In 2013, when I was 13, one of the oldest comedy TV programs in Russia released a sketch in which a group of musicians performed a version of Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” satirizing the country.

The lyrics went: “The roads in this country are like cars in this country. Like the salaries, the football, the communal services, and, of course, the cinema …” When Freddie Mercury sang “God knows,” it was twisted to sound like the Russian equivalent of “shit.”

As the audience laughed, another actor approached the band to tell them to stop singing the song because “respected people are sitting in the hall.” He added, “Be grateful that at least Putin is not.” One of the musicians exclaimed, in shock, “What? Putin is not?”— a common Russian sentence construction that can either mean something isn’t present, or that it does not exist at all. “I told you!” he said. “He doesn’t exist.” The audience burst out with laughter.

My mom and I saw the sketch on TV when it came out. We loved it. When she took me to school by car and “I Want to Break Free” played on the radio, we loudly sang “our” version.

The following year, 2014, Russia invaded Donbass.

I do not remember much about my feelings about the invasion back then. I was a teenager concerned with two things: my weight and final exams. But even so, I could sense clearly that a younger version of myself who had laughed at silly jokes about Putin was gone.

The only political mood I could count on then was the anticipation of change. After there were large-scale protests against election fraud at the Kremlin’s Bolotnaya Square in 2012, the adults around me repeated again and again, “We just need to wait a little more.” They believed that a future of democracy and free elections was near.

But it wasn’t. Even before I became old enough to really recognize myself as part of the political process, the patience became sticky and suffocating. Now, it’s hard for me to believe that a 13-year-old me laughed at opposition jokes about Putin on the main state TV channel. I want to tell her, even though it would be upsetting, “Remember how people would point out that you had spent your whole life under Putin, as though it were hilarious? Well, I have news — I’m 23 now, and it’s not funny anymore.”

I started to see the reality of things in 2018, when activist and opposition politician Alexei Navalny was banned from participating in the presidential race. A famous photo of Navalny and his team walking through the center of Moscow to register for the elections will forever remain in my memories. Nikolskaya Street, where the photo was taken, is always bright and filled with tourists. I often walked there alone during my first year at university, when I didn’t know anybody in Moscow yet and needed to feel crowds around me.

It was meaningful to me that Navalny was trying to participate in the election as an opposition candidate the same year I finished high school and started my bachelor’s degree. At the time, it seemed like new futures were stretching out ahead for both me and my country.

Instead, it was a lesson that my childhood was over. That was the last year when Navalny’s participation in the presidential elections could at least be imagined or contemplated.

I finally realized that changes would not come through electoral politics during the September 2021 municipal elections, when Russian cities elected their local deputies. One of the most prominent politicians was Mikhail Lobanov, an opposition candidate with a leftist agenda and a young team. In his district, Lobanov was ahead of his pro-government competitor by 12,000 votes. But then, Russian authorities introduced “electronic voting,” which opened up the possibility of fraud on an even larger scale than the ballot stuffing protested back in 2012.

According to the results of the electronic vote—which were announced at the very end—Lobanov’s rival received 20,000 votes out of nowhere, to win by several percentage points. Independent media published lengthy articles about mass falsifications.

It was those municipal elections—small in the scope of the country—that secured absolute control for Putin. From then on, voting results could literally be drawn on a computer screen.

It’s 2024 now. Navalny is dead, and Russia is engaged in a large-scale war in Ukraine. Russian state media insist that the government was not behind his death because “it would be unprofitable for Putin to kill Navalny in prison before the presidential elections”— as though voters actually affect the elections’ outcome. None of the opposition candidates condemning the war in Ukraine were allowed to participate in this year’s presidential elections.

None of this was a surprise. But it makes me angry that I’m not surprised by anything.

Instead of the optimism of 10 years ago, I feel meaninglessness. And I’m not alone. When I interviewed 18-year-olds who will vote for the first time in 2024, they said things like, “I am sure that my vote will not change anything, we all know the result,” and “There can be only one outcome of the elections.” For them, hoping for change feels irrational and forbidden, but still desired — like wanting to eat delicious fruit that gives you an allergic reaction.

Still, when the anti-war politician Boris Nadezhdin tried to become a presidential candidate this year, thousands of people in different cities stood in line in the cold to sign for his nomination. They didn’t necessarily support him as an individual but wanted to express their opposition to the war through legal means. A huge campaign collected more than 100,000 signatures, even though many people participating knew that the outcome would be the authorities rejecting Nadezhdin’s candidacy.

What was all their work for? Was it meaningless?

I think a lot about the conversations that people in those lines may have had. I remember how I used to go to the court hearings of political prisoners in Russia—not only to show solidarity but also because people who gathered near the courts became friends. The hearings were spaces of political communication, even if they had no real power or purpose.

Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said that “meaninglessness shouldn’t lead us to give away all subjectivity to others.” These words resonate with me. In the face of Russia’s anti-democratic acts and governance, I feel an urge to dissolve my voice because my vote means nothing. But that would be wrong.

For many Russians, the tedious wait for change has proven too frustrating. When nothing changes we gradually lose our political drive, deciding that our actions are meaningless.

But politics is not just what appears in history textbooks—key events and major actors. Growing up in Russia under Putin, I learned that you can’t wait for politics. Now I think my main political actions happen when I interact with other people, and when I care about other people. That could be outside the courts, at rallies, and in the living room with my friends when we argue about colonialism in Russian regions. It’s also when I comfort my mom, because she feels lonely in Russia and hates to see the pro-war posters on the streets of our city.

Over the weekend, the opposition conducted a “Noon against Putin” campaign. It asked people to come to polling stations at a specific time — 12 p.m.— to either spoil their ballot or choose any candidate other than Putin. The main value of the campaign was to give people the opportunity to see others who hold similar beliefs and anger. To feel solidarity and their own agency.

I think this is especially important for 18-year-old voters who have no illusions about a democratic future and who, like me, have spent their childhood under Putin. I once wanted to warn my younger self that nothing would change. Now, I think it’s better to say that waiting for change isn’t the main point. It’s also about forging relationships that turn into like-minded community. Perhaps, in doing so, we will create bonds on which to build new political hopes and democratic futures.

The post Seeking a Politics of Solidarity in Putin’s Russia appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In December 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin officially announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election. It had long been clear that he had plans to aim for his fifth term in office. Most people in Russia believed he would secure a victory, and that the other candidates served merely to legitimize the electoral process. For Russian authorities, demonstrating majority support for Putin has long been the objective of elections—this time, they were aiming for him to win 80% of the votes. The question was, would anyone be allowed to put up a real challenge, and would voters dare to support them?

The men who initially declared that they would run for president in the March 2024 elections were all establishment candidates who either tacitly or openly backed Putin remaining in power. There was no one who opposed Putin’s war with Ukraine.

Then, Yekaterina Duntsova, a journalist and former Duma deputy in Rzhev, a town west of Moscow, unexpectedly decided to run as an independent candidate. She quickly gained support throughout Russia thanks to her strong antiwar stance and criticism of the country’s direction over the past decade. But the Central Election Commission (CEC), the federal body that organizes and oversees elections, rejected Duntsova’s registration as a candidate in December 2023, citing numerous errors in her submitted documents.

The following month, the CEC approved the documents of another anti-war candidate, Boris Nadezhdin, who was nominated by the Civic Initiative party. Nadezhdin is known for his liberal views and has participated in elections at various levels for almost 35 years. His presidential platform focused on peace, reconciliation, and justice, with a commitment to resolving conflicts through negotiations. He supported holding referendums on disputed territories between Russia and Ukraine. He also emphasized the need to strengthen international relations, release political prisoners, and repeal discriminatory laws against organizations and individuals, including the LGBT community.

