A version of this essay first appeared at The Hamiltonian Republican.

This is Part II of a two-part series.

III- A NEW NIXON DOCTRINE

As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the world post-2014 has undergone tectonic shifts in power structure and institutional stability. Our world is as different from George H.W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s as Nixon’s was different from Truman’s and Eisenhower’s.

Five of those tectonic shifts include:

1. The relative weakness, exhaustion, and confusion of America on the world stage.
2.  The rise of functional ideological challengers.
3. The rise of would-be hegemons in key strategic regions of Eurasia.
4. The halting and reversal of the previously ascendant trends of globalization, democratization, and liberalization.
5. The rise of chaos, statelessness, and anarchy across significant swathes of the Middle East and Africa.

These trends complicate the diplomatic and military equations arrived at from 1991 to 2014, from free trade agreements to regional alliances and institutions to force structuring in different strategic theaters. Being no expert on any of these areas, I do not claim to make specific recommendations on any of them.  But I do think it is important to offer up a new intellectual framework- or rather, an old, surprisingly relevant, and updated one- through which to look at world trends and organize American strategy in all these areas and more. The principles, grand design, and grand strategy of the Nixon Doctrine of the early 1970s are very useful for the United States government’s foreign policy apparatus in the late 2010s.

Any “new Nixon Doctrine” for the foreign policy apparatus of the Trump Administration must accept and update the three general principles of the original Nixon Doctrine- Peace Through Partnership, America’s Strength, and Willingness to Negotiate.

PEACE THROUGH PARTNERSHIP

In the late 2010s, both President Obama and President Trump have encouraged America’s treaty allies to pay greater shares in their own defenses, and President Obama strongly encouraged local allies to provide manpower and other resources as proxies for American warfighting. This policy of retrenched American financial and manpower commitments has been politically popular at home, but is has also helped save American treasure and strength for the rising conventional competitions we enter with the regional great powers in all areas of Eurasia.

This policy can and should be adjusted nonetheless. In particular, the aim of “Peace Through Partnership” should not be mere cost-saving on America’s part. It should instead be the establishment of stronger relations and partnerships with American treaty allies and others based on mutual struggle, mutual contribution, and mutual trust- the solidification of our alliance system for a multipolar world, rather than the abandonment of it. American leadership is necessary and indispensable, but ultimately insufficient for world order- for that, we must cooperate with other nations.

AMERICA’S STRENGTH

As Nixon updated American strength in conventional superiority (investing more resources in precision munition technology and stealth technology, at the expense of unconventional warfare and standard manpower and readiness,) so it would be prudent for the Trump Administration to turn investment focus away from pure manpower and platform readiness, and especially from unconventional war methods like counterinsurgency and special operations, and towards investments in technological superiority in conventional warfare. Unconventional capabilities and manpower readiness have their place, but the most crucial investments that can be made for future American power are in the conventional air/sea/space spheres, areas where our regional rivals for dominance are rapidly catching up to our conventional capabilities.

Regional deterrence and great-power negotiation will be useless if our forces meant to deter go into battle against Russian and Chinese conventional forces of equal strength. The United States needs as many tools as it can get in this complicated era of international relations, and conventional technological superiority over conventional rivals is one of the most important tools there is.

WILLINGNESS TO NEGOTIATE

One of the key trends in American foreign affairs today is the continued frozenness of relations with North Korea and Iran, and the intensification of strategic competition with China and Russia. These are probably inevitable struggles from which we should not back down, and for which we should maintain national preparedness and strategic readiness. Diplomacy not backed up by force is not diplomacy.

At the same time, in the interests of world peace, it is crucial that the United States maintain relations with Russia and China and seek constructive agreements with them on whatever areas possible, while competing in the security sphere. As for the cases Iran and North Korea, the continued goal ought to remain their eventual integration into the international community, with or without regime change.

One of the main tools for managing such fraught and complex relationships remains diplomatic linkage- the attempt to effect changes in regime behavior in particular areas through incentives and pressure in other areas of diplomacy. Using linkage in all four aforementioned cases, as well as in other situations, can only be helpful.

All in all, the purpose of a new Nixon Doctrine, through the use of these three principles, is to produce a reasonably peaceful and open international order incorporating all nations and reducing the chance of war through institutionalized regimes backed up by a sustainable- if impermanent- balance of power. The United States must be the arbiter-of-last-resort for this international order, even if it is not liberal.

But these principles must be applied in practice.

Grand Design and Grand Strategy

Not only must a “new Nixon Doctrine” update the three general principles- it must outline a new set of hard objectives as well. The Grand Design and Grand Strategy of a new Nixon Doctrine might look like the following:

Grand Design:

1. Accept the emergence of a multipolar configuration of power in the security issue area with at least nine poles of significance (United States, Russia, China, Japan, and Western Europe as primary poles; Iran, Turkey, the Gulf States, India and perhaps others as secondary poles.) Further, accept the decentralization of configurations of power in the economic arena.
2. Preserve the liberal Atlantic community and American alliance system; integrate it into a post-liberal international system that also integrates authoritarian states. Diminish the universalism of the liberal Atlantic community’s aspirations and governance.
3. Stop the spread of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian influence into their respective regions and beyond, through expanded partnerships with regional powers and the attainment of conventional military-technological superiority; but avoid direct military confrontation.

Grand Strategy:

1. Contain spread of Chinese, Iranian, and Russian influence through Nixonian means- a) deterrence of military aggression, b) the use of positive incentives like relief and recognition, c) mixed strategies employing positive incentives and negative sanctions, and d) covert operations.
2. Maintain firm collective security arrangements with NATO, Japan, and other treaty allies, while maintaining flexibility in all other alliances and partnerships with state and non-state actors. As a general rule of thumb, all allies- including treaty allies- should be encouraged and expected to contribute more resources to their defense.
3. Communicate and consult openly with Russia, China, and other great powers including India and Turkey; be more open to consultation with Iran. Do this in the interests of avoiding direct military confrontation and maintaining stability, while still containing Chinese, Iranian, and Russian influence.
4. Functionally, though not formally, recognize current Chinese and Russian spheres of influence, as well as those of other great powers including India, Turkey, etc. Promote interchange and communication between these spheres of influence and their peripheral areas, to defuse conflict and preclude confrontations.
5. Encourage and deepen ties between U.S., Russia, and China, and to a lesser extent, other great powers, through various cooperative projects in technological, cultural, and economic areas. Consider nuclear energy and space exploration as primary areas of technological cooperation.
6. Maintain U.S. foreign policy commitments with reduced public and Congressional support. Strive to build new understanding and consensus in foreign policy making, similar to the “Containment Consensus” of the 1940s and 1950s.
7. Reduce U.S. military commitments in ungoverned regions, through advisory partnerships with local actors. (“Obama Way of War.”) Where possible, use cost-saving advanced technology in lieu of more expensive conventional forces. Simultaneously invest in said advanced military technologies.

All in all, the Nixon Doctrine’s utility in an era of increased competition and diminishing resources is this- protect “The American Way of Life”- American society, American prosperity, the American government, and the freedoms of Americans- through a preclusion of catastrophic war and catastrophic revolution, by preserving what is left of the international system and integrating potential adversaries into it. In practice, this would probably involve preserving the Atlantic community’s liberal order while turning the liberal international order into a post-liberal order into which non-liberal powers can be integrated, and through it, constrained. Underlying all this would necessarily be a complex and dangerous system of balances of power within and between the strategic regions of Eurasia and the rest of the globe.

Both President Obama and President Trump have practiced certain elements of the aforementioned Grand Design and Grand Strategy, but neither has fully practiced it, nor has either successfully articulated a coherent grand strategy with a sustainable vision of world order to the public.

To a certain degree, this “new Nixon Doctrine” is already being formed, simply due to institutional and strategic constraints, and to the Trump Administration’s pragmatic reactions to crises in the real world. Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis, and General McMaster are all generally sober-minded strategists–their management is useful in the world we enter. But management alone is not enough.

The brilliance of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger was not merely their ability to see where things were going and why they had come to where they had come; nor was it merely their skill at policy implementation and their successful management of crises as they came up. The real genius of Nixon and Kissinger, seldom replicated in subsequent Presidents and Administrations, was their ability to articulate a practical vision of world order and orient their Administration towards pursuing it; a vision based on their historical understanding and tempered by their skill at crisis management. Had the President and National Security Advisor not codified the basic grand design and grand strategy, it would have been much more difficult to order priorities, dedicate resources to necessary outlets, and generally be as successful in conducting American foreign policy as that great duo was.

As mentioned before, Trump’s team is not incompetent. There are good administrators and good thinkers in the State Department, Defense Department, the CIA, and the National Security Council. They are all managing their roles reasonably effectively, and in all honesty probably better than anyone would have expected under current circumstances. But President Trump has not yet articulated a usable grand strategy for national security and world order to guide the various tools of the administration.

It would be immeasurably helpful, both for the internal coherence of the American government’s efforts and for the ease of mind of all American citizens and watchers of foreign policy, for the Trump Administration to produce a sophisticated document on strategic principles and implementation articulating not only justifications for Administration policy, but the general aims of such policy as well. The time is approaching for the Trump Administration to produce a National Security Strategy, and it would be wise for whoever leads that effort- perhaps General McMaster- to revisit the four Annual Reports on foreign policy of the Nixon Administration for ideas, given the similar situations of the times.

No National Security Strategy or other strategic document can foresee all the crises and decisions a President will have to make, or perfectly document the realities approached by an American Administration in a complicated world. But it can provide a general framework of ideas, interests, processes, and policy goals for an Administration, and if there is anything the Trump Administration needs right now, it is such a general framework.

Richard Nixon is perhaps not the right ghost from which to solicit advice on all questions; but on the question of grand strategy, he is certainly the preeminent one to ask. An update of his general strategic principles for the conditions of the late 2010s would be a blessing for the Trump Administration’s foreign policy team.

Luke Phillips would like to thank Ambassador Winston Lord and Dr. Dan Caldwell for their advice in preparing this essay. But all ideas and assertions made are Phillips’s alone.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

The post Towards a New Nixon Doctrine, Part 2 appeared first on Glimpse from the Globe.

I- NIXON’S WORLD AND OURS

Most readers will be familiar with the not-often-observed legal responsibility of the President of the United States to provide Congress with an annual report on his administration’s foreign policy initiatives, called the “National Security Strategy.” Though the annual NSS requirement was not put into law until the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1982, the concept was inspired by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s publication of four “Annual Reports to the Congress on United States Foreign Policy,” published in 1970, 1971, 1972, and 1973 as the public articulation of the Nixon Administration’s overall strategic approach.

These four NSS prototypes surpass most of their legally-mandated descendants in conceptual solidarity, owing, perhaps, to the genius of Nixon-Kissinger duo and their staff, and to the lack of State Department and Defense Department meddling with the editing and publication processes. Most importantly, the first two reports open up with incredibly detailed analyses of the trends leading up to the 1970s, hinting towards necessary conceptual changes in American strategy. The second two reports, published during and after the administration’s great strategic successes in China, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East, document the administration’s practical application of the conceptual principles articulated in the first two reports.

It’s helpful to revisit the openings of the first two reports, if only to observe the parallels between Nixon’s time and ours. First we will look at the changes Nixon responded to- then we’ll look at the changes to which we in 2017 must respond.

To quote the first report at length, then, on international developments between 1945 and 1970:

“The postwar period in international relations has ended…

[When President Harry S. Truman adapted and implemented the Containment doctrine as U.S. strategy,] we were the only great power whose economy and society had escaped WWII’s massive destruction. Today, the ravages of that war have been overcome. Western Europe and Japan have recovered their economic strength, their political vitality, and their national self-confidence…

Then, new nations were being born, often in turmoil and uncertainty. Today, these nations have a new spirit and a growing strength of independence…

Then, we were confronted by a monolithic Communist world. Today, the nature of that world has changed- the power of individual Communist nations has grown, but international Communist unity has been shattered…

Then, the United States had a monopoly or an overwhelming superiority of nuclear weapons. Today, a revolution in the technology of war has altered the nature of the military balance of power…

Then, the slogans formed in the past century were the ideological accessories of the intellectual debate. Today, the “isms” have lost their vitality…”

Or, more succinctly, in the second report:

“We are at the end of an era. The postwar order in international relations- the configuration of power that emerged from the Second World War- is gone.”

A similarly tectonic series of shifts has happened in the Post-Cold War world, with the breaking point being effectively somewhere between 2014’s Russian annexation of Crimea and the rise of the ISIS Caliphate. The crumbling of the old era is in our instance, though, perhaps more fundamental and shocking even than it was in Nixon’s time. A similar autopsy of the Post-Cold War world today might read something like this:

“The Post-Cold War period in international relations is over.

