Der "war ein interessanter Artikel" Thread

Xiang macht keinen Hehl daraus, dass er an der Dysfunktionalität linker Politik leidet, ob in den USA oder in China. Für den Fall, dass Xi Jinpings Totalitarismus in den kommenden Jahren scheitert, erwartet er einen radikalen Rechtsruck in China und ein Revival libertärer Marktideologie, nach dem Muster von Silicon-Valley-Moguln wie Peter Thiel.

In München leben auch viele wohlhabende Menschen. Ist der Ernst der Lage in der Breite schon angekommen? Gehen die Münchner so sparsam mit Energie um, wie es jetzt notwendig wäre?
Vielen Leuten ist das Problem bewusst. Aber wir sehen bisher keine Verhaltensänderungen, die Leute sparen kein Erdgas. In München wird derzeit genauso viel Gas verbraucht wie in normalen Jahren mit vergleichbaren Temperaturen.

ZON: Your book also presents new details about Putin’s early days in Germany. What did he actually do there?
Belton: Well, he liked to pretend when he first came to the presidency that he hadn't done anything at all, and the very fact of his being there was a sign that his career had reached a dead end. He talked about how there was nothing to do, and all he did was drink so much beer that he put on weight.

ZON: The legend goes that he put on 12 kilos.

Belton: When, really, there are no photographs there showing Putin having put on any weight at all. I think people were overly dismissive of Dresden and its importance. Putin was working closely with Matthias Warnig, who we know now as the chairman of Nord Stream 1 and 2. In those days, Warnig was a hotshot Stasi officer. According to a defector who had worked with Putin in the Stasi, Warnig was running a KGB cell for Putin. Putin was the chief liaison between the KGB and the Stasi, and it also turns out from another defector that Putin was then involved in active measures against the West. For instance, he had been trying to entrap a professor into handing over the secret to untraceable poison by planting compromising pornographic materials on him. We don't know whether this operation ever came off. Putin was supposedly also a handler of a notorious neo-Nazi, who later helped stoke the rise of the far right in the east. According to a former member of a far-left terror group, Putin was also working closely with the Red Army Faction (RAF). Members of the RAF would come across to the east and would meet with Putin and another KGB officer there. They would not give the RAF members orders on targets, but they would make suggestions and make sure that they were equipped. The RAF members would hand over lists of things that you would need, whether it be cash or weapons, and these would then be left in a safe place in West Germany for them to be picked up. Putin being in Dresden did not mean his career was at a dead end. It meant that he was actually involved in much more covert operations that were far away from the eyes of the West, and the West was concentrating only on Berlin.

ZON: When your book was published in German, some news media picked up the fact that you talked to an anonymous former member of the RAF. You found hints that maybe the Stasi and also Putin were behind the attack on Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman of Deutsche Bank at the time. The sophisticated attack has always been a bit of a mystery.

Belton: It's an open question. We don't know whether Putin was directly involved in this, but it is certainly the case that the Stasi worked very closely in coordination with the KGB on all these issues. There were signs that that was a very professional attack in terms of the technology that was used to trigger the explosion when Herrhausen’s car was on its way to work. This former member of the RAF had pointed this out. We were also looking at the reasons for why somebody might want Herrhausen's removal. Herrhausen was then calling for a write-off of the Third World debt, and the debt in the Third World was one of the ways that the Soviets had traditionally exerted control. And it was also a time when the vast business interests in East Germany were going to be privatized, and whoever got to control that process could also potentially get access to a lot of secrets on how the Stasi and the KGB had operated.

ZON: With all that in mind, let us now jump back to the Germany of today. There’s Matthias Warnig, a former Stasi captain, and as you say close friend to Vladimir Putin, who until recently, had been running the Nord Stream pipeline project. And behind the scenes, there are also more former Stasi people involved in energy projects. Although it is public information, it is still shocking given the background of your book to see that, until recently, former Stasi officers had still been in charge of some important projects. The debate in Germany has mainly been limited to Gerhard Schröder. But many other details that seem to be more relevant, haven't been discussed very widely. Why do you think Germans have been so blind to this in the past?

Belton: I think it's a facet of the time after reunification. No one wanted to delve too deeply into the activities of the Stasi. Of course, there were several high-profile investigations in the late 1990s, but somehow they were conducted – and then forgotten. There was an attempt to bring members of the Stasi to trial over their involvement, for instance, in some of the bombing campaigns in the west, but then they just decided that the statute of limitations had expired, and that was it. People’s Stasi pasts were to some degree brushed over. I was very shocked, too, when I first heard that there were senior ex-Stasi officials running all these intermediaries of Gazprom in Germany. And perhaps the West just thought this doesn't matter because the overriding sense was that these networks actually don't matter anymore, that the KGB had collapsed at the Soviet Union's fall and that was it. In researching the book, you could see that behind the scenes, the KGB had remained a force to be reckoned with in the 1990s. The name was changed, but the foreign intelligence service was kept intact, and behind the scenes in Yeltsin's Russia, they were occupying quite high positions in the presidential administration and waiting for their moment when they could come back. It's perhaps an arrogance or a complacency of the West that after the Soviet Union's fall, Russia has only existed to cooperate with the West and integrate with us on our terms. Because it collapsed, it's an economic basket case and therefore, if this guy is ex-KGB or ex-Stasi, it doesn't really matter because that's not a security threat to us.

Mortality and Modernization


Under Xi, the CCP has a firm grip on power and even commands genuine support among a large swath of the PRC's more than 1.4 billion people. But as Deng warned, "Should the CCP get into trouble, that trouble will come from within." The factors most likely to undermine Xi's personalist rule will be his mortality, ideologically driven decisions, and refusal to heed sound advice.

Has China's experience in the past four decades proven that modernization theory is wrong? Today, the popular wisdom in Washington is that the United States was "naive" in assuming that China would democratize as it integrated into the world economy and grew richer. Such a belief justifies the claim that U.S. engagement with China was a monumental mistake—and the remedy, therefore, is to break ties with China and begin treating it like an enemy. That China has become more authoritarian and aggressive under Xi seems to verify this set of arguments. In fact, however, these arguments are wrong in two ways.
First, political reforms did happen in China as a precondition for economic reform—except those reforms did not take the form of multiparty elections and constitutional safeguards for individual freedoms. Instead, Deng transformed Mao's personalist dictatorship into a power-sharing system, with partial limits on elite power. Deng rejected dogma, opened a closed society to the world, and introduced bureaucratic autonomy. In the three decades since Deng, political values and practices in China have evolved despite the absence of formal democratization, with a slow but steady expansion of civil society. Xi's authoritarian turn has shown that this process of partial liberalization is fragile and reversible, but has not negated all its effects. Second, enmity toward China as a whole will not advance democracy; on the contrary, it carries grave risks of encouraging nationalism and a rally-round-the-leader effect in the PRC.

Both Xi Jinping and U.S. president Joseph Biden like to frame the U.S.-China relationship as a contest between political systems. Yet their positioning fails to acknowledge that U.S. democracy is deeply polarized and at risk of sliding into solidified populism, whereas in China, Xi has diminished the de facto progress made toward political liberalization over the past decades. If the U.S.-China contest is a competition between two political systems, then it is a case of a mature democracy that is in crisis competing with an authoritarian regime that has become more authoritarian than before.