Finland’s President Can Hold His Own With Both Putin and Trump →

Sauli Niinisto is hugely popular at home—and is one of the few world leaders who has the respect of both Washington and Moscow.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin as he arrives at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki on Aug. 21, 2019.

Sauli Niinisto, now halfway through his second six-year term as Finnish president, tends to be discreet.

A lawyer by training, Niinisto is the leader of the European Union’s northernmost member—which also happens to be the one that shares the longest border with Russia—and is the only Western leader who could be said to have good relations with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump. “He knows which fights to pick and which to avoid,” observes Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution.

Niinisto also knows how—and when—to make a point, as he did last October when he held a joint press conference with Trump, on the eve of the latter’s impeachment. “You have a great democracy,” he said, locking his eyes with Trump, as the latter listened intently (or seemed to). “Keep it going on.”

Still, Finland’s 72-year-old president has quite a few bones to pick, as he made clear in the course of a wide-ranging interview with Foreign Policy last month, beginning with the troubled state of democracy itself. “Democracy could use some nurturing,” he said.

The fact that a Finnish president can be taken seriously as a spokesperson for Western democracy illustrates how both Finland and Europe have changed since the fall of the Soviet Union. Thirty years ago, Finland was Europe’s odd man out. Its foreign policy was described as active neutrality; it shared a mutually beneficial, if onerous so-called special relationship with the Soviet Union, which, among other things, obliged Finland’s leaders to avoid entangling alliances with the West.

The Finnish state still bore the effects of the quarter-century reign of former President Urho Kekkonen, its Cold War-era leader who used his own special relationship with Moscow to win four terms in office, while the Kremlin acknowledged Finnish neutrality.

Today Finland no longer calls itself neutral. “Non-aligned is the word we use now,” Niinisto said. “We are also part of the European Union.” Finnish support for the EU, which it joined in 1995, remains strong.

“We belong to the West,” he continued, pointing to Finland’s resiliently democratic culture as proof. “But we also are a neighbor to the east,” he adds. Even though the most arduous, military dimension of the special relationship—the odious mutual defense pact by which both pledged to hold joint military discussions in the unlikely event of an invasion of Russia by NATO via Finnish territory—was formally dissolved after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Finnish head of state still listens to Putin.

The reverse is also true. “I get along with him very well,” he says of his Russian counterpart. “We can discuss issues very openly, even sensitive matters.”

“Niinisto is a cool-headed realist, and not an idealist,” says Mika Aaltola, director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. “This means he is not going to bother Putin with long liberal lectures. He has maintained a good working relationship with Putin, irrespective of events in the Ukraine or other serious security concerns … it is in the Finnish realist tradition not to turn your backs on Russians and show fear.”

High on the list of sensitive matters which Niinisto discusses with Putin is the possibility of Finland upgrading its current status as a NATO partner to full membership, something which Putin has explicitly warned Finland against. “The Russians have made it quite clear that when they look across the border, they see Finns,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2018. “If Finland were to join NATO, they would see enemies.”

For the moment, a majority of Finns also oppose NATO membership. For Niinisto, keeping the option of joining NATO open while maintaining a strong, independent, well-equipped defense force, is a sufficient deterrent. “Our defense forces can equip 280,000 trained soldiers,” Aaltola points out. “This compares very well with most European defense forces.”

Finland also ranks among the most militarily prepared nations in the world, in terms of the percentage of its population that is willing to defend itself—with nearly 80 percent of Finns willing to take up arms, something which Putin is doubtless aware of.

As proof of the two leaders’ special connection, Niinisto tweeted that he had phoned Putin and discussed “the possibilities of settling the tense situation in Belarus,” as well as the condition of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was allegedly poisoned with Novichok on Aug. 20, according to doctors treating him in Germany.

Navalny’s staff later explicitly thanked Niinisto for helping persuade Putin to allow his sickened critic to be flown to Berlin for medical treatment.

The savvy Finn also felt he knew both Trump and Putin well enough to give the former “a pep talk” on how to mix it up with the latter before the two leaders met in Helsinki in July 2018, according to John Bolton, the former U.S. national security advisor.

“It is important to get along with Washington, if you want to have a stabilizing influence on Moscow,” says Aaltola. “And obviously it is in Finland’s interest to know what is going on in Moscow.”

“Niinisto reminded Trump that Putin was a fighter, and Trump should therefore hit back if attacked,” Bolton describes in his book, The Room Where It Happened. “As if preparing for a boxing match, Niinisto warned Trump never to provide an opening or give one inch.”

Trump had difficulty taking Niinisto’s advice, as the farcical press conference that followed their meeting made clear. But no one questions that the advice Niinisto proffered was sound.

“You have to understand, we Finns have had to study and understand the modus operandi of the Kremlin more than any other Western country,” Michael Franck, the noted Finnish filmmaker points out.

According to Bolton, after telling Trump that Finland didn’t want to join NATO at their meeting in Helsinki, Niinisto reminded Trump that “Finland had an army of 280,000 if everyone was called up to make it clear the price would be high if they were invaded.”

The tricky triangulation required of a Finnish president is something that the judicious Niinisto manages well, which helps account for his record-high poll ratings: around 90 percent of Finns approve of his job performance. Between that and the high support for Finland’s celebrated 34-year-old prime minister, Sanna Marin, and her Social Democratic cabinet, Finland arguably has the most popular democratically elected government in Europe.