When President George H.W. Bush declared a “New World Order,” America was victorious in the bloodless end of the Cold War, and proudly stood tall as the unquestioned leader of the nations of the Earth. Today, America is exhausted, divided, and unsure of its basic purpose in world leadership, even unsure of the reason behind its own political existence….

 Then, there were no significant ideological challengers to Western liberal democratic capitalism. Today, various brands of authoritarianism have returned from history and brought their own conceptions of order to the world stage….

Then, no regional great powers threatened the stability of the international system. Today, ascendant great powers in every strategic theater of Eurasia seek to implement new regional orders of their own making….

Then, the processes of globalization, liberalization, and democratization seemed inexorable and inevitable, as nation after nation underwent peaceful revolutionary transitions and joined the liberal international order. Today, all those trends have been reversed- peoples around the world reject globalization, and more of them live under autocratic or semi-autocratic rule than at any other time since the end of the Cold War….

Then, the threat of geographic anarchy and mass-casualty terrorism seemed real, but manageable. Today, whole swathes of the Middle East and Asia have descended into chaos, and fundamentalist terrorists strike out at publics around the world on a regular basis.

We are at the end of an era. The Post-Cold War order in international relations- the order that emerged from the Cold War- is gone.”

Clearly, a new strategic grand design, set forth in this new era, is crucial.

II- PRINCIPLES, CONDUCT, AND LEGACY OF THE NIXON DOCTRINE

President Nixon aspired to be a “peacemaker,” if his first inaugural address is to be taken at its word- “The greatest title history can bestow is “peacemaker.”” Nixon’s vision of peace was far more sophisticated than that of some of his opponents- “Peace must provide a durable structure of international relationships which inhibits or removes the causes of war… Within such a structure, international disputes can be settled and clashes contained… the habits of moderation and compromise will be nurtured…”

It’s reasonable to assume that Nixon was enough of a political realist to know, with that other great realist Alexander Hamilton, that “the seeds of war are sown thickly in the human breast,” and contrary to liberal internationalist dreams, cannot ever be fully removed through institutions, in the interests of perpetual peace. That said, Nixon was certainly enough of an internationalist to know that the causes of war could be inhibited and constrained through institutional arrangements- the balancing of power against power, the formalization of dispute resolution, and all the rest.

Moving the international system towards such a practical, if perhaps temporary, vision and reality of peace, stewarded by American leadership, was what the Nixon Doctrine was all about.

As outlined in the first section of the first Annual Report, and extrapolated in the first sections of the subsequent three Annual Reports, there were three primary intellectual components to the Nixon Administration’s strategic approach: “Peace Through Partnership,” “America’s Strength,” and “Willingness to Negotiate.” Taken together, these constitute the Nixon Doctrine in the broadest possible use of that term.

PEACE THROUGH PARTNERSHIP

In the preceding quarter-century to the Nixon Presidency, the modus operandi of American foreign policy generally featured American involvement and direct American action wherever national interests and world order were threatened. This resulted in exceedingly expensive international commitments, in all senses- diplomatic capital, money, manpower, and oftentimes blood. It was not a particularly efficient way of carrying out policy, and often had the unfortunate side-effect of disillusioning the American public, as the Vietnam War scenario demonstrates.

Nixon’s response, similar to his mentor President Eisenhower’s, was to level the playing field of contributions in America’s alliances in order to reduce American expenditures while deepening American partnerships. This is not dissimilar to President Obama’s and President Trump’s insistence that NATO allies, Japan, and South Korea “pay their fair share” in defense spending, though it is not clear that Trump and Obama have had the deepest of strategic understandings behind their similar policies.

In direct contradiction to President John F. Kennedy’s “Bear any Burden, Pay any Price, for the Survival and Success of Liberty” promise, President Nixon declared a humbler and more partnership-oriented U.S. strategy his administration would pursue:

“…the United States will participate in the defense and development of allies and friends, but… America cannot- and will not- conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions, and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world. We will help where it makes a real difference and is considered in our interest.

America cannot live in isolation if it expects to live in peace. We have no intention of withdrawing from the world. The only issue before us is how we can be most effective in meeting our responsibilities, protecting our interests, and thereby building peace.

A more responsible participation by our foreign friends in their own defense and progress means a more effective common effort towards the goals we all seek….”

Although on the surface a cost-saving measure, the Partnership aspect of the Nixon Doctrine played a large role in Nixon and Kissinger’s vision of a peaceful international system, as well. By involving more nations in their own defense and development programs, and allowing them to take greater roles in their partnerships with the United States, American policy would increase the stake each partner nation had in the stability and continuity of the international system.

This same principle informed at least two other major components of the Nixon Doctrine- first, the invitations to isolated nations like China to join the international community, in the assumption that making former rogue states into minor stakeholders would pave the way to those states gradually assuming more productive and responsible stakeholder roles in the international system. Second, the concept of diplomatic “linkage” in negotiations- the idea that if states cooperated in multiple sectors and issue areas, misbehaving states could be induced to cooperate further with America by if pressure was applied to them on particular issue areas and if positive incentives were linked to good behavior across the board.

The harmony between the goals of lessening American commitments and increasing allied stakeholder participation in alliances, to be achieved by American retrenchment of funding and allied increase of funding, was in some ways a miracle- one of the great tricks of public policy is aligning gimmicks to build up programs that accomplish multiple beneficial goals, while minimizing the consequences and tradeoffs. The Nixon Doctrine’s emphasis on partnership in the dual interests of decreased U.S. expenditures and greater allied participation in the international system exemplifies that trick beautifully.

AMERICA’S STRENGTH

President Nixon increased and reformed the defense budget, focusing on upgrades to America’s strategic nuclear forces and naval and air platforms in the interests of modernization. The Administration also began investing in various technological advances to change the game of warfighting, specifically in the fields of stealth and precision munitions. These advances were not a luxury- it was a perceived necessity, given the recent attainment of Soviet nuclear parity and the USSR’s general increases in military spending and military activity.

The comprehensive reforms to the defense budget and defense planning system were accompanied by arms negotiations with the Soviets, to reduce global stockpiles of nuclear weapons in a bid to realign defense postures and reduce military tensions.

Nixon never approached the “Peace Through Strength” question quite the way President Ronald Reagan would, whose approach emphasized ultimate military superiority. Nixonian military planning and arms control, rather, assumed general equality of capabilities between nations, and sought to use other diplomatic methods to maximize the American position by reducing overall stockpiles. But it nonetheless was a realization that America needed a certain relative power position to other great powers that needed to be, if perhaps not superior to the capabilities of the USSR and others, at the very least equal and advantaged. It was strength in a relative rather than absolute sense.

WILLINGNESS TO NEGOTIATE

Finally, (and this is what the Nixon Doctrine is perhaps most famous for,) Nixon and Kissinger made a strong point to emphasize improving relationships with hostile adversaries and great powers. This particularly pertained to the opening to China and the negotiations with the Soviet Union, gestures of openness and goodwill accompanied by firmness and resolve.

Nixon and Kissinger believed, and Nixon often wrote, that the permanent exclusion of any society from the life of the international community was likely to make that society more radical; whereas the inclusion of that society could have a tempering effect on its behavior, and even begin the process of transforming that society into a responsible stakeholder. They were under no illusions about the prospect of changing hearts and the human condition or ending warfare permanently, but they did have a certain faith in the prospects of international order conducted through institutionalized avenues of communication between the great powers.

For this reason, the Nixon Doctrine emphasized cooperation with the USSR and PRC on as many noncontroversial and non-conflicting issues as possible, under the belief that fruitful partnerships in some areas would be useful as a general relationship-improving device in international affairs. Used with greater sophistication, this became the policy of linkage- pressure would be applied on lesser areas like economic development and scientific cooperation to influence foreign leaders’ decision-making on higher areas of statecraft like diplomatic openings and arms control.

These three elements of the Nixon Doctrine’s intellectual articulation- Peace Through Partnership, America’s Strength, and Willingness to Negotiate- provided intellectual backdrop for one of the most sophisticated applied grand strategies of the 20^th Century. The big takeaway from this information should be that the Nixon grand strategy was not solely about cold, cynical, Machiavellian balancing of power and calculation of interest- there was an incredibly significant faith in institutions and cooperation, as well.

But there was much more to the story than the three intellectual components of the Nixon Doctrine alone.

THE CONDUCT OF THE NIXON DOCTRINE

These three principles of the Nixon Doctrine were, of course, chiefly the Administration’s public articulation of its actual activities and intentions. The reports outlined the thinking and public image of the Nixon Doctrine, but deeper investigation is necessary to assess its actual conduct and legacy.

Fortunately, the foreign policy scholar Dan Caldwell did exactly that in his essay “The Policies of Henry Kissinger.” Caldwell argues that Nixon and Kissinger generally devised a “Grand Design” of the world they wanted to build, and a “Grand Strategy” to attain it and manage it. The relevant passage, a listing of principles, is copied below:

Grand Design:

1. Accept the emergence of a tripolar configuration of power in the security issue area and a multipolar international economic system.

2. Encourage the development of a moderate international system supported by the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and the P.R.C.

3. Stop the spread of Communism to areas of the world in the traditional Western sphere of influence, but avoid direct military confrontation with the U.S.S.R.

Grand Strategy:

1. Accept Soviet achievement of nuclear parity; strive for the limitation of strategic arms (SALT.)

2. Contain the spread of Communism through: a) deterrence of military aggression [Europe]; b) the use of positive incentives [China]; c) mixed strategies employing positive incentives and negative sanctions [Vietnam]; and d) covert operations (Chile.)

3. Maintain firm collective security arrangements with the NATO Alliance and Japan; other alliance commitments should be more flexible; all allies should pay a greater proportion of the cost of defense as well as provide manpower (Nixon Doctrine.)

4. Deal with tension between Grand Design objectives of containing Communism to traditionally Western areas and avoiding direct military confrontation with the U.S.S.R. through communication and consultation with the U.S.S.R.; threaten or use U.S. force only if absolutely necessary.

5. Employ careful, presidentially-controlled crisis management of confrontations and limited wars to prevent escalation; communicate and consult with other relevant great powers in crisis situations (Basic Principles and Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War.) [Yom Kippur War crisis, “Shuttle Diplomacy.”]

6. Recognize the boundaries of post-World War II European states and the Soviet sphere of influences in Eastern Europe, while attempting to encourage freer interchange between Eastern and Western Europe (Helsinki Agreement.)

7. Encourage ties between the U.S. and Soviet Union through the conclusion of a number of cooperative projects in the economic, cultural, scientific and technological areas. [Ping-Pong Diplomacy, international elements of the Space Shuttle program.]

8. Develop regimes (agreed rules, procedures, and institutions) in important issue areas.

9. Attempt to mesh the various regimes into an overall grand strategy; use asymmetrical advantage in one regime to influence other issue areas [linkage doctrine.]

10. Maintain U.S. foreign policy commitments with reduced public and Congressional support.

As Caldwell very clearly demonstrates, the Nixon Doctrine had very concrete objectives and methods attached to its three general principles. It also was very well aware of the context of America in the 1970s- exhaustion, relative decline amid a “rise of the rest,” reduced resources, and a worsening international environment under the nuclear specter of the Cold War.

Contrary to the common public memory of the Nixon years, the opening to China and the extrication from Vietnam were not done chiefly for their own sake- they were done in the broader context of a global grand strategy that ultimately centered on competing with the Soviets in the Cold War on terms more amenable to American interests and limited American resources.

THE LEGACY OF THE NIXON DOCTRINE

The legacy of the Nixon Doctrine in its own time was mixed- as Caldwell notes, many of the doctrine’s institutions broke down by 1976, and such trends of the late 1970s as the Communist expansions into Angola, South Vietnam, and other areas, as well as generally increased Soviet military activity, seem to imply that Nixon and Kissinger failed to institutionalize the “lasting structure of peace” the President so hoped to build through his diplomacy.

But in a broader sense, Nixon really did set up the contours of the Post-Cold War world in more ways than one. The realignment of diplomacy towards China and East Asia more generally did not, perhaps, create the “tripolar world” of Kissinger’s hopes; but it did produce a necessary adjustment in American diplomatic focus as the East Asian economies grew into global power players. The rules and regimes and programs set up were generally not new, as the internationalists of the preceding four decades or so had already dreamt them up. But Nixon, more than Kennedy and Johnson before him, figured out how to use such instruments, through the linkage doctrine, in broader diplomatic efforts- a feat that has not adequately been imitated by any President since.

