Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
By invading Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is challenging not only that country's independence but also the broader European system, which rests above all on the inviolability of borders and the law of nations. There has been no comparable event in Europe since the Hitler era.
Joschka Fischer
Berlin – Russian President Vladimir Putin has made his choice. He has brought war to Ukraine. This is a watershed moment for Europe. For the first time since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, which were limited to the area of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, the continent is once again confronted with bombardments of cities and rolling tank divisions. But this time, it is a nuclear superpower that started the fighting.
By ordering an invasion, Putin is showing a brazen disregard for international treaties and the law of nations. There has been no comparable event in Europe since the Hitler era. According to Putin’s latest declarations, Ukraine has no right to exist as a sovereign state – even though it is a member of the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Council of Europe; and even though Russia itself (under Boris Yeltsin) has recognized the country’s independence.
Putin now claims that Ukraine is an inseparable part of Russia. Whatever the majority of Ukrainians think is irrelevant to him; Russia’s greatness and international standing are all that matter. But make no mistake: Putin wants more than Ukraine. His war is about the entire European system,which rests above all on the inviolability of borders. In seeking to redraw the map by force, he hopes to reverse the European project and re-establish Russia as the preeminent power, at least in Eastern Europe. The humiliations of the 1990s are to be erased, with Russia once again becoming a global power, on par with the United States and China.
According to Putin, Ukraine has no tradition of statehood, and has become a mere tool of American and NATO expansionism, thus posing a threat to Russia’s security. In a bizarre speech the day before his troops stormed across the border, Putin even went so far as to claim that Ukraine is trying to acquire nuclear weapons. In fact, when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Ukraine – home to the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal at the time – surrendered its nuclear weapons to Russia with the active diplomatic support of the “evil” US.
Ukraine did so because it had received “guarantees” of its territorial integrity, as stated in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances of December 5, 1994. That document was signed by the guarantor powers: the US, the United Kingdom, and Russia, alongside Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan (the latter two relinquished the smaller nuclear arsenals they had inherited from the USSR).
Set against the historical facts, Putin’s statements are nonsense. His primary purpose, clearly, is to give his own population a justification for invading Ukraine.Putin knows that if ordinary Russians were given a choice between a war to dominate Eastern Europe and a better, more prosperous life at home, they would prefer the latter. As so often in Russian history, the country’s people are having their future stolen by their rulers.
Russia’s ascent to global power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resulted in numerous tragedies not only for the neighbors it subjugated and gradually absorbed, but also for its own people. China’s current leaders, in particular, should be mindful of this history, considering that imperial Russia seized more territory from China than from anyone else.
What Putin does not seem to realize is that Russia’s longstanding policy of dominating foreign peoples in its sphere of influence makes other countries focus on how to escape the Kremlin’s geopolitical prison at the first opportunity, by securing protection from NATO. The alliance’s eastward expansion after 1989 attests to this dynamic. Ukraine wants to join NATO not because NATO intends to attack Russia, but because Russia increasingly demonstrated its intention to attack Ukraine. And now it has.
It is worth remembering that in the 1990s, Russian propaganda accused the West of harboring all manner of evil plans. None of these plots was realized at the time, when Russia was down, because no such Western scheme ever existed. The accusations were fearmongering nonsense.
The Russian imperial project has always been characterized by a mixture of domestic poverty, brutal oppression, florid paranoia, and aspirations of global power. And yet, it has proved to be exceptionally resistant to modernization – not just under the czars and then under Lenin and Stalin, but also under Putin.
Just compare Russia’s economy to China’s. Both are authoritarian systems, yet Chinese per capita incomes have grown robustly while Russian standards of living have been declining. In historical terms, Putin is taking Russia hurtling back toward the nineteenth century, in search of past greatness, whereas China is forging ahead to become the defining superpower of the twenty-first century. While China has achieved unprecedentedly rapid economic and technological modernization, Putin has been pouring Russia’s energy-export revenues into the military, once again cheating the Russian people out of their future.
