Was Henry Kissinger Really a Realist? - Stephen M. Walt (Foreign Policy)

Was Henry Kissinger Really a Realist?

America’s most famous 20th century statesman wasn’t exactly what he claimed to be.

Foreign Policy, December 5, 2023

By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University

 

Henry Kissinger’s death last week produced a predictable flood of commentary, ranging from steadfast admiration to passionate criticism. I published my own assessment of his career on the occasion of his 100th birthday a few months ago, and I stand by what I wrote back then. Here I address a narrower but still salient question: Was Kissinger really a realist?

The issue is not merely one of academic interest. If Kissinger’s world view, his actions in government, and his subsequent career as a pundit, sage, and well-paid consultant are regarded as synonymous with foreign policy realism, that judgment will influence how others regard the entire realist tradition. But if he was either not a true realist or a highly idiosyncratic one, then realism’s core insights can stand independent of however one might judge the man himself or the decades he spent in the public eye.

To be sure, it is not hard to see why the realist label seems to fit him well (and it was a characterization Kissinger did little to dispel). From the very start of his career, he was primarily concerned with relations among great powers and the challenge of constructing stable orders in the absence of a central authority and the inevitable clash of competing interests. He fully appreciated the tragic nature of politics and was wary of naïve idealism. As many critics have noted, he gave scant attention to humanitarian considerations and certainly did not think human rights, the need to preserve the lives of innocents, or the niceties of international or domestic law should stop a great power from pursuing its own selfish interests.

Kissinger was also a ruthless bureaucratic infighter and accomplished practitioner of the darker political arts. He had clearly read his Machiavelli, who taught that to preserve order a prince “must learn how not to be good.” Machiavelli also thought successful leaders “must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind,” and when necessary be “a great feigner and dissembler.” Such characteristics fit Kissinger to a T. It is easy to see, therefore, why so many people regarded him as the quintessential American embodiment of foreign policy realism.

Yet it is impossible to be sure if Kissinger was a true realist at his core. Although he wrote thousands of pages about international politics and foreign policy, none of his books present his own distinct theory of international politics in any detail. You can learn a lot about how states behave from Kissinger’s voluminous works, but you can’t find an explicit statement explaining why they compete for power, how much power they want, or which causal forces matter most in the calculations of political leaders.

Moreover, his views were often at odds with those of other most prominent realists. Most realists believed nuclear weapons were useful only for deterrence, for example, but Kissinger’s varied (and admittedly contradictory) writings on nuclear strategy sometimes portrayed them as usable tools for fighting a war. Prominent realists such as George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, and Walter Lippmann opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam—and did so well before public opinion had shifted against the war—but Kissinger supported it before entering government and prolonged it while in office, even though he also recognized that the war could not be won.

After the Cold War, realists were among the loudest critics of NATO enlargement, a policy Kissinger supported despite its predictably negative impact on relations with Russia. And most realists recognized that going to war with Iraq in 2003 was not in the U.S. national interest, but Kissinger backed the war before it began and for several years afterward. As Edward Luce astutely observes in his own thoughtful reflection on Kissinger’s career, “He was a realist when he needed to be, and a neoconservative when the winds changed.”

What explains Kissinger’s singular position within the broader realist community? One can think of many possible reasons, but I think two interrelated elements of his worldview were central to his departures from realist orthodoxy. (For an alternative take on this question, see Paul Poast’s thread here.)

First, whereas most realists (and especially structural realists) emphasize the material elements of power (i.e., population, economic strength, resources, military power, etc.), Kissinger believed ideas were potentially just as powerful and could be especially dangerous. His official (and highly sympathetic) biographer Niall Ferguson goes too far in trying to repackage him as a neo-Kantian idealist, but his account recognizes Kissinger’s enduring belief that dangerous ideas could wreak vast havoc if they gained a following, because the strongest army might not be enough to prevent them from spreading. How else can we understand Kissinger’s exaggerated fear of Eurocommunism or his overwrought reaction to the election of a moderate socialist president (Salvador Allende) in Chile? Kissinger’s concerns about the destabilizing impact of ideas made him hypersensitive to the smallest perturbations in strategically marginal countries and inclined him to overreact to them in ways that other realists opposed.

Second, where most realists believe that states (and especially the major powers) are inclined to balance against powerful or threatening rivals, Kissinger often seemed to believe the opposite was true. Although he frequently invoked balance-of-power logic (and the opening to China was a perfect illustration of such behavior), deep down Kissinger believed that other states would “bandwagon” with America’s rivals at the drop of a hat. As he famously wrote in “The Vietnam Peace Negotiations” (published on the eve of his becoming Richard Nixon’s national security advisor): “nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness.” And he didn’t just mean the relatively weak states of Southeast Asia. He was worried that withdrawing from Vietnam would raise doubts about U.S. power and credibility and lead U.S. allies to opt for neutrality (or even worse, to align with the Soviet Union). This fear explains why he thought the United States had to keep fighting a war he knew it could not win. Kissinger was not alone in that belief—indeed, an obsession with credibility is hardwired into the U.S. national security establishment—but it is at odds with a core tenet of the realist tradition.

