From Tibetan Americans to Cambodian Americans to Palestinian Americans, many of these groups have rallied around causes, hoping to improve their homelands’ futures. Yet few have been as successful as the Armenian American community, which secured formal and explicit recognition of the Armenian Genocide from the Biden administration this year—the result of a single-minded, decades-long campaign that defied political obstacles, and reached across generations.

The Armenian American experience offers a crucial lesson to other U.S. immigrant groups working for change: Be patient, be persistent, and be prepared. The steadfast Armenian campaign for recognition needed the right set of circumstances to make its position an undeniable political reality—and when such openings for social change appeared, savvy activists in the diaspora capitalized on them, making such an outsized impact on the global stage. The U.S. government’s reversal on genocide recognition in April may have seemed sudden, but it was built on a century of cultural and political effort.

The cause célèbre for this community has been the pursuit of justice for the Armenian genocide. In the early 20th century, the Ottoman Turkish empire systematically killed or deported its Armenian population. Between 1915 and 1918, over 1 million Armenians perished. Soon after, the Ottoman government (and eventually, the Republic of Turkey) began a denial campaign that continues to this day, discouraging international recognition of the events as anything but an unfortunate but necessary instance of self-defense. The struggle to defeat this denialism provides a quintessential example of how power and entrenched political interests can stand in the way of justice. For over a century, it has fallen to survivors, their descendants, and the international community of human rights supporters to keep the memory of the genocide alive. At the very least, international recognition ensures a place in the historical memory for victims and survivors. Ideally, formal recognition can lay the groundwork for justice and restitution, similar to what was offered to survivors and descendants of survivors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

The Armenian cause has always had an American dimension. The Armenian American community predated the genocide; even as the massacres were taking place, Armenians in the U.S. were already engaging the American government on the issue. The United States was involved in some of the policy failures that failed to prevent the massacres, and was also a player in contemporary relief efforts. Continually since the early 1900s, the U.S. has remained a leading immigration destination for survivors and their descendants who carry the torch of remembrance, and who have worked for official recognition of what happened.

From the get-go, geopolitical concerns created formidable obstacles. Successive U.S. administrations were hesitant to recognize the genocide; their priority was to preserve the U.S.-Turkish relationship as it was, with its supposed economic, political, and military benefits to both countries. The U.S. foreign policy establishment traditionally saw Turkey as a strategic geopolitical partner since the Cold War era, given the country’s location. And for decades, the Turkish government aggressively lobbied the U.S. government, identifying and supporting academics who shared and promoted the denialist stance, and manufacturing a false debate over the veracity of genocide claims.

Despite these roadblocks, Armenian Americans kept pushing for recognition. At first, these efforts—fundraisers, marches, and campaigns—were often helmed by survivors. Later, direct descendants took over. In 1981, Ken Khachigian—a White House speechwriter whose grandfather fled to America in advance of the Armenian genocide yet lost his grandmother in exile—wrote a Holocaust remembrance speech for Ronald Reagan that implicitly acknowledged the genocide, marking one of the first major instances of U.S. government recognition of the genocide. After significant backlash from the Turkish government, the U.S. government—particularly the State Department—walked back the remarks given political concerns at the time. Reagan and the State Department further disavowed those remarks throughout the 1980s, much to the ongoing chagrin of then California governor George Deukmejian—himself of Armenian descent. Deukmejian, a strong supporter of Reagan, was public about his disappointment but failed to elicit a change of heart among his peers.

Yet advocates marched on, using other domains to keep the cause alive. At the local level, community leaders facilitated protests, and advocated for state- and city-level recognitions of the genocide across the U.S. One of the key Armenian lobbies maintains a list of hundreds of instances of acknowledgment, ranging from a memorial in New Jersey in 1965, an affirmation by the French National assembly in 1985, almost yearly state assembly resolutions in California from the 1980s onward.

On the cultural stage, successive generations of Armenian American artists also mainstreamed genocide recognition, relegating denial to the fringes. Nearly every Armenian American artist who gained mainstream popularity—from mid-20th-century author William Saroyan to the still-active metal band System of a Down to pop icon Cher—has engaged in some kind of public advocacy on the issue, or touched on the genocide question through their art.

Ultimately these local and cultural gains coincided with a shifting global context that made U.S. federal recognition of the genocide possible. Starting in the 2000s and driven largely by the cumulative power of these global advocacy campaigns, many governments in Europe and South America began issuing official recognitions of the genocide—and suffered few, if any, geopolitical repercussions. For all its bluster, the Turkish government could not make good on its promises to punish countries that challenged its denialism. National genocide recognitions, even if they were walked back or met with strong rebukes from Turkey, typically ended in little more than the recall of an ambassador.

Realpolitik became a factor, too. Today, Turkey is no longer the strategic U.S. ally it once was, as that relationship has been strained. Turkey has turned away from the U.S. in favor of stronger relations with Russia and China, while there has been a declining American appetite for engagement in the region. Genocide recognition became a safe—even, potentially, beneficial—political move. The bargaining chip of recognition was replaced with an opportunity for countries to demonstrate their (however belated) commitment to human rights.

Of course, despite the U.S.’s changed course on genocide recognition, the path to true justice for the descendants of survivors of the Armenian genocide remains unclear. If we look at the history of similar crimes against humanity, acknowledgment is supposed to be just the first step in a long and painful process toward reconciliation for survivors and their descendants. But it is highly unlikely that attitudes in Turkey will ever shift towards acknowledgment or reconciliation. The issue continues to be a flashpoint in contemporary Turkish politics. Today the ethnic cleansing of minorities is a point of pride for some of the country’s right-wing ideologues. Recently, one Turkish politician made headlines when he posted—in advance of Biden’s genocide recognition—a celebratory tweet lauding the masterminds of the Armenian genocide. He noted that Turkey is ready to proudly “do it again”—it being the supposedly non-existent Armenian genocide. In the face of outcry from a Turkish Armenian parliament member, he again threatened a repeat of the genocide.

Recognition of Armenia’s woes by the U.S. stemmed entirely from tireless and multigenerational advocacy, sustained for over a century. But to turn recognition into something more tangible, Armenian Americans will have to keep up the fight—offering yet another lesson for immigrant groups in the U.S. seeking influence on the world beyond. Picking one’s battles is a key question for immigrant groups, and that too was a point of contention for the Armenian community. Some critics of genocide recognition have expressed concern that if the Turkish government refuses to engage the issue, there may not be any value in creating international controversy. A notable critic of the focus on genocide recognition was Turkish Armenian intellectual Hrant Dink, who took massive steps to end the taboo on Armenian issues in the 1990s and 2000s in Turkey. While he was a fearless supporter of Armenians and other minority groups, he believed the obsession with recognition would come at the expense of cross-cultural dialogue. His political project was monumental, and is credited with opening in civic space in Turkey and breaking the taboo on the Armenian question. Yet his untimely assassination at the hands of a Turkish nationalist in 2007 was a cruel testament to the powerful potential of his message.

