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      The Politics of Recognition vs. Redistribution

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      At an earlier stage of my life, I had the great pleasure of spending two years teaching at York University in Toronto, Canada. Unlike the University of Toronto, whose campus looks like Harvard or Yale, York resembles British public universities such as Sussex: modern, functional, but without what in French is called “cachet.” York University also happened to be one of the last genuinely left-wing schools in the Western world, at least in the social sciences. I had colleagues who had actually read Karl Marx — and took him seriously. 

      By sheer coincidence, the day I interviewed for a position in the Department of Political Science, York had scheduled a public lecture by Nancy Fraser, a renowned feminist political theorist/philosopher from the New School for Social Research in New York City. The lecture was on the politics of recognition. Given her impeccable left-wing credentials, York was friendly terrain — or so it seemed. I still remember Fraser’s rather stunned expression when confronted with a barrage of attacks by York’s Marxists, who charged her with discounting if not dismissing the central importance of social class. 

      White Trash, White Privilege

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      That was some 20 years ago. Yet ironically, the tension between the politics of recognition and the class-based politics of redistribution is still as pertinent as it was when Fraser theorized it in the late 1990s. In recent years, it has become even more of an issue of vital importance for the future of progressive politics in liberal democracies, not least because of the challenge posed by contemporary radical, right-wing populism.

      Social Justice

      The questions of both redistribution and recognition are about social justice. Above all, social justice concerns leveling the playing field. This is a point Fraser has never tired of repeating. She has adamantly pointed out that struggles for redistribution are anything but “antithetical to struggles for recognition.” The problem is that, more often than not, one tended to be disassociated from the other. In reality, however, social justice involved both questions of redistribution and of “representation, identity, and difference.” 

      Unfortunately, the reality is quite different. In the 1980s, the left, by and large, started to abandon their commitment to what once was called the working class and its aspirations. In its wake, as Axel Honneth noted more than a decade ago, “‘equal distribution’ or ‘equality of good’ no longer form its central categories, but ‘dignity’ and ‘respect.’” To make matters worse, ordinary workers not only lost their privileged position in left-wing narratives. They were also increasingly denigrated, their needs and aspirations dismissed, and their values and views tagged as reactionary and retro, an expression of pervasive working-class authoritarianism. 

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      I remember a column written by the German satirist Wolfgang Ebert that said it all in a few lines. The article appeared in 1985 in the prestigious German weekly Die Zeit. The text was meant to be taken as what it was: satire on Germany’s post-68 new left, their delusions and disillusionment, which finally ended in the complete disavowal of the proletariat as a revolutionary class. On this reading, if the revolution never happened, it was because “the masses — not to speak of the working class as the so-called subject of the revolution — failed.” 

      In fact, Ebert continued, the masses “always fail.” Instead of following their “true interests” or at least listening to their “intellectual leaders,” they preferred to follow the siren calls of consumerism. Ebert’s conclusion: “Who would be stupid enough to risk their neck for these dumb masses?” The German Social Democrats (SPD) certainly didn’t. That’s why they are where they are today. Since the federal election of 1983, their share of the vote has plunged, from 38% to just over 20% in 2017. 

      Fast forward to 2011 in France, a few months before socialist Francois Hollande narrowly defeated the sitting president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the second round of the 2012 election. The election was overshadowed by the downfall of socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who for some time had been seen as a serious candidate for the presidency until his aspirations were sunk by sex scandals. 

      Terra Nova

      The reason Strauss-Kahn is mentioned here is because of his affiliation with Terra Nova, a progressive think tank modeled after the Center for American Progress and charged with “contributing to the intellectual renewal of the Left in France and in Europe.” In 2011, Terra Nova released a strategic paper that essentially advised that the left should forget about French workers. These workers, the authors charged, were no longer concerned with economic and social questions; instead, they had bought into the “cultural issues” promoted by the right. At the same time, they had progressively been seduced by the far-right National Front, both on cultural and socioeconomic questions.

      In short, as a highly critical commentary on the Terra Nova report in France’s premier left-wing daily, Liberation, ironically put it, workers were “dirty and nasty” — at least that was the impression one got from reading the paper. If the socialists were serious about winning the 2012 presidential election, Terra Nova insisted, they had to come up with a new progressive subject. Terra Nova suggested a “future-oriented” coalition (“tomorrow’s France”), “younger, more diverse, more feminized.” This was to be a coalition of the culturally progressive and the economically marginalized — except, of course, traditional workers. 

      The analysis was apparently heavily influenced by American strategists busily constructing the new or “emerging” Democratic majority — the title of an influential book from 2004. Today, as a recent dissertation on this question demonstrates, this (hitherto still quite elusive) majority consists of the “ascendant” and “rising” American electorate — constituencies that, unlike the traditional white working class, are growing as a share of the overall electorate: people of color, the young and well-educated, socially liberal whites and single women. As Christopher Cimaglio, the author of the essay, pointed out, in this framework, “the white working class often serves as a receding reactionary backdrop to emerging, forward-looking groups: ‘a more highly educated and diverse constituency,’ ‘a coalition of transformation, comfortable with demographic and cultural change.’” 

      Political Polarization

      The result of this strategy is what we have today: widespread polarization, mutual recriminations, intense loathing on both sides of the aisle, and a politics of grievances and resentment that makes a mockery of one of America’s most sacred notions: e pluribus unum. Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, roughly 80% of registered voters, both Democrats and Republicans, said “their differences with the other side were about core American values.” Around 90% in both camps “worried that a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States.”

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      To be sure, the left’s embrace of identity politics and diversity, together with its somewhat callous dismissal of what in French is called the couches populaires (aka “ordinary people”) seeking to make a decent living, has not gone unchallenged. Just a few years ago in Spain, a polemic with the telling title “La Trampa de la Diversidad” (the diversity trap) became a national bestseller — and provoked a vicious backlash. Among other things, the author, the polemicist Daniel Bernabe, was charged with denigrating the feminist, LGBTQ and ecological causes, primarily for suggesting that the oppression of women was fundamentally rooted in economics — i.e., the capitalist system — rather than purely in sexism, which he considered as just another face of capitalism.

      For Bernabe, everything started with Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher managed to reframe economic inequality in terms of individual difference and diversity against a form of socialism that sought to impose “uniformity.” In the years that followed, socialists and social democrats, such as Tony Blair of the UK and Gerhard Schroder of Germany, bought into this narrative — with suboptimal success, to put it kindly.

      Recently in Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht, a leading politician of The Left party (Die Linke), provoked controversy with a new book highly critical of the left’s adoption of identity politics. Identity, according to Wagenknecht, has become the pet project of a self-indulgent, left-libertarian, individualistic, urban, cosmopolitan elite — a “lifestyle” politics reflecting the smug complacency of the morally superior, far removed from the mundane material concerns of ordinary workers. The charge implies that if today’s left embrace causes such as Fridays for Future or Black Lives Matter, it is less out of genuine conviction than out of the need to constantly reaffirm their distinctive identity and habitus, promoted as “the epitome of progressivism and responsibility.”

      Other critics of identity politics have been even less kind. “Blue Labour” theorist Jonathan Rutherford, for instance, in an article for New Statesman, argued that the decline of the British working class had turned Labour into a “party of the bourgeois left,” espousing what he called the cause of “cosmopolitan liberalism.” This, he charged, is the “culture of the elites,” one that is “deeply divisive,” grounded in identity politics. In turn, identity politics at least “in its libertarian pursuit of self-realisation and its judging and dividing into victim status hierarchies, is corrosive of society.”

      Under the influence of cosmopolitan liberalism, Rutherford argued, “progressive and left politics in the 1990s turned away from class politics and solidarity in favour of group identities and self-realisation.” In the process, the politics of recognition turned into a politics of victimization. At the same time, society has moved on. While the postindustrial, postmodern plebs fight over the question of who has been most victimized, the “new revolutionary subject,” the “‘universal educated person’ of urban, higher-educated and networked youth,” is busy conceptualizing a brave new world of material abundance, social harmony and ecological wellbeing — or so I understand what Rutherford is trying to say.

      Identity Politics

      Others have gone even further, charging that identity politics threatens to undermine liberal democracy. On this view, identity politics has led to a fragmentation of social cohesion, undermined a common sense of belonging, and been replaced by a new type of “tribalism” that has largely benefited the right and far right. As Francis Fukuyama pointed out, identity politics reflects “important grievances.” At the top of the list is the long history of denigration, discrimination and outright violence that various ethnic minorities have been subjected to by the white majority. 

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      In some cases, however, identity politics has taken on an “exclusive character where people’s ‘lived experiences’” determine who they are. This, Fukuyama said, has “created obstacles to empathy and communication.” One might add that it has done a disservice to the notion of a shared humanity. 

      In other cases, the combination of identity politics and political correctness has reached absurd dimensions. Take, for instance, the case of Felipe Rose, the iconic member of the Village People. Rose is the guy dressed in Native American garb, which has exposed him to charges of cultural appropriation and playing to stereotypes. As a critic put it, “Rose’s Halloween-style Indian is the only character [among the Village People] to play on the identity of a living culture.” Dina Gilio-Whitaker, the critic, added: “Why on earth, after American Indians have for decades been successfully waging war against the use of Indian stereotypes in popular culture, is Felipe Rose still parading around on stage in an Indian costume” like a cartoon character come to life? 

      The answer is simple. The singer defines himself as of Native American descent (Lakota Sioux) and has done more for America’s indigenous population than many a well-meaning left-wing culture warrior (pun intended). Skeptics might want to watch Rose’s “Trail of Tears” — a tribute to the “eviction” of the Cherokee and other nations from their ancestral lands resulting in thousands of deaths on the way.

      Does this mean the left should abandon recognition in favor of a return to an exclusive focus on redistribution? Quite the contrary: As Fukuyama has strongly insisted, the politics of recognition reflects a fundamental human desire for dignity, for being esteemed. Taking his cue from the eminent German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he noted that “history itself is driven by the struggle for recognition, by the desire of human beings to have their fundamental dignity recognised by other human beings and that modern democracy emerges when equal dignity, not the dignity of the master, but the mutual recognition of equal dignity, is achieved.” 

      Michael Sandel, a leading political philosopher and celebrated author of “The Tyranny of Merit,” argues along similar lines. As he wrote in The Atlantic, any “serious response to working-class frustrations must combat condescension and credentialist prejudice. It must also put the dignity of work at the center of the political agenda.” In the book, Sandel cited data chronicling the decline of America’s white working class, many of whom have simply fallen out of the labor market, as if “defeated by the indignities of a labor market indifferent to their skills.” The data comes from Isabel Sawhill’s work on what she calls “the forgotten Americans.”  They are the victims of the kind of “misrecognition” that Fraser has theorized. More often than not, they have given up, both with respect to the labor market and to life itself, succumbing to what Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called “deaths of despair.”

      “White Trash”

      These developments are not only highly unsettling. They also drastically demonstrate the central importance of recognition in the current period of hyperglobalization, accelerated innovation and automation, and run-away individualization. Under the circumstances, it is of paramount importance to bestow a modicum of visibility to the ignored and forgotten, to have their existence acknowledged.

      Yet this is seldom the case. America’s “white trash” underclass is a case in point. Poor and, more often than not, addicted to opioids, structurally irrelevant as both producers and consumers, white trash epitomizes what is wrong with today’s politics of recognition and identity, laying bare its internal contradictions — if not its inherent hypocrisies. White trash might appear to be an American phenomenon but it is not. As Imogen Tyler has shown, the denigration of the white, socially marginalized underclass is also prevalent in Britain, reflected in the notion of the “chav,” a ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor. In fact, over the past two decades, “chavs” increasingly became a prevalent comedy television trope, exposing poor whites to ridicule and opprobrium by urban elites.

