eurasiareview.com

Serbia Between East And West – Analysis

IFIMES

15–18 minutes

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The election of Donald Trump as the new President of the United States introduces a new global reality. Elon Musk is emerging as the spokesperson for the new American foreign policy and the ongoing internal restructuring in the US.

The United States is facing numerous domestic challenges while striving to reassert strong leadership on the global stage. The new American administration's first major test will be bringing an end to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Following these actions, its approach to Russia and China will become clearer.

While the Western Balkans will certainly not be a priority for American foreign policy, the complex situations in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina will need to be addressed, particularly as tensions in North Macedonia continue to escalate. It remains to be seen how the new American administration will view individual countries in the Western Balkans, with particular attention on its stance toward Serbia. The question is whether countries with strong ties to Russia and China can expect stronger support from the Trump administration.

Sanctions on Serbia's Oil Industry (NIS)

Over the past few years, Serbia has significantly strengthened its relationship with the United States, as evidenced by numerous developments, most notably in the signing of this year's strategic Energy Cooperation Agreement[2] between the two countries. This agreement demonstrates strong support from the US government for clean energy investments, as a means to drive the green transition and foster sustainable development.

Under the leadership of President Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia has employed pragmatic policies to convince its public of the importance of deepening ties with the United States, the world's foremost superpower. This is particularly important because Serbia holds a central position in the region, making it nearly impossible to resolve any regional issue without its involvement.  Finalising the dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo will remain a priority for the EU, but it cannot be resolved without the active and decisive role of the US. Unlike previous administrations in Serbia, which largely pursued confrontational policies toward the United States, Vučić has opted to build friendships and foster partnership relations.

Serbia has strengthened its relations with Ukraine by voting in the UN General Assembly to clearly condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a violation of international law. Serbia's substantial aid to Ukraine further underscores its commitment to the European path, with the ultimate aim of attaining EU membership.

While Serbia has successfully repositioned itself within regional and international relations, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has reshaped Europe's geopolitical landscape, heralding a historic rift between Europe and Russia. Given the current geopolitical realities, it is of utmost importance for the EU to finally embark on an intensive enlargement process, as this would serve as an effective response to ward off all foreign (undesirable) influences on the Western Balkans.

Announcements of sanctions against the Oil Industry of Serbia (Naftna industrija Srbije – NIS), ), which has been majority-owned by two Russian energy companies since 2008, during the administration of Boris Tadić and Vojislav Koštunica, raise concerns about supply and energy stability. The sanctions imposed on NIS by the United States are directed at NIS specifically, not Serbia, as the company's majority owners are two Russian firms that serve as vital pillars of Russia's energy sector and, by extension, its state funding.

Analysts suggest that Serbia's leadership, through dialogue with its partners and allies, will likely find a viable solution to secure the supply of oil and oil derivatives, ensuring the country's energy stability remains unaffected. Given Serbia's strong financial position, it is feasible that the country could reclaim an ownership stake in NIS, thereby averting the proposed sanctions.

Serbia's relationship with the Russian Federation will continue to be a crucial factor in the future dynamics of the Balkans and its ties with the EU. Serbia has established well-defined relationships with Russia, China, the EU, and the US. The Russian Federation's defeat in Syria sends a strong message to all of its partners. A comparable scenario unfolded when the US withdrew from Afghanistan, and Donald Trump is now launching an investigation into the pullout and the abandonment of American military equipment to the Taliban. The world is bracing for Trump's return, and Serbia is no exception. Student protests in Serbia serve as a prelude that is likely to bolster the current government's policies. While Serbia maintains its approach, the leadership of Republika Srpska, which has become a typical Russian proxy, complicates Serbia's position amid the geopolitical shifts triggered by Trump's return.

Internal relations and challenges facing Serbia

Serbia stands at a geopolitical crossroads, entangled in diverse interests. Over the past few years, we have repeatedly cautioned that efforts to destabilise the country would emerge and escalate over time—warnings that have now been validated. The legacy of the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and several ensuing wars continue to weigh heavily, as Serbia grapples with overcoming lingering crises. The Western Balkans as a region still suffers from a lack of adequate reckoning with its past. Therefore, the numerous deviant phenomena in these societies come as no surprise and should not necessarily be blamed on former or current governments. Serbia's internal challenges are no greater than those of other nations; what truly matters is how it addresses these issues and seeks effective solutions to the problems it faces.

Serbia is currently experiencing a historic peak in its economic development. Relevant domestic and international indicators place Serbia among the leading European countries in terms of intensive economic growth[3].  A World Bank (WB) report[4] highlights the country's recovery following the Covid-19 pandemic and the improvement in its investment rating, recognised by leading international credit rating [5] agencies. These developments have consequently led to an increase in both domestic and foreign investments, contributing to the overall progress of the country.

Active citizenship and student protests

Civic activism and efforts to address societal phenomena, particularly deviant ones, should contribute to fostering a harmonious and responsible society. The concept of active citizenship encourages individuals to actively participate in their communities. It involves collaborative efforts to shape society and tackle public issues at local, national, and international levels. This, in turn, reinforces democratic processes and promotes the inclusion of all citizens within the society.

Active citizenship must be further promoted to ensure internal social cohesion and achieve societal consensus on Serbia's future and overall progress.

The state, or more specifically the government, must act responsibly, with state institutions serving the interests of the country and its citizens. It is crucial that citizens have trust in institutions and elected officials. Serbia has a tradition of mass protests, which have become a hallmark of its political culture.

It is precisely active citizenship that underscores the importance of the rule of law and robust state institutions. This also means that publicly expressed opinions in the streets do not imply that governments can be overthrown or installed through street demonstrations.  In democratic societies, democratic elections remain the only legitimate path to power, and Serbia should be no exception to this principle. Serbia and its leading political figures must undertake a form of self-reflection concerning the nation's current state and future direction.

Aleksandar Vučić's tenure has not been without its shortcomings. Mistakes have been made, naturally leading to public dissatisfaction. The Serbian President's announcements of a decisive crackdown on crime and corruption, along with plans to "shake up" the ranks of his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), are encouraging. The anticipated government reshuffle represents a step in this direction. This is a genuine path toward purging society of this scourge. At the same time, it is essential to nurture a culture of dialogue and forge a new political ethos.

