Populism causes extinction – causes war and destroys effective government response to crises

Claude Forthomme, Seniore Editor of Impakter, graduate of Columbia University, Why Populism is Dangerous: The Propensity for War, 2018, https://impakter.com/populism-dangerous-propensity-war/

Populism is dangerous and has shown overtime an irresistible propensity for war. Public safety, health and the economy are at risk. But populist propaganda is hard to resist. Populist politicians thrive on fake news: it is so much easier to fuel people’s emotions if you feed them fabricated news of imaginary crises. And if you divert their attention from real economic problems with the irresistible lure of national identity politics and blaming foreigners. Previous articles have addressed the issue of austerity (here), the public health crisis (here) and the false “migrant crisis” (here). Here we take a look at populism’s propensity for war. Historically, populist leaders have been warmongers, Hitler first among them, for waging war across national borders and Pol Pot within borders. Nowadays, exhibit A is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, diverting Russians’ attention from a deepening recession. Exhibit B is Trump’s rising militarism that has just jumped to the next level with John Bolton’s visit to Moscow this week to tell Putin the U.S. will withdraw from the I.N.F. Treaty. Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, has no doubts: A new nuclear arms race has begun, he writes in an opinion piece for the New York Times. He should know what he’s talking about. He is the man who signed with President Reagan in 1987 the I.N.F. treaty, one of the major arms non-proliferation treaties. For Europe, it is the most important since it aims at eliminating the arsenal of intermediate and shorter-range missiles. Back then, Gorbachev was at the helm of a dying Soviet Union shaken by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he, more than anyone, believed in a new age of peace and international cooperation. He famously talked of a “Common European Home” and hoped to bring Russia inside Europe as an equal partner. That did not happen and the rise of Putin put paid to those hopes. In that article, Gorbachev reminds us that the I.N.F. treaty was followed by two more important ones, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (a.k.a. Start 1, signed in 1991 by George H.W. Bush) and the New Start Treaty (2010 signed by Obama). By 2015, The US and Russia were able to report at the United Nations Nuclear Nonproliferation Review Conference that 85% of the arms had been retired and mostly destroyed. An amazing success that Trump, another Republican President, is about to reverse. Predictably, Russia is accused of violations, the standard way to break off treaties. And yet, the Republican party was not always the party of the military-industrial complex, a notion another Republican President warned America against: It was Eisenhower, in his farewell address in 1961, who identified the threat and famously coined that phrase. In the Trump era of America First, it’s hard to remember that just three decades ago, in the 1980s, there were politicians who had genuine liberal, progressive ideas – even in the Soviet Union that after 70 years of dictatorship looked like a hopeless case. Especially in the Soviet Union which, as events showed with Gorbachev’s Perestroika, was ready for a dramatic change, putting its Communist past and the Cold War in the dustbin of History. Now, History’s dustbin is about to be emptied on the world stage, bringing the Cold War back. Firebrand John Bolton, Trump’s National Security adviser (appointed last April) is having his moment of glory. A former U.S.Ambassador to the United Nations (under Bush), Bolton has always hated international treaties in general and the United Nations in particular. His fondest memory, he recalls in his 2007 memoir, was to pull the U.S. out of the International Criminal Court treaty. No matter the Court presented no particular danger to American sovereignty and that it was a major step forward for international law and justice. Bolton is an uncompromising hawk. For him the world is a jungle, justice is for sissies and the U.S. needs to be top dog. Now he is pushing Trump to withdraw from all international treaties – including further blocking the ICC and even moving out of some minor treaties like the Universal Postal Union, a 144 year-old postal treaty run by the United Nations, accusing it of letting China ship goods at an unfair discount. That was done last week. The fact that the ICC, as per its mandate, cannot prosecute any American without the consent of an American court is not mentioned by John Bolton or anyone in the Trump administration. They all prefer to present the ICC as illegitimate and a threat to American sovereignty. They do not accept the simple fact that the ICC is a UN body and therefore not illegitimate; and that it is never a threat to a country that respects international law and justice. And America used to be a paladin of justice but with populists in power, that has changed. Trump’s priority now is moving out of nuclear arms treaties – and that fits in nicely with his military build-up strategy. Let’s tick off the ways Trump has gone about re-militarizing the U.S.: Pumping up the defense budget to a historic high of $717 billion, even though America has always spent more than the rest of the world combined on military expenditures; of special note: $21.9 billion for the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons programs that includes research and testing; Getting out of the 2015 deal to limit Iran’s nuclear activities; And now systematically pulling out of all remaining non-proliferation arms deals. To be fair to Trump, the U.S. had already pulled out of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. That was done by the Bush administration without a good explanation, much to the dismay of the Federation of American Scientists, an association created in 1945 by the scientists who built the first atomic bomb. Their 2001 letter of protest to Congress ended with the following words that apply equally well to all the treaties that Trump is seeking to undo: “America has always sought to lead the world by example. Yet if other countries were to follow the example we have just set, the framework of international law would disintegrate. President Bush has just released NMD’s first shot, and it has landed squarely in the heart of American security.” Bolton’s trip this week in Russia was clearly intended to lay the ground to kill off the I.N.F. arms treaty, much to Putin’s barely concealed amusement. Watch him smile: This is exactly what makes Putin happy: He gets a green light from Trump to go ahead with building up his military arsenal, and takes none of the blame. The military build-up is entirely Trump’s. Bolton’s visit was relatively “friendly” and ended with an invitation to Putin to visit Washington in “early” 2019. Before then, Trump and Putin will see each other in Paris on 11 November, on the sidelines of the 100-year anniversary of World War I armistice. But Bolton stood his ground and warned Russia “not to mess with American elections”, threatening more sanctions to address Russia’s interference in its elections and its annexation of Crimea. What we get here is the American side of the story. But what is interesting is to look at the Russian side. Putin lays bare his thoughts, detailing the danger for Europe in the course of a recent press conference (25 October – Italian Prime Minister Conte was on a state visit). Putin’s candor is extreme: Should Europe worry? Judge for yourself. Putin puts it in very clear terms: The question is, he says, what will the Americans do with the new missiles they plan to build? Deliver them to Europe? If they do so, Russia will have no choice but to enter the arms race…Then he makes it even clearer: The European countries that agree to host American missiles need to realize that “they put their own territories under the threat of a strike response”. No matter how you interpret Putin’s statement or Trump’s breaking off arms treaties, there is little doubt that the Cold War will soon be back. Whether it will be as cold as the original one remains to be seen. But one thing is certain, populism’s obsession with national sovereignty is a source of tension, if not of out-and-out war. At least not yet.