Nearly three-quarters of the Finnish electorate voted in last year’s parliamentary elections, and Transparency International ranks Finland as the world’s third-least corrupt country. “We are almost free of corruption. Trust in authorities is high,” Niinisto proudly observes. “The health of our democracy is good.”

Still, as he gazes out from the presidential palace, Niinisto doesn’t seem to feel the same way about the health of liberal democracy in general. “We have learned that democracy is not a given thing,” he said. “We must nurture it, perhaps more so than we have had to do for a long time.”

Niinisto is outspoken on the threat posed by the social media. “Social media has added a new and even aggravating platform for aggressive behavior and manipulation,” he observes—an interesting position for the president of the country which gave the world Nokia, the company which essentially invented the mobile phone.

It seems that “connecting people”—Nokia’s old slogan—has turned out to be something of a mixed blessing, according to the president. “It is easier to write insults,” says Niinisto, “than to say them eye to eye.”

As befits someone whose job description has been likened to steering between Scylla and Charybdis—the monster and whirlpool of Greek mythology—Niinisto refrains from directly criticizing either Trump or Putin. However, he has no qualms about criticizing the two leaders’ policies.

Regarding Washington’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from the World Health Organization in July, he says flatly: “I would rather have seen the U.S. stay in.” Niinisto also indirectly criticized Washington’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. “We were all surprised by COVID-19. We received a serious lesson—climate change is not our only common enemy,” he said. “In order to stop the pandemic, it would be good to find the same common spirit as in the Paris climate agreement.”

As for the recent referendum that could allow the Russian president to remain in power until at least 2036, Niinisto said, “We do not know whether [Putin] is planning to continue or for how long.” That said, he continued mordantly, “the decision to hold the referendum does reveal that customs in Russia are very different when compared to our democracy.”

In the past, Niinisto has also been outspoken on the subject of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Explaining his balancing act, he asserts: “In Finland, we have long said we cannot do anything about geography. What we can do is to maintain a clear and consistent Western line in our relationship with our Eastern neighbor and improve understanding between East and West.”

He points out that “it has worked,” referring to the history of successful East-West summits that have been held in Helsinki—although some might exclude the one he presided over in 2018 from the list—dating back to the 1975 mega-summit and the historic Helsinki Accords. “I believe it will continue to work in the future, too.”

He isn’t surprised by Trump’s position on NATO and the U.S. responsibility for Europe’s defense. “President Trump has continued what the U.S. has requested for many years, [that] Europe should take more responsibility for strengthening its defense and fulfilling its commitment to NATO. Now he has changed the request to a demand. I do understand the American opinion on this, including President’s Trump’s viewpoint.”

Niinisto appears to have mixed feelings about the European Union. While he continues to support Finnish membership in EU, as do most Finns, he admits he is not happy with the lack of coordination with which the EU responded to the coronavirus pandemic, in contrast with the generally strong, proactive, and successful manner with which Finland and its neighbors—with the arguable exception of Sweden—conducted themselves.

He also is unreservedly critical about the body’s lack of common economic and security strategy. “The EU has a lot of potential. Counted together the EU member states have enormous economic power and 27 armies,” Niinisto continued.

“As long as I have talked with other European leaders about defense, the answer has always been” to fall back on NATO, and particularly the United States, rather than having the EU develop and maintain its own discrete, defense force, he says. “The EU must develop its common economic and security strategy, so that this potential turns into influence. It has a lot to do to make a comeback as an influential geopolitical actor.”

Like many older Finns who recall that the then-neutral United States was reluctant to come to Finland’s aid during the Finnish-Soviet Winter War of 1939-40, Niinisto remains wary of relying on Washington—or NATO—too much. He would like Europe to stand on its own, just as Finland has essentially done since World War II.

At the same time, he implied, he would like more clarity regarding the EU’s nebulous mutual defense clause which states that if a member state is the victim of armed aggression on its own territory, other member states are obliged to come to its aid. Niinisto, like many Finns, isn’t sure what that means. “Finns like clarity when it comes to defense,” says Aaltola.

Still, the president has remained mum on the subject of the continuing EU sanctions on trade with Russia enacted after Crimea, even though those sanctions hurt Finland more than other EU members—an example of a fight which Niinisto has avoided.

True to form, he is also reluctant to criticize Trump too openly. When asked how he felt about the deployment of federal troops in response to protests in the United States and if the country still had a “great democracy,” as he put it during his White House visit last year, Niinisto declined to answer.

‘The pandemic has united us’: A media divide fades in the Baltics (June 18/2020) →

Trusted news sources can shape behavior. In the midst of a health crisis, Russian speakers in the Baltics switched loyalties to watch local news, helping Latvia and Estonia fare better against the coronavirus.

Ints Kalnins/Reuters

The day after the pandemic state of emergency was lifted in Latvia, people in their cars attended a drive-in concert in the capital, Riga, on June 11, 2020.

The state of emergency in this venerable seaside capital ended last week. Many stores are still boarded up, including some that will never open again, and sidewalk cafes are far from full capacity.

Nevertheless, as this nation of 1.9 million people enjoys a welcome burst of late spring weather, there is an undeniable feeling of collective relief.

“It feels as if we are waking up from a bad dream,” says Bernhard Loew, the manager of a luxury hotel in the city’s historic Old Town. Like all of Riga’s hostelries, it was forced to close because of the scourge. “But at least we are waking up,” says Mr. Loew.

