Mobile devices are making a big difference in the lives of billions of people around the world who use them every day. Internet-enabled smartphones and tablets provide access to information and a channel of communication for users. Building wireless networks to support mobile devices requires large capital investments from wireless carriers who must purchase wireless spectrum and infrastructure. To ensure that mobile services are reliable and affordable, national governments must allocate enough wireless spectrum to commercial carriers to satisfy demand. This is the subject of a new paper from Shamika Ravi and Darrell M. West titled “Spectrum Policy in India."

A scarce resource

Mobile devices typically operate on frequencies from 30 kHz to 300 GHz on the radio spectrum. Unless spectrum is allocated efficiently, the scarcity of available frequencies leads to poor quality and high costs for mobile broadband. The growing demand for mobile service in India currently exceeds the amount of spectrum available to wireless carriers. The scarcity of wireless spectrum limits reliable Internet access for mobile subscribers who have no alternative point of access. According to the Cellular Operators Association of India, nearly 60 percent of Internet users only have access through their mobile phones.

Mobile service in India is relatively expensive for many consumers because the Indian military reserves so much spectrum for their own use. Much of this spectrum goes underutilized, even as commercial carriers plead for more spectrum to be released. When the Indian government does release spectrum, it is typically through auctions with high starting bids. Setting high starting bids for blocks of spectrum can lead to high selling prices that force wireless carriers to take out large loans. Higher prices for spectrum raise costs for consumers and reduce private sector investment in wireless infrastructure. Rather than make spectrum artificially scarce, the Indian government should work with wireless carriers to lower the prices for consumers. 

Investing in India’s future

Reliable mobile service has the potential to greatly enhance economic growth in India. Analysis from the Boston Consulting Group found that the India’s mobile sector grew at 12.4 percent annually from 2009-2014; it now accounts for 2.2 percent of India’s gross domestic product. Potential growth comes from filling gaps in educational and health care spending in rural communities. Innovative mobile applications provide a low cost method of sending education and health care resources to underserved rural communities that lack physical infrastructure. In India’s rapidly growing cities, mobile services are seen as a way to improve the quality of government services and promote entrepreneurship. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently designated 100 “smart cities” that would use technology to overcome the challenges of India’s rapid urbanization.

India could free up spectrum by adopting the “NATO Band” of spectrum for military uses and auctioning off the remaining spectrum.  The NATO band is used by the militaries of NATO member countries and several of their allies, and it already overlaps with much of the Indian military’s spectrum.  Furthermore, the Indian government must lower the minimum bids at spectrum auctions and lower taxes so that wireless carriers have enough profits to build their networks.  Mobile technologies are rapidly evolving, and each new generation has greater demands for spectrum. Regulators in India will not only have to maintain affordable prices for the current generation of mobile technology, but also anticipate upgrades that will deliver more data at faster speeds.

In a new paper, Shamika Ravi and Darrell West examine mobile technology in India, particularly the crucial role spectrum policy plays in facilitating wireless growth. The availability of devices, high telecommunications costs, and taxes on mobile usage make it difficult for consumers and businesses to take full advantage of the mobile revolution. India has enormous potential for growth in mobile applications as is reflected in its massive number of mobile customers.

While smartphone use has risen in the developing world, increasing access and capacity in key areas like education, health care, transportation, and commerce, countries are finding increased wireless utilization running up against the constraints of radio spectrum available. The frequencies necessary to keep mobile devices connected represent for many countries a scarce natural resource often used for defined purposes that cannot be used for other purposes. Without adequate spectrum, consumers in developing countries in particular may face dropped calls, reduced wireless availability, or high prices, causing slower mobile growth in many countries.

Ravi and West recommend that India open up spectrum space, revamp auctions, make sure that costs are affordable so that consumers don’t pay high telecom prices, enable the trading and management of spectrum, and harmonize regional rules. Without this commitment to a viable digital ecosystem, mobile growth will stagnate and it will be difficult to obtain the benefits of the mobile revolution.

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Since the Rose Revolution in November 2003, Georgia has grappled with the many challenges of building a modern, Western-oriented state, including implementing political and economic reforms, fighting corruption, and throwing off the vestiges of the Soviet legacy. On the path toward a functioning and reliable democracy, Georgia has pursued these domestic changes in an often difficult international environment, as evidenced by the Russia-Georgia conflict in 2008.

On March 17, the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings (CUSE) hosted President Mikheil Saakashvili to discuss Georgia’s approach to these challenges. A leader of Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, Saakashvili was elected president of Georgia in January 2004 and reelected for a second term in January 2008.

