Does the Great Retreat from Afghanistan Mark the End of the American Era? - Robin Wright (New Yorker)

Does the Great Retreat from Afghanistan Mark the End of the American Era?

It’s a dishonorable end that weakens U.S. standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably.

By Robin Wright

The New Yorker, August 15, 2021

 

History will surely note this absurdly ill-timed tweet. On Monday, August 9th, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul posed a question to its four hundred thousand followers: “This #PeaceMonday, we want to hear from you. What do you wish to tell the negotiating parties in Doha about your hopes for a political settlement? #PeaceForAfghanistan.” The message reflected the delusion of American policy. With the Taliban sweeping across the country, storming one provincial capital after another, the prospect that diplomacy would work a year after U.S.-backed talks in Qatar began—and quickly stalled—was illusory. By Thursday, the Afghan government controlled only three major cities. President Joe Biden, the leader of the world’s most powerful nation, announced that he was dispatching three thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan to pull hundreds of its diplomats and staff out of that Embassy. And, by Sunday, it was all over—before dusk. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, his government collapsed, and the U.S.-trained Afghan security forces simply melted away as the Taliban moved into the capital. American diplomats—having evacuated the fortress-like U.S. Embassy—were forced to shelter in place at the airport as they waited to be evacuated. America’s two-decade-long misadventure in Afghanistan has ended. For Americans, Afghanistan looks a little, maybe a lot, like a trillion-dollar throwaway. Meanwhile, Afghans are left in free fall.

It’s not just an epic defeat for the United States. The fall of Kabul may serve as a bookend for the era of U.S. global power. In the nineteen-forties, the United States launched the Great Rescue to help liberate Western Europe from the powerful Nazi war machine. It then used its vast land, sea, and air power to defeat the formidable Japanese empire in East Asia. Eighty years later, the U.S. is engaged in what historians may someday call a Great Retreat from a ragtag militia that has no air power or significant armor and artillery, in one of the poorest countries in the world.

It’s now part of an unnerving American pattern, dating back to the nineteen-seventies. On Sunday, social-media posts of side-by-side photos evoked painful memories. One captured a desperate crowd climbing up a ladder to the rooftop of a building near the U.S. Embassy in Saigon to get on one of the last helicopters out in 1975, during the Ford Administration. The other showed a Chinook helicopter hovering over the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Sunday. “This is manifestly not Saigon,” the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, tried to argue on Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week.” It didn’t wash. And there are other episodes. In 1984, the Reagan Administration withdrew the U.S. Marine peacekeepers from Beirut after a suicide bomber from a nascent cell of what became Hezbollah killed more than two hundred and forty military personnel—the largest loss for the Marines in a single incident since the Second World War. In 2011, the United States pulled out of Iraq, opening the way for the emergence of ISIS. The repeated miscalculations challenge basic Washington policy-making as well as U.S. military strategy and intelligence capabilities. Why wasn’t this looming calamity—or any of the earlier ones—anticipated? Or the exits better planned? Or the country not left in the hands of a former enemy? It is a dishonorable end.

Whatever the historic truth decades from now, the U.S. will be widely perceived by the world today as having lost what George W. Bush dubbed the “war on terror”—despite having mobilized NATO for its first deployment outside Europe or North America, a hundred and thirty-six countries to provide various types of military assistance, and twenty-three countries to host U.S. forces deployed in offensive operations. America’s vast tools and tactics proved ill-equipped to counter the will and endurance of the Taliban and their Pakistani backers. In the long term, its missiles and warplanes were unable to vanquish a movement of sixty thousand core fighters in a country about as big as Texas.

There are many repercussions that will endure long after the U.S. withdrawal. First, jihadism has won a key battle against democracy. The West believed that its armor and steel, backed by a generous infusion of aid, could defeat a hard-line ideology with a strong local following. The Taliban are likely, once again, to install Sharia as law of the land. Afghanistan will again, almost certainly, become a haven for like-minded militants, be they members of Al Qaeda or others in search of a haven or a sponsor. It’s a gloomy prospect as Americans prepare to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks next month. Since 2001, Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other jihadi extremists have seeded franchises on all six inhabited continents. Last month, the United States sanctioned an ISIS branch as far afield as Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony in southern Africa where almost sixty per cent of the population is Christian.

Second, both Afghanistan and Iraq have proved that the United States can neither build nations nor create armies out of scratch, especially in countries that have a limited middle class and low education rates, over a decade or two. It takes generations. Not enough people have the knowledge or experience to navigate whole new ways of life, whatever they want in principle. Ethnic and sectarian divisions thwart attempts to overhaul political, social, and economic life all at the same time. The United States spent eighty-three billion dollars training and arming an Afghan force of some three hundred thousand—more than four times the size of the Taliban’s militia. “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day,” Mark Milley told reporters back in 2013. He is now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet, by March, when I was last in Kabul, the Taliban controlled half of the country. Between May and mid-August, it took the other half—most just during the past week. Last month, Biden said that he trusted “the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped and more competent in terms of conducting war.” In the end, the Taliban basically walked into Kabul—and the Presidential palace—on Sunday.

Third, America’s standing abroad is profoundly weakened, symbolized by the U.S. Embassy’s lowering the Stars and Stripes for the final time on Sunday. Smoke was seen rising from the grounds of the Embassy—which cost almost eight hundred million dollars to expand just five years ago—as matériel was burned in the rush to exit. Washington will have a hard time mobilizing its allies to act in concert again—whether for the kind of broad and unified alliance, one of the largest in world history, that formed in Afghanistan after 9/11, or for the type of meagre cobbled-together “coalition of the willing” for the war in Iraq. The United States is still the dominant power in the West, but largely by default. There aren’t many other powers or leaders offering alternatives. It’s hard to see how the United States salvages its reputation or position anytime soon.

America’s Great Retreat is at least as humiliating as the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989, an event that contributed to the end of its empire and Communist rule. The United States was in Afghanistan twice as long and spent far more. The Soviet Union is estimated to have spent about fifty billion dollars during the first seven of its ten years occupying the mountainous country. Yes, the United States fostered the birth of a rich civil society, the education of girls, and an independent media. It facilitated democratic elections more than once and witnessed the transfer of power. Thirty-seven per cent of Afghan girls are now able to read, according to Human Rights Watch. The TOLO channel hosted eighteen seasons of “Afghan Star,” a singing competition much like “American Idol.” Zahra Elham, a twentysomething member of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority, became the first woman to win, in 2019. But untold numbers of the Afghans encouraged by the United States are desperately searching for ways out of the country as the Taliban move in. Women have pulled out their blue burqas again. And the enduring imagery of the Americans flying out on their helicopters will be no different than Soviet troops marching across the Friendship Bridge from Afghanistan to the then Soviet Union on February 15, 1989. Both of the big powers withdrew as losers, with their tails between their legs, leaving behind chaos.