Both Latvia and her sister Baltic republic, Estonia, have good reason to be relieved. Thanks to proactive, consensus leadership, both are emerging from this stage of the pandemic with remarkably little loss of life and lower infection rates than most of Europe, as well as a renewed sense of unity and national pride.

A major reason for this is that the top politicians of both countries stepped aside and allowed their medical experts to take the lead in a health crisis.

Ever since both countries regained independence in 1991, a legacy of the Soviet era has challenged them: tensions between the ethnic Latvian and Estonian majorities and their Russophile countrymen. Roughly a quarter of the population are Russian speakers, many of whom have family members who were Soviet troops and officials, or are themselves former military. 

In Latvia, for example, both communities have differed over the Latvian government’s recent push to make Latvian the state language.

Some expected those tensions to evince themselves once again when the coronavirus struck. But that didn’t happen – just the opposite.

Latvia’s Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins credits both the ethnic Latvian and Russian-speaking communities for adhering to the government’s directives on the pandemic.

“I suppose you could say it was ironic, and it certainly wasn’t planned,” says Prime Minister Karins. “But the pandemic has united us.”

“The measures we employed to stop the virus were only effective because they entailed our entire society,” he adds. “Basically, everyone collaborated on this.”

Gordon Sander

Medics to the World, by Aigars Bikše, is a sculpture dedicated to health workers that was funded by donations. It was installed this week in front of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, which reopened to visitors May 19, 2020.

Compounding the initial challenge was the fact that the two communities tend to rely on news from disparate sources. In Latvia, as in Estonia, much of the Russian-speaking population relies on the slicker, Moscow-based Russian media for information.

So it did – at least at first – with the pandemic. What the Russian community initially absorbed from Russian media jarred with the Riga government’s message. “The message Moscow was sending, both to its own citizens, as well as ‘Russia abroad,’ was that the virus was nothing worse than the flu,” says Uga Dumpis, the government’s head virologist. “Fortunately everyone realized that the virus was just as serious as we said it was.”

Meanwhile, the government’s chief epidemiologist, Jurijs Perevoscikovs, is a Russian speaker – putting Latvia’s two top health experts on different sides of the linguistic divide.

“People quickly realized that they had a common enemy,” says Jana Terakova, a broadcaster with Radio Latvia’s service for Russian speakers.

As Martins Lagzdins, the CEO of a Riga advertising firm, put it, “The virus has helped all Latvians realize that at the end of the day we are all in same boat.”

Prominent Latvian American journalist Pauls Raudseps agrees. “The differences between the two communities have receded into the background,” says Mr. Raudseps, who like the prime minister, is from the diaspora and came to Latvia in 1990. “And that is a good thing.”

Trusted Russian-speaking doctors

Across the border in Estonia, broad support for the government has also put a spotlight on new faces from the Russian community. One of them is Dr. Arkadi Popov, chief medical officer of the Estonian Health Board’s crisis team.

Dr. Popov, who became a reassuring nightly TV presence, says he is pleased if he has contributed to bringing the country together. “I think that in a crisis such as this, it is especially important that objective information is available to both Estonian- and Russian-speaking audiences,” he says.

He points to the way the Russian community observed May 9, the day that Russians in both Latvia and Estonia commemorate the end of World War II by gathering at Soviet cenotaphs in both capitals.

“Usually the area in front of the Unknown Soldier monument in the Military Cemetery in Tallinn is extremely crowded,” Dr. Popov notes. “This year there were just as many flowers at the monument as before, but this year it could be seen that people followed the 2 + 2 rule.”

The 2 + 2 rule allows people in public only in pairs, while maintaining a two-meter distance. “The pandemic has also made us more innovative,” says Dr. Popov, pointing to a dramatic increase in use of video consultation between doctors and patients in Estonian hospitals.

Tonis Saarts, a professor of comparative politics at Tallinn University, said during his weekly radio commentary that thanks to the “brilliant contribution” of Dr. Popov and other Estonian Russians, “the crisis has almost done away with ethnic boundaries.” As in Latvia, Russian speakers turned away from Russian news sources and began to rely on local information on the coronavirus. “For the first time in three decades we witnessed the birth of a common information sphere to unite the two communities,” said Professor Saarts on his radio show.

“When people realized that Russian TV was not talking about the situation in Estonia, they started watching our Estonian Russian-speaking TV,” says Jevgeni Zavadski, a producer for Estonia’s national broadcaster. “Our ratings have grown three times because we turned into a unique and accurate source of information.”

Next challenge, the economy

Professor Saarts nevertheless warns that this new sense of national unity will soon be tested by how well the government handles Estonia’s economic recovery.

“Unfortunately this trust in national institutions might not last very long,” he declares, “because it is clear that the looming economic crisis will hit Russians harder than it will Estonians.”

Professor Saarts’ optimism, as well as his concern, is echoed by Latvian sociologist Liene Ozoliņa, who teaches at the London School of Economics. “The medical challenge has been won,” she says. “The next one is economic.” Latvia’s unemployment rate is about 11%, and more than half of residents say that they have been negatively affected financially by the pandemic.

“Over 200,000 Latvians have emigrated over the past few decades to seek a more prosperous life abroad,” she says, referring to what most agree is the greatest challenge holding Latvia back from its full potential – population decline. “It will be crucial to see how the government supports the economy and protects ordinary people to prevent another wave of emigration,” says Dr. Ozolina, who herself is returning to her resurgent homeland next month.

