© REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

Is this the end of the West as we know it? It might be. But it’s up to us. Over the last 25 years or so, we have contributed to the Western decline because we have failed to actually think about history. It sounds banal and trivial, but it’s true: without history, you don’t have a future. So if there’s going to be a future of something called “the West,” there has to be a past of the West, and people who live in this thing have to be able to have conversations with one another that make sense about the past, present, and future of the West.

What we have done instead—turned away from history? Exactly. We have gotten ourselves focused on a kind of eternal present. And that has opened the way for politicians from the populist right to provide us with untenable pasts, which in turn makes it even harder to think about the future. And we have made some rather devastating mistakes. The European Union is still the largest economy in the world. The EU is also the most important zone of contiguous democracies in the world. And maybe most importantly, the EU is the only institution that has tried to come to grips with what I see as the real problems of the 21st century, namely monopolization, off-shore tax refuges, digital privacy, global warming. These are things that actually matter and that are addressed, if imperfectly, by the EU.

Still, Western democracy looks threatened by the rise of authoritarianism. How big are your concerns? I think it’s very important to avoid a dichotomy where we say: “Well, there was democracy, but now there is going to be authoritarianism.” We shouldn’t talk about red lines or moments beyond which there is no hope. There’s always hope! And above all, we shouldn’t spend all of our time in the position of the spectator, of the observer—as if we were the referees, and democracy some kind of football match. We’re not referees, we are all participants. Democracy depends upon people wanting to rule. And all politics depends on a notion of time. What we have done since 1989 is that we have endured something like the “politics of inevitability.” We’ve said: “We don’t need a history because we know how things are going to go. We know that capitalism brings democracy.”

Most people thought indeed that there were no alternatives. The problem with the politics of inevitability is that it is not true. There are alternatives. But the politics of inevitability, or as I also call them, the “politics of eternity” have led to a “futurelessness,” to a Zukunftslosigkeit that is surrounding us now all the time. The politics of eternity is Donald Trump saying, “Let’s make America great again.” The politics of eternity are European populists talking about bringing back some kind of time where everything was good, because somehow there weren’t any immigrants.

So the “politics of eternity” prevent people from thinking about the actual problems that face us? Yes. They prevent people from realizing that we can actually deal with the problems that face us. And to substitute them by threats—eternal threats, the threat of the migrant, the sexual threat, etc.; think of the “Lisa case” in Germany where Russia is trying to instruct Germans that what they really should be worrying about are Islamic rapists. So eternal threats, the threat of the other, the threat of violence, these things are substitutes for actual politics. That’s the politics of eternity, a term that helps when we’re trying to describe the current movement of authoritarianism so that we can see how it’s similar and how it’s different from other moments. Because it does have something to do with fascism, it does have something to do with the 1920s and 1930s. But it also is a creature of our moment, it’s creature of the Internet. In fact, the Internet is forcing us to live in a kind of eternal now.

Is the EU, and Germany in particular, doing enough to counter Russian attempts to undermine Western democracy and values? No. Germans, especially SPD voters I think, find it very convenient to think of Russia as the main victim in World War II and then to say that German policy toward Russia must therefore be gentle or generous. Whereas in fact the Ukrainians and the Belarusians suffered much more than the Russians did. That World War II was chiefly a colonial war to conquer Ukraine is almost totally absent from German memory. And of course the Russian foreign policy actively plays on this trying to instruct Germans that the Ukrainians were and are the bad guys.

So Germans overlook some of the victims because it’s politically convenient to do so? Exactly, and that brings me to the future. One example of Germany preserving and protecting the politics of eternity is Nord Stream 2. There is no argument for Nord Stream 2 except that it makes it easier for the current hydrocarbon oligarchy in Russia to function. It has no other purpose. And a hydrocarbon oligarchy is something that, one would think, people especially on the left would be suspicious of because concerns about climate and inequality would be high on your agenda.
More fundamentally, the politics of eternity are produced not so much by countries, but by situations. It is not the case that Russia is the source of all evil or that Russians are different than anyone else. It is rather that because Russia is an oligarchy with very little social mobility, it is very good at producing politics without a future. And because Russia is one of the very few countries that thinks it will profit from global warming and whose regime depends entirely on fossil fuels.
What Germany is doing with Nord Stream 2 is propping up a Russia that produces politics of eternity and tries to spread them around. So, with all due respect to Chancellor Angela Merkel and the current German government, which says very sensible things about Russia and Ukraine—these are the deep problems which prevent Germany from actually standing out.

This has a lot to do with emotions. Yes. And this is something Russia has been very good at understanding and exploiting. It’s the reason that Donald Trump is the president of the United States, actually. He was elected on a wave of emotion, and a lot of that emotion, of course, had its own purely American origins–economic inequality, the opiod crises, questions of race. But what was new was that Russian foreign policy was able to exploit those emotions and increase them. It helped Americans to vote in a certain way or not to vote in another way. I think that is new, and I think the Russians have understood that very well. They have a strong incentive to try to figure out how to be ahead in this new world of subjective or emotional power. And that allows them to score some victories: German public opinion about Ukraine, for example, or Brexit if it happens.

Returning to the future of the West: The disconnect between Germany and the United States seems to be increasing. For Donald Trump, Germany is no longer a partner but an adversary or even a foe. How should Berlin deal with this? Let’s look at this in a slightly different way. After World War II, when the United States engaged with West Germany, the thought was not necessarily that German leadership was so wonderful. The thought was that everyone has an interest in a transatlantic economic and political relationship. I would urge Germans to look at the US now a bit in the same way. Obviously, the current administration is a total disaster, and obviously, the US president says things about German and other democratic leaders that are hurtful, that are offensive, and that are counter-productive.
But it’s very important for German foreign policy to make sure that it keeps up connections. The danger in Europe is always to say that the election of Trump proves that America is a certain way. But America is a universe, America is huge, America contains all kinds of opinions and all kinds of possibilities.

The interview was conducted by Martin Bialecki.

The post “There’s Always Hope!” appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© US Marine Corps/Handout via REUTERS

If one is trying to think of events or actors that could shake up the world in the coming year or two, then Russia does not necessarily make it to the top of the list. In a world growing ever more disorderly, Russia suddenly seems a comparatively predictable actor. Its propensity to create chaos does not compete with that of some other regions and phenomena—think, for instance, of the failing state system in the Middle East or of migration from Africa.

In the world where―to use senior Brookings fellow Robert Kagan’s catchy phrase―the jungle is growing back, Russia remains an aging, though experienced “beast” among others that are younger, fitter, and hotter-headed. Aware of its vulnerabilities, it is trying to insulate itself from global threats, to guard its self-identified backyard and maximize its leverage, so as to have a voice on questions it considers essential or existential.

One can say that Russia’s loud rebellion happened in and against yesterday’s world: the world of the post-Cold war liberal Western-led order. This is the normative arrangement that Russia first tried to join. In a second phase, it imitated its form while ignoring its essence, before finally openly rebelling against it in words as well as deeds.

But the fact that Russia’s crimes—the annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbass—took place in yesterday’s world does not make them unimportant or unnecessary to address. For one, this history is now an acute part of Russia’s relationship with the West and cannot simply be ignored. Its repercussions keep manifesting and demanding diplomatic attention―think of the question of maritime traffic in the Azov Sea and Kerch strait. Left unattended, tensions can escalate and spill over into different theaters. If the West hopes to cultivate “the jungle” and ultimately resurrect an adapted version of the rules-based order, then it is important to address past transgressions—Russia’s as well as others.

The West’s Normative Disunity

Western-Russian relations in the four years since 2014 make for a very interesting case study, not least because in the middle of that period the Western approach toward Russia changed fundamentally. In 2014, Europe and America were by and large united in their normative assessment of the situation, and they closely coordinated their policies. Since the start of the Donald Trump presidency, though, not only has coordination grown shakier, but more importantly, European and American policies toward Russia have become based on entirely different philosophical foundations. Whereas Europe is still guided by and trying to defend the principles of the post-Cold War liberal order, America’s Russia policy is now fashioned on a volatile brew of hard-nosed, unsentimental great power calculations, unrelenting domestic political combat, and President Trump’s whims.

That loss of normative unity and coordination has resulted in a fascinating interplay of the European and American approaches to Russia: sometimes their policies have reinforced one another; sometimes they have cancelled one another out, often in paradoxical, non-linear ways. While common wisdom says that in order to influence Russia, the West needs to be bold, united, and apply coordinated pressure, a close examination of the recent developments suggests that on some occasions, uncoordinated pressure may in fact work better.

Sanctions may be the most vivid case in point. While the influence these punitive measures have had on Russia’s economy is usually not disputed (though estimates of its extent may vary), the question of political influence has always been trickier—are the sanctions affecting political decision-making, and how?

