Artwork © Arnaud Dechiron

There’s been a lively debate in Germany recently on the future of the transatlantic relationship. Is the postwar alliance destined for the dustbin of history?
SERGEY LAGODINSKY: I really don’t think it’s possible to replace the transatlantic relationship, its vision and values. And another point that is important to me: you cannot have it all! If Europe does not have a special, close, westward-looking relationship with the United States, then the continent will be drawn toward the East. We Europeans are not strong enough to develop and sustain our own sense of mission. Rather, we will come under pressure from the East.
One thing is new, though, and German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel touched on this recently: For the first time since World War II, we need a foreign policy strategy for the US. The question is, what kind of strategy?

Gabriel also spoke of a vacuum that exists as a consequence of US President Donald Trump’s policies. What if the other player in this relationship no longer shares the same values and goals in foreign and security policy?
LAGODINSKY: You have to keep trying, you have to be inventive, and you have to be interesting to the other party. And the other party is not just President Trump. There are a variety of other players in the US we can work with – on climate change, on refugee policies, and so on. This is something we are doing at the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The underlying idea is that, yes, we have to have a strategy vis-à-vis the present US government, but also one that addresses US society in its complexity and in its diversity, including on the level of the federal states. We should not write the US off as a country just because Donald Trump is making calls we cannot identify with.

Constanze, you are currently visiting from Washington. How does the debate look from your perspective?
CONSTANZE STELZENMÜLLER: Managing the fact that now, there are two completely different conversations going on in Washington and in the rest of the country is incredibly challenging for us Europeans. But Sergey is right to say that we Europeans should do better at reaching out to those Americans—in Washington and elsewhere—who continue to believe their country should engage with the world.
We do also need to see that the hardliners in the current US administration believe that globalization and alliances are bad for America. They want America to make its international relationships transactional and based much more on interests than on shared values. This thinking is by no means limited to the president. It exists not just in Washington but in other parts of the US too—and in some quarters in Europe as well, of course.
For those of us who want to defend the model of a non-transactional alliance, of a relationship that is based on an embrace of globalization and a liberal international order, we have to realize that this dark view is more widespread than we like to believe. So we also have to find ways of countering this dark narrative. There are two ways of doing this: by taking on a greater share of the burden ourselves; and by striving to correct the disadvantages globalization has brought to some groups in our societies.

How does this argument look from a Central and Eastern European perspective? When we are talking about the forces on the rise in the US―is that something that we also see in Eastern Europe?
MILAN NIč: Superficially, yes―there’s a less critical view of the Trump administration. But you have to realize that Central and Eastern Europe is no monolith; it doesn’t have a unified view. So there are the Polish and Hungarian governments voicing general agreement with Trump’s approach, and then you have critical voices – from within Poland and Hungary and elsewhere, like Slovakia where we see a more balanced view.
Overall, people do distinguish between Donald Trump on the one hand and the rest of the administration and Congress on the other. Arguments you hear often include: the US presence at NATO’s eastern flank is as strong as ever; the US effort to counter-balance the Russian threat is not lessening; there’s no decrease in the support for Ukraine, although that might be coming. You may call it delusion or denial, but the fact is that there’s a more optimistic view in parts of Central and Eastern Europe regarding the Trump administration. Some State Department appointments have certainly contributed to this – Kurt Volker, who is a very active Special US Representative for Ukraine, and Wess Mitchell, the new Assistant Secretary for Europe. Both are considered “friends of Central Europe,” and not so critical, if you will, toward the current governments in Poland and Hungary.
STELZENMÜLLER: Does it help the Poles or Polish society if the US government refuses to criticize the fact that the PiS government is rewriting the Polish constitution to undermine political pluralism and the independence of parliament and the judiciary?
NIč: It doesn’t help them, but the fact that the US keeps quiet helps the PiS government. It was no coincidence that Jaroslaw Kaczyński, the PiS leader, decided to proceed with the controversial judiciary reform a few days after Trump’s Warsaw speech last July.
At the same time, people in the Polish government were very nervous before Trump’s speech. They realized that they didn’t have any control over its messages, and they worried that Poland could be used as a platform to divide Europeans. They didn’t want that and still don’t. Unlike in Hungary, Poles are predominantly focused on the Russian threat, and they are concerned that if we are divided as Europeans, and Poland splits from Germany and France, it’s not good for Poland.
Hungary is different. Budapest has a different strategy of working at the margins of the EU and NATO and has its own independent relations with Russia and China. That said, there is still some criticism coming from some quarters of the US administration, especially the State Department, concerning illiberal tendencies in Hungary and Poland.
STELZENMÜLLER: That’s true. The State Department rebuked the Orbán government for the anti-Semitic campaign against George Soros and his organization, as well as for the crackdown on NGOs.
NIč: I think Orbán was caught by surprise, he expected a much smoother ride with the Trump administration. That hasn’t been the case so far. None of these illiberal leaders from Central Europe has been welcomed to the White House yet. In contrast, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis met Trump in the Rose Garden.
STELZENMÜLLER: Yes—but let’s get back to Trump’s Warsaw speech for a moment. He stopped just short of comparing the EU to the Soviet Union. He suggested that the West was under threat—not the West of open, liberal, representative, democratic society, but a Christian West of hyper-conservative values. There was a lot of dog whistling in that speech, and not just against the EU, but also against Germany. Trump repeated similar criticism of Europe very recently, in a speech in Pensacola, Florida.
NIč: Nevertheless, for many Europeans, the calculation runs like this: There is Vladimir Putin, and in the short term he is our biggest threat. Thus we need to keep the Americans engaged in NATO and slow down their disengagement for as long as we can. If Trump tells Europe, “Buy more arms and comply with the NATO goal of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense,” Central and Eastern Europeans are more understanding. But some of them are like many Germans who know that they will not get there that fast.
Poland is among the few NATO members that spend more than 2 percent, but Trump’s transactional approach has not really paid off for them lately. Warsaw wanted to purchase Patriot missiles, but now it seems that the sale will not go through. When Trump was in Warsaw, he promised the US would deliver more liquified natural gas to Poland – but again, there are no contracts yet. In other words, the Trump world view isn’t always based on realities.
LAGODINSKY: The question is: by focusing so much on the US president, don’t we invite our publics to start believing that the US is fundamentally different from us, that the election of Donald Trump heralds an irreversible change?
STELZENMÜLLER: I’m not saying that. But there are other people who are using this turbulent and confusing phase to claim that America is abandoning Europe, and that Atlanticism is over. Including in this country.
LAGODINSKY: That’s why when other German Atlanticists and I published the Transatlantic Manifesto back in October 2017, we stressed that Trump is not necessarily representative of the US at large. We called him a president sui generis.
STELZENMÜLLER: I think all three of us are in agreement that America has not changed fundamentally, and that we Europeans still have allies in America, including in Washington. Take the mayors or governors who want to stay in the Paris climate agreement. But there is another school of thinking that genuinely wants to disengage. And I’m saying that we need to work harder to convince that part of America that this is a really bad idea—bad for us and bad for them.

What will remain after Trump, though? The US engagement in the world has changed dramatically since Obama. Do you really think that the US will come back and play its former role again?
LAGODINSKY: No, history doesn’t repeat itself. But there is a good chance that after Trump the US will again be a more active, more internationalist, although maybe not more interventionist. We should not rule it out.

… and as focused on Europe?
LAGODINSKY: I think that despite the demographic change within the US and a changing global landscape, US elites still are interested in Europe, and they are frustrated about Europeans turning away. Obama called for the pivot to Asia, but was still interested in Europe. I have a feeling that in a sense the hasty turn-away from the US by many Germans is not caused by their emancipatory self-understanding, but by their betrayed wish to be loved and taken care of by America. This longing for fatherly love turns into complete rejection of “post-Atlanticist” as soon as reality falls short of their expectations. We need to grow up.

But Europe has lost its “father,” right?
LAGODINSKY: We’ll see – but even if that’s correct, we are still part of the same family. We should not start getting rid of our Western roots and our orientation toward the US just because we aren’t getting the attention we think we deserve. We should not underestimate the risk that our non-Western roots will lead to authoritarianism and populism.

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© REUTERS/Albert Gea

It began like an Asterix and Obelix story. In 2009 a tiny village – not Gallic, but Catalan – rose up against the central authority, in this case Madrid.

In the Catalan Arenys de Munt community, a network of pipes drains the water that flows under the Rambla and its sycamore trees. However, the pipes cannot handle the massive amount of rain the region experiences in the fall, and the Rambla is often flooded, with the magnificent sycamore trees in danger of drowning. The community of barely 9,000 inhabitants has long debated what to do to address the situation.

In December 2009, as autumn threatened to submerge the community once again, a new idea was proposed: rather than Arenys de Munt, Madrid would be responsible for the problem in the future. After all, the financial means to renovate the piping was only lacking, according to then-Mayor Carles Morà, because “we send much more money to Madrid than we get back.” The mayor called for a referendum to determine whether the community would manage its own affairs in the future, and a significant part of the population enthusiastically supported the proposal – independence seemed at the time to be the town’s philosopher’s stone, an alchemical miracle that would address economic problems and ensure lasting financial stability.

The referendum took place on September 13, 2009. Only 41 percent of eligible voters decided to take part, with 96 percent of those voting for independence. In other words, only 39 percent of eligible voters voted to separate from Madrid. However, the fight for independence continued. In 2013, the community cut its ties to the central state and declared itself the “free and sovereign territory of Catalonia.”

That might sound a little overblown, even unintentionally funny. But Catalonia was not satisfied with symbolic gestures. Other cities and villages followed the Arenys de Munt community, and eventually the whole Catalan regional government under Carles Puigdemont declared its intention to break free from the Spanish state. Though Catalonia’s efforts to achieve more autonomy, even full state sovereignty, have a long history, European publics and elites were caught entirely by surprise by what seemed like a sudden outbreak of nationalism – especially because the Catalan conflict feels so out of place in the current tableaux of European crises.

Secession and nationalism have a bad reputation: they are atavistic, backward, and xenophobic. That applies just as much to the separatists in the Donetsk as it does to the rebellious governments in Poland and Hungary, and to the Lega Nord in Italy, a party that works aggressively to safeguard the wealth of its own region against the country’s poorer southern regions. Just recently, more than 90 percent of voters in Veneto and Lombardy voted in (non-binding) referenda for significantly more autonomy, above all in financial matters. This separatism is at its core aggressive, angry, and anti-cosmopolitan.

For quite a while, Catalan nationalism did not seem like a threat to Europe; like the Scottish independence movement, it seemed friendly, cosmopolitan, and explicitly pro-European. In short, it seemed like there was nothing to worry about. So when the Catalans intentionally plunged Spain into a veritable state crisis it came as a shock.

