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, but it's not a global contest between hegemons, or alliances of nations. Instead, World War III consists of assaults by authoritarian national governments oncities, 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 masked secret police arresting anyone they see, or to 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 for years. This spring, the war came to Istanbul, with the arrests of the popular mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, senior municipal staff, city district leaders, and thousands of protesters. Imamoglu faces trumped-up charges of corruption. But the mayor's real crime was defeating Mr Erdogan's party in municipal elections and governing so well that he became more popular than Mr Erdogan. Mr Erdogan's decapitation of municipal leadership leaving the city "effectively rendered inoperable," according to 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, political conflict.
You might think that national regimes would thank localities that take on governance responsibilities. But it's a mean world, and 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 country's most populous, wealthy, and culturally distinguished city, was a threat to the Syrian regime. Then there's Russia's war in Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin insists belongs to him. In battle, the Russian regime has been most destructive in 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 the city of Mekelle, an independent-minded and fast-growing economic centre. 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 Viktor Orban targets the government and economy of the capital, Budapest. Mr 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 Mr Trump has threatened to bankrupt Los Angeles by blocking federal funds. Mr Orban, said Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony, "want[s] to push the city to the brink of an abyss. The political intention to paralyse 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. Mr Modi's allies also jailed and forced out Delhi's longtime chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal. 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.
In the US, the World War rages not just in California. Florida's governor has removed local officials, and Texas' right-wing government routinely cancels the democratic decision-making of its cities. 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 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 LA must make common cause. © Zócalo Public Square
Joe Mathews is founder-columnist at Democracy Local, a planetary publication.