The Answer to Ukraine’s Problems Is…a Comedian?

On April 2, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Last night was hardly Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s first time on stage. And, after advancing to the second round of Ukraine’s presidential elections with a double-digit lead over the incumbent president, it will certainly not be his last.

Speaking from the stage to a crowd of supporters and journalists at his Kyiv campaign headquarters—a headquarters replete with ping-pong tables, foosball and free liquor—Zelenskiy had plenty of digs at President Petro Poroshenko as the results came in. “There are many exit polls—there is only one winner,” Zelenskiy said, mocking one of Poroshenko’s slogans during the campaign (“There are many candidates—there is only one president”).

The 41-year-old Zelenskiy, an actor and comedian born into a Jewish family in a largely Russian-speaking industrial city in southern Ukraine, may well become the next president of Ukraine when he and Petro Poroshenko square off in the second round on April 21. With almost 90 percent of the votes counted by Monday afternoon, Zelenskiy had captured 30 percent of the vote compared to Poroshenko’s 16 percent—a lead greater than almost all pre-election polls had predicted, and one that left former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, jailed under previous president Viktor Yanukovych, out of the running in third place.

Five years after the bloody revolution that ousted the pro-Kremlin Yanukovych, Ukraine continues to fight a war with Russian-led forces in the country’s east, a war that’s now estimated to have taken 13,000 lives. The country continues to be plagued by corruption and poverty, and poll after poll shows the vast majority of Ukrainians dissatisfied with life in their country. Now, those dissatisfied voters seem to have placed their faith in a celebrity whose only experience as a politician is pretending to be one on TV.

Since 2015, Zelenskiy has played a Ukrainian president on “Servant of the People” (Sluga Naroda in Russian, Sluha Narodu in Ukrainian; the show is mostly in Russian), broadcast on the 1+1 network majority-owned by Ukrainian oligarch and Poroshenko foe Ihor Kolomoyskyi.

Vasyl Holoborodko, Zelenskiy’s character, is a divorced schoolteacher who lives with his parents. He manages to become president of Ukraine after a video of him ranting about corruption goes viral: He becomes a symbolic everyman, fighting the country’s ruling oligarchical classes.

Last December 31, in a time slot usually reserved for the president’s New Year’s Eve address, Zelenskiy declared on 1+1 that he’d be running for president in real life. “Unlike our great politicians, I did not want to make promises in vain,” he said at the time. “But now, just a few minutes before the New Year, I can promise you I’ll do it in the right way.”

As Zelenskiy, the actor and fictional president, became Zelenskiy, the actual real-life candidate for president, the lines between the two started to blur. The campaign events that Zelenskiy has held across Ukraine haven’t been political rallies but shows, complete with comedy routines and song-and-dance numbers.

At the final event last Friday night in a suburb of Kyiv, Zelenskiy took the time to call children up on stage for a song and took a few digs at his main opponent, Petro Poroshenko. “Why does Poroshenko want a second term?” Zelenskiy asked the crowd, in a canned line he’s used at other shows across the country. “Because he doesn’t want a first term”—in prison.

Zelenskiy and his team haven’t been shy about using “Servant of the People” for campaign purposes. The third season of the show debuted shortly before election day and showed a fictional president in jail—widely seen as a reference to Poroshenko.

The show has also helped them around Ukraine’s election laws. The day before the elections, when there’s not supposed to be any campaigning or political advertising, Kolomoyskyi’s 1+1 channel featured several episodes of Zelenskiy’s show, as well as a documentary dubbed by Zelenskiy about an American with a not-dissimilar story to his own: Ronald Reagan. (1+1 claimed that the shows didn’t violate campaign laws since they featured Zelenskiy as an actor, not a politician).

The current president and his supporters point to precisely these moves when warning the electorate about Zelenskiy. As the results came in Sunday, Poroshenko said in an address that, in his view, Zelenskiy is not only incapable of holding the office, but he’s incapable of facing down the country’s biggest enemy. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Poroshenko said at his campaign headquarters, “dreams of a soft, pliant, tender, giggling, inexperienced, weak, ideologically amorphous and politically undecided president of Ukraine. Are we really going to give him that opportunity?”

Poroshenko also made a point of mentioning the man who’s been rumored to be behind Zelenskiy’s campaign, oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, currently living in Israel. Some have speculated that Kolomoyskyi is behind Zelenskiy’s campaign as a means to get back at Poroshenko and avoid Ukrainian criminal charges for his alleged role in defrauding Ukraine’s PrivatBank of billions of dollars. Both the candidate and oligarch have denied any connection. But last night, Poroshenko called Zelenskiy “the puppet of Kolomoyskyi,” and made it clear that Zelenskiy’s alleged connection with Kolomoyskyi will feature prominently in the second-round contest.

From Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger to, of course, Donald Trump, this is not the first time an electorate has opted to lob an untested celebrity into the heights of power.

Almost two decades ago, contemplating Arnold Schwarzenegger’s run to become governor of California, political scientist Darrell M. West wrote about why celebrities are often able to “leapfrog” established career politicians. They’re able to attract greater media attention—being better in front of the camera—and raise more funds while, above all, also being perceived as standing outside the usual political class. “In an era of extensive citizen cynicism about conventional politicians,” West wrote, “voters often see celebrities as white knights from outside the political process who are too rich to be bought and thereby deserving of trust from the electorate.”

It’s a description that could apply now, a continent away, to the Zelenskiy phenomenon in Ukraine. “I think many voters see Zelenskiy as more genuine and honest than ‘normal’ politicians,” Nina Jankowicz, a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center, told me. Zelenskiy voters she’s talked to across Ukraine “see him as someone who’s not beholden to the powers that be, not beholden to the oligarchs, and that he’s a better choice than anyone else.” With his comedic and critical focus on the current political system, Zelenskiy is also less like a Martin Sheen on The West Wing or a Kevin Spacey on House of Cards, said Jankowicz, and more like a Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert-type personality.

But like many celebrity politicians before him, Zelenskiy has been criticized for being blank slate on policy—a serious concern in one of Europe’s poorest countries, and the only one on the continent with a war on its territory. Journalists attempting to cover the campaign have repeatedly been confronted by its complete lack of platform. “I spoke to many jubilant Zelensky campaign folks as results came in last night,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Christopher Miller wrote on Twitter, “[and] nobody had details about his plans for Ukraine.”

Should Zelenskiy win and become Ukraine’s next president, Jankowicz and others warn, he needs to surround himself with a team of intelligent, astute advisors. There are signs he is starting to do that, responding to pressure for him to elaborate on policy plans, as well as Poroshenko challenging him to a debate.

But with a first-round victory behind him, it’s far from clear sailing for Zelenskiy. He has a lot of enthusiastic, younger Ukrainians on his side—but not all. If those who voted for one of the other three dozen vanquished candidates in the first round wind up lining up behind Poroshenko, Zelenskiy could yet be defeated. And if he wins, he will be facing a situation few heads of state would envy.

“I don’t think anything good about [Zelenskiy],” says Alyona, 31, who lives and works in the capital. “I don’t think he’s a wise or capable politician. I think he’s a marionette in the hands of bandits.” From a small city, a few hour’s drive from Kyiv, she says she wasn’t able to vote because she wasn’t able to change her address before the election. Still, she says she wasn’t a fan of any of the candidates to begin with—and, like many other Ukrainians, is pessimistic, regardless of whether April 21 brings a comedian president to power.

“I feel bad about the thought that things could get worse.”

Beto O’Rourke just became the third 2020 Dem who wants to kill the Electoral College

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

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Abolishing the Electoral College is officially a campaign-trail talking point.

Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, the moderate Democrat who failed to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in a highly publicized Texas Senate race last fall, is the latest to champion the cause.

“Yes, let’s abolish the Electoral College,” O’Rourke said Monday at the We The People summit, part of a series of rallies billed as the official launch of his 2020 campaign.

“This is one of those bad compromises we made at Day One in this country. If we got rid of the Electoral College, we get a little bit closer to one person, one vote in the United States.”

A GOP presidential candidate has won the popular vote just once in the last three decades, but Republicans have won the White House three times. The Electoral College, which decides the presidential election through 538 electoral votes doled out to each state based on population. For each House and Senate seat a state has, it gets one electoral vote. This affords a handful of big swing states — like Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin — a large amount of power in federal elections.

O’Rourke joins Sen. Elizabeth Warren, another 2020 candidate, who said last month at a CNN town hall that she wants to do away with the Electoral College. Pete Buttigieg, the Indiana city mayor who’s waging a surprisingly successful bid for the White House despite being relatively unknown, also supports eliminating the Electoral College. New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is reportedly co-sponsoring a proposed constitutional amendment this week that would eliminate the body.

President Donald Trump now sits in the Oval Office thanks to the Electoral College. He lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. Before the election, Trump called the Electoral College a “disaster for democracy,” but he changed his mind a few days after claiming victory in the 2016 election and called it “genius.”

States dissatisfied with the Electoral College have already begun to form a coalition that seeks to give their votes to the popular-vote winner. Twelve states along with Washington, D.C., have a pact to do so, though it would take effect only if enough states join such that the Electoral College votes they represent total at least 270.

