foreignpolicy--2020-09-25--How Xi Just Saved the World

How Xi Just Saved the World

How Xi Just Saved the World “ China will scale up its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions by adopting more vigorous policies and measures .
We aim to have [ carbon dioxide ] emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.
” Xi Jinping ’ s speech via video link to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22 was not widely trailed in advance .
But with those two short sentences China ’ s leader may have redefined the future prospects for humanity .
That may sound like hyperbole , but in the world of climate politics it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ centrality .
Thanks to the gigantic surge in economic growth since 2000 and its reliance on coal-fired electricity generation , China is now by far the largest emitter of carbon dioxide .
At about 28 percent of the global total , the carbon dioxide produced in China ( as opposed to that consumed in the form of Chinese exports ) is about as much as that produced by the United States , European Union , and India combined .
Per capita , its emissions are now greater than those of the EU if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ production rather than a consumption basis .
Global warming is produced not by the annual flows of carbon but by the stocks that have accumulated over time in the Earth ’ s atmosphere .
Allowing an equal ration for every person on the planet , it remains the case that the historic responsibility for excessive carbon accumulation lies overwhelmingly with the United States and Europe .
Still today China ’ s emissions per capita are less than half those of the United States .
But as far as future emissions are concerned , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as Europeans and Americans may be with climate policy , they are essentially bystanders in a future determined by the decisions made by the large , rapidly growing Asian economies , with China far in the lead .
China ’ s rapid rebound from the COVID-19 shock only reinforces that point .
With his terse remarks , Xi has mapped out a large part of the future path ahead .
As the impact of his remarks sank in , climate modelers crunched the numbers and concluded that , if fully implemented , China @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lower the projected temperature increase by 0.2-0.3 degrees Celsius .
It is the largest favorable shock that their models have ever produced .
There ’ s an obvious question , of course : Is Xi for real ?
There are reasons to be skeptical .
Xi is not promising an immediate turnaround .
The peak will still be expected around 2030 .
Recent investments in new coal-fired capacity have been alarming .
A gigantic 58 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity have been approved or announced just in the first six months of this year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of America ’ s entire installed capacity and more than China has projected in the previous two years put together .
Due to the decentralization of decision-making , Beijing has only partial control over the expansion of coal-burning capacity .
If Beijing is actually to implement this policy , there are huge political as well as technological challenges ahead .
There have been some encouraging noises about new renewable energy commitments .
But the transition costs will be huge , and Beijing has to face its own fossil fuel lobby .
As one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they earnestly seek advice from Europeans on problems of the “ just transition ” and realize that the entire fossil fuel workforce that has to be taken care of in Germany is smaller than that of a single province in China .
It will be an upheaval similar to the traumatic 1990s shakeout of Mao Zedong-era heavy industry .
But as ambitious as the objective may be , Xi would not be making such an announcement lightly .
Within China , his words have huge weight .
The first test of the seriousness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when we get the final details of the 14th five-year plan , the road maps that have guided China ’ s economic development since the beginning of the Communist era .
They will begin to emerge by the end of the year .
Toward the outside world , the significance is no less momentous .
Hitherto the only big bloc fully committed to neutrality was the EU .
The hope for this year was an EU-China deal that would set the stage for ambitious new targets to be announced at the COP26 U.N. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Rather than a summit in Leipzig , the Sino-EU meeting took place via videoconference .
The exchanges were surprisingly substantive .
The Europeans wanted China to commit to peak emissions by 2025 and made menacing references to carbon taxes on imports from China if Beijing did not raise its ambition .
They have given a cautious welcome to Xi ’ s U.N. statement .
They can hardly have expected more .
Xi ’ s move is all the more striking given the deterioration of China ’ s relations not just with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ India .
This summer , Indian and Chinese troops skirmished in the Himalayas , and Germany pivoted to an Indo-Pacific strategy aligned with South Korea and Japan .
Now the pressure will be on India , long China ’ s partner in resisting calls from the West for firm commitments to decarbonization , to make a similarly bold climate announcement .
Though Europe will cheer Xi ’ s commitment , in strategic terms it underlines how awkward the EU ’ s position is .
On the one hand , the Europeans increasingly want @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hong Kong , Xinjiang , human rights , and any geopolitical aggression in the South China Sea .
Europe ’ s residual attachment to the United States is real .
But China has now underscored how firmly it aligns with a common agenda with the EU on climate policy .
The contrast to the Trump administration could hardly be starker .
Beijing has acted unilaterally .
It is playing by the rules of the Paris climate agreement , which revolve around independent national commitments .
Beijing has not asked for a quid pro @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nor has it waited for the outcome of the U.S. election in November .
This ought to give Americans from all sides pause .
If the Republican China hawks mean what they say , it surely should be puzzling to them that Beijing , which they accuse of foisting the climate issue on the world to hobble America , is now making a huge and unilateral commitment on decarbonization .
But Xi ’ s move should also be a wake-up call for advocates of proactive climate policy on the Democratic side .
Against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bill Clinton and Barack Obama eras , their approach tends , in its own way , to be highly transactional .
The conceit that one can still hear from veterans of U.S. climate diplomacy is that the world is waiting for America to come back to the table and that no big deal like that at Paris in 2015 is conceivable without the United States .
But 2020 is not 2015 .
The sobering truth is that neither the EU nor China is any longer conditioning its climate policy on the United States @ @ @ @ @ @ @ issue , how could you ?
If Washington does come around to supporting a Green New Deal of the Joe Biden variety , that will , of course , be welcome .
But in light of America ’ s cavalier dismissal of the Paris agreement , even if a new administration were to make a new and more ambitious round of commitments , what would that amount to ?
So long as the basics of the American way of life remain nonnegotiable and climate skepticism has a strong grip on public opinion , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fossil fuel industries is allowed the influence that it is , so long as one of the two main governing parties and the media that supports it are rogue , America ’ s democracy is not in a position to make credible commitments .
Whatever the outcome of the election , Donald Trump will surely carry through on his declaration that the United States is exiting the Paris agreement .
The day on which that decision comes into effect is Nov. 4 .
Trump ’ s inversion of U.S. policy is possible because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Congress .
Indeed , after the abortive cap and trade legislation of 2009 , the cornerstone of the original Green New Deal , the Obama administration abandoned major legislative initiatives on climate change .
Instead , it relied on regulatory interventions and the force of cheap fracked gas to deliver a modest decarbonization agenda , anchored on ending coal .
In the future too , the two things that can be counted on to drive the climate agenda in the United States are technology and markets .
And the same goes for other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
If there are affordable and high-quality technological options , the switch to green will happen .
Due to the advances in solar and wind power , we are rapidly approaching that point .
Whatever Trump ’ s bluster , coal is on its way out in the United States , too .
The U.S. environmental movement remains a vigorous and inspiring voice .
America ’ s science base and business nous , as well as the enthusiasm of capital markets for ventures like Tesla , can be counted on as drivers of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ synergies to be had between market-driven energy choices in the United States and the industrial policy options that the European and Chinese bids for neutrality will open up .
Solar and wind have already given examples of that .
But amid the shambles of U.S. policy both on climate and the coronavirus , it is time to recognize a qualitative difference between the United States and Europe and China .
Whereas Europe and China can sustain an emphatic public commitment to meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene with international commitments and public investment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ system and the depth and politicization of the culture wars make that impossible .
Perversely , the only way to build bipartisan political support for a green transition in the United States may be to pitch it as a national security issue in a cold war competition with China .
Of course , one should not despair of a more creative and positive scenario for the United States .
The Green New Deal points the way .
The push from the left has shifted the terms of debate across the Democratic Party .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the Republican Party calling for an accommodation with the reality of global warming .
But who knows how the electorate will decide on Nov. 3 and whether America ’ s institutions will hold up .
For the United States , everything hangs in the balance .
For the rest of the world , that is not the case .
As Xi made clear on Sept. 22 , as far as the most important collective issue facing humanity is concerned , the major players are no longer waiting .
If the United States @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be all well and good .
A constructive U.S. contribution to U.N. climate diplomacy will be most welcome .