Vice President Martin Indyk, director of Foreign Policy at Brookings, provided introductory remarks and Senior Fellow and CUSE Director Fiona Hill moderated the discussion. After the program, President Saakashvili took audience questions.

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• Georgia Is a Transformed Country
• Georgia Is a Valuable Asset to Europe
• The Key to Effective Change Is Youth

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• From Popular Revolutions to Effective Reforms: The Georgian Experience

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• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20110317_saakashvili_transcript

Trade with China has led to the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and put downward pressure on wages for blue-collar jobs here. This is a real problem and campaigns in both political parties are grappling with how to address it. In a speech this week, Donald Trump proposed high tariffs on imports of Chinese goods, labeling the country a “currency manipulator,” and ripping up the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). These measures are not likely to reverse the damage that trade has done to blue-collar workers in the United States.

First, on high tariffs: There is a long-term trend for manufacturing employment in the United States to decline as a share of employment. This reflects the fact that automation and productivity growth are easier in manufacturing than in services. The United States is still a manufacturing powerhouse from the point of view of production, but it simply does not take that many workers to produce the output. Trade with China accelerated that trend, and that was bad for the United States because slow adjustment is easier than the rapid adjustment that occurred. But imposing tariffs on Chinese imports now is truly closing the barn door after the horse has left. Jobs in apparel and footwear or the low end of electronics are not coming back to the United States. Tariffs aimed at China will divert that production to other developing countries. If we try to keep out imports from all of the low-wage countries then we are contemplating an end to the open trading system that has been a source of political and economic stability in the world. Economic results for the United States are not likely to be good even if there is no retaliation. But there is almost certain to be retaliation, especially from China which is a powerful and nationalistic country.

The fact that protectionism is likely to backfire and make matters worse for American workers does not mean that other measures would not work. Spending public money on infrastructure is the most obvious measure—it would create jobs immediately and enhance the productivity of the economy down the road. Improving education at all levels from pre-K through adult education is another obvious measure. Workers and communities are looking for more support in the face of uncertainties created by globalization, and providing that support will be more effective than trying to wall off the U.S. economy from the rest of the world.

Second, on currency manipulation: This is also a matter of fighting the last war. Ten years ago China was intervening heavily to keep the value of its currency low. But between 2005 and 2015 the yuan appreciated about 25 percent against the dollar, and this was one factor that brought down its large current account surplus (the broadest measure of its trade surplus) from 10.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2007 to 2.7 percent in 2015. Over the past year there has been pressure in Chinese currency markets for the yuan to depreciate because of large capital outflows in the face of diminishing investment opportunities at home. The Chinese central bank has been intervening to keep the currency high, not low. We should be happy that China is intervening to keep the currency high because this is a source of stability in the world economy at the moment. Congress passed a law in 2015 creating a rigorous definition of a currency manipulator and China does not meet that standard because it is selling reserves not accumulating reserves.

Third, on TPP: China is not a negotiating party to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and if the agreement is implemented, China cannot join without the approval of the United States. U.S. relations with the countries negotiating the TPP provide an interesting contrast to U.S. relations with China. It happens that the TPP partners have about the same sized economy as China—around $10 trillion. But the United States has much more balanced trade with the TPP partners: We export six times as much to them as to China. And we have 15 times as much investment in the TPP partners as we have in China. In other words, the TPP group is a much more open set of economies. The TPP agreement would deepen the integration among us while addressing important issues of labor and environmental standards.

The fact that China remains relatively closed to imports and to inward investment is a source of frustration for the United States. Frankly, we have little leverage over China to force them to open up. China’s communist leaders are much more concerned with domestic political control and territorial disputes with neighbors than with economic relations with the United States. Protectionist measures aimed at China are likely to be met by Chinese retaliation, not by China suddenly opening up. For the United States, deepening integration with the like-minded countries that have negotiated the TPP, as well as with European partners, is a sensible strategy. There are many good jobs in the United States tied to our exports and we want to encourage the expansion of a rules-based trading system, not spark a trade war that is likely to have no winners.

Last night, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn addressed the Republican convention as a headline speaker on the subject of national security. One of Donald Trump’s closest advisors—so much so that he was considered for vice president—Flynn repeated many of the themes found in his new book, The Field of Fight, How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, which he coauthored with Michael Ledeen. (The book is published by St. Martin’s, which also published mine.)

Written in Flynn’s voice, the book advances two related arguments: First, the U.S. government does not know enough about its enemies because it does not collect enough intelligence, and it refuses to take ideological motivations seriously. Second, our enemies are collaborating in an “international alliance of evil countries and movements that is working to destroy” the United States despite their ideological differences.

