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A View to the Threat Environment: Perspective from General David H. Petraeus

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Former CIA Director General David H. Petraeus, PhD, US Army (Ret) discussing the intelligence business as a guest speaker for a graduate course on open source intelligence taught by the interviewer at Johns Hopkins University, 2019. Photo Credit: Michael S. Smith II

Smith:  Thank you for agreeing to conduct this interview and thank you for your many other contributions to projects managed by Department of War Studies’ faculty and students, including your recent participation in the War Studies at 60 speakers series cohosted by RUSI.

General Petraeus:  Great to be with you, Mike, thanks.

Smith:  Before we proceed further, I should acknowledge that General Petraeus will be serving as an additional reader on my committee as I conduct PhD research supervised by faculty in the Department of War Studies here at King’s College London. And I probably would not have applied to conduct PhD research at King’s without his encouragement.

That said, here we go:

A careful reading of Usama bin Laden’s statements, al Qaeda’s propaganda, as well as the statements produced by ISIS leaders, who have claimed to be stewarding the global jihad charted by bin Laden, suggest a key objective among leadership figures in the wider Salafi-Jihadist movement has been to drain political will within the United States and its close allies to sustain “long and bitter wars,” as bin Laden put it, that might deny Salafi-Jihadists capabilities to bring their chief goal of reestablishing a caliphate to fruition. The growth in membership in Salafi-Jihadist groups during and after the Arab Spring, and the expansions of their operational footprints across many regions spanning from West Africa to the Philippines, suggest al Qaeda and ISIS have realized growing capabilities to convince people their objective of exhausting that political will is being met—thus their strategies for pursuing their apparently inspirational goal are indeed viable.

Since 9/11, what policies pursued by the United States and its allies might have inadvertently  intensified the perceptibility of these groups as being credible, durable and capable stewards of international campaigns aiming to reestablish a caliphate?

General Petraeus:  As you note, Osama bin Laden did, indeed, want to sap our political will and impose costs of various types on us. In fact, the 9/11 attacks did result in various costs, as we are reminded each time we go through airport security or have bags screened before entering a large public venue. Clearly, we had to improve our security and take innumerable measures to do that in various ways, not just physically but also in other domains, including cyberspace. 

 That said, in responding to your question, no actions come to mind that we took that inadvertently gave credibility to IS or AQ or their affiliates as they sought to achieve their goals of creating a caliphate or establish control of various areas. There were certainly deliberate actions in the past decade that heightened the “status” that IS, in particular, had attained as a serious threat to our allies and our homeland, and I believe those actions were needed, including the creation of the Counter-ISIS Coalition; however, again, no inadvertent ones come to mind. 

 Rather, it was the achievements of ISIS on the ground in Iraq and Syria that inspired alienated youth in Europe and elsewhere to seek to join ISIS in those two countries or to carry out attacks in their home countries. It was ISIS’s success on the ground in Iraq and Syria, as well as in cyberspace (where ISIS established what might be termed its virtual caliphate), that most powerfully conveyed that ISIS was a winner, was succeeding. ISIS’s accomplishments, in fact, demonstrated that nothing succeeds like success when it comes to recruiting, inspiring others to carry out extremist activities, prompting still others to contribute in various ways, and so forth.

 In sum, it was not inadvertent activities by the US and countries of the Counter-ISIS Coalition that established ISIS as a successful movement that others wanted to join; it was success on the ground until the US and other countries returned to Iraq and deployed to Syria, providing the military assets that enabled Iraqi Security Forces and Syrian Democratic Forces to defeat ISIS, eliminate the IS Caliphate, and dramatically reduce the virtual caliphate—though clearly there are remnants of ISIS that continue to be very threatening in Iraq and Syria, with affiliates in other countries, as well, most significantly Afghanistan, as well as some continued, but much reduced, activities in cyberspace, as well.

Smith:  A prominent feature of United States national security policies during the 20th and 21st centuries has been the use of America’s economic influence to constrain the capabilities of hostile state and nonstate actors to accrue financial and other resources. One way that the US Government has sought to diminish the capabilities of hostile foreign nonstate actors responsible for terrorist attacks targeting US interests to secure important resources—ranging from new members to cash and weapons, to sanctuaries in countries whose governments might not otherwise be inclined to interfere with their activities—has involved the US State Department designating them as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). Early in 2017, I tried to persuade Senator Lindsey Graham to push the Trump administration to insist that the State Department designate the Taliban an FTO. As he was receptive to the idea, I also shared contact details with Senator Graham for a holdover staffer on the National Security Council (NSC) from the Obama administration’s NSC who was happy to discuss evidence that demonstrated the Taliban met the criteria for such a designation. Yet it quickly became evident that this was not something the Trump administration was inclined to do. This year, following the withdrawal of US military personnel from Afghanistan pursuant to the terms of a deal struck with the Taliban by the Trump administration, Senator Graham called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to designate the Taliban an FTO. Several other prominent Republican senators have also introduced a bill to try to effectively force the State Department to designate the Taliban a terrorist group.

