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- [00:00]
Karin Kanezan Antulya
I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or
- [00:05]
Eric Edelman
more headache days a month, each lasting
- [00:06]
Yasha Monk
four hours or more.
- [00:08]
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- [00:53]
Karin Kanezan Antulya
Why wait?
- [00:54]
Eric Edelman
Ask your doctor, visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. And now the good fight with yasha monk.
- [01:28]
Karin Kanezan Antulya
My name is Karin Kanezan Antulya and I'm the Africa Advocacy Director for the Africa Division at Human Rights Watch. I wrote this article for Africa's Fallen Stars and I think the piece was inspired by two things. I think the first one is my personal experience, the fact that I've worked in six African countries Burundi, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and I've lived in four. And the second one is I think it's somehow inspired by a lecture that former President Obama gave in 2009 in Accra, Ghana, when he said the 21st century will be shaped by what happens not just in Rome or Moscow or Washington, but also by what happens in Accra as well. Obviously talking about Ghana, but referring to Africa as a whole. And he continued by saying that Africa doesn't need strong men, but it needs strong institutions. And I guess paraphrasing what he said and adding maybe the bit that relates directly to this piece is that the faults in Africa's democratic architecture is more often than not aided by the short sightedness or miscalculation of the West. And the piece is really in broad strokes about four African leaders, four cases. These case studies speak to what I call the question of values and ethics, because to focus on purported stability at the expense of the rule of law and human rights is just an argument that governments in places like China and Russia often make when Western liberal democracies effectively work on the same basis, they expose and they strengthen an uncomfortable argument that there might be little fundamental difference between Chinese calculations and Western ones. Finally, end the piece by really urging Western countries, liberal democracies, to live up and to support the values of the rule of law and human rights. They advocating their African allies and partners because ultimately they might actually lose significant moral authority to criticize Beijing or Moscow for their deviations from those very same norms. So if you haven't read the piece, I would encourage you to do so and feel free to follow me. Arinantulya Karine Caneza Nantulia's piece called Africa's Fallen Stars was published by Persuasion. To learn more about the community we're building at Persuasion and to get similar articles directly into your inbox, head to www. Persuasion.community
- [04:14]
Yasha Monk
My guest today is Eric Edelman. Eric is a colleague of mine at SAIS at Johns Hopkins. He's the Roger Hertog Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the Philip Merrill center for Strategic Studies. He also has a distinguished career serving the American government as Under Secretary of Defense for policy from 2005 to 2009, as well as the American Ambassador to Finland and Turkey before that. A proud and outspoken never Trumper, he has done a lot to raise awareness to the dangers of Donald Trump from early in Trump's political career and we had a broad ranging conversation about the state of a Republican Party dangerous to American democracy, but also what countries can do to push back against the democratic recession, to hope that countries like Turkey, which he knows so well, may one day become Democratic again. Eric Adelman, welcome to the podcast.
- [05:15]
Eric Edelman
Thank you. It's great to be with you this morning.
- [05:17]
Yasha Monk
So we're colleagues at sais and you wear many hats, but one of the things we've been doing very courageously for the last years is to stand up to the current powers that be within the Republican Party, to be one of the key voices of another Trump movement. In certain ways, that movement should feel more upbeat now. Donald Trump is no longer the commander in chief. He's no longer in the White House. Those are all excellent things. And I think we should remember in a political moment that can feel a little bit dark, how much darker things could be right now. But on the other hand, I imagine you're probably less enthused now about the state of a Republican Party than even over the last years. Where do you think the hope for a sane Republican Party stands in the spring of 2021?
- [05:58]
Eric Edelman
If you'll allow me, let me back up for a second and address the question that I think in some sense underlies the line of inquiry you were opening, which is why is it important to have a sane Republican Party? And you know, there, I think it's very important for people to understand that we have a two party system and having both of those parties committed to democracy in an era where in which globally we've seen a rise of authoritarian populism, radical ethno nationalism around the world. For the United States, it is important that both parties be responsible and capable of alternating governance. It is given the very narrow margin in the House of Representatives and given the traditions of American politics that the presidential out party gained seats in the off year elections and given the fact that this year we're in a post census, so we're going to have reapportionment and then redistricting, it is very likely that the Republican Party will take back the House of Representatives at least and perhaps Senate as well, although the map is a little less favorable to Republicans in the Senate. And in my view, it's just essential that that party be committed to democracy. I think a lot of us hoped that with the departure of Donald Trump from office that the party would begin to repair itself and would look for off ramps to get out from under the thrall of Donald Trump. But unfortunately that has not happened. And of course, particularly after January 6th, I think people hoped that that would provide a huge off ramp for Republicans, certainly in the Congress, most of whom privately detest Trump, excoriate him in private conversations, to take advantage of the opportunity to break away from him. And unfortunately that has not happened. In fact, the reverse. I think he's tightening his hold on the party in many ways. I'm by nature a short term pessimist and a long term optimist. I was taught to be that by my grandfather who fled the Bolsheviks in 1919 and then fled the Nazis in 1940. And so he taught me to be a short term pessimist, but a long term optimist. So I grasp for any signs of optimism that I can find. And certainly you see a growth in the number of Republicans who voted for the January 6 commission in the House. But even as we're coming on the air today, Republicans in the Senate failed to come through and block debate on the January 6 commission in the Senate, which I think effectively kills it, at least for the moment. I'm hopeful we'll have some other mechanism, a thorough investigation of what happened on January 6th. But you know, that's a less hopeful sign, it seems to me, speaking to
- [08:54]
Yasha Monk
the need for a sane Republican party. Look, in principle, it could be a different political party. I mean, there is a world in which Republican Party is eclipsed by a different insane conservative party. I think the institutional obstacles to that are high. But the fundamental need for it is simply that there's a lot of right of center Americans and there always will be and they will be capable of winning elections some of the time. And so even if you, I imagine, consider yourself right of center, I consider myself left of center. But even for those of us who are left of center, we need the political organization that represents those of our compatriots who are right of center to be committed to decency and to democratic values because they will sometimes be in power. And I think when people don't see the need for that, it's often because they have some theory in their mind about how right of center Americans are going to die out. Either because the young are all left leaning, which is not in fact true, or because minorities are all left leaning but growing as a proportion of a population. That story is not nearly as straightforward as it seems. That seems to be the fundamental case.
