I almost wonder whether, had we not endured a pandemic and the president’s behaviour in the fall-out, we might have been looking at a Trump landslide. But then, there’s nothing quite like a global crisis to take the shine off an entertainer-in-chief. And there’s nothing quite like an undignified response to defeat to complete the disenchantment, at least for the marginal majority.

In the absence of evidence, Trump continues to insist that widespread voter fraud means that he did not really lose the election on November 3—rather, he won “by a lot”. For the first few weeks after the election, his grip on the top job was so tight-knuckled that it looked increasingly as though he would have to be dragged out of the Oval Office by his ankles. He has (at the time of writing) relented and agreed to leave office if the electoral college vote against him on December 14. (Incidentally, the change from one presidency to the other neither legally nor constitutionally requires a concession from the losing candidate. He would always have been taken out in handcuffs if it came to that.)

However unseemly the president’s behaviour, the voter fraud controversy deserves serious consideration. This year was especially tense owing to the complications of the unprecedented level of mail-in voting. Even before the election, concerns were raised about the discrepancy between Republican and Democratic voters (the former voting disproportionately in person, the latter by mail). This played out exactly as feared. Trump made initial gains in key states but then, overnight, these leads reversed as the mail-in ballots were also counted. This led to suspicions of meddling. There are, of course, serious arguments to be made for voting reform, but Trump’s claims are something quite different. 

For one thing, while the margin of victory was narrow, it wasn’t that narrow. In 2000, the Supreme Court had to intervene in the recount dispute Bush v. Gore after the margin of victory in Florida was less than 0.5 per cent of the votes cast, a matter of mere hundreds. By contrast, in order for Trump to seriously contest a Biden victory, he would have to show that he had won at least two of the contested swing states, plus Pennsylvania. That is tens of thousands of votes per state, over a hundred thousand in total.

Again, all accusations of fraud—especially those made by a sitting president, however volatile—deserve serious scrutiny. The trouble for Trump is that his own party, judicial appointees, and honest brokers in conservative media have done this due diligence. His claims simply don’t check out. All but two of the 19 lawsuits brought forward by Trump legal team lawsuits have already failed.

Further undermining the president’s credibility are the wild inconsistencies in his legal team’s claims inside and outside of court. The press conference given by the Trump legal team at the Republican National Convention headquarters, led by Rudy Giuliani, was—to any objective onlooker—the cringiest ever televised. Giuliani stated they had in their possession “enough evidence” to “overturn this election”, an assertion that collapses upon the slightest inspection. For instance, in one suit, recently dismissed by a federal appeals court, Trump’s legal team argued that Pennsylvania violated the equal protection clause of the US constitution by allowing voters in some of its counties to potentially fix their ballots in the event of mistakes. Even if this quirk in the law had given rise to fraudulence in every instance (and there’s no proof that it did) it would still bring the count nowhere near what would be needed to overturn Biden’s 80,000 victory margin. Why, then, would a judge mandate a recount, risking the perceived legitimacy of an election?

Despite being either unable or unwilling to demonstrate a single instance of voter fraud (and no doubt, some does exist), Giuliani pointed instead to a “national conspiracy”. Attorney Sidney Powell went further still, claiming that the election was rigged via corrupted machinery at the behest of foreign communists and American traitors, which apparently includes Republican as well as Democratic officials. (If you are wondering, at this point, what electronic voting has to do with fraudulent ballot papers, Powell attempted to give an account of a broken “algorithm that had been plugged into the system”, requiring the invention of fraudulent ballots at the last minute.)

The Trump team has since unceremoniously dumped Powell. If this is an attempt to distance themselves from her allegations, it is unconvincing. As my National Review colleague Jim Geraghty has pointed out, no-one on the Trump team contradicted Powell when she shared a stage with them at the RNC press conference. Besides, Giuliani is hardly any better. He proclaimed on Twitter that “in 70 percent of Wayne County, Detroit, there were PHANTOM VOTERS. There were more votes than registered voters.” Yet according to the official records, 878,102 people voted out of 1,406,355 registered voters. Or are these figures also the product of corrupted communist machines?

Even those typically sympathetic to the president have been unable to stomach the conspiracy theories. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson complained on air that Powell “never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of polite requests. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell had never given them any evidence to prove anything she claimed today at the press conference.”

If it wasn’t already obvious from his time in office, when under threat, the president is inclined to prefer the conspiratorial to the constitutional. Admittedly, this is sometimes quite effective. Indeed, when applied politically, there is a certain benefit to “gish-galloping” (the debating practice of introducing a high volume of arguments without concern to strength or accuracy, so as to overwhelm one’s opponent). The logic being thus: that it’s easier to start ten fires than it is to put them out. The trouble is that fires tend to cause indiscriminate damage. And what then?

Take that old conservative talking point, “due process under law,” for instance. Lacking evidence to support his claims, Trump has attempted to pressure Republican officials and state legislators to refuse to certify the votes and appoint electoral college delegates. He even summoned Republican state senators and officials in Michigan to the White House in a bid to recruit them. Such an approach is as undemocratic as it is unconservative, undermining 200 years of precedent by which these decisions are determined by the will of the electorate made manifest in the results of state elections. Yet it is what many have come to expect from a president whose self-regard is seldom curtailed by any concern for loftier principles.

Fortunately for the country—if not for the president—Republican lawmakers have mostly ignored the Trump team’s cynical ploy. Michigan’s Republican House speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate majority leader Mike Shirkey have reasserted the certification of Trump’s defeat in the state. The Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, made clear that “we have not seen widespread, systemic voter fraud that would overturn the results of the people”.

The predicament Republican officials face harkens back to the judgement of Solomon. The true conservative, like the true mother in the story, is the one who refuses to split (and so kill) the baby—the American constitutional republic—even if that does mean conceding legitimate defeat in the 2020 election.

Nevertheless, if there is a predisposition among voters to believe partisan fantasies over objective reporting, we journalists might stop to ask ourselves why. After Trump’s victory in 2016, the Democratic establishment—enjoying the full support of the liberal press—spent two years pursuing a bogus Russian election interference conspiracy, at the cost of $32 million to the American taxpayer. Trump’s fabricated “illegitimacy” was frequently invoked as a reason for having him impeached or otherwise defeated. 

Now a sitting president has made similarly outlandish claims of voter fraud and the very same people are utterly incurious—content to ignore, or even to censor, his claims. This double standard is not lost on the American public, whose distrust in “official sources” (as Twitter so sinisterly arbitrates them) is more than justified. Once respected outlets such as the New York Times, are now so obviously partisan, hysterical and intolerant, that the “mainstream media” is the all-too-convenient face for the left-wing bogeyman that features in every Trumpian conspiracy. 

It’s no wonder that Trump is taking the loss so badly on a personal level. It is not only his ego at stake. Life in a post-Trump presidency has bigger implications for the outgoing incumbent. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has compared Trump’s final days to “an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon”, as famously described by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in 1974. Mayer nods to Trump’s resilience: he has “survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits”. Nevertheless, he may be at the end of his financial, as well as his political, rope. He has outstanding loans of three hundred million dollars, all of which he has personally guaranteed, many to foreign creditors.

In any case, Trump is clearly experiencing an unfamiliar and uncomfortable vulnerability. When he told General Services Administration chief Emily Murphy to “do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols,” signalling that he would instruct his staff to cooperate with the transfer of power procedures, he soon added, “What does GSA being allowed to preliminarily work with the Dems have to do with continuing to pursue our various cases on what will go down as the most corrupt election in American political history?”

Yet there is nothing truly inexplicable about Joe Biden’s victory. Trump’s respectability problem translated into an electability problem. He lost the support of educated suburbanites, as well as a significant portion of the conservative Christian vote, which contributed to his loss in key states. Considering the polling predictions, the real surprise has not been his defeat as much as the narrow margin, which has so far helped Republicans maintain their control in the Senate. At the time of writing, the Associated Press has called 33 of the 35 seats up for election; bringing the Republican lead to 50-46. All eyes are now on Georgia where the fate of the GOP candidates in the runoffs will determine whether or not the Republicans have the majority of 51 that they need to block a Biden-Harris legislative agenda. It doesn’t help that the GOP candidate Trump has endorsed has links with QAnon quacks.

Notwithstanding the remote possibility that the Trump team is delaying their revelation of widespread and systemic voter fraud, it seems, then, that much of the litigation is for show; it’s either a sore loser’s last protestation or a cynical ploy for political longevity.

Still, if we have learned anything about Trump, it is that he and his base exhibit a kind of ferocious loyalty to one another. At the last count, roughly half of Republicans believed that Trump “rightfully won” the election, while 68 per cent said they had concerns about a “rigged” vote count in favour of Biden. Those are not insignificant figures. In a way, the president’s final days merely solidify the great sorting that has been happening over the past four years on the American Right. To Republicans, the experiment of Trumpism was always destined to be high risk/high reward. It cost them 2020, and it may even cost them the future credibility of conservatism. But on the flip side, Trumpism did deliver three conservative Supreme Court picks and (potentially) a Republican-controlled Senate—beyond that, I suppose, there’s always 2024, when Trump or one of his disciples can take another run at it. Good luck to anyone who would try to stop them.    

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In a normal presidential race, incumbency might be an advantage. But “normal” is not a word that Americans are likely to associate with the year 2020 when they look back on this year’s presidential race. Like the rest of us, our transatlantic cousins are attempting to cope with the ongoing coronavirus crisis. So far, the pandemic has claimed over 170,000 American lives, with 5.46 million more confirmed cases and a staggering 20 per cent of US workers now reliant on unemployment benefits. Moreover, borders remain shut; businesses are closed; schools are torn over whether and how to reopen; and crime in cities is trending upwards. No country has responded perfectly to the challenges presented by the pandemic. Nevertheless, American leadership—at both the state and federal level—has, in many respects, been singularly indecisive, inconsistent, and corrosively partisan.