But the era in which the United States was the decisive voice has passed .
China and Europe are decoupling .

“China will scale up its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions by adopting more vigorous policies and measures. We aim to have [carbon dioxide] emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.”
Xi Jinping’s speech via video link to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22 was not widely trailed in advance. But with those two short sentences China’s leader may have redefined the future prospects for humanity.
That may sound like hyperbole, but in the world of climate politics it is hard to exaggerate China’s centrality. Thanks to the gigantic surge in economic growth since 2000 and its reliance on coal-fired electricity generation, China is now by far the largest emitter of carbon dioxide. At about 28 percent of the global total, the carbon dioxide produced in China (as opposed to that consumed in the form of Chinese exports) is about as much as that produced by the United States, European Union, and India combined. Per capita, its emissions are now greater than those of the EU if we count carbon dioxide emissions on a production rather than a consumption basis.
Global warming is produced not by the annual flows of carbon but by the stocks that have accumulated over time in the Earth’s atmosphere. Allowing an equal ration for every person on the planet, it remains the case that the historic responsibility for excessive carbon accumulation lies overwhelmingly with the United States and Europe. Still today China’s emissions per capita are less than half those of the United States. But as far as future emissions are concerned, everything hinges on China. As concerned as Europeans and Americans may be with climate policy, they are essentially bystanders in a future determined by the decisions made by the large, rapidly growing Asian economies, with China far in the lead. China’s rapid rebound from the COVID-19 shock only reinforces that point. With his terse remarks, Xi has mapped out a large part of the future path ahead.
As the impact of his remarks sank in, climate modelers crunched the numbers and concluded that, if fully implemented, China’s new commitment will by itself lower the projected temperature increase by 0.2-0.3 degrees Celsius. It is the largest favorable shock that their models have ever produced.
There’s an obvious question, of course: Is Xi for real?
There are reasons to be skeptical. Xi is not promising an immediate turnaround. The peak will still be expected around 2030. Recent investments in new coal-fired capacity have been alarming. A gigantic 58 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity have been approved or announced just in the first six months of this year. That is equivalent to 25 percent of America’s entire installed capacity and more than China has projected in the previous two years put together. Due to the decentralization of decision-making, Beijing has only partial control over the expansion of coal-burning capacity. If Beijing is actually to implement this policy, there are huge political as well as technological challenges ahead. There have been some encouraging noises about new renewable energy commitments. But the transition costs will be huge, and Beijing has to face its own fossil fuel lobby. As one commentator remarked, Chinese officials laugh when they earnestly seek advice from Europeans on problems of the “just transition” and realize that the entire fossil fuel workforce that has to be taken care of in Germany is smaller than that of a single province in China. It will be an upheaval similar to the traumatic 1990s shakeout of Mao Zedong-era heavy industry.
But as ambitious as the objective may be, Xi would not be making such an announcement lightly. Within China, his words have huge weight. The first test of the seriousness of China’s commitment will come when we get the final details of the 14th five-year plan, the road maps that have guided China’s economic development since the beginning of the Communist era. They will begin to emerge by the end of the year.
Toward the outside world, the significance is no less momentous. Hitherto the only big bloc fully committed to neutrality was the EU. The hope for this year was an EU-China deal that would set the stage for ambitious new targets to be announced at the COP26 U.N. climate conference planned for Glasgow in November. Rather than a summit in Leipzig, the Sino-EU meeting took place via videoconference. The exchanges were surprisingly substantive. The Europeans wanted China to commit to peak emissions by 2025 and made menacing references to carbon taxes on imports from China if Beijing did not raise its ambition. They have given a cautious welcome to Xi’s U.N. statement. They can hardly have expected more.
Xi’s move is all the more striking given the deterioration of China’s relations not just with the United States but with the EU and India. This summer, Indian and Chinese troops skirmished in the Himalayas, and Germany pivoted to an Indo-Pacific strategy aligned with South Korea and Japan. Now the pressure will be on India, long China’s partner in resisting calls from the West for firm commitments to decarbonization, to make a similarly bold climate announcement.
Though Europe will cheer Xi’s commitment, in strategic terms it underlines how awkward the EU’s position is. On the one hand, the Europeans increasingly want to stake out a strong position on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, human rights, and any geopolitical aggression in the South China Sea. Europe’s residual attachment to the United States is real. But China has now underscored how firmly it aligns with a common agenda with the EU on climate policy. The contrast to the Trump administration could hardly be starker.
Beijing has acted unilaterally. It is playing by the rules of the Paris climate agreement, which revolve around independent national commitments. Beijing has not asked for a quid pro quo from Europe or anyone else. Nor has it waited for the outcome of the U.S. election in November.
This ought to give Americans from all sides pause. If the Republican China hawks mean what they say, it surely should be puzzling to them that Beijing, which they accuse of foisting the climate issue on the world to hobble America, is now making a huge and unilateral commitment on decarbonization.
But Xi’s move should also be a wake-up call for advocates of proactive climate policy on the Democratic side. Against the backdrop of climate negotiations in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama eras, their approach tends, in its own way, to be highly transactional. The conceit that one can still hear from veterans of U.S. climate diplomacy is that the world is waiting for America to come back to the table and that no big deal like that at Paris in 2015 is conceivable without the United States.
But 2020 is not 2015. The sobering truth is that neither the EU nor China is any longer conditioning its climate policy on the United States. If you are serious about the issue, how could you? If Washington does come around to supporting a Green New Deal of the Joe Biden variety, that will, of course, be welcome. But in light of America’s cavalier dismissal of the Paris agreement, even if a new administration were to make a new and more ambitious round of commitments, what would that amount to? So long as the basics of the American way of life remain nonnegotiable and climate skepticism has a strong grip on public opinion, so long as the rearguard of the fossil fuel industries is allowed the influence that it is, so long as one of the two main governing parties and the media that supports it are rogue, America’s democracy is not in a position to make credible commitments.
Whatever the outcome of the election, Donald Trump will surely carry through on his declaration that the United States is exiting the Paris agreement. The day on which that decision comes into effect is Nov. 4. Trump’s inversion of U.S. policy is possible because Obama never put the Paris agreement to Congress. Indeed, after the abortive cap and trade legislation of 2009, the cornerstone of the original Green New Deal, the Obama administration abandoned major legislative initiatives on climate change. Instead, it relied on regulatory interventions and the force of cheap fracked gas to deliver a modest decarbonization agenda, anchored on ending coal.
In the future too, the two things that can be counted on to drive the climate agenda in the United States are technology and markets. And the same goes for other recalcitrant fossil fuel addicts around the world. If there are affordable and high-quality technological options, the switch to green will happen. Due to the advances in solar and wind power, we are rapidly approaching that point. Whatever Trump’s bluster, coal is on its way out in the United States, too.
The U.S. environmental movement remains a vigorous and inspiring voice. America’s science base and business nous, as well as the enthusiasm of capital markets for ventures like Tesla, can be counted on as drivers of progress. There are no doubt positive synergies to be had between market-driven energy choices in the United States and the industrial policy options that the European and Chinese bids for neutrality will open up. Solar and wind have already given examples of that. But amid the shambles of U.S. policy both on climate and the coronavirus, it is time to recognize a qualitative difference between the United States and Europe and China. Whereas Europe and China can sustain an emphatic public commitment to meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene with international commitments and public investment, the structure of the U.S. political system and the depth and politicization of the culture wars make that impossible. Perversely, the only way to build bipartisan political support for a green transition in the United States may be to pitch it as a national security issue in a cold war competition with China.
Of course, one should not despair of a more creative and positive scenario for the United States. The Green New Deal points the way. The push from the left has shifted the terms of debate across the Democratic Party. Of late, there are even voices in the Republican Party calling for an accommodation with the reality of global warming. But who knows how the electorate will decide on Nov. 3 and whether America’s institutions will hold up. For the United States, everything hangs in the balance. For the rest of the world, that is not the case.
As Xi made clear on Sept. 22, as far as the most important collective issue facing humanity is concerned, the major players are no longer waiting. If the United States joins the decarbonization train, that will be all well and good. A constructive U.S. contribution to U.N. climate diplomacy will be most welcome. But the era in which the United States was the decisive voice has passed. China and Europe are decoupling.