- [10:02]
Eric Edelman
I agree. But if you permit me, Asha, I would add one other thing which I try to remind my friends on the other side of the aisle periodically, which is it's great sport for some of them to look at the auto defe that is the Republican Party today and to say, oh, look at what a disaster it is. You know, look, there are issues in the Democratic Party as well. And I don't mean to say that right now the crises in the two parties are the same or they're equivalent. They're not. What's going on in the Republican Party is much more dangerous, much more serious. But there are elements of the progressive left left of the Democratic Party who also harbor certain kinds of anti Democratic populist sentiments that I think are potentially also very dangerous for democracies. And persuasion, of course, has done a great job, I think, in providing a forum where people who believe in Democratic values on both sides of the aisle can have these kinds of discussions. And it's important, I think, for people in the center left and center right both to be taking up their responsibilities to police their own homes, as it were, and to try and tamp down these unhealthy anti democratic elements.
- [11:12]
Karin Kanezan Antulya
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- [11:39]
Yasha Monk
what would the optimistic scenario look like for the Republican Party or for a different right of center political party to come in? Is the anti democratic nature of a Trump regime so driven by the grassroots that it is just likely to prevail for the next 20, 30 years? Or could it be that the right charismatic presidential candidate in 2024, 2028, recaptures the party? Probably not by being an anti Trumper, probably not by being one of the people who most courageously have criticized Trump, but somebody who just offers a different kind of vision of what the Republican Party might be. If somebody told me by 2030 some of these worries about the Republican Party have subsided, I guess the scenario I would paint in my mind would be that someone came along who managed to wrest the party back not by being the most morally forthright critic of Trump, but by moving beyond Trump, by having their own sort of vision of what the Republican Party should be in the 2000s and the 2000s. What do you think that would look like and how realistic a path is that? Or is there a different path that you think is more realistic?
- [12:43]
Eric Edelman
First, I think I start from the proposition that it may not be possible to save the Republican Party from its current self. And that's in part because of the factor that you raised, which is the very strong numbers of folks in the Republican base who seem to want this politics of grievance that seems to dominate today. I don't think that's dominant in the Republican conference, for instance, in either the Senate or the House. But there are unfortunately all too many members in both the House and the Senate who will maintain a judicious silence in the face of this vociferous element of the party, which I would say probably is in the vicinity of maybe 40% of Republican voters. So it's not trivial. So I like to think of myself as not being illusioned about how easy this will be, and I think it will be a long struggle. I don't think it's going to get resolved in one election cycle or two election cycles. I do think it will be a decade at least before the party can exercise itself of these forces. I think in the first instance, what has to happen is that Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger need to win their primaries and get reelected to office. There has to be a successful dissent wing of the party upon which those of us who want to move past Trumpism can build. That's not a given for both of them and others, then I think one of the things that probably has to happen is Republicans have to go through some cycles losing elections. To me, one of the worst things would be if they go into the 22 cycle and they win the House and the Senate while denying that what happened on January 6 was an insurrection against democracy and not really addressing the major issues in front of the country, but purely on Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and the other symbolic grievance issues, that performative politics of grievance that they've embraced. If that's seen as a winning formula, then it's going to make this process longer and harder to win. I mean, the other possibility I think is at some point the party fractures. I mean, if you look at American political history, which is something I actually, in my misspent youth and graduate school, spent a lot of time doing and have recently gone back to studying the 1840-1860 period, which doesn't have a happy ending. As you know, it took about a decade for the Whig Party to fragment and the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to fragment into a free soil wing which then coalesced into the modern Republican Party that elected Abraham Lincoln. The problem with that scenario, which in some ways might be the most attractive scenario, is that our polity is not as malleable as it was in the 1840s, 70 years after the country was established. It's much more routinized and bureaucratized now. And the two parties really have a monopoly on the political system. And as you said, the obstacles in terms of ballot access, et cetera, are really considerable. But if it were to happen, you would have to have, I think, a large group of current Republican office holders who would want to break away, and probably some on the Democratic side as well, who were concerned about some of the things I mentioned earlier, the kind of Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema types who might then coalesce to create another party. But again, I think there are considerable obstacles to that happening, and I think it's less likely.
