Tag Archive for: Donald Trump

Putting the populist revolt in its place

In many Western democracies, this is a year of revolt against elites. The success of the Brexit campaign in Britain, Donald Trump’s unexpected capture of the Republican Party in the United States, and populist parties’ success in Germany and elsewhere strike many as heralding the end of an era. As Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens put it, ‘the present global order—the liberal rules-based system established in 1945 and expanded after the end of the Cold War—is under unprecedented strain. Globalization is in retreat.’

In fact, it may be premature to draw such broad conclusions.

Some economists attribute the current surge of populism to the ‘hyper-globalisation’ of the 1990s, with liberalisation of international financial flows and the creation of the World Trade Organization—and particularly China’s WTO accession in 2001—receiving the most attention. According to one study, Chinese imports eliminated nearly one million US manufacturing jobs from 1999 to 2011; including suppliers and related industries brings the losses to 2.4 million.

As the Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton argues, ‘what is crazy is that some of the opponents of globalization forget that a billion people have come out of poverty largely because of globalization.’ Even so, he adds that economists have a moral responsibility to stop ignoring those left behind. Slow growth and increased inequality add fuel to the political fire.

But we should be wary of attributing populism solely to economic distress. Polish voters elected a populist government despite benefiting from one of Europe’s highest rates of economic growth, while Canada seems to have been immune in 2016 to the anti-establishment mood roiling its large neighbour.

In a careful study of rising support for populist parties in Europe, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan and Pippa Norris of Harvard found that economic insecurity in the face of workforce changes in post-industrial societies explained less than cultural backlash. In other words, support for populism is a reaction by once predominant sectors of the population to changes in values that threaten their status. ‘The silent revolution of the 1970s appears to have spawned an angry and resentful counter-revolutionary backlash today,’ Inglehart and Norris conclude.

In the US, polls show that Trump’s supporters are skewed toward older, less-educated white males. Young people, women, and minorities are under-represented in his coalition. More than 40% of the electorate backs Trump, but with low unemployment nationally, only a small part of that can be explained primarily by his support in economically depressed areas.

On the contrary, in America, too, there’s more to the resurgence of populism than just economics. A YouGov poll commissioned by The Economist found strong racial resentment among supporters of Trump, whose use of the ‘birther’ issue (questioning the validity of the birth certificate of Barack Obama, America’s first black president) helped put him on the path to his current campaign. And opposition to immigration, including the idea of building a wall and making Mexico pay for it, was an early plank in his nativist platform.

And yet a recent Pew survey  shows growing pro-immigrant sentiment in the US, with 51% of adults saying that newcomers strengthen the country, while 41% believe they are a burden, down from 50% in mid-2010, when the effects of the Great Recession were still acutely felt. In Europe, by contrast, sudden large influxes of political and economic refugees from the Middle East and Africa have had stronger political effects, with many experts speculating that Brexit was more about migration to Britain than about bureaucracy in Brussels.

Antipathy toward elites can be caused by both economic and cultural resentments. The New York Times identified a major indicator of Trump-leaning districts: a white-majority working-class population whose livelihoods had been negatively affected throughout the decades in which the US economy shed manufacturing capacity. But even if there had been no economic globalisation, cultural and demographic change would have created some degree of populism.

But it is an overstatement to say that the 2016 election highlights an isolationist trend that will end the era of globalisation. Instead, policy elites who support globalisation and an open economy will have to be seen to be addressing economic inequality and adjustment assistance for those disrupted by change. Policies that stimulate growth, such as infrastructure investment, will also be important.

Europe may differ because of heightened resistance to immigration, but it would be a mistake to read too much about long-term trends in American public opinion from the heated rhetoric of this year’s election campaign. While the prospects for elaborate new trade agreements have suffered, the information revolution has strengthened global supply chains and, unlike in the 1930s (or even the 1980s), there hasn’t been a reversion to protectionism.

In fact, the US economy has increased its dependence on international trade. According to World Bank data, from 1995 to 2015, merchandise trade as a percentage of total GDP has increased by 4.8 percentage points. Moreover, in the age of the Internet, the transnational digital economy’s contribution to GDP is rapidly increasing.

In 2014, the US exported $400 billion in information and communication technologies (ICT)-enabled services—almost half of all US services exports. And a poll released last month by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found 65% of Americans agreeing that globalisation is mostly good for the US, while 59% say that international trade is good for the country, with even stronger support among the young.

So, while 2016 may be the year of populism in politics, it does not follow that ‘isolationism’ is an accurate description of current American attitudes toward the world. Indeed, in crucial respects—namely, on the issues of immigration and trade—Trump’s rhetoric appears to be out of step with most voters’ sentiments.

Trump versus the West

In less than 50 days, we will know who the next president of the United States will be. Though Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has a lead in national opinion polls, it’s narrowed to a near-tie, meaning that her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, could well triumph. Indeed, US observers are now examining what a President Trump’s first 100 days in office would entail. It’s not pretty.

With Trump’s candidacy, reality has become more incredible than fiction. No Hollywood scriptwriter would have dared to invent a presidential candidate—much less an actual president—as ridiculous as Trump. In comparison, Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood, the evil and conniving protagonist of the American version of the television series House of Cards, who actually commits murder during the series, looks like some kind of Kant-Lincoln hybrid.

Trump is America’s reality-TV Mussolini. He is not just a populist, isolationist politician; he is a caricature of one. By electing him to the presidency, American voters would achieve what neither the Soviet Union during the Cold War nor Islamist fundamentalists today ever could: undermining—and potentially destroying—the democratic system of the world’s greatest power.