foreignpolicy--2020-09-25--The Real Hacking Threat

The Real Hacking Threat

“ Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections , ” National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina declared in an Aug. 7 statement , “ foreign states will continue to use covert and overt influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters ’ preferences and perspectives.
” Such activities may be less dramatic than an armed attack , but they ’ re even more sinister .
And although there are ways to counter them , the United States is running out of time to get it right .
In the run-up to the November vote , the United States @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remarks , will try to “ shift U.S. policies , increase discord in the United States , and undermine the American people ’ s confidence ” in their democracy .
In his agency ’ s assessment , while China works to discredit U.S. President Donald Trump , Russia is aiming to undermine Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden .
But “ it ’ s not about that election or the other , that candidate or the other , ” Marko Mihkelson , a member of parliament for Estonia ’ s liberal Reform Party , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stranger to foreign meddling in elections .
Ever since Estonia gained independence from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991 , Russia has needled it with disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks .
Most of the time , Mihkelson argued , interference isn ’ t really meant to sway the vote toward one side or the other .
In an interview with PBS , Alex Stamos , Facebook ’ s chief security officer during the 2016 U.S. presidential election , concurred .
In a discussion about Russia ’ s Internet Research Agency ( IRA ) , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ahead of that year ’ s vote , he noted that “ 90 percent of their content had nothing to do with any candidate .
It was really about driving division in American society.
” It became painfully obvious that the gambit had worked when Americans found themselves disagreeing about whether Trump ’ s victory was legitimate .
The IRA is at it again ahead of this year ’ s poll .
It has created fake Facebook and Twitter accounts and has set up a website intended for a left-leaning U.S. audience that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ record .
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ’ s Office of Intelligence and Analysis , Russia is also trying to discredit voting by mail .
And U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O ’ Brien alleged in August that “ China , like Russia , like Iran—they ’ ve engaged in cyberattacks and phishing and that sort of thing with respect to our election infrastructure.
” In September , Microsoft added a warning of its own , reporting that a Russian hacker group had struck over 200 organizations involved in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had gone after key personalities in Biden ’ s campaign , and that Iranian hackers targeted people in Trump ’ s campaign .
Microsoft said most of the attacks were stopped by its software .
But whether the United States ’ rivals actually do hack the country ’ s election infrastructure this year is almost beside the point .
What matters is people ’ s belief that interference campaigns are working .
A February poll by the Economist and YouGov showed that a majority of Americans don ’ t think their country can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Whatever the outcome in November , then , there ’ s reason to believe that supporters of the losing side may believe that foreign powers sabotaged the vote and will insist on the result ’ s invalidity .
In that sense , it doesn ’ t matter whether China , Russia , or any other country in fact manages to sway the ballot .
What matters is whether voters believe they did .
It doesn ’ t matter whether China , Russia , or any other country in fact manages to sway the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ believe they did .
And that is the kind of influence operation the United States needs to fight .
To do so , Washington should launch influence operations of its own , geared toward convincing American voters that the 2020 election will reflect the will of the people .
Although important , a quiet upgrade of U.S. election software alone won ’ t sway the public ; communications to hostile governments and their helpers that they will suffer consequences if they attempt to mess with voters might .
To be sure , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has to recognize that it is particularly vulnerable to sundry forms of meddling .
Freedom of expression provides would-be interferers with a smorgasbord of often divisive homemade opinions to disseminate .
What ’ s more , since liberal democracy ’ s very foundation is the majority ’ s conviction that their voices count , eroding that trust constitutes the biggest bang for a rival ’ s buck .
That is why resilience is paramount : informed citizens who check the provenance of social media content before reading or sharing it , social media @ @ @ @ @ @ @ undeclared state-linked entities , and trusted election infrastructure that can better withstand cyberattacks .
During the Cold War , Sweden perfected a “ total defense ” model that saw large parts of the population involved in defending their country against Soviet aggression .
Tasks included providing vehicles to the armed forces and training in crisis management .
The same can be done in defense against election interference .
A citizen who merely hears about meddling will feel despondent , while a citizen who is offered concrete guidance on how to curb it is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ follow the lead of enterprising Lithuanians and form citizen groups to ferret out suspicious online content .
These groups call themselves “ elves ” —the opposite of trolls .
And who wouldn ’ t want to be an elf for their country ?
After resilience comes counteraction , and that means retaliating against meddlers .
The United States is not going to respond militarily , which is part of why interfering in U.S. elections is appealing to begin with .
Should the United States tinker in Russian elections to punish Vladimir Putin ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ The United States , everywhere , all over the world , is actively interfering in electoral campaigns in other countries , ” the Russian president told then-NBC News host Megyn Kelly in 2017 .
He has a point .
In 1948 , the United States was so concerned about a potential Communist election victory in Italy that it energetically intervened on behalf of the Christian Democrats , who won .
The United States has tried to steer the outcome of assorted Latin American elections as well as Serbia ’ s 2000 presidential poll @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Instead , a more productive retaliatory effort would bank on surprise .
If a country interferes , the United States should punish it in a time and ( nonmilitary ) manner of its own choosing : a public relations version of asymmetric warfare .
Call it second-strike communications .
Washington could , for example , retaliate against Russian or Chinese intrusions by releasing information about those countries ’ leaders , including which of them have children at U.S. universities or how many bank accounts they have in the United States .
To @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such leaders by freezing their assets , but humiliation may be more effective .
Sure , nobody likes losing access to their money , but reputation matters more than treasure .
And apart from leaders like Putin and Xi Jinping , most officials in countries hostile to the West are not household names ; in fact , they ’ re hardly known abroad at all .
Gaining sudden notoriety as a hypocrite who tries to harm the West while owning property there is a sobering prospect .
Humiliation may be more effective than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to their money , but reputation matters more than treasure .
The Godfather could also provide inspiration .
In director Francis Ford Coppola ’ s masterpiece , Jack Woltz , a Hollywood executive who had refused to give Don Vito Corleone ’ s godson a movie role , wakes up to find the severed head of his beloved horse next to him in bed .
Woltz gets the message and gives Don Corleone ’ s godson the role .
Prior to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections , U.S. Cyber Command used such a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as such .
Cyber Command soldiers reportedly left hints for Russian would-be meddlers that American operatives had identified them and were tracking their activities .
It seemed to work : The 2018 elections proceeded without significant Russian interference .
The Godfather strategy works because it targets individuals rather than governments .
An American threat of revenge against the government of Russia or China would not frighten Moscow or Beijing because they know that the United States wouldn ’ t risk serious escalation .
But individual hackers may be keen to avoid being banned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bank accounts .
This summer , the European Union used such punishment for the first time , imposing travel bans on four Russian intelligence officers and two Chinese hackers .
Since then , there have been no serious attacks on the union that could be linked to the Chinese or Russian government .
At the same time , the U.S. government ’ s indictment of four Chinese military officers over the 2017 Equifax hack hasn ’ t ended Chinese cyberattacks on the country nor , as polling indicates , has it convinced the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
That ’ s reason for governments to be louder about the punishments they mete out .
Western officials should repeatedly mention any travel bans , bank account freezes , and criminal charges their governments impose .
That way , citizens grasp that their government is capable of defense and that , by extension , so are they .
The State Department , for its part , is trying to up the ante by offering rewards of up to $ 10 million each for those who report would-be cyberattackers targeting U.S. election infrastructure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government ’ s Rewards for Justice program—a program that had until now offered bounties for notorious terrorists .
The scheme may sound dubious , but with the election around the corner , even a Hail Mary pass is worth a try .
Even one election meddler turned in by a colleague or acquaintance would be an important victory for the United States , not least in the all-important realm of public perception .
Just as ordinary Swedes did their part for national defense during the Cold War by lending their cars and tractors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ must play more active civic roles .
In turn , they will realize that the sanctity of their elections truly is in their hands , whether the president uses his office to communicate to the public that the vote is unassailable—or not .
