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A realistic approach may help master the crisis in Ukraine

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At present, the only great power combination that can really threaten America’s global position in our new age is an ironclad alliance between revisionist powers China and Russia. And, for all their shared antipathy to the U.S., and for all that they strategically tilt toward one another, Beijing and Moscow are not there yet.

Russian resentment at taking a back seat to China does not fit comfortably with President Vladimir Putin’s Great Russian nationalism. On the other hand, China’s desire to economically — and eventually, militarily — challenge Russia for dominance in Central Asia does not make the two easy bedfellows. At the highest level, all American foreign policy must be about not throwing its two rivals into each other’s arms.

Of the two, China — the only possible peer superpower competitor — is the greater threat. Given that Russia is an uneasy part of Western civilization, it also makes it a better long-term option to pry away from the dangerous, putative Sino-Russian alliance. Even the outspoken Russia critic, former acting director of the CIA Michael Morell, recently said that “it is too bad we cannot have closer relations with Russia, because it could be a strategic partner with us against China.” This is why it is overwhelmingly in America’s interests, if it can be managed, to avoid open conflict with Russia over the Ukraine crisis.  

But how does this long-term geostrategic reality mesh with the immediate crisis in Ukraine? To be clear, the harsh, recent U.S.-Russia negotiations had an old, Cold War vibe. However, there are important differences between now and then. The current conflicts with the Kremlin are about Russia’s real or imagined security phobias and idiosyncrasies, not a fight over competing global ideologies. This is a new great power struggle, but not an ideological battle. As such, theoretically, the chasm between the two could be bridged.

Second, present weaknesses in the Western alliance are only spurring on Putin, even before Russia strikes. De facto neutralist Germany took unplugging the Kremlin from the global SWIFT banking system off the table, and the new governing coalition of Olaf Scholz is hedging on Germany’s earlier commitment not to allow the massive Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany to come online in the case of Russian invasion.

President Biden, in his news conference last week, suggested that a limited invasion might trigger only limited sanctions. Such weakness is no way to make fraught negotiations work. 

Instead, Washington and all the NATO allies must make it clear to Moscow that no effective “win-win” negotiations can be undertaken with the Russian military threat imminent. Any significant U.S. step toward Russia under current circumstances would be interpreted as just another sign of weakness by the Biden administration.

Instead, allowing that a cooling-off period can be managed, negotiations should be held with the clear intention to strengthen America’s geopolitical posture, while proposing to Russia a fair deal.

Some of Russia’s concerns can be acknowledged, in terms of verbal understandings, if not treaty obligations. George Friedman put it explicitly: “Russia has been invaded in the 17th century by the Swedes, in the 19th century by the French and in the 20th century twice by the Germans. In each case, they won the war or survived it by strategic depth.” 

Obviously, Ukraine is the number one priority for Russia, as far as a goal to reinstate some of the strategic depth lost with the fall of the USSR. They fear that another sudden outburst of aggression will — as it has done time and again — come from Europe, and they will have to defend themselves on frontlines dangerously close to Moscow. This is particularly relevant in our era of hypersonic missiles.

But the U.S. should make clear to the Kremlin that Russia’s neighbors also have an understandable historical dread of Russian aggression. Such trepidations may be alleviated by the further expansion of NATO to their territory, if they so wish, and when all other NATO members agree — which (crucially) so far, they do not. We must remind Putin that no NATO expansion to the East has happened since 2009 because of Germany’s and France’s fervent opposition, and that this is unlikely to change. While the U.S. cannot give in on the theory of further NATO expansion, reality can be directly conveyed to the Russian delegation. In practice, politically there is absolutely no appetite in the alliance for expansion to Russia’s borders, nor will it occur in the near term.

Leading European NATO powers (Germany, France and Italy) openly oppose further NATO expansion. This is not only because of the energy crisis and the German dependence on Russian gas but also because of their long-term interest in developing Russian markets and natural resources. The last thing any of these states wishes to do is to take a stick to the Russian beehive.

Putin’s preference, in time-honored Russian fashion, is to secure the country’s western borders. Negotiations on a renewed European security system could offer Russia enough strategically and tie Moscow’s hands for many years while the intricacies of a compact are developed, greatly reducing the dangerous incentive for it to form a military-political alliance with China.

The Russian proverb says that “a bad peace is better than a good war” — especially if the war can escalate in an age of nuclear weapons. Instead, a realistic approach could allow us time to find solutions acceptable to both sides, including agreements on limitations of strategic weapons deployment in Eastern Europe, military maneuvers, and offensive arms sales to Russian neighbors.

Quiet, realistic understandings, short of flashy treaties that are impossible to pass in the U.S. Congress, may be possible regarding NATO’s Eastern borderlands. Given the geostrategic stakes in play, thinking creatively is worth the effort.

This post was originally published in The Hill.

The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable(Part 4)

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As Vito’s three sons gather, the future of the Corleone dynasty hangs in the balance. The first brother the family turns to for advice is Tom Hagen, the German-Irish transplant who serves as ‘consigliere’ (chief legal adviser) to the clan. Though an adopted son, Tom is the most familiar of the three brothers with the inner workings of the New York crime world. As a family lawyer and diplomat, he is responsible for navigating the complex network of street alliances, backroom treaties, and political favours that surround and sustain the family empire.

His view of the Sollozzo threat and how the family should respond to it is an outgrowth of a legal-diplomatic worldview that shares a number of philosophical similarities with the Wilsonian liberal institutionalism dominating the foreign policy outlook of today’s Democratic Party.

