Philippa Kaur

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    The Unintended Economic Impacts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative

    China’s footprint in global foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased notably since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013. That served to bring Chinese overseas FDI closer to a level that one would expect, based on the country’s weight in the global economy. China accounted for about 12% of global cross-border mergers and acquisitions and 9% of announced greenfield FDI projects between 2013 and 2018. Chinese overseas FDI rose from $10 billion in 2005 (0.5% of Chinese GDP) to nearly $180 billion in 2017 (1.5% of GDP). Likewise, annual construction contracts awarded to Chinese companies increased from $10 billion in 2005 to more than $100 billion in 2017.

    Interestingly, however, the American Enterprise Institute’s China Global Investment tracker recorded $420 billion worth of investment and construction in BRI countries versus $655 billion in other countries between 2013 and 2018. So China actually invested more in countries outside the BRI during the period, given that Chinese investment in developed countries tends to have larger market values, particularly for mergers and acquisitions.

    Additional Pain

    Based on other measures, however, Chinese investment in BRI nations was much larger as a percentage of its total investment for the period. For example, greenfield investment represented almost half of all investment in BRI countries, but only 13% in other markets. Chinese firms were awarded $268 billion worth of construction contracts in BRI countries versus $166 billion elsewhere. Greenfield investment and construction in BRI countries amounted to $340 billion versus $230 billion in non-BRI countries.

    The subsidies that Beijing contributes to its state-owned enterprises implies that many of the BRI projects actually cost it far more than the face value of the construction and investment, meaning that loan defaults — a common occurrence — add that much more additional pain to Beijing’s coffers.

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    Asia attracted the majority of BRI-related investment and construction contracts between 2013 and 2018, receiving just over half of such activity, with Southeast Asia taking 46% of that amount. Africa received 23%, followed by the Middle East at 13%. Overall, approximately 38% of total investments and construction contracts were targeted at the energy sector in host nations, with 27% ending up in transport and 10% in real estate.

    The largest BRI project as of 2018 was the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which links Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang province with the port of Gwadar in Pakistan. Investments and construction contracts worth nearly $40 billion had been devoted to the project, with total spending likely to reach in excess of $60 billion by the time it is finished, equivalent to about 20% of Pakistan’s nominal GDP. The country endured a large increase in imports of materials and capital as a result, which aggravated its trade imbalance. By 2018, its current account deficit had expanded to more than 6% of GDP from less than 2% in 2016.

    Expensive Membership

    While Pakistan’s economic challenges were not and are not entirely attributable to the BRI, the strains added to it by the BRI became highly problematic. That turned out to be a common byproduct of the initiative among the countries receiving the largest amounts of investment. Large debts in countries with limited financial resources and means of generating revenue often undermine governments’ ability to successfully manage their economies. Rather than benefiting from the infrastructure investments made by China, they sometimes end up perpetually treading water.

    Rising debt service often increases a country’s borrowing costs, can raise doubt about its solvency, contribute to a depreciating currency and increase the local currency value of the external debt burden. Consequently, the macroeconomic fallout of being a recipient member of the BRI “club” can be severe, particularly for the smallest and poorest countries.

    A 2018 study from the Center for Global Development has noted, for example, that in the case of Djibouti, home to China’s only overseas military base, public external debt had increased from 50% to 85% of GDP in just two years — the highest of any low-income country. Much of that debt consists of government-guaranteed public enterprise debt owed to China’s Export-Import Bank (EXIM).

    In Laos, the $6-billion cost of the China-Laos railway represents almost half the country’s GDP. Debt to China, Tajikistan’s single largest creditor, accounted for almost 80% of the total increase in Tajikistan’s external debt between 2007 and 2016 period. And in Kyrgyzstan, China EXIM is the largest single creditor, with loans of $1.5 billion, or about 40% of the country’s total external debt.

    It certainly does not appear that Beijing put sufficient effort into contemplating the likely economic impact of the BRI prior to commencing it, either upon host nations or upon itself, for all concerned have borne the consequences of excessive and imprudent lending. Could it be that that Communist Party of China did not care, and that all that mattered was rolling the Initiative out as quickly as possible once it decided to do so?

    It is truly surprising that Beijing did not do a better job of envisioning the multiplicity of potential outcomes. That is undoubtedly the overriding reason why the Chinese government decided to pivot in 2018 and adopt a seemingly more rational, moderate and achievable approach to unleashing the remainder of the BRI upon the world. It now realizes that its reputation and legacy are at stake, never mind the hardship it has placed on scores of developing countries around the world in the process.

    *[Daniel Wagner is the author of “The Chinese Vortex: The Belt and Road Initiative and its Impact on the World.”

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    The Next President Needs to Learn From Past Mistakes

    Thirteen years ago, in summer 2007, I wrote a memo for the future president of the United States. The one who would take office in 2020.

    At the time, I had no idea who would win the 2008 presidential election, much less an election in the distant future. In summer 2007, Hillary Clinton was the Democratic frontrunner, ahead of second-place Barack Obama by as much as double digits. Rudy Giuliani was on top of the polls for the Republican Party, with John McCain trailing behind him. I figured, wrongly, that it would stay that way.

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    One year later, in summer 2008, both Obama and McCain would come from behind to secure their parties’ nomination. And I would predict in a TomDispatch piece that Obama would win the election, serve two terms and leave the US in a perilous place in 2016 because of his policies of “muddling through.” Well, I got that part right.

    But in summer 2007, all I could focus on was the relative decline of the United States, as seen with “2020 hindsight.” The subprime mortgage crisis was unspooling that summer, the Bush administration was still sending more US troops to Iraq as part of its “surge” and the Chinese economy was growing by 14.2%.

    Casting my mind 13 years into the future, I tried to imagine which of these three factors — Iraq, financial crisis, China — would prove most salient in explaining the downward trajectory of US standing in the world.

    Here’s what I wrote back in 2007.

    Memo to the President 2020

    “As a member of the transition team, I’ve been asked to give a backgrounder on the ‘loss of global influence’ issue that played such a major role in the last election. I’ve submitted my study entitled End of Empire and I would encourage you to read my full analysis. I’ve been told that you might not have the time to read all three volumes. As a historian, I find it extraordinarily difficult to boil this question down to 750 words. But I will try. 

    Historians are divided into roughly three camps on the causes behind the end of the unipolar system headed by our country. The largest camp is the Iraq Syndrome group. They argue that the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was the critical, history-changing moment. As you well know, the invasion turned into an unsuccessful 10-year occupation that sapped the U.S. economy and significantly eroded U.S. reputation in the world. More damaging, however, was the syndrome that followed the war. The unpopularity of the war made it increasingly difficult for the United States to launch military operations and virtually impossible to solicit international support. Although the Democrats tried to maintain high military budgets through 2010, they ultimately had to make significant cuts in order to salvage the economy. 

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    The second camp is generally called the China Rising group. These historians, influenced by the world-systems work of Wallerstein, locate the end of U.S. influence in shifting geopolitical power and particularly the growing influence of China. As of February 2019, the Chinese economy is now larger than ours, though we still maintain a lead in per-capita GNP. More importantly, China’s turn toward multilateralism in the early part of this century caught us by surprise. The transformation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) into the premier international security mechanism, with its own peacekeeping forces and development bank, undercut both NATO and traditional U.S. bilateral alliances. When the EU became a member of the SCO in 2014, the transatlantic alliance was effectively over. 

    The Iraq Syndrome and the China Rising arguments are familiar and persuasive. But I do not believe that they fully explain our fall. The third camp, to which I belong, is called the Subprime group. Although we are currently considered revisionist historians, I believe that my End of Empire books definitively establish that the financial crisis that the United States experienced in 2007 was the key element in destroying our position in the world. 