The Last Time the U.S. Army Cleared Demonstrators From Pennsylvania Avenue (6/20) →

In 1932, President Hoover set the military on a ragtag band of veterans protesting peacefully. The images horrified the nation and killed his chances for reelection.

The Washington, D.C., authorities told him “they can no longer preserve law and order,” the president’s statement declared. “In order to put an end to this rioting and defiance of civil authority, I have asked the Army to assist the District authorities to restore order.”

The author of the above presidential ukase was not the current, 45th occupant of the White House, Donald Trump, but his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, the 31st U.S. president. The year was 1932. And the authors of the aforementioned “rioting” were a scraggly, disgruntled group of World War I veterans who hoped to force the government to pay out their service bonuses. When Hoover sent in the troops to clear the protesters that July the newsreels showed Army troops wielding bayonets and tear gas as they brazened their way through the camps the demonstrators had built and set them ablaze. Time magazine called it the Battle of Washington.

It isn’t difficult to see the parallels with today, as protests rage in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the knee of a white police officer. Last Monday, as on that infamous afternoon 88 years ago, a militarized force backed by the White House roughly expelled a group of diverse, peaceful, unarmed protesters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Once again, the Capitol was silhouetted in tear gas smoke. Once again the cameras rolled and the nation was horrified.

So were a slew of retired senior military officials and uniformed officers, among them former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, and former director of the National Security Agency Michael Hayden, all of whom expressed their outrage at Trump’s militaristic response to the peaceful assembly in Lafayette Park.

There are also lessons from the original Battle of Washington for the current commander in chief, and anyone else curious about Trump’s 2020 prospects—including the effect that Hoover’s militarized response to the disorder on his front yard had on his reelection campaign. As Trump meditates further escalating his own Battle of Washington, he would do well to recall what happened the last time a president ordered troops to clear Pennsylvania Avenue.

Herbert Clark Hoover, who took office at the onset of the Great Depression, was one of the unluckiest men to occupy the Oval Office. Intelligent, competent, self-effacing to a fault, he had a stellar record of public service behind him when he was elected in 1928, most notably his acclaimed work as head of the life-giving U.S. Food Administration during World War I, and the American Relief Administration afterward when he strove to provide food for the starving masses of Central and Eastern Europe. But unfortunately, the goodwill that Hoover had accrued quickly dissipated after the stock market crashed in October 1929. Matters were not helped by the former engineer’s stubborn opposition to involving the federal government in alleviating the human toll of the historic depression that followed. By 1931, unemployment had reached 15 percent, breadlines filled the country’s streets and hordes of miserable Americans were encamped in decrepit shantytowns, or “Hoovervilles” as they were called. Hoover’s name had become a synonym for indifference.

By 1932, the third year of the economic catastrophe, this national tableau of misery had set the stage for a dramatic confrontation.

In 1924, when the economy had been strong, Congress had passed the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, awarding bonuses to surviving veterans of the Allied Expeditionary Force, as the American servicemen who sailed to France to fight against the Central Powers during World War I were called, as a gesture of gratitude for their service. There was a catch, however: The “bonus” certificates, which would have been worth approximately $500 plus compounded interest, were not redeemable until 1945.

One former sergeant and combat veteran from the Great War, Walter Waters of Portland, Oregon, decided that wasn’t good enough. Like many, if not most of the surviving veterans, by 1932 Waters was unemployed. He wanted his money now. At a Portland veterans meeting in March, Waters raised the idea of descending on Washington en masse to pressure Congress to paying the bonus immediately.

Thus the so-called Bonus Expeditionary Force—also known as the Bonus Marchers or the Bonus Army—was formed. In the late spring of 1932, the ragtag “army” of 17,000 veterans and their families, led by the charismatic Waters, descended on Washington by foot, truck and train to demand their pay.

Most of the Army settled in Anacostia Flats, a muddy area across the Anacostia River south of the 11th Street Bridge. There they erected a sprawling network of camps—which they of course called Hoovervilles—to serve as their base to lobby Congress and make their presence known around the capital. A smaller group of veterans bedded down near the White House in a group of abandoned buildings on government property on Pennsylvania Avenue near Third Street.

The sprawling cluster of camps, which included sanitation facilities and even a library, were tightly supervised by “Commander Waters,” as he was now called, and his adjutants. Veterans were required to register and prove that they had been honorably discharged. Although there were doubtless a number of radicals among the ranks of the shambolic Army, most of the veterans were nonpolitical and avowedly patriotic. There were a lot of American flags at Bonus City, the main Anacostia cantonment. Basically, the vets just wanted their money.

The Army was partly successful. On June 15, after an impassioned debate which caused one representative to drop dead of a heart attack on the floor of Congress, the House passed the $2.4 billion Wright Patman bill by which the Bonus Marchers and the other surviving doughboys would immediately be given $1,000. There was a lot of cheering in the House Gallery that afternoon.

The celebration was premature. Two days later, to general consternation, the Senate rejected the bill by a wide margin. Crushed by its defeat, the bulk of the Bonus Expeditionary Force did an about-face and skulked out of the capital. However a sizable number, estimated at 2,000, continued to hunker down, both at Bonus City and other sites around the capital, including the row of half-demolished buildings near the White House, hoping that somehow their presence would move the government to change its mind—and because they had nowhere else to go.

