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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 10, 2023; see related February 17, 2017 two-part article: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—I am giving myself the privilege of reading Orwell in Spain, the Penguin Classics edition of Homage to Catalonia by Eric Blair of the immortal pseudonym George Orwell and one of the original antifascists, bookended by a number of relevant letters written by Orwell and those in his circles and with context from editor Peter Davison throughout.  The volume also includes occasional files from archives of the Soviets, who were targeting Orwell, his wife, and his other comrades for a future show-trial just as Orwell and his wife slipped out of Spain; some of his comrades were not so fortunate as he by far.

Orwell went to Spain in late 1936 in the spirit of pitching in for the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on behalf of the Spanish Republic, supported by numerous liberal and leftist volunteers from around the world and ostensibly supported by dictator Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union against General Francisco Franco’s fascists, in turn supported by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  For his efforts, Orwell took a bullet through the neck but survived that and many other hardships, acquitting himself well in having genuinely sacrificed for a cause worthy of such sacrifice, but one that was undermined in part by Spain’s supposed ally, the Soviet Union, whose agents in Spain often focused on settling scores within the international leftist/socialist/communist movement and who turned on many of their supposed allies to engage in purges and trials based on lies and gaslighting.  This would be a main reason that the Republic would fall completely to Franco’s fascist Nationalists in 1939, shortly before the beginning of World War II.

Hitchens on Orwell, Ringing with Urgent Relevance for the Present

As usual, the late legend and one of the few humans who could rightly be described to be at least a partial heir to Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, provides an introduction to Orwell in Spain that is as mind-blowing as it is well-written and pithy (the introduction was also published around the same time as Orwell in Spain as an essay in The Los Angeles Times).  Hitchens’ essay on his hero Orwell’s experiences in Spain includes some points that hit all too close to home in the here-and-now:

The history of the May events in Barcelona in 1937 was certainly buried for years under a slag heap of slander and falsification.  Orwell, indeed, derived his terrifying notion of the memory-hole and the rewritten past, in Nineteen Eighty-four, from exactly this single instance of the abolished memory.  ‘This kind of thing is frightening to me,’ he wrote about Catalonia, ‘because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’:

But in our very immediate past, documents have surfaced to show that his vulgar, empirical, personal, commonsensical deposition was verifiable after all.  The recent opening of communist records in Moscow and of closely held Franco-era documentation in Madrid and Salamanca has provided a posthumous vindication.

The narrative core of Homage to Catalonia, it might be argued, is a series of events that occurred in and around the Barcelona telephone exchange in early May 1937.  Orwell was a witness to these events, by the relative accident of his having signed up with the militia of the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) upon arriving in Spain.  Allowing as he did for the bias that this lent to his firsthand observations, he nonetheless became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist putsch, complete with rigged evidence, false allegations and an ulterior hand directed by Moscow.  The outright and evidently concerted fabrications that immediately followed in the press, which convinced or neutralized so many ‘progressive intellectuals,’ only persuaded him the more that he had watched a lie being gestated and then born.

Hitchens continues later in his introduction:

…‘History to the Defeated’ is the underlying subject and text of this collection of pages and fragments.  Like several others in the ‘midnight of the century,’ the glacial period that reached its nadir in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Orwell wrote gloomily but defiantly for the bottom drawer.  He belongs in the lonely 1930s tradition of Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine and David Rousset — speaking truth to power but without a real audience or a living jury.  It is almost tragic that, picking through the rubble of that epoch, one cannot admire him and Auden simultaneously.  ‘All I have is a voice,’ wrote Auden in ‘September 1, 1939,’ ‘To undo the folded lie,/The romantic lie in the brain … And the lie of Authority.’  All Orwell had was a voice, and to him, too, the blatant lies of authority were one thing and the ‘folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves were another.  The tacit or overt collusion between the two was the ultimate foe.

Let’s let that sink in: it is not the generally bad-faith “blatant lies of authority” that is “the ultimate foe,” but the “tacit or overt collusion between” those “blatant lies of authority” and that authority on one side with the “’folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves” and those clever people on the other.  As a consistent antifascist, Hitchens himself often energetically dedicated himself to taking on such “clever people:” intellectuals and leaders who should know and act better but in their actions still give aid and comfort to the “blatant lies of authority,” often unintentionally making good faith yet terrible arguments as “useful idiots” (to borrow the phrase attributed to Lenin, perhaps falsely) but other times lying deliberately (hello Ted Cruz).  Thus, Hitchens happily took on fellow leftist intelligentsia members and activists like George Galloway, Julian Assange, and Noam Chomsky (almost?) as fiercely as he critiqued Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Kim Jong-il.

Fighting the Rewriting of History from 1937 to 2023

For the Stalinists and their apologists Orwell stood up against (and, indeed, for the fascists of that era as well), the fastidious, near-robotic repetition of baseless lies and disinformation over and over and over again served to give reality to such “alternative facts,” to borrow former Trumpist mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway’s Trumpian phrase.  And, of course, it is altogether fitting to quote that disgraced woman—her own daughter and now former husband even very publicly more honorably refused to support Trump’s lies and hers—because what is terrifying my soul even as I write part of this is that the Trumpist movement—now one of the two largest political factions in the United States of American in 2023—is very much successfully engaging in that tactic Orwell dedicated much of his writing to combatting, a tactic used by the people Orwell spent much of life fighting.

A stark example is the recent Ohio Republican Jim Jordan-led U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the so-called “Durham Report”  and the related investigation of Trump’s Justice Department-appointed Special Counsel John Durham’s pathetic, embarrassing, and failed attempt to find proof that the U.S. government’s investigation into Trump’s Russia ties and 2016 election interference was a baseless, politically-motivated witch hunt; this in and of itself is gaslighting and “hypocrisy” in the extreme, as the opposite is true, a truth I spent years of research and writing on in detail.  Short of ending in appalling violence, is there anything more politically Stalinist than an investigation ordered in bad-faith and/or extreme delusion to smear and undermine a good-faith investigation into topics most deserving of investigation, that then twists the results of the failed counter investigation to continue to make claims wholly unsubstantiated by reality??  In this vein, Republicans even spitefully, shamelessly, and wholly inappropriately censured—censured!—Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) the same day as the Durham hearing for his work against Trump on impeachment and his efforts to get answers on Trump-Russia, a ridiculous act of distraction from their embarrassing failure of a Durham hearing and in spirit also a pure act of abusive political retaliation: only five members of the House were censured in all the twentieth century and Schiff is only the third member of the House of Representatives this century and only the twenty-fifth member of the House in all of U.S. history to be censured, an act that is for generally serious offenses, including violence or incitement to violence, sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, and—at the time of the Civil War (1861-1865)—supporting the rebel “Confederacy.”

To go back to Durham and his probe, former Special Counsel Durham seems to be at least a partly honorable fool.  On the one hand, Durham seems to incorrectly accept as articles of faith that the Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller probes were baseless political hit jobs (the first in his deluded mind concocted by the Clintons) and that there is nothing to Trump-Russia to the degree that he is unaware of many of the facts and much of the evidence and context surrounding team Trump’s deeply troubling ties to Russia, his perspective warped enough to believe in the nonsense and/or gaslighting his higher-ups—including then Attorney General Bill Barr—and others fed him and that he fed himself: during the Judiciary Committee hearing, I heard him tell Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) that he did not think Barr’s infamous memo had “blatantly mischaracterized” the Mueller report, which it clearly and obviously very much did, even according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller himself.  On the other hand, Durham more or less carried out an investigation that at least mostly adhered to rules and the law within the confines of his warped worldview even as that worldview was biased, selective, and inaccurate when it came to the issues between Trump and Russia, and that is why his results were so limited along with the reality that the evidence he sought didn’t exist because the investigation’s premises were false.

Both those who put Durham in place as Special Counsel and the rest of the Trump faithful were hoping as much as possible over the course of the four years of the Durham probe of to undermine investigations into Trump, playing politics with legitimate, serious investigations. Durham’s disappointing results—0 for 2 on prosecutions that went to trial, defeated twice by unanimous juries that returned “not guilty” verdicts and one plea deal with no trial for an FBI employee doctoring an e-mail who was determined by the presiding judge not to have acted with any political bias (confirming the previous findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s far more credible report) and who only received a year of probation—speak volumes about Durham’s probe’s credibility despite the spin of his “report” and show just how baseless was his effort to show that the Biden Administration Department of Justice was weaponized as a tool of political persecution.  In the end, it was Durham’s and Barr’s own conduct that actually revealed it was the Trump Administration Department of Justice that fell into being weaponized, yet Jordan, Trump, and many other Republicans and “useful idiots” insist on persisting in gaslighting or making unsubstantiated arguments with their original unsubstantiated claims even after Durham’s probe failed to prove them (ironically, it seems the probe did find enough evidence of possible financial criminal wrongdoing involving Trump that the Durham probe was forced to launch a criminal investigation into that, which, unsurprisingly, we have heard very little about…).

And herein is one of the more horrific aspects of this Jordan’s show-hearing that should be giving us all trouble sleeping at night: some of the Republicans on Jordan’s committee, most notably the vile Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), are furious at Durham not for the degree to which he was inaccurate, ignorant, or possibly dishonest but for the degree to which he did not go into full Stalinist show-trial mode because he did not run wild with lies and falsehoods but, rather, still operated within some level of orbit of reality.

To be clear, this hearing is not a Stalinist show-trial, and does not carry the consequences of them.  But they do share, on the part of today’s Republicans and their accomplices on one hand and the those of the Stalinists and their accomplices of yesteryear on the other, absolute contempt for truth and justice and an absolute commitment to pursuing the party line relentlessly.  And both Orwell’s and Hitchens’s words rang loudly in my mind throughout my viewing of the hearing as I digested it in terror, far more profoundly for having recently read certain pages of Orwell in Spain.

The gaslighting is also strong with the claim that Trump is being persecuted unfairly and Hunter Biden might get off with a “sweetheart deal” should a submitted plea deal between Hunter and the government be approved, which was reported the day before the Durham hearing and Schiff censure.  Again, the opposite is true: people in a position similar to Hunter Biden when it comes to gun possession while being an addict are rarely criminally charged or see jail time, as are first-time offenders in terms of the tax violations he had committed and has since paid off his debts in relation to, including back taxes and penalties.  If anything, his treatment has been harsher because he is Joe Biden’s son and the government is going out of its way to avoid any credible suggestion that the son of the sitting president is being treated lightly while the former president, Trump, is not; and, if anything, Trump has been treated with an extraordinarily light touch, given the nature and severity of his crimes and the more than two-years’ worth of blatant obstruction of justice committed by Trump to further his crimes.  The gaslighting only becomes even more ludicrous when Trump’s defenders claims there is a “two-tiered” system of justice, with the Trumps of the world being the victims, a deeply “insulting” claim coming from many white Republicans who have been loath to acknowledge the very real systemic racial disparities in the American criminal justice system—let alone do anything about them—but now whine for “justice” (i.e., impunity and immunity) for Trump.

The gaslighting is also front-and-center when Trump’s insanely ridiculous classified documents case for which he has been indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith is claimed to be equivalent or close to the Biden classified documents case or Hillary Clinton’s (conspicuously omitting Pence’s case, which is pretty similar to Biden’s), all the other cases including Clinton’s case were dramatically different especially regarding intent and when the Biden/Pence examples only turned up a comparatively small number of documents which were promptly returned and both of them agreed rapidly to have their respective locations searched, bearing no resemblance to Trump’s obstructionist and gaslighting conduct and the severity of the material at issue.

And those are merely a few current examples…

Orwell and His “Power of Facing”: A Ghostbuster to the Gaslighting Ghosts of Nazism and Stalinism Rearing their Ghastly Heads Today

We fought a world war some eight decades ago against a totalitarian fascism that I have previously noted gaslit reality to the point of being at war with reality itself, and we triumphed some four-and-a-half decades later against a Soviet totalitarian communism that similarly gaslit reality and also, like the Nazis it defended its homeland against in the earlier world war, used disinformation as a preferred weapon of choice in its losing ideological struggle against the capitalist democratic West.

After the West’s victories in World War II and the Cold War, how depressing is it, then, that, in 2023 the West finds itself embroiled both internally and externally with major forces practicing and embodying much of the same spirit of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany when it comes to waging new wars on reality, with its biggest centers of gravity in Putin’s fascist Russia—resurrecting the Soviet war on reality as the successor state to the Soviet Union—and in the Trumpist fascist movement and its media and political allies within the West (if you doubt the appropriateness of the label fascist for Trump or Putin, read my two-parter [part I and part II] and realize that was written well before the violence of January 6, 2021 or the massively increased levels of violence and war crimes Russia has been perpetrating in Ukraine since February 24, 2022).  While the Chinese Communist Party helms a Chinese state that is increasingly totalitarian under the leadership of Xi Jinping and also embraces a war on reality, it is not nearly as aggressive with this tactic on the international stage as Russia, thus, China’s current relative restraint means its threat to the West is, for now at least, far less potent than that of both Russia and Trump as it is Russia that routinely engages in electoral and political interference in the West and Trump’s brand of fascism and its like-minded allies are a clear and present danger within the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, with fascists having real chances of gaining political power—even the U.S. presidency once again, though I do not believe they will succeed in this coming American election in 2024.  Other countries, such as France and Italy, are far more vulnerable, and some, like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Israel, are veering hard in that direction.  Indeed, while I have been warning of this possibility since just after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and even earlier in 2016, it brings little comfort to see the modern versions of fascism and their accompanying wars on reality staring us down directly in the face while also staring deeply into the past at horrors that we had vanquished twice in living memory, drawing power from their zombie-Frankenstein cousins from the Cold War and World War II.

Orwell would truly be rolling over in his grave were he aware of what was happening today, after so much blood and toil and sacrifice in the twentieth century to defeat fascist and communist regimes, to transcend their lies and assault against reality, and yet, he could take comfort in his words standing the test of time, not only validating his prescient view of past evils, but that his words could still be so useful and relevant today.  Yes, this is bittersweet, for we should have transcended those phantoms from past eras, but at least we have in Orwell the perfect guide to fighting these nefarious forces, that honesty, reality, truth, persistence, and simple eloquence can confront the enemy and defeat their lies, sometimes even without the forces of arms.  Orwell did risk life and limb (and was even shot) in Spain against Franco’s fascists (and Soviet agents), but it was in his writing that he made his largest contributions in the fight for freedom against fascism and communism.  Like Orwell and like his admirer and perhaps his heir Hitchens, we can and must be unflinching in the face of the gaslighting of Trump and Putin and their allies who constantly assert “that two and two are five” and that things that happened “never happened” (from the January 6 U.S. Capitol Insurrection—team Trump claiming “it was Antifa”—to the Russian military torturing and executing civilians in Ukraine—Putin saying, ludicrously, that: “The Russian army does not strike at civilian facilities. There is no need for that.”).  Though Orwell had “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” he never gave up and never ceased articulating the truth through his brave and, it seems, timeless writing.

As Hitchens wrote in his magisterial and pithy Why Orwell Matters:

‘I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’  Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’.  It’s oddly well put.  A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact.  So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’.  The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’.  Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious.  The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.

In the spirit of Orwell and (even if to a somewhat lesser degree) Hitchens, we must wield a similar “power of facing” in the face of the fascisms of Trump, Putin, and their lesser emulators.  In particular, the “clever people” and “progressive intellectuals” that Hitchens and Orwell single out who “tell themselves” Auden’s “’folded’ lies” that, when in “tacit or overt collusion” with “the blatant lies of authority,” become “the ultimate foe.”

Prominent “useful idiot” fools on such matters include Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Briahna Joy Grey, Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Michael Tracey, Caitlin Johnstone, Katie Halper, RFK Jr., Russell Brand, John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Joe Rogan, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Jill Stein, Tulsi Gabbard, Cornell West, Jordan Peterson, George Galloway, Scott Ritter, even Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s own rather less impressive brother) and others who fancy themselves public figures displaying freethinking but who ultimately do little more on these matters than to give aid and comfort to fascism and even colonialism and imperialism in the name of supposed “pacificism” or “free speech.”  Those people and their ilk make their arguments in ways that usually show they have little understanding of peace or the U.S. Constitution.  In particular, they often keep parroting debunked Kremlin talking points about Western “escalation” and NATO expansion, which I have debunked myself repeatedly.  Or they will conflate moderation of disinformation on private platforms with unconstitutional “censorship.”  Orwell has the best of possible responses to the first group, the so-called “pacifists,” here in his perfect essay from 1942 “Pacifism and the War” in which he noted that “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.” Orwell therein further elucidated his views:

What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don’t care to say so and take refuge behind the formula ‘I am just as anti-fascist as anyone, but—’.  The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda.  Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.

He added: “My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking” and that “It is just because I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don’t like the sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.”  Better descriptions of that crowd’s heirs in the present cannot be written, and, as before in Orwell’s day, many of those in this crowd today are often caught “back-scratching” and “arse-licking” each other in echo chambers.  To listen to them, rather than blatant Russian imperialism and colonialism, the greater evils are supposedly the Western exercise of power in daring to aid a Ukraine that, they will stress, has been dominated by and even been part of Russia for centuries (as if that should matter when Ukrainians themselves have earned their freedom and independence, recognized by formal treaty repeatedly by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union) and, even more so, in asserting either that there is, in fact, a moral dimension to supporting Ukraine or a false equivalence in equating Russia’s exercise and practice of its power in comparison with the America’s and the West’s: whether knowingly or unknowingly, these supposed and self-proclaimed “anti-imperialists” engage in behavior that dismisses, excuses, deflects from, or even advances Russian imperialism and its supporting false narratives. 

There can be but one course of action against today’s “intellectual” descendants of Orwell’s critics and enemies among the intelligentsia, and it must be that we especially utilize our “power of facing” to face them because they are usually the ones weakening the front against today’s fascists without claiming to actually be “for” those fascists, they are the ones who might persuade those with less moral discernment who would never think of consciously siding with fascists and who would be susceptible to low-hanging fruit of arguments relying on “free speech” and “peace” that objectively advance bad-faith disinformation and war against those fighting for their actual freedom.  And perhaps, with relentless opposition to their nonsense, some may even realize their folly and find their own “power of facing” directed back at themselves even though this may “put …[their] own position or preference to the test.”

Hitchens opens his introduction to Orwell in Spain with following two magnificent paragraphs:

The grandeur of George Orwell, in our store of moral and intellectual memory, is to be found partly in his very lack of grandeur.  He is remembered, with different and varying degrees of distinctness, as the man who confronted three of the great crises of the twentieth century and got all three of them, so to speak, ‘right’.  He was right, earlier than most, about imperialism, viewing it as an unjust and unjustifiable form of rule, and also as a cause of war.  He was right, early and often, about the menace presented by Fascism and National Socialism, not just to the peace of the world but to the very idea of civilization.  And he was right about Stalinism, about the great and the small temptations that it offered to certain kinds of intellectual, and about the monstrous consequences that would ensue from that nightmarish sleep of reason.

He brought off this triple achievement, furthermore, in his lowly capacity as an impoverished freelance journalist and amateur novelist.  He had no resources beyond his own, he enjoyed the backing of no party or organization or big newspaper, let alone any department of state.  Much of his energy was dissipated in the simple struggle to get published, or in the banal effort to meet a quotidian schedule of bills and deadlines.  He had no university education, no credential nor area of expertise. He had no capital. Yet his unexciting pen-name, drawn from a rather placid English river, is known to millions as a synonym for prescience and integrity, and the adjective ‘Orwellian’ is understood widely and – this has its significance – ambivalently.  To describe a situation as ‘Orwellian’ is to announce dystopia: the triumph of force and sadism and demagogy over humanism.  To call a person ‘Orwellian’ is to summon the latent ability of an individual to resist such triumphs, or at least to see through them and call them by their right names.

We don’t have to take a bullet in the neck like Orwell did in Spain in 1937, but the least we can do is call out the lies, disinformation, and misinformation religiously in the cause of reality, as Orwell seems to have pretty much always done and Hitchens mostly did (even when Hitch Hitch erred—most notably on Iraq—he usually did so for principled and admirable reasons).  We can, sadly, fall into either of the definitions Hitchens enumerates for “Orwellian,” but we must strive to be his latter definition and we can do so by calling out the imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism of today as Orwell did for the versions in his lifetime.  We can also be sure that Orwell’s stances on Trump, Putin, and their movements and allies would not be doubt were he alive today.

Herein, then, has not been any kind of comprehensive catalogue of Trumpist and Putinist attempts to rewrite history—those of you following these stories are all too familiar with too many of those examples—but a clarion call to honor the spirit of those two writers departed from us, whose careers were mostly dedicated to opposition to lies but fidelity to the truth should inspires us even if we, too, feel frightened like Orwell because we have “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”  Orwell consistently and unflinchingly spoke truth to power with “a power of facing unpleasant facts” and so must we.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, March 16, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit

Also see March 8 follow-up Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Great Russia: [i.e., Russia]

Do you know with whom you are speaking, or have you forgotten? I am Russia, after all: do you ignore me?

Little Russia: [i.e., Ukraine]

I know that you are Russia; that is my name as well.

Why do you intimidate me? I myself am trying to put on a brave face.

I did not submit to you but to your sovereign,

Under whose auspices you were born of your ancestors.

Do not think that you are my master:

Your sovereign and mine is our common ruler.

from A Conversation Between Great Russia and Little Russia, 1762
by Semen Divovych, Ukrainian Cossack scribe and poet

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—Underlying Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tired articulation of his rationale for invading Ukraine is the same old, same old in all the bad ways coming from Russia in a totally avoidable crisis wholly manufactured by the Kremlin.

As I noted just before this war’s dramatic late-February escalation, what was then the extremely-likely-to-be-pending invasion of Ukraine by Russia would likely be the largest invasion in Europe in over half a century (since the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and, before that, the final years of World War II) and the largest European war since WWII (since Ukraine’s army today seems quite willing to fight along with many civilians, but the Czechoslovak People’s Army did not resist at all in 1968).  Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing apart from the scale of all this is the predictable, soporific banality of Putin’s game plan, one visible from many miles and many years away.

And perhaps nothing besides Ukrainian icy steeliness better explains the pre-scalation nonchalant, yet defiant refusal of Ukrainians to panic, with others seeming to have been more worried than Ukrainians themselves.  After all, Ukrainians had experienced a smaller Russian troop buildup on their border early last year and this current one has been going on for months, so they shrugged their shoulders and lived their lives, with Ukraine’s government in recent weeks even launching a “Keep calm and visit Ukraine” tourism campaign that hearkens back to the famous domestic British morale campaign from WWII.

At least, that is what we were meant to believe to some degree: in an interview with CNN‘s excellent Matthew Chance, Zelensky made it clear that he had actually accepted U.S. intelligence warning of a Russian invasion but wanted to downplay that so as not to tip off Russia to the fact that Ukrainians were furiously preparing a defense, deliberately trying to throw the Kremlin off so that if/when the invasion came, the Russians would be caught off guard, fall behind schedule, and sustain more casualties from a far more prepared Ukraine than anticipated, a point I have yet to see anyone else make.

Public relations aside, the situation before the escalation was dire, with proxy conventional attacks by rebel separatists in eastern Ukraine and Russian cyberattacks having already been underway (in addition to de facto economic warfare as Russia’s troop buildup and naval “exercises” were already causing major damage to the Ukrainian economy).  I noted at the time that it was incredibly difficult to imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin amassing some 150,000-and-growing ground troops along with heavy military equipment, vehicles, and additional air and naval forces just for a failed intimidation campaign that yields no substantial positive results for him; just tucking his tail in between his legs and sending his forces home while losing face after a costly military buildup throughout harsh winter months is simply not in his nature. I wish I was wrong, but that interpretation turned out to be correct.

A Pathetically Predictable Playbook

Also pathetically predictable are both the rationales Putin regularly spews along with his army of propagandists and his methods, containing absolutely nothing new and going back centuries.

In my graduate studies and again in my journalism, I have researched and noted that the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union made it a decided policy to play with, keep simmering under the surface, and manipulate one way or another whenever convenient various nationalisms both within Russia and the Soviet Union and in their peripheries and near-peripheries.  At some times, it would be convenient to heat to a boiling point the majority ethnonationalism, at other instances, the minority ethnonationalisms in any given part of Russia or a (post-)Soviet Republic, sometimes playing one against the other in one era only to switch sides in the future.  As one scholar I quoted in a graduate school paper noted, the

system of ethnic autonomies [in Russia/the Soviet Union] was ostensibly a means of protecting national minorities, but in reality it was a time bomb that Moscow could blow up at its leisure by pushing the “protected” minorities towards separatism. Thus, this situation gave Moscow a means to weaken and destabilize republics whose nationalistic feelings ran high. (Areshidze 2007, 22)

To be absolutely clear, this a tradition in both the Soviet and Russian historical tradition, going back centuries, and is Putin’s favorite playbook among very few.

Within this context, it is just basic reality that many people of many ethnicities all over the world live outside the boundaries of their ethnicity’s nation-state(s) (if that ethnicity is lucky enough to have a full nation state; Kurds, Uighurs, and Palestinians, just to name three, are not).  Therefore, Russia extending Russian citizenship to ethnic Russians and others in regions with ethnic tensions or regions it has occupied in Georgia (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) and Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk, together in eastern Ukraine forming the Donbas area, as well as Crimea) in the cause of ethnonationalist solidarity is absolutely not a legal justification for interference in a sovereign country’s territory, let alone military invasion, occupation, and annexation, regardless of Russia’s and Putin’s longtime policy to award citizenship—complete with Russian passports—to such people in these countries and others, including the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia long wary of Russian schemes to dominate them and undermine their sovereignty.  This Russian policy is part of a longtime strategy to use ethnic Russians and other separatist minorities within the states of the former Soviet Union and that were once part of the Russian Empire at its height to serve the Kremlin’s interests, destabilize any of these states that do not fall in line with Russia’s wishes, and to create a potential fifth column for Putin to incite when convenient for him (just as he is doing with the separatists in Eastern Ukraine). 

While I will not dismiss the idea of genuine concern on the part of Russia and even Putin for their ethnic brethren, it is worth noting that one of Hitler’s main aims in the runup to and also during WWII was to unite ethnic Germans living outside Germany under a “Greater Germany” into which Hitler’s Germany would expand through war, conquest, and annexation (and no, I am not saying Putin is Hitler but it is worth noting what company he keeps in using war for similar ethnonationalist dreams).

Though such tactics have not been very effective in, say, the Baltic states, they have worked extremely well in Georgia and have been key to Putin’s Ukraine policy; indeed, the U.S., UK, Ukraine, and researchers have warned of and called out “false flag” staged or falsely-claimed “attacks” against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine or attacks across the border into Russia as a very possible pretext for a Russian invasion.

But one key difference from the days the czars and Soviets used these tactics is that, in the age of the internet, Russia’s use of hybrid warfare and cyberwarfare enable Putin to use these tactics in an effective and penetrating way far beyond Russia’s periphery in ways of which the czars and Soviets could only dream.  In this way, manipulating nationalism has become Russia’s weapon of choice against the West.  And while this is a multifront war, with cyberwarfare ranging from the U.S. to the UK, Germany, and, indeed, all over Europe, Ukraine is undoubtedly the hottest current front, combining hybrid/cyberwarfare with the kinetic physical warfare of guns, bombs, separatist rebels, and regular Russian forces: the main battlefield of the New Cold War, as I have noted before.

As such, Putin’s current machinations in Ukraine are not only wholly formulaic and predictable, but are so to the tune of a playbook going back hundreds of years, the basic mechanics of which were never terribly original to begin with but quite predictable and hardly unique to Russia (rather common to all nationalistic bullies).  And, to be clear, Ukrainians have endured within living memory such machinations to the degree of a Soviet-made, weaponized famine—the infamous Holodomor (the genocidal nature of which the Kremlin actively and vigorously now denies)—that killed millions of Ukrainians literally by design.  Ukraine also suffered some of the highest casualties of any country both per capita (more than both the Soviet Union overall and Russia specifically) and in absolute numbers during WWII.

Whether the invasion and annexation of Crimea, the intervention in eastern Ukraine, the repeated attempts to corrupt and dominate the Ukrainian political system (to which Ukrainians responded with the 2004-2005 Orange and 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolutions and the subsequent election of two presidents who have refused to bend the knee to the Kremlin), spasmodic cyberattacks (sometimes devastating like NotPetya, the most damaging cyberattack in history), or the current threat of a Russian invasion coupled with very likely further dismemberment of their nation, then, Ukrainians have endured far worse Russian meddling before and essentially live constantly with the prospect and/or the actuality of Russia intervention in one form or another, sometimes in a given period on a daily basis.  Ukraine’s surprising comedian turned president, Volodymyr Zelensky, eloquently said as much in his February 19 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

In fact, Russia’s imperialist and colonialist adventures, whether overt or the more recently sometimes-covert, have rarely waned in the past several centuries, but just because Ukrainians are used to it does not mean they have not also have found ways, even sometimes in the incredibly repressive Soviet era, of also daily asserting their national character and independence, sometimes more symbolically, sometime with rebellions or even, as today, in short eras of Ukraine being independent from an oppressive empire.

Ukrainians know their history, after all, despite the Kremlin’s attempts to rewrite it: as the selection from 1762 poem that introduced this article shows, Ukrainians have been protesting Russia’s trying to have their way with them for centuries and this quarrel is nothing new.