The election commission approved his initial documents, but Nadezhdin needed to collect 100,000 signatures from Russian voters from different regions to get on the ballot. Inspired by Nadezdin’s platform, I decided to join his team as a volunteer at a signature collection site in St. Petersburg in January 2024. I am an environmental sociologist and had never before been involved in politics. But Nadezhdin’s emphasis on peace resonated with me, and I was eager to make a difference.

On January 13, Nadezhdin arrived in St. Petersburg to engage with citizens at a public event in one of the city’s business centers. The atmosphere was electrifying, resembling the kind of unauthorized rally strictly prohibited in Russia. Nadezhdin delivered a speech and Q&A session that gave people the opportunity to express their views on the Putin regime and the future of Russia through an open microphone session.

I spent 12 days collecting signatures. Initially, it was slow: only a few individuals were willing to sign in support of Nadezhdin. But as the submission deadline approached, there was a significant surge in participation, particularly among young people, ages 18 to 25. Many were spurred on by exiled political players like Maxim Kats and the TV channel Dozhd, also known as TV Rain, as well as social media. This wave of enthusiasm rapidly spread across Russia, and long queues formed at Nadezhdin signature collection sites throughout the country.

By January 21, the waiting time at the Nadezhdin signature collection site in St. Petersburg was 2 to 4.5 hours. The collection site operated around the clock, spending 9 to 10 hours each day collecting signatures. At night, volunteers did quality checks to ensure that people’s handwriting would satisfy the CEC’s intricate and complicated rules and regulations.

According to the CEC’s regulations, Nadezhdin had to collect signatures from at least 40 regions of Russia, with each region limited to a maximum of 2,500 signatures. After our signature collection site surpassed this requirement, quickly collecting 5,000 signatures from residents of St. Petersburg, we shifted to only collecting signatures from people who were officially registered in other regions, as indicated by the official stamp in their passports. Many people were disappointed to be turned away.

On January 31, Boris Nadezhdin submitted 105,000 signatures—the maximum permitted—to the CEC. He had managed to collect 211,000 signatures in Russia alone, and 11,000 more from abroad.

The volunteers who collected signatures in St. Petersburg had doubts about his chances of being registered, but remained hopeful. One of them shared their thoughts in our volunteer group chat:

“Today, at noon, I stood on the street with frozen hands, scrolling through the news channels’ feeds, anxiously waiting for any updates from the Central Election Commission. It’s disheartening, but not surprising. However, I refuse to lose hope or give up, and I wish the same for everyone.”

Nevertheless, on February 8, 2024, the CEC refused to register Boris Nadezhdin’s candidacy. They justified their decision by declaring that more than 5% of the submitted signatures were invalid. Nadezhdin appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, but they rejected the appeal.

My fellow volunteers and I were deeply disappointed by the outcome. “Some people may have questioned the purpose of collecting signatures for Nadezhdin, believing that the CEC would find faults anyway. However, pay attention—the CEC officially recognized that 95,000 signatures are clean,” someone wrote in our chat. “Everyone saw the queues! There are a lot of people from different walks of life who are against the current system, and we showed that there are a lot of us.”

Just over a week later, another candidate for the presidency Vladislav Davankov from the New People party announced at his meetings with voters that he is for negotiations with Ukraine. Simultaneously, the government announced the death of another Putin opponent, Alexei Navalny. Nadezhdin attended his funeral, as did Duntsova.

The Russian government understands that millions of its citizens oppose Putin. Now, the whole world has seen that there are many people in Russia striving for peace, change, and a more inclusive future.

The post On the Campaign Trail With a Russian Antiwar Candidate appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is not new territory for Balta, which like much of Ukraine has been contested over centuries of wars. But in recent years, Balta has actually broken a lot of new ground, at least when it comes to the practice of citizen-centered democracy. In 2016, Balta adopted participatory budgeting, an innovative process—originated in Brazil—in which citizens rather than officials determine their local budget. Balta also gave its young people their own governing council and a decision-making process to influence local policies.

Democracy, in its essence, is everyday people governing themselves. Such self-government happens most often at the local level, which is why countries tend to get more democratic when they decentralize.

Since the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukraine has been among the more rapidly decentralizing, and democratizing, countries on Earth.

This context is crucial to understanding what is now at stake in Eastern Europe. The war is being described as a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, between Russia and the West, or between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. But it’s really a clash between two of the most powerful trends in worldwide governance: increasing authoritarianism in nation-states and increasing democracy in our local communities.

In other words, Ukraine is now a battlefield where the international democratic recession meets the local democratic expansion.

Balta’s advances in local democracy are representative of this shift toward greater local power and responsibility in 21st-century Ukraine. A generation ago, Ukraine was a post-Soviet state, with a centralized government conducting top-down rule of 24 oblasts, and nearly 500 rayons (territorial units of about 50,000 people). Localities—including larger cities and nearly 12,000 hromadas, orlocal communities—could hold elections, but their officials had little influence over local affairs.

In this century, and especially in the last eight years, Ukraine has devolved power to those local communities, more than 90 percent of which have fewer than 3,000 people. For many smaller hromadas, Ukraine authorized amalgamation—mergers of small communities into larger municipal units, called “amalgamated territorial communities,” which would have enough heft to provide services and lead economic development.

To incentivize these mergers—towns made rich by gas or property taxes sometimes were resistant—amalgamated communities were given a greater share of both national and local budgets, new power to impose local taxes, and greater responsibility for education, health care, transportation, social programs, and agricultural land. To improve governance, these communities were authorized to experiment with democratic tools like participatory budgeting; in the past year, Ukraine has also advanced legislation permitting more popular referenda.

In a politically divided Ukraine, this devolution of local power had support across the spectrum, for a couple reasons.

The first was positive, and driven by economics. Putting more money and power in localities was seen as the best bet for addressing poverty and inequality, and developing Ukraine in a balanced way that would make it a better fit with the rest of Europe, which has strong local governments.

The second reason, however, was defensive: the threat of separatism. In a country the size of Texas, greater local control was seen as the best way to placate localities and regions that might think of leaving—especially Donetsk and Luhansk, two Russian-speaking Ukrainian oblasts where Russia would make incursions (and which Putin would declare “independent” as a pretext for his new invasion).

“The path of decentralization was an asymmetrical response to the aggressor,” said Andriy Parubiy, a former speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, in 2017. “The process of the formation of capable communities was a kind of sewing of the Ukrainian space.”

Many of these newly empowered Ukrainian local governments have seized the opportunity, and not just for economic development. Municipalities have embraced political reforms—adopting ethics codes, making their records and decision-making transparent, establishing citizen-directed processes like participatory budgeting, and adding new guarantees for representation and participation of women, men, and underrepresented groups in local politics.

Just this past December, two Ukrainian cities, Khmelnytskyi and Vinnytsia, finished first and third, respectively, in a global contest for innovation in government transparency. Mariupol, a city in the southeast reportedly under siege by the Russian military, has won international praise for its model of sharing governance power with local organizations.

These newly empowered cities have also been eager to collaborate with one another, especially in infrastructure, waste management, and extending internet services. Planning is increasingly long-term. Kamianske, a locality of 240,800 in the oblast Dnipropetrovsk, is using a democratic, citizen-led process to compose a municipal development strategy for 2027.

The commitment to building includes infrastructure for democracy itself. In the Poltava oblast, where localities are especially collaborative, the larger city of Kremenchuk was preparing to launch a school for participatory budgeting while a smaller town, Pyriatyn, established a city council ethics code and a “Dialogue Club” that allows students to debate proposed decisions and participate in planning. In Luhansk, Sievierodonetsk, population 112,950, has prioritized initiatives to make it easier for internally displaced persons to participate in local decision-making.

Of course, not all the results of decentralization are praise-worthy. A 2018 assessment of three cities, sponsored by the intergovernmental democracy support organization International IDEA, identified problems such as greater local partisanship and political fighting under the new system, and a lack of clarity about which local officials and institutions are in control. In larger cities, notably Odesa and Kharkiv, critics see decentralization as having enabled corruption by powerful business interests and patronage-dispensing political machines.