At the beginning, they seemed not to have much influence. In the tense days of 2014, the Russian elites, instead of turning against Putin, rallied to the flag. But by 2017, dissenting voices started to speak out. “If we want our economy to grow, and grow smartly, then we need to improve relations with the West, and for that, also Russia has to take steps,” proclaimed the “intra-system liberal” and former finance minister Alexei Kudrin at the Primakov Readings conference in Moscow in June 2017. Many more liberal voices echoed the same line.

Turning to Europe

Paradoxically, what made that change possible was not the impact of coordinated Western sanctions itself, but their combination with the Trump presidency. President Vladimir Putin hates bowing to pressure, and for as long as he viewed the normatively united West as an existential threat, he could not possibly compromise. But the advent of the Trump presidency removed the hard ideological standoff, relaxed the political climate, and allowed pro-Western minds in Russia to speak out without fearing for their political future.

What also helped was the fact that, though he was nominally pro-Moscow, Trump was unable to resolve the Ukraine situation on Russia’s terms—even if he had really wanted to do so. Moscow certainly had some hopes on this account. “In Ukraine, Russia did not clash with the US, but it clashed with the US-led international order,” said Russian analyst Dmitry Suslov in late 2016, describing the Moscow establishment’s hopes that under President Trump’s priorities—America first, order last—a great-power deal between the US and Russia would become possible, and Europe, with its normative agenda, would be sidelined.

Instead, Trump’s Russia policy remained hostage to domestic political infighting, and this prompted Russia to turn to Europe. In September 2017, President Putin suggested deploying UN peacekeepers in the Donbass in a move that many in Moscow interpreted as a nod to Europe. At that point in time, relations with Washington were paralyzed, but Europe seemed to be in the ascendancy: it had not fallen apart after the Brexit vote; instead it had been strengthened by the Macron presidency. “It seems that in the Kremlin, a re-evaluation of Europe is happening,” said a Russian analyst in October 2017. “We need Europe’s help to manage the dangerously unpredictable America, and settlement in the Donbass would be a key to improved relations with the EU.”

A Drop in the Ocean

It is hard to say whether the peacekeeping proposal ever had a true potential to solve the Donbass issue. It might be that positions were too far apart. “Putin views the Donbass as an investment, which he is willing to sell for something tangible,” a Russian analyst told me at the time. But all that the West was willing to offer was a face-saving way out. Any accompanying perks remained either uncertain (such as a better relationship with the EU and/or US) or impossible (such as an agreement over Ukraine’s political future).

Moreover, any settlement for the Donbass would have involved a major diplomatic investment: sketching a way to resolution, with built-in guarantees for Kyiv as well as Moscow, and then steering the process toward conclusion. It could be that neither Europe nor the US had steady enough leadership for that. At least, that seems to have been the conclusion in Moscow: after some months of discussions on whether it should “sell the Donbass” to Trump or Merkel, Moscow has instead withdrawn it from the market.

And the reason for that is also clear: the new US sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections. Today, talk of Donbass peacekeeping has all but died out. Russia knows that in the conditions of the new sanctions, Donbass is not a game-changer. As said by a Kremlin adviser: “A year ago we thought that regulation in the Donbass would be a breakthrough in our relations with the West. Today we see that this would have no effect, be a drop in the ocean, hence pointless.” The US is seen to have moved the goalposts.

The conclusion from the above seems to be that while uncoordinated Western policy toward Russia may have created some openings, the West has so far failed to turn them into a decisive breakthrough. But it is questionable whether things would have been any better had the West stayed normatively united. Rather, one is inclined to assume that, in that case, Russia in President Obama’s words would have continued to be “a bored kid in the back of the classroom”―a contemptuous power happily using its disruptive potential to subvert the world order that it views as not just hostile to its interests, but also generally unviable.

On Virtues of Diversity

The Trump-era divergence between Europe and America has made the world more complicated for Moscow, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Moscow has had to reassess many of its earlier assumptions: it did not expect Europe to stick to sanctions, but Europe did; it expected Ukraine to “collapse,” but Ukraine did not; it expected Hillary Clinton to win the election and become a fiercely anti-Russian president, but she did not; it expected Trump to become a soft pro-Russian president―and that has not happened either. These reality checks should logically lead Moscow to critically question some of its own strategies. For instance, it could ask what it has won and what it has lost by interfering in the US’s (and other countries’) elections. Is the balance sheet really positive?

Or it could question whether its whole strategy in Ukraine—using the Donbass as leverage to control Ukraine’s geopolitical future—is in the end realistic at all. As Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center said, “the Minsk Agreement was a major diplomatic victory by Moscow which could not be cashed in for the simple reason that it was Moscow’s victory to which Kiev could never reconcile itself—and its Western backers were unwilling to make it accept.”

Paradoxically, the Kremlin’s reassessments vis-à-vis the Ukrainian situation would not have been possible under the conditions of the normatively united West. Only the more complex world of a West in dissolution has made this possible. By compromising now, Moscow would not be surrendering to a strong, united antagonist, but rather to the laws of nature—and acting in accordance to a realistic assessment of its own leverage.

Furthermore, the question is not just about Russia. One must not forget that there is also “the jungle,” and the West, in its Russia discussions, should remain aware of it. Not all of us are. In early 2018, the European Council on Foreign Relations organized a Russia discussion in Washington, with the intention of comparing European and American views on Russia and finding out whether there is a transatlantic rift in our approaches. And indeed there was a rift, but it was not transatlantic. Instead, it ran between participants, European as well as American, who said that Russia must to be pressured into accepting the rules-based world order, and others who asked, “What rules-based order? Where do you see it?”

A Future Full of Unknown Unknowns

It is unclear if the world has ever undergone changes as profound and multifaceted as the present ones.Not only is the global power balance changing, but globalization, migration, information technology, and gene technology are upsetting peoples’ long-held understandings of what it means to be a citizen of a country, or even a human being. This means that we are faced with years, if not decades of volatility. It also means that those in the West who want to save the liberal international order need to focus on adapting it to the emerging circumstances. Attempts to cling to the past, to recreate the international system as it existed in the 1990s, will be futile; they could even be downright counterproductive.

The chief reason why there has been no breakthrough with Russia is that Russia will not take Western rules and norms seriously until it realizes that the norms, and the West as a norm-setter, will be there to stay in the new, changed world. Getting to that point will take years, if not decades, and this work needs to start at home. The European Union can best support a rules-based order by ensuring its continuity at home. Likewise, the US―to be a global leader (not to mention the leader), it needs to first cater to its citizens and overcome domestic polarization.

To navigate through this period of chaos and volatility, the West can hardly have a strategy, as strategy implies a somewhat charted landscape, problems that are in most part known, and a notional way through. Our future, however, is full of unknown unknowns. And in such a situation, it is not actually necessarily so bad that Europe and America handle the world—and Russia—in different ways. If strategy is not possible, one relies on instincts—and a normative approach is Europe’s instinct in the same way that hard-nosed great-power calculations are Trump’s instinct, and up to a point America’s. Each approach has its flaws, but in their diversity and heterogeneity they could become a Western strength.

Or to put it another way: A chaotic jungle should be easier to navigate with a seemingly disorderly, motley crew of hobbits, elves, dwarfs, and wizards—as opposed to a uniform army under a single command.

The post Into the Jungle appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Tyrone Siu

Even for the rapid pace of our age, the shift of power and wealth to Asia has happened with remarkable speed. As Indian prime minister Narendra Modi recently reminded the World Economic Forum, his country’s economy is now six times as large as it was in 1997—the last time an Indian prime minister had spoken in Davos. The growth of the Chinese economy has been even more momentous. In 2014, according to the IMF, China became the world’s largest economy, ranked by purchasing power. The United States now is number two, relinquishing the top spot that it had held since the late 19th century. The IMF figures also showed that three of the world’s four largest economies are now in Asia, with Japan at number three and India at number four. In 2009, China also became the world’s largest merchandise exporter—a position that the US had held since the World War II. China is also now a vast market. Daimler Benz sells more cars in China than in any other foreign country. Indeed in 2016, China became Germany’s largest trading partner.

The economic transformation of Asia first became evident in Japan in the 1960s and then in South Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Southeast Asia in the 1970s. The expansion and evident wealth of the Japanese economy, in particular, was so dramatic that by the late 1980s, many Americans began to fear that the US might be eclipsed by its old second world war adversary. Yet the population of Japan, at just over 120 million in 1990, was too small to shift the global balance of economic power on its own. The rise of China and India, two countries with populations of over 1 billion people, is a different matter. From 1980 onward, the Chinese economy began to grow at the double-digit rates pioneered by Japan in the 1960s. India also grew strongly, albeit not quite as fast after economic reforms in the early 1990s.

The fundamental reason for the shift in economic power to Asia is simple—weight of numbers. By 2025 two-thirds of the world’s population will live in Asia. By contrast the United States will account for about 5 percent of the world’s population and the European Union around 7 percent. Hans Rosling of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute put it nicely when he described the world’s pin-code as 1114: of the planet’s 7 billion people, roughly 1 billion live in Europe, 1 billion live in the Americas, 1 billion in Africa and 4 billion in Asia. By 2050, the world’s population is likely to be 9 billion, and the pin-code will have changed to 1125, with both Africa and Asia having added a billion people.
For centuries, the wealth and technology gap between West and East was so enormous that western nations dominated international affairs and business, no matter the difference in population. But rapid economic development in Asia over the past two generations means that this wealth gap has narrowed sufficiently, and Asia is beginning to tilt the balance-of-power in the world.