- [16:29]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, I think it's hard to think through that scenario. One point in its favor, perhaps, is that we've seen similar surprising transformations in other countries. I mean, certainly parties with a system of proportional representation where two parties used to get 80, 85% of a vote between them, those parties are now down to 50, 40, sometimes 30% of the vote between them. And in a country like France, which these first presidential elections had a kind of two party system, some more institutional way to get a third candidate through because of the second round runoff. You know, you had the rise of some, like Emmanuel Macron, who completely obliterated the sort of traditional party system. So there's some evidence that there's something about fluidity of social media and the sort of ideological realignments that are going on at the moment. And I think the loss of sociological base of traditional political parties, but I suppose makes that seem like a more realistic prospect than it would have been for much of American history. But I agree, but it remains very unlikely.
- [17:28]
Eric Edelman
You know much more about this, Yasha, than I do, and you've written so much about the democratic recession and some of these phenomena that we're talking about. I do know a little bit about France and a little bit about Italy because I actually wrote my doctoral dissertation on US Italian relations, so I have some familiarity with Italian politics. But is it really the case in France? Let's just use that as an example, that for the French, the way they voted in the election was as much a part of their identity as it appears to be in polling in the United States. I mean, if you look at some of the polling that Pew has done over the last several years in which people say things like, I'd rather have my son or daughter marry someone from another religion than another political party, that strikes me as somewhat different than my friends and colleagues in France who might have voted for the her in the past, but they'll vote for Macron now. Or someone who might have voted for Christian Democrats in Italy, but then voted for Forza Italia, you know, when Berlusconi ran or something. It doesn't seem to me to be quite as much a part of identity in Europe as it does appear to have become in the United States. I don't think it was always that way.
- [18:44]
Yasha Monk
I think that's a good question and implicitly a very perceptive point. I guess I would say that there was a moment in European history when that was the case, but that's when political parties were much more sociologically based. So I think even in Germany, which is never a sort of deeply divided society in the post war era, whether you voted for Social Democrats or the Christian Democrats did come from a deep set of identity markers of whether you're working class or bourgeois, whether you are religious or not, whether you lived in a small town or a big town, those electoral coalitions were always a little bit more complicated than they seemed. I mean, there was always, for Example, a sort of liberal bourgeoisie who voted for the Social Democrats, and there was always conservative workers who voted for the Christian Democrats. But nevertheless, I think there was a deep question of identity there that is all eroded. And of course, that was in certain ways true in the United States in the past. But if you were an Irish or an Italian immigrant, you would vote for a Democratic Party as a matter of course. And if you were sort of small businessman or a businessman in small town America, you would vote for Republican Party as a matter of course. Those sociological realities have also dissolved. But you're right that American politics is, in a weird way, at the forefront of a repolarization, where suddenly you have an equally strong or even deeper loyalty to one political party, but it's not based on the same kind of sociological and certainly on the same kind of class things as it was in the past. Now, I guess one of the questions is, is this positive partisanship or negative partisanship? If it's negative partisanship, then perhaps a third party might have a way in. So if it's negative partnerships, just hatred of the other party, and then perhaps you're willing to vote for a third party if it's positive partnership as well. If it's no, I actually have a deep identity as a Democrat, as a progressive Democrat, or as a Trump Republican, then the third party is dead in the water. So I don't know how you feel about that.
- [20:32]
Eric Edelman
It's an interesting question. It probably needs some actual research. As you were speaking, I was thinking, of course, that Communist Party identity was very strong. You know, that was not just a go to the ballot box and cast a ballot. That was a lifestyle choice in a lot of ways. And that's why the French Communist Party was always regarded as a party, not like the others, because it was very much wrapped up in its own alternative culture, really. Domenite had all sorts of festivals that people went to, and the same in
- [21:02]
Yasha Monk
Italy with Festa DEI Unita, which was, you know, when I started going to Italy in the late 90s, still a big thing.
- [21:08]
Eric Edelman
Right. So it's an interesting question because you can argue it round or flat. I suspect that at least for the Trump kind of vote, a lot of it is negative partisanship. It's why you see so much of, you know, the owning the libs kind of performative stuff on social media among politicians like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley who are vying for the mantle of Trumpism. I guess the thing that I think is, you know, if Trump really is ultimately removed, and this is One reason why I really wish he had been successfully convicted in the second impeachment, because that would have barred him from running for office. And I do worry now that there is a reasonable chance he might make some kind of comeback. And we might want to talk about what happens if he does, because I think the 24 election, if he's running in it, is going to be way more dangerous than the 20 election for a whole variety of reasons we could talk about. But if he was excluded from it, I think that all of these Trump wannabes, for the most part in the Republican Party, the people vying for the mantle of Trumpism, are not going to be able to pull it off. I mean, I do think Trump is sort of sui generis in that sense. In part, as much as I despise him, he actually has a shtick, and he makes it entertaining. None of Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton, none of these guys have that flair.