Like the ostensibly conservative British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Biden’s economic recovery plan is modelled on the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legislative response to the Great Depression. With the slogan “Build Back Better”, Biden promises to prioritise economic recovery through massive structural change and economic redistribution—investing trillions of dollars into clean energy, child support, and industries in Middle America. Intriguingly, though, at the DNC’s opening night, Biden’s economic agenda was scarcely mentioned. What ensued instead was a careful framing of the November election as an urgent battle for “the soul of the nation”.

The message was clear: Trump is a threat to democracy and to the lives and livelihoods of the American public. Of course, the urgency of this struggle conveniently renders all of Biden’s faults and foibles temporarily irrelevant. Biden is “not perfect”, Michelle Obama admitted in her speech. (Which might refer to any number of progressive shibboleths he has violated in the past: his tough-on-crime stance in the 1980s and ’90s tends to taint him with the failures of mass incarceration, now widely perceived to be evidence of “systemic racism”, and his past support of the Hyde Amendment, which blocked the use of federal funds for abortions, is unlikely to sit well with pro-choice Democrats.) But voters just have to worry about that later. He is a “decent man”, at least.

Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist senator from Vermont, made a similarly desperate plea for party unity. He might not see eye to eye with Biden on everything (e.g. Medicare for All), but Trump is literally killing people with his incompetence. The ideological diversity of those making this argument was striking. From the opposite end of the ideological aisle, Sanders was followed by Republican John Kasich, the former governor of Ohio, who urged other conservatives to pick Biden over Trump. Paul Maslin—described by Politico as “a top Democratic pollster who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean”—told a reporter: “I was sceptical. But I think this is working. On message, that’s for sure. We the people. All of us. Including Republicans!”

The benefit of this “not Trump” strategy is that it provides endless cover for any and all Democratic shortcomings. The evidence of Democrats’ bright ideas and proven competence may not be readily available, but who needs it when the evidence of Trump’s failures is everywhere. And they really do mean everywhere. “In many ways, Covid is just a metaphor,” Andrew Cuomo told his virtual DNC audience. “A virus attacks when the body is weak and when it cannot defend itself.” (Never mind the mistakes that Cuomo made, putting infected patients back into nursing homes, or New York’s soaring crime rate.) When everything from racism to the coronavirus are reduced to symbolic rather than concrete errors, those on the “right” side are absolved from action. Marketing works best with contrasts. Trump is erratic, chaotic, and degrading, whereas Biden is steady, reliable and decent.

“Nero fiddled as Rome burned,” as Biden puts it, “Trump plays golf.”

The week before the Democratic convention, Joe Biden named Kamala Harris, the former attorney general of California, as his Vice President. The pick was not surprising. Biden had said in March he would pick “a woman” (if he was a conservative this would have been rightly criticised as patronising tokenism) and after the George Floyd riots, he came under pressure from within the party to pick a “woman of colour”. From the coverage, you would have thought that Harris was an entirely different politician from the woman who flamed out of the presidential race.

But if Biden has been shrouded in “not-Trump” soul-of-the-nation symbolism, Harris has been protected by the veil of identity. Shortly before her nomination was announced, Planned Parenthood, TimesUp and various women’s groups sent letters to the editors of major publications inducing them to be sufficiently “anti-racist and anti-misogynist” in their coverage. Subsequently CNN ran a whole segment on Tucker Carlson’s mispronunciation of Harris’s first name (phonetically, it’s comma-la), making no mention of the fact Biden himself has mis-pronounced it.

The squeamishness in covering Harris appears to have translated into a lack of scrutiny. The New York Times called her a “pragmatic moderate”. ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos described her as coming from the “middle of the road, moderate wing” of the Democratic Party. But her  track record tells a different story. Yes, Harris has the backing of Wall Street and major tech tycoons, but her policy positions on social issues are much farther to the left than Biden. And, more notably, she has demonstrated disrespect for due process and the sacred American Constitution. For instance, when Joe Biden said during the primaries that gun confiscation would not be permitted under the United States’ constitutional framework, Harris laughed in his face. She has also promised an overhaul to qualified immunity while being a beneficiary of qualified immunity (which a federal judge granted her in a 2017 lawsuit). This is cause for concern for more than just conservatives, as evidenced by Tulsi Gabbard’s infamous takedown during the second Democratic primary debate:

Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president, but I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labour for the state of California, and she fought to keep cash bail system in place, that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.

Progressive journalists can cry misogyny and racism all they like, but polling tells a different story. One such poll, by the Economist/YouGov, found that only half of African American voters viewed Harris favourably, while only 26 per cent of liberals did. Another survey conducted by the Bernie Delegates Network (a coalition of left-wing groups) found that one third of delegates “strongly disapprove” of a Biden-Harris ticket, 19 per cent “somewhat disapprove”, and 24 per cent are “ambivalent”. Which isn’t exactly the mobilisation Biden had in mind.

In truth, the single biggest advantage to the “not Trump” campaign is the man himself. To pick just a few examples, when Axios’s Jonathan Swan (accurately) told Trump that the US’s coronavirus “death [rate] as a proportion of the population” is “really bad”, the President’s response was to take this as a personal insult. “You can’t do that,” he told Swan, telling him to “go by the cases” instead. Elsewhere, Trump gave airtime to an ugly and unnecessary conspiracy theory about Kamala Harris, telling a reporter he had “heard” she “doesn’t meet the requirements” as vice president, citing an article by a “highly qualified, very talented lawyer” which questioned the immigration status of her parents at the time of her birth (Trump has made similar remarks about Barack Obama). And the latest completely pointless Trump-instigated controversy is the United States Postal Service, which the President has said ought not to receive emergency funding because it might favour the Democrats.

The race is likely to tighten as we get closer to November but, so far, Biden is leading by almost nine points nationally while Trump’s approval rating has just stabilised in the low 40s. Of course, in US elections, the popular vote does not always translate into the ultimately decisive Electoral College vote. (In the US, it’s usually up to the swing states.) But things don’t look good for the President given that, with less than three months to go until Election Day, key swing states, such as Florida and Pennsylvania, are now flashing blue. It is difficult to determine with any accuracy how prevalent are the Biden Republicans, but from the data available it would appear there are significantly more of them than there are Trump Democrats.

Trump’s support base is certainly more enthusiastic—they’re voting for Trump more than they’re voting against Biden. But in the end, if there are less of them in the decisive states, what does it matter? In normal times the lack of voter enthusiasm for Biden would be encouraging for Trump. Today, though, there’s not a lot to be enthusiastic about. The Trump campaign has barely even cobbled together a second-term agenda. If they don’t do so soon then “not Trump” may be enough.

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The protestors, although they flouted the coronavirus social distancing rules, had (and still have) broad public backing. A Monmouth poll from June showed 78 per cent of the public believe protestors’ anger to be partly or wholly justified. A Reuters/Ipsos survey found 73 per cent supported “the peaceful protests and demonstrations” though 79 per cent rejected the violence and criminality of rioters. And an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that Americans believe, by a ratio of two to one, that instances of police brutality against blacks point to a broader problem.

The scene is, after all, grimly familiar. Floyd’s death came only months after a similar injustice, the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old jogger, chased and shot dead by a former policeman and his son. These acts of violence not only resemble the lynchings of the previous century, and evoke the active role that government once played in depriving black citizens of their most basic rights—they are also a powerful illustration of what members of the black community have long complained. That even when conceding that the overrepresentation of African Americans in crime statistics has more than one explanation, the problems of police brutality and racial profiling remain, and require redress through rigorous reform. For instance, the Harvard economist Roland Fryer has analysed officer-involved shootings and found no evidence of racial disparities, but he has also observed in the data “large racial differences in police use of nonlethal force,” such as “black civilians who were recorded as compliant by police [being] 21 percent more likely to suffer police aggression than compliant whites.”

The trouble is that the spirit of conciliation and cooperation necessary to tackle this problem is altogether lacking in “woke” politics. I am referring to the over-simplistic and illiberal view of history and politics—and of everything else, for that matter—once shrugged off as student shenanigans which now holds sway in mainstream liberal institutions from the Democratic party to the New York Times editorial page. It is a view of America which overlooks the great milestones achieved in the country’s long and bloody history—the war which ended slavery; the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which respectively abolished slavery and enfranchised black men; the civil rights movement; increased social mobility; and the representation of African Americans in every sector and in public office, including a popular two-term president.

None of these advancements necessarily mean African Americans have arrived at total equality of opportunity and equal treatment under law. But neither should they be discounted in favour of a deterministic view of human history and nature, which argues that the trajectory of a person’s life is dictated by their skin colour to such an extent that the only viable solution is to “dismantle” the system and start over. Under this prevailing postmodern ethic, the difference between Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis—even between Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler—are matters of degree. These dead white men are all, by today’s standards, racist. The solution, according to Twitter’s trending page, is to #BurnItAllDown. This kind of fanaticism—quite apart from its disregard for progress—is dangerously counterproductive.

When the rioting began in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, Time magazine ran a piece arguing that there is a time “When Rioting is the Answer”. The piece points out that political violence has long been part of the American story and psyche, even noting that “America was founded on riots”. And that’s true (sort of). To pick but just two examples, in the buildup to the American War of Independence, colonial rebels ransacked and burned the house of Governor Thomas Hutchinson for his public support of the Stamp Act. They also famously destroyed property when they dumped chests full of tea into Boston Harbour. Americans consequently take pride in their insurrectionist beginnings, and their suspicion of tyranny (in the guise of authority) continues to this day. Distrust of government is the precise reason that the Founders enshrined a constitutional right to bear arms, providing Americans not only with the philosophy but with the actual means to take the law into their own hands, should that be necessary. So, yes, the anti-British colonial elites stirred up popular support for the cause of American independence. And perhaps today’s anti-American metropolitan elites, arguing that the greatest tyranny facing America is now itself, are attempting something similar. Wesley Lowery argued in The Atlantic that “the justice system—in fact, the entire American experiment—was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality”. R.H. Lossin took this a step further in a piece for The Nation, arguing that “attacking police stations” not only “makes rational sense” but is “the fulfilment in some small but concrete way of the central demand being made by protestors across the country: Police need to be defunded, and some police stations need to disappear.” I wonder whether such commentators realise that their ability to publicly castigate their government undermines their own argument.

