Democracy, autocracy, and European defense against Russia

I’m Old Enough To Remember way back earlier this year when the US Opus Dei Vice President J.D. Vance scolded the Rumanian constitutional court for throwing out the results of an election due to evidence the far-right candidate’s campaign had been generously assisted by illegal Russian assistance.

He also said it was a menace to free speech and democracy that other democratic parties in Germany rejected the idea of forming a government that would include the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

But by the end of May, the US Republicans were complaining that the EU’s governing body the European Commission wasn’t doing more to push Poland to elect the rightwing candidate in Sunday’s Presidential race.

I think there may be a pattern here …

U.S. Republican lawmakers are reproaching the European Commission for taking a hands-off approach to Poland’s presidential election despite what the Americans say is a bias in favor of establishment centrist candidate Rafał Trzaskowski.

Brian Mast, chair of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, wrote a letter, signed by other House members, to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to express “profound alarm over reported developments in Poland that may undermine the integrity of its democratic processes.” (1)

As it turned out, the Trumpista candidate of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) did win a bare majority in the Polish Presidential race last Sunday:

Conservative Karol Nawrocki’s victory in Poland’s weekend presidential runoff has set the country on a more nationalist course — and cast doubt on the viability of the centrist government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk after the defeat of his liberal ally.

Nawrocki, who was supported by U.S. President Donald Trump, won 50.89% of votes in a very tight race against Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, who received 49.11%, according to the final results of Sunday’s runoff published Monday morning. (2)

The President in Poland is the head of state and has veto power over budgets passed by Parliament, so he does have the ability to influence policy and legislation. However, the head of government is the Prime Minister, an office current held by Donald Tusk.

Deutsche Welle reported on the Presidential vote: (3)

Tusk is the head of a centrist coalition headed by his Civic Coalition party. He has called for a formal vote of confidence that is scheduled for June 11 to reaffirm his own position as Prime Minister. Since taking office in December 2023, he has moved to meet some of the objections the EU has had for authoritarian measures taken by the previous PiS government. A central issue is that the PiS had taken substantial steps to nullify the independence of the judiciary, a common goal of authoritarian governments. Tusk’s government has made substantial progress in that direction.

Dan Perry reports:

Anyone wondering what motivates the ferocity of the Trump administration’s attack on higher education and scientific research in America might look at the numbers behind this past weekend’s victory of the Trump-aligned presidential candidate in Poland.

Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist who narrowly defeated liberal the pro-European Rafał Trzaskowski, is no ordinary conservative. The former boxer and football hooligan with alleged ties to organized crime is backed by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023 with a Trumpian determination to mutate the country’s hard-earned democracy into authoritarianism. So he is backed by Trumpworld.

During its stint in government, PiS did all it could to neuter the independent judiciary, attack independent news media, consolidate political control over the civil service and undermine civil society. Nawrocki is now positioned to block the fixes being attempted by centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk and engineer his replacement. [my emphasis] (4)

Can there be a Nationalist International?

Since nationalism and xenophobia are characteristic elements of authoritarian rightwing political movements – certainly including the Trumpified Republican Part currently in power in the US – it seems surprising that far-right nationalist parties would cooperate politically across national borders. The idea of a Nationalist International is bizarre on its face. Although not a few conservatives found things to admire in Mussolini. (5)

But this is not new. Mussolini was certainly an Italian nationalist and that was a central feature of his politics. But far-right parties in Europe, including Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party, looked to Mussolini’s Italian model for his own politics. But Germany supported Italy’s colonial war in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) of 1935-1936, now known as the Italo-Ethiopian War or the second Italo-Ethiopian War. Hitler’s and Mussolini’s government actively supported Francisco Franco’s revolt against the Spanish Republic.

But when Hitler’s government first attempted to annex Austria in 1934, Mussolni’s government backed Austria’s new “Austrofascist” dictatorship against Hitler Germany:

Faced with a severe economic crisis caused by the Great Depression, [Austrian Chancellor Engelbert] Dollfuss decided against joining Germany in a customs union, a course advocated by many Austrians. He was in part dissuaded by a League of Nations loan of $9,000,000 and by the fear of Allied countermeasures. Severely criticized by Social Democrats, Pan-German nationalists, and Austrian Nazis, he countered by drifting toward an increasingly authoritarian regime. The Italian leader Benito Mussolini became his principal foreign ally. Italy guaranteed Austrian independence at Riccione (August 1933), but in return Austria had to abolish all political parties and reform its constitution on the Fascist model. Dollfuss’ attacks on Parliament, begun in March 1933, culminated that September in the permanent abolition of the legislature and the formation of a corporate state based on his Vaterländische Front (“Fatherland Front”), with which he expected to replace Austria’s political parties. In foreign affairs he steered a course that converted Austria virtually into an Italian satellite state. Hoping therewith to prevent Austria’s incorporation into Nazi Germany, he fought his domestic political opponents along fascist-authoritarian lines.

In February 1934 paramilitary formations loyal to the chancellor crushed Austria’s Social Democrats in bloody encounters. With a new constitution of May 1934, his regime became completely dictatorial. In June, however, Germany incited the Austrian Nazis to civil war. Dollfuss was assassinated by the Nazis in a raid on the chancellery. [my emphasis] (6)

In this case, Hitler’s Italian model Mussolini supported Austria against Germany. But as seen above, Mussolini required Austria to adopt a fascist model of government in return for Italy’s support. But Italy’s reliance on Germany to finance its Ethiopian war and the German-Italian cooperation in supporting Franco’s rebellion in Spain made Italian fascism dependent on German fascism.

When Hitler first became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, he was seen at first as a junior partner in the fascist “Nationalist International” alignment. When Italian King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Mussolini‘s government in 1943 and arrested him, Germany freed him and made him head of a new “Italian Social Republic,” (aka, the “Salò Republic”) a rump puppet state of Nazi Germany. (7) That brought the process full circle, with Mussolini as a figurehead for a foreign government.

All this is a reminder that in a world of nation-states, ideology can be shared across borders. But nations also form their own conceptions of what is their countries’ national interest. And defending The Nation is of course the focus of nationalism.

This is one of the reservations I have about the democracy-vs.-autocracy discussions of the moment. Having similar ideologies and/or political systems doesn’t mean countries are automatically friendly to each other in foreign policy. One of the most spectacular examples was the Sino-Soviet split, the decades-long between the Communist states of China and the USSR. Today, still-Communist China and no-longer-Communist rightwing authoritarian Russia are close geopolitical allies.