If anything, Nixon’s strategy for peace was timely, but his structure of peace was built too early- it better fitted a Post-Soviet world. The strategy and structure nonetheless were well-adapted for the American and international situation of the early 1970s, and provide a good model for our similar world of the late 2010s.

There remains the question of the legacy of the Nixon Doctrine throughout the remainder of the Cold War. Generally, President Gerald Ford imperfectly continued the Nixon Doctrine, particularly with Henry Kissinger as his Secretary of State, while President Jimmy Carter wholly rejected the Nixon Doctrine for a human rights-focused approach. But more interesting is the relationship between the Nixon Doctrine and the final phase of the Cold War- the Reagan years.

Some historians, like John Lamberton Harper, have argued that Nixon’s grand strategy was really a “holding action” in the Cold War- a reluctant acknowledgment of temporary American weakness, meant to hold the international order in place while new sources of American strength could be built up, all the while vowing an eventual return to Containment or even Rollback and a “policy of victory” in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

These historians point to Nixon’s support and advising of Ronald Reagan throughout the eight years of the Reagan Presidency, as evidence of Nixon’s supposed shared belief that the United States had to defeat the U.S.S.R. and eventually would do so through aggressive and active foreign policy.

This seems to me to be misguided.

First off, Nixon, like Kissinger, seems to have believed that American preeminence was over. Perhaps this was a mistaken assumption, given the triumphant roaring-back of the 1990s and 2000s. Nonetheless, a foundational intellectual element of everything Nixon did in foreign policy was the notion that America had to get used to leading the world with prudent statecraft, rather than by sheer mass, money, manpower, and influence. He was no declinist, but sincerely believed in the rise of the rest- including the Soviet Union.

Every policy instrument and strategic doctrine Nixon designed, then, was generally crafted assuming that the risen and forthcoming multipolarity would feature a strong Soviet Union. I don’t think Nixon wanted to destroy or even defeat the U.S.S.R.- in my interpretation, he merely wanted to keep it contained and, perhaps, at most, encourage it to become a more responsible stakeholder, and maybe even reform its domestic institutions a bit.

All this implies that had things gone differently- had Watergate been weathered or had it not happened- the Nixon Doctrine might have been institutionalized and the conservative and neoconservative takeover of the Republican Party might not have subsequently transformed American foreign policy. This in turn would have resulted in a very different endgame for the Cold War, perhaps resulting in a reformed-but-still-formally-Communist Russia not dissimilar to America’s post-1972 relationship with a reformed-but-still-formally-Communist China. But this is all speculative.

Less speculative is the fact that Reagan’s successor, President George H.W. Bush, in many ways refuted not only the rhetoric but the substance of Reagan’s policies. Bush 41 was basically a Nixonian realist in foreign policy, the best example of realist-style statecraft after 1974, better even than Nixon’s own Vice-President, Gerald Ford. President Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and his Secretary of State James Baker III were similarly-tempered. This trio- again, not dissimilar to the Nixon-Kissinger duo- presided over great historical shifts, very admirably managed the fall of the U.S.S.R. as bloodlessly as possible, and laid down the basic outlines of the “New World Order” of international relations for the 1990s and 2000s. Indeed, it could almost be argued that what Nixon and Kissinger failed to institutionalize by 1974, Bush and Scowcroft and Baker basically brought into practice in 1991.

There’s no way to tell whether or not a second Bush term might have resulted in the further institutionalization of realistic foreign policy-making and a revival of the popularity of the Nixon Doctrine’s spirit; alas, the “New World Order” of President Bush was to be inherited by three far less experienced statesmen over the subsequent two decades, and thus fell a bit more quickly than Truman’s world order of Containment fell.

A version of this essay first appeared at The Hamiltonian Republican.

This is Part I of a two-part series.

Luke Phillips would like to thank Ambassador Winston Lord and Dr. Dan Caldwell for their advice in preparing this essay. But all ideas and assertions made are Phillips’s alone.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

The post Towards a New Nixon Doctrine, Part 1 appeared first on Glimpse from the Globe.

Barack Obama’s historic trip to Cuba and the subsequent easing of relations has left Cuban and US scholars wondering if this is the beginning of the end for the Cuban Embargo. Since Raul Castro’s ascendence to the presidency, change has been in the air; Airbnb, privatized farms, and joint ventures in biotech have led the gradual trend of reform and marketization after a long period of depressed growth in the post-Soviet 90s. But even as American tourists pour into the country, and Cubans leave the state-sector for newly sanctioned private enterprises, and upper-class, LA-style cafés and brunch joints fill into Havana’s fashionably dilapidated colonial house interiors, it’s important not to get swept up into a melodrama of development. The state and state monopolies still govern the fundamental details of Cuban life, internet is barely there, shortages are frequent, and most who graduate from college must decide whether to take a low wage government job, or work as a tour guide or waiter at a private restaurant.

The state of agriculture is a great case study in the mixed results of Cuba’s reforms under Raul Castro, the hopes of ambitious entrepreneurs posed against the slow machinations of the regime. Since the collapse of the USSR, Cuban agriculture has suffered from low labor productivity, insufficient output, decapitalization and inefficient organization. The resulting food security crisis pushed the government to break-up poorly managed state farms into medium-sized cooperatives called CPAs and UBPCs (“basic units of cooperative production”) that were relatively more efficient, at about 10% the size of the original farms.

While by 1996 Cuba saw a moderate rise in non-sugar agricultural production, a lack of capital, inputs and processing organization meant Cuba still suffered from extensive food shortages, and had to import 80% of their food through the early 2000s. Though UBPCs were better than state farms, they still suffered from bureaucratic government administration, with no freedom in purchasing imports or labor for themselves.

                                                                   Data from ONEI (2014)

The transition to private and small cooperative farms has brought with it a radical shift in average farm size. Where a state farm producing vegetables and roots could average 4,200 hectares, a UBPC collective averages closer to 460, and a private farm only about 16-65 hectares. The return to the family farm model is believed to be key in the current boost in agricultural yields—smaller plots means less managerial costs, more crop-mixing and more labor intensity per hectare, which in the development literature translates into improved labor productivity, more bang per buck.

Usually these changes, which amounts to a massive decollectivization in Cuba, bring with them increased mobility, freedom, profit and quality of life for the independent farmers who can now work their own land, sell their own surplus and begin to accumulate savings beyond the meager wages offered by the state. So why is the majority of food that Cubans consume still coming from the US? Why isn’t total cultivated area in Cuba growing? A number of challenges are still holding farmers back, and preventing improved productivity from translating into real, tangible economic gains:

• Tenure insecurity— Because the Cuban government reserves the right to expropriate farmers from lent land if deemed unproductive, usufructary farmers suffer from intense tenure insecurity, which prevents them from making important investments in the land needed to boost production.
• Capitalization— Buying irrigation and farming equipment requires start-up money, which the state doesn’t provide. This issue is closely tied to Cuba’s dramatically low wage rates, which mean that family members who work off-farm often can’t make enough money to begin the process of capital investment.
• Inputs — Input markets for equipment are organized by the state and often too expensive to access. Certain imports such as diesel or some bio-fertilizers are quoted in CUC, Cuba’s convertible currency, which is valued much higher than the peso farmers are payed in, the CUP—expensive inputs render more serious yield improvements impossible.

In 2012 and 2013, the government took a number of steps to address some of these small farming issues. The granted plot size rose from 13.4 to 67.1 hectares (165 acres) as long as the usufruct recipient was linked to a cooperative or state farm (it was clear the government had gone too small on land grants, providing too little area for sustainable production). The usufructuary was granted permission to build homes and plant orchards on the land. Also, if the contract is not renewed after 10 years, the state is required to evaluate the farmer’s investment on the land and reimburse him. Relatives are able to inherit a plot if a farmer dies during his contract.  Usufructuaries were granted a two-year exemption on personal income tax, and land value tax. But none of these reforms seriously address several major problems in Cuban agriculture: the centralization of inputs in state-run markets, the inability for individual farmers to independently hire labor, and the inability for usufructuaries to rent out land [2].

Policy

• More robust improvements in agricultural yield and cultivated land growth will come from a dramatic liberalization of the market for agricultural inputs, the market for land, as well as a reduction or eradication of the state price system (channeling Vietnam) that delivers quota requirements to individual farms (the so-called acopio system). We’ve seen some success in the expansion of domestic food markets through farmers’ markets in Havana. The next step here is to begin to relax the complicated licensing measures required to sell agricultural surplus in the city. There is also ample opportunity to begin to integrate local food products into the major grocery chains within the country, instead of importing the majority of grocery products. This gradual strengthening of market linkages and private networks will naturally erode the state-centric acopio system of food purchasing.
• In terms of improving tenure security, while the government has already taken steps to improve legal protections and promise of compensation for expropriation, the next natural move would be to lengthen licenses for idle land from 10 years to 20 or 30 years, as is already being done for larger cooperatives.
• In order to stimulate further investment in the land and improve migration into the agricultural sector, the government must begin to offer incentives beyond tax write offs to spur investment in infrastructure and physical capital that will produce long term yield improvements. This includes offers of capital for building homes and barns on the land, in order to improve rural linkages and allow newly landed farmers to organize their household around the farmland for the long term.
• Decollectivization may not in fact have to be actively mandated, as long as the government allows current usufruct farmers to begin to consolidate and improve their holdings, and begins to offer cheaper alternatives for input purchase and capital accumulation we will see interest in independent farming grow. This means allowing farmers to determine their own output levels, the destination of their products and allowing independent farmers to begin to hire their own labor throughout the season so that they can begin to increase their output and cultivated area.

Watching Grass Grow

When South Vietnam was integrated into the communist regime, southern farmers were gradually transitioned to a collective farming system at the expense of rice productivity. As in the Cuban case, many cooperatives involved farmers pooling their land and tours, and sharing output based on time spent working. The poor incentive structure brought on by the high costs of monitoring performance depressed rice production –cooperative farmers had a 52% lower productivity than non-cooperative farmers. An initial attempt at decollectivization suffered from the same tenure security and incentive issues as in Cuba. It wasn’t until the Vietnamese government pushed a more radical set of reforms and liberalizations which included guaranteed compensation for farmers displaced from their assigned land, the privatization of output markets, ending the required sale of food to the state, and a decentralization of input supplies and input markets that Vietnamese agriculture bloomed [3].

But radical isn’t really the style of the Cuban dictatorship, whose bureaucracy is deliberately designed to articulate power and obstruct change through sheer largesse and inefficiency. Periodic food shortages, ration books and state pricing are all important parts of a strategy that has kept the Castro’s (along with the military and industry elites) afloat since 1959, and will continue to support whoever else is in charge come “elections” in 2018. Change will come from the people, the urban farmers, the entrepreneurs and biotech scientists who come up with new ways to make do without tractors or fertilizers, who fight food insecurity with organic, family farming methods, sell their surplus in the city to a blossoming network of private restaurants, cafes and farmers markets, while quietly (at first) grumbling to each other about the state’s violently out-of-fashion food monopoly.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

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Introduction

Recently, the EU has undergone significant changes due to external factors including, but not limited to, the 2008 economic crisis, the Arab Spring uprising, the emergence of Islamic State in the Middle East and the Syrian refugee crisis. Combined with the European Union’s already shaky sense of identity, these events have heightened tensions among and within states. In the UK, the trend of Euro-skepticism among a portion of UK citizens led Prime Minister David Cameron to promise to hold an EU referendum. Although the UK has always had a more distant relationship with the EU than other member states have, on June 23, 2016, the UK surprised the international community by choosing to leave the union.

Assessing the Current Situation

Britain’s exit from the EU, commonly referred to as Brexit, has created a host of economic and political issues for the EU, UK and the wider international community. For the EU, its size and stature in the global arena may be significantly decreased, as the union is losing over sixty-five million people and 94,525 square miles. Even more importantly, the UK is the second largest economy in Europe and the fifth largest economy in the world. Not to mention, London is arguably the most competitive financial center in the world. Without the UK’s large market and its economic status, the EU may experience a decline in internal movement of capital and may also have a harder time obtaining favorable trade deals externally.

For smaller member states, this is particularly worrisome as the UK is no longer present to act as a counterweight to Germany’s dominance in the economic sector as well as France’s dominance in the political arena. While some argue that the two remaining powers will balance each other out, Germany is still very much a reluctant hegemon in Europe and may be unwilling to go toe-to-toe with France. Furthermore, the UK has served as a bridge between the EU and US in the past. A more distant US leads to an even larger power vacuum within the union.