The Western media and leadership class should also know proper history, specifically, Putin’s and Russia’s (as well as their own history of dropping the ball on handling Russia), so while we may be alarmed at Putin’s warmongering towards Ukraine, we should never be surprised.  Rather, we should call out how blatantly banal, predictable, and repetitive it is.  Putin may think his utterly uninteresting, hackneyed callbacks to an antiquated, zombie brand of pan-Slavic and/or aggressive, imposed Russian ethnonationalism are exciting and inspiring, but they are the most overused playbook coming out of Moscow for the past three centuries and find little appeal outside Russia and some ethnic Russians in former Soviet states.

And by far, most Ukrainians are not falling for it.

“Make Russia Great Again” Without Ukraine

Self-determination for a sovereign Ukraine did not have mean war with Russia, and only Russia initiated this war of choice and only it chose to do so.  Its reasoning for war rests upon the most empty, banal, overused tropes from czarist Imperial Russia that claim Russians are an ethnicity above and apart from others, superior and blessed by Orthodox Christian God while destined to rule over the other Slavs and, at the lowest point in the hierarchy, other groups of people that surround the Slavs.  What any of those people want is irrelevant, for it is Russia’s birthright destiny. 

Without the free will and agency of these various peoples who had endured decades, sometimes centuries of oppression under Russian and/or Soviet rule, nothing NATO did would have resulted in countries formerly under Moscow’s sway becoming NATO members.  But those peoples chose for themselves, and, in the case of Ukraine, Ukrainians actually have a say.  And while the West will not die for their right to have that say, it can still support it all the same as they are now by supporting Ukraine in other ways and teaching Putin and Russians that a united West will not let Russia get away with literal murder (among other things) without paying a steeply heavy price, as seriously harmful to Russia as its rationales for its Ukraine mischief are mindlessly tedious.

Either we live in a world where the idea that a democratic nation has a right to freely choose to enter into alliances and partnerships its leaders and people deem desirable without having to face military attacks as a result or sovereignty with the legitimacy of the consent of the governed has no real meaning and war will become an increasingly preferred political tool.

One thing is for certain: Russia’s resoundingly unoriginal appeals to ethnonationalism, whether beyond its borders or within, whether specifically to Russians or more broadly pan-Slavic, have resulted in centuries of bloody war and conquests, most of which have come undone, rendering these struggles mostly pointless.  The people living under the bloody heel of the czarist and Soviet boots were only too eager to throw off Russian and Soviet imperialism the first opportunity they had, sometimes (as in Ukraine’s case) repeatedly, affirming the shallowness of such aggressive Russian ethnonationalism.  The historically blood-soaked lands of Eastern Europe, and Ukraine in particular—all the way through to today—embody this sad, failed history.  It was such pan-ethnic nationalism that propelled Russia into World War I, to utter disaster and a collapse of the Imperial Russian state along with the deaths of millions.  Unlike then, today, as noted, Russia is facing a united West supporting Eastern Europeans that have resolutely rejected Russian hegemony and influence to align themselves or clearly want to align with the West, choosing freely in democratic systems to do so from an informed position knowing full well what the West offers and what Putin offers.

That man would be far better off focusing on building Russia up at home (its economy is still a relic dependent on fossil fuels), for this misadventure might end up hurting Russia—and even Putin himself—far more than Putin was anticipating and, unlike NATO and the West, his friends are few and far between, chief among the them the dictators Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus (perhaps Xi Jinping of China, too, but I am not so sure they are that close yet: on February 19, at the same Munich Security Conference at which U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris met Zelensky and at which Zelensky spoke and was interviewed by Amanpour, China’s foreign minister reaffirmed his country’s longstanding position on respecting the territorial integrity of all nations, then specifically added “Ukraine is no exception.”).

Putin’s effort to revive this repeatedly failed, absurdly outdated ethnonationalist campaign may be laughably banal, then, but we must also take it deadly seriously since the size and power of the military force involved in supporting that campaign and its manifestation in a war of imperialist expansion against Ukraine unfortunately force us to do so.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), March 1, 2022 (additional source on NATO expansion added March 3); excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

Also see March 8 follow-up Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—The mistreatment of peoples living under Moscow’s oppression in the Soviet era led most of Eastern Europe to vigorously pursue NATO membership in recent decades.  After the Soviet Union’s collapse, many Eastern European states lined up for NATO about as fast as they could; they came to NATO asking for membership, not the other way around; NATO was not imposing anything on any of these countries against their wills, let alone even pressuring or pushing them in any direction they had not firmly decided to pursue because they wanted to or were very much willing to pursue in exchange for NATO membership.  Other than the special case of East Germany, NATO did not rush states into the Alliance; it did not rapidly surround Russia or come to its border.  Instead, NATO considered membership slowly for these countries, waiting, drawing out, even delaying that process over many years; some countries even had their bids for membership rejected at first.  The process was transparent, even to Russia, and contingent on each country establishing civilian control over the military and, along with requirements for joining the European Union, involved becoming a stable democracy that respected human rights and made lasting legal and economic reforms.  These states made it a top priority to join the NATO Alliance and organized their national priorities for years to meet these obligations before any were admitted, each country having a decent democracy and having its voters and leaders clearly choose this path as sovereign nations before becoming members. 

We will not include East Germany in the coming list because of the special case of German reunification in 1990, but aside from it, before the fall of the Soviet Empire in Europe, with East Germany there were five additional communist Soviet satellite states that formed, with the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact (the Soviet-led communist counteralliance to NATO) and would eventually become NATO members along with three European republics within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR/Soviet Union).  One of the Warsaw Pact countries, Czechoslovakia, would become two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, so that means that were eight countries (five Warsaw Pact states and three former Soviet republics) that were dominated by the Soviet Union that would become nine NATO members after the end of the Cold War.

These countries joyfully threw off Soviet and communist party control from 1988-1991, but it was not until 1999 that any were granted NATO membership (just three: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) and it was only in 2004, close to a decade-and-a-half after these countries had achieved independence, that the former Soviet socialist republics that would join NATO (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) did along with the rest of the Warsaw Pact (Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia).  Each one of these countries and peoples made clear national long-term choices of their own free will to do this, only too happy to turn away from Russian oppression and towards being a part of Europe and the West, NATO giving them the security of being able to preserve their new democratic gains free from Russian invasions (two that did not, Georgia and our topical Ukraine, have proven the need for NATO after being attacked militarily and dismembered by Russia).  And quality, repeated polling shows these new NATO members are generally very confident today that their nations’ prior decisions to abandon Russia for the West and a Western democratic system were the right ones.

Other NATO expansion has been with countries that were independent actors and not in the Soviets’ sphere of influence when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

Another dimension to this is that Russia in this case believes—as an article of faith of Russian grievance victimhood mythology because of a “misunderstood” (or misrepresented) comment made decades ago—that it was “betrayed” by the West, stabbed in the back by a U.S. that “promised” NATO would not expand to the east after German reunification, even though this was based on one informal exchange in early 1990 throwing ideas around and not making any guarantees between then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but the topic was about deployments of troops in the territory then comprising Eastern Germany, not NATO expansion to other states.  And even Gorbachev’s himself, in his most recent comments on the subject, denies this narrative driven by Putin and the current Russian government, though this shifted somewhat from an opinion offered years earlier.

Remove Russian rhetoric and take in reality and you realize that NATO was not part of the discussion around Ukraine at this particular moment in time until Russia forced this issue, Ukraine has not been extended any kind of a formal invitation to NATO, this is not even being seriously discussed as a present or near-future option, and NATO—including, specifically and most importantly, the U.S. and Biden—has made clear Ukraine does not currently meet NATO’s qualifications for membership and is not even close.  Keep in mind, too, as you are asked to understand the Russian “perspective,” that it is millions of Ukrainians and their legitimately elected leaders who have expressed a clear preference for the West over Russia and a desire to join NATO along with that: this is what they want, so much so they enshrined that goal formally into their constitution in early 2019.

A Natural Reaction, a Vital Principle of International Law and the Twenty-First Century

It should be no surprise that it turns out when Russia treats countries horribly, they do not want to enter in alliances with it and will, instead, eagerly break away from Russian domination when they can and just as eagerly join with NATO, as is their right as free and independent nations (the natural consequences of imperial collapse all throughout history, from which Russia is not immune).

Self-determination for a sovereign Ukraine does not have mean war with Russia, and only Russia will initiate that war of choice and only if it chooses.  Its reasoning for war rests upon the most empty, banal, overused tropes from czarist Imperial Russia that claim Russians are an ethnicity above and apart from others, superior and blessed by Orthodox Christian God while destined to rule over the other Slavs and, at the lowest point in the hierarchy, other groups of people that surround the Slavs.  What any of those people want is irrelevant, for it is Russia’s birthright destiny. 

Without the free will and agency of these various peoples who had endured decades, sometimes centuries of oppression under Russian and/or Soviet rule, nothing NATO did would have resulted in countries formerly under Moscow’s sway becoming NATO members.  But those peoples chose for themselves, and, in the case of Ukraine, Ukrainians actually have a say.  And while the West will not die for their right to have that say, it can still support it all the same as they are now by supporting Ukraine in other ways and teaching Putin and Russians that a united West will not let Russia get away with literal murder (among other things) without paying a steeply heavy price, as seriously harmful to Russia as its rationales for its Ukraine mischief are mindlessly tedious.

Either we live in a world where the idea that a democratic nation has a right to freely choose to enter into alliances and partnerships its leaders and people deem desirable without having to face military attacks as a result or sovereignty with the legitimacy of the consent of the governed has no real meaning and war will become an increasingly preferred political tool.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, February 21, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

Also see March 8 follow-up Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—If Russian President Vladimir Putin thought when he began this military buildup that any major concessions would be forthcoming from the by-far-stronger U.S. or NATO as a result of reckless Russian military provocations, U.S. President Joe Biden—unlike his unfit predecessor—has made it crystal clear Putin will get nothing of the sort from a Western alliance now invigorated by Russia’s own acts, acts that have united Europe against Russia in tandem with Biden’s firm leadership in the face of Russian aggression, aggressively countering every move and statement by the Kremlin.

It was only several months ago when many a pundit pundited that NATO and the Western and other U.S.-led alliances were somehow in “tatters,” along with Biden’s credibility, because of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan that, taken out of larger military, humanitarian, and historical contexts, was proclaimed by said punditry as a “disaster” and a “fiasco,” pronunciamentos that may very well been a major factor in Putin’s decision to vastly overplay his hand on Ukraine, a hand far weaker than he seems to realize.  I discussed the reality of the larger picture of Afghanistan and the U.S. war there several times during and after the withdrawal, with one key takeaway that, despite the tragic crises in Taliban-run Afghanistan itself, to read any tectonic shifts in the global balance of power or U.S. relationships was to overreach one’s mental and predictive limits (hardly a concern for so many “experts” and the press, more myopic and short-term focused than ever).

This would actually help precipitate the current drama in Ukraine.

Leading into 2021, Putin and his top advisors’ hubris only was only growing in recent years with the spectacular success of Russian cyberwarfare/hybrid warfare against the West—especially the U.S. and the UK (and why I have called for NATO’s Article 5 collective defense provision to explicitly add cyberwarfare in writing, including disinformation).  In the wake of the January 6 Trump Capitol insurrection, this hubris only greatly intensified, Trump serving his Kremlin enablers’ purposes even when he managed to lose.  And during the summer’s Afghanistan withdrawal, the aforementioned typical Western media coverage that oversold divisions within the Western alliance would only significantly add to Putin’s sense of American and Western fragility and disunity (never mind that the coverage blew entirely out of proportion a few tragic days at the very end of an otherwise nearly bloodless, remarkably successful withdrawal from Afghanistan—including the Kabul Airlift that evacuated some 124,000 people, the vast majority Afghan civilians, in just 17 days under incredibly chaotic and fraught conditions).

All these factors combined as 2021 dragged on with Biden’s flagging poll numbers, a brand-new and untested German chancellor in Olaf Scholz saddled by the pressures of Nord Stream 2 (the massive gas pipeline project that would connect Russian gas directly to Germany and behind which Russia’s massive state-owned Gazprom is the main force), a U.K under a Boris Johnson beset by scandal, an upcoming (and uncertain) French national election, and a general level of protest-inspiring dissatisfaction (justified or otherwise) with COVID-19 policies in the West to give Putin the impression that Biden, the U.S., and the West in general were weak and ripe for division.

For Putin, his inner circle, and Russian intelligence, the caricature of a hapless West—which, admittedly, the West had been playing into for years with its generally weak responses to Russia’s unabated aggression, hostility, gaslighting, and general bad-faith behavior—that was appearing to Russia with this unique combination of recent issues and events effectively fed into their confirmation bias and hubris and, thus, has led Putin to make his big gamble now.

Yet, as already noted, Biden has stood strong and rallied NATO and the West quite well and quite rapidly, proving that the doom-and-gloom assessments of the health of NATO after Afghanistan were way off; even Germany, often regarded as the weakest NATO link when it comes to Russia, just Friday indicated Nord Stream 2 is “on the table” to be involved in German economic retaliation for a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And part of the reason, again, is just how pathetically predictable Putin’s screen of smoke and mirrors here has been, unable to hide over 150,000 Russian troops amassing on Ukraine’s border along with their planes, helicopters, tanks, artillery, naval warships, and other heavy equipment.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 25, 2021 (updated August 26 to discuss the terrorist attacks near the airport); see related podcast The Real Context News Podcast #7: Col. Steve Miska, U.S. Army (Ret.) on the U.S. Withdrawal & Our Duty to Our Afghan Allies and related articles 9/11, Afghanistan, and the “War on Terror”: The Long View (& the Tragic One) and America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus

SILVER SPRING—The situation looked grim.  Wholly surrounded by a grim, much-feared, terror-inducing-and-utilizing hostile power and deep in the territory that power’s forces controlled, the U.S. military and its allies found itself with few options and many thousands of civilians in its care, dependent on U.S. assistance not just for aid but for survival.  The crisis had developed amidst a massive regional military withdrawal, with the current American presidential administration finding itself in shock, surprised that its foe would be in the position it was in at this time in a way that caught America and its allies at a distinct disadvantage and clearly without plans in motion that anticipated the current debacle.  The key U.S. planners and decision-makers had clearly underestimated the boldness of their foe and the speed with which it would act and succeed; earlier, more urgent warnings were not heeded in full.  And while the U.S. and this foe had not and were not engaged in direct hostilities in this time period, the tension was suffocating and combat seemed ready to erupt at any provocation.  Civilians were not so lucky and had found themselves targeted and caught in the standoff, their future uncertain and looking grim.  Would their American occupiers-turned protectors stand by them?  Or would they be abandoned to the cruel depredations of a sinister foe driven by an extremist ideology?

This description could easily apply to the situation today faced by U.S. President Joe Biden at Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on the outskirt’s Kabul, the country’s capital city, describing the situation of the U.S., its military allies, and Afghan civilians in an island of U.S. control amidst a sea of terrorist Taliban-controlled territory, but it would just as aptly describe the situation faced in June 1948 by one of Biden’s predecessors, Harry Truman, in Germany’s divided capital of Berlin, with West Berlin an island of U.S., British, and French control amidst a sea of Communist Soviet-controlled territory.

Obviously, there are key differences: the Soviet Union and the Taliban are hardly equivalents, and we had been allied to one and in a longstanding war with another; Germany is not Afghanistan, whether culturally or in its location; 1948 is not 2021; in one situation we were bringing in supplies to save at-risk civilians and to maintain our own position and in the other, we are trying to get people out from a position we are not trying to maintain after this evacuation; and the overall geopolitics leading to each are quite different in many respects.

Nevertheless, the tactical similarities are striking and deserve examination.

Two Dire Situations

Since the end of WWII, Germany had been divided by the victorious Allies into a Soviet zone in the east and American, British, and French zone in the West, with Germany’s capital of Berlin also similarly divided into four occupation zones: the Soviets in a large zone in what would be known as East Berlin, and the American, British, and French zones in what would be known as West Berlin. Some of the major issues that helped set up the possibility of the Berlin crisis arose much earlier, from oversights in planning and negotiations going all the way back to during WWII itself, under the previous presidential administration.  And it was in the fall of 1947 that Gen. Lucius Clay, the U.S. Military Governor for Germany, warned that the Soviets might go as far as to force the West out of Berlin, but, as historian Wilson Miscamble noted, “no precautions were taken nor were contingency plans made in Washington.”  When the U.S. Army’s Planning and Operations (P&O) Division put together in January 1948 a study of options in the face of Soviet aggression, its recommendation in the event of a full blockade was to try to remain in the city as long as supply would allow but to eventually evacuate.  Gen. Clay even warned on March 5, 1948, of the “dramatic suddenness” with which war could come, yet this sparked not attempts to shore up a weak U.S. position but only evacuations of family members of American staff and a discussion in the Army section of the Pentagon of withdrawing from Berlin.  The Secretary of the Army did not think the U.S. could stay if the Soviets applied significant pressure; Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradly in April echoed this with a lack of confidence the U.S. was prepared to fight to stay in Berlin, and had even that month suggested withdrawing from Berlin in response to a temporary crisis then over Soviet inspections of U.S. trains supplying Berlin.  The French wanted to leave Berlin entirely.

Even Gen. Clay, though, did not think that the Soviets would engage in a full blockade for fear of hurting their standing among the German people.  The leadership of both the Army and the State Department did not feel a Soviet blockade was likely, either, while the CIA on May 12 only warned of “further gradual tightening of Soviet restrictions” and even expressed as late as June 17 confidence that the Soviets wanted to improve relations with the West.  Other top officials thought the Soviets would apply pressure on the West to leave Berlin only over time and gradually.  Truman himself was focused on a tight Democratic primary, 1948 being a presidential election year.

Unsure if it would even stay in Berlin, the U.S. did not anticipate nor act to deter the Soviets from enacting a full blockade.  Thus, Truman and his team were caught off-guard after the Soviets imposed a full blockade on the Western sectors of Berlin late on the night of June 23, just a week after the CIA released an intelligence estimate that in no way predicted anything like a full blockade in a week.  Already low on supplies in a Berlin that was still mostly bombed-out ruins, the Germans living in the Western zones would start suffering in a few days, seriously so within two weeks, without access to new supplies.  Military and civilian planners, intelligence officials, and the president himself had failed to anticipate what was happening, and on June 24, the U.S., its allies, and the civilians under its control woke up and found themselves in dire straits, facing an entirely predictable but imminently looming disaster with very few options and the possibility of miscalculation or war erupting from even one wrong move tremendous.

This is remarkably similar to the situation the Biden Administration, its allies, and those civilians depending on the U.S. found themselves on August 14.  The Biden Administration had similar warnings that the security situation was dire, that preparations should be accelerated, and that Afghan security forces were not likely to last long and that government could collapse quickly, though, to quote U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff Gen. Mark Milley, “there was nothing…that indicated a collapse of this army and this government [Afghan] in eleven days” and it was blindsided like the Truman Administration was in 1948.  Those on Biden’s team, too, had to feel out and develop their approach and see how their foe would respond, and have made progress even with a lack of clarity and much confusion.

Yet the awful precariousness and desperation of the situation in Berlin on June 24, 1948, the miscalculations and missteps in the run-up to that moment, the terror of Berliners in Western zones, are barely remembered today; instead, the wildly successful outcome of the Truman Administration’s response, the bravery of American pilots, and the logistical miracle of the Berlin Airlift are remembered much more than the Berlin Blockade.

Here, history can be both instructive and provide hope.

Feeling through the Dark in Berlin

Truman’s top staff, even after the Berlin Airlift began in full on June 26th, did not know how things would unfold, did not know what U.S. policy would be over time, did not know what they would do in the event of a Soviet attack, remained divided on Berlin, and were often just trying their best to react to rapidly unfolding events.  The U.S., Britain, and France were divided with each other on Berlin policy, too.  Truman’s top advisors were still deciding if they wanted to stay in Berlin or leave when Truman communicated his (apparently “tentative” and “provisional”) decision (to stay), without much discussion, on June 28, but debate on this within his team would continue for months and Truman’s own tentative nature of the firm short-term commitment he made indicated he wanted to see how things would play out over time.

Over the coming weeks, Truman struck a precarious balance between acting forcefully to protect Americans, Western allies, and German civilians in West Berlin while also trying to avoid provoking the wily, nefarious, hard-to-predict Soviets or sparking military escalation.  The Airlift was even seen as a compromise, risk-averse, time-buying, temporary measure—one that lacked support from key U.S. military leaders—until late July, when Truman decided to make it a longer-standing policy; before then, the situation was characterized by uncertainty and anxiety, with Truman’s public and private statements offering some clarity for various present moments but not on general policy, leaving anything save the near-term future ambiguous.  And for some time—until January 1949—the Airlift fell short of what was needed to properly supply Berlin (one can only imagine how today’s media would decry this as a “failure” and focus on the shortages in Berlin, where households that winter of 1948-1949 had only one hour of electricity per day each).

It is important to note this suffering and the setbacks, and while the Berlin Airlift was messy, uncertain, and ad hoc, in the end, it worked out incredibly well for the U.S., its allies, and West Berliners, with the Berliners themselves particularly determined to hold out.  In hindsight especially, in a situation that was extremely tense that could serve as a catalyst for a full-blown conventional or even a nuclear war, instead of committing outright to high-risk policies, Truman allowing things to develop and to react as the developments occurred proved to be the safer, sounder middle course, despite the desire of many—including some of Truman’s top advisors—for firm positions, clear answers, and long-term clarity.

The Real Achievement in Kabul

Today, the press should not expect Biden to have all the answers, either; he, too, is responding to a rapidly developing, precarious, and uncertain situation and has to engage a wily, nefarious, hard-to-predict Taliban; he, like Truman before him, wants to avoid any military escalation.  But the Biden Administration and its allies still have options, with thousands of troops and their highest level of focus and energy bearing down upon the situation in Kabul as the Kabul Airlift is in full swing.

Yet much of the media—which barely, and I mean barely, covered Afghanistan in recent years)—ABC, NBC, and CBS devoted a collective measly five minutes to Afghanistan in all of 2020 on their main evening news broadcasts out of over 14,000 minutes of those programs’ total news coverage)—is pronouncing Biden’s withdrawal execution a failure (“total,” “complete”), inviting many of the people who botched America’s foray into Afghanistan over two decades, even those who negotiated or supported the terrible Trump Administration’s withdrawal agreement with the Taliban to hypocritically chime in along the same lines (a notable exception is Trump’s own former National Security Advisor, Gen. H.R. McMaster, who likens the deal to the Munich appeasement of Hitler).

While it is undeniable that there were disastrous tactical calculations and mistakes made during the past weeks and months, the media is mainly trapped in the mentality of August 14, when things seemed disastrous and any serious adjustments, fixes, or mitigating responses from the Biden Administration were not apparent.  Back in 1948, the press basically had daily print editions and radio/TV broadcasts at most few times a day, no twenty-four-hour news coverage, no mobile phones with video cameras, no Twitter, no Internet.  Coverage was less focused on details and anecdotes but on putting together a bigger picture, a task that I have repeatedly noted our current media struggles to accomplish. 

And that current press is missing the massive, increasing success of the Kabul Airlift.

Some numbers that do not lie: in the eleven days from fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 14-15 through August 24, the U.S.-led operation has evacuated some 82,300 people—mostly Afghans—from Hamid Karzai International Airport, including:

• some 7,800 on Saturday
• an incredible 10,400 by the U.S. military and 5,900 by coalition aircraft on Sunday (over 16,000 in one day and well over 27,000 in the two-and-a-half days from mid-Friday through Sunday)
• a further, even more staggering 21,600 people on Monday (12,700 on U.S. military flights and 8,900 on coalition flights)
• a similarly massive 19,000 on Tuesday (11,200 on U.S. military flights and 7,800 by coalition craft)
• the four-and-a-half-day total from mid-Friday through Tuesday is close to 68,000 people (40,600 from Monday-Tuesday alone)
• including those evacuated through the airport since late July, the operation has flown out from the airport some 87,900 since late July

And all this has been accomplished with zero U.S. casualties.* (see 8/26 update at end)

Let that sink in.  This is a remarkable achievement, especially considering the extreme circumstances and the rapid adjustments and moves required to make this happen, for which Biden, his team, and those operating on the ground in Kabul deserve much credit.

If we can meet this accelerated pace from the last seventy-two hours or even close over the next week, and assuming much of the final day or two would have to be prioritized for removing U.S. troops and coalition military and diplomatic forces, that would be roughly 70,000 to perhaps as many as 160,000 or more additional people evacuated by August 31, the just-yesterday reaffirmed apparent (but still apparently flexible) deadline chosen by Biden.  That would be roughly 120,000-220,000 total, but this presumes safe and free passage to the airport for Afghans trying to leave and recent developments have severely complicated this issue (more on that later).  Still, this has the potential to be one of the most remarkable humanitarian logistical feats since the Berlin Airlift (in many ways, it already is), and the media should at least recognize this hopeful possibility alongside the peril of a far worse possible outcome; if the possibility of ISIS-affiliate (ISIS Khorasan, or ISIS-K) attacks deserve being reported (and it does), then so, too, does the possibility of successfully getting out 100,000 to 200,000 or more people fleeing the Taliban, especially when the evacuations have been impressive, quickly increasing, and successful thus far.

Soviet Lessons for the Taliban

The Taliban, too, can also learn from history: the Soviet leadership, even under a man like Joseph Stalin who reigned through terror, realized that to interfere or attack these humanitarian flights would be a public relations disaster worse in scale than the circumstances they were imposing on Americans, their allies, and German civilians in West Berlin.  The Soviets were untrustworthy, extremists, and not afraid to use brutal violence on a massive scale.  And yet, they knew they had to some degree win hearts and minds and not appear to be a terrible, bad-faith actor on the world stage; they knew they had to govern in the territory they had newly acquired and, still recovering from a long, brutal war, they did not want to alienate the international community.

Understandably, then, the Soviets in the end decided it was in their own interests not to be seen stopping the Berlin Airlift and to eventually, eleven months later, end the Berlin Blockade on May 12, 1949.

The U.S.-led Western allies were able to leverage their superior economic might to impose their own blockade on Soviet-occupied eastern Germany, a major factor in the Soviet decision to relent in their blockade of Berlin.  This type of leverage is something today’s U.S.-led Western allies could easily exert if the Taliban interfere with the Kabul Airlift; the Taliban’s leaders—desperate for acceptance, recognition, and aid from the very institutions run and dominated by the U.S. and its allies—know this and know their requests for the West to engage with them, maintain and increase aid programs, and further economic ties with an Afghanistan under their control will fall on deaf ears should they not allow the Kabul Airlift to proceed and or even engage in violence against the operation or those trying to reach it.

Today’s geopolitical situation is actually surprisingly similar, then, to 1948 in a few crucial aspects: facing a stark imbalance similar to that faced by the Soviet Union in 1948, the Taliban today surround the Western position in question and are in a far superior military position locally even as it is in a far weaker position economically and diplomatically.  Both the U.S. today knows and in 1948 knew that the eyes of the world are and were on the crisis, that global public opinion is and was with their mission, and that judgment of their enemies would be harsh if those enemies thwarted that mission.  Today, the Taliban is capable of bluster and threats much like the Soviets, to be sure, but also like the Soviets with the Berlin Airlift and their occupation zone in Germany, the leaders of Taliban will find their movement’s position on the ground and ability to work with the world to rebuild the Afghanistan they just have taken over will be better off with the Kabul Airlift succeeding than with them derailing it.

It was hardly a love-fest between the Soviets and the West in a divided Germany after the Berlin Airlift—not long after, West and East Germany, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, were created—but peace has been in place in Germany ever since, all of Germany saw a massive recovery from WWII, and WWIII was averted.  Both the West and Soviets were able to maintain their positions, but, in the end, though it took decades, the repression of the Soviets and failure of their imposed system resulted in a lack of popular support and a desire and eventual reality of East Germans reuniting with West Germany under the free and democratic West German system, not the repressive Soviet model running on extremist ideology. 

The Taliban, far less powerful in 2021 in Afghanistan than the Soviets were in Germany in 1948, should also take heed from this lesson if it hopes to avoid resistance, revolution, and overthrow.  And, unlike Truman in 1948, Biden in 2021 is not even contemplating staying, so there is even less incentive for the Taliban than for the Soviets to interfere or attack the airlift operation, which even the Soviets did not do back then.

Despair and Hope in a Dance

The media is right to point out the mistakes made by Biden and his team in the past weeks and months, and if the Biden Administration fails to evacuate a significant number of Americans or Afghan allies who were not stuck behind Taliban lines in the weeks and months before the fall of Kabul, that will still be a disgrace, each individual left behind a failure of the Administration in and of itself.  But the press should also recognize the remarkable achievement that the Kabul Airlift is becoming and will hopefully firmly be remembered as—in addition to recognizing the clear parallels to the Berlin Airlift—provided our leaders see this mission through to a proper completion. 

And that is where things get a lot more complicated: it is altogether too easy to have a sinking feeling that we will fall far short of evacuating everyone we should be able to get out, leaving tens of thousands behind, that something really bad will happen.  It is easy to feel despair when you read yesterday that the Taliban is announcing a policy of blocking Afghans from the airport road, a policy that, if enforced robustly, will make it extremely difficult to extract many more Afghans; they are legitimately worried about a “brain drain,” but one cannot help worry that this stems at least as much from a desire to keep those who helped us from escaping, to mete out their barbaric sense of justice not just on our allies but also their families.  Should this happen, the grave earlier missteps of the Biden Administration will haunt Biden, the Kabul Airlift, and the whole Afghanistan war, should haunt all Americans and the world. 

And yet, there are reasons to still hope even with the latest developments.  It is easy to also feel a sense of American pride in how many tens of thousands of people we have gotten out so far, in how quickly we ramped up evacuations in just the past few days.  Unimpeded, there is so much more we can still do, so many more we can save, with our evacuation operation running amazingly smoothly and hitting a peak.  And there is apparently broad bipartisan support in Congress for extending the mission if necessary to get as many of our Afghan allies out as we can.

