“My research is trying to unlock our history and how white supremacy and racism have shaped U.S. foreign policy in Africa, in addition to how Africans themselves have understood their own policies,” said Osei-Opare, an assistant professor of history at Fordham who is originally from Ghana. 

A historian who focuses on African and Cold War history, Osei-Opare studies the history of his native Ghana, particularly the Ghanian political economy, Black Marxists, and Africa-Soviet relations. He has written about race and foreign policy in several media outlets, including a recent opinion piece about anti-Black racism in Ukraine for The Washington Post—and in many academic journals. 

Two Prestigious Research Positions

Osei-Opare was recently awarded two research positions that will help him to complete his first book, Socialist De-Colony: Soviet & Black Entanglements in Ghana’s Decolonization and Cold War Projects, which will explore Ghana’s relationship with the Cold War. Starting this August, he will begin a two-year research leave from Fordham. During the first year, he will serve as a Mellon Fellow for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies. In the following academic year, he will serve as a scholar-in-residence at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He plans on returning to teaching at Fordham in August 2024, after he finishes his book, which he called “one of the first history books to examine archival resources from West Africa, Russia, North America, and England.” 

An Unusual Perspective on the Cold War

The roots of his research began with his childhood in South Africa. He met two doctors from the former Soviet Union who often mentioned Vladimir Lenin, the founding leader of Soviet Russia, the world’s first communist state, and Osei-Opare grew curious about him. In college, he enrolled in courses that focused on Eastern European history. At the same time, he studied the life of Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and president of Ghana—and eventually, he reached a surprising conclusion. 

“Nkrumah’s ideologies sounded very similar to Lenin’s economic policy and Soviet philosophies. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on that, and it just spiraled from there,” said Osei-Opare, who earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in history from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Over the past decade, he has continued to study how Ghana sought to refashion its political economy out of colonialism’s extractive model, along with the nation’s relationship with the Soviet Union.

“Now my research has broadened to look at the Cold War in general and Africa’s role in shaping the Cold War. People in the West think of the Cold War as something solely between the U.S. and Soviet Union. But in fact, Africa was one of the big players. I’m trying to push Americans to think about the role that Africans have played in shaping what we know as the Cold War, in addition to the relationship between U.S. foreign policy and race,” he said.  

A Shift in Student Understanding of African History

Since he joined Fordham in 2019, Osei-Opare has taught six courses related to his expertise and today’s world, including slavery’s long-lasting impacts and racism in the American educational system. 

His course Understanding Historical Change: Africa, which is a requirement for all students, has improved many students’ knowledge of African history, said Osei-Opare. 

“Many students come into the class without the best understanding of what Africa is,” he said. “Through this course, I have shown them how the idea of Africa as a wild, barbaric place is pervasive. I show them where these ideas come from, how Africans have fought back against these ideas, and why they still persist.” 

In 2020, the United Student Government at Rose Hill awarded him the Beacon Exemplar Award for his excellent work as an educator. In 2022, he also served as the keynote speaker at Fordham’s Diversity Graduation ceremony for Black students.

But for all the recognition he’s received for inspiring students, he says that his students are often the ones who inspire him. 

“I’ve come across some wonderful students at Fordham who have helped me think about my research and African history through insightful analysis and questions and whose own research interests have expanded my own expertise,” said Osei-Opare. “They have also challenged me to think about what it means to be a Black male faculty member at a predominantly white instituion higher ed institution and encouraged me to continue to push for an anti-racist institution.” 

He recalled some of his most rewarding moments as an educator at Fordham. After the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, several students wrote to him, thanking him for helping them to see things differently and discuss issues with a more educated perspective. And at the end of his course UHC: Africa, he said he saw a shift in his students, too. 

“Before class began, I asked students to send me three words that come to mind when they think of Africa. At first, they submitted words like ‘dark continent,’ ‘safari,’ and ‘animals.’ At the end of the semester, new words popped up: ‘socialism,’ ‘Pan-Africanism,’ ‘Black consciousness,’ ‘colonialism,’” he said. “There was a shift in seeing Africa as a place where you go and see animals to a place where humans with ideas live and exist.” 

“I don’t want to leave Kyiv. I was born here. I love Kyiv. Kyiv is the most beautiful city in the world,” said Vitaly Chernoivanenko, Ph.D., a Ukrainian scholar who spoke at a Fordham virtual panel on March 17. “I’m not afraid of Putin and his military forces.”

The panel is part of a new Fordham initiative designed to help Ukrainians during the Russia-Ukraine war. Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies is co-hosting a virtual lecture series that discusses how the current crisis is affecting academia and co-sponsoring a fellowship program for Ukrainian scholars. The center is collaborating with three organizations: the American Academy for Jewish Research, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, and the Lviv Center for Urban History in Ukraine. 