The instability caused by this change might encourage other disenfranchised member states to think about leaving due to a perception that the union is disintegrating. As general anti-immigration and anti-establishment sentiments have increased, a wave of populist discontent with the status quo seems to be sweeping across Europe. Right-wing parties have grown in power, either surging in popularity, as is the case in France and Germany, or even taking control of the government, as is the case in Finland, Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania. With leaders of populist Eurosceptic parties in countries such as France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Sweden proposing to hold their own EU membership referendums, many fear that Brexit may have triggered a chain reaction that will ultimately lead to the dissolution of the UE.

Yet, for Britain, there are even larger implications. In terms of the domestic political situation, Prime Minister David Cameron of the Conservative Party resigned, leaving Theresa May to step in as the new Prime Minister. Although she is the leader of the Conservative Party, she is seen to have a more balanced stance than her predecessor, which will change the political climate of the UK. To add to the turbulence, with the UK leaving the union and sixty-two percent of Scottish voters wanting to remain in the EU, another Scottish UK referendum has been proposed. Although the one in 2014 narrowly failed, a future referendum may prove successful, as many analysts believe the majority of Scottish citizens would prefer to be part of the EU over the UK.

Outside of policy, the economic effects of the EU may have an even larger role in the future of the UK. Immediately after the announcement of Brexit, the British pound decreased in value to an over thirty year low and over two trillion dollars were wiped off shares globally. Perhaps most importantly, many bilateral trade relationships must be renegotiated or formed as the EU has many standing relations that the UK will no longer a part of.

Policy Proposals

The next steps for managing UK and EU relations must fall within the provisions of Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union. Now that Prime Minister May has officially triggered Article 50, divorce talks with the EU are underway. According to the first two sections of this article, although the member state may choose to withdraw based on its own methods—in Britain’s case, a popular referendum—the EU must negotiate and settle on a withdrawal agreement with the member state in the next two years. This may be an arduous process as member states often find it hard to agree on topics of importance. Although there are many routes that the UK can choose to take, three categories of viable options exist for these negotiations when determining the implementation of their exit from the EU.

The first of these constitutional options would be for the UK to make a relatively quick and complete break from the EU, including all its institutions and organizations. If the UK chose this option, it would have to fill the legal vacuum of EU legislation with its own new regulations in regards to areas such as customs, transport, food production, agriculture and fisheries. The nation would also have to form a completely new identity for itself and relationship with the EU, as well as other countries that have relations with the EU. For example, within Europe, the UK will have to redefine its relationship and set up new trade agreements with countries such as Switzerland and Turkey. Internationally, the UK would have to establish new bilateral relations while considering the effect on current trade partners and trilateral relations in circumstances where the EU already had or is in the process of developing bilateral relations.

Known as “hard Brexit,” this approach may take more time to implement given the many new regulations that will have to be formulated and approved. Undoing all the treaties formed over the 43 years that the EU has been around and determining how to fill the vacuum left is further complicated by the fact that the move to leave the EU is unprecedented. According to foreign secretary Philip Hammond, the whole process, including negotiating a new trade deal, will most likely take between four to six years, clearly over the two year provision of Article 50. However, if this happens, the EU-UK relationship will default to the mechanisms outlined by the WTO. This may be extremely detrimental, as it would mean EU’s external tariff would include trade with the UK.

The second option would be for the UK to attempt to maintain as much of its current relationship as possible. In order to do this, the UK would probably try to stall the actual implementation of leaving the EU and all its institutions and organizations. During this period, it would try maintain old and establish new economic ties by negotiating a bilateral free-trade arrangement with the EU block. Because Article 50 states that the withdrawing member state will remain within the EU until an agreement has been reached, the UK will have a buffer period to determine how it will proceed in the future. During this time, the UK will continue to have a say in EU proceedings and influence policy other than those directly concerning its withdrawal. The UK could use this opportunity to secure favorable trade agreements and international deals that will benefit both the EU and UK and will allow them to work as partners in the long run.

The difficulty with this option lies in convincing Euroskeptics, including sixty Tory MPs, to accept the compromise. They maintain that in this scenario, the UK would not truly be a sovereign nation without the ability to negotiate its own bilateral trade deals or implement its own border controls. Because this would require the UK to continue to accept certain policies and agreements that come with being a part of the EU, such as unlimited EU migration and required payment into the EU budget, “hard Brexiteers” may argue that this defeats the purpose of leaving the EU.

The third option lies somewhere in between these two choices. This would allow for a “customized special deal” for the UK, where the UK and EU would choose which part of EU membership to apply to the UK. For example, the UK could opt out of more costly and less popular portions of membership such as free movement or budgetary contributions. In fact, while the UK was still a member of the EU, it had already opted out of many of these institutions and agreements, such as the European Monetary System and the Schengen Agreement. Out of all the options, this one seems most probable because it would cause the least amount of political and economic disruption with the most benefits for both the union and the UK.

One proposed mechanism to facilitate this process and ease the transition is known as the Great Repeal Bill. This piece of legislation would initially copy all EU laws into domestic laws. These placeholder laws could then be changed or repealed by the UK Parliament. Yet even if this bill is passed, there are other significant obstacles to overcome. For one, revising each law on a case-by-case basis may be overly ambitious, as the UK government will have many other external issues to deal with. Also, trying to negotiate a favorable trade deal without paying EU dues will be extremely difficult and may lead to a prolonged process of formalizing the withdrawal.

Conclusion

In light of the many factors that are tied to the UK’s former role in the union, Brexit has deep and lasting implications. Political and economic repercussions within the continent and internationally are hard to determine, but may demand immediate solutions. Already, Prime Minister May has called for snap elections on the grounds that this will help the UK in the upcoming Brexit negotiations by unifying Westminister. Whichever option the UK decides to pursue, as an international power, it has a duty to establish its new position and the world and re-assert its leadership in various spheres of power and specific international organizations. Whether or not this change will lead to more positive or negative consequences remains to be seen.

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Since the fall of Apartheid in 1994, South Africa has served as a shining example for the rest of the African continent. It is Africa’s second-largest economy, home to Africa’s best universities and the continental office of many Fortune 500 companies. For the rest of the continent, South Africa is the promised land, and each new crisis or famine brings a fresh new wave of refugees, desperate to work any job for a pittance or a bowl of food. However, despite its “Rainbow Nation” moniker, South Africa has proven to be a nation hostile to foreigners. Xenophobic attitudes run rampant throughout the population, and racially-charged outbreaks of violence have plagued the nation post-Apartheid. Brutal beatings and mob lootings happen frequently in townships where many immigrants live alongside black South Africans.

In February 2017, Nigerians living in the capital of Pretoria were targeted by angry mobs destroying their homes and businesses. The worst outbreak of violence in recent years was in May of 2008, when South Africa was rocked by a violent series of xenophobic riots that broke out across the nation. Neighbors turned against neighbors as mobs took to beating, raping, and looting en masse in the townships. By the end, 62 people were dead, dozens were raped, and more than a hundred thousand were displaced. The riots were undeniably xenophobic in nature; common phrases heard during the attacks included ‘We do not want foreigners here. They must go back to their country,’ ‘Phuma amakwerekwere, phuma!,’ ‘Foreigners must go away!,’ and ‘Go back to Zimbabwe!’ The attacks were perpetrated by poor black South Africans on not only fellow black Africans, but also Chinese and South Asians. Most victims were foreigners, but a third were South Africans who had married foreigners, refused to participate in the riots, or had the misfortune of not appearing South African enough. Racial tensions reached another boiling point in April 2015, when a wave of xenophobic violence killed seven and displaced more than five thousand. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, condemned the violence: “(We are) witnessing hate crimes on a par with the worst that apartheid could offer.”

How did South Africa, the “Rainbow Nation,” become such a violent, xenophobic society? In Nelson Mandela’s 1994 presidential inauguration speech, Mandela proclaimed “never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.” One of the most famous phrases in the South African Constitution is the line “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.”

After the fall of Apartheid, South Africa attracted (and continues to attract) people from all across Africa fleeing conflict or seeking to improve their fortunes – Congolese, Ethiopians, Malawians, Mozambicans, Nigerians, Somalis, and Zimbabwean, among others. Poor black South Africans, however, have come to see outsiders as threatening to their own post-Apartheid success. The promised post-Apartheid renaissance for marginalized black South Africans never arrived; instead, the government is widely perceived as having failed to address both economic crisis and mounting societal unrest.

Over the past two decades, being “South African” has become an exclusive identity; for poor blacks, their citizenship status and right to be represented by a democratic government are the only fruits of labor earned from decades of struggle, and the disillusioned citizens are increasingly seeking answers and finding scapegoats in populist, Apartheid-era ethnic solutions. South Africa has become a country where citizenship is differentiated between nationals and foreigners, and it is exclusionary, rather than inclusionary. Xenophobia, deeply entrenched in roots of South Africa from its Apartheid past, is being used as a convenient scapegoat for failed economic revitalization and has been seized upon by the disenfranchised poor masses as a form of superior social currency against “invading” foreigners.

Economic Failure

Under Apartheid, the economic opportunities and internal mobility of black South Africans were highly restricted. Blacks were deemed “foreign natives” who had to remain in their “homelands,” or bantustans. At the same time, South Africa’s booming gold, diamond, and other mining industries heavily recruited cheap migrant labour from neighboring Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana and Malawi. Even before the fall of Apartheid, however, the mining industry began to decline; mining centers collapsed, jobs were lost, and fierce competition arose for the few mining jobs left. After the fall of Apartheid, the ruling African National Congress (“ANC”) unleashed a slew of initiatives aimed at empowering poor black South Africans, such as the 1994 “Building the Nation Program.”

However, South Africa has struggled to transform its economy to include its poor, low-skilled laborers: South Africa’s unemployment rates have remained relatively constant since 1998, GDP per capita has actually decreased annually since 2011, and the GINI coefficient – an indicator of economic inequality – remains one of the highest in the world. In the year leading up to the explosive May 2008 attacks, according to South Africa’s annual Development Indicators Report, the official HIV infection rate in 2007 stood at 11% of the population, the expanded unemployment figure stood at almost 38%, and 41% of the population lived on less than R367 (approximately £26) per month.

Concurrent to its economic challenges, South Africa has experienced continual increases in population size and foreign immigration which have led to a segmented labor market and ethnicized political economy. Significant push – pull factors contribute to South Africa’s linear population growth rate; push factors include the region’s continued violence, such as crisis in neighboring Zimbabwe and endemic poverty, and pull factors include South Africa’s historical and contemporary status as the regional economic powerhouse and a strong market for foreign labor. A segmented labor market has formed as these undocumented immigrants can be employed at lower wages since they do not require the benefits afforded citizens when directly competing in lower-wage sectors of the economy.

These trends have led to a highly ethnicized political economy: poor black South Africans, who have failed to see the promises of the post-Apartheid “renaissance” materialize, are angered by foreigners who they perceive to be stealing their jobs, housing, and government services and resources while they are more entitled, while wealthy South Africans – both black and white – resent “paying taxes to provide shelter and services to people seen to be pouring into South Africa to escape political incompetence and economic mismanagement further north.” Mounting frustration from poor and economic elites alike helped to not only ignite the tensions that led to the outbreak of xenophobic violence in 2008 and 2015, but also guaranteed the lack of high-level response addressing structural inefficiencies and other causes deeply rooted within the South African economy.

Social Failure

The creation of the modern South African state and South African citizenship necessitated a conceptualization of the “other,” the non-South African, which inevitably drew upon Apartheid’s legacy of racial discrimination. Apartheid, the structural coding of ethnocentrism by legally establishing the superiority of whites, led to the forceful ghettoization of racial groups and normalized racial discrimination.

Under Apartheid, the state feared that the larger the urban African proletariat, the greater the concomitant threats to the country’s political stability and industrial peace. The underlying assumption was that foreigners and human mobility were a threat to the nation’s prosperity; this perpetuated the use of geographic and cultural origins to determine utility and claims towards citizenship. Origin and race-based discrimination has continued post-Apartheid, as poor South Africans’ economic grievances against foreigners, the widening socioeconomic gap, and overall lack of upward mobility for those at the bottom has fed into a national sense of deprivation and negative discourse “othering” foreigners, or the “Makwerekere.” Poor black South Africans perceive foreigners as having unfairly exploited South Africa’s resources which undermines their own success, and this has been seized upon as the cause for the continued problems of poor black South Africans. Mobility has become a menace and a threat to the state; immigrants, thus, are now a convenient scapegoat for poor service delivery, crime, and other pathologies.

