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Tensions escalated this year, as the U.S.-brokered negotiations between Ethiopia and Egypt unraveled and new talks mediated by the African Union began

Construction of the dam was completed in July, and the filling of its reservoir started soon after amid heavy rains but before an agreement between Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan was signed. The U.S. government, a top source of aid for both Ethiopia and Egypt, said in August that it would halt some aid to Ethiopia over what it saw as a unilateral move to progress with the dam.

Social media users from the two countries frequently collide on the Internet, but seem to do so most often on Adel el-Adawy’s Twitter page: As a member of a prominent Egyptian political dynasty, a professor at the American University in Cairo, and the most visible disseminator of the Egyptian perspective on the dam in English, he has amassed a significant following. Adawy, whose pinned tweet is a picture of himself shaking hands with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, posts frequently about the Nile and Ethiopian affairs, especially when things get sticky.

It’s possible that the engagement is coming from concerned Ethiopians at home and abroad, at the encouragement but not the behest of Ethiopian officials. “I have friends who joined Twitter just for the sake of this. It’s highly emotional and nationalistic,” said Endalkachew Chala, an Ethiopian communications professor at Hamline University in Minnesota.

The Ethiopian government does broadly engage in “computational propaganda,” according to a 2019 report from the Oxford Internet Institute. Agencies there use human-run social media accounts to spread pro-government propaganda, attack the opposition, and troll users. The same goes for the Egyptian government.

the first known time these kinds of digital tools have been used by people from one African country against people from another, said Gilbert Nyandeje, founder and CEO of the Africa Cyber Defense Forum. “It only means one thing. It means we should expect this more and more.”

the dam provided a unifying issue around which Ethiopians of all ethnic backgrounds could rally. “We do have a lot of divisions—ideological, ethnic, tribal, religious,” said Chala, the Ethiopian professor. “But even though we have these bitter divisions, Ethiopians have overwhelmingly supported this Nile dam especially on social media.”

at the core of Egyptian identity is the Nile, so bolstering nationalism means defending the Nile, too. And officials have encouraged this outlook: One sleekly produced video shared on Facebook by the Ministry of Immigration and Egyptian Expatriates Affairs warned, “More than 40 million Egyptians are facing the threat of drought and thirst.… The cause of water shortage is Ethiopia building a dam five times bigger than its needs.”

a show of vulnerability rare in Arab power politics. But the strategy has helped garner global sympathy for Egypt, even as its Nile claims are framed by Ethiopia as the result of unjust colonial-era agreements in which Egypt’s interests were represented by British colonizers.

For both countries—Egypt since the 2011 fall of Mubarak and Ethiopia since the 2012 death of strongman Prime Minister Meles Zenawi—national identity has been in flux

Ethiopian officials, meanwhile, continue to encourage Ethiopians to post about the dam online and often use the #ItsMyDam hashtag in their own social media posts. This use of social media to rally around the dam has also meant that Ethiopia’s massive global diaspora can get involved, without having to worry about frequent in-country Internet shutdowns that otherwise curtail online movements there.

The thousands of Ethiopian refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants living in Egypt are now facing greater pressure and harassment from Egyptian citizens and authorities since the dam tensions started to heat up

in Ethiopia, it has meant that any domestic criticism of the dam from an environmentalist point of view—namely, that it could disrupt ecosystems and biodiversity, even within Ethiopia—is met with derision

for both countries, surging nationalist sentiment means that it’s harder for officials to agree to, and for the public to accept, compromise

the main sticking points now are related to dispute resolution, drought contingency plans, and future upstream projects. And yet, much of the online rhetoric remains maximalist, even rejecting items that have already been unanimously decided—such as the existence of an Ethiopian Nile dam in any form—raising the possibility that the online tensions and attacks may not subside anytime soon

Without a working majority, party leaders must pay attention to their hard-liners, or, as some Conservative Party members have been known to call them, “swivel-eyed loons.”

Normally, Britain’s flexible political system could accommodate one party’s indulgence of extremism: if the Conservatives found themselves advocating something radical such as leaving the EU, this would typically open up space in the center for Labour to position itself as the defender of economically pragmatic close relations with it. However, Labour is currently led by the far-left and anti-European Jeremy Corbyn, keen to facilitate Brexit and take advantage of the economic chaos to implement a radical socialist agenda.

new, essentially sectarian political identities created by the Brexit referendum itself. Leavers and remainers move in different social circles and have different understandings of the central facts of Brexit

David Cameron’s decision to hold this referendum about a question so fundamental to Britain’s national identity opened up this chasm in the country

There is no majority for any policy at all in Parliament

The true limits of their power now revealed, no-deal Brexiteers are now contemplating a legislative strike, which would deprive the government of its majority for everything except confidence votes, or even forming a new hard-right party. That would allow them to vote against the government in a confidence vote and provoke an election. The effect of a new party would, however, be to split the anti-Labour vote and give Jeremy Corbyn a good chance of entering Downing Street

The only certainty is that Britain’s political rewards now go to men and women who promote polarization, not compromise

rampant reports of conspiratorial plots within the cabinet: remainers plotting a new referendum (and seeking legal advice on whether Britain’s decision to leave could be revoked by executive action, without consulting Parliament) and anti-Europeans threatening to resign from the government, reject the withdrawal agreement Theresa May negotiated with the EU, and leave without any sort of deal at all. (The Bank of England estimated that such a “disorderly” Brexit would cause unemployment to almost double, inflation to rise to more than 6 percent, house prices to fall by 30 percent, and the pound to fall below parity with the euro.)

the young now identify as pro-European in a way that would never have occurred to them before the 2016 vote. The weight of their increasing numbers will eventually tell. Yet the boomers’ demographic albatross will press further still if, as is in my view probable, English political chaos stimulates Scotland to choose independence and (though this is less likely) Northern Ireland to unite with the Irish Republic.

A decade of intense political conflict is a grim prospect for a country with few formal institutions and weak legal oversight of the political process. The desire to seize positions of power and hold them against equally matched enemies is more associated with countries on the descent toward civil war than mature liberal democracies like the United Kingdom

Under international criminal law, you can’t persecute people based on sexual orientation, gender identity or sex characteristics. But fundamentalists around the world are promulgating fear and justifying discrimination with claims that women and LGBTIQ rights advocates want to impose what they call “gender ideology” – a supposed attack on “natural families”, “feminine values” and the male-or-female binary as the will of God.

We spent the first six months organising meetings with experts to work out our legal arguments and reasoning. We held seven briefings to receive feedback from representatives of the International Law Commission, governments, and civil society from around the world. We also distributed a toolkit in four languages to support broad civil society input on the treaty’s gender language and other key provisions.

nearly 600 organisations and academics from more than 100 countries signed our open letter. At least nine other civil society submissions echoed our demands, including from 60 African human rights groups, led by the Southern Africa Litigation Center; 12 transgender rights groups; two intersex rights groups; and Human Rights Watch.