If the Clinton, Bush or Obama administrations had insisted that the United States Department of State should have designated the Taliban as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in response to the various forms of support it offered al Qaeda—as well as other entities designated as FTOs—before and after 9/11, would the situation in Afghanistan be much different than it is today, and, if the State Department designates the Taliban an FTO in the near future, how might that affect things?

General Petraeus:  This is a difficult issue, of course, as the current US administration and its two predecessor administrations at various points sought to negotiate with the Taliban. And that was seen as difficult in various respects if the organization was designated as an FTO (though, in practice, I think workarounds were possible). In any event, I certainly recognize the challenges inherent in that situation. 

Beyond that, I’m not sure whether designating the Taliban as an FTO or identifying it as a declared hostile force on the battlefield (as it was treated for a number of years until the previous two US administrations, at various junctures, sought to distinguish between the Taliban and al Qaeda and other extremist groups, including the Islamic State) would have been best. But clearly not targeting Taliban elements that were attacking our Afghan Security Force partners, while not putting our forces in harm’s way, was very challenging—and maddening—for those advising and assisting Afghan forces during those periods. In essence, our forces could always hit any AQ and, over time, IS elements we identified, but at a certain point in each of the previous two administrations could not target the Taliban unless they threatened our forces. And that created, again, a very difficult situation for those trying to help our Afghan partners seeking to secure their country and fellow citizens. 

Smith:  A lot can be learned about the interests and plans of jihadist groups from what their leaders say. Much can also be learned from what they don’t say. The Taliban’s leaders have not publicly disavowed al Qaeda. This suggests that they may once again serve as willing hosts of al Qaeda. Meanwhile, given that (a) al Qaeda’s leaders have for decades referred to the Taliban’s founding leader and his successors as Emir al-Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful; a title historically reserved for caliphs), and (b) its current leaders have given baya (an oath of allegiance) to the Taliban’s current leader, it seems that the Taliban’s leader actually could persuade al Qaeda not to use Afghanistan as a base from which to train and deploy terrorists to perpetrate attacks in the West. Indeed, that al Qaeda did not seize on the opportunities to target US military personnel during the NEO staged at Hamid Karzai International Airport suggests the Taliban conveyed to al Qaeda’s leaders that it was not advisable to exploit that situation, and al Qaeda deferred to such guidance. Yet, even if al Qaeda were to honor a request not to use Afghanistan as a base to train and deploy its members to perpetrate attacks in the West, al Qaeda could still use Afghanistan to help it orchestrate attacks in the West. Because providing al Qaeda a sanctuary contributes to its capabilities to convince prospective aspirant terrorists the world over that the group is a durable enterprise that remains worthy of support—including support furnished in the form of terrorist attacks perpetrated in the US.

Do you see the situation in Afghanistan as something that contributes to al Qaeda’s capabilities to build and reinforce support, including among individuals in the West who may be willing to serve as de facto agents in its external operations? 

General Petraeus:  I do fear that either the al Qaeda or the Islamic State affiliates in Afghanistan—or both—could present challenges over time to the United States and, more likely, to the homelands of our allies, especially those in Europe—as IS elements and affiliates did at the height of ISIS’ power in northern Iraq and northeastern Syria. In fact, Colin Kahl, the US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy recently warned that IS’s element in the Af/Pak region and, to a lesser degree, AQ could present a threat beyond Afghanistan in relative near-term. “ISIS-K and al Qaeda have the intent to conduct external operations, including against the U.S.” he noted. “But neither currently has the capability to do so. We could see ISIS-K generate that capability somewhere between 6 to 12 months. I think the current assessments by the intelligence community [are] that al Qaeda would take a year or two.”

In fact, as you noted, there is a long history of varying levels of collaboration between the Taliban and al Qaeda elements in Afghanistan and Pakistan, not the least of which was when the Taliban permitted the sanctuary in the late 1990s and early 2000s that al Qaeda used to plan the 9/11 attacks. And one would expect the Taliban to continue to be permissive when it comes to al Qaeda, though there may be an attempt to discourage attacks on the US that might force the US to get more active once again in that region.

The Taliban-IS relationship, on the other hand, is one of conflict, as we have seen in the months since the Taliban took control of Kabul and Afghanistan, with IS elements carrying out horrific attacks against our forces and Afghans outside Kabul International Airport during the final days of our withdrawal operations and many subsequent attacks, often targeting Hazara Shia but also against Taliban forces and Afghan citizens. The Taliban leadership has deployed forces to track down IS elements, but one would expect conflict between IS and the Taliban to continue.