For the United States, the costs do not end with its withdrawal from either Afghanistan or Iraq. It could cost another two trillion dollars just to pay for the health care and disability of veterans from those wars. And those costs may not peak until 2048. America’s longest war will be a lot longer than anyone anticipated two decades ago—or even as it ends. In all, forty-seven thousand civilians have died, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. More than twenty-four hundred were U.S. military personnel, and almost four thousand were U.S. contractors.

I first went to Afghanistan in 1999, during the original Taliban rule. I drove through the breathtaking Khyber Pass from Pakistan, past the fortified estates of the drug lords along the border, on the rutted, axle-destroying roads to Kabul. The images of the Taliban’s repressive rule—little kids working on the streets of Afghan towns to support widowed mothers not allowed in public, checkpoints festooned with confiscated audio and video tapes—are indelible. I went back with Secretary of State Colin Powell on his first trip after the fall of the Taliban. There was hope then of something different, even as the prospect of it often seemed elusive, and the idea sullied by the country’s corrupt new rulers. I’ve been back several times since, including in March with General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, Jr., the head of Central Command, who is now overseeing the final U.S. military operations. On Sunday, as America erased its presence in Afghanistan in a race to get out, I wondered: Was it all for naught? What other consequences will America face from its failed campaign in Afghanistan decades from now? We barely know the answers.

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Robin Wright, a contributing writer and columnist, has written for The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”

 

 

 

Kissinger, o realista cínico - Thomas Meaney (New Yorker)

The Myth of Henry Kissinger

Nixon’s Secretary of State was a far less remarkable figure than his supporters, his critics—and he himself—believed.

By Thomas Meaney

The New Yorker, May 11, 2020

Kissinger in 1972. Recent works in the vast literature on him have questioned fundamental assumptions about his outlook.Photograph by Yousuf Karsh

In 1952, at the age of twenty-eight, Henry Kissinger did what enterprising graduate students do when they want to hedge their academic future: he started a magazine. He picked an imposing name—Confluence—and enlisted illustrious contributors: Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Lillian Smith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr. The publisher James Laughlin, who was a backer of the magazine, described the young Kissinger as “a thoroughly sincere person (terribly earnest Germanic type) who is trying his hardest to do an idealistic job.” Like his other early production, the Harvard International Seminar, a summer program that convened participants from around the world—Kissinger gamely volunteered to spy on attendees for the F.B.I.—the magazine opened channels for him not only with policymakers in Washington but also with an older generation of German Jewish thinkers whose political experience had been formed in the early thirties, when the Weimar Republic was supplanted by the Nazi regime.

For Cold War liberals, who saw the stirrings of fascism in everything from McCarthyism to the rise of mass culture, Weimar was a cautionary tale, conferring a certain authority on those who had survived. Kissinger cultivated the Weimar intellectuals, but he was not impressed by their prospects for influence. Although he later invoked the memory of Nazism to justify all manner of power plays, at this stage he was building a reputation as an all-American maverick. He appalled the émigrés by running an article in Confluence by Ernst von Salomon, a far-rightist who had hired a getaway driver for the men who assassinated the Weimar Republic’s foreign minister. “I have now joined you as a cardinal villain in the liberal demonology,” Kissinger told a friend afterward, joking that the piece was being taken as “a symptom of my totalitarian and even Nazi sympathies.”

For more than sixty years, Henry Kissinger’s name has been synonymous with the foreign-policy doctrine called “realism.” In his time as national-security adviser and Secretary of State to President Richard Nixon, his willingness to speak frankly about the U.S.’s pursuit of power in a chaotic world brought him both acclaim and notoriety. Afterward, the case against him built, bolstered by a stream of declassified documents chronicling actions across the globe. Seymour Hersh, in “The Price of Power” (1983), portrayed Kissinger as an unhinged paranoiac; Christopher Hitchens, in “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2001), styled his attack as a charge sheet for prosecuting him as a war criminal.

But Kissinger, now approaching his ninety-seventh birthday, no longer inspires such widespread loathing. As former critics crept toward the political center and rose to power themselves, passions cooled. Hillary Clinton, who, as a law student at Yale, vocally opposed Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia, has described the “astute observations” he shared with her when she was Secretary of State, writing in an effusive review of his most recent book that “Kissinger is a friend.” During one of the 2008 Presidential debates, John McCain and Barack Obama each cited Kissinger as supporting their (opposite) postures toward Iran. Samantha Power, the most celebrated critic of the U.S.’s failure to halt genocides, was not above receiving the Henry A. Kissinger Prize from him.

Kissinger has proved fertile ground for historians and publishers. There are psychoanalytic studies, tell-alls by former girlfriends, compendiums of his quotations, and business books about his dealmaking. Two of the most significant recent assessments appeared in 2015: the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography, which appraised Kissinger sympathetically from the right, and Greg Grandin’s “Kissinger’s Shadow,” which approached him critically from the left. From opposing perspectives, they converged in questioning the profundity of Kissinger’s realism. In Ferguson’s account, Kissinger enters as a young idealist who follows every postwar foreign-policy fashion and repeatedly attaches himself to the wrong Presidential candidates, until he finally gets lucky with Nixon. Grandin’s Kissinger, despite speaking the language of realists—“credibility,” “linkage,” “balance of power”—has a view of reality so cavalier as to be radically relativist.

Barry Gewen’s new book, “The Inevitability of Tragedy” (Norton), belongs to the neither-revile-him-nor-revere-him school of Kissingerology. “No one has thought more deeply about international affairs,” Gewen writes, and adds, “Kissinger’s thinking runs so counter to what Americans believe or wish to believe.” Gewen, an editor at the New York Times Book Review, traces Kissinger’s most momentous foreign-policy decisions to his experience as “a child of Weimar.” Although Gewen is aware of the pitfalls of attributing too much to a regime that collapsed before his subject’s tenth birthday, he is fascinated by the connections between Kissinger and his émigré elders, whose experiences of liberal democracy made them fear democracy’s capacity to undermine liberalism.

Heinz Kissinger was born in 1923 in Fürth, a city in Bavaria. His family fled to New York shortly before Kristallnacht, settling in Washington Heights, a neighborhood with so many German immigrants that it was sometimes known as the Fourth Reich. They spoke English at home, and Heinz became Henry. In his youth, he displayed few remarkable qualities beyond enthusiasm for Italian defensive soccer tactics and a knack for advising his friends on their amorous exploits. As a teen-ager, he worked in a shaving-brush factory before school, and aspired to become an accountant.

