We Knew Disease X Was Coming. It’s Here Now.

We need to stop what drives mass epidemics rather than just respond to individual diseases.

By Peter Daszak

Mr. Daszak is a disease ecologist.

In early 2018, during a meeting at the World Health Organization in Geneva, a group of experts I belong to (the R&D Blueprint) coined the term “Disease X”: We were referring to the next pandemic, which would be caused by an unknown, novel pathogen that hadn’t yet entered the human population. As the world stands today on the edge of the pandemic precipice, it’s worth taking a moment to consider whether Covid-19 is the disease our group was warning about.

Disease X, we said back then, would likely result from a virus originating in animals and would emerge somewhere on the planet where economic development drives people and wildlife together. Disease X would probably be confused with other diseases early in the outbreak and would spread quickly and silently; exploiting networks of human travel and trade, it would reach multiple countries and thwart containment. Disease X would have a mortality rate higher than a seasonal flu but would spread as easily as the flu. It would shake financial markets even before it achieved pandemic status.

In a nutshell, Covid-19 is Disease X.

Even as there are signs that the epidemic’s spread might be slowing in China, multiple communities and countries have now reported sustained transmission in their midst. The number of confirmed cases has exploded in South Korea in recent days. In Italy, villages and towns are on lockdown, Fashion Week in Milan has been disrupted and festivals are being canceled while public health authorities search for patient zero to identify who else is likely infected and may spread the disease in Europe. Iran appears to have become a new hub of transmission. The looming pandemic will challenge us in new ways, as people try to evade quarantines, and misinformation campaigns and conspiracy theorists ply their trade in open democracies.

But as the world struggles to respond to Covid-19, we risk missing the really big picture: Pandemics are on the rise, and we need to contain the process that drives them, not just the individual diseases.

Plagues are not only part of our culture; they are caused by it. The Black Death spread into Europe in the mid-14th century with the growth of trade along the Silk Road. New strains of influenza have emerged from livestock farming. Ebola, SARS, MERS and now Covid-19 have been linked to wildlife. Pandemics usually begin as viruses in animals that jump to people when we make contact with them.

These spillovers are increasing exponentially as our ecological footprint brings us closer to wildlife in remote areas and the wildlife trade brings these animals into urban centers. Unprecedented road-building, deforestation, land clearing and agricultural development, as well as globalized travel and trade, make us supremely susceptible to pathogens like coronaviruses.

Yet the world’s strategy for dealing with pandemics is woefully inadequate. Across the board, from politicians to the public, we treat pandemics as a disaster-response issue: We wait for them to happen and hope a vaccine or drug can be developed quickly in their aftermath. But even as Covid-19 rages, there still is no vaccine available for the SARS virus of 2002-3, nor for HIV/AIDS or Zika or a host of emerging pathogens. The problem is that between outbreaks, the will to spend money on prevention wanes, and the market for vaccines and drugs against sporadic viral diseases isn’t enough to drive research and development.

During its World Health Assembly in 2016, the W.H.O. set up the R&D Blueprint to bridge this gap and announced a priority list of pathogens that most threaten global health and for which no vaccines or drugs were in the pipeline. SARS made the list, as did MERS, Nipah, Ebola and other rare but serious diseases caused by epidemic viruses. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations — a global partnership between public, private, philanthropic and civil society organizations launched at Davos in 2017 — stepped up to the plate and sourced funding to develop vaccines and therapeutics against some of these.

To escape from the Age of Pandemics, we’ll need to treat them as a public health issue and start working on prevention in addition to responses. Our first goal should be to broaden our armory against potential mass epidemics. When some of us added “Disease X” to the W.H.O.’s priority list two years ago, we wanted to make the point that it’s not sufficient to develop vaccines and drugs for known agents when the next big one is likely to be a different pathogen — a virus close to SARS, say, but not close enough that the same vaccine can work against both.

As Covid-19 strikes today and a spate of other pathogens are ready to emerge in the future, we continue to butt up against nature. Scientists estimate that there are 1.67 million unknown viruses of the type that have previously emerged in people. Discovering and sequencing them should be a priority — a simple case of “know your enemy.” In the aftermath of SARS, research on coronaviruses originating in bats has discovered more than 50 related viruses, some of which have the potential to infect people; this information can now be used to test for broad-action vaccines and drugs. Scaling up this effort to cover all viral families, as the Global Virome Project proposes to do, is a logical first step toward prevention.

A radical shift is also needed in the way that tests, vaccines and drugs are designed so that entire groups of pathogens are targeted instead of individual pathogens that are already known. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States is working on a universal flu vaccine that would cover all known strains of influenza; a universal coronavirus vaccine, an Ebola-virus vaccine and others will also be needed.

With a smaller investment, we can also try to get ahead of pandemics by working with communities in hot spots of emerging diseases. Disease surveillance should be focused on farmers, rural communities and anyone who has extensive contact with wildlife, to look for unusual illnesses, test for novel pathogens and work with people to develop alternatives to high-risk activities such as the wildlife trade.

Pandemics are like terrorist attacks: We know roughly where they originate and what’s responsible for them, but we don’t know exactly when the next one will happen. They need to be handled the same way — by identifying all possible sources and dismantling those before the next pandemic strikes.

James Comey: What I Want From the Mueller Report

By James Comey

Mr. Comey is a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The country is eagerly awaiting the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Many people know what they want it to say — what they feel it simply must say — namely, that Donald Trump is a criminal who should be removed from office. Or that he is completely innocent of all wrongdoing.

But not everyone knows what it “must” say. Even though I believe Mr. Trump is morally unfit to be president of the United States, I’m not rooting for Mr. Mueller to demonstrate that he is a criminal. I’m also not rooting for Mr. Mueller to “clear” the president. I’m not rooting for anything at all, except that the special counsel be permitted to finish his work, charge whatever cases warrant charging and report on his work.

President Trump’s constant attacks on the special counsel, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department over the past two years raised the prospect that he would interfere to stop the special counsel’s work. It is deeply concerning that the president of the United States would try to protect himself by torching the institutions of justice. But he hasn’t used his authority to end Mr. Mueller’s work. (That would have been a crisis of a different order — shutting down the investigation, rather than just trying to undermine its credibility.) So we are in a position to wonder and hope about the report’s content.

 Wondering is fine. But hoping for a particular answer is not. The rule of law depends upon fair administration of justice, which is rooted in complete and unbiased investigation. We are best served when an investigation finds all relevant facts and illuminates the fullest possible view of the truth.

I have no idea whether the special counsel will conclude that Mr. Trump knowingly conspired with the Russians in connection with the 2016 election or that he obstructed justice with the required corrupt intent. I also don’t care. I care only that the work be done, well and completely. If it is, justice will have prevailed and core American values will have been protected at a time when so much of our national leadership has abandoned its commitment to truth and the rule of law.

