Saturday, June 29, 2019

A Strategy to save the system

Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - 12:00am

The Future of the Liberal Order Is Conservative
A Strategy to Save the System
Jennifer Lind and William C. Wohlforth
JENNIFER LIND is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House.
WILLIAM C. WOHLFORTH is Daniel Webster Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.




The liberal world order [1] is in peril. Seventy-five years after the United States helped found it, this global system of alliances, institutions, and norms is under attack [2] like never before. From within, the order is contending with growing populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism. Externally, it faces mounting pressure from a pugnacious Russia and a rising China. At stake is the survival of not just the order itself but also the unprecedented economic prosperity and peace it has nurtured.
The order is clearly worth saving, but the question is how. Keep calm and carry on, some of its defenders argue; today’s difficulties will pass, and the order is resilient enough to survive them. Others appreciate the gravity of the crisis but insist that the best response is to vigorously reaffirm the order’s virtues and confront its external challengers. Bold Churchillian moves—sending more American troops to Syria, offering Ukraine more help to kick out pro-Russian forces—would help make the liberal international order great again. Only by doubling down on the norms and institutions that made the liberal world order so successful, they say, can that order be saved.

Such defenders of the order tend to portray the challenge as a struggle between liberal countries trying to sustain the status quo and dissatisfied authoritarians seeking to revise it. What they miss, however, is that for the past 25 years, the international order crafted by and for liberal states has itself been profoundly revisionist, aggressively exporting democracy and expanding in both depth and breadth. The scale of the current problems means that more of the same is not viable; the best response is to make the liberal order more conservative. Instead of expanding it to new places and new domains, the United States and its partners should consolidate the gains the order has reaped.

The debate over U.S. grand strategy has traditionally been portrayed as a choice between retrenchment and ambitious expansionism. Conservatism offers a third way: it is a prudent option that seeks to preserve what has been won and minimize the chances that more will be lost. From a conservative vantage point, the United States’ other choices—at one extreme, undoing long-standing alliances and institutions or, at the other extreme, further extending American power and spreading American values—represent dangerous experiments. This is especially so in an era when great-power politics has returned and the relative might of the countries upholding the order has shrunk.

It is time for Washington and its liberal allies to gird themselves for a prolonged period of competitive coexistence with illiberal great powers [3], time to shore up existing alliances rather than add new ones, and time to get out of the democracy-promotion business. Supporters of the order may protest this shift, deeming it capitulation. On the contrary, conservatism is the best way to preserve the global position of the United States and its allies—and save the order they built.

A REVISIONIST ORDER

Since World War II, the United States has pursued its interests in part by creating and maintaining the web of institutions, norms, and rules that make up the U.S.-led liberal order. This order is not a myth, as some allege, but a living, breathing framework that shapes much of international politics. It is U.S.-led because it is built on a foundation of American hegemony: the United States provides security guarantees to its allies in order to restrain regional competition, and the U.S. military ensures an open global commons so that trade can flow uninterrupted. It is liberal because the governments that support it have generally tried to infuse it with liberal norms about economics, human rights, and politics. And it is an order—something bigger than Washington and its policies—because the United States has partnered with a posse of like-minded and influential countries and because its rules and norms have gradually assumed a degree of independent influence.

No country these days is consistently interested in maintaining the status quo; we are all revisionists now.
This order has expanded over time. In the years after World War II, it grew both geographically and functionally, successfully integrating two rising powers, West Germany and Japan. Supporting liberalism and interweaving their security policies with the United States’, these countries accepted the order, acting as “responsible stakeholders” well before the term was optimistically applied to China. As the Cold War played out, NATO added not just West Germany but also Greece, Turkey, and Spain. The European Economic Community (the EU’s predecessor) doubled its membership. And core economic institutions, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), broadened their remits.

After the Cold War, the liberal order expanded dramatically. With the Soviet Union gone and China still weak, the states at the core of the order enjoyed a commanding global position, and they used it to expand their system. In the Asia-Pacific, the United States strengthened its security commitments to Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and other partners. In Europe, NATO and the EU took on more and more members, widened and deepened cooperation among their members, and began intervening far beyond Europe’s borders. The EU developed “neighborhood policies” to enhance security, prosperity, and liberal practices across Eurasia, the Middle East, and North Africa; NATO launched missions in Afghanistan [4], the Gulf of Aden, and Libya.

For liberals, this is simply what progress looks like. And to be sure, much of the order’s dynamism—say, the GATT’s transformation into the more permanent and institutional World Trade Organization, or the UN’s increasingly ambitious peacekeeping agenda—met with broad support among liberal and authoritarian countries alike. But some key additions to the order clearly constituted revisionism by liberal countries, which, tellingly, were the only states that wanted them.
Most controversial were the changes that challenged the principle of sovereignty. Under the banner of “the responsibility to protect,” governments, nongovernmental organizations, and activists began pushing a major strengthening of international law with the goal of holding states accountable for how they treated their own people. Potent security alliances such as NATO and powerful economic institutions such as the IMF joined the game, too, adding their muscle to the campaign to spread liberal conceptions of human rights, freedom of information, markets, and politics.

Democracy promotion assumed a newly prominent role in U.S. grand strategy, with President Bill Clinton speaking of “democratic enlargement” and President George W. Bush championing his “freedom agenda.” The United States and its allies increasingly funded nongovernmental organizations to build civil society and spread democracy around the world, blurring the line between public and private efforts. U.S. taxpayers, for example, have footed the bill for the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit that promotes democracy and human rights in China, Russia, and elsewhere. Meddling in other states’ domestic affairs is old hat, but what was new was the overt and institutionalized nature of these activities, a sign of the order’s post–Cold War mojo. As Allen Weinstein, the co-founder of the National Endowment for Democracy, admitted in a 1991 interview, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
As never before, state power, legal norms, and public-private partnerships were harnessed together to expand the order’s—and Washington’s—geopolitical reach. Perhaps the clearest example of these heightened ambitions came in the Balkans, where, in 1999, NATO harnessed its military power to the emerging “responsibility to protect” norm and coerced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to acquiesce to Kosovo’s de facto independence—after which the United States and its allies openly joined forces with local civil society groups to topple him from power. It was a remarkably bold move. In just a few months, the United States and its allies transformed the politics of an entire region that had traditionally been considered peripheral, priming it for incorporation into the security and economic structures dominated by the liberal West.
To say that all of this represented revisionism is not to equate it mo
rally with, say, Beijing’s militarization in the South China Sea [5] or Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and electoral meddling in the United States and Europe. Rather, the point is that the order’s horizons have expanded dramatically, with state power, new legal norms, overt and covert actions, and public-private partnerships together stretching the order wider and pushing it deeper. No country these days is consistently interested in maintaining the status quo; we are all revisionists now [6]. Revisionism undertaken by illiberal states is often seen as mere power grabbing, but revisionism undertaken by liberal states has also resulted in geopolitical rewards: expanded alliances, increased influence, and more perquisites for the chief sponsors of the order, the United States above all.