Another example might be the current deterioration in relations between the United States and Canada. But that may not fit so well, since the current American government is pushing hard to turn the current US liberal democracy into some form of authoritarian government.

Poland and the current European realignment

Although far-right European parties may admire Trumpism as a form of politics and even of Vladimir Putin’s approach to politics and government.

But it doesn’t mean that all of them are wanting to defer to Russia in foreign policy. Speaking of Italy and Mussolini, the current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is head of the Fratelli d’Italia party. That party is not a immediate successor party to Mussolini’s Fascist Party. But it proudly shares some of its heritage, including some organizational continuity.

Profil notes that one of Fratelli d'Italia’s [FdI] predecessor organization was the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), which “existed from 1946 until 1995. Its founder Giorgio Almirante, a former propagandist of Mussolini, collaborated with the National Socialists after [Mussolini’s] overthrow in 1943.” (8)

Historian Joshua Arthurs explained in 2022 in an interview with Profil:

Arthurs: I find the question of whether Meloni is a post-fascist complicated. Her party, Fratelli d'Italia, has taken many different forms over the decades, often playing a double game. On the one hand, it presents itself to the mainstream as a conventional, conservative party. Meloni has already announced that she will support Ukraine in the war and rely on a policy of continuity in relation to the EU and NATO. On the other hand, "Fratelli d'Italia" uses symbols related to the period of Italian fascism (1922–1943) and the dictator Benito Mussolini. Meloni's party has repeatedly drawn historical revisionist references and tried to gloss over this period....

The Movimento Sociale Italiano changed over the decades. Until the end of the 1980s, "MSI" had very few supporters, a maximum of 8 percent. It was a fringe party for fascist nostalgics that was shut from the government. In 1989, with the end of the Cold War, not only Europe changed, but also Italy. The old parties that had dominated the country until then collapsed and the "MSI" took on a new form, henceforth called "Alleanza Nazionale".

Profil: Giorgia Meloni was active in its student organization.

Arthurs: In the 1990s, the Alleanza Nazionale tried to distance itself from the fascist past. Their party leader at the time wore suits like a businessman and traveled to Israel to apologize for Italy's role in fascist anti-Semitism. At that time, a kind of rebranding of the extreme right took place. The "Alleanza Nazionale" even entered Berlusconi's government in 1994 and later founded a party with him. Many MPs, including Meloni, were dissatisfied with this development. From their point of view, the party moved too far away from its fascist roots. So they separated and founded the "Fratelli d'Italia" in 2012. [my emphasis in bold] (9)

So, the democratic component of Meloni’s and her party’s perspective is more than a little dubious. But unlike various other far-right parties in EU countries, Meloni’s Fratelli d'Italia and the PiS in Poland are not fans of Russia’s foreign policy orientation. The historical reasons are perhaps more dramatically obvious in the case of Poland, which has had centuries of experience with Russia that have often not been happy ones.

The same is true for Poland and Germany, although Polish grievances against Germany have more to do with reparations for the damage done to Poland in the Second World War.

In the current situation in which European leaders are taking very seriously for the moment the need to establish a military deterrence capability not so heavily dependent on the United States as the current NATO arrangement is, Poland and Italy are among the five largest European military powers, along with Britain, France, and Germany. They currently have a strong incentive to cooperate with each other on the new independent-deterrence goal. So in this case, even if Poland and Italy have governments that ideologically lean towards the authoritarian-right view, that also have strong incentives to cooperate closely with the countries with a more distinctly democratic orientation.

Still, election interference by Russia is a real concern. And so is election interference from the Trumpistas in Washington. So the EU has good reason to stick to its basic principles of democracy and rule-of-law. The EU itself is unlikely to be the coordinating center of the new European security arrangements. Although the EU does have its own military cooperation functions, called the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO). And the EU Treaty does include a mutual defense obligation. But NATO member Britain is no longer an EU member. And when it comes to improved, independent self-defense capability, the European allies will certainly try to improve defense cooperation with NATO member Türkiye. Even though Türkiye is currently more part of the “authoritarian” spectrum than the liberal-democratic one.

The V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report for 2025 ranks Türkiye as an “electoral autocracy.” Hungary is the only EU country with so low a rating. Russia has the same rating.

But the EU as such will have to play a larger geopolitical role than before: in economic policy, on trade, in diplomatic relations. That will include increasing the attraction of the EU in its Eastern Partnership (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia) and its Western Balkan Partnership. The EU makes important decisions and laws that are binding on its individual members, so maintaining democratic institutions and a secure rule of law are critical for maintaining the EU’s internal legitimacy.

So it matters a lot whether EU member states maintain their democracy standards. It’s often mentioned that on formal foreign policy positions, the EU must have the unanimous support of all its members. While this is a real limitation, it doesn’t mean that the EU is unable to conduct any foreign policy. The European Commission, the executive body of the EU, can take foreign policy actions when it has substantial support from a majority of members. The EU often seems like a plodding, obtuse instrument. But it still gets things done.

Notes:

(1) Haeck, Peter & Kość, Wojciech (2025): US Republicans slam EU ‘double standard’ over Polish election financing. Politico 05/27/2025. <https://www.politico.eu/article/us-republicans-poland-election-financing-european-commission-rafal-trzaskowski-brian-mast/> (Accessed: 2025-01-06).

(2) Gera, Vanessa (2025): Nawrocki’s win turns Poland toward nationalism and casts doubt on Tusk’s centrist government. AP News 06/03/2025. <https://apnews.com/article/poland-presidential-election-karol-nawrocki-80a99eeb7a2f3ae64260a9263e7028ee> (Accessed: 2025-07-06).

(3) Pro-Trump conservative ekes out a win in Poland's presidential election. DW News YouTube channel 06/02/2025. <https://youtu.be/occF0fhIvXo?si=Lbk7tA7cQy5ivpyo> (Accessed: 2025-07-06).

(4) Perry, Dan (2025): What Poland’s election teaches us about Trump’s war on Harvard. New Eastern Europe 06/06/2025. <https://neweasterneurope.eu/2025/06/06/what-polands-election-teaches-us-about-trumps-war-on-harvard/> (Accessed: 2025-07-06).