    As you might remember, the United States experienced a significant housing bubble beginning in 2001. Americans became obsessed with buying houses, and selling houses. The banks devised a way of lending money to people who ordinarily would not have enough credit to buy a house. This was called the sub-prime loan. Without going into the details — please see Chapters 2-8 in Volume One of End of Empire — I will simply remind you of the rising number of foreclosures in the summer of 2007, the bankruptcy of lenders, the failure of hedge funds, the collapse of retail, the devaluation of the dollar, and the coordinated global bank interventions that turned out to be only a stopgap measure. 

    At the time, U.S. economists predicted that the housing market would recover by 2009. That didn’t happen. The subprime crisis revealed not only the underlying fragility of the domestic U.S. economy but the global economy as well. It is a common fallacy to draw parallels between household economics and the functioning of the national economy. However, in this case, I have argued that the parallel did apply. Average Americans, with their large amounts of debt, had to give up their prized possessions, that cornerstone of the American dream, the house. So, too, did the United States, with its nearly $9 trillion national debt, have to give up its global position, its “house” so to speak. 

    Historians in the two other camps overlook this simple and rather elegant explanation. Yes, the Iraq War was a tremendous drain on U.S. resources and thus a classic case of imperial overstretch. Yes, China played the multilateral card at just the right time and thereby built an international reputation. But it was a handful of greedy mortgage lenders that served as the catalyst. The market correction that followed the subprime crisis in fact turned out to be a much larger geopolitical correction that restored a certain balance to international affairs. Finally, with 2020 hindsight — to use this year’s most popular catch phrase — we can see that Iraq and China pale in comparison to the cold, hard bottom line. As you repeatedly said on the campaign trail, quoting one of last century’s most enduring lines, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’” 

    Fact-Checking the Memo

    Before evaluating my central argument, let’s see what I got right with the three factors. The occupation of Iraq was indeed unsuccessful in many respects, though it lasted officially for only eight years, not a full decade as I predicted. US troops returned in 2014 as part of the campaign against the Islamic State, and approximately 5,000 are still there today (though Trump has announced a reduction to 3,500 by November).

    The debacle of the Iraq War has deeply affected US military thinking. It has made it more difficult for the United States to mobilize popular support and international backing for military campaigns. But during the Obama era, the US largely shifted from “boots on the ground” to war at a distance through airstrikes and drone warfare. The military budget, as a result of economic pressures, peaked in 2010 at $849 billion and then began to fall (just as I predicted but not as significantly as I would have liked to see).

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    China has steadily strengthened its global position since 2007. The US economy remains larger than the Chinese economy, as measured by nominal GDP. But if you look at GDP by purchasing power parity, China surpassed the US in 2017. Either way, of course, China is still behind the United States in GDP per capita. Whether China on balance has become economically more powerful than the US remains controversial.

    What is not controversial, however, is China’s creation of a rival multilateralism. It decided to do this not through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), as I predicted, but through a set of institutions that it could more easily control: the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank it launched in 2014 and the various “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiatives that it started in 2013. Many European countries, by the way, joined the AIIB, over the objections of the US. Those defections didn’t end the transatlantic relationship, but they certainly weakened it.

    At the moment, the US is focused on China’s nationalism and the more assertive foreign policy of Xi Jinping. But even as it clashes with certain of its neighbors — India, Vietnam — China remains more focused on building a web of strong economic and diplomatic relationships around the world. And that makes China a more powerful rival for global influence than the flexing of its muscles in its neighborhood.

    Finally, let’s take a look at the US economy. The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 turned into a full-blown financial crisis the following year when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008. Nearly 10 million Americans lost their houses to foreclosure between 2006 and 2014, and less than a third of them would buy another house. In 2008, 2.6 million Americans lost their jobs. The housing market didn’t recover by 2009. But the Obama administration stabilized the economy with a significant bailout of the banks, and the US economy would eventually recover.

    But the financial crisis, in part because of the bank bailouts, also helped shift enormous resources to the wealthy. The resentment that caused, in the US and elsewhere around the world, helped generate a wave of right-wing politics that eventually deposited Donald Trump in the White House.

    Trump and the Next President

    In 2007, I could not have predicted the ultimate political triumph of Donald Trump. In fact, up until election night 2016, I still expected him to go down to defeat. Instead, I predicted that the backlash to Obama’s tepid, middle-of-the-road politics would hit in 2020. America B, the large part of the country that got hit hard by the financial crisis and never recovered, was itching for revenge. As I wrote in June 2016:

    “As long as America B is left in the lurch by what passes for modernity, it will inevitably try to pull the entire country back to some imagined golden age of the past before all those ‘others’ hijacked the red, white, and blue. Donald Trump has hitched his presidential wagon to America B. The real nightmare, however, is likely to emerge in 2020 or thereafter, if a far more capable politician who embraces similar retrograde positions rides America B into Washington.”

    Today, America faces a much more serious economic crisis. The stock market has barely taken any notice, as it heads back to its historic highs. Nor has Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires suffered from all the business closures and surging unemployment (indeed, Bezos has benefited tremendously from it all). America B, already weakened by President Trump’s trade war with China, is getting hit by the COVID-19 pandemic both economically and medically.

    So, it turns out that my memo to the 2020 president is eerily prescient. The cratering economy is shaping up to be the downfall of Trump. Let’s assume that the Democrats win in November. If they want to save the country — and that is the goal, not restoring America to its unipolar position — they’d better not repeat the mistakes of the Obama era. The cold, hard bottom line is that stabilizing the economy is not sufficient, particularly if it means locking in the economic inequality of US society, preserving the unsustainable nature of US manufacturing and agriculture, and relying on financial services to pull the economy out of its current hole.

    The next president has to deal with all the debacles of the Trump era — the failure to contain the pandemic, the miscalculated confrontations with China, the self-defeating hostility to internationalism. But the next president must also ensure that Trumpism doesn’t return in a politically more palatable form. To do that will require the kind of economic transformation that Obama didn’t have the political nerve (or the congressional backing) to enact.

    To win in November, the Democrats have to remember that simple electoral catchphrase of the 1990s. To govern successfully and remain in charge in Washington, however, they’d better repeat to themselves an updated mantra: It’s the sustainable economy, stupid.

    *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Israel and the UAE: The Myth of Normalizing Abnormalities

    As the El Al flight 971 touched down in Abu Dhabi, a number of people looking at the aircraft wondered about the significance of the message it carried. The number for what both sides claimed to be Israel’s first-ever commercial flight to the UAE was the dialing code for the Emirates, with the return flight to be 972 — Israel’s dialing code. More significantly, the aircraft’s name, clearly written on the cheek of its front fuselage, Kiryat Gat, is that of a Palestinian village, Iraq al-Manshiyya, whose population was forcibly removed by the Israeli Defense Forces in 1948 and ultimately annexed to become the Israeli city of Kiryat Gat.

    The symbolism was unmistakable. UAE’s military strongman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, had earlier tweeted that his decision to “normalize” relations with Israel was part of a deal that will stop the annexation of the West Bank. Immediately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by contradicting Bin Zayed, stating that his decision was only a temporary suspension, requested by President Donald Trump, an indication that even the suspension itself was not influenced by Bin Zayed.

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    The deal with Bin Zayed, Netanyahu affirmed, was “peace for peace.” Nothing more. The aircraft’s name was a confirmation that even as the flight carried the Arabic, English and Hebrew words for peace, it was not intended to revoke Israel’s annexation program. Ultimately, like Kiryat Gat before, the West Bank will also be annexed.

    How Normal Is Normal?

