Of pendulums and populists; or what the world needs now

Our domestic political pendulums are now swinging the other way. This makes many people uncomfortable, but such is the nature of our democratic system. Populists are ascending while “unpopulists” are in decline, unpopular for their failure to deliver the results that their respective majorities expected. Meanwhile, our international stability pendulum is seemingly swinging ever more rapidly from peace to insecurity, and here again, the unpopulists’ policies and actions appear to have been inadequate. People are starting to worry.

The dilemma of elected power at home is balancing short-term needs with long-term interests. Voters want their life to be better in the short-term, while so-called elites, who generally have their short-term needs met, focus more on addressing long-term challenges. The paradox for leaders is that a correct long-term focus will meet tomorrow’s short-term needs for everyone, but with limited budgets how does a leader do both? How does a leader convince voters to sacrifice today for a better tomorrow? It’s hard. Focusing on short term needs means that a leader can stay in power at least until the unaddressed long-term challenges reveal themselves. In other words, by slowing down the domestic pendulum there is a risk that the international stability pendulum will go faster. This is where we are now. The domestic pendulum now demands change. The international pendulum demands action.

Timely action is difficult. The dilemma of elected power abroad is that our adversary, the “axis of autocrats” has distinct comparative advantages: Autocrats can make decisions faster, marshal resources more rapidly and stay the course longer in crisis or conflict simply because they are not subject to elections. Autocracy imbues national unity of purpose and unity of effort upon their actions, and their longevity in office injects strategic patience into their designs. For one democratic nation, this disadvantage is a challenge; for decisions in NATO or the European Union, it can be perilous. None of this is to suggest that autocracy is better than democracy, merely that the former offers the adversary certain advantages, which need to be understood.

Free and open societies can overcome the decision advantage of autocrats. The task at hand for the nations is to take advantage of the momentum of change to make rapid decisions to improve the short-term at home, while acting robustly against insecurity abroad. The place to start is where international instability directly affects life at home. Here, home means the transatlantic and transpacific homeland of like-minded Allies and Partners – are we up to the task?

There is an American proverb which says, “Keep doing what you’re doing, and you will keep getting what you’re getting,” a rephrasing of Einstein’s definition of insanity. The American political equivalent first asked by Ronald Reagan is “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Internationally, most would agree we are not better off; therefore, we can’t keep doing what we’re doing. Our political leaders need to step up, make changes, and act.

Are they up to the task? The nature of our politics seems to suggest they are not. Some say that politics is the art of leading people to where they want to go in the first place – the pendulum. In any case, electoral politics is a competitive activity as someone always wants to replace you. This complicates decision making. Politicians are therefore cautious, tending to avoid decisions, and then, when they must make them, they do so at the last possible moment. Leaders are human. Like all humans, they tend to avoid difficult decisions and do not like to give people bad news. Nevertheless, within this reality, political organisations like NATO, the EU, the OECD, and others maintained relative international stability for 75 years. We were up to the task – the problem is that the task has changed.

Our adversaries have our script. They know us. They know how far they can push us before we can muster the will to use our enormous power to stop them. They are, therefore, insidious, subversive, and often coercive. Enabled by the internet, free to operate within our open and indulgent societies, and aided by useful idiots, their strategic indirect approach, amplified by their unity of effort, is slowly undermining both our will and our capability to act. Adversaries manipulate the short-term, which influences our political pendulum, while creating distractions which sap our resources and cloud our perceptions of their long-term ambitions. In other words, our reality is changing faster than we can perceive. We need to understand our own history to regain our perspective so that we can act effectively.

The post-Cold War world was a unique historical period that is rapidly ending. Pax Americana has given way to realpolitik, the unbridled pursuit of national interests, and great power rivalry, which means all the classic tactics, techniques and procedures of statecraft, as anti-thetical to our modern sensibilities as they are, need to be relearned. In short, what the world needs now is tough love.

Tough love starts with a clear-eyed and comprehensive examination of our strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities, an honest assessment of our tools, including our organisations, and an unvarnished evaluation of our performance. We also need to be willing to suspend disbelief and look at our adversaries as they really are and understand what they are really doing. We need to be more entrepreneurial, less dogmatic, and not ideological in the choice of our partners in this effort. We need to fully appreciate the gravity of the moment. Existential crisis is not too strong a description. We need to have a frank conversation with our electorates: We need to give them the bad news as well as the good. The good news is that we are in this together. We are stronger together. Through this strength, we can win the peace.

A good plan for winning the peace now is better than a great plan too late. A good plan that helps most of the people most of the time will gain support, especially if it starts with that which people want. According to Franklin Roosevelt in his Four Freedoms speech of 1941, people want freedom of expression and religion, and freedom from fear and want. To me, it seems that in the short-term freedom from fear and want are the priority, while freedom of expression and religion will be guaranteed in the long-term once basic needs are satisfied, but clearly, all need to be pursued together and neither the long nor short can be sacrificed.

In the new book, Confronting China: U.S. Defense Policy in an Era of Great Power Competition, my chapter on China and Europe, titled Strongest Together: The Dawning of the Transatlantic Century argues for a good global plan to ensure freedom from fear and want. First, NATO should relaunch and expand its highly successful Partnership for Peace to address fear, and the U.S. and the EU (with others, such as Japan) should launch a Partnership for Prosperity to address want. The nations involved in launching these partnerships already embrace freedom of expression and worship, which indeed are the foundation of their willingness to address fear and want.

In summary, we are where we are. Donald J. Trump is the new American president. He has skills applicable to the moment. How we work together and leverage his skills and instincts will reveal how committed all of us are, including President Trump, to our collective success. To do so, we need to embrace change and leverage its momentum to create an enabling environment for improvement. We need to embrace peace through strength to restore international stability, which means that each of our adversaries’ daily mini-aggressions needs to be met resolutely and the vulnerabilities that enabled them need to be robustly remedied. We need to act with an entrepreneur’s spirit, which means, for example, that while we endorse the mandate and mission of our organisations, we need to transform them where necessary to get the results we need. We need to be honest with one another and with our populations. We need to make decisions quickly to get good results while avoiding political paralysis. We need to work together, for we are strongest together.

In conclusion, war has many phases, the kinetic phase is just one and often of the shortest duration. We are at war. As Clausewitz noted, “war is a continuation of policy by other means.” Putin’s policy for Russia, like Xi Jinping’s for China, is pretty clear, and his means are becoming ever more evident and aggressive. Putin wants to win a war, while we fight to win the peace. We are strong enough. Can we decide to win in time? It’s up to us.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.