Negative discourse continues to fashion migration as a security threat. As mentioned earlier, immigration is argued to be an economic threat to prosperity; by taking away jobs, immigrants will further weaken the country’s economic potential and further burden a country struggling to reconstruct post-Apartheid. Researchers have argued that there is a cycle of antagonism and exclusion that perpetuates a lack of social inclusion: because South Africans view foreigners as threatening to their socio-economic prospects, they treat them poorly, and in turn many foreigners anticipate being treated badly by South Africans and subsequently form stronger bonds within their own networks, impeding the potential reconciliation of cultural divides. Contemporaneously, a sense of crisis – there being an overwhelming “flood” of immigrants – was introduced alongside the stereotyping of foreigners as illegal migrants, job takers, criminals and disease agents.

Institutional Failure

After the fall of Apartheid, South Africa’s new ruling African National Congress (ANC) faced a formidable laundry list of challenges. Tasked with dismantling the legacy of Apartheid and creating the equal-opportunity “Rainbow” South Africa they had campaigned on, the ANC experienced economic woes beset by political infighting which plagued productive societal discourse and reform. Overcoming decades of structural oppression and segregated systems requires a strong, unified government effort and well-developed policy planning, implementation, and strategic assessment.

Unfortunately, the South African government has failed in its task. Instead, ineffective, failed legal institutions have exacerbated xenophobic tensions and allowed for violence to act as a proxy for state sovereignty and control. The government suffers from internal schisms, poor interpretation and implementation of immigration legislation, and crippling inefficiency that hampers not only its ability to effect economic growth but its overall ability to govern and address xenophobic attitudes.

In studying the history of South African immigration policy, the shortcomings become evident immediately. As a regional economic powerhouse, South Africa has long attracted migrants from across the continent seeking employment, particularly low-skilled, low-wage foreign laborers to work in its booming Apartheid-era mining industry. The majority of immigrants were undocumented or came on select temporary work visas with strict regulations curtailing individual mobility. In 1986, the Aliens Amendment Act made it possible for skilled immigrants – especially from East and West Africa – to legally move to South Africa. This made South Africa a haven for those seeking to flee persecution in the home countries.

In 1991, however, the Aliens Control Act – dubbed the last significant Apartheid-era legislation – significantly restricted the status of immigrants; the use of the word “Alien” to describe foreigners immediately implied “otherness” and illegality, and the vagueness of the implementation and enforcement mechanisms empowered ordinary citizens to report foreigners they suspected of breaking immigration laws. In 1998, the Refugee Act recognized refugees as an immigration category and ordered the issuance of asylum to those who could prove political persecution in their home country. Continued international scrutiny of the failings of South Africa’s immigration policy in light of xenophobic incidents and attacks led to the 1999 White Paper on International Migration, which acknowledged the role that skilled migrants could play in filling in critical labor gaps and recognized the potential benefits of migration for South Africa.

However, the White Paper continued to address people who were not South African citizens or permanent residents as “aliens,” estimated the number of illegal immigrants in the country to be 5 million (which was grossly inflated and contributed to a popular perception of “invasion”), and emphasized the importance of training police and local authorities to address xenophobic behavior but provided no clear recommendations for the content of this training and no clear repercussions for the police if they failed to conduct training. After the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance was held in South Africa in 2001, the government founded the National Forum Against Racism and created the Counter Xenophobia Unit, but nothing was ever produced as a result. In 2002, the landmark Immigration Act replaced the term “alien” with “foreigner,” and directly addressed prevailing xenophobic fears about foreign economic integration in the preamble.

However, there has yet to be any clarity or direction on who is performing immigration control and how xenophobia is to be prevented and countered. These responsibilities fell largely onto the Department of Home Affairs and local law enforcement units, which were wholly unprepared to deal with such tasks. Finally, current immigration policy is focused more on internal control and enforcement activities, rather than border control; these policies have not served to constrain undocumented migrants or stem the flow of immigration but rather, have led to a massive increase in forged documentation and police corruption and bribery to escape arrest and deportation.

Law enforcement tends to act in accordance to personal value systems, and are oftentimes indifferent to the welfare of immigrants. Without special training, law enforcement can act as aggravators in sensitive situations, and only serve to contain, not prevent or address, xenophobic violence and attitudes. In fact, South African law enforcement regularly arrested and detained people on the basis of their physical appearance, language, or fitting a certain “profile”; they are also known to refuse to recognize work permits and refugee identity cards while enabling illicit economies and rampant corruption –bribes for freedom are common, as police see foreigners as “mobile ATMs.”

Government failure of responsibility to take the lead in addressing xenophobic attitudes has practically served to legitimize xenophobic violence. A former Minister of Home Affairs, Mongosotho Buthelezi, who was in a prominent position to set the tone of the discourse on immigration, commonly used the term “illegal aliens,” inflated the number of said “illegal aliens” within South Africa, and insisted upon a causational relationship between immigration and poor economic performance: “We are to scramble for resources with these illegal aliens – we might as well forget the Reconstruction and Development Programme,” and “South Africa is faced with another threat, and that is the [South African Development Community] ideology of free movement of people, free trade and freedom to choose where you live or work. Free movement of persons spells disaster for our country.”  In early 2015, Small Business Minister Lindiwe Zulu said “Foreigners need to understand that they are here as a courtesy and our priority is to the people of this country first and foremost.” Even the widely respected Human Sciences Research Council used derogatory terms such as “hordes” and “floods” to describe undocumented migrants in presenting research findings.

Political Failure

The African National Congress, despite being elected on overtures of reform and change, has failed to deliver on its promises, and its lack of response on xenophobic issues has done nothing to quell the violence. The Apartheid-era government partially sustained itself by promoting rivalries between “traditional” tribal authorities and ANC nationalists. When campaigning in the 1994 elections, the ANC evoked religious references when speaking about liberation, as if overthrowing Apartheid would lead South Africa to a promised land. However, the ANC has failed to create effective and responsive forms of government; power has become centralized within the ruling elite, and local governance has suffered.

Over the years, the ANC became perceived as out of touch with poor citizens and having failed to deliver jobs, services, and security. During a period of xenophobic violence in the 1990s, the ANC was decried as being “more concerned with its foreign policy concerns and repairing any damage the attacks might have on their international reputation” than with addressing the root causes of the issues. Through examining the structure of the ANC’s ruling coalition, a major fault becomes clear: in building the coalition needed to win the historic 1994 election, the ANC had to co-opt ethnic leaders such as Zulu King Zwelithini – who espoused a brand of ethnic chauvinism that appealed to young, poor men – by putting them on the state’s payroll as part of a group called the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa, legitimizing the ethno-nationalist politics which the ANC had opposed. King Zwelithini’s xenophobic comments at an event in early 2015 are widely believed to have sparked the second round of riots in April 2015. Disillusioned with the ANC, impoverished black South Africans who are searching for answers to their woes are increasingly looking to leaders like King Zwelithini who champion xenophobic scapegoat solutions. The ANC, facing a popular uprising, recognizes the value in funneling discontentment with itself into xenophobic outlets and deflecting the blame off its own policies. The failure of the South African government, broadly speaking, means that the citizens have taken it upon themselves to act. Poor South Africans’ hostile anti-foreigner attitudes are rooted in their acquisition of full rights and benefits of citizenship; they view foreigners as threatening or undermining their benefits.

A quote from a participant in the 2008 riots reveals his motivations: “We are not trying to kill anyone but rather solving the problems of our own country. The government is not doing anything about this, so I support what the mob is doing to get rid of foreigners in our country.” The lack of commentary by senior political leadership and refusal to acknowledge xenophobia worsens the problem. Even Nelson Mandela, in a speech on the National Day of Safety and Security, once said “the fact that illegal immigrants are involved in violent criminal activity must not tempt us into the dangerous attitude which regards all foreigners with hostility,” which furthered the perception and association of all foreigners not just with illegality but criminality.

Recent Developments

From an analytical standpoint, the South African government has failed to address the recent xenophobic attacks in a constructive or even logical manner. After the violence in 2008, hundreds of thousands fled into temporary immigration camps; then-President Mbeki denounced the camps, which would entrench spatial divisions between foreigners and South Africans and thus formalize the objective division between both; he argued instead in favor of “reintegration”: people should go back to townships and live together with the same neighbors who had attacked them. Yet Mbeki gave no indication as to how to re-integrate, and when a police commissioner was interviewed in Alexandra township – ground zero for the attacks – and asked who was in charge of overseeing reintegration, he responded “My job is stabilization, not re-integration.”

Following the xenophobic attacks in early 2015, the South African government launched “Operation Fiela,” deploying the police and military to combat crime throughout the country in coordinated waves. The timing, right after the attacks, as well as the operation locations in many immigrant strongholds, was tantamount to equating foreigners to criminals; xenophobia had, for all intents and purposes, officially become a politically expedient excuse. Foreigners who were caught in the Operation were granted dubious legal protection; it was likely that people were arrested without cause and deported without legal representation.

Conclusion

After analyzing South African immigration policy and xenophobic attitudes from a historical perspective, it becomes clear that the outbreak of xenophobic violence was part of a legacy left behind by Apartheid and ethnocentrism. The three main failures by the ANC-led South African government (to establish economic growth, social integration, and strong institutions) caused poor South Africans to construct outsiders into bogeymen and scapegoats, and the institutions meant to address inequality not only failed to do so but actually enabled violent xenophobic attitudes. As a discourse, xenophobia – and foreigners – will continue to be an expedient political tool the ANC channels so long as economic issues and political infighting persist in South Africa. Unfortunately, the lopsided victims of the status quo will continue to be the impoverished millions fighting for survival in the crowded townships, who see no solution to their problems and no agency other than through violence. A quote summarizing the situation comes from Nana Mkhonde, a resident in Durban’s impoverished Bottle Brush settlement following the 2015 attacks:

“Our citizens took action because [the foreigners]wouldn’t leave and they were being told they must leave. They came with nothing, they can go with nothing as well. I feel bad because they left crying, but we have no choice…they should go because we have no jobs. I’m a citizen and want to work for 150 rand a day but foreigners will do it for 70 rand a day. In the kitchens and the factories they are taking over our jobs. They bring cheap goods and we don’t know where from. They leave their countries with a lot of skills and we have nothing. Our education is not good enough…The government says it’s wrong because when they give jobs they help themselves. If you don’t have friends in the ANC, you get nothing. What about us? Our government is doing nothing for us. The reason we’re fighting foreigners is because of our government.”[1]

[1] Smith, David. 2015. “Xenophobia in South Africa: ‘They Beat My Husband with Sticks and Took Everything.’” The Guardian, April 17, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/17/xenophobia-south-africa-brothers-violence-foreigners.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

The post Xenophobia in “The Rainbow Nation”: Economic and Political Failure in South Africa appeared first on Glimpse from the Globe.

Abstract

Despite friendly appearances, there is a growing policy gap between the US and the EU, be it in military capacity, attitudes towards China or trade and migration. In the past, the UK served as a bridge between the two actors through its special relationship with the US, but with the British leaving the Union, ties between the Western powers  have weakened.

Given the importance of the transatlantic relationship, it is crucial that these two actors learn to cooperate and work as partners rather than competitors. Among the many points of tension, the issues of genetically modified organisms (GMO) regulations and data privacy are two areas in which the US and EU are prominently divided. However, unlike other spotlight issues, such as NATO or relations with the Middle East and China, they have fewer divergent opinions and more easily implemented solutions. Because of this, working to change policy in regards to these issues may be an effective step towards improving overall relations between the EU and US.

GMOs

Because GMOs are easier to grow, more robust to varying weather conditions, aesthetically pleasing, easier to transport, larger, nutritionally dense, cheaper to maintain and less perishable than normal or organic produce, the practice of genetically modifying produce has become more widespread. Yet this practice has been met with opposition because while there are obvious benefits to genetically modifying produce such as the increase in options and decrease in price, there are also concerns about the possible effects on the health of consumers, as well as the environmental impact.

In the United States, the general attitude is more accepting toward the production, sale and consumption of GMOs. Because of this, the US has fewer regulations and no specific policy to restrict the sale and consumption of these products. Furthermore, the US does not see the harm in continuing to produce GMOs, because while some believe that there may be adverse effects in consuming them, there have been no conclusive studies proving that they are indeed harmful. Because GMOs are easier to produce than non-genetically modified products, more companies have begun to adopt these processes and it has become a norm in the U.S. In fact, currently the U.S. has approved of 120 GMOs for cultivation while the EU had only approved seventeen.