Analysts believe that student protests have introduced a fresh dynamic to Serbia's social landscape and that this momentum should be responsibly leveraged to drive meaningful improvements across all areas of society.  Achieving this requires accountability from all stakeholders and safeguards against the misuse of student protests for ulterior motives. The voice of students should serve as a catalyst for self-reflection and a guiding lesson for the future, firmly aimed at reinforcing democracy. For this reason, it is crucial that students rise above the current challenges, shed light on societal conditions and problems, and remain vigilant against being co-opted for partisan interests or foreign agendas.

Vojvodina – a real or imagined secessionist threat?

Serbia's painful experiences with secessionism during the era of Slobodan Milošević are a chapter no one wants to see repeated. Milošević's rule ultimately resulted in Kosovo's secession, leaving a lasting scar on Serbia's collective consciousness. The EU has been mediating a dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina, but meaningful discussions have been stalled for years.  The negotiations have reached a deadlock, and it is expected that the new political leadership in Brussels and Washington will accelerate the dialogue, culminating in the signing of a comprehensive, legally binding agreement. Kosovo remains the "open wound" of relations in the Western Balkans, as some politicians still nurture hopes of changing state borders and reshaping the region's political architecture.

This is why statements made by certain politicians or segments of the public during protests in Novi Sad, which carry secessionist overtones regarding Vojvodina, have sparked concerns and apprehension in Serbia. It is vital to ensure that protests and active citizenship are neither misused nor directed toward secession and that free democratic expression by citizens, political parties, the government, or the opposition is not exploited for narrow political or partisan interests. It is no secret that some international and domestic circles have no interest in seeing Serbia become strong, influential, and prosperous.

The opposition plays a vital role in any democratic society, monitoring government policies with the aim of rationalising them or highlighting shortcomings and errors that may arise in the management of public affairs by the executive branch. A constructive opposition is a legitimate right and a cornerstone of building a democratic society. Protests and the peaceful expression of opinions are integral democratic practices recognised across all democratic systems. The essence of democracy lies in safeguarding the state within the boundaries of the constitution and laws, while also preserving and strengthening other state institutions. A clear distinction exists between constructive opposition, which strives to address and rectify mistakes for the greater good of the nation and its citizens, and destructive opposition, which deliberately searches for mistakes aiming to destabilise, undermine security and stability, and push the state into a spiral of violence and chaos.

Even more striking is the conduct of certain segments of the opposition and the so-called "independent" media in Serbia. Their approach falls far short of exemplifying professionalism or civic standards, teetering on the threshold of minimal professional norms, thereby undermining their own credibility and, paradoxically, fuelling public grievances against the government.

Rather than directing public dissatisfaction toward constructive criticism or proposing viable alternatives, the opposition and their allied media have acted in ways that undermine the very causes they claim to champion. Instead of raising the standards of public discourse, their reliance on sensationalism, misrepresentation, and unprofessional reporting has diluted the focus on legitimate flaws of the government. Some opposition leaders have openly acknowledged foreign backing for their activities, which is viewed negatively in Serbia. This approach has diminished the public's ability to take their grievances seriously, inadvertently shielding the government from sustained accountability. By muddying the waters of public discourse, these actors have paradoxically enabled the government to postpone meaningful scrutiny.

Serbia's European path must have no alternative

Serbia finds itself caught in the midst of geopolitical crosswinds, with foreign actors from both the West and the East vying for influence.  The country has firmly committed to EU membership as its strategic objective. Countering foreign influence requires prudent and responsible policymaking. Serbia needs to reassess who its genuine friends are, both in the West and the East.

On the journey toward EU membership, Serbia must embrace and implement the best practices and lessons learned from countries that have previously navigated the European path. However, it is regrettable that neighbouring states or other EU member countries often hinder candidate nations on account of their bilateral interests. A notable example is Bulgaria's blockade of North Macedonia's EU accession process, by obstructing the start of negotiations due to bilateral disputes. Croatia has displayed similar behaviour, particularly in its approach to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro.

In response to these challenges, Slovenia and Germany have drafted a non-paper proposing the elimination of vetoes and blockades stemming from unresolved bilateral issues with neighbouring countries during the pre-accession process. Furthermore, the introduction of qualified majority voting (QMV) in the EU accession process has been suggested to prevent obstructions from certain existing EU members during membership negotiations with candidate countries. Fast-tracked EU membership remains the only viable response to counter negative trends, foreign influence, and anti-European policies in the Western Balkans.

[1] IFIMES – International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has a special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council ECOSOC/UN in New York since 2018, and it is the publisher of the international scientific journal "European Perspectives", link: https://www.europeanperspectives.org/en   

[2] Remarks at the U.S.-Serbia Energy Cooperation Agreement Signing Ceremony. Available at: https://www.state.gov/remarks-at-the-u-s-serbia-energy-cooperation-agreement-signing-ceremony/ 

[3] 2024 Communication on EU enlargement policy. Available at: https://neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu/document/download/3c8c2d7f-bff7-44eb-b868-414730cc5902_en?filename=Serbia%20Report%202024.pdf 

[4] World Bank: Recent Economic Developments. Available at: https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/serbia/overview#3  

[5] Republic of Serbia's long-term credit rating. Available at: https://nbs.rs/en/finansijsko_trziste/informacije-za-investitore-i-analiticare/rejtng_RS/ 

 

 

nypost.com

Young men leaving traditional churches for 'masculine' Orthodox Christianity in droves

Rikki Schlott

9–12 minutes

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Ben Christenson was raised Anglican — church every Sunday, a religious school, and Christian camp every summer. But Christenson, 27 of Fairfax, Virginia, always found himself longing for a more traditional faith.

"The hard thing about growing up in my church is that there was a lot of change even in my lifetime," he told The Post. "I realized that there really was no way to stop the change."

He watched as traditions went by the wayside: The robed choir was swapped out for a worship band, lines were blurred on female ordination, and long-held stances on LGBT issues shifted.

"All of that stuff was basically fungible, which gave me a sense that the theological commitments are kind of fungible, too," he said.

CONTINUED:

 

 

https://nypost.com/2024/12/03/us-news/young-men-are-converting-to-orthodox-christianity-in-droves/

b92.net

Moscow: You allowed the destruction, it all started with the bombing of Belgrade

Sputnik

12–15 minutes

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Via video link, Volodin addressed the participants of the international conference "Long-term consequences of the bombing of Yugoslavia for Serbian society and the formation of a multipolar world", which is being held at the Russian House in Belgrade.