Ukraine has tried to escape this never-ending cycle of poverty, oppression, and imperial ambition with its increasingly pronounced orientation toward Europe. A well-functioning European-style liberal democracy in Ukraine would jeopardize Putin’s authoritarian rule. The Russian people would ask themselves and their leaders, “Why not us?”
Putin would have no good answer to give them, and he knows it. That is why Russia is in Ukraine today. (P.S.)
Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005, was a leader of the German Green Party for almost 20 years.
Existe algum risco de golpe de Estado por militares no Brasil? Não, mas o capitão está preparando algum. Não conseguirá...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Não veja riscos imediatos de o Brasil resvalar para um governo autocrático, ou seja, uma ditadura aberta, em moldes tradicionais; o próprio regime militar, na sua longa duração de duas décadas, se encarregou de “vacinar” o Brasil contra novas incidências desse tipo. Mas é um fato que os últimos dois anos e meio de um desgoverno medíocre e caótico redundaram numa deterioração sensível de muitas das instituições de Estado, bem como da qualidade das políticas públicas de governo. Não existe nenhuma dúvida que o personagem nefasto que ocupa a cadeira presidencial gostaria de se ver dotado ou investido de poderes que a Constituição lhe veda, ou de exercer algum controle sobre as duas outras instituições de Estado, e suas agências especializadas. Entre estas, também é notório que as FFAA, de modo geral, mas o Exército em particular, se envolveram ou se deixaram envolver numa ação de apoio político (e até logístico, quando não eleitoral) que redundaram nessa deterioração institucional que já é evidente e perigosa.
Os militares, em geral, e determinados setores em particular, atuaram em total contradição com os requerimentos de uma situação em completo descalabro financeiro, buscando e obtendo vantagens corporativas e pessoais que estão em nítido descompasso com o presente estado econômico do país e das contas públicas. O mais surpreendente é, justamente, a subserviência demonstrada em diversos episódios constrangedores aos olhos da opinião pública, quando não da ética e da moralidade política. Esse rebaixamento de padrões já se manifestou em pesquisas de opinião registrando a nítida diminuição e deterioração da imagem geralmente positiva que as FFAA tinham conquistado três décadas depois do final da ditadura militar, da qual elas saíram bastante chamuscadas em seu prestígio e imagem pública, quando não em sua qualidade técnica a serviço da nação.
Assim como o presente desgoverno não tem precedentes em toda a história do país, não existem registros comparáveis quanto à imagem pública das FFAA, salvo em momentos de comoção política mais forte: revoltas tenentistas do início do século XX, golpe do Estado Novo e implantação de uma feroz ditadura, novamente golpe militar em 1964, com episódios sombrios que mancharam a honra e a reputação das Forças e de seus integrantes – envolvidos em casos de torturas, assassinatos, desaparecimentos, arbítrio e violência, atos de crueldade e de desumanidade raramente vistos em nossa história – e inclusive colocaram certos setores das FFAA numa situação de rompimento com o Estado de Direito e com preceitos claros de natureza constitucional.
Mas, todos os episódios anteriores tinham um claro contexto de conflitos no próprio tecido social e no sistema político nacional. Atualmente, temos o primeiro exemplo histórico, e espera-se o único e derradeiro, no qual a própria chefia do governo e do Estado se apresenta como o fator de ruptura na normalidade democrática e da quebra de padrões institucionais, sem a conivência das FFAA, mas tampouco com uma atitude de distanciamento crítico que seria de se esperar de comandantes comprometidos com a manutenção de um ambiente de plena vigência do Estado de Direito: as ameaças atuais parte do chefe de Estado e comandante das FFAA, que invoca abusivamente o apoio de que supostamente dispõe nas corporações de defesa e de segurança do país, inclusive com sérias ameaças de quebra de disciplina e de hierarquia. Por algo menos do que isso, os militares se insurgiram em 1963-64, resultando no golpe militar que dividiu o país por mais de duas décadas. O país volta a estar dividido atualmente, e um pouco da responsabilidade incumbe claramente às FFAA.