I am rooting for a demonstration to the world — and maybe most of all to our president and his enablers — that the United States has a justice system that works because there are people who believe in it and rise above personal interest and tribalism. That system may reach conclusions they like or it may not, but the apolitical administration of justice is the beating heart of this country. I hope we all get to see that.

The interests of justice will also be best served by maximum transparency about the special counsel’s work. I don’t know all the considerations that will go into deciding precisely what to say about the completion of that work and when to say it. But because the Department of Justice is guided first and always by the public interest, it should provide details about finished investigations when the public needs to know them, as it traditionally has.

I do have one hope that I should confess. I hope that Mr. Trump is not impeached and removed from office before the end of his term. I don’t mean that Congress shouldn’t move ahead with the process of impeachment governed by our Constitution, if Congress thinks the provable facts are there. I just hope it doesn’t. Because if Mr. Trump were removed from office by Congress, a significant portion of this country would see this as a coup, and it would drive those people farther from the common center of American life, more deeply fracturing our country.

Critics of Mr. Trump should hope for something much harder to distort, or to nurse as a grievance, than an impeachment. We need a resounding election result in 2020, where Americans of all stripes, divided as they may be about important policy issues — immigration, guns, abortion, climate change, regulation, taxes — take a moment from their busy lives to show that they are united by something even more important: the belief that the president of the United States cannot be a chronic liar who repeatedly attacks the rule of law. Then we can get back to policy disagreements.

I just hope we are up to it.

America is slouching toward autocracy

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Columnist -The Washington Post

 

In their book, “How Democracies Die,” political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write: “How do elected authoritarians shatter the democratic institutions that are supposed to constrain them? Some do it in one fell swoop. But more often the assault on democracy begins slowly. . . . The erosion of democracy takes place piecemeal, often in baby steps.”

Our nation is divided in many ways, and one of the most important chasms involves the question of whether President Trump poses a threat to our constitutional foundations. Is he merely a loud-mouthed demagogue, or is he an autocrat in the making, willing to strike at the underpinnings of republican government?

Those of us fearful that Trump is subverting basic freedoms and the arrangements that sustain them are frequently dismissed as alarmists who fail to recognize the endurance of checks, balances and other circuit-breakers. In this view, asserting that Trump imperils our liberties demonstrates a lack of appreciation for the genius that is the American experiment.

It is certainly true that most of our rights are still intact. We still have free speech and a free press, despite Trump’s assaults on both. After all, I am writing this column, and you are able to read it — and to disagree with it if you wish.

The opposition party, moreover, has a good chance of taking over at least one house of Congress in this fall’s elections. At levels below the Supreme Court, judges have blocked many of Trump’s most egregious actions, among them the separation of immigrant children from their parents.

For all of this, one can be grateful. But it is precisely because citizens of enduring republican democracies easily fall into complacency that Levitsky and Ziblatt’s warnings are so pertinent.

Begin with those much-touted checks and balances. Their health depends — as my colleagues Norman Ornstein, Thomas Mann and I argued in our book, “One Nation After Trump” — on the willingness of those in the legislative and judicial branches to put their institutional loyalties and their stewardship of the system as a whole above their partisan loyalties.

The opposite is happening in the GOP-led Congress. With the exception of a few Republican elected officials at the periphery, Congress has worked to enable Trump’s abuses (witness the behavior of California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes to undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation) and to minimize the outrageousness of his conduct.

When Trump revoked former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance in retaliation for Brennan’s criticism of him (and, as Trump confessed in a Wall Street Journal interview, because he objected to Brennan doing his job in 2016 by probing connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia), the response from most Republicans was pathetic.

Trump’s actions were an abuse of presidential power far beyond anything Republicans used to complain about bitterly during President Barack Obama’s term. They are aimed directly at intimidating critics and interfering with a legitimate investigation. Where was House Speaker Paul D. 

Ryan on the issue? When Trump first threatened the security clearances of his critics last month, Ryan (R-Wis.) shrugged it off and said Trump was “just trolling people.” We still await a robust response from party leaders now that the president has shown he had more than “trolling” in mind.

And long before Trump ran for office, Republicans were eager to change the rules of the game when doing so served their purposes, as Michael Tomasky argued last week in the Daily Beast. Consider just their aggressive voter-suppression efforts and their willingness to block even a hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.

The list of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin’s phrase “enemies of the people” to describe a free press; the firing, one after another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing, starting with then-FBI Director James B. Comey; Trump’s effusive praise of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of interest and those of his family. Add to this the authoritarian’s habit of institutionalizing lying as a routine aspect of governing, compressed into the astonishing credo Rudolph W. Giuliani blurted out on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday: “Truth isn’t truth.”

This is not business as usual. Yet our politics proceeds as if it is. Slowly, Trump has accustomed us to behavior that, at any other recent time and with just about any other politician, would in all probability have been career-ending.

We know what a military coup looks like. But as Levitsky and Ziblatt note, a slow-motion dismantling of rules, norms and expectations can be more insidious because we don’t even notice what’s happening to us.

Bernie Sanders To Democrats: This Is What a Radical Foreign Policy Looks Like

By Mehdi Hasan

Bernie Sanders, now the most popular politician in the United States by a country mile, has long been obsessed with breaking up big banks and getting Medicare for all Americans. He can speak for hours about the evils of income inequality and the grotesquerie of the “billionaire class.”

On foreign policy? Not so much. 

Yet this week, the independent senator from Vermont finally delivered his major foreign affairs speech at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, part of the Green Foundation Lecture series. Winston Churchill gave his “Sinews of Peace” speech at Westminster College — in which he famously introduced the world to the concept of “The Iron Curtain” — as part of this lecture series in 1946. Mikhail Gorbachev’s memorable 1992 account of how the Cold War ended was also part of this series. Thus, on the basis of his appearance in Fulton, you might say that Sanders is now playing in the Foreign Policy Big Leagues. 

Beforehand, he sat down with me to talk through his thinking on global affairs. 

“I think what we have to do is take a hard look at where we are today in terms of foreign policy, and where we have been for many years,” Sanders tells me when I go to meet with him in his Senate office in Washington, D.C. the day before his big speech in Missouri. “And I think the main point to be made is that no country, not the United States or any other country, can do it alone.  That if we’re going to address the very deep and complicated international issues that exist, we need to do it in cooperation.”

The senator is tieless, in a crumpled navy suit and light blue shirt. His shock of white hair is, as usual, unruly. He looks distracted and exhausted, perhaps the result of having spent the previous week pitching his landmark Medicare for All single-payer bill to Congress and to the country. 

