Posts

20-7-18

Dear Partners in thought,

I wanted to tell you about David Frum’s “Trumpocracy – The Corruption of the American Republic”, as it is a well written book – probably the best of its kind – with deep insights about the ills of the Trump leadership, but also because DF, a senior editor at The Atlantic, is actually a Republican of the unquestionable conservative flavour of the intellectual W.F. Buckley kind. DF’s background thus makes for a very unusual read and his account of its voyage into the Trump Presidency all the more interesting. For those familiar with the classics, his book is an articulate study or rulership, dealing with DT’s exercise of power and neither his charming personality nor its few debatable early “results” (good and bad), and has an ancient Greek philosophical ring to it, hence its overall title. It is a study of how DT gained power, has used it and why it has not been really checked yet. I would personally see rulership, persona and style linked in the case of DT but understands that DF wanted to look at “facts” in a world where they are indeed debatable and distorted at will.

Having made the point that the period 1975-2000 marked a rise of democracy around the world and the subsequent one its decline globally, DF made the point that the U.S. were not concerned with that latter trend until the latest presidential elections and DT’s victory in 2016. Hoping back in 2015 that DT could be the wake up call that the Republican Party needed, DF decided to write a book that was published in early 2018 to dissect the inner democratic problems brought by the DT win from the ventage point of a clearly alarmed conservative, thus part of voters who would have naturally backed the Republican candidate in 2016 (The FT’s Edward Luce, father of the topic of “The Retreat of Western liberalism”, made a very useful multiple FT Weekend review of key books dealing with the matter, including DF’s right at its publication. For the sake of the originality of my note and while I thoroughly enjoyed Ed’s review, I did not go back to it when writing it, so all similarities are based on likely shared analysis).

DF’s focus is not on the fear that DT could overthrow the Constitution, but borrowing from French philosopher Montesquieu, whom the Founding Fathers studied closely, that he could paralyse governance stealthily, accumulating the subversion of norms and inciting private violence to radicalise supporters. DF stresses that DT operates not by strategy but by instincts, sniffing his opponents’ vulnerabilities with smears like “low energy”, “little” “crooked” or the famous “fake”, focusing on his discovery that Americans resent each other more than they cherish their shared democracy. DF also tells the story of those who have enabled, empowered, supported and collaborated with DT and without whom DT would be left isolated and indeed helpless. He stresses that there was already a natural, uncivil landscape ready to accept DT’s messages long before he came to power. He talks about indifference and incompetence dealing with major crises. He reminds us that some of DT’s ideas at the beginning of the campaign appeared fresh and balanced like with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) reforms, tax cuts and middle class empowerment, leading some voters, especially conservatives, to believe in a healthy wake-up call. He covers the disastrous and self-wounding impact he has had on world affairs and America’s 75 year relationship with its allies. He goes into the real resentments of many Americans, so called left-outs, who were aptly channeled and ensured a DT win while others who should have, did not vote, both segments ensuring a DT win. Finally he would like Republicans and Conservatives to be able to open a debate about DT and his impact on American democracy beyond partisan politics – and he finishes on a hopeful note, stressing the importance of civic engagement.

DF focuses on key features of his study of rulership in twelve chapters, which I will cover broadly.

In Pre-existing Conditions, DF stresses that DT did not create the environment where constitutional democracy was broken as the rules of the game had been already broken some years ago. He dates the last time when rules worked to the defeat of George HW Bush to Bill Clinton when the former graciously congratulated the latter and called for all Americans to support his winning rival as the new President. The victory of George W Bush over Al Gore in 2000 which was cemented by the Supreme Court marked the shift to a different discourse and environment in American politics. rather than bargains and compromises, all-or-nothing politics emerged as the order of the day. As DF states, DT did not create the vulnerabilities he exploited as they were waiting for him, largely built by the irresponsibilities of the elites, the arrogance of party leaders and the insularity of the wealthy, many of whom donors.

In Enablers, DF explains that DT would have been alone and could not have made it without the support of various key stakeholders such as i) a conservative entertainment propaganda complex; ii) fellow candidates for President who thought they could use him; iii) a Republican Party machine that submitted to him; iv) a donor site who funded him; v) a congressional party that protected him; vi) writers and intellectuals who invented excuses for him; and vii) millions of rank-and-file Republicans who accepted him.

In Appeasers, DF talks about Jeb Bush who was the presumptive winner with all the party apparatus behind him and the largest financial backing ever but who crated within seven weeks of launching his campaign. He goes through the early loneliness of DT and the opposition of virtually all the tenors and key donors of the Republican Party, only to find them changing their mind as DT gradually secured the nomination, rationalising their backing as DT being a better choice than Hillary Clinton, the latter that would be an “unthinkably catastrophic outcome”. Fox News that was relatively ambivalent if not hostile about Trump initially (Megyn Kelly, the then future of the network before “leaving” it post-election, becoming DT”s nemesis after her attacks centered on his treatment of women) became a stalwart supporter though would start paying this in 2017 in lower viewer ratings.

Incidentally it would appear that even key Republican leaders, all of them but Mike Pence trying his best to defuse a very embarrassing and unprecedented situation in modern American presidential history can experience second thoughts when confronted with DT’s communication at the Helsinki joint press conference and his kind handling of Russia and its leader at the end of his summit with President Putin on 16th July (to be noted on a Reuters-Ipsos poll still 71% of Republican supporters still approved of DT on this matter while 55% of all Americans disapproved).

In Plunder, DF mostly talks about corruption in the US (actually only 18th on the Transparency International’s corruption index) giving examples of cosy deals having involved Newt Gingrich and Tom Daschle, both leaders of the House at different times and from different parties. We see that DT became the first President and in fact senior “politician” to refuse to disclose his tax returns, a practice instituted by George Romney, Mitt’s father and then Governor of Michigan, in 1968. The focus is on DT and his family, including the Kushners, who hold records in spending public money to sustain their life style (each Mar-a-Lago jaunt costs at least USD 3m – the cost of the carts for security running at USD 60,000 a year, while the Kushner family ski trip to Aspen in May 2017 cost USD 300,000 to the taxpayers), making the overall spending of DT in one year equivalent of what Obama spent in eight. Nepotism in the DT age is obviously well covered by DT. It actually makes for fun reading if one can forget the significance of such behavior that DT’s supporters are either not aware of or not interested in focusing on. The subject of conflict of interest, unwitting or not, is very clear with the Trump hotel in DC having seen much increased occupancy from foreign visitors since DT’s elevation, but also DT’s business team working hard on a license for Trump Tower Moscow until January 2016 while Jared was in ultimately stopped negotiations with Chinese insurer Ambang to refinance the 666 building on Fifth avenue with its owner very much wanting to meet the President and Chinese investors being promised “investor visas” in a New Jersey property whose marketing was run by his sister. DF makes a very easy case for a very co-mingled way between public funding and private interests in the Trump family. The ethical safeguards set up by the extended Trump family are derisory according to DF, who shows an endless list of conflicts of interest which put DT as a record holder for “firsts” of what not to do for a President in many years. Last areas reviewed by DF are the sackings and delayed appointments of US attorneys, including the highly “unusual” personal DT interview of the one for the District of Columbia with potential criminal jurisdiction for his staff and himself. Lastly, nepotism, which is an art form at the current White House, goes through amazing public examples such as when Ivanka replaced her father at the G20 table in Hamburg in 2017. The conflict of interests problems experienced by Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross last week only stresses the common feature of the Trump Administration and its strange rapport with money and business interests.

In Betrayal, DF covers the meaness with which DT can denigrate or embarrass close advisers at any moment for any reason. DF gave the example of Sean Spicer, then Press Secretary and a devout Catholic, who was not put on the list to meet the Pope while others, far more junior, staff were. DF goes into DT’s habit of appointing deferential, servile individuals to work around him as key features going along with unquestionable loyalty. DT hates criticism (unsurprisingly) and expects huge amount of flattery (also unsurprisingly). He prizes fulsome tributes from his staff such as “I am privileged to be here – deeply honored – and I want to thank you for your commitment to the American workers” (SecLabour) or “It was a great honor traveling with you around the country for the last year and even a greater honour to be here serving on your cabinet” (SecTreasury) and quite a few other memorable quotes which other Presidents, notably GW Bush, for whom DF worked, would hate. DT embarrassed H.R. McMaster, the most admired soldier of his generation, by changing the script of his NATO speech in Sicily in May 2017 forcing him to live with it and defend the changes as perfectly fine and expectable. Those working for DT need to live through the betrayals of their own principles. Quoting Thomas More, DF stresses “the point where crossing a line, even an arbitrary one, means letting go without hope of ever finding yourself again”. What is the most surprising is probably the high risk that young staffers take in working with and for DT given the stigma that is going to be attached to their name and career long after their service, and which explains te relative dearth of young quality staffers at the top of the Trump Administration. Another feature commented by DF is the rise of the “Mini-Trumps” around DT, who incidentally are no band of brothers and easily turn on each other, also given the unhealthy environment at the White House. These Mini-Trumps, who show total obedience and display grotesque flattery to their leader, are exemplified by Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci, the very brief Communications Director – read Edward Luce’s Lunch with the FT, one of the most incredible pieces of the genre – or Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary: “He’s got perfect genes. He has incredible energy and he’s unbelievably healthy” to describe a President he sees as very engaged on multiple fronts all the time while actually DT is clearly known for poor work ethics, little attention span and clear problems with obesity, bad diet and a dogmatic refusal of exercise. All entering the Trump Administration for non selfish motives would sooner or later find themselves betrayed by a President who demands loyalty in its most servile form but never returns it.