- [22:39]
Yasha Monk
There is, and it's very hard to recognize from a perspective of somebody who deeply disdains him. But there's both a sense of humor, a kind of Alaska atmosphere, and, oddly, a joyousness in his public Persona. I mean, there is a bitterness and an anger as well, but there is a sense of sort of the fun and the joy of challenging the structures that be. And I think one of the things that's missing in his imitators is that it's sort of all of the nastiness without the sort of joy that he gives his supporters, even as he rightly horrifies everybody else.
- [23:13]
Eric Edelman
Well, his rallies to me are like, you know, professional wrestling event. And it's not an accident because he comes from, you know, that kind of world of entertainment and has participated in a lot of world wrestling events. And so he's the perfect, you know, heel who fans still adore. And that's a whole trope in American professional wrestling. And on another podcast earlier this year, I said, you know, there's no amount of pork rinds that are going to turn Ted Cruz, you know, who went to Princeton and Harvard, or Josh Hawley, who went to Stanford and Yale, into authentic populists. They themselves are elitists who are masquerading as populists. So I do think it makes a difference whether Trump actually runs again. And right now, it's looking to me like he will run. And so a lot will depend on the legal system. Does he get indicted? How tied up in litigation is he in defending both criminal and civil cases? And, you know, does that cause him to trim his sails somewhat or not. But if he runs, you know, the polling all suggests he'll be formidable and that he'll win nomination.
- [24:23]
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- [24:54]
Yasha Monk
What do you think about his prospects in the general election? And does that depend on his stance and his appeal, or does that depend in good part on both who his opponent is, whether it's Joe Biden or somebody else, and how many successes Democrats have to show for themselves or how many mistakes we're going to make in the coming years?
- [25:14]
Eric Edelman
Yeah, what my fear is is that by 24 there might be a bout of inflation that could be very damaging to President Biden's prospect for reelection. Or Kamala Harris. I think effectively it's either going to be Biden or Harris. I don't think there's much chance that another Democrat would emerge.
- [25:33]
Yasha Monk
If Biden doesn't mind. It would be incredibly hard for anybody to win a primary election against Kamala Harris.
- [25:38]
Eric Edelman
I agree. And so I've been having this debate with my son, actually, who's 27, and he was saying inflation doesn't matter. And I said, no, you only think that because you've never actually lived through a period of inflation and we've had very low inflation in the United States for 40 years. And it can be extremely corrosive. I think it would be very corrosive, and I would be very concerned about Trump's chances right now. His polling nationally doesn't look very good. I mean, that's something like 66% say they don't want him to run again nationally. Not of Republicans, obviously, but a lot can change. And when you're governing, you're alienating voters. That's just the nature of the beast. So my concern is it's not even whether Trump could win the popular vote. I think he would almost certainly lose it. But the question is by how much and in what states. I mean, that's one thing we've seen. Republicans ought to be very concerned by the fact that they haven't won the popular vote for president since 1988, save once in 2004 when George W. Bush was reelected, and then it was still pretty close. I think he won by 3 million votes.
- [26:49]
Yasha Monk
That's remarkable. I somehow hadn't thought about the fact that they haven't won the popular vote since 1988, with the exception of 2004. That's a remarkable fact about politics. I want to shift a little bit to some of the stakes for democracy in the United States, but also around the world. One thing I'm still struggling to make sense of is how much damage Donald Trump did ultimately do to democracy around the world. I think his actions were horrifying. The fact that he was clearly on the side of overtime populists like Viktor Orban in Hungary, he was very close to run remote in India, was all damaging. There's certainly circumstantial evidence that democracy has been impacted by it. We're now in the deepest democratic recession. 2020 was worse than the years before. But I guess how much at this point does it matter who the president of the United States is for the fate of democracy around the world? And how different would those four or five years have looked in countries like Hungary, like India, or for that matter in Turkey, where you were ambassador in the past, if we'd ended up with President Clinton in 2016?
- [27:50]
Eric Edelman
It's an interesting counterfactual. I'm not quite sure whether it would or wouldn't have been very different. I mean, I think one thing would have been different, which is there would have been at least somewhat more of an emphasis on both human rights violations in places certainly like Turkey, but also more, you know, support in general for the rule of law and for institutions like Central European University and a place like Hungary, which had played an important role not just in Hungary, but in central Europe more broadly. So I think there would have been certainly some differences whether those differences would have only been marginal or whether they would have amounted to something that changed the trajectory of the democratic recession, as you were saying, I think is a much harder question to answer because I think the democratic recession is rooted in a lot of structural causes that it's not very easy for one president to reverse or to change. I'd be interested in your reaction. But to me, this global democratic recession, there's some things that you and some of your co authors have pointed to with regard to the general decline in appreciation globally of the importance of things like free speech and other formal elements of democracy. I'm not quite sure why that is. It may be the success of democracy which then gets taken for granted. I haven't been able to figure out how to explain that. But I think there are other factors that run a little bit deeper. There is the unequal distribution of economic gains from globalization, which has certainly occurred here in the United States but also in various other societies. It has fueled in some sense some understandable economic resentments. Although I think the economic resentments have not been the real driver of this. It's been more, I think the cultural elements here which have been brought to the fore by things like greater global immigration, some of which has been brought about by, in the EU different institutional changes that were made to facilitate that, but also because of conflicts around the world and climate change, which have driven waves of immigration from sub Saharan Africa, but also from conflict regions in the Middle east, from Afghanistan all the way over to Syria and Libya. And those have obviously fueled lots of resentments in different countries. And then one aspect that I don't think gets as much attention as it should has been a global increase of women in the workforce. And this is a global phenomenon which has displaced some male workers or created at least some cultural dissonance for them. And I think all of those things have gone into the mix.