Centuries’-Old Problems

Nations are still just “imagined communities,” in the words of political scientist Benedict Anderson. And today, by invoking imagined ancient traditions, a wave of nationalism aimed at the breakup of the EU is gaining steam. Enlightened contemporary thinkers consider this use of the past illegitimate; they maintain that the conflicts of the present must be solved in the present. However, they miss the fallacy in the word “past:” once a thing has happened, it can never really pass. The conflict in Catalonia today is just the latest manifestation of the centuries’-old problem of the Iberian Peninsula.

Long before there was a Spain ruled from Madrid, Catalonia was a significant power in its own right. From 1137 on Catalonia led a community of states that would become one of the leading powers of the Mediterranean through its dynastic connections, a power that even issued its own currency. As a trading state it was externally oriented, self-confident, and open to the world. When the power of the Castilians later expanded outwards from the center, bringing with it a strictly enforced state unity and the Castellano language, there was resistance along the entire periphery of the peninsula, though only Portugal managed to return to independent statehood in 1640.

In the Basque country, this resistance was and still is ethnically motivated, which is one reason that it has turned hostile and xenophobic – and why in the second half of the 20th century it committed acts of barbaric atrocity. For the Catalans, however, secession was never a goal to be won at any price. Furthermore, their sense of self was never based on ethnicity, but rather on their nation’s culture: they wanted their right to self-governance back.

In the Spanish War of Succession at the beginning of the 18th century the majority of the Catalans found themselves on the losing side. The victorious Philipp V marched into Barcelona on September 11, 1714, and with one stroke did away with all the remaining institutions of Catalan self-governance. It was an event that was etched deeply into Catalan national memory: September 11 is an ecstatically celebrated national holiday, the Diada Nacional de Catalunya. As is often the case with history, the day of their greatest defeat has become a day for new beginnings.

After the end of an eight-year-long dictatorship under General Prima de Rivera, Catalonia’s hour struck in 1931. Spain had become a republic, and Catalonia got its full self-determination back. The entirety of its institutions of governance, the Generalitat de Catalunya, was recreated. But it lasted only a moment: When Francisco Franco and his Falange won the civil war in 1939, all rights to autonomy were eliminated in Catalonia, which had – like many other regions – fought for the Republic until the bitter end. Until Franco’s death in 1975, the Catalan language remained forbidden.

Even today, when many Catalans think of Madrid, the capital of a democratic state, they think back to Franco. Franco’s excessive push for Spanish unity has given it an ugly reputation – especially in Catalonia, it stands for Madrid’s attempts to play the center of the country against the rest, and the suppression of Spain’s diversity.

Ruling from on High

As soon as the dictator was dead, cries arose from all over the country for more autonomy. As though from nowhere, the September 11, 1977 Diada saw more than 1.5 million participants demonstrating, one of the largest demonstrations in Spanish history. That certainly made an impression: a process of regionalization was introduced, which seemed to be the only way to avoid violence. Catalan was allowed once more, there was suddenly Catalan TV, and the Teatro Lliure, the first theater in Catalan, opened in Barcelona. When King Juan Carlos visited Catalonia and spoke a sentence in Catalan during a public speech, the excitement was enormous. Everything seemed to be turning out well.

But when discussions switched from software to hardware – that is, from the language and culture to politics and the economy – things became more difficult. The government in Madrid slowed things down wherever it could, dragging its feet for years in talks over a statute governing the region’s autonomy. The Catalan draft read simply: “Catalonia is a nation.” In the final draft, however, an agonizingly awkward formulation was used to dodge the difficult questions: “Catalonia, as a nationality, exercises its self-governance as an autonomous community in agreement with the constitution and the present statute, which presents its fundamental identity norms.”

Madrid was simply not ready to transform the senate into some kind of body for regional representation. That would have bound the centrifugal forces of the autonomy movements back to the central state. Instead, Madrid dealt with the autonomous communities in an almost feudal way. It allowed them different levels of autonomy – in the case of Catalonia, for example, it allowed the creation of a Catalan police force and made moves, albeit limited ones, on the question of more tax autonomy for the region. Catalonia became autonomous in several areas. The process was not a dialogue, but rather a declaration from on high. At its core, the central government was only ready to present the autonomous communities with a sort of chaperoned self-governance.

Now the stubbornness on both sides has allowed the situation to escalate to a point that was only recently unthinkable in a democratic Europe. Without showing the slightest interest in the appearance of legitimacy, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has stuck to a legalistic position, constantly returning to the provisions of the Spanish constitution. In one interview, he said, “The only plan that we have is to make sure that the future Catalan government abides by the law. (…) Everyone can have their own political opinion, whatever that might be. But everyone must respect the law, otherwise we live in the Wild West.” His party, the Partido Popular, can trace its roots back to the Franco regime; for this reason alone, he would have been better off behaving less dictatorially.

In a situation of such high tension, when the government is nearly at the point of using force to assert its authority, references to the letter of the law cannot suffice alone. The Spanish government needs to behave in a way that builds a relationship with the opposition; brinkmanship will only guarantee that the conflict is prolonged.

Revolutionary Folly

But Madrid’s stubbornness in no way justifies the behavior of the Catalan nationalists. The region, especially Barcelona, is prospering, and the money it transfers to the central government is hardly leaving it impoverished. It has already achieved cultural and linguistic autonomy, and further steps toward self-determination will be difficult to achieve with an unfriendly central government. Spain has also given the region more weight in the EU – the EU documents concerning Catalonia are now translated into Catalan in Brussels, and in questions concerning their interests, Catalonia and the Basque Country can take part in the EU’s Council of Ministers meetings. The EU promotes the Catalan cultural scene, and one of the few EU Commission representatives sits in Barcelona. In several European capitals, including Berlin, Catalonia has its own representative, who the Catalans hope to someday turn into a full ambassador.

In light of all this, the secessionist furor seems slightly crazy. Full sovereignty has become an obsession, and those who buy into it cannot be swayed by arguments or facts. It hardly matters that only a minority – albeit a significant one – has taken part in the referenda so far, or that the region’s desire to leave Spain and immediately be admitted to the EU is unlikely to pan out. If one is being charitable to the Catalans, one could say that they are indulging in romantic revolutionary play acting. The separatists are dusting off an ancient, almost mythical conception of a people – and one that historically has often led to violence. Absolutely no one wants to get involved in the difficult work of compromise and real policy-making.

The fact that the Catalan secessionists dream of a peaceful state makes them no less foolish. This nationalism will contribute to the destruction of the political world, whether it wants to or not. Already, all other Catalan political priorities have been displaced by the independence question. But nationhood is not everything, and not even the most important thing. The strong minority pushing for Catalonia to break off from Spain is preventing the region from addressing its larger everyday problems: work, social issues, infrastructure, education, digitalization, and in general the question of how the region can succeed in a changing world.

History has shown us clearly that whenever the nation trumps all other issues – whether for ethnic or cultural reasons – the end is never good. Europe does not need another nation. It is telling that Russia’s disinformation campaigns have been active in Catalonia: Russia hopes that powerful secessionist tendencies in Catalonia will make its own annexation of Crimea look slightly better – and if the Catalan conflict destabilizes a Spain that has just recently emerged from an economic crisis, so much the better for Moscow.

The EU’s Dangerous Discretion

The EU is under incredible pressure. This new wave of nationalism, which sometimes aims to create entirely new states and sometimes aims to renationalize existing states, is hardly helping. Catalonia has shown that nationalist folly can also be peaceful and cosmopolitan. Does that mean that the EU’s existence is being questioned from both the left and the right, from the know-nothings and the elite? Does that threaten the EU’s basic existence?

The EU has decided to come down decisively on the side of the central government in Madrid. As the Spanish constitution does not allow a region to break away, the Commission is correct here – as it is when it points to the “Prodi Doctrine,” which specifies that a breakaway region will not be considered a member of the union until it completes a regular application process. Nevertheless, it was not smart to stick to these stances alone. To ridicule the secessionists, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said that the EU comprised 27 member states, not 98, and he has argued that a Catalan state would be too small for membership in the EU. But this is coming from a man who was once prime minister of a state that did not even have 600,000 citizens (i.e. Luxembourg); Catalonia has nearly three times the inhabitants, more than 13 existing EU member states.

The European institutions are not wrong in their fear that support from Brussels for the separatists, even ambivalent support, could trigger secessionist movements all over Europe. Nevertheless, in supporting Madrid unequivocally they have overlooked something important: since its foundation, the European Community has never been a traditional organization in which states alone cooperate towards common goals.

The EU is a community of laws and norms based directly on the rights and responsibilities of individuals. In 1963 the European Court of Justice established that the functions of the common market affected “the community of affiliated individuals directly” because the treaty establishing the European Common Market is “more than an agreement based on the reciprocal duties between the states that are party to the treaty.”

Since the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht there has been the idea of European citizenship: every citizen of the EU is not only a citizen of their own state, but also a direct citizen of the EU. For the EU, the interests of the individual citizens count just as much as the interests of the member states. In this sense, the European Community – a supranational body from its very beginnings – should serve as a preview of new forms of association that are possible. The EU cannot risk losing this element without also losing its substance, its soul, and its historical uniqueness.

Losing Its Soul

And that is exactly what it is doing in the case of Catalonia. In the words of legal scholar Bardo Fassbender, the EU is behaving like an old-school international organization, defending the position of Spain, its member state, without compromise. In doing so, it is hurting itself.

At the moment, the Spanish-Catalan conflict seems intractable, and it is unlikely the autonomist energy will simply dissipate. The EU should become involved without fear of an autonomist chain reaction, and become what is has long been on paper: a mediator with authority that will address both the justified concerns of the Madrid government and the equally justified concerns of the Catalan nationalists. The EU has to take the concerns of its separatist citizens seriously. Here the EU could actually prove it has the authority that its founding treaties have long established. Nationalism could then become the catalyst that pushes European unification a step further.

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Artwork: © Dominik Herrmann

A curious phenomenon marked the weeks that followed David Cameron’s resignation on the day after the 2016 EU referendum. While all the other hopefuls took to the airwaves, Theresa May managed to remain nearly silent. One by one, her rivals eliminated themselves from the contest by saying something catastrophically stupid, until May was the last person standing. It was the first time in British history that someone had become prime minister by shutting up. Whether by accident or design, it was a stunning piece of political gamesmanship.

What was so effective in getting her through the doors of 10 Downing Street, however, proved less helpful once she was ensconced. A prime minister cannot get away with saying nothing indefinitely, and eventually, May had to try out a few phrases. The most common of which was “Brexit means Brexit.” While a few of those who had been enthusiastic about Britain leaving the EU took “Brexit means Brexit” as a sign of intelligent life, the rest of the country began to wonder if there was even less to May than met the eye.