Waging a campaign for international recognition of a human rights issue is time-intensive, costly, and can be nearly all-encompassing for an immigrant community. But one cannot underestimate the historical and rhetorical benefits of international acknowledgment for crimes against humanity. Recognition offers a chance to firmly correct the record and bring an end to dangerous—and persistent—attempts at historical revisionism. In the Armenian case, the annual commemoration of the genocide leads denial groups in the United States to put up billboards, support scholars who falsely refute the killings, and even promote dancing flash mobs to erase the genocide from history or shift blame onto the Armenian community.

Genocide recognition was never a given for the global Armenian community, even though the people’s struggles have become the flagship issue associated with the violence of the late 19th century. Many instances of ethnic cleansing from that era have faded from view. The Ottoman Empire and early governments of the Turkish Republic committed atrocities against a range of minority communities, including ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Assyrian and Pontic Greek communities concurrent with the Armenian genocide. Other immigrant groups in the United States—not yet able to draw attention to their cause—may feel their own historical struggles are already in danger of erasure.

For all its triumphs, the ongoing story of the United States’ approach to the Armenian genocide poses a cautionary tale for other immigrant communities in the U.S. affected by genocide. What does it take for communities to get their issues on the U.S. agenda, particularly in the face of entrenched political norms? This question looms not just for historic injustices but also for ongoing atrocities, such as the genocide of the Rohingya community in Myanmar, and the ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs in China. Many other immigrant groups in the United States are far smaller than the Armenian community, and may face even steeper hurdles as they try to change their own political realities. But without a doubt, supporters of human rights should heed the lessons of the Armenian case: recognition requires tireless commitment from survivor communities. It is only that commitment that can keep the prospect of justice alive.

The post What It Takes to Change Your Adopted Nation’s Foreign Policy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But what exactly is feminist foreign policy, and how does it work? That’s a question New York Times reporter Alisha Haridasani Gupta found herself pausing on when she wrote about feminist foreign policy last summer—and one she posed to panelists at last night’s Zócalo/Scripps College event, “What Does a Feminist Foreign Policy Look Like?”

“The more we talk about this, and the more we open up the discussion, the more people will understand what it means,” said Haridasani Gupta, who served as moderator for the online discussion, and writes the Times’ gender newsletter, “In Her Words.”

The best way to start, said Melanne Verveer, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues and the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, is by considering what foreign policy does: “It advances the interest of our country, of our citizens; it advances democracy, human rights, international understanding; it’s about preventing conflicts and it’s about creating good relations with other nations.”

Recognizing that women make up half the world’s population, Verveer continued, feminist foreign policy puts “a gender lens or a gender perspective” on everything the State Department deals with, from economics to human rights issues—a lens that is necessary for meaningful diplomacy. “Women experience most circumstances differently and we have to factor in those differences if we’re going to have more effective foreign policy,” she said.

For Scripps College political economist Nancy Neiman, who studies global markets, her definition is less tied to traditional foreign policy goals. “I would move focus away from the interests of the nation, which is historically what foreign policy is about,” said Neiman, “and think about transnational issues—that the vulnerability of women in global markets is really a transnational issue, and it’s an intersectional issue; it’s about race, class and gender. I think those are the things that have to stay on the table, and the hope would be that more and more countries are interested in actually addressing these important issues.”

Diana Alarcón González, chief advisor and foreign affairs coordinator for Mexico City, meanwhile, considered it from the perspective of her own constituency of 9.2 million people, of which 52.8 percent are women. “Advocating for equal rights and defining our public policies around the issues of rights means making sure that more than 50 percent of people in our city have equal access to rights,” she said.

New America Foundation fellow Elmira Bayrasli spoke last—and welcomed the differing definitions that came before hers. “It isn’t just one thing,” she agreed.

Bayrasli, who is also co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted, an initiative that aims to increase the number of female voices in foreign policy, said she frames feminist foreign policy around “stability and progress.” While she’s met many people in Washington who have dismissed it “as a very kind of niche, a very cute little side issue that feminists like myself like to embrace,” she argued that feminist foreign policy speaks to the challenges of the world today, and how countries have to think beyond their own borders. “Now there are numerous global challenges that really require us to look at the outcomes, which are stability and progress, and fundamentally to me feminist foreign policy is about getting to that,” she said.

Looking at such outcomes, Haridasani Gupta asked the panelists for examples that show how a feminist lens can lead to progressive change on the world stage.

Verveer cited the role of women in the negotiations leading to Colombia’s peace agreement in 2016 after 50 years of civil war. “The women had put out proposal after proposal. Finally [they] gathered, in exasperation, in a summit, and came up with a bunch of recommendations at a time where there was a real serious effort to finally do this,” she said. Because of this, the issues that affected women throughout the conflict were considered, and there were recommendations in place in the peace agreement to address them. “For the first time ever,” Verveer added, “there was a gender subcommission that was part and parcel of the peace talks.”

On the flip side, the North American Free Trade Agreement offers a sobering example of what happens when feminist foreign policy isn’t considered, said Neiman, the professor of politics. “The story of Juárez is just a tragedy,” she said, referring to how the expansion of the maquila industry due to the 1994 trade pact led to a wave of migrants, particularly “young, Indigenous women, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable” to work in the expanding assembly plants in Juárez, where the homicide rate for women would increase by 600 percent between NAFTA’s passage and 2001. “We end up with a large number of disappeared and murdered women that is interconnected with the devaluation of young women’s lives,” said Neiman. All of this, she said, came out of a foreign trade policy that didn’t keep women’s interests in mind.

Audience members from the YouTube chatroom also contributed to the conversation. One asked what holds the U.S. State Department back from joining the countries that have already formally announced feminist foreign policies: “Is it just fear of the word?”

“Certainly, the word has something to do with it,” Verveer answered. Feminism has “been over time a loaded word in the United States, and detractors have tried to put all kinds of interpretations on it. But I don’t want to say we don’t have a feminist foreign policy. I think that’s a misapprehension.”

The U.S. may not be up there with Sweden, which first coined the term, she said, but it has made “vast efforts” to integrate issues that impact women into its foreign policy since the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women, which took place in Beijing in 1995.

In Canada, Haridasani Gupta noted, every budget now goes through gender analysis. Did the panelists have any concrete examples of ways governments can commit to feminist foreign policy?

In Mexico City, González offered, officials are ensuring women are at the policy table. “The chief of government, our mayor, just returned a proposal” from a technical committee, she said, because the group had only “two women [among] ten men at the table, and for her, it was not acceptable.”

There is much more feminist foreign policy can do for the world, the panelists agreed.

“Women always have to prove something is going to work when meanwhile there’s abundant evidence of things that aren’t working” in today’s world, Bayrasli said: democracy declining, strongmen on the rise, tensions simmering, and a pandemic killing millions. “Clearly there needs to be a reassessment to how we’re approaching foreign policy now.”

Feminist foreign policy could be a possible solution to the challenges of today, because, she said, it offers “a modern lens to the modern world.”

The post Feminist Foreign Policy Can Offer a ‘Modern Lens to a Modern World’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event, titled “What Would a New Cold War Mean for the World?” and part of a series on global challenges called “The World We Want,” offered a fast-paced look at dozens of aspects of the Chinese-American relationship, from their economic interdependence to their 5G networks, and from their military competition to the mutual hostility between countries that shows up in public opinion surveys.