19 governments affirmed that the rights of women and LGBTIQ people are protected under international criminal law and said this treaty must reflect that. No state spoke against gender rights in the treaty process. An astounding 24 UN special rapporteurs and other experts signed another submission echoing our legal reasoning.

the treaty goes to the UN General Assembly this autumn, where states will again debate its language and decide its fate

When Ambassador Grenell couldn’t break me, he started to pressure my coalition partner. Apparently not just threatening them but by maybe making some attractive future offer where they would lead the government, which actually is what they want. Telling them, “You are under Mr. Kurti’s shadow. You can’t take over. Just do this motion of no confidence. Drop reciprocity,” and so on and so forth. 

his hurry makes him side with Belgrade because if you want a quick fix, then you pressure the weaker side

I think a territorial exchange is going to lead to more refugees and more conflict and not really new borders as they might think

“Morsy sends a clear message to the Gulf countries and especially the [United Arab Emirates] that he can easily create alternative strategic relationship,” Labbad says, adding that such “political vexing” is a response to the failure of the visit by Morsy adviser Essam al-Haddad to resolve the issue of 11 Egyptian detainees in the UAE. The latter are said to have strong connections to the Brotherhood’s international organization, in the midst of growing enmity between Egypt and the UAE.. Labbad argues that Morsy thus does not aim at real and deep rapprochement with Iran, but rather a cosmetic patch up to send signals to the Gulf. “The context here is very dangerous, because the revived relationship with Iran should be an addition to Egypt’s foreign policy, not a replacement of its relationship with the Gulf countries,” he adds. Momani doubts such an inclination by Morsy, as Egypt cannot afford the cost of such a policy. “This strategy can backfire and upset Gulf donors and benefactors. Iran can never supply the kinds of funds that are provided by the Gulf,” she says.

“I think neither Morsy nor Ahmadinejad enjoy the authority to have complete control or knowledge of their respective government’s grand strategies for Syria. What seems certain is that a realist agenda determines foreign policy on both sides. Both seek a Syrian government they can control or at least influence,”

The European Union’s current crisis is symptomatic of a broader crisis or malaise of regional and international multilateralism

he EU has proved an extraordinarily robust and crisis-resistant organization. It survived: the collapse of the European Defence Community project in 1954; France’s rejection of two British bids for accession in the 1960s; the empty-chair crisis precipitated by De Gaulle in 1965; the crisis concerning the UK’s contribution to the EU budget in the first half of the 1980s; the semi-destruction of the European Monetary System in 1992–1993; and the defeat of several proposed new treaties in referenda in Denmark, Ireland, France and the Netherlands since the end of the Cold War

From an IR institutionalist perspective, the critical questions relating to the EU’s future are thus whether, especially in the enlarged EU, there are sufficiently pervasive common interests linking member states and whether, much as for intergovernmental-ists, the ‘most powerful states’ (Keohane and Nye, 1993: 18) — by which the US is as much meant as the ‘big three’ EU members — continue to support the integration pro-cess

far more regional organizations have failed, in the sense that they collapsed, than succeeded

to ask to what extent there has been any change in the variables that have fuelled the integration process in the pas

growing distrust among Europe’s big powers over ‘hard’ security issues is not at the root of Europe’s current crisis

From a realist perspective à la Mearsheimer, European disintegration would hence most probably result from an American military withdrawal from Europe and a collapse of NATO

uncertainty as to the durability or reliability of the American com-mitment to European military security has led to more rather than less security and defence cooperation between EU member states

Classical intergovernmentalism focuses our attention on the evolution and degree of convergence of the stances of the French, German and British governments as determi-nants of the future of European integration. Trends in this trilateral relationship in the last two decades do not augur well for the EU’s future. Growing British Euro-scepticism has made Franco-German threats to exclude the UK from the integration process increas-ingly hollow — not because such threats cannot be implemented, but rather because the British government has been increasingly impervious to them

The Franco-German ‘tandem’ can still exercise a decisive influence in the EU even after the post-Cold War enlargements from 12 to 27 member states, especially where the two governments form ‘opposing poles’ in the EU around which other member states can coalesce

Intergovernmentalism implies that if a fundamental breakdown should occur in Franco-German relations, this would surely lead to European disintegration

IR institutionalists argue that such organizations can achieve a high level of durabil-ity or permanence by helping states to overcome collective action problems, carrying out functions that these cannot (notably ‘facilitating the making and keeping of agreements through the provision of information and reductions in transaction costs’), monitoring compliance, reducing uncertainty and stabilizing expectations

s serious as the EU’s crisis seemed to be in 2012, there was no unequivocal empirical evidence that the integration process had begun to unwind and the EU to disintegrate. Still no member state had ever left the EU, while several states were queuing to join it. Still no issue-area into which the EU’s competence had previ-ously been extended had been repatriated to the member states. There had still not been any observable formal or actual diminution of the EU’s decision-making and implemen-tation capacities

From an IR institutionalist as well as an intergovernmentalist perspective, the EU’s future seems likely to ride on the evolution of the Franco-German relationship,

While the governments of “sovereign” member-states remain free to tear up treaties and walk away at any time, the constantly increasing costs of exit in the densely integrated European polity have rendered this option virtually unthinkable’

Whilst historical-institutionalist scholars generally focus on constraints and the ‘“stickiness” of historically evolved insti-tutional arrangements’ and provide ‘explanations of continuity rather than change’, they nonetheless recognize that critical junctures or crises can bring about ‘relatively abrupt institutional change’

‘punctuated equilibrium’

‘As transnational exchange rises, so does the societal demand for supranational rules and organizational capacity to regulate’

growing economic interdependence seems increasingly to fore-close other, unilateral policy options and to compel member governments to forge or acquiesce in closer integration

, Germany has increasingly visibly assumed the role of the Eurozone’s and the EU’s ‘indispensable’ member

it is still not evident that European-level political party groups can ‘discipline’ or ‘moderate’ the positions taken by their national member parties on EU issues

R institutionalism and, more so, clas-sical intergovernmentalism are more circumspect about the EU’s future. Viewed from these perspectives, European integration is a more contingent phenomenon, resting on the scope of member states’ common interests, which has arguably narrowed following successive waves of enlargement, and/or on the extent of hegemonic leadership or con-vergence of interests among the EU’s three big powers. The latter has diminished in as far as the UK has proved hostile to closer integration on most issues, leaving the EU’s fate in these perspectives increasingly in the hands of the Franco-German duo

Contrasting post-2000 EU politics with that of the preceding half-century, I sug-gest that European integration is threatened by sharply rising hostility towards the EU in the domestic politics of the member states. Contrasting Europe with other regions, I argue that a ‘semi-hegemonic’, pro-integrationist Germany accounts for the uniquely high level of political integration in Europe, but that there is a significant and growing risk that Germany’s commitment to the European ‘project’ will wane in future

