Tag: United States

Appeasement without limits

This interview, which I did Tuesday for Anja Ivanović at Podgorica daily Pobjeda, has attracted some attention, so I am posting here the original English version:

Q: The Minister of Serbian defense, Miloš Vučević, stated that the recognition of Kosovo will come back to haunt Montenegro and North Macedonia, much like it has for Ukraine and to all those who promoted Kosovo as an independent state. US ambassador in Serbia Christopher Hill did not make any criticism on this statement but said that he does not see the statements of Serbian officials as an attempt to destabilize the region. What kind of policy do you think Hill is demonstrating with such an attitude toward Belgrade’s propaganda? Why do you think Hill didn’t criticize Serbia at all?

A: US policy now favors Belgrade. Washington is silent on many things: corruption at high levels in Serbia, Serbian threats of the use of force, a Belgrade-sponsored attack on NATO troops, Vucic’s refusal to commit to implementing agreements reached recently in the Belgrade/Pristina dialogue. You will have to ask Ambassador Hill and Deputy Assistant Secretary Escobar why. My impression is that they have convinced themselves they can bring Serbia towards the West, despite a good deal of clear and compelling evidence to the contrary. They also appear to be prioritizing Serbia’s allowing arms supplies to get to Ukraine.

Q: Do you believe that the absence of a critical attitude of the American ambassador is proof of a “soft policy” towards Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić? What do you believe needs to happen to change Hill’s approach?

A: Yes, US policy towards Serbia is now all about appeasement. I don’t see this changing while present personnel are in place.

Q: Is it possible that Hill, who openly supported the “Open Balkan” initiative, abstains from reacting to the disputed statements of Serbian officials because of possible privileges in the Initiative “Open Balkan”?

A: So far as I am aware, Open Balkans is a dead letter. Nor do I think it offered much to the US. American support for it was part of the appeasement policy.

Q: This month, US and EU officials sent a letter in which they called for a change of soft policy towards Serbia and Aleksandar Vučić in relation to Kosovo. Do you think that this approach by Hill confirms their request? Is Hill opposing US officials with this statement?

A: The “officials” you mention were legislators. They would like a dramatic change in the current approach. I see no sign yet that US and EU executive branch officials will give it to them. Much more pressure will be required.

Q: The former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Montenegro and the first Montenegrin ambassador in Washington, Miodrag Vlahović, assessed in an Open Letter (published by Pobjeda) to the US Ambassador in Belgrade, Christopher Hill, that the “Pax Americana” policy promoted by His Excellency Hill through concessions and pandering to the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, was “deeply wrong and compromises decades of positive and effective US engagement in the Balkans.” Do you have comment about Vlahović letter?

Q: I think Ambassador Vlahovic is correct.

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Stevenson’s army, September 1

-US wants Philippine base close to Taiwan.

– Russia vetoes UNSC resolution on Mali.

– Carnegie analyst discusses impact of Niger coup.

– Russian oligarchs had US lobbyists.

FEMA wants more money

– Trump Treasury official wants better interagency process for economic policy.

– LA Times sees conservative plan to take over US government.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here, with occasional videos of my choice. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).

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Stevenson’s army, August 30

– We talked in class about how the Constitution gives Congress the power over trade. The Atlantic notes the many ways Congress has abdicated its trade powers with emergency provisions which President Trump notably used.

– Dan Drezner analyzes the chapter on Biden and Afghanistan that I sent around yesterday.

– Thomas Edsall reviews research on small donors to political campaigns.

– New Yorker reviews rise of right-wing violence.

– WSJ says  Saudis offer money to Palestinian Authority.

Military coup in Gabon.

– Given the hurricane threatening Florida, remember that CRS has background reports on issues like FEMA assistance.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here, with occasional videos of my choice. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).

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Stevenson’s army, August 27

Just in time for class, articles on relevant issues: tribalism and trade.

-WSJ has data on the increased tribalism in US politics. [Earlier NYT’s Thomas Edsall discussed the rise of partisan hatred.]

-WaPo notes how Biden’s trade policies are closer to Trump’s than Obama’s.