"The desire of one side, the United States of America, to have power and hegemony over other countries has led to numerous problems. When we talk about Yugoslavia, we also remember Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries on which the USA carried out aggression. But it all started from Yugoslavia, from the NATO bombing of peaceful Belgrade. Countries, and primarily EU countries, should understand that, when they allowed Yugoslavia to be bombed, they allowed the destruction of many other, once prosperous countries with original culture and traditions," said the President of the National Duma of Russia.

As he added, "it is very important to objectively assess the events that took place 25 years ago".

"We should do everything so that the tragedy that happened in 1999 in Yugoslavia, and then with other countries, never happens again," said Volodin and wished success to the participants in the conference.

Info

Svet

 

washingtontimes.com

Serbian protesters demand arrests over train station roof collapse that killed 14 people in Serbia

The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com

7–8 minutes

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BELGRADE, Serbia — Angry protesters on Sunday left red handprints at the entrances of government buildings in the Serbian capital to demand the arrest of officials, two days after a concrete canopy collapsed at a railway station, killing 14 people and injuring three.

Police formed a cordon outside the seat of the Ministry of Construction and Infrastructure in central Belgrade as several thousand people called for ranking government ministers, including Prime Minister Milos Vucevic, to immediately step down.

"Arrest, arrest!" chanted the crowd. They shouted at police officers outside the building that they are "guarding murderers" and that "your hands are bloody," while holding banners reading "corruption kills" and "we are all under the canopy!"

"Everywhere you can, leave bloody hands so they know their hands are bloody. In every city in Serbia, everywhere you can," opposition political activist Nikola Ristic said.

The concrete canopy that ran along the front of the railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed suddenly on Friday, landing on people who were sitting on benches or passing through the building's entrance. Surveillance camera footage showed the canopy crashing down in seconds.

The dead included a 6-year-old girl. The three injured, who are between 18 and 24 years old, all had to have limbs amputated. They were still in serious condition on Sunday, doctors said.

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PHOTOS: Protesters demand arrests over train station roof collapse that killed 14 people in Serbia

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Funerals for the victims, attended by thousands, have been held in northern Serbia.

The train station has been renovated twice in recent years, and critics of Serbia's populist government attributed the disaster to rampant corruption, lack of transparency and sloppy renovations. The renovation was part of a wider deal with Chinese construction companies.

"Citizens no longer have anything to lose, they are increasingly becoming aware of this," said liberal politician Biljana Stojkovic. "This is grief combined with anger, despair that is turning into rage."

Serbia's populist government has promised a thorough investigation, with prosecutors saying they already have questioned more than two dozen people. But critics believe that justice is unlikely to be served with the populists in firm control of the judicial system and the police.

Officials have insisted that the canopy had not been part of the renovation work, suggesting this was the reason why it collapsed but giving no explanation why this wasn't done.

The Novi Sad railway station was originally built in 1964, while the renovated station was inaugurated by President Aleksandar Vucic and his populist ally, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, over two years ago as a major stopover for a planned fast train line between Belgrade and Budapest.

Copyright © 2024 The Washington Times, LLC.

 

Serbia Is a Showcase of Authoritarian Neoliberalism

Western media coverage often presents Serbia under Aleksandar Vučić as a Russian puppet state. In reality, Vučić has been playing both sides in the new Cold War while applying the same neoliberal policies that hold sway in the West.

 

By Daniel FinnSeptember 9, 2024Z ArticleNo Comments28 Mins Read

 

Source: Jacobin

 

CONTINUED... https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/serbia-is-a-showcase-of-authoritarian-neoliberalism/

 

Lithium & Politics Clash In Serbia

cleantechnica.com

Lithium & Politics Clash In Serbia - CleanTechnica

Steve Hanley

9–11 minutes

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If the future of clean energy depends on lots of batteries to power electric vehicles and store electricity, the world will need lots of lithium. China realized that in the early part of this century and started securing lithium supplies all around the world. That is now having political repercussions, as other nations do not want to be beholden to China for their supply of a critical resource. Some people joked that past wars were fought over oil but future wars would be fought over lithium, but today the joke has turned sour as the political implications of access to lithium are coming into sharper focus.

In Serbia, the collision between lithium and politics is taking place today. Rio Tinto, one of the largest mining companies in the world, has elaborate plans to mine lithium in the Jadar Valley in the western part of that country. But those plans have sparked huge protest rallies across the country by Serbians who are concerned the mining will create enormous environmental problems.

A report by The Hague Center for Strategic Studies estimates that if it the EU is to reach its goal of carbon neutrality by 2050, Europe will need 60 times more lithium by that year than what it imported in 2020 from China and elsewhere. Michael Schmidt, a lithium expert at Germany's Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, told the New York Times that Europe might be able to reach its targets without supplies from Serbia, but "the Serbian project is one of the largest, and that is why it is so significant. We need each and every project to reach targets." Chad Blewitt, the head of Rio Tinto's Serbian operations, added that the company planned to invest more than $2.55 billion in the project. "There is no green transition in Europe without this lithium," he said.

The project has been supported by the United States and the European Union, which is in desperate need of lithium to meet its climate goals. But it has generated a wave of public fury in Serbia, where fears that the mine will poison the air and water have set off huge street protests against President Aleksandar Vucic.

Lithium & Politics

The Serbian government gave preliminary approval in 2019, but canceled it before an election in 2022 because it was worried about losing votes during protests. However, Serbia changed its mind against in July because it wants to become a member of the European Union and the EU wants Serbian lithium. Serbia's mining minister, Dubravka Djedovic Handanovic, said mining probably would not start for another two years, but once it did, lithium from the Jadar Valley would allow Serbia to manufacture batteries and electric cars, providing about 20,000 jobs.

Michael Schmidt, a lithium expert at Germany's Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, said Europe might be able to reach its targets without supplies from Serbia. But, he said, "the Serbian project is one of the largest, and that is why it is so significant." He added, "We need each and every project to reach targets." Last month, German chancellor Olaf Scholz and executives from Mercedes Benz, which has big electric vehicle plans, visited Belgrade to push for the Rio Tinto project to get started. Geoffrey Pyatt, US assistant secretary of state for energy resources, cheered the Serbian lithium project on social media last week, calling it "an opportunity to contribute to the green transition at home and abroad."

At a recent protest in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, Angela Rojovic held a sign at a protest against the Rio Tinto lithium project that said, "He sold out Kosovo but is not going to take away our clean water. She said the president had not done enough to defend the interests of Serbs living in mainly ethnic Albanian Kosovo. She also said Mr. Vucic was sacrificing Serbia's environment to serve Europe's climate goals. "I don't need green cars," she said. "I need green apples and green grass."