Liberal institutionalism found its modern prophet in Woodrow Wilson, the vainglorious president who pledged to fight a war to end war itself. Along with this messianic disregard for history as it has been lived, its key features include a core conviction that rules can be used to trump power, and a corresponding predilection for using international institutions to tackle global problems. But liberal institutionalism goes beyond this, seeing such organisations as the United Nations as being endowed with a unique global legitimacy, as if the institutions themselves were the critical players on the chessboard, with states playing an important but secondary role. As such, nations must give up sovereignty in order to endow such clubs with power. In a similar way, Tom believes that by relinquishing their individual freedom of manoeuvre and seeking consensus at the meetings of the Five Families (a kind of UN Security Council), local Mafia clans can cast off their thuggish beginnings and replace the rough-and-tumble world of gangland geopolitics with a cooperative framework for jointly governing the streets of New York.

It is with this larger goal in mind that he assesses the Sollozzo threat. Like many modern Democrats, Tom believes that the family’s main objective should be to return as quickly as possible to the world as it existed before the attack. His overriding strategic aim is the one that Hillary Clinton had in mind when she wrote in a Foreign Affairs article of the need for America to ‘reclaim our proper place in the world.’ The ‘proper place’ Tom wants to reclaim is a mirror image of the one that American politicians remember from the 1990s and dream of restoring after 2008. Like pre-September 11th America, the empire that Vito built in the years leading up to the Sollozzo attack was a ‘benign hegemon’—a sole Mafia superpower that ruled not by conquest, but by institutions and strategic restraint.

This is the system that Tom, in his role as consigliere, was responsible for maintaining. By sharing access to the policemen, judges, and senators that (as Sollozzo puts it) the Don ‘carries in his pocket like so many nickels and dimes,’ the family managed to create a kind of Sicilian Bretton Woods—a system of political and economic public goods that benefited not only the Corleones, but the entire Mafia community. This willingness to let other crime syndicates ‘drink from the well’ of Corleone political influence rendered the Don’s disproportionate accumulation of power more palatable to the other families, who were less inclined to form a countervailing coalition against it. The result was a consensual, rules-based order that offered many of the same benefits—low transaction costs of rule, less likelihood of great power war, and the chance to make money under an institutional umbrella—that America enjoyed during the Cold War.

It is this ‘Pax Corleone’ that Sollozzo, in Tom’s eyes, must not be allowed to disrupt. In dealing with the new challenger, however, Tom believes that the brothers must be careful not to do anything that would damage the family business. The way to handle Sollozzo, he judges, is not through force but through negotiation—a second trait linking him to today’s Wilsonians. Like more than one of the recent Democratic contenders for the presidency, Tom thinks that even a rogue power like Sollozzo can be brought to terms, if only the family will take the time to hear his proposals and accommodate his needs.

Throughout the movie, Tom’s motto is ‘we oughta talk to ‘em’—a slogan that, in the period since the publication of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report on Iran, has begun to harden into orthodoxy among the lawmakers and presidential hopefuls in the Democratic Party, who now say that immediate, unconditional talks with America’s latest ‘Sollozzo’—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—is the only option still open to Washington for coping with the Iranian nuclear crisis.

The party’s growing veneration of diplomacy as the sine qua non of American statecraft rests, as it did for Tom, on two assumptions: (a) that, despite their aggressive posturing, the Sollozzos of the world would rather be status quo than revolutionary powers, and (b) that the other big families have a vested interest in sustaining the Pax Corleone and will therefore not use the family’s distraction with Sollozzo as an opportunity to make their own power grabs. Working from these assumptions, today’s consiglieres have prescribed the same course of action regarding Iran that Tom prescribed for dealing with Sollozzo: a process of intensified, reward-laden negotiation (what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid calls a ‘diplomatic surge’) that they believe will pave the way for his admission as a normalised player into the family’s rules-based community.

This near-religious belief in the efficacy of diplomacy brings Tom into bitter conflict with those in the family, led by Sonny, who favour a military response to Sollozzo. To Tom, as to many Democrats, Sonny’s revelling in the family muscle runs counter to the logic of institutionalised restraint that Vito used to build the family empire. In the world that Tom knows, force is used judiciously and as a last resort: only on the rarest of occasions, and after repeated attempts at negotiation, would the Don dispatch Luca Brazi to cajole and threaten an opponent—’To make them an offer they can’t refuse’—and even then, it was usually with the foreknowledge and multilateral consent of the other families. By contrast, the street war that Sonny launches against Sollozzo is an act of reckless unilateralism—a Mafia equivalent of the Iraq War that, unless ended, threatens to upset Tom’s finely tuned institutional order and squander the hard-won gains of the Pax Corleone.

At first blush, Tom’s critique of Sonny’s militarist strategy sounds reasonable. Compared to the eldest child’s promiscuous expenditures of Corleone blood, treasure, and clout, Tom’s workmanlike emphasis on consensus building has much to recommend it; if successful, it would permit the Corleones to resume their peaceful hegemony to their own and the other families’ benefit.

But the hope Tom offers the family is a false one. For in order to be successful, the consigliere’s diplomacy must be conducted from a position of unparalleled strength, which the family no longer possesses. In this sense, he is more like Sonny than he realises; despite the seemingly vast philosophical differences between them, each wields an instrument of policy that was forged in a bygone age: for Sonny, the ability to field ‘a hundred button men’ at a moment’s notice; for Tom, the luxury of always being the man at the table with the most leverage. But the era of easy Corleone dominance is over. Though neither brother realises it, power on the streets has begin to shift into the hands of the Tattaglias and Barzinis—the Mafia equivalent of today’s BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Like the current international system, the situation that confronts the Corleone family is one of increasing multipolarity—a reality that is lost on Tom, who thinks he is still the emissary of the only superpower (a delusion many Democrats apparently share).