    It is the sovereign right of every country to define its relations with any other party. What Bin Zayed has done is revoke the promises made to the Palestinians by the UAE and other Arab nations, including the current undertaking, first declared in the Arab summit conference in Beirut in 2002 and reaffirmed as recently as 2017. Known as the Arab Peace Initiative, it offered normalization, but only if certain conditions were met. The UAE is a signatory to the original and subsequent declarations, including the 2017 document.

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    This and similar earlier declarations over the years by Arab governments had prevented Palestinians from seeking their own methods for liberating their lands. Negotiations, mainly controlled by Arab governments guided by their own political and economic agendas, had monopolized the Palestinian struggle for the past seven decades. In the process, Israel had become more powerful, imposing an increasing fait accompli by creating more settlements, while Palestinians still remain scattered in refugee camps, generation after generation, in hope that Arab governments will ultimately help them regain their rights. With Mohammed bin Zayed deciding to normalize relations with Tel Aviv, the question that springs to mind is how normal can relations be when one party to that normalization refuses to abide by normal behavior and in fact continues to evict, imprison, confiscate land, bulldoze houses and create more forced realities on the ground that deny the Palestinians some of the most basic human rights?

    Under what definition can a relationship between Israel and the UAE be termed “normal,” especially given Abu Dhabi’s repeated commitments to the Palestinians under the Arab League Charter and Arab summit conferences? By this normalization, Bin Zayed has unconditionally opened to Israel doors that were promised only as part of a comprehensive settlement for the Palestinians. This is not normalization. This is a sellout and betrayal of Palestinians who were denied — through Arab compromises and declarations — to seek their own route and method to a solution.

    The UAE’s abrogation of its commitments is not the first one we see. The US has abrogated its commitments under several international agreements. And the Palestinians themselves have been on the receiving end of numerous Israeli violations of their treaty commitments toward Palestinians, including many UN resolutions that obligate Israel, as a UN member, to obey. But the UAE used a pretext that the Palestinians find insulting — the claim that this normalization is part of a deal that will stop annexation of the West Bank. This claim is not only a foolhardy lie, as Netanyahu’s immediate denial shows, but also demonstrates political immaturity and lack of understanding about the 72-year Palestinian struggle.

    The Palestinian fight has never been about stopping or suspending Israel’s West Bank annexation but about the entire history of Palestinian rights that are being systematically eradicated while Arab governments continue to hijack their cause. If indeed Bin Zayed is correct that such an understanding exists, then Netanyahu’s turnaround will probably be just the first, but certainly not the last, that the UAE will experience in its dealings with Israel. The well-known Palestinian politician, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, told RT: “The UAE will experience what we have seen many times over the years. Israel doesn’t respect any treaties, any covenants, any promises it makes.”

    Of Dying and Forgetting

    Referring to Palestinians in the diaspora, Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, had said, “The old will die. The young will forget.” More than 70 years after the creation of the state of Israel and the forced eviction of Palestinians, many of them hold the keys to their homes which are passed over to their children. Every year as Israel celebrates another anniversary of its creation, Palestinians mourn another anniversary of the Nakba — the Catastrophe — that descended upon them. The old have died, and the young refuse to forget.

    Khalid al-Sheikh Ali, a Palestinian living under Israeli occupation in Al Shaafath refugee camp, told Al Jazeera: “We live here in prison. We live in a camp while we have a plot of land inside Palestine — it is empty. You want me to be an intellectual human being, a well-informed human being, a non-violent human being and so on. But I am not living like a human being here. You go out, you see the army, the overrunning drains, the piling garbage, the humidity that is eating into us and our dwellings, the dirty drinking water. The most painful thing we suffer, everyday, is to try to go outside the barriers.”

    This misery is being inflicted upon Palestinians to force them to abandon their homeland, throw away their keys, forget and escape. Instead, they endure, passing the barbed-wire barriers that separate them from their homes the keys to which they still hold on to, sure that they will return. Indeed, given the never-ending misery Palestinians inside and outside Palestine suffer, it is impossible to imagine Ben Gurion or any of his successors ever realizing their dream. Enduring pain has its own way of sustaining memories.

    In an act that again demonstrated the inability of Arab rulers to resolve Arab problems, Iran and Turkey — repeatedly accused of interfering in Arab affairs — have been vindicated by Bin Zayed. Arabs, especially Palestinians, indeed need to look to regional solutions instead of Arab solutions. Clearly, Arab rulers have decided that self-preservation takes precedence over national preservation. The deal with Israel, supported by the US, aims at enabling Netanyahu and Trump to win elections with the quid pro quo of helping Mohammed bin Zayed push back the growing internal opposition to his rule. The security agenda in this deal unmistakably stands out by the deafening silence of the dealmakers on the subject. Going forward, this deal will result in more draconian methods to silence the growing opposition. 

    Following the arrival of flight Kiryat Gat in the UAE, two explosions erupted almost simultaneously, one in Abu Dhabi, on a road leading to the airport, and another in Dubai. The government claimed gas leaks to be the cause for both. The coincidence and the timing are an uncanny precedence, in a country where such incidents are unheard of.

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    No Credible Alternative to the US Grand Strategy in Europe

    Never in the last 75 years has the US-led liberal order in Europe been intellectually more contested. Some in the United States, especially among realist and neorealist scholars, disapprove of what is commonly referred to as the West-centric institutional and rules-based order. They generally raise three interrelated, skeptical and somewhat pessimistic assumptions for growing isolationist sentiments in the US.

    First, there is are good reasons to think that the unipolar moment is coming to an end. As America’s primacy gradually declines with the rise of China, its grand strategy of liberal hegemony should also dissipate, including its institutional leg of collective security in Europe to which the US has given too much and received too little in return. Second, the Euro-Atlantic liberal order has generated more problems than solutions in the post-Cold War period. NATO expansion beyond the Iron Curtain poisoned relations with Russia and provoked unnecessary tensions in Georgia and Ukraine. The United States, so the argument goes, should gradually reduce its military presence in Europe and turn “NATO over to the Europeans.”

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    Third, Russia, in reality, is not as big a peril to European security as it is generally portrayed and perceived in the US and across Europe, for that matter. Moscow is driven more by defensive aims (or so it claims), so balancing between Russia and the European states on one hand and a restrained US foreign policy on the other is a better way forward for everyone. If we are to assume this logic is correct, then those who still prefer the liberal Euro-Atlantic unipolarity are wrong. Are they? 

    No Competitors Yet

    On first assumption, the United States is still by all major accounts the top dog on the world stage. It is wealthier, more powerful and more influential relative to any potential competitor in the international system despite an ongoing debate, additionally fueled by global disruptive events such as COVID-19. Its geography, an often-cited structural advantage, will persist despite the pandemic. While the US is flanked by two enormous oceans and surrounded by much weaker and friendly states, Russia and China, on the other hand, face balancing behavior from powerful regional rivals coupled with having ongoing territorial disputes.

    Second, Washington’s annual defense spending is at least twice as much as Moscow’s and Beijing’s — combined. America’s preponderance of power and strategic advance is far more superior considering increased military spending of its formal allies in the European and Indo-Pacific theaters. Out of 15 countries with the largest military spending, 11 are security partners of the United States. Russia and China neither have formal allies among the top 15, nor do any of their allies believe that an attack on one is an attack against all.

    Third, the US still boasts the world’s largest economy that can afford to fund the most powerful military in the world despite a disproportionately hard economic downturn triggered by the pandemic. Its global GDP share is still larger than the global GDP share of China and Russia combined, even by factoring in GDP reductions in the US this July. Moreover, the share of the global economic output by NATO members reaches more than 40% in world proportions and roughly 50% if other democratic allies in the Pacific theater are incorporated as well.