Easternization Full Speed Ahead

Western skeptics tend to highlight any signs of political or economic turmoil in China in particular—and there is no shortage of those. In 2015 alone, China experienced a sharp slowdown in growth, a spectacular plunge in the stock-market, an increasingly harsh political crackdown on domestic dissent, and the arrest or interrogation of high-profile political, media, and business figures as part of an effort to stamp out graft. It may well be that China’s economy will slow sharply in the coming years and will fall well short of the 7 percent growth a year that President Xi has targeted.

But a slowdown in Chinese or Asian growth would no longer be transformative. The economic development that allows China and India to push for great power status has already happened. The most senior analysts in western governments are already operating on the assumption that the shift in economic power from West to East will continue and that economic change will translate into political power. America’s National Intelligence Council recently predicted: “By 2030 Asia will have surpassed North America and Europe combined in terms of global power, based upon GDP and population.”

China’s communist system is clearly vulnerable to political and economic shocks, and India is notoriously hard to govern. But the idea that the fragility of the Chinese or Indian systems means that the trend of “Easternization” will soon end ignores the extent to which the West’s own rise was punctuated by episodes of extreme instability. The US, after all, fought a civil war in the middle of the 19th century, but that did not halt its rise to global pre-eminence. The rise of Asia has already been punctuated by occasional crises. China was on the brink of revolution in 1989, just a decade after the economic reforms promoted by Deng Xiaoping had begun. South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia all suffered huge economic damage during the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Yet the rise of Asia has marched ahead.

Predicting how this shift in economic power will change international politics, however, is an uncertain business because the relationship between economic and political power is not straightforward. When China became the world’s largest economy it did not also automatically become the world’s most powerful country; similarly, while the IMF may have ranked India as the world’s third largest economy, even India’s leaders acknowledge that their country is still no more than a mid-ranking power in international politics.

Over the long run, however, there clearly is a strong relationship between economic might and international political power. The British Empire became unsustainable when Britain’s economy was no longer strong enough to support its global commitments. The Soviet Union lost the cold war largely because its economy was too weak to keep up with the United States. By contrast, America’s rise in the 20th century would have been impossible without the might of the American economy. In time, the growing wealth of Asian nations will also translate into political power that will be felt all over the world.

Asia’s New Order

The erosion of America’s strategic and economic dominance formed the backdrop to the election of Donald Trump. In pledging to “Make America Great Again,” Trump implicitly promised to reverse the shift of power to Asia, restoring America to its unrivalled position.

Some of Trump’s most important advisers made a direct link between globalization, the rise of Asia, and the decline in American wealth and influence. Steve Bannon, who was appointed as chief strategist in the Trump White House, argued: “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.” Bannon and Trump have fallen out, but the protectionist instincts of the Trump administration endure. Trump’s first months in office began with a more conciliatory stance over trade. When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Trump at his Florida estate in April 2017, Xi did a masterful job of charming his American counterpart. Months later, Trump was still waxing lyrical about their relationship, telling an interviewer: “We got along great. I like him a lot. I think he likes me a lot.” Early threats of tariffs against China were played down, only to be revived a few months later—a useful reminder of the volatility of policymaking in the Trump White House.

Trump’s unpredictability is a profound worry for Japan and South Korea, America’s closest allies in East Asia. Both countries know that they would be in the front line if a war were ever to break out on the Korean peninsula or in the South China Sea. Efforts by South Korean President Moon Jae-in to launch a rapprochement with the North Korea underlines the extent to which US and South Korean interests are beginning to diverge. For the Moon administration, the biggest short term security threat is that the US, in pursuit of its own security interests, will attack North Korea and provoke a devastating war on the Korean peninsula.

The Japanese government, meanwhile, like the Obama administration, understands that the likeliest route to a China-dominated Asia is through commerce rather than conflict. Twenty years ago America was the most significant market for all the major Asian economies, and Japanese multinationals were the largest foreign investors across Southeast Asia. But those days are gone. Now China is the most important trading partner for South Korea, Japan, Australia, and most of the nations of South East Asia, and this carries geopolitical significance: Asian countries will be much less willing to confront China—or side with the US or Japan in a territorial dispute—if their economic futures depend on goodwill from Beijing.

For the Abe administration, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) —a giant new trade deal linking 12 countries including the US and Japan that had been painstakingly negotiated by Obama and Abe—represented a last effort to push back against a China-dominated co-prosperity sphere in East Asia. Trump’s repudiation of the deal was thus a grievous blow to Japan’s survival strategy for the 21st century. Eventually, Japan decided to press ahead with the TPP without American participation, but the alliance is clearly weaker.

Europe’s Waning Power

Outside the US, Trump’s treat from the TPP was widely interpreted as a symbol of an American retreat from global leadership. A couple of days after the decision was announced, a senior EU official in Brussels remarked to me: “It’s interesting, when the Brits were the world’s dominant economy, they were also the main promoters of free trade. And then when America became the world’s dominant economy, they became the main promoters of free trade. And now America is losing its faith in globalization and China is becoming the main advocate of free trade. You can feel the wheels of history turning.”

Go to most of the capital cities of the European Union and you will be visiting the capital of a former empire, from the ruins of the Acropolis in Athens to the Coliseum and the Pantheon in Rome and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. By 2009, when an economic crisis erupted in Europe, the age of European imperialism in Asia and elsewhere had already been over for roughly half a century. But most Europeans are still not prepared for the idea that their slide in global power might have further down to go. It is not simply that Europe’s voice counts less in the world. The real risk is that Europe’s desire to exist as an island of prosperity and political decency in a turbulent world is being put at risk because of a loss of political power.

The process of Easternization means Europe is increasingly vulnerable to political, social, and economic trends in the rest of the world that it cannot control – but which pose direct and indirect threats to European stability, prosperity, and even peace.

The traditional “West” as a political concept has always had two pillars—North America and Europe. But if the US and the EU end up at loggerheads during the Trump years, the “Western alliance” will be in profound trouble. Trump, as an advocate of “America First,” may not worry about antagonizing Europe. But the weakening of the Western alliance would actually gravely undermine Trump’s plans to restore American greatness because it would decrease the power of the US to shape world affairs; it would also hasten the shift of wealth and power to Asia that so troubles Trump and his supporters.

The rise of new Asian powers and the fracturing of the West strengthens the case for European unification, so that EU countries can defend their collective interests. But there is little reason to believe that the EU will move quickly enough to respond to a process of Easternization that is unfolding at remarkable speed.

The post Tipping the Scale appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh

Donald Trump’s recent visit to Poland and the G20 summit went better than expected. In Warsaw, Trump finally made the long-awaited and clear commitment to NATO’s mutual defense clause. There was no Russian reset, not to mention any great bargains between Russia and the United States. The US president actually urged Russia “to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes.” Unlike on earlier occasions, he refrained from explicitly criticizing the EU. He even called the G20 summit “a wonderful success […] carried out beautifully by Chancellor Angela Merkel.” – no Germany-bashing via Twitter and no refused handshakes this time. The G20 leaders were even able to agree on a joint final communiqué, as vague as it may be, despite significant differences on climate change and trade policy. The worst did not come to the worst.

That this came as a great relief is in itself telling. Trump’s leadership has turned the US into a source of unprecedented uncertainty – and the American presidency into a loose cannon. Although Trump’s visit to Europe did not create any sort of actual transatlantic crisis, it has underlined that the German chancellor and the American president do not share a common view of international relations – or of what “the West” is.

In fact, their worldviews could not be further apart. Merkel champions multilateralism, free trade, and environmental protection (though she herself has been accused of a kind of “mercantilism”, particularly in the context of eurozone). Trump, whose slogan is “America First,” sees the world as “an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors, and businesses engage and compete for advantage” and has already withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement. Whereas Merkel believes that international cooperation leads to mutual benefits and win-win-situations for all participants, Trump sees it as a zero-sum game where only relative gains matter. For Berlin, international institutions are linchpins of global diplomacy, for the Trump White House, they merely serve as tools for power projection.

Yes, Trump promised to preserve America’s post-Cold War alliances and promised that “the West will never, ever be broken.” He mentioned the rule of law and the right to free speech and free expression as defining Western values. But while President Barack Obama had expressed his concern vis-à-vis the PiS government’s crackdown on the independence of the judiciary and on journalists, President Trump had nothing but praise for the current Polish administration.