The conversation also turned repeatedly to the possibility of military conflict of Taiwan, with two panelists suggesting China could move to reunite the island by force with the mainland in the next few years.

The event’s moderator, New York Times associate managing editor Philip P. Pan, who spent much of his career reporting in China, started the conversation by asking to what extent the features of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union can be seen in conflict between the U.S. and China today.

Margaret MacMillan, the distinguished University of Toronto historian and author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us, said that the two conflicts both involved two large powers with global ambitions and reach. “The United States and the Soviet Union claimed to be speaking for a better part of the world,” she said. “We have elements of that in the current tension between China and the United States.”

But, she suggested, it is the differences that matter more. The U.S.-China relationship, MacMillan said, is not as ideological as the old Cold War, and the U.S. has a much closer relationship with China, especially as a leading trading partner, than it did with the economically isolated USSR. Another crucial difference: The U.S. and the Soviet Union were such dominant superpowers that they were able to pressure other countries in the world to take their side, while today’s world is more multipolar, with other major powers having enough autonomy and weight not to be drawn in.

Still, MacMillan cautioned, the fact that the U.S. and China are inherently closer to each other might actually produce more friction.

She recalled that before World War I, Germany and Britain were each other’s largest trading partners; four members of the British cabinet had been educated in Germany, and the British royal family’s lineage was quite German. Despite these elite connections, MacMillan said, public opinion turned hostile in each country against the other as war broke out.

“That is what concerns me today,” said MacMillan, nodding to the increasingly negative public sentiment in China and the U.S. toward the other at present. “The historical record isn’t that reassuring.”

Another panelist, Oriana Mastro, an FSI Center Fellow at Stanford University, warned that popular comparisons of the U.S.-China conflict to the Cold War could produce flawed strategies for dealing with today’s problems.

China, she said, is a profoundly different rival than the Soviet Union in that it is not trying to turn democracies into autocracies, and is not perceived as a military or security threat to other countries. Because China is in Asia, the most dynamic and populous part of the world, “China doesn’t have to be a power elsewhere to be a superpower; dominating Asia is enough, and that’s where it is focusing its energies and its military.”

But that focus on Asia might make this conflict more dangerous in some ways than the Cold War. “The military confrontation between China and the United States is going to happen in Asia,” said Mastro. “This competition is much more likely to turn hot than it ever was with the Soviet Union.”

After Pan asked whether countries would be pressed to choose sides between two superpowers, as in the Cold War, Mastro, who is also a Defense and Foreign Policy Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that China is not going to form its own bloc because it does not want a coalition forming against it. She referred to writing from Chinese strategists noting that the U.S. already has locked up the best partners—the world’s democracies, and richest nations.

Instead, she said, China is turning its lack of coalition into an advantage in its contest with the U.S. While the American government makes heavy demands of partner countries (such as economic or democratic reform, or providing military bases), China typically asks other nations merely to choose neutrality in the U.S.-China conflict, and to avoid talking about sensitive topics like Hong Kong or Taiwan.

“When countries choose neutrality, when they choose not to take a side at all, in effect, they are choosing China,” Mastro said. “It’s very hard for the United States to build coalitions against China … because we ask so much more.”

Meanwhile, while China is more focused on economic issues than military ones, Mastro warned that the country is using its extensive economic and technological expertise to enhance the lethality of its military. And China’s ability to gather a lot of data through its technological expansion could allow it to target elites in other countries.

For instance, she said, “They could use targeted cyberattacks to disrupt someone’s life who says something bad about Taiwan.”

Striking a much more optimistic tone than the other two panelists, the third panelist, UCLA Anderson distinguished professor Christopher S. Tang, argued that China’s new trade agreement with the European Union—in which China expressed new willingness to cooperate on technology transfer and meeting international labor standards—might provide an opening for less conflict, and more peaceful cooperation between the U.S. and China.

Tang said the U.S. and other countries should say to China, “We embrace you, we recognize your success, but if you want to win respect in the world, you need to become a leader” in protecting the environment, workers, and intellectual property.

More broadly, Tang argued that the rest of the world needs the U.S. and China to set a strong example of peaceful cooperation. He cited four major global problems that threaten both countries that would be easier to solve if the U.S. and China worked together: COVID recovery and global public health, combating climate change, reducing poverty, and caring for the rapidly aging population

“I think there is a window,” said Tang, pointing to President Xi Jinping’s stated commitment, at last month’s World Economic Forum, to solve global problems. “Why not leverage this moment?”

He described the U.S-China rivalry as primarily economic, and compared it to a 50-year-long chess match. He described President Trump’s trade war as a middle game of this chess contest, which had failed to advance American economic interests, and suggested that President Biden could work to “keep it to a draw … so there will be no winners and no losers.”

The Zócalo/University of Toronto virtual event drew a global audience, and it concluded with questions from the YouTube chat room about whether the Cold War strategy of containment applies to China (not really, panelists said), how Canada should deal with China (carefully and in partnership with other countries, MacMillan answered), about technology’s role in the rivalry, and about how the U.S. should respond to any Chinese military aggression, especially against Taiwan.

On that last subject, both MacMillan and Mastro were emphatic that the threat of conflict over Taiwan is more serious and urgent than generally understood, in part because Chinese leadership is losing patience. Mastro pointed to opinion polls showing that a majority of Chinese citizens support armed reunification with Taiwan—and expect it within three to five years.

That could mean we’re heading toward a very hot U.S.-China war.

The post The U.S.-China Rivalry Isn’t a New Cold War; It’s Bigger Than That appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Or as Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr., Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, put it: “Location, location, location.”

At a Smithsonian/Zócalo “What It Means to Be American” event supported by the Daniel K. Inouye Institute, Harris was joined by the president of the U.S.–Japan Council, a high-level diplomat, and a renowned chef in addressing the question: “What role will Hawaii play in the Pacific century?”

The wide-ranging conversation before a full house at the East-West Center in Honolulu explored trade, the economy, and military strategy, and emphasized Hawaii’s value as one of the nation’s most inclusive and culturally diverse states.

The program kicked off with a traditional oli, or native Hawaiian chant, including the harmonic blowing of conch shells, followed by a Chinese lion dance. Moderator Irene Hirano Inouye, president of the U.S.-Japan Council, opened the discussion by asking each of the panelists to address questions exploring how Hawaii is fulfilling its role on the global stage and what it could be doing better.

“Hawaii is a perfectly located and extraordinarily capable platform for diplomatic activity,” said Kurt W. Tong, U.S. Consul General to Hong Kong and Macau. “Every successful meeting of the Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders that President Obama has held has been here.”

There’s “a constant flow of soft-power exchange that Hawaii should aim to be a nexus for,” Tong said. Hawaii “can act as a magnet for really thoughtful people from around the world, for big set-piece government meetings, but also lots of conversations among leaders of the Asia Pacific. From the perspective of Washington, that’s how we would like to ‘use’ Hawaii.”