Cover image: Beto O’Rourke, former representative from Texas and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, center, greets attendees at a campaign stop in Houston, on Saturday, March 30, 2019. (Photo: Scott Dalton/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Liberalism as a Source of Trouble

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

I first discovered John Mearsheimer’s work in 2014 when he published a courageous article in Foreign Affairs on why the Ukraine crisis was the West’s fault. The blame could not be laid at Putin’s doorstep. From Mearsheimer’s realist political perspective, you had to be pretty dumb to imagine that Putin would permit NATO ships to dock at Sevastopol in the Crimea or wrench the Ukraine into the Euro-NATO orbit. Anyone who has two brain cells to rub together can figure out that Russia would not tolerate such developments. And it didn’t!

The Mueller report did not find any evidence, either, of Russian meddling in the US election of 2016. Perhaps I am too optimistic, but the lifting of dense fog around Russia and the Ukraine, Russian meddling and far-fetched ideas (espoused by the likes of Canada’s luny Russophobe Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland) that Russia desires to restore the old Soviet Empire can be cast in the malevolent bin of truth decay. Can truth be just over the horizon? Well, maybe not yet! Most thinkers these days imagine that Armageddon will arrive before we reach the land of shining truth.

Mearsheimer, who is a prominent US political theorist from the University of Chicago, had the guts to challenge the massive propaganda masking the US engineering of the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government. Now, in his new book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018), Mearsheimer displays the same moxie as he dissembles the “liberal hegemonic” futilities of US foreign policy. The title of my article, “Liberalism as a source of trouble,” is the title of chapter six in his book. The book surprised me. I didn’t think it possible that a mainstream political theorist from America could take a cold, hard look at his own county’s repugnant actions on foreign soil. So let me extract some of his provocative ideas for CP readers.

His basic question is a fascinating one: “What happens when a country that is deeply committed to individual rights and doing social engineering to promote those rights employs that template in the wider world?” (p. 120). The answer: “That formidable state will end up embracing liberal hegemony, a highly interventionist foreign policy that involves fighting wars and doing significant social engineering in countries throughout the world” (ibid.). The liberal hegemonic framework, fueled by America’s missionary religious impulses and an over-bearing hubris, permits the US to forgo international law to topple any regime deemed authoritarian and worthy of American tutorials in how to create an open economy and liberal democratic institutions. Sounds good? Well, for Mearsheimer the US  ends up invading countries (lots of them) and destroying the very goals they espouse publicly. This paradoxical outcome undermines the liberal hope that toppling authoritarian regimes like Iraq can lead to a more peaceful world. It hasn’t. Every invaded country is a bloody, shameful mess. Does the world look more peaceful to you?

Liberal hegemony carries a heavy burden. Once a country decides to fight to protect human rights and spread democracy around the world, a “liberal unipole becomes addicted to war” (p. 152). Once addicted—and who can doubt that the US military-industrial complex needs a constant fix—the globe provides a vast mission field and opportunities to fight. The righteous policy-makers (even if this righteousness is vitriolic) believe they have the right, responsibility and knowledge to use military force to achieve their goals. Pursuing liberal hegemony, however, negates diplomacy, making it harder to settle disputes with other countries peacefully and undermines the notion of sovereignty—a  “core norm that is intended to limit interstate war” (p. 152). Only recently the US has “given” the Golan Heights to the egregious state of Israel and “chosen” the reprehensible puppet Juan Guaido as “president” of Venezuela. The Syrian ambassador to the UN wondered whether the US might also give Israel North and South Carolina as well.

Beware of liberal democracy at work beyond its own national borders. Mearsheimer says that the liberal elites refuse to “learn from their failings and become averse to using military force abroad, but that seldom happens” (ibid.). Rather, the liberal hegemonic project stirs up conflict, fosters instability, fails and leaves the invaded state in trouble. The elites always think they know what is best for a particular country. They disregard the authoritarian country’s interests. They don’t bother even talking to the leaders. Diplomacy is out; military action is in. Fighting is always better than talking. The US constantly pressures other nation-states, even a nuclear power like Russia, to accept their agenda. Now, the US government is hysterically shouting out that Russian troops (there are now 100 military advisers based on a co-operative agreement made in Venezuela in 2001) should leave the US’s backyard. Bolton’s bombast is burning brightly. “Hey, Russian goons, stay away from our territory!

