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All extremists threaten us… but it’s the radical right we should fear now
Nick Cohen
Trump, Johnson and their kind are a far greater danger to our cherished freedoms More
Thirteen years ago, in summer 2007, I wrote a memo for the future president of the United States. The one who would take office in 2020.
At the time, I had no idea who would win the 2008 presidential election, much less an election in the distant future. In summer 2007, Hillary Clinton was the Democratic frontrunner, ahead of second-place Barack Obama by as much as double digits. Rudy Giuliani was on top of the polls for the Republican Party, with John McCain trailing behind him. I figured, wrongly, that it would stay that way.
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One year later, in summer 2008, both Obama and McCain would come from behind to secure their parties’ nomination. And I would predict in a TomDispatch piece that Obama would win the election, serve two terms and leave the US in a perilous place in 2016 because of his policies of “muddling through.” Well, I got that part right.
But in summer 2007, all I could focus on was the relative decline of the United States, as seen with “2020 hindsight.” The subprime mortgage crisis was unspooling that summer, the Bush administration was still sending more US troops to Iraq as part of its “surge” and the Chinese economy was growing by 14.2%.
Casting my mind 13 years into the future, I tried to imagine which of these three factors — Iraq, financial crisis, China — would prove most salient in explaining the downward trajectory of US standing in the world.
Here’s what I wrote back in 2007.
Memo to the President 2020
“As a member of the transition team, I’ve been asked to give a backgrounder on the ‘loss of global influence’ issue that played such a major role in the last election. I’ve submitted my study entitled End of Empire and I would encourage you to read my full analysis. I’ve been told that you might not have the time to read all three volumes. As a historian, I find it extraordinarily difficult to boil this question down to 750 words. But I will try.
Historians are divided into roughly three camps on the causes behind the end of the unipolar system headed by our country. The largest camp is the Iraq Syndrome group. They argue that the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was the critical, history-changing moment. As you well know, the invasion turned into an unsuccessful 10-year occupation that sapped the U.S. economy and significantly eroded U.S. reputation in the world. More damaging, however, was the syndrome that followed the war. The unpopularity of the war made it increasingly difficult for the United States to launch military operations and virtually impossible to solicit international support. Although the Democrats tried to maintain high military budgets through 2010, they ultimately had to make significant cuts in order to salvage the economy.
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The second camp is generally called the China Rising group. These historians, influenced by the world-systems work of Wallerstein, locate the end of U.S. influence in shifting geopolitical power and particularly the growing influence of China. As of February 2019, the Chinese economy is now larger than ours, though we still maintain a lead in per-capita GNP. More importantly, China’s turn toward multilateralism in the early part of this century caught us by surprise. The transformation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) into the premier international security mechanism, with its own peacekeeping forces and development bank, undercut both NATO and traditional U.S. bilateral alliances. When the EU became a member of the SCO in 2014, the transatlantic alliance was effectively over.
The Iraq Syndrome and the China Rising arguments are familiar and persuasive. But I do not believe that they fully explain our fall. The third camp, to which I belong, is called the Subprime group. Although we are currently considered revisionist historians, I believe that my End of Empire books definitively establish that the financial crisis that the United States experienced in 2007 was the key element in destroying our position in the world.
As you might remember, the United States experienced a significant housing bubble beginning in 2001. Americans became obsessed with buying houses, and selling houses. The banks devised a way of lending money to people who ordinarily would not have enough credit to buy a house. This was called the sub-prime loan. Without going into the details — please see Chapters 2-8 in Volume One of End of Empire — I will simply remind you of the rising number of foreclosures in the summer of 2007, the bankruptcy of lenders, the failure of hedge funds, the collapse of retail, the devaluation of the dollar, and the coordinated global bank interventions that turned out to be only a stopgap measure.
At the time, U.S. economists predicted that the housing market would recover by 2009. That didn’t happen. The subprime crisis revealed not only the underlying fragility of the domestic U.S. economy but the global economy as well. It is a common fallacy to draw parallels between household economics and the functioning of the national economy. However, in this case, I have argued that the parallel did apply. Average Americans, with their large amounts of debt, had to give up their prized possessions, that cornerstone of the American dream, the house. So, too, did the United States, with its nearly $9 trillion national debt, have to give up its global position, its “house” so to speak.
Historians in the two other camps overlook this simple and rather elegant explanation. Yes, the Iraq War was a tremendous drain on U.S. resources and thus a classic case of imperial overstretch. Yes, China played the multilateral card at just the right time and thereby built an international reputation. But it was a handful of greedy mortgage lenders that served as the catalyst. The market correction that followed the subprime crisis in fact turned out to be a much larger geopolitical correction that restored a certain balance to international affairs. Finally, with 2020 hindsight — to use this year’s most popular catch phrase — we can see that Iraq and China pale in comparison to the cold, hard bottom line. As you repeatedly said on the campaign trail, quoting one of last century’s most enduring lines, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’”
Fact-Checking the Memo
Before evaluating my central argument, let’s see what I got right with the three factors. The occupation of Iraq was indeed unsuccessful in many respects, though it lasted officially for only eight years, not a full decade as I predicted. US troops returned in 2014 as part of the campaign against the Islamic State, and approximately 5,000 are still there today (though Trump has announced a reduction to 3,500 by November).
The debacle of the Iraq War has deeply affected US military thinking. It has made it more difficult for the United States to mobilize popular support and international backing for military campaigns. But during the Obama era, the US largely shifted from “boots on the ground” to war at a distance through airstrikes and drone warfare. The military budget, as a result of economic pressures, peaked in 2010 at $849 billion and then began to fall (just as I predicted but not as significantly as I would have liked to see).
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China has steadily strengthened its global position since 2007. The US economy remains larger than the Chinese economy, as measured by nominal GDP. But if you look at GDP by purchasing power parity, China surpassed the US in 2017. Either way, of course, China is still behind the United States in GDP per capita. Whether China on balance has become economically more powerful than the US remains controversial.
What is not controversial, however, is China’s creation of a rival multilateralism. It decided to do this not through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), as I predicted, but through a set of institutions that it could more easily control: the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank it launched in 2014 and the various “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiatives that it started in 2013. Many European countries, by the way, joined the AIIB, over the objections of the US. Those defections didn’t end the transatlantic relationship, but they certainly weakened it.
At the moment, the US is focused on China’s nationalism and the more assertive foreign policy of Xi Jinping. But even as it clashes with certain of its neighbors — India, Vietnam — China remains more focused on building a web of strong economic and diplomatic relationships around the world. And that makes China a more powerful rival for global influence than the flexing of its muscles in its neighborhood.
Finally, let’s take a look at the US economy. The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 turned into a full-blown financial crisis the following year when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008. Nearly 10 million Americans lost their houses to foreclosure between 2006 and 2014, and less than a third of them would buy another house. In 2008, 2.6 million Americans lost their jobs. The housing market didn’t recover by 2009. But the Obama administration stabilized the economy with a significant bailout of the banks, and the US economy would eventually recover.
But the financial crisis, in part because of the bank bailouts, also helped shift enormous resources to the wealthy. The resentment that caused, in the US and elsewhere around the world, helped generate a wave of right-wing politics that eventually deposited Donald Trump in the White House.
Trump and the Next President
In 2007, I could not have predicted the ultimate political triumph of Donald Trump. In fact, up until election night 2016, I still expected him to go down to defeat. Instead, I predicted that the backlash to Obama’s tepid, middle-of-the-road politics would hit in 2020. America B, the large part of the country that got hit hard by the financial crisis and never recovered, was itching for revenge. As I wrote in June 2016:
“As long as America B is left in the lurch by what passes for modernity, it will inevitably try to pull the entire country back to some imagined golden age of the past before all those ‘others’ hijacked the red, white, and blue. Donald Trump has hitched his presidential wagon to America B. The real nightmare, however, is likely to emerge in 2020 or thereafter, if a far more capable politician who embraces similar retrograde positions rides America B into Washington.”