Hegemonic stability theory derives the indispensability of hegemonic leadership for economic openness and stability from public-goods theory, holding that only large states have a material incentive to supply non-excludable ‘collective’ goods rather than to ‘free-ride’. Germany has strong economic and political incentives in the maintenance of a politically and economically stable Europe that its governments have historically seen as being best secured through integration

In some member states, notably but not only in the UK, there was of course always significant domestic political opposition to European integra-tion. Nonetheless, in the post-Cold War and post-Maastricht Treaty period and especially during the last decade, hostility towards the EU and closer European integration has arguably transformed the domestic political context of EU decision-making to the point where one could more accurately speak of an ‘unpermissive dissensus’ that severely constrains the room for manoeuvre of member governments on EU issues

At the same time as the balance of political power in many member states has tilted sharply towards ‘anti-European’ political forces, the capacity of governments to control the EU agenda in the member states — a prerequisite for the smooth functioning of the processes of negotiation and ratification of EU policies — has been eroded

tension between the requirements or logic of domestic politics, on the one hand, and those of the EU (and international financial markets), on the other

Most federations fail (Lemco, quoted in Kelemen, 2007: 53). Multinational federa-tions, of which the EU is certainly an example, may be more prone to failure than others (Kelemen, 2007: 61)

growing levels of economic exchange and economic interdependence do indeed create pressures on governments to institutionalize their economic ties. However, levels of political integration in East Asia, the Asia-Pacific and North America are not even remotely comparable to those in Europe

It is rather the presence, in the form of Germany, of a pro-integrationist regional hegemon that best explains Europe’s comparatively very high level of political integra-tion

What has made the EU exceptional in respect of regional political integration is neither an exceptionally high level of economic integration nor the presence of a ‘leading state’ as such, but rather the fact that, compared with other ‘lead-ing’ regional powers, the member state that occupies this role in the EU — Germany — has pursued a much more radical agenda involving the creation of a quasi-federal European state

Germany needs good and close relations with other European states to avert the risk of diplomatic isolation and a resurgence of traditional ‘balance-of-power’ politics in the region

EU policy choices do not disproportionately reflect German preferences. Compromise and consensus, not a German diktat, are the rules in EU decision-making

As a regional paymaster, but hitherto not typically a disproportionately influential rule-maker, Germany was long more a ‘semi-hegemonic’ than ‘normal’ hegemonic power in the EU

A Grand Coalition of pro-European Social and Christian Democrats, on the other hand, may, as the experience of other EU member states suggests, spawn the emergence and growth of new national-populist parties and/or, for electoral-political motives, the transformation into Euro-sceptical movements of those established parties that would then be in the opposition

the EU’s future is more contingent

the EU is very vulnerable to domestic political backlashes manifested in the rise of national populism in the member states, particularly so long as few citizens in the member states share a strong European identity and there are no strong pan-European political parties that can effectively integrate and mediate their conflicting interests

German domestic politics therefore matters more for the EU’s future than that of any other member state

n more than 60 years, the European integration process has confronted and survived many crises. But it has never so far had to confront a crisis ‘made in Germany’.

The plethora of regional and pluri- or minilateral trade agreements signed across the world over the last decade or so cannot disguise the fact that most regions in the world remain at best only very weakly politically integrated and regionalorganizations therefore cannot be relied upon to institutionalize and secure peaceful cooperation among their members.

Is it possible that, as hegemonic stability theory would suggest, the roots of the gathering crisis of interna-tional multilateralism are to be found in the ‘end of the United States’ unipolar moment’ (Layne, 2006) and the arrival at long last of the long-anticipated decline in the capacity as well as willingness of the US to play the role of a stabilizing international hegemon?

the only thing that changed is the belief that something had changed

This article is about the strength and durability of that belief, and whether as a social fact it can be used to create a new political framing for world politics. In addressing this question I diff erentiate between a traditional materialist analysis of threat (whether something does or does not pose a specifi c sort of threat, and at what level) and a so-called securitizationanalysis (whether something can be successfully constructed as a threat, with this understanding being accepted by a wide and/or specifi cally relevant audience).4These two aspects of threat may run in close parallel, but they can also be quite separate. States, like people, can be paranoid (constructing threats where none exist) or complacent (ignoring actual threats). But since it is the success (or not) of the securitization that determines whether action is taken, that side of threat analysis deserves scrutiny just as close as that given to the material side

the explicit ‘long war’ framing of the GWoT is a securitizing move of potentially great signifi cance. If it succeeds as a widely accepted, world-organizing macro-securitization, it could structure global security for some decades, in the process helping to legitimize US primacy

US military expenditure remains largely aimed at meeting traditional challenges from other states, with only a small part specifi cally allocated for the GWoT. The signifi cance of the GWoT is much more political. Although a real threat from terrorists does exist, and needs to be met, the main signifi cance of the GWoT is as a political framing that might justify and legitimize US primacy, leadership and unilater-alism, both to Americans and to the rest of the world. This is one of the key diff erences between the GWoT and the Cold War. The Cold War pretty much wasUS grand strategy in a deep sense; the GWoT is not, but, as a brief glance at the USNSS of 2006 will show, is being promoted as if it were

Immediately following 9/11 NATO invoked article 5 for the fi rst time, thereby helping to legitimize the GWoT securitization.

In the case of Russia, China, Israel and India, the move has been to link their own local problems with ‘terrorism’ to the wider GWoT framing.

tied together several longstanding security concerns arising within the liberal order, most notably crime and the trades in drugs and the technologies for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Within the frame of the liberal international economic order (LIEO), it is well understood that while opening state borders to fl ows of trade, fi nance, information and (skilled) people is generally to be promoted, such opening also has its dark side in which illiberal actors, mainly criminals and terrorists, can take advantage of liberal openness in pursuit of illiberal ends

There are fi ve obvious types of event that could signifi -cantly reinforce or undermine the GWoT securitization:ü the impact of further terrorist plans and/or attacks (or plans or attacks success-fully attributed to terrorists);ü the commitment of the United States to the GWoT securitization;ü the legitimacy of the United States as a securitization leader within interna-tional society;ü the (un)acceptability and (il)legitimacy of both the GWoT securitization as a whole or of particularist securitizations that get linked to it;ü the potency of securitizations competing with the GWoT

The escalation option would strengthen the GWoT securitization, and the reduction option would weaken it. More of the same does not look suffi cient to sustain the costs of a long-term macro-securitization unless the fear of escalation can be maintained at a high level.

