martes, 28 de febrero de 2017

LA TRAMA ASESINA DEL "PERONISMO - CHIITA" de los KIRCHNER





La trama oculta

Audio inédito del fiscal Nisman: “Aunque quieras matarme o sacarme del medio, esto ya no tiene retroceso”

28.02.2017

BUENOS AIRES (Uypress) — Pasados dos años de la muerte del fiscal de la causa AMIA, Alberto Nisman, se conoció un impactante audio que aparecerá en el libro “Memorándum”, del periodista Daniel Berliner.


(El excanciller argentino Héctor Timerman con su par iraní Alí Akbar Salehi)

Dos años han transcurrido desde la muerte del fiscal Alberto Nisman, y su deceso y las causas siguen envueltos en la nebulosa y rodeados de las más variadas especulaciones.

Nisman investigaba el atentado a la AMIA registrado en 1994, que dejara un saldo de 85 muertos y centenas de heridos, y el memorándum de entendimiento firmado entre el Gobierno de Cristina Kirchner y su par iraní. El fiscal se aprestaba a presentar el 19 de enero de 2015 una denuncia penal contra la Presidenta y su canciller, Héctor Timerman. Un día antes, el domingo 18, fue encontrado muerto en su apartamento, en circunstancias aún no esclarecidas del todo.

Justamente "Memorándum" es el título del libro que presentará el periodista de la Agencia Judía de Noticias, Daniel Berliner.

De acuerdo a un adelanto brindado por Clarín, "Memorándum", el libro de Berliner, revela pasajes desconocidos de las negociaciones del gobierno de Cristina Kirchner con Teherán, y reproduce diálogos inéditos con el fiscal Alberto Nisman poco antes de su muerte. También, entrevistas con diplomáticos y líderes israelíes, como Benjamín Netanyahu y el ex canciller Avigdor Liberman y con funcionarios del gobierno argentino.

El autor recrea las presiones, los enojos, las vacilaciones y los desencuentros que provocó en la comunidad judía la noticia de la firma del acuerdo.

En el capítulo final se reproduce esa conversación clave de Berliner con el fiscal Nisman, quien aparecería muerto cuatro días después de denunciar a Cristina, al ex canciller Héctor Timerman y a otros, por encubrir a través de ese pacto a ciudadanos iraníes acusados por el ataque a la AMIA.

Aquí, sus tramos salientes, adelantados por Clarín.

"Aunque quieran sacarme del medio"


(Tapa del libro de Daniel Berliner)


- Alberto Nisman: Daniel, esto es un espanto, es una aberración jurídica, inaplicable, es lamentable, es todo una gran mentira. [En el Memorándum] se habla de fecha del viaje cuando en realidad, más allá de que no conduce a nadie y que es completamente inconstitucional, para viajar, según lo que dice ese mamotreto, tiene [que haber] una comisión de la verdad. Para eso tenés que conformarla, la tenés que integrar, tenés que evaluar.

Mirá, lo más suave que yo voy a tener para decir, más allá de no entrar en la parte delictiva, es que tanto Cristina como Timerman no se han cansado de mentir. No [es] que han dicho una o dos mentiras, no se han cansado de mentir. Tengo quince escritas, cada una de ellas verificable, y ahora hay que escuchar al señor canciller decir, encima: "Vamos a tratar de que todos los puntos se puedan cumplir". O sea, firmamos algo hace un año que es un espanto y encima te dicen: "Vamos a tratar de que se pueda cumplir". Evidentemente, es todo un mensaje para la gilada, se siguen cagando de risa [de] los familiares, de todo. Fue un espanto esa reunión, te lo dicen los propios tipos argentinos, está difícil porque tienen la contra allá [en Irán] y sacaron esto para salir del paso, o sea, esto, aun en el caso de que conduzca a algo, es inconstitucional, pero encima estás pagando el precio de un Mercedes, no por un Mercedes [sino por] por un auto fundido, no es más que una vergüenza más que va a saltar a la luz en poco tiempo.

(...) AN: Que esto quede entre nosotros: esto termina, y cada vez en menos tiempo, con gente presa, y mirá de qué manera te lo voy a decir, no es [por las] pruebas que tenga el fiscal, que igual serán muy válidas, porque es un fiscal al que en nueve años jamás le han revocado una resolución, nadie. ¿Qué decís vos si yo te digo que acá hay involucrados funcionarios del Estado, y la prueba me la otorga el mismo Estado?
- Daniel Berliner: No se puede digerir fácilmente.

(...) AN: Con todo esto el Gobierno no está haciendo más que corroborar y darme más elementos con la teoría que ya se está armando, de lo cual sobra prueba. Que sigan igual, que sigan igual, vas a ver cómo termina todo esto. Yo antes decía que esto termina mal en un año; ahora te digo, es cuestión de meses.

(...) ¿Sabés cuál es la diferencia? Yo lo pensé desde el primer día, la diferencia es que yo tengo las pruebas y con la pruebas más de uno que ni se imagina le va a temblar el orto, porque no es prueba inventada por mí, no son valoraciones (que son totalmente válidas), no, no, cuando vean las pruebas proporcionadas por el propio Estado (porque, obviamente, hay internas en el gobierno), te agarrás la cabeza, Daniel. Esperá, esperá un poco, seguí con tu laburo y todo, pero yo te digo: el ejemplo es feo, lo voy a dar, porque hablar de bombas, de esquirlas y todo en el contexto de lo que pasó es feo, pero acá hay que alejarse (los que están vinculados con todo esto) lo antes posible para que no le pegue alguna esquirla a pobre gente que quizá no tiene mucho que ver al lado de los máximos responsables. Ahora, que los máximos responsables terminan presos en poco tiempo, no tengas duda.

Y si a esta altura hablo por esta radio [Nextel] ya en estos términos es por dos motivos: hay mucha gente que respalda la prueba que hay, y, fundamentalmente, la prueba está guardada de tal manera que, aunque quieras matarme o sacarme del medio, esto ya no tiene retroceso. Algunos embrujados ya lo saben y no saben cómo salir y están pidiendo salvavidas, así que, que me escuchen. Ya no sé si puedo hacerlo público, si alguno me está escuchando, a esta altura me chupa un huevo, porque cada uno sabe lo que hizo, lo que dijo y dónde quedó registrado, así que el problema lo tienen ellos, no yo, y va a ser muy cómico cuando se demuestre y uno diga, entre otras cosas, la frase: "Y decían que no querían que esta causa sea una pieza de ajedrez del tablero geopolítico internacional". Vamos a ver ahora quién usa esta causa como un tablero de ajedrez, si un fiscal que solamente trae las pruebas o justamente el gobierno que quería acusar al fiscal diciendo que seguía lo que quería Estados Unidos, veamos lo que aparece acá.
(...) DB: ¿Estás tranquilo?

- AN: Más que tranquilo. Yo estoy absolutamente tranquilo, los que no tienen que estar tranquilos, porque yo considero que todavía estoy viviendo en un país normal, son los que hicieron estas cosas.

(...) Ya no te hablo como fiscal, estoy indignado, avergonzado, asqueado con ganas de vomitar muchas cosas.