“Many of my colleagues, Republican colleagues, here in the Senate, for example, disparage the United Nations,” he says, sitting across the table from me, in front of a wall of Vermont tourism posters. “While clearly the United Nations could be more effective, it is imperative that we strengthen international institutions, because at the end of the day, while it may not be sexy, it may not be glamorous, it may not allow for great soundbites, simply the idea … of people coming together and talking and arguing is a lot better than countries going to war.”

I ask him how such rhetoric differs from past statements in defense of the U.N. and of international cooperation offered by leading Democrats, such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry.

“Excuse me.” Sanders doesn’t like to be interrupted. “Let me just talk a little bit about where I want to go.” 

The senator makes clear that “unilateralism, the belief that we can simply overthrow governments that we don’t want, that has got to be re-examined.” After referencing the Iraq War — “one of the great foreign policy blunders in the history of this country” — the senator touches on another historic blunder which, to his credit, few of his fellow senators would be willing to discuss, let alone critique. “In 1953, the United States, with the British, overthrew [Mohammed] Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran – and this was to benefit British oil interests,” he reminds me. “The result was the shah came into power, who was a very ruthless man, and the result of that was that we had the Iranian Revolution, which takes us to where we are right now.”

Does he regret not speaking with such passion, bluntness, and insight on international affairs during his failed primary campaign against Clinton? He shakes his head. “No, I think we ran the kind of campaign that we wanted to run.” There’s a pause. “But I think that foreign policy is clearly very, very important.”

During the Democratic presidential primaries, politicians and pundits alike agreed that Sanders had a foreign policy deficit. “Foreign policy,” wrote David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s foreign affairs doyen, “is the hole in Sanders’s political doughnut.” Patrick Leahy, Sanders’s fellow senator from Vermont, was only a tad more diplomatic in an interview with the New York Times. “It’s not the subject he gravitates to, that’s fair to say,” acknowledged Leahy.

A long-promised set piece speech on foreign policy during the campaign never came, and the Sanders campaign website lacked a foreign policy page for the first few months of his candidacy. Some of the figures identified by the senator as outside advisers on national security issues later claimed to hardly know him.

His discomfort with the topic is palpable, but the truth is that the 76-year-old Sanders is far from a foreign policy neophyte. In the 1980s, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he was an outspoken critic of U.S. interventions in Latin America, becoming the highest-ranking elected U.S. official to visit Nicaragua and meet with President Daniel Ortega (which earned him the soubriquet “Sandernista”). He even went on honeymoon to the Soviet Union in 1988, as part of his effort to establish a sister city program between Burlington and Yaroslavl.

Since 1991, Sanders has served in Congress, as a member of the House and then the Senate, debating and voting on military action, foreign treaties, trade deals, arms sales, international aid, and climate change agreements. Few critics have paused to consider the fact that a President Sanders would have arrived in the White House in January 2017 with far more foreign policy experience under his belt than Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. (Oh, and of course former reality TV star Donald J. Trump.) 

Nevertheless the impression persists that Sanders is out of his depth when it comes to the outside world. Perhaps in anticipation of another presidential bid in three years time, the Vermont senator has been taking steps to correct that impression. So far this year, Sanders has hired Matt Duss, a respected foreign affairs analyst and former president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), as his foreign policy adviser, and has given speeches at the liberal Jewish lobbying group, J Street, where he condemned “Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories” as being “contrary to fundamental American values,” and at the centrist Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, where he rebuked Russian President Vladimir Putin for “trying to weaken the transatlantic alliance.”

Last week, my colleague Glenn Greenwald penned a column in The Intercept headlined, “The Clinton Book Tour Is Largely Ignoring the Vital Role of Endless War in the 2016 Election Result.” Greenwald argued that Clinton’s “advocacy of multiple wars and other military actions” pushed some swing voters into the arms of both Donald Trump and third-party candidates, such as Jill Stein. I ask Sanders whether he agrees with this analysis.  
“I mean, that’s a whole other issue. And I don’t know the answer to that.”


I persist. Surely he’d concede that foreign policy was a factor in Clinton’s defeat?
He doesn’t budge. “I want to talk about my speech, not about Hillary Clinton.”

So foreign policy plays no role in elections?

“The answer is, I don’t know,” he responds wearily. “You can argue that somebody would say, ‘Well Bernie Sanders was too soft on defense, I’m not gonna vote for him because he’s not prepared to bomb every country in the world.’ Do you know how many voters I’ve lost because of that? We don’t know, that’s speculation.” (Not quite: Greenwald cited an academic study published earlier this year which argued “that had the U.S. fought fewer wars, or at least experienced fewer casualties, Clinton would have … won the election.”)

I ask him if there is a foreign policy equivalent to Medicare for All — that is, a radical progressive policy proposal that Sanders intends to campaign on and make mainstream.

“I wouldn’t look at it like that,” he tells me. “Anyone who thinks there is a simple solution in dealing with all of the horrific and longstanding conflicts in the world would be mistaken … Where we’ve got to be radical is to understand we cannot continue with simply using military as a means of addressing foreign policy issues.” 

Despite once having hung a picture of legendary antiwar activist Eugene Debs in his congressional office, Sanders is not a pacifist. He backed NATO’s air campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001. Yet he opposed the Iraq War and voted against the arming and training of Syrian rebels. So, I wonder, does he have his own test that has to be met before the United States should use force? 

The senator makes it clear to me that, in his view, military action should be a last resort, except in cases of genocide. “I think there has to be a legitimate understanding that American interests are being threatened. Obviously if someone was going to wage war against the United States, attack the United States, there is very good reason to respond.” He continues: “When you’re looking at genocidal situations, where people are being slaughtered right and left … we need international peacekeeping force to address that.”

Earlier this week, the president of the United States made what some might call a genocidal threat at the U.N. in New York: “If [the U.S.] is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

I remind the senator that both Obama and Trump came to office pledging to meet with their North Korean counterparts — yet Obama never did while Trump is now busy mocking Kim Jong-un as “Rocket Man.” Does Sanders think a meeting between the two heads of state would be of value?

The senator says he would not object to “face-to-face meetings done in good faith” — rather than as cynical photo opportunities — and says that “in general, discussions and face-to-face meetings” are worthy of support. 

So, to be clear, would he support a U.S. president sitting down with the leader of North Korea to try and resolve the nuclear crisis? He shrugs. “Could I see that? Yeah, I could see that, yeah.”

One foreign policy issue, however, on which Sanders has attracted criticism from members of his own left-wing base is the Israel-Palestine conflict. Some pro-Palestinian progressives have accused him of giving Israel a pass. In an interview in April, for example, Sanders dismissed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; he also signed his name to a controversial letter attacking the U.N. for having an “anti-Israel agenda.”