      This suggests that the struggle for recognition, as Fraser has affirmed, is an all-encompassing, comprehensive struggle based on an inclusive notion of hurt and grievances. On this reading, the struggle for recognition and dignity cannot be divorced from the struggle for redistribution or, for that matter, the struggle for equal participation. This, of course, is hardly a new idea. As early as 1918, Max Weber distinguished between three distinct but interrelated foundations of social inequality: resources, power and status. The latter refers to “inequality based on differences in honor, esteem, and respect.” As Stanford sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway has noted, we tend to forget “how much people care about public acknowledgement of their worth.” Yet they tend to “care about status quite as intensely as they do [about] money and power.” They want “to be someone.”

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      Historically, this was one of the main selling points of populist leaders, including Juan Peron in Argentina. Peron, who served two terms as president before his death in 1974, accorded workers and the poor and dispossessed “their own voice and a new sense of their relevance.” This was a particular concern of his wife, Evita, who “was instrumental in transforming the sense of identity of the workers and the poor, and in doing so she helped them gain a sense of their own ‘dignity’, as she frequently repeated.”

      As Carlos de la Torre, a leading specialist on Latin American populism, has put it, populism is “a politics of cultural and symbolic recognition of the despised underclasses. It transforms the humiliations that the rabble, the uncultured, the unseen, and those who have no voice have to endure in their daily life into sources of dignity and even redemption.” 

      Unfortunately, in today’s world, many people are denied the right to be someone. As Senator Bernie Sanders recently noted with respect to rural Americans, “there is not an appreciation of rural America or the values of rural America, the sense of community that exists in rural America.” He added: [S]omehow or another, the intellectual elite does have, in some cases, a contempt for the people who live in rural America. I think we’ve got to change that attitude and start focusing on the needs of people in rural America, treat them with respect, and understand there are areas there are going to be disagreements, but we can’t treat people with contempt.” 

      Unfortunately, this is has happened too often, not only in the United States but also in Europe. Social justice, however, can only be achieved if everyone is brought on board.

      Equal Rights

      There are myriad examples of how these dimensions of social justice are inextricably linked. Take, for instance, the struggle for women’s equal rights. In Germany, until 1958, women were not allowed — by law — to open their own bank account without the explicit permission of their husbands. In other words, it was the men who disposed of the money women brought into the marriage and the money they earned while married. In the United States, until the mid-1970s, banks could refuse to issue unmarried women a credit card. If they were married, their husbands were required to cosign.  

      Germany and the United States are not alone. In 1979, a British general practitioner refused to give former Labour MP Helen Goodman a prescription for contraception on the grounds that she was unmarried. In Switzerland, it took until 1971 for women to be granted the right to vote. Swiss men were largely opposed, as were many Swiss women. The reason why Switzerland agreed to accord women the right to vote was that the country wanted to accede to the European Convention on Human Rights. For this to happen, women’s suffrage was a sine qua non, much to the chagrin of Swiss men. In fact, it took until 1990 for the last Swiss canton (Appenzell Innerrhoden) to allow its female citizens to vote. Each of these cases confirmed Simone de Beauvoir’s conclusion that women constituted the “second sex.” No wonder the Vatican added her treatise to the index of prohibited books. 

      These examples illustrate the notion that the way in which humans are recognized — or not — has important consequences, material and otherwise. Take the case of gay rights. It took until 1987 for homosexuality to no longer be categorized as some kind of “mental disorder” in the United States. It took three more years for the World Health Organization (WHO) to follow suit. It took another few decades for the WHO to stop classifying gender incongruency as a behavioral and mental disorder. As Patchen Markell noted, “the denigration of non-normative sexualities … helps to sustain the maldistribution of resources ranging from health care to police protection.”

      In fact, take the more recent case of “welfare chauvinism,” which has led to attempts by Western European governments to limit access to social benefits for migrants and refugees while favoring the “native-born.” More often than not, the poor do not vote. Why should they? Nobody cares about them anyway.

      “Deplorables” in America

      Unfortunately but not unexpectedly — here, Fukuyama is right — the political right have, in recent years, hijacked identity politics in the service of division and polarization, driven by resentment and mutual recrimination. A paradigmatic example is the American tea party movement. One of its grievances was that welfare programs went “to ‘undeserving’ immigrants, minorities, and youth” instead of “hardworking” Americans.

      An even more outrageous example is a statement made by Idaho State Representative Priscilla Giddings, who recently justified cuts for Idaho’s universities. She claimed that state lawmakers “don’t want funds expended for courses, programs, services, or trainings that confer support for extremist ideologies, such as those tied to social justice.” Giddings, a member of the Republican Party, also opposed a bill in the Idaho legislature that would have released a federal grant designed to support the development of Idaho’s early childhood care and education system. She was particularly incensed that the program was aligned with a nonprofit organization that in its national catalog stated that “whiteness … confers privilege, as does being male” and that the organization “supports a ‘social justice curriculum.’” Giddings did not believe, she stated, “that you are privileged based on your gender or your race.” The bill failed, depriving Idaho’s children of much-needed funds.

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      Donald Trump, the former US president, built on this base during his first election campaign. To a large extent, he appealed to grievances not met by the dominant politics of recognition, which has tended to privilege minorities while dismissing the plight of the underprivileged, as long as they happen to be white. In 2016, he made restoring dignity to American workers a central trope of his speeches. When Hillary Clinton famously called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” he responded that, for him, they were “hard‐working American patriots who love your country and want a better future for all of our people.” But above all else, Trump said, they were Americans, “entitled to leadership that honors you, cherishes you, and defends you.” He added: “Every American is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect in our country.” In the election, around two-thirds of white voters without a college degree voted for Trump.

      There can be no doubt that in recent decades, the question of recognition and dignity has become central in the politics of advanced liberal democracies. A prime example is the notion of multiculturalism, which presumes that all cultures are equal but different. In the process, the question of economic justice has taken somewhat of a back seat, to the detriment of those who have been struggling to keep afloat in an atmosphere of rapidly increasing economic uncertainty.

      One result has been an upsurge in support for political parties. Such parties have been astute in exploiting widespread popular resentment in the service of an exclusionary nativist notion of deservedness based on ethnicity or cultural compatibility. Unfortunately, too often the left have given up on their traditional electoral base, leaving the field wide open for the pied pipers of the radical, populist right. The radical right have promoted themselves as the advocates of ordinary people, claiming to give them a voice and a modicum of visibility and a sense of empowerment.

      Pandora’s Box

      The success of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the regions that comprise the former East Germany is a case in point. As Jennifer Yoder, a professor at Colby College, recently suggested, support for the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia — strongholds for the party — is to a large extent the expression of a “revenge of the East.” As she pointed out, it reflects a profound sense among easterners of “not being taken seriously,” of never being asked what they think.  At the same time, it illustrates the perception “that one’s own status now and in the future is at risk.” It is this combination of the subjective experience of a lack of recognition and materially-related anxieties with regard to the future that has proved a powerful motivation for supporting a political party that purports to speak for both the mental state and the interests of the eastern German population.

      Germany is hardly a unique case. The claim to take ordinary people seriously, to give visibility to the forgotten and invisible has been a major selling point of radical, right-wing populists — from Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump. In its election program for the 1985 election, the National Front in France declared that the “dignity of the French people” was one of its priorities. This was at a time of profound disillusionment among French workers over President Francois Mitterrand’s radical reversal of economic policy — aka tournant de la rigueur — of 1983.  Above all, rigueur meant austerity and subservience to Germany’s stringent monetary policy, which left French workers in the cold. Hardly surprising, in the years and decades that followed, many of them found a new home in Le Pen’s National Front.

      It might seem that the politics of recognition and diversity has opened Pandora’s box. To a certain extent, this is true. There is no good reason to recognize the suffering of ethnic, sexual and religious minorities at the hands of the majority, while dismissing the suffering of significant parts of the majority. White trash, as I have previously argued, might be white, but it is still dismissed and denigrated as “trash.” In this case, white privilege not only becomes meaningless, but it serves as an insult, adding to denigration and misrecognition, to use Fraser’s term.

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      Hardly surprising, the “deplorables,” to use Clinton’s term, overwhelmingly came out in support of Trump, who, as Clinton suggested, “lifted them up.” To be sure, Clinton meant that Trump reaffirmed their sexist, racist and homophobic views. Yet it could also mean that those who voted for Trump were — perhaps for the first time ever — given a sense that they existed, were “visible” and that they counted.  

      Le Pen, after being elected as the leader of the French radical, populist right, made the politics of recognition central to her project. In 2011, a few months before the presidential election, she promoted herself as the candidate of “la France des invisibles,” of all those citizens who never merit being mentioned, who are forgotten, who are — as she put it — “des triples riens.” The notion is an allusion to the triple-A ratings bestowed by international agencies on the creditworthiness of states — the main obsession, or so Le Pen maintained, of France’s political and economic elite.

      Le Pen failed to advance to the second round of the presidential election, which ended in a duel between Sarkozy and Hollande. In 2017, she made it to the second round but lost to Emmanuel Macron. Yet Le Pen’s politics of recognition had clearly hit a nerve, as did her adoption of a socioeconomic project that promised to expand the French welfare state; though this was under the proviso that the expansion would only be for the French.

      Same Boat

      The French case is neither unique nor limited to the radical, populist right. In Denmark, for instance, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, has advanced similar propositions, many of them adopted from the country’s far right. In today’s world, it appears that both recognition and redistribution only work if they are associated with a large dose of exclusion. Unfortunately, “identity politics” has turned into a zero-sum game. More often than not, the result has been more resentment and even less willingness to listen to the other side. The remarks by State Representative Giddings is paradigmatic of these trends. This kind of politics can only exacerbate social tension and increase polarization, in the process diminishing chances for moving forward.

      A progressive politics based on an honest assessment of the multiple crises we face today can only succeed if it includes all sectors of society, independent of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and material circumstances. It might sound a bit trite, but we are all sitting in the same boat. It would be a tragic mistake to throw some passengers overboard for the simple reason that they are deemed not to belong. 

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      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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      in World Politics

      Immigration Is the Solution for the Falling US Birth Rate

      by

      Germany faces a major crisis. The German birth rate is considerably below what’s needed to replace the population. German seniors, meanwhile, are living longer and drawing more on state resources for their pensions and health care. There are basically two ways out of this demographic crisis.

      First of all, Germany could boost its birth rate. The German state provides generous family leave and child-care policies — not to mention the famous Kindergelt, the direct monthly payments of child benefits — and the fertility rate has indeed edged up over the years from 1.24 children per woman in 1994 to 1.57 today. But the trend in industrialized countries suggests that it will be difficult to push the rate much higher. The closest to the replacement rate of 2.1 children that any European Union country gets is France at 1.88.

      The second way out of Germany’s crisis would be through immigration. The country could throw open its doors to people from all over the world to take unwanted and unfilled jobs, pay taxes and support the increasingly aging population.

      Germany’s Refugees Face a Future Without Angela Merkel

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      That is exactly what Germany did. The government of Angela Merkel, in 2015 and 2016, accepted over a million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Germany now has the fifth largest population of refugees in the world (after Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan and Uganda).

      This headline-grabbing decision, five years later, has been a remarkable success. The million refugees have prospered, reports the Center for Global Development:

      “Today, about half have found a job, paid training, or internship. On arrival, only about one percent declared having good or very good German language skills. By 2018, that figure had increased to 44 percent. … Such successful integration also has impacted the local German population. For example, between 2008 and 2015, the number of employees in companies founded by migrants grew by 50 percent (to 1.5 million). It has also mobilized civil society. A survey by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research suggests that 55 percent of Germans have contributed to the integration of refugees since 2015.”

      In 2015, nearly everyone in the media — German, European, international — referred to the millions of desperate people trying to get into Europe as an “immigration crisis.” They should have given it a different label: the immigration solution to Europe’s demographic crisis. Germany wisely chose to take advantage of this opportunity, while the countries of Eastern Europe, by and large, have embraced demographic suicide.