International Implications

The proposed mine in Serbia has not only provoked fury among farmers, environmental activists, and ordinary citizens, it also has become a proxy battleground in the West's efforts to extract the country from the orbits of Russia, its traditional ally, and China. For those who view Serbia as a partner for the United States and Europe rather than a Moscow-aligned and authoritarian regional bully, Mr. Vucic's support for Rio Tinto, along with his assent to Serbian-made weapons being sold covertly to Ukraine, is evidence he is serious about disengaging from Russia.

But Russia has strong support among hardline Serb nationalists, and some diplomats and analysts say Moscow has been stirring the unrest over the mine. Mr. Vucic, however, has said Moscow told him that the West is orchestrating the protests because it wants to topple him. "Unfortunately, it has become a political fight, a big political battle," said the mining minister, Djedovic Handanovic.

Among those taking part in recent nationwide demonstrations against Rio Tinto have been leaders of People's Patrol, an ultra-nationalist group aligned with Moscow. Social media accounts known for spreading Russian disinformation have been active in promoting horror stories about the planned lithium mine. Last week, a post on Serbian social media claimed an exploratory hole bored by Rio Tinto was belching radioactive fluid. But leftists and middle-of-the-road pro-Europeans have also joined the protests, chanting opposition to a project that has become a lightning rod for diverse grievances against the government.

In Gornje Nedeljice, a Jadar Valley village that sits atop Europe's biggest known deposit of high-grade lithium, the project has alienated Mr. Vucic's previously stalwart rural base. Dragan Karajcic, the district head for a cluster of small settlements around the proposed mine, said he was a member of Mr. Vucic's governing party but still joined a local protest group hostile to Rio Tinto and the government.

Goran Tomic, a native of Gornje Nedeljice who now lives mostly in Germany, said he understood the need to combat climate change by moving away from gasoline-powered cars, but he was still appalled that his older brother had agreed to sell his house and land to Rio Tinto. "He allowed himself to betray himself for money, and in doing that he betrayed us all," Mr. Tomic said, sitting on his front stoop with his mother, who was also angry but proud that two of her three sons refused to sell to Rio Tinto.

Nebojsa Petkovic, a villager from Gornje Nedeljice and an anti-lithium activist, traveled to Belgrade to help organize a demonstration on Saturday, August 10, that attracted tens of thousands of people. "Let the Germans save the planet," Mr. Petkovic said. "We need to save ourselves." Germany's role has only amplified opposition. Dragan Karajcic, the district head, said he was infuriated by German assurances that the mine would be safe, recalling Nazi atrocities in a nearby town in 1941 that the Germans had promised would be left unhurt. He said his great-grandfather fought nearby against Austrian troops during World War I. "He fought to keep our land, and now I'm supposed to give it away to Rio Tinto. No way," he said. "There is a lot of bad blood in these hills."

The Takeaway

If all this sturm unmd drang over lithium in Serbia makes your head hurt, joint the club. In the comfort of our homes far from the fray, we hear that Serbia has high-grade lithium sources and assume they will be developed soon so the price of electric cars will fall. We covered another story about how the quest for lithium is disrupting life for Indigenous people in Argentina. There, the crux of the problem is that the lithium is in an arid location but extracting it requires copious amounts of water. The native people fear the lithium operations will unalterably change their lives and force them to move.

The answer, of course, is to use other minerals — like sodium, potassium, or iron — to make batteries, but unfortunately none of the batteries made with those materials are as good at storing electricity as lithium ion batteries, at least not yet. It seems inconceivable that extracting lithium could create so much opposition when almost no one objects to drilling oil and gas wells anywhere on Earth. As former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill said "All politics is local."

Whether the issue is solar farms, wind farms, or lithium extraction, the opposition is loud and persistent, and yet fossil fuels put all of us at risk. Something's gotta give, somewhere, somehow. That may mean pivoting away from lithium as the foundation of the technologies that will provide us with a world free of carbon and methane emissions, which could be easier to do than untangling the torturous politics of Serbia. If we all need to get along in order to get to an emissions-free world, we are in a lot of trouble.

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Brantner: No "discount" for Serbia regarding the rule of law, Kosovo and BiH due to lithium

europeanwesternbalkans.com

Brantner: No "discount" for Serbia regarding the rule of law, Kosovo and BiH due to lithium - European Western Balkans

by EWB

5–6 minutes

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BERLIN – Franziska Brantner, State Secretary at the German Ministry of the Economy stated that a possible project regarding lithium mining in Serbia would not affect the European integration process of the country, in which the central points are the rule of law and democracy.

"There will be no discount for lithium when it comes to the rule of law, nor in relation to Kosovo or Bosnia and Herzegovina", Brantner, a member of the ruling Greens, told the Berlin daily TAZ.

She added that the Greens had always supported the civil society in Serbia and pointed out that "we managed to achieve that (mining company) Rio Tinto will form a permanent advisory body composed of representatives of civil society".

Franziska Brantner accompanied German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who visited Belgrade on 19 July, when the Memorandum between the EU and Serbia on sustainable raw materials was signed. On this occasion, she also met with representatives of the opposition parties and civil society who are against the lithium mining project in the valley of the Jadar River in the west of Serbia.

About 30,000 people took to the streets of Belgrade on 10 August to protest against the re-announcement of the opening of the lithium mine of the international company Rio Tinto in Serbia. The protest was organised by the Association of Environmental Organisations of Serbia, and speakers said that they would not allow the opening of the mine, due to the concerns that it would pollute water sources and seriously endanger public health. The protest in Belgrade was preceded by mass protests in dozens of Serbian cities.

Brantner also stressed for TAZ that the local population and the opposition rightly demanded that state institutions apply ecological standards.

"At the same time, it is good that European reserves are exploited and processed in a European way. In this way, China's increased influence on important European resources is prevented. I doubt that democracy, the environment and the local population will fare better with a Serbian-Chinese partnership", Franziska Brantner remarked.

She assessed that this was also an opportunity to show the whole world that German and European companies could make a difference and that the exploitation and processing of raw materials could be much more environmentally friendly than it had been so far.

"Rio Tinto has committed itself to respect the EU's environmental legislation, even though it is only partially applied in Serbia. The state control is the responsibility of Serbia. The EU and us will be able to provide expert advise", she said.

Some of Brantner's assessments echoed the recent comments of our portal's interlocutors. They stated for the EWB that the European Union would not stop insisting on improving the rule of law as a key condition for Serbia's membership.