This story appears in the Fall 2020 print issue .

“Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections,” National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina declared in an Aug. 7 statement , “foreign states will continue to use covert and overt influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters’ preferences and perspectives.” Such activities may be less dramatic than an armed attack, but they’re even more sinister. And although there are ways to counter them, the United States is running out of time to get it right.
“Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections,” National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina declared in an Aug. 7 statement, “foreign states will continue to use covert and overt influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters’ preferences and perspectives.” Such activities may be less dramatic than an armed attack, but they’re even more sinister. And although there are ways to counter them, the United States is running out of time to get it right.
In the run-up to the November vote, the United States’ rivals, Evanina explained in his remarks, will try to “shift U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people’s confidence” in their democracy. In his agency’s assessment, while China works to discredit U.S. President Donald Trump, Russia is aiming to undermine Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
But “it’s not about that election or the other, that candidate or the other,” Marko Mihkelson, a member of parliament for Estonia’s liberal Reform Party, said in August. Mihkelson is no stranger to foreign meddling in elections. Ever since Estonia gained independence from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has needled it with disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks. Most of the time, Mihkelson argued, interference isn’t really meant to sway the vote toward one side or the other. In an interview with PBS, Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, concurred. In a discussion about Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), which posted misleading content to social media ahead of that year’s vote, he noted that “90 percent of their content had nothing to do with any candidate. It was really about driving division in American society.” It became painfully obvious that the gambit had worked when Americans found themselves disagreeing about whether Trump’s victory was legitimate.
The IRA is at it again ahead of this year’s poll. It has created fake Facebook and Twitter accounts and has set up a website intended for a left-leaning U.S. audience that subtly sows doubts about Biden’s record. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, Russia is also trying to discredit voting by mail. And U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien alleged in August that “China, like Russia, like Iran—they’ve engaged in cyberattacks and phishing and that sort of thing with respect to our election infrastructure.” In September, Microsoft added a warning of its own, reporting that a Russian hacker group had struck over 200 organizations involved in the election campaign, that a Chinese group had gone after key personalities in Biden’s campaign, and that Iranian hackers targeted people in Trump’s campaign. Microsoft said most of the attacks were stopped by its software.
But whether the United States’ rivals actually do hack the country’s election infrastructure this year is almost beside the point. What matters is people’s belief that interference campaigns are working. A February poll by the Economist and YouGov showed that a majority of Americans don’t think their country can defend itself against foreign election interference. Whatever the outcome in November, then, there’s reason to believe that supporters of the losing side may believe that foreign powers sabotaged the vote and will insist on the result’s invalidity. In that sense, it doesn’t matter whether China, Russia, or any other country in fact manages to sway the ballot. What matters is whether voters believe they did.
It doesn’t matter whether China, Russia, or any other country in fact manages to sway the ballot. What matters is whether voters believe they did.
And that is the kind of influence operation the United States needs to fight. To do so, Washington should launch influence operations of its own, geared toward convincing American voters that the 2020 election will reflect the will of the people. Although important, a quiet upgrade of U.S. election software alone won’t sway the public; communications to hostile governments and their helpers that they will suffer consequences if they attempt to mess with voters might.
To be sure, as a liberal democracy, the United States has to recognize that it is particularly vulnerable to sundry forms of meddling. Freedom of expression provides would-be interferers with a smorgasbord of often divisive homemade opinions to disseminate. What’s more, since liberal democracy’s very foundation is the majority’s conviction that their voices count, eroding that trust constitutes the biggest bang for a rival’s buck.
That is why resilience is paramount: informed citizens who check the provenance of social media content before reading or sharing it, social media companies that filter out content generated by undeclared state-linked entities, and trusted election infrastructure that can better withstand cyberattacks.
During the Cold War, Sweden perfected a “total defense” model that saw large parts of the population involved in defending their country against Soviet aggression. Tasks included providing vehicles to the armed forces and training in crisis management. The same can be done in defense against election interference. A citizen who merely hears about meddling will feel despondent, while a citizen who is offered concrete guidance on how to curb it is likely to feel empowered. Americans could follow the lead of enterprising Lithuanians and form citizen groups to ferret out suspicious online content. These groups call themselves “elves”—the opposite of trolls. And who wouldn’t want to be an elf for their country?
After resilience comes counteraction, and that means retaliating against meddlers. The United States is not going to respond militarily, which is part of why interfering in U.S. elections is appealing to begin with. Should the United States tinker in Russian elections to punish Vladimir Putin? He says it already does. “The United States, everywhere, all over the world, is actively interfering in electoral campaigns in other countries,” the Russian president told then-NBC News host Megyn Kelly in 2017. He has a point. In 1948, the United States was so concerned about a potential Communist election victory in Italy that it energetically intervened on behalf of the Christian Democrats, who won. The United States has tried to steer the outcome of assorted Latin American elections as well as Serbia’s 2000 presidential poll. But such hypocrisy makes things worse.
Instead, a more productive retaliatory effort would bank on surprise. If a country interferes, the United States should punish it in a time and (nonmilitary) manner of its own choosing: a public relations version of asymmetric warfare. Call it second-strike communications. Washington could, for example, retaliate against Russian or Chinese intrusions by releasing information about those countries’ leaders, including which of them have children at U.S. universities or how many bank accounts they have in the United States.
To date, Western governments have mostly punished such leaders by freezing their assets, but humiliation may be more effective. Sure, nobody likes losing access to their money, but reputation matters more than treasure. And apart from leaders like Putin and Xi Jinping, most officials in countries hostile to the West are not household names; in fact, they’re hardly known abroad at all. Gaining sudden notoriety as a hypocrite who tries to harm the West while owning property there is a sobering prospect.
Humiliation may be more effective than freezing assets. Nobody likes losing access to their money, but reputation matters more than treasure.
The Godfather could also provide inspiration. In director Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece, Jack Woltz, a Hollywood executive who had refused to give Don Vito Corleone’s godson a movie role, wakes up to find the severed head of his beloved horse next to him in bed. Woltz gets the message and gives Don Corleone’s godson the role. Prior to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, U.S. Cyber Command used such a strategy, obviously without referring to it as such. Cyber Command soldiers reportedly left hints for Russian would-be meddlers that American operatives had identified them and were tracking their activities. It seemed to work: The 2018 elections proceeded without significant Russian interference.
The Godfather strategy works because it targets individuals rather than governments. An American threat of revenge against the government of Russia or China would not frighten Moscow or Beijing because they know that the United States wouldn’t risk serious escalation. But individual hackers may be keen to avoid being banned from visiting New York or maintaining U.S. bank accounts.
This summer, the European Union used such punishment for the first time, imposing travel bans on four Russian intelligence officers and two Chinese hackers. Since then, there have been no serious attacks on the union that could be linked to the Chinese or Russian government. At the same time, the U.S. government’s indictment of four Chinese military officers over the 2017 Equifax hack hasn’t ended Chinese cyberattacks on the country nor, as polling indicates, has it convinced the public that the problem is under control. That’s reason for governments to be louder about the punishments they mete out. Western officials should repeatedly mention any travel bans, bank account freezes, and criminal charges their governments impose. That way, citizens grasp that their government is capable of defense and that, by extension, so are they.
The State Department, for its part, is trying to up the ante by offering rewards of up to $10 million each for those who report would-be cyberattackers targeting U.S. election infrastructure. The initiative is part of the government’s Rewards for Justice program—a program that had until now offered bounties for notorious terrorists. The scheme may sound dubious, but with the election around the corner, even a Hail Mary pass is worth a try. Even one election meddler turned in by a colleague or acquaintance would be an important victory for the United States, not least in the all-important realm of public perception.
Just as ordinary Swedes did their part for national defense during the Cold War by lending their cars and tractors to the armed forces, Americans themselves must play more active civic roles. In turn, they will realize that the sanctity of their elections truly is in their hands, whether the president uses his office to communicate to the public that the vote is unassailable—or not.
This story appears in the Fall 2020 print issue.


foreignpolicy--2020-09-25--The Most Important Election. Ever.

The Most Important Election. Ever.