Ukraine also faces an underappreciated but enormous global problem for democratic governance: too few people have the skill and expertise to do the complicated work of running a local democratic government. As a result, too many local democracies struggle, or even fail, because they don’t have people who can organize consultations, manage a budget and contracts, prevent corruption, or lead a strategic planning process.

Putin’s determination to conquer Ukraine means these problems won’t be solved any time soon. Even if his invasion is repelled, the war could tear at all this newly sewn democratic fabric in Ukrainian communities. And the fighting may reinforce media and political narratives that Ukraine is a country dangerously divided between its Ukrainian-speaking, Europe-oriented west and the Russian-speaking, old-fashioned east.

But the true Ukraine picture is more complicated than that. And, despite all the human costs of this conflict, it’s quite possible that the recent rise of local democracy may allow community collaborations to continue, even through difficult times. Perhaps the war, for all its dangers to life and liberty, might even open up new possibilities for more democracy and development.

That’s not a blind hope. It’s history. The horrors of nation-state autocracies have long inspired the desire for local self-government, just as the weakness of democratic systems offers openings for dictators. Big authoritarianism and little democracy go together, like darkness and light—a reality famously recognized by the Ukraine-born Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov in his classic Stalin-era novel, The Master and Margarita.

The plot is driven by a visit from the devil to the Soviet Union. “What would your good do if evil didn’t exist,” Satan asks an evangelist-writer, who is full of despair, “and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?”

***

Democracy You Can Watch

The historic convention to draft a new Chilean constitution is meeting again as the South American summer ends. Watching people write can be boring, but your columnist, a Spanish speaker, is enjoying the proceedings live on the broadcast site https://convencion.tv.

Closing Words

“True democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the centre. It has to be worked from below by the people of every village.” —Mahatma K. Gandhi, 1948

This is the debut of Democracy Local, a new global column.

The post Can Ukraine’s Experiments in Local Democracy Survive the Invasion? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How can we decipher the nuances of today’s form of extreme nationalism? And what is new about it when compared to, for instance, the ultra-nationalism that led to fascism and dictatorships in the 20th century?

To answer that question, consider today’s nationalist political movements like you do the vegetable section in your grocery store. There are a variety of neo-national movements and leaders, but they are all metaphorically vegetables.

Varieties of neo-nationalism range from political movements and parties (think Brexit or the National Front, rebranded the National Rally, in France under Marine Le Pen), to neo-nationalist leaning governments (with wannabe autocrats like Trump or Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and the evolving story of Modi’s India), to illiberal democracies (Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Andrzej Duda’s Poland and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey), to authoritarian states (think China, Russia, and North Korea at the extreme end).

Hybrids abound. But most neo-national movements, parties, and governments are characterized by some combination of right-wing anti-immigrant, nativist, anti-science, anti-globalist (sometimes couched as anti-Western), and protectionist sentiments. When in power, they seek to squelch or even eradicate criticism.

And neo-nationalist leaders often have a core constituency that includes conservative religious groups—a marriage one finds in India, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and here in the U.S., but not in secular China where the Communist Party is the state religion.

Some of this is familiar. Like right-wing populist movements in the past, neo-nationalist supporters and parties are often reacting to their own sense of waning political power, and perceived declines in social status and economic opportunity. Demagogues, then, step in to feed off a desire to preserve or reclaim a seemingly lost national cultural and political identity.

In Russia, you can find such backward-looking neo-nationalism. Vladimir Putin is infatuated with asserting Russia’s power and place in the world in order to revive nationalism and reclaim in some modern form both Russia’s tsarist and Soviet empire.

But if you really want to go back to the future, go to China.

Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” is a rewind to hero-worship politics. He demands increased loyalty to the party, and has built a personal cult around himself reminiscent of the founding leader of China’s Communist Party, Mao Zedong. Xi’s goals are to preserve the existing domestic political order, to restore territory seen as lost (namely Taiwan), and to pursue a new global economic dominance and increasingly military presence in Asia, and beyond. Xi’s autocratic China is also portrayed as a superior model to established democracies that seem incapable of governing.

One of Xi Jinping’s earliest nativist edicts—in 2013, just a year after assuming power—was for the Chinese people to avoid Western values and what he called the “seven unmentionables.” These included “Western constitutional democracy,” human rights, media independence, promoting “universal values” in an attempt to weaken the theoretical foundations of the Party’s leadership, judicial independence, pro-market liberalism, and “nihilist” criticism of the party’s past.

For all the attention on autocratic regimes like Russia or China, it is the illiberal democracies that are growing the fastest in number. These are nations that often in the aftermath of dictatorships elect their leaders but have no history or culture of participatory democracy and civil liberties. Elected right-wing nationalists then establish a political environment that employs a mixture of corruption, demagoguery, and a lighter version of repressive regimes of the past, often with wide popular support.

Some illiberal democracies border on being authoritarian regimes. These are characterized by indefinite presidential terms, the repression or control of media outlets, erosion of judicial independence, the transfer of state resources to an oligarchy, and the persecution of opponents—along with the maintenance of some semblance of open elections.

Perpetually staying in power is often one major objective of neo-nationalist leaders. An example is Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In a call to arms, in 2014, Orbán infamously declared the end of liberal democracy in Hungary and his intention to build “an illiberal new state based on national values.” He cited China, Russia, and Turkey as his inspiration and encouraged others to follow. Indeed, autocratic leaning states and their leaders are supporting each other, sometimes to mitigate international sanctions, other times militarily—Putin’s support of Belarus’s autocratic government being one example.

What fuels the popular support for neo-nationalism? Orbán and other protagonists leverage the politics of fear to attack and blame perceived enemies, domestic and foreign, wrapping themselves in a mantle of patriotism. Such tactics were prevalent in previous forms of extreme nationalism.

But the causes and practices of today’s breed of nationalism (and hence the prefix neo) are newer and modern, and have three accelerants.

The first is the rapid pace of globalization and the economic uncertainty and fear it produces. While globalization, and specifically the growth of transnational trade, promised cheaper goods and a rise in living standards, it also led to economic stagnation and oftentimes an actual decline in living standards among lower- and middle-income populations in regions of the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and elsewhere.

The second accelerant is the pace of immigration and demographic changes among and within many countries. Today’s shifts in demography are historic, and are marked by mass immigration, mostly to Western economies, caused in part by the search for jobs as well as displacement caused by war, poverty, climate, and dysfunctional societies.

Open borders, open markets on an unprecedented scale, and the shock of the Great Recession, are all widely recognized causes for a populist reaction characterized by anti-globalism, nativism, protectionism, and opposition to immigration.

The third accelerant is the ability of a new generation of populists and demagogues to use technology and social networks to promote themselves, find allies for their movements, both at home and abroad, and attack enemies. The ease at which social media and its algorithms can distribute false narratives has added considerably to the power of political movements. Right-wing populists in many nations now bypass conventional media and build followings—like President Trump using Twitter for significant policy directives sandwiched between aspersions on political opponents.

Technology in the service of neo-nationalist leaders does not end there. In China, Russia, and in many illiberal democracies, new technologies offer paths for monitoring and punishing dissent, for spreading disinformation, and concerted efforts to subvert established democracies—what is termed sharp power.

Xi’s China, for all its backward-looking cult-making, has led both technologically and tactically. The state has imposed firewalls controlling access to websites and strict rules on what can be discussed. The 1989 events in Tiananmen Square are off limits to the web and discussion in China. So is the mass incarceration of ethnic Muslim Uighurs, again part of a nationalist drive for conformity.

Such suppression is blatantly overt, but other tools are more subtle and decidedly novel. Beijing has developed a Social Credit System using data sources, such as artificial intelligence and face recognition technologies, to give each citizen a score on their social and political conformist behavior—with the threat of penalties and even jail for those that stray. Putin’s Russia is experimenting with this in Moscow.