      The naysayers had a field day back in 2015 with their predictions of political failure for Merkel and social chaos for Germany. Today, Germany continues to be the strongest European economy. It has struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic but is now rapidly scaling up its vaccinations. And the anti-immigrant backlash, represented by the far-right Alternative for Germany, has ebbed, with the popularity of the party falling to 11% in recent polls. Meanwhile, with its liberal platform on immigration, the Green Party has surged to 25% and may well win the elections in September.

      It’s useful to bear the German experience in mind as the United States once again tackles its own “immigration crisis.”

      Immigrants Are a Gift

      The United States has been the exception to the demographic rule for industrialized countries. The US fertility rate, at 1.73, is also well below replacement. But because of a constant stream of immigrants, America has managed to grow at a healthy clip.

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      That began to change in the 2010s. According to the latest census numbers, the US grew at the second-slowest rate over the last decade since the founding of the country. The culprits were a declining fertility rate — the birthrate has declined 19% since peaking in 2007 — and a reduction in the number of immigrants. The impact of the pandemic — in terms of mortality, long-term disability and anxiety over economic insecurity — will only make matters worse.

      America has always depended on immigrants and undocumented workers. That dependency has only grown more acute over the years. Let’s take a look at four critical sectors.

      Between half and three-quarters of the farmworkers who ensure a supply of food to the American population are undocumented workers, and many of the rest are recent immigrants. The pandemic hit farmworkers and food manufacturing workers hard, and even the Trump administration had to acknowledge them as essential workers in reducing their risk of deportation (though not providing them additional protection against infection).

      Even before the pandemic hit, the food sector faced a shortage of workers. “In a 2017 survey of farmers by the California Farm Bureau, 55 percent reported labor shortages, and the figure was nearly 70 percent for those who depend on seasonal workers,” according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, Congress (read: Republicans in the Senate) has failed to provide a legal framework for what remains an essential workforce, pandemic or no pandemic, though the recent Farm Workforce Modernization Act has a shot of passing with bipartisan support to provide a million undocumented farmworkers with legal status.

      The health-care sector similarly depends on immigrants. Of the nearly 15 million people working in the health sector, about 18% are immigrants. COVID-19 is going to exact a heavy toll on this sector, though. According to a recent Washington Post poll, one in three health-care workers are thinking about exiting the profession: “Many talked about the betrayal and hypocrisy they feel from the public they have sacrificed so much to save—their clapping and hero-worship one day, then refusal to wear masks and take basic precautions the next, even if it would spare health workers the trauma of losing yet another patient.”

      Even without pandemic-related job changes, the United States has been looking at a major upcoming nursing shortage: over a million new registered nurses are needed by 2022. Nursing schools are just not keeping up with the demand created by retirement.

      Manufacturing, challenged by foreign competition and outsourcing, has infamously declined in the United States. Despite the spread of automation, this sector too needs more workers. There are currently 500,000 job openings, and one recent report estimates 2.1 million unfilled manufacturing jobs by 2030.

      Then there’s domestic work, one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy. Home health aides, child-care providers, housecleaners: the vast majority are women and more than one-third are foreign-born. “By 2026, care jobs will constitute one of the fastest growing professions in the country, and we will need more caregivers and nannies than we have ever needed before,” writes the National Domestic Workers Alliance. “Home-based elder care is already the single fastest growing occupation in our entire economy due to the rapidly growing aging population.”

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      Home health aides directly take care of aging Americans. But the United States needs younger workers across all professions to keep alive federal programs like Social Security that support aging Americans. The cohort of people aged 55 to 64 grew by 70% between 2000 and 2016 while the working-age population expanded by only 15%. That’s bad news for people looking to retire in the future on their Social Security benefits.

      Fortunately, immigrants have come to the rescue. They are overwhelmingly working age and have a higher participation rate in the labor force than the native-born. Their contributions to Social Security help keep the system afloat. The undocumented have been even more generous, providing an estimated $12 billion to the Social Security system through payroll taxes in 2010 alone (without much hope of ever drawing from the system themselves).

      Even with these contributions, however, Social Security is still expected to face a major funding shortfall by 2035 under current projections. One answer: more immigrants. If this story were a fairy tale, the immigrant would be the goose that lays the golden egg. Immigrants didn’t just build America. They are essential to the health and prosperity of the country today. Immigrants are the gift that keeps on giving.

      Whenever a goose starts laying golden eggs, however, someone invariably starts talking about wringing the poor animal’s neck and impoverishing everyone involved.

      The Politics of Immigration

      The Republican Party remade itself into an anti-immigrant force before Donald Trump entered the political scene. Tea Party insurgents called for closing the border with Mexico. David Brat, an unknown economist, ousted House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 Virginia race by hammering at the immigration issue. Trump, however, took immigration and ran with it, promising to build a new wall along the southern border, shut down travel from predominantly Muslim countries and make it nearly impossible for refugees and asylum-seekers to find haven in the United States.

      Because of Trump’s success in turning his extreme positions into federal policy, immigration largely disappeared as an electoral issue in 2020. The Republican Party focused instead on economic attacks (Joe Biden as a “socialist”) and cultural broadsides (the perennial racist and misogynist dog whistles).

      But with the Democrats back in the White House and in control of Congress, immigration will likely become again a major campaign issue in the midterm elections. The economy is on an upswing, the pandemic is waning and the Biden administration has been competent and relatively scandal-free. Without an actual platform of their own since they decided to turn their party into a personality cult, the Republicans will inevitably characterize the influx of people over the border as a “crisis” and the president’s “biggest failure.”

      The numbers at the border have indeed increased, with the influx for April near a 20-year high. Despite the Republican Party criticisms, these numbers are not the result of Biden administration policies. The number of people apprehended at the border, for instance, spiked in 2018, under Trump, at more than 850,000, which obviously had nothing to do with President Biden.

      The surge so far this year is largely seasonal, a result of pent-up demand from the COVID-19 border closures and a function of all the applicants stranded south of the border by Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. The numbers already appear to be plateauing. And the number of unaccompanied minors being held in Border Patrol facilities dropped dramatically in the last week.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Biden administration has reversed many of Trump’s policies, canceling funding for the border wall, reversing the “Muslim travel ban” and dismantling the “Remain in Mexico” program. Without any fanfare, the president also allowed the ban on guest-worker visas to expire at the end of March. Pictures of joyful family reunifications at the border are now replacing Trump-era images of children separated from the parents.

      The administration has also pledged to address the root causes of migration by funding initiatives in Central America that will reduce violence and corruption, stabilize economies and address humanitarian crises. That, of course, is easier said than done given the authoritarian leadership in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Tasked with tackling this issue, Vice-President Kamala Harris is well aware of the folly of funneling aid into corrupt governments, and she is reportedly lining up civil society representatives to meet on upcoming visits to the region. A long-term strategy of fostering political and economic transformation in the region, however, won’t win any points with Republicans or most voters in the United States in the short term.

      The recent kerfuffle around refugee policy illustrates the political stakes. As a candidate, Biden promised to bring US policies on refugees and asylum in line with international standards and raise the annual ceiling to more or less the level of the Obama years. Because of a failure to file the necessary paperwork, however, the number of refugees admitted into the United States in the first months of the Biden administration remained extremely low. Because refugees are often conflated in the public mind with immigrants — and the administration’s immigration policy was getting poor marks in the polls — the president tried to get away with suppressing the number of incoming refugees. Challenged by members of his own party, Biden again reversed himself, returning to the previous promise of a cap for the remainder of this year of 62,500 and an annual ceiling of 125,000 for 2022.

      The back-and-forth on refugee policy is an unusual deviation from an otherwise consistent set of policies coming from the administration. It’s a sign that immigration will continue to be subject to finger-in-the-wind calculations rather than rational debate. It’s a shame that it will require enormous political courage to embrace policies that are in the best interest of the United States, whether from the point of view of the labor force, the sustainability of the social welfare system or the livelihoods of the newest residents of the country.

      Republicans, with their steadfast commitment to political divisiveness and firearms, love to shoot themselves in the foot. There’s no reason for the rest of the country to follow suit. Maybe a delegation of Syrian-Germans can come to America on a speaking tour to explain how a “crisis” is really an opportunity.

      *[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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      in World Politics

      Has the US Always Been at War?

      by

      Here’s the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July 1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the atomic obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the most devastating bombs in history up to that moment, given the sweet code names “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.”

      I was the littlest of boys at the time. More than three-quarters of a century has passed since, on September 2, 1945, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the Instrument of Surrender on the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, officially ending World War II. That was V-J (for Victory over Japan) Day. But in a sense for me, my whole generation and the US, war never really ended.

      Western Sahara: Washington’s Accidental Red Line

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      The United States has been at war, or at least in armed conflicts of various sorts, often in distant lands, for more or less my entire life. Yes, for some of those years, that war was “cold” — which often meant that such carnage, regularly sponsored by the CIA, happened largely off-screen and out of sight — but war as a way of life never really ended, not to this very moment.

      In fact, as the decades went by, it would become the “infrastructure” in which Americans increasingly invested their tax dollars via aircraft carriers, trillion-dollar jet fighters, drones armed with Hellfire missiles and the creation and maintenance of hundreds of military garrisons around the globe, rather than roads, bridges or rail lines (no less the high-speed version of the same) here at home. During those same years, the Pentagon budget would grab an ever-larger percentage of federal discretionary spending and the full-scale annual investment in what has come to be known as the national security state would rise to a staggering $1.2 trillion or more.

      In a sense, future V-J Days became inconceivable. There were no longer moments, even as wars ended, when some version of peace might descend and America’s vast military contingents could, as at the end of World War II, be significantly demobilized. The closest equivalent was undoubtedly the moment when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the Cold War officially ended and the Washington establishment declared itself globally triumphant. But of course, the promised “peace dividend” would never be paid out as the first Gulf War with Iraq occurred that very year and the serious downsizing of the US military (and the CIA) never happened.

      Never-Ending War

      Consider it typical that, when President Joe Biden recently announced the official ending of the nearly 20-year-old American conflict in Afghanistan with the withdrawal of the last US troops from that country by September 11, 2021, it would functionally be paired with the news that the Pentagon budget was about to rise yet again from its record heights in the Donald Trump years. “Only in America,” as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore wrote recently, “do wars end and war budgets go up.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Of course, even the ending of that never-ending Afghan War may prove exaggerated. In fact, let’s consider Afghanistan apart from the rest of this country’s war-making history for a moment. After all, if I had told you in 1978 that, of the 42 years to follow, the US would be involved in war in a single country for 30 of them and asked you to identify it, I can guarantee that Afghanistan wouldn’t have been your pick. And yet so it’s been. From 1979 to 1989, there was the CIA-backed Islamist extremist war against the Soviet army there (to the tune of billions and billions of dollars). And yet the obvious lesson the Russians learned from that adventure, as their military limped home in defeat and the Soviet Union imploded not long after — that Afghanistan is indeed the “graveyard of empires” — clearly had no impact in Washington.

      Or how do you explain the 19-plus years of warfare there that followed the 9/11 attacks in 2001, themselves committed by a small Islamist outfit, al-Qaeda, born as an American ally in that first Afghan War? Only recently, the invaluable Costs of War Project estimated that America’s second Afghan War has cost this country almost $2.3 trillion (not including the price of lifetime care for its vets) and has left at least 241,000 people dead, including 2,442 American service members. In 1978, after the disaster of the Vietnam War, had I assured you that such a never-ending failure of a conflict was in our future, you would undoubtedly have laughed in my face.

      And yet, three decades later, the US military high command still seems not faintly to have grasped the lesson that we “taught” the Russians and then experienced ourselves. As a result, according to recent reports, they have uniformly opposed  Biden’s decision to withdraw all American troops from that country by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. In fact, it’s not even clear that, by September 11, 2021, if the president’s proposal goes according to plan, that war will have truly ended. After all, the same military commanders and intelligence chiefs seem intent on organizing long-distance versions of that conflict or, as the New York Times put it, are determined to “fight from afar” there. They are evidently even considering establishing new bases in neighboring lands to do so.

