Strongmen strike back [Robert Kagan] (fb2) читать постранично, страница - 8

and the weapons flowing from Washington. The Reagan administration discovered that, in the Philippines, South Korea, Chile, Paraguay and Haiti, the “friendly” dictators were obstacles to democracy, not to communism.

Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak played the game successfully for decades: He suppressed the moderate opposition while allowing space for the Muslim Brotherhood, knowing that the threat of a Brotherhood victory would keep the Americans on his side. It worked until he lost control of society — resulting in the Brotherhood victory at the ballot box in 2012 that his policies had helped make inevitable. That we have unlearned this very recent lesson and are once again looking to strongmen such as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Egypt’s Sissi as allies is a testament to how difficult it is for convenient myths to die.

Today, we have even more powerful reasons not to support dictatorships, even those we deem “friendly.” The world is now being divided into two sectors: one in which social media and data are controlled by governments and citizens live in surveillance states; and one in which individuals still have some protection against government abuse. And the trend is clear — the surveillance-state sector is expanding and the protected space is shrinking. The world’s autocracies, even the “friendly” ones, are acquiring the new methods and technologies pioneered by Russia and China. And, as they do, they become part of the global surveillance-state network. They are also enhancing the power and reach of China and Russia, who by providing the technology and expertise to operate the mechanisms of social control are gaining access to this ever-expanding pool of data on everyone on the planet.

We have already seen how authoritarian manipulation of social media transcends borders. Russia’s Internet Research Agency, its bot farms, state-sponsored trolls and sophisticated hacking have made Americans’ data and information space vulnerable — along with the minds into which that information is fed. A country such as Egypt may or may not be an ally in the struggle against radical Islam, but in the struggle between liberalism and autocratic anti-liberalism, Sissi’s Egypt will be on the other side.

Much more is at risk than our privacy. We have been living with the comforting myth that the great progress we have witnessed in human behavior since the mid-20th century, the reductions in violence, in the brutality of the state, in torture, in mass killing, cannot be reversed. There can be no more holocausts; no more genocides; no more Stalinist gulags. We insist on believing there is a new floor below which people and governments cannot sink. But this is just another illusion born in the era that is now passing.

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The enormous progress of the past seven-plus decades was not some natural evolution of humanity; it was the product of liberalism’s unprecedented power and influence in the international system. Until the second half of the 20th century, humanity was moving in the other direction. We err in thinking that the horrors perpetrated against Ukrainians and Chinese during the 1930s, and against Jews during the 1940s, were bizarre aberrations. Had World War II produced a different set of victors, as it might have, such behavior would have persisted as a regular feature of existence. It certainly has persisted outside the liberal world in the postwar era — in Cambodia and Rwanda, in Sudan and the Balkans, in Syria and Myanmar.

Even liberal nations are capable of atrocities, though they recoil at them when discovered. Non-liberal nations do not recoil. Today, we need only look to the concentration camps in China where more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs are being subjected to mental and physical torture and “re-education.” As authoritarian nations and the authoritarian idea gain strength, there will be fewer and fewer barriers to what illiberal governments can do to their people.

We need to start imagining what it will be like to live in such a world, even if the United States does not fall prey to these forces itself. Just as during the 1930s, when realists such as Robert Taft assured Americans that their lives would be undisturbed by the collapse of democracy in Europe and the triumph of authoritarianism in Asia, so we have realists today insisting that we pull back from confronting the great authoritarian powers rising in Eurasia. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s answer, that a world in which the United States was the “lone island” of democratic liberalism would be a “shabby and dangerous place to live in,” went largely unheeded then and no doubt will go largely unheeded again today.

To many these days, liberalism is just some hazy amalgam of idealisms, to be saluted or scorned depending on whose ox is being gored. Those who have enjoyed the privileges of race and gender, who have been part of a comfortable majority in shaping cultural and religious norms, are turning away from liberalism as those privileges have become threatened — just as critics of liberal capitalism on the American left once turned away from liberalism in the name of equality and justice and may be doing so again. They do so, however, with an unspoken faith that liberalism will continue to survive, that their right to critique liberalism will be protected by the very liberalism they are critiquing.

Today, that confidence is misplaced, and one wonders whether Americans would have the same attitude if they knew what it meant for them. We seem to have lost sight of a simple and very practical reality: that whatever we may think about the persistent problems of our lives, about the appropriate balance between rights and traditions, between prosperity and equality, between faith and reason, only liberalism ensures our right to hold and express those thoughts and to battle over them in the public arena. Liberalism is all that keeps us, and has ever kept us, from being burned at the stake for what we believe.

[Have a question about this essay? Submit it to Robert Kagan.]

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