Smith:  After United States President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. decided to withdraw US military and other governmental personnel from Afghanistan, as well as intelligence assets who assisted the US with counterterrorism operations there, President Biden claimed his administration would “maintain a laser-focus on our counterterrorism missions there and in other parts of the world.” He also advised the US is conducting counterterrorism missions “in multiple countries where we don’t have a permanent military presence,” adding:  “If necessary, we will do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.” Yet the optics of the US departure—in particular, the ease with which the Taliban returned to power and then placed individuals designated as Specially Designated Global Terrorists by the US in key positions within its new regime—could adversely affect perceptions of the US as being a reliable counterterrorism partner among local civilian populations in many countries where al Qaeda and ISIS are expanding their operations. Particularly Afghanistan. Indeed, it seems reasonable to assume that the optics of what unfolded in Afghanistan could negatively impact America’s and several partner nations’ capabilities to cultivate the assets who play important roles in helping intelligence and military organizations identify where to orient “over-the-horizon” tools.

Do you assess that President Biden’s decisions to extricate the US military from Afghanistan and do very little to prevent the Taliban from reclaiming power over much of the country will adversely affect the capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community and intelligence agencies in governments of America’s closest allies to maintain existing and cultivate new relationships with individuals and organizations that can help gather information about the activities, plans and locations of al Qaeda and ISIS members?

General Petraeus:  US intelligence and military leaders have very forthrightly noted that the loss of our bases in Afghanistan, which constituted the final bases we had in Central and South Asia, will make it much tougher to carry out operations to gain the kind of intelligence we will need to keep a close eye on AQ and IS elements in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region. There is no disputing that. Drones, for example, have always played an important role, together with all other sources of intel to be sure, in providing various forms of intelligence; however, they will now have to fly out of bases in the Gulf States—and depending on the specific location, they likely will use 50-65% of their flight time just getting to and from the location in Afghanistan where they may be needed to establish an “unblinking eye.” That obviously dramatically reduces dwell time and increases the number of such assets required. But all other typical actions will also be vastly more difficult given the loss of bases, partners, various intel assets, etc., etc. That is beyond dispute. And the intelligence community and US military elements are undoubtedly aggressively pursuing initiatives that will help mitigate the risks that have increased substantially with the loss of our Afghan government, military, and intelligence partners in Afghanistan.

Smith:  The proliferation online of incitement-focused propaganda produced by al Qaeda and ISIS, the ease with which their members can identify and cultivate prospective aspirant terrorists on popular and “dark” social media platforms, and the ever-increasing speed with which inspirational information about “successes” achieved in their global terrorism campaigns spreads across the cyber domain has not only enhanced their capabilities to radicalize, recruit and incite violence; this has simultaneously increased the availability of open source information that can be harnessed by the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) to identify and manage threats linked to the Salafi-Jihadist movement. Yet, 20 years after 9/11, persistent threats posed by this movement—and the largely unmitigated growth in threats within the United States posed by rightwing extremists who have harnessed the Internet in similar ways—suggests the USIC has not made a maximal effort to utilize OSINT to prevent and counter violent extremism. Indeed, the renewed efforts underway in policymaking spheres in the US to elevate OSINT’s profile among other intelligence disciplines suggests members of Congress are concerned that biases favoring more discreet intelligence disciplines like human intelligence and signals intelligence may have remained a persistent issue within senior echelons of the US national security enterprise since 9/11.

Does the threat environment make OSINT an increasingly valuable tool for the US Government, and, if so, what are some of the things that could be done to help ensure it is not an underutilized resource?

 General Petraeus:  It is publicly known that the [Open Source Enterprise] (previously named the Director of National Intelligence Open Source Center), for which the CIA is the executive agent, has been a very productive and exceedingly important source of information from traditional media and also from social media and other activities that use the internet. Indeed, the richness of what can be gleaned from sources of information available via the internet has exploded. It is not uncommon, in fact, for such sources to rival those obtained by more traditional tradecraft and tools. During the fight against ISIS in Mosul, the location of the Caliphate’s capital in northern Iraq, e.g., one of the best real-time sources of information was available via a blog titled “Mosul Eye.” I can only imagine that my former colleagues at the CIA had that high on their list of all sources of intelligence for insights on the situation inside Mosul during the fight with ISIS and during the eventual liberation of Mosul. The same has been—and is—true for many other situations around the world. And ensuring that all such sources are well known and used is imperative.

Offensive Cyber Series: Dr Jacquelyn Schneider on Cyber Strategy, Part II

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Photo Credit: The United States Military Academy at West Point, Licensed via Creative Commons.

This is part II of Ed Stacey’s interview with Dr Jacquelyn Schneider on cyber strategy for Strife’s Offensive Cyber Series. You can find part I here.

ES: You mentioned earlier your writing about this idea of a no first use policy with regards to strategic cyber attacks. I was wondering if you could speak a little to how that might help to limit escalation and maintain stability in cyberspace?

JS: One of the biggest hypocrisies, or logical inconsistencies, that is resident in US cyber strategy is this ambiguity about what they are willing to do offensively and yet they also say: do not dare attack our critical infrastructure or do not dare hurt our civilians. And so, if the US does not say that they are not going attack critical infrastructure, what are the incentives for other states to not attack critical infrastructure or how do they know that the US is not going to lump these attacks into defend forward?

