Category: comparative politics

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Dark Parallels.

Here is a thought that I originally posted as social media commentary:

The Epstein client list epitomises the decline of liberal internationalism. The list is a who’s who of (mostly Western) liberal internationalist leaders: billionaires, bankers, Silicon Valley tech moguls, athletes, academics, royalty, fashion entrepreneurs, politicians, philanthropists, diplomats, former presidents and prime ministers, special envoys, international organization leaders, sundry oligarchs and industrial magnates, etc. Other than some decadent Arabs, no tin-pot Latin American, African or Asian dictators are to be found amongst them. They were/are a E Suite aggregation and living embodiment of the liberal international order taken to excess, a epiphenomenal reflection of the institutional decay that infected the entire postcolonial, post WW2 edifice once the Cold War ended.

They traded in money, power, status, influence and darker things. It was their step into darkness that toppled them. Otherwise they would still be networking as usual and their sordid hypocrisy–enlightened and rationalist on the outside, greedy, privileged and perverted on the inside– continue unabated. Theirs was a culture of impunity destroyed by venal over-reach.

Likewise, liberal internationalism as a global ordering device fell due to its own internal decay, corruption, sclerosis and contradictions, not from the actions of external actors (although some may have pushed from the margins). The behaviour of liberal institutions like the World Bank, IMF, WEF and assorted subject and regionally focused agencies belied their ostensible universalist and humanitarian goals. In other words, the downfall of liberal internationalism is self-induced. That includes democratic governance in the West, which has been in decline for well over a decade due to its lack of responsiveness to public demands and capture by elite-driven special interests.

Like the Epstein investigation, the post-liberal international order must begin with an evaluation of its institutional architecture and the flaws inherent in it. From that can come an improved edifice better prepared to confront the global challenges that lie ahead in a more equitable and inclusive fashion. Because in an age of AI, robotics and nanotechnological crossover that knows no national borders and where post-industrial knowledge economies are the wave of the future where the privilege of Empire no longer applies, an International system made for and by Anglo-Saxon white males no longer is suited for, much less capable of dominating, the demands and pressures emanating from those who are not part of that demographic. In a time in history where things like climate change impacts and commercial and military use of space and deep sea environments are tangible and real, there is urgency to the needs for institutional transition.

Hint: the interests of the Global South (understood as a post-colonial ideological construct, not a geographic designation) need to be accommodated in a more equitable honest way.

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Veil of hypocrisy, lifted.

As I think about how to frame the opening episode of the relaunched “A View from Afar” podcast next week, I find myself wondering about silver linings. The current international moment is very dark and the end of the liberal order is nearing, but surely there must be some good shining amid the gloom. I think I have found one such glimmer, perhaps not of hope but of honesty in how one country represents itself before the world–and perhaps by extension, how the West sees or should see itself.

Readers may remember that last year I wrote about Trump believing himself to be the “Great Disruptor” and agent of change in the world. His advisors and acolytes seized on this self-perception to whisper chaos theory-based sweet nothings into his ears about carving out spheres of influence (for the US, in a Western Hemisphere that extends to Greenland) that he is willing to divide up with Russia and the PRC. He believes in annexing the sovereign territory of other states (including Canada), renaming international geographic landmarks (like the Gulf of Mexico), authorising the murder of civilians on the high seas and kidnapping of the authoritarian president of a foreign state on trumped up drug charges while leaving even worse dictators unscathed because they are “friendly,” blockading an island State out of ideological spite, and interfering in the elections of foreign countries by using direct foreign aid as a weapon of reward or retaliation. It does not matter if the view is simplistic, wrong in its theoretical grounding and practical application, and ultimately more of a fever dream than a practicable reality when extended over time, but however deluded it is his belief system and he acts upon it with the complicity of the MAGA/GOP establishment currently in control of the US government. And because the US government wields extraordinary coercive powers, both economic and military, it is dangerous.

It is apparent that Trump’s mental abilities have diminished considerably in recent times, but his advisors continue to blow sunshine up his skirt and oil him with grandiose ideas that are designed to stroke his ego, promote his brand and enlarge his bank accounts while serving their overlapped agendas (Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro are notable in this regard). From what I can discern, they encourage him to free range when it comes to speaking at domestic political rallies and campaign events, but then urge his caregivers to lace him up with the mother of all pharmaceutical cocktails when he has to give speeches to serious audiences such as foreign diplomats, business magnates and international statesmen in global fora. When compared with the stream of consciousness rants that he uses on domestic partisan audiences, with some exceptions his tone at these international meetings becomes more subdued, he speaks in a monotone, behaves semi-civilly and generally gives the appearance of situational detachment from the realities of the moment and consequences of what he is saying. If only we were to have access to his medication list and schedule!

Returning to the glimmer of light, it begins in darkness. It turns out that the US is indeed the core of the international system and Trump is the vortex that is drawing the old order into the black hole of systemic dissolution. One only needs to see the Trump ripple effects–he is the rock thrown into the centre of the global pond–to acknowledge his impact on domestic politics and international relations across the world. He is a malignant, evil force but he is also an irresistible object, a rip tide of ignorance, banality, self-interested corruption and narcissism using US power as the current against which all other global actors must now sink or swim. Fortunately, although undeniably strong, his hubristic ignorance weakens the US gravitational pull on the world scene.

There is good in this. For nearly a century the US has claimed to be the leader of the “free” world, the champion of democracy, upholder of human rights and defender of the innocent, weak and powerless. The reality is that it is a nation-state founded on racist beliefs standing on stolen lands by white property (and slave) owning men, using laws and institutions that promoted patriarchical heterosexist privilege over everything else. It took a civil war to abolish slavery and then another century to enact the Civil Rights Act that granted “equal” status to African Americans. It took over fifty years before females of age earned the right to vote, and long after that restrictions on the franchise remained in place (like poll taxes, residency and language requirements, forfeiture of voting rights due to criminal convictions even if for minor offences, etc. ). It systematically discriminated against waves of immigrants, be the Italian, Irish, Asian, Mexican and now those coming from the African and Latin American diaspora. It pushed indigenous tribes off their lands and onto reservations. Forced segregation was replaced by self-segregation, which is still a thing in many places. So is socioeconomic class stratification, gerrymandering, voter suppression (much more than fraud) and deliberate dumbing down of and distraction from obvious social contradictions on the part of the public majority. One percent of the population control eighty percent of the wealth. Christian nationalist-fascism, long thought to be on the wane, has a stranglehold on one side of the US ideological divide and skews public debates about cultural mores and social ethics. And yet the US public still believes, or at least until Trump entered office, to be living in the land of the free and home of the brave.