In 1942, Kissinger was drafted into the U.S. Army. At Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, he befriended Fritz Kraemer, a German-American private fifteen years his senior, whom Kissinger would call “the greatest single influence on my formative years.” A Nietzschean firebrand to the point of self-parody—he wore a monocle in his good eye to make his weak eye work harder—Kraemer claimed to have spent the late Weimar years fighting both Communists and Nazi Brown Shirts in the streets. He had doctorates in political science and international law, and pursued a promising career at the League of Nations before fleeing to the U.S., in 1939. He warned Kissinger not to emulate “cleverling” intellectuals and their bloodless cost-benefit analyses. Believing Kissinger to be “musically attuned to history,” he told him, “Only if you do not ‘calculate’ will you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the little people.”

For all the imputations of Kissinger’s Germanness, the indelible experience of his youth was serving in the 84th Infantry Division as it swept through Europe. “He was more American than I have ever seen any American,” a comrade recalled. The work of the U.S. occupation, with its opportunities for quickly assuming positions of authority, thrilled him. In 1945, Kissinger participated in the liberation of the Ahlem concentration camp, outside Hanover, and earned a Bronze Star for his role in breaking up a Gestapo sleeper cell.

In 1947, Kissinger enrolled at Harvard on the G.I. Bill, intending to study political science and English literature. He found a second mentor, William Yandell Elliott, a well-connected history professor from the Wasp élite, who advised a series of U.S. Presidents on international affairs. The young Kissinger was drawn less to the classic exponents of Realpolitik, such as Clausewitz and Bismarck, than to “philosophers of history” like Kant and anatomists of civilizational decay such as Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler. From these thinkers, Kissinger cobbled together his own view of how history operated. It was not a story of liberal progress, or of class consciousness, or of cycles of birth, maturity, and decline; rather, it was “a series of meaningless incidents,” fleetingly given shape by the application of human will. As a young infantryman, Kissinger had learned that victors ransacked history for analogies to gild their triumphs, while the vanquished sought out the historical causes of their misfortune.

Ferguson and Grandin both seize on one sentence in Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis, titled “The Meaning of History”: “The realm of freedom and necessity can not be reconciled except by an inward experience.” Such a deeply subjective world view might seem surprising in Kissinger, but French existentialism had arrived at Harvard, and the thesis cited Jean-Paul Sartre. Both Sartre and Kissinger believed that morality was determined by action. But for Sartre action created the possibility of individual and collective responsibility, whereas for Kissinger moral indeterminacy was a condition of human freedom.

In 1951, while pursuing graduate studies, Kissinger worked as a consultant with the Army’s Operations Research Office, where he became familiar with the Defense Department’s penchant for psychological warfare. To Kissinger’s peers at Harvard, tailoring their résumés to the needs of the U.S. security state, his doctoral work—on the Congress of Vienna and its consequences—seemed whimsically antiquarian. But his published dissertation invoked thermonuclear weapons in its first sentence, and presented readers in Washington with an unmistakable historical analogy: the British and Austrian Empires’ efforts to contain Napoleon’s France held lessons for dealing with the Soviet Union.

Kissinger is sometimes called the American Metternich, a reference to the Austrian statesman who forged the post-Napoleonic peace. But here, weighing the careers of the men he wrote about, he stressed the limitations of Metternich as a model:

Lacking in Metternich is the attribute which has enabled the spirit to transcend an impasse at so many crises of history: the ability to contemplate an abyss, not with the detachment of a scientist, but as a challenge to overcome—or perish in the process. . . . For men become myths, not by what they know, nor even by what they achieve, but by the tasks they set themselves.

Kissinger was taking a swipe at the bright-eyed social scientists around him, who thought that the deadly confrontation of the Cold War could be solved with empirical and behavioral models, rather than with existential swagger.

In 1954, Harvard did not offer Kissinger the junior professorship he had hoped for, but the dean of the faculty, McGeorge Bundy, recommended him to the Council on Foreign Relations, where Kissinger started managing a study group on nuclear weapons. In Eisenhower-era Washington, a fresh take on nuclear weapons could make your name. In 1957, Kissinger published the book that established him as a public figure, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.” It argued that the Eisenhower Administration needed to steel itself to use tactical nuclear weapons in conventional wars. To reserve nuclear weapons only for doomsday scenarios left the U.S. unable to respond decisively to incremental Soviet incursions. Kissinger intended his thesis to be provocative, and could not have known that Eisenhower’s Joint Chiefs of Staff had been telling the President much the same thing for years.

By the late fifties, Kissinger did not need to choose whether to be an academic, a public intellectual, a bureaucrat, or a politician. Each sphere of activity enhanced his value in the others. He was a sought-after consultant to Presidential candidates; assuming that America’s Wasp aristocracy offered the likeliest path to power, he spent years tutoring Nelson Rockefeller in foreign policy. In 1961, Bundy, who had become President John F. Kennedy’s national-security adviser, hired Kissinger as a consultant. Kissinger also finally got tenure at Harvard. Members of the faculty objected that his nuclear-weapons book was unscholarly, but Bundy pushed the appointment through, persuading the Ford Foundation to put up money for his professorship.

Kissinger is hard to place among the foreign-policy thinkers of his time. Does he belong with America’s most idiosyncratic and brilliant strategists, such as George Kennan and Nicholas Spykman? Typically, he is categorized with lesser “defense intellectuals,” such as Hans Speier and Albert Wohlstetter. These men moved fluidly between lecture halls and rand Corporation laboratories, where they complained about student protesters and gave alarming slide-show presentations about nuclear apocalypse.

Gewen prefers to put Kissinger among the more high-minded Weimar émigrés, although the “family resemblances” he finds are hard to pin down. Arendt never warmed to him, but they shared a disappointment about the U.S.’s early performance in the Cold War. In her book “On Revolution,” Arendt worried that post-colonial nations, rather than choosing to copy American political institutions, were following the Communist script of economic liberation through revolution. Kissinger argued that the U.S. needed to better broadcast its ideology, and he did so with an evangelical fervor that went beyond anything Arendt intended. “A capitalist society, or, what is more interesting to me, a free society, is a more revolutionary phenomenon than nineteenth-century socialism,” Kissinger said, in an interview with Mike Wallace, in 1958. “I think we should go on the spiritual offensive.” This was the impulse not of a critical intellectual but of someone who did not question the American global mission.

The émigré closer in viewpoint to Kissinger was Hans Morgenthau, the father of modern foreign-policy realism. The two met at Harvard and maintained a professional friendship that waxed and waned over the decades. “There was no thinker who meant more to Kissinger than Morgenthau,” Gewen writes. Like Kissinger, Morgenthau had become well known with a popular book about foreign policy, “Politics Among Nations” (1948). And he shared Kissinger’s belief that foreign policy could not be left to technocrats with flowcharts and statistics. But, unlike Kissinger, Morgenthau was unwilling to sacrifice his realist principles for political influence. In the mid-sixties, working as a consultant for the Johnson Administration, he was publicly critical of the Vietnam War, which he believed jeopardized America’s status as a great power, and Johnson had him fired.

