Never Speak to Strangers: Russia and the Soviet Union
(David Satter, April 4, 2021)

Transcript available below

About the speaker

David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent, is a long time observer of Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Satter was born in Chicago in 1947 and graduated from the University of Chicago and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a B.Litt degree in political philosophy. He worked for four years as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune and, in 1976, he was named Moscow correspondent of the London Financial Times. He worked in Moscow for six years, from 1976 to 1982, during which time he sought out Soviet citizens with the intention of preserving their accounts of the Soviet totalitarian system for posterity.

After completing his term in Moscow, Satter became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for The Wall Street Journal, contributing to the paper’s editorial page. In 1990, he was named a Thornton Hooper fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and then a senior fellow at the Institute. From 2003 to 2008, he was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2008, he was also a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches a course on contemporary Russian history at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced Academic Programs.

Satter has written three books about Russia: Russia: It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (Yale, 2011); Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Knopf, 1996; paperback, Yale 2001); and Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale 2003). His books have been translated into Russian, Estonian, Latvian, Czech, Portuguese and Vietnamese. His first book, Age of Delirium, has been made into a documentary film in a U.S. – Latvian – Russian joint production.

Satter has testified frequently on Russian affairs before Congressional committees. He has written extensively for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. His articles and op-ed pieces have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The National Interest, National Review, National Review Online, Forbes.com, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, The New York Sun, The New York Review of Books, Reader’s Digest and The Washington Times. He is frequently interviewed in both Russian and English by Radio Liberty, the Voice of America and the BBC Russian Service and has appeared on CNN, CNN International, BBC World, the Charlie Rose Show, Al Jazeera, France 24, Fox News, C-Span and ORT and RTR, the state run Russian television networks.

The views of the speaker are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Westminster Institute.

Transcript

Robert R. Reilly:

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Westminster Institute. I am Bob Reilly, your host. Today we are going to do something different. I am privileged to have a conversation with an expert on the Soviet Union and on contemporary Russia. I speak of David Satter, who is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. I began reading David Satter forty years ago when his brilliant pieces were appearing as op-eds in The Wall Street Journal. His writings in the Financial Times, National Review, and many other magazines, many of them written from the Soviet Union or Russia, from both of which he was expelled because of the kind of things he was reporting on which made things uncomfortable for the Soviet Union and then for the authoritarian Russian government.

Past publications

Now, David has written five spellbinding books on the Soviet Union and Russia. I am just going to mention them very quickly. The first was Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, on which he also made a prize-winning documentary film. Next, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State. Then, It was a Long Time Ago and it Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past, which is an absolutely riveting look at how Russians cope or refuse to cope with the communist legacy, and since David was there and had this on the ground experience and got some dirt in his hands as he went to some of the former killing grounds of the gulag, it is an indispensable book for anyone who wants to both understand the Soviet Union and why it has morphed into, in some respects, modern Russia today. The next book David wrote was, The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin.

Now, most recently David has put out a collection of his writings over a span of forty years from some of the journals I mentioned. It includes interviews and other kinds of writing he has done. It is called, Never Speak to Strangers and other writing from Russia and the Soviet Union: 1976 to 2019. I want to emphasize that you know all of these writings show a depth of understanding but are never academic dry as dry. They are really dramas, they are dramas of investigation and discovery. And David is a brilliant writer and these books are riveting. As I have been reading through his new book, I am so happy to have the gems that I remember from so many years ago collected in one place that shows how present his understanding was at the time and how accurately he foretold what most likely was coming next. So much of what he wrote in this is still relevant today and that is why David, I am so happy to have you with the Westminster Institute. Thank you for coming.

David Satter:

Well, thank you, Bob. I am very glad to be here glad to be engaged with you on this subject that is so important to both of us and I am sure to many of our viewers. Perhaps I can begin by talking a little bit about this most recent book because it brings together the articles that I have written in the course of more than 40 years and those articles chronicled not just the life of Russia and the Soviet Union, but in a way my life because I was so intimately connected with that part of the world and the events that took took place there. There is a lot of personal drama in here, absolutely. In a way this book is a kind of intellectual diary or an intellectual chronicle.

Four Russias

As I mentioned in the introduction, I was privileged to witness four different Russias: the Russia of Brezhnev, the Russia of Gorbachev, the Russia of Yeltsin and now the Russia of Putin. And those Russias were all quite different from each other, but at the same time they are fundamentally the same. What links these very different periods is a common attitude toward the individual, a common attitude toward the role of the state, a common attitude toward the necessary balance between the dignity of the individual and the prerogatives of those who are in power.

It is in fact the challenge for the future of Russia, at least in my opinion, to develop a regime which will not be like the four Russias that have preceded it. And one of the things that I have tried to do with my work and what I am trying to do now is suggest ways in which that could happen. I have devoted a lot of time and a lot of thought to what can be done exactly about a situation in which the individual is seen not as worthy of respect in his own right but is regarded as raw material for the deranged purposes of the state.

Brezhnev’s Russia

Under the Brezhnev regime, the individual was a builder of communism. He did not have identity of his own, he realized himself through his historic mission, of course which was defined by others, which was to build communism in the Soviet Union and then to extend the blessings of communism to the whole world. And it was this deranged idea that paradoxically gave a sense of meaning to what oftentimes were very deprived lives. People in the Soviet Union had few illusions about their standard of living. In fact, it was generally understood that the people in the West lived better than they did, that they lived worse than people in the West, but they compensated for that mentally with the idea that they had a great mission, that their lives had a purpose, that their country was capable of dominating the world and in fact inspiring fear.

I was constantly impressed by the extent to which Soviet people felt it was necessary to make other people afraid. It was a rather strange refrain that for a Westerner of course is quite surprising, that Soviet citizens said, ‘Well, you know the world is afraid of us,’ and they took that to be a very good thing because they understood their country less as a nation which was organized to guarantee the welfare and freedom of its inhabitants but as an organized messianic movement in the form of a political entity which existed not so much for its own sake but for the sake of its motivating idea.

Gorbachev’s Russia

Well, when Gorbachev came to power, he attempted to modernize this system, which had calcified and stagnated and had show and showed signs of slowing down and showed signs of not being able to compete militarily with the West. They understood that it could not compete economically, but that did not bother them very much. But the signs that it could not compete militarily had them very worried. In 1981, there was an air battle over the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon in which Israeli jets using American and Israeli technology destroyed 81 Syrian MiG fighters, which of course were acquired from the Soviet Union, without losing a single plane.

Well, that resonated in the Kremlin. They realized that Western countries were on the verge of mastering the new phase of the scientific-technical revolution and that their institutions were not capable of keeping up, that if there was going to be a new broad-based arms race, the Soviet Union was going to lose. Under those circumstances they were motivated and that was one of the motivations, but there were there were others as well, to undertake reform.

Those reforms however went nowhere because they were based on the use of force, on authoritarian methods, and they encountered the resistance of the party apparatus. Gorbachev himself was not able to reform anything. He relied on the party apparatus, on party officials at all levels, and if they decided to sabotage his plans, there was not very much he could do. And it was that dilemma that gave rise to glasnost.

But glasnost was fatal for the ideology because it opened up the idea that if people were given a little bit of free information, a little bit of freedom to speak, a little bit of freedom to demonstrate, it would put pressure on that recalcitrant party apparatus, which was refusing to carry out Gorbachev’s reforms. But in fact, a little bit of information is hard to control because it inspires demands for more information, and this is what happened. The limits of glasnost continually expanded until the ideology, which was an entire false version of reality, was in tatters and the legitimacy of the regime was hopelessly undermined.

A space had been created in a world of lies for the expression and examination of the truth and under those circumstances an unresolvable tension was created between the real world and the fictitious world that had long been imposed on rightless Soviet citizens. One or the other had to prevail and all the fault lines, the hidden fault lines in the Soviet Union, the national conflicts, the economic conflicts, even the conflicts within the party because the party was a monolithic structure as long as there was no possibility of disagreement.

But it was composed of people like any other human institution and as soon as the disagreement became a practical possibility, that tensions within the party apparatus appeared, it all culminated in August 1991 with the coup attempt, which was staged by people who were trying to preserve the Soviet Union and understood that Gorbachev’s policies would inevitably lead to the country’s collapse. Their coup attempt was unsuccessful and the Soviet Union survived for four months after the coup failed, and then it too became part of history. Gorbachev was replaced or the Gorbachev regime was replaced and Gorbachev’s Russia (in effect Gorbachev’s Soviet Union) by Yeltsin and Yeltsin’s Russia.

Ideology

Now, the ideology we have to go back to. The ideology – because this is very important for Americans to understand, that there are countries that are based on ideologies. It is possible to have a regime based on an entirely fictitious version of reality and that our appreciation of reality and our system, which is ultimately anchored in transcendent values, is not a given, that there are places that absolutely destroy the values of the West and establish their own anti-systems. That is what happened in the Soviet Union.

Well, the key aspect of that ideology was not unique, but let us say in terms of the Western tradition, a dissenting understanding of the source of values in the West. As we know, all of Western tradition is based on the assumption that values are transcendent and they derive from higher sources over and above the realm of society. The Soviet Union took the view, and communist ideology took the view, that it was society itself that was the source of values. Of course, that part of society which they felt was enlightened, so therefore it was the interests of the working class that determined values.

Right and wrong were measured exclusively by what was in the interest of the working class, supposedly. The working class, in turn, was represented not by workers, but by a group of intellectuals who claim to speak for the workers, and that group of intellectuals was organized into a structure which made it possible to rule on the basis of the will of a single person.

The notion that values come from society, that they come from human entities was, of course, taken over by Nazi Germany. In the case of the Soviet Union, values originated based on the interests of the leading class. In Nazi Germany it was the leading race, but the idea is the same, and what was important was to reassert after the fall of the Soviet Union was the primacy of universal, transcendent values, the values that Judeo-Christianity established for the Western world and which formed the basis for societies, that acknowledge the rule of law and that are based on the rule of law.

Well, unfortunately one would have thought that was an inevitable and logical next step, but it did not happen. Of course, those people who called themselves young reformers paid lip service to the importance of establishing the authority of universal values, but all of their actions demonstrated that they retained a communist frame of reference. In particular, they took the view for which is fundamental to Marx’s thought, that all spiritual institutions ultimately derive, and all political institutions as well, ultimately derive from economic relations. Marx held that socialism is the abolition of private property.

Well, they simply turned that on their heads and they were trained as Marxists, by the way. Even though they said they were free-market radicals, much of their approach continued to be Marxist. They took the view that what really mattered were under were the economic relationships and everything else would would result from those, so if Marx took the view that abolishing private property would end exploitation, they took the view that restoring private property was the key to establishing democracy. And in both cases the processes would be automatic because history was determinist.

It, of course, did not work that way. Russia needed more than anything else the establishment of the rule of law and the kind of ethical practices that are an indispensable concomitant of a law-based state and basis for it. In the absence of that, what happened was the young reformers embarked on the largest peaceful transfer of property in history as far as we know, and they did so without the guidance of law, without the guidance of ethics, and what they got was complete criminalization. The transition from communism to market capitalism took a detour and what was created was gangsterism. The consequences for the Russian people were so devastating that it seemed all but impossible that Yeltsin or anyone connected to Yeltsin could remain in power after the year 2000 when there were elections.

But as we know, apartment buildings were blown up in the middle of the night. Hundreds of innocent people were killed. The bombings were blamed on Chechen rebels. They were the excuse for the launching of a new war against Chechnya, a new invasion of Chechnya. Initial success boosted the popularity of the newly appointed prime minister, Putin, a colorless bureaucrat that no one had ever heard of, and Putin was elected president to the surprise of many. His first act in office was to pardon Yeltsin for all crimes committed while he was president, and he launched the fourth and most recent phase in Russia’s modern history, which was the period of explicit non-communist dictatorship but authoritarian rule marked by provocation, assassination, crimes such as the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner, but also – we must point this out – unprecedented prosperity for Russia because of the democrat, the capitalist, the market institutions that were created during the period of gangsterism, of open gangsterism.

Now we have gangsterism as a system, but nonetheless, market institutions were created and in the 2000s the world experienced the raw materials boom, of which Russia was the leading beneficiary. The combination of those factors was of immense use to Putin and the Putin leadership because it inspired an economic boom, and to this day Russians support Putin partly because of the transformation in the economic life of the country over which he presided. The moral issue of how he came to power, how he maintains power, what he intends to do in the future and how much freedom he intends to allow Russians; those issues were pushed aside by the spectacle of the long-awaited prosperity that began to affect people in Russia.

So today we have a country which, although not rich, is better off than it has been historically in economic terms, which is not free, but where the control of the population is mostly the result of manipulation backed up with selective terror, but not mass terror, but a country which nonetheless has a type of government that is too archaic for the educated population over which it rules and which has a mentality that is a potential and present danger for the rest of the world because whether it engages in mass killing or not, it holds to the notion that murder is an a normal part of political life, a normal way of settling quarrels and resolving disputes, and is determined to preserve itself and to undermine the West as a threat to its own existence because of the way in, because of the values on which it it operates.

So that is the story that is reflected in this book that I have compiled of my essays and articles, the kind of chronicle of my experiences, and my hope is we are now going to have a fifth chapter, but I want the fifth chapter to be different from the four preceding chapters and my view is that what Russia really needs and needs desperately is a truth commission. It needs the truth about the communist period, which has been buried, but it needs the truth about the post-communist period, including critical incidents like the blowing up of the buildings in 1999 that allowed Putin to come to power.

And then on the basis of the truth it needs a new constituent assembly. I mean students of history, of whom there are fewer and fewer these days, I am sorry to say, know that the Bolsheviks agitated for the constituent assembly and when it convened, they allowed it to meet for one day because they were a minority in the constituent assembly, which was to determine the new political system of the country.

Russia never really recovered from that. Everything that happened afterward reflected that critical event when those who had been freely elected from all parts of the country to determine the country’s future were dispersed. There needs to be a new constituent assembly capable of endowing Russia with a genuinely democratic system based on a real separation of power and with an awareness of the country’s history. Under those circumstances, the fifth chapter may well be different than the previous four. At least that is my hope for this country to which I have been connected for so many years.

Robert R. Reilly:

But David, would the culture allow for that?

David Satter:

I believe it would in part because of what I have seen over the years. I would have never thought that Russia could rid itself of communist ideology. It was so fundamental to the Soviet Union and to the way in which people lived and thought and yet it was discarded. And what we have now is not Marxism-Leninism, which after all was a false religion and functioned as one. I do not think that my life experience convinces me that the same person can have a radically different view of the world and of himself in a different situation.

I am presently writing a history of Russia after the fall of communism and I am recounting an incident that occurred in my life when I was approached by a person who was working as a security analyst for Gazprom, the big gas conglomerate. And he introduced himself and I in turn introduced myself. And he said, “Well, you do not have to introduce yourself. I know everything about you.” And it turned out that he was a former KGB colonel who had worked in counter-intelligence, and he had been responsible for monitoring the activities of Western correspondents, including me, and so he had been following everything I did throughout the six year period when I was a correspondent in Moscow for the Financial Times. And he began recalling the incidents and so on that he had overheard, listened to, seen.

But here is what was interesting. At that point this was the Yeltsin period and I was writing a book on the rise of the Russian criminal state, and he had become a liberal. When he was involved in counter-intelligence, he was involved in the apprehension of a man named Alexander Agarotnikov, who was a CIA agent in the Russian Foreign Ministry. And Alexander Agarotnikov after his arrest committed suicide. He took poison. This man’s name was Stanislaw Leckereff. He had a history of working on behalf of the regime, catching those who had in theory be traded or were working to undermine it in the case of Western correspondence.

You would have thought that this would be a real hardcore nationalist and communist. Nothing of the kind. He was, you know, once given the opportunity, he was a liberal and he was actually an active critic of the security services. And it was in his new role that in fact he wanted contact with me. Of course, he remembered me from the period when he was spying on me, so what I am trying to say here is that a person under one circumstances, under one set of circumstances, is one person. A person under a different set of circumstances is often a different person. It is the same a little bit within and because of my travels I have experienced this as well with the same place at a different time is a different place. And I think that the Russian people need to be liberated from a web of illusion and self-deception.

Robert R. Reilly:

But there is the truth commission you were calling for.

David Satter:

This is what is so important and there are a large number of Russians now who are living abroad who could play an important role in this. The emotional base of the authoritarian regime is not unchallengeable, it is not invincible. For one thing I have long been convinced that the truth about the apartment bombings and how Putin came to power is critical to Russia’s future and could have an important effect. Even people are not so cynical as to dismiss a crime of that magnitude, but of course, none of this is likely to be easy and there is a role for the United States, which we have historically not been able to play.

Robert R. Reilly:

Well, you know it is interesting you mentioned Russians abroad. A good friend of mine who was a neighbor was a Russian physicist. His father was the conductor of a Soviet army orchestra. Obviously, he grew up an atheist. There was no mention of god in his house. Now, he has in the past several years converted to Russian Orthodoxy. He is going back to Russia to find the graves of his relatives who disappeared in the gulag, who would describe the profoundly moving experience that was. So he is sort of a one-man truth commission. The thing is though – and that is what is so profoundly moving about your work David, is that when you are over there, and it is not a surprise you have been kicked out, you are basically forcing them to face the situation, to face the past by your own trips to those grave sites and your own interviews with the people who are still alive, when they were utilized, and asking them what they thought was going on there, and if they participated, how they rationalize this. So no wonder you were thrown out.

David Satter:

And the other thing, the other problem that we face here is the superficial mindset of the West. We talk about the reluctance of Russians to face the truth, but there is a reluctance in the West. There is a reluctance in the U.S. to face the truth as well. It does not derive necessarily from a fear of personal consequences so much as an unwillingness to think outside of a familiar, comfortable, and conventional framework. I am often discouraged by the reluctance of Western political figures and intellectuals to simply draw the obvious conclusions. So it is not Russians alone, but definitely we saw how important the truth can be during the glasnost period. It was powerful enough to demolish the Soviet state. It is powerful enough now to help the Russian people embark on a new direction and a better direction for their future, but there have to be people who really appreciate that and are committed to it.

Well, as you well know, Navalny is in prison and apparently in pain and not receiving adequate medical treatment. This is the latest news, yeah. So he is Exhibit A that they are not going to allow precisely what you are calling for. Yes, and my only concern as far as Navalny is concerned is that his emphasis on corruption, although uncomfortable for the regime, does not reach the fundamental level of values because what is at stake in the problem in Russia is not corruption, it is murder and it is an attitude toward human life and toward the value of the individual. Of course, corruption. Corruption is a symptom. Corruption is a symptom that arises from this mentality of the interchangeability of people, of their lack of genuine worth, one that is ultimately what has to be addressed.

Of course, Navalny’s video is his – he is a superb investigative journalist, by the way, and his videos are very effective in showing the symptoms of the underlying disease, but from where are they going to derive this value of the individual person? I think that that, of course, requires leadership. It, of course, requires the readiness to face the truth. There have been those people even in the post-Soviet period who have appeared. One of them was my my good friend Yuri Shakachikan. There was Annapolita, the investigative journalist who was murdered.

There are people. I mean not all of them are internationally famous. A lot of them are not famous even in Russia itself, but we do not know who will be the protagonists of such a movement, but it is necessary that it can exist, the conditions for its emergence exist right now. A lot of the opposition activity is directed toward exposing corruption, which is okay. It is not a fundamental challenge to the regime, but there are people and I know them, I know their names, who are capable of addressing [this]. Andrei Sakharov of course did, but addressing Russia’s problems at the level at which they are, that they are opposed by history.

Robert R. Reilly:

But, well, of course, before I ask you how Solzhenitsyn is thought of today, give me your reaction to President Biden recently agreeing to the characterization of Putin as a murderer.

David Satter:

Well, I think that he was right to do so. It was very hesitant. He basically responded to a question and we have to remember that when a similar question was posed to President Trump, Trump said, ‘Well, we kill a lot of people too.” It was one of one of the worst statements made by an American president, but it is meaningless without specifics and the specifics exist. In fact, Biden is not the first American political figure to make this statement. Hillary Clinton also said this, but she was not president at the time. Senator Rubio said it. Various other people have made this statement, always without specifics, always in the style of kids in a playground calling each other names.

And it is interesting that Putin, responding to Biden’s remarks, said, “Well, you know as Russian school children say, you are calling me what you are,” so it has to go beyond this. In fact, I wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal in which I gave the specifics and the most important, the murder of Boris Nemtsov, the shooting down of the Malaysian airline or the blowing up of the buildings. Those were three outstanding examples, but there are others.

I mean American journalism does not do anything that requires real penetration, real thought. I mean they will repeat crazy, unsubstantiated rumors or anonymous reports about the collusion of the Trump campaign with Russian intelligence, but when it comes to reporting on real crimes, where there is real information, and there are real sources, they are not able to do that. We get to what we were saying earlier about certain things being outside their frame of reference and basically over their heads and they do not want to make the effort to bring the truth about the Russian regime in all of its sordid detail to the American people and to people in Russia as well.

Robert R. Reilly:

But David where does that lead, one head of state calling another head of state a murderer or in laying out the specifics of what those murders have been, which you have done so well, in terms of a foreign policy? Where does that leave the United States?

David Satter:

You know there has been criticism for President Biden for having agreed with the remark of murderer, and some of it runs along the line of, well, you just pushed Putin and Russia further into the arms of President Xi because he has nowhere else to go, so he is deepening his strategic and military partnership with the PRC. I think that the value of raising these issues is to deter Russia from further crimes and also establishing the same thing with objecting to the seizure of Crimea, defending those international standards that are necessary for stability. I would not overestimate the extent to which speaking the truth to the Russian leaders pushes them in one direction or another. They are well aware of the truth.

The recent report – I do not know if it has been substantiated, substantiated that there is a Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border. That may well be, but it was not because of anything that Biden said. We have to be careful about what we assume are the causal links. In Russia there is a proverb – I actually like it in some ways, but it very well expresses their attitude. It is, ‘a dog barks but the caravan continues’, and Russians are very good at distinguishing between verbal statements and concrete actions. They understand however that when those verbal statements are more than just words but reflect real knowledge, they begin to resemble concrete actions and become a factor in the power relationship between the countries.

It is to the advantage of the United States to define the relationship with Russia. Once defined they are not going to take revenge on us for [revealing] what they know themselves. They will rather adapt to our conditions and it is the same with anything else that develops in the relationship between Russia and the rest of the world. They will not turn to China because we demonstrate to them that we will not tolerate or we are not going to encourage their illegal behavior. They will moderate their illegal behavior or at the very least attempt to camouflage it. If they turn to China, it will be for completely different reasons.

If they mass troops on the Ukrainian border, the strong statements by the U.S. that indicate that we actually know the kind of regime that exists in Russia and we know the facts about their crimes will deter to the extent it is possible aggression against Ukraine just as much as the provision of military support and political support. We do not drive them into aggressive behavior by resisting it. On the contrary, we make it clear to them that they have nothing to gain.

You made the interesting remark characterizing the period under the Soviet Union when people obviously were not living very well but they took pride in this fact that we were afraid of them. The whole world was afraid of them. Even now with a better standard of living. As you know, Russia is an economy about the size of Italy’s. However, they have modernized their nuclear forces. They have some first-class military equipment. They have reformed their military and their incursions into the NATO airspace, their nuclear submarines poking through the ice cap and the arctic. There are activities in Libya, Syria, the Mediterranean. How does that resonate in Russia today? Are Russians the same way?

That still plays well, same way. When the Russians developed a supersonic missile, yeah, I got a call from a Russian newspaper. I usually do not talk to them but they have my telephone number. I mean I talk to them, but I do not give an interview. I am polite, of course, and they said, well, is this going to compel the U.S. to treat Russia with more respect? I said well, it has nothing to do with whether Russia is treated with more respect. If Russia wants to be treated with more respect, it should behave in a manner that it inspires respect.

Robert R. Reilly:

So David, you mentioned they still enjoy this prospect through the significant military power they possess of provoking fear in the West and what of the United States? And certainly you can say Putin has played his hand very well in gaining leverage in various places where the United States has neglected its traditional role or other players in the West.

Now, I wanted to ask you a larger question about Russian culture. In this book you do make reflections upon ideology and you were a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. After going to the University of Chicago, I was fascinated to learn that you wrote your thesis on the great and famous Hannah Arendt and her fabulous work on the 20^th century on the origins and the nature of ideology. Without that background could you have seen so deeply as you have into the Soviet Union and how that ideology so thoroughly shaped and infected that country?

David Satter:

That is an interesting question. I have asked myself the same question because when I was at Oxford I wrote my thesis on the work of Hannah Arendt, her theory of totalitarianism, and then I ended up in the Soviet Union and saw it all firsthand. But in fact in my personal case, my views were also the result of a kind of evolution within my own family because I came from a family of people who were absolutely sympathetic toward the Soviet Union. My father was a delegate to the 1948 convention of the Progressive Party in Philadelphia where Henry Wallace was nominated for the presidency and he subscribed to left-wing periodicals. I grew up reading them like the National Guardian, which was at one time, you know, it was actually very well done. And I was fascinated by it as a child.

We lived in a neighborhood where there were many people who were either admitted or not admitted members of the Communist Party on the west side and south side of Chicago. We attended events at Hull House in Chicago, the Jane Addams Center, which was a gathering place for left-wing groups. There was a bookstore in Chicago called The Modern Bookstore, which sold thinly disguised or not even not disguised Soviet propaganda. In 1961, the 22nd Party Congress [was held]. My own father, I asked him as a young kid, what about these reports of slave labor camps? And he said that this was just an attempt to discredit the Soviet Union, if those camps had really existed, that we would have had information, we would have had witnesses, survivors, and so on. He horribly underestimated the repressive possibilities.

In 1961, Khrushchev made his remarks about especially the 22nd party congress, that there had been millions of victims. And my father was totally shocked by this news and he did not deny it, and did not justify it, and began a process of reevaluation, but unfortunately, he died in 1965. But I continued that process in my case, continued with my reading, so already by the time I had gotten to Oxford, I was already moving in that the direction. That would, of course, be greatly amplified by the work of Hannah Arendt, then as a young graduate student in Oxford traveling to the to the communist bloc and seeing the conditions firsthand, then going there and realizing that this was exactly what Arendt said it was: a diabolical attempt to impose a false reality by force on a helpless population.

So I mean in my personal case there was a process, which in fact existed for a lot of people. And I have read Arthur Kessler, The God That Failed, which was is still one of the greatest books written by ex-communists. In fact, you know you have to be able to get into the idea to understand its evil, and as I once told someone, he said, ‘to understand the weakness of communism, you first of all have to understand its strength,’ and those who were never attracted to it in any way have a tough time penetrating that very special mental universe.

Robert R. Reilly:

You have a very illuminating discussion in here about Nazism and communism and comparing the two forms of millenarianism. Hitler, the new messiah, the class is replaced by race, the Jews and the Gypsies become the new bourgeoisie that has to be eliminated and the Slavs enslaved, etc. Now, here is a larger question, again about Russian culture before the revolution in 1917. There was an idea in Russia of it as the third Rome.

David Satter:

Absolutely, it had a special, providential, maybe even messianic mission to play in the world, though as you well know, during the Cold War there were analysts who simply said, look, do not pay so much attention to communism, it is just an overlay on the traditional Russian character, which has these geopolitical interests and plus is animated by this idea of itself, this messianic idea of itself. You know just deal with it in that way and do not pay attention to the ideology. And they would therefore say there is really something fundamentally wrong with the Russian character. It does not matter in which current expression it takes itself. You see maybe Richard Pipes was a bit in that direction and his analysis, yeah, but then you would have to, of course, Russians themselves, Solzhenitsyn saying no, no, it is not something fundamentally wrong with the Russian character it is this ideology that is evil. This is the great debate within Russia itself between these camps.

Was the communist regime a logical expression of Russian history or was it something different? I think both are correct. I think that the drive to combine theory and practice and to impose an idea and combine religious and political authority, this has its roots in Russian history, but the absolutely amoral and even diabolical quality of the communist ideology when it imposed on that foundation set the stage for the mass slaughter, not just in Russia and the Soviet Union but in the countries that were affected by it as well. I mean we see countries where you did not have that historical background but where nonetheless the atrocities were known, were also horrific. And this is important to bear in mind, that because the communist expression, the denial of the spiritual beginning in a person, the utter denial that set the stage for the mass atrocities that followed and made them even logical, by the way, and that we deal with that residue today.

Growing up in Chicago, if we want to go back to sort of family history and the past, I have memory as a child of being absolutely irritated and angered by religious broadcasts on Sunday morning, which got in the way with of the cartoons that they used to show. The people who I considered totally uneducated, prattling on and on about dialectical materialism and the evils of dialectical materialism. And if there was anything that made me sympathize with the Soviet Union as a young kid, it was listening to these sermons Sunday morning on Chicago television about the evils of dialectical materialism, how it was reflected in communism in the Soviet Union. And my early impression was that these were the biggest idiots that ever existed, the people who were conveying these ideas.

So what happens? I go to Oxford, I study Hannah and write a thesis and go to the Soviet Union, understand that the essence of the Soviet system is the ideology. I study the ideology, start reading everything I can and what do I come up with? That the source of the evil is dialectical materialism, and I thought, well, they were right after all. And this goes back to question you posed, Bob, is can people change? Can the Russian people change, can they look at things in a different way and I have seen even in my own life that the same person with information, with experience, can change his views and in fact, we are, let us face it, we are all products of our information environment, I mean even the most informed among us.

Robert R. Reilly:

Well, that raises an interesting question. What is the information environment in Russia now? What are they getting, they are not getting, what they should be getting?

David Satter:

The Putin regime is clever. They want to give the impression of vigorous opposition activity and so they tolerate a certain amount, but there are taboo subjects that you cannot really touch, and if somebody tries, I mean they can they can pay with their lives. It is not the manufacture of an entire false version of reality has existed during the Soviet period. Of course, there is on the other side there is massive pro-government manipulation and propaganda, the use of television and, of course, they know their own people very well.

They know the fact is when the Soviet Union fell, a psychological vacuum was created in the lives of many people. They lost the ideology that had given meaning to their lives and more important they lost the sense that they were part of something great and anyone. One of the reasons that Putin is popular is that he has been adept at playing on that feeling of loss, loss of empire, loss of status, and even if it is only in a very limited way, restoring to people some of the sense that they are part of a great power. And that is something that we need to bear in mind.

We need, you know, if we want to influence them, we have to show them that they are getting something in return for what they lose. They may lose that sense of being part of a great power, of threatening the rest of the world, but they gain a sense of individual dignity and that is the message that the West needs to convey. That is a message that the U.S. needs to convey to Russia. It is what we do not often succeed in doing.

Robert R. Reilly:

Russia had a great culture.

David Satter:

It has a great culture. I mean at the late 19th century, earliest 20th century. You can speak of a great cultural renaissance in Russia. It was an astonishing period of creativity in literature, in music, in philosophy. I can remember even having conversations with senior Soviet people, including a member of the politburo, and if I would delve into Russian literature, Russian music, they would light up and that is all they wanted to talk about. Well, this is a country with so much to be proud of and it is there. There is so much talent and potential there if they can be re-grounded in exactly what that made that possible. And I do not know today if in Russia’s education that it instills any pride in that.

You know, Bob, I just want to point out a paradox to you that even during the Soviet period there were tremendous cultural achievements. Oh, yes, and the paradox is the following that it is exactly that sense of danger, of oppression, of uncertainty about fundamental values that generates creativity. I mean I think that one of the problems we have in the United States today, why we see really kind of diminishing level, you know, of culture in our universities and in our newspapers, in our public life, even our political life. I mean I thought it was not particularly high before, but what we are seeing now is just shocking.

And partially it is because it is a product of a world at peace, by and large. The fact that the sense of danger has receded, the possibility of war, I mean a country wants to be at peace, but you always want in a society to be aware that the country could face a, you know, a danger and therefore, you know, standards count. I think we may be returning to that sense of danger today. Many people see the danger coming from Russia. Many more see it coming principally from the PRC. Well, that may be the case. I mean whether it will generate the kind of reaction you are pointing to in which we recollect ourselves and return to the those transcendent principles that made this place possible remains to be seen.

Robert R. Reilly:

David, I am afraid that we have run out of time and I would like to thank you very much for this, for your remarks and this conversation and I cannot recommend more highly all of David’s writings and especially this this extraordinary tour through 40 years of his experiences in the Soviet Union and then in Russia, Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writings from Russia and the Soviet Union. David, thank you again. Thank you for joining us at the Westminster Institute. Please Google us. Go to the Westminster Institute website and you will see offerings of lectures and publications and I hope you will join us again in the future. Thank you.

America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding
(Robert R. Reilly, March 28, 2021)

About the book

The founding of the American Republic is on trial. Critics say it was a poison pill with a time-release formula; we are its victims. Its principles are responsible for the country’s moral and social disintegration because they were based on the Enlightenment falsehood of radical individual autonomy. In this well-researched book, Robert Reilly declares: not guilty. To prove his case, he traces the lineage of the ideas that made the United States, and its ordered liberty, possible. These concepts were extraordinary when they first burst upon the ancient world: the Judaic oneness of God, who creates ex nihilo and imprints his image on man; the Greek rational order of the world based upon the Reason behind it; and the Christian arrival of that Reason (Logos) incarnate in Christ. These may seem a long way from the American Founding, but Reilly argues that they are, in fact, its bedrock. Combined, they mandated the exercise of both freedom and reason.

Transcript

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Westminster Institute. I am Bob Reilly, its director. Today we are doing something a little different. I will not be introducing a guest as today I am the speaker at the suffrance of Westminster’s founder and chairman of the board, Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, to whom I sent a copy of my latest book, America on Trial: ADefense of the Founding. Patrick read the book and suggested that I give a Westminster talk about this subject, which otherwise would not have occurred to me. So fulfilling his kind wish, that is what I am going to talk about today, America on Trial.

Well, I do not think it is news to anyone that America is on trial, whether it is riots in the streets from last summer or attacks in the press from The New York Times 1619 project or otherwise in a way America has always been on trial. Certainly since 1776 at the time of the American Revolution it was on trial and at other times afterwards, most particularly during the civil war in the 1860s. America has been on trial in several world wars and other conflicts, usually ones that somehow involve on the opponent’s side a denial of America’s founding principle that all people are created equal, but I am getting ahead of myself. Let us start at the beginning and that beginning goes back very far indeed. I asked myself in this book what ideas made the American founding conceivable, from where did they come, what is their intellectual lineage?

Now, the reason I undertook this endeavor was because of a kind of attack that has been leveled against the founding that it itself is responsible for the depraved conditions in which we find the country today. Everyone pretty much knows that litany from a supposed homosexual marriage, widespread pornography, drugs, dissolution of the family, etc. Why has this happened to us? Did it happen despite the principles of the American founding or because of them?

This one school of thought has developed, indeed, it is popular in some Christian conservative circles that it is the founding’s fault. Why? Because the founding contained a time release poison pill and we are its victims. Why? Because they say the founding was invested with a radical enlightenment principle of individual autonomy. This was constrained so long as religion remains strong in the United States, but as religion has begun receding in the American population, ah, these principles of radical individual autonomy have come to the fore and they are responsible for the condition in which we find ourselves.

Of course, we can we can see this interpretation of the founding actually articulated in certain Dupreme Court decisions particularly those that were enunciated by then Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who frequently speaks of man’s autonomy, of his right to create for himself the meaning of the universe, and through the individual autonomy interpretation of the American founding, he curiously found in it the right to homosexual acts and then the right to homosexual marriage. Of course, preceding those was the right to abortion and now later, absent Justice Kennedy, we had the decision regarding transgenderism as a a right that had to be protected under equal protection.

Now, it is interesting that sectors of both the right and left agree that this radical individual autonomy was in the American founding. The left and others like Justice Kennedy embrace it. People who are more conservative deplore it but agree that it is there, that the founding is the problem. This book contests this interpretation and indeed posits that the historical evidence and a close examination of the founders, of what they thought and did, makes this interpretation insupportable.

Now, it is interesting that this interpretation goes back really no further than the enlightenment era in the 17th century, but the roots of the American founding, the ideas that made it conceivable are far older than that, and in this book I trace them. It is a long journey going back several thousand years, but I think without doing so, the case cannot be made that the American founding was indeed sound, that its principles were morally good and are defensible.

Tribal life

I begin the book by examining what life was like before Greek philosophy, before the monotheism of the Jews, and before Christianity. I examine, in short, what tribal life was like and we find in there a conception that the members of the tribe had of themselves only as members of a tribe adhering to the ways of their fathers and to the gods of the tribe. And the leaders of those tribes usually had some association, perhaps a direct lineage to one of the gods of the tribe, and so the ruler was perhaps a semi-divine person, and actually it was only through the ruler that the members of that tribe had access to the gods. Only he knew the magic words of the prayers to which the gods would listen to guarantee the harvests or to guarantee victory in battle.

No one thought of themselves outside of their tribal lineage and they knew members of other tribes only by the names of those tribes. They had nothing in common with them and if indeed they were in a state of war with them, which was a typical feature of tribal life, the tribe that won would usually kill all the males and enslave the females and the children, if indeed they did not kill everyone. Now, it would not have occurred to either side in such a struggle that there is something wrong with this because the losing side would have done absolutely the same thing had they won. There was no moral vocabulary, in other words, in the tribal universe that would have suggested that this was wrong.

Logos

Now, when Greek philosophy dawned upon mankind, say the sixth, fifth century A.D. observations were made of the following kind. There seems to be an order in the world and this order appears to be rational, and through our reason we can apprehend this order and come to understand it. Now, the first pre-Socratic philosopher to use the word logos to define the divine intelligence, he discerned that was behind this rational order, was Heraclitus. He said this logos, which is the Greek word for reason or word, was what imparted to the world this rational order and gave indeed our reason the means through which to come to understand it, and therefore we ought to live according to this logos, conform our lives to it to live, in other words, reasonably according to the laws that are apprehended in nature.

Aristotle, of course, took this much further by arriving at a notion of the laws of nature. Laws of nature are involved in what the essence of things, what makes them what they are and why they cannot be something other than what they are, and the ends toward which their nature directs them in the plant world. Let us say an an acorn has the nature of an oak, and given the proper conditions will grow into an oak unless something impedes it, a drought or too acidic soil. Otherwise, we know that this acorn will reach a state of completion, but Aristotle would call its perfection when it is a fully grown oak. In other words all the potentiality of that oak is reached when it arrives at completion, at full maturity, and that is how we know what a thing is.

Now, in the world of inanimate nature or animal nature, things act according to their natures. They have no choice but to do otherwise. Only when it comes to man can he make a choice regarding whether to act in conformity with his nature or to undertake acts that are against it. Now, just as Aristotle would say water is good for an oak tree, overly acidic soil is bad for it, when we come to understand what the end of man is, we can say the actions of man that he undertakes to reach his completion, his perfection, are good for him, and those actions he undertakes that impede his reaching his perfection are bad for him. In other words only with man because he has free will and reason is there a moral vocabulary of good and evil, and we know then through man’s nature that reason is morally normative for him. He is obligated to act according to those moral norms that will bring him to the state of perfection.

What are those? Aristotle like many other great philosophers said that the end of man is happiness. Well, how is this happiness achieved? He said it is achieved through the practice of virtue, therefore those acts which impede the virtuous acts are bad for them, those are vices. Now, this discovery that man has a nature and that reason is morally normative for him instills man with the capacity to now recognize another person as a human being because he knows now what a human being is. He knows that all men’s souls are ordered to this same good, this life of virtue and the end of happiness.

Now, this was expanded in by Socrates and others to the question of justice. Can we apprehend what is just through our reason or are we reduced to the tribal consideration of justice as simply the mores of the tribe or the ways of the fathers of that tribe, other tribes having different mores and different fathers, and therefore nothing in common with each other or do we have a justice that transcends the tribal order, that transcends the Greek polis so that we can say that justice is the same everywhere for everyone?

And indeed, Aristotle posited that natural law is the same everywhere for everyone, and Socrates gave his life for the proposition that there is an order that transcends the political order in which the good and the just are defined. When this was assimilated and articulated in Rome by the great natural law thinker Cicero, who had such an influence on the American founding, he said there is not one law or one justice in Rome and another in Athens, it is the same everywhere because human nature is the same everywhere.

Monotheism

You can see how this concept exploded the mindset of the tribal world and provided a key foundation stone for the American founding. Now, the other development in the ancient world, which was so profound and was also another essential foundation stone for the American founding, was the monotheism of Judaism. This was an extraordinary development because only the Jews in the Middle East conceived of god as one. They were in a sea of polytheism. All the surrounding cultures were polytheistic and indeed, many of them pantheistic. The Jews alone conceived of god as one Yahweh, and only they said this god Yahweh is transcendent.

No other Middle Eastern culture could conceive of their gods as being somehow above the world or the universe. They were within it. Indeed, up in the imperion, up in the highest part of that universe or world, but they they could not think of anything outside of that universe, and indeed, they thought that the world itself was eternal, that it had always existed and always would, and that a man was subject to a fate in it, and did a play thing of these gods, and that things were in this perpetual loop, everything that could happen would happen and then it would start all over again. You can see there was sort of an inherent futility to this conception.

Now, the Jews’ notion of creation cut through this idea, this transcending god created from nothing. The world was not eternal. He began it. He spoke through his word and things came into being as Genesis so majestically announces, and unlike the mythologies of these other Middle Eastern cultures. What they have is creation that comes from some primeval ooze, is the result of a conflict, of a fight between gods or between demiurges, a principle of evil and a principle of good or one of light and one of darkness, and they fight and the good demiurge subdues the evil demiurge, and thus we have some kind of order in the world. But this order could be temporary because that principle of evil is still there and in conflict and struggle with the principle of good or of matter with spirit and so forth. So what exists is not entirely good, it is infected with evil or matter or darkness. Only the Jews, again in Genesis, said no, creation was not born of conflict. It was spoken or loved into being by Yahweh and everything he made – in contra distinction to these other ancient cultures – everything he made was good as the refrains of the six days of creation end each line with, “And god saw that it was good.”