Combining new and more conventional forms of surveillance, like encouraging citizens to report on each other’s broadly-defined seditious activity, sometimes leads to arrests, or the loss of a job. It is not so much the number of academics, civil rights lawyers, or other pro-democracy advocates put in jail, but the message it sends to induce fear and encourage political conformity—whether in China, increasingly in Hong Kong, or elsewhere. One objective is self-censorship. And it works, particularly if practiced over a long period.

It’s crucial to note that nationalism—whether in new forms, or in revivals with new characteristics—is not solely the domain of right-wing politics. Modern nationalism also has a variant on the left side of the political divide. The left shares anti-globalist views espoused by nationalists of the right—for example that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), multilateral trade agreements, and even the EU, are conspiracies to increase inequality and erode national sovereignty. And there is intolerance for civil debate on both sides of the political spectrum.

One might also consider the nuances of nationalism that led to the Arab Spring. Nationalist movements that started with calls for participatory democracy and economic opportunity eventually resulted in religious conservative governments or new autocratic regimes—think Egypt under Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi and, perhaps, Tunisia since Kais Saied’s presidential coup earlier this year.

The COVID-19 pandemic should have eroded the attraction of neo-nationalists’ messaging. Think about the remarkably short period—just one year—from discovery of the virus to the creation of multiple effective vaccines. This governance and scientific success was built on decades of publicly funded biomedical research and it should have elevated the value of global collaboration and scientific inquiry.

Instead, the virus provided an opportunity to reinforce extremist views, spread fantastical conspiracy theories, and thus solidify and expand the power of savvy neo-nationalist leaders in much of the world. China used the pandemic as partial cover to crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong. In other corners of the globe, extreme nationalists used the pandemic to argue that international organizations are ineffective and pose a threat to national sovereignty.

Where is the world headed? Numerous non-profits monitor and provide data on this march of autocrats and right-wing nationalist movements. Freedom House, an NGO that monitors global freedom, has chronicled a long-term decline in democratic governments “broad enough to be felt by those living under the cruelest dictatorships, as well as by citizens of long-standing democracies.”

Varieties of Democracy or V-Dem, which uses an extensive dataset relying on local country experts, estimates that some 68 percent of the world’s population live under autocrats and autocrat-leaning governments—up from 48 percent in 2010.

Optimists might see a few signs of slowdown in the march of neo-nationalist political leaders and autocratic-leaning governments. The desire of young people in Hungary and Poland to stay in the European Union poses a political obstacle for nativist policies. The neo-nationalist Alternative for Germany (AFD) party just lost seats in the Bundestag. Trump lost to Biden. In France, Le Pen’s party is not making major gains, at the moment.

Societies with strong democratic traditions and civil discourse may appear to be partially immune to the worst scenarios of nationalism gone haywire.  But danger lurks for both established and new democracies. Donald Trump, despite his near-coup, remains a viable political candidate and has created a playbook for Brazil’s Bolsonaro, who has insisted that he can only lose the pending presidential election if it is stolen.

Perhaps democracy is more fragile than many of us would like to think.

Writing in the midst of the Great Depression and reflecting on nationalist movements in Europe and America, Sinclair Lewis warned in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here of a dystopian American future in which a charismatic and power-hungry demagogue leverages fear and nationalism to become president. The first American writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature, Lewis gave voice to a worry that fascism could emerge in arguably the world’s first modern republic as an outgrowth of economic disruption and populist anger.

The United States has an antiquated electoral process, a justice system seemingly incapable of swiftly prosecuting a treasonous political leader, and a Republican Party cheering on a possible autocrat. Only a year ago the U.S. was close to a complete constitutional meltdown instigated by a morally bankrupt neo-nationalist.

It can happen here.

The post What’s New About Neo-Nationalism, Anyway? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With the midterm elections fast approaching, and the American public seething with partisan anger, a Zócalo/Japanese American National Museum event on Friday night raised the question, “Can U.S. Democracy Survive Russian Information Warfare?”

Moderator Warren Olney, host of KCRW’s “To the Point,” put that query to a panel of three experts—Julia Davis, a Ukraine-born film producer and founder of the Russian Media Monitor, which analyzes Russian state media in the broader context of the Kremlin’s propaganda; Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent and now Senior Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs; and Caroline Orr, a Virginia Commonwealth University behavioral scientist who uses open-source information and data analytics to examine how Russia has weaponized social media against the United States.

The short answer, given by all three: “Yes,” America can prevail.

But as the panelists told an overflow crowd at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles, the United States is engaged in a new form of combat with Russia that won’t end anytime soon—no matter which political party controls Congress or the White House. Russia’s goal isn’t simply to boost a particular politician, or hand a megaphone to an extremist fringe group, but to undermine America’s core democratic values, institutions, and way of life, the panelists concurred.

“The more chaos there is here, the more it benefits Putin’s agenda,” Davis summarized. For example, she continued, even though evidence is mounting that Russia intervened in 2016 to help elect Donald Trump, the Russians wouldn’t be worried if Trump were to be impeached. Instead, Davis said, they’d be trying to exploit the situation to provoke massive civil discord, even armed unrest.

Orr said that Russian intelligence operatives have a variety of strategies and objectives for making Americans lunge at each other’s throats, even over something as relatively innocuous as whether NFL players should stand during the national anthem. In that situation, Orr said, the Russians are tapping into a preexisting societal problem of racism, and simply amplifying it digitally. “Sometimes [the Russian strategy] is to distract us, sometimes to make us fight, sometimes to make us hopeless,” Orr said.

Olney asked: Why hasn’t the United States been able to fight back more effectively against these threats. Rangappa said Americans have sufficient intelligence capacity for this contest, but also “have one big law that stands in the way of the government doing anything, and that is the First Amendment.” Rangappa, an adamant proponent of free speech, acknowledged that America’s constitutional protections are sometimes at odds with the ability to clamp down on foreign propaganda machines. “The FBI and the First Amendment are two great tastes that do not go great together,” she said.

And sophisticated digital technology has abetted perpetrators’ ability not only to carry out cyberattacks but also to hide behind a wall of anonymity. A key difference between our present age and the Cold War era, Rangappa said, is that today’s technology platforms can put out information much faster, with a much wider reach, and in ways that the United States can counter only in limited ways. One way, she said, is to force Russia propaganda outlets masquerading as journalistic enterprises to register as foreign agents, as RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik recently were required to do.

Moving to specifics, Olney asked the panelists who exactly the Russians are targeting. Davis replied that, since around 2009, the Russians have been identifying people who are feeling disenfranchised, who don’t believe their votes or their voices count, and who are cynical about the state of the U.S. Russia wants to discourage such people from voting and to make them believe that democracy itself is a sham, as it is in Russia.

Asked by Olney why people are vulnerable to this type of misleading information, Orr explained that, for one thing, these messages are narrowly targeted to various segments of the population, for maximum impact.

“We’re all susceptible to believing things that sound good, things that play into beliefs that we already have,” Orr said. “They help us make sense out of things that don’t necessarily make sense,” supply satisfying answers to troubling questions, and soothe us by their sheer simplicity.

But how, Olney persisted, is it possible to build a small platform on Facebook or Twitter into a gigantic, continent-spanning echo chamber of like-minded people?

Orr replied that the Russians launch many trial runs to see what kinds of storylines will get shared repeatedly online. One Russian campaign targeting U.S. veterans has been notably successful because it taps into issues that veterans already care about, she said.

Russian trolls and bots also tend to push out controversial material during the wee morning hours in the United States. Few Americans are using social media between, say, 2 and 4 a.m. But when the East Coast starts waking up a couple hours later, it will be greeted by an inflammatory new hashtag generated in Moscow. More Americans will start wading into the conversation, at which point the Russian perpetrators can quietly melt back, undetected, into the angry online mob they’ve aroused. “It looks completely organic, it looks human-driven,” Orr said of these bot-orchestrated online conflicts.