Americans, like most other citizens of democracies, quite willingly surrender some of their civil liberties in times of war. But it is easy to see the grounds within American society for reactions against the GWoT securitization, especially if its legitimacy becomes contested. One source of such reactions would be civil libertarians and others opposed to the reasser-tion of government powers through a state of permanent fear and emergency. Another would be isolationists and ‘off shore balancers’ who oppose the current levels and logics of US global engagement

Grounds for opposition include its costs, in terms of both money and liberty, and the ineff ectiveness of a permanent increase in the state’s surveil-lance over everything from trade and fi nance to individual patterns of travel and consumption

reformulate the GWoT

The US successfully generated and led the macro-securitization of the Cold War against communism generally and the military power of the Soviet Union in particular. It was aided in this both by the broad acceptability of its own qualities as a leader in the West, and up to a point even in the Third World, and by the fact that other states, especially west European ones, plus Turkey, Japan and South Korea, shared the fear of communism and Soviet military power

A weight of punditry agrees that the Atlantic has got wider, to the point where even the idea that there is a western community is now under serious threat.

states might support or oppose the GWoT not only on its merits, but also because of how it plays into the global hierarchy of power

In terms of the GWoT securitization as a whole, some of the lines of opposition are the same in the rest of the world as they are in US domestic debates, particu-larly over what kinds of emergency action it legitimizes. To the extent that the GWoT becomes associated with actions that seem to contradict the values that the West seeks to represent against the likes of Al-Qaeda, the legitimacy of the securitization is corroded

Wilkinson, who has solid credentials as a hard foe of the terrorists, echoes a sentiment widely held across the political spectrum when he says that ‘If we undermine or destroy our hard-won liberties and rights in the name of security against terrorism we will give the terrorists a victory they could never win by the bomb and the gun.’28 In this respect it is of more than passing interest that all of the current strategies being used to pursue the GWoT seem actively to damage the liberal values they purport to defend.

Most western leaders (the ever undiplomatic Berlusconi having been a notable excep-tion) have tried hard right from the beginning not to stage the GWoT as a war between the West and Islam. They have trodden the diffi cult line of maintaining that, while most of the terrorists speak in the name of Islam, that does not mean that most adherents of Islam are terrorists or supporters of terrorists. But despite this, the profoundly worrying relinking of religion and politics in the United States, Israel and the Islamic world easily feeds zero-sum confl icts. This linkage could help to embed the securitization of the GWoT, as it seems to have done within the United States and Israel. If religious identities feed the growth of a ‘clash of civilizations’ mentality, as seems to have happened in the episode of the Danish cartoons, this too could reinforce the GWoT securitization. It could, equally, create a reaction against it from those who feel that their particular religion is being mis represented by fundamentalists, and/or from those who object to religious infl uence on politics. The latter is certainly part of what has widened the gap between the US and Europe

Al-Qaeda and its like, while clearly posing a threat to the West, do not represent a plausible political alternative to it, Islamist fantasies about a new caliphate notwithstanding. The contrast with the Cold War could not be more striking. Then, the designated opponent and object of securitization was a power that represented what seemed a plausible political alternative: one could easily imagine a communist world. The post-9/11 securitization focused neither on an alternative superpower nor on an alternative ideology, but on the chaos power of embittered and alienated minori-ties, along with a handful of pariah governments, and their ability to exploit the openness, the technology, and in some places the inequality, unfairness and failed states generated by the western system of political economy

Iraq. The US and British governments attempted to justify the invasion by linking Saddam Hussein’s regime to both terrorists and WMD. This securitizing move was successful within the United States, but vigorously contested in many other places, resulting in serious and damaging splits in both the EU and NATO. Russia was generally very supportive of the GWoT securitization, seeking to link its own diffi culties in Chechnya to it, but Putin joined Germany and France in strong opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq. The ill-prepared occupation that followed the successful blitzkrieg against Iraq only deepened the splits, with many opponents of the war agreeing with Dana Allin’s assessment that ‘Iraq was probably the war that bin Laden wanted the United States to fi ght’,29and Wilkinson’s that it was ‘a gratuitous propaganda gift to bin Laden’.30 During the 2004 US election, even John Kerry began to argue the point that invasion of Iraq was distracting eff ort away from the GWoT.31 As the political disaster in Iraq continues to unfold, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it was both a tactical and strategic blunder of epic proportions in relation to the problem of global terrorism represented by Al-Qaeda

There are quite a variety of possible candidates for competing securitizations. Rising sea levels or approaching asteroids, or the spread of a new killer plague, could easily put planetary environmental concerns at the top of the securitiza-tion agenda. But in conventional mode the most likely threat to the GWoT as dominant macro-securitization comes from the rise of China

It was perhaps only the perceived remoteness in time of China achieving superpower status that prevented this securitization from becoming the dominant rhetoric in Washington during the 1990s. As time marches on, the rise of China becomes more real and less hypothetical

Given an ongoing disposition within Washington to construct China as a threat, the likely increase in Chinese power, both relative and absolute, and the existence of tensions between the two governments over, inter alia, Taiwan, trade and human rights, it is not diffi cult to imagine circumstances in which concerns about China would become the dominant securitization within the United States

o long as China conducts its so-called ‘peaceful rise’ in such a way as not to threaten its neighbours or the general stability of interna-tional society, many outside the United States might actually welcome it. Europe is likely to be indiff erent, and many countries (e.g. Russia, China, India, Iran, France, Malaysia) support a rhetoric of multipolarity as their preferred power structure over the predominance of the United States as sole superpower.

Because a world govern-ment is not available, the problem pits international society against global uncivil society

By hardening borders, homeland security measures erode some of the principles of economic liberalism that they are designed to defend; and the same argument could be made about the trade-off between enhanced surveillance under the GWoT and the civil liberties that are part of the core referent object of western civilization

War is seldom good for liberal values even when fought in defence of them

Equalizing starts from the assumption that the root causes of terrorism lie in the inequalities and injustices that are both a legacy of human history and a feature of market economies. The long-term solution to terrorism in this perspective is to drain the waters in which the terrorists swim by redressing the inequalities and injustices that supposedly generate support for them. It is not my concern here to argue whether this contested cause–eff ect hypothesis is correct or not. My point is that if a policy along these lines is pursued, it cannot avoid undermining the foundations of a competitive market economy

f inequality is the source of terrorism, neo-liberal economics does not provide a quick enough solution

terrorism poses a double threat to liberal democratic societies: open direct assaults of the type that have become all too familiar, and insidious erosion as a consequence of the countermeasures taken

f it is impossible to elimi-nate terrorists, as is probably the case, then this drive risks the kind of permanent mobilization that inevitably corrodes liberal practices and values

If the priority is to preserve liberal values, one is pushed towards the option of learning to live with terrorism as an everyday risk while pursuing counter-measures that stop short of creating a garrison state.