So I use the term no first use, which I stole from the nuclear world and has its own connotations, but really what I am advocating for is declaratory restraint at the strategic level. States like the US, the UK and others can say: we do not think it is appropriate for states to attack critical infrastructure and create strategic effects against civilian populations. We have seen this type of attack in war and we know that it is ethically fraught and not usually very useful, so we are not going to do it. Now that does not mean that we are going to accept when other people do it to us, but we just want them to know that this is off the table for us.

Now if we are in a full-blown conflict and our opponent is intermingling their civilian infrastructure with their conventional or nuclear arsenal, then we might attack that. But as a rule if they are not entangling these things and we are not in a violent conflict, then we are going to say that those are off the table.

People worry that adopting this policy would handcuff the US, for example, or whichever state adopts it. But strategic cyber attacks are a really high threshold – these are attacks on critical infrastructure or nuclear infrastructure that cause significant violence to civilian populations. That is a pretty high bar. I am not talking about military infrastructures; it is a relatively defined group of targets that we are saying we are not going to attack.

But I think, in general, states like the US, the UK, France, Germany, Japan – typical allies of the US – are not the type of states that are going to attack critical infrastructure anyway. There is a sense that this is something that is not above board, that it is not viable or something that a liberal democratic state should do, especially prior to a conflict. I do not think that these states are going to do it anyway, so why not get credit for it? If you are already restraining yourself, why not get credit for it?

The other thing is that these types of attacks are actually relatively difficult to conduct and it is hard to see how strategically useful they are. This goes back to the idea that attacking civilian populations is going to decrease their desire to continue conflict. And the empirical evidence on this is mixed because sometimes you push too far, you escalate and get rally round the flag effects. So strategically this is not of great use to states like the US anyway.

That policy then allows the US to be more assertive and risk acceptant with lower level cyber attacks, where you are attacking other states’ offensive cyber infrastructure, with less worry about things escalating to a more violent conflict or a strategic cyber attack.

ES: This next question is from Amy Ertan, who I spoke to for part three of this series. She was wondering how best to educate decision-makers about the strategic implications of offensive cyber capabilities? And just to add to that if I can, there has been a lot pushback in the literature against comparisons between cyber and nuclear, but are there ways in which we can borrow ideas and concepts from the nuclear world – such as no first use – for educational purposes?

JS: In general, when issues emerge we have a tendency to analogise. Cyberspace has been rife with this: cyber is a bomb, cyber is an aeroplane, cyber is a nuclear weapon, cyber is – just recently in the Wall Street Journal – letters of marque, referencing naval operations historically. So there has been a problem with cyber operations in analogising too much to other points in history.

We actually have a lot of data now about how states interact in cyberspace. We have more big data analysis of things that have already occurred, so the work of people like Brandon Valeriano, Ryan Manness and Ben Jensen. Then we have people who are using other data generating mechanisms to create scenarios that have never existed, to see how people react. I do some of that work, but Nadia Kustyok also has some fantastic work here with experimental politics and Sarah Kreps.

So we have information to tell us when cyberspace is different to other domains. That evidence suggests that cyberspace is very different to the nuclear domains, but that does not mean that some of the concepts that we have applied to nuclear politics are not concepts that we can evaluate when it comes to cyberspace. For example, deterrence is not a nuclear concept – deterrence is a concept of how states have interacted going back thousands and thousands of years.

I stole no first use from the nuclear realm but that was actually to my detriment. I did that to kind of create a polemic but if I could go back I would not of said no first use, I would have said declaratory strategic restraint. Because it imbued a lot of conversations like: well, no first use and nuclear did not work. But cyber is not nuclear and I had to spend a lot of time in the article talking about why cyber is not nuclear. So maybe that was not a useful analogy for me to try and hook people in.

I think the nuclear analogy was used a lot in the US because cyber fell under Strategic Command and that was the natural analogy that institutionally existed. But as I talked about a little bit earlier, talking about cyber – especially offensive cyber – as strictly strategic really did not lead to an understanding of what the real impacts of cyber operations are.

If I am sitting down and talking to decision-makers about cyber operations and trying to educate them, I am trying to teach them about the nuances of it. Firstly, strategic cyber operations are really hard to do – they just are. Offensive cyber is much harder than it seems. If the US was a criminal ransomware actor, they would have it in the bag. But those are not our incentives and it is actually really difficult to do the kind of operations that fit the US’ strategic priorities. So you have to teach decision-makers not only about the dangers of cyber operations, but also the difficulties and the nuances.

I like to tell decision-makers: look, most of our evidence suggests that cyber operations do not lead to escalatory behaviours. In fact, what we find is that cyber operations very rarely change people’s behaviours – that is the puzzle. So what does that mean for you? That means that, yes, you can conduct offensive cyber operations and be less worried about escalation than you were previously. But that also means that you cannot say that you are going to use offensive cyber operations to coerce and deter and signal and all of these other things. You have got to choose one or the other – you cannot have it both ways.