Set against this will to get the job done, there is now also a very real, breaking, specific, imminent threat from the aforementioned local ISIS affiliate, which intelligence indicates is seeking to attack civilians—American and Afghan—clustered outside the airport gates.

Knowing that just this past Monday our own CIA chief William Burns met in person in Kabul with de facto Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar (released from a Pakistani prison at the strong urging of the Trump Administration in 2018), there is clearly high-level intelligence sharing going on between the U.S. and the Taliban, a mortal enemy of ISIS.  In this context, it seems even more understandable that the Taliban would want to avoid having chaotic mobs of many thousands of Afghans interspersed with foreign nationals, including Americans, clogging the airport road and the areas outside the airport gates making an all-too-tempting target for ISIS suicide bombers, mortars, or any other manner of deadly attacks.  The U.S., obviously, wants to avoid this, too.  Ending the war with such scenes of terrorism and carnage, with people packed so tightly that casualties would undoubtedly be high, and putting Afghan civilians, American civilians, and American soldiers at such risk, would be irresponsible.  Neither the Taliban nor the U.S. wants ISIS attacks to succeed, so maybe most of the reason for the Taliban banning Afghans from trying to run the gauntlet of the airport road, especially after the chaos and crushing deaths there from earlier, but it would be irresponsible to not consider it likely that they also want to just keep U.S. allies from escaping their sick sense of justice.

Still, given this context of intelligence sharing and of the imminent ISIS action, and give the obvious reality that the U.S. is applying constant diplomatic pressure, that negotiations with the Taliban are constant and ongoing, that Biden did vow to get all the Americans and SIVs and their dependents out, that the U.S. (as discussed) has tremendous leverage over the Taliban, that a tremendous amount of pressure will be placed on the Taliban to allow the right Afghans safe passage to the airport and in a robust flow once security conditions allow, and that Biden himself yesterday said, announcing his intention to adhere to the August 31 deadline, that keeping to that deadline

depends upon the Taliban continuing to cooperate and allow access to the airport for those who were transport-—we’re transporting out and no disruptions to our operations.  In addition, I’ve asked the Pentagon and the State Department for contingency plans to adjust the timetable should that become necessary.  I’m determined to ensure that we complete our mission — this mission.

This gives me a lot of hope, even if security dictates a winding down of the U.S. military operation, that Biden, as a man of history and with the Berlin Airlift as inspiration, really will come up with one or more workable alternative if that is what is necessary to, as he said, “complete the mission.”  Nothing is certain yet other than what has already transpired—the bad and the ugly, but also the good.  We should all feel a sense of dread but also cautious hope, as the Biden Administration’s efforts, even after severe mistakes and setbacks and in sometimes anarchic and frenzied conditions filled with danger and uncertainty, have gotten over well over 82,000 people out in eleven days (that number is sure to grow) with zero U.S. casualties (that number is not sure to grow).* (see 8/26 update at end)  

To paraphrase the military historian Daniel Harrington, the very real confusion, lack of clarity, and hesitation during the Berlin Blockade are not among what we remember today; the symbolism of American defiance and determination resulting in a triumph against the odds in the Berlin Airlift are.  With so much yet to unfold, it is still quite possible that the Kabul Airlift may end well and succeed in evacuating a tremendous amount of people mostly without incident even after the initial disastrous missteps, that the U.S. might succeed in withdrawing with honor and staying true to most of our citizens and allies.

One other major legacy of the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift: that German troops are currently serving and fighting alongside U.S. troops as NATO partners in Afghanistan deployed to the airport at the heart of the current 2021 Kabul Airlift.  Even with all the justified dread, this fact, too, can inspire and remind us all that there is still a real chance for this operation to go down in history as a resounding success.  No one—not those in the media, not us, not President Biden’s allies, not his political enemies—should prematurely conclude that this mission is a failure or a success yet; time remains, with reasons to fear but also reasons to hope.  As Biden is fond of quoting the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, let me leave you with his words:

History says / Don’t hope on this side of the grave / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.

UPDATE: 8/26 2:30 PM U.S. EST: The awful carnage we were all hoping would be avoided has transpired in what is apparently an ISIS-K attack that has killed and wounded dozens of Afghans and Americans: at least sixty afghans and four U.S. Marines are dead, many people injured. This carnage is heartbreaking, and reminds us that the theme there really is despair dancing with hope. Yet how this mission will end remains to be seen: there is still the possibility for the mission to continue and evolve and move on to new phases, to still get many, many thousands more out, to do so with minimal casualties, to finish by and large as a historic success. One day, one attack can and will not define the overall character of the mission; the mission in its totality and how we finish it, though, will, and this still remains to be seen. Let us hope for the best and dismiss those making facile conclusions about an ongoing mission.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See related podcast The Real Context News Podcast #7: Col. Steve Miska, U.S. Army (Ret.) on the U.S. Withdrawal & Our Duty to Our Afghan Allies and related article America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 7, 2021; updated June 15, 2021, to take into account the June 14 NATO summit in Brussels; cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence; condensed rewrite for Small Wars Journal September 24 also cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence and featured by Real Clear Defense; see Brian’s related review of one of the most important books on national security to come out in years, Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This is How They Tell Me the World Ends; see his related articles: December 24, 2020, The History of Russia’s Cyberwarfare Against NATO Shows It Is Time to Add to NATO’s Article 5; February 17, 2017, Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; and December 7, 2016, The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

SILVER SPRING—Alliances between nations must adapt to retain power over time, and in no area has warfare evolved more in recent years than in cyberwarfare.  Article 5 of NATO’s founding 1949 North Atlantic Treaty mandates that if an “armed attack” is carried out against a member state, all member states (currently thirty, including the most powerful Western nations) “shall” consider that attack and any armed attack on even just one member state “an attack against them all” and “will assist” it, up to and “including the use of armed force.”  As the centerpiece for over seventy years of the West’sPax Americana, global military power, system of alliances and collective defense, and ability to project combined strength anywhere on the planet, NATO must adapt to the present by adding cyberwarfare—including information warfare—to Article 5.

Cyberwarfare As Modern Warfare

An obvious point in favor of including cyberwarfare in Article 5 is that, by far, the most effective, damaging, and destabilizing attacks against NATO countries since 9/11 have been cyberattacks, most carried out by Russia.  The term “information warfare” (“a new face of war,” quoting a RAND Corporation report) refers to a key element of this cyberwarfare and includes the word warfare to indicate these are hardly benign, normal influence operations and are, indeed, the types of operations that have always been part of any serious conventional war in modern times.  Even in the nineteenth-century, von Clausewitz wrote that “War is…an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”

The ever-evolving concept of warfare in our digital age, then, does not have to include shots being fired from guns, and it is naïve to not consider cyberwarfare as simply another form of war in the twenty-first century that uses force in the digital realm to achieve results in some of the same spirit as traditional armies: attack, defense, deception, sabotage, destruction, and to pressure actors to change behavior.  Clausewitz most famously wrote that “war is merely the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means” and would have well understood cyberwarfare (sometimes just termed cyberwar) to be war and well within that “other means” category.

The two countries that have led in cyberwarfare are Russia and China, the first (and weaker, but bolder) being NATO’s (and America’s) clearest top state enemy (even if unofficially but clearly in a de facto sense), the second (and stronger, more reserved) being America’s clearest top state rival in a holistic sense, as China has engaged and led in much non-weaponized hacking and espionage (admittedly common among major powers), but has not, say, brazenly released stolen information or disinformation in a way timed to significantly interfere with NATO member states’ elections (as Russia has).  And though China has its own sophisticated influence operations, Russia undisputedly has led by far in acts more hostile than espionage (uniquely so among major powers) since its watershed 2007 Estonia cybercampaign (such campaigns might better be termed cyberassaults than cyberattacks, the latter a broader, far more common term which can even apply to a single high school student’s cyberattacks against his own school district).

Russia officially views NATO as a “threat,” and since that 2007 Estonia cybercampaign, has become far more aggressive and threatening towards NATO, often playing with internal NATO nationalisms and blanketing NATO nations in cyberattacks, including election interference and bolstering of secessionist campaigns, with notable cybercampaigns being carried out against over twenty NATO member states (leaving aside its campaigns waged against non-NATO states). 

Furthermore, de facto, non-declared wars are the most common type of war in the modern era even if the term “war” is not specifically used.  America, for example, has a long history of undeclared war going all the way back to the Articles of Confederation and the early days of the Washington Administration involving conflict with Native Americans and also the John Adams Administration’s 1798-1800 Quasi-War, then popularly termed “The Undeclared War with France.”  Furthermore, as one scholar notes, “the legal state of war is possible without actual fighting.”

Taking all this into account, then, it is hardly unreasonable to consider Russia and NATO in a state of undeclared cyberwarfare and, therefore, a state of undeclared war.  One of NATO’s flagship publications, NATO Review, even published analysis in 2017 acknowledging that Russia was waging “non-kinetic political war on the West.”

In fact, as I have argued for some time, a truly deep look would expose Putin and his Kremlin conducting a clear de facto war to destroy NATO, the West, the EU, and Western democracy; to fracture trans-Atlantic and European unity and even the unity of individual Western nations; and to foment, fund, and favor the rise of far-right ethno-nationalists and secessionists friendly to Russia and hostile to the U.S. and NATO in NATO countries and elsewhere, all while savaging those in the center and mainstream left not preferred by Putin.  The parties Putin helps usually have much in common with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s banally nationalist United Russia party, which has struck up mixes of formal and informal alliances with several significant European political parties in major NATO states. 

Though there have been military moves by Russia in Ukraine and Georgia—two NATO aspirants—the main weapons in its undeclared war on NATO are not tanks, bombs, or jets; rather, they are bots, trolls, and fake news.

The Nature of Russian Cyberwarfare Confronting NATO 

Through hacking, disinformation, propaganda, and other cyber-methods, Russian campaigns that advance this war have been able to affect political outcomes in numerous NATO countries to suit (or, at least, more suit) Putin’s agenda.  These efforts are coordinated through powerful branches of the Russian government and close Putin allies in and out of the Kremlin, often using thousands of fake accounts to artificially bolster the reach of their lies, which, in turn, are augmented within the target countries by native agents and allies (with unwitting true believers long being dubbed “useful idiots”).  In many NATO countries—including the U.S.—Putin is even popular with far-rightists, no doubt in part because of Russia’s robust information cyberwarfare.

Reigning as the supreme disruptor on social media, Russia spews a “firehose of falsehoods” that has been massively effective, distorting and gaslighting the public discourse so that Russia’s preferred narratives are wildly amplified beyond their natural organic reaches, influencing many millions, thus helping to create an atmosphere where disinformation is sometimes consumed even more than actual news and doubt about even basic truths becomes widespread.

Domestic media outlets can be crucial instruments to this end of Russia’s, not only enthusiastic right-wing media outlets, but also far-left media outlets and figures (Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi being two of the most prominent examples); as long as the Russian narratives further their narratives—usually attacking more mainstream and/or moderate parties and figures—these more extreme domestic outlets are often happy to unquestioningly parrot the Russian-projected “information,” and whether it is illegally hacked or not even vetted matters little to them.  The distortions, lies, and unsubstantiated claims then become such a large part of the conversation that mainstream media latches onto this disinformation—sometimes echoing it, other times critiquing it yet still amplifying it—and the Russian narrative itself then becomes mainstream, as I have previously explained in detail.

And once Putin’s favorites are in office in part because of Russian disinformation, they in turn further spout Russian disinformation from the highest levels of the government and even copy Russian tactics (as former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa illustrates with the U.S. case).  They also pursue policies favorable to the Kremlin (e.g., weakening anti-Russian sanctions or creating geopolitical power vacuums for Russia to fill) and obstruct investigations into Russia’s cybercampaigns, making it all but impossible to effectively fight back.  Terrifyingly, both America’s 2019 Mueller report and the British Parliament’s Intelligence & Security Committee’s exceptional Russia report released last year note damning examples of obstruction in their respective governments.

With such additional feedback loops, Russian cyberwarfare is thus a gift that keeps on giving, with domestic news outlets and coopted politicians doing Russia’s dirty work for and alongside it.

The Big One: Targeting America

The revelations of Russia’s devastatingly far-reaching months-long government and corporate espionage hacking, known as the SolarWinds attack, and the Russian cyberattack against the third-party-run e-mail system of America’s main international aid agency, USAID (a multipronged attack that used access to that system to hit some 150 government agencies, think tanks, non-profits, and human rights groups that have been critical of Putin and Russia)—both carried out by the S.V.R., Russia’s equivalent of the C.I.A. and one of the main successor agencies of the notorious Soviet K.G.B.—highlight recently exposed Russian cyberwarfare against the U.S., NATO’s largest pillar.

The same can be said for a recent significant attack on major U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye, almost certainly also carried out by the Russian government, and for two recent ransomware attacks—one on the Colonial Pipeline and one on meat plants of JBS, the largest fuel pipeline and meat producer in America, respectively (in the latter, plants in Canada and Australia were also hit).  These ransomware cyberattacks were carried out by DarkSide and REvil, respectively, two criminal hacking groups thought to be based in Russia or former Soviet-dominated states and that are widely understood to have tacit approval and protection from the Kremlin (to put some perspective in an aside here, it should be noted that after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks—the only time NATO ever invoked Article 5—Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was overthrown by the U.S. because it gave harbor to al-Qaeda and did not hold the terrorist group to account, refusing to comply with American demands to shut down its camps, hand over its leaders, and arrest the rest of its members).

Much like Russia farms out parts of its aggressive foreign policy to Russian oligarchs, the Russian mafia, and Russian mercenaries in playing a sordid, cynical game of “deniability,” (something I have noted many times before), so too does it work similarly with hackers outside the Russian government.

Prior to the recent discovery of the activities outlined above, Russian cyberwarfare efforts against the U.S. have included clearly and repeatedly promoting unrest and division, pushing both disinformation about the coronavirus and illegitimate conspiracy theories of coordinated massive fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.  Before the election, the Russians’ cyberwarfare effort was all-in on attacking the main political rival (Joe Biden) of their preferred top candidate (Donald Trump).

Of course, division and brainwashing in America have hardly been created by Russia, but it is and has been obvious that these efforts are hardly in vain: multiple credible surveys and any casual examination of social media show that vast swaths of the American public—even many in senior leadership—are buying into this disinformation, believing nonsense about both coronavirus (including millions doubting coronavirus vaccines) and the 2020 presidential election.  All this undermines effective public health measures (literally helping kill Americans) and confidence in the very foundations of our electoral democracy.  In addition, all this Russian content and its fallout obviously does not stay confined to America: international populations’ opinions of America and its political system along with their own views on coronavirus and vaccines are being affected, too.

In the words of journalist George Packer, “antisocial media has us all in its grip.”

The new Biden Administration, then, has its greatest initial challenge—the coronavirus—made even worse by this Russian cyberwarfare even while it will face an unprecedented (excepting Lincoln) crisis of legitimacy in the eyes of millions of misinformed (and disinformed) Americans.

Cyberwarfare a Larger Threat Now to NATO than Terrorism

Russian cyberwarfare focused on election interference in the U.S. in 2016—what I called back in December of that year the First Russo-American Cyberwar—has already caused damage to America, its democracy, and its reputation that is hard to exaggerate, with effects not only still being felt by the U.S. but guaranteed to still be felt for some time.  In contrast, physical terrorist attacks in NATO countries since 9/11, while tragic, have still had comparatively limited effects.  Even Russia’s own 2018 Novichok chemical weapon attack on British soil against Russian military intelligence officer turned spy for the UK Sergei Skripal in Salisbury had more symbolic an effect than anything else, dwarfed by the damage from Russian efforts to tip the 2016 Brexit vote in the direction of Leave or the effect of Russia’s campaign to amplify Scottish secessionism (now increasingly likely and sooner rather than later, an outcome that would obviously fracture and devastate a UK already severely weakened by Brexit). 

As I explained in my analysis of the aforementioned excellent British parliamentary committee report on Russia, Britain’s own official self-reflection made it clear that the solid response (and solid effort to bring in allies to take part in this response) to the Salisbury attack needs to be replicated when it comes to other Russian hostile actions, the clear implication being to include Russia’s cyberwarfare, especially political interference.

The same idea can be applied to NATO as a whole, which does have a Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence located in Tallinn, Estonia.  Yet even today, one-sixth of NATO—Canada, Luxembourg, Albania, Iceland, and North Macedonia—are not members of this Centre, though, encouragingly, the first two are in the process of joining, new members have recently been added, and non-NATO states Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland are “Contributing Participants,” a status available to those outside of NATO; other non-NATO states Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Ireland also intending to join in that capacity.  There are also plans for a new military cyberdefense command center to be fully operational in 2023 at the main NATO military base in Belgium.

Overall, NATO considers “cyber defence…part of NATO’s core task of collective defence” and has since 2014, when the Alliance first explicitly laid out the theoretical possibility of invoking Article 5 in response to a cyberattack (though only “on a case-by-case basis”).  Since then, NATO has “pledge[d] to ensure the Alliance keeps pace with the fast evolving cyber threat landscape and that our nations will be capable of defending themselves in cyberspace as in the air, on land and at sea,” repeatedly reiterating the possibility of Article 5 being invoked in response to a cyberattack, including just this past September.

Update June 15: A communique issued by NATO from its Brussels summit on June 14, 2021, is heralded by some, including the White House, as a “new” cyberdefense policy but actually reiterates already vague and repeatedly articulated positions discussed above, namely, that NATO states “reaffirm that a decision as to when a cyber attack would lead to the invocation of Article 5 would be taken by the North Atlantic Council on a case-by-case basis,” hence, nothing much really new in actual policy and note the use of “reaffirm.”

Falling Short 

Official working papers, conferences, interviews, statements, and raising possibilities on the subject are one thing, but a concrete, clear policy is another, and NATO has nothing of the sort.

The vague idea seems to be that if a cyberattack was “serious” enough, Article 5 would be invoked, but there is no definition of what this threshold would be, and, frankly, this idea seems rather myopic: death by a thousand cuts is still death and has the same effect as decapitation, so tolerating many smaller attacks and sending a clear signal that there will not be a collective Article 5 response to them is simply bad policy.

Consider, too, that Russia would never be able to get away with flying over NATO skies and dropping leaflets of hostile disinformation by the millions onto NATO populations.  It could never get away with doing so once or once in a while, let alone consistently and during sensitive times of pivotal political decisions or unrest in the targeted countries, and yet this is exactly the cyber-equivalent of what Russia is getting away with against NATO’s most significant member states and many of its smaller ones, too.  And while Russia sending in Spetsnaz special forces to steal sensitive information from U.S. bases in Alaska or use physical weapons to sabotage or destroy government computer systems in Lithuania would be viewed automatically as an Article 5-triggering act of war, the same results over and over again from several years of unrelenting cyberwarfare are not, even though this has done more damage to NATO than any Soviet Army did throughout the decades-long Cold War.  This is, in part, because of NATO: the USSR and then Russia did not dare use armed force to attack any NATO state for fear of that explicitly guaranteed Article 5 collective response (even when NATO-member Turkey shot down a Russian military jet over Syria in 2015).

Yet when it comes to cyberwarfare, NATO is practically inviting Russia to attack and get away with it, with the Alliance quite consistently demonstrating its inability and unwillingness under its current framework to respond collectively to Russian cyberaggression.  As noted in the aforementioned UK Russia report, “Russia is not overly concerned about individual reprisal” against its aggressive acts, most certainly including its cyberattacks, with even the U.S. clearly inspiring no fear.

Language can often be tricky, and terms like “war” should never be thrown about lightly.  But with the advent of the internet and the realities of the modern world, NATO cannot become complacent with preventing traditional warfare while failing to adapt to cyberwarfare.  Pretending cyberwarfare is not war and allowing cyberwarfare in real-world practice to be kept out of NATO’s Article 5—leaving individual members states flailing independently and ineffectively against a determined, capable, and organized de facto enemy content to stand down its conventional forces against NATO while unleashing its cyberunits upon it with impunity—has not discouraged Russian cyberwarfare against NATO, it has encouraged it.  Article 5 makes no exception for smaller armed attacks, and any serious collective cybersecurity defense should make no exception for smaller cyberattacks.

An Urgent Need for Drastic Reform

Throughout New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth’s recent book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends—the indispensable, terrifying, definitive account of the development of cyberwarfare and the mess in which we currently find ourselves: a true must-read for anyone hoping to understand how grave is the danger we are facing at this very moment—a constant theme is that we need paradigm shifts in the way we approach cybersecurity, whether the private sector, government, or individual citizens collectively.  You can tell she was having trouble sleeping while researching and writing her book, and we should be, too.

At several points in her book, Perlroth notes that the U.S. in the past rebuffed attempts to discuss some sort of international cyberwarfare convention or treaty, feeling it was the undisputed champion in the cyberarms race and not wanting to give up that advantage.  That ship has long sailed, and just in the last few years a number of rival and hostile governments have greatly managed to shrink, maybe even close, that gap, and with Western countries far more wired than their main rivals and enemies, they are far more vulnerable—with far more to lose—to cyberwarfare.

As FBI Director Christopher Wray recently lamented, the threat cyberwarfare poses to the West has “a lot of parallels” to the threat of terrorism after 9/11.  Echoing Wray, former CIA director and secretary of defense for President Barack Obama, Leon Panetta, warned in a recent interview conducted by Perlroth that he fears we will not do what needs to be done before a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” may cripple us.

Perlroth warns at the end of her book’s epilogue that “many will say” that “these…critical assignments of our time” to deter and defend ourselves from cyberwarfare “are impossible, but we have summoned the best of our scientific community, government, industry, and everyday people to overcome existential challenges before.  Why can’t we do it again?…We don’t have to wait until the Big One to get going.”

How to Revise Article 5 and the NATO Treaty Overall

Considering that the West’s main advantage over Russia is that people like the West a lot more than Russia—manifesting itself in close diplomatic, military, and economic ties about which Russia can only fantasize—the easiest way for the West to face and counter this dire and worsening cyberthreat from Russia is by leveraging its alliances, and, more than anything else, this means involving NATO and involving it in a big way. 

U.S. President Joe Biden himself penned a recent Washington Post op-ed in advance of his upcoming trip to Europe for a NATO summit and to confront Putin face-to-face, writing: “In Brussels, at the NATO summit, I will affirm the United States’ unwavering commitment to Article 5 and to ensuring our alliance is strong in the face of every challenge, including threats like cyberattacks on our critical infrastructure.” 

He can do that by proposing to strengthen Article 5 itself.

With Russia’s rampant cyberwarfare only intensifying and its clear pattern as a bad-faith hostile actor, a paradigm shift in the international system for deterring cyberattacks is absolutely necessary.  Since NATO is the premier defensive alliance of the West, formalizing cyberwarfare’s relationship to Article 5 is a necessary leap forward on this much-needed path and the only way forward for NATO to maintain credible collective defense as the twenty-first century progresses. 

To this end, “or cyberattack” must be added after each instance of the words “armed attack” in Article 5 (e.g., “The Parties agree that an armed attack or cyberattack against one or more of them…” [emphasis added]).

As other Treaty articles have (sometimes subsequently) modified the scope of Article 5, I propose the following definitions of cyberattack are added in a new Article 15:

This crucial definition of cyberattack allows more traditional espionage to stay out of discussions of cyberwarfare for collective defensive purposes while making clear the singular degree of the SolarWinds operation or anything like it will not get such a pass.  It also means there will finally be a way to effectively counter and deter the massive weaponized disinformation campaigns conducted by Russia while also protecting citizens, including journalists and cybersecurity staff, who are on the front lines of this war.

While the Alliance is free to decide how it wants to respond when using Article 5, in many of the situations, appropriate coordinated cyberattacks coming from all of NATO’s member states would be the most conceivable and likely response except for far more serious cyberattacks.

Conclusion: Expanding Article 5 Is Necessary and Overdue

The early twenty-first century’s second decade has been something of a Wild West, with Russia emerging as the biggest beneficiary in terms of cyberwarfare as defined above.  While China has also benefitted in terms of massive espionage and acquisition of Western intellectual property, it is Russia that has used the lawlessness of the cyber domain from a collective security standpoint to engage in the most egregious acts (most recently and most notably with the unprecedented SolarWinds) and ransomware attacks), acts that could easily be defined as hostile acts of war.

The time for lawlessness is over, and, with no statute of limitations on cyberattacks and the just-proposed framework not precluded by the current NATO treaty, NATO would be in its full rights (and is overdue) to invoke Article 5 against Russia now for its cyberwarfare so that Russia’s cyberwarfare will cause Russia far more pain than any damage it inflicts.

This has not been the case, but it must be.

Revising NATO’s Article 5 as suggested herein (leaving aside invocation) will not only clarify the rules for NATO enemies and rivals, but also for the members of a NATO Alliance itself that is in desperate need of clarity and strength on this issue.  It will also make NATO once again an alliance that instills fear in the minds of Russian leaders (as it did with Stalin and subsequent Soviet leadership) who would engage in reckless acts of aggression against NATO or its states, even if “just” through cyberwarfare.

Member states recognizing that they are in a state of war—cyberwar, but still war—with Russia and unambiguously making cyberwarfare a key plank of the Alliance’s main collective defense mechanism is essential, then, to keeping NATO the force for deterring aggression it has been for many decades.

Projecting such strength, both on paper and in practice, will serve as a real-world check against further Russian cyberattacks when inaction and lack of clarity has not, enhancing the security of every NATO member state and perhaps even eventually forcing Russia to a point where productive engagement, not adventuristic brinksmanship, is its chosen priority.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s related review of one of the most important books on national security to come out in years, Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This is How They Tell Me the World Ends; Also see my related article on the UK Parliament’s singularly excellent Russia report and my discussion as a member of a panel with author and Senior International Correspondent for The Guardian, Luke Harding, on Russia’s bad behavior

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) December 10, 2019; see Brian’s related Dec. 24, 2020 article: The History of Russia’s Cyberwarfare Against NATO Shows It Is Time to Add to NATO’s Article 5 and June 7, 2021 article: Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare

WASHINGTON & ARLINGTON —  U.S. “engagement” with Russia needs to shift dramatically to acknowledge obvious reality: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is actively hostile to the United States and constantly seeking to undermine its interests and those of our allies and Western democracy in general.  While open military conflict is obviously the wrong approach, far short of such action, America must meet Russia’s state of hostility with hostility, countering Russian moves to undermine America with our own forceful undermining of Putin’s power and the Kremlin’s reach and credibility.

Russia is not our friend and does not act in good faith.  Pretending otherwise gives the U.S. no advantages.  From Syria to Ukraine, from arms control to our own election security, treating Russia as a serious partner willing to play ball has only led to frustration, destabilization, death, and humiliation.  To make matters worse, the current extraconstitutional U.S. presidency, in particular Donald Trump’s White House, is clearly compromised by the Kremlin to the degree that, unwittingly or not, Donald Trump is acting in the Kremlin’s interests and is undermining American interests, despite the best efforts of his own political appointees, career intelligence officials, diplomats, bureaucrats, and other “adults-in-the-room.”  Furthermore, the Republican Party as a whole has been coopted to a degree by Russia, too, with an unprecedented amount of Russian money going to fund and promote Republicans and Republican-affiliated organizations like the NRA and with Republican leadership and rank-and-file all too happy both to turn a blind eye to election security (since doing so benefits them) and to adopt Kremlin talking points and tactics.

In the entire history of Russo-American relations, never has the U.S. been at such an overall disadvantage, let alone a major disadvantage, as it is now, but with Russia’s own Agent Orange in the Oval Office, it is what it is.  The question, now, from our compromised position, is: what do we do to fix it and deal with Russia effectively?

We can play hardball, with or without President Trump. Simply put, Russia—Putin’s Kremlin specifically—has greatly benefitted from its hostile posture towards the United States with minimal cost in return.  It will continue to do so until it becomes more harmful than beneficial, and for this to be understood, Russia must experience harm in a way that sinks deep and puts fear back into calculus of the Kremlin, as was the case during the Cold War.

We know that Russia has been owning us as far as cyberwarfare.  We, too, can hack secrets of prominent Russian politicians and release them through third-parties like the Russians did with WikiLeaks in 2015-2016.  We can impose severe penalties on platforms like Facebook and Twitter for disseminating what is clear Kremlin propaganda online.  We can also ban RT and Sputnik in the U.S.  The U.S. must also set up its own media arms like RT and Sputnik to be broadcast aggressively and to offer free VPN services for native Russian speakers and readers that will allow them to bypass any censorship the Kremlin can muster against them.

The United States, not Russia, is the world’s largest natural gas producer.  If the Kremlin wants to play hardball with its gas assets, so can the U.S., and more so.  Russia’s state-run Gazprom often sells at a loss to further the Kremlin’s geopolitical aims; the U.S. government, in turn, can buy up stocks of natural gas from its own private sector and then sell at far lower rates than Gazprom to Europe even as it sanctions Gazprom for any of an array of offenses the company has committed over the years.

Russia has supported secessionist movements to harm the West, from Brexit and Scotland to Catalonia and Donetsk.  The Russian Federation is rife with minorities with centuries of grievances against Russia whose pots can also be stirred by propaganda.  And where Russia has aggressively countered Western influence in places like Moldova and the Central African Republic, the U.S. can offer even more economic aid in exchange for alignment with the U.S. and democracy.

We can offer far more military support to Ukraine and engage in deniable special operations missions.  Russia’s one aircraft carrier, the aging Admiral Kuznetsov, might meet with an unfortunate accident next time it ventures far from home…

Perhaps most effectively, we can go after Putin’s and his henchmen’s money.