- DB: ¿Entonces Eliaschev se quedó corto?

- AN: Mirá lo que te voy a decir, y vos sabés que yo lo critiqué: Eliaschev se quedó corto, no en lo que dijo, en lo que leyó, porque él en definitiva reproduce, y lo saca de unos documentos que dice haber leído. Se quedó corto, corto, corto, corto. Lo que dijo es verdad, pero se quedó corto. No lo estoy criticando, lo que te quiero decir es: imaginate la gravedad del tema.

- AN: Pero... ¿qué "recibir"?, ¿sos boludo? Lo van a tener que ir a visitar a Devoto en pocos meses. A ver si me entendés lo que te digo, ¿de qué "recibir" me estás hablando? Van a tener que pedir turno en la cárcel. La lógica indica que deben saber muchas más cosas que yo, con lo cual la situación sería desesperante.

[Timerman] es un maleducado, un grosero, un guarango, vaya a saber lo que le habrá dicho [a la embajadora Dorit]. Yo la tenía como una mina de bolas, [pero si] está en otro país, tampoco se puede hacer la loca. Tampoco la Cancillería israelí está jugando un papel fuerte en esto, más allá de lo que piensen y de que no lo reciban; son los más blandos de todos estos también. En su momento, cuando tenga la oportunidad, se los voy a decir: "Flojo papel público de la Cancillería israelí, y esto no es nuevo". Muy tranqui, los conozco a todos, los fui a visitar. Hay que poner las bolas sobre la mesa. ¡Comparame la Cancillería israelí con Netanyahu!, es vergonzoso lo de la Cancillería israelí.

Bueno, Daniel, te mando un abrazo, esto fue entre vos y yo y los que están escuchando."




UyPress - Agencia Uruguaya de Noticias

jueves, 23 de febrero de 2017

CHINA RUSSIAN FEDERATION






Russia and China’s Enduring Alliance
A Reverse “Nixon Strategy” Won’t Work for Trump
Foreign Affairs
By Jacob Stokes
February 22, 2017

Several commentators, among them Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute and Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have suggested that U.S. President Donald Trump should take any efforts to warm relations with Russia one step further and try to enlist Moscow’s help in balancing a rising China. Trump views China and Islamist extremism as the two principal challenges to U.S. security, and he sees Russia as a potential partner in combating both. The thinking goes, then, that Trump should run a version of the diplomatic play that former U.S. President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger followed in the early 1970s when they thawed relations with Beijing to counter the Soviet Union. This time, however, Trump would partner with Russia to balance China.
The proposal entices with visions of ambitious strategic gambits across Eurasia, in Trumpian vernacular the “big league” of geopolitics. Nixon going to China was one of the most consequential diplomatic deals in U.S. history. What better way for the dealmaker in chief—especially one who regularly consults with Kissinger—to burnish his credentials than carrying out a version of it for himself? In theory, the move would adhere to traditional maxims of geopolitics: namely, the imperative to maintain the balance of power on the Eurasian continent. U.S. strategists have relied on this principle to varying degrees since at least World War II. Further, a strategy that engages with Russia to counter China might lend a degree of coherence to the Trump administration’s otherwise disjointed foreign policy.
 ALLIED ENOUGH
The problem for Trump is that Sino-Russian ties have been improving more or less steadily since the waning years of the Cold War. The thaw between the two communist powers began in the early 1980s and was followed by normalized relations in May 1989. Beijing and Moscow established a “strategic partnership” in 1996 and signed a Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation in 2001. Chinese and Russian leaders now refer to the relationship as a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination,” a convoluted term for a not-quite alliance. Last September, Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi proclaimed that “the depth and scope of coordination between both countries are unprecedented.” Robust cooperation has accelerated since Xi Jinping became China’s top leader in 2012; he reportedly has a warm personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The two countries cooperate closely across a number of fields. On energy, Russia became the top oil supplier to China in 2016. Crucially for China, it transports supplies overland rather than through contested sea lanes. The nations have partnered on military exercises, including in the Mediterranean and South China Sea, as well as on some joint technology development projects. They have revived their languishing arms trade relationship. In 2015, Beijing agreed to purchase both Su-35 fighter jets and the S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile system from Moscow. The two countries have also embarked on a number of symbolic people-to-people projects, such as beginning the long-delayed construction of a bridge across the Amur River. And in June 2016, Presidents Xi and Putin agreed to work jointly to increase their control over cyberspace and communications technologies.
A shared political vision for world order provides the foundation for Chinese-Russian cooperation. It is defined primarily by the desire to see an end to U.S. primacy, to be replaced by multipolarity. Once this vision is realized, each nation would command an effective sphere of influence in Asia and eastern Europe, respectively. For now, though, China and Russia have tenser relations with the United States than at any point since the end of the Cold War. This is primarily because of maritime territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas—including over the Diaoyu/Senkaku, the Paracel, and the Spratly island chains—and the war in Ukraine, making the Sino-Russian partnership more important than ever. A recent op-ed in the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily called that relationship “the ballast stone in maintaining world peace and stability.”
A shared political vision for world order provides the foundation for Chinese-Russian cooperation.

In the 1970s, it was deep discord in the Sino-Soviet relationship that helped convince China to align with the United States. This discord culminated in border clashes in 1969. By 1972, relations between the two communist powers had deteriorated from frosty to outright frozen. When Kissinger came calling, Beijing already saw Moscow as a bigger threat than Washington. For Russia today, the opposite is true. Moscow sees Washington as the primary adversary despite hopes that Trump will repair the relationship.
Moscow sees Washington as the primary adversary despite hopes that Trump will repair the relationship.