Everything he made was good. Matter was good. Matter was not evil as the Gnostics thought. And what was especially good and what god made man – why? Because Genesis informs us that man was made in the image and likeness of god. This, again, was an extraordinarily unique revelation to the Jews. No other ancient mythology contained this concept that man was made in the divine image of god himself, and this invested man with a kind of sacredness, an inviolability that, again, was alien to the experience of other Middle Eastern cultures. Man was had as his purpose this relationship with his creator god, who acted toward him providentially. Even though Yahweh was transcendent, he would act within history for the good of his people, the Jews.

Now, this monotheism, this creation ix nihilo, the goodness of creation, as you might imagine creates a greater sense of optimism than the ancient world would otherwise experience because of the inherent futility in their view of things. Salvation history begins with the Jews, which is to say really history begins with the Jews, that the loop is broken. Now, there is a beginning. There is a trajectory, which will reach a final end in god’s judgment, so here is the other foundation stone.

Also, I have got to add very quickly that the account of evil in Genesis is also unique. It is not in the world, that is it is not part of the initial creation. Evil enters the world through man’s disordered will and through his disobedience, man’s disobedience of course leads to his expulsion from the Garden of Eden and into this veil of tears, but this providential god does not abandon man, he promises some resolution to the problem that man has introduced in Creation and the promise of a messiah. As we know in the Old Testament the prophets indicate who this might be or what he might do and so within the Jews this expectation of the messiah is very keen.

Now, the third foundation stone I would like to address of course is Christianity. Christianity saw itself very much as a Jewish religion as Christ was a Jew. He of course claimed to be the messiah, and that it was through his sacrifice that this reconciliation with god was achieved, so the laws of ecclesiastical polity was well known and also Hooker had a profound effect on two other English thinkers, whom we can say had a direct influence on the American founding. One of course is John Locke, who refers to in quotes from Hooker frequently in his Second Treatise and the other is Algenon Sidney, who in his Discourses on Government also frequently refers to in quotes from Hooker.

Now, I need not expatiate on Locke’s influence on the American founding. It is very famous. Sidney, however, also had a direct and profound influence. He was considered a republican martyr by the English colonists. Now, Richard Hooker’s defense of reason and his restoration of these medieval constitutional principles had a more or less direct impact on the American founding because his book, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity you can be sure was widespread in the American colonies because the Anglican Church was predominant in about half of those colonies.

Now, the interesting thing about the addition of Christianity to the view we have already provided is that it enhanced or gave a deeper understanding of what this image of god in man meant within Christianity is the revelation that the love for each individual person by god is infinite and that through his mercy and obedience, through god’s mercy and man’s obedience to god, he can reach an end that man in his natural state could not conceive of. Aristotle could not have conceived of it and that is a personal union with god in the sense that god offers to man his own divinity and eternal life.

Now, the inviolability of the individual person was enhanced by this, and how people ought to behave toward each other had to be considered within the context of this sacredness of the individual person. The other extraordinary thing within Christian revelation is not only that man had this personal relationship with god our father, familial relationship, but that his achievement of his end now is outside of the tribe, outside of the political order, outside of the empire. This was an extraordinary conception, again, alien to the ancient world but for the Jews.

Now, in that famous episode in the New Testament the Pharisees and Herodians try to trip up Jesus by giving him or he asks for a Denarius because they have asked him whether it is legal to pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus examines the Denarius and says whose image is on it? And they say Caesar’s, and he famously replies, “Give to caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” And the the New Testament records that the crowd acted with astonishment. Indeed, anyone would be astonished because this had never been said before.

And it meant, of course, that there was – now let us say – a division of power, the most important division of power that has ever been made, and that is between spiritual power and secular power. Christ acknowledges that there is a secular realm, which has its own autonomy or semi-autonomy in which Caesar or a secular ruler legitimately rules. However, there is a spiritual realm in which he does not have power, and this, of course, was at the origin of the famous two swords teaching that was developed early in the Middle Ages.

Now, as this teaching began to be articulated as early as the fifth century by Pope Delacious in a letter to the emperor, it was made clear that the pope had no authority to interfere in the secular rule by the emperor nor did the emperor have any right to interfere in the spiritual rule of the pope. Now, this is the most interesting thing that this meant that their man lived under a dual sovereignty, the sovereignty of the spiritual role and the sovereignty of the secular rule. In the middle ages this two swords teaching was instantiated to a more articulate and refined degree by the church and the princes and the kings.

Now, since these two sovereignties exercised their authority over the same subjects there is naturally some bumping and because the borders between the two spheres was not clearly defined except through a process in which each of them undertook this definition. In any case it was acknowledged by both realms, the spiritual and the secular, that they had their own sovereignties and this left men.

Now, the consequence of these two sovereignties is that neither of them was absolute, neither of them could claim complete authority over the person. It was a shared authority. Neither of them were absolute. This of course created a political space for freedom for medieval man. This may go against the popular imagination, but this indeed was true. Now, there were some other things that affected the development of constitutional principles or let us say the harbingers of modern constitutional principles in the medieval world that had assimilated these influences from let us say Athens, Jerusalem, and of course from Rome, which would I use as the term Christianity. And here is the way they addressed these truths in a way that had a profound political impact. It was generally considered within the middle ages that man had been created equal, that he was a rational creature with a free will.

Now, the question arose from where did the ruler the prince of the king get his authority? Did god invest him directly in the form of the divine right of kings or not? The near unanimous answer was no, god invested the people with this authority, and it was they through their consent who could then provide that authority to the king of the prince. In other words man’s equality was the foundation for the notion of popular sovereignty. If popular sovereignty exists, the conveyance of that authority to the ruler requires the consent of the people. That consent of the people can be expressed in a variety of ways, but it nonetheless comes with a covenant with the ruler. There are conditions which the ruler, the king, the prince must observe so long as they have that right to rule; popular sovereignty, representation, consent, the legitimacy of the political order in so long as the ruler observes the provisions in the covenant.

Now, what if the ruler does not? What if he begins ruling tyrannically? Again, the unanimous opinion of the middle ages was that people have a right to revolution against tyranny. Now, let me just give you an example of how this was developed. Interestingly enough it first came within canon law, the Justinian Code from the 6th century was rediscovered in the 11th century. It had a huge impact, particularly on the canonists and there was a principle within canon law or or let us say a ruling that said crodominus tanget of omnibus aprabari. Now, that is Latin for what touches all must be approved by all. What affects all must be approved by all.

This, however, was a principle that applied only to Roman private law. All it meant was that trustees of a property or trustees overseeing a minor had to be unanimous in their agreement for the disposition of that property or the direction of this minor. That is all it meant. It had no application outside of the private law. It really had no political application. Now, what these canonists brilliantly did was use this quote ‘omnis tanget principle’ and applied it to church corporations, which were really the first voluntary corporations that is consisted by the agreement of the members of the corporation in the history.

And how would these church corporations, which meant chapter councils, church councils, other church organizations, religious orders – how were they to rule themselves within this corporation? Along the lines of the quote ominous tanget principle and the way it came to be developed I think can I best give you an example from the dominican ordersaint dominic called for a convocation of the various dominican chapters in europe at which decisions would be made over how the dominicans would rule themselves and he asked that each chapter or abby would send representatives how would those representatives be selected by the consent of the monks or dominicans in that abbey or chapter those two representatives each she asked for would then be invested by those who had selected them with the power to agree or disagree with the proposals at this general conclave and then if a majority of the conclave through these representatives agreed to a proposition it then became the new rule in the order and and saint dominic made clear that he himself was subject to these decisions he was not above themhe this conclave was sovereign and so that is the way the dominicans ruled themselves from from that time forward.

Now, this spread to other religious orders and as the religious orders spread through europe particularly the dominicans to england you saw the principles by which they conducted their affairs seeping into the civil sphere and soon the early parliaments would also quote the quote on this tangent principle but affects all must be approved by all particularly when the king would require new revenues attacks this was an early instance of the famous cry of the American revolution no taxation without representation and this indeed is where it came from curiously enough it came from canon law in that medieval church and then developed within the civil law in the early parliaments.

Now, with this general unanimity that I have described to you one might wonder how is it then that we didn’t go straight from the middle ages without interruption since these principles were universally accepted to the American founding what came between that made indeed an American revolution necessary what came late in the middle ages was a different conception of reality indeed a different conception of god as to god’s nature that eventually affected political order and undermined the constitutional principles which we have been laying out here let us talk for a moment about william obakam was a priest who thought that theology had been compromised by what he called pagan philosophy that meant aristotle aristotle was the villain and that god actually was not constrained by the idea manhattan of what is just of what is right and wrong why because god is really pure will and power he can do anything god can do anything he is unconstrained.

Now, let us make this clear in the middle ages most particularly in the thought of thomas aquinas he said about the nature of god that in god’s essence it’s the divine intellect that is primary and the divine will is secondary this means the divine intellect rules the will follows the divine elect conceives of something and the will executes the word god said and then so it was. Now, what william of occam did was flip this relationship he said no no it’s not the divine intellect it is not reason which is primary, it is will and the reason is secondary is only an instrument of that will to find the best way to carry out what the will chooses the problem with this primacy of the will is that it’s impossible to differentiate one act of the will from another if there is no standard outside of that will by which to make a judgment and that is indeed what occam was proposing there is no such standard the will is predisposed to nothing but itself this is what we call in theology volunteerism after voluntars greek for will god’s pure will unconstrained by anything.

Now, what this had profound consequences for the notion aristotle’s notion of nature natural law according to arkham there was no natural law why because there was no nature and there was no order in nature because of this things just happened as a direct consequence of god’s will which and he could he could change that will at any instance so that confidence that reliability in creation that had been developed under judaism and Christianity up until this time kind of evaporates.

Now, the political consequences of this were seen later. It was not the intention akhem was not a politician it was not his intention to have this effect in the political order but so it developed and it was manifest particularly in martin Luther. Luther was an alchemist. He too was a bomb tryst he too like ankham believed that man’s reason was incapable of knowing right from wrong according to occam this was because if things have no nature reason is no longer normative if things have no ends within themselves one cannot say what brings them to perfection and what subverts them from reaching that perfection that’s all gone things are good and evil only insofar as god says they are and for no other reasons there’s nothing inherent in an act that makes it good or evil only if it disobeys what god tells you to do this you can see is the origin of sola scriptura scripture alone man has no access to moral knowledge Luther denounced the ethics of Aristotle as the worst book ever written and that Aristotle was close to being a devil in human form reason said Luther was the devil’s it no longer gave men access to this rational order those two swords that provided the most important separation of powers the spiritual power and the secular power was reduced now to one sword and it was the secular sword the sort of the prince that now obtained the spiritual powers so there was only one sword

Now, there wasn’t a dual sovereignty the prince became the head of the church it was to the prince luther looked for the reform of the churches it’s easy to see where this is going and how it laid the foundations for the divine right of kings and indeed luther believed that the people weren’t sovereign indeed they were not equal and if they weren’t sovereign certainly their consent was not required in their rule the king or the prince was received his power directly from god not through the people and therefore that prince or king was not accountable to the people but only to god and could rule the people with laws which he himself was not required to obey.

Now, what if that prince began to rule tyrannically did people have a recourse as they all believed in the middle ages they did to revolution against a tyrant Luther was emphatic and saying no they have no such right it does not matter what the prince does the people do not have a right to revolution. Now, after 1630 he modified this somewhat but that was the main force of the teaching and you could see now that every principle of constitutional government articulated in the middle ages was denied and this did lead to the divine right of kings and the concept of an absolutist state now there were two kinds of developments of this one was a secular absolutist state as articulated by thomas hobbes and his famous book leviathan and the divine right of kings absolutist state as articulated by King James I in England and by Sir Robert Filmer in his book patriarcha, which was famous as the most able defense of the divine right of kings.

Now, there was opposition to this and it arose in England in the late Elizabethan period before James I. The first Anglican theologian, Richard Hooker, wrote a profoundly influential book the laws of ecclesiastical polity in which he restored Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to Anglican thought and by so doing he restored the status of reason he was reacting to radical puritans who were saying we do not need English common law we do not need the laws of parliament all we need are the laws of scripture and we will rule ourselves by those alone no said Richard Hooker reason is able to ascertain the laws of nature which laws are themselves a form of god’s revelation just as much as the scriptures are and that god expects us to use our reason to live reasonably and to create laws which are according to reason the other revelation in Christianity which had a profound effect came in the gospel of saint john the introduction of which says the gospel is in Greek in the beginning was the word but in Greek the word is, of course, logos.

Let us keep it for a moment in the beginning was the logos and the logos was with god. Logos was god. All things are made through him as logos so now we know why there is this rational order in nature, because its creator is himself reason. Now we know we have this confirmation of Heraclitus’s intuition that this divine intelligence behind reality is logos, his reason. And so you have a startling confirmation of this when, let us say, god introduces himself as logos in the Gospel of Saint John. Thomas Jefferson recommended Discourses on Government, which he said was the greatest primer on republican government at the University of Virginia that should be read by all its students. Now, Sidney was a very well-grounded natural law thinker so we could see within his work everything we have articulated so far in terms of of the law of reason a natural law and what that leads to in the development of the constitutional principles which he advocated in which the founders of the United States embraced.

Now, John Locke was of course a fierce opponent of the divine right of kings and his first treatise is a devastation of the pretensions of Sir Robert Filmer in defending the divine right of kings and Patriarcha both he and Sydney were aware of the work of two thinkers Robert Bellarmine in Italy and Francisco Suarez in France, who had also used natural law and the medieval constitutional principles to attack the pretensions of James I, who was so infuriated with Suarez that he had his his works burnt in public by the public executioner and who was so upset by bellarmine that he engaged him in an exchange of monographs very unusual for a monarch to address a commoner and engage in this back and forth he felt he had to do it because the arguments of bellarmine were so powerful this was acknowledged by Sir Robert Filmer too because in Patriarcha he had to, quote, “Give the argument from Bellarmine in order to rebut it,” and he did the same thing regarding the arguments of Suarez.

Now, this is significant because both Sydney and film are I am sorry both this is important because both Sydney and Locke in their arguments against Filmer’s position were also familiar with what bellarmine and Suarez we are saying because it was in Filmer’s book so it is curious that this Italian cardinal and this Spanish Jesuit had also an influence on this you know even if indirectly on the American founding because Patriarcha Filmer’s argument was also a book present in the American colonies. In fact, it was present in Thomas Jefferson’s library. He had a copy with notes marked up. He also was familiar with the natural law and constitutional arguments by Bellarmine and Suarez as he was, of course, with Locke and with Sydney.

So you can see all of these forces against absolutism, against the divine right of kings, conjoined and helping form the minds, the American colonial mind, and the thinking of the founders so that they rose in 1776 against the expression of absolutism in the British Empire, which had gravitated somewhat from the king, from George III, to the British Parliament, which in the 1760s had passed a law, the Declaratory Act, saying that it could pass any law affecting the colonies, it was not restricted on any matter whatsoever without, of course, the consent of the colonists.

This was the battle cry the colonists then considered themselves by these same constitutional principles and the rule of reason the rule of natural law to have had those rights violated because they were being ruled without their consent therefore their revolution was a restoration of those principles a restoration of the rule of reason as against the rule of will and power American legitimacy is based upon that rule of reason and it is articulated so famously in the Declaration of Independence where according according to the laws of nature and of nature’s god man is created equal and he is endowed with certain inalienable rights; life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. The declaration that lists a long set of grievances against George III, each of which involves a transgression against the colonists in manners in which they are being ruled without their consent.

Well, in this very concentrated way and condensed way I have been trying to set the case against those who say that this American founding was based upon some radical enlightenment individual autonomy that it was no such thing but it was a restoration of these ancient principles that it was a restoration of the rule of reason as against the rule of will and a restoration of natural law as morally normative in man’s behavior now when we arrive at that part of the Declaration that says among these inaudible rights is man’s pursuit of happiness those who say that the founding is infected with this radical individual autonomy say aha this pursuit of happiness that means a libertine state this leads to transgenderism.

Well, no, actually not the happiness to which the founders referred in the Declaration of Independence. The happiness which Aristotle, Aquinas, Hooker, all of these seminal thinkers to which I have referred is the object of man’s life and is the object of his government. Now what does that happiness consist as we mentioned earlier in the life of virtue and so forth? And if there is anything about which the American founders agreed, it is that virtue was indispensable most particularly to the republican form of government which they had chosen. And George Washington famously said in his first inaugural address that there was, quote, “An indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.”

In other words this happiness could not be pursued but by virtue and a virtuous life. Another thing — and, by the way, there were any number of Christian sects, the colonies were overwhelmingly Christian. Despite whether they were Anglican, they all agreed with this and those few theists like Franklin agreed with it too — virtue was indispensable. And what was the primary source of virtue? Again, here they agreed was religion.

Religion was indispensable to the development of virtue and virtue was indispensable to the republican form of government, and if you wish to keep this republican form of government, the virtue of the American citizenry was primary. Therefore you can see that there is no room for an idea of radical, individual autonomy within this, where man gets to make up his own meaning of the universe. No, no they said that the meaning of the universe had already been determined by the laws of nature, of nature’s god. Its creator had already determined its meaning and that meaning, this predominantly Christian nation knew for man, was his own end in that god.

This is another profound thing about the American founding, that the colonists and the founders never looked to the state to displace religion or to assume upon itself a salvific role where it is the government that is somehow going to save man. No, the government had no such means. It had no such end within itself. Remember the separation of the secular and the spiritual authority is the most important separation of powers ever made, and it was distinct and kept distinct within the American foundings and within the American constitution, which made further separations of powers, of course, in the judicial, legislative, and executive to limit that power. Power will not be limited unless there is a conception of the meaning of life, which does limit it, and if man’s end is in a transcendent god, then the state cannot assume these absolute powers or absolute direction in man’s life to make this clear.

In the book I have a chapter comparing the French and American revolutions. The French revolution was essentially different from the American revolution. It contained a notion of the perfectability of man that was articulated by the Marquis de Congresses and others, that man could be perfected and that the state really was the agent through which this perfection could be reached so long as the state had sufficient power to direct it.

Now, the principal enemy of this enterprise in the French Revolution was not surprisingly Christianity itself, and it is why the French Revolutionaries undertook the extraordinary campaign of de-Christianization within France, the deportation of 25000 priests, the slaughter of other priests and nuns on the guillotine, the desecration of churches, knocking crosses off of cemeteries, melting down the church bells for coinage or bullets, to gain an adequate contrast between the French and American revolutions.

All one would have to ask oneself is would a de-Christianization campaign during the American Revolution have been conceivable? Of course not, it was inconceivable. There the Declaration and the Constitution were dated in the year of our lord unlike the beginning of the French Republic, which began sort of the year zero, began the calendar again. In fact, it changed the calendar to de-Christianize it so that there was no Sunday, there were 10 days to the week and so forth. This was radical. You want radical individual autonomy? Do you want an effort in which man himself reaches a state of self-divinization premised upon the power of the state, which will enforce the programs to make that necessary, albeit in a sea of blood?

If you want to prototype for the revolutions that were to follow in the 20th century that were totalitarian, the Nazis, the soviets, you have an origin in that French Revolution that provided the prototype for it and that is how different it was from the American Revolution, which was the principal opponent of those 20th century totalitarianisms that denied the existence of natural law, that denied the equality of all men, one based on racial superiority and the other on class superiority, and that tonight, of course, in the case of communism, the existence of god you see in those totalitarianisms the primacy of force, the primacy of will as against the primacy of reason. It was articulated in the American Revolution so I do not think that there is a case that can be made for this critique of the American founding as based upon radical enlightenment notions of individual autonomy.

In the book I go into some detail about what the American founders actually said that were so contrary to any such notion, and it is why it was a conservative revolution, it is why it returned man to that course of constitutional democratic rule, which had been erupted by the age of absolutism. Well, I want to thank you very much for your patience and listening to this very condensed summary of America on Trial the Defense of the Founding. And I again want to thank Patrick Sookhdeo for suggesting that I do this. By the way, please go to our Westminster foundation website where you will see our other interesting recent videos of lectures on such subjects as Russia, China, and others and please stay tuned for what we have coming up next. Thank you for joining us.

Is there a New Path to Peace in Afghanistan?
(February 23, 2021, Ambassador Ali Jalali)

Transcript available below

About the speaker

Ambassador Ali Jalali served as Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Germany and designated Special Envoy to NATO. He served as Interior Minister from 2003-2005, overseeing the creation of a trained force of 50,000 Afghan National Police and 12,000 Border Police to work effectively in counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, and criminal investigation.

He recently served as a Professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at National Defense University in Washington D.C. His most recent book is A Military History of Afghanistan from the Great Game to the Global War on Terror (2017). A former officer in the Afghan Army, Col. Jalali served as a top military planner with the Afghan Resistance (Mujahedin) following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

He graduated from high command and staff colleges in Afghanistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.A published writer in three languages (English, Pashto, Dari/Farsi), Ali A. Jalali is the author of numerous books and articles on political, military and security issues in Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. He is the author of The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War (2010).

Ali Jalali has taught at higher education institutions of Afghanistan and extensively lectured at U.S. National Defense University, U.S. Army War College, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the British Army Staff College, Camberley, England.

During his VOA career from 1982 to 2003, Jalali directed broadcasts in Pashto, Dari and Farsi (Persian) languages to Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan. As a journalist, he covered the war in Afghanistan (1982-1993) and the former Soviet Central Asia (1993-2000). He previously spoke to the Westminster Institute in 2019 on the subject of Is Peace Possible in Afghanistan? and in 2018 on the subject of Afghanistan: From the Great Game to the Global War on Terror.

Transcript

Robert Reilly:

Hello and welcome to the Westminster Institute. I am Bob Reilly, its director. In a deal with the Taliban made by the Trump administration one year ago this month, the United States promised a phased withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan so that by May 1 all foreign troops would be gone, including the remaining 2500 American servicemembers. The Taliban committed to starting peace talks with the Afghan government, which only just now resumed after having been canceled in January. The Taliban also pledged to end attacks on American forces and to publicly renounce all ties to Al Qaeda and other extremist groups.

However, the U.S. Treasury noted last month that Al Qaeda is “gaining strength in Afghanistan while continuing to operate with the Taliban under the Taliban’s protection.” The U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told NATO ministers that, “the United States will not undertake a hasty or disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan that puts their forces or the alliance’s reputation at risk.”

A congressionally-mandated Afghan Study Group (ASG) final report was issued this month by the U.S. Institute of Peace. Dr. Ali Jalali was a senior adviser for the report. He is a distinguished professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. Ambassador Jalali was Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Germany and designated Special Envoy to NATO. He also served as Afghanistan’s Interior Minister from 2003 to 2015. A prolific author, his books include The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War (2010), Afghanistan National Defense and Security Forces in Transition, and most recently, A Military History of Afghanistan from the Great Game to the Global War on Terror (2017).

Ambassador Jalali will discuss the final peace report and address the question: is there a new pathway to peace in Afghanistan? Ali, thank you for joining us.

Ali Jalali:

Introduction

Thank you very much, Bob, and thank you for giving me this opportunity to share my views on this very important topic that you have chosen to be the topic of discussion today. As you know, earlier this month on February 3 the Afghan Study Group (ASG) released its final report of policy recommendations to the new administration of the United States.

The time was very good for the release of this report. The Biden administration announced that it is reviewing the peace process or the Doha peace agreement with the Taliban, and also the declaration at the same time released with the relationship with the Afghan Islamic government. It will take some time for the new administration to see how this deal made about a year ago is going. Currently, it is stalled in any kind of definition that you give to it. But this report is giving some recommendations to what the new administration in the United States — given the current situation on the ground, in the experience of one year of the peace process — what choices the United States will have to review this, to continue this, to change it or to make adjustments to it.

The Afghan Study Group was actually established about a year ago. It was December 2019 by Congress. It is a bipartisan group. It was tasked with identifying policy recommendations in consideration of how the peace settlement in Afghanistan or the failure of a settlement can affect the future of Afghanistan, and also United States commitments, resources, and its dealing with the region and Afghanistan. It is a bipartisan group, as I said, with fifteen members led by Senator Ayotte and also General Dunford and Nancy Lindborg, the former USIP director. And then it also has twenty-six senior advisers who started working in April.

The Doha Peace Agreement

The ASG or Afghan Study Group started its work right after the deal that was made in Doha about the peace process in Afghanistan. Now, a few words about this deal. What is that deal? Some people call it a peace agreement between the United States and the Taliban. It is not a peace agreement. It is an agreement to facilitate peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government because ultimately the peace should be made by Afghans themselves.

For years, actually, the Taliban were arguing that they were refusing to sit for peace talks with the Afghan government or anybody as long as there are foreign troops present in Afghanistan. So in order to find a way to cut through this kind of obstacle, the United States talked to the Taliban, agreed to withdraw its forces in fourteen months from Afghanistan.

And during this period the Taliban made a commitment to not allow any terrorist groups to use Afghan territory against the United States’ interests and its allies, and also to sever ties with Al Qaeda and other interest groups, and at the same time to start negotiations, peace talks with the Afghan government in order to achieve a kind of political settlement that will bring peace and stability to Afghanistan. This would pave the way for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from the country.

That was an agreement to facilitate peace talks, not a peace deal between the United States and the Taliban, which some people believe. At the same time the United States actually issued a declaration with the Afghan government that actually recognized the Afghan government’s legitimacy as the government in Afghanistan, and also a commitment to support its institutions, and to support the Afghan government in its talks with the Taliban to reach a commitment, a resolution.

That walk was actually supposed to start ten days after the agreement was signed in Doha on the 29th of February 2020. However, unfortunately, it took a long time. First of all, in the agreement there was an understanding that in order to bring some kind of confidence between the two sides for the talks, the Afghan government would release about 5000 Taliban prisoners, and the Taliban would release 1000 prisoners in their custody. That took a long time because the Afghan government argued that they were not part of that deal, so therefore they took several months to release or free the Taliban prisoners. On the other hand, Afghans would argue that the Taliban should guarantee that they will not return to the battlefield.

Among those on the Taliban’s list, there were several who had issues and who were accused of criminal activities against other countries, particularly Australia and France, who were objecting to their release. So it took some time in order for the Afghan government to release these five thousand, maybe more than five thousand, Taliban prisoners in their custody. That delayed the talks.

The talks that were supposed to start on the tenth of March of 2020. It took them many months after September to start. And then after September it took another few months to agree, so during this period where the Taliban was dragging its feet, where the negotiation was stalled, the United States continued to withdraw troops from Afghanistan because the U.S. troop withdrawal was calendar-based. It was supposed to release about over five thousand in three months and fifteen days and the rest would be released by May 1st 2021, but as the negotiations stalled, and the Taliban increased their violence in Afghanistan and they did not honor the promises or the commitments that they made, this peace process became a very difficult process, and had so many obstacles.

Now, what is the problem here? Now, we are in the beginning of March and two months before the full withdrawal of the U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which was called for in the Doha accord, while there is no single item of progress in the talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. So the Taliban actually are accused of running the clock, and they are not committed, they are not honoring their promises, so therefore there is a new revision that should be made. That is actually one of the topics, that is one of the issues that the Afghan Study Group was looking at.

There are many observers in Afghanistan and the region who believe that if U.S. troops leave on the May 1 of this this year, then it will give the Taliban a disincentive to continue talks with the outbound government or to return to talks. On the other hand, the Taliban are insisting that the Doha agreement should be honored, all troops will be gone, should be withdrawn by May 1, while they themselves have not stopped fighting. They have not severed their ties with Al Qaeda according to the sources in the United States, also in Europe, and also in Afghanistan, so they have not honored the commitment. Therefore there is a problem with this accord.

The Afghan Study Group was also looking at this and I believe the new administration in the United States also is looking at it and what to do. So what was the data? It was not when the Afghanistan study began its work. The situation was different from today. At that time there was a hope that the peace process would continue and during the process, gradually, the U.S. forces would be able to leave Afghanistan while the two sides would reach a kind of agreement for peace, and then that would lead to a peace settlement in Afghanistan, and that will on the one hand reduce the threat of terrorism from Afghan territory against the United States interest and its allies. On the other hand, it would be a kind of a catalyst to bring stability to the region, and also it would be an opportunity for Afghanistan and the region to integrate Afghanistan into the region, which would actually be a key element in the future development of Afghanistan and stability in the country and in its economic prosperity.

This did not happen. So now we come back to what was the mandate of the Afghan Study Group and and what is now the recommendation? The Afghan Study Group was tasked with as I said earlier to identify policy recommendations in case the peace process succeeds or if the peace process fails. Now, the peace process has not failed, but it has not succeeded, so therefore a revision is needed. The Afghanistan Study Group believes that eventually peace should be made between the Afghans themselves. However, the United States can play a key role.

The opportunity now for a peaceful resolution of the Afghanistan conflict is there. However, the forces of fragmentation are still very strong. The kind of cohesive policy of the United States and an opportunity to support this process can increase the chances for peace. A dash and precipitous withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan actually decreases this chance and increases the chances of the breakdown of the government, which actually destabilizes the region, and eventually it actually heightens the threat of terrorism against the interests of the United States.

So therefore now there are two issues that we have to look at. First, what immediate things should be done in order to stave off the eventuality that the U.S. forces will leave Afghanistan while the peace process is not there. In this case I think there are a number of suggestions that the Afghanistan Study Group suggested and it says that the first one is the immediate diplomatic effort to extend the current 2021 withdrawal date in order to give the peace process sufficient time to produce an acceptable result. This actually has some challenges. There are some challenges involved with this.

The Taliban has announced that if U.S. troops do not leave by May 1 of this year, they will resume attacking international forces. They are already attacking Afghan troops and Afghan forces. But they stopped attacking international forces per the Doha agreement most of the time. They threatened that they will resume attacking the international forces.

At the same time they also have started a kind of a diplomatic effort with some other countries. Recently, their delegation visited Iran, they visited Russia, they have visited Pakistan, and they contacted China in order to drum up support of these countries to call for the withdrawal of U.S. forces by May 1 as was called in the Doha agreement. However, even Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and China want U.S. forces to leave Afghanistan but not before there is some kind of a political settlement that will prevent the deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan and become a destabilizing factor for the region. So all these countries want the U.S. to leave Afghanistan, but they do not want them to leave before there is some kind of a settlement.

The countries have always tried to call the Taliban as a political element, an important element in Afghanistan, but none of these countries have supported the return of the Taliban’s Emirate to Afghanistan. Even Pakistan does not want to see the Taliban dominating the political power in Afghanistan because in that case they cannot control them. So there is some kind of a consensus in the region that the withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan should be as an end in a process, not a condition for the process to go forward. So the key objective of the ongoing U.S. military presence should be to help create conditions for an acceptable peace agreement, not a kind of condition for the continuation of the peace process. This is another recommendation for immediate policymaking.

Then the third is continued support of the Afghan state, including security institutions, while continuing to message the Afghan partners that the support is not open-ended and as conditions on progress in the peace talks. Actually, peace talks between the two sides of Afghanistan, the Afghan government and the Taliban, should be invigorated through incentives and disincentives. The incentive for the Taliban that is the most important is the presence of U.S. forces in the region, and also the financial assistance of the United States. Without that assistance, no government in Afghanistan can survive for long.

Now, if you look at this year’s budget for Afghanistan, you will see that seventy-five percent of the budget, of the operational budget and development budget is supported by the international community, and of the Afghan security forces, four to five billion dollars are provided by the international community, the United States and Europe. So without that kind of assistance, until Afghanistan can develop its revenue collection, and the system becomes self-reliant, it is very difficult for any government. Even if the Taliban take over, they cannot continue to operate effectively, so that is an incentive. The disincentive could be also the cutting of the stuff, and then the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is also an incentive for the Taliban to talk. On the other hand, withdrawal is also an incentive for the Afghan government to be interested, to genuinely talk peace with the Taliban. So these incentives and disincentives should be used to give some kind of a dynamism to the peace process.

The fourth is the continued support for the dynamic members of the Afghan civil society, who have been instrumental in securing essential gains in human rights, education, and health, who have been and will continue to be a key supporting force sustainin the peace process. The Afghan civil society is a major, major power now in Afghanistan, major influential power in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s society has changed in the past fourteen years, and if you look at the twenty years that Afghanistan was supported by the international community, it is a new Afghanistan. About seventy percent of the population is under the age of thirty, and there are many educated people. They are people who believe in human rights and democracy. These are people who have been very dynamic in all sectors of life in Afghanistan, so it is not possible for the Taliban anymore to return, to turn the clock back to 2001 and have their way the way they had in the 2001. So it is a different Afghanistan, so supporting the civil society of Afghanistan is a major element, is a key element that can influence the peace process in Afghanistan. Continued support of the international community for Afghanistan’s civil society is going to go a long way toward supporting and sustaining any peace deal that eventually could be made between the two sides, and then a re-emphasis on diplomacy in negotiation, including a regional diplomatic strategy implemented over the longer term.

Afghanistan is living in a very difficult neighborhood. The security of Afghanistan is going to be very important for the security of the region. However, there are regional countries looking at the security and stability in Afghanistan from their own perspective. Some have deliberate interests and some have opportunistic interests. If you look at these actors in Afghanistan, it is a combination of different powers, different actors.

There are four categories of these actors. There is the war between the Afghan government and the Taliban, and then the second group is those who are supporting directly these sides. The United States and NATO is supporting the Afghan government and Pakistan is mostly supporting the Taliban.

Then there are the countries who are affected by this war, mostly it is Iran and India. India has a problem with Pakistan, a conflict with Pakistan. It does not want that kind of a peace that Pakistan will have a dominant role in the country. Iran has a problem with the presence of the United States in Afghanistan. It does not want a peace in Afghanistan, it is not in support of a peace in Afghanistan that perpetuates the presence of U.S. forces in Afghanistan unless the situation changes.

Then there are other powers. Some are opportunistic, they have opportune interests. Some have issues with the United States in the region or elsewhere. These are China, Russia, and the other Gulf countries. Russia actually wants Afghanistan to be a stable country, but does not want a long-term presence of the United States in Afghanistan. On the other hand, Russia actually is supporting the peace process, but as a low-cost activity, not risky activities, because it does not want to intervene in Afghanistan by force because it had a bad experience. It is also because of limited resources. They are always supporting a low-cost approach to peace in our country. China is looking at a peace in Afghanistan through its relations with Pakistan. It has conflict or tension with India and also in its opposition to the long-term presence of the United States.

So therefore China is in support of a regional kind of approach that all these other actors will buy into. Iran shares some of the concerns of the United States in Afghanistan with terrorism, particularly Da’esh, the Islamic State, but at the same time it does not want the longer presence of the United States in Afghanistan. So Iran and Russia in order to pressure the other actors in Afghanistan continues to have a collaborative relationship with the Taliban for two reasons. One, to use it as as as leverage in any kind of a peace in Afghanistan, and second, if the Taliban comes to power, becomes part of the power, they are on the soft side of the Taliban.

In the Gulf region all countries are supporting the peace process and the political settlement in Afghanistan. Only maybe Saudi Arabia is also concerned of the increasing role of Iran in Afghanistan. So while you look at all these difficult actors, so therefore actually it makes sense that the Afghan Study Group suggested continued regional diplomacy to bring all these countries together in order to support the sustainable peace in Afghanistan.

What immediate measure should be taken? The most important is to extend the May date of the withdrawal of the U.S. forces. Now, how long? I think it should be condition-based. If the peace process succeeds and the two sides genuinely and with some commitment set to resolve this conflict by peaceful means, and bring peace to Afghanistan, then that is fine and just paves the way for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. However, if it drags on and on, you cannot make it a calendar-based, as it should be a kind of mission-based withdrawal, it should be a kind of a mission-based withdrawal.

Now, is it possible? I think it cannot be done unilaterally. It can be done unilaterally, but it has some kind of obstacles because if the Taliban does not agree and they withdraw from the peace process, this can give an opportunity to Russia. They will have an initiative of peace. They can step in and that is going to discredit all the efforts that have been done so far in the peace talks. On the other hand if the Taliban withdraw from these peace talks, they said that they would resume fighting in Afghanistan.

They are already fighting in Afghanistan. They have actually escalated the violence in Afghanistan in the last few months, but the only difference would be that they say they will attack foreign troops, which they have not done since the Doha agreement. In that case they lose all political legitimacy. Taliban as a fighting force in many countries on the books they are still considered as a terrorist organization, including Iran, and they have been under major sanctions and if they withdraw from the peace process, they will lose their legitimacy as a political force committed to peace. Then they will become a kind of a fighting force, and then the Afghan government can withdraw assistance from others, including even from countries who are supporting the Taliban.

Therefore regional diplomacy is needed. Pressure the Taliban to agree on extension of the forces. This will also give them a disincentive, dragging their feet in the peace negotiations will actually cause the perpetuation or the longer term presence of the foreign troops in Afghanistan. This is something that we will see, how it has materialized, how it actually plays out in the region after the United States, the new administration, reviews the policy on Afghanistan and the Doha process.

Okay, now if the peace process fails, the scenarios are very unfavorable for Afghans themselves because although the Afghanistan Study Group looked at different scenarios, they do not support them. Now, we support the continuation of the presence there in order to support or to provide conditions for the success of the peace negotiations. Eventually, the Afghanistan conflict should be resolved through peace talks with the Afghans themselves, and other actors should facilitate that by providing the conditions to incentivize and disincentivize measures so that the two sides finally reach an agreement, but if that does not work, then the United States probably will have three options.

First, we will need to remain committed to the Afghan state. Should the negotiation fail, the outcome be deemed unacceptable. In this pathway the United States would continue to maintain a force in Afghanistan and support the Afghan state through the war, possibly increasing assistance until the opportunity for meaningful talks, preferably would strengthen the Afghan state, pretty much.

The other scenario, pathway, is a managed withdrawal from Afghanistan under which the United States would remove its troops but would not be indifferent to the outcome in Afghanistan. It would seek to use non-military leverage, including regional diplomacy, to secure as many of its state goals as possible. This scenario accepts and would accommodate the likely possibility of an eventual Taliban ascendance.

And finally, the rapid troop withdrawal irrespective of conditions on the ground and essentially indifferent to resulting outcome. None of these scenarios were considered available at this point. They were inadvisable at this point, but all were carefully studied by the group and could be adopted in the future.

Now, the conflict in Afghanistan is entering the twentieth year. It spans fourth U.S. administrations and it is the longest U.S. war. In fact, it surpasses the length of the war in Vietnam. Therefore what lies ahead? I think for Afghans it is a choice between talking to each other, coming together, finding a way to live together or continue this situation that can eventually become a kind of an isolated war. If the international community cuts their assistance, then the regional countries can enter and fight their own proxy wars in Afghanistan, and the people will suffer more. The longer this conflict continues, the more pain will come to Afghans themselves. This year, the last quarter of this year, was the bloodiest quarter for the Afghan civilians. This country has been at war for forty-two years now.

Now, why this country you know? This country has suffered a lot. You cannot find any country in the world that has in the last one hundred years had three major powers intervene military in this country. In 1919, Great Britain, which at the time was dominating in India, [intervened militarily in] the third Anglo-Afghan war. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union, actually, for more than nine years was fighting in Afghanistan with a lot of destruction. 1.3 million died, the countryside was totally destroyed. In the thirteen years since the last Soviet soldiers left Afghanistan, the first U.S. soldier landed in its place. It is a long war for Afghans themselves.

And this is the problem that reminds me of Arnold Toynbee, who says that if you want to look at the roadmap from the old world, the westward route passes through Aleppo and eastward it passes to Bagram. Bagram was the base of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan and Bagram is now the major the base of the international forces. So this country has been unlucky in the context of different countries. It has always been subject to competition between digital power and global powers.

I was talking to an old man in Ghazni a few years back and he was complaining about the international community. I said, “why are you complaining? Without the international community’s assistance you will not be the way you are now.” He says, “No, I am not talking about now, I am not talking about the assistance. I appreciate the assistance.” He said, “I know that the intervention in 2001 was a risky operation, but I am talking generally about our fate.”

He said, “Look, before 1978, Afghanistan was a peaceful country, a small country. It is not rich, but it was happy. There was a kind of harmony, ethnic harmony there. The people could travel easily, freely.” He said, “A young woman could travel without an escort from Kabul at night through Herat. It was no problem and people were happy with whatever they had, but then one superpower came and invaded us. The Soviet Union invaded us, they destroyed our country, and the other superpower came and brought all these other elements who became the extremists, and to fight the superpower. The country was destroyed, but the legacy, actually, is haunting us now.”

He said, “Now look, those people who come from all around the world, supported by counter-Soviet powers, they came from all over the world to fight the communists with the same fervor of ideology. Okay, there they trained, indeed, now they have become Al-Qaeda, they became the Taliban, they became whatever exists, and they are now fighting us.” He said, “But I wish somebody could undo what they did to us, but it is not possible.” So I think peace is more important for Afghans than anybody else. I mean I think there is a hope that the international community, including the regional countries who have some stake in the Afghanistan conflict, will eventually. Here, we say that the United States is a major actor, is a key factor. The United States by a kind of a coherent, responsible actions, messages, and policies can create the opportunity to increase the success of a peaceful resolution of the Afghan conflict. However, the United States also can increase the chances of chaos by leaving precipitously or cutting its aid to the institutions in Afghanistan.

Watch the Q&A…

Q&A

Robert R. Reilly:

Great, Ali, thank you so very much for that extremely comprehensive treatment of the current situation, the various stakeholders inside Afghanistan, and the surrounding countries. I believe it was February 15th was the thirty-second anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. A statement was issued by the ‘Taliban Emirate’ in which the the Taliban said, ‘just as Dr. Najibullah was executed after the Soviets withdrew, so too will Ashraf Ghani be executed,’ presumably when the U.S. withdraws, whether precipitously or not. That remark does not betoken well for negotiations to say the least. That is one point. They seem to be as bellicose as always.