When May began answering completely different questions to the ones she had been asked in every interview, I dared to think her brain might have been hacked and taken over by malware. Ask her what “Brexit means Brexit” really meant and she would invariably whirr into inaction and say, “I am determined to be focused… (she wasn’t; she really wasn’t) … on the things that the British people are determined for me to focus on.” The Maybot was born.

The idea of May as Maybot came to me while watching the prime minister give an interview to Sky News when on a trade trip to India. Her speech patterns were slow, robotic and faulty and you could almost hear the out of date motherboard creaking in the background. This wasn’t a sleek top of the range Apple Mac: rather the prime minister had modelled herself on an obsolete 1980s Amstrad.

Political sketch writers come up with a lot of names for politicians—I also referred to the prime minister as Kim-Jong May because she appeared to be the Supreme Leader of a failed state — but Maybot seemed to capture her perfectly. Not just her inability to hold meaningful one-to-one conversations, but also her lack of warmth and charm. Given the choice of talking to a person or a wall, the Maybot would invariably pick a wall. The name stuck and it wasn’t long before even right-wing, pro-Brexit publications were calling her the Maybot in print.

An Illogical Machine

Things never really improved in the first eight months of her time in office. First, her government lost its case in the Supreme Court over its refusal to allow parliament a vote in triggering Article 50. May was not at all happy about this: Britain hadn’t voted to take back control in the EU referendum only to allow the British parliament to have a say in how the country was run. She appeared to be even more angry when the Labour Party chose to thwart “the will of the people” by voting with the government to trigger Article 50. Logic never was the Maybot’s strong point.

Despite all these very obvious shortcomings, the Conservatives still held a twenty-point lead over the Labour Party in the opinion polls and immediately after the Easter break, May announced she would be holding a snap general election—despite having explicitly stated on seven previous occasions that it wasn’t in the national interest to hold a general election. Some people began to wonder if the Maybot was getting confused between what was in the public interest and what was in her own.

The early weeks of the election campaign were characterized by Theresa May going round the country saying “Strong and Stable” in front of a small group of Conservative party activists who had been herded into one corner of a community center to make it look on TV as if she was playing to sell-out audiences everywhere. Things didn’t improve with the launch of her manifesto. Within days she was forced to insist that “nothing has changed” as she changed pretty much everything.

She couldn’t see for the life of her why everyone was calling her dementia tax a tax on dementia just because it was a tax that targeted people with dementia. Besides which her manifesto had never been meant to be seen as a list of electoral promises; rather it was just a series of random ideas formed of random sentences. It was around this time that even her advisers started calling her “The Maybot.” The name seemed to describe her so well. Awkward, lacking in empathy and—above all—not very competent.

Despite all this, the Conservatives still held a large lead going into polling day with May expecting to gain a majority of sixty to eighty seats. The electorate saw things differently. Having been asked to back the prime minister and give her a strong mandate, they instead chose to give her no overall majority. The Maybot was devastated and the Tory party were far from impressed.

Ordinarily, she would have been forced to go as leader within a week, but these were desperate times. The gene pool of talent within the Tory party was so small, there were no obvious replacements. Besides which, the last thing the Conservatives wanted was another election as they would probably lose. So her punishment for failure was being forced to stay on as prime minister.

“Rong and Stale”

Over the summer May decided to lay low, licking her wounds and hoping no one in her party would launch a leadership bid against her. Come the party conference in October she was ready to reboot herself. Only Maybot 2.0 looked to all intents and purposes much like Maybot 1.0. She had meant to convince the party she had learned from her mistakes but her apology for her election campaign being too scripted just sounded… too scripted. Then comedian Simon Brodkin made his way to the stage to give Theresa her “P45”, a redundancy note. Then her voice went into revolt and refused to speak. The nadir was the frog leaping out of her throat and on to the screen behind her where it started knocking off the slogans. “Strong and Stable” became “Rong and Stale.”

Then May realized that maybe it had been a mistake to leave David Davis in charge of the Brexit negotiations. Having told a select committee that his department had been making in-depth impact assessments on 58 sectors of the economy, the Brexit secretary was forced to admit that the assessments did not actually exist when he was asked to produce them. At which point May headed over to Brussels to take charge of the negotiations. Unfortunately she had forgotten to inform Arlene Foster, the leader of the DUP on which she relied for her majority, and was then forced to tell the EU that she wasn’t able to agree to the deal she had come over specially to sign.

Eventually the EU took pity and came to her rescue. Better to deal with a fatally wounded Maybot whom they could at least vaguely trust than risk her being sacked by the Tories and being replaced with someone even more incompetent. So the EU signed off the first phase of the negotiations—even though no one could quite agree on what had been agreed—and gave the green light to the second phase.

The Maybot momentarily forgot that three members of her cabinet had been forced to resign, that the National Health Service was in crisis, and that UK productivity was among the lowest of all G20 countries and celebrated as if she had won the lottery.

So what if it had taken the best part of a year to conclude the really simple part of the Brexit negotiations and she had left herself under a year to deal with the really tricky stuff? So what if her party—and the country—were still as divided on Brexit as they had ever been? So what if she still didn’t really have a clue what final Brexit deal she even wanted? She may be useless but there was still no one obviously better in the Conservative party. There is life in the Maybot yet.

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© REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

The digital era, with all of its benefits, has profoundly changed the security environment of liberal democracies. We face potential destruction of national infrastructures and militaries in ways unimaginable a quarter century ago. Even the electoral process in a number of democracies has come under severe threat, with attempts to alter outcomes in a number of elections in the past two years. The response should be a new “Cyber NATO,” a coalition of liberal democracies that better meets the ubiquity of threats. This will be difficult to achieve, yet the alternatives are worse.

Threats can affect anyone. Only one Russian cyber operation, APT28 or “Fancy Bear,” has attacked servers of ministries, political parties, and candidates in the US, Germany, the Netherlands Sweden, Ukraine, Italy, and France and indeed even the servers of the International Association of Athletics Federations responsible for anti-doping monitoring. Military communications have also been targeted. Yet APT28 is but one of numerous groups from Russia alone. Nor is Russia the only authoritarian government seeking to increase its advantage through cyber operations. It is also clear that Iran has carried out its own offensive cyber operations. Chinese, primarily groups affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, have targeted militaries as well as intellectual property in companies the world over.

In other words, the digital age also has ushered in an era of new security threats, perhaps imaginable but not seen until the past decade. Governments, meanwhile, have been slow to respond; multilateral organizations such as NATO and the EU have been slower. Meanwhile international organizations such as the UN have failed even to broker a treaty arrangement to prevent the use of digital weapons.

From Blocking to Hacking

Virtually every history of what is now known as “cyber war” or “cyber warfare” begins with an account of an attack on Estonia ten years ago. In 2007, the country’s governmental, banking, and news media servers were paralyzed with “distributed denial-of-service” or DDOS attacks. People’s access to virtually all major online and digitally-based services was blocked.
Cyber attacks have a far longer history of course, but until then, they were generally carried out for espionage, not to create damage to adversaries or make a political point. This case was different: it was overt and public. It was digital warfare, described by the theoretician of war, Carl Paul von Clausewitz, as “the continuation of policy by other means,” meant as punishment for the Estonian government’s decision to move a Soviet-era statue from the center of the capital.

Since 2007, overt cyber warfare and the continuation of policy by other means has proliferated and in ever more virulent form: attacks blanking out regions preceding bombing in conflict zones with DDOS attacks (Georgia, 2008); crashing electrical grids (Ukraine 2016, 2017); private companies (Sony 2015); hacking into parliaments (the Bundestag 2015 and 2106); political think tanks and parties before major elections (the Democratic and Republican National Committees 2015-16), presidential campaigns (Hillary Clinton 2016, Emmanuel Macron, 2017), government ministries (Dutch ministries, Italy’s Foreign office 2016-17, the U.S. Departments of State and Defense).

In one especially egregious case, records of 23 million employees of the US Federal government were stolen in what is known as the “Office of Personnel Management hack.” Recent testimony and leaks in the US report attempts by a foreign power to delete or alter voter data in 21 (or possibly 39 states) before the US presidential elections. These represent merely the attacks admitted to by the victims, not those unreported.

Shutting Down A Country

A decade ago, the idea of a major cyber attack was strictly hypothetical. Indeed NATO was originally skeptical about the attack on Estonia in 2007. Since the recognition of politically motivated DDOS attacks and their paralyzing impact, the focus of cyber security has shifted to more elaborate possibilities: the use of malware to shut down or blow up critical infrastructure, including electricity and communication networks, water supplies, and even traffic light systems in major cities. This goes beyond DDOS and requires “hacking,” as we know the term―breaking into servers or a computer system, not merely blocking access as in DDOS. Indeed the vulnerability of critical infrastructure became a primary concern of governments and the private sector.

These kinds of cyber attacks could mean shutting down a country, or its military, rendering it unable to oppose a conventional attack. In 2010 the Stuxnet worm, which spun Iranian plutonium-enriching centrifuges out of control, warned us of the power of cyber to do serious damage to physical systems. Leon Panetta, US Secretary of Defense from 2011 to 2013, warned in 2012 of the potential of a “cyber Pearl Harbor.” Subsequent events such as the shutting down of a Ukrainian power plant in 2016 and again this year through cyber operations showed that such concerns were hardly unwarranted.

At the same time it is worth noting that one can do considerable damage to national security and the private sector without disabling infrastructure; the hack of Sony and of the Office of Personnel Management in which the records of up to 23 million past and present federal employees are good examples of an extremely dangerous breach that endangers a country’s national security or its commerce.

From these examples, we can see that “cyber attacks” as a term is a catch-all, spanning a range of activities from attacks that can destroy a nation’s critical infrastructure on the extreme side to subtler attacks: hacking politicians, leaking compromising information, and jeopardizing election integrity.

Slow Responses

Recognition of threats in the digital world has been slow in coming, although the US and others foresaw potential threats as far back as the early 1990s. In security policy circles, it was only in 2011 that the Munich Security Conference, the West’s premier forum of security policy makers, held its first panel on cyber security.

All of these concerns have fallen under the broad rubric of symmetrical warfare. Whatever they did to you, once you figured out who “they” were, you could do back to them. Cyber attacks were all in the realm of traditional warfare but in a new domain. The US in 2010 declared cyber the fifth domain of warfare, after land, sea, air, and space. Moreover, the US Department of Defense has explicitly said that a cyber attack need not be met in the cyber domain; a kinetic response to a digital one is possible.

While NATO has acknowledged the potential threats of cyber and propaganda, it has done little operationally. NATO did set up a Center of Excellence in Cyber Security in Tallinn, Estonia, and later a similar Center for Strategic Communication in Riga, Latvia. Yet even within the alliance, there has been little cooperation.