    America’s geopolitical leverage is even greater considering three additional factors. The primacy of the US dollar has not waned in 2020 just as it had not waned during 2008 financial crisis. The US also rests on soft-power capabilities. The top spots in global rankings, such as the Soft Power 30, are held by democracies — the United States was in fifth position in 2019. Russia and China are ranked far lower. And third, its population growth rate has also been relatively high.

    On the other hand, the Russian and Chinese workforce is aging, judging by all available measures. Given all these factors, it seems, as Gregory Mitrovich suggests, “wholly premature, short of a devastating major event, to claim that we are witnessing the end of America’s global dominance.” Equally premature is any call for American withdrawal from Europe, where the US is not only unchallenged but is largely accepted as benevolent.

    Whole and Free

    On second assumption, from a realist or neorealist perspective, a more powerful country does not necessarily mean a more attractive choice. What makes great powers more appealing, especially in the European theater, rests on an enduring combination of other capabilities grounded in less tangible resources. In other words, dominant powers are to be feared, but no liberal European state in the post-World War II era has ever felt a military threat from American hegemony — as Gilford John Ikenberry put it, “reluctant, open and highly institutionalized — or, in a word, liberal.” Some may correctly argue this was an act of deterrence against the common threat of the Soviet bloc in the bipolar system.

    However, when the unipolar era began, America’s liberal primacy has continued to offer system-wide benefits both within Europe’s old and new democracies with lasting and far-reaching consequences for their peace and stability. Its benevolent leadership, for example, stood shoulder to shoulder with the Germans seeking freedom and reunification despite some opposition from Paris and London. Washington also laid out its vision for Europe’s new security order and sought to keep a reunited Germany in NATO. Without such leadership, France and the United Kingdom would have been more fearful of Germany’s unilateral plans, let alone weaker neighbors that would find new realities difficult to balance against. As one senior European diplomat put it, “We can agree on U.S. leadership, but not on one of our own.”

    American leadership also persuaded Ukraine — also to a great benefit of Russia’s vital interests — to relinquish possession of nuclear arms it had inherited after the dissolution of the USSR. Without such leadership, Ukraine would probably have had second thoughts. As Ukraine’s then-Defense Minister Konstantin Morozov put it, plainly, “Ukraine would have posed no threat to anyone if, hypothetically speaking, it had possessed tactical nuclear weapons.” Had American leadership missed this opportunity, other states in the region would have also regarded their respective security distinctly from each other. Germany, for example, would have also been more tempted to contemplate nuclear deterrence at some point.

    To zoom out a little wider, American liberal hegemony in general, and the NATO alliance with its institutional and rules-based order in particular, attracted central, eastern and southeastern European countries — former illiberal states — to choose a common prescription for perennial peace and prosperity in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. New democracies from beyond the Iron Curtain have managed to transform themselves: Their economies have largely prospered, and their political systems liberalized despite recent authoritarian tendencies in Hungary and Poland. While some variation does exist, almost all new NATO members remain “free” according to the 2020 Freedom House scores. The only exceptions are Hungary, Montenegro and North Macedonia, which are marked as “partially free.”

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    NATO enlargement has been a net positive on security grounds as well. Europe has largely enjoyed peace and stability for the past 30 years. New allies offered themselves as foundational military partners and have willingly chosen to share the security burden to fight alongside the US. This mutual attraction within the Euro-Atlantic alliance has been so overwhelming in historical proportions that structural realists struggle to explain its extended lifespan and recent vitality. This includes the two latest enlargement rounds in southeastern Europe that happened on President Donald Trump’s watch, not sufficient but certainly greater share of collective defense burdens by European member states, regular military deployments and common military exercises all over the continent, as well as effective multilateral aid using NATO capacities during the COVID-19 crisis. This suggests, contrary to many pessimistic views, that American liberal hegemony in Europe is far from being in decline.  

    One can only imagine the different scenarios had the US decided to pursue a more restrained foreign policy in the region. Not only supporters but also critics of NATO enlargement also offered the possibility that Euro-Atlantic adversaries, namely Russia, would have been emboldened to expand the Kremlin’s sphere of influence beyond the current lines had any geopolitical vacuum existed in central and eastern Europe. J. J. Mearsheimer, for example, argues in his book that great powers “are always searching for opportunities to gain power over their rivals, with hegemony as their final goal.” Stephen M. Walt also conceded that relations with Moscow, provided Russia regained some of its former strength, “might still have worsened.”

    Counterfactuals such as these can hardly be verified. However, Russia’s brutal treatment of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine made it very clear what actually happens with states in geopolitical gray areas. Belarus, which falls in Russia’s sphere of influence, is not happy either.

    Net Positive

    American liberal hegemony has also been a net positive when it comes to security in the Balkans — if measured by the progress on where Balkan states started from and not their distance from a liberal Western world. US leadership, for example, contained an outbreak of nationalism in the region after the EU demonstrated neither effectiveness nor capacity of preemption in the early 1990s. The Clinton administration successfully brokered the Dayton Peace Agreement in a positive-sum game whereby Republika Srpska received formal recognition as a political entity within the sovereign state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the post-Dayton phase, the liberal-led European order, primarily NATO and the EU, patiently put in place new structures and policies so the country can move forward with the peace process.

    Notwithstanding NATO’s intervention in Serbia in 1999 and CIA interference in 2000, the US and its allies also used an array of softer policy instruments to promote successful democratic change in Serbia. The International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and former activists from new NATO members advised and supported independent civil organizations and opposition parties in Serbia to replace the “Butcher of the Balkans” Slobodan Milosevic in a democratic election. In recent years, Washington and Brussels also played an instrumental role in brokering the Prespa Agreement between Northern Macedonia and Greece. A bilateral deal between two bordering countries in 2018 put an end to the long-standing name dispute on the one hand and unlocked the Euro-Atlantic membership perspective for Northern Macedonia on the other.

    Some of these hard-won historical achievements could have not been possible had the US decided to pursue a more restrained foreign policy. In all likelihood, weaker American leadership in Europe in the post-Cold War era would have created more problems, making European states less liberal and more domestically nationalist, rendering the European periphery full of prolonged proxy wars and skirmishes.

    Russia would have also had more space to moderate such conflicts with its power-projection capabilities in the region. Likewise, absent integration into Western institutions, Europe’s soft underbelly would have exposed itself to sudden geopolitical stress bringing different local and regional powers into direct collision.

    In Russia’s Image

    On third assumption, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his speech at the Munich security conference in 2007 that “the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.” Thirteen years later, speaking at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov endorsed a multipolar concert with new centers of influence at the international level and common geopolitical space from Lisbon to Jakarta at the wider regional level. Lavrov also stated that “Our common European home needs serious reconstruction if we want all of its residents to live in prosperity.”

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    On a mission to correct “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” — the collapse of the Soviet Union — the Kremlin is practically interested in replacing an existing liberal order, primarily the one extended beyond the Iron Curtain, with favorable and less democratic European regimes that fit Russia’s image. Second, it is also interested in replacing the hierarchic order in Europe with some unknown and certainly more anarchic multipolar structure. However, it is not surprising that the Kremlin’s foreign policy attracted limited support from the former Soviet republics and other central and eastern European countries. Most of them continue to fear Russia. Unlike their attraction to the US, their anxiety toward Moscow can be explained from their shared national memory of what can happen under the rule of an illiberal hegemon — or a potential hegemon that is, by the logic of Walt’s balance of threat theory, too close, too powerful and too offensive.