But even if Tom doesn’t know the world is shifting, Sollozzo does. Like the two-bit petty tyrants who challenge Washington with mounting confidence in today’s world, Sollozzo senses that fundamental changes are under way in the global system, and knows that they give him greater latitude for defying the Corleones than he had in the past. As Sollozzo tells Tom, ‘The Don, rest in peace, was slippin’. Ten years ago could I have gotten to him?’ The consigliere is wrong about Sollozzo. He is not, like challengers in the past, out to join the Pax Corleone. He is an opportunist who will take things as they come—as either a revolutionary power or a status quo power, but certainly as one out to accelerate and profit from the transition to multipolarity. The other families have no more incentive to thwart his manoeuvres than Russia and China have to thwart those of Iran. And because Tom fails to see this, his strategy is the wrong one for the family, and the wrong one for America.

How the Biden presidency became a wreck

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There is a famous quote widely attributed to 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire that urges us to always look on the bright side: “Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” However, with the Biden administration on Thursday passing its one-year mark in power, there is little cause for such good cheer. The Biden White House — despite real legislative accomplishments such as passage of the COVID-19 economic relief package and the bipartisan infrastructure bill — resembles nothing so much as a political shipwreck.

A year into his term, the RealClearPolitics poll of polls finds the president’s approval rating underwater, with a 42 percent job approval, as opposed to 52 percent who disapprove of Biden’s performance. The standard political rule of thumb in Washington is that if a president’s approval rating stands above a lofty 60 percent, he can simply tell Congress what to do, so great is his popularity. On the other hand, a subterranean rating below 40 percent finds the occupant of the White House trying to squelch rumors that he is dead, so inconsequential has his administration become. Viewed in this Washington insider context, the Biden White House finds itself on life support.

What explains Biden’s dramatic fall from political grace? Beyond the specifics of politics and policy, the president has failed in a more elemental way. At his inauguration, after all the storm and tumult of the Trump years, the new president promised to restore competence, steadiness, decency and a boring, bipartisan normality to governing and to a country exhausted by four years of riding the Donald Trump roller coaster. He has signally failed to achieve this.

Instead, despite a 50-50 tie in the Senate and the slenderest of majorities in the House, Biden — long known as a moderate — tacked to the progressive left, unveiling a series of domestic initiatives as ambitious in their efforts to expand the role of the state as anything since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s. The difference, following the Democratic landslide in 1964, is that Johnson had overwhelming majorities to work with in both houses of Congress.

Perhaps the fatal flaw in Biden’s time in office so far is the disconnect between his highly ambitious (and highly ideological) domestic policy ambitions and the meager reality of his governing majority. With Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia effectively derailing the crown jewel of the Biden agenda — the mammoth Build Back Better progressive wish list bill — the White House has looked alarmingly leftist and legislatively maladroit. For a man elected to restore bipartisan competence and normality, this has been a political killer. With Build Back Better languishing in the Senate, the rest of Biden’s domestic agenda looks to be derailed for the next year, leading up to what looks to be a midterm shellacking in both houses of Congress.

Beyond these failures of policy, tone and ideology, the Biden team has besmirched its initial reputation for competence. The administration’s alarmist vaccine mandate — an odd and highly restrictive policy choice given that the omicron variant of COVID-19 seems to infect the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike — was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

The rise from seemingly nowhere of the beast of endemic inflation — the December inflation rate reached an almost 40-year high of 7 percent year on year — was badly missed and then downplayed by the White House. This has emerged in recent polling as the country’s primary concern, a problem almost entirely of Biden’s own making, which alone (if unchecked) has the power to sink his presidency.

Finally, even in international affairs — supposedly the president’s strength, given that he was long the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — the Biden administration has looked inept. While a majority of Americans were eager for the US to exit the endless war in Afghanistan, the panicky and amateurish manner in which the withdrawal was handled, as suicide bombers struck within Kabul airport itself, sickened all of America’s friends in the world, just as the debacle emboldened all of its foes.

For all the talk by the president that “America is back,” the grim reality finds Russia probing US weaknesses in Europe, with the transatlantic alliance still very much not on the same page regarding Moscow, the danger emanating from Iran or the rise of China as a peer superpower competitor. Once European allies got over the euphoria of no longer having to deal with Trump, relief quickly turned to concern as the Western ordering power of the world — mirroring the president’s increasing personal shakiness — seems unsteady, weak and flailing.

Ironically, the expected midterm drubbing in November — where the House seems certain to fall to the Republicans and with the Senate also very much in play — is probably the best political card Biden has left to play. This is because the rise of the GOP will undoubtedly tempt Trump back into the political fray. The most recent late December Reuters/Ipsos poll found Trump the favorite of a massive 54 percent of Republicans to be the party’s presidential nominee in 2024, with only Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (at 14 percent) also managing double-digit support. A rematch with America’s most polarizing figure in 2024 is Biden’s best chance for improbable salvation.

This post was originally published in Arab News.

The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable (Part 3)

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The Godfather and American Foreign Policy

The Don, alone, walks across the street to pick some fruit from the stand. He mumbles pleasantly to the Chinese owner, then turns his skilled attention to the task. However, his peaceful idyll is shattered by the sounds of running feet and multiple gunshots. Vito Corleone, head of the most powerful of New York’s organised crime families, lies slumped over his car, with five bullet holes in his body.