Elections Under Attack

It has been only a year since a broader consensus has emerged among intelligence agencies and security policy experts that electoral processes themselves have come under attack. Manipulations have included “doxing” or publishing materials obtained through hacking as seen in the case of Hillary Clinton and Emmanuel Macron. Such tactics have been bolstered by manufacturing fake news on an industrial scale and propagating these through “bots” or robot accounts on social media. Gaining currency, these can be further propagated by real users. One study showed that in the three months leading up to the US election, some 8.7 million fake news stories were called up by users on Facebook but only 7.3 million genuine stories. More worrisome is the prospect of manipulations through hacking into unsecured voting machines and by altering or deleting voter data, as both the Department of Homeland Defense and a leaked NSA memo have averred.

Indeed, the propagation of fake news stories need not be tied to elections and no longer is. Instead they can simply be used in an attempt to sway public opinion. The #Syriahoax hashtag, alleging Syria’s use of chemical weapons in Spring 2017 was a Western hoax, spread virally on Twitter via bots. Fake news regarding NATO troop assignments in Eastern Europe have become commonplace. In the French election campaign in Spring 2017, bots and fake news accounts spread lies and scurrilous “facts” about one candidate, Emmanuel Macron, while leaving his primary opponent, Marine Le Pen, untouched.

A New Threat Landscape

As the past several years in this new digital age have shown, the threat landscape facing democracies has dramatically changed, ranging from traditional threats such as destruction or incapacitation of critical infrastructure to what may be termed soft threats, the manipulation of electoral democracy and public opinion. Two fundamental differences to pre-digital threats emerge:

First, geography or physical distance, a key determinant of security since the beginning of conflict, has become irrelevant. For as long as people have been thinking, proximity to threats or hostile actors was a primary motivator in security policy. NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for a reason: it is a defense organization of liberal democracies in a geographical space, constrained inter alia by tank logistics, bomber ranges, the placement of troops.

Countries traditionally have invaded or been attacked by neighbors, not by adversaries from far away. Indeed, until the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles, distance from threats was the greatest source of security and proximity the greatest vulnerability.

This is no longer true. Digital threats do not recognize distance. One is just as vulnerable half the globe away as from next door to an adversary. This is why, in the digital age, the earlier basis of alliances, be they NATO or Sparta’s Peloponnesian League, weakens or even disappears. Everyone is equally vulnerable to attack, regardless of borders or of physical distance. Cyber is a tool that can be used anywhere.

Asymmetric Attacks

Secondly, in the digital era, liberal democracies are far more vulnerable to asymmetric attacks from autocratic states than before. Propaganda, fake news, disinformation are all as old as the Trojan Horse, yet most of what was considered disinformation as late as the 20th Century had little effect. In the pre-digital age, disinformation could not easily be propagated. Fake news could not swamp and overwhelm the news media. Election rolls could not be manipulated on a massive scale and across many election districts.

Moreover, only liberal democracies are fundamentally vulnerable to attacks and manipulations of the electoral process. Authoritarian governments need not fear external manipulations of electoral processes as these are manipulated by those in power anyway. While it would be difficult to imagine a liberal democracy employing the same methods against Russia as the Russians used in the US and French presidential elections, attempting to do so simply would have no effect. To have an effect, one needs free and fair elections to affect.

From a security policy perspective, however, the possibilities of using digital manipulations can be quite attractive to an adversary. Why bother with military interventions or attacks (even digital attacks for that matter), if it suffices to use digital means to get a candidate or even a political party into office that will do your bidding or at least follow a policy line favorable to you? Certainly a Le Pen in France or the defeat of Angela Merkel in the 2017 German elections would have done more to disrupt European policy toward Russia than any kind of military action.

An Alliance of Democracies

In light of these developments in this age of “cyber,” democracies need to think beyond the hitherto geographical bounds of security. We need to rethink our security. In addition to those already in existence, we need a new form of defense organization, a non-geographical but strictly criteria-based organization to defend democracies―countries that genuinely are democracies as defined by free and fair elections, the rule of law, and the guarantee of fundamental rights and freedoms.

This idea is not new, yet proposals predating the digital era were guided more by a philosophical approach than hard security concerns. In different contexts, both Madeleine Albright and John McCain at the turn of the century proposed the creation of a community or league of democracies. Neither proposal went far at the time. The threats to democracies then, however, were not of the type described here; neither proposal was based on security concerns. Today, every liberal democracy is potentially vulnerable.

Could such an organization do the job to face this new threat? I propose that we consider a cyber defense and security pact for the genuine democracies of the world. After all, Australia, Japan, Uruguay, and Chile, all rated as free democracies by Freedom House, are just as vulnerable as NATO allies such as the United States, Germany, or my own country.

The prospects for safeguarding democracies in the digital era through such a pact are probably better now than even a year ago. Nonetheless, until this is taken up by the governments of major countries, both in NATO and outside the Alliance, liberal democracies will remain vulnerable to the new threats of the 21st century.

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© Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik via REUTERS

It is not entirely surprising that Russia has made a name for itself in the cyber world. Russians are, after all, good at hacking―very good. It’s an ironic by-product of backwardness. If one goes back to the 1980s and 1990s, and even the 2000s, Russians were often unable to buy the latest technology that we in the West could access; at the same time, Russia is historically strong in mathematics. Quite a few Russians, deprived of the programs we rely on, actually learned to code. Hacking systems and programs was meant as a workaround, but these hackers eventually developed a subculture of their own.

Hackers are by definition nearly always ahead of the game. They are looking to exploit vulnerabilities that are largely unknown until they are weaponized. Because of this, hacker activity often says more about Western vulnerabilities than Russian capabilities. The Russians have not really been able to break anything that is not broken already; they have merely been able to exploit opportunities. Rather than recognize what this means about our own failings, we often use the Russians as scapegoats.

Conversations with those in the security establishment and military in Moscow inevitably reveal the extent to which they feel Russia is at war with the West―a war they believe the West started. This is a non-connected, non-military war, one where they are fighting for Russia’s place in the world and Russian sovereignty.

At the same time, under Putin, Russia is invested in a campaign to make Russia great again, to assert itself as a great power when in fact it is not. Despite Russia’s vast physical scale, its economy is smaller than that of New York state. Its soft power is almost non-existent. And its military power, while not inconsiderable, is reaching the point of being overstretched.

Not Much Impact

This helps to explain the country’s enthusiasm for cyber warfare: if you are sensible, you move the field of battle to where you feel your opponents are most vulnerable. Putin believes that the West’s vulnerability is precisely that it is a constellation of democracies, with legitimate internal and inter-state disputes and disagreements along various fault lines. He is aided by the fact that the West is going through something of a legitimacy crisis, with real suspicions about the political class, questions about the future of the EU, and pressures on the transatlantic alliance. Even if Putin had never been born, these tensions would still have arisen.

The Russians have exploited these weaknesses. In terms of the American election, the Kremlin was clearly trying to influence the outcome, though it is still unclear how great an effect its efforts had. The much-vaunted Facebook campaign has been shown to be relatively marginal, and so far research on voting patterns and intentions as a result of that, or the leak of Democratic emails, have not been able to demonstrate substantive shifts in any statistically robust way.

Donald Trump won to a large extent because of his own capacity to create a groundswell of public support, and perhaps more importantly thanks to both James Comey’s unexpectedly timed announcement about the investigation into Hillary Clinton and Clinton’s own clumsy campaign strategy. In general, when Russian hackers act abroad, their impact is often relatively small. But even when the effect is significant, this does not mean they are particular capable.

Many Russian people genuinely believe they are fighting Western attempts to muzzle or restrain their country. While there is a certain degree of exasperation in Russia over the claims of hacking, on another level it fits into a very convenient narrative: it elevates Putin to a status he frankly does not deserve, as this terrifying Bond-type villain threatening Western democracies. One would almost believe that Putin can reshape elections and topple governments with the click of a mouse. He cannot, but it suits him to maintain that appearance.

Democratic Resilience

In reality, we should not assume Russia is any more secure than we are, not least because we have witnessed a series of cyber crimes carried out against Russian targets as well. Instead, it is important to examine the country’s political intent and its willingness to take geopolitical risks. When you are fighting a war like the one the Russians believe they are, you are willing to take risks. The West, on the other hand, does not regard itself as being at war with Russia, so we have a very different set of basic operating principles.

If we question which global powers have the greatest offensive cyber capabilities, America would undoubtedly be at the top of that list. Western nations, however, are not deploying their capabilities against the Russians the way the Russians are deploying theirs against the West. The difference really is about politics and mind-set―indeed, the Russians are lucky we are not seeking to hack them in the same way as they are hacking us on a state level.

We should not underestimate the fundamental resilience of democratic systems and democratic societies. The Russians did not even seek to elect Trump, or believe he could be elected; they believed the American establishment would not allow a Trump to win, and that American democracy is much more managed than it is in reality. They simply wanted to ensure that Clinton, whom they were certain would be elected, would be as weak as possible on Day One of her presidency. It is entirely possible they played some small role in Brexit, but ironically enough, news about the scale of that support could give the British political elite the chance to renegotiate and revisit the decision to leave the European Union. The Russians supported the Front National in France, but they could not secure a victory. And in Germany, Russian meddling has in many ways forced the country and Chancellor Angela Merkel into a much more anti-Russian position. Time and again, what is seen as a tactical success by the Russians is really a strategic defeat.

Cyber Is Cheap

There is a strong case to be made for far less hysteria over Russia’s capabilities. When we overestimate Putin, we not only encourage him but also empower him; people begin to believe we need to make a deal with Russia. Instead of obsessing over Russia, however, we need to push for greater resilience in general. This is not merely a Russia problem, after all, it is a modernity problem.

There are various other protagonists that could be using these strategies, and quite possibly with much more serious intent. If one looks at Chinese military and political thinking, for example, it already embodies many of the principle of so-called “hybrid warfare,” and they have used similar tactics in the South China Sea. It is certainly not implausible that they will also be looking carefully at the lessons of Russia’s information warfare campaign for future reference. Other actors are unlikely to be operating on the same scale, but as cyber and information operations can be relatively cheap, we cannot exclude them being used in more limited ways, whether to try and tip the balance of power in the Balkans or other complex political environments. Finally, let’s not assume this is purely the province of states; in the US elections and the Brexit vote in particular, we have already seen significant legal campaigns by pressure groups and powerful individuals to manipulate the information environment for political purposes. This is only likely to become more common, and perhaps in some cases also shade into the realms of illegal operations―or at least morally questionable ones, given that laws tend to lag behind the technical capabilities.

In the case of more direct cyber attacks, unless it comes to a real conflict situation, Putin is not going to try and crash national power systems in the middle of winter, for example. That would mean war, a shooting war. But there may well be terrorists and pariah regimes that are less concerned about the implications.

