Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 130

The 800-Pound Gorilla in Hurricane Season

The current hurricane season in the southeastern United States and the Caribbean has been horribly telegenic so far. A lot of people are in distress, most recently in Puerto Rico, and despite the well-documented hemorrhaging of social trust in American society over the past few generations, many hearts and much help have gone out to care for them in their hour of need. We are not fated, it seems, to relive the Kitty Genovese syndrome ‘til doomsday cometh.

Not all the news around the storms is so upbeat, however. It was inevitable that some observers would latch on to the Houston catastrophe, in particular, to claim that much of it was man-made. And with good reason that need not even drag those obsessed with climate change into the mix: the standard Texan disdain for zoning and planning that led to a vast and rapid increase in impermeable surface (also known as concrete and asphalt) in what is anyway a geological zone not flush with (you should excuse the language) permeable soil types. A storm as large as Harvey would probably have overwhelmed even a well-zoned and planned-for city, granted, but very few storms are the size of Harvey. It’s safe to say, in any case, that the veritably deliberate failure to plan made a bad situation worse.

If the man-made rap is even partially true, this should come as no big shock to anyone who paid attention to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The flooding of New Orleans was exquisitely man-made: The levies failed because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been suborned over several years by corrupt politicians, local and national, to do substandard and incoherent (from an engineering standpoint) work that was pretty much guaranteed to fail in an emergency.

Then, with Irma, we beheld the spectacle of EPA Director Scott Pruitt opining that it was “very, very insensitive” to raise questions about climate change when people were suffering the aftereffects of the hurricane. The Republican Mayor of Miami, Tomás Regalado, and others respectfully, or perhaps a bit disrespectfully, disagreed with Pruitt. Given the current political climate (word chosen carefully), that’s about as surprising, and about as appealing, as fresh cow flop in a bovine-populated pasture.

Surprising or not, it wasn’t pretty. But it was also mostly beside the point. After all, few Floridians struggling in the aftermath of the storm cared much about Pruitt’s remark or Regalado’s rejoinder, especially since very large numbers of them lacked electrical power to attend to the conversation: no television, no desktop computers, no way to charge their phones to get internet.

Which brings me to my point, which concerns the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in just about everyone’s living room that, as these things go by definition, hardly anyone can see. Let me make the gorilla visible for you, if I may, in a somewhat roundabout but, I hope, entertaining fashion.

When I greet a class of undergraduates in the confines of a high-prestige university, I often find it useful to deploy a playful but pointed exercise in ego deflation. Whatever the subject I’m supposed to teach, I ask the class members three questions at the first session: Why are (pretty much) all manhole covers round? When a whip “cracks,” what actually makes the sound? And why do some birds in temperate climate zones migrate south for the winter while others do not?

From time to time some wiseass in the class actually knows the answer to one or more of these questions, but that’s rare. Some of the guesses students make range from hilarious to embarrassing. The answers are actually pretty obvious once pointed out, to wit:

Manhole covers are round because circles are a perfect shape, and so cannot be angled to fall into the hole and perhaps injure someone working below. Any other shape can be angled to fall through the hole.
A whip “cracks” not because leather has smacked against leather, but because the tip of the whip actually breaks the sound barrier.
Birds who migrate away from freezing weather have a live-food, mostly insect, diet; birds that stay eat seeds, nuts, berries, and the like. It has nothing to do with how thick their feathers are or how vivid their travel imaginations may be.

I’ve decided now to add a fourth question to my reservoir of undergraduate ego-deflation tools: Why is it that when serious storms strike most west European countries we rarely hear anything about major power outages in their wake, but when serious storms strike the United States we always do? The answer that accounts for the difference is the 800-pound gorilla.

Can you see the gorilla yet? Well, then, take a look at the photograph here, snapped in Puerto Rico after Maria had passed through, that appeared on the front page of the September 22 New York Times.

What do you see? You see, I assume, a large number of downed telephone poles and power lines. Look at any photograph of any major storm aftermath in the United States, whether it be a summer hurricane or a winter blizzard, and you will see pretty much the same thing to one degree or another.

As everyone realizes, downed power lines are dangerous. Massive power outages can also be life threatening, are certainly very expensive to remediate, and invariably have dour if usually temporary consequences for the economy. Some Pentagon experts will tell you that stringing power lines up on poles also constitutes a national security vulnerability, for it renders the grid naked to EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack. Why do advanced countries in western Europe, for example, not have problems of a similar scale with serious storm aftermaths (and yes, they have their share, even if not of Cat. 5 hurricane magnitude)? Because they generally don’t string their power lines up on ugly poles; they bury them!

There you go: gorilla revealed. See him smile. Hear him laugh at us. Listen to him comment: “What a bunch of idiots!”

Is the gorilla being unfair? Well, ask yourself: In all the coverage you have read about Harvey, Irma, and Maria, have you come upon a single politician or mass-media maven saying so much as a single word about our remarkable, seemingly overweening, desire to hoist electrical transmission lines up on “telephone poles” that, just by the way, most users of telephones in the United States today don’t even need them for? Me neither.

Of course, many neighborhoods in the United States have underground power lines—mostly newer and upscale ones. But it’s still the exception rather than the rule in most places, and there is no serious public-policy momentum in most states to modernize this aspect of the power grid (let alone others). When the current President makes a big deal about infrastructural investments, he does no better than his “shovel-ready” predecessor: For all anyone can tell, both of them are about repairing and adding to the legacy infrastructural forms we have inherited. No one in a position of political authority has a word to say about the kind of smart, integrated infrastructural reform that new technology makes possible.