Não vejo, portanto, riscos imediatos de o Brasil resvalar para um governo autocrático, ou seja, uma ditadura aberta, em moldes tradicionais; o próprio regime militar, na sua longa duração de duas décadas, se encarregou de “vacinar” o Brasil contra novas incidências desse tipo. Mas é um fato que os últimos dois anos e meio de um desgoverno medíocre e caótico redundaram numa deterioração sensível de muitas das instituições de Estado, bem como da qualidade das políticas públicas de governo. Não existe nenhuma dúvida que o personagem nefasto que ocupa a cadeira presidencial gostaria de se ver dotado ou investido de poderes que a Constituição lhe veda, ou de exercer algum controle sobre as duas outras instituições de Estado, e suas agências especializadas. Entre estas, também é notório que as FFAA, de modo geral, mas o Exército em particular, se envolveram ou se deixaram envolver numa ação de apoio político (e até logístico, quando não eleitoral) que redundaram nessa deterioração institucional que já é evidente e perigosa.
Os militares, em geral, e determinados setores em particular, atuaram em total contradição com os requerimentos de uma situação em completo descalabro financeiro, buscando e obtendo vantagens corporativas e pessoais que estão em nítido descompasso com o presente estado econômico do país e das contas públicas. O mais surpreendente é, justamente, a subserviência demonstrada em diversos episódios constrangedores aos olhos da opinião pública, quando não da ética e da moralidade política. Esse rebaixamento de padrões já se manifestou em pesquisas de opinião registrando a nítida diminuição e deterioração da imagem geralmente positiva que as FFAA tinham conquistado três décadas depois do final da ditadura militar, da qual elas saíram bastante chamuscadas em seu prestígio e imagem pública, quando não em sua qualidade técnica a serviço da nação.
Assim como o presente desgoverno não tem precedentes em toda a história do país, não existem registros comparáveis quanto à imagem pública das FFAA, salvo em momentos de comoção política mais forte: revoltas tenentistas do início do século XX, golpe do Estado Novo e implantação de uma feroz ditadura, novamente golpe militar em 1964, com episódios sombrios que mancharam a honra e a reputação das Forças e de seus integrantes – envolvidos em casos de torturas, assassinatos, desaparecimentos, arbítrio e violência, atos de crueldade e de desumanidade raramente vistos em nossa história – e inclusive colocaram certos setores das FFAA numa situação de rompimento com o Estado de Direito e com preceitos claros de natureza constitucional.
Mas, todos os episódios anteriores tinham um claro contexto de conflitos no próprio tecido social e no sistema político nacional. Atualmente, temos o primeiro exemplo histórico, e espera-se o único e derradeiro, no qual a própria chefia do governo e do Estado se apresenta como o fator de ruptura na normalidade democrática e da quebra de padrões institucionais, sem a conivência das FFAA, mas tampouco com uma atitude de distanciamento crítico que seria de se esperar de comandantes comprometidos com a manutenção de um ambiente de plena vigência do Estado de Direito: as ameaças atuais parte do chefe de Estado e comandante das FFAA, que invoca abusivamente o apoio de que supostamente dispõe nas corporações de defesa e de segurança do país, inclusive com sérias ameaças de quebra de disciplina e de hierarquia. Por algo menos do que isso, os militares se insurgiram em 1963-64, resultando no golpe militar que dividiu o país por mais de duas décadas. O país volta a estar dividido atualmente, e um pouco da responsabilidade incumbe claramente às FFAA.
Sobre a China, seu progresso material e a ditadura do Partido Comunista Paulo Roberto de Almeida Se a China, em lugar de ser uma ditadura comunista, fosse uma ditadura de direita, talvez houvesse menos pressão sobre ela, com chances de perder outras coisas que não apenas o lucro empresarial. O Brasil da era do milagre, por exemplo, atravessou um dos períodos autoritários mais sombrios de nossa história, com, torturas, assassinatos, desaparecimentos. E nunca deixou de receber vultosos investimentos estrangeiros.