(5) “After meeting Benito Mussolini in Rome in1927, Winston Churchill, then a Conservative member of Parliament, said that had he been an Italian, he would have ‘wholeheartedly’ supported the Fascist leader's ‘triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.’" Delzell, Charles (1988): Remembering Mussolini. Wilson Quarterly 12:2, 118. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/40257305>

(6) Editors (2024): Engelbert Dollfuss. Encyclopedia Britannica 09/09/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Engelbert-Dollfuss> (Accessed: 2025-07-06).

(7) Koenig, Duane (1945): The Establishment of Mussolini’s Neo-Fascist State. Quarterly Journal of the Florida Academy of Sciences 8:4. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/24313323>

(8) Tschinderle, Franziska (2022): Historiker über Melonis Partei: „Wurzeln liegen in der faschistischen Zeit“. Profil 25.09.2022. <https://www.profil.at/ausland/historiker-ueber-melonis-partei-wurzeln-liegen-in-der-faschistischen-zeit/402158598> (Accessed: 2025-07-06).

Krugman trashes the EU over the COVID vaccinations

Paul Krugman ruffled some feathers among European politicians with his high-profile criticism of the European Union's performance on COVID vaccination in his New York Times column, A very European disaster 03/20/2021 (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette link).

Krugman concludes his column melodramatically, "The European project is in deep trouble."

But saying "the European project is in deep trouble" about the EU is similar to describing the United States as "the American experiment." Any historic "experiment" can fail, e.g., the Soviet Union. The EU has a long and complicated history. I think it's tempting for Americans to think of the EU as some kind of parallel to the US. And that's not entirely wrong. Luuk van Middelaar in his history of the EU, Vom Kontinent zur Union: Gegenwart und Geschichte des vereinten Europa (2016), discusses the formation of the American Constitution as a reference point for the development of the EU.

But it's a reference point that presents both parallels and contrasts. The EU is an international organization, not a nation-state. It's more than a free-trade area, it's a political union, but it's a supranational institution, not a federal state. This Carleton University website takes a Mugwump position on the nature of the EU, but one that's probably as close as political theory can get right now, as something more closely tied together than a confederation but not so closely united as a federation. (Is the EU a federation or a confederation? n/d)

Krugman is an economist - a Nobel Prize-winning one at that - and he gave intense attention to the euro crisis including the  the Greek crisis of 2015. I think Krugman's basic criticisms of the euro's problems are right. The eurozone was not constructed as an "optimum currency area (OCA)." Having a common currency in a real sense makes the eurozone a single economy in the way that the EU as a whole is not. So, as Krugman and others have described, parts of the eurozone where productivity grows more slowly are forced into destructive austerity policies in the absence of compensating macroeconomic policy at the eurozone level.

Krugman's criticism of the EU's pandemic response includes the following.

Europe's vaccination debacle will almost surely end up causing thousands of unnecessary deaths. And the continent's policy bungles don't look like isolated instances, a few bad decisions made by a few bad leaders.

Instead, the failures seem to reflect fundamental flaws in the continent's institutions and attitudes--including the same bureaucratic and intellectual rigidity that made the euro crisis a decade ago far worse than it should have been.

This strikes me as a criticism founded in an assumption the EU has constructed what was supposed to be a unified health care system. And that's just not the case. In the case of the euro, a subset of the EU nations constructed a common institution with the single currency that did have some "fundamental flaws." But it doesn't seem so reasonable to criticize the absence of institutions (like an EU-wide health system) that the EU has never pretended to have or tried to construct.

Here, I think the analogy of the EU to a nation-state like the US is really problematic. But Krugman has more specific criticisms of the vaccine purchasing process

They seemed deeply worried about the possibility that they might end up paying drug companies too much, or discover that they had laid out money for vaccines that either proved ineffective or turned out to have dangerous side effects.

So they minimized these risks by delaying the procurement process, haggling over prices and refusing to grant liability waivers. They seemed far less worried about the risk that many Europeans might get sick or die because the vaccine rollout was too slow.

I'm inclined to think the purchasing process in the EU, which has been mainly handled at the EU level, was deficient in some way. I haven't followed that process so closely that I could offer a much more detailed analysis at this point. Krugman does allude to the fairly spastic policy of several countries including Germany and France on the AstraZeneca vaccine, which I do think diminished some of the confidence in the vaccine itself. He does seem to be so fixed on the idea that austerity thinking distorts European policy that he may be too inclined to blame stinginess for the problem.

And I found this point to be a real head-scratcher:

Finally, Europe turns out to have a problem with widespread hostility to science. So do we--but theirs is different, in ways that are doing a lot of harm.

In America, most--although by no means all--hostility to science comes from the right, especially the religious right. We're a nation full of anti-evolutionists, climate change deniers and, more recently, covid deniers--forms of science denial that are much less common in Europe. But other anti-scientific attitudes, less easily placed on a left-right spectrum, are distressingly widespread.

Reluctance to take a covid-19 vaccine, even if available, is hardly unknown here, but anti-vaccine sentiment appears to be alarmingly broad in Europe, especially in France.

I don't really know what he's talking about here. Far-right parties and sects have promoted anti-vaxxer notions and bizarre conspiracy theories around COVID. The more specific influence of the QAnon conspiracy has been notable in Europe, too, notably in Austria and Germany. So far as I'm aware, the COVID conspiracy mongers seem overwhelmingly "brown" rather than "green" in the EU.

There will hopefully be a lot of studies - and policy changes based on them - as the COVID pandemic comes under better control for what worked well and what didn't. There does seem to be something to the idea that countries with a stronger collective sense of social responsibility like China including Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. But aside from the fact that such broad "cultural" factors are extremely difficult to quantity and not exactly easy to export.

I haven't noticed any clear inclination that the particular types of health insurance or public-vs.-private organization of the delivery systems has made a dramatic difference in the response, although systems of universal insurance that produce generally better public health outcomes almost surely have had some influence on survival rates.

It does seem that countries that for whatever reason had structures in place to rapidly disseminate vaccines as such did better. Israel has been on a relatively high level of military alert basically since its founding, part of which means that they were prepared to rapidly distribute medical supplies like gas masks and vaccines. Israel has 9.1 million people, the same population size of Austria, which has been much less efficient in getting people vaccinating.