Trump’s understanding of the West is actually very Polish – or rather, PiS-ish. The PiS, like Trump, came to power by promising to fight the liberal, globalist ruling classes who are supposedly aiming at transforming their societies “toward a mixture of cultures and races, a world of cyclists and vegetarians, who only use renewable energy sources and combat all forms of religion” – as the Polish foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski put it in an interview with the German tabloid Bild in January 2016. “Making America great again” sounds like the PiS promises of “Rising from one’s knees.” Both Trump and the PiS leadership are convinced that the Western civilization is at risk of decline, under threat from “radical Islamic terrorism” and the “steady creep of government bureaucracy,” as the US president declared in Warsaw. And, most importantly, both think that at the heart of the Western civilization lay “the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that make us who we are.”

Herein lies the major difference between Trump’s and Merkel’s concepts of the West: when Trump speaks of the “Western civilization” he implicitly means the “culture, faith, and tradition” of white people in Europe and North America. When Merkel states that “Germany and America are bound by values – democracy, freedom, as well as respect for the rule of law and the dignity of the individual, regardless of their origin, skin color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or political views”, she understands the West not in cultural, religious, or historical, not to mention ethno-nationalist terms. Merkel’s understanding is universal. Her West is a place where people share certain fundamental political beliefs, including liberal democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and gender equality. While Trump (and the PiS) define the West geographically and want to pull up the drawbridges, Merkel’s West knows no geographical, only political bounds.

Trump’s Warsaw speech might have been meant as “an apologia for the West,” as the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page put it, where the president took “a clear stand against the kind of gauzy globalism and vague multiculturalism represented by the worldview of, say, Barack Obama and most contemporary Western intellectuals.” If so, he also took a clear stand against Merkel – and much of what the West has been standing for.

NB. This article was originally published by the WiseEurope blog.

The post When Worlds Collide appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

First it was Chinese goods flooding the world after leader Deng Xiaoping’s sweeping economic reforms at the end of the 1970s. Now it’s Chinese money targeting acquisitions across the globe. This latest trend has raised serious concerns, as governments fear China is making strategic investments that could affect their economies or even jeopardize national security.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), a government watchdog organization, has been particularly vigilant as Chinese direct investment in America reached a record $15.3 billion in 2015, according to the Rhodium Group research service.  In early December, President Obama upheld the committee’s recommendation to effectively stop the sale of German semiconductor supplier Aixtron SE to China’s Grand Chip Investment Fund – a deal totaling $714 million.

It was only the third time in more than 25 years that the White House had blocked a corporate acquisition on national security grounds, and it highlights how complex the debate has become – especially as advanced technology and defense are increasingly linked. The Treasury Department said there was “credible evidence that the foreign interest exercising control might take action that threatens to impair national security.”

China’s overall strategy is quite plain: It homes in on advanced technology companies that can enable Beijing to leapfrog ahead in key industries. According to German Ambassador to China Michael Clauß, Chinese investment in Germany in the first half of this year rose 2000 percent the same period in 2015, and most of that investment landed in the high-tech sector. “It seems … they are trying to close the technological gap through acquisitions,” he told Reuters.

A Perfect Fit

That is evident in the Aixtron case. Beijing has launched a program to build up its own production of semiconductors, and Aixtron would undoubtedly fit neatly into this portfolio.  We could then see a scenario where the People’s Republic (PRC) purchases Western technology in key sectors to expand and modernize its own operations, making it more competitive with the very Western countries where it made the acquisition. Essentially, it’s the high-tech equivalent of the way China adapted foreign expertise in manufacturing at much lower costs and surpassed Western producers.

This approach also dovetails with Xi Jinping’s broader, long-term aim of pulling even with the US on the global stage. Beijing plans to pursue this larger world role on various fronts, from the South China Sea to technology. Industrial modernization is one part of the effort. The Chinese leader wants to see his country become a leading innovator by the end of this decade. “Great scientific and technological capacity is a must for China to be strong and for people’s lives to improve,” he was quoted as saying this summer by the Xinhua news agency.

If implemented successfully, the government’s “Made in China 2025” plan to enhance technology and automation is an obvious challenge to Western economies like Germany, that have until now been global leaders in advanced engineering and machinery.

There are significant reasons to believe that progress will not be as smooth as the planners in China hope; for one, the Communist Party state – which Xi is intent on preserving and strengthening – is by nature ill-equipped to implement the necessary structural reforms, while Xi’s campaign of political and intellectual orthodoxy stands in the way of innovation.

Defense applications are relatively easy for governments to identify, but the wider issue of strategic industrial competition is set to become more acute in the years ahead, especially given the rising tide of complaints from developed nations over the lack of reciprocity in China. Western companies have regularly reported obstacles in expanding their operations on the mainland and working with Chinese enterprises on an equal basis, let alone making acquisitions. Ambassador Clauß reported recently that German companies operating in the People’s Republic were feeling a “considerable rise in protectionism.”

A Safeguard Clause

That prospect seems to be prompting at least some European governments to rethink their strategy. Germany did allow China’s domestic appliance manufacturer Midea to buy into robot maker Kuka, but Berlin has reconsidered its initial approval of the Aixtron purchase; Deputy Economy Minister Matthias Machnig said new, security-related information had come to light. In the summer, Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel had called for a safeguard clause that would allow European countries to block foreign takeovers of firms specialized in technology strategic to the EU’s economic success. German EU Commissioner Günther Oettinger wants to see a European foreign trade law to protect companies like Kuka from being bought up by non-EU entities.

Aixtron has a subsidiary in California and employs about one hundred people in the US . The company’s technology can be used to produce diodes, lasers, and solar cells, and it’s used by US defense contractors. The White House statement on the proposed acquisition said, “The national security risk posed by the transaction relates, among other things, to the military applications of the overall technical body of knowledge and experience of Aixtron.”

Aixtron responded that the Obama administration’s order applied only to its American business and did not stop the Chinese group from acquiring its shares. Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing responded by saying, “A normal commercial acquisition deal should be considered using commercial standards and market principles. We don’t want the outside world to overinterpret this commercial activity from a political angle nor to add political interference.”

In the initial phase of China’s development, investment flowed chiefly into the People’s Republic. Foreign companies built up their positions in the world’s largest developing market and played a central role in modernizing everything from consumer goods to industrial machinery, followed by high-speed trains and electronics. But then, the Chinese started shopping overseas. It started with raw materials, logically enough given the country’s shortage of vital industrial inputs. China pushed into Africa, Latin America, and Australia in search of iron ore, copper, and other hard commodities. There were also less successful efforts to purchase large tracts of land to grow food for the country’s 1.4 billion people.

But the shopping list now seems limitless, ranging from real estate to cinema chains, luxury yacht makers, and breakfast cereal and meat processing firms. Annual outward investment has soared to more than $100 billion a year. China’s spending in Europe alone has totaled around €50 billion since 2000, with the largest investment in Britain followed by Germany and France. Chinese investors have bought up everything from Volvo cars to Pirelli Tires and the Club Med resort chain.
Now, some fear that Chinese buyers – backed by the government in Beijing and cheap loans from state banks – will purchase whatever they fancy, with an emphasis on acquiring technology China lacks in key fields.

The Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin (MERICS) and the US research company Rhodium Group released a joint study last year predicting that the People’s Republic would be one of the biggest crossborder investors by the end of this decade, with its offshore assets surging from $6.4 trillion to $20 trillion by 2020. Much of that will be in the form of portfolio investments and accumulation of foreign exchange reserves, but its total global stock of outbound foreign direct investment (FDI) was set to almost triple from $744 billion to up to $2 trillion by the end of the decade, with flows to western countries rising fast, according to the study.

Welcome and Fear

This would be a natural development for a country that started late and still lags far behind developed nations when it comes to the FDI share of GDP. In fact, China’s FDI/GDP ratio is still under ten percent, compared to three times as much for the US and almost four times as much for Germany. Investments in raw materials, meanwhile, will fall: the PRC will always need hard commodities, but the shift toward consumption and services and away from manufacturing growth will reduce that demand.

Intense price competition in many non-state sectors means that overseas investments offer a higher rate of return, particularly in utilities. And some companies and countries have actually welcomed Chinese investment because they need the capital and value the connection to Beijing.

The challenge is inescapable for Western countries struggling to cope with China’s impact. World governments and the EU will have to confront the natural repercussions of China’s growing presence in a world that both welcomes and fears the People’s Republic.

The post Money Talks appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Axel Schmidt

The specter of an attack on Germany’s critical infrastructure has long been a deep concern for security services – power plants and electricity networks offer prime targets for cyberattacks, and authorities have redoubled their efforts to make sure they are protected.

This hardware is without doubt a central piece of Germany’s basic security. But the country is now facing a larger, more menacing threat to its software. Liberal democracy – the cornerstone of our society – is at risk. And the events of 2016 have shown that we urgently need to confront this threat before it erodes the foundations of enlightened debate.

At first glance, the hacking of the Democratic Party in the US, the proliferation of fake news and propaganda on social media, the rapid rise of nationalist populist movements and parties, and increasingly aggressive Russian secret service operations do not seem to have much in common. But these phenomena are very much connected. And we as a society have taken far too little action to protect our liberal democratic order from dangerous forces.