Second of all, when you mention the very promising developments in Afghan civil society over the past twenty years and particularly the experience of young people today, nonetheless, in the areas where the Taliban has been gaining ground, such as in the west around Kandahar’s countryside, they seem to be behaving just like the old Taliban. They are banning music. They are doing the things that they have said they purportedly will not do if they are ever brought back to power. So I guess what I am asking you is about the character of the Taliban movement itself and how genuinely susceptible it is to any settlement that is short of Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

Ali Jalali:

Thank you, yes that is a very good question and the problem with trusting the Taliban is that what their leaders say, what those who are involved in negotiations say, the message is not going all the way down to the rank and file. In order to get some kind of a legitimacy they say they have changed, they are going to respect the human rights, they are going to have to share power with other groups, respect the other political forces in Afghanistan. They even say that they are also not against the Shias in Afghanistan, which was one of the major issues left between them and the Shias when they were in power. However, this does not communicate down the way to the rank and file for two reasons.

First off, the Taliban do not want that because the moment that they go down to the rank-and-files and say they are from the peace process and they are going to make compromises, they will lose the support of some of these people, who believe that they are winning because they were given for years this idea that they defeated the Soviet Union, now they are going to defeat the United States. They do not want to communicate this to them in order to keep them in their trenches.

On the other hand, the moment that they give this message that they are about to make peace with the Afghan government, for years they called it a heretic government supported by foreigners, then probably some of them will leave their trenches because in some countries many of them are on the fences, and they will go to the winning side. If they say they are losing, why should they stay there?

That is why they are reluctant to accept a ceasefire. Ceasefire means the moment they stop fighting many of their fighters will leave and they cannot bring them back. So yes, what they did, these threats that you mentioned, are something, but the situation is totally different today from the old days. When the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, the mujahideen did not overthrow the Afghan government. The Najibullah government was destroyed from within because as the Soviet Union stopped supporting Najibullah, and the Soviet Union itself was dissolved, some of the elements of the Afghan government of the Najibulah government made special, separate deals with the mujahideen leaders (with Ahmad Shah Massoud, with Hekmatyar), and they actually surrendered to them.

This does not mean that the mujahideen came and overthrew the government, it does not. It is not going to happen today either because the Afghans are willing to make peace, but they are not going to compromise certain values that they cherish and they are not going to compromise certain achievements that they had during the past twenty years.

On the other hand, the situation from the region is different. Even Pakistan, which is supporting the Taliban very much, they do not want them to be a dominant force in Afghanistan because now if they are part of the government, they can use them for their own purpose. They can influence them for their own policy choices, but if you are dominant, they cannot control them.

In summer of 2001 the Taliban took their flag and put it in Mohmand Agency. They said this is part of Afghanistan’s territory at that time, so it was a very different time, but there is one thing to note, that Najbullah’s government collapsed because the assistance from outside stopped.

On the other hand, in 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed for a negative symmetry that they would stop supporting mujahideen. The U.S. pledged to stop supporting the mujahideen and the Soviet Union pledged to stop supporting the Kabul government. The Soviet Union stopped that assistance because they could not continue that assistance, and the United States stopped. However, some countries in the region like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan supported some elements, some fundamentalist groups in Afghanistan and this balance actually was disrupted.

See the rest of his talk…

The Sources of Russian Conduct
(Paul Goble, February 12, 2021)

Transcript available below

About the speaker

Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. While there, he launched the “Window on Eurasia” series.

Prior to joining the faculty there in 2004, he served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He writes frequently on ethnic and religious issues and has edited five volumes on ethnicity and religion in the former Soviet space. Trained at Miami University in Ohio and the University of Chicago, he has been decorated by the governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for his work in promoting Baltic independence and the withdrawal of Russian forces from those formerly occupied lands.

The views of the speaker are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Westminster Institute.

Transcript

Robert R. Reilly:

Hello and welcome to the Westminster Institute. I am Bob Reilly, its director back from a two-month leave of absence when I temporarily rejoined the government, and I am so happy to be back with you, especially with the speaker we have today. Now, in 1947 George Kennan under the pseudonym Mr. X published the famous essay titled, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” This helped formulate the policy of containment. Well, the Soviet Union is long gone but there are still very few people who know how Russia ticks internally and how that affects its external behavior.

Paul Goble is a scholar and writer at the top of that list. He has expertise on Russia, Eurasia, public diplomacy, and international broadcasting. He also served as a visiting scholar at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Prior to joining the faculty there back in 2004, he served in various capacities in the government, including the U.S State Department as a special adviser to the Secretary of State on Soviet Nationality and Baltic Affairs, at the Central Intelligence Agency, and at the International Broadcasting Bureau, as well as the Voice of America where I had the privilege of being his colleague, and also at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

He writes frequently on ethnic and religious issues and has edited five volumes on ethnicity and religion in the former Soviet space. Trained at Miami University and the University of Chicago, he has been decorated by the governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. To update George Kennan’s essay titled, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Paul will speak today on the sources of Russian conduct. Welcome, Paul Goble.

Paul Goble:

Thank you, Bob, it is a great pleasure to see you again and to be invited to make a presentation to your group. It was in fact seventy-five years ago this year that George Kennan wrote his Long Telegram, which a year later as you have mentioned became the Foreign Affairs article, The Sources of Soviet Conduct. That essay (or that telegram first) and that essay became the basis for the American understanding of the Soviet Union, the Soviet challenge, and structured what became known as containment, American policy that was directed against the Soviet Union between 1947 and the end, 1991. There are many things in that article that are worth remembering, but three I think are particularly important now because so much is being said about containment once again given Vladimir Putin’s aggressive foreign policy and a question about what the United States should do to protect its friends and itself under the circumstances.

First of all, Kennan understood and argued in his telegram, which became the article, that the Soviet Union was driven by an inherently false and self-contradictory ideology and that if the United States and its Western allies could contain the Soviet Union, could prevent it from metastasizing into other states, that those contradictions and that falsehood would ultimately breed the downfall of the Soviet system, and that we would know that containment had worked when the USSR ceased to exist. That was the basis of what the U.S. did. It was something that was possible because of the relative power positions of the United States and its Western allies compared to the much weaker Soviet Union and because of the particular economic and cultural arrangements that existed in the world in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

The second point that Mr. Kennan made that is important for us to remember is that in opposing the Soviet Union, it was critically important that the United States government and the United States intellectual leadership combined two forces that all too often operate against one another, and that is that the containment policy of the United States needed to have the support of American industry and it needed to have the support of the American human rights community, which was interested in producing, in promoting democracy. Kennan understood that without the economic power of industry, this policy would not be sustainable, but without the ideological commitment of the human rights community, it would not have the content that was necessary to defeat Soviet Marxism.

Fortunately, in Soviet times the economic community was quite willing to support this position for two reasons. On the one hand the Soviet Union was a closed economy and it was very difficult for American firms to make money in the USSR. Some tried, a few succeeded, but most realized it was hopeless. And the second thing is that the business community in the United States from the late 40s until the 1980s was constrained by any attempt to get involved inside the Soviet bloc because the human rights community could be counted on to denounce them as soft on communism if they did, and as a result there was very very little economic involvement by the American companies in the USSR. That kept that alliance together and it was one that Kennan understood from the beginning was essential to winning the Cold War.

The third thing that that Ambassador Kennan understood is something that is often forgotten. The Soviet agenda driven by this ideology was to spread communist systems and Soviet control of them across the world country by country. What that meant was that the Soviet ideological agenda was in many ways a very traditional foreign policy effort of aggrandizement. Moscow wanted to control Poland, so it wanted Poland to have a communist government, which would allow Moscow to control it. It wanted to control East Germany, same thing. That was a kind of challenge to Western powers like the United States, and Great Britain, and France.

That was something we knew how to respond to, keeping an aggressive power bound up, limited in its activities of expanding its power over other states, entire governments, was something we had experienced with before because that is how foreign policy was played in the 19th century. And it was certainly how we had seen Hitler behave with respect to the Third Reich just a few years earlier, so what Kennan said is this means that the United States has to in the first instance form military alliances to buck up those countries threatened by Soviet expansionism, that it needs to provide assistance to those countries’ governments to take care of those social classes, usually the poor, that the Soviets might exploit against those governments. And at the same time the United States needed to have a policy of income redistribution at home that would ensure that there was never an underclass that the Soviets would have any chance of getting recruits from.

Yes, it is true there were an awful lot of Soviet agents penetrating the American government at the time of Franklin Roosevelt, but it is also true that those numbers were microscopically small compared to the American population. And what Kennan understood is that as long as they remain small, they could be dealt with as criminal activities that we had means to address. They must never be allowed to grow, and therefore there was a certain discipline imposed upon ourselves in coping with the Soviet Union forty-five years later. The importance of these three insights and, of course, many more things that Kennan offered over the years meant that the USSR self-destructed, it ended, it simply ceased to exist.

This was an amazing thing. It was so amazing that people did not quite know how to respond to it. The United States (it is sometimes forgotten) was so uncertain what would happen if the Soviet Union finally disappeared that it kept the Soviet flag up in the U.S. Department of State a week after it was taken down over the Kremlin and over the Russian embassy, which is hardly a sign of great insight and planning of the kind that is often claimed by participants in the administration at the time. The tasks that we faced in the Cold War were remarkably simple. As I have suggested they were traditional as Kennan understood they simply required that the discipline be maintained for a very long time, that discipline was possible because of the Soviet government’s commitment to communism, which provided a kind of focus, an enemy that the United States could deal with.

When Gorbachev came to Washington for the first time, he brought along with him Georgy Arbatov, the Soviet Union’s leading expert on American political affairs, and Arbatov made a remarkable comment, which I have never forgotten because I think it says a lot about the way this country functions. Arbatov said that Gorbachev was going to do something far more terrible to the United States than any earlier Soviet leader had done. Namely, he was going to take away the enemy of the United States. And without an enemy he was not sure the United States would be able to function because having an enemy, as the Soviet Union clearly was and was understood to be, provided a discipline of American politics and a focus of American political activity, which, without this, without such an enemy, the United States rapidly lost its way.

Indeed, as evidence of that it is difficult to imagine any other country on earth where Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History, could have become a bestseller. The idea that history could be over because of one singular event, and there was a celebration of American democracy and American capitalism, free market capitalism, was all very well, but it was so ahistorical as to be unbelievable except by the American political elite of the 1990s, which desperately wanted to proclaim victory, pocket the benefits of that victory, and ignore foreign policy for a decade.

And in the 1990s that is exactly what happened. The United States ignored what was happening around the world. It ignored what was happening in Russia it celebrated its own achievement and it acted as if that was inevitable and that we would never have a problem again. Our ignoring problems in many parts of the world led to deterioration. It is difficult to imagine that either the crisis in Rwanda, leading to the deaths of 800,000 people or the vicious civil wars in the former Yugoslavia would have happened had the United States not decided to look away.

We were only pulled back into world affairs when we were attacked by what was the candidate for the next new enemy, namely Islamist radicalism, in 2001, and more recently some have suggested that China represents the kind of challenge that will reimpose discipline on the United States and that will force us to organize ourselves so that we can be in a position to defend our national interest and to promote them around the world, and not see ourselves go under to a new rising power.

There is a lot one could say about what happened around the world between 1991 and 2001. Most of it is not all that positive to remember, but what is especially not positive to remember is the way in which the United States looked away from the Russian Federation, adopted a policy of weak neglect rather than tough love, and therefore saw something emerge in Russia which is far more threatening to the United States, far more dangerous to what the United States stands for, a far greater challenge than anything we faced from the Soviets, and one that is going to be far more difficult for us to counter.

We simply did not pay attention to what was going on. We were unwilling to take these steps of providing assistance to the Russian peoples so that they would be able to get through what was a difficult transition, and not surprisingly, they began to blame us and the transition from communism as something we wanted to hurt them. Not surprisingly, politicians rose up, including Vladimir Putin, who promised to take revenge, and that is what we are seeing. We also ignored throughout the 1990s, having proclaimed Russia democracy in 1991. It was not a democracy then, it is not a democracy now, but we proclaimed it a democracy and we assumed that everything would work out as long as they got privatization right.

This sort of pseudo-marxist economic determinism had the effect of leading us to ignore the collapse of any progress toward a rule of law, something Russia did not have and does not have, that leading to a situation in which there was more income differentiation with the richest Russians now being among the richest people in the world while most Russians are vastly poorer than even sub-Saharan African countries. We ignored that and we failed to see what that would mean as a political motivation for launching a new crusade against the United States, and against Western democracy, and indeed even against what we understand is free market capitalism.

And the third thing that happened in the 1990s, which is perhaps the most important and certainly the easiest to understand although it was a horrific mistake, that we were not paying attention to the way in which the Yeltsin regime handled the privatization of the Soviet state. The Soviet economy resulted in the creation of a class of oligarchs of exceedingly wealthy people who, in the course of that decade and the following one, transferred out of Russia more than 1.5 trillion, with a t trillion dollars.

The Soviets had never had that kind of economic presence in the in in the West by three or four orders of magnitude. They had never had that kind of money to throw around, to buy up people, to corrupt other societies, to exploit various possibilities, to promote Russian policy. I mean corrupting an entire country is a rounding error if you have 1.5 trillion dollars. That is explode about largely uncontrolled, especially because you could be sure that those Western institutions, banks, corporations and governments that are benefiting from that money flowing through their their coffers are going to be interested in making sure that that money continues to flow rather than opposing it.

And that is something that perhaps is at the basis of what has changed in the relationship between Moscow and the West with the rise of Vladimir Putin. Putin came to power of course not as a fully formed revolutionist and fascist, I would argue, politician, but rather somebody committed to providing some kind of stability in a country that had been profoundly ratcheted around by the collapse of communism, by the failure of Russia to have an economy that produced anything anyone wanted. The only thing anyone wanted to buy from Russia or indeed even wants to buy from Russia now are raw materials that Russia has not processed; oil, gas, rare earth minerals, and the like.

So what happened is the Russian people sank further and further down and Putin to cover that, and to protect his wealthy friends and his own personal wealth, and he is certainly one of the wealthiest people on the planet, beginning in 2008 at his speech at the Munich Security Conference he warned that Russia was coming back, that it would use all the tools at its disposal to prevent other people from abusing Russia further, and that it would use those tools as well to destabilize, divide, and confuse Western democracies so that they could not pose a threat to Russia as he understands it. That attack in 2008 was at the time dismissed by most Western governments as for a domestic audience, that he was speaking to Russians who had suffered a great deal in the previous twenty years and he was giving them some kind of of sense that the government was going to look after them and the interests of Russia as a country.

Those people were wrong. What this was was a road map for a revolutionist state that was going to be attacking other countries in its neighborhood and seeking to undermine Western democracies, including our own, began by attacking Georgia, invading Georgia in 2008. In 2014 Mr. Putin invaded and then illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea. He has put his armies into Africa, his money into any opponent he can find to the United States, and he has used Western technologies against themselves.

Unfortunately, as Vladimir Putin was doing that, many American strategic thinkers were going right back to George Kennan’s article on the sources of Soviet conduct and therefore they were fighting the last war as old generals often do, but because the sources of Russian conduct now are not identical to the sources of Soviet conduct in 1946. It is critically important that we understand the difference, that we can see that what is happening now. What Mr. Putin is doing reflects an entirely different set of sources of conduct and what I would like to devote my remarks today primarily is to examining the key elements of those sources. They are, as I say, fundamentally different from the Soviet Union and they are going to prove much harder for the United States to counter, not just because Moscow has resources in the form of money that it never had before, but because it is not in an ideological straitjacket that the Soviet government often was because of its belief in communism.

Former Estonian President Thomas Hedrick once remarked that if the Russians ever came back to Estonia, they would not be constrained by communism. That is a very useful place to begin because in many ways the constraints that the Soviet governments operate on there were things it did not do. No Soviet government attempted to recruit rich people, no Soviet government attempted to work through the banking system, no Soviet government had the opportunity to make use of social social media. They did not even exist. Putin is prepared to do all those things because his agenda is not to spread Soviet control country bike under Moscow’s control country by country in the name of an ideological vision of the transformation of the world, and because he is willing, able, and quite frankly all too ready to do things that do not make sense, that do not seem to be consistent, and because they do not seem to be consistent, they are often ignored.

That is what has happened in the last decade and it is terribly important that we get beyond this obsession with either assuming that Russia is a liberal, democratic, free-market ally of the United States once and forever, as the readers of Francis Fukayama’s book would have believed, or that it is simply a remake of the Soviet Union that it is driven by the same ideological concerns, and seeks the same kinds of advantages. What Russia wants now is not what the Soviet Union wanted. What it is prepared to do to get what it wants is very different than what the Soviet Union was prepared to do, and the resources that Moscow has to achieve those ends are different and in many ways far larger than anything Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev could ever have dreamed of.

So now I would like to divide the rest of my remarks into two parts. In the first I would like to talk about how Russia is not the USSR because it is important to understand that Russia today is not the Soviet Union and is not going to be the Soviet Union again. The people who came to power in 1991 and 2001 do not want to go back to the Soviet Union. They might want to go back to a time when the West feared Moscow the way it feared Moscow in Soviet times, but they are not interested in going back to that system because that system would preclude them from gaining the wealth, and influence, and access to the goods of the West that they are not prepared to give up. That is critical to understand. The second thing I want to talk about is the sec is and related to that are to specify a little more clearly exactly what Moscow’s goals are, what resources it has, and what tactics it can and has been using. Each of those is important if we are going to address the final point in my remarks today.

What do we do about it? So often when I have done congressional testimony, I have described problems, and the first question I always get from one or another congressman or senator is, ‘well, you have told us what the problems are, now what is the solution?’ I wish I could tell you the solution was easy, quick, simple, and that we are likely to do it. Unfortunately, it will not be easy, it certainly will not be quick, and the likelihood that we as a society are going to come together in ways that will allow us to achieve the great successes we had by those who followed Kennan’s advice dealing with Soviet conduct are much less likely to be available in our attempts to cope with Russian conduct.

Russia is not the Soviet Union

What I want to talk about first then is on how Russia is not the Soviet Union. First, it is much smaller. The population is less than half as big. It is economically less important. The Soviet Union for all of its problems had an economy that actually produced things that it was able to sell abroad or to people who often had few choices to turn it down namely, the Soviet bloc. Today, the only thing the Russian Federation exports is oil and gas and other natural resources.

The country is fundamentally weaker in all of the strategic ways we measure these things. In 1990 there were five million men in the Soviet military. Today, there are 800,000 in the Russian military. That is simply not all that big. In fact, Turkey, which has the second largest standing army in the West, is within spinning distance of having an army as large as the army of the Russian Federation. To be sure, Russia still has nuclear weapons, although it is far from clear how many of them actually work given the decaying situation in Soviet nuclear technology and research.

The biggest change however is that the Soviet Union had real allies, not all of them willing, but some were very willing. It built up allies because it was able to organize people against the United States, against the Europeans, anti-colonial movements. The Third World movement was a Soviet creation. It was directed against the West. Right now, Russia has no allies. Even Russian commentators routinely say that the only country that might be an ally of the Russian Federation is Turkmenistan, which is hardly going to allow Moscow to stand up against anybody. The countries that vote with it at the UN are equally outcast as as the Russian Federation has become since its violations of the law, international law, with regard to the absorption of Crimea, with its use of chemical weapons to attack its own dissidents and emigres, and so it does not have the kind of alliance structure on which a great power has to rely in a complicated world like ours.

It is also not governed by communists. The people who believed in Marxism-Leninism probably were killed off by Stalin, but even under Brezhnev there were people who believed in the Marxist idea of progress in the notion that this was socialist state socialism was the wave of the future and they wanted to promote it. Vladimir Putin and the generation of secret policemen who have taken over the Russian Federation have no such commitment to those ideas. They are absolutely indifferent to social inequality. As far as they are concerned the wealthy can get wealthier and the poor ever poor, and if they die out, that is just okay too if we do not need their labor power.

The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has continued to spend more on the military at a time when during the pandemic Russia continued to close thousands of hospitals, which has led to more deaths from the coronavirus in Russia than were necessary at all. This kind of thing just is a very different attitude. It is a kind of extremist, Ayn Rand-selfish capitalism unconstrained by any morality other than power, and that is a very different kind of political leadership than anything we ever saw in Soviet times.

The Soviet argument with the West was in fact an argument within the West. It was an argument between those who believed in the primacy of the state as opposed to those who believed in the primacy of society, but it was not an attack on state and society. At the same time I would argue that the Russian Federation today is better understood as a massive corporation run for the benefit of its owners, namely the people at the top and the Kremlin, rather than as a state designed to function, to benefit its population.

The numbers are conclusive and that leads to a very, very different kind of approach to foreign and domestic policy. The agenda that this government has, the Russian government has, is not then to retake territory to take control of governments that become slavishly obedient to Moscow. At least that is not the case beyond the borders of the former Soviet space or at most the borders of the former Soviet bloc. Moscow simply is not trying to do that because it cannot. Its own approach to things does not allow it to build the kind of social and political base foundation that might make that possible.

Instead what the Russian government under Vladimir Putin is interested in doing is destabilizing other countries and the leadership of the West in particular so that it is not in a position to focus on what Russia is doing, to unite and act in concert against what Russia is doing, but instead are forced to focus on their own internal problems so that Russia can do what it wants in its neighborhood, and anyone who challenges it can be isolated through the use of social media and corruption. And if those things do not work, it is quite prepared to use, as we have seen, weapons of mass destruction, namely, poisons of various kinds injected into the veins of people that Vladimir Putin does not like.

To cover all this and to make it more popular within Russia, Vladimir Putin and his leadership have promoted a revengeless foreign policy of making Russia great again. They have promoted a radical nationalist agenda where ethnic Russians are superior to everyone else in a country which is going from being approximately one-fifth non-Russian in 1991 after the USSR came apart to a country which at present is certainly more than one quarter and indeed almost a third non-Russian, a situation which is explosive but which amazingly the West has largely ignored.

I want to come back to that, but if Russia is suffering from a lot of losses in terms of its ability to promote its policies, it has also gained a number of advantages compared to the Soviet Union. The first and probably the greatest is that most people, large numbers of people in the United States and most people in the West, do not want to see Russia as an enemy. They want to see Russia as a potential partner that may have gone astray on this or that issue rather than the kind of existential threat that they were almost all prepared to see the Soviet Union.

What that means is that whatever Moscow does, there will be those in the West and in Western governments who will argue that what it is doing is not a threat, that it is being misunderstood, that it should be that we should make it take steps to find a reset, to find new bases for cooperation because after all, they are capitalists and if their democracy does not look exactly like ours, well, democracies vary.

And again and again there has been almost complete unwillingness in the West to see the threats that the Russian Federation poses. Even when people talk about Russian use of the internet and social media against Western democracies, including our own, there has been a reluctance to see that as part of a larger strategy directed against the destabilization and weakness, weakening of the West so that it can be brought down to Russia’s level, and Russia can get away with what it has been doing.

Their second great advantage, I have mentioned this before but it needs to be stressed again and again because people forget it, in Soviet times people in Western countries or third world countries who signed up to work with the Soviet Union did so almost exclusively for ideological reasons. The Soviet government was notorious in not paying its spies very much. People who spied for Moscow in the 40s, 50s, and 60s did so because they foolishly believed in communism.

Now, Russia has enormous amounts of money and is prepared to buy people and governments and institutions because it can. When you have 1.5 trillion trillion U.S dollars floating about in Western banks that by itself has an influence, but it means that a tiny portion of that is siphoned off and that is easy enough for governments and intelligence agencies to do. A tiny fraction of that can create enormous problems and offer the opportunity to recruit people either by offering them trips, by offering them employment in Russian corporations (as they did to former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder), by providing financial assistance to businessmen who may be in trouble in their own societies.

These are things that the Soviets could never do because they did not have the money and if they had had the money those were things that their ideology would have prevented them from thinking about doing because it would be anti-Marxist. They had a Leninist to fund rich people in order to pursue your own goals. Only people who would come over on their own from among the rich people, like Alger Hiss for example, were acceptable, but to buy those people that was not something any self-respecting Soviet communists could consider and they were.

The Russian government also did something that the Soviet government generally did not in the Soviet times. The Soviets saw Western institutions as the enemy. They saw them as something to be taken down as such. The Russian government on the other hand sees Russian or Western institutions as providing opportunities to those same institutions, which are at the core of Western economy and society, to turn them against in martial arts fashion. And Putin, of course, is famous as a martial arts enthusiast. By turning the strengths of his opponents against them, by exploiting the inherent weaknesses of these institutions, and Putin has done that again and again.

And as we all know now to be very clear the sources of Russian conduct are about goals, they are about resources, and they are about tactics. The goals are so different from the Soviet goals that it is difficult to imagine. What Moscow wants today is not what Moscow wanted in 1946, and trying to stop it with the same tactics that were used in 1946 while it may be attractive is not very clever. It will ensure that we will be building Maginot lines and the dictator, the new dictator, will be running around them just as Hitler did in 1940 in France.

The Russian Federation is a declining power. It is a country that is going to be weaker and weaker. It is going to have a smaller and smaller population. This year it lost 500,000 additional people, excess deaths over births. About half of that maybe can be ascribed to the pandemic, although not all of those. Even that half were victims of the coronavirus, but rather the collapse of the Russian medical system, which could not cope in many places with the pandemic. It simply does not have enough people to be able to draft a a large military. It does not have an attractive ideology. I do not know anyone in the West who is signing up to be a foot soldier for the Russian world the way there were lots of people in Soviet times who were prepared to sign up to be foot soldiers for the communist future. And that means it has to adopt a different policy.

The first and foremost goal, the basic structure, basic impulse behind Putinism is to bring everyone else down to his level by spreading destabilization and disinformation. That is the basis of his efforts to destabilize democracies, by promoting radicalism on the far right as well as the far left. The Soviets would have welcomed promotion of radicalism on the far left, seeing such people as the natural allies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but Vladimir Putin is quite prepared to get in bed with Nazis and with the far right of other kinds because anything that undermines, that corrodes democratic structures, is from his point of view valuable. That is a big change and unless we recognize that that is where he is coming from, we are not going to get it right.

He is also committed as part of his own contempt for the people and for democratic values to undermine the principle of truth on which democracies rely. Democratic governance is only possible if people can have some confidence that they share the same facts even if they do not share the same opinions. What Vladimir Putin has promoted, and he has had lots of willing accomplices in this, is the idea that there is no such thing as a fact, there are only opinions and therefore one person’s opinion is as valuable as any, and therefore any fact is as likely to be true and untrue as any other fact. That has led to a post-truth world, which has meant democracies across the West have been destabilized, not just our own.

And third, he has tried by promoting a combination of smiles and frowns to keep the West off balance whenever it appears that the West may be waking up to the fact that Putin’s regime represents an existential threat to themselves, albeit a very different existential threat than the Soviets presented in 1946. He will do something that somebody likes and then people will say, ‘well, all should be forgiven, we should ignore anything bad that he did’.

And that is going to be accepted for the worst of all possible reasons, namely, that the business community in the West, which in the past could be counted on to stand up against communism either because there were no real possibilities of making money there or because they did not want to be charged with being soft on communism, will be only too happy to jump in and they will have an impact, an important impact, on the governments of the countries of which they are citizens. We have seen that again and again and again; the resources.

The second part, the resources that are part of this new Moscow agenda, first and foremost, of course, is money. I have talked about that, but I think we need to understand that it is not just money, it is that the level and intensity of contacts between Russia and the West have expanded geometrically under Putin. There are far more people going back and forth. There are far more friendships and linkages and these things are all being used to stop those efforts to promote an understanding that Russia does represent an existential threat.

I know many Russians who have come to this country, vastly more than ever came in Soviet times, and the numbers in Europe are even greater. What they are doing is not necessarily that they are self-conscious agents, but their presence creates a different situation, one in which Westerners begin to depend on them. They invest in the local economy, they offer trips to various places in the Russian Federation, and that means that they have an influence.

Shortly before I came and recorded this talk, I got an email from someone who said I have just been offered a free trip to a Russian city if I am willing to do a review of this this one rather obnoxious Russian figure, and the person said I think I will take it. Well, when you get to that point you can imagine the kind of networks that are out there, and that kind of arrangement has allowed Moscow to exploit things like social media, like the internet, in ways that are very difficult for people to track down.

This all leads to the fact that Putin, unlike the Soviet leaders, does not operate under the constraints that they did. He is not a prisoner of ideology. He is driven by naked self-interest and because he is, some people say well, that is what everybody does. Well, no, everybody does not do that. When we live in complex societies, we have to find ways to live together, and to cooperate, and to have rules and rule of law. Putin does not believe in that. His behavior toward Alexei Navalny and others shows that he has nothing but contempt for law. What he is doing is engaging in a brutal, brutal dictatorship and he is willing to ignore laws and rules of the game at all levels, nationally and internationally.

It is going to be a situation that is going to be very, very difficult for people in the West to counter. We have already seen how difficult it is to deal with Russian penetration of our social media and our political system. We have already seen how difficult it is to control black Russian financial flows through Western banks, and American banks especially because the Western banks are only too pleased to have this money because having the money allows them to make a big profit and they are not interested in giving that up. They do not see that what they are doing has negative consequences for their country because there is no explanation being given by the government or by the intelligentsia to explain that if you are involved in this kind of thing, you are promoting the kinds of negative consequences for the United States, and the American system, and democracy, and free market capitalism more generally that should never be allowed.

Are we going to be able to respond? Well, I think we can and I think in thinking about that we need to take something from the containment principles offered by George Kennan seventy-five years ago. I think we also need to take some lessons from those like the Dulleses in the 1950s and Ronald Reagan later, who called for a much more forward approach of coping with communism and an approach which often was referred to as roll back, of trying to drive that system out of existence by challenging it directly.

And third, I think that – and this is the most important – I think we need to change ourselves. The world we are living in is not the world of 1946. It is a very different world and that means that if we are going to cope with it, if we are going to win, we need to begin to change ourselves, and that is not something that is going to be easy.

From the principles of containment I think that there are two big lessons that apply to the kind of policies the United States needs to adopt. First, we need to build up our alliances, not neglect them. When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in 2014, I was among those who argued that the United States and NATO should offer preemptive NATO membership to Ukraine. Moscow should have been put on notice that invading a neighboring country which exists under various agreements that say that Moscow is supposed to respect its borders will get Moscow in much bigger trouble than it imagines because it will guarantee that it will find itself locked in a conflict with the West as a whole. That was not done, but we can still do it again.

There are other places where Russia is projecting force that the United States can use its alliance system to educate and resist Russian efforts. We can work with our partners to identify black Russian money, the corruption that it is bringing. We can work with our partners to fight the misuse of the internet and social media to undermine democracy. We can work with our partners to make sure that Russia will be identified as the culprit. It is in the rise of groups on the far right as well as groups on the far left, something that is not recognized in a large number of countries in the world.

The second aspect of that that we can take from the containment principles is that we can use economic force. The United States is still the most powerful country, economy, in the world. Together with our European allies we are going to be the most powerful economic bloc for the rest of this century. China is rising. Given its population it should. One can only hope that it will rise in that sense, but the West, that is to say Europe and the United States, are the dominant economies going, and we can make use of our economic power against countries that do not behave well.

Sanctions work. They really work. It is no accident that Russia has not been able to launch any satellites this past year. It simply cannot because it cannot get the equipment it needs. It cannot refit its only aircraft carrier because it cannot get the equipment it needs thanks to sanctions. Sanctions are a valuable tool. They are not the only one, but they can matter.

And with regard to the economy, the united, the West, Europeans have shown the way to make sure that income differentiation does not get out of hand. The United States, unfortunately, has allowed income differentiation to grow more than is safe for a democratic society. We can change that. Politics suggests that we will and because we need to do that to make our society more defensible against others. We need to isolate the radical, anything-goes kind of capitalism on offer from Putin in Moscow to make sure that the entire population of every country is taken care of rather than there being a handful of very rich people and a large mass of very poor ones.

The second point I would make is that we need to draw from the principles of rollback. It may very well be that the best we can do in countering Vladimir Putin’s Russia is to work for its disintegration. There are large parts of the country, some of them non-Russian, but some of them ethnic Russian like most of Siberia and the far east, that are as oppressed by Moscow as anybody else. I see no reason for not saying that it is the policy in the United States as it has been historically to support the right of peoples to self-determination, and that goes for people in the North Caucasus, the middle Volga, Siberia, the Urals and the far east. It also goes for the Russians who quite frankly are more oppressed than a lot of other people in other countries simply because their government invokes them, but it does not provide them with the support that it promises.

With regard to that I think there is no reason that the United States should not radically step up its sanctions regime, seeing Russia as an existential threat means that sanctions should be extended not only sectoraly but in terms of individuals, and those individuals should include everyone right up to the dictator in the Kremlin. We can do that without difficulty and I also see no reason why given Russia’s actions against ourselves and against its neighbors and our friends that we should not suspend Russia immediately from the SWIFT financial settlement system. Yes, some New York bankers would lose money because Russians would pull out some of their deposits, but the fact is until Russia decides that it is going to live by the rules rather than live in a world that seeks no rules as Mr. Putin does, we need to take the kind of steps we can take short of war to put Russia back in the box, and radical sanctions will do that.

Third one of the things that I am most proud of in my career is that I worked for both sides of the aisle as it were of USA international broadcasting, both surrogate broadcasters like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the government broadcaster, the Voice of America. We should be doing a lot more than that. We should be broadcasting more, we should be thinking about moving to direct to home satellite TV broadcast.

Now that we are no longer doing very much in the shortwave area, most people do not realize that when the United States decided to stop using shortwave radio, it effectively handed a censor’s pencil to the Russians. If you broadcast only in FM, you need to have your broadcasting center within 30 to 50 miles of the people you want to reach. What does that mean? It means if you want to reach the people in Moscow, you have to broadcast from the suburbs of Moscow. Guess what that does? It gives Moscow itself the ability to set the rules and Moscow is using them increasingly against both the government broadcaster and surrogate broadcaster. That needs to change. Greater reliance on the internet is a good thing, but I am convinced that direct to home satellite television broadcasting is the future. It may be expected, it may seem expensive, but it is cheap in terms of the geopolitical rewards.

And the third point I want to make is that we have to change ourselves. First and foremost that means we need to stop living in this dream world that the only threats that are on the horizon to the United States come from Islam in the Middle East or China in the far east the biggest threat to the United States and our way of life right now from abroad comes from neither of those places. It comes from the Russian Federation and its government, which is committed to the destabilization and destruction of American democracy, the undermining of American influence throughout the world and destabilization of our friends and allies in such a way that the West will cease to exist. That is the kind of challenge we should be responding to rather than remaining in denial. It is important that we therefore first and foremost recognize that we have a problem because if we realize there is a problem, we are much more likely to do something about it.

Second, that means that the American people need to recommit themselves to a much more serious program of public education/civic training as it is oft used to be called. Courses like ‘problems of democracy,’ which I took fifty years ago when I was in high school, those things need to be restored. We have so much to be proud of in this country. That does not mean we do not have problems and that does not mean that we are not ashamed. We are free enough and strong enough to be ashamed and to admit our problems, but we need to rebuild the foundations of American identity so that we will be immunized against the kinds of things, the kinds of attacks on truth, the kinds of attacks on civility, the kinds of attacks on democracy that are on offer by Vladimir Putin and his king.

Finally and more immediately, the United States needs to set put in place a system of media monitoring and response that will allow us to do something to counter these Russian activities. Most people are not aware of how much Moscow does and how much it spends to expand its influence. They are simply not aware that is a national task. It is something that should be pursued by a combination of the private sector and the government so that people will be aware that this problem is not some small thing dreamed up by a coterie of dissident ex-cold warriors or not-so-ex-cold warriors, but by people who are legitimately and deeply concerned about the prospects for American democracy where many of its leaders are in denial about the threats we face, looking at the wrong threats and ignoring the more fundamental ones.

Doing all this is going to be extraordinarily difficult for Americans, especially given that we think that what we did from 1946 to 1991 provides a model for success, forgetting that that model was appropriate against the threat we faced then but is not appropriate anymore for the threat we now face, coming from Moscow, but I am absolutely convinced and therefore I am especially pleased to have the chance to talk with you today. That with some understanding of the nature of the threat we can win out and we will.

History is on our side. History is on the side of democracy and free market capitalism. And the words ‘free’ and ‘market’ are just as important as ‘capitalism’ in that Vladimir Putin is a man of the past, not a man of the Soviet past but a man of the vicious, unrestrained, swashbuckling capitalist class before societies took measures to bring it under some measure, some degree of social control. That may be something some people in this country want to go back to, but it is not something that we as a modern democracy can ever afford. We need to recognize that the existential threat coming from Moscow today is far greater than the existential threat that came from Moscow under the late Soviet Union. Thank you.

Q&A

Robert R. Reilly:

Well, thank you very much for both the breadth and depth of your analysis. One thing George Kennan said in his famous essay was that the Soviet Union was impervious to the logic of reason but highly susceptible to the logic of force. Does that statement still apply to Russia as it did to the Soviet Union?

Paul Goble:

Well, I think that the Putin regime is also impervious to reason. What the Soviet Union or what the Putin regime believes however is that force only exists if someone is prepared to use it. The United States has enormous capacities to use force, but it usually chooses not to use them. We are, of course, entirely reasonably and justifiably concerned that any direct use of force against the Russians might lead to a nuclear exchange where we would be victimized too. What Kennan was driving at is that force used with some cleverness can constrain what Russia.

Do I think that is probably still true and hence that is why I argued for revival of our alliance system and its expansion eastward? I would love to see the day when Georgia and Ukraine and Azerbaijan are part of NATO. I think they should be they should have been already, but I would like to see that happen, that is to send it, put a marker down that there is a force that Russia had better not cross. The Russian military simply is not capable of standing up to a NATO country.

One of the reasons that the war in the southern Caucasus ended the way it did is that Russia realized that its weapons were not as good as the ones Azerbaijan had gotten from Israel and Turkey, and its military was not as well trained, and therefore it did not want to risk getting into a confrontation with Turkey where the weapons are better and the training is better too. So force does work but you have to use it, so you have to be able, you have to be ready, willing, and able to deploy it in ways that do not lead to nuclear war but that do send a message. Is Russia impervious to getting those messages? I think not, but it requires cleverness and sophistication that regrettably we do not always display.

Robert R. Reilly:

Paul, whereas it was fairly easy if you were willing to undertake the effort to understand the the motivations of the Soviet Union by knowing something about Russian history but most particularly Marxist-Leninist ideology, what you have been describing as Russia’s motivation or more exactly Putin’s is simply – I mean aside from greed – grievance that Russia or the Russian state is driven by a sense of grievance, so it is animated by revenge?

Paul Goble:

That is right. I spoke about that. It is a revolution-state. That is a little harder for people. There is not a communist manifesto to show them in which they can get some idea of. Yeah, they can read Mein Kampf. Hitler pursued exactly the same strategy of relativism to come to power in Germany, that Germany had been stabbed in the back according to him at the end of World War One. It had not lost the war, groups inside had undercut German power and that he, Adolf Hitler, was going to restore it and take revenge on all those who had done those terrible things to Germany, inside and on Germany’s enemies, France, Britain, and more generally.

Revolutionism is tragically a common feature of countries that have lost some major geopolitical competition. That is why we made such a terrible mistake in my mind in the 1990s by looking away and not asking ourselves how can we provide both assistance and structuring to make the transition? We did not do that. We were unwilling to make the kind of investment in the transition. We proclaimed victory and we looked away. That was a mistake and we are now living with the result of that. Had for example there have been some adjustment into the draconian arrangements of Versailles, I think very few people in the world would have ever heard of Adolf Hitler. If reparations had not been imposed to the degree that they were, that was a big mistake.

Unfortunately, in 1991 or years thereafter there were very few people in the United States and the West more generally who said, what can we do to make sure that ordinary Russians see that the new system benefits them in very concrete ways? We did not do that. Instead we proclaim that Russia was already a democracy, which it was not. We did not provide very much assistance because we were looking for quote “a peace dividend” constantly and so Russians were hurting. I mean it does not surprise me at all that people would want revenge. The important thing to remember however is that they want revenge for the fact that they lost power. They do not want to go back to exactly what what existed when they had more power. Those are two very different things.

Robert R. Reilly:

Yeah, my only point Paul is that of course that sense of grievance existed in in Weimar Germany. It was shared widely, but what Hitler had was a Nazi ideology based on a race theory of history versus as it was. It too had its adherence and generated a kind of fanaticism. There were many Germans who felt the grievance and the loss but who were entirely against Hitler’s program. That is all. I mean I know that is true in Russia, however the seems to be a harder problem. You could read Mein Kampf and if you took it seriously, know what was going to happen. What would you read about Russia today that would give you a similar grasp on its motivations?

Paul Goble:

Well, I think I would start with something I mentioned, which is Putin’s speech in Munich in 2008. That is probably the Rosetta Stone as far as understanding Vladimir Putin’s conception of the world. and of Russia’s place in it, and of his desire to inflict damage on others so that Russia will benefit. If you find yourself having lost, there are at least two possible strategies you might adopt. One is to work very, very hard to develop your country so that it would be a great success. There were many people who thought that Russia with all of its economic possibilities – I mean it is the only country on earth that has all known minerals in commercially exploitable amount – that country ought to be doing very well. It has not. If that you would had had a Russian government in 1992 that said we have to change ourselves because the Soviet system did not work, but we can build a country where we have a vibrant economy, where people are making good incomes, where they have hope for the future, where their children will live better than they do, that is one way to proceed. Okay?

When you are up against countries that are already way ahead of you economically and politically, the other way to proceed, and unfortunately this is what Vladimir Putin has chosen, is to try to bring the other people down. In other words to weaken. I would argue that there is not a single Putin doctrine, there is not a single Putin vision that is attractive to almost anybody helps to explain why he does what he does, which is to try to undermine and destroy successful countries. And I think he has had more success with that than he deserves.

Robert R. Reilly:

Well, you pointed to the need for education and understanding the nature of the threat that Putin presents and how important it is for the United States to rebuild alliances. Let us take for instance NATO. Today, as you know, Germany is not shy about saying that it will not meet its minimum commitment to building its military forces in terms of the two percent of its budget that would be required of its GDP that would be required to do that. Now, at the same time Angela Merkel is full steam ahead so to speak on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will make Germany even more dependent on Soviet gas supplies. Do you point to that?

Paul Goble:

It is just a clever strategy by Putin to exploit weaknesses in that alliance. He certainly would love to play that to weaken the alliance. I would make just three points of many that could be made, but three on that. The first is we should remember that NATO was not was an American institution. We paid vastly higher percentage than our share throughout its history and we did so for a reason, because we were beneficiaries of building up a defense in depth in Europe rather than having to fight them in New Jersey.