Chile with 19 million people has a much bigger geographic area than Israel and achieved a faster vaccination rate than Israel. In an analysis of Chile's experience (Impfweltmeister Chile Makroskop 23.03.2021), Jens Holst focuses on Chile's relatively recent experience in vaccination campaigns against epidemics, a general emphasis on primary health care in their system, and a high rate of acceptance of vaccination among the public. Somehow, anti-vaxxer sentiment doesn't seem to have gained much of a following there. Chile has relied on the Chinese vaccines Sinovac und CanSino along with AstroZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

If Krugman is upset about the EU not being more loosey-goosey about their vaccine bidding, I wonder what he thinks about the Chilean approach. As Holst describes it (my translation from German):

However, the terms of the contracts are not known in Chile … Prices remain secret in the South American country, and no one knows the clauses, and in particular the limitations of liability imposed by manufacturers, who usually travel with dozens of lawyers and, if possible, exclude all financial risks. However, President [Sebastian] Piñera, who knows the other side all too well, could not take this into account. He seized the unique opportunity to present himself as a do-er after his government had created a very bad image for itself, and not only in dealing with the pandemic. For years, his liberal-conservative government has been under massive political pressure, and protests against social inequality, the expensive education system, and the lack of participation of large groups of the population in economic growth have continued despite corona restrictions. Then comes a successful vaccination campaign eight months before the next scheduled presidential election.

The EU recovery funding plan - hopeful or ominous for the near future of the Union?

The European Union has come up with a recovery fund to deal with the immediate effects of the Covid-19 crisis and the resulting start of a recession that is likely to be very serious (Jim Brunsden et al, EU recovery fund: how the plan will work Financial Times 07/21/2020).

The final compromise is a scaled-down version of what Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president, originally requested from leaders in May. The core grants component of the recovery effort was reduced to €390bn, considerably less than the €500bn recommended by the commission and pushed by Germany and France.

However, it is still a landmark agreement, against considerable odds, which will give Brussels the unprecedented power to borrow hundreds of billions on the markets and hand it out as budgetary support to member states.

EU leaders have made the routine optimistic predictions that typically go with such supposed breakthrough moments. But opinions are very much divided on its prospects.

Mark Schieritz provides an optimistic take in Das rechnet sich Die Zeit 23.07.2020, starting with a caution about predicting historic turning points (my translations from the German):

Was it clear to the French when they stormed the Bastille that they would trigger a revolution and overthrow the king? Did the men who threw tea boxes into the sea in the Port of Boston in December 1773 in protest against British tax policy suspected that three years later the United States would declare itself independent? Probably not. History doesn't come out and say, Hello, it's me, History! It hides behind the events and in between. You have to look for them if you want to find them.

But he chooses to take what for him is a positive view that the deal shows the EU moving more into the macroeconomic role that the member states need it to play:

One could say that by financing itself like a state, the EU itself becomes a little bit of a state. And just as the nation-state in yesterday's world was the condition of national self-determination, so in the world of tomorrow a united EU is the condition of European self-determination. Because that is the only way they can preserve themselves. The British will still experience this. And maybe they will even come back. You would be welcome.

Shahin Vallée is also looking at the bright side in With its recovery deal, is the EU finally starting to act like a unifying force? Guardian 07/22/2020:

It was a long time coming, but the coronavirus crisis seems to have allowed Europe to make a leap towards genuine integration. The global financial crisis in 2008 exposed the inherent fragilities and incompleteness of Europe’s monetary union, prompting a decade of agonising debate over fiscal union. Essentially, sharing a common currency without sharing a real budget was always going to be unstable and potentially dangerous.

But now European leaders seem to be finally facing up this profound architectural problem. Common debt, common expenditure and the possibility of common taxation – which all seemed out of reach over the last decade – were accepted this week unanimously after a marathon summit that lasted more than four days.

Yet despite his optimism, most of the article is taken up describing the shortcomings of the proposal and the political risks for the EU that it has dramatized.

More pessimsitic take come from two sources that were very prescient about the 2015 Greece crisis, Wolfgang Münchau and Yanis Varoufakis.

(Münchau's) Eurointelligence reports (Why we don’t think this deal is historic 07/22/2020):

So, this is a list of things we think stand in the way of this programme being ultimately seen as historic

• the programme might not succeed on its own terms, or it might not be seen to succeed;
• member states may fail to use the opportunity of the fiscal boost by addressing structurally low productivity;
• member states may fail to endow the EU with an increase in the own-resources tax base;
• member states may fail to change the treaties to make it possible for the EU to raise funds outside fiscal emergencies;
• the programme pitches member states against one another, and could foster euroscepticism in the north.

Yanis Varoufakis, The EU coronavirus fund will take Europe another step towards disintegration The Guardian 07/24/2020. His commentary is in part at reponse to Shahin Vallée.

Varoufakis reminds us that Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning austerity economics is still alive and well among the European establishment:

[T]he recovery fund is a distraction from the elephant in the room: massive austerity. According to the International Monetary Fund, the eurozone’s total 2020 income will fall by 10%, causing an average budget deficit of more than 11%, with weaker countries such as Italy and Greece facing a much larger drop.

That would not be catastrophic per se, if it were not for the determination of Berlin and other governments to push member states to balance their books by 2021 (as witnessed by the 11 June Eurogroup communique). Even if the nascent recovery brings down, for example, Italy’s budget deficit to, say, 9%, to balance its books Rome must impose a cruel level of austerity equal to a new 9% of GDP in cuts and taxes. Similarly with Greece. Given that even Germany will have to practise austerity to balance its budget, the whole continent will be treated to an intensification of the doom loop between austerity and recession. [my emphasis]

He also notes that the amount of the European recovery fund is actually a small amount giving the like size of the recession facing the EU, especially in light of "the austerity tsunami down the line" he describes.

And he fears that the conditions of the program "are a Eurosceptic’s dream. ... It is almost as if the whole thing were designed by a cunning Eurosceptic." And one big part of it is that:

... our great and good leaders also decided that each national government will have the right to freeze payments, for up to three months, to any other government while it scrutinises how the money is to be spent. Endless recriminations are guaranteed, as the Dutch lambast the Italian government’s pension payments and Rome returns the favour with reports on the Netherlands’ famous tax loopholes. Imagine the mood in the room when such a challenge is made to, say, Spain, by a prime minister whose government the EU bribed, in the form of Thatcher-like rebates, to get the recovery fund across the line. [my emphasis]

In other words, this is another case of the EU collectively trying to do the least it can get away with in terms of a sound macroeconomic policy. All while operating with the time bombs embedded in the construction of the euro and the ludicrous borrowing and spending limits the 19 eurozone have imposed on themselves.