The necessary condition for doing so is that state and society raise their toleration for damage as a price they pay for openness and freedom. Kenneth Waltz long ago made the point that ‘if freedom is wanted, insecurity must be accepted’,38 though it has to be said that this part of his analysis has made little impact on US thinking about national security

if terrorism is a problem of the long term, as it well might be for advanced industrial societies, it would require a level of democratic sophistication and commitment rather higher than anything yet seen

Europe is more resilient and better able to defend its values without resorting to excesses of securitization. By comparison, the United States seems a softer target, too easily pricked into intemperate reactions that in themselves work to under-mine what it claims to stand for

What began as a humanitarian project has turned into an insidious form of conversion and riot control which has had many casualties. It has been profoundly anti-democratic in many cases, including in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. From the ground, for many of its recipients, the various iterations of this liberal peace project have taken on a colonial appearance. It has become illiberal

local actors are reframing what they require from a viable, just, and durable peace, often quietly and in the margins, drawing on the liberal peace as well as their own customs and interests.

Talk of ‘human security’, ‘responsibility to protect’, ‘do no harm doctrines’ and ‘local ownership’ seems very empty from the perspective of most of the peoples these concepts have been visited upon. This in turn has often elicited from subject communities a 'post-colonial response', criticising peace interventions as self-interested, imperialistic, orientalist, and focusing on the interveners' interests rather than local interests. A local (transnational and transversal) attempt is under way to reclaim political agency and autonomy from the new post-Cold War 'civilising mission', which has over the last twenty years, shown itself unable to provide for basic needs, rights, security (state or human) at levels local actors expect, or to respect or understand local differences and non-liberal, and even non-state patterns of politics. Non-liberal and non-western forms of politics, economics, society, and custom, are clamouring for discursive and material space in many post-conflict zones, with mixed implications for sustainability and for the purpose of achieving a normatively (to liberals at least) and contextually acceptable, locally sustainable peace.

In some cases, as in Kosovo and Timor Leste this has led to a modified form of state emerging, heavily influenced by both liberal norms and local customs, practices, identities, and national agendas. Very difficult issues arise here for 'international planners' of peace and world order, not least in how they respond to such confrontations between very different political systems, customs, and agendas. But, it is also the case that synergies may arise, where these are sensitively handled and properly understood.

peace requires well-being via human needs stemming from rights defined by their contexts, (where context may mean local, customary, state, market, regional or international, not merely the 'local' it is often taken to mean). These contexts are of course connected to the ambit of liberal state and international institutions, but they are not defined by them. As a result, millions of people around the world do not have adequate rights or needs provision, nor proper access to representation, despite the best intentions of liberal peacebuilders.

To achieve this the ethically and methodologically dubious privatisation of security and peacebuilding and its connection to neoliberal marketisation strategies in the context of a classically sovereign state should be abandoned. The privatisation of peacebuilding means that no accountability is possible until after a specific development project has failed, and only then by refusing funding often to those who need it most. Such strategies have attracted to this sector a dangerous fringe of arrogant bureaucrats, 'ambulance chasers' and 'cowboys' rather than imbuing peacebuilding with the dynamics of grounded reconciliation.

democracy is rarely resisted other than by the most extreme of actors, but it is often criticized for being distant in outcome to local communities.

At the moment the impulse appears to be to illiberalise, to postpone democracy, to open markets further, and to depoliticise because a lack of local agency is seen to be the cause of these failures, rather than faulty international analytic and policy approaches and mistaken idealism.

Uighurs’ DNA is collected during state-run medical checkups. Local authorities now install a GPS tracking system in all vehicles. Government spy apps must be loaded on mobile phones. All communication software is banned except WeChat, which grants the police access to users’ calls, texts and other shared content. When Uighurs buy a kitchen knife, their ID data is etched on the blade as a QR code

A law now bans face coverings — but also “abnormal” beards. A Uighur village party chief was demoted for not smoking, on grounds that this failing displayed an insufficient “commitment to secularization.” Officials in the city of Kashgar, in southwest Xinjiang, recently jailed several prominent Uighur businessmen for not praying enough at a funeral — a sign of “extremism,” they claimed.

The C.C.P., once quite liberal in its approach to diversity, seems to be redefining Chinese identity in the image of the majority Han — its version, perhaps, of the nativism that appears to be sweeping other parts of the world. With ethnic difference itself now defined as a threat to the Chinese state, local leaders like Mr. Chen feel empowered to target Uighurs and their culture wholesale

There’s an old Chinese joke about Uighurs being the Silk Road’s consummate entrepreneurs: When the first Chinese astronaut steps off his spaceship onto the moon, he will find a Uighur already there selling lamb kebabs. And so even as Mr. Chen cracks down in Xinjiang, the Chinese government touts the region as the gateway for its much-vaunted “one belt, one road” initiative, Mr. Xi’s signature foreign policy project. The grand idea combines a plan to spend billions of dollars in development loans and transport investment across Eurasia with a strategic bid to establish China’s diplomatic primacy in Asia.

How does the party think that directives banning fasting during Ramadan in Xinjiang, requiring Uighur shops to sell alcohol and prohibiting Muslim parents from giving their children Islamic names will go over with governments and peoples from Pakistan to Turkey? The Chinese government may be calculating that money can buy these states’ quiet acceptance. But the thousands of Uighur refugees in Turkey and Syriaalready complicate China’s diplomacy.

The Good Friday process also marked the last time that a U.S. administration would engage with Ireland as a modern country—as something more than a photo opportunity to impress clover-wearing, Riverdancing, green Guinness-drinking voters back home

failing to correct American misperceptions about Ireland helps Dublin tremendously – which gives the Irish good reason to keep up the tradition of putting on the poor mouth. If Americans treat Ireland as a poor country—and not as one that has a GDP per capita of $84,000, compared with the United States’ $62,500—that helps Irish diplomats lobby for special treatment. (Fair warning: The small size of Ireland’s population and its role in global finance make these comparisons difficult—but under just about any comparison, Ireland is fairly well ensconced in the high-income group and has the fourth-highest ranking on the United Nations Human Development Index, well above the United States.)

Ireland’s historic cultural transformation—ending the ban on abortion and greatly easing divorce—is in many ways symbolized by Varadkar himself. The youngest premier in the republic’s history, Varadkar is also half-Indian by descent and is partnered with another man, Matthew Barrett. Varadkar has apparently found it is either morally necessary or politically expedient—or both—to push back against traditionalist American politicians. In March of this year, Varadkar and Barrett breakfasted with Vice President Mike Pence and his family, where the Irish leader pointedly called out discrimination against sexual minorities. That’s a far different relationship than Kennedy or Obama ever had with an Irish leader. And Varadkar’s frostiness toward Pence mirrors the gap between Ireland’s current progressive image and the largely older, conservative, and white-identifying traditional Irish American constituency.