For Congress there is a deeper legal problem: as CFR’s Inu Manak argues, Biden is re-defining Free Trade Agreements to get around details in the Inflation Reduction Act. [He has a long piece on this in FP.] CRS summarizes congressional power over trade deals.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here, with occasional videos of my choice. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).

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Yes, I was there and then is now

I wrote this piece for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, but it has aged well so here it is again ten years later:

Eighteen years old in August 1963, I had spent the summer after high school graduation working in a factory, commuting by bike the five miles or so from where I was staying with a friend.  I don’t remember my decision to go to the March, but I do remember my racist aunt calling my mother the night before and trying to get her to stop me.  There would be violence, Aunt Betty was sure, and who knows what kind of trouble.

That appeal fell on deaf ears.  My mother was a committed advocate of integration, which had been an issue for years in my hometown of New Rochelle, New York.  My father, until he died in 1961, was an activist and successful opponent of “blockbusting”:  the real estate agents’ practice of scaring whites to move by implying that the neighborhood was “turning,” thus fulfilling their own prophecy and collecting lots of commissions.  A Federal court had found two years earlier that the Lincoln School half a mile from our house had been intentionally segregated and eventually ordered remedies.  This, people, was hundreds of miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.

I was already dating a “Negro” girl, in the terminology of the time.  That wasn’t common (nor was it common when we married five years later and remained married until today).  I confess it had taken me years to work up the courage to ask her out.  She was away that summer and did not go on the March.  But surely the sense I had that the March was the right place to be was connected to my romantic interests, if only by worldview.

To get to Washington around 8 am in those days meant a 2 am rising in New Rochelle, no breakfast and a quick dash out of the house grabbing the brown paper lunch bag from the fridge.  As the bus arrived in DC, I awakened to a strong fish smell.  It was that brown paper bag.  It wasn’t the one with my lunch.  I don’t know what my family had for dinner, but I had little money in my pocket (no ATMs then) and was hungry much of the day.

We staged at Thomas Circle and marched from there singing and chanting to the Lincoln Memorial, where I found a good spot on the left of the reflecting pool under the trees.  It was a happy but determined crowd.  We knew the country was watching.  We all dressed reasonably well, the “Negroes” better than the “whites” to look as respectable as possible.  We knew there was an absolute need to avoid violence, but the issue never arose in my part of the march.  There were just too many of us for anyone to tangle with.  The racists, who were many in that day in Washington, stayed home.

Solidarity was the overwhelming feeling.  The weather was beautiful and the mood was good, but this was no picnic.  It was a determined and disciplined protest.  “We Shall Overcome” was the anthem. The New York Times reporter who quoted me in Saturday’s paper asked whether I was surprised that celebrities like Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan sang.  No, that was no surprise:  they had been part of “the movement.”  The answer, my friend, was blowing in the wind.

A word about the concept of race at the time of the March, which was clearly organized and led by Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph.  In the terminology of the time, they were “Negroes,” not yet blacks or African Americans.  The concept of “whites” is likewise an anachronism.  I didn’t regard myself as part of a white majority then (nor do I really now).  The majority then was WASP:  white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.  As a Jew whose grandparents immigrated from Russia and Russian-occupied Poland, I was in none of those three categories.  I was a minority.  The barriers to Jews (quotas in universities, prohibitions in clubs and limitations in employment) had only recently come down.  The affinity of Jews for the civil rights movement was strong.

The March on Washington was important to us because it was a massive show of support to those who wanted to end segregation, which was more the rule than the exception.  It was inconsistent with what the marchers understood as the founding creed: all men are created equal (the question of women was posed later).  “Jobs and freedom” meant an end to discrimination on the basis of skin color in a society still based on racial separation.  It was a radical proposition.  I learned only this week that the even the police force in DC was still segregated, with no mixed patrols.

Segregation did not end during the March on Washington, as some would like to imagine. The struggle continued even more intensely after August 1963. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham came just two weeks or so later.  James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner, who was the son of my high school biology teacher, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi the next June.  I had wanted to spend the summer there but yielded to my mother’s entreaties and instead earned some much-needed cash doing research at Yale.  New Haven was still mostly segregated, especially schools and housing.  I imagine it still is to some extent.