A U.S. M1A1 Abrams tank fires into a building during the Battle of Fallujah, December 2004.
REUTERS

A WHOLE NEW WORLD

There are appropriate times to expand, but today is not one of them. Although the liberal order is still backed by a powerful coalition of states, that coalition’s margin of superiority has narrowed markedly. In 1995, the United States and its major allies produced some 60 percent of global output (in terms of purchasing power parity); now, that figure stands at 40 percent. Back then, they were responsible for 80 percent of global defense expenditures; today, they account for just 52 percent. It is becoming more difficult to maintain the order, let alone expand it. All the while, the order is suffering from an internal crisis of legitimacy that is already proving to be a constraint, as war-weary Americans, Euroskeptical Britons, and others across the West have taken to the polls to decry so-called globalist elites.

The order’s illiberal challengers [7], meanwhile, have gotten savvier about acting on their long-held dissatisfaction. China and Russia have insulated themselves from external influences by manipulating information, controlling the media, and deploying new information-age techniques to monitor their populations and keep them docile. They have modernized their militaries and embraced clever asymmetric strategies to put the order’s defenders on the back foot. The result is that the United States and its allies not only command a slimmer power advantage relative to in the halcyon 1990s but also face a tougher task in sustaining the order.

One might argue that the order should neutralize these challengers by bringing them in. Indeed, such was the motivation behind the U.S. strategy of engaging a rising China. But even though illiberal countries can participate productively in many aspects of the order, they can never be true insiders. Their statist approach to economics and politics makes it impossible for them to follow Germany’s and Japan’s path and accept any order that is U.S.-led or liberal. They see U.S.-dominated security arrangements as potential threats directed at them. And they have no interest in making concessions on democracy and human rights, since doing so would undermine vital tools of their authoritarian control. Nor do they wish to embrace liberal economic principles, which run afoul of the (often corrupt) role of the state in their economies.

Given their fundamental aversion to the core precepts of the liberal order, it’s no wonder that illiberal powers have invested resources in creating alternative institutions reflecting their own statist principles—bodies such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the New Development Bank, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. There was never a chance that a powerful, undemocratic Russia was going to join NATO, just as there was never a chance that China was going to be satisfied with U.S. military dominance in Asia. U.S. security commitments are directed against these very states. Washington and its allies buy into rules and values that these countries see as threatening. As long as the security commitments remain in place and the expansionist project continues, illiberal states will never fully integrate into the order.

Perhaps, one might argue, the order’s authoritarian adversaries are paper tigers. In that case, the order has no reason to adopt a conservative stance; all it has to do is wait for these fragile governments to meet their inevitable demise. The problem with this bet is that it lay behind the liberal order’s recent expansion, and yet over the past couple of decades, illiberal governments have only grown more authoritarian. Indeed, history has shown that great powers’ domestic regimes rarely collapse in peacetime; the Soviet case was an anomaly. Cheering on political dissent within great powers from afar rarely succeeds, and by feeding narratives about their being encircled by threats, it often backfires.

The bottom line is that the external challenges to the order are happening now. Insisting on continued expansion while waiting for adversaries to decline, liberalize, and accept American leadership is likely to only exacerbate the problems afflicting the order. If that happens, the ability of the United States and its allies to sustain the order will decline faster than will the capability of their opponents to challenge it. And a failure to head off the rising costs of maintaining the order will only increase the domestic political pressure to abandon it altogether.

China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, in the South China Sea, December 2016 REUTERS

CONSERVATISM IN PRACTICE

A more conservative order would recognize that both internal and external circumstances have changed and would adjust accordingly. First and most important, this demands a shift to a status quo mindset in Washington and allied capitals. Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s occasional bluster about withdrawing from the world, his administration has retained [8] all of the United States’ existing commitments while adding ambitious new ones, notably an effort to radically scale back Iran’s influence. And although the Obama administration was often accused of retrenchment [9], it, too, kept U.S. commitments in place and even tried its hand at regime change in Libya. Under a conservative approach, Washington would set aside such revisionist projects in order to concentrate its attention and resources on managing great-power rivalries.

As part of this, the United States should reduce the expectation that it will take on new allies. At the very least, any prospective ally should bring more capabilities than costs—a litmus test that has not been applied in recent years. Because the liberal order is in dire need of consolidation rather than expansion, it makes no sense to add small and weak states facing internal problems, especially if including them will exacerbate tensions among existing allies or, worse, with great-power rivals. In July 2018, NATO, with U.S. support, formally invited Macedonia to join the alliance (reviving a dispute with Greece over the name of the country), and the Trump administration has backed NATO membership for Bosnia, too (over the objections of the Serbian minority there). These straws may not break the camel’s back, but the principle of limitless expansion might.

The case of Taiwan shows what a successful conservative approach looks like in practice, demonstrating how the United States can deter a rival great power from expanding while preventing a partner from provoking it. For decades, Washington has declared that the island’s future should be resolved peacefully. Leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have sometimes sought to overturn the status quo, as when Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian began making pro-independence moves after he was elected in 2000. In response, U.S. President George W. Bush publicly warned Chen against unilaterally changing the status quo—a tough stance toward a longtime U.S. partner that helped keep the peace. This policy may be tested again, as demographic and economic trends strengthen the Taiwanese people’s sense of national identity, as China grows more assertive, and as voices in the United States call for an unambiguously pro-Taiwan policy. But Washington should hold fast: for decades, conservatism has served it, and the region, well.
The United States should reduce the expectation that it will take on new allies.

A conservative order would also entail drawing clearer lines between official efforts to promote democracy and those undertaken independently by civil society groups. By example and activism, vibrant civil societies in the United States and other liberal countries can do much to further democracy abroad. When governments get in the game, however, the results tend to backfire. As the political scientists Alexander Downes and Lindsey O’Rourke found in their comprehensive study, foreign-imposed regime change rarely leads to improved relations and frequently has the opposite effect. Liberal states should stand ready to help when a foreign government itself seeks assistance. But when one resists help, it is best to stay out. Meddling will only aggravate that government’s concerns about violations of sovereignty and tar opposition forces with the charge of being foreign pawns.