With hindsight, it is also clear that Kissinger was dead wrong, and the other realists were right. America’s European allies welcomed the disengagement from Vietnam, in part because the war had diverted U.S. attention and resources from European affairs. It is no accident that NATO’s strength and cohesion improved once the U.S. withdrew from Indochina, rebuilt its war-torn army, and focused once again on the central axis of Cold War competition. Realists like Kennan, Waltz, and Morgenthau were also correct in saying that nationalism was a far more powerful ideology than Soviet communism, and that the marriage of convenience between Beijing, Moscow and Hanoi would break down once the U.S. presence in Vietnam no longer gave these states a reason to collaborate. Instead of dominos falling and forming a unified communist sphere, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia ended up at odds once the U.S. withdrew. Similarly, realist opposition to the war in Iraq and to open-ended NATO enlargement looks wiser today than Kissinger’s endorsement of both these initiatives.

There is one sense, however, in which Kissinger can be regarded as the poster child for post-World War II realism. In Scientific Man Versus Power Politics, the classical realist Morgenthau located the taproot of international conflict in what he called the animus dominandi, or the desire to dominate that he believed was hardwired into human nature. My students are sometimes skeptical when they read this argument, perhaps because most of them don’t see themselves as driven to dominate others in the way Morgenthau describes. But if Morgenthau had been looking for an example to illustrate this concept, he could hardly have done better than Kissinger. As I argued in my earlier piece on him, no one in American history ever worked harder or longer at acquiring and retaining influence and power than Kissinger did, and few people were more successful at it. Morgenthau might also have warned that so long as people like Kissinger can rise to power in powerful countries—and not just in the United States—everyone must be on their guard. I can’t think of a more enduring realist insight than that.

Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Twitter: @stephenwalt

 

Why U.S. Presidents Really Go to War - Julian E. Zelizer: Andrew Payne, War on the Ballot (Foreign Policy)

Why U.S. Presidents Really Go to War

As a new book shows, it’s not always about strategy.

Foreign Policy, SEPTEMBER 10, 2023, 7:00 AM

By Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.

 

If there is one constant in U.S. political history, it is that presidents frequently make oversights, miscalculations, and even egregious mistakes in handling national security. Vietnam remains the ultimate case in point: a striking example of a talented and successful politician—in this case, President Lyndon B. Johnson—recklessly sending hundreds of thousands of service members into combat.

Historians and social scientists have spilled a great deal of ink trying to explain what has led U.S. presidents to misuse their power as commander in chief. For many generations of academics, the answer to the question of what went wrong in Vietnam and other failed wars lay in the ideological orthodoxies that blinded elected officials to the facts on the ground. In both Vietnam and Korea, historians argued, the “domino theory” was to blame, as it predicted that if one small country fell to communism, others would follow.

New Left historians in the 1960s and 1970s reached very different conclusions. In their work, ideology had little to do with it; rather than seeking to protect democracy abroad, administrations instead went to war to please interest groups, appease congressional committees, feed the budgets of defense contractors, or secure territorial control and valuable natural resources. As the scope of the executive branch grew, they argued, presidents and national security officials were granted too much unchecked power to do as they pleased, leading to poor wartime decision-making.

Over the past decade, however, academics have started to turn their attention away from ideology or material interests to examine the importance of another factor altogether: electoral politics. A new book by political scientist Andrew Payne, War on the Ballot: How the Election Cycle Shapes Presidential Decision-Making in War, is a welcome addition to the work of this small cohort of scholars—including Fredrik Logevall, Campbell Craig, Jeremi Suri, and me—who have attempted to develop a history of the U.S. presidency where commanders in chief constantly wrestle with the domestic political implications of their decisions overseas.

“It is an inconvenient truth,” Payne writes, “rarely admitted, that leaders habitually take electoral considerations into account when making decisions about military and diplomatic strategy in war.” For every military brass or State Department expert in the situation room advising the president on the best path forward for U.S. troops, another advisor is warning about the impact these policies might have on the next election.

As former President Richard Nixon candidly acknowledged, when it comes to determining the best course of action in wartime, “winning an election is terribly important.” In a democracy, it is virtually impossible for politics to stop at the water’s edge—and despite past blunders, that may not be such a bad thing.

In War on the Ballot, Payne provides a systematic assessment of the intertwined nature of elections and foreign-policy making over the course of a presidency. He outlines five ways that U.S. elections can affect presidential wartime decision-making: delay (postponing military action until an election takes place); dampening (watering down good strategic action until the vote); spur (accelerating military activity to appear tough on defense ahead of an election); hangover (being swayed to break or fulfill campaign pledges on war based on electoral results) and spoiler (when elections interfere with or disrupt bargaining strategies).