So this is a useful opportunity to consider the vulnerability of our modern systems and shore up their security and resilience. European security would be served better by investing more in cyber security rather than simply assuming that hitting the 2 percent of GDP mark on defense spending in terms of tanks and guns and rockets provides guaranteed protection.

Asymmetric Response

We must also rethink our response to Russia. There has been very little cost to the Putin regime as a whole, because we have a tendency to fetishize symmetry: If you carry out a cyber attack, then our response ought to be something cyber; if you limit our media, we will limit yours.

We can and should think more imaginatively and asymmetrically. It is perfectly legitimate for us to make clear that we regard hacking our systems as unacceptable, and that rather than responding by hacking into theirs, we will expel Russian companies from our countries or find other, comparable avenues of creating real, tangible costs. There should be more personal sanctions targeting people associated with Russia’s cyber and information warfare activities, but also those who simply order or encourage or justify them. We need to show there is some kind of price without feeling the need to be equally aggressive and equally cyber militarist.

Regardless of how we respond, the sound and fury hides the fact that Russian hacking is not some kind of existential threat to the West. We need to stop treating it like one, and instead consider specific responses to a specific problem.

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© REUTERS/Axel Schmidt

These days it does not take very long for the “cyber” prefix to be dropped into any discussion on foreign policy or national security in Berlin: cyber sabotage to shut down the energy system, cyber operations to influence elections, or cyber espionage to steal secrets and intellectual property―all examples given to show that future risks to our security will emanate from cyber space.

The urgent need for strategic responses has captured Berlin’s policy circles. Endorsing “hack-backs,” Germany’s interior minister Thomas de Maizière told German media last spring that police officers should not only wear body armor but also carry guns. This is more than mere rhetoric. The interior ministry is currently building a controversial new agency that is supposed to provide hacking capabilities to domestic security agencies. Ministry officials have also warned they may need to amend the constitution to hit back at hackers targeting private companies.

Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, meanwhile, is pursuing her own cyber agenda with similar arguments. At a ceremony launching the military’s new Cyber Command last April, she justified counterattacks in cyber space as effective response to cyber attacks.

Both ministers argue that Germany needs to be able to better defend itself in cyber space. But what does that actually mean? We need to unpack “cyber” if we want to understand the real problems that lurk behind this increasingly catchy term. Unfortunately, cyber defense is far more complicated than many policymakers realize.

More Clarity Needed

While “Internet” remains the term of choice for talking about the global connectivity of information networks in a civilian context, the term cyber in Germany has become a catchphrase for its military and security aspects. As such, it has climbed to the top of security experts’ and officials’ agendas. But the proliferation of the word cyber often obscures more than it clarifies. For example, spreading disinformation through social networks presents an entirely different issue from securing government IT systems or protecting critical infrastructure against hacking.

What is more, cyber is often used without making the important distinction between offense and defense. The German military, for example, uses “cyber defense” to refer to both its offensive and defensive capabilities. This includes the protection of its IT systems against attacks by foreign forces as well as conducting offensive cyber operations against adversaries to breach and disrupt their IT systems.

The distinction between offensive and defensive cyber operations here is crucial, and it reveals one of the most important challenges cyber space poses for national security: Offense and defense are directly linked, but mostly as a tradeoff. Offensive capabilities often come at the expense of IT security, especially if they pertain to globally used IT systems.

In essence, offense often relies on the exploitation of software or hardware vulnerabilities. While cyber security requires that such vulnerabilities are identified and fixed, cyber offense seeks to keep knowledge of their existence secret. But leaving such vulnerabilities unpatched amplifies the risk that an adversary, be it a foreign country or a criminal, could exploit them as well. Thus, accumulating so-called cyber weapons that rely on the exploitation of undisclosed vulnerabilities also means that potential weaknesses in our own systems remain open to exploitation.

It’s Complicated

It is not only this dilemma that makes the cyber dimension of national security so complex. One of the fundamental principles of national security – the distinction between foreign and domestic – also gets blurred in cyber space. One of the core problems of any sort of cyber operation is attribution. Using a global communication network makes it possible to obscure the origins of an operation or to plant false flags that point to an uninvolved third party.

The structure of Germany’s national security agencies makes it essential, however, that we quickly identify whether the attackers are operating from German soil or from abroad, and if they are sponsored by criminals or foreign states. That information is decisive in determining which government agencies get involved and what countermeasures they will take. This does not mean that attribution is impossible. But unlike in a conventional attack, when the origin of a missile is relatively easy to detect, attribution in cyber space is complicated, and thus more contested. The process involves computer forensics as well as conventional intelligence work, and it often takes weeks or months.

It is not only difficult to pinpoint the origins of a cyber operation, its purpose is often not self-evident. In their early stages, digital espionage missions and the manipulation of IT systems, for example in order to disrupt government services, are difficult to distinguish. Digital espionage and sabotage both require infiltrating IT networks. From the perspective of the network’s defender, both kinds of intrusion initially look the same. But what is the purpose? Is it an espionage operation that seeks to access and copy information only? Or will the intruder go further and manipulate the network to cause malfunctions or a breakdown?

Crucial Differences

The answer to these questions is crucial. Espionage operations violate national laws and undermine national security, but they are generally not seen as breaches of international law. However, if a foreign state’s cyber operation disrupts energy supply or disables financial services, it could be seen as a legitimate cause for a military response according to the right to self-defense in international law. Therefore, the distinction between espionage, sabotage, and a military attack is very important. Yet in cyber space this distinction is far more nebulous.

Arms control is also much more difficult to implement in the cyber sphere. Unlike conventional arms, cyber weapons only have value if they are kept secret. A cyber weapon is essentially malware developed for use in a military context. If the malware agent is disclosed, the vulnerabilities it exploits can be reinforced, rendering the weapon useless; this also means a cyber weapon will eventually be made defunct after deployment.

All of this complicates international cooperation. Even allies are reluctant to share cyber weapons, which is a serious concern. Few things are easier to copy and distribute than lines of code. The protection of this malware is crucial, but it is also hard. Even the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had their malware tools stolen and published on the Internet with disastrous consequences. Two of them were used by the ransomware worm “WannaCry” that infected more than 200,000 computers in over 150 countries.

“WannaCry” was an important reminder of the enormous damage cyber attacks can unleash. Multinational companies like Fedex or Nissan were affected, as well as the National Health Service in the United Kingdom and government agencies in Romania and Russia. Yet as the debate about creating hacking capabilities in Berlin illustrates, many government officials and MPs here believe that they can have it both ways, strengthening offensive and defensive cyber capabilities alike.

The tradeoffs involved, often ill-understood, simply work differently. The United States has great offensive capabilities. But it is reluctant to use them, and for good reason. As the US economy and society have become more digitized, there is hardly a country that is more vulnerable to cyber attacks. And after the leak of some critical offensive cyber tools, even in the US many experts are now publicly questioning whether the focus should shift from offensive cyber capabilities to policies that improve IT security.

That focus has served Germany well over the past decades. Given that its vulnerabilities are growing as it, too, digitizes its industry, the country should be wary of losing sight of this strategic priority. All the talk about cyber is important. But the discussion needs to grow more nuanced, informed, and open to secure good outcomes.

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Artwork: © Dominik Herrmann

To outside observers, Luigi Di Maio, the immaculately groomed 31-year-old hoping to become Italy’s next prime minister, is as ambiguous as the Five Star Movement (M5S) he leads. Described as poised and reassuring, he is the antithesis of the rabble of rebels initially brought together by Beppe Grillo, the messy-haired, loud-mouthed comedian who founded the opposition movement in 2009 against a backdrop of economic decline and severe discontent with the traditional political class.

Yet ever since he was elected the youngest-ever deputy speaker of Italy’s lower house of parliament in 2013, Di Maio has shown signs of being as temperamental as 69-year-old Grillo, and equally prone to gaffes. An attempt last year to compare former prime minister Matteo Renzi to Augusto Pinochet fell flat after he referred to the late Chilean dictator as Venezuelan; in November he described Russia as “a Mediterranean country.” He has also made several linguistic and grammatical errors in his native Italian.

Blunders aside, in 2016 he was ranked among the most influential people in Europe under the age of 30 by Forbes magazine, and in September he became leader of the M5S after winning an online ballot. The party’s founder Grillo has always excluded running for office because of a 1980 manslaughter conviction after a car crash in which three people were killed. So with Renzi forced to quit after a botched referendum on constitutional reform in December 2016 and the ruling center-left Democratic Party in disarray, Di Maio can now position himself as a serious contender in the electoral race.

He was just 21 when he was brought along by a friend to participate in Grillo’s debut “V-Day” protest against corrupt politics, with the “V” standing for vaffanculo, the Italian word for “fuck off.” Di Maio was tasked with collecting signatures for a petition calling for politicians with criminal records to be banned from standing for parliament.

But it has been his ability to distance himself from the party’s bombastic, conspiracy-theorist, euroskeptic tone that has not only aided his meteoric rise but also broadened the party’s appeal to such an extent that it is now Italy’s most popular. Di Maio has pledged to “rescue” Italy, a country with a perennially sluggish economy, high unemployment, and huge public debt, not to mention a vast number of migrants who have arrived on its shores in recent years. Still, as he travels around the country garnering support ahead of general elections on March 4, he is facing the double challenge of disproving critics and convincing a weary electorate to place their faith in a party that has yet to be tested at the national level.

“There are those who continue to say that we are anti-politics,” Di Maio told me in an email. “But the reality is we are another type of politics. It’s their way of discrediting us, but if Italy is at the point it is today, the responsibility is certainly not ours.”

From Engineering to Politics

Born in Avellino, a town close to Naples in the southern Campania region, di Maio’s penchant for order emerged early, when he decided he wanted to become a policeman at the age of 10. That aspiration was influenced by his upbringing in a region ravaged by the Camorra mafia organization.

While his inclination towards activism might have been shaped by his father Antonio, a former construction firm owner who was involved in the now-defunct neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), their political views differed. Earlier this month Di Maio reiterated his party’s condemnation of fascist ideology after being criticized for not taking part in an anti-fascism protest in the northern town of Como.

The eldest of three siblings, Di Maio studied engineering at Naples University before switching to law, but never completed either course. He said he became civically and politically engaged while at high school and university, where he helped establish a students’ union. Di Maio’s work experience includes waiting tables and laboring on building sites, as well as a stint as a steward at a Naples football club. As a student, he co-founded a web and social media marketing firm, and in 2012 created a documentary about the demise of small businesses in Naples.
A car lover, Di Maio has said his entrepreneurial idol is Enzo Ferrari, the racing driver and founder of the iconic sports car company. Meanwhile, in the world of politics, he told Vanity Fair earlier this year that he looks up to Alessandro Pertini, a socialist politician who was Italy’s president from 1978 until 1985. Yet he himself generally represents the conservative side of the M5S.