Though rioters are not an existential threat in the way that real revolutionaries (of the French, Russian, or American variety) were, the recent vandalism of the Lincoln memorial steps is more than just a public nuisance. It is symbolic of a kind of cultural masochism that occurs when American history is recounted in hyper-racialised terms. While slavery is undeniably the scourge, or “original sin”, of the country—one which must be acknowledged in stark and comprehensive terms—a great deal is lost, skewed and distorted when it becomes the only lens through which the past is viewed.

An obvious example of this is the recent 100-page issue by the New York Times Magazine, entitled “The 1619 Project”. (It has since won the Pulitzer prize for commentary). The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, argues that American exceptionalism needs to be “reframed” wholly in terms of the consequences of slavery. But Hannah-Jones does not mention, for instance, that emancipation plans in the rebel colonies were underway as early as 1780, that decades before the Civil War Thomas Jefferson implored Congress to stop Americans “from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa”, or even that President Lincoln was assassinated by a white supremacist for the central role he played in the nationwide abolition of slavery. That Frederick Douglass himself described him as “emphatically the black man’s president” is yet another piece of evidence on the other side of the ledger that Hannah-Jones fails to acknowledge. Writing for National Review, historian Allen C. Guelzo of Princeton University complained that history reduced to one single cause is no history at all: Hannah-Jones’s narrative is one “in which black leaders who preached reconciliation and seized hold of the American promise for themselves all but disappear from view” and in which “white abolitionists vanish, and in which 360,000 Union soldiers die in vain”. The consequences of this are significant. Adopting “The 1619 Project” in their school curricula, tens of thousands of children across America will now learn the self-fulfilling prophecy that America is not a land of healing and hope, but one of division and despair.

There is another consequence, too. Though the right to express a dissenting view is constitutionally guaranteed under the First Amendment, dissenting viewpoints—for example, the belief that America is not an intrinsically racist country or that affirmative action is not the best way to achieve social mobility—are shunned as further proof of racist pathologies.

The American social scientist Musa Al-Gharbi, a black independent, explained it to me thus: “There’s this idea that if you don’t toe the line, the progressive line for a lot of race issues, then you’ve ‘internalised racism’. This is an idea that actually goes back to Marx—he called it ‘false consciousness’. But the problem with false consciousness, especially as a social-scientific concept, is that it isn’t falsifiable . . . By [Karl] Popper’s definition of science, this kind of thing is just not science.”

Al-Gharbi views this theory as religious in nature. “There’s a metaphysics, with ‘whiteness’ operating as a malevolent force in the world, and an ‘original sin’ at the root of all society’s ills—albeit without any apparent hope for progress or redemption . . . if there’s no real hope, then white liberals, especially the elite class, don’t really have to change anything about the way they’re acting, about how they’re profiting from the system.”

The effect of this orthodoxy is to shut down debate at the precise moment that it would be most constructive—that is, when there is enough public and bipartisan support for meaningful political reform.

The political Left claims to hold the monopoly on anti-racism yet is interested in far more than just race relations. For instance, the Black Lives Matter Global Network advertises on its website its noble aims of working “vigorously for freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension, all people” but declares its means to achieving these aims as “dismantle[ing] cisgender privilege” and “patriarchal practice”, as well as “disrupt[ing] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”. Among its biggest policy priorities is to “defund the police”.

As Al-Gharbi noted, this is all too convenient for progressive politicians, who are effectively off the hook. Perhaps they think that the American public won’t notice that the cities with the worst crime problems, including Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed, are run by Democrats. The scenes of mayhem emerging from Seattle in which the mayor has allowed rioters to declare a nation state in a six-block area amounts to a staggering abdication of political responsibility. Graffiti from within the self-styled “police free” Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone reads “burn them all”, “kill pigs”, “kill cops”. Yet the the New York Times has declared it a “homeland for racial justice”. New York City, meanwhile, is facing what is potentially its sharpest rise in murder rates since the 1990s. Rather than address this, the mayor and governor are busy disbanding their 600 plainclothes officers in accordance with the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement. And what about the fact that the neighbourhoods worst affected will be communities of colour? After that Council voted to dismantle its police force, Lisa Bender, a member of the Minneapolis City Council, appeared on CNN to support the decision. When the interviewer asked her what a person would do if, in the middle of the night, her home was broken into, Bender replied that such a concern “comes from a place of privilege” and can therefore be discounted.

The fact that these problems are happening in Democrat municipalities would be politically advantageous for any normal Republican president. But that’s not what America has. Nevertheless, what Donald Trump lacks in conventional moral leadership he attempts to make up for in spectacle. The President tweeted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”—words associated with segregationist politicians of the 1960s. Unwilling to pass up a photo opportunity with a Bible outside St. John’s Episcopal Church (damaged by rioters the night before), he also used a combination of smoke canisters, shields, pepper balls and horses to clear out peaceful demonstrators. Luckily for him, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, is engaging in toe-curling posturing of his own. (He told voters via a popular African American radio host that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or for Trump, you ain’t black”.) Trump’s strategy now is to mirror Richard Nixon’s appeal to the “silent majority” of 1968, who might be sympathetic to the protestors but who are unwilling to do away with law and order.

So far, Biden has done well to ignore the more radical demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, refusing to “defund the police”. (Based on current polling, if Biden improves on Hillary Clinton’s abysmal performance among non-college whites and manages to maintain his lead in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—states Trump won in 2016 by less than one point—he is set for victory.) Senate Democrats, however, are pursuing a more all-or-nothing strategy and recently blocked a Republican police reform bill that would restrict officers from performing chokeholds as well as increasing federal funding for police body cameras.

It would be a shame if the momentum for constructive change in the aftermath of Floyd’s death were spoiled by its excesses or by naked election-year politicking. There are many areas for police reform; whether it’s police unions, which help protect bad cops such as Floyd’s killers, or policies such as “qualified immunity”, which prevent victims of police brutality from waging civil suits against their attackers. There are also many ways in which to educate against the real and present dangers of racism, remembering especially those blood-spattered chapters of American history, without surrendering to the quasi-Marxist dogmatists who cannot tell the difference between the American political system and that of Iran. It’s one thing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is quite another to argue that because the baby made the water dirty, it ought to be drowned. The progressive repudiation of America, on account of its struggle with racism, is an act of political self-sabotage that fundamentally misunderstands human nature and history. Come November, it will be a hard sell. 

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Outside his house on Pushkin Street, in the heart of Derbent’s Old Town, Isakov left the car and walked to his front door. From out of the darkness, shots rang out. One tore through his ribcage. Neighbours rushed the critically injured rabbi to hospital, from which an Israeli medical team flew him to Israel.

The gunman fled. Though the Russian police later announced that they had killed a known terrorist suspected of the attack, no one was ever brought to trial. In Dagestan’s years-long Islamist insurgency, a spillover of the Chechen wars, few militants ever were.

For the remnants of the Jewish community that once dominated Derbent, the assassination attempt seemed like the final straw. “There is no future for Jews here,” Angela Rubinova, head of the local branch of Atzmaut, a Jewish organisation, told The Times of Israel. “I’m staying because someone needs to turn out the lights.”

That Jews live in Dagestan at all can seem unlikely. In Moscow and St Petersburg, the autonomous republic’s name is almost a byword for the distant barbarism of Russia’s wild southern fringe: overwhelmingly Muslim, culturally alien and congenitally violent.

Historically speaking, however, Derbent is exactly the kind of place Jews would be found.

Squatting in a three-kilometre-wide gap between the Caucasus mountains and the Caspian Sea, the city has been a crossroads for five millennia. Sitting astride both Europe’s Silk Road with China and one of the only north-to-south passes through the Caucasus, it has been both commercial hub and military outpost. For the Persian shahs, the fortress they built at Derbent—which means “barred gate” in Farsi—was the end of the known world, Iran’s eternal insurance policy against northern invaders.

It was, some historians say, the shahs who brought the Persian-speaking Mountain Jews from Iran to the Caucasus, perhaps as early as the fifth century BC. Over the centuries, the Mountain Jews settled in a vast crescent spanning modern-day Azerbaijan, Dagestan, and the Russian North Caucasus. Derbent, growing rich on the trade routes, grew into one of the many improbably cosmopolitan dots that pepper Eurasia. Jewish and Armenian merchants dominated a dizzyingly international town that by the 20th century, according to Svetlana Anokhina, a local journalist, boasted Georgian, Polish and even Chinese residents, on top of 36,000 Jews.

It was not to last.

The Caucasian Mountain Jews suffered as much as anyone from the revolution, civil war, totalitarianism, and an eventual, precipitous collapse that Soviet power offered. “The Bolsheviks wouldn’t let us live as Jews, religiously,” says Robert Ilishaev, rabbi and chairman of the Derbent Jewish community. “My family were forced to leave Dagestan on foot, walked for months to Istanbul, and took a ferry to Israel.”

Amid the economic collapse and ethnically-inspired bloodshed that consumed the Caucasus after the Soviet collapse in 1991, Mountain Jewish communities in Chechnya, Ossetia and Dagestan shrivelled, died and emigrated. Only two final redoubts survived: in the village of Qirmizi Qasebe in Azerbaijan, and in Derbent.

Strung out along Tagi-Zade street, about halfway between the hilltop Sassanid fortress and the Caspian shore, stands the Kele-Numaz Synagogue. Restored and reopened with much fanfare in 2010, the centre of Derbent Jewish life is immediately recognisable: it is the only half-modern building on a street otherwise made up of decaying 19th-century merchants’ mansions. Containing a Jewish kindergarten, a museum, a medley of administrative offices and Russia’s southernmost mikvah (a bath for ritual immersion), the synagogue complex is a microcosm of a community that once dominated Derbent.