The first three, Payne writes, tend to occur between the midterms and reelection campaigns, and the latter two in the lame-duck period when presidents are more concerned about their legacies. Importantly, Payne argues that we have to consider the different kinds of election cycles—midterms versus presidential, election versus reelection, anticipatory versus post-mortem, and more.

Some readers will find these categories somewhat formulaic and jargony. Moreover, like any social scientific typology, Payne’s road map to presidential decision-making is too neat. Presidents can be contradictory. Often, they make decisions in an ad-hoc manner, motivated by shifting considerations amid the instability and unpredictability of war rather than a clear strategy. Some actions fit into multiple categories. Distinguishing between the national interest and political interest is not always easy. Payne’s book builds on the kind of rational actor model that animates political science but is often much cleaner than reality.

Nonetheless, Payne’s framework is useful in thinking about the ways that democratic politics shape different points in a presidency. And his work really shines in the detail. He provides three insightful case studies, using archival material, recently released documents, and interviews to show that presidents had their minds on the hustings as they determined whether and how to deploy troops in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. In each case, electoral self-interest triumphed over the national strategic interest.

We learn, for instance, how President Harry Truman allowed Washington’s hawks to accelerate the country’s involvement in Korea due to fears over appearing weak ahead of the 1950 midterms. The 1952 election also pushed Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower toward an increasingly aggressive stance on Korea as he sought to placate the hard-line anti-communists in his party—though he intentionally remained vague enough to leave himself room to change course upon taking office. After winning the presidency, Eisenhower pursued an armistice despite his campaign rhetoric.

The chapter on Vietnam delves into how Johnson held back on acting on the domino theory and “Americanizing” the war with U.S. troops until after the 1964 election—with the notable exception of requesting the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964 after an alleged attack gave him cover to act tough. Then Johnson intensified U.S. involvement after he defeated Sen. Barry Goldwater in a landslide victory. Since he was freed from electoral concerns, Johnson could have decided to withdraw or pursue neutralization, as Vice President Hubert Humphrey urged him to do, but instead he concluded that escalation was essential to preserve his legislative coalition. His efforts to secure a peace during the lame-duck period after he decided not to run for reelection were subverted by the 1968 election cycle, especially the infamous efforts made by then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon’s campaign to subvert negotiations.

Several decades later, President George W. Bush resisted increasing the U.S. troop presence in Iraq until after the 2006 midterm election for fear that doing so might influence voters; in his memoir, he admitted that he waited so that his decision would not seem political. Nor would he fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld until after the midterms. Two years later, when Barack Obama ran for president, he promised to remove troops from Iraq, but he slowed down after winning the election and confronting his own fears about the midterms. Obama then accelerated the drawdown as his reelection campaign approached, understanding that many Democrats would evaluate whether he had gone through with his commitment.

There are missteps and missed opportunities in Payne’s book. For example, Payne defines political considerations as being primarily about elections, as opposed to passing legislation and preserving congressional coalitions that are essential to protecting domestic and national security policies. And although Payne demonstrates how policy ambitions influenced Johnson’s resistance to withdrawing troops in 1965, he doesn’t devote much attention to how such considerations affected Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush, or Obama.

Payne would also have done well to offer more analysis of the news media—a curious absence, given that it serves as a key intermediary between presidents and the electorate in the dissemination of information (and misinformation) about war and diplomacy in the lead-up to a vote. Polling matters, but so too do the reporters who translate and analyze the data. The kinds of rational calculations that Payne emphasizes are not always possible given that voters don’t always know what is happening overseas.

During much of the period examined in the book, notions of press objectivity offered presidents considerable room to maneuver in keeping information away from the public. Early in the Vietnam War, for example, reporters often failed to interrogate the official statements they received in military briefings and went on to share that information without critical analysis. Even today, many voters have little knowledge about Washington’s role in key parts of the globe, especially as news outlets move on from hotpots where conflict rages on to cover other issues such as the latest political scandal.

There Once Was a President Who Hated War

American elites used to see war as a tragic necessity. Now they’re completely addicted to it.

Biden Must Rethink the American Way of War

Fighting drags on because it places too little burden on the public and politicians. That has to change.

The Long, Destructive Shadow of Obama’s Russia Doctrine

A series of bad decisions during the Obama years prepared the ground for Vladimir Putin’s war.

Finally, Payne devotes too little attention to Congress. As political scientists have shown, Congress retains immense power to influence voter opinion and focus public attention on certain aspects of foreign policy through investigations and public statements, such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s aggressive push this summer to promote initiatives that counteract China’s growing economic power. Legislators also control the purse strings, which remain a powerful consideration for presidents as they contemplate wartime strategy.

Still, the question at the heart of Payne’s book is one we must all grapple with: Does democracy produce better or worse results when it comes to war overseas?

Although Payne does not have a clear-cut answer, his book points to a long history in which presidential concern about elections has resulted in “suboptimal” foreign-policy decisions—especially when it comes to asymmetric warfare. “[P]owerful democracies are peculiarly bad at fighting small wars,” he writes. “U.S. participation in these ‘limited’ conflicts [such as Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq] has been characterized by long, protracted struggles that sap morale and ultimately result in a draw at best, if not outright defeat.”