What is good is that Trump has ripped the veil off of that foundational myth. He has revealed the US for what it is even if he and others do not want to admit it: a venal, bloated, self-absorbed authoritarian husk of a democratic Great Power. It never was any of things that it claimed to be but for a while it at least tried to improve or pretended to be better than it was, harking to the idealism of some of its founders who held a belief in the perfectibility of humankind. It took time and struggle, but the myth tells us that the US was getting better as a society and as a political construct. But it never was and now certainly is not a truly liberal democracy. Yet it took Trump to debunk the myth.

The myth was, if not a lie, more of a pipe dream than an achievable reality. So it is good that Trump has exposed the true nature of US society and better yet, rendered transparent the contradictions and fractures that undermine its increasingly brittle institutional edifice. Or to paraphrase my father, “when the wanna-be dictator starts naming everything after himself and painting everything in gold leaf, he reveals his true intent.”

The same applies to US foreign relations. It is the core of the international system, but that was the OLD liberal internationalist order that is currently being destroyed by the gravitational pull of the Trump dark hole. Again, the US used to claim that it was the “leader of the free world” etc., but today it is anything but. It is a neo-imperialist declining Great Power, once hegemonic after the Cold War but now more like an old athlete shouting “I used to be somebody” into the winds of time. The US has broken the global order but it is incapable of dominating what comes next. It is more akin to the death grasp of a drowning man, locked into a hopeless situation beyond its control and overcome by circumstance of its own and other’s making. So it thrashes about as it slips under, pulling anything it can get a hold of down with it. It now has the liberal internationalist order in its grasp.

Over the short term, as I have written at some length before, a declining Great Power is dangerous. It is more likely to start wars in order to preserve its position in the global status quo. But declining powers may be able to start wars but then are unable to finish them on their preferred terms. Instead, they are defeated by rising powers or, in what appears to be crystallising at the moment in response to Trump’s foreign policy adventurism, a polycentric constellation of established and emerging technopoles rooted in the Global South that use soft power as a counter-weight to US bullying. This is more than the BRICS and although critical minerals are the new gold of world technological economies, it is knowledge economies, knowledge production and commodified knowledge accumulation that will fuel the growth of the Global South and the ascendent Great Powers coming from within it.

The US is too socially divided, too inward-looking, too partisanly governed, too corrupt and too incompetent as political managers to meet the challenges of the emerging polycentric technopolar world. It lives on grievance, internal culture wars, fabricated problems, selectively applied situational ethics, denial of responsibility, contrived outrage and clickbait self-absorption in a culture where “influencers” are given more respect than neuroscientists and astrophysicists, and where modern bread and circus acts have replaced the fine arts as the currency of popular culture. All of this is epitomised by the MAGA regime.

Thanks to Trump, all of that is now made transparent. There is no pretence of “public interest” or “commonweal,” just naked self-interest, transactional bartering, bullying and opportunism posing as government for both domestic and foreign audiences. We finally see the US, or at least that part that is MAGA in orientation, for what it really is.

So it is that with Trump lifting the veil of hypocrisy from the self-proclaimed US position, we can now fully see that it is a two sided coin where the domestic side is marked by increased prejudice and avaricious authoritarianism and the foreign side is overtly neo- imperialist. There are certainly many decent people fighting against this in the US, but the dye has been cast and neither the US or the international system will be the same once Trump has left the scene. That should give the rest of the world pause to reflect on what might constitute a post-liberal world order and perhaps for some in the post-imperial West to draw parallels between themselves and the giant in its decline.

“A View from Afar” podcast relaunch: Monday February 23, 12PM noon NZ time/Sunday February 22, 6PM US East Coast time.

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Acquiescence is not consent, or a basis for rule.

As a follow up to my previous post (and harkening to a regular theme in my writing), consider this:

Used as the basis for authority, repression obeys a form of Newtonian Law: it wanes over time. You cannot repress the same amount of people with the same amount of force forever. Their numbers will grow and your ability to repress will drop unless you further increase the use of force. That only aggravates the situation. If the only response to dissent is more and wider repression, then less people have something to lose, even if it is their fear.

Repression must be justified ideologically and accepted by the majority for it to work as an instrument of social control. In other words, using mass repression without commensurate public consent is a brittle club. Despots try to shape narratives via lies, disinformation and propaganda in order to alter that inescapable fact, but the truth is that partisan spin or silence may obscure reality–what our eyes have seen and our ears have heard–but they can never replace it. It forms a memory that cannot be erased even if suppressed or delayed in its activation. It is the memory of what is and was real that forms the conscious basis of mass contingent consent (contingent because we do not give consent once, forever, to any given leader, government or administration).

That is why public acquiescence does not equal popular consent. That former is a short-term solution, born of silence and submission to superior physical force. The latter is the basis for political legitimacy and stable democratic rule. One is temporary, designed to break resistance to or reinforce a particular political project. The other is long-term in orientation even if contingent on material and social expectations being met.

Trump and co. appear to not understand this basic axiom and in fact seem blind to it given their slanderous and false accounts of the ICE murders in MN. This augers poorly for their longer-term prospects.

That gives me a basis for hope.

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The hollow hegemon.

Trump 2.0’s foreign policy has revitalised “old school” realists who, after years of being challenged by neo-realists, idealists, liberal internationalists and constructivists, have embraced the return of Great Power politics based on balancing power capabilities, national self-interest and geopolitical notions of spheres of influence, drawing on historical antecedents for policy-making precedent. This brings back memories of my own education in the discipline, where I studied under some of the foremost International Relations (IR) scholars of the late 20th century (including Hans Morgenthau’s last lectures as an emeritus professor and sit-in attendance at Henry Kissinger’s first course in academia after leaving government service) as well as people like Albert Wohstetter and Paul Ello for nuclear strategy and Morton Kaplan on international systems theory.

During that period of time I also was introduced to the study of comparative politics by the likes of Adam Przeworski, Philippe Schmitter, Guillermo O’Donnell, Loyd and Susanne Rudolph, something that made me appreciate the nuances and differences between national political systems (both authoritarian and democratic) as well as their impact on foreign policy and International relations. Przeworski, Schmitter and O’Donnell as well as other colleagues and students were the driving force in the study of comparative authoritarian regime decline in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then of the transitions to democracy in the late 1980s. Although fourth generation scholars have resurrected the focus (or perhaps reinvented the analytic wheel) on democratic backsliding or decay and the ways in which authoritarians emerge in democracies, the earlier works remain fundamental to understanding the dynamics of regime change, be it to or from democracy/dictatorship.