The threat of a hard Brexit and the reimposition of a hard border between the republic and the North jeopardize both political and economic stability.

In the absence of any major U.S. strategic interest in Ireland (which isn’t even a member of NATO), the greatest Irish leverage in Washington comes from fraying ties of family and identity. But that is far from the level of sustained influence and power that earlier generations wielded

U.S. investment and tourism are welcome, of course, but the focus of Irish diplomacy is squarely on Brussels

Next year will mark the 25th anniversary of the butchery of Srebrenica. To say that what happened in Srebrenica in July 1995 was the first such crime on European soil after World War II is to completely disregard the horror of the concentration camps discovered in 1992 or the rape camps for which there is no precedent in European history. Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a long process of systematic extermination.

what happened in the 1990s in Bosnia serves as an inspiration to far right terrorists across the world as well as their "anti-imperialist" allies. Today, we can no longer claim that another genocide is impossible.

governments still harass, expel, and attempt to exterminate minority groups in the name of the nation-state ideal, and sovereignty still gives them carte blanche to do so

insistence on the nation-state as the only legitimate and legal actor on the world stage leaves substate groups vulnerable to exploitation, attack, and shady dealing

the issue isn’t limited to the Kurds. In the news this week are Rohingya refugees stuck between two countries that don’t want them, Uighurs forced into detention camps, and Catalan protests for independence. History offers even more parallels, from the United States repeatedly breaking treaties with Native Americans to World War II, in which the United States was willing to go to war to protect the territorial integrity of France along with the people in it but was not willing to accept refugees fleeing the Holocaust. The nation-state system is designed to protect itself and its members, rather than people

nonstate groups are at a particular disadvantage. Though they may hold de facto territory, they don’t hold it legally; they have no international rights to a military or to self-defense. They have no seat in international or supranational organizations, leaving them outside global decision-making and with no recourse in attempting to hold states accountable for their actions. Their leaders are not accorded head of state status, and they have no official diplomats. Since even the most generous autonomy statutes don’t confer the protections of statehood, separatist groups are often willing to risk high losses to win independence, fueling conflicts

States remain reluctant to break the collective agreement on the legitimacy of sovereignty. They are similarly reticent about adding more states to their exclusive club, in part because it might suggest to dissidents within their own area that renegotiation of borders is possible

While interstate conflicts have fallen over the past 50 years, intrastate fighting has soared. These wars disrupt trade and world politics, weaken countries, and raise uncertainty in neighboring states. On the other hand, states have proved themselves adept at using substate actors to further their own interests within foreign countries while evading responsibility for it, from the United States arming the Contras in Nicaragua to Sudan and Chad supporting each other’s rebel movements.

it remains difficult to garner international recognition for a new state. That leaves mediators attempting to convince vulnerable groups to settle for something less, in the face of all evidence that a recognized state is their best chance for security and self-determination.

Substate groups are not the only example that the system is failing. Nonstate actors from terrorist groups to multinational corporations have increasing impacts on global politics, and traditional geopolitical theory does not do a great job of dealing with them. Even for bilateral issues, the nation-state is not always the most useful unit of analysis.

Russian elites attempted to tip the scales of U.S. leadership in order to win more modern spoils: unfettered soft power in their region, access to trade, and, notably, the ability to infringe on other countries’ sovereignty without consequences.

the United States—and other nation-states—has little or no control over multinational corporations, with their complex legal structures and tenuous ties to geography

we need to recognize both the rights of substate groups and the legal responsibilities of extrastate entities and create mechanisms in the international system to include them in the halls of power

What interests Hill is how the three such different countries end up in the same boat, run by populists and significantly less able to cope with a pandemic than their neighbours. She believes the critical common factor is the heady rise, and then the catastrophic collapse, of heavy industry and the failure of their governments to manage the fall and cushion the impact on their people.

when you’re coming from the north of England, you are completely network-poor – you have no idea of how to go about it. It’s all about mentorship and connections

In all three countries, the government did little to mitigate the pain, leaving afflicted families to move to where the jobs were. In practice, the barriers to mobility – vast distances and bureaucracy in Russia, house prices in the UK – kept them anchored. Even in the US, the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 made movement harder. And in all three countries, the ties of family obligations and social networks kept people rooted in place without prospects, and educational opportunities to change your destiny have withered away.

“If you’re in the north of England it’s probably easier to move to Australia, Canada or America and start again, like some of my family did, rather than trying to find a job in the south,” Hill said. “House prices in the north-east were so ridiculously low vis-a-vis in London or the south.”

In both the UK and Russia, the planners had built new towns as part of the great industrialisation drive, which suddenly had their economic lifelines cut off and were left to wither. Hill felt another echo when she visited the American midwest, where her in-laws lived. The great cities built on steel and automobiles had died, leaving hollowed-out communities.

At the interview in London, only she and another northern girl, a farmer’s daughter from Sunderland, took the time to chat to the secretary. It turned out that the secretary was part of the selection panel, and it was the two northerners who won the fellowships.

“Populism provides a narrative for people who have lost their identities that were tied to meaningful work,” she said. “When people lose that then they’re looking for something. There’s a feeling they’ve been robbed and deprived of a golden age, and they want that back and populist politics feeds upon that, and provides scapegoats for losing it.”

“Liberal democracy hasn’t been delivering,” she argued. “If I go back to my home town, it’s still no better than it was when I was growing up in terms of opportunity. The shops are boarded up in the main street. Nothing new is coming in. There’s just no kind of sense of optimism. And when I visit my relatives here in the US in Wisconsin and other places, there’s a lot of sense of: the rest of the world is kind of moving on and leaving us behind. People see that as being closely associated with liberal democracy.”

“Trump didn’t look up when I came in and I don’t think he looked up the whole time I was giving my spiel about the terrorist attack,”

Trump had decided he wanted a press release and assumed Hill, one of the few women in the room, was there to type it up.

“It’s not like the first time I’ve been mistaken for a secretary. I’ve been mistaken for many things, believe me,”

“A lot of this stuff which is described as policy is really all about personal fighting … And it’s kind of a comedy of errors, with all this intriguing. It’s very reminiscent of Kremlin intrigue and the kind of intrigue around No 10 in the UK – people always trying to do each other in.”

She argues Trump’s desire to forge a personal relationship with Putin is no different from his approach to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, or the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, or Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “He wants to be like he was as a CEO, he has all these discussions with people in private … He has a very informal style with everyone. Putin is similar. He just tries to engage with people in the way that he thinks kind of fits them best,” she said. “Boris is the same. It’s like the guy in the pub. It’s less getting into the weeds of the substance in some sort of formal way, and more two guys talking.