Florian Bieber, a Director of the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, and a coordinator of BiEPAG group, told European Western Balkans that he did not think that the EU would turn a blind eye on the rule of law per se, but rather that it would speak with two voices.

"Hopefully, the next Commissioner for Enlargement will be less compromised than the incumbent and might strengthen the credibility of the Commission in this regard. On the other hand, the lithium-mining deal suggests that the EU has strategic interests that might trump rule of law issues. The signing itself is a testament to it. The project was re-started despite not having any independent institutions evaluating it or any public consultations. In the EU, such a controversial project which was stopped due to citizens' protests could not just restart with so little regard to broader consultation. The fact that the EU supports it, suggests that when it comes to strategic interests, it might look the other way", Florian Bieber said.

In the similar vein, Đorđe Dimitrov, a researcher at the European Policy Centre (CEP) in Belgrade, stated the European Western Balkans that the Memorandum would not speed up Serbia's EU path, but would lead to stronger cooperation on critical raw materials and at one point would certainly result in a strategic partnership between Serbia and the EU.

"However, the key problems concerning Serbia's EU path remain, which are issues regarding the state of democracy, the rule of law and media freedom. It is difficult to expect that the EU member states which do not have an industry that needs lithium will be willing to turn a blind eye to these problems, as officials from Brussels and Germany do", Đorđe Dimitrov stressed.

 

euronews.com

Why is Europe desperate for lithium, and why are Serbians up in arms?

5–6 minutes

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With green groups set to mass for a protest on the streets of Belgrade this weekend over the planned opening of a Lithium mine, what is it about this controversial mineral that has Europeans keen to acquire supplies?

Green groups in Serbia have called what they hope will be a mass protest in Belgrade tomorrow (10 August) against plans to open Europe's largest lithium mining operation in the fertile Jadar valley in the west of the country, while China – the world's third largest producer – is also looking to gain a foothold in the region.

The Serbian mining project has been a source of growing unease since the Anglo-Australian mining conglomerate Rio Tinto first discovered deposits of a new ore it dubbed Jadarite twenty years ago, but tensions came to a head in January 2022 when the government of president Aleksandar Vučić withdrew approval for the mining project's spatial plan.

That decision followed months of protests spurred by fears of the drastic environmental impact of the planned operation that the firm estimates could produce annually some 58,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate (the form in which it is widely traded, equivalent to about 11,000 tonnes of pure lithium metal).

Available estimates suggest a typical 60kWh electric car battery requires about 50kg of the salt (containing 9.4kg of pure lithium) – so that's enough for over a million such vehicles.

With EV's taking up a growing share of annual car sales (14.6% of 10.5m units sold last year in Europe, according to the trade association ACEA), the market value of lithium carbonate is set to increase, although prices seem to have stabilised for now at around $13 per kilo after spiking to five times that in 2022.

Analysts at BMI – part of Fitch Group, better known for credit ratings – forecast in late June a more modest, but still significant, rise to something over $15 this year then $20 in 2025, with rising production largely meeting demand.

But the price on the global market is not the only reason Europe wants to mine the stuff closer to home: it wants to avoid dependence on large external suppliers in an era of increasing geopolitical tension – a fact most sharply reflected by domestic production and recycling targets in the recent Critical Raw Materials (CRM) Act.

By far the largest supplier globally is Australia, with its 88,000 tonnes of lithium almost double that of second placed Chile last year (the EU struck a strategic partnership with the Antipodean mineral giant shortly before that with Serbia).

China produced about 33,000 tonnes last year, but that figure belies its reach on the global markets.

Tianqi, a Chinese company that is one of the top four global lithium miners is heavily invested in production in Australia. In an interview with the South China Morning Post last month, chief executive Frank Ha Chun Shing Said the firm was in talks with potential European partners – including in one unnamed EU country - to expand into battery production.

China's Eve Power started recruiting in March for its new €1bn battery plant in eastern Hungary, while Chinese carmaker BYD announced its first European electric car production plant in the same country at the end of last year (more recently, it announced it would open a similar facility in Turkey).

With recent EU import tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles perhaps a sign of things to come, China firms have a clear incentive to locate production closer to the European market.

Plans for lithium production within the EU are on hold at the moment, with the ambitions of its only significant producer Portugal (380 tonnes last year) to hugely ramp up production also stymied by public opposition and, more recently, confused corruption allegations.

Which brings us back to Serbia, which the US geological survey estimates has reserves of 1.2 million tonnes to Portugal's 270,000. (Germany is sitting on 3.8m tonnes, according to the US government agency, and Czechia 1.3m, raising interesting questions about assumptions regarding public acceptance of lithium mining too close to home.)

On 19 July, the EU inked a memorandum of understanding with Vučić at a CRM summit in Belgrade, with the chancellor of Europe's automotive superpower Germany also in attendance. Just three days earlier, the Serbian government reinstated Rio Tinto's licence, unfreezing the mining project.

Protesters had mobilised even ahead of a supreme court ruling on 11 July that served as the pretext for the government U-turn, and which opponents of the mining plan clearly saw as a foregone conclusion. The EU-Serbia 'strategic partnership on sustainable raw materials, battery value chains and electric vehicles' triggered a fresh round of demonstrations that look set to culminate in what organisers hope will be a show of strength this weekend.

 

telegraf.rs

Serbian Deputy PM Aleksandar Vulin responds to retired US General Clark

Dragica Ranković

~2 minutes

---

"Both at the beginning and at the end Aleksandar Vucic will do only what the Serbs ask of him," says Vulin

Photo: Tanjug/Nemanja Jovanovic

Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia Aleksandar Vulin has responded to retired US General Clark to say that President Aleksandar Vucic will do only what the Serbs ask of him, "both at the beginning and at the end."

"Before Wesley Clark starts talking about the violence in the Balkans, he would first have to ask for forgiveness from the families of the murdered Serb children and all those whose lives he changed forever with his crimes. Aleksandar Vucic will do only what is asked of him by the Serbs both at the beginning and at the end, and the Serbs asked for and received peace from their president, but also freedom. I know that Wesley Clark thinks that in 1999 he missed the opportunity to destroy Serbia forever with the bombing, but he will not get another chance," said Vulin.

The deputy PM was reacting to Clark, the NATO Commander in Europe during the NATO bombing of Serbia, who made a statement containing lies about Serbia and President Vucic, whom he characterized as an "Eastern player."