Consider the support for Trump provided by Russian President Vladimir Putin, arguably the West’s most prominent authoritarian nemesis. Given his denigration of the West’s democratic model, the master of the Kremlin views Trump’s candidacy as a divine gift. Trump’s election would be definitive proof that, despite more than two centuries of struggle against the Enlightenment spirit of reason and freedom, the gods of despotism have not forsaken their earthly agents.

Even if Trump doesn’t win, the fact that he could come so close—that he was not roundly dismissed as a candidate by US voters, not to mention the entire Republican Party establishment—doesn’t bode well for the values and principles upon which Western democracies rest. But a Trump victory would obviously be far more destructive. And simply assuming that it’s not going to happen, that the scenario is too absurd and dangerous to consider, will only make it more likely.

The United Kingdom’s June vote to leave the European Union is a case in point. Virtually all of the experts agreed that Brexit would have serious economic repercussions, and many pro-EU Britons felt so confident in their fellow voters that they didn’t bother to vote. Alas, ‘Leave’ won the day, triggering financial and economic turmoil and a spike in hate crimes. The future of the UK and Europe remains uncertain.

The driving forces behind the Brexit vote were fear and false nostalgia. Britons were promised a return to an idealised past of peace and prosperity, when they were masters of their own destiny. And they were told that insidious external forces—from immigrants to EU institutions—were the reason for all of their problems. The ‘Remain’ campaign, for its part, was heavy on facts and light on emotion.

The parallels with the current US presidential campaign are arresting. As Clinton struggles to inspire, Trump is stirring up people’s basest passions.

For white Americans, in particular—faced with the evolution of a continent that, in less than 30 years, will be dominated by Spanish-speakers—the mixture of fear and nostalgia served up by the Trump campaign is a powerful potion. Unsurprisingly, Trump has done particularly well among white men without college degrees, and relatively poorly among those with less positive memories of the past: minorities and women.

In my 2009 book The Geopolitics of Emotion, I argued that, whereas the twentieth century had been the century of ideology, the twenty-first century would be the century of identity. Much to my dismay, the Brexit vote and Trump’s candidacy seem to vindicate my forecast. Identity politics—including issues of sovereignty and security—has replaced rational economic concerns as the main driver of voters’ choices. Man does not, after all, live by bread alone.

To be sure, economic factors contribute to the emergence of identity politics. Rising income and wealth inequality have weakened the middle class, spurring many to ‘revolt’ against the elites. As the British journalist Martin Wolf put it, for many, liberal democracy and globalised capitalism no longer seem to mesh, and indeed may directly contradict each other. Now, many seem to want to tear down both of them.

But the situation has escalated considerably, owing to a terrorist threat that has been blown out of proportion, together with general fearmongering about immigrants. People may be convinced to live in relative poverty, if it means staying safe. But, when faced with the prospect of both poverty and insecurity, fear joins anger to overwhelm their reason.

In such a context, everything becomes possible—even something as unthinkable as a Trump presidency. The fact that the establishment is represented by Clinton, with her long-standing unpopularity and portrayal by the media and Republicans as a frail old woman, doesn’t help matters.

Americans—but not only Americans—will watch the remainder of the campaign with the curiosity of Roman citizens watching a battle between gladiators. But we are not in a Roman circus. The future of the West, if not of democracy, depends on which contestant is still standing at the end of the race.

Playing defence in Europe

Image courtesy of Flickr user Wilderness Kev.

The most frightening periods in history have often been interregnums—moments between the death of one king and the rise of the next. Disorder, war, and even disease can flood into the vacuum when, as Antonio Gramsci put it in his Prison Notebooks, ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born.’ The dislocation and confusion of 2016 do not rival the turmoil of the interwar period, when Gramsci wrote, but they are certainly symptoms of a new interregnum.

After the end of the Cold War, the world was held together by an American-policed security order and a European-inspired legal order. Now, however, both are fraying, and no candidates to replace them have yet emerged. Indeed, unlike in 1989, this is not a crisis of a single type of system. Countries as different as Brazil, China, Russia, and Turkey are coming under heightened political and economic pressure.

Even if the nightmare of a President Donald Trump is avoided, as appears increasingly likely, the United States can no longer be the world’s policeman. Powers such as Russia, Iran, and China are probing US reactions in Ukraine, Syria, and the South China Sea. And US allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Poland, and Japan are forging independent and assertive foreign policies to make up for a US that cannot and will not carry its previous burdens.

Meanwhile, the European Union’s declining cohesion is undermining its moral authority on the world stage. Many of the global institutions that reflect European values and norms—from the World Trade Organization and the International Criminal Court to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—are gridlocked.

Regionally, the three strands of the European order are unraveling: the US is seeking to reduce its investment in NATO, the EU is de-emphasizing enlargement, and the chaos in the Middle East and Ukraine is making a mockery of the European Neighborhood Policy. The rise—and rapprochement—of illiberal forces in Russia and Turkey mean that the EU is no longer the only pole of attraction in the region.

Worse, EU integration has gone into reverse, with member states seeking to insulate themselves from the outside world, rather than trying to export their shared values. As a result, the biggest threats to free trade and the open society stem from domestic sources, not external enemies. Even in Germany, which had long seemed immune to such pressures, the interior minister talks of banning burkas (a policy that would affect 300 people), while the vice-chancellor has declared the death of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the US even before the body is cold.

The EU proved over the last few decades that it could be a force for globalization—tearing down barriers between peoples and nations. But today its survival depends on showing that it can protect citizens from the very forces it has promoted.

Maintaining the four freedoms at the heart of the European project—the free movement of people, goods, capital, and services within Europe—will be possible only if EU governments have credible policies to protect the most vulnerable in their societies. That will mean improving protection of the EU’s external borders, compensating domestic losers from migration and free trade, and soothing public fears about terrorism.