Di Maio recently split from long-term girlfriend Silvia Virgulti, a party spin-doctor credited with nurturing his communication skills and boosting his image. “They say the love story is over but I think she’s still his adviser,” said Alberto Castelvecchio, a public speaking professor at Rome’s Luiss University. “He listens to his spin-doctors – he’s very disciplined and studies hard, and he respects what they suggest.”

Nonetheless, it’s when he speaks publicly that the inconsistencies surface, Castelvecchio added. “You can see the difference between the two Di Maios: one is the perfectly programmed storyteller, and the other – who comes out when he has to improvise – is the real Di Maio, who unfortunately is not as brilliant as his spin-doctor.”

His boyish, clean-cut look and moderate manner have helped the party gain a lead over its rivals in opinion polls since September, with an Ipsos survey on December 18 positioning M5S at 29.1 percent, ahead of the ruling Democratic Party’s 24.4 percent. “He looks perfectly designed to be the grandson every grandmother would like,” Castelvecchio added.

The Populist Challenge?

Di Maio’s skyrocketing popularity comes despite outcries over how badly M5S politicians have run Rome and the northern industrial city of Turin, a lackluster performance in local elections in June, and a defeat in Sicily’s regional elections in early November. And as things currently stand, there is little chance of the party winning the 40 percent of the vote required to govern alone. A new electoral law was recently introduced allowing parties to form coalitions ahead of an election – something the M5S has vehemently opposed.

That is, until now: in a sign of his ability to change tack, Di Maio told an Italian radio station on December 18 that if it fails to reach a majority on election day, M5S might appeal to parties that have won parliamentary seats to forge an alliance. Until then, a key test will be his ability to unite a group made up of militants from across the political spectrum while giving voters a clear impression of what the party represents.

Ever since the Brexit vote, the party has softened its stance towards Europe, saying a referendum on the euro would be a “last resort.” But it has become tougher on immigration, an issue that will dominate the campaign. The party’s views on the topic now appear to be more in line with the far-right Northern League, even though in 2011 Di Maio volunteered to help asylum-seekers in Naples settle in, according to his online CV. And even with the shift, M5S’ core values of free water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, free internet access, and environmentalism remain mostly intact.

If it manages to seize power, the party has said it will place ministerial posts in the steady hands of people with high institutional profiles – magistrates, economists, professors, and the like. But competence is not something that seems to bother those supporters drawn to the radical ideals that helped establish the party, and which are expected to help it emerge as a clear winner, at least in terms of vote percentage.

“It’s about revenge, not competence,” said Castelvecchio. “They are bitter about the kind of climate we have in Italy… and they want to send the cronies home.” Meanwhile Di Maio says he never set out to become a politician, and even now he is not dwelling much on the prospect of leading the country. “I’m committed to bringing forward a program, an idea, values… after which it will be up to citizens to choose which way to go.”

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© REUTERS/Yuri Kochetkov/Pool

Nuclear arms control has been a central feature of the relationship between Washington and Moscow for some 50 years, but the nuclear arms control regime appears increasingly fragile. Several factors are placing the regime under stress, and there are currently no discussions underway that might bolster it. US-Russian relations have fallen to their lowest point since the end of the Cold War, beset by problems including Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, differences over Syria, and Moscow’s interference in the US presidential election. Should the nuclear arms control regime unravel—a prospect that is unfortunately very real—the world would become a more uncertain and dangerous place.

US and Soviet officials began nuclear arms control negotiations in the late 1960s. Over the next four decades, they produced agreements like SALT, INF, and START. Thanks to those agreements and other unilateral decisions, the United States and Russia currently maintain nuclear arsenals that are large but only a fraction of their respective Cold War sizes.

The latest agreement, New START, requires the United States and Russia to each reduce to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on no more than 700 deployed strategic missiles and bombers. Those limits go into full effect in February 2018, and both countries appear on track to meet the limits. Following the conclusion of New START, then-President Barack Obama proposed a new round of arms reduction negotiations that would include non-strategic nuclear weapons and non-deployed strategic weapons—meaning that for the first time, Washington and Moscow would negotiate on all nuclear weapons in their arsenals. Russian officials balked, citing concerns such as missile defense and conventional strike systems. They also called for the next negotiation to be multilateral, although the United States and Russia each maintain a nuclear arsenal that is more than ten times the size of that of any third country.

Over the remainder of the Obama administration, the two countries were unable to find a formula that would allow new negotiations. US and Russian officials have conducted one round of strategic stability talks since President Donald Trump took office, but those appear to have produced little more than agreement that there would be a second round.

The Eroding INF Treaty

The fate of the INF Treaty poses the most pressing challenge to the nuclear arms control regime. Signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987, the treaty banned all US and Soviet ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. By mid-1991, the two countries had destroyed some 2,700 missiles.

In 2014, the Obama administration charged that Russia had violated the treaty by testing a prohibited ground-launched cruise missile of intermediate range. Then, in 2017, US officials said that Russia had begun deploying the missile, which bears the Russian designator 9M729 and which the United States calls the SSC-8. Russian officials deny that they have violated the treaty, and instead charge the United States with three violations. Two are without merit, but Moscow’s claim that the launcher system for “Aegis Ashore,” the SM-3 missile interceptor site in Romania (and soon Poland as well), represents a violation appears to have some substance. Ashore’s vertical launch system, when on US Navy warships, can launch cruise missiles and other weapons as well as the SM-3, and the Russians say Aegis Ashore could hold ground-launched cruise missiles banned by the INF Treaty.

With more political will in Moscow and Washington, these problems could be addressed. The Russians, however, have thus far refused to even acknowledge any question about their compliance. For their part, Obama administration officials privately said that they would be willing to address Russian concerns if Moscow took the US charge regarding the Russian ground-launched cruise missile seriously.

Silent Allies

Since taking office, the Trump administration has conducted a review of the situation, while Republicans in Congress have added language to the National Defense Authorization Act that would authorize the Pentagon to develop a US ground-launched cruise missile. US officials have also consulted with NATO allies on the Russian violation.

On December 8, 2017—the 30th anniversary of the signing of the INF Treaty—the Trump administration announced that it remained committed to the treaty and would pursue an integrated strategy to bring Russia back into compliance. Under this strategy, the United States will (1) continue its pursuit of a diplomatic settlement, including through the Special Consultative Commission established by the treaty to discuss, among other things, compliance issues; (2) commence research and development of options for US intermediate-range ground-launched missiles (which would not per se violate the INF Treaty, though any flight test would); and (3) apply economic sanctions on Russian entities that developed and produced the SSC-8.

Meanwhile, US allies in Europe and Asia have said virtually nothing in public about the Russian violation, a missile designed to strike targets in their neighborhood rather than in the United States. This silence sends the wrong message to Moscow: for the Kremlin, this violation is just one part of an already troubled relationship with Washington, rather than a major political problem with the country’s neighbors. Moreover, if leaders in Berlin, Rome, The Hague, Brussels, and Tokyo, among other capitals, do not vigorously protest the Russian violation, their desire to maintain the treaty may not carry much weight with the Trump administration.

Trump and New START

If the INF Treaty collapses, it would increase the pressure on New START. New START expires by design in 2021, though it can be extended by up to five years. One would expect some quarters in Washington to oppose extending New START if the INF Treaty breaks down or Russia remains in violation; indeed, some Republicans on Capitol Hill have already sought to block funds for New START’s extension if Russia does not comply with the INF Treaty. Administration officials say that the question of extending New START will be considered after they see what happens in February 2018 and have a chance to complete a nuclear posture review.

US military leaders would most likely favor extension. They have testified to Congress that New START is in the American interest, emphasizing in particular the transparency regarding Russian strategic forces that is provided by the treaty’s data exchanges, notifications, and inspections.

Whether President Trump shares that view is an open question, in part because he seems to have a limited understanding of strategic nuclear issues. When President Vladimir Putin raised the possible extension of New START in an early 2017 phone conversation, President Trump was reportedly unclear what New START was, but denounced it as a bad Obama deal.

A World Without Arms Control Limits

On its current course, it is difficult to see the INF Treaty surviving much longer. While the US administration remains nominally committed to the treaty, pressure will grow to withdraw if the Russian violation is not addressed. (That said, it had better be able to present compelling evidence of a Russian violation, or the United States will get blamed for the treaty’s demise.) If the INF Treaty is terminated or doubts about Russian compliance remain unresolved, it would make extension of New START beyond 2021 less likely.

Thus 2021 could see the end of negotiated limits on US and Russian nuclear forces, at a time when Russia is completing its nuclear modernization program and the United States is beginning to accelerate its planned modernization of its strategic delivery systems. Without these limits, the Russian military can be expected to openly deploy its intermediate-range ground-launched cruise missile. Might Moscow also decide to complement these by developing and deploying an intermediate-range ballistic missile?

Given budget limitations, it could be that neither Russia nor the United States would dramatically expand its strategic nuclear force numbers beyond the levels permitted by New START. Neither side, however, would be constrained by treaty limits. The Russian military hopes to field a large intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) called the Sarmat. New START would likely require that that missile be deployed with fewer warheads than it is capable of carrying—but would the Russian military forgo deploying the maximum number of warheads absent New START? On the American side, the US Navy deploys an average of four to five warheads on its Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), which can carry eight warheads apiece. Absent New START, would the Pentagon be tempted to deploy a larger number of warheads on its SLBMs?

The Danger of Proliferation

Both sides would also lose the information provided by New START. Under the treaty, the sides exchange detailed data on their strategic forces every six months, and an average of 2,000 notifications every year regarding changes to their strategic forces. The treaty also allows each side to conduct up to 18 inspections per year of the other side’s deployed and non-deployed strategic forces. These provisions yield a huge amount of information, including the numbers of warheads on individual ICBMs and SLBMs at bases or submarine ports that are inspected. It would be difficult and expensive to develop other means of acquiring such information; without it, both sides would face greater uncertainty and be more likely to make worst-case assumptions about the size and composition of the other’s strategic forces. That would inevitably mean more costly decisions about how each side would equip and operate its own strategic forces.

Potential third country reactions also merit consideration. If the United States and Russia abandon nuclear arms limits, what would that mean for the nuclear non-proliferation regime and efforts to prevent the emergence of new nuclear weapons states? If the two nuclear superpowers do not limit their arsenals, can they credibly ask other countries not to acquire nuclear weapons?

China has built up its nuclear forces at a modest pace, in part because Beijing has operated in a context in which there were limits on US and Russian nuclear forces. The country certainly has the economic capacity to expand its nuclear forces at a much more rapid rate. Without any international limits, would it be tempted to do so in an attempt to narrow the gap between its nuclear forces and those of the United States and Russia?

