Foreign Affairs

Burma’s Military Junta Totters Toward the Brink

But that’s no reason for the U.S. to get involved.

Opponents of the military junta ruling Burma (or Myanmar) recently took another small step toward winning the ongoing civil war. The Karen National Liberation Army, an ethnic militia which has long fought for autonomy, captured some 600 government soldiers and seized Myawaddy, a busy border city. Humiliated, the regime had to fly personnel and records out of neighboring Mae Sot in Thailand. Last weekend, fighting continued as insurgents attacked retreating government forces. While the junta recaptured the city Tuesday, its gain remains tenuous. Reinforcements sent two weeks ago from a base three hours away have yet to arrive, blocked by other KNLA units.

The victory seems modest since Myawaddy has limited strategic value. Yet the town was a fixture of military control when in years past I visited the region to cover the KNLA’s fight on behalf of the largely Christian Karen people. The current battle follows a coordinated offensive last October by several other militia groups that seized several border posts in the Shan State to the north, neighboring China. Overall, the opposition controls upwards of 60 percent of the country.

Most important, the Tatmadaw, or military, is weakening. Increasing numbers of soldiers are surrendering; insurgents are cooperating more effectively; opponents are capturing abundant military materiel; fighters are targeting junta leaders. In February the so-called State Administration Council, an anodyne title for the brutal military regime, announced enforcement of universal conscription. Draft avoidance activities burgeoned, from hurried marriages to foreign flight. Potential conscripts also have joined both the ethnic militias and the People’s Defense Force, which is contesting control of the dominant Burman heartland.

The regime retains an advantage in airpower, which it deploys ruthlessly and cruelly against insurgents and civilians alike. However, military morale is cratering. Observed Thomas Kean, a consultant with the International Crisis Group: “They have lost thousands of soldiers, either killed, wounded or taken as prisoners, and lost a huge amount of weapons.” Even before the latest losses “There was already some discontent within the military leadership and the pro-military circles.”

Indeed, there is increasing speculation that the army, whose common soldiers are abused, underfed, isolated, and misused, might break. No longer are troops battling distant ethnic groups. Now they are fighting members of their own villages and even families. Expanding resistance across the country has stretched the Tatmadaw thin. Wives and children patrol bases in the absence of the men. Forcing regime opponents into uniform might spur resistance within the armed forces, with increased desertions, surrenders, sabotage, and attacks on officers, bringing to mind “fragging” by U.S. personnel in Vietnam.

Disagreements are growing even among top commanders, with harsh punishments meted out to those who fail. Additional defeats will only increase tensions. Moreover, the opposition has demonstrated its ability to target military leaders and reach the capital, meaning no one is safe. Observed Terence Lee of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies: “The more disillusioned they become, the more likely they are willing to move against [coup leader] Min Aung Hlaing. He promised a bed of roses but that didn’t turn out to be the case as the country now is in civil war and many do not accept the legitimacy of the Tatmadaw.”

The military has misruled the country since 1962. The junta held elections in 1990, which resulted in a landslide victory for Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of an independence hero, and the National League for Democracy. The regime voided the election, triggering democracy protests that were swiftly crushed. The nation’s Burman heartland, though hostile to military rule, remained largely quiescent as conflict continued to rage in the ethnic-dominated borderlands.

In 2010 the Tatmadaw created a hybrid system, sharing power with an elected civilian government. The Burmese military, like that in Thailand, expected to maintain control by rigging the electoral system and manipulating the government structure. Suu Kyi and the NLD, however, won overwhelmingly despite the generals’ hope to fracture the opposition. Fearing that it was losing authority, Hlaing, described as “power-hungry, slithery and wolflike,” staged a coup in February 2022. The Tatmadaw took over government agencies, abolished democratic institutions, proscribed demonstrations, arrested Suu Kyi, NLD leaders, and other military critics, and staged Stalinesque show trials of its opponents, including Suu Kyi.

Hlaing called for “unity between the military and the people,” but the latter are the junta’s primary victims. The regime soon crushed non-violent protests and mass civil disobedience, killing and imprisoning thousands.

The Tatmadaw miscalculated. The Burmese people, especially the younger generation, had come to expect more freedom and opportunities. No longer was there peaceful acceptance of military rule. Multiple ethnic militias reignited rural insurgencies that had ebbed a decade ago and trained an influx of urban volunteers. More dramatically, opposition throughout majority Bamar or Burman territory turned violent with formation of the PDF units. An incredible 315 of 330 townships are aflame. The regime is almost alone in waging war on its population as the opposition formed the National Unity Government.

The coup and resulting conflict have left the country in shambles. Nikkei Asia reported, “The economy and currency have tumbled perilously, the peace process with insurgent ethnic minorities has foundered, the medical system has buckled after defiant doctors and nurses quit public hospitals or were arrested, and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people cower along remote borders.”

As resistance has stiffened, the military has grown more murderous and destructive, killing civilians, destroying villages, and displacing residents. So far, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and almost three million people have been driven from their homes. Some analysts fear that another million might be displaced this year by the regime’s “campaign of brutality.”

What to do? There are no easy answers.

Washington should eschew military involvement. On my first trip to the region a quarter century ago, Bo Mya, the legendary Karen leader, asked me why Washington did not do for the Karen what it had done for the Kosovars, whom the U.S. protected from the Serb military. My cynical response was that their land held no oil. More seriously, the U.S. has no important security interests in Burma that warrant going to war. So distant is this battle that, amazingly, none of Washington’s predictable war hawks have advocated intervention. Adding another conflict would be especially foolish when the allies are engaged in a dangerous proxy war with Russia, North Korea is building ICBMs capable of hitting America, Israel’s war on Gaza has inflamed the Mideast, and American officials are threatening China if it attacks Taiwan.

There simply is no justification for risking the lives of Americans, including military personnel, in Burma. Overthrowing the regime would be costly and transfer responsibility for Burma’s future to America, creating an unpredictable, probably violent long-term commitment. Supporting an insurgency is tempting but could go bad. The U.S. would become responsible for the outcome—and war is rarely a good humanitarian tool.

The best strategy is working with friendly states to weaken the regime. The U.S. has sanctioned Naypyidaw, but most countries in the region, including India, Japan, and the Southeast Asian states, have proved reluctant to follow suit. Resistance to targeting general commerce, most notably energy sales, which would further impoverish the general population, is understandable. Nevertheless, the regime deserves the same treatment as Russia when it comes to cutting state revenue and restricting military purchases, especially of jet fuel for the air force, as well as defunding businesses run by military elites and their cronies.

Although it is premature to recognize NUG, as the junta’s hold on power weakens Burma’s neighbors might become more willing to expand ties with it. Naypyidaw’s defeat in Myawaddy caused the Thai prime minister to suggest pushing the junta to engage the opposition. Along with official ties could come as much as a billion dollars in regime funds frozen after the coup.

Naypyidaw’s most important supporters are Russia and China. The former is unlikely to abandon the junta so long as it is under attack by the allies over Ukraine. Which is another good reason to try to end, rather than prolong, the Ukraine war.

Beijing might be more willing to cooperate on Burma. The former’s relationship with the Tatmadaw was undermined by the former’s suspicion, even hostility. In contrast, China established good relations with the Suu Kyi government. Beijing has shown no great affection for the junta. Indeed, tired of the regime’s toleration of organized criminal activity along its border, China apparently acquiesced in last October’s insurgent operations in Shan State. Washington should disclaim any intent to push China aside in a new democratic Burma and encourage the Xi government to take a more balanced stance between regime and insurgency. Beijing might prefer a stable, prosperous though democratic neighbor which leaned its way rather than the status quo.

Finally, governments friendly with Burma’s democrats should encourage cooperation between the largely Bamar PDF and the ethnic movements. To forge a unified opposition against the junta, anti-regime elements need to build trust, especially by guaranteeing greater autonomy for ethnic minorities. Promises of financial aid from the region’s democracies, starting with Japan and India, might help encourage greater comity.

For more than six decades the Burmese people have suffered from political oppression and economic deprivation due to military rule. A decade ago, they had reason to expect a brighter future. The Tatmadaw is delivering the opposite. The road ahead remains long and hard, but recent gains by the opposition revive hope of creating a new Burma, one in which the Burmese people finally rule.

The post Burma’s Military Junta Totters Toward the Brink appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics

News From the Psychedelic Front

The powers of chemical unreason are on the ascent in the nation’s capital.