And it’s not easy to persuade people who’ve fallen for such propaganda that they’ve been duped. “Simply telling somebody… that what they think is incorrect is not an effective way of changing people’s minds,” Orr said. “Part of the reason is, we’re susceptible to believing misinformation because we want to. We don’t want to believe that we’ve been fooled.” What’s more, she said, a lot of Russian propaganda isn’t aimed at convincing you of a particular viewpoint; its more insidious purpose is to convince you that no truth exists. The goal is to make people feel mentally overwhelmed and worn out, so they’ll stop trying to figure out which version of, say, the Syrian civil war to believe, and will give in to cynicism and despair, Orr suggested.

As the conversational mood tone grew darker than a chapter of John le Carré, Olney was moved to observe that, “This is a very disturbing situation!” eliciting uneasy laughter from the audience. Indeed, the panelists emphasized, the American public needs to awaken to the size and scope of the threat—fast. The Russians are weaponizing our most fundamental freedoms, and launching them at our own society and institutions.

“This is warfare, even in peacetime,” Rangappa said. “What I think is really difficult for Americans to understand is to get your mind around a threat that is not visible.”

There are ways to fight back. Responding to a question from the audience, the panelists mentioned Twitter accounts and websites such as Hamilton 68 that monitor Russian propaganda. Educational programs are available to teach young people how to distinguish fact-based journalism from conspiratorial fantasies, the panelists said. Congress also must play a role in hitting back at Putin and his oligarchical allies with tough economic sanctions, the women agreed. “We are in serious peril and we shouldn’t be enriching Putin and his cronies in the process,” Davis said.

The panelists said that, while the U.S. government can take measures and Silicon Valley needs to be held more accountable for granting wide bandwidth to hostile foreign powers, in the end it’s up to us as individual citizens to pay attention to our information sources, protect ourselves, and defend democracy.

“We are the targets of Russian propaganda,” Davis said, “but we are also the solution.”

The post Only You Can Defeat Vladimir Putin appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By now, the Kremlin’s methods are becoming familiar: infiltrating email and other electronic data in order to sway public opinion through embarrassing revelations against political candidates the Russians disfavor, as they did by releasing Democratic National Committee emails via Wikileaks in the 2016 US election; creating “fake news” and using social media to create negative press around those disfavored candidates; publicizing their own infiltration methods to create fear and confusion around the integrity of democratic processes; and pouring funds into the coffers of favored political candidates, laundered through disguised and unlikely intermediaries.

Macron’s landslide victory on Sunday indicates that Russia’s hack and dump, along with other methods, may have had less traction in a European environment than in the United States. But why? Since all of the strategies the Kremlin used in the U.S. case were trotted out in France, why were the Russians ultimately unable to make more headway in favor of Marine Le Pen, who, after all, was about as favored to win going into the run-off as Donald Trump a few weeks before the American election?

While we will no doubt learn more in the coming weeks and months, we should note the measures France takes to guard against disruptive foreign influences. We can only speculate about what factors contributed to Macron’s victory, but the different approaches to freedom of the press and speech between France and the United States highlights an existential crisis for well-off democracies in the Kremlin’s crosshairs: Should we attempt to protect the integrity of the public’s knowledge base by restricting the information it receives, or is it better to fight the corruption of public news sources with more news, and the degradation of facts with more facts, in the hope that the truth will eventually win out? If we are willing to restrict freedom in order to protect it, what measures should we take to prevent and contain the spread of such destabilizing cyber interference?

France’s mandatory election news blackout 36 hours prior to the opening of the polls—which bars candidates from making statements and media from reporting election data, including exit polls—may have been fortuitous for Macron: It coincidentally had the beneficial effect of avoiding dissemination of last-minute “revelations” with the potential to throw public opinion immediately prior to the election. Other French laws, such as limitations on campaign finance, may have made it difficult for the Russians to surreptitiously funnel money into French campaigns or to wield control over French candidates through financial leverage.

Both of these measures are currently unthinkable in the American First Amendment landscape: A mandatory news blackout, or restrictions on what the press can report, seems un-American, and might not stand up to a constitutional challenge in a federal court. And while candidates cannot accept contributions from foreign governments, the restrictions on political campaign financing are weak and easily circumvented in the United States. Americans are thus limited in the defensive tools we have at our disposal. Then because we cannot restrict harmful speech, we like to comfort ourselves with the thought that the antidote to fake press and distorted speech is more speech and an even freer press.

Is it not clear we have it right and the French, and other European nations that have been willing to tolerate greater restrictions on speech in the name of truth, have it wrong. We have always prided ourselves, for example, on the fact that no matter how abhorrent the sight of a publicly displayed swastika is for us, we have not taken the route of European countries and succumbed to a “ban” of that symbol. But perhaps some speech that is false, heinous, and deceitful is not worth protecting after all, and further that because of the national security threat allowing such speech poses, and the powerful multiplying effect of disseminating “fake news” through social media channels, it is time to consider whether taking measures to protect national security by limiting access to the gigantic megaphone of Facebook and Twitter is not long overdue. While the United States is unlikely to adopt the same measures instituted in France, perhaps it is time for Americans to consider whether some such controls are more likely to protect freedom of the press in the long run than allowing the open marketplace of ideas to threaten the very purpose our open access to information is mean to serve.

The lesson we must draw from the Kremlin’s recent attempts at destabilizing elections in Europe and the United States is that institutions that are dependent on the concept of popular sovereignty are sitting ducks for foreign intervention carried out by cyberattack, cyber influence, and cyber manipulation. Russian intelligence operatives are technologically sophisticated and they understand the vulnerability of any political system that revolves around popular political will.

With these techniques firmly developed, Russia’s aim to destabilize democratic institutions as significant as NATO or the European Union, as well as its attempts to bring totalitarian leaders to power who will manipulate public opinion in Russia’s favor, no longer seem outlandish or out of reach. The cockiness of Russian intelligence services puts nothing beyond bounds, including the fake “Cal-Exit” movement, a Russian-inspired phony grassroots movements whose founder and director is now seeking permanent asylum in Russia, as well as in the concocted display of support for the idea of giving Alaska back to the Kremlin.

But why are Russian covert operations suddenly such a force to be reckoned with? Why now? Partly, perhaps, the answer lies in Russia’s relatively low military and economic power in comparison to its ambitions at this point in history—a formula that has resulted in right-wing extremism at other critical junctures in history. But the other half is the high degree of dependence on technology, particularly informational technology, among Western democracies. Compared to other vulnerabilities, cyber communications are comparatively easy to infiltrate, and a society governed by exchange of electronic information is thus intrinsically and unalterably at risk for this type of attack.

Advanced democracies are particularly vulnerable to both forms of cyberattack—invasion of cyber communications and manipulation of public opinion through social media. Wealthy nations are paradoxically more vulnerable than less affluent ones, since they are more highly dependent on computerized infrastructure and communication. But the critical point is that the vulnerability of democratic nations is a function of the degree to which popular opinion impacts political outcomes, as well as their commitment to freedom of expression and unfettered speech that attends the concept of popular sovereignty. The vulnerability of advanced Western powers to cyberattack is the great equalizer of our day in modern conflict: Weaker countries can exploit the increased vulnerability of stronger countries in order to capture influence and power. And though the asymmetric aggressor is the Kremlin now, smaller countries or organizations are starting to catch on and will pose an increasing threat in the future.

The advent of cyber espionage has thereby transformed the nature of the threat to our national security in a more profound way than we have heretofore realized. Our worry about cyber interference for the past decade has mostly been focused on scenarios where a foreign nation attacks U.S. critical infrastructure by sending a computerized virus into our command and control centers, disabling our weapons, our power grid, our financial institutions, and indirectly potentially causing massive casualties. But just as we are coming to terms with the idea of “cyberwar,” it is becoming increasingly apparent that perhaps conceiving of the dangers of the cyber domain in terms of “attacks” has us turning a blind eye to the most significant threat to our security, which is to public trust and democracy itself.

