In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, good news often goes missing.  It’s worth highlighting that today, March 27, NATO has a new member, the Republic of North Macedonia.   Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg tweeted the news from NATO HQ in Brussels, and Skopje, the capital, was ecstatic: "The Republic of North Macedonia is officially the new, 30th NATO member," the government said in a statement. "We have fulfilled the dream of generations."

The Republic of North Macedonia’s journey was a long one, dragged out by a dispute with Greece over the name of the country, and who had the greater claim to certain historical figures, particularly Alexander the Great.  For a long time, Athens feared that Skopje would go after its territory, the region of Greece that also goes by the name Macedonia.  Because Greece is a member of both NATO and the European Union, it could hold up Skopje’s membership in both institutions.  Luckily, the logjam was broken by an important compromise in 2018, when the country agreed after difficult negotiations with Athens to go by the name “Republic of North Macedonia.”

One can easily see the importance of NATO membership to the Republic of North Macedonia, but what is its importance to NATO?  The first point to emphasize is that no country gets invited to join NATO unless it has gone through a long and difficult process to bring its armed forces up to NATO standards: countries cannot enter NATO unless they are capable of being security providers, serving in NATO operations when they are called on to do so. 

The second point is that the Republic of North Macedonia is in a difficult neighborhood, the Western Balkans, long a source of bloody disputes among neighbors and never-ending instability.  To become a member, Skopje had to resolve those disputes, and not only with Greece, but also with NATO members Bulgaria and Albania.  As a result, new stability has come to a region stretching from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, across the southeast of Europe.  New stability means a better shot at economic development, as the last member to enter NATO, Montenegro, found out.  Its economy grew strongly in the years after its accession in 2017.  Economic health, in turn, further bolsters stability—a beneficial cycle.

So what the Republic of North Macedonia can do for NATO is help provide for stability in a region of the globe that has long suffered a dearth of it.  This result would be good at any time, but while we must grapple with the implications of COVID-19, having this small country with NATO in the fight will be a benefit to all. 

NATO is a military alliance, but it also provides its members with assistance, training and expertise on matters such as disaster relief and border security.  The high standards that NATO maintains ensures that its members can contribute responsibly both in their regions, but also, if asked, on the international front.  Whether NATO as an institution will be asked to contribute to address COVID-19 is not clear at this time.  Perhaps the NATO Foreign Ministers meeting virtually next week will have something to say on that score.  But we can say that NATO is capable of contributing—including its newest member, the Republic of North Macedonia. 

Rose Gottemoeller is the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Center for Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and was formerly the Deputy Secretary General of NATO

On March 24, the United Nations let it be known that the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference is “likely to be postponed” because of the coronavirus pandemic. The NPT RevCon, as it’s known, was due to take place April 27 to May 22 at the UN Headquarters in New York. The gathering is an opportunity once every five years to reconfirm the basic bargain at its heart: The five nuclear weapon states under the Treaty, the U.S., UK, France, China and Russia, agree to reduce nuclear weapons and move toward their ultimate elimination, and the non-nuclear weapon states agree not to acquire nuclear weapons.  That is practically everyone else, because only India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea stand outside the NPT.  2020 is an especially important year for the Treaty, its fiftieth anniversary of sustaining this important bargain.

A postponement is inevitable.  It would not be feasible to meet in person in New York at this time, with thousands of national delegates joined by large contingents from the non-governmental community, supporting arms control and nonproliferation efforts.  Delay may even have a silver lining in that it could allow some groups, such as the nuclear weapon states, to continue working together to launch some new initiatives to bolster nuclear disarmament. 

It may also be dangerous, however.  North Korea has already been testing short-range missiles off its coastline, at the same time claiming that it is impervious to coronavirus.  As the world’s attention is riveted by the pandemic, Pyongyang may feel the temptation to make rapid progress on some aspect of its nuclear weapon program, restarting fissile material production or even conducting a nuclear test. 

The NPT community normally keeps all eyes on North Korea, and never is that behavior more in evident than during the RevCon, because of the peculiar conundrum that the country poses to the NPT system.  North Korea sought to withdraw from the NPT in 1994, notifying under the procedures of the Treaty its intention to do so.  However, the NPT community never accepted that withdrawal notification, and diplomatic efforts ever since have been focused on getting the DPRK to give up its nuclear weapons program and rejoin the NPT family.  Because of this limbo status, there is a placeholder for North Korea at every RevCon table, and an enormous amount of discussion of withdrawal policy under the Treaty. 