Now, that does not mean that we should not be working to promote that now that the Europeans are doing better economically, that they should not be paying their fair share, but a hardline two percent figure I do not think is the best way to get there. I think we should be urging an equitable payment of that, but I think that the announcement of the two percent goal as such ignored the history of the alliance and our own interests to be honest. The United States benefits more than anyone else from the existence of NATO and it is not wrong that we have been paying more of it. It is wrong that we should always be paying more of it given the changing economies.

The second point I would make is Vladimir Putin has made a bet, which to be blunt is not a very good bet. He is betting that for the next fifty years or one hundred years hydrocarbons are still going to be the driving force of the economic system in the world. My guess is that one thing the pandemic has certainly shown is that the West’s reliance on oil and gas is going to be less ten years from now than it is today. The ability of Putin to play Western Europe against the United States with oil and gas is going to be a whole lot less than Vladimir Putin imagines because oil and gas are going to be much less important and they are going to be much less important to the Europeans than they are going to be to the Russians or the Americans.

The third point is this: I am not confident that the Russian gas export program is going to be as successful for as long in terms of its ability to deliver. One of the things that people forget is that almost all of Russian gas, and oil too but gas in the first instance, passes through permafrost zones in the Russian Federation. The permafrost in Russia is melting very, very rapidly. One of the consequences of that is pipelines are cracking because the Russians did not build them properly. They did not build them the way the Trans-Alaska Pipeline (TAPS) is. Each of the supports for the pipeline have a freezer element in it to keep the ground frozen so it does not shift. That is an extraordinarily expensive thing to do, but it is the only thing you can do if you want to move lots of gas and oil across a melting permafrost area. The Russians have not done that.

I think we are going to see disruptions of Russian gas and oil deliveries to the West that are going to make it a lot less attractive. Do I think that Vladimir Putin is trying to play this game? Yes, but I think that if we often make the mistake of ignoring what Putin is doing, we often sometimes make the mistake of assuming he is in better charge of the situation than other factors are going to are going to be make possible.

Robert R. Reilly:

If I could close with – just we only have two minutes left, but what about disruptions inside Russia? Of course, Navalny is back in jail, but there were some significant demonstrations in cities across the entire breadth and length of Russia. What about Putin’s vulnerabilities, domestically in that respect?

Paul Goble:

My own guess is that Mr. Putin is going to find himself less and less in control of the situation. That does not mean I expect to see him getting on an airplane and flying to Switzerland or someplace as you know, an exile, or to be killed by a crowd running over the Kremlin wall. I do not think that is likely. I think that he has enough coercive resources still to prevent that from happening.

On the other hand we have seen actions again and again that show how insecure he really is. It was not just the Navalny demonstrations which brought out 300,000 people in 150 cities and led to 12,000 arrests, the largest mass arrest in Russia since the death of Stalin. It is the fact that there are demonstrations going on in the North Caucasus, in Ingushetia, in Kalmykia, in Tatarstan, and in Bashkortistan in the middle Volga, and not unimportantly in Vladivostok in Siberia, where the dismissal of a popular governor has caused people to be in the streets every day for more than two hundred days at this point, so we are not talking about a man who has got absolute support.

But something happened last week, which I think should should have been on page one of American newspapers because it will tell you just how frightened Putin is of losing the support of the police. Last week the Kremlin proposed that children of policemen be advanced to the head of a line for admission to Russian universities. If you want to keep the police on your side and they are your last line of defense and you really cannot pay them more money because you do not have more money to pay them, giving them a benefit like that tells you that you felt you had to, and when you feel you have to make a benefit, a payment like that, you are you are announcing to the world that you are not nearly as strong as your supporters in Russia and the West would have us believe.

Robert R. Reilly:

Paul, thank you very much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us for another in our series of lectures at the Westminster Institute. Please go to our website and you will see other lectures on a variety of subjects that we have provided that are accessible there. Thank you for joining us and see you soon again.

Challenges Facing Christian Communities in Turkey Today
(Dr. Hratch Tchilingirian, November 21, 2020)

The views of the speaker are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Westminster Institute.

About the speaker

Dr. Hratch Tchilingirian is a sociologist (with a particular reference to sociology of religion) and Associate Faculty Member of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. He has published extensively and lectures on minorities in contemporary Middle East; inter-ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus, the Armenian Church, Diaspora, and Turkish-Armenian relations. From 2002 to 2012 he taught and held various positions at University of Cambridge, and was co-founder of the Eurasia Research Centre at Judge Business School.

Dr. Tchilingirian is the author of numerous studies, articles and publications and has lectured internationally in leading universities, academic institutions and international NGOs (see www.hratch.info). His television, radio and newspaper interviews have appeared in international media outlets, including the New York Times, Financial Times, BBC News, Al-Jazeera and Radio Vaticana.

A transcript is unavailable for this talk. Dr. Tchilingirian’s remarks will be a chapter of Handbook of Christianity in the Middle East (eds. Mitri Raheb and Mark A. Lamport). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021.

Selected works

The Armenian-Azerbaijani Crisis
(Svante E. Cornell, October 30, 2020)

Transcript available below

About the speaker

Svante E. Cornell is Director of the American Foreign Policy Council’s Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, and a co-founder of the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm. His main areas of expertise are security issues, state-building, and transnational crime in Southwest and Central Asia, with a specific focus on the Caucasus and Turkey. He is the Editor of the Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, the Joint Center’s bi-weekly publication, and of the Joint Center’s Silk Road Papers series of occasional papers.

Dr. Cornell is the author of four books, including Small Nations and Great Powers, the first comprehensive study of the post-Soviet conflicts in the Caucasus. His articles have appeared in numerous leading academic and journals such as World Politics, the Washington Quarterly, Current History, Journal of Democracy, Europe-Asia Studies, etc. His commentaries and op-eds appear occasionally in the U.S., European, and regional press.

Cornell is Associate Professor (Docent) in Government at Uppsala University and Associate Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Dr. Cornell holds a Ph.D. in Peace and Conflict Studies from Uppsala University, a B.Sc. with High Honor in International Relations from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and an honorary doctoral degree from the Behmenyar Institute of Law and Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan. He is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Military Science.

^{Listen to the podcast of Dr. Svante Cornell’s Westminster lecture on Apple iTunes.}

The views of the speaker are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Westminster Institute.

Transcript

Robert R. Reilly:

Introduction

Hello, I am Bob Reilly, the director of the Westminster Institute. Thank you for joining us for another one of our Zoom lectures during this curious time to which we are all living. We are particularly pleased to have a scholar speaking to us from Sweden today on the subject of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. He is Dr. Svante Cornell, who joined the American Foreign Policy Council as Senior Fellow for Eurasia in January 2017. He also serves as director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies program and he is a co-founder of the Institute for Security and Development Policy Stockholm. His main areas of expertise are security issues, state building, and transnational crime in Southwest and Central Asia with a specific focus on the Caucasus and Turkey.

He is the editor of the Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, the Joint Center’s bi-weekly publication and of the Joint Center’s Silk Road Papers, a series of occasional papers. Dr. Cornell is the author of four books, including Small Nations and Great Powers, the first comprehensive study of the post-Soviet conflicts in the Caucasus and Azerbaijan since independence.

Dr. Cornell is an associate research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He was educated at the Middle East Technical University. He received his Ph.D. in Peace and Conflict Studies from Uppsala University. He is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Military Science and a Research Associate with the W. Martens Center for European Studies in Brussels. Formerly, Dr. Cornell served as Associate Professor of Government at Uppsala University, so I thank you so much, Dr. Cornell, for joining us to discuss this very difficult subject of what seems to be an intractable conflict. Thank you.

Dr. Svante E. Cornell:

Overview

Well, thank you very much for having me. It is a pleasure. This is an issue that I have worked on for over twenty years and I will begin by saying that the fact that this conflict is now again in a phase of very hot military confrontation is really not very surprising. It is something that I wish to say I was the lone person predicting, unfortunately there were many more who predicted that this was a conflict that would eventually rekindle the way it has, and I think in order to understand this, I will just quickly go through a little bit of the background of this conflict and what what the issues are that are really at stake, how this conflict has evolved in the past three decades, especially focusing on what changed in the very recent past to get us to the point where we are today. We can also then, of course, talk about the implications of this current episode.

Historical Background

I guess I would start by saying that this is a conflict that really existed on several different levels and that is one of the reasons it has been very difficult to resolve. It started, of course, as a conflict that really was between the Azerbaijani Soviet government and the autonomous province of Nagorno-Karabakh, which was majority Armenian-populated and therefore also run by ethnic Armenians. Very soon it acquired a second level, which was that of a level between the two republics, Azerbaijan and Armenia, and obviously as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became an interstate war between these two republics, newly independent states, with an Armenian military in intervention inside Azerbaijan’s territory in support of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The third level of this conflict is the global or rather international geopolitical level I would like to call it because it started off very quickly with the Russian leadership in the Soviet era, manipulating this conflict to its own advantages, which meant in the beginning, during the Soviet era, supporting the Azerbaijani side because they were status quo-oriented, but then as soon as independence hit, Armenia flipped and became pro-Russian whereas Azerbaijan had a nationalist president and therefore the Russian side started supporting Armenia instead. And what we have seen since is that it has attracted the interest of great powers from Turkey to Iran, to western powers, Pakistan, Israel. Many powers have one way or another been involved in this conflict because of the strategic location of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Strategic Value of Nagorno-Karabakh

And particularly the strategic location of Azerbaijan, I would say, because if you look at a map, you will find that this is the only country that borders both Russia and Iran, and therefore is the key Western conduit to Central Asia as the United States found out after September 11 when the airspace of Georgia and Azerbaijan became the air corridor that connected NATO territory to the military operations in Afghanistan and the U.S bases that were located in Uzbekistan and in Kyrgyzstan. So again, it is a conflict of three levels, which means it is increasingly hard to resolve because you have the ability for external powers to, so to speak sabotage any effort at resolving the conflict that is very significant.

And obviously, as we talk of external powers, until very recently the main power that we had in mind was always Russia, which played both sides as I will get into in a minute, and with the sole purpose of maximizing the Russian influence over the south Caucasus and preventing an expansion of Western influence in this region. Now, in talking more about the background of the conflict I think one very important aspect of this conflict is the imbalance if you will between the two parties.

Why Azerbaijan Lost in the 1990s

Now, as I already mentioned, Azerbaijan is a country with a very geostrategic location. It also has large natural resources, primarily oil and gas, as well as a population that is three times larger than Armenia’s. In spite of all this, Azerbaijan lost the war in the early 1990s, which it really did because of two main reasons. One was the one I already mentioned, namely the Russian support for the Armenian side as soon as independence happened, and the second one was that the Azerbaijani side was basically in the first couple of years of independence busy bickering among each other for power in Baku, and that meant that there was a demoralized Azerbaijani military.

And the Armenians, who were very well organized with Russian support, were able basically not only to gain control over Nagorno-Karabakh, but also over seven adjoining districts surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh to the south on the Iranian border as well as to the west and east of this enclave, which was really an enclave because it was an Armenian territory separated from the rest of Armenia by Azerbaijani territory. And then when I say ‘Armenian enclave’, I mean, of course, it was an autonomous region, it had an autonomous status in the Soviet hierarchy of federalism.

What Happened After the War

Now, this imbalance is important because as the years went by from especially the late 1990s onward, I would say two things happened. The first was because of the amount of territory the Armenians had seized, they also ended up in a position where first, the Azerbaijanis could never accept this situation. Azerbaijan was for a while the country in the world with the highest percentage of internally displaced people, one in ten people in the country were internally displaced refugees, basically from this conflict zone that had been ethnically cleansed by the Armenian advancing armies.

At the same time, Azerbaijan was getting gradually richer because of the investments in oil and gas extraction in the Caspian Sea and the U.S supported construction of pipelines to carry this oil and gas to Western markets without transiting either Russian or Iranian territory, which was a (I would argue) a very major achievement of U.S. policy in this part of the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s. So this became like if you will the ‘rubber band’ that if you pull it too much, eventually it breaks, and I think that is exactly what we have seen over the past month, is that the imbalance between the countries I think it is best illustrated by the fact that for a while, when oil prices were at their highest, Azerbaijan was spending as much on defense as Armenia’s entire state budget, which meant that the imbalance between the two countries became untenable, and this is not something that Armenians, some Armenians, did not see.

How the International Community Viewed the Conflict

In fact, the first President of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, already three years after the military victory of Armenia in 1997, decided to accept a peace plan developed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which basically foresaw that Nagorno-Karabakh would have a high level of autonomy within Azerbaijan with very important security guarantees, and returned the occupied territories back to Azerbaijan. And he did so very much with the argument that, ‘Look, this is the best deal we are going to get because the year before in 1996 as well as previously, both the United Nations and the OSCE had passed resolutions that essentially made it clear that the international community had not accepted Armenia’s territorial grab.’

There was a consensus within the international community that these territories were Azerbaijani territories, that yes, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh may have some level of self-determination, but that the fact that this was an Armenian-populated territory would not amount to a right to secession, a right to create an independent state, so the Armenian leadership in the late 1990s understood this.

Unfortunately, this led to a palace coup in which the leadership of essentially people from Nagorno-Karabakh took over the state of Armenia. President Robert Kocharyan, who succeeded Ter-Petrosyan, as well as his successor, Serzh Sargsyan, who was in power until two years ago, were all from Karabakh. Their inner circle if you will was very much dominated by people who were either from Nagorno-Karabakh or had made their careers through the war in the 1990s, which meant that there was if you will the ‘Karabakh clan’ as they were called sometimes. They were in charge in Armenia and they were quite skilled statesmen.

Armenia’s Relationship with Russia

They also knew very well how to maintain their relationship with Russia, but they were not very much interested in making concessions that would lead to a peace deal. In fact, I think it is very clear that on the Armenian side there was for a very long time (and continued to be until last month basically) a sense that, ‘We can just ride this out. We can maintain control over these territories and if we cannot get international, judicial acceptance for the situation, we can at least get the world to accept that this is a reality and not do much about it.’

And I think they very much believed that the relationship Armenia has with Russia would end up being sufficient in order to deter any Azerbaijani effort to restore integrity by military means. As we know now, this was not the case. And I think that gets us to to the question, which is what changed and what really brought us to a position where we have a new war.

Weakened International Norms

And I think there are at least four or five factors that have changed, and as we all know, this is a world that is rather unsettled. The Eurasian continent particularly is rather unsettled. There are rapid changes in geopolitical alignments. There are deeper changes in the global structure of the international system as well as within the two countries, and all of these have combined. That goes back to what I mentioned earlier about a conflict that existed on several different levels.

Now, if you go from from the global to the local if you will, I think one main shift over the past several years that affected this conflict has been the weakening of the international institutions in the law and norms-based international order if you will. We see this, of course, mainly by Russia’s actions; the war in Georgia, the invasion of of Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea. We see it in Iran, of course, with the Iranian building of a sphere of influence, ranging from Lebanon to Yemen by the use of paramilitary forces, totally ignoring state boundaries and the sovereignty of the various countries be it Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and so on. We see it in Turkish actions in Syria and in Libya. We see it by the way the Chinese behave. We see it in many countries. You could say that there is an evolution of at least on the Eurasian continent of a situation where great powers do what they are able to do, not necessarily being restrained as they perhaps were ten to fifteen years ago by certain norms of behavior.

Kosovo and Crimea

Now, I think what is interesting in this that the two powers interpreted as very differently in the two countries that we are talking about. Armenia interpreted this as a positive sign that would enable them to maintain their territorial occupation of Azerbaijani territory and extended into the future, and I think they were particularly buried by two factors. The first was Kosovo and the second was Crimea.

Kosovo

Kosovo was important because Kosovo was an anomaly if you will in the sense that you had two Albanian states created in the Balkans. Traditionally, the principle of self-determination has always held that a people has a right to a state, not that a certain people may have a right to several different states, which is why a national minority was not traditionally accorded the right to self-determination reaching up to the level of independent statehood.

The international recognition of Kosovo did create in fact a certain precedent that you could not have only one, but you could have two Albanian states, and the Armenians felt that, ‘Hey, this is very good. This is a precedent for us. We can have two Armenian states in the Caucasus’, because the Armenians always very nicely played the niceties of international law by never recognizing the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenia’s Miscalculations

Now, there are Armenian parliamentary resolutions, dating back to the Soviet era, which incorporate Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia. There are Armenian soldiers in Karabakh and there are Karabakh parliamentarians in the Armenian parliament, but Armenia always said that this is not annexation. ‘This is a separate state and we just support them morally. We support them politically, but this is not annexation.’ And I think they figured that there would be a precedent for creating a second Armenian state.

I think there was a big miscalculation on the side of Armenia, and this is going to be a recurrent theme in my in my comments here, that I think they miscalculated many things, but a very important one was the implications of the weakening of international norms and institutions because what it really meant was also that Azerbaijan was held back from applying a military solution to the conflict precisely because of these international institutions and norms. And the moment they weakened, it also meant that the deterrence on Azerbaijan of applying a military solution also weakened. So that is on the global level.

On the second level, on the regional level, I think there were several mistakes made by, again, the Armenian side, and I am saying mistakes because as we can see on the ground, they are losing territory and they have lost most of the territories they conquered back in the ‘90s, and the military losses on both sides (but particularly the Armenian side) are fairly significant. And I think this relates to both the rule of Turkey and Russia.

How Armenia Misunderstood Turkey

The most obvious mistake, miscalculation, was the misunderstanding of Turkey’s position. Now, Turkey has always been pro-Azerbaijan, partly for ethnic and cultural reasons. Azerbaijani is a very closely related language. I was educated in Turkey as you mentioned, which enables me to understand Azerbaijani without even having studied the language. With a little bit of study, you can have very easy access to the language. This cultural linguistic proximity always made the Turkish public very pro-Azerbaijan. Mr. Erdoğan, the Turkish president, his government back ten years ago tried to develop a rapprochement with Armenia. The protocols as they were called would have opened the border and created diplomatic relations, which they have not had, and pro-Azerbaijani public opinion essentially killed that deal about ten years ago.

The Treaty of Sèvres

What changed is that Turkey now is much more unchained from the NATO alliance and the restrictions they might have put on Turkey by that. [Turkey] decided to very overtly take the Azerbaijani side and provide very significant military support to Azerbaijan. And I think there are elements of this that Armenia unwittingly contributed to. Anybody who is familiar with Turkish history will be familiar with the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, which ended the First World War. It was the corollary of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany. The Ottoman Empire had the Treaty of Sèvres in Paris in 1920, which would divide present-day Turkey into various sectors, including an Armenian state. And therefore, the Treaty of Sèvres has always been a red flag for Turkish nationalists. It is something that gets Turks animated if you will. If you want to start a dinner conversation and create a ruckus in Turkey, start talking about the Treaty of Sèvres.

Now, I mentioned this because this is the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Sèvres and it happened in August. And in August the Armenian leadership, both the president and the prime minister, made very important proclamations about the Treaty of Sèvres, saying that this treaty was never ratified. It was never implemented, but it remains on paper. Essentially, as the first Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s National Security Advisor, Gerard Libaridian, wrote in an article at the time, this amounts to a declaration of diplomatic war on Turkey. And I think this was a very important factor in leading Turkey to transition from a from a support to Azerbaijan to an active military support of an Azerbaijani effort to restore territorial integrity.

Misunderstanding Turkey’s Domestic Politics

And I think it to a certain point boils down to a misunderstanding of Turkish domestic politics. This is an issue I could go into in great detail, but I will not. I will just mention that in the past five years Mr. Erdoğan has been increasingly dependent on the nationalist forces within the Turkish state as well as on the nationalist party in Turkey to remain in power as his own domestic standing has weakened, and that has meant that whereas he was previously as an Islamist not particularly interested in the post-Soviet Muslims, which a real Islamist in Turkey consider the post-Soviet Muslims as rather iffy Muslims if you will. They drink vodka. They might even eat pork. You cannot really trust them. The traditional, Turkish, Islamist position has been much more interested in the Arabs of the Middle East, which they feel are real Muslims compared to those Soviet people, whereas the Turkish nationalists put much more priority on the Turkic, linguistic, ethnic element and therefore are much more pro-Azerbaijani.

So there are some of us who have been identifying for a while that Turkey has been shifting from an Islamist to a more nationalist position, but I think the Armenian side clearly did not see this coming and did not understand the implications of trying to raise issues that were very important to the Turkish nationalist forces.

The Russia Factor

Then there is a Russia factor and the Russia factor is very important because of the role Russia has played in this conflict, especially because the Armenian side has for at least twenty-eight years built their position on a very simple Faustian bargain you could say, and the bargain really has to do with the bargain between independence and control over Karabakh. And the Russians have basically put it to both Armenians and Azerbaijanis: you cannot really have both. You can have Karabakh, but then you will be under Russian tutelage and follow Russian foreign policy priorities or you can be independent and not have Karabakh.

And because the Armenians won the war it was easy for them to choose to remain, to retain control over Karabakh and compromise on the issue of their independence, which we can see, for example, through the positions they have taken on international affairs, voting with Russia in the most controversial U.N. Security Council and U.N. General Assembly resolutions, where only countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela, North Korea, maybe Belarus vote with Russia.

Armenia usually does because that has been part of their foreign policy bargain. Now, part of the reason for that is that Armenia, of course, has a very, very difficult history to say the least. And if you talk to Armenians, they view the victory in the 1990s as the first military victory in a thousand years. This is a theme that will keep coming up, which makes it very difficult for them to so to speak back down on it.

Azerbaijan, because they lost the war it was also easier in a way to conceptualize it differently and to say independence is more important. We will focus on maintaining our independence, and even though the Russians sometimes come to them and say, what if you join the Eurasian Economic Union? If you change your foreign policy, we may make sure to resolve the Karabakh conflict in a way that would be acceptable to you. These are the type of things that Russian high-level politicians come to Baku and say, and the Azerbaijanis have always said well, that sounds very nice, but why don’t we resolve the conflict first and then we might talk about all these wonderful initiatives that you are mentioning, like the Eurasian Union and so on?

What Changed: Russia and Azerbaijan

And I would say that what has changed (and this was a situation for a very long time) what really changed is I think the Russian perspective on the two countries, where it seems to me that they began to take the Armenian side for granted because of the level of economic control over Armenia, Russian ownership of the gas transmission lines in Armenia, ownership of the nuclear power plant, and so on and so forth, and the fact that Armenia is rather isolated. Russians felt increasingly that, you know what, we can broaden out and, again, coming back to the point I made earlier about looking at a map and which country is the most significant geo-strategically, it is clearly Azerbaijan. It is larger, it has resources, it is the only one that controls the east-west corridor across from the Black Sea to the Caspian, and it has been very clear that Mr. Putin has felt that he can also begin to draw Azerbaijan into Russian institutions.

Particularly because of its rather authoritarian political system, Azerbaijan has had problems in its relationship with the United States and Europe because of allegations over its human rights situation and so on. This was particularly a problem during the Obama administration and this meant that Russia actually started selling weapons to Azerbaijan as well as Armenia. This should have I think been an alarm bell started ringing in for the Armenians.

Now, the Armenians mainly got their weapons for more or less for free and the Azerbaijanis had to pay world market prices, which they did because they had oil and they they could get basically the same type of armaments the Armenians had, plus they could acquire high-level technologically sophisticated weaponry from Israel and from Turkey.

And in 2016, we had a brief episode of a flare-up of this conflict, which was the first time that Azerbaijan actually retook some of the occupied territories, and Russia really did not do much about it. Russians looked at it and said, ‘Okay, this is interesting,’ and within five days they basically sent a signal to both parties, saying, ‘Okay, it is enough, stop it,’ and the Azerbaijans obliged. There was a renewed ceasefire, but to me this also showed that, again, alarm bells should have started ringing in Armenia very loudly, that this reliance on Russia for their security, and actually not just for their security, but for their military conquest, was no longer a tenable proposition.

Russia Has Not Reacted

But instead, and this is when we go back down to the local level, the real thing that changed in this conflict – and what I mean to say by this (I forgot to mention) is that we see perhaps the most surprising element of what has happened in recent weeks is how Russia has really not reacted. Vladimir Putin has been very clear that as long as the fighting is going on on territory that is internationally-recognized as Azerbaijani territory, Russia will not intervene. Only if the [fighting] spreads into the officially-recognized territory of Armenia does Russia have a treaty obligation by the Collective Security Treaty to intervene in the conflict ,which basically means telling the Armenians, ‘You have bet on us for twenty-eight years and we are going to leave you to hang out to dry.’ And that is essentially what happened.

Russia is a Retreating Power

And my personal opinion, understanding of this is that Russia is a retreating power, and a retreating power in a territory where there are some states that remain weak states, like Armenia, like Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, that are in need of outside support. Meanwhile there are several countries that are beginning to become real states, that have influence on their own. You can call them regional middle-sized powers.

Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan fall into this category of states that have resources, that have an ability to build international opinion. Azerbaijan has done this very effectively through membership in the Non-Aligned Movement, which we all thought was dead but apparently is not, and this has meant that I think the Russians really understand that if they want to maintain influence over Azerbaijan, they cannot just use sticks, they have to use carrots as well, which means that they cannot just play the Armenian card in the Caucasus, it is not enough.

Azerbaijan’s Recent History

So that gets us to the final level of analysis if you will, which is the local level, which is the two countries, and I think this is where two major things happen. The Azerbaijani situation is that of a president that, as many of you would know, took power in an election after his father had been president. Heydar Aliyev was, of course, a Soviet Azerbaijani leader. He was then out of grace in the Gorbachev era. He came back to power after the military defeats in the early 1990s and rebuilt the modern state of Azerbaijan.

Ilham Aliyev came to power if you will close to oligarchs and a coterie of his father’s former allies, and it took him ten to fifteen years to basically come into his own, purge all of these oligarchs and take control over the country. And as he did this I think this also freed him from the restraints that these oligarchs had placed on him, and made him much more willing and able to use the military option in Karabakh.

What Changed on the Armenian Side

More importantly than that is what changed on the Armenian side. As is well known, in 2018 there was a Velvet Revolution in Armenia, which brought Mr. Pashinyan, Nikol Pashinyan, into power, who is the current leader of Armenia. And what I find interesting and cannot fully explain is a shift that Mr. Pashinyan went through when he first came to power.

It is interesting that Azerbaijan could have taken advantage of the internal turmoil in Armenia to make a military push. After all it was just two years after the 2016 ‘Four Day-War’ as it is called. The Azerbaijanis decided not to do this and thought that, ‘This is the first time that a non-Karabakhi person is taking power in Armenia in twenty years, and we should try to build a relationship,’ and I think there was initially an an appreciation of this on the Armenian side.

And then there was a summit in Dushanbe, I think of the Commonwealth of Independent States, where the two leaders met. They had a fruitful interaction. There seemed to be a road towards peace, What happened then I cannot fully explain, but I can say what happened, not why, and by 2019, the Armenian leadership went in a very assertive, even an aggressive direction rather than try to sue for peace if you will.

Armenian Missteps

The Armenian side took a number of steps that I think brought us to where we are today. And the first of these was to reject the Madrid Principles of negotiations that had been in force since 2011 if not before, to demand that the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians be represented separately from Armenia at the peace talks. And simultaneously, Mr. Pashinyan went to Karabakh and uttered his now famous words, “Karabakh is Armenia, period.” And now, on the one hand he is saying Karabakh is Armenia, on the other hand he is saying they should be separately represented ar the peace talks. Nobody really understood what he meant by all this, but what is clear is that they raised the stakes in the conflict.

Armenia’s defense minister, Mr Tonoyan, in a speech to Armenian expatriates in New York also in 2019, stated that Armenia had given up the defense, the previous strategy of which was essentially a land for peace strategy whereby Armenia would surrender the occupied territories around Karabakh in exchange for some form of agreement on what status Nagorno-Karabakh would have. He said that the new formula would be new wars for new territories.

There were many other things, like Mr. Pashinyan sending his son to volunteer as a fighter in the occupied territories. His wife, who in 2018 had started a movement called Women for Peace, suddenly this year dressed up in military fatigues, wearing Kalashnikov or carrying a Kalashnikov, and participating in military training for women. The Karabakh Armenians decided to move their parliament to the city of Shusha, which is the historically-Azerbaijani city in Nagorno-Karabakh. All these things were major provocations that led the Azeri side to understand that or to conclude that negotiations were fruitless, the Armenians were not interested in negotiations, and the only way that they could change the situation on the ground was by military force.

The U.S. Side of the Problem

The U.S. Did Not Pay Attention

And unfortunately, here is where we get to the U.S side of the problem, which is twofold. Number one that the U.S. government did not pay attention to this. And now our institute and myself we have written quite significantly about the Trump administration’s Central Asia strategy. There is a wonderful and very, very well developed new U.S. strategy for Central Asia that the National Security Council has put out. The problem is that how do you get to Central Asia? The way for the United States to have a presence in Central Asia depends on the Caucasus character. Otherwise this territory is surrounded by the likes of China, Russia, and Pakistan and Iran, which makes it not a very accessible route for the US to have influence.

The influence for the U.S. has always been from the West in from the Black Sea, from NATO territory through the Caucasus, and mysteriously there has been almost no attention to this region by this administration. When Mr. Bolton was National Security Adviser, that was an exception. He traveled to the region. He tried to develop policy, but of course, he did not stay long enough to make it happen.

The 2020 Election

And the other part of this is that I think passively if you know there is a strong Armenian lobby in the United States, but it is almost exclusively influential within the Democratic Party, and I think this had an effect on the timing of this war because I think when the flare-ups happened this summer, and we can discuss the length, but I do not think we can even conclude who started it. It does not really matter who started it, but the Azerbaijanis at some point I think drew the conclusion that either we act now or there might be an eight-year Biden administration in which the Armenian lobby will be very strong and then we will have to wait another decade, not 30 years but 40 years before we can do something about this conflict because the implications of making a military move during a Biden administration would have been stronger.

Now, this is just pure speculation on my part, but knowing how the Azerbaijanis are aware of the role of the Armenian lobby in the United States, I think this must have played a role. So all taken together I think in my final analysis I have said for a long time that this conflict resembles the Israeli-Arab conflict or the Indian-Pakistani conflict in the sense of a conflict that just does not get resolved. It goes on for decade after decade. There are periods of cold peace. There are periods of hot war. They get interspersed. You have smaller episodes. What happened in 2016 I compared with the Kargil operation on the Indian-Pakistani border in Kashmir in 1998, a smaller military operation. Then you have major wars, like the 1965 war in India-Pakistan, the 1971 war, or in the case of Israel and the Arabs, 1967 or ‘73.

Conclusion

So I think what we have right now is a major war. This is comparable to the 1967 or ‘73 wars for Israel and the Arabs. and I think the real question now is will this episode of warfare lead to a final solution of the conflict or will we just have a refreeze that will lead to it again being rekindled at some point in the future, and that is obviously dependent on the way the U.S. and the European Union react. And I think at this point the odds that there will be a strong effort to bring about a lasting peace I would say is relatively remote given the fact that it is still a relatively contained conflict.

If you do not do anything about it, it might not be a disaster. We have enough to deal with at home with our polarization and election in the United States, the pandemic in europe, and so forth, so I would I would submit that it is very likely that we are going to see a refreeze at some point with a major advance on the part of Azerbaijan, but it will not finally resolve the conflict. I think I should probably stop here. I think I probably talked for too long, but I will be glad to entertain any questions you might have.

Q&A

How Armenians View Azerbaijani Objectives

Robert R. Reilly:

No, not at all, Dr. Cornell, thank you very much. That background was very illuminating. You closed by saying that this might lead to a final solution, which is a rather chilling phrase that the Armenian Karabakh side would interpret as their elimination. I know you did not mean that, I am just thinking of how the Armenians in either Armenia or Karabakh understand the Azerbaijani objectives. How do they understand those objectives and might it include the very dangers about which the Armenians would worry with the terrible history of a genocide that has affected them, particularly if I might just add, recent statements, saying that Turkey and Azerbaijan are two states but one nation?

Svante E. Cornell:

Right, well, that statement, by the way, has an interesting history. It goes back to 1995, but you are absolutely right and I think interestingly, about five days before this conflict re-erupted (obviously, there had been skirmishes back in July) we had we organized a virtual round-table like we are talking now, but a round table where we had an Armenian and Azerbaijani speakers. We endeavored to try to find sensible people on both sides, which we did and I think the major takeaway was how the rhetoric on the two sides was being misunderstood by the other side, which is, of course, a classic issue in this type of conflict.

The Legacy of the Armenian Genocide

But to your to your point I think this entire conflict cannot be dissociated from the tragic history of the Armenian nation and, in fact, of course, of the genocide back over 100 years ago, which if you think about it for the Armenians, it is in a way understandable that they view the conflict with Azerbaijan in lenses colored by the experience of genocide, but at the same time the fact is that the genocide had nothing to do with the Caucasus. It all happened in present-day Turkey, and for Azerbaijan the answer is wait a minute, we were not involved in that. Why am I being punished and my people ethnically cleansed because you had a problem somewhere else? So there is a cognitive dissonance if you will by the way the Azerbaijanis perceive history and the way the Armenians perceive history.

But to your question about how the Armenians perceive history, I think you are absolutely correct. The Armenians are now painting this first of all in a civilizational light, and they are also talking about it in directly referring to the history of genocide. Now, the civilizational issue I very much think to some extent they believe it, to some extent this is a diplomatic ploy because they know it is one of the arguments that works in the West, but I think it is very clear that this conflict has very little if anything to do with with with religion. I wrote an article I think back in 1998 or something like that about religion and and the conflicts in the Caucasus, where I basically argued that this is the big, you could call it a refutation or you could call it the exception, to the Huntingtonian thesis of a clash of civilizations.

Geopolitical Alignments

If you look at how different powers align, you find, for example, that Iran has always supported Armenia. This is a country that is supposed to support Muslims abroad, and this is even written in its constitution, but because there are more Azerbaijanis living in Iran than in the republic of Azerbaijan, the Iranians have always wanted to keep down Azerbaijan and have therefore supported Armenia. Israel has supported Azerbaijan on the other hand because it is a secular, Shia-majority state right on the Iranian doorstep, and also for the Israelis it is an access point to Central Asia, and it has been an important role.

All these former Soviet Muslim countries have been important in the Israeli ambition to establish functioning relations with non-Arab states, which has always been an important part of Israeli foreign policy and the fact that there is this trio of countries that always supported Azerbaijan from day one, which are Turkey, Pakistan, and Israel. This is a very unlikely combination of countries that for their own reasons have done this, so whereas obviously, on the Armenian side you have the Syrian government, Bashar al-Assad, who has been one of Armenia’s strongest supporters throughout the past thirty years, so you cannot really read this conflict in a civilizational way.

Armenians’ Broad Settlement Patterns

Now, that might be the opinion of an outside observer, it might even be true, but from the Armenian position, I can sit here and analyze this as I have done, as essentially an Armenian overreach over the past twenty years over alliance and Russia misunderstanding of their counterparts, misunderstanding of the geopolitics and so forth, but from the Armenian position, very much they are seeing this as them being wiped out again in a historical land that they feel they are entitled to.

And we can go back and look at the size of Armenia, and the traditional size of the Armenian settlements does not add up. And I think the sad history of the past hundred years is that the way settlement patterns were in this part of the world was extremely poorly developed in order to create functioning nation states it is like a micro Bosnia, where Serbs and Croats and Bosnians were living all over the place, and you could not really develop three different states very easily without ethnic cleansing.

Similarly, if you look at eastern Anatolia all the way over to to the Caspian Sea, you see this broad settlement patterns where Armenians and Azerbaijanis are intermixed, and where if you look at the year 1900, probably the largest concentrations of Armenians were in places like Tbilisi and Baku. Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, had an Armenian majority in 1800, actually not in 1900, but still it shows how the Armenian nation was one of the more unlucky ones to live in a world where suddenly the world was divided into coherent geographic nation states because that is not the way Armenians lived. They lived spread out over a large territory, but for them this is very real and I take your point that from the Armenian perspective this is viewed in existential terms.

Robert R. Reilly:

If I just might interact with with one note or at least historical claim because you mentioned a large Armenian population in Baku in the early part of the 20th century, there are allegations that 20,000 of them were massacred in 1918.

Dr. Svante E. Cornell:

There were massacres on both sides, actually. I do not know about the numbers. I would have to go back and look, but essentially there at every point of weakening of Russian power in the twentieth century, there has been an upsurge in Armenian-Azerbaijani violence; 1905, 1918, 1989, all three, and in 1918 there was first an attempt by the so-called Baku Commune, which was the sequel to the Paris Commune in which the Bolsheviks with a very strong Armenian ethnic presence basically ethnically cleansed part of Baku, and set up this idealist, communist government. Then the Ottoman forces moved in a couple of months later and that led to a revenge ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Baku, so those things went both ways, absolutely.

What really changed I think happened in the 1950s. Actually, just like Istanbul was not traditionally a very Turkish city, it had Greeks, it had Armenians, it had Kurds, it had Turks. It was not a homogeneous Turkish city. [In the] same way Baku, if you go back in history, was was not very much an Azerbaijani city. It was a Russian colonial city in many ways with large Russian and Armenian and also immigrant Iranian populations that fed the oil boom of the 1870s. And it was really only in the middle of the twentieth century that ,just as happened in Turkey also in Azerbaijan, there was this migration from the rural areas outside in the provinces into the capital and that really turned Baku into a very heavily Azerbaijani city.

Now, it is interesting, I have met some Baku Armenians, and Baku Armenians largely were forced to flee back in 1989. And they fled to Russia rather than to Armenia, predominantly, some to the United States just as Azerbaijanis were forced to flee their settlements in mainly southern and eastern Armenia back also at the same period, so there was this mutual expulsion of peoples very much like the Greeks and the Turks back in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Among the Baku Armenians there is this unstated or understated anger at the Karabakh Armenians because if you imagine that there had not been a conflict, who would have been the people who would have benefited most from the oil boom in Baku? And whatever we said in the past twenty years, it would likely have been the most educated, the Armenians, who were the most educated. They held the professional positions. They spoke languages and so on. They did not get to experience that, unfortunately, and they were removed, and they now live elsewhere, but so this is a tragic history, of course, in so many ways.

How Far Will Azerbaijan Go?

Robert R. Reilly:

As we know there have been three ceasefires arranged, two by Vladimir Putin and one brokered by the United States, all of them broken within hours of of their supposedly going into effect. You mentioned that this looks like an intractable conflict. Now it seems though that Azerbaijan has the military wherewithal through its expenditure of large amounts of its oil and gas revenue on updating its military, the supply of state-of-the-art drones from Turkey and Israel that they may go go for broke because there is nothing inhibiting them other than Russia, which is saying if you go into Armenia, that might present a problem for us.

There are allegations that a a good number of Turkish troops that were in Azerbaijan for summer training did not leave, including drone operators. One observes the highly sophisticated coordination between military, intelligence, drones, artillery fire, etc. on the Azeri side against the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, which has led to the substantial losses. You have mentioned that the Turkish military presence, according to your sources. Do you also see that at the present moment?

Dr. Svante E. Cornell:

There are really no inhibiting factors other than the Armenian military forces in Karabakh keeping the Azeris from rolling this thing up. Very good questions. I think on the first one the Turkish-Azerbaijani military relationship has always been extremely opaque. You can see signs of it everywhere. You can look, for example, at where senior Azerbaijani officials have trained and so forth. Beyond that it is really a black box. I think it is safe to assume that there is a strong Turkish advisory element in this. How far it goes, if it goes to the extent of operating drones or just having trained the people who operate drones, I do not know, but I think what is clear is that the Turkish Vice President just last week made a statement that, ‘Well, we have not received any request from Azerbaijan for having our forces step in, but if that request came, we would be glad just to to do so,’ and that is completely different from what we have had in the past.

F-16s

You allude to the F-16s. What I mentioned earlier about the Armenian enthusiasm for the commemoration of the Sèvres Treaty in August or in July led to a Turkish send off of planes and troops for military exercises in Azerbaijan. I think President Aliyev, I just watched him talk about this in a France TV interview just last week where he very clearly mentioned that, ‘Yes, we have these troops, these F-16s here in Ganja, and they are on the ground. They are not in the air,’ but I think it is a form of insurance policy that Azerbaijan has acquired, which is directed, of course, both at Armenia and against Russia in many ways.

Russian Surprise

And I think the Russians have to a certain extent been taken by surprise here. I do not think they foresaw this level of Turkish intervention, and I think nobody really has so far, but we saw it in Libya earlier this year, how the Turkish drones are apparently in terms of technology sophisticated to such an extent that they can they can hit the Russian air defense systems in a way that we did not expect. I am sure there are military analysts who expected this, but we have seen this now in several places, so that is part of the answer regarding whether there is anything that inhibits Azerbaijan.

I think there still is and I think there still are many things and you can even hear it today in the Azerbaijani rhetoric of President Aliyev. Obviously, in the first couple of weeks of the conflict he was talking a lot, he was venting a lot. I think his very real frustration for having been hemmed in for the past twenty-five years and now finally being able to restore territorial integrity, and here is where you get to the question even in the Azerbaijani mind of what the difference is between the occupied territories on one hand and Nagorno-Karabakh on the other. And the Azerbaijani official position has always been that they are willing to give the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh a high level of autonomy.

What Inhibits Azerbaijan

Now, your question if I understand you correctly raises the question, well, why shouldn’t they just go for broke and just take the whole territory and let the Armenians that live there go wherever they want? And I think there are several factors that inhibit this, and I could be wrong, but I think that speak against this. And that is number one that we know that there is an official Russian red line on territory, on going into Armenian territory. There may be a Russian red line that has to do with Nagorno-Karabakh itself.

Russia’s Abkhazia Model

And we have seen in the past how Russia has really also wanted to play Nagorno-Karabakh both against Armenia and Azerbaijan. Just last year a gentleman by the name of Modest Kolerov, who is head of the Regnum News Agency and a former advisor to Vladimir Putin, went down to Karabakh and offered to the Karabakh, he said, ‘You know you have a right to a dignified state existence,’ [that] is the term he used. ‘You should not really be with either Azerbaijan or with Armenia, but you could have a dignified state existence under Russian control,’ basically the Abkhazia model if you will.