We have suffered needlessly from storms this season, as we suffer needlessly from storms almost every season. In larger perspective, however, what we really suffer from is a massive failure of imagination and political will.

Now, if you raise this matter of burying power lines to local power utility executives and local politicians, you get a varying line of talk. Some will say that distances in the United States are much greater than in most west European, Scandinavian, and other states (for example Singapore, the UAE) that bury their power lines, so the economic calculations differ.

Burying lines does carry more of an upfront cost than sticking them up on poles. This is therefore to some extent a valid point, but it doesn’t excuse sticking lines up on poles in densely populated areas. We could still have lines up on poles between urban areas and have the lines buried within urban areas. But as a rule, we don’t do that and most urban areas in the United States have no plans to do that. Why?

Well, if you continue the conversation with those “in the business” at local levels, you soon hear a stickier truth: We are sunk in a legacy maintenance investment of cherry-picker trucks and a raft of other physical stock related to telephone pole-power line installation and maintenance. To change to burying lines would require junking much of that investment and digging into our pockets for new equipment and materials, and new training protocols for our workers. We don’t have the money, they tell you. “Float a bond?”, you suggest. Answer: silence, usually.

And to be sure, burying power lines would not solve all problems related to power transmission. For starters, areas particularly prone to repeated storm flooding are not appropriate for buried lines. Even where they are appropriate, buried lines sometimes need maintenance, too, albeit less often. It’s hard for a tree limb to sever a power line if it’s underground. But they don’t usually need maintenance “all at once” because of storms (earthquakes are another story, but major earthquakes are much, much rarer than seasonal storms). Underground lines wear out and break over a much more evenly distributed period, meaning we wouldn’t need to finance the expensive surge capabilities required by storm emergencies. That means that electrical utilities could spend much less on maintenance over the life of system elements; over time that savings would more than compensate for the greater up-front costs of burying power lines, especially if underground systems employ new technologies that make electrical transmission more efficient. Yeah, we can do that too.

Burying lines is more expensive and time-consuming than it would otherwise be because all sorts of other stuff is buried in urban areas—gas lines, sewer lines, cable lines, and more. If the electric company doesn’t reliably know where all these other conduits are, the huge mess they are likely to make is predictable, and so are the fights with other utilities and companies. Well, don’t we have reliable maps of underground installations, and can’t these be aggregated at a clearinghouse of some kind to obviate this problem? You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Go right ahead, and see where that gets you.

But while some see this crowded-conduit situation as a problem, it’s wiser to see it as an opportunity. What it suggests is new “smart” infrastructure that can bundle infrastructural elements in a vastly more efficient way than we do now. Information technology advances applied to infrastructure enable us to use “peak load” thinking to spread out the energy input in infrastructure systems—its most expensive aspect over all—seen as an integrated unit, and not just in the electricity supply. Several other countries that have had the luxury of starting fresh in the absence of major legacy infrastructure inheritances. But that requires integrating different infrastructural elements at least to some extent, all of which have their own histories, business models, relations to government/private sector mixes, institutional cultures, relations to unions, and so on.

The technology is therefore not so much the problem: Impressive infrastructure-related innovation is going on at lab-scale in many American universities—Cal Tech, MIT, Case Western Reserve, Carnegie-Mellon, and plenty of others. We have the engineers and the materials scientists to do this sort of thing, even though it’s impossible to get to best practice at scale until we actually get our hands dirty trying to build some of this stuff. We have also had for some years now ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, one of whose mandates has been precisely innovation in infrastructure. But Congress has never funded ARPA-E properly, and the Trump Administration, so rhetorically gung-ho on infrastructure, has endeavored to kill it altogether in its first budget proposal. Talk about stupid.

We could even develop much more efficient trench-digging technology than we have now, were there a reasonable incentive to develop it. We still have brilliant pneumatic and hydraulic engineers for such a fairly straightforward challenge.

The real problem is that nowhere in government at any level is there a convening platform where all the different elements of the infrastructural enterprise can sit down together to rationally plan, invest, construct, and maintenance an integrated infrastructural system of systems. What we have, in other words is a textbook case of Galston’s Law (named after Bill Galston, on the TAI editorial board). Galston’s Law states: You cannot get new or bold policy outcomes from a bureaucratic set-up designed to do other things.

This is what I mean by a failure of imagination and political will. Precious few of our political leaders understand Galston’s Law, partly because few of them have ever worked in a government bureaucracy. They rarely see any relationship between policy outcomes and government structure; they tend to take the latter as an immutable given. They rarely think of innovating toward greater efficiency for the common weal; they instead incline to think of throwing more good money at bad arrangements. It’s so much easier, and doing so often appeases certain concentrated constituencies whose interests are in stasis rather than change. (Yes, this is a collective action sort of problem, for those readers who understand the concept.)

Of course the aggregate consequence of this kind of stasis-biased thinking is the impossible but nevertheless likely conclusion that we will never innovate in infrastructure, and so will fall ever further behind other countries that can organize their politics in more functional ways. So we look at Puerto Rico after Maria and shake our heads, muttering “oh, what a shame.” And then instead of seeing the mess as an opportunity to rebuild smarter—after emergency relief has been provided, of course—we just put more wires up on poles to guarantee that the next time a major storm hits we’ll all end up repeating, “oh, what a shame.” If this is not a description of abject political dysfunction in action, what is?