Today, America faces a much more serious economic crisis. The stock market has barely taken any notice, as it heads back to its historic highs. Nor has Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires suffered from all the business closures and surging unemployment (indeed, Bezos has benefited tremendously from it all). America B, already weakened by President Trump’s trade war with China, is getting hit by the COVID-19 pandemic both economically and medically.
So, it turns out that my memo to the 2020 president is eerily prescient. The cratering economy is shaping up to be the downfall of Trump. Let’s assume that the Democrats win in November. If they want to save the country — and that is the goal, not restoring America to its unipolar position — they’d better not repeat the mistakes of the Obama era. The cold, hard bottom line is that stabilizing the economy is not sufficient, particularly if it means locking in the economic inequality of US society, preserving the unsustainable nature of US manufacturing and agriculture, and relying on financial services to pull the economy out of its current hole.
The next president has to deal with all the debacles of the Trump era — the failure to contain the pandemic, the miscalculated confrontations with China, the self-defeating hostility to internationalism. But the next president must also ensure that Trumpism doesn’t return in a politically more palatable form. To do that will require the kind of economic transformation that Obama didn’t have the political nerve (or the congressional backing) to enact.
To win in November, the Democrats have to remember that simple electoral catchphrase of the 1990s. To govern successfully and remain in charge in Washington, however, they’d better repeat to themselves an updated mantra: It’s the sustainable economy, stupid.
*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
As the El Al flight 971 touched down in Abu Dhabi, a number of people looking at the aircraft wondered about the significance of the message it carried. The number for what both sides claimed to be Israel’s first-ever commercial flight to the UAE was the dialing code for the Emirates, with the return flight to be 972 — Israel’s dialing code. More significantly, the aircraft’s name, clearly written on the cheek of its front fuselage, Kiryat Gat, is that of a Palestinian village, Iraq al-Manshiyya, whose population was forcibly removed by the Israeli Defense Forces in 1948 and ultimately annexed to become the Israeli city of Kiryat Gat.
The symbolism was unmistakable. UAE’s military strongman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, had earlier tweeted that his decision to “normalize” relations with Israel was part of a deal that will stop the annexation of the West Bank. Immediately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by contradicting Bin Zayed, stating that his decision was only a temporary suspension, requested by President Donald Trump, an indication that even the suspension itself was not influenced by Bin Zayed.
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The deal with Bin Zayed, Netanyahu affirmed, was “peace for peace.” Nothing more. The aircraft’s name was a confirmation that even as the flight carried the Arabic, English and Hebrew words for peace, it was not intended to revoke Israel’s annexation program. Ultimately, like Kiryat Gat before, the West Bank will also be annexed.
How Normal Is Normal?
It is the sovereign right of every country to define its relations with any other party. What Bin Zayed has done is revoke the promises made to the Palestinians by the UAE and other Arab nations, including the current undertaking, first declared in the Arab summit conference in Beirut in 2002 and reaffirmed as recently as 2017. Known as the Arab Peace Initiative, it offered normalization, but only if certain conditions were met. The UAE is a signatory to the original and subsequent declarations, including the 2017 document.
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This and similar earlier declarations over the years by Arab governments had prevented Palestinians from seeking their own methods for liberating their lands. Negotiations, mainly controlled by Arab governments guided by their own political and economic agendas, had monopolized the Palestinian struggle for the past seven decades. In the process, Israel had become more powerful, imposing an increasing fait accompli by creating more settlements, while Palestinians still remain scattered in refugee camps, generation after generation, in hope that Arab governments will ultimately help them regain their rights. With Mohammed bin Zayed deciding to normalize relations with Tel Aviv, the question that springs to mind is how normal can relations be when one party to that normalization refuses to abide by normal behavior and in fact continues to evict, imprison, confiscate land, bulldoze houses and create more forced realities on the ground that deny the Palestinians some of the most basic human rights?
Under what definition can a relationship between Israel and the UAE be termed “normal,” especially given Abu Dhabi’s repeated commitments to the Palestinians under the Arab League Charter and Arab summit conferences? By this normalization, Bin Zayed has unconditionally opened to Israel doors that were promised only as part of a comprehensive settlement for the Palestinians. This is not normalization. This is a sellout and betrayal of Palestinians who were denied — through Arab compromises and declarations — to seek their own route and method to a solution.
The UAE’s abrogation of its commitments is not the first one we see. The US has abrogated its commitments under several international agreements. And the Palestinians themselves have been on the receiving end of numerous Israeli violations of their treaty commitments toward Palestinians, including many UN resolutions that obligate Israel, as a UN member, to obey. But the UAE used a pretext that the Palestinians find insulting — the claim that this normalization is part of a deal that will stop annexation of the West Bank. This claim is not only a foolhardy lie, as Netanyahu’s immediate denial shows, but also demonstrates political immaturity and lack of understanding about the 72-year Palestinian struggle.
The Palestinian fight has never been about stopping or suspending Israel’s West Bank annexation but about the entire history of Palestinian rights that are being systematically eradicated while Arab governments continue to hijack their cause. If indeed Bin Zayed is correct that such an understanding exists, then Netanyahu’s turnaround will probably be just the first, but certainly not the last, that the UAE will experience in its dealings with Israel. The well-known Palestinian politician, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, told RT: “The UAE will experience what we have seen many times over the years. Israel doesn’t respect any treaties, any covenants, any promises it makes.”
Of Dying and Forgetting
Referring to Palestinians in the diaspora, Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, had said, “The old will die. The young will forget.” More than 70 years after the creation of the state of Israel and the forced eviction of Palestinians, many of them hold the keys to their homes which are passed over to their children. Every year as Israel celebrates another anniversary of its creation, Palestinians mourn another anniversary of the Nakba — the Catastrophe — that descended upon them. The old have died, and the young refuse to forget.
Khalid al-Sheikh Ali, a Palestinian living under Israeli occupation in Al Shaafath refugee camp, told Al Jazeera: “We live here in prison. We live in a camp while we have a plot of land inside Palestine — it is empty. You want me to be an intellectual human being, a well-informed human being, a non-violent human being and so on. But I am not living like a human being here. You go out, you see the army, the overrunning drains, the piling garbage, the humidity that is eating into us and our dwellings, the dirty drinking water. The most painful thing we suffer, everyday, is to try to go outside the barriers.”
This misery is being inflicted upon Palestinians to force them to abandon their homeland, throw away their keys, forget and escape. Instead, they endure, passing the barbed-wire barriers that separate them from their homes the keys to which they still hold on to, sure that they will return. Indeed, given the never-ending misery Palestinians inside and outside Palestine suffer, it is impossible to imagine Ben Gurion or any of his successors ever realizing their dream. Enduring pain has its own way of sustaining memories.
In an act that again demonstrated the inability of Arab rulers to resolve Arab problems, Iran and Turkey — repeatedly accused of interfering in Arab affairs — have been vindicated by Bin Zayed. Arabs, especially Palestinians, indeed need to look to regional solutions instead of Arab solutions. Clearly, Arab rulers have decided that self-preservation takes precedence over national preservation. The deal with Israel, supported by the US, aims at enabling Netanyahu and Trump to win elections with the quid pro quo of helping Mohammed bin Zayed push back the growing internal opposition to his rule. The security agenda in this deal unmistakably stands out by the deafening silence of the dealmakers on the subject. Going forward, this deal will result in more draconian methods to silence the growing opposition.