And I think that was a very shrewd play by the Russians at a time when, of course, the Karabakh leadership is very much supporting the former Armenian leadership of Mr. Kocharyan and Mr. Sarkissian and not at all in very good terms with Mr. Pashinyan because after all the Karabakhs were controlling Armenia until two years ago and now they are not. And I think the Russians have played this so I think the Russians looking forward are still looking to play. I mean they might ditch Armenia, to put it very bluntly, but that does not mean they will ditch Karabakh. They might actually see this as an opportunity to strengthen Russian influence over Karabakh itself as this little enclave in the middle of the Caucasus through which they can influence both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

International Respectability

So that is one factor. The other factor, frankly, is international respectability, and this is something that the Azerbaijanis still care about. A total ethnic cleansing of the Armenians of Karabakh I think would be very bad. It would look very bad and I know that there are definitely people in Azerbaijan who would love to do it, do not get me wrong, because there is this feeling of revenge, that the Armenians did this to us thirty years ago, now it is time for us to do it. At the very top level of the leadership I still think that there are inhibitions against this. Azerbaijan has always wanted to be an accepted and, well, an appreciated member of the international community. I do not think that global geopolitics have deteriorated to such an extent that they do not care about this anymore.

Nakhchivan

And here we come to the third very real factor, which is if you look very closely at a map, you will see that Azerbaijan is divided in two. There is a little part of territory which is called Nakhchivan, which is locked in between Armenia and Iran with this five-mile border with Turkey. A part of all peace negotiations in this conflict has been that with whatever status Azerbaijan is willing to grant to Nagorno-Karabakh, they want the same type of access to Nakhchivan and that access would be over Armenian territory. Actually, Karabakh is separated from Armenia on the maps and the territory between them by the Lachin corridor, which by the way, apparently, the Azerbaijanis are threatening at this very moment. Whatever status Karabakh gets, Armenia would depend on transit through that territory in order to have its linkage between Armenia and Karabakh.

The Azerbaijanis if they just take over Karabakh, they would lose their their chance at the linkage through Armenia in some form or another, which matters very much to them, especially because the ruling elite itself is from Nakhchivan, so I think there are several factors here that mean that there are inhibiting factors on the Azerbaijani government. This could play out in very many ways. but if you were an American mediator, there is definitely a lot you could work with in order to arrive at some form of a solution.

Azerbaijan’s Legal Arguments

And I think to me for many many years the tragic irony of this has been that the solution to this conflict is very much on the table. It has been negotiated. It has been discussed year after year after year and it really has to do with some form of interim status for Nagorno-Karabakh, but at some point it has to start with the return of the occupied territories. I mean I think the biggest earlier mistake of the Armenian side, which is understandable from a purely military strategic point of view, was that when Azerbaijan was weak in 1993, they went in and took over all these territories and it is like biting off more than you could chew. They never this changed the whole international perspective on Armenia from being the victim to being the perpetrator in this conflict, and they have never even ever been able to recover from it.

And I think the Armenians in many ways have argued or have convinced themselves that they have a right to do this because they have a right to guarantee the security of the Armenians of Karabakh, but here we are and the Azerbaijanis can point to chapter and verse here every country you have signed this you have signed these documents that said that these are Azerbaijani territories.

And what the Azerbaijani argument is right now is there are four UN Security Council resolutions that say that Armenian troops have to vacate these territories immediately and unconditionally. We are just fulfilling the terms of the UN Security Council because nobody has been able to do it for us and then you see that, well, Europeans and Americans are grumbling and are thinking, well, this is not very nice, but at the end of the day nobody is willing to do anything because, again, for thirty years the Azerbaijanis were collecting all these documents that guaranteed their rights to this territory.

And I think that is where the Armenians made a mistake. I think this episode has made it clear if it was not before that more than anything it is in Armenia’s interest to sue for peace and to get a a serious peace deal that salvages some type of status for Nagorno-Karabakh in exchange for the return of these occupied territories. The big problem is security guarantees. The Armenians for twenty-eight years trusted the Russians. Turns out that was a bad bet. Who are you going to trust? Who are you going to trust to guarantee your security? Is it going to be the West? Is it going to be the EU or the United States?

At this point if I was in Armenia I would look around and I said there is nobody that I really would be willing to place my trust in and I think that is the problem right now. How do you achieve a deal and who guarantees that the Russians will be happy to step in and guarantee a deal? But neither the Azerbaijanis nor the Armenians trust them and I do not think anybody else is willing to step in. That is the problem.

A Major War

Robert R. Reilly:

Do you think there is potential for this conflict to get bigger? It certainly does not seem in Russia’s interest for it to grow larger other than in the ways in which you describe because it would increase its influence in say Nagorno-Karabakh, but President Erdoğan has exhibited a kind of recklessness, his behavior in Libya, his claims in the Mediterranean for expansive gas and drilling rights, his pressure on Greece, and the claim that President Macron of France made, that Turkey has sent Syrian jihadists into this conflict. First of all, it has either Syrian fighters there, mercenaries or jihadists provided by Turkey, which seems to be a big concern to President Macron and to others, and second of all, if Turkey is indeed doing these things, might its recklessness lead to that larger conflict about which people are warning?

Dr. Svante E. Cornell:

Syrian Jihadists

Well, there are two parts of your question. The question on the Syrian fighters is a very interesting one. This is one that I have tried to look into, We are going to try to do it in a more systematic way. I see the same reports that you have. I just do not make any sense of it for several reasons. The first is that Azerbaijan is a Shia-majority country. Now, if you are a Shia-majority country, bringing in a couple of hundred Syrian jihadis is not a very smart thing to do because the moment they realize that they are in a Shia country you are going to have a problem on your hands. It also goes completely against the Azerbaijani claim for twenty-five years of being this secular Muslim nation on Iran’s doorstep. It would actually also create unnecessary problems in their relations with the Iranians and it would destroy their international reputation.

Now, on the one hand I think so far what is clear is that there are Syrian jihadis who have left Syria and it appears that there are reports that they were heading towards Azerbaijan. They were sighted in Gaziantep. Now, for many of these reports the credibility of the report is questionable. There are very sophisticated information warfare aspects to this as well that I do not even begin to understand. So far as far as I can see there have been no confirmed sightings of them by either video or photographic evidence in the conflict zone. They apparently left Syria but did not get to Azerbaijan is what I can tell. I may be wrong. They may be there. The only way that I see them being there is if the Turkish role in this conflict involves some of the Turkish private military corporations like Sadat, which may have used them in a way that the Azerbaijani government may have not appreciated. but grudgingly was forced to accept.

On the other hand, I do not either see what military use they could be for the Azerbaijani side because this is a war that has mainly being fought with drones and high technology. Yes, of course, you send an infantry, but how could you use Syrian troops that do not speak the same languages as you and that you are not coordinated with? So this is truly a mystery to me. I am not saying they are not there, I just do not see them there. I do not see the logic by which they would be there.

And now do not get me wrong, I think for Erdoğan it makes perfect sense. He has done it in Libya. He has this expendable column of forces that he feels he can use wherever he likes. I think he would be glad to use them in Azerbaijan. I could actually foresee a scenario in which the Turks started moving these troops out of Syria and the Azerbaijanis suddenly said, ‘Stop, we do not want them,’ which means that they might be somewhere else right now. I do not know. It just does not make any sense to me. I hope that eventually we will understand what this was all about.

A Regional Conflagration

Now, the other part of your question was whether this could get out of hand in a bigger, regional conflagration. Yes, of course, this is a conflict that in many ways resembles the situation that led to the First World War with somebody getting shot in Sarajevo, and then one power gets involved, the other power gets involved, and at this point you could already go back to what happened in 2015 when Turkey shot down a Russian fighter over the Syrian-Turkish border. It led to a very sharp deterioration of Russian-Turkish relations.

This could easily happen again. A Turkish drone could target something in Armenia that includes Russian soldiers because there are joint Russian military units with Armenia. You could see the fighting down on the Iranian border spilling into Iranian territory, getting the Iranians to move in, which could get both the Russians and Turks involved. At this point it seems to me that this would be unlikely, but again, I think there are many ways in which this could happen.

Turkish-Russian Confrontation

Now, the broader question I think going on here if you move a little west also is that there is a broader and much more serious Turkish-Russian confrontation happening, that started in Syria, that expanded in Libya, that is now developing in Nagorno-Karabakh, but especially I think right now surrounding Ukraine because of the way Erdoğan has moved and not only expressed great the greatest level of support for Ukraine, but also talked about supplying Ukraine with drones and even manufacturing Turkish drones in Ukraine.

I think there are suppliers of naval ships from Turkey to Ukraine as well, which totally shifts the balance of forces in the Black Sea. This was completely unforeseen and it puts American planners in a very difficult situation because on the one hand, as you alluded to you have Erdoğan behaving in completely unconstructive ways in the eastern Mediterranean, in the Middle East, his anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic policies, frankly, on one hand, and then on the other hand, totally uncoordinated with the West, you have Erdoğan and Turkey, stepping up as the main supporters of Ukraine against Russia in the region, which really is completely congruent with Western interests. And how do you deal with this country? I think this is a very big problem for any administration that we will see emerging on Tuesday. If we do, hopefully we do well.

How Will Israel Respond?

Robert R. Reilly:

Dr. Cornell, speaking of drones, Canada has announced that it is going to embargo its drone technology to Turkey because of Turkish drones being used in this conflict. As you said, Israel is a military supplier to Azerbaijan. Very sophisticated drones are being used there as well as cluster munitions. Do you think Israel will have any second thoughts? I mean Israel in reaction to this has said that its military supplies to Azerbaijan were purely defensive. What do you think Israel is going to do as a response to this?

Dr. Svante E. Cornell:

So that depends on your definition of defensive. In many ways Azerbaijan is fighting on Azerbaijani territory and I think you could easily get away with calling that defensive. No, I think on the Israeli side the Israelis have been very pragmatic. They have understood from the beginning that if they are selling drones to the Azerbaijanis, these drones are going to be used one day. I do not think that there is any surprise on the Israeli side about this.

I think the Israelis have taken their position. They took a position on this conflict over 25 years ago and that is unlikely to change now. I will say that there is and there has always been in Israel a faction that sees more of a commonality because of historical experiences with the Armenian side, but overall Israel has a real political perspective to this.

Azerbaijan is a Link to the Muslim World

They view Azerbaijan as one of their most important allies in the Muslim world. I would say we are all making a lot out of Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain having diplomatic relations now with Israel. Azerbaijan has had it for from the beginning. I think one of the biggest Israelis embassies in any Muslim country is in Baku. The intelligence sharing that they are having on issues with regard to Iran is probably much more significant than than we can imagine. This is a relationship that is very deep and very strategic for the Israeli side.

Yes, there will be people in Israel who will raise questions about this, but overall I think we can see also during this conflict if you look at the statements of the Israeli ambassador in Baku, if you look at the role played by Israelis in sending emergency supplies and help to Azerbaijan, in terms of getting support for people who are in the civilian areas in Azerbaijan that have been bombed by the Armenian side, this has strengthened and not weakened the relationship between Israel and Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan is a Link to Turkey

I would say furthermore that for the Israeli side, President Aliyev is a very useful and very important vehicle for them to try to manage and possibly restore their relationship with Turkey at some point in the future. In many ways the Israeli-Azerbaijani relationship was born out of the trilateral Turkish, Israeli, and then Azerbaijani relationship of the late 1990s when Turkey and Israel were the best of friends. And I think there are many people in the United States, particularly in the pro-Israeli forces which I work with very frequently, that view Turkey as basically being lost.

And I think the difference is that in Israel they have not drawn that conclusion. They are still holding out hope that there is a way to restore some form of relationship with Turkey either because there are other forces than Erdoğan in Turkey or either just holding out for the post-Erdoğan period in Turkey, and for any kind of effort to reach out to Turkey because it is such an important country, such a key country in the region.

I think that is also something that makes Azerbaijan so important to Turkey, because of the influence Azerbaijan has in Turkey, so I think for all of these reasons there will be grumblings, there will be people who question the strategy that has been put in place, but overall I really do not see the absence of major shifts in developments on the ground, I do not see any serious change in the Israeli position.

Cluster Munitions

I think at least if as is claimed, it is their cluster munitions that are being used on civilian areas in Nagorno-Karabakh, that is going to, well, that at least is a public relations problem for them. I think that is true and I think that is we have seen that on both sides, cluster munitions.

That for me is reminiscent of the war in Georgia in 2008, which I covered very closely, where we had exactly the same purportedly Israeli-supported cluster munitions used by the Georgians. The Russians also used them, and we are seeing in this conflict both the Armenian and Azerbaijani side allegedly using these munitions, so I think you are right, this is going to be a public relations issue.

But again, this is a world in which we are living that has gotten harsher. And I think the Israeli leadership is very much an extremely pragmatic one that sees the world in very existential and very difficult terms and that now feels that they are building a significant group of allies of Israel in the Muslim world that include a bunch of Arab states, very influential ones as well as non-Arab states, where Azerbaijan plays a key role. And at the end of the day, it seems to me that that is going to carry the day in Israel. I could be wrong, but I really think that that is likely to be the case.

What about the United States?

Robert R. Reilly:

Well, if we can close with this question, what about the United States? Where does it leave the United States and its relationship with Azerbaijan, particularly the military? Well, no, partnership is too strong in term, but there are military aid training programs and so forth, so if history is any guide, there has always been this dichotomy in the U.S. government where Congress has always been pro-Armenian and the executive has always been leaning in the Azerbaijani direction, and that has been irrespective. I mean the gap has been shorter or smaller, depending on times, but it has always been more or less that type of divide.

Dr. Svante E. Cornell:

I think it really depends on what type of administration we get. Obviously, a Democratic administration will have a much stronger Armenian influence. The Republican administration will not. That said, even Secretary of State Pompeo’s comments indicate a certain sympathy towards the Armenian side. I think overall the U.S. reaction unfortunately to this conflict has been one of absence. It is the absence of a U.S. response to this situation that has been the most significant and that is in a certain way understandable. And that was probably by design if you will on the part of the belligerents or at least one of the belligerents, that this was done when it was done, in the middle of a very polarized U.S. election campaign in the times of a pandemic.

I frankly do not see overall the U.S. policy changing very much because the bigger story in all of this is the national defense strategy and the national security strategy laid out two years ago, which is the issue of strategic competition being the new leitmotif if you will of U.S. foreign defense policies. And what is the strategic competition, the great powers that we are talking about, Eurasian powers we are talking about? Russia. We are talking about China. We are talking about Iran, and that is also what brought us such a sophisticated Central Asia strategy because all these states in Central Asia are in the middle between all of these great powers. And by this virtue they are important to the broader U.S. foreign security and defense strategies.

And I think although it has not been an outspoken addition because the strategy did not include the Caucasus, the same logic applies here. The logic is the heart of Eurasia, the land that is encircled by all of these great powers that is involved in strategic competition will be important to U.S. policy, and smaller mid-sized states. Rather, not the smallest one, but the mid-sized states that have an independent ability to choose their own foreign policy will remain important to U.S. strategy in this region. And these are mainly three states. It is Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan. I think there will be the continued appreciation for the role that these countries can play in the broader U.S. strategic objectives in regards to Iran, in regards to Russia, in regards to Turkey, in regards to China, and I think that will is going very likely to carry the day.

Now, there might be grumblings. There might be congressional resolutions, and there is very definitely going to be a lot of think tank and civil society outrage on the whole. I go back to this point, I am probably making it too often, but if the Armenians had stayed at taking Nagorno-Karabakh, they would not have had this problem, but because they took all these occupied territories, now if Azerbaijan does not try to retake the whole of Karabakh, if they just stay at having taken back the occupied territories that everybody in the world considers to be Azerbaijani, from which 700,000 Azerbaijanis were ethnically cleansed twenty-five, thirty years ago, I think, frankly, the world and American opinion will recover very quickly. If there is a major disaster in Karabakh itself or if the war spreads to Armenian territory, then the situation would be different. But the way I understand the Azerbaijani war aims, I would be surprised if it goes that far.

The issue for the United States will be how to to maintain relevance. I think everybody now in the region, the Azerbaijanis, the Armenians, the Georgians nearby, I have looked at this and said, well, all of this is going on and where is the United States of America? That to me is the most worrying situation right now because it means that people will care about what Erdoğan says, what Putin says, maybe what the Iranians say, what the Israelis say, but if America is missing in action, what will be America’s leverage in order to obtain national security objectives in this region in the future if the United States is basically absent when this is happening. I think that is that is one of the big big issues going forward as far as I can see.

Concluding Remarks

Robert R. Reilly:

Dr. Cornell, thank you very much for that illuminating lecture. I greatly appreciate it and I would like to invite our Westminster audience not only to share this video, but to visit our YouTube channel and see what else we have on offer, recent talks on Russia and China. Thank you very much for joining us, hope to see you again soon. Thank you very much.

Dr. Svante E. Cornell:

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

^{Watch this and other lectures from Dr. Svante E. Cornell’s Speaker Playlist.}

The Nature of Putin’s Regime and the Reasons for its Foreign Policy
(David Satter, October 10, 2020)

Transcript available below

About the speaker

David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent, is a long time observer of Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Satter was born in Chicago in 1947 and graduated from the University of Chicago and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a B.Litt degree in political philosophy. He worked for four years as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune and, in 1976, he was named Moscow correspondent of the London Financial Times. He worked in Moscow for six years, from 1976 to 1982, during which time he sought out Soviet citizens with the intention of preserving their accounts of the Soviet totalitarian system for posterity.

After completing his term in Moscow, Satter became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for The Wall Street Journal, contributing to the paper’s editorial page. In 1990, he was named a Thornton Hooper fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and then a senior fellow at the Institute. From 2003 to 2008, he was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2008, he was also a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches a course on contemporary Russian history at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced Academic Programs.

Satter has written three books about Russia: Russia: It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (Yale, 2011); Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Knopf, 1996; paperback, Yale 2001); and Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale 2003). His books have been translated into Russian, Estonian, Latvian, Czech, Portuguese and Vietnamese. His first book, Age of Delirium, has been made into a documentary film in a U.S. – Latvian – Russian joint production.

Satter has testified frequently on Russian affairs before Congressional committees. He has written extensively for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. His articles and op-ed pieces have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The National Interest, National Review, National Review Online, Forbes.com, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, The New York Sun, The New York Review of Books, Reader’s Digest and The Washington Times. He is frequently interviewed in both Russian and English by Radio Liberty, the Voice of America and the BBC Russian Service and has appeared on CNN, CNN International, BBC World, the Charlie Rose Show, Al Jazeera, France 24, Fox News, C-Span and ORT and RTR, the state run Russian television networks.

The views of the speaker are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Westminster Institute.

Transcript

Robert R. Reilly:

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the Westminster Institute’s ongoing, online series of lectures. Today, I am particularly gratified to welcome David Satter as today’s speaker. David is a leading commentator on Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is the author of five books on Russia and the Soviet Union, and the creator of a documentary film on the fall of the USSR. His most recent book is Never Speak To Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union, an anthology of his writing from 1976 to 2019. It was published this year.

David is a former Moscow correspondent and he is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. David graduated from the University of Chicago and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar. He worked for four years as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

In 1976, he was named Moscow correspondent of the London Financial Times. He worked in Moscow for six years from 1976 to 1982, during which time he sought out Soviet citizens with the intention of preserving their accounts of the Soviet totalitarian system for posterity. After completing his term in Moscow, Mr. Satter became a special correspondent on foreign affairs for The Wall Street Journal.

In 1990, he was named the Thorton Hoover Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, and then a Senior Fellow at that institute. From 2003 to 2008, he was a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. David teaches a course on contemporary Russian history at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced Academic Programs.

Mr. Satter’s other books about Russia include It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past, Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, and Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State. His books have been translated into Russian, Estonian, Latvian, Czech, Portuguese, and Vietnamese. It is his first book, Age of Delirium, that was made into a documentary film.

Mr. Satter has testified frequently on Russian affairs before Congressional committees. His articles and Op-Ed pieces have appeared in all of the major newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The National Interest, The National Review, The New York Republic, The New York Sun, The New York Review of Books, and many others. He is frequently interviewed in both Russian and English by Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, and the BBC Russian service, and many others. Today, David is going to speak to us on the nature of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and the reasons for its foreign policy. Welcome, David.

David Satter:

Overview

Bob, thank you very much. I am very glad to be here and very glad to talk about a subject that is often not very well understood, which is Russian foreign policy, and especially the sources of Russian foreign policy. We talk a lot about Russia and what it does in the world, but much of the discussion is distorted by the fact that we are assuming that Russia acts on the same general assumptions and with the same general goals as other countries. That is not the case.

Russia has always been motivated by factors that are outside the typical Western frame of reference when it comes to making foreign policy decisions, and this dates back actually to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was animated by its ideology and all of that ideology appeared absurd when viewed from the outside. It was the most potent factor in organizing the society and directing its actions towards the outside world.

Soviet Ideology and Afghanistan

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, our immediate reaction in the West was to assume that this was the first step in an attempt to seize the Persian Gulf or at least advance the Soviet Union to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, but in fact the invasion of Afghanistan was motivated by completely different factors.

Soviet ideology held that a communist regime once it was established could not be displaced, it could never be overthrown. And this was not a matter of politics, this was a matter (according to the ideology that was inculcated in people’s minds for decades) this was a matter of science. Lenin himself said that the ideology is irrefutable, Marxist ideology is as irrefutable as the axioms of geometry, so for a country on Russia’s borders, to witness the overthrow of a communist regime once that regime had taken power, would have been destabilizing for the Soviet Union itself.

There is evidence that the Soviet leaders, in fact, were unaware that the Afghan communists were plotting to take power, and their seizure of power in the country in 1978 took the Soviet leadership by surprise. But once they were in power, once they were aligned with the Soviet Union, once they were identified as communists, there was no longer a question in the eyes of the Soviet rulers of allowing the Afghan people to overthrow what was really very much a foreign implant and a regime that was contrary to the traditions of what was at one time a relatively peaceful country.

We began a tremendous build-up at the time in the Persian Gulf and in the Middle East. In fact, our major commitment in the Middle East in that part of the world dates back from a misreading of what happened in the Soviet Union and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And we continued to misread the situation vis-à-vis the Soviet Union throughout the final years of the Soviet Union, during which time we neglected the fact that the Soviet Union was not interested in building an empire per se, it was interested in turning its fictitious ideology into reality, and the only way to do that was by force.

Post-Soviet Foreign Policy

When the Soviet Union fell, the ideology disappeared with it. The Soviet Union that existed was not a normal country. Russia is a traditional country, Ukraine is a traditional country, Armenia is a traditional country, Georgia is a traditional country. The Soviet Union is a collection of traditional countries organized to realize an ideology, and without the Soviet Union, the ideology could not any longer be the motivating factor in the actions of the countries that at one time were part of the Soviet Union.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the countries that emerged from the wreckage of what was in fact an ideological empire had to find new sources of motivation for their foreign policy, and in so far as what happened in Russia, and we will get to this in a moment, was a criminal takeover of the country by a small group. Russian foreign policy, again, began to be motivated by the power considerations of a very restricted elite, no longer for ideological reasons, but rather in order to keep that small group (I do not like to use the word elite because there is nothing elite about them), but this small group, which monopolized property and monopolized power to keep them in control, basically forever.

And we have seen that and we do see it. We saw it recently with the vote in Russia to remove the last constitutional limits on Putin remaining in power indefinitely, although he always intended to remain president for life. Under these circumstances, Russia makes war for internal reasons. It does so in order to distract the population from the way in which they are misruled.

Chechnya

The First Chechen War, which began at the end of 1994, actually in December 1994, and there was a decisive battle on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in Grozny. It was undertaken, in the words of Oleg Lobov, who was the head of the Security Council under Yeltsin, in order to boost the ratings of President Yeltsin. He said, ‘We need a short, victorious war in order to boost the president’s ratings.’ This is the same formula that was used to describe the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905, which, in fact, was decisive in setting Russia on the path to the Russian Revolution.

The war was neither short nor victorious, and it did not seem to occur to anyone at the time that this was an unacceptable reason for starting a war, but nonetheless, this was the explanation given by Lobov, and all evidence supports the idea that the war was motivated, basically, to shore up Yeltsin’s political position. The First Chechen War was followed by the Second Chechen War, which was necessary in order to put Putin in power. The Second Chechen War was followed by the seizure of Crimea and the intervention in eastern Ukraine, which was necessary in order to distract Russians from the true meaning of the Maidan Revolt in Ukraine. The war in Syria was launched in order to distract Russians from the failure of the intervention in Ukraine.

In every case people were killed, devastation was inflicted upon innocent populations in order to protect the small group of people in Russia who monopolize property and power. Well, how did all of this come about? In fact, it is the product of a long evolution and a very tragic evolution, but something that is frequently seen in human history.

False Ideas from the Communist Past

Russia emerged from the Soviet dictatorship with a great opportunity, the possibility of becoming really a respected and prosperous member of the international community. And that possibility was lost because Russia proceeded on the basis of false ideas, and those ideas were unconsciously inherited from the communist past.

One of the fundamental principles of the communist ideology is the notion of economic determinism, the idea that the base of society is always determined by the nature of economic relations, and those relations dictate everything else. They dictate the laws, the culture, the education, the mentality, and the psychology. This was taken for granted by the Soviet regime, which assumed that a country run by the working class would be automatically just, and Marxist theory was turned on its head by the young reformers in the Russian period, in the post-Soviet period, who assumed that all that was necessary was to put private property into the hands of private owners, and a democracy and rule by law would automatically result.

In both cases what was missing was an appreciation of the importance of the rule of law, of a moral framework, of the authority of transcendent values, so in a true sense there was a revolution when the Soviet Union was overthrown. In terms of the economic system, one economic system was replaced with another, but in terms of the mentality of people, in terms of the moral framework of society, things remained absolutely the same.

No Rule of Law

Anything that the authorities did was considered to be justified. The justification for any act, no matter how barbaric, was considered to be the economic system, and the attitude toward crime was absolutely casual because the criminals were seen as socially friendly. They were on the side of the new emerging capitalism, just as they had been on the side of the authorities in their terrorizing of the political prisoners under the Soviet regime.

Country without law, undergoing a massive economic transition from socialism to capitalism, could not have any other fate than complete criminalization. Too much money was at stake. It was too easy simply to grab what already existed, and the most clever predators rose to the top under these conditions. Yeltsin was the creature of these criminal groups, and he had no intention to share power.

In 1993, the last remnant, really, of democratic rule was destroyed when Yeltsin unilaterally (ignoring the law) abolished the parliament, and then engaged in a massacre at the Ostankino Television Tower, in which dozens of people were mowed down. And then at the White House the next day, using tanks to shell the parliament building in order to establish a new political system in Russia in which there was no challenge to executive power. And there was no challenge also to the illegal accumulation of money.

Corrupt Privatization

Well, privatization proceeded. The former socialist economy was put into private hands. It was the greatest peaceful transfer of property in human history, and it proceeded at break-neck speed. Anyone who had corrupt connections to the authorities could be basically appointed a millionaire. Property that had been created through the collective efforts of the entire population was handed out to criminal gangs, to businessmen with corrupt connections to officials, to those who had worked in the economy previously and were adept at taking over what had originally been given to the workforce as a whole, and a ruling group was created in Russia that was composed almost in equal parts of organized crime, corrupt officials, and corrupted former factory directors.

This group began to experience phenomenal wealth as reflected in their ostentatious spending. Under the Soviet regime there were inequalities, but they were hidden. Under the post-Soviet regime inequality and difference in wealth, ostentatious consumption, became one of the most defining features of the urban landscape.

Desperation

At the same time, the economy collapsed. World War II veterans were driven into the streets to sell their belongings. Beggars appeared everywhere. The number of unsupervised children abandoned by their parents reached unprecedented levels. They lived under railroad bridges, at stations, begging and suffering, committing crimes.

Prostitution became inescapable. It began to be taken for granted that the big streets in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Gorky Street and Nevsky Prospect, would be lined at night with women selling themselves. Under these conditions there was a psychological crisis that was experienced by millions of Russian people. It is no justification of the Communist regime to say that for millions of Russian people, communism defined the framework of their lives.

Communist Values in a Capitalist System

The values of communism, the mythology of communism, they were inculcated in people, generation after generation. These values, of course, because they did not allow for any kind of religious or transcendent point or moral reference were incapable of creating a moral society, but at the same time they did propagate certain practices that were not all bad. Russians were encouraged to care for each other, to look out for each other, and to a certain extent this ethos was assimilated.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, it was important that that communist constellation of values and practices be replaced by a new mentality based on genuine universal values and genuine fairplay. What Russian former communist citizens saw on the contrary was that the country was taken over by obvious criminals.

Demographic Devastation

In the eight years that Yeltsin was in power, the death rate in Russia achieved unprecedented levels. Demographers looking at the rate of mortality in Russia beginning in ’92-’93 could not believe that so many people were dying under peacetime conditions. They died from accidents, they died from illness, they died from suicide, they died from despair. Many Russians, trained to rigidity and obedience, could not adapt to the new situation. And add to the fact that the new leadership did not consider seriously the importance of any kind of social protection in a transitional period, they felt abandoned and helpless. Yeltsin himself said – in this respect he was right – he said, “We jumped into the water without knowing how to swim.”

At the same time, it is estimated that the number of surplus deaths in Russia in the 1990s was about six million people. Surplus deaths is a term that is used by demographers. It refers to deaths that could not have been anticipated by previous conditions, by projection based on previous conditions. The Russian population’s longevity, especially male longevity, was reduced to a degree that had not been seen in the twentieth century in any other industrial country except under conditions of war.

Hardship and Suffering of the Average Russian

At the same time, the hardship for normal people was simply unbelievable. I got a sample of this when I went to Vladivostok. There was one incident that stuck in my mind. People were fishing on the ice in the bay outside the city, and police were continuously chasing them off the ice because the ice was breaking and there was one drowning after another.

There was one particularly bad incident in which the ice broke and a whole group of people drowned, and the next day the police were out there and chasing again fishermen, who were out on the same dangerous ice. And one old man absolutely refused to leave. Finally, the police went out and got him, taking a risk themselves, and afterwards he was asked why he had not listened to the police, who told him to abandon his post, and did he not realize that he was risking his life? His answer was something I will never forget. He said, “I would rather die than live like this.”

And that was not an aberration. At the largest graveyard outside of Moscow where a whole tract of land had been set outside for fresh grapes, gravedigger told the Journal, he said, “You see these grapes? They are all young people. We never had it like this before.” Under these conditions, needless to say, Yeltsin’s popularity with the population collapsed, and no number of short, victorious wars or other stunts were capable of restoring it.

Russian Apartment Bombings

In 1999, Yeltsin’s popularity rating was 2%. Now, those pollsters will attest that in almost any survey, 6% of respondents do not understand the question, so that will give you an idea of just how hated Yeltsin was at that point in time. It was considered to be impossible for Yeltsin or for anyone he supported to be elected the new Russian President.

Then, at that point, rumors began to circulate that something big was going to happen. It was going to be some type of provocation that would make it possible for Yeltsin to declare martial law. I was in Moscow at the time, and there were conflicting rumors. One rumor was that there was going to be a war between criminal gangs unleashed in the center of Moscow. The other was that famous celebrities were going to be kidnapped and tortured publicly, and then killed, and another was that government buildings were going to be blown up.

And a short time after that buildings were blown up, but they were not government buildings, they were buildings in which ordinary people were living. This is the most important event in recent Russian history. The bombing of the apartment buildings, first in the city of Buynaksk in the Caucasus, then in Moscow, then in the city of Volgodonsk. Apartment buildings were blown up in the middle of the night for maximum casualties. The Chechens were accused of being responsible.

A new war was initiated in Chechnya. The Russians had been opposed to a new invasion because the previous invasion had been unsuccessful. The new invasion was launched after initial successes based on the indiscriminate use of banned weapons, including cluster bombs, on civilian areas, the popularity of Yeltsin’s designated successor, Vladimir Putin, a person who had been the head of the KGB and had been virtually unknown, began to rise. On September 8, Yeltsin in a conversation with Bill Clinton said that, ‘Vladimir Putin is going to be the new president. You will be able to work with him. He will be a good partner for the United States.’

First of all, the very idea that Yeltsin could determine in advance the new president showed you the mentality and the respect for democracy, but second of all, it was somewhat mysterious how a person with a popularity rating of 2% could be so sure that he had the power to designate his successor, but on September 9, the next day, the apartment building on Guryanova street in Moscow blew up in the middle of the night.

From that point on, the scenario played itself out perfectly. Russians all over the country were terrorized and afraid to go to sleep at night. Putin, the newly-designated Prime Minister, vowed that he would pursue the terrorists wherever he could find them, even in their outhouses, and kill them. A massive invasion was mounted and Putin was transformed from an anonymous stooge of Yeltsin into the savior of the country, and he was elected president.

Ryazan Bombing

Now, all of this would have worked perfectly had it not been for one hitch, which is a fifth bomb was placed in a building in the city of Ryazan. And that bomb was discovered in time by watchful residents and deactivated. Three people were arrested in Ryazan because the whole city was cordoned off. They turned out not to be Chechen terrorists, they turned out to be agents of the FSB. Our government made a decision not to raise this issue. I know this from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) inquiries that produced documents that showed that they were informed there was something deeply suspicious about those bombings. And the the Ryazan incident was capable of creating a massive crisis in the country, in the interest of the truth, of course, if it was revealed.

But in any case, three hundred people were killed. Putin’s power was firmly established, and the present regime embarked on self-enrichment and a program of assuring that it would never lose power. The ruling group in Russia became former KGB agents and cronies of Putin’s. The methods that they used throughout the 2000s and the 2010s were terrorist methods, beginning with the siege of the Dubrovka Theater, the Beslan school massacre, the assassinations of Anna Politkovskaya, the leading investigative reporter, Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with a nuclear isotope in London, Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader, the shooting down of the Malaysian Airliner in 2014.

All of this was intended to consolidate the power of this group that acceded to the presidency, acceded to total authority as a result of a terrorist act the FSB carried out against their own people. What makes it positively blood-chilling is not the fact that they killed political opponents. A lot of people do that. But they killed people at random. They were ready to just blow up buildings in a working class area, and all for political goals.

Under these circumstances, nothing that Russia does today in foreign policy is really surprising. The Soviet Union wanted to act out its ideology. In acting out its ideology, it ensured that the group which consisted of the guarantors, the protectors, the interpreters of that ideology be permanently in power. In post-Soviet Russia, the animating factor is to protect this corrupt, and otherwise totally undistinguished group that was able to seize power because of their willingness in the first instance to protect Yeltsin and his family, and in the second instance their determination to protect themselves.

Russiagate

Now, we in the U.S. have been really convulsed with various Russian related scandals. We are absolutely outraged that Russia would try to interfere in the U.S. election, and there is a good likelihood that they did interfere in the U.S. election. That would be very typical of them to do that. They are not really able to influence a U.S. election very much. They do not say anything that is not said more often, more forcefully, and actually better by the American political opponents themselves. What they are able to do is to do something that the KGB was expert at doing when it was fighting dissidents in the Soviet period. They are capable of turning people against each other. They are able to create chaos in American society.

The most dangerous accusation against a dissident was that he was really a KGB agent, and with that in mind the KGB tried to infiltrate the dissident milieu. They did have their agents and provocateurs. The standard Russian-Soviet technique for discrediting somebody is to try to create the impression that they work for Russian intelligence, that they are an asset, that they are in some way serving the interests of the Kremlin.

The Steele Dossier

And this is what happened in the 2016 election with the Steele Dossier. It was not that the Dossier was convincing or was not. Anyone with real knowledge would have read it and immediately seen that it was an FSB fake, but for those who are already at each other’s throats, it was brilliant in that it could be used as a weapon inside the American political competition. And with the Russians basically doing very little. They understood that one said was hungry for a dossier of this type. They provided it. They did not have to do much, the opposing sides did everything themselves.

And for two-and-a-half years, of course, we were transfixed with phony stories, anonymous sources, a fraudulent investigation that should have never taken place, and Russian crimes in the meantime were completely ignored. Serious issues affecting the United States and Russia, such as the murder of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, the shooting down, deliberately, of a civilian airliner, on which, by the way, there was an American passenger, the assassination of opponents of the regime abroad, the use of chemical weapons as instruments of murder, for example, in the Skripal case, these are the real issues in U.S.-Russian relations.

But this is what affects the stability of the regime. This is what those who rule Russia would like us to ignore, and they have tried and true methods of getting us to ignore what they do. And one of the most important is to make sure that we are fixated on our internal animosities, which revolve around issues which are of no real importance.

Ukraine Manipulation

The Russians act similarly in the case of Ukraine. The Maidan revolt was a fundamental challenge not just to the rulers in Ukraine, but also to the Putin regime. The Putin regime controls all the principal levers of power in Russia, but it can still be threatened by a massive revolt, a massive, spontaneous, self-organizing revolt, such as what took place in Ukraine, where you had hundreds of thousands of people on the street. Under those conditions, the instruments of oppression are no longer reliable. It is no guarantee that you can order troops and police to open fire on civilians when their numbers reach that level, and the Russian authorities know that.

Just as they sought to distract Americans, they sought to distract their own people with the invasion of Ukraine. Nothing could have been better calculated to play to nationalist instincts in the country than an invasion, which was supposedly taking place in order to protect the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine, which in reality was not in any danger.

Making the World Fear Russia

Similarly, in Syria, the Russian leadership is acting not so much in the pursuit of specific goals, and certainly not specific geopolitical goals, but rather in order to strengthen its hold over its own population. Russia is half of the Soviet Union in terms of its economy, in terms of its population. It is not in a position to become a world power, nor does it have any ideology that it is seeking to propagate. Its interests in having a presence in the Middle East is a tribute to its vanity and to the idea on the part of many Russian people that Russia should be a great power.

When the Soviet Union fell, a void was created in many people’s lives. It is important to bear in mind, I can describe an incident that took place when I was in the Soviet Union. I was standing in line in a store, actually waiting for potatoes, and a man in the long queue began shouting, “How long can we wait in these lines? How long can this go on?” And a woman started shouting back at him, “Never you mind. The whole world is afraid of us.”

And this reflected very much the attitude in Russia in the idea that we should make people afraid. ‘Yes, we do not live very well. Our lives are miserable. People in the West probably live better, but we are part of a great state, and we determine what goes on in the world.’ This compensatory mechanism was very effective.

And when the Soviet Union fell and Russia suddenly was an indigent and largely impotent power, it created a psychological vacuum that any nationalist would ultimately be able to fill. To a certain extent, of course, some of the same mechanism played itself out during the Weimar Republic in Germany.

Putin understood this and he understood the first thing he had to do to prevent Russians from imitating what happened in Ukraine or at least taking it as an example for how they could liberate themselves, he understood that distracting them with a successful war in Ukraine and a successful annexation would be all that he would have to need to change the subject and boost his own personal popularity, so that is what happened.

How to Deal with Russia

Well, under these conditions in which we have a small criminal group in power in Russia, which organizes the foreign policy of a great country strictly in its own interests, and is willing to sacrifice the lives of their own people and other people in the pursuit of the strengthening of their corrupt power, how ought we to deal with them? What should we expect?

Trump’s Approach to Russia

We have had a very controversial and in some respects uneven experience with President Trump, who is by all measures an unconventional president. At least he behaves in ways that were not typical of his predecessors. In regard to Russia, he began by making statements that I thought were exceptionally inappropriate. And by choosing foreign policy advisers who made statements that even given the relatively low bar in these matters were naive and harmful. In February 2017, President Trump when asked about killings in Russia, political killings, he said, “Well, we kill people too.”

Now, no American president had ever gone that far in justifying political crimes, but in Trump’s defense, it has to be said that he did not repeat that mistake, that the early advisers were eliminated, and despite the fact that he is an unnecessarily effusive in his attitude toward Putin, his decisions and his actions have been generally quite prudent. Trump has provided defensive weapons to Ukraine. He, of course, retaliated against the chemical weapons attack in Syria. He retaliated against violations of demarcation agreements by Russian-backed mercenaries. He has demanded that NATO increase their spending, and in that way made NATO stronger. He has redeployed many of our forces to the East where they are needed.

And he has retaliated appropriately to events like the poisoning of the Skripals in the United Kingdom, even though they took place not on American soil, but in the United Kingdom. In other words he recognized that this kind of lawlessness affects everyone, so in a second term, if he has one, and whoever is our president next year, it will be important to drop the friendly rhetoric, which in fact gets us nowhere. The Russians do not do anything on the basis of that, that they would not have done otherwise. And it diminishes the ability of the United States to exert influence in the world. It is self-defeating even though American Presidents who are often quite naive may not realize that.

The people who have taken power in Russia are dedicated to their own survival. And that takes precedence over anything else, over human life, over the welfare of the country, over the welfare of the world. You cannot talk them out of it, you cannot charm them out of it, and that is something that every American President needs to realize.

At the same time, Russia is an immensely powerful and deeply cultured country that needs to be part of the West both for our sake and for the sake of the people who live there, and we can have a role in that through the simple exertion of moral influence, and that means speaking out in the case of events that are important.

Disarming the Regime with Truth

If there is a crisis of power in Russia, we should bear in mind the example of the 1991 August Coup. The GKChP, those were the coup plotters, had the ability to drown the opposition in blood just as what happened in Tiananmen Square in China. They did not do it. The reason they did not do it is because in 1991 the ideology had lost its force. Four years of glasnost had so discredited the ideology that it could no longer motivate people to kill.

There is no ideology in Russia now that is comparable to what existed in the Soviet Union, but there is nationalist feeling and there is the delusion that the rulers of Russia are on the side of the people. The truth about what happened in Russia, including, first of all, the truth about the apartment bombings, is important in order to disarm the Russian regime in the face of a future confrontation if it takes place, or more appropriately, when it takes place.