It’s a grim conclusion—made more dispiriting by the fact that Payne does not really offer any compelling solutions to the serious problems he identifies.

The problems created by democratic pressure won’t disappear. Yet this is a feature, not a bug, in the U.S. political system. We would not want to support a politics where presidents are freed from the electorate. This is part of what separates the United States from nondemocratic nations. It has also been one of the most powerful forces in pulling presidents away from their most disastrous decisions, such as the electoral and grassroots pressure in the late 1960s and early 1970s that was essential to bringing U.S. involvement in Vietnam to an end.

What the United States can do is work to bolster its democracy so that the president receives accurate signals of where the electorate stands, and the public can ensure accountability for any commander in chief who moves in harmful directions. That entails ensuring that voting rights are respected, that the Electoral College is not open to manipulation, and that congressional procedures don’t perpetually favor anti-majoritarian opinion and hyperpartisan calculations. In short, Washington must get its own house in order. It is one thing to have presidents constantly balancing expert-driven strategic advice and democratic pressures, but quite another when those democratic pressures are stunted and incomplete.

Democracy isn’t always pretty, but it’s the best system that exists. When the processes work, the nation’s most powerful official can’t afford to take their eye off what voters are thinking. In turn, members of the electorate have opportunities to register their opinions, replace leaders with ones they feel can do better, and have a stake in wartime decisions made at the highest levels of power.

The fact that presidents can’t escape the electoral cage, even when conducting wars overseas, is a good thing. It remains our best check against the imperial and autocratic tendencies latent in any position of power. While that check can lead to all sorts of bad decisions and skew deliberations away from strategic concerns, it keeps Washington’s leaders grounded on main street rather than in the Pentagon.

Over time, this still offers our best insurance against commanders in chief who will take troops unnecessarily in harm’s way and face no pushback for doing so.

Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.

Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 25 books, including Arsenal of Democracy, The Fierce Urgency of Now, Burning Down the House, and Myth America. Twitter: @julianzelizer

 

 

ASEAN Fights for Relevance - Foreign Policy

 

ASEAN Fights for Relevance 

Foreign Policy, Sept 6. 2023

Indonesia is hosting the three-day Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit this week. On Tuesday, leaders and officials from 10 countries convened in Jakarta to discuss regional security, territorial sovereignty, and growing animosity between the world’s two largest superpowers: the United States and China. ASEAN—whose members are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—represents around 650 million people and more than $2.9 trillion in GDP.

Traditionally, the bloc had preached a policy of nonalignment due to strained loyalties between its biggest security partner, the United States, and its biggest economic partner, China. But recent foreign-policy challenges have tested that practice.

At the top of ASEAN’s agenda this week is the security crisis that has engulfed Myanmar since 2021, when its military overthrew the country’s quasi-democratic government and imprisoned many top leaders, including former leader Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as thousands of other critics. On Tuesday, reports emerged that the ruling junta had denied Aung San Suu Kyi’s request to see an outside physician for her ailing health. The military-led government was set to chair ASEAN in 2026, but the bloc announced on Tuesday that the Philippines would lead the grouping instead. Since the coup, ASEAN has pushed for a five-point peace plan that would end violence in Myanmar, catalyze peace talks between the junta and its opponents, and deliver humanitarian aid.

However, junta-attended dialogues hosted by Thailand and Cambodia have divided the bloc’s approach to the nation’s conflict. Specifically, Thailand and Cambodia, alongside China, have embraced the junta rather than calling for its ouster—while the rest of the bloc suspended Myanmar’s top generals from participating in this week’s ASEAN meetings.

Myanmar isn’t the only regional crisis limiting ASEAN’s effectiveness. Internal disagreements over China have curtailed the bloc’s ability to assert its power. Last week, Beijing released a new map that defined almost all of the South China Sea as under its sovereignty. Numerous ASEAN members—including Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam—denounced China’s actions. However, growing Chinese investment in the region, specifically through its Belt and Road Initiative, has hindered the bloc’s willingness to collectively counter rising Chinese aggression.

The bloc’s inability to agree on foreign-policy next steps has damaged its international reputation. Most significantly, major leaders such as U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping chose not to attend this year’s summit. Instead, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Chinese Premier Li Qiang will take their places. “We can complain all we want about other countries not respecting us or not coming to our summits,” former Indonesian Foreign Affairs Minister Marty Natalegawa said. “But ultimately, it is actually a point of reflection.”

Biden’s decision to skip this week’s summit was particularly humiliating for ASEAN because the U.S. president will be in the region later this week. On Thursday, Biden heads to India for the G-20 summit; he will then visit rising economic power Vietnam on Sunday. Despite its seeming deprioritization of ASEAN, the White House has been quick to reaffirm Washington’s interests in Southeast Asia, pointing to Biden’s creation of the first U.S.-hosted summit with ASEAN leaders last year. “It’s just impossible to look at the record that this administration has put forward and say that we are somehow walking away” from the region, White House spokesperson John Kirby said.