(Telegraf.rs)

 

n1info.rs

Adoption of Jasenovac Resolution by Montenegrin Parliament strains relations with Croatia

N1 Belgrade, DW

5–6 minutes

---

Is the adoption of the Jasenovac Resolution by the Montenegrin Parliament a "tribute to the victims" or more about "the interests of the regime in Serbia"? Regardless, the relations between Podgorica and Zagreb have been seriously damaged.

Just two days after unblocking the European integration process, the Montenegrin government angered both Croatia and Brussels by adopting the Jasenovac Resolution. On June 26th in Brussels, Montenegro received a positive IBAR (Report on the fulfilment of temporary benchmarks in Chapters 23 and 24 on the rule of law), and according to its officials, entered the final phase of negotiations to join the European Union. However, despite Prime Minister Milojko Spajic's statement that the EU integration process would never again be subordinated to party or other interests, this is exactly what happened just two days later.

At the proposal of the Parliament Speaker, Andrija Mandic from the New Serbian Democracy, the Montenegrin Parliament adopted the Resolution on Genocide in the Jasenovac, Dachau, and Mauthausen camps. The first reaction from Brussels to this condemnation of World War II genocide was the cancellation of the visit by European Council President Charles Michel, who instead met with Montenegrin President Jakov Milatovic in Brussels. Following this, praise for Montenegro was removed from the official statement of the European Council, which was done at the suggestion of Croatia.

Milica Kovacevic, Program Director of the NGO Center for Democratic Transition from Podgorica, believes that the adoption of the Resolution on genocide in the camps of three European countries – Croatia, Austria, and Germany – is part of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic's agenda, aiming also to relativize the UN Resolution on Srebrenica.

The intention behind adopting the Resolution in the Montenegrin Parliament is illustrated by a statement from one of its proposers, Milan Knezevic, leader of the pro-Serbian Democratic People's Party (DNP). He said on Belgrade's TV Prva that „we should not forget that Germany was the sponsor and Croatia the co-sponsor of the Srebrenica Resolution, so it is fair that they face their own consequences."

Former Montenegrin Minister of European Integration and University of Montenegro professor Gordana Đurovic stated that Montenegro had no need to worsen relations with Croatia. „We all suffer from this resolution, as citizens and as a state. We are now anxious about whether Montenegro will be blocked soon. The question is only when and for how long, not if it will happen. Some things cannot be fixed, but the question is how Montenegro will proceed," Đurovic said.

In addition to sending a protest note to the Montenegrin Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Croatia could declare the parliament members who voted for the Resolution „personae non gratae," a move requested by Most party member Miro Bulj in the Croatian Parliament. Meanwhile, unresolved issues between the two countries, such as the demarcation at Prevlaka and the dispute over the ownership of the „Jadran" ship, could escalate.

On the other hand, Prime Minister Spajic claims that all decisions, including those on Srebrenica and Jasenovac, are made by Montenegro as an independent country that will, as he said, be principled in condemning every crime.

„All resolutions focused on paying tribute to victims, rather than on condemnation, historical circumstances, geopolitics, etc., will be supported. These other topics should be left to historians to objectively investigate the circumstances," Spajic stated – although, prior to the Resolution's adoption, he told the Brussels portal „Politico" that „the resolution definitely harms Montenegro."

Interviewees from DW believe that the damage has already been done and suggest that efforts should now be made to mitigate the consequences.

„This doesn't have to be a tragedy if it stops here and if institutions start doing their jobs. Montenegro must return to the policy that all our neighbours are equally important and detach itself from Aleksandar Vucic's agenda. I think he is very unhappy if someone is better than him, and Montenegro's progress towards the EU doesn't suit him politically," Milica Kovacevcc pointed out.

Gordana Djurovic recalled that Montenegro gained many points in Brussels precisely because of its good neighbourly relations, which have now been damaged for the sake of someone else's interests.

„It would be good to return to a culture of dialogue, to think about our common interest, to calm the situation, and to return to diplomacy and the European agenda," Durovic concluded.

 

"The Funeral of Old School Diplomacy"

May 15, 2024
Valdai Club/Literaturnaya Gazeta

Translated by Geoffrey Roberts

Will Russia return to dialogue with the West? Or is humanity sliding from a cold war to a "hot" one? What is the essence of the Ukrainian crisis? Will we arrive at a multipolar world? Can Russia be split by inter-ethnic differences? We talk about these pressing political topics with politologist, Richard Sakwa, the leading British expert on Russia, Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent, and a member of the Valdai international discussion club.

[Continue Reading]

thefp.com

Niall Ferguson: We're All Soviets Now

Niall Ferguson

22–28 minutes

---

Bari here.

In the early days of The Free Press, I put together a fantasy roster. Niall Ferguson was at the top of it. Today, I am thrilled to announce that Niall is joining The Free Press as a biweekly columnist.

Niall's résumé is a little much. He has two degrees from Oxford and has taught there as well as at Cambridge, NYU, the London School of Economics, and Harvard. He's now a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. 

Given the present state of many of those institutions, you might dismiss Niall as an establishment hack who shapes history to serve the acceptable narrative.

That isn't Niall. Unlike so many of the excellent sheep that enjoy tenure in academe, Niall thinks for himself, a quality you can see on display in any one of his 16 books (and counting), including The Pity of War: Explaining World War I; Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist (part one of a two-part biography); The Square and the Tower; and, most recently, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. 

For this incredible body of work, King Charles just knighted Niall a few days ago.

In recent years, Niall has been one of the most thoughtful and intellectually honest voices in the cultural battle that has engulfed America's most storied institutions—including academia. In an epochal essay he published this past December in The Free Press, "The Treason of the Intellectuals," he argued that "American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place" as German academia pre–World War II. "The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it."

Niall is doing something. He is one of the founders of the new University of Austin, where I sit on the board alongside him and where, this fall, we will welcome the university's first class. 

Oh, and did I mention that he's married to Ayaan Hirsi Ali? In journalism we call that burying the lede.

Sir Niall's first column is just below. —BW

 

The witty phrase "late Soviet America" was coined by the Princeton historian Harold James back in 2020. It has only become more apposite since then as the cold war we're in—the second one—heats up.

I first pointed out that we're in Cold War II back in 2018. In articles for The New York Times and National Review, I tried to show how the People's Republic of China now occupies the space vacated by the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991. 

This view is less controversial now than it was then. China is clearly not only an ideological rival, firmly committed to Marxism-Leninism and one-party rule. It's also a technological competitor—the only one the U.S. confronts in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. It's a military rival, with a navy that is already larger than ours and a nuclear arsenal that is catching up fast. And it's a geopolitical rival, asserting itself not only in the Indo-Pacific but also through proxies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. It's a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: "Are we the baddies?"