Washington, DC, is an irrational city; its conspicuous sobriety and even dullness do not diminish its irrationality. The imperial capital is laid out on a supremely systematic grid that fosters some of the worst traffic conditions in the country; Los Angeles had to go out of its way to destroy its original planning to achieve the same levels of automotive misery. If you are lucky enough to be on foot, the madness within the system is no less evident. A walk from The American Conservative’s offices toward the White House features an amble down a little vestige of Connecticut Avenue between green spaces, past the Bombay Club and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. This stretch is lined with young trees to alleviate a forbidding, unusually broad stretch of hot concrete. Look closer: They’re sweet gums, which, in their maturity, will drop spiny fruits all autumn, making the pleasant avenue a Highway of Death for the formally shod apparatchiks hustling to and fro. DC is a place where processes carry themselves forward without any regard for purpose or consequences. Things just happen.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the powers and principalities decided that what this nutty burg needs is to decriminalize psychedelics. A three-block walk from the TAC offices up Connecticut Avenue and down a side street (away from the White House, for those following along with map and pencil at home), your prowling columnist and his intrepid investigative sidekick may find a converted townhouse in which the purveyors of rare herbs and prescribed chemicals ply their trade.

Not in a sub rosa way, either. Thanks to the Entheogenic Plant and Fungus Policy Act of 2020, a ballot initiative that met with the approval of three quarters of the voting citizens of the federal district, the Metropolitan Police are mandated not to enforce laws against LSD, magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, non-synthetic DMT, mescaline, and all that jazz so long as there are any other laws that need enforcing—the same mechanism that was used for DC’s 2014 decriminalization of cannabis. The cops have their hands full with the other leisure activities of the district’s unruly denizens, guaranteeing that the “porh&pc” can operate with the insolent openness of an Apple Store.

The Apple Store or something like it seems to be the inspiration for “Wellness Dreams Weed Dispensary LLC”; white plastic and glass surfaces dominate, accented with fake plants and art in a style that we’ll call Corporate Psychedelic. Floor displays are minimal; you order your rh&pc via an iPad at the counter. It’s all very Crate & Barrel, if Crate & Barrel reeked of cannabis and played shuddering modern rap instead of Regina Spektor.

The spell of Obama-era retail interiors is broken by the staff, who seem undifferentiated from the porh&pc of the benighted era before the Entheogenic Plant and Fungus Policy Act of 2020. Your prowling columnist and his investigative sidekick were served by a visibly high man in a sweatshirt. Have you guys ever done mushrooms before? (Slightly shamefacedly: No.) Are you guys doing them together? (We don’t know.) People usually start with the Albino Penis Envy. (This, it turns out, is the name of a mushroom.) If you take it with people, make sure it’s people you feel good about, because if there’s anyone you, like, feel shady about, it could sour your trip. (Noted.) Much beyond this brief conversational decision tree, our guru’s comments became hazy and impressionistic. He told us Dream Wellness Weed Dispensary LLC, despite its name, sells a lot more mushrooms than weed. He told us the Albino Penis Envy was from California, he thinks, probably. (Does Gavin Newsom know this?) He told us to drink orange juice if the mushrooms turned our stomachs. He told us about the time he did DMT in the store. Who buys all this? “Like, veterans with, like, PSD [sic] and stuff.” (The other customers, while we were there, were two standard-issue 20-year-old wastoids and a guy in a button-down with one of those official corporate or government name tags.) We walked out with $60 worth of Albino Penis Envy, bundled in a paper bag with no information on it besides Dream Wellness Weed Dispensary LLC’s rainbow logo.

This all will end in tears. As with cannabis legalization, psychedelic legalization has relied on an equivocation between recreation and medication. (In DC, the mascot for the shrooms ballot measure was a young mother self-treating for postpartum depression.) Yet in the gap between the two, the normal structures of responsibility for either recreation or medication have been lost. If your bartender were drunk on the job, that would be a problem. If your doctor, psychiatrist, or pharmacist were to hand out controlled substances without any real instructions, that would also be a problem. If you didn’t know where those substances came from, that would be a problem, too.

Drug legalization is, by my lights, a bad idea, but there are arguments to be made for it. None of those arguments involve downplaying the fact that these are potentially dangerous substances that, in the case of psychedelics, at least temporarily derange your senses and intellect. (There is a reason that the psychedelic tradition encourages some sort of supervision for your first trip, particularly with high-test stuff like DMT—a suggestion that was conspicuously lacking from our porh&pc’s advice). They aren’t candy, any more than liquor or Thorazine are. The question with every deregulatory policy is whether the industry and its customers can be responsible with the new freedoms acquired. Observations from the field are not encouraging.

I have a mortgage and three kids. I’m not going to start taking mushrooms at this point in my life. Your prowling columnist happily left the paper bag with his investigative sidekick. Isn’t envy a sin, anyway?

The post News From the Psychedelic Front appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics

How Biden Courted Johnson for Ukraine Aid

State of the Union: President Biden takes a victory lap after coaxing Speaker Johnson into passing more support for the war in Ukraine.

President Joe Biden’s administration is taking a victory lap as the president prepares to sign a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes $61 billion for Ukraine.

Specifically, Biden and company are boasting about how they worked over House Speaker Mike Johnson in the six months since the Louisianan started his tenure. “For months, President Joe Biden and his team pressed the case for additional aid both publicly and privately, leaning into courting Johnson,” CNN, one of the administration’s favored outlets, reported. The effort mostly took place, “behind the scenes through White House meetings, phone calls and detailed briefings on the battlefield impacts, administration officials said.”

The courtship started with “a Situation Room briefing one day after Johnson became speaker,” per the CNN report. Johnson was worked over by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young—even Biden himself stopped by the meeting. From then on, Biden administration officials were in regular contact with the Speaker. The aids Steve Ricchetti and Shuwanza Goff ran point together for the administration’s courtship of Johnson and his staff. Sullivan gave Johnson the occasional ring; Biden gave Johnson the occasional invite to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

CNN’s story and others like it should embarrass Republicans. They should embarrass Republican voters, who have put their trust in their elected officials to represent them. They should embarrass Republican lawmakers, who have lost on every major issue this Congress. But most of all, they should embarrass Mike Johnson.

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Politics

The Bragg ‘Interference’ Allegations Are Business as Usual

The furore around the case underlines how vague the concept of “election interference” is.

The former President Donald Trump says Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money case against him is election interference. Prosecutors say the same about the hush money payments themselves.

The question then becomes: What is election interference?

“This case is about a criminal conspiracy,” said Bragg deputy Matthew Colangelo. “Trump orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”

“The prosecution detailed allegations of a sensational tabloid scheme to ‘catch and kill’ stories that could prove damaging to Trump, a plan, the DA’s office said, that was elicited with Trump’s blessing and that he was directly implicated in,” writes NBC News’ Katherine Doyle.

One of the legacies of the Trump-Russia affair is the persistence of imprecisely defined “election interference.” In that case, the phrase was used to describe unmistakable crimes like hacking and stealing emails, but also generally hamfisted Russian attempts to swing American public opinion.

Many Democrats believe, or at least told pollsters they believed, that Russia altered the vote totals to get Trump elected. This was not backed by any evidence, but it is a perfectly reasonable way to interpret the term “election interference.”

Much of what was described as interference had to do with the publication of unflattering information about Hillary Clinton through WikiLeaks dumps of her emails. (Forever memorialized in the segments of the press that attribute her 2016 loss to a trivial matter of “her emails!”)

“The Russians—in my opinion and based on the intel and the counterintel people I’ve talked to—could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they had been guided,” Clinton later said when she laid out her own theory of Trump-Russia collusion. “Guided by Americans and guided by people who had polling and data information.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation never found any evidence of such collusion or coordination, just indications that the Trump camp liked the anti-Clinton info getting out there.

The most damaging revelation might have been the Democratic National Committee’s attempts to tip the scales in favor of Clinton during the primaries. This news led to some Bernie Sanders supporters staying home, voting for third-party candidates like the Green Party’s Jill Stein, or even pulling the lever for Trump. This in turn helped Trump penetrate the “blue wall” in the Rust Belt.

You could argue that the information was overblown. Clinton would have likely won the nomination without the DNC’s favoritism—Richard Nixon would have still won a 49-state landslide in 1972 without Watergate—and that these were mild interventions by an entity that is primarily tasked with electing Democrats. Bernie had never really run for anything as a Democrat before those primaries, even though he caucuses with them in the Senate, and was sincerely viewed by most party professionals as a weaker general election candidate.

But the information was also true and of public interest. All the talk of Russian interference never really grappled with how to reconcile the public’s need to know pertinent if politically inconvenient facts with the understandable desire to not have our elections influenced by hostile—or even friendly—foreign powers.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) just recently suggested Israeli voters should replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Voters here replacing the Squad would undoubtedly be welcomed in Israel.

Allegations of interference in the Iranian hostage crisis bedeviled Ronald Reagan’s campaign, with the New Republic declaring the science settled on the matter last year. Nixon has similarly been painted with the collusion brush for interference in Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks, a story given legs in Trumpian fashion by LBJ-ordered surveillance.

But in the hush-money case there is no foreign government involved. The placement of favorable stories and the attempted killing of negative ones is pretty central to how modern political campaigns do business. Partisans have been trading accusations of “dirty tricks” for virtually all of the country’s history.