Publicly, the authorities are cagey about precisely how many Jews remain. Privately, most put the figure today at a little less than a thousand. “This whole part of town used to be Jewish,” says Vafik Gasanov, a Shi’ite Azeri security guard I meet on the street outside. “Further down, towards the sea, it was Christians. Armenians and Russians. In the upper city, beneath the fortress, Azeris. We always just got along. Derbent has always been like that—tolerant, educated.”

‘That Jews live in Dagestan at all can seem unlikely. In Moscow and St Petersburg, the autonomous republic’s name is almost a byword for the distant barbarism of Russia’s wild southern fringe’

Dagestan is, for outsiders, dizzyingly diverse. Over 30 ethnicities with their own, largely unrelated, languages inhabit a region no larger than Scotland. It is a cultural jigsaw so complicated that it resembles more a whole series of puzzles, each with little to do with the next. Even the Avars, Dagestan’s single biggest nationality at around a third of the population, who traditionally dominate politics in the capital of Makhachkala are almost unheard of in Derbent, barely an hour’s drive south.

Dagestan’s extraordinary variegation has often been seen as self-fulfilling: nationalism isn’t practical when no one nation is anything other than a small minority. Dagestan was simply too multicultural for ethnic cleansing or national sorting. Many credit this diversity for the Jews’ survival.

A billboard advertises Shi’ite pilgrimages to Mecca, Medina and Karbala (©Felix Light)

“If there weren’t so many different nationalities here, we Jews would have left long ago,” says Viktor Mikhailov, editor of Vatan, Derbent’s Jewish newspaper. “Everything in Dagestan depends on a very precise balance. That meant we never came under attack from our neighbours, as happened elsewhere.” He says that in the 2000s, during the worst of the Islamist insurgency, Derbent’s balkanisation helped protect local Jews from the fate of other, vanished Dagestani Jewish communities. “The southern Dagestan, Derbent mentality is very, very different from the rest of the republic. In Makhachkala, in the north, everyone is Sunni. Here, it’s always been a mix of Sunni, Shi’a, Christians and Jews. That has made Derbent more pluralistic, and meant that terrorism was always less of a problem.”

Nevertheless, Dagestan’s distinctive brand of ethnic coexistence has demanded sacrifices from the Mountain Jews. One of the most painful has been their specifically Jewish identity. When the Soviets took control of Dagestan in the Civil War, they began to grapple with the new republic’s dazzling ethnic kaleidoscope, creating 14 official nationalities into which all Dagestanis were expected to fit. Rather than being recognised as Jews, Mountain Jews were officially categorised as Tats, members of another Dagestani people with distant Persian origins.

“The word ‘Tat’”, Ilishaev, the community leader, says flatly, “is a communist invention. It was always about eroding our religion and heritage as Jews.” Even so, others suggest this bureaucratic compromise has brought the Derbent community certain advantages. “In Soviet Dagestan, there were very strict ethnic quotas for employment, access to education, housing,” says Mikhailov. “Being one of the 14 official nationalities got you all kinds of advantages that outsiders didn’t get. Of course we’re not actually Tats, but we certainly benefitted from pretending to be Tats.”

The old Jewish quarter in Derbent (©Felix Light)

Today, however, many of the old certainties that nurtured and protected the city’s Jewish community are gone. Derbent’s unique cultural mix has started to crumble. Amid the post-Soviet chaos the city’s Christians, Soviet Russian administrators and technicians, and ancient Armenian merchant clans almost all left, as well as most of the Jews. The collapse of Soviet-era controls on internal migration have seen huge influxes into Derbent from Dagestan’s hinterland, swelling the city’s population from 80,000 in 1989 to 120,000 today. The new arrivals, mostly Tabasaran and Lezgin Sunnis, known derisively as uncivilised, uncouth gortsy, or highlanders by some Derbent old-timers, have decisively shifted the city’s demographic balance.

For the Mountain Jews, the problem is not security—with the long-running Dagestani insurgency now largely defeated, Jews are now perhaps safer than at any time since 1991. Rather, it is a sense that the multi-confessional city that nurtured and protected their community is no more. With thriving Mountain Jewish communities in Moscow and Acre, emigration looms ever larger for those who remain.

Yet stubbornness flickers. “My entire family have already gone to Israel”, says Ilishaev, “but I’m not leaving, I’ve no business in Israel. Derbent is my home, and my community’s home and I’m staying here.” 

The post The Mountain Jews: an ancient community between the Caucasus and the Caspian appeared first on Standpoint.

One of these exceptions is impeachment, which is wholly given over to Congress. There is no appeal to the courts, removal from office is self-executing, and the president cannot pardon an impeached offender. Nevertheless, impeachment is not a legislative power. Rather it is a juridical power with indictment (the bill of impeachment) adopted by the House investigating in a manner similar to a grand jury, and trial by the Senate, similar to a petit jury in a criminal proceeding but in fact acting as a panel of judges trying issues of both law and fact.

It was agreed early on in the Constitutional Convention that treason and bribery would be grounds for the removal from office of any federal official. But some of the delegates thought this did not go far enough. Like their cousins in Britain, the Americans followed closely the impeachment of Warren Hastings for his behaviour as Governor-General of India. Hastings, one delegate observed, was not being tried for treason or bribery; perhaps a broader, catch-all phrase should be added. “Maladministration” was proposed.

This was promptly rejected by James Madison, one of the principal architects of the new governing structure, as being incompatible with the American model. It would mean, he said, that the president would serve at the pleasure of the Senate and thus would convert the US constitutional structure into a parliamentary one in which the executive is integrated with the legislature. “Maladministration” was withdrawn. In its place, the drafters substituted the phrase, “high crimes and misdemeanors”, drawing perhaps from Edmund Burke’s prosecution of Hastings in which Burke had said that the charges “were crimes, not against forms, but against those eternal laws of justice, which are our rule and our birthright: his offenses are not informal, tactical language, but in reality, in substance and effect, High Crimes and High
Misdemeanors”.

Republicans defending President Trump have seized upon the general unfamiliarity with this history to throw sand in the eyes of the public and even members of Congress, arguing that the import of the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” is that a statutory  criminal act must be shown to have been committed in order to obtain a conviction, that the standards of proof of an ordinary criminal proceeding—evidence beyond a reasonable doubt—must be shown, that flaws in the preliminary investigation taint an impeachment such that the indictment must be thrown out, and much more nonsense.

They succeeded, as successful criminal defence attorneys can do, in casting enough doubt on the prosecution to permit the Republican caucus in the Senate to prevent a conviction of the president for behaviour that almost certainly merited his impeachment. At present, his approval ratings have significantly increased and his theatrical poses as the maligned innocent have attained even greater heights of pained
oppression.

Was there anything the House managers, the prosecutors, could have done to avert this farce?

Perhaps they should have gone to the courts to enforce a subpoena against the president’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, who is reported to have confirmed in his unpublished book that Trump did indeed withhold military assistance to Ukraine in order to compel the Ukrainian government into announcing a baseless investigation into former Vice-President Joe Biden, at the time Trump’s likeliest opponent in the upcoming presidential election. But such a resort to the courts would have been time-consuming and might have pushed off impeachment proceedings into the summer, interfering with the election campaign.

Certainly the House managers should have focused more clearly on the constitutional crime—for so it is—of impounding congressionally appropriated funds. By resting the case on vague “abuses of power” the prosecutors left room for doubt whether the charges were too broad and would remove a president for self-serving but ordinary politics.

Or perhaps the bill of impeachment should never have been sent to the Senate where the majority leader, who controls the docket there, had already said, “I’m not an impartial juror. This is a political process. There is nothing judicial about it. I would anticipate we will have a largely partisan outcome in the Senate. I’m not impartial about this at all.”

In 1841, following the death of President William Henry Harrison, Harrison’s vice-president John Tyler succeeded to the presidency. He quickly alienated many members of Harrison’s party when he vetoed two important pieces of legislation. The following year an impeachment resolution was introduced in the House and a House select committee, headed by former President John Quincy Adams, was formed. Though Adams was convinced of the grounds for impeachment, he refused to propose an impeachment resolution on the grounds that it would be defeated in the Senate. Perhaps Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was wise to pause before sending the Trump impeachment to the Senate, should have simply tabled it [in the American sense, meaning to stall it] in the House.

In any case, the matter will now be sent to the American people—in yet another example of a popular referendum replacing the rule of law. 

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Yet he has been exposed as one of the weakest and most ineffective leaders his country has ever known. His understanding of politics, economics, tactics and strategic planning paled in comparison to his late father, the former prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and other predecessors of both parties. He stumbled and fumbled his words in speeches and interviews, which made him a target for public mockery and a perpetual meme.

What really unravelled his premiership was the Globe and Mail’s investigative report into SNC-Lavalin, a large Montreal-based construction company accused of bribing Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. Trudeau’s office pressured Jody Wilson-Raybould, the then Attorney General, to help the company by intervening in a related criminal proceeding. Trudeau could have stopped the political bleeding by apologising and allowing her to speak freely about this controversy. (Cabinet confidentiality and solicitor-client privilege in Canada prevented her from doing so.) Instead, he stubbornly claimed he never “directed” her to do anything. The controversy dented his popularity and his ego, prompting the resignation of Gerald Butts, his longtime friend, senior advisor and principal secretary.

In evidence to the parliamentary justice committee in February, Wilson-Raybould, who had also been Justice Minister, meticulously outlined dates, times and meetings with senior officials. There were apparently several attempts to pressure her, along with “veiled threats” about job security.