The "Merkron" plan and the Frugal/Greedy Four

There is a discussion underway in the EU about a plan for the EU to borrow money and distribute it to member countries to counter the negative economic effects of the corona crisis. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Merkel proposed a €500 billion recovery fund for the European Union in which the EU would borrow funds to distribute (not loan) to member countries to deal with the current recession that we're so far calling the COVID crisis or the coronavirus crisis. (Daniel Boffey, Merkel and Macron propose €500bn EU rescue fund Guardian 05/18/2020) One of the notable features of the proposed fund is that it would be an project of the full European Union, not of the euro currency zone.

The press like to refer to the relationship between the two leaders as "Merkron," reflecting the continued centrality of German-French leadership in the EU. A role that has now increased in relative importance with Brexit.

The "Merkron" proposal drew support from 23 of the EU's 27 members. Four countries, styled as the "Frugal Four," objected to the proposals on the grounds that it would be a direct EU support to member nations without an obligation to repay: Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden. Austria's baby-faced Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has been prominent in making the case for the Frugal Four, also known as the Greedy Four. They made a counter-proposal whose central concept was that the assistance be made in the form of loans that would have to be repaid. This, of course, would affect the national credit rating and bond rates of countries like Spain and Italy, especially in the latter case increasing the likelihood of a new euro crisis.

The proposal has been evolving in the negotiations with the Greedy Four, with Ursula von der Leyen as head of the EU Commission proposing a variant. Lionel Laurent reports (An $826 Billion Battle Is Brewing in Europe Bloomberg Opinion 05/28/2020:

The European Union’s pandemic recovery plan has all the hallmarks of a historic leap in the dark for the 27-member bloc.

It aims to unleash as much as 750 billion euros ($826 billion) of fiscal stimulus, fueled by joint borrowing on financial markets - a big deal for member states that have always jealously guarded the power to tax and spend. The fact that the plan unveiled by Commission boss Ursula von der Leyen is so clearly aligned with the proposal from France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel is especially positive: Paris’s desire for continental assertiveness and foreign-policy grandeur hasn’t always matched Berlin’s focus on balanced budgets. ...

At the center of the battle are the so-called “frugal four” - the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Denmark - taking up a combative role similar to that of the British when they were members. As wealthy net contributors to the bloc’s budget, they’ve already been pushing back against what they see as unfair increases to the share they’re expected to chip in after Brexit; February negotiations on the next seven-year budget went nowhere after 28 hours of talks.

The Covid-19 crisis has redoubled efforts by the frugal four to push back against perceived profligacy, as the EU considers a bigger budget outlay than before, at 1.1 trillion euros (still only about 1% of gross national income), adds on pandemic stimulus tools and proposes aid in the form of grants rather than loans to be paid back — a package worth 2.4 trillion euros. The budget hard-liners may lack the diplomatic heft of Germany, but they can’t be ignored, as the plan needs unanimous support across national parliaments. [my emphasis]

Basti (Austrian Chancellor Kurz) is working this to promote his own anti-European credentials among the hard-right voters he works hard to cultivate. Basti has often aligned himself with the Visegrad group (Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia) on other anti-European positions like flat opposition to an revision of the Failed Dublin System of immigration and asylum processing. But his friends in the Visegard Group, including the EU's current start authoritarian, Hungarian Prime Mnister Viktor Orbán, want some of the money foreseen in the Merkron aid concept.

And, of course, different players try to negotiate deals over all kinds of things, so that's a factor always present in EU politics. (Just like every other kind of politics!)

Matthew Karnitschnig reports (Sebastian Kurz cautious on Commission’s €750B recovery blueprint Politico EU 05/27/20):

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said that he and the other leaders of the EU’s so-called frugal four group were encouraged by some aspects of the European Commission’s proposal for a coronavirus crisis recovery fund, but cautioned it represents just a “starting point” for negotiations.

“What we find positive - not just myself, but the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark - is that there is a time limit and that the fund will be a one-time emergency measure and not the first step toward a debt union,” Kurz, who has emerged as the unofficial spokesman of the frugal faction, said in a telephone interview with POLITICO on Wednesday.

“Considering that there are many in Europe who want such a debt union, it’s important to us that this be clarified in writing once and for all,” he said, referring to concerns among the frugal group that the fund could morph into a permanent fixture, opening the door to mutualization of members' debt under the banner of the EU. [my emphasis]

Such political melodramas need to be understood in the context of EU politics, which is too often superficially reported even by the European press.

The EU is a strange critter. Its formal justifications are that it has promoted peace and democracy in Europe. And that's true. It's done both. But the teeth of the EU legal structure is in the economic area, and that structure is very much in the mode of the neoliberal gospel that we see embedded in "trade" treaties that are actually corporate-deregulation treaties.´ So despite the reality of the peace and democracy rationales, which I think are generally taken very seriously, the EU has no common foreign policy (to speak of), no common EU military, and a unanimity rule on major policies that make it extremely difficult to enforce the democracy part.

But the trade laws based on the deregulation-privatization model are enforceable in the courts. And the corporate lobbies aren't at all inclined to give up the advantages the EU structure brings them. Business regulation is dominated by EU laws and rules, but the various forms of social insurance - "social state" polices as they are also called - are the responsibility of individual countries, which given the way the European Supreme Court (EuGH) interprets the laws, creates heavy pressure to lower social-insurance protections toward the lowest common denominator. But it's not just the courts. The EU Commission, which is the EU executive body, has for years pushed member states to privatize their national health insurance programs, though fortunately most EU governments weren't so politically suicidal that they actually did much of it.

There's a lot of justified talk about the "democratic deficit" in the EU. I'm guessing that not even half of the voters in EU countries could correctly describe how laws are made by the EU Commission, the European Council, the Council of the European Union (not the same as the European Council!), and the European Parliament. For corporate lobbyists, this is a *desirable* state of affairs. Neither Merkel nor Macron have any intention of rocking that boat. And here's where the unanimity principle comes into play. If Macron and Merkel think it somehow looks good politically to advocate a common EU borrowing-and-subsidy program that they may not actually want, as long as they know that even one country will veto it, they are free to posture without having to worry they'll actually have to carry through. That way they can be the Good Europeans whose enlightened proposal got blocked by some annoying small countries.