Virgil ‘the Turk’ Sollozzo arranged the hit on Vito, as the Don refused to ally with him in expanding into the very lucrative narcotics trade. By a miracle, he is not dead, only gravely wounded. His three sons, Santino (Sonny), Tom Hagen, and Michael, gather in an atmosphere of shock and panic to try to decide what to do next, with the towering figure of the Don looming over them all. For the Godfather was more than just the most powerful mafioso of his era; he has come to epitomise a power structure that has stood the test of time. All that has been imperiled, along with the Don’s dwindling life.

This, of course, is the hinge of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, one of the greatest movies ever produced by American cinema. The Godfather has always been a joy to watch; however, given the present changes in the world’s power structure, the move becomes a startlingly useful metaphor for the strategic problems of our times. The raging Vito Corleone, emblematic of Cold War American power, is struck down suddenly and violently by forces he did not expect and does not understand, much as America was on September 11th.

Even more intriguingly, each of his three sons embraces a very different vision of how the family should move forward following this wrenching moment. The sons approximate the three American foreign policy schools of thought—liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism, and realism—vying for control in today’s disarranged world order. While we certainly accept that analogies have their limits, taking a fresh look at The Godfather, and the positions of the three quarrelling sons, casts an illuminating spotlight on the American foreign policy debates that rage today.

What comes next in Europe might surprise us

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As the writer, Anais Nin put it, “All the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it.” Political risk analysis — which is essentially an art rather than a science, and no less essential for it — demands thinking ahead so as to always be ready for whatever comes or, as Nin would put it, to always be ready for the truth. To never be surprised when seemingly unlikely events unfold is an artistic prerequisite to doing political risk well.

At present, two somewhat unconsidered but quite possible political currents are unfolding in the heart of Europe. While the potential of Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Valerie Pecresse of France to rise to power has been under-evaluated, it is also likely that at least one of these “surprising” events will happen. To see what comes next in Europe, it is imperative to take the possibility of their success seriously, and to do so now.

Outside of Italy, almost no one has thought through the fact there is a very real possibility that Meloni, leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy, could soon be prime minister. She has proven to be a savvy political operator, working with some success to detoxify a party that still has all too many ties to the fascist nightmare of Benito Mussolini.

In addition, Meloni sensibly opted to stay outside of Mario Draghi’s COVID-19-inspired government of national unity. She has ably criticized the Draghi government’s many panicky zigzags regarding pandemic policy, as well as emerging as an eloquent (if somewhat unlikely) champion of parliamentary sovereignty and the need for the technocratic-heavy government to more openly and democratically submit its program to the Italian people. All of this has done her a world of good, as her party has risen to second place in the most recent Italian polling ahead of the next scheduled election in 2023.

Politico’s Jan. 10 poll of polls put the center-left Democratic Party at 22 percent, with Meloni’s Brothers of Italy just behind at 20 percent, the far-right League on 19 percent, and the populist and foundering Five Star Movement at 15 percent. These numbers make it obvious the right will be heavily favored to win the 2023 parliamentary election.

Better still for Meloni, she has put in place a deal with Matteo Salvini of the League — long the golden boy of the far right — that whichever of their parties does best in the next election will have its prime ministerial candidate favored by both, making them the odds-on favorite to assume power. While Italian politics is byzantine at best and while there are many twists and turns to come over the next 18 months, at present a strong case can be made that the far-right Meloni (with all the policy repercussions this entails) is as likely as anyone to be prime minister, and as soon as next year.

Likewise, in France, a largely unknown woman has also quietly made political inroads. Pecresse, the leader of the Paris regional council and former Cabinet minister in the Sarkozy government, has surprisingly emerged as the Gaullist candidate for the French presidency, with the two rounds of voting to be held in the late spring and early summer of this year.

The latest polling numbers from Politico find President Emmanuel Macron with 25 percent of the vote, the far-right Marine Le Pen with 17 percent of the likely tally, Pecresse breathing down her neck at 16 percent, and with Eric Zemmour — the far-right talk show superstar — at 13 percent. Given the complexities of the French voting system, this means that Macron would easily get through to the decisive second round, but that the other three all still stand a real chance of advancing in the second slot.

Unlike the personality-driven campaigns of Macron, Le Pen and Zemmour — who merely have factions rather than established parties behind them — Pecresse is the heiress of the Gaullist Party, the oft-ruling governing party of the French Fifth Republic. The party has branches throughout the country, long-established community ties, money and organizational clout, giving her a level of support the other three candidates simply cannot match. Also, Pecresse, as opposed to her far-right rivals, simply cannot be demonized as a threat to the safety of the republic — she, like Macron, is a moderate center-right politician who demonstrably poses no threat to the French state.

As such, if there is a runoff between Macron and Pecresse, the incumbent cannot count on disaffected leftists to unenthusiastically but decisively vote for him, as they did in the 2017 showdown between Macron and Le Pen. Instead, the president’s many detractors — due to his imperious intellectual nature, he has never been loved by his countrymen, if admired as capable — now have a real opportunity to vote against him. With Pecresse only a point behind Le Pen as the campaign gets into full swing, she has a real chance to claim the Elysee Palace.

For both Meloni and Pecresse, victory is far from assured. However, as Nin’s analytical injunction makes clear, neither should these seemingly surprising political risk outcomes really surprise us if they swiftly come to pass.

This blog post was originally published in Arab News.

