Trump's 'Liberation Day' Tariffs: Fair trade or global trade war?

FA 2024.7 A Better Path for Ukraine and NATO What Kyiv Could Do Now for a Place in the Alliance M. E. Sarotte This article is paywall-free Why NATO Should Stay Out of Asia The Alliance Would Leave the Region Less, Not More, Secure Mathieu Droin, Kelly A. Grieco, and Happymon Jacob 普丁的新戰爭經濟 為什麼蘇聯式的軍費開支和國家幹預無法拯救俄羅斯 安德烈·科列斯尼科夫 2024 年 7 月 10 日 俄羅斯總統普丁、國防部長安德烈別洛烏索夫與軍事官員，莫斯科，2024 年 6 月 在俄羅斯，嘲笑蘇聯經濟計畫的傳統幾乎與改善經濟體系的嘗試一樣古老。 “如果在撒哈拉建立社會主義會發生什麼？”一個老笑話問。答案是：「一開始，除了計畫之外，什麼都沒有。那麼就會出現沙子短缺的情況。根據另一位前聯準會主席艾倫‧葛林斯潘非常喜歡的說法，勃列日涅夫時代，一群人正在莫斯科紅場參加閱兵式，只不過他們穿著寬鬆的正裝，而不是軍裝。一名助手跑到蘇聯領導人面前：“列昂尼德·伊里奇，我們不知道這些人是誰！”勃列日涅夫回答說：“冷靜點，同志，這些是我們最具破壞性的武器——蘇聯經濟學家。” 經過兩年六個月的俄羅斯在烏克蘭的“特別軍事行動”，俄羅斯總統弗拉基米爾·普丁似乎並沒有被該國經濟規劃者的聲譽所嚇倒。今年春天他的政府改組最引人注目的結果無疑是他用沒有軍事經驗的國家經濟學家安德烈·別洛烏索夫取代了長期擔任國防部長的謝爾蓋·紹伊古。別洛烏索夫沒有穿著寬鬆的西裝，而是穿著一套昂貴且合身的西裝，他曾擔任經濟發展部長、總統經濟助理和副總理。但他的任命是有原因的：俄羅斯的軍事開支現在已經達到如此龐大的比例——根據一些估計，2024年預算的近三分之一用於國防，佔GDP的比例比後任何一年都高。 這至少是普丁的解釋之一，而且這似乎是他沒有說謊的罕見情況。另一種解釋是，對俄羅斯軍事技術的有效管理將使該國也有可能在民用工業中實現「技術主權」——完全自給自足。此外，巨額軍費開支，即使必須以犧牲人力資本（有時包括社會和衛生服務）為代價，原則上也能夠推動經濟發展。從這個意義上說，別洛烏索夫是正確的選擇：作為蘇聯經濟數學學派的產物，他完全相信最高當局有能力計算一切，相信國家資金和國家幹預可以解決任何危機。 觀察家們已經將別洛烏索夫描述為「軍事凱因斯主義者」——這是對二十世紀早期英國理論家和政府刺激政策倡導者約翰·梅納德·凱恩斯的有點冒犯的說法。更準確地說，別洛烏索夫的想法恰恰讓人想起了破壞蘇聯的方法：國防開支的不可持續增長和經濟的無情軍事化。當然，身為職業經濟學家，別洛烏索夫並不主張放棄市場。但他支持這樣的觀點，不僅是密集的政府支出，特別是軍事支出也可以成為發展的動力。可以公平地將這種做法描述為普丁的新經濟模式，這種模式不僅受到烏克蘭戰爭的必要性的影響，而且還受到數十年蘇聯秘方和妄想思維的影響。 在某種程度上，這標誌著普丁執政第一年的轉變。畢竟，他是在1990年代自由主義改革之後上台的，並且在執政初期似乎支持俄羅斯經濟的大規模重組和自由化。他也充分意識到維持強勁的宏觀經濟指標和平衡國家預算的重要性。這就是為什麼他仍然在政府中保留理性的技術官僚，例如擔任央行行長的埃爾維拉·納比烏林娜（Elvira Nabiullina）和擔任財政部長的安東·西盧安諾夫（Anton Siluanov） 。 別洛烏索夫完全相信當局有能力計算一切。 但別洛烏索夫的出身與前自由派改革者截然不同。透過任命他，普丁現在正在回歸本質上的蘇聯經濟，但具有重要的市場要素。新模式將國家幹預主義、主要強調軍工複合體和進口替代與不同領域的市場經濟結合起來，包括平行進口各種西方產品以滿足消費者需求。這是一項有趣的實驗，但也是一個有著悠久而危險歷史的實驗。考慮到越來越多的大型企業正在被國有化，這削弱了人們對保護私有財產的信心，並表明市場本身面臨風險，情況更是如此。此外，克里姆林宮還以其他方式發出信號——例如，它只是提高了中產階級的稅收——它沒有足夠的資金來平衡預算。 與他的一些蘇聯前任一樣，普丁似乎押注於經濟數字計算者管理的巨額軍事開支可以拯救國家，而不是讓國家破產。但已故的共產主義政權認識得太晚了，無論規劃者的數學有多好，建立在戰爭基礎上的經濟都無法永遠生存。透過採取這種做法，普丁和別洛烏索夫面臨著侵蝕俄羅斯來之不易的自由經濟基礎的風險。這些原則是 30 多年前由經濟改革者制定的，儘管該國日益孤立，但迄今仍使俄羅斯體系保持相對穩定。當它們消失時，可能很難避免更大的崩潰。 勃列日涅夫的寬鬆套裝 回到蘇聯時代，莫斯科的領導層幾乎總是對該國經濟轉型的成功或失敗發揮著至關重要的作用。儘管經濟改革是在尼基塔·赫魯雪夫（Nikita Khrushchev，1953-64 年）的領導下討論的，但在勃列日涅夫時代，總理阿列克謝·柯西金（Alexei Kosygin）在勃列日涅夫的同意下首次嘗試重啟社會主義經濟。這項努力始於 1962 年一位名叫埃夫塞·利伯曼 (Evsei Liberman) 的經濟學家在《真理報》上發表的一篇頗具爭議性的文章，他主張需要增加企業的自主權，主要是在企業如何使用利潤方面。這論點的出現並非偶然。在蘇聯時代，《真理報》上的一篇文章不僅僅是一篇文章；它是一篇文章。這幾乎總是一個指示。在這種情況下，這意味著當局認為蘇聯經濟改革的時機已經成熟，現在是變革的有利時機。 由此，蘇聯媒體和當局之間開始了一場關於如何徹底改革所謂經濟機制的辯論。 1965 年初，利伯曼出現在《時代》雜誌的封面上，標題是「共產主義與利潤的調情」。最後，那年秋天，柯西金發布了他著名的政府報告，在經濟學家之間進行了持續爭論之後，他正式提議給予企業有限的獨立性、更大的處置收入的自由，甚至是擴大其產品範圍的自由。這標誌著蘇聯意識的革命：商品不僅必須按照蘇聯的計畫生產，而且最好還必須按照蘇聯的計畫進行銷售。不過，這只是一個實驗。在懷疑論者中，柯西金改革被諷刺地稱為「自由主義化」。 蘇聯時代的坦克正在為閱兵練習，莫斯科，2024 年 5 月 蘇聯時代的坦克正在為閱兵練習，莫斯科，2024 年 5 月 馬克西姆·謝梅托夫/路透社 事實上，這些改革與經濟學專業本身的轉變同時發生。當時，經濟學家正在採用數學方法，將蘇聯經濟學從單純的正統馬克思列寧主義的支柱轉變為現代科學。最重要的是最優運作理論，即可行的社會主義模式可以基於對完美平衡經濟的全面計算，其中考慮到所有行業和公民的需求。新思維的中心之一是中央經濟與數學研究所，新一代數理經濟學家在那裡尋找通用優化的神奇公式，他們希望藉助電腦技術來設計公式。 這項工作的規模之大令人望而生畏。蘇聯經濟學家如何將數千項計畫任務和 10,000 多項物料平衡表連結起來並平衡，這些計畫任務必須為蘇聯的每一種商品（從黑色金屬軋材到乳製品）編寫？畢竟，甚至沒有一個官僚機構來處理這一切，前者隸屬於國家計畫委員會（Gosplan），後者隸屬於國家供應委員會。在蘇聯時代末期，Gosplan 本身擁有 70 個分支機構和約 3,200 名員工。年度計劃本身就佔了幾十卷，並在 Gosplan 的主計算中心進行計算，那裡有一台從英國購買的巨大計算機，佔據了兩層樓；機房下方有自流水，因為機器需要冷卻。 然而，這些巨大的努力對於拯救蘇聯經濟並沒有太大作用。確實，蘇聯經濟在 20 世紀 60 年代後半期有所回升，官方成長數據也非常高。這是由於改革，儘管成長似乎是由通膨壓力引起的：最低限度的自由促使企業增加品種，相應地，價格略有上漲。更深層的現實是，如果沒有市場和私人財產，柯西金改革注定會失敗。如果沒有開放的經濟，規劃者進行再多的計算也無法使供給和需求一致。 政治局石油政權 到了1960年代末，蘇聯經濟又面臨另一個問題：勞動力短缺。除其他因素外，長期提供勞動力的農村已經疲憊不堪。令人驚訝的是，普丁今天在他自己的戰爭助長的國家主義經濟中也面臨著類似的問題，但對他來說，這更多是長期人口下降和部分合格人員外流以及武裝部隊大量補給需求的結果。 1969年12月，勃列日涅夫在中央全會上直言不諱地談到了勞工危機和其他經濟問題。這篇演講非常火熱，以至於被列為機密。也許他是想表明他的對手柯西金的改革毫無成果。但勃列日涅夫的批評——從低效支出到未能實施新技術——是準確的。他似乎為莫斯科參與代價高昂的地緣政治冒險而道歉，其推理出奇地符合普丁今天的邏輯。 勃列日涅夫說：“如果我們沒有幫助擊退帝國主義在東南亞和中東的陰謀，美國及其盟友就會在靠近我們邊境的地方發起新的侵略行動……” 。 。 。如果我們沒有挫敗捷克斯洛伐克的反革命計劃，北約軍隊很快就會到達我們的西部邊境。 與其他失敗的俄羅斯和蘇聯改革一樣，柯西金努力的衰落與政治凍結同時發生。這事件始於 1968 年 8 月，當時蘇聯入侵捷克斯洛伐克。經濟變革被擱置，不僅是因為高層興趣減弱。大約在這個時候，隨著 20 世紀 60 年代發現的油田投入使用，石油美元大量湧入蘇聯經濟。 1973年石油危機後，石油價格上漲。與普丁領導下的俄羅斯的情況一樣，這個超級大國對石油和天然氣著迷，並用石油和天然氣為食品和工業進口提供資金。改變的意願被貶低了。但正如蘇聯人很快發現的那樣，這種做法只能維持這麼長時間。 今天的克里姆林宮最好注意到蘇聯的石油統治在十年內就耗盡了。到 1979 年，隨著蘇聯入侵阿富汗以及莫斯科與華盛頓的核武軍備競賽，蘇聯經濟幾乎在所有可能的領域都出現了赤字。正是這些因素後來導致了惡性通貨膨脹，蘇聯解體後，新一代改革者結束了價格管制。此時，俄羅斯的經濟改革者可以重複 20 世紀 60 年代一部流行的蘇聯電影中的著名台詞：“我們面前的一切都已經被偷了。” 誰害怕失業？ 如今，20 世紀 90 年代被普遍認為是俄羅斯大規模經濟自由化的年代，而且常常被視為普丁現在所反對的時代。事實上，在1980年代米哈伊爾·戈巴契夫的領導下就已經嘗試過經濟改革，他開始不僅給予蘇聯人民一些政治自由，也給予一些經濟自由。但戈巴契夫的經濟改革進展緩慢，然後就完全停止了。 一方面，戈巴契夫尋求逐步擴大經濟主動性空間：政府首次授權與外國人合資，並允許某種形式的小型私人企業和在服務業創建半私人公司。然而，機器製造業繼續以通常的方式獲得國家資金的注入。當經濟學家尼古拉·什梅列夫（Nikolai Shmelev）魯莽地公開建議政府應該允許社會主義制度下的失業時，戈巴契夫勃然大怒。 戈巴契夫不敢重新設計蘇聯經濟。 不過，很明顯，需要採取更激進的經濟改革方法。自本世紀初以來，年輕的經濟學家團體一直在列寧格勒和莫斯科舉辦地下研討會，然後是官方研討會。在列寧格勒，他們的領袖是年輕的經濟學家阿納托利·丘拜斯（Anatoly Chubais），他在該市組織了非正式和正式的科學研討會，聚集了一群志同道合的人；在莫斯科，葉戈爾·蓋達爾（Yegor Gaidar）作為年輕一代中最有天賦的人，已經參與了為黨和政府準備分析和綱領文件的工作。這兩個群體或多或少形成了一個有凝聚力的團隊，他們很快就意識到需要進行徹底且影響深遠的經濟改革；他們也考慮了財產私有化的不同方式，他們知道，沒有這些方式，社會主義經濟就不可能實現真正的轉變。 改革的最後幾年充滿了激烈的經濟討論和不同改革派別之間的競爭。 1987年6月，中央甚至召開了一次經濟全會，其中包括許多來自舊派的進步蘇聯經濟學家。特別是，學院派經濟學家亞歷山大·安奇甚金（Alexander Anchishkin）被選為新成立的經濟與科技進步預測研究所所長，該研究所吸引了包括蓋達爾在內的一批有前途的年輕經濟學家。在其非常年輕的工作人員中，還有普丁未來的國防部長安德烈·別洛烏索夫（Andrei Belousov）。 然而戈巴契夫未能採取更大膽的步驟。儘管他在蘇聯的大規模轉型中發揮了巨大的作用，但他卻不敢重新設計蘇聯經濟，蘇聯經濟開始經歷更加嚴重的危機：經濟停滯加上巨額外債，隱性通貨膨脹逐漸破裂。預算赤字，同時商品和產品的嚴重短缺。 1991年8月針對戈巴契夫的未遂政變後，蘇聯的政治崩潰勢不可擋，這是這種崩潰的自然結果。 少數學，多牛奶 身為戈巴契夫的對手，鮑里斯·葉爾欽明白蘇聯正在崩潰，他只能在獨立的俄羅斯建立權力——而不僅僅是在政治上。他也意識到，俄羅斯需要進行根本性的經濟改革，而這些改革無法與前蘇聯加盟共和國協調一致，其中許多加盟共和國還沒有為市場經濟做好準備。就在那時，1991 年秋天，他召集了蓋達爾的年輕改革者來制定改革計畫。 他也為這些年輕的經濟學家——因其自由主義信念而被暱稱為「芝加哥男孩」——提供了在其政府的金融和經濟集團中擔任關鍵職位的機會：蓋達爾成為葉爾欽的主要經濟顧問，然後擔任代理總理；丘拜斯成為私有化部長，然後擔任負責金融穩定的第一副總理。而且，在改革實施的過程中，俄羅斯總統和總理的職位得到了有效的結合，為改革者提供了所需的政治支持。 （這些改革遭到了議會的強烈反對，而葉爾欽的支持對於為改革提供政治掩護至關重要。） 總統顧問葉戈爾·蓋達爾和第一副總理阿納托利·丘拜斯於 1994 年 11 月在莫斯科 經濟學家兼總統顧問葉戈爾·蓋達爾和第一副總理阿納托利·丘拜斯於 1994 年 11 月在莫斯科 根納迪加爾佩林/路透社 1990年代備受爭議的經濟重組由此展開。蓋達爾放開了價格以及國內外貿易，政府開始將國有財產私有化。儘管這些強制改革在西方被視為休克療法，但蓋達爾本人將其稱為“除顫措施”，因為他相信，如果沒有這些措施，只會出現飢荒，商店將沒有東西可賣。由於自由化計劃，貨架已滿，市場力量開始發揮作用。 然而，改革者很快就被指責為通貨膨脹急劇上升、需求不足的商品停產、軍事和農業支出迅速下降、大量軍工工廠關閉以及缺乏社會支持資金等問題。一場激烈的政治鬥爭爆發，蓋達爾政府——當時的名稱，儘管蓋達爾正式擔任副總理兼經濟和財政部長，然後擔任內閣代理主席——只維持到1992年底。 但無論受到多麼猛烈的批評，俄羅斯的激進經濟學家都完成了一件偉大的事：建立市場經濟。他們在這方面取得了巨大的成功。考慮一下給商店貨架上貨的簡單挑戰。在70年代初期，中央經濟數學研究所估計，一台每秒執行100萬次運算的電腦需要3萬年才能滿足計畫經濟對每種產品的龐大需求。然而，在蓋達爾於 1992 年 1 月放寬價格控制後，幾乎無需任何計劃就可以實現同樣的結果：消費者需求足以讓商店保持爆滿。蘇聯控制論創始人維克多·格盧什科夫（Viktor Glushkov）曾提議在每頭乳牛的乳房上安裝感測器，以計算最佳產奶量；現在，無需任何感測器即可確定最佳交易量，這一切都歸功於市場這隻看不見的手。 自由主義幽靈 與大多數出生於1930年代的第一代蘇聯經濟改革者不同，葉爾欽時代的新一代經濟改革者出生於1950年代。他們在蘇聯經濟停滯最嚴重的時期接受了教育，對地下自我教育和研究匈牙利、波蘭和南斯拉夫的社會主義經濟改革產生了濃厚的興趣。匈牙利經濟學家亞諾什·科爾奈（Janos Kornai）公開論述了赤字經濟的本質，對這一代許多人來說，他是一個特別重要的人物。克服社會主義幻想使這群人得以進行初步的經濟改革，然後在政府行政部門中獲得重要的立足點。這意味著他們可以繼續監督結構性改革，或者對於像蓋達爾本人這樣退出學院的人來說，他們可以透過諮詢和起草提案為改革的實現做出貢獻。 然而，為了對政治體系產生持久影響，經濟自由主義者將他們的想法制度化至關重要。值得注意的是，葉夫根尼·亞辛是少數接受蓋達爾改革的老一代成員之一，也是莫斯科國立大學許多年輕經濟學家的導師，包括未來央行總裁納比烏利娜。同樣重要的是 1992 年在莫斯科創建了一個新的經濟學院，後來成為一所成熟的大學——高等經濟學院。這個自由主義的巢穴很快就吸引了最優秀的教授和研究人員，並成為俄羅斯最傑出的研究機構之一。值得注意的是，這也使其成為近年來政權鎮壓的目標。 2021 年戰前更換大學領導階層後，政府對教職員中的自由派教授進行了大規模清洗。 俄羅斯聯邦預算的近四分之一是秘密的。 然而，即使是頑固的普丁主義者也無法從經濟教育和經濟政策中徹底根除自由主義。總統的經濟助理馬克西姆·奧列甚金（Maxim Oreshkin）也許不是一個自由主義者，但他是一個技術官僚，而且是相當典型的高等經濟學院畢業生。當今的俄羅斯保守派和共產主義者支持普丁主義的一切表現，他們對政府金融和經濟管理部門中「自由主義者」的存在感到不滿。但普丁並沒有自殺傾向：在他執政之初，幾位自由派經濟學家向他傳授了宏觀經濟學、預算和貨​​幣政策的基礎知識，其中以丘拜斯和在普丁執政第一個十年擔任財政部長的阿列克謝·庫德林為首。當然，普丁遠離了自由主義，幾乎所有的改革者都發現自己處於邊緣。充其量，我們可以將那些仍然是理性的技術官僚的人描述為理性的技術官僚。進行非自由主義反改革和去現代化的獨裁者不需要自由主義現代化主義者。 身為經濟學家，別洛烏索夫的做法與自由主義者截然相反。他的父親是蘇聯數學經濟學派的傑出人物，而他，簡單地說，就是該派的追隨者。當你以正確的方式使用公共資金時，你就會得到成果。這就是他的經濟哲學的全部內容。技術變革也很重要。近年來，別洛烏索夫在新技術方面投入了大量精力，這並非巧合。但技術創新不僅發生在公共部門，當然也不會發生在與世界日益孤立的經濟體中。更深層的現實是，普丁的新軍事經濟模式似乎很可能使該國更難避免變得更加脆弱。 蛋蛋捲 蘇聯國家計畫局的工作人員堅信，社會主義制度的原則是高估所需的資本投資並拒絕技術創新。他們明白，在缺乏私人利益和主動性的情況下，錢越多，在國有經濟中浪費的就越多。這種自相矛盾的國家計劃智慧似乎已被當今一代的俄羅斯經濟學家完全遺忘，他們正在建立一種成熟的普丁經濟學新模型，其基礎是對政府支出有效性和軍事經濟特殊作用的近乎宗教信仰。普丁現在提出了一項雄心勃勃的任務：按照他的說法，經濟學家必須在大砲和奶油之間找到平衡。國家預算中根本沒有錢用於購買黃油，但這可以由市場部門來處理，由於三十多年前蓋達爾改革的推動，市場部門在普丁的俄羅斯仍然存在。 普丁領導下的俄羅斯政府在槍支方面的支出幾乎達到了蘇聯末期的規模：從形式上看，它佔國內生產總值的比例略低，但當老闆們宣布這些數字時，他們卻對這樣一個事實保持沉默：幾乎四分之一的聯邦預算是秘密的。這種保密並不神秘——這些錢都花在了可恥的所謂「國防和安全」上，並為那些成功從國家獲取巨額財政補貼的遊說者提供了財政支持。別洛烏索夫對經濟如何發展持有嚴格的統制主義和國家主義觀點，他被賦予了充分實現這種模式的責任。 2024 年 5 月，俄羅斯巴泰斯克徵兵中心的俄羅斯應徵入伍者 2024 年 5 月，俄羅斯巴泰斯克徵兵中心的俄羅斯應徵入伍者 謝爾蓋·皮沃瓦羅夫/路透社 對於那些支持這種做法的人來說，對國家幹預的信念確實接近一種特殊的宗教——或者至少是一種意識形態。正確計算政府在軍工複合體產品上的支出能夠成功維持甚至發展日益孤立的俄羅斯經濟的信念在現代經濟思想中是反常的。如果沒有適當的政治框架和強而有力的意識形態理由，它就無法被維護。但以如此荒謬的軍費開支為前提的唯一框架不可避免地是獨裁政權。普丁提出的俄羅斯特殊使命觀、特殊道路、特殊文化密碼、特殊正統作用等提供了思想支撐。為此，人們必須真正地戰鬥：戰爭已經成為俄羅斯「發展」的永久因素。 1940年代，二戰期間管理蘇聯經濟的經濟規劃師尼古拉·沃茲涅先斯基成為約瑟夫·史達林的寵兒。衝突結束後，他寫了一本極受歡迎的專著《衛國戰爭期間的蘇聯軍事經濟》，隨後於1949 年被斯大林清洗。同樣成功的專著「特別行動」期間俄羅斯聯邦的軍事經濟是一個懸而未決的問題。不能保證成功。俄羅斯經濟學家遲早必須讓俄羅斯經濟從軍事幹預主義模式回歸到某種形式的常態——或者正如改革者在 90 年代初開玩笑說的那樣，「用煎蛋捲做雞蛋」。 二十世紀末，莫斯科的經濟軍事化和對大規模國家投資神奇力量的信念加速了蘇聯的崩潰。到目前為止，普丁透過維持開放市場的殘餘並將其金融機構置於技術官僚手中，避免了當今俄羅斯的同樣命運。但現在，老派經濟學家正在引領閱兵式，這種經濟理性主義還能持續多久還不清楚。 安德烈‧科列斯尼科夫 (Andrei KOLESNIKOV) 是卡內基俄羅斯歐亞中心的高級研究員。 安德烈·科列斯尼科夫的更多作品 更多的： 俄羅斯 經濟學 經濟發展 政治與社會 意識形態 安全 戰爭與軍事戰略 弗拉基米爾·普丁 最常閱讀的文章 以色列與沙烏地阿拉伯關係正常化的危險推動 如果沒有建立巴勒斯坦國的真正道路，協議將破壞中東穩定 瑪麗亞·範塔皮和瓦利·納斯爾 避免南海戰爭 美國如何在不與中國作戰的情況下支持菲律賓 瑞安·哈斯 普丁的新戰爭經濟 為什麼蘇聯式的軍費開支和國家幹預無法拯救俄羅斯 安德烈·科列斯尼科夫 債務正在拖累發展中國家 如何結束當前危機並避免下一場危機 馬克·蘇茲曼 推薦文章 北約秘書長延斯·斯托爾滕貝格於 2024 年 4 月在基輔向烏克蘭立法者發表講話 烏克蘭和北約更好的道路 基輔現在可以做些什麼來獲得聯盟的一席之地 我薩羅特 2024 年 5 月，俄羅斯士兵在莫斯科行進 俄羅斯精英如何與戰爭和平相處 莫斯科的勝利削弱了對克里姆林宮的反對 米哈伊爾·齊加爾 Putin’s New War Economy Why Soviet-Style Military Spending—and State Intervention—Won’t Save Russia By Andrei Kolesnikov July 10, 2024 Russian President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Andrei Belousov with military officials, Moscow, June 2024 Russian President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Andrei Belousov with military officials, Moscow, June 2024 Alexander Kazakov / Sputnik / Reuters In Russia, the tradition of making fun of Soviet economic planning is almost as old as attempts to improve the economic system. “What would happen if socialism were built in the Sahara?” an old joke asks. The answer: “At first, except for plans, there will be nothing. Then there will be sand shortages.” According to another—one that former U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan liked very much—in the Brezhnev era, a group of people are walking in a military parade in Moscow’s Red Square, except that they are wearing baggy formal suits instead of military uniforms. An aide runs up to the Soviet leader: “Leonid Ilyich, we don’t know who these people are!” Brezhnev replies: “Calm down, comrade, these are our most destructive weapons—Soviet economists.” After more than two years and six months of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be undeterred by the reputation of his country’s economic planners. The most striking outcome of his government reshuffle this spring was undoubtedly his replacement of longtime defense minister Sergei Shoigu with Andrei Belousov—a state economist with no military experience. A man not in a baggy suit but in an expensive and well-fitting one, Belousov previously served as minister of economic development, assistant to the president for economics, and vice prime minister. But there is a reason for his appointment: Russia’s military spending has now reached such gargantuan proportions—according to some estimates, nearly one-third of the 2024 budget is devoted to defense, reaching a higher portion of GDP than any other year in post-Soviet Russian history—that only an economist can make it efficient. This, at least, is one of Putin’s explanations, and it appears to be the rare case in which he is not lying. Another explanation is that effective management of Russia’s military technology will make it possible for the country to achieve “technological sovereignty”—complete self-sufficiency—in civilian industries, as well. And also that vast military spending, even if it must come at the expense of human capital, sometimes including social and health services, is in principle capable of driving economic development. In this sense, Belousov is the right choice: as a product of the mathematical school of Soviet economics, he has total faith in the ability of the supreme authorities to calculate everything, and that state money and state interventions can solve any crisis. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. Observers have already described Belousov as a “military Keynesian”—a somewhat offensive reference to John Maynard Keynes, the early-twentieth-century British theorist and advocate of government stimulus. More accurately, Belousov’s ideas are reminiscent of exactly the approach that helped undermine the Soviet Union: the unsustainable growth of defense spending and the relentless militarization of the economy. Of course, as a professional economist, Belousov does not advocate abandoning the market. But he supports the view that not only intensive government expenditures but specifically military spending can serve as a driver of development. It is fair to describe this approach as Putin’s new economic model—one shaped not only by the imperatives of his war in Ukraine but also by decades of Soviet nostrums and delusional thinking. To an extent, this marks a shift from Putin’s first years in the office. After all, he came to power on the heels of the liberal reforms of the 1990s, and in his early years in power seemed to support large-scale restructuring and liberalization of the Russian economy. He is also fully aware of the importance of maintaining strong macroeconomic indicators and balancing the state budget. That is why he still keeps rational technocrats in his administration, such as Elvira Nabiullina as central bank governor and Anton Siluanov as finance minister. Belousov has total faith in the ability of the authorities to calculate everything. But Belousov is cut from a very different cloth than the former liberal reformers. By appointing him, Putin is now returning to what is essentially a Soviet economy, but with important market elements. The new model combines state interventionism, a dominant emphasis on the military-industrial complex, and import substitution, with a market economy in different areas, including for parallel imports of various Western products to satisfy consumer demands. It is an interesting experiment, but also one with a long and perilous history. All the more so given that an increasing number of large businesses are being nationalized, undermining confidence in the protection of private property and suggesting that the market as such is at risk. Moreover, the Kremlin has signaled in other ways—it has just raised taxes on the middle class, for example—that it does not have enough money to balance the budget. Like some of his Soviet predecessors, Putin seems to be wagering that huge military expenditures, managed by economic number crunchers, can save, rather than bankrupt, the country. But as the late communist regime learned too late, an economy built on war cannot survive forever, no matter how good the planners’ math. By embracing such an approach, Putin and Belousov risk eroding what remains of Russia’s hard-won liberal economic foundations. Established by economic reformers more than 30 years ago, these principles have until now kept the Russian system relatively stable, despite the country’s growing isolation. When and if they disappear, it may be very difficult to avoid a larger collapse. BREZHNEV’S BAGGY SUITS Going back to the Soviet era, the leadership in Moscow has almost always had a crucial part in the success and failure of attempts to transform the country’s economy. Although economic reforms were discussed under Nikita Khrushchev (1953–64), it was in the Brezhnev era that Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, with Brezhnev’s consent, first attempted to reboot the socialist economy. The effort began with a provocative 1962 article in Pravda by an economist named Evsei Liberman, who argued for the need to increase the autonomy of enterprises, primarily in how they use their profits. The airing of this argument was no accident. In the Soviet era, an article in Pravda was not just an article; it was, almost always, an instruction. In this case, it meant that the authorities had deemed that the Soviet economy was already overripe for reform and that it was a favorable moment for change. Thus began a debate in the Soviet press and among the authorities about how to overhaul the so-called economic mechanism. By early 1965, Liberman was appearing on the cover of Time magazine under the banner headline “The Communist Flirtation With Profits.” And finally, that fall, Kosygin issued his famous government report, in which, following a sustained debate among economists, he formally proposed giving enterprises limited independence, greater freedom to dispose of their revenues, and even the freedom to expand their range of products in response to demand. This marked a revolution in Soviet consciousness: goods not only had to be produced according to Soviet planning but also, preferably, sold. Still, it was just an experiment; among skeptics, the Kosygin reforms came to be known, with some irony, as “libermanization.” Soviet-era tanks practicing for a military parade, Moscow, May 2024 Soviet-era tanks practicing for a military parade, Moscow, May 2024 Maxim Shemetov / Reuters In fact, the reforms coincided with a transformation of the economics profession itself. At the time, economists were embracing mathematical methods to turn Soviet economics from a mere pillar of orthodox Marxism-Leninism into a modern science. Paramount was the theory of optimal functioning—the idea that a workable model of socialism could be based on a comprehensive set of calculations for a perfectly balanced economy, in which all industries and needs of citizens are taken into account. One of the centers of the new thinking was the Central Economic and Mathematical Institute, where a new generation of mathematical economists searched for a magic formula of universal optimization, which they hoped to design with the help of computer technology. The sheer scale of the work was daunting. How could Soviet economists link and balance the thousands of planning tasks and more than 10,000 material balances that had to be written for every Soviet good, from rolled ferrous metal to dairy products? After all, there was not even a single bureaucracy to handle all this, with the former under the State Planning Committee, or Gosplan, and the latter under the State Supply Committee. In the late Soviet era, Gosplan itself had 70 subdivisions and about 3,200 employees. The annual plan itself took up dozens of volumes and was calculated in Gosplan’s Main Computing Center, where an enormous computer bought from the United Kingdom occupied two floors; underneath the machine rooms there was artesian water, because the machines needed cooling. Yet little of this prodigious effort did much to save the Soviet economy. It is true that the Soviet economy picked up during the second half of the 1960s and official growth figures were very high. This was due to reforms, although it seems likely that the growth was provoked by inflationary pressures: a minimum of freedom pushed enterprises to increase their assortment and, accordingly, slightly increase prices. The deeper reality was that the Kosygin reforms were doomed to failure in the absence of a market and private property. Without an open economy, no amount of planners’ computations could keep supply and demand in line. THE POLITBURO PETROCRACY By the end of the 1960s, the Soviet economy faced another problem: labor shortages. Among other factors, rural villages, which had long supplied the workforce, had been exhausted. Surprisingly, Putin faces a similar problem today in his own war-fueled statist economics, but in his case it is more the result of long-term demographic decline and partly exodus of qualified personnel abroad, as well as the massive replenishment needs of the armed forces. In December 1969, Brezhnev spoke bluntly about the labor crisis and other economic problems to the Plenum of the Central Committee. The speech was so red hot that it was classified. Perhaps he was trying to show that his rival Kosygin’s reforms had achieved nothing. But Brezhnev’s criticisms—from inefficient spending to the failure to implement new technologies—were accurate. And he seemed to apologize for Moscow’s engagement in costly geopolitical adventures, with reasoning that uncannily anticipates Putin’s logic today. “If we had not helped repel the machinations of imperialism in Southeast Asia and the Middle East,” Brezhnev said, “it would have inspired the Americans and their allies to launch new aggressive actions somewhere closer to our borders . . . . If we had not thwarted the counterrevolutionary plans in Czechoslovakia, NATO troops would soon have been right on our western borders.” As with other failed Russian and Soviet reforms, the decline of the Kosygin efforts coincided with a political freeze. This one began in August 1968, with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The economic changes were put on hold, and not only because of flagging interest from the top. Around this time, petrodollars were pouring into the Soviet economy, as the oil fields discovered in the 1960s came on line; and oil prices rose after the oil crisis of 1973. At this point, there was apparently no longer any need for reforms at all. As with the case of Putin’s Russia, the superpower was hooked on oil and gas, which it used to fund food and industrial imports. The will to change was devalued. But as the Soviets soon discovered, such an approach can only be sustained for so long. Today’s Kremlin would do well to note that the Soviet petrocracy was exhausted within a decade. By 1979, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Moscow’s nuclear arms race with Washington, the Soviet economy was accumulating deficits in almost every possible sector. It was these factors that would later lead to hyperinflation, when, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a new generation of reformers ended price controls. At this point, Russia’s economic reformers could repeat the famous line from a popular Soviet movie from the 1960s: “Everything has already been stolen before us.” WHO’S AFRAID OF UNEMPLOYMENT? Today, the 1990s are generally remembered as the years of large-scale economic liberalization in Russia—and are often seen as the era against which Putin is now reacting. In fact, there had already been attempts at economic reforms in the 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev, who began to give the Soviet people not only some political freedoms but also some economic ones, as well. But Gorbachev’s economic reforms were slow, and then they stopped altogether. On the one hand, Gorbachev sought to gradually widen the space for economic initiative: for the first time, the government authorized joint ventures with foreigners, as well as allowing some forms of small private enterprise and the creation of semi-private companies in service sectors. Yet the machine-building industry continued to be pumped with state money in the usual way. And when the economist Nikolai Shmelev had the temerity to publicly suggest that the government should allow for unemployment under socialism, Gorbachev was furious. Gorbachev did not dare redesign the Soviet economy. Still, it had become clear that a more dramatic approach to economic reform was needed. Since the early years of the decade, groups of young economists had been holding underground, and then official, seminars in Leningrad and Moscow. In Leningrad, their leader was Anatoly Chubais, a young economist who organized informal and formal scientific workshops in the city, gathering a group of like-minded people; in Moscow, it was Yegor Gaidar, who, as the most gifted of the young cohort, was already involved in preparing analytical and program documents for the party and the government. These two groups formed a more or less cohesive team, and they quickly understood that radical and very far-reaching economic reforms would be required; they also considered different ways of privatizing property, without which they knew that no real transformation of the socialist economy was possible. The remaining years of perestroika were filled with heated economic discussions and competition among different reform factions. In June 1987 the Central Committee even convened a plenum on the economy that included many progressive Soviet economists from the old school. In particular, the academic economist Alexander Anchishkin was chosen to head the new Institute of Economics and Forecasting of Scientific and Technological Progress, which drew a cohort of other promising young economists, including Gaidar. Among its very young staff was also Andrei Belousov, Putin’s future defense minister. Yet Gorbachev failed to embrace bolder steps. Although his role in the large-scale transformation of the Soviet Union was enormous, he did not dare redesign the Soviet economy, and it began to experience an ever more serious crisis: stagnation combined with a gigantic foreign debt, hidden inflation that was gradually breaking through, a colossal budget deficit, and, at the same time, an acute shortage of goods and products. The political collapse of the Soviet Union, which gained unstoppable momentum after the attempted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, was the natural corollary of this breakdown. LESS MATH, MORE MILK As Gorbachev’s adversary, Boris Yeltsin understood that the Soviet Union was collapsing and that he could only establish a hold on power in an independent Russia—and not just politically. He also realized that Russia would need to carry out radical economic reforms that could not be coordinated with the former Soviet republics, many of which were unprepared for a market economy. It was then, in the fall of 1991, that he called in Gaidar’s young reformers to author the reform program. He also offered the young economists—nicknamed the Chicago Boys because of their liberal convictions—key positions in the financial and economic bloc of his government: Gaidar became Yeltsin’s key economic adviser and then served as acting prime minister; Chubais became minister of privatization and then first deputy prime minister responsible for financial stabilization. Moreover, while the reforms were being implemented, the position of Russian president and prime minister were effectively combined, giving the reformers the political backing they needed. (The reforms met with fierce opposition from the parliament, and Yeltsin’s support was crucial in giving them political cover.) Presidential adviser Yegor Gaidar and First Vice Premier Anatoly Chubais in Moscow, November 1994 Economist and presidential adviser Yegor Gaidar and First Vice Premier Anatoly Chubais in Moscow, November 1994 Gennady Galperin / Reuters Thus began the controversial economic restructuring of the 1990s. Gaidar liberalized prices as well as domestic and foreign trade, and the government began to privatize state property. Although these forced reforms were considered shock therapy in the West, Gaidar himself referred to them as “defibrillation measures,” because he believed that without them there would simply be famine, and stores would have nothing to sell. Thanks to the liberalization program, the shelves were full and market forces began to work. Very quickly, however, the reformers were blamed for galloping inflation, production stoppages of goods that lacked sufficient demand, the rapid decline of military and agricultural spending, the closure of numerous military-industrial factories, and the lack of money for social support. A fierce political struggle erupted, and Gaidar’s government—as it was called at the time, although formally Gaidar was vice prime minister and minister of economy and finance, and then acting chair of the Cabinet of Ministers—lasted only until the end of 1992. But no matter how fiercely they were criticized, Russia’s radical economists had accomplished one enormous thing: establishing a market economy. And in this they had significant success. Consider the simple challenge of stocking store shelves. In the early 1970s, the Central Economic and Mathematical Institute estimated that a computer performing a million operations per second would require 30,000 years to manage the gigantic demands of the planned economy for every single kind of product. Yet after Gaidar liberalized price controls in January 1992, the same result could be achieved with almost no planning at all: consumer demand was enough to keep the stores full. The founder of Soviet cybernetics, Viktor Glushkov, had once proposed attaching sensors to each cow’s udder to calculate the optimal volume of milk production; now the optimal volume was being determined without any sensors, simply thanks to the invisible hand of the market. LIBERAL GHOSTS In contrast to the first generation of Soviet economic reformers, who were mostly born in the 1930s, the new generation that came of age in the Yeltsin years had been born in the 1950s. They had been educated during the worst years of Soviet stagnation, gaining an appetite for underground self-education and for studying the reforms of socialist economies in Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. The Hungarian economist Janos Kornai, who wrote openly about the nature of the deficit economy, was a particularly important figure to many of this generation. Overcoming socialist illusions allowed this cohort to carry out initial economic reforms and then to gain a significant foothold in the government administration. This meant that they could continue to oversee structural reforms or, for those, like Gaidar himself, who withdrew to the academy, contribute