Following the arrival of flight Kiryat Gat in the UAE, two explosions erupted almost simultaneously, one in Abu Dhabi, on a road leading to the airport, and another in Dubai. The government claimed gas leaks to be the cause for both. The coincidence and the timing are an uncanny precedence, in a country where such incidents are unheard of.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
Never in the last 75 years has the US-led liberal order in Europe been intellectually more contested. Some in the United States, especially among realist and neorealist scholars, disapprove of what is commonly referred to as the West-centric institutional and rules-based order. They generally raise three interrelated, skeptical and somewhat pessimistic assumptions for growing isolationist sentiments in the US.
First, there is are good reasons to think that the unipolar moment is coming to an end. As America’s primacy gradually declines with the rise of China, its grand strategy of liberal hegemony should also dissipate, including its institutional leg of collective security in Europe to which the US has given too much and received too little in return. Second, the Euro-Atlantic liberal order has generated more problems than solutions in the post-Cold War period. NATO expansion beyond the Iron Curtain poisoned relations with Russia and provoked unnecessary tensions in Georgia and Ukraine. The United States, so the argument goes, should gradually reduce its military presence in Europe and turn “NATO over to the Europeans.”
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Third, Russia, in reality, is not as big a peril to European security as it is generally portrayed and perceived in the US and across Europe, for that matter. Moscow is driven more by defensive aims (or so it claims), so balancing between Russia and the European states on one hand and a restrained US foreign policy on the other is a better way forward for everyone. If we are to assume this logic is correct, then those who still prefer the liberal Euro-Atlantic unipolarity are wrong. Are they?
No Competitors Yet
On first assumption, the United States is still by all major accounts the top dog on the world stage. It is wealthier, more powerful and more influential relative to any potential competitor in the international system despite an ongoing debate, additionally fueled by global disruptive events such as COVID-19. Its geography, an often-cited structural advantage, will persist despite the pandemic. While the US is flanked by two enormous oceans and surrounded by much weaker and friendly states, Russia and China, on the other hand, face balancing behavior from powerful regional rivals coupled with having ongoing territorial disputes.
Second, Washington’s annual defense spending is at least twice as much as Moscow’s and Beijing’s — combined. America’s preponderance of power and strategic advance is far more superior considering increased military spending of its formal allies in the European and Indo-Pacific theaters. Out of 15 countries with the largest military spending, 11 are security partners of the United States. Russia and China neither have formal allies among the top 15, nor do any of their allies believe that an attack on one is an attack against all.
Third, the US still boasts the world’s largest economy that can afford to fund the most powerful military in the world despite a disproportionately hard economic downturn triggered by the pandemic. Its global GDP share is still larger than the global GDP share of China and Russia combined, even by factoring in GDP reductions in the US this July. Moreover, the share of the global economic output by NATO members reaches more than 40% in world proportions and roughly 50% if other democratic allies in the Pacific theater are incorporated as well.
America’s geopolitical leverage is even greater considering three additional factors. The primacy of the US dollar has not waned in 2020 just as it had not waned during 2008 financial crisis. The US also rests on soft-power capabilities. The top spots in global rankings, such as the Soft Power 30, are held by democracies — the United States was in fifth position in 2019. Russia and China are ranked far lower. And third, its population growth rate has also been relatively high.
On the other hand, the Russian and Chinese workforce is aging, judging by all available measures. Given all these factors, it seems, as Gregory Mitrovich suggests, “wholly premature, short of a devastating major event, to claim that we are witnessing the end of America’s global dominance.” Equally premature is any call for American withdrawal from Europe, where the US is not only unchallenged but is largely accepted as benevolent.
Whole and Free
On second assumption, from a realist or neorealist perspective, a more powerful country does not necessarily mean a more attractive choice. What makes great powers more appealing, especially in the European theater, rests on an enduring combination of other capabilities grounded in less tangible resources. In other words, dominant powers are to be feared, but no liberal European state in the post-World War II era has ever felt a military threat from American hegemony — as Gilford John Ikenberry put it, “reluctant, open and highly institutionalized — or, in a word, liberal.” Some may correctly argue this was an act of deterrence against the common threat of the Soviet bloc in the bipolar system.
However, when the unipolar era began, America’s liberal primacy has continued to offer system-wide benefits both within Europe’s old and new democracies with lasting and far-reaching consequences for their peace and stability. Its benevolent leadership, for example, stood shoulder to shoulder with the Germans seeking freedom and reunification despite some opposition from Paris and London. Washington also laid out its vision for Europe’s new security order and sought to keep a reunited Germany in NATO. Without such leadership, France and the United Kingdom would have been more fearful of Germany’s unilateral plans, let alone weaker neighbors that would find new realities difficult to balance against. As one senior European diplomat put it, “We can agree on U.S. leadership, but not on one of our own.”
American leadership also persuaded Ukraine — also to a great benefit of Russia’s vital interests — to relinquish possession of nuclear arms it had inherited after the dissolution of the USSR. Without such leadership, Ukraine would probably have had second thoughts. As Ukraine’s then-Defense Minister Konstantin Morozov put it, plainly, “Ukraine would have posed no threat to anyone if, hypothetically speaking, it had possessed tactical nuclear weapons.” Had American leadership missed this opportunity, other states in the region would have also regarded their respective security distinctly from each other. Germany, for example, would have also been more tempted to contemplate nuclear deterrence at some point.
To zoom out a little wider, American liberal hegemony in general, and the NATO alliance with its institutional and rules-based order in particular, attracted central, eastern and southeastern European countries — former illiberal states — to choose a common prescription for perennial peace and prosperity in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. New democracies from beyond the Iron Curtain have managed to transform themselves: Their economies have largely prospered, and their political systems liberalized despite recent authoritarian tendencies in Hungary and Poland. While some variation does exist, almost all new NATO members remain “free” according to the 2020 Freedom House scores. The only exceptions are Hungary, Montenegro and North Macedonia, which are marked as “partially free.”
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NATO enlargement has been a net positive on security grounds as well. Europe has largely enjoyed peace and stability for the past 30 years. New allies offered themselves as foundational military partners and have willingly chosen to share the security burden to fight alongside the US. This mutual attraction within the Euro-Atlantic alliance has been so overwhelming in historical proportions that structural realists struggle to explain its extended lifespan and recent vitality. This includes the two latest enlargement rounds in southeastern Europe that happened on President Donald Trump’s watch, not sufficient but certainly greater share of collective defense burdens by European member states, regular military deployments and common military exercises all over the continent, as well as effective multilateral aid using NATO capacities during the COVID-19 crisis. This suggests, contrary to many pessimistic views, that American liberal hegemony in Europe is far from being in decline.
One can only imagine the different scenarios had the US decided to pursue a more restrained foreign policy in the region. Not only supporters but also critics of NATO enlargement also offered the possibility that Euro-Atlantic adversaries, namely Russia, would have been emboldened to expand the Kremlin’s sphere of influence beyond the current lines had any geopolitical vacuum existed in central and eastern Europe. J. J. Mearsheimer, for example, argues in his book that great powers “are always searching for opportunities to gain power over their rivals, with hegemony as their final goal.” Stephen M. Walt also conceded that relations with Moscow, provided Russia regained some of its former strength, “might still have worsened.”
Counterfactuals such as these can hardly be verified. However, Russia’s brutal treatment of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine made it very clear what actually happens with states in geopolitical gray areas. Belarus, which falls in Russia’s sphere of influence, is not happy either.