Even if we effectively figure out how to guard against intrusive hacking on the part of foreign governments, there is a form of interference that works by direct manipulation of the people, namely covert operations designed to impact public opinion. Since the people are the true sovereign in a democracy, this kind of interference poses the greatest threat to the independence of democratic governance.

Such manipulations cannot be identified with the concept of “war,” even expanding that concept to include “cyberwar.” If the core of democratic governance can be threatened by the massive injection of “fake news” into legitimate informational conveyances such as Facebook, that suggests the need to prepare for a wholly different type of threat to our national security. Just as the advent of nuclear weapons and the possibility of mutually assured destruction between the United States and the Soviet Union required a wholesale revision of our diplomatic and military strategies, so the advent of the cyber age has catapulted us into a world in which national self-defense may require a transformation of our strategies for preserving democratic governance.

Balanced regulation of the cyber world, coupled with sophisticated intelligence and defense strategies, as well as educational efforts around cyber communications, are some of the options that urgently merit exploration. My Center at Penn Law will be holding an interdisciplinary meeting of high-level experts next fall to engage in precisely this kind of exploration.

Becoming more sophisticated about how we protect democratic institutions is not just desirable; it is a matter of survival. Without a more capacious view of the nature of the threats to popular sovereignty, democracy is likely to prove a short-lived experiment.

The post How Democracy, in the Kremlin’s Crosshairs, Can Fight Back appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mostly, it seems, not in Russia. And it may be time for those of us in the West to grudgingly admit that our Eastern friends like their leader. In fact, they seem to really, really like him.

To put this latest referendum in context, let’s think about all that’s happened between the Western world and Russia since 2011-2013, when anti-government protestors were last taking to the streets in droves.

In the interim years, there was the annexation of Crimea by Russia after its ally, Ukrainian then-president Viktor Yanukovych, was run out of office in Kiev. There were subsequent sanctions. There was action threatened, and sometimes taken, over dueling interests in Syria. There were the Sochi Olympics. There was the international outcry after Russia implemented anti-LGBTQ legislation. There were falling oil prices and athletic doping scandals. There was the passage of a law that allows civil society groups to be put on a list of foreign agents if they accept foreign money or are politically engaged (the list now numbers over one hundred organizations, including independent pollster Levada, which was targeted on the eve of the election). There was derision over Mitt Romney saying Russia was our greatest geopolitical foe. There was derision over Barack Obama saying otherwise.

And plenty has happened within Russia, too—some independent from external events, some intricately entangled. There was the arrest, imprisonment, and release of punk group Pussy Riot. There was the arrest, imprisonment, and release (and Moscow mayoral campaign!) of lawyer and anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny. There was the release of billionaire turned political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. There was the murder of prominent opposition figure Boris Nemtsov. There were the recent Kremlin shake-ups. There was an economic crisis.

Throughout, journalists have been harassed, and opposition figures silenced (and, in the case of Boris Nemtsov, killed).

And still Vladimir Putin’s approval rating sits at 83 percent, up nearly 20 points from the time of his 2012 re-election. A fact that, again, is hard to face in certain quarters.

But, to quote Chekhov, “Mother Russia is vast,” and the vast majority of its people—including over a quarter who reside in rural areas—do not live in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or Vladivostok. They are divorced from the “foreign agents” and opposition figures of the cities, and want what so many people the world over want: To have enough money to eat and drink, enough to find a place to live, and to be left in a quiet peace. Whether we accept it or not, opposition to Putin is small and (at least geographically) contained. And those members who are not in jail or tired of arrest threats, like Soviet dissidents before them, cannot seem to agree on how to bring free and fair politics to Russia.

There may be something to the idea that Moscow’s persistent political persecution of the opposition and Putin’s high approval ratings are related, an opinion that’s been floated by America’s former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and echoed in a recent speech by President Barack Obama. And yet, to the extent that this criticism reaches ordinary Russians, it rarely influences their political outlook in the way Western elites intend.

We deride and mock Putin, and assume the Russian people should do the same. At the very least, we say, they would criticize him if they were free to do so. But Putin isn’t just popular because he keeps Russians from seeing alternate paths for themselves. He’s been able to gain and keep power because ordinary Russians saw themselves, and continue to see themselves, in him. They also see Putin as their protector. In the wake of the most recent election, the Moscow-based daily Vedomosti wrote that voting behavior was likely influenced by a popular notion that Russia is surrounded by enemies—and that only a president like Putin and members of his party can protect them.

In other words, when the West criticizes Putin— the man who stabilized Russia after a decade of discord, who told them they were great after the world told them they’d lost, who pointed out that Uncle Sam shouldn’t get to dictate how they live—the Russian people see us criticizing them. When we say that they only vote for Putin because they’re afraid or deluded, they may well feel not only insulted, but also justified in their political outlook. An outlook which will likely continue to be tied to how they perceive us perceiving them.

There are, to put it mildly, autocratic checks on civil society. And there are Russians who already want—and who have been arrested for, and who have died for—a freer, fairer society. But the fact is that many Russians won’t feel compelled to demand another choice so long as they see the necessity of a leader who will, first and foremost, be there to defend them from a hostile world. Tough talk like the American president likening their leader to a bored child slouching in the back of the classroom; the U.S. Congress cheering Russia’s isolation during a State of the Union address; or the leadership in Washington considering the Ukraine as an extension of the NATO alliance doesn’t boost Putin’s detractors—it only enshrines the problematic leader’s worldview.

In the technical language of political science, the calculus for many of the Russians who bother to go out to vote today boils down to this: Putin may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard. If Westerners really want to see his popularity wane, they best not give him justification to stay.

The post Memo to the West<span class="colon">:</span> Stop Giving Russians Reasons to Love Putin appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Putin has had an extraordinary run since first being elected president in 2000, then stepping aside to be prime minister (under his hand-picked President Medvedev) and returning to the presidency in 2012. He’s mapped his career, and amended Russia’s constitution accordingly, so as to be able to remain president of Russia through 2024 (assuming a re-election in 2018), when he will be 72 years old.

Putin retains high approval ratings and there is no mass movement to rally against his regime. These facts have led many in the West to assume that no matter how challenging things get for Putin in the short term, he will remain at Russia’s helm for as long as he chooses. But such a view overlooks the possibility of an increasingly likely, and classic Russian, scenario: that of a Kremlin coup.

The year started so well. Despite widespread claims of corruption, the Winter Olympics in Sochi was a major success. However, no sooner was the Olympic torch extinguished than things took a turn for the worse. The so-called “Euromaidan” revolution in Ukraine, which had been prompted by its pro-Kremlin president rejecting a closer relationship with the European Union in favor of relations with Russia, resulted in President Yanukovych fleeing to Russia. And, as became his pattern throughout the year, Putin compounded bad luck and unfortunate events beyond his control with spectacular misjudgments and overreaching of his own. Not only did he refuse to recognize the new regime in Kiev and describe it as the result of an illegal coup, he seized on the disarray to illegally annex Crimea. This triggered Western sanctions against the Kremlin and individuals in its inner circle, and the spiraling sequence of events that followed: the low-grade conflict throughout eastern Ukraine brought into stark relief by the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner, the bullying and jockeying over gas exports and pipeline diplomacy, and the saber-rattling aimed at former Soviet republics. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel took to calling calling Putin dishonest.

Meanwhile, Putin’s resources to underwrite this belligerence rested on a fragile foundation. Despite years of rhetoric about the need for Russia to modernize and diversify its economy, the country remains highly dependent on its energy and extractive sectors. The share of Russia’s budget revenue derived from the energy sector increased from 9.3 percent in 2000 to 50 percent in 2012, when the energy sector accounted for 30 percent of Russia’s GDP and 68.7 percent of its exports. For Putin, that amounts to putting all his Fabergé eggs in one basket so that his quasi-imperial project relies on volatile energy and currency markets, both of which are easily influenced by the very Western powers he loves to provoke.