O novo despotismo oriental já não se fundamenta no luxo ostentatório do soberano absoluto, erguido sobre a miséria dos camponeses controlados pela chusma de mandarins fieis ao despota (mas nem sempre).
Agora, o regime autocrático busca o “desenvolvimento socioeconômico, lutando para construir uma sociedade moderamente próspera em todos os aspectos, e erradicando a pobreza”. Trata-se de algo extraordinário na história da Humanidade.
Para alcançar essa finalidade, “a China vai implementar de maneira abrangente grandes políticas e medidas destinadas a assegurar as seis prioridades do emprego, os padrões de vida da população, o desenvolvimento das entidades de mercado, segurança alimentar e energética, o funcionamento estável das cadeias industriais e de suprimentos ao nível das comunidades.”
Finalmente, ela “também está fazendo esforços para assegurar estabilidade nas seis áreas do emprego, das finanças, comércio exterior, investimentos estrangeiros e domésticos e as expectativas dos mercados”.
Estes são os grandes objetivos do despotismo oriental contemporâneo, fundado na prosperidade do povo, na boa conduta dos mandarins e na benevolência do novo imperador, não absoluto, mas dispondo de amplos poderes, limitados apenas por sua competência em entregar o que promete. Trata-se de um excelente programa de governo, mas que não contempla pontos essenciais de qualquer regime democrático moderno. Seria suportável no Ocidente? Provavelmente não. Mas a China nunca conheceu um regime democrático. E várias “democracias burguesas” do Ocidente — Itália, Alemanha, Brasil, Argentina — caíram eventualmente sob o tacão de ferro de ditaduras de direita, civis ou militares, que não entregaram nem a metade do que a autocracia chinesa está entregando ao seu povo.
O problema de muitas análises ocidentais sobre a China é o fato de pretenderem que ela seja algo que ela nunca foi, uma democracia competitiva, modelo sob o qual elas tendem a examinar o gigante asiático. Elas não veem que se trata de uma das maiores democracias estritamente de mercado do mundo, sem o componente político das liberdades democráticas justamente. Isso virá, um dia, e a China premiará o mundo, democrático e menos democrático (como os paises em desenvolvimento), com altas doses de prosperidade e bem-estar com base em mercados competitivos.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 17 de julho de 2020
Xi hails execs' faith in growth, pledges reform
China Daily, July 17, 2020
China will expand opening-up, improve business environment, president says
China will keep deepening reform and expanding opening-up and provide a better business environment for the investment and business development of Chinese and foreign enterprises, President Xi Jinping said in a letter of reply to representatives of Global CEO Council members.
In the letter dated on Wednesday, Xi assured the global CEOs that China will foster new opportunities and create new prospects for Chinese and foreign enterprises. He said that those CEOs have made the right choice to stay rooted in China.
Saying the interests of all countries are highly integrated in today's world and humanity is a community with a shared future, Xi said win-win cooperation conforms with the trend of the times.
China unswervingly commits itself to pursuing the path of peaceful development, making economic globalization more open, inclusive, balanced and beneficial to all, and promoting the building of an open world economy, the president noted.
Xi expressed hope that those CEOs will adhere to the principle of win-win cooperation and common development, strengthen exchanges and cooperation with Chinese companies, and contribute to the world economic recovery.
Speaking of China's economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Xi said the fundamentals of China's long-term sound economic growth remain unchanged and will not change.
China is coordinating efforts in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and socioeconomic development, striving for a decisive victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and eradicating poverty, he said.
To this end, Xi said, China will comprehensively implement major policies and measures aimed at ensuring the six priorities of employment, people's livelihoods, development of market entities, food and energy security, stable operation of industrial and supply chains, and smooth functioning at the community level.
It is also making efforts to ensure stability in the six areas of employment, finance, foreign trade, foreign investment, domestic investment and market expectations, he added.