Readers will immediately notice a tension between the two ideas. “On the surface,” Flynn admits, “it seems incoherent.” He asks: 

“How can a Communist regime like North Korea embrace a radical Islamist regime like Iran? What about Russia’s Vladimir Putin? He is certainly no jihadi; indeed, Russia has a good deal to fear from radical Islamist groups.” 

Flynn spends much of the book resolving the contradiction and proving that America’s enemies—North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, and ISIS—are in fact working in concert.

No one who has read classified intelligence or studied international relations will balk at the idea that unlikely friendships are formed against a common enemy. As Flynn observes, the revolutionary Shiite government in Tehran cooperates with nationalist Russia and communist North Korea; it has also turned a blind eye (at the very least) to al-Qaida’s Sunni operatives in Iran and used them bargaining chips when negotiating with Osama bin Laden and the United States. 

Flynn argues that this is more than “an alliance of convenience.” Rather, the United States’ enemies share “a contempt for democracy and an agreement—by all the members of the enemy alliance—that dictatorship is a superior way to run a country, an empire, or a caliphate.” Their shared goals of maximizing dictatorship and minimizing U.S. interference override their substantial ideological differences. Consequently, the U.S. government must work to destroy the alliance by “removing the sickening chokehold of tyranny, dictatorships, and Radical Islamist regimes.” Its failure to do so over the past decades gravely imperils the United States, he contends.

The book thus offers two very different views of how to exercise American power abroad: spread democracies or stand with friendly strongmen...[P]erhaps it mirrors the confusion in the Republican establishment over the direction of conservative foreign policy.

Some of Flynn’s evidence for the alliance diverts into the conspiratorial—I’ve seen nothing credible to back up his assertion that the Iranians were behind the 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Sunni apocalypticists. And there’s an important difference between the territorially-bounded ambitions of Iran, Russia, and North Korea, on the one hand, and ISIS’s desire to conquer the world on the other; the former makes alliances of convenience easier than the latter. Still, Flynn would basically be a neocon if he stuck with his core argument: tyrannies of all stripes are arrayed against the United States so the United States should destroy them.

But some tyrannies are less worthy of destruction than others. In fact, Flynn argues there’s a category of despot that should be excluded from his principle, the “friendly tyrants” like President Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi in Egypt and former president Zine Ben Ali in Tunisia. Saddam Hussein should not have been toppled, Flynn argues, and even Russia could become an “ideal partner for fighting Radical Islam” if only it would come to its senses about the threat of “Radical Islam.” Taken alone, these arguments would make Flynn realist, not a neocon. 

The book thus offers two very different views of how to exercise American power abroad: spread democracies or stand with friendly strongmen. Neither is a sure path to security. Spreading democracy through the wrong means can bring to power regimes that are even more hostile and authoritarian; standing with strongmen risks the same. Absent some principle higher than just democracy or security for their own sakes, the reader is unable to decide between Flynn’s contradictory perspectives and judge when their benefits are worth the risks. 

It’s strange to find a book about strategy so at odds with itself. Perhaps the dissonance is due to the co-authors’ divergent views (Ledeen is a neocon and Flynn is comfortable dining with Putin.) Or perhaps it mirrors the confusion in the Republican establishment over the direction of conservative foreign policy. Whatever the case, the muddled argument offered in The Field of Fight demonstrates how hard it is to overcome ideological differences to ally against a common foe, regardless of whether that alliance is one of convenience or conviction. 

Editors’ Note: Donald Trump has exposed the tension between democracy and liberal values—similar to the Arab Spring, writes Shadi Hamid. This piece originally appeared on The Atlantic.

When I was living in the Middle East, politics always felt existential, in a way that I suppose I could never fully understand. After all, I could always leave (as my relatives in Egypt were fond of reminding me). But it was easy enough to sense it. Here, in the era of Arab revolt, elections really had consequences. Politics wasn’t about policy; it was about a battle over the very meaning and purpose of the nation-state. These were the things that mattered more than anything else, in part because they were impossible to measure or quantify.

The primary divide in most Arab countries was between Islamists and non-Islamists. The latter, especially those of a more secular bent, feared that Islamist rule, however “democratic” it might be, would alter the nature of their countries beyond recognition. It wouldn’t just affect their governments or their laws, but how they lived, what they wore, and how they raised their sons and daughters.