Generally, the richer countries would prefer to have the vetoing country be one of the former "Eastern Bloc" countries. But in this case, the lowly Eastern countries want the money, so it's the Greedy Four  who are the sticks in the mud on this one. If Germany and France apply even a fraction of the pressure they applied to Greece, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal in the last euro crisis to enact austerity measures, the dissenters will come around. (Craig Crowther, 'Frugal Four' will come round to EU's €750bn COVID-19 recovery fund, says former Finland PM Stubb Euronews 05/28/2020) If Merkel and Macron don't apply that kind of pressure, we'll know they aren't serious. Since we're talking here about using public funds largely to bail out failing corporations and banks, it's possible that Merkel and Macron are serious on this one. Even staunch neoliberal austerians are true believers in "socialism for the rich."

Florian Gathmann et al, Auf den Kopf gestellt Spiegel Online 28.05.2020

Yanis Varoufakis is skeptical of the proposal, which he doesn't think will help with the problem the "periphery" EU countries like Italy face with pressure on their bond rates in a crisis. On the surface, the Merkron proposal is a move to make the EU more of a "transfer union". But the more critical problem is to make the eurozone (18 countries) a transfer union. That would mean things like have a eurozone-wide unemployment support program, for instance. Otherwise, the eurozone still faces the problem of the kind of tremendous pressure for internal devalution, i.e., lowering wages and living standards, that countries like Greece and Italy faced during the last eurocrisis. DiEM25 on Merkel Macron Announcement 19 MAY 2020:

There is an important geopolitical consideration in play with the "Merkron" proposal, as Wolfgang Münchau explains in China is pitting EU countries against each other Financial Times 06/24/2020:

China has shown remarkable skill in playing EU countries off against one another — for example in the race to develop 5G mobile networks. But this is just the beginning. China is well on the way to emerge as the most influential external power for the EU.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a project of long-term infrastructure investment spanning the Eurasian continent, lies at the heart of China’s global industrial strategy. EU governments understand this well. The Franco-German proposal for the €500bn coronavirus recovery fund includes a specific demand for an industrial policy to protect Europe against investments by third countries in strategic sectors. Yet such a strategy would pose problems for Italy, the likely main beneficiary of future Chinese investment in Europe. [my emphasis]

And Münchau's Eurointelligence looks more closely at the smoke and mirrors involved (Why it is not €500bn 05/29/2020):

When we read through the official document for yesterday's briefing, we were perplexed that the numbers did not add up - at least not in an obvious way. Further study of the proposal has revealed to us the reason why. The European Commission's claim that €500bn of the €750bn package comes in the form of grants is misleading. A more correct assessment is €400bn, which includes the €310bn grant element in the recovery plan and various bits and bobs, including an increase in structural funds. But it also includes components which the EU classifies as grants but whose ultimate incarnation is a loan. This is the Commission's old Juncker-fund reflex. It starts off by taking some real money and then leveraging it into a large loan. Whether this works or not is beside the point. Economically, this is not a fiscal impulse because it relates to claims that must be ultimately repaid. [my emphasis]

Europintelligence also argues that this is a clumsy attempt to backdoor a transfer-union function that really pertains to the specific needs of the eurozone:

... will the package survive the onslaught of the frugal four? The EU will need the consent of each of them to move ahead. They each will extract a price. On a per-capita basis, the frugal four are among the five largest net contributors to the EU budget. Leif Pagrotzky, a former Swedish economics minister, made the argument in Dagens Nyheter that Sweden should not veto the recovery fund, but argue that it is a eurozone-only instrument and Sweden should not take part in it. We agree with that argument. There is a lot of muddled thinking in Brussels about the nature of the monetary union, which is one of the reasons why the eurozone is stuck in a perma-crisis. The recovery fund is an economic necessity that arises as a direct result of countries having locked themselves into a permanent monetary union. It is not another regional aid programme.

The Dutch and the Austrians will have different objectives. We don't think they will want to veto the package, but the net economic gain for the EU as a whole is likely to be reduced through rebates for these countries. For example, if non-eurozone countries were allowed to opt out from the recovery fund, the refinancing burden on the remaining countries would increase, which in turn would reduce the extent of the fiscal transfer that is built into the package. [my emphasis]

Legitimate questions about sources (3 of 3): Russia, Russia, Russia

Nate Sliver writes of the Russian effect on the outcome of the US Presidential election in 2016:

For instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller based on... 5,000 tweets? That's **nothing**. Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day.https://t.co/LI8wt6tua8 pic.twitter.com/I2XOIf0rdy

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 18, 2018

In the three critical states for the Democrats that narrowly went to Trump in 2016, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, "Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she'd have won the electoral vote, too." (Philip Bump, Donald Trump will be president thanks to 80,000 people in three states Washington Post 12/01/2016)

Bump goes on to say, "The 540-vote margin in Florida that swung the 2000 election is still the modern record-holder for close races, but this is a pretty remarkable result. (Especially since the final gap between Al Gore and George W. Bush was only a little over 500,000 votes nationally.)"

I would say that is a bit of a sloppy way to talk about the 2000 election. Because he didn't mention that in the detailed press consortium recount of the Florida votes, Gore actually won the Florida vote and the state's Electoral College votes should have gone to him. The Supreme Court gave that election to Bush Junior in a crassly partisan decision. But the results of the consortium research were announced during the orgy of patriotic fury in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. So the press generally reported those results in a sloppy way in 2001: Miranda Spencer, Who Won the Election? Who Cares? FAIR 01/01/2002.

This post is not so much about sources as such as about the frameworks we apply to thinking about US and European relations to Russia.

Russia and the 2016 US Election

Russian interference in the 2016 election outraged a lot of Americans, mostly Democrats it seems, and very justifiably so. It's the duty of the government at all levels to protect the integrity of elections.

But the actual effect of the Russian intervention via social media and their own media outlets like RT is impossible to determine for certain. Because national election results, and most below the national level, too, are overdetermined. Many factors effect them. To take a counterfactual example, if there were a state that was considered competitive in a Presidential election and no Demoratic or Republican advertising or campaign events took place in it, while Russian bots generated huge publicity for the Republican in the race, then it would be more credible to conclude that Russian interference decisively affected the outcome of the race.