From the internet to gas, we can outplay Russia with the strengths it has used against us.  Most actions can be undertaken by Congress even without the president.  The time to act is now.

See Brian’s see Brian’s related Dec. 24, 2020 article: The History of Russia’s Cyberwarfare Against NATO Shows It Is Time to Add to NATO’s Article 5, June 7, 2021 article: Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare, and e-Book, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook; preview here

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

WARNING: SPOILERS THROUGH SEASON 8, EPISODE 4 OF THE SHOW!! (but not beyond)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) May 12-13, 2019 (updated May 17 to add a quote)

All photos from HBO

AMMAN—As I contemplate life, art, and their imitations of each other before the final two episodes of HBO’s magisterial Game of Thrones, it is worth reflecting on the journey of the show’s characters and, yes, our journey with them.

Of course, not all the characters left standing as we entered the final two-thirds of the final season are/were “good guys” or even anti-heroes, but even the most wicked among them has also suffered deeply and grievously.  We now find ourselves rooting for characters that killed (The Hound, Jon [sorry Olly], Theon) or attempted to kill (Jaime) children, just to point out one crazy aspect of this show.  In fact, much with like another magisterial HBO show, The Sopranos, one of the most unique things about this show is the surprising level of empathy, sympathy, and respect it generates in the unlikeliest of situations, both in those watching and between the characters themselves.  Just to name a few such situations in which characters working together in the final season on the eve of the climactic Battle of Winterfell: Night King edition had previously found themselves in terrible relations with each other:

• Ser Davos and Tyrion commanded forces against each other at the Battle of the Blackwater.
• Jorah kidnapped Tyrion.
• Brienne was Jaime’s captor.
• Beric fought The Hound and was killed by him (before being revived by Thoros and the Lord of Light).
• Beric gave Gendry against his will to Melisandre, who nearly sacrificed him.
• Jaime pushed bran off of a tower with the intent to kill him and it left Bran crippled.
• Jaime and the Starks fought a war against each other and Jaime personally wounded Ned.
• Jaime and Daenerys nearly killed each other on the battlefield.
• Jaime had said he would kill Tyrion for killing their father, Tywin.
• Tormund and Jon were mortal enemies.
• The Hound, serving Joffrey, killed Arya’s friend, the butcher’s boy.
• Theon betrayed the Starks and took Winterfell from them. 

All of these people came to later join forces with some degree of respect, enthusiasm, and often even affection.  Incredibly, in the situations over the course of the show through the battle of Winterfell and, it seems, beyond in some cases, these folks take the maxim of Nelson Mandela (“To make peace with an enemy one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes one’s partner”) to a beautifully artistic height, as insane as it might sound to invoke Mandela and Game of Thrones in the same sentence.

In an age in which empathy, sympathy, and respect is in ever shorter supply, this aspect of the show is without a doubt one of the most culturally enriching and healing elements it has bequeathed to the world, and make no mistake about it, Game of Thrones is global and a part of human culture in a way few works of fiction in history have been, putting it on par with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the Bible (I kid my religious readers… well, not really).  That one of the most brutal shows ever in the history of television may also be helping to make us kinder and remind us all of our common humanity is part of the stunning joy that this show has become.  There is still plenty of time for betrayal and backstabbing, but at least up until this point, there has been a coming together despite the daunting odds and clashing personalities that has been refreshing.

In particular, the second episode of this final season reminds us that, under the right conditions (and threats), almost any set of people can come together and share their humanity.  The small moments of intimacy between characters we’ve known for eight years and who’ve often been mortal enemies, or at least at odds with each other, was once of the most unique series of moments in the show and, indeed, television or cinematic history, as rarely do audiences have scenes that take the time to show us such non-rushed, imitate moments between characters we’ve known for nearly a decade but so rarely got to see interact in this way or interact at all, especially when they’ve so often been enemies, all capped with a barrier-breaking knighting scene for the ages and subsequent warm toast.

Another thing you think of as you watch this final season is that one of the first overall themes that really sticks with you is that flexibility is a key survival tool.  Some of the most important characters that are still with us—Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Arya Stark, Sansa Stark, Bran Stark, Tyrion Lannister, Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Sandor “The Hound” Glegane—have been able to evolve as the conditions demanded.  Characters that did not evolve—Ned Stark, Joffrey Baratheon, Catelyn Stark, Robb Stark, Tywin Lannister, Stannis Baratheon, Tommen Baratheon—met with untimely ends (to say the least).

The other thing that really sticks with you is how so much death has consumed the land and how pyrrhic almost all of these victories have been.  Of the six main great families of Westeros in the story—the Baratheons, the Starks, the Lannisters, the Greyjoys, the Martells, the Tyrells—all of them have been devastated, losing not only their heads of their households, but others as well, in addition to huge portions of their bannermen and lords.  The Wildlings and Night’s Watch are mostly wiped out, and it seems the Giants and the Children of the Forest might even be extinct.  There’s also only one dragon left.  There’s (almost?) a tragic pointlessness to it all, these petty squabblings between houses, as is often the case in real life (see my take on WWI for West Point’s Modern War Center here); of course, most people dying in a war would hope their death has some great meaning and makes some big difference, but that is far too often not the case.  As Tyrion says in episode four of season eight, “What is the ‘Realm?!’ A vast continent, home to millions of people, most of whom don’t care who sits on the Iron Throne!”

Perhaps the most depressing thing other than Westeros truly becoming, perhaps futilely, a “Feast for Crows,” is that (BIG SPOILER), as soon as the Night King and the Army of the Dead are defeated (and even a bit during the battle), squabbling about who will hold what title and bend the knee to whom comes right to the forefront, with alliances apparently unraveling even before their casualties are fully mourned.  As Tyrion tells Davos during the celebration after the battle, “We may have defeated them [the dead], but we still have us to contend with.” All this, too, is frighteningly realistic, with perhaps the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union beginning even in the final stages of WWII while they were still allies only the most prolific example that comes to mind out of many in history.

Even in a world of dragons, Giants, Children of the Forest, White Walkers, wights, wargs, and a three-eyed raven, it seems people really are the final threat.  In our world, we don’t have such horrors to force us to more or less unite, and even in the world of Game of Thrones, that unification seems ever so brief, all the more depressing when one contemplates how hard it is without supernatural threats to transcend conflict in our real world. 

Game of Thrones may offer some individual stories of redemption and noble sacrifice, but its bleakness, as was always the intention of its creator, was always meant to reflect more our own actual world than that of the staple worlds of the fantasy genre.  Perhaps it is with its deep reminders of our own world that Game of Thrones has managed to become such a phenomenon.  Even after the tropiest feel-good battle against the dead, we are so quickly brought back to the misery of human vs. human conflict.

Perhaps in making us appreciate how tragic our own world is, even when reflected in fantasy—and how rare the moments of uplifting transcendence can be—Game of Thrones may help us to appreciate how precious, and worthy to strive for, such transcendent moments of understanding, empathy, cooperation, and peace can be.  May the misery and death of Westeros inspire us to overcome the death and misery all too common in our own world.  If we can grow to love controversial characters like Jaime, Theon, and The Hound, perhaps we can find more room in our own hearts to understand, work together with, and even forgive our enemies in the real world, no matter how bad the sins of the past or the wounds inflicted, if we can find a real effort at redemption in them, as each of those characters in the show demonstrated with great effort and sacrifice after the many evils they had committed.  Having had, just before finishing this essay, a pointless argument in the Middle East (one of many I’ve had) with a friend on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and with my futile effort to try and engender some level of empathy and understanding of the other side within this friend falling far short, I can say that the rare empathy amidst the bleakness Game of Thrones gives us is just as precious, important, and in short supply in Westeros as it is in earth in 2019.  If the show (and books) can help many of its viewers (and readers) appreciate this and inspire them to keep trying or to try harder to create such moments of empathy, the show will have more than earned is viral fame with that kind of transcendence and heart.

See related article: Top Political & Foreign Policy Lessons from Game of Thrones

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 22, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981), September 11th-13th, 2018, and republished by Tuck Magazine September 24th; See my related Trumpism and Tribalism Run Amok in the Middle East for Small Wars Journal

Danielle Parhizkaran/USA Today Sports

AMMAN — As I write this while watching the memorial service at Ground Zero with mourners reading the names of those they and others lost seventeen years ago today, as we remember the horrors of September 11th, 2001, and their aftermath, more and more, it looks like 9/11 can be seen as a turning point, one in which the world went from becoming less tribal to becoming more tribal, and not at all in a good way.

Hell, even tennis has just exploded into tribalism. TENNIS!! A spat between a (THE) tennis superstar and a stickler-of-an umpire became just like everything else: tribes gearing up for war, trying to gain ground in their culture wars consumed by vitriol and hate. TENNIS is now Trump vs. his many enemies, the left vs. the right, Sunni vs. Shiite, black vs. white, Hillary supporters vs. Bernie supporters, men vs. women, Israel vs. Palestine…

How did it get to this?

*****

As the millennium celebrations approached, the world could celebrate an era of increasing international peace, cooperation, and prosperity not seen since the Pax Romana some roughly two thousand years earlier.

Flikr/Paul Mannix

The Cold War had finally ended, and the two most powerful countries in the world had engaged in a massive reduction of their military forces, including their nuclear arsenals, as the great rivalry between Cold War superpowers the United State and the Soviet Union had melted away to a new if rocky friendship between the U.S. and Russia even as the U.S. extended friendship and alliances to many of Russia’s former Soviet republics and satellite states.

Europe was becoming more and more united politically, economically, militarily, as well as more democratic. Longtime enemies Jordan and Israel had finally signed a peace treaty, and a difficult but important peace process between Israelis and Palestinians had begun under the Oslo Accords. Even the U.S. and Vietnam were beginning a new chapter of friendship. Bitter rivalries in Asia had given way to increasing regional economic cooperation, and after a century of hatred, Japan and South Korea had agreed to host the 2002 FIFA World Cup together. Democracy and freedom were spreading in Latin America and Africa too, where apartheid had finally ended in South Africa and other nations were making important strides away from dictatorship.

This era of optimistic globalization would come to a screeching halt as planes slammed into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. 

*****

It took a tremendous amount of `both hatred and willpower to plot to plan and fly those planes into their targets on September 11th, 2001. I’d love to say that, overall, we Americans responded with love to overcome the hate. We did, if ever so briefly, but that quickly gave way even more intense partisan rancor, two grossly mismanaged wars, and profligate spending along with a resurgence of all the awful trends that continued and spiraled out of control into what we have now. 

America became incredibly divided well before the 2004 presidential election; while the numbers were not dramatically different from 2000, the level of rancor and acrimony was. And America had just invaded Iraq in 2003, under deceptive and misguided if at least partially well-intention pretenses, and mismanaged the occupation in such an incompetent way that it ripped open the ethnic and sectarian divides in Iraq in a way that would, over time, raise tensions between Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds, and Sunnis and other minorities like Christians, and this throughout the Middle East.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq exacerbated, but by no means created, these divisions, and the damage would be considerable. For a brief window, the U.S. seemed like it would be able to shape events as it desired, but that dream faded away to reality as soon as an al-Qaeda truck bomb killed dozens and wounded far more at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, including its all-star chief diplomat, the incomparable Sergio Vieira de Mello, that August; the UN pulled out soon after and Iraq, under hapless U.S. misleadership, descended in hell.

Yet the damage was hardly America acting by itself: particularly Syria and Iran—nervous about what American success in Iraq would mean for their regimes—were happy to let terrorists, insurgents, militiamen, other people and/or weapons enter Iraq by the thousands, caring little for the death and violence these actors and equipment would inflict upon the Iraqi people as long as they were undermining American interests there. This only further exacerbated tensions and problems already festering due to American incompetence to such a degree that Iraqi Shiites settled on an Iraqi Shiite strongman—Nuri Kamal al-Maliki—to feel safe, whose oppression of Sunnis was the largest single factor in the degree to which ISIS would experience success in Iraq. 

In a true case of chickens coming home to roost, ISIS—an offshoot of the breakaway former al-Qaeda group in Iraq that killed de Mello—added to the brutality of the Syrian Civil War, both directly in its own barbaric acts of mass murder and mass destruction but also indirectly in dragging less extreme factions closer to its brutality level and giving the regime of Bashar al-Assad and later its Russian allies all the excuse they would need to employ their own barbaric tactics against any and all resistance, pointing to ISIS and making little-to-no distinction between ISIS and Syrians simply fighting for their freedom.  The Syrian Civil War was itself one of a number of failures of the Arab Spring that have turned people against each other rather than uniting them, was already a horror-show of bloody sectarianism bringing out the worst in people all-around by the time ISIS had marched to the outskirts of Baghdad in mid-2014. 

Israel’s right-wing leaders, from the late Ariel Sharon to Benjamin Netanyahu, likened their conflicts with the Palestinians and with Hezbollah incorrectly to George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” just as Putin did with the Chechens, and prosecuted these conflicts with a ferocity that only empowered extremists in Hamas and Hezbollah (who do their part to empower extremity in Israeli politics) and has helped make the prospect for peace all but impossible for now, destroying Oslo and the peace process. 

The same increasing sectarianism and tribalism has led to a cruel callousness with which the Saudi-led coalition has prosecuted the war in Yemen and has created one of the worst humanitarian disasters in a half-century.

Just to look at a few other major locations: India is increasingly a hotbed of religious violence, China is engaged in the mass-cultural and religious destruction of its Uighur Muslim minority in its worst oppression since Mao, a genocide against the Muslim-minority Rohingya is happening in Burma, the South China Sea is becoming an increasingly nationalistically confrontational arena, and ethnic and/or religious tensions are driving forces reigniting wars in central Africa, from the Central African Republic to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to South Sudan.

While Americans were focused on the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, including two wars overseas, the Bush Administration and Republicans rammed through a disastrous series of regulatory and economic moves that more than helped set the stage for the 2008 global financial crises. The hardships caused, intensified, and/or perpetuated by the near-collapse of the global financial system created and/or facilitated a state where masses of citizens globally were experiencing regression in their well-being, fostering much of the instability, political division, violent conflict, and rage at the status quo mentioned above.

As people looked for easy targets to blame, economic setbacks gave way to even greater racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious resentment; too many non-whites blamed white people in general for their ills in an unproductive way, painting with a broad brush and alienating possible white allies while energizing angry whites, while, even more importantly, whites laughably and ignorantly looked at racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as the roots of all their frustrations. Racial unrest exploded across America over the past few years, and white identity politics, more so than the economy, have brought us Brexit and Trump, though obviously there are relationships between the two. At this point, tribal secessionism in Europe is rising, in Spain with Catalonia and in the UK with Scotland (both having enthusiastic Russian support).

In hindsight, Brexit in 2014 was an obvious herald of Trump’s triumph in 2016 (both dramatically and in determining ways aided materially and abetted by the Russians). By 2016, poor whites in Appalachia and elsewhere were told to check their privilege, while nonwhites moving into the suburbs and in other communities were told to go back to where they came from. The resulting election (with the help of a massive, concerted state-sponsored Russian effort), was the most racially polarizing since the Civil Rights era a half-century earlier, a “whitelash” (to quote Van Jones from election night) of white nationalism that revealed the depths of American tribalism and made American politics in many ways as banal as those of the former the Soviet Republic of Georgia and many other places consumed by ethnic division.

Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

*****

Since Trump’s win, the world has only plunger deeper into tribal division. The U.S. presidency—the single largest public media organ in global politics—has gone virtually silent on human rights, tolerance, respect for other cultures, and appreciation of diversity, with the consequences far transcending the verbal arena. This is a dramatic swing considering that human rights have been a major theme of U.S. foreign policy (even with all its shortcomings) for most of America’s modern history regardless of which party was in the White House. Concurrently, the forces on the other side of those stances have only too eagerly filled the void, and often with the help of Putin’s Kremlin.

As I noted not long ago, small-minded tribalism was a major factor in the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and it is a major factor in the current unraveling of the West.

Regrettably, a tennis match is now—like everything else in the current cultural landscape—a frontline battle in a vicious global war of tribalism. This tremendous tribal tidal shift can be traced to 9/11, a tombstone not just for thousands of Americans and those who died in the ensuing misguided wars, but also for an era of humanity transcending petty differences. 9/11 is not just a time to mourn the dead, but what is to come, the petty creatures we have become, and the alternate world of lost opportunities: the what-might-have-beens if that glorious march forward—even with all its inconsistencies, bumps, and steps backwards—had continued without the slamming of planes into buildings and without the sad, counterproductive responses launched from what can be called, in hindsight, the ashes of hope.

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

See my related Trumpism and Tribalism Run Amok in the Middle East for Small Wars Journal

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Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 18, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) October 18th, 2017

AP Photo/Hank Walker

AMMAN — I’m 35 years old and I can’t remember ever seeing anything so alarming in relation to the Korean Peninsula as what has been happening in the toddler-months of the painfully birthed Trump Administration. Obviously, there has always been a tremendous amount of tension there since the Korean War ceasefire was reached in 1953 (that’s right, just a ceasefire: the war never formally ended and is still technically ongoing even in 2017). But things are happening so fast since Trump took office, and the main actors so comfortable with hyperbole and brinksmanship, that we can safely say that we are now in more danger of having war erupt on the Korean Peninsula than at any time in decades.

But to understand where we are today, and where we may be going, it’s imperative to understand some history, and far more and far earlier than the start of the Korean War in 1950.

Imperial Entanglements

Koreans as something of a distinct people go back thousands of years, and from quite early in their history, being on an isolated peninsula and in relatively inhospitable parts of Manchuria and Siberia, they tended to absorb and reinvent culture (an ability/trait that would become very Korean) from the neighboring Chinese. In the first century B.C.E., three major kingdoms emerged, and by the mid-seventh century C.E., one of the kingdoms emerged to defeat the others with the help of China, then turned on China to drive its forces out of Korea.

The following centuries were generally filled with disorder and rebellion until a new kingdom reunified Korea in the tenth century, but it would eventually come into brutal and devastating conflict with the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century C.E. Koreans put up quite a fight but eventually came to vassal terms with the Mongols, retaining formal independence for their efforts, unlike many others. 

A new dynasty took over in just before the fifteenth century, but would suffer a depopulating cataclysmic invasion at the hands of the Japanese and the end of the sixteenth century, one they were able to pyrrhically beat back, but only several decades later they were defeated by the Chinese Qing dynasty, and though they retained independence, the Koreans were forced to become part of China’s international tributary state system and give China control over its foreign policy; a resentful peace ensued in which Korea seldom had contact with the outside world and because of this isolation, Korea became known as the “Hermit Kingdom” from this period onward.

By the late nineteenth century, with Qing China in decline and coming under Western pressure, and with ambitious Russia and Japan eyeing Korea, the days of conflict were about to return to Korea. 

Like Korea, Japan was forced to pay tribute to China for centuries, but did so less consistently and did not suffer the full vassal status that surrendered foreign policy control to China that Korea did. Like all Asian nations at the time, Japan was forced in the mid-1850s to contend with encroaching, predatory Western powers and was forced to “open” itself to Western trade and influence; this caused a great deal of unrest that culminated in the Meiji Restoration/Revolution of 1868, from which point Japan would start its rapid rise in power and modernization that would culminate in ill-fated war with Western powers in WWII. 

Especially after 1868, Japan’s leaders, scornfully observing its nominal overlord China suffer humiliation at the hands of Western powers, sought to emphatically alter the balance of power that had been the political reality in Asia for centuries, with China as the unquestioned center of power. Caught in the middle would be Korea, over which Japan sought to extend its power and influence (especially as Russia was encroaching on Korea’s northern border), even though technically both Japan and Korea were part of the subservient China tribute system. Among other reasons for targeting Korea, Japan felt Korea’s geographic proximity was a major security risk to its homeland, while the traditionalist Koreans looked with disgust on Japan’s Westernizing ways and as to ancient regional values and identity.

Japan would take aggressive actions to alter the status quo and to open Korea to its trade, just as the U.S. and other Western powers did with Japan years earlier, but Japan’s diplomatic efforts could not sway the stubborn Koreans. By 1871, though, Japan had begun a formal diplomatic process of redefining its relationship with China, itself facing the brunt of Western pressure in East Asia. Korea’s stubbornness made many Japanese leaders feel it deserved to be punished with an invasion, and this idea was even encouraged by America’s representative to Japan. Though divided, Japan’s leadership decided to bide its time rather than invade Korea, instead opting for a strike against the weaker and more isolated island of Taiwan, nominally under Chinese control, in 1874, a step that further highlighted the rise of Japan at the expense of China. After a series of confrontational incidents, in 1876, Japan was able to extract from Korea an “unequal treaty” of the kind imposed by Western nations on Japan and China, in which Japan was clearly given better terms and the prying away of Korea from China’s traditional sphere of control and influence was firmly begun.

Finally realizing that their traditional vassal-state empire was disintegrating before their very eyes, China’s leaders belatedly decided to reassert China’s influence on the Korean Peninsula. Over the next two decades, China and Japan would seek ways to outdo each other’s trade advantages, power, and influence when it came to Korea, which, in turn, seemed to accept the necessity of modernization, though Koreans were deeply divided as to how to go about it; infighting only made the Koreans weaker, even as China now found itself competing in a Korea where it had just recently enjoyed centuries of unquestioned dominance; the more traditional Korean royal court favored China but younger reformers favored Japan. As tensions mounted, both China and Japan moved troops into Korea, with war nearly breaking out over a coup attempt in 1884, but in 1894, mounting tensions and a peasant rebellion would finally spark war between China and Korea; Japan’s more modern military easily defeated the larger Chinese forces and by 1895, a humiliated China was asking for peace from a Japan that had invaded mainland China and had secured sea lanes to Beijing and islands near Taiwan; in the peace treaty that followed, China ceded Taiwan to Japan and rescinded any claim of formal authority over Korea, allowing the Japanese to conquer the former and to dominate the latter.

Japan would trounce Russia in 1904-1905’s Russo-Japanese War, keeping another major power out of East Asia and making clear to all that Japan would now be the dominant power in East Asia, one that, significantly, could also take on Western powers. American President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt even mediated an end to the war, and though he publicly maintained neutrality, unbeknownst to the world at the time, he undertook this mediation at the secret request of the Japanese. In fact, Roosevelt privately very much favored the Japanese, wrote “I should like to see Japan have Korea,” and even desired that Japan would become a hemispheric hegemon just as the U.S. had become in its hemisphere. Still, he publicly kept up a neutral stance to the degree that the Japanese were frustrated by the U.S. negotiated-treaty, which denied Japan an indemnity from Russia and left the Japanese wanting more.

Korea had been sold out by the U.S. and was formally annexed by Japan in 1910, which began a period of brutal colonial Imperial Japanese rule that would not end until Japan’s defeat in WWII in 1945; the Japanese were hated when they left and still are very much hated in Korea today.

The Long Shadow of WWII Over Korea

Starting in 1931, Japan would use its base in Korea to begin expanding into Chinese territory in a conflict that would merge into WWII. Strangely enough, Japan’s puppet state in Chinese Manchuria would become a well-planted garden of future East Asian politics. During that war, a Korean named Kim Il-sung fought under Chinese Communist and Soviet leadership as the Japanese in Japanese-occupied Chinese Manchuria and distinguished himself greatly. Koreans actually formed the bulk of the anti-Japanese in Manchuria, and one of the main Japanese figures in Manchuria, against whom Kim fought, was Kishi Nobosuke, who served as Japan’s prime minister from 1957-1960; his grandson is Abe Shinzo, Japan’s current Prime Minister, so, yes, that means Kim Jong-Un’s grandfather fought against Abe’s grandfather. Additionally, the Korean Park Chung-hee fought for the Japanese occupiers in Manchuria and specifically against guerillas like Kim while wearing a Japanese uniform; he would overthrow South Korea’s democracy in 1961 and install a military dictatorship (one that relied heavily on other Korean collaborators with Japan from WWII) that would last until his assassination in 1979, only to be replaced by a new dictatorship that would last until 1987; his daughter, Park Geun was president of South Korea from 2013 until her impeachment and imprisonment earlier this year.

As for Kim, while Chinese communists returned to prioritizing fighting the Chinese Nationalist government after WWII, Kim and a cadre of other Koreans who had fought as guerillas came back to Korea under the patronage of the Soviet Union. There was no clear specific Allied plan for Korea after Japan surrendered, but the Americans proposed to the Soviets dividing Korea into occupation zones at the 38th parallel and the Soviets agreed. Soviet forces had already made their way into a sliver of northeastern Korea, and the Americans would belatedly make their way into the south. With all the division and confusion, neither appeared eager to have full responsibility, but once assigned a formal zone, the Soviets quickly established control and order, while the Americans did anything but, engaging in what was perhaps the most poorly planned and executed occupation until the launch of George W. Bush’s Iraq misadventure in 2003. The Americans did not even feel that Koreans were ready for self-rule, soon came to view them as enemies that needed to treated as a surrendered (rather than “liberated”) people, and avoided using the divided, preexisting political groups (ones that that had already started on the path to self-rule) to form any kind of Korean government, though the Americans did favor conservatives since they were anti-communist even though the environment was one in which the long-oppressed (by both Japanese and Korean overlords) Korean masses favored leftist candidates; since America’s main reason for being in Korea was to contain Soviet expansion, it was hardly eager to set up a democracy that would be ideologically disposed towards the Soviet Union; in fact, they even kept many of the hated Japanese in low-level bureaucratic and security positions, while the Soviets were quick to sweep away Japan’s colonial structures in the north. Though Americans and Soviets were publicly committed to trying to forge a single national Korean government, the American zone only became more fractious internally and the Americans increasingly favored un-representative rightists and those who had collaborated with the Japanese, while by February 1946—after some initial atrocious behavior by Soviet troops who were then replaced by more disciplined, restrained troops—the Soviet had stifled dissent and seen to it that Kim and the Communist Party were leading a proto-government; clearly, prospects for a unified government were dim. Also at this time, Western-Soviet relations were rapidly deteriorating; by the fall of 1947, it was clear the U.S. and Soviets would not come together on Korea and that Korea would be divided. Later in 1948, a new U.S.-backed Republic of Korea (ROK, a.k.a. South Korea) emerged south of the 38th parallel and a Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, a.k.a. North Korea) emerged north of the 38th parallel, each with clearly stated designs on ruling the entirety of the Korean Peninsula.

The Soviets were confident enough in what they had built that they fully withdrew their occupation forces from DPRK in 1948, well before the U.S. had fully withdrawn their occupation forces from ROK in mid-1949; both sides, though, left military advisors.

Kim would be in firm control of DPRK while his counterpart could hardly claim the same for the south after several years of inept U.S. policy, and while each side sought to unify the Peninsula under its own control, only Kim and his DPRK were in a position to do so as ROK was destabilized and fractured within its own borders, but that didn’t stop Syngman Rhee, ROK’s leader, from devising his own plans to take over the whole of Korea just as Kim was doing the same. Their American and Soviet patrons were not as eager for war and sought to restrain their clients’ offensive ambitions. In particular, Kim almost nagged Stalin for permission to invade the south, but Stalin repeatedly declined to give his assent. By the end of 1949, the Soviet Union had conducted its first nuclear test and mainland China was then firmly under the control of Mao’s Chinese Communists, who trounced the American-supported Nationalists and drove them to Taiwan, meaning the U.S. would be nervous about further communist gains in Korea during 1950. Likewise, Stalin and Kim were nervous that, with U.S. aid, ROK (and perhaps the strongly anti-communist Japan and Nationalist Taiwan) would eventually be much more powerful and seek to unify Korea under ROK control, just as Rhee was threatening, and South Korean forces actually crossed the 38th parallel repeatedly to conduct operations in North Korean territory not long before the Korean War erupted in 1950. 

In January 1950, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech that would later become infamous, with many later blaming it for the start of the war. In that speech, South Korea was conspicuously not included in what was defined as U.S. vital national interests, meaning there was no U.S. guarantee of military protection and defense in the event it was attacked by communists. It was thought that this essentially gave a green light to Stalin and Mao to do as they please in Korea and that this was why Stalin gave his blessing to Kim in April for an invasion. Such was the conventional wisdom, anyway, until Soviet archives later painted a much more complicated picture…

North and South Korea, Seeking War 

Both before and after Acheson’s speech, Stalin was concerned that the U.S. would intervene directly into the conflict if North Korea attacked South Korea, even right up until the outbreak of the war, and wanted above all to not risk a major confrontation that could erupt in war between his Soviet Union and the United States. In other words, Stalin feared U.S. intervention on the Korean Peninsula regardless of Acheson’s 1950 and even rejected a formal defensive alliance with DRPK in 1949.

Acheson himself didn’t see the speech as a “green light” to communist attacks on ROK, but regardless of his intent, rhetorically his speech did anything but convey a clear American commitment to ROK’s security or that the U.S. was prepared to counter DPRK, Soviet, or Chinese actions towards ROK. The incompetence here mirrored the same incompetence of the U.S. occupation of southern Korea, and the communists wouldn’t have been irrational to interpret the speech as conceding Korea if it came to a war. Despite a general picture from the West of Stalin being hell-bent on world domination, then, it was a cautious Stalin who refrained from taking that speech as a “green light.” Quite strangely, an incorrect report in The New York Times actually convinced DPRK that South Korea was within the U.S. military protection guarantee.