The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable (Part 2)

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Yet despite the increasingly obvious inadequacies of its competitors, realism has not taken the American foreign policy community by storm. With their hopeful outlook, refusal to retreat from even the largest of world problems, and principled stand on the merits of democracy, the Democratic and Republican iterations of the ‘Wilsonian’ approach to foreign policy—be it through liberal institutionalism or through neoconservatism—are widely thought to be quintessentially American, and have prospered. It is as if people would rather be demonstrably wrong, but well-meaning, than adopt a point of view that might be right but seems cold, bloodless and plodding. By contrast, realism—with its laser-like focus on assessing power relationships and the often discomforting insights that it brings—conjures up images of Old World European cynicism. It is gloomy, unsexy—in a word, un-American. America, so the thinking goes, is not suited to playing power politics: Realpolitik is simply not in our political DNA. As a result, Wilsonian foreign policy strategies have gained a near-monopoly among the nation’s decision-makers—a monopoly that is likely to dominate the next four years (Obama’s first term) just as it did the previous eight (George W. Bush’s two terms).

This is more than unfortunate. It is dangerous. For we believe that realism has something unique to say about America’s growing predicament in world affairs—something that the other schools, for all their boundless optimism, are not equipped to provide us. Far from being an antiquated, foreign transplant, realism as a concept is in fact deeply rooted in the American national consciousness—not only at the top, but in the collective popular imagination. To specifically protect America and its people above all other considerations so they can get on with enjoying the personal benefits of liberty that come from living in a strong, prosperous, powerful country; to believe that too much power in the hands of any one group (or country) has the potential to corrupt and should therefore be balanced; to deny that any government, including our own, has all the answers for what ails the world—all are uniquely American insights that inform modern realism as well.

Instead of being foreign, realism has been a large part of the American discourse since the administration of George Washington and the signing of the Jay Treaty with our then enemy Great Britain. Washington and Alexander Hamilton made it clear that securing peace for the American people should supersede distaste for doing a deal with the formerly hated George III. This hard-headed approach set the fledgling American Republican on its way to its eventual rendezvous with destiny, as the essential modern great power confronting the horrors of both Hitler and Stalin. Contrary to the argument of realism’s foes, Americans have in many ways been realists from the founding. That has been one of the secrets of our success.

That is precisely why it is such a pity, from our point of view, that the pragmatism so inherent in both realism and in American foreign policymaking since the founding has been submerged (but not eliminated) by the recent dominance of the liberal institutionalist and neoconservative schools of thought, which start from utopian premises, not being based upon a practical assessment of the world we actually find ourselves in. The founders would know better.

But if realism’s critics are wrong in saying that it is un-American, they are right that it is unsexy. In recent years, realists have shown little interest in making their insights understandable to the American public. Too often they have glorified in their craft as if the world were merely a mathematical formula that needed working out, one that should be explained only to an inner-circle priesthood of true believers who had enough intellect and guts to see the world as it truly was. To put it mildly, such elitist nonsense is not likely to lead to political success in any democratic country. Realism has come to resemble the worst kind of Shakespearean production, glorifying in the bard’s obscurity, forgetting that the secret to his universal appeal is that he wrote the plays using themes and language that everyone of his day could entirely understand. Realism, like Shakespeare, must be for everyone.

We strongly believe that realism, beyond the usual academic cloisters, needs to reconnect with the people of the country, if it is to remain relevant. To make this point, and to convey what we believe is a message of grave importance for the future of the American Republic, we have chosen an unconventional format for this book. Precisely because the stakes for the United States are now so high and our current policymaking habits so predictably tragic, we—both of whom are prolific foreign policy analysts—believe we cannot afford to simply add another book to the growing list of foreign policy analyses that are being written to advise the next president (Obama).

Instead, we have chosen to present an allegory of American power drawn from that most American of mediums—film—and that most American of film dramas: Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather.

The idea of using this iconic 1972 movie to explain US foreign policy was born in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, a most un-Mediterranean setting, on a November night in 2007. While we had independently realised the film’s parallels to the world of geopolitics, it was not until Wess joined John for a Hefeweizen (German wheat beer) one night at his Berlin apartment that we realised the movie’s full potential to convey the seriousness of America’s current predicament and the strategic alternatives that are available for handling it. For in his chronicling of the rise, fall, and rebirth of the Corleone Mafia empire, Coppola presents two hauntingly prophetic messages that speak directly to America today: That the fall of the powerful is inevitable; and that we have options for how we respond to this tragic truth, make the most of the hidden opportunities it presents, and chart a course to renewed strength.

The travails of the Corleone family in the anarchic and fluid world of organised crime are not unlike those America will face in the anarchic and fluid world of geopolitics. Like Coppola’s characters, America today can rest assured that adjustment will come; it is simply a question of on whose terms. And while Americans may not be a cynical people, we are—like the Corleone family—a practical people, a people who value their birthright enough to make hard decisions in hard times, outwitting intelligent foes to prosper in a world cut loose from the moorings of everything we thought—and hoped—it would be.

And so we present a parable of American statecraft, offered at a moment of unexampled danger, in the hopes that our Republic will foresee the coming earthquake, and prosper in spite of it. We present The Godfather Doctrine.

John Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell, June 15, 2008.

On the global stage, is 2022 the happy new year we’ve been hoping for?

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As ever, Oscar Wilde put it best: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Optimism, the most underrated quality in our cynical age, is necessary to get through the day.

