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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) February 28, 2023; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; 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.

SILVER SPRING—Much has happened in this momentous yet cataclysmic past year, and almost a year ago, shortly after Putin launched his escalatory invasion, I wrote the following and absolutely still stand by it today:

After well over a year of isolation induced by the COVD-19 pandemic, it seems Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has become so detached from reality with his wild Ukraine gamble that he may finally have adventured too far, stumbling into a trap entirely of his own making.  Surprising as it is, this time it is distinctly possible his aggression, ultimately, will not provide him with any way to save face: no “offramp,” as the media seems to love to refer to a possible endgame that leaves him comfortable and not in a weak and unstable position at best (for him) or ousted at worst (obviously, the latter would be ideal for us)…

…I’m optimistic like never before that Putin’s end is coming and coming soon even as that optimism is surrounded by the dread of an increasingly bloody and lawless conflict.  I truly think this is the last gasp for a very long time of the Great Power conflicts on European soil, of the major wars that have been constant on the continent since the ancient Greco-Persian wars through today, with the two main exceptions being the Pax Romana and the Pax Americana; this war in Ukraine will either be the end of the Pax Americana in Europe or the one great interruption of it for some time to come.

I have expanded on this feeling, that Putin has absolutely violated the implicit social contract he made with his people—give up their democracy in exchange for strength, stability, and respect from the world—that this this war really has doomed him, that Russians know who has been in charge for years and who created the system that produced this disastrous performance on the battlefields of Ukraine and will eventually appropriately blame Putin, that even the military may revolt against him, and that revolution is going to come because Putin will destroy the Russian military and economy if he is not stopped since he will not give up his losing war effort that cannot succeed, that Putin has finally bitten off more than he can chew and will choke on his hubris.  And from the Russo-Japanese War to World War I to Afghanistan, Russian defeats in war tend bring about serious consequences domestically for Russia of the revolutionary type.  So in the first days after the one-year-anniversary of Putin’s escalatory invasion, it is fitting to contemplate a world without Putin and how much better it will be.

There are three key reasons to suppose this idea…

1.) Russia under Putin is by far the most powerful bad actor in the world, constantly working to undermine the U.S.-led rules-based international world order in place since the end of World War II

It is no exaggeration to say that Russia under Putin is easily now and by far not only the chief antagonist of the United States and the West, but is also the largest impediment to global cooperation and world stability.  And this has been the case for a solid decade-and-a-half.

Apart from the obvious example of Ukraine, Russia has also for some time been supporting some of the worst factions and adding to instability in a series of regional and local interventions.  Militarily, most notably with its occupation of Transnistria in Moldova and its intervention to support dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria but also the “private” military contractor Wagner Group (really an extension of the Russian military and the Kremlin’s will) also in Syria and throughout Africa, especially (including Libya, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, Mali, and Sudan, though Wagner is also intervening in less-militarily-explicit ways in other African countries).  Politically, Russia has interfered to support the very worst of the far-fight throughout Europe, the U.S., and Canada, whether movements, individual figures, or political parties, movements that often not just brush up against fascism but veer headlong into it.  In the same places, Russia is also fostering far-left movements (the kind that try to tear down the part of the left that can actually do something).   It is even pumping up secessionists movements, from Catalonia and Scotland to Texas and California.  I have discussed much of this in detail—citing many, many sources—before.  And, of course, there are Russia’s cyberwarfare campaigns—including disinformation and what I termed in 2016 the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar—related to all of these, which I have also discussed at length and before most others would, as far back as July 2016; even now, Russian propaganda accounts are buying up blue checkmark status on Twitter from Elon Musk, just another example of how Musk clearly doesn’t give a damn about actually policing actual misinformation

As I argued long ago, it is time to get even tougher with Russia, which has for a decade-and-a-half clearly been a bad-faith and faithless actor on the world stage, that fighting back isn’t escalation but merely long-overdue defense against such rampant aggression, that countries voluntarily joining alliances with the West is not aggression but Russia actually invading countries to dismember them and annex their territory is.

We are rivals with China but not enemies, but Russia under is clearly our enemy and acts like it. 

2.) Russia under Putin now is incredibly isolated, and there is little reason to think other major powers would follow Russia’s example after Putin is finished; most notably, China will likely be more cooperative and less oppositional

Russian Isolation

While countries like the U.S. and Ukraine have many friends that actually admire them on immensely deep levels, Russia does not even understand these concepts: Russia has a few alliances of interest and convenience, but that is really it: Russia has no real friends—and only has itself to blame for that.

But let’s take a look at the nations supposedly close to Russia, just to drive down how pathetically isolated it is internationally.

Putin’s big “ally” in this war has been Belarus, formerly a part of the Soviet Union and led by its quite unpopular and buffoonish dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who was weakened by massive domestic protests in 2020-2021 after he stole an election to stay in power and has now let Russia use Belarusian territory to base troops and launch attacks against Ukraine (he has notably declined to deploy his military alongside Russia’s in Ukraine, as that could very well be the end of his deeply unpopular regime).  Polling tells us Belarusians are against Russia’s invasion and that Russia’s war of aggression is very unpopular; indeed, there are Belarusians fighting for Ukraine against Russia, Belarusians in Belarus sabotaging logistical systems used by the Russians, and, just a few days ago, it was apparently Belarusian partisans that critically damaged an expensive Russian military aircraft on an airbase outside of the Belarusian capital of Minsk (an A-50U Mainstay—one of seven in Russian service and modern upgrades of the A-50, with only nine of those A-50s “in service” for a total of “sixteen” of these types of aircraft “operational” for Russia—likely fewer with Russian maintenance woes—planes with advanced detection equipment that are essential to monitoring enemy aircraft in the battlespace and in preventing surprise air attacks, essentially the counterparts to the U.S. E-3 Sentry AWACS).

And as far as “friends” and allies, for Russia, Belarus is as good as it gets.

What about China?  Shortly before Putin’s February 24 invasion, China declared “friendship…has no limits” with Russia but has very much set limits on this friendship, refusing so far to support Russia’s military with lethal military aid or vote with Russia in key United Nations votes on the Ukraine war.  At most, China has helped Russia with some economic and technical support and on the one-year-anniversary of the invasion offered a piece of paper with a twelve-point “peace” plan paying lip service to some Russian talking points but offered no concrete military aid to Russia in its war effort (I’m sure Putin was hoping for much more than a piece of paper; so much for “friendship…[with] no limits”).

What about Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic and the government of which Russia helped by deploying troops to quell a massive series of protests just the month before Putin launched his escalatory invasion?  How has Kazakhstan responded after this help from Russia?  By breaking from Russia and Russia’s positions on Ukraine and the war, sending aid to Ukrainian civilians, giving sanctuary and shelter to over 100,000 Russians fleeing conscription/mobilization into Putin’s war and/or persecution, and also not voting with Russia at the United Nations.  Other former Soviet republics long-deferential to Russia even after the fall of Soviet Union are now beginning to finally distance themselves from or to assert themselves publicly against Putin or are seeking patronage from elsewhere, including America.

What about Iran?  Iran has provided drones that have been used against Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure (yet are ineffective against Ukrainian military targets and Russia may be even running out of those drones) while Iran has thus far declined Russian requests for more powerful missile systems and has also declined to vote with Russia at the United Nations.

In reality, Russia is incredibly isolated: in five key United Nations votes on the Russia-Ukraine war—including the latest one on February 23, 2023, demanding Russia withdraw from Ukraine, 141 countries voting for it, only seven including Russia against, and with thirty-two abstentions; also including a General Assembly vote on October 12 of 143-5 against Russia, a 10-1 Security Council vote against Russia on September 30, a March 2 General Assembly vote of 141-5 against Russia, and an 11-1 Security Council vote against Russia on February 25, 2022, right after Russia’s escalatory invasion—China has refused to vote with its supposed BFF; instead, it has chosen in each instance to abstain.  Kazakhstan abstained in those three General Assembly votes and Iran and has behaved the same way with two of those General Assembly votes (including the latest February 23 vote) and did not vote in a third.  That means no country of any significant power or clout has stood by Russia diplomatically: 141 to 7 most recently (Russia along with Belarus, Syria, North Korea, Eritrea, Mali, and Nicaragua; that’s it) and similar results from the other General Assembly resolutions, plus Russia being the only veto on the two Security Council resolutions described, tell you a lot about what you need to know about Russia’s standing in the world after its Ukraine invasion.

With “friends” like this, Russia really doesn’t need enemies, but it has them in a Ukraine that is smashing Russian dreams of imperial conquest and a West that is happy to aid Ukraine not just diplomatically and economically but, unlike China with Russia, militarily in its fight for freedom and self-determination.  And Even if the Biden Administration sometimes gives lip service to the general concept of eventual negotiations, it knows full well and has stated that Russia is not a party it can ask Ukraine to negotiate with because Russia does not act in good faith.  So think about this, then: both U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are shunning the idea of talking to Putin or his Russian government, that doing so is pointless, that Putin is not worthy of direct engagement at this time.

Essentially alone in their war against a Ukraine with many steadfast and true allies and friends, 2022 for Putin and Russia was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year and, as I have been arguing, 2023 will only be worse.

China’s Conundrum on Russia and the West as It Ponders Its Path Forward

Considering this dramatic isolation, I am a big believer that, without a Putin running Russia to stand next to, or even hide behind, that China would take a different, more cooperative approach on the international stage.  That is not to say that everything would be great between the U.S. and China and they would not have fierce disagreements still.  Yet if Russia were to stop being a rogue nation, but a responsible, good-faith actor instead that is not knee-jerk opposing the West but seeks cooperation over confrontation, peace and trade over war, democracy over autocracy, human rights over oppression, China would not want to look like a lone spoiler, isolated as some sort of pariah among the major nations.  With Russia at its side, it can avoid this, but with a Russia under a different, more sensible leader, it cannot.

Another thing to consider is that China and Russia do not have a shared culture and history, do not have any deep-seeded shared values.  China’s tepid “support” for a full year of Russia’s escalatory invasion of Ukraine after proclaiming “friendship…[with] no limit” just before that invasion tells you how deep that relationship goes.

Indeed, apart from neo-Marxist-educated, Chomsky– and Gramsci-devoted disciples of anti-Westernism and their students, fans, and offspring—the crowd Christopher Hitchens described as the “masochistic…Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter”—not many people will really miss Putin’s Russia (and, as I have explained before, most of the people who do are, sorry-not-sorry, too stupid to know the difference between Putin’s Russia and the Soviet Union—the latter opposed fascists and the former is fascist).  These people are so myopically trapped in Cold War-era thinking that they have not realized their ship has sailed, their train departed, their flight taken off; they fail to see how the world has adapted and changed, how the postcolonial-rebellion era is now over, how Putin’s Russia is not an anti-imperialist nation fighting against empire and colonialism but is, in fact, a neoimperialist and neocolonialist empire, the only major power to be doubling down on such a backwards, long-expired ideology.

People try to argue (rather unconvincingly) that the U.S. just another old-school empire, China has an economic empire, and while there are obviously various dimensions, I’d argue that influence and alliances and mutual agreements are not the same as empire: there’s no substitute for empire-empire: actually stealing land by military conquest with the intent of annexation and colonization.  Say what you will about America’s Iraq War and War in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 era, but neither Iraq nor Afghanistan were ever going to be the fifty-first or fifty-second state or a U.S. Territory.

The tsarist era is calling, Vlad, and it wants its ideology back.  This chauvinistic ethnic Russian “Eurasianism” is moving Russia backwards in time, and the totality of its former vassals that have broken free are having none of it, with even the people of Belarus disgusted by it as they are of their own cartoonish dictator, Lukashenko.  Few states of any stature are going to look at how Russia’s horrid war of revanchist imperialist and colonialist expansion goes and will want to imitate it, with Putin’s failing and sooner-rather-than-later to be failed war—itself the last gasp of such anachronistic justifications—to leave an even greater distaste for such thinking and behavior than before he embarked on his futile folly.  Hopefully, this war will be the last hurrah of old-school imperial wars, this war the last imperial war, at least for several generations.

If anyone will truly miss Putin’s Russia, it will be China, but not out of any love; rather, it will simply be that Russia constantly made China look good.  Sure, China can be pretty awful—just look at its genocidal treatment of its Muslim ethnic minority Uighurs—but people could always point to Russia and say “see, at least China isn’t that bad” when it came to international behavior beyond its borders.  To quote a RAND report title: “Russia Is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China Is a Peer, Not a Rogue,” i.e., China has a considerable amount of economic power that Russia does not even approach (in 2021, China’s GDP was nearly ten times Russia’s and U.S. GDP was nearly thirteen times larger than Russia’s) and China does not seek to destroy the current international order, just to shape it more in its own image and offer competition with and an alternative to the U.S. even while generally operating within the system’s rule (the big exceptions being trade, intellectual property theft, and maritime borders).  Conversely, as noted, Russia is relatively weak economically and cares little to nothing for the rules, even seeks to destroy that rules-based international system.

China loved having Putin as the lighting rod to absorb most of the West’s ire even while China moved as a force often opposing the West, making China the “good one” of the two major autocracies.  China enjoyed a position where it could be both an ally to Russia but also present itself to the West as a more moderate country than Russia, as a country that could be a mediator and interlocutor between the West and Russia that was still happy to have Russia as another major pole in the multipolar world order aligned against the West, a with which China enjoyed a much better relationship than Russia with which China has far, far larger economic ties than it does with Russia.

It’s not even close, as the charts below show (The Observatory of Economic Complexity’s excellent visualizations are deeply revealing and they were kind enough to provide me with the latest data free of charge; 2019 and 2020 data is available without a subscription, but I have provided images of some of the 2022 data; in datasets, OEC counts both Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate trading partners and I am counting Taiwan as Western since it is de facto independent and a Western democracy, whereas Hong Kong is de facto and de jure part of China).

In 2022, Russia was just the sixteenth-largest partner (2.12% of the total) in China’s export market (compared to 16.1% for the U.S. at number-one); excluding Hong Kong (second-place) as part of China, the top three Chinese export recipients are firmly Western, as are six of the top ten and eight of the fourteen ahead of Russia; for comparison, in 2019 before the pandemic, Russia also ranked sixteenth but at a lower overall percentage: 1.87%; the U.S. was still first but at 16.4%.  Russia was only the seventh-highest importer to China, with 4.14% total of Chinese imports; the U.S. was significantly higher, in third place at 6.54%, and the top five importers were firmly in the Western alliance and the sixth was actually China reimporting to itself; for comparison, in 2019, Russia was the eighth-largest importer to China (3.7%) to America’s third-ranked spot (6.56%).

Russia has not been releasing important elements of its economic data for most of 2022, hoping to hide the effect of sanctions, but the incomplete data we do have tells us that in 2022, China was by far Russia’s largest export destination and import source, with the value of Russian exports to China apparently sharply increasing from 2019.  Back then, China was also by far Russia’s top export (14% of all Russian exports) and import (20.6% of all Russian imports) partner.  For the U.S. in 2022, China is its third-largest export destination (7.39%) and its largest source of imports (16.7%); China was also similarly third for U.S. exports in 2019 (6.82%) and first that year in imports (18.1%).  Despite some rising tensions, Chinese-American economic ties remain indisputably strong and profoundly stronger than Chinese-Russian economic ties.

Simply put, Russia needs China way more than China needs Russia, then.

Even in this context, China calculated that it still made sense to align itself in politically in general with Russia, and, in this spirit, it backed Russia just before Russia’s nightmarish disaster of an escalatory invasion of Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022.  China probably thought like many others that in a few days, weeks, maybe a few months, Russia would triumph in Ukraine: the war would be over quickly and China’s relationship and substantial economic ties with the West would not really come into play or be too strongly negatively affected.

But to China’s dismay, a year later Russia’s war is failing and the Russian pole in the multipolar order is now shattered, Russia having exposed its weakness, China obviously having buyer’s remorse and knowing it has backed a loser and now a pariah, not at all what Chinese President Xi Jinping had bet would happen.  With Russia desperate for help, China is still clearly declining even now after an entire year of massive military escalation to send Russia any weapons or direct military support.  China appreciated having Russia as a useful pole bent away from the West (and its utility is now fast diminishing), but it’s not like it likes Russia.  If it liked Russia, it would be doing far more to help Putin’s war effort, like just about all of the West and even places like Morocco are helping Ukraine (yes, Morocco has offered more military support for Ukraine than China has offered Russia).

Some “no-limits” “friendship.”

Instead, China must feel like it has hitched itself onto the Titanic and does not want this Titanic to ruin its far stronger, far more important economic ties with the West at a time when the economy and COVID policy in China have the domestic situation there faltering, and, in reality, it is obvious China has been and is considering all of this heavily or it would already have been voting with Russia at the United Nations and been sending it weapons to help crush Ukraine if it really, truly believed in its alliance with Russia as a true alliance and not an alliance of mere convenience.  Sure, China could technically still throw a lot more support behind Russia, but why would it risk a major economic fight with the West now after a whole year of keeping its distance from Russia’s war when Russia is clearly losing that war and at a time of increasing domestic woes in China?  It would be highly irrational for China to do so and would not further China’s national interests.

In fact, Xi and the Chinese leadership have to be looking at Russia and seeing the dreaded potential for what they fear most in their own country: revolution.  The Chinese Communist Party has already lived through the demise of one communist regime based in Moscow in 1991 and has to see the similarities between then and now in Russia as well as with the 1917 revolutions in the midst of another major war for Russia, revolutions that brought down the Russian tsar and ushered in communist Bolshevik rule followed by the terrible years of the Russian Civil War.  The point is, if—in my view, when—Putin goes, the Chinese will have had some time to think about how they will adjust, and they will know that increasing their isolation and following Putin’s path will not be in their interests.

I asked one Brookings scholar at a live event in early February what she thought of this scenario, and her answer was that China would likely look to replace Russia with others.  Except there is no replacing Russia with any other state of similar stature because all those states, even if not fervently pro-Western, are not really anti-Western and enjoy playing both the West and East off each other for their own advantages and interests, even while still overall being closer to the West: we’re talking the rest of the BRICs, that is, Brazil and India, along with a number of other nations in the Global South of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.  Neither India nor Brazil neither wants to be or be seen as anti-Western.  The other large non-Western G-20 economies of Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia do not want to be anti-Western with the possible exception of Turkey (at least to talk that talk but less so walk that walk), but even NATO-member Turkey has been and will very likely try to play both sides rather than veer so far as to be anywhere near as anti-Western as Russia (even less anti-Western if would-be Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can finally get voted out of office in May).  Outside the G-20, there are non-Western states of Iran, Thailand, and Nigeria to round out the top 30 economies in the world, and with the obvious exception of pariah Iran, they do not want to be anti-Western.

So China’s best bet for a new BFF to replace Russia is…Iran?  Meh.  Maybe Turkey?  Doubtful even if possible.  While both Muslim-led countries have been conspicuously and relatively silent on China’s genocide against the Muslim Turkic Uighurs to try not to rock their relationship with China too much, that hardly means Turkey will want to become the new anti-Western power to replace Russia and China is not going to be thrilled about cozying up too much more to an isolated Iran pursuing terrorism and nuclear weapons and even it likely won’t end up supporting Putin’s war against Ukraine dramatically more than it is already, save for another weapons system or two added to the so-so drones it has already supplied.

With Putin’s Russia out of the mix and is led by a different person, then, frankly, China just doesn’t have any good options but to become less antagonistic and more cooperative with the West.  That hardly means that China cannot compete and fight for its interests with the United States, that China must be subservient to the U.S. or cannot pursue its own path and oppose American policies, sometimes sharply and persistently.  It just means that all this talk of two major blocs opposing each other, one led by the U.S. and Europe, the other by Russia and China, that has gripped analysts for years will be a thing of the past.  Sure, China could go it alone among major world powers in pursuing a sharply anti-American path, but then China will suffer from some of the same problems that are bringing Russia down today.

In short, it just doesn’t make sense and isn’t likely for China to become the next Russia in terms of anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, to take up the flagging banner now being dragged by Russia though the mud and blood of its Ukraine war.  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has united the U.S. and Europe even more intensely than before, the narcissism of its small differences always being exaggerated (even now, the coverage of the recent Leopard/Abrams tank tussle reminds me of the coverage of Biden’s infrastructure bill debate in the U.S.: the commentariat highlighted the differences, then myopically did not properly appreciate the success of those differences being overcome), so China’s hope of driving a wedge between Europe and America must be fading fast.

3.) When Putin is finally finished—dies, is killed, or deposed—it will be because Russians—the Russian people, the military, and the elites around Putin in the Kremlin—are absolutely exhausted and have learned the hard way that a different course is needed

I have encountered numerous commentaries stating we may very well end up with someone worse than Putin if Putin is taken out, but I don’t buy that.  Maybe temporarily and briefly someone worse ends up in charge, but when the dust settles and leadership stabilizes after Putin is overthrown/replaced, I think it is far likelier we would see someone better than Putin running things than someone worse.  When Putin is gone —and I am saying when because I cannot think of a time in recent centuries when a leader of a major state fails so badly in a major war and just stays in power with no major consequences, and I am convinced Russia has already lost this war, it’s just a matter of how much longer and how many more dead—it will absolutely be a reflection of a national exhaustion with Putinism.  By Putinism, I mean the man himself, his stooges, his system, his war, all of it; Russia will not be looking for more of the same and will certainly not be wanting to double down a failing war that has already cost hundreds of thousands of casualties, including, by Ukraine’s credible estimate, nearly 150,000 killed and wounded*, and who knows how many more ruined in mind and spirit.

There is also the reputational damage.  The nation of Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, and Pajitnov is being led barbarians who have created a barbaric culture that has created a barbaric army that is behaving more like ISIS than a respectable army (this is not meant as some kind of hyperbole: the atrocities happening throughout this war are exhausting to consider and massive in scale, pure barbarity of the terroristic variety—as I discussed with Ukraine’s 2022 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Oleksandra Matviichuk—atrocities in line with centuries of atrocities committed against Ukraine by Russia, centuries I summarize here) and yet, somehow instead of being truly fearsome, these barbarians are only good at killing innocent civilians and fare far less well against the Ukrainian military.  Thus, the Russian state’s military that so many feared for so long has exposed itself an object of ridicule when it comes to actual military prowess, the Russian Army getting slaughtered to advance mere miles in months while losing far more territory and the overhyped Russian Navy and Air Force largely cowed by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and air defenses, respectively.

Russia is a pathetic state with a pathetic military, pathetically losing a war handily to a former part of its empire that is far weaker and much smaller than it.  Every single day this war drags on is additional humiliation not only for Putin but for all of Russia and all Russians.  This is one of the greatest military upsets in world history, no doubt about it, and it is hard to think of many parallels for a mighty nation to have lost its reputation so rapidly (France in 1940 and Persia in last few years of the 330s BCE are two that come to mind). 