Nonetheless, it is undeniable that in recent years the Vermont senator, who is Jewish and briefly lived on a kibbutz in Israel in the 1960s, has taken a more pro-Palestinian position on the conflict and, specifically, against the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu. “There comes a time when … we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time,” he told Clinton during a Democratic primary debate in April 2016.

These days, unlike other members of Congress, Sanders has no qualms about identifying, and decrying, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. But does he accept that the United States is complicit in Israel’s occupation, through its military aid and arms sales? And does he also accept, therefore, that the occupation of the Palestinian territories will never end until the U.S. stops arming and funding the Jewish state?

“Certainly the United States is complicit, but it’s not to say … that Israel is the only party at fault,” he tells me. However, he adds, “in terms of Israeli-Palestinian relations the United States has got to play a much more even-handed role. Clearly that is not the case right now.”

Would he, therefore, ever consider voting to reduce U.S. aid to Israel — worth at least $3bn per annum — or U.S. arms sales to the Israeli military?

“The U.S. funding plays a very important role, and I would love to see people in the Middle East sit down with the United States government and figure out how U.S. aid can bring people together, not just result in an arms war in that area. So I think there is extraordinary potential for the United States to help the Palestinian people rebuild Gaza and other areas. At the same time, demand that Israel, in their own interests in a way, work with other countries on environmental issues.” He then, finally, answers my question: “So the answer is yes.”

It is — by the depressingly low standard of modern U.S. politics — a remarkable and, dare I say it, radical response from Sanders. “Aid to Israel in Congress and the pro-Israel community has been sacrosanct,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted earlier this year, “and no president has seriously proposed cutting it since Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s.”


Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing Labour Party leader in the United Kingdom, who is constantly compared to Sanders, grabbed headlines in May after urging Britons in a speech, to “be brave enough to admit the war on terror is simply not working” and to draw “connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home.” In the past, the Labour leader has labelled NATO a “danger to world peace” and called for engagement with groups, such as the Irish Republican Army, Hezbollah, and Hamas. 

You might say Corbyn is a genuine radical on foreign policy. Is the more cautious Sanders willing to match the Labour leader’s rhetoric on terrorism and the West’s response to terrorism? Does he, for example, think the United States has lost the so-called war on terror?

“Well, no, that’s too general of a question,” he replies dismissively. “I think you best deal with terrorism by trying to understand the root causes of those problems: the massive poverty that exists, the lack of education that exists, that when you drop a drone, for example, that kills innocent men, women, and child, that it only forms more antagonism toward the United States.”

I ask about the role of Saudi Arabia in allegedly supporting and funding terrorism. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers, lest we forget, were Saudi citizens. So is it an ally or enemy of the United States?

“It is not just that many of the 9/11 bombers came from Saudi Arabia,” he says, “what I think is more significant is their … continuing to fund madrasas and to spread an extremely radical Wahhabi doctrine in many countries around the world. And they are funding these mosques, they’re funding the madrasas, and they are fomenting a lot of hatred.”

Sanders wants the United States to pivot away from blind, uncritical support for the Gulf kingdom. He even seems to suggest that the United States should embrace the Saudis’ mortal enemy: the Iranians.

So could this be his foreign policy equivalent of Medicare for All? Trying to end almost four decades of hostility and mistrust between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran? Without firing a shot? It would be a dramatic and historic shift in approach. During the presidential primaries, Sanders was attacked for suggesting that the U.S. should “move as aggressively as we can to normalize relations with Iran.”

Yet, almost two years later, he isn’t afraid to make the case again. “I think that one of the areas that we have got to rethink, in terms of American foreign policy, is our position vis-a-vis Iran and Saudi Arabia,” he tells me, leaning forward in his chair. “For whatever reason — and I think we know some of the reasons having to do with a three-letter word called oil — the United States has kind of looked aside at the fact that Saudi Arabia is an incredibly anti-democratic country and has played a very bad role internationally, but we have sided with them time and time and time again, and yet Iran, which just held elections, Iran whose young people really want to reach out to the West, we are … continuing to put them down.”


While Sanders has “legitimate concerns … about Iran’s foreign policy” he wants a more “even-handed” approach from the United States to the “Iran and Saudi conflict.”

So I try to pin him down on the nature of the U.S.-Saudi relationship and ask again: Does he or does he not consider Saudi Arabia to be ally of the United States in the so-called war on terror?

He pauses. “Do I consider them an ally? I consider them to be an undemocratic country that has supported terrorism around the world, it has funded terrorism, so I can’t … No, they are not an ally of the United States.”

Wait, maybe this is the foreign policy Medicare For All — downgrading diplomatic ties with one of the world’s worst regimes. Distancing Washington from Riyadh. But could Sanders really pull it off? Help persuade his fellow senators, on both sides of the aisle to depart from the decades-long bipartisan consensus on Saudi Arabia as a key U.S. ally? In June, the senator joined four Republicans and 42 Democrats to try and block a $510 million sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia. They were defeated — but by only six votes.

Greeted by a cheering crowd of students Thursday and awarded an honorary degree by the college in advance of his speech, a stern Sanders denounced the global war on terror as “a disaster for the American people” because it “responds to terrorists by giving them exactly what they want.”

He also offered a rousing defense of Obama’s key foreign affairs legacy: the Iran nuclear deal. “We must protect this deal,” Sanders told his audience, citing the nuclear agreement as an example of “real leadership” on the part of the United States.

Over the course of an hour on Thursday, the independent senator offered an unashamedly progressive, diplomacy-oriented, non-militarized vision of U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century: “The goal is not for the United States to dominate the world. … Our goal should be global engagement based on partnership, rather than dominance.

At a time when the U.S. president is beating the drums of war, threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea and tear up the Iran nuclear deal, it is both refreshing and admirable to hear a leading U.S. politician speak in this direct way. Sanders tells me that he wants a “serious discussion about foreign policy” — which, shamefully, is something his Democratic colleagues in the Senate have yet to agree to. For example, he points to a vote in the Senate on Monday, which authorized a whopping $80 billion annual increase in Pentagon spending. “Is that really a wise investment?” he asks.


“I dare say,” he adds acidly, “that most of the people who voted for this huge increase in military spending really would not be able to tell you exactly why it is needed.” 

Only four Senate Democrats joined Sanders to vote against the bill. Why does he think the rest of them voted for it?

“You’ll have to ask them,” is the curt rejoinder. 

Some of his critics on the left, however, don’t think Sanders goes far enough. Writing in July, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic castigated Sanders over his “relative silence on Obama’s foreign policy” and his “fairly conventional foreign policy thinking throughout his Washington career.” Such critics tend to want to see a full-throated, Noam Chomsky-style denunciation of U.S. imperialism from Sanders — and they want to see it yesterday. 