In the past, it has usually been the private sector in the United States that has led technical innovation, and government has tagged along afterwards in an effort to disambiguate, regulate, and, of course, tax if it can. There have been exceptions: the canal-building projects especially of the Madison and Monroe Administrations; the Manhattan Project; NASA and DARPA, are some of them. But these are the storied exceptions that illustrate a rule that may not work with future infrastructure reform, because so many of its elements are deeply entangled in public-utility monopoly arrangements, as many need to be. There isn’t much market balm to expect from that context.

So this is a huge undertaking that only government, working the Federal apparatus as it is capable of being worked, can initiate and manage successfully. If an administration were to state as a four- or eight-year goal the burying of all urban power lines in America (and Puerto Rico), it would soon come to conclude that broader innovative reforms of the country’s infrastructural system as a whole are both necessary, possible, and highly desirable.

Such an effort would be an easy political sell, and politicians wouldn’t even have to lie about it—alas, the default posture of all too many of them. Such an effort, after all, would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in private-sector contractor businesses—high-tech jobs and all sorts of other jobs. It would stimulate the economy in all the right ways, through investment rather than through consumption, from building rather than through dissipation. It would be a boon for many universities and for R&D efforts both governmental and corporate, with unpredictable but perhaps not small ancillary benefits for the economy in the longer run. It would bolster STEM education efforts nationwide. And I could go on.

The Trump Administration will never do something like this. The Obama Administration might have but, alas, didn’t. American politics are ecumenically broken. But now listen up Democrats: Anyone who is thinking about how to peel away the outer layers of Trump voters, by figuring out a way to do something positive and practical for people who’ve gotten the shaft of globalization these past few decades, would do well to start with smart infrastructure investment in innovation.

Allow me, please, a final remark to illustrate something of the structure/function mismatch that increasingly bedevils the efficacy of the American state.

You will perhaps recall that during Hurricane Harvey some chemical storage facilities of the (French-owned) Arkema Corporation in Crosby, Texas caught fire—a building and several trailers—sending plumes of toxic gasses and smoke into the air. The reason the chemicals exploded into fire was that their cooling mechanisms failed thanks to power outages. The electrical transmission lines, strung up on poles, blew down; their backup generators ended up under water. Bad scene.

After something like that happens, any normal person in a position of authority would want to figure out how to prevent something like it from happening again. One obvious approach is to site the backup generators up on the roof, or on some scaffolding strong and high enough to be reasonably safe from flooding. Another is to bury the principal transmission lines in watertight conduits. The company might decide to do such things without anyone in government at any level forcing it to, because it makes economic sense: saves on insurance premiums, lost operating time and hence lost revenue, reconstruction costs, and so on. Or it might not.

But again, the technical side isn’t the real problem. When something like a major chemical fire occurs, as it did in Houston during Harvey, what responsibility does government have, even if the company acts wisely in its own interests? Think this is a simple question to answer? Ha!

First, you’ll need to figure out what level of government matters most here—county, state, or Federal? Does regulatory jurisdiction overlap in a case like this? If so, how and to what effect? Want answers? Then get ready to experience a major headache trying to get them.

Second, looking just at the Federal level, which agencies and departments are liable to be engaged? Well, since potentially dangerous chemicals are involved, OSHA will be present to protect workers whether there is an emergency or not. The EPA will have to be involved as well, since disposal of chemicals and chemical by-products are part of its mandate. What about the Department of Transportation? Sure, these chemicals have precursors that have to come from somewhere and the finished products have to be transported somewhere—if any of that process crosses state lines, that’s DOT’s responsibility. What about DHS, since such facilities are clearly potential terrorist targets? Sure. The Department of Energy? Maybe; depends on what chemicals we’re talking about. CDC? Same answer: maybe, depending on the stuff at issue. Commerce? Possibly a small role, if the chemicals in question are mainly being processed for export. Even DOJ could conceivably have a role if criminal neglect can be established as a source of the disaster. FEMA? When there is a problem of this sort, certainly.

With that bureaucratic dramatis personae in mind, ask yourself the obvious next question: Who’s actually in charge when things go wrong? Is there a rationally organized, standing Interagency arrangement of some sort—or any protocol-in-waiting to disentangle jurisdictional overlap—that kicks into action when something like this happens?

Let me offer a hint as to the answer: Sorry, there’s no gorilla.

The post The 800-Pound Gorilla in Hurricane Season appeared first on The American Interest.

Academic Freedom in an Era of Globalization

For the past few years, the American principle of academic freedom has been under attack. On campus after campus, these attacks have come from extremists on both ends of the political spectrum. And while university administrators have struggled to cope, most of their efforts have been so ineffectual that zealous activists themselves are now proposing remedies—from even stricter campus speech codes on the Left to convoluted lawsuits on the Right—that will only make the situation worse.

Yet curiously, the international reputation and drawing power of the U.S. system of higher education remains high. Despite fluctuations in world opinion toward the United States as a whole, America’s universities continue to bask in the glow of global approval. As John Waters, former president of the American University in Beirut, once put it, “The word American is to education what Swiss is to watches.”

The American traveler will hear this sentiment echoed everywhere. In Jakarta a few years ago, the eminent Muslim intellectual Azyumardi Azra told me, “Even those Indonesians who oppose U.S. foreign policy have America as their first choice for higher education.” In Dubai, a Lebanese media executive remarked, “Even when Arabs have negative stereotypes of Americans, we dream of sending our kids to an American university.” And in Mumbai, a prominent Indian businessman commented, “Education is an incredibly farsighted form of public diplomacy for America.”

These two phenomena, campus disruption and global renown, may seem unrelated at first. But there is a real and troubling similarity between them. Surprising as it sounds, both phenomena pose a threat to academic freedom.

