The price of alliance

18 min read4 days ago

A fine line between pleasing Washington and home

Almost everyone I’ve talked to about it is a conservative or a centrist. Absolutely no one thought the meeting went well. A couple of people said that Zelensky should have been less combative and more obsequious; no one praised Trump’s or JD Vance’s actions. Everyone is uneasy. Some are downright scared.
The MAGA apparatchiks are out in full force on social media, bellowing “America First!!”, praising Trump for what they think was a show of strength, and denouncing Zelensky at maximum volume. Republicans whom Trump has cowed into submission admitted the meeting was a disaster, but blamed the Ukrainian leader for failing to show Trump proper respect. But deep down, everyone who isn’t fully in the tank for Trump knows that this was a dark moment in American history.

Anyway, I encourage you to watch the whole meeting, if you have time. The basic context for understanding the Ukrainians’ “stubborness” is this: The Imperialist Philosopher Who Demanded the Ukraine War. There is, by the way, this description that reveals the affinity among some Trumpistas (the Culture Warriors, an interesting minority of them also anti-Vatican II Catholics like Bannon and Vance), for the Russia of Putin:

For Dugin, the greatest enemy of Russia is liberalism, which he has defined as the “false premise that a human is a separate, autonomous individual-a selfish animal seeking its own benefit. And nothing more.” He has written that “such a liberal person-completely detached from God, history, and society; from the people and culture; from the family and loved ones; from collective morality and ethnic identity-does not exist; and if they do exist, they ought not to.”
…Dugin assails the West and its values. He inveighs against democracy, secularism, individualism, civil society, multiculturalism, human rights, sexual openness, technology, scientific rationalism, and reason in general, which he rejects in favor of the mystical revelations of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Apropos of the Ukraine in particular,

Since invading Ukraine, Putin has regularly invoked old arguments about Russia’s imperial role in the world, yet his references amount to a mercenary patchwork. In contrast, Dugin’s fluency with these arguments is as formidable as his loathing for liberalism is sincere. A close reading of his work offers an answer to the central question of the war, a question that, after three years, has still not been adequately addressed: Just why did Putin want to conquer Ukraine?
[Dugin] …argues that the destruction of Ukraine is essential to Russia’s continued existence. In his 1997 book “Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” which brought him to fame in his home country, he writes, “The existence of Ukraine within its current borders, and with its current status as a ‘sovereign state,’ is tantamount to delivering a monstrous blow to Russia’s geopolitical security.” Although other Russian intellectuals have called for Ukraine’s incorporation into the Russian Federation, none have done so for quite so long, or with such a murderous tone, as Dugin. “Russia can be either great or not at all,” he writes in his 2014 book “Ukraine: My War,” adding, “Of course, for greatness, people always, in all centuries, pay a very heavy price, sometimes shedding entire seas of blood.”
Putin was once known for his distaste for ideology. Just before becoming his country’s acting President, in 2000, he wrote, “I am against the restoration of an official state ideology in Russia in any form.” In the decade after he took office, whenever he did resort to violence abroad-continuing the war in Chechnya; invading Georgia, in 2008-no grand ideology lay behind it. These were acts of opportunism by a cold-eyed pragmatist. The same could be said of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, which was brazen and unlawful but also virtually bloodless, so much so that it moved Henry Kissinger to call Putin “a serious strategist.” (The mandarin of Realpolitik knew no higher praise.)
Putin’s decision, in 2022, to try to conquer all of Ukraine can’t be arrived at by extrapolating from those prior invasions. This was less the gambit of a master of Realpolitik than the reckless gamble of an ideologue, and the impulse to invade belongs to an antique tradition of Russian political thought-a messianic imperialism that originates not in the Soviet Union (which the former K.G.B. agent Putin has been accused, imprecisely, of wanting to revive) but in tsarist Russia.
Today, Putin talks like a Romanov-era zealot. This once terse apparatchik seems to have succumbed to the notion, as Dostoyevsky put it in “ The Brothers Karamazov,” that “all true Russians are philosophers.” Putin has even taken to quoting Dostoyevsky; not too long ago, the idea that he’d ever read Dostoyevsky would have been laughable. Putin waxes on about the “civilizational identity” that underlies Russia’s claims to cultural dominance, and about the “historical and spiritual space” of Greater Russia, which, naturally, includes all of Ukraine. “The world has entered a period of fundamental, revolutionary transformation,” he declared in a speech several months after attempting to topple Kyiv. Russia, he said, was defending not only its national interests but also the oppressed of the world against the “Western élites” who exploited them. His country had made “a glorious spiritual choice.”
The speech could have been written by Dugin. In “Foundations of Geopolitics,” he writes, “The Russian people certainly belong to the messianic peoples, and, like any messianic people, it has a universal, pan-human significance.” Putin has come to sound like Dugin to such an extent that Dugin has been called Putin’s Rasputin and Putin’s philosopher. “Putin’s Brain” was the headline of a Foreign Affairsprofile of Dugin; “ Inside ‘Putin’s Brain’ “ is the title of a recent book. All oversell the point. Putin’s telegram of condolence to Dugin notwithstanding, there is little to suggest that the two men have a personal relationship. But wars don’t arise from personal relationships. They arise from ideas-from the accretion, and corruption, of ideas over time. Putin’s assimilation of Dugin’s thinking is likely indirect, maybe even unconscious. It might be more apt to call Dugin the Russian President’s imperial id. When I asked the historian Andrei Tsygankov, the author of “ Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin,” about the pair’s connection, he said, “Putin uses Dugin in the way that the tsars used the Slavophiles”-for “mobilizing the population to their cause.”