To be sure, there is some potential for a rupture between China and Russia. Moscow worries about a lopsided economic relationship based on trading Russian resources for Chinese finished goods. China’s growing influence in Central Asia and the sparsely populated areas of eastern Russia, Moscow’s arms sales to India and Vietnam, and China’s theft of Russian weapons designs all threaten to derail the partnership. But the United States’ ability to fuel those disputes in order to foster divisions remains limited at best. Moreover, Xi and Putin have found a modus vivendi that downplays and contains those frictions while focusing on the cooperative aspects of their relationship. When Chinese leaders talk about a “new type of great power relations” with the United States, they envision something much like the Sino-Russian relationship as a model.
WEAK RETURNS
In exchange for turning against China, Moscow might seek the lifting of sanctions imposed following the annexation of Crimea, an end to U.S. support for a free and independent Ukraine, and acquiescence to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It may also demand a removal of missile defenses from Europe, the cessation of NATO expansion, or, even better from a Russian perspective, the abolition of NATO altogether. Granting Putin’s wishes on these issues would undermine the seven-decade U.S. investment in a Europe whole, free, and at peace—an investment that propelled the United States’ ascension to postwar primacy in the first place. What is more, accepting Russia’s acquisition of territory by force would undermine U.S. arguments about the prohibition of such actions under international law when Beijing asserts its expansive claims in the East and South China Seas using force.
Even if Trump convinced Putin to end Moscow’s partnership with Beijing, Russia would still have little capability to thwart China’s bad behavior in places that matter. Russia’s Pacific Fleet, although relatively sizable in number, suffers from severe shortfalls in maintenance, and many of its assets are aging. Planned additions to the fleet—including extra missile defense systems and submarines—will bolster deterrence capabilities but have limited applicability to the types of sea patrol tasks necessary to counter China’s maritime assertiveness. In theory, Moscow could help arm Asian nations to contribute to the balancing effort, but direct U.S. and other allied assistance could easily substitute for that, building relationships more advantageous to U.S. interests in the process.
Putin would also need to patch up diplomatic relations in Asia if he planned to balance against Beijing. Doing so would require a substantial diplomatic investment and, likely, Russian concessions. Putin’s ballyhooed rapprochement with Tokyo seems to have run aground despite clear eagerness on the part of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for a deal to address the dispute over the Northern Territories islands, which Russia calls the Southern Kurils, as well as a peace treaty officially concluding World War II. And Russia’s continued support of North Korea and staunch opposition to the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile defense system has made for rocky relations with Seoul. The Russian position on the South China Sea—studied aloofness while agreeing to joint naval exercises with China—means that strategic relations in Southeast Asia would also require substantial diplomatic spadework (Putin’s warm relations with President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines notwithstanding).
FINDING LEVERAGE
A better U.S. strategy for competing effectively in the no-holds-barred contest of great power politics—including in “triangular diplomacy” with Moscow and Beijing—would focus on two lines of effort. First, the Trump administration should work with both Russia and China where possible. Those efforts should seek to forge a trilateral understanding on contentious issues affecting strategic stability, such as nuclear and missile defense issues, twenty-first-century definitions of sovereignty, and rules for armed intervention. Trilateral discussions should also build practical cooperation on areas of mutual interest, such as climate and energy, counterterrorism, and nonproliferation. Addressing frictions head-on and building habits of cooperation could mitigate strategic distrust among the three great powers by lessening the worry that two will cut deals at the expense of the other.
Second, Washington must continue to do the hard work of maintaining and building support among current U.S. allies and partners in both Europe and Asia, along with other increasingly powerful middle-tier states such as Brazil, India, and Vietnam. Such ties give the United States leverage over China and Russia, neither of which has similar worldwide networks of friendly states. The United States must assess the costs and benefits of finding and keeping friends overseas in a manner that looks beyond the narrow transactionalism Trump espoused on the campaign trail. Put simply, when considered in the context of a global competition for power and influence, a vast network of allies and partners starts to look more like an asset than a liability.
Trump seeks “good deals” with Russia. Cozying up to Putin in hopes of receiving Moscow’s help in balancing Beijing would not be one.

lunes, 20 de febrero de 2017

THE REVIVAL OF TOTALITARISM ?








Hannah Arendt in the US in 1944



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Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump: lessons from Hannah Arendt

The political theorist who wrote about the Nazis and “the banality of evil” in the 60 has become a surprise bestseller. Should we heed her warning that protesting just feed the chaos?

THE GUARDIAN

by ZOE WILLIAMS
Wednesday, 1 february 2017


In the scramble to make sense of the post-inauguration world, Amazon has been forced to restock a few key titles: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four hit No 1 at the end of last week, after Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” in place of “some bullshit I just made up”. But the surprise hit – being long, complex and demanding or, as the online magazine Jezebel described it, “extremely metal” – is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951. Commentators have been referencing the work since Donald Trump’s election in November but rarely has this spurred so many people to actually buy a copy.

 

In it, the political theorist (she always explicitly rejected the term “philosopher”) details the trajectory: “antisemitism (not merely hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship)” are considered in their interrelation. Against the necessary background of imperialism, “antisemitism became the catalytic agent first for the rise of the Nazi movement … then for a world war of unparalleled ferocity and, finally, for the emergence of the unprecedented crime of genocide”. That much is well established; the chill is in the detail.

 

When she describes the rise of the dictator, which requires a mass not a mob, you could be reading a sociologist’s thesis about Trump supporters. “The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organisation based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organisations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every country and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.”

 

She describes, quite brusquely, antisemitism at its incipience: “Whereas anti-Jewish sentiments were widespread among the educated classes of Europe throughout the 19th century, antisemitism as an ideology remained, with very few exceptions, the prerogative of crackpots in general and the lunatic fringes in particular.” Yet however you dismissed their mental capacity, this hardcore created the ideological infrastructure on which a mass movement could be built. It is strikingly reminiscent of John Naughton’s description on David Runciman’s interesting Talking Politics podcast about the “alt-right”: “People who belonged loosely to this side of the political system were essentially excluded from public discourse. But it just so happened, they didn’t go quiet. They went to the net. So, for the best part of 20 years, a network of rightwing echo chambers has been established, upon which was built the infrastructure of Trump’s campaign.”

 

Two points come out of that. First, that we can see from the comparison that the net isn’t responsible for everything. Antisemites found ways to keep their ideas alive and generative without any such advantage, and with all the same forces of conservatism and common sense ranged against them. Second, as Runciman asks, what happened to the leftwing networks? Why don’t we have effective echo chambers? It is a question that all of us have been asking, one way or another; there is no shortage of radicalism on the left.

 

Here, Arendt brings some liberating insight, described in precis by Professor Griselda Pollock, an expert in Arendt. “She talks of the creation of pan movements, these widespread ideas that overarch national, political and ethnic elements – the two big pan movements she talks about are bolshevism and nazism. There is a single explanation for everything, and before the single explanation, everything else falls away. She gives a portrait of how you produce these isolated people, who then become susceptible to pan ideologies, which give them a place in something. But the place they have is ultimately sacrificial; they don’t count for anything; all that counts is the big idea.” The left, in other words, isn’t necessarily unequal to the task of creating a pan-ideology; but anyone who believed in pluralism or complexity would have no currency on this terrain. We should be glad not to have been effective in this space, even if it feels like a failure.

 

Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 and was an academic until 1933, when she embarked on charity work, securing passage to Palestine for Jewish children and teenagers. The decision was not based on any sudden realisation of Hitler’s menace. “For goodness sake,” she said, laughing, in a television interview in 1964, “we didn’t need [him] to know that the Nazis were our enemies. We also knew that a large number of Germans were behind him. That could not shock us in 1933.” Rather, she had been alienated from the intellectual milieu by their “coordinated” exclusion of their Jewish colleagues (Arendt came from a family of secular Jewish lefties).

 

“The personal problem did not lie in what our enemies did but in what our friends did,” she said. “[They were] not yet under the pressure of terror, [but] it was as if a vacuum formed around one.” She conducted the refugee work from Paris. Stripped of her German citizenship in 1937, she escaped to New York in 1941 with her husband and mother, via the Gurs internment camp in the Vichy-held south of France.

 

She was never unclear about the magnitude of the Holocaust, saying, in the same interview: “The decisive day was when we heard about Auschwitz. Before that, we said: ‘Well, one has enemies. That is natural. Why shouldn’t people have enemies?’ But this was different. It was as if an abyss had opened. Amends can be made for almost anything, at some point in politics, but not for this.”