An extraordinary consensus exists among historians , political scientists , diplomats , national security officials , and other experts that the stakes of the U.S. presidential election between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden this November rise to these portentous historical standards .
Indeed the stakes may go well beyond that , considering the central place the United States today holds in the global system—in a way it did not as a much younger nation in 1800 , 1860 , or even 1932 .
Some suggest that Trump and the malign forces he has summoned up have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ institutions of U.S. democracy—especially his failure to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and his open encouragement of racial violence and national division—that his reelection in November could damage forever the 244-year-old American experiment of a republic of laws .
After a first term in which Trump has openly defied Congress and the courts , twisted foreign policy to serve his political interests , dismissed electoral norms , and turned a terrified Republican Party into his plaything , his return to power would , in effect , legitimize the gutting of the institutions of law @ @ @ @ @ @ @ checks and balances .
Reelection would vindicate his view that as president he can , as Trump said , “ do whatever I want.
” It would all but destroy , in other words , the American conceit that the United States is a different kind of democracy than has existed in the past , leaving the country as just another abject discard on the ash heap of failed republics going back to ancient Rome and Greece .
The concern is shared by many Republicans—former senior officials who worked for previous Republican administrations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ several who worked for Trump himself .
Some have openly warned that a second Trump term represents an existential threat to American democracy .
“ This is a kind of fulcrum moment , ” said Edward J. Watts , a University of California , San Diego historian and the author of Mortal Republic : How Rome Fell Into Tyranny .
“ If Trump is reelected , then I think the norms and restraints of American democracy disappear completely , ” in ways that echo what went awry in past republics .
Even if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recovery will be a long time coming .
“ There ’ s no question in my mind that it ’ s the most important election in American history .
The stakes are just enormous , ” said Charles Kupchan , a Georgetown University political scientist , former diplomat , and the author of Isolationism : A History of America ’ s Efforts to Shield Itself From the World .
“ One term is bad enough , but if Trump is reelected , Americans and people around the world would no longer be able @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mistake .
Instead it would be an affirmation this is the direction Americans want to go.
” Kupchan said the reason this contest is more consequential than those critical elections in 1800 and 1860 is that “ the United States was not the most powerful country in the world during those times .
“ Basically we stayed out of other people ’ s hair then .
That ’ s not the case today , when you have a country this big that has so profoundly lost its way .
We are entering an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of power is changing .
During the era of post-Cold War unipolarity , the system was more forgiving .
Even during the Cold War , when the U.S. made a mistake here and there , like Vietnam , it didn ’ t knock the world off kilter .
But at a moment when the West has lost its material preponderance [ to China and Asia ] at the same time as it ’ s begun to stumble politically , that ’ s a double whammy of historic proportions.
” Indeed , because the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in stabilizing the global system , the election of 2020 could be compared to other important global realignments that transformed the fates of previous great powers , empires , and diplomatic constructs of international stability .
“ Internationally , it is a world-historical moment—America ’ s role in the world , and the organization of the global system , is also on the ballot , ” said John Ikenberry of Princeton University , the author of A World Safe for Democracy , a book chronicling two centuries of liberal internationalism .
“ If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ order continues to unravel , and democratic and other allies of the U.S. , who are hedging and hoping that the U.S. will return to playing a ‘ system role , ’ will start making other plans.
” “ Internationally , it is a world-historical moment—America ’ s role in the world , and the organization of the global system , is also on the ballot , ” said John Ikenberry .
Harvard University ’ s Joseph Nye , also one of the leading political scientists and diplomats of his day , agrees @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a leading diplomat from an allied European nation as telling him recently : “ We can hold our breath for four years .
Eight years is too much.
” According to former U.S .
Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder , if Trump is reelected or manages to seize power by contesting the election—he is already accusing Democrats of fraud and in late September refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power—it would be tantamount to a formal divorce from Europe and the West .
It would mean that “ the way Americans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what used to be the European view of America.
” For four years , Trump has derided long-standing European allies and recently , in a fit of pique , announced he was withdrawing thousands of U.S. troops from Germany .
The U.S. government ’ s inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic has only solidified this sense of alienation and frank disgust , Daalder said .
So abysmal has been the country ’ s performance under Trump that the Irish Times columnist Fintan O ’ Toole wrote in April that for the first time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the rest of the world , which sent disaster relief to Washington rather than the other way around .
“ What happened during COVID-19 represents the pinnacle to this disgust , ” Daalder said .
“ The COVID response shows so clearly the deep problems with the American system—with our health care infrastructure , the income inequality and racial problems that persist .
America has become something to be looked down at.
” The best hope , many pundits and scholars say , is that Trump is soundly defeated in November and accepts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suggested he won ’ t .
Eventually he comes to be seen by the world—and by history—as a strange aberration , a one-of-a-kind oddity whose jingoism , narcissism , and incompetence are unlikely to come along again , whether in a Republican or Democratic president .
The United States then rejoins the global system—with its usual blend of nativist reluctance and exceptionalist arrogance , yes , but on a more moderate ( or , to be precise , adult ) level than during the Trump era .
Under this scenario , a newly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deeply experienced internationalist committed to U.S. alliances , and his multicultural vice president , Kamala Harris , act swiftly to restore U.S. prestige by reversing Trump ’ s worst failures on COVID-19 , political polarization , the economy , global stability , and climate change , as Biden has promised to do .
Pointing out that Trump has failed to replace the many international agreements he has torn up , Biden would immediately rejoin and work to shore up the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris agreement on climate change , which he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vice president ( and which the United States is scheduled to complete its withdrawal from on Nov. 4 , one day after the election ) .
Going by his campaign promises , he will try to revive the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces ( INF ) Treaty that Trump has discarded and begin talks to extend the Obama-era New START nuclear reduction pact ( which would expire only a few weeks into his term , though even now Trump is seeking to blow it up ) .
Biden would also likely seek to restore something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the most comprehensive trade deal in history ( which has been kept breathing in reduced form by Japan , the United States ’ closest ally in Asia , since Trump pulled out of that accord as well ) .
Because the TPP was designed to exclude and pressure Beijing into accepting fair-and-open trade norms , Biden could thereby do far more than Trump has done to confront a rising China and continue to co-opt it into the global system .
Meanwhile a paralyzed and polarized Congress—so traumatized by Trumpian divisions , investigations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years—starts working more effectively again ( especially if Democrats win the Senate as well as the House , ending the legislative stalemate ) .
But even in this scenario it ’ s hard to imagine that things go back to the way they were pre-Trump .
Biden , for example , will find it difficult to simply resurrect the INF Treaty and TPP , in part because he must accommodate the powerful progressive wing in his own party , which rejects untrammeled free trade pacts and overcommitment to a U.S. military presence overseas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not simply rejoin the TPP as it existed , for example , but would seek to renegotiate it to include “ strong rules of origin ” requiring more manufacturing in the United States and has also said , before entering any new international trade deal , he would focus on a Trump-like $ 400 billion “ Buy America ” initiative to boost domestic production .
Support for the World Trade Organization , which was fathered by Democrats under President Bill Clinton , is fast waning inside the party as well , amid Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ abused its rules to rob middle-class Americans of their jobs .
And Biden , like Trump , has been seeking to pare down the United States ’ role overseas for years ; even as Obama ’ s vice president , he argued vociferously against a U.S. buildup in Afghanistan and negotiated an accelerated withdrawal from Iraq .
Indeed , perhaps the greater threat is that the stakes of this election are not quite as momentous as the optimists hope—and that Trump , even if he loses power , proves to be less an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country that is no longer functioning well , whether as a republic or a global stabilizer , and can ’ t be fully trusted again .
Perhaps the greater threat is that Trump , even if he loses power , proves to be less an aberration and more a symptom of a country that is no longer functioning well and can ’ t be fully trusted again .
“ If you ’ re European , you ’ re saying to yourself , ‘ If this country , which we have basically counted on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unpredictable as ‘ Trump Island ’ and it remains so polarized , how do we know what ’ s going to happen in 2024 and ’ 28 ?
’ ” Nye said .