Perhaps more than at any other time, millions of Americans are getting a sense, however mild in comparison, of what it might feel like to lose your country—or at least think about losing your country—because of what people decide to do in the privacy of the voting booth. It still remains (somewhat) unlikely that Donald Trump, the now presumptive Republican nominee, can win a general election. Regardless of the final outcome, however, the billionaire’s rise offers up a powerful—and frightening—reminder that liberal democracy, even where it’s most entrenched, is a fragile thing.

* * *

When I hear my friends debating how, exactly, so many of their fellow citizens could support someone like Trump, it reminds me a bit of Egypt. In my forthcoming book, I relay a telling conversation I had four years ago, which has stayed with me since. A few days after the country’s first post-revolutionary elections concluded in January 2012, I visited my great aunt in her extravagant flat in the posh Cairo suburb of Heliopolis. She was in a state of shock, but worse than that was the confusion. It was one thing for the Muslim Brotherhood, long Egypt’s largest opposition group, to win close to 40 percent of the vote, but how could 28 percent of Egyptians vote for ultraconservative Salafi parties, which believed in the strict implementation of Islamic law?

Like most Egyptians, she personally knew Brotherhood members even if she didn’t quite like them, but she hadn’t had much experience with Salafis and seemed totally unaware that they had extended their reach deep into Egyptian society. She realized, perhaps for the first time, that the country she had thought was hers for the better part of 70 years would never quite be the same. It hadn’t really even been hers to begin with.

What if voters don’t want to be liberal and vote accordingly?

What my aunt feared was that Egypt would become an “illiberal democracy,” a term popularized by Fareed Zakaria in his 2003 book The Future of Freedom, but one that’s still difficult for Americans to fundamentally relate to. In the American experience, democracy and liberalism seemed to go hand in hand, to such an extent that democracy really just became shorthand for “liberal democracy.”

As Richard Youngs writes in his excellent study of non-Western democracy, liberalism and democracy have historically been “rival notions and not bedfellows.” Liberalism is about non-negotiable personal rights and freedoms. Democracy, while requiring some basic protection of rights to allow for meaningful competition, is more about popular sovereignty, popular will, and accountability and responsiveness to the voting public. Which, of course, raises the question: What if voters don’t want to be liberal and vote accordingly?

* * *

When the stakes are high, there is more to lose, and if there is more to lose, those on the losing end of a ballot box have powerful incentives to play “spoiler.” Fortunately, in the post-Civil War United States, the stakes have never reached what political scientist Barry Weingast calls the “threshold” at which citizens decide to defend themselves through extra-constitutional means, including by appealing for the military to take sides. This, in part, is why (good) constitutions are so important: They lower the stakes, reassuring citizens that even if their preferred party loses the election, it’s still just that—an election.

Donald Trump, or more specifically what he represents, calls some of these assumptions into question. Trump himself isn’t quite an Islamist, but he is a proponent of a kind of “illiberal democracy,” even if he himself may not be familiar with the term. Drawing on a wellspring of white nativism and machismo, candidate Trump has regularly made demeaning statements about entire groups of people, including African-Americans, Mexicans, and women. His commitment to the protections enshrined in U.S. constitution are questionable, at best, and if we assume the worst, downright frightening (the difficulty with Trump is that he’s not precise with words, so it’s sometimes hard to make sense of what he’s saying). He has expressed support for registering Muslims in a database, elaborating that they could “sign up at different places.” When a reporter asked how this was different from requiring Jews to register in Nazi Germany, Trump said “you tell me,” prompting The Atlantic’s David Graham to note that “it’s hard to remember a time when a supposedly mainstream candidate had no interest in differentiating ideas he’s endorsed from those of the Nazis.” Trump, for good measure, has also refused to disavow President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans.

The U.S. Constitution includes robust civil-liberties protections, enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But these protections are not unlimited. Contrary to popular belief, majorities—if they’re large enough—can, in fact, do nearly anything they want, even in established democracies. It’s only really a question of how high the majoritarian bar is. In the United States, two-thirds of Congress and 75 percent of the states can amend or repeal articles of the Constitution. They could theoretically pass a constitutional amendment banning abortion. In countries like Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey, where alcohol is currently legal and relatively easy to find, the issue of alcohol consumption is a touchstone for endless “what if” hypothesizing. Yet, Prohibition happened not in any of those countries but in America, with large majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives as well as 46 of 48 states backing the 18th Amendment (of course, banning alcohol in the U.S. wasn’t justified on primarily scriptural grounds, while in Muslim-majority countries, prohibition is seen as fulfilling an explicitly Quranic directive).