Far from ceding power to illiberal great powers, a strategy of conservatism would directly address those external threats. Part of the reason those countries contest the order is that it exacerbates their insecurities. Restraining the order’s expansionist impulses would reveal just how much of illiberal states’ current revisionism is defensive in nature and how much is driven by sheer ambition. It could also stymie potential balancing against the order by illiberal states—China, Iran, Russia, and others. Although these revisionists have many divergent geopolitical and economic interests that currently limit their cooperation, the more their rulers worry that their grip on power is under threat from a liberal order, the more they will be inclined to overcome their differences and team up to check liberal powers. Reduce that fear, and there will be more opportunities for the liberal states to divide and rule, or at least divide and deter.

A less revisionist order could take the edge off of growing great-power rivalry in another way, by fully exploiting the advantages of a defensive, rather than offensive, stance. In general, preserving the status quo is cheaper, easier, and less dangerous than overturning it, as strategists from Sun-tzu [10] to Thomas Schelling have argued. The order is deeply set, legitimate, and institutionalized. When it remains committed to the status quo, it is easy for its defenders to set redlines clarifying which challenges will be reversed and which won’t, a strategy that can help contain adversaries and limit rivalry. Yet when all the players in the game are revisionists, setting unambiguous lines becomes much more difficult; what is acceptable today could become unacceptable tomorrow. Shifting to a more clearly status quo orientation would increase the chances that the United States and its allies could strike explicit or, more likely, implicit bargains with their rivals. Like any strategic approach, conservatism offers no guarantees and requires skilled statecraft. But by setting more realistic goals, it can dramatically increase the likelihood of success.

Greater conservatism would also help bolster the order against internal challenges. Although these will require domestic policies to address, because a less ambitious order would provoke less pushback from authoritarian states—and such pushback is costly to deal with—it would also be a more sustainable order. The higher the costs of maintaining the order, the more suspicion about it grows, and the harder it gets to maintain domestic support for it. Polls show that American voters like the country’s existing alliances. What many balk at are commitments they see as costly adventures unrelated to core national security concerns. Continued expansion risks feeding those perceptions and generating a popular backlash that would throw the baby out with the bath water. Conservatism, by contrast, would minimize that risk.

Conservatism today need not mean conservatism forever. Any ambitious enterprise, whether it be a political movement or a corporation, undergoes phases of expansion and phases of consolidation. After a firm engages in acquisition, for example, the C-suite must ask whether the new management and workers are fully on board with the firm’s culture and mission and must address any dislocations caused by the recent changes. Consolidation, then, should be seen as a prudent reaction to expansion. In the future, conditions may change such that the order can responsibly start looking for ways to grow, but that day has not yet arrived.

A TIME TO HEAL

One might wonder whether an order grounded in liberal principles can in fact practice restraint. In the mid-eighteenth century, the philosopher David Hume warned that the United Kingdom was prosecuting its wars against illiberal adversaries with “imprudent vehemence,” contradicting the dictates of the balance of power and risking national bankruptcy. Perhaps such imprudence is part and parcel of the foundational ideology and domestic politics of liberal powers. As the political scientist John Mearsheimer has put it, “Liberal states have a crusader mentality hardwired into them.”
Indeed, the principles of liberalism apply to all individuals, not just those who happen to be citizens of a liberal country. On what basis, then, can a country committed to liberal ideals stand idly by when they are trampled abroad—especially when that country is powerful enough to do something about it? In the United States, leaders often try to square the circle by contending that spreading democracy actually serves the national interest, but the truth is that power and principle don’t always go together.

Because liberal convictions are part of their identity, Americans often feel they should support those who rise up against tyranny. Perhaps in the abstract one can promise restraint, but when demonstrators take to Tahrir Square in Cairo, Maidan in Kiev, or Bolotnaya Square in Moscow, many Americans want their government to stand with those flying freedom’s flag. And when countries want to join the order’s key security and economic institutions, Americans want the United States to say yes, even when there is scant strategic sense in it. Political incentives encourage this impulse, since politicians in the United States know that they can score points by bashing any leader who sells out lovers of liberty.

There is evidence, however, that liberal countries can check their appetite for spreading virtue. Nineteenth-century British statesmen liked to think that liberal principles and imperial interests often coincided, but when the two clashed, they almost always chose realism over idealism—as when the United Kingdom backed the Ottoman Empire for reasons of realpolitik despite domestic pressure to take action on behalf of persecuted Christians in the empire. The United States in the twentieth century had idealistic presidents, such as Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, but it also had more pragmatic ones, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.

The period of détente in U.S.-Soviet relations, which lasted throughout the 1970s, exemplifies the possibility of a liberal order going on the defensive. During this period, the West largely followed a live-and-let-live strategy informed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s controversial maxim to not hold détente hostage to improvements in Moscow’s human rights record. Washington negotiated with Moscow on arms control and a range of other security issues and held frequent summits symbolizing its acceptance of the Soviet Union as a superpower equal. In the 1975 Helsinki Accords, aimed at reducing East-West tensions, the United States effectively accommodated itself to the reality of Soviet suzerainty in Eastern Europe.
The essence of the deal was that the United States would render unto the Soviets roughly a third of the world—while making it clear that they should not dare come after its two-thirds. To be sure, super-power competition never truly ceased, and in the 1980s, détente died out altogether. But while it was in place, the strategy worked to limit U.S.-Soviet rivalry and facilitate rapprochement with China. This gave the United States and its allies the breathing room they needed to get their own houses in order and patch up alliances torn apart by domestic upheavals, the Vietnam War, and wrangling over trade and monetary policy. What this history suggests is that today’s liberal order, for a time at least, can be conservative.

Liberal countries can never be thoroughly status quo actors, for they foster relatively free economies and civil societies presided over by governments committed to giving those vibrant forces free rein. Left to their own devices, those forces will always be revisionist—such is the nature of liberalism. But that inherent revisionism need not prevent leaders of liberal states, responsible for dealing with the world as it is, from recognizing that conditions have changed and deciding to trim their sails and tack away from expansion. That is what those leaders must do now: to protect an order based on liberalism, they must embrace conservatism.

