Episode Info
- Season3
- Episode2
Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Richard Gowan
Richard Gowan heads an organization focused on trouble spots of the world and alerts the world to looming crises of violence and instability.
Episode Summary
Liberia, Myanmar, Haiti, etc.—the trouble spots of the world are what Richard Gowan’s organization focuses on. And alerts the world to looming crises of violence, instability.
But this time—the focus was right here at home. A controversial decision that pointed straight to Jan. 6th. Before it happened.
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Transcript
COLD OPEN
Gowan: Coming up on One Decision. In the past, we might have written about Liberia or Haiti. When you start talking about the US as a place that looks fragile, the rules of the game globally are changing.
INTRODUCTION
Kosinski: Welcome back to One Decision. I'm Michelle Kosinski. As we watch every former Trump administration official now come out with their books and stories on the decisions they watched in disbelief happen around them, we have a story of a highly unusual decision. We're talking to a man named Richard Gowan, whose organization could no longer just watch what was happening leading up to the 2020 election. As strange as it was, as foreign as it felt to them, they came to the conclusion that they needed to act to ring that bell. But first, let's take a quick peek into the mind of Britain's former spymaster and current analyst extraordinaire, Sir Richard Dearlove. Well, howdy, Richard. Let's talk America today. Okay, Michelle. Okay, your take on the state of the union right now.
Dearlove: There's no question that the divisions within the union are very deep, but, you know, the strength of the United States really was sealed, if you wish, in the American Civil War, the most brutal modern war of the nineteenth century. You know, American democracy has shown its resilience.
Kosinski: Yeah, at least we're not in a civil war. We got that.
Dearlove: I lived, you know, for a significant period of my life in France. I mean, street violence in France is part of the French political tradition, and you know, really ghastly riots, think of some of the recent Gilets Jaunes riots in Paris, happen, I wouldn't say, you know, every month, but they happen quite often. I mean, my very first night in France, there was this massive street battle right outside the restaurant.
Kosinski: Oh, dinner and a show.
Dearlove: My children just couldn't believe. I mean, this is really violent stuff. Actually, more violent than you would have seen in the Capitol Building. I think it was shocking because of the sort of violation of the sanctity of American democracy, but it wasn't a sort of systemic threat to the US system, in my view.
Kosinski: And if you could sit down with American leadership and remind them of the dangers of some of those problems within their own borders, what would you say to them?
Dearlove: Wow, that's a really tough question. Well, I guess the basic advice has to be that the polarization that you find in American politics has to be resolved, but the extremists need to be marginalized and isolated.
Kosinski: Right.
Dearlove: And they don't, as it were, need to be regarded as a key part of any political process, and I admire the US greatly. I mean, I am a fan, if you see what I mean. I think that civic life in the States at a local level generally is much stronger than in many European countries, and I admire that enormously.
Kosinski: Thanks, Richard. Now let's set the scene. Let's go on a trip to Midtown Manhattan, that reliably energetic part of town. We head for a busy side street, a building that blends in perfectly with its gray, stony surroundings. But inside, we find this absolute dimly lit heaven of sleek, minimalist design perfection. This feels like a stylish bunker in the middle of the city, a dramatic buffer between the outside world and the deep thought on difficult problems that goes on inside these walls. And way upstairs, we enter the airy but basic, no nonsense offices of the International Crisis Group. This place is designed for work, for thinking and writing, no frills. And that is how we find its UN director, Richard Gowan. He's the image of the academic in a black turtleneck, white beard, and longish hair. His business, trying to solve the world's crises. Well beyond the white noise and constant taxi jolting of New York into some of the planet's most troubled, dark, and violent corners. International Crisis Group was founded in 1995, a response to horrible wars in the Balkans, Sudan, Somalia, some of the worst conflicts humanity could produce. So a group of statesmen and diplomats put this group together to warn the world about nasty conflicts brewing with the goal of preventing them from turning even uglier. The goal of preventing war.
INTERVIEW
Gowan: We have specialists, many of them in pretty dangerous places around the world, looking at conflicts from Latin America through to East Asia.
Kosinski: For the first time in its history, Crisis Group made the decision to sound the alarm to warn of the looming violence and instability within the United States of America.
Gowan: You know, we didn't say on the January 6, something very bad will happen on Capitol Hill, but we did say that we saw conditions in the US very similar to those we saw around violent elections in other countries.
Kosinski: There it was, and the group's impressive body of work sandwiched among reports on crises like Iraq, Myanmar, Lebanon suddenly appeared one in October, days before the presidential election, analyzing the very real potential for serious politically charged violence in America. It seemed to come out of left field and from right in front of our faces all at the same time.
