fundamental and redefine them, weakening state sovereignty enduring errors in America’s foreign-policy and legitimizing force to right perceived debates. Realism is pragmatism rooted in wrongs. It is naive to expect others— awareness of international anarchy, infused especially dissatisfied major powers like

6 The National Interest The Realist Even as Obama describes the limits of force, he seems to overestimate his personal rhetorical and persuasive power.

China and Russia—to observe international through which the United States won the rules and norms that we ourselves consider Cold War. So trying to change the way the inadequate and are attempting to modify. world works actually risks destabilizing an This is a particularly daring assumption international system that is fundamentally when we ourselves often try to change rules to America’s advantage in managing rivals and norms through action and precedent and adversaries. Realists understand all of rather than negotiation and consensus. this. Obama doesn’t. It’s also naive to think that once some major powers question rules and norms, bama’s statements about Ameri- others will not seek to modify them can power have been even more too—and in ways more suitable to their O telling. After Iraq and Afghani- interests than to ours, whether in the South stan, it is understandable that Obama—and China Sea or in Crimea. Moreover, from other Americans—worry about the limits of the viewpoint of Beijing and Moscow, power. But the president has gone well be- Washington often appears to go well yond this, renouncing military power to an beyond what its interlocutors believe has extent unprecedented among post–World been agreed upon in international talks, War II U.S. presidents. Perhaps most telling as in Libya and in the former Yugoslavia’s was his shocking statement in Brussels that successive conflicts. For them, the United Russia could not be “deterred from further States is violating the same international escalation by military force”—a dramatic law it purports to uphold. Because rules abandonment of a foundational principle of and norms are inherently subjective and American foreign policy for seven decades. open to contending interpretations, these More recently, Obama said, “Very rarely perspectives matter—and arguments about have I seen the exercise of military power what is “legal” go nowhere. The fact that providing a definitive answer.” But an the U.S. Senate has not ratified agreements answer to what? Military power will indeed like the un Convention on the Law of the very rarely be a definitive answer to nation Sea or the Rome Statute, which established building, but it is often quite sufficient in the International Criminal Court, does not determining which nation owns what— strengthen Washington’s hand. as Ukrainians have painfully learned. Most perversely, however, the rules (And, as they say, possession is nine-tenths and norms that existed at the end of the of the law.) Coupled with credible troop Cold War—the ones that the Obama movements, a stronger position on Ukraine administration, the Bush administration could have created sufficient uncertainty and the Clinton administration have been for Russian president Vladimir Putin to trying to change—contributed enormously moderate his conduct after his annexation to America’s power, leadership and of Crimea. Declaring Moscow’s conduct capabilities in defending its vital national “unacceptable” and then tying our own interests. This was, after all, the system hands in responding piles weakness on top

The Realist September/October 2014 7 of overreach; it is far more dangerous than pragmatism is politically driven at its either weakness or overreach alone and can core, often placing domestic struggles and encourage other challenges. standing ahead of foreign-policy outcomes. Even as Obama describes the limits of This distorts the decision-making process force, he seems to overestimate his personal and produces policies that may sound rhetorical and persuasive power. How else pragmatic but are actually unlikely to could Obama think that declaring that “the succeed and thus largely unprincipled. time has come for President Assad to step His mutually contradictory policies on aside,” without actually doing anything, opposite sides of the Iraq-Syria border are would remove Syria’s brutal leader from one example; his approaches to China and office? Or that his declarations that Russia’s Russia, which risk simultaneous and thus annexation of Crimea is “unacceptable” will doubly dangerous confrontations with each, produce real results? This is either outsized are another. The latter could have profound self-confidence or remarkable disinterest consequences for America. in the consequences of regularly failing to To be clear, most realists agree that live up to one’s own explicit and implicit “nation building at home” is important to commitments. Neither has any place in a the prosperity that creates the foundation realist foreign policy. for America’s global power. But “nation The Obama administration’s lack of any building at home” is a goal, not a strategy, clearly defined international strategy is in and it requires a foreign-policy strategy some ways the strongest argument against founded on engagement and leadership its supposed realism. Obama may often to succeed. Moreover, for all his criticism look for pragmatic approaches to individual of “self-described realists” who don’t foreign-policy issues, but in the absence want to get too involved in other people’s of an overarching strategy, his pragmatism problems, Obama himself is the one who in isolated cases doesn’t build toward any is doing as little as is (politically) possible larger objectives. At the same time, Obama’s in international affairs. Obama’s response

8 The National Interest The Realist to security challenges usually appears style “body counts” tell us little. Another intended to do enough to avoid severe modern-day analogue, the number of Iraqi domestic criticism while simultaneously troops trained by the U.S. military, has avoiding doing so much that it becomes a evidently had very little to do with security distraction. Hence the surge in Afghanistan and stability in Iraq.) Absent a well-defined before the withdrawal, the “leading from strategic framework, narrowly focused behind” in Libya, modest support for pragmatism often leads to incrementalism, Syria’s opposition, ineffective sanctions precisely as it has in the administration’s against Russia as a substitute for a real use of drones—and, for that matter, in policy and a bare-minimum response in its responses to Moscow’s involvement in Iraq. The administration has tried to clothe eastern Ukraine. This is not realism. all of these policies in realistic-sounding rhetoric, but in fact there was little realism hat would a realist foreign-pol- involved because there is no serious icy strategy look like? It would strategy. W start with the recognition that The president’s heavy reliance on drone maintaining America’s international leader- strikes in combating terrorists—though ship—without incurring costs that neither attacks in Pakistan have slowed—is a our political system nor our economy can clear demonstration and a direct result sustain—is the best way to protect U.S. of his administration’s excessive political national interests. This is a core difference pragmatism that could come back to haunt between realists and isolationists, who gen- the United States after Obama leaves the erally see global leadership as too expensive White House, if not sooner. Drone strikes to last and want to conserve America’s re- have understandable appeal: when handled sources to the maximum extent. However, well, they can kill America’s enemies realists also know the difference between without putting troops on the ground or genuine leadership and the pseudoleader- pilots in the air and with limited civilian ship of exceptionalist rhetoric, which seeks casualties when compared to some other to proclaim leadership rather than earning options. Yet, as a recent high-profile it. This distinguishes realists from many nonpartisan task force from Washington’s neoconservatives, who often assume that Stimson Center compellingly set out, other governments and peoples will support widespread drone attacks also raise big us when we act—or that it doesn’t matter if strategic issues, including the risks of they don’t—because America is exceptional. blowback among foreign populations, The policies they advocate often squander unintentional norm-setting for others leadership, lives, money and other resources possessing drones, a “slippery slope” to in vain. broader conflict and the lack of any clear In looking at the world, realists emphasize standard for success. (On the last point, it that relationships among the world’s key should be obvious by now that Vietnam- powers are a central factor in determining

The Realist September/October 2014 9 Obama may look for pragmatic approaches to individual foreign-policy issues, but in the absence of an overarching strategy, his pragmatism doesn’t build toward any larger objectives.

the number, extent and impact of rivals requires both incentives and penalties, international conflicts—something that can and that relying strictly on our ability to have serious consequences for U.S. national impose costs makes conflict more likely, security in an age of failed states and not less—especially when we preemptively terrorism. Wars between and within states disavow force. can start for many reasons, but relations Within this framework, a realist among major powers play a critical role in foreign-policy strategy would give the determining whether they escalate, expand greatest priority to threats to America’s or end. This, in turn, powerfully influences survival, prosperity and way of life. This whether they create and sustain the means preventing the use of nuclear or lawlessness that terror groups seek, as well biological weapons against the United as how many innocent people are killed, States, maintaining stable global financial maimed or displaced. Anyone looking for and trading systems (including trade in security, stability and peace should therefore energy and other key resources), ensuring start with ties between key states. the survival of U.S. allies, and avoiding In addition to this, because America the emergence of hostile major powers or is the principal beneficiary of the collapsed states on our borders. The United international system that it has taken States has many other important aims, but the lead in constructing, Washington should not pursue them at the demonstrable should be highly motivated to maintain expense of these truly vital interests or of an it. This has two components. The first is international system favorable to America. preserving relationships with U.S. allies, U.S. leaders must also establish priorities whose ongoing support and friendship are among significant but lesser interests. extremely important both at the systemic The Obama administration has avoided level and in implementing specific policies. short-term foreign-policy catastrophes, but The second is managing contacts with has also made very costly mistakes. The countries that are not its allies, most consequences are less immediately visible notably China and Russia, whose active than the Bush administration’s wars, but opposition can do the most damage to the may prove more damaging over time— international order and to particular U.S. particularly with respect to China and interests. This includes avoiding a China- Russia—by accelerating dangerous changes Russia alignment, which is the greatest in the international system that encourage possible threat to the current world order challenges to U.S. leadership and to the and to America’s leadership of it. Being world order the United States and its allies strong, firm and reliable in upholding our built in the aftermath of World War II. commitments and realistic in appraising This, in turn, threatens America’s long-term others’ interests and objectives contributes prosperity and increases the likelihood of to both of these goals. On the last point, serious confrontations and even wars. That realists know that successfully managing isn’t realism—it’s a disaster in the making. n

10 The National Interest The Realist Fixing Fragile States

By Dennis Blair, Ronald Neumann and Eric Olson

ince the 9/11 attacks, the United or failure. We need to develop the plans to States has waged major postwar protect American interests and strengthen reconstruction campaigns in Iraq these countries out in the field, where local and Afghanistan and similar but realities are understood, before Washington Ssmaller programs in other countries that agencies bring their inside-the-Beltway harbor Al Qaeda affiliates. Continued com- perspectives to bear. Congress and the plex political, economic and military opera- executive branch need to authorize field tions will be needed for many years to deal leaders to shift resources across agency with the continuing threat from Al Qaeda lines to meet new threats. It is, in short, and its associated organizations, much of a time for change—change that upends it stemming from fragile states with weak our complacent and antiquated approach institutions, high rates of poverty and deep toward foreign societies and cultures. ethnic, religious or tribal divisions. Despite thirteen years of experience—and innumer- he 9/11 attacks offered us a painful able opportunities to learn lessons from reminder of an old verity, which is both successes and mistakes—there have T that fragile states unable to enforce been few significant changes in our cumber- their laws and control their territory are the some, inefficient and ineffective approach progenitors of potent threats that can be car- to interagency operations in the field. ried out simply and effectively. Such states We believe the time has come to look to provide safe havens from which Al Qaeda a new, more effective operational model. and its affiliates plan and launch terror at- For fragile states in which Al Qaeda is tacks against the United States and other present, the United States should develop, countries. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Penin- select and support with strong staff a new sula (aqap) operates in Yemen; Al Qaeda in type of ambassador with more authority the Islamic Maghreb operates across Algeria, to plan and direct complex operations Mali and other neighboring countries; and across department and agency lines, and Al Shabab operates in Somalia. Civil war in who will be accountable for their success Syria, spreading violence in Iraq and contin- ued turmoil in Africa will most likely open Dennis Blair is the former director of national new havens for similar groups. intelligence and former commander in chief of Until now, the American response U.S. Pacific Command. Ronald Neumann is to the threat from fragile states has had president of the American Academy of Diplomacy three major components: First, we have and former U.S. ambassador to Algeria, Bahrain greatly strengthened the control of our own and Afghanistan. Eric Olson is the former borders. Second, American intelligence and commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. military forces, particularly the cia and the

Fixing Fragile States September/October 2014 11 U.S. Special Operations Command, have bureaucratic compromises and delayed taken the fight to Al Qaeda. Third, the decisions that have hampered progress. United States, along with other countries The authors of this article know personally and international organizations, has most of those involved in leading the long increased economic and civil assistance to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are many fragile states using existing programs to a person—whether military officers or and authorities. civilian officials—diligent and dedicated How much have these approaches patriots. They have often worked across achieved? The American-led reconstruction departmental lines to integrate security, efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been governance and economic-assistance prolonged and massive, but cannot be programs to achieve real successes. However, considered successful. when officials and officers in the field did A dysfunctional system of authorities and not get along, the deficiencies of the system procedures hampered effectiveness. Plans allowed their disputes to bring in-country were made in Washington by committees progress to a halt. What is needed is an of the representatives of different overall system that will make cooperation departments and agencies; individual and integration the norm, not the exception. departments and agencies sent instructions to their representatives in the field; and the emen and Libya provide smaller- allocations of resources to country programs scale but more contemporary il- were based in large part on individual Y lustrations of the shortcomings of departmental and agency priorities and today’s approaches. Although American of- available funding, not on overall national ficials have gained more experience, the au- priorities. Each of the departments thorities and procedures have not changed. maintained direct authority over its field Yemen is the home base for aqap, personnel and resources. Short-term staffing generally considered the most dangerous was endemic and cooperation in the field franchise of Al Qaeda. The speeches was voluntary, with neither the ambassador of American officials paint a picture of a nor any official in Washington below the comprehensive, balanced set of U.S. president authorized to resolve disputes or government programs not only to attack set overall priorities. Budget resources for aqap, but also to assist the current Yemeni a particular program could not be shifted government with both political and smoothly to others when local conditions economic development. In congressional changed, and congressional oversight was testimony in November 2013, for example, split among committees that oversaw only Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the individual aspects of the overall program in Arabian Peninsula Barbara Leaf emphasized a country. American “support for Yemen’s historic Even when the president, the National transition and continued bilateral security Security Council and an energetic cooperation.” She mentioned the $39 interagency process in Washington were million that the United States had provided fully engaged—as they were in later years to support the national reconciliation in Iraq and Afghanistan—the results have process, U.S. encouragement of economic not matched the commitment of resources. reform, its support for restructuring the Numerous accounts by journalists and Yemeni armed forces, and its participation memoirs of participants have documented in a weekly meeting among outside the interdepartmental frictions, inefficient countries and international organizations to

12 The National Interest Fixing Fragile States Fragile states unable to enforce their laws and control their territory are the progenitors of potent threats that can be carried out simply and effectively.

“compare notes, compare approaches, and interagency process. Because congressional coordinate tightly.” She said nothing of the funding for counterterrorist programs, American military and intelligence attacks both military and intelligence, is still on aqap fighters, yet these actions are the flowing relatively freely, they are the largest most costly U.S. programs dealing with American programs in Yemen. According to Yemen, and they feature prominently in press reporting, there are two independent Yemeni popular opinion. task forces—one military, one cia— Even in this friendly hearing, however, operating drones over Yemen, and U.S. the shortcomings of American and security assistance to the Yemeni armed international programs were made forces is focused on the creation of small, clear. Congressman Ted Deutch noted, well-trained counterterrorist forces. The “U.S. assistance to Yemen totaled $256 Saudis and other Gulf Cooperation Council million for Fiscal Year 2013, but these (gcc) states have promised over $3 billion funds come from 17 different accounts, in economic support to Yemen. American all with very different objectives.” He economic assistance to Yemen is a small asked a fundamental question that went fraction of this amount; thus, the American unanswered: “What exactly is our long-term plan must leverage the greater gcc strategy for Yemen?” contribution. The overall picture in Yemen, The view on the ground in Yemen then, is one of unbalanced, uncoordinated is considerably darker. Two weeks before and suboptimal U.S. and international Leaf’s testimony, an op-ed in the Yemen Post programs based on no coherent plan. under the headline “Law of the Jungle in Libya is another excellent illustration Yemen” stated: of an American assistance program that is not meeting the needs of the country. People have lost hope in the National Dia- American commitment of financial logue. . . . Billions of US dollars are still loot- resources to assist Libya has been modest: ed in the poverty stricken Yemen with not the State Department estimates about $240 one corrupt senior official prosecuted. . . . million since the beginning of operations Laws are only practiced against the weak and to oust Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011. Far helpless. . . . An internal war is ongoing in the more money was spent by the United States north of Yemen. . . . Al-Qaeda is regrouping on the nato air operations that pushed and seeking to become a power once again . . . Qaddafi out of power. American assistance Safety and security in Yemen is nowhere to be to Libya has been spread across different seen. Government authority and presence over government programs, depending on the many parts of the country is limited, and where other bills for those programs in the rest they are present they are almost useless. of the world. With few resources at their command, the country team needed an U.S. policy in Yemen has been cobbled integrated plan to make the actions they together in Washington through the typical could take effective, to set priorities and

Fixing Fragile States September/October 2014 13 to leverage the actions of other countries. The same experience tells us that “strengthen- Yet the various American agencies working ing the central government” is an insufficient in Libya, as usual, cooperated as best they goal if the country is to become stable and could, under no integrated plan, with little under the rule of law. experienced leadership either in Tripoli or Washington. As crises occurred and Meanwhile, the official U.S. activities conditions deteriorated, responses were in Libya, as described by the current U.S. improvised. ambassador, Deborah K. Jones, are directed Like Iraq in 2003, Libya was coming toward “a broad process encompassing out of a long and brutal dictatorship. a National Dialogue, constitutional Rebuilding the country would require development, and governance capacity- extraordinary actions by the Libyans building to increase public confidence.” In themselves and by outside countries like American pronouncements, there is little the United States that had helped bring sense of priorities, combined programs, down Qaddafi and had a stake in a favorable milestones or urgency. outcome. International security-support programs, including those by the United he embassies of the United States States, have been notably weak. Any doubt and its international partners in about the conditions on the ground ended T these fragile countries must do when Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens more than just be supportive of individual was murdered in Benghazi in September areas needing improvement. Their approach 2012, the first U.S. ambassador to die in has to be selective, hands-on, tailored, flex- the line of duty since 1979. Yet it was over ible and integrated. another year later that the United States Selective: Resources are limited, and and several other European countries began the approach needs to be sustained over belatedly to take actions to strengthen the an extended period of time. It should be army and police. nato began a program applied only to the handful of countries to train about twenty thousand Libyan in which the threat is high and host soldiers. The program is not scheduled to be government capacity is low. completed for many more months, and the Hands-on: The United States and other result will be trained soldiers who perform international partners cannot simply their duties with mostly inadequate medical, transfer money to government departments communications and logistical support. in fragile states, as it will likely be stolen Yet this belated program to strengthen or misused. Instead, they must take an basic security in Libya still is not part of active role in building competent local an overall plan to help Libya become a government organizations that can use competent, functioning state. According to increased resources effectively. American two experts at the Atlantic Council and the and other international operators cannot European Council on Foreign Relations, train local organizations to be replicas of respectively: their Western equivalents, or models of counterparts in other countries; conditions The current western agenda for Libya lacks a are too different. Likewise, they cannot political strategy and is focused almost exclu- simply fly in for a two-week stint and sively on the training of the Libyan army. If ex- then head home; there will be no follow- perience elsewhere is an indication, it will take through. Experienced, carefully selected between 5 and 15 years for that to conclude. and trained officials who can influence host

14 The National Interest Fixing Fragile States The American-led reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been prolonged and massive, but cannot be considered successful.

officials and build local capacity without interim plans that will ensure progress. causing resentment are essential. Finally, current operations to capture Tailored: Sometimes existing security or or kill hardcore Al Qaeda members law-enforcement organizations or judicial need to continue, without stirring up systems can be strengthened; other times local resentment that will make it more they must be created. Sometimes putting difficult to make the necessary longer-term the national finances of a country in order improvements. However, these operations will unleash economic growth; other need to be consolidated and integrated into times training and economic support in a an overall plan in each country. particular region of the country are vital. Sometimes training and assisting central here is duplication, overlap and government officials is important; other sometimes competition between times it is competent provincial officials T the traditional military operations that are essential for success. The key to of the Department of Defense and the a tailored approach is for the American covert paramilitary operations of the cia representatives in a country to have the against Al Qaeda. To fully understand the authority and responsibility both for issue, it’s important to be clear about the planning and for carrying out the plan. significant difference between clandestine Flexible: Requirements are always and covert operations. A “clandestine” op- dynamic in fragile states. Plans need to be eration is one that is secret, and no govern- revised quickly in response to events on the ment official is to talk about it. Clandestine ground; money and personnel need to be operations are routinely conducted by the shifted quickly to meet new problems and Department of Defense, and on occasion by to take advantage of new opportunities. other U.S. government agencies. A “covert” Integrated: Integration depends on operation is one in which the involvement setting a common set of priorities across of the U.S. government is to be kept secret, all programs. Once security forces stabilize to the point of official denial. The cia has a city or region, improved governance generally conducted covert operations, and and economic opportunity must follow an executive order gives this preference, but immediately, or the security gains will be the basic legislation authorizes them to be wasted. Integration depends on realistic conducted by other departments or agencies sequencing of different programs. Unless the as directed by the president. judiciary and prison systems are improved Although geopolitical conditions have along with police forces, criminals will changed fundamentally since the Cold War, be released or tortured after their arrest. when covert operations were originally Policemen can be trained or retrained in authorized, there has been no serious weeks and prison systems can be improved consideration of updating the authorities quickly, yet training a core of judges and for covert action. The 9/11 Commission’s lawyers takes years. There must be practical recommendation to assign paramilitary

Fixing Fragile States September/October 2014 15 operations to the Department of Defense clandestine traditional military operations was not adopted either by Congress or commanded by the secretary of defense by two successive administrations. The under Title 10, or covert intelligence result has been continued complicated, operations controlled by the director of the duplicative and costly operations against cia under Title 50. Al Qaeda. It has only been experienced, In reality, the president has the legal dedicated and mission-focused operators authority to order these operations under

in the field that have permitted the either title, using either organization. In current system to work, and their successes 2011, the president decided to authorize have obscured the need for clarity and the Abbottabad raid, entirely conducted simplification. This recommendation by Department of Defense personnel, should be seriously revisited based on our as a Title 50 covert action, under the experiences of the last decade. control of the director of the cia. It was a Two types of armed operations against “clandestine military operation” conducted Al Qaeda are the most important: raids under authorities that were designated and armed drone strikes. For raids—the for “covert action.” There was never any helicopter raid that killed Osama bin Laden reason or intention to deny the role of the in Abbottabad is the best known—all the U.S. government—the primary rationale operational skills are in the Department for covert action—once the operation of Defense, mostly within components of commenced and inevitably became public. the Special Operations Command. Yet, To the contrary, government officials were there are often questions and disputes running for the microphones as soon as about whether they should be conducted as the helicopters returned from Pakistani

16 The National Interest Fixing Fragile States airspace. Fortunately, experienced military is much more likely to deliver a plan that commanders made all the tactical decisions, is balanced between the short and the and the raid was a success. Had anything long term, that includes the most effective gone wrong—the loss of a helicopter and the applications of the capabilities of the capture of its crew by Pakistan, or a dispute different departments and that realistically between cia officers and special-operations matches the needs on the ground. During officers during the raid, with each group interagency review in Washington, there will appealing to its own chain of command— be plenty of opportunity for adding other the results could have been quite different. considerations and good ideas. For armed attacks by drones, the cia and However, for an embassy to submit a the Department of Defense have set up good plan takes a uniquely qualified and duplicate organizations, each authorized experienced ambassador with a dedicated, by separate legislation. There are reasons competent supporting interagency staff, for the current arrangements. The bottom in addition to the usual country team, line, however, is that it is the Department comprising the representatives from the of Defense that is established, trained and various departments and agencies. authorized to kill enemy combatants. For Foreign Service officers spend most of reasons of competence, accountability and their careers in staff positions, responsible effectiveness, the armed drone campaign for observing, reporting, negotiating, and should be assigned to the secretary of making policy recommendations that are defense, with the entire intelligence heavily weighted toward the short term community, including the cia, playing an and tactical. Their career pattern develops essential role in identifying, prioritizing and a high level of expertise, observational and tracking the targets. writing skills, and diplomatic abilities. The leader of American in-country operations in new model for interagency op- a fragile state needs high-order managerial erations in fragile states would be and leadership skills for complex program A strongest and longest lasting if it execution as well as a deep knowledge of were established by legislation. However, the capabilities and limitations of other much can be done by executive order, poli- American organizations, especially cy and practice. military and intelligence. Some Foreign The foundational process change Service officers who became ambassadors should be to assign the task of developing have developed these skills. James Jeffrey, a comprehensive plan for a fragile state Ryan Crocker and Anne Patterson to the team on the ground in that state, are among several in the recent past. rather than to an interagency group in However, although such training has been Washington. It is axiomatic in both business recommended, the Foreign Service is not and military planning that a plan ought to geared toward producing such skills broadly. be drafted by those responsible for carrying A qualification-and-selection process is it out. Only in American interagency needed for ambassadors to places like Yemen, planning is it done by a committee at Libya, Pakistan, Mali, Somalia, Afghanistan headquarters, then passed to the field for and Iraq to identify candidates with the implementation. Washington’s plans are experience, knowledge and stature to direct subject to pressures that often make them an integrated, multiagency task force. unrealistic and unsuitable for conditions The current manning of embassies in the field. An in-country planning team does not include a central staff to

Fixing Fragile States September/October 2014 17 The foundational process change should be to assign the task of developing a plan for a fragile state to the team on the ground in that state, rather than to an interagency group in Washington.

support an ambassador in designing and authorities under which to conduct them. implementing a country plan. What is During the course of the campaign, the needed is a small, separate staff of perhaps ambassador needs the authority to approve a dozen experienced officers, drawn from direct actions—drone strikes as well as different agencies, to help the ambassador raids and conventional military strikes— formulate the plan, and then to monitor to ensure that they are integrated into the its execution to determine if it is achieving overall plan. its objectives and recommend adjustments When the ambassador has formulated as circumstances on the ground change. an integrated plan for the country, While maintaining strong links back to incorporating diplomatic, economic, their parent organizations for advice, intelligence, military and other aspects, support and guidance, these staff officers including milestones that the plan will would primarily serve the ambassador achieve on specified dates, it should be sent in developing and coordinating his or to Washington for interagency comment her plans. Such help is beginning to be and for the allocation of resources—people available from the State Department’s and money. The Office of Management Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization and Budget should participate at all levels Operations, but this falls short of an of interagency review to ensure that budget integrated interagency effort. plans are realistic. Ultimately, a resourced, Within the overall integrated plan comprehensive plan for a fragile state in a fragile state, the ambassador should should be approved by the president. recommend the military and intelligence Virtually every fragile state both affects actions to be taken directly against Al and is affected by its neighbors. Tribal, Qaeda personnel and units. The country ethnic and religious influences cross plan must establish the priority and national boundaries; borders are often scope of these activities within the overall porous; pressuring groups in one country mission of strengthening security. It needs pushes them into others. The cooperation to define the areas in which the raids and of neighboring states is thus essential to drone strikes will be conducted and the success within fragile states. To ensure intensity of the campaign. The overall that these factors are considered to obtain objective is to capture or kill more enemies regional buy-in, each country plan should than are created. The ambassador should be sent to neighboring embassies (in the recommend whether these actions be taken case of the State Department and other as military activities under Title 10 or agencies without regional organizations) intelligence activities under Title 50. With and to regional and global combatant special-operations forces and cia planners commands (in the case of the Department as part of his team, the ambassador is in of Defense) for review and comment. the best position to recommend both the No plan survives first contact with the actions themselves and the most appropriate enemy; success in the implementation of a