    So far, all attempts from the Kremlin to impose its own illiberal and structural order in Europe, largely constrained by its limits of hard and soft power, have only made young democracies and vulnerable countries scattered around the European periphery more divided and, eventually, more anarchic. In August 2008, Russia’s military intervention in Georgia restored the Kremlin’s geopolitical relevance in the European neighborhood. However, Georgia was divided between Russian-backed self-proclaimed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia on one hand and the rest of Georgia on the other.

    This small triumph encouraged Russia to bully again by lopping off Crimea from neighboring Ukraine in 2014. Ukraine was then equally forcefully divided along similar geostrategic and domestic lines between Kyiv’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations and secessionist tendencies by a pro-Russian minority in the east. Some have argued that Moscow’s incursions into Georgia and Ukraine were conducted preemptively and in reaction to perceived NATO enlargement and were therefore defensive in nature. Mearsheimer famously rejected prevailing wisdom in the West that this problem is largely the result of Russian aggression.

    Stephen F. Cohen also justified Russia’s interest in restoring traditional zones of national security on its borders, including Ukraine. However, Russia marched into Syria, dropping bunker-buster bombs on Aleppo, supported mercenaries in Libya and became increasingly offensive in the Balkans — not Russia’s “near abroad” but deep inside NATO and the EU’s eastern borders. The Kremlin has reportedly fanned the flames of internal crisis in Montenegro in 2015-16 and Northern Macedonia in 2017-18. Milorad Dodik, a pro-Russian Serb leader in Bosnia and Herzegovina called his own country “an impossible state.” In February this year, he bluntly declared: “Goodbye B&H, welcome RSexit.”

    Serbia and Russia carried out a joint Slavic Shield military exercise in 2019, including Russia’s first use of its advanced S-400 missile defense system abroad. In the meantime, Serbia also received Russian donations of MIG-29 fighter jets, T-72 tanks, BRDM-2MS armored vehicles and purchased, at Putin’s suggestion, the Pantsir S-1 air defense system in 2020. Russia’s appetite, therefore, goes well beyond its immediate neighborhood. It openly challenges the established liberal order in Europe by taking advantage of tensions between Serbia and Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro, and different ethnicities within North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and so on.

    This revisionist path doesn’t lead to security in Europe but rather to new skirmishes and security dilemmas in the Balkans, a region divided between rival power dyads, which is at worst all too reminiscent of the 1900s, when unintended consequences of nationalist fervor led to the murder of millions.

    Bottom Line

    Contrary to claims that the US strategy of liberal hegemony is generally a source of endless trouble, supported by real failures and terrible misadventures of social engineering in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya, its mission in Europe was historically successful and mutually beneficial both before and after the Cold War. American leadership in Europe has been a net-positive force, essentially without US military casualties, mutually acceptable and institutional — all missing in other troubled areas. It has secured undisrupted peace dividends among major European powers, provided various public goods to newcomers from beyond the Iron Curtain, and eventually brought peace to the Balkans after the international community failed to prevent genocide in Srebrenica.

    The United States, which is still the preeminent global power, does not need to reassess this grand strategy in Europe or quit NATO, an alliance encompassing nearly a billion people and half the world’s military and economic might. Down that road lie many other long-lasting win-win outcomes as well as serious challenges that are better faced collectively.

    An alternative order that is promoted by some American realist and neorealist pundits on one side and revisionist challengers in the Kremlin on the other might have different motivations, means and ends. However, their common preference for dissolving NATO or having different poles in the European theater brings, by logic of structural realism, crosscutting relationships among different axes of conflict. That gloomy trajectory, if it ever happens, would make a perfect setting for a 21st-century Gavrilo Princip to fire his bullet again and trigger a chain of regrettable events here, there and everywhere.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Why Are the Indian and Chinese Economies Decoupling?

    Many experts argue India is the weaker power unable to take on China. In an article in Foreign Policy, James Crabtree argues that a trade war with China would be a bad idea for India. In his view, India’s “military is inefficient, underequipped, and dogged by procurement corruption scandals.” To develop its military strength, India needs a dynamic economy, and an “inward economic direction” would only benefit China in the long run. Therefore, an India–China decoupling is a terrible idea.

    Han and Hindu Nationalism Come Face to Face

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    These analysts are wrong. Their argument against decoupling is based on three implicit assumptions. First, India is a deeply-divided country unable to act or respond decisively. Second, India is dependent on the Chinese economy for its growth. Third, China’s rise is inexorable and India has no option but to come to terms with it. These assumptions are true, but it is an error of judgment to treat them as unqualified truths.

    A Trip Down Memory Lane

    For Indians with longer historical memories than many of these experts, these arguments sound familiar. Anglo-Saxon publications have long hectored, advised and moralized on Indian issues. On July 5, 2014, the editorial board of The New York Times made a case against India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. To be admitted, India needed “to sign the treaty that prohibits nuclear testing, stop producing fissile material, and begin talks with its rivals on nuclear weapons containment.”

    In response, Gurmeet Kanwal, a retired Indian brigadier-turned-defense analyst, called the editorial “partisan and condescending.” Some even saw it as neocolonial. He pointed to “the existential threat posed by two nuclear-armed states on India’s borders” that led India to develop its nuclear weapons capability. Kanwal argued that India had been a “responsible nuclear power” with a “positive record on non-proliferation” and had “consistently supported total nuclear disarmament.” In typical Sikh humor, he advised nuclear ayatollahs to focus on real proliferators and let go of the cap, roll-back and eliminate (CRE) stance they had adopted against India since the 1990s.

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    Just as India stood up to the US on the nuclear issue in the 1990s, it is capable of standing up to China in 2020. An India–China conflict is highly undesirable. Ideally, New Delhi and Beijing should be able to work something out over endless cups of tea. However, sanctimonious advice from foreign experts about dire consequences of an India–China decoupling has to be taken with a bucket, not a pinch, of salt.

    In 1998, India went nuclear despite dire predictions for its economy. Many in Washington assumed that India depended on the West for its economy. Barely seven years prior, India had experienced a serious financial crisis. The Gulf War and slowing exports to the US crippled an economy by rising deficits and increasing debt. The precipitous decline of the Soviet Union meant India no longer had a godfather to bail it out. So severe was India’s 1991 currency crisis that it had to pledge its gold reserves and liberalize its economy to get a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. In 1998, India was better off than in 1991 but certainly not in a strong position. Nuclear tests put it under immense pressure.

    At the UN, the Conference on Disarmament condemned Indian nuclear tests. In the preceding years, India had watched the West ignore the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and fete China for its economic reforms. Condemnation for nuclear tests strengthened, not weakened, India’s response. It stood up to the West, ignored experts and upended nuclear apartheid. Today, India is again in a mood to defy experts and stand up to China.

    Like Love, Trade Is Complicated

    As troops amass on the India–China border, a full-scale economic war has broken out. It is leading to a structural break in the Indian economy. Both public opinion and political leadership is now committed to decoupling from China. In India, there is a ban on 59 Chinese apps by government authorities. Major trade bodies have formally announced boycotts of Chinese products. For instance, the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has listed 3,000 such products. CAIT is a national umbrella organization with 40,000 smaller trade bodies and 70 million traders as members. The government has tightened country of origin rules for e-retailers and other sellers.

    Demand for Chinese products is declining. Xiaomi is no longer India’s top-selling phone. Samsung has replaced it. Increasingly, selling Chinese goods using Southeast Asian free trade agreements is becoming difficult. The existing business model of buying in China and selling in India is under pressure.