 

 

Protecting the Amazon (Foreign Policy)

 Protecting the Amazon

Foreign Policy, August 8, 2023

A deforested and burnt area is seen on a stretch of the BR-230 highway in Humaitá, Brazil, on Sept. 16, 2022.Michael Dantas/AFP via Getty Images

On Tuesday, members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), Latin America’s largest environmental bloc, met in Belém, Brazil, for a two-day summit to further regional cooperation, battle climate change and deforestation, and strengthen Indigenous protections. This is the first time the body, composed of eight Amazon rainforest nations—Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela—has convened in 14 years, and only the fourth time in its 45-year history. The last time the organization met, the only ACTO member with a president in attendance other than the summit’s host, Brazil, was Guyana.

“It has never been so urgent to resume and expand that cooperation,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “The challenge of our era and the opportunities that arise will demand joint action.”

Around 130 issues are on the bloc’s agenda, from economics to sustainability. But deforestation and oil drilling are at the top of the list. At last month’s pre-summit meeting in Colombia, Colombian President Gustavo Petro urged Lula to halt a new offshore drilling site near the mouth of the Amazon River. Brazil was the ninth-largest oil producer in the world in 2022, ahead of Kuwait and just behind Iran. “Are we going to let hydrocarbons be explored in the Amazon rainforest?” Petro asked. “Is there wealth there, or is there the death of humanity?”

Petro and other Latin American leaders hope to decrease oil drilling as a means of reducing deforestation. Last year alone, almost 10.2 million acres of primary rainforest was lost worldwide, according to the World Resources Institute—the equivalent of losing 11 soccer fields’ worth of trees every minute. Both Brazil and Colombia have pledged to stop deforestation by 2030, but other ACTO members have been slow to take up the pledge. And Lula is battling years of catastrophic environmental policies established under former President Jair Bolsonaro.

In a further blow to the summit’s effectiveness, not all eight members are in attendance. Both Ecuador and Suriname sent senior representatives instead of their nations’ leaders, and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro canceled at the last minute due to an ear infection. Still, Brazil is hoping to encourage the other ACTO nations in attendance to sign the Belém Declaration, a list of collaborative strategies for combatting carbon emissions. The document would also create an international police center in Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon, to promote interstate cooperation to combat organized crime in the region.

Prigozhin Should Study Europe’s Greatest Mercenary -Lucian Staiano-Daniels (Foreign Policy)

ARGUMENT

An expert's point of view on a current event.

Prigozhin Should Study Europe’s Greatest Mercenary

Albrecht von Wallenstein was the Holy Roman Empire’s power broker—until he clashed with his superior.

By Lucian Staiano-Daniels, a visiting assistant professor at Colgate University.

A colorized print depicts Bohemian military commander Albrecht von Wallenstein as a maverick prepared to ride any mount to get what he wants. HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Foreign policy,  JULY 2, 2023, 7:00 AM

Over a 24-hour period last weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the commander of Russia’s Wagner Group, called for an uprising against Russia’s military leaders and advanced most of the way to Moscow at the head of his mercenary army before abruptly stopping. Prigozhin and Russian President Vladimir Putin looked each other in the eye, and both blinked.

Commenters have been likening this incident to a spat among gangsters, harking back to Prigozhin’s rise from a petty crook to, until recently, a close crony of Putin. This is more apposite than they might realize. The political theorist Charles Tilly famously compared state-making and war-making to organized crime. Both are human networks that extract resources, use these resources to promulgate violence, and attempt to monopolize violence in areas they control.

Putin and Prigozhin are fighting as a late medieval or early modern head of state and one of his mercenary generals might fight: Social networks of violent men tend to act in remarkably similar ways in many different contexts. One interpretation of Prigozhin’s actions suggests that they were intended more as an elaborate protest than as a serious threat; although this is by no means certain, this kind of mutiny is well attested in early modern Europe.

In 1973, the historian Geoffrey Parker analyzed the mutinies of the Spanish Army of Flanders, arguably the greatest infantry army of its age, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Their mutinies were forms of protest against harsh conditions or lack of pay, they followed a ritualized formula of work stoppage and presentation of demands, and the authorities often met them with negotiation rather than draconian punishment.

These protests were not bloodless: Antwerp has never fully recovered from its sack in 1576 during one of these events. But they and other large mutinies in the early modern Swedish or Parliamentarian armies demonstrate that the relationship between mercenary and master operated according to what the social historian E.P. Thompson called a moral economy, according to which proper behavior was expected on either side. This relationship could be extraordinarily vexed. The career of Europe’s last and greatest early modern mercenary general, a man whose eventual fall may offer insights into Russia’s future today, demonstrates this well.