In Enemies of the People, DF deals DT’s relationship with the news media which is a key focus for him. Of DT’s 770 Tweets in his six months of Presidency, attacks on the media were the largest topical segment with 85 Tweets, usually stressing FAKE NEWS. CNN, The New York Times and NBC News, but also The Washington Post (and Amazon given Jeff Bezos’s ownership) are the main targets. The attacks are focused on news media that are critical of his actions and policies and as such are not so much “his enemies” as they are those “of the American people”. DT holds the record for the most untruths based on various organisations dealing and ranking such features, the exact list of which, for the main ones, we will remember. His close team does not hesitate to threaten the press like with Kellyanne Conway DT’s favourite enforcer, tells Meet The Press’s Chuck Todd that unwelcome questions would provoke some unspecified reprisal and “a rethink of our relationship”. DT simply enjoys a world where media is reduced to “the sycophancy of Fox News & Friends” and “Hannity”. DT’s approach is to delegitimise accountability journalism by framing it as partisan. DT is unequivocal as he speaks unlike a politician, usually very directly which is perceived as clarity and frankness by supporters, which however is not the same thing as being honest. DT lies without qualm or remorse and if necessary will lie about the lie itself. As DF states, he lies blatantly to assert power over truth itself, his main objective being to feed his message to his core supporter base. DT also incites violence when addressing supporters in his rants about some of the news media, such as “I truly don’t think they like our country”, touching a key trigger point of his base, at times whipping the crowds at rallies into fevered chants like “CNN Sucks” and leading attendees to shout epithets at targeted reporters. DF finally goes into the matter of Russian-originated fake news modus operandi and infrastructure, which may have benefited DT during the campaign even if the subject of collusion is still under investigation.

In Rigged System, DF goes into some of the reasons the 2016 results were what they were, well beyond the vagaries of the Electoral College system and the 2.9 millions more votes for Clinton, most of which were “illegal votes” according to DT though he did not press the matter. The matter of illegal votes is a perennial issue in American politics and simply relates to the fact that individuals move from state to state from birth, college, jobs, marriages and that the voter registrations sometimes stay unchanged, making them able in theory to vote in several states. It looks like, whether this matter should be fixed, it would be quite unpractical and would require incredible efforts for people to vote in several states on election day, though on-line voting and mail voting may create some leeways. It is thus hard to think that elections could be swayed by a massive multiple vote conspiracy. On the other hand, one of the strange changes of the 2016 section compared with the 2012 one is for DF the massive decline in participation of African-American voters, whose ethnic group share of the vote went from 65 percent in 2012 to 58 percent in 2016, which is the steepest decline of voter participation for any ethnic group in American election history. While the absence of an Obama they would feel naturally close to and the presence of a Clinton they might not all relate to is an undeniable fact, it would seem that the surge of Republican victories at the state and local levels during the Obama period (Only seven states out of 50 were controlled by Dems in 2016) may explain the shift due to a substantial rise of changes in voting procedures, the most important since the Reconstruction post-1865. Republican states went through a change in early voting, weekend voting and online voting that had an impact on those voters, especially in minority groups, who did not control their working time as well as others or were not tech-savvy or following the rule changes. DF is then covering the targeting of those responsible for what he calls the “rigged system”, notably against ordinary, working class, Americans, pointing to the likes of financier George Soros, FED Chair Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein as the main “agents of global special interests robbing the working class, stripping the country of its wealth and lining the pockets of corporations and political entities” (It should be noted that The Anti-Defamation League made a quick and concerned statement about the anti-semitic undertones of DT’s attack, which in many ways was strange when knowing DT’s strong closeness to Israel, Jerusalem embassy and all, which perhaps is another example of erratic behaviour and spur of the political moment, the main objective being to send a message to his core base). DF finally deals with the investigated Russian involvement in the 2016 elections through various means of hybrid warfare as well as the rise of open display military style outfits intimidating involved citizens and voters at events like in Charlottesville in August 2017, resulting in an ISIS-style lethal car-ramming onslaught, or more simply at the voting booth in some “conceal and carry” states and locations. While condoning political violence, DT often encouraged supporters to adopt tough behaviour dealing with political opponents at rallies or law enforcement in their dealing with criminal suspects. While the American economic system might feel “rigged” against Trump supporters, the American political system of 2016 had in important ways been rigged in Trump’s favour.

In America Alone, DF starts stressing through HR MacMaster and Gary Cohn, the then national security and economic lead advisers to DT in a Wall Street Journal op- ed in May 2017 that “America first does not make America alone” as if there was a need to state it. DF then goes through the many attacks against allies South Korea or Germany, initially about their participation to defense cooperation in Korea for the former or through NATO and later trade for the latter. We then go through the decline in trust of allies’ populations in DT as opposed to Obama (like 24 percent vs. 78 percent in Japan or 28 percent vs. 84 percent in Australia). We go through the business ties of DT with both Qatar and Russia and the detailed positions of DT regrading the two countries. While we know the issues at stake with Russia, we learn how a successful visit to Saudi Arabia, empowered the UAE, Saudis and Egyptians to organise a blocus of Qatar, thinking that Washington was fine with it. Similarly a visit of DT in Warsaw where he emboldened the nationalistic government with his praise of a “safe, strong and free” Poland that led it to start attacking the independent court system and clashing with the EU. We then go back to the U.S.- EU relationship, within a NATO and later trade context, remembering the traditional U.S. approach to its allies like with GW Bush stating in 2003 “Since the end of World War II, the United States has strongly supported European unity as the best path to European peace and prosperity” on the footsteps of Bill Clinton when he had declared years early that “We recognise we will benefit more from a strong and equal partner than a weak one”. DF then covers all the demonstrations of support from DT and its representatives (the latest being the new Ambassador in Germany) in support of populist movements and developments, like with Farage In Britain or Le Pen in France or again Orban in Hungary to only name a few in a long list, of which Salvini and di Matteo in Italy are the latest members. We hear Rex Tillerson in May 2017 congratulating the “Turkish people – brave men and women – (who) stood up against coup plotters and defended their democracy” (In fairness, he probably would not make the same speech today). We then realise that DT wants only one- on-one deals with countries and not deals with the likes of the EU so as to avoid “big quagmire deals that are a disaster”. DF stresses that “DT never understood that America’s power arose not only from its own wealth and its own military force, but from its centrality to a network of friends and allies”. We go through leading examples of mismanagement when DT told Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign minister about an imminent ISIS threat and the city where the US intel partner (Israel’s Mossad) had detected the threat, resulting in a great embarrassment and potential blow if not among country leaderships but likely friendly intel organisations. DF stresses the views of both Steve Banon and Chris Caldwell who saw an alignment of DT with President Putin as being natural given the latter seen as the leader for a new form of otherwise traditional form of nationalism, this time expressed against globalism (the big battle of our time for them), thus self-determination in a way populist conservatives see VP (and DT) as progressives saw Fidel Castro in another era. In sync with that ideological rapprochement, DT, while praising Putin, has clearly casted doubt on the Russian meddling invitation by the DoJ’s Robert Mueller as well as tried to promote the cooperation with Russia in Syria. DF finally reminds us of the speech of Vaclav Havel the he addressed to a joint session of Congress after the fall of “all the Berlin Walls”, stressing how America and its constitution, 200 years later, still inspired the world and the Czechs to be citizens, lamenting (DF) that government of the United States seemed today to have made common cause with the planet’s crooks, thugs and dictators against its own ideals, while forgetting friends and allies who should pay more for their defence and not run trade surpluses. In doing so he, once again, stresses that DT has been enabled, also on the international front, by individuals who “execute his whims fro crass and cowardly reasons of their own: partisanship, ambition, greed for gain, eagerness for attention, ideological zeal, careerist conformity or malicious glee in the wreck of things that they could never have built themselves”. The only redeeming feature being for DF (and I) that they will be remembered (thus creating a gradual, welcome, dampening effect in their DT zeal driven by self preservation), like the Trump Presidency and what it revealed about the American political system, long after DT retires to the great golf in the sky, even if damages could sadly have longer lasting effects than what we would want even with him no longer around.

In Autoimmune Disorder, DF talks about the leaks at the White House that have been at all time historical high since the start of the DT era and acted as a stop to some of the most crazy policy moves of DT. Leading examples of such leaks resulted in the removal of Michael Flynn, first National Security Adviser, from office and leading to his indictment; the exposition of the blabbing of DT to Sergey Lavrov about the ISIS threat and where; of the deterrence of the lifting of sanctions to Russia. The problem with the leaks is that they exposed to adversaries, like in the case of Russia, that conversations were not secure as previously thought and that surveillance methods had overcome security set-ups – stressing a common problem often found in cybersecurity, the most recent form of warfare, albeit hybrid, that while you know you have been hacked you don’t want your attacker to know about it. By outing information via leaks and when involving adversaries, the leakers drove them to change their security measures to restore confidentiality in their communication, making your own side go back to the drawing board to yet intercept information in the future. DF then underlines how the office of the President was traditionally always staffed by committed people taking their jobs very seriously but how the Trump White House has become “a mess of careless slobs” giving us a long list of examples making the point very easily. He then goes on to stress that DT has gone on to surrender himself with top military officials in his team, partly as he wanted obedience and that these men, not being politicians, are usually selected, trained and promoted to get results, there being no wrong ways to win a battle. VP Mike Pence stressed to the 2017 graduating class of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis that they “should follow the chain of command without exception. Trust you superiors, trust your orders and you’ll serve and lead well” which had a strange flavour as key message to the future U.S. Navy leadership in terms of obeying all orders, lawful or not. As stated by DF and we know, it turned out that men like Mattis, Kelly and McMaster, all first rate military (USMC) commanders and great Americans have demonstrated an appreciation of and commitment to liberal democracy exceeding that of their commander in chief, which was very fortunate and even if the principle of civilian supremacy must remain indispensable when and if the President has revealed himself unfit for office. DF finally touches upon the key but currently fraught relationship of DT with the national security apparatus (mainly but not only DoD, CIA and NSA), notably on intelligence-related matters – see DT’s 16th June Helsinki Trump-Putin press conference and later “walking back” with “would and wouldn’t” -, a wider topic which is also related by James Clapper and Michael Hayden, two former CIA and NSA Directors in their books very recently published which should be read by those of us who are interested in the matter.