Iran comes to mind as another possible mischief-maker, although Iran is so immersed in fighting the coronavirus that its resources for new work on its nuclear program are likely to be limited.  In this case, perhaps the postponement could have a positive effect, for unlike North Korea, Iran has never attempted to withdraw from the Treaty.  It is clearly still a part of the NPT family.  Countries who are helping Iran to cope with disease could also use this time as an opportunity to encourage its renewed cooperation with the NPT and its nuclear nonproliferation objectives.  

Thus, although postponement of the NPT Review Conference is inevitable, the nuclear policy community needs to keep a sharp eye out during the pause, to ensure that nuclear mischief does not ensue, whether from North Korea or from other countries.  At the same time, we should look for opportunities for extra progress, whether among the nuclear weapons states, or with states who have posed proliferation concerns inside the NPT family.

Five Stanford scholars will be among 38 fellows in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) during the 2020-21 academic year.

The five fellows are MICHAEL BERNSTEIN, associate professor of computer science, ANNA GRZYMALA-BUSSE, professor of political science, SAUMITRA JHA, associate professor of political economy, GREG WALTON, associate professor of psychology, and ROBB WILLER, professor of sociology; formerly a CASBS fellow in 2012-13. Walton served as a consulting scholar at CASBS during the 2014-15 academic year.

This article was originally published in Stanford News 

By Melissa DeWitte

The rise of populism – a political argument that pits ordinary people against a corrupt, government elite – is putting democracy at risk, said Stanford scholars in a new white paper released March 11.

When populist leaders discredit formal institutions and functions, democracy is being undermined and hollowed out, warns Stanford political scientist and paper co-author Anna Grzymala-Busse.

Here, Grzymala-Busse discusses what is at stake for democracies worldwide if populist rhetoric continues to take hold. As Grzymala-Busse points out, populists’ grievances about government failures are not entirely baseless. That’s why Grzymala-Busse and the paper’s co-authors – who include director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, and political scientists Francis Fukuyama and Didi Kuo – argue that populism is a political problem that requires political solutions.

Their paper, Global Populisms and Their Challenges, released Mar. 11 through the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), outlines what mainstream political parties must do to protect democracies from populists, including strategies such as reclaiming the rule of law and upholding democratic norms and values.

Why do some politicians find populist arguments so appealing?

Populism argues that elites are corrupt and the people need better representation, but makes very few policy commitments beyond this criticism. There’s been increasing distrust regarding political parties and politicians, especially given various funding and election scandals. And so people readily believe that these actors are corrupt and not to be trusted.

It is a message that is credible these days. It is also a message that doesn’t tie politicians down to any other ideological or policy commitment.

Why is populism on the rise?

The immediate causes are the failures of mainstream political parties – parties of the center-left and center-right – to meet voter concerns and respond with distinct policies. In both Europe and in the United States, many voters who support populists want a change from politics as usual, which they view as unresponsive and unaccountable, and who fear losing cultural and economic status. They perceive that politicians have failed to respond to immigration, free trade, international cooperation, and technological advances and the threats they pose to many voters.

According to your research, what makes populist rhetoric detrimental to democratic governance?

Populist politicians and governments view the formal institutions of liberal democracy as corrupt creations spawned by crooked establishment elites – and so they systematically hollow out and undermine these institutions, such as the courts, regulatory agencies, intelligence services, the press, and so on. They justify these attacks as replacing discredited and corrupt institutions with ones that serves “the people” – or, in other words, populist parties and politicians. Moreover, precisely because populists claim to represent “the people,” they have to define the people first and that often means excluding vulnerable and marginalized populations, such as religious or ethnic minorities and immigrants.

For example, in Hungary, the governing populist party brought the courts under political control, abolished regulatory agencies, and funneled funding to allied newspapers and media. In Poland, the chair of the governing populist party refers to his opponents as a “worse sort of Poles.”

In the short term, what can be done to counter the effects of populism?