“With people in war zones and in exile from their homes and in need of basic supplies, it may not seem urgent to give attention to scholarship. Nevertheless, society also depends on those who create and preserve knowledge through their scholarship, work, and institutions devoted to research and culture,” said Magda Teter, Ph.D., Fordham’s Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies and a professor of history who is moderating the lecture series. 

The first lecture featured two Ukrainian scholars: Chernoivanenko, a senior research fellow at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine and president of the Ukrainian Association for Jewish Studies, and Sofia Dyak, Ph.D., a historian and director of the Lviv Center for Urban History. The panel was moderated by Teter and Iryna Klymenko, Ph.D., a European history scholar from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. 

‘We Don’t Think About the Office or Our Laptops. We Think About People’

Chernoivanenko reflected on how the past three weeks have affected his professional and personal life. As a scholar who specializes in Jewish studies, preserving the work of his predecessors and colleagues is important, he said, especially in Ukraine, where his scholarship was once banned under Soviet rule. 

“It’s a miracle that for these 30 years since our independence was proclaimed in 1991, we have a very prospective field … All these scholars sincerely want to research Jewish heritage of Ukraine and Eastern Europe,” said Chernoivanenko, who established the first Ukrainian peer-reviewed journal in Jewish studies and the first master’s degree program in Jewish studies in Ukraine. “It’s very important to preserve this heritage, especially now during the war.” 

Chernoivanenko said many of his colleagues are still in Ukraine, where they are doing what they can to help with the war effort.

“We don’t think about the office or our laptops. We think about people, our colleagues,” said Chernoivanenko, speaking from Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. 

Chernoivanenko said he has been assisting local defense forces and strangers in the streets, including the homeless population. He added that he is thankful for his colleagues across the world who invited him to flee Ukraine by taking scholarship positions in their schools, but he said he wanted to stay home and help. His father and mother, who are 74 and 73, respectively, aren’t fleeing either, he said. 

“My parents are very brave,” he said. “They said no, never. We believe in our military forces.” 

Protecting Heritage and New Priorities

Scholars in Ukraine and those who have fled the country both need support, said Teter and Klymenko. There are opportunities that can help scholars who live anywhere, like the new fellowship co-sponsored by Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies and the American Academy for Jewish Research, said Teter, which consists of a $5,000 stipend, remote access to library resources, and networking with faculty members from both institutions. Klymenko added that her own university’s history department has been providing financial aid and refuge for displaced Ukrainian scholars in Germany. Most of the refugees are women with children and elderly parents, she said. 

“These are people, mainly scholars, who are basically trying to save their children from being further traumatized,” said Klymenko, who is affiliated with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. 

The war has also changed people’s views on the preservation of heritage, said Dyak, director of a research institution in Lviv, Ukraine. Her colleagues have been wondering whether or not their artifacts should be wrapped, hidden, or moved. They have also accommodated their facilities to the realities of wartime, she said. 

“We turned our conference room and cafe into shelters … We are discussing [playing]cartoons and classic films for kids, but not home movies because that would be very painful. The shelter is for people who lost their homes or probably can’t go back to their homes,” Dyak said.

A Silver Lining and Hope

There is a silver lining within the chaos of the current crisis, said Teter. 

“It is terrible that a war had to happen, but it puts your voices out there and makes the world discover the amazing scholarship that is being produced in Ukraine and your centers and institutions,” Teter said, directly addressing the panelists. 

It is unclear when Ukrainian scholars will continue their partnerships with Russian scholars and institutions, said Dyak. She added that the path to collaboration will require much introspection on Russia’s part. 

“Cultural arrogance can lead to violence,” Dyak said. “I am hopeful that in the future, from our shared experiences, we will be able to revisit, in a new way, conversations that are painful and hard … Right now we probably are not able to pick up these conversations, but I do hope that these shared experiences will create a space of trust.” 

The second lecture will be held this Thursday, March 24, at 10 a.m. EST. Watch a full recording of the first lecture below: 

For many years, NATO did not admit Ukraine or Georgia to its ranks because its members were afraid that Russia would retaliate by invading Ukraine and other countries, said John Davenport, Ph.D., philosophy professor and director of Fordham’s minor in peace and justice studies. But the effort to placate President Vladimir Putin has gotten us nowhere—except for a war that will result in millions of refugees, hundreds of billions of dollars of damage in Ukraine, and possibly a worldwide recession, he said. 