In Resentments, DF covers a few resentment groups and issues that propelled DT in the White House. Political correctness was a big resentment factor triggering DT’s exasperation, which resonated with many voters who became supporters. “PC culture” was deemed by many analysts as one the key voting issues and according to comedian B.L. Hughley “probably is why” DT got elected as “people are tired of being told what to think and say”. DF mentioned another testimony from a 21 year old San Franciscan DT voter: “I am a gay millennial woman and I voted Trump because I oppose the political correctness movement which has become a fascist ideology of silence and ignorance”. For another 28 year old from San Francisco: “He was an outsider . He spoke truth about the political correctness” (If I may say, while political correctness was very useful to enshrine societal advancements at the ground level in particular in terms of civil, minority, women, gay and gender diversity rights, the PC culture may indeed have gone too far on some topics. I personally dislike the activist approach of viewing historical events with today’s lenses and values, like campaigning to rename colleges because 200 years ago the man whose name on the college porch, while an American Vice President, happened to also have been a slave owner at the time). DT was very good at focusing on these frustrations and taking advantage of them in the voting booth. The rejection of PC- culture was often combined with other resentments like those of the young white males, particularly without any love relationship (and often no job, many of whom would still live with their parents), who felt lonely and alienated in today’s America. As it is widely assumed that the millennial elected Barack Obama, Romney beat Obama by seven percentage points in 2012 among whites under the age of 30. Among white males under the age of 30, Romney beat Obama by 13 points. A 600 per cent increase was noted in the following of white nationalist groups on online media between 2012 and 2016. In 2014, only 71 percent of men aged 18-34 were employed compared with 84 percent in 1960. In 2016, 19 percent of Americans under the age of 30 smoke marijuana, twice as many as before 2008 and the Great Recession. Hillary Clinton crystallised resentment of white men with 52 percent holding a “very unfavourable” view of her, 20 and 32 points higher than those who viewed Obama very unfavourably in 2012 and 2008 respectively. Hillary Clinton was seen “as embodying the cultural transformations of the 1960s: the liberal, feminist, working-mother spouse of the first boomer President”. To many supporters among those who needed to rationalise intellectually their support, DT was the first post- religious conservative of their lifetime, not hating gays and not caring if women have abortions, the first who talked about things that matter now, even if he drew support from the alienated, including the crackpots, extremists and also racists at a time when for the first time in American history life expectancy was declining, most steeply, among American whites, who also were leading the ethnic pack in terms of male suicides and opioid overdoses. Marriage, church attendance, civic participation also plummeted along income, by 9 percent, for white males between 1996 and 2014. DT was also sent to the White House on a multiple wave of resentment focused on alienation and loneliness that he understood how to channel.

In Believers, DF shows where DT won which is not in the wealthy locations (Clinton won the counties that produced 64 percent of the country’s wealth and even the knowledge centres of the Trump states, like the Research Triangle of North Carolina). Trump won by and large most of the poorer counties nationally. Political power quickly divorced from cultural power with business leaders leaving DT’s Advisory Council for fear for their brands following the leader’s outbursts. Big Tech denounced DT’s immigration policies. By July 2017 DT’s approval rating in the under 30 age group was at 20 percent. DT polled better among those earning USD 50,000 and USD 99,000 than with those earning above USD 100,000, “a freakish outcome for a Republican” and interestingly performed better with Latinos and blacks than Romney in 2012 while performing better with union households by any Republican since Reagan II in 1984. I recommend the book by Zita Salerno and Brad Todd “The Great Revolt” to understand better where Trump won and with whom and why.

In Hope, his aptly-named and hopeful final chapter, DF stresses the importance, as we all know, of civic engagement – in the case of one reader, contacting his school board about media literacy, calling state and local legislators on key issues and embarking (for those who need) on programs of self-education in history, politics and philosophical ideals of the Republic…This recipe by the way is very valid globally (not to sing the praises of globalism) so as to counter the excesses and ways of cheap and easy populism. DF is optimistic in spite of the dark days as he sees a rise in Americans seeking “better” news sources and getting more engaged. He focuses on lying as a way of governing, reminiscent of what the Chinese went through with Mao’s reeducation campaign, which sounds eerily current and warps minds (half of DT’s supporters accepted his claim that he in fact had won the popular vote in November 2016 though in contrast 60% of all Americans, a rising figure, now reject his views about his connections to Russia). DF goes on expanding on why there is reason for hope though stressing that “liberty is actually threatened in modern democratic state, not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralising process of corruption and deceit” and that “what happens next is up to you” in what can be “your finest hour as a citizen and an American”.

I believe that it is a great, at times dense, book that needs to be read and closely digested. For my part and if I may say, I think DT does not have many beliefs in anything – He was a Democrat and then a Republican – but he is first and foremost for DT and by and large his business interests, not really having wanted or believing he would get the top job, finding himself thrown into it against all odds, as if the electoral college fluke was on him (as “Fire and Fury”‘s Michael Wolff tells us likely rightly). He clearly does not have a good handle on American and Western values, which has a key impact on his rulership, and is more about the means than the ends in politics, this being amply demonstrated by his primary focus on the message to his core base that is more aimed at reassuring and keeping their votes (“Winning” being the true end – as he never lied and much wrote about it all his life) than about any substance or their future well being. He also may be hard to follow at key times, even for his supporters, like with his latest surrealistic statements for an American President at the Helsinki summit press conference with President Putin, naturally making people wonder what they don’t know about his inner motivations and landing himself deeper into very dangerous constitutional grounds.

As a French-born Transatlantic man, I do not feel yet the “very direct” and daily impact of all the DF-narrated ills of DT’s rulership, even if their effects on the world order as we have known it for 75 years are certainly real and hurtful for all including America, so I clearly would like the sun to shine again on that “city on the hill” so we all have a great, shared weather going forward.

Warmest regards,

Serge

Serge Desprat – 20th July, 2108 (Plymouth, MA)

19-7-18

Dear Partners in thought,

I wanted to depart temporarily from politics and geopolitics to address a topic that is more centred on my professional field with the unbelievable story of Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. EH was the Steve Jobs-like black turtleneck- and slacks-clad blond girl-wonder, Stanford dropout, precocious entrepreneur extraordinaire, female role model who astounded the world of tech and finance with her Theranos start-up while in fact leading the biggest fraud in modern Silicon Valley history. She was a real poster “child” for entrepreneurial success, a genuine medical visionary, having gathered a senior team with years of tech experience and a board comprising leaders of our times. Bad Blood, written by John Carreyrou, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, twice Pulitzer Prize winner and the man who uncovered the EH fraud, is a very well crafted, highly enjoyable account of this unbelievable story, which saw him awarded several top prizes in journalism. Bad Blood is a story of the ambitious (and noble) ends justifying any means and a very personal obsession to succeed at all costs combined with a tyrannic and dishonest approach to management. As an aside, it would make a great movie or mini-series, which I am sure has not escaped Hollywood or Netflix.

When she grew up in DC in an upper middle class family, Elizabeth Holmes matter of factly told her family at age 9-10 that when she would grow up, she’d be a billionaire (and in fact not the President of the U.S., as the family wondered, as he would actually marry her as she would have one billion dollars). She grew up as an intensely competitive child, piling up the little Monopoly buildings on the way and making sure all of her competition was going bust (this early real estate background being puzzling…). As she became a sophomore in one of Houston’s finest high schools, she decided to focus exclusively on her studying, which ultimately led her to Stanford and starting a chemical engineering degree. When there she worked for the lab of famed Engineering Department head, Channing Robertson, assisting one of her first future Theranos employees, Shaunak Roy, who was concluding a PhD. When her father asked EH at Christmas dinner that year if she thought of pursuing a PhD programme, she responded: “No Dad, I am not interested in getting a PhD, I want to make money”. She dropped out of Stanford in 2003 at age 19, after one year, (breaking up with her freshman boyfriend, telling him she would have no time for him going forward) having decided to found Theranos and work on a revolutionary and patented while at Stanford blood-testing patch which could not only identify diseases but would cure them, something she wisely reduced to simple patch-less micro-fluidic testing so drug companies could in turn benefit from a more time- and cost-efficient means of developing their own products. Very few Silicon Valley actors and observers had run into such an ambitious individual before, indeed reminding them of the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

EH, who possessed an incredible charisma and great, unblinking-eyed, convincing powers even at a very young age, raised initial capital (USD 6 m) from leading venture capital veterans whom she had been exposed to (like Tim Draper from famed Valley DFJ, Larry Elison from Oracle and his early 70s backer, financier Donald L. Lucas, who also became Chairman of the Board and others) and family, gathering around her a first class senior team with years of experience gained at IBM, Intel and Panasonic and having Channing Robertson on the Board. The first problem arose in 2006, three years on and at an impressive valuation of USD 165m post third round, when her CFO of eight months, who kind of worked on trust, started to query the validity of Theranos’s testing methods after a trip of EH and team to Novartis in Switzerland when the pharma company became very impressed with Theranos and its main product, wanting to secure a financial arrangement to develop a project together. As the CFO, who was responsible for upbeat sales forecasts based on product and client development, was becoming increasingly worried that investors might be misled through less than above-the-board testing demonstrations, he decided to confront EH at one of their regular meetings. EH told her CFO that there had been indeed a few hick ups with testing processes thus making the team have a ready made one just to use with investors and partners so they could avoid disappointing expectations. She also promptly added that he was not a team player and that he should leave right now – and not only the room (he would disappear, other staff speculating as to why, some embezzlement story floating around in his wake).