Question: Which part of the university is most affected by protests and disruption? Answer: The undergraduate liberal arts college, especially the social sciences and humanities. Question: Which part is least affected? Answer: All the rest. No matter who is marching, attacking monuments, or shouting down speakers, the gleaming science centers, the imposing professional schools, and the lavishly funded research institutes keep humming along. These precincts of the university are not pleased by the disruption, but they are not really affected by it either.

Why is this? Back in the 1970s, the sociologist James Coleman explained that, like Gaul, the American university is divided into three parts, each with its own distinctive history and ethos.

First is the small liberal arts college, whose roots date back to 1636, when Harvard College was founded to train the Puritan clergy of Massachusetts. It’s worth remembering that until the late 19th century, the majority of small colleges in the United States were devoted less to the classical artes liberales than to transmitting the heritage of a particular Christian denomination, primarily by preparing men for the ministry but also by molding the moral character of a social elite.

Second is the basic research university, devoted to “pure,” disinterested scientific inquiry directed by an individual researcher or team. This model emerged in Germany during the 19th century and was introduced into America in 1876, with the founding of Johns Hopkins University. Hopkins began life without a liberal arts college because its stated goal was not to transmit a heritage but to push back the frontiers of knowledge. Notably, it was this part of the university that in the late 19th century asserted the principle of academic freedom against interference by outside authorities, whether religious or political.

Third is the technocratic university, serving the interests of agriculture, industry, and government through applied research and workforce training. The starting date here is 1862, when through the Morrill Act Congress mandated grants of Federal land to all the then-existing states on the condition that they create colleges for the study, not just of traditional academic subjects, but also of “agriculture and the mechanical arts.”

Since Coleman’s time, U.S. higher education has become a global institution. Indeed, former New York University president John Sexton has led the way by proclaiming NYU the world’s first “global university.” Strikingly, this may be one of the few instances in which the adjective “global” retains its 1990s glow. But perhaps it shouldn’t, because while all three parts of the contemporary American university have become globalized, the part that has benefited most from the process is the technocratic university. And this has emboldened it to launch ambitious projects with powerful overseas partners, some of whom are indifferent, indeed hostile, to academic freedom.

 

This is not really breaking news. In the late 1930s, when Saudi Arabia began sending students to the University of Southern California to gain technical skills related to oil production, the exchange was welcome because, as one American geologist recalls, USC at the time was “basically a nuts and bolts university as far as the oil patch was concerned.” The pattern has repeated ever since: Authoritarian regimes have sought to benefit from American science and technology, while at the same time avoiding liberal arts and basic research, which they warily regard as repositories of unwanted ideas about society and (especially) politics.

For example, after the U.S.-Soviet cultural agreement of 1958, the Soviets began sending students to U.S. campuses. As noted by veteran diplomat Yale Richmond, the “fields of study were determined by an interagency governmental committee according to the needs of the Soviet economy,” and “the Soviet participants were simply told, without prior consultation, that they were being sent to the United States.”

Needless to say, the U.S. government also tapped the technocratic university. During World War II and the Cold War, many Federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the CIA, relied heavily on campus expertise. This was considered prestigious until, in the late 1960s, the New Left rose in protest against “university complicity in the war machine.” Not everything changed as a result of the antiwar movement and the counterculture that got hitched to it, but at least as regards social science connectivity to government, this did change, and in no small measure, over time.

In response, the most controversial defense-related projects retreated into think tanks and R&D contractors. But that did not cramp the technocratic university’s style. Its impressive facilities continued to attract external funding from the U.S. government, foundations, and corporations—as well as from foreign governments. Not surprisingly, this growing dependence on outside funding has been criticized for weakening the technocratic university’s commitment to academic freedom.

This is not just disturbing in the domestic context. It is also troubling in the global context. For example, some of America’s leading universities have in recent years agreed to help authoritarian regimes build their own state-of-the-art research facilities. There are, for example, several medical school satellites of U.S. institutions—Duke’s partnership with Singapore was one of the first of these, dating to 2005. One of the most prominent non-medical examples of these ventures is the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, developed in cooperation with MIT. Masdar wears the benign aspect of a richly resourced institution devoted to finding new sources of sustainable energy. But given the lack of transparency in the Persian Gulf kingdoms, not to mention the susceptibility of American researchers to flattery and especially generosity, it is not hard to imagine some dubious outcomes.

An even greater challenge arises when an American university agrees to plant a full-fledged liberal arts college in authoritarian soil. Three prominent examples would be NYU-Abu Dhabi; NYU-Shanghai (developed in cooperation with East China Normal University); and Yale-NUS (a partnership between Yale and the National University of Singapore). Because these transplants do not confine themselves to science and technology, it seems inevitable that their commitment to academic freedom will be tested.

So far, the record is mixed, with NYU and Yale both trying to sidestep the fact that their overseas partners do not share the assumption, deeply ingrained in U.S. higher education, that there is a necessary connection between liberal arts education and democratic citizenship. In the case of NYU, Sexton is on record saying, “I have no trouble distinguishing between rights of academic freedom and rights of political expression. These are two different things.”

Less facile is this comment from a Yale professor who served on the Yale-NUS curriculum committee: “Some leaders in Singapore’s government see the link between academic freedom and political freedom. They think that at least some degree of liberalization and democratization [is] inevitably in Singapore’s future, and they hope that institutions such as Yale-NUS can help.”

These comments reflect the default position of most American educators toward these ventures: cynically compromising on the one hand and, on the other, reflexively expressing optimism that any exposure to U.S. higher education, no matter how circumscribed, will ultimately sow the seeds of freedom and democracy. Reinforcing this position is the rhetoric of overseas partners who, despite their authoritarian values, sound a lot like U.S. businessmen when singing the praises of innovation and creativity as the fuel for a dynamic and growing economy.

