Message from the Director

“All politics is global politics,” I tell my students, in an inversion of Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum about the primacy of local concerns. We live in a single global economy, where increasingly complex networks of international value chains produce most of the goods we consume, and where political instability in distant corners of the world can disrupt retirement plans in Rochester. The international affairs that draw the most media attention are not necessarily the most important; terrorist activity, for example, is much less common in America today than it was in the 1970s. However, the international environment poses greater challenges than it has at any time in the last thirty years.

Europe is in trouble, which poses severe risks to the global economy. Nearly a decade into the global financial crisis spawned by the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble in 2008, Europe still struggles with an unemployment rate of 10%, and the Eurozone area is projected to grow only 1.7% this year. The Greek bailout program is frozen and threatening to destabilize financial markets again this summer, while Italy, with the eighth-largest economy in the world, faces political uncertainty and a national debt of 133% of GDP. Brexit, of course, was an unexpected blow that shook confidence in the European Union, and for the next two years the EU and the UK will be locked in combat over its terms, which will leave everyone dissatisfied and much worse off than before. Nationalist governments that are deeply skeptical of Europe are in power in Hungary and Poland. The tide of ethno-nationalist reaction seems to have been stemmed by elections of moderates in Austria, the Netherlands and France, and the prospects look strong for a similar outcome in Germany. Nevertheless, Europe is likely to be too paralyzed by its internal divisions to do anything very creative in the rest of the world, and it may yet succumb to another financial crisis.

Meanwhile, Russia has returned to being a profoundly unfriendly actor, and is making aggressive moves in the East. The sham civil war in Ukraine has continued for three years with no sign of progress towards a solution. A series of short-lived cease fires have been punctuated by fighting that has claimed over 10,000 lives, in which the ill-equipped Ukrainian army faces well-equipped Russian army troops who are being paid a multiple of their usual salary while they are technically on leave. Russia insists that peace will come when Ukraine fulfills the Minsk agreement, which it interprets to mean adopting a constitutional amendment that permanently neutralizes Ukraine—so that it can never join the EU or NATO—and decentralizes power so that Ukraine becomes a loose confederacy without any central foreign policy. No Ukrainian government is likely to accept these terms, particularly after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, or to survive long after accepting them; but in any case, the Ukrainians insist that Russia has to remove its forces from Ukraine before a peace deal can go forward. Russia, meanwhile, insists that it has no forces in Ukraine. Deadlock. The Putin regime’s strategy appears to be to do whatever is necessary to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, which Russian policymakers would regard as a strategic disaster. Indefinitely prolonging a low-level civil war that destabilizes Ukraine and preserves the status of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as a frozen conflict seems to be the most effective way to do that.

Enter the U.S. presidential election. Russian foreign-policy elites had convinced themselves that their position would become untenable if Hillary Clinton became president, because they regarded her as tougher than President Obama. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s public statements and cozy relationships with Russia reassured them that he would be more amenable to letting Russia have its way in Ukraine. His campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was a paid Russian agent, and he had managed Viktor Yanukovych’s successful presidential campaign in Ukraine. (Yanukovych was a pro-Russian politician who had been ousted in the Orange Revolution in 2004 after attempting to steal an earlier election, but was elected in 2010 when the liberal opposition failed to govern effectively and then split into opposing electoral camps. He was driven from office again by a popular uprising in 2014, after he withdrew from a popular trade agreement with the EU because of Russian pressure.) Trump’s chief advisor on Russia policy during the campaign, Carter Page, was an investor in Russia with financial connections to Russian oligarchs. Some of Trump’s own real-estate projects in Manhattan depended on investments by shady Russian front companies.

While it seemed unlikely at the time, it has now become increasingly clear that Russia intervened heavily in the U.S. presidential election in an effort to elect Donald Trump. Russian intelligence agencies hacked into the computer files of the Democratic National Committee and revealed embarrassing emails. Statements by members of Congress with oversight over intelligence matters have hinted that Russian authorities apparently followed up with an effort to spread misinformation about Clinton through social media using both humans and automated internet identities, or “’bots.” This effort is believed to have targeted swing states where Trump won surprising victories, including North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, so it may have made the crucial difference in an unusually close election. A Russian advisor to Putin whom I met recently insisted that this account is all science fiction. “We don’t have the capability to do this,” he argued. “If we had it, we would have used it, but we don’t have it.” The U.S. government took these allegations seriously in the closing days of the Obama administration, however, and the spreading scandal has already led to the resignation of Trump’s first National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn. Trump’s decision to fire James Comey, the FBI Director who was leading the investigation, has deepened the crisis to the point that it may overshadow his presidency.

All of this comes on top of a presidential agenda that is profoundly disruptive of U.S. foreign policy. One of the foundational principles of U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II has been commitment to allies, through multilateral alliances including NATO, and through strong bilateral partnerships. Donald Trump promises to reevaluate all of these commitments, and to observe them only if the United States reaps sufficient short-term benefits. It seems unlikely that he will walk away from NATO, but even raising the question is profoundly dangerous when Russia is testing the limits of our commitments and openly scorns the credibility of the U.S. guarantee to defend the Baltic states. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are NATO allies, and the NATO treaty obligates the United States to defend them if they are attacked. If Putin does not believe that commitment, he might be tempted to test it in a crisis, which poses the most plausible scenario that could escalate to a nuclear exchange that has existed since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Meanwhile, President Trump has made a point of snubbing most of our closest allies, including Britain, the EU generally and Germany in particular, Canada, Mexico and Australia.

Another fundamental principle is a commitment to an open international economy that assures opportunities for peaceful growth through trade and investment. Trump scrapped the laboriously negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the embryonic Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and threatens to renegotiate NAFTA, which has been the basis of the North American economy for over twenty years. More generally, his mercantilist focus on getting the best possible deal for the United States undermines the commitment of other countries to multilateral rules, and threatens to unravel the fabric of the international economy if pushed too far. A third fundamental principle has been to work cooperatively, through multilateral institutions when possible, to promote economic development in poor countries as a strategy of providing long-term growth and security. Trump has signaled that the United States may not do this anymore; indeed, his proposed budget cuts almost all foreign aid, almost all contributions to international institutions such as the UN, and much of the staff for U.S. embassies around the world. As his Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has said, “If you don’t fully fund diplomacy, ultimately I have to buy more ammunition.”

We live in uncertain times. I concluded my newsletter article last year by darkly hinting, “The center would become increasingly difficult to hold, however, if the United States joined the trend and elected a xenophobic, populist nationalist leader of our own.” This has come to pass, and a lot will now depend on the courage of our other elected leaders and appointed officials, whose task it will be to limit the damage. The consequences of our choices will be felt far beyond our borders, because all politics is global.

Randall W. Stone is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Skalny Center.