to the realization of reforms by consulting and drafting proposals. To have a lasting impact on the political system, however, it was crucial for the economic liberals to have their ideas institutionalized. Notably, Yevgeny Yasin, who was one of the few members of the older generation who accepted Gaidar’s reforms, was a mentor to many young economists at Moscow State University, including Nabiullina, the future central bank governor. Also important was the creation of a new economic institute in Moscow in 1992, which later became the Higher School of Economics, a fully fledged university. This nest of liberalism soon attracted the best professors and researchers and became one of the most preeminent research institutions in Russia. Tellingly, that has also made it a target for regime crackdowns in recent years. After the replacement of the university leadership just before the war in 2021, the government oversaw a major purge of liberal professors on its faculty. Almost a quarter of Russia’s federal budget is secret. Yet even die-hard Putinists cannot completely eradicate liberalism from economic education and economic policy. Maxim Oreshkin, the president’s economic aide, may not be a liberal, but he is a technocrat and a fairly typical graduate of the Higher School of Economics. Present-day Russian conservatives and communists, who support Putinism in all its manifestations, grumble about the presence of “liberals” in the government’s financial and economic administration. But Putin is not suicidal: at the beginning of his rule, several liberal economists taught him the basics of macroeconomics and budget and monetary policy, led by Chubais and Alexei Kudrin, who was finance minister during Putin’s first decade in power. Putin, of course, moved away from liberalism, and almost all the reformers found themselves on the periphery. At best, it is possible to describe those who remain as rational technocrats. An autocrat who carries out illiberal counterreforms and demodernization does not need liberal modernizers. As an economist, Belousov’s approach is diametrically opposite that of the liberals. His father was a prominent figure of the Soviet mathematical school of economics, and he is, to oversimplify a bit, an adherent of it. When you spend public money in the right way, you get results. That’s what his economic philosophy is all about. Technological changes are also important. It is no coincidence that Belousov has been working a lot on new technologies in recent years; but technological innovation does not happen only in the public sector, and certainly not in an economy that has become increasingly isolated from the world. The deeper reality is that Putin’s new military-economic model seems likely to make it significantly more difficult to avoid making the country more brittle. OMELETS INTO EGGS Employees of the Soviet Gosplan were firmly aware that the socialist system depended on the principle of overestimating the required amount of capital investment and rejecting technical innovations. They understood that the more money there is, the more it is wasted in the state economy in the absence of private interest and initiative. This paradoxical Gosplan wisdom seems to have been completely forgotten by today’s generation of Russian economists, who are building a new model of mature Putinomics, based on an almost religious belief in the effectiveness of government spending and the special role of the military economy. Putin now has set an ambitious task: according to his words, economists must find a balance between guns and butter. There is no money left at all for butter in the state budget, but that can be handled by the market sector, which is still in place in Putin’s Russia thanks to the impetus given more than three decades ago by Gaidar’s reforms. Government spending on guns in Putin’s Russia has nearly reached the scale of that of the late Soviet era: formally, as a share of GDP, it is slightly less, but when the bosses announce the figures, they keep silent about the fact that almost a quarter of the federal budget is secret. There is no mystery to this secrecy—the money is spent on what is shamefully called “defense and security” and on financial support for those lobbyists who successfully extract huge financial subsidies from the state. Belousov, who has a rigidly dirigiste and statist view of how the economy should develop, has been entrusted with the duty of bringing this type of model to full realization. Russian conscripts at a military recruitment center in Bataysk, Russia, May 2024 Russian conscripts at a military recruitment center in Bataysk, Russia, May 2024 Sergey Pivovarov / Reuters For those who support this approach, the belief in state intervention does indeed border on a special religion—or at least an ideology. The conviction that correctly calculated government spending on the products of the military-industrial complex can succeed in sustaining, and even growing the increasingly isolated Russian economy is anomalous in modern economic thought. It cannot be upheld without an appropriate political framework and strong ideological justifications. But the only framework that presupposes such an absurd scale of military spending is inevitably an autocracy; ideological support has been furnished by Putin’s concept of Russia’s special mission, its special path, its special cultural code, and the special role of its orthodoxy. And for all this, one must literally fight: war has become a permanent factor in Russian “development.” In the 1940s, the economic planner Nikolai Voznesensky, who managed the Soviet economy during World War II, became a favorite of Joseph Stalin. At the end of the conflict, he wrote an extremely popular monograph, The Military Economy of the USSR During the Patriotic War, before being purged by Stalin in 1949. Whether Belousov, Putin’s current favorite, is destined to write a similarly triumphant monograph on the military economy of the Russian Federation during the “special operation” is an open question. Success is not guaranteed. And sooner or later, Russian economists will have to return the Russian economy from the military interventionism model to some form of normality—or, as the reformers joked in the early 1990s, to “make an egg out of an omelet.” In the late twentieth century, Moscow’s militarization of the economy and belief in the magical power of massive state investment helped precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thus far, Putin has avoided the same kind of fate for today’s Russia by maintaining the remnants of an open market and keeping his financial agencies in technocratic hands. But now that old-school economists are leading the military parades, it is unclear how long this economic rationalism can continue to survive. ANDREI KOLESNIKOV is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. MORE BY ANDREI KOLESNIKOV More: Russia Economics Economic Development Politics & Society Ideology Security War & Military Strategy Vladimir Putin The Dangerous Push for Israeli-Saudi Normalization Without a Real Path to a Palestinian State, a Deal Will Destabilize the Middle East By Maria Fantappie and Vali Nasr July 11, 2024 U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Al Ula, Saudi Arabia, January 2024 During his first three years in office, U.S. President Joe Biden based his Middle East strategy on a single, straightforward project: normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such a deal, Washington thought, would stabilize the tumultuous region and constrain an increasingly emboldened Iran. The United States would then be free to shift its resources away from the Middle East and toward Asia and Europe. The Arab world might even become part of an ambitious Eurasian trade corridor connecting the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, an enterprise that could compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. By the fall of 2023, U.S. officials seemed close to brokering an agreement. Saudi Arabia indicated it was ready to normalize ties with Israel if, in exchange, Washington would strike a security pact with Riyadh. The United States was prepared to grant the Saudis their wish. Although the pact would theoretically deepen the United States’ regional commitments, American officials hoped that, thanks to a newly strong Israeli-Saudi relationship, Saudi Arabia would rarely need U.S. military assistance. Then came Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. The assault, which killed roughly 1,200 people, shattered the notion that the Middle East’s actors could simply ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When Israel responded by launching a devastating invasion of Gaza—one that, so far, has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians—it enraged the Arab world’s citizens and cast Iran and its regional allies as frontline defenders of the Palestinian cause. Arab rulers were forced to change course. Saudi Arabia pulled back from the normalization agreement, insisting that Israel first accept Palestinian self-determination. Its neighbors also distanced themselves from Israel. American officials are aware that the facts on the ground have shifted. But they are still clinging on to their pre–October 7 vision. Despite the mass demonstrations, they are shuttling back and forth to Riyadh to peddle a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In fact, U.S. officials seem to think that an agreement is timelier than ever. American policymakers have suggested that Riyadh should normalize ties with Israel if the latter agrees to a cease-fire in Gaza. To Washington, Israeli-Saudi normalization remains the solution to the Middle East’s ills. But this view is, increasingly, a fallacy. Saudi Arabia will not establish relations with Israel in exchange for an end to the war. At this point, Riyadh will establish relations with Israel only if the Jewish state takes clear and irrevocable measures to create a Palestinian one. And Israeli officials have shown absolutely no interest in doing this. If the United States still wants an Israeli-Saudi deal, it will have to lean hard on the Israelis to change their position. It needs to secure not only a cease-fire but also a positive, long-term plan for Gaza’s future that ends in Palestinian statehood. It needs, in other words, to show Arab leaders that working more closely with Israel will not further inflame the region with conflicts that undermine their own credibility while strengthening Tehran and its partners. Otherwise, the United States is wasting its time by pushing for normalization—and jeopardizing the security of besieged Arab governments. WON’T BACK DOWN Since the war in Gaza began, the United States has had a decidedly mixed diplomatic record in the Middle East. On the one hand, Washington pulled Iran and Israel back from the brink of direct confrontation, after the two exchanged missile fire in April. It is now scrambling to prevent Israel and Hezbollah from entering into all-out conflict. But when it comes to the heart of the matter—the fighting in Gaza itself—American diplomacy has achieved very little. Washington has failed to influence the conduct of the war, to secure a cease-fire, or to obtain any commitments from Israel about the future of Gaza or a Palestinian state. These failures jeopardize Washington’s successes in other domains. So long as the fighting continues, for instance, Israel’s standoff with Hezbollah will intensify. Shelling between the two has displaced tens of thousands of Israelis since the onset of the war in Gaza, and so Israel now views securing its northern border as part and parcel of its campaign to destroy Hamas. Such an escalation could invite Iran and its regional actors to intervene to assist their Lebanese partner. It is not hard to see why the United States has failed to stop the bloodshed. U.S. officials have been pressuring Arab states, particularly Egypt and Qatar, to secure Hamas’s acquiescence for a cease-fire deal. But it has barely exercised its considerable leverage over Israel. Instead of threatening to curtail or end offensive aid, Washington’s main approach has been to tell Israel that, should it stop fighting, it can have formal relations with Saudi Arabia. This is not a promise that the United States can deliver. The Saudis have refused to offer normalization in exchange for just a cease-fire, and it is unlikely that they will reconsider. Even if Riyadh were to accept such a deal, there is no guarantee that Israel would consent. The country has rebuffed every call, whether from Washington or the UN, to end the conflict. It has considered pulling back its forces only temporarily, in order to free Israeli and foreign hostages. Israel has proved so committed to the war that it has even jeopardized its ties to the Arab states with which it does have relations. Egypt and Jordan—which normalized ties with Israel in 1978 and 1994, respectively—have cooled diplomatic ties, put their military forces on alert, and warned that their peace treaties with Israel are at risk. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which both normalized ties in 2020, have reduced diplomatic contacts and business relations. Washington has barely exercised its considerable leverage over Israel. These moves have clear antecedents. Israel’s conduct has inflamed the Arab world and threatened its stability. Egypt has seen mass domestic protests in support of Palestinians, and the country’s leaders worry these demonstrations might turn against them. Cairo has, meanwhile, come under direct pressure from Israel, which violated the countries’ 1978 agreement by seizing Gaza’s Rafah border crossing. Israel did so without even giving Egyptian officials adequate notice. Other Arab governments that have relations with Israel, including Jordan and Morocco, have also witnessed large-scale street demonstrations. They fear that this popular outrage could eventually explode into an Arab Spring–type uprising or prompt a recrudescence of extremism and terrorism. Israel’s disregard for the interests of its Arab allies is explained, in part, by its all-out drive to destroy Hamas. But it also comes from a sense among Israeli officials that their country does not need regional peace treaties to be secure. Israel assumes that, if the need arises, Washington will control the behavior of Arab states. It also figures that these countries’ anger toward Israel is balanced by their fear of Iran. When Tehran lobbed missiles and drones at Israel in April, for example, Jordan and the Gulf countries cooperated with the United States to intercept nearly all of them. Israeli officials expect that, as escalation with Iran continues, the Gulf monarchies will have no choice but to close ranks with Israel and the United States, and that Abu Dhabi and Riyadh will terminate their own normalization deals with Tehran. But Israeli officials are mistaken. Although it is impossible to discern their exact motivations, Jordan and the Gulf states likely helped down Iranian drones and missiles not to protect Israel but to prevent the larger war that would surely have ensued if Israel had been seriously hit. Since normalizing ties with Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have become more secure. (Before those deals, Iranian-backed groups routinely struck both countries’ territories.) They have no interest in reneging on their agreements, especially because their people do not see Iran as the enemy right now. Instead, their nemesis is Israel. DEAL OR NO DEAL To overcome Arab governments’ qualms about working more closely with an unchanged Israel, the United States could try to make its partners an offer they can’t refuse. In exchange for increased Israeli-Saudi cooperation, for example, Washington might promise the Saudis not just a security pact but one in which Riyadh can maintain close ties to China. The United States could promise Amman that it will respond if Jordan is attacked by Iran, and that it will keep Palestinians from flooding across the Jordanian border. It could extend to Egypt additional economic support as well as guarantees that Israel will pull back from Rafah and desist from any actions that could push Palestinians into the Sinai Peninsula. But these promises would be financially and politically costly for the United States, which is already stretched thin. And they are still unlikely to have any effect. Arab governments would, no doubt, love more U.S. support. But there is nothing that Washington can directly provide that would protect them from the rage of their citizens. There is only one workable path to greater Arab-Israeli cooperation, and it entails ending the war in Gaza and setting up a sovereign Palestinian state. Washington must therefore stop focusing on how it can deliver normalized relations and start focusing on what will happen to Gaza in both the near and long term. In this, it has much work to do. The United States has not put forth a credible plan for the day after the conflict ends, risking anarchy and an endless humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip. In the absence of U.S. pressure, Gaza could even end up being indefinitely ruled by the Israel Defense Forces. The Israeli government might then direct the IDF to gradually push Gaza’s population into Egypt, opening the territory to Jewish settlers. Should that succeed, Israel could force Palestinians out of the West Bank, as well. It may not even need the military to do so. Instead, it could simply defund an already enfeebled Palestinian Authority, rendering it unable to deliver services, and then let violent settlers run rampant. Until these scenarios are firmly off the table, no Arab state will agree to normalize relations with Israel. There is only one workable path to greater Arab-Israeli cooperation. To save the Palestinians and promote Arab-Israeli ties, the United States must promote an alternative pathway for Gaza’s future. It can start by presenting a strategy for how Gaza can be reconstructed and how its security can be ensured. Such a plan must have buy-in from Arab states, which are essential to securing an intra-Palestinian consensus that can keep the strip safe. But only Washington can pressure Israel into ending the war and accepting such a proposal, and only Washington can mediate between Israeli and Arab leaders over a security arrangement for Gaza. Arab states might be hesitant to work with Israel at all, but U.S. leaders should remind them (and the Israelis) that no one benefits from continued turmoil, and that they have a shared interest in creating a sustainable postwar plan. The alternative, after all, is a forever war in Gaza and possibly the West Bank and Lebanon, which would destabilize the entire region. After there is a viable plan for reconstructing Gaza, the United States can begin to work on its bigger mission: creating a Palestinian state. It must get Israel to recognize the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, commit to creating a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and create a diplomatic track to realize it. This process would have to begin with a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, one in which Israel agrees to end its occupation of Gaza and let a unified Palestinian Authority govern over both Gaza and West Bank. Such commitments could be enough to win over the Saudis and other Arab governments and open the door to deeper connections. To be sure, this process will be extremely difficult. Israel is governed by hard-right politicians who have disavowed Palestinian statehood; the gulf between them and Arab governments is massive. But the United States must still make a serious effort to bring these parties together. Until there is a clear path to a Palestinian state, the Middle East will be caught in a continuous cycle of conflict. There will be no hope for regional stability. And there will be little chance that Israel and Saudi Arabia can normalize relations. MARIA FANTAPPIE is head of the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Africa Program at Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome. VALI NASR is Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is a co-author of How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare. MORE BY MARIA FANTAPPIE MORE BY VALI NASR More: Israel Saudi Arabia Diplomacy Geopolitics Security Defense & Military Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy U.S. Foreign Policy Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Israel-Hamas War Debt Is Dragging Down the Developing World How to End the Current Crisis—and Avoid the Next One By Mark Suzman July 11, 2024 Shopping in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, April 2024 Shopping in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, April 2024 Tiksa Negeri / Reuters The violent protests that began in Nairobi in June appeared to erupt suddenly, a direct response to the government’s proposal of a contentious finance bill the month before. But the economic crisis that motivated the legislation, which would have raised taxes in part to pay off the country’s debt, has been years in the making. Kenya’s debt burden has forced its leaders to face a series of impossible choices. Last year, they slashed the federal budget, including health spending, to provide funds for debt servicing; the government also delayed salary payments to civil servants. In February, despite these measures, Nairobi had to issue an international bond at an eye-watering ten percent interest rate, compared with roughly six percent on bonds it issued in 2021, to refinance its existing debts and meet development needs. Kenya is now spending 75 percent of its tax revenue on debt service. Under pressure from the protests, President William Ruto rejected the finance bill after it received parliamentary approval. But Kenya’s larger crisis remains. Like many countries in Africa and across the developing world, the economic gains Kenya made in the two decades preceding the COVID-19 pandemic are slipping away. In 38 percent of countries eligible for development assistance from the World Bank, per capita GDP is lower today than it was before the pandemic—a drop the bank has described as “a historic reversal in development.” The heart of the problem is debt financing. Debt is not necessarily bad; nearly every country takes on external debt to fuel its economy. In normal times, most countries can sustain the burden of servicing that debt. But four years of exogenous shocks, starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, have made the task impossible in many developing economies. Unlike their wealthy counterparts, they could not shore up their economies during the pandemic by tapping domestic resources or borrowing the necessary funds. State coffers rapidly drained, and fiscal challenges piled on. When the Federal Reserve raised interest rates on U.S. Treasury securities in March 2022, low-income countries’ currencies declined in value and their governments lost access to capital markets. In sub-Saharan Africa, 19 countries are unable to make debt payments or are at high risk of reaching that point. As governments divert more and more resources toward servicing an unmanageable debt burden, they have fewer funds available for investments that can save and improve lives. The total value of interest payments made by the world’s 75 poorest countries, more than half of which are in Africa, has quadrupled over the past decade. In 2024, these countries will have to spend more than $185 billion, which amounts to roughly 7.5 percent of their combined GDP, to service their debts. According to the World Bank, that’s more than what they spend annually on health, education, and infrastructure together. Although low-income countries, especially in Africa, have suffered most from this shift, it is a global crisis. Stalled growth has reduced countries’ capacity to contain infectious diseases and the damaging effects of climate change. Stagnation has stoked political instability and forced people to migrate. It translates to smaller markets for global goods and services. And economic pressure throttles innovation that could benefit not only low-income countries but also the rest of the world. To help low-income countries out of the debt crisis and to restore global growth, wealthy governments should increase their funding for the World Bank’s affordable financing programs and build on earlier debt-relief efforts, such as those coordinated by the G-20, aimed at the poorest countries. Together, world leaders have the power to write a new story—one that ends in a positive cycle of development, not in a decade of lost opportunity for the 1.5 billion people who call Africa home. THE DEBT DILEMMA To better understand the bind that many governments are in, consider Ethiopia. In the 1980s, it was one of the world’s poorest countries and experienced a devastating famine. Yet it went on to become one of the biggest success stories in global health and development. Foreign and domestic investments in health and agricultural systems significantly reduced child malnutrition. Between 2000 and 2019, deaths from infectious diseases halved, the mortality rate for children under five years old fell by two thirds, and the maternal mortality rate fell by three quarters. Access to sanitation and clean water improved dramatically. From 2004 to 2019, Ethiopia’s per capita GDP rose by nearly 200 percent, and its economy grew roughly ten percent per year. But over the past few years, much of this progress has been lost. The country endured overlapping crises, including the outbreaks of COVID-19 and other diseases; a devastating civil war in Tigray, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed; and natural disasters, including a drought, floods, and billions of locusts. With tax revenue faltering and international aid for basic health and development dropping to the lowest point in nearly a decade, the Ethiopian government hasn’t had the money to both respond to these shocks and serve the needs of its more than 120 million people. Debt service has become the single largest item in the government’s budget, while investments in critical human development sectors have stagnated. The government spent $8 per capita on health in the fiscal year ending in July 2021 compared with $26 on debt service. Plans to transform the country’s health system have stalled: only half of Ethiopia’s health centers and hospitals have reliable sources of electricity and water, and construction of new facilities has slowed dramatically. Without adequate funding and consistent pay, health workers are leaving the profession. And the government, facing a $58 million shortfall in its maternal health budget, cut the types of free life-saving supplies it provides to each health center from 60 to 11. Pregnant women can no longer expect to give birth in a facility equipped with anesthetic drugs, suturing materials, or even surgical gloves. Every Ethiopian birr or Kenyan shilling spent servicing expensive debt is money that is not available to build and staff health clinics, train teachers and equip schools, and improve agricultural productivity as the region adapts to harsher weather. A vicious cycle has developed. Investments in health care and development are impossible without financial resources, but the progress that leads to economic growth—which in turn generates those resources—is impossible without improvements in health outcomes and poverty reduction. THE BANK OF LAST RESORT The Gates Foundation has long advocated for reforms to the global financial system to allow cheaper financing for the countries that need it most. During the pandemic, international institutions took a few promising steps in this direction. In 2020, the G-20 launched the Common Framework, an initiative intended to help creditors collaborate on debt restructuring for borrowing countries. And in 2021, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) unlocked the equivalent of around $650 billion in special drawing rights—a type of reserve asset that recipients can exchange for currency when needed. But these moves have proved insufficient. The IMF’s allocation provided critical temporary relief, but because of the IMF’s shareholding structure, the lion’s share of the assets it disbursed went to countries that didn’t need the assistance, such as the United States and Japan, whereas African countries received only five percent of the total. The G-20 followed the IMF allocation with its own commitment to redirect $100 billion worth of special drawing rights, but implementation has been slow, and in practice, only a tiny fraction of those resources has been accessible to the low-income countries that need them the most. In sub-Saharan Africa, 19 countries are unable to make debt payments or are at high risk of reaching that point. At the same time, countries entering the Common Framework experienced delays in debt restructuring as creditors struggled to agree on which loans to include and how to divide the costs. To date, four countries—Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia—have applied for debt treatment under the G-20’s framework. Chad was the only one to complete the process until last month, when