Sadly, the international relations literature (and US policy-makers) ignored and continue to ignore these and other aspects of comparative politics, thereby leaving a void in IR understanding of how foreign policy and strategic perspectives are made in different national contexts. The focus on the State as a unitary actor in a world of similars blinds it to the differences between States the it comes to addressing the external world. Geopolitics recognises that size, for example, matters, but it does not recognise how size and size differentials, resource endowments, etc.–the basis of geopolitics–translates into foreign policy perspectives and making. Think of it this way: even if both are small liberal democratic primary good exporters, NZ has a very different political culture and foreign policy than Uruguay. They are not uniform in their approaches to the world and even if both are mice in a global elephant show, they react very differently to many world events.

In light of these analytic deficiencies in the IR field, I made comparative foreign policy a regular feature of my own research and teaching because I felt that there was a gap between the study of international relations, especially the realist school of IR theory, and the study of comparative politics, which tended to be more region-specific and usually did not extend beyond the borders of the country under study. However, comparative politics research (at least then) required language training and cultural immersion, which was the main reason why I chose my adopted home country, Argentina, as the subject of my Ph.D. research ( I spent my childhood and teenage years there so was immersed in the culture and politics of the place). I also began to see that although thorough reading of Thucydides, Hobbes, Metternich, Clausewitz and Sun Tse were essential to understanding the history of IR and warfare, old school realism, back then and now in its resurgence, suffers from the same intellectual flaws: selective historicism and a lack of political depth when its comes to cross-national engagement. The State as unit of analysis is fine as a broad brush stroke, but it is in the finer, sometimes idiosyncratic aspects of foreign policy making where the differences between States are made. That should be better accounted for.

For example, let’s start with the notion of “spheres of influence.” Apparently the Trump 2.0 foreign policy “brain” trust has decided that a return to dividing the world into Great Power spheres of influence–that is, geographic areas in which their interests dominate and their power is unchallenged–is a good thing. The US reclaims the Western Hemisphere and Greenland under the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, Russia gets East Europe and Central Asia, the PRC gets East continental Asia, the Middle East is considered shared influence space and they agree to compete for influence and territory in Africa (because, as Kissinger once joked, it was a good place to trial weapons). The historical precedent for this “neo-Gilded” view is the McKinley presidency and that of his successor Teddy Roosevelt during the so-called “golden age of imperialism” in the late 1800s-early 1900s, something that I have recently written about here.

The “spheres of influence” posture derives from geopolitical theory. Geopolitics is about the relationship between geography, political power and power projection. There are three main types of geopolitical theory, one being a continental view based on control of land masses (MacKinder), the second being a maritime focused view based on control of the seas (Mahan), and the third being aerial (or vertical) geopolitical theory focused on air power domination (de Seversky, Douhet, Mitchell). Spheres or zones of influence (as per MacKinder) are areas within the physical control or direct influence of a given power and where its interests prevail unchallenged by competing powers.

As weapons technologies have advanced, so have the scope of geopolitical thought, leading to hybrid theories (cyber warfare and joint forces automated warfare) and the expansion of the reach of sub-types into space and nuclear weapons (aerial), submarine and seabed warfare (maritime) and irregular guerrilla warfare (continental). Great Powers such as the US and PRC now embrace all geopolitical perspectives in their national security strategies, with smaller powers left to focus on a more limited range of strategies based on their resource capabilities and geographic location.

The trouble is that the “spheres of influence” scheme is a product of a different, less technologically advanced era when physical barriers to power projection were more important to strategic calculations. In today’s strategic environment those impediments have been increasingly overcome by technological advancement (especially hybridisation and joint force automation), so the notion that a Great Power can wall off entire regions as as if they were its own is archaic at best and ludicrous at worst. Moreover, it fails to account for how the nation-states located in a given region react to attempted Great Power sphere of influence projection. The original premise of the term was based on strategic conceit born of overwhelming military superiority, where a Great Power forced nation-states within its self-proclaimed sphere of influence to bend to its will while strategic competitors acquiesced to or at least did not dare challenge the claim in the face of a bilateral overmatch.

This ignores the true historical record. Take the Western Hemisphere and the Monroe Doctrine. The US proclaimed it as the foundation of its approach to “its” region at a time when it was hard for competitors like France, Germany and Russia to reclaim or lay claims to Western Hemisphere territory. But some did (think of the French, UK and Dutch presence in the Caribbean), and later during the Cold War both Soviet and Chinese covert operations worked hard to support Marxist-Leninist/Maoist insurgencies against US backed (most often authoritarian) regimes. That is because Western Hemisphere societies, including elements within political elites, did not recognise the Monroe Doctrine as anything other than an imperialist statement of intent. Only the most craven boot-licking dictators like Somoza, Batista or Trujillo bent to Uncle Sam’s will back in the day. But even then many in their societies did not, a sentiment that was and is wide-spread throughout the region to this day. Other than contemporary brownnosers like Bukele and Miilei, few in the Western Hemisphere consent to being part of a US sphere of influence. Many will not acquiesce either if push comes to shove.

On a practical level, although the US can bully Venezuela and other small neighbouring states, it is entirely different matter when it comes to larger countries like Brazil, Colombia and Mexico (and Canada!). Moreover, the PRC has developed extensive infrastructure facilities and networks throughout the region (including the largest container port and hub distribution center in South America in Peru) and is heavily invested in extractive enterprises as well as supplying advanced telecommunications technologies to regional clients. Although PRC firms relinquished control of container processing terminals on either end of the Panama Canal when the US pressured Panama on the matter, it is the largest Latin American agricultural commodity purchaser, including of soybean quotas normally allocated to the US but disrupted by Trump 2.0’s tariffs (which Argentina and Brazil happily stepped in fill). Other entities like the EU also have extensive economic ties to the Western Hemisphere, so without using military means extra-regional actors have created a situation that is far from conducive to a repeat of the “Gilded Age’ where the US called the shots using, as I have mentioned before, Gunboat Diplomacy and the Big Stick policy in order to do so. Finally, global lines of communication, including supply chains and telecommunications networks, make it impossible to return to a sphere of influence-based international system. There are simply too many systemic variables and changes to allow for a return to the past.

Put simply, the US may be selling the Monroe Doctrine as the bottom line when it comes to claiming that the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence, but the inhabitants of the region, to now include economic, social and political elites not beholden to the US and who have developed ties to non-regional actors like the PRC and EU, are not buying the idea that the claim has a legitimate basis for it. To the contrary, only the US has a long history of military and covert interventionism in regional affairs, so there is a large reservoir of ill-will towards it that is now once again being tapped. Other than the bullying antics and influence-peddling in a few instances, for most of the Western Hemisphere the US claims and threats are more of the same ole’, same ‘ole, but this time with more bluster than substance.