Interestingly, in 1985, Sanders invited Chomsky to speak in Burlington City Hall, introducing him to the crowd as “a very vocal and important voice in the wilderness of intellectual life in America” and saying he was “delighted to welcome a person who I think we’re all very proud of.” In 2016, when I interviewed Chomsky for my Al Jazeera English show, UpFront, the veteran philosopher and foreign policy critic heaped praise on Sanders as a “decent, honest” politician with “the best policies.”

I ask Sanders if, three decades later, he still agrees with Chomsky’s blistering critique of U.S. foreign policy across the board, including his provocative description of the United States as a “rogue state.”


Sanders cuts me off before I can finish my question. “OK, I get it. Noam Chomsky has played an extraordinarily important role. I am a United States senator. We live in different worlds.” He quickly — and conveniently — changes the subject. “Bottom line is I think we need to rethink foreign policy … and that means dealing with issues like income and wealth inequality, which is not only an American issue, it is a horrific global issue.” 

Sanders is now in his element and on a roll. “We have six of the wealthiest people who have more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population. We need to deal with the issue of climate change, because if we don’t get our act together internationally on that, we may not have much of a planet left for our children and our grandchildren.” 

Let’s be clear: On foreign policy, Sanders does not go as far in a left-wing direction as his old friend Noam Chomsky or even his U.K. counterpart Jeremy Corbyn. But his renewed interest in foreign policy and his willingness to break with the established consensus could be among his most radical acts yet.

“Where we’ve got to be radical,” Sanders tells me, “is to understand that we cannot continue with simply using military as a means of addressing foreign policy issues. Where we have got to be radical and forceful, in an unprecedented way, is to force debate and discussion on the causes of international conflict – and certainly, we have not been doing that, and we need more American leadership to do that.”

The Democrats should rethink their immigration absolutism

By Fareed Zakaria

In 1992, the Democratic Party faced a challenge on the issue of abortion. Pennsylvania’s governor, Robert Casey, a Democrat dedicated to the working class, asked to speak at the national convention in New York City. He wanted to propose a pro-life plank for the party platform, mostly as a way of affirming his Catholic beliefs. 

He fully understood that the motion would be voted down, but the Democratic Party refused to permit him even to air his views, so great was his heresy. “That sent a strong signal to working-class Catholic and evangelical voters that if they did not fall into line on this one issue they were no longer welcome in the party,” writes Mark Lilla in “The Once and Future Liberal,” his brief but brilliant book that comes out later this month.

I wonder if today the Democrats are making the same mistake on immigration. To be clear, I think the bill that the Republicans rolled out this week is bad public policy and mean-spirited symbolism. But that’s beside the point. Lilla acknowledges that he is a pro-choice absolutist on abortion, but he argues that a national party must build a big tent that accommodates people who dissent from the main party line on a few issues.

In Lilla’s view, there is a larger crisis within American liberalism. When he visited the online home page of the Republican National Committee, he found a statement of broad principles that guide the party, starting with the Constitution and ending with immigration. On the Democrats’ website, by contrast, he noticed a set of links to “People,” and when he clicked on them he got to pages specifically designed to appeal to one group or another — women, Hispanics, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans. Alluding to Lebanon’s system of power-sharing among religious and ethnic groups, Lilla writes, “You might think that, by some mistake, you have landed on the website of the Lebanese government — not that of a party with a vision for America’s future.” (The Democratic National Committee’s home page now features the party’s platform more prominently.)

There have been two different agendas for American liberalism, according to Lilla. The first was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s — a collective, national effort to help all Americans participate in the country’s economic and political life. Its symbol was two hands shaking, an affirmation of the binding strength of national unity. The more recent liberal project has been centered on identity, affirming not unity but difference, nurturing and celebrating not national identities but sub-national ones. “A recurring image of identity liberalism is that of a prism,” Lilla notes, “refracting a single beam of light into its constituent colors, producing a rainbow. This says it all.”

Immigration is the perfect issue on which Democrats could demonstrate that they care about national unity and identity — and that they understand the voters for whom this is a core concern. Look at the Democracy Fund’s voter study done in the wake of the 2016 election. If you compare two groups of voters — those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, and those who voted for Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016 — the single biggest divergence on policy is immigration. In other words, there are many Americans who are otherwise sympathetic to Democratic ideas but on a few key issues — principally immigration — think the party is out of touch.

And they are right. Consider the facts. Legal immigration in the United States has expanded dramatically over the last five decades. In 1970, 4.7 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born. Today, it’s 13.4 percent. That’s a large shift, and it’s natural that it has caused some anxiety.

The anxiety is about more than jobs. In his 2004 book “Who Are We?,” Harvard University scholar Samuel Huntington pointed out that the scale, speed and concentration of Mexican migration into America after 1965 were without precedent in the country’s history and could provoke a backlash.

He asserted that America had more than just a founding ideology; it had a culture that had shaped it powerfully. “Would America be the America it is today if in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics?” Huntington asked. “The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.” He advocated some modest limits on immigration and, more important, a greater emphasis on assimilation.

Democrats should find a middle path on immigration. They can battle President Trump’s drastic solutions but still speak in the language of national unity and identity. The country’s motto, after all, is “out of many, one” — not the other way around.

Say hello to a post-America world

By Fareed Zakaria

In London last week, I met a Nigerian man who succinctly expressed the reaction of much of the world to the United States these days. “Your country has gone crazy,” he said, with a mixture of outrage and amusement. “I’m from Africa. I know crazy, but I didn’t ever think I would see this in America.” 

A sadder sentiment came from a young Irish woman I met in Dublin who went to Columbia University, founded a social enterprise and has lived in New York for nine years. “I’ve come to recognize that, as a European, I have very different values than America these days,” she said. “I realized that I have to come back to Europe, somewhere in Europe, to live and raise a family.”

The world has gone through bouts of anti-Americanism before. But this one feels very different. First, there is the sheer shock at what is going on, the bizarre candidacy of Donald Trump, which has been followed by an utterly chaotic presidency. The chaos is at such a fever pitch that one stalwart Republican, Karl Rove, described the president this week as “vindictive, impulsive and shortsighted” and his public shaming of Attorney General Jeff Sessions as “unfair, unjustified, unseemly and stupid.” Kenneth Starr, the onetime grand inquisitor of President Bill Clinton, went further, calling Trump’s recent treatment of Sessions “one of the most outrageous — and profoundly misguided — courses of presidential conduct I have witnessed in five decades in and around the nation’s capital.” 

But there is another aspect to the decline in America’s reputation. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey of 37 countries, people around the world increasingly believe that they can make do without America. Trump’s presidency is making the United States something worse than just feared or derided. It is becoming irrelevant.