This lengthy contextual preamble is necessary to address this sort of response, to the expulsion of the Ukrainian president from the White House:

The most unbelievable response from the Trumpistas or the “not Trumpista but claiming to be impartial” is that the Ukrainian leader was mad to stand his ground. I wonder. If a leader sat there and simply tacitly accepted assertions absolutely contrary to what the alliance had been founded on and which your countrymen had fought and died -you might as well never have come home after that, such would be your disrepute among your countrymen:

Not least because those assertions would have conclusively proven to the other officials still quietly trying to salvage America’s standing and reputation, that you were not just gamely but meekly going on with the New Order. And not changing anything: your people would still fight for their freedom and the Americans would be left with simply signing on to a diktat without even the pretense of having actually negotiated anything since it was made manifestly clear the chief executive had never intended to do what the prestige and power of his office makes possible -be an honest broker.

To my mind and which no one seems to have noticed, the burden of self-control was on Vance since he had no standing to intervene: any admonishing if the Americans deemed it warranted, was for Rubio to administer, he being the manager so to speak, of the negotiations; as Veep, Vance had no standing to interject himself since the chief diplomat, the President, was there and his chief alter ego, Rubio. He (Vance) could and did intervene though, because he saw the danger inherent in Z putting his country’s refusal to oblige Trump without any guarantees, on the record: it would, indeed, have “litigated” it before American public opinion which might just root for the underdog. But every national leader dealing with any American administration knows American public opinion is an important even crucial factor to court and consider in an assymetric engagement such as dealing with the White House. And in an international situation there are other publics -and allies-to consider, too.

But in the end, Zelensky sent a letter of apology in time for the State of the Union Address, which allowed Trump to save face:

it’s all explainable with this kind of American epitaph:

America has to retreat to pre-1898: defended by its two-ocean moat from events in Europe and the Pacific, leaving Europe to its own devices, and Asia to what, until the mid-1800s, was the planet’s biggest economy: China. In the meantime, the battlelines are along economic lines:

Vance, the Spawn of Amy Chua:

Since as I mentioned in previous edition of this newsletter, Everything old is new again, here’s an old word back in circulation: Eugenics, as in ‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word. It just so happens on the day I saw that article, I’d been discussing Amy Chua and Vance with my wife, who got me thinking…

Vance (and, interestingly, his wife) was mentored by Amy Chua (she encouraged him to write his book; for his wife, she obtained a coveted Supreme Court clerkship through Chua’s influence and connections).

She may not advocate racism (whether old or new) but rather, cultural exceptionalism.