And that is why the foreign policy of the United States in dealing with Russia should be based on fundamental principles, readiness to enunciate those principles, the absence of any desire to be ‘friends’ with the Russian leaders, who are not worthy of any friendship, and an awareness that our internal conflicts in this country are simply not that important compared to the stakes in the broader world. Under those circumstances, we can feel reasonably assured that the challenges that await us, and there will be challenges, will be challenges that we can handle for our good and for their good, as well.

Discussion

Will Russia Invade Belarus?

Robert R. Reilly:

You mentioned at some length Ukraine. Could you talk a little about Belarus and the situation developing there now, and whether Putin is sufficiently concerned that he would move militarily there?

David Satter:

Well, there is a danger of that. Here again this is why we should never underestimate (in our dealings with Russia) the importance of deterrence. Deterrence always has an important psychological element. The Russian authorities are interested in understanding the character of the person with whom they are dealing. How is he likely to respond?

They do various types of psychological profiles, but they are also informed by experience. How will a person react? This is why when President Obama hesitated to respond to the chemical weapons use in Syria, it reverberated throughout Eastern Europe, and throughout the former Soviet Bloc because it suggested that in the case of aggression addressed against them, he would be similarly irresolute.

And the present situation in Belarus differs from the situation in Ukraine. In Ukraine there was a large Russian-speaking, pro-Russian element. Crimea itself is majority ethnic Russian, whereas Belarus is relatively homogeneous. There is no obvious group of collaborators in the case of a Russian invasion, and once again the calculus becomes how advantageous would it be to the power structure in Russia to become involved in fighting in Belarus, that might not prove controllable? How serious would be the reaction of the outside world?

One of the things that the late Boris Nemtsov and I tried to explain to a person who become adviser to President Obama, was that the appearance and the impression of commitment to principle in critical situations can have a very important deterrent effect, and one of the factors that is being weighed in Russia right now is the capacity of Donald Trump is he is president or whoever may or may not succeed him, depending on the results of the election, to what degree would they react and what would they be likely to do?

I think under the present circumstances, the Putin regime is hoping that Lukashenko can hold onto power without them, and that may or may not prove to be true. If he is overthrown or if he is on the verge of being overthrown, the decision of whether or not to intervene will be greatly influenced by their perception of our determination not to let it happen or to react to it forcefully if it does.

Is Nord Stream 2’s Future in Danger?

Robert R. Reilly:

Another issue, David, is the reaction in Europe to the poisoning with the Novichok nerve agent of opposition leader Navalny is quite interesting, that the Europeans and the Germans are indicating that they will stand together against this behavior they assume by Putin since it was a military grade nerve agent. Might this throw in doubt the continuation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which Germany is relying on as a major supply of natural gas, and on which Putin is relying because it is a huge source of income for his regime? What do you think might happen there? Would the Europeans actually be tough enough to do something like this?

David Satter:

We will see. They might be. Putin’s behavior is very provocative. The Europeans took part in the sanctions that were imposed after the poisoning of the Skripals, and if he is using exactly the same poison or a poison that is related to it to murder or attempt to murder an anti-corruption fighter in Russia, who is probably the most prominent opposition leader in Russia at the moment, that indicates that previous sanctions did not work. They did not have any effect, so the question is is it really sensible to repeat sanctions on the same level as those that were in effect in the past or does it make sense to escalate? I think that a logical person – and President Trump, in fact, urged this – would understand that under these circumstances, continuation of the Nord Stream project is not advisable for anyone, not for any of the Western parties.

A Religious Revival in Russia

Robert R. Reilly:

On another issue you mentioned that the Soviet ideology is no longer operative in Russia, and you indicated that nationalism is part of a replacement.

David Satter:

It is an attempted replacement.

Robert R. Reilly:

An attempted replacement. You also mentioned the word transcendent several times, the lack of a transcendence. Certain people believe there is a religious revival in Russia, that the Russian Orthodox Church is gaining in strength. You know the hierarchy of that church was so seriously compromised in the Soviet regime. Do you think there is a genuine religious recovery in Russia? And, of course, Putin tries to portray himself as a believer and attends some Orthodox services. Is that just a charade?

David Satter:

Yes, it is just a charade. The people buy the costume, the Cossacks and the paraphernalia. They love to appear on religious festivals. There is nothing religious about them. As for a religious revival in the country, people have been saying that for decades. I think it is pretty superficial if it exists at all. What you have in Russia is that the village priests, the local priests, do a lot of good in comforting people, in giving people some support, but the hierarchy of the church is rotten. The church is a national symbol, but it is manipulated by those authorities.

Those observances that you note, and Putin’s attempt to depict himself as deeply religious, largely for the benefit of the West, it is all false. The Church has not spoken out against corruption. Just to give you an example the Church received under Yeltsin special privileges to import tax-free, duty-free cigarettes and alcohol, although smoking in the Orthodox Church is considered a sin. They made huge fortunes on that, the higher-ups did. A photo was taken of the present Patriarch, wearing a very expensive watch worth tens of thousands of dollars. In the official photograph they removed the watch because it had been noticed, but they forgot that the reflection of the watch was still present in a polished table.

So I would not attach a great importance to the so-called religious revival in Russia, and people in the West, particularly American conservatives, should be aware that there is nothing religious, for example, about ordering groups to open fire on women and children, hundreds of hostages, with, for example, flamethrowers and grenade launchers as if this is a military objective. There is nothing religious about blowing people up in the middle of the night in order to seize power. The Russians are are that the Americans are in many ways very parochial, and do not understand that there are places where the mentality is very different.

What is Russia’s Geopolitical Strategy?

Robert R. Reilly:

Russia, according to some accounts, has an economy smaller than Italy’s, yet it has developed a first class military in terms of modern weapons and, of course, it has used some of them in the Middle East. It is applying weapons in Libya. You seemed to indicate that Putin really does not have any geopolitical strategy. If not he has got to be one of the first class and most effective opportunists in terms of foreign policy, in gaining a presence in the Mediterranean. I do not know, perhaps in his alliance with China. We will see about that one, but certainly he seems to be successful in creating an image of having a geopolitical strategy.

David Satter:

They do want to create that image, you are right, but the strategy is not what the outside world thinks it is. Their strategy is to keep themselves in power. They understand that certainly the impression given to the Russian people, that Russia is once again a great power, will work to their benefit. Russia has an imperial mentality. It has had it traditionally. If you stop to think about it, what really could be their geopolitical strategy? What is it they are trying to do? What is it trying to achieve?

The Soviet Union had a geopolitical strategy. It wanted to spread communism all over the world. It wanted to save humanity from the oppression of capitalism, and create a world in which there was no war, no class conflict, everyone was guaranteed a job and so on, so that was their geopolitical strategy, according to the ideology.

But there is no ideology in Russia, so what is their geopolitical strategy? To defend themselves? Well, no one is attacking them. To dominate the Middle East? For what reason? Why is that in their interest, and why is it necessary? What do they gain from that? On the contrary, because of their actions they may create a kind of extremism, and encourage the kind of extremism that might rebound eventually against Russian civilians, as well as everybody else, although they have little concern for Russian civilians. We do not want to think in clichés. The government of Russia has an interest and it pursues it, making sure those who are in power, stay in power. That is their geopolitical strategy. Of course, the multiplication of weapons and so on goes on, but that plays into the traditional mentality of the country and its desire to make people afraid. Nicholas I in the beginning of the 19th century said that Russia should make people afraid. It is not something new.

Robert R. Reilly:

What about their objectives in respect to China. I would think that any long-term thinker on geopolitical issues would be extremely worried (as a Russian) about the burgeoning power of China.

David Satter:

They should be and they should see the West as their natural ally, and they should be worried about the power of Iran because of the crimes of which the Iranians are capable. They should be worried about a lot of things, and they would be if they were thinking in terms of the welfare of their own population, but they are not because what is good for the population is not necessarily good for those who rule the population. Friendship with the United States and close cooperation with the U.S. makes sense for Russia as a country.

It makes no sense whatsoever for a small group that has taken power in Russia, and was able to do so as a result of acts of terror. That is the point. For them, Western institutions, Western demands for due process… The last thing they need is a system in which they cannot go and kill their opponents. They can kill anybody now and nobody is going to go and squeak inside Russia. They do not want to have to be under pressure from the West. We saw what happened with Boris Nemtsov, my personal friend, by the way.

Could Russia Have a Vaccine for COVID-19?

Robert R. Reilly:

David let me close with asking you a question about the effect of the coronavirus in Russia, and the claim of the regime that it has now developed two vaccines. Is that also a charade?

David Satter:

They are capable of developing vaccines. Russia has many talented people. During the Soviet period and even afterwards they had an active research program in virology, and they developed many bacteriological weapons, by the way, in violation of treaties with the U.S. So it is not out of the question that they came up with something. What is a question is whether it has been adequately tested and whether there is a risk from the Russian vaccine because one thing we can be sure of is that they would not be overly concerned about the possible adverse effects on the population if they thought that it could get some propaganda benefits from this.

Robert R. Reilly:

Well, actually, let me ask one more question. What ought the United States be most worried about in respect to Russia?

David Satter:

The most worrying possibility is that there will be internal instability, and that it could become uncontrollable because the regime is not fundamentally stable. If we define stability not as surface calm, but rather as the ability to absorb and handle unexpected internal and external shocks, then Russia is not stable. The present regime does at the moment seem to have a grip on power, and they do it with a relatively low level of violence, I must say to give them credit, compared to previous Russian regimes. they do so with corruption, manipulation, false information, the external threat, of course, which they need in order to consolidate the population.

But those instruments are unreliable in the long run, and history shows that no one can rule forever. We saw what happened to the Assads and the challenge that was posed to them, to Qaddafhi. We saw what happened to Ceauşescu and now the challenge to Lukashenko. Authoritarian regimes tend to degrade over time, and to become more corrupt, more intolerant, less flexible, and more lawless, and engender more and more discontent. Russia is not an exception to that rule.

Robert R. Reilly:

David Satter, thank you very much for joining us today at the Westminster Institute. We greatly appreciate your insights into Russia. I invite our audience to not only share the video of this lecture, but go to the Westminster Institute website where you will see the library of videos from our past lectures on subjects such as China, the Middle East, Islam, and other things of concern to the United States, and the West. Thank you for joining us.

How China Sees the World
(Dean Cheng, October 2, 2020)

Transcript available below

About the speaker

Dean Cheng is The Heritage Foundation‘s research fellow on Chinese political and security affairs. He specializes in China’s military and foreign policy, in particular its relationship with the rest of Asia and with the United States. He is fluent in Chinese, and uses Chinese language materials regularly in his work. Prior to joining Heritage, he was a senior analyst with the China Studies Division at Center for Naval Analyses from 2001-2009, where he specialized on Chinese military issues, and authored studies on Chinese military doctrine, Chinese mobilization concepts, and Chinese space capabilities.

Before joining CNA, he was a senior analyst with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He has also served as an analyst with the US Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment in the International Security and Space Division, where he studied the Chinese defense industrial complex. He is the author of the book Cyber Dragon: Inside China’s Information Warfare and Cyber Operations, as well as a number of papers and book chapters examining various aspects of Chinese security affairs. He has been interviewed by or provided commentary for publications such as Time magazine, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Jane’s Defense Weekly, and Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. Mr. Cheng earned a bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton University and has done doctoral studies at MIT.

The views of the speaker are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Westminster Institute.

Transcript

Robert R. Reilly:

Introduction

Hello, I am Bob Reilly, the director of the Westminster Institute. I would like to welcome you to our continuing series of Zoom lectures during the time of the virus. I am particularly happy today to have Dean Cheng, who is the Heritage Foundation’s research fellow on Chinese political and security affairs.

He specializes in China’s military and foreign policy, in particular its relationship with the rest of Asia and with the United States. He is fluent in Chinese, and uses Chinese language materials regularly in his work.

Prior to joining Heritage, Mr. Cheng was a senior analyst with the China Studies Division at the. Center for Naval Analyses from 2001-2009, where he specialized on Chinese military doctrine, Chinese mobilization concepts, and Chinese space capabilities.

Before joining CNA, he was a senior analyst with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He has also served as an analyst with the US Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment in the International Security and Space Division, where he studied the Chinese defense industrial complex.

He is the author of the book Cyber Dragon: Inside China’s Information Warfare and Cyber Operations, as well as a number of papers and book chapters examining various aspects of Chinese security affairs. He has been interviewed by or provided commentary for publications such as Time magazine, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Jane’s Defense Weekly, and Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. Mr. Cheng earned a bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton University and has done doctoral studies at MIT.

Dean Cheng:

Thank you very much for having me and my appreciation to you and the Westminster Institute for the opportunity to be here. So my comments today are going to try to provide you with some context about both how does China view the world and therefore how should we be thinking about China. Let me begin by what I sometimes term the Three Nots: why Asia is not Europe, why China is not the Soviet Union, and why this is not your father’s People’s Liberation Army.

Why Asia is not Europe

So to begin with why Asia is not Europe. It is important to recognize to begin with that the Cold War has not ended. The Cold War ended in Europe in 1989 when there were those wonderful images from Berlin of young people taking sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall and the ability of East Germans to go to West Germany followed by the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and a couple of years later, the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But it is important to recognize that that all occurred in Europe and it did not extend to Asia. In fact, if we look at the Cold War, there were four divided countries, three of which were in Asia, so you had China, between China and Taiwan, North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, and East and West Germany. So the end of the Cold War only saw in the unification of the two Germanys. North Vietnam had conquered South Vietnam ten years earlier, and even today both China and the Korean peninsula remain divided along ideological lines.

It is also important to recognize that the Cold War was an ideological layer applied over a series of fundamental issues in Asia that were also resolved in Europe. The best example of this is the issue of borders. In Europe we had the Helsinki Accords. These among other things basically were signed by all the nations of Europe along with nations such as the United States and Canada to basically say, look, whether you are happy with the results or not, the borders of Europe are as they stand.

And so with the signing of the Helsinki Accords, no one really thought that there would be another war over Alsace and Lorraine (those are now French), or over Silesia (Poland), or the Sudetenland, which was Czechoslovakian, now part of the Czech Republic. In fact, one of the things that is stunning about Mr. Putin was his land-grab of the Crimea, which did in fact overturn established order.

But when we look to Asia, we see a very different situation. In Asia, the borders are not set. There has never been a Helsinki Accord, and indeed from north to south across Asia there are still outstanding territorial problems, and by the way, these do not only apply to China. So, for example, we have the Northern Territories or the Southern Kurils, the group of islands between Japan and Russia. We have Dokdo or Takeshima between South Korea and Japan. We have the Diàoyútái or the Senkakus among Japan, Taiwan, and China. And most in the news has been, of course, the Spratlys or the Nánshādǎo in the South China Sea.

The fact that there are multiple names for every one of these territories reflects the deep-rooted nature of these issues because how you even refer to the islands north of Japan or the island that is in dispute between South Korea and Japan is a political statement. If you go to South Korea, do not refer to the island as Takeshima. You may be asked to step outside because you are making a political statement in South Korea that you support Japan. That may be inadvertent, but that is not necessarily how they will take it.

As a consequence of this, in Asia you do not see overarching regional architectures, economic or security. There is no NATO in Asia because there has never been a consensus on who the bad guys are. NATO was formed against the Soviet Union, but, again, South Korea and Japan are at least as suspicious of each other as they are of even North Korea or Russia or China. Similarly, there has never developed really a regional market such as the European Economic Community, which grew out of the 1958 Coal and Steel Agreement, among Italy, France, and Germany. But also within Asia there is still not really a free trade zone among Asian countries. There are a number of bilateral agreements, but in the main, Asian countries still have tariffs, still have non-tariff barriers to each other.

Another vital difference between Asia and Europe, which really defines how each region looks at itself and also how China looks at itself is the fact that Europe has always had balance of power politics since the Treaty of Westphalia made the nation-state the center piece of European relations, whether it was the rise of Napoleon, the rise of Hitler, the rise of the Kaiser, the rise of the Soviet Union. What you saw was a coalition of other major powers coming together to balance that hegemon, the balance of power politics. Russia, Prussia, France, Spain, Britain, Sweden in some cases; all of these countries were playing in a sense of power politics. Asia never saw balance of power politics.

When we look at five thousand years of Asian history, we never see a Japan, allying with a Vietnam against the Han Dynasty, or Koreans and Khmers coming together to face the Qin Dynasty. Instead, you had a single, dominant hegemon, a central kingdom, if you will, which really is what zhongguo is. Zhongguo is how China refers to itself. It typically is translated as Middle Kingdom, but it also can be translated as the Central Kingdom.

And then, along its periphery were tributary states, nations that did not balance against China, but bandwagoned with China or were at least as suspicious of each other as they ever were of China, and they gave tribute to that central hegemon. And that is a fundamentally different perspective about how international relations is supposed to work at all. It is not multiple major powers balancing against each other, it is smaller countries in a sense deferring to the single, big country.

China is not the Soviet Union

So if Asia is not Europe, China is not the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was in many ways our evil twin. If you are a Star Trek fan, you may recognize the following reference: it was Spock with a beard. The Soviet Union, like the United States, was a global power and we each had a messianic ideology. We wanted to bring the benefits of capitalist democracy to the rest of the world. The Soviets wanted to bring the benefits of centralized economic planning, socialism, and authoritarian government under a Leninist, vanguard party to the rest of the world. Each felt that the entire planet was part of the battleground, but also was suitable. You wanted to make other countries, whether they were Brazil or Bangladesh, like us, and the Soviets wanted to make, whether it was Sudan or Saudi Arabia, like them.

Military Power

Another important characteristic of the Soviet Union was that it was a military power and it prioritized military capability over all else, and it was a global military power. There were Soviet forces in Angola, in Cuba, in Vietnam. The Soviet Navy had bases across Africa and the Mediterranean. It was a very military-heavy focus. It was very econ-lite. The Soviet Union did not trade with many other countries, and frankly it did not have to. It traded with Eastern Europe for political reasons, to keep the East Germans and Czechoslovakians tied to Moscow, much more than to derive economic benefit.

China is Different in Every Way

China is different in every one of these characteristics. To begin with, while it has a large military and it is steadily modernizing, it is still a regional military. The focus of the Chinese military, which we will get to in a little bit, is on local contingencies, those very close to China’s borders.

China is Not Messianic

Second of all, China today does not really have that much of an ideology. Certainly, it is not messianic. The People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party, are not trying to remake the world into little CCPs. China will trade with any country. China will have diplomatic relations with any other country. Its conditions are much more political, things like you cannot recognize Taiwan, than they are ideological.

You want to be capitalist? We will sell you the tools to be a successful, capitalist country. If you want to be socialist, we will see you the tools to be a socialist country. You want to be a single dictatorship? We will trade with you there, as well. China is not interested so much in exporting dialectics as it is in exporting t-shirts, washing machines, and computers. Again, a fundamental difference from the Soviet Union, and that last aspect there is, of course, most important of all.

China is an economic superpower. As it turns out, the Soviet Union’s economy was actually never as large as we thought it was. China’s economy is probably about where we estimate it to be, about 60-75% of the American economy at this point. It is a huge trading nation in a way that the Soviets were not. So in every one of these aspects then, China really is not simply another large communist country that does not use the English alphabet.

It is instead a major power coming from a fundamentally different tradition, and that tradition again is in part as I said not European, but also it is marked by thousands of years of being the central power of Asia, but is marked by the Century of Humiliation when it was subjugated and nearly colonized by a largely European-dominated international system, and here the Century of Humiliation is the second major characteristic that helps define how China looks at the world.

The Century of Humiliation

From 1839 to 1949 China went from being the top dog, if you will, to the sick man of Asia. And what happened during that century? Well, in 1839, China fought the First Opium War against Great Britain, and by the way, this is where the whole issue of Hong Kong comes from because the British Empire fought a war to force China to accept opium, its sale and its use in the streets of China.

Imagine if we had fought a war with the Medellín or Cali cartels in the 1990s and had lost. And today, when you go to McDonald’s and order your Big Mac and fries, and you want a coke with that, they ask five grams or ten. That is what happened in the wake of the Opium War. China was not allowed to prohibit the sale of opium in China because Great Britain was exporting opium from India to China, and was therefore reaping huge amounts of silver and some gold in the process. So that is the beginning of the century of humiliation.

Over that period from 1839 to 1949, China fought a Second Opium War and lost to Britain and France. It fought two wars with Japan, the First Sino-Japanese War (1894 to 1895) is where Taiwan becomes an issue because China lost that war also, and had to cede Taiwan to Japan. The Second Sino-Japanese War overlapped, but is not quite the same as the Second World War because it began in 1937 when the Japanese started pushing deeper into China, and some would even date it all the way back to 1931, when Japan detached all of Manchuria and made it into a puppet kingdom part of the Japanese Empire.

To give you a sense of scale: imagine if somebody had detached all of New England down to essentially the Hudson, and made it into the Republic of New England, and attached it to Great Britain or Nazi Germany. That is the kind of embarrassment and humiliation that China was subjected to, and of course, the Second World War, where you had things like the Rape of Nanking and Japan’s bombing of Chungking.

So this was a tumultuous century. It was a horrible century in terms of Chinese pride. It was a period when China frankly lost control of its own destiny, over its own people, over its own territories, so for China, this is something to be avoided. This is a major defining element of what drives people like Xi Jinping because they have been taught never again will we allow a repetition of this century of humiliation.

No Rule of Law

A third characteristic that feeds into China’s view and why China is not the Soviet Union is that there is no real rule of law. And again, this is something that dates back thousands of years. It is now new to China or because of the Chinese Communist Party. Throughout thousands of years of Chinese history there has never evolved the rule of law, the idea that the law is its own institution, the idea of a separate judiciary as a co-equal branch of government.

In imperial China, magistrates were appointed by the emperor, and served as prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge, and would hand down sentences. So this is a very different model of how you go about settling disputes, of the role of law, of the role of courts as an arbiter. The Chinese people do not particularly trust court systems, especially because in today’s China every judge is a member of the Chinese Communist Party, and it is very clear that given a choice between findings under the law, and findings in accordance with the CCP, China’s Communist Party, you had best decide in favor of the CCP.

A Lack of Civil Society

And then finally, you have a lack of civil society. And this is perhaps in some ways the hardest thing for Americans to understand. We live in a society where there are vast parts of our lives that are beyond the reach and scope of government, and we like it that way. These days it is a little harder to find something that is beyond the realm of politics, but even there, too, under more normal circumstances, where you eat, what you eat is a personal decision. It is not a political decision.

And in China, nothing is beyond the reach of the Chinese Communist Party: no company, no religious organization, no sports league, no non-governmental organization. The Chinese Communist Party itself will often say if there are three people, there should be a Party member present. And so we see efforts to insert the CCP into the functioning of churches, the Catholic Church has been fighting this battle now for quite some time.

The Chinese dangle the idea of well, maybe we will let you do a little more proselytizing – even as they also make clear that what you proselytize, what your message is must be acceptable to the Party. And this is also why Chinese companies, Chinese students, Chinese academics, Chinese businessmen can (and under Chinese law can be made to) provide information about their customers, about their contracts, about the data that sits on their servers, can be held even if that is not what they were when they first showed up at your business or at your university.

The People’s Liberation Army

So all of this is to indicate how fundamentally different China looks at the world, different from us, even from the Soviet Union, certainly different from Russia. A lot of this is encapsulated in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This is the Chinese military. Even though it is the People’s Liberation Army, think of it more as the People’s Liberation military because it encompasses the ground forces, the air forces, the navy, and the missile units.

So two things to keep in mind about today’s PLA. The first is that this is not a national military. The People’s Liberation Army is a Party army. It is the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party. And every officer in the PLA is a member of the CCP. For those of you who have served in our armed forces, I am sure you remember your oath is to uphold, defend, and protect the Constitution of the United States, without regard to party, without regard to who is president, that is what you are to uphold. And your lawful orders are that they be consistent with our Constitution and the laws.

Your Chinese counterparts swear an oath to uphold the rule of the CCP. And so in 1989, when the Chinese military was ordered to roll into the streets of Beijing and we had the Tiananmen massacre, that was a lawful order in the Chinese context because it was an order that went to Party members of the armed wing of the CCP to suppress a threat to CCP rule.

The PLA Has Changed

The other thing to keep in mind is that this is not your father’s People’s Liberation Army. This is no longer a military that believes that you will run out of bullets or AMRAAMs or Harpoons or Mark 48 torpedoes before they run out of bombs. Instead, this is a military that has paid very close attention to other people’s wars and has come to the conclusion that future wars will be based not on quantity, although quantity matters, but as much on quality, quality of personnel and level of sophistication of their equipment and weapons.

And this is an enormous shift from the PLA that went to war in Korea or against India in 1962 or even against Vietnam in 1979, which is the last time the Chinese military fought a war at all. This is a military that instead has basically been saying we need to become more sophisticated, we need to incorporate more technology, and its doctrine has evolved.

PLA Joint Operations

Its doctrine has gone from, again, mass quantities of poorly armed troops to what they term joint operations. Their version of joint operations is different from ours. When we think about joint operations, we tend to think about different services operating together; the army and the air force, the navy and the army, the air force and the Marines.

For the People’s Liberation Army, joint operations is about operating across multiple domains: land, sea, and air, outer space, and the electromagnetic domain, which includes but is not limited to cyberspace. This is a very different approach. It comes out of watching how we, the United States, have fought most of our wars. They consider our military to be the gold standard, and so they see how we are able to operate across vast distances, hundreds of thousands of square miles, coordinating carrier task forces, submarines launching cruise missiles, special operations forces, armored divisions, and their conclusion from watching this is that the key to future warfare is the ability to create shared situational awareness, to have the various participating forces know where each other are, where the enemy is, and how to bring kinetic force but also electromagnetic force, electronic warfare, cyber warfare, to bear against an adversary. And so this is a very different approach.

The PLA has not fought a war since 1979, but it has been slowly evolving its military forces in this direction. At the end of 2015, the People’s Liberation Army underwent a massive evolution, huge changes, changes we have not seen frankly since the founding of the PLA back in 1927.

PLA Strategic Support Forces: Pursuing Information Dominance

One of those changes was the creation of a new service, what is termed the PLA Strategic Support Forces, and what it did was it brought together China’s electronic warfare forces, who do things like jam radars, network warfare forces, which includes cyber warfare capabilities, hacking, but is more than that. They can also disrupt other networks, power networks, energy networks, transportation networks. And there are space forces.

They brought them all into a single service because to the PLA, all of these are capabilities that really revolve around information: the ability to gather information, the ability to transmit information, the ability to exploit because for the PLA, the ability to establish what they term information dominance, the ability to gather, to transmit, and to exploit more rapidly and more accurately than your adversary while also preventing your adversary from doing all of those things is the key to winning future war.

So the Chinese basically have organizationally put their money where their mouth is. They said, you know what, winning the next war is going to require information dominance, and we are going to create a service whose job is to go after achieving information dominance. So looking at this very different regional context, this very different national context, with this evolving military, what is it that China wants?

Comprehensive National Power

I would suggest that when we look at how China is thinking about strategy and its future requirements, we see several things. First off, we need to recognize that the Chinese do engage in a very holistic approach towards its strategy and towards its power. The Chinese are not pursuing a military strategy. They are not pursuing an economic strategy. They are not pursuing a diplomatic strategy. They are pursuing all of these.

This is part of what the Chinese term comprehensive national power. Comprehensive national power basically is how do nations rack and stack, how do you compare a Brazil, a France, a Colombia, with a China, a Thailand, an United States? And the answer is all of these pieces matter. Military capability is very self-evident. If you cannot defend yourself, you are not a great power, but military power by itself is insufficient.

What happened in the Soviet Union? It collapsed by spending huge amounts of money. Economic power is therefore important, but economic power by itself does not necessarily get you respect. So what else do you need? You need to be politically unified, and this is one of the reasons why Taiwan is such an issue. If you are not politically unified, you cannot be strong. If part of your country is constantly trying to break away, and from China’s perspective Taiwan is part of China, then how can you be strong? That also is why Tibet is an issue, why the South China Sea is an issue, why Xinjiang with the Uyghurs is an issue.

You have to have diplomatic respect. That century of humiliation was all about China not being shown respect, so China wants that respect. Being a member of the UN permanent five is an example. Science and technology: you do not want to be making other people’s washing machines forever. You want them to be running your operating system, buying your computers, designing the microprocessors that power those computers. You want to define space exploration, so you might land on the far side of the moon, something no other country has done, but which China did in 2019.

And then you have cultural security. Cultural security is something Americans do not tend to think about all that much. We go around the world and we expect one to find people who speak English, to find Coca-Cola available pretty much at every convenience store and every restaurant, McDonald’s on most street corners, people wearing blue jeans and listening to Taylor Swift.

For China this is very irksome. To their mind, ‘We are five thousand years of history. We invented paper. We invented paper money. We invented gunpowder, and yet people go around speaking English and eating McDonald’s, why aren’t they going around speaking Chinese and eating kung pao chicken?’ And as important people in China people are eating McDonald’s and drinking Coca-Cola, so for the Chinese cultural security is part of that broader context of comprehensive national power and national security.

China Dream

And so China’s strategy is to evolve the world towards a situation where China resumes its more rightful place as the middle kingdom, as the central kingdom, and this is part of what Xi Jinping has called the China Dream. When you read what Xi Jinping says in Chinese, the China Dream is also termed the Great Revival of the Chinese People. Maybe that is the single biggest, most important takeaway.

What is China’s strategic goal? China is not imperial Germany. China is not some new country, arriving on the scene from out of nowhere, working its way up. China is talking about its return, its revival. We were gone for a hundred years, but we are back, more powerful than ever, richer than ever, more scientifically capable than ever, and with a military that is now unlike one hundred, one-hundred and fifty years ago, able to defend China itself and China’s interests.

And in fact, this is part of the mission of the Chinese military. It is stated: to keep the CCP in power, to keep the country unified, which is another way of saying to be able to take Taiwan if necessary, but to defend China’s interests, defined partly in economic terms, access to resources, but in key domains because that is how the Chinese think about joint operations (the maritime domain, the outer space domain, the electromagnetic domain).

So in practical terms we see in this time of COVID-19 that China has made pretty clear what it wants to see the world look like after COVID-19. It wants a world where Taiwan is kept in a box, where organizations like the WHO do not listen to Taiwan, no matter how urgently it might say we think there is a new disease breaking out in China. It will not seat Taiwan within the World Health Assembly. It is a global economy, where China maintains key roles in global supply chains, where countries look at China and see a fuzzy, warm panda, not a fearsome dragon, and so this is why we saw Chinese aid in the form of personal protective equipment, and why China has pushed even in the time of COVID-19 that Huawei should play a role in your 5G network.

But at the same time it is a China that is increasingly prepared to pound on the doors and pound on the table if its way is not had. And so with Chinese aid it turned out a lot of this aid was not aid at all, it was actually bought and paid for. China was merely delivering. In other cases it was equipment that did not work, a shockingly high percentage. One report estimates something like 70% of Chinese PPE did not work, but when you brought this to light, the Chinese started basically saying, well, you are not being very friendly. Such wild accusations will hurt your country’s relations with China. We are going to remember that in future economic contexts. So this is a China that is increasingly trying to shift global standards and norms in its own favor.

China poses a fundamentally different standard to the United States as a result. This is a country that frankly has more resources than the Soviet Union did. It has also spent a lot more time developing ties to the rest of the world, so it is going to be a lot harder to isolate them, and because they trade with everyone else, they have – whether deliberately or accidentally – stumbled onto one of the keys that make democracies work, which is interesting.

In every country where China is a major trading partner, there are interest groups of both those who export to China, and those who import from China, who look at China, and they do not see a threat. They see a customer. They see an economic partner. They see part of their own well-being, and so figuring out how to work with a country that is intermittently tied up our supply chains and everyone else’s, that is diplomatically well-connected, that is not trying to push an ideology, it is not trying to remake other countries into China’s own likeness, but will differ to China’s key interests is going to be the challenge of the coming decade, and is going to require a lot smarter, well-rounded, holistic thinking than we had to bring to bear when we fought and won the Cold War. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak.

Q&A

What American Policymakers Missed

Robert R. Reilly:

Thank you so much for that very interesting presentation. What was missing in the U.S. expectation that subsidizing Chinese economic transformation, inviting it into the World Trade Organization or voting for its membership there, willingly transferring our own technology to China, sometimes giving it to them, acceding to American corporations doing business there on the terms that they turn over their proprietary technology to China all in the hope that this would somehow transform China itself into our own self-image? What was it that American policymakers did not know that led to this enormous miscalculation?

Dean Cheng:

It was not anything that they did not know, but it was the circumstances. When we won the Cold War, and I said earlier we only won it in Europe, we assumed that from there the rest of the world would naturally follow, and it was that hyper-optimism that said, well, look at Eastern Europe. No one fought, no shots were fired, and they became democracies. Boris Yeltsin, kind of, sort of thought might be a democratic leader and he did jump on the back of a tank to stop the coup in 1991, which broke up the Soviet Union.

So I think a huge piece of this was the enormous optimism. I mean remember Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History. History was done. We had won. And so all of the other countries of the world would see that obviously democratic capitalism was the right answer. And so if we made some concessions, if we allowed the Chinese to access intellectual property, if we brought them into the World Trade Organization and promoted free trade, then naturally China would one, see the wrongness of its dictatorial ways, and two, would seek to evolve.

And if they did not, well, there would come a Chinese middle class, and every middle class around the world no matter what nationality, what ethnic origin you are, all believe the same things. This is in many ways the charm and the goodness of the American system because we believe anyone can become an American. That is good. But it is failing to recognize that yes, but you have to come here, and you have to buy into the Constitution. And just because you have a middle class in a China does not mean that they will immediately subscribe to Jefferson and Rousseau, and quote the Federalist Papers. And so that was one huge piece of this.

Changes in Chinese Leadership

The second piece of this it is important to recognize that the Chinese leadership in the 1980s and 1990s was very different from the Chinese leadership of the 21st century. Jiang Zemin, who came to power in 1992 under the direction of and with the blessing of Deng Xiaoping, did want to push Chinese economic reform. And in fact, his premier, Zhu Rongji, was described by Deng Xiaoping as the smartest man in China. And he was a genuine reformer.

We have seen the Chinese economy, and China’s politics, frankly, evolve away from its Mao totalitarian state. It is authoritarian, but it is far, far more relaxed than it was in the bad old days under Mao were, in comparison to the Soviet Union. For example, if you go to – we are here in Washington, DC – if you go to the Mall, when it is not a period of COVID, and you go to the Smithsonian’s, you will see thousands of Chinese tourists. If you go to the Louvre in Paris, if you go to the British Museum in London, if you go to Hermitage in St. Petersburg, you will see thousands of Chinese tourists.

You know what, not one of those people has a hostage back home. Those people, if they wanted suddenly to make a dash and try to defect, no one is going to stop them. There is no mother, daughter, brother, son who is locked up. [The government is not] saying if you do not come back, they will suffer. This is very different from the Soviet Union. It is different from China in the 1960s because the Chinese attitude is you know what, go ahead, leave. We have got 1.3 billion other of you. This is a very different model of authoritarianism, and it is in part what makes it harder for us to figure out how to counter.

So we basically were in the 1990s working with a China that politically and economically more liberal than it had been, which is not to say they were free because they were not free, and we were drunk with our own success. And we thought everyone was going to become like us. Fast forward to the twenty-first century and two things happen: one is that the Chinese leadership changes. Hu Jintao came to power in 2002 and he was far less interested in both economic and political reform. He had no interest in political reform and frankly no interest in economic reform.

We are seeing the Chinese economy slow down today in part because for ten years and now under Xi Jinping another ten years where China is no longer economically, but I think we also realize maybe because of 9/11, maybe because of the rise of Vladimir Putin, maybe because of the failure of the Arab Spring and the Jasmine Revolution, the Color Revolutions, that maybe democracy takes more than just one election or what is the phrase, democracy is not one man, one vote, one time, and realizing that China is not about to become democratic and you can have a middle class live better, who can go and be tourists and have nice homes with central air conditioning.

They are not necessarily going to go and agitate for democracy, especially if the price of agitating for democracy might be your life or might simply be that your children will not have that opportunity to go and study abroad and have a shot at a good job. So I think it is sort of easy to say, look, what were the one or two big mistakes we made? It was a lot of mistakes by a lot of people, understandable in many cases. That is what makes this a Greek tragedy in many, many ways because it could have been different, maybe, but it would have required us to understand where things really were and not how we wanted them to be.

Marxism-Leninism in China Today

Robert Reilly:

In the way in which you describe China today, how do you account for President Xi’s renewed emphasis on Marxism-Leninism as the animating ideology and special instruction to CCP members to ensure that they are indoctrinated with this ideology, and along with it, of course, a rather active repression of religious groups? This all seems to cohere with what we normally understand as Marxist-Leninist Party behavior.

Dean Cheng:

Well, I think part of that unfortunate hyper-optimism that we saw in the ’90s and early 2000s was also this idea, and you saw this in places like The New York Times, that, ‘Oh, the Chinese Communist Party today is a lot like private clubs. It is really where businessmen get together to cut deals.’ And that was a fundamental misunderstanding of the role and reality of the CCP. The CCP in China may not be messianic, they may not be trying to spread this ideology outside of China’s borders, but it has never ever stopped being a Marxist-Leninist Party at home.

The CCP is a Marxist-Leninist Party

First off, there are no other parties in China. The thing to keep in mind here is that the Chinese Communist Party today is not so much Marxist, by which I mean for each according to their ability to each according to their needs, let us not have much in the way of separation, sort of financial inequality. China has several hundred billionaires, several thousand millionaires, and three to four hundred million people living on roughly three dollars a day. This is not an equal society.

So the CCP is a Marxist-Leninist Party. What was it that makes it Leninist? It is a vanguard party. It is what will lead the Chinese people into the future. It is the only source of political legitimacy and authority and that has never ever changed, not Mao, not Deng, not Jiang Zemin, not Hu Jintao, not Xi Jinping. It is just that under Jiang Zemin they talk less about it, and Jiang Zemin said, ‘By the way, if you are a businessman, come on into the Party. We welcome you into the Party. Bring your stuff, bring your money, we are not going to take it from you.’ And they did not. They said, ‘You know what, you can be a millionaire and be a member of the Party. Great.’

And that was, again, part of our miscalculation. We saw that and we said, ‘Oh, you know what is going to happen?’ Those business people will change the Party. They will make the Party more open because they are going to want to protect their resources. They will get the CCP to help invest in places. What actually happened is the CCP brought them into the Party and said, ‘Now that you are a member of the Party, we are going to watch you because that is what we do.’

An End to Economic Reform

And so under Hu Jintao as I said we have seen a slowdown, frankly an end, to economic reform, and the business people were allowed to keep on making money as long as they understood where the political power was and that, again, was sort of a salami slice. It is like, ‘Alright, I can understand that.’

And under Xi Jinping what we have seen is an open set of attacks upon businessmen. Anbang Insurance, Dalian Wanda Industries, these are major conglomerates in China, whose leaders have either been replaced, been encouraged to retire, or it has otherwise been made very clear to them you are a potential challenge to the power of the Party. It is time for you to step aside for your industrial, economic conglomerate to be broken up.

Suppressing Challenges to Xi’s Authority

Now, Xi is doing this partly out of his own personal authority. He is probably the single most powerful leader in China since Deng Xiaoping. He uses the context of Marxism-Leninism, but above all Leninism, the only source of political power to then crack down on all of the other potential places of dissent within China. So there have been regulations going out to the military, saying, remember the Party has absolute leadership over you, the military.

It cracks down on religion because as I said earlier, there is no room for civil society, there is no room for a sphere beyond the reach of the Party. Your conscience is not your own. Your conscience or at least your loyalty belongs to the Party. It says, of course, in the Bible to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s. In Xi Jinping’s China, there is no separation, there is no realm that is beyond the reach of Caesar or Xi Jinping.

Weakness and Suspicion

What is this about? Ironically, I think some of this is actually a sign of weakness. It is a sign of weakness because we have an economic system that is slowing down, partly because of COVID-19 and everyone’s economy is slowing down, but even before COVID-19 because of the U.S.-China trade war, because of increasing questions about Chinese disrespect for intellectual property, because of questions about China’s debt trap behavior, because of questions about how China basically is engaged in broad theft of intellectual property and other things.

There has been more and more suspicion about China. Donald Trump has amplified this. Without him, frankly, you would probably see 5G networks being built by Huawei across Europe. You don’t because in no small part this White House has said, you will not, you cannot cut a deal with the Chinese and expect close ties with us. We are still the largest economy and we are for better or worse still, frankly, more transparent and far more democratic than China is. We pay attention to the law, we have respect for the law, we have rule of law and those are things that are very important.

A Delicate Moment

So China finds itself economically weaker, politically more troubled, whether it is Hong Kong or Taiwan or Uyghurs. COVID-19 occurred in the middle of a key moment in the Chinese calendar year, the Chinese Lunar New Year. There is a reason why the Chinese did not quarantine. The economic hit alone had they quarantined before this would have been the equivalent of canceling Thanksgiving and Christmas. Think about what that would have done economically. Think about what that would have done just politically.

So Xi is at a fairly delicate moment. This should not be interpreted to mean that China is on the verge of collapse or Xi Jinping is on the verge of losing power. All it is to say is that in any authoritarian system, uneasy rests the head upon which lies the crown. Xi Jinping always has to worry about who might have their knives out for him, in a way that not even Donald Trump has to worry because at the end of the day, we have an orderly succession system. They do not.

Mao’s Three Bases of Support

Robert R. Reilly:

How accurate would you say is the idea that many people have concerning China that there are not many real communists left in the country, they do not believe in this ideology, and the deal between the people and the Party is you can keep your power as long as their is still a growing economy? If we get richer, you can get more powerful or keep the power you have, but if you cannot keep your side of the bargain, that undermines this arrangement and then your power is vulnerable. Do you think that is true?

Dean Cheng:

I think that it is true. I think it is somewhat simplified because there are multiple things that keep any group in power, including the Chinese Communist Party, but what I have said in the past elsewhere is that in a sense, the CCP is experiencing what it is like to go from a tricycle to a bicycle to a unicycle.