      America’s “forever wars” — once known as the global war on terror and, when the administration of George W. Bush launched it, proudly aimed at 60 countries — do seem to be slowly winding down. Unfortunately, other kinds of potential wars, especially new cold wars with China and Russia (involving new kinds of high-tech weaponry) only seem to be gearing up.

      War in Our Time

      In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a “voluntary” activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways.

      In the years that followed, for instance, the elite Green Berets of the Vietnam era would be incorporated into an ever more expansive set of Special Operations forces, up to 70,000 of them (larger, that is, than the armed forces of many countries). Those special operators would functionally become a second, more secretive American military embedded inside the larger force and largely freed from citizen oversight of any sort. In 2020, as journalist Nick Turse reported, they would be stationed in a staggering 154 countries around the planet, often involved in semi-secret conflicts “in the shadows” that Americans would pay remarkably little attention to.

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      Since the Vietnam War, which roiled the politics of this nation and was protested in the streets of this country by an antiwar movement that came to include significant numbers of active-duty soldiers and veterans, war has played a remarkably recessive role in American life. Yes, there have been the endless thank-yous offered by citizens and corporations to “the troops.” But that’s where the attentiveness stops, while both political parties, year after endless year, remain remarkably supportive of a growing Pentagon budget and the industrial (that is, weapons-making) part of the military-industrial complex. War, American-style, may be forever, but — despite, for instance, the militarization of this country’s police and the way in which those wars came home to the Capitol on January 6 — it remains a remarkably distant reality for most Americans.

      One explanation: Though the US has, as I’ve said, been functionally at war since 1941, there were just two times when this country felt war directly — on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and on September 11, 2001, when 19 mostly Saudi hijackers in commercial jets struck New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

      And yet, in another sense, war has been and remains us. Let’s just consider some of that war-making for a moment. If you’re of a certain age, you can certainly call to mind the big wars: Korea (1950-53), Vietnam (1954-75) — and don’t forget the brutal bloodlettings in neighboring Laos and Cambodia as well — that first Gulf War of 1991 and the disastrous second one, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then, of course, there was that global war on terror that began soon after September 11, 2001, with the invasion of Afghanistan, only to spread to much of the rest of the greater Middle East and to significant parts of Africa. In March, for instance, the first 12 American special-ops trainers arrived in embattled Mozambique, just one more small extension of an already widespread American anti-Islamist terror role (now failing) across much of that continent.

      And then, of course, there were the smaller conflicts (though not necessarily so to the people in the countries involved) that we’ve now generally forgotten about, the ones that I had to search my fading brain to recall. I mean, who today thinks much about President John F. Kennedy’s April 1961 CIA disaster at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba; or President Lyndon Johnson’s sending of 22,000 US troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to “restore order”; or President Ronald Reagan’s version of “aggressive self-defense” by US Marines sent to Lebanon who, in October 1983, were attacked in their barracks by a suicide bomber, killing 241 of them; or the anti-Cuban invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada that same month in which 19 Americans were killed and 116 wounded?

      And then, define and categorize them as you will, there were the CIA’s endless militarized attempts (sometimes with the help of the US military) to intervene in the affairs of other countries, ranging from taking the nationalist side against Mao Zedong’s communist forces in China from 1945 to 1949 to stoking a small ongoing conflict in Tibet in the 1950s and early 1960s, and overthrowing the governments of Guatemala and Iran, among other places.

      There were an estimated 72 such interventions from 1947 to 1989, many warlike in nature. There were, for instance, the proxy conflicts in Central America, first in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas and then in El Salvador, bloody events even if few US soldiers or CIA agents died in them. No, these were hardly “wars,” as traditionally defined, not all of them, though they did sometimes involve military coups and the like, but they were generally carnage-producing in the countries they were in. And that only begins to suggest the range of this country’s militarized interventions in the post-1945 era, as journalist William Blum’s “A Brief History of Interventions” makes all too clear.

      Whenever you look for the equivalent of a warless American moment, some reality trips you up. For instance, perhaps you had in mind the brief period between when the Red Army limped home in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, that moment when Washington politicians, initially shocked that the Cold War had ended so unexpectedly, declared themselves triumphant on planet Earth. That brief period might almost have passed for “peace,” American-style, if the US military under President George H.W. Bush hadn’t, in fact, invaded Panama (“Operation Just Cause”) as 1989 ended to get rid of its autocratic leader Manuel Noriega (a former CIA asset, by the way). Up to 3,000 Panamanians (including many civilians) died along with 23 American troops in that episode.

      Embed from Getty Images

      And then, of course, in January 1991 the first Gulf War began. It would result in perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 Iraqi deaths and “only” a few hundred deaths among the US-led coalition of forces. Airstrikes against Iraq would follow in the years to come. And let’s not forget that even Europe wasn’t exempt since, in 1999, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, the US Air Force launched a destructive 10-week bombing campaign against the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.

      And all of this remains a distinctly incomplete list, especially in this century when something like 200,000 US troops have regularly been stationed abroad and US Special Operations forces have deployed to staggering numbers of countries, while American drones regularly attacked “terrorists” in nation after nation and American presidents quite literally became assassins-in-chief. To this day, what scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson called an American “empire of bases” — a historically unprecedented 800 or more of them — across much of the planet remains untouched and, at any moment, there could be more to come from the country whose military budget at least equals those of the next 10 (yes, that’s 10) countries combined, including China and Russia.

      A Timeline of Carnage

      The last three-quarters of this somewhat truncated post-World War II American century have, in effect, been a timeline of carnage, though few in this country would notice or acknowledge that. After all, since 1945, Americans have only once been “at war” at home, when almost 3,000 civilians died in an attack meant to provoke — well, something like the war on terror that also become a war of terror and a spreader of terror movements in our world.

      As journalist William Arkin recently argued, the US has created a permanent war state meant to facilitate “endless war.” As he writes, at this very moment, our nation “is killing or bombing in perhaps 10 different countries,” possibly more, and there’s nothing remarkably out of the ordinary about that in our recent past.

      The question that Americans seldom even think to ask is this: What if the US were to begin to dismantle its empire of bases, repurpose so many of those militarized taxpayer dollars to our domestic needs, abandon this country’s focus on permanent war and forsake the Pentagon as our holy church? What if, even briefly, the wars, conflicts, plots, killings, drone assassinations, all of it stopped? What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

      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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      Are Americans Waiting for a Cyber Apocalypse?

      by

      America has a serious infrastructure problem. Maybe when I say that what comes to mind are all the potholes on your street. Or the dismal state of public transportation in your city. Or crumbling bridges all over the country. But that’s so 20th century of you.

      America’s most urgent infrastructure vulnerability is largely invisible and unlikely to be fixed by the Biden administration’s $2-trillion American Jobs Plan. I’m thinking about vulnerabilities that lurk in your garage (your car), your house (your computer) and even your pocket (your phone). Like those devices of yours, all connected to the internet and therefore hackable, American businesses, hospitals and public utilities can also be hijacked from a distance thanks to the software that helps run their systems. And don’t think that the US military and even cybersecurity agencies and firms aren’t seriously at risk, too.

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      Such vulnerabilities stem from bugs in the programs — and sometimes even the hardware — that run our increasingly wired society. Beware “zero-day” exploits — so named because you have zero days to fix them once they’re discovered — that can attract top-dollar investments from corporations, governments and even black-market operators. Zero days allow backdoor access to iPhones, personal email programs, corporate personnel files and even the computers that run dams, voting systems and nuclear power plants.

      It’s as if all of America were now protected by nothing but a few old padlocks, the keys to which have been made available to anyone with enough money to buy them (or enough ingenuity to make a set for themselves). And as if that weren’t bad enough, it was America that inadvertently made these keys available to allies, adversaries and potential blackmailers alike.

      The recent SolarWinds hack of federal agencies, as well as companies like Microsoft, for which the Biden administration recently sanctioned Russia and expelled several of its embassy staff, is only the latest example of how other countries have been able to hack basic US infrastructure. Such intrusions, which actually date back to the early 2000s, are often still little more than tests, ways of getting a sense of how easy it might be to break into that infrastructure in more serious ways later. Occasionally, however, the intruders do damage by vacuuming up data or wiping out systems, especially if the targets fail to pay cyber-ransoms. More insidiously, hackers can also plant “timebombs” capable of going off at some future moment.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have all hacked into this country’s infrastructure to steal corporate secrets, pilfer personal information, embarrass federal agencies, make money or influence elections. For its part, the American government is anything but an innocent victim of such acts. In fact, it was an early pioneer in the field and continues to lead the way in cyberoperations overseas.

      The US has a long history of making weapons that have later been used against it. When allies suddenly turn into adversaries like the Iranian government after the shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution or the mujahideen in Afghanistan after their war against the Red Army ended in 1989, the weapons switch sides, too. In other cases, like the atomic bomb or unmanned aerial vehicles, the know-how behind the latest technological advances inevitably leaks out, triggering an arms race. In all these years, however, none of those weapons has been used with such devastating effect against the US homeland as the technology of cyberwarfare.

      The Worm That Turned

      In 2009, the centrifuges capable of refining Iranian uranium to weapons-grade level began to malfunction. At first, the engineers there didn’t pay much attention to the problem. Notoriously finicky, such high-speed centrifuges were subject to frequent breakdowns. The Iranians regularly had to replace as many as one of every 10 of them. This time, however, the number of malfunctions began to multiply and then multiply again, while the computers that controlled the centrifuges started to behave strangely, too.

      It was deep into 2010, however, before computer security specialists from Belarus examined the Iranian computers and discovered the explanation for all the malfunctioning. The culprit responsible was a virus, a worm that had managed to burrow deep into the innards of those computers through an astonishing series of zero-day exploits.

      That worm, nicknamed Stuxnet, was the first of its kind. Admittedly, computer viruses had been creating havoc almost since the dawn of the information age, but this was something different. Stuxnet could damage not only computers but the machines that they controlled, in this case destroying about 1,000 centrifuges. Developed by US intelligence agencies in cooperation with their Israeli counterparts, Stuxnet would prove to be but the first salvo in a cyberwar that continues to this day.

      It didn’t take long before other countries developed their own versions of Stuxnet to exploit the same kind of zero-day vulnerabilities. In her book, “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends,” New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth describes in horrifying detail how the new cyber arms race has escalated. It took Iran only three years to retaliate for Stuxnet by introducing malware into Aramco, the Saudi oil company, destroying 30,000 of its computers. In 2014, North Korea executed a similar attack against Sony Pictures in response to a film that imagined the assassination of that country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. Meanwhile, Perlroth reports, Chinese hackers have targeted US firms to harvest intellectual property, ranging from laser technology and high-efficiency gas turbines to the plans for “the next F-35 fighter” and “the formulas for Coca-Cola and Benjamin Moore paint.”

      Over the years, Russia has become especially adept at the new technology. Kremlin-directed hackers interfered in Ukraine’s presidential election in 2014 in an effort to advance a far-right fringe candidate. The next year, they shut down Ukraine’s power grid for six hours. In the freezing cold of December 2016, they turned off the heat and power in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. And it wasn’t just Ukraine either. Russian hackers paralyzed Estonia, interfered in the UK’s Brexit referendum and nearly shut down the safety controls of a Saudi oil company.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Then, Russia started to apply everything it learned from these efforts to the task of penetrating US networks. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, Russian hackers weaponized information stolen from Democratic Party operative John Podesta and wormed their way into state-level electoral systems. Later, they launched ransomware attacks against US towns and cities, hacked into American hospitals, and even got inside the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant in Kansas. “The Russians,” Perlroth writes, “were mapping out the plant’s networks for a future attack.”

      The United States did not sit idly by watching such incursions. The National Security Agency (NSA) broke into Chinese companies like Huawei, as well as their customers in countries like Cuba and Syria. With a plan nicknamed Nitro Zeus, the US was prepared to take down key elements of Iran’s infrastructure if the negotiations around a nuclear deal failed. In response to the Sony hack, Washington orchestrated a 10-hour internet outage in North Korea.