Gowan: It woke up a lot of people within the US system to this risk of not just sort of the election becoming politically divisive, but actually sort of instigating violence.
Kosinski: And I guess there's always, I don't want to say it's a risk, but there's always, you know, groups in the United States who will say, oh, well, it was just a provocative, it was something done to be provocative and to call out political elements that you might not agree with.
Gowan: Well, we work on international crises. We do also work on crises within countries. And we've looked at other countries and other election processes in places such as Ethiopia or Libya and made similar warnings in the past. And I think we do take pride in the fact that our research is very much grounded in factual analysis and Crisis Group's reports still look a little like sort of academic texts, packed with footnotes. We really try and test our own assumptions. And I think we felt that in saying that there was a risk of election related violence in the US, we were basing that firstly on what we were seeing on the ground in the US last year. And secondly, our expertise in election violence based on over two decades of working in unstable places around the world. So I think that our analysis was objectively sound, and I guess the other reason that we look back and say it was objectively sound is that we were tragically proved right by events in Washington.
Kosinski: So take us back there. At what point did International Crisis Group start seeing this as this is something that we need to look at?
Gowan: So it was the events in Washington in the summer. You know, the famous moment where you had, you know, uniformed personnel on the streets in Washington, Trump, I think, you know, waving his bible at the crowds. And I remember a colleague, I think, covering Eastern Europe, just sending an email to the organization as a whole or to the senior management team saying, this looks precisely like the sort of crisis that we cover. And then they stepped back and then prior to the election, I forget if it was September or October last year, they put out this much more detailed sort of piece looking at the risks of violence and, you know, what steps might follow. So it was the sort of initial moment of chaos in Washington that inspired the focus.
Kosinski: And when you heard this suggestion, did this really turn your head based on the kinds of things that you were used to focusing on?
Gowan: Yes, it did. And I think it gave one pause because we've seen over the years sort of moments of chaos in other countries the Crisis Group hadn't chosen to write about for one reason or another. I mean, for example, the independence referendum, the unilateral independence referendum in Catalonia was something which some colleagues had felt at the time we should focus on because it was a crisis similar to those we had looked at elsewhere but for whatever reason we did not. So yeah, I think everyone understood that simply the fact that Crisis Group would be looking at the US and making the decision to write about that rather as in the past we might have written about Liberia or Haiti would create a shock.
Kosinski: And there was the risk of looking alarmist.
Gowan: There was the question, well, what if nothing does happen? What if everything turns out to be just a moment of paranoia, would that make us look a bit silly? Sadly, that's not a problem we've had to deal with because it turned out that it was worth looking at.
Kosinski: Was it controversial within your organization? I mean, at ICG, were people arguing about this?
Gowan: I think there was a healthy debate. I wouldn't say that it wasn't a row but I think there were certainly discussions of could we make sure that our methodology was sound? Could we make sure that we had the necessary facts and understanding of what was going on. But again, I think there were also voices in the organization saying, you can't not do this just because the crisis is in the US.
Kosinski: And how long had you lived in the US at that point?
Gowan: Well, I've lived in New York since 2005, so I'm not actually a US citizen, but this is where I spent the majority of my adult life. I, of course, was sitting in Brooklyn and because of pandemic conditions, I was confined to a fairly small area of Brooklyn which did not feel like it was on the verge of serious political violence. And I mean, I'd actually been doing a lot of work last year on another unexpected issue, which was the risk that COVID could lead to more conflicts globally by undercutting states. So my focus was away from the US and I think when I first heard that we were doing it, I guess I looked around myself in leafy Brooklyn and thought, is this really justified? But then you know, seeing what happened last summer, seeing the sort of inflammatory tone that a lot of Trump's, you know, statements were taking and his supporters were taking, I think the case for doing it became fairly clear. NEWS CLIP [12:50] Am I allowed to rip that whistle out of the mouth? I'd rip that, I'd just like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you.
Gowan: And these ominous kind of warnings that the election results could not be trusted.
Kosinski: For an American, any American, or I think 50% of Americans, that was extremely chilling. It was like where are we? What is this place anymore? And I'm sure inside your organization many people felt the same way.
Gowan: I mean I should say we're an organization with branches globally in places like Beirut and Nairobi and so forth. We're not an overwhelmingly American organization. And I think that probably also helped us think through whether to write about the US because were we an entirely American organization, anything we would have said would have been seen as partisan one way or another. But the fact that we had colleagues in Europe, colleagues in Africa and elsewhere who could look at the arguments that we were making and tell us whether they fit with external perceptions of the situation in the US, but also, as I say, with lessons from election related violence in other regions, I think that sort of gave Crisis Group a stronger sense that we were saying something credible.