Analytically, it is also often of more use than the doom and gloom that passes for the base case in the political risk profession. Even the name of the industry—with the pejorative “risk” being the crucial word—misses the larger ideational point. In understanding the world, there are both risks to be avoided and opportunities to be embraced. You would not know this by looking at what passes for political risk literature, a post-apocalyptic trawl through chaos and misery. It is just as utopian to view the world as irredeemably beyond repair as it is to see it as only full of butterflies and light. 

So, as a necessary analytical corrective, here are three political risk calls for 2022 that amount to being very good news indeed.

The first one is that the Covid-19 pandemic will come to an end. Certainly, Covid-19 is not going anywhere. We will all have to learn to live with it, as humans have with every other virus that has blighted their existence since we first emerged from caves. However, as a world-historical crisis, its deadly reign is coming to an end. 

If we look at the two key initial factors that should matter above all else, put forward by governments in March 2020 – the death rate and the hospitalization rate – Covid-19 is already winding down. The Omicron variant, in line with Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, is trying to survive and is thus far less lethal. Two studies show how hospitalization rates are a dramatic 40 percent lower than the earlier Delta variant. This is true even if Omicron is far more transmissible and vaccine-resistant. Overall, this is very good news.

Weaker strains of a more transmissible version of the virus means Covid-19 is well on its way to becoming just another variant of the flu, rather than a world-altering emergency. Better still, the many recovering from Omicron will possess antibodies that will further sideline the virus. 

We are not out of the political woods yet. We now must worry about the locust effect of Omicron, where the high frequency of cases still has the ability through sheer numbers to overwhelm our put-upon health care systems. But Covid-19 is historically behaving as viruses tend to do. This is the year it ceases being the defining political risk of our planet. 

The second prediction is that for all the increase in geopolitical tensions, Asia remains the locus of the world’s future growth. The Sino-American Cold War has come into its own, becoming the defining geo-strategic contest of our era, but Asia remains the world’s greatest source of economic reward.

Beijing is topping out as a peaking power. China is a great power whose relative rise is stalling as a result of demography – it will get old before it gets rich – shadow banking and real estate debt, and a foolhardy, vainglorious foreign policy. Meanwhile, the rest of the continent looks set to steam ahead. With China’s labor costs on the rise, “Factory Asia” – the next-door ASEAN countries such as booming Vietnam – have taken up the economic slack. 

Next-door India is an even better bet for the future. Delhi is blessed by its youthful population as the only major great power in the world set to take off due to catch-up growth. It is democratic, politically stable, and primed to retake its place as one of the world’s great political and economic powers. In short, it amounts to the best long-term macroeconomic investment out there. 

And finally, we can forecast that the very structure of our world favors the continuation of a Western-dominated order. Think of it this way. There are two superpowers in our new era, the US and China. Beneath them, are five other great powers that can largely set their own foreign policy course. Of them, three (Japan, India and the Anglosphere countries) are fully in the American camp, with the EU veering between neutralism and a pro-American tilt. Only Russia is partially allied with China. This gives America and the West an overwhelming power advantage setting the terms for our new era. 

So here’s to a wonderful, optimistic 2022.

This blog post was originally published in City A.M.

The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable (Part 1)

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“The Don, rest in peace, was slippin.’ Ten years ago would I have got to him?”

—Virgil ‘The Turk’ Sollozzo

The age of American global dominance is drawing to a rapid and definitive end. In the space of barely a decade, the United States has slipped from a position of seemingly inexhaustible national strength to one of breathtaking vulnerability. Crowning its victory in the Cold War, the American Republic sat atop an economic, diplomatic, and military power base rivaling that of the Roman Empire. American businesses set the pace of global commerce; American diplomats piloted international institutions whose rules we ourselves had written, and American armies were underwriters of peace in the world’s remotest regions. America’s was a power so irresistible, and an influence so pervasive, that no country, large or small, could reasonably hope to succeed in an international undertaking without Washington’s blessing.

That world is gone. America in 2009 is economically palsied, diplomatically isolated, and militarily exhausted. Rather than a triumphant stroll along the flagstone-paved pathway to a new American century, the country’s current course looks more and more like a grim and unforgiving trudge down the steep and rocky slope of decline.

Upon assuming office, the forty-fourth president (Obama) will inherit two simultaneous land wars, a rapidly arming Iran, a brooding and reanimated international jihad, a tottering atomic Pakistan, a $500 billion budget deficit, a devastating mortgage and investment banking crisis, a $700 billion bailout of the financial sector, and the weakest dollar in modern American history. He will also be the first US president since the end of the Cold War to face a world in which America must share its seat in the global cockpit with other Great Powers. A resurgent and energy-rich Russia, a geopolitically awakened India, and a booming and proud China—all see themselves as rising powers gaining traction at the expense of the United States. They will expect to have a say in how the world is run.

Just as the challenges facing the US are growing more numerous, the tools for managing them will be scarcer than ever. With a national image still deeply disfigured around the world by the Iraq War and a western alliance system on the verge of rupture, the next president could well find himself commander-in-chief of the loneliest nation on earth.

This is not the America that emerged victorious from the life-or-death struggle of the Cold War. Chastened and confused, America must find the courage, resources, and, above all, creativity to navigate a world, unlike anything that US statesmen in living memory have had to confront. For we live in a world none of us studied in school. It will neither be wholly-dominated by one great empire nor be the chessboard on which many countries with roughly equal power vie to establish their dominance. We are entering new geopolitical territory.

For a long time, the United States will remain chairman of the global board of directors. But it is not enough merely to look to America anymore. The confusing thing will be that there are new and rapidly growing board members and that the board’s membership will vary depending on the issue. Brazil will be new to the board, as will China. Gone is the comforting simplicity of the old Cold War era, with one enemy to fight, one ideology to defeat, one opposing system to understand. Ours is a strange and complicated new world.

