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Report from the Brave Old World, and Another Thank You
I’m stunned by how much support you’ve given this project. I’m honestly astonished. Thank you. I don’t know if I can even explain how much it means to me and why. Suffice to say, it means a great deal.
Here’s the first thing I did with the money. I spent an experimental $7.49 on a Pressfolio site to see whether Pressfolio’s easy to use and whether it might be a good way to keep all of the coming year’s reporting in one place. Pressfolio gets an A+ from me for design and simplicity (putting that up took me all of an hour), but it fails “multimedia-friendly.” There’s no easy way to add video or audio unless you host it somewhere else. That might be okay, though: Having an easy-to-use, visually pleasing place to put for “finished essays” might be worth $7.49 a month. What do you think?
Now — to Europe. Thought I’d share a few items that caught my eye this morning.
In The New York Times, Ross Douhat revisits Robert Kagan’s thesis that Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus:
Most Europeans, Kagan argued, thought of themselves as citizens of “a posthistorical paradise of peace and relative prosperity,” in which threats could be safely managed without military force, and systems of “transnational negotiation and cooperation” were making war and nationalism obsolete.
Most Americans, on the other hand, still saw geopolitics through a Hobbesian lens: as a struggle for mastery in which threats need to be confronted quickly, multilateralism is at best a luxury, and liberal values only flourish under the umbrella of overwhelming military might.
But now, Ross believes, the planetary roles are reversed:
Which is why, in this time of political turmoil on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s so striking to watch Mars and Venus reverse their Bush-era alignment.
It’s too soon to say Europeans are actually from Mars once again. But the Continent’s Venusian idyll has taken blow after blow: the euro crisis, the aggressions of Vladimir Putin, and now the convergence of mass migration and Islamist terror. Nationalism is returning, border fences are going up. The center is weakening, the far right is gaining power. The Mediterranean and the Russian marches are zones of conflict again, and ancient habits — French military adventurism, Little Englander separatism, a tense relationship with Islam — are resurfacing.
The European elite still believes in the Kantian dream of perpetual peace, which is how the Continent ended up with Angela Merkel’s open-door policy for Syrian refugees. But its leaders are also adapting to post-Kantian reality, and nowhere more so than in France, where the government has basically gone Le Bush-Cheney under both Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande: intervening in Libya, Mali and Syria, responding to terrorist attacks with Bush-esque rhetoric, and implementing a terror crackdown that makes the Patriot Act look libertarian.
I was never wholly persuaded by Kagan’s planetary thesis in the first place, and I’m not sure I agree with Ross’s description of the role-reversal, but let’s accept it for the sake of argument. What’s strange, notes Ross, and “somewhat in tension with Kagan’s original argument” (flatly contradicted by it, actually) is that this is happening even though there’s been no real change in the relative power of the United States and Europe. “We’re still the only hyperpower; they’re still militarily weak … France and Britain couldn’t have toppled Qaddafi without us. The nations of Eastern Europe still need our protection against Putin.”
He imagines the future if these trends continue:
The time is the late 2020s, let’s say, and the French and Germans and Poles demand that the United States lend our still-unparalleled military strength to a conflict that seems essential to European security — toppling a nascent caliphate in North Africa, or recovering W.M.D. from a collapsing post-Putin Russia.
And a Socialist administration in Washington, backed by more than a few Trumpian Nationalists in Congress, looks across the ocean at Europe’s wars and whispers, “not this time.”
Maybe.
But if Europe is at war, argues H.D.S. Greenway, it’s only at war with itself:
Virtually all involved with the terrorist attacks on Paris and Brussels were either French- or Belgian-born citizens. If Europe is at war, it is at war with itself. How did this come to pass? Primarily it comes from Europe’s inability to integrate its growing Muslim population, and that’s a problem that has been going on for almost a century.
He hasn’t much insight about this; the rest of the article only offers the now-standard observation that Europe’s problems are complex. “War is not going to solve this problem,” he concludes — although he doesn’t say what will.
Quite a few Europeans don’t agree that they’re at war with themselves. They believe they’re at war with Russia, and they believe the United States is, too:
The disconnect was striking. As Donald Trump doubled down on his disdain for an “obsolete” NATO this week, Eastern European and Baltic leaders were pitching a very different message to U.S. leaders: American support for the 66-year-old alliance is more vital than ever.
“It is in the interest of the United States not to have war in Europe,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told reporters in Washington. “The alliance has to be protected on all of its flanks” against an increasingly aggressive Russia, he added.