“What we should be doing now is matching him tit for tat … We [should]admit Georgia next year. And as soon as this war is over in Ukraine, we’ll admit Ukraine as well. We’re going to stand up for a no-fly zone. If he takes further aggressive actions, maybe we’ll get rid of the puppet regime that [he’s] supporting in Venezuela. We’re in a new cold war here,” Davenport said. “Putin is doing this partly because he thinks we’re weak-willed, right? That countries in the NATO alliance don’t have the will to fight. If we don’t show him that’s not true, we’re going to end up—by the end of this century—with a world perhaps completely ruled by dictators.” 

In the virtual panel on March 4, Davenport and Olena Nikolayenko, Ph.D., a Ukraine native and chair and professor of Fordham’s political science department, explained how Western foreign policy led to the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine and offered ways that the U.S. can alleviate the conflict. 

A Mission to Revive the Soviet Union

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became an independent state. For Putin, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the “greatest catastrophe of the 20th century,” said Nikolayenko. 

“He’s on a mission to reset Russian greatness and revive the Soviet Union,” said Nikolayenko, who is originally from Ukraine and has held prestigious positions in several U.S. universities. “This year marks the centennial of the establishment of the Soviet Union, which was set up in 1922. So to some extent, maybe it’s not an accident that he decided to launch this military campaign in order to rewrite history.” 

Since Putin came to power in 2000, he has successfully seized territory from Russia’s neighbors—Georgia and Ukraine—and supported dictatorships across the world, including the Assad regime in Syria, said the professors. Now he has started “the largest ground war in Europe since World War II,” said Nikolayenko. 

Years of Assumptions and Appeasement

There are several factors that emboldened Russia, particularly Western foreign policy, said Nikolayenko. U.S. presidential administrations often downplayed Russia’s belligerent behavior, she said. They expressed concern and implemented soft sanctions to signal disapproval of Russia’s actions, but they continued to maintain diplomatic relations and trade and purchase energy resources from Russia, which inadvertently provided financing for Russia’s military, she said. 

“Over the past decade or more, Western governments tried to appease Russia. They assumed that if Russia takes over just one piece of land—a piece of Moldova, a piece of Georgia, a piece of Ukraine—then the incumbent government in Russia can be appeased and the West can continue to have economic, political, and cultural relations with Russia,” Nikolayenko said. “But of course, as we can see now, this policy might not work very well.”

Finding Solutions: Aid, Trade, and a NATO No-Fly Zone

Nikolayenko said that countries can help Ukraine by providing humanitarian assistance for refugees and military aid for the Ukrainian army. She shared several resources with panel attendees, including a list of charity organizations and upcoming anti-war protests worldwide.

She said that countries can also stop trading with Russia, especially in the oil and gas industries, which would significantly undercut Russia’s ability to finance the war. Davenport added that it will be difficult to make Europe independent of Russian energy, but it’s possible within the next decade. 

“In the long run, it would take a huge investment—maybe five, 10 years at least,” Davenport said. “We could [massively increase]shipping natural gas … There are other countries that could do the same. This could be the beginning of a big push in Europe to try to become free of Russian energy dependence.” 

The U.S. and Western states can also introduce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would reduce deaths and overall destruction in Ukraine, said Nikolayenko. However, audience member Annika Hinze, Ph.D., associate professor of political science and director of the urban studies program, pointed out a potential conflict.

“NATO allies are concerned that if they established and policed a no-fly zone over Ukraine, Russia would not respect it and start shooting down NATO fighter jets, putting NATO at a direct confrontation with Russia, and essentially escalating the war into a Great War (and potentially a nuclear conflict),” Hinze typed into a Zoom chat box. “As an expert, do you think these concerns are warranted?”

Nikolayenko said that she didn’t see how, militarily, the Ukrainian army could stop the bombardment of its cities without a no-fly zone. 

“The United States and Western states have the military capacity to confront Russia, but they are reluctant to do it,” Nikolayenko said, adding that these countries are worried about further escalating the war. “And this is a source of frustration for many people in Ukraine because the world is watching and not willing to go that far.”

This event was sponsored by Fordham’s Pi Sigma Alpha chapter. Watch a full recording of the lecture below:

“To our soon-to-be officers, congratulations,” said Jack Keane, GABELLI ’66, a national security and foreign policy expert and Fordham trustee fellow who was the ceremony’s featured guest speaker. Later, he added: “The oath which you are about to take is a sacred trust between you and the American people.”

“We who take it, embrace it, and take it very seriously. I expect you to do the same,” said Keane, who administered the oath of office to the cadets. In his address, he outlined several security threats that he said will continue to challenge the military worldwide, ranging from a resurgent Russia to a belligerent and nuclear-armed North Korea.

Twenty-two cadets became second lieutenants at the May 17 commissioning ceremony, held in the University Church on the Rose Hill campus the day before Fordham’s 174th Annual Commencement. Another cadet was commissioned on May 20. Nine members of Fordham’s Class of 2019 were among the cadets, who attended a number of New York-area universities.