A new, illiberal order has risen on the back of populist protest movements in the US and Europe. Russia and other anti-democratic actors have aided them, using the very framework of our open societies to their advantage. And Russia’s propaganda campaign has played a central role. It is true that there have long been illiberal movements in liberal societies, and democratic institutions bear some responsibility for the loss of trust and confidence among certain social groups. But ignoring or concealing the role that anti-democratic foreign governments have played in order to avoid confrontation (in this case with Moscow) is foolish. We have to recognize this attack as such, despite lingering reluctance to do so.

Guardians of the West

Most German lawmakers have until now shied away from calling the current turmoil a “new Cold War,” and there are indeed good reasons not to do so. Still, we should not be fooled by the fact that we are no longer embroiled in the same great-power conflicts of a bygone era. Even if it is not immediately clear what Vladimir Putin’s alternative to liberal democracy actually is, he embodies the forces seeking to dismantle our hard-fought liberties, from gender mainstreaming to gay marriage, multiculturalism, immigration, and perceived political correctness. Putin has in fact fashioned himself to be a guardian of the West, a defender against Islamization, foreign infiltration, and rising feminine influence.

It is no coincidence that Russian broadcasters like RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik have become central sources of information for the new populist movements. Even if these movements do not always align with the Kremlin’s agenda, they offer cheap and easy platforms for propaganda. From the Brexiteers in the UK to Donald Trump in the US, the Five Star movement in Italy, the Front National in France, and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, populist movements are peddling Kremlin-friendly reports or even replicating Russian propaganda with zeal.

The links between the illiberal movements and their almost symbiotic proximity to the Kremlin are now well documented. The Five Star movement in Italy, for example, has an entire media network that disseminates Kremlin-induced fake news. One platform called TzeTze belongs to a founding member of Five Star and has amassed 1.2 million followers on Facebook alone. It beams out stories like Sputnik’s assertion that refugees and smugglers from North Africa are really financed by the US.

The propaganda does not have to be convincing – it just has to succeed in sowing doubt and calling into question the system of values behind our open societies. And as skepticism towards liberal democracy and the established political order grows, disruptive forces are finding fertile ground. In Germany, a recent poll conducted by the survey institute Forsa with the national weekly DIE ZEIT on August 31, 2016, showed that 31 percent of AfD supporters and 30 percent of left-wing voters trust Vladimir Putin more than Angela Merkel.

Western societies are now turning to the same tools wielded so effectively by Russia. In Peter Pomerantsev’s startling book on Russia’s media landscape, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia, he describes the mechanisms of political technology in a world where it matters little whether something is true or not.

What is true today can be obsolete tomorrow: one day, Putin can claim there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea; the next day, he can casually admit that Russian soldiers had been active on the Black Sea peninsula all along. If the truth is blurred, twisted, and distorted long enough, the standards by which we orient right and wrong disappear. Propaganda does not have to be consistent. As the influential political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote more than sixty years ago, the best subject of totalitarian rule was neither the convinced Nazi nor the convinced communist, but the man who could no longer distinguish between true and false, between facts and fiction.

The “Post-Truth” Era

The relativization of truth is not just a tool employed by Russia. The Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2016 was “post-truth.” According to an analysis on Buzzfeed, in the last three months of the US election campaign the twenty most influential fake news stories generated more response on Facebook than the twenty most influential real news stories produced by traditional media.

In the lead-up to the Brexit vote, it was the seemingly farcical stories on British payments to Brussels and the economic consequences of leaving the EU that proved more powerful than facts from economic groups or the Bank of England. “People in this country have had enough of experts,” declared conservative Justice Secretary and Brexiteer Michael Gove, when he was questioned on why no economists supported Brexit.

In the US, meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s confidential emails were leaked to the public. Dmitri Alperovitch of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike warned back in July that the hacker collectives Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear were responsible. Experts said the style and approach showed all the hallmarks of Russian intelligence services.

In September, at the Munich Security Conference’s special Cyber Security Series at Stanford University, US intelligence representatives and cyber experts raised the alarm over the growing influence of foreign intelligence services on American elections. Nearly a month later, the Office of Homeland Security and the CIA announced they were certain that the Russian government were behind the hacks; the scale and sensitivity of the operation indicated involvement at the highest level.

This is not the first attempt to influence public opinion in Western societies. But the ability to disseminate information through social media and online gives illiberal forces new powers and bandwidth. And it comes as social media users are increasingly divided into insular groups that quickly become echo chambers. That trend leads to greater polarization and information tribalism, where each societal group lives its own version of truth and reality. These increasingly isolated groups are especially vulnerable to propaganda and fake news.

That is why protest parties and alternative media gain such traction on social media. With the slogan “We write what others can’t print,” Germany’s far-right magazine Compact has amassed upwards of 90,000 followers on Facebook. The outlet propagates conspiracy theories and stories touting Putin as a champion of balanced dialogue and restraint, unlike the EU.

Whether it’s fake news, leaks, trolls, or automated social media bots, these instruments present a grave challenge to enlightened public debate, the core of a functioning democracy. How do you maintain the principles of balanced, democratic debate when a significant percentage of those taking part are not real people or when they cast doubt on these very principles in the first place?

It Can Happen Here

After the US elections, the German chancellor was celebrated as the “leader of the free world,” and Germany fast became the last bastion of liberal democracy. But German society is not immune to illiberal forces. On the contrary, the fact that Berlin played a central role in rebuking Russian aggression in Ukraine makes it a target for propaganda and disinformation campaigns, especially from those who reject sanctions and strive to protect Russia’s “sphere of influence” in Eastern Europe. The chancellor has already expressed concern that Russia might interfere in this year’s election campaign. And the head of Germany’s intelligence agency, Bruno Kahl, warned, “This kind of pressure on public discourse and on democracy is unacceptable.”

With pressure mounting, the building blocks of our open society must now actively fight to safeguard it. Government institutions have to take every possible step to protect our hardware and shield constitutional bodies from cyberattacks. But the task of maintaining our software is up to society.

Lawmakers and stakeholders need to publicly speak out about our democracy and the myriad ways it can be influenced. They should open up access to free pools of information as a way to discredit fake news campaigns and supplement the efforts of virus scanners that track and report false information – like the European External Action Service (EEAS), which reports on Russian disinformation twice a week. The German government should also consider how to curb websites that regularly violate constitutional laws. But in a society that nourishes and protects freedom of opinion, this will be difficult.

It would be especially helpful to employ independent, non-governmental organizations to monitor the quality and credibility of media coverage, even producing a blacklist with particularly egregious transgressions. Companies that choose to advertise on platforms that consistently disseminate disinformation or propaganda should face consequences. And lawmakers themselves should refuse interviews with questionable sites so as not to legitimize them.

The challenge will be great for television, radio and other news outlets. Populists have revived the Nazi-era smear “Lügenpresse,” or lying press, to blast what they see as biased mainstream media. But it is precisely these established outlets that play such a central role in educating society on how to parse disinformation and fake news.

German media are fortunately far less polarized than in the US; a 2014 poll from the Pew Research Center revealed that 47 percent of conservative American voters turn to Fox News as their chief source of information. Germany’s public broadcasters and national dailies still reach a broad spectrum. But established media have come up short on two fronts.

First, several outlets readily republish large leaks without taking a critical look at who or what is behind them and without differentiating between what is authentic and what is fabricated. During the Cold War, the Stasi and the KGB often tried to leak compromised material to Western media, but they wouldn’t make such information public. Now, close ties between intelligence services and platforms like WikiLeaks have renewed a debate over the ethics of leaks, and journalists can’t afford to ignore the discussion.

Second, there is a growing trend toward feigned objectivity in various talk shows and even mainstream news. Russian propaganda is reproduced without context or challenge. Germany’s popular political talk shows feature guests who are presented as independent experts but clearly hawk the Kremlin’s line. If their statements are not challenged or even disproved, the viewer is left with a sliver of doubt and the impression that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Back to the Facts

That is not to say that we should not challenge the West’s policy on Russia. We can and must examine whether the EU’s sanctions, for example, are actually counterproductive. And an open society must tolerate the wrath of its critics (as long as they remain within the bounds of the law). We need to engage the populists in our discourse, not shut them out. But we also cannot tolerate half-truths or false information, nor can we accept foreign propaganda. In the end, there is nothing more critical than our liberal democracy itself. And it cannot survive without a fact-based, open debate.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – January/February 2017 issue.

The post Politics by Other Means appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

(c) REUTERS/Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency

What separates the free West can be understood neither through geographical or cultural categorization nor through idealistic abstractions: Western values are valid not only for those in the “Occident,” for citizens of certain countries or members of specific tribes, religions, or schools of philosophy, and their true worth only becomes clear when their mortal enemies threaten to extinguish them.