We are onto a new generation, though, of cyber decision-makers who have a much more mature understanding of what works and what does not work in cyberspace. We see less of cyber as a magic pixie wand and less of cyber Armageddon, minus the public discourse. And I am not sure how you nuance the public discourse; there are a lot of incentives to overinflate the threat and the capabilities or the capacity of the US to do big things.

So in terms of educating, we need to get rid of analogies. We need to show people: this is what the data says. We need to invest in data-generating mechanisms that help us to understand the puzzles of cyberspace. I am not strictly an empiricist but I think that in cyberspace we can actually use data, as opposed to nuclear which we have not used very often, thank god, and therefore have very little data. We can actually generate good data and that can help us to understand when and why cyber operations might be more or less effective, escalatory or destabilising.

ES: And finally, does the increasing frequency and severity of cyber incidents in the US suggest that its more offensive cyber strategy is failing? Broadly, what lessons can we learn about the role of cyber operations from the US’ experimentation since 2018?

JS: You have to remember that these offensive cyber operations are actually pretty scoped. So when we see, for example, this increase in ransomware attacks from criminal organisations, nothing about US offensive cyber is geared towards criminal organisations and ransomware, at least in the current strategy. So those incidents are not an indicator of whether offence is working or not and more of an indicator that other elements of the strategy are off kilter – that we are not investing enough in information sharing, criminal prosecution or diplomatic measures that we can use to convince states to prosecute these criminals, which are basically functioning with zero sense of retribution in cyberspace.

I think the real question with things like defend forward is: are the Chinese, Russians, North Koreans, Iranians – so state actors – are they less able to use offensive cyber operations? Is it more expensive for them? Do they have to spend more time on defence? These are really hard things to measure and all of the strategies so far have punted on measurement. That is something I hope that the next strategy tackles because the problem with where the US is going when it comes to offensive cyber is that it is being organised in things called task forces. And when the US stands up a task force, there is never a clear plan about how you stand it down – it is like a perpetual cycle. So this question is really important: how do we figure out what is effective and what is not?

When you are thinking about SolarWinds and other espionage attacks, you do need to evaluate whether defend forward is doing anything against these activities to decrease the ability of those actors to even get in. That said, I think SolarWinds probably predates a lot of defend forward – that was kind of a long-standing issue. So we will see. The evidence is not there yet, but the US should try and think about how it would measure that to find out.

This is the final interview in Strife’s Offensive Cyber Series. You can find parts one, two and three with Dr Tim Stevens (Part I, Part II), Dr Daniel Moore (Part I, Part II) and Amy Ertan (Part I, Part II) here.

Smallness over bigness – the way to a healed politics: An interview with Professor Marc Stears (Part Two)

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by James Brown

Marc Stears speaking on CNBC in October 2019 about Brexit
Source: CNBC

On the evening of January 11th, which was actually the early morning of the 12th for the Australia-based interviewee, our Staff Writer James Brown spoke with the head of the Sydney Policy Lab, Marc Stears, about his new book Out of the Ordinary, in which he argues politics needs to reconnect with ordinary life.

You can read James’ review of the book for Strife Journal here.

This is Part Two of our interview with Marc Stears.  Part One can be read at this link.

JB: Moving back to the contemporary scene, how does a political party go about connecting with your Ordinary? In the last ten years, there have been four general elections in Britain and the Ordinary has still been missing. But have fringe parties perhaps done a better job of tapping into it than the major ones?

MS: I think what the fringe parties have been able to do is move into the void. It is as Peter Mair says in Ruling the Void, probably the definitive book on this in politics, which says that mainstream parties have become much more elite-centric, much more professionalised, much more divorced from organisations like local trade unions or churches, or cooperatives et cetera. And as a result, there is a space – a gap – and you have ordinary people thinking about how they can get involved in politics, if they want to, but there is no answer for them anymore. So, what you have seen is fringe parties, populist parties, and single-issue parties move into that space to mobilise people, at least briefly, and get some level of excitement and engagement.

But that is not a long-term solution because most of those parties are in the manipulation business, not in the representation business. I think the only real way to do it is to is to stitch back together the big political organisations, the Labour Party or the Conservative Party in the UK, with these intermediary institutions which once were effectively a sort of communications device between people’s everyday lives and the public policy process.

That is what we tried to do during 2010-15 in Labour and what we talked about a lot during Ed’s period as leader of Labour Party. Ed always talks extremely movingly about his efforts with Arnie Graf, the American community organiser, to try to resuscitate local Labour parties and connect them to churches, mosques, synagogues, football clubs and community groups – to try to get the party to be a lived part of everyday life.