In his address, Keane told the cadets they are entering not just a job or a career but something “more akin to a vocation” because of the sacrifices and discipline it demands.

Keane noted that he began his own military career as a cadet in the Fordham ROTC program. Following his commissioning, he was assigned to an infantry paratroop unit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

It was intimidating. “They were our very best. I did not know if I could measure up,” he said. “The noncommissioned officers, though subordinate to me, were also my teachers. Outside of our beloved Jesuits, they were the most professional and different group of men I ever encountered—smart, confident, totally dedicated, and completely selfless.”

They cared little about his background, he said. “What they wanted to know was, who was I? Was I willing to work hard to learn the necessary skills, did I really care, would my troops truly come first? In other words, they were … more interested in my heart than anything else.”

“I tried awfully hard to earn their respect and trust,” he said. “I eventually became one of them. I lived a life of shared experiences that enriched my life and my family’s beyond expectations.”

A career infantry paratrooper, Keane was a platoon leader and company commander in Vietnam, where he was decorated for valor. He commanded the 101st Airborne Division and the 18th Airborne Corps, the Army’s largest war-fighting organization, and served as the Army’s acting chief of staff and vice chief of staff before retiring from the Army in 2003. He spoke about the Russia threat before the Committee on Foreign Affairs on May 1, one of many times he has provided expert testimony before Congress.

Keane said the U.S. faces security challenges “on a scale we have not seen since the end of World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union.” They include China’s efforts to dominate the Indo-Pacific region and supplant the U.S. as the world’s leader; radical Islam; and tensions being inflamed by Iran in the Middle East, in addition to the challenges posed by Russia and North Korea, he said.

In light of these threats, along with past defense budget cuts and the erosion of America’s military dominance, the Trump administration’s defense buildup “is even more critical than the Reagan defense buildup of the 1980s,” he said. “The United States military is a much-needed deterrent to these dangers. Your job will be to prepare yourself, your unit and your troops, to be ready.”

“I am proud you want to serve your country,” he said. “We do not take your commitment lightly.”

Protecting America’s Ideals

Speaking before Keane took the podium, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, reflected on the ideals in the country’s founding documents, calling them “luminously beautiful” but also “inherently fragile.”

“They must be protected, defended, and nurtured in every generation,” he told the soon-to-be-commissioned cadets. “They have called out to you and they have awakened in you the same bold generosity that has marked the lives of our greatest heroes.”

“I admire your courage. I am grateful for your generosity,” Father McShane said. “I am challenged—as I always am when I am in the presence of heroes—by your selfless love of our nation.”

During the ceremony, Father McShane presented Lt. Col. Samuel Linn, professor of military science at Fordham, with a certificate praising him for his “transformative leadership” of the ROTC program over the past three years. Linn is departing for Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to command an artillery battalion.

Two cadets were presented with awards honoring distinguished military graduates: Declan Wollard, GABELLI ’19, received the President’s Sabre, and Chris Bolton of Columbia University earned the General Jack Keane Award.

Also on May 17, two Fordham students earned commissions in the Navy ROTC program based at SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx, and the University held an inaugural Victory Bell ceremony at the Rose Hill campus to honor the veterans among the Class of 2019.

John Davenport, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy, says these and many more developments are proof that NATO and the United Nations Security Council, the two bodies best equipped to promote human rights and peace, are no longer up to the job. In a book that will be published by Routledge this fall, Davenport makes the case for creating what he calls a “League of Democracies.”

Listen below

And in an extended bonus track, Davenport delves into the ways in which game theory explains how the challenges the world’s democracies face are similar to those that America’s founding fathers faced in the 18th century.

Full transcript below

John Davenport: The goal of this proposal is not to create an entity that would take over the whole world. It’s to create a new organization that could protect democracies from the rising threats posed by Russia and China, and to stop the enormous mass atrocities that keep coming at us wave after wave.

Patrick Verel: In 2011 a series of uprisings known as the Arab Spring briefly gave the impression that democracy was on an unstoppable march across the globe. Seven years later, it hasn’t exactly turned out that way. Egypt has embraced authoritarianism, Libya is in a state of near anarchy, and Syria has been mired in a catastrophic civil war for seven years. Meanwhile, the international influence of authoritarian countries such as China and Russia as grown significantly.

John Davenport, a professor of philosophy at Fordham, says these and many more developments are proof that NATO and the United Nations Security Council, the two bodies best equipped to promote human rights and peace, are no longer up to the job. In a new book that will be published by Routledge this fall, Davenport makes the case for creating what he calls a league of democracies. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

What was the genesis of this book, was there one particular moment that made you think, “You know what, let’s just start all over?”