By the middle of 1949, both the Soviets and the DPRK were apprehensive of the military buildup in the south and an American-supported invasion of the north from there, but Stalin was firmly against Kim’s plan to invade the south. Mao and the Chinese were more generally supportive but repeatedly stressed that the timing was too early, especially as they were still fighting their civil war, though they did pledge to come to Kim’s aid if he needed help; in other words, the Chinese wouldn’t be there from the beginning, but if things went badly enough, they would intervene on Kim’s behalf. Kim’s overtures to Mao made Stalin more nervous about the outbreak of war, and just before the Americans withdrew from the south, he resolved on a policy of supporting Kim enough to discourage an attack from the south but not enough to encourage Kim to attack from the north. So it was that over and over and over again, Stalin told Kim an emphatic “no” when it came to invading the south. And when DPRK forces initiated clashes with ROK forces along the border late in the year, Stalin was furious. At the same time, Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China as he was routing Nationalist Chinese forces from most of China and taking over the country. This made Stalin even more cautious, as he wanted to assess the situation with a newer, additional center of communist gravity in Mao’s China. Thus, as 1950 dawned with Mao’s Chinese Communists firmly in control of mainland China, Stalin took a more passive approach to Korea. Hardly a fool, Stalin would have realized how China had long regarded Korea as under its influence, and either may not have wanted to alienate the only other major Communist power in the area by asserting too much of a role in Korea or may have hoped, nervous of an eventual conflict anyway, that the Chinese would intervene to the degree that they would prevent the need for a massive Soviet intervention to support DPRK. Whatever Stalin’s calculation in this regard, Kim engaged in a policy that still defines North Korean policy today: playing Soviets/Russians against the Chinese to try and get more out of each.

Of course, the Nationalists being driven from mainland China raised alarm bells in the minds of American planners. And they had reason to be alarmed: where the Soviets quickly installed Kim Il-sung as a leader in the local, dominant communist party, the Americans dithered, stumbled, and nurtured instability and division in the South. There was so much unrest and brutal fighting among factions in the south even before 1950 that research indicates between 100,000 200,000 people were killed in political violence by either ROK forces or U.S. occupation forces in the years before the war, and once war broke out, a further 300,000 were killed or “disappeared” at the hands of the ROK government in just the first few months of the conflict. Much as was the case with South Vietnam years later, in South Korea the U.S. was supporting a government that was highly oppressive to its own people and hardly worth fighting for, a tragic situation that was far less forgiving in the Vietnamese case.

In the months after Acheson’s speech, Stalin would make preparations for war alongside DPRK, in particular sending specialists, advisors, and technical assistance without actually endorsing war or invasion as a course of action, further reflecting his caution. He would also continue to demonstrate concerns about possible American intervention in the following months. And yet, he also became more comfortable with the idea of a northern invasion of the south after the victory of Mao in mainland China and his agreeing to a new treaty with the Soviets. Stalin also felt more secure as the Soviet Union had only just recently conducted its first successful nuclear weapons test, ending the American monopoly on that technology and creating a nuclear club of two. Stalin’s fear that American and even Japanese troops would invade the Soviet Union, after all these considerations, must have seemed much less of a possibility, yet even when Stalin finally approved in April Kim’s request to be able to invade the south that summer, he did so only on the condition that Mao also approved the plan, which Mao later did, though reluctantly.  Furthermore, Stalin had only approved a limited offensive, only reluctantly assenting to a full-scale invasion mere days before the planned invasion and the start of the war amid reports of a buildup of South Korean forces on the border, in part because the thinking was that if the North won a quick war, it would keep the U.S. out, but that a long war would draw the U.S. into the conflict and a stronger offensive was more likely to achieve a quicker victory.

In the end, it was Stalin’s fear that the U.S. would support a South Korean struggle against North Korea that held back his approval of Kim’s desired invasion for so long, and his fear that the U.S. would eventually support a South Korean takeover of North Korea that led to his to the same invasion and its expansion.

The Terrible Cost of War

It turns out Stalin’s concerns about U.S. interference had been correct: when DPRK forces overran Seoul, ROK’s capital, just days after the invasion and continued pushing South Korean forces south, the U.S., mustering the support of United Nations (the USSR was boycotting it at the time because the UN would not seat Mao’s representative in China’s seat), deployed to fight alongside ROK against the DPRK invasion, but even so, they kept losing ground and were in danger of being annihilated at the bottom edge of the Korean Peninsula; the U.S. then launched a counterattack that involved an amphibious landing behind North Korean lines, and in the ensuing counterattack, the mainly-U.S.-and-South Korean- forces pushed North Korean forces all the way to the Chinese border in October, which only invited a massive Chinese counterattack that, by the middle of 1951, had resulted in a stalemate back along the 38th parallel.

TES.com

It is important to note that both the U.S. and China only directly intervened when the situation was dire for each of their clients.

Gamma-Keystone via Getty

The war was terrible for Koreans. Atrocities were common on both sides, American forces included. About three million Koreans died, one in ten people on the Korean Peninsula, but far more died in the north, where 12-15 percent of the whole population died. The U.S. ran a brutal air war against North Korea, one which resulted in probably the most utter and complete destruction of any single nation’s infrastructure, cities, towns, and villages since the times of the great Mongol massacres and perhaps, arguably, of any period in history. In the early months of the war, the North Koreans were essentially defenseless against U.S. air attacks (as were many of the South Korean civilians unlucky enough to be mixed in with occupying North Korean forces). And yet, there was a degree of American restraint in the bombings as U.S President Harry Truman did not want to provoke a wider ground war with Soviet or Chinese forces, which had not entered the conflict; this relative restraint vanished after Chinese ground forces entered the war. In fact, more bombs were dropped by the United States during the Korean War than Americans dropped in the entire Pacific War during WWII, including nearly twice as many tons of napalm, which only during the Korean War had reached a level of high appreciation on the part of senior U.S. military planners, setting the stage for its far greater future use in Vietnam.

Targets even included livestock and farming essentials, and the population that survived was driven down to underground facilities. By the fall of 1952, bombing had been so successful that virtually no targets remained. Eventually, targeting expanded to include major dams, with catastrophic results for the population. By the end of the war, nearly every man-made structure in North Korea had been destroyed by U.S. bombing raids, and, apparently, “only two modern buildings remained standing in Pyongyang” when the fighting stopped; this level of destruction was well understood by those involved at the time.

The war dragged on until July, 1953 (and, had it not been for Stalin’s death in March 1953, it might have dragged on longer, but the Soviets who took over after Stalin died had no desire to continue supporting the war effort in Korea), resulting in a cease-fire—not a peace treaty—which has been in place to this day, signed between U.S.-led UN forces, North Korean forces, and Chinese forces; conspicuously not among the parties that signed the treaty were the South Korean forces. Thus, the agreement was more of a cessation of war between various military forces than anything resembling a political agreement representing any kind of deeper understanding.

A Scarred Nation

From a psychological standpoint, this destruction understandably was something that shaped North Korean culture, mentalities, and worldviews into one of anxiety and fear when it came to America and the outside world in general, and even though North Korea was remarkably rebuilt rapidly and impressively during one of the few true brotherly and inspiring moments of the international socialist movement, with generous aid and on-the-ground assistance coming from the world’s other socialist countries, the sense of vulnerability and fear engendered by the U.S. bombing campaign is still a hallmark of the North Korea’s collective mentality to this day; indeed, hatred of America runs deep in today’s DPRK.

And though North Korea received substantive help from China, the Soviet Union, and other socialist countries, it never allowed itself to be controlled by any of these other powers or to become a pawn. And Kim would not forget that at the beginning of the war, support from both China and Russia came reluctantly. Kim would forge North Korea into a nation that would plot its own path its own way, accepting help while never submitting to foreign control or domination at the hands of far larger powers that had sought, for centuries, to exert their influence and domination over the Korean Peninsula.

While North Korea led South Korea in terms of per capita GNP as late as 1973, today democratic South Korea’s economy dwarfs North Korea’s, whose per capita GDP was less than 4.5% of South Korea’s in 2016 even though North Korea’s population is just under half of South Korea’s; furthermore, even today North Korea is facing mass starvation and may very well be the most oppressive, horrible nations in which to live in the entire world, where anyone can end up imprisoned in Soviet-style gulag labor camps or worse. Photos from space of North Korea at night show a country with virtually no electrical power, making it easy to mistake it for the black of the ocean, a jungle, or a desert uninhabited by humans. And Christopher Hitchens is hardly the only person to remark that the North Korean state has perpetuated—what must be regarded for all intents and purposes—a state religion centered around of the Kim family, nationalism, and Stalinist communism. He also poignantly noted the sad state of the North Korean people: hostages of the Kim “crime family”-sponsored high-stakes blackmail scheme, run against the rest of collective civilization:

Another version of our complicity with the Dear Leader is to be found with his oppression and starvation of his “own” people. It is felt that we cannot just watch them die, so we send food aid in return for an ever-receding prospect of good behavior in respect of the Dear Leader’s nuclear program. The ratchet effect is all one way: Nuclear tests become ever more flagrant and the emaciation of the North Korean people ever more pitiful. We have unwittingly become members of the guard force that patrols the concentration camp that is the northern half of the peninsula.

NASA/ISS

All-in-all, North Koreas’s past history has been a nightmare, one that extends into the present and will certainly extend into the future for at least the foreseeable future.

Old Grudges, New Weapons

Thus, in many ways, the shadow of the bitter, bloody rivalries of the late-nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth-century that consumed East Asia in war through 1953 cast a long shadow over the politics and current crises in the region, especially the North Korean conundrum. It was perhaps fitting that Kim the First, in the weeks before his death in 1994 and after such a long career defined by conflict, desired to improve relations with South Korea. While he had seen and suffered much through occupation, exile, revolution, resistance, and war, the same cannot be said of his disturbingly odd son and successor, Kim Jong-il, or his son and North Korea’s current leader, the deceptively-rotundly-jolly-appearing Kim Jong-un. 

After Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, Kim Jong-il did not take long converting to reality his father’s long-held dream of turning DPRK into a nuclear-weapons power (American leaders throughout the Korean War had hinted at potential nuclear weapons use against North Korea and, bluff or not, these threats had an effect, one that was lasting). In particular, George W. Bush’s first State of the Union (the “axis of evil”) speech in 2002, seems to have really struck fear into the heart of the Kim Jong-il and his regime, pushing them to think then more than ever that the possession of a nuclear weapon would be their only true safeguard against a U.S. attack. Not long after the speech, North Korea removed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors from its territory and in January, 2003—just months before Bush invaded Iraq and with a clear U.S. military buildup occurring on Iraq’s borders—withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), giving signals as clear as any that it was working on building nuclear bombs, the first of which it finally tested on October 8th, 2006, despite severe warnings from the U.S. and the international community. Since that initial test, five more nuclear tests have been conducted by DPRK, with the largest bomb by far the one that was tested just last month, in early September, and four of which have been conducted by Kim Jong-un, who took over when his father, Kim Jong-il, died late in 2011.

 CNN/CNS/NTI

Hand-in-hand with these efforts were efforts to increase North Korea’s missile capability, and the implication was lost on no one: the North Koreans were going to make sure it could hit the U.S. with nuclear missiles as the ultimate deterrent to any military action that the U.S. could take against them. As with the nuclear tests, it is under Kim Jong-Un that the most missile tests have been conducted and the most progress in the technology and capability reached: by 2015 not even four full years into his reign, Kim Jong-Un had tested more strategic missiles than his grandfather (15) and his father (16) had combined in the 28 years of their strategic missile tests; through today, Kim Jong-un has conducted 85 total missile tests including a record 24 in 2016 and another 22 so far this year since President Trump’s inauguration, with North Korea being on pace in 2017 to break the previous 2016 record. 2017 saw the DPRK’s first tests of missiles that could strike the U.S. (the 50 U.S. states, anyway), including, pointedly, a test on July 4th—not coincidentally America’s Independence Day—of North Korea’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Hwasong-14, the first missile which could which could strike the 48-contiguous U.S. states, including the cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, and perhaps even New York. Thus, it’s not only the rhetoric between the unstable Kim and the unstable Trump that has been heating upsince Trump became president. And with a long history of DPRK/ROK border-area incidents (any of which could have quickly escalated an always tense situation into nuclear war), with Kim Jong-un increasingly willing to violently gamble with provocative and violent border actions, and with Trump personally calling for an end to diplomacy, the likelihood of war erupting on the Korean Peninsula is higher today than any time in decades, a time when one misunderstanding can spiral out of control before there is any chance of stopping war.

*****

Reuters/Kevin Lamarque; Reuters/KCNA

Some key points need to be made here, taking all this into account:

1.)   China is no silver bullet to solving the North Korea problem, and it does not have a magic wand with which it can control Kim Jong-un or his regime

China probably finds North Korea as frustrating as the United States, probably even more so. DPRK’s extreme self-reliance (juche) was also at the core of Kim Il-sung’s governing ethos: no matter what help he was able to gain from the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other communist states, Kim was careful to limit the influence of any state on North Korea as much as possible, warily trusting the Chinese, Russians, or anyone. His children are most certainly carrying on this tradition. The ability of any outside power to force major changes in North Korean behavior peacefully should, at best, be regarded as limited. Thus, Trump’s constant assertions that China can “solve the North Korean problem” are more fantasy than reality.

2.)   China is definitely not looking to have history repeat itself

China’s current leadership will most certainly not want to repeat the mistakes or results of the Qing Dynasty. China enjoyed a centuries-long relationship with a subservient Korea under undisputed Chinese hegemony until Western powers weakened China to the point where Japan felt comfortable enough to challenge China’s sphere of influence in Korea starting in 1876 and then totally pushing China out in a war with China that left Japan in 1895 occupying the status in relation to Korea that China had occupied for hundreds of years, but with even more direct control and influence. This gave Japan a foothold on continental Asia from which to expand aggressively against China in a devastating war that began in 1931 and merged into WWII, a conflict in which only the Soviet Union more death and devastation absolutely than China. China then lost Taiwan because of U.S. support for the Nationalists who fled the Chinese mainland in the face of victorious Chinese Communists during 1949 in the closing chapter of the Chinese Civil War, and then had to accept a Korean Peninsula partitioned into two less than a decade later, where China only retained major influence over North Korea (and only after tremendous sacrifice) and the United States had a clearly dominant position in South Korea when the ceasefire of 1953 came into place. With its long-view of history, China would see any Western military action in North Korea as a disaster, a lost to its prestige and a stage-setting for further aggression and weakening of China, as was the case far too many times for China’s liking between 1876-1953. It certainly does not help that the U.S. is so strongly allied with Japan, the perpetrator of such much aggression against China from the late nineteenth-century through WWII.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, two of the major neighbors sharing Iraq’s borders—Iran and Syria—did not share the aims of the United States in Iraq and actively worked against the U.S. succeeding in these aims. If the U.S. attacks North Korea without the support of China and/or Russia (hell, even U.S. ally South Korea is warning the U.S. not to strike North Korea), this dramatically reduces that the outcome in the long-running will resemble what American leaders hope it will. Even this year, Chinese trade with North Korea increased dramatically in the first half of 2017, while Russia is actively undermining anti-North Korean sanctions. If these two major UN-veto wielding powers work to undermine U.S. actions or any arrangements the U.S. would now take/make in regard to North Korea, the success of those U.S. moves would very much be in doubt.

3.)   North Korea is probably less responsive to international pressure than any other nation on Earth

As already mentioned, DPRK embodies an extreme form of self-reliance () that is deep-seated, meaning it has been and is prepared to go it alone with little or no help from the outside world. Its leadership uses the humanitarian concerns others have for the welfare of its own people to gain concessions from those and uses the threat of war and chaos to get what it needs from a nervous China and others eager to not rock the boat. Its regime cares not about the welfare of its own people, only its own survival, and has glorified itself and brainwashed its own isolated people from near-birth to hate America to such a degree that many will genuinely gladly sacrifice themselves in to preserve a leadership that treats them as mere resources to be utilized. At best, North Korea will respond far less than other countries to conventional methods of exerting pressure, at worst, not at all in a helpful way. This makes dealing with the nation as an adversary miserable, forcing foreign leaders to choose between risky and ineffective diplomacy and catastrophic war. 

North Korea’s entire history has been defined by its resistance to foreign domination (whether imperialism or colonialism) and it has only bent to foreign powers when forced and after great cost and sacrifice; as of now, there is a long way to go before Kim and North Korea will simply bow to the Trump Administration’s demands.

This means there is little room for incompetence or error, two things at which the Trump Administration unfortunately excels. As of now, it is incredulously and unjustifiably undermining the very Iran nuclear agreement (against which there is no logical argument, as I have noted) reached between Iran, the U.S., and other the major world powers only a few years ago, destroying America’s own credibility as a nuclear negotiator at the precise moment when it needs to convince North Korea that the U.S. is a credible negotiating partner, destroying most of whatever hope exists that North Korea would trust any new nuclear agreement the U.S. would offer or abide by it if an agreement were to be made.

4.)   A terrible status quo is not always the worst option

The status quo may seem bad, but as many people who understand the current standoff have warned, open war against North Korea—which has the world’s fourth-largest military—would be an unimaginable horror compared to any recent conflict, a bloodbath of a scale not seen anywhere in decades that would kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions in just days or weeks and would likely see Seoul, South Korea’s capital and the world’s fourth-largest city, obliterated… And that doesn’t even get into the fact that South Korea is currently the world’s 11th-largest economy and, of course, this does not even get into potential damage to Japan, China, Russia, or other nations that may be drawn into the conflict.

And oh, we haven’t even mentioned the use of nuclear weapons. We have never seen a military attempt by a foreign nation to disarm the nuclear capabilities of a nuclear-weapons power. Let’s hope we never do.

****

When it comes to North Korea, the history is a nightmare, the present is a nightmare, and the future is a nightmare, but even that does not mean that the nightmare cannot be mitigated, its worst outcomes prevented, and improvements made. President Trump and anyone now advising him that doesn’t consider the above history and points will be doing Americans and Koreans both an unforgivable disservice. Terrifyingly, at this point, the fate of millions of people in one of the world’s worst historical flashpoints rests with the decisions of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. If anyone is comforted by that thought, that, too, is a nightmare. 

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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Trump’s flirtatious waltz with hints and threats of political violence cannot be ignored and should not be underestimated. Apart from echoing some of America’s own worst episodes in the South after the Civil War, such dangerous dancing brings to mind the lessons of the ancient Roman Republic, and how, after centuries of peaceful politics and peaceful transitions of power, one horrible incident of political violence begat many others in subsequent decades, culminating in civil war and the death of Rome’s democratic Republic; the Roman Republic far outlasted America’s republic (so far) even before that violence began, so anyone who thinks the United States is immune from a similar fate is suffering from a hubris that ignores history and human nature and the terrible consequences of precedent-shattering political violence.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 23, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 23rd, 2016 (UPDATED 10/26 to further discuss race & politics in America)

AP Photo/ Evan Vucci

Silvestre David Mirys (1742-1810) – Figures de l’histoire de la république romaine accompagnées d’un précis historique Plate 127: Gaius Gracchus, tribune of the people, presiding over the Plebeian Council

AMMAN — We have already had people being punched at Trump rallies, clashes with police, a mini-riot by Bernie Sanders fans inside a Democratic state convention in Nevada and that Bernie Sanders himself all but seemed to fully excuse at the time, and now, a firebombing of a Republican HQ in a county in North Carolina.

Trump Fanning Flames of Unrest

In the midst of all this Trump has convinced many of his supporters that there is a global top-to-bottom conspiracy to cheat him of the election and that this election—which is only just beginning—is already rigged against him and, by extension, his supporters (never mind how astronomically impossible that such a rigging as he describes it would actually be happening). In fact, he has been so successful at this that almost 70% of Republicans believe Clinton can only win by cheating and half of Republicans would refuse to accept her as president. At the final debate, he even raised serious doubts about whether he would accept the results of the election, putting in jeopardy an unbroken tradition going back to George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson in 1796-1797 of a peaceful transfer of power between presidents and the loser accepting the outcome, even in hotly disputed or controversial elections like those in 1800, 1824, 1876, 1888, 1960, and 2000. The day after the debate, he doubled down on this rhetoric and failed to alleviate the concerns he had raised the previous night, joking(?)/stating(?) that he would accept the election results “if I win.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, Trump has been saying that there is a need for volunteers to “watch” polling places to make sure there is no “voter fraud” and is encouraging his partisan supporters to undertake this task that is supposed to be bi-partisan and non-partisan, and he and his surrogates are specifically suggesting monitoring of certain urban (code word for heavily-black) areas. In places like Texas and Florida, over 80% of Republicans think that voter fraud is a major problem, with zero evidence to support this but ample rhetoric from Team Trump and the GOP trumping reality yet again with their misinformation and disinformation.

Yes, angry, white, possibly-well-armed Trump supporters—people who number in the tens of millions, who are passionately convinced Trump is right and should be president, who are now talking of assassination, revolution, and coups should Hillary be elected—are already talking about descending upon minority-heavy polling areas on Election Day in an effort to make sure such shifty (in their view) minorities, prone to election malfeasance (in their view), don’t try anything funny; and yes, many of these people own guns and will show up openly armed because in many locations they will be allowed to do so, and yes, out of Trump’s tens of millions of devotees, we can certainly expect many thousands to show up as he has asked them to, and to show up in this manner, at polling places on November 8th, something that will more likely than not lead to trouble, especially in America’s increasingly racially-tense atmosphere. For those who don’t know their history, this was how white Southerners intimidated and usually prevented freed slaves and African-Americans from voting, from Reconstruction all the way through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Never mind that Republican and Democratic officials at all levels, including local election officials from both parties, have dismissed as absurd the idea that the election is rigged or that any local polling places are going to be compromised or part of a voter fraud scheme. Never mind that voter fraud is practically non-existent, and that campaigns claiming to want to deal with voter fraud are more about denying minorities the ability to vote than anything else (for actual voter fraud on a staggering scale, see Vladimir Putin’s Russia).

Unfortunately, this election is a moment of terror, and for many Latinos, Muslims, African-Americans, and others, it must on a personal level be a terror that far exceeds any emotions I have on the issue as a white male. I am not sure if state and local authorities are up to the challenge, are aware of what could really happen in a realistic worst-case scenario here: thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe more, of Trump supporters, many who could be armed, are going to be seeking to either harass and intimidate people they falsely believe, with no evidence, are committing voter fraud—picking people out by skin color almost certainly—or maybe even just be flat-out seeking to disrupt voting in liberal precincts in an effort to suppress minority votes (again, nothing new in American history and something that has happened in living memory). Violence, riots, voter disenfranchisement—all are in the realm of realistic possibility on Election Day now. We have already recently seen what crowds and individuals can do when animated by racial animus, crowds on different sides of the debate, from crowds of mainly angry black citizens to crowds of paranoid police in a cycle that seems to have been reignited since Ferguson after decades of near dormancy.

I am not being hyperbolic. I am not being paranoid. And Donald Trump’s rhetoric to millions of his supporters that the election is being stolen from them and that they need to go “watch” polling places is not abating or going away; nothing inherent in American society makes it immune to internal violence or breakdowns of law and order. This is the reality mere weeks before Election Day, and I hope federal, state, and local law enforcement are planning accordingly; some are aware of these dire possibilities, but whether they are given the resources to deal with this possibility, or if their plans are competent, remains to be seen.

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Lesson’s From Ancient Roman Politics

Is this a Rubicon moment for America?

HBO/Rome

Not really a Rubicon moment, but more of a Gracchi moment.

By a Rubicon moment, I am using a colloquialism of a point-of-no-return when a drastic action is taken. This word Rubicon in this case refers to the moment in 49 B.C.E., when Julius Caesar crossed south over the Rubicon River with his army, a river which marked the boundary between a province where his army was authorized to operate and Roman Italy proper where it was not after the Senate left him a choice between what would have been an unjust prosecution at the hands of his political rivals on one hand and starting a civil war (only the second since the founding of the Roman Republic in 509. B.C.E. but also the Republic’s last, the Republic itself not surviving this final round) on the other. But the Roman Civil War that began in 49 B.C.E. was merely the culmination of a number of awful trends that started in 133. B.C.E.

We are clearly not at a Rubicon moment in America, the second most successful republic in history after Rome’s ancient one.

But, still terrifyingly, we may be approaching a 133 moment: the snowball which starts an avalanche.

What happened in 133? After the Romans’s version of the Revolutionary War that overthrew the rule of kings in 509. B.C.E., apart from some minor incidents early in Rome’s history as a Republic that are more legendary than anything certain, Rome essentially had three-and-a-half centuries worth of relatively stable, democratic republican government; political violence was a minimum or nonexistent, and nothing like an officially directed assassination, civil war, or use of the military to settle internal political disputes ever occurred. Sure, its democratic qualities evolved over time and like even modern democracies there were factors that favored elites, much like in the United States, which did not even begin with allowing all white adult men to vote, let alone blacks or women. In fact, some states in America did not even have popular votes in the first presidential election, during which all had property-owning requirements for voting for president if there were popular votes at all, requirements that were only gradually abolished in the coming decades, starting with New Hampshire in 1792, though a greater degree of democracy was practiced at the state and local levels. Still, it was not until 1856 that all white male citizens in America were finally able to vote regardless of property ownership, and that was only 14 years before freed slaves and all adult males were given the right to vote with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.

By 133 B.C.E., common Romans had long had an important role in selection of the Republic’s senior magistrates, and, in particular, there was one office that from Rome’s earliest days was created to be a sacred, inviolable protector of the people: the tribunate. The tribunes of the plebs (short for plebeians, the members of the lower class) were elected each year and could prosecute any other government official for abuse of power, as well as veto any government act, and introduce legislation of their own accord and even bypass the Roman Senate and go directly to the people’s assemblies to pass their programs, even though this was against unofficial custom. The most powerful political officeholders were the two annually elected chief executives, the consuls (think of America having to co-equal presidents elected every year), who presided over the Senate and had more power than any other elected officials. These two offices are important to understand when looking at the events from 133 on, and the below chart I created gives a good idea of how the Roman government operated:

It is also important to understand the seismic changes going on in Roman society at this period in its history. After well over a century of on-and-off-again conflict, Rome had finally succeeded in literally wiping its greatest rival Carthage off the map in 146 B.C.E., a Carthage that was just a shadow of its former self long before that final last gasp. As a result of Rome’s successful wars, a huge influx of slaves into Roman lands meant that many small freeholding farmers were put out of business as wealthy elites created huge estates run by slave labor and greedily gobbled up the land of small farmers. Rome had gone from a primarily small-farming Republic to an overseas empire dominated by large slave-owning landowners. Roman cities swelled with newly landless urban poor, many of them veterans and their descendants, veterans who had been unable to maintain their family farms fighting for years at a time in long, overseas wars; Rome’s elites were clearly leaving the concerns of the poor masses unattended. 

While Carthage and others were a threat, the different classes of Roman society were forced to work together in a spirit of pragmatism to fend off so many existential foes (this is similar to the moderation and bipartisanship exhibited in American politics during its Cold War with the Soviet Union). But a new political culture of selfishness, greed, and ambition, each rising to new heights, was emerging in Rome with the destruction of Carthage. There was just so much unprecedented power to be had that the stakes of and how far people were willing to go in politics had reached new levels; competition became much stiffer as a few of the most powerful elite families were drowning out the other lower aristocrats. Corruption grew by leaps and bounds as a result, and the tradition of the abstemious, stoic, small farmer ideal had become just that, that ideal further from being a reality than at any time in Roman history and that gap only about to get worse. In fact, it got so bad that the governing Romans began to be worried that the military was going to lose its base of recruitment, at that point limited to landowners. And decades later in the first century B.C.E., the interests of large multinational corporations called publicani helped to put so much money into the political system that Roman senators could not be trusted to fight for the people over their own and publicani pocketbooks.  

Even at the time, many contemporary Romans of the first century B.C.E. were aware that the post-Carthage culture of Roman elites of greed, corruption, ambition, scorched-earth politics, and extreme partisanship bieing placed over both the common good and a spirit of compromise; this new culture was at the heart of the disease which led to the death of the Republic (nominally in 27 B.C.E. but really in 49 B.C.E.); in the words of the ancient Roman historian Sallust, it was peacetime, not war, which undid Rome:

“Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity took over. the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity. For the aristocracy twisted their ‘dignity’ and the people twisted ‘liberty’ towards their desires; every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated…self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity. For the aristocracy twisted their ‘dignity’ and the people twisted ‘liberty’ towards their desires; every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated…

And so, joined with power, greed without moderation or measure invaded, polluted, and devastated everything, considered nothing valuable or sacred, until it brought about its own collapse.” ( The Jurgurthine War 41.1-10)

To place Rome’s rapid rise in perspective, consider that by 133, Rome had gone in living memory from surviving multiple existential threats from Carthaginians, Gauls, and Greeks, had gone from just controlling Italy, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and some of Spain’s east coast to dominating nearly the entire Mediterranean either directly or indirectly; specifically, 133 was year of remarkable fortune for Rome: the late King of Pergamum—a wealthy Greek kingdom in what is now Turkey un western Asian Turkey—had actually willed his entire domain to the Roman Republic, and it passed to Rome upon his death in 133. Rome had already grown dramatically in size, wealth, and power, adding most of northern Italy, all of Greece, most of Spain, most of Southern France, and much of Carthage’s old African holdings to its domains. But Rome’s Western territories were far less developed than the older, fabulously wealthy cities and kingdoms of the East. The addition of the Asian Kingdom of Pergamum to the Republic’s empire had Roman businessman salivating as the prospect of the profits from the riches of doing business in the Asian east.