Zambia finally managed to restructure its debts, four years after its initial application. Ghana and its creditors also finalized a deal in June that should provide some relief, but it will take time for the country’s economy to rebound. Both the IMF’s and the G-20’s efforts were well intentioned, but their limited effectiveness calls to mind global leaders’ failed commitment to equitably deliver vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic—another in a long list of unfulfilled promises to low-income countries. Financial decision-makers have opportunities to do better at the upcoming meetings of the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, and the G-20. Any solutions they consider should prioritize making low-cost capital available to those countries that cannot access money in any other way. One of the best steps would be to generously fund the World Bank’s International Development Association. IDA is the single largest source of concessional finance—below-market-rate loans, grants, and other types of funding that support development projects. It is effectively the bank of last resort for the 75 poorest countries on the planet, offering affordable financing even when these countries do not have access to global markets and when other development assistance stagnates. With adequate funding, the World Bank has a proven track record in this kind of finance. In its six decades of operation, IDA has helped countries improve their health and education systems, create jobs, build infrastructure, and recover from disasters. By 2022, 36 countries that once relied on IDA funding—including Angola, India, and South Korea—had strengthened their economies enough to no longer need the bank’s assistance. Twenty of them now rank in the top half of all countries in measures of GDP per capita, and 19 now contribute to IDA themselves. Every Ethiopian birr or Kenyan shilling spent servicing debt is money that is not available to build clinics or train teachers. Donor countries, led by the United States (the single largest contributor), Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and China, pledged $23.5 billion to IDA’s most recent replenishment in 2021. Because of IDA’s triple-A credit rating, the bank was able to leverage that commitment on private markets and turn it into $93 billion that it can distribute to low-income countries. But this is still not enough to pull recipient countries out of crisis. Government contributions replenish IDA funds every three years, and ahead of the next round, later this year, World Bank President Ajay Banga has called on donors to increase their contributions by as much as 25 percent. Political leaders have echoed that call. When more than two dozen African heads of state gathered at an IDA summit in Nairobi in April, they emphasized the need for a sizable replenishment of the bank’s funds. IDA “has been and must remain a dependable development partner for Africa,” Ruto said. “We urge stronger donor contributions … so that together we can drive transformational impact.” Asking for more money is difficult at a time when wealthy countries are facing their own fiscal constraints, but there is no better investment they can make to improve the lives of the world’s poorest people. The challenges in low-income countries are, by and large, the result not of indiscriminate borrowing but of climate-change-induced shocks, a pandemic, and far-off wars. In many cases, access to cheaper loans would be enough for these countries to restore growth, building toward a more prosperous and more stable world—an outcome that is in everyone’s interest. That outcome also depends on trust between governments and the public. As the protests in Nairobi have demonstrated, many Kenyans have lost faith in their country’s institutions—and they are not alone. Citizens across Africa are taking leaders to task for wasteful spending and corruption. These governments need to be able to borrow, but they also must show they are accountable for the resources entrusted to them. A SYSTEMIC SOLUTION Even if donations to IDA increase, however, the countries that receive funds from the bank will continue to struggle without large-scale debt relief. The first step to make that relief possible is to reform the G-20’s Common Framework. Lenders have so far failed to agree on how to share the costs of debt relief, and it is time for them to recognize that procedures designed for the world of 20 years ago—the last time they dealt with debt crises in many countries at once—need to be refreshed. Some potential fixes are already on the table. A group of African finance ministers, for example, has proposed a reform that would bring private-sector creditors into the debt-restructuring process at an earlier stage and crack down on vulture funds that profit from debt distress. International finance institutions also need to start thinking about debt crises differently. In a report published earlier this year by the Finance for Development Lab, a Paris-based think tank, the economists Ishac Diwan, Martin Kessler, and Vera Songwe suggested that at least some of these crises should be treated as problems of short-term liquidity, not of fundamental solvency. Low-income countries with young and expanding populations and opportunities for development have high potential for economic growth over the long term. Ethiopia is a great example. Despite the country’s challenges, its economic growth rate was still around six percent in 2023. Its leaders had the vision and skills to build up the country for 20 years; with the right policies and improved liquidity, they can surely do so again. This change in mindset can lead to more tailored solutions. The Finance for Development Lab’s report goes on to recommend a “bridging program,” for instance, whereby countries facing liquidity challenges would commit to investing in a program of sustainable and inclusive growth in exchange for additional financing from multilateral development banks, including IDA, that would provide a bridge to financial stability. The specifics would need to be worked out in each case, but the collective approach in this proposal shows promise. The challenges in low-income countries are not the result of indiscriminate borrowing. The leaders of developing countries are not looking for free money, and they recognize that debt financing is not a one-way street. The presidents of Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia underscored this point in a March 2024 essay for The Economist. “Africa must look within for solutions,” they wrote. “We must invest our borrowing in the continent’s growth, job creation and revenue generation rather than in consumption that will not pay us back in the long run; make sure development projects are high-quality, priced correctly and finished on time; and start looking to each other as major trading partners rather than overseas.” Before any of that can happen, however, developing countries must have access to more affordable financing. If the leaders of global financial institutions and wealthy countries fail to do their part, there is a very real possibility that dozens of countries will languish for a decade or more. But with the right reforms and investments, these countries can provide for their people and outgrow their debt, perhaps for good. By helping African countries emerge from this crisis, Western governments and international financial institutions could unlock much more funding for African innovation and development. They could free up resources to build long-term resilience in health and food systems. And they would allow governments to support more teachers and health-care providers, ensuring that the next generation of Africans—the fastest-growing population on the planet—can realize their full potential. These are smart investments that will yield economic, health, and security benefits not just for recipient countries but for the whole world. MARK SUZMAN is CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. MORE BY MARK SUZMAN More: Africa Economics Economic Development Finance International Institutions Politics & Society Coronavirus World Bank What the Lebanese People Really Think of Hezbollah And How Their Views Might Shape the Next Phase of Conflict in the Middle East By MaryClare Roche and Michael Robbins July 12, 2024 A rally in support of Hezbollah, Beirut, Lebanon April 2024 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently declared that as his country’s military operations in Gaza wind down, Israel will turn its attention to its foe to the north: the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah. The two parties have a long history of conflict rooted in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, its occupation of the southern portion of the country from 1985 to 2000, and a full-scale war the two sides fought in 2006. In recent years, Israel and Hezbollah have been carrying out low-scale cross-border attacks, but the frequency and scale of these increased following Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza. In recent weeks, concerns have grown that another major war between the two parties could break out. If it did, such a war would take place in a country that is already on the brink. Ever since experiencing a near-total collapse of Lebanon’s economy in 2019, ordinary Lebanese have faced immense challenges. The depth of their despair is clear from the results of a nationally representative survey that our organization, Arab Barometer, carried out between February and April 2024, which encompassed all areas of the country, including both urban and rural locations, and covered all the major sectarian communities. Historically, Lebanon was one of the Arab region’s more affluent and developed non-oil-producing countries. But conditions there have deteriorated considerably, especially in recent years, fueling intense frustration and anger among ordinary Lebanese of all sects. Around 80 percent of citizens say the availability and the affordability of food is currently a problem. Sixty-eight percent reported sometimes or often running out of food before they could afford to buy more in the last month. Among the seven predominantly Arab countries where we have conducted surveys since September 2023, Lebanese respondents reported by far the lowest satisfaction in the region with the provision of water, electricity, Internet access, and health care. Lebanese respondents were also the most likely to say they have experienced weekly electricity outages: 92 percent did so, which is 43 points above the next-worst performer, the Palestinian territories, which were surveyed just prior to October 7. The same was true of weekly water shortages, which 65 percent of Lebanese respondents reported—17 points above the next-worst performer (again, the Palestinian territories). There is also very little hope for the future. Only 13 percent of citizens think the situation will improve in the next two to three years. Among the Arab populations we surveyed, Lebanese respondents were the most likely to say that they are worse off than their parents (over 50 percent), and only 28 percent think their children will have a better quality of life than they do. Even before October 7, Lebanon was a deeply factious country. It experienced a horrendous civil war, fought largely along sectarian lines, from 1975 to 1990, which ended with a tenuous peace accord guaranteeing the main confessional groups specific political rights. For example, the president of Lebanon is designated to be Christian, the prime minister Sunni, and the speaker of parliament Shiite. But Hezbollah’s rise in the last three decades has fundamentally altered this balance of power. As the most heavily armed nonstate actor in the world, Hezbollah has been designated a terrorist organization by most Western countries. Within Lebanon, however, it operates as a legal political party and as a security force: the group effectively governs much of the country, particularly in the south and east. Hezbollah also provides basic services to those living in the areas it controls, which would normally be provided by the national government. In effect, the group operates as a state within a state. Neither the national government nor the Lebanese Armed Forces has the capacity to counter Hezbollah, meaning the group could effectively drag Lebanon into a war with Israel on its own. The Arab Barometer survey makes clear that, despite being a driving force in Lebanese politics and enjoying high levels of support among the country’s Shiite population, which is concentrated in the south and east, Hezbollah does not command widespread support across the country. And yet many Lebanese favor some of Hezbollah’s basic positions. Lebanese overwhelmingly support the rights of Palestinians and condemn Israel for its actions in Gaza. Tellingly, the findings make clear that support for Hezbollah’s role in regional affairs has risen among non-Shiite Lebanese, almost assuredly because of the group’s resistance to Israel in the wake of the war in Gaza. And if Israel invades Lebanon to attack Hezbollah, support for the organization would likely rise further. A MATTER OF TRUST The Arab Barometer survey reveals that, despite Hezbollah’s significant influence in Lebanon, relatively few Lebanese support it. Just 30 percent say they have quite a lot or a great deal of trust in Hezbollah, whereas 55 percent say they have no trust at all. Levels of trust vary widely by sect. Among the Shiite population, 85 percent say they have a great deal or quite a lot of trust in Hezbollah. By comparison, just nine percent of Sunnis and Druze, respectively, and six percent of Christians say the same. Since Arab Barometer last surveyed Lebanon in 2022, trust in Hezbollah has risen among Shiites by seven points but has remained unchanged among Christians, Sunnis, and Druze. There is also not broad support among Lebanese for Hezbollah’s role in regional politics. Only a third say that they agree or strongly agree that it is good for the Arab world that Hezbollah is involved in regional politics, whereas a plurality of 42 percent strongly disagree. Unsurprisingly, Lebanese Shiites are most likely to rate Hezbollah’s role in regional affairs as positive (78 percent), compared with only 13 percent of Sunnis, 12 percent of Christians, and 16 percent of Druze. Nevertheless, the perception that Hezbollah’s role in regional politics is positive has increased by nine points since 2022—and, notably, this increase in support is not coming from Shiites, whose views on this question have remained unchanged over the last two years. Instead, the heightened support comes from members of other sects, with a ten-point increase among Druze, an eight-point increase among Sunnis, and a seven-point increase among Christians. This increase likely points to sympathy for Hezbollah’s stance toward Israel rather than deep support for the group itself. Lebanese citizens of all sects are horrified by Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. From a list of seven terms ranging from “conflict” to “genocide,” the most common terms they use to describe the Israeli operations there are “genocide” (36 percent of respondents chose that term) and “massacre” (25 percent). Meanwhile, 78 percent of Lebanese say that Israel’s bombing of Gaza represents “a terrorist act” compared with only 11 percent who view Hezbollah’s attacks in Northern Israel as “terrorism.” Hezbollah’s primary patron is Iran, so it is unsurprising that Lebanese views of Iran mirror their attitudes toward Hezbollah’s role in regional politics. Thirty-six percent of Lebanese hold a very favorable or somewhat favorable view of Iran, with the sectarian divide once again visible: 80 percent of Shiites do so, compared with only 26 percent of Druze, 15 percent of Sunnis, and 15 percent of Christians. Despite this low overall level of support, such positive views toward Iran have increased by eight percentage points since 2022, and the increase was driven primarily by changing views among non-Shiites. Iran’s image improved the most among Druze (nine points), followed by Christians (five points) and Sunnis (four points). The shift toward Iran, particularly among non-Shiite sects in Lebanon, has been coupled with a collapse in support for the United States. In 2024, just 27 percent of Lebanese have a favorable view of the United States, down from 42 percent in 2022. Christians are the most positive toward America (49 percent), followed by Druze (32 percent), and Sunnis (25 percent). Among Shiites, the figure is extremely low: five percent. The change was most dramatic among the Druze population, where favorable views of the United States fell by 31 percentage points. Favorability fell by 13 points among Christians, 11 points among Sunnis, and eight points among Shiites. There is little question that Hezbollah’s standing is shaped by how Lebanese view the situation in Gaza. Despite the group’s gains, however, its policies and actions have not resulted in much cross-sectarian support. At the national level, only 12 percent of citizens feel closest to Hezbollah as a political party. Shiites are the only Lebanese sect in which more than one percent of members say that, among all the country’s parties, they feel closest to Hezbollah. And even among Shiites, only 39 percent say they feel closest to Hezbollah, roughly the same percentage (37 percent) who say they do not feel close to any political party. MY ENEMY’S ENEMY Given the importance of the war in Gaza, one result from the survey is somewhat surprising. Alone among Arab populations in the seven countries Arab Barometer has surveyed since September 2023, Lebanese say the Biden administration should prioritize economic development in the Middle East over the Palestinian issue. This is striking, since most Lebanese feel a tremendous amount of empathy for Palestinians and harbor deep skepticism of Washington; the finding underscores just how desperate circumstances in Lebanon have become. Indeed, Lebanese respondents were generally receptive to the idea of help from foreign actors; 62 percent supported the deal the Lebanese government made with the International Monetary Fund in 2022 to bail out the country, even though some of its terms might prove unpopular. Lebanese are turning to foreign actors because the ongoing political and financial crisis has destroyed citizens’ trust in their own government and faith in their religious leaders. Lebanese citizens express the lowest level of trust in political leaders and institutions of any country surveyed by Arab Barometer. Nine out of ten Lebanese respondents said they have not a lot or no trust in their government, the parliament, the president, or the prime minister. Ninety-four percent of Lebanese citizens say they are dissatisfied with the government’s performance. What is more, three out of four said they do not trust religious leaders; 65 percent say religious leaders are just as likely to be corrupt as nonreligious ones. Tellingly, the one public institution that is seen as having any significant credibility is the Lebanese Armed Forces, which enjoys the trust of 85 percent of respondents—far higher than the level for Hezbollah or any other actor. Members of all sects express similar levels of trust in the LAF. This may have something to do with the fact that the LAF includes members of all of Lebanon’s sects and is the largest employer in the country, providing a crucial safety net to service members and their families. As both Israel and Hezbollah contemplate the prospect of escalating their conflict, they should take into account the context in which a new war would take place: a period of intense precarity in Lebanon. Lebanese citizens in large part remain wary of Hezbollah (and Iran), but almost all have been horrified by Israel’s war in Gaza, and some have become increasingly approving of Hezbollah’s fight against Israel. That basic logic—my enemy’s enemy is my friend—would likely take firmer hold if Israel chose to launch a larger war against the group, and especially if Israeli forces invaded Lebanon. An Israeli military campaign in Lebanon would significantly magnify all the difficulties ordinary citizens already face, and many would come to see supporting Hezbollah as a pragmatic way to defend their homeland, making it harder for Israel to achieve its goals. At the same time, if Hezbollah were to be seen as the party that caused the war to expand to Lebanon, it could lose the limited support it has gained since October 7 from Lebanon’s non-Shiite population. Ordinary Lebanese do not want a war in their homeland. If one breaks out and they blame Hezbollah, its popularity may drop. Given the extremely negative views the Lebanese have of Israel’s actions in Gaza, it seems unlikely a decline in the limited support for Hezbollah would result in any positive change in views of Israel. That would leave many Lebanese opposed to both main actors in a war that would make their already difficult circumstances even harder to bear. MARYCLARE ROCHE is Director of Technology and Innovation at Arab Barometer. MICHAEL ROBBINS is Director and Co-Principal Investigator at Arab Barometer. MORE BY MARYCLARE ROCHE MORE BY MICHAEL ROBBINS More: Lebanon Geopolitics Politics & Society Public Opinion Security Defense & Military Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy Hezbollah Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Israel-Hamas War Most-Read Articles The Dangerous Push for Israeli-Saudi Normalization Without a Real Path to a Palestinian State, a Deal Will Destabilize the Middle East Maria Fantappie and Vali Nasr Avoiding War in the South China Sea How America Can Support the Philippines Without Fighting China Ryan Hass Putin’s New War Economy Why Soviet-Style Military Spending—and State Intervention—Won’t Save Russia Andrei Kolesnikov Debt Is Dragging Down the Developing World How to End the Current Crisis—and Avoid the Next One Mark Suzman Recommended Articles Lebanese watching an address by Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Beirut, April 2024 Israel’s Next Front? Iran, Hezbollah, and the Coming War in Lebanon Maha Yahya Posters of the former Hamas leader Ahmad Yassin, the former chief of the Iranian Quds Force Qassem Soleimani, Lebanon’s Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah; and the Houthi leader Mahdi al-Mashat in Sanaa, Yemen, January 2024 How the War in Gaza Revived the Axis of Resistance Iran and Its Allies Are Fighting With Missiles and Memes Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr Most-Read Articles The Dangerous Push for Israeli-Saudi Normalization Without a Real Path to a Palestinian State, a Deal Will Destabilize the Middle East Maria Fantappie and Vali Nasr Avoiding War in the South China Sea How America Can Support the Philippines Without Fighting China Ryan Hass Putin’s New War Economy Why Soviet-Style Military Spending—and State Intervention—Won’t Save Russia Andrei Kolesnikov Debt Is Dragging Down the Developing World How to End the Current Crisis—and Avoid the Next One Mark Suzman Recommended Articles At the International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington, D.C., May 2018 How to Revitalize the World Bank, the IMF, and the Development Finance System The Urgent Need to Update Institutions Built for a Different Era Mia Amor Mottley and Rajiv J. Shah A Tigrayan family uprooted by the recent civil war, eastern Tigray, Ethiopia, June 2023 Ethiopia Back on the Brink How Abiy’s Reckless Ambition—and Emirati Meddling—Are Fueling Chaos in the Horn Alex de Waal and Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe Fish Wars How to Prevent Conflict Over an Increasingly Scarce Resource By Sarah Glaser and Tim Gallaudet July 12, 2024 Buying fresh fish in Fass Boye, Senegal, March 2024 In 2012, British and French scallop fishers clashed in a series of violent encounters, dubbed the “great scallop war” in the press. The conflict did not escalate beyond rammed boats and thrown rocks, but it heightened tensions between the two governments, and when Brexit went into effect in 2020, a majority of French fishers were banned from operating in British territorial waters. This year, after the United Kingdom banned bottom trawling to protect fragile marine habitats, the French government protested vehemently and threatened to respond with punitive trade measures. Clashes are happening in other parts of the world, too. In 2022, when a U.S. Coast Guard cutter approached to inspect a Chinese squid vessel near Ecuador—following established legal protocols—the Chinese ship used aggressive maneuvers to avoid being boarded. In the meantime, dozens of other vessels fled without being inspected. In a world consumed with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East—and a potential conflict over Taiwan—these incidents may seem insignificant. But although they may fly under the radar, disputes over fisheries have the potential to turn into larger conflicts and to exacerbate existing ones, just as disputes over oil, water, and grain have done in the past. Fisheries are finite natural resources that provide sustenance to billions of people; seafood constitutes nearly one-fifth of global consumption of animal protein. Its products are among the world’s most highly traded food commodities. The fisheries sector employs hundreds of millions of people and fuels the economies of many developing countries and small island states. And the industry already faces growing pressure as overfishing, poor management, and climate change degrade fish stocks across the planet. Rising ocean temperatures alone are expected to push nearly one in four local fish populations to cross an international boundary in the coming decade, reshuffling access to this critical resource and incentivizing risky illegal fishing and labor abuse in the sector. It is not hard to imagine how, in this context, a fish-related fight could spiral. In fact, skirmishes are already happening with alarming frequency. Fights over fish are not new: during the Cold War, for instance, countries that were otherwise aligned clashed frequently over fisheries. In 1979, Canada seized U.S. fishing boats in a dispute about albacore tuna, and the Cod Wars of the 1970s saw Iceland and the United Kingdom clash over fishing rights in the North Atlantic. But the frequency of confrontation over fishery resources has increased 20-fold since 1970, and the rapid growth of fishing fleets able to travel to distant waters has further raised the risk of serious clashes. Still, it is possible to avoid escalating conflicts over access to this increasingly scarce resource. When they have sufficient data and resources, scientists know how to rebuild stocks and manage fisheries sustainably, and their ability to predict the effects of new environmental stressors on fish populations is rapidly improving. When it comes to funding this work and applying its findings to governance, most countries fall short. But with strong institutions, conservation programs, and better real-time information about what is happening in national waters, national and international fishery bodies can make fishing grounds zones of peace rather than sources of conflict. Now is the time to muster the political will to do just that—and to thereby prevent tragedy at sea. CONSIDER THE FISH U.S. policymakers and the American public are aware that fishing is a fraught industry. Recent reporting, including an October 2023 investigation in The New Yorker, has revealed widespread abuse of laborers aboard squid fishing vessels in the Pacific. Other reports have shown that the poor working conditions and other crimes that run rampant in the sector—from illegal fishing and piracy to the smuggling of wildlife, drugs, arms, and people—make the seas less secure by increasing the risk of armed robbery against fishers, militarizing conservation zones, and facilitating corruption. Since these issues have come to light, members of the U.S. Congress have held hearings, proposed changes to government procurement policies, and called on the Biden administration to strengthen existing regulations that prevent the import of seafood produced using forced labor and through illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, as well as applying sanctions against companies that use forced labor. Laudable as such measures may be, however, they do not address the economic and environmental factors that feed interstate conflict over fisheries. Narrow, country-specific policies are necessary but are not sufficient to address problems that are regional or global in scale. The United States, with its capable bureaucracy and ability to enforce maritime law, has a strong record of implementing measures to promote sustainable fishing. But many other countries lack the resources for effective fisheries management, and nearly 40 percent of global stocks are overfished as a result. Localized efforts have made progress in some cases, such as the cooperative management measures that eight Pacific Island nations have implemented under the Parties to the Nauru Agreement. But there is no global mechanism to settle disputes. The primary vehicle for multilateral governance of fisheries is the UN Fish