EH went on a campaign describing the future of preventive medicine in which drugs would be specifically tailored to individual needs thanks to Theranos’s blood- monitoring technology, stating that Theranos could eliminate 100,000 American deaths a year from adverse drug reactions. She started focusing on using as little blood as possible and avoiding needles in her experiments, partly as a long-lasting phobia and what would become a company trademark. As 2006 went on, she raised another USD 9m for a second round or so-called Series B and USD 32 m from a Series C round. While EH had received no medical or scientific training, she had developed a great vision and was able to sell it. In the summer of 2007, she took her admiration for Apple and Steve Jobs a step further, hiring several of Apple’s employees to work for Theranos, especially in the design area, including Ana Arriola who became its Chief Design Architect. Ana started also to change the look of EH and her wide gray pantsuits and Christmas sweaters to the black outfit that quickly became her trademark in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile the company kept moving forward, leaving East Palo Alto of ill repute to set up shop on the right side of the tracks.

Theranos was not just a tale of fraud. Its management culture was one of tyranny, fear and dishonesty prompted by the imperative need to keep dark secrets, with staff being fired through what could be seen as an ever revolving door policy enforced by EH (and later boyfriend and Executive Chairman, Ramesh Balwani, a.k.a. Sunny, a successful Bombay-born Valley entrepreneur, 20 year+ EH’s senior who acted after 2009 as the top enforcer at Theranos with a personal focus on staff timesheets and productivity). No senior staff could stay very long at Theranos, willingly or not, the former through crisis of conscience, the latter though periodic purges. Following the CFO, the heads of engineering, chemistry, marketing, sales, design, IT as well as the general counsel and many in their teams would be fired either as they were perceived as not loyal enough or actually because they asked too many questions about the validity of the testing processes at Theranos. EH demanded absolute loyalty from staff, this feature being an overriding quality. She would have files “built” on leaving employees, insist on the strictest belt-and-braces non-disclosure agreements and would ask her IT team to control all staff communication and ensure they knew what they were doing at all time, also making sure dinner was brought on-site so they would only leave by 10 pm every day and thus worked longer hours. Early board members like Avie Tevanian, one of Steve Jobs friends since NeXT decided to leave, having greatly supported the company, after legal threats from Theranos following his incessant questioning, including with true believer Chairman Lucas of how the company really operated. EH showed a renewed intensity in developing the business asking her engineering team to work 24-7 (which was turned down by her engineering head to his latter sorrow) and making teams compete against each other, without sharing information, so she could be the only one to have the full picture. Departments were not working together, operating in tight silos officially to enhance security, with the sales team never seeing any testing validation data before they would market the product. Paranoia was running high as EH and Sunny were strong believers in that Laboratories of America and Quest Diagnostic, the leading American lab rivals, would stop at nothing to undermine Theranos, while they barely noticed it at the time. So focused on speed to market she was, she even hired a competing engineering team to ensure that progress went faster, which it did, resulting in the head of her first team and his entire staff to be asked to leave. EH slept four hours a night, popping chocolate-coated coffee beans during the day. In August 2007, she went after former and current key employees who wanted to set up a company of their own (albeit for the veterinarian segment, judged easier) under license of the company technology, pursuing them in court and showing her extreme care for the company’ proprietary information or, as it turned out, to protect the secret of the viability of Theranos to develop a reliable testing process. Finally, while not disclosing her relationship with her number two, Sunny, she displayed tone-deaf nepotism by hiring her brother, Christian, as director of product management together with three of his Duke fraternity brothers (all aptly named “The Frat Pack”), the group benefiting from access to EH and Sunny well beyond their seniority, essentially based on the key feature of total loyalty. This approach was also combined with a pervasive lack of empathy as shown when a depressed (due to his qualms with the Theranos culture) and (as such) recently demoted head of chemistry committed suicide and EH’s first reaction was to have the in house counsel to ask his widow to send back his laptop and privileged information/or made sure she destroyed them (incidentally first concealing the death from most staff and then allowing the rumour that the employee had died from a cancer relapse).

While many discussions, leading to funding agreements with Big Pharma such as Astra Zeneca, Novartis, Pfizer or J&J entailed early testing and validation projects which in the end fizzled out by lack of concrete results, EH focused on the leaders of the grocery retail sector with Walgreens and Safeway, both old world companies that needed to reboot growth. While EH was able to enter into two potential exclusive agreements with both – Walgreens for supermarkets and Safeway for drugstores – she did not let them and their consultants (especially Walgreens’ Collaborative, a consulting firm whose task initially was to vet Theranos’ testing processes) to even have a look at their lab, which was not ready for inspection as not fully developed. Unbelievably the senior management of both Walgreens (led by Dr. J, a very colourful head of innovation and true believer in EH) and Safeway (with its CEO also swayed by EH) were too enthusiastic for a new future via healthcare to risk losing the Theranos opportunity by probing too closely testing processes at Theranos and alienating EH. Walgreens had a bad case of FoMO (Fear of Missing an Opportunity) fearing that CVS would then replace them while Safeway was pressured by stock market analysts to find a fast way to grow a stagnating business. In the end both companies came up short and in the case of Safeway with USD 250m in non-existant blood testing revenues as well as USD 100 m of store redesign costs when they set up state of the art, quasi-luxury in-house clinics throughout 2012. Theranos could not show their mini-labs or lab to any parent as all of their equipment was straight from Chicago’s Abbott Laboratories, Germany’s Siemens and Italy’s DiaSorin. Trying parallel expansion routes, EH also met four star General James Mattis in 2011, now Secretary of Defense, then the Head of U.S. Central Command to explore how Theranos could assist finger pricking blood testing to help diagnosing and helping wounded soldiers in the Afghan war theatre, a concept that was immediately strongly supported by Mattis. The discussions with the military bogged down on regulatory matters in spite of EH trying to sway the course of events her way against the views of the military medical leadership and going straight back to Mattis, the latter who retired shortly thereafter, making the project vanish without much internal support (incidentally this military link was often mentioned by EH to various parties, including her leading ad agency of past Apple glory, who had a contract of USD 6m a year, and whose team thought that this small start-up, an unusual client, was funded by the Pentagon and also understood why secrecy explained they could not have access to reports supporting its scientific claims).

On 7th September, 2013, the WSJ did a front page Weekend piece on EH and Theranos right at the time of the official commercial launch of Theranos (ten years after its set-up!) with the first wellness center cum blood testing facility installed in the Walgreens store in Palo Alto as a prelude to nationwide roll-up to be started in sunny Phoenix. Both events would be artfully used to validate the product as EH was deciding to go for another, this time very meaningful, fundraise that would value the privately-held company at USD 6 bn (with some investors then participating when they had turned down the opportunity at USD 40 m). We see two founding partners of a San Francisco hedge fund being wheeled in to a meeting with EH and Sunny, in the Theranos building, going through a security team supervised by Mattis’s connection, Jim Rivera, former head of security at the Pentagon, and being escorted everywhere including to the restroom, still with some off-limit areas like the lab facilities (for some good reasons that it is not yet functional). One of the key deciding factors for investors in addition to EH’s clear visionary leadership and top salesmanship, combined with Theranos’s supposed scientific accomplishments, is the unquestionable quality of its board of directors. In recent years, EH managed to reshuffle her board, inviting 92 year old George Schultz, former secretary of state to Ronald Reagan (who concluded the September 2013 WSJ article comparing EH to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs), James Mattis following his retirement from the Army earlier that year, Henry Kissinger, former secretary of defence William Perry, former senate armed services committee chairman Sam Nunn and former navy admiral Gary Roughead. It would be hard not to be impressed with such a display of former senior officials (all fellows at the Hoover Institution at Stanford) who clearly must have done their homework on Theranos before lending their name and time as Board members in exchange for grants of stock (incidentally further validating the links of Theranos with the defense establishment). Sadly target investors were shown financial projections that were five to twelvefold higher than internal projections, something that would never cross their minds with such a great overall story, amazing leadership, prestigious board and top legal advisers, including famed David Boies, keeping watch. In February 2014, the company was valued at USD 10 bn with EH owning slightly more than half of it.

The first serious potential blow to EH and the company came from an unexpected quarter – from a young Stanford graduate recently hired named Tyler whose grandfather was…George Shultz. Tyler had grown suspicious of the quality of the mini-lab and testing processes at Theranos, had met with EH who placated him far more she would have with another employee, sending him to recheck with more senior staff. When Tyler was still not convinced, having had exchanges with the New York Health Department to double check matters, he went to his grandfather who thought EH would explain everything, which in turn was left to Sunny in an unusually less blunt but still venomous way, asking for an apology from Tyler, who in turn decided to quit. Amazingly, EH contacted George Shultz asking for Tyler to stop his vendetta “or else”, a message that was conveyed to him as he was still in the company’s parking lot by his own mother, with George still “doting” on EH, thinking he was wrong on Theranos. Meanwhile the specialist printed media were sending EH to stardom with Fortune’s article entitled “This CEO is Out for Blood” in its 12th June 2014 issue, the new valuation of the company, the ascetic and reclusive profile, and the repeated comparisons of EH to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Forbes followed suit with an article entitled “Bloody Amazing” and pronouncing EH as the youngest woman to become a self-made billionaire, being pictured in Forbes 400, the issue showing the wealthiest Americans. Other articles on EH followed with USA Today, Inc., Fast Company and Glamour with NPR, Fox Business, CNBC, CNN and CBS News offering extended coverage of the new Valley girl wonder. EH was becoming truly unassailable. She was the recipient of the Horatio Alger Award with Time Magazine naming her one of the top 100 most influential people in the world. President Obama made her a U.S. Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship and Harvard Medical School a fellow. She had the right profile that attracted all the attention of the time, something that she may not have looked for but she thoroughly enjoyed, judging from the frequency of her rock star interviews. What differentiated her from Marissa Meyer or Sheryl Sandberg was that EH had been a tech “founder” billionaire. From ascetic and reclusive, EH went quickly to the status of “ubiquitous celebrity”. She quickly changed her habits and image, hiring her top advertising agent to work as the company’s Chief Creative Officer on her new image and that of Theranos.