The Obama administration was clearly listening. On Wednesday, it said more troops and tanks will be sent to Europe’s eastern fringes from February 2017, with military exercises planned in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. …
Leaders from Europe’s eastern countries were quick to tell the U.S: We pay our own way.
“We understand that security is not a one-way street. You can’t only be a consumer — you need to do your bit,” Estonian Defense Minister Hannes Hanso told POLITICO, after a meeting with Defense Secretary Ash Carter at the Pentagon.
Noting Estonian involvement in the Middle East and the Balkans, along with the country’s population of just 1.3 million, he said his country is sending instructors to Iraq to help train security forces, and added that Estonia is one of only five countries that meets the NATO mandate of spending at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. (The others are the U.S., Poland, Greece and the United Kingdom.) …
European defense cuts have halted after years of clawbacks. And NATO’s former supreme allied commander in Europe, Admiral James Stavridis, told POLITICO that “we love to hammer [the Europeans],” but the reality is that non-U.S. NATO alliance members spend a total of $300 billion on defense — more than Russia and China’s total defense spending. …
Officials from the Baltic states stress that the Russian threat to their security is far from theoretical. Hanso noted that Moscow has been placing weapons systems and troops in the Russian province of Kaliningrad — which is separated from the rest of the country and sits between Lithuania and Poland — and conducting exercises there. …
Garry Kasparov agrees with the Baltic states about the severity of the threat. But he doesn’t agree that the Obama Administration is listening. He holds, as does Douhat, that America has already retreated-unto-Venus — and he suspects war might solve at least some of the problems.
“The 21st century,” he writes, “has been marked by two complementary trends in global security: the rise of new and unexpected threats and the return of old ones.” (I don’t know what he means when he says those trends are “complimentary.” I suspect he just means, “bad.”)
The old menaces of the 20th century have reappeared in updated forms. Communism as a political ideology is as bankrupt as ever, but the aggressive despotism that enforced it for decades before the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union has returned to the world stage, due largely to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The United States, a global hegemon alternately over-eager or reluctant, has reacted in dramatically inconsistent ways to the new threats while mostly ignoring the resurgence of the old ones.
No, he doesn’t think the Obama Administration is listening at all. To the contrary, he sees a marked isolationist trend in American policy:
Obama and his fellow neo-isolationists are well aware that few are condemned and fewer are convicted of having the power to prevent a tragedy but refusing to do so, while a single death resulting from intervention will be denounced. A quarter-million deaths, a dozen terror attacks, a million refugees, these are politically acceptable consequences of inaction, but a single casualty from action, even attempting to prevent those horrors, is considered politically unacceptable. That is the ghastly arithmetic of appeasement in the 21st century.
Knowingly declining to prevent a murder, or a genocide, cannot carry the same moral charge as committing one, but it is nonetheless a crime. When America, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, is content to play the role of a just another apathetic bystander, it is a crime with a powerful ripple effect. Recently, Freedom House released its latest Freedom in the World report, finding “an overall drop in freedom for the ninth consecutive year.” It is no coincidence that this has happened as history’s greatest defender of freedom, the United States, has abdicated that role.
One last item that caught my eye: Former Defense Secretary William Perry is warning that we’re on the verge of a new nuclear arms race. “The danger of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than during the Cold War,” he argues:
The danger stems not only from terrorist groups like Islamic State, which would gladly steal or buy nuclear material on the black market, but also from the huge nuclear arsenals the United States, Russia and other big powers maintain more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War. … “We’ve avoided a catastrophe more by good luck than by good management,” Perry told a meeting at the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank.
I’m struck by this: Everyone in the West senses that something dreadful is afoot. No one thinks things are going swimmingly. No one is optimistic. But no one can agree who the West’s enemies are, whether the West really exists, whether it’s allied with itself, and if so, who’s supposed to lead the charge — or who’s in fact leading it.
What’s the source of this confusion?
I’ll try to answer that in the coming year. I’m curious to hear your first, instinctive response to that question.
Published in General
It looks good. Nice clean layout, easy navigation.
Could you just host the stuff on YouTube and add links to your site for A/V stuff?
I don’t know. I’ll try and see how it looks.
Part of the confusion comes from the Western ideals of loyalty and assimilation. Quite frankly it doesn’t matter if the Brussels terrorists were born in Syria, Belgium or Brooklyn.