    In an additional twist, Indian tax authorities have conducted raids on Chinese companies and individuals for money laundering. It led to the arrest of a Chinese national. Apparently, he was married to a woman from India’s northeast border state of Mizoram, had spuriously obtained an Indian passport and been arrested earlier for espionage. It seems trade is not as simple as experts imagine it to be. Intelligence, influence and geopolitics are inextricably intertwined with trade, business and investment. In the India–China economic relationship, three largely forgotten factors are noteworthy.

    First, India enhanced trade ties with China not only for economic reasons but also geopolitical ones. Becoming a key market and investment destination for China was supposed to reduce the risk of conflict and wean Beijing off Islamabad. Aggressive Chinese actions have made India reconsider this strategy and change tack.

    Second, India’s manufacturing sector is reasonably well developed but has suffered from Chinese competition since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. A 2018 parliamentary report concluded that Chinese imports were playing “a negative role for [India’s] domestic industry.” The report warned about the loss of jobs, an increase in bad debts for banks, a decline in tax revenues and a worrying dependence on China for critical products. It concluded that China does not play by WTO rules and “the problem of Chinese dumping is a matter of concern across the globe.”

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    India is not alone in having concerns about China’s abuse of WTO rules. A 2018 report to the US Congress expressed concern at “China’s continued embrace of a state-led, mercantilist approach to the economy and trade.” It detailed “substantial costs borne by WTO members as a result of China’s problematic trade regime” and  the challenges presented by its “non-market economic system.” Given China’s track record, there is a case to be made for India taking a more protectionist path.

    There is another tiny little matter. Protectionism has played a key role in industrialization for any latecomer. Furthermore, industrialization has been the key driver of economic growth. In a 2019 article, one of these authors observed that the first major act passed by Congress was the Tariff Act of July 4, 1789. Without protecting its infant industry, the US would not have emerged as an industrial power.

    Since 1978, China has followed the American playbook on steroids. It has powered through the largest and fastest industrialization in history. Its companies enjoy the advantages of infrastructure, cheap financing and political support. Therefore, they have been able to achieve economies of scale. As a result, Indian companies have been blown away. An India-China decoupling might give sectors from aerospace components to advanced pharmaceuticals a second chance.

    Third, Chinese imports into India are nice-to-have, not must-have, goods. Demand for them is elastic unlike the inelastic demand for energy from the Middle East and the US. An India-China trade war that leads to a decoupling of the two economies could lead to short-term pain but has a strong rationale for the longer term.

    The Shape of Things to Come

    In any case, experts forget that India is unlikely to turn entirely inward as it did after independence in 1947. Recently, billions of dollars have poured into India from the US. Reliance Jio, an Indian mobile internet company, raked in $15 billion in 10 weeks. This is indicative of a deeper trend. Given new geopolitical imperatives, India is now looking to boost economic ties with friendly powers. It wants Korean, Japanese, European and American firms to set up shop in the country. Foreign market players who can act nimbly would be in a good position to grab some of the approximately $60 billion China’s trade surplus with India. There are new investment, manufacturing and trading opportunities emerging as the status quo changes and a new order emerges.

    Many economists predict a short-term price shock as Chinese goods stop coming into the country. They forget that India has struggled with jobless growth even during the best of times. Decoupling with China could boost domestic manufacturing not only for large but also for medium and small industries. This would increase employment, tax revenues and even demand thanks to a multiplier effect. Improved job figures further increase political support for decoupling and decrease India’s need to subsidize agriculture so heavily. For decades, agricultural subsidies have put pressure on public finances. If a lower amount is spent on subsidies, pressure on the fiscal deficit would abate.

    To sum up, India has strong reasons to decouple and no longer consider WTO rules sacrosanct. A tectonic shift is underway. After World War II, a new rules-based order emerged. The end of the Cold War strengthened this order and led to visions that Western democracy was the final destination for all societies. With polarization and partisanship at home, Western democracies themselves are in peril. The order that emerged in 1991 is crumbling and a new one is about to emerge. History offers us lessons as to what to expect.

    In the past, India and China focused on their spheres of influence with the Himalayas keeping them apart. Both prospered. In this age of trade, peace and prosperity, a Chola empire based in the modern-day southeastern state of Tamil Nadu ruled Malaysia (Putrajaya), Indonesia (Srivijaya), Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The Middle Kingdom held sway over Mongolia, Korea and Japan. Both India and China could go back to sticking to their historic spheres and to trading with each other.

    At the moment, China has followed salami tactics and encroached on territory India claims as its own. China has also been meddling in Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, India’s key neighbors. Since  1963, China has been in a close alliance with Pakistan. Yet China has never played a role in the Indian subcontinent and cannot suddenly turn into an overlord here. Therefore, close India-China economic ties no longer make strategic sense.

    Additionally, China disingenuously claims to meet India halfway while insisting that the onus to improve the border situation lies entirely with its neighbor. This is a one-way, not halfway, diplomacy that suggests aggressive intent. The Chinese also seem determined to win the war of narratives and are enlisting the support of free market ayatollahs to do so. It is only natural that the Indian narrative is bound to be different. It is in sync with the new realities of the day, which drive India’s decision to decouple its economy from China. Trade, investment and deep economic ties are a jolly good thing with allies and friends, not with rivals and foes.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Can Colombia’s Former President Get a Fair Trial?

    On Tuesday, August 4, via a short and unassuming tweet, the former president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe Velez, informed the world that he was placed under house arrest. The news sent shockwaves throughout South America’s political circles and sparked protests across Colombia. Uribe’s house arrest order, issued by the supreme court of justice as part of a case investigating witness tampering and false testimony, is surprising and problematic for several reasons.

    For starters, it is the first time that a former president has been deprived of personal liberty in Colombia, a country where more than one recent head of state has questionable records, such as campaign financing by major drug cartels. Secondly, since March, Colombia has been in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which means that individuals are for the most part already confined within their residences. Moreover, as former president and senator, Uribe doesn’t go anywhere in Colombia without a substantial security apparatus.

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    Thirdly, the former president is well known both nationally and internationally, which translates to extremely low flight risk and one that could have been addressed by merely confiscating his passport. Adding to the controversy of the supreme court’s order is the fact that, as recently as last year, individuals who pose actual security and flight risks, such as Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) leaders Ivan Marquez and Jesus Santrich, were not preemptively detained despite probable cause and ended up fleeing Colombia to set up a dissident guerrilla movement.

    Lastly, Uribe should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, like any other citizen, as outlined in Article 29 of Colombia’s Constitution. However, it seems that given his high profile and political history, the supreme court is treating the former president differently. This is problematic for the rule of law in Colombia.

    Irregularities in the Process

    Under Uribe’s presidency, Colombia’s security was largely restored, narco-terrorism was fought head-on by the national government, numerous FARC leaders were captured, over a thousand drug traffickers were extradited to the United States, and large paramilitary groups demobilized under the auspices of the Justice and Peace Law. Uribe’s work and legacy, much of which was implemented in close coordination with the United States at the time, is also recognized internationally. One of the global voices against Colombia’s former president’s house arrest is US Vice President Mike Pence, who, on August 14, tweeted in solidarity, asking that Uribe be allowed to “defend himself as a free man.”

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    Given his former status as senator, Uribe’s case, which happens to be against left-wing Senator Ivan Cepeda, had Colombia’s supreme court as its original jurisdiction, in accordance with Article 235 of the constitution. Specifically, this case began in 2012 when Uribe filed a legal complaint against Cepeda accusing him of paying bribes to imprisoned criminals in exchange for testimony that would incriminate the former president and his brother for paramilitary activities during Uribe’s time as mayor of Medellin and governor of Antioquia. In 2018, an election year in Colombia, the supreme court flipped the accusation and charged Uribe with allegedly paying witnesses to testify in his favor and against Cepeda.