Eighteen CEOs from the Global CEO Council, which groups 39 multinational companies that are global leaders in their respective industries, wrote to Xi recently and offered suggestions on China's economic development and international cooperation in the post-pandemic era.
In their letter to Xi, the CEOs spoke highly of China's efforts to successfully contain the novel coronavirus under Xi's leadership and take the lead in resuming work and production as well as its positive role in supporting the global COVID-19 fight and maintaining global economic stability.
They said that Xi's proposals on creating new opportunities out of crises and opening up new prospects in changing circumstances, as well as his resolve to unswervingly promote economic globalization, have further boosted their confidence in China and their commitment to staying rooted in China.
The Global CEO Council was founded in 2013. The initial CEO Council was formed by the CEOs of 14 multinational companies.
Desde 2016, quando Masha Gessen escreveu estas cinco regras para escapar de um autocrata, as coisas pioraram muito na Rússia do neoczar Putin. Mas, veja, suas regras se aplicam mais ao trumpismo do que ao putinismo, que já é explicitamente autoritário, ao passo que o primeiro é apenas implicitamente autoritário Se você acha que as coisas podem piorar aqui também, adapte estas regras à presente situação brasileira, que ainda é refresco comparada à da Rússia e talvez seja mais parecida com a dos EUA trumpista. Aqui ainda se pode chamar o protoditador de fascista, sem arriscar a sua pele. Só os fanáticos vão perturbar um pouco a sua paz no Twitter. Paulo Roberto de Almeida
The New York Review of Books, November 10, 2016, 5:26 pm
Andrew Kelly TPX/ReutersProtesters outside Trump Tower the day after the election, New York City, November 9, 2016
“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”
That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. Instead, she said, resignedly,
We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.
Hours later, President Barack Obama was even more conciliatory:
We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy. And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world….We have to remember that we’re actually all on one team.
The president added, “The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.” As if Donald Trump had not conned his way into hours of free press coverage, as though he had released (and paid) his taxes, or not brazenly denigrated our system of government, from the courts and Congress, to the election process itself—as if, in other words, he had not won the election precisely by acting in bad faith.
Similar refrains were heard from various members of the liberal commentariat, with Tom Friedman vowing, “I am not going to try to make my president fail,” to Nick Kristof calling on “the approximately 52 percent majority of voters who supported someone other than Donald Trump” to “give president Trump a chance.” Even the politicians who have in the past appealed to the less-establishment part of the Democratic electorate sounded the conciliatory note. Senator Elizabeth Warren promised to “put aside our differences.” Senator Bernie Sanders was only slightly more cautious, vowing to try to find the good in Trump: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”
However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one.
More dangerously, Clinton’s and Obama’s very civil passages, which ended in applause lines, seemed to close off alternative responses to his minority victory. (It was hard not to be reminded of Neville Chamberlain’s statement, that “We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.”) Both Clinton’s and Obama’s phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clinton’s speech but in spite of it. One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat’s favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.
The second falsehood is the pretense that America is starting from scratch and its president-elect is a tabula rasa. Or we are: “we owe him an open mind.” It was as though Donald Trump had not, in the course of his campaign, promised to deport US citizens, promised to create a system of surveillance targeted specifically at Muslim Americans, promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico, advocated war crimes, endorsed torture, and repeatedly threatened to jail Hillary Clinton herself. It was as though those statements and many more could be written off as so much campaign hyperbole and now that the campaign was over, Trump would be eager to become a regular, rule-abiding politician of the pre-Trump era.
But Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.
I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.
He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.
To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture members of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets again—but by that time Dubnow had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in history—it’s just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.
Of course, the United States has much stronger institutions than Germany did in the 1930s, or Russia does today. Both Clinton and Obama in their speeches stressed the importance and strength of these institutions. The problem, however, is that many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.
The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.