The danger is that much of what the EU rightly pushed for during the good times could hasten its unraveling now, during the current interregnum. For example, given so much uncertainty about the future state of Europe and the world, debating enlargement or the TTIP seems pointless—or worse, because even opening such discussions is certain to play into the hands of Euroskeptics.

The EU needs to distinguish between core and peripheral priorities. For issues such as EU relations with Russia and Turkey (and these two countries’ relations with each other), member states need to agree on a policy that recognizes the interests of all. But much greater flexibility is advisable in other areas, including commitments to refugee re-allocation and eurozone rules, where excessive rigidity could cause European unity to buckle and snap.

In addition to preventing an alliance between Russia and Ankara, the EU should rethink its goals in its neighborhood. Although the Balkan countries that are outside the EU will remain there for many years, they are in the European security space already, and Europeans should be prepared to intervene militarily if outbreaks of violence recur. Moreover, EU leaders should pursue a broader definition of peace than the absence of war, including political and social stability and preventing radicalization in Bosnia and Kosovo.

For Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, the goal should be to promote stable and predictable governments. For the next few years, the EU should view them as independent buffer states rather than as member-states-in-waiting. It will be particularly important not to set red lines that the EU is not willing to defend.

In the troubled Middle East, the EU cannot hope to be the central actor. But EU countries cannot protect their populations from instability if they are only spectators. Particularly in Syria and Libya, the EU needs to playing a more concerted role with regional powers—as well as with the US and Russia—to advance political processes that could help reduce violence, provide humanitarian aid, and stem the flow of refugees.

One of the EU’s main challenges is to define success in a defensive era. During the heyday of enlargement, the goal was to deepen integration and broaden its reach across Europe. Now, however, success means preventing countries from leaving the EU or hollowing out its institutions.

History moves in cycles. The interregnum will eventually end and a new order will be born. What is certain is that the survivors and inheritors of the old order will write the rules of the new one. The EU’s goal, achievable only with flexibility and courage, must be to remain a viable project—and thus be one of the authors.

A Trump victory and the alliance—a preliminary cut

US defence secretary Ashton Carter told the world at this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue that ‘the US–Australia alliance is more and more a global one. As our two nations work together to uphold the freedom of navigation and overflight across the region, we’re also accelerating the defeat of ISIL together in Iraq and Syria.’

The ANZUS alliance isn’t necessarily the most significant allied relationship for the US. However, it is arguably the most productive. The other allies draw the US into their affairs and spend American security capital. The Australian ally demands nothing, in the current environment, of American security that can’t be met with (albeit lopsided in Australia’s favour) intelligence exchanges, paid-for access to the best American equipment, joint scientific research projects, and mutually useful exercises. We don’t spend American capital obliging the US to confront dangerous possibilities. Our military is also capable of enhancing American capacity, supporting the American forces anywhere with effective force. We are more than just a flag.

Arguably, of all the allies of the US, we’re capable of an intense strategic dialogue free of a subliminal self-interested agenda. That’s been the case since World War II (with a brief exception in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s). The difference now is that we’re a meaningful power with the sophistication to articulate effective suggestions in dialogue about the affairs of our region and world.

Our conundrum in the current American political race is this: having established a complex strategic relationship and dialogue with the US, what on earth do we say, and where do we begin, with a victor in the presidential race who during the campaign has trashed the entirety of the alliance system, and the liberal international rules-based order, that have underpinned trade and broader global relationships since 1945?

Trump may not win. His campaign has had a shocking month. His party followers at the Republican National Convention manifested the psychology of hostages. It was like watching a mass Stockholm syndrome event. There was nothing in their talisman’s basic line that represented previous Republican verities so they mobilised around chants worthy of the killing of Piggy in Lord of the Flies. Hillary’s the substitute for the virtuous Piggy. Mostly it wasn’t ‘kill the beast’, but ‘jail her—though ‘shoot her’ was to be heard as well.

Should Trump win, there will be immense responsibilities on us. Almost exclusively our trade and security arrangements have missed his widely swung sabre. But that sabre slices into trade and security arrangements which have been critical for our prosperity and security. There will be plenty in our zone who will have things to say to him, and at least his vice president would be listening—Trump is unlikely to listen to them. When he’s briefed on the depth of our relationship and the massive character of our mutual investment, which far exceeds any American pairing in the region outside Japan, he might listen to us. The ensuing discussion will be tough.

Some of our commentators and analysts share in a broader global schadenfreude that will see them rub their hands at a picture of a rogue, isolationist America repudiating old shared values and perspectives. However, we don’t have the capacity to readily survive an uncoupling of our bilateral defence relationship with our national security intact. For example, when I was defence minister, the objective with the joint facilities was to ensure we had full knowledge of, and concurrence with, their capabilities and operations. Now, having expanded in number and capacity in recent years, they’re integrated into our intelligence system and our military’s operational capabilities.

The equipment, systems and technologies we get from the Americans are vital to our order of battle. The marines in Darwin are important, but what’s critical for us is the engagement of US-origin equipment and technologies in assisting the defence of our northern approaches. Though our latest defence white paper placed the role outlined by Ash Carter as a co-equal force-structure determinant, the character of the equipment to be acquired and the systems to be developed overwhelmingly relate to that more traditional task.

I have mentioned here before the essential American-origin character of our air defences. We start with the strategic and tactical contribution of US satellite surveillance, over-the-horizon radar (an Australian-developed joint research product), airborne early warning, anti-submarine warfare, and broader surveillance US-origin aircraft. Strike and interdiction comes from our Classic Hornets, Super Hornets and Growlers (ours is the only other air force deploying the latter). The F-35s constitute the next phase. Equipment foreshadowed to enter service over the next 30 years will need the enhancements of capability coming through emerging technologies developed under the rubric of Washington’s ‘third offset strategy’. Our Defence Science and Technology Group is heavily engaged in associated research programs.