Turns European cohesion.

Kendall-Taylor 19 – Senior Fellow and Director, Transatlantic Security Program – CNAS

Andrea-Kendall-Taylor, Center for a New American Security, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and Alina Polyakova, President and CEO - Center for European Policy Analysis, and former David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Foreign Policy in the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution, Populism and the coming era of political paralysis in Europe, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/05/28/populism-and-the-coming-era-of-political-paralysis-in-europe/

Europe’s populists seem set to pull off a major win in the European parliamentary elections this week. But populism’s real challenge to European democracy goes far deeper than its ability to force ideas long regarded as extremist or unsavory into the political agenda. Populist parties, even when not in the majority, are splintering the political party system, making governing more difficult. If support for populism and anti-establishment parties continues to grow, European democracies will remain on a trajectory toward an era of paralysis, unable to deliver results to an increasingly frustrated public.

Europeans, like many Americans, have grown disenchanted with politics as usual. In Europe, the financial crisis of 2008 and especially the refugee crisis of 2015 dealt a major blow to centrist parties that advocated for open markets and open borders. Greeks resented the economic austerity measures imposed on them by the European Union. Germans never got to vote on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow more than 1 million refugees into their country. As a result, a growing swath of Europeans no longer view mainstream political parties as representing their interests. Far-right populist parties have been the biggest beneficiaries of this growing resentment. Today far-right parties have a presence in 23 out of 28 European parliaments.

As these parties gain a foothold in national parliaments, coalition-building—the bedrock of effective governance in parliamentary systems—is becoming increasingly difficult. More and more European citizens find themselves ruled by “weak coalition” governments, the results of political parties scrambling to form legislative majorities to keep the populists out.

Such coalitions typically take months of horse-trading to form. In Sweden, the surge in support for the far-right Sweden Democrats in last fall’s elections meant that the center-left and center-right parties fell short of a majority. It took the government 130 days to form a minority government to shut the far right out. After Germany’s 2017 federal elections, there was an unusually prolonged period of nail-biting negotiations until the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) formed a grand coalition that excluded the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Regardless of the strategy pursued by centrists, the outcome is the same: a government that is too weak and mired in disagreements to deliver results.

But the problem is much bigger than the immediate spike in support for the far right. The rise of new parties across the political spectrum is splintering party systems throughout Europe. In Spain, for example, the creation of new parties on the far right (Vox) and far left (Podemos) in 2014 transformed the country’s political system from a two-party system to one with five. Similarly, in Germany, the emergence of the far-right AfD in 2013 and the far-left Die Linke in 2007 contributed to the diffusion of power across seven national parties in the Bundestag. The Netherlands now has 13 parties in its parliament.

Because politics at the European level reflect national-level politics, populist-fueled fragmentation is coming to the European parliament as well. The center-right (EPP) and the center-left (S&D) parliamentary groups are likely to lose their narrow combined majority. In Italy, Matteo Salvini’s party, the League, received only 6 percent in the previous elections five years ago, but will probably sweep to first place this year to lead the far-right opposition together with France’s Marine Le Pen. While Le Pen’s rebranded National Rally party is running neck and neck with President Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche, she and Salvini have announced a plan to join forces in a Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group. With En Marche expected to forgo joining the centrist bloc in favor of the liberal coalition (ALDE), the center-left faction will split. And as Britain brings an anti-European Union Brexit party to the parliament, one thing is certain: This European parliament will be the most divided in the union’s history.

The populist-fueled fracturing of politics is bad news for democracy. Not only does such fragmentation make it difficult to form a government, but it also impedes the ability to unite around a common vision or reach consensus. Recent elections suggest that Europe is just at the beginning of a growing trend toward fragmentation. As the number of conflicting interests grows, it will become more difficult for European governments to effectively address complex challenges such as sluggish economic growth, immigration and ineffective armies. In other words, populist-fueled fragmentation will produce political stasis that will make it difficult for democracy to deliver.

Democracies are, by design, competitive and thus often messy. But the kind of political fragmentation taking place in Europe today is pushing the boundaries of useful debate and deliberation. As voters become increasingly frustrated with a lack of results, they will look to “more effective” strongman models of the type embodied by Russia and China. As the competition between democracy and authoritarianism intensifies, democracies must be able to deliver. Unfortunately, populist-fueled fragmentation will make that harder. At the end of the day, people may be willing to forgo some of their freedoms in exchange for governments they view as capable of delivering results.