John Davenport: In a word, Syria. I think the idea for the book really came to me in the summer of 2013 when it became clear that no nations were going to do anything about the new genocide in progress. After seeing this go on for decades, in the period we thought the world was going to get better after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, we had Bosnia, we had Rwanda, we had the slaughter in the Darfur region of Sudan. All of the mass movements of refugees that these crisis cause. The civil war in Libya. There just isn’t a system in place in the world today to prevent mass atrocity crimes that destabilize whole regions.

Patrick Verel: What do you think is the most pressing concern for liberal democracies today?

John Davenport: Clearly we have division among democracies across the world. Those tensions are being aggravated by China and Russia, which are trying to buy off and woo many of these democracies. That’s not something that Western democracies should take sitting down. We need some new system that can unite the will of democratic countries and assure each of those nations that others are going to do their fair share in order to have a real security arrangement that can stand up to the new threats of cyber attacks, of endless hacking of our elections. New technology, unfortunately we’re going to face armed satellites, robotic weaponry, even nanotechnology. Now we have microwave attacks on our diplomats.

Patrick Verel: President Trump’s American First posture has been described by many as a form of isolationism, which would seem to preclude any acceptance of another international body. What do you think needs to happen for that to change?

John Davenport: It’s a natural reaction for people when faced with huge challenges to retrench and say well if we just retreat within our own borders we can weather out the storm that way. Unfortunately, that’s like the illusion that the hobbits suffered from in The Lord of the Rings. If we just stick to our own affairs in the Shire we don’t have to deal with these larger problems. That’s not how the world works. Things are going to get worse and worse in the 21st century as we approach peak population, not only with climate challenges but with pandemic diseases, financial instability across the world, mass movements of people driven by mass atrocity crimes and rising dictatorships.

The United States has to give up the pretension that we can take unilateral action whenever we want to, as we did in 2003. But, I don’t think that would be a huge price for a lot of Americans now, so ironically it might turn out that the isolationist tendency could even help this argument. But then, in other parts of the world, like Europe would have to accept that in order to get the multilateral decision making that they want, they have to be willing to go outside the U.N. Security Council. It’s now proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that this system is never going to work.

If 500,000 people can be killed in Syria with no forceful response, it’s time to abandon the Security Council. By the way, I should note, I don’t propose abandoning the United Nations entirely. This proposal is simply a replacement for the security council. It provides a way for democracies to act outside the purview of the security council, so we no longer give Russia and China a veto over what we’re doing.

Patrick Verel: Now, I understand that the Federalist Papers are actually a source of inspiration for this plan. Can you explain that a little bit more?

John Davenport: Yes, it’s amazing how exactly the situation between nations in the world today fits the analogy of the relation among the 13 young states in the founding of the United States. During the revolutionary war and the period immediately after, we had enormous discoordination among the 13 states. They were being played off against one another by old European powers. They couldn’t form any common foreign policy. They couldn’t even raise revenue to pay their debts or pay their veterans.

The whole relationship among them was falling apart and easily could have devolved into civil war a lot earlier in American history, if it wasn’t for the intervention of Alexander Hamilton with his friends Madison and Jay, who were able to make very powerful and convincing arguments that these problems. The collective action problems is what is the technical term for them between the 13 states, could only be overcome by a strong central authority that could make decisions for all of them and have binding power to enforce those decisions.

That’s exactly what the United Nations Security Council, NATO, and even the European Union for the most part really lack today. All of our international bodies make decisions by consensus, which means that almost every member nation has to agree. That’s how the old American confederation worked, or rather didn’t work, and that was precisely Hamilton’s insight.

Patrick Verel: Have you thought about any unintended consequences that might happen in the event that something like this actually is put together?

John Davenport: Absolutely, there are a lot of possible objections to the plan. Of course the most likely one is you’re going to create a massive leviathan, a world government that’s going to tyrannize humanity for the remainder of our future. The goal of this proposal is not to create an entity that would take over the whole world. It’s to create a new organization that could protect democracies from the rising threats posed by Russia and China, and to stop the enormous mass atrocities that keep coming at us wave after wave. It’s got to be, in my view, a directly elected council. So that, in unlike the U.N. Security Council, it’s answerable directly to people in all of those democratic nations.

It has to have real enforcement powers. It has to have at least a small armed force of it’s own that the council together with the chief executive of the league can deploy when they see that that’s really necessary to prevent new waves of ethnic cleansing or genocide.

Patrick Verel: When I ask about unintended consequences and you mention this idea that oh, it’s not meant to be this world wide government, it allows for freedom. One of the things that dawned on me was, okay, so if you had like a Libya where they fell apart and you did have this league, and the league decided okay, we’re going to go in and we’re going to stabilize it. What happens when China and Russia they’ve formed their own little alliance and they decide, well no, they say they want us to come in and help and we’re going to send in our own troops. Then you end up with a sort of a proxy war.