“He wanted to treat Putin the same way he treated Xi or Netanyahu. He wanted to be able to pick up the phone and talk to them.” But Putin could not be treated like the others. The Trump campaign had dozens of contacts with Russian officials or Kremlin intermediaries, and the candidate had appealed to Moscow to interfere in the election by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails. Furthermore, as Hill made clear in her biography of him, Putin has taken all the skills of his long KGB career with him to the Russian presidency. And the Kremlin was constantly outmanoeuvring the White House, arranging events so that Trump would be alone with Putin with only the Russian president’s translator in the room. The state department, which stuck to rigid protocol rules on whose translator should be where and when, was being played.

In her efforts to have US career officials included in Trump’s meetings with Putin, she found herself facing determined resistance from inside the president’s entourage, as they became more and more distrustful of career officials as disloyal potential whistleblowers.

It gave Russians unnecessary leverage

He has torn up one arms control agreement after another with the result that in less than a year’s time, there could be no limits left on the world’s major nuclear arsenals.

a wide array of initiatives have emerged as a direct response to China’s Belt and Road to undermine and dilute China’s infrastructural prowess: the U.S. International Finance and Development Corporation, the EU’s “Asia Connectivity Initiative,” the EU-Japan “Partnership on Sustainable Connectivity and Quality Infrastructure,” the U.S.-Japan-Australia “Blue Dot Network,” the India-Japan “connectivity corridors” and myriad other coalitions. None of these existed even three years ago. Roads have always been the pathways of conquest; now they are the battlefield of competitive connectivity. 

A repeat of the Cold War would surely not play out as favorably for the U.S. as the last one. America is politically polarized and is the world’s largest debtor nation. Its most recent major wars have been disasters and its military needs time to rebuild and adjust to new adversaries and tactics. And many of its erstwhile allies from Europe to Asia are far more vested in China than America is and don’t trust it to lead a consensus-based global coalition.

Bogging down the adversary while moving stealthily towards one’s objective has been an axiom of Chinese diplomacy for generations. But there is little stealth anymore in China’s land grabs, island-building and wolf-warrior diplomacy

With China’s suppression of information about the coronavirus painting it into a corner, Beijing no longer feels it has anything to lose and is going for broke: moving on Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Senkaku Islands, India’s borders and other disputes while the rest of the world is off-kilter, girding itself for a new Cold War with America. China’s leadership has convinced itself that West-leaning powers seek to encircle it militarily, splinter it internally and destabilize the Communist Party. This is the classical psychological spiral at the heart of any security dilemma in which each action taken by one side elevates the perceived insecurity of the other. 

in dozens of visits to Beijing, I have found my interlocutors unable to grasp this basic psychological fact. While many societies admire China’s success and are grateful for China’s role in their development, none want to be like China, nor be subservient to it. It’s an argument that’s fallen on deaf ears in Washington, too. And as with America’s experience of benevolent nation-building, China’s policy of intimidating neighbors into feebly muting their own interests has predictably backfired

American strategists have been far more fixated on China’s presence in Africa and South America rather than developing a comprehensive strategy for reassuring China’s neighbors and supporting their own efforts to stand up to it.

What the U.S. and Europe do have in their favor is that they are territorially secure while China is not. China has 14 neighbors, all of which harbor deep suspicions of its motives even as many (especially Russia) cooperate with it.

Despite the immense economic leverage China has accrued vis-a-vis the many states along its perimeter, it is the complexity of having so many neighbors that constrains China more than its increasingly sophisticated military arsenal suggests. Maintaining global influence is much harder when you are fighting a 14-front war in your own neighborhood. 

From Malabar to Pearl Harbor, the U.S., Japan, Australia, India and numerous other countries have been deepening their coordination in the Indo-Pacific maritime domain. The “quad” coalition features joint strategic patrols and hardware support for the navies of Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia in the South China Sea. This summer, ASEAN foreign ministers finally graduated from their usually limp communiques watered down by Chinese pressure and reaffirmed that the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea must be the basis for arbitrating maritime disputes. 

Boundary agreements are rarely perceived as fair by both sides, yet such settlements have the virtue of enabling counties to mature towards functional cooperation.  

Precisely because the U.S. and EU have imposed such stiff restrictions on Chinese investment, China has redirected its outbound capital portfolio ever more towards its more proximate Asian domain. And in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, once fast-growing countries face capital outflows and weak global demand amid ruptured supply chains. The West may be squeezing China out of some markets, but China’s balloon is inflating across Asia as it lowers tariffs on all its Belt and Road trading partners

Laos and Cambodia, two of Asia’s poorest countries, have become all but wholly owned subsidiaries of China, even as China’s Mekong River dams have ravaged their agriculture through volatile water flows and chemical pesticides. With stronger technical and diplomatic assistance, these countries could demand that Chinese investments reinforce their sustainability and local businesses. 

It was always going to be an uphill battle for China to be perceived as a benevolent superpower. Unlike America or the European Union, China is wholly unconvincing as a multiethnic empire. It systematically squelches diverse identities rather than elevating them. Furthermore, though China is an ancient and rich civilization, it coexists with other Asian civilizations with equally respectable glory. None will ever bow to the others, as Japan learned the hard way in the 20th century. Every time China gains an inch of territory, it loses a yard of credibility. The essence of geopolitical stability is equilibrium, and the pathway to it follows the logic of reciprocity. 

China’s assertiveness signals neither an inevitable new Cold War nor a new unipolar hegemony. Rather, it is one phase in Asia’s collective story and the global shift towards multipolarity.

Never has Eurasia been ruled by a single hegemon. The Mongols came closest 700 years ago, but the 14th-century Black Death fractured its disparate khanates, and the Silk Road fell idle. Today again, a pandemic has emerged from China, but rather than shut down the Silk Road, we should build many more of them among dozens of Eurasian nations rather than in and out of China alone. All roads need not lead to Beijing.

bilateral agreements Japan has drafted with countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, which will allow them to send tens of thousands of care workers to Japan annually. Both countries see this as a win-win proposition. Japan gets much-needed labor, the Philippines gets an increase in foreign remittances, and many workers will eventually return, having learned new valuable skills

Conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has based his support for the changing immigration policy not on any humanitarian concerns but rather on pragmatic, demographic arguments. By 2050, the world population is expected to increase by 2 billion people, according to the United Nations, but Japan’s population is expected to shrink by at least 20 million. Meanwhile, the fertility rate in Japan has fallen to 1.4 children per woman, while 28 percent of the country is over 65 years old. This means that the country’s population has been dropping by around 400,000 people a year

With unemployment consistently below 3 percent in recent years, even after the pandemic, employers are increasingly raising alarms about labor shortages. Last year, for the first time in Japan’s history, there were more jobs available than the number of job seekers in all of Japan’s 47 prefectures. In a country long known for its restrictive borders, immigration is now seen as the most obvious solution to that demographic challenge.