The government didn’t change its mind. Meanwhile, the remaining BEF holdouts got on Hoover’s nerves, a living testament to his failure to alleviate the Depression. Angry, brooding over his dimming chances in the forthcoming election, Hoover convinced himself, with the aid of Douglas MacArthur, his Caesar-like Army chief of staff that the BEF had been infiltrated by communists and was planning to stage a revolt. This was balderdash. In fact, Waters had made a point of ferreting out any Reds or would-be Reds from his “troops.” No matter. As far as Hoover and MacArthur were concerned, the Bonus Marchers were a horde of criminals and communist subversives.

Finally, on the afternoon of Thursday, July 28, 1932, under prodding from the White House, the commissioners of the District of Columbia ordered the D.C. police to clear the smaller, disheveled site near the White House, where several hundred of the Bonus Marchers were squatting. The police moved in. The veterans, who were armed with nothing more than bricks, resisted. The squatters were joined by several hundred of their comrades from Bonus City. Bricks were thrown. Shots rangs out. When the brick dust and gun smoke cleared one veteran was dead, another was mortally wounded and a D.C. policeman also lay near death.

That is when the D.C. commissioners asked the White House for federal troops.

Unlike his jingoist successor, Hoover was hardly a militarist; if anything, he was the opposite. Just a month before, Hoover had startled delegates to the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva when he introduced a proposal which, if enacted, would have further reduced America’s already modest peacetime military forces by discarding submarines, tanks and military aviation.

That was then. Now, pacifist no longer, Hoover, fed up with the rabble outside his house, was happy to oblige the District commissioners’ request for reinforcements. The president passed the request to his secretary of War, Patrick Hurley, who passed the request to strutting four-star General MacArthur, who also was happy to oblige.

In Hoover’s statement justifying sending in federal troops, which was carried on the front page of the New York Times and other major American newspapers, he asserted: “An examination of a large number of names discloses the fact that a considerable part of those remaining are not veterans; many are Communists and persons with criminal records.”

“Damned lie,” Waters raged. “Every man is a veteran. We examined the papers of everyone.” No matter: The then-largely conservative American press trumpeted Hoover’s hollow, martial words. Waters’ protest was ignored.

To say that MacArthur was eager to do battle with the Bonus Army is to understate the case. For weeks his men at nearby Fort Myers had undergone anti-riot training for just such a confrontation.

Still, there was neither need nor call for MacArthur himself to actually be on the scene that afternoon, as his aide, Major Dwight Eisenhower, reportedly told him. “I told that son of a bitch that he shouldn’t go there,” Eisenhower later recounted. MacArthur’s subordinate, General Perry Miles, was technically in charge.

But there MacArthur was, in his shiny jodhpurs, as the bayonet-wielding men of the 12th Infantry Regiment, and the mounted troops of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, supported by six M197 light tanks, marched up Pennsylvania Avenue while thousands of civil service employees left work to line the street and watch.

The New York Times reported what happened next: “Amidst scenes reminiscent of the mopping up of a town in the World War, Federal troops drove the army of bonus marchers from the shanty town near Pennsylvania Avenue in which the veterans had been entrenched for months. Ordered to the scene by President Hoover detachments of infantry, cavalry, machine gun and tank crews laid down an effective tear-gas barrage which disorganized the bonus-seekers, and then set fire to the shacks and tents left behind.”

After that, Hoover, whose aides were keeping him updated on the fracas, ordered MacArthur to stop.

But MacArthur had a fuzzy appreciation of the principle of civilian control of the military. Excited by the whiff of battle (even though it hadn’t been much of a battle) and convinced that the shoddy Bonus Marchers constituted a real and present threat to the government, the general disobeyed Hoover’s direct order and instead ordered his troops to cross the Anacostia River to Bonus City. There, as newsreel cameras rolled, his men proceeded to forcibly evict the remaining veterans and their families and torch their tents. Fifty-five veterans were injured and 135 arrested in the confrontation that day.

Hoover, for his part, was unrepentant. Twenty years later, by which time MacArthur was commander of U.S. forces during the Korean War, the storied general's disdain for the string of command resulted in his relief by the president (and former Army captain) Harry Truman. But in 1932, MacArthur’s gross insubordination went unheeded and unpunished. Instead, the government called him a hero. “It was a great victory,” War Secretary Hurley exulted the next day. “Mac is the man of the hour.”

Although Hoover himself never appeared on the scene, that night he could see the fires his men had set from his White House bedroom. So could all of Washington. So could all of America.

The Battle of Washington was over, and so, for all practical purposes, was the presidency of Herbert Clark Hoover. The Bonus March fiasco was seen by many as the death knell for Hoover’s reelection campaign, already facing long odds because of the cratering economy. The sight and sound of his and his top general’s troops tear-gassing the pitiful remaining tenants of Bonus City and their weeping families, as shown in biograph theaters around the country, certainly didn’t endear him to voters. In November, Hoover lost by a landslide to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Flash forward to last Monday’s confrontation at Lafayette Park.

To be sure, Donald Trump’s Battle of Washington is quite distinct from the first one. The vainglorious, saber-rattling Trump bears little resemblance to the modest, if misguided Hoover. The largely young, well-dressed and well-fed protesters who assembled in Lafayette Park on Monday bore little resemblance to the aging, ragamuffin Bonus Marchers who were driven away by MacArthur’s cavalry nearly 90 years ago. Their cause—police brutality—differed from that of the Bonus Marchers. And the heavily swathed, helmeted men who pushed back the protesters at Lafayette Park—a mix of police from several federal agencies as well as National Guardsmen were—were not active duty troops, like the saber-drawn cavalrymen who confronted the Bonus Marchers near the White House in 1932. (Though Trump did threaten to call active troops.)