A semi-related footnote, I’ve never forgotten Joe Studwell’s assertion that the late Lee Kwan Yew (originally, Harry Lee) was the last Social Darwinist standing, though it seems afterwards he moderated his views somewhat (but still in an engaging summing-up):

Harry’s departure severs the direct link between south-east Asia’s political elite and its colonial past. (Mahathir is still alive, but he was not a player in the colonial era.) This seems to me to be the key import of this moment. There won’t be another Harry, born into an Anglicised and privileged family, angered yet titillated by colonial power, driven to reinvent himself as a true Chinese (and struggle to learn the Chinese language that was foreign to him as a kid), then striving to find a happy medium as Singapore’s leader somewhere between Asian nationalist and American lickspittle. He opted for a combination of proto-Victorian morality re-dressed-up as Asian values, and the biggest CIA station in the region, that saw American lickspittle win comfortably.
Pragmatism is I think what defined Harry more than anything. He was a fantastic leader for Singapore. But he didn’t really give a toss about south-east Asia so long as Singapore was ok. In this sense he was a modernisation of British governors of the Crown Colony of Singapore. Smarter, more savvy, more efficient than any colonial goon, but at the end of the day nothing very different. He provided phenomenal leadership, and he led by example. But the notion he had ‘vision’ at the level of south-east Asian politics and development does not stand up for me.

Meanwhile, in The Long View:

I. Hard Bargains, 3/6/25

Columnists

The Long View

Hard bargains

By: Manuel L. Quezon III — @inquirerdotnet

Philippine Daily Inquirer / 04:30 AM March 05, 2025

That exemplar of partnership with America, Winston Churchill, in a moment of retrospective reflection, once confessed to an aide, “No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.” Any leader worth their salt has always had to negotiate a tricky tightrope, between striking the right tone for American ears, without disgracing themselves before the domestic audience to whom they’re ultimately accountable. Americans have always demonstrated two tendencies, one typical of the new rich (the idea everyone is out to take advantage of them) and another typical of those with an abundance of land (that it’s better to keep outsiders out). At times, this makes it even more difficult to be a friend of America than one of its enemies-except for that thing that makes it worthwhile because it’s not merely a transaction but rather what’s described as shared values. There would always be a greater affinity between the British or Filipinos and Americans than say with Soviet Russia or Communist China.

Two months later, when Britain ran out of funds to pay for supplies to save itself, Roosevelt maneuvered the Lend-Lease Act through Congress, despite a public united in isolationist opinion. To do so, he made sure the United States earned more than it gave.

Fighting for its very survival, Britain adorned this brutal exchange, with ribbons of rhetoric, all the while anxiously trying to ensure its lifeline would continue for the rest of the war. Then, at the moment of victory in Europe, the United States announced it was suspending lend-lease, risking wrecking the Soviet and British economies at the moment they direly needed assistance in reconstruction. The lifeline would continue, as it turned out, as long as there was still a war to be won against Japan. After Japan’s defeat, the lifeline was again cut off.

The economist, John Maynard Keynes, was dispatched to Washington in 1946 to negotiate a loan to keep the British economy afloat, which he did. This debt to America was finally paid off in December 2006, but the terms were tempered by the British being allowed to defer payments in times of economic crisis (1956, 1957, 1964, 1965, 1968, and 1976) and with an extremely low interest rate of 2 percent. It was these considerations, aside from American military protection of Europe that were the payoff for cultivating the “special relationship” over decades.

Filipinos have had an experience of this firsthand; they were made expendable in 1942, but promised a full indemnity or war damages and equal pay for Filipino troops under American command. Then shattered by liberation, they were told by a Republican-controlled Congress that the price of reconstruction would be to grant Americans the same economic rights as Filipinos while veterans would find neither justice nor honor because of the Rescission Act in 1946, denying Filipino veterans’ benefits. It was the price of reconstruction and the American security umbrella.