John Davenport: The first thing to say about Libya, the lack of reconstruction. That’s a case where there was an assurance game between nations and no one nation wanted to be stuck with the bill and the quagmire like what we went through in Afghanistan and Iraq. So, the advantage of a league of democracies is that you could have 30 or 40 nations contributing, so the cost on any one of them is small. You could have a large presence of peace keepers there for 20 years or more and yet, the burden on any one nation is really very small.

Now, the possibility of a league of dictators, Robert Kegan has addressed this. I argue about this in the book that I think it’s very unlikely, although China and Russia are attempting to ally these days and trying to bring other smaller countries into their orbit. I think once there was serious pressure on them from a league of democracies, it would be very hard for them to continue that posture. Unless we wait too long until China’s so big that it’s got most of the worlds economy in it’s pocket. I think actually a league of democracies could simply use trade sanctions to put enough pressure on China that they would probably have to democratize.

Once either China or Russia join the league, well it’s game over. The other one would never be able to continue completely isolated. The problems that are posed by Russia and China today, the rise of their despotis model where you’ve got economic growth without political rights, that would be ended. The future of humanity would be much brighter. It would also be easy for example with a league of democracies to get China to do what it needs to, to disarm North Korea. Can you imagine what trade sanctions between 40 nations that controlled 80% or more of the worlds economy would do to China? They couldn’t withstand a month of that. The regime would collapse within weeks.

Bonus Track

Patrick Verel: Now I understand that the Federalist papers are actually a source of inspiration for this plan. Can you explain that a little bit more?

John Davenport: Yes. It’s amazing how exactly the situation between nations in the world today, fits the analogy of the relation among the 13 young states in the founding of the United States during the Revolutionary War and the period immediately after. We had enormous dis-coordination among the 13 states, they were being played off against one another by old European powers, they couldn’t form any common foreign policy, they couldn’t even raise revenue to pay their debts or pay their Veterans. The whole relationship among them was falling apart and easily could have devolved into Civil War, a lot earlier in American history, if it wasn’t for the intervention of Alexander Hamilton with his friends, Madison and Jay. Who were able to make very powerful and convincing arguments. That these problems, the collective action problems, is the technical term for them between the 13 states, could only be overcome by a strong central authority that could make decisions for all of them and have binding power to enforce those decisions.

That’s exactly what the United Nation Security Council, NATO and even the European Union for the most part, really lack today. All of our international bodies make decisions by consensus, which means that almost every member nation has to agree. That’s how the old American Confederation worked, or rather, didn’t work. And that was precisely Hamilton’s insight.

Patrick Verel: The Federalist papers though, they wrote those in like what, 1780-something? How is that relevant to today?

John Davenport: Well what’s interesting about it is that, although they didn’t use these phrases. The problems that Hamilton, Madison and Jay saw between the states were basically, games of chicken where they’d each wait for other states to do the hard work like, sending troops to Washington’s army, prisoners dilemmas where they would compete with each other to have better trade deals with other nations. And assurance games, which is less of a familiar term, but that stands for cases where the parties will only act together if they have enough trust in one another to do what’s needed for their collective good, so they don’t waste their resources. These are exactly the problems that we see among governments around the world today, SERI is basically a game of chicken. Nobody wanted to intervene. It’s a losing game of chicken, where everybody goes off the cliff.

And, like in the old car chase. In the case of preventing pandemics, like with the Ebola crisis. The U.S. did the work mainly, to prevent the last one from spreading around the world. Prisoners dilemmas, well climate change is a prisoners’ dilemma and nations are not cooperating well enough with each other because, they each gain an advantage by having cheaper energy in short. And so it’s very difficult without some power that can really enforce decisions over enough leading nations to come up with some solution to that problem.

Sophie Pinkham, a journalist and activist who witnessed corruption, poverty, substance abuse, ethnic clashes, and Russian aggression during a seven-year-long visit in Ukraine, will share her insights at Fordham’s Russian Forum.

March 9th
4 – 5 p.m.
Fordham Law School, Room 3-09
Lincoln Center Campus

Pinkham, who first visited Kiev in 2007, detailed her time in the country in Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine! (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).

During that time, the nation experienced the Maidan Revolution of 2013–2014, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the ensuing war in Eastern Ukraine.

Riley Ossorgin, Ph.D., lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, is coordinating the forum, which will consist of a series of talks on topics related to Russia. He said he invited Pinkham to speak because she can testify to both the “absurdity of life” in a place where the influence of Russian President Vladimir Putin is inescapable, as well as how the situation there is relevant to the United States today.