In other words, built-in constraints and constitutional “guarantees” aren’t enough on their own to preclude illiberal outcomes. What Americans really depend on, then, is a shared political culture and the ideas and ideals that undergird it. As James Fallows notes, “Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms—on the assumption that you’ll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends.” But all it apparently takes is one man with charisma and an unusually perceptive understanding of the human psyche to change that. There are norms against politicians suggesting that minorities should have special identification cards. There are norms against saying you want to kill the families of terrorists. There are norms against encouraging your supporters to use violence against their political opponents. It’s not entirely clear why you don’t do or say these things (because Trump clearly has), but you just don’t. The very fact that Trump has made such frightening comments on national television—without any corresponding “disqualification” or decline in popular support—has already undermined these longstanding norms.

The United States has had demagogues before, but they rarely make for viable presidential candidates. This is democracy’s blessing as well as its curse: that people you really don’t like—people who you think might threaten the Republic—can actually win. In the specific context of the Republican nomination, Trump opponents basically called for prioritizing good outcomes over democratic ones. They continued to search for possible paths to denying Trump the nomination, despite the fact that, barring acts of God, he was certain to win the popular vote and a plurality of delegates in the primaries.

Even if Trump reached the magic number of 1,237 delegates, which would normally settle the matter, there were those who still seemed intent on scouring the rulebooks, parliamentary procedure, and delegate details in the hope of averting disaster. Democratic norms, the thinking goes, are great in normal contexts, but sometimes the stakes are simply too high to let democratic outcomes stand. As the columnist Walter Shapiro wrote, “[W]ith the threat of the first takeover of a modern political party by an authoritarian who traffics in racism and exudes contempt for the First Amendment ... [t]here would be nothing anti-democratic about GOP leaders using every mechanism in their power to stop Trump.” Nate Silver pointed out that “technically [Republicans would] be able to deny Trump the nomination even if he had a delegate majority by changing the rules at the last minute.” They could still theoretically do something like this, even after Trump’s decisive victory in Indiana. The Republican Party is not a country, and the party can disregard the preferences of primary voters if it so chooses, but elite pacts and back-room negotiations would seem decidedly antiquated during an unusually populist moment in American politics.

[T]here will no doubt be a temptation to defy or otherwise undermine a democratically elected Trump.

This particular debate in some ways mirrors arguments over the tensions between democracy and liberalism, a debate that will only intensify if Trump gains ground on Hillary Clinton in the coming months. It is probably time to err on the side of imagination, since party elites and pundits failed to imagine the unthinkable once already. What if Trump actually wins the presidency? How would we as Americans deal with an outcome that at least some of us see as a potential danger to our Constitution as well as our livelihoods?

If Donald Trump wins, he would have, whether we liked it or not, a democratic mandate. Once in power, he might moderate his rhetoric and policies (yet another data point in the debate over the “inclusion-moderation hypothesis”), rendering at least some of this discussion moot. Yet it’s also possible that, facing a growing terrorist threat and a sputtering economy, more and more Americans might, like their newly elected president, dispense with the norms of reasonable conduct and support extreme measures. Still, a President Trump would be a legitimate president, having been freely and fairly elected by enough Americans. He would be, as much as it pains me to say it, our president. Still, there will no doubt be a temptation to defy or otherwise undermine a democratically elected Trump. For those of us who study the Middle East, the idea of not respecting democratic outcomes is business as usual, but I never thought it would be up for debate in the United States.

* * *

“Deep state” is a phrase that’s used to describe the constellation of autonomous and self-perpetuating institutions, namely the judiciary, military, and security services, which operate outside the glare of the public and are immune to the electorate’s whims. This deep state, acting as the guardian of national identity, puts limits on what elected politicians can hope to accomplish. The deep state was responsible for four coups in Turkey, the most recent of which deposed the country’s first-ever democratically elected Islamist prime minister in 1997.

It would be difficult for Americans to think about their own government—or “regime”—in such terms. The U.S. military is subject to civilian control, while Supreme Court justices, though unelected and appointed to life terms, are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. It is possible, however, to imagine a president so reckless as to activate state institutions against him or her, in a way that makes the notion of an American deep state more meaningful and relevant.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden ignited some speculative debate when he said that the military “would refuse to act” if ordered by a President Trump to take actions that were clearly illegal, such as killing the families of terrorists. Moreover, he said, military commanders are “required not to follow an unlawful order.” Even short of flagrant illegality, the military can still do what it’s done, at times, with nearly every sitting president. Peter Feaver, a leading expert on civil-military relations, notes that “the historical record is replete with cases of the military shirking—withholding information and options, slow-rolling, end-runs to Congress and the media, inflating cost estimates, etc.—to thwart civilian policies they deem to be unwise.” Considering, however, that Trump would likely be more “unwise” than most past presidents, such tensions could intensify well beyond what America’s political system is accustomed to.