18 The National Interest Fixing Fragile States Once budgets have been allocated to U.S. programs to strengthen a fragile state, an ambassador should be able to shift them, within realistic thresholds, as needs and opportunities develop. plan depends on flexibility and adaptation. hese reforms will go a long way Yet currently those carrying out military, toward improving American sup- economic, diplomatic and other programs T port for fragile states and dealing in fragile states have very little authority with Al Qaeda groups that find refuge in or capability to react. A change in one them. However, additional improvements aspect of a plan will always cause changes are needed. in other aspects, yet because authorities It is only the Department of Defense that in the American national-security system has either the authority or the tradition pass directly from departments and agencies of assigning personnel to difficult overseas to representatives in the field, it is very postings, whether they volunteer or not. difficult to gain approval for necessary All other agencies rely on volunteers. The adjustments. Congressional oversight, result has been chronic shortchanging of based on jurisdiction over appropriated the nonmilitary billets in fragile states— budgets, further hinders flexibility. short assignments for officers, or the use Economic-development programs depend of contractors. Authority must be granted on successful security operations, yet there to department and agency heads to assign is no authority in a country that can direct their personnel as needed to support the adjustments when setbacks in one area national interest. Without this change, require changes in another. No financial American campaigns in these countries or personnel reserves are available to cover will be unbalanced and heavily influenced unexpected problems or to take advantage by military considerations, since it is the of surprise opportunities—the budget military personnel who show up. incentive is “use it or lose it,” whether Although the Department of Defense has or not a program is effective, or whether the authority to send personnel overseas or not the money could be used more as needed, some key skills for assisting effectively elsewhere. Again, dedicated, fragile states have deteriorated within the hardworking officers and officials cooperate military services in recent years. In the with each other as best they can, but the past, there were experienced civil engineers, current system does not support flexibility. utility company officials, local government The solution is to give the ambassador administrators and transportation officials both the responsibility for overall progress in the Army and Marine Corps Reserve. on the plan and directive authority over the They had the skills and experience to programs in country within the limits of help establish competent organizations the plan that was approved. Once budgets to provide basic infrastructure in fragile have been allocated to U.S. programs to states. The civil-affairs personnel in military strengthen a fragile state, an ambassador reserve units are more junior and much should be able to shift them, within realistic less experienced now. The contractors and thresholds, as needs and opportunities individually mobilized reservists that are develop. now used to assist struggling government

Fixing Fragile States September/October 2014 19 organizations in fragile states are inadequate in front of one committee, ambassadors for the importance and difficulty of the in front of another, and no executive- need. The Reserve Components of the branch official below the president has the Army and Marine Corps must reestablish responsibility for overall success or failure strong civilian-affairs components. to strengthen a fragile state in which the Successive secretaries of state in recent United States has important interests. administrations have made strong attempts to improve the numbers and qualifications ountries with weak governments, of civilian officials sent to fragile states. high levels of poverty, and internal Continued emphasis is needed, as the State C ethnic, religious and tribal tensions Department still has difficulty filling even that provide sanctuaries for Al Qaeda or its established billets in Afghanistan, language affiliates will remain a perennial source of skills do not meet existing requirements instability and threats for America and its in fragile states, and there are too many allies. Most of the discussion of the chal- short-term assignments of personnel to lenges of dealing with fragile states has been jobs that require sustained interaction dominated by abstract debates over vital with local officials to build trust. The State American interests, fears of long-term com- Department must continue to develop a mitments, sterile arguments over military cadre of officers who can be effective in the versus civil components, disagreements over tough tasks of strengthening fragile states. deadlines and often ill-informed applica- In virtually every fragile state, some of tions of the perceived lessons of the U.S. the weakest institutions are the police, experience in one country to another. This courts and prisons. The U.S. government is unfortunate. What has been missing from has very little capacity to help strengthen the discussion is an understanding of the them. The Department of Justice has only very segmented, rigid and inefficient system a limited training-and-advisory capacity under which the United States attempts to similar to that in the Department of help these countries stabilize their govern- Defense or the Department of State, and ments and societies and control outside ter- generally requires outside funding to mount rorist groups. The current system guarantees training programs. Other countries have that the resources—people and dollars— some capacity, but retired state and local that are allocated to these countries do not police officers, private contractors, or produce the results they could and should. volunteer judges and prison officials man The United States should likely provide the American assistance programs. In more funding for its programs in countries Afghanistan, the mission of police training like Yemen, Libya and Mali. However, what was assigned to the Department of Defense, is even more important is for the Obama despite the fundamental differences between administration and Congress to improve the the military and law-enforcement missions. basic system for organizing and conducting We need to develop a cadre of advisers these programs. The improvements in au- and trainers for police, courts and prisons, thorities and procedures that we recommend and a means to supplement the cadre with here will go a long way toward making qualified and supervised private volunteers. America safer with a very small expenditure Finally, Congress will need to establish of additional resources. It’s time to replace new oversight procedures for an integrated decades of failure with a new approach that country strategy, rather than the disjointed protects American security by transforming current system in which generals testify fragile states into genuinely secure ones. n

20 The National Interest Fixing Fragile States The Eternal Collapse of Russia

By Paul Starobin

ussia, it is often said, is a coun- appear to be responsible for the July shoot- try that is barely able to stumble ing down of a Malaysia Airlines passenger out of bed and put on match- jet as it flew over rebel-held territory. Nor ing socks in the morning. is Russia’s determined and so far successful RIn the lead-up to the Winter Olympics in backing of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Sochi and continuing during the Games, its nascent alliance with China based on a the U.S. media declared open season on historic energy pact, suggestive of a nation the nation. Americans were told that Russia that is no longer a consequential player is a country just about bereft of function- on the world stage. Russia remains a risk- ing elevators or toilets. Or even a national taking nation—and as questionable, even food, “except perhaps bad sushi.” Its people reckless, as its gambles may be, as in its “hardly know who they are anymore” and its support for the rebels in eastern Ukraine, essence is defined by copyright infringement this is not the behavior of a country des- and “all-encompassing corruption.” All in tined for insignificance. And while there is all, Russia is “a country that’s falling apart,” a great deal that is second-rate about Rus- as a New Republic cover story in February sia, from its sagging transportation infra- put it. structure to its shoddy health-care system, It’s a hardy theme. It’s also a complete- such blemishes, common to many nations, ly bogus one. But that hasn’t stopped the including the United States, are hardly evi- media from reviving it again and again. dence of a fatal malaise. Thirteen years ago, for example, the At- The interesting question, then, is lantic published a cover story, “Russia Is what lies behind this unbalanced mind- Finished,” on “the unstoppable descent of set—what might be called the “Russia Is a once great power into social catastro- Doomed” syndrome. What is the source of phe” and ultimately “obscurity.” That was such stubbornly exaggerated thinking—and a particularly bad year to predict Russia’s why is Russia chronically misdiagnosed in demise, as an economic revival was start- this fashion? ing to take hold. And these days, Russia is proving itself to be anything but “finished” t feels right, as a first line of explora- as a geopolitical actor, with its aggressive tion, to call in Dr. Freud. Maybe the seizure of Crimea and its arming of pro- I strange idea that “the drama is com- Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine—who ing to a close,” as the Atlantic piece pre- maturely declared of Russian history, is Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief actually a wish of the collective Western of Business Week and the author of After America: subconscious—the silent urge of the id. Narratives for the Next Global Age (Viking, 2009). The Freudian recesses can subtly affect our

The Eternal Collapse of Russia September/October 2014 21 political desires, after all, and our twen- novels, Dracula and The Lady of the Shroud, ty-first-century nervousness about Russia that can be read as conjuring an “Eastern” can be traced to long-standing European or Slavic threat to England. In the end, of anxieties about despotic Russia as a kind of course, Count Dracula has his throat slashed repository of the primitive in the human and is stabbed dead in the heart. condition—dangerously and infuriatingly Granted, the British Empire was a pro- resistant to higher and hard-won European miscuous slanderer of its motley rivals— values. In his popular and bigoted early consider the aspersions regularly cast toward nineteenth-century travelogue, the French the French. Still, British feelings toward aristocrat Marquis de Custine said that in Russia were notably raw. The historian J. Russia “the veneer of European civilization H. Gleason, in his 1950 book The Genesis was too thin to be credible.” His dyspeptic of Russophobia in Great Britain, character- view of Russia has lived on ever since. ized the nineteenth-century English pub- Russia was indeed less developed than lic’s “antipathy toward Russia” as the “most Europe—according to standards of moder- pronounced and enduring element in the nity such as science, technology and indus- national outlook on the world abroad.” The try—but there was a self-serving element sentiment, Gleason concluded, was con- of power politics as well as cultural hauteur cocted by a manipulative, imperial-mind- behind such disparagements. It is no sur- ed elite—and was off base, anyway, since prise that the notion of Russia and Russians Britain’s foreign policy was actually “more as representing an Other—as in, apart from provocative than Russia’s” in this period. “us Westerners”—was strikingly prevalent Others concur. “The world champion im- in nineteenth-century Victorian England. perialists of modern history, the British, That was the time of the Great Game—the were in a permanent state of hysteria about competition between Britain and Russia the chimera of Russia advancing over the for influence and spoils in a swath of Asia Himalayas to India,” Martin Malia observed stretching from the Indian subcontinent to in his 1999 book Russia under Western Eyes. the Black Sea. Nevertheless, British pigeonholing of Rus- The Crimean War of the 1850s, pitting sia endured even among the most sophis- both the French and the British against ticated of observers. Thus John Maynard the Russians, sparked an especially intense Keynes, after a trip to Bolshevik Russia in British animus against a marauding Rus- 1925, wondered whether the “mood of op- sian bear, pitted against the regal British pression” there might be “the fruit of some lion, as the political cartoonists of the day beastliness in the Russian nature.” had it. (Or a meek lion, as some illustrators sketched the scene. In one such cartoon, a ritish attitudes, inevitably, migrat- massive bear, a Russian soldier’s cap on its ed across the Atlantic to America. head, sits atop a prostrate Persian cat, a lion B Continental America, of course, was looking on helplessly in the background.) thousands of miles away from continental Negative images of Russia seeped into Brit- Russia, although Russian colonizers man- ish literature. George Stoker wrote an an- aged at one point to establish a settlement ti-Russian travelogue, With the Unspeak- at Fort Ross in northern California in the ables, drawn from the Russo-Turkish war of early nineteenth century. The perceived 1877–1878. That book, in turn, may have threat, though, was less about territory and supplied an impetus for his older brother, more about the foreignness and sheer un- Bram, who later wrote of a pair of fantastical savoriness of Russian ways. “No human be-

22 The National Interest The Eternal Collapse of Russia ings, black, yellow or white, could be quite Soviet Union, even though its ruler, until as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant—in his death in 1953, was a native Georgian, short, as untrustworthy in every way—as Joseph Stalin (born Dzhugashvili). Vilifi- the Russians,” President Theodore Roos- cations of the Russians came from across evelt wrote in 1905, as the Russo-Japanese the political spectrum. Even J. Robert Op- war was drawing to a close. By contrast, the penheimer—nuclear physicist, admirer of Japanese were “a wonderful and civilized Igor Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles, global people,” he said. (Roosevelt won the Nobel traveler, student of the Bhagavad Gita in the Peace Prize the following year for his efforts original Sanskrit, director of the Institute for

to negotiate an end to hostilities between Advanced Study in Princeton—harbored the the Russians and Japanese.) crudest of prejudices. “We are coping with a America’s foremost Russia hand, George barbarous, backward people who are hardly F. Kennan, it is true, had a very strong, loyal to their rulers,” he said in 1951, the even mystical, attraction to Russia. “There echoes of Keynes and Marquis de Custine was some mysterious affinity which I could resounding in the distance. not explain even to myself,” he wrote in his Americans had plenty of encouragement memoirs. But Kennan stands out as an idio- in seeing themselves as the white hats in a syncratic exception amongst the American Manichean struggle against the wild Rus- political class. That became evident during sians. In his famous prophecy that America the Cold War, when blunderbuss denounce- and Russia were destined to divide up the ments of the Russians were a rote element of globe, set forth in the conclusion of the the national discourse—with the Russians first volume of Democracy in America, pub- always seen as the active agent behind the lished in the mid-1830s, Alexis de Toc-

The Eternal Collapse of Russia September/October 2014 23 Our twenty-first-century nervousness about Russia can be traced to long-standing European anxieties about despotic Russia as a kind of repository of the primitive in the human condition.

queville made clear where his sympathies former Soviet Baltic republics on Russia’s lay. Glossing over the rough treatment of border, there was even a weird idealization Native Americans by musket-bearing Eu- of the mostly compliant Boris Yeltsin as ropean settlers, he insisted that “the con- an avuncular, ruddy-cheeked, American- quests of the American” are “gained by the style democrat (with a touch of the ward ploughshare; those of the Russian by the boss about him). Not even Yeltsin’s war to sword.” What’s more, the “Anglo-Ameri- subdue the breakaway province of Chech- can,” as Tocqueville described the incomers nya—which ended in at best a draw for to America, “gives free scope to the un- him—ended the romance. guided strength and common sense of the The mist dried from the Western eye people; the Russian centers all the authority with the ascent of the strongman Putin— of society in a single arm.” viewed, not without reason, as a sort of And yet Tocqueville’s assumption—that composite throwback to the autocrats of the a democratic society like America would Soviet and czarist past. Feelings of revulsion prove inherently less warlike than an auto- reentered the discourse. “The Russians, on cratic society like Russia—while plausible whom I have wasted far too much of my on its face, represented as much as anything life, are drink-sodden barbarians who oc- a hope that the future belonged to the dem- casionally puke up a genius,” Ralph Peters, ocratic peoples of the world. Thus, Russia’s a retired army lieutenant colonel and com- assigned role as a potential wrecker of this mentator, declared in 2008 at an Ameri- happy vision was made possible by John can Enterprise Institute forum on Putin’s Locke, Thomas Jefferson and others with invasion of Georgia. Unlike Yeltsin, Putin, liberal ideas that had made only the tiniest however cynically, embraced “old” Russian of sprouts in the stinting Russian soil. Over- traditions like Orthodoxy, and he baldly looked—Tocqueville’s gift of foresight was affirmed that Russia had its own special remarkable but not without limitations— character and destiny and was not to be a was the fascist menace to come from within “second edition” of America or Britain. As the very heart of Europe. a kgb officer he had been stationed in Dres- The dissolution of the Soviet Union in den, and he bridled at ingrained Western 1991—the expiration, if not of Russia itself, preconceptions of Russians as “a little bit then at least of an enormous Moscow-di- savage still,” as if “they just climbed down rected utopian project, nearly three-quarters from the trees,” as he remarked to a group of a century long in the tooth—afforded of American journalists back in 2007. a respite in such feelings about Russia. It’s And now, a century and a half after the always easier to be kind to the feeble: Rus- Crimean War, the conflict that arose there sians were said to recover their humanity this year serves as a reminder of the durabil- and decency precisely when their national ity of American and European derision for power was at a historic ebb. As nato ex- Russia, seen as “a gas station masquerading panded eastward, eventually to include the as a country,” in the words of Senator John

24 The National Interest The Eternal Collapse of Russia The history of Europe, it sometimes seems, is a prolonged case of pots calling kettles black.

McCain. “Russia is an anti-Western power also the case that a prime source of negative with a different, darker vision of global stereotypes about Russia—and of a seem- politics,” Anne Applebaum, an author and ing desire for a wiping away of “traditional” journalist who is married to Poland’s foreign Russia—comes from within the bosom of minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, wrote in Slate. Mother Russia herself. (The headline: “Russia Will Never Be Like The truth is, Russia often has been mad- Us.”) The seemingly everlasting British tra- dening to a certain strata of educated Rus- dition of Russophobia is nowadays embod- sians (and by Russians I mean not just ied by an editor at the Economist, Edward ethnic Russians, strictly speaking, but all Lucas, a former Moscow bureau chief for peoples native to or attaching themselves that magazine who, in a Daily Mail column to Russia). A recurrent motif, just as in the back in May, labored to draw scary parallels West, is Russia’s inherent and seemingly between Hitler and Putin in their respec- inescapable backwardness, as captured in tive “expansionist” ambitions. While Putin’s Gogol’s supposed quip that Russia has just actions no doubt fall far short of Hitler’s two problems—duraki i dorogi (fools and atrocities, “the Austrian corporal and the roads). Lenin, born Vladimir Ilyich Uly- German-speaking ex-spy do share troubling anov in the Russian heartland, was a stand- similarities,” Lucas said. “History may not out student of Greek and Latin who came repeat itself. But, as Mark Twain once said, to see old-style Russian institutions and it often rhymes.” And in an imagined let- beliefs—czarist autocracy, the land-bound ter sent by Machiavelli to Putin, crafted by wooden-hut peasantry, icon-worshipping Josef Joffe, publisher-editor of the German Orthodoxy—as so retrograde as to be be- weekly Die Zeit, Russia’s leader is scolded, yond the scope of reform. The solution was “You have just reaffirmed a historic Russian demolition. Lenin castigated “that really habit: You would rather be the great spoil- Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvin- er and outsider.” Surely Europe, though, ist” as “in substance a rascal and a tyrant.” as Joffe must be keenly aware, has seen a And his utopian dream, of course, was for great many spoilers in its periodic lettings Russia to fade away into a transnational of blood and gore. The history of Europe, amalgamation of the global proletariat. it sometimes seems, is a prolonged case of This, then, is the tortured dynamic— pots calling kettles black. the tension between a Russian intelligen- tsia with a liberal, radical or revolution- t is tempting to conclude on this note, ary critique of the country and a populace punctuated with the wry observation and a political elite generally accepting of I by the Russian philosopher Nicolas Russian traditions and at times embracing Berdyaev that “the Russians have a disturb- them with fervor. And the criticism tends ing effect upon the peoples of the West.” not to stop at the leader of the moment— So they do. But the story has another and in the current instance, Putin, who often maybe even more curious facet. For it is does seem to be heartless and cynical, as

The Eternal Collapse of Russia September/October 2014 25 in his efforts to dodge any responsibility sia—she herself was murdered in Moscow for the downing of the Malaysia Airlines in 2006, on the day, suspiciously, of Putin’s plane—but rather to include the Russian birthday. (Gangsters in Russia have a habit people themselves. In 2002, with Putin of making “presents,” solicited or not, on embarked on post-Soviet Russia’s second the name day of their “bosses.”) Still, what war in Chechnya, and with the public ral- stand out are the sweeping and unsustain- lying in support, the Russian journalist able generalizations—the idea that Russians Anna Politkovskaya wrote in the Los Angeles are “irrational by nature” doesn’t square, Times that for example, with a society that produced world-class scientists from Mikhail Lo- it is common knowledge that the Russian peo- monosov in the eighteenth century to An- ple are irrational by nature. The majority of drei Sakharov in the twentieth. Such dec- them do not require candidates running for larations amount to a form of masochistic offices to provide clear-cut economic programs. self-flagellation—and seem to hold Rus- In fact, the people are even slightly irritated, sians themselves as collectively culpable for as opinion polls show, when a candidate is too producing malevolent leaders. intelligent—or at least more intelligent than Nevertheless, such critics are influential the mass. At the same time, Russian people love in the West—and have found a welcome macho—they love brutality, demonstrations of in leading U.S. publications. “Russians strong-handed policies and tough moves made have told so many lies about themselves for show. they hardly know who they are anymore,” Masha Gessen, a Russian American born Politkovskaya was certainly not wrong to in Soviet Moscow and currently living in discern a thuggish element in Putin’s Rus- the United States, began an essay last year

26 The National Interest The Eternal Collapse of Russia in the New York Review of Books. “These ideal leads to the current spectacle in which days,” she continued, Putin Russia is beaten over the head for its regres- sive stand on matters like gay rights—an talks gibberish about Russia having a “cultural issue that is at the cutting edge of civil-lib- code,” which he seems to imagine is some sort erties activism in America and Europe but of a spy code for the spirit. They should have not of any particular resonance in Russia started with food. There is no common Russian outside of progressive enclaves in places like equivalent for the saying “you are what you Moscow. In the West, the Pussy Riot epi- eat,” but it is no accident that Russians have sode made celebrity dissidents of the femi- hardly any idea of distinctively Russian food. nist punk band jailed by Russian authorities for hooliganism for their stunt in Moscow’s The overstatements are easy enough to Cathedral of Christ the Savior two years correct. In my own experience living in and ago when the group prayed, “Virgin Mary, traveling around Russia, I have had no trou- Mother of God, banish Putin.” Masha Ges- ble finding Russians with a secure sense sen enshrined the affair in her recent book, of identity. Once I asked a friend in Mos- Words Will Break Cement, to a laudatory re- cow, a young history professor, if he could view by Anne Applebaum in the Washington point to some essence of Russia. He im- Post. But in Russia, an opinion poll found mediately suggested the ancient Orthodox that only 5 percent of Russians believed church known as Pokrova, situated at the Pussy Riot deserved “no punishment” and confluence of the Nerl and Klyazma Rivers nearly 50 percent supported either manda- near the medieval capital city of Vladimir. tory labor or a large fine. Viewed from afar, the church seems to be In this vein, the lectures directed at Rus- floating on a pool of water, the clouds re- sia on what it ought to be rival and possibly flected on the surface. A religious symbol, even exceed the instructions that today’s yes—but also, my friend stressed, a symbol China also regularly gets from the West of Russia’s deep immersion in nature. Nor on how to better itself. Russia needs to have I had difficulty finding food that Rus- “sort out some of its psychological issues,” sians (including my own Russian Uzbek including “paranoid projection,” an “infe- wife) assured me was characteristically Rus- riority complex” and “delayed adolescence,” sian, such as the cold soup, okroshka, typi- Julia Ioffe, the New Republic’s leading writ- cally made of sour cream, vinegar, potatoes, er on Russia, counseled this February. (The cucumbers, eggs and dill, which is a sum- headline for the piece was “The Russians mertime favorite in southwestern Russia Think I’m a Russophobe? They’re Right.”) in particular. (And yes, it is also enjoyed in A Moscow-born Russian American, Ioffe Ukraine, large parts of which, for most of its was also the author of the cover story on history, have been part of a greater Russia.) how Russia is “falling apart.” It might be relevant that Ioffe, as some t is perhaps an exaggeration to say that who take umbrage at her barbs are apt to the impulse of Putin’s critics inside sneer, is Jewish (which in certain Russian I Russia—some, not all, of them—to nationalistic circles can be taken to mean deny Russia its Russianness is simply a spe- decidedly not Russian). Masha Gessen, cies of loathing, since such critics do have too, is Jewish, and there is plenty in the an ideal of what their Russia should be: a Russian experience—the word “pogrom” is model that amounts to making Russia more of Russian origin—for any Jewish person like Europe and America. This alternate to despise and fear. (I’m Jewish myself,

The Eternal Collapse of Russia September/October 2014 27 Russia isn’t going anywhere. Critics tend to exaggerate its ailments or fail to place them in proper context.

with ancestors from Russian lands.) Ges- try’s vast oil and gas resources are without sen also is a lesbian. But while not being question current-day Russia’s prize econom- an ethnic Russian may help to dispose ic asset. Russia is the world’s top natural-gas one toward criticism of Putin’s Russia— exporter and possesses the planet’s largest and being a lesbian all the more so—such proven gas reserves. But energy is much things don’t quite account for the passion more to Russia than just a source of cash: displayed in reprimands of the country. the Kremlin is adeptly using its fossil-fuel The active ingredient in such chastise- treasure to accomplish geopolitical objec- ments seems to have, as much as anything tives, as in the recent megadeal to ship else, an aesthetic component. Russia, it is natural gas by pipeline to China. Beijing clear, is not to everyone’s taste. and Moscow may never be close friends, but energy gives them a practical reason ut a nation is not a piece of art to work together. Meanwhile, the editorial that one can choose simply not to page of the Wall Street Journal, a persistent B hang on the wall, never to have critic of Putin’s Russia, has pleaded for the to look at. The reason that the “Russia Is United States to use its own energy reserves Doomed” strain of criticism matters is that as a “strategic asset” to help Europe reduce this perspective is grounded in unreality. its current reliance on Russian gas. Such an Russia isn’t going anywhere. Critics tend to appeal underscores the reality that Russia’s exaggerate its ailments or fail to place them petroprowess is apt to endure well into the in proper context. Consider corruption. twenty-first century. Systematic corruption, from the bottom What about Russia’s grim demographic to the top of society, is indeed pervasive profile? The analyst Nicholas Eberstadt at in Russia—and this has been a condition the American Enterprise Institute labeled of post-Soviet Russia going back to the Russia “The Dying Bear” in a 2011 essay corrupt deals struck in the 1990s between in Foreign Affairs. “The country’s popula- the Kremlin and a rising generation of tion has been shrinking, its mortality levels oligarchs. But corruption also is endemic are nothing short of catastrophic, and its in nepotistic (and yet fast-growing) one- human resources appear to be dangerously party China, and in democratic India. In eroding,” he wrote. Critics of that piece the latter half of the nineteenth century, pointed out that Russia in 2010 actually in the Gilded Age of the “robber barons,” had a lower mortality rate than in 2000. America, too, was a swamp of malfeasance, And this progress has continued. In a Wall as the rich and powerful bent government Street Journal piece earlier this year, Eber- to their will. There is no reason to think stadt conceded: corruption will harm Russia more than it does other societies. Russia’s post-Soviet population decline has As for Russia being little more than a halted. Thanks to immigration chiefly from “gas station,” in McCain’s words, the coun- the “near abroad” of former Soviet states, a

28 The National Interest The Eternal Collapse of Russia rebound in births from their 1999 nadir and a America’s most vexing and formidable dip- drift downward of the death rate, Russia’s total lomatic challenges for a long time to come. population today is officially estimated to be So the future of the presentation of Rus- nearly a million higher than five years ago. For sia as a hodgepodge of unflattering ste- the first time in the post-Soviet era, Russia saw reotypes seems bright. The naive liberal more births than deaths last year. notion that the world has a teleological dis- position toward a progressive end—if only It seems the ursine creature is not, after all, holdouts like Russia would get with the dying. program—is deeply entrenched. Headlines In any case, our taste for a country—fa- datelined in Russia—on corrupt oligarchs, vorable or unfavorable—shouldn’t dictate or on control-freak kgb-generation political our foreign policy, which is properly shaped operators—will continue to nourish sweep- by a cool calculation of our national inter- ing criticism of Russians, from their leaders est. On these terms, America is right to on down, as primitive and psychologically resist Russia if Putin seems truly bent on ill. Probably no other nation is so easy (or bullying his way to a redrawn map of Eu- so safe) to caricature. rope, but also right to try to keep working And the “Russia Is Doomed” syndrome with Russia on matters of mutual concern is bound to survive because Russia, alas, such as Islamic militancy. And that same still matters. The object of such concen- calculation will hold when Putin, as must trated anxiety over the centuries, far from happen eventually, exits the Kremlin, will- heading down a path to obscurity, remains ingly or unwillingly, whether replaced by a a global force and impossible to ignore. So new autocrat or a more democratic figure. the worries will live on, too, as will the sub- Today’s heightened tension between the limated wish to efface Russia. But perhaps United States and Russia, conceivably the the good news for the critics is precisely first chapter of a new cold war, with Europe that Russia is not about to go away. They as ambivalent as ever about its role, under- will have plenty of grist for their mill for scores that Russia is likely to remain one of decades to come. n

The Eternal Collapse of Russia September/October 2014 29 Britain’s Tea Party

By Tim Montgomerie

igel Paul Farage was a mem- main newspapers for being dominated by ber of the Conservative Party privately educated “toffs.” He grumbles that when Margaret Thatcher was Britain is led by career politicians, even its leader. Today, he still looks though he is now a fourth-term member Nand sounds a lot like an old-fashioned Brit- of the European Parliament. He complains ish Conservative. He wears pin-striped about how British industry employs so suits during the working week and bright many foreigners, even though he employs red or yellow trousers on weekends—as one—his wife—as his personal aide. His many upper-class fashion criminals inex- party succeeds by pitting itself against plicably do. He was educated at Dulwich London—the city where Nigel Farage made College, a fee-paying private school where his money and where he was educated. And he enjoyed cricket and rugby and joined London is where the explanation of Britain’s the army cadets. complicated ukip phenomenon must begin. The son of a stockbroker named Guy Oscar Justus Farage, Nigel (incidentally, ondon is the British economy’s great- a very Tory name) skipped university and est success story. It is currently living went directly into the City of London, L through its second great age. It dom- where he made his mark as a commodities inates the United Kingdom in a way that no trader. Since 1999, he has been a member American city comes close to doing in the of the European Parliament. He is married United States. It is not just Britain’s politi- to a German, Kirsten Mehr, whom he cal capital like Washington. Or its financial employs as his secretary, quite legally, with capital like New York. Or its cultural capital taxpayers’ money. And he is the leader of like Los Angeles. It is all of these things and Britain’s fastest-growing political party, more. the United Kingdom Independence Party Roughly ten million people live in (ukip). His larger-than-life, straight-talking the Greater London Urban Area. People personality is central to ukip’s success, but, commute from all over Britain and from perversely, he is succeeding by attacking many parts of Europe to what is now the nearly everything he once embodied. world’s third most productive city. Some He laments Thatcherism’s impact on dub London the sixth-biggest city in France Britain’s working classes, for example. due to the number of French expatriates He criticizes the Tories and the nation’s living in Britain’s capital, many of who are fleeing François Hollande’s confiscatory Tim Montgomerie is a columnist for the taxes. London accounts for less than London Times and founder of the website one-sixth of Britain’s population, but it ConservativeHome.com. contributes a quarter of its tax revenues.