In 1949, when Mao Zedong stands atop Tiananmen Square and waves his hands, announcing the creation of the People’s Republic of China, there were three things that he could point to to say, ‘This is why we are in charge.’ One, ‘We are communists.’ It is the Marxist part of Marxist-Leninism. ‘We will end landlords, we will make people more equal, we will redistribute. Second, you will live better. Just regardless of the economic system, you will live better. And third, we drove the foreigners out,’ especially the Japanese, but also all those colonialists, and all of those Brits, and Americans, and so on.

So that is 1949. Fast forward about seventy years and what do we see? Well, first off as I said earlier inequality is through the roof. It is probably as bad if not in some ways worse than it was back in 1949, so it went from three wheels, three bases of support, a tricycle, to bicycle.

Successes and Failures

Will your children live better than you did? The CCP actually delivered on that relative to 1949. In 1949, the estimate is that eighty percent of Chinese people were illiterate, eighty percent. Today, I think most people would agree that China is like ninety-five percent literate. And in a society and a culture that values education, that is huge. Where the path to advancement is through education, that is huge.

But in today’s China, if you live in the wrong place, you are breathing air – I had a colleague who was stationed in China for two years. After six months he came back to the United States for a medical checkup and his doctor looked at him and said, “You know, Bill, I am really disappointed in you.” “Why?” “I would think you are smart enough not to take up smoking, a man of your age.” He said, “Doctor, I am not smoking.” He said, “Looking at your lungs, you look like a one to two pack-a-day smoker. That is the quality of the air in China.

So are you living better? Well, maybe, but maybe your children have emphysema. Maybe you are eating food that has high mercury and heavy metal content. Maybe you are living in substandard housing, where your chances of improving are very limited. So let us say that that front wheel of that bicycle is often soft and leaky.

Eroding Legitimacy

Now, this is why the third part is important, why Taiwan cannot ever be allowed to go independent, why you have suppressed the Uyghurs in Xijiang and elsewhere is yes, well, but we drove the foreigners out, we made China strong, and China is strong because of we, the CCP. And we land people on the far side of the Moon, and we have naval exercises in the Mediterranean and the Baltic, which has never occurred in human history before because we are strong.

So there are attacks, there are erosions on the legitimacy of the CCP across all three wheels, one of which is thoroughly flat and one of which is pretty soft and wobbly. Are there people who believe? Yes, I think there are. I think there and people who believe and I think there are Party members who believe, but belief only gets you so far. It has been said that no country is more than three meals away from revolution. One of the really interesting things right now in China is food prices are going up because there are a number of pests and diseases that are affecting food prices in China.

So even if people who believe if they cannot get pork, which is the staple meat, they cannot get vegetables, which is the centerpiece of Chinese food, because of diseases and things that are affecting China’s pig herds and vegetable gardens, that faith and belief will only get you so far, and that is absolutely something that the CCP is terrified of.

Aggression or National Restoration

Robert R. Reilly:

Well, Dean, how powerful a glue is nationalism today in China and is it strong enough that President Xi’s program to restore China [will succeed]? It is more than a restoration when you claim sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, that is an extraordinarily aggressive act, plus the armed conflict on the border with India, and you mentioned the crack down in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Is this all playing to a strong sense of nationalism in the Chinese people or at least the Han Chinese?

Dean Cheng:

In the Chinese people, not just the Han Chinese people, yes, absolutely. So to begin with are the Chinese people nationalistic? Absolutely, partly because of their own education, partly because it has been drummed into them, that Century of Humiliation is all about building up that sense of we were kicked around, we were taken advantage of, but no more and by the way, that is because of us, the Chinese Communist Party. As Mao said, China has stood up. China is off its knees.

Restoring Historic Borders

When we look at all of the various regions that you ticked off, as an American, as an outsider, we look at this and we say how in the world do they claim the South China Sea, which is 1500 miles from your shore? The Chinese say it has always been China. How do you lay claim to the border with India?

Well, if you look back (and the reality is that if you look back far enough, borders change) so if you look back (and China is part of an Asia that has five thousand years of history), there was a time when Tibet extended further than its current border, when the borders of China extended into the steppe that is today part of Kazakhstan or part of Russia or part of Outer Mongolia.

So from the Chinese perspective, this is not a land grab à la Adolph Hitler. This is not Lebensraum. This is not ‘my final territorial demand.’ This is restoring China’s historic border. I am not saying that is a correct interpretation, but I am saying from the Chinese perspective it is not an incorrect view, and that is part of the problem here, it is that China’s claims are expansive but they are at the same time strangely limited. So, for example, they do not necessarily claim that the Korean peninsula is Chinese, and they certainly do not think that Japan is part of China.

China’s Claim in the South China Sea

Now, the problem is for the South China Sea, as an example, $5.3 trillion dollars worth of trade transits through there. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan; their food and their oil transits through the South China Sea. So China’s claim is well, this has always been ours, and the funny thing is there is a little bit of truth to that because three thousand years ago nobody set out boundaries at sea.

It was simply areas that got transited, but in a world where there are treaties and delineations, borders, and therefore economic rights within those borders, now people do delineate, and the Chinese attitude is fine, if you are going to say we have to delineate, I am going to delineate it all. And the fact that this leaves Vietnam with literally no territorial seas, if you look at where the Chinese claim that their Nine Dash Line goes in the South China Sea, it goes about three miles off of Vietnam’s coast.

According to the Chinese, anything beyond three miles is Chinese, and they get to do things like run over Vietnamese fishing boats. There are videos of this, of Chinese fishing boats and coast guard vessels literally running over the Vietnamese boats and ships. We have a right to do that because it is our territory. Well, okay, that is not how the rest of the world works. And this, again, is where China now says that that is how I work. We need to figure out how to say to them, no, it is not, and if that is what you are going to do, there will be consequences.

Can China Tolerate American Pacific Power?

Robert R. Reilly:

Does the idea of a restoration of China as a middle kingdom necessitate the elimination of the United States as a Pacific power?

Dean Cheng:

So the story goes – I do not know if this is true – that Xi Jinping supposedly said to President Obama, I tell you what, we will draw a line at Guam. And you can have everything east of Guam and we will have everything west of Guam, so you get to be a Pacific power, you just do not get to be a western Pacific power. You have hit the question on the head. The U.S. has very few direct, territorial or other issues with China. We have them in space, we have them in cyberspace, but physically, on the ground, we do not touch China.

But the problem is our key allies do, and that is Japan, and that is the Philippines, and that is South Korea, and that is to a lesser extent Australia, New Zealand, because while they do not touch China, China’s actions very clearly affect their sovereignty, and Thailand, which again does not touch China, but their interests brush up against it.

The History of Sino-American Relations

And a China that dominates Asia is fundamentally against America’s interests and has been since the founding of the republic. The very first ship flying an American flag to leave an American port was a U.S. merchant ship on its way to China as part of the tea trade. I believe in fact it was called the Empress of China. It left Baltimore harbor.

We have always seen Asia as a region that we could not afford to allow a single country to dominate. Now, the unfortunate reality is American history is about two hundred and twenty years old, and that mostly overlaps with China’s century of humiliation. So our normal setting for Asia is an Asia that did not have a single dominant power, there was a rivalry there, and we actually wanted to keep China intact. This was the Open Door Policy of John Hay.

China says yes, but that is the exception. For four thousand nine hundred years we were the top dog, we were the dominant power, the central kingdom, the middle kingdom, and your normal is our abnormal, so this again is a friction because in all of that time that China was dominant, countries like Japan and Korea were weak and either isolated, Japan isolated itself, or subservient.

And in today’s world, we believe in this system where countries have their own voice. They are not always equal, but they have their own voice and their own sovereignty, and China’s behavior very clearly is ‘until that sovereignty interferes with what I want, and then you should defer.’ And our allies, Japan and South Korea and others, are saying why should we do that? And that is a very reasonable question. And so, yes, I think as time goes on, as China finds itself increasingly restrained, it does more and more see the U.S. as the problem to restoring China.

China’s Model is Not 20th Century Imperialism

Robert R. Reilly:

To what extent would it be helpful to see the plan on the Chinese part in some ways as a parallel to the Japanese-Asian Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere that they tried to develop in the ’30s?

Dean Cheng:

Not very useful at all, and the reason for that is because the Japanese modeled their empire on European form. When we look at European empires and Japan’s empire, it meant physical occupation. It meant Japanese troops in the streets of Seoul and Pyongyang, and after World War II began in the streets of Manila and the streets of Saigon, and the streets of Phnom Penh, just like there were British troops in the streets of Calcutta and Cairo, New York, and Boston in 1700.

So the Chinese are not pursuing a European model of imperialism. So for example, Japan took what it wanted from Manchuria, then called Manchukuo, and Korea. It was a very, very one-way colonial, imperial system that said raw materials will be basically shipped where we need it, and you will buy and take our finished goods.

China buys the raw material at world market prices, whether it is copper and lithium or oil and soybeans, and it wll buy them from whoever is selling them, including America, including Brazil, including South Sudan, including Angola. It is not trying to make an Angola or a South Sudan or even an Indonesia somehow part of a Chinese economic closed machine. In fact, if anything, the closed machine part is China itself. But if Indonesia wants to sell oil or soybeans or anything else to the United States, go ahead, whereas in the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere, that was not going to be allowed.

And again, are the Chinese hoping to put troops on the borders on the streets? No. What they want is in some ways far more insidious. They want a chair in every Prime Minister’s office, in every cabinet office, in every Parliament with a label on the back: “China.” And most of the time there will never be anyone in that chair, but they want self-censorship. They want the Prime Minister and the cabinet and the Parliament on every decision to look at that chair and think to themselves, ‘Would China be okay with this?’

And if the answer is no, then you yourself will self-censor, you will say, ‘I do not think we should invite the Americans to hold exercises. I do not think we should grant Microsoft that contract. We should give that to Huawei. We should give that to the Chinese Navy.’ But not because there are Chinese troops, jackboots, goosestepping down the central avenue, but because it is in your economic interest, because it is in your political interest, because you do not want to make me angry. It is a very different model.

BRI and Energy Resources

Robert R. Reilly:

To what extent ought the Belt and Road Initiative be understood as a way of overcoming China’s vulnerability on energy resources as it looks at the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca? Its sea lanes are vulnerable, the United States is a great naval power, so we had better secure our sources by land.

Dean Cheng:

For the Chinese, they almost always have multiple different motivations and multiple different strategies, so the Belt and Road Initiative is partly an effort to secure resources. Hydrocarbons is one, oil, natural gas. It is also an attempt to secure raw materials from places like Central Asia. Food; China is a net importer of food, do not forget that.

It is also a jobs program for the Chinese. At one point China had enough manufactured steel just sitting in stockpiles that if the entire rest of the planet had shut down all of its steel mills, I am talking about steel mills in Austria, in Brazil, in Alabama had all shut down, China could have supplied the entire planetary demand for steel for over a year, so the Belt and Road Initiative is partly a jobs program for China’s steel mills and cement plants because it has huge overcapacity and that is a lot of good jobs, and China has built most of the stuff that it wants to build at home.

Central Asia

It is partly competition, especially in Central Asia, with Russia. Central Asia used to be part of the Soviet Union. These republics still have political ties back in Moscow. There is significant political penetration, but these are raw materials that Beijing wants, so we have this asymmetric competition, Russia playing politics, China playing economics as they each try to influence Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan.

We also have, as you say, building out separate lines of communication that are not maritime, so eventually you will be able to ship goods to Europe, and raw materials from Central Asia, but also raw materials and component parts from Europe by train, entirely, without ever having to put them on board a merchant ship. So it is multiple different pieces, factoring into this. Absolutely, raw materials are par of it, but it is not the only thing.

Vulnerabilities in the Chinese Approach

Robert R. Reilly:

You mentioned the overcapacity that China has developed, which speaks to some extraordinary misallocation of capital. You also referred to a debt trap. How vulnerable is China in these respects? State-directed capitalism can produce quick results, but it also has some terrific vulnerabilities because it is not a market allocation of or an efficient use of capital.

Dean Cheng:

Absolutely. The Chinese themselves recognize that top-down socialism the way the Soviets practiced it was a bad idea. This is one of the many reasons why China is not the Soviet Union, so the Chinese really hope to marry the two systems or perhaps create a Frankenstein creation, depending on your preferred analogy. The Chinese want the state to provide broad direction and create state champions in key industrial sectors; shipbuilding, aerospace, petrochemicals, petroleum.

But it recognizes that markets are the most efficient way of allocating resources, so it says, okay, but we want to rely on markets, not top-down direction on supply chain, on how much of something you buy, and the further you get from strategic industries, the fewer state enterprises there are. So clothing, consumer goods, pots and pans, food, etc., make it, grow it, can it, sell it, the state basically takes very little role. The closer it is to a military or a defense industry, the closer it is to, ‘We are going to tell you how this is going to work.’

Ghost Cities

Now, as you said earlier: resource misallocation. A good example of how we in the West often fail to understand both China’s strength and weakness is that at one point China was building what were termed ghost cities, cities that could handle three to five million people that had maybe a couple hundred thousand people living there, Detroit in reverse.

And Western news sources talked about how this was a great idea, this shows China’s ability to think ahead. They are building these cities, they are going to be ready to go when people start moving out of the bigger cities, they will all just be waiting, ready to start up, and those cities will have factories ready to go at a moment’s notice. Is this not so much better than Western capitalism?

No, it is not. This is called stupidity because all of that concrete and steel, all of those stores and whatever inventory was in them, was wasted sitting there rather than being put to more productive use in a better allocated structure, which would have been under capitalism. And you know what? Some of those cities are still sitting there years later. You can only imagine how mildewed the apartments are and how rotted the inventory of the stores might be if nobody has lived in a building designed for five thousand people for ten or fifteen or twenty years.

Outsmarting Capitalism

So absolutely, the Chinese approach is in their mind, ‘We can be smarter than capitalism.’ Maybe in the short run, maybe for a few months or even a few years, but then, this is part of the problem of the lack of economic reform. Under Jiang Zemin, under Zhu Rongji, you really did see the Chinese shift to a more heavily capitalist system. They said, ‘Okay, for a very small number of industries that are militarily-focused we will have the state. Everything else we will be liberal on.’

Instead what we have seen is for a whole lot of industries the state plays a key role. The state picks its winners and losers. The state says, ‘At the end of the day, you will be our preferred choice,’ usually not for economic reasons. And more efficient producers, private companies, get swallowed up or get denied capital and go bankrupt. And by the way, their intellectual property is handed back to the state or are otherwise unable to really flourish. Now, the Soviet Union survived with even more incompetent economic planning for seventy plus years, so people should not be expecting that China is about to economically collapse. That is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that China could be more efficient. That is scary. In some ways we are lucky they are not being as liberal.

Chinese Military Modernization

Robert R. Reilly:

Could we talk for just a moment about Chinese military modernization and what it is for? You seem to be saying that the principal objective of China is economic dominance, which can be expressed in a number of other ways, diplomatically, culturally, etc. Within that perspective is the modernized military simply a shield behind which this economic dominance will develop or is there some other way in which we should be thinking of it?

Dean Cheng:

Well, if you are Taiwan, it is is not a shield, it is absolutely a sword and a spear. If you are Indian, you are increasingly seeing it as a sword, and a spear, and a set of arrows. If you are Japan, you have always thought of it as a spear and a sword, dating back to the Mongols. What I would say is that the Chinese see their military as defending China’s interests, whether it is territorial interests in places like Taiwan and the South China Sea and the border with India or its interests in outer space or its interests in the cyber domain or the electromagnetic domain.

What Protecting Interests Means

Now, protecting those interests however means, for example, being able to drive everybody else out of the South China Sea, so they may think of it as a shield because this is not just Chinese territory that we are defending, but to everybody else, including the United States, that is an awfully offensive approach here. Again, if you are India, you are watching China steadily nibble away, salami slice away at the border, moving it toward where China thinks it should be, which means losing multiple pieces of key Indian states to Chinese claims.

If you are the Russians, you look at China with some nervousness because large chunks of Siberia were once part of China. If you are Central Asia, large chunks of your country, which did not really exist before 1989 or 1991, and for a long time were part of the Russian Empire, before that may have been part of the Chinese Empire. So is this defensive? Absolutely, from China’s perspective this is all defensive. This is all defending what was China.

Internet Interceptions

But let me just note in the two key domains of outer space and the electromagnetic realm, including cyberspace, domains that have never existed before, we see a very, very offensively-oriented China. We saw a China that in 2007 did an ASAT test that generated thousands of pieces of debris, a China that makes it very clear that it has the right to determine what appears on the internet around the world, that has redirected portions of the internet to China that had no business going to China.

Imagine if back in the days when there was still airplane travel, when you flew to London or you flew to Rome, your baggage would be redirected to Beijing. That is what the Chinese have done with the internet. They have redirected portions of global internet traffic through the equivalent of the air traffic control system, the internet traffic control system, to shunt information flow to China for days, for an hour.

Think about how much information, ranging from your dog or cat’s veterinarian report to your company’s top marketing plans to blueprints for new equipment to military transport schedules, redirected through Chinese manipulation of the internet traffic control system to China. That is remarkably offensive. First off, they would deny they had anything to do with it, but second, they would then say, ‘Well, we are just making sure we are okay.’ Oh, okay, you have crossed some lines here. That is what China has done.

What Should We Do

Robert R. Reilly:

Well, in light of all of this, what do you think the United States ought to do? China has not been shy in saying things like our development of hyper-sonic missiles makes your, the United States’, carrier task force obsolete because they can be taken out in the wink of an eye, and since those are your principal means of projection of power in the South China Seas and the western Pacific, you are finished here.

Dean Cheng:

We need to know what it is that we want. One of the things that is central to Chinese success is they know what they want. We seem to be having a lot of trouble deciding, for example, do we think that is a threat at all. You and your audience may be surprised at the number of people who say, ‘We should not call China a threat. We should not call China an adversary. That is just a self-fulfilling prophecy.’ [These are] people who think that the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy of the Trump administration is one of the stupidest set of documents ever produced because we have said, ‘We are back in a period of great power competition and China and Russia are the threats.’ ‘That is nonsense because that just makes China our enemy. China does not want to be our enemy.’

What is the Greatest National Security Threat?

Well, okay, alright, if that is what you believe, what is the greatest national security threat? And if your belief as in the previous administration is global climate change, you will view China very differently. When the admiral in charge of our Pacific forces said three times to Congress and to the press, “The greatest threat that I face is climate change,” you are going to view those Chinese hyper-sonic missiles and submarines very differently than you will if you say the greatest threat I have right now is the fact that China’s navy is larger than the entire U.S. Navy, China’s air force is the world’s largest air force, China is developing space and cyber capabilities that are on par or ahead of where we are.

How China Saw Obama

We did not conduct freedom of navigation operations at all, zero, for three years in the South China Sea. What do you think Beijing took away? What the American administration wanted China to take away from that was work with us on climate change, come to Paris, say nice things about how you will not emit carbon dioxide and methane and things in the future. You can have the South China Sea because really does that matter when we are all in this together about climate change?

Okay, you know as they say, elections have consequences. The American people chose Barack Obama to be our president. He put forth that policy. He had every right to put forth that policy. If you think China is a problem, you should be thinking about how we would counter that. If you think China is not a problem or China is less of a problem than global climate change, you should vote accordingly.

But understand that the China that is building these weapons and all of these is also a country that does not show much interest or readiness to cooperate on global climate change where it matters. If it affects Chinese jobs because that touches legitimacy, if it affects Chinese industrial capacity because that touches on military, economic, or if it means that they would have to cut back on cyber attacks because that is a key part of not just modern warfare, but modern power.

Robert R. Reilly:

Dean Cheng, thank you very much for this illuminating presentation. I greatly appreciate your joining us at the Westminster Institute and I invite our audience to share this video, and also to go to the Westminster website, where you will see the other videos concerning various other foreign policy issues, as well as some on China itself. So thank you very much for joining us.

Al-Shabaab Update and Strategic Plan
(Harun Maruf, September 18, 2020)

Transcript available below

About the speaker

Harun Maruf is a reporter and writer at VOA Africa Division with an extensive experience in working in conflict zones. He also covers security, extremism, piracy, human rights, politics and other current affairs issues. He secured the first radio interview with the late American jihadist Omar Hammami.

Maruf has also reported on the emergence of pro-Islamic State militants in Somalia; the travels of Somali youth from Minnesota to Syria to fight alongside ISIS and has presented hundreds of original radio documentaries about Al-Shabab, extremism, corruption, piracy, and human rights. In addition, Maruf is the author of hundreds of articles, papers and scholarly works about Somalia and the Horn of Africa and he’s frequently invited to speak on these subjects at international events, conferences, round-table discussions and town halls. Prior to VOA, Maruf worked for BBC and Associated Press as a reporter in Somalia, and as a researcher for Human Rights Watch. He holds a Master of Arts in international journalism from the City, University of London.

One of the most powerful Islamic militant groups in Africa, Al-Shabaab exerts Taliban-like rule over millions in Somalia and poses a growing threat to stability in the Horn of Africa. Somalis risk retaliation or death if they oppose or fail to comply with Al-Shabaab-imposed restrictions on aspects of everyday life such as clothing, media, sports, interpersonal relations, and prayer. Inside Al-Shabaab: The Secret History of Al-Qaeda’s Most Powerful Ally recounts the rise, fall, and resurgence of this overlooked terrorist organization and provides an intimate understanding of its connections with Al-Qaeda.

Drawing from interviews with former Al-Shabaab militants, including high-ranking officials, military commanders, police, and foot soldiers, authors Harun Maruf and Dan Joseph reveal the motivations of those who commit their lives to the group and its violent jihadist agenda. A wealth of sources including U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, letters taken from the Pakistani hideout of Osama bin Laden, case files from the prosecution of American Al-Shabaab members, emails from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, and Al-Shabaab’s own statements and recruiting videos inform Maruf and Joseph’s investigation of the United States’ campaign against Al-Shabaab and how the 2006 U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia gave the group the popular support it needed to radicalize ordinary citizens and become a powerful movement.

The views of the speaker are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Westminster Institute.

Transcript

Robert R. Reilly:

Introduction

Hello, I am Bob Reilly, the director of the Westminster Institute. Welcome to our ongoing series of lectures via Zoom. I am particularly happy today to welcome back to the Westminster Institute Harun Maruf, who spoke to the Westminster Institute less than two years ago on the subject of Al Shabaab and Somalia, about which I will tell you a little more in a moment after introducing Harun.

Harun has had three decades of experience in journalism covering Somali and its struggles with war, terrorism, piracy, and drought since the early 1990s, and is one of the founders of the independent Somali media, which emerged after the collapse of the repressive government in 1991. In the past Harun worked for the Associated Press and the BBC as a reporter in Somalia. He is the longest serving editor of the Voice of America’s Somali service from July 2008 to the present moment.

In addition to his responsibilities as a senior editor, he introduced hard-hitting programs at VOA, including investigative reports and series programs. In March 2018, he launched the Investigative Dossier, a biweekly, groundbreaking investigative program and the first of its kind by Somali media. Harun thinks it is the greatest journalism work in his career. His work influenced policy changes by the Somali government. He has more than 325,000 Twitter followers in the Horn of Africa.

In 2018, Harun released a book co-authored with his VOA colleague Dan Joseph entitled Inside Al Shabaab: The Secret History of Al-Qaeda’s Most Powerful Ally. It tells the story of the militant group that is still trying to overthrow Somalia’s government and turn the country into a terrorist haven. The book was well received in Somali and internationally. Harun’s lecture on the topic of his book gained more than 106,000 views on Westminster’s YouTube channel, making it the all-time champion so far. Today, Harun will give his analysis of Al-Shabaab attacks this year, plus their strategic plan and the threat to Somalia and beyond. Welcome back, Harun.

Harun Maruf:

Thank you very much, Robert. I am grateful for you inviting me back, I am also grateful for the kind introduction, and I am happy to be back. The topic we are going to talk about today is Al-Shabaab in recent months and the last couple of years, what Al-Shabaab has been doing. Before I move on to Al-Shabaab’s subject, I wanted to open my statement and my lecture by saying that I am speaking to you in my capacity as co-author of the book as an expert on Al-Shabaab. I am not representing the Voice of America, my employers, and my views are only mine.

The Electoral System

Having said that, and moving onto the situation in Somalia and Al-Shabaab, the good news today that is emerging from Somalia is that the federal government of Somalia and the leaders of five regions and Mogadishu have agreed to an electoral model. Somalia has been preparing for a long time to hold popular elections, one person, one vote election. There was a lot of optimism that this popular election would take place, but one more time Somalia’s leaders have agreed to hold an indirect election. That is an election based on the clan system and a power-sharing system.

The reason that the type of election in Somalia is important is because politics has dictated security and the government response to Al-Shabaab. Every four years a leader and a parliament are elected. That means any government that comes to power has a very, very short time to deal with Al-Shabaab or to make progress in securing the country. During the first two years of any government, the government tries to adapt to the situation, come up with a plan to govern the country, and to fight Al-Shabaab.

For the next two years any government that is in power prepares for the next election and starts campaigning, so there is very little time to fight against Al Shabaab. There is very little time to plan a strategy against extremism and terror, and to execute that. That is why it is very important that elections and politics have negatively impacted the war against Al-Shabaab.

This is also important because whoever comes to power, changes the leaders of the security agencies in the country, and changing the security agencies and the leadership of these different apparatuses, different parts of the government, is determined by power-sharing, not necessarily the competence of the individuals.

I understand that the leadership tries very hard in order to appoint a competent person, but it has not worked in the benefit of degrading Al-Shabaab so far. For instance, the Somali federal government leaders and the regional leaders were supposed to implement a strategy to build the Somali National Army (SNA) to take over responsibility from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), and to fight against Al-Shabaab and liberate Al-Shabaab from the remaining parts of the country. But that strategy has not been implemented during the last three years because of mistrust and bickering between the federal government and the regional leaders. So for the leaders to agree today that they are going to hold another election means we are expecting another government to come, and that government will decide the strategy and how to approach the fight against Al-Shabaab.

African Union Mission in Somalia

In the meantime, Al-Shabaab has been at ease. They have not been under pressure. They have been under some pressure imposed by the United States, but there has been very insignificant pressure coming from the Somali government and the African Union troops in Somalia. The African Union troops in Somalia have been in the country for thirteen years. They have done an amazing job in protecting the government from falling down in light of the attacks from Al-Shabaab. They have ceased all the major towns from Al-Shabaab, but they have not been able to neutralize Al-Shabaab and drive it out of the country.

Al-Shabaab has been playing the long-term war since 2011. They have been withdrawing from major towns without putting up a major fight. They have been saving their men to fight the fight in the long-term, so this is why it has been very important for Somalia and for its international partners to come up with a strategy to neutralize Al-Shabaab.

COVID-19

I am going back to earlier this year, for instance, when the epidemic COVID-19 came to Somalia in March 2020. March 16 was the first time COVID-19 arrived in Somalia. Al-Shabaab initially did not take the epidemic very seriously. They gave that generic response like any other extremist group, that the epidemic is solely infecting infidels, it is not very serious.

But it immediately spread to the rest of the country and it affected some of their members. One of their doctors was killed. Some of their members were also killed. Then they started to take it seriously and they have implemented a center to combat the virus. What happened was that they did not officially announce a reduction of the attacks. They did not officially accept the ceasefire call from the United Nations Secretary General. They did not officially make any statement, but somehow the attacks decreased in April, May, and June significantly.

Airstrikes

There were different interpretations for why the attacks have decreased. Some people have suggested maybe because COVID-19 severely affected Al-Shabaab and they were trying to distance their fighters, they were trying to avoid bringing together fighters into one place in order to avoid getting infected. Some others suggested that what also happened was that the number of airstrikes by the United States have also decreased during this period, so the interpretation by some experts is that this was also an opportunity for Al-Shabaab to reorganize itself since these relentless airstrikes are not taking place.

The relentless airstrikes increased in 2017 when President Trump came to power. The President has given a lot of leeway to the Commanders to carry out attacks against Al-Shabaab, so the number of attacks increased considerably. This year alone nearly fifty airstrikes were carried out in Somalia. That is a record and we still have a few more months until the end of the year.

So these attacks have disrupted the movement of Al-Shabaab leaders. There were a couple of notable attacks where these airstrikes killed about one hundred militants each time, so Al-Shabaab stopped graduating new recruits. They have stopped congregating in one place, and certainly the movement of Al-Shabaab killers have either stopped or significantly decreased, but when COVID-19 came, airstrikes stopped or decreased.

Al-Shabaab found an opportunity to make movements, maybe to reorganize itself, maybe to put their infrastructure, their resources into places for future attacks. That is also another reading. The other reading is that these airstrikes have significantly disrupted the vehicles that are bringing explosives into major towns. We have also seen a reduction of Al-Shabaab’s major, complex attacks on military bases because this kind of attacks requires a large gathering of militants in certain points in order to attack a military base.

So we have seen this significant impact on Al-Shabaab by the airstrikes, but on the other hand, without a clear strategy on the ground, without a ground force taking on Al-Shabaab, airstrikes alone cannot completely neutralize the threat of Al-Shabaab in the country, and Al-Shabaab apart from these airstrikes has not suffered major losses in battle for a long time, for nearly ten years.

Al-Shabaab Resumes Attacks

So I am mentioning this COVID-19 period because when Somalia opened up in July and major restrictions were lifted, Al-Shabaab restarted carrying out major attacks with the last four or five weeks there were heavy attacks in Mogadishu at an upscale hotel. There was an attack in Mogadishu’s central prison.

There was an attack on a military camp manned by Somali forces and U.S. forces that happened very recently this month on September 7. A U.S. soldier was wounded in that attack, also four Somali soldiers were killed. But the importance of this attack for Al-Shabaab is that they were attacking a military base that accommodates, that hosts U.S. soldiers. This is significant because like many Al Qaeda affiliates, Al Qaeda member extremist groups, fighting the great infidel, the United States, is the pinnacle of jihadi [targets].

If we go back to the number of attacks that Al Shabaab has conducted against the United States since 2017, three U.S. soldiers and two Pentagon contractors were killed in Al Shabaab attacks. The most notable attack happened on January 5 in northeastern Kenya in Manda Bay. That is when Al-Shabaab carried out that complex attack on the airbase which is used by the United States and Kenya’s forces, and that was significant because Al-Shabaab bypassed several Kenyan military bases in order to attack this base where the United States soldiers were based.

So this is very important. Al Shabaab is sending a message that it can attack the United States and it will attack the United States given the opportunity. It also shows and gives us an understanding the nature of Al-Shabaab, which is a transnational organization that has ambitions beyond the borders of Somalia.

Mixed Messaging

Al-Shabaab sometimes sends mixed messages. In one week you might see them attacking, for instance, a hotel complex in Kenya, like the attack in January last year. That attack killed more than twenty people. The reason they gave for that attack was in response to President Trump recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Then in another week within that month you might see Al-Shabaab calling for Somalis to defend their country against Crusaders, portraying themselves as a nationalist organization.

So they gave these mixed messages, but it is a typical, transnational, terrorist organization that is bent on taking over Somalia, attacking other countries beyond the borders of Somalia, so that has been the threat that Al-Shabaab posed to Somalia, as well as to the countries in the region and beyond.

After the attack last week in southern Somalia where the U.S. soldier was wounded, Al-Shabaab issued a new threat against the United States, emphasizing that they are going to concentrate their attacks on U.S. interests and against the United States. This is probably partially propaganda, but also they have shown that they can attack the United States and U.S. interests.

We have seen a major attack, an insider attack, on the biggest airbase in Somalia in September last year about a year ago. This airbase hosts the largest number of U.S. troops that are training Somali forces. Nobody expected Al-Shabaab to infiltrate the base. It is heavily protected. It was a suicidal mission. All of the attackers were killed, about ten of them. None of them were injured on the part of the United States and Somali soldiers, but the message was that they can attack U.S. soldiers.

Actually, a few months later, Al-Shabaab showed us a video of their leader, sending off these attackers, who carried out the attack on the military base. They did not completely show his face, but they carried his message and they showed him partially. So Al-Shabaab remains a threat to the Somali government, to the regions, and also it remains a threat to other countries, and other countries’ interests in Somalia.

Al-Shabaab’s Losses

I want to talk about the other part of Al-Shabaab, which is despite this threat, Al-Shabaab itself has been losing some men in recent years. Within this year alone they have lost three major leaders. One of them was killed in February this year. Probably the most important leader Al-Shabaab lost for a long time since the death of its former leader in September 2014.

This gentleman’s name was Bashir Mohamed Mahamoud Qorgab. He was a ruthless, long-time military commander. The United States put five million dollars on his head, and apart from that he was commanding the Al-Shabaab wing that operates in northeastern Kenya, the Al-Shabaab group that was behind that attack on Manda Bay, the base in northeastern Kenya where the U.S. soldier and two contractors were killed in January. So he was killed in February. That was a major success for the Somali government and for the United States, which cooperated in this attack.

In April this year, the United States and Somali government also killed another commander. His name was Yusuf Jiis. He was the head of Al-Shabaab in charge of NGOs. Why are the NGOs important? Because they try to exploit NGOs. Al-Shabaab naturally expelled all of the international NGOs from Somalia, but they deal directly with local NGOs, some of whom represent international NGOs. So they tried to extort them, to get money from them, in order to finance their operations. This guy was reportedly involved in the ransacking of NGO offices in early 2000 in southwestern Somalia. He was quite ruthless, and he was taken out in April this year.

Lastly, just last month the United States targeted another military commander. His name was Abdulkadir Commando. He was killed near the town of Sakow in southern Somalia. The reason I am mentioning these key leaders is that these attacks had an impact on the operations of Al-Shabaab as I mentioned earlier. It is targeting not only foot-soldiers, but also key leaders.

But when it comes to the long-term strategy in dealing with Al-Shabaab, it might not account for very much unless there is a robust, on-the-ground strategy in order to fight against Al-Shabaab. African Union troops have twenty-two thousand soldiers in Somalia, but twenty-two thousand soldiers is insignificant in number compared to the size of Somalia, Somalia is a very large country and Al-Shabaab is a very deadly, organized, militant organization that is bent on playing the long game, fighting the long war, taking their time.

And their strategy, very, very clearly, is to wear off these operations, to exhaust these military operations against them, whether it is the United States’ airstrikes or whether it is the African Union Mission in Somalila, to exhaust these operations and eventually force them to leave Somalia. That is the game they are playing and not many people doubt that unless Somalia builds its own army, they could eventually retake most of the country, unless there is a really focused, viable strategy in order to build a viable Somali National Army.

Negotiation

One other item I want to mention is that because of the length of the African Union Mission in Somalia, which is now in its thirteenth year, and because of the unpredictability of airstrikes in the long-term – because, after all, these airstrikes are to disrupt Al-Shabaab attacks and to degrade, they are not necessarily there to completely neutralize the threat of Al-Shabaab – because of this there are forces in Somalia who are suggesting perhaps we should talk with Al-Shabaab.

This argument has gathered momentum since the Taliban started talking with the United States. They argue that since Al-Shabaab’s core members are Somalis, that they will be susceptible to negotiations that they will entertain. While this argument cannot be completely written off, negotiations might be possible with Al-Shabaab, I do not think the Somali government ever rejected negotiating with Al-Shabaab if that leads to a negotiated settlement.

But Al-Shabaab has only shown an interest in negotiations one time in its entire history, snd this is the reason that many people are saying maybe it is perhaps time to talk to Al-Shabaab. That was in 2009. A new government formed in Djibouti led by the former leader of the Islamic Courts Union, which emerged in Mogadishu in 2006 and almost took over south-central Somalia. Some Salafi scholars have tried to mediate between the new government led by the former leader of the Islamic Courts, and Al-Shabaab.

Al-Shabaab’s Conditions

Sharia law

At that time Al-Shabaab did not officially announce it was negotiating, but it was negotiating behind the scenes. It was talking to the Salafi leaders, and it came up with two major conditions. The first condition was that Somalia must accept Sharia law and the second condition was that African Union troops must leave Somalia very soon.

The Somali government, without any negotiation settlement with Al-Shabaab, found it difficult to accept one of the conditions. The first condition was accepted immediately by the Somali Parliament and they have implemented an article passed by the Parliament, which says that the Constitution and the laws of the country will never contradict Sharia. And they have passed a law, which says Sharia is the basis for the laws of the country. Still, that was not acceptable for Al-Shabaab. That is very important because Al-Shabaab did not recognize that Parliament, and I will explain later why they do not recognize the Parliament.

African Union Withdrawal

The second condition was the withdrawal of African Union troops from Somalia. That was very important for the government because if the troops withdraw at that time without the Somali Army, Al-Shabaab is going to take over the country. They are going to overthrow the government, so the government could not have accepted that condition. So both conditions – one of which was accepted by the government and they passed a law, accepting Sharia as the basis for the laws of the country – still that was not acceptable to Al-Shabaab.

The indication here is that Al-Shabaab is not going to accept the Somali government and the Somali Parliament because they are both apostates, and militant, jihadi, Salafi groups do not negotiate with groups they describe as apostates. But then there are those who say the Taliban is negotiating with the United States.

Bringing Al-Shabaab to the Table

It is very likely that Al-Shabaab might not reject negotiations with the United States, but they might not negotiate with the Somali government. But the majority consensus is that a negotiation will come if the power of Al-Shabaab is significantly reduced, and if the scholars of Al-Shabaab – because Al-Shabaab has scholars who issue fatwas, and these fatwas have described the Somali government as apostate, and they believe in killing the apostates in their own interpretation of Islam. And a majority of scholars believe that unless these scholars are engaged and these scholars withdraw that fatwa, describing or designating the Somali government and the Somali Parliament as apostates, the road to negotiations or the possibility of negotiating with Al-Shabaab is just going to be a futile exercise.

Al-Shabaab’s Roots

But what we have practically seen in Somalia is that Al-Shabaab was not the first, armed, militant, Salafi organization in Somalia. There was Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (AIAI), which had an armed wing in the early ’90s. From 1991 it fought against Somali administrations in the country.

There were a number of [clashes] between Somali administrations and militant organizations. There was fighting in April 1991. There was more fighting in 1992. There was fighting between Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya and Ethiopia in 1995. All these fights were defeated, the militant organizations were defeated and they were dispersed. And each time they were defeated, they came back to reorganize themselves in a different form. And the last fighting between Ethiopia and Al-Shabaab in 1995 completely destroyed Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, but it split them into two groups; a new Salafi jihadi group, which later on became Al-Shabaab, and another Salafi group, which completely renounced fighting jihad, and instead they opted for a peaceful spread of the religion throughout Somalia.

Degrading Al-Shabaab

So there are very large segments of the community who believe that, okay, Al-Shabaab will talk, they might talk, they might change, but there has to be certain pressures, certain developments that can force Al-Shabaab to negotiate. Al-Shabaab is not in a position now militarily, financially. They are taxing the population, not only in the areas they control, but in the areas they do not control, including Mogadishu, the capital. They are calling rich people and asking them to give millions of dollars, extorted money, in order to finance their operations.

So Al-Shabaab is a shadow administration that is also taxing, just like the Somali government, taxing the population, sending attacks, threatening, trying to micromanage people, not only the government and the people who work for it, but ordinary people, civil society leaders, journalists, others. They are threatening them.

In order to degrade them significantly and force them to negotiate, they say, Al-Shabaab has to either be militarily weakened, financially weakened, ideologically challenged, because after all, if you fight with them, but this ideology still attracts some youngsters, some people in the countryside, you may not make a lot of progress in terms of fighting the ideology.

So the fight against Al-Shabaab is not only a military [battle], it is also ideological, it is economic, it is social, like anywhere else in the rest of the world. Based on the experiences we have seen from 1991, there is a very good chance that if Al-Shabaab forces are weakened militarily, socially, ideologically, then they can be forced to negotiate or at least they can be split into two groups.

Defections from Al-Shabaab

So far the Somali government has been investing heavily in trying to get some people to defect from Al-Shabaab. There were a number of high profile people who defected from Al-Shabaab, but they have been defecting from Al-Shabaab since 2009, yet that has not affected their capacity, and their capability, and the threat. So instead of focusing on getting people to defect from Al-Shabaab, why not militarily pressure them, ideologically pressure them, economically pressure them? And then try to change the mindset and the dynamics on the ground, and the geographic presence of Al-Shabaab.

If these steps are taken, many Somalis believe Al-Shabaab can be significantly weakened. But I am going to conclude with my earlier remarks. Unless there is a very strong, determined Somali government that has a strategy in building a national army, that has a strategy in fighting against Al-Shabaab money laundering, that has a very viable, strong strategy to counter Al-Shabaab ideologically, then this fight is going to be a long war, and that is what we have now.

Hear the Q&A

Q&A

Sharia Courts

Robert R. Reilly:

Harun, thank you so much for that fascinating update. You offered the analogy with Afghanistan, so let me begin by asking you a question about the Taliban and Al-Shabaab. One very effective thing the Taliban did was institute a Sharia court system, which was scrupulously fair. It was unlike the Afghan government court system. It was not corrupt and it was expeditious. This really was an exercise of sovereignty. If you can administer justice, you are the sovereign of the area in which you administer. Has Al-Shabaab been able to do that in Somalia? Do they have a functioning Sharia court system that is respected?

Harun Maruf:

Al-Shabaab has about twelve maktabs or departments, what they call their Department of Defense, Department of Politics, Department of the Jabhas, and there is also a Department of Courts and a Department of Da’wah. So they have courts and they have been taking civil cases, land disputes, marriage disputes. They have been taking cases not only in the areas they control, but also there were reports of some people going to Al-Shabaab areas, seeking justice.

A Flawed Judicial System

But Al-Shabaab’s court system is heavily flawed. It is biased. Al-Shabaab does not believe in lawyers. They do not have lawyers for the accused. And there is significant evidence that people who have the power in how these courts rule are the Amniyat. Amniyat is the security branch of Al-Shabaab that has the intelligence unit, the assassination unit, the explosives unit, all of these come under the Amniyat.

So people are taken to courts in many occasions and courts issue rulings without any evidence. Judges read statements, saying that this person has confessed to the alleged crime, and they have executed a number of people, a countless number of people. So these Al-Shabaab courts have not been transparent, and the people who defected have testified and have told me that most of the people give forced confessions because they are tortured. And they have very dangerous prison cells where people are tortured and they are forced to confess.