Maintaining the Regime

Washington and Moscow can still avoid the breakdown of the nuclear arms control regime. They could have a forthright dialogue on how to preserve the INF Treaty, using the Special Verification Commission to work out ways to address compliance concerns.

For example, the sides could agree that Russia would exhibit its SSC-8 ground-launched cruise missile and provide a briefing on its characteristics to US experts. With more information, those experts might conclude that the missile does not violate the treaty. Of course, if it really has a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, the missiles would have to be eliminated.
Meanwhile, the US side could address Russia concerns on Aegis Ashore by introducing observable differences—functionally-related observable differences, if possible—to distinguish those SM-3 interceptor launchers from launchers on US warships. The sides might also set procedures under which Russian inspectors could periodically visit the SM-3 interceptor sites in Romania and Poland to confirm that the launch systems contained SM-3 interceptors, not cruise missiles.

Washington and Moscow could also agree to extend New START until 2026. That would preserve the treaty’s benefits and allow time for negotiation of a possible follow-on agreement. Of course, resolution of compliance concerns regarding the INF Treaty would create a much more positive atmosphere for consideration of New START’s extension.

Unilateral Commitments

Furthermore, US and Russian officials could use the strategic stability talks to explore the possibility of new negotiations on reducing nuclear arms, ideally including non-strategic nuclear weapons and non-deployed strategic warheads. To get to that point, Washington would almost certainly have to agree to some discussion of missile defense. It is difficult to see the Senate consenting to ratification of a treaty that limits missile defense, but a number of steps short of a treaty—an executive agreement on missile defense transparency, a NATO announcement of a self-imposed limit on the number of SM-3 interceptors in Europe, and/or a NATO decision to complete the SM-3 site in Poland but not deploy interceptors there—might interest Moscow.

As for third-country nuclear forces, the disparity in numbers between US and Russian nuclear weapons levels and the nuclear weapons levels of third countries makes it hard to conceive of a workable multilateral agreement, particularly if third countries insisted on equal limits. However, in the context of a US-Russian agreement that further reduced their nuclear arms levels below New START limits, it might be possible to get third countries, or at least Britain, France, and China, to commit unilaterally to not increase their total numbers of nuclear weapons.

An end to the nuclear arms control regime would be fraught with negative consequences for the United States, Russia, and the world, and the US and Russia should carefully consider how they proceed regarding the INF and New START treaties. With political will, the nuclear arms control regime can be maintained and perhaps strengthened, but doing so will require wise decisions in Washington and Moscow—ideally with appropriate encouragement from US allies and others in Europe and Asia, who will see their security diminished if the INF and New START treaties lapse.

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© REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

Where do we stand as far as Russia’s relations with the West are concerned―is this a new low? Certainly for the United States, and to some extent for Europe as well, relations with Russia are the worst since before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power back in 1985.
In the US, that has been driven of late by the investigation into Russian influence in the US presidential election last year. Even if some of the media coverage is hyped up, even if some of the characters who claim to have had contact to the Trump campaign or the Kremlin did not, we know there was interference and leaks to WikiLeaks. It is the same in Europe. There have been cyberattacks in Germany on the Bundestag that have been attributed to the Russians. We know in France there was interference as well. Be it Brexit or Catalan independence, we hear about Russia trying to benefit from euroskepticism and populism. These movements already exist in the US and Europe. But the Russians certainly try to intensify both the questioning of our fundamental beliefs about democracy and the European Union and the post-war commitment to a closer Europe.
If we are asking ourselves if we need a new Russia policy, then one part of the answer is that we certainly need better and more sophisticated defenses against the kind of interference we are seeing. We have freedom of expression in the West. We don’t have one state-controlled media outlet. We cannot respond to what Russia is doing perfectly symmetrically because the government cannot tell our media what to write. But you can respond better both in terms of the messaging and preparing stronger cyber defenses.

Is this interference opportunistic or part of a deliberate Russian strategy? Even if we question how state-controlled various hackers are, the Kremlin obviously saw a vulnerability looking at the US and Europe, and they definitely have a policy of trying to influence. Russia does not like dealing with a united European Union, so anything that weakens it, why not? In the US, they listened to what Trump was saying and saw an opportunity to move beyond the sanctions. A lot of these euroskeptic parties they support across the EU would lift sanctions if they had power. And don’t forget, Russia hosts meetings with separatists and far-right groups, and we know they gave money to Marine Le Pen. All of that is deliberate and comes from high up.
There were similar efforts to influence our politics in communist times, of course. I remember in 1982 the Soviet Union was supporting the American peace movement. I think the concern now is that the Russians are so much more effective. And it comes at a time when we in the West are also questioning the moorings of our own democracies. I think the cyber aspect means we are in uncharted territory, and perhaps it is simply a question of building better tools. In Soviet times, there was a lot of Soviet television and propaganda, but we had our own response. Now the cyber tools give the Russians new capabilities.
On the other hand, a lot of Russians, or certainly those who do not like President Putin, cannot understand how we in the West are building up Russia as this monolith capable of destroying our societies and democracies. They say we give far too much credit to the Russians, that we should have some confidence in ourselves.

The EU has on the one hand implemented sanctions alongside Washington, but on the other tried to keep diplomatic channels with Moscow open. What do you make of the EU’s policy? The EU doesn’t have a single Russia policy. You have German policy and French policy that is more or less aligned, and British policy is less important now. But if you look at the so-called “illiberal democracies”, the Poland’s and Hungary’s, and then you look at the Czech Republic and Cyprus and even Italy, Spain, and Greece, there are EU member states that want to lift sanctions but cannot without German-French agreement.
US policy is very divided at the moment, but the official line that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has put forward is a three-prong policy. You resist Russian aggression where you need to; you work with Russia where you have common interests; and you try and establish strategic stability. It goes back to the old two-track policy of the 1969 Harmel Report―you engage Russia where you have common interest and try and push back in areas where you want to counter Russia. In that sense, I don’t think there is a huge difference between official US policy and German policy or EU policy.

So how do you stabilize or improve the situation? Is it time for another reset? I’m always very wary of a reset. I wrote a book about four American presidents who have done resets and they have all ended in disappointment. You have to think about what your expectations are. Russia hasn’t budged an inch on Ukraine. Do we start to normalize the relationship? Do we try to improve it and begin to lift sanctions? If you do that while Russia hasn’t changed its Ukraine policy, that sends a strong signal. If you want to try and move beyond the Minsk agreement, you would need to have all sides agree, and you would need much more active French and German engagement.
In Syria, the US has basically abandoned its leadership role, and that happened under Obama. It has now ceded that role to Russia, which has become the power broker. Putin has managed to get Turkey and Saudi Arabia to accept Russia in that role. The Saudi king was just in Moscow meeting Putin, and Erdogan, and the Iranian leadership more recently visited Sochi for talks. We have all stepped back from the position that Bashar al-Assad has to go, but we are still dealing with a humanitarian catastrophe. I think now it is up to Russia to see what they are going to do. Are they going to step back? Will there be a reconciliation process? I don’t know. But the US is no longer a main player in the conflict.
So what would be the basis of another reset, of a different Russia policy? Right now everything is suspended until the Russian presidential elections are over. Once Putin is reelected in March, certainly from my discussions with the Russians, I have no sense that there is any kind of policy change in the cards, either domestically or in foreign policy. One of the things we should be asking ourselves is: is it us that should be doing the reset? Or do we need signals from Russia, that Russia understands that it needs to take our considerations into account?
One of the problems if we talk about a new policy is sanctions. Europe could lift sanctions, but in return for what? In the US case that has become really difficult: Congress enacted very tough legislation because Republicans and Democrats were worried that Trump would lift sanctions unilaterally―and I believe he was intending to do exactly that but couldn’t. What’s more, the process of lifting sanctions is so unwieldy. It took 25 years to change the Jackson Vanik amendment of 1974 that denied “most favored nation” status to Russia. Also, the sanctions as they currently are could have far-reaching consequences for Germany because they contain language that says nobody should be building new energy pipelines, and I don’t know what will happen with Nord Stream 2―nobody does. It would be good to have the US and Europe really coordinated. I think one of the successes of the Obama administration is they did work with the Europeans very closely.
Beyond that, what would a new Russia policy look like? Some say the problem goes back to the 2008 Bucharest NATO summit, where the final communiqué stated that Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO. There was no date attached, but it is very easy for the Russians to say “this is why we had to take Crimea.” So does NATO change that language to prevent another escalation? To do that without going over the heads of Ukraine and Georgia is difficult. This is an issue that the Europeans and NATO have to confront.
A new policy on Russia has to take into consideration what Russia wants from us. It’s a recognition of its sphere of influence. That influence extends at least to the border of the former Soviet states, not the borders of the Russian federation. Are we prepared to do what Putin would like, which is to re-enact the Yalta conference of 1945 with Russia, China, and the US? It is unclear where Europe comes in. There are some who argue that Russia has its historical interests in its region and is threatened by the idea of the West coming closer to its borders. Do we say: no more NATO enlargement? The reality is there won’t be anyways for the foreseeable future.
A new Russia policy that could successfully avoid producing new Russian actions would probably have to accommodate Russian interests. Other people might argue that we need a much tougher Russia policy. We need to push back more. We are already deploying more troops as a result of what happened in Ukraine. We have more US troops in Poland. But there is no consensus on a tougher response.

What does accommodating Russian interests mean―what are the Kremlin’s interests, and its long game? I think it has a particular interest in the former Soviet space, but in general its interest is to have a seat at the international table on important issues, to be one of the great powers again. In the Middle East at the moment it looks as if it has succeeded quite dramatically in the last few years in establishing itself as a major power and influencing policy there, particularly in Syria. One of the lines I use is that Russia would like the West to treat it as if it were the Soviet Union―a great power whose interests we have to respect as legitimate, one that we respect and to some extent fear. The Chinese are very clever in treating Russia as if it’s a great power and equal, even though they understand the reality.
Russia has been able to benefit from opportunities opened by US withdrawal. There are global ambitions there, but I think a lot of it is simply opportunism. And you have to remember that many of these global ambitions feed the current Russian elites’ desire to stay in power and continue to enrich themselves. A lot of foreign policy is driven by that, and obviously a concern is to not have the outside world try and raise questions via democracy promotion. The EU is not going to give up its standards, but it understands the limits. And a country like China is never going to tell Russia it has concerns about its human rights record.