The most fascinating finding of the Pew survey was not that Trump is deeply unpopular (22 percent have confidence in him, compared with 64 percent who had confidence in Barack Obama at the end of his presidency). That was to be expected — but there are now alternatives. On the question of confidence in various leaders to do the right thing regarding world affairs, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin got slightly higher marks than Trump. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel got almost twice as much support as Trump. (Even in the United States, more respondents expressed confidence in Merkel than in Trump.) This says a lot about Trump, but it says as much about Merkel’s reputation and how far Germany has come since 1945.

Trump has managed to do something that Putin could not. He has unified Europe. As the continent faces the challenges of Trump, Brexit and populism, a funny thing has happened. Support for Europe among its residents has risen, and plans for deeper European integration are underway. If the Trump administration proceeds as it has promised and initiates protectionist measures against Europe, the continent’s resolve will only strengthen. Under the combined leadership of Merkel and new French President Emmanuel Macron, Europe will adopt a more activist global agenda. Its economy has rebounded and is now growing as fast as that of the United States. 

To America’s north, Canada’s foreign minister recently spoke out, in a friendly and measured way, noting that the United States has clearly signaled that it is no longer willing to bear the burdens of global leadership, leaving it to countries such as Canada to stand up for a rules-based international system, free trade and human rights. To America’s south, Mexico has abandoned any plans for cooperation with the Trump administration. Trump’s approval rating in Mexico is 5 percent, his lowest of all the countries Pew surveyed.

China’s leadership began taking advantage of Trump’s rhetoric and foreign policy right from the start, announcing that it was happy to play the role of chief promoter of trade and investment around the world, cutting deals with countries from Latin America to Africa to Central Asia. According to the Pew survey, seven of 10 European countries now believe that China is the world’s leading economic power, not the United States. 

The most dismaying of Pew’s findings is that the drop in regard for America goes well beyond Trump. Sixty-four percent of the people surveyed expressed a favorable view of the United States at the end of the Obama presidency. That has fallen to 49 percent now. Even when U.S. foreign policy was unpopular, people around the world still believed in America — the place, the idea. This is less true today.

In 2008, I wrote a book about the emerging “Post-American World,” which, I noted at the start, was not about the decline of America but rather the rise of the rest. Amid the parochialism, ineptitude and sheer disarray of the Trump presidency, the post-American world is coming to fruition much faster than I ever expected.

Join The Intercept in Documenting the Conflicts of Interest of Hundreds of Trump Appointees

By

Lee Fang, Nick Surgey

 

The Trump administration has faced a growing clamor over the glaring conflicts of interest of many of its high-level appointees.

Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, is currently under investigation for his failure to report $45,000 in fees for a speech given in Moscow to RT, the Russian state media outlet. The billionaire investor Carl Icahn has been criticized for serving as an informal and unpaid adviser to Trump, including on areas in which Icahn has a direct financial interest.
What’s more difficult to track, however, are the conflicts of interest of lower-level appointees — the personnel who execute Trump administration policy on a day to day basis.

To shed light on these appointees’ backgrounds, The Intercept and the Center for Media and Democracy have requested the Office of Government Ethics Form 278, the standard financial disclosure document, for hundreds of Trump officials. We have now received over 150 of them and compiled them in a public Google Documents table, and will be adding more as they arrive.
As seen below, we have begun examining these appointees’ previous lives in the D.C. swamp, including stints as lobbyists and trips through the industry-government revolving door.

We invite readers to join us in combing through the pasts of these appointees, as well as informing us of any officials whose disclosure forms we have not obtained. Many appointments are made without announcements and are not identified on the relevant agency websites.

We will credit you if we use any of your work in future stories. We can be contacted by email at lee.fang@theintercept.com (encryption key available here) and nick@prwatch.org, or via Twitter at @LHFang and @NickSurgey. Instructions for communicating with The Intercept anonymously and with additional security are available here.

The documents show numerous potential conflicts of interest:

Anthony DeMartino, appointed as deputy chief of staff to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, previously consulted for defense contractor Palantir, helping the firm cultivate “government relationships,” according to his ethics disclosure. DeMartino’s consulting work was conducted through “SBD Advisors,” a firm with ties to high-level military officials. Former Defense Secretary Ash Carter previously worked for SBD Advisors, and its current advisory board includes retired Adm. Michael Mullen, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Barack Obama. The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Anthony DeMartino

Office of the Secretary of Defense Deputy Chief of Staff

Form 278

Travis Scott Fisher and Daniel Simmons, two appointees at the Department of Energy, previously worked for the Institute for Energy Research, a pro-fossil fuel think tank founded by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch. The Department of Energy is deeply involved in the approval of liquified natural gas export projects, a field in which Koch’s business has deep involvement. The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.

Travis Scott Fisher	Department of Energy Assistant to the Secretary	Form 278
Daniel Simmons	Department of Energy Assistant to the Secretary	Form 278

In other cases, Trump officials appear to have failed to follow the instructions for Form 278, which state that filers must name any source that paid more than $5,000 for their services. This is designed to force attorneys and lobbyists to disclose their significant clients.

Nathan Miller, appointed as a senior adviser to the Small Business Administration, is a former corporate lobbyist at a company called Public Strategies Washington. According to the required lobbying disclosure forms, Miller and other PSW staff met with Senate officials on behalf of clients including Bain Capital, Lockheed Martin, and Liberty Mutual last year in return for payments to his firm far over $5,000. However, none of these clients are listed in Miller’s presidential appointee disclosure form. Carol Wilkerson, the spokesperson for the SBA, sent us the following statement: “Utilizing our normal review processes, we have determined that appropriate disclosures were made with respect to Mr. Miller’s New Entrant OGE 278e Report.”

Nathan Miller

Small Business Administration Senior Adviser

Form 278

Anthony Pugliese, a senior White House adviser to the Department of Transportation, previously worked as a state-based lobbyist in Pennsylvania. Pugliese’s state lobbying disclosure shows clients including John Deere and Luxottica Retail North America. But Pugliese’s federal ethics disclosure reveals no client information. The Department of Transportation press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Anthony Pugliese

Department of Transportation Senior White House Adviser

Form 278

 Michael Egan, appointed as the special assistant to Department of Defense White House liaison, previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. Egan lists three consulting clients but does not disclose their identities, instead writing “Not specified” and the city where each client is headquartered. The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Michael Egan

Department of Defense Special Assistant to the White House Liaison, OSD

Form 278

Justin Schwab, a senior attorney appointed to the Environmental Protection Agency, initially only listed his former law firm Baker Hostetler and did not disclose any clients. After being contacted by reporters, Schwab refiled his disclosure, revealing that he previously worked for Southern Co., a major utility that is directly affected by the Clean Power Plan climate change regulation. “We decline to comment,” wrote Enesta Jones, EPA spokesperson, when reached for a response.