Then there’s the economic costs.  The international sanctions ensuing from Putin’s invasion, while not bringing Russia to its economic knees in a matter of months, are still hurtling Russia’s economy into a prolonged era of pain.  Despite extreme, unsustainable measures taken by the Kremlin to hide and minimize the very real effects of the sanctions (basically, don’t trust Russia’s official numbers), Russia’s economy is, in fact, struggling and will only be degraded more over time.  With more sanctions just imposed and more sure to come, the substantial effects are already widespread in Russia and are shrinking Russia’s role in the global economy, with an energy revolution (one I called for some time ago) rapidly unfolding in Europe and fundamentally altering and diminishing Europe’s relationship with Russia (please feel free to consider the sources above in this paragraph as rebuttal-central to the idea that the sanctions are “not working”).

While regular Russians will feel the economic pain the most, Russia’s elites—including those staffing the Kremlin and in Putin’s inner circles as well as social and economic elites—are also worse off for this war and will hardly stand by Putin forever, especially as things will go from bad to worse; indeed, the process of them despairing and turning on him has already begun, and I have argued this before, with this paragraph of mine worth quoting here:

It is clear that the Russian military—rank-and-file and officers alike—are more aware of Putin’s failures than anyone as they wade through their own blood.  But this war is not just affecting them and regular Russians: the lifestyles of the elites—powered by luxury goods and lavish vacations—are also suffering; nobody in Russia is benefitting from this war and nobody will.  And nobody knows how bad things are going more than the very people surrounding Putin in the Kremlin, not just those closest to Putin, but the layers of bureaucracy underneath them.  When those types of mid-level government officials gave up on the Soviet system, they were happy to dismantle it from within to find some power to grasp onto amidst the system’s collapse and did not work to preserve it but to preserve themselves, one of the fatal five reasons Stephen Kotkin gives for the Soviet Union’s collapse.  Thus, the spawn of the crisis of legitimacy in Moscow that Mikhail Gorbachev faced in the late 1980s and early 1990s is ready to return with a vengeance, this time targeting Putin and his regime.

And as I read the new book (Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921) of another great historian, Antony Beevor, I am relearning how the same happened in Russia 1917 as Tsar Nicholas II’s autocratic regime gasped its last spasmodic breaths in its final months and days.  Russians successfully resisted the powerful tsar and the dreaded Soviet state; they can handle the weaker Putin when they are of a mind to do so.  And today, there is already dissent and resistance, active resistance in Russia that is only going to grow over time, however small or ineffective it seems now.

This is all hitting Russians hard both psychologically and materially and, again, goes a long way to destroying the tacit deal Putin made with Russians to Make Russia Great Again if Russians just let him take their freedom.  Since he is failing miserably to uphold his end of the bargain, since in one year he has undone everything, he has accomplished in two decades of holding power and with the worst yet to come, Putin has outlived his usefulness for Russians even if many or even most do not realize it yet.  But at some point—when Russia suffers more major defeats and Ukraine takes more and more territory back from Russia up to perhaps all of it if it gets to that point or even maybe when Ukraine has driven Russia out fully from its sovereign international recognized territory and Russian counterattacks against the Ukrainian border fail and fail and fail repeatedly (scenarios I laid out several times), sometime around that point or before with some good fortune—enough Russians will realize this Putin product is expired, hazardous, and must be tossed into the garbage, like a piece of rotting food that is stinking up the refrigerator and will make anyone foolish enough to still try to consume to retch it back up the hard way.

Putin is, simply put, a disease not only in the Russian body politic but the global body politic.  The sooner the Russians realize this and do something collectively about it (or the sooner one brave person or a few brave people around Putin do a great patriotic duty, perhaps inspired by growing public unrest), the fewer dead Russians, the less damage to Russia’s economy and reputation, and the sooner Russia can begin building a better future for itself, for all Russians, and for Russia’s long-abused and weary neighbors, most of all Ukraine.

All nations and people’s have breaking points, and Putin is well on the way to pushing Russia and Russians to theirs.

So when this man is finally ejected from a decision-making capacity for the Russian state, yes, I am highly confident Russians will not opt for a Putin wannabe or anything close, not someone to his right who will raise the stakes even further and force even more Russians to keep fighting a losing war, no.  Russians by then will want to envision a future where they become a part of the world again, travel without drawing contempt, buy the things they were used to buying, be with relatives and friends who are alive and not buried in some crater in Ukraine or a cemetery in Russia of living in exile in foreign lands, begin the path to becoming accepted among the nations of the world again not as monsters but as peaceful and friendly good-faith people.  They will not want to continue the war but will want the war to end, as they did during World War I and the Soviet-Afghan War.  They will want to move in the opposite direction into which Putin had dragged them.  They will want to transcend this horror and start anew.

Even if someone like Putin or someone worse came to power immediately after Putin’s fall from grace, that person would not last long.  That person would not command the loyalty of the army or government officials, let alone the people.  Putin was the singular force above all others and there is no one approaching him in terms of that stature, yet his failure will mean those most closely associated with him will be horribly tainted even as not one can truly fill his shoes in his role as it has been up to now.  Likely the only outcome most people will accept, from the insiders to the common folks, will be an end to the war and the killing as well as the repression, something approaching free and fair elections in its place, and the ability to breathe a big sigh of relief, maybe shed a few tears, and begin to move on the only way possible: one step at a time, with the desire for it to be one free step at time.

It won’t be easy—it never is—and yes, freedom was scary in the 1990s, but better to try again after the alternative has produced the current nightmare of a reality that is now consuming all of Russia and ruining a proud nation and a proud people so that they have little left of which to be proud.  Something other than that will probably find it close to impossible to impose its will on the Russian project overall. 

Still, there may be some instability and fighting over what comes next.  There may even be some separatist movements that gain (further) steam within the Russian Federation, given how awful its history of its treatment of minorities is, how minorities are disproportionately being used as cannon fodder in this war (as imperialist and colonialist as anything about this war), and that some minorities are concentrated in particular regions.  And yet, I do not see some prolonged civil war: in the end, it should not take terribly long for a consensus—of the public, the battered military, and the elites who are souring even now on the current regime—on a more peaceful, stable, and cooperative way to engage with the wider world to emerge.  And when that happens, Russia will have to focus on remaking and rebuilding itself, leaving China without any major partner to carry any sort of anti-Western banner.

A lot of people are understandably bearish and quite cynical when it comes to betting on the Russian people, and I get it, especially with Ukrainians.  But history can be our guide here, as I have mentioned; and if the credulous, ignorant, superstitious peasant masses can turn on the tsar in the early twentieth century, if the masses of relatively better-educated Russians choking on Soviet totalitarianism can turn on Soviet communism, then, yes, you better believe Russians today can turn on Putin and the war as a whole, you better believe it is more likely than not that what will finally settle into and run the Kremlin after Putin will be better and not worse.

The Future Looks Better

When you take out the trash, the air is clearer, smells nicer.  Such will be the case for the world with Putin, with a man at the head of a state with a large nuclear arsenal that wields (irresponsibly and often alone) a veto on the United Nations Security Council, a state that is a declining power with a bad addiction to revanchism, and, for the reasons outlined above, the tone and tenor of major-power statecraft will be redefined for the better with his absence.  That doesn’t mean Xi or China can’t and don’t make mistakes—clearly more so presently than before—but China is very likely going adjust in a way that is best for China, and, as argued, that will not be fighting and being confrontational with the West even more than now while alone among major powers in a post-Putin world: it will mean confronting the West less—significantly less—paving the way for a new era of relative cooperation, perhaps at a level never seen before in human history.  The unipolar moment after the end of the Cold War was brief, but this emerging era should be a lot longer than a moment.  And together—especially without the Russian knee-jerk veto at the United Nations Security council—the great powers of the world can accomplish so much more working together than opposing each other.

A quick Taiwan aside: even if China were to invade Taiwan—and that, of course, would be a disaster on so many levels—given the differences between China’s and Russia’s imperial history and the far, far larger scale of Russian revanchism that does not end with Ukraine, whereas China’s (excepting some nearby tiny islands and reefs) would seem to end with Taiwan, I do not think that would doom the world to another dysfunctional era of the type Putin wants to create.  That is not to say war over Taiwan is likely—and I would argue Russia’s performance in Ukraine and the Biden-led West’s response to it makes that far less likely)—just that I would expect more norm-abiding and normalcy from China relative to Putin’s Russia even after such an horrible potential event, given time for the dust to settle.

In conclusion, I will not-so-humbly proclaim that one year after Putin’s massive escalatory invasion of Ukraine, the world is one year closer to a post-Putin world and, therefore, a better world.  Let’s keep up and keep increasing support for Ukraine to ensure Putin falls on his face and falls on his face sooner, as I know Russian leaders doing so in Russian history can often find themselves falling “into the dustbin of history,” a phrase made famous by communist Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky just days before the 1917 Bolshevik October Revolution when he shouted “You are miserable bankrupts.  Your role is played out.  Go where you belong from now on: into the dustbin of history!” at the leader of the rival Menshevik communists, Julius Martov, as he and his crew walked out of a meeting of the Second Congress of Soviets and into irrelevance.  That was the fate of the backwards tsardom, the backwards Soviet Union, and it will be the fate of Putin’s backwards regime, as Putin is doing so much to advance himself and his regime down a similar path: “into the dustbin of history.”

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.

© 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).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

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(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 13, 2022; excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; see related RCN 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 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

Also see Brian’s preceding February 21 Small Wars Journal piece The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine, featured by SOF News on February 26; see related RCN 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
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—The focus of my last excerpted article was to show how disgustingly careless, even cruel, the Russian military has been with the lives of its soldiers, how abusive and deceitful they have been to these fighting men of Russia and their families.  And the point of this is to acknowledge that, by such unforgivable conduct towards Russia’s own soldiers and their families, Putin and his cronies may have finally sowed the bittersweet seeds of their own demise.  This was one thing with the hundreds of concealed deaths over eight years with “volunteer” deployments into rebel-held portions of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions (known together as the Donbas) in Ukraine’s east (discussed in more detail earlier); it is already an entirely different phenomenon with thousands of deaths less than two weeks into Putin’s exponential escalation in the whole of Ukraine.

Even allowing for the possibility that some of the images and video coming out of Ukraine are not authentic, there is still (as I have noted recently) a lot of real footage of dead Russian soldiers and destroyed Russian vehicles, evidence of Putin’s lies to his own people and his lack of competence in managing and leading Russia’s army, evidence that increasingly destroys his credibility not only with his own people but his own soldiers and their officers.

The dead collectively are something that is very hard for Kremlin spinmasters and apologists in Russia and around the world to explain away, an undeniable public monument to Putin’s astounding failure.  The truth is enormous, visible even from afar, and death on the scale that the Russian Army is experiencing just across a border where many Russians have friends and family cannot be hidden by Putin from his people forever: Russia is not North Korea, its people not North Koreans.

As more and more Russians take in parts of the horrific picture, they will realize how totally they have been gaslit, how pathetically their army has performed under the leadership of a man so desperate to project strength that he literally rides around shirtless on a horse to pose for photos for public consumption.

The key psychological component here is that the foundation of Putin’s regime rests on the idea of restoring Russian strength.  So when the Russian people realize how totally degraded the Russian Armed Forces are after two decades of Putin’s leadership, only able to beat up on Georgia and Syria and utterly humiliated by its first real challenge under Putin’s Potemkin regime in a war with far smaller and far weaker Ukraine—which Russia has always regarded as a little brother, a former vassal of Russia in recent centuries—and understand that thousands of their boys have been needlessly slaughtered in a needless war as Russia hits its economic nadir and apex of isolation under well-deserved historic sanctions, there is going to be massive public outrage.

For Putin’s whole bargain with his people was “Give me your fledgling democracy to discard and I will raise you up and deliver you from the pit of Boris Yeltsin’s humiliated Russia,” yet Russia finds itself now—after only a matter of days into Putin’s absurd war—precisely where Putin promised to move it away from: the weak laughingstock status of the Yeltsin years, not respected, just tolerated because of its nuclear weapons and natural resources.

As more and more Russians realize this, Russians overall will realize that the bargain it struck with Putin repeatedly over the years is null and void, that they owe him no allegiance or support since the little man delivered (after some stability) mainly illusions and repression: the weakness of the Russian military, state, and international standing has now been exposed in a matter of mere days to the whole world as the Ukrainian people kick the Russian Army’s ass, the U.S.-led international order roars into action to show how defenseless the main institutions of Russian daily and economic life are rendered if America and its allies will them to be so, and the world overall isolates Russia as a pariah as no top-tier state has ever been isolated before. 

This last point bears some spelling out: Germany, Japan, and Italy had each other and numerous vassals during World War II.  Today, Russia could only muster the support of four other pariahs—Belarus (essentially its puppet), Syria (its mass-murdering client-state), the Stalinist/Maoist relic of North Korea, and basket-case Eritrea in a historic 141-5 vote at the United Nations condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (China, Russia’s supposed new “best friend,” wanted no part in the historical record of being seen to be emphatically on Russia’s side here, settling for a cowardly pathetic abstention, a choice shared by 34 others).

According to a major CNN poll conducted shortly before Putin launched his full Ukraine war, when asked “Would it be right for Russia to use military force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO,” half of Russians said “Yes,” one-quarter “No,” one-quarter “Don’t know;” if the war was framed as one “to ‘reunite Russia and Ukraine,’” that support dropped to only 36% “Yes,” “No” rising to a plurality of 43%, with 21% as “Don’t know.”

It is remarkable that the numbers for war are not higher when one considers the insane media atmosphere inside Russia and how it trickles down throughout public life in Russia.  It is a constant Orwellian bombardment of an alternate universe, one where Russia is a perpetual victim fighting against the whole world.  Ukrainians with relatives and friends in Russia (as well as the pro-Russian separatist parts of Ukraine’s Donbas and a very Russian Crimea controlled by Russia since that region’s 2014 invasion and annexation) are even having inane conversations with these brainwashed relatives and friends, those relatives and friends telling the dismayed Ukrainians laughable fictions about the reality of the war.  So strong is the pull of Kremlin propaganda that these wayward friends and relatives believe fantasy over their own blood as they dare to lecture on the invasion to those actually living through the bombs and shells of the invasion.  Much like America’s Trumpist Capitol insurrectionists in the U.S. believe in an alternate reality bellowed out by Fox News and its ilk, so, too, does Putin’s base in Russia (and the few Ukrainian regions with high-proportions of Putin-loyalists) loyally and enthusiastically consume Russian state-run television networks’ non-stop barrage of the world according to Putin (and it is no coincidence that the American rightist and Kremlin media ecospheres have tremendous overlap, as I have noted in detail before).

As a result, most Russians actually get their news from state-run media, so most Russians, then, simply do not have an accurate understanding of what is currently happening in Ukraine and believe as fact many absolute falsehoods while rejecting actual facts.  Because of the relentless propaganda, lies, and straight-up gaslighting that is the media and government apparatchik public landscape in Russia, they think that this has been a limited humanitarian peacekeeping operation mostly in the Donbas area of Ukraine with few Russian casualties. 

But there are others in Russia who see past the propaganda and disinformation.  And the brittle reality of the Kremlin’s fake news operations can come crashing down like a house of cards in the face of hard realities, none more likely to cause this than thousands of dead Russian soldiers and their enraged families.

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, YouTube) August 27, 2020

Author’s note: I wrote most of this in April and May, originally as part of my much longer coronavirus deep-dive, but held off on publishing this part in the hopes that I could publish it with a major outlet, making some edits and additions in the meantime, but I do not want to wait any longer.  So, if you find value in my policy proposal here, please do share profusely!

Winter Is Coming.

—House words of House Stark, in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones (1996)

SILVER SPRING—These past few months, the United States has more and more resembled a failed state (to borrow George Packer’s phrase and Anne Applebaum’s sentiments as expressed in The Atlantic) in various ways to varying degrees as it has produced one of the least effective coronavirus pandemic responses of any nation on earth, as the below chart makes clear:

I have discussed that chart in my late-May deep-dive, big-picture exploration of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic and its implications, one in which I also pointed out both that the coronavirus pandemic poses a number of dire threats that we are simply ill-suited to handle and that this is the situation, in part due to our overall structural, societal, even cultural inability to effectively confront unconventional and asymmetric threats for much of our history.

Yet as Modern War Institute (MWI) nonresident fellow Max Brooks noted in a Foreign Policy piece, we are not helpless against the threats presented by coronavirus.  These threats do not have to mean our defeat, which “the world can stop…  And nobody has to develop a whole new weapons system to do it.  Unlike all other means of war, where new inventions require counterinventions for protection, from bulletproof vests to anti-tank missiles, all we have to do is change our thinking.  All we have to do is see public health as national security” and “strengthen…cooperation with global health networks.”

Along these lines, in a mid-April webcast conversation with Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden said “I really think we should be thinking about having a new office, a new Cabinet office, on pandemics in the United States,” and this is what I had been thinking, too, in preceding months while I had been working on this piece and my earlier coronavirus work.

Before the next big biothreat hits us—be it a natural pandemic or one resulting from biowarfare or bioterrorism—I propose the creation of a presidential-Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR), with its Secretary a top-tier official on the National Security Council (NSC) appointed to a ten-year term much like the FBI director to ensure a higher degree of continuity, signal the position’s non-partisan nature, and keep the department less exposed to political ups-and-downs.  If 9/11 saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a major part of our national response, this far deadlier coronavirus pandemic can see the creation of DPPR as a response.

DPPR would be a civilian-led joint civilian-military agency, designed to coordinate a national civilian and military response in the event of a pandemic, something of a mini-Pentagon for pandemics but with a higher proportion of medical and logistics experts than anything else but also with strong legal components to navigate the various local, state, and federal legal structures a pandemic would touch, one that would work closely with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other agencies but still remain independent.

I. The Army Pandemic Corps

Involving the military is essential.  For one thing, because of distinct and clear resourcing, cultural, and structural reasons, the military has a high level of discipline and efficiency relative to civilian agencies, is able to move large numbers of people and equipment with more ease, and can act more swiftly overall.  In contrast, civilian planners and capacities have failed and are still failing spectacularly during this coronavirus pandemic, and a huge portion of America’s coronavirus response has come down to an ad hoc approach, only adding to the confusion and chaos.  As Gen. Russel Honoré (who helped lead America’s response in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) explained about our current pandemic, the main choices for logistics are between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, a civilian agency under the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS) and the military.  But, as he also explained, FEMA is designed to handle one or several localized emergencies at once, not a full-fledged national one; it simply does not have the capacity to run as the point organization for this pandemic.  Instead of needing to create an entirely new civilian apparatus that can handle a national pandemic or slapping together disparate agencies not used to working closely together, building upon existing military structures that already have far more capacity than any civilian apparatus makes much more sense.  And, as will be demonstrated below, there are so many other ways that a large military role further enhances both preparedness and response for pandemics.  And yet, the military in its current state would have a tough time taking over pandemic operations, navigating unfamiliar state and local legal jurisdictions.  Expanding the military with a new Army Pandemic Corps, as described below, will address these issues and put DPPR, including the Corps, in a position to be the best possible entity to handle pandemic preparedness and response.

The DPPR’s main logistical deputy would be a new four-star Army general officer, officially a liaison reporting primarily to the Secretary of Defense as part of the Army and the Department of Defense (DOD) in non-pandemic times and but whose main deference and primary reporting line would switch to the Secretary of DPPR in pandemic times.  This logistics-specialized general would command a single new Army corps of pandemic response professionals—military personnel who specialize in logistics, transport, maintenance, medicine, and protective gear—that would be formally commanded by this four-star general as part of the Army and Pentagon command structure during non-pandemic times, during which it would focus on preparation and training.  But when a pandemic is upon us, the corps would be handed along with its four-star general to the command of the DPPR secretary as a temporarily-formal part of that agency.  Keeping the corps under the same four-star general but switching his position from the Pentagon pre-pandemic to the DPPR to deal with a pandemic ensures a proper balance between continuity and flexibility, both of which have been lacking in our current pandemic leadership.  The switch would be relatively smooth, too, since both the commander and the Corps itself will have spent much of the non-pandemic time liaising with all the relevant actors.  This general would need to be approved by both the Defense and DPPR secretaries and would clearly understand his dual roles, specifically when one supersedes the other.

A large portion of the Corps who would be full-time active-duty military and those who would be reservists would not be allowed to have civilian roles as first-responders or needed medical staff elsewhere (as many in the military currently do), thus avoiding the issues of a callup cannibalizing crucial local response staff as would be the case with call-ups of the National Guard, a problem discussed by Mississippi National Guard Maj. Dennis Bittle in an MWI piece.  The U.S. already has a shortage of doctors and nurses, having to import many from foreign countries.  This Army Pandemic Corps could provide generous incentives to make its positions attractive—including paying for the college and advanced degrees of those who want to bindingly commit to serving in the Corps for a certain number of years—thereby serving as an incubator for increasing our overall civilian healthcare workforce, allowing those who eventually leave the Corps to fill important roles in the U.S. healthcare system.  When coronavirus subsides, the new normal will require far more healthcare workers and this Corps is an excellent way to facilitate this growth.

During non-pandemic times, Corps soldiers can supplement existing civilian and non-Corps military teams in emergencies in ways that do not lead to dependence or hamper their ability to be rapidly deployed for a pandemic.  And those with enough experience can help train relevant local and state personnel, too.  Teams of the Corps can also shadow other healthcare workers as well as relevant workers in other fields both in the U.S. and abroad to learn even more.  They can also significantly supplement U.S. foreign aid and assistance to organizations like the United Nations (including the WHO), NATO, and the African Union.  Such work will not only build goodwill among allies and friends, it will also help forge new relationships, improve America’s image abroad, and help America to gain valuable experience from medical and logistical situations that our personnel would not otherwise gain.  Such an approach was taken by the Obama Administration in sending teams from the Army and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—a main agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, (HHS)—to West Africa to assist with fighting a major Ebola outbreak there, a rapid, proactive response that helped to prevent a much larger outbreak even as the deadly disease still ended up spreading to ten countries on three continents.

As Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky remarked in a mid-May op-ed extolling the value of international cooperation in the coronavirus era, “in early April, we sent some of our doctors to Italy.  Their work treating patients there has helped us to learn lessons about the spread of the disease that are now informing our own quarantine procedures and in turn, helping to save lives here.”  Just imagine if we had had thousands of members of the Corps ready to deploy in northern Italy when Lombardy was put on lockdown on March 8: not only could we have saved lives there, we would have learned valuable firsthand lessons and deepened our experience with COVID-19 before it slammed the U.S., saving American lives, too.  As it actually played out, Italy had to request assistance from the U.S. rather than the U.S. taking a leading, proactive role.