The West has entered into it’s secular humanism phase full throttle and that renders it unable to intellectually grasp with an ideology based in religious fervor. They sit confused, arguing what it means to be European while their enemies know that they are, first and foremost, soldiers for Allah. Once you have declared a suicidal devotion to a god how strong is a call for patriotic loyalty to the geography of birth?
As for American isolation, that’s hardly new. The America First movement before WWII is a mirror image of today. The horror of The Great War turned a generation into isolationists. The horror of the next war turned a generation into the world’s policemen. This generation in power now has never really seen the consequences of a genocidal maniac and has no understanding whatsoever of how to prevent world war.
What confusion? Why should there be agreement on what “the West” really is? In the absence of such (unlikely) agreement, how can there be agreement on who the enemy is? And how could there possibly be a leader?
At the core of the New Mentality, the End of History ideology is a specific form of narcissism. The myth is that one is the judge of events, never a mere participant much less the victim of events. Wealthy white people have supposedly transcended membership in mere ethnicity or religion but act as a benevolent ruler of those who remain contained with cultures and (acceptably unfamilar) religions.
War and any assertion of national interest is bad because it threatens to drag one back down into mere membership on a side instead of invulnerable transcendence. Similarly, reports of attacks by Islamist and other external enemies do not instill anywhere near as much fear as as the ever present danger from traditional morality, kinship, ethnicity, patriotism and similar threats to one’s self-gratifying transcendence.
For a European ‘transcendent’, fighting Islamist aggression and making unqualified demands for adoption of liberal, secular values as a condition of immigration raise the horrible bubble-bursting notion that one is actually a vulnerable member of a nation, a cultural tradition and a creed and not a transcendent being, free and entitled to the unfettered pursuit of gratification.
I am one consumer-of-content who strongly prefers to have the A/V stuff “right there.” My vote is that you continue looking for possible platforms, until you find one that can be a one-stop.
“What’s the source of this confusion?” is quite a question to take up, Claire.
I appreciate Kagan’s and Douthat’s turning to our psychologies for a partial answer, and I think it is often helpful to look at national character as a factor that can both help and hinder us internationally. But it is important to understand that we have been the naive objects of disinformation campaigns and the willing victims of harmful ideologies (relativism and historicism, among others) and I think that you will find part of your answer in the decline of the West’s ability to defend itself fundamentally. See, for instance, Senza Radici (Without Roots) by Marcello Pera and Joseph Ratzinger.
I think that one of the reasons people are so nervous now is because the beheadings and crucifixions strike at the foundations of the West in a way that the Russians and the Chinese, say, do not, partly because these brutal actions are not hidden but are indeed glorified. We may have bought into relativism and a deadly meekness, but anyone who takes them at their word can see that radical Islam is a deadly enemy. Still one might argue that the Russians, with their disinformation campaigns and their seeming reasonableness and their desire to re-establish their empire are the greater enemy, and that they have been a great source of confusion to our President and his comrades.
I very much look forward to your odyssey.
YouTube is a great platform with all sorts of interesting features for content creators, and does allow embedding almost anywhere. I would suggest you turn off comments on YouTube, though…
Definitely there’s something about the way ISIS revels in evil and doesn’t even pretend to adopt Western discourse that’s got people very worked up. Russia pays homage to Western values by insisting it’s not violating them, even if it’s a bald-faced lie. For example, this article makes perfect sense in terms of Western values: We’re against purposeless aggression, right? If you didn’t know that Russia’s been gobbling up its neighbors, that would sound very plausible. But proudly beheading Christians for professing their faith and advertising that you do it is never going to look normal and reasonable to any Westerner. So you could say ISIS is so anti-Western it doesn’t even bother to lie to us, hence more frightening.
In terms of real threats, though — “existential” threats, as the cliche goes — ISIS is weak precisely because of that. It can’t destroy Western civilization, and the number of people to which it appeals is limited by definition to the psychotic fringe of the Islamic world. ISIS can harass us, it can pull off very painful and possibly spectacular acts of terrorism, it could possibly even detonate a nuclear weapon. None of that’s a trivial threat. But Russia (and Iran) clearly want to be at the center of a new Eurasian power structure, the organizing principle of which is rule by mobsters.
And that could really happen. Within a short time, too. Europe isn’t going to become part of the Caliphate — I absolutely guarantee it. But in exactly two days, the Dutch are going to vote on the issue of whether they want to take orders from Vladimir Putin. And it looks from the polls as if they do.