Admiral Harris concurred on the value of Hawaii’s physical location for different reasons, pointing out that Hawaii is home to the United States Pacific Command, America’s largest and oldest command with about 400,000 total personnel throughout the Pacific.

“I look at the world through the lens of the threats,” and protecting the United States and its friends and allies from those threats, Harris said. In that regard, he said, location is crucial. “Being in Hawaii makes it especially helpful. It’s where we need to be.”

He said that the U.S. government is in the midst of a “rebalance” in terms of its economic, diplomatic, and military commitment to the Asian Pacific region. “The most visible piece,” of the rebalance is a military shift, Harris said. “Everything that’s new and cool that the military has is coming to the Pacific,” whether it’s combat ships aircraft carriers.”

Harris added that the most important piece in the effort to both recognize and bolster the value of the region is not military but economic. “The business community here—the civic community—is very welcoming of the military. We enjoy this synergy that’s special. It’s critical that we continue the rebalance and continue to grow the relationship between the military and all of you here in Hawaii.”

The third panelist, Roy’s Restaurant chef and founder Roy Yamaguchi, whose chain stretches across both Hawaii and the mainland, stressed the importance of cross-cultural understanding to Hawaii’s economic success. Yamaguchi, who is known for fusing French and Japanese cuisine, described himself as an “Army brat” who grew up in Japan but whose family heritage is rooted in Hawaii.

“Growing up on army base—I probably think Japanese,” Yamaguchi said. “I’m an American, but for some reason I just feel that I think Japanese.” People from Hawaii, he said, “understand the Asian culture, so it’s easier to do business.”

Inouye asked the panelists to address another ongoing challenge for the islands: Ambitious visions for the future aside, Hawaii’s draw as a tourist destination has generated significant economic benefit, but also contributed to a soaring cost of living. How, she asked, can Hawaii balance growth and its global aspirations while also ensuring that it is “livable and affordable”?

“That’s probably a question for the governor of Hawaii,” Tong quipped, to appreciative laughter from the crowd.

“If you think about a place like London or New York or Hong Kong—where I live now—it’s very expensive, but people continue to move there,” Tong said. The government needs to work hand-in-hand with business to ensure livability.
“That’s a struggle that every major successful city on the planet has to contend with,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s a reason not to be ambitious.”

Harris acknowledged Hawaii’s high cost of living, but, he said, “It’s not insurmountable. The advantages of living here are great. People come here to vacation; we get to live here.”

Yamaguchi added: “What can I say? It’s paradise. I’m very blessed that I’m able to live here.”

During the question-and-answer period, one audience member wondered why, despite Asia’s obvious emergence as a global leader, the United States remained stubbornly Euro-centric in its cultural leanings.

Harris observed that while the U.S. will always have strong ties to Europe, “we’re changing as a nation,” and Asia’s primary role will become more apparent in the months and years ahead.

The question brought to mind a comment made earlier in the evening by Tong regarding the multiple ways in which Asian cultural influence is growing in the United States. Tong described his own experiences as “an arrogant guy from Massachusetts” who has spent decades living and working across Asia. His wife is Japanese, and their children are “double kids,” meaning “they really mix both cultures, they understand both.””

“I meet more and more people in the United States who are living ‘salad bowls,’” Tong said. “I think, as a nation we’ve moved beyond the whole melting pot idea to really appreciating that a salad tastes better than a soup.”

The post Can Hawaii Be America’s Bridge to Asia—and the World? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Washington’s foreign policy establishment is an imperial court of a particularly Byzantine kind, and when it comes to Russia and certain other areas of policy, the court’s insular, conformist, and bipartisan consensus has so crushed free discussion, essential critiques have been banished to the fringes. No Washington analyst or commentator who values his or her career, and wants to be recognized as residing within the narrow confines of mainstream American “nationalism,” is likely to have the guts to challenge settled wisdom when it comes to U.S.-Russia relations.

Enter Trump. The candidate may be a professional TV clown, with buffoonish and dangerous opinions on a wide array of issues, but when it comes to Russia, his views merit serious consideration.

The U.S. media obsesses over Trump’s rather grotesque personal admiration for Vladimir Putin, and the authoritarian, macho, tough guy image that both seek to portray. But this focus allows the media and foreign policy analysts to avoid addressing the actual content of Trump’s broader Russia policy.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, given how the U.S. media and commentariat have long conflated Russia with Putin. Russia’s behavior is often portrayed as springing from the personal whims of a brutal dictator, rather than reflecting an overwhelming consensus among Russian policy elites and society—a consensus with deep roots in Russian nationalism, strategy, and Russian history. Of course, that does not make Russian external policies correct. It does, however, make them enduring, coherent, and largely predictable. They are unlikely to change significantly even after Putin retires from the scene.

Russian actions found objectionable in Washington are most often supported by all significant factions of the Russian opposition, who can be more nationalist than Putin. But challenging “Putin” may seem an agreeable and cost-free occupation for Washington’s policy elites; challenging Russia has a rather more challenging ring to it, for anyone who knows history.

These days, Washington policy elites rarely articulate reasons why continued confrontation with Russia is in the interest of ordinary Americans. This goes back to a collective failure to answer a question set by the realist thinker Owen Harries, former editor of The National Interest: that if the Cold War with Soviet Communism was indeed an essential and epochal struggle requiring the transformation of U.S. institutions and the massive mobilisation of U.S. resources, then why did the end of the Cold War and the Communist threat not naturally also lead to a transformation of institutions and a demobilisation of resources?

For Trump, the failure to adjust the U.S.-Russia relationship to a new reality serves the entrenched policy establishment, not the American people. The pillars of Trump’s retrenched nationalism (which he shares with far-right European political factions like Marine Le Pen’s French National Front) rest on what he claims are the real interests of ordinary U.S. citizens: restrictions on immigration; protection against terrorism, which threatens the lives of Western citizens in a way that the Russian government has not the slightest desire to do; and the management of trade relations so as to protect the jobs and living standards of ordinary people. On these issues Russia is either irrelevant or an ally.

Foreign policy and national security elites, meanwhile, have become so bound up with a continuation of Cold War institutions that abandoning them would amount to a mortal threat to their personal and institutional interests, and so the necessary structures of hostility and confrontation have to be continued. By this I don’t mean to impute conscious individual cynicism and opportunism to most U.S. foreign policy experts. Rather, the policy elites’ attitudes towards Russia reflect beliefs deeply entrenched in American culture. These collective beliefs have a grip so powerful that they can lead people to act against their interests, and even (as in war) against their survival.

In the case of the U.S. policy elites, what followed the end of the Cold War can be summed up in the curious trajectory of Paul Wolfowitz and his beliefs. In 1992, Wolfowitz, then serving as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the George H.W. Bush administration (under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney), together with his assistant “Scooter” Libby, wrote an advisory calling for the U.S. to prevent the emergence of any potential rival, not only on the world stage but in any one region of the world, and be prepared to use force unilaterally to this end. In other words, the USA should be the sole and permanent hegemon in every part of the world.