Net Positive
American liberal hegemony has also been a net positive when it comes to security in the Balkans — if measured by the progress on where Balkan states started from and not their distance from a liberal Western world. US leadership, for example, contained an outbreak of nationalism in the region after the EU demonstrated neither effectiveness nor capacity of preemption in the early 1990s. The Clinton administration successfully brokered the Dayton Peace Agreement in a positive-sum game whereby Republika Srpska received formal recognition as a political entity within the sovereign state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the post-Dayton phase, the liberal-led European order, primarily NATO and the EU, patiently put in place new structures and policies so the country can move forward with the peace process.
Notwithstanding NATO’s intervention in Serbia in 1999 and CIA interference in 2000, the US and its allies also used an array of softer policy instruments to promote successful democratic change in Serbia. The International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and former activists from new NATO members advised and supported independent civil organizations and opposition parties in Serbia to replace the “Butcher of the Balkans” Slobodan Milosevic in a democratic election. In recent years, Washington and Brussels also played an instrumental role in brokering the Prespa Agreement between Northern Macedonia and Greece. A bilateral deal between two bordering countries in 2018 put an end to the long-standing name dispute on the one hand and unlocked the Euro-Atlantic membership perspective for Northern Macedonia on the other.
Some of these hard-won historical achievements could have not been possible had the US decided to pursue a more restrained foreign policy. In all likelihood, weaker American leadership in Europe in the post-Cold War era would have created more problems, making European states less liberal and more domestically nationalist, rendering the European periphery full of prolonged proxy wars and skirmishes.
Russia would have also had more space to moderate such conflicts with its power-projection capabilities in the region. Likewise, absent integration into Western institutions, Europe’s soft underbelly would have exposed itself to sudden geopolitical stress bringing different local and regional powers into direct collision.
In Russia’s Image
On third assumption, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his speech at the Munich security conference in 2007 that “the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.” Thirteen years later, speaking at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov endorsed a multipolar concert with new centers of influence at the international level and common geopolitical space from Lisbon to Jakarta at the wider regional level. Lavrov also stated that “Our common European home needs serious reconstruction if we want all of its residents to live in prosperity.”
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On a mission to correct “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” — the collapse of the Soviet Union — the Kremlin is practically interested in replacing an existing liberal order, primarily the one extended beyond the Iron Curtain, with favorable and less democratic European regimes that fit Russia’s image. Second, it is also interested in replacing the hierarchic order in Europe with some unknown and certainly more anarchic multipolar structure. However, it is not surprising that the Kremlin’s foreign policy attracted limited support from the former Soviet republics and other central and eastern European countries. Most of them continue to fear Russia. Unlike their attraction to the US, their anxiety toward Moscow can be explained from their shared national memory of what can happen under the rule of an illiberal hegemon — or a potential hegemon that is, by the logic of Walt’s balance of threat theory, too close, too powerful and too offensive.
So far, all attempts from the Kremlin to impose its own illiberal and structural order in Europe, largely constrained by its limits of hard and soft power, have only made young democracies and vulnerable countries scattered around the European periphery more divided and, eventually, more anarchic. In August 2008, Russia’s military intervention in Georgia restored the Kremlin’s geopolitical relevance in the European neighborhood. However, Georgia was divided between Russian-backed self-proclaimed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia on one hand and the rest of Georgia on the other.
This small triumph encouraged Russia to bully again by lopping off Crimea from neighboring Ukraine in 2014. Ukraine was then equally forcefully divided along similar geostrategic and domestic lines between Kyiv’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations and secessionist tendencies by a pro-Russian minority in the east. Some have argued that Moscow’s incursions into Georgia and Ukraine were conducted preemptively and in reaction to perceived NATO enlargement and were therefore defensive in nature. Mearsheimer famously rejected prevailing wisdom in the West that this problem is largely the result of Russian aggression.
Stephen F. Cohen also justified Russia’s interest in restoring traditional zones of national security on its borders, including Ukraine. However, Russia marched into Syria, dropping bunker-buster bombs on Aleppo, supported mercenaries in Libya and became increasingly offensive in the Balkans — not Russia’s “near abroad” but deep inside NATO and the EU’s eastern borders. The Kremlin has reportedly fanned the flames of internal crisis in Montenegro in 2015-16 and Northern Macedonia in 2017-18. Milorad Dodik, a pro-Russian Serb leader in Bosnia and Herzegovina called his own country “an impossible state.” In February this year, he bluntly declared: “Goodbye B&H, welcome RSexit.”
Serbia and Russia carried out a joint Slavic Shield military exercise in 2019, including Russia’s first use of its advanced S-400 missile defense system abroad. In the meantime, Serbia also received Russian donations of MIG-29 fighter jets, T-72 tanks, BRDM-2MS armored vehicles and purchased, at Putin’s suggestion, the Pantsir S-1 air defense system in 2020. Russia’s appetite, therefore, goes well beyond its immediate neighborhood. It openly challenges the established liberal order in Europe by taking advantage of tensions between Serbia and Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro, and different ethnicities within North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and so on.
This revisionist path doesn’t lead to security in Europe but rather to new skirmishes and security dilemmas in the Balkans, a region divided between rival power dyads, which is at worst all too reminiscent of the 1900s, when unintended consequences of nationalist fervor led to the murder of millions.
Bottom Line
Contrary to claims that the US strategy of liberal hegemony is generally a source of endless trouble, supported by real failures and terrible misadventures of social engineering in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya, its mission in Europe was historically successful and mutually beneficial both before and after the Cold War. American leadership in Europe has been a net-positive force, essentially without US military casualties, mutually acceptable and institutional — all missing in other troubled areas. It has secured undisrupted peace dividends among major European powers, provided various public goods to newcomers from beyond the Iron Curtain, and eventually brought peace to the Balkans after the international community failed to prevent genocide in Srebrenica.
The United States, which is still the preeminent global power, does not need to reassess this grand strategy in Europe or quit NATO, an alliance encompassing nearly a billion people and half the world’s military and economic might. Down that road lie many other long-lasting win-win outcomes as well as serious challenges that are better faced collectively.
An alternative order that is promoted by some American realist and neorealist pundits on one side and revisionist challengers in the Kremlin on the other might have different motivations, means and ends. However, their common preference for dissolving NATO or having different poles in the European theater brings, by logic of structural realism, crosscutting relationships among different axes of conflict. That gloomy trajectory, if it ever happens, would make a perfect setting for a 21st-century Gavrilo Princip to fire his bullet again and trigger a chain of regrettable events here, there and everywhere.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
Many experts argue India is the weaker power unable to take on China. In an article in Foreign Policy, James Crabtree argues that a trade war with China would be a bad idea for India. In his view, India’s “military is inefficient, underequipped, and dogged by procurement corruption scandals.” To develop its military strength, India needs a dynamic economy, and an “inward economic direction” would only benefit China in the long run. Therefore, an India–China decoupling is a terrible idea.
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These analysts are wrong. Their argument against decoupling is based on three implicit assumptions. First, India is a deeply-divided country unable to act or respond decisively. Second, India is dependent on the Chinese economy for its growth. Third, China’s rise is inexorable and India has no option but to come to terms with it. These assumptions are true, but it is an error of judgment to treat them as unqualified truths.
A Trip Down Memory Lane
For Indians with longer historical memories than many of these experts, these arguments sound familiar. Anglo-Saxon publications have long hectored, advised and moralized on Indian issues. On July 5, 2014, the editorial board of The New York Times made a case against India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. To be admitted, India needed “to sign the treaty that prohibits nuclear testing, stop producing fissile material, and begin talks with its rivals on nuclear weapons containment.”