We can’t afford to sit back and let mayhem rule. More broadly, we can’t afford to see our region, including relations with China, fall victim to ill-considered confrontations. Some have confidence that the US constitutional system of checks and balances will counter Trump’s worst excesses. US presidents have few positive initiatives they can engage without Congress.

The powers, however, for a US president’s negative initiatives are manifold. He can undermine confidence among allies that he will initiate action in support of them under any guarantee. He can use the broad licence US trade laws give an American president to pursue punitive action against trade partners. He has plenty of power to ensure border agents torment unwanted entrants.

A Trump presidency won’t be a question of hold onto your hats for four years and then sanity will rule. America will be a different place after four years of Donald Trump. Australia’s responses, should they be necessary, must be immediate, forceful and sustained.

ASPI suggests

It was a good week for women in Japan, with the country’s first female Defence Minister (2007), Yuriko Koike, breaking through another glass ceiling to become the first female governor of Tokyo—despite sharp opposition from her party, the Liberal Democratic Party, which elected to endorse one of her male colleagues. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced his new cabinet a few days back, which included the elevation of Tomomi Inada to the defence portfolio, making her the second woman to hold the post. Inada is an up-and-comer in the LDP, known for her nationalist views and as a close confidant and protégé of the prime minister. The Wall Street Journal carries an easy profile. She’ll be one to watch when Abe’s time comes to an end.

Here are some prime cuts on Trump and the presidential circus. Stephen Colbert and John Oliver both took Trump on after his attack on the Khan family (here and here). David Remnick dives into Trump’s ‘humid political embrace’ with Putin, while Jonathan Chait gave us more detail on on the Don-Vlad bromance. Two must-read postmortems on the DNC and RNC come courtesy of Laurie Penny in Medium and Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. And with the conventions out of the way, some are looking to the intelligence briefings that the candidates can now avail themselves of. A column at Foreign Policy takes a look at the history of the mechanism and recommends that Obama cancel Trump’s briefing; and one in the Times imagines just how that briefing might unfold. If you feel like you’re not getting enough Trump in your life (afterall, 2016 is about feelings not facts), The Atlantic’s James Fallows has a continued to fill up a Trump time capsule for the horror of future generations. And finally, The Simpsons have played their hand (above).

Two interesting longer reads on human nature and war this week. The first, from TIME, takes an in-depth look at rape in war, ‘a weapon even more powerful than a bomb or a bullet’. It draws on the first-hand accounts of women living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and asks how their experiences might be used to counter Daesh’s sexual enslavement of Yezidi women. The second, from The New Yorker, examines the evolution of war photography, arguing that:

‘Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they don’t help us much to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.’

The Economist has published an excellent short piece on the latest arms race—between surface vessels and submarines (with the balance tipping in favour of the latter) as navies around the world rush to develop better methods to track enemy boats.

This week has seen loads of fresh research offerings from plenty of different areas, kicking off with the massive State of the Climate report from the American Meteorological Society. Based on the work of 450 scientists from 62 different countries, the report confirms that, yes, the climate is going to hell and taking us with it, with 2015 coming in as the hottest year on record. This primer from The Guardian displays some of the report’s key findings in a series of infographics. From CSIS, a great report on the US–Egypt relationship dives into the shared interests of the two countries and the impact of a closer partnership in today’s Middle East. The bi-monthly ASEAN Focus (PDF) is also out, with a special issue focusing on the South China Sea ruling. And if you want to contribute your thoughts to an important US research effort, check out this quick survey from CNAS on the use of drones.

Finally, someone has written a spec script for a Seinfeld episode set in the days following 9/11. It’s in incredibly poor taste but the gags are pitch perfect. So bad, but so good.

Podcast

In this week’s episode (44 mins) of the Foreign Policy E.R. podcast series, David Rothkopf, Rosa Brooks, Molly O’Toole and David Sanger dissect the relationship between Donald Trump and Russia—and ask the question on everyone’s mind: should US officials be trusting ‘America’s burst appendix’ with national security secrets in the lead up to November?

Videos

Back in June we foreshadowed Blackout, an online series being pulled together by VICE and Jigsaw to highlight free expression around the world. The series has shone a spotlight on the situations in Pakistan (16 mins), Venezuela (20 mins), Belarus (17 mins), and Eritrea (17 mins). The final installment, on cyber laws and wars in Thailand, was uploaded this week (14 mins).  

GQ Australia’s Adam Baidawi visited North Korea for the Pyongyang Marathon earlier this year, and released some A+ footage of the hermit kingdom’s capital city along with a first-hand interview (7 mins) on visiting the world’s most isolated country. The short video touches on the ethics of holidaying in an oppressive regime and the use of propaganda during the Marathon period, which is incidentally the DPRK’s peak tourism season, with about 1,000 foreigners participating in the race.

Events

Canberra: The ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre will next week host Yukiya Amano, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who will deliver the 2016 John Gee Memorial Lecture and sit down for a chat with Gareth Evans on the topic of Atoms for Peace and Development. Register here.

Melbourne: The Asia Institute, the Melbourne School of Government and the Centre for Asian Business and Economics are co-hosting an exciting panel event on the future of Indonesia’s economic prospects, featuring Indonesia’s Minister for National Development Planning and Head of the National Development Planning Agency, Bambang Brodjonegoro. Mark your diaries for 15 August.