The demise of EH and Theranos was dated February 2015 when John Carreyrou, an investigative journalist at the WSJ, twice Pulitzer Prize winner and the subsequent author of our book, began to look into the whole story. The lack of peer reviewed data mentioned in more recent and inquisitive The New Yorker article seemed very suspect to him while the process as described by EH did not have the ring of a scientist or medical expert that she could not actually be and derided as “comically vague” by the magazine. He went back to the WSJ piece of seventeen months earlier, realising the impact it had had on EH’s image, company’s achievements and subsequent meteoric fundraising. He contacted various former company employees and individuals involved with Theranos, getting the impression that the technology just was not working as the world thought. Most former employees were obviously worried by their non-disclosure agreements and requested anonymity which was given. JC established very quickly through Alan Beam, the former head of the lab, all the testing process problems as if the flood of information had waited to erupt for too long even if the technical aspects required time to be digested. Management culture, style and the role of Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were particularly addressed by JC’ interviewees, with some focus on the romantic relationship between the number one and number two at the company, all the while the New Yorker article had portrayed EH as a single whom the Kissingers had tried to fix up on dates, showing a lack of forthrightness with her board that might hide other key matters. Tyler Shultz was particularly eager to talk to JC, believing that in end his grandfather would do the right thing. So was Rochelle Gibbons, the widow of Ian Gibbons, the former head of chemistry who committed suicide. And increasingly, others. As it is like a detective story that is enjoyable to discover I will let you taste personally the ways JC uncovered the fraud and its many legal developments which ultimately led on 14th March 2018 to the SEC charging Theranos, EH and Sunny with “conducting an elaborate years-long fraud”. In order to resolve the agency’s civil charges, EH was forced to relinquish her voting control over Theranos, give back a substantial share of her stockholding and pay a USD 500,000 penalty, agreeing not to be a member of any public company for ten years. The SEC sued Sunny in California, having been unable to reach a settlement wth him. This set of civil remedies may seem little in relation to the magnitude of the fraud that was committed though, post-pool publication, EH and Sunny have been charged with Federal wire fraud (criminal charge) in relation to defrauding investors and the Federal Government by the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California on 16th June, 2018, paving the way to potential jail time that would potentially and ultimately match the immensity of the fraud.

The most remarkable feature in this story of fraud is that it was a fraud that was orchestrated and hidden for so long and that EH was able in the meantime to attract so many talents as staff and board members without any problem and in spite of a terrible work environment and management culture. One should also remember that, while devoid of any formal medical or scientific training, EH was indeed a talented individual having identified a segment where she wanted to do good and make money as an entrepreneur, something that should not be totally forgotten. When EH started Theranos , another young dropout from Harvard this time, was also making history: Mark Zuckerberg. He would change the world, as EH wanted, but would have to deal with hubris and serious issues, prompting some drastic personal and corporate adjustments, later. Theranos is also one of the most recent and biggest story of “vaporware” or “fake-it-until-you-make it” culture that is on and off prevalent in Silicon Valley. There will be may books and studies focused on EH to ascertain whether she was under the spell of Sunny or a real sociopath having created a corporate hell on earth, as it may be more likely, who took all the decisions as she did, controlling 97% of the voting rights of the company as of late 2013, rendering the board pointless in terms of decision-making if only as counterweight.

One of the main questions will remain why nothing could be done to stop that fraud earlier even if and when many tried to blow the whistle and more importantly how and why so many senior personalities enabled it by being true believers, especially among short-sighted potential partners who needed solution for their own futures and most certainly heavyweights at the board level. Finally the Theranos story is a story of Big Tech – with a health care focus that indeed lacked the adequate tech – (which the company could have been a leader of and was briefly to some extent) and its impact on our lives and society, changing it for the better and for the worse, depending where one looks. On this Big Tech evolution I recommend that you read regularly the great articles of Rana Foroohar from the FT, today one of the best journalists and writers dealing with the many implications of tech for us. Let’s remember that it is an investigative journalist who uncovered the Theranos fraud.

Incredible story of our times. Bad Blood is a book that should be read also as it is linked to “who we are” and why, even if we are, some of us, awed by tech wonders and their makers, we need to ensure that the creation of dreams and especially staggering wealth does not involve fraud and follows best practices and behaviour, lest we see other Theranos or Uber older formula arise…It is also a question of values and about what kind of society we wish to be and our children to grow and believe in.

I dedicate this book note to Kris, a brother and a great banker, who goes through tough times and I love. Life is short and what differentiates the greats is their care.

Now I have a question: Who’s going to play EH in the movie?

Warmest regards

Serge

Serge Desprat 19th July, 2018 (Martha’s Vineyard, MA)

11-7-18

Dear Partners in thought,

“A true American hero” is how John McCain is most described, increasingly so and this for many reasons. It may look excessive if not Hollywood-like, except that it’s not. America has always been a country of exception – indeed the indispensable country – often with individuals of exception at its helm, not all running it but always contributing to its destiny. John McCain is one of them and “The Restless Wave” his testimony, a book that stresses his longlasting drive I recommend reading for those who like great stories and believe in a world ran by our traditional Western liberal, not to say American, values. McCain is emblematic of a disappearing specie in our times which is that of the moderate Republican, a value- based internationalist, free trader, strong on defense and pro-capitalist individual (incidentally my political home, assuming I were to hold a U.S. passport).

The son and grandson of two Admirals (his grandfather was on the deck of the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered), McCain was nevertheless not predestined to greatness (in his very own words), having followed his recent forebears’s footsteps to Annapolis, where he graduated at the bottom of his class. We know that the Vietnam war and his extremely tough prisoner experience changed everything, later leading to a career in the U.S. Senate as first, junior, then senior, moderate, Republican Senator for the State of Arizona. This book, while reminiscing about the key aspects of his whole career and persona is really more focused on the period following his defeat against Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential elections. McCain could have been President if not for the wind of history bringing in the first African American President and a dubious choice of running mate, which he still supports, though being aware of its weaknesses. The book is well structured and its chapters focus on key topics and people having marked America and McCain very directly over the last ten years, which I will cover broadly. After reading this book, if there was an adjective to describe McCain across the aisles, it would be “honorable” and that would be a major understatement.

In No Surrender and Country First, MacCain discusses the 2008 campaign and the men and women involved in it, among whom, also his brief primary rival, the lawyer- turned actor-turned U.S. Senator Fred Thompson (a tall, massive, easily recognisable Law & Order character, always projecting the requisite gravitas that would get him later to the U.S. Senate). While he campaigned for two years, McCain, while running, also fulfilled his duties as a U.S. Senator, his main focus at the time being supporting the Iraq surge which was unpopular and risking costing him dearly in the Republican primary where Mitt Romney, the ex-Bain Capital founder, former Governor of Massachusetts and future 2012 nominee, was his main rival then. We see him with his friend Senator Lindsay Graham of Florida (often a duo that would rise against DT’s policies years later) in Iraq. There is a notable ceremony of naturalisation of Hispanic immigrants, often illegal, who were fighting within the U.S. forces in Iraq. We see a couple of boots representing two dead soldiers that had made the ultimate sacrifice with General David Petraeus, the Roman legion strategist and fighter, first in class at West Point and the figurehead of the surge, saying: “They died serving a country that was not yet theirs”. McCain wishing “that every American who out of ignorance or worse curses immigrants as criminals or a drain on the country’s resources or on our “culture” could have been there”, wanting “them to know that immigrants many of them having entered the country illegally, are making sacrifices for Americans that many Americans would not make for them”. Going back to the race and the primary he finally secures, McCain goes into his strategy of running a McCain-Libermann ticket, with Joe Lieberman, an independent, formerly Democratic Senator, before going for Sarah Palin, whom he will select as running mate, going in great details to explain the rationale for it. McCain knows early on Obama’s strong competitive advantages based on his age, image of change at so many levels and comparative party positioning though he bets on his experience and foreign policy acumen. The polls are close but the Lehman Brothers collapse changes everything, putting Obama in the lead and making the McCain team not expecting miracles. In addition he has to fight some of his more extreme supporters’ racial slurs against Obama and defend responses that are not strong enough from him and his team, assuming they were obvious to start with. His team feels outspent, out-advertised and out-organised, expecting to lose which they do on election day. There is a feeling that, while he does not like to lose (who does?) he was stoically ready for it.

About Us is about the formal breach of American ideals in the fight against terrorism in the aftermath of 9-11. While having declared on 9-12 that “We are coming. God may have mercy on you, but we won’t”, McCain discusses the extreme measures taken since late 2001 to respond to the losses of 3,000 lives at The World Trade Center in NY, including the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT) or torture in an other name and the dilemma counter-terrorists and the military face in defending the U.S. from further attacks. McCain feels strongly it is wrong politically, intellectually and morally to torture terrorists and not applying the Geneva Convention to these enemy combatants, while branches of the U.S. government feel it can apply EIT to seized terrorists as they are not signatories to any convention. McCain believes that in doing so the application of EIT openly damages the interests, reputation and interests of the U.S. globally. We go through various cases of EIT application, including the famous one in relation to the Abu Ghraib Confinement Center. McCain calls on all Americans to live America’s ideals to remember that “we are always Americans, and different, stronger and better than those individual who wish to destroy us”. Once again, “the moral values and integrity of our nation, and the long, difficult, fraught history to uphold them at home and abroad, are the test of every American generation”. This chapter is the first of a few to focus on values, that define McCain. It is also a very hard issue to deal with, remembering 9-11 and its trauma (We all have very personal ways and memories to relate to 9-11 and the end of an era; I worked briefly on the 93rd floor of the South Tower in 1987). It is definitely a problem of conscience though I can also hear the voices in the trenches of the Len and women who protect us, doing what we don’t and don’t want to know, stressing that the end justifies the means and that in front of the most abject terror, war can only be total.