In response, Gurmeet Kanwal, a retired Indian brigadier-turned-defense analyst, called the editorial “partisan and condescending.” Some even saw it as neocolonial. He pointed to “the existential threat posed by two nuclear-armed states on India’s borders” that led India to develop its nuclear weapons capability. Kanwal argued that India had been a “responsible nuclear power” with a “positive record on non-proliferation” and had “consistently supported total nuclear disarmament.” In typical Sikh humor, he advised nuclear ayatollahs to focus on real proliferators and let go of the cap, roll-back and eliminate (CRE) stance they had adopted against India since the 1990s.
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Just as India stood up to the US on the nuclear issue in the 1990s, it is capable of standing up to China in 2020. An India–China conflict is highly undesirable. Ideally, New Delhi and Beijing should be able to work something out over endless cups of tea. However, sanctimonious advice from foreign experts about dire consequences of an India–China decoupling has to be taken with a bucket, not a pinch, of salt.
In 1998, India went nuclear despite dire predictions for its economy. Many in Washington assumed that India depended on the West for its economy. Barely seven years prior, India had experienced a serious financial crisis. The Gulf War and slowing exports to the US crippled an economy by rising deficits and increasing debt. The precipitous decline of the Soviet Union meant India no longer had a godfather to bail it out. So severe was India’s 1991 currency crisis that it had to pledge its gold reserves and liberalize its economy to get a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. In 1998, India was better off than in 1991 but certainly not in a strong position. Nuclear tests put it under immense pressure.
At the UN, the Conference on Disarmament condemned Indian nuclear tests. In the preceding years, India had watched the West ignore the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and fete China for its economic reforms. Condemnation for nuclear tests strengthened, not weakened, India’s response. It stood up to the West, ignored experts and upended nuclear apartheid. Today, India is again in a mood to defy experts and stand up to China.
Like Love, Trade Is Complicated
As troops amass on the India–China border, a full-scale economic war has broken out. It is leading to a structural break in the Indian economy. Both public opinion and political leadership is now committed to decoupling from China. In India, there is a ban on 59 Chinese apps by government authorities. Major trade bodies have formally announced boycotts of Chinese products. For instance, the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has listed 3,000 such products. CAIT is a national umbrella organization with 40,000 smaller trade bodies and 70 million traders as members. The government has tightened country of origin rules for e-retailers and other sellers.
Demand for Chinese products is declining. Xiaomi is no longer India’s top-selling phone. Samsung has replaced it. Increasingly, selling Chinese goods using Southeast Asian free trade agreements is becoming difficult. The existing business model of buying in China and selling in India is under pressure.
In an additional twist, Indian tax authorities have conducted raids on Chinese companies and individuals for money laundering. It led to the arrest of a Chinese national. Apparently, he was married to a woman from India’s northeast border state of Mizoram, had spuriously obtained an Indian passport and been arrested earlier for espionage. It seems trade is not as simple as experts imagine it to be. Intelligence, influence and geopolitics are inextricably intertwined with trade, business and investment. In the India–China economic relationship, three largely forgotten factors are noteworthy.
First, India enhanced trade ties with China not only for economic reasons but also geopolitical ones. Becoming a key market and investment destination for China was supposed to reduce the risk of conflict and wean Beijing off Islamabad. Aggressive Chinese actions have made India reconsider this strategy and change tack.
Second, India’s manufacturing sector is reasonably well developed but has suffered from Chinese competition since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. A 2018 parliamentary report concluded that Chinese imports were playing “a negative role for [India’s] domestic industry.” The report warned about the loss of jobs, an increase in bad debts for banks, a decline in tax revenues and a worrying dependence on China for critical products. It concluded that China does not play by WTO rules and “the problem of Chinese dumping is a matter of concern across the globe.”
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India is not alone in having concerns about China’s abuse of WTO rules. A 2018 report to the US Congress expressed concern at “China’s continued embrace of a state-led, mercantilist approach to the economy and trade.” It detailed “substantial costs borne by WTO members as a result of China’s problematic trade regime” and the challenges presented by its “non-market economic system.” Given China’s track record, there is a case to be made for India taking a more protectionist path.
There is another tiny little matter. Protectionism has played a key role in industrialization for any latecomer. Furthermore, industrialization has been the key driver of economic growth. In a 2019 article, one of these authors observed that the first major act passed by Congress was the Tariff Act of July 4, 1789. Without protecting its infant industry, the US would not have emerged as an industrial power.
Since 1978, China has followed the American playbook on steroids. It has powered through the largest and fastest industrialization in history. Its companies enjoy the advantages of infrastructure, cheap financing and political support. Therefore, they have been able to achieve economies of scale. As a result, Indian companies have been blown away. An India-China decoupling might give sectors from aerospace components to advanced pharmaceuticals a second chance.
Third, Chinese imports into India are nice-to-have, not must-have, goods. Demand for them is elastic unlike the inelastic demand for energy from the Middle East and the US. An India-China trade war that leads to a decoupling of the two economies could lead to short-term pain but has a strong rationale for the longer term.
The Shape of Things to Come
In any case, experts forget that India is unlikely to turn entirely inward as it did after independence in 1947. Recently, billions of dollars have poured into India from the US. Reliance Jio, an Indian mobile internet company, raked in $15 billion in 10 weeks. This is indicative of a deeper trend. Given new geopolitical imperatives, India is now looking to boost economic ties with friendly powers. It wants Korean, Japanese, European and American firms to set up shop in the country. Foreign market players who can act nimbly would be in a good position to grab some of the approximately $60 billion China’s trade surplus with India. There are new investment, manufacturing and trading opportunities emerging as the status quo changes and a new order emerges.
Many economists predict a short-term price shock as Chinese goods stop coming into the country. They forget that India has struggled with jobless growth even during the best of times. Decoupling with China could boost domestic manufacturing not only for large but also for medium and small industries. This would increase employment, tax revenues and even demand thanks to a multiplier effect. Improved job figures further increase political support for decoupling and decrease India’s need to subsidize agriculture so heavily. For decades, agricultural subsidies have put pressure on public finances. If a lower amount is spent on subsidies, pressure on the fiscal deficit would abate.
To sum up, India has strong reasons to decouple and no longer consider WTO rules sacrosanct. A tectonic shift is underway. After World War II, a new rules-based order emerged. The end of the Cold War strengthened this order and led to visions that Western democracy was the final destination for all societies. With polarization and partisanship at home, Western democracies themselves are in peril. The order that emerged in 1991 is crumbling and a new one is about to emerge. History offers us lessons as to what to expect.
In the past, India and China focused on their spheres of influence with the Himalayas keeping them apart. Both prospered. In this age of trade, peace and prosperity, a Chola empire based in the modern-day southeastern state of Tamil Nadu ruled Malaysia (Putrajaya), Indonesia (Srivijaya), Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The Middle Kingdom held sway over Mongolia, Korea and Japan. Both India and China could go back to sticking to their historic spheres and to trading with each other.
At the moment, China has followed salami tactics and encroached on territory India claims as its own. China has also been meddling in Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, India’s key neighbors. Since 1963, China has been in a close alliance with Pakistan. Yet China has never played a role in the Indian subcontinent and cannot suddenly turn into an overlord here. Therefore, close India-China economic ties no longer make strategic sense.
Additionally, China disingenuously claims to meet India halfway while insisting that the onus to improve the border situation lies entirely with its neighbor. This is a one-way, not halfway, diplomacy that suggests aggressive intent. The Chinese also seem determined to win the war of narratives and are enlisting the support of free market ayatollahs to do so. It is only natural that the Indian narrative is bound to be different. It is in sync with the new realities of the day, which drive India’s decision to decouple its economy from China. Trade, investment and deep economic ties are a jolly good thing with allies and friends, not with rivals and foes.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
On Tuesday, August 4, via a short and unassuming tweet, the former president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe Velez, informed the world that he was placed under house arrest. The news sent shockwaves throughout South America’s political circles and sparked protests across Colombia. Uribe’s house arrest order, issued by the supreme court of justice as part of a case investigating witness tampering and false testimony, is surprising and problematic for several reasons.