From such cooperation and experiences at home and abroad, members of the Corps can amass and pass on institutional knowledge that will enhance local, state, national, and international bodies of knowledge.  The Corps can play a leading global role in research, evaluation, and dissemination of findings as well as in running simulations with a variety of actors.  Medical “wargames” should be a major priority along with military wargames, and few institutions would be as well-suited for this as America’s new Army Pandemic Corps.

The Corps would also greatly facilitate civil-military cooperation. In non-pandemic times, the Corps could take input from various relevant bodies at all levels as part of the Army with the Army understanding that the Corp’s mission under Army control is primarily one of learning, bridging, and supplementation.  In times of military pressure, this ensures we have a significant boost to military medical and logistical operations, but, as in the Corps’s supplementary civilian-support operations, without creating dependency so that rapid deployment for pandemic operations is still possible without compromising normal military operations.

Writing for the U.S. Naval Institute, Commander of NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command Naples, Italy, U.S. Adm. James Foggo—who has been dealing with COVD-19 in Italy—calls germs the seventh domain of warfare.  In his piece, he notes that “logistics are the sixth domain of warfare, the Achilles heel of any military force.  When fighting pandemics, the logistical capabilities of the force are paramount.”  He also notes that “confronting a pandemic requires an all-hands approach—we must work with our interagency and host-nation partners to leverage mutual strengths to stem the spread of the virus, while offering our support to those in need. Yet we must be mindful of our operational readiness, retaining the ability to respond immediately if challenged in another domain of warfare.”  Some of his top takeaways from his experience as a commander in Italy facing coronavirus are that, to better face biothreats (including pandemics), we must protect our forces, ensure continuity of operations, build and preserve strong relationships with allies and partners, elevate experts, fuse with the other domains of warfare, prioritize humanitarian intervention early, and train and wargame for biothreats intensely and often.  The Army Pandemic Corps, as I have proposed it, would specifically and significantly advance all these priorities and more.

And yet, as Dr. Jacob Stoil and Army Maj. Bethany Landeck point out in an additional MWI article, it has been decades since the U.S. military included large-scale epidemic response in its operations, as was the case in major wars of the past.  Looking at the current state of the military in yet another MWI piece titled “The Military Is Not the Nation’s Emergency Room Doctor,” U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies Director Al Mauroni noted the military should be ready to support civilian efforts in a pandemic, but not to take them over.  The Corps will restore and elevate the past role discussed in the former and keep things in the spirit of the latter by keeping the military in a support role and civilians in the top leadership roles.  The Corps will also very much help advance needed reform within the military by addressing problems that the pandemic has exposed, shortcomings highlighted by Army Reserve Capt. James Long in still another MWI piece discussing “our lack of preparation, in the form of adaptive digital networks and robust connective tissue with civilian partners.”  While the civilian apparatuses have in many ways failed us during this pandemic and the military did not have a clear, robust role to play when it could have made a clear, robust difference, DPPR with a new Army Pandemic Corps at its heart addresses both of these crucial gaps.

II. CDC and FEMA Reorganization

The head of the CDC would simultaneously occupy a deputy secretary position within the DPPR that would function as the main liaison between HHS/CDC and DPPR, but in times of pandemics would, along with the CDC itself, report primarily to DPPR, switching formally from HHS to DPPR much like the general and his Pandemic Corps.  This would ensure that HHS and DPPR have strong coordination both before and during a pandemic and give the appropriate command and departmental emphasis when necessary.  DPPR would also have its own infectious disease intelligence desk, to coordinate with staff at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (a small portion of whom would be transferred to DPPR’s desk upon its creation to jumpstart it), American medical infectious disease teams, the WHO, and global experts to track and identify pandemic threats.  In short, the CDC’s pandemic-related work would carry on as normal but with a boost and different reporting lines during a pandemic.

DDPR would also have lead jurisdiction when it came to related the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, normally under DHS) operations for the duration of the pandemic.  However, unlike the CDC and Pandemic Corps, all of FEMA would not be part of the switch.  Like his CDC and Pandemic Corps counterparts, the FEMA Administrator would during non-pandemic times have a dual liaising role as a deputy secretary of DPPR, but he would stay reporting to DHS both then and during a pandemic.  The Secretary of DPPR during a pandemic would automatically be authorized to take all FEMA personnel working on pandemic operations, automatically being able to allocate a certain portion of all FEMA field personnel and the support staff for those field teams directly to his DPPR, with them reporting directly to his office.  Beyond that specified portion, if the DPPR secretary feels he will need more FEMA resources, that can be worked out by reaching agreement with the head of FEMA or, failing that, the president would mediate and decide.  This ensures that FEMA would have considerable capacity to deal with non-pandemic emergencies even during a pandemic, allowing flexibility and for staffing levels be based on the bigger picture, while still empowering DPPR to lead on pandemic matters.

III. Keeping DPPR from Being Politicized in a Hyperpartisan Era

U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Wonny Kim notes for MWI the failure of communications tactics and strategy, and, without a doubt, politicization of public statements on the pandemic at the highest levels of government—up to and including dangerous disinformation and misinformation on vital health information (and on things as simple as wearing a mask and social distancing)—is a regular feature of this failure in communication.  Thus, in order to prevent politicization of information related to pandemics and preparedness, DPPR must regularly brief—in times of pandemics and in non-pandemic times—not only the White House, but all major intelligence agency heads, top Cabinet officials,  as well as top relevant leadership of both parties in Congress, including of key committees, at regular intervals.  All governors of U.S. States and Territories and their attorneys general would also be briefed along with all nine Supreme Court Justices, the latter in case there would be legal challenges between the Executive and Legislative Branches over DPPR information dissemination, giving the Supreme Court the context to rule quickly on those disputes.  All non-sensitive information will be made publicly available and the DPPR secretary will also brief the media regularly.  If certain information is felt by the White House—specifically the president and a majority of the Principals Committee of the NSC—to need to be kept from the public and maintained as secret because of issues of national security and/or protecting intelligence gathering assets and methods, the highest congressional leadership from both parties must also be briefed in full on these issues of secrecy along with the nine Supreme Court Justices to, as stated before, provide the justices proper context should disputes arise.  Such disputes can be initiated by congressional leaders—the top leader of either party in either the House or Senate would be enough to trigger a formal challenge—and the Supreme Court would exclusively handle and fast-track these disputes to avoid delays during a pandemic.  In short, all three branches have potential major roles in deciding what information is kept from the public and lawmakers overall, helping to keep information from being used or withheld for partisan political purposes.

IV. DPPR: Improving Preparedness and Response at All Levels, Minimizing Politics

At the state and local levels, we have seen vast gulfs in competency from one state to another and within the federal government during this coronavirus response.  By having DPPR preplan and coordinate with Congress, other parts of the federal government, and with states and localities before the next pandemic, our entire society will better prepared.  This way, DPPR insulates the nation from poor leadership at multiple governmental levels.  Relieving governors and mayors of the need to do as much planning as we have seen them have to scramble do on their own (see Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s twenty-two-day odyssey to get coronavirus tests from South Korea and keep them from being confiscated by the Trump Administration) in favor of knowing they can tap into plans, logistics networks, and coordination already well-laid out in advance will then free up local leaders and resources to focus on aspects of disaster management more uniquely suited to their unique capabilities (e.g., supporting local officials, assuring the public), meaning the overall response on the levels most felt by actual citizens will be that much more effective.  And local staff will be better trained and prepared since DPPR personnel will be dedicated liaisons and trainers in non-pandemic times, with those relationships developed from all the DPPR’s non-pandemic period activities paying massive dividends on multiple levels.

Conclusion: A Bold, New Cabinet Department and a Bold Reorganization for an Existential Threat

In the end, DPPR represents what is ideal in times of dire threat: vast, temporarily, and transparently concentrated power allocated in a preplanned way with all relevant actors understanding their roles and responsibilities and having been included in the preplanning.  Ad hoc responses can be great, but they depend greatly on the quality of individual leaders and can fail just as often.  Leadership will always matter, but setting up the DPPR in the manner described above will not only limit the damage poor leadership can do by providing a clear institutional framework that can relieve top leadership of the need to be involved in so many details, it will allow top leaders to focus on calming the people of the nation, international coordination and outreach to other heads of state and major international bodies, and recovery and post-recovery planning while the actual day-to-day disaster management and logistics are left to the professionals best suited to handle them, operations we are seeing have been currently neglected and mismanaged at the top federal levels to disastrous effect.  Instead of arguing and debating different agency plans and different ideas and philosophies for crucial lower-level wonky decisions, instead of having to introduce personnel to each other and form working groups or task forces in an ad hoc manner, which, in this case, has produced confusion more than anything else and failed to deliver adequate results, we can have a clear, singular road map for general operations and overall approaches, a road map that minimizes infighting, confusion, uncertainty, and dependence on individual political leaders’ competence.

While there is certainly possibility for confusion and head-butting with this more complex structure and roles for the Army Pandemic Corps, the CDC, and FEMA, with proper leadership, better coordination and more effective, robust operations should result, especially compared to the current ad hoc, dysfunctional coronavirus response.  Even allowing for new potential issues, the net effect is of these overlapping relationships is still very likely to be forcing a greater level cooperation and coordination than currently exists, as DPPR and especially the Pentagon, CDC, and FEMA—but also HHS, DHS, and DOJ—would need to be intimate partners in planning and executing policy.  In essence, just as DHS became an umbrella agency that involved a reorganization of many agencies after 9/11, DPPR would function both as a permanent planning and coordination agency and specialized, temporary DHS for pandemics to be activated with a higher level of authority and responsibility, from planning and coordination in one state to execution in another.  If this sound superfluous, consider that the United Nations has a whole major office within its Secretariat—the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)—that focuses on running complex humanitarian efforts and maintains many relationships before and after such efforts rather than allow for an ad-hoc response for each humanitarian disaster.

In fact, history shows there is no major reason to ipso facto oppose complex or joint civil and military overlap or commands.  Going back to the ancient Roman Republic, one could argue that one of the main reasons Rome’s (surprisingly) democratic republic—upon which the American Founding Fathers based our own republic—was able to govern its expanding empire so successfully for so long before the rise of the autocratic emperors was its ability to both divide and expand creatively both the wielding and implementation of executive authority (imperium) within its flexible yet strong constitutional framework, especially in its combination of civil and military authority abroad in ways that helped avoid conflict between the two without overwhelming any one officer-holder or office.  Here we would think less of the of rarely utilized office of dictator for the most extreme of emergencies, which essentially suspended the normal constitutional order and invested overwhelming power in one man, and more of the special office of proconsul (pro consule), a special version of the authority of the annually elected top normal office-holders (a pair of consuls, on which the American presidency is based).  Proconsuls could still be given extraordinary powers but over a limited sphere of affairs and for a limited time.  Thus far avoiding the eventual giant excesses of imperium that helped bring down ancient Rome’s republic, America has attempted something in this Roman tradition on notable occasions.  At the dawn of the twentieth century, we have (then-future President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) William Howard Taft as a civilian governor being given proconsularesque authority by President William McKinley over U.S. civil and military authorities in the newly acquired Philippines after the Spanish-American War.  Yet a certain vagueness, political disputes, McKinley’s assassination, his successor Theodore Roosevelt’s reluctance to be involved, and U.S. military commanders’ resistance to civil control of the military outside the president exercising it himself (and even then…) meant the actual application of this idea was limited, but when it was, the largely benevolent Taft mostly improved the situation in the Philippines in spite of military leaders’ sometimes-tendency to make things worse with harsh overzealousness there.  Other notable American pronconsular moments include Reconstruction after the Civil War and Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan after World War II, but there are numerous examples of American variations on the Roman proconsular model over many years up through our recent overseas wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and even Gen. Honoré in New Orleans after Katrina (plus, America is hardly alone in utilizing this model).  Examples of different types of American civil-military overlaps involve the U.S. Army’s Civil Affairs branch (including its soldiers serving as advisors for United Nations and NATO missions) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which from some of the earliest days of United States history through the present has been and is still massively engaged in civilian projects affecting large portions of the American population.

So the idea of temporarily having a military corps under civilian control should not be thought of as too revolutionary: after all, all American military forces serve under the civilian U.S. President, civilian Secretary of Defense, and some other combination of civilian (deputy) secretaries overseeing the various branches of the armed forces, a principle of civilian control enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.  Also enshrined in the document is the idea of temporary measures to meet extraordinary challenges, such as the suspension of habeas corpus in Article I Section 9, and plenty of modern-era laws have allowed for temporary unorthodox measures, from the 1950 Defense Production Act to far more typical presidential– and state-level disaster declarations, which have seen unprecedented application during this coronavirus pandemic but which are already largely being lifted (though the lifting seems frighteningly premature).

But moving in this general direction of more concentrated civilian authority over biodefense is what some of the most notable experts have already articulated.  A major working group meeting on biodefense that convened in 2014-2015—one that involved many senior former and current government officials from both major political parties as well as numerous experts in various fields—produced a landmark report late in 2015, A National Blueprint for Biodefense: Leadership and Major Reform Needed to Optimize Efforts, and among its top recommendations was to institutionalize, centralize, and prioritize biodefense at the very highest levels of government.  The creation of DPPR as a Cabinet-level agency does just that.

While DPPR’s creation along the lines described would certainly be a shakeup of the existing order and way of doing things, as Army Lt. Col. ML Cavanaugh notes in his MWI piece on coronavirus-era military strategy:

Organizations are loath to try new things, take on new projects, and risk new avenues of approach.  Only when real-world crises confront us do we really and ruthlessly set priorities and change our behavior accordingly.  This is rare.  Very rare.

COVID-19 is already permitting ideas to go forth that might have seemed absurd just months ago.  This is how the unthinkable gives birth to the impossible.

King Abdullah II of Jordan expressed similar sentiment in a late-April op-ed, that

the moments of unity inspired by [major global] events—and the financial crises and natural disasters we’ve also faced over the years—have never lasted long enough to push us to fundamentally rethink the systems we have in place. More often than not, our responses have done little more than plug holes, falling far short of what could be achieved with modern technology.

…Many are optimistic we will simply rebuild after this pandemic. But rebuilding is not enough. We should focus instead on creating something new, something better.

…That means recalibrating our world and its systems.

He could not be more right.  And since his government in Jordan has swiftly enacted far more successful and competent national coronavirus measures than we did (and far earlier)—including robust targeted and random testing—perhaps we should heed his advice even more so.

In the end, we can and should be better prepared for the next pandemic, and there will be one.  Whether or not we will adapt, there is a good chance our enemies will, with the COVID-19 devastation serving as a kind of inspiration we wish did not exist, nor occur to the human mind.  Let our minds take truly inspiring direction from this crisis, inspiration that accepts major and creative top-level reform as urgent and necessary.

Whether coming from nature herself, a foreign enemy government, or terrorists, the next bioassault as powerful as or even worse than the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic will take a nontraditional, unconventional reform of our national biodefense structures and approaches in order for us to be properly prepared to face it.  This Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response exponentially improves the odds that we will be, regardless of who is in the White House.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 11, 2020 (see related articles: August 20, 2020: I Was Wrong about Harris. Why I Changed My Mind and How She Won Me Over and August 8, 2020: Based on Experience, Susan Rice Is Easily—by Far—the Best Choice for VP for Biden (Sorry Harris Fans, that Includes Kamala))

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—In my earlier recent piece comparing the careers of California Senator Kamala Harris and former Obama Administration National Security Advisor and United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, I noted that I have been watching and really enjoying ESPN’s The Last Dance (the documentary series about Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls’s championship teams, especially their final championship run).  I noted that there are two main facets as to how a player gets selected for a team and how they perform: the first facet is the stats: the numbers that would be a on a player’s trading card; that is what I looked at in that last piece as far as Harris and Rice.  In this piece, I want to look at some of the intangibles, the second facet: the stuff that you would not get by looking at a trading card, but which speak more to personality and traits that are more about how you operate or fit on a team in ways that numbers cannot display.  And a lot of these intangibles can come across in informed first impressions voters get from seeing each for the first time.

First Impressions

I will begin first by just explaining how I remember being introduced and familiar with both Rice and Harris.

Rice

With Rice, I do not really remember anything specific.  I did not watch or read a lot of news in the 1990s in middle school or high school.  I was super busy in both: lots of activities (music, sports) and taking advanced classes throughout.  I also went to a fairly strict boarding school for high school (shout out to Canterbury), where TV-watching was quite limited (and when we had freedom to watch TV in the common room, it was usually sports and MTV that the other kids had on; I never, ever recall seeing the news on in the dorms.  If I had put the news on, I probably would have been physically driven out of the dorms) and where I was busy enough that I did not get to read the news too often, either.

I still followed politics a bit somehow in high school, but I can say that I have no recollection that I ever heard of or even saw Susan Rice when she was with the Clinton Administration or in the time that followed before she was with the Obama campaign.  I do not have any recollection of becoming aware of her existence during the 2008 election either, though perhaps I saw her on TV or read an article or few that mentioned her.  I do know that I became aware of her as our Ambassador to the United Nations.  I recall nothing specific between the first term and the Benghazi “scandal,” other than a few times she would have been speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the UN and I am sure I saw her other times in clips of other UN deliberations as well as press conferences, interviews, and in articles.  Each time, I remember seeing her calm, composed, knowledgeable, competent, sharp, and articulate, a solid representation of America to the world and a competent National Security Advisor, one of the only black women in American history to reach such heights in government and on the world stage representing America.  Until recently, I only had a vague—I had never digested her in depth or at length—but strongly positive impression of her, with no complaints that I can recollect; this was, in part, because I researched the Benghazi situation deeply in advance of Clinton’s marathon Congressional testimony of October, 2015, and realized that entire case against Hillary Clinton (and, by default, Susan Rice) in terms of the Benghazi fiasco, was, as I noted at the time, a cynical, disgusting, disingenuous, dishonest, witch hunt-like, purely political attempt to damage Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration before the 2016 election (check out my in-depth article examining this hearing for a dismantling of all the specious, misleading, and/or untruthful arguments put out by Republicans).  The first experience I ever had that really focused on Rice was watching while working out in the fall of 2019 an interview of her by Walter Isaacson for Amanpour and Company on the event of the release of her memoir.  I was incredibly impressed with her, and have since paid more attention to her and her interviews and tweets since her book tour started, and her public interactions have consistently been at a level that keeps impressing me at a very high level.

Harris

When it came to Harris, my introduction to her was very much at a time when I was glued into politics as a freelance reporter who was then focusing much more on American politics than I had previously, and, she was also being built up as a star; for these reasons, I ended up paying way more attention to her when I first came across her than I did with Rice.  I was still living in the Middle East, but had found, most disappointingly and quite sadly, that Trump and the U.S. election cycle giving me much more opportunity and paid way better than covering Syrian refugees, ISIS, Iraq, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  I had been closely following the whole Trump-Russia saga, in particular, since July, 2016.  Thus, when there was a highly-anticipated hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee with key figures from the intelligence and law enforcement community, including Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had only weeks earlier appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia, Russian election interference, and any possible collusion between people around Trump with the Russian government or its intermediaries, I was highly interested. 

One of the Democratic senators taking part in the hearing was the newly-elected Kamala Harris from California.  Her win in 2016 was certainly met with some excitement, the second black woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate and the first South-Asian (her father was black and her mother was Indian).

Full disclosure: I grew up near New York, and we East Coasters pay little attention to California politics.  So, I barely paid attention to her in the 2016 campaign, which was an extremely busy time for me when I was trying to cover the primaries and Clinton vs. Trump.  Thus, I was pretty excited about this hearing: in many ways, it would be Harris’s biggest stage yet, her introduction to the national scene, and it was certainly her introduction to me.  I remember hearing a lot of hype about how she could be the next Obama, presidential material, and the future of the party, so I was expecting to be mightily impressed and looking forward to seeing one of our brightest new stars of my left on the national stage in action.

Now, full disclosure: before you read my take on what transpired, you should know I watched the entire hearing live and closely (full video and transcript).  I was deeply interested in all the proceedings and was at least somewhat, sometimes very, familiar with the issues being discussed.  And I have to say that from the very beginning of her allotted time (video beginning with that here) during the hearing, I was shocked at how obnoxious, grating, and disappointing I found her performance to be.  From the very beginning, she was rude and grandstandy, first very briefly to Admiral Mike Rogers, cutting him off after asking him a question so that he asked, respectfully, “Senator, if you could, could I get to respond, please, ma’am?” He then tried to continue but she interrupted him again.  “No, sir. No, no.”

It looked like Harris was going to act like a Big Name prosecutor taking on a Hostile Witness, and almost immediately, she switched to question Rosenstein with the bulk of her time, confirming this impression with him, too.  She constantly interrupted him and cut him off, was rude and hostile, not yelling and haranguing like maniac and staunch Trump apparatchik Jim Jordan might in the House, not even raising her voice to the less-annoying-than-Jim Jordan-level of Republican Ted Cruz in the saucer-cooling Senate, but still clearly determined to stand out, show that she was being “tough,” demonstrate her stern courtroom prosecutorial demeanor, and make a name for herself with a figure like Rosenstein very much in the headlines.  And her whole premise was to act like she was leading an effort to protect Mueller from Trump Administration interference or from even being sacked to protect the president, citing a precedent where a previous Attorney General (AG) overseeing an independent, specially-appointed inquiry had pledged in writing to respect the independence of the investigation.  But in that case, the appointed head of the inquiry was a sitting U.S. Attorney that could be fired by the president, so there was a potential conflict in that he normally reported as a Department of Justice employee to the AG and served at the pleasure of the president.  In this case, Mueller was a retired and private citizen who was not part of the Department of Justice and did not have that conflict or reporting issues and could not be fired by the president and under law could only be fired under special, non-political, non-arbitrary circumstances by the top Department of Justice official overseeing the investigation (Rosenstein, because AG Jeff Sessions had recused himself).   Between that and the regulations of the particular law governing Mueller’s appointment—regulations that that did not apply to the precedent Harris was citing—Harris’s point was moot and so were her attempts to get Rosenstein, in a quite a badgering (do not worry, I apply that term often for male congressman) and hostile manner, to commit to a statement in writing like the one she cited earlier but that did not apply under circumstances that were quite different in relation to Harris’s line of questioning.

Rosenstein was very respectfully trying to explain this to Harris, but Harris repeatedly cut him off and continued to demand a simple answer to a complex question.  Sen. John McCain, who stood up more to Trump and Republican malfeasance and better than any other Republican senator during the Trump Administration, came to the rescue of Rosenstein, asking for Harris to stop interrupting the witness and to let him answer the question.  The Republican Chairman of the Committee, Senator Richard Burr, would join in, stopping Harris after she challenged even Burr him from repeating the same question in a hostile manner and permitting Rosenstein to make the above explanation about why a simple “yes” or “no” did not as answer given the different circumstances.