Because many people often forget, or never fully appreciated, the extent to which the Soviet Union collapsed as a result of domestic economic woes exacerbated by plummeting oil prices in the early 1980s, we might lose sight of the degree to which history may be repeating itself. But certainly Putin, the former KGB agent who bemoans the fall of USSR, should be aware of the parallels. Here’s a trendline from the past that should haunt Putin’s sleep: energy went from accounting for less than a third of Soviet hard currency income in 1970 to accounting for 80 percent of it by the mid-1980s, as Thane Gustafson chronicled in his 1989 book Crisis Amid Plenty.

Increased global supply of oil has caused crude prices to plummet from more than $100 a barrel this summer to less than $60 this week, significantly shrinking the proverbial basket that holds all of Putin’s eggs. And even beyond the vagaries of international pricing from week to week, all is not well in the supposedly formidable Russian oil and gas industry. Since a dramatic slump in the 1990s, oil production has rebounded, largely by getting more out of the fields inherited from the Soviet Union. Western companies have played a major role in increasing output from traditional producing regions. More recently, new fields have been exploited in Siberia and offshore Sakhalin Island, for example, and Russia has been able to produce more than the 10 million barrels a day benchmark set by President Putin.

As oil prices rose in the last decade, the Kremlin’s coffers filled with petrodollars. However, those traditional fields are now well past their prime producing years and new sources of oil must now be developed to sustain exports into the 2020s. Having forced the international oil companies to cede control of key projects in 2006, Prime Minister Putin enticed them back in 2009 with the promise of access to the Russian Arctic. The result was a series of projects involving the likes of ExxonMobil, ENI, and Statoil, with over $55 billion in exploration funding promised in partnership with state-owned Rosneft. But these projects will take at least a decade to deliver new production. Russia’s room to maneuver has further shrunk as a result of this year’s Western sanctions that have deliberately targeted deep-water offshore, Arctic oil and gas exploration and “tight oil” beneath conventional fields in West Siberia. Such projects are now stalled and will remain so in the absence of foreign capital and technology, meaning the country’s oil output will decline in coming years.

The outlook for Russia’s gas industry is similarly cloudy, especially as Gazprom’s Western European customers seek to wean themselves from relying so heavily on Russian gas.

But those are long-term challenges. In the immediate here and now, the drop in oil prices has devastated the Russian currency—the ruble has now lost almost 50 percent of its value against the dollar in 2014. This creates a serious problem for Russian companies that owe $600 billion, payable in Western currency—a debt that sanctions have made very difficult to roll over or refinance. The wealthy tycoons surrounding Putin also don’t appreciate their impoverishment respective to the West. And, more broadly, the currency’s fall also makes imports far more expensive for Russia’s emerging middle class, unleashing inflationary pressures that erode people’s living standards and the premise that Putin equals stability and prosperity. The government’s own reserves are deep, but it has already spent $80 billion of its $400 billion stash of foreign currency in attempts to stem the ruble’s collapse.

The Kremlin now faces multiple demands on its limited resources, to help Russian companies meet their financial obligations and to shore up the banks. With recession a certainty, and falling revenues for oil and gas exports, it will be hard for Putin to please everyone. It will also be difficult to justify increased defense spending.

While the West will surely wish for Putin to seek closure in Ukraine and usher in an era of pro-market reforms to promote a more diversified economy—an opportunity missed in 2008-2009—he is far more likely to batten down the hatches and rely on the same old state-centric, top-down approach. In his annual year-end press conference this week, Putin doubled down on his defiance towards the West and his increasingly delusional optimism about the course he has embarked upon, saying the Western-inflicted recession will be short-lived.

So far Putin has been able to ensure that he faces no effective opposition and fully controls the media. His path to another six-year term is probably not going to be derailed by any Maidan-style or Arab Spring-type popular uprising. But what is far more likely, as Moscow’s elites get financially squeezed as a result of Putin’s recklessness, is a palace revolution whereby the Kremlin’s inner circle forces him to step aside, or avoid running again in 2018. Here the West needs to be careful what it wishes for, should the Putin era come to a difficult and premature end. There is no guarantee that Putin’s successor will be any easier to deal with, so there may be something to be said for the old saying “better the devil you know.”

The post Vladimir’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Thank you.

California, with its historic reliance on defense-related industries, never quite recovered from the end of the Cold War. Today, Los Angeles has fewer jobs than it did in 1990. Fortunately, Putin seems intent on giving us a new Cold War.

Let’s stipulate that Putin’s crushing of dissent at home, his seizing of the Crimea, his wars against Ukraine and Georgia, and his bullying of European neighbors are bad for the peace and security of the world. But all this Russian madness—not to mention the threatening, nationalistic expansionism of Putin’s Chinese ally President Xi Jinping—presents an opportunity for California.

The belligerence of Russia and China could boost a host of California industries. Aerospace could benefit from increasing insecurity among Russian and Chinese neighbors, since more countries will be inclined to increase their spending on defense, and to curry favor with Uncle Sam by buying American. California’s space industry could become much more important as the United States moves from collaborating with the Russians in space to competing against them—and against a growing Chinese space program. And Silicon Valley’s data security firms are already booming in part because of widespread concerns about Russian and Chinese hackers, not to mention the intrusive behavior of U.S. intelligence agencies.

The threat of Putinism also could change the politics of oil and natural gas production here—more domestic production serving as another counter to Russia’s oil-based economy. (Maybe we’ll hear politicians from the San Joaquin Valley, where development of the Monterey Shale’s natural gas could be an economic game-changer, accuse fracking opponents of being soft on Russian imperialism.) Alternative energy businesses—from wind to solar to geothermal—should also find it easier to wrap their pitches in national security terms. It’s no longer about merely ending our reliance on Mideast oil, but also about declawing the Russian bear.

California’s softer industries could prosper too. Hollywood, which has struggled to develop compelling bad guys since the end of the Cold War, can mass-produce Russian villains again. As for tourism: With headlines of downed aircraft and bombings everywhere, isn’t it tempting to stay closer to home and go to Disneyland, or check out the minions at Universal Studios?

The potential here is for a partial revival of the 20th-century California growth model, which was based on embracing the world—and its conflicts. The state’s strategy was to develop ideas and an educated citizenry by investing in affordable, world-class higher education; turn those ideas and innovations into products like planes and weapons that could fuel international growth and wars; then welcome the ambitious people fleeing those conflicts (sometimes on planes we built) into our industries and universities. The big question that Putinism poses for California is whether our governments, our industries, and our people are still in a position to exploit the misfortune of others.

The pessimistic view: Our dysfunctional governing system will keep us from seizing the moment. The optimistic: Our persistent economic struggles (at least outside Silicon Valley) and the dangerous provocations of Russia and China might spur us to action. Our country has been mired in Middle East wars and has struggled against terrorists for years, but those threats and challenges seem awfully remote, and diffuse, to Californians. Formidable nuclear-armed nation-states seeking to reclaim their lost empires, on the other hand, might get our attention.

It is the military-industry complex where the opportunity for a Putin-inspired California comeback is greatest. The aerospace industry made the state a success—and brought millions into the middle class (including my grandmother, a line worker at North American Aviation), produced innovations from propeller-driven airplanes to satellites, and remade the state’s culture (historian Peter Westwick has shown how modern surfing owes a debt to aerospace engineers). Today, the industry is smaller but still cutting-edge, producing drones, satellites for commercial purposes, and space start-ups like Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

There is precedent for an aerospace revival here. After collapsing in the post-Vietnam funk, aerospace rebounded in the ’80s, headlined by the F-117 Stealth aircraft, the B-2 bomber, and the space shuttle. But more recently we’ve missed chances for revival. As defense spending increased after 9/11 and the industry expanded in other states, California’s aerospace continued its decline. The blame for this goes in part to California’s fractious Congressional delegation, with its fatal combination of conservative spending hawks and liberal pacifists, and a state government consumed with its own budget problems.