Justin Schwab

EPA Senior Adviser

Form 278

 

The education of President Trump (and us)

By Fareed Zakaria

There are so many unusual, unprecedented aspects of President Trump’s first 100 days in office that it’s hard to know where to begin. By his own yardstick, the number of promises unfulfilled is staggering. During the campaign, Trump said he would ask for a bill repealing Obamacare “my first day in office.” He said he would deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, starting with 2 million “criminal aliens” within his “first hour in office.” The liberal blog ThinkProgress counted 36 policies that Trump promised to roll out “on Day One.” He did just two on his first day.

But more striking than the policies unfulfilled — some of which might still be proposed or implemented — have been those reversed entirely. Never in the annals of the presidency have there been so many flip-flops so quickly, and with so little explanation. Trump had called NAFTA “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country.” He promised to label China — “the greatest abuser in the history of this country” — a currency manipulator on, yes, “Day One.” He described NATO as “obsolete,” suggested that he might eliminate the Export-Import Bank and implied that he might support Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

Within days of becoming president, Trump’s flip-flops began. He said that he had discovered, perhaps through secret intelligence briefings, that China was not actually manipulating its currency, that NATO was engaged in lots of crucial operations, that the Ex-Im Bank helped lots of small U.S. businesses and that Assad had been committing war crimes. He announced these reversals cavalierly, as if he surely could not have been expected to know these facts previously, when he was running for president. As he said in February, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”

I suspect that his next education will be in tax policy. Trump’s proposals, outlined this week, are breathtakingly irresponsible. They would add trillions of dollars to the debt and are not even designed for maximum stimulative impact. (Abolishing the estate tax, which is paid by 0.002 percent of Americans each year, would not cause a rush to the stores, but would cost $20 billion a year.) Tax negotiations will be an interesting test for Republicans. A party that claims it has deep concerns over the national debt is considering enacting what might be the biggest expansion of debt in U.S. history (in absolute dollars).

The larger education of Trump and, one would hope, his supporters, is surely that government isn’t easy. His appeal for so many was that he was an outsider, a businessman who would bring his commercial skills and management acumen to the White House and get things done. Washington’s corrupt politicians and feckless bureaucrats would see how a successful man from “the real world” cuts through the fog.

Instead, we have watched the sheer incompetence of Trump’s first 100 days — orders that can’t get through courts, bills that collapse in Congress, agencies that remain understaffed, ceaseless infighting within the White House and the constant flip-flops. It turns out that running a family-owned real estate franchising operation is not really the same as presiding over the executive branch of the U.S. government. It turns out that government is hard, “complicated” stuff.

While there are plenty of problems with Washington, the real reason so little gets done there is that the American people have wildly contradictory desires. They want unlimited amounts of health care, don’t want to be denied such care because they are sick (have “preexisting conditions”) and yet expect that costs should plummet. They want government out of their lives but revolt at the prospect of any slight cuts to its largest programs (Medicare, Social Security) or the removal of tax benefits for health care and home mortgages.

This condition has been building for years. In a 1995 book, Michael Kinsley explained what he saw as the roots of the then-raging populist anger at Washington that Newt Gingrich had exploited with his “Contract with America.” Kinsley wrote, “[American voters] make flagrantly incompatible demands — cut my taxes, preserve my benefits, balance the budget — then explode in self-righteous outrage when the politicians fail to deliver.”

He titled the book “Big Babies” in honor of the American people, and he opened it by quoting Alexis de Tocqueville: “The French under the old monarchy held it for a maxim that the king could do no wrong; and if he did do wrong, the blame was imputed to his advisers. . . . The Americans entertain the same opinion with respect to the majority.” Let’s hope that the greatest education of the Trump presidency will be that Americans come to realize that Washington is dysfunctional not because of the venality of the politicians but rather because of the appetites of the people they represent.

Peter Eigen: How to expose the corrupt

I am going to speak about corruption, but I would like to juxtapose two different things. One is the large global economy, the large globalized economy, and the other one is the small, and very limited, capacity of our traditional governments and their international institutions to govern, to shape, this economy. Because there is this asymmetry, which creates, basically, failing governance. Failing governance in many areas: in the area of corruption and the area of destruction of the environment, in the area of exploitation of women and children, in the area of climate change, in all the areas in which we really need a capacity to reintroduce the primacy of politics into the economy, which is operating in a worldwide arena. And I think corruption, and the fight against corruption, and the impact of corruption, is probably one of the most interesting ways to illustrate what I mean with this failure of governance.
 

 Let me talk about my own experience. I used to work as the director of the World Bank office in Nairobi for East Africa. At that time, I noticed that corruption, that grand corruption, that systematic corruption, was undermining everything we were trying to do. And therefore, I began to not only try to protect the work of the World Bank, our own projects, our own programs against corruption, but in general, I thought, "We need a system to protect the people in this part of the world from the ravages of corruption." And as soon as I started this work, I received a memorandum from the World Bank, from the legal department first, in which they said, "You are not allowed to do this. You are meddling in the internal affairs of our partner countries. This is forbidden by the charter of the World Bank, so I want you to stop your doings."

In the meantime, I was chairing donor meetings, for instance, in which the various donors, and many of them like to be in Nairobi — it is true, it is one of the unsafest cities of the world, but they like to be there because the other cities are even less comfortable. And in these donor meetings, I noticed that many of the worst projects — which were put forward by our clients, by the governments, by promoters, many of them representing suppliers from the North — that the worst projects were realized first. Let me give you an example: a huge power project, 300 million dollars, to be built smack into one of the most vulnerable, and one of the most beautiful, areas of western Kenya. And we all noticed immediately that this project had no economic benefits: It had no clients, nobody would buy the electricity there, nobody was interested in irrigation projects. To the contrary, we knew that this project would destroy the environment: It would destroy riparian forests, which were the basis for the survival of nomadic groups, the Samburu and the Turkana in this area. So everybody knew this is a, not a useless project, this is an absolute damaging, a terrible project — not to speak about the future indebtedness of the country for these hundreds of millions of dollars, and the siphoning off of the scarce resources of the economy from much more important activities like schools, like hospitals and so on. And yet, we all rejected this project, none of the donors was willing to have their name connected with it, and it was the first project to be implemented.
 