30 The National Interest Britain’s Tea Party The properties found in Elmbridge—a the metropolitan establishment’s contempt London suburb home to 130,000 people— for his party. He deploys the victimhood are worth an estimated £31 billion. That’s tactics long used by the Left. Where the more than the value of all of the houses Left augmented its support by championing in Greater Glasgow—home to over one victims of sexism, racism and homophobia, million Scots. Farage builds his base by suggesting that The strength of London’s economy is native, patriotic Britons are victims of an all the more remarkable because just establishment that has surrendered the seven years ago it was hit by the financial nation to immigrants, rule by Brussels and equivalent of a tsunami. London’s self-serving political elites. banks were at the center of the global Although the British media sometimes crash. Today, the financial companies present ukip as the party that hates headquartered in the Square Mile and London—its immigration, cultural in the Docklands are powering the city’s diversity and youth—it would be resurgence, contributing to a $71 billion more accurate to say that ukip is the surplus in financial services for the whole antiglobalization party and London uk economy. London is an outstanding encapsulates the open, free-trading nature example of a wider global trend where of the twenty-first-century economy. great cities such as Istanbul, Shanghai and Farage is the champion of those people Mumbai enjoy supercharged growth as and communities who feel ill served by they act as magnets for talented, inventive globalization. People who don’t like people—from their own countries and from immigration. Who don’t like “wars for oil,” abroad. as the argument goes, or other overseas But guess what? London is the one part interventions. And, just as importantly, of Britain that ukip cannot reach. In the people who feel that their traditional May elections to the European Parliament, views on family life and national identity ukip topped the poll. It beat Labour, Her are under attack from the liberal values Majesty’s official party of opposition, into that politicians like David Cameron, Bill second place and the ruling Conservatives Clinton, Barack Obama and Tony Blair all into third. ukip did very well in most parts seem to share. Many traditionalist Tories of England, winning 35 percent of electors were shocked, for example, when Cameron, in the East, for example, and 32 percent in the Conservative leader, introduced the South West. But in London it could legislation that ultimately succeeded in only muster 17 percent of the vote. legalizing same-sex marriage. While ukip Asked to explain why ukip had done is definitely an economic phenomenon, it so well across most of the country but also has important cultural ingredients. relatively poorly in the nation’s capital, Suzanne Evans, one of the party’s principal n different times, a political gap may spokespeople, may have revealed more than not have existed for Britain’s equiva- she intended. Londoners, she explained, are I lent of the Tea Party to emerge, but a more “educated, cultured and young” than constellation of political events has come the rest of Britain. Twitter and social media together to give ukip its great opportunity. seized on her candor and quickly presented The Conservative Party has been led by the average ukip supporter as stupid, David Cameron, a man who does not know backwards and, well, a little past it. Nigel the price of milk, to quote one of his own Farage will not have minded. He feeds on rather disloyal mps. While the charge may

Britain’s Tea Party September/October 2014 31 be unfair to Cameron, Britain’s prime min- in British politics is divided. A strong ukip ister since 2010, there can be no doubting result could put Labour and Ed Miliband that he has struggled to connect with poorer into 10 Downing Street. Britons. Meanwhile, Labour’s leader, Ed If Labour is elected, Britain will not get Miliband, also has difficulty reaching the the referendum on membership in the victims of globalization. European Union that David Cameron This is, perhaps, more surprising, as the has promised for 2017 if he is reelected. working classes have historically been his A strong ukip performance, dividing party’s backbone. But Miliband struggles the Right, might therefore delay or even to close the growing gap between the prevent the goal for which Nigel Farage’s green, socially liberal elites that lead left- party was first formed: An independent wing parties across the world and the Britain. Sovereign. Free. And outside the more patriotic, socially conservative voters European Union. Let us travel back to that politicians such as Ronald Reagan, 1993, the year in which ukip was founded. Margaret Thatcher and Australia’s John Howard successfully cultivated. And kip emerged at a time when Eu- providing the third ingredient of ukip’s roskepticism was beginning to happy constellation is Britain’s third party, U march in British politics. Margaret the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems Thatcher had been ousted as Tory leader traditionally have been the nation’s party of and prime minister just three years earlier. protest, but under Deputy Prime Minister She had won three general elections for her Nick Clegg’s leadership they entered into a party and is still widely regarded as one of coalition government with David Cameron. the country’s greatest leaders. But she had They can no longer be the party of protest. become unpopular with many big beasts Even more than the Tories, they are the inside her own party because of her growing object of protest. antipathy toward the European project. ukip, which received just 3 percent of Once an enthusiast for Britain’s the vote in Britain’s last general election, membership in what was originally called now picks up anything between 10 and 20 the European Economic Community, percent in wildly fluctuating opinion polls. Thatcher had turned against what she had In the most recent European Parliament come to see as an emerging superstate. elections, which use proportional She had wanted to be part of a free-trade representation, it won 28 percent. At the area with other European nations. That next uk general election, fought under the was what the British people had signed first-past-the-post system, most experts up for when they had been asked to vote think it will struggle to win many— to either ratify or reject membership in a if any—seats, but that does not mean it 1975 referendum. But Europe had become won’t influence the result. Although it is something very different by the end of the siphoning off votes from all parties, it is 1980s. It had a parliament, a court and a winning the lion’s share of its support from bureaucracy in Brussels that was always the Conservative Party. It is also winning greedy for new powers. Although there was Labour voters whom the Tories need to a common market across Europe, it was win a majority and who might have been not a particularly free market. Brussels had attracted to a Conservative leader who was become a super-regulator, wrapping industry more earthy than Cameron. For the first after industry in red tape. That red tape time since the Second World War, the Right suited big businesses with big compliance

32 The National Interest Britain’s Tea Party Farage builds his base by suggesting that native, patriotic Britons are victims of an establishment that has surrendered the nation to immigrants, rule by Brussels and self-serving political elites. departments, but it was damaging to small, Party in a Euroskeptic direction. But the upstart businesses. Thatcher was particularly successful “regicide” against Thatcher suspicious of the single-currency project— was far from the end of the matter. and rightly so. If some of Europe’s utopian It was only the beginning. For all of the politicians had heeded her warnings, the last twenty-five years, a battle has raged euro zone’s southern nations might not be inside the Conservative Party as to what enduring youth unemployment rates of 50 kind of relationship Britain should have percent today. with the rest of Europe. In opposing further The facts in the European debate are European integration or even supporting hotly disputed, but some estimates suggest exit from the eu, many Conservatives that three-quarters of all laws affecting the believe that they are following the orders United Kingdom originate from within the that Thatcher issued in 1988. Many European Union, as this deeply political other skeptics decided, however, that enterprise is now called. 40 percent the establishment factions within the is probably a more accurate estimate. Conservative Party that toppled Margaret Whatever the true number, it is still a Thatcher would never allow the Tories to huge proportion and a proportion that the lead Britain out of Europe. Many of those British people never envisaged when they skeptics joined ukip and to this day believe were asked for their consent in 1975. that the Conservative Party can never be Thatcher made her political mission clear trusted to ensure that Britain becomes an in a landmark speech in 1988, delivered in independent, self-governing nation again. the Belgian city of Bruges. “We have not,” she thundered, “successfully rolled back lthough Europe may be the issue the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to that motivated its earliest support- see them reimposed at a European level.” A ers, it does not directly explain why She did not just object to Europe taking ukip finished first in this May’s European a socialist turn. She hated the very idea Parliament elections. The secret of ukip’s of what she called “a European superstate growing success is that Nigel Farage has exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” broadened his party’s message. It no longer The leader who had fought the unions and talks just about Europe. At the end of a the Soviet Union during her early years TV debate with Nick Clegg, Farage in- in power had new enemies in her sights: vited viewers to “come and join the people’s the big state and a big, antidemocratic army.” He continued: “Let’s topple the es- European project. tablishment who led us to this mess.” By When Europhiles ousted her in “this mess” he means the global recession, November 1990, exploiting unpopularity foreign interventions, political corruption caused by an economic recession and and, most of all, large-scale immigration. a controversial tax reform, they hoped to The British electorate never endorsed end her attempts to lead the Conservative large-scale immigration at any general

Britain’s Tea Party September/October 2014 33 If ukip is to become a permanent force in British politics, it will need to decide how to resolve the conflict between its libertarian and traditionalist tendencies.

election, but during Tony Blair’s time at against immigration there is one stubborn 10 Downing Street a net three million fact that immigration advocates cannot people—equivalent to 5 percent of the escape: the British people have never population—entered Britain. And despite voted for large-scale immigration of the the current Conservative-led government’s kind that has occurred. Any political party promises to bring numbers under control, that promised immigration of two or three net immigration into Britain is still hundred thousand people per year would proceeding at a historically unprecedented not do well at elections. Three-quarters level of two hundred thousand people per of British voters want net immigration year. Immigration experts predict seventy reduced to lower levels. Immigration million people will be living and building control was what the Conservative Party upon Britain’s green and pleasant lands by vowed to deliver before the last election. 2030. While David Cameron and his home Many argue that immigration has secretary, Theresa May, have succeeded in brought significant benefits to Britain. reducing immigration, they have not come London is enjoying its second great age, close to meeting their promised target. for example, because of the energetic and This failure is the number-one policy factor highly skilled people from many parts of driving ukip’s progress. the world who are working in its creative Immigration is in fact the perfect issue sector and its financial and information- for ukip. First, there is the policy substance: technology industries. Many of the great voters disapprove of large numbers of brains working in Britain’s universities and people entering Britain, pushing up housing teaching hospitals are also immigrants. But prices and “stealing our jobs.” Second, there have been significant downsides to there is the antiestablishment dimension: immigration as well. Housing prices are all of the three major political parties have rising to record levels, especially in the promised to control immigration but once southeastern parts of England—making in power were proven to have “lied,” claims ownership unaffordable for many local and Farage. And third, there is the European young people. Immigration may also partly dimension. So long as Britain is a member explain the depressed nature of the wages of the eu, it does not have control of its of lower-skilled people. British employers borders. Free movement of labor is an have little incentive to cooperate with the integral component of the European single government’s welfare-to-work programs so market—negotiated, ironically, by Thatcher long as foreign workers, motivated to cross herself. Just as any Briton is free to live and continents in search for work and therefore work in any other part of the eu, so any certainly motivated to turn up for work at 5 Bulgarian, Romanian or Pole is free to come a.m., are ready and available to take the jobs to live and work in the United Kingdom. they create. Any potential limits on immigration But whatever the arguments for and into Britain from outside of the eu can

34 The National Interest Britain’s Tea Party be overwhelmed by immigration from breakthroughs necessary to really change inside the eu—especially from its poorer, British politics and secure its founding goal: recession-struck member states. As the only exit from the European Union. party promising to take Britain out of the eu, ukip is therefore the only party with a hatever future ukip might carve credible policy to control immigration. out for itself, it has already W posed huge questions for the ver time, ukip has devoted more mainstream parties. For twenty or more and more of its campaigning ef- years, much of British politics has become O forts to opposing immigration. far removed from the concerns of large Sometimes, however, this has led ukip to numbers of voters. Often using campaign- appear as anti-immigrant as much as anti- ing techniques imported from America, the immigration. Although a majority of eth- established parties have become adept at nic-minority Britons as well as white Brit- targeting swing voters in swing parliamen- ons oppose large-scale immigration, ukip’s tary seats. As a result, only a few million, sometimes strident emphasis on the issue largely middle-income voters decide Brit- helps to explain why it is such a white party. ain’s government. Half of British parliamen- 14 percent of Britons come from ethnic mi- tary seats haven’t changed hands since 1970. norities, yet a recent collage of hundreds of Nearly one-third have remained in the same ukip members, produced by the party itself, party’s control since 1945. Without Ameri- contained not one nonwhite face. ca’s system of primary elections, most Brit- ukip also opposes gay marriage, wants ish mps think they have a seat for life. This the foreign-aid budget slashed and takes an has led many of them to become indifferent even tougher line on welfare payments to to their constituents’ concerns. It is a recipe the poor than the governing Conservatives. for political stultification. It is certainly a The overall impression that has been breeding ground for disenfranchisement. created is that ukip supporters don’t much The people who need politics most—the like modern Britain or people that they do people struggling to make ends meet, who not know. It is in danger of becoming a very run out of money at the start rather than traditionalist, even reactionary party. That the end of months—are most shut out from was not its original intention. ukip still the electoral system. ukip has given them a describes itself as a libertarian party, and in voice. supporting smokers’ rights and opposing Establishment politicians on both sides state surveillance, for example, it retains of the Atlantic can choose to see Britain’s some freedom-loving beliefs. ukip—or America’s Tea Party, for that If ukip is to become a permanent force matter—as irritants. They can paint them in British politics, it will need to decide as extremists. They can attempt to defeat how to resolve this conflict between its them. And it is certainly true that both libertarian and traditionalist tendencies. movements have weaknesses. But the If it moves in a libertarian direction, it establishments also have their weaknesses. might alienate the older, more conservative Too many influential Republican voters that form its current bedrock of politicians grew too close to special support. If it does not become a little more interests on Wall Street and to the big- open-minded and reach some of Britain’s business lobbyists of Washington’s K Street. “educated, cultured and young” voters, it They came to embody a crony rather than will struggle to make the parliamentary a competitive form of capitalism—let alone

Britain’s Tea Party September/October 2014 35 a Main Street capitalism rooted in local longer afford private education or who face communities. The result was the Mitt extra taxation on their £2 million homes. Romney candidacy and the devastating They are out of touch. They do not seem to finding that among those who said that realize that only about one in twenty Britons whether a candidate “cares about people send their children to fee-paying schools or like me” was a top concern for them, a full that a £2 million home is far beyond the 81 percent voted for Barack Obama rather earning potential of most Britons. than the Republican nominee. Every Conservative mp should be given The British Tories have a similar a business card with just one thing written problem. All of the influential Tories live upon it: £28,600. £28,600 is the average in London. They imbibe its prosperity, its uk salary. Many earn much less, of course. multiculturalism, its skyline full of cranes, Until every Tory mp understands what it is its sexual liberalism and its internationalism. like to try to pay for a home, a holiday, a But London—for all of its qualities—is only petrol tank and a supermarket trolley full part of Britain. There is another Britain, of groceries for the family with that kind one that lacks the capital city’s cultural of money, they should not be in politics. spring and where wages are depressed, They certainly won’t beat ukip. Because for where working hours are long and where everything ukip says about immigration, globalization can be more of a problem gay marriage and Europe, it is the ale- than a blessing. Too many Conservatives drinking, cigarette-smoking Nigel Farage’s give the impression that they do not really attack on the remoteness of the political understand this Britain. Senior Tories talk class that has made ukip the most talked- about “middle-class families” who can no about party in British politics today. n

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Euro Realist Newsletter. CC BY 2.0.

36 The National Interest Britain’s Tea Party Limited War Is Back

By Jakub Grygiel and A. Wess Mitchell

urope needs to rearm and de- that the traditional formula for deterrence, fend itself to cope with a new based on retaliation and the extended deter- military threat. The American rent provided by the United States, will suf- security umbrella—in both its fice. It won’t. Econventional and nuclear forms—is no lon- ger adequate, particularly on nato’s vulner- hereas limited warfare went able eastern flanks. Indeed, the extended out of fashion in the West after deterrent provided by the United States W Vietnam, Russia regards it as a to its most exposed allies may not be well central part of its military doctrine. It has suited to inhibiting attacks similar to Rus- practiced it in Georgia, Crimea and eastern sia’s recent incursion into Ukraine, which Ukraine, and presumably rehearses it else- displayed all the hallmarks of the newly where. It is therefore imperative to study popular limited conventional wars—brief anew the challenges presented by such a and decisive, violent and yet very restrained. form of sanguinary behavior. “Limited wars” The purpose of such conflicts is to achieve have several distinctive features. First, they a quick fait accompli in a geographically are characterized by self-imposed restraint in circumscribed area through limited force— the political objective sought and the level of in this case, paramilitary means followed force used. The aggressor could escalate the by Russian regular forces. It is difficult to confrontation, but chooses not to. The pur- deter such a threat through the promise of pose of limiting the use of force is to avoid retaliation, which by its very nature must some reaction that would undermine the occur after the facts on the ground have political objective sought in the convention- already been changed. A threat of retaliation al assault. In the case of today’s Russia, the is simply less credible when the enemy has purpose is to extend influence and control achieved his objective through a low-in- westward without eliciting a strong response tensity action. What are needed instead are from nato and the United States. Moscow strong local military capabilities—a preclu- recognizes the clear military superiority of sive defense—that increase the costs of that its main rivals and consequently desires to limited attack. Europe must start to defend avoid a pitched confrontation that it would its border rather than indulge in the belief lose. Hence, its use of force is calibrated to be sufficient to conquer pieces of Ukraine Jakub Grygiel is the George H. W. Bush but not so large and violent that it would Associate Professor of International Relations at prompt a unified political, economic and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced military reaction from the West. International Studies. A. Wess Mitchell is president Russia is as clear regarding what it wants of the Center for European Policy Analysis. to avoid as it is concerning what it wants

Limited War Is Back September/October 2014 37 to achieve. Moscow’s objectives are limited: that of its neighbors, but Moscow cannot a small and quick territorial grab rather sustain a prolonged conflict with Western- than a massive invasion (at least for now). supported forces and certainly cannot do There is no drive to the capital (Kiev, in so against nato member states. But the this instance) or attempt at full conquest risk of a Western military response was and but instead a speedy push inside the neigh- remains negligible, and Russia achieved its boring state followed by a sudden, self- objective in Crimea with ease. imposed stop. It is a “jab and pause” style of war fighting meant to achieve a swift wo main challenges present them- and limited fait accompli. A rapid conquest selves when crafting a response of Crimea or parts of eastern Ukraine is T to a limited war waged by a rival. followed by a pause and apparent openness First, it is politically difficult to answer a to seek a mutually acceptable negotiated restrained military attack. As the Crimea settlement. But the limited objective has al- case illustrates, Western policy makers face ready been achieved, and the quick suspen- significant hurdles when attempting to mo- sion of violence is a sign of the satisfaction bilize public opinion in support of a stiff of the original goal. diplomatic—much less military—response A limited war is also characterized by to low-scale aggression. Moreover, the ten- limited means. The aggressor state care- tative nature and high speed of the initial fully tailors its methods to the goal it wants attack complicate the formation of a re- to achieve—and the reaction it wants to sponding coalition, whose potential mem- avoid. Minimal violence is employed. The bers are naturally divided as to the most potential for escalation is made clear but appropriate answer to that limited push. held in reserve. In the case of the Crime- The sign of a successful limited war is the an invasion, the Russian operation start- absence of a strong concerted response, the ed anonymously with unmarked troops reaction that the attack wanted to avoid (dubbed “little green men” by Ukraini- in the first place. Russia’s self-imposed re- ans), an indication that Moscow was un- straint in Crimea gave Moscow the advan- certain about how local Ukrainian forces tage it sought. would react. In the event of determined The second difficulty is that when faced opposition, Russia maintained the option with a limited attack, the targeted country of either escalating with larger forces or, cannot trade space for time. The objective should Western powers come to Ukraine’s pursued by the attacking party is limited, aid militarily, halting the operations of the most often geographically. The conquest unmarked troops. of a small, carefully delimited piece of real The aggressor, in fact, constantly has to estate is the goal of the aggressor, and if the weigh the value of the limited objective defending country abandons that territory against the risk of the rivals’ response. The in the hope of buying time to develop a higher the value of the objective, the more response, it ipso facto allows the enemy to risk it is willing to accept. In Ukraine, it achieve its objective. Consequently, defense is plausible that Moscow’s desire to avoid in depth—the practice of initially yielding a military clash with nato members (in- territory and then counterattacking—is use- cluding in the form of Western-armed and less in such a case. Russia does not appear -trained Ukrainian forces) is greater than interested in conducting a military con- its desire to occupy Crimea. Russian mili- quest of Ukraine in its entirety, and seems tary might is impressive when compared to for now to be satisfied with only Crimea

38 The National Interest Limited War Is Back Europe needs to rearm and defend itself to cope with a new military threat. The American security umbrella—in both its conventional and nuclear forms—is no longer adequate. and perhaps parts of eastern Ukraine, if it sion—from the outset. The role of local de- can hold them. In this scenario, defense fense is to force the aggressor to escalate the in depth would simply give the aggressor level of violence, which adds both military what he wants, one bite at a time, as the and political costs. Ukrainians quickly discovered. Whatever Second, in the event that the aggressor the reasoning behind Kiev’s initial decision does attack, an effective local defense buys not to defend its outer territories, this ap- time for the target state, increasing the like- proach allowed Moscow to achieve its early lihood that external reinforcements will objectives virtually cost-free—a hard lesson arrive before the offensive has succeeded. that prompted Kiev to switch tactics and In a limited-war scenario, space cannot be transfer forces eastward. traded for time, but time can be bought by These difficulties indicate that the sine local defensive actions. The longer it takes qua non of a successful response to an of- for the aggressor to achieve its limited ter- fensive strategy based on limited war is the ritorial objectives, the greater the opportu- fielding of effective local forces capable of nity for external military aid to buttress the withstanding the initial attack. There is no targeted country. alternative to local defense organized by the Third, local defensive forces permit the targeted country. Of course, it is unlikely conflict to remain limited, an outcome that that a country much weaker than the at- is in the interest of all parties. As William tacking power, as in the case of Ukraine or Kaufmann wrote in 1956, “To the extent, any other neighboring country to Russia, therefore, that a conflict starts with local can defend itself alone. Local defenses only forces clashing over local issues, to that ex- serve as a complement to—not a replace- tent will the chances of limiting it be im- ment for—extended deterrence. Without proved.” This, paradoxically, increases the local defensive capabilities, extended deter- likelihood of external support for the target- rence is fragile, in particular in a limited of- ed party. The security patron of a targeted fensive war; without an extended deterrent, small country has no interest in, and very local defense by small states facing more little ability to generate domestic support powerful neighbors is sacrificial. for, a large-scale conflict in defense of a dis- Shifting the strategic emphasis to local tant ally. If the extended deterrent is predi- defense achieves three things. First, it in- cated on a massive military response, it is creases the costs of military aggression: the less credible in the event of a limited attack. more difficult it is for the revisionist state This is why Europeans—especially those to achieve the political objective sought on the eastern frontier facing a revisionist by the limited-war format, the more force Russia—need to take their own defense the aggressor will have to employ and the seriously. The extended deterrence provided higher the risk of a stronger response by ex- by the United States will not suffice to ternal forces. This defeats the very purpose prevent a limited-war scenario, even in the of limited war—low-cost, low-risk revi- case of a nato member. It is plausible, in

Limited War Is Back September/October 2014 39 fact, to imagine a repeat of the Crimea creating the incentive to defend the allied grab in one of the Baltic states: a lighting country. The loss of American soldiers to strike with minuscule territorial objectives an initial attack by the enemy would, so the pursued with limited conventional means, argument goes, create powerful pressures followed by an abrupt stop to the offensive. for Washington to respond. As French gen- The larger goal of such a strike, like in the eral Ferdinand Foch reportedly said when Crimean case, would be to prove that the asked before World War I how many Brit- international arrangements underwriting ish troops would be needed for the security the targeted country’s security are a house of France, “Give me one, and I will make of cards. The political shadow of influence sure he gets killed on the first day of the

that would follow such a demonstration of war.” Or, as Thomas Schelling put it in power would be preferable to an outright more recent times, the purpose of placing conquest for many reasons. thousands of American troops on our al- The forward positioning of U.S. troops lies’ territory is so that “bluntly, they can is useful for shoring up the effectiveness of die.” But what if they do not die? What if American extended deterrence in the re- they’re never even involved because the at- gion and should be done immediately. But tack is so limited—a “jab and pause” like that step alone will not deter Russia. The that in Crimea—that it does not come near deterrent aspect of this forward posture is American forces? If the aggressor estab- that it puts U.S. assets and manpower in lishes a quick fait accompli, then the U.S. a vulnerable position—creating a so-called forces would have to be used not to defend tripwire—thus showing commitment and an ally’s territory, but rather to attack an

Image: Wikimedia Commons/SFJZ13. CC BY 2.0.