If we’re going to begin to criminally prosecute people for the seedier side of politics, we are probably going to have to develop a better working definition of election interference than “attempting to swing public opinion in a way that will benefit a candidate I don’t like.”

It’s probably too much to ask that the election-year Bragg case against a leading presidential candidate get us there, but hope springs eternal.

The post The Bragg ‘Interference’ Allegations Are Business as Usual appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs

What $61 Billion for Ukraine Won’t Do

There are problems money can’t fix.

(paparazzza/Shutterstock)

On April 20, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the long-delayed $61 billion aid package for Ukraine. The package quickly passed Tuesday night through the Senate on its way to President Joe Biden’s desk, where it will quickly be signed.

House Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly reversed course and led the aid package through the House in part because, during intelligence briefings, he came to “believe the intel” that without the “lethal aid,” “Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Baltics next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.”

That Ukraine is a stepping stone in Russia’s march through Europe has long been a key argument in justifying continued aid for Ukraine. Johnson should not have so readily believed it. Aside from the not unimportant question of whether Russia even has the ability to invade Europe and engage in a war with all of NATO, there is no evidence that this is Putin’s intent. U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said on April 2 that she “really want[s] to be clear” that “we do not have indicators or warnings right now that a Russian war is imminent on NATO territory.”

Nor does the historical record suggest waging war on NATO and conquering Europe has ever been Putin’s intent. Putin’s claim that the decision to go to war was motivated by the security necessity of keeping Ukraine out of NATO has been verified by NATO and Ukrainian officials. Davyd Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team at the Istanbul talks, says that Russia was “prepared to end the war if we…committed that we would not join NATO.” Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky called the promise not to join NATO “the first fundamental point for the Russian Federation” and said that “as far as I remember, they started a war because of this.”

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently conceded that a “promise [of] no more NATO enlargement… was a precondition for not invading Ukraine.” When NATO refused to discuss such a promise, Putin “went to war to prevent NATO—more NATO—close to his borders.” Stoltenberg concluded that “Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO.”

If Ukraine was a member state of NATO and tried to take back Crimea militarily, then Russia and NATO could find themselves at war. If Putin went to war to prevent this scenario and avoid a war with NATO, as he has stated a number of times, then it would seemingly make little sense that he would launch a war against Ukraine as a stepping stone to war on NATO.

But aside from the question of whether Johnson should have been convinced of the need to aid Ukraine, there is the question of whether the $61 billion will provide the aid it is intended to give.

There are five things the aid package will not do for Ukraine. It will not provide enough money. It will not provide the badly needed weapons, nor deliver them on time. It will not provide the even more badly needed troops. And it will not provide victory.

Though $61 billion is a massive amount of money, it is not massive enough to defeat Russia. Ukraine accomplished little but the loss of life and the most advanced weapons during its centerpiece counteroffensive when it was receiving even more.

“$61 billion will not change the outcome of this war,” Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhodes and the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine, told The American Conservative. “In order to change the outcome, much, much more money is needed. Just how much more? We know, because just talking about it is one of the things that got the head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, fired in February. In an interview in December 2023, Zaluzhny pointed out that a mere 61 billion USD would not suffice to liberate all of Ukraine. That, he said, would require five to seven times that amount, or $350-400 billion.” There is the additional danger that future aid packages might all be smaller.

Even if the money was sufficient, it would not provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs because the weapons are not available for purchase. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Daniel Davis, Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities, agrees that the $61 billion “is fairly small in terms of the overall need.” But Davis adds that “even if you get the money, you’re not going to have the number of artillery shells, interceptor missiles for air defense. You can’t make the artillery shells any faster than we are right now. It’s a matter of physical capacity: we can’t do it.”

And even if the West could produce the weapons, there is the question of whether they could deliver them to Ukraine on time. Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Bruce Slawter, who served as attache at the American Embassy in Moscow and spent 25 years working on government assignments in Russia and Ukraine, agrees that there is an “inability to produce weapons that have already been used up in the war” but adds that “any additional funding for Ukraine will take many months, if not a year or more, to have any effect on the battlefield.” And that may be too late if Russia launches a summer offensive as some expect.

Even if the West could provide Ukraine with the weapons on time, the “big problem for Ukraine,” Davis says, is not the provision of weapons, but the “manpower issue.” Ukraine’s losses on the battlefield, to death and injury, have left Ukraine with a bigger manpower problem than artillery problem. A close aide to President Zelensky told TIME magazine in an interview published in November 2023 that, even if the U.S. gave Ukraine all the weapons it needed, they “don’t have the men to use them.”

For all these reasons, the $61 billion aid package will not provide the promised victory. The one thing it will do is prolong the war and continue the loss of Ukrainian life and land.

“The $61 billion will not change the outcome of this war, which is now decisively turning in Russia’s favor,” Petro told TAC. The best the aid package can do, Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute, told TAC is “help Ukraine to defend its existing lines – though not ensure that it will be able to do so successfully. What it will not do is to enable Ukraine to break through Russian lines and recover the territory that Ukraine has lost. Given the strength of Russian defenses and the imbalance of numbers and ammunition favouring Russia, that looks militarily impossible for the Ukrainians.”

Though the aid package “is extremely unlikely to have any meaningful impact on the eventual outcome of the war,” Alexander Hill, professor of military history at the University of Calgary, told TAC, it “will certainly prolong the bloodshed.” Geoffrey Roberts, professor emeritus of history at University College Cork, agrees that the aid will just “prolong Ukraine’s agony.” He told TAC that “Ukraine will lose more people, more territory and its viability as an independent state.”

“This decision will only prolong the agony of Ukraine and Europe,” Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, told TAC. But, he added, “It also raises the stakes, and pushes the world one step further towards a cataclysm the likes of which we have never seen. Now is the time to start de-escalating, and to outline what it would take to start a diplomatic process of some sort.”

Hill said that if the U.S. wants to help Ukraine “it would be pushing for meaningful negotiations that would include not only territory, but also the future nature of the Ukraine-NATO relationship, with the aim being to facilitate a lasting peace.” Roberts agreed and added that the $60 billion would be better spent on “aiding Ukraine’s postwar recovery, not its further unnecessary destruction in pursuit of the West’s proxy war with Russia.”

In trying to help Ukraine, the aid package will in fact prolong its tragedy.

The post What $61 Billion for Ukraine Won’t Do appeared first on The American Conservative.

Books

Meritocracy and the Great Power Competition

A new book examines weaknesses in China’s meritocratic system—and in our own.

(Xinhua/Xie Huanchi via Getty Images)

The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, Yasheng Huang, Yale University Press, 440 pages

Whether you are a globalist or a supporter of economic nationalism, a China hawk or dove, you must consider a number of critical questions. What is the basis for the stability of CCP—how has the party managed to survive so many upheavals and not lose legitimacy? Does Xi Jinping’s rule signify a further strengthening of the Chinese Communist Party’s power, or will it lead to a weakening of its foundations? And finally, is China’s system capable of surpassing the West technologically, and therefore militarily and economically? Yasheng Huang’s latest book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, offers a careful analysis of these questions that distinguishes it from the biased and predictable speculations of many commentators.

According to Huang, the sources of political stability can be found in the institution of keju, the civil service examination, that molded Chinese mentality and institutions. The tradition of examinations dates back to several centuries before Christ, but it was during the Sui Dynasty in the 6th century AD that the keju system was established. This system remained in effect until the fall of the empire in the 20th century.

Thanks to the keju, emperors were able to create a uniform class of educated bureaucrats. The exam enforced an intellectual monoculture; to pass, one had to master Neo-Confucian philosophy. It advocated absolute submission to the ruler’s will and strictly prohibited questioning his decisions. As Huang points out, the examinations focused on the inculcation of complex doctrines to the extent that “there was no time or energy to do much of anything else, whether that was exploring new ideas and natural phenomena, delving into mathematics, organizing a political opposition, or developing a crucial trait in the development of liberalism and science—skepticism. The human capacity was already taxed to its very limit.” This stifling intellectual environment meant that a culture of democratic discussion never emerged.

The keju also curtailed the influence of aristocracy and its regional power; the emperor no longer had to rely on nobility, having a new class of bureaucrats to carry out his orders. Further, this system monopolized human capital. An intelligentsia like that of Czarist Russia—a country with a lower literacy rate than the Middle Kingdom—never developed in imperial China. The class of civil servants absorbed all intellectuals, instilling in them a Neo-Confucian loyalism. For the same reasons, a bourgeois class never emerged. Emperors viewed trade as a disruptive element, and in the hierarchy of Confucian values, market activities were regarded with contempt.

Thus, the paths to social mobility were narrowed to one: the civil service. The enduring effects of the keju system help to explain CCP’s stability.