That brings up another realist chestnut: the notion of a “hegemon” that dominates a given geopolitical space and the networks established within it, be they regional or global in nature. Here again, the lack of analytic depth and comparative politics cross-pollination is evident. For realists hegemony is equal to domination based on power asymmetries and national resource capability differentials. Since national interest determines the foreign policy of Great Powers and power is the currency used to secure that interest, Great Powers work to dominate other powers in contested areas and especially within spheres of influence. Given contending or opposing national interests, this inevitably leads to conflict, which itself can be cultural, economic, diplomatic, social and/or both overt and covert military/kinetic. Conflict is the systems regulator and the exercise of national power is the ultimate determinate of conflict outcomes. In that view, durable peace is an anomaly, not a normality, which is why establishing spheres of influence provides for international systems stability via balance of power politics.

The trouble here is that realism does not recognize domestic agency on the part of individual nation-states. They are just units of analysis in a larger power-balancing game. Although scholars have raised the issue of the “second image” in recent years, that is, the role of domestic factors in shaping foreign policy, realists remain fixated at the nation-state level, treating it as a homogenous actor with uniform preferences and interests. With that variable controlled, realists can then focus (fixate?) on power balancing within the international system rather than on the causes and motivations of decision-makers operating within it.

Comparative politics helps in this regard. For example, in the neo-Gramscian school of IR theory, the notion of consent is introduced in order differentiate between domination (which is unilateral imposition of preferences on others and their subordination and acquiescence to that superior force), and hegemony understood properly as social order based on consent. For realists hegemony and domination are synonymous and consent does not matter–subordination and acquiescence do.

For comparative politics theorists consent is the core feature that distinguishes between democracy and authoritarianism. Democracies are based on mass contingent consent, reproduced and reinforced via things like regular open elections and freedoms of association, movement, speech and the like. Authoritarianism, on the other hand and whatever its specific guise, is based on the domination of one social group over all others. In some cases the dictatorship is theocratic. In others it is military. In others still, it is clan, ethnic, tribal or class-based. In all cases it is imposed rather than consented to.

Therein lies the problem with the selective historicism and shallow analytic approach that serves as the realist foundation for Trump foreign policy 2.0. It confuses acquiescence with consent, hegemony with domination and removes agency from actors other than the US while using outdated concepts to make revisionist claims on other people’s territory. Trump and his entourage may think that might makes right and that a new era of Great Power balancing based on spheres of influence is at hand, but it does not have the Might or Right to re-make the global system in its preferred retrograde vision because, quite frankly, times have changed and it has neither the internal unity or external capabilities or will to pay the costs required to effectively secure a sphere of influence-based balance of power in an increasingly polycentric (as opposed to multipolar) context.

In that sense, Trump foreign policy 2.0 is that of a hollow hegemon, devoid of the moral, ethical, intellectual and ultimately physical ability to fully cash in the checks that the mouths of Trump and his sycophantic minions are writing. They can certainly deliver on some short-term promises (say, impeding drug trafficking) and achieve short-term goals (e.g., influencing foreign elections) while doing harm to others and the US reputation, but over the long term the self-appointed role of the US as global hegemon will be hollowed out to the point that all that will remain is a paper tiger growling in a cage of its own making.

Truth be told, the US has started to look like the Soviet Union in its decline. It is a military giant, but a bloated one as well, with waste, fraud and corruption embedded throughout the military-industrial complex. It is ruled by a self-serving, corrupt, pandering and highly partisan political society that is disconnected from the social realities of most of its citizens and obsequious to the interests of the economic elites that fund them (the so-called “techbros” and Wall Street being foremost amongst them). And it is deeply divided–one might say increasingly splintered–along racial, religious, ethnic, sectarian, cultural and political lines that serve as diversions from and disguises for the class divisions that underpin the increasingly frayed social fabric. That is not the stuff that a hegemon is made of.

Because in the end the real measure of power is social cohesion, political unity and policy-making discipline grounded in practical reality coupled with a realistic strategic vision that takes account the a nation’s comparative global position given the tenor and technologies of the times rather than the performative symbolism of political theatre–or perhaps better said, the cruel and vacuous circus side-show–that the Trump 2.0 administration has become.

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Addressing some mistruths.

The Bondi Beach mass murder attack is yet another inevitable sequel to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The precise nature of the sequels are seldom known, much less prevented in advance of their occurrence, but the fact that they will occur should. be obvious to anyone who has studied or experienced the dialectic of sectarian violence whatever its specific origins. In this case we saw a small-cell (not lone wolf) attack where operational secrecy in preparing, planning and execution was apparently well maintained.

While digesting the stock pap that passes for NZ local “expert” commentary on the Hanukkah attacks I found myself thinking about the broader tone of Western media coverage and the implicit biases reflected in it. Let me start with a few small points of order and then speak to what is left largely unsaid in mass media coverage.

The father and son attacks on the celebrating Jewish crowd at Bondi may or may not be a terrorist attack or simply a hate crime. I have written about this many times before, here and professionally, but the core of the definition is worth repeating. Terrorism is a violent tactic that has been used by States (during and outside of war), non-state ideological actors, criminal organisations and psychopathic individuals. It has a subject (audiences), object (to influence the will or psychological health of subjects by installing fear and dread among them) and target (victims). Seemingly random and unwarranted violence is the instrument and being terrorised is the effect. For unconventional warfare analysts and practitioners, the motivation of the terrorists is less important than the epistemological sequencing or chain of causality involved. Terrorism must have all three components in order to be correctly labeled as such.

Terrorism can be (and often is) a product of hatred but is not synonymous with hate crimes. Hate crimes lack the subject-object-target sequencing that distinguishes terrorism from other forms of unconventional violence. Hate crimes are often born of passion and fury. They may be done for revenge, retribution or sadistic pleasure. In some cases these pathologies enter into the terrorist’s equation. But what distinguishes hate crimes from terrorism is in the latter’s choice of subjects and objects, which gives an element of cold dispassioned rationality to the calculation. The subjects are more than the victims and their immediate circles. They include governments, communities, specific entities or organisations,, supporters, opponents and peer competitors. The object is to do more than inflict pain, suffering and punishment on victims and subjects. It is to bend the will of subjects in a specific direction pursuant to the perpetrator’s interests.