As important as stopping Putin is stopping Texas or another state from becoming the next California, the place the world turns to in its hour of need. Putin’s pronouncement that he will revive his own aerospace industry, at the same time the Chinese military continues it buildup, should rally us to offense. Putin’s madness and Chinese expansionism have created a new Sputnik moment, one that should also spur us into investing in science and math education—California needs hundreds of thousands more technically and scientifically skilled workers, for good times and bad.

The state has established a military council and created some incentives, but it should go further, and provide seed money to fund business investment and research that serve both national security and the state’s long-term interests. How to pay for it? Why not establish an emergency “Putin tax” on certain items (hard liquor, cigarettes, oil, and big houses would be fitting) or a “Putin break” from certain regulations for priority industries?

It’s time for the governor to call a “security council” summit of California officials, business leaders, and scholars. The perfect venue would be Fort Ross State Park, in Sonoma County, site of a settlement established by the Russians in the early 19th century, with the goal, not yet realized, of colonizing America. It’s a beautiful place, and a powerful reminder that there are few things more enduring than the need to keep Russians czars in their place.

The post What’s Good for Putin Is Good for California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The only country that could possibly benefit from such an outcome is China. As with the invasion of Iraq and the horrible mismanagement of the campaign in Afghanistan, the U.S. would be distracted for another decade from the question of how to deal with its only competitive peer in the world today. Yet given the potentially appalling consequences for the world economy of a war in Ukraine, it is probable that even Beijing would not welcome such an outcome.

If there is one absolutely undeniable fact about Ukraine, which screams from every election and every opinion poll since its independence two decades ago, it is that the country’s population is deeply divided between pro-Russian and pro-Western sentiments. Every election victory for one side or another has been by a narrow margin, and has subsequently been reversed by an electoral victory for an opposing coalition.

What has saved the country until recently has been the existence of a certain middle ground of Ukrainians sharing elements of both positions; that the division in consequence was not clear cut; and that the West and Russia generally refrained from forcing Ukrainians to make a clear choice between these positions.

During George W. Bush’s second term as president, the U.S., Britain, and other NATO countries made a morally criminal attempt to force this choice by the offer of a NATO Membership Action Plan for Ukraine (despite the fact that repeated opinion polls had shown around two-thirds of Ukrainians opposed to NATO membership). French and German opposition delayed this ill-advised gambit, and after August 2008, it was quietly abandoned. The Georgian-Russian war in that month had made clear both the extreme dangers of further NATO expansion, and that the United States would not in fact fight to defend its allies in the former Soviet Union.

In the two decades after the collapse of the USSR, it should have become obvious that neither West nor Russia had reliable allies in Ukraine. As the demonstrations in Kiev have amply demonstrated, the “pro-Western” camp in Ukraine contains many ultra-nationalists and even neo-fascists who detest Western democracy and modern Western culture. As for Russia’s allies from the former Soviet establishment, they have extracted as much financial aid from Russia as possible, diverted most of it into their own pockets, and done as little for Russia in return as they possibly could.

Over the past year, both Russia and the European Union tried to force Ukraine to make a clear choice between them—and the entirely predictable result has been to tear the country apart. Russia attempted to draw Ukraine into the Eurasian Customs Union by offering a massive financial bailout and heavily subsidized gas supplies. The European Union then tried to block this by offering an association agreement, though (initially) with no major financial aid attached. Neither Russia nor the EU made any serious effort to talk to each other about whether a compromise might be reached that would allow Ukraine somehow to combine the two agreements, to avoid having to choose sides.

President Viktor Yanukovych’s rejection of the EU offer led to an uprising in Kiev and the western and central parts of Ukraine, and to his own flight from Kiev, together with many of his supporters in the Ukrainian parliament. This marks a very serious geopolitical defeat for Russia. It is now obvious that Ukraine as a whole cannot be brought into the Eurasian Union, reducing that union to a shadow of what the Putin administration hoped. And though Russia continues officially to recognize him, President Yanukovych can only be restored to power in Kiev if Moscow is prepared to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and seize its capital by force.

The result would be horrendous bloodshed, a complete collapse of Russia’s relations with the West and of Western investment in Russia, a shattering economic crisis, and Russia’s inevitable economic and geopolitical dependency on China.

But Western governments, too, have put themselves in an extremely dangerous position. They have acquiesced to the overthrow of an elected government by ultra-nationalist militias, which have also chased away a large part of the elected parliament. This has provided a perfect precedent for Russian-backed militias in turn to seize power in the east and south of the country.

The West has stood by in silence while the rump parliament in Kiev abolished the official status of Russian and other minority languages, and members of the new government threatened publicly to ban the main parties that supported Yanukovych—an effort that would effectively disenfranchise around a third of the population.

After years of demanding that successive Ukrainian governments undertake painful reforms in order to draw nearer to the West, the West is now in a paradoxical position: If it wishes to save the new government from a Russian-backed counter-revolution, it will have to forget about any reforms that will alienate ordinary people, and instead give huge sums in aid with no strings attached. The EU has allowed the demonstrators in Kiev to believe that their actions have brought Ukraine closer to EU membership—but, if anything, this is now even further away than it was before the revolution.

In these circumstances, it is essential that both the West and Russia act with caution. The issue here is not Crimea. From the moment when the Yanukovych government in Kiev was overthrown, it was obvious that Crimea was effectively lost to Ukraine. Russia is in full military control of the peninsula with the support of a large majority of its population, and only a Western military invasion can expel it.

This does not mean that Crimea will declare independence. So far, the call of the Crimean parliament has been only for increased autonomy. It does mean, however, that Russia will decide the fate of Crimea when and as it chooses. For the moment, Moscow appears to be using Crimea, like Yanukovych, in order to influence developments in Ukraine as a whole.

It also seems unlikely that the government in Kiev will try to retake Crimea by force, both because this would lead to their inevitable defeat, and because even some Ukrainian nationalists have told me in private that Crimea was never part of historic Ukraine. They would be prepared to sacrifice it if that was the price of taking the rest of Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit.

But that is not true of important Ukrainian cities with significant ethnic Russian populations, such as Donetsk, Kharkov, and Odessa. The real and urgent issue now is what happens across the eastern and southern Ukraine, and it is essential that neither side initiates the use of force there. Any move by the new Ukrainian government or nationalist militias to overthrow elected local authorities and suppress anti-government demonstrations in these regions is likely to provoke a Russian military intervention. Any Russian military intervention in turn will compel the Ukrainian government and army (or at least its more nationalist factions) to fight.

The West must therefore urge restraint—not only from Moscow, but from Kiev as well. Any aid to the government in Kiev should be made strictly conditional on measures to reassure the Russian-speaking populations of the east and south of the country: respect for elected local authorities; restoration of the official status of minority languages; and above all, no use of force in those regions. In the longer run, the only way to keep Ukraine together may be the introduction of a new federal constitution with much greater powers for the different regions.

But that is for the future. For now, the overwhelming need is to prevent war. War in Ukraine would be an economic, political, and cultural catastrophe for Russia. In many ways, the country would never recover, but Russia would win the war itself. As it proved in August 2008, if Russia sees its vital interests in the former USSR as under attack, Russia will fight. NATO will not. War in Ukraine would therefore also be a shattering blow to the prestige of NATO and the European Union from which these organizations might never recover either.

A century ago, two groups of countries whose real common interests vastly outweighed their differences allowed themselves to be drawn into a European war in which more than 10 million of their people died and every country suffered irreparable losses. In the name of those dead, every sane and responsible citizen in the West, Russia, and Ukraine itself should now urge caution and restraint on the part of their respective leaders.

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