 

However, she was a controversial figure by the 1960s, following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, a consideration of Adolf Eichmann’s trial and what it revealed about the nature of the Final Solution and all those who were complicit in it. Opponents accused her of making the Jews complicit in their fate. She rejected that outright – “Nowhere in this book did I accuse the Jews of failing to resist” – but said, “that the tone is predominantly ironic is completely true. [Reading Eichmann’s trial] I laughed countless times, I laughed out loud. I’d probably still laugh three minutes before my certain death.”

 

This is the book that coined the phrase “banality of evil”, which has ramifications for both totalitarianism as a project and the pathways of resistance. But it is also a useful thumbnail of the primacy of language to her understanding of politics; cliches in the service of control, their mundanity, their mendacity, cannot but amuse her. There is also the matter of Martin Heidegger, the philosopher with whom she had a turbulent relationship in the 20s, and some other contact – its extent unclear – after the war, despite his links with the Nazi party, even justifying them (it reads like the darkest imaginable romcom – “But I love him! But he’s a Nazi. But I love him!”).

 

Pollock guards against drawing too many of the obvious parallels between The Origins of Totalitarianism and the US’s situation today: “Islamophobia is not elaborated with the same complexity of tropes and myths as antisemitism and one shouldn’t equate them.” The work of Arendt’s that she refers to most often is the one that came directly after Origins, 1958’s The Human Condition. In the Holocaust, “we have seen the abolition of the human,” Pollock explains, “and then she has to write what would actually be an account of the human as a political creature”. Arendt has two core beliefs about the human condition (not to be confused with human nature). First, Pollock explains: “Every human life is the potential beginning of something new. Unlike animals, which are predictable – each will behave as its parents behaved – something has begun in a human that could be completely different. This is ‘natality’. As a result of that, the human condition is plural.” The consequences of this are vast: as we communicate and use language, we show ourselves to one another in our difference, and it’s in this disclosure that action is generated: we can do something to change the world.

 

Then comes a really important dichotomy, taking its roots from Greek philosophy: the difference between this action and labour, which is what we do to survive. Work is the economic, “which comes from the Greek word oikos, which is the household. But they imagined this other source, the political, the source of speech and action.” This is what constituted, for the Greeks, the human, and through Arendt’s prism, natality and plurality are the spurs of that political self; that is, the political recognises the infinite potential of each human life, while the economic recognises only that element of the human that works, that produces. As Pollock says: “What she was afraid of was the tendency to devalue action, for the economic to overtake the political.”

 

Taken to its logical end, the economic overtaking the political results not in the extermination camp but in the concentration camp; the difference is crucial, Pollock explains. The concentration camp exists not to extinguish life but to extinguish the human. “You are removed from moral action, you become a number and, finally, you are reduced physiologically to a bundle of reactions, as the body struggles to survive extreme emaciation.” If politics is only a set of economic decisions, then the person is no more than the work they do and the infinite preciousness of every person’s potential cascades into a brutal homogeneity, one person indivisible from the next.

 

To put this in a modern context, “official political reality is now being enacted by the modern capitalist businessman”. Politics and economics are, in Trump, indivisible. “And although it looks wonderful that people are demonstrating, it’s actually rather frightening, because it’s generating a crisis situation in which, ultimately, the protection of law and order justifies the government in extreme measures. For some of us, it’s repeating the proto-fascist scenario.” It’s an old Leninist stunt, the generation of civil unrest in order to attack civic society. In that sense, we are all playing into Trump’s tiny hands.

 

Mark Davis, director of the Bauman Institute in Leeds, points us towards another text, On Violence (1970). “I think that gets us closer to what’s going on at the moment,” he says. “She said in that book that violence and power are actually opposites. When institutions, particularly those of government, start to break down and lose their legitimacy, they lose their power over the everyday conduct of citizens. So what they do as a response to the loss of power is incite violence. Violence floods in to the loss of power rather than being an expression of it.”

 

Pollock brings us back to demonstrations and what they do to language, the slogan being a flattening out of complexity, an echo of exactly the same one-idea pan-ideology of the oversimplified worldview they protest against. I’m not sure. You can pack quite a lot into a slogan – I particularly like: “First they came for the Muslims, and we said, not today, motherfucker.” Yet I see the sense of these arguments, and wonder, what would Hannah Arendt do? Would she have marched on Downing Street? Davis is conflicted. “Certainly, I think there is a lot to be gained from people gathering together to show solidarity. But in a world where the institutions that we’re protesting in front of are losing their legitimacy and their power, I’m not sure that this has the impact that it once did. If we think of evil as this one person, this one big event, then we tend to want to match that with one big display of resistance. But actually, if evil is banal – a set of ordinary, mundane decisions day by day – then maybe we have to start living differently day by day.”

 

I still see the point in protesting as a concrete expression of solidarity. I’d take more, if under attack, from a person who went outside than a person who signed a petition. Tangentially, I have a sudden new faith in the feminist framing of recent demonstrations as women’s marches, which does something to allay the intimation of public violence that is always used as the justification of suppression. It seems clear, nonetheless, that it isn’t enough: that perhaps Arendt’s most profound legacy is in establishing that one has to consider oneself political as part of the human condition. What are your political acts, and what politics do they serve?

 

Fuente: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/01/totalitarianism-in-age-donald-trump-lessons-from-hannah-arendt-protests

¿ Qué futuro para Israel ?



Israel iliberal

Netanyahu conduce a Israel hacia posiciones retrógradas. Su gobierno ha abandonado la concepción liberal y globalizada para sumarse a las aventuras de Trump. 
Febrero 2017 
Israel iliberal



Después de medio siglo de ocupación del territorio palestino, Israel está sucumbiendo a sus más profundos impulsos de etnocentrismo y rechaza cada vez más las fronteras reconocidas. El país está ahora en camino a unirse al creciente club de las democracias iliberales y hay que agradecer por esto al primer ministro Benjamín Netanyahu.

Durante los 11 años en los que ha desempeñado el cargo de primer ministro de Israel, Netanyahu ha reformado la psique colectiva del país. Ha elevado al «judío» aislado y traumatizado –que aún no se reconcilia con los «gentiles», sin llegar a mencionar a los «árabes»– por encima del «israelí» laico, liberal y globalizado, conceptualizado en la visión de los padres fundadores del país.

El propio Netanyahu es una persona laica y es un cínico hedonista que se enfrenta a una investigación en curso sobre su supuesta aceptación de lujosos regalos ilícitos de un magnate de Hollywood. Sin embargo, es experto en jugar la «ficha judía» en su propio beneficio. En el año 1996, su promesa de ser «bueno para los judíos» hizo que ganara el poder. En 2015, logró el mismo cometido con su advertencia de que los judíos debían correr a votar por él o su destino iba a ser decidido por «manadas» de árabes que supuestamente se dirigían a las mesas de votación.

Así como apelar a la identidad judía de las personas logra que se ganen elecciones, también logra que se bloqueen las negociaciones de una solución al conflicto palestino-israelí. La insistencia de Netanyahu en que los palestinos reconozcan a Israel como un Estado judío en el año 2014 se convirtió en el último clavo en el ataúd de un proceso de paz ya moribundo.