I was sitting down in the street in Cambridge, Maryland in 1964 in support of people trying to end school and housing segregation in what was known then as the Delmarva peninsula (not the Eastern Shore).  Delmarva was more akin to the deep South than the northeast when it came to segregation. The state-mobilized National Guard blocked our march there with fixed bayonets, wearing gas masks. The protest leadership decided not to test their will to use them. I’ve never regretted that.

Once MLK and RFK were murdered in 1968, the civil rights movement lost steam to the anti-Vietnam War movement. I got my first whiff of tear gas protesting at Fort Dix in 1969 and tested the patience of army officers at my physical in 1970. The civil rights movement ended prematurely, befuddled by weakened leadership and dissension within the black community  (as it came to be called), some of which toyed with violence while others tried to move further in the direction of economic justice.

Another ten years of MLK leading the challenge to the American reality would have done a lot more good than the lionizing of him now.  In housing, schooling and the economy the sharp divides between blacks and whites have not disappeared.  Some have even widened.  The mechanisms of segregation are no longer overt and direct, but they are effective and persistent.  No one can hope to do what Bull Connor and George Wallace did once upon a time, but voter ID laws are just a more sophisticated version of a particular group’s desire to keep America in the hands of people who look, behave and vote like them.

Still, things have changed for the better.  I can hope that the voter ID laws will mobilize massive minority participation in the states that pass them.  I am pleased my children have had opportunities that would have been denied a generation earlier.  My wife and I married in the year after the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s prohibition on interracial marriage, though we were unaware of the decision at the time.  Today we  travel the length and breadth of America without worrying about being lynched.  And yes, President Obama embodies the ideals of August 28, 1963.

But we still need to make sure we treat all people as the equals they are.  Then is now.

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Lessons from the Wagnerian tragedy

While the odds of my saying anything new are minimal, it is difficult not to comment on the death yesterday of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner comrades. I think it is fair to assume it was murder. A plane accident would be just too convenient. And we’ll never know for sure, so why not assume the obvious?

What we don’t know and what the incident tells us

It is difficult to fathom why Prigozhin thought he could fly around Russia safely. Just a few days ago he put out a video purporting to show him in Africa. Might he have imagined that Putin would be fooled? Might he have believed that his good friend Vladimir would allow him to continue to live after attempting a coup? Had he tried to blackmail Putin into leaving him alone, by promising to have published incriminating material if he were to die? No one knows.

What we do know is that this incident confirms, once again, that Putin is a garden variety homicidal dictator. No one should have doubted that–the denefestrations and poisonings have been confirming it for decades. But it has political implications, both in Russia and in the United States.

Russians need to get brave

The implication in Russia is that Putin will never leave office voluntarily. He knows that peaceful retirement is not an option. He’ll try to stay in power as long as he can.

To get rid of him, Russians will need to be courageous. There is little sign of such courage so far, but it might be brewing beneath the surface. Whoever arranged for Prigozhin’s plane to come down could do the same for Putin’s. That will make him extra cautious and repressive. He has already tightened the screws on dissent, but will likely do more. Even much more.

Americans need to get smarter

Following Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, there is a part of the Republican Party, and a fringe on the left, that has been inclined to accommodation with Putin. They would like less aid for Ukraine and more, echoing a Moscow troll line, for Hawaii, though of course the Republicans would never actually push aid in Hawaii’s direction.

Trump and Carlson may continue to shill for Putin. They are not just dumb but craven. But the filo-Russian faction on both left and right should now be as dead as Prigozhin.

There is no longer any alternative, if ever there was, for the West in Ukraine. Europe and the US need to give Ukraine everything it needs to defeat Russia and expel its forces from all Ukrainian territory. Putin’s defeat may not guarantee his fall, but if he manages to hold on to territory in Ukraine it will make his fall much less likely. His succesor may be worse for Russians, but defeat in Ukraine will make him and Russia weaker. That is what Americans need to aim for.

Accountability would be nice

I guffawed at the first news of Prigozhin’s accident. But it is not a laughing matter, even if he was a clownish war criminal. Dictators worldwide will be watching to see the consequences. Let’s hope Russians can somehow give Putin his just desserts.

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