Kosinski: Yeah. And it was looking eerily similar to these other incidents that you've seen in the past.
Gowan: We did see certain similarities with tendencies in weak states around dangerous elections. And so just to give you some examples, the rhetoric of powerful figures, the emergence of hate speech online and so forth is a classic warning sign that something could go wrong. The existence of armed militias, which many people were not taking very seriously in the US at that time. Again, that fits with what you see in a lot of weak states before election crises.
Kosinski: It's true that this can be a view that can be hard to see from inside America. These warning signs don't seem so much like warning signs when they're right there at home.
Gowan: The data that we were starting to see around the US did fit with the indicators that we would identify in other cases as blinking red when you have an election coming up. So it was that sort of recognition that this is all a bit too familiar from our work elsewhere that sort of gave the organization, I think, the courage to push through. It wasn't just a parochial, this is not how we like politics to be done in the US feeling.
Kosinski: Got it. Were you viewing this as a potential for widespread violence within the US or were you looking out even further and seeing this as potentially internationally destabilizing?
Gowan: I would make two points. Firstly, we never said the US was going to collapse into civil war and our analysis was measured in terms of how violence could escalate because we didn't want to seem to be overwarning. There's a well known professional trap in conflict analysis which is you start to worry about something and then you immediately say that it's going to lead to the worst possible outcome, state collapse, and we didn't feel that we should make that claim in the US case. We didn't really get as far as thinking through what violence in the US would mean for great power politics because it would probably have just become highly speculative.
Kosinski: Yeah, got it. So in terms of, or when you look at the array of the kinds of decisions your organization makes, how difficult was this as a decision?
Gowan: Crisis Group and Crisis Group's leadership make a lot of difficult decisions because like many of the others, people you've spoken to on the podcast, we deal with war and peace and we make policy recommendations even if they're policy recommendations concerning less prominent conflicts that if they are taken seriously but backfire, could lead to more violence and more instability. Crisis Group actually has an extraordinarily rigorous internal policy discussion because we don't want to throw out recommendations that could have unintended but really nasty consequences.
Kosinski: Well, what could that mean? What would a recommendation be that would have unforeseen consequences or bad ones? What would that look like?
Gowan: So in the past, we have recommended on some occasions that countries should actually delay elections, for example, when there seem to be signs that you just can't have free and fair elections or they could lead to violence. But clearly that is a risky proposal because there's also a chance that canceling the election could lead to violence too and you have to make a question of judgment about whether the risks are higher in one scenario or another. Now, we never suggested cancelling the US elections. I think that would have been many bridges too far for us. I think coming back to your basic question though, how hard was this? I think it was clearly sort of a big institutional decision because Crisis Group was born in the 1990s in the period of US predominance on the world stage. And for twenty five years we have operated in a world where the US and its allies have tended to set the rules of the international game and intervene in other countries' affairs. And I think that we recognized as an institution that when you start talking about the US as a place that looks fragile, the rules of the game globally are changing. And so, you know, it was an important decision for the institution in sort of, you know, recognizing how political instability is shifting, political instability is growing and countries that twenty years ago seemed eminently stable and immensely powerful suddenly have fragilities of their own.
Kosinski: And was there a backlash when it came out?
Gowan: There were people criticizing us on social media, like anyone who works—
Kosinski: You didn't feel like your organization was being attacked?
Gowan: No. I think what struck us was actually that the analysis tapped into themes that people were starting to recognize were very real but hadn't been able to formulate perhaps as clearly as we were able to formulate. So I think the response that our colleagues in DC especially got was respectful and interested. But we were quite used to being on the receiving end of crazy stuff because we write about controversial things.
Kosinski: Do you feel like your report changed anything? Or what was the impact, do you think?
Gowan: It had a very high readership. It was widely circulated. It was one of our sort of two or three most read reports in 2020. I think it raised awareness. I think that it probably did put a lot of political observers in the US sort of on alert to what might take place. Clearly, it didn't actually succeed in preventing what happened in Washington in January. And I think that that reflects the nature of policy advice more generally in the field of peace and conflict that you can inform, you can put people on alert, but sometimes sadly, sometimes exactly when you're most perceptive, you're least able to stop things getting out of control because they're already spinning in a certain direction.
Kosinski: Exactly. So when it came out, how did you feel about it? Did you feel like, you know, this needs to be exposed, it needs to be called out in the same way that this kind of warning is called out in other places. Did you feel like, you know, we've broken some ground here that needed to be set?