And by hostile, I mean hostile; again, I watched the entire over two-and-a-half-hours-long hearing, and nobody else acted in any way near the manner of Harris.  Only her’; everyone else—Democrat and Republican alike—was polite to the witnesses, did not repeatedly cut them off, used a respectful, non-badgering tone, and did not feel the need to be adversarial even though they found a great many things to be frustrating and concerning, but Harris adopted this adversarial tone from her very first question to the admiral and continued using it until her time was up.

There are two other reasons why this is incredibly obnoxious: despite pressure from the president to stop Mueller, Rosenstein had defended Mueller’s probe (it was Rosenstein who became alarmed enough at Trump’s behavior that he was the one who decided to appoint a special counsel to investigate Trump, and it was also Rosenstein he who chose Mueller) and had given Mueller a lot of freedom, independence, and support.  Rosenstein is far from perfect and has had some problematic aspects of his time as Deputy AG ands since, but at this point he has been very much on the right side by deciding to appoint a special counsel, Mueller, and working to keep the integrity of Mueller’s investigation secure amidst considerable pressure to compromise it by Trump, Republicans, and right-wing media.  The other reason this is incredibly obnoxious is that I am certain Kamala Harris knew the law (she is an accomplished prosecutor and served as California’s Attorney General) and knew that her point was largely moot, not appropriate, and not fair to Rosenstein.  But she was determined to establish herself as a tough newcomer, to get attention, to rise above all her peers during her first major public hearing.  She was trying to trap both the admiral and especially Rosenstein into “gotchya” questions, embarrassing them and pushing them into a seemingly hypocritical trap to make the witness look like he hiding something unnecessarily in the case of the admiral and that he was not willing to stand up for the independence and integrity of the Mueller probe in the case of Rosenstein (which by all accounts up to that point and many beyond, he had).  So Harris knew she did not need to be overly concerned over Rosenstein at that point; she knew her clever attempt to prosecutorally box Rosenstein in like he was a defendant on the witness stand back in California was not getting at the heart of any major issues with the Mueller probe, knew that her actions were designed to generate a soundbite that would hopefully go viral, and knew she was engaging in self-promotion that was a subtle attack on the integrity of both Rosenstein and Admiral Rogers over a moot point, designed to make her look like she was a tough prosecutor who was taking a version of Law and Order to Washington.  In an otherwise cordial hearing, her contentious exchanges would stand out and get her attention in a situation where most junior senators would not behave this way.  You could smell presidential aspirations on her from a mile away.  And if you think I am making this up, this is exactly how Maya Rudolph satirized Harris on Saturday Night Live: always looking to create a media moment that would go viral on the internet, designed to get her attention and often show her as a tough ready-for-primetime prosecutor, regardless of the level of substance behind what she was saying.

Yep, that was my introduction to Harris: a woman clearly of great intellect, substance, and capability that chose to engage in grandstanding devoid of substance, misleading but guaranteed to get headlines.

I was deeply saddened; is this what the internet was doing to us, hollowing out our politics to be mostly hot air?  Was Harris going to use her office to be an effective legislator or focus on promoting herself in the media and on using her office to prepare a presidential run?  Would we be elevating the likes of Bernie Sanders whose “plans” were never in the realm of reality and whose central narratives and premises justifying his campaign were crafted on fantasy, thus pretty much dooming his campaign?  Were capable women of substance going to choose to play for meme and viral moments, hoping to base their campaigns on social media likes and shares?  Were these folks really going to be the future of the Party?

But the next day, it would get even worse, as Harris tried to capitalize on her events from the day before in an even more blatantly cynical attempt to create a viral, slogan-ready moment.  Because she had been interrupted by McCain and Burr—two men, two white men—there was an opportunity to frame their actions as sexist or even racist.  One thing is for certain: Warren’s viral “Nevertheless, she persisted” moment form just a few months earlier—when Republican male Senate colleagues had silenced Warren with a rarely used technicality regarding actions that “impute” fellow senators directly—was very much on Harris’s mind, and she clearly wanted to recreate that, especially the vibe of a woman standing up to powerful men.  It was almost like she could see Warren (whom I have been fairly critical of for various reasons) getting an edge over here for 2020 and she wanted to respond, and while Warren’s moment seemed relatively authentic, this would have a feel of being manufactured.  Harris’s plan was already implemented within two days of the hearing, with Harris was advertising stickers on Facebook with the words “courage not courtesy” you could get on her website—not on her Senate site, but kamalaharris.org (translation: she’s running.  Already.  In June, 2017).

Now, first off, there is a tremendous amount of sexism in the world, in America, in politics, in the Senate.  Of that, there is no doubt among rational, informed people.  And to be fair to Harris, it was smart politics.  Gimmicky as hell?  Cringingly forced and inauthentic?  Sure.  But definitely effective: most voters would not have watched the hearing.  Some—many—will have seen the clips of Harris and taken the image of her she wanted them to; most certainly would not have known much about Rosenstein or the special counsel regulations, and she was betting on that.  She had created her viral moment, though it would pale in impact and reach to Warren’s, and, I suspect, fell far short of what she was hoping, but it certainly got the attention of the media, some outlets of which tried to make it a sequel to Warren’s big moment.

I have watched Harris plenty of times since then, and, at least until the 2020 campaign—another story possibly for another time—most of her performances were much better that what I saw at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.  I would be wrong if I did not admit that this first major impression she made was strong, and that it made me more likely to read calculated political gamesmanship into some of her actions—I would say fairly—but that did not stop me from seeing her as capable, formidable, one of the top rising stars on the left, and a top-tier contender for the 2020 nomination, one of the few I thought that could compete with Biden if he was to run.

Yet still, once of the reasons I love Biden is his authenticity and positioning of substance front and center throughout his career.  As for “courage not courtesy,” just ugh.  I have written about the devolution of our politics for years and it has been happening for years, but once thing that was fairly consistent for some time was that, unlike the more unruly House, the Senate was supposed to be an elevated form of politics less prone to theatrics, more prone to comity, civility, cooperation, and compromise, with less heated rhetoric and more substantive deliberations, more removed from the passions and the whims of the masses.  There is an old, unsubstantiated tradition that Washington told Jefferson that the Senate was like a “saucer” that could allow “our legislation to cool.”  In the words of James Madison in Federalist “No. 62,” the Senate would be less “subject to the infection of violent passions, or to the danger of combining in pursuit of unjust measures” than the House.  But these days, this distinction is decidedly weakened and weakening, and I am not for that.  Today is all about “populists” on both sides smashing tradition and norms and going around institutions and political colleagues “directly to the people,” whatever that means.  Think Bernie Sanders’s mobilizing millions of people to take to the streets as a governing philosophy.  Far worse, think about Trump’s calls on his supporters to take to the streets if things do not go well for him.  Harris’s theatrics were by far nowhere near the worst I have seen in the Senate, not even close to second worst (Hello, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton!), but they were another step in a decline that seriously worried me.  And Harris, clearly, cared little for such tradition if she felt she could blaze a trail for her advancement.

A reasonable case can be made that this is what is needed at this time, that Harris’s calculation is what is needed against the Republican and Trumpian threat.  I thought to myself, Harris might have what it takes to win in the Internet/Twitter age, perhaps even what is needed to take on Trump, and she would have my support against him, but I do not have to like it.  I do not have to like how she treated DAG Rosenstein and Admiral Rogers.  I not have to like the premeditation to stand out tonally in a setting when it just was not at all necessary.  I do not have to like the calculated attempt to prepare sloganeering stickers within days.

But that does not mean I can not like or support Harris.

Rooting for (vice presidential nominee) Harris’s Best Self

As I write this conclusion, news is breaking that Biden has picked Harris.  My preference would definitely have been for Susan Rice.  But I point out these issues I have with Harris (before or after her being picked) not to denigrate her, not to turn people against her.  Harris if anything responds to the atmosphere in the moment.  She could very likely be our next vice president.  She would have my support as VP and should have all our support, has mine as a candidate for VP, and deserves our respect for earning this pick on the part of Biden.

To an extent, some of the concerns I have about Harris are mollified by Biden’s confidence in her in selecting her.  At the same time, I am still publishing this not just because I had written most of it before the pick was announced, but because I hope these concerns I have will be shared by others in a way where we push Harris to be her best self, not the disappointing campaigner we saw in 2019 and much better than the performance I saw in the hearing from 2017 I discussed above.

I have 100% confidence that Harris is more than capable of taking the higher road.  Even though I argued recently that Rice had better experience to be a VP, Harris’s experience is still impressive and contains much substance, much to be proud of, and she is both a safer and probably a better bet politically.  It is a sad testament to our current politics that a woman of color so accomplished and so talented would feel the need to play to internet/meme culture so strongly, though Peter Beinart makes a good case defending her in The Atlantic that, like Obama, as a black trailblazer in politics she has had to play it safer, in that article’s case, with her actions on criminal justice in California, actions which have been heavily criticized.  I hope, now that she has bested all but one man to be the second survivor of the Democratic primaries, that she will feel less pressure, feel more freedom, and feel confident enough in her selection by Biden to run more on substance and less on style and seeking viral moments (not that those do not help, but that is my preference as one of her supporters and one who wants to see our politics reelevated).  I hope that, if Biden wins, she can learn from someone like Susan Rice on foreign and security policy, follow Biden’s lead, be a great governing partner, and set herself up to be an amazing president of her own years down the road. 

And that is in part up to us:  it is no longer the Democratic primaries, and a much more moderate, national crowd is her audience; as her supporters or on-the-fence-voters, it is, in part, up to us to telegraph what we want from her, so lets us demand her very best, not clamor for internet gimmicks and viral videos.  I know that my complaints here were mostly about her style and how she operated, but these “little” things, the way you pursue your goals, the norms you respect and those you break, the tenor and tone you set, set all matter… just look at Trump!

Even as I am writing this conclusion, my emotions changed a bit.  Even as someone who was rooting for Susan Rice, I am happy and pleased with Harris (whom I saw as a much better-qualified candidate than Warren, both for president and vice president), and I am genuinely proud of Harris and of her selection by my candidate Joe Biden and my Democratic Party, the historic first woman of color on a major party ticket.  It is sad because of our insane coronavirus pandemic response that we cannot have a live event with a huge crowd welcoming Kamala Harris on stage with Joe Biden: both deserved that, especially Harris.  But that lost moment is the least of the slights and challenges Harris will face going forward.  I am now rooting for Harris, and confident she can help Biden win and govern.  She is immeasurably better than Vice President Pence and even more so (obviously) than President Donald Trump.

The pressure is on, but I hope and am confident that Senator Kamala Harris will rise to the occasion.  We, the people behind her, can help by pushing to keep substance front and center in a campaign that will contain a historic amount of nonsense from Trump, Republicans, the right-wing media, and the Russians.  But together and, yes, with Kamala Harris’s help, we can ensure that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are sworn in on January 20^th, 2021.

See related previous article: Based on Experience, Susan Rice Is Easily—by Far—the Best Choice for VP for Biden (Sorry Harris Fans, that Includes Kamala)

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

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 8, 2020 (See Brian’s follow-up articles: August 20, 2020, I Was Wrong about Harris. Why I Changed My Mind and How She Won Me Over and August 11, 2020: Substance vs. Style as Biden Picks Harris over Rice)

WASHINGTON—There is no question the punditry’s Conventional Wisdom has California Senator Kamala Harris as “the favorite”, or front-runner, for Joe Biden’s vice-presidential sweepstakes. 

Besides Elizabeth Warren, it is hard to find any current sitting senator with more star power or who inspires more passion from supporters than she, the only other exception being Elizabeth Warren or, at the very least, out of any Democratic senator; Cory Booker sort of comes to mind, yet Harris polled so much higher than him in the primaries that that surely dampens that argument, as has the number of times she has been highlighted by the mainstream news media compared to him.  While few can compare to the likes of freshman House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Speaker Nancy Pelosi for Congressional publicity in the House (though Reps. Ilhan Omar, Ted Lieu, and Adam Schiff would get honorable mentions), the Senate just has a lot of older folks who simply come off as more boring.  On the right, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton are stars and good at getting lots of coverage and publicity, and while younger and engaging Cory Booker is helped a bit by his celebrity girlfriend Rosario Dawson, there just aren’t many senators that generate much excitement, quotable videos, or positive press coverage regularly aside from Warren.

However, there is a special climate in this time of a serious racial awakening in America in light of the mass groundswell behind the black lives matter movement in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd as well as other African-Americans and the massive protests and some rioting  that came in the wake of Floyd’s killing, events which unfolded of in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and worst economic crisis in America since the Great Depression.  And in this climate, we can pretty much count Warren out (and could even before indications are that Biden has narrowed his list down to two women of color, Sen. Harris and Susan Rice, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations and former National Security Advisor, both in the Obama Administration), as the spirit and mood of both the media elites and Party activists—along with at least the most vocal part of the Democratic electorate—seem to strongly prefer a non-white running mate.  Also, I won’t even get into these in detail here, but there are other clear reasons for Biden not to pick Warren that range from her narrow ideological appeal (the absurdity that somehow she would bring in lots of Bernie voters, who generally seem to hate her, does not hold much water) to her frequent inability to work well with the leaders of her own Party, including Obama himself when she had a real chance to be chosen lead her brainchild, the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, but blew it.  Most important is that her style and politics are quite different from Biden, even as they agree on the larger issues more or less, and, when it comes to being picked as a vice president, the ability to work with with—and, especially, defer to—your running mate is paramount.

Counting Warren as essentially out, it is useful to briefly compare the lives of Harris and Rice, who were born in the same year within a month of each other, making the comparisons especially apt.  Most available biographies of them are short, the exceptions being their own memoirs, though Wikipedia provides quite a few details and citations.

As I write this, I will note that I have been watching and really enjoying ESPN’s The Last Dance (an amazing documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’s championship teams, especially their final championship run) recently, and there are two main facets to how a player gets selected for a team and how they perform: the numbers and the intangibles, the latter being traits that do not show up on paper but are still vital, including personality.  We will leave that second category for a sequel piece, as the first category, the resume, what a player’s trading card would look like for Harris and Rice, is going to be our subject for today.

A Tale of Two Women

Harris was the child of a black Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both immigrants who achieved elite status as a distinguished professor and a cancer scientist, respectively, who divorced when Harris was seven.  The eventual senator was born and raised in California, but attended an elite public high school in a suburb of Montreal, Canada, participating in the pep club and a dance group, and her grades, according to one classmate, were among the best in her class.

Susan Rice’s parents were also elites and both black Americans, her mother a prominent education policy scholar and her father a prominent economic policy scholar, each heavily involved in the U.S. government in fairly high-tier, prestigious capacities.  Rice was born and raised in Washington, DC, and her parents divorced when she was ten.  Her mother would remarry, a prominent lawyer in a major government position.  Rice’s family was friends with Madeleine Albright, then already experienced in government and a prominent scholar, and, when Rice was becoming a young woman, a top foreign policy advisor to major Democratic Party figures.  She acted as mentor to the young Rice, who was already exposed to lots of government policy discussions at her dinner table.  In high school, Rice lettered in three varsity sports, was student government president, and graduated as the top student in her class, the valedictorian of a top-tier elite private school in Washington.

Harris certainly had an impressive record as a student before college, but it is still one that pales in comparison to Rice, who dominated as a valedictorian, a leader on and off the field, and, in terms of government, was exposed to top policymakers and experts and their policy debates in her family and its circle of friends at a young age in ways Harris was decidedly not.

If we move on to college, both women graduated in 1986 with Bachelor of Arts degrees in the short-term, in Harris’s case, from Howard University, where she double-majored in political science and economics.  While attending school, she interned as a mailroom clerk for one of her California senators, led both a campus economics society and the debate team, and joined a sorority (the nation’s oldest African-American one).  In 1989, she had earned her law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and passed her bar exam shortly after, being admitted to the California Bar in 1990. 

Rice attended Stanford as an undergraduate, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most exclusive academic honor society, also generally thought to be the most prestigious, and also won a Truman Scholarship, the nation’s most prestigious graduate fellowship for public service leadership.  Her B.A. in History was awarded with honors.  She also earned a Rhodes Scholarship, studying at the UK’s world-renown Oxford University, where earned a Masters and a Doctorate in Philosophy in 1988 (while also serving as a foreign policy advisor to Michael Dukakis’s campaign) and 1990, respectively, each in International Relations.  Her doctoral dissertation was named the best in the UK in her field by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (also known as Chatham House) and it also won a Royal Commonwealth Society award for outstanding research in the field of Commonwealth history.

Again, while Harris’s achievements and activities in school were impressive by any standard, Rice’s were absolute standouts among standouts and far exceeded even Harris’s high bar, especially in graduate school, where Rice gained entry into far more elite and exclusive programs and then literally bested all her peers in the UK, winning two Royal awards.

The 1990s would be years of solid achievement for both women.

Harris was hired in 1990 as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California, an incredibly impressive achievement for someone who passed the bar the same year; in this role, her performance was noted positively.  By 1994, she was dating the Speaker of the California Assembly, Willie Brown, (the lower house of the California State Legislature), who placed her in 1994 in a board spot on California’s Unemployment Insurance Appeals body and, subsequently, a spot on the California Medical Assistance Commission, for which she temporarily left her prosecutor position.  By 1998, she was picked by the San Francisco District Attorney (DA) as Assistant District Attorney (ADA), where she ran the Career Criminal Division, taking on many of the most serious violent cases and where she quickly stood out for her leadership and passion, challenging her more established male superiors and connecting in significant ways with the public and the media to raise her profile and fight for her agenda.  This caused controversy, friction, a true battle of egos, and, eventually, resulted in Harris quitting her post in 2000 (more on that another time).

Rice would work for two years for famed consulting firm McKinsey, but with the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, she joined the Clinton Administration in 1993 as a National Security Council (NSC) staffer, until 1995 as director for international organizations and peacekeeping and then, rising quickly, as special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs until 1997.  With lobbying from Madeleine Albright, then Secretary of State, Bill Clinton appointed Rice Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in 1997.  Rice’s relative youth and meteoric rise made some of the “old guard” uncomfortable, but Rice’s direct yet persuasive approach won over some of her doubters.  Her time in the Clinton Administration was during an era of major upheaval throughout Africa and major peacekeeping and international aid and development initiatives, and she managed to have significant impact on a number of pressing crises.

After Harris quit her ADA role, moving to a role in San Francisco City Hall under the City Attorney and running the Family and Children’s Services Division, fighting against neglect and abuse, it was soon fairly clear Harris was planning a comeback to challenge and overthrow her former colleagues at the DA’s office, beginning to seriously organize in 2002, even persuading top Democrats to not endorse her incumbent former boss who was in the middle of a significant scandal.  She also out-fundraised her opponent significantly, running to his right and beating him in 2003 by a significant margin to become the state’s first black DA in 2004.  As San Francisco DA, she was aggressive on pursuing violent crime and made significant improvements in multiple areas, including conviction rates, recidivism, and truancy.  As DA for San Francisco, she was named a “Woman of Power” by the National Urban League Conference, won the National Black Prosecutors Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award, and was voted onto the National District Attorneys Association’s Board of Directors as vice president and appointed as co-chair of its Corrections and Re-Entry Committee.  At the end of the decade, she began preparing a campaign to become the California Attorney General. 

After the election of George W. Bush to the presidency, Rice was a managing director and principal at political risk consulting group Intellibridge from 2001-2002 (it was eventually bought by Ian Bremmer’s Eurasia Group), then moved onto the influential Brookings Institute, where, as a senior fellow, she worked on a number of major international issues from 2002-2009, including global poverty, transnational security threats, weak and failing states, and U.S. foreign policy.  While at Brookings, she also served as a top foreign policy advisor to John Kerry’s presidential campaign and played a similar role for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, taking on that role relatively early, also playing a top tole on his incoming Administration’s transition team, during which Obama announced he would appoint Rice as America’s Ambassador to the United Nations, elevating it back to a cabinet-level position; thus, it was clear Rice would play a major role in in the incoming Obama-Biden Administration.

While Harris the 2000s would have a clear edge in governmental experiences to Rice’s more academic decade, both would position themselves for meteoric rises in the 2010s.

In Harris California Attorney General campaign, she won early the backing of major California Democrats.  While easily winning the Democratic Primary, she barely won the 2010 general election by 0.5% but still did so, becoming both the state’s first black person and first woman elected to that office, assuming it in early 2011.  She won reelection by a wide margin in 2014, and her time as attorney general was often characterized by boldness and impressive results, including in corporate accountability, truancy, recidivism, the environment, and aspects of police reform.  Though not without controversy, hers was a historic tenure in the office, and as attorney general she was co-awarded the Bipartisan Justice Award (shared with Republican Senator Tim Scott) by the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center.  She left her second term early after winning the 2016 election for a California U.S. Senate seat.  While none of her sponsored legislation has been enacted into law in a Republican-controlled Senate, she did receive as senator the ECOS Environmental Award for her efforts towards environmental protection throughout her career and she has been adept at making hers a voice that is heard and covered by the media (and shared on social media) on a variety of issues.

During the time Rice was with the Obama-Biden Administration, she served all of its first term as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a cabinet-level position restored to that status by Obama in a sign of his confidence in her and value to him as an advisor.  She conducted high-level diplomacy through many crises, including involving Israelis and Palestinians as well as the Arab Spring.  She championed anti-poverty efforts, human rights (including women’s rights), non-proliferation, and was effective in implementing tough sanctions on North Korea and Iran, the latter of which helped set the stage for the eventual Iran nuclear deal.  She was a major force in ending the full-scale Libyan Civil War, and though she became controversially embroiled in the Benghazi attacks’ fallout, ten investigations failed to find any wrongdoing on her part, including six led by Republicans, though this controversy would lead her to withdraw herself from the path to becoming the next U.S. Secretary of State.  Instead, she would be named by Obama early in his second term in 2013 as U.S. National Security Advisor, where she continued to work on many of the same issues as she had as UN Ambassador.  One issues she had a measurable impact on was her helping to mitigate the aggressiveness of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.  She even presciently saw the national security threat that a pandemic could post.  Throughout Obama’s presidency, she was present and participated in key meetings on key issues making key policy, working closely with both Obama and Biden.  Shortly after the Obama-Biden Administration was out of power, France awarded Rice with its prestigious Commander, Legion of Honor rank, one of the highest awards France can bestow on anyone, instituted by Napoleon himself.

Based on Experience, Rice is the Clear Choice for Biden

To return to our NBA trading card comparison, both Rice and Harris would be All Stars, but Rice’s stats would make her one of the top players (the top in this year’s draft), and while Harris would be a very talented player any team would be lucky to have, still among the best of the picks available, any team would draft Rice over Harris based on their stats unless, somehow, a team was overstacked on foreign policy and desperately needed criminal justice system experience. 

And that is no to say Rice has no relevant domestic experience or insight: she still had to lobby congress in her various roles, still worked three presidential campaigns where her foreign police expertise would have been engaged through the prism of domestic politics, and grew up in a family where her parents, step-father, and other close family friends were deeply involved in domestic policy, having that be part of young Susan’s regular dinner conversations with prominent from active practitioners.  And the same can be said for foreign policy.