Morgenthau and Kissinger both resisted describing themselves as practitioners of Realpolitik—Kissinger recoiled at the term—but Realpolitik has proved a remarkably flexible concept ever since it emerged, in nineteenth-century Prussia. Political thinkers grappling with Prussia’s rise on a continent crowded with competing powers propounded several strains of strategic thought. In an increasingly bourgeois society, diplomacy could no longer be tailored to the whims and rivalries of a royal court; prudent foreign policy required marshalling everything at a state’s disposal—public support, commerce, law—in order to project the image of power toward its rivals. The irony is that these doctrines were at root an attempt to codify something that their adherents believed Anglo-American statesmen already did instinctively. “We Germans write fat volumes about Realpolitik but understand it no better than babies in a nursery,” the New Republic editor Walter Weyl recalled being told by a German professor during the First World War. “You Americans understand it far too well to talk about it.”

America has never been short of statesmen capable of communicating their vision of the national interest to the public. If Kissinger was a realist, it was in this sense—of making the image-management aspect of foreign policy a priority. Morgenthau, though also fixated on the reputation of a state’s power, believed that that reputation could not diverge too much from a state’s ability to exercise its power. If the U.S. upset this delicate equilibrium, as he believed it was doing in Vietnam, other states, more realist in their assessment, would take advantage. The best a realist could do was adapt to situations, working toward a narrowly defined national interest, while other nations worked toward theirs. Idealistic notions about the advancement of humanity had no place in his scheme. For Morgenthau, Gewen writes, “war was not inevitable in international affairs,” but “the preparation for war was.” Wars waged by realists would be less destructive than ones waged by idealists who believed themselves to be fighting for universal peace.

Morgenthau was disappointed when Kissinger defended the Vietnam War in public, despite having privately admitted to him that the U.S. could not win. It took Kissinger’s close contemporary the political theorist Sheldon Wolin—another son of Jewish émigrés who fought in the war and studied at Harvard with William Yandell Elliott—to fully dissect Kissinger’s careerist instincts. On the surface, Wolin observed, Kissinger would have appeared a mismatch for the anti-élitist Nixon. But the pairing was perfect: Nixon needed someone who could elevate his opportunism to a higher plane of purpose and make him feel like a great figure in the drama of history. As Wolin wrote, “What could have been more comforting to that barren and inarticulate soul than to hear the authoritative voice of Dr. Kissinger, who spoke so often and knowingly about the ‘meaning of history.’ ” Later, Kissinger liked to mention his qualms about taking the job with Nixon: he’d been so successful at mobilizing his academic pedigree in Washington that he might well have been appointed to the same position even if the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, had become President instead.

As early as 1965, on his first visit to Vietnam, Kissinger had concluded that the war there was a lost cause, and Nixon believed the same. Yet they conspired to prolong it even before reaching the White House. During the Paris peace talks, in 1968, Kissinger, who was there as a consultant, passed information about the negotiations to the Nixon campaign, which started to fear that Johnson’s progress toward a settlement would bring the Democrats electoral victory. Nixon’s campaign then used this information in private talks with the South Vietnamese to dissuade them from taking part in the talks.

Having won the election promising “an honorable end to the war,” Nixon wanted to appear to be in pursuit of peace while still inflicting enough damage on North Vietnam to achieve concessions. In March, 1969, he and Kissinger began a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, which was a staging ground for the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. In four years, the U.S. military dropped more bombs on Cambodia than it had in the entire Pacific theatre during the Second World War. The campaign killed an estimated hundred thousand civilians, hastened the rise of Pol Pot, and irrevocably ravaged large tracts of countryside. It also fell so far short of its strategic aims that more than one historian has wondered whether Kissinger—who personally tweaked the schedules of the bombing runs and the allocation of planes—had some other motive. But, as Grandin writes, “he had built his own perpetual motion machine; the purpose of American power was to create an awareness of American purpose.”

Gewen occasionally defends Kissinger’s record more strenuously than Kissinger himself has done. He argues that the claims about the need to maintain “credibility” were rooted in legitimate concerns about securing a U.S.-led global order. But, as Morgenthau saw, Kissinger’s argument rested on a disastrous miscalculation of America’s capacities. How would the credibility of the United States be enhanced by dragging out a war against a fourth-rate power? How, to paraphrase John Kerry, do you ask thirty thousand American soldiers to die so that the thirty thousand soldiers before them will not have died in vain?

As it was, each successive American initiative eroded credibility rather than reinforced it. Not even the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, in 1972, the largest of the war, could convince the North Vietnamese to renegotiate. The young Foreign Service officer John Negroponte offered a wry postmortem, which Kissinger never forgave: “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.”

Gewen also defends Kissinger’s idea that every political event anywhere in the world demands a response somewhere else, a view that, in practice, made every pawn appear to be a threatened queen. When Nixon and Kissinger backed the Pakistani President Yahya Khan’s genocidal campaign against East Pakistan, in 1971, they did so to show the Soviets that America was “tough.” Four years later, Kissinger’s sign-off on the Indonesian President Suharto’s genocidal campaign in East Timor was meant to signal that America would unquestioningly reward those who had decimated Communists within their reach. In retrospect, the notion that everything America did would be duly registered and responded to by its opponents and friends seems like an expression of geopolitical narcissism. At the time, the thirty-three-year-old senator Joe Biden accused Kissinger, at a Senate hearing, of trying to promulgate “a global Monroe Doctrine.”

Given Gewen’s insistence on Kissinger’s realism, it is odd that he does not dwell more on the most pragmatic episodes in his career—the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, the opening of relations with China, and the development of “shuttle diplomacy” to contain the 1973 Arab-Israeli war—which are still widely celebrated as major diplomatic achievements. Détente required Kissinger to prevail over hard-liner views of the Soviet leadership as ideologues bent on world domination and to see Leonid Brezhnev’s Kremlin as populated by rational actors. Instead, Gewen often seems drawn to defend Kissinger at the points in his career where defense is hardest. He opens the book with a long chapter on U.S. involvement in Chile, which culminated in a coup, in 1973. When Chile elected the socialist Salvador Allende as President, in 1970, Nixon and Kissinger resolved to remove him. The fact that Allende was popularly elected made him only more dangerous in their eyes. “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people,” Kissinger observed. Gewen thinks this quip captures the tragic dilemma of Kissinger’s relationship to democracy and power. “The statement looks a lot different if one has the rise of Adolf Hitler in mind,” Gewen writes, and suggests that socialist Chile should be grouped with the Weimar Republic as examples of a people voting themselves out of a democracy. Gewen lists the sins and foibles of Allende—including “pernicious” wage increases for workers and indoctrinating the young in the “values of socialist humanism”—but withholds such scrutiny from his successor, the right-wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet, whose power the U.S. helped consolidate, and who, if one has the rise of Hitler in mind, seems rather more germane.