This is why campaign laws are so important and spending limits are badly needed. There's a general recognition that how well a campaign is financed does affect outcomes, although spending more money it itself doesn't automatically guarantee a win. The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling even cleared the way for donors to be able to spend essentially sums on election campaigns, in some cases without even reporting publicly who donated the money. It is mainly destructive because it gives our own oligarchs excessive power to control elections and politicians. But it also opens vulnerabilites for illicit foreign interference.

In the end, the kinds of measures that protect the integrity of elections in the United States from regular election-stealing mischief are also the kinds of things that would protect against illicit foreign interference. Secure voting machines not connected to the Internet with paper audit trails checked by systematic audits. Limits on campaign donations and effective reporting measures. Automatic voter registration and federally-enforced limits on how states purge voter lists. And social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be required to screen against anoymous accounts that could be fronts for illicit campaign activities, foreign or domestic.

The discussion on the significance of the 2016 Russian election interference was heavily influenced by the Clinton campaign's decision to try to blame the election outcome on it. So for many people, it became the party line that Trump's Electoral College win was mainly due to Russian meddling. And it conveniently deflected criticism from the Demoratic candidate and how both her campaign and the Democratic Party establishment.

It also had the very dubious effect of exaggerating the power of Russia and of Putin's government to influence events.

Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) sometimes sounds like he's arguing that the Russian intervention in the 2016 American election was a stunning feat of international cyber-aggression.

But in the "America" section, he also makes clear that it is actual weaknesses in American democracy that gives Russia or other powers an opening for illicit influence. The current way the Electoral College functions is very heavily undemocratic. That fact needs to be faced realistically. To put in the active voice, the Democratic Party must face it and take action to correct that and other problems. The Republican Party has just as much responsibility to do so. But their basic integrity and commitment to democracy are very much in doubt. And for all too many of them, it's clear that they reject democracy and the rule of law. The Democratic Party since the stalling of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s has avoided any serious consideration of needed Constitutional reforms as though they would be comparable to unleashing an anthrax outbreak. They have to change their mindset.

Russia as a world power

Russia and the United States have most of the nuclear weapons in the world. Russia also spends something like 10% of its GDP on military expenditures. (Though GDP numbers are not an exact measure of economic activity.) Russia's economy is usually taken to be somewhat the size of Italy's. In any case, it's not anywhere near the economic power of the former Soviet Union. And the EU's economy is far larger than Russia's. Germany and France together have a bigger military than Russia. Even excluding US contributions, NATO's military budgets are far greater than Russia's. Although that doesn't mean that they are directly comparable, because that compares a number of country to a single one, Russia.

Russia's nukes are a clear threat to the US and Europe. And Russia and the US have a vital interest in reducing and better regulating their nuclear stockpiles and in strenthening nuclear nonproliferation. We often talk these days about climate change being the biggest threat to humanity. But the single most devestating anthropogenic event affecting climate would be an all-out nuclear war betwee the US and Russia. And sudden, catastropic climate change would be only one of the devastating results.

But as the "nuclear Jesuits", the theoreticians of nuclear war, realized even in the 1950s, the actual use of nuclear weapons as a supplement to conventional war is limited in many ways. The American public regarded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as something like a magic power to win in wars. Some fools would still like to think of it that way. But, to take an example, if Russia decided to follow up on Putinist rhetoric on how Ukraine is part of eternal Russia and take it over, dropping a nuclear bomb or two on it would be anything but a magical solution. Assuming they would nuke targets of military significance, it would not only kill a lot of people instantly and destroy infrastructure that the Russians would want to preserve. It would also spread radioactive particles all around Ukraine and into neighboring countries, including Russia and the Russian-occupied Crimea.

Another major factor in Russia's geopolitical situation is the stable relationship that Russia currently has with China. A glance at a map of Russia will illustrate why this is significant. Russia has a long border with China. And the current stable relationship between Russia and China are distinctly different from most of the Cold War, when the "Sino-Soviet conflict" was a persistent factor, only belatedly fully recognized by the government and foreign policy establishment in the US. There was even a Sino-Soviet War in 1929, before the Communists took power in China.

Speaking of China, by some measures it is already the world's largest economy. Pretty soon it will be described as such without qualifiers. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in his book Der Abstieg des Westens: Europa in der neuen Weltordnung des 21.Jahrhunderts (2018) describes the implications of China's rise to being the leading world power from a realist foreign policy perspective. In his view, the US will have to deal with the practical implications of becoming the second-leading power. The European Union and Russia will be among the secondary level of world powers along with the US. Fischer argues from the standard realist viewpoint that the US should manage the transition carefully in cooperation with the EU and Russia. And cooperation between the latter two will be important in protecting EU and Russian interests, all while hopefully avoiding military clashes.

In other words, the US, the EU, and Russia cannot afford to treat each other exclusively as adversaries, much less enemies. And this aspect is something easy to lose sight of in the various polemics around Russian election interference. That doesn't mean that the US and EU should refrain from hard-headed negotiating, particularly not on a unilateral or asymmetrical basis. Just the opposite. Achieving the needed level of stable relationships will require clear-headed and expert negotiations on all sides. It should go without saying that the Orange Clown and his like are incapable of such a thing.

Russia and the European Union

One factor very much at work currently is that the Putin government is more set on breaking up the EU than developing more solid cooperation with it. Brexit serves that purpose. Which of course is not the same as the question of how much Russian influence may have affected the outcome of the Brexit referendum.

Russia isn't alone. Trump's America First policy also is hostile to the European Union. While Trump's position is more drastic than those of his predecessors, the Cheney-Bush Administration also sought to divide EU members against each others, especially over the Iraq War. And had notable success in doing so. The Clinton Administration was favorable to the EU. But they wanted a broad but relatively weak EU. Which led them to push for faster expansion than a more sober assessment of how well countries like Hungary and Romania met the basic democratic and rule-of-law critieria of the EU might have produced. The Obama Administration also took a similar position of preferring a united but weak EU. But Putin and Trump share a downright hostility to the EU.