To survive and prosper in this radically transformed age, America’s leaders, we believe, must adopt a radically new strategy—one that is radically different, in its core assumptions and preferred instruments, from the alternatives currently posed by either of the nation’s two major political parties. Like most Americans, we believe that the neoconservative approach to foreign policy that has held sway in Washington the past eight years has been disastrous and must be discarded. But we also believe that the intellectual alternative put forward by the Democratic Party—liberal institutionalism—will also leave the nation ill-prepared for the epochal change that lies ahead.

Instead, we believe that, in a time of unprecedented crisis, the US must employ the least ideological and most thoroughly tested approach to foreign policy at its disposal—a school of thought known as realism. At its root, realism can be reduced to a simple proposition: that, in order to anticipate and adapt to change in international politics, you must first understand the nature, uses, and limitations of power, tailoring strategies to the actual capabilities a country possesses.

In this, it differs from its intellectual competitors, both of which—despite their seeming partisan animosity—share a preoccupation with how other states are governed on the inside. If only foreign governments could be brought—through force of arms or force of diplomacy—to resemble our own, so the reasoning goes, American could finally and definitively inoculate itself, and the rest of the world, against the old contagions of war, crisis, and geopolitical competition. History could then come to an end as the rest of the globe would look like America, sharing both its values and interests.

This is a laudable dream, as dreams go. But it is well beyond the current power of the United States, or indeed any power in recorded history, to accomplish. The pursuit of such an unrealistic dream will soon morph into the unending nightmare of national decline as the rest of the world, to forsake its own dreams, values, and interests.

Such a gargantuan undertaking would have been beyond America even during its heyday following 1945. In the new multipolar era, it should be comical to think the US need merely dictate, and others will follow. But such a view is still all too popular in both parties. This is because both neoconservatism and liberal institutionalism—much as their adherents often personally despise one another—share an understandable vice, that of nostalgia for a world that has passed them by.

It is entirely human to want to continue to live in the simple Cold War world, where America was dominant, its choices clear, its strategy set. As a result, America increasingly finds itself with a unipolar mindset and a bipolar toolbox in a multipolar world. When this dangerous affection for a past that cannot be re-created in today’s changed world is linked with universalist policy goals that no great power can ever hope to enact, the end result is a great acceleration in America’s decline. For realists are surely right that, to make the world better, we must see it as it is, warts and all, rather than as we would like it to be.

Getting 2022 right: Three political risk predictions for the coming year

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As I wrote in my last book about the political risk industry, “To Dare More Boldly: The Audacious Story of Political Risk,” I have long held heretical views about my chosen profession. Despite their shiny exteriors, the recent predictive call record of many top firms has been nothing short of abysmal.

To get out from under this inconvenient truth, they now disingenuously tell you that their predictive records don’t matter much; as if being analytically right were not at the core of the profession. We must not let them get away with this conjuring trick. As I wrote in the book, political risk calls are a lot like baseball; while there is an undoubted element to chance in the game, there is a lot more skill than randomness driving both fields of work. In both cases, over time, the best teams tend to win the World Series, real or analytical. If the soothsaying perfection of Merlin is out of the question, mastering political risk analysis is not.

So my firm is putting its 80 percent positive call record over the past decade on the line here, with three predictions for 2022.

  • The COVID-19 crisis will come to an end. It is surely true that COVID-19 is not going anywhere; we are all going to have to learn to live with it. However, as a world-historical crisis, its deadly reign is nearly over. In terms of the two key initial factors put forward by governments in faraway March 2020, that must matter above all else — the death rate and the hospital admission rate — COVID-19 is already winding down.

The number of people in hospitals in England is less than half what it was a year ago, despite there being three times as many cases. This is because the omicron variant, in an effort to survive — in line with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution — is far less lethal than earlier strains, even as it is far more transmissible and vaccine-resistant. Overall, this is good news. Weaker strains of a more transmissible version of the virus mean COVID-19 is well on its way to becoming just another variant of flu, rather than a world-altering emergency. This is the year it ceases being the defining political risk of our planet.

  • The Sino-American “cold war” is the pivotal geostrategic feature of our era. Historically, such a political competition has always been likely. As the American political scientist Graham Allison has pointed out, “Thucydides’s Trap” — the Greek historian’s metaphor for Athens’s challenge to Sparta in ancient Greece —makes clear that 12 out of 16 times in the past 500 years there has been a war when a rising superpower (such as China) has bumped into an established superpower (such as the US).

Xi Jinping’s China is a peaking power — much like the Kaiser’s Germany of the 1910s and imperial Japan in the 1930s — whose march to superpower status has been blunted, leaving it aggressive and at a strategic crossroads. Its effortless rise to superpower status has run into terrible demography (China will get old before it gets rich), a giant real estate bubble and a shaky shadow banking system, and a recognition by its Asian neighbors of its adventurism, from India to the South China Sea. The counter-reaction has led to the rise of an anti-Beijing coalition from the Quadrilateral Initiative (composed of India, Japan, Australia and the US) to the AUKUS Defense Treaty between the UK, Australia, and the US. With Taiwan as the key flashpoint to watch over the next half decade — the Berlin of this new “cold war” — the moment of maximum peril lies in the medium term. But it is coming.

  • The beast of endemic inflation has been loosed. Overly sanguine central banks have taken their eye off the ball, unleashing the beast of endemic inflation after a hibernation of 40 years.