Additionally, lobby groups in the agribusiness industry are extremely vocal and influential in shaping the U.S. policy stance on GMOs. In 2016 alone, the total spent on lobbying in this sector was $126,242,202. Because powerful companies and corporations like Monsanto have the resources to pour into successful lobbying, their objectives, such as ensuring there is as little regulation as possible on GMOs, get pushed most heavily.

On the other hand, the EU takes a more anti-GMO stance and has policies in place to limit the sale and distribution of GMOs. Traditionally more interventionist, the EU clashes with US vendors who try to sell GMOs to member countries. Not only does the EU have a slower and more restrictive process to approve of crops that can be sold in the marketplace, but it also requires mandatory labeling and full traceability of crops from the origin to the consumer, the farm to the final product.

The roots of the stringent standards on produce are about more than just concerns over general welfare. Certain causes of this issue lie within the EU political sphere, as the conflict over GMO regulation has become a proxy battle about leadership and legitimacy. Various actors within the EU have used the debate over GMO regulation as a means of furthering their own political clout, giving it a lot of attention, even if genuine concern about the issue itself is minimal.

Furthermore, with the World Trade Organization supporting the stance of the US and the United Nations supporting the stance of the EU, the two entities have split the international community in terms of GMO regulation. Without a supranational organization to set worldwide standards, the US and the EU lack an arbiter to settle their differences and the division only continues to grow as the EU becomes increasingly stringent in its regulations.

Privacy Rights

Another point of tension between the EU and US concerns privacy rights and data protection. After 9/11, the US government adopted a much more proactive stance towards ensuring domestic security. In order to prevent future terrorism attacks, the government implemented several initiatives, like the Patriot Act, which gave the government relatively free access to its citizen’s information when national security is at stake. Although certain acts such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act exist to protect several areas of citizen information, there is no specific piece of legislation that protects privacy in general. Given the recent decision by the majority Republican Senate and House to approve a bill granting ISPs (Internet Service Providers) the right to sell user information, it seems as if the US is moving towards even more deregulation of internet privacy protection.

In contrast, the European Union protects the rights of its citizens’ right to withhold their private information except under the most pressing security issues. This protection explicitly applies to citizens withholding information from the EU, but it implicitly applies to entities outside the EU as well. However, the EU does not have direct control over other organizations so this mismatch of expectation and power to enforce it becomes a major point of contention.

The European Data Protection Directive, the EU’s formal policy on privacy rights includes a limit on international data transfers. This directive, passed in 1995, was one of the many steps the EU has taken to protect the privacy of its citizens. Since 2009, various organizations within the EU have taken further measures to extend and implement the protection of privacy. For example, in 2011, the European Commission stated that it planned to implement a regulation to harmonize data protection laws in Europe.

The conflict between the EU and the US arises from the fact that the US has harvested data of citizens of not only the US, but also of the EU. The U.S. government’s lack of a comprehensive stance on privacy rights has infringed on EU directives and caused the two entities to clash. Especially with the advent of the Internet, privacy issues have become an even larger point of debate. When Edward Snowden publicized information that exposed the NSA and FBI had direct access to information from servers like Google, many EU citizens were outraged as it gave U.S. governmental organization access to its citizens’ information without their knowledge and/or consent.

Towards A Reconciliation

In regards to the GMO issues, the EU and US can attempt to alleviate the source of this friction by implementing a two-part solution. The first step is to increase the amount and quality of research regarding the effects of GMO’s. Because the process of genetically modifying products is fairly recent, there is not enough reliable data to judge whether or not consuming and using GMOs has adverse health effects. The EU should partner with the US and pool resources in order to determine whether or not GMOs is truly detrimental to humans. Once reliable data is found, they should make sure to publicize this information so that the public can be duly informed and will not have unfounded fears.

The second step is to implement policies depending on their findings. If GMO’s do not have any adverse effects on people’s health or the environment, the EU should remove its ban on importing genetically modified products. This will improve relationships between the two countries and increase trade. If they do find issues regarding GMO’s, the EU and the US should implement policies to prevent these harms from reaching the public and limit environmental impacts. There should be and open dialogue and clear agreements should be made between the two entities. In addition, the EU should not necessarily act as a bloc in banning GMO’s. Member states should be able to implement their own standards regarding the imports of GMO’s, since this will provide more flexibility for the US to export and trade with the EU.

In regards to the issue of data protection from government encroachment (especially that of the US government on members of the EU), the US and EU should have open dialogue about their expectations regarding access to information of both citizens and national and supranational governments. Additionally, a revised Data Protection Regulation should soften requirements by handing the role of determination from the Commission to each member state. By giving member states the freedom to implement their own regulations regarding privacy rights, the EU and the US will have a less cohesive friction since issues will be between the US and specific member states rather than the EU as a whole.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

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INTRODUCTION

Nearly ten years after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement officially ended the bloody Sudanese Civil War, South Sudan is again on the brink of disaster. Months of negotiation following a tenuous peace deal between President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar collapsed in July, when forces clashed on the streets of the capital city Juba for several days. In the months since, a brewing humanitarian disaster has reached catastrophic levels of food insecurity and created millions of refugees while the government cracks down on platforms for news and political dissent. On November 11^th, the popular radio station Eye Radio was shuttered by security officials with no official reasoning, and in September, authorities similarly closed the Nation Mirror newspaper without providing a reason. Adama Dieng, United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, visited South Sudan and reported: “I saw all the signs that ethnic hatred and targeting of civilians could evolve into genocide if something is not done now to stop it.”

Today’s struggle is a vicious zero sum game – a battle for power between the political and military elites who exploit the long-running history of conflict in the region, depriving citizens of basic necessities such that ordinary people believe that their survival depends on pledging loyalty or support. With no end in sight, South Sudan’s current situation reflects its legacy of violence and highly fragmented internal state, as well as its origins born out of a bloody war with northern Sudan.

A LEGACY OF VIOLENCE

Civil war raged between the North and South for almost 40 years (1955-1972 and 1983-2005). After the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005 and referendum for independence in 2011, South Sudan became the world’s newest country – as well as one of its least developed. After decades of conflict, South Sudan faced the formidable task of developing basic infrastructure, human capital and formal civilian institutions.

Pre-occupied with state-building failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. and larger international community lavished $1.4 billion dollars of aid onto the apparent poster-child for Western conflict resolution. However, the carrots came without a stick. With little oversight or aid conditions, the money rarely found its way into infrastructure projects or public services. The advice of hundreds of international consultants sent to South Sudan was ignored. At the time of independence, South Sudan had an estimated 11.6 million people, including the Dinka (35.8 percent), Nuer (15.6 percent), and in descending size, the Shilluk, Azande, Kakwa, Kuku, Murle, Mandari and Didinga minorities. While ethnic tensions were relegated to the background during battles with the North, they returned soon after independence, and the West failed to pressure and bring together these estranged communities. The government was inefficient, incompetent and unable to enforce bureaucratic order in the country.  Institutional gaps, a failure to meet citizens’ expectations, and a collapse of mechanisms made it clear that the government was incapable of fulfilling its promises. The corruption-security nexus was exacerbated by the fragile public institutions which were too weak to manage resources, enforce government transparency or maintain checks on abuses of power.

Public expenditure in South Sudan was 8 to 9 times higher than Ethiopia’s and 5 times higher than Uganda’s. Yet there was little to show by way of improvements in education, public health or infrastructure. The only thing that grew was the gap between the newly rich and powerful corrupt officials and the impoverished citizens who had nothing; “Instead of creating institutions that deliver services and ensure the rule of law, and ignoring systemic checks and balances, leading members of the factions united momentarily to create a parasitic system in which mass corruption and the brutal maintenance of power became the raison d’etre of governance.”

In December 2013, accusations of a coup plot against the state, months of mounting political tension between President Kiir and Vice President Machar, inefficient financial institutions and widespread perceptions of corruption culminated into a bloody civil war. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), long seen as the symbol of national unity and sovereignty, was subsequently divided primarily along ethnic lines either in support of President Kiir (the Dinka) or Vice President Machar (the Nuer). Although the Dinka are the largest ethnic group in South Sudan, they do not make up the majority of the population. The Dinka have long dominated politics and have been accused of monopolizing top posts. That sentiment was exploited by Machar as he declared a rebellion with the support of several senior Nuer military commanders, effectively invoking an ethnic conflict.

Awash in arms from decades of armed conflict, South Sudan’s rural citizens formed militias along ethnic lines. With no apparent national civic identity or strong basis for a stable state, political identity in South Sudan has defaulted to ethnic identity; the militias are essentially ethnically based armed units, mobilized by ethnic narratives of fear and legacies of violence, which were exploited by Kiir and Machar.

CONTINUED STRUGGLES

Since 2013, continued fighting has displaced more than 2.7 million people, including 200,000 sheltered at U.N. bases throughout the country.  Various negotiations under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) finally led to an international peace agreement in August 2015. Kiir signed the deal a week after Machar, expressing his concerns and calling the agreement divisive and an attack on South Sudan’s sovereignty. Although the agreement was signed in August 2015, the Transitional Government of National Unity (TGNU) was not formed until April 2016. Former Vice President and opposition leader Riek Machar returned to Juba for the first time since the outbreak in 2013, and was sworn in as the First Vice President of the new power-sharing government under President Kiir. By June, however, the agreement had seemingly collapsed and hundreds were killed before ceasefires were declared on July 11^th. Both sides of the civil war have been accused of mass rape, massacre, and the use of child soldiers. Both sides have been exploiting South Sudan’s natural resources. President Kiir’s wife and children own stakes in the oil and mining sectors, while Machar has been selling oil futures for weapons.

South Sudan is now classified by the United Nations as a “level 3” humanitarian disaster – one of only four in the world, alongside Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. A crippling hunger crisis affecting an estimated 4.8 million people is reportedly so dire that some refugees living in swamps are surviving on water lilies and goat bones. Food costs have skyrocketed since fighting began in July, and in the capital of Juba, vegetable traders now cut tomatoes in half to sell because some customers cannot afford a whole tomato. The World Food Program’s main warehouse in Juba was reportedly looted by government soldiers in July, losing 4,500 metric tons of food which would have fed 220,000 people for a month. As of October 2016, an estimated 2,500 refugees – mostly women and children – were crossing from South Sudan into Uganda every day. Most live in settlement camps, where resources are limited and families have been living on partial food rations. An estimated 200,000 South Sudanese refugees have fled to Uganda since July, and according to the UNHCR, there are now 54,000 registered South Sudanese refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Out of the UNHCR’s pledged $251 million South Sudan refugee plan, only $48.5 million has been received.

The economy is in shambles. South Sudan is the size of France yet has only 200 kilometers (125 miles) of paved roads. This is a serious inhibitor to not only delivering aid, but also to developing any sort of self-sustaining industry. Inflation is at 835.7 percent – the highest in the world. South Sudan is an oil income-dependent country, and until independence, South Sudanese oil fields produced 75% of Sudanese oil and sold it through Sudanese oil transport infrastructure. Now that infrastructure is monopolized by Sudan. In 2014, total oil revenue was reportedly $3.38 billion, of which the government only received $1.71 billion after $884 million in transit fees to Sudan and $781 million in loan payments. A 2016 IMF visit determined that South Sudan would receive no oil revenue if it were to meet its obligations to Sudan; negotiations are currently ongoing to reschedule delivery dates. The low global price of oil, combined with rampant inflation, drastically rising food costs, and the extreme shortage of hard currency have put severe strains on the economy.

Furthermore, the United Nations has catastrophically failed to fulfill its responsibilities. It has failed to protect both civilians and humanitarian workers; South Sudan had more attacks on aid workers than any other country last year, and at least 57 aid workers have been killed since 2013. Despite a large presence of around 12,000 U.N. Peacekeeping forces, a horrific gang rape of aid workers by government troops in a hotel less than a mile from a U.N. compound went unanswered, even as the victims frantically called for help. In late October, a U.N. inquiry accused the UNMISS of failing to respond to the attack; in response, Kenya began pulling its Peacekeeping troops out of South Sudan. Almost 200,000 South Sudanese reside in U.N. Protection of Civilian (POC) sites – refugee camps for the displaced that are secured by peacekeepers at or near their bases. The camps were never intended for large, long-term settlements, and are overcrowded with terrible living conditions. In 2015, a UN human rights commission found that the situation in South Sudan demonstrated “new brutality and intensity,” with “a scope and level of cruelty” that “suggests a depth of antipathy that exceeds political differences.”