“We have a new relationship with Russia, and we should know how they negotiate international relations with other countries. Pinkham’s book covers that, as well as offering cultural information about the tensions between Ukrainians and Russians,” he said.

Ossorgin said that the book features interviews with Ukrainians who wanted to connect with Russians, even though they were ideologically opposed to their political ideas.

“That is powerful, and much needed in a time when our political parties are speaking completely different languages,” he said.

Julia Alekseyeva, an artist who published the graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (Microcosm Press, 2017), will be the forum’s guest speaker on March 30. Ossorgin said he’s in the process of booking a third speaker to talk on architecture or graphic arts.

Recent revelations that Russia attempted to influence the U.S. presidential election have made the forum conversations even more important, he said.

“Is the U.S. relationship with Russia worsening, and, if so, what does that mean?” he said. “We need experts who have lived there, who know how Putin runs things, and who understand the laws that have been passed.”

He spoke forcefully about the importance of the rule of law, both within nations and internationally, saying it has been obscured in other nations’ reactions to Russian incursions. “No matter what is the psychological explanation of the acts of occupation of its neighbors, we have to condemn it,” Margvelashvili said at the Sept. 28 event.

His appearance came as world leaders gathered across town for the 70^th United Nations General Assembly, where Russia also faced criticism from the president of Ukraine over its annexation of Crimea last year. That action, along with Russia’s occupation of Georgian territories after a 2008 war between the two nations, is the kind of violation that is “equally dangerous for the violated, for the violator, as well as for other countries,” Margvelashvili said.

It was muted, “thoughtful” reactions to Russia’s 2008 actions that led last year to its annexation of Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine, he said.

“I’m talking about the other nations trying to understand, trying to describe, trying to explain, what Russia did, and thus going beyond the whole concept of condemning Russia to the concept of explaining Russia,” he said. “[The] law is clear: a neighboring state cannot violate the borders of another state no matter how strong or effective or efficient its army is. But there are still nations around the world that are trying to explain, and sometimes in a very sophisticated psychological analysis, why Russia did this.”

He noted that the Russian Federation’s actions in Ukraine came 20 years after Ukraine agreed to nuclear disarmament.

“What is the message after this that we are trying to send to other countries when we are asking them to disarm from their nuclear weapons?” he said. “Wouldn’t they ask the question, ‘Well, Ukraine did this and look at what they have got. Their territories have been occupied.’ So those kind of violations, they don’t only affect Ukraine, they didn’t only affect Georgia, they affected everyone else in the world.”

He took questions from moderator Karen Greenberg, director of Fordham Law’s Center on National Security, and from the audience. He spoke of the importance of the Eurasian “Silk Road” free trade zone that Georgia is trying to establish in partnership with China, and also about Georgia’s aspirations for membership in NATO. “We deserve to have NATO as an umbrella for our peaceful development,” given Georgia’s military sacrifices in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan, he said.

He also told the law students in the audience about the value of the profession they seek to join.

“What I see, not only in the international relationships but in internal politics, in any of the democracies—be it the U.S., be it Georgia, be it other countries—is that the ability of a country to grow and become stronger is in [the]decision of people, political leaders and actors in society, to be bound to the rules,” he said. “That’s an effort that makes your jobs important.”

“He ensconced himself on the ambo in the center of the Royal Doors and delivered a thoroughly secularly speech extoling the fatherland and the church’s role in bolstering the fatherland,” said Father Galadza, the Kule Family Professor of Liturgy at Saint Paul University, Ottawa.

“Even during Romanov era the czar has never been allowed to speak from holy space of the Royal Doors.”

That “political intrusion into the sacred” became symbolic of the religious undertones of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which was the topic of an Orthodox Christian Studies Center discussion at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Nov. 4.

“Putin’s campaign in Ukraine is tragic because the natural goodwill between Ukrainians and Russians that had predominated during period of Ukrainian independence is now being sorely tested,” Father Galadza said.

Because of the close ties between the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox Churches, the Russian government has often employed religion to pursue its political aims, including fanning nationalistic flames within religious communities and even bringing criminal charges against clergy to pressure religious leaders.

“The fear is that Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church will swallow the Ukrainian Orthodox Church through the Moscow Patriarchate and bring Ukraine that way into Russia,” said Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, the chief rabbi of Kiev and all of Ukraine.

Rabbi Bleich gave the example of his own experience in a government-organized group called the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations.

“We would come to meetings once a month and talk about essentially nothing because the agenda was set by government people,” Rabbi Bleich said about the organization, which has since claimed independence. “Basically, government took all the religious leaders, created an organization for us, then locked us in a room and threw away the key.”

The use of religion is just one smokescreen Putin has created to shape the ongoing conflict, said Adrian Karatnycky, nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. Another is to spread propaganda casting it as a “civil war.”