Friday, June 28, 2019

Article by Ali Tuygan (Rtd. Ambassador) Deal of the Century >First Episode : Disappointment


Deal of the Century First Episode: Disappointment

June 28, 2019
Ali Tuygan
On June 22, the White House released the first of a two-part Middle East peace plan, “the deal of the century”. Three days later, in Bahrain, President Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner presented the administration’s vision of a new prosperity for the Middle East, if peace could be achieved. As for the political dimension, all he said was: “We’ll get to the political plan when we are ready to get to the political plan. However, today is not about the political issues.”
One cannot but recall that a former special US envoy to the Middle East Ambassador Dennis Ross, a scholar, had served two years as special assistant to President Obama and National Security Council senior director for the Central Region, and a year as special advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He is also the author of several books.
George Mitchell, an American politician and diplomat who had served as a member of the Senate, including service as majority leader, and later as special adviser to the peace process in Northern Ireland under Bill Clinton was another US special envoy to the Middle East under Barack Obama.
Jared Kushner is President Trump’s son-in-law. And, the Trumps and the Netanyahus are family.
In his newly disclosed testimony, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson said President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, operated independently with powerful leaders around the world without coordination with the State Department, leaving Tillerson an others in the dark. (1)
Snap legislative elections are due to be held in Israel on September 17. How President Trump will support Mr. Netanyahu this time remains to be seen. Before the April 2019 Israeli elections, Mr. Trump recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli territory; remained silent on Mr. Netanyahu’s drive for new West Bank settlements; and, designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. (2)
After the election CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote:
“President Donald Trump is celebrating Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli election victory like it’s his own — and in many ways, it is.
“Trump and his foreign policy team orchestrated one of the most undisguised US interventions in an election abroad of recent times, helping to win the Israeli Prime Minister a fifth term.”
Nobody expected the “deal of the century” to offer much to the Palestinians. On the contrary, general impression was that this would be a step back from the two-state vision. Before and after the Bahrain workshop there was hardly an expression of support or appreciation for the “Peace to Prosperity” economic plan. The Palestinians rejected calls to attend the workshop and even limited Arab participation was linked to Israel’s absence.
In brief, the timing of the launch of the Kushner initiative, given the current adverse features of the regional political stage, raised questions, as did its venue and title and not least the identity and level of its participants. Despite the intensity of public relations effort that may have gone into its promotion, it did not have a seismic political impact.
On the second day of the Bahrain workshop Oman, a country with a distinguished record of quiet diplomacy, announced that it has decided to open an embassy in the Palestinian territories in support of the Palestinian people, in a first for a Gulf Arab state.
“Peace to Prosperity” economic plan consists of three initiatives designed to support distinct pillars of the Palestinian society: the economy, the people, and the government. With the potential to facilitate more than $50 billion in new investment over ten years, it claims to represent “the most ambitious and comprehensive international effort for the Palestinian people to date”.
Under the third pillar it says: “… Just as the Japanese, South Korean, and Singaporean governments rose to meet the daunting challenges their societies faced at critical times in their respective histories, so too can the Palestinian leadership chart a new course for its people…”
According to the World Population Review there are 1.7 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and 2.8 million in the West Bank. With enough international financial support and Israeli cooperation there can indeed be substantial economic transformation in these areas. The reference to Japan, South Korea and Singapore is no doubt an attempt to highlight the prospect and make the “Peace to Prosperity” economic plan appealing to the Palestinians.
Nonetheless, the assumption that the Palestinians will give up the two-state solution in exchange for a promise of prosperity is unrealistic. Because, it overlooks the root cause of the problem.
Bahraini Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa told Israeli Channel 13:
“Yes, you do have a peace agreement with Egypt. You do have a peace agreement with Jordan, and … some kind of understandings with the Palestinians. … But this is not the limit of the scope of where you belong. Israel is a country in the Middle East. Israel is part of this heritage of this whole region historically. So the Jewish people have a place amongst us. So communication needs to be a prerequisite for solving all the dispute. We should talk.”
He is right. Indeed, Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel. Should the Gulf states wish to follow suit this would be their independent choice.
The 2002 Arab Peace initiative called upon Israel to affirm:
  • “Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the June 4, 1967 lines as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.
  • “Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194.
  • “The acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
And, the Arab countries affirmed the following:
  • “To consider the Arab-Israeli conflict over and to enter into a peace treaty with Israel to consolidate this.
  • “To achieve comprehensive peace for all the states of the region.
  • “To establish normal relations within the context of comprehensive peace with Israel.”
By establishing diplomatic relations with Israel now, Gulf states would be taking the first step, fulfilling their part of the proposed peace deal. The question would then be how Israel would react.
However, Gulf states would be well-advised to avoid giving the impression that normalization of relations with Israel is being undertaken as part of the effort to forge a regional anti-Iran bloc at Palestinians’ expense. Because this would offer Iran the opportunity to emerge as the leading advocate of the Palestinian cause.
The Bahrain workshop met under the shadow of rising tensions between Tehran and Washington and its Gulf allies. So, “confronting Iran” must have been a top agenda item in behind the scenes talks during the workshop. Members of the anti-Iran regional bloc need to see that a new conflict in the Middle East will only result in further destruction and chaos which will inevitably have an impact on their internal and external security.
As the foreword to the Peace to Prosperity economic plan says, generations of Palestinians have lived without knowing peace. Neither have the Iraqis for the last four decades. Iraqi President Barham Salih, after underlining Iraq’s yearning for lasting peace, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last week, “We do not want our territory to be a staging post for any hostile action against any of our neighbors, including Iran.”
The JCPOA was world’s way of dealing with the threat of Iran’s nuclear program. And so far, Tehran is abiding by its commitments.
A more troubling global threat is the Islamic State. And there is no possibility of striking a “deal” with it even by the world’s number one dealmaker. The threat has to be eliminated.  Since the Islamic State has largely been defeated on the battlefield, the world agrees that priority must now be given to defeating its evil ideology. An honorable Israeli-Palestinian peace can deal a mighty blow to that very ideology.
A final note: Presenting the conclusions of her investigation into the Khashoggi murder, Agnes Callamard, the United Nations expert said, “There is sufficient credible evidence regarding the responsibility of the crown prince demanding further investigation.” Regardless, Saudi Crown Prince figured prominently in the “family photo” of G20 leaders in Osaka. So much for international moral standards…
…………………………………………………………………………………………

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Turkey's demöocratic hope Istanbul MAyor Poses Existential Threat to Erdogan

Turkey's Democratic HopeIstanbul Mayor Poses Existential Threat to Erdogan

After opposition politician Ekrem Imamoglu won the first Istanbul mayoral election, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had the vote repeated. The new mayor's second victory heralds the arrival of a great democratic hope for Turkey -- and perhaps even the beginning of the end of the Erdogan era.
Ekrem Imamoglu after his victory in the Istanbul mayoral race last Sunday
Onur Gunay/ DPA
Ekrem Imamoglu after his victory in the Istanbul mayoral race last Sunday
No matter where