En muchos sentidos, el perfil político de Netanyahu coincide con el de los republicanos estadounidenses de la línea más intransigente. Su esposa dijo una vez, jactándose, que si Netanyahu hubiese nacido en Estados Unidos podría haber sido presidente de esa nación. Probablemente habría preferido esa vida, en gran medida por el inmenso poder que eso le hubiese otorgado. También le habría permitido evitar ocho años frustrantes de desacuerdos con el presidente Barack Obama.

Ahora, sin embargo, Netanyahu está aliviado con la llegada a la Casa Blanca de Donald Trump, un republicano con ideas afines a las suyas y que es prácticamente en todos los sentidos el polo opuesto de Obama. El último presidente estadounidense mostró empatía por las minorías y los inmigrantes; defendió los derechos humanos y civiles; logró un avance diplomático con Irán; buscó la paz en Palestina; y, lo más problemático de todo, intentó que el líder israelí se responsabilizara por sus actos. Uno de los últimos actos de Obama como presidente fue hacer que Estados Unidos se abstuviera de votar en una resolución del Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas contra la construcción de asentamientos israelíes en los territorios ocupados, en lugar de vetarla.

Netanyahu prefiere, de lejos, la cruda charlatanería de Trump al liberalismo profesoral de Obama. De hecho, Trump y Netanyahu tienen mucho en común, y también con otros líderes iliberales, como el presidente turco Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Los tres consideran la hostilidad abierta hacia los medios de comunicación como una forma de asegurar y consolidar el poder.

Trump ha lanzado, inequívocamente, una «guerra contra los medios de comunicación». Erdoğan, por su parte, ha reprimido la libertad de prensa y arrestado a periodistas por acusaciones de participación en el fracasado golpe militar de julio pasado. Netanyahu se ha desempeñado como ministro de Comunicaciones en ejercicio de Israel desde finales del año 2014

Comuncación tienen que cuidar que quienes están en el poder se responsabilicen de sus actos. Por lo tanto, aquellos que están en el poder tratan de sofocar a los medios de comunicación. Una forma de hacerlo es amplificar las voces de alternativas que están más de acuerdo con las ideas que ellos tienen, como por ejemplo el Israel Hayom, un periódico gratuito en idioma hebreo que se publica diariamente y se dedica a vocear alabanzas a Netanyahu.

La meta de este folleto de estilo norcoreano no es obtener ganancias. En 2014, Sheldon Adelson, un magnate de los casinos estadounidenses que apoya desde hace tiempo a Netanyahu y que también ha ayudado a financiar la campaña de Trump, invirtió unos 50 millones de dólares en el Israel Hayom, que ha perdido más de 250 millones de dólares desde su lanzamiento en 2007. Netanyahu celebró elecciones anticipadas en 2014, con el objetivo de proteger a su periódico portavoz –el mismo que ahora tiene la mayor circulación entre todos los periódicos israelíes– de los proyectos de ley presentados en el Parlamento que amenazaban con imponerle restricciones. 

Netanyahu siempre ha negado tener algo que ver con el Israel Hayom, aunque la verdad es que prácticamente es su redactor en jefe. ¿En qué otra capacidad pudo haber discutido con el propietario de su principal competidor, Yedioth Ahronot, la posibilidad de restringir la distribución de Israel Hayom, a cambio de una cobertura más favorable?

Por supuesto, Netanyahu no está haciendo todo el trabajo pesado en cuanto a empujar a Israel hacia el iliberalismo, y la censura y el acoso no están reservados exclusivamente a los medios de comunicación. El ministro de Educación, Naftali Bennett –presidente del partido Casa Judía, un aliado clave en la coalición de extrema derecha de Netanyahu y un destacado defensor de la anexión de tierras palestinas– está impartiendo instrucciones a las escuelas sobre que «estudiar el judaísmo es más importante que estudiar matemáticas y ciencia». Una novela que describe un romance entre un muchacho palestino y una muchacha judía ha sido prohibida en los programas escolares.

La ministra de Justicia, Ayelet Shaked, también miembro del partido Casa Judía, es la segunda persona tras Bennett que muestra su ardor ultrasionista. Actualmente encabeza un ataque contra la última frontera de la democracia israelí, la Corte Suprema, condenándola por acciones como la decisión del pasado mes de abril en la que se sostuvo que las políticas sobre el gas natural de Israel eran inconstitucionales.

Más recientemente, Shaked aprobó la «Ley de Lealtad Cultural», que haría que el financiamiento cultural del gobierno dependiera de la «lealtad» que tiene el receptor hacia el Estado judío. Los grupos derechistas que apoyan la anexión, mientras tanto, reciben un apoyo abundante del gobierno, así como de donantes judíos del extranjero. 

Las nociones de lealtad se utilizan como armas no solo contra los artistas. Un recién aprobado proyecto de ley –claramente dirigido a los representantes de los árabes israelíes en el Knéset (Parlamento)– permitiría que los miembros del Knéset sean retirados por deslealtad al Estado. Las ONG que se centran en los derechos humanos y la búsqueda de la paz son escrudiñadas como agentes extranjeros.

Para Israel, la democracia siempre ha sido un activo estratégico, porque un Israel democrático encaja de manera natural en la Alianza Occidental. Al tiempo que Occidente impuso rápidamente sanciones a la Rusia del presidente Vladímir Putin después de su anexión de Crimea, no ha castigado la ocupación israelí de tierras palestinas. Sin embargo, a medida que Israel adopta prácticas inspiradas en Putin, su conexión con su retaguardia estratégica en Occidente se torna cada vez más débil.

Queda por ver si el impredecible Trump cumplirá las expectativas de Israel. Lo que está claro es que, al debilitar sus credenciales democráticas, Israel pone en peligro la cuerda salvavidas que lo conecta con Occidente, incluyendo al Estados Unidos post-Trump.

Traducción: Rocío L. Barrientos
Fuente: Project Syndicate

domingo, 12 de febrero de 2017

Looking to World War III




Resultado de imagen de brookings institution press










 


Backing into World War III
Monday, February 6, 2017


Foreign Policy

Robert Kagan


Senior Fellow -  Project on International Order and Strategy, Brookings Institution

Think of two significant trend lines in the world today. One is the increasing ambition and activism of the two great revisionist powers, Russia and China. The other is the declining confidence, capacity, and will of the democratic world, and especially of the United States, to maintain the dominant position it has held in the international system since 1945. As those two lines move closer, as the declining will and capacity of the United States and its allies to maintain the present world order meet the increasing desire and capacity of the revisionist powers to change it, we will reach the moment at which the existing order collapses and the world descends into a phase of brutal anarchy, as it has three times in the past two centuries. The cost of that descent, in lives and treasure, in lost freedoms and lost hope, will be staggering.
Americans tend to take the fundamental stability of the international order for granted, even while complaining about the burden the United States carries in preserving that stability. History shows that world orders do collapse, however, and when they do it is often unexpected, rapid, and violent. The late 18th century was the high point of the Enlightenment in Europe, before the continent fell suddenly into the abyss of the Napoleonic Wars. In the first decade of the 20th century, the world’s smartest minds predicted an end to great-power conflict as revolutions in communication and transportation knit economies and people closer together. The most devastating war in history came four years later. The apparent calm of the postwar 1920s became the crisis-ridden 1930s and then another world war. Where exactly we are in this classic scenario today, how close the trend lines are to that intersection point is, as always, impossible to know. Are we three years away from a global crisis, or 15? That we are somewhere on that path, however, is unmistakable.
Are we three years away from a global crisis, or 15?