That’s the weirdest discussion of the referendum I’ve read. I guess that’s what happens when you source your article from interviewing someone who says they’ve made Putin the central issue of the campaign.
Claire,
So pulling my chain are we.
First, Kant is one of the least popular philosophers of great import. I sincerely doubt that most Europeans are aware of the concept of Perpetual Peace or understand Kant. Second, if they were aware of it by the description of the concept presented it would be clear that the Europeans simply misunderstood the actual idea.
Perpetual Peace is the a priori ultimate goal of any realpolitik analysis. Recognizing this doesn’t commit you to any particular course of action. However, the assumption is that the ability to formalize an ultimate aim will improve your efforts. Of course, the real problem with people who want to start with “Perpetual Peace” and work backwards is that Kant doesn’t work that way. Perpetual Peace is the last concept that you learn. You must first learn to properly distinguish moral concepts from natural concepts. Then you can go on to the ethical concept of Right. From there you can build up your view of the world from Private Right, to Public Right, to National Right, to Cosmopolitan Right. Once you properly understand Cosmopolitan Right (and its foundation as I just described) then and only then are you prepared to grasp Perpetual Peace properly. If you are properly prepared then you are far more of a realist than the foreign policy realists.
For instance, those who think they can ignore National Right and force an undesirable, unstable Cosmopolitan solution upon unwilling Nations are not being realists. Another example might be a situation where a rogue Nation is damaging the National Rights of neighboring Nations. A group of Nations can then respond by forming an alliance and under the proper imprimatur of Cosmopolitan Right “coerce the coercer Nation”. This is not only a Cosmopolitan Right it is a Duty of Cosmopolitan Right.
In conclusion, saying that “Perpetual Peace” is just a dream is like saying that “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line” is just a dream. It may be just a dream but I wouldn’t want to live in a house built by people that didn’t think they needed to dream this particular dream. Everything in the house would be crooked if the house didn’t just fall down. Similarly, a human race governed by those who think that Perpetual Peace is a dream that they don’t need to dream will find themselves living in a “crooked” society if the society just didn’t collapse entirely.
Regards,
Jim
“Rule by mobsters,” is, I think, correct, and I think you’ve got the players right, too. They both certainly have the administration’s number.
This line is worth stealing!
The rest of what you wrote is good, too.
This, I think.
Douhat/Kagan are proceeding from a false premise. Both the US and most Europeans see the world through a Hobbesian lens; those most Europeans wouldn’t see a need for systems of transnational negotiation and cooperation if they didn’t at least sub rosa recognize the world’s nations being in an essentially Hobbesian interrelationship. We’ve just taken differing approaches to dealing with the world around us: Europe by sitting around the campfire chanting cheerfully about the warmth and bright light in front of them and their backs carefully turned against the outside threats, America by recognizing the nature of the threat and daring to face it down, unilaterally or as part of a group, overreacting or not.
And this:
(I also saw this quote in an LATimes piece.) McManus, of that LAT bit, built on Perry’s theme:
If an apparent attack against U.S. missile bases is detected, officials will have only a few minutes to decide whether to launch the missiles in response, or lose them.
And that makes them susceptible to false alarms
And then he contradicted himself:
— which actually occurred several times in both the U.S. and Russia during the Cold War.
Sorry, that’s not luck. Perry also missed his own larger point, saying also,
“I have no doubt that the United States will follow suit.”
No, given that our enemies are expanding and modernizing their own strategic and tactical nuclear arsenals, our mismanagement would be if we were to choose not to follow suit, choose not to go farther and faster with our expansion and modernization, choose not to expand and modernize our missile, submarine, bomber, other anti-delivery defense systems. And not only against nuclear weapons.
If we don’t understand the Hobbesian world in which we live, and if we don’t understand our own character, we cannot accurately characterize the threats within that world, much less determine the best way to confront and then destroy those threats.
Eric Hines
Claire,
I believe that one of the reasons Muslims are not assimilating in Europe is because the lowest rungs of the “economic ladder” have been cut off. Minimum wage laws, payroll taxes, and regulations raise the cost of hiring to the point that unskilled workers cannot find employment. The least experienced, least educated, and most discriminated against are left with few prospects. In the United States, those most affected are African American teenagers; in Europe it’s young Muslims.