After all , Trump ’ s neoisolationism didn ’ t spring from nowhere ; it had a lot of popular support and still does .
In his new book , Kupchan argues that America ’ s embrace of internationalism is more an aberration than the norm in U.S. history—and he says that even for a President Biden and subsequent U.S. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to be going back to the old foreign policy .
We ’ re not going back to the institutionalized , treaty-based system that emerged after World War II .
The votes in the Senate won ’ t be there.
” To that point , a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs released in September shows an unprecedented breakdown in the old consensus in support of Washington ’ s role , demonstrating the “ Trumpification ” of the Republican Party , in Daalder ’ s words .
Perhaps the greatest fear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a degree Americans once hoped they had transcended , the American republic may simply be caught up in an inevitable cycle of history by which great powers grow complacent and decadent and eventually collapse or wither away .
Prominent realist thinkers such as John Mearsheimer have long argued that American-style liberal internationalism contains the seeds of its own destruction : excessive ambition and overreach .
“ Liberalism has an activist mentality woven into its core , ” Mearsheimer has written .
“ The belief that all humans have a set of inalienable rights @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other [ domestic ] concerns , creates a powerful incentive for liberal states to intervene ” abroad .
In recent decades , both Republican and Democratic presidents gave in to this impulse to differing degrees—from Vietnam to Bosnia to Iraq .
And in 2016 , Trump realized , as his Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton did not , that many Americans had grown weary of being global caretakers when so much was going awry at home , especially the decimation of the middle class under the aegis of rapid globalization .
Biden is unlikely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in his crude way Trump has been channeling the deepest of U.S. traditions and the fears of America ’ s founders , who were always worried about overreach in foreign conflict and constantly warned against its self-destructive effects , including the rise of demagogues like Trump .
Most famously , John Quincy Adams said in 1821 that America must not go “ in search of monsters to destroy ” abroad ; to do so , Adams said , would corrupt the very character of the nation : “ The fundamental maxims of her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ force.
” In the spring of 2016 , a senior Trump campaign advisor told me that Trump ’ s first major foreign-policy speech—in which he declared that “ the world must know we do not go abroad in search of enemies ” —was intended as a conscious echo of Adams and a rebuke of his predecessors and their reckless interventions in Iraq and Libya .
In the case of ancient Rome , this conceit proved to be ultimately fatal in the arrogance and geopolitical excess it spawned .
“ The decline of Rome @ @ @ @ @ @ @ immoderate greatness .
Prosperity ripened the principle of decay , ” Edward Gibbon wrote in his classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire .
Nor was the United States the first great power to close itself off xenophobically , even at the height of its power and influence , to immigrants and foreigners .
Hence even a Biden administration may find that the American people , like the corrupted ancient Roman plebeians and patricians , are no longer up to the task of world leadership and that they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their predecessors ’ brainchild , the liberal international system .
The U.S. education system is badly broken , and many voters simply no longer comprehend the benefits of a global free trade system or how a network of military alliances keeps the United States safe ( and actually costs less than if it were to deploy troops at home ) or how Washington has fended off global challengers by supporting the international institutions it created .
It then becomes far more difficult for mainstream Republicans and Democrats in the future to restore the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ global leadership role .
In his presidential farewell address almost 60 years ago , Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that an “ alert and knowledgeable citizenry ” would be necessary to ensure the United States ’ future .
But many Americans may no longer care about asking , or answering , fundamental questions about their role in keeping world peace , his granddaughter Susan Eisenhower , the author of the new book How Ike Led , said in an interview .
“ That ’ s the tragedy here .
If we don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s going to do it for us ?
And we don ’ t like the answer to that question either .
But not enough people are asking that question.
” Trump here is , once again , more an outcome than a cause of larger historical forces .
He rose to the presidency out of nowhere on a platform of “ America First ” populism in part because many Americans were angered by the poor policy choices offered to them by mainstream Republicans and Democrats , whether it was the parties ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economic rise , which cost the American middle class millions of jobs , or the disastrous invasion of Iraq .
( According to a recent Pew Research Center survey , large majorities of both Democrats and Republicans agree with Trump ’ s harsh view of China . )
But Trump also succeeded by exploiting the gap between the ever increasing complexity of the global system and an electorate that has struggled to keep apace .
( As Trump himself declared exuberantly on the 2016 campaign trail : “ I love the poorly educated.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ a new wave of xenophobia and neoisolationism , and it is unlikely these trends are going away soon .
In the current election , Trump is again inciting the anger of his nativist , white-majority base by creating new divisions in American society—campaigning as the law-and-order president in the face of civil unrest over police killings of Black Americans .
He is ordering federal forces into cities that aren ’ t requesting them .
But the kind of law and order Trump is peddling is akin to that of autocrats going back to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ republican pretense even as they became dictators while the complaisant Romans let their republic be slowly snuffed out , Watts said .
“ The key lesson is that what happened in ancient Rome is still relevant .
It is possible for a powerful state to retain the illusion of democracy or republican values long after those values have become nonfunctional.
” It ’ s a mistake , of course , to overdraw historical analogies .
Even at its imperialist worst , the United States is far more different than similar to ancient Rome @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one doubts that the difference between a second Trump term and the election of Biden will have enormous consequences , especially for Washington ’ s involvement in the world .
“ The policy choices on offer are stark , ” Kupchan said .
“ From 1941 through the Obama administration , there weren ’ t fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy .
Certainly this was true during the Cold War and somewhat less true during the ’ 90s : Both parties still more or less adhered to the liberal internationalist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tear it all up.
” Biden , by contrast , will keep the current structure even if he tries to minimize Washington ’ s global role in response to popular domestic demand .
In that respect , the stakes of the current election , Kupchan said , resemble more what happened in the elections of 1900 and 1920 , when the United States ’ global role also was a central issue .
The outcomes of those elections were almost diametrically opposite .
In 1900 , incumbent Republican President William McKinley had just turned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in effect , by winning the Spanish-American War and assuming control of colonies ; he was contending with Democrat William Jennings Bryan , who ran on an explicitly anti-imperialist agenda .
“ McKinley cleaned Bryan ’ s clock , ” Kupchan noted .
The contrary example occurred in 1920 , when a war-weary United States was fed up with Woodrow Wilson , a Democrat who had taken the nation into World War I and was proposing a broad new global projection of U.S. power .
But the U.S. Senate repeatedly rejected participation in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ says this election is a referendum on the League , ” Kupchan recounted .
“ Warren Harding responds , ‘ Over my dead body .
We want nothing to do with the League of Nations .
We are Americans and nationalists and not globalists.
’ Much like Trump now.
” Wilson ’ s anointed successor , James M. Cox , then lost to Harding in what is still the most lopsided election in U.S. history , crushed by a margin of 26 percent of the popular vote .
There is an interesting footnote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s vice presidential running mate in that devastating Democratic loss was a young Franklin D. Roosevelt .
As we know , FDR later made quite a comeback , restoring American power and prestige and becoming the primary author of its global leadership role today .
And no one should count out another American comeback , especially if Trump becomes history in the next few months .
This story appears in the Fall 2020 print issue .

Pick your historical precedent. In each case, the direction and very survival of the American republic were at stake. There was the close election of 1800 between Aaron Burr—an unprincipled fellow with dictatorial impulses who was in some ways the Donald Trump of his day—and Thomas Jefferson. The 1860 contest in which Abraham Lincoln faced off against Stephen Douglas, with the Civil War looming. Or the 1932 election during the Great Depression, the stakes of which were so consequential that when Franklin D. Roosevelt was warned he’d be known as the worst president in U.S. history if his recovery program failed, FDR reportedly replied, “If it fails, I’ll be the last one.”
Pick your historical precedent. In each case, the direction and very survival of the American republic were at stake. There was the close election of 1800 between Aaron Burr—an unprincipled fellow with dictatorial impulses who was in some ways the Donald Trump of his day—and Thomas Jefferson. The 1860 contest in which Abraham Lincoln faced off against Stephen Douglas, with the Civil War looming. Or the 1932 election during the Great Depression, the stakes of which were so consequential that when Franklin D. Roosevelt was warned he’d be known as the worst president in U.S. history if his recovery program failed, FDR reportedly replied, “If it fails, I’ll be the last one.”