ASPI suggests

It was the week that US politics junkies had hung out for—the one where the Republican National Convention circus rolled up to Cleveland for the coronation of Donald J. Trump. While The Donald was finally elevated as the GOP’s Presidential nominee, things otherwise didn’t go to script—Ted Cruz failed to deliver an endorsement of Trump, and Melania Trump failed to deliver a wholly original speech. Both distractions have contributed to a divisive, destructive gathering—one that Nate Silver describes as ‘flirting with disaster’. Trump has just delivered his campaign speech, which you can watch here with a side of fact-checking (and here and here). If you’re after a blow-by-blow, you could do worse than check out the liveblogs filed for New York magazine by the august Andrew Sullivan (nights 1, 2, 3 and 4). And with the Donald now one step closer to the nuclear codes, it’s a good moment to explore his grey matter through these two pieces: one on Trump’s potential sociopathy; the other a psychologist’s dive into Trump’s personality. But the final thought rests with Jeffery Goldberg from The Atlantic, who claims Hillary Clinton is now effectively running against Vladimir Putin:

‘Donald Trump, should he be elected president, would bring an end to the postwar international order, and liberate dictators, first and foremost his ally Vladimir Putin, to advance their own interests. The moral arc of the universe is long, and, if Trump is elected, it will bend in the direction of despotism and darkness.’

A few research efforts and publications have bubbled up this week. Brookings’ Order from Chaos project has this month taken the temperature of US alliances and security partnerships in East Asia, with chapters focused on Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan. If you haven’t yet come across New America’s worthwhile international security data project, it’s a veritable goldmine of facts and figures on MENA drone strikes and US extremism. And finally, fresh out of Copenhagen comes Foresight, a new effort honing in on climate change and energy issues. Catch up with the slick, scholarly Scandi-chic mag here.

Last Friday’s coup attempt by a small faction within the Turkish Armed Forces across Istanbul and Ankara has received significant airplay across the world’s media. Now, as the failed coup’s impact is felt, analysts are looking at what comes next for the country. The Atlantic has been live-blogging major updates relating to the coup attempt and its aftermath, concluding with Wednesday’s declaration of a three month state of emergency. For another firsthand account, this podcast (18 mins) from CSIS includes an interview with Bulent Aliriza who was in Ankara as the coup took unfolded. Looking to the future, Foreign Policy thinks that Turkey will now be unable to answer Washington’s call to provide greater assistance in the fight against Daesh; The New Yorker asks how President Erdoğan will use the coup to his political advantage; and CSIS looks into security implications from the putsch for the wider Eastern Mediterranean. Wired also has two stellar offerings on Turkey: the first on how the coup attempt played out on social media, and the second on Wikileaks’ ‘Erdoğan emails’—294,548 emails leaked from AKP HQ in response to the government’s brutal post-coup purges.

Want to catch ‘em all? There are plenty of people around the world who want otherwise, as backlash against the viral game Pokémon GO was felt this week, with some even suggesting that the game’s use of smartphone cameras could be a high-tech spying tool. That’s been the rhetoric in Indonesia, where on-duty police have been banned from hunting Pokémon; in Egypt, where Pikachu and pals have elicited national security concerns; in Saudi Arabia, where clerics have renewed a fatwa on Pokémon; and in Russia, where the game has been branded a ‘CIA plot’. Beyond espionage, others are face-palming over gamers hunting Pokémon in Auschwitz, Arlington Cemetery and the 9/11 memorial.

Podcasts

CSIS has the podcast goods on China this week. Bonnie Glaser sits down with Philippe Le Corre to discuss how Brexit will impact on China (28 mins); Scott Kennedy on Beijing’s 13th Five-Year Plan (19 mins); and Peter Mattis and Christopher Johnson on the origin, role, practices and structure of China’s esoteric intelligence bureaucracy (56 mins).

The Diplomat also weighs in, with South China Sea heavies Ankit Panda and Prashanth Parameswaran offering their thoughts (21 mins) on the impact of last week’s Tribunal ruling on geopolitics and security in the Indo–Pacific.

Videos

CSIS’ recently hosted a discussion on technological innovation with William Roper, director of the US Strategic Capabilities Office. Roper offers an insider’s perspective (1 hr) on how defense innovation in the 21st century will differ from previous experiences for the Department of Defense. It’s definitely worth sticking around for Q&A, too.

Earlier this week, Politico premiered a new series of short videos, ‘Retro Report’, which will run every day over the week and a half that the Republican and Democratic parties hold their conventions. The series will explore eight significant US presidential conventions and draw parallels between them and the state of US politics today. The first four episodes are already available: Episode 1: The Power of the Delegate (6 mins); Episode 2: The Mess in Chicago (6 mins); Episode 3: How it started (4 mins); and Episode 4: The Outsider Republican (6 mins).

Events

Canberra: Richard Fontaine, head of the Center for a New American Security in Washington D.C., continues his tour of Australia for a few more weeks, so mark your diary for 8 August and get along to hear some wisdom. Fontaine will be at the ANU’s National Security College where he will sketch out US foreign policy futures under the next president. Register here.

Sydney: With Prime Minister Abe having been returned with a supermajority in the Diet, now’s as good a time as any to check in on how the Japanese economy is faring. And there’s no better bunch to do that with than has been assembled by AsiaLink, including two serving Ambassadors and corporate heavyweights. Sign up and head to PwC Sydney at midday on Friday 29 July.

Lying and leadership

Image courtesy of Flickr user Alan Cleaver

This election season has been marked by frequent charges of dishonesty. During Britain’s ‘Brexit’ debate, each side charged the other with distorting the truth, though the speed with which the ‘Leave’ camp has been disowning its campaign promises, and the ‘Remain’ camp’s claims have come true, suggests which was telling it like it is. In the United States’ presidential election campaign, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, seldom referred to his closest competitor in the primaries without calling him ‘Lying Ted Cruz’.