The Gracchi and Rome’s Descent Into Political Violence

Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume- The Gracchi

The year this remarkable gift to Rome came about, one of the tribunes of the plebs that had won election for that year of 133 was an ambitious but high-minded would-be reformer: Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, hailing from two very famous and elite Roman bloodlines. A champion of the masses, the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch has GRacchus giving a passionate speech in which he lamented that while the

“wild beasts of Italy have their dens and holes to lurk in…the men who fight and die for our country enjoy the common air and light and nothing else…The truth is that they fight and die to protect the wealth and luxury of others. They are called the masters of the world, but they do not possess a single clod of earth which is truly their own” (Plutarch Tiberius Gracchus 9). 

And this was the center of his program: doing something about the wealthy’s assault on the small-farm landowners who were disappearing as a class. But Gracchus was hardly looking to liquidate the rich: his proposal was to use a preexisting law that had been on the books for centuries that had long been unenforced, one which limited the amount of public land that any one individual could own. That limit was still quite large, but far less than what the ultra-wealthy had accumulated in the years of Rome’s great expansions, during which many Romans elites had used fake names to accumulate more than the legal limit. The excess land would be handed over to the poor, but in return for accepting this legal limit, all the legal-sized holdings would be formally recognized as legitimate and each son of these landowners would be given a portion of land equal to half the maximum size.

As would be expected, though, these wealthy landowners dominated the Senate, and they refused to go along with this compromise scheme even though the problems of ultra-concentration of land and wealth and the rapid rise of landless poor were all at a crises points.

Thus Gracchus, as was his legal-but-frowned-upon-and-untraditional right, called an assembly of the people and got his bill passed with the people’s enthusiastic approval. Equally as uncommon were for senatorial elites to orchestrate a veto of such a popular measure, but that the Senate did, co-opting one of the other nine Tribunes to veto Gracchus’ bill. Quite dramatically, Gracchus convened another assembly and had the people vote that tribune out of office: this dramatic move was extremely unprecedented, but was very likely still legal. The elites opposed to Gracchus were shocked at this move, and began a public relations campaign suggesting the Gracchus was out to make himself a king—just as offensive a suggestion to Roman sensibilities then as it would be to Americans today—and a portrayal Gracchus played into when he appointed himself and two of his relatives as the three-person commission to oversee the land reform. The Senate’s response to this was to refuse to allocate funding for Gracchus’s commission (if this sounds familiar to current U.S. politics on anything from Obamacare to the Zika virus, it should). In turn, Gracchus moved to get funding from future revenue from newly bestowed Pergamese lands in Asia, stepping into both financial and foreign affairs, policy spheres traditionally run by the Senate.

In pursuing his land reform and in its efforts to stop him at any cost, both Gracchus and the Senate were showing a willingness to discard centuries of compromise and precedent that had served Rome well, though Gracchus could at least in part be said to be acting on behalf of a Roman people and Republic in desperate need of land reform while the primary concern of the senatorial class was preserving their own power and obscene wealth. 

Against such odds, Gracchus did something no Roman as a tribune had ever done before: he made it clear he would stand for election again to serve a consecutive second term as a tribune, signaling to the Senate that it could not just stall in the hopes of outlasting him or hope to simply overturn his legislation when he was gone. A group of Senators, in part feeling this was a major step towards Gracchus moving to make himself king, and obviously acting to preserve their own power and wealth, marched on an assembly of the people where Gracchus was present and beat him, and hundreds of his supporters, to death; afterwards, other supporters of his were executed, imprisoned, or exiled without trial.

*****

This was a terrible turn for Rome: for hundreds of years and not since the earliest days of the Republic had anything even remotely like this happened, and even then nothing remotely this bad: tribunes were as a matter of religion sacrosanct and inviolable; to try to harm one was considered a terrible sacrilege. Elites, even members of the Senate, had resorted to settling a political dispute with mass murder, killing a major elected office-holder. And from this point, Rome’s politics would be driven by two main parties: the optimates—self-dubbed “best-men” who were the conservative leaders of the aristocracy and the Senate and generally acted against reform or anything that would redice their wealth and power—and populares—bold men from within the aristocracy who were willing to challenge the optimates, drawing support from the people with populist programs aimed helping the masses—and the conflict between the two would eventually destroy republican government in Rome altogether.

In order to prevent mass unrest, however, the Senate let much of Gracchus’ land law stand, but this was a temporary measure and the Senate stopped the reform in 129, to the dismay of not only Roman citizens; at this point, much of Italy was not so much directly controlled by Rome as by other Italians whom Rome considered allies and were not legally full Roman citizens, and it was clear to all that these Italians were the junior partners in the relationship; these Italians had not been consulted on the ending of the reform, to their consternation. This provided an opportunity for the murdered Gracchus’ younger brother, Gaius, who, it seems, sought to gain their support when they were shut out of the decision-making process by the Senate, apparently by supporting a bid to make many of them full Roman citizens. 

But when Gaius sought and won a tribunate for the year 123, this was only one of his many aims; he also ran for and won the tribunate for the next year, 122, without the cataclysmic reaction suffered by his brother for attempting the same thing. 

If Tiberius could be thought of as something of a Bernie Sanders of ancient Rome, then Gaius was going to take more of a Hillary Clinton-like approach, trying to build a broad coalition designed to appeal to many swaths of society instead of a more narrow populist program and to make it harder for the optimates to brush him aside like they did his brother. 

As such, Gaius Gracchus passed a law ensuring access to grain for bread to win over the urban poor; for the poor of the countryside, he suggested creating a new colony to settle people on the site where Carthage had once stood, in Africa; for an emerging middle-class of lower aristocrats and businessmen known as equites (who ran many of the publicani), he allowed them to bid for the lucrative tax-collecting contracts in the western parts of Pergamum’s former lands, now organized as the new Roman province of Asia (taxation was not undertaken directly by the government but was a task the Roman state contracted out to private companies); to this end, rather than have the bidding take place as would normally happen in the province itself (often abused by whichever Roman governor was there), Gracchus made sure it would take place in Rome, and instead of than splitting the taxation responsibilities for the province of Asia into multiple contracts, he made it a single contract for the whole province, an appeal to the support of the upper Roman business-class since only larger corporations could handle a contract on that scale (this move would have unintended blowback as it gave rise to the obscene growth in power of the publicani that would be such a huge problem for Romans decades later). 

On the legal front, he ensured capital trials could only be conducted through a law or people’s assembly, preventing the Senate from conducting trials by decree, and any senator or official who tried to bypass this restriction was subject to prosecution. He also brought equites into juries, so that the dominant portion of the pool from which judges and jurors in most civil cases were drawn were now equites over senators by a two-to-one margin; additionally, one of his allies passed a bill that made equites total replacements for senators on the juries of extortion courts that tried provincial governors and other senatorial-level officials for corruption (senators had generally avoided convicting their peers), and a permanent extortion court was established.

But in casting such a wide net, Gracchus made himself vulnerable as well; his wily Senatorial opponents used his effort to help Rome’s Italian allies against him, convincing many Romans that extending citizenship to these people would weaken the power of Roman citizens themselves, and the senators also used their individual patron-client ties with many of the non-Roman Italian to keep a good number of them from supporting Gracchus. They also preempted his attempt to win over the rural poor by having two of their own put forth bills to establish colonies. His support apparently undercut, Gaius lost an election in which he ran for a newly-unprecedented third tribunate in a row, and a fight broke out between some of his supporters and those of one of the current consuls, a consul who had bitterly opposed Gracchus and was a personal enemy of his; the fight resulted in the death of one of the consul’s supporters.

The Senate’s response to this was swift and unprecedented: it passed an emergency decree against Gracchus, authorizing the consul to do anything whatsoever to take Gracchus down: Gracchus and thousands of his followers were killed in a brief yet bloody fight and subsequent executions.

From the Gracchi to Caesar: the Cycle of Political Violence Explodes Into Civil War

Sadly, violence would come with frightening ease and regularity over the following decades.

Close to four centuries had passed in Roman history without violent episodes other than some disturbances early in Rome’s history, but after the deaths of the Gracchi brothers in 133 and 121, violence increasingly became a political tool, beginning mainly with the Senate’s optimates’ efforts to squash would-be reformers challenging their power too much for their liking, first in 100 and again in 91, both used against tribunes and the latter being used on a man pushing for citizenship for Rome’s Italian allies; the assassination of their champion sparked a rebellion by many of Rome’s Italian allies called the Social War (91-88), which was only ended by Rome’s granting of most of them the citizenship they had wanted to achieve through peaceful means. But an actual civil war between roman military units fighting for supporters of one generally popularis consul (Gaius Marius) against the forces and supporters of another optimas consul (Lucious Cornelius Sulla)—Rome’s first civil war in over four centuries of republican government (consider it took the United States only 85 years before it had its Civil War from 1861-1865)—broke out the same year (along with a major overseas conflict in Greece and Asia). The period of conflict between supporters of Marius and Sulla would not finally end until 72 (and that foreign war not ending until 63). 

But no rest for the weary: one ambitious popularis tried to overthrow the Republic after losing an election in 61, and he and his makeshift army were annihilated in 62. As the 50s unfolded, tension was constant and bouts of mob violence frequent, while the many pressing problems facing the Republic were left unaddressed by obstinate optimates who showed a total disregard for the Roman people. (Gaius) Julius Caesar would be their champion as a popularis, but his foes in the Senate would never forgive him; with a veteran army after his victorious war in Gaul, the Senate issued its emergency decree again in 49, basically authorizing tCaesar’s death because he would not step down from office; but this was after intense behind the scenes maneuvering in which Caesar’s supporters tried to negotiate a way for him to take up a new office when his term as consul expired, without which Cesar would be out of office and therefore open to legal prosecution, which his enemies were certainly planning for him. Essentially, they were daring Caesar to start a civil war or accept disgrace and prosecution and who-knows-what-punishment, in addition to an untenable political situation for the Republic and its citizens.

Caesar chose civil war.

By the time the wars which grew out of the civil war beginning in 49 ended nearly twenty years later in 30 with Caesar’s nephew Octavian defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Rome’s people were so exhausted by war that they didn’t mind that Octavian set up a dictatorship masquerading as a republic, and thus the Roman emperorship was born. There would not be another large-scale democracy or democratic republic with as much participation by the people until the United States of America grew to be a major power roughly 1,800 years later.

America’s Own Problems With Political Violence: Civil War to Civil Rights

Harper’s Weekly- October 19th, 1872

That time would roughly coincide with America’s Civil War. The war itself did not really end in 1865: during Reconstruction, the Republican-dominated federal government with its army acting as an occupying force put into place new state governments in the Southern states that had rebelled that enforced racial political and legal equality for freed slaves, but over the course of the next decade and then some, Democratic extremist terrorist white supremacists carried out insurgencies and violently overthrew almost all these governments, putting in place racist governments highly oppressive and violent to black Americans that lasted until the 1960s; southern whites finally negotiated the withdrawal of federal troops left in the only remaining states southern white insurgents had not violently taken over after the disputed election of 1876, an election, like so many others between 1865-1876, marred in the South by widespread violence, fraud, and voter suppression.

Harper’s weekly- “Of Course He Wants to Vote the Democratic Ticket:” White Democrats intimidate a black Republican,October 21st, 1876

With the exception of the election of 1948, in which many southern whites punished Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman for supporting civil rights for African-Americans and voted for racist third-party candidate Strom Thurmond, Democrats would continue to be the party of racists until John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson embraced equality for African-Americans in the 1960s, causing the parties to swap positions on issues of race, with white southern voters then defecting en masse to the Republican Party mainly because of racism, where they are now the Republican Party’s primary base. And, disturbingly, most of the states where today the state-level government is leading the charge in suppressing black and other minority voters are former “Confederate” states in the South.

America is fortunate that apart from riots and strikes, many of them race-based, there has been very few period of civil unrest since the 1870s, the main exceptions being the sporadic taming of the “Wild West” and later the Civil Rights Era’s 1960s and early 70s. But now, starting with the Ferguson riots in 2014 that was the first in a series episodes of racial unrest that have so far culminated in the dark days of racial tension of this very summer of 2016, we are seeing the most unrest this country has faced in more than 40 years.

Trump: The First Major Party Candidate to Stoke Unrest While Running for President?

And in the middle of all this is Donald Trump, the most polarizing major-party candidate since the election of 1860 that precipitated this country’s only civil war.

As history and even our own world today amply demonstrates, the sinister genie of political violence is prohibitively difficult to get back into its bottle once it has been unleashed; often, the attempt to rebottle it fails to succeed before the self-destruction of whatever state-structures were in existence, or before people turn to autocracy out of weariness of violence, with the violence itself often bred by a disintegrating public trust in major institutions. Most worrisome about Trump is that he is mixing subtle, implied threats of mass violence and/or intimidation with a very overt effort to obliterate trust in such institutions; just to recap, from the beginning of his candidacy and throughout, Trump falsely exaggerated how bad problems were with our institutions, even allowing for their increasingly problematic nature: first, he assailed the media and the party presidential nomination process as being “rigged” by elites to keep him down (that is, until he won and then stopped caring); added to this are his repeated allegations that the presidential voting system is rigged from top to bottom, with exhortations of his (largely white) supporters to be enthusiastic volunteer Election Day poll-watchers (in minority-heavy precincts), a task that only trained professionals are qualified to do (the parts in parentheses are understood even as candidate Trump does not emphasize them). Combined with his casual references to beating up dissenters at his rallies, his earlier threats/hints of possible violence (and his campaign’s preparations for intimidation tactics) were the Republican Party to try to deny Trump the nomination at its convention, his repeated musings as to what gun enthusiasts could show Hillary Clinton, especially if she were to be stripped of her Secret Service protection, and his stated desire to put Clinton in jail were he to be elected president along with his encouraging of chants of “lock her up” with crowds at his rallies, all Americans paying attention who have any sense of decency left should be feeling chills down their spines.

And yet for millions of Trump’s deplorable supporters, who are hanging on to every word in person at mass rallies, watching him on TV, or listening to him on the radio, they hear all this, easily understand all the implied subtleties about race and violence, and eagerly absorb every word joyfully, salivating at the very prospect of being able to assert their white dominance yet again on the political system, with far too many of these people also delighting in the prospect of political violence as a means to achieve these ends.

I wish I could say that I firmly believe such a prospect of political violence on anything other than a minute scale is a remote possibility, but I can’t; Trump’s recently far more sinister rhetorical turn is driving delusions and fantasies of violence in the heads of far, far too many of his flock, especially if that recent poll that had half of Republicans refusing to accept Clinton as president is even remotely accurate (and it probably is). I honestly don’t know what will happen, so extreme has Trump’s rhetoric become, so extreme have the views of many of his supporters been for some time, that I fear what will happen should this toxic mix boil over.

All Americans, regardless of political affiliation, in an atmosphere of increasing racial animosity and rumblings of political violence, should be afraid, and demand that Trump cease such rhetoric immediately, before it may be too late to prevent the unimaginable. But, as a consequence of all of this, we must begin to imagine the unimaginable, and prepare for the worst.

In some ways, that in itself is close enough to a 133 moment that we are in trouble regardless of what happens on and/or after Election Day.

Conclusion: A True Test for America, Its System, Its Leaders, Its People 

I want to also be careful here to note I am not arguing inevitability here: 133 did not make Sulla’s and Caesar’s civil wars inevitable, and Trump doesn’t make anything inevitable about today’s America. But each made and make, respectively, the possibility of really bad things happening far more likely: once such things occur in a society, they are far more likely to occur again than if society had prevented them from occurring at all in the first place.

Do I think Trump really wants to spark violence and riots? To undermine democracy? Maybe not, maybe it’s just bravado, but maybe not; either way, I do not think he appreciates or understands the raw hatred and emotion with which he is toying; in fact, the Republican Party did not realize how dangerous a game they were playing for decades stoking these fires, and Trump blew it all up right in the Party’s elites’ face. These forces are larger than Trump, and it remains to be seen if he can contain them, or if he even wants to. At the final debate, he said he wanted to keep us “in suspense,” and no matter what happens, we can all agree he has succeeded wildly on that front, and not for the good of our republic. The example of Rome’s self-destructive descent into civil political violence and strife is frighteningly instructive for our times, then, and should give us all pause, and we will have to judge ourselves very much on the basis of what happens over the next few weeks. In some ways, no less than the fate of our (and even Western) democracy itself is at stake.

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 15, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) September 15th, 2016

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

AMMAN — I’ve written repeatedly about 9/11 before: what it meant for me, what it should mean for Americans, how we have failed to properly honor the memory of the victims, how our nation has become worse, not better, since that fateful day, about all the missed opportunities. I think today it’s pretty clear that we as a nation still have not honored the memory of the victims through proper action, but what I could write about that now would be nothing new that I and others have not written before.

I’m not sure if it would make me feel better or worse to be able to write an article saying “9/11 helped to ruin us by starting a new style of politics that is ruining us.” In any case, I can’t, for while in many ways 9/11 must still clearly be regarded as a watershed, cataclysmic event in world history, let alone American politics and history, that sad truth is that the disgusting political gamesmanship of sucking in foreign policy and national security issues into the partisan maelstrom in the same manner as any other issue is not something that began (or ended) with 9/11, with the politics of 9/11 marking more continuity than change, just a larger example of growing partisanship amidst a rising tide of partisanship in post-Cold War America.

The big move towards consistent politicization in any significant way started almost exclusively with the Republican Party just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, beginning with its withering partisan criticism of Bill Clinton’s efforts in Somalia in 1993, criticism that was wildly inconsistent and undermined U.S. policy.  When Republicans began using 9/11 as a partisan wedge issue in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003 and in the 2004 presidential election, this was merely a continuation of the post-Cold War modus operandi of the Republican Party, which is only more extreme today. It is worth going through some of this history to better understand this dynamic besetting America today.

Bipartisanship During the Cold War, But Not For Bill Clinton

Somalia

In 1991, Somalia’s longstanding dictator, short of international support when he was no longer “needed” after the Cold War had drawn to a close, was overthrown, and the country fell into anarchy and warlordism. The political and security situation combined with a famine into one of the first great humanitarian disasters of the post-Cold War era. With the UN Security Council supporting a relief mission, and the Democratic-led U.S. Congress, including Republicans, urging support for such a mission, Republican President George H. W. Bush, though he had just lost re-election nearly two months earlier, announced on Dec. 4th, 1992, that he would send 28,000 U.S. troops as part of a peacekeeping force intended to ensure the distribution of food to hundreds of thousands of Somalis on the verge of starvation, a move supported by President-Elect Clinton. 

Not long after Clinton became president, though, Republicans especially began voicing strong criticism of Clinton’s efforts to sustain the mission, contradicting their earlier support for the mission under George H. W. Bush; while criticism was by no means coming from Republicans alone, they were generally particularly vocal and harsh in their criticism, exaggerating and distorting what was going on and using hyperbolic language to criticize a mission they were perfectly happy to support when commanded by a Republican president only a few months earlier. The mixed support of WWII veteran (and soon-to-be-Republican presidential nominee in 1996) Bob Dole was more the exception, rather than the rule, as Republicans were generally unified in opposing Clinton and succeeded in undermining public support and confidence in the mission, calling for an end to the mission and constantly threatening to cut off funding for the mission even while U.S. troops in the field were carrying it out, a mission that was far from a disaster and hardly a failure. Even when President Clinton announced a withdrawal date after the unfortunate October 1993 “black hawk down” incident, in which U.S. forces tangled with warlord forces and incurred relatively substantial casualties, many Republicans, rather than accept the withdrawal announcement as a sufficient political victory, pushed for a faster withdrawal than the one Clinton had called for; whatever Clinton did, these Republicans were sure to meet it with scorn and criticism. 

In the end, hundreds of thousands of Somali lives were saved by the mission, for all its faults. But Republicans seemed to be in lock-step with Osama bin Laden as viewing the mission as an American failure (even before the “black hawk down” incident), and sure helped to move public opinion in that direction despite the significant achievements of the mission. Perhaps even more hauntingly, the experience was a major influence on Clinton’s decision not to intervene during the Rwandan genocide that occurred only months later, in the spring of 1994.

Bosnia

Clinton was already clashing with Congress over the war in the disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1993, as well, as more and more reports of Serbs committing atrocities against Bosnian Muslims dominated the headlines. It was an odd mixture of Republicans and Democrats who said the Clinton Administration was doing too little, and Republicans and Democrats who argued the Administration was doing too much. Such wide-ranging bi-partisan criticism reflected how complex and difficult the situation was in the Balkans as Europe’s first real test of the post-Cold War era unfolded; against a backdrop of confused and divided U.S. lawmakers, European governments were nervous that any aggressive U.S. action would endanger their peacekeeping forces, already on the ground in the Balkans. In other words, there were no easy solutions and no single plan had widespread, bipartisan support or even strong agreement within one party. As president, Bill Clinton was in an unwelcome and lonely position in trying to craft a position on the conflict. This situation more or less continued through 1994, though after the November midterm elections, at least the leadership of the victorious Republicans signaled a desire for more forceful action.

But somewhat conflictingly, even as Republicans seemed to want to end the arms embargo to help arm the Bosnians (unwise for multiple reasons, e.g., that escalation could have prompted Russia to arm their Serbian friends, could have weakened the NATO alliance and prompted the UK and France to withdraw their forces from the region and force America’s hand in filling the void, measures that nonetheless also had some significant support from some Democrats; still, Clinton correctly noted that “…unilaterally lifting the arms embargo will have the opposite effects of what its supporters intend. It would intensify the fighting, jeopardize diplomacy and make the outcome of the war in Bosnia an American responsibility” and increased air strikes against the Serbs. But Republicans mostly balked when Clinton publicly weighed the idea of U.S. ground forces either assisting beleaguered UN peacekeepers or helping to enforce an eventual peace; thus, Republicans slammed him for not doing enough even while slamming him for raising the possibility of what would likely help the most. They also later balked at Clinton’s efforts to help support a new UN plan to create a rapid-reaction force of European troops to help the thinly-spread peacekeeping forces already on the ground.

When a cease-fire was finally negotiated in October 1995, and the U.S. held talks in November, a more partisan nature to opposing the president came into being, just when it was most crucial to achieve peace in the Balkans for Congress to support a long-term peace plan. Nearly every Republicans in the Senate but only one Democrat sent a letter to Clinton asking him to ask Congress for approval before committing any U.S. troops to a peacekeeping force; this was done just days before formal peace talks were to begin in the U.S., undercutting the president’s team’s negotiating authority at a crucial moment. Next, nearly the entire House Republican caucus voted on a successfully-passed (non-binding) resolution that spurned and disavowed Clinton’s promise to provide 20,000 troops as part of an eventual peacekeeping force, undermining the prospects of an agreement and an end to the war, but a majority of Democrats opposed this resolution even as a substantial minority voted with the Republicans. 

With negotiations between the warring parties underway on U.S. soil, House Republicans voted to prevent the deployment of U.S. troops without Congress specifically authorizing money to do so in what was largely a partisan vote, and even after the peace treaty was signed, House Republicans only narrowly failed in a bid to cut off funding for the mission (210-218) and Senate Republicans barely failed to pass a vote condemning the mission but “supporting” the troops (47-52). Another partisan vote passed just before the peace treaty was signed condemned Clinton’s decision to deploy troops, and another vote that would have offered language supporting the troops but not criticizing Clinton’s plan failed to pass pretty much along party lines the very day the treaty was signed. And in 1996, many Republicans rather myopically criticized both Clinton’s decision to provide substantial reconstruction aid for Bosnia and an extension of the peacekeeping mission. Despite Republican opposition, U.S. forces in Bosnia undoubtedly played a key and decisive role in forging and maintaining peace and stability in Bosnia and, in a larger sense, the Balkans and southeastern Europe.

Kosovo

Just a few years later, Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was again threatening massive numbers of civilians, this time the mainly Muslim Kosovar Albanians in Serbia’s province of Kosovo. In response to a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, NATO launched airstrikes against Serb forces threatening Kosovar Albanians. House Republicans, in particular, engaged in behavior that could reasonably (certainly) be said to have undermined the Clinton Administration’s efforts during the crisis. Not long before NATO began its airstrikes, a substantially large majority of Republicans in the Republican-dominated House voted to bar the use of American ground troops: “American soldiers have been trained to be warriors, not baby sitters,” was how House Majority Whip and Republican Tom DeLay put it. The measure was defeated by nearly every Democrat and a minority of Republicans teaming up to vote down the amendment. Even after the airstrikes began, a tie vote in the House failed to give public backing to the airstrikes. While Republican leaders tended to prevent direct challenges to the president in these cases, especially in the Senate, it was clear that many rank-and-file congressional Republicans, including a clear majority in the House, felt differently. Thus, when George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 and campaigned on pulling out of the peacekeeping efforts in the Balkans—making it clear how much value he placed on the missions in Bosnia and Kosovo—that position was not terribly surprising.

Of course, after 9/11, the Balkans receded greatly in importance in America…

9/11: More Continuity Than Change

Most people would have missed the fact that The 9/11 Commission Report, while produced ostensibly at a time when the nation was trying to heal and explicitly avoiding leveling particular blame with one administration or political party, nevertheless does make it clear how lax, unmotivated, and ill-prepared George W. Bush and his Administration were to deal with the crisis, and a careful reading (one which the general public did not even attempt or would even have been capable of attempting) showed that, while the Clinton Administration had not done everything it possibly could have done to go after bin Laden (after years of partisan Republican criticism whenever it had tried to act forcefully elsewhere!), it had increasingly focused on bin Laden as a threat over time and stridently recommended to Bush’s team during the 2000-2001 presidential transition to make bin Laden a top priority, advice which Bush’s people just as stridently refused to accept. Here is just one glaring example that exemplified both the Commission’s unwillingness to point fingers but willingness to still lay the clear picture there for those intelligent enough to follow the evidence:

“In May, President Bush announced that Vice President Cheney would himself lead an effort looking at preparations for managing a possible attack by weapons of mass destruction and at more general problems of national preparedness. The next few months were mainly spent organizing the effort and bringing an admiral from the Sixth Fleet back to Washington to manage it. The Vice President’s task force was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack occurred.” (6.5 The New Administration’s Approach)

Specifically, President Bush’s announcement that Cheney’s task force would be coming came May 8th, but presumably some thought and groundwork had occurred prior to this date. Then from May 8th until September 11th—more than four full months after Bush’s announcement—Cheney’s group had, famously, not met once; “The Vice President’s task force was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack occurred” is about as polite and diplomatic a way as possible to say that next-to-nothing had been done in those four months. One finds such an understated approach throughout the report, and an ability to look past it makes it clear a partisan gap, not in favor of senior Republican officials, in regards to the attention paid to bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Much like after the terrorist attacks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983, that killed 258 Americans (among others), after 9/11 Democrats supported the Republican president—tending to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, including then-Sen. Hillary Clinton—and conspicuously avoided playing a partisan political blame-game in the wake of a major attack against Americans even though the way both Presidents Reagan and his administration and Bush and his administration handled the events leading up to and surrounding the respective attacks in 1983 and 2001 were objectively ripe for criticism.

Of course, none of this mattered to Republicans in general, who were quick to blame 9/11 on Bill Clinton, continued to do so for years and still do so today, and who were also quick to politically weaponize foreign policy and national security as a partisan club with which to beat down Democrats into submission and defeat.  Especially as debate on potential and then actual war in Iraq intensified, those who raised questions, doubts, or criticism about the decision to go to war or even how the war was being prosecuted were loudly shouted down as “unpatriotic” and/or “not supporting the troops” (I had a reputation as one of the few liberals on my small conservative college campus back in the day, and late one night at a party in 2003 one drunken Republican angrily asked me “Why do you hate the troops?”). This happened in spite of the fact that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and the prosecution of the Iraq war were far more deficient and problematic than the H. W. Bush/Clinton Somalia intervention and Clinton’s two Balkan interventions. Democrats also did not really intensify their opposition until it was quite clear that Iraq was going from bad to worse and the promised WMDs that were the main ostensible pretext for the invasion never materialized.

The rancor of the debate in 2002 and 2003 was just a warmup for the 2004 general election campaign between Democratic Senator John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam war veteran who was wounded twice in action, and incumbent President George W. Bush, whose stateside service in the Texas Air National Guard was largely understood as a way to keep him out of having to serve in Vietnam. A group calling itself “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” attacked Kerry on his very Vietnam record, disputing his heroism, his accounts of what happened during his service, and his worthiness of receiving any of the medals he did receive with a bevy of shamefully false and misleading accusations, most notably displayed on prominent television ads and myopic media coverage that damaged Kerry’s candidacy greatly with various segments of the public and maybe was the greatest single factor contributing to his defeat at the hands of Bush that November. Lies, not truth, prevailed in 2004. Some of the impetus behind those attacks on Kerry had to do with the fact that Kerry, then as a recently decorated combat veteran, famously and prominently came out against the Vietnam War just after he had served in it and while that war was still very much ongoing. Even years after the election, Kerry found that he was still having to defend his reputation against those 2004 lies about his service in Vietnam. The attacks were so damaging that the term “swift boat” came to be a phrase commonly used to describe extreme and false political attacks.

This was just another chapter in the right’s attempts to both “own” national security as an issue to the exclusion of Democrats and serving up caricatures of liberals as haters-of-the-military and extremist hippies, caricatures that served as straw-man phantoms and that bore little resemblance to reality. Other recent chapters had been 1992’s and 1996’s attempts by the Republicans to portray Bill Clinton as a raging antiwar pot-smoking draft-dodging hippie unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

Recently, It’s Just Getting Worse

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

While the rise of Obama occurring hand-in-hand with an increasing, newly dominant anti-war feeling in America meant such fault-lines, concerns, and lines of attack would recede as they became increasingly ineffective (especially after the Obama Administration successfully took out Osama bin Laden; Mitt Romney barely mentioned, or challenged Obama on, foreign policy during the campaign homestretch in 2012), when the Arab Spring really turned for the dramatically worse and ISIS burst into view, Republicans, once again, found effective returns from investing in familiar tactics.