But make no mistake. These partners may praise the spirit of free inquiry, but under their regimes free inquiry is a privilege, not a right. And their real purpose in partnering with U.S. universities is to nurture their own technocratic elites.

A research topic not likely to be funded is the underlying connection between these growing ties to authoritarian regimes and the anger and protest presently corroding campus life. The only connection I can discern at the moment has to do with the seeming inability of university administrators to exercise mature judgment when their campuses blow up. This may be unfair, but their attitude seems to be along the line of: “Give them what they want, so we can get back to business as usual.”

The current campus disruptions over what is and isn’t acceptable speech cannot be judged a blessing in disguise—they are far too illiberal and misguided for that. But by interfering with business as usual, perhaps they will also make it harder for the purported leaders of U.S. higher education to speak in lofty clichés while selling their birthright to deep-pocketed authoritarian sponsors.

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Is the India-China Border Heating Up Again?

Long after China and India negotiated a face-saving “disengagement” to the Sikkim border standoff, PLA troops are still causing unease with a heavy presence near the disputed terrain. The Indian Express reports:

More than five weeks after India and China stepped back from a standoff at Doklam on the Sikkim border, Indian soldiers remain on high alert with around 1,000 Chinese troops still present on the plateau, a few hundred metres from the faceoff site. […]

At the plateau, sources said, the Chinese have not dismantled any of their tents and temporary construction in the vicinity. The PLA battalion, which has been spread over the area due to lack of space, is being kept under surveillance by the Indian Army, said sources. The Chinese soldiers in the area still have road construction equipment and other stores, they said.

[…]

Although India doesn’t expect another “flashpoint” in the area, the assessment is that China could attempt a stronger intrusion at another location on the 3,488-km Line of Actual Control (LAC) — possibly at Barahoti in Uttaranchal, in the central sector.

Other reports have echoed this one, with additional details offering more cause for concern: according to the Hindustan Times, for instance, PLA troops were widening a road approximately 12km from the original standoff site. Indian sources say that work is being done within Chinese territory, unlike the road-construction that triggered the border dispute back in June. But the reports of a new Chinese road in the sensitive region have spread quickly, fueling political fires in New Delhi. Rahul Gandhi, a prominent rival of Modi and the Vice President of the Congress party, took to Twitter to demand an explanation of the Prime Minister: “Modiji, once you’re done thumping your chest, could you please explain this?”

Beijing, for its part, has been adamantly denying that anything is out of the ordinary. “The Chinese troops of border defence have always been patrolling in Donglang to protect their territorial rights, according to the relevant border treaties and agreements,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. And India’s Ministry of External Affairs has been trying to calm the anxieties produced by reports, claiming that there have been “no new developments” since the August 28 disengagement and that the “status quo prevails.”

But as Indian Express reporter Sushant Singh has pointed out, that framing is somewhat deceptive. Yes, the “status quo” since the August disengagement is technically being maintained by the Chinese. But that agreement only entailed a stepping back of 150km on each side—not a full-scale withdrawal, and a far cry from the previous status quo that India and Bhutan wanted China to adhere to:

Essential point is that India and Bhutan wanted China to restore status quo ante as on June 16. China has not done so, but has altered that. https://t.co/INWTraeoU0

— Sushant Singh (@SushantSin) October 6, 2017

In short, this looks like a subtle but pointed provocation from the Chinese side. Barely a month after the border crisis was supposedly defused, Beijing is maintaining a heavy troop presence, showing India that it will not fully withdraw and can still stir up trouble along the border. This fits a pattern of what India’s top army chief recently described as a “salami-slicing” strategy of periodic Chinese transgressions to inch positions forward and make gradual gains along India’s northern border.

It remains to be seen whether the current situation will snowball into something more dangerous; some analysts believe the PLA troops are just engaging in minor border bluster and do not want to cause a crisis ahead of China’s Communist Party Congress. Regardless, the jitters being felt in India now are an indication of where relations are heading in the future. With distrust high on both sides of their long and partly disputed border, the risks of miscalculation are high—and China and India are likely to engage in many more standoffs to come.

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Can Europe Reform its Carbon Market?

There’s no denying that the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is, in its current configuration, failing as a carbon market. The bloc’s attempt to put a price on carbon—and therefore incentivize emissions reductions—was bold, but its execution has been flawed from the beginning. The problem is easily identified: the price for carbon credits in this system is entirely too low to effectively motivate heavy emitters to change their behavior. But solving that problem—reforming the market—is proving devilishly difficult.

One of the reasons the EU ETS carbon price is so low has to do with how many allowances it doled out when it was first being set up. Shortly after its creation, the 2008 financial crisis hit European industry hard, and led to a natural dip in greenhouse gas emissions as businesses suffered. But the carbon market lacked a proper mechanism to match the ebbs and flows of the EU’s economy, which helps explain why there have been so many extra credits floating around: a glut of carbon credits predictably produces a low carbon price.

To address this, the EU created the Market Stability Reserve (MSR), which is designed to “soak up” these extra allowances and provide Brussels more resiliency in the face of future shocks to the system. However, the MSR hasn’t fixed the problem yet. Carbon credits are still dirt cheap, and the phase-out of the credit glut will be gradual. There’s a real fear in the EU that an overzealous correction could create a carbon price that’s too high, which might induce heavy industry to pack up and leave for regions without any carbon market to speak of. That process, called carbon leakage, is a worst case scenario, as it cuts no emissions and loses jobs and economic activity for the EU. It’s no wonder, then, that the hand on the proverbial tiller of the EU ETS has been so cautious in correcting course.