Some, especially in Germany, believe extending economic relations and a “modernizing partnership” be the way forward. Could economic cooperation to help boost the Russian economy provide some leverage? Economically Russia is a raw materials exporter―oil and gas and military hardware. Those are important, but is Russia really interested in modernization? So far I think we can say there are some individuals and groups in Russia that are interested in modernization, that understand if Russia doesn’t modernize its economy it will remain a raw materials exporter while countries around it become much more formidable economic powers. But there is very little evidence that the people in the Kremlin are seriously interested, because such a program in the end would erode the basis of their own power. One of the answers to “Do we need a new Russia policy?” is that we could perhaps have one if we had different leadership in the Kremlin, one that understands modernization and is willing to undertake the kind of economic reforms that would move Russia away from being a petrol state.
There are Russians who say they don’t believe Putin will leave the Kremlin voluntarily. But there are other Russians who say he may well be preparing the path for a successor. We know he has put in power a number of younger people who could potentially be successors and who might understand the need for modernization. So in the longer run maybe such a policy would work. But right now that doesn’t look likely.

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© REUTERS/Thomas Peter

One year into the presidency of Donald Trump, international affairs are in flux—not in the perennial sense that “a lot is going on across the world,” but in the more fundamental sense that things are changing structurally with an unknown outcome.

Trump has accelerated a central, structural change in international affairs that was already happening prior to his arrival in the White House: a noticeable decline in the United States’ political desire as well as capacity to lead on the international stage. Under its most recent four presidents, the US has gone from declaring itself indispensable to international diplomacy, to regretting its period of unilateral hubris, to trying to lead from behind, to not leading at all.

Today, Trump’s determination to take the US out of the leadership game is forcing America’s allies and opponents to adjust and challenging them to take greater responsibility for their future security as well as prosperity. The world is at the beginning of an uneasy new normal, where leaders across the world are driven to adopt more proactive foreign policies in order to compensate for the loss of US leadership.

The Receding Tide of US Leadership

Many people’s worst fears of a Trump presidency have not come to pass. US troops remain forward-deployed in Eastern Europe, and US-Russia relations are frozen in an uneasy stand-off of mutual suspicion. The president has appointed national security cabinet members who understand the value of NATO, and he has grudgingly committed his administration to uphold Article 5 of the Atlantic Alliance. He has re-engaged with traditional allies in the Middle East. He has not imposed the swingeing unilateral trade measures against China that he promised during his campaign.

Even in those areas where the president has taken radical steps–on climate change, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program, or Jerusalem – his dramatic public announcements disguise a near-term continuity and leave room for maneuvering. His choice of method for withdrawing the US from the Paris agreement on climate change extends US adherence to the end of his presidential term. His “non-certification” of the Iran deal transfers responsibility for deciding whether to abandon the agreement to an already overloaded US Congress. His statement recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and embassy move will not occur for another three years–also around the end of his first presidential term.

On the other hand, these ambiguities cannot disguise the fact that the Trump administration has accelerated the shift from the US being a committed, if imperfect world leader to being a more explicitly self-interested superpower. His mantra of “America First” is a declaration that the US will relinquish its core role of leading the world by example.

The Trump administration’s approach to regulation (or de-regulation), whether on the environment, financial supervision or corporate transparency in developing countries, appears designed to create market advantage for US firms versus their international competitors. This has meant the US relinquishing its role as the driver of a new wave of international liberalization of trade and investment–specifically through the Obama administration’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. They would have generated a common rise in standards on issues such as public procurement, intellectual property protection, labor standards and internet governance across two of the largest regional marketplaces in the world.

Similarly, Trump has removed the US from its role as a promoter of better domestic governance and democracy. His most successful visits have been with authoritarian leaders who offer the best opportunities to secure economic benefit for the US. Trump’s references in his first speech to the UN General Assembly in September about the primacy of strong sovereign nations with different values and different dreams being able to “coexist … on the basis of mutual respect” could easily have been delivered by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Trump supporters would counter that his administration is now simply playing the same hard ball as everyone else, and that far from all Americans benefited from the liberal, open market approach of his predecessors. This may be true, but under his leadership, America is returning to the role it played in the mid-1930s, when its beggar-thy-neighbor domestic policies contributed to the rise of authoritarian governments around the world—and ultimately to a second world war.

Ripple Effects

History may rhyme, but it rarely repeats itself, as the saying goes. So how are other countries reacting to the return of a brutally realist outlook in the White House? There are three groups to consider.

First, this has been an especially difficult year for US allies in Europe who see themselves as America’s traditional partners in upholding the liberal international order. Some European leaders, most notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel and, to a certain extent, French President Emmanuel Macron, have sought to pick up the baton of liberal leadership. A majority, including the British, are trying to look beyond the personality of the occupant of the White House and focus on sustaining the many other channels of transatlantic cooperation, including with the US Congress. Some European leaders, mostly but not all in political opposition, even welcome Trump’s ascendancy.

Wherever one stands on this spectrum, it is possible to argue that Trump has had a positive effect on Europe. Concerns over the US becoming a security insurance policy of last resort and Britain’s imminent withdrawal from the EU have forced serious steps towards higher defense spending and deeper EU defense integration. Europeans are also being drawn into a more serious debate about Iran’s destabilizing effects across the Middle East, rather than just focusing on the importance of protecting the JCPOA and hoping for the best after the plan’s expiry. They are ramping up their security relationships and presence in the Sahel, a region that matters greatly to Europe and less to the US. And the EU has completed its Economic Partnership Agreement with Japan and is seeking a mandate to begin free trade negotiations with Australia and New Zealand.

These initiatives will continue to face obstacles and expose the distinct priorities and sometimes divergent interests of EU member states. Many would prefer simply to turn inwards and focus on fixing themselves after the trials and tribulations of the European financial crisis. The White House’s nationalist discourse, actively promoted across Europe by its ideological champions and financial backers among the “alt-right” movement, could exacerbate those differences. But there is no doubt that Trump is having a catalyzing effect on efforts to create a more autonomous Europe in international affairs.

Stepping In: China and Russia

A second group to consider are America’s main challengers for leadership around the world: most prominently China and Russia. In many ways, they are the main beneficiaries at this stage of America’s withdrawal from global leadership.

President Xi has been quick to step into the leadership vacuum, from his pro-globalization speech a year ago in Davos to hosting a major international conference last May on the Belt and Road Initiative. With US domestic politics in turmoil following Trump’s election, and the same in Britain following the Brexit decision, China’s soft power among its neighbors and the wider world is rising by default. The Chinese are looking for ways to exploit their new-found influence, whether in UN bodies or on international debates such as over regulating the internet.

In the absence of a US strategy for the Middle East, Vladimir Putin has doubled down on his military intervention in Syria and is now deepening relations with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He can also stir up European popular discontent in order to weaken the EU with no fear of US retaliation. And he takes every opportunity to demonstrate equivalence between Russia’s amorally self-interested approach to international affairs and that of the United States under Trump.

At the same time, however, America’s more selective engagement in regional conflicts will lessen the options for low-cost Russian interference. The case of Syria shows that if Russia wants to play a more active role in the Middle East, it will have to bear the financial, security, and reputational costs itself. The same can be said for China’s growing military presence in the South China Sea and its broader neighborhood. If China is now seen as Asia’s regional hegemon, this will create opportunities for the US to play the role of counter-weight, much as China has done while the US has been in the dominant position.

An Inevitable Adjustment

The third group of countries are those that lack the protection of a strong regional institution and that still depend individually on the United States for their security. They include countries that are part of the broader democratic “West,” like Japan and South Korea, as well as some non-democratic countries now experimenting with more representative forms of governance and more inclusive models of economic growth, like Saudi Arabia. They are the most vulnerable in this more barren international landscape, where US protection from dangerous neighbors is increasingly conditional as well as unpredictable.

Like the Europeans, these US allies are being forced to build up their defense capabilities and rely more on their own diplomatic agility, including by triangulating their foreign policy beyond the US to the world’s other major powers. This is a less safe geopolitical space for these countries to inhabit; the fate of their economic and physical security is tied as much to their leaders’ personal chemistry, or lack thereof, with President Trump as to America’s formal security commitments, whose credibility had already come into question during the Obama administration.

It was inevitable that this adjustment from a period of US global leadership would happen at some point, and it seems unlikely that there will be a return to the status quo. The net result is that no country in the world has the luxury any more to free-ride on what has become a decaying American hegemony.

Hinge points in 2018

When all is said and done, it will be healthy for allies to escape their over-dependency on the United States. Although poll numbers continue to fluctuate, much of America’s population has become at best more ambivalent and at worst increasingly resentful of playing such a costly leadership role on the international stage.

But if other countries must take greater responsibility for their futures, this will pose new challenges, some of which will come to bear in 2018.

First, negotiations over Britain’s departure from the EU must not fall into a “cliff-edge” Brexit, with no clear sense of what the country’s future relationship will be with the EU. This should be economically and geopolitically self-evident for the British, although it might not seem so by the quality of the domestic British debate. But nor can the EU afford to lose the UK into a “splendid isolation” off the edge of the European continent, while grappling at the same time with a more anti-EU United States. Finding a resolution to its relations with the UK is largely in the EU’s gift, whereas this is not the case with the US.

If the two sides can arrive at a compromise, the EU may evolve into the UK’s second special relationship. And the prospects for a more strategically autonomous Europe could improve, with the UK committed to the security of its European neighbors through NATO and more comfortable with its post-Brexit security relationship with the EU, and with its EU neighbors more willing to integrate their security capabilities through EU institutions without British obstructionism.

Learn To Do Without US Leadership

This will also be the year where other nations need to demonstrate that coalitions of the willing can drive positive change on issues of global importance, even without US leadership. The successful follow-on summit to the Paris climate change agreement that President Macron held in Paris in December 2017 has shown that leading governments, working in tandem with major multinational corporations and international NGOs, can on occasion mobilize political and public action towards shared goals in the absence of US leadership.

On a more negative note, there is a high risk that US efforts to re-negotiate aspects of its key trading relationships, whether with Canada and Mexico in NAFTA or with China, will fail in 2018. With Congressional mid-term elections due in November, President Trump will be tempted to take unilateral action to demonstrate to his political base the seriousness of his intent to re-draw America’s terms of trade with some of its major partners. The EU, Japan, China, and others will have to work hard either to avoid this outcome or demonstrate that they can hold meaningful plurilateral and bilateral trade negotiations without US engagement.

The other wild card for 2018, of course, will remain North Korea. Here, there is no escaping the centrality of the US in any solution or, at least, the avoidance of a major escalation. But it would be far healthier in the future if the US administration could focus on critical questions of this sort, rather than having to apply its diplomatic time and capital simultaneously towards multiple other stand-offs where regional actors could play more constructive roles.

In the end, the rest of the world cannot and should not wait for the US to keep the world safe. Each country, each actor of scale–nationally, regionally, internationally–needs to step up to its own set of responsibilities as a beneficial stakeholder in the current system of international prosperity and relative stability that America has played such a central role in building.

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