Leaked to The New York Times, this document alarmed much of the U.S. policy establishment and commentariat, who wasted no time in pointing out that no country in history had achieved this sort of hegemony, that it would impose a massive burden on U.S. resources, that it would conjure up enemies who otherwise would have no reason to be hostile to the USA, and that the fading of the global Communist threat made such hegemony less necessary than ever. In effect, the plan amounted to U.S. global primacy for the sake of U.S. global primacy and was promptly disowned by the Bush administration itself.

Remarkably, in subsequent years the basic principles of the Wolfowitz/Libby paper were gradually and quietly adopted as strategy without serious debate by both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. After the overwhelming U.S. victories in the first Gulf War and in NATO’s Balkans campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, by the late 1990s both Republican and Democratic foreign policy elites were lulled into thinking that the American “hyperpower” could have its way in a newly “unipolar” world with relatively little effort. And America’s civic nationalism has always believed passionately that U.S. power in the world is a force for good, morally justified, and welcomed by all people of good will in the world.

If Hillary Clinton wins in November, these principles look to be the guiding light of U.S. foreign policy in the next administration as well. Barack Obama, by his own confession a cautious realist at heart, was only able to slightly moderate this approach to the world, with its deep roots in the old nationalist (“exceptionalist” if you like) belief in America’s role, duty, and right to lead the world towards freedom and progress.

This approach led to the bipartisan U.S. strategy of extending NATO, first into Eastern Europe and then into the former USSR itself, contrary to promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev in return for Soviet agreement to German reunification. This was accompanied by the creation of GUUAM—a bloc of Georgia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova that was supposed to erode Russian influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus and replace it with U.S. leadership. (It should be noted, by the way, that Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan are open dictatorships, with Uzbekistan widely understood as an exceptionally repressive one.)

At no stage was there any serious attempt to address the obvious question of why Washington, after two centuries of completely ignoring these former Soviet regions, had suddenly developed a vital national interest in them; or whether there was anything that ordinary Americans could conceivably gain from the inevitable confrontations with Russia that would result from acting on this new interest. Instead of seeking to answer these questions, let alone raise them, Washington’s establishment has engaged in intellectual and moral sleight of hand: the Russian reaction to U.S. encroachment into Russia’s centuries-old influence in its near-abroad has been exploited to create an image of Russian expansionism and revisionism. Washington’s own expansionist policies have thus been sold to the U.S. public as necessary to defend the USA against Russian aggression—even though since the end of the Cold War there has been no recorded Russian threat against the U.S. homeland or its citizens.

Russian actions may have been correct or incorrect in particular cases (thus incorrect on the annexation of Crimea but obviously correct in opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya), but they have been overwhelmingly reactive to those of the USA.

None of this should be read as a plea to vote for Donald Trump. Quite apart from his odious personal character, in the area of climate change alone— by far the greatest real challenge facing America, along with the rest of humanity—Trump’s stance, like that of most Republicans, should disqualify him from any high office. But international co-operation on climate change and any other important international issue (such as the fight against ISIS) depends on some measure of international harmony. And if the bipartisan Washington strategic consensus under a second President Clinton continues to counteract international co-operation by provoking serious crises with Russia (and China, for that matter), then Trump the clown will have had the last laugh.

The post Don’t Laugh, But Trump May Be Right on Russia appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The last decade of the previous millennium is suddenly all the rage, claiming a growing slice of our cultural mindshare. Monica Lewinsky is on the speaking circuit. American cable networks have served up series based on the O.J. Simpson trial and Anita Hill confirmation hearings, as well as remakes of everything from Twin Peaks to the X-Files. And, as we contemplate sending the Clintons back to the White House, the ’90s are framing many of the policy debates underlying this year’s presidential election. Clinton-era economic globalization, anti-crime efforts, welfare reform, and financial deregulation are all on trial this election year.

Nostalgia for the ’90s is triggered by plenty of contemporary prompts, but the trend is also a matter of generational scheduling. We’ve acquired the requisite amount of distance from the decade to allow it to come into focus as a distinct, coherent period of time, the way the 1980s came into focus for us in the last 15 or so years, and the way the “aughts” will in another decade or so. In addition, the children of the ‘90s are now coming into their own as cultural gatekeepers in movie studios and media, able to indulge in and share their personal nostalgia.

More than anything, the ’90s in retrospect were an exuberant interlude between the Cold War and the post-Sept. 11 era. Hardly anyone would dispute that. The debate is over whether you think we wasted this exuberant interlude by indulging in mindless pursuits of no lasting impact, or whether the decade stands, as Bill Clinton asserts, as a consequential time of sound governance, impressive innovation, expanding opportunity, and prosperity.

I am with Clinton in this debate, but it isn’t hard to see the appeal of the counterargument that this was a decade—as Seinfeld, the iconic TV sitcom of the ’90s referred to itself— “about nothing.” The notion is that American society, liberated from the decades-long nuclear standoff with the Soviets, was allowed to exhale, and focus on frivolity. Even in the political realm, the Inquisition of Clinton for his sexual peccadillos (or the peccadillos themselves, if you insist) can be interpreted as an admission that this was a new era of lowered stakes, when politics wasn’t constrained by the exigencies of confronting existential threats.

As a society, we struggled in the ’90s to assess risk, and this was as true in foreign policy as it was in the business world and in politics. The decade that started with much angst about declining American economic power (remember the odd popularity of Paul Kennedy’s history tome on the decline of great powers and worries about how Japan was taking over?) and a stubborn recession would end with strong economic growth and soaring financial markets amidst what then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance.”

In foreign policy, the end of the Cold War allowed America to consolidate our capitalist model as the default for the international order. It also made policymakers far more tactical and opportunistic about weighing the costs and benefits of engaging American military power around the world, especially since we were no longer in a global contest with the Soviet Union. We oscillated between being enamored of our sole superpower status and being mindful of our historic reluctance to play global policeman. We were stunned at how easy it was to defeat Saddam Hussein’s army in the first Gulf War, but then chastened by the loss of 18 soldiers in a task force under the Joint Special Operations Command in Somalia. Soon thereafter, we tragically stood by as genocide took place in Rwanda. Later in the decade, somewhat belatedly, we led NATO to destroy ethnic Serbian militarism in the Balkans, but allowed looming threats from non-state terrorist actors to fester elsewhere, like Afghanistan, with fatal consequences in the 2000s. When it came to national security, it was the case-by-case decade.

However, the sense that we were no longer stuck in a divided, zero-sum world proved enormously beneficial for cross-border collaboration and economic expansion around the world. The Europeans transformed their common market into a full-blown union, with a shared currency; closer to home, the North American Free Trade Area was born; in Asia, the world’s most populous nation became more integrated into the global economy; and a loose set of governing trading rules became the World Trade Organization.

With nationalism resurgent in 2016, and even well meaning First World elites fetishizing locally sourced everything, I miss the spirit of those days: the recognition that we are all in this together, and the ambition to raise living standards around the world.

Globalization and technology exacerbated inequality within many countries over time. But it’s less often acknowledged that the single most important economic story of the past two decades is the unprecedented decline in dire poverty around the world, and the expansion of a global middle class. Many of the institutions and approaches from the ’90s may be under siege in today’s political climate, but their legacy continues to be impressive.