Yet it was never certain that murderous jihadist campaigns would remind Western societies of their unique inner strengths and the merits of their freedom-based political and social achievements. In France, popular opinion sought the reason for terrorist excesses in deficient domestic social conditions – the French interior minister even spoke of an “apartheid” between French society and Muslim immigrants. And in fellow EU member state Greece, a questionable coalition was formed between leftist and rightist nationalist parties, bound as much by their affinity for Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule as by the anti-American strain of their opposition to Europe’s transatlantic ties.

The ability to criticize and correct oneself is an unquestionable element at the heart of the Western model of democracy. Yet Western self-doubt has its own pitfalls. In the global political power game, the West continues to lose ground, often appearing overrun by growing global threats, with reaction speeds ranging from inert to lethargic.

Reluctant Engagement

The US only recently overcame its long resistance to intervening militarily to stop the spread of the Islamic State (IS) across Iraq and Syria. Yet it soon became clear that while air attacks could slow the spread of this horrorible militia, they could not destroy it. IS was able to establish state-like structures across wide swaths of Syria and Iraq, a half-mythological jihadist terrorist state financed not least by unabashed criminal activity. This once-unthinkable force is a new element in the history of terrorism, as well as in the process of disintegration the Middle East is currently experiencing. Now, successfully squelching the worldwide Islamist terror threat seems further away than ever.

Those profiting most from halfhearted US engagement (not to speak of that of the Europeans) are Iran and Russia. In the shadows cast by IS, their ally and minion Bashar al-Assad has been able to solidify his dictatorial power over Syria – even if only over a portion of the country. There is a kind of unspoken agreement here: in exchange for Assad being left alone by the West to engage unencumbered in his destructive campaign against his own people, the Syrian dictator and his backers in Tehran and Moscow will tolerate US air attacks on Syrian soil without screaming bloody murder over American violation of international law. As a result, reliable sources report that 2,100 people were tortured to death by Assad’s henchmen over the past year, and over the past four years 12,000 prisoners were murdered through a combination of starvation, lack of medical care, and torture in the regime’s cells.

The difference between Assad and ISIS is in fact only in their degree of shamelessness: the latter murders its enemies in public and gloats over its horrific crimes in front of the entire world, while the regime in Damascus, with the support of Russia and Iran, hides its transgressions. For this reason, the Western public rarely takes notice of the latter – otherwise it would show outrage similar to that displayed toward IS’s atrocities. Even worse, a growing number of Western voices argue that it is better to come to terms with the “lesser evil” of Assad, and with the Islamic Republic of Iran as a purported “stabilizing factor.”

In fact, this appears to be the path that Washington and Obama are now following. An atomic agreement with Iran is one of the US president’s highest priorities. The selection of supposed reformer Hassan Rouhani for the office of Iran’s president has nurtured the Western illusion that the Islamic Republic could be rebaptized a reliable partner in the new Middle Eastern security architecture.

In reality, however, the Iranian regime continues to pursue not only its brutal and repressive domestic agenda, but also its aggressive, hegemonic regional policies. Iraqi territories not occupied by IS are now controlled by the pro-Iranian militias that have terrorized the Sunni population for years, and a pro-Iranian militia recently took control of power in Yemen. The Tehran regime continues to lead its atomic negotiations under the premise that it will not relinquish its potential weapons program, instead compromising just enough to have international sanctions lifted.

While the West fails to develop its own groundbreaking future perspective for the Middle East, Iran is wasting no time in forging an anti-Western alliance across the region. Iran and Russia just signed a military agreement under this exact premise – and this at the same time that Tehran threatens Israel openly with attacks carried out by Lebanese Hezbollah. This Iranian-led militia murders in Syria alongside Assad, thereby gaining access to Chinese- and Russian-produced short-range missiles.

At the same time, the West clings to the idea that Russia is, after Iran, an indispensable ally in the restabilization of the region, a premise often introduced as one reason why Putin should not be too harshly rebuked in the Ukraine conflict; the destructive role that Russia actually plays in the Middle East is rarely addressed.

Helpless Western Maneuvering

Western global policy disorientation cannot be attributed entirely to the West’s decreasing importance in relation to other rising powers in the oft-touted multipolar world order. It is also an expression of a deep crisis of Western feelings of self-worth, an ever-growing doubt that the universal values it defends are applicable to “foreign cultures.” After the painful experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan – which led to a hurried and prematurely announced Western retreat – and the dreadful disappointment of euphoric expectations awakened by the Arab Spring, democratization as a strategic aim for the Middle East has nary a Western supporter remaining. At the same time, a simple return to complicity with established despots is also impossible. The regional enemies of the West recognize its paralysis, taking advantage of it to carry out more and more brazen offensive maneuvers.

The degree to which the West is currently being run over by global developments was shown dramatically by the reaction – especially among Europeans – to Russia’s policy of aggression and annexation in Ukraine. While Western nations finally brought themselves to impose economic sanctions in response to Putin’s increasingly militarized hybrid warfare tactics, the unity of the EU’s Russia policy was so clearly fragile that the Kremlin’s leadership remained unfazed in the face of the collapsing Russian economy.

Putin does not lead like a Westerner, putting top priority on increasing the prosperity of his country; instead, he has shown himself willing to sacrifice the well-being of the Russian citizenry to maintain Russian power. This positions him to take advantage of some of the West’s enduring vulnerabilities: Putin was able to massively intensify his secret war in January at the exact moment when Europeans could no longer bring themselves to further increase sanctions. And as for the German government’s contribution, while Berlin took a strong position against Putin in principle when it condemned both the annexation of Crimea and the arming of eastern Ukrainian separatists as running counter to international law, in practice the German government has maintained a language of equidistance from the beginning rather than clearly differentiating between aggressor and victim. The numerous appeals, most notably from Social Democrat (SPD) Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to “both conflict parties” to return to dialogue suggest the meeting of two actors of equal political and moral footing. Berlin’s leadership has taken great pains to avoid stating the simple reality that Russia’s military activities in eastern Ukraine were not only an injury to the sovereignty of its neighbor, but in reality an invasion which Kremlin propaganda has made little effort to disguise.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mantra that there is “no military solution” to the conflict – as if Putin hasn’t been pursuing exactly such a military solution for quite a while – is the result of the staggering illusion that the Kremlin leader can be led back to the path of international law through some persistent expert horse whispering. Merkel’s steadfast stand on this position, resulting in both her categorical refusal to deliver weapons to Ukraine and her public statement that Putin would not be impressed by Ukrainian militarization, has concrete consequences. For one thing, the chancellor is fundamentally incorrect: Putin, who respects no principle other than a hierarchy of power and superpower and who holds the West in contempt for its “decadent” frailty, can be impressed by nothing less than a clear demonstration of strength and decisiveness. His logic is the same as Stalin’s, who once derisively commented, “The Pope? How many divisions does the Pope have?”

Categorical refusal to provide military support for Ukraine from the beginning, thereby reinforcing Putin’s sense of invulnerability in the earliest stages, was a grave diplomatic failure, amounting to the delivery of defenselessness to the aggressor on a silver platter. Former high-level German diplomat and security expert Wolfgang Ischinger’s proposed strategy to use the potential of weapons deliveries to Ukraine as a form of diplomatic pressure on Moscow was entirely on point. Similar to the NATO double-track decision from the late 1970s and early 1980s, the message to Putin must be that we in the West are willing to forgo arming the Ukrainian army if Moscow will grant substantial concessions – otherwise, we will do it. That successful diplomacy requires concrete threats is a lesson from International Security 101. In the case of the conflict with Putin, this basic wisdom appears to have been fundamentally forgotten.

Historical Revisionism as Weapon

Putin has introduced historical revisionism as a weapon in the disinformation war with the West. He hammers away at the Western public with the idea that his regime and his war with Ukraine stand in a long, proud tradition of Red Army victories over Nazi invaders, whereby the Ukrainians take on the role of “fascists.” That the Red Army was not only the Russian army but also the army of all nations of the Soviet Union – including Ukraine – is glossed over entirely, much as the fact that there were a large number of Russians – and Ukrainians – who collaborated with their Nazi occupiers. This creates the impression that Ukraine was once in league with Hitler’s Germany rather than a victim of invasion, a country subjugated by its Nazi occupiers and plundered to the bone.

Putin’s attempt to stylize the Soviet Union as “humanity’s savior from fascism” – thereby reducing the Western allies to at most marginal actors – and to reclaim this inheritance for himself lies in bold contrast to the fact that the Kremlin chief is also a generous supporter of radical rightist parties across Europe, providing financial support for everyone from France’s Front National to openly neo-Nazi Jobbik in Hungary. What is more, Putin has succeeded in unifying the allegedly mortal enemies of European leftist and rightist radicals under the flag of anti-liberalism and anti-Americanism, manifest in the groundbreaking Greek coalition government of leftist and rightist nationalist parties.

Putin’s cynical instrumentalization of anti-Nazi consensus is not without effect in the West, especially in Germany. The Russian president will play this card in a grand display timed to coincide with early May’s Victory Day celebrations, and whoever strays from his glorified representation of the Soviet Union’s unblemished anti-fascism may find themselves the target of Russian propagandists and their amplifiers, criticized for their historical relativism and vilification of the grand sacrifices made by the Soviets in vanquishing national socialism.