An extraordinary consensus exists among historians, political scientists, diplomats, national security officials, and other experts that the stakes of the U.S. presidential election between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden this November rise to these portentous historical standards. Indeed the stakes may go well beyond that, considering the central place the United States today holds in the global system—in a way it did not as a much younger nation in 1800, 1860, or even 1932.
Some suggest that Trump and the malign forces he has summoned up have already done so much damage to the institutions of U.S. democracy—especially his failure to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and his open encouragement of racial violence and national division—that his reelection in November could damage forever the 244-year-old American experiment of a republic of laws. After a first term in which Trump has openly defied Congress and the courts, twisted foreign policy to serve his political interests, dismissed electoral norms, and turned a terrified Republican Party into his plaything, his return to power would, in effect, legitimize the gutting of the institutions of law and what remains of the founders’ checks and balances. Reelection would vindicate his view that as president he can, as Trump said, “do whatever I want.” It would all but destroy, in other words, the American conceit that the United States is a different kind of democracy than has existed in the past, leaving the country as just another abject discard on the ash heap of failed republics going back to ancient Rome and Greece.
The concern is shared by many Republicans—former senior officials who worked for previous Republican administrations stretching back to Ronald Reagan, including several who worked for Trump himself. Some have openly warned that a second Trump term represents an existential threat to American democracy.
“This is a kind of fulcrum moment,” said Edward J. Watts, a University of California, San Diego historian and the author of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny. “If Trump is reelected, then I think the norms and restraints of American democracy disappear completely,” in ways that echo what went awry in past republics. Even if Biden wins, Watts added, U.S. recovery will be a long time coming.
“There’s no question in my mind that it’s the most important election in American history. The stakes are just enormous,” said Charles Kupchan, a Georgetown University political scientist, former diplomat, and the author of Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself From the World. “One term is bad enough, but if Trump is reelected, Americans and people around the world would no longer be able to say the American electorate made a mistake. Instead it would be an affirmation this is the direction Americans want to go.”
Kupchan said the reason this contest is more consequential than those critical elections in 1800 and 1860 is that “the United States was not the most powerful country in the world during those times.
“Basically we stayed out of other people’s hair then. That’s not the case today, when you have a country this big that has so profoundly lost its way. We are entering an unforgiving period in history. The balance of power is changing. During the era of post-Cold War unipolarity, the system was more forgiving. Even during the Cold War, when the U.S. made a mistake here and there, like Vietnam, it didn’t knock the world off kilter. But at a moment when the West has lost its material preponderance [to China and Asia] at the same time as it’s begun to stumble politically, that’s a double whammy of historic proportions.”
Indeed, because the United States occupies such a central place in stabilizing the global system, the election of 2020 could be compared to other important global realignments that transformed the fates of previous great powers, empires, and diplomatic constructs of international stability.
“Internationally, it is a world-historical moment—America’s role in the world, and the organization of the global system, is also on the ballot,” said John Ikenberry of Princeton University, the author of A World Safe for Democracy, a book chronicling two centuries of liberal internationalism. “If Trump wins, the whole postwar liberal order continues to unravel, and democratic and other allies of the U.S., who are hedging and hoping that the U.S. will return to playing a ‘system role,’ will start making other plans.”
“Internationally, it is a world-historical moment—America’s role in the world, and the organization of the global system, is also on the ballot,” said John Ikenberry.
Harvard University’s Joseph Nye, also one of the leading political scientists and diplomats of his day, agrees. In an interview, Nye quoted a leading diplomat from an allied European nation as telling him recently: “We can hold our breath for four years. Eight years is too much.”
According to former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder, if Trump is reelected or manages to seize power by contesting the election—he is already accusing Democrats of fraud and in late September refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power—it would be tantamount to a formal divorce from Europe and the West. It would mean that “the way Americans view themselves has become completely alien to what used to be the European view of America.” For four years, Trump has derided long-standing European allies and recently, in a fit of pique, announced he was withdrawing thousands of U.S. troops from Germany. The U.S. government’s inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic has only solidified this sense of alienation and frank disgust, Daalder said.
(In August, a special report from FP Analytics ranked the United States 31st out of 36 countries for its response to the coronavirus pandemic, coming in below Brazil, Ethiopia, India, and Russia. The report found that the United States ranked so poorly because of the federal government’s inability to mount an appropriate scientific response; inadequate emergency health care spending; insufficient testing and hospital beds; and limited debt relief.)
So abysmal has been the country’s performance under Trump that the Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote in April that for the first time the United States is provoking pity from the rest of the world, which sent disaster relief to Washington rather than the other way around.
“What happened during COVID-19 represents the pinnacle to this disgust,” Daalder said. “The COVID response shows so clearly the deep problems with the American system—with our health care infrastructure, the income inequality and racial problems that persist. America has become something to be looked down at.”
The best hope, many pundits and scholars say, is that Trump is soundly defeated in November and accepts that outcome, even though he has suggested he won’t. Eventually he comes to be seen by the world—and by history—as a strange aberration, a one-of-a-kind oddity whose jingoism, narcissism, and incompetence are unlikely to come along again, whether in a Republican or Democratic president. The United States then rejoins the global system—with its usual blend of nativist reluctance and exceptionalist arrogance, yes, but on a more moderate (or, to be precise, adult) level than during the Trump era.
Under this scenario, a newly inaugurated President Biden, who is a deeply experienced internationalist committed to U.S. alliances, and his multicultural vice president, Kamala Harris, act swiftly to restore U.S. prestige by reversing Trump’s worst failures on COVID-19, political polarization, the economy, global stability, and climate change, as Biden has promised to do. Pointing out that Trump has failed to replace the many international agreements he has torn up, Biden would immediately rejoin and work to shore up the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris agreement on climate change, which he helped champion as Barack Obama’s vice president (and which the United States is scheduled to complete its withdrawal from on Nov. 4, one day after the election). Going by his campaign promises, he will try to revive the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that Trump has discarded and begin talks to extend the Obama-era New START nuclear reduction pact (which would expire only a few weeks into his term, though even now Trump is seeking to blow it up).
Biden would also likely seek to restore something like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the most comprehensive trade deal in history (which has been kept breathing in reduced form by Japan, the United States’ closest ally in Asia, since Trump pulled out of that accord as well). Because the TPP was designed to exclude and pressure Beijing into accepting fair-and-open trade norms, Biden could thereby do far more than Trump has done to confront a rising China and continue to co-opt it into the global system. Meanwhile a paralyzed and polarized Congress—so traumatized by Trumpian divisions, investigations, and impeachment for the past four years—starts working more effectively again (especially if Democrats win the Senate as well as the House, ending the legislative stalemate).
But even in this scenario it’s hard to imagine that things go back to the way they were pre-Trump. Biden, for example, will find it difficult to simply resurrect the INF Treaty and TPP, in part because he must accommodate the powerful progressive wing in his own party, which rejects untrammeled free trade pacts and overcommitment to a U.S. military presence overseas. Biden has already said he would not simply rejoin the TPP as it existed, for example, but would seek to renegotiate it to include “strong rules of origin” requiring more manufacturing in the United States and has also said, before entering any new international trade deal, he would focus on a Trump-like $400 billion “Buy America” initiative to boost domestic production. Support for the World Trade Organization, which was fathered by Democrats under President Bill Clinton, is fast waning inside the party as well, amid Trump’s accusations that China has unfairly abused its rules to rob middle-class Americans of their jobs. And Biden, like Trump, has been seeking to pare down the United States’ role overseas for years; even as Obama’s vice president, he argued vociferously against a U.S. buildup in Afghanistan and negotiated an accelerated withdrawal from Iraq.
Indeed, perhaps the greater threat is that the stakes of this election are not quite as momentous as the optimists hope—and that Trump, even if he loses power, proves to be less an aberration and more a symptom of a country that is no longer functioning well, whether as a republic or a global stabilizer, and can’t be fully trusted again.