      As the leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013, the NSA had set up full-spectrum surveillance through various communications networks, even hacking into the private phones of leaders around the world like Germany’s Angela Merkel. By 2019, having boosted its annual budget to nearly $10 billion and created 133 cyber mission teams with a staff of 6,000, the Pentagon’s Cyber Command was planting malware in Russia’s energy grid and plotting other mischief.

      Unbeknownst to Snowden or anyone else at the time, the NSA was also stockpiling a treasure trove of zero-day exploits for potential use against a range of targets. At first glance, this might seem like the cyber-equivalent of setting up a network of silos filled with intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to maintain a rough system of deterrence. The best defense, according to the hawk’s catechism, is always an arsenal of offensive weapons.

      But then the NSA got hacked. In 2017, an outfit called the Shadow Brokers leaked 20 of the agency’s most powerful zero-day exploits. That May, WannaCry ransomware attacks suddenly began to strike targets as varied as British hospitals, Indian airlines, Chinese gas stations and electrical utilities around the US. The perpetrators were likely North Korean, but the code, as it happened, originated with the NSA. The bill for the damages came to $4 billion.

      Not to be outdone, Russian hackers turned two of the NSA zero-day exploits into a virus called NotPetya, which caused even more damage. Initially intended to devastate Ukraine, that malware spread quickly around the world, causing at least $10 billion in damages by briefly shutting down companies like Merck, Maersk, FedEx and, in an example of second-order blowback, the Russian oil giant Rosneft as well.

      Sadly enough, in 2021, as Kim Zetter has written in “Countdown to Zero Day,” cyberweapons “can be easily obtained on underground markets or, depending on the complexity of the system being targeted, custom-built from scratch by a skilled teenage coder.” Such weapons then ricochet around the world before, more often than not, they return to sender. Sooner or later, cyber-chickens always come home to roost.

      Trump Makes Things Worse

      Donald Trump notoriously dismissed Russian interference in the 2016 election. His aides didn’t even bother bringing up additional examples of Russian cyber-meddling because the president just wasn’t interested. In 2018, he even eliminated the position of national cybersecurity coordinator, which helped National Security Adviser John Bolton consolidate his own power within the US administration. Later, Trump would fire Christopher Krebs, who was in charge of protecting elections from cyberattacks, for validating the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The SolarWinds attack at the end of last year highlighted the continued weakness of this country’s cybersecurity policy and Trump’s own denialism. Confronted with evidence from his intelligence agencies of Russian involvement, the president continued to insist that the perpetrators were Chinese.

      The far right, for partisan reasons, abetted his denialism. Strangely enough, commentators on the left similarly attempted to debunk the idea that Russians were involved in the Podesta hack, 2016 election interference and other intrusions, despite overwhelming evidence presented in the Mueller report, the Senate Intelligence Committee findings and even from Russian sources. But this denialism of the right and the left obscures a more important Trump administration failure. It made no attempt to work with Russia and China to orchestrate a truce in escalating global cyber-tensions.

      Chastened by the original Stuxnet attack on Iran, the Putin government had actually proposed on several occasions that the international community should draw up a treaty to ban computer warfare and that Moscow and Washington should also sort out something similar bilaterally. The Obama administration ignored such overtures, not wanting to constrain the national security state’s ability to launch offensive cyber-operations, which the Pentagon euphemistically likes to label a “defend forward” strategy.

      In the Trump years, even as he was pulling the US out of one arms control deal after another with the Russians, The Donald was emphasizing his superb rapport with Vladimir Putin. Instead of repeatedly covering for the Russian president — whatever his mix of personal, financial and political reasons for doing so — Trump could have deployed his over-hyped art-of-the-deal skills to revive Putin’s own proposals for a cyber-truce.

      With China, the Trump administration committed a more serious error. Stung by a series of Chinese cyber-thefts, not just of intellectual property but of millions of the security-clearance files of federal employees, the Obama administration reached an agreement with Beijing in 2015 to stop mutual espionage in cyberspace. “We have agreed that neither the U.S. [n]or the Chinese government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage,” Barack Obama said then. “We’ll work together and with other nations to promote other rules of the road.”

      In the wake of that agreement, Chinese intrusions in US infrastructure dropped by an astonishing 90%. Then, Trump took office and began to impose tariffs on Chinese goods. That trade war with Beijing would devastate American farmers and manufacturers, while padding the bills of American consumers, even as the president made it ever more difficult for Chinese firms to buy American products and technology. Not surprisingly, China once again turned to its hackers to acquire the know-how it could no longer get legitimately. In 2017, those hackers also siphoned off the personal information of nearly half of all Americans through a breach in the Equifax credit reporting agency.

      As part of his determination to destroy everything that Obama achieved, of course, Trump completely ignored that administration’s 2015 agreement with Beijing.

      Head for the Bunkers?

      Larry Hall once worked for the Defense Department. Now, he’s selling luxury apartments in a former nuclear missile silo in the middle of Kansas. It burrows 15 stories into the ground and he calls it Survival Condo. The smallest units go for $1.5 million and the complex features a gym, swimming pool and shooting range in its deep underground communal space.

      When asked why he’d built Survival Condo, Hall replied, “You don’t want to know.” Perhaps he was worried about a future nuclear exchange, another even more devastating pandemic or the steady ratcheting up of the climate crisis. Those, however, are well-known doomsday scenarios, and he was evidently alluding to a threat to which most Americans remain oblivious. What the Survival Condo website emphasizes is living through five years “completely off-grid,” suggesting a fear that the whole US infrastructure could be taken down via a massive hack.

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      And it’s true that modern life as most of us know it has become increasingly tied up with the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). By 2023, it’s estimated that every person on Earth will have, on average, 3.6 networked devices. Short of moving to a big hole in the ground in Kansas and living completely off the grid, it will be difficult indeed to extricate yourself from the consequences of a truly coordinated attack on such an IoT.

      A mixture of short-sighted government action — as well as inaction — and a laissez-faire approach to markets have led to the present impasse. The US government has refused to put anything but the most minimal controls on the development of spyware, has done little to engage the rest of the world in regulating hostile activities in cyberspace, and continues to believe that its “defend forward” strategy will be capable of protecting US assets. (Dream on, national security state!)

      Plugging the holes in the IoT dike is guaranteed to be an inadequate solution. Building a better dike might be a marginally better approach, but a truly more sensible option would be to address the underlying problem of the surging threat. Like the current efforts to control the spread of nuclear material, a nonproliferation approach to cyberweapons requires international cooperation across ideological lines.

      It’s not too late. But to prevent a rush to the bunkers will take a concerted effort by the major players — the US, Russia and China — to recognize that cyberwar would, at best, produce the most pyrrhic of victories. If they don’t work together to protect the cyber-commons, the digital highway will, at the very least, continue to be plagued by potholes, broken guardrails and improvised explosive devices whose detonations threaten to disrupt all our lives.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

      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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      in World Politics

      German Nationalism, From Revolution to Illiberalism

      by

      It is often noted that 19th-century nationalism owed much to the rise of academic history. As historians have observed, studies in national development provided materials for later and cruder claims of fascist cultural supremacy. For instance, Leopold von Ranke and Georg Hegel represented different versions of such narratives. The former traced a conceptual movement in large patterns of events; its ideological consequences were various, but one aspect was the justification of the Prussian state. The latter urged rigorous attention to historical evidence but suggested that in such detail a pattern of providence could be found.

      Remembering Germany’s Dark Colonial History

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      Ranke’s method, adopted by a generation of historians, was that of a conservative liberal of the Restoration period, envisaging a balance of European power. By mid-century, however, new historians had taken a Prussian-centered national narrative to a new level of conviction, combining elements of Hegel’s statist teleology with Ranke’s evidence-based method. In the German revolution of 1848, the rhetoric of liberty and nationhood was confused, and the goals of a constitutional monarchy and a united Germany seemed united under one banner.

      Yet within a short time, the revolution failed, and a conservative mood descended. Subsequently, the liberal spirit of nationalism was replaced by a Bismarckian argument for nationalist militarism and expansionism. Academic writing was touched by this sequence of events.

      A Historical Method

      Prior to 1848, academic historians were already sketching accounts of providential German unification and expansion. The writers of the Prussian School of History were former students of Ranke and Hegel. They wrote at first in a liberal register. Johannes Gustav Droysen began his career as a classicist, coining the term “Hellenism.” His 1833 life of Alexander the Great launched his academic career. A popular volume, its account of the Macedonian marshaling of Greek culture into a powerful empire was read as a pattern for Prussia’s future role.

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      Droysen’s historical work became overtly political with his 1842-43 “Lectures on the Wars of Liberation,” a record of Prussian popular resistance against foreign invaders. A member of the Frankfurt parliament during the 1848 revolution, he witnessed the failure of its liberal and nationalist aspirations. The crisis came when members voted to fight for the regions of Schleswig-Holstein against the claims of Denmark. It was clear, on Prussia’s withdrawal of support, that the parliament was impotent without the northern state’s backing, and by 1849 Frederick William IV was secure enough to reject liberal proposals.

      Since 1840, Droysen had taught at Keil University in the disputed region. His account, “The Policy of Denmark towards the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein,” lent support to nationalist calls for the defense of Germany’s territory. In a similar spirit, in 1851 he published a life of Count Yorck von Wartenburg, the general whose decision to change sides was a turning point in the war with Napoleon. The historical stage was set for a renewal of this national self-assertion. Otto von Bismarck, the prime minister of Prussia and the founder and first chancellor of the German Empire, no doubt saw the usefulness of such narratives when formulating his foreign policy in the early 1860s.

      Droysen took pains with his lecture series on the historical method, hoping to provide a philosophical basis for the discipline. The lectures were published only in 1937, but in 1858, he circulated a precis, the “Grundriss der Historik,” translated as “Outline of the Principles of History,” which describes history as theodicy, forming an organic pattern of growth. The method was Rankean, but drew explicitly on Hegel in its emphasis on the direction and progression of history. Going beyond Ranke’s hints at the runic import of recorded facts, Droysen pointed directly to signs of development, specifically toward a Prussian state.

      This commitment was clear in his major work, “The History of Prussian Politics,” which he began having taken a chair at Jena in 1851. Through the period of the Prussian wars on Austria and France until his death in 1884, Droysen completed 14 volumes that traced the growth of the Prussian monarchy to the year 1756.     

      From French Revolution to German Empire

      Heinrich von Sybel made his name with a history of the first crusade written with Rankean documentary rigor. Yet he already had a political aim, undercutting romantic medievalism in his commitment to a liberal future. In 1848, he too attended the Frankfurt parliament, and similarly transferred his nationalist faith toward Prussian statism over time. Despite this allegiance to the “polar star” of the north, he took a chair at Munich on Ranke’s recommendation, leading Prince Maximilian’s new Bavarian Historical Commission and founding the Historische Zeitschrift (Historical Journal).

      His debt to Ranke did not preclude a shift in tone. A celebrated 1856 address on historiography demurred at the excessive pursuit of objectivity. His major work of these years, the “History of the French Revolution,” was a Burkean warning against the destructive effects of Jacobinism. Using archives in Paris, Sybel mounted a scholarly assault on France’s role in recent European history. He effectively downgraded the revolution to a by-product of historical providence centering on Prussia. The French historiographer Antoine Guillard described it as “an attack not only on the Revolution but on the mind and history of France.”

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      In this view, the French Revolution indeed signaled the end of the old order, but it was merely one of three such events, the others being the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the destruction of Poland. This wider break with feudalism and the rise of a modernity that would be encapsulated in a unified Germany under Prussia. French pride at the assertion of popular sovereignty and human rights was undercut and German nationhood celebrated.