For starters, it is the first time that a former president has been deprived of personal liberty in Colombia, a country where more than one recent head of state has questionable records, such as campaign financing by major drug cartels. Secondly, since March, Colombia has been in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which means that individuals are for the most part already confined within their residences. Moreover, as former president and senator, Uribe doesn’t go anywhere in Colombia without a substantial security apparatus.
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Thirdly, the former president is well known both nationally and internationally, which translates to extremely low flight risk and one that could have been addressed by merely confiscating his passport. Adding to the controversy of the supreme court’s order is the fact that, as recently as last year, individuals who pose actual security and flight risks, such as Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) leaders Ivan Marquez and Jesus Santrich, were not preemptively detained despite probable cause and ended up fleeing Colombia to set up a dissident guerrilla movement.
Lastly, Uribe should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, like any other citizen, as outlined in Article 29 of Colombia’s Constitution. However, it seems that given his high profile and political history, the supreme court is treating the former president differently. This is problematic for the rule of law in Colombia.
Irregularities in the Process
Under Uribe’s presidency, Colombia’s security was largely restored, narco-terrorism was fought head-on by the national government, numerous FARC leaders were captured, over a thousand drug traffickers were extradited to the United States, and large paramilitary groups demobilized under the auspices of the Justice and Peace Law. Uribe’s work and legacy, much of which was implemented in close coordination with the United States at the time, is also recognized internationally. One of the global voices against Colombia’s former president’s house arrest is US Vice President Mike Pence, who, on August 14, tweeted in solidarity, asking that Uribe be allowed to “defend himself as a free man.”
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Given his former status as senator, Uribe’s case, which happens to be against left-wing Senator Ivan Cepeda, had Colombia’s supreme court as its original jurisdiction, in accordance with Article 235 of the constitution. Specifically, this case began in 2012 when Uribe filed a legal complaint against Cepeda accusing him of paying bribes to imprisoned criminals in exchange for testimony that would incriminate the former president and his brother for paramilitary activities during Uribe’s time as mayor of Medellin and governor of Antioquia. In 2018, an election year in Colombia, the supreme court flipped the accusation and charged Uribe with allegedly paying witnesses to testify in his favor and against Cepeda.
Since its inception, the process against Uribe has been overly politicized and marred by irregularities, including the admission of illegally obtained wiretap recordings as evidence in the case. Over 20,000 illegal interceptions were made to Uribe’s cellphone, under a judicial order that was supposed to tap Congressmember Nilton Cordoba, not the former president. Making matters worse, as soon as the analyst from Colombia’s attorney general’s office in charge of the wiretap realized that the cellphone belonged to Uribe and not Cordoba, he notified his superiors. However, the illegal interceptions continued for nearly a month and were eventually submitted to the supreme court as evidence.
There is a history of animosity between the former president and members of Colombia’s supreme court of justice due to alleged wiretapping of the court’s premises as well as judges’ phones by the security services during Uribe’s presidency. Compounded by the evident lack of procedural guarantees for a fair trial, Uribe resigned his seat as senator shortly after he was placed under house arrest and triggered a jurisdictional change. His case has now been passed on to Colombia’s attorney general and a lower court, in which Uribe expects a less politicized and more fair trial.
The Need for Judicial Reform
Although Uribe’s house arrest remains in force until a new judge takes over the case and decides whether to revoke or maintain the preliminary detention, public outcry has been heard throughout the country. The most salient example of an institutional double standard is the recent case of FARC commanders like El Paisa, who were never placed under house arrest pending trial as part of the 2016 peace process and then escaped to take up arms again. Observing this precedent, the judicial measure against Uribe is disproportionate, particularly since the former president has attended all of his court hearings as scheduled and been responsive to judicial inquiries.
Finally, the controversy around the judiciary’s handling of Uribe’s case has rekindled the calls for constitutional reform in Colombia. Reforming the country’s complex judicial branch seems for many to be the only way to rescue the institutional mechanisms, which are currently failing within the Colombian justice system. In this time of uncertainty, the alternative of carrying out judicial reform would give a new direction to the presidency of Ivan Duque and would provide a unique opportunity for Colombia to emerge institutionally strengthened.
One of the main issues with Colombia’s judicial system is that the country has not one but three top courts: the supreme court of justice, the council of state and the constitutional court. Another problem lies with the fact that the members of both the supreme court and the council of state select their membership themselves, without much executive or legislative oversight, albeit in accordance with Article 231 of the constitution. Having such a closed and endogamous nature has led to judicial malpractice and corruption in Colombia’s judiciary, such as the infamous “Cartel of Robes” scandal that saw supreme court judges abuse their independence to derail cases and stifle investigations by the attorney general in exchange for hefty bribes.
While Alvaro Uribe’s case is likely to drag on for months, there is a higher likelihood that the process will have a lower profile and a more balanced outcome now that it has left the supreme court’s docket. Nevertheless, the judicial branch will now be increasingly seen as a politicized institution, and there are important voices in the country calling for both a consolidated supreme judiciary and a more transparent selection process for its members. Already in a bind due to the pandemic and its socioeconomic fallout, Colombia’s government must now address growing calls for constitutional reform in an increasingly polarized political climate.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
As reported by Al Jazeera, China’s President Xi Jinping is seeking to realize the traditional Chinese ideal of harmony within the borders of Tibet. He has a threefold goal: Xi wants to “build an ‘impregnable fortress’ to maintain stability in Tibet, protect national unity and educate the masses in the struggle against ‘splittism.’”
Anyone familiar with Chinese culture knows the central, practically sacred place that the value of harmony holds. It has both a spiritual and social dimension. It accounts for the ability of Chinese emperors in the past — as well as today’s Communist Party — to hold in tow a large and diverse population over a vast expanse of territory. It works by inducing attitudes of conformity and disciplined behavior that serve to maintain public order. Most Chinese accept this as a rational principle and an essential feature of their culture. People hailing from the individualistic cultures of the West still have trouble grasping this fact.
The concept derives from the dynamics of music that in ancient times infused Chinese culture. Harmony is not unison. It always implies the combining of divergent elements whose different principles of resonance produce sounds that converge in an agreeable or intriguing way. Dissonance that points to resolution within the dynamics of music is a necessary ingredient. This is true of every musical tradition. Elizabethan poet and composer Thomas Campion expressed this in the simplest terms in his poem, “Rose-Cheeked Laura”: “These dull notes we sing/ Discords need for helps to grace them.”
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Xi appears not to be too fond of discord, even when it is needed for the sake of true harmony. The Chinese government has even invented a barbarous word that English translators appear to have accepted because a more conventional translation, such as “separatist,” fails to convey its deeper meaning. That word is “splitism.” Unlike separatism, which supposes two potentially autonomous entities, splitism designates something akin to a violation of the integrity of a territory, a people or a culture. It is an attack on unison voicings.
Concerning the status of Tibet, a territory, like Xinjiang, potentially guilty of splitism, Xi offered a practical suggestion demonstrating his unorthodox conception of harmony. Al Jazeera summarizes Xi’s message: “Political and ideological education needed to be strengthened in Tibet’s schools in order to ‘plant the seeds of loving China in the depths of the hearts of every youth.’”
Here is today’s 3D definition:
Seeds of loving:
Active principles of emotional orientation that can be based either on the authentic concern for the good of the other or on a policy of intimidation sufficiently strong in its negative force to appear superficially to resemble deep and spontaneous affection for the object of one’s fear.