Similarly, Trump rarely misses an opportunity to refer to Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, without attaching the prefix ‘Crooked’. When she recently delivered a careful speech on foreign policy, Trump responded by calling her a ‘world-class liar’. But, according to PolitiFact, a Pulitzer prize-winning organization that checks the veracity of political statements, 60% of the claims by Trump that it investigated since he began his campaign have been deemed false or ‘Pants on Fire’ false, versus 12% for Clinton.

Some cynics shrug off such exchanges between candidates as typical behavior by politicians. But that’s too facile, because it ignores serious questions concerning how honest we want our political leaders and our political discourse to be.

In fact, we may not want our political leaders to tell the literal truth all the time. In wartime or during a counterterrorism operation, deception may be a necessary condition of victory or success—which clearly is in our interest.

Other cases are less dramatic but no less important. Sometimes, leaders have objectives that differ from those of a large part of their followers; rather than revealing the differences, they deceive their followers. When such actions are self-serving, as in cases of corruption or narcissistic ego gratification, moral censure is easy and appropriate. In contrast, other leaders with different objectives from their followers invest heavily in educating those who would oppose them to a different point of view.

In some instances, leaders find it impossible to educate their followers adequately in time, or their followers are too deeply divided to reach a consensus that will sustain collective action. In such circumstances, some leaders may take a paternalist view and decide to deceive their followers for what they see as their larger or later good.

For example, as Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon B. Johnson deceived his southern supporters in order to pass the 1957 civil rights act. Charles de Gaulle did not reveal his strategy for Algerian independence when he came to power in 1958, because he knew that doing so would doom it to failure. John F. Kennedy misled the public about the withdrawal of US nuclear warheads from Turkey in the deal that peacefully ended the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Moreover, Franklin D. Roosevelt lied to the American public about a German attack on a US destroyer, in an effort to overcome isolationist resistance to helping Britain before World War II. And Winston Churchill once said that the truth may be ‘so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’.

The fact that leaders’ ends may sometimes justify violating norms about honesty does not mean that all lies are equal, or that we must suspend our moral judgment in such cases. Machiavellian deception is often part of a strategy, for example, in bargaining or even in bringing a group to accept new goals. But intentions matter. Deception that is purely self-serving turns from a strategy that may benefit others into selfish manipulation.

Even if one admits that deception may sometimes be necessary, one can still ask about the importance of the goal, the availability of alternative means to achieve it, whether the deception is likely to spread through precedent or example, the damage done to various victims, and the deceivers’ accountability (whether their behavior can be discovered and explained later). In his book, When Presidents Lie, the historian Eric Alterman concludes that presidential lies ‘inevitably turn into monsters that strangle their creators’.

And presidents may set bad precedents. When Roosevelt lied about the German attack on the destroyer Greer in 1941, he set a low bar for Johnson’s highly embellished description of a North Vietnamese attack on US naval vessels, which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964.

It’s all too easy for leaders to convince themselves that they’re telling a noble lie for the good of their followers, when in fact they’re merely lying for political or personal convenience. That makes it all the more important in a democracy that we carefully examine the nature of the tradeoffs between ends and means that leaders make. There may indeed be situations where we would approve a political leader telling us a lie, but such cases should remain rare and subject to careful scrutiny. Otherwise, we debase the currency of our democracy and lower the quality of our political discourse.

This is why it’s a mistake for cynics to shrug off Trump’s rhetoric as simply one of the things politicians do. If PolitiFact and other similar organizations are correct, politicians aren’t all the same when it comes to lying. Trump has made many more false statements than any of his opponents, and few (if any) could pass the test of not being self-serving. An independent and vigorous press that checks the truth is crucial to preserving the integrity of democracy; but so is an electorate that resists cynicism and the debasement of political discourse.

Trump and China

Image courtesy of of Flickr user Gage Skidmore

The first question Chinese officials ask Americans when they come to Beijing these days has little to do with economic policy, or the South China Sea, or the particulars of global instability. They focus on Donald Trump, their queries filled with a mixture of astonishment and trepidation.

‘What about Donald Trump?’ Liu He, the chief economic adviser to Xi Jinping, asked the entourage of Secretary of State, John Kerry, during their June meetings for the Security and Economic Dialogue, the prime venue for US–China policy making.

‘Who are his advisers and what are his policies?’ a senior Communist Party official asked Bonnie Glaser, a China specialist at CSIS, when she visited in early July.

In those encounters, there’ve been no flippant comments by the Chinese favoring Trump. Second thoughts are in abundance. If any Chinese policy-makers favoured Trump in the early going, there’s buyer’s remorse now.

For a while—as Trump ascended during the Republican primary season and decimated a big field of competitors—he was viewed as not so bad, not so scary, and almost certainly preferable to Hillary Clinton.

There was admiration for his come-from-behind winning streak. He would modify his policies in office, he would have sensible advisers, he wouldn’t dare start an all-out trade war, the Chinese said. And his bravado in insisting that during his presidency the United States would withdraw its troops from Japan and South Korea had great appeal to Chinese army officers. They chose to overlook the second part of Trump’s plan—that Japan and South Korea would be allowed to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

And there was an allure to Trump because he was a businessman. China could always do a business deal, according to this thinking. But most of all, Trump seemed an interesting prospect based on the fact he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. In fact, he was the anti-Hillary.