 The good projects, which we as a donor community would take under our wings, they took years, you know, you had too many studies, and very often they didn't succeed. But these bad projects, which were absolutely damaging — for the economy for many generations, for the environment, for thousands of families who had to be resettled — they were suddenly put together by consortia of banks, of supplier agencies, of insurance agencies — like in Germany, Hermes, and so on — and they came back very, very quickly, driven by an unholy alliance between the powerful elites in the countries there and the suppliers from the North. Now, these suppliers were our big companies. They were the actors of this global market, which I mentioned in the beginning. They were the Siemenses of this world, coming from France, from the UK, from Japan, from Canada, from Germany, and they were systematically driven by systematic, large-scale corruption. We are not talking about 50,000 dollars here, or 100,000 dollars there, or one million dollars there. No, we are talking about 10 million, 20 million dollars on the Swiss bank accounts, on the bank accounts of Liechtenstein, of the president's ministers, the high officials in the para-statal sectors.

This was the reality which I saw, and not only one project like that: I saw, I would say, over the years I worked in Africa, I saw hundreds of projects like this. And so, I became convinced that it is this systematic corruption which is perverting economic policy-making in these countries, which is the main reason for the misery, for the poverty, for the conflicts, for the violence, for the desperation in many of these countries. That we have today more than a billion people below the absolute poverty line, that we have more than a billion people without proper drinking water in the world, twice that number, more than two billion people without sanitation and so on, and the consequent illnesses of mothers and children, still, child mortality of more than 10 million people every year, children dying before they are five years old: The cause of this is, to a large extent, grand corruption.
 

 Now, why did the World Bank not let me do this work? I found out afterwards, after I left, under a big fight, the World Bank. The reason was that the members of the World Bank thought that foreign bribery was okay, including Germany. In Germany, foreign bribery was allowed. It was even tax-deductible. No wonder that most of the most important international operators in Germany, but also in France and the UK and Scandinavia, everywhere, systematically bribed. Not all of them, but most of them. And this is the phenomenon which I call failing governance, because when I then came to Germany and started this little NGO here in Berlin, at the Villa Borsig, we were told, "You cannot stop our German exporters from bribing, because we will lose our contracts. We will lose to the French, we will lose to the Swedes, we'll lose to the Japanese." And therefore, there was a indeed a prisoner's dilemma, which made it very difficult for an individual company, an individual exporting country to say, "We are not going to continue this deadly, disastrous habit of large companies to bribe."

 

So this is what I mean with a failing governance structure, because even the powerful government, which we have in Germany, comparatively, was not able to say, "We will not allow our companies to bribe abroad." They needed help, and the large companies themselves have this dilemma. Many of them didn't want to bribe. Many of the German companies, for instance, believe that they are really producing a high-quality product at a good price, so they are very competitive. They are not as good at bribing as many of their international competitors are, but they were not allowed to show their strengths, because the world was eaten up by grand corruption.

And this is why I'm telling you this: Civil society rose to the occasion. We had this small NGO, Transparency International. They began to think of an escape route from this prisoner's dilemma, and we developed concepts of collective action, basically trying to bring various competitors together around the table, explaining to all of them how much it would be in their interests if they simultaneously would stop bribing, and to make a long story short, we managed to eventually get Germany to sign together with the other OECD countries and a few other exporters.

 

In 1997, a convention, under the auspices of the OECD, which obliged everybody to change their laws and criminalize foreign bribery. (Applause) Well, thank you. I mean, it's interesting, in doing this, we had to sit together with the companies. We had here in Berlin, at the Aspen Institute on the Wannsee, we had sessions with about 20 captains of industry, and we discussed with them what to do about international bribery. In the first session — we had three sessions over the course of two years. And President von Weizsäcker, by the way, chaired one of the sessions, the first one, to take the fear away from the entrepreneurs, who were not used to deal with non-governmental organizations. And in the first session, they all said, "This is not bribery, what we are doing." This is customary there. This is what these other cultures demand. They even applaud it. In fact, [unclear] still says this today. And so there are still a lot of people who are not convinced that you have to stop bribing. But in the second session, they admitted already that they would never do this, what they are doing in these other countries, here in Germany, or in the U.K., and so on. Cabinet ministers would admit this. And in the final session, at the Aspen Institute, we had them all sign an open letter to the Kohl government, at the time, requesting that they participate in the OECD convention.

And this is, in my opinion, an example of soft power, because we were able to convince them that they had to go with us. We had a longer-term time perspective. We had a broader, geographically much wider, constituency we were trying to defend. And that's why the law has changed. That's why Siemens is now in the trouble they are in and that's why MIN is in the trouble they are in. In some other countries, the OECD convention is not yet properly enforced. And, again, civil societies breathing down the neck of the establishment.

  In London, for instance, where the BAE got away with a huge corruption case, which the Serious Fraud Office tried to prosecute, 100 million British pounds, every year for ten years, to one particular official of one particular friendly country, who then bought for 44 billion pounds of military equipment. This case, they are not prosecuting in the UK. Why? Because they consider this as contrary to the security interest of the people of Great Britain. Civil society is pushing, civil society is trying to get a solution to this problem, also in the U.K., and also in Japan, which is not properly enforcing, and so on.

  In Germany, we are pushing the ratification of the UN convention, which is a subsequent convention. We are, Germany, is not ratifying. Why? Because it would make it necessary to criminalize the corruption of deputies. In Germany, we have a system where you are not allowed to bribe a civil servant, but you are allowed to bribe a deputy. This is, under German law, allowed, and the members of our parliament don't want to change this, and this is why they can't sign the U.N. convention against foreign bribery — one of they very, very few countries which is preaching honesty and good governance everywhere in the world, but not able to ratify the convention, which we managed to get on the books with about 160 countries all over the world.

  I see my time is ticking. Let me just try to draw some conclusions from what has happened. I believe that what we managed to achieve in fighting corruption, one can also achieve in other areas of failing governance. By now, the United Nations is totally on our side. The World Bank has turned from Saulus to Paulus; under Wolfensohn, they became, I would say, the strongest anti-corruption agency in the world. Most of the large companies are now totally convinced that they have to put in place very strong policies against bribery and so on. And this is possible because civil society joined the companies and joined the government in the analysis of the problem, in the development of 

  Of course, if civil society organizations want to play that role, they have to grow into this responsibility. Not all civil society organizations are good. The Ku Klux Klan is an NGO. So, we must be aware that civil society has to shape up itself. They have to have a much more transparent financial governance. They have to have a much more participatory governance in many civil society organizations. We also need much more competence of civil society leaders. This is why we have set up the governance school and the Center for Civil Society here in Berlin, because we believe most of our educational and research institutions in Germany and continental Europe in general, do not focus enough, yet, on empowering civil society and training the leadership of civil society.

  But what I'm saying from my very practical experience: If civil society does it right and joins the other actors — in particular, governments, governments and their international institutions, but also large international actors, in particular those which have committed themselves to corporate social responsibility — then in this magical triangle between civil society, government and private sector, there is a tremendous chance for all of us to create a better world.

  Thank you.

  (Applause)