I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day—perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?

Yes, I know what you are going to say. 

There is a world of difference between the dysfunctional planned economy that Stalin built and bequeathed his heirs, which collapsed as soon as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform it, and the dynamic market economy that we Americans take pride in. 

The Soviet system squandered resources and all but guaranteed shortages of consumer goods. The Soviet healthcare system was crippled by dilapidated hospitals and chronic shortages of equipment. There was grinding poverty, hunger, and child labor. 

 

A drunken man lies down at the Kazansky train station buffet in Moscow on January 6, 1992. (Vitaly Armand via Getty Images)

In America today, such conditions exist only in the bottom quintile of the economic distribution—though the extent to which they do exist is truly appalling. Infant mortality in the late Soviet Union was around 25 per 1,000. The figure for the U.S. in 2021 was 5.4, but for single mothers in the Mississippi Delta or Appalachia it is 13 per 1,000. 

The comparison to the Soviet Union, you might argue, is nevertheless risible.

Take a closer look. 

A chronic "soft budget constraint" in the public sector, which was a key weakness of the Soviet system? I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future, and to rise inexorably to 8.5 percent by 2054. The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration's "industrial policy."

Economists keep promising us a productivity miracle from information technology, most recently AI. But the annual average growth rate of productivity in the U.S. nonfarm business sector has been stuck at just 1.5 percent since 2007, only marginally better than the dismal years 1973–1980.

The U.S. economy might be the envy of the rest of the world today, but recall how American experts overrated the Soviet economy in the 1970s and 1980s.

And yet, you insist, the Soviet Union was a sick man more than it was a superpower, whereas the United States has no equal in the realm of military technology and firepower. 

Actually, no. 

We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker's newly published report makes clear. As I read Wicker's report—and I recommend you do the same—I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and therefore most lethal military in the world.

On paper, it was. But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of. It could not even win a war in Afghanistan, despite ten years of death and destruction. (Now, why does that sound familiar?)

On paper, the U.S. defense budget does indeed exceed those of all the other members of NATO put together. But what does that defense budget actually buy us? As Wicker argues, not nearly enough to contend with the "Coalition Against Democracy" that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have been aggressively building. 

In Wicker's words, "America's military has a lack of modern equipment, a paucity of training and maintenance funding, and a massive infrastructure backlog. . . . it is stretched too thin and outfitted too poorly to meet all the missions assigned to it at a reasonable level of risk. Our adversaries recognize this, and it makes them more adventurous and aggressive."

And, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the federal government will almost certainly spend more on debt service than on defense this year. 

It gets worse. 

According to the CBO, the share of gross domestic product going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041, thanks partly to the fact that the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3 percent of GDP this year to a projected 2.3 percent in 30 years' time. This decline makes no sense at a time when the threats posed by the new Chinese-led Axis are manifestly growing.

Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko. 

 

Visitors walk through the courtyard to visit the Winter Palace courtyard in Leningrad, now known as Saint Petersburg, in November 1983. (Mikki Ansin via Getty Images)

But by current American standards, the later Soviet leaders were not old men. Brezhnev was 75 when he died in 1982, but he had suffered his first major stroke seven years before. Andropov was only 68 when he succeeded Brezhnev, but he suffered total kidney failure just a few months after taking over. Chernenko was 72 when he came to power. He was already a hopeless invalid, suffering from emphysema, heart failure, bronchitis, pleurisy, and pneumonia.

It is a reflection of the quality of healthcare enjoyed by their American counterparts today that they are both older and healthier. Nevertheless, Joe Biden (81) and Donald Trump (78) are hardly men in the first flush of youth and vitality, as The Wall Street Journal recently made cringe-inducingly clear. The former cannot distinguish between his two Hispanic cabinet secretaries, Alejandro Mayorkas and Xavier Becerra. The latter muddles up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. If Kamala Harris has never watched The Death of Stalin, it's not too late.

Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. Leon Aron's brilliant book Roads to the Temple shows just how wretched life in the 1980s had become. 

In the great "return to truth" unleashed by Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, Soviet citizens were able to pour forth their discontents in letters to a suddenly free press. Some of what they wrote about was specific to the Soviet context—in particular, the revelations about the realities of Soviet history, especially the crimes of the Stalin era. But to reread Russians' complaints about their lives in the 1980s is to come across more than a few eerie foreshadowings of the American present.

In a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda from 1990, for example, a reader decried the "ghastly and tragic. . . loss of morality by a huge number of people living within the borders of the USSR." Symptoms of moral debility included apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching. The entire country, he wrote, was suffocating in a "miasma of bare-faced and ceaseless public lies and demagoguery." By July 1988, 44 percent of people polled by Moskovskie novosti felt that theirs was an "unjust society."

Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it's below 20 percent. For Congress, it's 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979.

 

A man reads the Russian newspaper Pravda, publicly displayed on the walls of a Moscow building during the Gorbachev era. (Bernard Bisson via Getty Images)

It is now well known that younger Americans are suffering an epidemic of mental ill health—blamed by Jon Haidt and others on smartphones and social media—while older Americans are succumbing to "deaths of despair," a phrase made famous by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. And while Case and Deaton focused on the surge in deaths of despair among white, middle-aged Americans—their work became the social-science complement to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy—more recent research shows that African Americans have caught up with their white contemporaries when it comes to overdose deaths. In 2022 alone, more Americans died of fentanyl overdoses than were killed in three major wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries. The main explanations, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, are a striking increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide, and a rise in various diseases associated with obesity. To be precise, between 1990 and 2017 drugs and alcohol were responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths among the working-age population (aged 25 to 64). Suicide accounted for 569,099 deaths—again of working-age Americans—over the same period. Metabolic and cardiac causes of death such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease also surged in tandem with obesity. 

This reversal of life expectancy simply isn't happening in other developed countries. 

Peter Sterling and Michael L. Platt argue in a recent paper that this is because West European countries, along with the United Kingdom and Australia, do more to "provide communal assistance at every stage [of life], thus facilitating diverse paths forward and protecting individuals and families from despair." In the United States, by contrast, "Every symptom of despair has been defined as a disorder or dysregulation within the individual. This incorrectly frames the problem, forcing individuals to grapple on their own," they write. "It also emphasizes treatment by pharmacology, providing innumerable drugs for anxiety, depression, anger, psychosis, and obesity, plus new drugs to treat addictions to the old drugs."