More simply, terrorism is a reflective exercise of violence. Hate crimes are a visceral violent response.

It remains to be seen whether the Bondi attacks were reflective or visceral in nature. Reporting has suggested a variety of motives but nothing concrete has been produced other than reports that one of the gunmen traveled to the Philippines in recent months, which may or may not be linked to the presence of ISIS cells in that country. What is clear is that the Australian government and global media have jumped to describe the event as an antisemitic terrorist attack. The antisemitic part of that label is undoubtably true (more on this below) but the terrorism label appears to be more one of unreflective convenience, political opportunism and/or agenda-serving rather than serious analysis (as is the case with what passes for local “expertise” in NZ).

Mind you, not all instances of hidden agenda grammatical opportunism and mistruth are necessarily bad. Authorities may misuse terms like terrorism to shake society out of complacency and/or expand their legitimate deterrent or preventive reach via expanded powers of surveillance and arrest with cause. The emotive weight of terms like terrorism may allow legislative and institutional reforms that provide legal and operational latitude that previously did not exist but which are needed inn the face of fluid and evolving threat scenarios. On the other hand, the risks of official misuse of terms like terrorism are obvious, to which can be added media misuse for reasons other than objective reporting of the facts and political and interest group misuse of terms in pursuit of partisan and sectorial advantage.

War criminal and corrupt fraudster Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to blame the attacks on Australia’s recognition of the right to Palestinian Statehood is the most patently crude of recent attempts to take advantage of the situation for self-serving purposes. He is far from alone, as pro- and anti-gun lobbies have jumped into action over the issue and then, of course, pro-Israel and pro-Palestine lobbies blanket the media with their respective takes on who/what/when/why/how. The objective truth does not matter here. What matters is the public weight of the sectorial spin.

We can assume that counter-terrorism authorities in Australia (now under the microscope because one of the gunmen was monitored for some time as a possible ISIS sympathiser and was known to. hold a legal firearms license and six hunting weapons), are acutely aware of what the attack really was but prefer in any event to fall into line when it comes to brandishing the terrorism accusation. As for other Western governments and media, the uncritical use of that label suits their specific interests quite well.

By way of another aside, please note that “ISIS influenced” is not equivalent to “ISIS” or “ISIS directed.” The killers showed little fire control in using their weapons (such as one providing covering fire for the other) and demonstrated little tactical acumen like effectively using cover and efficient angles of fire to their front and rear, instead scurrying around while firing indiscriminately into the crowd and at arriving police. Theirs was not the work of proficient and disciplined assassins trained by and serving in a militia, but instead appears be that of weekend warriors with limited time at the shooting range. They were still deadly, but they may not be actual members of ISIS. In fact, no claims of intellectual or material authorship of the attack have been made ISIS or any affiliate group.

Another unacknowledged mistruth is the constant reference to the “Israel-Hamas” conflict and the events of October 7, 2023. No serious person disputes that Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities on that day, including crimes against humanity. They deserved what came to them. However, had Israel limited itself to pursuing, locating and killing every single person involved in the attacks with some “collateral” damage thrown in because of the “fog of war,” relatively few people other than rabid Islamicists would have objected. October 7 was too barbaric for the global community to tolerate and for a very brief moment, much like the US after 9/11, the world majority stood in sympathy for and solidarity with the Israeli people (as distinct from the Israeli government)..

Like the US after 9/11, Israel squandered that goodwill. We will not dwell on the backdrop to October 7 here (the intelligence failures, the clandestine Israeli support for Hamas prior to the attacks, the unspoken agenda of conquest shared by radical Jewish ethno-nationalist elements in the Knesset and wider Israeli community, including by foreign-born illegal settlers on Palestinian land in the West Bank). What we will address is a simple fact that is crucial to understanding the inevitability of sequels such as that at Bondi Beach.

That fact is that the conflict in Gaza is not between Hamas and Israel. It may have started that way, but Israel’s response, an act of collective punishment of an entire population that quickly became a prolonged process of ethnic cleansing that has now become a UN-recognized genocide, and which has moved into the West Bank, makes the conflict an Israel-Palestinian war. It has also spilled into Lebanon, home to many Palestinians, under the pretext of eliminating Hezbollah (and by connection, Iranian interference in the Levant). The war is grossly one-sided and is being waged against an entire people, not just armed insurgents and their immediate political leaders and supporters. Truth be really told, it is civilizational in nature and seen by the (willing and unwilling) participants exactly as that.

It is this war–an Israeli war of annihilation designed to pave the way for permanent occupation and annexation of Palestinian lands–that has ripped off the scab of global antisemitism. Primordial antisemitic prejudices now combine with modern grievances and anti-Jewish tropes in the face of global indifference to the suffering of the Palestinian people. Western liberal democracies do nothing or side with Israel. Authoritarians of the Left and Right steer clear of the fight or cut secret deals with Israel in order to keep commercial, diplomatic and security ties flowing. Regardless of thousands of protests and millions of marchers, the situation has not appreciably changed and instead we hear open commentary about US-backed development of Gaza as a tourist destination. Needless to say, anger, frustration, hopelessness and feelings of powerlessness begin to mount. In that mix, hatred rises and eventually–inevitably given human nature–violence happens.

That is why semantic precision is necessary. The conflict in Gaza is not between Hamas and Israel but waged by Israel against the Palestinian people, That started the sequel-chain involving antisemitism (which gathered “old school” hatred of Jews such as that of neo-Nazis and Groypers with modern anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist hatred), and pushed its eventual descent into, at a minimum, hate crimes (such as the Australian arson and graffiti attacks on Jewish centres leading up to the Bondi attacks), and now perhaps a mass murder event that may be an act of (even if unlikely if we are honest in our use of the term) terrorism.

The sad and often unspoken fact is that signal events like the Gaza conflict bring out suppressed hatred and prejudices as well as opportunistic corporate, social, political and ideological agendas that seek to frame the narrative about the event and its sequels in specific self-serving fashion. Unfortunately, the media and political commentariat in NZ is not immune from that syndrome.

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A return to darkness.

In 1994 I was the lead author of the US National Security Strategy for the Western Hemisphere (in reality, the region below the US-Mexico border and adjacent waters). In that section of the Annual US National Security Strategy Report (which covers the entire globe), my colleagues and I focused on regional democracy promotion and cooperative security arrangements after years of authoritarianism and internal conflicts in Latin America, focusing on civil-military relations, conflict resolution and non-traditional security concerns like environmental degradation, drug production and so-called “human security” issues (e.g. poverty alleviation) that could be mitigated via international military assistance and cooperation programs. That section, as with other regions around the globe, was written with input from various other foreign policy agencies, including the intelligence community, State Department, NSC, Treasury, Customs and Immigration and various service branches, although the Office of the Secretary of Defense compiled and published the report under the Department of Defense banner.