The longevity of the CCP is astounding, particularly in view of the shocks the party has weathered. These include surviving not only the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution but also the Tiananmen protests of 1989, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1998, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the SARS epidemic of 2003, and Covid-19. The Party has implemented draconian reforms, such as the One Child Policy and the mass layoffs from state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, during which between 30 and 50 million people lost their jobs. It has withstood internal power struggles, globalization, the growth of the private sector, and the expansion of the middle class.

Some suggest that the resilience of the CCP should be attributed to “performance legitimacy.” Yet a closer examination of the Chinese Communists’ governance reveals that its stability cannot solely be explained in this manner, especially considering its history of explosive growth alongside political catastrophes.

Huang proposes an alternative explanation for the CCP’s longevity: “axiomatic legitimacy.” According to this perspective, the state’s legitimacy is seen as unconditional; it has been deeply ingrained in the Chinese mentality through the keju, which emphasized obedience to the ruler and created a natural inclination towards statism. Given more than a thousand years of autocracy and intellectual homogenization, such a form of governance does not appear abnormal to the populace.

But can the legacy of imperial meritocracy explain why the PRC did not end up like Soviet Russia? Huang suggests that China’s political history can be understood through the prism of a pursuit of balance between heterogeneity—embracing diversity and autonomy—and the homogenization necessary for governing such a massive country. This delicate equilibrium between what Huang refers to as “scale and scope” has been achieved only a few times throughout the history of the Middle Kingdom, most recently by the CCP reformers.

Huang adopts the concept of M-Form and U-Form organizations from managerial theory to explain this. In U-Form organizations, decisions are made through a tight vertical hierarchy by general offices; for example, the sales department is responsible for sales across all regions. In contrast, in M-Form organizations, each regional branch operates its own sales department. This approach mitigates informational overload and conflicts of interest within individual offices. The Soviet economy worked according to the U-Form model, whereas the Chinese economy has adopted the M-Form structure since the late 1970s.

In Communist China, provinces were endowed with a significant degree of autonomy, creating a set of incentives distinct from those in Russia. Unlike USSR, where regions received funding from the central government, Chinese provinces lived off collected taxes from companies operating within their boundaries, encouraging a more pro-business attitude.

The goal to maximize GDP has spurred innovation within the Chinese system. Successful experiments could be, and often were, replicated across other parts of the country. In contrast, Russia dictated all changes from the center, which lacked the feedback from local levels. Huang observes that regional autonomy prevented Beijing from enforcing central planning. The shift towards a market economy occurred not because the central authorities decided to make this transition, but because they lost the capacity to execute central planning effectively.

GDP served as the meritocratic element within this decentralized structure. Regional leaders were primarily evaluated based on this metric, which, in turn, granted them room for maneuver—the focus was on growth, regardless of how it was achieved. When GDP becomes the primary objective, concepts like class struggle or mass campaigns fade into the background, resulting in a more rational and stable system.

The Gaokao, China’s college entrance exam, and CCP schools represent the communist version of the keju meritocracy. Just as in imperial China, human capital today is channeled through the civil service examination system. The route to the top of the party passes through provincial governance, where GDP serves as the most important metric for assessment.

This system may be witnessing a transformation; Xi is eroding its meritocratic character and restricting its autonomy.

According to Huang, Xi’s leadership represents a profound shock to the reformist system established by Deng Xiaoping and his successors. Xi has steered China away from the political moderation that characterized the party’s approach since the 1990s.

Although Xi’s predecessors also engaged in anti-corruption crackdowns, their efforts were surgical and, in contrast to the current campaigns, did not involve millions of people. Another instance of Xi’s new rigidity is the curbing of fintech and gaming industries, private educational services, and the real estate sector. The equilibrium between autonomy and control, or scope and scale, that has been so rarely achieved in China’s history has been unsettled by Xi’s actions, affecting not only the economy but also the very essence of the CCP system. The meritocratic emphasis on GDP has been overshadowed by vague criteria such as “political integrity,” paving the way for arbitrary political decisions. While the author acknowledges that the focus on GDP has led to issues like the fabrication of statistics or a disregard for environmental concerns, it is crucial to recognize that the alternative, that is political criteria, could prove to be far more detrimental.

As for the downfall of the USSR and the survival of the PRC, Xi has his own interpretation. According to him, the culprit is the so-called “historical nihilism”: the regime was destined to collapse as Marxist faith waned. Huang argues, however, that Xi overlooks the strengths of the reformist system built by previous CCP generations. As a result, the scope for political, intellectual, and economic autonomy has further narrowed: University curricula increasingly focus on Marxism and the Xi Jinping Thought, and private companies are required to introduce Party cells into their organizations. Contrary to viewing the private sector as the “crown jewels” of the economy, he believes China’s development stems from the design of party officials.

This is where Huang’s thesis may show an excessive emphasis on market mechanisms. Undoubtedly, Chinese companies have demonstrated remarkable vitality, yet this vitality might not have been stimulated without the subsidies, preferential loans, or tax breaks provided by the state. The term “industrial policy” is scarcely mentioned in Huang’s book, which is regrettable. A more careful consideration of CCP’s neomercantilism could have lent more nuance to his argument.

Nevertheless, this observation does not diminish the strength of the thesis that under Xi, the issue of succession in the CCP has gained unprecedented importance. In the Chinese empire, succession was determined by heredity; in the PRC, its outcome is shaped by political maneuvering and factional struggles. Huang notes that in modern autocracies, 68 percent of power transitions occur through coups d’etat. By contrast, in imperial China, violence accounted for only 38 percent of succession cases. While tensions over succession have frequently sparked crises within the CCP, they have not led to systemic collapse.

On the other hand, under Xi, the author expresses concern that China may be drifting toward the pattern seen in modern autocracies. The elimination of internal opposition, the removal of term limits, and the cult of personality mark a clear departure from the “gentle politics” framework established by Deng Xiaoping, within which the PRC has functioned for the past several decades.

To China’s leadership, technology represents the paramount advantage in securing national power. Take for instance this study from a think tank affiliated with the Ministry of Security, which argues that in the realm of great power competition, technology is the critical determinant of success—a perspective repeatedly endorsed by Xi.

In addressing the so-called Needham question—that is, why China, despite once having a significant technological advantage over the West, has lost its edge—Huang offers an original answer: the keju system. He argues that the intellectual homogenization and monopolization of human capital undermined the conditions necessary for innovation. The delicate balance between autonomy and control, crucial for the generation of new ideas and innovations, was reestablished only by the Communist reformers and lasted until the Xi era. Two critical factors contributed to the construction of this balance: Hong Kong and scientific cooperation with foreign countries.

Globalization has facilitated the development of international collaborations with research centers around the world, enabling Chinese universities to bypass the need for liberalization. Huang notes that “international collaborations provide access to foreign talent, capabilities, and ideas, as well as to the ‘think-different’ attitude that has been lacking and repressed domestically.”

Hong Kong has played an equally pivotal role in providing Mainland companies with access to venture capital, enabling them to circumvent the constraints imposed on the private sector. Without access to Hong Kong’s financial markets, companies like ByteDance or Lenovo, along with thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises, would have faced capital shortages and would never grow in such a rapid way.

Geopolitical tensions have resulted in a reduced scope and frequency of foreign cooperation. The clampdown on Hong Kong has transformed it from a bastion of free market principles and the rule of law into just another Chinese city ( some claim that, to the contrary, a tighter integration would be beneficial for economic dynamism). According to Huang, these actions will ultimately harm the PRC, undermining the very foundation necessary for technological competitiveness.

If this book were read by someone with a hawkish view on China, they might draw two conclusions that could be unsettling for liberal minds. First: Further integration of Hong Kong into the PRC is a good thing, precisely because it will be a self-inflicted wound. Second: There is an argument for tighter restrictions on scientific cooperation (making, for instance, the admission of Chinese scientists contingent upon their agreement to work exclusively in the West).

The Rise and Fall of the EAST is a book about the crisis of China’s authoritarian meritocracy, so naturally it provokes reflection on the state of meritocracy in the West, where the idea that ability should determine success has become controversial in recent years.

While meritocracy once received strong support from the left, viewed as a pathway for social mobility for the working class, today’s attitude towards this ideal has shifted dramatically. Criticism of the SATs, justified by claims that these tests are saturated with bias against racial minorities, increased the importance of factors unrelated to ability like ethnic identification.

Populist critiques of meritocracy highlight two primary failures. First, the elites produced by this system have demonstrated a poor track record: From the Vietnam War through the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to the financial crisis of 2008, the “best and brightest” have often fallen dramatically short of expectations. Higher education, rather than enhancing their abilities, often inflates their self-confidence to delusional levels. The second accusation targets universities: they have shifted from recognizing the most deserving individuals to perpetuating privilege.

As Adrian Wooldridge notes in The Aristocracy of Talent, meritocracy is the worst system—except for all the others. The principle that an individual’s place in society should be determined by ability and effort arguably represents the most universal ideal uniting the West today. Far from inherently favoring elites, this ideal originally emerged in opposition to the undeserved usurpation of positions within the social, political, and economic hierarchy.