    Since its inception, the process against Uribe has been overly politicized and marred by irregularities, including the admission of illegally obtained wiretap recordings as evidence in the case. Over 20,000 illegal interceptions were made to Uribe’s cellphone, under a judicial order that was supposed to tap Congressmember Nilton Cordoba, not the former president. Making matters worse, as soon as the analyst from Colombia’s attorney general’s office in charge of the wiretap realized that the cellphone belonged to Uribe and not Cordoba, he notified his superiors. However, the illegal interceptions continued for nearly a month and were eventually submitted to the supreme court as evidence.

    There is a history of animosity between the former president and members of Colombia’s supreme court of justice due to alleged wiretapping of the court’s premises as well as judges’ phones by the security services during Uribe’s presidency. Compounded by the evident lack of procedural guarantees for a fair trial, Uribe resigned his seat as senator shortly after he was placed under house arrest and triggered a jurisdictional change. His case has now been passed on to Colombia’s attorney general and a lower court, in which Uribe expects a less politicized and more fair trial.

    The Need for Judicial Reform

    Although Uribe’s house arrest remains in force until a new judge takes over the case and decides whether to revoke or maintain the preliminary detention, public outcry has been heard throughout the country. The most salient example of an institutional double standard is the recent case of FARC commanders like El Paisa, who were never placed under house arrest pending trial as part of the 2016 peace process and then escaped to take up arms again. Observing this precedent, the judicial measure against Uribe is disproportionate, particularly since the former president has attended all of his court hearings as scheduled and been responsive to judicial inquiries.

    Finally, the controversy around the judiciary’s handling of Uribe’s case has rekindled the calls for constitutional reform in Colombia. Reforming the country’s complex judicial branch seems for many to be the only way to rescue the institutional mechanisms, which are currently failing within the Colombian justice system. In this time of uncertainty, the alternative of carrying out judicial reform would give a new direction to the presidency of Ivan Duque and would provide a unique opportunity for Colombia to emerge institutionally strengthened.

    One of the main issues with Colombia’s judicial system is that the country has not one but three top courts: the supreme court of justice, the council of state and the constitutional court. Another problem lies with the fact that the members of both the supreme court and the council of state select their membership themselves, without much executive or legislative oversight, albeit in accordance with Article 231 of the constitution. Having such a closed and endogamous nature has led to judicial malpractice and corruption in Colombia’s judiciary, such as the infamous “Cartel of Robes” scandal that saw supreme court judges abuse their independence to derail cases and stifle investigations by the attorney general in exchange for hefty bribes.

    While Alvaro Uribe’s case is likely to drag on for months, there is a higher likelihood that the process will have a lower profile and a more balanced outcome now that it has left the supreme court’s docket. Nevertheless, the judicial branch will now be increasingly seen as a politicized institution, and there are important voices in the country calling for both a consolidated supreme judiciary and a more transparent selection process for its members. Already in a bind due to the pandemic and its socioeconomic fallout, Colombia’s government must now address growing calls for constitutional reform in an increasingly polarized political climate.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Nearly two centuries ago, a QAnon-like conspiracy theory propelled candidates to Congress

    Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Republican congressional primary win in Georgia ensures, in all likelihood, that the heavily Republican district will be represented by a QAnon conspiracy theorist in the 117th Congress.
    But Greene was just one of several primary candidates who embraced the conspiracy, which coincides with the trend of “Q” paraphernalia appearing at Republican rallies.
    The conspiracy originated in 2017, when a mysterious poster named “Q” began posting to the internet message board 4chan. Q soon amassed a following, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that its popularity exploded. Q’s near-daily posts detail the existence of a satanic cabal of pedophiles that secretly control the government and other institutions. They promise that the enterprise, run by Democrats and celebrities, will soon be taken down by Trump.
    This may sound like a new development – some might say a new low – in American politics. But it isn’t the first time candidates have promoted conspiracies as part of their platform to win seats in Congress.
    In the 1820s, an anti-Masonic conspiracy theory dominated politics in the Northeast. It even birthed a political party, the Anti-Masonic Party, which ended up holding its own presidential convention and nominating the United States’ first third-party candidate.
    A mysterious disappearance
    The Freemasons was founded as an upper-class fraternal organization in early-18th century Britain. Membership quickly grew, and many influential American politicians and thinkers – including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Paul Revere – joined the ranks.
    Its secretive nature, elaborate rituals and the wealth and power of its members made the Masons fodder for conspiracy theorists from the start. Because it often challenged the power of the church, conspiracies against the Masons have tended to frame the group as anti-Christian or even satanic.
    In 1798, British author John Robison published a text arguing a secret cabal of Freemasons had formed a group called “the Illuminati,” which peddled a philosophy of “cosmo-politism” bent on subverting all religions and resisting state authority.
    William Morgan’s disappearance fueled the rise of the Anti-Masonic Party. Wikimedia Commons
    In the United States, anti-Masonic fervor took hold following the disappearance and presumed killing of a Mason, William Morgan, in the 1820s. Morgan had vowed to publish a book exposing Masonic secrets. Local members urged Morgan to stop the book project; when he refused, they had him arrested for a debt of under $3. After being released on bail, he was never seen again. It was widely believed that local Masons killed him to in order to prevent him from publishing their secret rituals.
    Anger at the purported killing and cover-up led to widespread criticism of secret societies and to the formation of a new political party, the Anti-Masonic Party. Running on a platform against corruption, immorality and elitism, the party won 15 state legislative seats in 1827, and its ranks swelled thanks to an organized media campaign. At one point, party backers were publishing 35 weekly newspapers and dozens of party members were elected to Congress in the 1830s.
    The movement was most popular in the Northeast, especially in areas that had been heavily impacted by evangelical revivals. Evangelicals were drawn to its critique of sinful behaviors, while members of the working class liked the party’s anti-elitist rhetoric.
    During the presidential election of 1832, the Anti-Masonic Party opposed President Andrew Jackson, who was a Mason, and had planned to support his opponent, Henry Clay. But after members found out that Clay was also a Mason, the party went on to back a third-party candidate, William Wirt. The anti-Masons hosted their own convention, and Wirt received 8% of the presidential vote.
    After the election, the Anti-Masonic Party merged with former Republicans to form the Whig Party, which would become a force in American politics for several decades. A number of prominent Whigs, from former President Millard Fillmore to former New York Gov. William Seward, were originally members of the Anti-Masonic Party.
    An apron contrasts the ideals of the Freemasons with the ‘darkness’ and ‘ignorance’ of the Anti-Masonic Party. Corbis Historical via Getty Images
    Enter: Q
    Investigative journalist Chip Berlet, who has written extensively about the spread of conspiracy theories, has pointed out that many of the conspiracies tied to American politics contain similar threads. Everyday Americans tend to be “held down by a secretive group of wealthy elites” who manipulate “corrupt politicians, mendacious journalists, propagandizing schoolteachers and nefarious bankers.”
    Like the anti-Masonic conspiracies, QAnon followers believe that a secretive group of elites is secretly controlling social institutions for satanic ends. The conspiracy also portends a “Great Awakening,” during which the masses will finally grasp the existence of the depraved cabal and bring it to justice.
    A bumper sticker promotes the ‘Great Awakening.’ Amazon
    The Anti-Masonic Party understood the importance of leveraging the media in order to reach a wider audience. Likewise, QAnon adherents have used social media platforms as digital megaphones. Facebook and Twitter recently banned QAnon groups and content, but only after their platforms helped the movement grow exponentially. A recent study conducted by Facebook found that QAnon-affiliated groups on the platform had millions of members.
    There’s an important difference between the two conspiracies, however. The Freemasons are actually a secret society. Their influence may have been overstated, but they nonetheless represented an actual group of people, many of whom have held positions of power.
    The cabal described by QAnon loops in individuals who have long been targeted by conspiracy theorists, from George Soros to Jeffrey Epstein. Anyone, really, can be accused of being part of the satanic ring, and it becomes that much more difficult to argue with the conspiracies to either prove an individual’s innocence or disprove the conspiracy.
    Media attention backfires
    Political scientist Michael Barkun describes conspiracy theories as “stigmatized knowledge,” in which attempts to invalidate the claims only reinforce the beliefs among followers, who see these efforts as proof that those in power want the theories muzzled. This is the same impetus that no doubt helped transform the unsolved mystery of William Morgan’s disappearance into a nationwide political movement.
    QAnon discussions frequently blame the mainstream media for intentionally discrediting them in order to prop up the cabal. Under a YouTube video explaining Q, one commenter wrote, “‘Conspiracy Theory’ is CIA-speak for ‘Uh-oh! They KNOW!’” A poster on “Q Research Forum” wondered “where is the journalist who will do a ‘what the [mainstream media] won’t tell you about Q’ story?”
    Before winning her congressional runoff, Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly voiced support of QAnon in Facebook videos. AP Photo/Mike Stewart
    A 2019 Emerson poll found that 5% of Americans believe in QAnon. This might seem like a small number. But elections can serve as important platforms to expand movements. At their most basic level, they expose more voters to individuals who hold certain beliefs and ideas.
    Even a small group of motivated conpiracists can have an outsize effect on broader society, as in the anti-Masonic Party, and increasing representation in elected officials can end up legitimizing fringe beliefs. This is particularly true if those politicians, like Greene, are maligned by both the media and the political establishment.
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    Why the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ is still pushed by anti-Semites more than a century after hoax first circulated