Scheer and the Conservatives caught up with Trudeau’s Liberals in most opinion polls. Faced with the prospect of a real opponent, Trudeau tried to depict him as a bigot, circulating a 2005 video of Scheer speaking about gay marriage. “They have many of the collateral features of marriage,” he said, “but they do not have its inherent feature, as they cannot commit to the natural procreation of children. They cannot, therefore, be married.” Scheer didn’t apologise, but acknowledged his views have evolved. He has repeatedly said the issue of gay marriage in Canada is “over”.

Both party leaders made unforced errors. In September, Time magazine released a 2001 photo from a school yearbook that showed Trudeau, then a 29-year-old teacher, wearing brown face makeup during an Arabian Nights-themed party. The profusely apologetic premier told reporters he had also put on black face makeup in high school while singing “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)”.

Another, conveniently forgotten, instance was revealed by the media the next day that had occurred during a “costume day” for instructors at a Quebec-based whitewater rafting company. Trudeau preposterously claimed his privileged background meant he had not realised that such actions were perceived as being racist. Few, if any, Canadians believe Trudeau is racist. But three occasions of racial insensitivity jarred with his sanctimoniously “woke”
approach to identity politics.

Scheer also made several mistakes during the campaign, but they were hardly of the same magnitude. For instance, he had never discussed publicly his dual US citizenship, while criticising a former Governor-General, Michaëlle Jean, for the same thing. That looked hypocritical and mean. A muddled explanation of whether he was entitled to call himself a licensed insurance broker in Canada didn’t help, either.

As the mudslinging and viciousness dragged on, Canadian voters leaned back to the familiar and gave Trudeau a half-hearted endorsement on October 21, with 157 out of 338 seats. He also lost the popular vote to Scheer by 34.41 per cent to 33.07 per cent, the lowest vote share of any party to take or hold power in Canadian history.

Trudeau has opted not to build a coalition (which is rare in my country), and will work with the NDP, Greens and others issue by issue. Even though his closest allies are Left-leaning and share certain core values, political and economic differences will undoubtedly lead to some serious policy disagreements before long. Although the usual lifespan of a minority government in Canada is 18-24 months, the prime minister may face an uphill battle to even reach this political benchmark.

In four short years, Trudeau’s shiny progressive vision turned into a cloudy left-wing mess. The political forecast looks no better. Just the weather conditions that Scheer and the Conservatives are hoping for.   

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This mentality survives: you just have to look for it.

Burgas, Bulgaria’s second port, is a city of neglect. Dingy streets are lined by crumbling communist estates, pockmarked by neo-Nazi graffiti and rusting steel frames jutting out of broken concrete. The roads and railways that converge on its docks, built for an era of Soviet plenty, reflect the straight lines of the past onto an abandoned warehouse at its entrance.

The Drujba (Friendship) is the weekly sea link between southern Bulgaria and Batumi, Georgia’s tourist boom-town to the east. In the 1980s, the Black Sea was criss-crossed by dozens of state-owned truckers’ ferries and passenger ships linking Romania and Bulgaria to Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and Georgia. Now, there are far fewer.

It is two in the morning. The truckers are restless. “We aren’t leaving until tomorrow,” says a Ukrainian. “We’ll be gone in 15 minutes,” says an Azeri. They file onto the deck in ones and twos, clutching the thin plastic bags of clothes that they carry with them for weeks on the road. They fidget with lighters and drag nervously on cheap Bulgarian cigarettes. Their agitation is infectious.

We are waiting for the universal smell of movement: the tang of low-octane fuel.

In the old Eastern bloc days, truckers were known as the “Tsars of the Road”. They were the slightly subversive, semi-independent workers who could travel abroad, mysterious loners who drove the roads that their neighbours only dreamt of. The mystique is gone but this ship’s odd community has a distinctly post-Soviet feel, recalling a world long-gone. The language is Russian. The films are Soviet. The routes follow trade routes dating from the communist era: Armenian vegetables and cognac for Sofia, Ukrainian sweets for Azerbaijan, Georgian cheese for Brno.

The truckers are Russian, Bulgarian, Armenian, Georgian. You can see the currents of Black Sea trade—and the visa restrictions, tariffs and politics that constrain it—by counting the passports. The Ukrainians, heading to Central Asia and the Caucasus, would have previously taken the much shorter route through Russia. Crimea and the war in the Donbass have kinked routes. The Armenians choose not to travel through Turkey, or are prevented from doing so.

Most of the truckers are heading to Georgia and Armenia. A few are going further, to the Middle East and Central Asia. The Armenians are the odd ones out, mixed in with the drivers of 18-wheelers, they are the diaspora going home.

The metal deck begins to shake and there is an echo beneath our feet. The engine is on and the ramp is closing. Depressed truckers sit around on the dock’s dusty truck-stop. They’ve arrived too late.

The Panamanian-flagged cargo ship moored behind us gives a monotonous blare and disappears into the misty sea. “I’ll send you a text on Monday, and I’ll be in Yerevan on Tuesday,” a man beside me whispers into a phone. “I’m sorry, I’m coming as fast as I can.” He has the tired eyes of a man whose mother is lonely and dying.

I start to feel self-conscious and spot a man watching me. He has buck teeth and bug eyes and makes me uncomfortable. I stare back at him. “What are you driving?” he calls out. “Take a cigarette. I’ll show you how these boats work.” This is Nemo, a trucker, and, as I observe him over the three-night crossing, the leader of the Bulgarian posse.

“You see these guys here? They are the Bulgarians, we have the right side of the ship and those cabins there.” He points down the grimy corridor. “Over there, are the Georgians, the Armenians and the Russians. They stay on that side and we don’t talk to them much.” He lights up. “Listen, they are just not like you and me. Georgians, Armenians and Azeris, they are nice people, but they just aren’t Europeans, are they?”

In fact, the Bulgarians are the worst. They’ll push a vodka across the table and start their rants: “The Ukrainians. You won’t see this if you read your newspaper,” I am reproached, “they are dangerous and poor. They are the real bandits. If I drive through Dnipro and Odessa, I lock my doors. It’s no surprise they have a shooting war there now.” Around the Black Sea, Turkish, Russian and European radio beam their broadcasts into truckers’ cabins.

Burgas’ lights are fading. Autumn’s Scythian winds, blowing across from the Ukrainian steppe, force me from the deck.

I head to the “bar”—a man sitting in front of a shelf of spirits and cheap beer in the ship’s canteen. In Varna, I was told that there is a favourite of the lonely trucker: a peroxide blonde who sells more than alcohol. The groups are coalescing, and introductions and reunions are being made. I sit down with Raoul, a third-generation Czech trucker, so obese that his body moulds to the rubber chairs.

“You’re a Jew, right? You look like one.”

Raoul, like me, doesn’t have a crowd. There are no Czechs.

“You people are fucking everywhere. Even here. Shit.”

He knocks back a shot and pulls out a cigarette. “I don’t have to drive, so it doesn’t matter,” he says when I ask him if he’ll have a mean hangover tomorrow.

Welcome to the truckers’ cruise. For three nights, they don’t have to worry about their wives telling them that their children are sick, or that their fathers have had a stroke. There is no mobile phone signal or WiFi. There is alcohol, cigarettes, and most of all, a proper bed.

The Bulgarians have colonised the central tables. The Armenians are shunted to the corner and are already drunk. The Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians have found each other and are three-quarters through two litres of whisky. The Georgians are playing dominoes in a smoky annexe; a Russian film from the 1970s plays in the background.

We awake to an overcast sky. Dolphins buzz the ship like torpedoes, swimming
perpendicular to it under the waves, before they crash into the hull and ricochet off in all directions. Drinking begins at breakfast.

Truckers are like cowboys. Mythical. Mysterious and dangerous. Independent and strong. The blue-collar heroes of the road. When I told my friends that I was going to spend time with the truckers, they asked for the wild stories of the Kazakh steppe. Just like the West, the truckers’ world is a world without women. The women they meet are those with something to sell.

Like the cowboy, the trucker, cigarette in tow, introduces himself by listing his conquests. “Manchuria, Mongolia, Pakistan, Tajikistan,” says Andrei, pausing at each name to make sure I am impressed. “Iraq, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia,” says Nemo, as he sketches a map—which he supplements with his theory of “strategic missile base locations” long stewed on Turkish motorways. “Holland, Russia, Poland,” are the boring, but more common answers.

Truckers are the first to know when the world is changing.

Just as the Genoese opened the Pontic Steppe and the cowboy the American West, truckers make new geographies plausible. Europe, Eurasia, the post-Soviet space, are abstractions until trucks, trade and TV realise them. Tracing the new and dying routes will tell you where is connecting and where is fracturing.

Eventually, the cowboys were unmasked as criminals and outcasts. The truckers are lonely and homesick. They show you pictures of smiling wives and share downloaded photos of the supercars that drive in the fast-lane. Their badges of conquest are meaningless: they’ve seen the world, but through the glass of a cabin window.

That night, as I lie in my bunk, there is a knocking at the door. I ignore it. “Open the door you fucking idiot,” a slurring man says outside. I open my eyes. He hits harder and my heart quickens. The door swings open. He collapses onto the floor. “Shit.” He looks up at me. “Who the fuck are you?” He tries to stand, but the boat is rocking and he is fat and drunk. I stare at this beached whale unsure of what to do, until someone helps him up and ushers him out.

For a brief moment, my phone buzzes. “Welcome to Turkey.” I rush out onto an almost empty deck. Fishing boats are just visible. Everyone has gone inside where a man is playing with a satellite box. In-and-out comes Bulgarian satellite television. Momentarily the ship is somewhere.

Sailing at night is a disorientating experience. The sea sucks in the horizon, which blurs invisibly into the water. The only flecks of light are stars: the Black Sea’s are the tiny fragments of plastic that float out from the Turkish coast and reflect back the ship’s floodlights.

“It’s really bad,” says Igor, as he leans against the metal railings. “Ships come past and they dump their rubbish in the sea.” He points to the glinting white specks. He flicks his cigarette into the sea. The closer we get to Georgia and the bottle-neck of the south-eastern Black Sea, the more plastic-packet stars appear.