Perhaps the greater threat is that Trump, even if he loses power, proves to be less an aberration and more a symptom of a country that is no longer functioning well and can’t be fully trusted again.
“If you’re European, you’re saying to yourself, ‘If this country, which we have basically counted on since 1945, can produce something as unpredictable as ‘Trump Island’ and it remains so polarized, how do we know what’s going to happen in 2024 and ’28?’” Nye said.
After all, Trump’s neoisolationism didn’t spring from nowhere; it had a lot of popular support and still does. In his new book, Kupchan argues that America’s embrace of internationalism is more an aberration than the norm in U.S. history—and he says that even for a President Biden and subsequent U.S. leaders, “it’s not going to be going back to the old foreign policy. We’re not going back to the institutionalized, treaty-based system that emerged after World War II. The votes in the Senate won’t be there.” To that point, a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs released in September shows an unprecedented breakdown in the old consensus in support of Washington’s role, demonstrating the “Trumpification” of the Republican Party, in Daalder’s words.
Perhaps the greatest fear among U.S. allies is that, to a degree Americans once hoped they had transcended, the American republic may simply be caught up in an inevitable cycle of history by which great powers grow complacent and decadent and eventually collapse or wither away. Prominent realist thinkers such as John Mearsheimer have long argued that American-style liberal internationalism contains the seeds of its own destruction: excessive ambition and overreach. “Liberalism has an activist mentality woven into its core,” Mearsheimer has written. “The belief that all humans have a set of inalienable rights, that protecting these rights should override other [domestic] concerns, creates a powerful incentive for liberal states to intervene” abroad.
In recent decades, both Republican and Democratic presidents gave in to this impulse to differing degrees—from Vietnam to Bosnia to Iraq. And in 2016, Trump realized, as his Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton did not, that many Americans had grown weary of being global caretakers when so much was going awry at home, especially the decimation of the middle class under the aegis of rapid globalization. Biden is unlikely to make the same mistake.
Thus in his crude way Trump has been channeling the deepest of U.S. traditions and the fears of America’s founders, who were always worried about overreach in foreign conflict and constantly warned against its self-destructive effects, including the rise of demagogues like Trump. Most famously, John Quincy Adams said in 1821 that America must not go “in search of monsters to destroy” abroad; to do so, Adams said, would corrupt the very character of the nation: “The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.” In the spring of 2016, a senior Trump campaign advisor told me that Trump’s first major foreign-policy speech—in which he declared that “the world must know we do not go abroad in search of enemies”—was intended as a conscious echo of Adams and a rebuke of his predecessors and their reckless interventions in Iraq and Libya.
The United States is hardly the first major power to see itself as an exception in the history of nations—and to overextend and exhaust itself in the end because of the hubris that accompanies such delusions. “’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past / First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails / Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last,” Lord Byron wrote. There is, as the historian Watts suggested, a discomfiting lineage here going back to the fall of the Roman Republic more than two millenniums ago. In his 2007 book, Are We Rome?—written in response to George W. Bush’s disastrous attempt to democratize the Arab world by invading Iraq—Cullen Murphy observed: “At the most expansive, strategic level of all, that of historic purpose, both Rome and America have considered their way to be the world’s way.” Much as the founding generations of Americans saw Providence’s hand at work in their idealized republic, the Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder described Rome as “a land chosen by divine providence to unify empires so disparate and races so manifold; to bring to common concord so many rough, discordant voices; to give culture to mankind; to become, in short, the whole world’s homeland.”
Sound familiar?
In the case of ancient Rome, this conceit proved to be ultimately fatal in the arrogance and geopolitical excess it spawned. “The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay,” Edward Gibbon wrote in his classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Nor was the United States the first great power to close itself off xenophobically, even at the height of its power and influence, to immigrants and foreigners.
Hence even a Biden administration may find that the American people, like the corrupted ancient Roman plebeians and patricians, are no longer up to the task of world leadership and that they no longer desire to finance and maintain their predecessors’ brainchild, the liberal international system. The U.S. education system is badly broken, and many voters simply no longer comprehend the benefits of a global free trade system or how a network of military alliances keeps the United States safe (and actually costs less than if it were to deploy troops at home) or how Washington has fended off global challengers by supporting the international institutions it created. It then becomes far more difficult for mainstream Republicans and Democrats in the future to restore the old consensus on the United States’ global leadership role.
In his presidential farewell address almost 60 years ago, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” would be necessary to ensure the United States’ future. But many Americans may no longer care about asking, or answering, fundamental questions about their role in keeping world peace, his granddaughter Susan Eisenhower, the author of the new book How Ike Led, said in an interview. “That’s the tragedy here. If we don’t feel like doing it anymore, who’s going to do it for us? And we don’t like the answer to that question either. But not enough people are asking that question.”
Trump here is, once again, more an outcome than a cause of larger historical forces. He rose to the presidency out of nowhere on a platform of “America First” populism in part because many Americans were angered by the poor policy choices offered to them by mainstream Republicans and Democrats, whether it was the parties’ cavalier approach to China’s swift economic rise, which cost the American middle class millions of jobs, or the disastrous invasion of Iraq. (According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, large majorities of both Democrats and Republicans agree with Trump’s harsh view of China.)
But Trump also succeeded by exploiting the gap between the ever increasing complexity of the global system and an electorate that has struggled to keep apace. (As Trump himself declared exuberantly on the 2016 campaign trail: “I love the poorly educated.”) He fomented and then rode a new wave of xenophobia and neoisolationism, and it is unlikely these trends are going away soon. In the current election, Trump is again inciting the anger of his nativist, white-majority base by creating new divisions in American society—campaigning as the law-and-order president in the face of civil unrest over police killings of Black Americans. He is ordering federal forces into cities that aren’t requesting them. But the kind of law and order Trump is peddling is akin to that of autocrats going back to the Caesars, who garbed themselves in republican pretense even as they became dictators while the complaisant Romans let their republic be slowly snuffed out, Watts said.
“The key lesson is that what happened in ancient Rome is still relevant. It is possible for a powerful state to retain the illusion of democracy or republican values long after those values have become nonfunctional.”
It’s a mistake, of course, to overdraw historical analogies. Even at its imperialist worst, the United States is far more different than similar to ancient Rome and other failed republics. And no one doubts that the difference between a second Trump term and the election of Biden will have enormous consequences, especially for Washington’s involvement in the world. “The policy choices on offer are stark,” Kupchan said. “From 1941 through the Obama administration, there weren’t fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy. Certainly this was true during the Cold War and somewhat less true during the ’90s: Both parties still more or less adhered to the liberal internationalist playbook. But Trump really wants to tear it all up.” Biden, by contrast, will keep the current structure even if he tries to minimize Washington’s global role in response to popular domestic demand.
In that respect, the stakes of the current election, Kupchan said, resemble more what happened in the elections of 1900 and 1920, when the United States’ global role also was a central issue. The outcomes of those elections were almost diametrically opposite. In 1900, incumbent Republican President William McKinley had just turned the United States into an empire, in effect, by winning the Spanish-American War and assuming control of colonies; he was contending with Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who ran on an explicitly anti-imperialist agenda. “McKinley cleaned Bryan’s clock,” Kupchan noted. The contrary example occurred in 1920, when a war-weary United States was fed up with Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who had taken the nation into World War I and was proposing a broad new global projection of U.S. power. But the U.S. Senate repeatedly rejected participation in his League of Nations.
“Wilson says this election is a referendum on the League,” Kupchan recounted. “Warren Harding responds, ‘Over my dead body. We want nothing to do with the League of Nations. We are Americans and nationalists and not globalists.’ Much like Trump now.” Wilson’s anointed successor, James M. Cox, then lost to Harding in what is still the most lopsided election in U.S. history, crushed by a margin of 26 percent of the popular vote.
There is an interesting footnote to this history, however. Cox’s vice presidential running mate in that devastating Democratic loss was a young Franklin D. Roosevelt. As we know, FDR later made quite a comeback, restoring American power and prestige and becoming the primary author of its global leadership role today. And no one should count out another American comeback, especially if Trump becomes history in the next few months.
This story appears in the Fall 2020 print issue.