THE PATH FORWARD

The complexity of the situation proves there will be no easy solution anytime soon. Although the conflict began with a political dispute, it will not be resolved simply by reconciling rival political factions. South Sudan’s history of ethnic manipulation for elites’ own political and economic benefit continues to challenge the feasibility of social cohesion in the country, and there is little evidence that President Kiir’s government is willing to share power with the opposition. Increasingly antagonistic rhetoric against the UN and international groups pose threats not only to peacekeepers, aid workers and expatriates, but also to the viability of continued operations within South Sudan. Furthermore, aid donors are hesitant to take policy stances that could threaten the ability of aid agencies to deliver relief in the midst of humanitarian crisis. The efficacy of piecemeal technocratic solutions is dubious without an accountable, functional government in place. There are, however, a few critical first steps that must be taken for any long-term solution to materialize.

1. Stop the meddling of regional actors. The interference of neighboring countries and their national interests has played a destabilizing effect, from Sudan to Uganda to Kenya to Ethiopia. Sudan has failed to demonstrate commitment to the terms of the CPA, as evidenced when they prevented the residents of Abyei (which continues to be a hotly contested region) from participating in the referendum. In 2012, the South Sudan government, angered by border disputes and negotiations over oil transit and export to the Port Sudan terminal in the North, suspended oil production for over a year, and oil production continues to be a critical area of contention. With so much at stake in resource-rich South Sudan, the continued meddling of outside actors obstructs not only internal stability, but also forces the rival factions to compete with one another for foreign funding and support. The U.S., U.N., and other international allies must show that the overarching goal of bringing peace and stability to the region should be regional actors’ foremost priority and is beneficial for all. Once this is done, South Sudan needs to negotiate resource-sharing or access agreements with all its neighbors.
2. The aid agencies must leave. Not only have the aid agencies failed to protect citizens and their own workers, most significantly, they have been severely hindered by forces on both sides. It can be argued that aid agencies, especially food agencies, are keeping a larger humanitarian crisis at bay. Yet, as Dambisa Moyo argues in “Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa,” halting aid delivery will force actors to be accountable for the plight of their supporters once it is clear that outside aid is what is keeping the country afloat. It will also force actors to promise and provide conditions stable enough for aid agencies to carry out their missions.
3. President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar both must step down. International questions about the status of the peace agreement and legitimacy of the TGNU have persisted following President Kiir’s replacement of Machar and other opposition representatives in late July. The faith of the population in the current government is dubious at best, and much like the debate over President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, a fundamental disagreement over the governance needed to unify a fragile state divided down ethnic lines is one that can only continue with new leaders in both parties. The U.N. Security Council has already blacklisted six generals – three from each side of the conflict – under a targeted sanctions regime, and on November 18^th, the U.S. proposed for Machar, South Sudan army chief Paul Malong and South Sudan Information Minister Michael Makuei to be added to the list.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

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One morning in 2010, foreign governments and American officials around the world were faced with the possibility of a multipronged scandal. Each of the 251,287 US diplomatic cables leaked by Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange potentially held an uncomfortable government truth, an identity or worse, a broken bilateral secret. Soon they would all be available in an online, searchable library—a nightmare for countries, companies and officials relying on the confidentiality of communications with the US, including the US government itself.

Diplomatic secrets—and their periodic breaches—are as old as the practice of diplomacy. The advent of the internet has arguably made these breaches more frequent. Since 9/11, information about US misdeeds and misconduct in its operations abroad has inundated the international public. As the press, whistleblowers and legal mechanisms reveal facets of US intelligence, surveillance torture and military operations, both foreign and domestic citizens resent their exclusion from the shadowy dealings of day-to-day foreign policy. After all, secret state-level negotiations between ostensibly open societies contradict democratic values. On the other hand, leaks like the 2010 Cablegate not only compromise US security, but also the security of every country represented in the information. Relations are weakened if countries are not guaranteed privacy in communications. Diplomats thus defend this routine privacy, not only as a security-enhancing, but also as a trust-building measure.

Not all secrets are created equal. There are two kinds of diplomatic secret – substantive and procedural. Substantive secrets are the ones that reveal key military positions and concrete information on government actions; these are generally the ones that stir global controversy. Procedural secrecy, however, is just that: the routine show of respect when discussing state affairs with international counterparts. Because of this two-dimensional secrecy, the diplomatic costs of illegal disclosures (leaks) can’t all be swept under the blanket argument of “national security” and compromising military data. When diplomatic information is leaked, countries lose trust in each other and suffer reputational costs.

For international politics, the most important difference among secrets is how they are divulged. Security and trust-building may explain why states keep secrets—but why would a state reveal its own secrets? Secrecy as a diplomatic institution makes information a threat when leaked but a tool when officially disclosed. Despite the disproportionate weight of their media attention, whistleblowers don’t have a monopoly on divulging secrets. In fact, disclosing previously classified information is a good-will tact used by state governments either to respond to international pressures or to ease longstanding tension with a particular state. Finally, normative information-sharing is promoted through legal mechanisms that allow citizens to request state documents.

In today’s push for international transparency and government accountability, these three major sources for disclosure have very different uses, or outcomes, for international relations. The following is a framework for analyzing the tools available for disclosure and their international implications according to type of source.

Uniformly Declassified Documents

Over 30,000 nuclear physicists, university professors and other white collar professionals “disappeared” in Argentina during the 1970s. They have since been presumed kidnapped by the military junta in power during the so-called “Dirty War”. Caught up in Cold War paranoia, the US was so consumed with halting the spread of communism that it saw leftist elites in Latin America as a threat to national security. Publicly accessible communications between Henry Kissinger and Argentine military officials suggest an implied support of the abuses.

The Argentine public has been clamoring for additional documents detailing specific US involvement in the military’s human rights violations. Just last year, when he visited Argentina on the national holiday commemorating those who disappeared in the Dirty War, President Obama announced a “comprehensive effort” to declassify the long-awaited documents. This has been called, by critics and admirers alike, “declassification diplomacy.”

Technically, the US has a program for uniformly declassifying documents once they reach a certain maturity. Under Executive Order 12958, older documents are automatically declassified after 25 years, and new documents, after 10. But the order, passed in 1995, was overridden by another executive order in 2003 under the Bush administration on Classified National Security. Consequently, it became more difficult for classified documents to become declassified.

 Furthermore, to declassify a document (done only after a formal review process) does not mean to make it readily available. Once “released,” a document won’t necessarily get distributed to federal libraries, and may be subject to bureaucratic restrictions of access. Not to mention, when a document does become available to the public, it is hardly ever intact. Document images may be of a reduced quality and the content itself may be redacted.

Thus, in the case of the Dirty War, declassification as carried out by the government is more strategic than it is in the pure interest of transparency. Anti-American sentiment, widespread in Argentina, carries a resentment tied to a history of questionable involvement. While a leak of smoking-gun documents would have exacerbated existing tension, controlled declassification here allows the Obama administration to acknowledge the truth of past events.

Legal Recourse

The golden age of diplomatic transparency took place between the Soviet Union’s collapse and 9/11. During the international transparency movement that became known as the Decade of Openness, a total of 26 countries enacted formal statutes that guaranteed their citizens’ access to government information. In the US, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) allowed citizens, corporations and even foreign individuals to file requests for access to official documents. Movements like these represent a normative, international commitment to make foreign policy more democratic.

But after 9/11 this came to a screeching halt. Capping (and infiltrating) the flow of information was and remains a central, albeit controversial component of the War on Terror. Understandably, the public’s right to know took a back seat to the need for increased security. Now, a new wave of openness has begun to take shape—but the dynamics are much more complex than during the Decade of Openness.

In 2009, President Obama renewed FOIA’s guidelines, declaring that “in the face of doubt, openness prevails.” Still, this doesn’t always hold. Thanks to a court order in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Obama administration released a policy procedure for airstrike operations on terror suspects. The 18-page document that was issued was nothing more than a redacted “factsheet” that described the content of the real document.

 Legal action through mechanisms like FOIA will put pressure on governments to disclose, especially backed by claims to values like democracy and transparency. Most recently, FOIA was the mechanism that required the State Department to release inventories and broad descriptions to settle 35 lawsuits related to Hillary Clinton’s email.

But governments will still disclose on their terms. This means more redacted documents, like the airstrike policy, or more “inventories and broad descriptions,” which may not give a complete picture. Because legal demands are usually made by constituents, these disclosures are largely to assuage domestic audiences, and therefore play a lesser role in state-to-state politics, though they reveal key foreign policy information and carry potential threats.

 Leaks as Delivered by Whistleblower-Press Partnerships

Diplomatic consequences of illegal third party leaks are always initially catastrophic. A White House statement following Cablegate declared the leak “could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only US foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world.” On the other hand, a fellow at UK think tank Chatham House felt “governments have a tendency to try to keep as much information as possible secret or classified, whether it really needs to be or not. The really secret information, I would suggest, is still pretty safe and probably won’t end up on WikiLeaks.”

The most widely discussed disclosures are those carried out illegally by third parties. Because these revelations are conducted against the state government’s will, they are expected to be the most illuminating. Yet the dynamic surrounding them is contradictory.

The persistence of government restrictions on willingly disclosed, decades-old documents should translate to severe repercussions for any whistleblower or third party who leaks classified documents. Indeed, the repercussions have been severe for the likes of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.  But put into perspective, throughout US history there have only been 13 criminal cases in which a whistleblower was prosecuted. Seven of these were prosecuted under the Obama administration, compared to the other six prosecuted by all previous administrations combined.

As information law scholar David Pozen observed, the US government is constantly denouncing the release of classified information by anonymous sources to the media, and yet laws against them are rarely enforced. When it comes to document leaks, the US government condemns by law, but condones in practice. This permissiveness, he believes, is a pragmatic response to the mistrust generated by the secret-keeping as well as to the over-classification and fragmentation within bureaucracies.

An image of transparency is perceived as a national interest and, depending on the international context, can be as important as national security. Pozen describes the US as “a polity saturated with, vexed by, and dependent on leaks,” and while the government makes a point of outwardly “vilifying leakers,” in reality it maintains “a permissive culture” of disclosures.

Diplomatic secret-keeping is in many ways a balancing act. For the same reason that Italy’s foreign minister called the WikiLeaks Cablegate scandal in 2010 “the 9/11 of diplomacy,” secrecy can never be completely erased from foreign policy. It may be the same reason why, when asked for his thoughts on US involvement in the Dirty War, President Obama responded to an Argentinian journalist saying, “I don’t want to go through the list of every activity of the United States in Latin America over the last 100 years.” State-guided disclosures are only as useful to publics (foreign and domestic) as the disclosing government wants the information to be. Calls for citizens’ right to know are legitimized on the basis of domestic open-society principles; but so are the implications of illicit and official disclosures on diplomacy conducted worldwide. Thus when any secret is divulged, trust, transparency and political consequences hang in the balance.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

The post The Politics of Declassification appeared first on Glimpse from the Globe.

On October 1 of this year China celebrated a “historic milestone” as the International Monetary Fund added the renminbi (RMB) to its elite basket of reserve currencies, joining the dollar, the pound, the euro and the yen. This codification of its currency is but one of China’s many milestones in recent years as it entrenches itself in the global economy. Given the country’s standing as the world’s second-largest economy with a growth rate that evokes jealously among developed nations, few question China’s rise as a preeminent economic power. Far from merely expanding its own proportion of the proverbial pie, however, China’s economic activities have assumed a fundamentally integrated character.  As the US prepares for a new president and China poised to overtake the US economy within a decade, China’s regional and global integration presents numerous challenges and opportunities that policymakers would do well to address now.

An Interdependent, Integrated China

The internationalization of the RMB has long been a stated goal of the Chinese government. Although its past policy of weakening its currency has rendered the RMB a lightning rod for political criticism, the rhetoric has largely softened. This month, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde praised China’s strides in “liberalizing and improving the infrastructure of its financial markets.” In the Treasury Department’s latest report to Congress on Foreign Exchange Policies of Trading Partners, it assumed a markedly tamer position on China. It found that China made progress on allowing the RMB to appreciate and reining in its current account surplus; two contributing factors to the renminbi’s adoption as a global reserve currency.

Alongside advancing the wide use of China’s currency, 2016 provided another platform for Chinese economic collaboration and integration. For the first time, China held the presidency for the G20 Summit, which elevated Xi Jinping as the mouthpiece of the world’s collective twenty most advanced economies throughout the year. He further selected the summit’s theme: “an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive world economy” with China assuming a leading role in “advancing international economic cooperation,” according to Xi’s welcome message.