Nearby, Artur, a sad Armenian, is pacing.

“The Bulgarians say we are not European.” His drunken eyes widen. We dance around the deck, my feet falling back as he stumbles with the rhythm of the rolling sea. “They don’t even have proper roads in Bulgaria, they aren’t smooth like in Germany or France, and they think that they are Europeans!” He grabs my shoulder. “I am French!”

We switch from Russian to French.

“I am a political refugee! I am from Baku! When the Azeris, the sons-of-bitches, started the killing and burning, I got in my cement-mixer and drove to Russia. That was 1987.” He remembers when the Soviet Union began to fall apart, when the Caucasus went up in flames and Armenia and Azerbaijan went to war. For the Armenians of Azerbaijan, and the Azeris of Nagorno-Karabakh, it was the end of the road.

By 1997, Artur had made his way to the banlieues of France, trading Europe’s edge for the French periphery.

He is spiralling. “The real sons-of-bitches are the Turks. They could see I was an Armenian and they didn’t let me into the country. My father is dying and they blocked me at the Greek border. They said that my documents were bad.” He drags on a cigarette so long I wait for him to choke, but instead he launches into 1915: the Genocide.

He reaches for a torn paper document. “Look, this is my licence, they said it was bad but they are lying. It’s fine. Look there. My French isn’t good.” I give it a glance.
Expired.

“You’re going to Georgia to work, right?” I nod. He writes down the phone number of his sons, one of whom runs a garage in Lyon. “You’re French, I’m Armenian, we’re brothers. When you come to Lyon, call my sons. We’ll hook you up.” Then, bemusingly, “You’re an engineer?” Inexplicably, I nod. “We’ll hook you up. You speak French and he needs someone who can do front-of-house.” He drifts off for another whisky.

Batumi comes into view: beaches, casinos and Turkish strip-clubs. A 21st-century boomtown swallowing its 19th-century grandfather. This is the land where Jason and the Argonauts came to find the Golden Fleece. Behind it, the mountains of the Caucasus that spellbound Dumas, and enthralled the Lermontovs and Pushkins of the Russian Empire, the dangerous intellectuals, spared Russia’s Siberian heart, but exiled to its Caucasian periphery.

In the distance, the black mountains of Abkhazia, and Anaklia, the future super-port of Chinese dreams. Most of the truckers have rolled-off here dozens of times, but they stay at a truck-stop a few kilometres down the main road to Tbilisi.

I crush into the canteen for passport control. “Soon, back to my home: Ukraine,” I overhear. Mobile phones start to buzz. I hear children on the lines. It is three days to Tehran, and Nemo is itching. The Armenians can make Yerevan before nightfall if immigration is quick. Everything speeds up.

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The President’s decision with regard to the handful of troops positioned in northern Syria has resulted in not only the regular commentariat attacking the Commander-in-Chief, but also well-known former military men, including Admiral William McRaven and the retired Marine Corps General Jim Mattis, who until very recently actually served in President Trump’s Cabinet as his Secretary of Defence.

Was the vituperation justified? No.

As the events of late October demonstrate, America’s commitment to what was originally called the Global War on Terror is no less robust than before. The most dangerous terrorist in the world, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the “Caliph” of the Islamic State,  was brought to justice in a bold mission, Operation Kayla Mueller, that required the President to authorise a high-risk Delta Force deployment into Syria, over Russian-controlled airspace, and which necessitated the collaboration of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), 70 American operators, and at least one dog. These are not the actions or decisions of a “cut and run” politician who believes in isolationism or that he has arrived at a Bushian “Mission Accomplished” moment.

The public attacks on the President’s counterterrorism and national security policies have been sophomoric, simplistic, and at times churlish. Marxist ethno-nationalist Kurdish militias are not suddenly transmuted, by dint of fighting jihadists such as Islamic State, into treaty-level allies who must be protected in perpetuity. This is the kind of counterfactual elitist sophistry the American electorate rejected in 2016. We will work with local actors when national interest and viable strategies dictate. No more, no less.

Likewise, the astrategic idea that we should militarily engage or leave forces in theatre as Turkish tanks and armoured personnel carriers roll into northern Syria, thus risking a war with the largest Nato army in Europe, beggars belief. The real problem was not withdrawing our troops. It is what would have happened if the President had kept them there—especially if some had been killed in the ensuing clash between Turkish forces and the Kurds. The repositioning of a handful of our troops from one area of Syria to another is not a sign of our surrender to local jihadists, be they IS or even Al-Qaeda. America is still in the fight. Just read the Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy (which, full disclosure, I helped shape). It is informed by “principled realism” and reorients America to the needs of an age of “great power competition” with the likes of China. But it is explicit in our commitments to hunt down and kill globally capable terrorists, and support local Sunni allies in doing the same against their local fundamentalist foe, since we see these groups as inimical to the American way of life.

America under Trump makes this commitment because we believe that such organisations are intrinsically evil, but most importantly because they represent a threat to our interests and the interests of our allies and our partners. Having advised candidate Trump and then President Trump, I can attest that he is a patriot and— thanks to his 50-plus years in business—a pragmatist.

“America First” is not the same as America Alone, but it does mean this White House looks at the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. As such, President Trump knows that Russia is a menace. That is why we sent Ukraine anti-tank missiles when we came into office, unlike the Obama White House, which shipped piles of blankets to Kiev. And the President is fully cognisant of the fact that Turkey is today the Nato nation that least acts like a proper member of the Alliance. But he also knows, because he lives in the real world, that Turkey is geostrategically far more important than the Kurds and Syria combined. If the West loses Turkey for good, that will make the Kurdish question look like a footnote in history. Strategy is best done through the lens of realpolitik, not on the basis of emotion or ideology. Just look at the failed strategies of Adolf Hitler, or Saddam Hussein.

Our allies—big and small—need not worry. At the beginning of the Trump Administration, when I had to formally represent the “America First” policy, I often resorted to the US Marine Corps saying: “No better friend, no worse enemy.” Whether you are a small Baltic state gravely concerned about Putin, or Taiwan facing a Communist threat like China, rest assured that reliable American leadership is back. Just ask Prime Minister Abe of Japan, or the Australian government. Or consider how Nato is finally, after decades, truly grappling with the “freeloader complex” and getting serious about the external threat of Russia. This is all thanks to the concrete policy changes of the last three years that roundly rejected the “strategic patience” and “leading from behind” of the Obama years.

Whether it comes from a retired flag officer, or an “expert” pundit, criticism of the 45th American president has far more to do with who he is than what he does. The brash real-estate mogul from Queens, the reality TV star, is utterly alien to a body politic that since the end of the Cold War has too often resembled an amorphous blob of mediocrity and group-think. The Beltway’s civilian and military uniparty—those who thought nation-building in South Asia was a good idea, or that Saddam Hussein must have weapons of mass destruction he wanted to give to Osama bin Laden—cannot abide the man chosen by 63 million people who most definitely do not populate the capital. Trump will never be loved, or even liked by the Swamp. That’s really the point.

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The ANC has ruled since 1994 largely because of black voters’ sense of racial solidarity, but after nine nightmarish years under the corrupt and institution-destroying rule of Jacob Zuma great faith was also placed in the would-be reforming new president Cyril Ramaphosa. Nonetheless, turnout slumped by nine percentage points to 65 per cent, and the ANC slipped badly by 4.6 percentage points. Even former interim president Kgalema Motlanthe admitted that this was “the ANC’s last chance”. The far-left populists, the Economic Freedom Fighters, whose leader Julius Malema favours the nationalisation of all industry, banks and land and promises that he “will not slaughter the whites, at least not now”, saw their vote almost double to 10.8 per cent while the main opposition, the liberal Democratic Alliance (DA), saw its vote fall by 1.5 per cent to 20.8 per cent. Small but significant gains were also scored by Prince Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party and the conservative Afrikaner Freedom Front Plus (VF Plus).

‘South Africa is now in its fifth year of falling real incomes, the chronic power cuts are expected to last at least another five years, the crime rate is horrendous and the police are corrupt and ineffectual’

Whether Ramaphosa can or will really change the country’s direction is unclear. He was, after all, Jacob Zuma’s deputy president for many years and said not a word about the orgy of looting going on all around him. Zuma’s faction remains strong within the ANC and will fight like fury for its right to continue to steal. Two of the most corrupt men in the government are David Mabuza, the deputy-president, and Ace Magashule, the ANC secretary-general. Moreover, Ramaphosa has thus far backed down before every pressure group he has confronted. Half of the electorate already regard him as weak. The least one can say is that if Ramaphosa is to fulfil the reforming hopes placed in him he will have to reveal a backbone of steel of which there has been no sign to date.

I was commissioned by South Africa’s independent TV station ENCA to carry out pre-election research. Never have I seen such pervasive and deep levels of depression and demoralisation among all races as we saw in our focus groups. Some of our black respondents quite spontaneously welcomed the idea of the return of white rule, at least for a period of time, to help sort out the country’s
comprehensive mess. Similarly, since the ANC has now had 25 years in power, we asked voters why they thought that unemployment, corruption, education and health had all got worse under ANC rule. Overwhelmingly voters of all parties, including the ANC, said that the government/the ANC simply does not care about such things. When we probed further, 54 per cent of voters (including 55 per cent of ANC voters) said that “the ANC may care but its policies just don’t work”. Only 21 per cent even of ANC voters disagreed about that.

Given that 20-30 million people now live in complete penury and South Africa under ANC rule has become the world’s most unequal society, we asked (a multiple-choice question) who was to blame. Among ANC voters 55 per cent said “the government” and another 29 per cent said “the ANC”; 16 per cent said “rich whites” and under 1 per cent blamed apartheid. When we asked our focus groups what they thought about the future of the ANC, there was laughter, derision and suggestions that it was all but finished—a strange contrast with the fact that it took 57.5 per cent of the vote.