Yes, back were the days of Republicans using national security and foreign policy in hyperpartisan politicized attacks during Obama’s second term. The baseless, repeatedly-proven-to-be-false accusations trying to pin the blame on Hillary Clinton for the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya—including our then-Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens—is perhaps the best example of this shameful disgrace of abuse of the concepts of oversight and political discourse (especially when contrasted with how Democrats responded to the 1983 Beirut and 2001 9/11 attacks, as discussed above). Other great recent examples of Republican weaponization of foreign policy and national security politics include trying to blame Obama for both the rise and success of ISIS, both accusations being quite factually incorrect, as well as pretty much the entire Republican/Trumpian critique on immigration and the despicable demonization of Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s refugee policies (and refugees, for that matter; the previous five links are to my own detailed rebuttals of each criticism). The irony is lost on Republicans, too, as they criticize Obama both for being feckless on Syria but for doing too much on Libya, when criticism of one of those policies begs the very response of the one they are criticizing in the other, take your pick; the same can be said when they try to blame Obama for Ukraine’s crisis, even though Russia’s Putin also invaded and annexed parts of Georgia under W. Bush’s watch. The irony in their criticism is also lost on Republicans because they themselves either have terrible alternative “policies,” if they have any at all, a reality simply augmented terribly by their terrible candidate for the presidency but a reality that is very much the status quo in today’s Republican Party even without Trump.

Conclusion

Linda Davidson/The Washington Post

One thing that is certain is that the trend of Republicans hyperpartisanizing and politicizing national security issues as a party began under Clinton in the 1990s with Somalia, not with 9/11. To a very large extent, national security and foreign policy were bipartisan issues during the Cold War, but that did practice not survive after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ancient republican (small “R!”) Roman historian Sallust hits the nail right on the head with the hammer describing this dynamic some 2,000 years ago in his Roman Republic:

“…the pattern of routine partisanship and factionalism, and, as a result, of all other vicious practices had arisen in Rome… It was the result of peace and an abundance of those things that mortals consider most important. I say this, because, before the destruction of Carthage, mutual consideration and restraint between the people and the Roman Senate characterized the government. Among the citizens, there was no struggle for glory or domination. Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity…In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated.” ( The Jurgurthine War 41.1-5)

With the U.S., we can simply replace Rome with ourselves and Carthage with the Soviet Union, and that’s pretty much where we are today. While we faced the more-or-less existential threat of the Soviet Union, bipartisanship governed much (though hardly all) of our politics when it came to foreign policy and national security, and American victory in the Cold War was largely the result of decades of bipartisan policy and internal Soviet dynamics, hardly just because of the efforts of one man named Reagan, as many conservatives would have you believe.   Since then, largely because of the Republican Party (at least until the rise of the Bernie Sanders crowd), good practices are very much on the decline, not least of all in terms of how politics and issues of both foreign policy and national security have become toxically mixed, and we can’t blame this on 9/11, for it was a disease already growing in our body politic years before.

Today, there is hardly anybody left in a Republican leadership position who is someone like Bob Dole, who, though often opposing Clinton, put American interests and productive outcomes in foreign affairs ahead of partisanship and political gain, often acting to reign in his unruly Party members. There does not seem to be any new blood among Republicans who are capable of leading and cooperating like Dole, which means this untenable status quo of today is something with which we will be stuck for some time to come.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 26-27, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 26-27th, 2016

The Economist

AMMAN — Apart from the many negative and potentially-and-likely disastrous series of effects on England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland—what is now but perhaps not for long known as the United Kingdom—there are far greater things at stake in the wake of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, popularly termed “Brexit.” 

This vote result—which The Economist termed a “senseless, self-inflicted blow”—occurred even after British Prime Minister David Cameron secured a number of important and unprecedented concessions from the EU; it clearly wasn’t enough for the majority of Britons who voted to leave, 51.9% over the 48.1% of voters who wanted to stay and by a margin of nearly 1,270,000 votes out of over 33,550,000 total cast, or 72% of eligible voters.

The New York Times

Brexit: A Bookend on the Post-WWII Era?

Over three months ago, I wrote how between trends in the EU and Trump’s rise in America, Western democracy was not looking so good.  Now, with the Brexit vote beginning the process of the UK’s severance from the EU, and possibly-and-likely the fracturing of the UK itself to the degree that possibly only England and Wales will remain, 2016 may very well be remembered as the year the post-WWII international system—at least in Europe—began to unravel.  This was a world order based on coming together, and on a political and economic union in Europe supporting a military union that would make the division, strife, conflict and wars that had devastated the continent since ancient Rome’s fall a thing of the past.  After WWII, Western, Northern, and much of Southern Europe eastward through Greece slowly came together over decades; after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the iron curtain, this process of integration proceeded much more rapidly and included much of Eastern Europe.  Since WWII, the trend has been one of coming together.

A few days ago, with the Brexit vote, that trend, which had already been slowing considerably in Europe, seems to have come to an irrevocable, screeching halt, and the gear seems to have been switched to reverse. 

As an American who cares deeply about the international world order, I know that a strengthening European Union that could be a true partner in promoting peace, security, and justice around the world would be most welcome, as the U.S. acting to shoulder most of the burden has not seemed the best, let alone the most sustainable, model.  Recent crises in Syria, Libya, and Ukraine beg questions about what a more unified, determined, and enthusiastic Europe could have achieved, working as a true partner with the U.S., not just a junior one.  As bad experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, and paranoia over immigration and terrorism, drive a mentality of far lower engagement in the collective mind of the U.S. public, the Brexit could not have come at a worse time in recent memory for those looking to see another center of gravity besides the United States emerge to put their money where their mouth is in terms of promoting a just world stability.

The Brexit, then, basically signals to a weary American public to not count on Europe to increase its role on the world stage, or in any way help to shift the global leadership burden away from a United States whose public seems increasingly unwilling to shoulder that responsibility.  This bodes ill for the world’s ability to tackle its greatest collective challenges.

Dark Days for Europe

Beyond the aforementioned, Brexit signals that Europe is now ripe for new divisions and quarrels that could, over time, undo much of the progress made since WWII.  In my piece where I discussed how Western Democracy is on trial, I noted that Russia is actively “poking and prodding” Europe from Europe’s edge, orchestrating war in Ukraine, menacing parts of Eastern Europe, fomenting unrest, and both forming relationships with and funding right-wing extremist parties.  Make no mistake about it, Putin is ecstatic over the Brexit result; anything that weakens European unity and sees the rise of the right plays directly into his hands and there is no doubt that Putin is mightily pleased at the prospect of a weaker and more divided Europe; such divisions provide opportunities for Russian influence and meddling as Putin seeks to peel away parts of Europe into his ideological, economic, political, and perhaps eventually military camps.  We see in Eastern Europe, specifically in Ukraine, the chance of open, armed conflict to occur; Kosovo (which Russia is still very upset about) is also ripe for mischief, as is Northern Ireland currently, especially after the Brexit vote.

Bad Signs for America

In the U.S., this emphatically anti-establishment, populist decision by UK voters has also caused alarm for Hillary Clinton and her supporters and given comfort to Trump (who called the vote to leave “a great thing”) and his supporters in the U.S., even if the result hardly makes a Trump victory in November a foregone conclusion.  If anything, this vote makes even more painfully obvious what should already have been obvious: what we think of as “Trumpism” is a global phenomenon of anti-“Establishment” rage, from the Tea party to the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, and now to the Brexit vote; there are clearly both liberal and conservative versions of this, exemplified in the U.S. by Bernie Sanders’ “Sandernistas” on the left and the Tea Party/Trump supporters on the right.  The low turnout of youth voters in the Brexit vote—who overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU—should also cause Clinton concern as questions remain as to how young Bernie Sanders supporters will behave come November, when not voting for Clinton will help Trump and youth turnout could become the deciding factor in who sits in the White House’s Oval Office.

Something else that makes me nervous after this vote and which generally hasn’t yet gotten much mainstream scrutiny is what I regard as the very real possibility of secessionist movements arising in the United States to a serious level, with the Brexit vote as a major part of the inspiration; many of the left simply can’t stomach the idea of a Trump presidency, and many on the right feel the same about Hillary Clinton, and I imagine large numbers of people will be receptive to secessionist arguments in certain locations of the country, depending on who wins; even one state in America seriously moving to secede would create an internal national crisis not seen in America since 1860, when secession precipitated the American Civil War(1861-1865).  It may not happen, but I would put the chances of a serious secessionist movement emerging in the very-near-future at it highest since the Civil War.

Sadly, Americans—least of all young Americans—cannot take it for granted that love will trump hate…

A Rotten and Backwards Mentality

Perhaps most disturbingly, the UK leave vote is just the latest in a pervasive Western trend of voters irrationally favoring xenophobia and nationalism to their own personal and national detriment.

As Fareed Zakaria noted on his CNN show this week, “The new politics of our age will not be left vs. right, but open vs. closed.”  The last time the world lurched in the direction a closed mentality favoring nationalism, ethno-centrism, and insulation, the world was propelled into WWII.  It seems the Brexit vote to leave the EU was fueled more by angst over immigration (all part of ethno-centric identity politics) than anything else, just as is the case with the rise of Trump in America; Brexit was a vote to be a less diverse, more closed society.

Not least of all to note among all the issues surrounding the Brexit is that one of its strongest opponents, Member of Parliament and passionate supporter of integration, diversity, justice, and human rights Jo Cox was assassinated in an act of terrorism that targeted her for her beliefs, a killing timed shortly before the vote.  Perhaps the only silver lining in this sorry experience is that she did not live to see her beloved UK vote to make such a regrettable decision, one that would have pained her deeply.

How to Avoid War Amid So Much Hate, Fear, & Division? 

If 2016 truly does mark the end of an era of increasing openness that lasted from 1945-2016 and the beginning of populations saying “No!” to globalization and “No!” to reasonable, measured centrism, the real question we must all start asking ourselves right now is, if, for the time being, a more closed, insular, nationalist, and bigoted world is where we are headed, how will we be able to operate in such a world to avoid the massive levels of armed conflicts those mentalities have always produced in the past? 

The answers are not easy or even apparent, but this question must be central to our politics and our worldview in the post-Brexit world.  I personally hope that, if this is the direction in which humanity is headed, there is a way to avoid large-scale conflict, but I am not sure I can objectively say that I hold this hope with a high level of confidence.  Yes, we can take hope that, whether with Trump in America or the Brexit vote in the UK, the rising generation is clearly choosing openness and diversity over being closed and bigoted (for the time being, anyway); at least in the UK, though, we see that the old and fearful carried the day and have set the course of the UK for time being, and younger voters turned out in significantly lower numbers than older voters.  Will these trends be mirrored in the U.S.?  It appears to be too late to stop Europe’s rightward lurch at the hands of the old and fearful, at least for some time; should the U.S. follow suit, I tremble for the West, democracy, and the world.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here.

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse May 26, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 26th, 2016

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

EILAT and TEL AVIV — In what has become a constant occurrence throughout the 2016 Republican nomination contest, Trump’s own behavior has so lowered the bar as to what is considered “acceptable” that when he behaves in a way that is only mildly offensive as opposed to egregiously offensive, that when he speaks using prepared notes in a normal tone as opposed to yelling and rambling incoherently, people that are held to be respectable mainstream analysts are able to claim Trump is “presidential” and “serious” and is “improving” as a candidate.

Apart from Trump’s AIPAC speech, perhaps no better example of this has happened thus far during his campaign than his recent foreign policy speech.

Trump’s Elementary Mentality

For starters, Trump used the word “great” eighteen times in his address.  While it would be inane to expect the American people to elect someone of the linguistic abilities of Shakespeare, I myself remember how by middle-school, my instructors took great pains to teach us that using the same word over and over again was not to be desired, and that variety was an essential aspect of what is to be considered “good” communication.  Then again, as it has been pointed out, Trump tends to communicate at best at a middle-school level, and often at an elementary-school level; this is not some expression, but the result of sophisticated linguistic analyses.

Pretty early in his speech, Trump made clear that the cornerstone of his foreign policy would be to “put…‘America First.’”  I think it would be hard to accuse even the worst of our presidents of not acting in what they felt were the best interests of the United States, or to find one that acted on behalf of other nations primarily, and not on behalf of America; thus, while this is certainly a crowd-pleaser among some segments of the population, on a substantive level this “cornerstone” can only fairly be regarded as pointless, for while the segments of the population that appreciate such language feel that President Obama and others who don’t think like them are traitors who actively try to sabotage the United States in the interest of helping the Muslim Brotherhood or other apparently nefarious actors, such talk is simply inane and not even worth addressing… unless you are a mainstream Republican candidate for the presidency.

Another thing worth noting is how many times Trump repeats himself throughout.  That means even though Trump spoke at some length, the “content” of the speech was stretched pretty thinly throughout.

Dr. Trump Diagnoses U.S. Foreign Policy Problems

Trump then went on to assert that there are five main weaknesses in today’s American foreign policy, only one of which was accurate, and even that one is not exactly something that can be controlled on America’s end directly.

1.) “First,” he began, “our resources are totally over extended,” and maintained that Obama’s actions that have weakened the economy have thus weakened the military and America’s power in the world. 

What’s ironic about this criticism is that Obama, more than any president since the end of the Cold War, has retrenched, reducing and pulling back American commitments overseas, most notably in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, and cutting what was a historically and unnecessarily high defense budget in ways not seen since the end of the Cold War and more steeply than any time since the end of the Korean War.  If anything, Obama has clearly helped the U.S. to be less overextended. 

POGO.org

As for the economy, since the peak lows during the Great Recession—the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—Obama has overseen 74 consecutive months of net job creation (a record for any president), the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 stock indexes have more than doubled in value, the export-import trade deficit has fallen by 24%, America has risen to become the world’s number-one producer of both oil and natural gas, and the unemployment rate has been cut in half.  So Obama has clearly “outperform[ed] Reagan on jobs, growth, and investing.”  Now, this does not tell the full story, and there are aspects of the economy which are certainly still troubling, but by any measure these numbers are impressive, even when allowing for very real problems, and one can hardly claim that Obama is “weakening our economy” overall, as Trump claims. 

Trump’s first major point can be dismissed, then.

2.) “Secondly, our allies are not paying their fair share,” and he expects them, especially fellow NATO members, to pay up, and pay up far more than they have been. 

Trump actually has a point here, besides the U.S. only four other NATO members are meeting their NATO defense-spending obligations.  But these decisions are not up to the Obama Administration, and while Obama could try to undiplomatically strong-arm close allies to do even more than the Obama Administration is already urging them to do, at a time when China and Russia are rising, when combating global terrorism requires better, not worse relationships, it is hardly a given that bullying our allies into paying more would be the best method.  And yet, Trump still has a point—EU nations and others that enjoy a high standard of living (including better education and healthcare than America) while America puts more effort into defending these same countries from potential foes like Russia, China, and North Korea than these countries expend themselves is definitely an imbalance that should be adjusted—but this has been the case long before Obama and Obama is not the one to blame for it.

3.) Then, “Thirdly, our friends are beginning to think they can’t depend on us. We’ve had a president who dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies, something that we’ve never seen before in the history of our country.”

Like his first claim, this statement of Trump’s is also very problematic.  As noted above, the Obama Administration does more than its fair share to contribute to European security, and Obama has led a regime of economic sanctions against Russia that have quite likely restrained the scope and intensity of its aggressiveness.  Europe, India, Russia, and China also very much wanted progress in improving the West’s relationship with Iran, and Obama led the way in achieving a historic nuclear agreement between the world’s most powerful nations and Iran’s government on their nuclear program.  But Trump’s criticism focuses on this Iran deal, which he and many Republicans (and Netanyahu and many Israelis) myopically and erroneously label a “disastrous deal.” 

Part of the argument that is made against this Iran deal is the claim that this deal makes Israel less safe, an absurd argument that is related to an absurd general criticism that many Republicans and many Israelis make in which, in Trump’s words, “President Obama has not been a friend to Israel.”  In fact, under Obama, Israel has seen a notable increase American in military aid and has been given more American military aid overall and on average per year than under any previous American president.  This aid includes the highly effective Iron Dome missile/rocket defense system, so effective in neutralizing Hamas’ and other militant groups’ rocket attacks against Israel. Besides this, Obama has not been shy in using the diplomatic might of America to defend Israel, the U.S. both being the sole Security Council veto of a resolution critical of Israeli settlement building in early 2011 and using pressure behind to scenes to push against Palestinian diplomatic efforts.  As is obvious to many, doing right by Israel does not mean supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party’s agenda.  That Obama challenged Israel under Netanyahu to do what’s in its own interests is not “throwing Israel under the bus,” it’s being a true, honest friend.  So while Obama does not hand over to Israel (increasing) billions every year in military aid without letting Israel know that its occupation and expansion of settlements is inflammatory and self-destructive, this does not make him an enemy of Israel. 

As for our other allies, Obama has been increasing America’s military presence in Eastern Europe to reassure allies wary of Russian aggression as well as increasing it in East Asia to reassure our Asian allies wary of aggressive Chinese moves.  So it is hard to find substantive examples of where we have let our allies down, though we may not always agree 100% with each other, as is the case with every American president.

And the whole fuss that people made over Obama “bowing” to foreign leaders was selective outrage at best and misleading at worst.  Another silly non-issue.

Thus, Trump’s narrative here is also false.

4.) After that, we have “Fourth, our rivals no longer respect us.”

“No longer” in this case implies that America’s image in the past was better.  As objectively measured in reliable global public opinion surveys, this can be dismissed at least in comparing America under Obama to America under George W. Bush, where a clear general trend of global opinion has been an improvement in America’s standing under Obama.  The largest downward trend in recent decades was a sharp decline in global opinion from the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency to when George W. Bush was president.  In short, any recent major decline in the respect people have had for America has a strong association with the Republican presidency of George W. Bush, not Democrats Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.  So Trump’s characterization of placing a supposed decline in the respect the world has for America as being associated mainly with Obama simply flies in the face of the facts. 

While it is true that, in contrast to many other nations, China’s opinion of America has dipped slightly and Russia’s has tanked, this is due to the increasing divergence of interests in the South China Sea on one hand, and in Eastern Europe and Syria on the other.  In addition, Putin has based much of his power on using state-owned and social media to whip up propaganda, including anti-American sentiment.  In addition, Russia was happy to invade U.S. ally Georgia even when George W. Bush was president, and China’s recent assertiveness is a reflection of its recent growth in power more than anything else, fueled by its impressive economic growth in recent years.  And in both Russia and China, it could be argued that its people like America less because Obama is standing up to their governments’ aggression.

To be fair, the Obama administration’s single biggest blunder to its credibility—backing away in 2013 from the “red line” it set for Syria’s Assad—did not help with the respect America’s rivals have for America; but to define Obama’s presidency on this single incident, and to blame him for the chaos erupting around the world, from the Arab Spring to the refugee crises in Europe and the Middle East, is myopic and extremely American-centered.  If anything, anti-Americanism is fueled by decades-long American policies, including aggressive military action, support for Israel, and support for oppressive regimes during the Cold War, not specifically because of President Obama.

Under Obama, even after historic cuts, America’s military spending (#1 in the world) still dwarfs China’s (#2) and Russia’s (#4) combined spending, and that is a reality of power that both Russia and China respect whether they admit it or not.  In the end, tying our rivals’ assertiveness to Obama’s policies and personality at the expense of other factors is speculative at best, then.

Thus, we have another dubious assertion on the part of Trump.

5.) And “Finally, America no longer has a clear understanding of our foreign policy goals. Since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, we’ve lacked a coherent foreign policy.”  

Perhaps that is because the world is much more complicated now as far as international relations.  Trump early in his speech vowed to create a “new foreign policy direction, one that replaces randomness with purpose.”  For Trump, “after the Cold War…our foreign policy began to make less and less sense.”  This involves the typical assumption that conservatives makes all too often about the American foreign policy and the current world in which that policy needs to be crafted to fit.  For American conservatives, the Cold War is remembered somewhat fondly: the Soviet Union was unquestionable our biggest problem, threat, and adversary, with no other nation even coming close; our foreign policy subordinated all else to the competition between our two nations and their competing ideologies of free-market democracy vs. state-run economic communism/socialism.  Our aims and objectives throughout the Cold War remained consistent and obvious: counter the Soviet Union by any means necessary, preferably but not limiting ourselves to the spread of free-market capitalism and democracy, at least in theory.  Conservatives fail to remember with much clarity that this often meant, in practice, promoting undemocratic and abusively oppressive regimes that opened their markets to us but opened as well as prisons and torture rooms for dissidents within their own borders.  It is in these very trade-offs of convenience that roots of both the 9/11 attacks and many of the problems in the world today lie.

So for Trump and Republicans, they are right on one thing: foreign policy was far more simply conceived and strategized in the Cold War, and was executed without the same amount of hand-wringing and (social) media attention that is the norm in our present world.  If people living in Vietnam could live-tweet and post camera-phone pictures and videos of American carpet-bombing raids and killings like those at My Lai, the Vietnam War would have been a very different experience with potentially very different outcomes.  In other words, simplicity did not necessarily lead to the best long-term results.  Of course, Trump presents a hubristic vision of the Cold War in which the U.S. “won big,” with Reagan the Great getting much of the credit (of course, in this view, the Berlin Wall coming down and the the Soviet system was a consequence of Reagan’s rhetoric, and internal Soviet dynamics and policies, decisions on the part of Gorbachev to reform the USSR and essentially stand his forces down and to respect the will of the people—a hallmark of much of his later period of leadership—are myopically not considered or mentioned as major factors).

The solution to today’s foreign policy problems?  To return to the consistency and simplicity of our foreign policy approach of Reagan and the Cold War.  He engaged in a critique of what he called the “Obama-Clinton” approach to the world, notably repeating a number of repeatedly debunked assertions about Clinton’s response to the Benghazi attacks.

The problem is, the world is a much more complex place than the bipolar world of the Cold War; the current unipolar system, perhaps transitioning to a multipolar one, begs for a different approach, one not rooted in simplicity but in complexity.  A one-size-fits all “consistent” approach would very clearly be a poor fit for today’s more complex world.  This means that consistency is not to necessarily be pursued, as a nuanced and complex world requires different approaches for each new crisis.  Another problem is that while policy during the Cold War was relatively consistent compared with today’s foreign policy, it, too, was subject to nuance and departures and is hardly as simple as some make it out to be.

Trump also made clear that “We’re getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world.”  This statement itself is a slap in the face of logic, as it is weakening, failing, and failed states that are among the greatest contributors to global and regional instability, including the fueling of terrorist movements like ISIS. It’s also a slap in the face to the most successful U.S. foreign policy ever: nation building in Europe with the Marshall Plan and with the American occupation of Japan after WWII are the main reasons why peace has reigned in Europe and East Asia ever since; without nation building, it is very likely that war, extremism, and chaos would have reigned instead.

Still, Trump seemed to articulate that the solutions to today’s crises are rooted in the strategy America had in the Cold War, a conflict that was quite different from the challenges faced by the world today and an ill-fit for as a toolbox for crafting an approach for today’s very different world.

Thus, Trump is wrong to call for a simple, unified approach to foreign policy; if anything, today’s more complex world requires inconsistency as each crisis and region requires solutions that defy them being lumped into a single box.

Dr. Trump’s Prescription to Make America’s Foreign Policy Great Again

Trump then laid out the pillars of his own “foreign policy”:

1.) “First,” he said, “we need a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam. Trump doesn’t really have a plan, as the lack of specifics in this speech demonstrate.  However, Obama has an approach that is set up quite well for longer-terms success, as I have pointed out before.  As part of this, he says “we must as a nation be more unpredictable.”  While there is merit in keeping our enemies guessing, too much unpredictability will unnerve our allies as well.  Either way, Trump has far from demonstrated that he has any competent, detailed ideas for dealing with ISIS, while Obama’s strategy, which Trump criticizes profusely without even understanding it, is very sound.

2.) Then, “Secondly, we have to rebuild our military and our economy.” This has been covered, already, and this statement is simply nonsense.  See above.

A.) After that, either as an aside or as a separate point, Trump says “We must even treat…[our veterans] really, really well and that will happen under the Trump administration.” There’s no denying the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) had and still has serious problems, and there’s no denying that the Obama Administration should have addressed these problems with far more energy than it did.  But the simple fact of the matter is that the lion’s share of the VA’s problems go back many years, and Obama inherited a situation that was a ticking time bomb, most notably from the fact that the Bush Administration fought two significant wars over nearly a decade and did not prepare the VA for what was going to obviously be a serious increase in the number of veterans needing treatment; as soon as the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions began, expansion of funding, staffing, and support for VA services should have been among the first steps undertaken and should have been further expanded as the wars grew longer and more costly.

3.) “Finally,” Trump continues, “we must develop a foreign policy based on American interests.” Again, going back to our earlier commentary, this almost doesn’t even need to be addressed, so silly is this statement. 

Still: Trump engaged in a disorganized and meandering explanation of what this means.  He cites the Clinton years of the 1990s as a time of policy in which we were not acting in our interests based on a few isolated but not insignificant attacks Trump cited as somehow indicative of American policy being totally off -course, even though under Clinton we enjoyed an unprecedented jobs boom and employment growth, helped to bring stability to Europe several times by ending two wars there, and had a better relationship with Russia than any during any other American president’s administration, with the arguable exception of FDR.  Trump then made points he already made about the Middle East.  He then proceeded to spout a series of vague generalities on improving relationships with Russia and China and about the use of military force.  

For Trump, success relies on having a “disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy.”  This coming from a candidate whose entire behavior on the campaign trail has been anything but.  Even within the speech, he seems unaware of the apparent contradictions (e.g., calling for stability while casting aside the role of nation building, calling for closer alliances while also threatening to weaken them).  He then repeated yet again some of his earlier points about the Middle East and the U.S. economy, and took additional jabs at NAFTA, tying all this into putting “America First” again, and vowed to bring in new and different voices into the foreign policy machine in order to do so.  Additionally, he also had this very contradictory statement to make:

“Finally, I will work with our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions. Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.” 

In a broad sense, basic Western values—democracy, human rights, equality, transparency—have been spreading, and even where they are not present are generally sought by people in the face of their intransigent governments.  Battles over religion and gender are particularly difficult, but do not negate the fact that many “Western” values since WWII and especially after the Cold War are approaching a universal quality, especially as embodied by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Trump correctly maintains that these values should not be spread at gunpoint, but then calls for “promoting Western civilization” even as he criticizes the idea that we should “spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants.”  So in the same paragraph, Trump is confusing as to whether or not he thinks the West should promote its values, even as he is clear about not using force to do so, while at the same time asserting he would be firmer than Obama about use-of-force red lines, or “a line in the sand,” as Trump put it.  In fact, this paragraph sums up his speech nicely: full of different ideas and talking points that sound good alone, but that Trump failed to connect coherently in this address and articulated in ways that were often either confusing at best or contradictory at worst.

Trump’s Speech: A Perfect Representation of GOP “Foreign Policy”

Several Republican foreign policy bigwigs, falling pretty easily for Trump’s plummeting expectations game, including the Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker and George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, praised the speech.  Former Republican Speaker of the House (and possible Trump vice presidential running mate) Newt Gingrich also praised Trump’s speech, calling it “very serious” and “presidential.”

Seth Wenig/AP

But this Republican Party is a party that has been devoid for some time of substantive and serious ideas about foreign policy, which is a reality that was on display beyond any reasonable doubt (and not for the first time) as numerous Republican presidential candidates showed how out of their depth they were back in a December debate focused on foreign policy and security.  A few months before that, we had the Benghazi hearing featuring Clinton, and well before that, another case in point is George W. Bush’s presidency.  Trump’s foreign policy speech—and candidacy—is only the latest sign that the Republican Party and most of its voters are not serious or substantive.