Ekrem Imamoglu goes these days, his fans await him: Women with headscarves who want to touch him, teenagers asking for a selfie. That's the case in Istanbul, where Imamoglu was elected mayor last Sunday by an overwhelming margin, but it's also true of conservative strongholds like the city of Trabzon on the Black Sea.
Videos recorded in Trabzon shortly before Imamoglu's election as mayor of Istanbul, show people celebrating him like a savior. They swing flags with this portrait, yelling: "President Ekrem!" His election song blasts from the speakers: "Her sey cok güzel olacak!" All will be good. The Imamoglu hype has swept across all of Turkey.
Up until a few months ago, Imamoglu, 49 years old, was the largely unknown mayor of Beylikdüzü, a drab district on the edge of Istanbul. But now that he has beaten President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) candidate twice at the ballot box, he has emerged as the great hope of proponents of democracy in Turkey.
It all began on March 31, when he came in almost 14,000 votes ahead of the AKP candidate, Binali Yildirim, in the Istanbul mayoral election. Erdogan had the result annulled. When the vote was carried out a second time, Imamoglu increased his lead to more than 800,000 votes. Few politicians in Istanbul have ever achieved a better result.
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For Imamoglu, it's more than local politics that are at stake now. Istanbul is the social, economic and cultural center of the country. "The person who governs Istanbul, governs Turkey," Erdogan once said. Now, many Turks see Imamoglu as their next president. From this point on, Erdogan will be fighting for his political survival.
To have a chance of landing the country's highest office, he will first have to prove himself in Istanbul's City Hall. There are few jobs in Turkey that are tougher. At least 15 million people live in greater Istanbul. Tens of thousands more move to the connurbation each year, and the city's administration is chronically overwhelmed. The city recently experienced conflicts between residents and migrants from Syria, and Turkey is mired in an economic crisis. Inflation is at 19 percent, and every fourth Turk under 25 is unemployed.
Expectations for the new mayor are enormous: He is supposed to create jobs, for which he will have to work with the central government. He is expected to improve the quality of life in Istanbul by expanding public transport, making apartment buildings earthquake-proof and taking measures to combat pollution.

Erdogan was considered an Islamist ideologue when he moved into City Hall 25 years ago. As a mayor, he proved to be a pragmatist who freed the city from garbage and improved its water system. If Imamoglu manages to govern as successfully as Erdogan, it will be impossible to deny him candidacy in the next presidential election.
As Istanbul's mayor, he can now put pressure on the government in Ankara. The opposition has frequently accused Erdogan of bestowing privileges on his favorites. Now Imamoglu is in a position to prove their accusations. Imamoglu's people already announced in May that the Istanbul city administration paid about 130 million euros to Islamic foundations partly under the control of Erdogan's relatives over the past year.

"The system of waste" is over, Imamoglu says.
His party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), will soon be governing well beyond Istanbul. In local elections in March, it won four of the five largest cities, including the capital, Ankara. According to calculations by the Istanbul think tank Edam, it is now governing in areas responsible for over two-thirds of the Turkish economy. Although Erdogan still controls state institutions, especially the judiciary, the era in which he could govern unimpeded is now over.
Imamoglu poses a threat to Erdogan because he is garnering the support not only of the secular, urban middle- and upper classes, but also pious Muslims and Kurds. In the Istanbul election, he won highly conservative districts like Fatih and Üsküdar, where Erdogan lives. Those had previously been no-go areas for CHP politicians.

A New Era
Like Erdogan's family, Imamoglu comes from the Black Sea. His father was a construction entrepreneur. Imamoglu moved to Istanbul to study business administration and didn't join the CHP until late. He became the district mayor of Beylikdüzü in 2014. The CHP is the party of modern Turkey's founding father, Kemal Atatürk, and many Muslims see it as elitist and distant. Imamoglu changed this image: His mother wears a headscarf, and during the election, he had himself photographed visiting a mosque and breaking fast. He removed the conservatives' fear that, if he took power, the discrimination of the pre-Erdogan period would resume.

"The era of partisanship is over," he said after his victory. "The era of law and fairness has begun."
For a long time, Erdogan was able to rely on his political instincts. His decision to have the Istanbul election repeated, however, might nevertheless be one of the most consequential mistakes of his career. He turned Imamoglu into a resonant figure by giving him something worth more than any campaign funds: a story. Imamoglu is now known as a man who won an election despite having been accused of cheating for dubious reasons.
Erdogan once campaigned as an outsider against the establishment. The regime in the 1990s turned him into a martyr by having him arrested. By voiding the results of the Istanbul election, however, he has reversed the roles: Now, Erdogan is suddenly the powerful one unfairly keeping his competitor down, and Imamoglu is the victim. In a country like Turkey that always sympathized with underdogs, these roles are important. Essentially, Imamoglu is the new Erdogan.

The president is now facing a reinvigorated opposition, and he is no longer as uncontroversial within his own party as he once was. After the election, AKP politicians began criticizing him more publicly than ever. "We lost Istanbul because we forfeited our moral superiority," tweeted AKP lawmaker Mustafa Yeneroglu. In off-the-record background interviews, members of the government were more assertive. "Erdogan's time is clearly over. He has no idea anymore how he can bring the country forward. We need a fresh start," one cabinet member told DER SPIEGEL.
Observers believe the AKP could split as soon as the next few weeks. In the past, there have often been rumors that high-ranking AKP politicians were preparing a break with Erdogan. Now, these plans seem to be taking concrete shape.

Sources in Ankara have stated that Ali Babacan, an AKP co-founder and former economics minister, could announce the formation of a new party as early as July. Sources close to the president told DER SPIEGEL that Babacan personally informed Erdogan about his plans before the Istanbul election. Former President Abdullah Gül reportedly supports Babacan, but isn't planning to seek office himself. And former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu is also reported to have frustrated AKP members swarming around him.
Undoing His Changes
It remains unclear how many AKP lawmakers would join Babacan or Davutoglu, and whether Erdogan could lose his majority in parliament as a result. Erdogan's opponents are already discussing scenarios in which they could push Erdogan out of power.

After that, the three opposition parties -- CHP, lyi and HDP -- would have to join forces, together with parts of the AKP, to pass a parliamentary resolution to hold a new referendum on the presidential system. Erdogan had secured extensive powers in the 2017 referendum that many lawmakers would like to reverse.
The plan is a risky one. It assumes that parties until now considered to be rivals would cooperate in a disciplined way. But constitutional experts believe a referendum is the only way to get rid of the president because the next presidential election otherwise won't take place until 2023. If Erdogan lost such a vote, he would still be president, but he would lose much of his power. New elections would then be inevitable.