    An anti-Semitic hoax more than a century old reared its ugly head again as the Republican National Convention was underway last week.
    Mary Ann Mendoza, a member of the advisory board of President Trump’s reelection campaign, was due to speak on Aug. 25. But she was suddenly pulled from the schedule after she had retweeted a link to a conspiracy theory about Jewish elites plotting to take over the world.
    In her now-deleted tweet, Mendoza urged her roughly 40,000 followers to read a lengthy thread that warned of a plan to enslave the “goyim,” or non-Jews. It included fevered denunciations of the historically wealthy Jewish family, the Rothschilds, as well as the top target of right-wing extremism today, the liberal Jewish philanthropist George Soros.
    The thread also made reference to one of the most notorious hoaxes in modern history: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” As a scholar of American Jewish history, I know how durable this document has been as a source of the belief in Jewish conspiracies. The fact that it is still making the rounds within the fringe precincts of the political right today is testament to the longevity of this fabrication.
    Fake news
    Surely no outright forgery in modern history has ever proved itself more durable. In the early 20th century, the Protocols were concocted by Tsarist police known as the Okhrana, drawing upon an obscure 1868 German novel, “Biarritz,” in which mysterious Jewish leaders meet in a Prague cemetery.
    This fictional cabal aspires for power over entire nations through currency manipulation and seeks ideological domination by disseminating fake news. In the novel, the Devil listens sympathetically to the reports that representatives of the tribes of Israel present, describing the havoc and subversion that they have wrought, and the destruction that is yet to come.
    The Okhrana – “protection” in Russian – worked for what was then the most powerful anti-Semitic regime in Europe and wanted to use the hoax to discredit revolutionary forces hostile to the reactionary policies and religious mysticism of Tsarist rule.
    The document became a global phenomenon only about two decades after the Okhrana’s fabrication. Widespread publication and republication coincided with both the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 and the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 – both of which stirred fears of obscure forces that menaced social control.
    Scapegoating Jews for disease and political unrest was nothing new. Medieval Jews had been massacred in the wake of accusations of having poisoned wells and spreading plagues.
    But a century ago, the crisis in public health probably mattered less than the Communists’ seizure of power in Russia, which, if unchecked, might overwhelm the political order that the Great War had destabilized. That some of the revolutionary leaders were of Jewish birth seemed to reinforce the predictions of the Protocols.
    Tsar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanovs, was known to have read the Protocols before being executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. In the following year, Hitler delivered his first recorded speech, in which he depicted an international conspiracy of Jews – of all Jews – to weaken and poison the Aryan race and to extinguish German culture.
    Hitler himself was unsure of the authenticity of the Protocols – a question of verification that may not have mattered all that much to the Nazis. The Führer told one of his early associates that the Protocols were “immensely instructive” in exposing what the Jews could accomplish in terms of “political intrigue,” and in demonstrating their skill at “deception [and] organization.”
    ‘Americanized’ conspiracy
    In the U.S., the hoax was given a wide distribution by the most admired businessman of his time: Henry Ford. By 1920, Ford had “Americanized” the forged document as “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” It ran as excerpts in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, for 91 straight weeks. “The International Jew” was translated into 16 languages.
    Henry Ford published anti-Semitic conspiracies. Library of Congress
    Though Jewish communal leadership mounted a lawsuit that forced the auto magnate to issue a retraction in 1927, the malignant hatred behind the Protocols continued to seep into the public conversation.
    In the 1930s, the popular anti-New Deal “radio priest” Charles E. Coughlin excerpted the Protocols in his newspaper, Social Justice. But Father Coughlin was wary about endorsing its accuracy, and merely stated that it might be of “interest” to his readers.
    History as conspiracy
    Why is it that this demonstrably false document continues to hold sway today?
    Perhaps the simplest explanation is human irrationality, which neither education nor enlightenment has ever managed to defeat.
    The willingness to believe in the fantasy of a surreptitious Jewish stranglehold on the international economy and on mass media also validates the insight of the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter. He traced in political extremism of both right and left an apocalyptic strain and a belief in an imminent confrontation between good and absolute evil.
    Hofstadter was well aware that conspiracies punctuate the annals of the past. But especially for those Americans who hanker for the security of a settled way of life, political paranoia is tempting, such as the belief – as Hofstadter wrote – that “history is a conspiracy,” in which unseen forces are the shadowy driving mechanisms of human destiny.
    Because anti-Semitism has survived nearly a couple of millennia, no form of prejudice has yet found a more vivid place in the imagination. And the fact that no international Jewish conspiracy was ever located has never depleted the power of the Protocols to tap into subterranean currents of demonization.
    From the Rothschilds to Soros
    What sustains the influence of the Protocols among cranks and extremists is not the language of the text itself – which few of them are likely to have fully read in its various versions – but what this forgery purports to underscore, which is the astonishingly cunning influence of Jews in modern history.
    The Protocols thus have no importance in themselves; they are spurious. But they do bestow precision upon apocalyptic fears, which could not survive without some ingredient of plausibility – however wildly far-fetched.
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    The Rothschild family was pivotal to the emergence of finance capitalism in 19th-century Europe. The family firm had branches in Germany, France, Austria, Italy and England, which lent credence to the charge of “cosmopolitanism” during an era of rising nationalism. The boom-and-bust oscillations of the economy generated not only misery but also grievances against financiers who seemed to benefit from such uncertainties.
    Today, Soros, a Hungarian-born, British-educated American Jew, has become an especially hated figure for the far-right. Among the world’s canniest investors, he has spent billions of dollars promoting progressive causes. He seems to personify what Ford called “the international Jew.”
    Venom against minorities other than Jews has not resulted in any equivalent to the Protocols. Judeophobia produced a specious documentation that bigotry against no other minority has ever elicited. Perhaps the very explicitness of the Protocols helps strengthen the suspicion that majority beliefs and interests are under attack, and keeps this dangerous form of anti-Semitism alive. More