World War III has already started — but not where you think

San Francisco Chronicle​

16 hours ago

I was to visit Ukraine this week, but didn't make the trip. Because the same war I would have seen there had already come to Los Angeles.
World War III is well underway. Contrary to popular belief, it is not a global contest between hegemons or even between alliances of nations. World War III consists of assaults by authoritarian national governments on cities, usually their own.
To Americans, the Trump administration's lawless attacks on Los Angeles might seem shocking. We are not accustomed to the federal government sending thousands of troops to police Americans or to a president authorizing masked secret police stormtroopers to arrest anyone who looks like an immigrant. Nor have we experienced federal administrations seeking to imprison elected local leaders.
But look around the planet, and the Battle of Los Angeles appears familiar.
World War III's hottest spot may be Turkey, where autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been sacking local governments. Last fall, he replaced the elected mayors of Batman, Mardin and Halfeit, all in Kurdish-majority regions, with cronies.
This spring, the war came to Istanbul, with the arrests of the popular Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, senior municipal staff, city district leaders, contractors and thousands of protesters.
Imamoglu faces trumped-up charges of corruption. But the mayor's real crime was defeating Erdogan's party in municipal elections and governing so well that he was leading Erdogan in presidential polls. Istanbul is suffering for its success, with Erdogan's decapitation of municipal leadership leaving the city 'effectively rendered inoperable,' according to senior lawmaker Gokhan Gunaydin.
In this, Turkey embodies a global dynamic. National governments are losing legitimacy by failing to resolve social problems. To remain in power, they turn to authoritarianism, ruling through fear and political conflict. And they ignore the work of governance — maintaining infrastructure, delivering health care — which increasingly falls to local leaders.
You might think that national regimes would thank localities that take on governance responsibilities. But it's a mean world, and national authoritarians instead attack their most successful and independent cities — from Istanbul to Los Angeles.
That's why the destruction of Aleppo was the essential battle of the now-deposed Syrian dictatorship's civil war. Aleppo — previously the Syria's most populous, wealthy and culturally distinguished city — was a threat to the Syrian regime.
Then there's Russia's war in Ukraine — Europe's largest country, which Vladimir Putin insists belongs to him. In battle, the Russian regime has been most destructive in successful Russian-speaking municipalities in Ukraine's east, notably Mariupol, a major steel producer and port.
Ethiopia's government, in its civil war with the Tigray region, has focused violence on Mekelle, an independent-minded and fast-growing economic center. The Myanmar junta has repeatedly bombed its beautiful second city, Mandalay.
Even in countries that are not at war, conflicts between authoritarian regimes and self-governing cities are ugly.
Hungary's strongman ruler, Viktor Orban, frequently targets the government and economy of his country's capital city, Budapest. Orban's assaults are mostly financial — including a June 4 decree that lowers the local business taxes for Orban allies, a tax cut that would destroy the local budget. Effectively, Hungary is bankrupting Budapest, much as Trump has threatened to bankrupt Los Angeles by blocking federal funds. Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony said Orban wants 'to push the city to the brink of an abyss. The political intention to paralyze the capital's operations is obvious.'
Authoritarian nation-states are more frequently detaining local leaders, often under the pretext of fighting corruption. Indonesia's new president, Prabowo Subianto, is replacing local leaders with military officials and proposing to end local elections. India's authoritarian-nationalist leader, Narendra Modi, revoked the autonomy of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir and dissolved its local assembly. Modi's allies also jailed and forced out Delhi's longtime chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal.
'We have to save this country from dictatorship,' Kejriwal said last year.
For some regimes, destroying local self-governance is not enough. China, after dismantling Hong Kong's self-rule, is hunting Hong Kong officials and activists wherever they have fled. Nation-states also fuel overseas civil wars that destroy cities; the worst example is the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, now a ruin via a civil war involving Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, Russia, China and Turkey.
Do besieged cities have any chance of defeating the authoritarian nation-states that oppress them? Yes. But it won't be easy. It would require the residents of targeted localities to transform their hometowns into stronger, higher-capacity city-states.
Before that can happen, the protesters opposing the Istanbul mayor's jailing, the bombs dropping in Mandalay and the secret police in L.A. must make common cause.