Erdogan has often managed to reinvent himself in crisis situations. It's possible he will change tack this time and compromise with his opponents. This would mean asking for help from the International Monetary Fund to help resolve the economic crisis, working to reconcile with Western partners like Germany and the United States and setting political prisoners like former HDP Head Selahatin Demirtas or philanthropist Osman Kavala free. In his first speech after the Istanbul election, the president presented himself as comparatively conciliatory.

It's more likely that Erdogan, pushed by his right-wing extremist coalition partners, the MHP, will continue to escalate the situation. Since the 2013 Gezi protests at the latest, Erdogan has ruled through intimidation. Ever since, he has posed his citizens with a choice: You can choose either me or chaos.
His problem now is that, since Sunday, there is another alternative: Ekrem Imamoglu.

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

A Foreign Policy for All

A Foreign Policy for All
Strengthening Democracy—at Home and Abroad
Elizabeth Warren
ELIZABETH WARREN is a Democratic U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. 


Around the world, democracy is under assault. Authoritarian governments are gaining power, and right-wing demagogues are gaining strength. Movements toward openness and pluralism have stalled. Inequality is growing, transforming rule by the people into rule by wealthy elites. And here in the United States, many Americans seem to accept—even embrace—the politics of division and resentment.

How did we get here? There’s a story Americans like to tell ourselves about how we built a liberal international order [1]—one based on democratic principles, committed to civil and human rights, accountable to citizens, bound by the rule of law, and focused on economic prosperity for all. It’s a good story, with deep roots. But in recent decades, Washington’s focus has shifted from policies that benefit everyone to policies that benefit a handful of elites. After the Cold War, U.S. policymakers started to believe that because democracy had outlasted communism, it would be simple to build democracy anywhere and everywhere. They began to export a particular brand of capitalism, one that involved weak regulations, low taxes on the wealthy, and policies favoring multinational corporations. And the United States took on a series of seemingly endless wars, engaging in conflicts with mistaken or uncertain objectives and no obvious path to completion. 

The impact of these policy changes has been devastating. While international economic policies and trade deals have worked gloriously well for elites around the world, they have left working people discouraged and disaffected. Efforts to promote the United States’ own security have soaked up huge resources and destabilized entire regions, and meanwhile, U.S. technological dominance has quietly eroded. Inequality has grown worldwide, contributing to an unfolding nationalist backlash that seeks to upend democracy itself. It is little wonder that the American people have less faith in their government today than at any other time in modern U.S. history. The country is in a moment of crisis decades in the making. 

To fight back, we need to pursue international economic policies that benefit all Americans, not merely an elite few. We need strong yet pragmatic security policies, amplified by diplomacy. And the United States can no longer maintain the comfortable assumption that its domestic and foreign policies are separate. Every decision the government makes should be grounded in the recognition that actions that undermine working families in this country ultimately erode American strength in the world. In other words, we need a foreign policy that works for all Americans.

The urgency of the moment cannot be overstated. At home and abroad, democracy [2] is on the defense. The details of the problem vary from place to place, but one cause stands out everywhere: the systematic failure to understand and invest in the social, political, and economic foundations on which democracies rest. If we do not stand up to those who seek to undermine our democracy and our economy, we will end up as bystanders to the destruction of both. 

MAKING GLOBALIZATION WORK

The globalization of trade has been tremendously profitable for the largest American corporations. It has opened up opportunity and lifted billions out of poverty around the world. 

But U.S. trade and economic policies have not delivered for the middle class. For decades, both Democratic and Republican leaders asserted that free trade was a rising tide that would lift all boats. Great rhetoric, except that the trade deals they negotiated mainly lifted the boats of the wealthy while leaving millions of working Americans to drown. Policymakers were willing to sacrifice American jobs in hopes of lowering prices for consumer goods at home and spreading open markets abroad. They pushed former Soviet states to privatize as quickly as possible despite the risk of corruption, and they advocated China’s accession to the World Trade Organization despite its unfair trading practices. They backed international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, even as those organizations pushed austerity, deregulation, and privatization—policies that reduced public faith in both capitalism and democracy and left governments with fewer fiscal levers when economic crises hit. 
And what has this brought us? Policymakers promised that open markets would lead to open societies. Instead, efforts to bring capitalism to the global stage unwittingly helped create the conditions for competitors to rise up and lash out. Russia [3] became belligerent and resurgent. China [3] weaponized its economy without ever loosening its domestic political constraints. Other countries’ faith in both capitalism and democracy eroded. A program once aimed at promoting the forces of freedom ended up empowering the opposite. 

Meanwhile, multinational corporations exploited their enormous influence on both sides of the negotiating table to ensure that the terms of trade between nations always favored their own bottom lines. Time after time, American workers got the short end of the stick. Median household income in the United States stagnated for a generation, and policy-makers’ choices helped the elite but put workers at an even greater disadvantage: decimated unions, lower labor standards, rising costs of living. Job training and transition assistance proved powerless against the onslaught of offshoring, providing little more than burial insurance for workers who lost their jobs. And as capital became more mobile, corporations and wealthy individuals sent trillions of dollars to offshore tax havens, robbing the U.S. government of needed resources to reinvest at home in updated infrastructure and public education. By the time the 2008 global financial crash [4] came around, it only confirmed what millions of Americans already knew: the system was rigged against working people. 
Donald Trump [5] campaigned against that rigged system. But after two years in office, it is clear that his economic policies are beyond inept; they are deliberately rigged in favor of his family and his wealthy friends. His renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement raises drug prices for consumers while doing little to stem the flow of good jobs going to other countries. His tariffs have hit farming communities hard and driven trading partners into the arms of U.S. competitors. And his conflicts of interest with corrupt foreign governments—from expedited Chinese patent applications for his daughter Ivanka Trump to the millions in foreign money spent at the Trump family’s Washington hotel—raise obvious questions about who he is really working for. This president may have campaigned on a promise to put “America first,” but his policies have put the Trump family first and middle-class American families last. 

A new approach should begin with a simple principle: U.S. foreign policy should not prioritize corporate profits over American families. To make sure that globalization benefits middle-class Americans, trade negotiations should be used to curtail the power of multinational monopolies and crack down on tax havens. Workers should be meaningfully represented at the negotiating table, and the resulting agreements should be used to raise and enforce labor standards. Washington should also work with like-minded allies to hold countries that cheat to account.