- [30:38]
Yasha Monk
They're all interesting. I think the last one is especially interesting. And there is a cross national pattern in either every or virtually every country in which four times populace have been elected. But they've been more popular among men than among women.
- [30:50]
Eric Edelman
I'm relying on Pippa Norris's work and some of that. And it's created what my wife likes to call testosterone poisoning in the body politic. And you see that here too. There's a cult of macho that Trump tries to project and which Ted Cruz pathetically tries to appeal to, as he did most recently with his attacks on the recruitment of folks in the military in the United States. You know, is a part of this larger pattern. And I guess the point I was trying to make is these are big social forces that Hillary Clinton wasn't going to be able to change in one four year term.
- [31:26]
Yasha Monk
And that's partially why I asked the question which is in my mind it was a setup to ask what can the Biden administration do in order to contain the Democratic. Clearly what they can do and what they are doing is to signal that the United States is concerned about democratic backsliding and human rights violations. They can signal that many of these countries can expect a closer relationship with the United States if they re established democratic institutions and norms rather than backslide further. But how much of a lever do they really have? And therefore, how optimistic can we be that we might be able to contain the democratic recession or perhaps at some point reverse it?
- [32:06]
Eric Edelman
So I think it's a complicated question. I guess I would say that in the first instance, the damage Trump has done at home makes it tougher for his successor to try and project a policy that takes into account the many issues you just raised abroad. And the reason is, although Biden has said all the right things about promoting democracy and human rights, again and fitfully in places, has tried to implement it a little bit, it's very hard. And it's hard, for instance, for the people at the National Endowment for Democracy, at iri, the International Republican Institute, or ndi, the National Democratic Institute, to go out and talk about the importance of free and fair elections. When you've got major issues in the United States about the elections, and when our authoritarian adversaries like Russia and China are explicitly trying to make the point that you're no better than we are, you criticize us, but you know your democracy is no better than ours. It's an explicit part of the political warfare that I think Russia and China have been waging against the United States now for four or five years at least, if not longer. And it's a point that Liz Cheney tried to make in her Washington Post op ed the other day about why it's important to have the January 6th commission and to dispel the big lie about what happened in our election. So that's very much a complicating factor. Having said that, I do think that the United States has been, for all of our flaws, and believe me, I'm aware of them, and I don't discount them. We have been the most successful democratic experiment in the history of the world since 1776. And when we say that for us, the condition of democracy in the world matters, it enables American presidents to play a role that they might not have been able to play elsewhere. So to go back to the Reagan administration, for instance, President Reagan famously said that he saw the United States, as John Winthrop did, as a city on the hill, a beacon unto the nations. And you saw during his tenure, the United States actually moved to help ease Ferdinand Marcos out of power in the Philippines, Baby Doc Duvalier out of power in Haiti, obviously, both Philippines and Haiti. I'm not touting them as great success stories. Both of them have a prolonged history of problems. But it does enable a president, when circumstances present themselves where you can make a difference, to actually act in a way that advances democracy and freedom and human rights in the world. Moreover, when we hold ourselves up as that beacon, it also forces us to address our own deficiencies. Sam Huntington wrote about this in his book the Politics of Disharmony, where he talked about the tension between American ideals and the actual behavior of its institutions, and that inevitably there became dissonance between them. And that's what led to great periods of reform in the United States, the effort to bring the institutions back into consonance with the ideals. So I think it's important for us at home to hold out this vision of ourselves for the rest of the world and to try and exercise it on behalf of greater freedom and democracy. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with
- [35:44]
Yasha Monk
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- [35:47]
Eric Edelman
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- [35:50]
Yasha Monk
You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments.
- [35:55]
Eric Edelman
But that's weird. Okay, one judgment.
- [35:59]
Yasha Monk
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- [36:07]
Eric Edelman
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- [36:13]
Yasha Monk
So what sort of concretely is it that the administration could and should be doing? Is it that when there is a conflict within a country you put pressure on authoritarian leaders to step down? Or is it sort of tactical, so you're waiting for the right opportunity and trying to make your influence felt in order to move things towards democracy? Or do you think there's a broader conceptual frame or a broader set of standards, a broader doctrine that can be helpful as required?
- [36:43]
Eric Edelman
Well, I'm mindful that I worked for a president who in his second inaugural address said that his objective for the United States was to end tyranny in the world. And it was pretty expansive, objective, laudable, but pretty hard to execute and did
- [37:00]
Yasha Monk
not sadly come to fruition.