In the Company of Heroes deals with McCain’s natural, close, involvement with the U.S. troops on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq (he will have gone more to Afghanistan) and his admiration for the military leadership and tactical brilliance of Generals Petraeus and Odierno as well as the new ways to fight insurgency led by “Team of Teams”‘ General McChrystal, the latter who was removed from command by President Obama following the ill-famous Rolling Stones interview on how the U.S. could win the war in Afghanistan, outside the traditional chain of command. It is palpable that McCain relates vividly to these soldiers away from home, fighting for their country as he did in another life. Arab Spring unsurprisingly covers the seismic regional power shifts initially triggered by the self-immolation of Tunisian fruit trader Mohamed Bouazizi that was followed by home-made leadership and regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, the dreadful civil war in Syria and the internationally-led elimination of Muammar Qaddafi and his regime in Lybia. McCain goes in detail about each key zone of change and spends time on the attack of the Benghazi mission resulting in the death of Special Envoy Christopher Steven, whom he knew and admired for his “all in” trademark attitude, that would have long repercussions including in the campaign of the 2016 presidential elections. McCain also covers in detail the Syrian conflict and its many vivid ramifications in terms of migrations and political and human consequences within the EU. In Fighting the Good Fight (with and against Ted Kennedy), McCain focuses on immigration, legal and illegal, and narrates his many bill efforts and working most of the time with the senior Senator of Massachusetts to craft bipartisanship solutions until his death from brain cancer in 2009. It is also about the old bipartisanship, of the kind I mentioned in “The Hellfire Club” among veterans, even if Ted (another “great” I was fortunate to meet in 1982 in Boston) was not. Then comes Russia and Putin, the latter’s McCain’s primary foe in Nyet (know thine enemy) where he goes through the change in relationship with the Kremlin since the advent of President Putin and a gradually more nationalistic foreign policy in the mid-eighties, focusing on Georgia and the slow descent to war as well as the Magnitsky Act and its related sanctions following the death in jail of Russia-based asset manager Hermitage’s Bill Browder’s lawyer. As a sequel, McCain covers in Know Thyself (defending the West) the invasion of Crimea and the Ukraine conflict in Kiev and in the east, the killing of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, as well as the attempts to destabilise Montenegro following its desire to join NATO and the EU. As MacCain concludes: “China is the challenge of the century but Putin is the clear and present danger…”. In deference to my Russian friends and while Russia has had a very unilateral, nationalistic, foreign policy, at times using the widest range of tools at its disposal to compensate for its relative strength status, one should never forget the Russian trauma associated with the loss of empire, the way it may not have been treated afterwards and the utter need for respect as a key international player. While being aware of McCain’s rationale, there may indeed be merits in engaging with Russia so as to gradually make it change its approach and perceptions in order to work with her in the concert of nations. In this respect, events like the World Cup, an organisational and sporting success for Russia may be one the early steps toward normalisation, even if the hybrid war may perdure for a while as my expert friend Dmitri Trenin recently wrote for the famed Carnegie Moscow Center.

In Part of the Main (American Exceptionalism) is a key chapter. McCain quotes Saint Exupery, the famed author of The Little Prince, expressing during WWII when flying with U.S. forces, the inextricable link between American interests and the global progress of American ideals. McCain believes that the U.S. has a special responsibility to champion human rights “in all places, for all people, at all times”. Because “it is who we are” (incidentally, I used that one often lately). He is not shy of proclaiming: “I am a democratic internationalist, a proud one and I have been all my life”. He goes on to focus on Burma and his involvement in making changes happen in that country ruled by the military.

Always respecting Obama as a man and a President, he briefly mentions his foreign policy record. He defended the Libyan intervention but was appalled at too early a withdrawal on the ground of avoiding another Iraq quagmire, coining the “leading from behind” approach. He was angered by the refusal to provide Kiev with weapons to protect its sovereignty. He was sad when the Obama administration did not uphold the red line after the use of chemical weapons in Syria, naming it the biggest mistake of his presidency, hurting American interests and values. While he never doubted Obama’s sincerity, he regretted that Obama did not make the hard calls when needed, confounding allies, encouraging enemies and having many good people stranded, starting an American leadership withdrawal in fact if not in name. However McCain never doubted that Obama shared the 75 year old bipartisan consensus that American leadership of the free world was a moral obligation and a practical necessity.

While discussing American exceptionalism, McCain starts clearly distancing himself from DT (even if he would vote for some of his legislative proposals like the tax cuts but not others like the repeal of Obamacare). McCain clearly stresses how appalled he is about DT’s style in communication and overall tactics and his disdain for American values, the global progress of democracy and the rule of law abroad. He finds disturbing DT’s “lack of empathy for refugees, innocent, persecuted, desperate men, women and children” and finds abhorrent his mention of welfare or terrorism being for him their only reasons to come to America. He cannot condone DT’s absence of interest in the moral compass of world leaders and their regimes. He lambasts DT’s attacks on free media and his use of “fake news to discredit unflattering news stories. He cannot stand DT’s showing with praise the world’s worst tyrants. His criticism goes far beyond DT, when he attacks former State Secretary Rex Tillerson who warned State Department employees not to condition relations with nations “too heavily” on their adoption of values “we’ve come to after a long history of our own” (to his credit, RT’s VMI Commencement address last May, heavily reported, shows his regrets and clear adherence to traditional American values). There is no doubt that McCain is appalled at the treatment by DT of allies, be it in relation to NATO, trade or the G7, regardless of the necessary changes that the U.S. may wish in striking more balenced relationships. There is a long, emotional address to the U.S. Senate that MacCain gave on the occasion of the health care debate that transcends it, focused on the role of the Senate itself, going to the core of American history and values, which is particularly moving in our challenging times. This speech also underpins the need for enhanced civility and cooperation in politics and society, two features which have been seriously damaged lately, also given the example provided by those who should lead by example at the top.

McCain is fighting brain cancer, knowing the odds, but keeping hope that he will be around for a bit longer to contribute a few more times. (If I may say, even if mine was non-cancerous, I relate more than others to the unfairness of the affliction and the powerlessness attached to it, feeling his approach all the more admirable). He looks forward and is simply grateful. Grateful for 50 years of service to his country and having lived so long – he is 81 -, contributing so much. I am sure this American hero knows that tough times, also for countries, don’t last, and that tough countries do. In one sign of control over his own destiny, he sent the clear message to DT that he should not attend his funeral. After you have read his book, you will feel that McCain, whom you would have liked to have known more earlier, whilst being an American hero, is also like founding father Thomas Paine, a citizen of the world.

Merci, Monsieur McCain.

Warmest regards,

Serge

PS: If I may I would like to provide you with a tailored excerpt of the powerful words of his prologue. Written only a few years ago, they would have seemed mundane, if not quaint. Written in 2018, they sound reminiscent of a distant golden era while pushing us to go back to it.

(America is) “the most wondrous land on earth, indeed. What a privilege it is to serve this big, boisterous, brawling, intemperate, striving, daring, beautiful, bountiful, brave, magnificent country. With all our flaws, all our mistakes, with all the frailties of human nature as much on display as our virtues, with all the rancor and anger of our politics, we are blessed. We are living in the land of the free, the land where anything is possible, the land of the immigrant’s dream, the land with the storied past forgotten in the rush to the imagined future, the land that repairs and reinvents itself, the land where a person can escape the consequences of a self-centred youth and know the satisfaction of sacrificing for an ideal, where you can go from aimless rebellion to a noble cause and from the bottom of your class to your party’s nomination for President.

We are blessed, and in turn, we have been a blessing to humanity. The world order we have built from the ashes of world war, and that we defend to this day, has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. This wondrous land shared its treasures and ideals and shed its blood to help make another, better, world…We have sought to make the world more stable and secure, not just for our own society…To fear the world we have organised and led for three- quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is unpatriotic. American nationalism isn’t the same as in other countries. It isn’t nativist or imperial or xenophobic, or it shouldn’t be. Those attachments belong with other tired dogma that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

We live in a land made from ideals, not blood and soil. We are custodians of these ideals at home, and their champions abroad. We have done great good in the world because we believed our ideals are the natural aspirations of all mankind, and that the principles, rules and alliances of the international order that we superintended would improve the prosperity and security of all who joined with us. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as well. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we let other powers assume our leadership role, powers that reject our values and resent our influence. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.

All is said.

Serge Desprat – 11 July, 2018 (Boston)

3-7-18

Dear Partners in thought,

As we are now well into the summer, I decided to turn yet again to the world of novels which has always provided us with a way to escape, a feeling that is very welcome.

I wanted to tell you about “The Hellfire Club” by Jake Tapper, the very Jake from CNN’s State of the Union. This novel has nothing to do with today’s politics (directly at least, but indirectly who knows?) so friends of Fox News and the like can enjoy a break without the fear of so-called liberal and radical fake news. The action takes place in the DC of the 1950s where America and its leadership were rebuilding the world and where the “swamp” we hear about was getting perfected. Whist a novel all the protagonists and general background are real and the research very thorough. As an aside, Jake could easily be a main character with his Gary Cooper’s 1950s good, clean, looks (No, I am not gay).

We are in 1954 and Joe McCarthy, working with Bob Kennedy (indeed, how do we forget), is at his fifth year of eradicating the red threat from all walks of American life, having no qualms of breaking careers and doing away with otherwise good people. We run into Joe Alsop as well as Richard and Patricia Nixon, him the current VP and of course Ike, the D Day mastermind, who has been in the White House for two years. We have a chat with LBJ then Senate minority leader and running Texas for the Democrats, in a time, long ago, when they did. The hero is Charlie Everett Marder, a Columbia academic, specialist of the Founding Fathers, turned Republican congressman when asked to take up a seat after his predecessor died in mysterious circumstances (we know something is afoot early on). Like many of his peers he is a war veteran who saw the horrors of the former world conflict, him in France. He is married to Margaret, a very independent lady, zoologist by trade, whom he met in college and was not just studying “for her Mrs. degree” to borrow from a well-know line of the times. He is an idealist do-gooder and wishes to change things for the better, but learning fast he has to compromise to survive and still matters in his new career in DC.