Gowan: Yeah. I mean, I remember feeling relieved and gratified that as an institution that we had taken this on. Before you put out any report of that type, yeah, on the night before you're like, oh, are we just overestimating the situation? Are we calling this one wrong? The response was massive. You could see that people really wanted to read it.
Kosinski: Is there any feedback that you remember that stayed with you?
Gowan: I remember getting, we got some quite sort of quizzical comments from diplomats around the UN. People sort of definitely raised their eyebrows that we had said this and I think I recall diplomats joking that, you know, maybe we would be arguing that the Security Council should intervene in the US next. I know from having spoken to my colleagues who'd worked on this in DC that they got a lot of private feedback and people really sort of seized with what the report was saying. What's interesting is that we actually got a very positive response after the events from people in the countries we normally write about. People in Africa and the Middle East said, you know, we'd always thought the International Crisis Group, which is headquartered in Brussels, was a Western organization that wouldn't look at politics in the rich world and sort of say there was a risk of violence. And actually, the fact that you did that, the fact that you were willing to call out the US, also makes them feel that maybe our coverage of politics in Africa and so on is more impartial and fairer.
Kosinski: There were accusations the election would be rigged, fury and distrust across social media, partisan news organizations cranking it out. All in the gray late autumn chill of pandemic sickness, isolation, and division, and America slogging angrily towards the polls. So you see the election happen. Yep. You hear the statements that are coming right after it. Do you feel leading up to January 6 the tension building? Are you thinking, my God, you know, our report was right. This is going to happen.
Gowan: I think we could see, or I could see tracking events that a lot of the conflict factors which the report had emphasized were present and were getting more intense. Does that mean that on the morning of the January 6, I was convinced we were going to see that level of violence? I'm afraid I probably didn't. I think my own personal sense was at that moment that maybe the moment of highest threat had passed. I mean, actually, I recall on the afternoon of the sixth, I thought nothing much seems to be going on. There's a protest in Washington. I'm gonna pop out to the bank. And then when I came back from the bank, suddenly, the center of the free world was under siege. NEWS CLIP [26:58] 1776. You're free, Andrew. Well, guess what? America showed up.
Gowan: I mean, I think looking at it, we definitely felt that the analysis was being borne out by events and the risks were there. The well nature of political crises is that there are moments when just as we've sort of seen with Afghanistan in the last couple of weeks, suddenly sort of history speeds up and you hit an inflection point. And even if you've done the thinking in advance, you can still be taken by surprise.
Kosinski: On January 6, the world stood stunned watching the heart of Washington, the capital, that great symbol of Western democracy breached, government officials in some cases egging it on, lives stolen from people who were trying to stop it. God, I get upset again just remembering this. It must have made your team feel like we really did the right thing. Even if it was controversial in some ways, it was right to call this out in the United States.
Gowan: Yes. I mean, no one felt satisfaction with what had happened, not even grim satisfaction. There was no sense of told you so.
Kosinski: Right.
Gowan: But I think there was sort of a clear eyed sense that the analysis had been proved correct. And so that, you know, I'm grasping for the right word because a moment like that doesn't give you satisfaction.
Kosinski: Yeah. It's very tricky.
Gowan: Very tricky. But, you know, I think everyone did feel that it unquestionably validated the decision to have done that work and made those calls that this was something we should be warning about.
Kosinski: Is the United States still on your watch list?
Gowan: I think now you'll find that there are actually a lot of other organizations who have picked up on what has happened and are tracking outbreaks of violence. It isn't such a controversial thing to say now that this is something which could happen again. But we've done it once and if necessary, we'll do it again.
Kosinski: Has this changed your view of how stable the US is?
Gowan: I may still be too influenced by seeing US politics from the vantage point of New York City, but I think the US also has some fundamental resilience that is not there in tragically some weaker states and I hope that resilience will prevail. However, I think that everyone who watched the events of 2020 and of January this year is now conscious that political violence is a very present threat here.
Kosinski: You have the risk in America of political violence. You have a lot of weapons, first of all. Yeah. You have the risk of political violence and the risk of racial violence. And in some ways, they are connected. But what do you think is the bigger risk to America?
Gowan: I think ultimately the fact that quite a lot of our political leaders do not seem to have been shocked enough by what happened in January is very worrying to me. And the fact that you have efforts to rewrite history to minimize what happened in January strikes me as a very significant failure to learn the lessons of this outburst of political violence. I think if we aren't serious about understanding where that violence came from, if we simply reduce it to being like one man in a funny hat running around Congress, then we are making a pretty profound mistake because it revealed some divisions and it revealed some real problems in the way the country's political leadership handle the threat of violence that could come back to haunt us.