      Taking a chair in Bonn in 1861, the historian was now also a politician, sitting in the 1860s and 1870s in the Prussian Diet and the Constituent Reichstag of the North German Confederation. Bismarck saw Sybel’s value and made him director of Prussian archives in 1875, where he worked on his last major work, “The Founding of the German Empire by William I.” This overtly politicized work of history gave a Bismarckian slant to events leading up to 1871. Some, noting William I’s ambivalence about his chancellor’s maneuverings, joked the phrase “by” should have read “despite.”

      The work lacked life and bore the weight of a propagandistic tome; later its political slant worked to its author’s disadvantage as the focus on Bismarck over William I offended the new kaiser, and Sybel was banished from the state archives in 1890. He died five years later, having completed his last volume. Sybel, though wary of democracy as a step toward Bonapartism and a believer in Prussia’s power, was also a believer in a Burkean pluralism, whereby power was best distributed among social groups under the protection of the state. Toward the end of the 19th century, a more virulent language of racial homogeneity and expansionism came to the fore.

      Racial Theory

      The boldest publicist of the Prussian School, whose messages most clearly herald the racialized nationalism of the 20th century, was Heinrich von Treitschke. Born in Saxony with Czech roots, Treitschke began his career as a Privatdozent in Leipzig, but his conviction in Berlin’s destiny to rule was out of place there, and he returned to take university posts in Prussia. His earliest publications included patriotic poems, while his 1859 dissertation on “the science of society” made a strong case for the state as necessary and primeval, without need for a contract with its citizens. Prussia provided a nucleus for a German state forming according to historical destiny.

      Treitschke’s path exemplified the historians’ trajectory away from liberalism. As his writing gained influence, his distance from Ranke was clear. When sending a copy of his polemical essays to his father in 1865 he noted: “That bloodless objectivity which does not say on which side is the narrator’s heart is the exact opposite of the true historical sense. Judgment is free, even to the author.” His essays, often biographical studies or political arguments, grew more fervently nationalistic. The smaller German states should submit to annexation; colonial growth was a natural expression of a vital new power.

      This set a tone for German expansionism from the 1860s onward. Treitschke too was politically active, sitting in the Reichstag in 1871 as a member of the new National Liberal party and welcoming the culture war against Catholics isolated in the new Kleindeutschland. In 1874, he was invited to take the chair in history in Berlin; Ranke was ushered from his post to make room for Treitschke, whom he deemed disapprovingly a publicist, not a historian. Yet student fraternities preferred their new teacher, the court made him official historiographer of Prussia in 1886, and his academic standing was reinforced by his editorship of Historische Zeitschrift after Sybel’s death in 1895.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Treitschke’s “History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century” was a colorful and lively work; keyed into the public mood, it impressed foreign readers including the British historian G.P. Gooch, who compared it to Macaulay’s “History of England” in style and vigor, “both vibrate with their authors’ personality.” Gooch wrote in 1913, not seeing the full legacy of the Prussian School. As Treitschke gained influence in polemical attacks on socialists and Jews, his arguments converged with forms of social Darwinism and a racialized politics. In 1879, a long review essay in the Preussische Jahrbucher, the right-wing journal he edited from 1866 to 1889, concluded with an anti-Semitic polemic. He claimed that fundamental differences between Jews and Christians in Germany could not be resolved, and that the Jews had “assumed too large a space in our life.”

      These passages were later republished in the pamphlet, “A Word About Our Jews,” which reached a wider audience and sparked the Berlin Anti-Semitism Conflict, a two-year spate of protest and violence against the Jewish population. Treitschke’s anti-Semitic pronouncements coincided with those of Adolf Stöcker, then a court preacher to William I, who created the Christian Social Workers’ Party in 1878 to draw laborers away from socialism. Between them, Treitschke and Stöcker gave a new clerical, political and academic respectability to anti-Semitism from the 1880s onward.

      Such theories were not far removed from the biological variants of similar ideas, for example in Ernst Haeckel’s monism of the same period, with which it seems aligned as much with a social Darwinist as an Idealist or Christian idea of providence. It was Treitschke who coined the phrase “The Jews are our misfortune,” repeated ad nauseam in the Nazi period, and most recently adapted as “Israel is our misfortune” by the far-right party Die Rechte (The Right) in the European Parliament elections of 2019. The tradition of German nationalism had come a long way from the liberal rhetoric of freedom during the revolutionary period.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      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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      in World Politics

      Escaping Thucydides’ Trap: Keeping the Peace Between Rising and Reigning Powers

      by

      A conflict between the United States and China seems increasingly likely. A trade war that began several years ago has had economic repercussions for both sides. In the South China Sea, Chinese aggression against Taiwan is checked by the US military. In cybersphere, the war has already begun, as American and Chinese hackers attempt to exploit weaknesses in each other’s online defenses for military, political and economic information.

      With this ever-increasing antagonism between China and the US playing out on the world stage, little imagination is required to appreciate the catastrophic result of a conflict between the world’s two largest economies with nuclear triads.

      Forecasting the US-China Relationship

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      Several years ago, Dr. Graham Allison of Harvard University unveiled a historical pattern where increasing tensions between rising and reigning states led to diplomatic friction and war. Allison dubbed this pattern Thucydides’ Trap, in honor of the Athenian strategos who identified “the growth of the Athenian power, which [put] the Lacedaemonians into fear” as a cause of the Peloponnesian War between 431 and 404 BC. Allison identified 16 cases throughout history in which the rise of a rival state provoked a response from an existing hegemonic power. In 12 of those cases, titanic wars followed, while peace prevailed in only four.

      So, what lessons do the four cases with a peaceful ending offer when considering the nascent Sino-American rivalry? Close examination reveals that military, economic and political considerations contributed to a diplomatic decision for peace. In every case, both sides were vulnerable to substantial military losses in terms of personnel and equipment. The winner of the contest would find economic gains that paled in comparison to what they could have achieved in peacetime, and the loser could expect nothing short of economic devastation. Likewise, winning these conflicts could leave the victor weakened politically and almost certainly lead to the deposition of the loser. Victory in each case would have been Pyrrhic in human, economic and political terms. Defeat would have been near annihilation.

      Thus, the four cases in which adversaries escaped the trap provide potential avenues for China and the US to do the same.  

      Spain vs. Portugal

      In the late 15th century, the Iberian Peninsula held two of Europe’s economic and military powerhouses: Spain and Portugal. In Portugal, the reign of Henry the Navigator ushered in a period of exploration and colonization in Africa. Through a combination of squeezing out rivals and occupying key positions in the Eastern Atlantic, Portugal was able to utilize important sea lanes to facilitate trade with western Africa. However, the War of Castilian Succession between 1475 and 1479 ended with a unified Castille and Aragon, greatly shifting the balance of power by creating a unified Spain.

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      After the Reconquista ended with the capture of Granada in 1492, Portugal’s trading empire was exposed to a newly united Spain. Flush with captured Muslim treasure and in possession of an experienced military, Ferdinand and Isabella needed only to look west to find targets for future expansion. Later that year, the discovery of the Americas and the potential for economic dominance over two continents made war even more likely. Yet Spain and Portugal were able to negotiate the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. In doing so, they averted a potentially brutal military conflict.

      Subsequently, Spain and Portugal concentrated their militaries and economic might into their colonial empires. Spanish colonies in Latin America and the Pacific created a colonial empire that only crested in the 18th century. Portugal’s possessions in Brazil, Africa, India and the Far East allowed it to access spice markets, and it generated a Portuguese-Indian sea trade monopoly. Though both empires eventually faded, their shared peace allowed each of them to experience massive economic growth — albeit at the cost of the indigenous peoples they attacked and enslaved in doing so.

      The example illustrates an emphasis on foreign trade and domestic investment instead of escalation to war. As a result of their peaceful settlement of tensions and the ensuing economic boom, Spain and Portugal became more politically stable. The new Spanish monarchy consolidated its power after 1492, making its previously multifaith state into a Catholic stronghold and ensuring that the ties between Aragon and Castille were permanent. Meanwhile, spurred on by strong trade from their colonies, Portugal was able to endeavor its Renaissance.

      The United States vs. the United Kingdom

      The precipitous rise of American industrialism and the modernization of the US Navy challenged British domination of the seas at the turn of the 20th century. As American factory output, as well as iron and steel production, surged, the US built a formidable modern battle fleet of the latest capital ship designs. Consequently, the British government realized that the cost of a conflict was something it could ill afford. By the early 20th century, the first lord of the Admiralty admitted that the United States could create a larger navy than the British Empire.

      A territorial dispute over Venezuela in 1895 threatened to ignite a third Anglo-American war, creating economic panic. By 1901, the British Admiralty realized that the US Navy would soon possess the potential to outstrip the British Grand Fleet. Thanks to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the leadership of President Theodore Roosevelt, American naval tonnage had tripled from 1900 to 1910. Britain’s ability to maintain a stronger navy than its allies was threatened by this massive growth.

      Meanwhile, Britain was also engaged in a naval race with Germany, its primary antagonist during the era. The rapid construction of the German high seas fleet with the latest armor and guns threatened the British coastline and maritime trade routes in the event of a war. Faced with two bids for naval supremacy, the UK concentrated on the German threat and ignored American naval competition. By exempting the US from the two-power standard (to have as many battleships as its next two great competitors, plus 10%), and by leaving the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine unchallenged, Britain was able to deescalate the potential conflict between the two countries.

      As a result of this diplomatic and military resolution, Britain’s prudence soon netted extensive economic and national security gains. As the Great War commenced, Britain’s war economy relied increasingly on raw materials, munitions production and food supplies from the United States. This ongoing trade, coupled with Imperial Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare and the revelation of the Zimmerman Telegram, helped propel the US into declaring war on Germany in April 1917 and thus into becoming an ally to its onetime rival. By averting a war, Britain was able to win another, one with truly disastrous consequences for European liberty had it lost.

      Although its enemies were dismembered or subjected to humiliating terms that sowed the seeds of political violence and the Second World War, the UK enjoyed a period of political continuity, which helped its victory against Nazi Germany in 1945 and led to a more gradual dissolution of the British Empire by the 1960s.

      The Soviet Union vs. the United States

      Following a joint victory in World War II, tensions rose rapidly between the United States and the Soviet Union. A 40-year rivalry and a nuclear arms race threatened the world with a mutually annihilating conflict. But despite multiple flashpoints, such as the Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Cold War never fully went hot. 

      Though the phrase “mutually assured destruction” is typically used to refer to destruction by nuclear weapons, a conflict even before both sides wielded large arsenals could have been catastrophic. The Soviet Union was savaged by the Second World War with an estimated 24 to 27 million deaths and could not afford another conflict in the immediate aftermath. Though the United States held a stronger economic position, it realized that an invasion of the Soviet Union was likely to end the same way it did for the Germans in the summer of 1941. Thus, for both sides, victory would have come at too great a cost.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Reeling from the cost of total war from 1941 to 1945, the Soviet Union quickly repaired its economy and produced notable growth consistently. Its annual gross national product (GNP) rose by 5.7% from 1950 to 1960 and 5.2% from 1960 to 1970. At the same time, the US experienced unprecedented development. This was due in part to geographic isolation from Europe during World War II, which prevented extensive damage to American industries. The inception of new industries such as television, the rise of suburbia and government investment in infrastructure helped the US economy expand continuously for decades after 1945. The resources for each nation’s respective economic success would not have been available if they had chosen to start a third world war.

      Extensive proxy wars led by the US and the Soviet Union offered glimpses of the destruction and economic hardship that would have ensued if NATO combated the Warsaw Pact. From 1955 to 1975, the United States fought a desperate containment war against insurgents in Vietnam that ended with a communist victory and the destabilization of several other countries in Southeast Asia. In Afghanistan, the Soviets spent 10 years trying to suppress the mujahadeen before their ignominious withdrawal in 1989.