On top of that, Rice’s academic credentials are quite exceptional and add further dimensions to her policy expertise in ways that I would say career practitioners who do not take some academic time generally fail to match.  While in office, public officials are pulled in so many directions that a Rhodes Scholarship and years at the Brookings Institute can offset by allowing more focused, in-depth research.  But the last academic experience Harris had was law school, which admittedly is broad and pulls students into many directions.  Harris of course deserves praise for earning two degrees, but Rice exceeded this achievement with three.  Rice also went to better institutions and distinguished herself more, winning prestigious top-tier honors and awards Harris did not and standing out to a far higher degree.

In addition, Rice has some experience in the private sector, and therefore a deeper understanding of it and economic issues, whereas Harris has only been in government since passing her bar exam.

To briefly review:

In the 1990s, Harris was putting in time in with various district attorneys offices, and, to be sure, she impressively got selected for these positions at a young age.  But Rice at the same time rose to leadership roles in the National Security Council and State Department, and working in state DA offices pales in comparison.

In the 2000s, Harris had a leg up in earning relevant experience, staying in government while Harris took a more academic turn, though she still managed to work for two presidential campaigns.

Yet in the 2000s and through 2016, Harris’s work would remain narrowly focused on one aspect of domestic policy—law enforcement—while Rice during the Obama-Biden Administration was one of the senior officials in the entire U.S. government on both national security and the entirety of U.S. foreign policy.  She worked closely with President Obama and Vice President Biden throughout the Obama-Biden Administration, including in a cabinet-level position, and would thus have a far deeper understanding of how the White House works and works with the rest of government and Congress than Harris would.

To be clear, this is not an anti-Harris argument, but between two exceptional, amazing, inspiring women of color who overcame much adversity in their careers, one stands out far more in terms of her government experience and accomplishments than the other, and that person is easily Susan Rice.

See Brian’s follow-up article: Substance vs. Style as Biden Picks Harris over Rice and related article: Benghazi Hearing: GOP’s Embarrassing Shame, Clinton’s Triumphant Vindication

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

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

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg, all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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 June 20, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 20th, 2018 (republished in slightly edited form on the English version of Al Bawaba News on June 20th, 2018, and by The Muslim Times on June 20th)

AFP/Getty Images

AMMAN — Recent protests have led some analysts to characterize Jordan as weak and going through destabilization. Instead, Jordan has pretty much schooled the entire Middle East (and, indeed, many other places) on protests, civic engagement, and how government can and should respond to both. Rather than produce fear and apprehension in the eyes of analysts and other observers, Jordan and Jordanians have rightfully earned a tremendous amount of respect, whether or not those that should show this respect realize this.

Longstanding Grievances Flowing Together

Something remarkable has happened—is happening—in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the past few weeks. The small but relatively very stable country has seen a confluence of several trends and grievances that have spilled over—erupted would be rather too strong—into a flowering of national protest.

One long-running trend in for Jordan is that it has been a dumping ground for refugees from various regional conflicts for years now (really decades, but especially of late). The majority of today’s Jordanians are Palestinian refugees from the wars with Israel and those refugees’ descendants. A decade ago, Jordan was hosting from around 700,000, perhaps as many as a million, Iraqi refugees. Today, there are some 1.4 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, including informal, unregistered refugees, comprising roughly 20 percent of the small Kingdom’s total population. The Syrian refugee influx, in particular, has had serious negative economic consequences for Jordan, especially in terms of soaring rent increases, food price increases, and increased youth unemployment, with Syrian refugees costing Jordan some six percent of its GDP, or about one-quarter of Jordan’s yearly governmental revenue, roughly $2.5 billion a year according to a 2016 World Bank report.

Many Jordanians see the conflicts driving these refugees to Jordan as being driven and orchestrated by the U.S. (conspiratorially, so much so that, after four years in Jordan, I have yet to hear a Jordanian that blames the American people, whom they usually see as pawns being manipulated by elites, and many do not even blame Trump, Obama, Bush, or other past presidents, seeing them as puppets of a mysterious international cabal) and Saudi Arabia.

With recent Saudi comments and moves indicating an informal alliance of common interests between Saudi Arabia and Israel, many in Jordan (especially Palestinian) see the Saudis as selling out to Israel, and feelings towards Saudi Arabia in Jordan are far from warm.

Indeed, there is a perception among many Arabs that there is an emerging U.S.-Israeli-Saudi axis that is throwing the Palestinians under the proverbial bus. And it was in this context that Donald Trump threw more gas onto the fire when he announced in early December, 2017, that he would move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, breaking decades of official U.S. neutrality on the subject (both Israelis and Palestinians claims Jerusalem as their capital) and prejudicing the Israeli side in any future negotiations. After the first Friday noon prayers (the Muslim equivalent of Christian Sunday mass) at al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (Islam’s third holiest site after Mecca and Medina) after Trump’s announcement, worshippers, of course, vented anger at Israel and the U.S., but were also very vocal in blaming Saudi Arabia, too, for seeming to at least tacitly support the U.S. decision behind the scenes. Saudi Arabia is also a driving force behind the rebellion against Assad, particularly in its support of Sunni rebel militias challenging his rule, and yet, Saudi Arabia has not taken in a single official Syrian refugee, content to let Jordan and others shoulder that burden despite the Saudis intense involvement in Syria.

That same Friday, this led to massive (but peaceful) protests in Amman, witnessed by yours truly. 

Protests were hardly limited to Jerusalem, Amman, or Jordan.

In particular, protests have been organized mainly by Hamas in Gaza—under an Israeli semi-siege for over a decade—since late March, protests in which many thousands of Palestinians have approached, and even rushed, Gaza’s militarized border manned by Israel. While the vast majority of these protesters, including women and children, have not been armed, many have still thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli troops, as well as rolled burning tires towards them and sent kites with burning material attached over Gaza’s border with Israel in an attempt to start fires on the Israeli side. No Israeli soldiers have been killed or wounded by these actions, but Israeli gunfire against the protesters have killed over 120 Palestinians and wounded another 3,800 more in actions much of the rest of the world calls disproportionate.

Many Jordanians, even those not of Palestinian descent, feel an intense emotional connection to their fellow Arabs—often kin—living across the Jordan river under some form of Israeli control. Thus, is has been very difficult these past few months for them to accept Trump’s decision and to witness the violence from the Israeli army in Gaza meted out on the protesters.

The bloodiest day was the day of the official move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, a day in which at least 58 people were killed and several thousand more injured.

The move was officially made on May 14th of this year, on the Western calendar reckoning of Israeli’s Independence Day, in this case the 70th anniversary the end of the British Mandate and the declaration of Israel as a state, an event Palestinians remember as al-Nabka, the Catastrophe, in which some 700,000 Arab Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during a conflict in which the Jewish state of Israel was established on most of British Mandate Palestine, an area which had been majority Arab for many centuries. The embassy move in 2018 came just two days before the holy month of Ramadan began, a month of intense day-long fasting, reflection, and spirituality. But with this Ramadan coming right after U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the bloody Gaza protests, and the relocation of America’s embassy to disputed Jerusalem, from a Palestinian-centered standpoint (a view shared by an overwhelming majority of Jordanians, whether they have Palestinian blood in them or not), this was a Ramadan with all too much that was unpleasant left to linger in the minds of Jordanians as they engaged in deep reflection.

Tone-Deaf Policies Lead to a Chorus of Protests

In the months leading up to this, there was another form of violence occupying the minds of Jordanians besides the violence in Gaza: the assault of steady price increases throughout 2018. The year began in January with a series of tax increases in January, first increasing sales tax and taxes on a range of goods, including cigarettes (extremely popular in Jordan: Jordan has the 8th-highest smoking rate in the world), with the first major decrease in bread subsidies since 1996 announced shortly after, leading to the main staple bread in Jordan going up in price by 60%. The move sparked unrest back in 1996, and the deeply unpopular moves to start this year were also met with some protests. Early in 2018, Jordanians in general were estimated to have to increase spending by 10-15 percent just to maintain their current living standards after these changes.

A least a proposed tax increase on medicines that month was canceled after over half of the parliament voiced disapproval, though.

But more pain was to come.

While in February, Jordan raised the minimum wage, a tax increase was levied that month on non-essential goods and the government also raised taxes on cigarettes again and on widely-consumed soft drinks and telecom services, including mobile phone plans and credit used by virtually everyone. There were further increases in electricity in March (sparking some protests) and also in April, and in In May, it was more increases, a minor one in fuel and an over 13 percent increase in electricity costs.

While in these months, the increases in electricity excluded households that consumed lower amounts of electricity, that exemption was absent for an announced whopping 23.5 percent increase in electricity prices for June that was also accompanied by a smaller fuel price increase.

The series of price increases and proposed tax increases were in part a result of an agreement made between the International Monetary Foundation (IMF) and the Jordanian government. Despite a lot of ignorance and conspiracy theories about what the IMF is and what it does, it is not simply a tool of U.S. control and “neoliberal” “imperialism” designed to keep countries like Jordan poor and weak, though, as with so many things in this region, it is easy to understand why such misperceptions and conspiracy theories flourish. In reality, the IMF is a global financial institution that is part of the United Nations group of institutions and is somewhat economically proportionately dominated by the wealthiest nations with the biggest economies and that contribute the most to the IMF’s fund. The U.S., as the largest contributor and world’s largest economy, has by far the largest voting share (less than 17 percent) in the IMF, and, to be sure, it wields a lot of influence in the institution beyond that voting share, but the point to recognize here is that the IMF is a broad international financial institution that generally reflects the collective will of the world’s largest economies, and if they decide to provide financial assistance to other countries, like any loaner, they have a right to attach conditions to those nations who want their money. At the same time, the agreement for a $723 million IMF loan between Jordan and the IMF—reached back in 2016—seems to have clearly overestimated Jordan’s capability to enact reforms at the desired pace and significantly underestimated the continuing problems posed by the refugee crisis and other maladies plaguing Jordan, and that should have been clear to both sides when the agreement was made.

Even before June’s price increases were announced, on May 22nd, a major proposed income tax law overhaul designed to keep pace with agreed-to IMF reforms was approved by the Cabinet, to be sent to and debated by the parliament. This tax law would have greatly increased the corporate tax rates, empowered tax collection capabilities to deal with tax evasion, and doubled the income tax base (only 4 percent of Jordanians currently pay income tax).

By May 30th, Jordanian civil society had organized a massive general strike of the professional middle class: doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, pharmacists, journalists, and others, along with some of the key related professional organizations and unions. Other Jordanians, in particular youth, joined the protests. 

A tone-deaf government then announced the aforementioned June major price hikes the following day, the day before Friday prayers and during Ramadan, no less, when fasting and reflective moods would only contribute to the agitation felt by the new policy proposals after many months of steady increases. In fact, one could not think of a much worse time than on a Thursday during Ramadan, the day before main Friday noon prayers—the traditional time to go through with major protests in the Muslim world—and coming so soon after the Jerusalem-Gaza drama that affected so many Jordanians so deeply on an emotional level.

These Jordanians may not have been able to stop violence in Gaza or reverse Trump’s Jerusalem decision, but they were not going to look at these latest government tax increases and price hikes with the same spirit of frustrated (if rage-filled) resignation. Unlike Donald Trump and Israel, Jordanians would expect their government to listen, and they would be sure to make sure their government heard their voices loud and clear.

The same day as the announcement, and just one day after the civil-society-orchestrated general strike against the tax law, a far more spontaneous series of mass protests broke out throughout Jordan against the utility price increases specifically and in general against the overall price/tax increases. As noted, the timing all but guaranteed mass protests on Friday, after noon prayers. Seeing the mass public outcry, later that day King Abdullah II froze the just-announced price hikes, responding swiftly to what was clearly widespread public pushback against them.

Yet the protests did not diminish, not Friday night, not throughout the weekend. If anything, they grew and intensified around the country. No one-off temporary freeze on price hikes would suffice: the people were focused wanted an indication of deeper change, also taking up the cause of the earlier civil society protests against the changes to the income tax law; if anything, the two seemingly separate protests had clearly merged into one nation-wide movement.

These were the most intense protests in Jordan focused on domestic policy since the 2011-2012 “hirak” protests over a range of issues that were concurrent with the heyday of the Arab Spring, then fluctuating between price (especially gas) increases and tribal and Islamist issues, peaking in early 2011 and late 2012, with a few notable flare-ups in violence that were still ultimately minimal, especially considering the regional context.

Arab Spring 2.0?

Unlike the wider Arab Spring protests, despite some exceptions the overwhelming focus of the 2011-2012 protests were not overthrowing the government but on calling for action on specific policies. Those protests were more sporadic and less representative of the overall population that the recent protests that just took place, which had a very unified, mass-participatory character that transcended what happened before even as Jordanian protesters and civil society organizations built upon what happened back then.

In fact, Jordanians in the past few weeks seemed largely committed to avoiding the mistakes of the larger Arab Spring with these latest protests, almost as if they had studied them in detail and took away specific lessons of what not to do, making clear their peaceful intentions and enthusiastically waving abundant Jordanian flags. The same could be said of both government leaders and security forces. If 2011-2012 could really be seen as a major emergence of civil society, even a birth (or rebirth?) of it in Jordan, then 2018 can be said to be Jordanian civil society’s coming of age, perhaps even an Arab Spring 2.0 that can avoid much of the tragedy of the first iteration.

As the 2018 protests continued into the following week, on Monday the King sacked Prime Minister Hani Mulki, who had stood by seeing the bill through to a parliamentary debate and had thus drawn the ire of protesters. But still the protests continued.  So the King appointed reform-minded, liberally-inclined Omar Razzaz as the new prime minister, who had been a supporter of civil society and had also held a significant position at the World Bank and was thus poised to be able to balance the competing interests in question. Yet still the protests continued, and for several days, until Razzaz promised to withdraw the income tax law. He promised dialogue and an unprecedented, robust engagement with civil society. The King himself directed that such an approach be undertaken, too, so it seems clear that Razzaz will have support from the highest levels of the Jordanian system.

It truly seems as if the people and civil society have won: by all indications since Razzaz took over, the government will take into account input from the people and civil society, especially on reforming the tax law, and it seems highly unlikely that the same attempted price hikes will be tried again to that degree anytime soon, as the people made clear they were able to organize quickly and sustain their pressure if only cosmetic adjustments were made. Thus, after the eighth day of what were almost entirely peaceful protests, after it was announced the tax law changes would be tabled, the protests basically ended on Thursday, June 7th, one of their epicenters in Amman’s Fourth Circle near the Prime Ministry with a far smaller group of young people celebrating their achievement that evening, replacing the protesting crowds of earlier, far tenser nights.

In fact, things seem to be coming together nicely for Jordan: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait just pledged some $2.5 billion in aid to Jordan, the EU has indicated that it will keep supporting Jordan economically, and Jordan has indicated it will push the IMF for a slowdown in the reform plan. Together, these three things could really alleviate the strain of the increasing economic burdens on Jordan’s weary population.

It is probably safe to say that, when the civil society-organized strike began on Wednesday, May 30th, that nobody imagined that things would be where they are now. In a region—heck, a world—starved of positive political developments and hope, this series of events in underappreciated Jordan is nothing short of remarkable.

*****

A Model the Cynics and Extremists Can’t Easily Dismiss

In the end, Jordan—its people, its civil society, its security forces, its government, and the King—all faced a series of challenges in the past week and then some; all overall conducted themselves in a deliberative, focused, organized, respectful, restrained way. The preceding adjectives are basically impossible use if you are trying to describe the angry hordes of protesters and activists, both right and left, that seem to monopolize protest scenes in the West and many other places of late, as well as both traditional and social media and can, therefore and unfortunately, be more effectively described as ineffective mobs content to do what satisfies their emotional needs as opposed to doing anything that might even be remotely described as helping to bring about effective change. 

This was not a group of radicals hijacking a disciplined civil society movement, as has happened far too often in history.

This was no amorphous Occupy rabble, no Tea Party mob, no Women’s March asserting their collective identity as a gender against a misogynistic president but not having any overwhelmingly clear aims.

This was not a Tahrir Square crowd vaguely demanding unspecified massive change or a whole new government, and this was certainly not a mass of Palestinians calling for a total reversal of the entire status quo.

No, this was a disciplined, focused, restrained coming together of civil society, the middle class, and the working class. 

It was the population of Jordan speaking out more or less in one clear voice, about clear specific desires on specific issues.

And this is a model the whole world can learn from, as much of it seems to have forgotten that this is how change happens: incrementally, with discipline, organization, patience, and non-violence.

Twitter/@AlghadNews

As opposed to weapons, Molotov cocktails, or rocks, protesters chanted peaceful slogans and even handed refreshments to security forces, and the security forces returned the favor. Only very small numbers on either side were looking for trouble: the rest were looking to make a difference and/or keep things peaceful. There was respect all around here in Jordan over the past few weeks, between protesters and security forces, between the people and government, between civil society and both the people and the government.

Twitter/@AlghadNews

That’s right: tiny little Jordan has just schooled the world as how to mount an effective protest movement that leverages civil society to bring about meaningful change, bringing the people and the government closer together in their positions on specific policies.

What is remarkable is that so few people either here in Jordan or in the international media seem to understand what has happened, and how urgently this needs to be celebrated and respected and—most importantly—copied.

In the end, a reformer who is perfect for this moment now leads Jordan’s parliament, the two major problems—the tax law amendments and the price hikes that were the focus of protesters—will not proceed as originally planned, civil society showed it is now truly a force to be reckoned with in Jordanian politics, the government showed its people and the world it is ready to listen and respond to the people, and the people showed all would-be protesters how to get the job done.

If you’re Jordanian, you can hold your head up high after a truly special week in Jordan’s history. And if you’re not Jordanian, swivel that head to pay attention to Jordan, and be sure to take notes.

See a related article by the same author in Venture Magzine: Relief and Development: Ending the Zero-Sum Myth

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg in an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. The views expressed here necessarily represent only his own, not necessarily the views of any organization with which he has been, or is currently, associated. 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 

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Team Trump’s assaults on Mueller and McCabe are only the latest salvos in an intensifying Trump/GOP war on the rule of law and democracy itself

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 19, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) March 19th, 2018

Photo by author

Support Brian and his work by donating here

AMMAN/TEL AVIV/HAIFA — One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athenian democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were somewhat democratic and then failed, or democratic in appearance but oppressive in spirit. These systems had little protection for dissenters and/or minorities, and used democracy for some to destroy it for others. They were Tocquevillian tyrannies of the majority, built on exclusion of both “the other” and those not in lock-step with the ruling faction.

Such systems are obvious in Erdoğan’s Turkey, Putin’s Russia, Duterte’s Philippines, but less obvious in many other places.

And today, under the leadership of Donald Trump and an increasingly craven Republican Party, the United States of America is moving in this direction.

I’m old enough to remember a time, not so long ago, when both major parties could be counted on to support the rule of law—a core foundation of true democracy—at a bare minimum. 

That is no longer the case.

At this point, it would be good to understand what we mean when we say “democracy.” In a pure, technical sense, there are no democracies today: every modern national system avoids direct rule by the demos, the people, in favor of a system in which the demos choose from among themselves a number of representatives to govern.

Modern democracy can be understood to transcend the 1.) necessary but not sufficient mechanism of popular elections and to extend to include among the sufficient conditions: 2.) a justice and law enforcement system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool of self-empowerment and oppression of others by those in power (this necessitates some degree of judicial independence), i.e., “rule of law”, 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, 4.) and a population free to express itself and not stupid enough to be manipulated by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality (although organized differently, these requirements roughly line up with the UN General Assembly’s list of the “essential elements” of democracy).

The typical political candidate usually asks you to vote for her to use the system and improve it to benefit you, the voter.

Trump and many of his fellow Republicans campaign to go to war with the system, to destroy.

By their virtue and abilities and with the power of the people behind them, they will sweep away the bureaucracy, institutions, politicians, laws, rules, and norms that supposedly hold us back. There is no love or praise of the system or working within it; the system is rotten to the core, there’s nothing to work with, it only has flaws, deserves only anger and contempt. They need to take existing legitimate problems and grossly exaggerate their intensity or to completely fabricate problems that do not exist but that play into people’s preconceived notions and prejudices to create a climate where their obscenities become acceptable.

Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak the language of such politics, a formal language of propaganda, deception, and control: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” Umberto Eco noted Orwell’s Newspeak makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

There can be little doubt that this describes what Trump and his advance guard of language warrior beserkers are doing today in their war on reality. Such propaganda and the sheer stupidity of many people dancing together emerge in a horror of a feedback loop: more and more people are receptive to more and more absurd lies and distortions that only help to increase the numbers of the herd of credulous creatures lapping up lies like manna from Heaven. 

The dire threat to democracy today is the weaponization of the press (with which Trump is already long at war) concurrent with weaponizing the people, who, in turn, weaponize elections, the victors of which, in turn, can weaponize the justice and legal system into a political tool to stay in power, reward supporters and punish opponents, and control or bend the media to its will, corrupting or destroying all four of the key elements of healthy democracy. If this is allowed to happen, it is always with some combination of the ignorance of those voters who buy into the rulers’ propaganda, voters’ tacit approval, and/or voters’ enthusiastic embrace of a system that explicitly favors them and explicitly discriminates and punishes those with differing views and/or identities; it is always because of, not in spite of huge swaths of the population.

Thus, Trump and his Republican allies target the justice system—the FBI, including former Director James Comey, the just-heavily-pressured-to-resign and now formally fired former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and the FBI agents conducting the Russia probe; the Department of Justice, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his staff and their Russia probe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and his predecessor, Sally Yates, as well as former tough-on-Russia U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara; various courts and federal judges, including the FISA court and its Republican-appointed judges; and other people and agencies—the professionals of which dare to serve the Constitution as their oath demands before serving Trump the man and his partisan agenda. 

The firing of McCabe, the “memo” baselessly attacking the FBI and Justice Department from the ridiculous and disgraced Trump acolyte Devin Nunes, Nunes’s fellow House Intel Republicans nakedly trying to cover for Trump in prematurely ending their Committee’s investigation into Trump and Russia and their baselessly disputing the intelligence community’s strong consensus that Putin acted to help Trump and hurt Clinton in the 2016 election, and now calls from Team Trump to terminate Mueller’s probe (and just after it was revealed that Mueller subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Russia-related documents) along with more Tweets from the president himself attacking those involved in the Russia investigation—including Trump’s first direct attack against Mueller and his team—are just the latest salvos in a clear effort to not only clearly obstruct justice turn the people against true non-partisan public servants in the justice system and to pave the way for partisan hacks eager to do Trump’s bidding, an effort that (of course) has the full and active support of Putin’s Kremlin and its army of cyber-Cossacks.