Obese? Try Ozempic.

The mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase deaths of despair for years has been ringing a faint bell in my head. This week I remembered where I had seen it before: in late Soviet and post–Soviet Russia. While male life expectancy improved in all Western countries in the late twentieth century, in the Soviet Union it began to decline after 1965, rallied briefly in the mid-1980s, and then fell off a cliff in the early 1990s, slumping again after the 1998 financial crisis. The death rate among Russian men aged 35 to 44, for example, more than doubled between 1989 and 1994. 

The explanation is as clear as Stolichnaya. In July 1994, two Russian scholars, Alexander Nemtsov and Vladimir Shkolnikov, published an article in the national daily newspaper Izvestia with the memorable title "To Live or to Drink?" Nemtsov and Shkolnikov demonstrated (in the words of a recent review article) "an almost perfect negative linear relationship between these two indicators." All they were missing was a sequel—"To Live or to Smoke?"—as lung cancer was the other big reason Soviet men died young. A culture of binge drinking and chain-smoking was facilitated by the dirt-cheap prices of cigarettes under the Soviet regime and the dirt-cheap prices of alcohol after the collapse of communism. 

The statistics are as shocking as the scenes I remember witnessing in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which made even my native Glasgow seem abstemious. An analysis of 25,000 autopsies conducted in Siberia in 1990–2004 showed that 21 percent of adult male deaths due to cardiovascular disease involved lethal or near-lethal levels of ethanol in the blood. Smoking accounted for a staggering 26 percent of all male deaths in Russia in 2001. Suicides among men aged 50 to 54 reached 140 per 100,000 population in 1994—compared with 39.2 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic American men aged 45 to 54 in 2015. In other words, Case and Deaton's deaths of despair are a kind of pale imitation of the Russian version 20 to 40 years ago. 

The self-destruction of homo sovieticus was worse. And yet is not the resemblance to the self-destruction of homo americanus the really striking thing?

Of course, the two healthcare systems look superficially quite different. The Soviet system was just under-resourced. At the heart of the American healthcare disaster, by contrast, is a huge mismatch between expenditure—which is internationally unrivaled relative to GDP—and outcomes, which are terrible. But, like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy, brilliantly parodied by South Park in a recent episode—is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.

Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in. 

 

Muscovites queue at a liquor store to buy wine, limited to two bottles per person, on May 29, 1990. (Janek Skarzynski via Getty Images)

In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants, and that the United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis had been in "the great Patriotic War." The truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude, while Stalin, who had started World War II on the same side as Hitler, utterly failed to foresee the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and then became the most brutal imperialist in his own right.

The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves "without sending U.S. troops to war."

In reality, policies to promote "diversity, equity, and inclusion" do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI "officers." In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of "gender-affirming surgery."

As for the current direction of U.S. foreign policy, it is not so much to help other countries defend themselves as to egg on others to fight our adversaries as proxies without supplying them with sufficient weaponry to stand much chance of winning. This strategy—most visible in Ukraine—makes some sense for the United States, which discovered in the "global war on terror" that its much-vaunted military could not defeat even the ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort. But believing American blandishments may ultimately doom Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to follow South Vietnam and Afghanistan into oblivion. 

As for climate change, the world is now awash in Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, and solar cells, all mass-produced with the help of state subsidies and coal-burning power stations. At least we tried to resist the Soviet strategy of unleashing Marxism-Leninism on the Third World, the human cost of which was almost incalculable. Our policy elite's preoccupation with climate change has resulted in utter strategic incoherence by comparison. The fact is that China has been responsible for three-quarters of the 34% increase in carbon dioxide emissions since Greta Thunberg's birth (2003), and two-thirds of the 48% increase in coal consumption.

To see the extent of the gulf that now separates the American nomenklatura from the workers and peasants, consider the findings of a Rasmussen poll from last September, which sought to distinguish the attitudes of the Ivy Leaguers from ordinary Americans. The poll defined the former as "those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile," and having attended "Ivy League schools or other elite private schools, including Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago." 

Asked if they would favor "rationing of gas, meat, and electricity" to fight climate change, 89 percent of Ivy Leaguers said yes, as against 28 percent of regular people. Asked if they would personally pay $500 more in taxes and higher costs to fight climate change, 75 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said yes, versus 25 percent of everyone else. "Teachers should decide what students are taught, as opposed to parents" was a statement with which 71 percent of the Ivy Leaguers agreed, nearly double the share of average citizens. "Does the U.S. provide too much individual freedom?" More than half of Ivy Leaguers said yes; just 15 percent of ordinary mortals did. The elite were roughly twice as fond as everyone else of members of Congress, journalists, union leaders, and lawyers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 88 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said their personal finances were improving, as opposed to one in five of the general population. 

 

A food shop clerk standing by empty display counters amid shortages and economic reform price hikes in political turmoil–beset Moscow, USSR. (Sergei Guneyev via Getty Images)

A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.

The question that haunts me is: What if China has learned the lessons of Cold War I better than we have? I fear that Xi Jinping has not only understood that, at all costs, he must avoid the fate of his Soviet counterparts. He has also, more profoundly, understood that we can be maneuvered into being the Soviets ourselves. And what better way to achieve that than to "quarantine" an island not too far from his coastline and then defy us to send a naval expedition to run the blockade, with the obvious risk of starting World War III? The worst thing about the approaching Taiwan Semiconductor Crisis is that, compared with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the roles will be reversed. Biden or Trump gets to be Khrushchev; XJP gets to be JFK. (Just watch him prepping the narrative, telling European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that Washington is trying to goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan.)

We can tell ourselves that our many contemporary pathologies are the results of outside forces waging a multi-decade campaign of subversion. They have undoubtedly tried, just as the CIA tried its best to subvert Soviet rule in the Cold War. 

Yet we also need to contemplate the possibility that we have done this to ourselves—just as the Soviets did many of the same things to themselves. It was a common liberal worry during the Cold War that we might end up becoming as ruthless, secretive, and unaccountable as the Soviets because of the exigencies of the nuclear arms race. Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway.

I still cling to the hope that we can avoid losing Cold War II—that the economic, demographic, and social pathologies that afflict all one-party communist regimes will ultimately doom Xi's "China Dream." But the higher the toll rises of deaths of despair—and the wider the gap grows between America's nomenklatura and everyone else—the less confident I feel that our own homegrown pathologies will be slower-acting. 

Are we the Soviets? Look around you.

 

Niall Ferguson's latest book is Doom. Follow him on X @nfergus.

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