In America, its heyday came at the beginning of the Cold War. The launch of Sputnik raised fears in Washington that the Soviets might win the brain race, and thus the geopolitical competition. It was during the early stages of confrontation with the USSR that standardized tests gained prominence, as tapping into the largest possible talent pool—effectively democratizing education—became imperative for national security. As Julius Krein explains: “Driven in large part by great power competition, university education went from a narrow, elitist pursuit—led by the Ivy League and ‘Saint Grottlesex’ feeder schools, along with regional replications—to a national and meritocratic endeavor.”

With the Cold War’s end, both the role of universities and the nature of American meritocracy underwent significant changes. Neoliberal policies, embraced by both the left and the right, led to the abandonment of capital-intensive sectors and spurred deindustrialization. As factories closed, elites promulgated the mantra that education would provide those affected by offshoring with access to “jobs of the future.” These promises failed to materialize. Universities did not usher in a bright future where everyone became knowledge workers; instead, they turned into a form of job insurance for the offspring of privileged families.

Krein suggests that the Claudine Gay scandal may herald a return to reason, as more colleges started to reinstate SAT requirements. The harsh realities of great power competition may dispel previous illusions. Nevertheless, there remains much work to be done. Alongside Krein’s proposal to eliminate diploma prerequisites for many jobs, another idea worth considering (similar to a practice in Singapore) involves financing the education of the most talented students in exchange for their commitment to work in state institutions for a certain period of time.

The drive towards economic nationalism highlights the importance of achieving a degree of self-sufficiency in domains such as semiconductors. The economist Alex Tabarrok points out that this sector—and many others that are technologically challenging—requires workers with exceptionally high IQs. This raises the important questions of how to select these individuals, and how to prevent their talents from being misallocated in fields like finance or law.

Another issue concerns political meritocracy. The projects that policy-makers aim to implement today are so complex and multifaceted that asking questions about the cognitive capabilities of those making these decisions should be inevitable, yet is often overlooked, as this study demonstrates.

Finally, if America wants to take in immigrants, which ones? Research suggests that their potential to thrive and contribute to the modern economy is influenced by their cultural heritage, with notable effects persisting into the second generation. The effort of rebuilding the American system requires not only inventing a new kind of mercantilism, but a new form of meritocracy as well.

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Politics

Is It Game, Set, Match to Moscow?

The American brand will suffer so long as Washington pretends its capacities are limitless.

(Photo by DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images)

It is an axiom of warfare that it is always desirable to have friendly territory beyond one’s own borders or the capacity to prevent the buildup of significant military power in neutral territory for an attack against one’s own territory. When it lacked the military strength to do much, the United States promulgated the Monroe Doctrine with a similar purpose in mind.

When Moscow sent Russian forces into eastern Ukraine in February 2022, it did so without any plan of conquest or intention to permanently control Ukrainian territory. As Western military observers pointed out at the time, the Russian force that intervened was far too small and incapable for any mission beyond limited intervention for a brief period. In fact, Western observers predicted Russian forces would soon run out of ammunition, equipment, and soldiers.

The rationale for Moscow’s limited military commitment was obvious. Moscow originally sought neutrality for Ukraine as a solution to Ukraine’s hostility toward Russia and its cooperation with NATO, not territorial subjugation or conquest. Moscow believed, not unreasonably, that a neutral Ukrainian nation-state could be a cordon sanitaire that would shield Russia from NATO and, at the same time, provide NATO with insulation from Russia.

Nearly three years of Washington’s practically limitless funding for modern weapons and support in the form of spaced-based surveillance, intelligence, and reconnaissance for a proxy war designed to destroy Russia makes this approach laughable. Chancellor Merkel’s admission that the Western sponsored Minsk Accords were really designed to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military power is enough for Moscow to reject Western promises to ever respect, let alone enforce, Ukrainian neutrality.

When questioned on January 19 about the potential for negotiations with Washington and NATO, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, “We are ready [for negotiations]. But unlike the Istanbul story, we will not have a pause in hostilities during the negotiations. The process must continue. Secondly, of course, the realities on the ground have become different, significantly different.” What do Lavrov’s words mean?

In 1982, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, argued that control of the Rhine River would determine the outcome of any future war with NATO in Central Europe. There is little doubt that Russia’s senior military leaders have already concluded that Russian control of the Dnieper River is essential to Russian national security.

In addition to annexing historically Russian cities like Odessa and Kharkiv, Moscow will almost certainly insist on a modern demilitarized zone from the Dnieper River to NATO’s eastern border to prevent the reemergence of a hostile military force in Western Ukraine. Whether the Poles, Hungarians, or Belarusians decide to engage Moscow in discussions regarding Ukrainian territory with historic connections to their countries is unknown, but the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian state and armed forces will no doubt inform such discussions.

Washington’s strategy toward Moscow, if it can be called a strategy, consisted of organizing coercive measures across the Atlantic Alliance—economic, diplomatic, and military—to harm Russia fatally and destabilize its government. Washington’s unrealistic approach failed, and NATO, the framework for its implementation, is now fatally weakened, not Russia.

As a result, Washington’s brand has been grievously diminished, even enfeebled. Washington’s belief that with the combined might of NATO’s scientific-industrial power it could achieve a strategic victory over Russia by arming Ukrainians to do the fighting for them backfired badly. Like FDR in 1939, who expected the Germans to end up in a stalemate with the Anglo-French Armies on the model of the First World War, Washington did not consider the possibility that Ukraine would lose the fight.

During the 1930s, FDR became trapped in a debt spiral of “special interest” spending. In defiance of logic and affordability, FDR opted for more Federal spending until he realized that it was not working. With the onset of war in Europe, FDR saw the opportunity to extricate American society from the Depression by steering the United States into war. FDR’s scheme worked. The Second World War reinvigorated the American economy and ended America’s chronic unemployment. At the same time, America’s physical insularity kept American infrastructure and the American People beyond the reach of its enemies.

President Biden and Congress are on a similar course with profound consequences, but today, horrifically destructive modern weapons make the war option suicidal. Put another way, 21st-century problems cannot be solved with the use of 20th-century plans and policies. Instead of framing another false narrative to justify funding for a corrupt Ukrainian state that is collapsing, Washington and its allies should question the rationale for a new, costly cold war directed against Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and a host of countries with world views that diverge sharply from our own.

Business schools teach their students that good brands have the power to sway decision-making and create communities of like-minded people. It isn’t just companies that need brands; countries need them, too. When asked about Washington’s ability to cope with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, President Biden said, “We are the most powerful nation in the world, in the history of the world. We can take care of both of these [wars].” Biden was and is wrong. America’s resources are not limitless. Our power is constrained.

In Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, the American brand has been damaged. Americans need (and should demand) a sober-minded analysis of the facts from the men who want to be president. They should be compelled to identify the United States’ true national interests; a process that should also identify the political and cultural realities that are not Washington’s to change.

The post Is It Game, Set, Match to Moscow? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics

The CIA’s Man in Constantinople

The U.S. government is making itself felt in Orthodox internal politics.

Everyone knows that the Moscow Patriarchate is in bed with the Kremlin. Few realize that the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople is deeply beholden to the United States government.

This ignorance is surprising, given that many Greek Orthodox leaders are quite proud of the fact. In 1942, Athenagoras Spyrou—the Archbishop of America for the Greek Orthodox Church—wrote to an agent of the Office of Strategic Services. “I have three Bishops, three hundred priests, and a large and far-flung organization,” Athenagoras wrote. “Every one under my order is under yours. You may command them for any service you require. There will be no questions asked and your directions will be executed faithfully.”

In 1947, the OSS was rechristened as the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA. One year later, Athenagoras was elected Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodoxy.

One might point out that, when Athenagoras reached out to the OSS, his native Greece was under Nazi occupation. It is understandable that a Greek bishop in America would support the American war effort. But it was more than that. Athenagoras was a strong supporter of American exceptionalism and encouraged Washington’s militarist foreign policy. The U.S. Consul in Istanbul recounted a conversation with Athenagoras in 1951: “As usual, he talked at some length of his belief that the United States must remain in the Near East for several centuries to fulfill the mission which had been given it by God to give freedom, prosperity and happiness to all people.”

(These quotes, by the way, are pulled from a talk given by an Orthodox historian called Matthew Namee at Holy Cross Hellenic College, the Greek seminary in Boston. These are not malicious forgeries peddled by Russian propagandists—the Greek Orthodox are quite proud of their association with the American deep state.)

Athenagoras was not merely an Americanist. He was also known as a renovationist, as liberal Orthodox are known. In 1964, he met with Pope Paul VI in Jerusalem; together, they officially lift the mutual excommunications placed by their predecessors in 1054. This gesture sparked outrage across Orthodox world. Athenagoras was accused of compromising the Orthodox Faith for the sake of a paper union with Rome.