NBC News

We are seeing with Trump-appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions a clear lack of vigor in pursuing civil rights and voting rights/suppression cases so central to allowing fair play in our society and elections, a lack of vigor that directly aids GOP efforts to twist elections in ways that tip the odds considerably in its favor. We are seeing that Trump’s allies in Congress seek to undermine everything related to the Russia probe and, instead, call for unwarranted investigations into Trump opponents—including Hillary Clinton—or even those investigating him. Trump and the GOP-dominated Congress will also have the opportunity to appoint and confirm more federal judges in his first term than any president in the last 40 years. All of these bits and pieces add up to a very real danger of a one-party state in which the rules and laws are twisted to allow that party to unfairly maintain control, in which the levers of justice and law enforcement are used as tools to suppress efforts to challenge this unfair use of what is supposed to be “a government of laws, and not of men,” to quote John Adams.

This is what happens in Turkey, Russia, and the Philippines, as well as in many other places more outwardly autocratic when a new leader comes to power and cleans house, installing minions ready to serve the Dear Leader, not the people or the state. In these places, the Dear Leader equates himself with the state and loyalty to himself with patriotism for the nation; Trump isn’t even being careful about his attempts to do just that.

With Rachel Brand, the no. 3 top official at the Department of Justice, resigning earlier this year, if Rosenstein quits or is fired or also has to recuse himself, Trump will likely have the Department’s leadership in his pocket, led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and whatever likely partisan loyalists Trump appoints and Republicans confirm to replace Brand and/or Rosenstein. This could place Mueller’s entire Russia probe into jeopardy, since, with Sessions having had to recuse himself from the Russia probe (which enraged Trump) because of his own Russian entanglements, the replacements of Brand and Rosenstein could act on behalf of Trump and end the investigation with little to stand in their way. And we now that Trump is even considering firing Sessions and replacing him with Trump loyalist and current E.P.A. head Scott Pruitt, who would not be under obligation to recuse himself and could easily squash Mueller’s entire probe.

This is not normal, and this is entirely unprecedented in American history. The people and the media and elections failed, their pillars crumbling, to prevent a man who so clearly had contempt for the rule of law from becoming president; now, the last pillar that can prevent us from a real danger of becoming a banana republic—a generally professionally-run non-politically-partisan justice system that is faithful first and foremost to the Constitution and its rule of law—is under siege. The women and men manning its ramparts are doing an exemplary job of standing up to tyranny, but they need help from the people and the press and elections that will punish those laying siege, not reward them.

See related articles by the same author on Comey firing: With Comey Firing, Trump Moves America Closer to Banana Republic Status; How We Respond Is Vital to Preserving Our Democracy and on much of the deep history Mueller is almost certainly looking into between Team Trump & Team Russia: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind; also see his June 22, 2017, article for The Jordan Times: Ideal governance in ‘the rule of law, and not of men’

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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). 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 December 11, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) December 11th, 2017

Photo by author

AMMAN — More often than not, the situation whenever the parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are involved in discussing their near-identity-defining, almost sickly-beloved conflict rapidly becomes a contest to see who can deny reality the most vehemently. In this conflict, you learn quickly that if one side has a choice between quietly enjoying some advantage or rising opportunity on one side and rubbing it in the faces of their rivals at the cost of sabotaging their own blessing on the other, the latter is almost always the choice; this makes you realize that spite, as much as anything else, is a motivating factor among too many in this struggle.

Photo by author

Typical Tribal Conflict… BUT GOD!

As a student, you read about this conflict and it fascinates you; as someone who has the opportunity to talk to the parties and live among them over an extended period of time, it depresses you and tires you out, even if you don’t have a vested interest in one side or another. You form a deeper respect for the suffering of both sides, even as you become exasperated by their stubbornness and unwillingness to acknowledge valid points made by the other side in a cycle of dehumanization that helps to explain the deadly and nasty nature of this conflict.

After enough time, you become good at asking people questions and getting them to talk, but this also results in your being accustomed to being usually disappointed in their answers. Occasionally, you hear voices of reason, then become even more depressed as you realize these are the minorities, often represented at pathetically low levels in the halls of political power, even when democratically elected.

Frequently, the more religious the individual, the less compromising they are in their views. And I have found that such people rarely consider things from the other perspective.

Should Jewish babies being born now in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Haifa suffer because of the sins and/or failures of their fathers and grandfathers? No more than Palestinian babies born in Jerusalem or Ramallah or Hebron should suffer for the sins and/or failures of their fathers and grandfathers. And if your answer to those questions involves you saying that yes, innocent children being born in situations totally beyond their control do indeed deserve to suffer under occupation, legal inequality, or the constant threat or “retributive” violence and you somehow justify this response by citing your God or His holy texts, then your God is not worthy of worship and esteem but should instead be cast off into the obscurity and irreverence that has been the fate of most of the capricious and cruel deities of millennia past.

I confess I am not among those who would describe themselves as the faithful, and it is with increasingly robust pride that I describe myself as such in the face of more and more encounters with otherwise kind and generous souls who, when animated by discussion of this or that holy place they are told is to be their rightful inheritance by some ancient book of yesteryear, can and do find specific verses from said text that they claim (and they are hardly alone) justify some sort of violence to either take back what is “theirs” or prevent sharing sovereignty over what they now control.

God “gave” you this land? Funny, why don’t you control it now, then? Is it not His will that you lost it? Why not reserve your hostility for the God that allowed this to happen, rather than the people who are now in possession of what is supposedly “yours,” for are not those people instruments of His Will? Or are you claiming that these people are somehow successfully opposing the Will of God and that your all-powerful God needs you, a band of lowly primates, to somehow aid him in seeing His Will through? Or do you who now possess such holy places look at the mass of outside-your-tribe humanity that surrounds you and are also laying claim to said holy places believe that your God put these people here for you to displace, keep out, or even kill in large numbers just to maintain exclusive sovereignty? Am I to respect a God that is so tribal that He favors your possession and not sharing such sacred holy sites, that this God truly cares whether you or some other primates that are nearly identical in blood and DNA control some speck of a vast planet that is merely a piece of dust in the wider universe?

The truth of the matter is that there is no respectably serious answer that can be provided by any of the faithful who believe in divinely sanctioned violence to either maintain or retake such and such location. Believe me, I’ve tried to find one by personally asking many on both sides of this conflict, and the range and originality of the answers such a crowd can give you are narrow and hackneyed in the extreme.

It was extremely unfair to the Jews when the Romans slaughtered and expelled the Jews from Jerusalem and its environs in the first and second centuries C.E. amid vigorous Jewish revolts, and it was also extremely unfair to the Arabs who would become known as Palestinians the way first Ottoman Turkish and then British European colonial overlords oppressed them and also allowed the long-exiled Jews to return to their ancient homeland in a manner that did not consider asking or consulting those local Arabs how they felt about the matter and then, in the case of the British, wearily presented it as a fait accompli to the United Nations in 1947-1949. Wars were fought and won and lost, and, as is so often the case with such things, there is no full rewind button, try though many may to find it or claim they have.

It is also worth asking: by what right did the ancient Jews (at least in the Biblical telling) massacre and/or displace those who were in what is now Israel/Palestine when they arrived thousands of years ago? By what right did the seventh-century Arab conquerors take the land from the East Roman (Byzantine) Greco-Romans? The same questions about taking land can be asked of many others, including the Romans, Ottomans, Turks, British, and those who would become Israelis; the answer is the same for each of them: they and/or their leaders wanted to and they had the power to do so.

The biggest myth of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it is some sort of difficult to understand Gordian knot, singular among world conflicts in its uniqueness and intensity, inscrutable to all but those most studied in it or closest to it.

The reality is that the conflict is remarkably banal: two tribes want the same land and contest sites that are particularly holy to them. You know, like what happened many thousands of times in recorded history and innumerable times from prehistory when we were barely more than upright primates.

Perhaps most obnoxiously, both Israelis and Palestinians often speak as if they are the only people to have been in a predicament like theirs. While many people around the world are stuck in conflicts and occupations the world has long forgotten—Tibetans under the Chinese, Kashmiris, the long-suffering people of Somalia, Hutus in Central Africa, and today’s ignored Yemenis—it seems even the slightest provocation involving anything Palestinian-Israeli generates front page news, drowning out other, more intense conflicts that have killed and displaced far more people in recent decades.

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Jerusalem Is NOT the Center of the World

Before Trump delivered his ill-advised speech on Jerusalem, it finally seemed as if things had hit a critical mass of a point where the world might finally start paying attention to Yemen in the wake of the death of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s former president turned rebel leader. Before that event threatened to further destabilize an already incredibly unstable situation, Yemen was suffering from the worst cholera outbreak in modern human history, a man-made one wrought by Saudi incompetence and global indifference, with about one million cases and getting worse, and was also facing a food crisis that has put Yemen on the brink of the worst famine in the world in decades, with some seven million people at risk. It was thought that Saleh’s death might bring some much-needed attention to the neglected conflict, but two days later, Trump gave his speech on Jerusalem, and now Yemen’s war is at most an afterthought (if that) in much of the Arab/Muslim world and in global headlines, just as it has been for most of the war’s duration. In Jordan, where I reside, I haven’t seen a single mention of Yemen recently in social media among any of my regional contacts except from those who are Yemeni.

There is only so much oxygen to be shared among major stories during any given news cycle, and the tiny sliver of land on the Eastern Mediterranean coast know as Israel/Palestine consumes far more than its fair share of what is available. I was chatting with one Palestinian-Jordanian friend recently and complained about the disproportionate attention the subject got, but in her mind it was totally justified: “Jerusalem is very important to Muslims,” she said. “So a place is more important than millions who are on the brink of starvation in Yemen?” I asked? “Yes, of course!” she replied. I would cite here a piece I wrote a while back about how, on balance, religion intensifies conflict, not de-escalates it; religion may or may not “poison everything,” to cite Christopher Hitchens, but it more often than not certainly poisons conflicts, and quite irrationally so.

I will not excuse the many and severe misdeeds of Israel when it comes to its treatment of Palestinians under its control (and I have written about them extensively before, though that is not to suggest that Palestinians are blameless, either), but especially when it comes to white Europeans (and especially those from countries with backgrounds of strong anti-Semitism and fascist governments and/or fascistic leanings), one really does have to wonder why—when surrounded by conflicts in which human rights are being abused, from Western Sahara to northern Cyprus to Belarus to Crimea to Darfur to Syria to the Kurds to the Uighurs to the Rohingya to North Korea—so many of these Europeans are so virulently, almost obsessively focused on the misdeeds of Israel when it comes to human rights violations; some won’t even mention the word Israel, as if it’s a dirty word, and a good number come at their own expense to protest or document abuses in Palestinian communities.  After nearly two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism dominating Europe, perhaps the idea—after a mere few decades of progress (and well under a century since the Holocaust was hardly a just a German, but a collective European crime)—that some level of residual anti-Semitism is a factor in current European views on Israel and Israelis, and the intensity and frequency of criticism of them, is hardly unreasonable.

America, of course, is more complicated: it has the largest Jewish population in the world (even including Israel) and a far larger population of extreme white Christian Evangelicals who literally believe that the Jews must control all of the Biblical “Holy Land” in order for Jesus to return, prejudicing them wholly against the Palestinians in favor of Israeli Jews, even more so than American Jews. And among major powers, it is the nation most supportive of Israel, one of only a few nations around the world that don’t view Israel negatively.

I’ve seen a number of Europeans express solidarity with the Palestinians by posting a Facebook profile photo frame showing the Dome of the Rock and with Arabic stating “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine,” almost as if to also deny that it is Israel’s capital. Is it so awful to post that Jerusalem is the capital of BOTH Israel AND Palestine? Few people I talked to here in Jordan wanted to admit that Israel has any claim to Jerusalem (Jordan controlled East Jerusalem until 1967, when Israel drove the Jordanians out), still fewer that it could or should be Israel’s capital. While more Israeli Jews had mixed views when I’ve spoken with them in the past, the ones that felt Jerusalem could be divided and shared were generally a minority of disillusioned hippies not well-represented in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament; those who were more mainstream politically—and therefore more empowered—were far less keen on the idea of a shared Jerusalem, let alone Palestine as a state.

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The Reality of Jerusalem

The obvious (if painful for some) reality is that Israel has controlled much of Jerusalem since 1948 and all of it since 1967, something which ISIS (of all groups) surprisingly and ironically pointed out after Trump’s speech. This reality means that, for all intents and purposes, Jerusalem has been the de facto capital of Israel’s state (a state recognized today by 158 nations, the vast majority of the world) since 1948, officially so in Israel’s view though unofficially so to the rest of the world. Because of the sensitive nature of the unresolved status of Jerusalem between two parties in conflict, the United States and the rest of the world have avoided recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s (or Palestine’s) capital. Yes, it practically is Israel’s capital, and everybody knows it, but Trump’s public acceptance of it violated basic principles of neutrality, and even while changing virtually nothing on the ground, it enraged millions of Arabs and Muslims worldwide.

If the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims were smart, they would abstain from any sort of violent reaction to a speech that changes nothing on the ground for anyone except people who work at or need the U.S. Embassy as it moves from one city to another. They could unite on a focused, organized plan to engage the world community now that sympathy is more intensely with them after Trump’s incompetent oration needlessly kicked a hornet’s nest. In fact, Trump’s address needlessly weakened U.S. standing and credibility on this issue, enough that it might even be possible for the Palestinians to achieve some results even if they bypass America.

Yet instead, mass protests and beginnings of violence are the response. Young men rush towards nervous Israeli and sometimes trigger-happy troops, throwing rocks. The only tangible result of such acts will be destruction, injury, and death, and fatalities have already occurred. Not a wise move at all or one that will accomplish anything or have any effect on the status of Jerusalem or how Trump feels about his decision. Such acts are the surest way to lose a moral high ground that has been handed to them on a silver platter by President Trump and may prevent more positive measures that would help advance the Palestinian cause on the part of the rest of the international community. The protesters’ chants offer no hint that they could share Jerusalem or historic Palestine with Israel. 

As for Israel, having received a major boost and gift from America, it would be in a perfect position to reach out to Palestinians with a real offer of compromise, buttressed from a newly stronger position after action by their closest ally. Instead, per usual, Israel seems content to play their hand to their maximum advantage and to the Palestinians’ maximum disadvantage, as Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governments are wont to do.

Too many on both sides talk as if the city will be their exclusive sovereign domain. Jerusalem is the de facto practical capital for Israel while simultaneously being the symbolic capital of Palestine in the heart of virtually every Palestinian. It is also the emotional heart and soul of Israel for most Israelis and a practical capital for Palestinians, more of whom live there than in any Palestinian city except for Gaza City and with Jerusalem as the heart of Palestinian spiritual life. Too many on both sides want to deny these realities, living in a fantasy world where such practical, emotional, and spiritual concerns can be ignored in pursuit of total victory. Trump’s blunder is an opportunity for both sides to move closer to compromise, but, as can be expected in this conflict, it has only hardened positions and made compromise that much harder. Sure, blame Trump, but Israelis and Palestinians are reacting in just the ways that can compound Trump’s folly, rather than mitigate it.

The Arab and Jewish residents of Jerusalem, while hardly brothers, demonstrate a functional coexistence to any who visit, as they have for me repeatedly. If only a clear majority of Palestinians and Israelis could build on this spirit, rather than once again throw practicality to the wind, one could begin to feel hope. Trump’s stupidity should not be an excuse for stupidity from either Israelis or Palestinians, yet these types of conflicts often fall into predictable, repetitive, unproductive patterns, and that, sadly, is the case here with Jerusalem, the shared capital of Israel and Palestine, whether officially recognized as such or not.

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

See related article by same author: Victory in Alabama May Run Through Jerusalem: Moore Likely at Heart of Trump Decision

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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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 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 July 3, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 3rd, 2016, also published by StupidParty Math v Myth here

All photos taken from the Clinton Foundation website

AMMAN — If you listen to many conservatives, the Clinton Foundation is little more than a personal, criminal stash for cash for the Clintons (one big “scam,” to quote Trump).  But like so many other things that conservatives claim, upon closer inspection, efforts to tarnish or call into question the Clinton Foundation fall flat, quite like their efforts to dismiss the good work of the United Nations, even for all the UN’s faults.  In reality, the Clinton Foundation is a massive organization, atypical of most charities but one that does a staggering amount of good all around the world.

Love or hate the Clintons’s politics, it is an objective and indisputable fact that Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton have been involved in programs that have bettered and save the lives of millions of people.  Even without Bill’s political career, his work with the Clinton Foundation would be enough to make him one of the great philanthropists of our time, and Hillary Clinton has also been getting increasingly involved, as has Chelsea.

What the Clinton Foundation Is and How It Works

The Clinton Foundation is actually a public charity that mainly does direct charity work, which can be confusing since many foundations primarily funnel money to other charities.  While conservative media and political figures (like serial liar Carly Fiorina) have claimed that only a small portion (Fiorina said 6%, hot-air-dispenser Rush Limbaugh said 15%) of the money going into the Foundation goes to charity, this statistic is in reference to the money that the Foundation gives to other charitable groups; the vast majority its money still goes to charity, its own charitable works, with 87.2% of all funds going directly to either their or others’ program activities/beneficiaries.  Unsurprisingly, conservatives myopically failed to do even this basic level of research before making their wildly off-base claims, which is par for the course in these hyperpartisan times. 

What is now the Clinton Foundation began in 1997 as an organization that began helping then-President Clinton set up his presidential library, but since then it has grown to be a global foundation that encompasses eleven initiatives, has raised over $2 billion for charity and development work, and now raises about a quarter of a billion annually.

Let’s look at these eleven parts, and a twelfth that was recently ended:

Clinton Foundation:

2014 expenses: $249,545,030 (12.3% overhead, including management, administrative, and fundraising expenses; 87.2% directly to program activity/beneficiaries; and 0.5% to make up for shortfalls in donation pledges)

Clinton’s Presidential Center (library) (1997-present)

2014 expenses: $13,501,618 (5.4% of Foundation total)

Presidential libraries serve as something of a combination of a museum and an archive for the particular presidency they showcase.  The Clinton Foundation was formed in 1997 to help raise money for Bill Clinton’s presidential library, which it did to the tune of $165 million over some years plus over $11 million in the form of grant of land from Little Rock, Arkansas, on which the library was built (in comparison, Reagan’s library cost $60 million at the time it was built, and George W. Bush’s presidential library cost about $250 million).  Clinton’s library, which includes the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service and provides year-round educational programs and camps for students of all ages, has benefited the city of Little Rock greatly, as well.

Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative (2002-2013)

The Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative began in 2002 by helping small businesses in Harlem and grew to focus on promoting entrepreneurs and small businesses in cities across America.  Through partnerships with successful entrepreneurs who acted as mentors and major business institutions like Booz Allen Hamilton and UBS, the Initiative specialized in providing consulting and mentoring to small businesses and small business owners.  The 2012 annual report for the Clinton Foundation noted that the Clinton Economic Initiative had provided 75,000 hours of pro bono consulting and mentoring hours, over $15 million in pro bono consulting, that 92% of businesses that received assistance from its Entrepreneur Mentoring Program said that that assistance had helped them deal with the recession, that all these the businesses assisted had an average of a 16% increase in workforce, and over 600 volunteers provided long-term pro bono services for small businesses in nine different U.S. cities.  Another example of the type of work the Initiative engaged in, as highlighted in the 2009 annual report, was helping to provide banking services to struggling populations in America that were underserved by the banking industry. The program was shuttered in 2013 because the Foundation found that the efforts were too labor intensive and dependent on many too outside factors to be replicated on the larger scale the Foundation had hoped for it.

Clinton Health Access Initiative* (2002-present, *now affiliated but separate entity)

2014 expenses: $143,041,357 (57.3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Health Access Initiative began in 2002 as a big push to provide HIV/AIDS patients with low-cost access to life-saving drugs, and since then has expanded to include treatment for malaria and vaccine access, among other programs; nearly 10 million people have received access to lifesaving treatment at low cost through the Initiative since 2002, to name its most significant achievement.  It now operates directly in more than 33 countries benefiting over 70 countries overall.  Its 2014 annual report noted that it was also heavily involved in assisting Liberia with its recent Ebola epidemic.

Clinton Alliance for a Healthier Generation (2005-present, *now affiliated but separate entity)

2014 expenses: $16,436,262 ($2 million from Clinton Foundation, 0.8% of Foundation’s total expenses; rest is (presumably) raised by Alliance on its own, outside of the efforts of the Foundation)

The Alliance for a Healthier generation was founded by the Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association in 2005 to fight America’s childhood obesity epidemic by providing alternatives to soft-drink sodas in schools and other facilities used by children, all through making deals with the soda industry.  It is the nation’s largest effort to fight childhood obesity, and in large part because of the Alliance’s efforts, the calories of drink products sent to school locations fell 90% from 2004-2010.  Through 2015, the program has spread to help affect 18 million students in over 31,000 schools in all 50 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, as well as over 6,300 locations used by children outside of school grounds.  There is also an effort to help students improve health in other ways, engaging over 56,000 doctors and health professionals.  The Alliance also engages companies like McDonald’s to improve the level of healthier offerings within their product lines, in McDonald’s case covering 85% of its worldwide sales.

Clinton Global Initiative (2005-present)

2014 expenses: $23,544,381 (9.4% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Global Initiative began as way for President Clinton to bring together world leaders and thinkers as only he can together in one place and to get them to make substantive commitments towards tackling major global problems.  Through 2015, it has engaged over “180 heads of state, 20 Nobel Prize laureates, and hundreds of leading CEOs, heads of foundations and NGOs, major philanthropists, and members of the media, which has resulted in $90 billion in commitments representing over 3,100 Commitments to Action, which have improved the lives of over 430 million people in more than 180 countries,” spanning issues as diverse as job creation, training, education, human rights, gender equality, health, medicine, conservation, ecology, endangered species, and international development, among others. 

Clinton Climate Initiative (2006-present)

2014 expenses: $8,293,416 (3.3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Climate Initiative has been working for years to address fundamental drivers behind dangerous man-made climate change using easily replicable and cost-effective methods that the Initiative is spreading throughout the U.S. and the world.  The Initiative’s Forestry Program is helping governments together with other partners to better manage their forests and forested lands and to help plan and enact forest restoration, with major programs in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. The Islands Diesel Replacement program helps small island countries transform their energy sectors into ones that involve far more clean energy and far more sustainable practices, and also assists with waste and water management, which all, in turn, spur new jobs and markets for the green energy sector.  An energy-consumption-reduction program and a Home Energy Affordability Loan (HEAL) program that both began in Arkansas have both spread to six other states—California, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Vermont, and Wisconsin—and allowed both employers and employees to greatly improve energy efficiency and reduce costs, with the HEAL program alone helping over 5,600 people and both programs together reducing U.S. carbon emissions by over 33,500 tons every year.