The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaign—will grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues. Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaign—when, for example, the candidates argued, in essence, whether Muslim Americans bear collective responsibility for acts of terrorism or can redeem themselves by becoming the “eyes and ears” of law enforcement. Thus was xenophobia further normalized, paving the way for Trump to make good on his promises to track American Muslims and ban Muslims from entering the United States.
Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.
Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This means not only that Trump will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.
Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats in Congress will begin to make the case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything done—or at least, they will say, minimizing the damage. Nongovernmental organizations, many of which are reeling at the moment, faced with a transition period in which there is no opening for their input, will grasp at chances to work with the new administration. This will be fruitless—damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.
Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.
Chen Tianyong, a Chinese real estate developer in Shanghai, boarded a flight to Malta last month with no plans to return anytime soon. After landing, Mr. Chen, a former judge and lawyer, shared on social media a 28-page article explaining himself. “Why I Left China,” read the headline, “An Entrepreneur’s Farewell Admonition,”the New York Times reports:
Many members of the business elite are unhappy that the leadership’s economic policies favor state-owned enterprises even though the private sector drives growth. They are angry that the party is trying to put a Mao-era ideologicalstraitjacket on an economy driven by private enterprises and young consumers. They are upset that the party eliminated term limits last year, raising the prospect that Mr. Xi could become president for life.
“The most important cause of their pessimism is bad policy and bad leadership,” said Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College [and contributor to the NED’sJournal of Democracy] who is in frequent contact with business figures. “It’s clear to the private businesspeople that the moment the government doesn’t need them, it’ll slaughter them like pigs. This is not a government that respects the law. It can change on a dime,”he told the Times.
As our essay this week explains, two decades ago it was possible, even sensible, to imagine that China would gradually free markets and entrepreneurs to play a bigger role. Instead, since 2013 the state has tightened its grip. Government-owned firms’ share of new bank loans has risen from 30% to 70%. The exuberant private sector has been stifled; its share of output has stagnated, and firms must establish party cells which then may have a say over vital hiring and investment decisions.
According to its website, the Vancouver-based United Association of Women and Children has 1,500 members, branches in several provinces and a focus on equal treatment and work opportunities for women — but it lists no contact information. Two B.C. leaders of the non-profit sector dedicated to helping women in business — Laurel Douglas of the Women’s Enterprise Centre and Lisa Niemetscheck of WebAlliance — told the National Post they had never heard of it.
The group seems to have “all the hallmarks” of a front organization to further Beijing’s interests,says Jonathan Manthorpe, whose just-published book,Claws of the Panda, documents China’s influence campaigns.
“Establishing fake civil society NGOs is an established modus operandi” of the United Front, said Charles Burton, a Brock University professor and former Canadian diplomat in Beijing.
Thanks to blockchain, internet users have achieved some victories in the fight against China’s strict internet censorship, notesNir Kshetri, Professor of Management at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro. A historic moment occurred when Peking University‘s former student, Yue Xin, penned a letter detailing the university’s attempts to hide sexual misconduct. The case involved a student, Gao Yan, who committed suicide in 1998 after a professor sexually assaulted and then harassed her, hewrites for the Conversation:
Increasing Chinese leadership in the Middle East is served by a growing interest among the region’s states to pursue the “China Model” at the expense of the “Washington Consensus” that has traditionally defined foreign economic presence in the region,analyst Nicholas Lyall writes for the Diplomat:
TheChina Model– characterized by a strictly controlled political arena, as well as state control of the economy’s commanding heights, accompanying market capitalism – resonates significantly with Middle Eastern governments. Despite the fact that Middle Eastern regimes have largely proven incapable of achieving the state capacity, industrialization, and institutional structures imperative to the success of the China Model, the appeal of Beijing’s economic alternative is likely to remain a source of Chinese soft power that consolidates its economic influence vis-à-vis the US in the Middle East.
“The most important cause of their pessimism is bad policy and bad leadership,” said Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College [and contributor to the NED’s
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The group seems to have “all the hallmarks” of a front organization to further Beijing’s interests,
Increasing Chinese leadership in the Middle East is served by a