Vote! Vote for politicians and parties who make credible promises, who do not simply want to shut down criticism or who view their opponents as their enemies, and who are committed to the democratic rules of the game. At the same time, we need to understand, not just condemn, why so many voters find populist politicians appealing.

And in the long term?

Mainstream political parties need to credibly differentiate themselves, become far more responsive to their voters and consistently articulate and uphold the democratic rules of the game. Our research finds that where mainstream political parties are strong, populists stand far less of a chance of making inroads. Such parties would also be far more responsive to voter concerns about economic and cultural status, which also motivate populist support.

Some of the paper’s findings are from Global Populisms, a project sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CCDRL).

The rise of populism – a political argument that pits ordinary people against a corrupt, government elite – is putting democracy at risk, said Stanford scholars in a new white paper released today.

Once associated with Latin American and post-communist democracies, populist parties and politicians have now gained support and power in established democracies. Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) experts Anna Grzymala-Busse, Didi Kuo, and Francis Fukuyama — co-authors of a new white paper, “Global Populisms and Their Challenges” — joined FSI Director Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast to discuss how to spot a populist, how populism threatens democracy, and whether the movement can be stopped. 

Populists and populist parties are a threat to liberal democracy, and they generally make two claims: first, that the elites are corrupt and self-serving, and that the will of the people has to be better represented; and second, that those who disagree with the populist representation of “the people” are not the “real” nation, Grzymala-Busse said.

[Read the full report “Global Populisms and Their Challenges”]

“It’s very much a criticism of democracy,” she told McFaul, who is also a co-author of the report. “It doesn’t call for specific sets of solutions for institutions — it can be anti- or pro-democractic, but fundamentally it’s a criticism of how liberal democracy functions.” 

A common practice among right-wing populists is to define the “people” as a dominant ethnic group, and to exclude groups such as ethnic or religious minorities, immigrants, or marginalized economic groups, Fukuyama pointed out, and added that populists on the left tend to not make that kind of distinction. 

Populist leaders have typically used democratic institutions as a means to come to power, Kuo said.

“It’s a two-step process,” Kuo explained. “Once [populist leaders] are in power, they go after the liberal foundations of democracy and potentially the democratic institutions themselves.”

For example, a leader like Russia’s Vladimir Putin — who does not criticize the elite and who is not functioning in a democracy — would not be considered a populist, said Grzymala-Busse. However, people like U.S. President Donald Trump, French politician Marine Le Pen, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini would be.

[Get stories like this delivered to your inbox by signing up for FSI email alerts]

Immigration and globalization have contributed to the rise of populism, said Fukuyama, who pointed to the 2014 Syrian migrant crisis as a trigger in Europe.

“All of a sudden a million non-white, non-European people show up in a part of the world that’s not used to this sort of thing,” Fukuyama said. “It produced what the right calls ‘cultural replacement.’ This is language that you hear in the U.S. from Donald Trump and his supporters — I think it’s something that binds a lot of these groups together.”

While all three experts were not optimistic that the populist wave will be stopped in America in the near future, voters in European countries such as Slovakia and Croatia have been pushing for anti-corruption, anti-populist candidates, they said.

“Parties of the left have to figure out how to capture the symbolism around the nation — people want to belong to a community, and over the last 30 years, the left has fractured into a lot of different, partial identities,” said Fukuyama. “The idea that you have a broader democratic civic identity that all Americans share is important culturally to give people the idea that they’re actually living in the same community.” 

Related: Learn more about FSI’s Global Populisms Project

Taiwan is only 81 miles off the coast of mainland China and was expected to be hard hit by the coronavirus, due to its proximity and the number of flights between the island nation and its massive neighbor to the west.

Yet it has so far managed to prevent the coronavirus from heavily impacting its 23 million citizens, despite hundreds of thousands of them working and residing in China.

According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases map, as of Tuesday there were only 42 cases and one death in Taiwan, far behind China, with more than 80,000 cases and more than 2,900 deaths. The country also lags far behind its other Asian neighbors and ranks 17^th in the world for the number of global cases. As of this writing, South Korea was second, with 5,186 cases; followed by Iran with 2,336 and Italy with 2,036 people infected with the virus.

The United States currently stands at 107 known cases and six deaths.