Mearsheimer observes that, the Clinton administration in 1992 embraced liberal hegemony from the start. The policy, he argues, “remained through firmly intact through the Bush and Obama administrations” (p. 153). What have been the results? During this period the US has been involved in “numerous wars” and “has failed to achieve meaningful success in almost all of these conflicts” (ibid.).  First, Washington has played the “central role in destabilizing the Middle East, to the great detriment of the people living there.” Second, Britain has to share the blame “for the trouble the US has helped cause.” Thirdly, “American policymakers also played the key role in producing a major crisis with Russia over Ukraine.” Fourth, “Back in the US., America’s civil liberties have been eroded by an increasingly powerful national security state” (ibid).

The “great delusion” of America, according to Mearsheimer, is that America can only be “secure ”when, as Dean Rusk once said, the “total international environment is ideologically safe” (p. 154). Now, Washington can go to war under several pretenses: to impose liberal democracy and a neo-liberal economy on all sovereign nation-states and to protect various victims of alleged human rights abuses. Let it be clear, though, that invasion to protect is a selective strategy. For Mearsheimer, Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003 is the “best example of liberal interventionism” (p. 155).

Bush and his gang were supremely deluded: they would defeat al-Qaeda and then Iran, Iraq and Syria. And who knows where else. They thought that the best way to deal with terrorism was to “turn all countries in the Middle East into liberal democracies” (ibid.). A “great zone of peace” would rise like a phoenix from the ashes of burnt corpses and shattered lives. Peace would arrive! Calm elections would occur! Starbucks on every corner!

The great delusion of US foreign policy is that it is possible to function as a de factoform of world government. Mearsheimer thinks that this delusory, perhaps insane, project presses the liberal hegemonists to develop “deep-seated antipathy toward illiberal states” (p. 157). The unipolar state is disinclined to diplomacy. It demands full surrender. One cannot compromise with evil. This form of Manichean mythology, embedded in right-wing Christian Zionism, has horrible consequences. For me, the unipolar state acts too much like the moth drawn inexorably to the flame.

Liberal hegemony undermines sovereignty. As Mearsheimer puts it, “Respect for sovereignty is the most significant norm in international politics, and its purpose is to minimize war and facilitate peaceful relations among states” (p. 158). This means, fundamentally, that nation-states have the “ultimate authority” over events inside one’s borders and that “foreign powers have no right to interfere in their politics” (p. 159). The cornerstone of international law, sovereignty, means that “countries are not supposed to invade each other, at least not without permission from the UN Security Council” (ibid.).

Mearsheimer claims that norms have little impact on state behaviour. While I don’t agree with his forlorn realism completely, he says that the norm of sovereignty was eroding by the mid-1990s, “mainly because the US took to interfering in the politics of other countries even more than it had in the past” (p. 160). He states bluntly: “Liberalism, of course, is all about meddling in other countries’ politics, whether the aim is protecting the rights of foreigners or seeking to spread liberal democracy” (ibid.). The US has led the crusade against sovereignty. For Mearsheimer, this means that the “erosion of sovereignty is one more reason a powerful state with a liberal foreign policy ends up fighting never ending wars and fostering militarism at home” (pp. 161-2). Ironically, the US liberal hegemony espouses peace-making and democracy-gifting goals, but ends up creating great instability in the global system. The US actions are more chaotic and unpredictable than ever.

The US unipolar state can’t keep out of other people’s business. They don’t invade powerful states. But they antagonize their target states like Russia by interfering in their internal affairs through using civil society institutions, CIA-fronted organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy, sanctioning business persons and particular industries, mucking around trying to disrupt trade relations with Europe and elsewhere, hammering away at alleged human rights violations. This mucking around activity is topped off with a relentless anti-Russia propaganda game and endless insults from leaders. The US has also promoted “colour revolutions” in Georgia and the Ukraine to turn them into subservient liberal democracies.

Mearsheimer also takes us on grim trip through the US’s devastation in the Middle East. He states: “Washington’s performance in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Syria has been dismal” (p. 168). It “has played a major role in spreading death and disorder across the greater Middle East.” Incentive to acquire nuclear weapons has “increased in the face of America’s policy of forcible regime change” (ibid.). Consider Gaddafi: Mearsheimer says he would still be around if Libya had nukes. Beware North Korea! Give up your nukes and the conquistadors will be at your doorstep.

All of this intervention and interference in other country’s affairs has been driven by persons who knew little about the countries they were invading. The US invaders also knew little about the factions making up the country, and how a US invasion would set them against each other. Perhaps they didn’t even fully realize that in the age of nationalism, “occupation almost always breeds an insurgency, as the US discovered in the Philippines, and later in Viet Nam” (p. 169).

Final irony: “States that promote liberal hegemony invariably damage the fabric of liberalism inside their own borders” (p. 179).