Bipartisanship is a reality in American politics then, mainly through weekly poker games among veterans that form a class transcending parties and where policies are promoted or killed in a late night, smoke-filled, atmosphere of camaraderie forged on the battlefields of Asia or Europe. As an observer says: “It’s both reassuring and disconcerting to see them all friendly-like” but the bond is there nearly ten years after the war as they share humble memories, knowing that their main achievement was to survive. They all drink like fish (“Political life seems to require new levels of drinking”) as if alcohol was a fully accepted cement of policy- making. We witness the first black congressmen – again two veteran Tuskegee airmen – at a time when the civil rights movement is not yet at full speed. Clubs rule the day, some more known that others like the Alfalfa or the Gridiron, some far more obscure, not to say secret like the Hellfire Club that has its roots in 17th century England and an infamous history of debauchery by its then aristocratic members. Fights take place when companies that manufactured military goods during the last war wish to get funding from the Appropriations Committee in an effort led by its prominent Chairman and a fight ensues, led by Estes Kefauver, a leading Democratic Senator (who – trivia time – won the New Hampshire primary in 1952 before being sidelined). Investigations are launched into the pernicious effect of comic books on the American youth. We learn that a boy thought he was a super hero and could fly). It is reminiscent of today’s articles and the young’s (and no so young’s) addiction to their iPhone. In a famous line, we learn that via a book pushed by the crusaders that “Batman and Robin were like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. Superman was a fascist, Wonder Woman a lesbian dominatrix”. Good people do prevail as in all good novels that wish to et us to read more.

It is America at its best (with funny quirks) and at times worst – even then – running the world, setting up the Western Alliance, telling us why it makes sense. And I bought it. And still believe in it.

As it is a novel I shall stop here and not return like MacArthur. Enjoy this great book.

Warmest regards,

Serge

Serge Desprat- July 2018 (Paris)

15-6-18

Dear Partners in thought,

I was hesitant to comment on “The President is Missing” from James Patterson and Bill Clinton as I did not want to stray from my core initiative, not to say mission. However I thought that when a former American President and a leading thriller writer band together, there might be a message or two to be found, especially in our troubled times. The book is clearly a novel but the subject matter, the co-authorship and even the title led me to do a review of sorts, especially at the start of the summer in Prague when a dose of lightness (of being and this time very bearable) is always nice, whatever the prevailing times.

JP and Bill are both displayed as fully-fledged authors on the same cover type font (and unsurprisingly not this time with JP before his “co-author”). I will admit that, yes, I have liked JP’s books ever since “Jack and Jill”, especially those written in the late nineties-early noughts. And even if Anne-Sophie (my very educated and wise wife) takes JP’s books as not real literature as three page chapters in big print don’t pass the test, I always liked JP’s knack for good stories, including his choice of characters, like the famed Alex Cross, even if I tend to agree that he has found a peculiar way to bring the old industrial revolution to penmanship through the use of an ever larger team of writing partners, potentially dampening something on the way. What decided me was the title – “The President is Missing” – that could be taken literally (and indeed one should, while I will respect the plot’s fine prints for better beach times) – but that could also be a tongue in cheek one, probably never admitted (or admissible, though that sounds so much Mueller investigation-like) as it could be argued that the actual President is indeed missing, this in more ways than one. Or maybe is he too much around these days and we would like him to be missing? (but always in good health, in sunny Florida, that is, so there is no unfortunate confusion).

Bill seems to have had a good time working with JP, if we except the book tour when “Monicagate” was brought back unexpectedly to the fore in a TV interview (and JP was on-his-feet swift in his defence or that of the book focus which showed, regardless of any view on the 20 year old matter, some nice and true grit). As an aside, it is an interesting point that we call Bill Clinton Bill while we never call George W Bush (whom we miss too, especially now) George, though I digress. Bill brought in the experience, the kind of which you only get by walking the corridors of the West Wing and projecting that unique track record of having run the greatest show on earth. The book is definitely on top of JP’s writing quality, mixing a great plot with a level of authenticity that can only come from an insider like Bill. Chapters are no longer three pages and while the type font is the same, wording density and quality is way above the usual JP fare. The book at 500+ pages is also much longer than the usual JP productions. It would be interesting to know whether Bill actually did some of the writing though probably not, focusing on contents veracity (in chapter 4, there is an episode mentioning the political demise as a congresswoman of his chief of staff that will make readers knowingly smile at the likely self-deprecating wink).

The President is Jonathan Lincoln Duncan (note Dun-can rings like Clin-ton and the reference to Lincoln, Professor Gaddis’s hedgehog-fox supremo), a former Governor of North Carolina (and not Arkansas) and speaks in the first person, making us feel somehow that he will make it to page 513. The atmosphere feels real which is the least to expect but is especially well rendered in the painting of each scene and the delivery of the characters. There is an effort to depict those senior civil servants with humanity so we know where they come from, how they got there and what makes them tick. The President is very human, a recent widower with a relapsing illness fighting impeachment in his first term. Run of the mill stuff. There is a Martin Sheen’s President Bartlett’s “West Wing” feel to JLD up to the depiction of his personal assistant. We go from crisis to crisis to ceremonial events that shows us the daily life of Presidents with uprisings in Central America, followed by assassination attempts in the Gulf and memorials to fallen soldiers, going back to the Sit Room to oversee a drone strike against a terrorist cell in Yemen and finally night walks without Secret Service detail running into fellow Irak 1 war vets and ex-members of the Big Red One. (note that Hillary was quite supportive of the book as stated in the “thanks” and that JLD met also his wife at law school – UNC at Chapel Hill not Yale – though similarly in the library).

The President is taking the lead to thwart a massive viral cyber attack after his daughter, a grad student at La Sorbonne (excellent choice), is approached with information about the mother of all terrorist plots against the U.S. and a plan to meet her father in DC to tell more. A Turkish cyberterrorist boy wonder looks to be behind the threat though is saved by the President when a Ukrainian hit team targets him in Algeria for elimination, making us and a select congressional committee wonder. An attractive professional Serbian lady sniper in an early stage of pregnancy (very differentiated foe indeed) and her merc team get involved. Ensues a number of intense developments like a shooting at a baseball stadium, car chases along the Capitol area and more shooting, without us and the President still knowing what the threat really is. Then there is a Benedict Arnold in our midst, one of six tested senior officials in the know of the threat, who might have arranged the earlier hits, in cahoots with the terrorists. A foreign power is behind all this, which the ever friendly Mossad tells JLD could be Russia, which does not raise eyebrows. I will not spoil the story anymore, knowing you want me to stop.

The story is well crafted, if only a little bit convoluted. In any case the plot, which is very enjoyable, does not really matter. What does are the messages conveyed by JP & Bill as they are the reason why they banded together so they could stress a few key themes along the way and make them more easily absorbed in the novel format by the widest possible audience.

The main message is raising the awareness of the risk of cyberthreats to our way of life and the need for state of the art cybersecurity (I have to disclose my wife and I are lead investors in a great UK cybersecurity start-up before I go any further (*)). The book provides a crash course on what cyberthreats, phishing and other cyber warfare weapons, tactics and targets are and the nation states and their patriotic proxies that have used that new war tool (some far more than others offensively as is well known – my intent is not to conduct a seminar on cyber warfare – but basically all the leading powers). It is clear that recent years and all the hackings that took place during the last U.S. presidential campaign, posing a risk to the very democratic process, that have been attributed directly and indirectly to Russia, have led JP and Bill to stress the point, all the more as it was close to home for the latter. Richard C. Clarke, the cyber warfare Czar under four Presidents was consulted for insider accuracy (read his 2010 Cyber War, which is non-fiction but reads like a novel). The timing of the book ahead of critical November mid-term elections at a challenging time for America is no coincidence. Cyber warfare is a major and exponential threat to our societies as we rely increasingly on technology and thus make ourselves, our key infrastructures and our very democratic process unwittingly weaker and asymmetrical targets in the process.

The book has also other messages which are peppered along with quite a few depictions of emblematic scenes of daily American life (e.g. on one of his “nights out” in the Capitol area, JLD witnesses an African American teenager being forcibly arrested by two police officers and has a very balanced thought he shares with us) and sayings that warn of newer risks and stress these old Western liberal values:

• “What happened to factual down-the-middle reporting?”
• “We can’t survive without a free press.”
• “We’re using modern technology to revert to primitive kinds of human relations. The media knows what sells – conflict and divisions. It’s all quick and easy. All too often anger works better than answers; resentment better than reason; emotion trumps (hm, hm – me here) evidence.”

There is a beautiful address to the joint session of Congress from JLD that encapsulates what America is and its values as we grew up to know them, that could have been given by Bill or by Ronald Reagan for that matter as it transcends partisanship and is the best summary of why Bill and JP became a band of brothers on this one occasion.

Going back to Western values, one of the common mistakes voters make when tempted by the sirens of populism is to forget the things that actually work in their lives. It is a case of taking things for granted and gradually forgetting about them, if only to regret them when the consequences of their action or inaction leads to the disappearance of key things and rights that seemed inalienable. What is key in a book like JP’s & Bill’s is also as much its messages as its sheer existence and the fact that we came to a point in our Western world when we can freely read a novel very close to the topic and actors of national leadership without suffering censorship. We actually do not think about it but that right was made possible because others fought for it, hence our duty to defend the values upon which that right was built. Nothing lasts forever if not protected and challenging times, like ours, should show that these rights and values are indeed eminently fragile.