An underlying premise of our work at that time was to try to end the history of US military and grey are/covert (and obsessive anti-communist) interventionism in the region, in particular by deliberately ignoring the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and 1904 Roosevelt Corollary that saw Latin America as the US “backyard” where it played the role of regional policeman via Gunboat Diplomacy and other Big Stick means.

It is therefore with profound alarm that I read that the 2025 US National Security Strategy for the Western Hemisphere explicitly bases itself on the Monroe Doctrine (which is neither a Treaty or sanctioned by international law), and adds a “Trump Corollary” to the Roosevelt Corollary. The Trump Corollary states that the US is the determinant of Latin American fortunes rather than these stemming from the sovereign exercise of a Latin American country’s free will.

Implicit in this strategy is the notion that the US will and can intervene I the internal affairs of Latin American states. It’s interventionism is not guided by support for democracy and/or opposition to autocracy. That is irrelevant to the new US strategic calculus. What matters is the age-old geopolitical concern with having “friendly” and pro-US regimes installed in and foreign competitions pushed out so that the US (or better said, Trump-connected interests) can maximise regional opportunities of an economic and political sort.

The 2025 National Security Strategy for the Western Hemisphere is an outright claim to unilateral US imperialist interventionism. Seen in that light, it  frames recent US actions in the region in sharper (and darker) relief and explains its recent meddling in the internal affairs of places like Argentina, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela as component parts of this new (neo) imperialist strategy.

That augers poorly for regional peace and security. The PRC is now the leading trade and investment partner of several LATAM countries and is unwilling to surrender its interests to the US (or better said, Trump-aligned economic interests). It has a satellite tracking facility in Argentine Patagonia and is heavily involved in port management in several countries (including a newly opened container processing port facility and transportation hub in Peru, the largest of its kind in Latin America). It is deeply involved in resource extraction and infrastructure development throughout the region. This is the type of soft power influence that the US used to wield, but which is now being replaced by crony capitalism, election meddling and Gunboat Diplomacy. Although there is much to dislike about its approach, the PRC “does business” with Latin Americans as partners and sovereign equals. The US rattles sabres and extra-judicially kills Latin American civilians under pretexts, regarding its Southern neighbours as nothing more than assorted lawn furniture that can be arranged at will or whimsey.

At some point push may come to shove. The US currently has the strategic advantage over the PRC and other extra-regional competitors, but they may only be temporary as the MAGA administration hollows out the federal government and sows partisan political and social division within US society. In a weird sense, the US could wind up like the USSR at the end of the Cold War: a bloated military machine standing on a fractured society and skewed oligarchical economy where the interests of a connected  few prevail over the needs of the many.

Whatever happens, born of ignorance and hubris, this year’s US National Security Strategy is a retrograde turn in its relations with its Latin American neighbours.

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Rats fleeing a moral slum.

Apropos the Washington Post/CNN stories regarding Pete Hegseth verbally instructing the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Commanding Officer (Admiral Frank Bradley) and SEAL Team 6 to “kill them all” when survivors of a missile strike were seen clinging to the wreckage.

Well, the inevitable happened once the story got out. After weeks bragging about ordering attacks on supposed drug-running boats that have killed 81 people so far (no tangible evidence of drug-smuggling has been provided and even if they were involved in such activities, the penalty for drug-smuggling is imprisonment, not summary extrajudicial execution at sea), Trump and Hegseth are  trying to distance themselves from the order to kill shipwrecked survivors of a US military strike on a unarmed civilian boat by throwing Admiral. Bradley under the bus. 

Trump says that Hegseth told him that he did not order the strike and that he (Trump) would not have ordered it if he knew about it. Hegseth says that he did not give the “kill them all” order and did not watch the live feed coverage of the second strike (aka “double tap”) that killed the survivors even though he watched the rest of the operation up until that moment. They both pointed the finger for giving the “pull the second trigger” order at Admiral Bradley, who according to the original story passed it down the chain of command to SEAL Team 6, who then fired the Hellfire missile that killed the two people treading water. In total, 11 people died in the two strikes. No drugs were located.

This sequence of blame-shifting was predictable because Trump and Hegseth have no sense of honour or ethical compass guiding their actions in what conservative writer George Will calls a “sickening moral slum of an administration.” We can only hope that Admiral Bradley, whose career is finished regardless of who ultimately gave the double-tap kill order, has receipts or a document trail that will provide evidence of where the illegal order came from and who, precisely, gave it. Because killing shipwrecked survivors, during times of war and certainly doing times of peace, is a war crime, a crime under US and International law, and a violation of the Geneva Conventions and US code of military justice. That the people in question were defenceless civilians not engaged in a real conflict with the US makes things worse and opens up the possibility of criminal liability for those involved in giving and executing the order.

Interestingly, Admiral Alvin Holsey, the previous commander of the Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which is the lead command involved in the military pressure campaign against Venezuela and its supposed drug-running activities, tendered his resignation 45 days after the Sept. 2 double tap strikes. He was not involved in the chain of command that conducted the strikes so likely was ignorant of operational details (SEAL Team Six was answering to JSOC, not SOUTHCOM). He had not yet completed the first year of his three year term and may have to forfeit the fourth star promotion to Admiral that came with his appointment to be the Southern Command boss (that is significant in terms of his retirement benefits). It could well be that Admiral Holsey resigned in protest against the illegal extrajudicial kills of mariners at sea. Should he be called before Congress to testify under oath about what he knew and when he knew about the double-tap and other kinetic operations carried out in the SOUTHCOM Area of Responsibility (AOR), things could get interesting.

Likewise, the Post story claims to be quoting two people in the room when Hegseth gave the “kill them all” order, with corroborating statements by five other people with direct knowledge of the operation. Given the high level decision-making involved, these are likely to be senior military officers and/or civilian Defense Department personnel. Should they be requested to appear before Congressional investigations committees and be questioned under oath, things could well get dicey for Hegseth in particular, but potentially for Trump as well if he knew about the “kill them all” policy in advance of the strikes.

As things stand, while Admiral Holsey will retire honorably, Admiral Bradley could well wind up court-martialed, sentenced and imprisoned, dishonorably discharged and all retirement benefits forfeited. For a 35 year service naval office and former SEAl, this is a tremendous fall from grace. The same could well happen to others in the chain of command that fateful night.