- [37:01]
Eric Edelman
Yes, sadly, things have moved actually in a quite different direction. There's one level at the abstract, this is kind of declaratory policy about the importance of democracy and human rights in the real world. Obviously this gets mediated by all sorts of geopolitical factors, but to take some concrete examples. So just this week we've seen a assault on the rules based international order by Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus with the incident of air piracy that allowed him and his government to force down a civilian airliner and take Protossevich, a Belarusian dissident and journalist, prisoner, and then to produce a hostage video after he had clearly been beaten. I think this is an opportunity for the administration to show some leadership with our European colleagues who have taken some steps, but I think are still struggling for an appropriate response. But it also raises the question of how we approach Putin, because Lukashenko couldn't do any of this without support of Putin. In fact, he's going to Sochi today to meet with Putin to reinforce his position. And I would like to see President Biden perhaps either incorporate this somehow into his agenda with Putin when he meets with him on the 16th of June at the summit, or maybe even threaten to postpone the summit until Putin does something about Lukashenko. I mean, nobody has more influence over Belarus than Vladimir Putin. Is also, frankly, a question which I think we have to get to the bottom of my hope. Bellingcat is working on it right now about how involved Russia was in this incident. So the CEO of Ryanair has written a letter to the Belarusian government complaining about this act of state sponsored air piracy, but moreover noting that three people got off the flight, which I think originated in Athens, if I'm not mistaken, and was headed to Latvia, and they got off in Minsk along with Protostevich and his Russian girlfriend. Who were these people? And it may have been that they were purely Belarusian kgb, because they still call it the KGB there. I have my own suspicions that it might have actually been maybe some Russian FSB or SVR operatives, because it's hard for me to believe that Belarusian intelligence on its own was able to carry this out. So in any event, I would like to see the Biden administration do more on that score. I think they've also been maybe a little too timid about making a big deal about Navalny. And this for me is not only a human rights issue, but it is more than a human rights issue because it's part of the broader trend that the Lukashenko episode also speaks to, which is the transnational repression, as Freedom House have called it, of human rights advocates and activists and dissidents by authoritarian governments around the world. And this is something we really need to get a handle on and put a stop to. Moreover, in the instance of Navalny, along with the Skripals and Litvinenko, these are instances of, at least in the cases of Skripal and Navalny, the use of banned chemical agents that violate the Chemical Weapons Convention to commit political assassination. And I think we've got to be much stronger on this than we have been. Biden has a meeting coming up on the margins of the NATO summit, which will be before the Putin summit with Recep Tayyip. Erdogan, the president of Turkey, and I hope he raises several cases of human rights issues. Certainly Osman Kavala, but also Salahaten Demurtas, the head of the Kurdish party, the HDP in Turkey. I hope that those will be at the forefront of the discussion with Erdogan, whatever other issues they need to discuss, and there are obviously several, but that I think ought to be at the forefront. I don't think it's by accident, as I might have said in an earlier part of my career, when I was a Sovietologist, that the NATO meeting on Wednesday that issued the statement about Lukashenko, it was the Turkish government that tried to water down the statement. And we don't know why the Turkish government did that. But my supposition would be that Erdogan said to himself, this is an interesting precedent. I might be able to use that. There are a lot of flights that go over Turkish airspace. And so this is one reason why I think we really have to try and take stronger action.
- [41:44]
Yasha Monk
And it's one of those places where I've been mocked by some people for caring about norms and democratic norms. And the way in which the ridicule sometimes goes is that it's sort of like if you come over for dinner, I really care about the norm of how you hold your fork and knife. And democratic norms are in a sort of similar ballpark of just good manners. When justice is at stake, who cares about good manners? But I think that's really a misunderstanding of both the nature and the importance of norms in the democratic realm, but also here in the international realm. I mean, making sure that the norm that you don't commit air piracy is maintained really guarantees that you can be on a plane without worrying that because either you happen to be a dissident or there happens to be a dissident on board, you're suddenly forced down by a military jet to land in some other location. This is a key example of why the maintenance of norms is not, oh, please don't put the fork in your right hand and the knife in your left hand. It is the maintenance of our ability to cooperate internationally and domestically in really key ways. You mentioned Turkiy and Erdoan. You were an ambassador in Turkey relatively early in Erdoan's rule. I'm intrigued by how you see the trajectory of the Erdogan regime in the early 2000s, when you were ambassador there, there was a very lively debate about whether to see Erdogan as a democratizer, as somebody who is taking on some of the ways in which the Turkish regime was in fact exclusionary to devout Muslims some ways in which it was sort of an illiberal secularist regime. And the people who saw him as a danger, either as an authoritarian or as an Islamist. How do you see the sort of 20 year trajectory of Turkey? And what can we learn by re examining those debates?
