They wanted to restore Spain, the Spain of old, a Spain where the dominant institutions were the large estates in the countryside, no more of this nonsense of land reform. There would be no trappings of democracy, no free trade union. The army would remain – would reign supreme.
It would be a military dictatorship, and education would be handed back to the Catholic Church. And you can actually see photographs of bishops and cardinals giving the fascist salute alongside nationalist officers. So it was a pretty stark difference between what two kinds of Spain these two sides wanted.
.. GROSS: You said that Franco’s war was against modernity.
HOCHSCHILD: Absolutely. I mean, he also talked about regaining the Spanish Empire of old. But of course, it was always very foggy how that would happen because the former Spanish colonies in South America, for example, had been independent for hundreds of years. So exactly how the empire was to be regained wasn’t clear, but he certainly had the idea of an empire on his mind.
.. he also talked about regaining the Spanish Empire of old. But of course, it was always very foggy how that would happen because the former Spanish colonies in South America, for example, had been independent for hundreds of years. So exactly how the empire was to be regained wasn’t clear, but he certainly had the idea of an empire on his mind.
And in fact, after Franco and his nationalists won the war, he bargained with Hitler about whether he was going to actually join the Axis in World War II – finally decided not to because Hitler wouldn’t give him everything he wanted, which were a huge swath of British and French colonies in Africa and a slice of France. So he was definitely somebody who want0ed to expand his power.
.. One of the most interesting characters that you write about in this book is the head of Texaco oil, Torkild Rieber. He was the head during the Spanish Civil War, and he supported the fascist cause, the military coup in Spain. And he made a deal with Franco’s regime. What was the deal?
.. He not only did that but he gave them the oil at a big discount, which, as far as we can tell, he never told Texaco shareholders or even his board of directors about. And he violated American law in a couple of ways because U.S. neutrality legislation was pretty strict
.. And this information was passed on to the Nationalists to help submarine captains and bomber pilots look for targets. Twenty-nine oil tankers heading for the Spanish Republic were destroyed, damaged or captured during the war. And in at least one or two cases, we can specifically tie it to information supplied by Texaco. So the United States might be neutral, but Texaco had gone to war.
.. GROSS: Wow, Texaco was acting – because of Rieber – was acting like a spy.
HOCHSCHILD: Absolutely, absolutely. I don’t know of any parallel where a private corporation has supplied a vast amount of intelligence information to a warring government secretly.
.. many of the principle weapons that the Nazis used during World War II had their first trial in combat in Spain – the Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane for example, the Stuka dive bomber, the 88 millimeter artillery piece, which could be used both for antiaircraft purposes and also shelling on the ground. And American soldiers were the victims of these things in Spain, American volunteers.
So this war was really a testing ground for Hitler. And he learned a great deal from it about the strengths and weaknesses of these different weapons.
.. a woman named Virginia Cowles, who was 26 years old when she arrived in Spain, never been to college.
.. What makes her reporting so good, I think, is that she’s one of the very few people who reported from both sides in the war.
She reported from the Republican side. Then she set her sights on being able to get into Nationalist Spain, which was very difficult, especially for a journalist who had written from the Republic. But she managed it, traveled all over the place, was the first foreign correspondent in Nationalist Spain to be able to quote Nationalist officers admitting that they had bombed Guernica – because this was something that Franco and Hitler were strenuously denying.
.. if President Franklin Roosevelt had agreed to sell arms to the Democratic side in Spain, that maybe the Democratic side would’ve won.
Spain would not have become a fascist country. Hitler wouldn’t have been victorious in Spain because Hitler was aligned with the fascist side in Spain. And maybe he would have thought twice before invading so many other countries, and he wouldn’t have had all the military experience that the Spanish Civil War provided for his troops and the tests that it gave to his new bombers and artillery.
So do you think it’s possible that if the U.S. had been willing to sell arms to Spain, that World War II wouldn’t have happened? Or it wouldn’t have happened in the same way that it did?
HOCHSCHILD: I don’t think World War II wouldn’t have happened because Hitler was determined to conquer the world, especially Eastern Europe, the Balkan and Caspian oil fields. This is what he had his eye on. And I think a setback in Spain would not have deterred him from that. But I still think it could’ve made a difference if the Spanish Republic had won because during World War II, Franco was sort of a de facto ally for Hitler.
By Trashing Mexico, Trump Hurts the U.S.
Without Nafta, American businesses would lose protection from populism south of the border.
In contrast, Mr. Trump’s approach seems almost designed to help elect an anti-American, pro-Castro populist, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to the Mexican presidency in 2018... Today’s illegal immigrants are coming primarily from Central America. Washington should cooperate with Mexico to create a multistage defense. Working with Mexico to strengthen law enforcement, the rule of law, and intelligence would leave both countries better positioned to stop drug traffickers, criminals, human smugglers and terrorists.Insulting Mexico, on the other hand, will make it impossible for politicians there to work with Yankee gringos. A hostile Mexico can ignore the flow of people northward, while American policies that weaken investment and growth in Mexico simply create more incentives for Mexicans to migrate to the U.S... Mr. Trump’s great wall would be a waste of money, as conservative Republicans from border states now acknowledge. A combination of fencing, additional border police, electronic surveillance and other intelligence tools would stop illegal immigration more effectively and at a lower cost.
