BJR1: ’After the Fall’

Review by Bill Doughty––

In “After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made” by Ben Rhodes (Random House, 2021) a great thinker “worries about the danger of where the blend of nationalism and authoritarianism can lead.”

This is a must-read about not only “how did we get here?” but also “where are we heading?”

“After the Fall” is divided into four parts –– I, The Authoritarian Playbook; II, The Counterrevolution (mostly Soviet- and Russia-related); III, The Chinese Dream; and IV, Who We Are: Being American, which includes a chapter called “Forever War.”

Rhodes, a deep thinker, considers whether American exceptionalism and supremacy still exist in a world turning away from liberal democracy and more toward authoritarian, even totalitarian, rule:

“Ironically, once they were unbridled, the very forces that enabled this nation’s rise would accelerate its descent. The globalized spread of profit-seeking capitalism accelerated inequality, assaulted people’s sense of traditional identity, and seeded a corruption that allowed those with power to consolidate control. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, this nation’s sense of purpose was channeled into a forever war that hemorrhaged resources, propagated a politics of Us versus Them, and offered a template and justification for autocratic leaders who represented an older form of nationalism. This nation’s new technologies proliferated like an uncontrolled virus before we understood their impact, transforming the way that human beings consume information; at first hopeful, the unifying allure of the Internet and social media segmented people back into lonely tribes where they could be more easily manipulated by propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theory. Somehow, after three decades of unchecked American capitalism, military power, and democracy itself, bringing back those older forms of nationalism and social control in new packaging.”

Then-President Bush meets with Orban in 2001

As a prime example, Rhodes takes a deep look into Hungary’s transformation under dictator Viktor Orban. Like many leaders, Orban is a complicated figure who seems to have gravitated to a need for more power, a man who claims grievances in establishing a populist blood-and-soil nationalism.

Rhodes explains “how Viktor Orban had transformed Hungary from an open democracy to a largely authoritarian system in the span of a decade.” Orban shut down a free and open media, and promoted a national religion (Christianity) and national racial identity (white). Orban politicized the nation’s supreme court, gerrymandered voting districts to favor nationalists, and changed voting laws to suppress dissent and political rivals.

Rhodes sees a similar “landscape for nationalism” in the United States, particularly in the past decade. Even since his book was published we see an increase in polarity, extremist-fascist ideology, and even vigilantism, where neighbors are encouraged, even paid, to turn in neighbors.

“In America, as in Hungary, the right wing has embraced a nationalism characterized by Christian identity, national sovereignty, distrust of democratic institutions, opposition to immigration, and contempt for politically correct liberal elites.’

Putin’s Landcape and Xi’s BRI

Navalny

Of course, a modern architect for such a nationalist “landscape” is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rhodes says that Putin’s view of the world is “a place in which truth and individual human beings are incidental to the raw will to power.”

Putin allegedly ordered the poisoning and imprisonment of one of his nemeses, Alexey Navalny, who had dared to threaten Putin’s power. Navalny, who has been imprisoned more than a dozen times, became politically conscious in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union after witnessing privatization schemes that consolidated wealth to a handful of oligarchs. He saw corruption schemes in action in Moscow courts. Navalny told Rhodes, “The Soviet Union was an empire based on a lie. And Putin’s Russia is a country based on a lie.”

Attack exercise at a People’s Liberation Army base in Shenyang, China, Aug. 16, 2017. (PO1 Dominique A. Pineiro)

Rhodes then outlines how China embraced American globalization and capitalism while “carefully removing the freedoms” –– Shanghai’d as it were. 

He takes us on a poignant visit to Hong Kong, where young people fight for freedom, democracy, and the right to express themselves without constant surveillance; where booksellers are arrested –– and “The most shocking thing is that it was not shocking.”

Rhodes shows how China is trying to control sea lanes and wrap other Asian nations in their tightening “Belt and Road Initiative.” China, through corruption, exports authoritarianism but expels human rights, he says; the Communist Chinese Party’s treatment of the Uighurs seems based on a version of the U.S. Patriot Act.