The current Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew, is cut from the same cloth as Athenagoras. He is very close to Pope Francis; the two share a passion for mass immigration and environmental activism. Also like Athenagoras, Bartholomew shares a close relationship with the U.S. government—a partnership that has proven mutually beneficial.

The Ecumenical Patriarch is the spiritual leader of Orthodoxy. However, he only has direct jurisdiction over a few thousand Orthodox Christians in Turkey. The rest of the Greek Orthodox world are autocephalous, or self-governing. This includes the Church of Greece, the Church of Cyprus, and the American metropolises (or dioceses). Many look to Bartholomew for leadership, but they are not directly under his authority. It is also worth noting that a large majority of Orthodox Christians around the world belong to the Russian Orthodox tradition. These churches do not look to Bartholomew for leadership in any meaningful way. Some, like the Patriarchate of Moscow, are in schism with Constantinople.

Bartholomew is not the “pope” of Orthodoxy—although he would like to be. Over the last few decades, the ecumenical patriarch has also worked to consolidate hard power over the various Greek Orthodox churches. This effort has proven most fruitful in the United States.

In 2014, Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, the current Archbishop of America and Bartholomew’s heir apparent, published a short essay called “First Without Equals.” Its name was a play on the phrase primus inter pares, or first among equals. This title originally referred to the Pope of Rome, but was transferred to Patriarch of Constantinople by the Orthodox following the Great Schism of 1054. Of course, the Schism itself was caused in no small part by a sense that the Roman Pontiffs failed to respect the rights and privileges of their fellow bishops, especially in the Christian East. Clearly, the Archbishop was signaling his desire to cultivate a more authoritarian, centralist ecclesiology within the Orthodox Church, a philosophy which has been dubbed Greek papism.

In 2022, during an interview with the Greek newspaper Ta Nea, Elpidophoros was asked if he expected to become the next Ecumenical Patriarch. Elpidophoros demurred, claiming that “the succession will be decided by God.” This, too, is a radical departure from Orthodox tradition. In fact, it goes beyond Greek papism. Even the Roman Catholic Church explicitly denies that the Pope is chosen by God.

Nevertheless, the United States government officially supports the doctrine of Greek papism, as will be shown. Strengthening the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s position within global Orthodoxy serves two purposes. First, it necessarily subtracts from the influence of Constantinople’s rival, the Moscow Patriarchate. Washington regards Russian Orthodoxy as a tool for Kremlin propaganda and, therefore, a legitimate target for counterintelligence operations. Secondly, the renovationist Ecumenical Patriarchs are willing partners in Washington’s campaign to spread liberal, democratic values across the globe.

Consider, for example, the schism in the Ukrainian Church. In 1990, the Patriarchate of Moscow granted self-governing status to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC). It was not, however, given full autocephaly. However, a group of Ukrainian nationalists led by then-president Minister Petro Poroshenko organized an “independent” Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). With the support of Western media, these nationalists successfully branded the canonical UOC as the “Russian Church.”

In 2018, when asked about the Orthodox Church of Ukraine’s bid for autocephaly, Kurt Volker—then Special Representative of the United States Department of State for Ukraine—appeared to wave the question off. He insisted that the U.S. government does not take a position on such matters and would respect the decision of Bartholomew and his synod.

Make no mistake: By declaring that the decision belongs to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the U.S. government is taking a position. First of all, autocephaly cannot be granted unilaterally by any patriarch or bishop. Second, if the decision belonged to anyone, it would be the Patriarch of Moscow, the spiritual leader of Slavic Orthodoxy. Even the great Kallistos Ware denounced the Ecumenical Patriarchate for meddling in the Ukrainian Church:

Though I am a metropolitan of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, I am not at all happy about the position taken by Patriarch Bartholomew. With all due respect to my Patriarch, I am bound to say that I agree with the view expressed by the Patriarchate of Moscow that Ukraine belongs to the Russian Church. After all, the Metropolia of Kiev by an agreement of 1676 was transferred from the omophorion of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to that of the Patriarchate of Moscow. So, for 330 years Ukraine has been part of the Russian Church.

Third, just days before Volker gave his interview, Joe Biden—then only the former vice president—flew to Ukraine to express his support for the OCU. As soon as Bartholomew ruled in favor of the OCU church, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed the Trump administration’s firm support for his decision. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, our government has implicitly supported Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky’s policy of seizing property (including church buildings) from the UOC and transferring them to the OCU. In one particularly egregious episode, a nationalist mob attacked a UOC church in the middle of a funeral, dispersed the worshippers and beat the celebrant-priest so badly he had to be hospitalized. The kicker? It was a funeral for a Ukrainian soldier who died fighting against Russia.

This one detail cannot be emphasized enough: Whatever the media claims, the canonical UOC is not an arm of Russian influence. Its members are not “pro-Russia”; much less are they Russian collaborators. They, too, are giving their lives to defend their homeland against Russian aggression. But that doesn’t matter to Washington or Constantinople. By supporting the separatists, Bartholomew is undermining Moscow’s influence within global Orthodoxy. And that’s good for the Russophobes in our foreign-policy establishment.

In 2019, the State Department gave $100,000 to the Orthodox Times, a news site strongly aligned with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The purpose? “To counter entities spreading fake news and misguiding believers in Orthodox communities”—in other words, Russian disinformation.

It’s ironic that Trump’s State Department pursued this pro-Constantinople agenda given that the Ecumenical Patriarchate is openly and proudly aligned with the Democratic Party. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America boasts:

President Truman often emphasized the pro-American convictions of Patriarch Athenagoras and the importance and influence of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, along with the Greek Orthodox community in the U.S., as vital to American foreign policy objectives. Indeed, Truman saw the Patriarchate and Athenagoras as crucial to bolstering the pro-Western resolve of both Greece and Turkey, as well as to promoting stability in the Middle East.

In 2020, Patriarch Bartholomew wrote to congratulate his old friend Biden for defeating Donald Trump in the presidential election. “You can only imagine my great joy and pride for your successful election as the 46th president of your distinguished nation, the United States of America.” Archbishop Elpidophoros, in that same interview with Ta Nea, also offered a thinly-veiled endorsement of Joe Biden:

In America, the issue of abortion has been completely politicized…. It is as if the only qualification for being a good Christian or a good politician depends on one’s stance on the issue of abortion. All other principles and doctrines of Christianity do not matter; you can be a crook, a liar, a swindler, a warmonger, violent, or a misogynist, but if you are against abortion, then you are a politician suitable enough for “pious people” to support.

As Rod Dreher pointed out, this little-noticed interview contains quite a few shocking revelations. For instance, Elpidophoros is not simply concerned that abortion has been “politicized”: he is openly pro-choice. “Women bear the full burden in giving birth and raising their children, while men, otherwise directly involved in the pregnancy, do not bear the same burden,” he told Ta Nea. “Therefore, we must support women’s right to make reproductive decisions of their own free will.” Elpidophoros also discusses how proud he was to support the protests which erupted after the death of George Floyd, as well as the infamous “gay baptism.”

For those who aren’t up on their Orthodox church politics: In 2022, Elpidophoros baptized the sons of two wealthy Greek-Americans, Evangelo Bousis and Peter Dundas. (The children were conceived through surrogacy.) The baptism was performed in Vouliagmeni, a suburb of Athens. This set off a firestorm in world Orthodoxy for two reasons. Firstly, it is wrong to baptize a child if there is little to no chance of their being raised according to the Church’s teachings. The parents are making a commitment to their child to the Christian faith without giving them the tools to fulfill that commitment. Second, visiting clergy (including bishops) must receive permission from the local metropolitan before publicly celebrating the sacraments within their jurisdiction. In this case, the local metropolitan was Antonios of Glyfada. Elpidophoros requested and was granted permission to baptize the children of an American couple, but did not inform Antonios that the parents were a same-sex couple.

Elpidophoros was condemned by the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece as well as the monks of Mount Athos, but he didn’t care. The Archbishop was simply giving the Orthodox world a taste of how he’ll do things once he becomes Ecumenical Patriarch.

There’s more. In 2019, Elpidophoros appointed Father Alexander Karloutsos as vicar-general for the Archdiocese of America. Father Alexander is, for all practical purposes, the Biden family’s pastor. He sits on the board of the Beau Biden Foundation and serves as a spiritual advisor to the President. In 2015, Father Alexander attended a (now infamous) dinner hosted by Hunter Biden at the Cafe Milano in Georgetown. The dinner was a private reception for several Eastern European oligarchs, including Yury Luzhkov, the profoundly corrupt former Mayor of Moscow. This was the night that Hunter introduced his father to Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at Burisma, allegedly fulfilling the deal for which Baturina had paid Hunter $3.5 million the year before.