Albrecht von Wallenstein was born in 1583 in Bohemia, then a kingdom of the Holy Roman Empire. When the Thirty Years’ War broke out with a rebellion in Bohemia, he was a minor Bohemian noble with military experience. He remained loyal to the Holy Roman Empire’s establishment and became a colonel in the Imperial Army of Emperor Ferdinand II. He also became extremely wealthy during the early years of the war by expropriating the confiscated properties of rebels who fled or were defeated. This is also how Prigozhin’s generation of Russian kleptocrats rose after the fall of the Soviet Union, which was followed by a massive sell-off of state-owned property.

Wallenstein used his financial base to make himself essential to Ferdinand by raising and financing armies on his own while also advancing immense loans to the crown. He was repeatedly ennobled and eventually given command of the Imperial Army. Centuries later, Prigozhin echoed him in his own fusion of public war-making and private finance but in a different form. Wagner was funded by the Russian defense ministry, but Prigozhin’s companies also made large sums of money through government contracts. In return, until Prigozhin’s rebellion, the Wagner Group not only acted as an extralegal army but also helped strengthen the Russian economy by extracting natural resources in Africa.

Military enterprise and state activity have been intertwined in many states, at many times. Early modern political entities relied on this public-private cooperation because they were not yet able to finance warfare on their own or handle other essential activities such as minting coinage, an ambiguously crooked enterprise in which Wallenstein also participated. The public, the private, and the potentially criminal were intertwined in Wallenstein’s career because the prince he served was not yet powerful enough to do what he relied on Wallenstein to do for him.

In contrast, they were and are intertwined in Russia because the Russian state in the Weberian sense is weakening. The Russian institutions of state are substantially interpenetrated with private and criminal interests, and functions such as universal suffrage and the rule of law are compromised. Most importantly for this essay, in both the early modern Holy Roman Empire and contemporary Russia, the central authority lacks the monopoly on legitimate lethal force.

This has become brutally clear in Russia over the past few days, as Prigozhin’s men seized Rostov-on-Don and shot down Russian army helicopters while other forces avoided engaging them. Their mutiny has damaged the image Putin cultivated of himself as the most powerful warlord, the man whose extra-state rule was acceptable because it was effective. But this rule laid the structural foundations that made the mutiny possible.

Like Prigozhin and Putin, Wallenstein and Ferdinand were tied inextricably to each other: Wallenstein was both the emperor’s creditor and his creature and owed his social position solely to the emperor’s promotion. The Imperialists may not have been able to win without him, just as the use of mercenaries such as Wagner is one way Russia is effacing the true costs of the war in Ukraine. 

Yet politically Wallenstein was troublingly independent. Like Prigozhin, Wallenstein clashed repeatedly with his government over strategies that he was responsible for implementing but on which he had little influence, and he attempted to broker peace on his own. He was dismissed twice and eventually accused of treason, lured into a meeting with the connivance of some of his officers, and assassinated in early 1634. Like Prigozhin, Wallenstein’s contacts with his government’s enemies were ambiguous; unlike him, he probably was not planning armed rebellion until he figured out that the emperor had put out a warrant on him.

Both Prigozhin and Wallenstein were powerful military leaders acting within a fusion of public and private. Such men were both subjects of their head of state and mercenary generals, neither purely dependent nor purely independent. This is one reason they chafed against their respective heads of state. But militarily, Wallenstein was the most powerful man in the empire, and the army he commanded was the largest in Europe since classical Rome. The Imperialists literally could not fight without him. Wagner is tiny: Prigozhin is not, in terms of military force, a serious rival to the Russian army.

But Wallenstein’s rise and fall illustrate not only Prigozhin’s weakness but also Putin’s. Although Wallenstein was probably not a traitor, once Ferdinand became convinced that he was, he acted decisively and authorized Wallenstein’s apprehension, dead or alive. In contrast, Putin has let Prigozhin live so far.

Wallenstein’s end suggests two possibilities. The first is that Ferdinand may have been a colder operator than Putin, despite the former’s lace collar and the latter’s tough-guy image. The second is that Putin is planning to kill Prigozhin—perhaps with the compliance of some of his own men, much like Wallenstein. Alive, especially in an independent base in Belarus, he will be a threat.

Lucian Staiano-Daniels is a visiting assistant professor at Colgate University.  His book on the historical social anthropology of early seventeenth century common soldiers is upcoming from Cambridge University Press.

BRICS Faces a Reckoning - Foreign Policy - Online

BRICS Faces a Reckoning

Foreign Policy - Online

June 22, 2023, 1:21 PM

https://adb.empauta.com/e6/noticia/2306221687455889007?autolog=eJwzMDA1NzMzNDU2MTMwMjAyNjAzMgYAKh4D--2Fg--3D--3D%2F

In 2001, Goldman Sachs banker Jim O'Neill created the acronym "BRIC" to refer to Brazil, Russia, India, and China- countries he predicted would soon have a significant impact on the global economy. In 2006, Goldman Sachs opened a BRIC investment fund pegged to growth in these four nations. The moniker captured the global excitement about emerging powers at the time and transformed into a political grouping in 2009, when leaders of the four countries held their first summit. South Africa joined a year later.