Clinton Development Initiative (2006-present)

2014 expenses: $4,482,714 (3.3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Development Initiative has been helping small farmers in Tanzania, Malawi, and Rwanda by leveraging knowledge, resources, and partnerships to help over 105,000 small farmers improve their efficiency and access to markets.  In addition, its Trees of Hope program in Malawi has helped over 2,300 farmers plant more than 2.6 million trees to help offset their carbon footprint and create a new opportunity in tree farming, where it is also helping local farmers and their families by establishing local health clinics.  In Rwanda, the Initiative recently helped to create two local businesses based on producing soy in one case and coffee in the other that are combined expected to create hundreds of jobs and help 150,000 farmers with their livelihoods.  With a New Seeds to Sale Project in Myanmar, the Initiative also helps to reach some 15,000 farmers there over the first 3 years of implementation.

Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (2007-present)

2014 expenses: $7,358,967 (3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership seeks to implement the best of non-profit and for-profit approaches to help emerging-market-nations around the world deal with major gaps in either supply chains or distribution chains in ways that improve both the social and financial situations of poorer, underserved populations by bringing them into one of three-market driven approaches: supply chain enterprises, distribution enterprises, or training center enterprises in the hopes of providing economic opportunities through which people can find social mobility and lift themselves out of poverty.  Distribution enterprises can make a huge difference in rural areas where many small villages and towns and farmers often find it very difficult to obtain basic supplies.  The Partnership in one instance found almost 3,000 women in one of the most remote parts of Peru and trained and equipped them with the help of major corporations to be able to sell many basic, in-demand products to their own communities; these women are expected to double their income within a year of beginning the program.  Supply chain enterprises help small farmers in developing countries obtain ways to get their products to the right markets and improve their business as a result as well as help developing markets fill their shelves with appropriate and better quality products.  A Partnership enterprise in one region of India was able to help small farmers get cashew products to new customers, and another Partnership program set up many small farmers with PepsiCo’s local juice operations; along with efforts to help local farmers become more efficient and produce better crops, the Partnership hopes to see these farmers’ incomes double within 5 years and to spread these models to encompass some 15,000 local farmers in the region in the near future.  Another project is helping over 12,000 peanut farmers in Haiti get their crop to markets.  Finally, training center enterprises help to provide youth in developing countries the skills needed to get decent jobs in places where there is often a skills mismatch.  One such enterprise in Cartagena, Colombia, is training some 20,000 young people to be able to find jobs in the hospitality industry.  The Partnership will be expanding to new regions and countries soon, and thus far has helped to train and empower more than 450,000 people in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia.

Clinton Health Matters Initiative (2012-present)

2014 expenses: $3,696,323 (1.5% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Health Matters Initiative works in the United States through a wide variety of public and private, local and national entities to reduce the occurrence of preventable health problems, conditions and diseases, while also working to bridge inequality in health and healthcare access and to improve access for all Americans.  Its national-level programs focus on “employee health, military and veteran health, health disparities, access to nutrition, access to sport and physical activity, and prescription drug abuse,” while a variety of local and regional programs (mainly focusing on working through many hundreds of partners to help some 8 million people in specific regions in the U.S.: California’s Coachella Valley, Central Arkansas, Northeast Florida, the Greater Houston Area, and, most recently, Adams County, Mississippi) combine with the national programs to be projected to be able to benefit some 85 million Americans.  The initiative has also created over $200 million in partnerships with various organizations to help improve Americans’ health, is helping to innovate new technology to improve healthcare across the country and access to information about health and healthcare, is improving substance abuse and mental health programs on over 60 college campuses, is pioneering fitness programs, is working with 40 different organizations to improve employee wellness, and is bringing together experts from many different organizations to plan new ways to tackle health problems in America.

The following programs fall under the “other” category as listed in the Foundations’ financial statements/annual reports, as is (presumably) the $2 million grant that goes to the Clinton Alliance for a Healthier Generation; the “other” category comprised $13,789,165, or 5.5% of the Foundation’s 2014 expenses; minus the Alliance grant, these below programs would be part of $11,789,165, or 4.7% of the Foundation’s 2014 expenses.

Clinton Foundation in Haiti (2009-present)

The Clinton Foundation in Haiti began in 2009 as a way to specifically help the beleaguered Caribbean nation, but when a major earthquake devastated the nation in 2010, the program focused for some time on disaster relief, recovery, and rebuilding but is now back to its original intent: helping to empower the people of Haiti through education and economic opportunity by engaging a wide range of actors.  Since its inception, the program has raised some $36 million for Haiti (including $16.4 million in for immediate relief after the earthquake tragedy), and has also been instrumental in bringing about $120 million in direct investment to Haiti, including in Haiti’s agricultural, artisan, and environmental sectors, helping some 117,000 Haitians and creating some 11,200 jobs.

No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project (2013-present)

The No Ceilings: Full Participation Project, led by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, aims to bring women and girls around the world to points of full participation and equal opportunity in their societies using data-driven methods.  To this end, the Project partnered with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to produce a detailed global report on the status of women and girls worldwide, identifying specific areas of concern that can be targeted by various organizations around the world.  As part of this process, the Project began a global conversation about the status of women involving over 12,000 people, and conducted a survey about the status of women of over 10,000 people in over 150 countries.  The Project also teamed with The Brookings Institution to secure pledges from over 30 partners to provide $600 million to help girls get access to and do well in secondary school, which has since been increased to $800 million through 50 partners with plans to reach 15 million girls.  Another initiative plans to facilitate access to mobile technology for women in Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Arab Gulf States in order to help empower disempowered women in those locations.

Too Small to Fail (2013-present)

The Too Small to Fail project, also led by Hillary Clinton, seeks to help different parts of society to come together to provide solid heath and growth environments for children from when they are born to age 5, focusing in particular on interactions involving talking, reading, and singing.  Such interactions foster vital early brain and language development among our youngest children, ensuring that they enter school not in a mental state behind that of their follow classmates and in a better position to succeed in life.  This helps to fight the “word gap” in which lower-income kids by age 4 hear an average of 30 million fewer words than their better-situated counterparts, causing their brains and language skills to develop more slowly.  With partners like Sesame Street, the American Academy of Pediatrics, Univision, Text4baby, and Scholastic, Too Small to Fail was a major force in efforts to donate some 500,000 books, reach 700,000 parents regularly with parenting information and tips through text messaging, use television programming to get important information and tips out to parents, get over 20,000 families to take pledges, and distribute 62,000 literacy toolkits to pediatric professionals.

*****

In addition:

In America, the Clinton Foundation has also helped to organize thousands of volunteers for “Days of Action” that have resulted in over 18,000 hours of volunteer service since 2012, at first in response to Hurricane Sandy and later to include other projects.  There is also the Job One initiative, designed to help young Americans find meaningful employment in the wake of the Great Recession; so far, the initiative has secured promises from 13 companies to focus on mentoring and hiring young people, has generated commitments worth $37 million, and expects to be able to help some 150,000 young Americans in the near future.

*****

All in all, The Clinton Foundation is a unique thing in the world, one of the world’s largest charities on its own, but then transcending even that status when the extensive action it has led indirectly through its special partnerships and relationships is taken into account, amplifying its already staggering scale of impact on people all over the world.  It’s time the media and even the Clintons’ critics clearly acknowledged this basic truth.  And for Trump to criticize the Clinton Foundation, when nothing he has done has even come close to a fraction of this level of charity, is shameful.

© 2016 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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)

The entire series of disturbing events surrounding the Democratic Party’s state convention in Nevada, discussed in Part I, provides excellent insight into the condition I am labeling Sanders Derangement Syndrome. Weeks away from their national convention in Philadelphia, Democrats are right to worry about Sanders and his supporters: their willingness to use low-level violence and threats of disruption as political terrorism is both insidious and unacceptable, in addition to being incompatible with American political values and democracy. A detailed exploration here in Part II of just what Sanders Derangement Syndrome is will shed light on just how serious a threat it is to American democracy, a serious threat overshadowed and not given appropriate attention because of the larger spectacle of the Trump phenomenon.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 20, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 20th, 2016

AP

JERUSALEM — Having seen a full-range display from the Sanders campaign recently in a number of telling ways, and, specifically, having gone through in detail the events surrounding the Nevada Democratic Party’s state convention controversies, we can now describe how the whole Nevada situation is an excellent prism through which to understand Sanders, his campaign, and his supporters on a more general level. Specifically, this means we can break down the very real phenomenon I am labeling Sanders Derangement Syndrome.

If there’s one thing that I am learning during this election cycle, it is that in many ways the far-left and the far-right do not “cancel each other out,” they simply both make things much worse in their own, sometimes similar, ways and can even feed off of each other, much like Hamas and Likud and other like-minded non-moderates feed off of each other in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Sanders and the Rise of the Tea Party of the Left

There were times during the Bush years and some of the Obama years when I really questioned whether Democrats had any spine, and I even considered registering as an independent a few times. But with the rise of the Tea Party, I increasingly grew proud to call myself a Democrat because of the Republican Party’s descent into extreme irrationality and silliness and the Democrats’ refusal to follow suit, with my party choosing rationality and compromise over hostility to facts and favoring results over “principles”.

But now I look at Sanders and his Sandernistas, and I have become horrified: they truly have become our own version of the Tea Party, cocooned in an alternative reality of “alternative” “news” media outlets like AlterNet.org, Salon.com, and USuncut (among others) that constantly praise Bernie Sanders as the second coming and political Messiah for America, preventing the permeation of much of anything that does not fit their worldview or agenda; such outlets constantly demonize Hillary Clinton and moderates in the most extreme manner while buoying false hopes and delusional expectations. Wrapped snug as babies in this blanket of generally one-sided coverage, Sanders supporters have become hostile to facts, context, and nuance; they are brimming with anger and ideology at the expense of being level-headed and exhibiting any shred of practicality, and are determined to push their views without compromise and to both “Bern” the system in the hopes of a clean start and “Bern” those with whom they disagree as punishment for holding different views.

This type of nonsense brought the Republican Party to the brink of self-destruction this spring, helped to bring about the rise of Donald Trump and see to his successful hostile hijacking of the Party “Establishment” and apparatus, and history shows us that the Tea Party may have cost Republicans control of the Senate and may have been a deciding factor in Romney’s 2012 defeat at the hands of Obama. I tremble for the damage this type of nonsense might do to the Democratic Party. I am a proud Democrat today in part because I am so proud of Democrats’ pragmatism, respect for data and context, and willingness to compromise; the Sandinista wing of the Democratic Party rejects all of this. Furthermore, Sanders and his people are engaging in a series of behaviors that are dangerous for the health of democracy. And all this and much more was on display throughout the Nevada state convention drama, which is fully emblematic of Sanders, his campaign, and his supporters.

Sanders Derangement Syndrome 

Specifically, we have the clear symptoms of Sanders Derangement Syndrome:

1.) Sanders and his fans exhibit blatant hypocrisy:

a.) Bernie and his supporters claim to be champions of democracy, but have no problems favoring undemocratic means when it suits them

Just to recap what we discussed in Part I: Clinton won Nevada by over 5%, and Sanders supporters didn’t have any problem disenfranchising the voters of Clark County (home of Las Vegas and most of the state’s delegates) when Clinton’s supporters failed to organize at the subsequent county convention, giving Sanders more state delegates from there going to the state convention even though Clinton won the county by almost 10 percentage points. Some Sanders supporters happily talked about their (mistaken) prospects of being able to win the state in defiance of the voters. In the same vein, Sanders has been complaining about the undemocratic nature of superdelegates for months, but now has no problem courting them to pick him and overturn the clear majority of voters, who have favored Clinton over Sanders by a margin of about three million votes as of May 19th no matter how you calculate it (and even if superdelegates were allocated proportionately to the votes, he’d still be losing by a lot). 

And while Bernie is happy to complain about superdelegates and closed primaries (primaries where, e.g., only Democrats can vote in a Democratic primary), he has said precious little about caucuses, which are abominations of democracy that involve public peer pressure, favor the passionate and outspoken, and discriminate against the working class, producing a result that generally does not actually represent the will of voters statewide like primaries do. As a case in point, the Washington State caucuses produced a Bernie win over Hillary, 74% to 27%, with 230,000 participants, which was the basis for how the state awarded its delegates; in a nonbinding primary, Clinton won over Sanders, roughly 52%-47%, with over 800,000 participants, and that contest was obviously a better representation of the will of the people, with people being able to vote all day, quickly, and privately, and with far, far more people voting. Likewise in Nebraska, where Sanders won 57%-43% with about 33,000 participants in that state’s caucus, and which was the basis for the state awarding its delegates; in the non-binding state primary, Clinton won 53% to 47% with over 80,000 participants. It’s pretty easy to see why Sanders is so quiet on caucuses: like most politicians, he’s pretty mum on things that benefit him (note to Sanders supporters: this is something that particularly irks non-Sanders supporters since his mantra is basically “I’m a holier-than-thou political white knight, not like other politicians!”). In fact, mostly because of caucuses favoring passionate Bernie-supporting-types, being less democratic, and having far lower voter turnout than primaries, Sanders has earned many more delegates than he would have otherwise and more delegates than the percent of the vote he has won, rending laughable the claim that the overall system is “rigged” against him.

b.) Sanders and his supporters condemn most other politicians and their tactics, but then copy those tactics when such tactics are convenient for them 

I know there is some overlap here from part a.), but we can point to when Clinton’s campaign outorganized the Sanders people at the state convention, after the Sanders people outorganized the Clinton people at the Clark County convention; yet even as Sandernistas did not even give pause to the idea that they had won more delegates out of organization than they should have won based on the caucus votes, they went into a holy rage when they were outorganized in turn and lost that advantage at the state convention even though that restored things to what the will of the voters had initially set. The issue with superdelegates, as explained above, reflects the same principle. 

Another reflection of this principle involves how Sanders criticized Clinton’s votes and positions as pretty much black-and-white, right and wrong, on anything from Iraq to the TPP; but when Sanders is attacked for his record of not being as tough on guns as he could be, he expects people to take into account that Vermont is a rural state; in other words, he is saying “My controversial positions deserve a nuanced understanding, but Clinton’s do not.” Sanders was also quick to condemn Trump for violence at Trump’s rallies, but then hypocritically issued the statement he issued in response to his own supporters’ actions in Nevada that I discussed in Part I absolving himself and his campaign. He claims that his is a campaign of high-minded principles that will avoid personal attacks, but constantly engages in indirect personal attacks on Clinton’s character and credibility by association and implication and is more than content to let his surrogates and supporters do his dirty work, rarely reigning them in. 

In other words, while Sanders claims to transcend politics, he’s still a politician who’s pretty good at politics and is quite capable of giving unfair jabs and engaging in distortions, just like many other “Establishment” politicians he criticizes.

2.) Sanders supporters are obsessed with absurd conspiracy theories that they think specifically target them and their candidate: “The Whole World Is Against Us!” (or, “Losing Is Never Bernie’s fault!”)

During the Obama years, much of the right could (and still can) be characterized by an insane sense of perpetual victimhood, that they were the victims of massive conspiracies and everybody and everything was out to get them. This was one of the great contrasts between the Republicans and the Democrats: the mainstream left generally avoided such paranoid, conspiratorial mentalities. In part thanks to Sanders and his supporters, as well as a rising culture of highlighting “microaggression,” the left is now catching up rapidly to the right. I’ve been proud for some time that the right was a bunch of whiny people with an overinflated sense of victimhood and that my left presented a real contrast to this. It’s now much harder for me to say that today (not that there aren’t many Americans, particularly minorities, that are entitled to a real sense of victimhood because of very real and present grievances, but white college-attending/graduate Millennials—a very large portion of Bernie’s base—are generally not among American society’s greatest victims).

But how you fight these battles, and what you choose to fight over, is important and says a lot about you and your crowd. And I’m very sorry to say that Sanders and his Sandernistas are at the very forefront of helping the left close the gap with the right with their own growing hyperbolic outrage on often questionable or relatively tangential issues/incidents, if it hasn’t already. As I’ve noted before, Sanders and his supporters constantly explain in nearly identical, hackneyed responses that all setbacks and defeats are a conspiracy against them, the effort of the “Establishment” media/political elites; they claim thinking people only support Sanders, and everyone else has been brainwashed; it’s up for Sanders and his supporters’ missionary zeal to convert the stupid heathens and “Bernie-splain” the truth to them, including Republicans, who will be with Bernie once they see the light. And in his effort to campaign on a sense of perpetual, partly-imaginary victimhood, he resembles all-too-much one Donald J. Trump. Sanders and his supporters constantly feel as if they are unfairly treated when, in fact, they are often treated with a lot more tolerance and their candidate treated much more gently by Clinton, her campaign, the Democratic Party, and the media than they realize; if anything, “the system” has demonstrably given Sanders a relative advantage with its many caucuses in states demographically favorable to him that skewed delegates even more towards him and with a calendar that started with states like Iowa and New Hampshire that were also very favorable to him. 

Yet in Nevada, Sanders superdelegate Erin Bilbray was quick to level wild charges of “disenfranchisement” when the state Party chief Roberta Lange calmly swatted such a conspiratorial accusation away, noting that it was the Sanders camp’s own disorganization, lack of long-term planning, and inability to effectively engage existing avenues and persuade enough people that were the reasons they were not seeing the outcome they had desired. But for far too many Sandernistas, everything that happened in Nevada is “proof” of a massive “conspiracy” and they, personally, are victims of “the Establishment.”

3.) Sanders and his supporters can’t even entertain the idea that they don’t represent most Americans despite mountains of evidence that they don’t 

It seems as if they are almost incapable of conceiving that they just don’t have a message and a candidate that is as appealing as Clinton’s and that most Americans, particularly African-Americans and Hispanics by incredibly wide margins, prefer Hillary Clinton and have entirely reasonable and data-backed foundations for concluding that Clinton is a more capable leader with a more accomplishable agenda and a more effective plan for implementing it, thus making her a leader that will help them and the country much more than Sanders and his incredibly idealistic platform and approaches that are far less likely to succeed; it doesn’t occur to Sandernistas that most Americans are not receptive to an informed understanding of Sanders and his agenda and methods, and that by far most Democrats by a margin of millions simply prefer her to him and not because they are brainwashed (if anything, Clinton supporters have a much more nuanced and data-driven mentality about politics than Sanders supporters). In fact, a major mantra of Sanders and his campaign is that, ispo facto, the more people that turn out to vote, the better it is for Sanders, that Sanders will win with high turnout but Hillary will triumph when there is low turnout; this is demonstrably incorrect (just see my discussion of Washington/Nebraska above as two examples). 

Thus, when Nevada’s state convention awarded two delegates to Clinton that gave her the 20-15 edge over Sanders that reflected the actual caucus numbers and the initial projection based on those numbers, Bernie Bros and Bernie Sistahs howled at the unacceptable idea that somehow they did not come out on top. They “feel” they are the majority and “the will of the people” even without any serious numbers or evidence to prove this.

In reality, there is no mass Bernie Sanders “movement,” just a common coalition of the leftist opposition within the left that is challenging the more centrist and mainstream Democratic Party, a coalition that rises here and there in various election cycles, “from George McGovern to Jerry Brown to Bill Bradley to Howard Dean,” even if this one is more to left and exceeded expectations.

4.) Sanders and his supporters have a wildly inflated view of their self-importance and self-entitlement, and partly as a result his supporters take political disagreements in a deeply personal way that leads to deeply personal attacks as a response 

Sanders supporters really tend to take everything very personally; they feel that they are victims (one wonders how so many young voters who haven’t lived long enough to generally have experienced too much hardship, that are participating in all this as part of a cozy-college-existence extracurricular social activity, feel so deeply aggrieved), feel personally hurt by reasonable criticism of Sanders, take it as a personal insult when you challenge anything about their worldview, and respond with personal attacks, harassment, and vicious insults to almost any challenge or criticism directed at them or their candidate; for Bernie supporters, it’s all about them, their feelings, what they want, their issues, to the exclusion of any others(’). And for Bernie, it’s all about his candidacy; he clearly feels entitled to force his agenda on a Democratic Party and Democratic voters even though a majority supported a different candidacy, with different ideas and a different approach, just as his supporters feel perfectly entitled to force their candidate and agenda on a majority of voters who picked Clinton and her agenda, Nevada just being one salient example.

Another important point to make is that Sanders was not even a Democrat when the year 2015 began, and he was proud of the fact that for years he was not part of the Democratic Party as an independent (small “d”) democratic socialist, having actively campaigned against Democrats repeatedly. And most of Sanders supporters come from voters who are not actually Democrats, but left-leaning independents: from many exit polls, it’s clear that Clinton won Democrats by about 2-1 throughout the primaries and caucuses, while Sanders won non-Democrats who voted in the Democratic contests (independents and some Republicans) by about the same margin (keep in mind these independents are generally left-leaning to begin with and are not actually representative of true independents who don’t lean right or left, with whom Sanders struggles, and struggles almost equally as much as Clinton). In fact, Sanders only won more Democrats than Clinton in 2 of the 27 states surveyed: his home state of Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire. So Sanders—only a recently-minted Democrat who has generally avoided fundraising for his fellow Democrats—and his non-Democrats feel they are entitled to control the Democratic Party and its direction.  Talk about chutzpah…

That registered Democrats think and feel otherwise is merely inconvenient; because they are Bernie Sanders supporters, and because they know Bernie Sanders is “right,” the majority must be with them. This mentality puts the utmost importance on themselves as individuals, how they feel, what they think; what others think is irrelevant, and the idea that a majority of Americans would dare to disagree is explained away as smokescreens of the political/media “Establishment.” Hence, Sanders supporters get really, really angry when there are voting irregularities (which they term voter “suppression” as if it was directed to benefit Clinton though there is no evidence for such a charge to be leveled), and assume that any irregularities, which are common in elections, are deliberately targeting them and are the difference between victory and defeat. 

For Sanders supporters, it’s all about them, what they think and want, and how fast they want it; other voters with similar views but preferring different methods, and others with dissimilar views, who together clearly outnumber Sandernistas, are not even considered, and ridiculous ideas of bringing people with fundamentally different views on board in matter of months are confidently bandied about, even though there is no such precedent in American history. Sandernistas also arrogantly assume that they are the future of a Democratic party to which many of them are not even really attached in any deep sense. 

Their certainty that they speak for “the people” without even taking time to understand what and how people other than themselves think and feel is unquestionably one of the most off-putting things about Sanders supporters.

The Nevada drama sums this up nicely: at the state convention, Sanders supporters assumed they had a majority of legitimate delegates in the room (they did not) and that it was dirty tricks (it wasn’t) directed at personally disenfranchising them (they weren’t) that made the difference (it wasn’t), that they are so important as to be the object of a mass conspiracy (they aren’t) and they took it so personally and lashed out in such a deeply personal way in response. This particular type of delusional narcissism is rampant throughout Sanders, his campaign, and his supporters.