No, General Mark Milley, the relatively mild-mannered chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is not anything like the blustering Douglas MacArthur. Still, like that infamous long-ago day, Milley was very much on the scene on Monday, as his glowering commander in chief strode across Lafayette Park after the phalanx of federal police had cleared away those protesters so he could he take his photo op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. Milley was wearing combat fatigues, the first time the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had been thus adorned in recent memory. As General Michael Hayden recounted for the Washington Post in its oral history of last Monday’s debacle: “The chairman of the Joint Chiefs was walking with [Trump] and I said, ‘Oh my God, what is he doing. The military would not do that.”

Once again, as in 1932, many feel a line has been crossed. Just as Americans were aghast at the newsreel scenes of the original confrontation, so were many of today’s Americans, who looked agog at the surreal, Goya-esque scene unfolding on their TV sets and smartphones as the heavily armed federal police pushed and flash-banged their way through the defenseless crowd in Lafayette Park while Trump prattled on in the Rose Garden about the threat to the U.S. government. Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis put it succinctly when he wrote, “Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C. this week, sets up a response, a false response between the military and civilian society. It erodes a vital bond between the men and women in uniform and the society they were sworn to protect.”

Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst for the Brookings Institution, further elaborated on what is potentially at stake, particularly if the current, martial-minded chief executive takes the throttle up a notch and actually does call in active duty forces, as the hapless Hoover did in 1932: “This is a time when anyone who worries about the image and role of the military in society should shudder. It doesn’t take long to go back to the days of the 1960s and the 1970s when Americans were disdainful of both the Vietnam War and the troops. Beyond the blow to its prestige, a military that is roughly half minority could suffer enormously in its ability to recruit if the armed forces are seen as adversarial by large chunks of the population.”

“Also all the progress we have seen in modern times with good civilian-military relations—we’ve had no Douglas MacArthurs lately, dancing right up to the edge of outright insubordination in this country for a long time, thank goodness—could be jeopardized if Defense Secretary Esper and General Milley are seen as serving the illegitimate political agenda of a badly flawed president.”

Only time will tell if the second Battle of Washington will damage Trump’s electoral prospects as badly as the first quashed Hoover’s. Still, Trump should be worried: If history is any lesson, the American people aren’t happy when federal militarized forces bulldoze their way through peaceful protesters. The real worry, though, is the lasting damage Trump’s decision to blur the line between the civil and the military—the same mistake Herbert Hoover made on that long-ago day of infamy—may have on America’s relationship with its military and law enforcement. Put simply, once our troops, as well as our police, turn their bayonets and batons on us, who can we trust?

Facing Pandemic, Latvia Follows the Lead of Its Experts (Foreign Policy, 5/20) →

The country has taken a unified, middle-of-the-road approach to the coronavirus, rooted in respect for science. It’s working.

RIGA, Latvia—To the surprise of many, this not particularly wealthy Northern European country of 1.9 million people appears to be one of the coronavirus pandemic’s success stories. As of May 13, Latvia has confirmed only 951 coronavirus cases and 19 deaths. By contrast, neighboring Estonia has recorded double the number of cases and three times as many deaths.

In Latvia, there has been one only death related to COVID-19 since May 4. It seems that the country has not just flattened the curve but smashed it.

Without its usual number of tourists, one could hardly call the capital of Riga bustling, but life goes on. The government has taken a middle-of-the-road approach to restrictions. There is an increased police presence, but it is not overbearing. There is a strict social distancing rule: Citizens are allowed in public only in groups of two and must maintain a six-foot distance from each other. At the same time, all cafes, restaurants, and shops are allowed to remain open.  Still, many have been hit hard by the loss of business and forced to close.

There is no lockdown here—only a slowdown, and it is working. The mood in Riga isn’t exactly upbeat, but it isn’t grim. It is something else: The feeling of an ethnically divided country that is pulling itself together, perhaps for the first time.

March 12—when the cabinet declared a state of emergency—stands out as a pivotal moment in Latvia’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Elsewhere in Europe, there was little agreement about how to respond to the crisis. In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson joked about how he was still shaking hands. The European Union was still “assessing” the situation. It appeared to be every country on its own.

“That was a tense day,” Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins told Foreign Policy. “The World Health Organization had just declared COVID-19 a pandemic. We had not recorded any deaths. The number of infections was small and growing slowly.” Karins is a U.S.-born, Ivy League-educated politician appointed by President Raimonds Vejonis in January 2019 as the head of a broad-based, five-party coalition. A member of the Latvian diaspora, he returned to the small Baltic state in the early 1990s and entered politics in 2002.

After declaring the state of emergency, which allows the cabinet to set new laws, pending parliamentary review, the government shut down Latvia’s school system and switched it to remote learning. At the time, schools in many other countries remained open, but acting on the advice of its medical advisors, Latvia’s government decided to shutter them. “We decided to do this in order to prevent a disaster,” Karins said.

With the support of the opposition, the government took a number of other forceful steps. On March 17, Riga’s international airport was closed except for government repatriation flights for Latvians abroad. At the time, the airports in Tallinn, Estonia, and Vilnius, Lithuania, were still in full operation. The social distancing rule was imposed for all private and public meetings, with fines up to 2,000 euros ($2,200) for violating the two-person limit. At the same time, the cabinet pursued its middle-of-the-road approach in the commercial sector, shutting down malls on the weekends, while allowing most other commercial establishments to remain open.