- [43:35]
Eric Edelman
You know, when I arrived AS ambassador in 2003, the AKP, the Justice and Development Party, had been in office for about a year. And I happened to participate in President Bush's meeting in December of 2002 with Erdogan, when he was not yet Prime Minister. He was still under a political ban at that point, and only later the ban was lifted, he was elected to Parliament and became prime minister. But in that meeting, he made a point of telling President Bush that he was a Islamic democrat and in essence depicted himself as a Muslim equivalent of a European Christian democrat, and essentially said, you know, I want to create space in Turkey for those pious Muslims who have sort of, as you said, been somewhat excluded under the Kemalist dispensation. And as you can imagine, in a period of time when we were already at war in Afghanistan, about to go to war in Iraq, and dealing with the entire panoply of jihadist terrorist adversaries and understanding that the war on terror, as we called it in those days, was more than a military enterprise. It really was about a debate inside Islam about Islam's accommodation to modernity and that we needed people like what Erdogan was describing in order to, in the long run, prevail against these Salafist jihadist influences in Islam, which are quite strong.
- [45:21]
Yasha Monk
It was a convincing sales pitch.
- [45:22]
Eric Edelman
It was a very convincing sales pitch. And of course, there was motivated bias on the part of all of us. Right. This was like manna from heaven. You're the ones we've been looking for. Thank God you're here. The AKP looked like moderate Muslims from central casting for those who were looking for people to take up that part of the debate in the Muslim world. And I would say for the first year or so of my tenure, up until December of 2004, which was when the European Council formally agreed to reopen the accession process for Turkey to the European Union and to begin the process of negotiating the various chapters of, I think 29 or something of the Aqui Communitaire that would allow Turkey ultimately someday, everyone who knew it was going to be a long term process to accede to the European Union. And Erdogan in those days was extremely good about saying, you know, the EU says we must meet these Copenhagen criteria, but we're going to rename them the Ankara criteria. Because even if there weren't a European Union, you know, we'd want to be doing these things ourselves. It actually took an enormous effort at that December Brussels summit to get Erdogan to take yes for an answer. To my surprise, I mean, I was in touch with the then Director General of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, the senior civil servant who was in Erdogan's suite. I was on his cell phone with him constantly. My British counterpart, whom you may know, Peter Westmacott, who was later ambassador here in the United States, was in Brussels with Tony Blair in Erdogan's suite. Jacques Chirac was in the suite trying to sweet talk Erdogan, as was Gerhard Schroeder, who was then Chancellor.
- [47:19]
Yasha Monk
And the point is that Erdogan actually didn't want the accession process to be reopened, or what was the.
- [47:26]
Eric Edelman
So it's very interesting, first of all, this had been a big ongoing U.S. interest, I think, through 11 presidential administrations going back to, I think, 1963, when Turkey first applied for membership in the then European Economic Community, the eec. And so to me, this was one of the most important elements of our mission in Turkey, which is why I was working on this issue. I mean, we're not members of the eu. All we could do was use our influence with the EU and then try use our influence with the Turks to take yes for an answer. Erdogan was offended by some of the conditionality that was attached to the invitation. So he said. And when he ultimately agreed, but came back to Turkey in December of 04 and gave the sour speech, I mean, this should have been, in my view, an occasion for Turkish governments for 40 years have been trying to accomplish this. I finally achieved it. This is a great day for Turkey, you know, on and on and on. Instead it was all this stuff about they think they're going to make us do this with the Kurds and make up with the Armenians and that we're going to live with these limitations on labor mobility. That was one of the things that was in there that really galled him. But it was a very, very sour speech. And for me personally, I date a lot of what's happened since to that speech.
- [48:51]
Yasha Monk
But do you feel that this was a turning point or that there was signs that had been missed earlier on?
- [48:57]
Eric Edelman
There were already some earlier signs. There was the so called Zena law against adultery that had been passed in the summer of 04 that led to a little mini crisis with the EU, there were a couple of cases in the European Court of Human Rights that they lost, having to do with the headscarf ban. That elicited reactions. There were some worrying anomalies I was seeing even before that. But after that, it became increasingly clear to me that the EU accession process for Erdogan was something that he had instrumentalized to advance his own political interests. You don't hear, for instance, Erdogan saying today, oh well, screw the Copenhagen criteria, we're going to move forward with the Ankara criteria. He doesn't say that anymore and he has no interest in it.
- [49:45]
Yasha Monk
Where do you think that leaves the country now? I mean, it seems to me, and this is of interest, I think, beyond Turkey, that at this point Erdoan is probably less popular than he was certainly in the early 2000s, but he may be significantly less popular than he was in the last few years. But that he has also gained such complete control over the media and the country, such far reaching control, not complete, but far reaching control over the electoral system. But it's also harder than ever to imagine him being pushed out of office, certainly in fair, but also in free elections. What does that tell us about the future of these regimes? I mean, is he now essentially just a dictator who's going to stay in power likely until the end of his life, unless there's a sort of revolutionary movement? Or what's the prospect of Turkey and other authoritarian populist regimes that have been consolidated in both auto and nature to this extent?