40 The National Interest Limited War Is Back enemy that has already achieved its territo- erful political aftereffects. Russia does not rial goal and, in all likelihood, has ceased want to march through the Fulda Gap; it military operations. As Henry Kissinger simply wants to test and, if attainable at low put it, “Once the aggressor is in possession risk, to tear down the U.S.-built and -sup- of his prize . . . the psychological burden ported European security system. shifts in his favor. The defender must now nato needs a different defense strategy— assume the risk of the first move. The ag- one that retains the best features of Ameri- gressor can confine himself to outwaiting can military protection against unlimited his opponent.” war but also places greater importance on ensuring the ability of frontline states to here is no substitute for local forces defend themselves during the critical, early that possess the ability to protect phases of a Russian limited-war attack. T their own borders, even if it means Without abandoning extended deterrence merely increasing the costs of aggression based on retaliation, this strategy would without hope of winning the conflict un- shift the emphasis to deterrence based on aided. But this will require a change from preclusive defense. While similar in the nato’s current approach to defense. As im- sense that both seek to prevent war by plied above, it will mean a conscious move changing the strategic calculation of aggres- away from the exclusive emphasis on ex- sion, retaliation and preclusion are differ- tended deterrence that has dominated al- ent in important ways. Where the former liance strategy for decades. This approach discourages aggressive behavior by instilling made sense when the threat facing nato fear of retaliation, the latter discourages it was above the threshold of formal war, by removing or reducing the gain that the and in the immediate post–Cold War pe- opponent would have achieved from ag- riod, when the threat was negligible. But gression. Using the analogy of a schoolyard in today’s landscape, given the weak state bully, deterrence is the fear of a teacher’s of defenses along nato’s eastern borders, paddle; preclusion is equipping the weaker overreliance on extended deterrence would students with sets of brass knuckles. Pre- confront nato with the same problem now clusion works not because the opponent facing Ukraine, but on a wider scale. With- thinks it will lose a conflict outright—the out the ability to defend against a limited Russians can still overcome individual attack in its initial stages, nato would be frontline nato states no matter how much forced to rely on defense-in-depth tech- they bulk up their forces—but instead be- niques that would trade space for time. cause it will take more time and effort to This is the concern that many Central and win than the object is worth. Preclusion Eastern European states have—that they reinforces the effectiveness of American would have to absorb the loss of territory extended deterrence because it signals to while awaiting relief forces that, for politi- the attacker that the target can survive long cal or military reasons, might never come. enough for the resources of its larger patron In a best-case scenario, such an event would to be brought into play. render an alliance in nato’s divided political The point of the Russian “jab and pause” state a dead letter. In a worst-case scenario, strategy is to make nato’s members choose it would turn frontline nato members like between the unsavory options of respond- Poland and the Baltic states into a war zone. ing militarily to an already-achieved land And it also may simply let Russia achieve its grab (risking escalating the overall con- limited territorial objectives, but with pow- flict) and inaction (and the resulting po-

Limited War Is Back September/October 2014 41 litical self-nullification). Preclusive defense Czech Republic and Romania have all im- evens the odds by forcing Russia to choose plemented or promised significant increas- between the defeat or stalling of its lim- es, and other regional allies are considering ited “jab,” and the adoption of a higher similar options. threshold of military violence that it is un- As the behavior of some U.S. allies dur- likely to be able to sustain. Either way, it ing the Cold War (and in Central Europe redefines the contest in ways that allow today) has shown, it is not a foregone con- nato’s advantages to come into play and clusion that all frontline states’ free riding exposes Russian disadvantages. It prevents will decrease or that local defense will be- Russia from being able to achieve the all- come a priority on its own—even within important psychological advantage of the the context of a growing threat of lim- strategic-offense-cum-tactical-defense that ited war on or near their territory. These it has used in Ukraine—the “draw[ing] of changes are particularly unlikely if Russia an opponent into an ‘unbalanced’ advance” maintains its low-intensity approach to the that the military strategist Basil Liddell Ukraine conflict, staggers the pace of ter- Hart identified as the most crucial determi- ritorial acquisition in other parts of the nant of success in warfare. post-Soviet space, and continues its subver- For preclusive defense to work, Europe- sive campaign inside Central and Eastern ans will have to get serious about defend- European political systems. ing themselves. In particular, the frontline states of Central and Eastern Europe will f European states are to respond to have to develop a capacity—and mind- Russia’s reintroduction of limited war set—for self-defense that they currently I by embracing the concept of local de- do not possess. One recent study by the fense individually, much less adopting a Center for European Policy Analysis found preclusive-defense strategy as an alliance, that Russian military power outstrips the they will need strong encouragement from defenses of Central and Eastern European the United States. While Washington can- states in all dimensions by a wide margin— not force nato to respond to the new envi- in land power by a factor of three to one, in ronment, there are things it can do to make airpower by four to one and in overall de- this adaptation more likely. fense spending by ten to one. One positive To begin with, America should provide side effect of the Ukraine crisis has been to a clearer statement of its own strategy that increase the willingness of these states to places its requests for its allies to do more invest in their own defense. As the recent in local defense within the context of U.S. behavior of America’s East Asian allies has intentions and resources. At present, the shown, the return of traditional geopolitical widespread perception is that America is competition has a way of awakening stra- simply making it up as it goes along, trying tegic seriousness—and reducing free riding to hold together the U.S.-led global system on the United States—among vulnerable on an ad hoc basis with the same tools that states. There are already some signs of this it used in the past, except with occasional trend in nato, as European defense estab- adjustments in geographic emphasis. The lishments appear to be shifting emphasis to flat-footedness of the U.S. response to the territorial defense. Poland and Estonia are invasion of Crimea, after years of asserting already relatively big military spenders; in the strategic imperative of shifting atten- the period since the invasion of Ukraine, tion to Asia, only deepened this impression. neighboring states Latvia, Lithuania, the In such a context, and amid cuts into the

42 The National Interest Limited War Is Back Whereas limited warfare went out of fashion in the West after Vietnam, Russia regards it as a central part of its military doctrine.

muscle tissue of America’s own capabili- ventional land power sufficiently robust ties, requesting allies to spend more looks to create local “no-go” zones until U.S. dangerously close to outsourcing respon- forces arrive. Such a bargain would need sibility for problems we ourselves cannot to be buttressed by the physical presence of afford (and do not wish) to confront. Such American assets and manpower—small gar- an approach creates the opposite of incen- risons at the frontier to show U.S. commit- tives for local defense—it fuels a suspicion ment and make the use of its more mobile that “America is leaving” and that, rather and lethal power credible. than risking a hopeless defense on their Most importantly, the United States own, vulnerable states would be better off needs to figure out how to create the right avoiding actions that might antagonize the incentives for allies to invest in local de- nearby aggressor (Russia). The perception fense. It is one thing to tell states to do of American disengagement, and thus of a more for their own defense, as recent U.S. weaker extended deterrent, will not stimu- secretaries of defense have done again and late exposed allies to engage in more serious again, and another to give them real incen- efforts at local defense. tives to create robust indigenous militaries These impressions and tendencies can and avoid free riding. It’s not enough for ultimately only be countered by having and states to be exposed to a threat, as advocates implementing a workable strategy. nato’s of “offshore balancing” have long argued; Strategic Concept has ceased to carry the they must also know that they have a rea- credibility for playing such a role. Wash- sonable chance of success in pursuing the ington can begin to address this problem option of resistance. If nato is going to by producing an umbrella concept that persist in its current split into two tiers of outlines the seriousness of new threats like the serious and the unserious, we might as limited war, states its resolve for counter- well stack the incentives to make the for- ing them, and explains how U.S. and allied mer behavior profitable—and be explicit capabilities could plausibly be employed in about it. Article 5 of the North Atlantic tandem to ensure continued stability. Al- Treaty should remain the life insurance lies need to understand, in unambiguous of a nato country’s security relationship terms, that while we may be cutting back, with the United States—a safety net in we also have a strategy for reshaping the the event of a catastrophic, full-scale as- U.S. military at a doctrinal and techno- sault on a member of the alliance. But, as logical level that sustains stability in their we observed, Article 5, and the American region. It needs to be clear to them that extended deterrent that underpins it, is less the success of this strategy requires local credible and effective when dealing with defense on their part. An implicit bargain a quick and limited incursion. Hence, the would include U.S. investments in upper- United States should devise a “matching” tier capabilities like naval, air and nuclear strategy—a kind of geopolitical 401(k): for assets paired with local investments in con- those allies that spend a certain amount on

Limited War Is Back September/October 2014 43 Using the analogy of a schoolyard bully, deterrence is the fear of a teacher’s paddle; preclusion is equipping the weaker students with sets of brass knuckles.

local defense, we will “match” their efforts of Swiss-style self-defense doctrines among in the form of commitments or agreements exposed allies that would deter Russian ag- over and above our commitment to extend- gression by driving up the costs of conflict ed deterrence under Article 5. This could at the local level. be broadened at an alliance level, if mem- Ultimately, the war in Ukraine dem- ber politics allow, to create a new clause in onstrates that nato must find an effec- which the alliance’s four largest economies tive way to deal with the revived threat of agree to match the defense contributions of limited war. The West faces similar tactics its four most geopolitically exposed mem- from China in the South China Sea. What- bers (e.g., Poland and the Baltic states) on ever form it takes, the key is to shift the some basis, whether through defense subsi- focus from extended deterrence as a solu- dies, technology sharing, access to sensitive tion to all the alliance’s security needs to a weapons or troop contributions. preclusive-defense mind-set that raises the The “matching” approach increases the costs of limited war, mainly by incentiv- risk for those states that decide not to shore izing increased investments in local de- up their defenses. But, unlike a U.S. re- fense. Such an approach would prioritize trenchment that abandons allies to a more the strategic resilience and survivability of dangerous scenario, it also establishes clear nato’s frontline states as the ultimate deter- rewards for those who decide to contribute minant of the alliance’s survival. It would in a meaningful way to their own security. explicitly seek to alleviate these states’ re- An increased risk alone may tilt some fron- emerging security dilemmas by both their tier states toward the revisionist neighbor, own and other members’ contributions in Russia; the possibility of a reward restores the full spirit of the North Atlantic Treaty the balance and gives a clear alternative while shifting intra-nato requirements to to the local leaders. Further steps could match a profoundly altered threat land- include the offer of rebated surplus U.S. scape. Doing so would help to support military equipment (artillery, tanks and the creation of a new defense posture that, fighters) to eastern nato members, the cre- while difficult to imagine in its details now, ation of light frontier forces to give the is indispensable for ensuring the relevance Baltic states time to mobilize in the event and survival of nato in a new and in many of a crisis, and—over time—the creation ways more dangerous era. n

44 The National Interest Limited War Is Back Europe’s Peripheral Vision

By Milton Ezrati

t’s too soon to pop the champagne cance. Success or failure on this front will corks. Europe, mired in gloom for effectively determine power relationships years, still faces many high hurdles to throughout the euro zone and the European resolve its crisis. Nonetheless, there Union. German dominance, even hegemo- Iare some auguries of prosperity that might ny, will expand if France and the nations of invite a stockpiling of party hats and noise- Europe’s beleaguered periphery fail to enact makers. In December 2013, Ireland success- fundamental economic reform. Without it, fully emerged from its bailout, and Portugal they will remain economically weak, finan- followed this May. This verifiable progress cially fragile, dependent on Germany and represented a first for members of Europe’s subject to its lead. With effective reform, struggling periphery. But this news should however, France and the periphery have only lift spirits so high. If these financial a chance to regain economic vitality and gains make anything clear, it is the need now shed the need for German support. These to go beyond budget control to more fun- are the options. Ironically, all the initiative damental and structural economic reform. lies with the weaker countries. Germany is Ireland’s finance minister, Michael Noonan, bound to the union. It will have to play the summed up the situation well, characterizing hand France and Europe’s periphery deal it. his nation’s emergence from the bailout as a They will determine whether Berlin gains “milestone,” not the “end of the road.” To se- dominance or whether Europe can restore cure their economic and financial future, Ire- its former balance. land, Portugal, the rest of Europe’s periphery and France (which increasingly resembles the or all that remains to be done, Dub- periphery) will have to reform long-standing lin, Lisbon and Brussels are entitled labor, product and tax practices, and even F to some rejoicing. In 2009, Ireland industrial structures, to promote rather than and Portugal were insolvent. Each country’s impede organic growth. These nations must ongoing budget deficit ran at more than do nothing less than reshape the political- 10 percent of its gross domestic product economic models under which they have (gdp). They had to pay double-digit inter- operated for decades. est rates to borrow on global capital mar- Such structural reform has huge signifi- kets, an expense that intensified their fi- nancial strains. The official bailout lifeline, Milton Ezrati is senior economist and market €85 billion for Ireland and €78 billion for strategist for Lord, Abbett & Co. He is the author Portugal, bought time for needed budget of Thirty Tomorrows: The Next Three Decades of reform. It also enforced it. Unlike in the ad Globalization, Demographics, and How We Will Live hoc arrangements made for Greece, Europe (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014). was much better organized when it moved

Europe’s Peripheral Vision September/October 2014 45 If France and the nations of Europe’s beleaguered periphery fail to enact fundamental reform, they will remain economically weak, financially fragile, dependent on Germany and subject to its lead.

on to Ireland and Portugal. Germany and large budget deficits, eliciting more auster- other stronger nations pooled their resourc- ity that causes more recession, more budget es in what they called the European Stabili- problems and so on in a downward spiral. ty Mechanism, which then, in concert with What makes matters even worse is that the International Monetary Fund (imf) there is little room for fiscal latitude. Even and the European Central Bank (ecb), sup- now, as these countries emerge from troi- ported the bailouts. This troika, as it is ka controls, Ireland and Portugal know called, offered subsidized financing in a that promoting growth and employment series of tranches, each conditioned on cer- through expansive fiscal policies, as France tain budget and deficit milestones. And the has suggested on occasion, is out of the process can claim success. Now, Ireland ex- question. Though they have regained con- pects deficits at 4.7 percent of gdp in 2014 trol over their ongoing budget situations, and Portugal at 4.0 percent. The improve- they cannot so easily shed the legacy of past ment has allowed both governments to profligacy. Because this legacy has created return to capital markets, where investors suspicion among investors and left capital have shown considerable interest in their markets with a huge overhang of their debt, bonds, allowing them to borrow at signifi- the slightest hint of a turn away from aus- cantly reduced interest rates. terity now would panic investors. The same Gratifying as this success is on one level, constraint applies throughout Europe’s pe- it has undeniably come at a terrible cost. riphery, France included. Any attempts to The budget austerity demanded by the troi- use expansive policies would quickly cool ka has driven both Ireland and Portugal investor interest, drive up these nations’ into deep recessions, especially coming, as borrowing costs and prompt credit-rating the bailout demands did, while these econo- agencies to downgrade their national bonds mies were still reeling from the 2008–2009 (as they have already done with France’s), financial crisis. Unemployment in Portugal raising borrowing costs still more. Finding remains a heartbreaking 14.3 percent of the it increasingly difficult to borrow at reason- workforce. In Ireland, unemployment, hav- able rates, these countries would have to re- ing peaked at 15 percent of the workforce turn to austerity or they would quickly find in 2012, has improved to about 11.6 per- themselves back in a fiscal-financial crisis of cent, but more from mass emigration than the sort from which they have just begun to economic gains. Worse, ongoing austerity emerge. threatens to keep these economies in reces- Confronted with such constraints, the sion or stagnation at best. Indeed, contin- countries of Europe’s periphery must either ued austerity runs the risk of creating a vi- accept the unpalatable option of ongoing cious cycle in which the budget restraint so recession or find some other way to pro- depresses the economy that, despite the best mote growth. This is where fundamental efforts of the authorities, slow growth and reform comes in. At other times in other additional demands for social services en- nations, efforts to improve economic ef-

46 The National Interest Europe’s Peripheral Vision ficiency, flexibility, innovation and com- to fire excess or incompetent employees. petitiveness have promoted growth and Previously, the time and expense needed employment even under strict budget con- to terminate an employment contract had trols. The ability to return to well-ground- made German businesses reluctant to hire ed growth and financial health has both even promising employees. In a similar its own obvious appeal and the added at- vein, Schröder’s reforms liberalized rules traction of freeing these nations from their on part-time and temporary employment. present dependence on Germany. Still, To put labor resources at the disposal of a such structural reform will face high politi- revitalizing economy, his policies sought cal hurdles. Many powerful groups in these to encourage work by cutting taxes and countries have vested interests in the old emphasizing the training of young work- policies and practices and will inevitably ers and the retraining of displaced workers. resist the necessary changes. Established He reduced the attractions of welfare and businesses, many of which receive subsidies unemployment by consolidating the two or otherwise dominate the status quo, will benefits into a basic living standard, widen- fight any effort to promote competition or ing the range of jobs considered acceptable efficiency. Union officials will resist labor- by the authorities and shortening the time market reform for fear that it would detract people could collect unemployment from from their power and influence. Govern- three years to one year, or eighteen months ment bureaucracies will fight the need to for those over fifty-five. change their presumptions and biases. The reforms took time to have an ef- fect. In the interim, Schröder lost the f such reform faces resistance, these chancellorship to Angela Merkel in 2005. nations certainly do not lack for guid- Now, with the Hartz Reforms widely ac- I ance on what they need to do. In fact, knowledged to have revitalized Germany’s Germany’s own experience offers one proven economy, Merkel is enjoying the payoff. blueprint for economic revitalization. Just Today, Germany, unlike much of Europe, over ten years ago, Germany, too, had an is growing. Even in the midst of this cri- unsustainable political-economic model. Its sis, its economy expanded in real terms industry was inflexible, becoming less pro- by 4.0 percent in 2010 and 3.3 percent in ductive and competitive. Employment pol- 2011. The weight of Europe’s crisis slowed icy discouraged work. Unemployment, not growth to 0.7 percent in 2012 and 0.4 per- surprisingly, had risen toward 12 percent of cent in 2013, but there is still widespread the workforce. The Economist fairly called confidence in the fundamental strength Germany “the sick man of Europe” in 1999. of the German economy as a result of the In response, Peter Hartz, personnel director reforms. German unemployment stands at of the Volkswagen Group, offered a series 6.5 percent of the workforce, less than half of bold proposals in 2003. To his immense Europe’s average and its lowest rate since re- credit, then chancellor Gerhard Schröder unification in 1990. Youth unemployment, embraced them and, against all the recidivist a scourge throughout most of the rest of inclinations of his own party, launched a se- the Continent, stands at a twenty-year low ries of successful reforms that have come to in Germany. The difference is especially be called the Hartz Reforms or, as Schröder evident among older workers as well. Some preferred to call them, “Agenda 2010.” 60 percent of Germans between fifty-five These changes, first and foremost, aimed and sixty-four work today, well up from 40 to encourage hiring by making it easier percent in 2003. Meanwhile, Germany’s

Europe’s Peripheral Vision September/October 2014 47 budget is balanced and its debt is falling, easier and less costly. Similarly, the oecd both absolutely and as a percentage of gdp. identifies great potential gains from efforts Swedish, Finnish and Danish experiences to reduce the cost of labor by cutting pay- should bolster confidence in the power of roll taxes and by decentralizing wage bar- such structural change. Having followed gaining, especially moving from national Berlin’s lead, all these countries have shown contracts to company-by-company negotia- better economic performance and stron- tions. Less a part of Germany’s reform but ger national finances than France and Eu- identified by the oecd as significant are ef- rope’s periphery. Between 2009 and 2013, forts to increase competition within domes- these three Scandinavian countries grew in tic markets by, for instance, removing inter- real terms at annual rates of 3.0, 1.0 and nal protections for inefficient, established 0.6 percent, respectively, hardly a power- firms and sweeping away regulations that ful performance by longer-term histori- impede entry by new competitors. Pointing cal standards but vastly better than the to successful reforms made in Norway, the outright declines registered in Spain, Italy Czech Republic and the Netherlands, the and France, for example. What’s more, the oecd also recommends a simpler tax code Scandinavian countries’ growth, by raising that reduces statutory rates and makes up tax revenues and curtailing demands for the revenue difference by sweeping away social services, has put their public finances subsidies and applying taxes more broadly on a much firmer footing. They have re- throughout each nation’s individual and duced their budget deficits, in most cases business populations. to within the eu’s acceptable parameter of 3 percent of gdp, and so they have kept their till another reform blueprint emerg- outstanding debt burdens lower relative to es from the efforts of Italy’s former gdp than elsewhere. S prime minister, Mario Monti. He The Organisation for Economic Co- was well aware that every nation in the operation and Development (oecd) pro- oecd’s study that adopted such reforms vides another authoritative source of reform grew faster and achieved lower rates of un- guidance. Drawing on the experience of employment and a better fiscal balance all its members, both inside Europe and than those that failed to reform. He was outside it, the oecd has developed a thor- even more acutely aware of the need for an ough review of the structural reforms that, alternative way to promote growth while in its own words, have a proven ability to Europe’s periphery remained unable to give “enhance long-run productivity and growth up budget austerity. Structural reforms, performance.” The organization’s research, he made clear, were the only option for presented in a series of studies under the Italy and for Europe’s periphery in general. title Going for Growth, professes to tell na- Though diplomacy no doubt prevented tions not just “where to go” but also “how him from promoting such reforms explic- to get there.” itly as a way to shed dependence on Ger- The wealth of analysis and recommenda- many and so avoid German dominance, he tions in the oecd’s book-sized reports go surely must have thought about it. beyond the scope of an article like this. In Monti set out a reform agenda for Italy summary, it is fair to say that much of its in 2011. Though he never drew the paral- work resembles the Hartz Reforms. On la- lel explicitly, it looked remarkably like the bor-market policies, for instance, the oecd Hartz Reforms. He began with an effort would encourage hiring by making firing to liberalize Italian labor markets, making

48 The National Interest Europe’s Peripheral Vision them more flexible by easing rules on hir- and Italy had to call new elections in 2012. ing and firing, allowing wage negotiations Monti, never a politician, could not pre- to proceed company by company instead of vail. Yet while he was making his biggest on a national level and giving management push in 2011 and early 2012, these sorts more freedom to set work schedules. He of reforms did gain adherents elsewhere also looked to alter unemployment com- in Europe’s beleaguered periphery. Spain, pensation in order to encourage displaced Portugal and even Greece pushed similar workers to seek training and return to the changes. Clearly, the fiscal-financial crisis workforce. Though such labor-reform ef- served as a considerable lever with which forts have failed in Italy’s past, Monti was to move entrenched opposition aside. able to use the exigencies of Europe’s crisis The oecd analysts behind the Going for to move the government to action. The Growth series noted a marked uptick in progress he made, though far from com- interest during that time, especially from plete, was remarkable, especially given the Spain and Portugal. But lately, enthusiasm powerful interests vested in those old labor about such progrowth reform has ebbed, rules. The last two times Italy tried to relax no doubt because the intensity of the crisis its restrictive labor laws, in 1999 and again has also ebbed, though no government to in 2002, the Red Brigades paramilitary or- this point has substantively unwound its ganization murdered the leading lights of former reforms. reform. This time, not even all the unions France would seem to be an exception. opposed the changes. Though the intensity of the crisis has dis- Monti had to leave his efforts incom- sipated there, too, Paris faces an alternative plete, however, because, for reasons un- source of pressure. All three major credit- related to reform, his coalition collapsed rating agencies have downgraded France’s

Europe’s Peripheral Vision September/October 2014 49 It is increasingly obvious that the eu never directly served the people of Europe. It has always only worked through the separate member nations.

standing. Since the agencies have encour- “sectors of the future.” Hardly the “com- aged structural change as a remedy for petition” the oecd and the rating agencies France’s troubles, Paris, unlike the others, have recommended, this is an extension of has felt obliged at the very least to increase government control and government sub- its conversation on the subject. Paris began sidies for its favorites. Meanwhile, the pres- to talk up reform last spring and even im- ent government has raised individual taxes plemented rule changes at the time that at and reversed many of the small reforms of least gestured at the available reform mod- its predecessor. els. In 2014, President François Hollande has again talked of reform in what he called he way it looks right now, France a probusiness agenda. Acknowledging and Europe’s periphery will fail to that Paris cannot redistribute if there is no T embrace structural reform suffi- wealth, he vowed to remove the burdens on ciently. Unless they accelerate their efforts, business. As per much of the reform advice, they, stuck as they are with their budget he promised in particular to slash payroll constraints, will face ongoing recession or taxes and wasteful government spending. at best economic stagnation. They will con- So far, however, French efforts have been sequently remain dependent on Germany more apparent than real. Admittedly, Paris and so increasingly be subject to Berlin’s has made it marginally easier to hire and influence. Perhaps if the euro zone were re- fire and has made unemployment compen- ally a single coherent whole, as its elite so sation less attractive, but it has done little earnestly claims, weakness in the periphery to help displaced workers gain additional would not lead so directly to rising German skills for new jobs. It talks about reducing power. In such a world, financial and eco- the cost of labor, but, last spring, rather nomic burdens would be more diffused and than lighten overall employment tax bur- ambiguous, making it easier to argue that dens, Paris merely shifted them from direct the burdens, wherever they fell, served the payroll taxes to the value-added tax. And union’s general needs. But as it is, Europe Paris has only offered selective tax relief. is not yet such a coherent whole. Burdens More recent statements promised more and requests for help are associated with earnest efforts to cut taxes and pay for the nations. And the citizens of those nations lost revenue with spending cuts, but those doing the lifting will naturally demand statements notably lacked specifics. Nor has compensation in one way or another for Paris done much to promote competition. bearing those burdens. Such demands will Instead of encouraging efficiency by eas- manifest themselves in claims for greater ing barriers to entry into French industry, control and leadership. Paris so far has left all its old regulations, This crucial difference between elite subsidies and special accommodations in dreams and reality became painfully clear place. Its substitute is a scheme of subsi- in an otherwise insignificant incident late dized financing for firms in what it calls the last year. A group of smaller German banks,