With yet another UN climate summit coming up next month, the EU is desperate to shore up its carbon market. According to Reuters, a draft document is in the works that would double the rate at which the MSR takes extra permits out of the system, and to move up the date of this necessary haircut. But it won’t be easy to fix this market when so many European countries stand to take an economic hit. Much of central and eastern Europe is still heavily reliant on coal production (including, ahem, Germany), in addition to heavy industry and all of the emissions that that entails. It will be hard to convince countries like Poland and Hungary to get on board with a policy that could do a lot of good for the planet’s climate but a lot of harm for their national economies. And therein lies the rub.

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The Russia Lobby Flops in Canada

On Wednesday night, Canada’s lower house of Parliament voted unanimously to approve its own version of the Magnitsky Act, the 2012 U.S. law sanctioning Russian officials involved in human rights abuses. That law has become a famously radioactive issue in U.S.-Russian relations, first triggering a retaliatory ban on American adoptions of Russian children, and recently figuring into the Trump-Russia drama after the news broke that Donald Trump Jr. had met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who has been lobbying to overturn the measure.

The Veselnitskaya affair is only the most famous example of Russia’s concerted campaign to repeal or undermine the Magnistky Act. As our own Karina Orlova extensively documented, the Russians also screened a defamatory propaganda film on Capitol Hill to cast doubt on the law, have sought to smear and undermine its architect Bill Browder, and have openly courted the Putin-friendly Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) to assist in those efforts.

Sure enough, the Canadian version was also the subject of a vigorous lobbying campaign. As the New York Times reports, Canadian politicians began to hear an outcry from a nonprofit called the Russian Congress of Canada in the weeks leading up to the vote:

John McKay, a Liberal member of Parliament, dismissed the group as a front for the Russian Embassy in Ottawa and cited its lobbying activities in his concerns over interference by the Russian government in Canadian affairs. “We are concerned about the business of fake news and misinformation,” he said.

He said his suspicions of coordination between the Russian government and the group deepened after a speech he gave on the issue in Parliament on Monday, when he received an email from the Russian Embassy spokesman, Kirill Kalanin, that included articles making similar pro-Russian arguments mentioned in a letter from the group.

“Their tactics are so amateurish they’re not even subtle,” Mr. McKay said. “It’s so stupid that the dullest among us can see through that.”

The president of the group in question, a former software engineer named Igor Babalich, completely denies any official connection with the Russian government. But as the Times rightly notes, the organization reliably reinforces Kremlin narratives in a manner that draws suspicion:

In addition to organizing rallies and parades in Canada celebrating the anniversary of Germany’s surrender to the Soviet Union in World War II, the group has written scores of letters to Canadian politicians and articles that lobbied against Canada’s involvement in NATO; condemned Ottawa’s criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and questioned the integrity of [Foreign Minister] Freeland by citing claims that her Ukrainian grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.

The NYT story is worth reading for a glimpse of how today’s Russia lobby works. It is, in many ways, a troubling story, one that reinforces the need for vigilance to guard against disinformation and shows how Moscow is trying to co-opt foreign diasporas to advance its political agenda in the West.

At the same time, though, the story suggests another truth: the Russia lobby is not particularly effective at advancing that agenda. The Canadian Magnitsky Act, after all, passed Parliament without a single dissenting vote, despite the furious entreaties of the Russian Embassy and astroturfed supporting groups. Nor has the Russian lobby figured out how to effectively exploit tensions within Canadian society to sow useful divisions. The Russian Congress of Canada’s public output reveals a fixation on the Magnitsky Act, the suppression of ethnic minorities in Ukraine, and Chrystia Freeland’s Ukrainian heritage. These are hardly concerns that resonate beyond the narrow enclaves of the Russian diaspora, nor do they suggest a particularly shrewd propaganda campaign.

The American context is not identical, of course: Russia is much more heavily invested in the U.S. than in Canada, and it made a substantial effort to stoke divisions online during election season. But there is nonetheless a lesson here for the United States. When it comes to the effects of Russian influence campaigns, Moscow hasn’t really moved the needle in Washington any more than it has in Ottawa. For all the anxiety about Russia’s influence in the West, its track record in achieving favorable policy outcomes remains a dismal one.

In recent months, for example, Russia has tried to hawk a dicey Ukraine peace plan to the Trump Administration through a Ukrainian back channel; it has dispatched a top banker to Capitol Hill to argue for a rollback of sanctions; it has aggressively lobbied to change the narrative around the Magnitsky Act and undermine the law. Moscow is, by all accounts, actively trying to influence policy in the West, and it has visibly stepped up its outreach in Washington.

In each of these cases, though, the results for Russia have been the opposite of its intentions. In Ukraine, the Trump Administration’s special envoy has staked out a tough line on the Minsk Agreements and the Pentagon is advocating for sending lethal weapons. On the sanctions front, Russia has been hit with tough new restrictions and has seen Congress tie Trump’s hands on lifting existing sanctions. And when it comes to the Magnitsky Act, the precedent it has set is only gaining more traction around the world. Not only has Russia failed to repeal the original law, it has seen it spawn a copycat in Canada and a Global Magnitsky Act that was passed in the U.S. last year.

None of this is an argument for complacency. Russia has devious intentions, and in the years to come it will surely redouble efforts (both overt and covert) to shape policy outcomes in the West. But one can be clear-eyed about that threat while still acknowledging the limitations of Moscow’s ability to shift policy in its favor—as, indeed, it has largely failed to do since Trump’s election.