Once again, when Ed tells those stories, he says that the cultural reaction at the top of the party to Arnie’s arrival was just shocking. They did not want to do it because they felt they knew how to do it already through old fashioned door knocking and party-political broadcasts. But they do not know how to do the slow, often more mundane process of building a party up at the community level. Our experiment did not work, but I do think it was an experiment in the right direction. One thing I would add is that, if people are looking for successful examples of what we tried to do, they should look at what Joe Biden did at the Democratic Party’s national convention this year, which was basically organised on Arnie Graf-style principles.

Biden had a whole series ordinary people telling stories about why Donald Trump was not the answer to the problems of the country. He had janitors and people who work on the trains doing what we call ‘testimony’ in community organising – just telling their story. This was a very unusual way of organising a mass convention. But it was extremely effective at showing the way that Biden wants to run his presidency: not as a distant elite, but as somebody who is in touch and connected with the lived experience of ordinary Americans. That was really interesting.

JB: Let us say that one of the major British or American party leaders reads your book and they think its ideas are good, are there any problems in using what are now quite old ideas, as powerful as they are? How would one negotiate some of their problematic attitudes?

S: That is absolutely right. I do not think that you can just take something from the 1930s, forties, or fifties, and put it in contemporary politics. For one reason, attitudes to gender, sexual identity, and race and empire have dramatically changed in the close to one hundred years since these folks were writing.

That is a fundamentally important issue. Also, the world today is just more disruptive. Back then, they were dependent upon community life, which although struggling through things like the Depression, nonetheless had a rhythm to it which was much more predictable. People were born and brought up in communities that they spent their whole life in.

That clearly is not the case anymore. I have always been struck by the work of people like Hillary Cottam today. Hillary calls herself a social entrepreneur. She tries to create profound solutions but working with local communities.

So the kind of big social injustices that we face, and the spirit of Hillary’s work in rectifying them, I think are extremely familiar to anyone reading my book. It is the 1930s and forties made new for the 21st century, if you like. It has all of that democratic spirit, that everydayness, that localism, that willingness not to rush but go slowly, to listen to people, to build solutions that cannot be scaled. Sometimes they are bespoke solutions for certain places, but they can have a profound impact upon people’s lives.

So, there are modern examples of this going on at the moment and what I would always encourage politicians to do when I speak to them is to look to experiments like the ones Hillary runs and think about how they could support endeavours and initiatives like that.

JB: We have mainly talked about domestic politics. Is there any sense in which international politics and international relations could benefit from some kind of reconnect with the Ordinary?

MS: One of the most exciting things I have done in the last few months is working with a man called Glen Weyl, who is at Microsoft in the US and also an international commentator on politics. Glenn has got this overview of the whole pandemic crisis, which basically cleaves the world into two sections: there are countries that have fared terribly during COVID-19 and there are countries which have done pretty well. He argues that the primary distinction between the two is that the countries which have done badly have looked for big, moonshot solutions.

From the start, their leaders thought there had to be grand answer as to how to beat COVID. They were focused on the big ideas, like herd immunity. Whereas the countries that have actually done well have thought about small, localised solutions like contact tracing run by GP surgeries or public health programs which are based upon giving people the ability to stay at home in their communities.

Glen points to Taiwan and Australia as examples of the type of route they should have taken. What is really interesting about Glen’s work is that he takes this idea, which can seem mundane and parochial, and brings it up to the global level. He says that at a global level, there are two pathways open for us at the moment: this obsession with grandeur and the better ability to look to the micro. And he is trying to get people at big corporations, in diplomacy, and international governments to look at what they are doing at the local level and at the micro level. He asks them to look at how they are empowering people there. Because the big problems that we have are going to have to be solved at that particular sort of level.

JB: Thank you for bringing us onto the virus because that was my next question. We will take Britain as one of the countries that has done awfully. Britain also had a moonshot obsession with regard to the virus. Would you envisage that the failure of these grand projects is going to lead to a reassessment in the long term in Britain about what went wrong and lead to an identification that the cause of what went wrong was a detachment from the Ordinary? Do you think that will take place over the next decade?

MS: I very much hope so. The story is just astonishing. Twenty-two billion pounds spent on a test and trace system which did not work because it was run by people who had no experience in public health and were completely detached from the communities that they were designed to serve. I mean, it is just outrageous. And you compare that to where I am currently living in New South Wales, which has a contact tracing system which is the envy of the world. It is phenomenal. And it has had almost no new investment in it because it already existed as an integrated public health system, which had its origins back in the HIV situation in the 1980s. You had contact tracers already on the public books who knew their communities, who knew where different kinds of people worked, where different kinds of people lived, and were able to work in tandem on the ground from day one. It has been an astonishing success.

That contrast really should stand in sharp relief when Britain holds any Royal Commissions after the pandemic, and people ought to be really clear about that. Britain’s failure is twofold: bigness over smallness and private over public. You have to have public solutions on the ground if you are going to be able to tackle issues like the pandemic.