In 2001, Goldman Sachs banker Jim O'Neill created the acronym "BRIC" to refer to Brazil, Russia, India, and China- countries he predicted would soon have a significant impact on the global economy. In 2006, Goldman Sachs opened a BRIC investment fund pegged to growth in these four nations. The moniker captured the global excitement about emerging powers at the time and transformed into a political grouping in 2009, when leaders of the four countries held their first summit. South Africa joined a year later.

BRICS as a political body has faced countless critics and doubters from the start. Analysts in the Western press largely described the outfit as nonsensical and predicted its imminent demise. In 2011, the Financial Times' Philip Stevens announced it was "time to bid farewell" to the "BRICS without mortar." A year later, another columnist at the paper, Martin Wolf, asserted that BRICS was "not a group" and that its members had "nothing in common whatsoever." BRICS has also been described as a "motley crew," "odd grouping," "random bunch," and "disparate quartet." In 2015, Goldman Sachs decided to close the BRIC fund (which never grew to include South Africa) due to its low returns.

BRICS member countries have numerous differences and disagreements. While Brazil and Russia are commodity exporters, China is a commodity importer. Brazil, India, and South Africa are democratic countries with vibrant civil societies, but China and Russia are autocratic regimes. Brazil and South Africa are nonnuclear powers, in contrast to China, India, and Russia, which boast nuclear arsenals. Perhaps most seriously, China and India face an ongoing border conflict.

And yet, despite their differences, not one BRICS leader has ever missed the group's annual summits. (Meetings took place virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic.) Instead of unraveling, diplomatic and economic ties have strengthened, and BRICS membership has become a central element to each member's foreign-policy identity. Even significant ideological shifts- including the election of right-wing populist leaders such as India's Narendra Modi in 2014 and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro in 2018- have not significantly altered countries' commitment to the club.

Yet as BRICS approaches its 15th summit in Johannesburg this August, the grouping is experiencing an unprecedented disagreement over enlargement. The outcome will be a test of BRICS identity in the face of rising Chinese influence.

Despite the many disagreements and tensions among them, BRICS members have more in common than Western analysts often appreciate. The strategic benefits the outfit produces for its participants still far exceed its costs. Four aspects stand out.

First, all BRICS members see the emergence of multipolarity as both inevitable and generally desirable- and identify the bloc as a means to play a more active role in shaping the post-Western global order. Member states share a deep-seated skepticism of U.S.-led unipolarity and believe that the BRICS nations increase their strategic autonomy and bargaining power when negotiating with Washington. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said in opening remarks at the BRICS foreign ministers' meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, on June 1, the concentration of economic power- presumably in the West- "leaves too many nations at the mercy of too few."

Second, the BRICS grouping also provides privileged access to China, a country that has become enormously relevant for all other members. Brazil and South Africa in particular, which had only limited ties to Beijing prior to the group's founding, have benefited from BRICS as they adapt to a more China-centric world. It's not just the summits attended by heads of state: Ministers and other officials frequently gather to discuss issues such as climate, defense, education, energy, and health. And, largely under the radar, the grouping has organized countless annual meetings- in some years more than 100- involving government officials, think tanks, universities, cultural entities, and legislators. BRICS membership also granted countries a founding stake in the Shanghai-based New Development Bank (NDB), created during the fifth BRICS summit in 2013.

Third, BRICS members have generally treated each other as all-weather friends. The group has created a powerful diplomatic life raft for member countries that temporarily face difficulties on the global stage: Fellow BRICS states protected Russian President Vladimir Putin from diplomatic isolation after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and stood by Bolsonaro when he found himself globally isolated after his close ally Donald Trump's failed reelection bid for the U.S. presidency. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin could again rely on the other BRICS countries to provide him explicit diplomatic and economic support (China), help circumvent sanctions (India), participate in military exercises (South Africa), or embrace his narratives about the war (Brazil). Without BRICS support, Russia would find itself in a far more difficult situation today.

Finally, being a member of the BRICS creates considerable prestige, status, and legitimacy for Brazil, Russia, and South Africa, which for years have stagnated economically and are now anything but emerging powers. Even as Brazil has fallen behind in its share of global GDP, analysts continue to describe it as an emerging power- which facilitates investment and allows the government in Brasília, the capital, to punch above its weight diplomatically. That some 20 countries are now seeking membership in the group only confirms the notion that the BRICS seal remains powerful.

It is precisely on this last issue that the grouping is facing its biggest disagreement since its inception 14 years ago. Beijing, which does not need to preserve the grouping's exclusivity to retain its global status, has for years aimed to integrate new members and slowly transform the bloc into a China-led alliance. Since 2017, when it presented the "BRICS Plus" concept- a mechanism to bring countries closer to the outfit before eventually granting them full membership- Beijing has sought to put expansion on the agenda. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, expansion has also been of interest to Moscow, as it could help create a Russia-sympathetic bloc to counter Western attempts to isolate the country.