50 The National Interest Europe’s Peripheral Vision It is cheaper for Germany to support the periphery than it would be to support itself were the periphery to fail.

called Sparkassen, complained to the ecb only worked through the separate member about its monetary policy. The decision to nations. The best it has ever been able to hold interest rates low, the banks argued, do is to ask the governments of its stronger helps Europe’s periphery at the expense members to accept disadvantages for the of German savers. What they said is true, sake of the union, which they do only to of course. The deeply indebted periph- the extent that it suits their longer-term ery benefits from low rates, as Germany’s national interests. In this crisis, that has earnest savers suffer low returns on their effectively meant German support for the assets. German media picked up the story weaker nations of Europe’s periphery. As and, knowing the popularity of the mes- the burdens of the crisis have intensified, sage, broadcast it widely. What most high- those asked to do the carrying, the Ger- lighted the contradictions in Europe’s real- mans, have increasingly pushed their na- ity was the way the ecb’s president, Mario tional government to demand something in Draghi, responded. Instead of dealing with return for their cooperation and sacrifice. the Sparkassen’s argument, he chided them As long as France and the periphery con- for their “nationalistic undertone,” insist- tinue to need German help, those demands ing that the members of the ecb Governing will continue to grow. Council are “not German, neither French nor Spaniards nor Italian” but instead “are t might seem that Germany could re- Europeans,” and the ecb is “acting for the lieve the strain simply by walking away euro zone as a whole.” By clumsily pretend- I from the union. But it has stayed—and ing that these burdens and benefits did not will stay—despite the burdens, less out of fall along national lines, Draghi only man- loyalty to Europe (though doubtless there aged to emphasize how few “Europeans” is some of that) and more because Berlin there really are, at least as he uses the term, sees more cost in leaving than in staying. and how many Germans and Spaniards Both the political leadership in Berlin and remain, one to carry the burden to help the financial leadership in Frankfurt know how other. severely a dissolution of the union or the This is just the latest illustration of how common currency would impinge upon this fiscal-financial crisis has forced Eu- Germany. Given the amount of the periph- rope’s national reality repeatedly to break ery’s debt held by German banks, such an through the illusions of elite opinion. Be- event could actually threaten the country’s fore the crisis, it was easy to pretend that entire financial system. According to recent Brussels or the ecb spoke for a coherent reports, German banks hold €300 billion whole of “Europeans.” But as the crisis in Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, Italian and developed and burdens and needs clearly Irish obligations. A loss of half this magni- fell along national lines, it became increas- tude would so curtail liquidity and credit in ingly obvious that the eu never directly the German economy that it would drive it served the people of Europe. It has always into a deep recession, causing much more

Europe’s Peripheral Vision September/October 2014 51 harm than even a much larger burden of cellor Angela Merkel has proceeded dip- rescues and bailouts. Clearly, it is cheaper lomatically and respectfully, but neverthe- for Germany to support the periphery than less Berlin increasingly has taken control. it would be to support itself were the pe- A recent check to Merkel’s proposal for riphery to fail. more centralized control of the euro zone’s Germany’s leaders can also see how the economic policies was noteworthy mostly country gains economically from the com- because such resistance to German pre- mon currency. If Germany were alone, its scriptions has become so rare. Otherwise, relative success would by now have pushed Berlin has dictated the rules for the use of the price of its deutsche mark up to levels the zone’s stabilization fund. It has insisted that would make it difficult for its indus- on German-style bank supervision before try to compete globally. Tied to the euro, it will allow European (meaning German) however, with its weaker members, the cur- funds to help troubled financial institutions rency in which German producers trade is in Spain and elsewhere in Europe’s periph- hardly likely to rise as far as an independent ery. It has blocked the issue of pan-Europe- deutsche mark would, sparing them those an bonds, insisting, before even considering competitive disadvantages. Further, the euro them, on ways to guard German wealth. offers German industry special advantages One Brussels bureaucrat summarized the within the euro zone. Because Germany situation for the Economist by saying that joined the euro when the deutsche mark was when the Germans change their position, cheap relative to German economic funda- “the kaleidoscope shifts as other countries mentals, the common currency has effective- line up behind them.” Now, elements in ly enshrined a competitive pricing edge for Germany are trying to influence ecb policy. German producers across the entire zone, es- Merkel has had to make many of these de- pecially compared to producers in Europe’s mands on behalf of her constituents even periphery nations, which joined the euro while playing the good European. She will when their respective currencies were stron- have to continue in this way as she pursues ger. oecd data show that these currency dif- further European diplomacy. It is the only ferences initially gave German producers a 6 way she can get Germany to cooperate, percent pricing advantage over their Greek, though it is an open question whether she Spanish and Irish competitors, an edge that will try to influence the ecb. has actually expanded during the hard times In theory, the whole union could come of the crisis to between 15 and 25 percent. unwrapped. But it’s an implausible out- On this basis, Germany might well owe the come. The European Union may not be periphery support. back yet as a healthy economic player. But But if national interests will hold Ger- it’s also not going away. If real reforms are many in the union, Berlin will still demand implemented—always a big if—then before compensation for the support it provides. too long it may be time to take the cham- It is already making such demands. Chan- pagne and party hats out of storage. n

52 The National Interest Europe’s Peripheral Vision The New Interventionism

By David C. Hendrickson

hen he ran for president since the Reagan administration, though in 2008, Barack Obama it was only under the younger Bush that promised a new era of re- it reached full flower. While the public straint in U.S. foreign pol- rightly grimaces over the consequences, Wicy. And in some respects, he has indeed there is little appreciation by the elites been more restrained than his predecessor. of how unprecedented these doctrines But those looking for a reconsideration of are, both in international law and in the America’s universalist ambitions have been American diplomatic tradition. Given the disappointed by Obama’s record. Where it ill consequences following the breakage of has mattered, there has been no retreat from states across the Middle East and now in the revolutionary ends to which George W. Ukraine, the time is ripe for reconsidering Bush committed the United States in his these newfangled views. As a method of second inaugural address in 2005. Thus promoting liberty, the strategy of overthrow Obama (after much agonizing) threw in is deeply counterproductive. The old his lot with those seeking to overthrow Lib- American lexicon taught that anarchy bred ya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi by force. Thus tyranny, whereas the new school teaches Obama called for Bashar al-Assad to leave, that the revolutionary destruction of the encouraged “allied” efforts to overthrow old order will produce democracy. The new him and made negotiations to end the civil interventionism has also thrown out the war in Syria dependent on his departure. old rulebook for dealing with civil war, And thus the Obama administration (with substituting a set of policies that in practice the president himself curiously in the shade) provides Western powers with unlimited played a key role in supporting the Maidan’s discretion to intervene in civil conflicts overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, throughout the world. Viktor Yanukovych. Liberal interventionists, neoconservatives n the legal order birthed by World War and State Department officials insist that it II and the United Nations, the right of is America’s duty to support those making I external intervention was sharply cir- revolution in other countries. The United cumscribed; preventive war, in any normal States has often been attracted to that policy definition of the term, was made illegal. A right of humanitarian intervention might David C. Hendrickson is a professor of political be inferred from the vast discretion given science at Colorado College. He is the author of to the Security Council by the un Charter, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate but no one thought of inferring that until over International Relations, 1789–1941 (University many years had passed. It contradicted the Press of Kansas, 2009). dominant emphasis in the charter on state

The New Interventionism September/October 2014 53 sovereignty. The right of self-determination rescue populations imperiled by gross in the charter put the colonial powers on humanitarian abuses. This view, as it is notice that their imperial rule was coming presented by the r2p myrmidons, is happily to an end, but states were not deemed to cleansed of all special national interests in have forfeited their right to put down inter- theory, but deeply bound up with them nal revolts. On the contrary, the state was in practice. Obama is more inclined seen as an indispensable source of order. to this idea than he is to preventive war; When circumstances subsequently in America, r2p has its home on the left arose that seemed to call for humanitarian and is strongly urged upon him by voices intervention—as with Bangladesh, within his own administration. But Cambodia and Uganda—the intervening r2p, since it authorizes uses of force in states (India, Vietnam and Tanzania) anticipation of atrocities, as in Libya, has invariably appealed to their right of national a strongly preventive rationale as well. In self-defense, not humanity, in justifying the authoritative version of r2p, endorsed their military movements across borders. by the un General Assembly and Security That was because they thought the Council, external action still depends upon humanitarian claim would not cut it in Security Council approval, but that restraint the international community, not because is not accepted in American opinion. they had poor legal advice. Their actions Of course, many of these expansions in did not cause a change in norms; that came what is considered a just war have been later, with the end of the Cold War and the contested at home and abroad. The widespread call that the “sole superpower” American public is especially opposed to should not hesitate to respond, by military interventions that are purely humanitarian force if necessary, to acts that shocked the in character; it wants (but has never really conscience of mankind. The traditional gotten) a demonstration of the national prohibition against intervention that was interests at stake. In official circles, however, consecrated in 1919 and reaffirmed in 1945 most of these criteria for intervention are was then greatly relaxed, if not entirely seen as legitimate, even if exercised on a abandoned. A whole host of interventions pick-and-choose basis, and with greater were subsequently pursued or proposed in or lesser degrees of enthusiasm in any the next twenty-five years that took, amid particular instance. the plenitude of justifications offered, the The sovereign state still remains the most convenient route to the sea. foundation of the international legal order, The grandest departure from the legalist but there have been so many exceptions and paradigm took the form of the Bush provisos to its customary protections as to Doctrine, with its warrant for preventive leave ample room for intervention whenever war and democracy by jackboot. A large states wish to do so. At least, that is true portion of the world rejected Bush’s of the West. A much stricter set of rules doctrine, but they did not get a voice in the in practice binds the non-Western powers. matter, much less a veto. The United States Such are the advantages of hegemony. did what it wanted. A second hole in the legalist paradigm t is the conjunction of the right of arose from a revived doctrine of revolution and the presumptive duty humanitarian intervention, now called I of external support for imperiled popu- the “responsibility to protect” (r2p), lations that needs special attention. The which asserted a duty to intervene to interplay between the two is an important

54 The National Interest The New Interventionism The old American lexicon taught that anarchy bred tyranny, whereas the new school teaches that the revolutionary destruction of the old order will produce democracy. phenomenon in its own right, as these doc- international order. What could possibly trines—so potent together—are often con- be the rule of limitation if everything could sidered separately. The interplay between suffice for war? the two is often ignored, but undoubtedly Grotius opened the door to humanitarian the expectation of external support has re- intervention, but he denied the popular cently played a critical role in triggering right of resistance to an oppressive ruler. In rebellion. an age of religious warfare and widespread To understand this issue properly, we slaughter, his reasons had weight. Grotius need to go back to some long-standing was not actually as strict on the question debates in the tradition of reflection on just of internal rebellion as his hostile critics, war, that sphere of thought dedicated to like Rousseau, have alleged; he carved determining when the use of force is just or out several important exceptions to his unjust. The thought of Hugo Grotius, the seemingly blanket prohibition against putative founder of modern international rebellion, such as when a king breaks a law, is the most profitable place to begin. contract with his people, which were During the Thirty Years’ War, in his Rights probably intended to justify the Dutch of War and Peace, Grotius formulated what Revolt against Spain. But Grotius did look to our ears must seem to be a surprising with horror on the anarchy that would doctrine. Grotius made one of the first great arise in contests over sovereignty, and he statements of the principle of humanitarian was not alone in that conviction. He was intervention, but he simultaneously followed by Hobbes, who erected a whole forbade a population to rebel. The system around the same sentiment. Hersch suffering masses had to sit out oppression Lauterpacht, the distinguished jurist and lest they invite anarchy, it appeared from legal scholar, noted: his curious reasoning, but foreign princes might intervene to succor those selfsame This frowning upon rebellion and the favour- masses when found in awful distress. You ing of authority were in accordance with what might think he had it backwards, and the were considered to be the essential needs of the weight of subsequent opinion would agree. times. The horrors of civil war were foremost Eighteenth-century publicists reversed in the minds of political thinkers. There was the Grotian resolution—they gave greater not, in this respect, much difference between latitude to the right of revolution, less to Hobbes and Bacon on the one side, and Hook- external intervention. er, Gentilis, and Bodin on the other. They dis- Two things are notable about this history: cussed in detail the right of resistance; they all everybody saw the questions as related, rejected it. So, perhaps with less justification, and nobody justified both together. The did Pufendorf. At a time of general uncertainty reason, evidently, is that allowing both the and of loosening of traditional ties of society, right of rebellion and the duty of external national and international, order was looked intervention would imperil domestic and upon as the paramount dictate of reason.

The New Interventionism September/October 2014 55 That view changed in the eighteenth It is unpopular in Great Britain, in the rest of century. Grotius came under much Europe, in America, in France itself. criticism. Locke recognized a right of revolution, as did, of course, the American Everett, the quintessential voice of New Founders. Even those who located England Whiggery, went on to declare that sovereignty in the people, however, cabined the French Revolution was inevitable given the right of revolution by restricting it to the iniquities of the old regime. Still, in this situations in which rebellion amounted to era of disenchantment, observers looked a sort of absolute necessity, which is how askance at violent revolution as any sort of the American revolutionaries of 1776 model of reform and enlightenment, even portrayed their own struggle. They sought in republican America. not to overthrow the existing order but Europe’s “springtime of nations” in 1848 to preserve their ancient liberties. Once elicited a tremendous gush of approval in independence was declared, they sought the United States—President James K. membership within the society of states, Polk commended Germany for seeking to not defiance of its strictures. The American emulate America’s experiment in federal appeal to “thirteen solemn and sacred union. When spring turned to fall and Compacts” and to a liberty founded “upon reaction set in, Americans were horrified. immutable statutes and tutelary laws” What to do? The vast majority displayed made their revolution fundamentally no inclination to intervene with force, different from that of France. The French but even those who scorned an entirely Revolution smashed the icons of legitimacy isolationist policy were careful, as in and blew away the past. The subsequent the days of old, to consider the right of spiral of hostility between revolution and revolution together with the question of counterrevolution sparked a twenty-five- foreign involvement. In a paper prepared year war. with some like-minded fellows, Abraham Lincoln took a fairly advanced view of the n the aftermath of the French Revolu- matter, affirming in ringing tones the rights tion, the revolutionary idea fell into of the subject nationalities of Europe to I disrepute. The thinking world did not overthrow their rulers but also insisting relish the demons that revolutionary change that “it is the duty of our government to had unleashed in France. One American, neither foment, nor assist, such revolutions Edward Everett, summarized in 1834 the in other governments.” Toward the actions attitude of the generation that survived the of the Russian government in Hungary, in frenzied wars of the revolution: their brutal suppression of that nation’s bid for independence from Austria, Lincoln The atrocious, the unexampled, the ungodly took the view later adopted by John Stuart abuses of the reign of terror have made the Mill: Russian actions were illegitimate and very name of the French Revolution hateful to gave rise to a right (but not really a duty) of mankind. The blood chills, the flesh creeps, the counterintervention. hair stands on end, at the recital of its horrors; Lincoln declined to depart from and no slight degree of the odium they occa- America’s own “cherished principles of non- sion is unavoidably reflected on all who had intervention” in this case, but he pointed any agency in bringing it on. The subsequent to the logic that would subsequently be events in Europe have also involved the French adopted when the noninterventionist Revolution in a deep political unpopularity. disposition was ultimately overturned in

56 The National Interest The New Interventionism The Wall Street Journal will cheer a million-man march in Ukraine but would have you arrested for littering if you dropped a gum wrapper in Zuccotti Park. the twentieth century. In essence, that was power in the twenty-first century. No soon- to see aggression as a fundamental threat to er were Iraq and Afghanistan put on the the legal order and to posit the necessity of back burner than Libya, Syria and Ukraine counterintervention if the legal order was to flared up, and in each case the United States be salvaged from certain ruin. But Lincoln’s supported the side that wanted to overturn thinking on this question also displayed a an existing government by violent means. conservative bias toward order. He conceded One feature of this giddy revolutionary to the Southern states, for example, the fever is especially remarkable. A large part natural right of revolution under unbearable of the identity of the West in the twentieth oppression, but also denied that secession century consisted of its justified aversion from the government could be a legal to the consequences of revolution, as they remedy under the Constitution. played out in Russia (1917), China (1949) Like the older writers on the law and Iran (1979). All these venues featured of nations, Lincoln was aware of the plenty of hair-raising episodes that made potentially incendiary character of the prospect of revolution as big a downer revolution. He laid down a strict duty of for the Cold War generation as it had been nonintervention on the part of outside for Everett. During most of the Cold War, powers. He was emphatic that outsiders America was concerned with shoring up were not to foment revolutions elsewhere. In despotic allies, not throwing them out, and this respect, Lincoln followed Jefferson and in its own mind it was often seeking balance the widespread American consensus on these with, rather than domination of, the Soviet points. That consensus differed radically adversary. Partly due to the memory of from the liberationist doctrines that France revolution’s rocky road, it supported order proclaimed in 1792 in a universal war to without a guilty conscience. sweep despotism from Europe. The experience of 1989 had the effect of pushing these traditional images of he conception that Lincoln held revolution into the shade, awakening the in the mid-nineteenth century is idea that what was coming to be called T not the one the United States holds “peaceful revolution” would make further now. On the contrary, today the United inroads just about everywhere. What States has fomented and assisted—indeed, had formerly connoted the seizure of often played a starring role in—a fair num- power in anarchic conditions, producing ber of such revolutions. It has learned that totalitarianism, was now suddenly to make omelets, you must break eggs. symbolized by enormous but peaceful From a self-consciously conservative power crowds collectively discovering the sheer in the early years of the Cold War, dedi- force of “people power” against autocrats. cated to containment as a middle path be- Because the Russians surrendered their tween rollback and surrender, the United empire in the West with hardly a shot, States has fully emerged as a revolutionary because Ferdinand Marcos fell to a jubilant

The New Interventionism September/October 2014 57 crowd, because F. W. de Klerk relented, it consists of lighting fires that it doesn’t came to be the expectation that revolution know how to put out. The conjunction would be peaceful. 1989 ensured that we of its two legitimating doctrines—nearly would make it our mission to support it. unprecedented in international history and Certainly, violent methods have repudiated by the most eminent jurists in the sometimes brought about good results in Western tradition—has had an incendiary human affairs. In the abstract, it would be effect on the international system. difficult to completely disavow a right of Such hyperactivity, under such a revolution, but we also need to be aware revolutionary spell, is dangerous to American that, concretely, revolution can mean a security, because it keeps us in blood rivalry human disaster so immense that nothing with nations and terrorists across the globe. good can possibly come out of it. The It is also hypocritical, because it endorses breakages of the state in Iraq, Libya and methods of political change—by huge mobs Syria are all testaments to that danger. They or armed rebels—that we would never have loosed anarchy upon the world. sanction at home. The Wall Street Journal Even with a reluctant public mood, will cheer a million-man march in Ukraine the United States remains a genuine but would have you arrested for littering revolutionary force, preaching a if you dropped a gum wrapper in Zuccotti commitment to “democratic revolution” that Park. The U.S. and Western preference for in theory celebrates peace but in practice unruly crowds overturning constitutional procedures is strictly for export, not for home consumption. There are precedents for a reconsideration of the doctrines examined here. Notes historian Richard Tuck, summarizing the sober outlook of the writers who came after the religious wars: “Scared by what their continent had done to itself in the name of humanitarian intervention—for we must remember that this was how the Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years War appeared to their participants,” they became yet more restrictive in the latitude they gave to external intervention. Tuck calls that new outlook isolationism, but it might as well be known as prudence. Contemplating the mangled bodies and deranged minds produced by war, especially civil war, many thinkers continued to affirm that the maintenance of civil order was a paramount dictate of reason. It is by no means obvious that they were wrong. n

58 The National Interest The New Interventionism A Tale of Two AUMFs

By Robert Golan-Vilella

n June, the jihadist organization now the Iraq War—a war that President Barack calling itself the Islamic State staged Obama had already declared over years a stunning series of operations to before. capture large swathes of territory in At a meeting with congressional leaders Inorthern Iraq. In the span of just a few in mid-June, Obama reportedly told those days, the militants seized Mosul and Tikrit present that he did not believe the military and continued marching south. Some ob- options that he was considering required servers feared that the Iraqi state itself might any further congressional authorization. collapse completely. Several senior congressional figures of Washington quickly scrambled to try to both parties—including Senate Majority reverse these gains and bolster the Iraqi Leader Harry Reid, House Minority government. It sent multiple teams of Leader Nancy Pelosi and John Thune, the military advisers to Iraq and positioned gop’s third-ranking senator—all suggested more intelligence, surveillance and publicly that they agreed with this reconnaissance units in the area. The assessment. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law Department of Defense also announced professor and former head of the Office of that it was considering conducting air Legal Counsel, likewise argued that same strikes against the Islamic State in order to month that “the 2002 Iraq aumf almost break the group’s momentum. certainly authorizes the president to use Among those in the U.S. government force today in Iraq.” who must have been scrambling in the The two aumfs and the conflicts they aftermath of this advance were the Obama underwrote have played an outsized role in administration’s lawyers. In a strange turn the past thirteen years of American foreign of events, there were in fact three separate policy. Yet both pieces of legislation have legal rationales that could have potentially also evolved in deeply problematic ways served as the basis for using military force since their passage. One has served as the in Iraq. The first was the president’s power basis for a conflict surrounded by such as commander in chief under Article II a degree of secrecy that many basic facts of the Constitution. The second was the concerning its scope remain unknown. The Authorization for Use of Military Force other, passed to authorize a war that many (aumf) passed in response to the terrorist Americans would come to think was over, attacks of September 11, 2001. And the lapsed into disuse and was overlooked by third was the 2002 aumf that authorized all but a few—but still stayed on the books, with the potential to provide the legal Robert Golan-Vilella is associate managing editor grounds for a future, renewed war in Iraq. of The National Interest. Together they tell a story of dangerous drift.

A Tale of Two AUMFs September/October 2014 59 The two aumfs and the conflicts they underwrote have played an outsized role in the past thirteen years of American foreign policy.

he 2001 aumf was passed by both yes.” At the same hearing, Senator Lindsey houses of Congress with only a sin- Graham asked if the president had the T gle “no” vote between them on Sep- authority to “put boots on the ground” tember 14, and signed into law by President in Yemen or the Congo, and Michael George W. Bush on September 18. Its cen- Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense tral clause gives the president the power to for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, “Yes, sir.” Sheehan later use all necessary and appropriate force against attempted to revise this answer, saying, those nations, organizations, or persons he de- “When I said that he did have the authority termines planned, authorized, committed, or to put boots on the ground in Yemen or in aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on the Congo, I was not necessarily referring September 11, 2001, or harbored such organi- to that under the aumf.” But he never zations or persons, in order to prevent any fu- stated explicitly that the aumf would not ture acts of international terrorism against the provide the president with that authority, United States by such nations, organizations or or clarified what the alternative source of persons. authority would be. Adding to the confusion is the fact that Today, the legislation is understood to au- the administration has refused to tell the thorize force against the Taliban, Al Qaeda public the names of the groups that it and their “associated forces.” It has been considers to be covered under the 2001 used as the legal basis for the war in Afghan- aumf. A Pentagon spokesman explained istan, the continued detention of prisoners the rationale for this in July 2013, telling at Guantánamo Bay, and the targeted-killing ProPublica that “because elements that campaign that the United States has con- might be considered ‘associated forces’ can ducted in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. build credibility by being listed as such The Obama administration’s public by the United States, we have classified statements on the scope of the 2001 aumf the list. We cannot afford to inflate these have often been vague, but they suggest organizations that rely on violent extremist that its interpretation of the law is quite ideology to strengthen their ranks.” As a expansive. At a May 16, 2013, hearing of result, the U.S. government is in the bizarre the Senate Armed Services Committee, situation of considering itself to be at war Senator John McCain asked Robert with a series of organizations while at the Taylor, the acting general counsel of the same time refusing to tell its own citizens Department of Defense, whether the exactly who those enemies are. aumf could “be read to authorize lethal The story of the Iraq aumf is more force against al Qaeda’s associated forces in straightforward. After its passage in additional countries where they are now October 2002, it served as the legal basis present, such as Somalia, Libya, and Syria.” for a disastrous war in which the United Taylor replied, “On the domestic law side, States overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime

60 The National Interest A Tale of Two AUMFs The U.S. government is in the bizarre situation of considering itself to be at war with a series of organizations while at the same time refusing to tell its own citizens exactly who those enemies are. in early 2003, and then spent nearly nine for any U.S. Government activities,” said years attempting to build a new Iraqi state National Security Council spokeswoman and defend it against insurgents. American Caitlin Hayden. Yet Paul’s bill never received military troops completed their withdrawal a vote in the Senate. In the House, as the from Iraq in December 2011. Obama, White House was weighing the possibility who had previously touted his early of conducting air strikes against the Islamic opposition to the war while running for State this June, Representative Barbara Lee president and campaigned on a promise (who had previously cast the lone “no” vote to end it, declared the war over that same against the 2001 aumf) led a push to ward month. However, the Iraq aumf itself off this possibility by cutting off all funding was never actually repealed. And so the in support of the Iraq aumf—but she too 2002 legislation was still in effect when was unsuccessful. the Islamic State began its march across The debate over the 2001 aumf has northern Iraq this summer. As a result, been much more sustained. This should when Washington found itself weighing not be particularly surprising. Unlike the the use of military force to try to stop Iraq aumf—which, as Hayden said, has this advance, the law was left as an option not been used as the basis for any military for the Obama administration to use in activities since the end of 2011—the 2001 order to save it from having to go back to aumf continues to be used extensively, from Congress for a new authorization. Afghanistan to Yemen to Guantánamo Bay. It is thus a natural target for criticism here have been long-running at- from those who disapprove of many of tempts to repeal or modify both of the actions the United States is taking in T the aumfs. In the case of the Iraq the “war on terror.” The New York Times War, that effort began in late 2011 as U.S. editorial board warned in March 2013 that troops were finishing their drawdown and the authorization was becoming “the basis leaving the country. Then, Senator Rand for a perpetual, ever-expanding war that Paul introduced an amendment to the an- undermined the traditional constraints on nual National Defense Authorization Act government power.” Accordingly, the board that would have repealed the Iraq aumf. recommended that the law be repealed upon The Senate rejected his amendment by a the completion of the withdrawal of U.S. vote of sixty-seven to thirty. troops from Afghanistan. In the House, Earlier this year, Paul renewed this effort, Representative Adam Schiff has introduced introducing a new bill to repeal the law legislation in each of the last two years that along with Democratic senators Ron Wyden would have done just this. However, both and Kirsten Gillibrand. This time, however, times it has been voted down. he also had the support of the White House. What’s perhaps most interesting is that “The Administration supports the repeal even many observers who favor waging a of the Iraq aumf since it is no longer used continued “war on terror” are unhappy with

A Tale of Two AUMFs September/October 2014 61 the current state of the 2001 aumf. Like the National Defense University. At the the critics, they see that the conflict has same time, the administration is currently evolved significantly over the course of the using the aumf for a whole host of military past thirteen years, and that the enemy that activities that it perceives as necessary in the United States is fighting today is quite order to protect American security. The different from the one it faced in 2001. The result is an uneasy standoff where almost most obvious difference is that while “core” everybody sees significant flaws in the status Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has quo but simultaneously worries about it seen its capabilities substantially weakened being made even worse. as a result of America’s military campaign, at the same time numerous other terrorist oday, both aumfs remain intact. groups have emerged in other countries. Both have survived multiple chal- Along with the Islamic State, these include T lenges and seem unlikely to be re- Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (aqap), pealed anytime soon. The Obama admin- Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al istration has announced that its “combat Shabab, Ansar al-Sharia and Al Nusra Front. mission” in Afghanistan will come to a There are wide variations between all of close by the end of this year. It will leave these groups both in their capabilities and roughly ten thousand troops in Afghanistan in how connected they are to the original in 2015 and about half that in 2016. How- “core” of Al Qaeda. What this means, some ever, it has also strongly suggested that the say, is that whether or not an organization “armed conflict” against the Taliban and Al is an “associated force” of Al Qaeda has Qaeda under the 2001 aumf will not end ceased to be the best metric in evaluating with this withdrawal. The Department of whether America might need or want to Defense’s general counsel, Stephen Preston, take military action against it. Thus, they told the House Armed Services Committee argue for rewriting the aumf to take account this June that he was “not aware of any de- of these changes. This might involve termination as yet, that with the cessation specifically listing new groups, or delegating of the current combat mission at the end of to the executive branch the authority to this year that the armed conflicts are deter- target certain groups or individuals based on mined to be over.” a set of criteria to be determined. But even if nothing is likely to change To this point, however, neither group in the immediate future, it’s worth asking: of critics has been successful. At an event What should we want to see happen? earlier this year at the New America What would be the ideal outcome to work Foundation, the Brookings Institution’s toward, if the current political obstacles can Benjamin Wittes explained why. be overcome? “Everybody hates living under the aumf,” For the 2002 Iraq aumf, the answer is he said. But, he added, the status quo is clear: it should be repealed. It should have also “everybody’s second-worst option.” been repealed in December 2011 when Human-rights groups worry about the 2001 U.S. troops finished their withdrawal. It’s aumf being made more permanent, Wittes not a healthy practice for the government said, while hawks worry about it being to end its involvement in a war but leave repealed or limited. The White House has the legal authorization for that war in place. expressed a vocal commitment to narrowing The United States may decide that it is and ultimately repealing the aumf, as wise to use military force in Iraq again at a Obama outlined in a May 2013 speech at level that requires an aumf from Congress.