And while it is too soon to know what effect Donald Trump’s presidency will have on these trends, early signs suggest that the new administration is more likely to hasten us toward crisis than slow or reverse these trends. The further accommodation of Russia can only embolden Vladimir Putin, and the tough talk with China will likely lead Beijing to test the new administration’s resolve militarily. Whether the president is ready for such a confrontation is entirely unclear. For the moment, he seems not to have thought much about the future ramifications of his rhetoric and his actions.
China and Russia are classic revisionist powers. Although both have never enjoyed greater security from foreign powers than they do today—Russia from its traditional enemies to the west, China from its traditional enemy in the east—they are dissatisfied with the current global configuration of power. Both seek to restore the hegemonic dominance they once enjoyed in their respective regions. For China, that means dominance of East Asia, with countries like Japan, South Korea, and the nations of Southeast Asia both acquiescing to Beijing’s will and acting in conformity with China’s strategic, economic, and political preferences. That includes American influence withdrawn to the eastern Pacific, behind the Hawaiian Islands. For Russia, it means hegemonic influence in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which Moscow has traditionally regarded as either part of its empire or part of its sphere of influence. Both Beijing and Moscow seek to redress what they regard as an unfair distribution of power, influence, and honor in the U.S.-led postwar global order. As autocracies, both feel threatened by the dominant democratic powers in the international system and by the democracies on their borders. Both regard the United States as the principal obstacle to their ambitions, and therefore both seek to weaken the American-led international security order that stands in the way of their achieving what they regard as their rightful destinies.
IT WAS GOOD WHILE IT LASTED
Until fairly recently, Russia and China have faced considerable, almost insuperable, obstacles in achieving their objectives. The chief obstacle has been the power and coherence of the international order itself and its principal promoter and defender. The American-led system of political and military alliances, especially in the two critical regions of Europe and East Asia, has presented China and Russia with what Dean Acheson once referred to as “situations of strength” that have required them to pursue their ambitions cautiously and, since the end of the Cold War, to defer serious efforts to disrupt the international system.

The system has checked their ambitions in both positive and negative ways. During the era of American primacy, China and Russia have participated in and for the most part been beneficiaries of the open international economic system the United States created and helps sustain; so long as that system functions, they have had more to gain by playing in it than by challenging and overturning it. The political and strategic aspects of the order, however, have worked to their detriment. The growth and vibrancy of democratic government in the two decades following the collapse of Soviet communism posed a continual threat to the ability of rulers in Beijing and Moscow to maintain control, and since the end of the Cold War they have regarded every advance of democratic institutions—especially the geographical advance of liberal democracies close to their borders—as an existential threat. That’s for good reason: Autocratic powers since the days of Klemens von Metternich have always feared the contagion of liberalism. The mere existence of democracies on their borders, the global free flow of information they cannot control, the dangerous connection between free market capitalism and political freedom—all pose a threat to rulers who depend on keeping restive forces in their own countries in check. 
The continual challenge to the legitimacy of their rule posed by the U.S.-supported democratic order has therefore naturally made them hostile both to that order and to the United States. But, until recently, a preponderance of domestic and international forces has dissuaded them from confronting the order directly. Chinese rulers have had to worry about what an unsuccessful confrontation with the United States might do to their legitimacy at home. Even Putin has pushed only against open doors, as in Syria, where the United States responded passively to his probes. He has been more cautious when confronted by even marginal U.S. and European opposition, as in Ukraine.
During the era of American primacy, China and Russia have participated in and for the most part been beneficiaries of the open international economic system the United States created and helps sustain; so long as that system functions, they have had more to gain by playing in it than by challenging and overturning it.

The greatest check on Chinese and Russian ambitions has been the military and economic power of the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia. China, although increasingly powerful, has had to contemplate facing the combined military and economic strength of the world’s superpower and some very formidable regional powers linked by alliance or common strategic interest—including Japan, India, and South Korea, as well as smaller but still potent nations like Vietnam and Australia. Russia has had to face the United States and its NATO allies. When united, these U.S.-led alliances present a daunting challenge to a revisionist power that can call on few allies of its own for assistance. Even were the Chinese to score an early victory in a conflict, such as the military subjection of Taiwan or a naval battle in the South or East China Sea, they would have to contend over time with the combined industrial productive capacities of some of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations and the likely cutoff of access to foreign markets on which their own economy depends. A weaker Russia, with its depleted population and oil- and gas-dependent economy, would face an even greater challenge.
For decades, the strong global position enjoyed by the United States and its allies has discouraged any serious challenge. So long as the United States was perceived as a dependable ally, Chinese and Russian leaders feared that aggressive moves would backfire and possibly bring their regimes down. This is what the political scientist William Wohlforth once described as the inherent stability of the unipolar order: As dissatisfied regional powers sought to challenge the status quo, their alarmed neighbors turned to the distant American superpower to contain their ambitions. And it worked. The United States stepped up, and Russia and China largely backed down—or were preempted before acting at all.