.. because Nafta’s energy terms refer to Mexico’s constitution, American investors are now protected against a populist reversal of Mexican policy—but only as long as the U.S. remains in Nafta... U.S. producers seeking to compete with Asian and European manufacturers now transfer components across North American borders up to 14 times in the process of completing final goods. More than 30% of Mexico’s exports to the U.S. contribute to the integrated auto sector...Yet when the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation recalculated trade statistics to count only the value added by each country, the U.S. had a surplus in manufactured goods with Mexico and Canada... the alliance of the three North American democracies—being energy self-sufficient with integrated infrastructure and efficient and secure borders—could offer the U.S. a resilient and powerful base from which to face global challenges... William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state and the man with the vision to purchase Alaska, wrote in 1853 that someday Mexico, Canada and the U.S. would create a North American union, but only after a long process and solely through free choice. Seward fought for America’s national union while also promoting an internationalist vision.
Russia: A Land Power Hungry For The Sea
Simply, the argument is that geography demanded that insular and coastal nations such as England, Japan, and the Netherlands develop strong navies to support their national economic and political interests. Conversely, Germany, the Turkish Republic, and the Roman Empire were required to use their formidable land armies to defend and expand their territories. Russia stands out as a one-off. Situated squarely on the borders of Eastern Europe and central Asia, she endured numerous land assaults, and, accordingly built large defensive and offensive land armies. However, in fits and starts, she has also assembled naval forces equal to or greater than most of her presumptive adversaries. Why does Russia, a traditional land power, engage in such counterintuitive and unique behavior?
.. at the height of the Cold War when Soviet Adm. Gorshkov planned and built a naval force that rivalled American supremacy at sea. His submarines alone (385) outnumbered those of the NATO Alliance and they regularly patrolled off the American Atlantic and Pacific coasts until the fall of the Soviet Union.
.. in an act that surprised and impressed most of the world, the Russian navy launched multiple long-range Kalibr cruise missiles on so-called terrorist positions in Syria from both small Buyan-M patrol boats in the Caspian Sea as well as similarly small Kilo-class diesel submarines in the Mediterranean.
.. there is no point on the Russian periphery where a foreign military can now operate with impunity.
.. Russian fascination with the sea does not rest on economic necessity. Moscow never had, and still today does not have, an economy that is dependent on global trade, much less one that demands control of the seas.
.. The Russian naval mission appears to have quietly expanded to become a vehicle to sell sophisticated weaponry.
.. Weapons exports follow behind the sales of petroleum products as the leading source of Russian foreign exchange.
.. he is a risk taker, known to overplay weak hands – and get away with it.
How to Think About Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin is a powerful ideological symbol and a highly effective ideological litmus test. He is a hero to populist conservatives around the world and anathema to progressives. I don’t want to compare him to our own president, but if you know enough about what a given American thinks of Putin, you can probably tell what he thinks of Donald Trump.
.. Vladimir Vladimirovich is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy. He is the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled. His job has been to protect his country’s prerogatives and its sovereignty in an international system that seeks to erode sovereignty in general and views Russia’s sovereignty in particular as a threat.
.. Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time.
.. When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans.
.. His voters credit him with having saved his country.
.. they assume there can never be legitimate historic reasons why a politician would arise in opposition to it. They denied such reasons for the rise of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. They do the same with Donald Trump. And they have done it with Putin.
.. he restrained the billionaires who were looting the country, and he restored Russia’s standing abroad
.. Russia retains elements of a kleptocracy based on oligarchic control of natural resources. But we must remember that Putin inherited that kleptocracy. He did not found it.
.. The transfer of Russia’s natural resources into the hands of KGB-connected Communists, who called themselves businessmen, was a tragic moment for Russia. It was also a shameful one for the West. Western political scientists provided the theft with ideological cover, presenting it as a “transition to capitalism.”
.. Khodorkovsky and fellow investors paid $150 million in the 1990s for the main production unit of the oil company Yukos, which came to be valued at about $20 billion by 2004.
.. they acquired a share of the essential commodity of Russia—its oil—for less than one percent of its value.
.. Putin said: “We will not tolerate any humiliation to the national pride of Russians, or any threat to the integrity of the country.”
.. The degradation of Russia’s position represented by the Serbian War is what Putin was alluding to when he famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” This statement is often misunderstood or mischaracterized: he did not mean by it any desire to return to Communism. But when Putin said he’d restore Russia’s strength, he meant it. He beat back the military advance of Islamist armies in Chechnya and Dagestan
.. There is no country, with the exception of Israel, that has a more dangerous frontier with the Islamic world.
.. Half a century ago, for instance, the Zeitgeist was about colonial liberation.
Think of Martin Luther King, traveling to Norway to collect his Nobel Peace Prize, stopping on the way in London to give a talk about South African apartheid. What did that have to do with him? Practically: Nothing. Symbolically: Everything. It was an opportunity to talk about the moral question of the day.
.. We have a different Zeitgeist today. Today it is sovereignty and self-determination that are driving passions in the West.
.. The United States was offered the chance to lay out the rules of the world system, and accepted the offer with a vengeance. Russia was offered the role of submitting to that system.
.. According to the Russian view, Ukraine’s democratically elected government was overthrown by an armed uprising backed by the United States. To prevent a hostile NATO from establishing its own naval base in the Black Sea, by this account, Russia had to take Crimea, which in any case is historically Russian territory.
.. “Most Russians have come to believe that democracy is what happened in their country between 1990 and 2000, and they do not want any more of it.”
.. Reagan’s gift as a foreign policy thinker, he said, was not his idealism. It was his ability to set priorities, to see what constituted the biggest threat. Today’s biggest threat to the U.S. isn’t Vladimir Putin.
.. why are people thinking about Putin as much as they do? Because he has become a symbol of national self-determination. Populist conservatives see him the way progressives once saw Fidel Castro, as the one person who says he won’t submit to the world that surrounds him.