In the public policy world of academics and think tanks, I think people are very well aware of that. There also are certain journalists like John Harris at the Guardian who are also very well aware of it. But I do not think it has yet penetrated into political debates, and that is quite shocking. For example, however well or badly we think Labour are doing their job of opposition, they are not really making this point that you need localised, micro solutions which share power with people on the ground if you are going to be able to tackle these problems. I know it is hard to find a political language which makes that sexy but it is what was required, so we better get on and try and come up with a way of expressing it.

JB: That is the end of all my formal questions, Marc. I suppose the last ones I would ask are: what projects have you got coming up, do they touch on the virus in any ways, and is there any chance you might be sweeping back into British politics to bring the Ordinary back?

MS: I really miss British politics because for all my critique of it, the best people in my life were engaged in that 2010 to 2015 period. It did not result in electoral victory and that obviously will haunt me for the rest of my life, but we did surface some extremely important issues and we began a conversation which I think is really important to continue to have. Allies, like John Cruddas who I have mentioned, Ed himself, Rachel Reeves, I just have a huge amount of respect and time for them.

I think that they still are a vital force and I would love to do anything I can to help. In Australia there is a very different situation, essentially that we have a successful response so far to the pandemic and politics here is very localised. It is federal system and power rests with the States and not the federal government. It is kind of the opposite of grandiose, but incredibly parochial, and that showed its strength during the pandemic process. I think our challenge here in Australia is to get the scale of the challenge accepted. Where we have to look for answers is at the local level, but sometimes people’s eyes are not on things like that. For example, the intensity of the climate emergency that we face, or the depths of social injustice which affect all liberal democracies right now. So here in Australia, I spend my time paradoxically trying to get people to think bigger while not losing that strength that they have from being connected so powerfully to everyday life.

 

James Brown is a PhD candidate in history at Northumbria University. His focus is on Soviet dissidents and their use in the politics and international relations of the Cold War. He previously studied at Glasgow University, doing a Master’s in East European, Russian, and Eurasian studies. During this time he studied Russian and wrote his thesis, ‘Returning to Machiavelli: Giving Belarus-Russia relations the Original Realist Treatment’, which received the prize for best dissertation from the Centre for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at Glasgow.

James is a Staff Writer at Strife.

Smallness over bigness – the way to a healed politics: An interview with Professor Marc Stears (Part One)

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by James Brown

Professor Marc Stears speaking in 2016 at the 12th Univ Annual Seminar and Buffet Supper, The Royal Society, London
Source: University College, Oxford

On the evening of January 11th, which was actually the early morning of the 12th for the Australia-based interviewee, our Staff Writer James Brown spoke with the head of the Sydney Policy Lab, Marc Stears, about his new book Out of the Ordinary, in which he argues politics needs to reconnect with ordinary life.

You can read James’ review of the book for Strife Journal here.

James Brown (JB): First of all, Marc, could you give me a break down of your recent history, of what you have been up to – you were of course at the Labour Party with Ed Miliband during 2010-15 – and then talk a little bit about what you’re doing at the Sydney Policy lab.

Marc Stears (MS): Most of my career I was an academic, mainly at Oxford as a political theorist and historian of political ideologies. I then moved into politics around about 2010, when Ed Miliband became the leader of the Labour Party and there was all sorts of excitement about potential renewal for social democratic politics, which lasted for five years of ups and downs.

The biggest down of all was losing the election in 2015. It was pretty grim, and Ed himself is just beginning to talk and write about what happened, why it happened, and what it felt like. And I guess ever since then, I have been trying to find a way of resuscitating some of the most interesting arguments we were having back then. So, I ran the new economics foundation as CEO for a couple of years, and then moved to Australia where I am running the Sydney policy lab, which is an effort to combine academic research in public policy with community organising, grassroots mobilisation, participant research, and policymaking. Essentially, we try to bridge the gap between academia and community organisations.

JB: You talk about bridging the gap between community organisations and academia, and that definitely comes across in the book. Just to begin with, could you sum up some of the key arguments that you are trying to get across in Out of the Ordinary?

MS: I remember when I first thought about moving from academia into politics. We used to go up to Parliament and meet MPs, and I was really struck by how almost all of them were obsessed with what I would call ‘bigness’.

So, the very first question you got was, ‘what’s your big idea?’ And they would be looking for this kind of moonshot – the one big thing which is going to solve all the problems in British society or the economy or politics. At the time I kind of struggled with this because, I guess, I did not have one big idea.

Over a while, I just came to think that it was kind of a silly question, really, and that political change and social change does not happen like that. It is not a sort of big boom which sorts everything out. Instead, it is a much slower, calmer, sometimes harder process, which has to be rooted in people’s everyday experiences, in their everyday lives.

And so, that became an obsession when I was in politics – that so many people were looking for the big, easy answer, rather than the complicated, small answer. I became obsessed with discovering whether this argument was a new one or whether it had been around before. I was working a lot at that point with Maurice Glassman – Lord Glassman as he is now – and Morris always had the argument that everything had gone wrong in 1945 because the Attlee government had been such a success and given everyone this idea that you could have a big, single reforming government which did something amazing, like create the NHS, and that that should be the model for politics. Maurice always said that the model of politics should instead be located in people’s neighbourhoods, in their families, their local communities – not always in that big answer.