More troublingly, Father Alexander is also close to John Poulos, the Greek-Canadian founder of Dominion Voting Systems. Father Alexander has been credibly accused of serving as a go-between for Poulos and the Bidens during the 2020 election scandal. It is said that the priest relayed information between the two parties, but cannot be subpoenaed due to New York’s clergy privilege laws. Though all parties admit that Father Alexander was in frequent communication with both parties during that time, they also insist that he was simply offering them spiritual counsel. Undoubtedly both Poulos and Biden spent those difficult months in prayer and fasting.

As it happens, in 2018, Father Alexander also found himself at the center of an $80 million financial scandal, which was probed by the U.S. government. The federal government’s investigation to the matter was dropped shortly after it began, despite the fact that no explanation was ever unearthed. When President Biden awarded Father Alexander the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year, he jokingly warned, “I’m going to ruin your reputation by talking.”

Unfortunately, such allegations of corruption are fairly widespread in the Archdiocese of America. The Greek Orthodox Church is by far the wealthiest denomination in this country relative to its size. (A Roman Catholic priest can expect to make no more than $45,000 per year; a Greek Orthodox priest can earn upwards of $130,000.) There are many well-established second-generation families who still feel a deep loyalty to the Church even if they tend not to practice very faithfully.

In other words, the Archdiocese of America is in roughly the same position that the Catholic Church was under Kennedy. It is rich in capital and assets but largely beholden to secular, liberal donors. Hence why the Hellenic College Holy Cross, the Greek Orthodox seminary, refers to former congressman Michael Huffington as a “faithful Orthodox Christian” despite the fact that he’s a practicing homosexual who publicly dissents from the Church’s teaching on sexuality.

Happily, most Greek Orthodox jurisdictions are not renovationist; neither are they in the pocket of the American government or beholden to liberal, secular donors. In fact, when the Greek parliament voted to ratify same-sex marriage, the Church of Greece called the decision “demonic” and excommunicated several of the “immoral lawmakers” who voted for the bill.

But whatever our government may claim, it will promote Bartholomew and his successor, Elpidophoros, as “Greek Popes” in order to liberalize Greek Orthodoxy and counter Russian Orthodoxy. This is the policy of the U.S. government. There are State Department personnel (and taxpayer dollars) dedicated to achieving this exact goal. It is discussed—openly; gleefully—in the major institutions of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Archdiocese of America. And yet anyone who suggests that this is a gross betrayal of both the American people and the Orthodox faithful is immediately accused of being a “Russian asset.” Go figure.

The post The CIA’s Man in Constantinople appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics

The Long Road to the Steyn Verdict

Climate scientists have been hounding dissenters for years. In a D.C. courtroom, they scored a crowning victory for censorship.

In July 2012, I came within a hair’s breadth of ruining my life. I escaped, but the very talented Canadian writer Mark Steyn did not. My mention of his name will rightly signal to many readers that this is a story about the infamous verdict in a D.C. Superior Court earlier this year. It will signal to others who care about such things that this is also a story about the hollowness of much of what passes as “climate science.” But let me tell the story in my own convoluted way.

For those for whom the words “infamous verdict” and “Mark Steyn” fail to ring a bell, here is a short course. Steyn was sued by the climate “scientist” Michael Mann, who had taken umbrage twelve years ago when Steyn likened him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky. On February 8, a Washington, D.C., jury agreed with Mann and found Steyn and co-defendant Rand Simberg guilty of defaming Michael Mann. It was an extraordinarily odd verdict. The jury assessed “compensatory damages” of one dollar each from Steyn and Simberg—which is to say they found no real harm to Mann in his ability to make money. But the jury didn’t stop there. It added a fine of $1,000 for Simberg and a cool $1 million for Steyn for “punitive damages.” This was retribution for their supposedly making statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”

It took a dozen years for Mann’s defamation suit to reach a trial court. What the case was really about was Mann’s reputation as a liar and a hack who had nonetheless gained wide influence in the political world for his promotion of the idea of runaway man-made global warming.

Mann had risen to international fame beginning in 1999 by propounding his “hockey stick graph,” which purported to show that global temperatures had risen very little until 1900, then began to rise rapidly. In 2001, the International Panel on Climate Change put Mann’s hockey stick chart in the prominent summary of its Third Assessment Report. This conferred on Mann the science (or pseudo-science) equivalent of rock star status. After that, Mann would throw a tantrum when skeptics—of whom there were many—criticized his work. Rather oddly, he refused to divulge the data out of which his famous graph was constructed.

Steyn was only one of the many who mocked Mann and his pretensions to scientific rigor. The Jerry Sandusky jibe was just colorful rhetoric, i.e. Sandusky molested children; Mann molested data.

The court case was closely watched and nearly all observers thought that Mann was thoroughly defeated. He was shown indeed to have made numerous false claims and to have suffered no material damage at all from Steyn’s satire. Mann had instead prospered in the years that followed.

But in the closing minutes of the trial, Mann’s lawyer, John Williams, turned the case into a referendum on Donald Trump, who of course had no part in what Steyn had said in 2012 and as far as anyone knows had no opinion at the time on Michael Mann’s career. Williams urged the jury to award punitive damages to send a message to others who might engage in “climate denialism,” which he likened to Trump’s “election denialism.”

“Denialism” appears to be Williams’ term for disagreeing with the left’s established views. Such denialism has to be obliterated like the dangerously invasive lantern fly wherever it is encountered. And the D.C. jury did what Williams asked. It came back with a crushing punitive judgment against Steyn.

This happened in early February. Since then, we have had several lessons on how juries in unfriendly cities can be relied on to impose preposterous fines on Trump and to use “lawfare” to destroy the lives of innocent people who have some connection to Trump. Even those like Steyn who are not connected to Trump can be targets of this legal maliciousness.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In July 2012, former FBI director Louis Freeh released a 250-page examination of how Penn State University had handled child molester and former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. What had university officials known? What had they done or failed to do? Freeh had been commissioned in November 2011 by the university’s board of trustees to lead this study, immediately after they fired President Graham Spanier. Freeh’s report blamed Spanier and Penn State’s revered football coach Joe Paterno for concealing what they knew about Sandusky from “the Board of Trustees, the University community and authorities.” Freeh blamed them as well for allowing Sandusky to continue to molest children. Spanier disputed the findings and to this day continues his attempts to claw back his reputation, but it is a stiff climb. In 2017, he was convicted in state court of endangering the welfare of children and spent two months in jail.

I wasn’t especially interested in the Sandusky scandal, but I had had my eye on Graham Spanier since 2010 when he had orchestrated the Penn State branch of the coverup of the “Climategate” affair of 2009. Professor Mann had been caught red-handed in the suppression of scientific findings that ran counter to his own. Penn State had quickly rallied to Mann’s defense, but public doubt remained intense, and to put it to rest Spanier established a committee to look into the matter. The committee in short order determined that “Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community.”

By 2009, I had begun to follow closely stories that dealt with “climate science” and its overlap with higher education. My interest grew out of finding that the dean of residence life at the University of Delaware had imposed a Stasi-like regime on students in the name of “social justice.” The planning documents for this Delaware dorm-based indoctrination called it a “sustainability program.” As I peeled back the layers, I found that “sustainability” took its intellectual warrant from the supposed crisis of global warming. At the bottom of all this, “climate science” and climate scientists were promoting a vision of impending catastrophe caused by humans recklessly burning fossil fuels. I initiated a project called “How Many Delawares?” aimed at documenting how far this effort by university administrators had penetrated American higher education.

Global warming hysteria was truly launched way back in 1988, but it was not one of those movements that first poked up on college campuses. It was, rather, a combination of government bureaucrats and grant-hungry scientists who invented it and politicians who marketed it. The International Panel on Climate Change was formed in November 1988. The Rio Summit (“The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development”) was held in 1992. It would take almost two decades before climate hysteria became epidemic in American higher ed.

In time, I caught up with this history, and later I co-wrote a book about it with Rachelle Peterson, Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism (2015). Global warming hysteria finally caught on with students when college presidents, rallied by John Kerry, took up the cause, attracted by the potential for vast amounts of new federal funding to support “climate research.” President Spanier was one of the early adopters; Michael Mann joined his faculty in 2005, after leaving the University of Virginia.

Mann’s sojourn in Virginia bears telling as well. It was there that he developed his “hockey stick.” In the wake of Climategate, in 2010, Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli attempted to force the University of Virginia to divulge records of Mann’s research on the grounds that Mann may have committed fraud against the state’s taxpayers. The university refused to cooperate and the press smeared the investigation as a violation of academic freedom. The case had various twists and turns but eventually landed before Virginia’s Supreme Court, which ruled that Cuccinelli had no right to see the records.