The one global supply chain — centered on the US and China — has been challenged by the coming of the aforementioned cold war between the two superpowers. Geopolitics, for the first time in two generations, now trumps geo-economics, as countries care far more about where pharmaceuticals and semiconductor chips are made, and less about whether they are manufactured in the most economically efficient way. Onshoring, regionalization, and hedging mean that there will be many new economic alternatives to the one global supply chain — but at an increased price, which will fuel inflation.

Moreover, policymakers, particularly in the Biden White House, have poured gasoline on the raging economic fire, in terms of wildly profligate spending. As Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, makes clear, if you increase fiscal stimulus by 14-15 percent, as Trump and Biden have done, while the economy is only a couple of percentage points short of capacity, the math is the math: You will have skyrocketing rates of inflation. True to form, the inflation rate in the US was a whopping 6.8 percent in November. The beast of endemic inflation is once again roaming the earth.

Take these predictions to the bank; hold us to account for the predictions we make, and for the work that we do. On that bold note, I wish you the happiest of new years.

This blog post was originally published in Arab News.

To America’s advantage, the Central Asian region stirs

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It long has been an adage of international relations that a country is either “at the table” or “on the menu.” This never has been truer than regarding the nations of Central Asia, a region that all too often has been on the menu of other voracious powers, rather than an entity with its own sovereign agency. In line with good realist thinking, it stands to reason that middle-ranking powers in the region itself ought to band together to balance against the great outside powers, preserving their precarious autonomy.

Helpfully, this is just what is happening in Central Asia. With Uzbekistan, the country with the largest population, in the lead, Central Asia recently and dramatically has shown itself increasingly capable of holding its own with the three great outside powers invested in the region: China, Russia and the United States.

Following the debacle of its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, America’s new strategic objectives in the region dovetail almost perfectly with this development, which the U.S. should nurture. Central Asia is looking for freedom from any form of great-power domination, whether it be strategic dependence on Moscow or economic tutelage under the wing of Beijing. It is precisely because America’s interests so reflect those of the region itself — its primary goal is that no other great power dominates the vast Eurasian hinterlands — that the Biden administration must do what it can to encourage this Central Asian renaissance. 

If the region as a whole is coming together, it is Uzbekistan that provides much of the impetus for this, serving as a regional integration catalyst and a pioneer of cooperation, connectivity, stability and sustainable development. This is no accident, starting with the new overall strategic direction that Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has set, which revolves around a “neighbors first” policy. 

In line with this approach, Tashkent has worked to resolve decades-old disputes over territorial claims and state borders with the other Central Asian countries, while also settling prickly water and energy resource disputes. The Uzbek government has lifted bans on intra-regional trade, while enhancing increased regional transport, as a practical way to bind Central Asia organically together. In 2020 alone, the country’s trade turnover with Central Asia increased by threefold, despite the COVID-19 crisis.

Geostrategically, and entirely in line with U.S. interests, there are now regular summits of the five Central Asian countries — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — without any outside great-power involvement, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

President Mirziyoyev inaugurated a foreign policy initiative to hold regular regional meetings, and the first Central Asian presidents’ meeting took place March 15, 2018. The initial thrust of the summits has been economic in nature, focusing on eliminating trade barriers, encouraging closer industrial cooperation, and modernizing the region’s overall energy infrastructure, in order to increase overall trade and facilitate regional connectivity. But beneath it all, there has been a clear strategic rationale for the entire project. As Mirziyoyev put it: “We would like Central Asia to be perceived as a world region with its own interests and objectives.”

At the country level, the key fulcrum of regional success — much as the Franco-German link drives the European Union — is strong, increasing ties between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the two largest, most populous and strategically and economically important states in Central Asia. In just the past few weeks, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have declared the upgrade of their strategic partnership to an alliance relationship, with a focus on economic matters. 

Strikingly, this is the first alliance of former Soviet states not involving Russia. Taken together, all of this signifies Uzbekistan’s strategic shift to place itself and the region equidistant from the three outside great powers — a state of play that can only benefit the U.S.

That this change is real is beyond doubt. On Dec. 13, Uzbekistan and the U.S. held their first Strategic Partnership Dialogue meeting. The two sides agreed to expand cooperation; U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu noted that America stands ready to help Uzbekistan further liberalize its economy to increase American private-sector trade and investment. 

So, how should the U.S. take advantage of this strategic shift in Central Asia? As I wrote here recently, for the U.S. to play the new “Great Game” successfully, it must clearly articulate its interests in the region. First, it wants to stop the revival of Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia, following the fall of Kabul. Second, it wants to keep rival great powers (Russia and China) from wholly dominating the Eurasian heartland. 

To make this happen, it is past time for America to rescind the outdated Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974, a Cold War relic that imposed economic sanctions and tariffs on a Soviet Union that interfered with Jewish emigration. The amendment no longer applies to Russia but applies, nonsensically, to Uzbekistan and its neighbors, which have good diplomatic relations with Israel and freedom of emigration. 

It precludes closer U.S. economic ties with the region. While entirely correct for the time, now everyone — from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to chief rabbis and Jewish communities throughout the region — has urged Washington to terminate the amendment, allowing for a much-needed expansion of trade. At the same time, U.S. Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR), the common platform by which America trades with even such competitors as Russia, must be enacted with Central Asian countries.

Central Asia finally being “at the table,” rather than being “on the menu,” presents the U.S. with a largely unforeseen strategic opportunity. It is high time that America takes advantage of it.

This blog post was originally published in The Hill.