"[C]oup”...is not a word that Americans should ever get used to hearing in everyday political discourse.

One can also easily imagine left-of-center (and right-of-center) civil servants in the Departments of State and Defense working against the president from within to mitigate his effectiveness and even his authority. This would be good, insofar as Americans wouldn’t want their president doing things that were crazy, illegal, or both. But it would still raise difficult questions about democratic legitimacy and how far an elected president can pursue his preferred policies, especially when it comes to issues that aren’t clear-cut. If the military refused to obey orders, however justified their refusal, then it could very well erode norms against military intervention in domestic politics. In response to Hayden’s comments, host Bill Maher joked that the former CIA director was floating “a coup.” This is not a word that Americans should ever get used to hearing in everyday political discourse. The norm against “coups” is a powerful one, which explains why American analysts (if not the U.S. government) are generally uncomfortable with military coups in foreign countries. No one teaches us that military coups are bad. Rather, it’s something we absorb in the process of being American. It goes without saying, so it’s rarely said.

Recently, a few friends (who work on Middle East issues) and I had an interesting although ultimately frightening conversation, as Trump extended his delegate lead over Ted Cruz. Sometimes it’s useful to game out worst-case scenarios, however unlikely they might seem. We tried imagining a dystopian future and came up with internment camps, (threats of) military coups, and pro-Trump militias. Soon enough, the last didn’t seem nearly so farfetched, with volunteers offering to provide security at Trump rallies (for Trump supporters).

* * *

It is hard to imagine such things because, despite a long, low-intensity war on terrorism, America hasn’t faced a large-scale terrorist attack on the homeland since September 11, 2001. Democratic systems produce self-perpetuating norms, because they are accountable to a voting public. It’s this very responsiveness, though, that can be a source of vulnerability, if enough citizens, in the grip of fear, decide to prioritize “security” over liberty. As the legal scholar Christopher Kutz writes in the suggestively titled article “How Norms Die,” democracy can be “at the same time both fertile and toxic: fertile as a source of humanitarian values and institutions, but toxic to the very institutions it cultivates.”

This is something we can measure. As Daniel Bush observed, after analyzing Pew survey data from 2002 to 2014: “During each campaign season, respondents reported having a higher negative impression of Muslim Americans than in non-election years.” This is a bit more mild than the link between elections and religious riots in India. As the historian of religions Michael Cook notes, “There is no doubt that Hindu nationalist politicians believe that communal riots can get out the Hindu vote for them. ... Under the right conditions the communal riot is a winning [electoral] strategy.”

Norm shifting of an even more dangerous kind than India’s can happen rather quickly in countries where democracy is not yet consolidated. For example, millions of Egyptians who demanded freedom and democracy in 2011 turned seemingly against it in less than two and half years, supporting not just a return to authoritarian rule but the August 14, 2013 massacre of more than 800 protesters—what Human Rights Watch calls the “worst mass killing in [Egypt’s] modern history.”

The kinds of shifts that occur in established democracies are less nefarious, but they can happen just the same. Torture is a good example. Kutz calls the spread of global norms against torture “one of the most impressive successes of the post-war period.” Yet, in the United States, these norms began to erode after the attacks of September 11th. Soon enough, torture—or what some were now euphemistically calling “enhanced interrogation”—came to enjoy broad support among the American public. The lesson again is clear. However strong they may first appear, norms, particularly those relating to national security, are more fragile than we might like to think. Once their sanctity is undermined by authority figures (whether presidents or presidential candidates), others can judge that what was once considered shameful is now not just socially tolerated but also necessary, good, and just. This is why “political correctness”—even if it seems irritating and is sometimes abused to restrict reasonable debate—still represents a public good: It makes us think twice about saying things that might contribute to the erosion of liberal and democratic norms.

[N]orms, particularly those relating to national security, are more fragile than we might like to think.

We have now reached a point where current or former presidential candidates from both parties have flirted with the idea of internment camps (former Democratic candidate Wesley Clark has called for “segregating” radicalized Muslims who are “disloyal to the United States”). In a series of incidents that have received less attention, a Tennessee State Representative called for using state institutions, in this case the National Guard, to “round up” Syrian refugees. Meanwhile, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, called for suspending assistance to refugees, but went further in an official statement on government letterhead. “I’m reminded,” he wrote, “that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

No less than Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia believed that it could happen here. On this, he is on strong ground, since it has, of course, already happened. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans in Korematsu v. United States. While Scalia said that the decision was “wrong,” he also issued a warning in his blunt style: “You are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again.”