Similarly questionable is Gewen’s assertion that “what cannot be dismissed is the Nixon/Kissinger worry that Chile under Allende was a paving stone on the road to Soviet hegemony.” In fact, the Soviet Union had scaled back its rivalry with the U.S. in the developing world, where countering China now diluted its resources. The Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, and a failed attempt to establish a submarine base in Cuba, eight years later, had soured any hope for developing a true proxy state in Latin America. The Kremlin leadership was reluctant to increase the pittance it sent to Chile, knowing that Allende would spend it on badly needed American imports.

If Allende did represent a threat, it was almost certainly less to do with any Soviet ambitions than with his own powerful arguments for a global distribution of resources far beyond anything that Washington was prepared to countenance. Unlike Morgenthau and Kennan, who saw the non-industrial world as a backwater not worth America’s attention, Kissinger considered Third World socialism a serious foe, capable of disturbing the U.S.’s delicate face-off with the Soviet Union. He and Nixon assumed, correctly, that they could back a coup against Allende with minimal fuss, just as Eisenhower, two decades before, had rid Guatemala of its democratically elected President, Jacobo Árbenz. Still, the spectacle of Allende’s removal had one unintended consequence: it lit the wick of one of Kissinger’s most durable annoyances, the global human-rights movement.

In 1972, when the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked Kissinger to explain his popularity, he said, “The main point arises from the fact that I’ve always acted alone.” Critics and defenders alike tend to accept this self-assessment, but his record shows a more mundane figure who assimilated prevailing foreign-policy assumptions. His most controversial moves have clear precursors. President Johnson had secretly bombed Cambodia, too, and, in 1965, he condoned Suharto’s genocide in Indonesia, which in scale outstripped the one Kissinger approved in East Timor. The U.S.-backed interventions prefiguring Allende’s removal include dozens in Latin America and the Caribbean alone.

Since leaving office, too, Kissinger has rarely challenged consensus, let alone offered the kind of inconvenient assessments that characterized the later career of George Kennan, who warned President Clinton against nato expansion after the Soviet Union’s collapse. It is instructive to measure Kissinger’s instincts against those of a true realist, such as the University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer. As the Cold War ended, Mearsheimer was so committed to the “balance of power” principle that he made the striking suggestion of allowing nuclear proliferation in a unified Germany and throughout Eastern Europe. Kissinger, unable to see beyond the horizon of the Cold War, could not imagine any other purpose for American power than the pursuit of global supremacy.

Although he has criticized the interventionism of neoconservatives, there is scarcely a U.S. military adventure, from Panama to Iraq, that has not met with his approval. In all his meditations on world order, he has not thought about how contingent and unforeseen America’s rise as global superpower actually was. Nothing in the country’s republican tradition prior to the Second World War demanded it.

Although Kissinger may not have originated the precepts for which he is best known, it is hard to find discussions of them that don’t refer to his career. As Grandin has pointed out, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s one-per-cent doctrine—the idea that a state has to act against enemies if there’s even the merest chance that they can harm it—is thoroughly Kissingerian, and when Karl Rove reputedly said, “We create our own reality,” he was echoing words of Kissinger’s from forty years before. In 2010, the Obama Administration’s lawyers used the precedent of Nixon and Kissinger’s incursions into Cambodia as part of their argument to establish the legal basis for drone killings of American terrorist suspects who were outside the battlefield of Afghanistan. A Justice Department memo argued that military action in places like Yemen was justified when recognized threats had already spread there. The Trump Administration’s recent assassination of the Iranian commander Qassem Suleimani, apparently intended to terrify the Iranians into ceasing Middle East operations, conforms to Kissinger’s obsession with “credibility.”

“Historians could learn a great deal about the years after World War II simply by studying the vicissitudes of Kissinger’s celebrity,” Gewen hazards toward the end of his book. One could go further: the main display of Kissinger’s “realism” was in the management of his own fame, his transformation of a conventional performance into a symbol of diplomatic virtuosity. It can sometimes seem as if there has been an unconscious compact between Kissinger and many of his detractors. If all the sins of the U.S. security state can be loaded onto one man, all parties get what they need: Kissinger’s status as a world-historic figure is assured, and his critics can regard his foreign policy as the exception rather than the rule. It would be comforting to believe that American liberals are capable of seeing that politics is more than a matter of personal style, and that the record will prevail, but the enduring cult of Kissinger points to a less palatable possibility: Kissinger is us. ♦

Published in the print edition of the May 18, 2020, issue, with the headline “The Wages of Realism.”

Thomas Meaney is a fellow at the Max Planck Society, in Göttingen, and at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Jair Bolsonaro’s Southern Strategy - Jon Lee Anderson (New Yorker)

Se Bolsonaro tivesse uma "estratégia meridional, como argumenta Jon Lee Anderson, da New Yorker, isso representaria um enorme progresso, pois significaria que haveria algo, ainda que minimamente racional, em lugar do caos criado pela famiglia Bolsonaro, com três zeros igualmente caóticos dividindo o trabalho para atrapalhar o governo, um na política externa, outro na interna e um terceiro sabe-se lá com quem exatamente, pois os vínculos com as milícias criminosas é o que foi reportado pela imprensa.

Ou seja, ainda falta um enorme progresso para que se chegue a um arremedo de estratégia.

Por enquanto, o que se tem é um "esquecimento" providencial de coisas do passado, das quais se encarregou de lembrar Jon Lee: “I would prefer that my son die in an accident than show up with some guy with a mustache.” 

Mas Anderson também parece minimizar a gigantesca corrupção do regime lulopetista: 

[Lula's] administration did little to diminish Brazil’s tradition of corruption, and not enough to reduce crime or develop industry,...". 

De fato, Lula foi o maior mafioso quadrilheiro de toda a história do Brasil, o maior ladrão do hemisfério, um psicopata megalomaníaco.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

A Reporter at Large

The New Yorker, April 1, 2019 Issue

Jair Bolsonaro’s Southern Strategy

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/jair-bolsonaros-southern-strategy

In Brazil, a budding authoritarian borrows from the Trump playbook.

By Jon Lee Anderson

Jair Bolsonaro promises prosperity and order. His critics fear tyranny.

 Illustration by Bráulio Amado; photograph by Simon Dawson / Bloomberg / Getty

The authoritarian leaders taking power around the world share a vocabulary of intolerance, insult, and menace. Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected President of Brazil on promises to end crime, right the economy, and “make Brazil great,” has spent his career gleefully offending women, black people, environmentalists, and gays. “I would be incapable of loving a homosexual son,” he has said. “I would prefer that my son die in an accident than show up with some guy with a mustache.” As a national legislator, he declared one political rival, Maria do Rosário, “not worth raping.” Immigrants are “scum.” The United Nations is “a bunch of communists.” He supports the torture of drug dealers, the use of firing squads, and the empowerment of a hyper-aggressive police force. “A policeman who doesn’t kill,” he has said, “isn’t a policeman.”