Theoretically the election should have been tailor-made for the Democratic Alliance, but instead it went backwards, losing eight seats and half a million votes. The fact that this disaster occurred on the watch of its first black leader, Mmusi Maimane, has placed the party in a quandary. Maimane’s popularity has steadily declined (he is now less popular than Malema). He is widely seen as indecisive and he has failed to  attract the extra black voters that he hoped for. Shortly before the election the DA’s policy chief, Gwen Ngwenya, resigned, saying that “the party doesn’t take policy seriously”, and indeed its policies were mainly a paler version of the ANC’s offerings. It had no clear economic policy and its failure to defend Afrikaans language and cultural rights cost it dearly among the Coloured and white Afrikaans-speakers who had been some of its strongest supporters. Maimane is young (38) and inexperienced, was previously an ANC supporter who still thinks in ANC terms, and is a pastor in a fundamentalist church which rejects evolution, none of which helps him with the party’s traditional liberal voters.

But the most serious problem is that the DA has gained in every election since 1994, generating a tremendous spirit of momentum and confidence in its ranks from top to bottom. Just as the German Social Democrats happily talked of “Comrade Trend” in the 1960s as the party crept up at each election, so this same phenomenon in the DA generated a happy sense that “the future belongs to us”. This has now been dashed and the damage is very great. There are demands for the whole top leadership to go and fears that unless the party turns itself round quickly it could face further losses in the local elections in 2021. Throughout the campaign the DA claimed that its own (secret) polls showed the party gaining. This now looks like a deliberate lie.

The main gainers of the election were the Economic Freedom Fighters, a ferociously anti-white and anti-Asian grouping. The EEF advocated the doubling of all social grants and pensions and as many other unfundable promises as it could dream up. Its leaders have been involved in various scams (Malema lives in a mansion let to him by a major cigarette smuggler, is a member of Johannesburg’s most expensive country club, and has a child at a private school) but none of this seems to dull the passionate support of many younger blacks (especially young men) for the party.

Interestingly, voters associated the party mainly with anti-corruption—a reflection of the many occasions when the EFF reduced parliament to a shambles by shouting at Zuma, “Pay back the money!” This was clearly a big hit and Malema’s predominantly young followers are excited by his wild rhetoric, his all-red uniforms and military style. This, indeed, is the danger: if the ANC continues to fail as badly as it has to date there is a clear possibility that Malema and the EFF will be the main beneficiaries, in which case the country will be caught in a destructive downward spiral, with Malema frightening investors away or scaring the ANC into aping his populist promises, thus causing further job losses—which in turn creates more fuel for Malema’s fire.

The sight of Ramaphosa appealing to Malema to return to the ANC does little to allay investor anxieties. For the moment the country is waiting with bated breath for Ramaphosa’s announcement of his new cabinet. If he kicks out all the notably corrupt, there will be major ructions within the ANC, but if he fails to do so, hope in the reforming potential of his presidency will collapse.

However, careful analysis of the poll data reveals a more complicated reality. Among ANC voters a majority of 3:1 rejects Zuma’s policy of “radical economic transformation” in favour of more pro-business policies—thought more likely to produce desperately-needed jobs. An even larger number of EFF voters agreed with this and, despite their leader’s policies, they were also the most likely to favour the privatisation of loss-making state-owned industries.

Similarly, while Malema says all land should be nationalised, EFF (and ANC) voters heavily endorsed the idea that the land currently administered by the chiefs should be individually owned by whoever lives on it. Less than 2 per cent thought land reform a burning issue (except for housing land near big cities) and even EFF voters were overwhelmingly willing to ditch the policy of expropriation without compensation if this was more likely to bring foreign investment. EFF and ANC voters were also happy to ditch both black economic empowerment and affirmative action policies if that would help the jobs crisis. And a large majority of EFF voters favoured the idea of South Africa seeking an IMF bail-out.

‘The large majority of black South Africans are in despair. They were promised so much, the ANC has failed them so utterly and they don’t know where to turn’

This reveals three things. First, the EFF is a confused populist movement, a sort of African Poujadisme, and its supporters are by no means disciplined supporters of Malema’s views. In effect the hunger for more jobs easily outweighs any sense of party loyalty. Second, the usual ANC/EFF socialist agenda is actually a reflection of the prejudices of a very small elite of political activists who are wildly unrepresentative of their electorates. Third, the large bulk of black South Africans are absolutely desperate: 237,000 more jobs were lost in the first quarter of 2019 alone. Among the young joblessness is over 50 per cent.

When you speak to ordinary Africans they are bewildered. They were promised so much, the ANC has failed them so utterly and they don’t know where to turn. Some 19 million adults failed either to register or, if registered, failed to vote. It is easy now to find nostalgia for the “good old days” of higher employment and greater order under white rule, and our focus groups even showed that there was nostalgia for the old black homelands.

Indeed, despite the apparent stability of ANC dominance, large shifts are taking place. The electorate is becoming far more fluid and less firmly attached to any party. We found that more than 25 per cent of all our respondents had switched either their party or into abstention during the election campaign. The greatest fluidity was found among African voters, 17.1 per cent of whom had changed parties in that period. Nothing like that existed in the Mandela period. The standard way the ANC has campaigned against the DA is to say that if the DA win they will restore apartheid and cancel all social grants. This canard has worked wonderfully well for years but this time we found that only 38.8 per cent of African voters said they believed it, while 43.3 per cent didn’t. (Among the 18-24s a 2:1 majority disbelieved this central piece of ANC propaganda.) Similarly, less than 40 per cent of black voters believe the government’s promise that it will restore the electricity utility, Eskom, and stop the power cuts. The other 60 per cent expect it to fail and/or say that Eskom should be privatised. ANC credibility is now thin.

Moreover, the ANC vote is increasingly fragile. Among all African voters only one third said they would vote ANC whoever the leader was (in the Mandela period this figure would have been 80-90 per cent), while 27.3 per cent said they would never vote ANC. However, 19.4 per cent said they would vote ANC because they had confidence in Ramaphosa even though there were many crooks on the ANC list. This exactly bears out the claim by the ANC election boss, Fikile Mbalula, that without Ramaphosa the party might have fallen to 40 per cent. This dependence on a single individual is also new: in the past there was fierce loyalty to the ANC as an institution and a historic force. Those who still feel that way are concentrated among the older age groups and are thus literally dying off.

Another 20 per cent of African voters said they might have voted ANC but there were just too many corrupt people on the party’s list—so they wouldn’t. Again, this degree of discrimination is new. The old image of the ideologically committed and unconditional ANC voter is fading fast—and among the young it is close to vanishing. The idea of the ANC as a non-racial party has also largely faded—the top white on its election list, Barbara Creecy, was in 53rd position, and the top Asian, Pravin Gordhan, was 73rd.

Ramaphosa’s popularity, though large, is also fragile. Half of all voters say either that he is weak or that he is just doing whatever he can to stay afloat. Most of the latter—about a quarter of black voters—say he is just another politician, full of empty promises. Until now he has given way to almost every pressure group. Unless he ceases such behaviour he will rapidly fall into disrepute. His popularity is his greatest asset but unless he uses it to bring in major reforms, he will rapidly lose it.

When an experienced old politician like Motlanthe says that this is the ANC’s last chance, what does that mean? Perhaps that they could just be voted out next time—though it is hard to see the DA, in its present dilapidated state, replacing it.

What seems more likely is that the government could just lose control of the country. This is already happening. Hundreds of small towns are in virtual ruins as corrupt ANC councillors steal the money for maintenance, sewage, road repairs and everything else. A major university town like Grahamstown now has sewage running in the streets, broken roads, power cuts and water cut-offs on a regular basis. The railways have largely ceased to work. The country is plunging ever more heavily into debt. The electrical utility Eskom alone owes $35 billion and the government has no means of paying it. Large numbers of professionals are emigrating and the result is that the tax base is shrinking. Two of the three ratings agencies have consigned South Africa to junk status; if the third (Moody’s) follows, there will be a catastrophic outflow of capital.

The government, meanwhile, is living in fairyland: Ramaphosa has announced that he is determined to set up a national health service which will cost at least another 5-6 per cent of GDP. With the national debt already out of control it takes magical thinking to imagine where that might come from.

Perhaps most striking of all, there are currently 84 major infrastructural projects stalled because in each case thugs descend on the works and demand a 30 per cent equity share in the company concerned, while local people demand that all the construction jobs must go to them. If these groups don’t get what they want they destroy the plant and buildings of the companies concerned. Hence the companies pull out—many of them international firms of just the sort Ramaphosa is trying to entice to invest in South Africa.

Julius Malema, leader of the far-left EFF, which gained 19 seats. Voters associate the party with anti-corruption despite various scandals (©GUILLEM SARTORIO/AFP/Getty Images)

How can this happen? Mainly because the police are nowhere to be seen. There is, after all, nothing in it for them. These days when you’re driving and a policeman pulls you over it is often to demand a small cash present (“money for a cool drink”). When we asked voters which institutions they trusted the most the police came rock bottom.

Ramaphosa still enjoys the enthusiastic support of the business and financial world. He will need all the help he can get. But he still clings to many orthodox ANC platitudes: there will be no privatisation; there will be no recourse to the IMF; inflation-plus wage increases have been granted to the civil service and the staff of state-owned enterprises, though no one has any idea how to fund them; he will legislate the expropriation of property without compensation, though in a way which does not frighten investors away; he has legislated a minimum wage policy which is already putting more poor people out of work. And so on. He has also promised complete job security for public sector workers, who often earn 30-40 per cent more than comparable workers in the private sector. It may be, of course, that all this has been done or promised simply because Ramaphosa was desperate to win the election and that he will start backing away from all such promises now that he has been elected. But the worrying possibility exists that he actually means what he says, in which case he has yet to understand properly how dire is the situation that he and the country are in and how large are the challenges that he faces.