      Both conflicts resulted in the US and Soviet Union suffering tens of thousands of casualties among military service members, while causing even higher death tolls among the people of Vietnam and Afghanistan. Those wars also cost the US and the Soviet Union large sums of money that could not be regenerated, prompting economic hardship. The price of these proxy wars, terrible as they were in their own right, offered a window to the horror that would have ensued if the two superpowers had gone to war.

      Eventually, the nonviolent end of the Cold War brought with it far greater political stability than a military tête-à-tête between the Americans and Soviets would have done. The new government of the Russian Federation was able to take power quickly and without international incident.

      Germany vs. the United Kingdom and France

      Following the reunification of Germany in 1990, the fear of a third world war was foremost on the mind of the British and French governments, who prepared to make an independent military alliance should Germany rearm. Understanding this fear, and with the horrors of the world wars within living memory, Germany opted against rebuilding its military to the same degree as earlier in the 20th century. The costs of the two world wars further dissuaded Germany from posturing in a way that would invite another total conflict. In this way, the Germans ensured peace for the foreseeable future in Europe. 

      As a result of decreased military tensions between the UK, France and Germany, Europe focused its energy on opening its borders and harmonizing its economic exploits. The continued expansion of the European Union and the introduction of the euro currency cemented these aims. All three partners benefited economically from this period of stability. In 2019, Germany had the largest national economy in Europe, followed closely by the UK and France, respectively. There is freedom of travel and ease of custom that furthers cultural interaction and social development, and Europeans are arguably happier, healthier and freer than they were at any previous point in history.

      Subverting the Modern Trap

      None of the four cases cited above is an exact clone of current relations between the United States and China. In both the Iberian and the American-British examples, there was a shared cultural background and a similar language between the two sides that doubtlessly contributed toward peace. During the Second World War, the US and the Soviet Union formed a military alliance that defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. By contrast, the US assisted nationalist forces during the Chinese Civil War of 1945-49 and combated Chinese communist soldiers during the Korean War of 1950-53. In the late 1980s, memories of both world wars provided Britain, France and Germany with enough incentive to resolve their issues peacefully.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This does not mean there are no similarities each side can use as a guide to peace. Economic incentives played a role in the reduction of tensions between Spain and Portugal. Similarly, ending the trade war between the US and China and resuming normal economic ties would help fill each nation’s coffers. The United States and Great Britain were able to ally before combating a single enemy. If climate change were viewed as a shared problem, the US and China could ally to combat it together.

      Finally, the US and China do not share a land border, which was also true of the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War; this reduces the opportunity for an overzealous or nervous service member to inadvertently start a conflict. Both countries, in addition, are important members of the United Nations, which mirrors how Britain, France and Germany were important members of the European Union and NATO.

      Graham Allison’s analysis of relations between rising and reigning powers paints a grim future, one in which two powerful nations armed with nuclear weapons fight one another. To avoid such a future, the American and Chinese governments must strive to understand the lessons of the past. They must learn about the instances in which Thucydides’ Trap did not spring. Diplomacy between the two powers must always be pragmatic, and each side should understand that they will never get everything they want at the negotiating table. Finally, each side must scale down their military presence, particularly in the South China Sea, before a misstep or negligent discharge can potentially ignite a global war.

      By recognizing the devastating harm that would occur in the event of a war, and the potential for economic growth and political stability if peace is sustained, two of the world’s largest powers can concentrate on shared goals and projects for mutual benefit. This will not be easy. But, as Benjamin Franklin once observed, “There has never been a good war or a bad peace.”

      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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      in World Politics

      Is the Long War Finally Ending?

      by

      In October 1944, with the end of World War II in sight, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin passed a note back and forth to each other at a conference in Moscow. On the piece of paper, Churchill had assigned percentages to several Eastern European countries. Stalin amended the numbers and Churchill agreed. The deal remained secret for nearly a decade.

      The percentages on the piece of paper referred to the amount of influence that the Soviet Union and the West would wield in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece, with the first three countries falling in the Soviet sphere, control divided evenly in Yugoslavia, and Greece staying in the Western camp. It was the first major articulation of the geopolitical “spheres of influence” that would characterize the Cold War era.

      What an Afghan Peace Deal Could Look Like

      READ MORE

      During the first post-war elections in Eastern Europe, communist and non-communist parties vied for power, eventually cobbling together different versions of coalition governments. Ultimately, however, the communist parties seized control, except in Greece, where the West intervened in a civil war to help defeat leftist insurgents. By 1948, the region looked very much like the agreement that Churchill and Stalin had drawn up.

      The Long War

      Today, the end of a much longer war appears to be approaching. The fighting in Afghanistan has lasted nearly two decades, the most protracted conflict the United States has ever endured. This war is, in turn, part of a much larger battle that has been variously described as “America’s endless wars,” the “war on terror” or simply the “long war” that began in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, though earlier skirmishes took place during the 1990s.

      The Biden administration is currently trying to negotiate a spheres-of-influence arrangement in Afghanistan that resembles what Churchill laid out in 1944. The American-backed government in Kabul, according to this proposal, would share power with the insurgent Taliban forces as an interim step until elections can be held under a new constitution.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Such a deal would make it easier for the United States to withdraw all of its 3,500 soldiers from Afghanistan by May 1, as laid out in a peace deal signed in 2020. Even if that withdrawal goes through, however, the institutional apparatus of the larger “long war” will still be operational. US forces remain in Iraq and Syria, and the Pentagon eyes the civil war in Libya with concern.

      In all, after drawdowns in Afghanistan and Iraq, about 50,000 US troops are stationed in the greater Middle East, with 7,000 mostly naval personnel in Bahrain, 13,000 soldiers in Kuwait and a roughly equal number in Qatar, 5,000 in the United Arab Emirates and several thousand in Saudi Arabia. US Special Forces are also scattered across Africa, while the United States is still conducting air operations throughout the region.

      But, as in 1944, the preliminary discussion of a power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan suggests that the active phase of the “long war” is coming to an end. The specific US adversaries — al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and various smaller global actors — have more or less been defeated. Local groups that have battled US forces, like the Taliban, remain powerful, as do adversarial governments like Bashar al-Assad’s in Syria, but they don’t pose a threat to the US homeland. Larger geopolitical rivalries, with Russia and Iran in particular, continue to shape the conflicts in the region, but the US has already established an uneven pattern of engagement and containment with these actors.

      If history is to be replayed, the United States will wind down direct combat in favor of a tense cold war and intermittent “out-of-area” operations. The end of this “long war” against the architects of the 9/11 attacks and their supporters is long overdue. The Biden administration is eager to focus on “building back better” at home, enjoy a post-war economic expansion and beef up the US capacity to challenge China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. The administration is reassessing its military capabilities to reflect these priorities.

      All of this begs the question: Will it be possible to avoid repeating the 1945 scenario by ending the “long war” and not replacing it with a cold war?

      After promising to end the forever wars during the 2020 election campaign, President Joe Biden is eager to enjoy his own “mission accomplished” moment in Afghanistan. But that pledge comes with a couple asterisks.

      For one, Biden would like to maintain a “counterterrorism” force in Afghanistan with the permission of the Taliban. Such an agreement would parallel the arrangement in Iraq, where the government allows around 2,500 US troops to focus on suppressing any remnants of the Islamic State (as well as reining in Iran-backed paramilitaries). Second, Biden has in the past broached the possibility of moving US military bases from Afghanistan to Pakistan, where they would continue to serve their counterterrorism function. It’s not at all clear whether the Taliban or Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan would be enthusiastic about these options.

      At the moment, the United States is paying a relatively low price for its continued presence in Afghanistan. After last year’s peace deal, there haven’t been any US combat deaths in the country, which means that Afghanistan is basically absent from the hearts and minds of Americans. The US foreign policy community would like to preserve that status quo as long as possible, particularly given the post-withdrawal prospects of “ethnic cleansing, mass slaughter and the ultimate dismemberment of the country,” as Madiha Afzal and Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings have written. Similar arguments were made around the proposed withdrawal of the bulk of US troops from Iraq, and yet those worst-case scenarios haven’t come to pass.

      In recent days, the warnings about Afghanistan have increased. According to The New York Times:

      “American intelligence agencies have told the Biden administration that if U.S. troops leave before a power-sharing settlement is reached between the Taliban and the Afghan government, the country could fall largely under the control of the Taliban within two or three years after the withdrawal of international forces. That could potentially open the door for Al Qaeda to rebuild its strength within the country, according to American officials.”

      It doesn’t take an intelligence agency to predict that the Taliban will play a major role in any future Afghanistan, with or without a power-sharing settlement. The Taliban control about 20% of the country with as much as 85,000 full-time soldiers (though the areas under Taliban control are relatively underpopulated). At the same time, the insurgents are active over a much larger stretch — as much as 70% of the country — and are putting pressure on a number of key cities, including Kunduz in the north and Kandahar in the south.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In other words, there’s a good possibility that regardless of power-sharing arrangements, the Taliban will simply take over the country, much as the communists did throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1940s. Given the record of the Taliban’s last sojourn in power, the prospect of a reestablishment of their rule is very sobering.

      But the US has failed in two decades to defeat the Taliban with the full force of its military. Keeping a few thousand soldiers in the country is not going to change the balance of power on the ground. “The hawks argue that to leave Afghanistan is simply unthinkable until someday when they have finished winning the war,” writes Scott Horton in his new book, “Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism.” “But they lost the war more than a decade ago, and no one who protested against Trump’s drawdown had a single coherent thing to say about how staying there is supposed to somehow change the reality of Taliban power in that country.”

      Won’t Afghanistan again become a safe haven for international terrorists once the US troops withdraw along with their NATO partners? For all their immersion in Islamic religion and culture, the Taliban are Pashtun nationalists interested above all in kicking out the foreigners. They’re not big fans of the Islamic State group, but they do maintain a close relationship at the moment with the 200-250 al-Qaeda militants in the country. Take NATO out of the equation, however, and that relationship will likely fray at the seams, particularly if international recognition, access to the global economy and the support of powerful neighbors like Russia and Iran depend on a verifiable divorce.

      When he proposed the two spheres of influence, Churchill was not relying on the goodwill of the Soviet state. The British leader hated Stalin and communism. He was taking a clear-eyed look at the balance of power at the time and striking what he thought was the best deal he could, even if that meant “losing” most of Eastern Europe. A power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban that “loses” Afghanistan is comparably pragmatic. But will it be accompanied by other, equally pragmatic policies to bring the long war to an end?

      The Rest of the War

      The “endless wars” are obviously not just being fought by the 3,500 troops in Afghanistan and 2,500 soldiers in Iraq. As the Bush administration transitioned to the Obama era and war fatigue began to set in, the United States shifted its focus from ground operations to an air war. In Afghanistan for instance, as the number of troops declined from a high of 100,000 in 2011, the number of airstrikes steadily increased, with a peak in terms of bombs dropped in 2018 and 2019 and a consequent rise in casualties. “The number of civilians killed by international airstrikes increased about 330 percent from 2016, the last full year of the Obama Administration, to 2019, the most recent year for which there is complete data from the United Nations,” reports Neta Crawford of the Costs of War project. Throughout the greater Middle East, the United States has launched in excess of 14,000 drone strikes, which have killed as many as 16,000 people, including several hundred children.

      Since taking office, as I note in my recent study of Biden’s take on multilateralism, the new administration has launched two airstrikes, one against Iranian targets in Syria on February 25 and the other in Iraq on February 9 against the Islamic State. The Syrian attack, in particular, has prompted a bipartisan effort in Congress to repeal the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (passed in 1991 and 2002) in order to narrow the presidential ability to launch future airstrikes.

      Meanwhile, the administration has yet to report any drone strikes. This is in marked contrast to the strikes that Barack Obama and Donald Trump ordered almost immediately upon taking office as well as the escalation in attacks that took place in Trump’s final months. In one of its first orders, the Biden administration issued a temporary halt to any drone strikes outside of combat areas such as Afghanistan and Syria. As Charli Carpenter, an expert in the laws of war, points out:

      “Essentially what Biden is doing is he’s moving the barometer back to where it was before Trump devolved authority for drone strikes away from the executive branch and into the hands of commanders. What that means is that anytime a drone strike is envisioned, it needs to be approved by the White House. There’s going to be a much higher level of oversight and much more concern over the legal nuances of each strike. It will just make drones harder to use, and you can imagine the weaponized drones will only be used in the most extreme cases.”