To this day, the actual data that Mann supposedly used to construct the hockey stick remains hidden away. This hasn’t gone unnoticed. Mark Steyn, for one, compiled a 300-page book in 2015, A Disgrace to the Profession, which consists entirely of statements by “The World’s Scientists in Their Own Words on Michael Mann, His Hockey Stick, and Their Damage to Science.” It was an audacious conceit on Steyn’s part to gather so much salt to rub into the wounds in Professor Mann’s sensitive ego. It was possibly not the gentle balm with which to convince the partisan public that he meant no harm to Mann’s career.

Any sensible person who cares about the integrity of science and good public policy should want to cure the problems presented by Mann’s odd ways of conducting “science.” There is no lack of earnest efforts by well-informed writers to do just that. A. W. Montford’s The Hockey-Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (2010) is a classic of the genre, but there has been a steady stream of expert deconstruction of Mann-ian science in the last decade. My favorite among recent ventures is Stephen Einhorn’s Climate Change: What They Rarely Teach in College (2023). These are not polemics. They are efforts to synthesize the scientific data that bears on the questions of what has happened and what is happening to the Earth’s temperature. And it just so happens that Michael Mann’s testimony on these matters does not come off well.

Many climate researchers have not been shy in devising more and more terrifying forecasts. Global warming circa 2010 (not yet rebranded “climate change”) was supposedly taking off like a sky rocket or, ahem, a hockey stick.

Back in 2009, when I was new to the subject, I expected the news of “Climategate” would desolate the field. Here were esteemed researchers emailing one another about ways to bury the findings of other researchers who had discovered deep discrepancies in the warmist narrative. Here were researchers discussing a “trick” they could use to make the existence of warm medieval temperatures disappear. (It was awkward that the Earth had warmed before the invention of the internal combustion engine or indeed the Industrial Revolution.) And at the center of the Climategate scandal stood one redoubtable figure: Michael Mann.

The scandal, however, failed to dethrone him, thanks in considerable part to Penn State’s determination to prop him up. Mere months after Climategate broke, President Spanier appointed the committee to look into it and early in 2010 the committee came back with its finding that Mann was clean, honest, and reliable—or something like that.

So when Penn State convened another special committee in 2011 in the Sandusky matter, I had trepidations. Was another cover-up in progress? It turned out not, but when the Freeh report was issued I saw an opportunity to remind readers of my weekly columns in The Chronicle of Higher Education that Spanier’s decision to cover up Sandusky’s lewdness and Paterno’s indifference was nothing new. I possessed no first-hand knowledge of either the Sandusky case or the Mann matter, but from a distance the evidence of a look-the-other-way attitude among Penn State administrators with Sandusky and a protect-our-asset attitude towards Mann seemed awfully convincing.

How close could I dare draw the parallel? In my article, “A Culture of Evasion,” I decided to tread lightly:

Then there was the Michael Mann case, the well-known advocate of the theory of man-made global warming, accused in the wake of the Climategate memos in 2009 of scientific misconduct. Penn State appointed a university panel, headed by the vice president for research, Henry Foley, to investigate Mann. According to ABC News Foley’s committee asked:

whether Mann had 1) suppressed or falsified data; 2) tried to conceal or destroy e-mails or other information; 3) misused confidential information; or 4) did anything that “seriously deviated from accepted practices” in scholarly research.

The committee exonerated Mann on the first three and punted on the fourth. Make of this what you will, but a review by the university’s vice president for research, who oversees grant-funded projects, does not have exactly the same standing as an investigation carried out by the former director of the FBI. Penn State has a history of treading softly with its star players. Paterno wasn’t the only beneficiary.

Even this bland summary raised the ire of the famously thin-skinned Professor Mann. He strikes me as the sort of person who drags a heavy load of guilt through life. The evidence is indirect: He viciously attacks anyone who impugns his intellectual integrity but utterly refuses to divulge the data and other details that would go far to clear his name. The points that have prompted others to express their doubts about his honesty are matters of fact that simple candor could settle once and for all.

When I published that passage in 2012, I already knew about and had grazed Michael Mann’s litigious wrath. In August 2011, I published an article, “Climate Thuggery,” in which I cataloged some of Mann’s “nuisance lawsuits,” including one against a Canadian geographer, Tim Ball, who had joked that Mann “should be in the state pen, not Penn State.” Mann had also threatened a Minnesota group for a satiric video, and he had won the allegiance of a handful of admirers who were making it their business to harass his critics. One of these was a fellow named John Mashey who was praised in the pages of Science for “trying to take the offense” against global warming skeptics. Mann praised Mashey for “exploring the underbelly of climate denial.”

Mashey came after me, and I was told by my editor at the Chronicle that Mann himself did as well, but nothing much came of it. The Chronicle soon dropped its experiment in having a handful of conservative columnists, but I had already been sternly warned off writing about climate change.

As it happened, I wasn’t the only writer who conjured a connection between the Sandusky and Mann cases. Mann sued Rand Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for publishing Simberg’s comment that Mann had “molested and tortured data” and sued Mark Steyn and National Review for referencing and expanding upon Simberg’s statement.

I certainly do not want to be sued by Michael Mann or get The American Conservative drawn into such bother. So I will continue to mind my words. It is my personal opinion that Michael Mann’s research, especially on reconstructions of global temperature, is profoundly flawed. It is also my opinion that the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a compound of leftist ideology, mass delusion, biased, self-confirming pseudo-science, and over-interpretation of fragmentary and ambiguous data. What relative proportions of these four factors go into the mix depends on the individual and the situation. Millions of people go along with so-called climate science because they don’t know any better. A fair number of scientists are so psychologically invested in the theory that they are literally unable to question it. Others have doubts but make their peace with it because it has become their livelihood. Still others are straight-on radicals intent on “decarbonization” as the shortest route to their anti-capitalist revolution.

Put all this together, and we have the figure of Michael Mann alongside a few others such as Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, and Bill McKibben as our latter-day Jeremiahs pronouncing world-ending doom as punishment for modern prosperity. They enjoy the backing of most of the world’s governments and a huge number of foundations.

For all that, they have failed to create the crisis mentality on a mass scale that they hope for. Last year, Pew Research Center reported that only 27 percent of Americans say fighting climate change “should be a top priority for the president and Congress.” Another 34 percent say such a fight is important but not a priority. Among Republicans only 13 percent say it is a “top priority.” That makes it by definition a political issue, which in turn means that the apocalyptos have not prevailed. If a world-ending catastrophe were in the offing and people really believed that, these numbers would look very different.

Where then does Mark Steyn stand? He is a hero to many who, like me, count ourselves among the climate skeptics. There are others, especially many scientists who have risked their reputations and careers by coming out as climate skeptics. There are organizations such as the Heartland Institute and the CO2 Coalition that put real intellectual muscle into gathering and analyzing facts that belie the prevailing climate-change narrative.

All of us need a Mark Steyn who with cussed determination and quick wit has stood up against climate thuggery and its most self-important champion. Steyn will appeal the absurd verdict and the outlandish penalty. May he win. In the meantime, I recommend the excellent day-by-day recreation of the trial by the Irish documentarians Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer. Their podcast, “Climate Change on Trial,” presents the whole debacle.

The post The Long Road to the Steyn Verdict appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics

Trump Could Be in Serious Trouble

State of the Union: Could the hush-money case against former President Trump be over before it has even begun?

Today, the hush-money prosecution of former President Donald Trump started in earnest. But could this case be over before it has even begun?

In the prosecution’s opening statement, Matthew Colangelo, on behalf of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, told the jury that Trump orchestrated “a criminal conspiracy and a coverup,” to win the 2016 presidential election. Predictably, in his own opening statement, Trump’s leading lawyer Todd Blanche told the jury that the former president is “innocent” and “did not commit any crimes.”

The statements were directed towards the jury composed of 12 members and six alternates. Finding members to serve with impartiality has unsurprisingly proved difficult. When court proceedings began on Monday, one of the twelve jurors met with Justice Merchan and both sides’ attorneys because they were concerned for their safety. Before the jurors were chosen from the 96 prospects, they were among the scores to fill out a 42-question form.

One question, the results of which have been reported by the New York Times, asked about the media appetites of prospective jurors.

The most frequent response from jurors on the list: the New York Times. The Gray Lady has been deeply involved in the deep state’s effort to delegitimize President Trump’s election in 2016. Even disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok admitted in 2017 that the Times’ reporting was full of errors. Nevertheless, the Times reporters who worked on this Russian collusion story received Pulitzers.

Only one juror watches Fox News, and only one other reads the New York Post (the outlet that originally broke the Hunter Biden laptop story). One other juror says they receive their news from X (formerly Twitter) and Truth Social—which has caused some users on social media to suggest this juror will prevent a Trump conviction.

Maybe so, but to pretend that the jury members’ media appetites suggest anything other than a difficult road ahead for the former president is disingenuous. In fact, that’s the entire point of the operation: get a conviction against Trump before the election by trying him in the most hostile territory imaginable.

The post Trump Could Be in Serious Trouble appeared first on The American Conservative.