Court Corruption

So they have this court system, but there are very serious question marks. But there were cases I documented where instead of inviting people who have a dispute over land for instance, one of the cases I came across, Al-Shabaab did not invite the people who were disputing [the issue]. Instead of inviting, they sent assassins and they got rid of one of the people who were in the dispute because he did not obey their order to appear before the court.

This happened. It is not just one case, there were a number of cases where Al-Shabaab assassinated people who refused to appear or recognize their courts. So they have this court system, but there are also these cases where people were either tortured and forced to confess or people were assassinated because they have not accepted Al-Shabaab rulings or they have not accepted Al-Shabaab summons to appear before their courts. But to answer the biggest question, the Taliban were hosting Al Qaeda, which is a transnational organization that believes in fighting global jihad. Al-Shabaab is Al Qaeda that believes in global jihad, that wants to fight beyond the borders of Somalia.

Sharia Law

Robert R. Reilly:

Thank you, Harun. Might I ask you before we leave the subject of the legal system, you mentioned that the legislature in Mogadishu accepted Sharia as the law or at least that no law in Somalia would contravene Sharia. Did that have a practical effect in the legal system? Did that have any meaning on the ground?

Harun Maruf:

It has meaning on the ground because, for instance, Al-Shabaab cases and cases of murder by members of the Somali military are taken by military courts, and these courts rely on Sharia in order to pass their judgements against Al-Shabaab, against killings, against murders, against the attacks by Al-Shabaab. These courts heavily rely on Sharia. There are also civil cases in the country. The civil laws in the country also refer to religion when they are passing judgement. There is the Somali penal code that was passed in 1964, which they also refer to when they are passing judgements.

So it has some meaning and it is also very important because the arguments that are coming from Al-Shabaab is that this is an apostate government and they are fighting in order to impose Sharia in the country, but the Somali Parliament and the Somali government are saying, okay, Sharia is the basis for the Somali laws.

The Somali Constitution says any law that is against the Sharia is not a law. That is an article in the Somali Constitution, so it is very important that Somalia has that because it is one of the articles that Al-Shabaab is using in order to manipulate people and say that this government is imposing man-made laws on the country.

The Caliphate Debate

Robert R. Reilly:

Now, in terms of its larger ambitions, you mentioned in your 2018 Westminster talk that Al-Shabaab’s objective was a caliphate, [but] of what dimensions? Where would this caliphate be? [Would this be] a universal caliphate?

Harun Maruf:

A universal caliphate. That is very important. Al-Shabaab discussed this. In 2010, there was a large meeting that Al-Shabaab held in southern Somalia, and that discussion was should we declare a caliphate in Somalia or should we become part of a larger caliphate in the world? And the discussants who were participating in that meeting agreed that the caliphate they are looking for is a global caliphate. It is not just a small caliphate in a small part of Somalia or a small part of Africa.

This was also a contentious point because the leader of Al-Shabaab at the time, Ahmed Abdi Godane, argued although he wants to wait, that the larger caliphate, the global caliphate, he still wants to be regarded as the amir al-mumineen of Somalia or the leader of the Islamic Emirate of Somalia.

Godane and Aweys

And that has raised some objection from some of the Al-Shabaab scholars. One of the scholars who rejected that notion is Hassan Dahir Aweys, and he later on defected or was forced to defect from the group. He is now under house arrest in Mogadishu. They rejected that idea and he did not want Ahmed Abdi Godane, the former emir of Al-Shabaab, to be considered as the interim leader of an Islamic Emirate in Somalia.

There are certain religious articles that govern (in the eyes of Al-Shabaab) this kind of caliphate, and the scholars who attended that conference agreed that Al-Shabaab did not meet this criteria, so they need to be part of a larger caliphate. And later on to emphasize that role they merged with Al Qaeda in February 2012.

Al Qaeda or ISIS

But when the caliphate emerged in Iraq and Syria, that is when some members of Al-Shabaab asked the hard question of the leaders of Al-Shabaab and said, okay, so the caliphate came. Why do we not join the caliphate? And then the question became political. What is going to be our role? Who is going to appoint and dictate us? We do not want somebody in Iraq and Syria to call the shots. We are going to stay as Al-Shabaab, as Al Qaeda.

And that is partially why they stuck with Al-Shabaab. Apart from the emotional connection, the background that they shared with Al Qaeda, some of the leaders of Al-Shabaab were trained in Afghanistan. They met Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. Because of that affinity and that affection and because they did not want to lose relevance in Somalia they decided not to join the caliphate, but there was a time when the vast majority of Al-Shabaab members, the ordinary members, were very keen on joining, merging with ISIS.

But Al-Shabaab saw the danger that they would lose their relevance, their leaders felt that their positions would be in question, and they rejected the idea. And they went against the people who advocated for this idea. They attacked and killed some of them. This is why a small number of Al-Shabaab defected and announced the Somali Islamic State Group, and merged with ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2015.

Funding

Robert R. Reilly:

Harun, you mentioned the taxation system that Al-Shabaab has inside Somalia, but that cannot be sufficient to sustain them. I do not know how many troops they now have or the size of Al-Shabaab, you might mention current estimates, so where does the rest of the money come from and where do the weapons come from?

Harun Maruf:

Taxation

This is very important. Al-Shabaab is a complex organization. They are a multifaceted organization. They have been taxing businesses, wealthy people, shops, all kinds of small businesses in Mogadishu, and in most Somali towns in south central Somalia, but Al-Shabaab also controls the countryside, largely, vast land in the countryside. And commercial goods leave major towns in Somalia in order to go to another town, and because Al-Shabaab is still capable of attacking not only the Somali government and African Union forces, but also civilian vehicles.

These transportation vehicles, these commercial vehicles that are moving goods from one part of the country to another go through Al-Shabaab territory, and Al-Shabaab erected so many checkpoints throughout the country in order to tax this. They tax the goods, they tax the vehicles, and they tax the people. So Al-Shabaab is taxing a vast amount of money. In 2018, for instance, a local think tank estimated that Al-Shabaab collected $27 million. That is a lot of money in Somalia, where they pay, for instance, their militias between $30 and $70 a month.

Livestock

And apart from this Al-Shabaab is involved in other illicit trades. They make money in other forms. They also collect animals from the public, from the pastoral community. They collect thousands and thousands of animals, camels, sheep, goats, and as you well know, livestock is the number one pillar of Somalia’s economy, livestock for exportation.

Somalia heavily relies on livestock exportation. Somalia traditionally has relied on livestock exportation, and Al-Shabaab collects this large number of livestock, which they redistribute, some of them to poorer people, but we believe and experts believe that these animals are also sold and it also generates a large amount of money, which they use to run their operations, incuding buying weapons.

Weapons

But they have also been carrying out attacks in 2014, 2015, 2016 on military installations. They ran over and seized a large number of weapons, which can sustain them for a long period. So the weapons that they need to buy today are the explosive agents, TNT. This is the kind of weapons they have bought recently from outside the country, but the rest of the weapons had been abandoned in the country.

Somalia has been heavily weaponized, heavily militarized for decades because of the war between Somalia and Ethiopia, and because the former military government of Somalia heavily imported weapons from the Soviet Union. These weapons are still in abundance in the country.

Size

Robert R. Reilly:

And if you could briefly address the estimated size of the Al-Shabaab militias today.

Harun Maruf:

The estimated size of Al-Shabaab according to my book I based on that estimate interviews that I had with two Al-Shabaab defectors; the former number two Al-Shabaab leader, Mukhtar Robow, and the former military intelligence officer of Al-Shabaab. And they both came to very similar numbers, that is thirteen thousand men in Somalia. Estimates given by other experts range from five thousand to ten thousand, but this estimate has been in place since 2009-2010.

It is inconceivable that the number of Al-Shabaab members would stay the same for ten years because they have been recruiting militias from the clans, from the countryside, from the schools. And they have forced a number of clans to — as they call ‘donate’ — young boys. For instance, Al-Shabaab has carried out a daring attack on Puntland, that is a relatively stable part of Somalia, in 2016. And they lost a lot of men in this attack, and a large number of their attackers were captured.

Recruitment

And the young men who were captured were aged from 13, 14, 15, 16, very young aged kids, so that shows that Al-Shabaab has been recruiting from the schools, from the clans, from the madrassas, and they are still recruiting. The recruitment in large numbers and graduation of large number of Al-Shabaab recruits have probably stopped recently because of the airstrikes, but the recruiting nonetheless has not stopped. And Al-Shabaab largely operates in small numbers, anyway. They are a guerrilla group, carrying out hit-and-run attacks apart from once in a while a major attack on a military base. So I would estimate their numbers at at least thirteen thousand.

Clans

Robert R. Reilly:

Harun, some analysts say one mistake the United States made in Iraq in 2003 was a lack of appreciation for the tribal system in that country. They thought Iraq is a very cosmopolitan place and we need not take the tribes into account. There was a very low level of awareness of the importance of tribes.

You mentioned the clans in Somalia. Are they of paramount importance, and how does the clan structure play out in respect to the government vis-à-vis Al-Shabaab?

Harun Maruf:

Clan Power-Sharing

That is a very important question. Somali clans have been an important factor in the conflict in the country. I say this because when the former government of Siad Barre collapsed in 1991, clans became very important in the civil war. Clan militias have ransacked, destroyed towns and they have taken the country in a downhill.

Clan warlords have been marauding the country and this is why the famine broke out in Somalia in 1991-1992. This is why President Bush Sr. sent thirty thousand U.S. troops to Somalia in December 1992 in order to degrade the clan warlords and help the aid reach the people who need it. About a thousand people were dying in Somalia at the time. So the clans are a very important part of Somalia.

Clans also play a very important part in the current government because the entire political system of Somalia is based on clan power-sharing, the so-called 4.5 Formula. There are four major clans and other smaller clans that take half of what a major clans takes. We have 275 members in the parliament. Each major clan takes 61 members. The rest, which is half of that, 31 members, go to the rest of the clans. So the clans are very important.

How Al-Shabaab Used the Clan System

Al-Shabaab came and took advantage of this clan system, but before Al-Shabaab the Islamic Courts came. That was very important because the Islamic Courts convinced the clans that in the absence of government, the only way they can restore some time of stability in their respective areas is to form Islamic courts that are based on clans.

They were clan warlords that do not believe in Islamic courts, but there were religious scholars who wanted to start Islamic Courts in order to pacify their respective areas, their regions, and this is the system that Al-Shabaab and Salafi jihadists took advantage of. They got themselves embedded in the Islamic courts, and they strengthened and grew within the Islamic courts until it was too late to stop in 2006. This is how Al-Shabaab emerged in 2006, so the clan system is very important.

Clan Support Today

Al-Shabaab used that system in order to recruit young boys, in order to collect weapons from the clan. They still hold meetings for the clan elders, and ask them to bring a hundred men from each clan, and a hundred guns, rifles. They still do that today and Al-Shabaab uses that to their advantage and they do not shy away from mentioning clans who support them. The name them and they say these clans came to our aid and because of that they are ahead of the other clans, and they force other clans to also do the same.

So they eulogize this clan system and the clans who support them, but clans are also important and they can become a tool to fight against Al-Shabaab because when it comes to politics and political representation, clan representation is very important. There are still some clans who are supporting Al-Shabaab because they do not see themselves to be benefiting from the current power-sharing, which is the system that the Somali government is using, so the clan system can be used against them.

I want to mention one very important thing. Clans also have weapons. I mentioned earlier that one of the biggest challenges facing the Somali National Army is the clan issue. Why? Because there are efforts in order to integrate different clans into the Somali Army so that they reflect the country, and that has not worked very well so far.

And one other important thing is that according to the last assessment made by the Somali government, about thirty percent of the weapons that the Somali Army uses against Al-Shabaab belongs to certain clans. So this is why it is very important clans are engaged, represented in politics, and mobilized against Al-Shabaab.

Al-Shabaab knows this danger and they continuously court clan elders. They continuously held seminars, workshops, endless [events]. I have not seen within the last five years or so the Somali government or the United States, holding a meeting for clan elders in Somalia. Al-Shabaab holds seminars and workshops for clans almost on a monthly basis just to keep them in check and to make sure they are intimidated because this is also intimidation. There were meetings last year, for instance, that Al-Shabaab arranged with elders who selected delegates who will be voting for the MPs.

I mentioned the agreement reached by the federal government and the Somali regional leaders today. This agreement says each MP will be selected, will be voted on by one hundred-and-one delegates. These delegates will be selected by clan elders, so it is very important. Any delegate selected by these clans is an important delegate. So this is why Al-Shabaab last year invited the clan elders and agreed to a deal with them that they will not be participating in the elections, that they will not be electing delegates to elect MPs. I do not think that is going to stop the election from taking place, but they can also manipulate these clan elders, so that is also another vulnerability.

Before Al-Shabaab held this meeting for the clan elders, they assassinated dozens and dozens of delegates who participated in the last election in 2017 in order to scare people from participating in this process. So Al-Shabaab assassinates clan elders who do not listen to them, who participate in government elections and government programs, and they keep clan elders in check regularly in order to keep their support on their side.

Geopolitics

Robert R. Reilly:

If I may ask one last question, Harun, supposedly Turkey has its largest overseas military base in Somalia for the purposes of training the Somali National Army. Other countries have a presence there aside from the United States; Qatar, the UAE. There seems to be a lot of players. Can you speak briefly as to their competing interests and how that is playing out inside the country?

Harun Maruf:

That is another very important question. Somalia has a government that is very fragile, that is just starting to stand on its feet, but Somalia is also located on a very strategic part of Africa. Somalia has the longest coastline in Africa. Somallia is very close to the Middle East, to the Far East, and Somalia has vast mineral resources.

Turkey

Humanitarian Aid

I am going to start with Turkey. Turkey came to Somalia at a time when Somalia was going through a difficult time. That was in 2011. That was the second time since 1991 that Somalia suffered famine, and thousands of people were dying every day. There was not a lot of international attention to this disaster until the former Prime Minister, now the President of Turkey, Erdoğan, visited Mogadishu in August 2011.

That visit led to visitors from different countries and pledges from other countries, from Africa, from Arab countries, from Western countries to see what was happening on the ground. It was a landmark visit that captured the hearts of Somalis because Turkey opened its support to Somalia. Turkish charities went to Somalia. They helped people who were suffering from famine and starvation, and it was a turning point. It was a game changer. It led to other countries doing the same, and famine was contained.

Then Turkey moved on to development programs, building roads, buildings, rehabilitating old government buildings including the two buildings of the Somali Parliament; the Upper House, the Senate, and the Lower House. They modernized the seaport in Mogadishu, as well as modernizing the airport in Mogadishu. So Turkey heavily invested in Somalia. Hundreds of millions of dollars were given to Somalia by Turkey in aid, but also billions of dollars were invested by Turkey in development projects.

Military Aid

So the establishment of the military base came in 2017 and that was very significant because Somalia was training soldiers in Ethiopia, in Uganda, in Djibouti, in Kenya, and these troops were coming and they were just joining the fight against Al-Shabaab. So there was no cohesion, there was no uniform training. There was a unit of Somali soldiers, a brigade of Somali soldiers, trained by Ethiopia, and people would say, oh, this is brigade X and Y, trained by Ethiopia, or by the United Arab Emirates, or by Kenya. So what Turkey did is it said we are going to do a uniform training for all these different soldiers, so they set up a very modern military training [program] in the country.

But in 2017, when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain cut ties with Qatar, Somalia found itself in a difficult position. Why? The United Arab Emirates had a military training facility in Mogadishu and in other parts of the country. It was training the Somali Army and it was helping the government. Saudi Arabia was financially helping the government. Turkey and Qatar were also helping the government, not only militarily but also through budgetary support. Turkey still until today gives $25 million in budgetary support to Somalia. That is a lot of money when the annual budget of Somalia is $364 million, so that is significant.

So the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Egypt pressured Somalia, among many other countries, to cut ties with Qatar, and Somalia said Qatar has been helpful to us the same way you have been helpful to us, so we are not going to cut ties, we are going to stay neutral. But staying neutral was a lilfeline, it was a reprieve for Qatar because when these countries isolated Qatar, one of the airspaces that Qatar Airways and Qatar officials could use was Somalia in order to commute to the rest of the world, to Africa, to Asia, to the West. Somalia found itself in a very important place, so Qatar got even closer to Somalia. Qatar respected Somalia even more for the independent decision Somalia had taken. That led to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia getting even more agitated.

Qatari influence in Somalia

One other important thing is that there are individuals who are ideologically close to Qatar, who are within the Somali government. So these individuals have vigorously defended Qatar. The Somali government turned against the United Arab Emirates when the UAE sent a plane-laod of cash, $9.5 billion, which the Somali government thought was for the opposition to the government, in order to weaken the Somali government and undermine the government into influence the emergence of a more pro-UAE, pro-Saudi Arabia politicians.

So the Somali government took a very decisive action. It closed the UAE military training facility and it came very close to cutting ties with the UAE. The ties were not cut, but the two governments are not on good terms, and that has undermined the political stability. It certainly undermined the training of the Somali Army because the United Arab Emirates was one of the countries that were really significantly improving the Somali Army, but that support has stopped now. The Somali government still has that $9.5 billion. It has not returned it to the UAE. The UAE asked for this money to be returned.

Relations with Egypt

The relations between the two countries is very, very complicated. We do not know if this election will change that, but Somalia got closer to African countries, to Ethiopia. The current Somali leadership have grown close in its relations with the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea, and that has also annoyed the government of Egypt because Egypt was also looking for Arab countries that support it in its dispute with Ethiopia over the Nile River. So some Arab countries support Egypt.

Somalia is a member of the Arab League. It joined the Arab League in 1972. But Somalia is also located in a very strategic position, very close to Ethiopia. Egypt supported Somalia militarily, historically, when it was fighting aginst Ethiopia. This current Somali government has changed that dynamic. It got closer to Ethiopia. It turned away Egypt, so Egypt is furious, Ethiopia is happy, but Somalia is in a fragile situation.

Robert R. Reilly:

Harun, thank you very much for this extraordinarily rich presentation on Somalia and Al Shabaab today, and Al Shabaab’s strategy. I greatly appreciate your return to the Westminster Institute. I thank our viewers and invite them to go to the Westminster Institute’s webpage, where you will find this lecture posted and you can explore our other videos on the Westminster Institute YouTube channel. Thank you very much for joining us.

Harun Maruf:

Thank you very much, Robert. It is an honor joining you, and I am glad I have appeared at the Westminster Institute again.

Hagia Sophia: The Latest Target of Erdogan’s Supremacist Policies
(Dr. Aykan Erdemir, August 28, 2020)

Transcript available below

About the speaker

Dr. Aykan Erdemir, senior director of FDD’s Turkey program, is a former member of the Turkish Parliament (2011 to 2015) who served in the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, EU Harmonization Committee, and the Ad Hoc Parliamentary Committee on the IT Sector and the Internet.

As an outspoken defender of pluralism, minority rights, and religious freedoms in the Middle East, Aykan has been at the forefront of the struggle against religious persecution, hate crimes, and hate speech in Turkey. He is a founding member of the International Panel of Parliamentarians for Freedom of Religion or Belief, and a drafter of and signatory to the Oslo Charter for Freedom of Religion or Belief (2014), as well as a signatory legislator to the London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism.

He has edited seven books, including Rethinking Global Migration: Practices, Policies, and Discourses in the European Neighbourhood (KORA) and Social Dynamics of Global Terrorism: Risk and Prevention Policies (IOS Press). He is co-author of the 2016 book Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces (Routledge).

On April 27, 2016, Aykan was awarded the Stefanus Prize for Religious Freedom in recognition of his advocacy for minority rights and religious freedoms. In March 2015, he was awarded a distinguished fellowship at the Oxford Centre for the Study of Law and Public Policy. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Hill, Politico Europe, The Huffington Post, The National Interest, War On The Rocks, The Cipher Brief, Business Insider, Turkish Policy Quarterly, Hurriyet Daily News, Ahram Online, and The Times of Israel.

After completing his BA in International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara, Aykan received an MA in Middle Eastern Studies and PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, where his doctoral dissertation was entitled, “Incorporating Alevis: The Transformation of Governance and Faith-based Collective Action in Turkey.” He also worked as a doctoral fellow at Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a research associate at the University of Oxford’s Center on Migration, Policy and Society.

The views of the speaker are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Westminster Institute.

Transcript

Robert R. Reilly:

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Westminster Institute’s continuing series of Zoom lectures, which we are holding during this time of the virus. I am extremely happy to welcome back to the Westminster Institute Dr. Aykan Erdemir, who is Senior Director of the Turkey program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is a former member of the Turkish Parliament (2011 to 2015) who served in the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, and other EU committees. Aykan has been at the forefront of the struggle against religious persecution, hate crimes, and hate speech in Turkey. He is a founding member of the International Panel of Parliamentarians for Freedom of Religion or Belief, and a drafter of and signatory to the Oslo Charter for Freedom of Religion or Belief (2014).

Dr. Erdemir has edited seven books, including Rethinking Global Migration: Practices, Policies, and Discourses in the European Neighbourhood (KORA) and Social Dynamics of Global Terrorism: Risk and Prevention Policies (IOS Press). He is the co-author of the 2016 book Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces (Routledge). In 2016, Aykan was awarded the Stefanus Prize for Religious Freedom in recognition of his advocacy for minority rights and religious freedoms. In 2015, he was awarded a distinguished fellowship at the Oxford Centre for the Study of Law and Public Policy.

His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Turkish Policy Quarterly, and many other journals and newspapers. After completing his BA in International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara, Aykan received an MA in Middle Eastern Studies and a PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. He has also worked as a research associate at the University of Oxford’s Center on Migration, Policy and Society. He last spoke to Westminster in 2018 on, “How Erdoğan Consolidates Power: The Weaponization of Turkish Media.” His topic today is, “Hagia Sophia: The Latest Target of Erdoğan’s Supremacist Policies.” Welcome back, Aykan.

Aykan Erdemir:

Introduction

Thank you, Bob, for the kind introduction and for this opportunity to address your distinguished audience. Today, I would like to take a look at Turkish President Erdoğan’s policies through the lens of Hagia Sophia. You know Hagia Sophia’s conversion into a mosque in and of itself is an extremely important topic, and we could spend our time just discussing that. But I would like to situate it as part of a broader alarming trend that we are seeing with Turkey’s Islamist President Erdoğan.

Since we planned this event actually another church has been converted into a mosque – namely, the church of Chora in Istanbul – and so I would like to add that also to our subject matter because the two are also intricately linked.

So just to give background as to what these two churches mean and how they were converted into mosques, let me begin by saying that there have been numerous churches named Hagia Sophia across Turkey. We are familiar with the one in Istanbul, which has been the most important, sacred architecture , especially for Orthodox Christians, for almost two millennia.

But besides that there were other Hagia Sophias, which suffered the same fate before the one in Istanbul. Today I would like to draw attention to four other Hagia Sophias. There was one in Trabzon on the Black Sea coast, one in a sub-province of Bursa in a town called Iznik, the ancient Nicaea, as well as another one in Vize.

All these three Hagia Sophias, you know smaller Hagia Sophias, but nevertheless important Hagia Sophias, were converted into mosques gradually under Erdoğan’s rule. So this shows that Erdoğan has had a very patient and systematic policy of converting Hagia Sophias into mosques. But of course, the biggest prize, not just for Erdoğan but Turkey’s successive generations of Islamists, was the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

History

Now, Hagia Sophia’s history is very interesting not just within the Turkish republican history but also since the Byzantine times. This was a magnificent Orthodox church central not only to Christianity, but also to the East Roman Empire, to the Byzantine Empire. And in 1453, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II conquered Istanbul, he converted the church into a mosque as a symbol of the Muslim, Turkic ruler’s domination of the Christian subjects.

Since then Hagia Sophia served as a mosque, but only when in 1934, the founder of the Turkish Republic, the secular Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, with a Council of Ministers’ decision decided to turn the Hagia Sophia mosque into a museum.

Symbolism

Now, this was a very important move for various reasons. It, of course, symbolized the new era of the secular republic of Turkey and equal citizenship, a state that is at least theoretically equal distance to its Muslim, and Christian, and Jewish, and other citizens. At the same time it was an important symbolic gesture to Greece as well as Turkey’s other Western neighbors, showing that this is no longer the Ottoman Empire that is pursuing conquest and domination, this was the secular republic of Turkey that would like to be a member of the European family of nations. And I think it was a very positive and important gesture.

Definitely, the Turkish Republic had all sorts of shortcomings when it comes to separation of mosque and state, when it comes to institutionalizing equal citizenship, and more importantly guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of Turkey’s ethnic and religious minorities. But I would like to argue the glass was half-full, so despite all these shortcomings, there were important steps taken. If successive Turkish political leaders had pursued this track, I think Turkey could have become and remained a beacon for the Muslim majority world to emulate in terms of institutionalizing pluralism, fundamental rights and freedoms, and most importantly religious freedoms.

Hence, for Turkey’s Islamists the Hagia Sophia remained also a symbol but a negative symbol. To them that was a symbol of defeat of their supremacist, sectarian project. So especially in the aftermath of the Second World War we see a vocal campaign that revolves around the Hagia Sophia, revolves around this crusade to convert it into a mosque.

It was more than just a conversion of the building itself, but it was a symbol of reversing Turkey’s fortunes, reversing Western-oriented, pro-secular Turkey’s trajectory and reinstating a majoritarian, Sunni Muslim rule that is back on a pan-Islamist and neo-Ottoman track. And in case you are wondering, this was also the ethos with which Erdoğan was raised and socialized in.

Strategic Patience

He was inculcated with these ideas, so it is no coincidence that when Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002, this became a key but secret goal of Erdoğan’s. So this is a point that I would like to emphasize: that Erdoğan since the rise of his AKP to power in 2002 remained quite demur, what I call a strategic patience at work when it comes to Hagia Sophia because when we take a look at Erdoğan before the militant Islamists of the ’70s, 80’s, 90′, he was open about Hagia Sophia.

But when he claimed that he was reformed, that he was now kind of a conservative, Muslim, democratic leader, he dissimulated when it comes to Hagia Sophia. He pretended as if he had given up his old, radical, Islamist ways, but instead for those of us observing Erdoğan closely, this was only a renewed and patient strategy to build Islamist domination and supremacy in Turkey. This patient path meant over this last decade meant gradual, legal, and incremental steps toward converting Hagia Sophias.

Legal Paths

Now, there are two legal models at hand and I would also like to present them. One is the three Hagia Sophias I mentioned, the one in Trabzon, Nicaea, and Vize, which were museums under the Turkish Ministry of Culture. So in those cases Turkey’s Directorate General of Foundations, which is in charge of all the pious foundations in Turkey, took the Ministry of Culture to court.

So one Turkish state agency took another agency to court, and through the courts took over these three museums and converted them into mosques. So they managed to prove in court (under Erdoğan’s of course immense pressure) that the Ministry of Culture was basically occupying sites that belonged to the Directorate of General Affairs, and that they had a right to convert them into mosques.

When it comes to Hagia Sophia and Chora in Istanbul, there was a different legal path at work because these two churches then converted into mosques, then converted into museums. Basically, this process took place through the Council of Ministers’ decisions. Hence, it was a private association that took these two Council of Ministers’ decisions to court to one of the high courts in Turkey, namely the Council of State. And the Council of State’s reversal of those Council of Ministers’ decisions paved the way to Erdoğan’s conversion of these two monumentally important church museums into mosques again.

Rhetoric

Now, the act of conversion itself is important, it is highly symbolic, but I argue that we have to pay attention to the rhetoric, to the explosive rhetoric, the official rhetoric, that accompanied the conversion of these churches because that is what should alarm us as much as the act of conversions themselves.

Now, Erdoğan, as is usually the case, used multiple discourses, different ways of framing the debate to address different audiences. At home he was very brazen. He framed this whole debate around this issue of conquest, so Hagia Sophia’s conversion was yet another step in the Turko-Muslim conquest of this land.

I know it sounds strange that almost one hundred years into the secular republic of Turkey, Turkey’s ruling party is still trying to conquer the land and the peoples, the citizens, and their homes of worship, but this is the bizarre thinking of not only Erdoğan but also his coalition partner, namely the Nationalist Action Party, Turkey’s ultra-nationalists. In fact, the leader of the ultra-nationalist party stated that this was yet another step in the centuries-long process of conquest of Turkey. So he again framed it as part of the same conquest mentality.

Framing Conversion as Conquest

To make matters worse, pro-government circles framed conversion of Hagia Sophia through an Ottoman legal term and an Islamic legal term called the ‘right of conquests’. So they claimed that the legitimacy for converting Hagia Sophia was based on Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II’s ‘right of conquest’, namely, literally, the ‘right of sword’.

And in fact there were others in the pro-government circles who referred to minorities as ‘remnants of the sword’. This is another pejorative term used frequently in Turkey to refer to Armenians and Greeks. So what this basically means is those few Christians who still remain in Turkey are ‘remnants of the sword’. These are individuals who escaped centuries of pogroms and mass killings. I would argue that a government or a ruling party would refrain from such language, right? It is an embarrassing term.

But in an interesting way Turkey’s Islamists and ultra-nationalists use it in an affirmative way. They use it to simply signify their domination over Turkey’s religious minorities, and that the right makes it right, that they, the beholders of swords, are the ones who have the legitimate right to rule and decide on the future of minorities as well as their religious and cultural heritage.

Doublespeak

So this was the language at home. What made it more alarming is also the ruling coalition’s constant references to the few Turkish, Muslim individuals who resisted this conversion as fifth columns, as Byzantines, and as traitors. So this was not only an attempt against Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities, but this was also an Islamist attempt against Turkey’s pro-secular Muslims who disagreed with Erdoğan.

You can imagine it is extremely difficult to speak up against Erdoğan, especially when it comes to such a sensitive topic. Erdoğan dominates over 95% of Turkey’s media. Turkey’s journalists, opposition politicians, academics, are frequently in jail based on trumped up charges, often brought by Erdoğan himself. So it really takes a lot of courage to speak up, but nevertheless there were individuals who spoke up and this was the treatment they received.

Framing Critics as Traitors

Now, of course, this serves two purposes. You not only frame those Muslims who oppose Islamist policies as being crypto-Greeks, crypto-Byzantines, crypto-Christians, but you also put pressure on Turkey’s religious minorities because you isolate them by framing any Muslims who would be in solidarity with them, who would like to work with them, as basically traitors, as fifth columns. So this really will have long-term repercussions in terms of building alliances and defending the rights of Turkey’s minorities.

Now, when it came to the West, Erdoğan again had this quite typical doublespeak. He, of course, did not use the term ‘conquest’. He made sure he did not come across as a radical Islamist. He gave assurances. He said that that Hagia Sophia would be open to people of all faiths. People would have access all throughout the day.

In fact, pro-government circles said that it would be even better. They said look, back in the days you had to buy a ticket to enter the museum. Now, in the mosque form you can enter and visit any time of day, not just during museum hours, and you do not even need to buy a ticket, so there were all of these ‘sugar-coating’ attempts and Erdoğan simply presented this as a court decision, just a legal procedure.

Global Influence

Now, there was a third set of rhetoric, and this is Erdoğan’s address to the global Islamist movement, to his fellow Muslim Brotherhood members as well as other radical Islamists. And we also saw this in various social media messages and in messages Erdoğan conveyed made in Arabic. And again, there was a strong emphasis on conquest, but there was also a strong emphasis on this process all around the world.

Erdoğan referred to this as the bringer of good news also for other sites, including Al Aqsa Mosque. So he talked about liberating Al Aqsa Mosque, which was kind of a message about Israel, although he did not mention Israel. Again, one could find Erdoğan’s messaging toward the Muslim majority world to also be problematic.

Repercussions on the Discourse and Policies in the Middle East

And in case you are wondering whether this is just a concern on the part of us analysts, whether we are reading too much into it, there is already I think enough evidence to show that Erdoğan’s conversion of Hagia Sophia and Chora and the accompanying rhetoric have already had a very negative repercussions on the discourse and policies in the Middle East and beyond.

We have documented numerous cases of radical Islamists, stating their support of Hagia Sophia’s conversion, but then vowing to carry out further acts in their parts of the world. For example, a Muslim Brotherhood member from Jordan, speaking on a Muslim Brotherhood channel, after praising Erdoğan and the conversion of Hagia Sophia, stated that when the Muslims conquer all of Palestine and Israel, they would of course push out all Jews to the sea, and convert all synagogues into mosques. So this was just one of the examples in which other extremists were emboldened, other supremacists were emboldened by Erdoğan’s practice and rhetoric. And it would not be surprising to see more such discourse and potentially policies to come.

And of course here I would like to note that we are not discussing all of this in a vacuum, right? We are discussing this in the immediate aftermath of one of the most brutal genocidal campaigns of killing, enslavement, mass rape, and forced conversion in the Middle East. We have seen the Islamic State and other radical Islamist movements that targeted Yazidis, Christians, Muslims who did not fit into their narrow view of Islam as victims.

So I think it is extremely irresponsible and risky to fuel such hatred, such prejudices, to convey such inciting rhetoric in the Middle East and North Africa that happen to be still suffering from the consequences of these recent episodes of violence and mass killing and destruction.

Equal Citizenship

Now in terms of what this act does to Turkey’s religious minorities, my key message is this has completely transformed Turkey’s citizenship regime. Yes, although Turkey is nominally a secular republic and has legalized full, legal, citizenship rights, in practice, of course, there has been systematic discrimination. But now with this conversion and the accompanying rhetoric I would argue that Turkey’s religious minorities’ citizens are being relegated from citizens who are being discriminated against to subjects who are dominated.

So things have gone for the worse. In fact, we can hear this first hand from the protests of the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, Archbishop Elpidophoros, who emphasized the exact same point because he, too, is also a Turkish citizen and he mentioned in a BBC interview how this transforms his status as an equal citizen in Turkey.

And so it created a hierarchy of Turkey’s citizens, and by relegating Turkey’s Christians, and by extension Jews, into subjects, tolerated subjects of a benevolent ruler, reintroduced an Ottoman idiom. And again it is very important to pay attention to Erdoğan’s accompanying propaganda campaign because those in the audience who might have come across Erdoğan’s spectacles of tolerance, namely the Turkish government’s sponsorship of restoration of churches and synagogues, could be confused.

Spectacles of Tolerance

They could argue how does this Erdoğan, the tolerant Erdoğan who pays for church and synagogue restorations, come together with this Erdoğan who talks about conquest, and the right of the sword, and dominates minorities? And I would argue the two are basically two sides of the same coin because for Erdoğan the minorities in their subordinate status should be subjects who should be bestowed with the benevolent tolerance of the ruler, so they should know their place, and they should when asked play their role in spectacles of tolerance and inclusion.

In fact, just like Iran, we have begun to see increasing demands by the Turkish government to force Turkey’s religious minority communities to sign and issue statements, saying that everything is wonderful in Turkey, that they are free to worship, that there is perfect freedom of religion in Turkey. So I always argue if religious minority communities are in a position to constantly affirm that life is good for them, that is a sign that something is deeply wrong in that polity because we see the same in Iran with Iran’s Jewish community, frequently put under pressure by the Islamic Republic to express how free they are and that they have a wonderful time in Iran.

Recent Examples

Now, two of the spectacles of tolerance were Erdoğan’s recent announcement that this year there will be for the first time after the restoration period liturgies held in the Sumela Monastery, which is a Greek Orthodox monastery on the eastern Black Sea coast, and in Aghtamar Church in Lake Van, which is an Armenian Apostolic Church.

Now again both this monastery and the church have been restored by the Turkish State, but these properties have not been handed over to their minority communities, so this is a very important point. Erdoğan’s government restores some of these synagogues and churches, but then keeps them under government control, and decides if and when minority communities can hold liturgy, and when that happens, televises that widely as proof of Turkey’s tolerance and inclusion of religious minorities.

So I call this a tolerance for minority worship sites without their worshipers. So it is a world where almost all minorities have been wiped out, almost all Christians and Jews are no longer existent, but then some monuments are there for occasional spectacles.

Impact in the Muslim World

Now, let me move onto the impact of these conversions in the Muslim majority world because there was a very mixed result. First of all, Erdoğan wanted the first Friday prayer at Hagia Sophia to be a major spectacle, emphasizing his leadership in the Muslim world, as well as in the world at large.

So he invited a long list of dignitaries all the way from the Pope to heads of Muslim majority states. To his surprise, no one else showed up, so there were no dignitaries who wanted to join him in this spectacle, so the only words of praise came from the usual suspects: Iran, Hamas, Pakistan, and a few other radical Islamist actors. In general, most chose to look the other way. They did not want to be associated with Erdoğan’s act of conversion.

Again, in the Muslim majority world we had two different kinds of opposition. On the one hand, we have a kind of pro-Western, pro-secular, pluralist Muslims who saw this as an offense. In fact, some of them even tried to push within the Islamic tradition against such conversion, arguing that it is against Islam and Islamic law as well.

But then you also see an interesting pushback from traditional monarchies in the Gulf, in the Middle East. Since there is an ongoing fight between Erdoğan and the Muslim Brotherhood and the established traditional monarchies in the Middle East, this was also yet another battlefield.

As we have seen lately, some of these countries, for example, the United Arab Emirates, have been having a very pro-active campaign to build churches and synagogues and to encourage a multi-faith coexistence in these countries. So they highlighted their efforts and contrasted it with Erdoğan’s ongoing efforts to convert Christian sites.

Western Response

Now, beyond the Muslim world, let me give you a quick overview of the response or the lack thereof from the West. Now, we have seen some of the usual talking points, expressions of concern, from the United States International Commission of Religious Freedom, from the State Department, from some Europeans heads of state.

Of course, there were intellectuals, academics, and advocates who raised their voices, but overall I would argue that the policy response was weak, meaning this was exactly what Erdoğan predicted, that there would only be some statements, mild statements, which would then be within a week or two or a month forgotten. And in fact, as we now approach September, that is where we are, right? Hagia Sophia, unfortunately, is not necessarily making headlines and it no longer appears to be central to the policymaking process.

Of course, we still wait to see whether Erdoğan’s policy and rhetoric will prompt the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom to consider Turkey’s Tier 2 Status in its annual report. And whether it will go forward with recommending the State Department designate Turkey as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC). If and when that happens, of course, the White House can issue sanctions based on the International Religious Freedom Act, and this would be of course a strong policy response that proves to Erdoğan that he cannot just get away with some statements but there will be some material consequences for his actions.

EU Response

When it comes to the European Union, again I think it would have been unrealistic to expect much of a pushback because on a wide range of issues the European Union so far has proven to be ineffective when it comes to pushing back against Erdoğan’s policies. And Erdoğan continues to hold the Syrian refugees as leverage in disciplining the European Union, threatening Brussels with opening what he calls the floodgates of refugees to destabilize and undermine Europe. So this limits the room for maneuver when it comes to the European Union as well as the constituent nation-states, but as you can imagine, especially Greece was very vocal and continues to be so.

Russia

Now, I would like to emphasize one country, Russia, which has had a very interesting take, a very strategic take on the Hagia Sophia issue. Putin, who has very cordial relations with Turkish President Erdoğan despite their disagreements in Syria and Libya, was quite silent. He stayed silent. Basically, the Russian Orthodox Church did most of the talking in terms of protesting Hagia Sophia’s conversion.

But Russia played a dual game because there has been an ongoing rivalry between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Ecumenical Patriarchate is the primus inter pares among all the Orthodox Patriarchates in the Orthodox Christian world. This is threatening to Putin as well as the Russian Orthodox Church because especially since the end of the Cold War, Moscow perceived the expansion of NATO and the European Union as being coterminous with the expansion of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s influence and outreach.

Targeting the Ecumenical Patriarchate

So Russia has done its best over the years, often colluding with Erdoğan, to undermine the Ecumenical Patriarchate. I know this is an interesting point because one would assume why should Erdoğan work with Russia to undermine the Ecumenical Patriarchate seated in Istanbul? Because ultimately this is also a great honor, a source of influence, for Turkey itself. It is like having the Vatican in your country.

But for Erdoğan, who is not necessarily the most rational politician, the Ecumenical Patriarchate is not a resource, it is not a blessing for Turkey, it is a challenge, it is something to be undermined. And hence, on this issue Moscow and Ankara, Putin and Erdoğan, are fully aligned. We have seen some messaging from the Russian Orthodox Church, pointing to the weakness of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, weakness that allows such conversions to take place.

Now, I do not believe this is a criticism in good faith. I think this is part of the ongoing Russian attempt to delegitimize and undermine the Ecumenical Patriarchate as part of a Russian, imperial policy of inscribing not only Putin’s but also the Russian Orthodox Church’s primacy in the former Soviet-controlled or influenced domains.

Conclusion

So overall we can see that Hagia Sophia’s conversion, Chora’s conversion, has major ramifications for Turkey’s democracy and religious pluralism, for Turkey’s vulnerable religious minorities, for the Muslim majority world, for religious minorities in the Muslim majority world, but more importantly for the global power struggle between the West and its adversaries.

Hence, this is I think not just an issue for the Orthodox Christians or Christians or people who care about sacred heritage and architecture. This should be an issue of major concern to all of us since it brings together multiple fault lines and since it has the potential to trigger detrimental processes in parts of the world a long way away from Istanbul and Hagia Sophia.

Overall I believe we have not done a terribly good job, and when I say we I am talking about the concerned international community, the rights and freedoms community. We have not fully articulated the problems with Erdoğan’s policy and rhetoric. We have not fully succeeded in building interfaith, intercultural, and non-partisan alliances necessary to push back against such a policy. And more recently, I think we have dropped the ball in the sense that we have allowed other headlines to take over what really should continue to be a major concern around Hagia Sophia and Chora.

So it is my hope that also thanks to the Westminster Institute we will raise further awareness about this, and that this will also spark greater interest among policymakers in the U.S. and beyond, and that this could become a part of not only policy rhetoric but also some concrete policy action to push back against Erdoğan’s supremacist, sectarian, discriminatory policy that puts lives as well as ancient communities and their traditions in the Middle East at risk. Thank you, Bob, for giving me the opportunity and I would be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Q&A

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_{For more on Armenia, see Svante Cornell’s lecture on the Armenia-Azerbaijan Crisis.}