“Test, track, isolate,” is the government’s mantra.

Like both Germany and South Korea, Latvia at the same time instituted an aggressive diagnostic testing regimen with the aid of a hastily scrambled consortium of public and private laboratories, with the aim of tracking and isolating every case of the coronavirus. The country currently has one of the highest testing rates per capita in the world. “Test, track, isolate,” is the government’s mantra, according to Karins. “It’s terrible to compare death rates across countries,” the prime minister said. “The deaths we have had are still tragedies. But considering how things could have gone, and looking around Europe, it seems that we’re doing well.”

While it was likely aided by its small size and a bit of luck, it is surprising that Latvia has fared so well against the coronavirus. Its underfunded health care system, which includes a number of Soviet-era facilities, could hardly be called state-of-the-art. Moreover, many staff are over the age of 65 and there are too few nurses. In part, it was an awareness of the health care system’s deficiencies that prompted the government to act quickly and preemptively. There was no room for an influx of patients.

Health Minister Ilze Vinkele reported on March 19 that Latvia had 450 ICU beds, with 1,500 additional beds that can be retrofitted as ICU units—but even that is nowhere near enough to handle an outbreak the size of Italy’s or Spain’s. At first, personal protective equipment for medical staff was in short supply but the government enlisted the Ministry of Defense’s logistics team to expedite procurement of such equipment.

The government has also acted with a deep-rooted respect for science and medical expertise, relying on a cadre of the region’s top epidemiologists and virologists based in Latvia. “There was a feeling, early on, that we needed to bring our best medical minds to the fore,” said Janis Bekeris, the chief spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There were also the cautionary examples of other European countries such as the United Kingdom, which ignored its experts at the beginning of its outbreak, or Italy, which counted on a regional rather than a national strategy.

One of  Latvia’s experts is Uga Dumpis, an infectious disease specialist at Pauls Stradins Clinical University Hospital and one of the cabinet’s top advisors. Dumpis called Latvia’s carefully calibrated, relatively unrestrictive response “one of the freest in Europe.” He and his colleagues are nonetheless critical of the largely haphazard, no-lockdown response in Sweden, where schools remain open, social distancing is recommended rather than mandated, and nearly 3,500 people have died.

In Latvia, according to Dumpis, the government’s containment measures have received a high degree of public support. He hopes that the coronavirus will compel the country’s leaders to invest more money in the cash-strapped health care system. “Last year Latvia spent 4 percent of its GDP on health care,” he said. By contrast, in 2018 Estonia and Lithuania spent 5.1 percent and 5.9 respectively.

Along with the public support for the government’s response, the pandemic seems to have helped bring the country together. The two most prominent experts on the pandemic, Dumpis and Jurijs Perevoscikovs, happen to be from different sides of Latvia’s ethnic divide. Dumpis is an ethnic Latvian, while Perevoscikovs is a member of the country’s Russian-speaking minority. Having representatives of both communities as the public face of the government’s COVID-19 response is “an unexpected side effect of the pandemic,” Karins said. “The virus doesn’t treat people by their level of income or ethnicity.”

The government’s challenge now is finding the right balance between keeping the curve flat and deciding which restrictions to loosen.

“The fulcrum of the balance is our experts,” Karins said. On May 7, when, after consulting its experts, the cabinet extended the state of emergency through June 9 while loosening some restrictions. In-person consultation for school exams is allowed, and shopping malls can stay open during the weekend. Masks are now mandatory on public transportation. Members of the business community hit hard by the coronavirus have been among the Karins government’s supporters during the crisis. The government has covered 75 percent of employees’ salaries up to 700 euros ($750) and granted tax deferment to companies for up to three years. “I have to say that I am very impressed by the way the government handled the situation,” said Bernhard Loew, the Austrian manager of a luxury hotel that has temporarily closed. “The correct moves were taken at the right time.”

The right decisions by the right people at the right time: That seems to be the best explanation for Latvia’s success. “Crises can bring out the best and worst in people and governments,” Karins said. “And I think in our case we’re one of the countries where at least this crisis has brought out the best in our people and the government as well.”

Hopefully, Latvians will continue to exercise the same exemplary self-discipline and concern for the commonweal they have displayed thus far. Whether they do so remains to be seen. “We are dealing with human behavior here, not mathematical modules,” Dumpis said. Still, it is difficult to take issue with Karins’s rosy assessment: It’s bracing to see a country get its act together. It appears that a medical crisis has helped Latvia resolve its identity crisis and enhanced the public’s sense of safety, as well as  the feeling that the national government cares about its citizens.

One of the many surprises of the coronavirus crisis has been the number of Latvian diaspora who decided to return. Over 5,000 Latvians boarded the repatriation flights the government offered amid the outbreak, according to Bekeris, far exceeding the foreign affairs ministry’s expectations. The returnees included tourists and students, but also reportedly many Latvians residing abroad who decided that now was the right time to come home for good.

Rod Serling’s ‘The Twilight Zone’ remains startlingly relevant 60 years after its debut (The Washington Post 4/20)

Bigotry, nuclear annihilation and climate change were all targets for the original show, which is being revived by director Jordan Peele

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man ... It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. ... It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.