One of the memorable quotes in the book, on its last page, comes from Ben Franklin when asked after the Constitutional Convention what kind of government the founders had given to the nascent America. His reply: “A republic, if you can keep it”.

Warmest regards,

Serge

(*): Just for fun, information and to inject some personal angle on the core topic of the novel: http://www.cyberessentialsdirect.com

Serge Desprat- 15th June, 2018 (Boston)

14-6-18

Dear Partners in thought,

I would like to tell you about a wonderful book published in 2015 as it directly and indirectly deals with many key subjects we regularly cover, which is the famed “In Defense of a Liberal Education” by Fareed Zakaria. This book and his author are actually emblematic of major issues facing us today such as immigration, globalisation, meritocracy and what – and implicitly where – we (well, mostly but not only, our kids) should study in an age focused on securing jobs and lives constantly redefined by the tech revolution.

Fareed Zakaria was born and raised in Mumbai in a Muslim family (a fact not so well-known – he is secular and non-practising), educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. Then he came to America in 1982, having been accepted at Yale (his older brother, Arshad, had gone to Harvard a few years earlier – they never played the Game). He was a President of the Yale Political Union and a member of Scroll & Keys society (He was actually quite politically conservative there while considering himself a centrist today). He went on to do a PhD in Government at Harvard (political sciences in the local lingo) studying under Samuel Huntington (well-known for “The Clash of Civilisations” in 1993) and Stanley Hoffman, the latter a great Vienna-born immigrant and European Affairs guru I mentioned in my brief 1982 dealings with. Interestingly Fareed eventually would help set up the Yale-NUS program (National University of Singapore) creating a strong Asian presence for Yale and mixing the best of both worlds (*). At age 28, he became the Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs, the Bible of the Council of Foreign Relations, which as you know, has been the NY-based establishment beacon of American foreign policy-makers for decades. Today, while being known for his CNN work (see below), he also has a weekly column in the Washington Post (Go see “The Post” with Streep and Hanks by the way) and has contributed to Newsweek, The Times and the Atlantic Monthly. Fareed is indeed a most accomplished chap and a very professional one too, also oozing balance and modesty. He is the embodiment of the American dream and why immigration, a pillar of American success, is key to the continued growth of the indispensable country.

Fareed is the “trailblazer” representative of the rising Asian-American class, many of whom, still very often not-American born, have excelled at integration and literally invaded Ivy League world and the likes (I was at the Yale Commencement Ceremony last May and had a feeling New Haven, CT was a suburbs of Singapore). Typically only 10-11% of college classes of Harvard, Yale and Princeton are comprising foreigners but the proportion of Asian-Americans far exceeds that number today, based obviously on merit that cannot be ignored by admission committees in spite of quota rumours and pressures often heard. In all fairness these Asian-Americans are culturally far more American than Asian, as I have noticed with my very interesting and enriching encounters and friendships – one in particular. What is key is their successful blending of the hard work ethics, often dismissed discipline and, to some extent, scientific approach provided by their Asian roots with the entrepreneurial freedom, conventional wisdom challenging and”sky is the limit” ethos traditionally breathed by their country of adoption. They simply have brains, work hard, are focused, want to succeed and benefit from the greatest learning environment. They also show immigration can be very successful for the host country as they will go on to expand the American (apple) pie. One could be forgiven to say that they are the very kind that Make America Great Again (with or or without the red cap). This is an interesting feature for us to realize during those times of immigration tragedies and debates even if the comparison could be simplistic as illegal immigrants may not all possess the same qualities or aspirations as they cross the border simply to escape strife, persecution and/or desire a better life. And they are illegal, which these Asian-American Ivy Leaguers are not, even if a tiny few may have been initially.

Another feature linked to topics often debated is Fareed’s first really widely recognised opus in 2003 which was “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad”. In this book he was the precursor, 12 years before the rise of Western populism, of the dangers that democracy itself (“democracy is the worst of all systems except for all the others” to quote Winston Churchill) could have hidden in its midst and was indeed hidden so far, especially in America, as voting participation was so low and considered the game of the “educated” or knowledgeable ones. In its aftermath came “The Post American World” published in 2008 which was also an extension of the message of “The Future of Freedom” as America, in the midst of the Iraq quagmire, was confronted with the demise of the unipolar world arisen from the ashes of the Berlin Wall (I found this book so good that when on holiday in Cambridge, Massachusetts I bought a few copies and sent it to mentors and friends – usually the same!). I also recommend their reading as they provide an unusual rear view mirror which Fareed did not think about then, so much his visions came true across the Western world (and elsewhere – Read the FT’s Gideon Rachman’s Tuesday 26th June excellent piece on “Trump Leads a Global Revivalism of Nationalism”).

Coming back to the current note on the book published in 2015 (his latest), Fareed stressed that liberal arts education was under attack as many states governors had then pledged not spending taxpayer money on subsidising them while he lamented that English and History majors were in decline. Fareed remembered the focus he had known in India for “skills-based” education so students could simply find good jobs. He explains his journey to the top of American learning, discovering literally a new world. He then goes on explaining why that skills-based approach is short- sighted and mistaken. He offers a brief history of liberal education and then expounds on the key virtues of a liberal arts education: How to write clearly, how to express yourself convincingly and how to think analytically. In fact he goes back to the roots of education which is not to focus on a job but to make one “thinks” so one can do whatever she wants, including finding a great job. This mission of education and universities in particular to shape thinking abilities is crucial and immemorial for many good reasons tested by history. Technology cannot replace this even if it can provide different tools and media to shape thinking as long as it does not replace it or individuals do use it as a mean instead of an end. Fareed takes engineering as an example stressing that this skills-based value-added profession is great but that it is strongly enhanced by creativity, lateral thinking, design, communication, storytelling and importantly learning and keeping at it – all gifts of a liberal education. A liberal education can also provide the tools to empower individuals to think for themselves and not be subjected by ready-made opinions that fit too nicely what one wants to hear – the problem of our times. Liberal education can be the guarantor of a working democracy as it usually comprises and therefore safeguards values that have defined our Western societies – those old Western liberal values (you see the full circle here).

The book is also a very enjoyable read as Fareed is very witty, starting on the very first page as what one should do when coming to America today (I will let you enjoy it). While focused on liberal education, he also goes through the key developments that led to the creation of an unparalleled meritocratic educational system, very much representing the views of the founding fathers, which perdures until today. To expand on his views, it is remarkable that in 2018 “everybody” can go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton if one has a great story to tell and achievements to show. While cultural background of course matters as well as, some would say, zip codes – as it gives those applicants a privileged environment to have grown into -, money is no object thanks to the massive endowment funds that will keep funding excellence: Harvard has a USD 35bn endowment while Yale and Princeton rely upon a USD 25 bn fund each that are run by dedicated asset managers and the highest level professionals in the trade (such as David Swansen for Yale) devoted to funding tuitions for students in need as well as research to keep these places of learning at the top of their leagues worldwide. Admissions Committees also want diversity as they value its benefits to all so not all NY Upper East Siders go enjoying the ivy. However it is true that there is a finite number of slots (1500 per class at Yale College) and admission committees need making choices among a pool of extremely highly talented applicants, not all of whom who will make it. Higher education, particularly at the top, still is a key American competitive advantage, an indispensable creator of leadership material and the perfect example of the symbiosis of business and society that has so well defined America. And many of them are focused on liberal education even if one should never forget the likes of MIT and the very suitably Valley-located Stanford (the latter, yes George, Nikos and Haitao, which I am told has a great business school 🙂 ).

I would also like to recommend you to join the Fareed Zakaria daily Global Briefing (Google and subscribe) which is a very quick summary of key issues you can get every day from main headlines selected by Fareed (it is enjoyable as it also takes one minute to read). I also recommend for those who do not fear weekly challenges (usually on Sunday) to take the Fareed quiz: ten questions on international relations news, some obvious, many trivial. It is a real test of ego as I do not know anyone who did 10/10 and most fall below 5 (my record is 8/10 but I was lucky on one or two questions) http://www.cnn/fareed.zakaria.com (If you do a ten please let me know). Lastly, I find his CNN GPS on Sunday very good (11 am EST/3 pm London/4 pm Paris/5 pm Athens) as he covers key topics of international relations with maestria, inviting key people and not just those easy to handle (he had a famous and quite friendly and civilised one hour exchange with Steve Bannon when the latter was holidaying with the Northern League recently).

So the word of the day is “Think” and the message is that society, whilst needing to protect its core identity, gets richer through diversity as America amply demonstrated thus far. Fear of the unknown can be helped through education, liberal of course, like our values.

This book note is dedicated to Qi, a close friend and mentee, but first and foremost a Yalie gentleman and scholar, who came from China age 6 and is ensuring the American dream goes on while quietly taking, during the storm, the leadership mantle that America and the world need.

I wish you a great summer. I am now off to Paris and then to Boston, where it all began.

Warmest regards,

Serge

(*) Back in 2013, my daughter mistakenly applied to Yale NUS thinking she was applying to Yale, making for some funny developments. It turned out she went to the main Yale, became a History major and now is going to work in Boston for a great strategy consulting boutique. And to think she did not have the benefit of reading Fareed’s book! (I assume too much maybe 🙂
And if I may, by the way, getting into the Ivy League is not about whom you know or you can bribe. It is about core values. It is about merit. Relentless hard work. Discipline over years. Abnegation. Dedication. As I am sure you know.
Last point on immigration, lest my message may be misconstrued. Recognizing immigration as a tested component of American excellence does not mean foregoing a regulated approach to it and the need to maintain “identity”. It means understanding American history and ethos, going away from bigotry and also ensuring through appropriate legislation that good women and men looking for a better life have a fair shot at contributing to building that unique American pie in all walks of life and, of course, not only via the hallowed grounds of Harvard and Yale.

Serge Desprat- June 2018 (Prague)