The norm against internment has been undermined, even though Americans do not face anything close to the threat presented by the Nazis and Japan during World War II. Which raises the question of what a plurality, or even a majority, of Americans might be willing to support if they had to confront a threat that was truly existential. We Americans are not, today, at war, at least not in the normal sense. I hope to God that we never will be again. But we might be. And this is where Scalia’s words that day were perhaps most chilling, in part because he was right. Evoking the Latin expression inter arma enim silent leges, he reminded the audience that “in times of war, the laws fall silent.” All we will have then are the things we still believe in—our norms. But, by then, they might not be enough.

Editors’ Note: The attempted coup in Turkey was, for many observers, reminiscent of another recent July uprising in a key American ally: the 2013 military takeover in Egypt. These coups were a disaster for U.S. policy in both cases, and would have been regardless of how they turned out, argues Jeremy Shapiro. This post originally appeared on Vox.

Friday’s attempted military coup in Turkey demonstrates that yet another U.S. partner in the Middle East seems to be descending into domestic unrest. The spectacle was, for many observers, reminiscent of another recent July uprising in a key American ally: the 2013 military takeover in Egypt. There, as in Turkey, a powerful military in a country with a history of coups rebelled against a democratically elected Islamist government.

Egyptians and Turks alike will naturally reject such comparisons and emphasize the unique nature of their respective situations—not least that the coup in Egypt succeeded and the one in Turkey failed. They have a point. The differences in the local political context are more important than the superficial similarities.

But from an American perspective, there is a key similarity: These coups were a disaster for U.S. policy in both cases, and would have been regardless of how they turned out.

In each case, the U.S. government’s immediate response to fast-moving situations was to issue bland statements urging calm and condemning violence. Regardless, it gets blamed for not acting forcefully enough, and often accused of directly instigating the violence. In the end, a relationship with the government that emerges is strained, both by such accusations and by the ensuing crackdown and human rights abuses that usually follow both successful and unsuccessful coups.

How does the United States end up in this no-win situation so frequently? Why is domestic unrest in faraway countries like Egypt and Turkey such a problem for the United States?

The essential problem is that the United States cannot just do foreign policy business with its partners. Because of America’s own values and domestic politics, it needs to get involved in their domestic political struggles. It needs to promote democracy and civil society in its partners and to take positions on controversial domestic issues such as the proper functioning of democratic institutions and the protection of human rights or media freedom.

This means that when domestic politics explodes, the United States is often caught in the middle.

Partnership isn't enough

Both Egypt and Turkey are “key security partners” of the United States. This means the U.S. government needs these countries to deal with critical security issues.

Turkey is a NATO ally that sits at the crossroads of practically every geopolitical issue in the Middle East. It is particularly critical for the fight against ISIS. The United States and its anti-ISIS coalition partners supply their partners on the ground in Syria through Turkish territory and use the military base at Incirlik in Turkey to launch airstrikes against ISIS. The foreign fighters that replenish ISIS’s ranks have also often come into Syria via Turkey.

Egypt is also seen as an important partner for counterterrorism. It is struggling to cope with jihadist groups, some of them linked to ISIS, in the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt also provides the United States military with privileged access to the strategic Suez Canal, helps keep the peace with Israel, and helps ensure that weapons that might be used to attack Israel don’t get to Hamas through Egypt’s border with Gaza.

One could argue about whether these are truly important security interests for the United States. But the key point is that successive American governments since, in the case of Turkey in the 1950s and in the case of Egypt in the 1970s, have accepted that they are.

They have accordingly sought to build an effective partnership with both countries. The United States is committed, through NATO, to defend Turkey in case of aggression. And the United States provides Egypt with more than $1.3 billion a year in military assistance and $150 million a year in economic assistance, making it the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world (after Israel).

But the United States can’t just give these guarantees and this money without taking on some moral responsibility for what goes on in these countries. Debates over these countries in U.S. domestic politics reflects this sense of moral responsibility.

If the Egyptian military overthrows a democratically elected government, U.S. Congressmembers will quite naturally ask why the United States is giving nearly $1.5 billion a year to a government that shoots peaceful protesters in the street. If the Turkish government suppresses media freedom or arrests judges, U.S. human rights groups will similarly question why the United States accepts such actions by a NATO ally.

Hoping to escape from this dilemma, the U.S. government has long sought to promote the Western values of democracy and human rights in its security partners.