On the domestic front, too, the ’90s were the opposite of a wasted decade. The U.S. economy registered its longest economic expansion ever, from March 1991 to March 2001, creating nearly 25 million jobs in the period. Americans enjoyed rising wages, low inflation, and accelerating productivity growth, thus almost forgetting about economic cycles and the concept of risk. Uncle Sam benefited from the good times, as government deficits gave way to healthy surpluses. The financial exuberance around the internet’s adoption proved to be irrational in the end, with all the buzzy talk about a “new economy,” but the hype around the transformative power of the new technologies was well deserved.

For Americans living in cities, the decade saw a vast improvement in our physical surroundings as well. I lived in New York in 1990, then mired in the fearful mood captured in Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel. When I returned near the end of the decade after a stint away, I found Manhattanites as likely to be worried about the Disneyfication of their city as they were about their personal safety. Violent crime in New York declined by more than half in the 1990s, and public spaces throughout the city were reclaimed for public enjoyment. The same was true in cities across the country.

It’s as reasonable to second-guess the decade’s bipartisan anti-crime legislation and strategies as it is to second-guess our embrace of globalization in those years. But the conversation should start with a recognition of how much things improved. Pretending the 1990s were a wasteland of frivolity is a recipe for losing sight of that exuberant decade’s bountiful, lasting legacies.

 
*An earlier version incorrectly referred to the 18 Americans who died in Somalia as Marines. They were Army soldiers in a task force assembled from several branches of the military.

The post The ’90s Were an Exuberant Interlude Between the Cold War and Sept. 11 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Critics of the president’s opening to Cuba accuse Obama of appeasing the Castro regime, but they missed the historic significance of the trip.

When Obama went on Cuban TV and radio to say that he’d made the visit to “bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” he might as well have been burying the nation’s virulently anti-American regime, not just Washington’s outdated policies.

Obama’s visit did more to spotlight the truly heinous nature of the Castro regime than a half-century of non-engagement ever did. It was moving to watch the American president, at the head of a willing and eager trade delegation, tell Cuba’s trapped youth he hopes they become more connected to the outside world. It was moving to watch how the American president deftly shamed the grumpy elderly Cuban dictator Raúl Castro into addressing reporters’ questions about human rights at what Cuban officials had planned to be a stilted and scripted press conference.

Obama’s words and his very presence in Havana spoke loud and clear to the Cuban people: America is not your enemy, or your problem. But you-know-who is.

For decades, the Castros, along with the right-wing exiles who’ve long insisted on a U.S. embargo, made Washington out to be the perfect scapegoat for the regime’s brutality and poor governance. Obama has said “no más” to that tired script. If Congress follows the president’s lead and lifts the embargo (a failed and foolish departure from America’s belief in the subversive power of engaging other dictatorships around the world), the Communist regime will be deprived of its entire self-justifying narrative.

Obama’s trip to Havana, the historical capital of Latin America’s anti-Americanism, came at a poignant time when that revolutionary leftist worldview is in full retreat across the hemisphere. Venezuela is fast becoming a failed petrostate, where people are turning towards the anti-Chavista opposition and away from dreams of an anti-U.S. Bolivarian South American order. In Bolivia and Ecuador, too, the left is losing its grip on power. And Brazil’s Labor Party is engulfed in an existential political crisis.

Obama’s second stop on his Latin victory lap last week, Buenos Aires, was a full-on celebration of the fact that Argentina voted its leftist Peronists out of office. At his press conference with the new conservative Argentine President Mauricio Macri (a man quite comfortable with taking questions from reporters), Obama could not have been more effusive about the shift in that nation’s orientation. He said Argentina’s historic transition was seeing the country “reassume its historic leadership role in the region,” implicitly bashing the previous Peronist governments that aligned themselves with Cuba and Venezuela and against Washington and free markets. Obama also addressed a Cold War remnant by acknowledging some U.S. complicity in the human rights abuses committed by that nation’s 1970s military dictatorship, and pledging to declassify more U.S. government documents from that era.

What’s most satisfying about this weakening of the destructive Cold War left in Latin America is that it is accompanied, if not enabled, by a widespread rejection of the idea that the United States is the enemy. The levels of distrust and hostility towards the “empire” to the north are at historical lows across the region.

The decline of anti-Americanism is notable in the most important Latin American partner to the United States, the nation across our southern border. Anti-Americanism used to be a staple of Mexican political discourse. But at a recent conference in Mexico City, Gerardo Maldonado of the think tank CIDE cited polls from 2014 in which 49 percent of Mexicans say they “admire” the U.S.; 32 percent are “indifferent”; and only 14 percent view us poorly. The Pew Global Attitudes Survey in 2015, for its part, found that 66 percent of Mexicans had a favorable view of the U.S., compared to 65 percent of respondents in the U.K.

Andrew Paxman, a historian at CIDE, explained that what he calls traditional “gringofobia” in Mexico—a form of xenophobia that demonizes Americans, especially its political and business leaders, as culturally inferior imperialists who can be blamed for most of Mexico’s woes—dates to the 19th century, but has been surprisingly absent from Mexican politics of late. Paxman credits greater cross-border engagement as the demystifying balm. The explosion in bilateral trade post-NAFTA and the constant movement of millions of Mexican workers back and forth across the border, spreading word of what the U.S. is really like, have helped strengthen feelings of trust, understanding, and friendship.

There is a specter clouding this triumphant moment in U.S.-Latin relations, of course, and that is Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. Trump’s xenophobic and bombastic rhetoric is a dream come true for the beleaguered anti-American left in Latin America, whose leaders see in the candidate a fellow authoritarian populist with a recognizable style. Trump’s rambling rallies—with their mix of picaresque humor, vague promises of great things to come, and menacing bullying of media and opponents—are reminiscent of Hugo Chávez at his most entertaining.

For Mexicans, Trump’s hateful anti-Mexican rhetoric poses a real test of their newfound trust in the U.S. Paxman says he is starting to see an uptick in gringophobic language in Internet memes and opinion columns. A couple of weeks ago there was an editorial in Excélsior, a major Mexican daily, entitled “That’s How They See Us in the United States,” which falsely claimed that Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric was shared by most of the candidates.

And Paxman says that it’s already typical among cartoonists to draw Trump with a swastika: “If he’s elected, a common reaction here will be ‘Americans can’t be trusted—they elected a Nazi.’” And that could have a spillover effect in Mexican politics, according to Paxman, giving the leftist perennial presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador an opening in the 2018 elections to attack the current governing consensus for pro-American openness and pro-market reforms. His message, Paxman believes, could well become: “Why are we aligning ourselves with a country that hates us? Why are we letting those who hate us control our oil?”

That would be an appealing message for the desperate left throughout Latin America. Indeed, if Donald Trump wins the election next November, it will be a time for anti-American leaders in the region to take a victory lap, and to thank their lucky stars for their improbable reversal of fortune.