On Monday night, TV viewers will once again hear the portentous opening narration of “The Twilight Zone,” the celebrated dramatic anthology produced and largely written by Rod Serling, when the latest reboot of the 60-year-old series premieres on CBS All Access.

This time, however, those ominous words will be said by Jordan Peele, the acclaimed director of “Get Out” and recent hit “Us,” who also is executive producer of the new “Zone.” Whether the latest incarnation of Serling’s show, which aired from 1959 to 1964, will prove as successful or enduring as the original remains to be seen.

One of the reasons the original “Zone” still strikes such a chord with today’s viewers is that those episodes have proved to be uncannily prescient.

Fear of the other, nuclear paranoia, body shaming, the perils of artificial intelligence — each of these phenomena is still with us.

“In his ‘Twilight Zone’ scripts, Serling grappled with the contradictions and anxieties of post-World War II America,” says Ron Simon, curator for television and radio at the Paley Center for Media. “These deeply rooted fears persist today as the same prosperous country confronts its unresolved uncertainties.”

“Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” Serling’s haunting disquisition on fear and raw prejudice, was broadcast on March 4, 1960.

On a quiet summer day on Maple Street, a meteor speeds overhead causing a failure of all power equipment. Residents gather and try to explain the outage, and a young boy who reads comic books says that humanlike monsters from outer space have actually already invaded.

At first the adults laugh this off, but then they begin to point fingers at each other. Who is the monster? The accusations become more vehement.

Finally, violence erupts, with one resident getting shot. Then the camera pulls back to reveal two aliens discussing how their experiment in fear has proved successful; one little power failure, and Maple Street — and every other street like it — will destroy itself.

For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, Serling says in his closing narration, while the town below continues to self-destruct, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn.

And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

And they remain deeply entrenched in 21st-century America.

The atomic bomb and the fear of the bomb were a major preoccupation of Americans during the Cold War.

Serling was particularly perturbed by the bomb-shelter craze those jitters induced, including a column by a Catholic cleric who declared that Americans would be justified in keeping their neighbors out of their shelters during an actual atomic attack.

In “The Shelter,” broadcast Sept. 29, 1961, the radio warns that UFOs have been sighted and everyone should run for their shelters. A beloved neighborhood physician, Doc Stockton, locks his family in their shelter, but his neighbors are unprepared. They plead with the kindly physician for entry from outside. No longer kindly, he refuses them.

The neighbors’ anger boils to the point where they break down the shelter door — just as the radio announces that the UFO sightings were a false alarm. Stockton knows, however, that the experience has destroyed them as a community, anyway.

No moral, no message, no prophetic tract, Serling intones over the closing credits. Just a simple statement of fact: For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized. Tonight’s very small exercise in logic from the Twilight Zone.

Fear of nuclear annihilation is still with us. Witness the hysteria created by last year’s false nuclear alert in Hawaii and the resultant pandemonium. Once again, there is a boom — or at least a boomlet — in building bomb shelters.

Actor Burgess Meredith performs in the television show “The Twilight Zone.” (Getty Images)

Serling also took aim at the increasing popularity of psychotherapy and cosmetic surgery in one of his most prophetic — and heartbreaking — episodes, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” which aired Jan. 24, 1964.

In a future society, teenagers are compelled to go through something called the Transformation, by which they can choose a “beautiful” body type acceptable to their vacuous, Kardashian-like peers.

Marilyn, a literature-loving teenager with “sub-acceptable” looks, whose parents drink something called “Instant Smile” (read: Prozac) balks.

However, after remedial therapy, she relents and permits herself to be Transformed. At the end of the process, which takes place off camera, the newly svelte — and brainwashed — teenager emerges to meet her mother and her friend Valerie, who also models the statuesque No. 12 look.

As the “beautiful” Transformed teenager preens before the mirror in front of her carbon copy friend, she babbles, “And the nicest part of it all, Val, I look just like you!”

Portrait of a young lady in love — with herself? Serling muses before the fade-out. Improbable? Perhaps. But in an age of plastic surgery, body building and an infinity of cosmetics, let us hesitate to say impossible. These and other strange blessings may be waiting in the future, which, after all, is The Twilight Zone.

Prophetic words in the age of Instagram.

Climate was not something that Americans thought much about in 1961. But Serling did. In “The Midnight Sun,” the installment that aired on Nov. 17, 1961, an artist, Norma, and her landlady, Mrs. Bronson, are the last occupants of their New York City apartment building.

After a mysterious change in the Earth’s orbit, the planet is slowly falling into the sun. All of Norma’s and Mrs. Bronson’s neighbors, it seems, have either died or moved north to escape the super-high temperatures.

As Serling declares in his opening narration, The time is five minutes to twelve, midnight. This is the eve of the end, because even at midnight, it’s high noon, the hottest day in history — and you’re about to spend it in The Twilight Zone.

As the mercury rises and the climatological end draws near, Mrs. Bronson beseeches Norma to paint a waterfall before dropping dead of heat stroke. Soon Norma also collapses and presumably dies.

However, in the ending twist that was a signature of the classic, mind-bending series, we see that Norma has been dreaming — only to awaken to a different, literally chilling nightmare. It turns out that in reality Earth is moving away from the sun and the world is actually freezing to death.

Serling, who died in 1975, didn’t live to see the dystopia he foretold in “The Twilight Zone,” but he called it.

Or, as Simon, of the Paley Center for Media, puts it, “Rod Serling’s vision is still real — perhaps too real.”