Stocks Agreement, which established the legal tools and mechanisms now used by an overlapping set of regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs). But these bodies address only the issues that their founding members agreed to address, and not all fishery conflicts are under their purview. Conflict can occur when RFMO members do not comply with the organizations’ rules, when a fish stock is spread across more than one organization’s jurisdiction, or when rule-breaking fleets belong to a country that is not a member of the relevant RFMO. These regional organizations have settled disputes among their members. But existing governance mechanisms must be more flexible and proactive, taking steps to prevent the conflicts that could arise from climate-change-induced movement of fisheries. Nearly 40 percent of global stocks are overfished. In part, the problem is one of mindset. Governments have long treated fisheries either as tradable commodities, with a focus on maximizing yields, or as subjects for environmental conservation and resources to be maintained like a national park. Their potential to become sites of conflict—and the need to manage them in a way that preserves peace—has been overlooked by all but a handful of researchers. As a result, access to fisheries is often seen as a zero-sum game, while opportunities for diplomacy are overlooked. On some occasions, such as when Nigeria and São Tomé and Príncipe adopted a joint development agreement, in 2001, maritime negotiations led to additional cooperation on resource management. But these instances are rare. Where economic interests drive governments to maximize the yield of a single species, too, fishing practices are typically not designed to realize the full potential of fisheries to support human well-being. It is not just fisheries whose geopolitical value is underappreciated. More than 75 percent of the earth’s oceans remain unexplored, despite the role that these waters play in food supply, economic development, energy sustainability, public health, climate change, and security. When asked by researchers at the College of William and Mary to rank the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors listed number 14, “life below water,” as the least important. Ocean issues, including fisheries, protected areas, and marine science, have received less than one percent of global philanthropic funding since 2009, and government investments in ocean science have been declining for decades. Most government funds come in the form of conservation projects worked into development budgets—which themselves represent a minuscule fraction of what governments spend annually on defense. Even though the resources available for ocean- and fisheries-related work have been limited, they have been enough for researchers to demonstrate that governments need to pay more attention. The circumstances in which fisheries conflict is more likely to occur are well established: unequal or contested access to fishing grounds; the presence of foreign fishing vessels, whether they are fishing legally or illegally, in domestic waters; low government capacity to enforce maritime law; and real or perceived declines in sizes of fish stocks. Recent analysis by World Wildlife Fund highlights 20 potential conflict hotspots across the world. Some, such as the South China Sea, the Horn of Africa, and the Gulf of Guinea, come as no surprise, given the ongoing clashes between military vessels and fishing boats, and between foreign and domestic fishing boats, in those regions. Others, including the Arctic, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Melanesia, are likely to heat up if fish stocks migrate in expected directions in response to climate change. Armed with this knowledge, policymakers can turn their focus to conflict prevention. GOOD GOVERNANCE International momentum is building around expanding maritime regulations. Government and civil society delegations at COP28, the UN’s most recent climate summit, recognized the ocean’s critical contribution to climate mitigation and adaptation. Since 2016, when the UN’s Port State Measures Agreement entered into force, 78 signatories have agreed to fight illegal fishing with inspections and other security and compliance measures for vessels entering their ports. Last year, the UN also adopted the agreement on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (also known as the High Seas Treaty), a historic step for conservation efforts in international waters. The World Trade Organization, too, has begun to address government-sponsored fisheries subsidies. The first part of a multilateral agreement is in place, but more governments need to ratify it before it enters into force. Next, WTO negotiators need to expedite the final text of a second, more powerful agreement to end subsidies that that lead to overfishing. The challenge now is to build on progress toward ocean governance with policies that specifically mitigate the risk of conflict over fisheries. Governments should start by devoting more resources to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing; adopting practices that build resilience to climate change; and expanding the role of civil society and indigenous communities in fishery management. In the United States, there are already mechanisms in place and tools available to crack down on illegal fishing and boost maritime security, but the agencies involved need adequate funding. The U.S. Maritime SAFE Interagency Working Group on Illegal, Unregulated, and Unreported Fishing, established in 2020 under the Maritime Security and Fisheries Enforcement Act, was tasked with coordinating the U.S. government’s approach to ending illegal fishing. But the group still lacks sufficient resources to fulfill the objectives outlined in its ambitious five-year strategy. The U.S. government should make the security of fisheries an explicit part of the mandates of the agencies—including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, the State Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development—that protect U.S. and international waters and engage with foreign counterparts to strengthen fishery management. In a positive step, Representative Garret Graves, Republican from Louisiana, and Representative Jared Huffman, Democrat from California, successfully attached an amendment to the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act that adds illegal fishing to the portfolio of the Department of Defense’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency. But more can be done. Preventing fish wars in the eastern Pacific in particular is in the United States’ national security interest, and U.S. military services can help deter conflicts by conducting more joint exercises and training with regional partners in areas where illegal fishing takes place. Ocean health, human health, and peace and security can all hinge on fisheries. The United States should also help foreign governments monitor the movement and activities of ocean vessels, train and support judges and prosecutors to ensure existing maritime rules are enforced, and raise the penalties for illegal fishing. U.S. and foreign enforcement agencies should work together to disrupt other organized criminal activities, including the smuggling of arms, drugs, and wildlife by fishing vessels, to lower the overall risk of conflict at sea. Stronger global governance is necessary, too. The existing network of regional fishery management organizations is consensus-based and relies on members’ voluntary commitments. So far, these organizations have had varying success in reaching multilateral agreements on fish catch allocation and other fishery management measures that take the effects of climate change into account. But they do bring to the table a diverse set of actors, from government representatives of small-scale fisheries in coastal nations to those of the world’s distant-water fishing fleets, including policymakers from China and the EU. By scheduling supplemental meetings when a dispute emerges—keeping scientific or policy meetings free of such issues—these platforms can foster constructive dialogue to address potential conflicts before they escalate. Finally, small-scale and artisanal fisheries need data-driven, climate-responsive management. In many of these fisheries today, regulations apply to one species at a time, without accounting for environmental change or interactions with other species; scientists lack sufficient data to predict the potential effects of warming waters; or the fishers, managers, and policymakers cannot agree on new catch quotas. Ultimately, fishers need to reduce the number of fish they kill each year if fisheries are to remain viable sources of sustenance. There are many tools available to make this happen, and they can be adapted to suit each fishery. Regulators can allow fewer boats in the fishery; with sufficient funds or private sector investment, fishers can adopt practices that reduce spoilage and waste; governments can invest in scientific research to improve modeling of fishery ecosystems; and policymakers can eliminate harmful fuel subsidies and address labor abuse in the fishing sector, thus making the price of seafood reflect the true cost of catching fish. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but the good news is that there are many possible paths forward. Ocean health, human health, and peace and security can all hinge on fisheries, and it is time that policymakers value these assets for what they are worth. Fish stocks are an increasingly scarce and unpredictable resource, and the resulting disputes over fisheries could escalate and feed into regional or even global conflicts. The violence that ensues would not only take human lives. By disrupting a critical industry and releasing pollutants into the ocean, war at sea would also destroy habitats, degrade ecosystems, imperil food security, cost jobs, weaken economies, and set back climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. The total price of waging fish wars dwarfs the investment in natural resource protection and global governance that states would need to make to keep conflict from happening in the first place. The scientific and conservation communities have reached clear conclusions about how to manage this challenge. The onus is now on policymakers to take preventive action while they still have the chance. SARAH GLASER is Senior Director of Oceans Futures at World Wildlife Fund, U.S. TIM GALLAUDET is a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral, former Undersecretary of Commerce and Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a member of World Wildlife Fund’s Oceans Futures Advisory Board. 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Grieco, and Happymon Jacob July 8, 2024 Japanese soldiers participating in a joint military drill with U.S., British, and Australian armed forces in Funabashi, Japan, January 2023 Issei Kato / Reuters Writing in Foreign Affairs last week, NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, took aim at Beijing, condemning its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and declaring that NATO had entered a new era of “enduring competition with China.” This situation “shows that in today’s world, security is not a regional matter but a global one,” he wrote, adding, “Europe’s security affects Asia, and Asia’s security affects Europe.” This is not a new idea. Stoltenberg has long championed a greater role for NATO in countering China’s rise. “Everything is intertwined,” he said in June, referring to European and Asian security at a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “and therefore, we need to address these challenges together.” Stoltenberg’s statements echoed a crucial pillar of U.S. President Joe Biden’s vision for countering China and Russia, as laid out in his administration’s October 2022 National Security Strategy: “We place a premium on growing the connective tissue—on technology, trade and security—between our democratic allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.” NATO, with Washington’s backing, has made some progress toward this goal of strengthening cooperation with key partners in Asia. In 2022, for the first time in the alliance’s history, NATO officially identified China as a security challenge. The organization is now strengthening political dialogue and practical cooperation with its Indo-Pacific partners on a wide variety of issues including cyberdefense, new technologies, space, and maritime security. The alliance has also boosted its visibility in the region. In another landmark first for the organization, in 2022, NATO observers attended regional military exercises in the Indo-Pacific. Acting in their national capacities, NATO allies such as France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom increasingly participate in large-scale military drills with Asian partners and have dispatched naval vessels to high-profile waters including the South China Sea amid rising tensions between China and its neighbors. At the Shangri-La Dialogue security conference in Singapore in June a high-ranking Chinese general accused Washington of trying to build an “Asia-Pacific version of NATO.” Lest anyone miss it, the alliance’s 75th-anniversary summit, beginning on July 9, will offer a very public reminder of NATO’s focus on the region. For the third consecutive year, the leaders or representatives of four non-NATO states—Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea, known as the Indo-Pacific Four (IP4)­—will take to the NATO summit stage. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. That NATO and its Asian partners are deepening their cooperation is clear. What is less clear is that this cooperation is in either’s best strategic interests. China’s assertiveness presents complex challenges, and transatlantic and Indo-Pacific security are interconnected in important ways, particularly because of closer collaboration between Beijing and Moscow. NATO, however, is not the correct forum for fostering transregional cooperation to counter China. Pulling the alliance into Asia fuels Beijing’s narrative of a U.S.-led confrontation between global blocs and risks alienating Asian countries without ultimately helping to shore up regional security or deterrence. NATO can still contribute indirectly to Indo-Pacific security, however, by prioritizing the threat posed by Russia—and by building up European military capabilities that would allow the United States to pivot toward Asia. At the same time, the alliance should adopt a lower profile in Asia to avoid stoking Chinese paranoia and instead emphasize practical and discreet cooperation with the region. Instead of drawing NATO into Asia, policymakers should leverage the European Union’s considerable economic and diplomatic power to build transregional cooperation among Asian, European, and North American states, using a web of flexible and overlapping partnerships and issue-based coalitions. Only through such a network of close ties can the United States and its partners effectively counter threats that span the globe, but having NATO lead that effort would ultimately be counterproductive, leaving both Asia and Europe less, not more, secure. SQUARE PEG IN A ROUND HOLE NATO’s Indo-Pacific outreach may be a largely welcome development for its IP4 partners—particularly Japan, which has pursued close collaboration with the alliance in the face of mounting provocations from China as well as Russia. South Korea and New Zealand, however, have been more cautious in their engagement with the organization, given their extensive trade ties with China, as well as Seoul’s desire to secure Beijing’s cooperation on North Korea and Wellington’s long-standing tradition of foreign policy independence. Australia’s enthusiasm has varied over time, reflecting shifts in its domestic politics regarding support for a tough stance toward China. But NATO has a deeper problem: its engagement in Asia is out of sync with broader regional political dynamics, especially in South Asia and Southeast Asia, where many states fear it will destabilize the delicate balance that they strive to maintain in their relations with Washington and Beijing. Even though concerns about Chinese aggression and lack of respect for international norms in arenas such as the South China Sea are steadily growing, most Asian countries tend not to perceive Beijing as an existential threat and in turn are unwilling to pick a side in the U.S.-Chinese rivalry. Depending on the issue at hand, Asian countries may seek to work with China, the United States, neither, or both. Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto, for instance, stated in June that his country would “continue our strong cooperation with China” but “at the same time, we will work to expand and deepen our close partnership with the U.S. and the West.” NATO is not the correct forum for fostering transregional cooperation to counter China. Many regional leaders—and some European ones—have expressed concern that NATO’s deepening involvement could not only force them to pick sides but also divide Asia into rival blocs. President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., of the Philippines, for instance, has called on the region to reject a “Cold War mindset.” Policymakers throughout the Indo-Pacific are wary that NATO’s foray into Asia could constitute another step in Washington’s efforts to build a U.S.-led regional security bloc to counter China. These fears are fed by the legacy of European colonialism and Western intervention in the region and by uneasiness over NATO’s military approach. Kishore Mahbubani, formerly Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations, for example, has warned that the “biggest danger” of NATO’s Indo-Pacific shift is that the alliance “could end up exporting its disastrous militaristic culture” to East Asia. NATO is not a good fit for a region where states such as India and Indonesia have long traditions of not aligning with military alliances. And leaders in key capitals have pushed back on the idea of an “Asian NATO.” India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, for example, referred in 2021 to the use of that term as a “mind game” and asserted that India has never had a “NATO mentality.” The power to set the country’s own path, he declared, is “my national choice.” NATO has attempted to allay these fears, offering repeated assurances that it will neither move into the South China Sea nor admit Asian members. But skeptics and opponents of NATO in Asia remain unconvinced of the alliance’s intentions, especially as NATO now routinely invites top officials from IP4 countries to its summits and ministerial meetings. The alliance has also pushed for the opening of a liaison office in Japan. Nor has it helped the organization’s messaging when influential figures such as James Stavridis, NATO’s former supreme allied commander, have floated the idea of expanding the alliance to include Asian democracies. If NATO continues to insert itself into the Indo-Pacific, it is possible that some will see the alliance, rather than China, as a risk to regional security dynamics—alienating the very countries the United States and Europe need to balance Chinese power in the first place. WORST OF ALL WORLDS Supporters of engagement with Asia, both within the alliance and among NATO’s Asian partners, believe that these partnerships can enhance deterrence in the region. The organization is a military alliance, after all, so some observers imply that it could play some larger military role in Asia. At a minimum, the argument goes, the alliance could offer indirect support such as weapons, logistics, and intelligence sharing to Asian partners as well as to NATO member states choosing to intervene militarily under their national flags in a Taiwan Strait or South China Sea contingency. But it is unclear how this kind of deterrence would work in practice—and a more active NATO role in Indo-Pacific security could well backfire. Rather than bolstering regional security, the alliance’s growing engagement with Asia could fuel insecurity and instability. Indo-Pacific states can see firsthand how NATO’s recent tilt feeds China’s paranoia, and they worry about being caught in the crossfire should a conflict break out. Beijing regularly accuses Washington of using the alliance as a “handy tool” for unifying its European and Asian allies into an “Asia-Pacific NATO” designed to “encircle” and “contain” China. Such rhetoric could be dismissed as Chinese propaganda, but many states in the region fear that Beijing could lash out if it felt it were backed against a wall. This kind of security dilemma would become more likely with a larger NATO presence in the region—and the alliance’s half-hearted military engagement and its less-than-perfect security assurances would offer scant protection for its Indo-Pacific partners. Indeed, there are good reasons to doubt that NATO has the political will or military capabilities to make a meaningful contribution to Indo-Pacific security and deterrence. Many European allies would not be willing to support a NATO mission to check Chinese aggression in a far-off theater, either because they are busy dealing with Russia; because of their extensive economic ties with Beijing; or because Asia is, strictly speaking, not an existential interest for European countries. Pulling NATO into Asia fuels Beijing’s narrative of a U.S.-led confrontation between global blocs. The bulk of NATO’s enhanced cooperation consists of individually tailored partnerships with IP4 countries rather than “ironclad” security commitments, amounting more to cheap talk than credible signals of intent. As a result, Asian states are well aware that closing ranks politically with NATO in the absence of any security commitments could raise the risks of becoming a target. As the aftermath of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia—and its invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022—make clear, the alliance does not intervene directly to protect mere partners. NATO’s collective defense, via Article 5 of its founding treaty, applies only to full-fledged members, and is geographically limited via Article 6 to attacks occurring on their territory or their assets in “the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.” In a contingency affecting a regional partner—a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, for instance—NATO would have no obligation to intervene, and as a consensus-based organization, it would most likely remain on the sidelines. Even if every NATO member wanted to intervene in Asia, the alliance has little to no spare capacity for operations thousands of miles away. European defense budgets are on the rise, spurred by Russia’s war in Ukraine, but those funds will be used primarily to replenish weapons sent to Ukraine, and to close urgent shortfalls for collective defense against Russia. Moreover, the type of military assets that NATO countries in Europe require for deterrence and defense on the continent—such as heavy artillery, antitank weapons, and tactical drones—are quite different from the maritime and air capabilities needed to project power into the Indo-Pacific. NATO is simply not equipped to deal with Asian contingencies. NATO’s Asian proposition, in short, is the worst of all worlds: it feeds fears about the alliance’s intentions and infuriates Beijing without giving Asian partners the means to further deter China. Half-measures meant to counter China could end up sparking the very conflict the alliance is seeking to defuse. IT’S NOT NATO OR NOTHING Even if NATO avoids deeper involvement in Asia, however, greater European engagement in the region remains critical to countering China’s rising power and assertiveness. A reimagined European contribution to Asian security should proceed along several tracks. First, instead of trying to project military power into Asia, NATO’s European members should prioritize strengthening conventional deterrence and defense on their own territory, building up their own military capabilities to allow the United States to shift more resources to Asia. In keeping with this more indirect approach to Asian security, NATO should concurrently lower its public profile in the region, emphasizing tailored, discrete, and useful technical cooperation with the IP4 in areas such as intelligence threats, standardization of equipment, cybersecurity, and maritime security over high-profile military exercises and photo ops. Transregional cooperation should also leverage Europe’s advantages—its diplomatic clout and economic, financial, and technological resources—to counter Beijing. Europe, the United States, and like-minded Asian partners should work together to promote good governance, particularly at the United Nations, where Chinese nationals have served in many leadership positions in recent years and used those opportunities to advance Beijing’s promotion of authoritarian rules and norms. NATO members must engage in diplomatic cooperation with Asian allies, including to jointly elect candidates to top UN positions, to effectively push back against Beijing’s efforts. Europe should also leverage its position as an economic powerhouse to expand trade and foreign direct investment with Asian partners, providing an economic counterweight to China. The European Union should start by finalizing free trade agreements with India, Indonesia, and the Philippines and delivering on its promise to invest 10 billion euros in areas such as sustainable infrastructure and digital connectivity in Southeast Asia through the Global Gateway initiative over the next few years. Most Asian countries are looking for more than just military assistance; they want help in achieving fast-paced economic growth, technological advances, and regional stability. NATO is simply not equipped to deal with Asian contingencies. The European Union is far less politically controversial than NATO and much better equipped to address this broad array of concerns. Indo-Pacific policymakers should make the most of EU security and defense tools that have already proved their value in the context of the war in Ukraine and that offer an alternative path for building Asian-European cooperation in the absence of NATO. These instruments include the European Peace Facility, which coordinates the provision of military equipment to partners and EU training missions for partner countries; and the Critical Maritime Routes Indo-Pacific (CRIMARIO) project dedicated to enhancing maritime security and capacity building with Indo-Pacific partners. These EU programs offer an effective alternative to the kind of defense cooperation NATO boosters claim the alliance could provide. Moreover, cooperating through the European Union would also open opportunities to address a wide array of security-related issues that fall outside NATO’s remit, such as protecting critical infrastructure, regulating foreign investments, and building societal resilience against disinformation and hybrid threats. Whereas NATO’s hard military focus could provoke a regional backlash, the EU’s inclusive approach is likely to garner far more support in the Indo-Pacific. Finally, European states should work to integrate themselves more fully into the region’s security architecture. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the security challenge presented by Beijing; states in the Indo-Pacific are building different strategies to address their China problems. Europe should lean into the region’s mix of bilateral and multilateral arrangements, including more robust collaboration with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on issues including cybersecurity, sustainable clean energy, and supply chain resilience. It should also deepen and expand minilateral initiatives with the region, such as the trilateral initiative between France, India, and the United Arab Emirates focused on defense, technology, and climate innovation projects, or Germany and the United Kingdom’s joint efforts to address the threat Pacific Islands face from rising sea levels through the Blue Pacific Initiative. If the objective is to effectively counter China’s growing assertiveness in Asia, militarized Western platforms are not the best answer. Instead, Asian and European countries must come together to forge more nuanced and calibrated approaches that won’t stoke further conflict—or put the region in an impossible, and potentially ruinous, position. MATHIEU DROIN is a Visiting Fellow in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. KELLY A. GRIECO is a Senior Fellow at the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. HAPPYMON JACOB is Associate Professor of Diplomacy and Disarmament at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the founder of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research. MORE BY MATHIEU DROIN MORE BY KELLY A. GRIECO MORE BY HAPPYMON JACOB More: World Diplomacy Geopolitics European Union NATO United Nations Public Opinion Security Defense & Military Strategy & Conflict Xi Jinping Most-Read Articles A Broken Promise? What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion Mary Elise Sarotte How France Fell to the Far Right In the End, Le Pen Hardly Had to Moderate to Gain Power Cécile Alduy Can Starmer Save Britain? Why Labour’s Sweeping Victory May Not Reverse the Country’s Decline Fintan O’Toole What NATO Means to the World After 75 Years, the Alliance Remains Indispensable Jens Stoltenberg Recommended Articles A Finnish fighter plane near a NATO flag in Constanta, Romania, June 2024 NATO’s Missing Pillar The Alliance Needs a More Powerful Europe Mathieu Droin, Sean Monaghan, and Jim Townsend Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te attending a military academy graduation ceremony in Taipei, Taiwan, June 2024 The Looming Crisis in the Taiwan Strait How Washington Can Lower the Tension Between Taipei and Beijing Bonnie S. Glaser and Bonny Lin A Broken Promise? What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion By Mary Elise Sarotte September/October 2014 Published on August 11, 2014 No backsies: Gorbachev and Bush at the White House, June 1990. Ron Edmonds / AP Twenty-five years ago this November, an East German Politburo member bungled the announcement of what were meant to be limited changes to travel regulations, thereby inspiring crowds to storm the border dividing East and West Berlin. The result was the iconic moment marking the point of no return in the end of the Cold War: the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the months that followed, the United States, the Soviet Union, and West Germany engaged in fateful negotiations over the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the reunification of Germany. Although these talks eventually resulted in German reunification on October 3, 1990, they also gave rise to a later, bitter dispute between Russia and the West. What, exactly, had been agreed about the future of NATO? Had the United States formally promised the Soviet Union that the alliance would not expand eastward as part of the deal? Even more than two decades later, the dispute refuses to go away. Russian diplomats regularly assert that Washington made just such a promise in exchange for the Soviet troop withdrawal from East Germany -- and then betrayed that promise as NATO added 12 eastern European countries in three subsequent rounds of enlargement. Writing in this magazine earlier this year, the Russian foreign policy thinker Alexander Lukin accused successive U.S. presidents of “forgetting the promises made by Western leaders to Mikhail Gorbachev after the unification of Germany -- most notably that they would not expand NATO eastward.” Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive actions in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 were fueled in part by his ongoing resentment about what he sees as the West’s broken pact over NATO expansion. But U.S. policymakers and analysts insist that such a promise never existed. In a 2009 Washington Quarterly article, for example, the scholar Mark Kramer assured readers not only that Russian claims were a complete “myth” but also that “the issue never came up during the negotiations on German reunification.” Now that increasing numbers of formerly secret documents from 1989 and 1990 have made their way into the public domain, historians can shed new light on this controversy. The evidence demonstrates that contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington, the issue of NATO’s future in not only East Germany but also eastern Europe arose soon after the Berlin Wall opened, as early as February 1990. U.S. officials, working closely with West German leaders, hinted to Moscow during negotiations that month that the alliance might not expand, not even to the eastern half of a soon-to-be-reunited Germany. Documents also show that the United States, with the help of West Germany, soon pressured Gorbachev into allowing Germany to reunify, without making any kind of written promise about the alliance’s future plans. Put simply, there was never a formal deal, as Russia alleges -- but U.S. and West German officials briefly implied that such a deal might be on the table, and in return they received a “green light” to commence the process of German reunification. The dispute over this sequence of events has distorted relations between Washington and Moscow ever since. GETTING THE GREEN LIGHT Western leaders quickly realized that the fall of the Berlin Wall had brought seemingly long-settled issues of European security once again into play. By the beginning of 1990, the topic of NATO’s future role was coming up frequently during confidential conversations among U.S. President George H. W. Bush; James Baker, the U.S. secretary of state; Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor; Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister; and Douglas Hurd, the British foreign minister. According to documents from the West German foreign ministry, for example, Genscher told Hurd on February 6 that Gorbachev would want to rule out the prospect of NATO’s future expansion not only to East Germany but also to eastern Europe. Genscher suggested that the alliance should issue a public statement saying that “NATO does not intend to expand its territory to the East.” “Such a statement must refer not just to [East Germany], but rather be of a general nature,” he added. “For example, the Soviet Union needs the security of knowing that Hungary, if it has a change of government, will not become part of the Western Alliance.” Genscher urged that NATO discuss the matter immediately, and Hurd agreed. Three days later, in Moscow, Baker talked NATO with Gorbachev directly. During their meeting, Baker took handwritten notes of his own remarks, adding stars next to the key words: “End result: Unified Ger. anchored in a ´changed (polit.) NATO -- ´whose juris. would not move ´eastward!” Baker’s notes appear to be the only place such an assurance was written down on February 9, and they raise an interesting question. If Baker’s “end result” was that the jurisdiction of NATO’s collective-defense provision would not move eastward, did that mean it would not move into the territory of former East Germany after reunification? In answering that question, it is fortunate for posterity’s sake that Genscher and Kohl were just about to visit Moscow themselves. Baker left behind with the West German ambassador in Moscow a secret letter for Kohl that has been preserved in the German archives. In it, Baker explained that he had put the crucial statement to Gorbachev in the form of a question: “Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces,” he asked, presumably framing the option of an untethered Germany in a way that Gorbachev would find unattractive, “or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?” Baker’s phrasing of the second, more attractive option meant that NATO’s jurisdiction would not even extend to East Germany, since NATO’s “present position” in February 1990 remained exactly where it had been throughout the Cold War: with its eastern edge on the line still dividing the two Germanies. In other words, a united Germany would be, de facto, half in and half out of the alliance. According to Baker, Gorbachev responded, “Certainly any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.” In Baker’s view, Gorbachev’s reaction indicated that “NATO in its current zone might be acceptable.” After receiving their own report on what had happened in Moscow, however, staff members on the National Security Council back in Washington felt that such a solution would be unworkable as a practical matter. How could NATO’s jurisdiction apply to only half of a country? Such an outcome was neither desirable nor, they suspected, necessary. As a result, the National Security Council put together a letter to Kohl under Bush’s name. It arrived just before Kohl departed for his own trip to Moscow. Instead of implying that NATO would not move eastward, as Baker had done, this letter proposed a “special military status for what is now the territory of [East Germany].” Although the letter did not define exactly what the special status would entail, the implication was clear: all of Germany would be in the alliance, but to make it easier for Moscow to accept this development, some kind of face-saving regulations would apply to its eastern region (restrictions on the activities of certain kinds of NATO troops, as it turned out). Kohl thus found himself in a complicated position as he prepared to meet with Gorbachev on February 10, 1990. He had received two letters, one on either end of his flight from West Germany to the Soviet Union, the first from Bush and the second from Baker, and the two contained different wording on the same issue. Bush’s letter suggested that NATO’s border would begin moving eastward; Baker’s suggested that it would not. According to records from Kohl’s office, the chancellor chose to echo Baker, not Bush, since Baker’s softer line was more likely to produce the results that Kohl wanted: permission from Moscow to start reunifying Germany. Kohl thus assured Gorbachev that “naturally NATO could not expand its territory to the current territory of [East Germany].” In parallel talks, Genscher delivered the same message to his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, saying, “for us, it stands firm: NATO will not expand itself to the East.” As with Baker’s meeting with Gorbachev, no written agreement emerged. After hearing these repeated assurances, Gorbachev gave West Germany what Kohl later called “the green light” to begin creating an economic and monetary union between East and West Germany -- the first step of reunification. Kohl held a press conference immediately to lock in this gain. As he recalled in his memoirs, he was so overjoyed that he couldn’t sleep that night, and so instead went for a long, cold walk through Red Square. BRIBING THE SOVIETS OUT But Kohl’s phrasing would quickly become heresy among the key Western decision-makers. Once Baker got back to Washington, in mid-February 1990, he fell in line with the National Security Council’s view and adopted its position. From then on, members of Bush’s foreign policy team exercised strict message discipline, making no further remarks about NATO holding at the 1989 line. Kohl, too, brought his rhetoric in line with Bush’s, as both U.S. and West German transcripts from the two leaders’ February 24–25 summit at Camp David show. Bush made his feelings about compromising with Moscow clear to Kohl: “To hell with that!” he said. “We prevailed, they didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.” Kohl argued that he and Bush would have to find a way to placate Gorbachev, predicting, “It will come down in the end to a question of cash.” Bush pointedly noted that West Germany had “deep pockets.” A straightforward strategy thus arose: as Robert Gates, then U.S. deputy national security adviser, later explained it, the goal was to “bribe the Soviets out.” And West Germany would pay the bribe. In April, Bush spelled out this thinking in a confidential telegram to French President François Mitterrand. U.S. officials worried that the Kremlin might try to outmaneuver them by allying with the United Kingdom or France, both of which were also still occupying Berlin and, given their past encounters with a hostile Germany, potentially had reason to share the Soviets’ unease about reunification. So Bush emphasized his top priorities to Mitterrand: that a united Germany enjoy full membership in NATO, that allied forces remain in a united Germany even after Soviet troops withdraw, and that NATO continue to deploy both nuclear and conventional weapons in the region. He warned Mitterrand that no other organization could “replace NATO as the guarantor of Western security and stability.” He continued: “Indeed, it is difficult to visualize how a European collective security arrangement including Eastern Europe, and perhaps even the Soviet Union, would have the capability to deter threats to Western Europe.” Bush was making it clear to Mitterrand that the dominant security organization in a post–Cold War Europe had to remain NATO -- and not any kind of pan-European alliance. As it happened, the next month, Gorbachev proposed just such a pan-European arrangement, one in which a united Germany would join both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, thus creating one massive security institution. Gorbachev even raised the idea of having the Soviet Union join NATO. “You say that NATO is not directed against us, that it is simply a security structure that is adapting to new realities,” Gorbachev told Baker in May, according to Soviet records. “Therefore, we propose to join NATO.” Baker refused to consider such a notion, replying dismissively, “Pan-European security is a dream.” Throughout 1990, U.S. and West German diplomats successfully countered such proposals, partly by citing Germany’s right to determine its alliance partners itself. As they did so, it became clear that Bush and Kohl had guessed correctly: Gorbachev would, in fact, eventually bow to Western preferences, as long as he was compensated. Put bluntly, he needed the cash. In May 1990, Jack Matlock, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, reported that Gorbachev was starting to look “less like a man in control and more [like] an embattled leader.” The “signs of crisis,” he wrote in a cable from Moscow, “are legion: Sharply rising crime rates, proliferating anti-regime demonstrations, burgeoning separatist movements, deteriorating economic performance . . . and a slow, uncertain transfer of power from party to state and from the center to the periphery.” Moscow would have a hard time addressing these domestic problems without the help of foreign aid and credit, which meant that it might be willing to compromise. The question was whether West Germany could provide such assistance in a manner that would allow Gorbachev to avoid looking as though he was being bribed into accepting a reunified Germany in NATO with no meaningful restrictions on the alliance’s movement eastward. Kohl accomplished this difficult task in two bursts: first, in a bilateral meeting with Gorbachev in July 1990, and then, in a set of emotional follow-up phone calls in September 1990. Gorbachev ultimately gave his assent to a united Germany in NATO in exchange for face-saving measures, such as a four-year grace period for removing Soviet troops and some restrictions on both NATO troops and nuclear weapons on former East German territory. He also received 12 billion deutsch marks to construct housing for the withdrawing Soviet troops and another three billion in interest-free credit. What he did not receive were any formal guarantees against NATO expansion. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait immediately pushed Europe down the White House’s list of foreign policy priorities. Then, after Bush lost the 1992 presidential election to Bill Clinton, Bush’s staff members had to vacate their offices earlier than they had expected. They appear to have communicated little with the incoming Clinton team. As a result, Clinton’s staffers began their tenure with limited or no knowledge of what Washington and Moscow had discussed regarding NATO. THE SEEDS OF A FUTURE PROBLEM Contrary to the view of many on the U.S. side, then, the question of NATO expansion arose early and entailed discussions of expansion not only to East Germany but also to eastern Europe. But contrary to Russian allegations, Gorbachev never got the West to promise that it would freeze NATO’s borders. Rather, Bush’s senior advisers had a spell of internal disagreement in early February 1990, which they displayed to Gorbachev. By the time of the Camp David summit, however, all members of Bush’s team, along with Kohl, had united behind an offer in which Gorbachev would receive financial assistance from West Germany -- and little else -- in exchange for allowing Germany to reunify and for allowing a united Germany to be part of NATO. In the short run, the result was a win for the United States. U.S. officials and their West German counterparts had expertly outmaneuvered Gorbachev, extending NATO to East Germany and avoiding promises about the future of the alliance. One White House staffer under Bush, Robert Hutchings, ranked a dozen possible outcomes, from the “most congenial” (no restrictions at all on NATO as it moved into former East Germany) to the “most inimical” (a united Germany completely outside of NATO). In the end, the United States achieved an outcome somewhere between the best and the second best on the list. Rarely does one country win so much in an international negotiation. But as Baker presciently wrote in his memoirs of his tenure as secretary of state, “Almost every achievement contains within its success the seeds of a future problem.” By design, Russia was left on the periphery of a post–Cold War Europe. A young KGB officer serving in East Germany in 1989 offered his own recollection of the era in an interview a decade later, in which he remembered returning to Moscow full of bitterness at how “the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe.” His name was Vladimir Putin, and he would one day have the power to act on that bitterness. MARY ELISE SAROTTE is Dean’s Professor of History at the University of Southern California, a Visiting Professor at Harvard University, and the author of The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall. This essay is adapted from the afterword to the updated edition of her book 1989: The Struggle to Create Post–Cold War Europe (Princeton University Press, 2014). MORE BY M. E. SAROTTE More: North America United States Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union Russia Germany Diplomacy Geopolitics NATO Security U.S. Foreign Policy GHW Bush Administration Most-Read Articles A Broken Promise? 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Altman United States - Foreign Affairs Save Public Diplomacy: Broadcasting America’s Message Matters Walter Laqueur United States - Foreign Affairs Sidelined on Human Rights: America Bows Out Kenneth Roth 新美國主義 為什麼一個國家需要一個國家故事 吉爾·萊波雷 2019 年 3 月/4 月 發表於2019 年 2 月 5 日 為自己是美國人而自豪：2018 年 11 月在西維吉尼亞州亨廷頓舉行的川普集會上 1986 年，普立茲獎得主、打著領結的史丹佛大學歷史學家卡爾·德格勒(Carl Degler) 發表了一些不同於通常困擾年會晚間節目的、抽煙鬥、加冰塊的蘇格蘭威士忌的餐後論文。相反，德格勒，一個溫和而平靜的英雄人物，指責他的同事們完全失職：他們對民族主義感到震驚，放棄了對國家的研究。 「我們可以書寫含蓄地否認或忽視民族國家的歷史，但這將是一部與生活在民族國家中的人們的要求和要求背道而馳的歷史，」德格勒當晚在芝加哥說道。他發出警告：“如果我們歷史學家無法提供國家定義的歷史，那麼其他不那麼批評和不那麼了解情況的人就會接替我們的工作。” 當時的智者說，民族國家正在衰退。世界已經全球化。何必去研究民族呢？民族主義在十九世紀還處於嬰兒期，但在二十世紀上半葉卻變成了怪物。但到了下半場，它幾乎已經死了——一個跌跌撞撞、可怕的幽靈，至少在後殖民國家之外是如此。歷史學家似乎相信，如果他們停止研究它，它就會死得更快：挨餓、被忽視和被遺棄。 法蘭西斯‧福山是政治學家，而不是歷史學家。但他 1989 年的文章《歷史的終點？說明了德格勒的觀點。福山在冷戰結束時宣布，法西斯主義和共產主義已經死亡。民族主義是對自由主義最大的威脅，它在西方已經被“拔掉了獠牙”，而在世界其他地方，民族主義仍然活躍，但這並不完全是民族主義。福山寫道：“世界上絕大多數民族主義運動除了獨立於其他群體或人民的消極願望之外，沒有任何政治綱領，也沒有為社會經濟組織提供任何全面的議程。” （不用說，他後來不得不走了很多路，在他最近的書中寫道，俄羅斯的弗拉基米爾·普丁、波蘭的雅羅斯瓦夫·卡欽斯基、匈牙利的維克托·歐爾班、土耳其的雷傑普·塔伊普·埃爾多安、菲律賓的“意想不到的”民粹主義民族主義'羅德里戈·杜特爾特和美國的唐納德·特朗普。 福山並不是唯一一個宣稱民族主義已經消亡的人。很多其他人也有過這樣的經驗。這正是德格勒擔心的地方。 民族國家在形成時就想像過去。這至少部分解釋了為什麼現代歷史寫作是隨著民族國家而興起的。一個多世紀以來，民族國家一直是歷史探究的中心對象。從 1830 年代的喬治·班克羅夫特到小阿瑟·施萊辛格或理查德·霍夫施塔特，研究美國歷史意味著研究美國民族。正如歷史學家約翰·海厄姆所說：“從 19 世紀中葉到 20 世紀 60 年代，民族是美國歷史的重要主題。”在同一段時間裡，美國經歷了內戰、解放、重建、種族隔離、兩次世界大戰和前所未有的移民——這使得這項任務變得更加重要。歷史學家托馬斯·本德（Thomas Bender）曾經指出：“共同的歷史對於維持構成國家主體的聯繫至關重要。” “除其他外，各國達成集體協議，部分是被迫的，以確認共同的歷史是共同未來的基礎。” 1889 年 12 月，美國歷史協會官員在華盛頓特區舉行年會 1889 年 12 月，美國歷史協會官員在華盛頓特區舉行年會 維基共享資源 但在 1970 年代，對國家的研究在美國歷史學界失寵了。大多數歷史學家開始著眼於較小或較大的事物，調查社會群體的經驗和文化，或利用全球歷史所承諾的廣泛優勢。這一轉變產生了優秀的獎學金。但同時，是誰在為生活在美國的人們提供清晰的過去和合理的未來——一個國家？江湖騙子、傀儡和暴君。民族主義的持久性證明，從來不乏流氓，他們願意用神話和預言、偏見和仇恨來支撐人們的自我意識和命運，或者倒掉裝滿潰爛的怨恨和暴力呼籲的舊垃圾袋。當歷史學家放棄對民族的研究，當學者停止試圖為一個民族書寫共同的歷史時，民族主義並沒有消亡。相反，它吞噬了自由主義。 也許現在要恢復共同的歷史為時已晚，歷史學家要有所作為也為時已晚。但除了嘗試創造一部新的美國歷史之外——一部可以培育新的美國主義的歷史之外，還有其他選擇嗎？ 民族與國家 美國與其他國家不同——每個國家都不同——它的民族主義也不同。回顧：民族是有共同起源的人民，國家是法治的政治共同體。民族國家是一個受法律管轄的政治共同體，它將具有共同祖先的人民團結在一起。當民族國家從城邦、王國和帝國中興起時，它們透過講述其起源的故事來解釋自己——這些故事意味著，比如說，「法蘭西民族」中的每個人都有共同的祖先，而他們當然沒有。正如我在《這些真理》一書中所寫的那樣，“很多時候，民族國家的歷史只不過是神話，隱藏著民族與國家之間的接縫。” 但就美國而言，國家的起源可以在這些接縫中找到。當美國在 1776 年宣布獨立時，它成為一個州，但是什麼使它成為一個民族呢？認為其人民擁有共同祖先的說法表面上是荒謬的。他們來自世界各地，在對英國發動戰爭後，他們最不想慶祝的就是他們的英國身分。獨立後很久，大多數美國人並不將美國視為一個國家，而是名副其實地視為國家聯盟。這就是為什麼爭取批准憲法成為一場艱苦的戰鬥。這也是為什麼憲法的擁護者稱自己為“聯邦主義者”，而實際上他們是民族主義者，因為他們提議根據《邦聯條例》用國家製度取代聯邦制度。當約翰·傑伊在《聯邦黨人文集》中堅稱不。 2、“上帝很高興將這個相連的國家交給一個團結的人民——一個來自相同祖先的人民，說相同的語言，信奉相同的宗教，遵循相同的政府原則，行為方式非常相似和習俗，”他在黑暗中吹著口哨。 將一個國家變成民族的方法之一就是書寫它的歷史。 正是由於缺乏這些相似之處，諾亞·韋伯斯特等聯邦黨人試圖透過敦促美國人採用獨特的拼字來創造民族特徵。韋伯斯特在 1789 年寫道：“語言和政府都應該是全國性的。美國應該有自己的獨特之處。”這讓美國得到了「青睞」而不是「青睞」。然而，它並沒有使美國成為一個國家。到 1828 年，當韋伯斯特出版了他的巨著《美國英語詞典》時，他沒有收錄“民族主義”一詞，因為這個詞在 1820 年代的美國沒有任何意義或流行。直到 1840 年代，歐洲國家進入了所謂的“民族時代”，美國人才開始認為自己屬於一個國家，擁有自己的命運。 就國家建設而言，這一事件的進程是如此不尋常，以至於歷史學家大衛·阿米蒂奇（David Armitage）表示，美國不是一個民族國家。阿米蒂奇寫道：「我們所說的民族主義是指民族（無論如何定義）希望擁有國家來創造我們稱之為民族國家的特殊混合體，但「還有一種我們可以稱之為國家民族的野獸，它的出現當國家形成之前，任何意義上的民族意識都沒有發展起來。美國可能被視為後者的一個，也許是唯一的，引人注目的例子」——不是一個民族國家，而是一個國家國家。 將一個國家變成民族的方法之一就是書寫它的歷史。美國第一部實質歷史，班克羅夫特的十卷本《美國歷史，從美洲大陸的發現》出版於1834 年至1874 年間。一位歷史學家。他也是一位政治家，曾在三任美國總統的政府中任職，包括在美國大陸擴張時代擔任戰爭部長。班克羅夫特是昭示命運的建築師，他書寫歷史的目的是要讓美國的成立看起來是必然的、它的發展是不可阻擋的、它的歷史是古老的。他不再強調其英國遺產，而是稱讚美國是一個多元化和國際化的國家，其祖先遍布世界各地： 我們所說的語言的起源將我們帶到了印度；我們的宗教來自巴勒斯坦；在我們的教堂裡唱的讚美詩中，有些是在義大利首次聽到的，有些是在阿拉伯的沙漠中，有些是在幼發拉底河沿岸；我們的藝術來自希臘；我們的判例來自羅馬。 十九世紀的民族主義是自由主義的，是啟蒙運動的產物。它是基於個人與集體之間的類比。正如美國民族主義理論家漢斯·科恩曾經寫道：“民族自決的概念——將自由理想從個人轉移到有機集體——被作為自由主義的旗幟高舉起來。” 自由民族主義作為一種思想，從根本上來說是歷史性的。十九世紀的美國人在一套新興的人權觀念的背景下理解民族國家：即國家的權力保證每個有資格獲得公民身份的人都享有同樣的不可撤銷的政治權利。未來的馬薩諸塞州參議員查爾斯·薩姆納 (Charles Sumner) 在 1849 年提出了這樣的解釋： 這是每個在這片土地上呼吸生命的人的偉大憲章，無論他的狀況如何，也無論他的父母是誰。他可能是貧窮的、弱小的、卑微的或黑人，他可能是白人、猶太人、印度人或衣索比亞人，他可能是法國人、德國人、英國人或愛爾蘭人的後裔；他可能是法國人、德國人、英國人或愛爾蘭人。但在馬薩諸塞州憲法頒布之前，所有這些差異都消失了。 。 。 。他是一個男人，與所有同胞平等。他是國家的孩子之一，國家就像公正的父母一樣，平等地對待所有的後代。 或者正如對薩姆納影響巨大的出生於普魯士的美國政治哲學家弗朗西斯·利伯（Francis Lieber）所寫，“如果沒有民族特徵，國家就無法獲得我們進步所必需的政治社會的長壽和連續性。利伯最具影響力的論文《民族主義：政治學的片段》發表於 1860 年，內戰前夕。 聯邦和邦聯 美國內戰是關於民族國家的兩種相互競爭的概念的鬥爭。這場鬥爭從未結束；它剛剛移動過。 在南北戰爭前的美國，北方人，尤其是北方廢奴主義者，將（北方）民族主義和（南方）地方主義進行了對比。 1850 年，一位密西根州議員敦促說：「我們必須培養一種全國性的愛國主義，而不是局部的愛國主義。」但南方人也是民族主義者。只是他們的民族主義現在被稱為“非自由的”或“種族的”，而不是北方人的自由主義或公民民族主義。這種區別受到了很多批評，因為它只不過是一種將一種民族主義稱為好而另一種民族主義稱為壞的方式。但南北的民族主義其實是不同的，美國歷史的大部分時間都是南北雙方之間的鬥爭。 「我們的政府是白人政府，」美國政治家約翰·C·卡爾霍恩 (John C. Calhoun) 於 1848 年宣稱，反對承認墨西哥人為美國公民。美國政治家 Stephen Douglas 1858 年表示：“這個政府是我們的父輩在白人基礎上建立的。它是由白人建立的，是為了白人及其後代的永遠利益。” 亞伯拉罕·林肯以黑人廢奴主義者的論點為基礎，揭露了道格拉斯的歷史是虛構的​​。 「 我相信，從《獨立宣言》發表之日起直到三年前的整個世界記錄中，可能徒勞無功地尋找來自一個人的單一斷言，即黑人沒有被包括在《獨立宣言》中。1858 年，林肯在伊利諾伊州蓋爾斯堡與道格拉斯辯論時說道：「獨立。」他繼續說道： 我想我可以挑戰道格拉斯法官，證明他曾經說過這樣的話，華盛頓曾經說過這樣的話，任何一位總統曾經說過這樣的話，任何國會議員曾經說過這樣的話，或者全世界任何一個活著的人曾經說過這樣的話，直到民主黨在奴隸制方面現行政策的需要不得不發明這個主張。 不管怎樣，南方邦聯的創始人回答：我們將制定一部基於白人至上主義的新憲法。 1861 年，聯邦新當選的副總統亞歷山大·史蒂芬斯(Alexander Stephens) 在薩凡納發表講話，他在講話中解釋說，美國憲法背後的思想“基於種族平等的假設”——這裡放棄了林肯的論點－但「我們的新政府是建立在完全相反的理念之上的；它的基礎和基石是建立在黑人與白人不平等這一偉大真理之上的。奴隸制是他的自然和道德狀況。 北方贏得了戰爭。但自由主義和非自由主義民族主義之間的鬥爭仍在繼續，特別是在關於第十四和第十五修正案的辯論期間，這標誌著美國在關於公民權利和民族國家權力的自由主義思想所設定的條件下的第二次建國——即，與生俱來的公民權、平等權利、普選權和對非公民的法律保護。這些重建時期的修正案也引發了關於移民、種族和性別平等以及公民身份限制的辯論。根據第十四修正案的條款，在美國出生的中國移民的子女將成為美國公民。很少有主要政治人物以有利的言辭談論中國移民。典型的是來自加州的前礦工、共和黨議員威廉·希格比(William Higby)所表達的惡毒偏見。希格比在 1866 年說道：“中國人只不過是一個異教種族。你無法讓他們成為好公民。”第十五修正案的反對者認為非裔美國人投票和中國公民身分都是可恥的。來自肯塔基州的民主黨參議員加勒特戴維斯 (Garrett Davis) 怒不可遏：“我不想要黑人政府；我不想要黑人政府。”我不想要蒙古政府；我想要我們的父輩組成的白人政府。 這場辯論中最重要的聲明是由一個出生於奴隸制的人發表的，他尋求自己的自由，並為解放、公民身份和平等權利奮鬥了數十年。 1869 年，弗雷德里克·道格拉斯(Frederick Douglass) 在全國觀眾面前發表了美國政治史上最重要、卻最少人閱讀的演講之一，敦促本著建立“複合國家”的精神批准第14 條和第15 條修正案。他說，他“談到了這樣一個問題：我們是由不同種族的人組成，是更好還是更糟。”如果進步所必需的國家是由相似性形成的，那麼像美國這樣的國家又是由差異性、美洲原住民、非洲人、歐洲人、亞洲人以及各種可能的混合體組成的國家呢？ 在世界上”？ 2015 年 12 月，在華盛頓特區舉行的第 13 條修正案通過 150 週年紀念儀式上，弗雷德里克·道格拉斯 (Frederick Douglass) 雕像站在美國總統巴拉克·奧巴馬 (Barack Obama) 身後 2015 年 12 月，在華盛頓特區舉行的第 13 條修正案通過 150 週年紀念儀式上，弗雷德里克·道格拉斯 (Frederick Douglass) 雕像站在美國總統巴拉克·奧巴馬 (Barack Obama) 身後 喬納森恩斯特/路透社 對於像希格比這樣反對中國移民和與生俱來的公民身份的共和黨人，以及像戴維斯這樣反對白人以外任何人的公民身份和投票權的民主黨人，道格拉斯給出了熱情洋溢的答复。至於中國人：「你問我是否贊成這樣的移民？我回答，我願意。您會讓他們入籍並賦予他們美國公民的所有權利嗎？我會。你允許他們投票嗎？我會。至於美國的子孫後代和未來移民，道格拉斯說：“我不僅希望在這裡為黑人、黑白混血兒和拉丁人種提供一個家，也為黑人、混血兒和拉丁人種提供一個家。”但我希望亞洲人能在美國找到一個家，並在這裡有賓至如歸的感覺，無論是為了他，還是為了我們。對道格拉斯來說，只有這種新的國家形式——複合國家——才能取得進步。他說：「我們將把我們的科學和文明網絡擴展到所有尋求庇護的人，無論是來自亞洲、非洲還是海洋島嶼，並且所有人都將遵守同樣的法律，說同樣的語言。」 ，支持同一政府，享受同樣的自由，以同樣的民族熱情振動，並尋求同樣的民族目標。這就是道格拉斯的新美國主義。但它並沒有佔上風。 歷史學家和民權運動家 WEB Du Bois 在 1935 年寫道，《解放與重建》是「實現民主的最佳努力…」。 。 。這個世界從未見過。但這項努力遭到了北方白人和南方白人的背叛，他們編造了一個神話，即這場戰爭根本不是一場針對奴隸制的戰爭，而僅僅是民族與各州之間的鬥爭，從而將美國重新團結在一起。杜波依斯痛苦地寫道：“我們在那些為了現在的和平而向過去的真相妥協的人的領導下。”道格拉斯的新美國主義就這樣被遺忘了。杜波依斯對美國歷史的思考也是如此。 國家歷史 美國歷史協會成立於 1884 年，即法國哲學家歐內斯特·雷南 (Ernest Renan) 撰寫其標誌性文章《什麼是國家？民族主義正在轉變，從自由主義轉向非自由主義，包括在德國，從俾斯麥的「血與鐵」開始。這項變化的驅動力是大眾政治的出現，正如歷史學家埃里克·霍布斯鮑姆（Eric Hobsbawm）曾經寫道的那樣，在大眾政治的術語下，民族國家「以前所未有的程度依賴於普通公民的參與」。這“將‘民族’問題以及公民對他所認為的‘民族’、‘國籍’或其他忠誠中心的感情問題置於政治議程的首位。” 這種轉變始於 1880 年代的美國，隨著種族隔離法的興起，以及移民限制制度的出現，從 1882 年通過的第一部限制移民的聯邦法律《排華法案》開始。五修正案所做的承諾和憲法保障。為實現這項承諾而奮鬥將是旗手們的工作，其中包括領導反對私刑運動的艾達·B·威爾斯(Ida B. Wells)和1892年創立華人平權聯盟的黃進富(Wong Chin Foo)，他們堅持認為，“我們主張共同的男子氣概”。 民族主義越醜陋、越不自由，自由主義者就越相信自由民族主義是不可能的。 但那些年在美國歷史協會年會上發表演說的白人對討論種族隔離、剝奪黑人公民權或移民限制興趣不大。弗雷德里克·傑克遜·特納引起了歷史學家對邊境的關注。其他人則思考民粹主義和社會主義的挑戰。進步時代的歷史學家將美國民族解釋為「民主與特權、窮人與富人、農民與壟斷者、工人與公司、有時還有自由土地者與奴隸主之間的衝突的產物」。勒所觀察到的。許多協會主席，尤其是伍德羅·威爾遜，都對所謂的「邦聯失敗的事業」表示哀悼。所有這些都提供了民族歷史，而忽略了種族不平等的起源和持久性。 同時，從 1910 年代開始，尤其是 1930 年代，民族主義發生了變化。民族主義越醜陋、越不自由，自由主義者就越相信自由民族主義是不可能的。在美國，民族主義主要表現為經濟保護主義和孤立主義。 1917年，出版業大亨威廉·蘭道夫·赫斯特反對美國捲入第一次世界大戰，開始呼籲“美國優先”，他在1938年也採取了同樣的立場，堅持認為“美國人應該維持我們偉大而獨立國家的傳統政策”。 ——很大程度上是因為它是獨立的。” 在美國參加第二次世界大戰之前的幾年裡，甚至有一些邊緣人士支持希特勒。查爾斯·考夫林（Charles Coughlin）是一名牧師，接近總統候選人，也是廣受歡迎的廣播員，他在廣播中宣揚反猶太主義和對希特勒和納粹黨的欽佩，並呼籲聽眾組建一個新的政黨——基督教陣線。 1939 年，大約 20,000 名美國人，其中一些身著納粹制服，聚集在麥迪遜廣場花園，裝飾著納粹黨徽和美國國旗，高舉海報宣稱這是一場“真正美國主義的大規模示威”，他們譴責新政是“猶太人政”。希特勒則表達了對南方邦聯的欽佩，並對「基於奴隸制和不平等原則的偉大新社會秩序的開端被戰爭摧毀了」表示遺憾。作為擴大美國分裂和削弱美國決心運動的一個手段，納粹在種族隔離南方散發的宣傳品呼籲廢除第十四和第十五修正案。 「美國優先」的支持者查爾斯·林德伯格（Charles Lindbergh）因獨自飛越大西洋而出名，這並非無關緊要，他的民族主義是建立在地理基礎上的。 “只要看一眼地圖，我們的真正邊界就在哪裡，”他在 1939 年說道，“除了東邊的大西洋和西邊的太平洋，我們還能要求什麼呢？” （富蘭克林·羅斯福總統在1940 年做出了回應，宣稱美國是「一座孤島」的夢想實際上是一場噩夢，「這是一個人民被關在監獄裡、戴著手銬、挨餓、靠飢餓吃飯的噩夢」。日復一日地受到來自其他大陸的輕蔑、無情的主人的酒吧。」） 第二次世界大戰結束後，美國歷史學家將美國歷史寫成一個共識的故事，政治學家路易斯·哈茨（Louis Hartz）認為，這是一種不變的“美國自由主義傳統”，隨著時間的推移，這種傳統似乎一直延伸到一個不變的領域。施萊辛格在 1949 年撰文指出，自由派佔據了美國政治的「重要中心」。這些歷史學家有許多盲點——他們尤其對保守主義和原教旨主義的力量視而不見——但他們仍然對美國國家和美國人民的歷史提供了廣泛、自由的描述。 二十世紀最後一部最好的單卷本美國通俗史是德格勒 1959 年出版的書《走出我們的過去：塑造現代美國的力量》：這是一部令人驚嘆的、全面的敘述，深受杜波依斯的影響，將種族問題置於奴隸制、種族隔離和公民權利是故事的中心，同時還有自由、權利、革命、自由和平等。令人驚訝的是，這是德格勒的第一本書。這也是同類中的最後一個。 國家歷史的衰落 如果對民族的熱愛是十九世紀美國歷史學家研究過去的動力，那麼對民族主義的仇恨則在二十世紀下半葉驅使美國歷史學家遠離它。 人們很早就清楚，民族主義是一種發明、一種詭計、一種虛構。第二次世界大戰後，當美國總統哈里·杜魯門 (Harry Truman) 幫助建立所謂的「自由國際秩序」時，國際主義者開始預測民族國家的終結，哈佛大學政治學家魯珀特·愛默生(Rupert Emerson) 宣稱，“民族和國家在原子時代，民族國家已經不合時宜了。”到了 20 世紀 60 年代，民族主義看起來比不合時宜更糟。同時，隨著越戰的到來，美國歷史學家停止了對民族國家的研究，部分原因是擔心與美國外交政策的暴行和國內政治壓迫政權共謀。 「歷史寫作和教學的專業實踐作為國家建設的女僕而蓬勃發展；本德在 2002 年《重新思考全球化時代的美國歷史》中指出，「民族國家既提供了支持，也提供了欣賞的觀眾。」他繼續說道，「直到最近，由於民族國家的不確定地位，人們才認識到歷史作為一門專業學科，它是其自身實質性敘述的一部分，並且對這種循環性的含義根本沒有足夠的自覺意識。從那時起，歷史學家變得更加自覺，甚至到了癱瘓的地步。人們認為，如果民族主義是一種病態，那麼民族歷史的書寫就是其症狀之一，只不過是神話的另一種形式。 如果對民族的熱愛是十九世紀美國歷史學家研究過去的動力，那麼對民族主義的仇恨則在二十世紀下半葉驅使美國歷史學家遠離它。 還發生了其他事情。從 20 世紀 60 年代開始，女性和有色人種進入歷史職業，提出不同的問題並得出不同的結論，撰寫新的、豐富的革命歷史。歷史學術呈現爆炸性成長，變得無比豐富且複雜。在鄰裡間的熱潮中，許多老歷史學家質疑了這項學術研究的價值。德格勒沒有；相反，他對此做出了貢獻。大多數撰寫有關種族的歷史學家都不是白人，大多數撰寫有關女性的歷史學家也不是男性，但德格勒是一名白人，他是全國婦女組織的兩位男性聯合創始人之一，並於1972 年憑藉一本書獲得了普立茲獎稱為非黑非白。不過，他和海厄姆一樣擔心，大多數新的美國歷史學術研究「不是關於美國，而只是美國」。 1986年，當德格勒從椅子上站起來，在美國歷史協會發表演講時，美國的許多歷史學家開始倡導一種歷史世界主義，書寫全球歷史而不是國家歷史。德格勒對此並沒有太多耐心。幾年後，波斯尼亞內戰爆發後，政治哲學家邁克爾·沃爾澤冷酷地宣布「部落已經回歸」。他們從未離開過。歷史學家只會變得更難看到它們，因為他們不再真正地尋找。 新的美國歷史 書寫國家歷史會帶來很多問題。但不書寫國家歷史會產生更多問題，而且這些問題會更嚴重。 新的美國主義和新的美國歷史會是什麼樣子？它們可能看起來很像道格拉斯想像中的複合民族主義和杜波依斯所寫的清晰的歷史。他們可能會以 1869 年道格拉斯對美國實驗及其挑戰的描述作為出發點： 一個建立在正義之上並承認所有人平等權利的政府；不要求比自然、理性和人民定期確定的意志更高的存在權威或對其法律的認可；堅決拒絕將其劍和錢包用於任何宗教信仰或家庭的服務，對世界上大多數政府以及我們當中一些狹隘和偏執的人來說是一種長期的冒犯。 冷戰結束時，一些評論家得出結論，美國的實驗已經勝利結束，美國已經成為世界的一切。但美國的實驗其實還沒結束。一個建立在革命和普世權利基礎上的國家將永遠與混亂和特殊主義勢力作鬥爭。一個在矛盾中誕生的民族將永遠為自己歷史的意義而奮鬥。但這並不意味著歷史毫無意義，也不代表任何人都可以袖手旁觀。 「美國目前的歷史並不尋求回答任何重大問題，」大約三十年前，德格勒對他的聽眾說。他警告說，如果美國歷史學家不開始提出並回答這類問題，其他人就會開始提出和回答。他們會效法卡爾霍恩、道格拉斯和考夫林神父。他們會哀嘆「美國大屠殺」。他們會稱移民為“動物”，稱其他國家為“糞坑國家”。他們將採用「美國優先」的口號。他們會說他們可以「讓美國再次偉大」。他們會稱自己為「民族主義者」。他們的歷史將是虛構的。他們會說只有他們愛這個國家。他們會錯的。 已追加更正（2019 年 2 月 26 日） 本文的早期版本錯誤地認定了二戰後開始建立自由國際秩序的美國總統。這是哈利·杜魯門，而不是富蘭克林·羅斯福。 吉爾‧萊波雷 (JILL LEPORE) 是哈佛大學大衛‧ 伍茲‧肯珀 (David Woods Kemper ) 41 屆美國歷史教授、 《紐約客》特約撰稿人，也是《這些真相：美國歷史》一書的作者 。 吉爾·萊波雷的更多作品 更多的： 北美 美國 政治與社會 意識形態 外交：100 年 2019 年最佳 民族主義 最常閱讀的文章 破碎的承諾？ 關於北約擴張，西方到底告訴莫斯科甚麼 瑪麗·埃莉斯·薩羅特 法國如何淪為極右派 最終，勒龐幾乎不需要透過節制來獲得權力 塞西爾·奧爾杜伊 史塔默能拯救英國嗎？ 為什麼工黨的壓倒性勝利可能無法扭轉國家的衰落 芬坦·奧圖爾 北約對世界意味著什麼 75年後，聯盟依然不可或缺 延斯·斯托爾滕貝格 推薦文章 人潮擁擠：布魯克林大橋上的行人，2018 年 12 月 其他地方的重要性 捍衛世界主義 夸梅·安東尼·阿皮亞 新加坡動物園的一隻黑猩猩，2005 年 5 月 這是你的民族主義大腦 我們和他們的生物學 羅伯特·薩波爾斯基 破碎的承諾？ 關於北約擴張，西方到底告訴莫斯科甚麼 作者：瑪麗·埃莉斯·薩羅特 2014 年 9 月/10 月 發表於2014 年 8 月 11 日 沒有後話：戈巴契夫和布希在白宮，1990 年 6 月。 羅恩·埃德蒙茲/美聯社 二十五年前的今年 11 月，一名東德政治局委員搞砸了對旅行規定進行有限修改的宣布，從而激發了人群衝進東柏林和西柏林的邊界。結果是標誌著冷戰結束的不歸路的標誌性時刻：柏林圍牆的倒塌。在接下來的幾個月裡，美國、蘇聯和西德就蘇聯撤軍和德國統一問題進行了至關重要的談判。儘管這些談判最終導致德國在 1990 年 10 月 3 日實現統一，但也引發了後來俄羅斯與西方之間的激烈爭端。關於北約的未來究竟達成了什麼共識？作為協議的一部分，美國是否正式向蘇聯承諾聯盟不會向東擴張？ 即使二十多年過去了，這場爭論仍然沒有消失。俄羅斯外交官經常聲稱，華盛頓做出這樣的承諾，以換取蘇聯從東德撤軍，但隨著北約在隨後的三輪擴員中增加了 12 個東歐國家，華盛頓又背叛了這項承諾。俄羅斯外交政策思想家亞歷山大·盧金今年稍早在本雜誌上撰文，指責歷任美國總統「忘記了德國統一後西方領導人向米哈伊爾·戈巴契夫做出的承諾——最引人注目的是他們不會向東擴張北約。事實上，俄羅斯總統普丁 (Vladimir Putin) 2008 年在格魯吉亞和 2014 年在烏克蘭採取的侵略行動，部分原因是他對西方違反北約擴張協議的持續不滿。但美國政策制定者和分析家堅稱，這樣的承諾從未存在過。例如，在 2009 年《華盛頓季刊》的一篇文章中，學者馬克·克萊默(Mark Kramer) 向讀者保證，俄羅斯的主張不僅完全是“神話”，而且“在德國統一談判期間從未出現過這個問題」。 現在，越來越多 1989 年和 1990 年的秘密文件已進入公共領域，歷史學家可以為這場爭議提供新的線索。證據表明，與華盛頓的傳統觀點相反，早在 1990 年 2 月柏林圍牆打開後不久，北約在東德和東歐的未來問題就出現了。暗示，該聯盟可能不會擴大，甚至不會擴大到即將統一的德國的東半部。 文件還顯示，美國在西德的幫助下很快就向戈巴契夫施壓，要求其允許德國統一，但沒有就聯盟的未來計畫做出任何形式的書面承諾。簡而言之，正如俄羅斯所聲稱的那樣，從未達成正式協議，但美國和西德官員簡短地暗示可能會討論這樣的協議，作為回報，他們獲得了開始德國統一進程的“綠燈” 。自此，圍繞這一系列事件的爭論扭曲了華盛頓和莫斯科之間的關係。 獲得批准 西方領導人很快意識到，柏林圍牆的倒塌讓看似長期解決的歐洲安全問題再次發揮作用。 