The post How Latin America’s Left Could Lose Their Scapegoat appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Cuba has long been such a titillating no-go zone for American travelers. Never mind that hordes of Canadians and Europeans have been going to Cuba for decades, for Americans the Caribbean island nation has been off-limits since the Kennedy presidency. If you didn’t have relatives there, going to Cuba has thus amounted to making a statement, either of cool defiance or serious purpose, since only certain types of visitors could obtain a license from the U.S. government to go. (Technically, the license is to spend U.S. currency there.)

Even better, going to Cuba has been risqué without being all that risky. Nobody is going to hurt you like they might in Yemen or Nigeria. Street crime is virtually nonexistent and your biggest danger was from the guy at José Martí Airport who might stamp your U.S. passport right off the flight from Cancun and leave you vulnerable to a hefty fine for “trading with the enemy” when you get back home.

President Obama’s trip to Havana this week marks the end for this status-conferring ritual—and winsome party story—available to white-collar subversives who relish the forbidden fruit. After all, what’s trailblazing and salacious about following in the footsteps of a trade delegation that included members of Congress, and CEOs from companies like Marriott looking to make deals?

This is where I get to boast that I went to Cuba last summer as part of the last wave of American travelers to jump over the knee-high barriers to see the island before it gets re-colonized by U.S. corporate interests. But here’s a confession you won’t hear from everyone who peeked into the locked box: What I saw there was deeply sad. If Cuba occupied a special place in the imagination of the American thrill-seeker, it is a place that deserves to die.

Cuba in the late-embargo period resembled a giant work of fiction. The jet that took me there from Miami (I went on a scholastic visa) was operated by a charter company but painted with the livery of American Airlines. The notes I traded my dollars for were Cuban convertible pesos—the CUCs or “kooks” used by foreigners and the rich—a luxury currency pegged to the U.S. dollar. Communist iconography was limited to statues and a few obligatory billboards complaining about the blockade. Nobody I met under the age of 60 expressed any zeal, let alone fondness, for the ongoing “revolution.” The entire country felt like a plantation run for the personal benefit of the Castro family.

A curious fact about Cuba: Literacy is among the highest in the world, at 99.7 percent. But there is almost nothing around to read, not even approved dogma. Bookstores are rare in Havana and almost nonexistent everywhere else. The only newspaper, Granma, is distinguished by its thinness and its utter lack of anything interesting to say. Virtually nobody sits on park benches reading, as if the activity were shameful. And of course there are no electronic tablets. There is barely any Internet.

The working fleet of Harry Truman-era Detroit cars remains on display, and the food is just as scarce and crappy as the guidebooks warn, but even more prevalent is the double-mindedness required of any individual to get along in a repressive society. Cubans behaved one way in public and another behind closed doors. “We live a lie here,” one woman told me in a city on the southern coast. “Nobody believes in the rhetoric. But we have to go along with it.” The bifurcation of the mind is a long-term national illness.

The most common complaint (quietly) expressed throughout Cuba is the lack of any reward whatsoever for imagination or hard work. You may labor for years on a project and still be forced to accept a monthly wage of $15 per month, with bare nutritional staples. Education, housing, and health care are virtually free, but with a lifetime guarantee of no hope for advancement or distinction. Being Cuban with an imagination is a particular kind of torture. Labor is truly alienated here, though not in the way Karl Marx intended.

The names of Raúl or Fidel Castro are rarely spoken aloud; a common gesture when referring to the government is to stroke an unseen beard. In the absence of a successful revolution, the people found personal release in sex—“the only thing Fidel couldn’t nationalize,” goes the old joke—and turned infidelity and speed-flirtation into national games. Tourists wielding dollars need not look far to find a desperate prostitution trade, both of the conventional variety and of the unspoken expectation of a morning “gift.”

Old Havana is undeniably charming but only because it is poor and somewhat hopeless, full of spontaneous scenes that look like a Gershwin opera unfolding under the balconies of 18th-century Spanish townhouses, their fading parlors lit with harsh shadeless lamps.

Walking through the city at night under arcades splashed with shades of ebony and maroon and seeing dozens of alleys and passageways stemming from a single block, each leading to new bad rooms, is to see a real-life 1959 film noir improbably preserved less than 90 miles from the Florida Keys. But Cuba exists in this state of functioning ruin because of the selfishness of its leadership, the autism of its official politics, and the complicity of shortsighted U.S. diplomacy. If you’re a tourist, the place is a grotesque amusement park, with the theme of a totalitarian state.

An entire generation of Cubans have been forced to squander their life’s possibilities under an oppressive system hostile to progress or personal initiative. The exodus to Florida stood as a lesson in cold Darwinism, for it seems likely that America took in many of the most daring personalities who were willing to risk their all.

Memories of a blockaded Cuba will linger before they fade entirely, before Cuba becomes like a Costa Rica of open borders and consumerist values. While the crowds of ordinary American visitors should be aware they are treading into a special place in its twilight days, their journey should also come with a mindfulness of just how contorted and artificial the mid-20th-century Cuban distinctiveness was, and what a high price in human potential was paid for it.

The post Obama’s Visit to Cuba Spells the End of a Grotesque Amusement Park appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No, I am not talking here about national security or counter-terrorism policy, but rather the telling issue of how governments think about money–specifically the money they are entitled to, as established by their tax policies.

The president and Jack Lew, his treasury secretary, have labeled companies that relocate overseas “unpatriotic.” Last week, the administration announced a series of executive actions meant to crack down on such relocations–legally known as “inversions”–when they entail folding a U.S. entity into an overseas holding company, often for tax purposes. Walgreens, the drugstore chain, recently backed down from a plan to pull off an inversion given the firestorm around the issue.

The political fight around these inversions has pitted profitable corporations (mostly pharmaceuticals) and their lobbyists against politicians and pundits lamenting the fact that some folks refuse to pay their “fair share” or to appreciate the benefits bestowed upon us all by our American citizenship. And we all know which side of that fight we’re supposed to be on.

But hold on. The political debate around this issue is–and I know this will come as a shock!–divorced from the real underlying problem. The inversions debate is less about greedy companies wanting to lower their taxes and more about the fact that ours is a country with an outdated tax code: one that reflects the worst go-it-alone, imperialistic, America-first impulses.

Most of the arguments around inversions, and most of the media coverage, are purely focused on tax rates. And that’s understandable. We’re used to squabbling about rates and, at 35 percent, America’s corporate income tax is among the highest in the world. So this story of unpatriotic companies is almost entirely told as a quest for lower rates elsewhere.

But the far more significant problem is old-fashioned Yankee imperialism. The United States persists in imposing its “worldwide taxation” system, rather than the “territorial” model embraced by most of the rest of the world.

Under a “territorial” tax system, the sovereign with jurisdiction over the economic activity is entitled to tax it. If you profit from doing business in France, you owe the French treasury taxes, regardless of whether you are a French, American, or Japanese multinational. Even the United States, conveniently, subscribes to this logical approach when it comes to foreign companies doing business here: Foreign companies pay Washington corporate taxes on the income made by their U.S. operations.