The viral outbreak in China occurred just before the Lunar New Year, during which time millions of Chinese and Taiwanese were expected to travel for the holidays.

So what steps did Taiwan take to protect its people? And could those steps be replicated here at home?

Stanford Health Policy’s Jason Wang, MD, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine who also has a PhD in policy analysis, credits his native Taiwan with using new technology and a robust pandemic prevention plan put into place at the 2003 SARS outbreak.

“The Taiwan government established the National Health Command Center (NHCC) after SARS and it’s become part of a disaster management center that focuses on large-outbreak responses and acts as the operational command point for direct communications,” said Wang, a pediatrician and the director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes, and Prevention at Stanford. The NHCC also established the Central Epidemic Command Center, which was activated in early January.

“And Taiwan rapidly produced and implemented a list of at least 124 action items in the past five weeks to protect public health,” Wang said. “The policies and actions go beyond border control because they recognized that that wasn’t enough.”

Wang outlines the measures Taiwan took in the last six weeks in an article published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Given the continual spread of COVID-19 around the world, understanding the action items that were implemented quickly in Taiwan, and the effectiveness of these actions in preventing a large-scale epidemic, may be instructive for other countries,” Wang and his co-authors wrote.

Within the last five weeks, Wang said, the Taiwan epidemic command center rapidly implemented those 124 action items, including border control from the air and sea, case identification using new data and technology, quarantine of suspicious cases, educating the public while fighting misinformation, negotiating with other countries — and formulating policies for schools and businesses to follow.

Big Data Analytics

The authors note that Taiwan integrated its national health insurance database with its immigration and customs database to begin the creation of big data for analytics. That allowed them case identification by generating real-time alerts during a clinical visit based on travel history and clinical symptoms.

Taipei also used Quick Response (QR) code scanning and online reporting of travel history and health symptoms to classify travelers’ infectious risks based on flight origin and travel history in the last 14 days. People who had not traveled to high-risk areas were sent a health declaration border pass via SMS for faster immigration clearance; those who had traveled to high-risk areas were quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phones to ensure that they stayed home during the incubation period.

The country also instituted a toll-free hotline for citizens to report suspicious symptoms in themselves or others. As the disease progressed, the government called on major cities to establish their own hotlines so that the main hotline would not become jammed.

Some might say that because Taiwan is such a small country — about 19 times smaller than Texas — it is easier to mobilize during emergencies. Yet Taiwan is particularly challenged by its proximity to China and the fact that 850,000 of its citizens reside on the mainland; another 400,000 work there. Taiwan had 2.71 million visitors from China last year.

So when the WHO was notified on Dec. 31, 2019, of a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, Taiwanese officials began to board planes and assess passengers on direct flights from Wuhan for fever and pneumonia symptoms before passengers could deplane.

As early as Jan. 5, notification was expanded to include any individual who had traveled to Wuhan in the past 14 days and had a fever or symptoms of upper respiratory tract infection at the point of entry. Suspected cases were screened for 26 viruses, including SARS and MERS. Passengers displaying symptoms were quarantined at home and assessed whether medical attention at a hospital was necessary.

What the U.S. Could Learn

One of Wang’s co-authors, Robert H. Brook, M.D., ScD., of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Washington could learn a great deal from Taiwan’s so-far successful management of the virus.

“In Taiwan, diverse political parties were willing to work together to produce an immediate response to the danger,” said Brook, also of the nonprofit RAND Corporation. “Transparency was critical and frequent communication to the public from a trusted official was paramount to reducing public panic.”

The other co-author of their study is Chun Y. Ng, MBA, MPH, of The New School for Leadership in Health Care, Koo Foundation Sun Yat-Sen Cancer Center, Taipei, Taiwan.

Brook said Taiwan got out ahead of the epidemic by setting up a physical command center to facilitate rapid communications. The command center set the price of masks and used government funds and military personnel to increase mask production. By Jan. 20, the Taiwan CDC announced that it had a stockpile of 44 million surgical masks, 1.9 million N95 masks and 1,100 negative pressure isolation rooms.

“In a country as complex as the United States,” Brook said, “there needs to be a sharing of intelligence on a real-time basis among states and the federal government so that action is not delayed by going through formal channels.”

Please contact Beth Duff-Brown for media requests.