Contextual Note
Xi’s concerns with the hearts of young Tibetans and his idea that they may be fertile ground for “seeds of loving” radically distorts the traditional notions of both harmony and love he seeks to promote. The questions every society must ask itself are, “What is harmony?” and “What is love?”
In both Chinese and Western music, harmony implies the physical notion and even cosmological notion of sympathetic resonance. One student of Chinese musical culture describes harmony as an “inner dialectic between the creation and resolution of tension and, by extension, a similarly nuanced relationship.” Thomas Campion would undoubtedly agree. In other words, harmony is not the effect of unison or forced imitation, but of the coming together or the resolution of diverse discords.
Xi’s idea of love appears to radically differ from that of Lao Tzu, who famously said: “Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have.” If it resonates with anything, rather than with Lao Tzu, Xi’s concept recalls the traditional right-wing slogan cast in the face of protesters against the US war in Vietnam: “Love America or leave it.” Xi wants Tibetan youth to love China, but, in contrast with Lao Tzu, he is unwilling to learn from them. They must learn from him.
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Perhaps Xi is seeking to distinguish China from the decidedly superficial and jaded West that no longer pays attention to its youth. US politicians have clearly become indifferent to “the depths” within the hearts of the younger generations. China at least thinks about its youth.
US President Donald Trump has dismissed this generation’s young protesters as “anarchists and agitators” who must be reined in by a strict policy of “law and order.” He has shown some love for the 17-year-old vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse who killed two protesters, but the president is doing everything within his power to prevent young people from voting. The Democratic National Convention underscored the startling fact that it has consciously abandoned the youth-oriented movement led by Bernie Sanders, a movement that was clamoring for health care, social justice, reduced military engagement and relief from oppressive debt. The Democrats consider all these issues, which are truly “at the depths” of young voters’ hearts, as irrelevant to their overriding mission of electing a man with no vision for the future, who will turn 80 in his first term.
Al Jazeera reports on Xi’s vision of the future: “Pledging to build a ‘united, prosperous, civilised, harmonious and beautiful new, modern, socialist Tibet,’ Xi said China needed to strengthen the role of the Communist Party in the territory and better integrate its ethnic groups.” And it will all be done in the name of harmony.
Chinese political analysts and apologists claim that “China’s long tradition of thinking about harmony makes it uniquely able and disposed to exercise soft power in world politics.” In the realm of geopolitics, Xi claims to understand the value of the concept of soft power, an idea initially proposed by Joseph Nye to contrast with the hard power of military might.
That may or may not be true. But internally, Xi mobilizes the same soft-power rhetoric, including the appeal to harmony, to justify a policy of hard power designed to enforce something more like conformity than harmony. On the international front, Xi understands that since the United States, under the past three presidents, has allowed military power and economic sanctions to define its foreign policy, by doing the opposite — notably thanks to the Belt and Road Initiative — China could emulate the success the US had with its Marshall Plan for Europe following World War II. But can China achieve this goal in harmony with the nations it is bringing on board? That is a moot question.
Historical Note
Xi’s conception of the concept of harmony is innovative in the sense that it diverges from tradition. In her book, “Music Cosmology and the Politics of Harmony in Early China,” Erica Fox Brindley places the origins of the Chinese concept of harmony in ancient times, when “conceptions of music became important culturally and politically.” Xi’s musical tastes as demonstrated in this official government rap song appear to have little in common with the contemplative character of traditional Chinese music. Xi’s wife is a famous singer, but the harmony of her music on display in this patriotic song demonstrates greater respect for conventional Western harmony than it does for the Chinese musical tradition.
While explaining the roots of the concept in Chinese spirituality and “protoscientific beliefs on the intrinsic harmony of the cosmos,” Brindley reminds her readers that the “rhetoric of harmony in the People’s Republic … is complicated.” The author identifies the Zuo Zhuan — one of the earliest works of Chinese history composed before 500 BC — as the “locus classicus for defining the term ‘harmony’ in ancient China.” Harmony refers “not merely to the conformity of similar items but to an appealing admixture of many diverse ones.” Xi’s current admixture reflects little more than the combination of stale Western trends with Chinese pop vocal style.
There is a traditional saying in Chinese, lǐ yuè bēng huài, which literally means “rites and music are in ruins.” As Jamie Fisher explains on his website dedicated to learning Mandarin, the idiom “refers to a society in disarray.” Xi would claim that his new rites and music are solidly built and are a protection against the prospect of ruin that the entire world is facing. Lao Tzu might disagree, at least concerning the methods employed.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s announcement on August 21 that Turkey had discovered some 320 billion cubic meters of natural gas in the Black Sea has exposed the acutely divided domestic political environment in the country. Whereas the pro-Erdogan camp hailed the development as an important milestone toward the government’s declared ambition to become a leading global power — it has the potential to significantly reduce Turkey’s current account deficit — the opposition, particularly the Republican People’s Party (CHP), sent out messages that disdained the importance of the discovery by declaring it financially unfeasible.
The secretary general of the CHP, Selin Sayek Boke, went so far as to argue that Erdogan is going to use the gas for his own ends. Engin Atalay, the deputy chairman of CHP’s parliamentary group, had previously declared that “Even if the government has done the best thing in the world, we will unconditionally criticize and refuse it,” which is indicative of the opposition’s modus operandi.
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So, what explains the opposition’s hostility toward this seemingly groundbreaking development in the Black Sea, as well as its steadfast total rejection of government actions? Simply put, it is part of the opposition’s long-time perception that Erdogan is consolidating his power and that the hydrocarbon discovery may serve his interests. This state of mind is also a reflection of the opposition’s fear that it is running out of options to stop Erdogan’s rise.
Safety Valve
Since CHP’s inception on September 9, 1923, by Mustafa Kemal, a secular nationalist and founder of modern Turkey, the CHP elite has considered itself entitled to govern the country. Having completely severed ties with the Ottoman past, Kemal crafted the state on the strict interpretation of Westernism and secularism. The CHP elite assumed the responsibility of upholding those principles by perpetuating the CHP single-party regime by suppressing any opposition. This state of privilege and entitlement lasted until 1950. That year, the first democratic elections in the history of modern Turkey were held as a prerequisite for receiving funds as part of the Marshall Plan, which the CHP desperately needed given the abysmal state of the economy after World War II despite Turkey’s neutrality.
The opposition, under Adnan Menderes, a conservative who overtly displayed his Muslim identity, won the elections by a landslide, allowing him to form a single-party government — a blow to the CHP elite. In his 10-year tenure, Menderes defied the Kemalist establishment by, among others, reverting the Muslim call to prayer to Arabic, and allowing the education of the Quran in primary school. He declared in 1951 that “Turkey is a Muslim country and will remain so.” Secular CHP’s three electoral defeats against Menderes convinced the CHP elite that democracy is not an option to regain what they believe was theirs and that the erosion of the Kemalist principles can only be halted by force.
In 1960, the Kemalist Turkish armed forces (TAF) stepped in and toppled Menderes, executing him and the two other prominent cabinet members. This launched the tradition of military coups in Turkey, where the TAF assumed the guardianship (praetorian) role of the Kemalist principles, specifically secularism. In the next 50 years, the TAF would “keep the civilians in line” by stepping in three more times, in 1971, 1980 and 1997. It made its presence known to governments through the supreme national security council, in which top generals dictated domestic and foreign policy recommendations to civilian government members.