5). Sanders and his supporters constantly project and feed off of wildly unrealistic expectations on a massively delusional and fantastical level

I’m sorry, but to anyone who’s been paying attention to the details of American politics for the last eight years, if you think there is even a remote chance in the very near future that any of Sanders’ three main policy pillars of his campaign—1.) single-payer government run healthcare for all, 2.) free public college for all, and 3.) a massive tax increase on particularly the wealthy and corporations but also the middle class to pay for the first two pillars—you are simply delusional and peddling and subscribing to fantasy of the sort that only serves to dash hopes and increase cynicism once the inevitable letdown occurs. As I have noted before, America is a conservative country—with 47 out of 50 states with more self-identified conservatives than self-identified liberals—and Bernie keeps talking as if the millions of Americans who outnumber him and his followers simply don’t exist. Expectations that even today in 2016 that a man who puts “(democratic) socialist” proudly before his name actually has a chance in a general election race are also delusional. 

Yet for Sanders supporters, visions of sugarplums danced in their heads along with visions of imminent free college, single-payer health care, massive punitive taxes on the rich, and political revolution, all arm-in-arm with the victorious Bernie Sanders candidacy both in the primaries and in the general election; feeding such expectations is particularly unforgivable on Sanders’ part (especially so late into the primaries), but with his constantly reinforcing these expectations and beliefs among his many enthusiastic followers, one truly wonders how they will cope with or without therapy when the inevitable reality becomes clear even to them. 

When it came to the Nevada convention, Bernie’s campaign had led supporters to believe they could “win” and/or expect to overturn the rules, people, and system in a matter of days and weeks, all while they were a minority; if that’s not the definition of being delusional, I don’t know what is.

6.) Sanders and his supporters subscribe to an extremist narrative and an extremist worldview

If you listen to Sanders and especially his supporters, how warped their vision of the world is becomes ever so clear. Basically, Sanders thinks that the really REALLY bad rich Americans and EVIL Wall Street have bought the “corporate” media and the “Establishment” politicians to serve their interests. He does not allow for the reality that they are, in part, the engine of much of America’s economic success even considering their massive transgressions; he does not say they have too much influence influence or a seat at the table that is too big; rather, the entire system, including the leadership of the Democratic Party, are part of a “corrupt campaign finance system” and a “rigged economy” and a “rigged” party nomination process. The “corporate” media keeps people uninformed and in the dark on all this and if only the media told the truth and if Bernie missionaries were then to make their case to people with fundamentally different beliefs, if only the masses rose and put the wealthiest Americans in their place and limited their ability to corrupt the system with their money, then a clear majority of Americans would support Bernie Sanders, democratic socialism, and Bernie’s policies and methods, which would fix pretty much everything. Other problems like racism would melt away once corruption and the wealthy are curtailed. 

In this view, the primary evils in society are capitalism and the people and institutions who benefit the most from a capitalist system. Only the “alternative” media give Bernie a fair shake. Hillary Clinton is a major force promoting this corrupt system and therefore is a major part of the problem. Using military intervention to stop mass killing is hopeless, and the current domestic system is also hopeless. With Sanders peddling this to his devotees, is it any wonder that many of them think that whenever Sanders loses, foul play and cheating MUST be to blame? That they have no faith in the current system? That there MUST a “corporate” media conspiracy or cover-up, a “Bernie blackout?”  That Hillary deserves to be called SHillary, a warmonger, and far worse? And her supporters also? That there’s “no difference” between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, or Clinton or Trump? That liberal moderates are now somehow exposed as part of the right? 

This view overemphasizes the importance of Wall Street and the wealthy in contributing to America’s problems even as they are clearly far from blameless. This view fails to make basic, obvious distinctions in a self-serving manner. This view makes his supporters think that any outcome which does not result in a Bernie victory is illegitimate, that they and their candidate are perpetual victims in a system rigged against them. This view makes his supporters think that dealing with inequality and corruption is a silver bullet for the rest of America’s woes. And this view fails to acknowledge that very real progress has been made from working within the system, instead making people believe that nothing positive can happen with our public institutions and creating an unrealistically cynical view that breeds further hopelessness and makes it even harder for actual elected leaders to mobilize support for real reforms that can help real people; to put it another way, Bernie turns people off when it comes to the system, the success of which depends on people’s engagement with it, and it creates a cycle of inaction and anger that only leads to worse outcomes and more anger. And all this just feeds further into the hopeless, cynical views that are peddled by Sanders and consumed by his supporters, regardless of reality. As an Atlantic piece notes:

“…anger and frustration are far more likely to create chaos and confusion than they are to facilitate a productive discussion about common goals—like keeping a Republican out of the White House.”

Twitter meme, totals as of late May 

This view also fails to take into consideration that by every metric (and even if the system awarded delegates differently, including if every state held primaries open to independents), Bernie Sanders lost and lost “fair and square,” to use even the words of Bill Maher, a strong Bernie Sanders supporter; it fails to take into account that no matter how just you feel your cause is and how self-righteously you behave, “sometimes you just lose.” Yep, despite flaws, the system worked, awarding the nomination to the candidate with the broadest support and the most votes by far.

Yep, in “Bernieworld,” pretty much every politician is a corrupt hack; the media, wealthy, and corporations control pretty much everything and brainwash everyone; the rich and corporations are what primarily stand in the way of solving our problems; and only a democratic socialist revolution and candidate can save the day, with anything less being meaningless. Such a mentality is not only unhelpful and unproductive, but decidedly dangerous for the health of any democracy, from the ancient Roman Republic to the republic of the United States today. 

And this extremist worldview and mentality is well-illustrated by Bernie’s supporters’ explanations and accusations swirling around Nevada, the DNC, Chairwoman Lange, and Bernie’s own statement on the Nevada state convention.

7.) Sanders and especially his supporters have an incredibly selective intake and total disregard for information that runs counter to their narrative 

Without a doubt, one of the most annoying things about Bernie Sanders and his supporters is that they constantly make their case using arguments that are easily refutable or made far less compelling with information that is easily and readily accessible and hardly in dispute. “Bernie as a socialist has a real chance to win the general election!” (but voters are more likely to vote for a Muslim, a homosexual, a black candidate, a Mormon, or an atheist than a socialist, with the hypothetical socialist earning less support than any other candidate category). “Bernie has relatively high favorable ratings!” (but he is new to the general public and has not been really attacked on many of his biggest weakness by any major candidate or organization, and Republicans are laying off Sanders [Trump is even encouraging him] with hopes that he will weaken Clinton or somehow be the nominee, a situation in which Republicans see a far better chance to win in November). “General election polls show Bernie is the better candidate!” (but polls at this stage are wildly and demonstrably historically inaccurate). “The public is behind big parts of Bernie’s agenda like free college and single-payer healthcare!” (except when members of that public are shown how much their taxes will increase as a result, when support drops dramatically to 17% and 15%, respectively). “Independents love Bernie!” (but only left-leaning independents, not truly middle-of-the-road or conservative ones). “The system is rigged against Bernie!” (except because of caucuses Bernie has more delegates than if those states held far more fair and participatory primaries). “Hillary voted ‘for the Iraq war!’” (she actually voted to authorize the president to use force if necessary, and implicitly as a last resort, to disarm Saddam Hussein of WMD and enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions). “Bernie wins most working class voters!” (but only if you completely factor out African-Americans and Latinos, who overwhelmingly support Clinton, and ignore that older white working class voters support her over Sanders, too). The list goes on and on…

Thus, even in a contest in which he lost the caucus vote, in Nevada, Sanders and his supporters were able to whine that they were being robbed, whine about their delegates being disqualified, and accuse the state’s Democratic Party of foul play even though it was Sanders supporters themselves who had failed to organize properly or follow the rules, even though Clinton won the caucus by over 5%, even though Sanders’ own people sent the wrong information to their prospective delegates about deadlines. Of course their complaints and Bernie’s own complaints fail to mention any of these facts, fitting into a clear trend of selectivity and misrepresentation.

Melina Mara/Washington Post via Getty

Conclusion: A Liberal Tea Party Is Still a Tea Party, And Must Still Be Called Out And Fought As One

In the end, then, we have a compelling and clear idea of the symptoms and manifestations of Sanders Derangement Syndrome: a blithe combination of the following characteristics exhibited by Sanders and/or his supporters:

1.) hypocrisy when it comes to democracy, tactics, and politics

2.) a conspiracy-oriented mindset that allows for all manners of explanations for Bernie’s losses other than that he actually lost and was the less appealing candidate

3.) incorrectly assuming that they speak for “the people,” this not being the case being inconceivable to them

4.) a narcissistic sense of self-importance and self-entitlement that helps lead to a vindictive personalization of political discussion

5.) holding onto a set of wildly unrealistic expectations to the extent that Sanders supporters live in an alternate reality

6.) the articulation of an extreme narrative and an extreme worldview

7.) both a strong disregard for and an inability to incorporate facts and context unfavorable to their positions

If this sounds familiar, it should: these are exactly the type of symptoms exhibited on the right by those in the Tea Party. Much like how whatever we would want to call the syndrome that led to the creation of Tea Party spread rapidly like a virus and created a horde of zombies that was dangerous to anything in its proximity, Sandernistas infected with Sanders Derangement Syndrome have descended upon America, the left, and the Democratic Party and are wreaking havoc and damaging all in their path. Ultimately, like with Trump, the responsibility is not as much with the candidate but with the voters themselves but that still does not absolve Sanders of his responsibilities for channeling such an unhelpful and unproductive group of voters and encouraging their worst tendencies.  And with these crowds rising on both the right and the left, the ability of society to discuss its differences is simply deteriorating.

Just like Trump with his fans, these people were not created by Sanders, but he did bring many of them into the political process and looking at both Trump’s and Sanders’ more extreme supporters, the argument that it is always better when more people participate in democracy looks problematic at best; the fringes are better off being on the sidelines than in derailing those who are actually more interested in governing than in making noise and disrupting. It is Sanders more than any other single person, then, who can and must do something to harness these people and their passions in a productive way that thus far he has spectacularly failed to do, and it is doubtful as to whether even he will be able to do so, so extreme and myopic are Sandernistas.

I understand that what I said may be offensive to some, and that I may be ruffling some feathers. But I don’t care; the time for platitudes and pretending obvious problems are not problems is long past, if it ever existed; few people outside the Tea Party would agree that its emergence and the participation of its ranks in politics has been a good thing, and that we weren’t all better off with them stewing in irrelevance. Well, the same is true about how hardcore Sandernistas are viewed outside their own camp. There is no doubt that, rather than releasing a force upon the American body politic that will help advance meaningful and workable reform, Sanders has helped to unleash a force as unhelpful and unproductive as the Tea Party, in style if not so much with some of their intentions and end-goals.

Sanders Derangement Syndrome is a virus that must be treated as an infection, especially since it infects so many young people that could be the future of American politics. Maybe Obama and more practical minority voters are the future, and I hope that this is the case; but if Sanders and the angry white liberal hoi polloi that has so strongly contributed to the breakdown in civility and rationality in the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination contest are the harbinger of things to come, we’re in even more trouble on the left nationally than we have been over the majority of Obama’s presidency. And that thought, even in the year of Trump, is terrifying in its own right.

I have written before about how the ancient Roman Republic shows us how bad precedents, once set, can destroy a democracy from within, and have recently taken great pains to discuss Donald Trump and the precedents he is setting in this context. Without a doubt, Bernie Sanders is a far better human being than Trump and represents far less of a problem than Trump. But that does not mean that Sanders and his supporters have not set some disturbing precedents that must be called out and dealt with in their own right, regardless of the many separate and often more alarming maladies with which Trump has infected our body politic.

For anyone who thinks I am being hyperbolic or paranoid, I point the reader to the Nevada Democratic Party’s state convention and Bernie Sanders’ response to his own supporters disruptions and death threats: it is truly a textbook example of the wider phenomenon I’ve identified as Sanders Derangement Syndrome; combined with the “penchant for extra-parliamentary behavior — indeed, actual violence” his supporters exhibited in Nevada, it’s not unreasonable to view Sandernistas as a serious threat with which one cannot reason. They are indicating they will behave as political terrorists willing to use low-level violence to intimidate the majority whom they could not persuade into granting them concessions they did not and could not earn democratically; with Nevada set up as a potential coming attraction for the Democrats’ national convention taking place in Philadelphia this July, Sanders himself is still vowing to take his fight to the national convention floor, potentially inflicting serious harm on the Clinton campaign and indirectly aiding Trump, the Republicans, and their chances of victory at a time when the fate of Western democracy for the foreseeable future may be at stake.

For years and especially since the so-called “Gingrich Revolution,” the right has falsely caricatured the left as a disruptive angry mob; now that disruptive angry left has finally arrived. Call it whatever you want, but it’s real and it’s here and it is a problem that demands attention; we ignore it at our own and our collective peril, and perhaps why I have been so strident in calling all this out for what it is is because too many others are ignoring this serious problem, distracted by the antics of Trump and his flock, without whom this would be the darkest emerging trend of our current unfortunate and calamitous election cycle.

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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 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 January 4, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 4th, 2016; alternate version published on Global Risk Insights

AMMAN — The year 2015 very much seemed to be, and will likely be remembered as, a year of transition, and not generally for the better, filled with many surprises. Below is a list of topics related to risk that defined the year, with five negative trends and one surprisingly positive one. The list is hardly comprehensive, but it would also be hard to not include any of them in any discussion of the major developments of 2015, even if one argue that others also deserve inclusion/recognition.

1.) The staying power of the Islamic State

YouTube

Perhaps even more shocking that the initial rise and onslaught of the group now known as ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/al-Sham) is their staying power: under not insignificant military pressure from the U.S., Iraq, Syria, several European/NATO states, various rebels groups and nominally Russia (which is targeting mainly non-ISIS groups) and some (minor) action from Arab nations, ISIS has not only survived but thrived. This is the case even as it has lost some of its gains from its peak territorial power (Iraq only just recently—apparently—managed to retake the city of Ramadi from ISIS, which has held it for most of the year, and is not even close to regaining sovereignty in much of Western Iraq, let alone the situation in Syria), so even as ISIS has suffered some setbacks in Iraq and Syria, it has seen its power increase in Libya, Egypt’s Sinai, and elsewhere, and has also demonstrated its global reach as far away as Paris, France, and San Bernardino, California, in the United States. Though the favored political rhetoric involves talk of “eradicating” and “destroying” ISIS, such talk is not only wildly premature, it borders on the farcically ridiculous. The unfortunate truth is that ISIS is here to for the foreseeable future, in one form or another. With the death of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda receding somewhat into the background, the West might have thought that terrorism was not much of a global problem, but a regional one successfully contained in places far away; instead, ISIS has made clear that that terrorism is not fading away, and perhaps its greatest success is to direct the attention of large portions of the population of countries like France and the United States to consider ISIS/terrorism a—or the—major issue they face, whereas before few French or Americans would have prioritized such so highly.

2.) China’s economy comes back down to earth

Agence France-Presse

After decades of remarkably consistent and robust economic growth, the Chinese economic juggernaut has plummeted down from the celestial heavens and had taken on a far more earthly, vulnerable quality. Hitting the lowest officially announced levels since the world economic/financial crisis was in full gear early in 2009, China said its GDP growth rate slowed to 6.9% in 2015’s third quarter, but there is plenty of suspicion surrounding that figure, as some experts and indicators point towards what could actually be a (significantly?) lower number. Furthermore, the overall trend this year thus far has been a significantly downward one compared to 2014 and earlier years. All this affects all manner of global economic indicators, as China’s massive economic engine consumes and outputs many things; global oil prices are but one of the casualties of China’s slowing economy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been able to fairly easily deal with both labor and political unrest while its economy was doing better, but one thing to watch in 2016 will be how the CCP handles what will surely be growing unrest as the economy in China is expected to continue to slow down. Another thing to watch will be how China’s crisis will further affect the global economy. Finally, how this crisis affects China’s effort to shift from an economy driven on manufacturing exports to a domestic consumer-based economy will also be telling. All-in-all, China and its leadership is looking at a challenging 2016.

3.) The resurgence of refugees

There is something deeply disturbing about the fact that seventy years after the end of WWII, the world is seeing the largest global displacement of human beings from their homes since the end of that conflict which was in absolute terms the most destructive the world has ever seen. At the end of 2014, the number of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs: those who fled their homes but did not leave their countries) was nearly sixty million, and that number has only increased this year, so that roughly one out of every 122 people in the world has been forced to flee home. That the international community has been unable—no, to be honest, unwilling—to 1.) stem the tide of increasing refugees and/or 2.) settle existing refugees with any zeal or energy proportionate to the crisis is a testament to the failure of said community to live up to the hopes and dreams that characterized the founding of the United Nations just a few months after the end of WWII. This failure has produced pathetically tragic results. From Jordan to Italy, waves of displaced bring considerable risk and possibility of destabilization. Specifically, the wave of migrants into Europe (particularly from Syria) has been a major catalyst for a number of developments there, which launches into the next main theme of 2015…

4.) EU in crisis mode and lurching to the right

Reuters

Though hardly unforeseeable, the refugee flow into Europe has touched off a series of crises that has meant steep challenges to the European Union as a political entity, though, as usual, predictions of the EU’s demise are wildly premature. Apart from the crisis of dealing with some 1,000,000 refugees entering Europe (with the EU only formally settling a startlingly mere 190 of them so far) the refugee influx has invigorated Europe’s far right and helped it to rise to newfound positions of power. In Germany, the EU’s most powerful state, Chancellor Angela Merkel is “under fire” for her liberal refugee policy there and a right-wing party is polling ahead of all others in Sweden, which threatens Sweden’s position as a bastion of liberal immigration policy. The earlier economic crises have laid open rifts within the European polity that were only made wider in 2015, and while some may take a degree of inspiration in the rise of new populist parties in Spain, the political chaos this has fostered must also be acknowledged. Voters there and in Portugal and Greece seemed to reject the collective EU solutions for their economic crises (even after a third massive bailout for Greece!), casting doubt on the ability of the EU to move forward collectively economically. Another election has empowered the far right in Poland, and right-wing parties are performing extremely well in places like Austria and even Denmark. And in the wake of the ISIS attacks in Paris, only a unifying of socialists and conservatives headed off a major victory by France’s main far-right party. Not only in these places, but throughout Europe, the sharp rise of the right is undeniable. Even some leftist European leaders are now flirting with and mimicking, to a degree, those on the far-right. To coin The Economist’s phrase, this is “[t]he march of Europe’s little Trumps,” which brings the reader to the next main development…

5.) Political chaos in the United States

AP Images

In case Americans are not aware of this fact, let it be clear: the rest of the world, from Europe to the Middle East, is paying attention to the American two-party political race just enough to shocked and dismayed at the one-man-phenomenon known as Donald Trump, who has been the Republican front-runner since July and will still be the front-runner going into 2016, something very few political-powers-that-be predicted. Many a punditclaimed that his campaign would implode almost as soon as he entered the race, but yours truly wrote only a few weeks after he had taken the lead that it would be foolish to dismiss Trump too easily or too quickly. The world’s most powerful nation with the most powerful military (one which it has shown it is not afraid to use aggressively) is showing a degree of political chaos and unpredictability not seen in generations. While smart money would be on Hillary Clinton beating Trump or any of the more extremist Republican political candidates who have been doing well in polling of late, one thing is for certain: the world is watching with a degree of fear and horror at what is coming out of the American presidential race, at least on the Republican side, and the political unraveling of the Republican Party in 2015 may yet move global mountains in the not too distant future, for better or for worse.

BONUS: Iran!

While it is too early to make any surefire long-term claims about Iran and its regional proxies, 2015 at the very least will be remembered as a year when Iran made it clear that it would not be sidelined, will be there to defend Shiite leaders and people, and is eager to play a larger role in the greater-Middle East. 2015 saw the U.S. reach out to both Iran and Cuba in ways unprecedented for decades; a big-loser here was non-engagement. Another big loser in the long-run is Sunni extremism: from Yemen and Lebanon to Iraq and Syria, Iran is a force supporting Shiite interests that Sunni leaders are now undoubtedly going to have to reckon with; unlike in many instances before when Sunni leaders avoided politics in the hope that U.S. support or military action would help them crush enemies they should otherwise accommodate or co-opt, America reaching out to Iran and helping to forge a major international nuclear agreement with global powers is a signal that the Sunni world better start getting on the same page; a regional cold war fought with proxy-militias and terrorist groups is fraught with peril for all sides and could turn the whole region into Syria if tensions are not reduced and conflict not mitigated.

For those who are naysayers, it should be pointed out that there is, simply, no better realistic alternative than this agreement and that Iran-sponsored militant Shiite Islam and its accompanying terrorist, militia, and rebel groups have for years not come anywhere close to the (scale of) brutality ofSunni Islamist extremist groups like ISIS, its al-Qaeda in Iraq precursor, Boko Haram, the Taliban, etc. Hezbollah and the Houthis are not taking sex slaves by the thousands, chopping people’s heads off regularly for internet mass consumption, destroying the world’s great antiquities, or executing civilians and prisoners by thousands. In fact, they seem rather quaint compared with the mass brutality of ISIS and its affiliates. And under Iran’s leadership, Hezbollah has turned from firing its rockets at Israel to firing them at ISIS. In fact, the Iranian military and Hezbollah have put much more of their military might into fighting ISIS than any Sunni-led states surrounding Syria or Iraq have. That is a fact that must be acknowledged, not dismissed. Compared to the Saudi-led Sunni status quo in the region, there are indications that the ascendance of Iran and its Shiite proxies would not only not be worse than, but that such an ascendancy might push the region in some positive, less extreme directions. An Iran eclipsing Saudi Arabia in power and influence, then, may not be a bad thing overall. That in itself says much about the dire depths to which the region has sunk, but it is true nonetheless.

If one wants to contest this, ask this question: would anyone prefer to be captured by ISIS instead of Hezbollah?

*****

Such was the year 2015 that the empowerment of Iran can be seen as a relative positive. As to how 2016 turns out, all of the important trends outlined here will have significant bearing on whether or not there is a more positive feel to 2016.

Honorable mentions: the resilience and growth in power of Russia’s Putin and Turkey’s Erdoğan, despite the fact that they are taking their nationsbackwards and down dangerous paths… democracy in Burma and oh, Canada too! Also, Bibi Netanyahu has been slowly entangling his Israelis—and the Palestinians along with them—into the ditch of conflict and no tow truck is on the horizon, plus security problems in Afghanistan. And, finally, as the world became more dependent on the Internet/mobile devices in 2015, cybersecurity was still lacking for both the private sector and government…

Vogue

Vogue

AP     

Happy(yier?) New Year!(?)

Related article: Happy—Wait, No—Risky New Year

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)