Filipino leaders learned their lesson and took to increasingly hard bargaining over the years as chronicled in the American historian Nick Cullather’s book, ”Illusions of Influence,” which argues Americans continuously overestimated their influence and underestimated the ability of Filipino leaders to wheedle what they wanted out of Washington. (The Americans’ final miscalculation came when they negotiated an extension of their bases agreement but left out lobbying the Senate — which rejected the deal, shrinking the Philippine desk from one of the biggest to just another small one at State and knocking off several stars’ worth of promotion positions in the US military, no wonder Americans were sore for close to a generation). For now, this shrewdness has enabled our government to successfully navigate the stormy waters of the Trump White House.

II. Lawfare, 2/26/25

Columnists

The Long View

Lawfare

By: Manuel L. Quezon III — @inquirerdotnet

Philippine Daily Inquirer / 04:30 AM February 26, 2025

The late scholar Benito Legarda Jr. once told me the question of collaboration during World War II had long been settled by the time President Manuel Roxas issued an amnesty to high- and middle-level officials accused of cooperating with the Japanese. That’s because the people themselves solved it by exterminating those they viewed as particularly notorious in their local communities, in the brief period of lawlessness between the retreat of the Japanese and the restoration of authority by the Americans. Those who were amnestied still sought, in many cases, absolution through election, starting with Jose P. Laurel who tried to be (unsuccessfully) elected to the presidency (though he did achieve political vindication by being elected to the Senate).

In a similar manner, it could be argued the flight of the Marcoses in 1986 avoided civil war and their turning into political martyrs had they been subjected to a trial (we studiously forget and thus ignore, that their return was not a case of Filipino laxness but rather, a human rights condition set by the Swiss government, on the principle that they should be allowed to face their accusers in court). Still, the Marcoses themselves and many of their principal lieutenants sought absolution through election.

If a show trial wouldn’t have convinced anyone it was more than victor’s justice, what would have accomplished more would have been depriving them of the material rewards of power. But this avenue was permanently closed off very early on: arguably the battle for public opinion was lost, the moment an attaché case of documents was stolen in New York City. Steve Salonga later recalled it was Pedro Yap’s briefcase that was stolen, and no original documents were lost; but thereafter the whole effort lost the appearance of invincible competence. When the present Chief Justice theorized that the future of continuing cases would hinge on a very simple premise — justice delayed is justice denied (for the defendants) — one could further argue the battle for public opinion has been conclusively lost (or won).

Another fork in the road was in 2001, when, having been ousted, then President Joseph Ejercito Estrada found himself under arrest and, briefly, the capital was convulsed by an urban insurrection which was a reminder of what could have happened-except probably much more ferociously-in 1986. The question of culpability was settled outside the courts: some who’d supported Estrada, ended up permanently politically disgraced; others, including the Estradas themselves, sought and achieved political absolution through the polls.

Then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in the end followed the example of former president Roxas (and to a lesser extent, former president Fidel Ramos, with his amnesty for military rebels) when she pardoned former president Estrada. But the damage had been done: the Church and civil society never recovered after egging her on to throw the book at Estrada, only to cower, powerless and frightened, when the urban insurrection of 2001 resulted in the military rescuing the situation (and her government). At the time I’d written and continue to believe, that she’d been forced to ignore a basic principle of our politics: never kick a man when he is down; when someone falls from power, the fall and thus, loss of influence and authority, is widely accepted as punishment enough. To go further is to embark on the road of vendetta, which can span generations.

The waters were muddied by Arroyo and her successor as both represented what had long been attempted but only finally achieved by the two: regime restoration, sparked, not least, by the manner in which both families had been vilified by their successors. If restoration for them was acceptable, how could it be denied for anyone else, particularly since all had been, at one point or another, tarred with the same rhetorical brushes? Whether for survival or out of spite — and more importantly, for a public that refused to see any difference — the pursuit of legal reprisals only served to reduce any deeper political, legal, or moral justifications for the cases to the superficial level of a vendetta.

One thing that the old system of presidents running for reelection had going for it was they often lost, and conclusively proved they were done. It spared the country their continued interference in politics.