Canada’s passage of the Magnitsky Act is another welcome reminder that the bear is not as unstoppable as many Americans like to believe. Moscow’s impotent lobbying and threats of retaliation against Ottawa are not the actions of an emboldened rival so much as an embittered one, a frustrated power unable to realize its objectives. In a bitter irony for Putin, his electoral interference may have only made the West more wary and vigilant about Russia’s agenda—and thus made its fulfillment less likely.

The post The Russia Lobby Flops in Canada appeared first on The American Interest.

Baghdad Burlesque?

Iraq is a country with little going its way these days. The corrosive nature of its politics, the long and costly war against ISIS, and looming discussions regarding unity in a fragmented country give Iraqis very little to laugh about. But taking a cue from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and Egypt’s al-Bernameg with Bassem Youssef, Ahmed al-Basheer and his team of comedians decided that, actually, there was a lot to laugh about. It seems they were onto something: According to a recent study, 65.4 percent of Iraqis regularly tune in to watch the show.

As he explained to me in a recent telephone conversation, after an eight-year career in news correspondence, al-Basheer left his job and, together with a group of friends, created the Al-Basheer Show. The relatively youthful, ethnically and religiously diverse production team, led by the 33-year old al-Basheer, set out to make a television show that discussed and mocked topics Iraqis have traditionally shied away from out of fear of causing offense, and hence creating the necessity of defense. “The whole purpose of the show,” al-Basheer told me, “is to spread the culture of dialogue, not the culture of violence.”

Not everyone sees it that way. The show has attracted an array of detractors, ranging from ISIS to several politicians in Baghdad. The show has had to switch stations four times, and on August 10, the Iraqi Communications and Media Commission queried the show’s broadcaster, Nalia Radio and Television (NRT), about its “violations” and threatened to pursue further legal action. During the current season’s first episode, al-Basheer apologized for the many delays and interruptions the show has endured, adding that these were largely due to a politically motivated court case brought against him, which had left him imprisoned for four days. Regardless of the constant attempts to stop the show and the almost daily threats to his life, Ahmed and his team relentlessly continue in their efforts to make light of darkness.

Dealing with Personal Loss through Comedy

Part of what makes Ahmed and the show so popular—the audience sums to about 19 million, more than half of the Iraqi population—is how relatable his personal suffering is to many Iraqis. During the now-protracted chaos that has engulfed Iraq, al-Basheer lost a brother to one terrorist attack and seven of his best friends in another, and watched his father die after the trauma of being kidnapped ruined his health. He himself was kidnapped and tortured for 40 days in 2005. But as Ahmed says, “instead of getting revenge with a weapon, I try to fix the situation so nobody has to go through the things I went through. Instead of turning violent…I see this as the best way to respond to all the killing.”

Ahmed says that he wanted to discuss politics during his career as a correspondent, but not as a politician, because he “preferred to be in the media [to] be closer to people and help their voices to reach a greater level.” In trying to find ways to reach people, Ahmed realized he needed to get on their level and use a method familiar to them. He found comedy to be the answer, and despite dealing with difficult topics on his show, he believes that “when something makes you cry and laugh at the same time, [it will] really affect you and stay with you.”

Sectarianism in Iraq: Men of God and ISIS

One of the most intractable issues plaguing Iraq is the sectarian nature of its politics and the plethora of sectarian militias that reflect those politics. The Al-Basheer Show plunges straight into the topic with little hesitation, and deploying a level of shock value rarely found on Iraqi television. One famous episode from the previous season crossed an unthinkable line with a skit called “a man of religion,” where al-Basheer elaborately dresses up as a mix of a Shi‘i Imam and a Sunni mullah and announces that he has turned into a man of God. “By being a man of God,” he continues, “I must now start to form my own militia”—a blatant jab at all religious militias in Iraq.

Ahmed has created a collection of jokes meant to break negative stereotypes about these various religious factions. Recalling his time living in Ramadi during the height of the civil war in 2007, he remembers how “these jokes helped the people of Ramadi work with Shi‘a, as it showed them the Shi‘a were people just like them.” One neighbor who had never even left the Sunni-majority city of Ramadi once warned Ahmed to watch out for Shi‘a, since “they were known to eat human flesh.” After hearing a few of Ahmed’s jokes, the neighbor took a trip to Baghdad and exclaimed upon his return that, “these people were good people. I have seen nothing like this before!”

When he moved to Amman, Jordan in 2012 to start filming the show in relative safety (it first aired in 2014), he could have had no idea that his former city of residence would be taken over by ISIS just two years later. According to Ahmed, his show was considered an “apostate program” in Ramadi and anybody found watching it at an internet café would be flogged. “I’m very proud of this fact…very proud,” he laughs and continues, “I consider me and the guys as soldiers who helped free Iraq from ISIS. Except we didn’t fight with guns, we fought with comedy.”

Stupid Governance and Stupid Politics

Iraq’s political problems stem partly from galactic-scale levels of corruption and poor-to-negligible governance. Transparency International ranked Iraq as number 166 of 176 in 2016. The show tries to make people aware of the problems by picking on the politicians responsible for them, although Ahmed states that after “many of the politicians or officials we previously made fun of then fixed their mistakes,” the show left them alone, since “we have no personal problems with them. We only want to improve the situation…although half of them we could get rid of and be better off without them.”