Kosinski: So what do you think you've learned from that decision?
Gowan: I felt very proud to be part of an organization that wasn't afraid to be asking hard questions about where US politics was going. I sometimes feel that political analysts, you know, sidestep these difficult questions if they worry that it might affect their access to decision makers in future and so forth, and we didn't do that on this occasion. I think that was the right thing to do.
Kosinski: Well, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. Well done.
ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE
Kosinski: Let's bring in Richard Dearlove again. The threat of political violence in the US, like we saw January 6, where do you think we stand on that today? How much does it worry you?
Dearlove: Yeah. The trouble is, you know, I think that's part of your political and social character in the States. I mean, the whole concept of ownership of weapons.
Kosinski: I mean, all them, you mean all them guns is what—
Dearlove: Yeah. It's so fundamentally ingrained in your DNA that it's going to be there forever, you've got to learn to live with it, to control it. The other aspect of American society is this fundamentalist approach to belief in religion, so you get these extraordinary communities who are almost impervious to outside influence and have an impact and an influence on aspects of the political process as well.
Kosinski: What do you think about International Crisis Group's decision? I remember when their report came out. It felt ominous.
Dearlove: Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty surprised that the ICG took that particular line. If I had been on the managing board of ICG and this proposal had been put forward, I would have strongly opposed it.
Kosinski: Really? Even though the violence actually did happen?
Dearlove: You know, the two things that you cannot contest about the United States is the democratic process and the rule of law. Okay, it gets distorted and misdirected at times and some weird things happen, but there is a fundamental difference between the way they function, and then if you're looking at countries like Myanmar, if you're looking at Rwanda, they just don't have that institutional strength and stability.
Kosinski: Were they going out on a limb? Do you see it at all as a brave decision?
Dearlove: I mean, the comparison I would make is with France. French politics are far more volatile and worrying. The social divides in France are profound. Are they applying that template to France? I bet they're not. It's very fashionable during Trump, post Trump, to sort of victimize the United States as going politically into a dead end and I do not subscribe to that viewpoint. America showed it was bigger than the Trump experience and you know, I think what's worrying now is he's there in the background, what's the Republican Party going to do? Is Trump going to dominate it? Is he going to be the next presidential candidate? You never know.
Kosinski: It reminds us too of the value of organizations like this. These are not pundits on TV ranting about opinions, trying to make the biggest noise, and get the most shocked reactions. These are experts on conflict doing the deep research. They have a well of actual knowledge.
Dearlove: Yeah. Well, I personally am not particularly surprised by what happened. I was involved in a conference in New York way back now and we had to choose a topic to discuss, and I chose the topic populism, and a lot of the people looked at me and said, well Richard, what the hell is populism? What's it got to do with the United States? I said, well I think this is a coming influence in our politics and we need to take it very seriously, and I'm quite proud of myself for having, because this was four or five years before Trump even got elected or appeared on the political scene, and I had a strong feeling in my bones that where traditional parties were beginning to have great electoral difficulties, it seemed to me the perfect circumstances for this surge of populism to come through.
Kosinski: You get extra points for that, Richard. And in terms of the potential for violence, you know, for decades, people and police would warn the criminals have all the weapons, and more people arm themselves then. And now these hyper right wing groups and militias, they have all the guns. Those people are armed to the teeth.
Dearlove: It's really scary. I mean, I think this is a phenomenon of American society which I find the most disconcerting, but statistically, is it large enough to be— But is it a systemic threat?
Kosinski: Yeah. That is a question. That's a good point. I think what bothers me in the US is there's so much hate now in politics. There is outright hatred of the opposite political party.
Dearlove: In the past it wasn't possible for extremists to find like minded people so quickly, so easily. They were isolated, they were in small pockets, they were not interconnected, they were not able to coordinate.
Kosinski: Right. When you look at these kinds of simmering volatile tensions politically around elections in the West, I was going to say what other country do you think is most at risk for things blowing up?
Dearlove: The French presidential election. And if these two right wing candidates combine, if Marine Le Pen and this guy Zemmour combine together into a single and they have some agreement, I think they'll defeat Macron, and I think that they will win the French presidential election, and that would upend European politics in quite a fundamental way. I mean, it will be a Trump like event. There's no question.
Kosinski: Well, we talked to two Richards today, but I'm very happy we have both. Thanks, Richard, number two. You know, you're always number one to us.
Dearlove: Very good, Michelle, if you say that. Thank you.
Kosinski: And thank you for joining us here at One Decision. Follow us wherever you find your podcast and on social media. We'd love to hear from you. I'm Michelle Kosinski here at One Decision.