III. Musk the destroyer

Columnists

The Long View

Musk the destroyer, 2/19/25

By: Manuel L. Quezon III — @inquirerdotnet

Philippine Daily Inquirer / 04:55 AM February 19, 2025

The saying goes that the private sector is fast because it’s imperative is to turn a profit and thus, efficiency is the key to unlocking the cash register. Government, on the other hand, is in the business, such as it is, of public service, which does not depend on turning a profit. This is why, for example, most public transport is done by the government, which subsidizes it. At a certain point, however, the slowness of government exasperates the public it’s meant to serve, who resents government demanding taxes while providing services that fail to meet the efficiency or speed of the private sector.

Recently, reading the May 26, 1940 diary entry of Winston Churchill’s assistant private secretary, Jock Colville, I found a comparison of socialism and private enterprise that foreshadowed present-day events.

“Private enterprise,” Colville wrote, “is valuable because it is efficient, while state control makes for petty tyranny by government officials and for lack of drive or imagination. Local government is now in socialist hands and the result has been overspending of public money and the spread of corruption in local government. The Conservatives, on the other hand, have failed to take sufficiently strong measures. As was said of Erasmus, they have ‘sought to heal by incantations a wound which required the surgeon’s knife.’”

This phrase can be found in a 1995 speech by Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri who orated during a budget debate, “You cannot heal by just speaking words those things which require the surgeon’s knife. The truth of the matter is that we are in a condition in this country where the scalpel of surgery needs to be applied to the cancer of national irresponsibility. We need to have the scalpel of the surgeon’s knife cut out the unwanted and malignant growth which is taking over and depriving us of the ability to make good decisions regarding the future of this country.”

Fast forward to 2025 when Anne Lewis, who used to head the American government’s Technology Transformation Services, described what Elon Musk is doing to the United States government in this manner: “That’s taking a machete to something as opposed to making surgical cuts that try and improve the functioning of the government.” And being rabidly applauded for it by many Americans.

Everyone is against government waste, but what seemed impossible on arcane paper proved remarkably easy to do, once the formerly unthinkable became possible. All that was needed was to ignore precedents, regulations, and the entire philosophy of Republican government in pursuit of exercising what Filipinos like to call “political will.”

But will needs a way. According to the historian Lawrence Zhang, Musk is now referred to in China as “Secretary Ma ???” as in “party secretary aka the real holder of power.” Musk occupies a unique place as a person with government authority who remains in the private sector, who has unleashed teams of young programmers in a kind of Spanish Inquisition-style, rooting out of what Musk believes to be waste or impermissible (because unaligned with Trump priorities) programs. Along the way, he has embarked on massive cuts to the Federal bureaucracy, justifying it on something similar having been done before. Given the task by President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore cut over 377,000 Federal jobs by offering early retirement as well as taking advantage of significant Pentagon cuts with the end of the Cold War.

The key difference then and now is that a six-month review, then a message to Congress, which then authorized the program, took place under Clinton-Gore but no such thing has happened under Trump. He simply ignored regulations (such as conflict-of-interest rules and security vetting requirements) and unleashed Musk and his teams on the bureaucracy. Using X, the social media he owns, Musk then took to a kind of striptease-by-Tweet, making lurid assertions of odd programs and seemingly shocking expenses which, he said, his teams had identified, exposed, and ended-along with entire government agencies such as the US Agency for International Development.

Shocked and appalled, critics tried to protest but by then it was too late. Consider one example, supposedly anomalous fields in Social Security entries, which suggested many 150-year-old Americans receiving payments. COBOL was to blame, one argument went; something Filipino bankers might quietly admit to in their private moments (one legacy hire supposedly earns very well, kept on to maintain one bank’s systems). Banks, having to provide service, can’t just decouple; they have to keep functioning to the extent their systems, some programmers say, are held together “with duct tape and a prayer,” programming-wise.

But how to explain when, in politics, the moment you have to explain, you’ve already lost? There’s a saying in political communications that the moment you have to explain something, you’ve lost the argument. The framing of Musk and friends is as ancient as it is effective: We are doing good and we are exposing bad things; the more good we do, the more it offends the bad who did bad things; thus, anyone objecting to the good we are doing is bad.