“By now it may have the elements of a civil war, but it is a civil war that was constructed from outside,” Karatnycky said. “There were only a few thousand people disgruntled and engaged in protest at first. Then there was a wave of trained fighters who came to reinforce them. Now this is a fight by a new group of people empowered by money and weapons from the Kremlin.”

In reality, the conflict is a military incursion, not a civil conflict, panelists said.

“There is no civil war. It’s a bunch of terrorists who are getting arms from people who have an interest in retaining the situation,” said Rabbi Bleich.

“People ask, ‘When will there be peace?’ It won’t be with Putin. Putin doesn’t want peace now. He wants the situation to stay the way it is — instability, a war economy, not allowing Ukraine to develop into a thriving democracy with its own economy, which will could dominate Russia.”

The panel featured:

• Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, chief rabbi of Kiev and all of Ukraine and vice president (Ukraine) of the World Jewish Congress;
• Father Peter Galadza, the Kule Family Professor of Liturgy at the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at Saint Paul University, Ottawa;
• Father Cyril Hovorun, research fellow at Yale Divinity School;
• Adrian Karatnycky, nonresident senior fellow at the Transatlantic Relations Program with the Atlantic Council;
• Olena Nikolayenko, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science at Fordham; and
• Moderator Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture and cofounder of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.

The panel discussion was co-sponsored through gifts received from the Jaharis Family Foundation, Inc., the Nicholas J. and Anna K. Bouras Foundation, Inc., and the Office of Alumni Relations at Fordham.

Will sanctions against Putin’s inner circle succeed in provoking regime change? And if so, will Putin’s replacement be any better?

A lively panel discussion on Monday, Sept. 22 at Fordham’s School of Law, laid bare the bind that the U.S. and its allies face when it comes to how to deal with Russia in the years ahead.

“Back to the Future of U.S.-Russia Relations,” featured Stephen Sestanovich, Ph.D., professor at Columbia University, Kimberly Marten, Ph.D., professor at Barnard College, and Mark Galeotti, Ph.D., professor at New York University. Stephen Holmes, Ph.D., professor at New York University School of Law, served as moderator.

Panelists spent a great deal of time debating the best way to counter the sway that Putin exerts on the Russian elite. His decision to annex Crimea and send troops into Eastern Ukraine, are clearly meant to be challenges to international institutions such as the United Nations, which Galeotti noted he despises for being too dominated by Western interests.

“From Putin’s point of view, he’s happy to see Russians sacrifice their day-to-day quality of life, if in the process they regain some sort of Russian-ness,” he said.

“He wants to ensure that Europe is not in a position to flout Russian interests within what he regards as Russian’s sphere of interest.”

The biggest disagreement revolved around sanctions that the United States and Europe have recently imposed on Russian businesses and leaders.

Martin argued that it’s not clear what Russia would have to do to get them lifted, it’s not clear whether any of the things we would like Russia to do are possible, and for them to be successful, they have to be as severe as those that are currently being imposed on Iran.

“In terms of what the goal is in Russia, it’s not clear either. Is it to separate Putin from his networks so that they’ll put pressure on him? Who would provide for their needs better than Putin is providing for them?” she said.

“It’s just cementing a really ugly form of anti-west nationalism, that now the west is once again picking on us, so let’s all get together on this.”

Sestanovich said if there’s something wrong with sanctions, it’s that there haven’t been enough of them.

“It seems to me that we should also establish the precedent that serious cooperation is possible. We shouldn’t write that off,” he said.

Martin cautioned that a replacement for Putin might be no better than he is; a point that Galeotti took issue with. He noted that Nikita Kruschev and Margaret Thatcher are good historical examples of times when countries’ elites judged their leader to be a problem rather than an asset, and forced them to step down.

“I’m not sure the next person is likely to be worse. We’re not talking about Libya. We’re not talking about a place where we bomb the snot out of countries and hope suddenly that democratic leaders rise from the rubble,” he said.

At the same time, all the panelists agreed that Russia’s foray into Eastern Ukraine illustrated a stunning level of over-reach on Putin’s part. Sestanovich said that had Russia only seized Crimea, it probably would have gotten away with it, while
Marten noted that the incursion had re-invigorated the NATO alliance, which isn’t in his interest.

It helps to remember that Putin’s a judo master, not a chess player, she said, because judo masters go into every round as if it’s a new one.

“To be the winner of a judo match, you don’t have to be the stronger person, you have to be the cleverer person. You have to know more about your opponent more than your opponent knows about you, and have to get your opponent to fall from his own weight,” she said.

“I believe that’s how Putin approaches every interaction with the west, and so I don’t think even he knows what how long term strategy is in Ukraine.”

The evening was sponsored by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and PEN America.