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Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter(you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 15, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 15th, 2016

HBO

The following is a small excerpt from a graduate school paper of mine from late 2010 (revised mid-2011 and mid-2012) that is also part of an ongoing scholarly book project.  A related short eBook of mine on the legal and political legacy of Ancient Rome in America’s founding can be found here.  For a PDF of the full graduate paper on which this piece is based and more background, including full footnote citations and works cited, click here

“ …the pattern of routine partisanship and factionalism, and, as a result, of all other vicious practices had arisen in Rome… every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated.”—Sallust,  The Jurgurthine War  41.1-10 

Dramatis Personae and rough political alignment 

Populares (liberals)

Tiberius Sempronius GRACCHUS- tribune; elder of the two reforming Gracchi brothers

Gaius Sempronius GRACCHUS- tribune; younger brother of Tiberius

(together, the Gracchi)

Gaius MARIUS- Roman general and statesman; plebian champion; uncle of Julius Caesar

Lucius Cornelius CINNA- consul; ally and successor to Marius; father-in-law of Julius Caesar

Marcus Aemilius LEPIDUS- consul

Quintus SERTORIUS- Roman general and rebel for the Marian cause

Publius CLAUDIUS Pulcher, later Publius CLODIUS- tribune;populareschampion; rival of Cicero

Lucius Sergius CATILINE- populares champion

Gaius Julius CAESAR- yes, THAT Caesar; Roman general and statesman

Titus Annius MILO- tribune; ally of Pompeius; rival of Clodius

Marcus ANTONIUS (Mark Antony)- tribune; Caesar’s deputy and ally

Optimates (conservatives)

Lucius Cornelius SULLA- Roman general and statesman; patrician champion

Lucius Licinius LUCULLUS- Roman general; deputy of Sulla

Marcus Porcius CATO- an uncompromising leader of the optimates; paragon of traditional values

Quintus Caecilius METELLUS Celler- leading optimate

Marcus Calpurnius BIBULUS- co-consul and great rival with Caesar; Cato’s son-in-law

Gaius CASSIUS Longinus- one of Caesar’s assassins; main ally of Brutus

Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius SCIPIO Nasica- leading optimate and ally of Cato

Marcus Junius BRUTUS- friend (later leader  assassin) of Caesar ; descendant of Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic who overthrew the last Roman king; fought against Octavian and Antonius

In-between

Gnaeus POMPEIUS “Magnus” (Pompey)- Roman general and statesman; plebian

Marcus Licinius CRASSUS- Roman financier and statesman; richest man in Rome

Marcus Tullius CICERO- lawyer; orator; moderate; one of the great Roman statesmen

Gaius OCTAVIAN Thurinus- Caesar’s great-nephew/adopted heir; later Augustus, Rome’s first emperor

The Rest

MITHRIDATES VI Eupator- King of Pontus; one of Rome’s great nemeses

SPARTACUS- Thracian slave gladiator who led largest slave rebellion in Roman history

CLEOPATRA VII Philopater- last of the Egyptian Pharaohs; ally of Caesar and Antonius

Why the Republic Fell, and Who and What Is to Blame

In December, 50. B.C.E., the Roman Senate passed a motion that Caesar should step down, failed to pass the same for Pompeius, and voted yes on a tribune’s proposal that both step down.  No further action was taken, but on January 1, 49, a letter of Caesar’s, severe in tone, was read to the Senate.  In response, Scipio proposed that Caesar dismiss his armies or be named an enemy of the state, but this was vetoed by two tribunes, including Antonius. After this, the Senate passed its senatus consultum ultimum against Caesar, warning Antonius not to interfere; he and other agents of Caesar’s fled the city in disguise.  In response, on January 10, Caesar crossed the Rubicon River—the border of the province of Cisalpine Gaul with Rome/Italy proper—with his legions.  Republican government in any meaningful way for the people of ancient Rome, after nearly five centuries, would never operate again.  It is likely that there were many misunderstandings between Pompeius, in Rome, and Caesar, far away in Gaul.  Neither seemed to seek conflict directly, yet at the same time, the optimates were clearly trying to use Pompeius to destroy Caesar, which Pompeius may or may not have realized, so eager was he to be on their good side.  That the Senate was willing to call a man with active veteran armies an enemy of the state, in the confidence that Pompeius would defeat Caesar in a civil war, rather than allow such a powerful man to avoid prosecution and disgrace, and find some way to come together peacefully to deal with the problems of the Republic, is very troubling indeed.  The way events developed, it seems that it would be fair to say that the Senate pushed Caesar into marching on Rome, while he anticipated they would leave him the choice of war or disgrace and prosecution.  The Senate and Pompeius did not anticipate how much Caesar had prepared for this possibility before they called him a traitor and left him no desirable options other than war.  Short of being a sacrificial lamb, Caesar’s only option was war then, while Pompeius might likely have been manipulated by the Senate into thinking Caesar was trying to ruin his career and overthrow the Republic.  Caesar, as opposed to Crassus and even Pompeius, was always the peacemaker among the triumvirate, and his career suggested that he usually sought moderate and conciliatory measures first, so it is an argument with little evidence that claims he was always out to destroy the state and republican government for his personal gain.  Perhaps if Julia had not died, or the two great men had been able to meet in person, the final falling out, and civil war, could have been avoided.  The world may never know. Conversely, there was little action on the part of Cato, the Senate, and the optimates that indicated they would have behaved in any kind of moderate, conciliatory, or non-obstructionist way.  As opposed to the civil war between Marius and Sulla, then, the civil war between Pompeius and the Senate on one side and Caesar on the other seems, relatively, to have been driven and caused not so much by the individuals themselves but by a Senate which intentionally drove a wedge between Caesar and Pompeius and then felt powerful enough, with Cato in the lead and in many ways driven by a long-standing opposition to all of Caesar’s actions, to isolate and destroy Caesar,  through civil war, if necessary, this being their preferred course of action above all else.[1]

Years of war would follow: Caesar against Pompeius with Cato, Scipio, and the optimates, then Caesar’s nephew and adopted heir, Octavian, against Antonius, then Antonius with Octavian against Brutus and Cassius, and finally Octavian against Antonius and Cleopatra.  Throughout all the years up to 49 B.C.E., there was a functioning republic, even if it was rotten on the inside; yet after 49, the Republic was only a farce, and competing generals controlled virtually everything until, after nearly twenty years of war, Octavian reigned alone as “first citizen,” laying the foundation of the emperorship as he would soon become Augustus.  Caesar had famously remarked that “The Republic is nothing—just a name, without substance or form” (Seutonius Lives of the Caesars The Deified Julius Caesar 77), but his actions, like Cato’s, Pompeius’s, and many others before, contributed heavily to this fact.  It was the majority of the ruling elite, the Senate, populares, and optimates together since the days of the Gracchi, who had brought Rome to where it was in 49.  Things might have turned out differently.  Had Brutus and Cassius prevailed, a republic might have been restored (though one likely to embody the optimates’ obstinacy and unable to function well without severe change).  If Caesar had not been assassinated, he might have restored the Republic in time, after much reform; it is impossible to know such things, and those who succeeded Caesar did not restore republican government.  Before Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.C.E., Pompeius, Cato, Bibulus, Scipio, Domitius, and Milo would be casualties of war.  The wars that brought Octavian to power would see the deaths of Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, Antonius, and Cleopatra.  Only Octavian among the major players would remain.

“Caesar was born into a Republic already prone to sudden outbreaks of savage political violence,” notes Goldsworthy.[2]  With the mass civil violence in Rome in the years before the civil war of 49, the final clash of armies against armies was simply the next step in a natural progression and escalation of violence which began in 133.  From 133 on the political violence steadily increased until it peaked when Marius and later Cinna fought with Sulla and his followers and had a high plateau for years through Lepidus and Sertorius and Spartacus, receded and then spiked again with Catiline, immediately after went down to a low level of relatively bloodless controlled violence until Clodius targeted Cicero and others with the collegia, became even greater when Milo finally responded, and then escalated out of control, disrupting basic and vital functions of the state from commerce to elections to court proceedings, until Clodius was finally killed; but then his supporters burned down the Senate house and it was only after this in 52 when a breakthrough occurred, when the feuding parties agreed to have Pompeius restore order. Pompeius was then able to implement meaningful electoral reforms and harsher measures against violence and bribery, but this as sole consul and with his own troops in the city; that was not how the Republic was supposed to function, with only one consul and uniformed soldiers keeping the peace in the city of Rome itself.  One can easily speculate that under “normal” circumstances, the optimates would have tried to block such reforms of Pompeius as they had blocked most of his agenda, and most major reforms, in the past.  While calling on Pompeius to restore order during the civil war which started between Marius and Sulla and ended with Pompeius’ defeat of the Sertorian rebels in Spain, against the pirates and against Mithridates, the elites consistently blocked his political agenda, preferring to let his veterans languish and the political situation in the new eastern acquisitions remain up in the air. From 133 onward, only twice before 52 had the optimates even grudgingly compromised on major domestic reform (unless one counts awarding Pompeius the position of a unified grain administrator, then it is thrice): first by having some of their own officials propose establishing colonies for veterans during the tribunate of Gaius Gracchus, if mostly seemingly to counter Gaius’s similar proposals, and at the end of the Social War in extending citizenship and Latin status to allies when faced with the disintegration of Roman Italy. The social war ended and three-and-a-half decades would pass before had the factions came together in such a meaningful way as in 52, but it literally took near anarchy and the destruction of the Senate house to bring this about. Not even three full years of tense calm followed before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.  And while all this was going on, Rome was fighting wars against foreign peoples, from Germanic and Gallic tribes, to Jurgurtha and Mithridates, from the deserts of North Africa to the shores of Britain, from Armenia to even the walls of Jerusalem.  Considering both the domestic and foreign conflicts, Rome was involved in non-stop violent conflict for the vast majority of the history of the Late Republic covered in this paper. One should not doubt that at least indirectly, and quite likely directly, this contributed to the increasing level of violence in Roman society as a whole.  Rather than soldiers being a part of normal civic life while out of uniform when Rome was at peace, as they had for much of the Early and Middle Republic, now soldiers were quite outside of normal life; the maintenance of a large overseas empire and the economic changes of the later Punic Wars discussed early in this paper, left unaddressed by the Senate, meant there was little for the solider to be able to come back to in civilian life.  As Goldsworthy notes:

the Senate…refused to take responsibility for these men and provide them with some sort of livelihood.  This encouraged a trend whereby legionaires became more loyal to popular commanders than they were to the State itself.  The Roman Army had ceased to be the entire State under arms, each class serving in accordance with its wealth so that men fought to preserve a community from which they benefited, and became something outside normal society.  This was the change which allowed successive Roman generals to lead their armies against each other and Rome itself.  Scipio Africanus [hero of the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.E.) and one of Rome’s greatest generals] could not even have dreamed of turning to the men who had served under him to bring armed force to bear against his [domestic political] opponents in the 180s. [3]

For von Ungern-Sternberg, “[t]hrough its refusal to produce a solution to these problems [i.e., the plight of the urban poor and land and farming issues including settlement of veterans], the Senate created serious doubts about its own legitimacy as the ultimate governing body, which in turn caused the soldiers to stage repeated “marches on Rome.”[4]

It is tellingly ironic that the optimates were the first to bring political violence into the forum, against the Gracchi, and that it was violence that would undo them.  Most of the reforms the Gracchi were calling for were sensible, even essential; but their tactics, their challenge to the status and power of the old-school of Rome’s elite, was more than that elite was willing to tolerate.  In general this was the pattern the optimates would follow from 133 to 49: nearly a century of near total obstruction.  They rarely put the interests of the people or Rome as a whole above their own.  The tribunes’ physical bodies were made religiously sacrosanct when they held that office, which existed as the people’s constitutional mechanism for influencing the higher mechanisms of the state, so the Roman elites’ willingness to use violence against the tribunes who did put Rome’s people first is very revealing, for it shows that they fought to preserve tradition as long as such traditions were beneficial to themselves, but the tradition of the tribune being sacrosanct, going back almost to the founding of the Republic, was repeatedly ignored by the optimates and the Senate. Such actions by the optimates furthermore meant that anyone who wanted to succeed in such matters had to counter the optimates with violence, or they would end up dead like the Gracchi and their political heirs if they seriously tried to push reforms through.  This repeated initiation of targeted political violence by the optimates meant that anyone serious about reform or addressing the Republic’s most serious problems had to be prepared to meet violence with violence or likely would only meet with failure and death.   Even up until Caesar, these optimates continued the same tactic; the fanatically stubborn Cato, seen in later years as a martyr for the Republic, left his opponent, Caesar, with no choice but of that between prosecution and disgrace or a fight, between an unacceptable and dangerous status quo and political violence.  After Caesar had defeated Pompeius’s and the optimates’s forces decisively at Pharsalus, Suetonius quotes a source who fought with him there and throughout the conflict that has Caesar looking out over the battlefield filled with dead enemies and saying “It was they who wanted this, for I, Gaius Caesar, would have been found guilty, despite all my achievements, if I had not turned to my army for aid” (Lives of the Caesars The Deified Julius Caesar 30). 

Without the threats of his enemies, keen to tear him down, it seems more than possible that Caesar would have found an alternative to marching his legions into Italy.  But as Cicero’s speeches and career, and the episodes between him and Clodius, and Milo and Clodius, and Sulla and Marius (among others) would show, the politics of personal destruction in the post-Gracchi order would prove to be so destructive as to destroy the Republic.  People that feel threatened often make more extreme decisions, have more extreme views.  So it was that from Tiberius Gracchus down to Caesar, almost all of the major populares of Rome were threatened with political violence at least in part orchestrated by the optimates; this generated a mentality among reformers of extreme risk-taking which became a modus operandi.  The gambling started with legislation under the Gracchi, but the chips came to be legions and the Republic itself in the days of Caesar.  But a special blame must be assigned to the optimates leading the Senate: they compromised on virtually nothing from 133-49 B.C.E., daring someone to destroy the Republic in order to get even the most basic reforms that were wholly necessary passed.  Caesar took them on their dare, but apparently tried to avoid doing so; but Cato and his ilk never let him sit easy, and made it clear they would do everything they could to tear him down for his “sins” of his consulship of 59.  They did this to a man with a personal, veteran army, and they were willing to fight a civil war just to take him down.  Caesar, for his part, let his own sense of self worth get in the way of working out a better deal with Pompeius, as did Pompeius with Caesar.  Sadly, the stakes set by nearly a century of life-and-death struggle over basic governance left little room for alternative and too much risk for those thinking of compromise.  It is important to note that Caesar generally offered clemency and eventual reinstatement to his opponents during and after the civil war, something unique among all the generals in Roman history who had seized power by force, for which Caesar was famous in his own lifetime, and something, it should be noted, his opponents would clearly not have shown him, except perhaps for Pompeius, and did not show him when many of these former opponents, pardoned by Caesar, assassinated him in the Senate.  His successors, Octavian and Marcus Antonius, were not prone to the same clemency.  This clemencia regularly offered by Caesar further adds to the argument that unlike his opponents, Caesar was conciliatory and willing to work with his opposition peacefully before the outbreak of hostilities.  Furthermore, one must ask how different things would have been if Caesar had not been away from Rome for most of the 50s.  His personality was exceedingly charming and he was able to boldly reconcile others throughout his career, notably Pompeius and Crassus twice, and even Pompeius and Clodius.  With his record and skills of personal diplomacy, and the personality to make him excel so well at this, it is not unreasonable to speculate that, had Caesar spent more time away from his provinces in Rome in the 50s, like Pompeius did, the forces that pushed Rome to civil war might have been ameliorated just enough to prevent civil war.  One might assume that there would have been a fairly good chance of his relationship with Pompeius not deteriorating as much as it eventually did, and one must remember that this was one of the final factors that led to open war.  Though one cannot know such things, the point should be considered all the same.  And, though even more speculative, it is certainly possible that Pompeius and Caesar working together for a much longer period of time might have peacefully reformed the Republic into something worth preserving, or at least with far less violence than ended up occurring.  Instead, the real world outcome was massive bloodshed on a continental scale and the destruction of the Republic.

At the heart of the process leading to the end of the Republic was corruption, especially the corruption of the senatorial class/optimates and the publicani (Roman multinational corporations), but certainly also of the later populares, not terribly discriminating in their methods.  There is the obvious material corruption, and the corruption of those seeking power, which, despite many attempts at reform and all sorts of legislation, proved ineffective abroad until Caesar’s reforms of his consulship for officials in the provinces and ineffective at home until Pompeius’s reforms during his second consulship, both just before the civil war between the two great men.  As a class, the senators were atrocious; Cicero makes this more than clear in his prosecution of Verres, but Verres’s blatant guilt was one of the few instances that the senatorial class ever demonstrated even an inkling of a willingness to convict one of their own, unless personal vendettas or bribery were there to offer an incentive.  For decades, senatorial elites abused their power to an extraordinarily extreme degree and thought nothing of it.  Men like Lucullus and Rutilius paid a heavy price for their attempts to be fair and just and avoid corruption.  Whenever their interests were seriously threatened, the publicani were able to buy off large portions of the Senate.  This did not matter even if it hurt the interests of the state, as shown most blatantly in the cases of the pirates and the war with Mithridates.  Without the senators, the publicani would not have been able to carry out their exploitation of the provinces, and without the publicani, it would have been much harder for the senatorial elite to pay off their campaign debts, and this relationship was a large source of the cash that ruined the extortion courts and elections.

But it is the corruption of the institutions of the Republic themselves which is perhaps most striking.  Rather than use the rules, laws, and institutions as their creators intended, courts, Senate procedures, legislation, even armies became the tools of individual office holders to use to further their own individual interests and vendettas.  This general abuse of governance ensured that the politics of personal destruction became inextricably woven into the fabric of the Republic itself.  Prosecutions were rarely conducted, for example, to pursue justice; rather, they were a form of escalation in personal disputes, more often than not, between individual members of the ruling class.  Procedures and rules in the Senate and in government, as demonstrated starkly by Cato’s filibustering, Bibulus’s use of interpreting religious omens, and the dispute between Metellus and the tribune that resulted in the Senate being convened in a jail, are only some of the examples.  This is telling: for the senatorial elites; they were the Republic; their interests were the Republic’s.  Before in Roman history, the interests of the state had tended to be the interests of the senators; but in the era discussed in this paper, the interests of the senators became the interests of the state.  Even when good legislation and good magistrates were present, if the senators had a personal grievance against something or someone, or the people presenting the reforms or legislation were from a different class or rival faction, paralysis was the norm.  Even Pompeius and Cicero found, for most of their careers, acceptance among the elite optimates almost impossible to attain, despite their many accomplishments, and despite their many attempts to ingratiate themselves to these elite optimates.  First and foremost, then, the senators cared for themselves, and defined the Republic in terms of themselves.  On the other side, populares leaders used their popularity so much to advance their programs that they themselves became synonymous with their agendas.  Any personal blow to themselves had to be fought with every measure available, because their own personal failure meant that their causes would fail, too.  In the high stakes game of politics in the Late Republic, this may have been true, with any reformer who did not cultivate public opinion as a check against the governing elites who would use violence against them appearing as too easy a target for that very violence; but often like the optimates, populares put their own advancement at the head of their programs and accepted nothing less, risking their very lives and taking even more and more drastic measures in the face of senatorial threats and intransigence.  The careers of Cicero, Pompeius and Caesar show how utterly futile it normally was searching for common ground with the optimates, however, lending some legitimacy to the view that it was the optimates who left men like Caesar little choice.  The triumvirate, then, can be seen as a semi-peaceful attempt to sideline the fairly useless Senate from getting in the way of necessary reform, while also advancing the careers of the reformers and their supporters, to be sure; but taken too far, this would, and did, have the effect of destroying the Republic’s institutions, as the next level of escalation, on both sides, was the use of street gangs and, after that, armies, to achieve political aims.  The stakes being what they were, neither the optimates nor the populares were willing to take a step back and avoid further escalation; doing so, because of the intensity of the politics of personal destruction, often meant that they risked prosecution, exile, or even death, though these risks seemed to be more true for the populares, who were generally not more than a few powerful men and their supporters who would face a Senate generally united behind the optimates or courts dominated by the same men and the publicani. Yet at the very end, the leading populares, men like Caesar and Clodius, had armies and gangs at their disposal, the only weapons they could use against a rigid opposition. The optimates, facing such powerful men, did not change their tactics but only intensified them; such behavior made a clash all but inevitable, and yet, if a few leading optimates had been able to go against the trend of initiating violence and selfish and partisan obstructionism, one can see a path where compromise would have been possible and republican institutions could have been adapted and renewed to the changing demographics and realities of the Late Roman Republic.

While the Conflict of the Orders between elites and the masses in the Early Republic had been bitter, it helped drive consensus and compromise and made Rome better able to deal with external threats, while the same external threats helped to bring unity to Rome and drive down class conflict.  By the Late Republic, cultural changes in how the leading Romans conducted themselves and how they used public institutions had profoundly produced a complete reversal in this trend: class conflict and conflict between the elites themselves helped to make consensus and compromise particularly elusive and made the Romans less able to deal with external threats, while the external conflicts, much farther, generally speaking, from the city of Rome itself than in previous centuries, helped to fuel conflict over who would lead and benefit from these wars, and what to do with the results, be they new territories or thousands of idle soldiers from victorious armies. The various measures and compromises, laws and regulations, did nothing to solve Rome’s critical issue of corruption before it was too late.  It took a war to give the Italians voting rights, and much civil violence just to settle veterans and poor who needed assistance from a state that had marginalized them.  But no matter what the state did, it could not cause the individuals in charge of Rome to exercise restraint, either in the pursuit of office, the acquiring of wealth, or in how they chose to oppose those of other political blocs.  These men proved unable and unwilling to retrain themselves, and this lack of restraint caused an escalation of too many negative trends that ended up swallowing the Republic.  The system worked when Romans were more austere and less avaricious, but could no longer work when the level of greed and ambition became as extreme as it did.  Thus, the belated reforms only succeeded in delaying what was seemingly inevitable for a society that could no longer restrain itself:  a collapsing in on itself.  Only Romans restraining themselves could have preserved the Republic; they did not, and it did not survive.  “All over Italy men were conscripted,” wrote Caesar of the civil war that began in 49, “and weapons requisitioned; money was exacted from towns, and taken from shrines; and all the laws of god and man were overturned,” (The Civil War 1.6) yet all this had been happening for decades before 49; the Republic had been dying long before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

The populares of Caesar’s day might deserve more of the short term blame, then, in the specific events that led to the Republic’s downfall, but it was the optimates who ensured the long-term conditions which ate away at the Republic from the inside long before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.  Blame must certainly be shared heavily across parties, but if one wants to pick one side or another as being more culpable, much of it will depend on how the individual assigning blame views the world: a view that is more liberal and inclined to look at long-term, structural reasons for the fall of the Republic might put more of the blame with Cato and the optimates, while a more conservative, individual-responsibility-oriented viewpoint might single out Caesar for being the man (or the populares as the party) responsible for destroying the Republic.  Roman historians, even living under the emperors who saw themselves as the heirs of Caesar, would debate this for centuries.  The debate still rages on, and will likely never be settled, having been and likely to be framed through the commentary of those wishing to make points about their own times and societies. Still, objectively it should be noted that men are responsible for actions and shape structures over time, but also are shaped very much by the structures in which they find themselves.  In the case of the Republic, generational failure on the part of the several generations of optimates leading the Senate set the stage on which Caesar was an actor, an actor who clearly generally tried to avoid bloodshed and escalation but was left by these same optimates, and the structures they had failed to reform, with little choice.  Both the actions of men like Cato and the optimates and Caesar and the populares should both inspire and be cause for concern for those preoccupied with the future of the American republic.  For all their differences in their lives, times, and actions from the modern world, denying the similarities and the lessons they present dooms America’s republic to failure.  While this period presents far more lessons of what not to do than what to do, this is but one chapter of the history of Rome’s republic; Rome’s greatness was established long before Caesar and even the Gracchi, and other periods not covered in this paper provide many positive examples.  At the close of the Revolutionary War, the veterans’ organization the Society of Cincinnati was founded for American and French military officers who had served in the war, winning the United States its independence; it was named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who, after being called from his farm to serve as consul and then dictator of Rome in a time of crisis in the middle of the fifth century B.C.E., gave up his extraordinary power and returned home to farm his fields.  It was an example which America sought to emulate among those who served in its armed forces, George Washington himself the best example when first he tried to stay out of politics after the Revolution and then retired after his second term as president, and is today a huge part of American culture and tradition.

Web Gallery of Art: The Death of Julius Caesar, Vincenzo Camuccini, 1798

Romans Lessons for America 

There are major, thematic similarities going on in the U.S. today that are similar to the above dynamics concerning Rome.  If left unchecked, the U.S. system could be in danger in several decades of collapsing as well, though not likely in as violent a way as the Roman Republic did.  If this seems implausible, just remember how it took only a few decades for Rome’s republican institutions to cease to function and then crumble.   

Three specific themes emerge.  Firstly, there is the increasing role of money and big business in politics.  In the U.S., elections are more often than not now determined by which candidate spends the most money.  Like Rome, the increase in money has led to a narrowing of who can compete to hold office.  The influence of this money especially buys large corporations, but also large unions, influence in the halls of power and their interests, not the people’s as a whole, are what are often considered.  What is good or necessary for the country is not done.  Halliburton’s donations gave it much influence, and resulted in it being awarded no-bid contracts where it was later found it had committed fraud and had overcharged the U.S. Government; in this sense, Halliburton, and others, are just modern publicani, their supporters in Congress no different than corrupt Roman senators.  But the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (nicknamed “McCain-Feingold”) campaign finance law of 2002 is perhaps the best example of how loopholes undermine the best of intentions.  The law itself has been basically struck down by the Supreme Court with its 2009 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, itself a 5-4 decision split along partisan lines, but was already severely weakened by loopholes before that.  Sen. Feingold lost his re-election, and Sen. McCain is becoming increasingly marginalized within his own party; there are other reasons besides this for each of their troubles, but it is important to note what is happening to the two men who did more than anyone else to attempt to change the role and scale of money in elections.  Another major theme is the increase in the politics of personal destruction and partisanship.  These forces saw a dramatic increase in the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency and have escalated ever since, especially during campaign season.  Today, newly elected Republicans are speaking not of their agenda, but of stopping Obama. The level of personal attacks on candidates and the extent of distortion of an opponent’s record (Obama is apparently a Marxist revolutionary, a Muslim intent on imposing Islamic Sharia law, and is a foreign-born person ineligible to be president, just to list a few) are only increasing.  This is making it harder for both parties to work together.  And procedures, like introducing amendments or placing nominations on indefinite hold, have become hijacked for blatant partisanship in an increasing fashion.  Clodius would not find himself totally out of place in today’s climate, save for his violence.  Another theme is that of the rise of obstructionism and paralysis.  Different factions are not trying to work together, they are trying to stop the government from functioning when something one faction does not like is being adopted or likely to be adopted, though, unlike Rome, this has not turned into a violent process.  Whether out of genuine disagreement or a desire to prevent the other side from reaping credit, Congress has done little to tackle long-term problems at all in the last several decades while America’s schools, health system, infrastructure, entitlement programs, and debt/deficit (just to name a few) were all facing massive problems which grew steadily worse and are making life as Americans know it unsustainable.   Such obstructionism, from filibusters or other tactics, was common, too, in Rome, and contributed significantly to the long list of massive problems that festered due to government inaction. The change in money and corporate involvement, tone and tactics, and the increase in obstructionism and paralysis are all feeding each other, and threaten to undermine the ability of the system to function not only well, but at all.  These dynamics will undermine America’s government and Constitution without the personal warlord armies of Caesar or Pompeius, Marius or Sulla being necessary.  The example of Rome should infuse American policy makers with even stronger motivation to tackle these three major challenges before the damage is too great.  Unless major action is undertaken, the whole American system might find itself caving in on itself under the weight of these three problems and their amplifying effects. 

Yet there is also one broad, societal theme: the general lack of restraint that is ever more present in American culture today.  There is little else to be said about that: either Americans—individual citizens, government, society, and private enterprise—exercise more restraint, or three specific trends discussed above will doom America to destroying itself.  Whatever the reforms were passed, corruption, and corrupt people, found a way to circumnavigate them in Rome.  The U.S. is having the same problem today: laws and regulations are not something to be respected and observed in the U.S., it seems, so much as they are obstacles to be creatively bypassed or changed with the right amount of money thrown at the right number of senators and congressman.  CEOs, senators, individuals, and presidents all reach beyond constraints regularly, whether legally, financially, morally, or procedurally established.  If America keeps finding ways to reward, rather than punish, such behavior, it will find itself in a similar position to Rome in the twilight of its republic: the reckless, high stakes gambling will become so commonplace and accepted that few with the opportunity to push the limits of acceptable behavior will ever refrain from doing so.  Individuals may spend, living for the moment, with reckless abandon; corporations may treat their customers as prey, to be bled dry for maximum profit for the company; government officials may tell people what they want to hear so they can be reelected and see to their own personal interests through the benefits of office; society as whole might not questions its own behavior and focus on short-term material gain, greed, glamour, unsustainability, personal success at all costs, and selfishness as “values” it demonstrates and passes onto the next generation. When such behavior becomes too common, then the U.S. will be like the republic Caesar described, “nothing—just a name, without substance or form.”

Only a few decades after Rome had formally turned most of the Mediterranean into provinces administered by the Senate, the very system which had brought it to dominate a large portion of the world collapsed suddenly and violently, though the symptoms of its fatal disease had been present for at least a generation if not more.  One should shudder when one thinks that Rome had centuries of a tradition of no political violence at home, to only, in mere decades, episodically resemble some of the scenes common in sub-Saharan African cities, even with no history of such behavior.  For the U.S., the ugly specter of anarchy appeared, though only very briefly, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and in the past, riots and disturbances were even more commonplace.  The United States today, only two decades after the end of the Cold War, found itself on the brink of financial ruin and even still has an unsustainably massive and expanding deficit and debt, this only a few years removed from the booming years of the 1990s; its parties for decades have been unable to come together to deal with debt and many other major issues from immigration to education to social security, and the fact that Rome’s republican system of representative government and checks and balances collapsed on itself so soon after its total dominance of the Mediterranean should provide a stark warning for America: partisanship and obstructionism that delays tackling essential issues and lets them fester can bring down even the mightiest and most successful nation rapidly, and when corruption geared towards money and power substitutes for true patriotism, when leading elites seek to serve themselves and not the people, when a whole society loses its restraint and self-control, change can come rapidly in such a way that even a political system like America’s, based very much on Rome’s, might become mere history, one of Livy’s lessons from which a future power can learn “from it…what to emulate, from it what to avoid.”  It is now for the republic of the United States to learn from the republic of Rome’s example, or to become mere history like it, another tragic morality tale in the dustbin of history.

Check out my related book chapter: The Roman Republic in Greece: Lessons for Modern Peace/Stability Operations (Chapter 10 in Global Leadership Initiatives for Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding)

See related eBook: The Ancient Roman Legal and Political Legacy in the Founding of America

[1] Holland, 290-296; Tatum, 206-207; von Ungern-Sternberg, 104; Goldsworthy, Caesar,358-374.

[2] Goldsworthy, Caesar, 512.

[3] Goldsworthy, Carthage, 362.

[4] von Ungern-Sternberg, 106.

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