Faced with these obstacles, the best option for the two revisionist great powers has always been to hope for or, if possible, engineer a weakening of the U.S.-supported world order from within, either by separating the United States from its allies or by raising doubts about the U.S. commitment and thereby encouraging would-be allies and partners to forgo the strategic protection of the liberal world order and seek accommodation with its challengers.
The present system has therefore depended not only on American power but on coherence and unity at the heart of the democratic world. The United States has had to play its part as the principal guarantor of the order, especially in the military and strategic realm, but the order’s ideological and economic core—the democracies of Europe and East Asia and the Pacific—has also had to remain relatively healthy and confident.
In recent years, both pillars have been shaken. The democratic order has weakened and fractured at its core. Difficult economic conditions, the recrudescence of nationalism and tribalism, weak and uncertain political leadership and unresponsive mainstream political parties, and a new era of communications that seems to strengthen rather than weaken tribalism have together produced a crisis of confidence not only in the democracies but in what might be called the liberal enlightenment project. That project elevated universal principles of individual rights and common humanity over ethnic, racial, religious, national, or tribal differences. It looked to a growing economic interdependence to create common interests across boundaries and to the establishment of international institutions to smooth differences and facilitate cooperation among nations. Instead, the past decade has seen the rise of tribalism and nationalism, an increasing focus on the Other in all societies, and a loss of confidence in government, in the capitalist system, and in democracy. We are witnessing the opposite of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history.” History is returning with a vengeance and with it all the darker aspects of the human soul, including, for many, the perennial human yearning for a strong leader to provide firm guidance in a time of confusion and incoherence.
THE DARK AGES 2.0
This crisis of the enlightenment project may have been inevitable, a recurring phenomenon produced by inherent flaws in both capitalism and democracy. In the 1930s, economic crisis and rising nationalism led many to doubt whether either democracy or capitalism was preferable to alternatives such as fascism and communism. And it is no coincidence that the crisis of confidence in liberalism accompanied a simultaneous breakdown of the strategic order. Then, the question was whether the United States as the outside power would step in and save or remake an order that Britain and France were no longer able or willing to sustain. Now, the question is whether the United States is willing to continue upholding the order that it created and which depends entirely on American power or whether Americans are prepared to take the risk—if they even understand the risk—of letting the order collapse into chaos and conflict.
That willingness has been in doubt for some time, well before the election of Trump and even before the election of Barack Obama. Increasingly in the quarter century after the end of the Cold War, Americans have been wondering why they bear such an unusual and outsized responsibility for preserving global order when their own interests are not always clearly served—and when the United States seems to be making all the sacrifices while others benefit. Few remember the reasons why the United States took on this abnormal role after the calamitous two world wars of the 20th century. 
The millennial generation born after the end of the Cold War can hardly be expected to understand the lasting significance of the political, economic, and security structures established after World War II. Nor are they likely to learn much about it in high school and college textbooks obsessed with noting the evils and follies of American “imperialism.” Both the crises of the first half of the 20th century and its solution in 1945 have been forgotten. As a consequence, the American public’s patience with the difficulties and costs inherent in playing that global role have worn thin. Whereas previous unsuccessful and costly wars, in Korea in 1950 and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and previous economic downturns, such as with the energy crisis and crippling “stagflation” of the mid- to late 1970s, did not have the effect of turning Americans against global involvement, the unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis of 2008 have.
Obama pursued an ambivalent approach to global involvement, but his core strategy was retrenchment. In his actions and his statements, he critiqued and repudiated previous American strategy and reinforced a national mood favoring a much less active role in the world and much narrower definition of American interests. The Obama administration responded to the George W. Bush administration’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan not by restoring American power and influence but by further reducing them. Although the administration promised to “rebalance” American foreign policy to Asia and the Pacific, in practice that meant reducing global commitments and accommodating revisionist powers at the expense of allies’ security.
The administration’s early attempt to “reset” relations with Russia struck the first blow to America’s reputation as a reliable ally. Coming just after the Russian invasion of Georgia, it appeared to reward Moscow’s aggression. The reset also came at the expense of U.S. allies in Central Europe, as programs of military cooperation with Poland and the Czech Republic were jettisoned to appease the Kremlin. This attempt at accommodation, moreover, came just as Russian policy toward the West—not to mention Putin’s repressive policies toward his own people—was hardening. Far from eliciting better behavior by Russia, the reset emboldened Putin to push harder. Then, in 2014, the West’s inadequate response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea, though better than the Bush administration’s anemic response to the invasion of Georgia (Europe and the United States at least imposed sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine), still indicated reluctance on the part of the U.S. administration to force Russia back in its declared sphere of interest. Obama, in fact, publicly acknowledged Russia’s privileged position in Ukraine even as the United States and Europe sought to protect that country’s sovereignty. In Syria, the administration practically invited Russian intervention through Washington’s passivity, and certainly did nothing to discourage it, thus reinforcing the growing impression of an America in retreat across the Middle East (an impression initially created by the unnecessary and unwise withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq). Subsequent Russian actions that increased the refugee flow from Syria into Europe also brought no American response, despite the evident damage of those refugee flows to European democratic institutions. The signal sent by the Obama administration was that none of this was really America’s problem.
In East Asia, the Obama administration undermined its otherwise commendable efforts to assert America’s continuing interest and influence. The so-called “pivot” proved to be mostly rhetoric. Inadequate overall defense spending precluded the necessary increases in America’s regional military presence in a meaningful way, and the administration allowed a critical economic component, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to die in Congress, chiefly a victim of its own party’s opposition. The pivot also suffered from the general perception of American retreat and retrenchment, encouraged both by presidential rhetoric and by administration policies, especially in the Middle East. The premature, unnecessary, and strategically costly withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, followed by the accommodating agreement with Iran on its nuclear program, and then by the failure to hold the line on threats to use force against Syria’s president, was noticed around the world. Despite the Obama administration’s insistence that American strategy should be geared toward Asia, U.S. allies have been left wondering how reliable the U.S. commitment might be when facing the challenge posed by China. The Obama administration erred in imagining that it could retrench globally while reassuring allies in Asia that the United States remained a reliable partner.
NATURE ABHORS A VACUUM
The effect on the two great revisionist powers, meanwhile, has been to encourage greater efforts at revision. In recent years, both powers have been more active in challenging the order, and one reason has been the growing perception that the United States is losing both the will and the capacity to sustain it. The psychological and political effect of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the United States, which has been to weaken support for American global engagement across the board, has provided an opening.
It is a myth, prevalent among liberal democracies, that revisionist powers can be pacified by acquiescence to their demands. American retrenchment, by this logic, ought to reduce tensions and competition. Unfortunately, the opposite is more often the case. The more secure revisionist powers feel, the more ambitious they are in seeking to change the system to their advantage because the resistance to change appears to be lessening. Just look at both China and Russia: Never in the past two centuries have they enjoyed greater security from external attack than they do today. Yet both remain dissatisfied and have become increasingly aggressive in pressing what they perceive to be their growing advantage in a system where the United States no longer puts up as much resistance as it used to.
The two great powers have differed, so far, chiefly in their methods. China has until now been the more careful, cautious, and patient of the two, seeking influence primarily through its great economic clout and using its growing military power chiefly as a source of deterrence and regional intimidation. It has not resorted to the outright use of force yet, although its actions in the South China Sea are military in nature, with strategic objectives. And while Beijing has been wary of using military force until now, it would be a mistake to assume it will continue show such restraint in the future—possibly the near future. Revisionist great powers with growing military capabilities invariably make use of those capabilities when they believe the possible gains outweigh the risks and costs. If the Chinese perceive America’s commitment to its allies and its position in the region to be weakening, or its capacity to make good on those commitments to be declining, then they will be more inclined to attempt to use the power they are acquiring in order to achieve their objectives. As the trend lines draw closer, this is where the first crisis is likely to take place.
Russia has been far more aggressive. It has invaded two neighboring states—Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014—and in both cases hived off significant portions of those two nations’ sovereign territory. Given the intensity with which the United States and its allies would have responded to such actions during the four decades of the Cold War, their relative lack of a response must have sent quite a signal to the Kremlin—and to others around the world. Moscow then followed by sending substantial forces into Syria. It has used its dominance of European energy markets as a weapon. It has used cyberwarfare against neighboring states. It has engaged in extensive information warfare on a global scale.
More recently, the Russian government has deployed a weapon that the Chinese either lack or have so far chosen not to deploy—the ability to interfere directly in Western electoral processes, both to influence their outcomes and more generally to discredit the democratic system. Russia funds right-wing populist parties across Europe, including in France; uses its media outlets to support favored candidates and attack others; has disseminated “fake news” to influence voters, most recently in Italy’s referendum; and has hacked private communications in order to embarrass those it wishes to defeat. This past year, Russia for the first time employed this powerful weapon against the United States, heavily interfering in the American electoral process.

Although Russia, by any measure, is the weaker of the two great powers, it has so far had more success than China in accomplishing its objective of dividing and disrupting the West.