Perhaps China’s boldest incursion into the integrated economy was the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2015 and its opening this year. Seen as the eastern analogue to the west’s World Bank, the AIIB has confounded US policymakers who cannot decide whether to jeer it or join it. Meanwhile, China has spent the past year assiduously promoting infrastructure projects to its regional neighbors though the One Belt, One Road initiative. To date, the AIIB boasts 57 members—including many of the US’s closest allies—a capital stock of $100 billion, and four inaugural projects.

These developments demonstrate that China is not operating as an independent actor on the economic stage, but rather a profoundly interdependent one whose rise now relies on cooperation and collaboration. As the election season tends to intensify rhetoric and force a dichotomous “good versus bad” view on China, one may reasonably worry about what this portends for the future. Realistically, China as a driver of integration is not inherently bad, but such a paradigm shift risks normalizing its significant internal challenges that the US can and should assume a leadership role to remedy before welcoming China as a major interconnected player.

First Challenge: Overproduction and Underconsumption

China produced more cement in just three years, 2011-2013, than did the US in the entire twentieth century; 60% of China’s aluminum production has a negative cash flow, and China produces more than double the amount of steel as the world’s next top four producers combined. The EU Chamber of Commerce in China identified eight industries that are “severely affected” by overcapacity in which 20–35% of production is never used. China’s history of central planning haunts it today in the form of inefficient state-owned enterprises that accumulate such massive inventories, they begin to spill over into international markets. The US Trade Representative reports that overproduction in Chinese heavy industry distorts global markets and harms US workers, as well as other G20 members and developing markets. Last year, China produced 300 million tons of steel in excess of demand. Consequently, the steel flooded markets at artificially low prices, prompting the US, EU and Japan to impose a 450% anti-dumping duty this summer. Chinese industrial dumping depresses production in other domestic economies, applies downward pressure on wages, and triggers producer price deflation.

Many global financial leaders reportedly criticized China for its overproduction at October’s IMF and World Bank meetings. China, for its part, has called the steel tariff “irrational” and dismissed concerns about overcapacity as “hype.” Even so, China has announced a plan to eliminate 100–150 million tonnes of crude steel production, and it has begun paying companies to exit the chemical industry, another sector plagued by overproduction. In September the G20 proposed the formation of a global forum to coordinate reductions in steel overcapacity, but China must champion these production cuts given its wildly disproportionate market share. The US, meanwhile, can use its global influence to withhold market status for China and maintain the pressure of anti-dumping duties until it makes meaningful progress on restructuring its production and allows the so-called “zombie industries” to fail.

Second Challenge: Theft of Intellectual Property

General Keith Alexander has asserted that IP theft amounts to the “greatest transfer of wealth in history,” and it so happens that China accounts for the world’s largest source of IP theft. Cyber-enabled IP theft does devastating harm to the US economy, costing about $300 billion annually—a figure comparable to US exports to all of Asia each year. The US Trade Representative estimates that if Chinese piracy were reduced by 50%, legitimate software sales from the US to China would increase by $4 billion. These are just bilateral figures; projected to the world stage, China’s IP theft eviscerates the incentives to innovate, deprives entrepreneurs of hard-earned revenues and eliminates employment at businesses of all sizes.

Fortunately, there are already policies in place for the US to counteract Chinese IP theft. Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 gives the International Trade Commission broad authority to sequester traded goods that contain or benefit from stolen IP. The Obama Administration issued Executive Order 13694 in 2015 declaring cyber-enabled IP theft a national security and economic emergency. The order, along with Section 1637 of the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, provides for the unilateral use of targeted sanctions against foreign agents and entities that engage in IP theft or cyber espionage. These statutes provide powerful tools to combat China’s malicious activities before they spill over into the international economy, but they are currently grievously underutilized. The 2013 IP Commission Report co-chaired by Jon Huntsman and Dennis Blair offers over twenty specific policy recommendations to combat IP theft, including creating a civil cause of action for victims of cybercrimes. Policymakers should partner with American companies to deny Chinese hackers access to US markets and vigorously defend intellectual property rights and the hundreds of billions of dollars it contributes to the economy.

Third Challenge: Low Standards, High Ambitions

A primary reason for the US’s refusal to join the AIIB is China’s notoriously low and inadequate standards. The White House National Security Council has repeatedly questioned China’s ability to meet high international standards on its array of initiatives including the AIIB and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership trade deal. Standards in this context refer to more than just physical quality; they also connote governance, transparency, accountability, protection of rights, and social and environmental safeguards. Xi Jinping’s unprecedented anti-graft campaign, China’s repressive stance against labor rights and the mainland’s irredeemably polluted air are evidence of the country’s significant struggles on these fronts.

From a policy perspective, the best way to effect change is from the inside. The US has mastered and championed the west’s idea of high standards and embedded them in negotiations with its Pacific Rim partners in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The US should move to ratify the trade deal immediately, notwithstanding the ardent and economically illiterate anti-trade election rhetoric. Aside from its demonstrable economic and strategic benefits, the TPP embodies and would enact the “highest-standard trade deal ever negotiated,” with provisions that directly address good governance, state-owned enterprises, environmental protection, human rights, intellectual property and labor standards.

China’s RCEP by contrast covers none of these areas except intellectual property rights—which, for reasons discussed above, is not China’s strong suit. The US and its eleven partners concluded negotiation of the TPP, which excludes China, in November 2015. China and its fifteen partners met most recently in Laos for the 14th negotiation round of RCEP, which excludes the US. TPP encompasses $28 trillion in GDP; RCEP, $21 trillion. Seven members of each trade deal are members of both trade deals. The US and China are essentially engineering trade blocs in direct competition with one another, and it is incumbent upon the US, having concluded and signed the higher quality deal, to ratify it and admit the many nations that have since expressed interest in joining.

Failing to follow through, the US and global economy will find itself not so well served by the result. The world will follow someone’s example if not the TPP’s. China’s trade deal would prevail, and the Indo-Pacific—the world’s most robust economic and population center—would be held to the lowest of international standards. In game theory, this provides a prime example of a coordination failure. Under a ratified and enacted TPP, RCEP would likely collapse under its own weight, and the US could use the leverage of its regional partners to induce China to assent to the TPP’s standards and join the deal. Game theory would call this the optimal equilibrium, and indeed the world would be better for it.

***

As China’s own GDP growth rate begins to diminish, the country has clearly raised its gaze to the international arena. Many of its initiatives have garnered great success, from the internationalization of its currency to its successful hosting of the G20 Summit to its largescale infrastructural undertakings. In entrenching itself into an increasingly integrated world economy, China has discovered its niche for continued influence and growth. In so doing, however, it exposes the world to its own extensive economic ailments. There are many more than those discussed here, but each of these dimensions illustrates how the US and China, even on ostensibly bilateral issues, are operating on an international level with global ramifications. As the world’s largest, most interconnected and influential economic power, the US should not hesitate to prosecute its powerful tools of economic statecraft to chart a course for Chinese integration held to the highest standards.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

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Infrastructure investment is a perennial staple in the American political diet. Journalists, politicians and pundits idolize ambitious infrastructure programs as economic silver bullets, single-handedly capable of propelling the US out of its slow-growth blues. The US’s crumbling infrastructure has also become representative of the political dysfunction that prevents its resolution. According to the dominant narrative, a gridlocked legislature beset by hyper partisanship makes a joint infrastructure deal impossible, despite its benefits. After painting a portrait of congressional ineptitude–usually invoking the legacies of Eisenhower and FDR–the imagined pundit pontificates on the need for another massive public works program that would employ hundreds of thousands and reinvigorate the promises of the American dream. There’s only one catch: it’s a ridiculous proposition

In our zealous promotion of infrastructure investment, fidelity to the grand ideal of infrastructure as an economic deus ex machina has come at the expense of sensible policy. The principal line of thinking, that the US needs a massive spending program, is not incorrect per se, but obfuscates the more nuanced reality: that how we spend is as important as how much we spend.

Expanding What We Call “Infrastructure”

It’s easy to snark about incompetent policymakers instinctively throwing money at complex political problems—and more public spending is needed. The question is, how do we go about doing it? To answer, we need to first examine what we mean by infrastructure spending. Naturally, we associate the phrase with massive, historical public works, usually pertaining to transportation. These tower both figuratively and literally above all else, and we are most conscious that we’re utilizing ‘infrastructure’ when interacting with, say, bridges or roads— the hidden systems of pipes, grids and waste are all “Out of sight, out of mind”. As a consequence, the American political approach to infrastructure tends to be overwhelmingly transit-centric.

We don’t immediately think of the public health crisis of lead water contamination in Flint, Michigan as a failure of public water infrastructure or broadband access as an infrastructure concern. Yet the Council of Economic Advisors suggests that investment in public broadband in areas that desperately need it could reduce frictional unemployment, improve labor market outcomes and boost  economic growth more broadly. Meanwhile, Joseph Kane and Robert Puentes from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program suggest that improving municipal water infrastructure could help prevent public health crises like Flint, decrease costs and ultimately lead to better water quality. Expanding our conception of what constitutes infrastructure isn’t just rhetorically pedantic. If transit dominates what we understand infrastructure to be in an abstract sense, we may ignore other core domains of infrastructure when allocating funds. A transit-centric approach to infrastructure in an era in which transit concerns are unbelievably less pronounced than they were fifty years ago ignores more significant infrastructure concerns for water, energy, information technology, and even aging. All of this serves to illustrate a guiding principle: spend first where the money is needed most.

Fix It First

Advocates of robust investment envision federal stimulus in terms of massive new high-tech construction projects bringing us ever closer to the space-age reality of the Jetsons. While I’m as big a fan of incredibly fast bullet trains, interstate hyperloops and stylish bridges as the next warm-blooded American, historically, public works projects that prioritize new construction tend to fail abysmally.

Japan is the best example of this. The massive several-trillion dollar Japanese public works stimulus that was meant to rescue Japan from its decade-long period of stagnation fell disappointingly short of its goal—too much money went to the construction of new roads and bridges that were either duplicative or simply unnecessary, and the stimulus failed to bring the promised economic boom.

Spending on new projects, especially new transit projects, in an already developed country at the expense of repairs is a ridiculous but common practice in the United States. While tens of thousands of bridges are structurally deficient and lie in disrepair, states spend 55% of road funds on new construction. Despite repairs having a return on investment several times higher than new construction, our glorification of new things leads to poor investments like the Alaskan Gravina Island bridge and Detroit’s notorious monorail system.

Part of this phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that new projects are far more politically profitable—flashy, visible construction is more attention-grabbing and meaningful for constituencies. This underscores how the way we think about our public systems informs the political economy of infrastructure policy. For a politician, there is a clear incentive system that rewards the construction of large public works at the expense of investment in other domains.

The bottom line is that there are several compelling reasons to prioritize repairing our nation’s infrastructure. 1/3^rd of traffic fatalities are caused by poor road conditions, deterioration leads to higher future repair costs and investment tends to have large returns. Alternatively, there are very few compelling reasons to construct new infrastructure. It has a low return on investment and around 50% of new roads do not generate enough taxes to pay for themselves. Furthermore, a “Fix It First” approach emphasizes the primary goal of infrastructure to provide the populace with the baseline services necessary for the proper functioning of society and conduct of commerce. When we tolerate the deterioration of these services, we undermine the raison d’être of these sorts of public institutions. Sure, the “Fix It First” doctrine is boring. But it is far more efficient and pragmatic.

Smart Infrastructure Investment is a Free Lunch

If we choose to adopt a more sensible spending policy by prioritizing fixing existing roads and pivoting away from investment in transit, infrastructure investment can be a macroeconomic powerhouse, and also pay for itself in full. Assuming that investment earns a 6% real return, according to Larry Summers tax revenues would increase by 1.5% of the amount invested. Tax revenues demonstrably increase even while ignoring the fact that a dollar in a well-targeted infrastructure investment program increases output by nearly three dollars, or the fact that the return on investment on targeted infrastructure spending is around 20% (or even 40% for repairs). Even with grossly conservative estimates, there is a compelling case to believe infrastructure investment financed by borrowing will reduce the debt burden substantially.

Public infrastructure investment has never been more necessary or better positioned to engender economic growth. But it must done intelligently, and policymakers should endeavor to defy the transit-centric, new-construction pathology of most infrastructure discussion. While infrastructure investment will not be an economic panacea, it surely will help to boost U.S growth prospects and lift up the standards of living for many Americans. While spending on mundane fixes is not nearly as exciting as spending on flashy though largely useless massive works projects—we must not sacrifice the efficacy of our infrastructure projects at the altar of political aesthetic. Fast bullet trains are pretty darn cool, but the well-being of the American people is always a more compelling imperative.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

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