The United States’ economic policies must also reflect the realities of the twenty-first century. To address corruption, it is critical to work closely with allies to require transparency about the movement of assets across borders. If we are serious about privacy, we must protect data rights from global technology companies and countries that seek to exploit technology as a means to control their populations. To make progress on climate change [6], we should leverage foreign countries’ desire for access to U.S. markets as an opportunity to insist on meaningful environmental protections. 

None of this requires sacrificing the interests of American businesses—although it will require some of them to take a longer view. U.S. businesses can compete with the best in the world when given a level playing field, and they are stronger when the American middle class is strong. If our trade and economic policies work for all Americans, shareholders and corporate executives will profit as well.

ENDING ENDLESS WAR

A foreign policy that works for all Americans must also be driven by honest assessments of the full costs and risks associated with going to war. All three of my brothers served in the military, and I know our service members and their families are smart, tough, and resourceful. But having a strong military doesn’t mean we need to constantly use it. An effective deterrent also means showing the good judgment to exercise appropriate restraint. 
Over the past two decades, the United States has been mired in a series of wars that have sapped its strength. The human cost of these wars has been staggering: more than 6,900 killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, another 52,000 wounded, and many more who live every day with the invisible scars of war. By financing these conflicts while cutting taxes, the country has essentially charged the costs of war to a collective credit card for future generations to pay, diverting money that could have been invested in critical domestic priorities. This burden will create a drag on the economy that will last for generations. 

The costs have been extraordinarily high, but these wars have not succeeded even on their own terms. We’ve “turned the corner” in Afghanistan so many times that it seems we’re now going in circles. After years of constant war, Afghanistan hardly resembles a functioning state, and both poppy production and the Taliban are again on the rise. The invasion of Iraq destabilized and fragmented the Middle East [7], creating enormous suffering and precipitating the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The region remains a tangled mess—the promise of the Arab Spring crushed, Iran emboldened, Syria devastated, the Islamic State (or ISIS) and its offshoots stubbornly resilient, and a massive refugee crisis threatening to destabilize Europe. Neither military nor civilian policymakers seem capable of defining success, but surely this is not it.

A singular focus on counterterrorism, meanwhile, has dangerously distorted U.S. policies. Here at home, we have allowed an imperial presidency to stretch the Constitution beyond recognition to justify the use of force, with little oversight from Congress. The government has at times defended tactics, such as torture, that are antithetical to American values. Washington has partnered with countries that share neither its goals nor its ideals. Counterterrorism efforts [8]have often undermined other foreign policy priorities, such as reinforcing civilian governance, the rule of law, and human rights abroad. And in some cases, as with U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s proxy war in Yemen, U.S. policies risk generating even more extremism.

As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I have seen up close how 17 years of conflict have degraded equipment, sapped forces’ readiness, and forced the postponement of investment in critical military capabilities. It has distracted Washington from growing dangers in other parts of the world: a long-term struggle for power in Asia, a revanchist Russia that threatens Europe, and looming unrest in the Western Hemisphere, including a collapsing state in Venezuela [9] that threatens to disrupt its neighbors. Would-be rivals, for their part, have watched and learned, and they are hard at work developing technologies and tactics to leapfrog the United States, investing heavily in such areas as robotics, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and quantum computing. China is making massive bets in these and other areas in an effort to surpass the United States as a global technological power. Whether the United States will maintain its edge and harness these technologies for good remains an open question. 

It is the job of the U.S. government to do what is necessary to protect Americans, but it is long past time to start asking what truly makes the country safer—and what does not. Military efforts alone will never fully succeed at ending terrorism, because it is not possible to fight one’s way out of extremism. Some challenges, such as cyberattacks and nuclear proliferation, require much more than a strong military to combat. And other dangers, such as climate change and the spread of infectious diseases, cannot be solved through military action at all. The United States will spend more than $700 billion [10] on defense in the 2018–19 fiscal year alone. That is more in real terms than was spent under President Ronald Reagan during the Cold War and more than all the rest of the country’s discretionary budget put together. But even as Washington spends more and more, U.S. military leaders point out that funding a muscular military without robust diplomacy, economic statecraft, support for civil society, and development assistance only hamstrings American national power and undercuts any military gains. 

As a candidate, Trump promised to bring U.S. troops home. As president, he has sent more troops into Afghanistan. On the campaign trail, Trump claimed he did not want to police the world. As president, he has expanded the United States’ military footprint around the globe, from doubling the number of U.S. air strikes in Somalia to establishing a drone base in Niger [11]. As a candidate, Trump promised to rebuild the military, but as president, he has gutted the diplomatic corps on which the Pentagon relies. He promised to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation, but he has undermined a successful nuclear deal with Iran, has failed to roll back the North Korean nuclear program, and seems intent on spurring a new nuclear arms race with Russia. 

These actions do not make Americans safer. It’s time to seriously review the country’s military commitments overseas, and that includes bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq. They have fought with honor, but additional American blood spilled will not halt the violence or result in a functioning democratic government in either place. 
Defense spending should be set at sustainable levels, and the money saved should be used to fund other forms of international engagement and critical domestic programs. The Pentagon’s budget has been too large for too long. It is long overdue for an audit that would allow Congress to identify which programs actually benefit American security and which merely line the pockets of defense contractors. Rather than mindlessly buying more of yesterday’s equipment and allowing foreign countries to dominate the development of critical new technologies, we should recommit to investing in cutting-edge science and technology capabilities at home. When it comes to nonproliferation, we should replace the current bluster and hostility toward nuclear diplomacy with a reinvestment in multilateral arms control and nonproliferation efforts for the twenty-first century, recommitting the United States to being a leader in the fight to create a world without nuclear weapons. 

To achieve all these goals, it will be essential to reprioritize diplomacy and reinvest in the State Department and the development agencies; foreign policy should not be run out of the Pentagon alone. The United States spends only about one percent of its federal budget on foreign aid. Some Americans struggling to make ends meet understandably question the value of U.S. commitments and contributions abroad, and certainly we should expect our partners to pay their fair share. But diplomacy is not about charity; it is about advancing U.S. interests and preventing problems from morphing into costly wars. Similarly, alliances are not exclusively about principles; they are about safety in numbers. The world is a big, complicated place, and not even the strongest nation can solve everything on its own. As we face down antidemocratic forces around the world, we will need our allies on our side.

FOREIGN POLICY STARTS AT HOME

President John F. Kennedy, whose seat in the U.S. Senate I now hold, once wrote that “a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home.” With American power increasingly challenged from within and without, we can no longer afford to think of our domestic agenda as separate from our foreign policy. A stronger economy, a healthier democracy, and a united people—these are the engines that power the nation and will project American strength and values throughout the world. 