Although Russia, by any measure, is the weaker of the two great powers, it has so far had more success than China in accomplishing its objective of dividing and disrupting the West. Its interference in Western democratic political systems, its information warfare, and its role in creating increased refugee flows from Syria into Europe have all contributed to the sapping of Europeans’ confidence in their political systems and established political parties. Its military intervention in Syria, contrasted with American passivity, has exacerbated existing doubts about American staying power in the region. Beijing, until recently, has succeeded mostly in driving American allies closer to the United States out of concern for growing Chinese power—but that could change quickly, especially if the United States continues on its present trajectory. There are signs that regional powers are already recalculating: East Asian countries are contemplating regional trade agreements that need not include the United States or, in the case of the Philippines, are actively courting China, while a number of nations in Eastern and Central Europe are moving closer to Russia, both strategically and ideologically. We could soon face a situation where both great revisionist powers are acting aggressively, including by military means, posing extreme challenges to American and global security in two regions at once.
THE DISPENSABLE NATION
All this comes as Americans continue to signal their reluctance to uphold the world order they created after World War II. Donald Trump was not the only major political figure in this past election season to call for a much narrower definition of American interests and a lessening of the burdens of American global leadership. President Obama and Bernie Sanders both expressed a version of “America First.” The candidate who spoke often of America’s “indispensable” global role lost, and even Hillary Clinton felt compelled to jettison her earlier support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. At the very least, there should be doubts about the American public’s willingness to continue supporting the international alliance structure, denying the revisionist powers their desired spheres of influence and regional hegemony, and upholding democratic and free market norms in the international system.
Coming as it does at a time of growing great-power competition, this narrowing definition of American interests will likely hasten a return to the instability and clashes of previous eras. The weakness at the core of the democratic world and the shedding by the United States of global responsibilities have already encouraged a more aggressive revisionism by the dissatisfied powers. That, in turn, has further sapped the democratic world’s confidence and willingness to resist. History suggests that this is a downward spiral from which it will be difficult to recover, absent a rather dramatic shift of course by the United States.
The weakness at the core of the democratic world and the shedding by the United States of global responsibilities have already encouraged a more aggressive revisionism by the dissatisfied powers.

That shift may come too late. It was in the 1920s, not the 1930s, that the democratic powers made the most important and ultimately fatal decisions. Americans’ disillusionment after World War I led them to reject playing a strategic role in preserving the peace in Europe and Asia, even though America was the only nation powerful enough to play that role. The withdrawal of the United States helped undermine the will of Britain and France and encouraged Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia to take increasingly aggressive actions to achieve regional dominance. Most Americans were convinced that nothing that happened in Europe or Asia could affect their security. It took World War II to convince them that was a mistake. The return to normalcy” of the 1920 election seemed safe and innocent at the time, but the essentially selfish policies pursued by the world’s strongest power in the following decade helped set the stage for the calamities of the 1930s. By the time the crises began to erupt, it was already too late to avoid paying the high price of global conflict.

In such times, it has always been tempting to believe that geopolitical competition can be solved through efforts at cooperation and accommodation. The idea, recently proposed by Niall Ferguson, that the world can be ruled jointly by the United States, Russia, and China is not a new one. Such condominiums have been proposed and attempted in every era when the dominant power or powers in the international system sought to fend off challenges from the dissatisfied revisionist powers. It has rarely worked. Revisionist great powers are not easy to satisfy short of complete capitulation. Their sphere of influence is never quite large enough to satisfy their pride or their expanding need for security. In fact, their very expansion creates insecurity, by frightening neighbors and leading them to band together against the rising power. The satiated power that Otto von Bismarck spoke of is rare. The German leaders who succeeded him were not satisfied even with being the strongest power in Europe. In their efforts to grow still stronger, they produced coalitions against them, making their fear of “encirclement” a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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GIVE ‘EM AN INCH, THEY’LL TAKE A MILE
This is a common trait of rising powers—their actions produce the very insecurity they claim to want to redress. They harbor grievances against the existing order (both Germany and Japan considered themselves the “have-not” nations), but their grievances cannot be satisfied so long as the existing order remains in place. Marginal concession is not enough, but the powers upholding the existing order will not make more than marginal concessions unless they are compelled to by superior strength. Japan, the aggrieved “have-not” nation of the 1930s, did not satisfy itself by taking Manchuria in 1931. Germany, the aggrieved victim of Versailles, did not satisfy itself by bringing the Germans of the Sudetenland back into the fold. They demanded much more, and they could not persuade the democratic powers to give them what they wanted without resorting to war.
Granting the revisionist powers spheres of influence is not a recipe for peace and tranquility but rather an invitation to inevitable conflict.

Granting the revisionist powers spheres of influence is not a recipe for peace and tranquility but rather an invitation to inevitable conflict. Russia’s historical sphere of influence does not end in Ukraine. It begins in Ukraine. It extends to the Baltic States, to the Balkans, and to the heart of Central Europe. And within Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, other nations do not enjoy autonomy or even sovereignty. There was no independent Poland under the Russian Empire nor under the Soviet Union. For China to gain its desired sphere of influence in East Asia will mean that, when it chooses, it can close the region off to the United States—not only militarily but politically and economically, too.
China will, of course, inevitably exercise great sway in its own region, as will Russia. The United States cannot and should not prevent China from being an economic powerhouse. Nor should it wish for the collapse of Russia. The United States should even welcome competition of a certain kind. Great powers compete across multiple planes—economic, ideological, and political, as well as military. Competition in most spheres is necessary and even healthy. Within the liberal order, China can compete economically and successfully with the United States; Russia can thrive in the international economic order upheld by the democratic system, even if it is not itself democratic.
But military and strategic competition is different. The security situation undergirds everything else. It remains true today as it has since World War II that only the United States has the capacity and the unique geographical advantages to provide global security and relative stability. There is no stable balance of power in Europe or Asia without the United States. And while we can talk about “soft power” and “smart power,” they have been and always will be of limited value when confronting raw military power. Despite all of the loose talk of American decline, it is in the military realm where U.S. advantages remain clearest. Even in other great powers’ backyards, the United States retains the capacity, along with its powerful allies, to deter challenges to the security order. But without a U.S. willingness to maintain the balance in far-flung regions of the world, the system will buckle under the unrestrained military competition of regional powers. Part of that willingness entails defense spending commensurate with America’s continuing global role.
For the United States to accept a return to spheres of influence would not calm the international waters. It would merely return the world to the condition it was in at the end of the 19th century, with competing great powers clashing over inevitably intersecting and overlapping spheres. These unsettled, disordered conditions produced the fertile ground for the two destructive world wars of the first half of the 20th century. The collapse of the British-dominated world order on the oceans, the disruption of the uneasy balance of power on the European continent as a powerful unified Germany took shape, and the rise of Japanese power in East Asia all contributed to a highly competitive international environment in which dissatisfied great powers took the opportunity to pursue their ambitions in the absence of any power or group of powers to unite in checking them. The result was an unprecedented global calamity and death on an epic scale. It has been the great accomplishment of the U.S.-led world order in the 70 years since the end of World War II that this kind of competition has been held in check and great power conflicts have been avoided. It will be more than a shame if Americans were to destroy what they created—and not because it was no longer possible to sustain but simply because they chose to stop trying.