Clinton has a special place in the pantheon of Chinese antipathies. She earned China’s displeasure when she came to Beijing as First Lady in 1995 for a UN women’s conference and declared that women’s rights were human rights. Early on, as Secretary of State, she publicly called on China to stop its bullying tactics in the South China Sea. Much to Beijing’s annoyance, she ordered a Chinese human rights activist, Chen Guangcheng, to be given shelter in the US embassy in 2012, and then personally negotiated his departure for the United States. She promoted the pivot to Asia, seen in China as a pure containment strategy.

‘Some people in China favor Trump over Hillary not because they like him, but because they dislike her—she is regarded as ideologically biased against China and strategically hostile towards China,’ said Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at the Institute for International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

‘Trump appears to be more focused on economic issues with China, which of course will cause troubles too. But economic friction is more manageable than political and strategic differences.’

But as Trump has been unmasked in the American press, the portrayals of his fraudulent business deals have made for second thoughts. His efforts to be more anti-China than Clinton are nerve-making for Chinese officials.

He calls China’s unbalanced trade with the United States ‘the greatest theft in the history of the world,’ vowing to slap 45% tariffs on Chinese imports. Right there, Trump is challenging the pro-trade American economic orthodoxy that the Chinese count on.

Clinton has veered off the free trade path too, turning her back on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the key economic component to the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia that she helped engineer.

But with the slowdown in the Chinese economy—and fears of global instability in the wake of the upheavals in Europe—Clinton, an experienced policymaker, is looking a surer bet to senior Chinese leaders.

Some Chinese may well have been put off by recent revelations about Trump suing his Hong Kong partners for US$1 billion in a major New York City real estate deal in the 1990s. (He lost in the courts).

Trump—who dislikes traveling abroad—visited Hong Kong to do the deal, but plainly didn’t enjoy the place, his investors said later. (He had difficulty with chopsticks and was put off by the food). It’s not clear whether he’s ever visited mainland China.

Senior Chinese officials are obsessed by the US, the rival nation they hope to overtake. They read, they study, they talk and they visit America to find out as much as they can. Some Chinese policy makers, like Yang Jiechi, the state councilor, have special friends in high places. In Mr Yang’s case, he’s on good terms with the Bush family.

Donald Trump is unsettling because he didn’t figure in Beijing’s calculations. They have no idea who his advisers are, Glaser said. The Chinese are accustomed to dealing with the establishment in Washington, but there’s no-one they can call to get a reading on Trump. When asked about his inner circle, Glaser said she replied that few in Washington knew his advisers either. In fact, she told them, he seems to have hardly any foreign policy or economic counsellors.

The growing unease about Mr Trump among Chinese officials doesn’t mean that he’s lost his luster among the Chinese public.

His anti-Muslim tirades, his celebrity status—Chinese like brands, and he’s a brand par excellence—earn high approval ratings on China’s Internet. A Trump Fan Club and Great Man Donald Trump group have attracted plenty of followers.

In an online poll by Global Times, a tabloi-style state owned newspaper, 54% of respondents say they supported a Trump presidency, far more than the roughly 40% of Americans who did towards the end of the primary season.

If Trump prevails over Clinton, there will surely be buyer’s remorse among the Chinese public, too.

An introverted Anglosphere?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Mirai Takahashi

Recent tumultuous political events—including Australia’s election—seem likely to produce a troubling set of strategic consequences. Some of those consequences will be reflected in the strategic policies of key individual Western states. But they’re also likely to be reflected in a broader sense, as part of the pattern of shifting weights and balances in global politics—where we’re likely to see a diminishing role for the Anglosphere in shaping strategic outcomes.

The Anglosphere is typically seen as a select group of countries: the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and—sometimes—Ireland. The group falls naturally into three geographic pairs, and in each pairing there’s one extroverted strategic player (the US, Britain and Australia) and another less extroverted one (Canada, Ireland, New Zealand). Collectively, the group exercises an influence on international relations disproportionate to its small size.

Quite suddenly, though, an important question has arisen about the prospective future role of the Anglosphere. As anyone can now see, there’s a problem. The three most extroverted players are all—to a greater or lesser degree—turning inward.

‘America first’ is now the dominant theme in US politics, and—with the Washington Metro broken and the US middle class resentful over its declining fortunes—it seems likely that even a Clinton presidency might involve a step away from continuing global engagement rather than a step back towards it. A Trump presidency might easily result in Washington taking rather more than one step away.

Across the Atlantic, the UK is wrestling with life after deciding to leave the European Union. That’s no small task. For the better part of a decade, British political leaders are likely to be absorbed in the all-encompassing task of ‘reinventing’ Britain. In short, the national enterprise is likely to trump (no pun intended) the regional or global one. It seems that the UK—traditionally an active security contributor in many parts of the world—will be playing a smaller role in coming years. Apart from activities deemed essential to national reinvention, foreign and strategic issues seem likely to receive fewer resources and less leadership attention.

And so we come to the third extroverted member of the Anglosphere—Australia itself. After its election on 2 July, the outcome of which remains uncertain, we might well be staring down the barrel of a more hesitant Australia in regional and global affairs. Regardless of whether we end up with a minority government or a government clinging to a bare majority in the House of Representatives, the political climate is unlikely to be one to support a particularly venturesome strategic policy. That’s somewhat ironic given the theoretical boldness of the most recent Defence White Paper—the key internal policy parameters of which must surely be in doubt in the new post-election world.

The ruling on the South China Sea by the International Court of Arbitration, for example, seems likely to be issued (on 12 July) while Australia’s still enjoying a period of caretaker government. And grander objectives that Canberra had been keen to explore—including the question of whether the time is now ripe for a new, more action-oriented security structure in Southeast Asia—seem more likely to wither than to flower.