There is, however, another source of sympathy for the Kremlin in Germany: the feeling of thankfulness for reunification, the biggest historical gift received by the Germans in the 20th century. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Helmut Kohl, Horst Teltschik, Hans-Jochen Vogel, not to mention Helmut Schmidt – practically every member of the generation of politicians who were architects of German reunification or who promoted the policy of detente – have in the wake of the Ukraine conflict spoken out as empathetic advocates of powerful Russian interests. The elder statesman’s credo is: Only when robust, close relations with Russia are ensured is Germany’s security and prosperity guaranteed. This conviction, the result of successful reunification, is buried deeply in their collective consciousness. In fact, it is now clear that the years 1989-90 carried different significance for Germans and for Eastern Europeans, especially the Balts and Poles: while the latter countries saw the retreat of the Soviet Union as a result of their persistent struggle for freedom, the German sense was rather that the peaceful fall of the USSR was above all a result of Gorbachev’s intuition and magnanimity. Dogged diplomatic trust-building measures, it is believed, led to internal clarification processes in the previously aggressive Soviet Union.

What worked in the case of a totalitarian power long believed unassailable, so goes this faulty German logic, must also succeed with Putin. In order to buttress this narrative, the elder statesmen must indeed gloss over large sections of their own success stories. Schmidt, Genscher, and Kohl were all on the front lines of formulating and enacting the NATO double-track decision, which was in fact the major turning point in Soviet policy. Only when the Soviets understood that Western nations were in fact prepared to arm themselves and it was clear that they could not keep up in another arms race did Gorbachev’s reform ideas finally receive due consideration.

In the end, the policy of detente was only possible in the shadow of a massive deterrence strategy – and it is exactly this element that is missing in response to Putin’s neo-Soviet and greater Russia expansionism. His massive military might and his unabashed support for extremist leftist and rightist parties have yet to convince Europe’s elites that he is a strategic threat for the entire continent that must be met with a similar level of armament. Instead, we hear repeated claims that no one wants to provoke a new Cold War and that it is essential to avoid anything which could escalate the conflict with Moscow further – this despite the fact that Putin has been waging a Cold War for quite a while, and keeps escalating the “hot” conflict in Ukraine. The probability continues to rise that Europe will be forced to abandon its peace strategy sooner or later – with Ukraine and its hopes for democracy paying the heaviest toll.

Is Truth Really Relative?

It is not only open sympathizers of Putinism in Western Europe and apologists for a misunderstood policy of detente who open a gateway for the Kremlin’s propaganda maneuvers in the West. There are also structural changes in the Western public’s state of consciousness that have over the years lain the groundwork for the lackluster defense of Western values. This effect could be called the principle of postmodernity, a school of thought that claims there is neither a singular nor an objective truth, but rather many subjective truths fed by various personal experiences. As a critique of dogmatic world views and closed ideologies, such relativism at first seems to fit with the understanding of freedom in pluralistic democracies, their functioning based on the mutual respect and balancing of contradictory political and cultural views. In liberal democracies, no one final truth can or should be forced upon everyone; rather, we construct partial truths through debate between various differing interest groups and societal positions, truths which are repeatedly questioned.

In its most radical form, postmodernism suggests that there are no objective criteria to identify the differences between reality and fiction, between opinion and rumor, or between truths and lies. Everything, so it is believed, is interpretation, merely a reconstruction of reality – a reality free from subjective bonds simply does not exist. What over time appears either true or false depends only on the power relations between the given actors to anchor their interpretation of reality in the central consciousness of their society.

Driven by criticism of power, this postmodern school of thought ultimately blurs the differences between democratic and authoritarian power. Even the Western promise of freedom appears in this light nothing more than one element of any number of stories of domination serving the justification of existing power structures. The reverse side of this general suspicion of Western values is an implicit sympathy for dictatorial and totalitarian regimes – the criticism Western democracies level at the conditions in authoritarian states is deemed hypocritical and hubristic, a way Western leaders seek to distract from their own questionable applications of power. What began as a libertarian impulse against every form of power resulted in the implicit affirmation of the legitimacy of dictatorships.

The communications revolution fed by the Internet and the growth of social media strongly advanced this leveling of perceptions of democratic and authoritarian power. The Internet is today seen by many as an informal countervailing power, balancing the supposedly prescribed truths of our leaders and their purportedly loyal “official” media outlets. In this view, every piece of “information” distributed over the Internet, however absurd, receives the same weight as traditional sources of news or analysis.

In the most extreme variation of this ultraskepticism, every piece of information supporting the Western view of the Ukraine war appears per se suspicious – a manipulated lie fed to us by our leaders. A powerful Russian manipulation factory systematically fabricating propaganda and feeding it to the media utilizes this shocking inability of the public to evaluate narrative truth to its advantage.

The middle-class milieus that during the Cold War were relatively immune to such propagandistic influences – at that time also widespread – are today dissolving. In their place an ever more divided Western society is developing, floating in an ocean of unavoidable currents of information and disinformation, in which a fundamental skepticism of its own Western values reigns.

This tenor overlaps in significant ways with the authoritarian ideology of Putinism, in which human rights and democratic freedoms are viewed as creations of Western propaganda and in which universal Western values are touted as little more than camouflage for Western imperialist interests. Russia is thus even more justified in forcing its interests upon others with amoral violence, according to the sinister and paradoxical conclusion of the Kremlin’s ideologists, since the West also engages in exactly the same behavior. This false logic resonates not only with leftist and rightist Putin supporters, but also among sections of the political and societal median. Thus, Putin’s regime is carrying the destruction of moral legal standards now underway in his own society into Western societies as well.

Read more articles from the May/June 2015 issue FOR FREE in the Berlin Policy Journal App.

The post Helpless and Halfhearted appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Many, myself included, find these speeches reassuring. They ease the minds of policymakers that feel overwhelmed by world events and breed transatlantic confidence at a time of considerable uncertainty. But are they right? Even if one assumes that the West has the ability to shape today’s complex security environment (which is by no means a foregone conclusion), one has to ask if it possesses the will, innovation, and resources to actually do so. In truth, what Europe and the US are actually doing in response to the changing face of geopolitics makes what they are saying far less inspiring.

Unimaginative “Reforms”

There is no question that the West deserves high praise for the creation of a global network of international institutions, laws, treaties, and norms. From the United Nations to NATO to the World Bank to the OECD, the West has invested decades in building, maintaining, and reforming the bedrock of the international order. With emerging powers, revisionist powers, and non-state actors actively challenging that system, though, how much is the West doing to either counter or adapt to those challenges?

The heads of major international institutions will tell you “a lot,” rattling off a long list of internal reforms over the better part of the last two decades. But such reforms have done little to halt Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Bashar al-Assad’s barrel bomb attacks against the Syrian people, the rise of Islamic State (IS), or China’s aggression in the East and South China Seas. Why? Many of the oft cited “reforms” are simply too unimaginative and timid. By tinkering on the margins, these reforms do little to get at the heart of the challenge. Bold structural reforms on the scale of revisiting the consensus rule in NATO or the veto on the UN Security Council are considered impossible, counter to our interests, or too high risk.

The West seems to have forgotten, though, that it did not come to be the architect of the global system in the 1940s and 1950s by avoiding risk and relying on conventional approaches. Quite the contrary, the individuals that built that foundation often took considerable political, professional, and strategic risks both at home and abroad. In fact, several of the obstacles that policymakers faced at the time – a disinterested public, resource constraints, and high stakes negotiations with friends and foes alike – resemble some of those we face today.

Take popular support: Similar to the retrenchment instincts present on both sides of the Atlantic today, American and European publics in the late 1940s were skeptical about the value of creating new international institutions that would require making long-term commitments to the economic prosperity and security of Europe. Those that worked to build a new liberal order, therefore, often put their political careers on the line and fought tirelessly to counter the skeptics, who were sometimes inside their own administration. This was particularly true for President Truman who had to persuade members of his own inner circle, the US Congress, and the American public about the value of creating the Marshall Plan in 1947.

Of course, today’s era differs quite significantly from the post-World War II era. In the span of the last two decades, the world has experienced a dramatic diffusion of power, which means that the US and its Western allies can no longer produce and shape the outcomes they once did. Furthermore, the West is living in an era characterized by unprecedented interconnectedness in the shadow of globalization. As a result, both the international system and individual nation states are straining to respond to rising expectations, an array of domestic and economic pressures, and broader questions about the value of international cooperation.

Strengths to Build On

Despite these challenges, the West still benefits from a number of comparative advantages. It can build and run international coalitions like no other; its collective economic strength remains a powerful force in the global economy; its education system continues to attract students from around the globe; its economies have shown a remarkable capacity to repair themselves; and its values, while by no means admired by everyone, still serve as a beacon to many around the world. And for better or worse, the world still relies on the West to solve global problems and underwrite international security.