Russia's political meddling in the EU is a more serious threat to European and American interests than anything the Russians are doing to meddle in American politics. That will look like an absurd statement to anyone convinced that Machiavellian Master Vladimir Putin decided the outcome of the 2016 American Presidential election. But not only is that a questionable call, as explained above. It seems far more likely that the Russian goal was to cause enough trouble for Hillary Clinton to politically weaken her Presidency. It's conceivable that they may not even regard the actual election result as a more favorable outcome.

But if nationalistic parties succeed in fragmenting the European Union, that will put Russia in a more powerful position in shaping world politics in the era of Chinese pre-eminence relative to the US and the EU. And Putin currently exerts actual leadership on far-right parties of the Nationalist International, though that designation is still an ironic grouping more than a formal alliance. But alliances among them do exist. The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), currently the junior coalition partner in Chancellor Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz' government, concluded a formal friendship and cooperation agreement with Putin's Russia United Party in 2016. So far, they haven't been caught taking illicit funds from Russia. Marine Le Pen's far-right party in France, currently called the National Rally (RN, Rassemblement national), on the other hand, has taken dubious Russian financing (Gabriel Gatehouse, Marine Le Pen: Who's funding France's far right? BBC News 04/03/2017):

But there is more to the relationship between Mr Putin and Ms Le Pen than ideological convergence. Because of the National Front's racist and anti-Semitic past, French banks have declined to lend the party money.

So Marine Le Pen has been forced to look elsewhere for financing.

In 2014, the National Front took Russian loans worth €11m (£9.4m). One of the loans, for €9m, came from a small bank, First Czech Russian Bank, with links to the Kremlin.

The general nationalist, Islamophobic, Christianist stance that Putin has taken in his current Presidency is attractive to the far-right parties in Europe, though some of them like the FPÖ have a more secular cast. There's no question that Putin's authoritarian practice and nationalist ideology have real political attraction for political groups in Europe, and not exclusively for those who would be considered part of the Nationalist International group. (E.g., Babyface Kurz' "turquoise" faction of the Christian Democratic People's Party in Austria.)

Here's where an interesting question arises than I can only touch on here. To what extent is the current relationship of the Russian government and ruling party like the relationship that existed between the Soviet Union and other Communist parties in the world? I don't doubt that Russian officials are drawing on their country's previous experience. I'll mention two relevant factors here. One is that the Communist political program was internationalist, however much the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, and other Communist countries may have applied their official ideology for nationalist purposes. The explicit nationalist and racist ideologies attractive to the Straches and Salvinis of Europe are much more difficult to package as internationalist. As one example, the Austrian FPÖ's plans to give dual citizenship to native-born Italians in the South Tyrol area of northern Italy, endorsed by Babyface's current Austrian government, are adamantly opposed by Italy's Salvini-dominated, more-or-less neofascist Italian government.

The second consideration is that, for all the differences, the basic problems involved in parties taking inspiration from foreign models is similar today to what the case for the USSR and affiliated Communist Parties was. There's nothing inherently wrong in a party looking to foreign examples for good ideas. In fact, its a completely commonplace thing. Lord knows the United States has never been shy about holding itself up as a model to the entire world.

On the other hand, there are national secrets to be guarded and national interests to be defended. Voters need to be confident that their leaders are committed to those things. The US Constitution specifies that the President must be a native-born American citizen. While it sounds dated today - it is really unnecessary today - it was designed to prevent a member of a European dynasty being installed as the American President. If a party owes some kind of allegiance to the ruling party of a foreign power, how can they be trusted to lead a national government?

Making such distinctions is not as hard as it may sound in the abstract. The US and EU countries have laws regulating what kinds of interactions with foreign governments are permitted and which not. And for the stealing of national secrets, people professing admiration for a foreign government that wants to steal the secrets aren't the most obvious candidates for that task. On the other hand, it's not in the least unusual for Democrats and Republicans in the United States to point to foreign examples and experiences to support their own proposals and priorities. The current court judgments against Trump allies like his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn are a reminder that laws defining what makes someone a foreign agent are fairly specific and capable of being enforced. (It's not illegal for an American citizen to act as a foreign agent for another government as long as the purpose is legal and the relationship is reported according to law.)

Evaluating Foreign Threats

Underestimating foreign threats has sometimes been a problem for the United States in the post-World War II era. The most obvious example being the Cheney-Bush Administration's reckless and irresponsible neglect of the very well known terrorist threat from Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda group in the first months of their rule.

But overestimating threats, aka, threat inflation, has caused far more problems for the US in that period. Jeffrey Record provides an excellent discussion of this problem in his The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007). Most of the material is included in the paper, Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (Strategic Studies Institute; Aug 2005). Inflating threats led to some of the worst disasters of post-WWII US foreign policy, the most spectacular being the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. The sorry hisory of "Team B" is a major cautionary tale. (See: Khurram Husain, Neocons: The men behind the curtain Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Nov-Dec 2003)

The American government, political parties, and voters need to keep those lessons in mind as we're moving into the era of China as the world's leading power. Take real threats seriously, including Russian interference in American elections. But don't lose our minds about it. And remember that there are very real factions, some business lobbies and some political ideologues, who have no compunction about wildly exaggerating international dangers for cynical purposes that are not at all identiical to American interests or the cause of peace.

Concluding Thoughts

Yes, Virginia, countries try to influence political outcomes in other countries. And all countries have to deal with it. It's nothing new. In fact, the phenomenon considerably preceded the establishment of nation-states as we know them today.

Noting the Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election, Mark Weisbrot writes (“Fort Trump” in Poland Is Another Dangerous, Delusional Idea CEPR 12/20/2018):

Americans are understandably upset about any foreign interference in our elections. As are Hondurans, Chileans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Italians, Iranians, or citizens of scores of other countries where the United States has intervened much more heavily ― sometimes with military coups to reverse results ― in elections. This includes Russia itself, where Americans organized and spent heavily to reelect their ally, Boris Yeltsin, in 1996.

Legitimate and illegitimate means of exercising such influence are defined in national and international law. And, yes, the US, Russia, and other countries will continue to break those rules in the pursuit of their national interests. That doesn't make it right. It doesn't make it effective or constructive, a fact the US really needs to keep more in mind in our own interventions. But it's a fact of international relations, and getting crazy about it isn't really helpful to any country's legitimate national interest.

And, yes, Trump should be impeached and removed from office. And he and his associates should be investigated and prosecuted for violations of the law, including those involving some kind of illegal collution with the Russian government.

[12/28/2018: The spelling of the name of Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been corrected.]