Brazil and India, on the other hand, have long been wary of adding new members to BRICS, as they have less to gain from a diluted club that includes smaller powers. Both Brasília and New Delhi fear that expansion would entail a loss of Brazilian and Indian influence within the group. In their eyes, new members would join largely to gain easier access to Beijing, making BRICS positions more China-centric and potentially less moderate. This explains why Jaishankar recently cautioned that deliberations on expansion were still a "work in progress," and Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said that "BRICS is a brand and an asset, so we have to take care of it, because it means and represents a lot." South Africa, which traditionally has the least influence within BRICS, has sought to hedge its bets.

There is no formal application process- or specific criteria- to become a BRICS member. Some countries have simply been added to the list of potential future members after an informal expression of interest. But in last year's BRICS summit declaration, member countries vowed to promote "discussions among BRICS members on BRICS expansion process" and stressed "the need to clarify the guiding principles, the standards, criteria and procedures." The debate about BRICS expansion is not directly related to the NDB, which in 2021 added Bangladesh, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Uruguay as new members and announced that at least 30 percent of loans would be provided in the currencies of member states rather than the U.S. dollar.

In theory, each BRICS member has a veto over the group's decisions, which explains why yearly summit declarations have often been vague. In practice, the grouping's profound asymmetries- China's GDP is larger than that of all other members combined- creates informal hierarchies. South Africa's 2010 accession was led by China to bolster Beijing's engagement on the African continent. It also made the IBSA grouping (of India, Brazil, and South Africa) superfluous. If killing IBSA was a desired side effect of South Africa's BRICS membership- to show that three large democracies in the developing world discussing can't discuss the future of the global south without China- Beijing succeeded: The 10th IBSA leaders' summit, scheduled to take place in 2013, has been postponed indefinitely.

China and Russia may therefore succeed, despite Brazilian opposition and Indian skepticism, in adding new members to the club, particularly since Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva- to his advisors' chagrin- recently expressed support for inviting Venezuela to BRICS during improvised remarks.

Disagreements over whether to expand BRICS are about more than exclusivity and status. Several potential accession candidates- such as Iran, Syria, and Venezuela- have largely pursued an anti-Western foreign policy. Their integration could complicate Brazil's and India's efforts to preserve a nonaligned strategy amid growing tensions between the West and the Beijing-Moscow axis.

The key to BRICS' success since 2009 has been its capacity to circumvent internal disagreements and focus on unifying themes, such as the desire to build a more multipolar world and strengthen south-south relations. India-China ties are notoriously fraught and, despite New Delhi's decision to help Moscow export its oil, India has systematically sought to reduce its dependence on Russian weapons and increased its arms purchases from Europe. The status quo may be the best BRICS can achieve without exposing its rifts. While Russia has long attempted to position the BRICS grouping as an anti-Western bloc, Brazil and India have steadily sought to prevent Moscow from doing so.

The uncertainty about how the South African government in Pretoria should handle hosting the upcoming BRICS summit in Johannesburg reflects the dilemmas it and Brasília currently face in the context of growing tensions between Moscow and the West. Since South Africa is a party to the Rome Statute, the founding charter of the International Criminal Court (ICC), it would be obligated to arrest Putin- whom the ICC has indicted- if he attends. For months, South Africans have debated how to handle the delicate situation. As former South African President Thabo Mbeki recently pointed out: "We can't say to President Putin, please come to South Africa, and then arrest him. At the same time, we can't say come to South Africa, and not arrest him- because we're defying our own law- we can't behave as a lawless government."

While hosting Putin without arresting him would strain South Africa's ties to the West, not hosting him- or organizing the summit elsewhere- would dilute BRICS' commitment to being all-weather friends. The most likely scenario is that South Africa finds a legal loophole to host Putin without detaining him- representing a diplomatic triumph for the Russian president.

Still, it is largely a lose-lose dilemma for South Africa, and means that being part of BRICS has started to have a tangible cost for the country by negatively affecting its ties to the United States and Europe. Pretoria has already had a taste of this: After South Africa drew closer to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine- including by allegedly supplying Moscow with weapons- the G-7 decided not to invite it as a guest to a recent summit, for the first time since South African President Cyril Ramaphosa took office in 2018. Unless the Russia-Ukraine war ends soon, Brazil- which has also signed the Rome Statute and is slated to host the G-20 summit in 2024 and the BRICS summit in 2025 - will soon face the same problem.

For all its ongoing challenges, BRICS generates many benefits for its members and is here to stay. Yet if the group announces the inclusion of new members during the upcoming summit in Johannesburg, it would be simplistic to interpret it as a sign of strength. Rather, expansion should be read as a sign of China's growing capacity to determine the bloc's overall strategy- and may reflect the emergence not of a multipolar order, but of a bipolar one.