But particularly in the Middle East, this has rarely worked. The United States doesn’t really know how to democratize these societies, and in any case, it values its security relationship with the government too much to exert sustained pressure.

So even as the Egyptian military overthrew the democratically elected government, the United States continued to give it military aid. Even as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has moved in an increasingly authoritarian direction, the United States has stepped up its security cooperation with Turkey over ISIS.

The result is a hypocrisy that is evident and annoying to both the government and its opposition. Every effort to pressure governments on human rights elicits furious reactions and denials. And when, despite the rhetoric about human rights from U.S. officials, nothing really improves, the population grows cynical about U.S. motives.

So every effort to build up civil society organizations spawns a million conspiracy theories about U.S. involvement in domestic politics.

The crucible of a coup

Military coups or revolutions in U.S. partners always bring these tensions out into the open. They force the United States to confront in extremely fraught circumstances whether it most prizes its security relationship or its commitment to democratic values.

Usually, it can’t decide. The immediate reaction tends to be both muddled and seen through a lens of decades of built-up distrust of the United States. The conspiracy theorists find ample evidence for every preconceived notion.

The reaction to the Turkish coup has been a textbook example of this dynamic. The U.S. government condemned the coup, but it took several hours. The Turkish government interpreted this as hedging and evidence of ill will.

President Erdoğan has blamed the coup on Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim cleric in self-imposed exile in the United States, and wants the U.S. government to extradite him to Turkey.

When Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would need solid evidence to extradite him, a Turkish government minister accused the United States of instigating the coup itself. As Kerry warned Turkey about the large number of arrests, the Turkish government temporarily restricted use of the Incirlik base and arrested its Turkish commander on suspicion of involvement in the coup. The conspiracy theorists went wild:

If the United States wanted to break out of the vicious cycle, it would either have to end its security partnership with Turkey or accept that that partnership means accepting Turkish authoritarianism. But if experience is any guide, the United States will not take either of those paths.

As in Egypt, the U.S. relationship with Turkey will probably survive these events, albeit in diminished form. After a period of distancing, both sides will accept that they need each other for their mutual security problems too much to allow a complete breakdown.

But at the same time, the distrust of the United States within the government and the hatred of the United States within the population will grow. The U.S.-Turkey relationship will fail to evolve into a true alliance of trust and thus be of limited use in defeating ISIS or ending the civil war with the Kurds in Turkey.

In the meantime, Turkey's roiled domestic politics will continue as Erdoğan attempts to cleanse Turkish politics of his opponents. The next coup or revolution may be the last that the strained U.S.-Turkish alliance can withstand.

Major changes in geopolitics, political economy, and energy markets are altering the global energy landscape. A potential nuclear deal with Iran has raised the possibility of new supplies coming online, and ongoing political gridlock in Iraq has hampered the country’s ability to expand supply. The U.S. energy boom is increasingly viewed as a long-term phenomenon, while a prolonged crisis in Ukraine threatens to impact Russian gas supplies to Europe.

How will the political developments in Iraq and Iran affect oil supply? What will be the impact of the Ukraine crisis on Europe, Russia, and China? How will these shifts help shape the energy markets of tomorrow?

Read the paper online: Brookings Doha Energy Report 2014

The 2014 Doha Energy Forum convened prominent industry experts and policymakers from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States for an in-depth dialogue on the rapidly changing global energy landscape. Based on the Forum’s plenary and roundtable sessions, this paper from the Brookings’ Doha Center and Energy Security Initiative reflects much of the discussion and debate around these changes. It also outlines the complexity of today’s energy markets and the geopolitical factors that set them in motion.

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From the rapid fall in oil prices to the conflicts that have threatened key energy sources and transit routes in the Middle East and North Africa, the global energy landscape has shifted dramatically over the past year. The change of a single number – the price of a barrel of crude oil – can carry profound implications for government policies and company decisions around the world, from efforts at subsidy reform to shale oil extraction. Understanding the interplay between key geopolitical events and energy markets remains crucial.

Has Asian consumers’ growing dependence on Middle Eastern energy supplies prompted greater interest in providing for the region’s security? How will new sources and new transit routes reshape the global LNG and natural gas landscape? What has been the impact of falling energy prices on unconventional production and investment in renewable energy resources?

At the fourth annual Brookings Doha Energy Forum, experts and policymakers from around the globe met to discuss the key global energy trends. In broad plenary sessions and focused roundtable discussions, industry leaders from the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the United States wrestled with these and other questions. The findings of these many conversations are reflected in this report, jointly prepared by the Brookings Doha Center and the Energy Security and Climate Initiative.

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