Because 1945 was that kind of moment, I wanted to look at what had happened before that and what happened immediately after it to try and discover whether this argument between bigness and smallness had been present at the time. And essentially that is what the book claims. It says that actually, right from the 1930s and forties through into the fifties, people were really having that exact debate about whether you should be looking for a big utopian answer to all the problems of the country and the world, or should you be thinking more local, smaller, or incrementally? And I tried to kind of paint a picture in the book of the people on the second side of that debate.

JB: How would you describe all these people advocating the Ordinary, like George Orwell and J.B. Priestley? Would you be prepared to call them a school of thought, the ‘Ordinary school of thought’ perhaps?

MS: I basically think that is right. I mean, it is a struggle, this one really, because what I discovered in the book is that these people in some cases did not know each other, while others really disliked each other. Dylan Thomas’ view of J.B. Priestly was extraordinarily bad while Orwell was incredibly dismissive of almost everybody, especially the people that I put him in a group with.

Then others, like Barbara Jones, were very much individualists. They did their own work and they very rarely cited or engaged with others. So, they are not a school in the sense of people who sit down in a seminar room or in a common room and come up with a collective view. They never published collectively and they did not write manifestos, but the claim in the book is that, nonetheless, there was a spirit or a sentiment which animated their work and which they all had in common. They did actually feed off each other as they created their work.

One of the things that I am pleased about in the book is being able to show that these characters – who are so different, and as I say, who often disliked each other so much – nonetheless inhabited a shared intellectual viewpoint.

JB: So in the book, you bring all these people together and establish this Ordinary school of thought as the solution to what you diagnose as a political health crisis in Britain. You say that Britain cannot get a grip on its past and cannot build an inclusive national identity. Would you go as far to say that Britain faces a culture war, or is that just a hyperbolic label? What is going on in the country with its identity?

MS: I think that is a great question. Look, my instinct is that it comes down really to disdain. I mean, I think there is still an incredible amount of disdain that many, otherwise very well-meaning, politicians have for ordinary people.

That disdain takes different forms. For example, on the populist right, there is a view that ordinary people can be manipulated and should be manipulated – that you should play the lowest common denominator of xenophobia. This is something that is more pronounced in the US than in the UK, but it is clearly present in Britain too.

On the left, meanwhile, I think it is more often this sense that people do not know their own interests and that they are not smart enough to be able to design programs of policy or change. That is a kind of more well-meaning disdain, in a way, but it still is disdain in the sense that it argues that the person in Westminster knows best. And this is very deeply ingrained.

When I was in politics, we used to float ideas about devolution or democratisation and Ed Miliband was fabulous at trying to advance those arguments. But the vast majority of the political establishment was extremely sceptical that you could have a politics which was more participatory, more bottom up – more grounded in everyday life – just because they thought that ordinary people were not up to it. Everybody always quoted that mythical bit of Oscar Wilde, that is not actually an Oscar Wilde quote, when he says, ‘there aren’t enough weekends for socialism,’ meaning that ordinary people do not really want to be engaged in politics.

So, I think that is the fundamental culture issue: Westminster-first, Whitehall-first, centralisation and elitism are the dominant forms of thinking about politics across left and right. The people in my book were struggling against that and trying to argue intensively against it. We have seen other versions too, though. That same debate was had in the 1960s, and then again in the eighties. More recently, there have been instances where people have argued that to solve political problems, you have to have more faith in everyday people’s capacity to be active agents in that process.

JB: Why is it that the Ordinary was completely left out of politics from 1945 onwards and is to this day – how did that come about?

MS: There was a big argument on the left throughout the 1930s about how to achieve reform after the Depression, and then again after the war. There were those who thought that the solution had to be small scale, had to be localised, had to be democratised. For example, people had plans for workers control of industry and localised health and welfare responses. But this argument was beaten by big, welfare state solutions, nationalisation, and for the public corporation model of nationalisation – which is really just like a private company but owned and run from London.

So, the opportunity was missed in 1945. But as Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP, has shown, Attlee himself was torn between the two different approaches and there were parts of Attlee that wished his government could have gone for the more localised and more democratic roots, but it just did not happen. Over time, the alternatives became forgotten. You got a process of path dependency and it just got harder and harder to move out of the direction in which the country was headed.

This is Part One of our interview with Marc Stears.  Part Two can be read at this link.

James Brown is a PhD candidate in history at Northumbria University. His focus is on Soviet dissidents and their use in the politics and international relations of the Cold War. He previously studied at Glasgow University, doing a Master’s in East European, Russian, and Eurasian studies. During this time he studied Russian and wrote his thesis, ‘Returning to Machiavelli: Giving Belarus-Russia relations the Original Realist Treatment’, which received the prize for best dissertation from the Centre for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at Glasgow.

James is a Staff Writer at Strife.