Which is why I hope that they carry receipts in the form of documentary evidence about the mission.

Even so, the Supreme Court has ruled the Trmp is immune from prosecution for actions taken in his official capacity as President (including murder). Trump can use his pardon powers to shield Hegseth, Bradley and others in the chain of command who participated in the operation. Trump has already demonstrated his willingness to exercise his pardon power as he deems fit, including pardoning war criminal Eddie Gallagher, a former SEAL.

Whatever happens, one can only hope that this is the beginning of the end for the corrupt and incompetent (yet dangerous) deck of cards known as the MAGA White House. Because just like the garish gold decor now festooning its walls like it was a Liberace showcase in Vegas, the term “gilded” in its original sense seems most appropriate. 

Shiny on the outside, rotten on the inside.

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No surprises versus plausible deniability.

The sordid saga of Jevon McSkimming reminds us of the inherent tension between two largely unspoken axioms of democratic politics. These are the “no surprises” and “plausible deniability” rules. Infrequently formalised in written instructions and more commonly shared as unwritten understandings between government officials, these axioms require delicate juxtaposition in order to strike the right balance between institutional accountability, individual responsibility and partisan fortunes. Balancing the oft-counterpoised understandings speaks to the vertical and horizontal dimensions of institutional and individual accountability as well as issues of institutional self-preservation, bureaucratic “capture,” individual and partisan interests. It is a tough mix to get right and yet if democracy is to be served, that is exactly what must happen.

What will not be addressed here are the specifics of the McSkimming case or whether this balancing act occurs in authoritarian regimes. The former has been covered extensively by political commentators detailing the chronology of and participants in events leading to recent revelations. The latter usually do not concern themselves with addressing matters of public accountability so do not place as much emphasis on the axioms in question. They may not like surprises and tend to deny responsibility when called out on failures or misbehaviour, but authoritarians mostly discount the governance implications of their actions because mass contingent consent is not the basis of their rule.

In contrast, mass contingent consent and attendant faith in institutions, leaders and policies constitute the foundation of the social license that is given to political leaders and government institutions to perform their duties and responsibilities in democracies. That is the foundation of the vertical accountability that lies at the core of democratic governance–both leaders and institutions are accountable to the people that they ostensibly serve. Several mechanisms ensure vertical accountability–elections being the ultimate adjudicator of government performance–including entities like inspectors general of agencies, comptrollers, auditors, boards of inquiry, independent commissions, parliamentary committees and in-house regulation enforcement of institutional and personal standards of conduct. Electorates vote for governments to carry out a given policy agenda, and the institutional apparatus is responsible to the electorate via independent means as well as through the mediation of that government for implementation of that agenda within the framework of the law.

Unfortunately in practice many oversight agencies like the Independent Police Complaints Authority (IPCA), the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security prior to the Zaoui case and various parliamentary committees developed reputations for having been the subjects of “bureaucratic capture” whereby the entities that they are supposed to monitor wind up controlling what they can see and do when it comes to their oversight and investigation functions. In some instances they and Royal Commissions of Inquiry have been suspected of being “whitewashing” devices at the service of the government of the day or the agencies they oversee or investigate. This erodes public trust and promotes insularity, unethical behaviour and organisational defensiveness within public bureaucracies, especially those in the security and intelligence arenas.

Whether they are subject to bureaucratic capture or not, where institutional traditions in NZ government agencies and amongst some parts of the political class reward unaccountable practices, there may exist the sense that there will be limited to no consequences for untoward behaviour because the agencies in which they serve or depend on close ranks and shield them when things “hit the fan.” If vertical accountability mechanisms are weak or rigged against honest and transparent scrutiny and responsible exercise of duty, then the institutional culture in government agencies may develop forms of self-preservation that usurp legitimate public accountability.

This organizational pathology is known as a culture of impunity. Officials and agencies get away with misbehaviour because they are protected by their peers and political superiors, and the more that happens and the longer a tradition of doing so exists within any given agency, the more likely that, absent major institutional reform, that will be the default response when individual and organisational problems arise.

It is in this context that the tension between the “no surprises” and “plausible deniability” axioms come into play. The “no surprises” policy is simple: subordinates inform superiors in advance of problems or trouble (personal, political, institutional) that may be coming their way. This provides government leaders the opportunity to prepare contingency plans for what they know is coming. That involves more than crisis management and PR spin campaigns that “get out in front” of the emerging story. It may or may not involve diversion tactics and “flooding the zone with s**t.” It also offers leaders the chance to engage in proactive reforms that are already underway when the issue in question reaches the public domain.

“No surprises” is a discrete foundation of vertical accountability in democracies that is critical to informed decision-making and government stability. It prevents smaller problems from metastasizing into institutional or political crises and reassures and reaffirms public faith and trust. It has a horizontal accountability dimension in that warnings embedded in the “no surprises” (or “head’s up) policy can be shared with other agencies not specifically involved in the matter at hand. For example, the Police could have shared information about the Christchurch terrorist that was derived from investigations into criminal matters with their intelligence counterparts had they not been governed by a “siloed” inter-agency information-sharing policy. In other words, there was an institutional antipathy towards horizontal accountability between the NZ Police and other security agencies that prevented proactive action that might have prevented the March 15 mosque attacks.

Conversely, the intelligence community warns the Police about potential foreign government involvement in criminal enterprises targeting NZ. In may instances this is part and parcel of inter-agency information sharing, but it also is clear that does not always happen and that in NZ accountability between agencies (again, the horizontal dimension of public accountability) is not a commonly observed standard in practice.

Tension in governance occurs because there is another side of the coin when it comes to institutional and political accountability: “plausible deniability.” Modern democratic leaders have learned that often the best way to deal with crises is to deny any knowledge or involvement in them and to that end ensure that no evidence can come to light tying them to any specific event, order or action. Instead, the problem is blamed on people or entities further down in government organisational charts. Reagan and George H.W. Bush denied any involvement in the Iran-Contra affair even thought the plotting and scheming was done down the hall from the Oval Office in the West Wing. Donald Trump denies knowing who the people are that he pardons or consorts with (consensually or not) before they become controversial, and instead uses diversions and personal character assassination to shift attention onto others. Helen Clark knew nothing about the Urewera raids before they happened and John Key knew nothing in advance about the Kim Dotcom raids or assorted acts of cabinet misbehaviour. They were then “surprised” when these events hit the public eye but could plausibly deny that they were involved in them, thereby escaping responsibility for the excesses committed in each case (in which the NZ Police were heavily involved). Although McSkimming rose to senior rank in the NZ Police during the Ardern/Hipkins government, Mr. Hipkins apparently knew nothing about his problematic proclivities, as is the case with the current government leadership, including the Minister of Police.