1990年初，美國總統老布希的秘密談話中頻繁提及北約未來角色的議題；美國國務卿詹姆斯貝克；赫爾穆特·科爾，西德總理；漢斯-迪特里希·根舍 (Hans-Dietrich Genscher)，西德外交部長；以及英國外交大臣道格拉斯·赫德。 例如，根據西德外交部的文件，根捨在2月6日告訴赫德，戈巴契夫希望排除北約未來不僅向東德而且向東歐擴張的可能性。根舍建議，該聯盟應發表公開聲明，稱「北約無意向東方擴張領土」。 「這樣的聲明必須不僅僅針對[東德]，而是具有普遍性，」他補充道。 “例如，蘇聯需要安全感，因為它知道匈牙利如果更換政府，將不會成為西方聯盟的一部分。”根舍敦促北約立即討論此事，赫德同意了。 三天后，貝克在莫斯科與戈巴契夫直接就北約問題進行了交談。在會議期間，貝克手寫了自己的言論，並在關鍵字旁邊添加了星星：「最終結果：統一德國。紮根於「改變了（政治）的北約」—「其法律體系」。不會“向東移動！”貝克的筆記似乎是 2 月 9 日唯一寫下這樣保證的地方，它們提出了一個有趣的問題。如果貝克的「最終結果」是北約集體防禦條款的管轄權不會東移，是否意味著統一後不會進入前東德領土？ 在回答這個問題時，根舍和科爾正要親自訪問莫斯科，這對子孫後代來說是一件幸事。貝克給西德駐莫斯科大使留下了一封給科爾的密信，該信已保存在德國檔案館。貝克在其中解釋說，他以問題的形式向戈巴契夫提出了關鍵的聲明：「你是否希望看到一個獨立於北約、獨立且沒有美國軍隊的統一的德國？」他問道，大概是在製定這樣的選擇：以戈巴契夫認為沒有吸引力的方式建立一個不受束縛的德國，「或者你更喜歡一個統一的德國與北約聯繫在一起，並保證北約的管轄權不會從目前的位置向東移動一英寸？ 貝克對第二種更具吸引力的選擇的措辭意味著北約的管轄權甚至不會延伸到東德，因為北約在 1990 年 2 月的「當前立場」仍然保持在整個冷戰期間的狀態：其東部邊緣仍然處於分裂狀態。換句話說，統一後的德國實際上一半加入同盟，一半退出同盟。據貝克稱，戈巴契夫回應說：“當然，北約區域的任何擴展都是不可接受的。”在貝克看來，戈巴契夫的反應表明「北約在當前區域可能是可以接受的」。 然而，在收到有關莫斯科發生的事情的報告後，華盛頓國家安全委員會的工作人員認為，這種解決方案在實際​​問題上是行不通的。北約的管轄權怎麼可能只適用於半個國家？他們懷疑這樣的結果既不可取，也沒有必要。結果，國家安全委員會以布希的名義寫了一封給科爾的信。就在科爾出發前往莫斯科之前，它到達了。 這封信並沒有像貝克那樣暗示北約不會東移，而是提議「為現在的[東德]領土賦予特殊軍事地位」。儘管這封信沒有具體說明特殊地位意味著什麼，但含義很明確：所有德國都將加入聯盟，但為了讓莫斯科更容易接受這一發展，某種保全面子的規定將適用於德國。 （事實證明，限制某些類型的北約部隊的活動）。 因此，當科爾準備在1990 年2 月10 日會見戈巴契夫時，他發現自己處於一個複雜的境地。兩端寫的，第一封來自布什，第二封來自布希。布希的信暗示北約的邊界將開始向東移動；貝克建議不會。 根據科爾辦公室的記錄，德國總理選擇附和貝克，而不是布希，因為貝克的溫和路線更有可能產生科爾想要的結果：得到莫斯科的許可開始統一德國。科爾因此向戈巴契夫保證，“北約自然無法將其領土擴大到[東德]目前的領土。”在平行會談中，根舍向蘇聯外長愛德華·謝瓦爾德納澤傳達了同樣的信息，他說：“對我們來說，立場堅定：北約不會向東方擴張。” 與貝克與戈巴契夫的會面一樣，沒有任何書面協議。在聽到這些反覆的保證後，戈巴契夫給西德開了科爾後來所說的“綠燈”，開始在東德和西德之間建立經濟和貨幣聯盟——這是統一的第一步。科爾立即召開記者會鎖定這一漲幅。正如他在回憶錄中回憶的那樣，那天晚上他高興得睡不著，於是在寒冷的紅場上走了很長一段路。 賄賂蘇聯 但科爾的措辭很快就成為西方主要決策者的異端。 1990 年 2 月中旬，貝克回到華盛頓後，他同意國家安全委員會的觀點並採納了其立場。此後，布希外交政策團隊成員嚴格遵守資訊紀律，不再就北約堅守1989年第一線議題發表任何言論。 科爾的言論也與布希的言論一致，美國和西德兩國領導人 2 月 24 日至 25 日在戴維營舉行的峰會的記錄都顯示了這一點。布希向科爾明確表達了他對與莫斯科妥協的感受：“管它呢！”他說。 「我們贏了，他們沒有。我們不能讓蘇聯從失敗中奪取勝利。科爾認為，他和布希必須找到安撫戈巴契夫的方法，並預測，“這最終將歸結為現金問題。”布希尖銳地指出西德「財力雄厚」。於是，一個簡單的策略就出現了：正如時任美國副國家安全顧問羅伯特·蓋茨後來解釋的那樣，目標是「賄賂蘇聯人」。西德將行賄。 4月，布希在給法國總統佛朗索瓦‧密特朗的一份機密電報中闡述了這個想法。美國官員擔心克里姆林宮可能會試圖透過與英國或法國結盟來智勝他們，這兩個國家也仍然佔領柏林，考慮到它們過去與敵對的德國的遭遇，它們可能有理由與蘇聯一樣對統一感到不安。因此佈希向密特朗強調了他的首要任務：統一的德國享有北約的正式成員資格，即使在蘇聯撤軍後盟軍仍留在統一的德國，北約繼續在該地區部署核武和常規武器。他警告密特朗，沒有其他組織可以「取代北約作為西方安全與穩定的保障者」。他繼續說：“事實上，很難想像包括東歐甚至蘇聯在內的歐洲集體安全安排將如何有能力阻止對西歐的威脅。” 布希向密特朗明確表示，冷戰後歐洲的主導安全組織必須仍然是北約，而不是任何形式的泛歐洲聯盟。碰巧的是，下個月，戈巴契夫提出了這樣一項泛歐安排，其中統一的德國將加入北約和華沙條約組織，從而創建一個龐大的安全機構。戈巴契夫甚至提出了讓蘇聯加入北約的想法。根據蘇聯的記錄，戈巴契夫五月對貝克說：“你說北約並不是針對我們，它只是一個正在適應新現實的安全結構。” “因此，我們建議加入北約。”貝克拒絕考慮這樣的想法，輕蔑地回答：“泛歐安全只是一個夢想。” 在整個 1990 年，美國和西德外交官成功地反擊了此類提議，部分原因是德國有權自行決定其聯盟夥伴。當他們這樣做時，很明顯布希和科爾的猜測是正確的：事實上，戈巴契夫最終會屈服於西方的偏好，只要他得到補償。說穿了，他需要現金。 1990 年 5 月，美國駐莫斯科大使傑克·馬特洛克 (Jack Matlock) 報告稱，戈巴契夫開始「不再像一個掌控一切的人，而更像一個四面楚歌的領導人」。他在來自莫斯科的電報中寫道，“危機的跡像很多：犯罪率急劇上升、反政權示威活動激增、分裂主義運動蓬勃發展、經濟表現惡化…” 。 。權力從政黨到國家、從中心到外圍的緩慢、不確定的轉移。 如果沒有外國援助和信貸的幫助，莫斯科將很難解決這些國內問題，這意味著它可能願意妥協。問題是，西德能否以某種方式提供這種援助，使戈巴契夫避免看起來像是被賄賂而接受北約統一的德國，而對聯盟向東的移動沒有任何實際限制。 科爾分兩次完成了這項艱鉅的任務：首先是在1990 年7 月與戈巴契夫的雙邊會晤中，然後是在1990 年9 月的一系列情緒激動的後續電話中。巴喬夫最終同意統一的德國加入北約。他還獲得了 120 億德國馬克，用於為撤軍的蘇聯軍隊建造住房，另外還獲得了 30 億德國馬克的無息信貸。他沒有收到任何反對北約擴張的正式保證。 1990年8月，薩達姆·侯賽因入侵科威特，立即使歐洲在白宮外交政策優先事項清單上的排名下降。隨後，布希在 1992 年總統大選中輸給比爾·柯林頓後，布希的幕僚不得不比預期更早離開辦公室。他們似乎與即將上任的柯林頓團隊溝通甚少。結果，柯林頓的幕僚在上任之初對華盛頓和莫斯科就北約問題進行的討論知之甚少，甚至一無所知。 未來問題的根源 與美國方面許多人的看法相反，北約東歐問題很早就提出了，並引發了不僅向東德、而且向東歐擴張的討論。但與俄羅斯的指控相反，戈巴契夫從未讓西方承諾凍結北約邊界。相反，布希的高級顧問在 1990 年 2 月初出現了一段時期的內部分歧，他們向戈巴契夫展示了這一點。然而，到戴維營峰會時，布希團隊的所有成員以及科爾都一致同意提出一項提議，戈巴契夫將從西德獲得財政援助，除此之外別無其他，以換取德國統一。允許統一的德國加入北約。 從短期來看，結果是美國獲勝。美國官員和西德同行巧妙地智取了戈巴契夫，將北約延伸至東德，並迴避了聯盟未來的承諾。布希領導下的一位白宮工作人員羅伯特·哈欽斯(Robert Hutchings)列出了十幾種可能的結果，從“最合適的”（北約進入前東德時不受任何限制）到“最敵對的」（統一的德國完全脫離德國）。北約）。最終，美國的成績介於榜單上最好和第​​二之間。很少有一個國家在國際談判中贏得如此大的勝利。 但正如貝克在他的國務卿任期回憶錄中很有先見之明地寫道，“幾乎每一項成就都在其成功中蘊藏著未來問題的種子。”按照設計，俄羅斯被置於冷戰後歐洲的邊緣。 1989 年，一名在東德服役的年輕克格勃官員在十年後的一次採訪中講述了自己對那個時代的回憶，他在採訪中回憶起回到莫斯科時對「蘇聯如何失去了在歐洲的地位」的痛苦。他的名字叫弗拉基米爾·普京，有一天他將有能力對這種痛苦採取行動。 您正在閱讀一篇免費文章。 訂閱《外交事務》即可獲得無限的存取權限。 免費閱讀新文章和一個多世紀的檔案 解鎖對 iOS/Android 應用程式的存取權以保存版本以供離線閱讀 每年六期印刷版和線上版，以及音頻文章 瑪麗·愛麗絲·薩洛特 (MARY ELISE SAROTTE) 是南加州大學歷史學系主任教授、哈佛大學客座教授，也是《倒塌：柏林圍牆的意外打開》一書的作者。本文改編自她的書《1989：創造冷戰後歐洲的鬥爭》（普林斯頓大學出版社，2014 年）的後記。 我薩洛特的更多作品 更多的： 北美 美國 東歐 與前蘇聯 俄羅斯 德國 外交 地緣 政治 北約 安全 美國 外交政策 布希政府 最常閱讀的文章 破碎的承諾？ 關於北約擴張，西方到底告訴莫斯科甚麼 瑪麗·埃莉斯·薩羅特 法國如何淪為極右派 最終，勒龐幾乎不需要透過節制來獲得權力 塞西爾·奧爾杜伊 史塔默能拯救英國嗎？ 為什麼工黨的壓倒性勝利可能無法扭轉國家的衰落 芬坦·奧圖爾 北約對世界意味著什麼 75年後，聯盟依然不可或缺 延斯·斯托爾滕貝格 推薦文章 日本 - 外交 為何施壓東京？ 羅傑‧奧特曼 美國 - 外交事務 拯救公共外交：傳播美國的訊息很重要 沃特·拉克爾 美國 - 外交事務 人權議題邊緣化：美國退出 肯尼斯·羅斯 美國 - 外交事務 什麼制裁疫情？ 美國商界的好奇十字軍 傑西·赫爾姆斯 烏克蘭和北約的較好道路 基輔現在可以做些什麼來獲得聯盟的一席之地 作者：ME 薩羅特 2024 年 7 月 8 日 北約秘書長延斯·斯托爾滕貝格於 2024 年 4 月在基輔向烏克蘭立法者發表講話 我們知道本週在華盛頓舉行的北約 75 週年峰會上不會發生什麼：烏克蘭成為該聯盟的第 33 個成員國。正如國家安全委員會歐洲事務高級主任邁克爾·卡彭特最近所說，美國官員正在談論為烏克蘭提供「通往北約的橋樑」。但在談到成員資格時，包括美國和德國在內的許多聯盟領導人仍然擔心，只要基輔處於戰爭狀態，就不可能採取正式行動，因為聯盟第 5 條的核心保證是：一個人將被視為對所有人的攻擊。 然而，這種擔憂雖然可以理解，但卻沒有充分考慮到美國政治的現狀或戰爭本身。如果唐納德·川普 (Donald Trump) 贏得 11 月美國總統大選，烏克蘭的「通往北約的橋樑」很可能會成為一座通往無處可去的橋樑。川普威脅要退出該聯盟，或者，正如前北約和川普政府官員最近在《外交事務》上共同撰文的那樣，他可能會透過「扣留資金、從歐洲召回美國軍隊和指揮官以及阻止朝鮮的重要決定”來破壞該聯盟。大西洋理事會。”他還承諾將在一天之內結束烏克蘭戰爭。 即使川普沒有獲勝，美國和歐洲政府的援助流量也不太可能繼續接近過去兩年半的水平。俄羅斯取得重大進展或突破的機會將會增加。這些可能會導致不穩定的難民流動和俄羅斯邊境國家（及其他地區）的恐慌。一些國家可能會採取法國總統馬克宏提議的做法來回應——向烏克蘭派遣自己的軍隊，這可能會引發對其受北約保護的本土領土的報復。 對美國及其盟國來說，確保烏克蘭的未來不應該被視為一種可以延後到以後的利他行為；這是一種自衛行為，需要立即實施。儘管雙邊協議很有用，但在大西洋兩岸政府選舉陷入混亂之際，它們缺乏持久力。很難避免將加入北約視為解決可能造成災難性後果的衝突的最持久的解決方案。 那麼，鑑於俄羅斯軍隊幾乎肯定會在未來幾年佔領其部分主權領土，烏克蘭如何在不久的將來加入聯盟？歷史為如何向一個分裂的國家（甚至是處於前線的國家）授予會員資格提供了答案和先例。這些歷史模式並不完美，它們發揮作用的機會還遠未確定，而且所涉及的成本將非常高，因為它們包括烏克蘭結束重大戰鬥並暫時容忍其領土分裂。然而，儘管成本高昂，但現在是時候認真考慮這些模式了——因為如果有哪個國家值得就某種創造性方式盡快成為盟友舉行聽證會，那麼這個國家就是烏克蘭。 創造力的空間很大，因為雖然北約1949 年成立的條約確實規定盟國有義務將對一國的攻擊視為對所有人的攻擊，但它並沒有強加一刀切的成員資格要求，這意味著一些國家已經能夠透過談判客製化條款。例如，即使法國總統戴高樂在 1960 年代中期做出了看似最終的破壞性決定——退出北約統一軍事指揮部，但法國仍然是其盟友。另外兩個例子更相關：挪威和西德，儘管它們分別靠近莫斯科並與莫斯科發生衝突，但它們都找到了加入聯盟的方法。 北部暴露 七十五年前，挪威想要烏克蘭今天想要的東西：儘管與俄羅斯（當時在蘇聯）接壤，但仍成為盟友。儘管莫斯科當時並沒有入侵挪威，事實上，紅軍甚至幫助從納粹手中解放了挪威北部的一些領土，但挪威人對他們曾經的中立性如何以納粹的殘酷佔領而告終有著痛苦的記憶。當捷克斯洛伐克——東西方之間另一個前被佔領的國家——於 1948 年落入莫斯科的控制之下時，他們感到震驚。 挪威人爭論了兩個選擇：加強北歐防務合作或跨大西洋聯盟——儘管有可能成為唯一與蘇聯接壤的北約創始成員國，從而承擔將聯盟推到俄羅斯家門口的責任。挪威選擇了第二種選擇，但有所不同。 1949 年2 月1 日，也就是聯盟成立前兩個月，挪威政府發表單方面聲明，表示「只要挪威不受到攻擊或不受到攻擊，挪威領土上的基地就不會為外國列強的武裝部隊提供”。受到攻擊威脅。”後來它對核武增加了類似的限制。 當時和事後，盟軍對此都有怨言。冷戰後北約東擴期間，柯林頓政府的國家安全委員會甚至反對「給予新北約成員國『挪威』地位」。但挪威人已達成廣泛共識，認為這一戰略很好地服務了他們的國家安全利益，導致不是“精簡版北約”，而是完全的第五條地位，並可以選擇改變挪威的姿態以應對新的事態發展。直到今天，奧斯陸可以透過改變或放棄這些自我施加的限制來應對威脅，從而提供一種訊號和威懾機制。 儘管冷戰時期的挪威和今天的烏克蘭之間存在許多差異，但挪威模式仍然具有現實意義，因為它顯示了一個與俄羅斯接壤的國家如何加入北約：透過制定有針對性的單方面例外來減輕敵對反應的風險來自莫斯科。挪威模式還有另一個好處。俄羅斯前總統鮑里斯·葉爾欽和他的繼任者弗拉基米爾·普丁總統都譴責北約擴大其成員國。但當各種談判進入緊要關頭時，他們揭示了不同的底線：反對北約擴大其基礎設施。例如，2021 年12 月17 日，普丁向北約發出了事實上的最後通牒——「在這裡簽字，否則烏克蘭就得到它」條約——要求的不是北約成員國資格，而是其基礎設施，特別是「軍事力量和武器裝備」。 這種區別提供了一個機會。 1997年，北約在《北約-俄羅斯成立法案》中宣布，北約將通過“永久駐紮大量戰鬥力量”以外的方式在新成員國執行任務，從而使莫斯科對冷戰後東擴的容忍程度最低。以及相關的基礎設施和武器。挪威的本土戰略早已實現了同樣的目標——不妨礙該國為北歐盟軍建立總部，為美國和加拿大軍隊儲備重型軍事裝備，以及其他許多準備工作。 我們立場分歧 1955 年西德的入盟之路具有不同的意義：它顯示了一個國家如何在分裂的情況下成為盟友。提倡這種模式需要強而有力的免責聲明。理想情況下，烏克蘭能夠擊退俄羅斯入侵者並恢復 1991 年的邊界。然而，儘管烏克蘭軍隊有勇氣，但短期內透過軍事手段實現這一目標的機會微乎其微。如果川普贏得 11 月大選，勝算將會更小。 因此，考慮成員資格與分裂相一致是一個可怕但緊迫的問題——儘管不是按照評論員在 2023 年維爾紐斯北約峰會期間提出的方式。他們認為，既然分裂的德國已經加入北約，分裂的烏克蘭也可以立即加入北約。然而，這是對歷史的嚴重誤讀，因為分裂的德國並不在北約。西德人加入北約；東德人陷入了困境。 簡言之，任何沒有明確邊界的國家都不能加入北約，因為要使第 5 條可信，就必須明確界定其覆蓋範圍。然而，擁有明確的邊界並不意味著擁有不可撤銷的甚至是國際公認的邊界，只要一個國家效仿西德，採取臨時性戰略，即從一開始就明確邊界是臨時性的。 1955 年西德加入北約的道路表明，一個國家如何在分裂的情況下成為盟友。 理解這一戰略的最好方法是回顧西德領導人是如何執行它的。他們意識到，他們必須在一段無限期的時間內容忍分裂，並放棄「訴諸武力來實現德國的統一」。但他們拒絕承認德國內部邊界，明確表示他們正在忍受而不是接受這種分裂。他們通過的不是憲法，而是臨時的“基本法”，號召“全體德國人民…”。 。 。透過自由自決實現德國的統一和自由”，並承諾僅在此事件之後最終確定該國的法律結構。他們選擇的首都不是大城市，而是萊茵蘭小鎮波恩，強化了西德作為臨時建築的概念。把法蘭克福這樣的城市當作首都似乎太永久了。他們堅持從加入北約到1975年《赫爾辛基最終法案》的外交協議的統一目標，該法案保留了在西德堅持下改變邊界的可能性。 基輔當然值得比這種痛苦的模式更好。但鑑於烏克蘭及其支持者無法結束該國事實上的分裂，這種分裂目前已成為現實。最好效仿西德，為獨立的烏克蘭爭取正式的北約成員資格，而不是眼睜睜地看著美國的基本支持隨著國會的爭吵和川普連任幾率的增加而減少。 烏克蘭可以希望以另一種方式追隨西德模式。 1955 年加入北約後，西德鞏固了其經濟復甦和新的民主規範，成為主要出口國和強大的北約盟友——這是烏克蘭所熱切期盼的未來。正如歷史學家史蒂芬·科特金所說：「烏克蘭贏得和平的必要條件是停戰並儘快結束戰鬥、可獲得的安全保障以及加入歐盟。換句話說，一個安全可靠、已加入西方的烏克蘭。覆蓋烏克蘭大部分地區的北約成員資格將使該國能夠開始邁向這樣的未來，而不必等待普丁讓步。 超過半個麵包 鑑於這些模式的教訓，北約成員國領導人應私下鼓勵基輔做三件事：首先，劃定一條臨時的、軍事上可防禦的邊界。其次，同意對未佔領領土上的基礎設施進行自我限制（例如永久駐紮外國軍隊或核武），並做出重要的挪威免責聲明，即這些限制僅在烏克蘭未受到攻擊或攻擊威脅時才有效。第三，也是最痛苦的，承諾除非自衛，否則不會在邊界之外使用軍事力量，就像西德人所做的那樣，以便向北約盟國保證，一旦烏克蘭成為俄羅斯的盟友，他們不會突然發現自己與俄羅斯交戰。這一步驟的代價將是接受無限制的分裂，但好處是為烏克蘭大部分地區提供北約的避風港。 一旦解決，基輔和聯盟將公開這些協議。北約可以透過類似的聲明來擴大基輔的單方面聲明。目標是讓獨立的烏克蘭盡快加入北約，最好是在 2025 年 1 月 20 日之前，但如果需要的話，也可以將其作為川普「協議」的一部分。 雖然這些聲明綜合起來代表了既成事實——也就是說，它們不會與俄羅斯進行談判——但仍然會存在隱含的談判：胡蘿蔔不是以土地換和平協議，而是沒有和平基礎設施。公開提出這個問題至少有利於揭示俄羅斯的兩個關鍵偏好：普丁是否會再次就國防基礎設施進行談判，以及俄羅斯的合作和北約成員資格是否相互排斥。 該提案將帶來重大風險和挑戰。我首先想到的至少有五個：首先，所有盟友都必須批准烏克蘭加入，而在美國，這需要參議院批准。這是一個陡峭的上坡路，但它是任何通往北約成員資格的道路上的一次攀登，因此並不是該提案的獨特負擔。 對烏克蘭來說，時間在流逝，剩下的可行選擇已所剩無幾。 其次，委婉地說，俄羅斯將反對烏克蘭加入北約。然而，鑑於俄羅斯前總統梅德韋傑夫呼籲分割烏克蘭，莫斯科可以選擇稱之為勝利，以保全面子。鑑於普丁的首要任務——甚至比在烏克蘭取得成功更重要——是其個人政權的生存，烏克蘭聯盟成員資格的市場版本可能就足夠了。可悲的是，那些遭受苦難的人已經被莫斯科佔領了。但除非西方認為值得大幅升級以收復被佔領土，否則無論如何都會如此。 第三，莫斯科將抵制任何真正的談判，尤其是因為普丁意識到時間站在他一邊，因此沒有動力去解決。但普丁無法簽署任何可信的文件，因此這並不像看起來那麼嚴重。儘管最近流傳的一項協議表明俄羅斯希望在 2022 年達成協議，但莫斯科作為談判夥伴已失去信譽。烏克蘭及其支持者可以而且應該在沒有普丁的情況下實現和平。結果將是烏克蘭缺乏國際公認的邊界，但正如西德所表明的那樣，只要邊界劃分明確且軍事上可防禦，這就不是加入烏克蘭的障礙。 第四，許多烏克蘭人會攻擊他們的總統弗拉基米爾·澤連斯基採取這些步驟。他可以而且應該指責西方作為回應，以保護自己的國內利益。這對烏克蘭人來說將是一個重大好處，這在學者傑德·麥格林的著作中顯而易見，他認為疲倦的烏克蘭軍隊正在日益失去希望和戰鬥意願。儘管他們不願意承認分裂，但他們會從知道對他們的家人來說，烏克蘭的大部分地區已經變得安全而獲得靈感。 最後，在加入過程中保護獨立的烏克蘭將非常困難。然而，最近允許使用西方提供的武器攻擊俄羅斯境內某些目標的決定表明，俄羅斯對風險的容忍度有所提高。正如麥格林所說，這種意願可能會被推動，以涵蓋在入盟過程中分階段在臨時分界線上空設立禁飛區。 下一個盟友 該提議最終建立在對第五條的持久性和威懾力的信念之上。懷疑論者可能會爭辯說，烏克蘭加入北約可能是導致他改變主意、導致災難性升級的事件，這並非沒有道理。但即使在2022 年秋天，俄羅斯軍隊在烏克蘭快速推進之前羞辱性地逃跑，而且據報道普京考慮使用核武器，他也沒有違反第五條。 鑑於俄羅斯人儘管烏克蘭做出了英勇的努力，卻堅定了自己的路線，而且烏克蘭加入北約後將放棄使用武力並限制軍事基礎設施，因此相信第 5 條將成立並非沒有道理。 最重要的是，時間在流逝，剩下的可行選擇很少。如果烏克蘭不想隨著美國支持的減少而陷入困境——懇求歐洲人填補國會不和或川普第二任期的斷絕所造成的差距——就必須考慮所有選擇，包括不太理想的選擇，將其在北約的安全制度化。挪威和西德展示瞭如何做到這一點。對於烏克蘭和聯盟來說，採取這條道路要比繼續推遲加入歐盟直至普丁放棄在烏克蘭的野心或俄羅斯取得軍事突破之前要好得多。這條道路將使烏克蘭在面對俄羅斯孤立的情況下更接近持久的安全、自由和繁榮——換句話說，走向勝利。 ME 薩洛特是約翰霍普金斯大學高級國際研究學院教授，也是《一英寸不到：美國、俄羅斯和冷戰後僵局的形成》一書的作者。 我薩洛特的更多作品 更多的： 烏克蘭 俄羅斯地緣 政治經濟學 對外援助國際機構北約安全防禦與軍事戰略與衝突戰爭與軍事戰略美國外交政策烏克蘭戰爭 最常閱讀的文章 破碎的承諾？ 關於北約擴張，西方到底告訴莫斯科甚麼 瑪麗·埃莉斯·薩羅特 法國如何淪為極右派 最終，勒龐幾乎不需要透過節制來獲得權力 塞西爾·奧爾杜伊 史塔默能拯救英國嗎？ 為什麼工黨的壓倒性勝利可能無法扭轉國家的衰落 芬坦·奧圖爾 北約對世界意味著什麼 75年後，聯盟依然不可或缺 延斯·斯托爾滕貝格 推薦文章 2024 年 5 月，俄羅斯士兵在莫斯科行進 俄羅斯精英如何與戰爭和平相處 莫斯科的勝利削弱了對克里姆林宮的反對 米哈伊爾·齊加爾 2024 年 4 月，烏克蘭軍隊在烏克蘭頓內茨克地區 如何讓普丁相信他會輸 西方必須證明它可以在烏克蘭擊敗俄羅斯 丹·奧特曼 北約對世界意味著什麼 75年後，聯盟依然不可或缺 延斯·斯托爾滕貝格 2024 年 7 月 3 日 2024 年 4 月，斯洛伐克萊斯特舉行的北約軍事演習上的旗幟 下週，北約 32 個國家的領導人將在華盛頓特區舉行北約成立 75 週年峰會。他們將慶祝歐洲和北美團結75週年——這種團結保護了跨大西洋和平、民主和繁榮。但這次高峰會不僅僅是慶祝活動，還將提供一個機會，讓人們能夠做出對歐洲和北美 10 億人的未來至關重要的決定。 如今，他們的安全受到威脅。 2022 年 2 月，俄羅斯總統普丁 (Vladimir Putin)向烏克蘭派遣坦克，引發了歐洲自二戰以來最血腥的衝突，打破了歐洲大陸的和平，並在全球舞台上製造了動盪。日復一日，他正在將這場戰爭進一步升級。俄羅斯飛彈不僅不斷瞄準烏克蘭公民、城市和關鍵基礎設施，克里姆林宮也針對北約國家進行協調一致的敵對行動，包括破壞、網路攻擊和虛假資訊。與此同時，莫斯科仍在繼續揮舞其核武刀。 普丁無意很快結束這場戰爭，他越來越多地與包括中國在內的其他威權國家結盟，這些國家希望看到美國失敗、歐洲分裂和北約​​動搖。這說明，當今世界，安全已不是地區問題，而是全球問題。歐洲的安全影響亞洲，亞洲的安全影響歐洲。 隨時了解狀況。 每週提供深入分析。 這些都是巨大的挑戰，需要做出大膽的決定，這也是聯盟領導人將在北約峰會上解決的問題。從國內開始，我們將加強自身防禦，確保人民安全。我們也將加強對烏克蘭的支持，並與印太夥伴在共同安全關切上攜手合作。結果將是一個更強大的北約——準備好應對當前和長期的挑戰。 更大更好 北約的主要目的不是打仗，而是預防戰爭。這就是該聯盟在四分之三個世紀裡成功做到的事情，即使在冷戰最危險的時期，當時北約邊境有數十萬做好戰鬥準備的蘇聯軍隊。經驗告訴我們，防止任何攻擊的最佳方法是確保我們的威懾仍然可信，我們的防禦仍然強大。換句話說，維護和平的最好方法就是做好戰爭準備。 冷戰的結束緩解了歐洲的緊張局勢，但 2014 年標誌著跨大西洋安全的轉折點。在俄羅斯非法吞併克里米亞並破壞烏克蘭東部穩定之後，北約重新將重點放在威懾和防禦的核心任務上。該聯盟開始了一代人以來最重大的集體防禦變革。它放棄了境外的重大行動，重新把重點放在加強國內防禦上——在所有領域部署更多部隊，提高戰備狀態。北約也為與中國的持久競爭做好了更好的準備，包括減少有害的依賴並加強對其關鍵基礎設施、戰略物資和供應鏈的保護。 今天，北約更加強大。聯盟的軍隊訓練有素、裝備精良。五十萬軍隊在陸地、海洋、空中、太空和網路空間等各領域處於高度戒備狀態，準備隨時保衛每個北約盟友。他們訓練如何透過大型、高要求的演習無縫協作，例如今年的「堅定捍衛者」演習，北美軍隊跨越大西洋，穿越歐洲，並與歐洲軍隊一起演習——總共約有 90,000 名士兵參與。 北約國家也在安全方面投入更多資金。自2014年以來，各成員國國防預算均增加。光是今年，歐洲盟國和加拿大就將國防開支增加了 18%，這是冷戰結束以來的最大增幅。 2014年，當我擔任北約秘書長時，只有三個盟國 將GDP的2%用於國防：希臘、英國和美國。當普丁在 2022 年 2 月對烏克蘭發動全面入侵時，達到目標的還不到 10 人。今年，有 23 個盟友達到或超過 2%。歐洲和加拿大確實已經採取了行動。美國並沒有獨自承擔聯盟共同安全的重擔。 需要明確的是，北約加強防禦並不是為了挑起戰爭。它這樣做是為了保護和平。我不認為對北約國家有任何迫在眉睫的軍事攻擊風險，因為該聯盟的威懾作用有效。每個人都看到了聯盟放鬆警戒所面臨的風險。透過變得更強大，我們變得更安全。 隨機應變 自2022年2月俄羅斯全面入侵烏克蘭以來，北約國家已提供大量軍事援助，協助烏克蘭抵禦俄羅斯的侵略。這種支援在戰場上發揮了很大的作用。最初，許多人預計戰爭時間會很短，基輔將在幾天內落入俄羅斯手中，烏克蘭將在幾週內落入手中。相反，烏克蘭人表現得很堅強。在北約的支持下，他們勇敢地為自己的國家和自由而戰，收復了俄羅斯佔領的一半以上領土，並擊退了黑海的俄羅斯艦隊。後者的成功使他們能夠重新開始向世界市場出口烏克蘭糧食。 援助的提供嚴重拖延，為戰場帶來了嚴重後果。幾個月來，美國無法通過新的一攬子援助計劃，歐洲也無法按照承諾的規模提供彈藥。我四月在基輔時親眼目睹了這一點，烏克蘭總統弗拉基米爾·澤倫斯基向我解釋了烏克蘭如何在武器裝備上處於劣勢，無法擊落俄羅斯飛彈和無人機。從那時起，事情發生了變化。大西洋兩岸的北約盟國均發布了重大新公告，其中包括美國提供的 600 億美元一攬子計劃，以提供烏克蘭急需的彈藥和防空系統。 然而現實是，為了讓烏克蘭獲勝，北約需要做得更多、更快。為此，在華盛頓峰會上，盟國將同意由北約主導對烏克蘭的安全援助和培訓。這將使聯盟的支持真正跨大西洋，並減輕目前處於領先地位的美國的負擔。鑑於 99% 的軍事支援已經來自北約成員國，其中大約一半來自美國，另一半來自歐洲和加拿大，這一轉變也是有道理的。我還預計我們將就財政承諾達成一致，為烏克蘭提供所需的可預測性。我們想明確表示，我們將長期致力於此。我們對烏克蘭的支持越有力，普丁就越早意識到他不能等我們，這場戰爭也能越快結束。 加強我們的支持並不意味著北約成為這場衝突的一方。該聯盟並不尋求與俄羅斯對抗。但我們已經並將繼續竭盡全力支持烏克蘭的基本自衛權，正如《聯合國憲章》所規定的那樣。 同船 最後，在下週的峰會上，北約將深化與其全球夥伴的關係——尤其是在印太地區。我期待在華盛頓歡迎澳洲、日本、紐西蘭和韓國的領導人。這將是這些國家第三次參加北約峰會：這證明了我們不斷發展的關係和共同利益。無論現在或未來，我們都將共同對抗威權主義、維護全球規則並保護我們的民主價值。我們將透過烏克蘭、網路、虛假資訊、新技術和國防工業生產等領域的旗艦項目加強務實合作。 北約是歐洲和北美的聯盟，並將繼續如此。但我們面臨的挑戰是國際性的。烏克蘭戰爭清楚地證明了這一事實。如果沒有亞洲威權朋友的支持，俄羅斯將無法維持這場戰爭。伊朗和北韓分別向俄羅斯提供致命的無人機和砲彈，以換取俄羅斯的技術和軍事物資。 就北京而言，它正在為莫斯科的戰爭努力提供重要支持。在公開場合，中國國家主席習近平希望世界相信他正在推動和平。然而，私下里，他透過向俄羅斯輸送半導體和微電子等高端技術來加劇衝突，莫斯科用這些技術來生產飛彈、坦克和飛機。同時，習近平希望與西方保持良好關係，以避免制裁並保持貿易暢通。但他不能兩全其美。在某種程度上，中國對俄羅斯非法戰爭的支持必然要付出代價。 華盛頓峰會為北約提供了再次展示團結和決心的機會。北約面臨的挑戰太大，任何一個國家都無法單獨應對——即使是世界第一強國美國也是如此。美國擁有世界四分之一的經濟，但北約盟國加起來擁有世界一半的經濟和一半的軍事實力。總之，我們的威懾更加可信，我們對烏克蘭的支持更加穩定，我們與外部夥伴的合作更加有效。普丁和習近平堅決反對北約，因為它代表了他們最害怕的東西：選擇自己命運的自由。他們討厭歐盟，因為它擁有他們所沒有的東西：32個盟國團結在一起的強大力量。當這些國家的領導人下週前往華盛頓峰會時，他們必須為一個日益危險的世界做好準備。不是單獨行動，而是在一個強大的北約組織中共同行動。 延斯·斯托爾滕貝格是北約秘書長。 更多延斯·斯托爾滕貝格的作品 更多的： 歐洲 世界 外交 地緣政治 全球化 國際機構 北約 烏克蘭 安全 戰 最常閱讀的文章 破碎的承諾？ 關於北約擴張，西方到底告訴莫斯科甚麼 瑪麗·埃莉斯·薩羅特 法國如何淪為極右派 最終，勒龐幾乎不需要透過節制來獲得權力 塞西爾·奧爾杜伊 史塔默能拯救英國嗎？ 為什麼工黨的壓倒性勝利可能無法扭轉國家的衰落 芬坦·奧圖爾 北約對世界意味著什麼 75年後，聯盟依然不可或缺 延斯·斯托爾滕貝格 推薦文章 2024 年 5 月，俄羅斯士兵在莫斯科行進 俄羅斯精英如何與戰爭和平相處 莫斯科的勝利削弱了對克里姆林宮的反對 米哈伊爾·齊加爾 2024 年 6 月，羅馬尼亞康斯坦察，一架芬蘭戰鬥機靠近北約旗幟 北約缺失的支柱 聯盟需要一個更強大的歐洲 馬蒂厄·德羅因、肖恩·莫納漢和吉姆·湯森 A Better Path for Ukraine and NATO What Kyiv Could Do Now for a Place in the Alliance By M. E. Sarotte July 8, 2024 NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg addressing Ukrainian lawmakers, Kyiv, April 2024 We know what will not happen at NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington this week: Ukraine becoming the alliance’s 33rd member. U.S. officials are talking instead about giving Ukraine “a bridge to NATO,” as National Security Council Senior Director for Europe Michael Carpenter put it recently. But when it comes to membership, many of the alliance’s leaders—including the United States and Germany—remain concerned that a formal move will be impossible as long as Kyiv is at war, given the centrality of the alliance’s Article 5 guarantee that an attack against one will be considered an attack against all. Yet such concerns, while understandable, do not take sufficient account of either the current state of U.S. politics or the war itself. Ukraine’s “bridge to NATO” could easily become a bridge to nowhere if Donald Trump wins the November U.S. presidential election. Trump has threatened to withdraw from the alliance—or, as former NATO and Trump administration officials wrote together in Foreign Affairs recently, he could undermine the alliance by “withholding funding, recalling U.S. troops and commanders from Europe, and blocking important decisions in the North Atlantic Council.” He has also pledged to end the war in Ukraine in a single day. Even without a Trump victory, it is unlikely that the flow of assistance from the U.S. and European governments will continue at anywhere near the levels of the past two and a half years. Chances of a major Russian advance or breakthrough will grow. Those could cause destabilizing refugee movements and panic among Russian border states (and beyond). Some countries might respond by doing what French President Emmanuel Macron proposed—sending their own forces to Ukraine, which could provoke retaliation against their NATO-protected home territories. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. For the United States and its allies, securing Ukraine’s future shouldn’t be dismissed as an altruistic act that can be put off until later; it’s an act of self-defense that demands implementation now. Although bilateral accords are useful, they lack staying power at a time when elections scramble governments on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s hard to avoid seeing NATO membership as the most enduring solution to a conflict with potentially catastrophic consequences. So how could Ukraine join the alliance in the near future, given that Russian troops are almost certain to occupy portions of its sovereign territory for years to come? History provides answers and precedents as to how to grant membership to a divided state—even one on the frontline. These historical models aren’t a perfect fit, their chances of working are far from certain, and the costs involved would be gut-wrenchingly high, because they include Ukraine ending major combat and provisionally tolerating division of its territory. Yet despite the costs, it’s time to consider these models seriously—because if any country deserves a hearing on some kind of creative way to become an ally as soon as possible, it’s Ukraine. There’s room for creativity, because although NATO’s 1949 founding treaty does obligate allies to treat an attack on one as an attack on all, it doesn’t impose one-size-fits-all membership requirements, meaning that some countries have been able to negotiate bespoke terms. France, for example, remained an ally even after President Charles de Gaulle committed seemingly the ultimate dealbreaker in the mid-1960s—withdrawing from NATO’s integrated military command. Two other examples are even more relevant: Norway and West Germany, which both found ways to join the alliance despite, respectively, proximity to and conflict with Moscow. NORTHERN EXPOSURE Seventy-five years ago, Norway wanted what Ukraine wants today: to become an ally despite bordering Russia (then in the Soviet Union). Although Moscow wasn’t invading Norway at that time, or ever—in fact, the Red Army had even helped liberate some northern Norwegian territory from the Nazis—Norwegians had bitter memories of how their onetime neutrality had ended in brutal Nazi occupation. And they were horrified as Czechoslovakia—another formerly occupied country between East and West—fell under Moscow’s control in 1948. These experiences diminished the attractiveness of continued neutrality. Norwegians debated two options: stronger Nordic defense cooperation or a transatlantic alliance—despite the risk of becoming the only NATO founding member with a Soviet border, thereby bearing responsibility for bringing the alliance to Russia’s door. Norway settled on the second option, but with a twist. The Norwegian government issued a unilateral declaration on February 1, 1949, two months before the formation of the alliance, stating that it would not “make available for the armed forces of foreign powers bases on Norwegian territory, as long as Norway is not attacked or subject to the threat of attack.” It later added similar restrictions on nuclear weapons. There was allied grumbling about this then and afterward. During post–Cold War NATO enlargement, the Clinton administration’s National Security Council even argued against “a ‘Norway’ status for new NATO members.” But there has been broad consensus among Norwegians that this strategy has served their national security interests well, resulting not in “NATO lite” but in full Article 5 status, with the option of changing Norway’s posture in response to new developments. To this day, Oslo can react to threats by altering or dropping these self-imposed restrictions, providing a mechanism for signaling and deterrence. Despite the many differences between Norway in the Cold War and Ukraine today, the Norwegian model remains relevant, because it shows how a country sharing a border with Russia can join NATO: by carving out targeted, unilateral exceptions to mitigate the risk of a hostile response from Moscow. And there’s another benefit to the Norwegian model. Both former Russian President Boris Yeltsin and President Vladimir Putin, his successor, decried NATO expanding its membership. But when push came to shove in various negotiations, they revealed a different bottom line: opposition to NATO expanding its infrastructure. For example, on December 17, 2021, Putin issued a de facto ultimatum to NATO—the “sign here or else Ukraine gets it” treaty—demanding not the rollback of NATO memberships but of its infrastructure, specifically “military forces and weaponry,” along with a block on deploying “land-based intermediate and short-range missiles.” This distinction presents an opening. In 1997, it enabled NATO to make post–Cold War enlargement minimally tolerable to Moscow by declaring, in the NATO-Russia Founding Act, that the alliance would carry out missions in new member states by means other than the “permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” and associated infrastructure and weapons. Norway’s homegrown strategy had long since achieved the same—without preventing the country from building a headquarters for Allied Forces Northern Europe and stockpiling heavy military equipment for U.S. and Canadian forces, among many other preparations. DIVIDED WE STAND The West German path to membership in 1955 is relevant for a different reason: it shows how a country can become an ally despite being divided. Advocating for this model requires strong disclaimers. Ideally, Ukraine would repel Russian invaders and restore its 1991 borders. Yet despite their courage, Ukrainian forces have heartbreakingly little chance of doing so through military means in the near term. The odds will become even smaller if Trump wins the November election. Accordingly, it’s a matter of awful but urgent necessity to consider membership consistent with division—although not in the way proposed by commentators during the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius. They argued that, since a divided Germany had joined NATO, a divided Ukraine could, too—immediately and as-is. That’s a serious misreading of history, however, because a divided Germany was not in NATO. West Germans got into NATO; East Germans got left in the lurch. Simply put, no state without clear borders can join NATO because, for Article 5 to be credible, the extent of its coverage must be clearly defined. Yet having a defined border does not mean having an irrevocable or even an internationally recognized border, as long as a country follows West Germany’s example and adopts a strategy of provisionality—that is, making clear from the start that the border is provisional. The West German path to NATO membership in 1955 shows how a country can become an ally despite being divided. The best way to understand this strategy is to recall how West German leaders executed it. They realized that they had to tolerate division for an open-ended period and to renounce “recourse to force to achieve the reunification of Germany.” But they made clear that they were enduring, not accepting, that division by refusing to recognize the inner German border. They adopted not a constitution but a temporary “basic law,” calling on “the entire German people . . . to achieve by free self-determination the unity and freedom of Germany,” and pledging to finalize the country’s legal structure only after that event. They chose as their capital not a major city but a Rhineland town called Bonn, enhancing the notion of West Germany as a provisional construct; making a city like Frankfurt the capital would have seemed too permanent. And they upheld the goal of unification in diplomatic agreements from NATO accession to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which maintained the possibility of border changes at West German insistence. Kyiv of course deserves better than this bitter model. But given that Ukraine and its backers have been unable to end the de facto division of the country, that division is for now a reality. Better to follow the West German example and achieve full NATO membership for independent Ukraine than to watch essential U.S. support dwindle as Congress bickers and Trump’s reelection odds increase. And Ukraine can hope to follow the West German model in another way. After joining NATO in 1955, West Germany solidified both its economic recovery and new democratic norms, becoming a major exporting state and strong NATO ally—a future devoutly to be wished for Ukraine. As the historian Stephen Kotkin has put it: “The sine qua non of Ukraine winning the peace is an armistice and an end to the fighting as soon as possible, an obtainable security guarantee, and European Union accession. In other words, a Ukraine, safe and secure, which has joined the West.” NATO membership covering most of Ukraine would allow the country to begin moving toward such a future without having to wait for Putin to concede. MORE THAN HALF A LOAF Given the lessons in these models, leaders of NATO member states should, in private, encourage Kyiv to do three things: First, define a provisional, militarily defensible border. Second, agree to self-limitations on infrastructure on unoccupied territory (such as the permanent stationing of foreign troops or nuclear weapons) with the important Norwegian disclaimer that these limits are valid only as long as Ukraine is not under attack or threat of attack. Third, and most painful, undertake not to use military force beyond that border except in self-defense, as the West Germans did, in order to assure NATO allies that they won’t suddenly find themselves at war with Russia as soon as Ukraine becomes a member. The cost of this step would be acceptance of open-ended division, but the benefit would be to give most of Ukraine a safe haven in NATO. Once settled, Kyiv and the alliance would go public with these agreements. NATO could amplify Kyiv’s unilateral statement with a similar declaration. The goal would be for independent Ukraine to join NATO as soon as feasible, ideally before January 20, 2025—but, if need be, as part of Trump’s “deal.” While these announcements would, taken together, represent a fait accompli—that is, they would not be negotiated with Russia—there would still be an implicit negotiation: instead of a land-for-peace deal, the carrot would be no infrastructure for peace. Raising this issue publicly would, at a minimum, have the benefit of revealing two key Russian preferences: whether Putin will once again negotiate over defense infrastructure, and whether Russian cooperation and NATO membership are mutually exclusive. This proposal would come with significant risks and challenges. At least five initial ones come to mind: First, all allies would have to approve Ukrainian accession, which in the United States requires Senate approval. That’s a steep uphill climb, but it’s a climb on any path to NATO membership, so not a unique burden to this proposal. For Ukraine, the clock is ticking and remaining viable options are few. Second, Russia will, to put it mildly, oppose Ukrainian NATO membership. Given that the former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has called for the partition of Ukraine, however, Moscow would have the face-saving option of calling that a victory. And given that Putin’s highest priority—even more than success in Ukraine—is the survival of his personal regime, a marketable version of Ukrainian alliance membership might be enough. The people who would suffer are those, tragically, already under Moscow’s occupation. But unless the West decides it’s worth significant escalation to reclaim occupied territories, that will be the case in any event. Third, Moscow will boycott any real negotiations, not least because Putin senses time is on his side and so has little incentive to settle. But there’s no document Putin could sign that would be believable, so this is less of a problem than it appears. Despite the recent circulation of an accord suggesting Russia wanted a deal in 2022, Moscow retains no credibility as a negotiating partner. Ukraine and its supporters can and should aim at a peace without Putin. The result would be the lack of an internationally recognized border for Ukraine—but, as West Germany shows, that’s not an obstacle to membership as long as borders are clearly demarcated and militarily defensible. Fourth, many Ukrainians would attack their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for taking these steps. He could and should blame the West in reply, in order to protect himself domestically. And there would be a major benefit to Ukrainians, one that becomes apparent in the work of the scholar Jade McGlynn, who argues that weary Ukrainian forces are increasingly losing hope and willingness to fight. Although hating to concede division, they would find inspiration in knowing that, for their families, a large part of Ukraine had become safe. Finally, protecting independent Ukraine during the accession process would be enormously difficult. The recent decision to allow use of Western-provided weapons against some targets inside Russia, however, shows an increased tolerance for risk. As McGlynn has argued, that willingness could be pushed to cover the phased introduction of a no-fly zone over the provisional line of division during the accession process. THE NEXT ALLY This proposal rests, ultimately, on a belief in the staying and deterrent power of Article 5. For all of his seeming brashness and brutality, Putin has not launched any major attacks on Article 5 territory. Skeptics might argue, not without merit, that Ukraine joining NATO could be the event that causes him to change his mind, leading to catastrophic escalation. But even in the fall of 2022, as Russian troops fled humiliatingly before a rapid Ukrainian advance and Putin reportedly considered the use of nuclear weapons, he did not violate Article 5. Given that Russians have, despite heroic Ukrainian efforts, firmed up their lines, and that Ukrainian NATO membership would come with a renunciation of use of force and a limit on military infrastructure, it’s not unreasonable to believe Article 5 will hold. The bottom line is that the clock is ticking, and remaining viable options are few. If Ukraine is not to be left scrambling as U.S. support dwindles—imploring Europeans to plug the gaps caused by congressional discord or second-term Trump cutoffs—it is necessary to consider all options, including less than ideal ones, for institutionalizing its security in NATO. Norway and West Germany show how. And taking this path would be far preferable, for Ukraine and the alliance, than continuing to put off membership until Putin has given up his ambitions in Ukraine, or until Russian has made a military breakthrough. This path would bring Ukraine closer to enduring security, freedom, and prosperity in the face of Russian isolation—in other words, toward victory. You are reading a free article. Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access. Paywall-free reading of new articles and over a century of archives Unlock access to iOS/Android apps to save editions for offline reading Six issues a year in print and online, plus audio articles M. E. SAROTTE is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate. MORE BY M. E. SAROTTE More: Ukraine Russia Geopolitics Economics Foreign Aid International Institutions NATO Security Defense & Military Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy U.S. Foreign Policy War in Ukraine Most-Read Articles A Broken Promise? What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion Mary Elise Sarotte How France Fell to the Far Right In the End, Le Pen Hardly Had to Moderate to Gain Power Cécile Alduy Can Starmer Save Britain? Why Labour’s Sweeping Victory May Not Reverse the Country’s Decline Fintan O’Toole What NATO Means to the World After 75 Years, the Alliance Remains Indispensable Jens Stoltenberg Recommended Articles Russian soldiers marching in Moscow, May 2024 How Russian Elites Made Peace With the War Moscow’s Victories Have Dampened Opposition to the Kremlin Mikhail Zygar Ukrainian troops in Ukraine's Donetsk region, April 2024 How to Convince Putin He Will Lose The West Must Show That It Can Outlast Russia in Ukraine Dan Altman Can Starmer Save Britain? Why Labour’s Sweeping Victory May Not Reverse the Country’s Decline By Fintan O’Toole July 5, 2024 Labour Party leader Keir Starmer at a campaign event in the town of Hitchin, north of London, July 2024 Although the polls had been predicting it for many months, the result of the United Kingdom’s July 4 general election was nonetheless stunning. This was the worst performance in the 190-year history of the Conservative Party. It lost almost half its share of the vote and 250 parliamentary seats. One former prime minister (Liz Truss), nine cabinet ministers (including the secretaries of defense, education, and justice), and other prominent Conservative figureheads were unceremoniously ejected from the House of Commons by their constituents. This was a tidal wave of anger washing over not just outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak but also the last 14 years of Tory rule, and it made landfall with a deafening roar. Seldom in any democracy has a governing party gone so quickly from triumph—Boris Johnson won a huge majority in 2019—to disaster. The reasons are clear: a botched exit from the European Union, stark social and economic decline, institutional decay, a revolving door of ineffective and sometimes disastrous leaders, Johnson’s anarchic antics, and Truss’s ill-fated and short-lived experiment with extreme neoliberal economics. Over the last decade and a half, the widespread feeling that the United Kingdom was on its last legs was reflected in surging English nativism and Scottish, Welsh, and Irish separatism that in different ways threatened to pull the union apart. The voters have left the world in no doubt as to whom they blame for this malaise. On the other side of the coin, Labour leader Keir Starmer now finds his party with a projected 413 seats, a total that brings him close to repeating Tony Blair’s historic victory of 1997. From the very low state it was in when he became leader just five years ago, Labour has not only been resurrected; it has ascended into a heaven of euphoria. It has recaptured most of the “red wall” of working-class constituencies that, in 2019, it lost to Johnson’s strange charm and his promise to Get Brexit Done. It has regained its dominance in Scotland, which had seemed over the course of this century to have become the fiefdom of the pro-independence Scottish National Party. It has also won 27 of 32 seats in Wales. The new Labour government can therefore claim to be a genuinely “British” one in ways that none of its predecessors since Blair’s could. In the short term, the threat of the country breaking up has undoubtedly receded. The United Kingdom under Johnson—who inaugurated an especially unruly series of chaotic Conservative governments—seemed to be under the same spell of performative, personality-driven reactionary politics as the United States under former President Donald Trump. Now, the accession of the pragmatic, charisma-free Starmer bucks the trend toward the far right in so many European democracies, from Italy and France to the Netherlands and Sweden. It holds out hope that the center can hold after all. The sigh of relief will be heard far beyond the shores of the United Kingdom. And yet, as overwhelming as they are, these results come with a very large caveat. Labour’s overall share of the vote, at 34 percent, was actually quite low. It rose by less than two percent from the poor showing of 2019. The popular rage that has swept the Tories out of power is not matched by a surge of belief in Starmer’s ability to save the country. Starmer owes his huge majority to the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system, which can conjure dramatic national swings in seat numbers from relatively small changes in individual constituencies. Equally, the vast sea change in the relative fortunes of the Conservatives and Labour in just five years suggests how extremely volatile the United Kingdom remains. Even as Starmer grasps the reins of power so firmly, the road ahead remains rocky. The deeper tremors that have slowly but inexorably been eroding the social and political foundations of the country will continue to rumble just under the surface. Although it was hardly mentioned in the campaign, the Brexit debacle is a continuing reality that will severely constrain Starmer’s frantic push for economic growth, without which his promise of renewal will quickly turn hollow. Living standards are in shocking decline, amplifying social divisions and widening the gap between southern England and the rest of the United Kingdom. And without vast new infusions of cash, the looming collapse of public and health services threatens to destroy some of the few remaining sources of a collective British identity. Labour’s overall share of the vote was actually quite low. None of these challenges can be met without radical reform to the basic system of government. For years now, London has shown itself to be incapable of solving large-scale problems or giving all citizens the belief that the central institutions of power belong to them. The slogan that won the Brexit referendum for the Leave side in 2016—Take Back Control—was so effective because it identified a genuine loss of faith in the promise of democracy: that the people are running the show. The wildly careening course of British politics since then has surely done nothing to restore that faith. Nor does Starmer present himself as a man who lights fires. His public demeanor is stiff and remarkably downbeat. Despite its slogan of “change,” his party’s offering to the electorate was relentlessly risk averse. Labour has accepted the very fiscal constraints laid down by the Conservatives while largely eschewing tax increases to raise the revenue it needs if it is to shore up public services and begin to make up the deficit in investment. Given the multiplying social and economic stresses facing the country, the new leadership will be tempted to avoid bolder reforms in favor of mere crisis management. But such a cautious approach would not really be risk free. It would in fact risk squandering a parliamentary majority of historic proportions. Either the incoming administration can seize the moment to finally shake up the system and confront the core constitutional and democratic issues on which the long-term viability of the union may depend, or it can choose to muddle through and hope for the best. For such a fractured polity, this could be the last time there is such a choice. BACK IN THE D.D.R. From the very start of the campaign, a sense of doom hung over the whole idea of a Conservative United Kingdom. On May 23, the day after Sunak called the unexpectedly early election, he made a campaign stop at the Titanic Quarter in Belfast, an upscale waterfront development area named after the ill-fated ocean liner that was built in shipyards nearby. Inevitably, a reporter asked the prime minister if he was the captain of a sinking ship. After all, it was hard not to predict the dramatic implosion of the Conservatives, who had returned to power under Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010 and then supplied a dizzying merry-go-round of failed leaders since 2016: Theresa May, Johnson, Truss, and finally Sunak. In a recent book, The Conservative Effect 2010–2024, the political historians Anthony Seldon and Tom Egerton have concluded that “overall, it is hard to find a comparable period in the history of the Conservatives which achieved so little, or which left the country at its conclusion in a more troubling state.” Yet the Titanic metaphor raised a less obvious but more profound question. What if the sinking ship is the United Kingdom itself? That the country is in deep trouble is not in dispute. Wage growth between 2010 and 2020 was the lowest over any ten-year period in peacetime since the Napoleonic Wars. The country’s annual growth rate in productivity since 2007 has been a minuscule 0.4 percent, its lowest over an equivalent period since 1826. It is perhaps apt that one of the country’s most popular cultural exports, the Netflix historical fantasy Bridgerton, is set in a version of the early nineteenth century—the last time the British economy was performing so sluggishly. GDP per capita has grown by a mere 4.3 percent over the past 16 years, compared with 46 percent in the previous 16 years. Moreover, GDP growth over the past few years has been driven almost exclusively by increases in the overall size of the population—in other words, by the immigration that both main parties say they want to limit severely. Conservative governments, theoretically tax averse, have been forced to increase overall taxes to a level not seen since 1950, when the United Kingdom was still recovering from World War II. The average annual real wage has fallen about $14,000 below its level before the financial crisis of 2008. These economic trends will not simply disappear with a change in government. Living standards in many parts of the country are in shocking decline. Measures of social well-being are no more encouraging. The National Health Service, a source of justifiable British pride since its inception in 1948, is in crisis: in June, the nonpartisan Institute for Government described its current state as “dismal” and found that “hospital performance is arguably the worst in the NHS’s history.” There are three-quarters of a million more British children living in poverty than when the Conservatives came to power in 2010, and 4.3 million children are going hungry. Many local agencies have gone bankrupt, leading to deep cuts in basic services such as waste collection, social care, and libraries. In 2022, the Commission on the UK’s Future, an independent body chaired by former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, found that on the simple measure of GDP per capita, “half the British population”—more than 30 million people— “live in areas no wealthier than the poorer parts of the former East Germany, poorer than parts of central and eastern Europe, and poorer than the U.S. states of Mississippi and West Virginia.” A sense of decline flows through and around the land in the form of rivers and shores polluted with sewage. In March, one of the great English public rituals—the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race on the River Thames—was for the first time preceded by warnings to the rowers that because of the concentration of E. coli bacteria in the water, they should cover cuts and grazes with waterproof dressings and take care not to swallow any splashes from what used to be called the “Sweet Thames.” The British Environment Agency has found that in 2023, the companies managing the national water supply—water service was privatized by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the late 1980s—spilled more raw, untreated human effluent into the country’s rivers and seas than in any previous year on record. Indeed, the electoral revolt against the Tories in many of their rural bastions was partly driven by the feeling even among traditional Conservative voters that what the poet William Blake called “England’s green and pleasant land” had been blighted. For many of those voters, such concerns are made worse by the awareness that they were, after all, supposed to be entering an era of uplift and optimism. Just five years ago, in his first speech in the House of Commons after he swept to power as prime minister, Johnson insisted that the years of “managed decline” were over and hailed “the beginning of a new golden age.” Of course, the fulcrum of this transformation was supposed to be the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. The narrative spun by Johnson and his allies was that the country’s natural exuberance had been stifled for half a century by bureaucrats in Brussels and that freed from these encumbrances, the union would flourish. The cold reality is that Brexit has merely shown that the United Kingdom has no one to blame for its problems but itself. And those home-grown problems have been made worse by the folly of erecting new barriers between British exporters and their primary markets in Europe. DON’T MENTION IT Among the more striking features of Starmer and Labour’s campaign this spring was the utter absence of Brexit from party talking points. This silence may, in purely electoral terms, have been wise: polling now suggests that just 13 percent of voters see relations with the EU as one of the most important issues facing the country. Anand Menon, the director of the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, noted during the campaign that “if you do focus groups and mention Brexit, the biggest reaction you get from voters is a yawn and an eye-roll.” Yet it is nonetheless remarkable for the opposition to decline to attack the ruling party for its single greatest policy fiasco and for voters to seem bored and irritated by their country’s most momentous political change of the last half century. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, Johnson and his fellow advocates had persuaded a small majority of voters that breaking with Brussels would restore “Global Britain” to its natural place at the summit of prosperity and achievement. In fact, this vision was more a narrowing than an expansion of the horizons of Britishness. It was driven by an inchoate but resurgent English nationalism. It had little appeal in multicultural London, in Scotland, or in Northern Ireland, all of which voted heavily to stay in the EU, as did Welsh-speaking Wales. But enough of Johnson’s English compatriots were persuaded of this proposition to give him a massive parliamentary majority in the election of December 2019, just seven weeks before the Brexit deal was consummated. It is hard to think of a successful political project whose luster has faded as quickly as Brexit’s. In June, in a report titled “Life in the Slow Lane,” the nonpartisan Resolution Foundation found that “since 2019, Britain’s relative performance in goods exports has tanked,” noting that it has grown at just 1.1 percent annually, a mere fifth of the average for members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The reasons for this kind of collapse are not mysterious: choosing to leave the world’s largest single market has consequences. As the report boils it down in hard cash, had the United Kingdom preserved its pre-Brexit market share, its exports would have grown by $64 billion instead of shrinking by $4 billion between 2019 and 2022. People shielding themselves with Union flag umbrellas, London, May 2024 People shielding themselves with Union flag umbrellas, London, May 2024 Toby Melville / Reuters Increasingly, the British economy is kept afloat by its export of financial, legal, technical, and advertising services, much of it driven by U.S. companies outsourcing this kind of work to British firms, and notably by private equity outfits. This is very good for bankers, lawyers, ad executives, and management consultants—but far less so for farmers, manufacturing workers, and ordinary consumers. There are many more losers than winners: in March, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility found that its prediction that Brexit would lead to a long-term four percent drop in productivity is being borne out, one of many factors contributing to the worst decline in living standards since the 1950s. Amid these disastrous effects, few in the British political class seem willing to say the “B-word.” Given that just 18 percent of those who voted Leave in 2016 now think Brexit is going well, Sunak, an enthusiastic Brexiteer, declined to even mention it on the campaign trail. But consider Nigel Farage, the veteran anti-immigrant and anti-EU campaigner who now leads the far-right Reform Party. If Farage can reasonably be said to be the progenitor of Brexit, he now seems able to do no more than shake his head in disappointment at the way his child has turned out and issue vague admonitions that it must do better. Starmer and Labour’s omerta may be far more telling. In the weeks before the election, Starmer hardly uttered a word about Europe; as the incoming prime minister, he will have a strong temptation to ignore not just Brexit itself but all the unresolved questions of British identity that were wrapped up in it. In part, this may be a matter of sheer expediency. Almost all the country’s public services—from health and social care to policing and prisons to water and sewage to schools and libraries and even to basic nutrition for large parts of the population—are struggling. The country urgently needs massive amounts of public investment. But Labour has accepted the fiscal restraints it has inherited from the Conservatives—government borrowing is to be limited to three percent of GDP and overall government debt is targeted to keep falling—and it has promised not to raise taxes for “working people.” Squaring that circle will be so hard that Starmer may well feel that large-scale political reforms are a luxury he cannot afford. HOLLOW EMPIRE But Starmer will soon confront the inescapable truth that he cannot address the country’s economic failure without also confronting the profound problems of the union itself. First, Labour will need growth to fund those urgent public services improvements it has to deliver to its newly expanded electorate. Ironically, because its trade with the rest of the world has shrunk, the United Kingdom has actually become more dependent on European markets since 2019. The solution is obvious: the government has to undo at least some of the damage it has done to its trade with the EU. Starmer has gestured broadly in this direction but has ruled out the only moves that would actually make a difference—seeking to rejoin the EU’s single market or its customs union. Something has to give, and when it does, all the big questions that were raised by Brexit—sovereignty, the United Kingdom’s postimperial place in the world, the antiquated nature of the country’s democracy, the tensions between its individual nations—will be back on the table. It would make sense, therefore, for Starmer to address these large existential issues while his government still has the air of novelty and while the British electorate is so clearly crying out for a fresh start. The second reason why Starmer cannot ignore the parlous state of the union is the strong connection between power and prosperity. The parts of the country with the least political power—roughly speaking, the northern region of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—are also the ones that are the most impoverished. Feelings of national and regional resentment have been channeled into different forms of separatism—independence movements in the so-called Celtic fringes; “independence” from the EU in England—but they have common roots in the realities of the country’s chasmic geographical inequalities. According to the economist Philip McCann, the United Kingdom is “almost certainly the most interregionally unequal large high-income country” in the world. And those gaps have expanded in recent decades. In 2019, GDP per capita in London was $73,000—almost 90 percent higher than in Scotland and eastern England, where it was just $38,000. Brexit, which has depressed manufacturing exports while allowing the service economy to continue to thrive, has only exacerbated these regional inequalities; just within England itself, the wealth gap between the southeast and the languishing north is expected to reach $290,000 per person by 2030. All the big questions raised by Brexit will be back on the table. Even Boris Johnson recognized this. His signature domestic policy was “levelling up”—bringing all regions up to the standards of the rich southern areas. But neither he nor his successors managed to do much to achieve that goal. In March, a report by the all-party parliamentary Public Accounts Committee found that only ten percent of funding for the “levelling up agenda” had been spent and that Conservative ministers were unable to furnish “any compelling examples” of what the funding had accomplished. These failures are not merely the products of incompetence; they highlight the inability of a top-down postimperial state to devolve real power to its member nations and its neglected regions. As an opposition party, Labour was hardly blind to these issues. In 2022, it published the findings of the Brown Commission on the UK’s Future, which made precisely this connection between the United Kingdom’s economic stagnation and its forms of government: “At the root of this failure” is “an unreformed, over-centralised way of governing that leaves millions of people complaining they are neglected, ignored, and invisible”—people who, as the commission put it, increasingly see themselves “treated as second class citizens in their own country.” It was with this democratic deficit in mind that the Brown Commission proposed radical constitutional changes, among them the abolition of the “indefensible” House of Lords and its replacement with an elected “chamber of the nations and regions,” and greatly enhanced status and powers for the devolved Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish assemblies, as well as for cities and regions in England. It also recommended at least the beginnings of a written constitution, with a “constitutional statute guiding how political power should be shared” as well as “constitutionally protected social rights—such as the right to health care for all based on need, not ability to pay.” At the time, Brown’s ideas were driven by his sense that this may be the last chance for the United Kingdom to right itself. Polling showed that the proposed reforms had significant voter support; they also were endorsed by Starmer. At the launch, the Labour leader predicted that people would someday look back at the report and view it as “the turning point between an old economy that was not working and a new economy that has worked for the whole of the United Kingdom.” Yet none of Brown’s proposals were featured in Labour’s hypercautious election campaign, and Starmer seems disinclined to spend his new stock of political capital on overcoming resistance to such a fundamental rethinking of the union. FIX OR FAIL What the incoming government needs to recognize is that the United Kingdom has already changed irreversibly. It was created and held together by huge historical forces: the development of the British Empire, the forging of a Protestant (and explicitly anti-Catholic) identity, the Industrial Revolution, the apparent invincibility of British arms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the successful invention of a “relatable” monarchy, and the building of a postwar social democracy. All these stabilizers have been kicked away. The empire is no more; the United Kingdom is no longer a majority Christian, let alone Protestant, country; its industrial base was abandoned under Thatcher; its days of military might are long gone; the monarchy, with the death of Queen Elizabeth, has lost its anchor in history; and many of the achievements of British social democracy have been destroyed by the Conservatives. It is still, just about, possible to imagine a whole new kind of union, one that revels in the diversity of a place that has many different national, regional, and ethnic identities and plays to its potential economic strengths by reopening itself to trade and human capital from Europe and further afield. But Starmer and his government would have to begin by acknowledging that what was holding the country back was not, after all, an unaccountable Eurocracy in Brussels but rather an overcentralized government in London—one that was created to rule a far-flung empire of largely voiceless subjects and still rules over a smallish island with citizens who want to feel in control of their own lives. Starmer will certainly try, however hesitantly at first, to rebuild the social democracy that buttressed the union in the decades when the empire was vanishing and gave ordinary people in every part of the country a tangible sense of common belonging. He seems, at least in principle, to understand that the only viable future for the United Kingdom is, in effect, as a federal democracy in which power flows to and from the nations and regions—and the people who inhabit them. He is, moreover, rather good at reinvention, having reinvented himself from his early persona as a radical left-wing human rights lawyer to a stolid technocrat and having given his party a similarly drastic makeover. The economy will not rebound without far-reaching changes in the way the country functions. Can Starmer go further and reinvent the union? It is not at all clear that he wants to take on that task. He seems inclined to see his own triumph across so many different parts of the country as proof that the kingdom is indeed still united and intact; that a restoration of decency, competence, and coherence to government will also serve as a restoration of pride in Britishness itself. In the immediate term, he may well be right. Feelings of relief and renewal will certainly be widespread. But they won’t last unless communities start to see improvements in public services, reductions in poverty, and rises in productivity and wages. Those things in turn will not happen without far-reaching changes in the way the country functions, both internally and in its relations with Europe. The same political systems that got the country into such a deep hole will not suffice to get it out. They are not for the purposes they have to accomplish: bringing the United Kingdom, gradually, back to where it belongs in the EU; restoring pride in institutions such as the National Health Service; convincing people across the union that they have an equal stake in the country’s future. Starmer has to create a virtuous circle in which a radical renewal of the United Kingdom’s sclerotic democracy feeds into and is in turn fed by an energetic revival of its flaccid economy. But if there is no virtuous circle, there will be a vicious one. Political disillusionment will quickly take hold again. Over four million people voted for Farage’s far-right Reform Party, giving it 14 percent of overall party support. Although the workings of the electoral system translated this into just four Commons seats (including one for Farage himself), it gives him a solid base from which he can seek to capitalize on the Conservatives’ disarray. If Starmer fails to turn public anger into a more long-term optimism, the sour English nationalism that Farage taps into will thrive on that hopelessness. With traditional conservatism in such deep disarray, there is the potential for the right-wing of English politics to end in a MAGA-style takeover. Not the least of its consequences will be the blocking of any moves toward taking the country back into Europe. That in turn will renew the drives toward separation in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. Labour’s victory has given the United Kingdom a chance to save itself by remaking itself. It has sprung from a very deep pool of disenchantment with the way things work in the country—and the multiple ways in which they patently do not. If Starmer grasps the truth that his triumph is a function of the United Kingdom’s brokenness, he will have the courage to begin to fix it. If not, it will remain dangerously unfixed. And it may indeed become unfixable. The party that has dominated it for 200 years has imploded. It would be foolish to imagine that the same thing could not happen to the country. FINTAN O’TOOLE is Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton. He is the author of We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. MORE BY FINTAN O’TOOLE More: United Kingdom Campaigns & Elections Politics & Society Ideology Political Development Public Opinion Brexit Most-Read Articles A Broken Promise? 