- [50:35]
Eric Edelman
So Turkey suffers very badly from very poor quality of its domestic political opposition. The jpe, the People's Republican Party, nominally the party of Ataturk, the Kemalist party. It's supposed to be a social democratic party, but it's a highly nationalist party, the mhp, the nationalist party that Erdogan has allied himself with. And I think the best description of the regime is an Islamo nationalist regime. That's really what it's become. Jenny White, who is a very good scholar of Turkey friend, and she's now up at the University of Uppsala, she's taught for bu for many years now in Sweden at University of Uppsala, coined that phrase Muslim nationalist regime. And I think that's right. So the opposition to Erdogan has been divided and quite feckless. But as you say, he's lost ground with the public. And Turkey is on the cusp, I believe, of a very serious economic crisis crisis, a debt crisis domestically and a balance of payment crisis internationally. They right now, I think, are at negative 50 billion in foreign reserves and after burning through something like 125 million this summer under the economic guidance of Erdogan's son in law and putative successor. And therein lies the problem for Erdogan. Because of the corruption that he and his family, I think have engaged in, I think he's got the same problem Putin does. Right. And a lot of these electoral authoritarians, because these are all kind of electoral authoritarian regimes. I can't turn power over to anybody who's not either a blood relative or a crony who will guarantee that I'm taken care of in the way that Putin himself did for some members of the Yeltsin family after they turned things over to him in December of 1999. And that's, I think, the problem for Erdogan. And so the system, it's become more and more illiberal and more and more undemocratic. I mean, you now see violent attacks against opposition leaders. Mrs. Merrill, who is the head of the so called Yi Party, the good Party, who is a splinter group from the Nationalist Party, she's a former interior minister, she's actually fairly popular figure. She just went to the Black Sea coast and was attacked by a mob, as have other opposition leaders in Turkey. This has been clearly instigated by the regime. You were talking about free and fair elections. You know, elections in Turkey have never been completely fair because the media has been so beholden to the state that whoever was in government had a huge advantage with the media traditionally, but they'd always been, you know, free in the sense that there didn't seem to be a lot of chicanery at the ballot box. That's changed over the last half a decade or so. Certainly in the 2017 constitutional referendum that created this presidential system that's made Erdogan extremely powerful as president. There's a lot of indication that the vote was fiddled to get over the 50% approval mark, including in the southeast. A lot of irregularities in the mayoral races in Istanbul and in Ankara. In fact, the Istanbul one had to be rerun. And of course, Ikram Imamolu, the current mayor, who is potentially maybe a successor to Erdogan eventually. He seems to be quite successful as mayor so far, which is galling to Erdogan. And Erdogan is doing everything he can to make it hard for Imamolu to be successful. I think it's going to be a long road, a hoe to get him out of office, unless natural causes somehow takes him. And he's, I think now casting about, he cashiered his son in law in part because there was so much uproar over the loss of foreign exchange reserves to support the lira foolishly that he resigned. But I think that was sort of to spare him so they can bring him back. Because I can't imagine that Erdogan would find any other successor he could live with.
- [54:39]
Yasha Monk
This is certainly part of a problem, as you were saying of his regimes, but you need somebody whose loyalty you can be sure of. You said earlier in the conversation that you are a short term pessimist and a long term optimistic. I think we've spent a lot of time covering the reasons for short term pessimism. Why don't you leave us with some of the reasons why you retain your long term optimism?
- [55:01]
Eric Edelman
Well, about the United States of America. I retain my long term optimism because we are a very resilient society that's been through enormous upheavals in the past and always managed to come out better and stronger. Whether it was the Civil War in 1860s or the Great Depression or the aftermath of the Vietnam War, we've always managed to come out of terrible moments in our history and gone on to succeed and do many good things. So I'm counting on that resilience. I mean, I think as a free society, we remain one of the most innovative societies in the world and one of the ones that's most open to innovation that's put us at the forefront of technology. I do think we have a challenge now from China because of China's effort, so called civil military fusion, to try and harness future technologies, in particular for military purposes like AI and quantum computing and things like that. I mean, they're putting enormous investments into this. I think we may have to rethink some of our traditional, more hands off approaches. I think we may have to contemplate some kind of industrial policy that in the past I personally would have probably opposed, but I'm still fairly bullish on us long term. But we have some pretty serious challenges.
- [56:24]
Yasha Monk
Is there similar reasons to be a long term optimist about the state of democracy in the world?
- [56:28]
Eric Edelman
I'm a long term optimist about democracy in the world because at the end of the day I think there's something about human beings that they want to have this kind of ability to express themselves. Certainly we see that in the various global value surveys that are done. This is really pretty much something that's universal. The desire for self expression and the freedom to enjoy it. I don't think it's bound by ethnicity or race or religion. It seems to be universal craving that people have, and I think over a very long period of time, it's tough to repress that. So I remain hopeful that some of these phenomena that we have noticed that Freedom House has documented, that you and colleagues have documented about the Democratic recession, I'm hoping they turn out to be
- [57:21]
Yasha Monk
epiphenomena, your word in God's ear. May that turn out to be true. Eric Adelman thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [57:28]
Eric Edelman
Been my pleasure and I hope to join you again. Yashua,
- [57:40]
Yasha Monk
Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about this show. If you too have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to good fightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [58:07]
Eric Edelman
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.