I have experience with this axiom. During my stay in the US Department of Defense I was advised to make sure that the paper trail ended at the desk of someone above me in the Pentagon pecking order. Otherwise I would be made the scapegoat should controversial actions that I was involved with became a matter of public interest. It did not matter that these actions “came from the top,” that is, were ordered by people much higher up in the US security policy-making food chain and way above my pay rate. Instead, senior officials made sure that should things hit the fan, so to speak, on some policy issue in my field of responsibility, that the lowest ranking subordinate would take the blame/be blamed and those giving the orders would get a free pass on the accountability scales because there was no evidence specifically connecting their orders to subsequent actions taken further down the chain of command.

Those were the days of physical paper trails. Today they are email trails or even text trails, but their evidentiary worth is the same. The buck stops not with the higher-ups but with some schmuck further down the bureaucratic line. As it turns out, I was lucky. My immediate superior, a military man, told me that so long as he was kept informed about my “grey zone” activities, he would take responsibility for them should things go awry. In other words, he was combining “no surprises” with “plausible deniability” on my account. He was an honourable man dealing with difficult and complex situations involving security policy, bureaucratic practice, partisan politics and national interests.

Closer to recent events in NZ, revelations that emails directed by McSkimming investigators were re-directed to the Police Commissioner’s office on the latter’s orders raises the question as to wether plausible deniability outweighed the no surprises axiom in the handling of the investigation. It opens the question of retrospective accountability with regard to the Ardern government (what it knew and when it knew about McSkimming’s behaviour while it was in power). It raises questions about the possibility of outside influences and pressures on the investigators and their work, and if there were any, in what form and by who. In other words, both vertical and horizontal accountability appears at cursory glance to have been compromised in the handling of the matter.

To its credit, the IPCA pulled no punches in its assessment of the handing of the McSkimming case. It remains to be seen what consequences derive from its report, or whether a line will be drawn on the affair in the interests of–you guessed it–organizational reputation. Much will be made of the need to “move on” from this unfortunate episode, and already the civilian and uniformed leadership speak of a “few bad eggs” spoiling the otherwise good reputation of the NZ Police. You can insert your Tui ad here.

Again, it is very worth detailing the specifics of the IPCA report findings and the details of other potential acts of institutional coverups by the NZ Police (for example, handling of the investigation into the Roastbusters rapist gang that included the son of a police officer). But those are incidents that of themselves do not address patterns of institutional behaviour and the implications that they have for democratic governance. For that, dots must be joined and trends analysed in order for broader syndromes to be. identified and addressed.

In the end it appears that deeper reflection on accountability mechanisms, institutional culture, organizational practice and individual responsibility within official settings needs to be undertaken. Getting rid of a few “bad apples” from public institutions does not stop organizational pathologies from reproducing and infecting public agencies as a whole, especially when they are the product of long-standing traditions of institutional impunity in which the balance between “no surprises” and “plausible deniability” is tilted in favour of those who dishonour the public trust contingent consent given to them.

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Mamdani’s monster move.

The shouting about communist/socialist/Marxist/Islamist by the US Right when it comes to Zohran Mamdani suggests they live in a 1950s McCarthyite time warp and/or an ideological ignorance bubble. Besides a social democratic being none of the above, the operative term in the phrase is “democratic.” He was elected in a landslide on a working class focused platform that was well known and well received across the electoral demographic (age, gender, religion race, etc.)”. Although the Right did its dishonest best to smear him with the usual culture wars and “Reds under the beds” fear-mongering, it may be the case that after years of corrupt NYC machine politics-as-usual that catered to the interests of the corporate and oligarchical classes, voters are willing to try something new. 

“New” means a move to the center-Left. Mamdani is no radical extremist no matter what the rabid Right mouth-frothers say about him. NYC has never had a social democratic mayor and given what has come before, especially recently, perhaps voters decided to not listen to the troglodytes and try something different when it comes to a governance approach.

Mamdani still has to deal with a city council, borough governments, state government and people within his own party who will force him to compromise in order to be effective. But shifting the starting point to the policy Left after years of the city government maintaining a corporate-Right bias could just break the hold of embedded vested interests when it comes to how the public purse is distributed. That can only be a good thing, especially if working and middle class socio-economic wellbeing is a major focus.

Best of all, even if NYC is not representative of the entire nation (far from it), Mamdani is an absolute nightmare for the MAGA morons in and out of government at all levels. That is because should he be successful and cast his eyes an even higher federal office, there is bound to be a lot of bed-wetting in Red States and in red parts of DC as a result.

That should be fun to watch.

On a personal note, the rightwing hysteria about Mamdani’s “Marxism” brought back memories of when I underwent my first Top Secret US security clearance interview and polygraph test (in the early 1990s). I was asked if I had ever been a member of a Communist Party or advocated for the overthrow of the US government. Although I had affiliations with left-wing groups in Argentina and then elsewhere as a teenager and young adult, I could honestly say that I was never a member of any Communist Party (basically because most CPs of that era were pro-soviet Stalinists and I was and am not into Stalinists). I could also honestly say that I did not advocate the overthrow of the US government, although I certainly advocated for the overthrow of US client dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere.

So I said “no” to both questions and passed that part of the exam. In the long form interview I explained to my interviewers from the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) that I was a Peronist symnpathizer-turned-neo-Gramscian analytic Marxist whose political sympathies tended towards what was then called the “Eurocommunist” line. I tried to be helpful and told them that they should try to be more specific in their questioning, since there were significant differences between Maoists, Leninists, Trotskyites and other Marxist derivatives. In response (and I kid you not, dear readers), the interviewers literally rolled their eyes, looked at each other, shook their heads and mouthed the letters “W-T-F?” After a long pause, the lead guy said to me “we do not care whatever you were and are so long as you are not a commie.” That was the state of play when it came to official Defence Department understanding of Marxism in the year Bill Clinton came to office.

They then moved on to ask me if I “liked” men. What ensued was an interesting discussion about the meaning of “liking men” and in what context. Their basic line was that they did not care whether I “liked men” or not, but that they simply had to know in the event that I was blackmailed given my new job. My then Navy Officer girlfriend was highly amused by this when I told her about the interview and offered to vouch for my, er, “proclivities.”

Anyway, I passed the test and headed off to the Pentagon with my clearance secured. I met a fair amount of closet commies and man-likers once there.

Mamdani was not among them.