62 The National Interest A Tale of Two AUMFs But the order to use military force then in doing so. When it comes to the Iraq shouldn’t be based on a decade-old legal aumf, however, the bottom line is simple: authorization for a fundamentally different Either the legislation will be used again war. The decision should be made by the or it will not. If it is not, it is therefore current Congress based on the merits of the superfluous and repealing it would have case at the time. Washington may not have no consequences. But if it is, this would conducted air strikes in Iraq this June—but represent a damaging outcome that ought the argument that it could use the 2002 to be prevented. aumf to do so was apparently persuasive to Likewise, Congress should also revisit some legal experts and various members of the 2001 aumf—but first, and just as Congress. Since this law has no temporal importantly, the executive branch should limitation, it’s entirely possible that a answer some very basic questions about similar series of events could recur, making it. The administration’s secrecy regarding it an attractive option for a future president some elemental facts about this war has to use to bypass the existing Congress. made it much more difficult to have an An outright repeal would eliminate this informed public debate on how we possibility. ought to proceed. Here are the two most Repealing the 2002 aumf wouldn’t prominent examples: guarantee that the United States would First, there is very little clarity on the never employ force in Iraq in the future question of which of the actions that without congressional approval. President the United States has been taking in Obama (or one of his successors) might the “war on terror” require an aumf in choose to act under his Article II powers order to be done legally, and which could as commander in chief—and depending continue without an aumf on the basis on the circumstances, he might be justified of the president’s Article II powers. At a

A Tale of Two AUMFs September/October 2014 63 It’s not a healthy practice for the government to end its involvement in a war but leave the legal authorization for that war in place.

hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations and make the group more threatening Committee on May 21, 2014, Senator Tim to the United States. Furthermore, Kaine raised precisely this issue. He asked as Jack Goldsmith has pointed out, the the executive-branch witnesses what the government’s argument ignores the cost effect of repealing the 2001 aumf would of keeping the list classified—namely, be on America’s ability to do three specific the damage it does to the U.S. system of things: to hold prisoners at Guantánamo democratic accountability. In Goldsmith’s Bay; to keep military troops in Afghanistan words, it ignores the public’s interest “in beyond 2014; and to use the Department knowing against whom, and where, U.S. of Defense to conduct counterterrorist military forces are engaged in war in its operations against Al Qaeda. The witnesses name”—knowledge which “is minimally did not give clear answers to any of these necessary for the American people to assess questions. Rather, they suggested that the quality, prudence, and necessity of our all of these practices could potentially be military efforts.” affected by the absence of an aumf, but did Greater clarity from the administration, not say for sure that any of them would particularly concerning its interpretation of be or to what extent. The administration Article II, would make it easier for Congress ought to clarify its interpretation of what to decide what path to take on the aumf. it would be allowed to do under Article II. But Congress should revisit the aumf even Without this knowledge, it is impossible if this information is not forthcoming. In for Congress or the public to assess with doing so, it should keep in mind the fact any degree of accuracy what the actual that in 2001, Congress initially conceived impact of any legislative modifications to of the aumf as a relatively narrow grant of the aumf would be. power. Indeed, it specifically did not adopt Second, the administration should the proposed language of the George W. abandon its secrecy on the question of Bush administration, which would have whom we are at war with and publicly given the president the authority to “deter name the organizations that it considers and preempt any future acts of terrorism to be covered under the 2001 aumf as or aggression against the United States.” “associated forces.” Its official rationale This was the right choice then, and it’s the for why it must keep this list classified— right way for Congress to think about the that such groups would be made more law now. The aumf shouldn’t be seen as a dangerous if it listed them publicly—is blanket authorization to combat all terrorist completely unpersuasive. For one thing, organizations and individuals, anywhere in the administration has already stated the world they might be. that aqap is among the organizations If Congress revises the 2001 aumf, on the list, which suggests that it was therefore, it ought to name the groups not worried that acknowledging this that the United States is fighting. It should fact would “inflate” aqap’s standing move away from the existing aumf’s

64 The National Interest A Tale of Two AUMFs reference to the events of September 11 Appetite in Congress for changing this is next to and instead focus on those groups that it nothing; oversight of a lot of these sorts of op- believes to represent the greatest danger erations is quite minimal. Every president wants today. The most important criterion for maximum authority and minimum oversight, as determining which organizations qualify does this one, as will all future ones. . . . On the should be whether they are believed to current track, there is a path dependency to this have the capability and intention to launch perpetual war. attacks against the American homeland or, to a lesser degree, U.S. diplomatic There’s a lot of truth to this. Zenko none- and military assets abroad. Based on the theless supports the repeal of the 2001 intelligence community’s public statements, aumf, writing elsewhere that it “must be aqap would be the most obvious candidate pursued as it at least brings a rhetorical end for such an authorization right now. to the post-9/11 counterterrorism frame- Congress might also wish to include work.” But he correctly warns that the im- others, depending on whether or not the pact of its repeal is likely to be limited. The intelligence supports such an assessment. factors that have led the United States to But this approach decidedly should conduct the “war on terror” in the way it not encompass terrorist groups whose has—among them technological changes ambitions are primarily localized. And if and sustained public support—will not dis- and when we reach the point in the future appear even if the aumf does. where no organizations meet this standard, Still, there are at least two additional then it will be time for the 2001 aumf to reasons why increased congressional be retired as well. attention to both aumfs would be a positive development. First, it would be a good ome might be tempted to ask: How thing from a rule-of-law perspective. No much does all of this matter? Won’t matter what your personal opinion is on S the executive branch still do whatever the current conflict we are waging, you it sees as necessary in order to combat ter- shouldn’t want to see the executive branch rorism independent of what the law says, pushing ever more strained interpretations and then come up with some legal justifi- of the law in order to make what it’s cation to support it? Speaking at the New doing cohere with words written over a America Foundation, the Council on For- decade ago. And you shouldn’t want to see eign Relations’ Micah Zenko made a ver- the U.S. government fall into the habit sion of this argument when he said: of declaring wars over but keeping their legal authorizing documents on the books, The words that the president—any president— with the potential to be used by a future point to to justify using military force don’t president for an unknown future conflict. constrain him or her. And if the [2001] aumf Even if Congress just replaced the 2001 is rewritten or not rewritten, it will not make aumf with one that more clearly authorized much operational difference in when any presi- everything the executive branch is currently dent decides to use military force or not. The doing, this would be a positive step simply capabilities exist in great abundance. These are because it’s a healthier procedure for a broadly endorsed and supported by the Ameri- constitutional democracy to follow. can people. Over 70 percent of Americans in Second, a robust debate over both aumfs every poll support all sorts of drone strikes no would work to create political constraints matter how you define the scope of targeting. for the president in addition to legal ones.

A Tale of Two AUMFs September/October 2014 65 philosophical stance, but rather by the political constraints under which Obama was operating. These circumstances included the British House of Commons’ rejection of war and the fact that the prospect of intervention appeared to be quite unpopular with the American public. Thus, Obama decided to take the decision to Congress in order to ensure that another branch of government would be politically accountable for the result that ensued. When Congress appeared poised to reject Obama’s request, he seized upon a diplomatic plan proffered by Russia to provide for the removal of Assad’s chemical weapons. This was an example of a president acting under real political constraints. In contrast, when it comes to the 2001 and Iraq aumfs, the executive branch has generally As many others have observed, the most been able to operate without constraints. significant barriers to a president’s ability Congress has made this easier by leaving the to wage war are political rather than legal. Iraq aumf in place and by remaining largely Recall what happened last year when indifferent to the administration’s broad, Obama proposed conducting military vague claims about what the 2001 aumf strikes against Bashar al-Assad’s regime allows it to do. It is a textbook example in Syria following Assad’s use of chemical of what former senator Jim Webb called weapons. Obama said in a speech that the legislative branch’s “abdication” of its he believed he possessed “the authority role in defense and foreign-policy matters to carry out this military action without in a cover story in The National Interest specific congressional authorization.” last year. The trend that Webb identified is Nevertheless, he stressed, he was also decades in the making. It is not going to be “the President of the world’s oldest reversed overnight. But a serious reckoning constitutional democracy,” and as such he by Congress with what has happened to decided to seek the approval of Congress. the legislation it passed would be as good a This decision was surely not inspired by a place as any to start. n

66 The National Interest A Tale of Two AUMFs Reviews & Essays

code of conduct. By rejecting this last attempt Kissinger’s Counsel to suborn a dereliction of duty, Henry saved my reputation, my honor, my life, really. . . . By Jacob Heilbrunn So, I salute my friend and benefactor, Henry Kissinger, the classical realist who did so much to make the world safer for his country’s inter- Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: ests, and by so doing safer for the ideals that are Penguin, 2014), 432 pp., $36.00. its pride and purpose.

hen Henry Kissinger It was a poignant moment. On one side celebrated his ninetieth was a scion of one of America’s preeminent birthday in Manhattan’s military families who went on to become St. Regis Hotel in June a senator championing a hawkish foreign W2013, he attracted an audience of notables, policy that precisely reflects the neocon- including Bill and Hillary Clinton, John servative wing of the gop. On the other Kerry, Valery Giscard D’Estaing, Donald was a Jewish refugee who had personally Rumsfeld, James Baker and George Shultz. witnessed the descent of his homeland into Kerry called Kissinger America’s “indispens- ideological fanaticism and fled it with his able statesman,” but it was John McCain parents to embark upon a new life in the who, as the Daily Beast reported, electrified United States, where he became a premier the room with his remarks. McCain, who exponent of realist thought in foreign pol- was brutally tortured in what was sardoni- icy and a world-famous statesman. Both cally known as the Hanoi Hilton, earned were bound together by events that forged widespread respect for courageously refusing a bond between them that was deeper than to accept an early release from his Vietnam- any differences they may have about Amer- ese captors after his father had been promot- ica’s role abroad. ed to commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. At the party, McCain recounted for the he comity they displayed at the first time the specific circumstances of that birthday gala is especially striking refusal. He explained that when Kissinger T in the context of the contemporary traveled to Hanoi to conclude the agree- Republican Party, where the principles that ment ending the war in 1973, the Viet- Kissinger has espoused over the past seven namese offered to send McCain home with decades have not simply been abandoned. him. Kissinger declined. McCain said: Again and again, they have been denounced as antithetical to American values. And this He knew my early release would be seen as denunciation has come from both the left favoritism to my father and a violation of our and the right. Though Kissinger has come under attack Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest. from liberal circles—among the more no-

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 67 table assaults are Seymour Hersh’s The Price study on nuclear weapons and Europe. He of Power, Christopher Hitchens’s The Trial was also a professor of government at Har- of Henry Kissinger and, most recently, Gary vard and a consultant to John F. Kennedy’s J. Bass’s The Blood Telegram—he has also national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. regularly incurred the ire of conservatives. Then, in 1968, Richard Nixon tapped Kiss-

Throughout the 1970s, he was steadily de- inger to become his national-security ad- nounced as deaf to human-rights concerns viser. Kissinger added the post of secretary on the one hand, and as an appeaser on the of state in 1973, a position that he retained other. after Gerald Ford became president, though Perhaps the virulence of the attacks he had to relinquish his post as national- should not have come entirely as a sur- security adviser. prise, since Kissinger did not emerge from Throughout, Kissinger attempted to the conservative wing of the gop. Instead, apply the theoretical principles of clas- he emerged from the ranks of the Ameri- sical realism to achieve what he saw as a can establishment. Indeed, Kissinger was global equilibrium of power. Together with a Rockefeller Republican who first earned Nixon, he promoted détente with the Soviet fame in the 1950s as a fellow at the Council Union, established relations with China, on Foreign Relations, where he published a ended the Vietnam War, and pursued shut-

68 The National Interest Reviews & Essays Kissinger argues that the central challenge of the twenty-first century is to construct a new international order at a time of mounting extremism, advancing technology and armed conflict.

tle diplomacy to end the 1973 Yom Kip- best” against the Soviet Union. Kissinger pur War between Israel and the Arabs. In responded by issuing a ten-page State De- essence, Kissinger outmaneuvered the So- partment document titled “The Reagan viets in both China and the Middle East. Speech and the Facts” and by calling Rea- Kissinger’s aim was not to launch a crusade gan’s remarks a “contemptible, irresponsible against the Soviet Union, but to formulate invention.” a creative response to promote a balance As president, Reagan split the difference of power in the mold of the Congress of between Kissingerian realism and a crusad- Vienna, which secured the peace for much ing foreign policy. He was cautious about of nineteenth-century Europe before the the direct use of military force abroad, rely- big bang of World War I, when a rising ing upon aiding insurgent forces in Nicara- Wilhelmine Germany embarked on a reck- gua, Afghanistan and elsewhere to take the less bid to relegate the British Empire to the battle to Moscow. He temporized during second tier of world powers. the imposition of martial law in Poland in In response, the neoconservatives, who 1981, causing Commentary editor Norman had been staunch Democrats, united with Podhoretz to accuse him of “appeasement the Right in decrying Kissinger as pursu- by any other name.” By the end of his term, ing a policy of appeasement and surrender. Reagan, prompted by his fear of nuclear Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson and war and the rise of a more conciliatory So- his aide Richard Perle steadily worked to viet leader in the form of Mikhail Gor- stymie the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks bachev, signed more sweeping arms-control that Nixon and Kissinger pursued with the treaties than Nixon and Kissinger had ever Soviet Union and helped author the 1974 envisioned. Jackson-Vanik amendment, which tied The George H. W. Bush administration most-favored-nation status to the right of represented a reversion, more or less, to Soviet Jews and others to emigrate. (In his the doctrines of Nixon and Kissinger. Bush memoir Years of Renewal, Kissinger would himself was an alumnus of the Nixon ad- single out neocon leaders Norman Podho- ministration, as was his national-security retz and Irving Kristol for criticism: “Tactics adviser, Brent Scowcroft. Secretary of State bored them; they discerned no worthy goals James Baker incurred the wrath of the neo- for American foreign policy short of total cons for his opposition to Israel’s construc- victory. Their historical memory did not in- tion of settlements. And as the Soviet Union clude the battles they had refused to join or imploded, the administration deliberately the domestic traumas to which they had so avoided adopting a triumphalist tone. often contributed from the radical left side But triumphalism quickly became the of the barricades.”) order of the day as conservatives claimed At the same time, Ronald Reagan, during that Reagan, and Reagan alone, had not his 1976 primary run against Gerald Ford, only prognosticated the collapse of the So- denounced Kissinger as aiming for “second viet Union, but also brought it about. By

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 69 1996, William Kristol and Robert Kagan contemporary foreign-policy discourse. Dip- were declaring in Foreign Affairs that it was lomatic history has largely fallen into desue- high time to return to what they termed a tude in the American academy, but Kissing- “neo-Reaganite foreign policy.” er expertly mines the past to draw parallels The results were on display in the de- between it and the present. Kissinger returns bacle that the George W. Bush administra- to his central concern of the difficulty of tion created in the Middle East. The gop establishing an equilibrium among the great has not really moved on from this disaster. powers. He has been preoccupied with this For much of Barack Obama’s presidency, it problem since his first book, A World Re- has mostly refused to reexamine what went stored, in which he examined the efforts wrong in Iraq. Senator Ted Cruz, Gover- of Metternich and Castlereagh to create a nor Rick Perry and Senator Marco Rubio stable Europe in the nineteenth century. It are all decrying what they describe as the is remarkable how consistent his thought appeasement-minded policies of President has remained over the decades. He argues Obama and calling for a return to what that the central challenge of the twenty-first they see as the principles exemplified by century is to construct a new international Reagan. Today, a debate has belatedly begun order at a time of mounting ideological ex- to emerge as Senator Rand Paul challenges tremism, advancing technology and armed the presuppositions of the neocons, as he conflict. did in a speech at a dinner at the Center Kissinger begins by returning to the ten- for the National Interest in January 2014, sion in Europe between the Peace of West- where the audience included Kissinger and phalia in 1648 and the French Revolution. Scowcroft. Paul said that “our foreign policy He next turns to Islam and the Middle East. and national security policy are too bellig- He follows his scrutiny of the Ottoman erent” and that “negotiation can improve Empire and Islam with a study of China’s our world.” But no potential candidate has rise and its implications for its neighbors. sketched out a fully coherent and persuasive But his most extended thoughts are reserved program of renewal. for what he sees as America’s ambivalence about its status as a superpower. He traces n his new book, World Order, Kiss- the rise of the United States from Theodore inger does just that. It demonstrates Roosevelt down to today, discussing his I why he remains such a courted adviser own tenure in the Nixon administration to American presidents and foreign leaders to explore the unresolved tensions in U.S. alike. Written with his characteristic lucidity foreign policy between isolationist and cru- and incisiveness, it offers a grand tour of the sading instincts. Throughout, he aims to rise of the West. Kissinger does not provide reconcile American universalist aspirations a laundry list of policies. Instead, he offers with the stark reality of competing powers a meditation and a mode of thinking about intent on protecting and projecting their events that is starkly at variance with much own visions and concepts of order.

70 The National Interest Reviews & Essays The seventeenth-century representatives of the warring European states employed pious phrases about a “peace for Christendom,” but their true aim was to create stability through balancing rivalries.

Nowhere was the concept of order more of international relations. Its lodestar should fragile than in Europe for much of its his- be the national interest—not a ruler’s family tory. As Kissinger observes, in contrast to interests or the demands of a universal reli- China and the Islamic world, where politi- gion. In essence, Richelieu commandeered cal contests were conducted to control an the state as an instrument of high policy. established order, Europe never enjoyed a His motto was: “The state has no immortal- single, fixed identity. It was always a geo- ity, its salvation is now or never.” graphic expression. The closest it came Richelieu’s insistence on the centrality of to unity was in 800, when Pope Leo III the state was codified at the Peace of West- crowned Charlemagne as Imperator Roma- phalia, which terminated the Thirty Years’ norum. But the Carolingian Empire suc- War and which occupies a good deal of cumbed to its fissiparous tendencies almost Kissinger’s thinking about international re- as soon as it had been formally established. lations. Kissinger makes many illuminating Charlemagne never made a serious attempt points about Westphalia and emphasizes to rule the Eastern Roman Empire. Nor that the peace it established continues to did he recapture Spain. The Habsburg Em- have profound implications for the pres- pire tried to re-create the idea of European ent. Though the seventeenth-century rep- identity, but its monarchs were never re- resentatives of the warring European states ally more than Europe’s leading landlords. employed pious phrases about a “peace for Charles V was thus unable to vindicate Christendom,” their true aim was to cre- the universality of the Catholic Church. ate stability through balancing rivalries. Bowing to reality, he signed the Peace of The Thirty Years’ War may have started as Augsburg in 1555, which recognized Prot- a battle of Catholics against Protestants, estantism by sanctioning the principle of but Kissinger aptly remarks that it rap- cuius regio, eius religio, or “whose realm, idly devolved into a “free-for-all” of con- his religion”—a principle that essential- stantly shifting alliances. The treaty’s most ly amounted to a premodern version of profound innovation was to affirm that spheres of influence. To be sure, the name the state, not a dynasty or empire, was Holy Roman Empire lingered on for cen- the basic structure of European order. All turies. Its formal existence prompted Vol- were granted equal treatment in protocol, taire to quip that it was “neither holy, nor from new powers such as Sweden and the Roman, nor an empire.” Dutch Republic to older, more established ones such as France and Austria. Kissinger or all his emphasis on structural fac- underscores that this set the basis for the tors, Kissinger does not scant the im- international order that exists down to this F portance of individuals in history. He day: points, for example, to Cardinal Richelieu as a statesman whose fundamental insight The Westphalian concept took multiplicity as was that the state should be the basic unit its starting point and drew a variety of multiple

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 71 societies, each accepted as a reality, into a com- petted children when compared with this mon search for order. By the mid-twentieth wretched heir apparent of a crown”—he century, this international system was in place surprised his contemporaries by transcend- on every continent; it remains the scaffolding ing his early woes to become the archetypal of international order such as it now exists. benevolent despot, establishing Prussia as a European power without attempting to The Peace of Westphalia may be attacked dominate the Continent. Westphalia, in as a system of cynical power manipulation, other words, worked. Kissinger writes, but it actually represented something else—the attempt to ward off he most potent early challenge to dominance of a single country by establish- the Westphalian system came from ing a balance of power. T revolutionary France. The revolu- It was even flexible enough to allow for tion of 1789 morphed into a militant ideo- the integration of rising powers. Consider logical persuasion, a crusading international Prussia. An army in search of a state, Prus- movement that demonized its adversaries. sia was something of a Johnny-come-lately The French revolutionaries scorned the no- on the European scene. It was Frederick tion that an international order with clearly the Great who established the House of demarcated limits of state action should have Hohenzollern as a great power during the any purchase. In 1792, the members of the Seven Years’ War. Despite being abused National Convention passed a decree stating by his capricious father—Lord Macaulay that France “will accord fraternity and assis- wrote, “Oliver Twist in the parish work- tance to all peoples who shall wish to recover house, Smike at Dotheboys Hall, were their liberty,” an idea that may sound harm-

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Paul K. CC BY 2.0.