Japan has developed a unique program of customized immigration, based on specific requests for workers from various countries

Japan custom-orders a labor force in the 14 sectors where they are most urgently needed, including nurses and care workers, shipbuilders, farm workers, car mechanics, and workers in the fishing and construction industries

given that latest bill allows an easier pathway for skilled foreign workers to apply for permanent residency and, eventually, Japanese citizenship—it may do more than simply sustain society. “More workers will try to stay here permanently,” Oguma said. “So even if the bill is not meant to change Japan, it certainly has the potential to change Japanese society in the long term.”

most of Japanese society supports the changing immigration policy. In a recent survey by Nikkei, almost 70 percent of Japanese said it is “good” to see more foreigners in the country. “The nationalist, anti-immigrant groups here only make up perhaps 1-2 percent of voters. It’s not like Europe. And they have not raised their voices about this so far,”

This growth in immigration, in turn, is changing the image of Japan from ethnically homogenous to moderately diverse. Among Tokyo residents in their 20s, 1 in 10 is now foreign-born. And Tokyo is no longer an outlier. Much of the migration is happening in small industrial towns around the country, such as Shimukappu in central Hokkaido and Oizumi in Gunma prefecture, where migrant populations make up more than 15 percent of the local population. In the mostly rural Mie prefecture, east of Osaka and Kyoto, foreign migration has reversed years of population loss.

opposition has largely come from Abe’s left, over concerns about a lack of regulation on employers, which they fear could lead to exploitation. Many foreign workers are already forced to work overtime, receive less pay, and risk having their passports and travel documents confiscated by employers

some factories in the mostly rural Gifu prefecture have implemented segregated bathrooms and locker rooms for domestic and foreign workers

This dynamic was common in the immigration debate in Europe and the United States in the 1980s and ’90s, when pro-business conservatives often pushed for more immigrants and guest workers, while labor unions raised concerns for workers’ rights and downward pressure on wages.

The widespread xenophobia in Japan is hardly a myth. In 2010, the U.N.’s human rights experts called out Japan for racism, discrimination, and exploitation of migrant workers. Increased immigration has not changed the country’s notoriously strict asylum policies. In 2018, only 42 asylum-seekers were approved, out of around 10,000 applicants.

he said he prefers the casual xenophobia of Japan to the structural racism of America

Sooner or later, Japan may face nationwide debate on what it means to be Japanese in the 21st century. Few countries undergoing demographic shifts are able to avoid these challenges.

When South Korea accepted 500 Yemeni refugees in 2018, it created storms of protests, with street rallies demanding that the Yemenis be sent back, calling them “fake refugees.”

In early June, thousands of people participated in Black Lives Matter protests in Tokyo, which has contributed to a nationwide debate on harassment of migrants and foreigners—as well as race.

“Xenophobic nationalists are generally irrelevant in politics. If there is a backlash, it will most likely begin as a local uprising against Tokyo, a populist revolt against the central government, just as in the EU,” Oguma said. “But I don’t see it happening right now. The far-right here is too atomized, each faction want different things. So I don’t really worry about an organized uprising.”

With massive stimulus spending and a robust, universal health care system, Japan has weathered the pandemic fairly well. Unemployment in April was 2.5 percent. While there has been some anecdotal evidence of increased racist harassment of foreign workers, coupled with an emerging skepticism toward globalization and migration, Japan at the moment is one of the few countries where resentment against immigrants is not the defining feature of politics.

emphasize the overriding importance of some combination of sovereignty, territorial borders, and national identity and culture. They routinely claim that efforts, spearheaded by sinister external forces, to undermine all three constitute an existential threat to the political community

in order to implement their policies, populists need to shield themselves from pressure to, variously, protect human rights, maintain the rule of law, combat corruption, and respect domestic pluralism

populists in Europe rightly see the liberal values that undergird the EU as an obstacle to their political programs

Even as he depends on EU subsidies to maintain his patronage networks, Orban positions himself as defending Hungary against EU efforts to subvert its sovereignty and values.

populists have converged on the idea that a multipolar international system will best serve their interests and is therefore something to both welcome and advance

Leaders argue that, unlike Western donors, China and other new patrons do not demand intrusive conditions such as economic conditionality or respect for individual rights. However, these deals involve opaque schemes and private payoffs, as well as expectations of future support. Beijing, for example, expects recipients to back its foreign-policy priorities and support—or at least not overtly criticize—China on matters such as respect for human rights in general or its current policies toward Uighurs in Xinjiang in particular.

This “goods substitution” is significant on its own terms because the provision of international club and private goods is the main mechanism by which great powers order international politics. But countries such as China and Russia often do not, in fact, provide superior goods and bargains to those offered by the United States and its allies. China’s behavior surrounding the BRI and its preexisting aid programs has led recipients to accuse Beijing of neocolonialism, and growing evidence suggests that Chinese development projects are more problematic than Western ones.

A critical part of the domestic politics of goods substitution is that populists claim that their pragmatic courting of illiberal or authoritarian states affords them a wider range of partnerships and international networks. The fact that new partners like China and Russia are authoritarian becomes a net political positive: a signal that populist leaders are pragmatic and committed to protecting national interests—because they are flexible enough to find new partners who can deliver the goods.

Leaders, and populists especially, now increasingly see partnership with the United States—once viewed as an indispensable pillar of foreign policy—and its Western allies as overly constraining. For example, Duterte, Erdogan, and Orban all came to power in states that were fully integrated members of the U.S.-led security order. All three now point to potential security relations with Russia and China as providing the possibility of greater balance with, if not outright exit from, that order.

The difference now is that elites in multiple, and otherwise very different, countries are actually implementing policies that distance themselves from the U.S.-led security order. In all of these cases, populist leaders are invoking multipolarity as a rhetorical commonplace, taking advantage of the growing shift toward a multipolar order, or both. In doing so, they contribute to a power transition away from the United States by reducing its influence.

invoking multipolarity also makes it easier for populists to reject external, mostly Western, criticism of their domestic governance practices. When the West was dominant, even autocrats had to accept significant incursions on their domestic sovereignty—such as critical election monitors, foreign-sponsored NGOs, and members of the Western press. Now, emulating the practices of China and Russia, populists are much more comfortable with banning or repressing these same actors—and in justifying their actions as ways of protecting their national values and interests

The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, at first glance, strengthens and fuels these dynamics. The closing of borders and the curtailment of international economic exchange increase the appeal of national fortress narratives conjured by populists about the perils of globalism

It’s one thing to use exit options to reduce external liberalizing pressure, but it’s another when new patrons start calling in favors. Despite Beijing’s defense of sovereignty as an international principle, its practices toward clients suggest that, eventually, it will use its leverage in ways no less coercive than other great powers. Moscow has already demonstrated its lack of concern for the sovereignty of clients and partners

the COVID-19 crisis underscores that international goods provision abhors a vacuum