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An awareness of what has come before may serve to illuminate what might now unfold. In the decade until 2015 President Mahinda Rajapaksa (MR) and family ruled imperiously and unchecked. MR ended a long separatist war but ruthlessly crushed dissent with scant regard for human rights. Media freedom was curtailed and the lives of journalists made perilous. Control over state institutions including the judiciary was virtually absolute. Nepotism was rampant: two of the president’s brothers occupied key ministries and another was parliamentary Speaker, while countless relatives held lucrative sinecures.

In the aftermath of war, the economy grew strongly, but was being juiced by extravagant foreign borrowing, often financing projects making little economic sense.

‘My wife had alerted me to a bearded character laden with heavy backpack in the hotel, but Colombo has lately felt more secure than most cities’

Rajapaksa enjoyed strong support among the 70 per cent who identify as Sinhala-Buddhist, but was viewed less favourably by the Tamil and Muslim minorities. In 2012 the militant Buddhist Power Force (known locally as the BBS) emerged. Avowedly supremacist in outlook and inflammatory in tone, it considers the hegemony of Sinhala-Buddhists to be threatened by demographics, Muslim extremism and Christian proselytising. The president and his brother Gotabaya, a former army officer, attended BBS functions. The BBS waged aggressive campaigns against mosque construction, the burqa, halal and certain Muslim-owned businesses. In 2013, the International Crisis Group warned that the BBS’s activities would encourage Islamic fundamentalism. Serious clashes in the south between BBS supporters and Muslims in 2014 resulted in several fatalities and the destruction of homes and businesses. The Rajapaksa government developed misgivings about the organisation but failed to rein it in for fear of alienating its support base.

By the time of the 2015 presidential election the population had tired of authoritarianism, nepotism, white elephant projects and corruption. Nonetheless, Rajapaksa’s position seemed unassailable, given his control of the state apparatus, media and an enfeebled opposition. Unexpectedly, a challenger emerged from within in the shape of  health minister Maithripala Sirisena, supported by a rainbow coalition of opposition parties, sympathetic monks and government MPs. Sirisena promised a Yahapalana, or clean government, entailing the restoration of the rule of law, investigation of war crimes and ethnic reconciliation once family rule was ended. Sirisena won the election and many dared hope his triumph would bring ambitious reform, but initial optimism quickly dimmed. Following parliamentary elections it was in the president’s gift to nominate a handful of new MPs, the purpose being to utilise the experience of individuals from the professions, academia and business. Ignoring precedent, he brought back political hacks rejected at the polls, calling into question his commitment to reform.

The new regime was always an uneasy coalition. The prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, and the president came from different parties, which made for an awkward duo. Within days, the government got bogged down in a financial scandal concerning manipulation of the bond market and embroiling the Central Bank governor, his son-in-law and some ministers. Sirisena was criticised for appointing his brother chairman of Sri Lanka Telecom. Nepotism and graft were precisely what the electorate had voted to end, but it seemed as though there was merely a different set of snouts in the trough. The government had lambasted the corruption of the Rajapaksa regime but did not pursue those accused. The head of the Bribery Commission resigned after she stated her intention to reopen dormant cases and Sirisena demanded they be dropped. The absence of prosecutions suggests a tacit agreement to overlook past plunder, perhaps in the expectation that the favour may be returned in the future.

The new government inherited an economy encumbered with debt and burdened with a bloated state sector accruing staggering losses. While some ministers assumed office with lofty intentions they have struggled to effect fundamental structural reform. Anaemic growth, a rising trade deficit and a sharply weakening rupee have made the servicing of external debt obligations increasingly onerous.

A flurry of construction projects, mainly high-end apartments, hotels and shopping malls, are transforming Colombo’s skyline. The Chinese are reclaiming a huge tract of land from the Indian Ocean to establish a new port city within Colombo. It is doubtful that the demand exists to justify this building frenzy, which leaves some developers, construction firms and elements of the financial sector seriously exposed.

Doing business in Sri Lanka is challenging. Enterprise is hobbled by high interest rates, punitive taxes, a sclerotic bureaucracy, corruption, and poor transport and energy infrastructure. Employment laws are skewed in favour of labour, making it difficult to dismiss the indolent or feckless.

An economic bright spot had been tourism, and Sri Lanka gained the accolade of number one holiday destination 2019 from Lonely Planet. Tourist arrivals were on the up, notably from China and India. The attacks are a cruel blow for an already struggling economy as tourism, along with worker remittances, garments and tea exports, is a key currency earner.

Although Sri Lanka is ethnically diverse, for the most part communities harmoniously coexist, but periodically there are flashpoints that push the country towards the abyss. In March 2018 there was an alarming outbreak of Buddhist militancy in eastern Sri Lanka. The preposterous catalyst was an entirely false accusation that a Muslim restaurant laced meals served to non-Muslims with contraceptive powder, a dangerous claim given sensitivity over the issue of relative birth rates.  Gangs attacked mosques and Muslim properties. Disorder spread to Kandy district, ignited by the
killing of a Sinhalese truck driver by Muslim youths. The BBS made their presence felt and persuaded the police to release Sinhalese rioters. A state of emergency was imposed but scores of houses, businesses and vehicles were torched. Journalist Tisaranee Gunasekera wrote during the riots: “If we, the Sinhalese, fail Muslims as we failed Tamils, history will not forgive us, and will punish us with a new and a worse war.”

The present government came to power supported by the minorities and has shunned communalism. However, it has attracted criticism for not quelling unrest quickly and forcefully in deference to Buddhist opinion. Days before the recent bombings, a Methodist church in Anuradhapura was besieged by a Sinhala-Buddhist mob, but the authorities’ dilatory response dismayed many observers.

Disillusionment with the government enabled Rajapaksa’s new party to win local elections in February last year. This bruising defeat should have brought the PM and president together but instead relations virtually collapsed. In October, without warning the president removed

Wickremesinghe, and, incredibly, installed Rajapaksa as prime minister, having previously railed against his authoritarianism, corruption and family rule. Sirisena had earlier said that had he lost in 2015 Rajapaksa would have put him “six feet under”.

The PM refused to depart and thousands took to the street, not in support of Wickremesinghe but in defence of the rule of law and democracy. Despite the lure of huge financial inducements insufficient MPs joined Rajapaksa. The crisis ended only when the Supreme Court ruled the coup unconstitutional and after appalling scenes of disorder in parliament. Sirisena had vowed never to work with the PM again but was forced into a humiliating climbdown. Subsequently the government has merely limped along, which may partially explain why the Easter attacks could succeed.

Many countries in the region—India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Maldives—have experienced manifestations of Islamic radicalism. Moderate Muslims in Sri Lanka have long been concerned that more radical forms of Islam were gaining ground, in particular Wahhabism funded by Saudi largesse. Though few in number, Sri Lankans are known to have fought abroad for IS. In 2014 the Chief Mufti relayed his concerns to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, then secretary to the defence ministry. The group responsible for the Easter attacks belonged to a small Salafi Islamist group, the National Towheed Jaamat (NTJ), led by radical preacher Zahran Hashim. Inspired by IS, it probably received material support and training from it. In Zahran’s home town of Kattankudy in the east, 60 mosques serve a population of 45,000, mostly preaching an austere form of Islam. The storm had been coming for some time. The authorities including the president, were warned of the NTJ’s espousal of violence and bellicose rhetoric. The group had been attacking only Sufi Muslims but last November it murdered two policemen, a crime wrongly ascribed to remnants of the Tigers. Last December arrests were made at Mawanella in central Sri Lanka following the defacement of Buddhist and Christian statues by Zahran’s adherents. This led to a large cache of explosives being uncovered on a remote coconut plantation.

The April attacks have laid bare the dysfunctional nature of the Sri Lankan polity. The president, as defence minister, had stopped inviting the PM and the deputy defence minister to National Security Council meetings. Neither were told of intelligence detailing locations, personnel and timing received from Indian sources on multiple occasions and well in advance. Sirisena denies being appraised and claims he received no alert while holidaying in Singapore. Rejecting personal culpability, he dismissed the senior civil servant at defence and the police chief. He has lambasted “human rights uncles” for launching investigations into the alleged crimes of senior military and intelligence officers during the last regime, weakening the security establishment. The cases are scarcely trivial, involving abduction and murder, and the issue was not the absence of intelligence but the failure to act. At times the president appears entirely friendless and noticeably erratic. He has suggested that the attacks were prompted by his recent crackdown on the drugs trade. For implausibility this ranks with an unsubstantiated allegation that Indian intelligence planned to assassinate him.

There is little likelihood that Sirisena or his government can regain public trust before presidential elections in December. There is widespread exasperation with a self-serving political class, disproportionately peopled by venal rabble-rousers, virtually all male, bereft of outside accomplishments. It is unsurprising that capable, educated individuals of integrity find no place in parliament and that governance is shambolic.

Badly shaken by the severity and unexpectedness of the attacks, Sri Lankans crave security and a protector. The armed forces have acted vigorously and courageously, but ministers and diplomatic missions warn that a threat may still exist. Normality is slowly returning, but it is nonetheless depressing to see the return of checkpoints, troops on street corners and ubiquitous bag checks.

In the wake of the attacks the BBS crow that their warnings of Muslim extremism should have been listened to. The chief political beneficiary is Gotabaya, who has now declared himself a certain presidential candidate, vowing to crush Islamic radicalism just as he did the Tigers. He will be constrained by a fragile economy, precluding the grandiose projects of his brother’s tenure. Despite having been a US citizen Gotabaya will pivot away from the West and towards China, Russia and Iran, countries unperturbed by authoritarian and illiberal governance. A resumption of Rajapaksa rule will engender trepidation among the minorities, civil society activists and journalists, for they will see the future by looking into the past. To invoke Mark Twain, “There is a danger that to the man with a hammer,     everything looks like a nail.”

Strength and resolve are certainly required in these disconcerting times. However, nuance and delicacy are equally indispensable to avoid a fresh conflagration that would again tear apart this beautiful but troubled island.

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