72 The National Interest Reviews & Essays less enough but soon led to a series of wars. Nationalism, the revolutions of 1848, The revolution, writes Kissinger, the Crimean War and the unification of Germany ensured that the arrangements demonstrated how internal changes within so- forged by Europe’s magnificoes in 1815 did cieties are able to shake the international equi- not last. Kissinger perceptively notes that librium more profoundly than aggression from the shift from Metternich, who was focused abroad—a lesson that would be driven home on preserving the principle of legitimacy, by the upheavals of the twentieth century, to Bismarck, who was intent on amassing many of which drew explicitly on the concepts power, acutely displays the breakdown of first advanced by the French revolution. the European order. Both are often viewed as conservatives, but Bismarck is probably Order was restored at the 1815 Con- best viewed as a radical conservative, at gress of Vienna. But there another messi- least in his formative incarnation. Unlike anic vision emerged. Czar Alexander I was Metternich, Bismarck sought to demon- convinced that he could usher in a new strate that conservatism could be annealed world order—a “Holy Alliance” of princ- to nationalism. But Bismarck was aware es that forswore sordid national interests of Germany’s limits. He may have created and sought to create a new international an empire, but he did not seek to displace brotherhood. He espoused a great melting the British Empire or to humiliate France. pot of nations: “There no longer exists an After the unification of Germany, his main English policy, a French, Russian, Prussian, object was to preserve the peace, which he or Austrian policy; there is now only one did. His epigones in the Wilhelmstrasse, by common policy which, for the welfare of contrast, did not. all, ought to be adopted in common by all After World War II, the division of Eu- states and all peoples.” rope into two hostile camps meant that Alexander’s eupeptic sentiments prompt the western half largely sought to subsume Kissinger to deliver the sternest rebuke he its identity, partly by identifying with the can offer, which is that they represented United States, at least when it came to its a “Wilsonian conception of the nature of military defense, as well as by aiming for world order, albeit on behalf of principles economic unity within its bloc. With the dramatically the opposite of the Wilsonian end of the Cold War, Europe has striven vision.” In the end, the Congress created to define a separate, independent identity. three institutions to establish peace: a Qua- Kissinger worries that the Continent’s pur- druple Alliance consisting of Britain, Prus- suit of soft power may have become an end sia, Austria and Russia; a Holy Alliance to in itself, thereby creating an imbalance of neutralize domestic threats to the legitimacy power at a moment when other regions of the monarchies; and a Concert of Europe, of the globe are pursuing hard power. He which provided for regular diplomatic con- suggests that Europe finds itself uneasily ferences among the heads of governments. suspended between a past it seeks to over-

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 73 come and a future that it has yet to define. “It was as if in the Providence of God, a But even as it searches for a new order, continent had been kept unused and wait- Europe, he concludes, has evolved into a ing for a peaceful people who loved liberty society united by the laudable ambition and the rights of men more than they loved to sequester moral absolutes from political anything else, to come and set up an unself- endeavors. ish commonwealth.” For all its idealism, however, America he contrast with the United States, bumped up against rather different views we are told, could hardly be starker. of world order. Communism and the Third T America fused distrust of estab- World directly challenged the American lished institutions with a crusading spirit. gospel. Kissinger raises several questions For Thomas Jefferson, America was an “em- that he believes confronted Washington: pire of liberty.” It was, he wrote, “acting Was American foreign policy a tidy story under obligations not confined to the limits with a beginning and an end that leads to of our own society.” The first president to final victories? Is there an ultimate desti- assign America a role as a world power was nation? Or is it really a tale of managing Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt sketched constant challenges? It will come as no sur- out a vision of America as the guardian of prise to those familiar with his record and the global balance of power and, by exten- writings that Kissinger markedly inclines sion, the international peace. In Kissinger’s toward the latter view. view, “This was an astonishingly ambitious It was for this approach to international vision for a country that had heretofore relations that he came under such fire in viewed its isolation as its defining charac- the 1970s. But the notion, widely dissemi- teristic and that had conceived of its navy as nated by his ideological foes, that Kissinger, primarily an instrument of coastal defense.” far from trying to buttress U.S. power, was Kissinger makes clear his admiration for trying to manage its decline is something Roosevelt. He believes that had Roosevelt of a fiction. Actually, he was attempting been president during World War I, the to address a daunting new reality, which conflict would have been terminated much was that the tumult of the 1970s meant more quickly. A negotiated peace would that the United States required breathing have left Germany defeated but indebted space as it extricated itself from Vietnam to American restraint. But it was Woodrow and confronted a newly emboldened Soviet Wilson, of course, who gave full flower to Union, not to mention a Western Europe, the proselytizing persuasion. Rather than led by the Federal Republic of Germany, seeking to restore a balance of power, Wil- that was intent on rapprochement with son wanted to “make the world safe for Moscow. democracy”—a goal that was as laudable as When it comes to his discussion of this it was impractical. Speaking at West Point era and his own accomplishments, Kiss- in 1916, Wilson told the graduating class, inger is not reticent about expressing his

74 The National Interest Reviews & Essays Kissinger aims to reconcile American universalist aspirations with the stark reality of competing powers intent on protecting and projecting their own visions and concepts of order.

admiration for Richard Nixon. Nixon’s soli- power.” Kissinger himself never returned to tary nature meant that he had read widely, high office after Ford’s defeat in 1976. He a trait that Kissinger avers made him the was too controversial a figure inside both best-prepared incoming president since tr political parties. But no other modern secre- on foreign policy. Nixon and Kissinger also tary of state has come close to matching his evinced a theoretical unanimity in their ap- influence and fame. proach toward foreign affairs that is quite His latest contribution amounts to a rare. Kissinger reminds us that in 1971, guide for the perplexed, a manifesto for Nixon told the editors of Time that it reordering America’s approach to the rest would be desirable to have an interlocking of the globe. No doubt Russia, China and set of ambitions among the great powers: Iran may strike out on courses that seek to “I think it will be a safer world and a better overturn the kind of Westphalian principles world if we have a strong, healthy United lauded by Kissinger. But as a means of ap- States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, prehending international affairs—and of each balancing the other, not playing one maintaining the delicate balance between against the other, an even balance.” power and idealism—Kissinger’s precepts This sentiment did not represent a ma- are surely more valuable than ever. It is no leficent doctrine antithetical to the Ameri- accident that after the debacles of the past can credo. On the contrary, it constituted decade, Kissinger’s realism is starting to a form of moralism—relations based on make something of a comeback. Now that mutual dignity and respect, forgoing the the doctrines championed by his neocon attempt to derive advantage from tempo- detractors have largely come into disrepute, rary circumstances in favor of an endur- at least among the American public, realism ing peace. As Kissinger notes in reflecting is starting to receive more of a hearing. upon Reagan’s record as president, neither Perhaps the return of realism should not pure power nor pure idealism can suffice. altogether be surprising. In a sense, it has Kissinger calls for “a concept of order that never gone away. For the tenets that Kiss- transcends the perspective and ideals of any inger has studied and pursued amply merit one region or nation. At this moment in the term classical, as they are timeless. Kiss- history, this would be a modernization of inger’s vision could help to shape a more the Westphalian system informed by con- tranquil era than the one that has emerged temporary realities.” so far. He himself ends his work on a note Whether this will actually occur is, of of humility, observing that in his youth course, questionable. When it comes to he was “brash enough” to believe he could the gop itself, as Robert D. Kaplan noted pronounce on “The Meaning of History.” of Kissinger in the Atlantic last year, “The “I now know that history’s meaning,” he degree to which Republicans can recover writes, “is a matter to be discovered, not his sensibility in foreign policy will help declared.” It would be a pity if his counsel determine their own prospects for regaining went unheeded. n

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 75 as, to quote Perry Anderson, “evidence Bourgeois of an exceptional integrity and strength of character.” They refer with something Hobsbawm approaching reverence to the justification he formulated in his 2002 autobiography, By David A. Bell Interesting Times: “Emotionally, as one converted as a teenager in the Berlin of 1932, I belonged to the generation tied Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times: Cul- by an almost unbreakable umbilical cord ture and Society in the Twentieth Century to hope of the world revolution, and of its (New York: The New Press, 2014), 336 pp., original home, the October Revolution.” $27.95. But in what ways did Hobsbawm’s politics really shape the voluminous n a famous exchange in 1994, Mi- writings that made him one of the most chael Ignatieff asked Eric Hobsbawm famous historians of the past century? whether the vast human costs in- Certainly, the dynamic and destructive flicted by Stalin on the Soviet Union energies of capitalism constitute the central Icould possibly be justified. Hobsbawm re- theme of his most famous work: the grand plied, “Probably not. . . . because it turns quartet of general histories that proceed out that the Soviet Union was not the be- from The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 to ginning of the world revolution. Had it The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991. Without been, I’m not sure.” Do you mean, Ignatieff whitewashing Stalin’s crimes, the last of pressed him, that “had the radiant tomor- these nonetheless argued that the Soviet row actually been created, the loss of fifteen, example led directly to the West’s adoption twenty million people might have been jus- of Keynesian economics and the welfare tified?” Hobsbawm answered, “Yes.” state. Yet the books offered anything but a Two years after Hobsbawm’s death at the rigidly Marxist interpretation, and generally age of ninety-five, his lifelong, unapologetic eschewed sharply polemical language. It Communism remains for many the is doubtful that a true Stalinist ideologue most important thing about him. To could have been saluted at his death his critics on the right, it discredits him, (admittedly, by the Guardian) as “arguably pure and simple. On the left, even some Britain’s most respected historian of any commentators who took more admirable kind,” or received the title of “Companion stances on Communist tyrannies treat of Honour” from Queen Elizabeth II in his steadfast commitment to the ussr 1998. Niall Ferguson (hardly an ideological soulmate) called him a “truly great David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus historian.” Among the members of the left- Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions wing student group called the Cambridge at Princeton University. Apostles, it was Kim Philby, not Eric

76 The National Interest Reviews & Essays Fractured Times is something of a mixed bag, with forgettable book reviews and superficial lectures jostling for space with several trenchant and beautifully written essays.

Hobsbawm, who actually went to work for his homes, his larger middle-class milieu Stalin, and lived out his final decades in was characterized by a deep reverence for lonely, crapulous Moscow exile. German high culture: Goethe and Schil- Hobsbawm’s posthumous book of essays, ler, Mozart and Beethoven. In Berlin, amid Fractured Times, gives considerable insight the misery of the Depression and the tur- into the factors other than Communist moil accompanying the collapse of the Wei- politics that shaped his outlook—and mar Republic, the teenage Hobsbawm was that shaped it more strongly. Like most swept into street politics. He later compared such collections it is something of a the intense experience of “participation in mixed bag, with forgettable book reviews a mass demonstration at a time of great and superficial lectures jostling for space public exaltation” to sex. But after Hitler’s with several trenchant and beautifully seizure of power the family relocated to written essays. At first glance it also seems London, where Hobsbawm finished his sec- to be detached from the main themes of ondary education at that most middle-class Hobsbawm’s historical work—namely, of British institutions, the grammar school, capitalism, revolution, war and the and spent his spare hours reading Roman- “primitive rebels” against the social order tic poetry and listening to jazz, along with whom he examined in his 1959 book of selling Communist Party pamphlets. From that title (the book that first brought him there, it was off to Cambridge, and his ex- real fame). Fractured Times deals mostly ceptionally long and productive intellectual with high culture in the twentieth century, career. in an unapologetically elitist tone. But it is Politics, in fact, shaped this career less precisely this subject matter and this tone than many of Hobsbawm’s obituaries that reveal something often overlooked suggested. His membership in the British about Eric Hobsbawm. For all his Communist Party and on the editorial commitment to international Communism, board of the party’s main organ Marxism he was also profoundly, if paradoxically, Today may have kept him from a glittering bourgeois, and in a distinctly Jewish way. Cambridge professorship, and made travel to the United States difficult, but his obsbawm’s upbringing was cer- position at Birkbeck College, University tainly that of a bourgeois Jew. His of London hardly amounted to Siberian H father came from a Jewish trade exile. Nor did he do much of the actual background in the East End of London; street-level work—leafleting, picketing, his mother was the daughter of a Jewish organizing—of ordinary Communist Viennese jeweler. Born in Alexandria in militants (he famously chastised fellow 1917, Eric spent his childhood in Vienna left-wing historian and peace activist E. and then, from 1931, after the death of P. Thompson for neglecting historical his parents, with an aunt and uncle in Ber- scholarship in favor of political organizing). lin. Although English was the language of Like most intellectuals who had come of

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 77 age in the thirties, Hobsbawm also had class European Jews of the late nineteenth trouble taking the political and cultural century felt with their countries’ high upheavals of the sixties seriously. Rather cultures: French, Russian, Hungarian and than making common cause with the especially German. Throughout Central British New Left, he talked about the Europe, Jews seeking emancipation from impending death of socialism and the “self-segregation” of the shtetl (it was supported the New Labour movement not, of course, entirely the Jews’ own eventually headed by Tony Blair. He choice) found in German culture a path proudly boasted that he had never worn toward professional and social distinction. blue jeans, and once attributed the success Embracing it, Hobsbawm notes, also of rock and roll to “infantilism.” His own proved the most effective way of separating musical passion remained jazz, which for themselves, in their own eyes as well as many years he reviewed with great flair, those of their gentile neighbors, from the

under the pseudonym Francis Newton, for uneducated, religious, Yiddish-speaking the New Statesman. Jewish masses to the east. Hobsbawm The essays in Fractured Times that deal also makes, quite keenly, another point: with Hobsbawm’s formative bourgeois “The passion of emancipated Jews for the Jewish milieu do so not just with insight, national languages and cultures of their but also with respect. They take as a starting gentile countries was all the more intense, point the intense identification that middle- because in so many cases they were not

78 The National Interest Reviews & Essays joining, as it were, long-established Jew Elias Canetti write in the middle of the clubs but clubs of which they could see Second World War that ‘the language of themselves almost as founder members.” my intellect will remain German,’ can fully What we now see as German high culture, realise what its loss meant.” It is no wonder at least in philosophy, literature and the that Hobsbawm was a devotee of Joseph visual arts (Kant, Goethe, etc.), took shape Roth, the Jewish novelist who composed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth that piercing elegy for the German-speaking centuries, just as German Jews were first Habsburg Empire, Radetzky March. gaining civil rights and prominent positions Hobsbawm also perceptively notes that in gentile society. In the great multilingual in many cases, Jews did not simply embrace stew of Austria-Hungary, the Jewish passion high culture, but also ended up giving it a for everything German was unrivaled distinctly Jewish flavor. In Vienna, where (although in Hungary itself, some Jews did the Jewish population soared from less prefer the local vernacular). Hobsbawm than four thousand in 1848 to 175,000 offers as an example (twice!) the heavily in 1914, Jews played an outsized role in Jewish town of Brody, in Galicia, once shaping middle-class institutions, artistic Austro-Hungarian, and subsequently Polish, genres and forms of humor (the same, it Soviet and Ukrainian. In the nineteenth might be noted, was true of Budapest and, century, its principal languages were Yiddish later, New York). By the twentieth century, and Ukrainian, but the Jewish town fathers Jewish writers and artists were weaving nonetheless insisted that its schools adopt more and more recognizably Jewish themes German as their language of instruction. into their work. Hobsbawm muses that In these essays, Hobsbawm dwells on when it comes to Jewish cultural creativity, past Jewish achievements with something “a certain degree of uneasiness in the approaching ethnic pride. He enumerates relationship between them and non-Jews Jewish Nobel Prize winners, and gives has proved historically useful,” pointing out long lists of Jews who dominated their that the end of the nineteenth century— respective fields (“Heine, Mendelssohn the years of the Dreyfus Affair in France Bartholdy, Ricardo, Marx, Disraeli. . . . and the anti-Semitic Mayor Kurt Lueger in Modigliani, Pascin, Marcoussis, Chagall, Vienna—was in fact a time of “maximum Soutine, Epstein, Lipchitz, Lissitzky, stimulus for Jewish talent.” Zadkine”). He speaks of the “enormous oilfield of [Jewish] talent . . . waiting to be n none of these essays does Hobsbawm tapped by the most admirable of all human let drop even a hint of contempt for movements, the Enlightenment.” And I the bourgeois settings in which the this refugee from Hitler says of German cultural developments in question took culture: “Only those who have experienced place. Unlike, say, Karl Marx, he does not the force, the grandeur and the beauty of poke beneath the surface of Enlightenment that culture, which made the Bulgarian philosophy in search of a rancidly selfish

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 79 “bourgeois ideology.” And unlike the cul- the austere beauty of Mondrian, were both tural radicals of the sixties, he does not more revolutionary than oil-painting, and reject high culture as the suffocating ex- better at passing on their message.” halations of a dead, white, male Establish- These assessments may be defensible, ment. Quite the contrary. He speaks of the but Hobsbawm, at least here, doesn’t really Enlightenment with pure admiration, and try to defend them. Rather, he simply at the end of the book laments the retreat pronounces, and therefore sounds too much of its values, “faced with the anti-universal like an indignant middle-aged museumgoer powers of ‘blood and soil’ and the radi- circa 1950 expostulating about the dots cal-reactionary tendencies developing in all and drips of abstract expressionism. At least world religions.” he does not try to assign blame for the The chapters that deal with twentieth- “failures,” and makes sensible if unoriginal century culture feel very similar in points about the way the invention tone. Indeed, while Hobsbawm has of mechanical reproduction changed characteristically smart things to say along representational art. As early as 1850, he the way, these essays also voice exasperation notes, critics were warning of the threat with cultural experimentation that posed by photography to lithography and sometimes verges on the curmudgeonly. portraiture. But he leaves readers with the Hobsbawm regrets the fact that so little strong sense that he would have felt much contemporary classical music and opera more comfortable in the long-vanished reaches popular audiences, leaving cultural world of German-speaking Central performers to live on dead repertoires. Europe. “Overwhelmingly, operatic production . . . consists of attempts to freshen up eminent hese ex cathedra judgments will graves by putting different sets of flowers hardly surprise longtime readers of on them.” Contemporary sculpture, he T Hobsbawm. One collection of his says, has a “miserable existence,” while lectures bore the title Behind the Times: The the break with pictorial representation Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-Century a hundred years ago put avant-garde Avant Gardes. Much of what he says in Frac- painting “on the way to nowhere.” Indeed, tured Times he also said there, and in his Hobsbawm speaks of the “historic failure” autobiography. His four-part world history of pictorial art in the twentieth century. As brims with sharp, confident pronounce- for philosophy, he writes, a little cringe- ments on all manner of artistic and literary inducingly, that its practitioners can no endeavors. But this new collection under- longer compete with “Bono or Eno,” or lines Hobsbawm’s belief in the essential the “universal noise of Facebook.” An autonomy of these endeavors. Politics and essay simply titled “The Avant-Garde economics, in his view, can powerfully af- Fails,” originally published in 1998, states, fect the arts—he considers periods of politi- “Disney’s animations, however inferior to cal anxiety and economic crisis particularly

80 The National Interest Reviews & Essays Like most intellectuals who had come of age in the thirties, Hobsbawm had trouble taking the political and cultural upheavals of the sixties seriously.

useful for spurring creativity. Technology to the producers of film, television and can do so as well. But in no way can works rock music. Symphony halls closed while be read primarily as reflections of their so- Hollywood grew fat. cial and economic origins. For Hobsbawm, It is a compelling thesis, one that the difference between a bourgeois work of jibes well with the story Hobsbawm art and a proletarian one matters less than told in his histories about the power of the difference between a good work of art capitalism to make and unmake societies: and a bad one. In this, he not only indicates to hasten revolution, transform living his own good sense, but also echoes the conditions, beget empires and finally lead stance taken by the late nineteenth-century the world into the massively destructive bourgeoisie, which embraced the idea of “age of extremes.” But it does not cast “art for art’s sake” and believed that raising capitalist development as the “structure” children in the properly “cultivated” man- that determines the actual content of ner meant equipping them with the ability culture. And so it allows him, at least in to make proper critical distinctions. part, to rescue the ideals that governed In the preface to Fractured Times, the bourgeois Jewish mitteleuropäisch Hobsbawm relates its essays to the world of his childhood from the cynical larger themes of his historical work, and condescension of posterity. Hobsbawm formulates the following thesis. “The freely admits the socially elitist nature of logic of both capitalist development and this world. He notes that on the eve of bourgeois civilisation itself,” he writes, World War I, in Britain, France and “were bound to destroy its foundation, Germany, only a tiny percentage of the a society and institutions run by a population attended university. Total progressive elite minority.” Technological enrollment in higher education, out of a innovation, mass politics and above all combined population of 150 million, barely the rise of “mass consumption” made it reached 150,000. If pressed, Hobsbawm impossible for the educated bourgeoisie to would certainly have conceded that even dictate taste to the rest of the population, among these educated thousands, many or even to preserve their own cultural came closer to the satirical figure known practices and institutions. In a world of as the Spießbürger (the Philistine petty mass entertainment, swept by constant bourgeois) than to an embodiment of technological innovation and the ceaseless proper Kultur. He ends the preface with pursuit of the new, artistic and literary a frail paean to the “century of common production could no longer consist men and women” which followed, and primarily of adding a steady stream of which produced new, original, hybrid art fresh, critically approved works to a stable forms (jazz?), and he quotes the familiar canon. The traditional forms themselves— mocking lines of “Prufrock” on the limits of orchestral music, opera, framed painting— bourgeois culture: “In the room the women waned, and the cultural initiative passed come and go, / Talking of Michelangelo.”

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 81 For Hobsbawm, the difference between a bourgeois work of art and a proletarian one matters less than the difference between a good work of art and a bad one.

But in the end he cannot hide his fear that of the Public Sphere. Habermas, born just mass culture has fundamentally corrupted twelve years after Hobsbawm, was then the arts, while the essays themselves, a Marxist of sorts, although an eclectic as noted, breathe with more than a little one. This work tells the story of how the nostalgia for a world in which people did, at commercial capitalism of the seventeenth least, talk about Michelangelo. and eighteenth centuries, thanks to the premium that merchants placed s a historian, Hobsbawm’s great on timely and accurate news, spurred strength was always as a synthesiz- the development of new forms of public A er. He was not an “archive hound” communication. Newspapers were born, who lived to track down new facts amid the and, along with them, new spaces to discuss dusty cartons of a provincial public-records the news, such as coffee houses, literary office. Nor was he a theorist who cogitated salons and lending libraries. New forms in thick, jargon-filled prose about the ideo- of public discussion followed, in which logical structures underpinning historical contributors participated as equals and change. He relied heavily on the work of placed few if any topics outside the reach other historians, and his writing was envi- of rational critique. From such forms of ably lucid, witty and accessible. He was in discussion and such spaces—the “bourgeois fact a master of this style of history, which public sphere”—arose a spirit of critique has long flourished in Britain, but also has and contestation that eventually expressed something in common with the entertaining itself in revolutionary action. The vision works (Stefan Zweig’s and Emil Ludwig’s, of the public sphere as rational and free for instance) that appealed to the history- was always, Habermas recognized, more reading public of prewar Central Europe. an ideal than a reality. Only educated For these reasons, while fellow historians men of a certain social class could actually generally speak of Hobsbawm with great participate, and a spirit of rational exchange respect, they do not actually cite him very did not always predominate. But however often. There was never a real “Hobsbawm imperfect, it did exist—for a time. It School,” and a generation from now, his could not, however, survive the further works are unlikely to find a wide readership. development of capitalism in the nineteenth Yet Hobsbawm’s theses about capitalism and twentieth centuries. As voracious and culture, however impressionistically new business interests came to dominate sketched out, remain worthy of attention. newspaper publishing, and to dictate the In some ways, interestingly, they recall a content of publications, the older forms far more self-consciously theoretical, far of free discussion were corrupted beyond more difficult work by the German recognition. Habermas’s book, while much philosopher Jürgen Habermas, initially debated, remains an intriguing, powerful published in 1962 and entitled, in English and much-read account of the birth of the translation, The Structural Transformation modern age.

82 The National Interest Reviews & Essays Habermas’s story has quite a bit in common with Hobsbawm’s, despite Rebels Who their differences in emphasis, chronology and style. Each of these two Marxisant Had a Cause thinkers hoped to trace the way capitalist development, at one stage of history, By Barry Gewen helped to generate certain identifiably bourgeois ideals. Both then saw these ideals undermined by the further progress of Elzbieta Matynia, ed., An Uncanny Era: capitalism. But both showed a surprising Conversations Between Václav Havel & Adam appreciation for the initial ideals—the Michnik (New Haven: Yale University Press, “public sphere” for one, and the reverence 2014), 264 pp., $25.00. for a tolerant, high-minded high culture for the other. In fact, both scholars took Adam Michnik, The Trouble with History: these ideals seriously enough to use them Morality, Revolution, and Counterrevolution as yardsticks against which to measure the (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), flaws of the modern age. 208 pp., $25.00. Somewhat ironically, given Hobsbawm’s vocal Communist politics, it is this side hat happens to revolu- of his work, rather than his Marxism, that tionaries after the revolu- now does the most to keep it readable tion? If the revolution fails, and relevant. The political tyrannies to the answer is easy: they end which he professed loyalty have collapsed Wup in exile, in prison or dead. But what if so completely that even the ideals they the uprising succeeds? Then the answer is proclaimed can no longer function more complicated. Successful rebels scatter seriously as yardsticks against which to across the political landscape, with former measure anything. The hope of a world brothers-in-arms often becoming fierce ene- revolution springing from the source of the mies—professional radicals on one side, up- October Revolution has joined its original holders of the new status quo on the other. exponent, Leon Trotsky, in the place he In one of the fascinating exchanges himself named the “ash heap of history.” included in a collection of letters, interviews But the impulse that drove the doomed and essays called An Uncanny Era: Jews of Central Europe to define their new, Conversations Between Václav Havel & Adam emancipated status by their veneration Michnik, two of the preeminent heroes of for high-minded, beautiful poetry and the upheavals that destroyed the Soviet painting, novels and plays, symphonies and empire and brought the Cold War to an end operas—surely that is something for which we should all continue to feel more than a Barry Gewen is an editor at the New York Times little nostalgia. n Book Review.

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 83 survey the fates of their colleagues among not only Eastern Europeans at sea in an the dissidents. Some returned to their era of predatory capitalism and toxic normal careers because protest had been nationalism, but also readers throughout only a temporary disruption in the course the West, all standing before an abyss of of their lives. Others chose more public corrosive cynicism. As the always-hopeful avenues, plunging into politics full-time. Havel told Michnik: Havel and Michnik, of course, both went on to hold positions of great distinction— That means that we would take upon ourselves Havel as president of Czechoslovakia and a bigger responsibility and in some sense we then, after his country’s breakup, of the will become a source of inspiration for the Czech Republic; Michnik as editor-in- wealthy West. This could happen if we were chief of the influential Warsaw daily Gazeta able well ahead of time to notice the dangers Wyborcza. Still others, however, turned lurking in the contemporary world and to ar- bitter, disillusioned. A few, bereft of hope ticulate them in the right way thanks to the and their dreams shattered, went mad. specific experience of Communism and our Post-Communist Eastern Europe, with entire history. its Hieronymus Bosch panorama of greed, corruption, hedonism and cynicism, gave For Havel and Michnik, that history began the former revolutionaries much to be in the 1960s—in a double sense. Both were disillusioned about. Was this the freedom products of the worldwide sixties cultural they had sacrificed so much to attain? explosion of hippies, student rebellions, Did it amount to nothing more than and rock and roll; rock music had a key enrichissez vous? “We changed the human role in instigating the revolt against So- rights charter into a credit card,” Michnik viet domination, and when Havel took writes. Both Havel (until his death in 2011) up residence in the presidential palace, he and Michnik struggled to maintain their played host to Frank Zappa and the Roll- bearings in a low, dishonest time, and An ing Stones. But they were “1968-ers” in a Uncanny Era, together with a companion political sense as well, deeply affected when volume of essays by Michnik entitled The Soviet power crushed the Prague Spring of Trouble with History, can be read as a plea to Alexander Dubcek’s reformist government keep the revolutionary faith, to uphold the that year, killing the promise of “socialism idealism that motivated the battle against with a human face.” The lesson Moscow’s Communism—even if it’s not clear what tanks taught disaffected students was that idealism means in a postideological age. changing Communism from within was What’s more, since Havel and Michnik never going to happen, but neither would believe that the intellectual and spiritual it be brought down by insurrectionist, anti- shortcomings they perceive extend Communist violence. Between those two far beyond their own societies, they see poles, Eastern Europe’s dissident movement themselves as prophets of a kind, addressing was born.