But under our worldwide tax system, Uncle Sam also taxes your income as an American citizen (or Apple’s or Coca-Cola’s) anywhere in the world. What confers jurisdiction in this case is not the location of the economic activity but your home base or residency, as a company or individual. So $100 made by Apple selling a device in Shanghai or Paris is the same to Uncle Sam as $100 made in Los Angeles.

Well, almost the same. The one difference is that the $100 profit Apple makes in another country is first taxed by that country, and only taxed by Washington when it is literally brought back home (“repatriated,” in tax lingo). At that time, Apple receives a credit for the taxes paid elsewhere (just like you get to deduct your state income taxes from your federal tax bill).

So, let’s assume Apple makes $100 in a country with a 15 percent corporate tax. Apple pays that country’s tax authority $15. Then, Apple must decide whether or not to keep the rest of its money overseas. Bringing that $85 back to the United States to invest in business here or return to shareholders would require Apple to pay an extra $20 tax to Uncle Sam. (Apple would owe $35 in U.S. taxes minus the $15 credit it would receive for taxes paid elsewhere on that income.)

This deferral in imposing a tax that shouldn’t be imposed in the first place gives us the worst of all possible worlds: in complexity, inefficiency, and disincentives to investing in America and its future. Defenders of the status quo and corporate critics like to point out that companies often don’t pay a full 35 percent rate on their global income because a hefty portion of their overseas profits remains trapped overseas. So they shouldn’t whine about the rate, the argument goes, as if companies relish these artificial hurdles to allocating resources where they are most needed.

Imagine you are a California-based widget manufacturer competing around the world against a Dutch widget manufacturer. You both do very well and compete aggressively in Latin America, and pay taxes on your income there. Trouble is, your Dutch competitor can reinvest those profits back in its home country without paying additional taxes, but you can’t. Alibaba, the Chinese online retailer that just floated its massive IPO in New York, may face a lot of challenges expanding beyond its Chinese market, but taxes certainly won’t be one of them. USA Today reported that the company’s effective tax rate is 11.9 percent, compared to more than 30 percent for Amazon. And, the Chinese company won’t be hounded by its Communist regime to pay taxes on money it makes outside China.

The big underlying conceptual problem is that our worldwide approach to taxation, dating back to the 1920s, is the tax code equivalent of gunboat diplomacy. It presupposes that America has jurisdiction over anything Americans do elsewhere, and that other countries don’t really matter. It presupposes that it is our government, and no other, that is responsible for creating the conditions for business to take place. This approach dates back to a time when it would have been unimaginable to think that iconic American multinationals could one day do more business in foreign lands than at home, or that they might face formidable foreign competitors (even within the U.S. market!).

A number of companies have moved their headquarters outside the United States because our tax code makes it so difficult to run a global business. But it was emblematic of our nationalistic hubris that Burger King was also denounced as “unpatriotic” recently when its merger with Canada’s Tim Horton’s was announced. The company’s relocation to Canada (hardly a dodgy, tax-evasion haven) makes sense given where the combined companies’ operations are, but in Washington this was just seen as another treason by inversion, because in our myopic worldview, other countries don’t matter.

Instead of attacking companies struggling to compete in the global marketplace, the Obama administration should work with Republicans to move to a territorial tax system. That’s even more important than fiddling with the actual rates, because it is what will level the playing field between U.S. companies and their foreign competitors. Both would pay the U.S. rate here, but not elsewhere.

If we modernize our tax system to reflect the realities of the global economy, we won’t just stop more American companies from leaving. We’d also be encouraging plenty of foreign companies to pull off inversions of their own, to America. We may not be the only country that matters (sorry, D.C.), but if we fix the tax code, we’d be about as good a place to do business as anywhere else on earth.

The post Why Do Burger King and Walgreens Want to Flee the U.S.? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The headlines these days all seem to demand exclamation marks. Iraq is teetering on the brink! Russian troops are massing on the Ukrainian border! Gaza lies in ruins! World’s worst Ebola epidemic afflicts Africa!

Oh, and it is also National Goat Cheese Month. Welcome to another quiet and peaceful August.

Yeah, right. One of the puzzles of summer is why so many of us persist in pretending that August is a month when nothing happens, when we can step back, tune out, take a break, and recharge. Europeans even think they are entitled to take the entire month off.

Perhaps there’s something about late summer, a couple months gone since school let out in June, that makes us forget our history. This year, August is full of reminders. We’re commemorating the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s resignation and the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I.

Bellicose August also brought the Gulf of Tonkin incident that triggered our involvement in Vietnam, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the failed coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939 that enabled Hitler to invade Poland on September 1, and the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 and ensuing Japanese surrender. Hurricane Katrina also occurred in August, but let’s leave Mother Nature out of it.

There’s a melancholic quality to August, a month nearly synonymous with “waning days of summer.” Less acknowledged in our cultural vernacular is the extent to which the “waning” feeling is as much about the end of another year as it is about the end of summer.

Sure, we sing “Auld Lang Syne,” kiss under the mistletoe, and wish each other a “Happy New Year” when December turns to January. But who among us doesn’t feel that the real reset moment each year, the new beginning, comes in September, the day after Labor Day? The fall is when we start school and football season and the U.S. government fiscal year, and when we get serious, if we ever do, about our work.

August, then, is about the waning not only of summer, but also of each passing year, and lost possibilities. It is about the waning of life, even. There is a grasping, desperate quality to many of the historical events that took place in August—hence the resonance of the title of Barbara W. Tuchman’s historical bestseller about the outset of World War I, The Guns of August. It’s quite fashionable to study the sequence of events that led to the so-called “Great War,” which in retrospect appear like dominoes falling as if on a predetermined course. The rest of the war is far less fashionable to read about, as it proves too muddled a narrative. Best to focus on the August beginning, and how it ended all that came before.

Mischief conspires with melancholia in August, the notion that mice can play while the cat’s vacationing. It’s not clear whether Saddam Hussein thought he would get away with taking over Kuwait if he did so while the American president was summering in Maine, or whether that president’s son, when he was in office a decade later, would have taken warnings of an airborne Al Qaeda plot more seriously had he been briefed about them at some time and place other than August at his Texas ranch.

August and the waning days of summer (and of the year, I insist) is when we let our guards down, creating an opening for those with an agenda, be it the invasion of Poland or Kuwait, or the shorting of the pound (George Soros famously bet against the British currency in August 1992, and won big). So keep your eye on colleagues who seem especially busy and eager to stick around the office this month. Who knows what they’re up to?

Financial markets are notoriously slow in August, the month of lowest trading volumes, when bankers follow their clients to the beach. But “slow” can be a deceptive term in business as in life, given that lower volume and less liquidity in a market can make it more volatile, and more susceptible to speculation. If you buy or sell 1,000 shares of a company, you are far more likely to influence that stock price on a day when only 5,000 shares trade hands than on a day when 100,000 shares trade hands.

That same dynamic applies to anyone seeking to influence the outcome of any event: your influence increases the fewer people are engaged. Which is what makes this such a dodgy month, and the current news headlines so ominous.

And now, I’m off to the beach for a week. It’s August, after all.

The post Stop Pretending Nothing Happens in August appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.