On New Year’s Day, Bolsonaro was inaugurated in the capital city of Brasília. Standing in the back of a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith convertible, he waved at crowds of supporters, and they shouted back, “The captain has arrived!” “The legend!” Bodyguards trotted alongside the car, flanked by uniformed cavalrymen on elegant white horses. Bolsonaro is sixty-four, tall and slim, with sharply parted dark hair and heroically bushy eyebrows. His third wife, Michelle, stood next to him, waving at the masses.

After the inaugural ceremony, Bolsonaro gave a speech outside Planalto, the Presidential palace; huge video screens magnified his image for tens of thousands of supporters. Many wore Brazilian flags draped over their shoulders and T-shirts featuring the outline of Bolsonaro’s face, in the style of the movie poster for “The Godfather.” At the ceremony, Bolsonaro had spoken broadly of the need to “unite the people.” Now, addressing his most fervent supporters, he could relax. He said that he had come to free them from the scourge of socialism—an allusion to his left-leaning predecessors Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, who had governed from 2003 to 2016. “Our flag will never be red,” he said. “It will be red only if we need to bleed over it.” The crowd took up a chant: “Never red!”

A former Army captain, Bolsonaro served seven undistinguished terms in the Chamber of Deputies, Brazil’s highest legislative body, representing four different political parties. Over twenty-seven years, he delivered some fifteen hundred speeches and introduced more than a hundred and fifty bills, but only two passed—one exempting computer equipment from taxation and another approving a controversial cancer drug. Mostly, he spoke on behalf of the armed forces, even calling for a restoration of the repressive military dictatorship that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. In one interview, he discounted the idea that democracy could bring order and prosperity: “You’ll only change things by having a civil war and doing the work the military regime didn’t do. . . . If a few innocent people die, that’s all right.”

Like many autocrats, Bolsonaro came to power with a suddenness that alarmed the élites. He had run a low-budget campaign, consisting mostly of a social-media effort overseen by his son Carlos. At events with supporters, he posed for selfies making a gesture as if he were shooting a machine gun. He promised to “reconstruct the country”—and to return power to a political right that had been in eclipse for decades. In the inaugural ceremony, he vowed to “rescue the family, respect religions and our Judeo-Christian tradition, combat gender ideology, conserving our values.”

Afterward, Bolsonaro received a procession of foreign dignitaries, and as they stepped up to pay their respects the crowd greeted them with cheers or boos. The Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán got perfunctory applause; the bolsonaristas seemed not to know who he was. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is fending off charges of fraud and bribery, got a riotous cheer. Bolivia’s President, Evo Morales, the only left-wing leader to attend, was subjected to shouts of “Get out, communist,” and “índio de merda”—“fucking Indian.”

Despite Bolsonaro’s divisive rhetoric, American conservatives were enthusiastic about his Presidency. He had expressed leeriness of China and hostility toward socialists in Cuba and Venezuela; he promised to move Brazil’s Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Donald Trump didn’t attend the inauguration, but he tweeted his solidarity: “The USA is with you!” Bolsonaro, who sees in Trump a kindred spirit and an opportunity, tweeted back, “Together, under God’s protection, we shall bring prosperity and progress to our people!”

Brasília, built in the late nineteen-fifties, is a city of immense spaces, with sweeping lawns and public buildings in curvilinear shapes—a “Jetsons”-era vision of optimism for the future. As the seat of government, it is home to tens of thousands of middle-class bureaucrats and their families. It is also a place where destitute people camp out in improvised shelters alongside highways and use grand fountains to wash their laundry. The country’s population, two hundred and nine million people, is bitterly polarized. Violent crime is endemic. In 2017, nearly sixty-four thousand Brazilians were murdered, an average of about a hundred and seventy-five every day. The economy, after several years of devastating recession, is virtually stagnant. Twenty-five per cent of the population lives below the poverty line of five dollars and fifty cents a day.

A decade ago, Brazil was prospering, amid a boom in oil and other commodities. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the President at the time, was a charismatic leftist; the son of farmworkers, he had gone from shoeshine boy to steelworker and union leader before taking office, in 2003. Lula was popular, and his Workers’ Party (known by its Portuguese initials, P.T.) instituted generous domestic programs. His administration did little to diminish Brazil’s tradition of corruption, and not enough to reduce crime or develop industry, but, as long as commodities prices stayed high, the economy thrived. In 2005, his government finished paying off a fifteen-billion-dollar loan to the International Monetary Fund, a year ahead of schedule.

In 2010, Lula stepped aside, having reached the legal limit of two consecutive terms, and his protégée Dilma Rousseff—a leftist guerrilla in her youth—became Brazil’s first female President. But commodities prices were slipping, and in her second term a corruption scandal exploded around the state-run oil company, Petrobras. Brazilians came to the streets to protest, and Rousseff’s political rivals sensed an opportunity. In 2016, they began hearings to impeach her, on charges of improperly using loans from state banks to obscure a budget deficit. Rousseff’s supporters complained of hypocrisy, noting that many members of the Brazilian legislature had been indicted for crimes ranging from bribery and money laundering to kidnapping and slavery. (The legislator who led the impeachment effort, Eduardo Cunha, was subsequently convicted of taking forty million dollars in bribes.) But the bid to remove Rousseff worked. It also helped draw attention to Bolsonaro. During the proceedings, he dedicated his vote to Carlos Brillhante Ustra, who had commanded the military unit that captured and tortured Rousseff when she was a young guerrilla.

For Brazilians watching the news in recent years, the country can appear to be perilously in decline. An enormous scandal—called Operação Lava Jato, or “Operation Car Wash”—seems to involve every third official in the government. Two dams have collapsed at mine sites in the countryside, releasing millions of gallons of waste. Last September, an accidental fire broke out at the two-hundred-year-old National Museum, destroying an irreplaceable ethnographic collection. “The country is overwhelmed by a terrible feeling that we have failed as a nation,” Gunter Axt, a Brazilian historian, told me. “And perhaps it is true.”

When Bolsonaro won his party’s nomination, in July, 2018, he seemed to offer a total inversion of political power and ideology. The military, despite a constitutional mandate to stay out of politics, backed him openly, as did a raft of wealthy business interests. His strongest competitor, Lula, was sidelined;Sérgio Moro, the judge who oversaw the Car Wash trials, had sentenced him to twelve years in prison, on charges of corruption and money laundering. Still, Lula retained a large lead in the polls, and he appealed to the Supreme Court to allow him to remain free so that he could run in the election. The appeal was denied, a few days after the commander of the Brazilian Army suggested on Twitter that the armed forces wanted him in jail. This February, Lula, who is seventy-three, was given an additional thirteen-year sentence. Moro is now Bolsonaro’s minister of justice.