True, there are a couple of questionable assumptions contained in the reasoning outlined above. Even a US standing a little further back from the world, for example, will remain a strong force for good. Even a Britain out of the European Union will remain a Britain inside of NATO. And even a minority Australian government could rely upon a tradition of bipartisanship—at least amongst the two major parties—to ensure the wheels didn’t completely fall off its foreign and defence policy.

The argument, though, is over a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind. If we are facing a future where the US is stepping back from the international role it has played since World War 2, where Britain’s absorbed in a project of national reinvention, and where Australia’s more fixated upon domestic issues and politics, then we should expect strategic consequences to follow. In short, Western influence in the world is likely to be receding at a critical time in international affairs—when the world stands at a new inflection point, and the old strategic verities are fading. Critics of the Anglosphere mightn’t have liked it, but I suspect they’ll rue the waning of its influence.

Is there a cure for introversion? Possibly. All three countries might be forced back into more extroverted roles by a major international crisis. On the other hand, I suspect they’re not going to be dragged back into their traditional roles by a set of troubles that creep in on little cat feet.

The Strategist Six: Kurt Campbell

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Welcome to The Strategist Six, a feature that provides a glimpse into the thinking of prominent academics, government officials, military officers, reporters and interesting individuals from around the world.

1. What are the major challenges facing the future of the US role in Asia?

The biggest challenge that the United States currently faces is not the result of external variables, but rather our domestic politics. Among both Republicans and Democrats, this election has called into question some of the foundational aspects that have defined how the United States has engaged in Asia for generations, such as strong support for alliances, careful engagement with China, an emphasis on trade, and a recognition of the importance of defence relationships in Asia. Each of these items are in play in American domestic politics at the moment and the questions that the campaigns have raised, both in the left and right of the United States, are likely to have seismic consequences in Asia for some time. I think many in Asia now believe that regardless of who wins the Presidential election, even if it’s a more reassuring candidate, bigger questions are now in play about the future of the US role in the region.

2. If you were advising the next US President on their Asia policy, what would your counsel be about maintaining domestic support for the U.S.’s central role in Asia?

The historic status quo to maintaining domestic support has been much less active than what is required today. I think this new era requires much more explanation and context to the American domestic political environment in order to ensure that there’s a broad understanding about why we do what we do in Asia. If you look at how the United States has handled issues in the Middle East, you see dozens of speeches by President Obama and former President Bush, explaining why we took various steps in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve not done a comparable set of explanations about why we need to do what we do in Asia, so I’d very much like to see a dedicated, persistent and sustained effort by the next US President to explain to Americans why the lion’s share of the history of the 21st century will be written in Asia, and why we have to play a strong and determined role in this critical region.

3. You were one of the main architects of the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia. What’s your assessment of the pivot almost five years on?

I think the pivot, or the rebalance, has proceeded in fits and starts, but I am proud of elements where we undeniably made a major contribution. You’re starting to see across the board a strong recognition that we need to step up our game in Asia—in defence strategy, the TPP, diplomacy and our commitment to multilateral institutions. But at the same time, it’s undeniable that the amount of focus at a senior level of our government has been on the Middle East and South Asia for over 10 years, so finding the wit and wisdom to engage appropriately in Asia remains a tough balance. I think we’re doing better, but to be truly effective in Asia it will take a succession of Presidents who are committed to ensuring the US’s important role in the region, not just one administration. However, I think that overall President Obama has made a very good effort in turning the page on a period in which we were almost exclusively focused on the Middle East; there’s now a broader recognition that we need to do more in Asia.

4. While the United States and China may not be predestined for conflict, to what extent is it now inevitable that the two countries have now entered a contest for regional leadership?

I think the United States and China recognise, at a fundamental level, that despite misgivings they must work together going forward. Sharing leadership responsibilities will be difficult for both countries but nevertheless that’s the essential purpose of high-level diplomacy between Beijing and Washington. It’s true that China wants to play a larger role in Asia but I would still argue that the US’s efforts and role have been unique in how we’ve provided the operating system of Asia. Much of China’s actions have to do with securing its immediate neighbourhood —almost in the way a 19th century power would do so with respect to spheres of influence. The rest of the region must convey quite directly to China the expectation that Beijing plays a reassuring and stabilising role in an increasingly complex Asia. That’s going to be essential.

5. How is Asia viewing the US elections? What kind of questions is Donald Trump raising for US allies and partners in the region?

I get questions everywhere I go about it. I’ve worked on Asia for almost 30 years and I’ve never seen this level of anxiety, nor these kinds of questions about the implications of Trump’s candidacy and the current state of American politics for the continuing US role in Asia. We do what we can to be reassuring, and explain that the US has been underestimated or counted out many times before and almost always has rebounded and demonstrated hidden reserves. The Trump candidacy is something quite different though. Almost every major initiative that the US has undertaken in Asia has been bipartisan. Trump’s departures from these Asian orthodoxies are potentially destabilising and dangerous, and I think coddling dictators, encouraging proliferation, disdaining our allies doesn’t constitute a coherent foreign policy. I think if such an unbalanced approach were implemented it would undermine literally decades of hard bipartisan work to advance and strengthen the U.S. role in Asia. It would be deeply counterproductive and profoundly regrettable.

6. What is the biggest threat to global security?

Unchecked climate change is the biggest challenge to global security—in ways that are both direct and pernicious. There is a view somehow that the threat of climate change lies well in the horizon. I do not think that’s the case. We’re already seeing its effects: more intense storms, desertification, coral bleaching, changing food patterns, and rising sea levels. All of these things have extraordinarily negative potential consequences. And I am of the view that discussions around climate change are intrinsically tied with the challenges of the South China Sea; it isn’t somehow a soft issue. Climate security is central to American and global purpose going forward.