Denied legal means of earning a living, young men may turn to crime. Denied constructive outlets for their energies, they may turn to gangs and violence to bolster their self-images. Adolescent Swedes, Germans, and Frenchmen whose parents emigrated from the Middle East may have little knowledge of Islam while still understanding that it inspires fear in the countrymen who look down on them. The combination of unemployment, anger at discrimination, anger at their lack of opportunity, and a need for self-respect and the respect of others may lead them toward radical views and actions.
Their anger, their unemployment, and their dependence on taxpayers all lead to more prejudice against them, which in turn increases their anger and their inability to get a job.
Website suggestion (Under the tongue in cheek section)
In the skills block perhaps you should include Cat Husbandry. With seven of the little dears in the confines of an apartment you must be an expert on the feeding and litter box duties. I know what PITA it is with just five of the little gals.
Correct. Civilized Humanity does not appreciate terroristic murderers, (well, actually murderers of any kind) no matter where they are from, where they happen to live, or travel.
Novel concept.
Before any of this is carved in stone, I need to ask you why you aren’t writing for the Wall Street Journal. I already mentioned the Mary Anastasia O’Grady column on the Americas as being a good-quality remnant of their formerly excellent foreign coverage. You could do something similar for Europe and its Islamic immigrants, etc. The WSJ used to have a special interest in Turkey, one of your areas of expertise.
You have in mind doing something more interactive with your readers; well, James Taranto has already broken the ice with his column that interacts with readers in a way that others don’t. The WSJ might be interested in going further along those lines.
Special bonus: They could get rid of Karl Rove and William Galston to make room for you. Galston’s article is just refried trendy leftism. Rove is an electoral consultant. What something like that is doing on the pages of a paper run by professional journalists is hard to fathom. They could upgrade their newspaper in one fell swoop by hiring you to replace them.
It would be a killer lineup if was not just Taranto, O’Grady, and Strassel but Claire Berlinski as well. And it would make it easier to explain to Mrs. Reticulator why we’re paying well over $400/year for that paper.
Is there any reason this hasn’t happened already?
I’ve pitched stories to them before, and they’ve run one or two. It mainly didn’t happen from Turkey because Joe Parkinson was their Turkey correspondent and one of the best in the business. Then they closed down their Istanbul bureau for lack of demand for coverage.
Because the WSJ is part of the problem? The last thing we need is to imprison a voice like Claire’s inside an ideologically compromised and dying institution.
Important semantic distinction germane to this whole discussion that needs highlighting: integration vs. assimilation. “Integration” means essentially Muslims getting jobs and learning (at least a bit) of the host country’s language and accepting secular rule of law as the highest law of the land. “Assimilation,” on the other hand, is considered racism among the bien pensant throughout Germany and Sweden.
Claire often speaks of integration, but I don’t recall her speaking of assimilation.
But without demand for assimilation, you’re not going to get even very good integration. 54% of Turks living in Germany voted for Erogan in last election, to take only a salient example.
And if “assimilation” is a dirty word, is Claire’s laudable demand for vaporizing multiculturalism even remotely feasible?
I still wonder if Claire will read/take seriously Pierre Manent, arguably the most important political philosopher alive today, who throws a large bucket of cold water on pretensions to create a “United States of Erope,” Claire’s vaunted wish.
But I suspect she treats him with the same dismissiveness that liberal internationalist Mark Lilla treated him in the NYRB.
Claire is perfectly right about Putin’s sinister threat and nefarious designs — and the despicable rabble scum at the head of Pegida in bed with Putin.
But I see my beloved Europe of variegated, culturally rich, hitherto basically autonomous nations being destroyed by a post-political, elitist mentality.
Presage to a forthcoming post by me “Pierre Manent Answers Claire Berlinski”….
Robert,
I listened to a Manet lecture hosted by another one of your favorites, Harvey Mansfield.
Thematically, I am in complete agreement with his analysis. The European idea started well but then went over the top. What I would add from my Kantian toolbox is a litmus test. It would go like this.
If a proposed new Federated Nation is willing (by that I mean all constituent states are willing) to maintain both its Duty of Public Right (proper domestic fiscal & regulatory policy) and maintain its Duty of National Right (proper foreign policy & security policy) then there should be no objection to its formation.
If, for instance, the new Federated Nation is only willing to maintain its Duty of Public Right (assuming that is by the will of its constituent states) and takes no part in maintaining its Duty of National Right then the claim of the new Federated Nation is false on its face. Individual constituent states may well see it as an unnecessary and even a dangerously unstable option. Worse, external aggressor states may seek to take advantage of its mismanagement and subvert it, extort it, or even attack it.
Metaethically yours,
Jim