Bolsonaro’s Vice-President, Hamilton Mourão, told me that his boss’s greatest virtue was his humble roots. “People have to understand, he comes from one of the poorest parts of São Paulo state,” he said. “He is a self-made man. He understands the problems of poor people, and he says what they want to hear.” Bolsonaro is often compared with Trump, but Mourão disputed the analogy. “Trump has always had a lot of money,” he said. “Bolsonaro was never rich. But both came in the moments that their countries needed them.”

Bolsonaro grew up in Eldorado, a sleepy town in Brazil’s “banana heartland,” south of São Paulo. His parents, who were of Italian and German descent, moved there when he was a boy, and his father, an itinerant dentist, set up a practice. One of six children—several of whom have never left Eldorado—Bolsonaro did not get along with his father, whom he has described as a heavy drinker who inspired discord in the family. He has claimed, perhaps straining credulity, that he did not speak to his father until he was twenty-eight, at which point he stopped hoping for him to change and decided to buy him a drink; after that they became “good friends.”

In 1970, during the first decade of military rule, a Brazilian Army unit descended on Eldorado in pursuit of Carlos Lamarca, an officer who had gone rogue and joined a Marxist guerrilla group. As the soldiers ransacked houses and searched the woods for hideouts, Bolsonaro, who was fifteen, was enthralled; he offered to help them in their search.

Three years later, Bolsonaro was accepted into the Army’s cadet corps, and he soon transferred to the élite Agulhas Negras (Black Needles) Military Academy. While he was training, Brazil’s Army was engaged in a vicious campaign to eliminate leftists. Thousands of Brazilians were detained in secret torture centers, and more than four hundred were killed, their bodies disappeared. Bolsonaro apparently played no part in the repression, but he hasn’t condemned it. He has said of the military regime that its “biggest mistake was to torture and not kill.”

In 1985, Brazil returned to democratic rule, and the military returned to its barracks. Soon afterward, Bolsonaro wrote an unauthorized magazine article in which he complained about the military hierarchy and argued for increased wages for the troops. His superiors imprisoned him for two weeks, for creating an “environment of unrest.” A year later, he faced a more serious charge: as part of his campaign to increase wages, he had conspired to put pressure on commanders by setting off grenades at military garrisons around Rio. Although he proclaimed his innocence, investigators found sketches for the bombing plan drawn in his hand. Bolsonaro was found guilty by a disciplinary committee but cleared in the Superior Military Court, where a majority of judges decided that there was insufficient evidence; he was allowed to enter the reserves as a captain, with a full pension. There were reports that Bolsonaro had been treated favorably, to prevent unrest in the lower ranks—although several judges chided him for being “consumed by vanity.”

Around that time, Bolsonaro won a seat on Rio’s city council, representing the Christian Democratic Party. In 1990, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, where he became known for intemperate behavior, registering more disciplinary proceedings than any of his peers. In 2003, he grew violent during a dispute with the legislator Maria do Rosário, twice shoving her roughly in the chest. When she protested, he said that she was a “slut” and told her to “go cry.” In 2014, he called out to Rosário during a congressional session, crudely reminding her of the incident. Bolsonaro was fined twenty-five hundred dollars for having “offended his colleague’s honor.”

During Bolsonaro’s Presidential campaign, women protested his candidacy, under the slogan #NotHim. Nevertheless, he got more than half the female vote. When he was denounced, it often seemed only to strengthen his support. Last September, a month before the first round of voting, he visited the provincial city of Juiz de Fora. He was relaxed, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, as his supporters carried him through the streets on their shoulders. Suddenly, a man carrying a knife concealed in a plastic bag lurched forward and stabbed him in the stomach. The attack nearly killed Bolsonaro; his liver, lung, and intestines were punctured, and he lost a great deal of blood. But it gave him a clear bounce in the polls. On October 7th, he won forty-six per cent of the vote. His nearest opponent—Fernando Haddad, called in at the last minute to replace the imprisoned Lula—got twenty-nine per cent. In the second round, Bolsonaro beat Haddad again, and he began to speak of the attack in providential terms. At his inauguration, he thanked God for saving him so that he could “carry out the honorable mission of governing Brazil.”

In late November, Bolsonaro appeared at an anniversary celebration for Brazil’s Paratrooper Infantry Brigade, from which he graduated, in 1977. The Brigade is stationed inside the Military Village, a fastidiously maintained complex on the run-down outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. When Bolsonaro arrived, in a procession of black S.U.V.s, officers in camouflage swarmed around, greeting him with salutes and affectionate hugs. Bolsonaro stood at the podium, watching with satisfaction, as parachutists jumped from planes and descended onto a wide lawn.

Later, Bolsonaro spoke to a group of reporters, who seemed unfazed by the habitual abuse that he directed at them. One asked about rumors that he was using a colostomy bag after the assault, and that he would have to undergo more surgery. He said yes, with a disdainful look. Asked whether his son Carlos might join his administration, Bolsonaro replied defensively: “My children are still with me, without any problem. He can have a place in the government if he so desires.”

Bolsonaro’s three sons from his first marriage, who are in their mid-thirties, are a central part of his political team. He calls them Zero One, Zero Two, and Zero Three. Flávio, the eldest, won a seat in the Senate last year. Carlos, who helped run his father’s campaign, is an alderman in the Rio city council. Eduardo, the youngest, is possibly the most extreme of the brothers. In the impeachment proceedings against Rousseff, he stood behind his father, mouthing along with his words as he cast his vote in the name of her torturer. A former federal policeman, Eduardo recently joined Steve Bannon’s far-right organization, the Movement, as its Latin America representative. (Bolsonaro also has a fourth son, Renan, a law student, from his second marriage, and a young daughter, Laura, with his current wife.)

Bolsonaro’s administration is heavily stocked with military leaders; eight of the twenty-two cabinet positions are filled by ex-generals. His ideas are informed by Olavo de Carvalho, a philosopher and a former astrologer who has attracted a following with eccentric interpretations of works by Machiavelli, Descartes, and others. Carvalho, seventy-one, lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he identifies with American “redneck” culture by hunting bears, smoking cigarettes, and drinking. Two current cabinet ministers were appointed on his recommendation: the education minister, Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, a conservative theologian; and the foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo. Both subscribe to Carvalho’s notions that “cultural Marxism” has contaminated Western society and that climate change is a Marxist plot. Carvalho lends a patina of intellectualism to Bolsonaro’s proposals; recently Carvalho told an interviewer that Brazil’s problem with violent crime might have been averted if the military regime had killed the right twenty thousand people.