      In addition to initiating a review of drone strikes, the administration has launched a probe into Special Forces operations to ascertain whether they have adhered to the Pentagon’s “law of war” requirements. In effect, the Biden administration is applying greater oversight across the range of military operations to bring them into closer compliance with international rules and regulations. Such oversight, however, does not imply the end of the endless wars.

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      For that to happen, the United States would have to dramatically shrink its global military footprint, the constellation of US bases around the world that serve as the launching pad for myriad operations. About 220,000 military and civilian personnel operate in more than 150 countries and over 800 overseas military bases. A significant chunk of the Pentagon’s $700 billion-plus budget goes toward maintaining this immense archipelago of force.

      In early February, the Biden administration also announced a Global Posture Review to assess the US. footprint. Such a review is much needed. After all, did this massive apparatus save a single one of the more than half a million Americans who have died from COVID-19? Is the Pentagon protecting the United States from climate change (or merely contributing to the problem with its own carbon emissions and its protection of overseas fossil fuel production and distribution)? And all that “forward-based defense” has done absolutely nothing to safeguard US infrastructure from cyberattacks like the SolarWinds hack (that, by the way, gained access to the emails of Trump’s cybersecurity team at the Department of Homeland Security).

      For the time being, the architects of the Global Posture Review are thinking primarily of refocusing “strategic capabilities” against China in the Far East and Russia in the Arctic. But that just replaces one set of threats with another, which will adjust the footprint without actually reducing it.

      So, let’s remember that the 3,500 American troops in Afghanistan are just the tip of the iceberg. For the United States to avoid the fate of the Titanic — also famous at one time for being immense and impregnable — it had better address the rest of the icy hazard of war.

      *[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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      in World Politics

      The Sports Pages of Death

      by

      Here’s one of the things I now do every morning. I go to the online Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and check out the figures there — global coronavirus cases and deaths, US coronavirus cases and deaths. And I do so the way that, not so long ago, I would have opened the sports pages and checked out the latest scores of whatever New York team I was rooting for.

      Where it was once a matter of the Knicks winning 109-92 or the Mets losing 4-2, it’s now those other, always rising, ever grimmer figures — say, 29,980,628 and 544,724. Those are the ever-updated numbers of reported American cases and deaths in what, until the arrival of the Biden administration, was a pathetically chaotic, horrifically mismanaged and politically depth-charged struggle with COVID-19.

      Wealth Inequality Breeds Health Inequality

      READ MORE

      In certain Republican-run states now rushing to unmask and open anything and everything to the limit, in places where crowds gather as if nothing had truly happened in the past year (as at Florida beaches this spring), we may face yet another future “wave” of disease — the fourth wave, if it happens — in a country at least parts of which seem eternally eager to teeter at the edge of a health cliff. That it wouldn’t have had to be this way we know from the success of the city of Seattle, which faced the first major coronavirus outbreak in the US a year ago and now has, as The New York Times reports, “the lowest death rate of the 20 largest metropolitan regions in the country.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Think of COVID-19-watching as the sport from hell. And when you look at those ever-changing figures — even knowing that vaccinations are now swiftly on the rise in this country (but not everywhere on this beleaguered planet of ours) — they should remind you daily that we live in a deeply wounded land on a deeply wounded planet and that, no matter the fate of COVID-19, it’s only likely to get worse.

      Here, for instance, is another figure to attend to, even though there’s no equivalent to that Johns Hopkins page when it comes to this subject: 40%. That’s the percentage of the human population living in tropical lands where, as this planet continues to heat toward or even past the 1.5-degree Celsius mark set by the 2015 Paris climate accord, temperatures are going to soar beyond the limits of what a body (not carefully ensconced in air-conditioned surroundings) can actually tolerate. Climate change will, in other words, prove to be another kind of pandemic, even if, unlike COVID-19, it’s not potentially traceable to bats or pangolins, but to us humans and specifically to the oil, gas and coal companies that have over all these years powered what still passes for civilization.

      In other words, just to take the American version of climate change, from raging wildfires to mega-droughts, increasing numbers of ever-more-powerful hurricanes to greater flooding, rising sea levels (and disappearing coastlines) to devastating heat waves (and even, as in Texas recently, climate-influenced freezes), not to speak of future migration surges guaranteed to make border crossing an even more fraught political issue, ahead lies a world that could someday make our present pandemic planet seem like a dreamscape. And here’s the problem: At least with COVID-19, in a miracle of modern scientific research, vaccines galore have been developed to deal with that devastating virus, but sadly there will be no vaccines for climate change.

      The Wounding of Planet Earth

      Keep in mind as well that our country, the United States, is not only an especially wounded one when it comes to the pandemic; it’s also a wounding one, both at home and abroad. The sports pages of death could easily be extended, for instance, to this country’s distant wars, something Brown University’s Costs of War Project has long tried to do. (That site is, in a sense, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center for America’s grim, never-ending conflicts of the 21st century.)

      Choose whatever post-9/11 figures you care to when it comes to our forever wars and they’re all staggering: invasions and occupations of distant lands; global drone assassination campaigns; or the release of American airpower across the greater Middle East and parts of Africa (most recently, the strike President Joe Biden ordered in Syria that killed a mere “handful” of militants — 22, claim some sources — a supposedly “proportionate” number that did not include any women or children, though it was a close call until the president canceled a second strike). And don’t forget Washington’s endless arming of, and support for, countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates engaged in their own orgies of death and destruction in Yemen. Pick whatever figures you want, but the wounding of this planet in this century by this country has been all too real and ongoing.

      The numbers, in fact, remain staggering. As has been pointed out many times at TomDispatch, the money this country puts into its “defense” budget tops that of the next 10 countries (China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and Brazil) combined. And when it comes to selling weaponry of the most advanced and destructive kind globally, the US leaves every other country in the dust. It’s the arms dealer of all arms dealers on planet Earth.

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      And if you happen to be in the mood to count up US military bases, which are on every continent except Antarctica, this country garrisons the planet in a way no previous power, not even imperial Britain, did. It has an estimated 800 such bases, while, just for the sake of comparison, China, that other fearsome rising power the US military is now so focused on, has… hmmm, at least one such base, in Djibouti, Africa (remarkably close — you won’t be surprised to learn — to an American military base there). None of this really has much of anything to do with “national security,” but it certainly adds up to a global geography of wounding in a rather literal fashion. In this sense, on this planet in this century, the United States has truly — to use a word American politicians have long loved to apply to this country — proved “exceptional.”

      America Unmasked

      At home, too, until recently, American political leadership has been wounding indeed. Keep in mind that this was in a country in which one political party is now a vortex of conspiracy theories, bizarre beliefs, wild convictions and truths that are obvious lies, a party nearly a third of whose members view the QAnon conspiracy theory favorably, 75% of whose members believe that Biden lost the 2020 election and 49% of whose male members have no intention of being vaccinated for COVID-19 (potentially denying the country “herd immunity”).

      And just to put all this in perspective, not a single Republican “statesman” offered a vote of support when Biden’s congressional radicals passed a (temporary) $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, parts of which were aimed at alleviating this country’s historic levels of inequality. After all, in the pandemic moment, while so many Americans found themselves jobless, homeless and hungry, the country’s billionaires made an extra $1.3 trillion (a figure that should certainly fit somewhere on the sports pages of death). Never, not even in the Gilded Age, has inequality been quite so extreme or wounding in the country that still passes for the greatest on the planet.

      For the first time in its history, in 2017, a self-proclaimed billionaire became president of the United States and, with the help of a Republican Congress, passed a tax cut that left the rich and corporations flooded with yet more money. Admittedly, he was a billionaire who had repeatedly bankrupted his own businesses, always jumping ship just in time with other people’s money in hand (exactly as he would do after helping to pandemicize this country, once again with oodles of his followers’ money in his pocket).

      As for me, shocking as the assault on the Capitol was on January 6, I never thought that the Senate should have convicted Donald Trump for that alone. My feeling was that the House should have impeached him and the Senate convicted him for the far more serious and direct crime of murder. After all, he was the one who played a crucial role in turning the pandemic into our very own set of mask wars (even as he called on his followers, long before January 6, to “liberate” a state capitol building).

      The half-baked, dismissive way he would deal with the coronavirus, its importance and what should be done to protect us from it — even before he got a serious case of it, was hospitalized and returned to the White House, still infectious, to tear off his mask in full public view — would functionally represent acts of murder. In effect, he unmasked himself as the killer he was. (A study in the International Journal of Health Services suggests that by July 2020, his personal decision to turn masks into a political issue had already resulted in between 4,000 and 12,000 deaths.)

      Now, throw in other Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Tate Reeves of Mississippi, who knowingly refused to declare mask mandates or canceled them early, and you have a whole crew of killers to add to those Johns Hopkins figures in a moment when the all-American sport is surely death.

      A Genuinely Green Planet?

      Admittedly, I don’t myself have any friends who have died of COVID-19, although I have at least two, even more ancient than I am, one 91 in fact, who have been hospitalized for it, devastated by it, and then have slowly and at least partially recovered from it. As for myself, since I had the foresight to be 75 when COVID-19 first hit and am now heading for 77, I’ve had my two vaccine shots in a world in which, thanks again at least in part to Trump and to a social-media universe filled with conspiracy theories and misinformation, far too many Americans — one-third of mostly young military personnel, for instance — are shying away from or refusing what could save us all.

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      So, we’ve been plunged into a nightmare comparable to those that have, in the past, been visited on humanity, including the Black Death and the Spanish Flu, made worse by leaders evidently intent on shuffling us directly into the graveyard. And yet, that could, in the end, prove the least of our problems. We could, as President Biden has only recently more or less promised, be heading for a future in which COVID-19 will be truly under control or becomes, at worst, the equivalent of the yearly flu.

      Let’s hope that’s the case. Now, consider this: The one favor COVID-19 seemed to be doing for humanity by shutting so many of us in, keeping airlines passengers on the ground, taking vehicles off the road and even, for a while, ships off the high seas was cutting down on the use of oil, coal and natural gas and so greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere. In the year of COVID-19, carbon emissions dropped significantly. In December 2020, however, as various global economies like China’s began to rev back up, those emissions were already reportedly a shocking 2% higher than they had been in December 2019 before the pandemic swept across the world.

      In short, most of what might make it onto the sports pages of death these days may turn out to be the least of humanity’s problems. After all, according to a new report, thanks in significant part to human activities, even the Amazon rainforest, once one of the great carbon sinks on the planet, is now releasing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it’s absorbing. And that should be a shock.

      If you want to be further depressed, try this: On our planet, there are now two great greenhouse gas emitters, the United States (historically at the top of the charts) and China (number one at this moment). Given what lies ahead, here’s a simple enough formula: If China and the US can’t cooperate in a truly meaningful way when it comes to climate change, we’re in trouble deep. And yet the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, remains remarkably focused on hostility to China and a military response to that country, an approach that someday is guaranteed to seem so out of touch as to be unbelievable.

      Climate change will, over the coming decades, prove increasingly devastating to our lives. It could, in a sense, prove to be the pandemic of all the ages. And yet, here’s the sad and obvious thing: The world doesn’t have to be this way. It’s true that there are no vaccinations against climate change, but we humans already know perfectly well what has to be done. We know that we need to create a genuinely green and green-powered planet to bring this version of a pandemic under control and we know as well that, over the next decades, it’s a perfectly doable task if only humanity truly sets its mind to it.

      Otherwise, we’re going to find ourselves on an increasingly extreme planet, while the sports pages of death will only grow. If we’re not careful, human history could, in the end, turn out to be the ultimate ghost story.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

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