Fast forward to 2002, when Erdogan’s ascent to power and the beginning of the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) single-party rule in Turkey heralded the impending clash with the military reminiscent of the Menderes era. This time the Kemalist military would lose. Erdogan had long believed that the military’s interpretation of strict secularism, particularly in the 1990s, suppressed the pious masses to which he belonged. He skillfully used Turkey’s European Union accession process to take on the military. He did this by zealously implementing EU guidelines, among which was the “civilianization” of politics requiring the demilitarization of the supreme national security council. In 2004, for the first time since its inception in 1938, a civilian, Mehmet Yigit Alpogan, became the secretary general of the council.
The Turkish military would strike back in April 2007 by issuing a stern warning against the election of Erdogan’s then-comrade, Abdullah Gul, as president. The move backfired, and the AKP won the general election by a landslide that summer, heralding the beginning of total civilian control over the Turkish armed forces. It is this loss of the Kemalist “safety valve” that began to raise alarm bells for the CHP. The abortive coup of July 15, 2016, was probably the oppositions last dimming hope. To its dismay, the popular resistance against the coup resulted in failure, along with the widespread purge of the supporters of Fethullah Gulen — Erdogan’s “public enemy number one” — in the military, judiciary and law enforcement, allowed Erdogan to further consolidate his grip on power.
The New System
An unexpected glimmer of hope for the opposition in its effort to topple the invincible Erdogan emerged with the introduction of the presidential system in 2017, which replaced the parliamentary system. In the parliamentary system, the main opposition party, the CHP, had no chance of forming a government, mostly due to unfavorable demographic realities. Its numbers consistently hovered around 20%-25%, whereas the AKP doubled that. In the new two-round presidential elections, a candidate is required to obtain at least 50%+1 of the popular vote in order to be elected. If no overall majority is reached, then a runoff is held between the two most popular candidates from the first round.
The first such election was held in June 2018, where four major parties — the AKP, the CHP, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and the Good Party — nominated their candidates, with President Erdogan polling highest. With what is now called the People’s Alliance, where the AKP and the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) formed an official pact, Erdogan won 52% of the popular vote. However, a win by a slight margin convinced the opposition that in a 50%+1 system, it may have a chance against him. Therefore, in an unprecedented turn in Turkish politics, the opposition began to coalesce around the idea “anybody but Erdogan.”
The opposition formed what is now called the Nation Alliance, where the CHP and the Good Party created an official pact with the HDP and the Felicity Party (SP, Erdogan’s former party) throwing in their unofficial support. The Good Party, with its moderate nationalist ideology, did not want to enter into an official pact with the Kurdish nationalist socialist-leaning HDP, which is the political arm of the outlawed PKK terrorist organization. The prospect of this new style of opposition was first tested in the March 2019 mayoral elections.
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To ensure success, the Nation Alliance nominated only the candidates whose party had the highest chance of winning against the People’s Alliance. This tactic seemed to have worked. For the first time in 30 years, a party with a manifestly leftist and secular worldview and with the support of the rest of the opposition, the CHP, won the mayoral elections in Turkey’s four biggest cities: Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Adana.
However, in the aftermath of this success, the anyone-but-Erdogan alliance began showing signs that it was headed for a catastrophic failure. One of the biggest problems was that the alliance had only one requirement — without any meaningful policy contribution to Turkish politics — for the completely opposite political views, and that was to coexist in the name of toppling Erdogan. The right-wing Turkish nationalist Good Party constituency grew resentful of the de facto alliance with the HDP. Furthermore, the HDP’s claim that “without its some 1 million votes [10-12% of total votes], the anti-Erdogan alliance would not have won the elections in Istanbul” further inflamed the Good Party base, which represented some 7%-8% of voters. This led to the resignation of five Good Party deputies.
Moreover, in order to appeal to conservative constituents, which was necessary to take on Erdogan, the leftist-secular CHP nominated former ultranationalists and conservatives as mayoral and presidential candidates. For instance, the current mayor of Ankara, Mansur Yavas, is listed as affiliated with the CHP, but he used to be a prominent member of the MHP, which is currently in an official alliance with Erdogan. Yavas’ newly surfaced undated video where he called Deniz Gezmis and his friends — the icons of the Turkish leftist movement who were executed in 1972 on charges of communist affiliations — a “bunch of thugs” drew criticism from certain leftists within CHP.
The biggest threat to the alliance appeared to be Muharrem Ince, who unsuccessfully contested the current CHP premier Kemal Kilicdaroglu for the seat of party chairman. He has sternly criticized Kilicdaroglu for being undemocratic and lambasted him for leading the CHP astray from Mustafa Kemal’s interpretation of secularism and nationalism (ulusalcilik) by courting the former conservative candidates and aligning with the Kurdish secessionist HDP. Ince, poised to form his own party, drew criticism from the anti-Erdogan coalition for dividing the much-needed block of votes.
Foreign Entities Against Erdogan
With the armed forces now under Erdogan’s full command following the July 15 coup, Turkey began to display activism abroad, which once again is perceived by the opposition as part of Erdogan’s powerplay. Since 2016, Turkey has successfully conducted three incursions into Syria, saved the UN-recognized Libyan government from implosion, and defended its maritime claims in the Eastern Mediterranean against a coalition of countries including Greece, France and the United Arab Emirates.
The anybody-but-Erdogan coalition has harshly criticized the president’s virtually every foreign policy move. The “What are we doing in …?” phrase has become an iconic expression the anti-Erdogan block used to decry Turkey’s military involvements in Syria, Libya and the Eastern Mediterranean, which pro-Erdogan circles see as a crucial matter of national security.
In the name of weakening Erdogan, the members of the opposition have not shied away from supporting foreign countries and entities that Turkey is known to clash with militarily and politically. For instance, as opposed to Erdogan, Kilicdaroglu does not recognize the PKK’s Syria branch, the YPG, as a terror organization. Whereas Erdogan has expressed his desire to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad, Kilicdaroglu advocated dialogue with him.
Kilicdaroglu believes Turkey has no business in Libya, whereas the government states it is an important move to counter the Greek maritime claims in the East Mediterranean that could cripple Turkey’s ability to navigate in those waters. Moreover, the CHP mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, criticized the government for converting the Hagia Sophia from a museum into a mosque, which led the pro-Erdogan circles accusing Imamoglu of being a “Greek spy.”
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Despite these appeals, the Turkish opposition has very few prospects to receive meaningful support from abroad. The bygone days when the Western governments were able to wield absolute influence on the Turkish authorities are just that — gone. The inability of the US and EU to dissuade Turkey from dislodging the PKK from northern Syria is a clear sign of a relative weakening of Western influence over Turkey, conversely signaling Erdogan’s ever-growing power. Likewise, last week’s refusal of EU members — Germany, Spain, Italy, Hungary and Malta — to adopt the sanctions against Ankara proposed by Greece indicates that Erdogan’s Turkey is much more important to Germany in the post-COVID-19 world than a member state’s declared interests in the Mediterranean. What is more, France was dismayed when President Emmanuel Macron could not convince NATO that Turkey was at fault in the naval incident where Turkish and French frigates dangerously came too close off of Libya in July. Finally, Greeks mourn that Europe has bowed to Erdogan on Hagia Sophia.
The entitled CHP elite still resents that the country it believes it founded has been taken over by what it sees as a conservative Muslim. What is more disappointing for the CHP is that the Turkish military’s DNA to meddle with domestic politics has been removed, leaving little chance for a coup. It also appears that growing infighting among the members of the anti-Erdogan coalition after the successful 2019 local elections is likely going to affect the opposition’s prospects of taking on Erdogan in 2023.
The impression that, in the name of weakening Erdogan, it would rather collaborate with foreign entities hostile to Turkey will further damage the opposition. Most Turks are wary of this type of political game. Perhaps some sort of cooperation with Erdogan is a must for the Turkish opposition to save itself from extinction.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