84 The National Interest Reviews & Essays Havel and Michnik see themselves as prophets of a kind, addressing not only Eastern Europeans but also readers throughout the West, all standing before an abyss of corrosive cynicism.

decade after the abortive Prague Benes after he became president and had Spring, eight young opposition- to deal with the dilemmas of governance. A ists—four from Poland, four from Michnik writes that the issue for those Czechoslovakia—trekked up the mountains leaders of small powers was whether bordering the two countries to meet, drink to “go up in flames, or to capitulate in vodka and exchange ideas. Out of that en- order to survive.” It’s a problem as old as counter came promises of cooperation, Thucydides. Nonetheless, West Germany Havel’s hugely important essay “The Power was not exactly a small power, and in of the Powerless,” and the beginnings of a Brandt’s case, Michnik says disapprovingly, thirty-year friendship between Havel and “Geopolitics drove out morality.” Michnik. What followed, too, was increased In the face of the brute realities of power repression by the authorities—wiretaps, politics, all the isolated dissidents had was personal harassment, interrogations, house their idealism. But sometimes hopeless arrests and years of imprisonment. There causes win. Sometimes idealism stops tanks. were so few protesters at first that the sac- Even as late as 1988, Michnik says, only rifices seemed, to use Michnik’s word, “ri- “some possessed village idiot” would have diculous.” What chances did the dissidents predicted that within a few years the Soviet have against the mighty Soviet machine? Union would implode, Communism would Along with the physical suffering, they en- die, and Poland and Czechoslovakia would dured the torments of a terrible loneliness. be free to end censorship, hold democratic In a cautious yet ultimately bitter essay elections and join nato. “So—after all in The Trouble with History, Michnik that—when somebody tells me that this writes that even natural allies like the West glass is half-empty, then I reply that he has German chancellor Willy Brandt, who probably never had a beer in his life.” might have been expected to support the Yet what precisely was the idealism cause of human rights, abandoned them that drove the Havels and Michniks? for the sake of his Ostpolitik. Michnik What enabled them to live all those years recognizes the difficulty of determining like Sisyphus, pushing their boulder up just when an understandable desire for the mountain without hope? That wasn’t rapprochement in international affairs entirely clear, not even to them. They mutates into a policy of appeasement. knew they were against Communism and Haunting questions of history keep Soviet domination, but it was much harder reemerging through these two books. Did for them to articulate what they were for. Czechoslovakia’s president Edvard Benes Moreover, to build as broad a movement have any choice but to yield to Hitler’s force as possible, it was best to remain vague. So majeure at Munich? Was General Wojciech they spoke with “a polyphonic voice,” with Jaruzelski right to declare martial law in no illusions about constructing the perfect Poland in 1981 to avert a Soviet invasion? society out of the post-Communist rubble; Havel says he developed more sympathy for as Michnik put it, “Our revolution was a

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 85 revolution without a utopia.” “Solidarity McCarthy, Michnik reports, had become was forced on us,” Havel says, “by our a hero to some of his countrymen, who common enemy.” Michnik observes that chose to ignore the many different kinds of Havel himself had “reservations” even about people who had been caught in the Soviet parliamentary democracy, seeing it as a web. “Should the writer who supported possible transitional phase to some other, the communist power in its early years, more undefined end. but later became a symbol of resistance Having experienced the long lines and to the dictatorship and a moral authority, perennial shortages of the Soviet system, be counted as a traitor or included in of one thing they were sure: they knew the pantheon of national heroes?” It was they wanted no part of a centralized necessary to recognize degrees of culpability; economy. “The fact that everything in the bad old days, one often did what one should be privately owned and that there had to do in order to survive. “All sorts of is a law of supply and demand is for me things happened,” Michnik writes. obvious,” Havel says. He took pleasure Likewise, Havel says that “the people who in the fact that greengrocers, the kind of to a greater or lesser degree cocreated the people he wrote about in “The Power of regime, and those who silently tolerated it, the Powerless,” could now own their own but also all of us who unconsciously got shops and set their own prices. At the same accustomed to it, we are all in it together.” time, he didn’t think free markets were the Just about everyone was guilty in some answer to every problem; they were “not way or another. Indeed, such widespread a religion,” and Havel was no libertarian. collaboration (if it can be called that) Michnik puts his own spin on the question. made many Eastern Europeans reluctant to Eastern Europeans would be wise, he says, acknowledge the heroism of the dissidents. to reject the “cult” of the ruthless market They inspire distaste, Havel says, because for “a market with a human face.” When it they are “the living pangs of conscience.” came to economics—as was true in other (In much the same way, it has been said matters—the two men agreed that they that the Germans will never forgive the were neither on the left nor the right. Jews for Auschwitz.) In any case, to get over Both of these fundamentally moderate the past, to move forward, forgiveness was men were compelled to revolution by the just as important as justice. Havel speaks of circumstances of their time, and they were the need to “find the appropriate balance,” troubled by what they saw as the rush from though he recognizes that doing so wouldn’t one extreme to the other—from a creaky, be easy in the current climate. state-regulated system to an economic free- for-all, and from a meek acquiescence in an he problem was that the end of oppressive left-wing tyranny to a fanatical Communism had created an ideo- anti-Communism intent on extirpating all T logical vacuum, and a “coarse and traces of the Soviet past. Senator Joseph primitive nationalism” was rushing to fill

86 The National Interest Reviews & Essays it, in Michnik’s words. Xenophobia, anti- enemies were no longer as easily defined as Semitism and ethnic intolerance were on the the Red Army and the secret police. Now rise. Talk about racial purity and the need for they tended to be abstractions—selfishness, a strong leader was back. In 2007, Michnik intolerance, the darker impulses of the observed, “We should look at the practices of human soul. The solution he reached for Putin to understand the nature of the threats (such as it was) consisted of a change in to democracy in the countries of post-Com- mentality itself, a deepening of spirituality munist Europe.” Prophetically, Havel said that he called an “existential revolution,” in 2008 that Moscow “glances at neighbor- almost a worldwide moral reformation.

ing states as though it doesn’t know exactly One senses in him a genuinely religious where Russia begins and where it ends.” temperament, even if he never turned to For Havel, what was required in our organized religion. Michnik, who knew “uncanny” post-Communist era was a him as well as anybody, says that Havel new global awareness. “In my opinion the was in essence a “homo religiosus,” though, most important division is between people to be sure, there was no more heterodox who care only for their garden and those religiosus. “I accept the Gospel of Jesus,” who are interested in what’s beyond their Havel said in a summation of his theology, fence.” That is, he remained an idealist to “as a challenge to go my own way.” the day he died, urging people to be better Michnik’s feet have been planted more than they thought they were, though his firmly on the ground—no doubt because

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 87 Havel remained an idealist to the day he died, urging people to be better than they thought they were, though his enemies were no longer as easily defined as the Red Army and the secret police.

he isn’t an artistic visionary like Havel. lives.) But they have a point. What does Not that there isn’t room for spirituality Michnik propose to put in place of power in his thinking: he speaks of the need for and money? Still, it has to be said that “metaphysics” in any civilized society. But conditions in Eastern Europe are making he seeks no grand moral reawakening. voices like Michnik’s more urgent than ever. Rather, his calls are for the more humble He is someone to be praised and prized. virtues: compromise, dialogue, mutual As uncertainties grow on Poland’s eastern understanding and pluralism. He opposes border, fear and paranoia will surely grow vengeance, fanaticism in any form and with them, with Vladimir Putin’s own all dogmatic certainties—in politics, belligerent nationalism matched by the economics, religion and philosophy. He very same tendencies in Russia’s neighbors. celebrates contingency and ambiguity. His is Calls for a strong leader to root out and the idealism of moderation. eliminate the nation’s enemies will only In An Uncanny Era, his hero is Havel, grow louder. Moderation will be the first who “was afraid of all closed ideologies,” victim, pluralism the second. and when asked about his political The “most dangerous” of the arguments orientation, he responds, “Havelian.” But used by Communist Poland to legitimize The Trouble with History has a different, the evils of the regime, Michnik reminds more surprising hero—the nineteenth- readers, was playing on the fear that century writer Marie-Henri Beyle, better Germany was only waiting to repeat history known by the pen name Stendhal. Michnik and pounce again. Those same arguments sees his own age—and ours—as a mirror can now be employed looking east, with the image of Stendhal’s Restoration France, same malignant result. At the present time, when cynicism and careerism prevailed, and everything points to a rise in nationalist politics had deteriorated into little more hysteria on Russia’s borders, and if the than a struggle for power and money. “Let Poles needed any additional push in that us look at things through Stendhal’s eyes,” direction, there is always the fact that Michnik writes. “Instead of democracy, Russia’s 2009 war games culminated in the money ruled; instead of a great idea, nuking of Warsaw. It’s not a good time for money; instead of quality and taste of the Adam Michniks. Moderates need all life, money; instead of dignity, honor, and the help they can get. As a former dissident, solidarity, money.” Meanwhile, the forces however, Michnik can at least say that he’s of repression were swooping down to been through this before, and worse, and eradicate all freethinking, individuality and though he tends to be more pessimistic moderation. than his idol Havel, he has endured enough Michnik understands that so-called to have earned his own strain of optimism, realists will accuse him of “empty however ironic it may be. “In Poland,” he moralizing.” (They are the ones who says, “everything is possible: even change for have never had a glass of beer in their the better.” n

88 The National Interest Reviews & Essays ed by “what was supposed to be a stirring Perlstein’s Bridge sight”: a fifty-foot, 1,500-pound inflated elephant soaring overhead. Unfortunately, to Nowhere in “classic 1970s fashion,” the beast’s stom- ach had been accidentally punctured by its By Geoffrey Kabaservice rigging and it now wallowed limply in the parking lot. The American public imagination has Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The long preferred to overlook the 1970s, seeing Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New it mainly as a regrettable decade marked York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 880 pp., in hindsight by embarrassments that were $37.50. both national (Watergate, stagflation, the oil crisis) and personal (disco, leisure suits, n a sweltering Monday in Au- bell-bottom pants, quaaludes, ridiculous gust 1976, delegates began to hairstyles). Many historians, however, arrive at the Kemper Arena in recently have proclaimed its importance Kansas City, Missouri, for the as the period in which the conservative Ostart of the Republican National Conven- movement gained strength, giving rise to tion. Unlike today’s tightly scripted party neoconservatism as well as the religious conventions, which have become little more Right, and culminating in 1980 with the than four-day infomercials, the outcome of election of the most conservative president this convention was in serious doubt. The since Calvin Coolidge. Now Rick Perlstein presumptive nominee was President Gerald has added to that historical literature with Ford, who had assumed the office only after The Invisible Bridge, his retelling of the the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Rich- period between Nixon’s 1972 reelection and ard M. Nixon. His challenger was Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Ford in 1976. Reagan, the conservative former governor of Perlstein is a talented but erratic writer. California, who could seize the presidential Emerging from a background in journalism nomination by winning over a comparative that included a stint at Lingua Franca, he handful of uncommitted delegates. It was entered the ranks of best-selling historians a moment of high and historic drama. As with Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and Rick Perlstein relates, when the delegates the Unmaking of the American Consensus arrived at the arena, they were to be greet- and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. In all of his Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author, most recently, books, Perlstein has attempted to chronicle of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation the rise of modern conservatism through and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from a biographical focus on its emblematic Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford University leaders. He also seeks to convey the feel and Press, 2012). flavor of the period through a sprawling

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 89 mass of incident and detail. Unfortunately, intelligence operations, and the economic all of this history is filtered through a privation produced by the Arab oil embargo New Journalism writing style that is more and stagflation—not to mention the afflic- annoying than stimulating. tions of crime, terrorism and urban decay. The New Journalism that came into Perlstein tells a tale of a divided and being in the 1960s and 1970s with the unhappy society through vignettes work of writers like Tom Wolfe, Hunter about the return of prisoners of war S. Thompson and Joan Didion was from Vietnam, demonstrations against an attempt to expand the possibilities skyrocketing food prices, the Watergate of journalism by borrowing some of the hearings, Patricia Hearst’s kidnapping techniques of novelists. Perlstein partakes and participation in the crimes of the of this tradition principally through his Symbionese Liberation Army, and growing hyperactive prose style. He deploys peppy public interest in ufos and the occult. He phrases—helicopters “swoffed,” pundits describes the success of morally bleak films become “chin-stroking penseurs,” hotels (like Death Wish and The Parallax View) “were putting on the dog”—and makes and blockbusters (like The Exorcist and frequent resort to italics, capital letters, one- Jaws), along with scares over acid rain and sentence paragraphs, mantra-like repetition, killer bees. He also covers the rise of self- sentence fragments, grammatical solecisms, righteous “Watergate baby” Democrats as odd mashups of tense and other writerly well as conservative antibusing protests in pirouettes. He continually inserts himself South Boston and antitextbook protests in into the narrative with sarcastic asides that West Virginia. make reading the book akin to watching an This is hardly a comprehensive history; episode of the cult television show Mystery it barely touches on the music, art, fashion Science Theater 3000, in which the movie and literature of the period, or phenomena onscreen is drowned out by its wisecracking such as the founding of Microsoft and spectators. Apple, immigration, deindustrialization, a growing assertion of ethnic identity and erlstein’s spastic writing detracts the rise of supply-side economics. But even from the historical material he for people who know the history of this P presents, which can be captivating. period fairly well (or who lived through it), The period from 1973 to 1976 was one the book contains lots of surprises. Who in which “America suffered more wounds knew that the first message passed through to its ideal of itself than at just about any “tap code” by Vietnam pows was “Joan other time in its history.” These included Baez sucks,” or that one of Nixon’s advisers the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the suggested that Americans compensate for subsequent collapse of its South Vietnamese higher meat prices by dining on offal? ally, the shocking revelations of Watergate, Would an eBay search turn up a “Watergate congressional investigations into unsavory Scandal” card game (“No one wins,

90 The National Interest Reviews & Essays there are just losers”)? Did a Washington come to grips with the world’s complexity, Post columnist seriously propose that an and accept uncomfortable truths about appropriate response to the energy crisis the dark aspects of America’s history and would be to impose a speed limit on car the fallibility of its leaders. The other was racing at the Indianapolis 500? Did theaters made up of those who continued to believe showing The Exorcist really keep kitty litter that America was “God’s chosen nation” on hand to soak up audience vomit? Did and who nostalgically yearned for heroes,

daredevil Evel Knievel make his ill-fated simplicity, comforting myths and a return jump attempt over the Snake River Canyon to national innocence. on the same day that Ford pardoned Nixon? Perlstein leaves little doubt that he’s on But the narrative suffers from Perlstein’s the side of the “suspicious circles.” The desire to squeeze the era into a procrustean Watergate controversy, he tells us, was analytical framework. He posits that the “a battle over the meaning of America,” stresses of the mid-1970s split American pitting rule-of-law idealists against the society into two tribes. One was the majority of Americans, who apparently “suspicious circles,” made up of those who wanted to suspend the First Amendment felt that realism and a higher patriotism to end disruptive protests and “who now required Americans to “question believed, with Richard Nixon, that our authority,” overturn outdated morality, neighbors might be our enemies, and our

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 91 Perlstein’s suspicion-versus-innocence framework is too muddled and historically inapt to hold any real contemporary resonance.

enemies might destroy us.” Those in the political stripes are, in Perlstein’s terms, both “suspicious circles,” conversely, felt “that all innocents and skeptics in various measures. that turbulence in the 1960s and ’70s had Their views of government and American given the nation a chance to finally reflect institutions are informed by a complicated critically on its power, to shed its arrogance, blend of partisanship, the performance of to become a more humble and better those institutions, personal experience, citizen of the world—to grow up.” Perlstein media exposure and historical events such laments that the reactionary innocents as the attacks of September 11, 2001. won the battle, as now even Democrats Americans in decades past held equally like Barack Obama praise America complicated and sometimes contradictory as “the greatest nation on earth” and an views. Any attempt to treat them as exception to history. “What does it mean political naïfs, as Perlstein does, reveals to truly believe in America?” Perlstein asks what historian E. P. Thompson termed “the rhetorically. “To wave a flag? Or to struggle enormous condescension of posterity.” toward a more searching alternative to the shallowness of the flag-wavers—to criticize, his ideological agenda makes Perl- to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent?” stein an unreliable narrator—inca- For all Perlstein’s desire to spur debate, T pable, for example, of attempting however, his suspicion-versus-innocence any objective evaluation of a complicated framework is too muddled and historically historical figure like Richard Nixon. Perl- inapt to hold any real contemporary stein is content to present Nixon, largely resonance. The reader’s own suspicion through the lens of Watergate, as a black- grows that Perlstein’s motive is not so much hearted conservative malefactor and two-di- to explore the 1970s in all their complexity mensional doer of dastardly deeds. But this as to expose the villains who forced America is a tired and indeed anachronistic interpre- into its alleged contemporary cult of tation that serious historians haven’t held optimism and willful blindness to national for decades. Any fair historical accounting faults—and, unsurprisingly, he finds of Nixon’s presidency also has to consider nearly all these moustache-twirlers on the his achievements in statecraft, his progres- conservative side. sive record on issues from the environment But even a casual viewer of Fox News to the arts to Southern school desegrega- will know that today’s conservatives are tion, and his masterful ability to balance simultaneously critics and boosters of different factions of the Republican Party. America, fearful of its big government and Perlstein offhandedly notes that Nixon deeply suspicious of its politics and culture had “proposed programs of such dubiously while in the same breath maintaining that conservative provenance as wage and price it is still the envy of the world. Liberals, too, controls, a guaranteed minimum income, mix censure and approval in their views of and the federal Environmental Protection the country and its history. Americans of all Agency,” yet also had been expert at

92 The National Interest Reviews & Essays Few of the right-wing impulses of the 1970s cohered into a unified movement, and conservatism likely would have had limited national impact if not for the singular figure of Reagan.

“damping the ideological passions of his every aspect of his life, consciously molding party’s right wing.” How did he maintain his past, his physical presentation and his that balance? (And can someone let John persona in order to come across as a hero Boehner in on the secret?) Perlstein also and leader to other people. (Not, of course, refers in passing to the “delirious” welcome that Perlstein believes his subject was a truly Nixon received from millions of Egyptians principled hero, as he infers that Reagan on a visit to Cairo in 1974, after which was willing, as head of the Screen Actors he went on to almost as rapturous a Guild, to countenance corrupt insider reception in Jerusalem. Why was that, deals for Wasserman and then to shave his and doesn’t it seem a bit strange in view political convictions to meet the business of America’s current unpopularity in the needs of Boulware’s ge.) As a politician, region? And isn’t it odd that Nixon, the Reagan used his appeal to make his blithe realpolitik exponent of a foreign policy optimism and innocence into America’s rooted in pragmatic recognition of the unofficial cult. Reagan promulgated “the relative decline of American power, should belief that America could do no wrong. Or, be presented as an enabler of national to put it another way, that if America did innocence? it, it was by definition not wrong.” Reagan’s black-and-white moral certainties helped erlstein’s real focus, however, is on to put an end to the budding American his main villain, Ronald Reagan, Enlightenment of the 1960s and 1970s, P whose biography unfolds in flash- “encouraging citizens to think like children, backs through the first half of the book. waiting for a man on horseback to rescue Perlstein brings considerable verve and them: a tragedy.” originality to the oft-told tale of Reagan’s The book’s curious title comes from some midwestern boyhood and college years, his cynical advice Nikita Khrushchev once radio and movie career, and his job as a gave Nixon: “If the people believe there’s pitchman for General Electric. His digres- an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell sions through Reagan’s cultural influences them there’s no river there. You build an (including Frank Merriwell novels and the imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” Golden Age of Sports) and mentors (such as The core of Reagan’s appeal, in Perlstein’s Hollywood’s Lew Wasserman and ge’s Lem- view, was that he used his considerable uel Boulware) are fascinating. political gifts to allow people to forget the But Perlstein’s portrait of Reagan is deeply traumas of the 1970s and recover their unflattering. Reagan comes across as a cherished myth of America as a blessed and near-lifelong fantasist: “An athlete of the exceptional nation. imagination, a master at turning complexity Perlstein’s assessment of Reagan as a and confusion and doubt into simplicity human being is ungenerous at best. He does and stout-hearted certainty.” Perlstein make some perceptive points about Reagan’s implies that Reagan lied about virtually preternatural awareness of the camera—

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 93 the book’s stunning cover photo of him It’s still a mystery why a governor campaigning in his Illinois hometown, arms who passed the largest tax increase in his outstretched and poised dramatically on the state’s history, signed the nation’s most bumpers of two cars, is ample testimony to liberal abortion bill and no-fault divorce that—and ably dissects Reagan’s rhetoric. law, and supported gun control and But he has almost nothing to say about pioneering environmental legislation Reagan as a practitioner of politics. This could have remained a hero to the lacuna is highlighted by Perlstein’s bizarre conservative movement. It would never decision to devote no more than a few happen nowadays, but Reagan somehow pages to Reagan’s eight years as governor of threaded the needle. It’s not enough to say, California, or more than a few paragraphs as Perlstein does, that Reagan was merely to his seminal 1966 election. opportunistic or sought to blame his actions The result is that Perlstein fails to grapple on the liberals in the California legislature, with what made Reagan a successful who were “furtive and diabolical in ways conservative politician in a liberal state, unsullied innocents could not comprehend.” who would use his broad appeal first to come close to toppling Ford in 1976 erlstein loosely ties Reagan’s ascent and then to win the presidency outright to that of the New Right, a popu- in 1980. Perlstein equates Reagan’s early P list and antiestablishment political 1960s conservatism with the paranoia of movement he outlines without defining the John Birch Society, but makes little and which he views as an entirely perni- effort to figure out why Reagan was able cious development in American history. He to campaign as a big-tent Republican or dolefully relates the growth of conservative govern as a pragmatist. Perlstein claims evangelical churches, the creation of po- that Reagan’s goal was to purify the gop litical action committees, the rise of activist by kicking out all who did not subscribe organizations like the Heritage Founda- to rigid conservative principles, when in tion and the American Legislative Exchange fact Reagan opposed this sort of ideological Council to supplement existing outfits like cleansing. Reagan told California’s the American Conservative Union (acu) conservative activists in 1967 that they had and Young Americans for Freedom (yaf ), an obligation “not to further divide but to and protests against busing and abortion lead the way to unity. It is not your duty, and the Equal Rights Amendment. Ironi- responsibility or privilege to tear down cally, however, Perlstein buys into conserva- or attempt to destroy others in the tent.” tives’ triumphant accounts, written after He warned that “a narrow sectarian party” Reagan’s 1980 presidential election, of the would soon disappear “in a blaze of glorious movement’s irresistible rise, internal har- defeat.” The conservatives would have mony and exquisite coordination. In fact, booed anyone else off the stage for offering few of the right-wing impulses of the 1970s this diagnosis, but they obeyed Reagan. cohered into a unified movement, and con-

94 The National Interest Reviews & Essays Perlstein ultimately is purveying a shallow and tendentious version of history that will only convince the already converted: those who believe in the innate baseness of conservatives.

servatism likely would have had limited national visibility.”3 And Reagan secured national impact if not for the singular figure the presidency in 1980, despite his role in of Reagan. torpedoing Ford’s 1976 candidacy, precisely Take, for example, the perspective of because he was the one conservative leader William Rusher, publisher of National who was able to win over a majority of the Review and an important and well-respected gop’s moderates. liaison between the Old and New Right. In June 1975, he complained that he found it or a writer who insists that respect impossible to make contact with the leaders for complexity is a moral virtue, Perl- or institutions of the social conservatives: F stein proffers a surprisingly simplistic analysis. Part of this stems from a lack of Does anybody speak for these people? Is there original archival research. Before the Storm anybody I can sit down and have a drink with, was a splendidly researched book, but in who has the slightest influence over them and this one he relies mainly upon newspaper their actions? We traditional or economic con- clippings available online. Perlstein’s analysis servatives are, as you know, organized up to the is also weakened by his bogus dichotomy of eye teeth: in acu, yaf, etc. But where on earth sophisticates versus innocents and his insis- are the social conservatives?1 tence that American society was completely bifurcated into hostile opposing camps, an Nor were all of these developments assertion that was no truer in the 1970s working in Reagan’s favor in the mid- than it is now. 1970s. The incipient religious Right, for Other shortcomings in Perlstein’s example, was drawn to Jimmy Carter analysis stem from the defects of his New in 1976 rather than to anyone on the Journalism style and his penchant for Republican side. (Rusher thought Carter’s overstatement. It may be that Spiro Agnew nomination “makes it likely . . . that the was “that pathetic man a heartbeat away Democratic Party itself will turn out to from the presidency,” or that “no one be the vehicle of the anti-Establishment trusted much of anything” in the 1970s, conservative-populist trend.”2) The or that the 1970s were “suspicious times. conservative movement was hardly unified Or maybe not. America couldn’t decide.” around Reagan, as many preferred younger or harder-edged potential candidates like 1 William A. Rusher to James Gavin, June 3, 1975. John Ashbrook, James Buckley, Phil Crane William F. Buckley Jr. Papers (Yale University) and George Wallace. A lot of conservatives 34:5. who supported Reagan’s challenge to Ford 2 William A. Rusher to Jameson G. Campaigne Jr., did so out of a sense of resignation; as May 10, 1976. William A. Rusher Papers (Library Ashbrook put it, “Ron has always looked of Congress) 18:6. for easy answers and yet, he is the only one 3 John Ashbrook to Michael Djordjevich, March conservative at the present time who has 21, 1975. Rusher Papers 26:3.

Reviews & Essays September/October 2014 95 These and a dozen other overgeneralizations Perlstein doesn’t just come close to parahis- may be true—but as they say in the writers’ tory—he embraces it. workshops, “Show, don’t tell.” There’s also a basic inconsistency in And while New Journalism–influenced Perlstein casting nostalgia as a vice, given historians can borrow from the techniques that his main strength as an author is of fiction, they have no business at all precisely his ability to spin nostalgic, inventing history, as Perlstein does by giving detailed, you-are-there narratives of events us the thoughts of an imaginary audience at such as the 1976 Republican National a Reagan speech on the Panama Canal: Convention. Readers who make it through all eight hundred pages of The Invisible His listeners remembered those shameful imag- Bridge most likely will enjoy immersing es of the evacuation of Saigon, that line of bod- themselves in the 1970s and, even more, ies snaking up the ladder to that shack atop the being able to put the book down and leave cia station chief’s home. God’s chosen nation, that troubled decade. with its tail between its legs. They remembered But Perlstein ultimately is purveying those Panamanian riots from 1964, and now a shallow and tendentious version of Panama was being rewarded for rioting—just history that will only convince the already like those ungrateful Negroes in those North- converted: those who believe in the innate ern cities they had left behind to retire in Flor- baseness of conservatives. He is not writing ida; they had rioted, and then got more civil what his publisher boasts “is becoming rights bills and social programs. . . . And now the classic series of books about the rise of Jerry Ford was ready to let it happen again. modern conservatism in America” in order to investigate and understand but rather Dwight Macdonald famously excoriated to mock and condemn. This is history New Journalism as “parajournalism,” which that sets out to expose the limitations of he defined as “a bastard form, having it conservatives but ends up exposing the both ways, exploiting the factual authority limitations of the author. Anyone seeking of journalism and the atmospheric license a definitive history of the transition from of fiction.” In passages like the one above, Nixon to Reagan should look elsewhere. n

96 The National Interest Reviews & Essays