Every day, shortsighted domestic policies weaken American national strength. The United States is in the midst of a reverse-Sputnik moment, reducing investments in education and scientific research even as potential adversaries expand them. At a time when growing inequality stifles economic growth, Congress’ response has been a $1.5 trillion tax giveaway [12] to the wealthiest Americans. Life expectancy in the United States is falling as overdose deaths skyrocket, and the country’s health-care system remains ill equipped to respond. Climate change poses a threat to our survival, but the government is gutting environmental regulations and subsidizing fossil fuels at the bidding of wealthy campaign donors. The educational opportunity gap is widening, while politicians starve schools of resources and saddle an entire generation with crippling student debt. And in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable reckoning, the president seems bent on keeping Americans frightened and divided. 

Investments at home strengthen the economy, but they also serve national security. A twenty-first-century industrial policy, for example, would produce good jobs that provide dignity, respect, and a living wage, and it would reinforce U.S. international economic might. When workers and families are more secure in their livelihoods, the country is stronger on the world stage. 

The needs for investment are many: Infrastructure projects to increase connectivity and expand opportunity across the United States. Educational and job-training policies to produce skilled workers, encourage entrepreneurship, and grow the talent base. Immigration policies to yield a more robust economy and a more diversified work force. Higher education to equip the coming generations for the future without crushing them with debt. High-quality, affordable health care to ensure security and productivity for every person. An economy that is fair and open to entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes. A progressive tax system that requires the wealthy to pay their fair share. A government that is not for sale to the highest bidder. 

Underlying it all, we need to remain vigilant against threats to American democratic norms and processes. The 2016 election raised the alarm, reminding us that democracy is not a self-sustaining machine. We must fight for it every single day. That means protecting the electoral process and making clear that there will be severe consequences for anyone, foreign or domestic, who meddles with it. 

Our democratic norms also require us to renew our commitment to justice. Fractures in society—racial injustice, political polarization, economic inequality—damage us from within, leaving us vulnerable to a toxic stew of hatred and fear. Hateful rhetoric fuels domestic terrorism of all kinds, whether in Charleston or Orlando, Charlottesville or Pittsburgh. And we must strengthen our determination to ensure that every American has equal access to opportunity in society and equal justice and protection under the law. We must do that because it is morally right—and because it is essential to our national strength. 

WHAT’S AT STAKE

The need to get our house in order is not theoretical. Whether our leaders recognize it or not, after years as the world’s lone superpower, the United States is entering a new period of competition. Democracy is running headlong into the ideologies of nationalism, authoritarianism, and corruption. China is on the rise, using its economic might to bludgeon its way onto the world stage and offering a model in which economic gains legitimize oppression. To mask its decline, Russia is provoking the international community with opportunistic harassment and covert attacks. Both nations invest heavily in their militaries and other tools of national power. Both hope to shape spheres of influence in their own image and ultimately remake the global order to suit their own priorities. If we cannot make our government work for all Americans, they will almost certainly succeed. 

The dictators who run those countries stay in power not simply because they hold unwilling populations under brutal control; they also maintain control through corrupt economic policies that favor the wealthy elites who keep them in power. In China, President Xi Jinping consolidates his power and talks of a “great rejuvenation,” while corporations that answer to the state make billionaires out of Communist Party elites. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin attacks free speech and fans nationalism, but his real power derives from the careful intertwining of his government with state-run corporations conveniently overseen by friendly oligarchs.

Other countries have learned from this approach. From Hungary to Turkey, from the Philippines to Brazil, wealthy elites work together to grow the state’s power, while the state works to grow the wealth of those who remain loyal to the leader. This marriage of authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism is a direct threat to the United States, because it undermines the very concept of democracy. It enables corruption to spread across borders and allows authoritarian leaders to foment a global crisis of confidence in democracy. Free and democratic societies, the United States’ included, risk sliding toward corruption and kleptocracy, becoming democracies in name only. 

Despite these growing threats, President Trump seems all too comfortable with this rising authoritarianism. He shamefully kowtows to Putin, even in the face of Russian attacks on American democracy. His trade policies toward China are hardly stopping Chinese economic malfeasance. Instead of strengthening crucial alliances with Japan, South Korea, and Europe, he is actively undermining them. And the president has displayed an unsettling enthusiasm for replicating authoritarian language and tactics at home, while autocrats abroad return the compliment by using the president’s words to justify their own misdeeds.

The United States has lived through devastating wars in the past, and no sane person wishes to invite conflict between great powers in the future. In fact, many of the trials of our time will require cooperation. But it is essential that we are honest and clear-eyed about the challenges the United States faces. Our democratic allies share our values, and we should join forces to protect not only our collective security but also our shared ideals. In Europe, we should work with our allies to impose strong, targeted penalties on Russia for its attempts to subvert elections, and we should work to help our European allies develop energy independence. In Asia, we should encourage our allies to enhance their multilateral cooperation and build alternatives to China’s coercive diplomacy. We should also respond to China’s efforts to force foreign companies to hand over sensitive technology in order to gain access to the Chinese market and penalize its theft of U.S. intellectual property. Around the world, we should aggressively promote transparency, call out kleptocracy, and combat the creeping influence of corruption. And we should stand with those who bravely fight for openness and pluralism in Moscow, Beijing, and beyond.

AFTER TRUMP

The world was changing before President Trump took office, and it will continue to change after he has gone. There is no going back, but we can shape the world we inherit.
We can adopt a foreign policy that works for all Americans, not just wealthy elites. We can protect American interests first and foremost, while recognizing that those interests are best served when we leverage the support of allies and partners. We can reform international institutions to make them more flexible and inclusive, while still preserving the United States’ global leadership role. We can make smart investments to deter adversaries and defend the country, while balancing our ambitions with our resources. We can adapt to the technological demands and challenges of the twenty-first century, designing policies that reflect the world not as it once was but as it will be. And we can recognize that global power is generated here at home, recapitalizing the American economy and reinvesting in American democracy at its roots. 

None of this will be easy, but we persist. “America is not a country which can be confounded by the appeasers, the defeatists, the backstairs manufacturers of panic,” President Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1941. He continued: “This will of the American people will not be frustrated, either by threats from powerful enemies abroad or by small, selfish groups or individuals at home.” His words ring true today. Despite the threats on the horizon, I am confident that we can pursue a foreign policy that works for all Americans—one that, for generations to come, safeguards government of the people, by the people, and for the people.