Is China’s blend of capitalism, militarism, and stolen technology the future of global power? Is the nationalism/authoritarianism landscape growing and breeding identity-based polarization?

And, how does all of that apply to the United States in the wake of Trump, Russian interference in our elections, the COVID-19 pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, and the January 6 coup attempt at the Capitol? Rhodes says, “You have to look squarely at the darkest aspects of what America is in order to fully, truly love what America is supposed to be.”

“American democracy doesn’t offer us immunity from human fallibility,” Rhodes writes, “but it does offer second chances.”

Afghanistan and Saudis

This book was especially relevant to read during the ending of the nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan –– a war that may actually be almost twice that long. Rhodes reminds us in Chapter 23, “Forever War,” how in 1983 President Reagan “welcomed the mujahideen to the White House as freedom fighters, men of God, comparing them to George Washington.” The United States supported those fighters in their war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but some of those same fighters became part of the Taliban in the 1990s.

According to Rhodes, “Our effort in the 1980s had generated unintended consequences like the birth of al Qaeda just as our post-9/11 wars have generated all manner of unintended consequences, including the creation of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which became ISIS. In this way, the forever war has actually been a forty-year enterprise at war with itself.”

Among unintended consequences over many decades have been the results of America’s relationship with the House of Saud. What was the role of Saudi Arabia on 9/11? What is the U.S. role in Saudi Arabia’s war with Yemen? What kind of legitimacy and support do we give to Saudi Prince Mohamed bin Salman?

“In 2015, Saudi Arabia –– the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers, the source of the oil money that fueled decades of radicalization around the world –– went to war in Yemen. A Houthi sect that had long been a rival to the Saudis had seized control of the capital. The Houthis were aligned with Iran. The new Saudi defense minister and heir apparent to the throne, Mohamed bin Salman, wanted to send a message that he was an assertive character while using the war to consolidate his control over the kingdom’s foreign policy. He was, according to some reports, thirty years old.

“Tentatively at first, America participated, providing logistical and targeting support. The Saudis were, after all, our allies, and the machinery of the government was built to support them. Obama was ambivalent, but he was ultimately persuaded that by participating, we could be a moderating force not the Saudis. It was soon apparent that this wasn’t the case, and this war would escalate when Donald Trump came to office, offering a full embrace of Mohamed bin Salman. Hundreds of thousands of people would be killed, displaced, put at risk of famine. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was fighting the same Houthi enemy as the Saudis were. So the United States, nearly two decades after 9/11, was fighting on the same side as al-Qaeda and Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Such was the logic of the forever war.”

Rhodes reflects on his “list of things we’d done wrong” while Obama was in office: “for instance, supporting the Saudi-led war in Yemen, surging troops in Afghanistan, or failing to more forcefully confront the Republican Party’s efforts to undermine democracy.”

He describes the normalization of a no-longer-surprising-but-still-shocking dynamic over the past decade.

“This whole dynamic was reinforced when Mohamed bin Salman traveled across the United States in early 2018. By that time, it was clear that he was a brutal dictator –– imprisoning his own family at home, waging an increasingly out-of-control war in Yemen, briefly kidnapping the prime minister of Lebanon, lavishly supporting autocrats across the Middle East. Yet he was fully embraced … He may have been a brutal dictator, but he had bottomless cash and supported the War on Terror. Those were America’s preeminent interests. It’s no wonder he felt a sense of impunity. A few months later, Jamal Khashoggi –– an outspoken critic of Mohamed bin Salman and a journalist for The Washington Post –– would be chopped up in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.”

Threats to our own democracy are reflected in the book’s epigraph, a quote from Turkish journalist and author Ece Temelkuran:

“The final takeover does not happen with one spectacular Reichstag conflagration, but is instead an excruciating, years-long process of many scattered, seemingly insignificant little fires that smolder without flames.”

Where are we heading as threats to democracy smolder?