Much of Bolsonaro’s political support comes from agribusiness, the arms industry, and the religious right, a nexus of power referred to as the Three “B”s—beef, bullets, and Bibles. In Brasília, I met with Alberto Fraga, one of his oldest friends and a close political ally, who headed the “bullet bloc” in congress for two decades, until a recent conviction on bribery charges. (Fraga is appealing the decision.) In office, Bolsonaro had moved quickly to loosen gun laws, and Fraga, who was a police officer for twenty-eight years, was pleased that more people would be able to own weapons. (It was also good for business; the stock value of Taurus, Brazil’s largest gun manufacturer, has doubled since Bolsonaro secured his party’s nomination.) “Guns don’t increase crime,” Fraga said. “Public policies do.” He had forty-eight guns himself, he told me, shrugging: “I like them.”

Bolsonaro posits authoritarian violence as the way to solve Brazil’s crime problem. In one television interview, he said that officers who kill dozens of troublemakers “need to be decorated, not prosecuted.” His allies, like Trump’s, at least feign exasperation at their leader’s rhetorical excesses. Fraga told me, “I think that’s just him talking. We need to get him to control that.” But these sorts of views are common among his loyalists. The newly elected governor of Rio de Janeiro state recently initiated a “shoot to kill” policy against armed criminals and recommended that police helicopters patrolling the favelas carry snipers to “slaughter” anyone openly carrying a weapon. In February, police officers in the Fallet-Fogueteiro favela killed thirteen young men, most of whom were reportedly executed after they had surrendered.

Bolsonaro’s programs risk giving greater license to a police force that is famously violent and corrupt. For years, Marielle Franco, a popular left-wing city councilwoman, spoke out against extrajudicial killings by police officers in the city’s favelas. In March, 2018, Franco, an openly bisexual black woman, was killed in downtown Rio.

One afternoon, I visited Marcelo Freixo, a fifty-one-year-old congressman from Franco’s party, who has spent years investigating Rio’s milícias—paramilitary groups, linked to the police, that compete for territory with criminal gangs in the favelas. Because he has received many death threats, he lives in a closely guarded building, next to an Army base, and travels with armed guards provided by the state. He told me that he believed Franco was killed by former members of the police’s Élite Squad, working for a group of hit men known as the Crime Bureau. “Her assassination was the most sophisticated in the history of modern Rio,” he said. Franco was tracked by men driving a car with a cloned license plate, and killed with four precise shots to the head; the weapon was a submachine gun often used by Rio’s military police. Freixo surmised that her killers were hired by rival politicians. “You can’t understand Rio unless you understand the organized crime here,” he said. “Naples has nothing on us. It’s not a parallel state—it is the state.”

Franco’s killing has led to one of the Bolsonaro administration’s biggest scandals, as the Brazilian press has noted links between suspects and the President’s family. Flávio served in the state legislature alongside Franco, and the two sometimes clashed. Like his father, he has argued to legalize the milícias, in the hope of putting pressure on drug-trafficking gangs. In January, it was revealed that Flávio had employed the wife and the mother of Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, a former policeman who was now the leader of the Crime Bureau. Nóbrega was wanted in connection with the killing, but he had fled before he could be detained. As an investigation began, Flávio persuaded a friendly judge to have it quashed, but another judge reversed the ruling, and the inquiry has continued. Flávio maintains that he has “nothing to hide,” and Jair Bolsonaro says that he believes his son—though he has promised to let justice take its course. Steve Bannon dismissed the case as politically motivated—a witch hunt. The forces of “cultural Marxism,” he said, had attacked the Bolsonaros, who were “extraordinary people.”

The investigation has produced no conclusions, but there has been some political fallout. Jean Wyllys, one of the country’s three openly gay lawmakers, was on a trip abroad when the news broke about Flávio’s connection with the Crime Bureau. Wyllys, a friend and political ally of Franco’s, announced that he would not return to Brazil; he did not want to choose between living with bodyguards and risking death. Wyllys was an antagonist of Bolsonaro’s. When Bolsonaro cast his vote during Rousseff’s impeachment, Wyllys spat at him. After Wyllys announced that he was not returning, Bolsonaro tweeted, “Great Day!” with a thumbs-up emoji. Freixo, from his apartment in Rio, shot back: “How about you start behaving like President of the Republic and stop acting like a brat? Show some dignity.”

On the left, the new administration has inspired fears that the country is “going back to 1964,” the year that the military seized power. But some liberals have strained to understand the new order on its own terms. One of the most visible is Fernando Gabeira, a founder of Brazil’s Green Party who is legendary for his involvement in a Marxist guerrilla group that, in 1969, kidnapped the American Ambassador to Brazil. In the eighties, Gabeira gained additional celebrity by posing for seaside photographs wearing only a crocheted bikini bottom.

Gabeira is now seventy-eight. A lean man with silver hair and rimless glasses, he lives in an apartment near Ipanema Beach. Working as a television interviewer, he spoke with Bolsonaro supporters during the campaign, trying to understand their motivations. Gabeira told me that he saw Bolsonaro’s victory as a reaction to the “moral collapse” of the left, owing to the P.T.’s corruption scandals. In his view, “the left is finished unless it deals with its failings and engages in self-criticism.” Many leftists evidently believe that the criticism is better applied elsewhere; after Gabeira had a friendly exchange with Bolsonaro on the air, he was accused of “normalizing barbarism.”

Brazil, particularly in the countryside, is a traditionalist, Catholic country, and at times the urban left has made it easy for Bolsonaro to score points. In Rio, a woman who works as a literary translator told me about a fracas in her son’s public high school. Last year, amid a debate on gender identity, the chancellor decreed that the female school uniform was valid for both sexes, and some male students and teachers began wearing skirts to class. Conservative parents were furious. “You can just imagine,” she said. The school had also hosted a commemoration of China’s bloody Cultural Revolution, with activities that uncritically celebrated Mao’s “achievements.” Worst of all, the teachers belonged to a communist-linked union, and often went on strike, sometimes for months. A parents’ group was formed to get the children back into the classroom, with little success. “The Maoist and gay stuff was crazy, but we were able to deal with it,” she said. “We couldn’t get the union to budge.” She laughed bitterly and held open her hands. “And so now we have the fascists.”

In situations like these, Bolsonaro has deftly exploited conservative resentments. Under Rousseff, the government offended traditionalists by legalizing same-sex marriage and designing materials for schools to combat homophobia. During the Presidential race, Bolsonaro repeatedly told crowds that the P.T. had tried to introduce a “gay kit” to their children. A rash of messages linked to his campaign arrived on voters’ phones, accusing P.T. candidates of endorsing pedophilia.

For gay Brazilians, these actions intensified a sense of siege. There has been an alarming increase in homophobic attacks. Brazil already had the world’s highest levels of lethal violence against L.G.B.T.Q. people, with four hundred and forty-five murders reported in 2017. During the Presidential election, some fifty attacks took place that were directly linked to Bolsonaro’s supporters; among them were at least two incidents in which trans women were killed by men who invoked his name.