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Why Labour’s Sweeping Victory May Not Reverse the Country’s Decline Fintan O’Toole What NATO Means to the World After 75 Years, the Alliance Remains Indispensable Jens Stoltenberg Recommended Articles British Labour opposition leader Keir Starmer speaking in Bristol, United Kingdom, January 2024 Don’t Bet on a British Revival How the Labour Party Might Win the Election—but Still Lose the Economy Matthias Matthijs and Mark Blyth Shonagh Rae The Case for Progressive Realism Why Britain Must Chart a New Global Course David Lammy A New Americanism Why a Nation Needs a National Story By Jill Lepore March/April 2019 Published on February 5, 2019 Proud to be Americans: at a Trump rally in Huntington, West Virginia, November 2018 In 1986, the Pulitzer Prize–winning, bowtie-wearing Stanford historian Carl Degler delivered something other than the usual pipe-smoking, scotch-on-the-rocks, after-dinner disquisition that had plagued the evening program of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association for nearly all of its centurylong history. Instead, Degler, a gentle and quietly heroic man, accused his colleagues of nothing short of dereliction of duty: appalled by nationalism, they had abandoned the study of the nation. “We can write history that implicitly denies or ignores the nation-state, but it would be a history that flew in the face of what people who live in a nation-state require and demand,” Degler said that night in Chicago. He issued a warning: “If we historians fail to provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us.” The nation-state was in decline, said the wise men of the time. The world had grown global. Why bother to study the nation? Nationalism, an infant in the nineteenth century, had become, in the first half of the twentieth, a monster. But in the second half, it was nearly dead—a stumbling, ghastly wraith, at least outside postcolonial states. And historians seemed to believe that if they stopped studying it, it would die sooner: starved, neglected, and abandoned. Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist, not a historian. But his 1989 essay “The End of History?” illustrated Degler’s point. Fascism and communism were dead, Fukuyama announced at the end of the Cold War. Nationalism, the greatest remaining threat to liberalism, had been “defanged” in the West, and in other parts of the world where it was still kicking, well, that wasn’t quite nationalism. “The vast majority of the world’s nationalist movements do not have a political program beyond the negative desire of independence from some other group or people, and do not offer anything like a comprehensive agenda for socio-economic organization,” Fukuyama wrote. (Needless to say, he has since had to walk a lot of this back, writing in his most recent book about the “unexpected” populist nationalism of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, and the United States’ Donald Trump.) Fukuyama was hardly alone in pronouncing nationalism all but dead. A lot of other people had, too. That’s what worried Degler. Nation-states, when they form, imagine a past. That, at least in part, accounts for why modern historical writing arose with the nation-state. For more than a century, the nation-state was the central object of historical inquiry. From George Bancroft in the 1830s through, say, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., or Richard Hofstadter, studying American history meant studying the American nation. As the historian John Higham put it, “From the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1960s, the nation was the grand subject of American history.” Over that same stretch of time, the United States experienced a civil war, emancipation, reconstruction, segregation, two world wars, and unprecedented immigration—making the task even more essential. “A history in common is fundamental to sustaining the affiliation that constitutes national subjects,” the historian Thomas Bender once observed. “Nations are, among other things, a collective agreement, partly coerced, to affirm a common history as the basis for a shared future.” Officers of the American Historical Association at their annual meeting in Washington, D.C., December 1889 Officers of the American Historical Association at their annual meeting in Washington, D.C., December 1889 Wikimedia Commons But in the 1970s, studying the nation fell out of favor in the American historical profession. Most historians started looking at either smaller or bigger things, investigating the experiences and cultures of social groups or taking the broad vantage promised by global history. This turn produced excellent scholarship. But meanwhile, who was doing the work of providing a legible past and a plausible future—a nation—to the people who lived in the United States? Charlatans, stooges, and tyrants. The endurance of nationalism proves that there’s never any shortage of blackguards willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to empty out old rubbish bags full of festering resentments and calls to violence. When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism. Maybe it’s too late to restore a common history, too late for historians to make a difference. But is there any option other than to try to craft a new American history—one that could foster a new Americanism? THE NATION AND THE STATE The United States is different from other nations—every nation is different from every other—and its nationalism is different, too. To review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws. A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry. When nation-states arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins—stories meant to suggest that everyone in, say, “the French nation” had common ancestors, when they of course did not. As I wrote in my book These Truths, “Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.” But in the American case, the origins of the nation can be found in those seams. When the United States declared its independence, in 1776, it became a state, but what made it a nation? The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, after having waged a war against Great Britain, just about the last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Britishness. Long after independence, most Americans saw the United States not as a nation but, true to the name, as a confederation of states. That’s what made arguing for ratification of the Constitution an uphill battle; it’s also why the Constitution’s advocates called themselves “Federalists,” when they were in fact nationalists, in the sense that they were proposing to replace a federal system, under the Articles of Confederation, with a national system. When John Jay insisted, in The Federalist Papers, no. 2, “that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs,” he was whistling in the dark. One way to turn a state into a nation is to write its history. It was the lack of these similarities that led Federalists such as Noah Webster to attempt to manufacture a national character by urging Americans to adopt distinctive spelling. “Language, as well as government should be national,” Webster wrote in 1789. “America should have her own distinct from all the world.” That got the United States “favor” instead of “favour.” It did not, however, make the United States a nation. And by 1828, when Webster published his monumental American Dictionary of the English Language, he did not include the word “nationalism,” which had no meaning or currency in the United States in the 1820s. Not until the 1840s, when European nations were swept up in what has been called “the age of nationalities,” did Americans come to think of themselves as belonging to a nation, with a destiny. This course of events is so unusual, in the matter of nation building, that the historian David Armitage has suggested that the United States is something other than a nation-state. “What we mean by nationalism is the desire of nations (however defined) to possess states to create the peculiar hybrid we call the nation-state,” Armitage writes, but “there’s also a beast we might call the state-nation, which arises when the state is formed before the development of any sense of national consciousness. The United States might be seen as a, perhaps the only, spectacular example of the latter”—not a nation-state but a state-nation. One way to turn a state into a nation is to write its history. The first substantial history of the American nation, Bancroft’s ten-volume History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, was published between 1834 and 1874. Bancroft wasn’t only a historian; he was also a politician who served in the administrations of three U.S. presidents, including as secretary of war in the age of American continental expansion. An architect of manifest destiny, Bancroft wrote his history in an attempt to make the United States’ founding appear inevitable, its growth inexorable, and its history ancient. De-emphasizing its British inheritance, he celebrated the United States as a pluralistic and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world: The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine; of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome. Nineteenth-century nationalism was liberal, a product of the Enlightenment. It rested on an analogy between the individual and the collective. As the American theorist of nationalism Hans Kohn once wrote, “The concept of national self-determination—transferring the ideal of liberty from the individual to the organic collectivity—was raised as the banner of liberalism.” Liberal nationalism, as an idea, is fundamentally historical. Nineteenth-century Americans understood the nation-state within the context of an emerging set of ideas about human rights: namely, that the power of the state guaranteed everyone eligible for citizenship the same set of irrevocable political rights. The future Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner offered this interpretation in 1849: Here is the Great Charter of every human being drawing vital breath upon this soil, whatever may be his condition, and whoever may be his parents. He may be poor, weak, humble, or black,—he may be of Caucasian, Jewish, Indian, or Ethiopian race,—he may be of French, German, English, or Irish extraction; but before the Constitution of Massachusetts all these distinctions disappear. . . . He is a MAN, the equal of all his fellow-men. He is one of the children of the State, which, like an impartial parent, regards all of its offspring with an equal care. Or as the Prussian-born American political philosopher Francis Lieber, a great influence on Sumner, wrote, “Without a national character, states cannot obtain that longevity and continuity of political society which is necessary for our progress.” Lieber’s most influential essay, “Nationalism: A Fragment of Political Science,” appeared in 1860, on the very eve of the Civil War. THE UNION AND THE CONFEDERACY The American Civil War was a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state. This struggle has never ended; it has just moved around. In the antebellum United States, Northerners, and especially northern abolitionists, drew a contrast between (northern) nationalism and (southern) sectionalism. “We must cultivate a national, instead of a sectional patriotism” urged one Michigan congressman in 1850. But Southerners were nationalists, too. It’s just that their nationalism was what would now be termed “illiberal” or “ethnic,” as opposed to the Northerners’ liberal or civic nationalism. This distinction has been subjected to much criticism, on the grounds that it’s nothing more than a way of calling one kind of nationalism good and another bad. But the nationalism of the North and that of the South were in fact different, and much of U.S. history has been a battle between them. “Ours is the government of the white man,” the American statesman John C. Calhoun declared in 1848, arguing against admitting Mexicans as citizens of the United States. “This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis,” the American politician Stephen Douglas said in 1858. “It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.” Abraham Lincoln, building on arguments made by black abolitionists, exposed Douglas’ history as fiction. “I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence,” Lincoln said during a debate with Douglas in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1858. He continued: I think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation. No matter, the founders of the Confederacy answered: we will craft a new constitution, based on white supremacy. In 1861, the Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he explained that the ideas that lay behind the U.S. Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races”—here ceding Lincoln’s argument—but that “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural and moral condition.” The North won the war. But the battle between liberal and illiberal nationalism raged on, especially during the debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which marked a second founding of the United States on terms set by liberal ideas about the rights of citizens and the powers of nation-states—namely, birthright citizenship, equal rights, universal (male) suffrage, and legal protections for noncitizens. These Reconstruction-era amendments also led to debates over immigration, racial and gender equality, and the limits of citizenship. Under the terms of the 14th Amendment, children of Chinese immigrants born in the United States would be U.S. citizens. Few major political figures talked about Chinese immigrants in favorable terms. Typical was the virulent prejudice expressed by William Higby, a one-time miner and Republican congressman from California. “The Chinese are nothing but a pagan race,” Higby said in 1866. “You cannot make good citizens of them.” And opponents of the 15th Amendment found both African American voting and Chinese citizenship scandalous. Fumed Garrett Davis, a Democratic senator from Kentucky: “I want no negro government; I want no Mongolian government; I want the government of the white man which our fathers incorporated.” The most significant statement in this debate was made by a man born into slavery who had sought his own freedom and fought for decades for emancipation, citizenship, and equal rights. In 1869, in front of audiences across the country, Frederick Douglass delivered one of the most important and least read speeches in American political history, urging the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments in the spirit of establishing a “composite nation.” He spoke, he said, “to the question of whether we are the better or the worse for being composed of different races of men.” If nations, which are essential for progress, form from similarity, what of nations like the United States, which are formed out of difference, Native American, African, European, Asian, and every possible mixture, “the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world”? A statue of Frederick Douglass pictured behind U.S. President Barack Obama at a ceremony commemorating the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment in Washington, D.C., December 2015 A statue of Frederick Douglass pictured behind U.S. President Barack Obama at a ceremony commemorating the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment in Washington, D.C., December 2015 Jonathan Ernst / REUTERS To Republicans like Higby, who objected to Chinese immigration and to birthright citizenship, and to Democrats like Davis, who objected to citizenship and voting rights for anyone other than white men, Douglass offered an impassioned reply. As for the Chinese: “Do you ask, if I would favor such immigration? I answer, I would. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to vote? I would.” As for future generations, and future immigrants to the United States, Douglass said, “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.” For Douglass, progress could only come in this new form of a nation, the composite nation. “We shall spread the network of our science and civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the Isles of the sea,” he said, and “all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same Government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.” That was Douglass’ new Americanism. It did not prevail. Emancipation and Reconstruction, the historian and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois would write in 1935, was “the finest effort to achieve democracy . . . this world had ever seen.” But that effort had been betrayed by white Northerners and white Southerners who patched the United States back together by inventing a myth that the war was not a fight over slavery at all but merely a struggle between the nation and the states. “We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present,” Du Bois wrote bitterly. Douglass’ new Americanism was thus forgotten. So was Du Bois’ reckoning with American history. NATIONAL HISTORIES The American Historical Association was founded in 1884—two years after the French philosopher Ernest Renan wrote his signal essay, “What Is a Nation?” Nationalism was taking a turn, away from liberalism and toward illiberalism, including in Germany, beginning with the “blood and iron” of Bismarck. A driver of this change was the emergence of mass politics, under whose terms nation-states “depended on the participation of the ordinary citizen to an extent not previously envisaged,” as the historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote. That “placed the question of the ‘nation,’ and the citizen’s feelings towards whatever he regarded as his ‘nation,’ ‘nationality’ or other centre of loyalty, at the top of the political agenda.” This transformation began in the United States in the 1880s, with the rise of Jim Crow laws, and with a regime of immigration restriction, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law restricting immigration, which was passed in 1882. Both betrayed the promises and constitutional guarantees made by the 14th and 15th Amendments. Fighting to realize that promise would be the work of standard-bearers who included Ida B. Wells, who led a campaign against lynching, and Wong Chin Foo, who founded the Chinese Equal Rights League in 1892, insisting, “We claim a common manhood with all other nationalities.” The uglier and more illiberal nationalism got, the more liberals became convinced of the impossibility of liberal nationalism. But the white men who delivered speeches at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association during those years had little interest in discussing racial segregation, the disenfranchisement of black men, or immigration restriction. Frederick Jackson Turner drew historians’ attention to the frontier. Others contemplated the challenges of populism and socialism. Progressive-era historians explained the American nation as a product of conflict “between democracy and privilege, the poor versus the rich, the farmers against the monopolists, the workers against the corporations, and, at times, the Free-Soilers against the slaveholders,” as Degler observed. And a great many association presidents, notably Woodrow Wilson, mourned what had come to be called “the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.” All offered national histories that left out the origins and endurance of racial inequality. Meanwhile, nationalism changed, beginning in the 1910s and especially in the 1930s. And the uglier and more illiberal nationalism got, the more liberals became convinced of the impossibility of liberal nationalism. In the United States, nationalism largely took the form of economic protectionism and isolationism. In 1917, the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, opposing U.S. involvement in World War I, began calling for “America first,” and he took the same position in 1938, insisting that “Americans should maintain the traditional policy of our great and independent nation—great largely because it is independent.” In the years before the United States entered World War II, a fringe even supported Hitler; Charles Coughlin—a priest, near presidential candidate, and wildly popular broadcaster—took to the radio to preach anti-Semitism and admiration for Hitler and the Nazi Party and called on his audience to form a new political party, the Christian Front. In 1939, about 20,000 Americans, some dressed in Nazi uniforms, gathered in Madison Square Garden, decorated with swastikas and American flags, with posters declaring a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism,” where they denounced the New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” Hitler, for his part, expressed admiration for the Confederacy and regret that “the beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by the war.” As one arm of a campaign to widen divisions in the United States and weaken American resolve, Nazi propaganda distributed in the Jim Crow South called for the repeal of the 14th and 15th Amendments. The “America first” supporter Charles Lindbergh, who, not irrelevantly, had become famous by flying across the Atlantic alone, based his nationalism on geography. “One need only glance at a map to see where our true frontiers lie,” he said in 1939. “What more could we ask than the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Pacific on the west?” (This President Franklin Roosevelt answered in 1940, declaring the dream that the United States was “a lone island,” to be, in fact, a nightmare, “the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.”) In the wake of World War II, American historians wrote the history of the United States as a story of consensus, an unvarying “liberal tradition in America,” according to the political scientist Louis Hartz, that appeared to stretch forward in time into an unvarying liberal future. Schlesinger, writing in 1949, argued that liberals occupied “the vital center” of American politics. These historians had plenty of blind spots—they were especially blind to the forces of conservatism and fundamentalism—but they nevertheless offered an expansive, liberal account of the history of the American nation and the American people. The last, best single-volume popular history of the United States written in the twentieth century was Degler’s 1959 book, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America: a stunning, sweeping account that, greatly influenced by Du Bois, placed race, slavery, segregation, and civil rights at the center of the story, alongside liberty, rights, revolution, freedom, and equality. Astonishingly, it was Degler’s first book. It was also the last of its kind. THE DECLINE OF NATIONAL HISTORY If love of the nation is what drove American historians to the study of the past in the nineteenth century, hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century. It had long been clear that nationalism was a contrivance, an artifice, a fiction. After World War II, while U.S. President Harry Truman was helping establish what came to be called “the liberal international order,” internationalists began predicting the end of the nation-state, with the Harvard political scientist Rupert Emerson declaring that “the nation and the nation-state are anachronisms in the atomic age.” By the 1960s, nationalism looked rather worse than an anachronism. Meanwhile, with the coming of the Vietnam War, American historians stopped studying the nation-state in part out of a fear of complicity with atrocities of U.S. foreign policy and regimes of political oppression at home. “The professional practice of history writing and teaching flourished as the handmaiden of nation-making; the nation provided both support and an appreciative audience,” Bender observed in Rethinking American History in a Global Age in 2002. “Only recently,” he continued, “and because of the uncertain status of the nation-state has it been recognized that history as a professional discipline is part of its own substantive narrative and not at all sufficiently self-conscious about the implications of that circularity.” Since then, historians have only become more self-conscious, to the point of paralysis. If nationalism was a pathology, the thinking went, the writing of national histories was one of its symptoms, just another form of mythmaking. If love of the nation is what drove American historians to the study of the past in the nineteenth century, hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century. Something else was going on, too. Beginning in the 1960s, women and people of color entered the historical profession and wrote new, rich, revolutionary histories, asking different questions and drawing different conclusions. Historical scholarship exploded, and got immeasurably richer and more sophisticated. In a there-goes-the-neighborhood moment, many older historians questioned the value of this scholarship. Degler did not; instead, he contributed to it. Most historians who wrote about race were not white and most historians who wrote about women were not men, but Degler, a white man, was one of two male co-founders of the National Organization for Women and won a Pulitzer in 1972 for a book called Neither Black nor White. Still, he shared the concern expressed by Higham that most new American historical scholarship was “not about the United States but merely in the United States.” By 1986, when Degler rose from his chair to deliver his address before the American Historical Association, a lot of historians in the United States had begun advocating a kind of historical cosmopolitanism, writing global rather than national history. Degler didn’t have much patience for this. A few years later, after the onset of civil war in Bosnia, the political philosopher Michael Walzer grimly announced that “the tribes have returned.” They had never left. They’d only become harder for historians to see, because they weren’t really looking anymore. A NEW AMERICAN HISTORY Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But not writing national history creates more problems, and these problems are worse. What would a new Americanism and a new American history look like? They might look rather a lot like the composite nationalism imagined by Douglass and the clear-eyed histories written by Du Bois. They might take as their starting point the description of the American experiment and its challenges offered by Douglass in 1869: A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family, is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves. At the close of the Cold War, some commentators concluded that the American experiment had ended in triumph, that the United States had become all the world. But the American experiment had not in fact ended. A nation founded on revolution and universal rights will forever struggle against chaos and the forces of particularism. A nation born in contradiction will forever fight over the meaning of its history. But that doesn’t mean history is meaningless, or that anyone can afford to sit out the fight. “The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned. They’ll echo Calhoun and Douglas and Father Coughlin. They’ll lament “American carnage.” They’ll call immigrants “animals” and other states “shithole countries.” They’ll adopt the slogan “America first.” They’ll say they can “make America great again.” They’ll call themselves “nationalists.” Their history will be a fiction. They will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong. CORRECTION APPENDED (February 26, 2019) An earlier version of this article misidentified the U.S. president who began building the liberal international order after World War II. It was Harry Truman, not Franklin Roosevelt. JILL LEPORE is David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of These Truths: A History of the United States. MORE BY JILL LEPORE More: North America United States Politics & Society Ideology Foreign Affairs: 100 Years The Best of 2019 Nationalism Most-Read Articles A Broken Promise? What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion Mary Elise Sarotte How France Fell to the Far Right In the End, Le Pen Hardly Had to Moderate to Gain Power Cécile Alduy Can Starmer Save Britain? 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