In order to adequately address today’s complex security environment, though, Europe and the US need to envision and promote change on the scale of what we witnessed at the end of World War II. Small-scale tactical shifts that avoid taking risks and fail to challenge the status quo simply will not suffice. We need leaders willing to buck the system, to get their hands dirty, and not only to think but to do the unthinkable. A bold, ambitious agenda that matches the enormity of today’s complex security challenges should include the following goals:

Launch and lead a global effort to redesign the international system so that it reflects today’s balance of power and is positioned to address today’s challenges, from the rise of non-state actors to asymmetric warfare to the diffusion of technology. If the UN refuses to alter the composition of the Security Council, it is time to consider a more inclusive architecture. In establishing the rules and distribution of power of any new model, however, the founders should consider countries’ past behavior. In other words, countries that act primarily as spoilers or have repeatedly violated global norms should not be rewarded with a leadership role in the creation of future structures.

Lead the world in the establishment of global norms in a number of new areas, including cybersecurity, unmanned and autonomous systems, genome editing, and disruptive technology like 3D printing. The West, particularly the US, prides itself on its ability to innovate, which has brought tremendous economic and technological benefit. Occasionally, though, countries like the US fail to foresee (or prefer to deny) the challenges that such innovation may someday bring to the global system and instead take advantage of the fact that few rules exist around a particular technology’s use. This is shortsighted. While establishing global norms is no small task and inevitably involves trade-offs and often years of tense negotiations, the West needs to reassert its leadership role in this area.

Break down the barriers that prevent international organizations from working together. The EU and NATO, for example, have struggled for years to find ways to establish institutional links. But age-old objections tied to the situation in Cyprus have prevented anything of real substance from taking root. With global challenges such as cyber- and energy security straddling the mandates of both institutions, the West can no longer afford to keep these two institutions on separate planes. The only way to develop innovative policies and tools to cope with a range of cross-cutting issues is to abolish longstanding barriers to cooperation. That should also include the barriers that exist between the public and private sectors, especially in the area of cybersecurity.

Double down on efforts to promote and finalize the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic clearly see value in establishing a new trade agreement that would provide much needed growth, position the two sides of the Atlantic to set global standards in a number of sectors, and send a clear message about the US and EU’s willingness to open markets. But their approach to date has been far too risk-averse and rooted in the hope that the merit of their arguments will ultimately win the day. Just as Truman launched an ambitious campaign to educate the American public about the Marshall Plan, Washington and Brussels need to launch their own engagement plan that would answer tough questions, directly engage stakeholders, and counter the anti-TTIP narrative dominating the debate. This project’s value stretches far beyond creating jobs and boosting exports but one would never know that from the way the two sides are promoting it.

Develop an international home for global forecasting and risk assessment. In 2014 the West was caught completely off guard by not one but three separate international crises – Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the rapid spread of Ebola, and the rise of IS. While it is impossible to predict with certainty where the next crisis might erupt, the West should find or create an international forum for global forecasting where groups of countries can prepare for the unexpected. The West should also dedicate resources to collective risk assessment. One possible starting point would be an examination of the risks involved in the gradual collapse of the international arms control regime. Russia is in direct violation of the INF Treaty and yet the West is still spending most of its time wordsmithing the documents for the next NPT Review conference. What the West should be doing is discussing tectonic shifts that could lead to additional noncompliance, a complete withdrawal, or decreased prospects for future agreements and how the West might prevent such shifts from actually occurring.

Europe and the United States share a truly breathtaking record of achievement, one that remains unmatched by any other two regions of the world. But admirable past achievements simply aren’t enough to lead us into the future. This era of compounding complexity demands leadership, bold ideas, new models of doing business, and unbridled ambition on a scale we haven’t seen in several decades. There are countless reasons, though, why today’s leaders may not rise to the occasion. Our publics are weary, resources are scarce, and the relentless pace of social media makes it difficult to maintain strategic attention. The West has also experienced some sobering lessons in recent years about the limits of US and European power. But one of the lessons of the last seventy years is that when the West marshals the right mix of will and leadership, it does indeed have the ability shape the world order in unimaginable ways, even in less than perfect conditions. The real tragedy, therefore, would be not if the West tried and failed to take on such an ambitious agenda but if it did not try at all.

Read more articles from the May/June 2015 issue FOR FREE in the Berlin Policy Journal App.

The post The Tasks Ahead appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

(c) REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

While the Bundestag is wrestling with the implications of the most recent spy scandal, the ex-Communist Left Party (Die Linke) has access to the secrets of Germany’s three intelligence agencies: the domestic intelligence service (Verfassungsschutz), whose spying on Germans until recently focused also on Left Party parliamentarians; the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD); and the foreign intelligence agency (BND).

Now the Left Party’s André Hahn, chair of the PCC, has been indirectly accused of leaking secret documents to the media. In return, he has hinted that the documents were leaked directly by the agencies themselves and that his oversight committee had not even seen them. Welcome to a country where questions of national security are routinely used as ammunition in political squabbles. Welcome to a political class that still cannot understand why American and British intelligence services might deem it necessary to spy on them now and again, if only to find out who is telling what to whom.

The most disturbing aspect is: the Germans consider NSA spying or the cooperation between it and the BND scandalous, but not the fact that confidential information has been leaked. Nor did anyone cry foul when Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, in fact, used leaked intelligence material to lay a trap for Chancellor Angela Merkel: It appears that back in 2006, America’s National Security Agency (NSA) asked the BND to check out two European companies, EADS (now Airbus) and its subsidiary Eurocopter. Nobody knows what the NSA was looking for – possibly attempts to subvert the sanctions against Iran. But Gabriel – who is also economics minister – lost no time in describing this as “industrial espionage.” He went on to say that Merkel had “assured” him twice that these were the only two “German” companies (they are, in fact, multinational) that had been spied on by the BND.

This seems unlikely. German companies have a sorry record of dealings with unsavory regimes, from the Mullahs’ Tehran to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad to Putin’s Moscow. If any more companies turn up (and, given the porous nature of the spy agencies, that could happen at any time), Merkel will stand accused of lying.

It was, of course, no accident that Gabriel, a member of the SPD, chose to unleash his revelations a week before elections in Bremen, where his party stood to lose votes to Merkel’s CDU. But German media patted Gabriel on the back for his indiscretion, because he had found a chink in the iron chancellor’s armor. Nobody questioned his use of the term “industrial espionage” or the wisdom of using secret intelligence material to score points.

Admittedly, Merkel was asking for it. When in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations it became clear that the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters were spying on German politicians – even tapping Merkel’s cell phone – the chancellor publicly declared that “friends don’t spy on friends.” This was a stupid thing to say, as she must have known better. Shortly afterwards it turned out that the BND had tapped US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s cell phone – but only “inadvertently,” according to the official explanation. Yeah, right.

Meanwhile, Merkel convened a meeting of Germany’s European partners to agree on a “No-Spy Treaty,” under which EU members – “friends” – would not spy on one another. This PR exercise – shortly before the last general election, incidentally – was a dig at the British, who of course were not going to sign any such agreement. All the while, however, the BND was spying on hundreds, possibly thousands of European Union institutions and officials at the behest of their friends at the NSA.

A No-Spy Treaty is an inherently absurd proposition, as is the idea of “friendship” between nations. A husband might swear never to read his wife’s diary, but when jealousy strikes, his wife had better be sure her diary is well hidden. In the harsh world of international relations, you want to be sure that what your “friends” are telling you to your face is what they are saying behind closed doors. Trust, but verify.

Merkel could have said just that. She did not. She could have pointed out that the cooperation between the BND and the NSA is a valued part of our “friendship” with the US. She did not. She could have stated that it is illegal for the BND to spy on German citizens at home, and that there is no evidence that the BND did that – and, in fact, there is a lot of evidence that the BND routinely refused such requests by the NSA. She did not. She could have explained that it is not illegal to spy on European institutions and businesses and why such espionage might be necessary. She did not. Instead, she tried to ride the tiger of German anger at the Americans and the “scandal” of cooperation with them; now, though the tiger will not eat her, it just might bite her. Serves her right.

In discussions with American and British visitors, Germans like to point to the Nazi or Stasi past to explain their sensitivity when it comes to data collection. Nonsense. Every German regularly surrenders more information to the tax authorities and state Registration Office than a British or American person would deem acceptable. The Verfassungsschutz is the only spy agency in a Western democracy dedicated not only to tracking down real and present dangers to the state, but also to documenting “dangerous thoughts,” including those of Parliamentarians.

The problem with Germany is that part of its political class is politically immature. There is no discussion of concepts such as the national interest; the idea that there is not only a duty to control the security agencies but also to protect them is alien to most people. This is, potentially, much more dangerous than the possibility that the BND might have overstepped its remit now and then.

Read more articles from the May/June 2015 issue FOR FREE in the Berlin Policy Journal App.

The post Spies, Lies, and Politics appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.