On one shocking episode, Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament Salim al-Jabouri made an appearance after a pre-Eid bombing in the Karrada district of Baghdad. The death toll of this suicide attack was second only to the 2007 Yazidi community bombings, and it was the deadliest terrorist attack in Iraq carried out by a single bomber. Al-Basheer pressed al-Jabouri, showing him pictures of politicians and asking him who was responsible for the bombing, including a picture of al-Jabouri himself. The entire episode also focused on the frustration with the use of “bomb wands” by Iraqi security, which were widely regarded as inefficient and a shining example of the incompetence of Iraqi politics.

Al-Basheer also ridicules Iraq’s consistently ridiculous foreign policy, notably its close relationship with Iran. An episode from September of last year criticized the unexpected visit of Yemen’s Houthi leadership to Iraq with a skit depicting Ahmed screaming at a Houthi delegation, “why have you come to Iraq?!” Meanwhile, the Houthis are too high on qat even to answer him. He even compares the Houthis to ISIS, telling the Iraqi government that it now had no right to get upset if another country hosted armed rebel group from Iraq and brought them to meet its Prime Minister or Foreign Minister. This year, in response to airstrikes by Turkey on Mt. Sinjar and Iranian proxies moving near the region to exert control, al-Basheer took an Iran War-era nationalist army song “Oh Ground Whose Dirt Is Sacred,” and switched the lyrics to “people cheer for Erdogan, people cheer for Qasem Soleimani.”

The Future of Comedy in Iraq

There are several reasons why al-Basheer’s show is so popular in Iraq, but without a doubt a key to its success is its grounding in genuine Iraqi humor. Iraqi humor has different flavors to it, and the show never fails to incorporate all of them. Awkward sexual innuendo, stereotypes of various cities or regions (for example, that the people of Mosul are cheapskates), absurd actions, and dark sarcasm are just some of the types of humor used in the show. The awkward sexual innuendos are mainly for the young male viewers, while the stereotypes of different areas of Iraq are enjoyed by all Iraqis and might as well be a national pastime.

However, the special, hard-earned humor that suffuses Iraq today is the dark humor born of more than thirty years of war, sanctions, and internal strife that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Instead of mimicking the comedic styles of the Daily Show and al-Bernameg, al-Basheer has done what many Iraqis have had to do during the past few decades: laugh at the sheer absurdity of the destruction brought upon the country, given that the only alternative is to cry oneself sick. This kind of humor is most effective when it carries a bit of truth and mixes it with the absurd, yet when the truth itself is absurd, as is the case for many Iraqis, the humor is naturally super-charged. Al-Basheer rarely laments explicitly the destruction and chaos of Iraq; instead, he finds unique ways of insulting ISIS and Iraq’s political and militia leaders to help civilians cope with the insanity they are regularly put through.

The episodes—typically an hour long and aired each week on Fridays—usually end on a more serious note, to show to the viewers that the problems in Iraq they were just laughing at are real and need to be fixed. However, al-Basheer does struggle with the fact that many in Iraq perceive the show to be an arm of the political opposition, which he says “is a vestige of the previous regime, when [the mindset was that] you were either with the government or against it.” That the show is produced in Jordan, and al-Basheer and his production crew count themselves among Jordan’s 700,000 Iraqi refugees, doesn’t help, since so many opposition movements in the modern Arab world have had to base themselves outside of their countries of origin.

When asked about the risks of making so many powerful enemies—Amman is not a totally foolproof refuge—Ahmed sounds more like a fighter for democracy than a comedian. “I believe that continuing to live life is the best way to face the killers,” he said, “When you laugh at them, it is going to hurt more than if you pick up a gun against them.” Indeed, well-aimed satire can be much mightier than the sword.

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The Relentless Decline of Social Democracy in the West

Imagine a map of Europe showing which party of the Left or the Right heads the government. Twenty years ago, it would be almost wholly covered in red, the traditional color of European democratic socialism, not to be confused with “red for Republicans” in the United States. Today, following the bellwether elections in France and Germany, only five countries are inked in red, among them such giants as the tiny island of Malta.

There goes the Socialist International. The decline reflects a long-term trend; it seems to betray destiny, not just a trough in the usual ups and downs of democratic politics.

Take France. In the postwar period, tenure pretty much alternated between the moderate Left and the moderate Right. In recent times, the Socialist Party (PS) had conquered the presidency twice, propelling François Mitterrand and François Hollande into the Élysée Palace. In the first round of June’s presidential elections, the Socialists barely scraped together 6.4 percent.

In Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) once brought forth towering figures like Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Gerhard Schröder, scoring up to 46 percent of the national vote. In the September elections, its candidate Martin Schulz went down in flames with 20.5 percent, the party’s worst take since World War II.

In Italy, the once mighty Socialist Party (PSI), which used to dominate Italian politics prewar and shared tenure in the early postwar decades, is no more. In the Netherlands, the Labour Party (PvdA) headed the government as recently as 2002. Then it fell to a junior partner—and into oblivion, winning just nine seats in this year’s general elections. Its share of the vote plummeted from 19 to less than 6 percent.

In Greece, PASOK used to be one of the two major parties—in the government and out. Once able to collar 44 percent of the vote, it is now down to 6 percent. Greeks have a name for this kind of shrinkage: “pasokification.” And so it goes, from Iberia all the way to Scandinavia, where the social democrats perfected the modern welfare state. Finland now has the first conservative President in five decades. Norway has been ruled by the center Right since 2013.

There seem to be two exceptions to this pattern. One odd-man-out is Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Party ended up just two points behind the Tories in the June snap elections. This last-minute surge from way behind in the polls does not seem to indicate a reversal of the trend. Arguably, Corbyn scored because of a torrent of dislike that nearly drowned Theresa May. The vote was not pro-Labour, but anti-May.

The other exception is the United States, where the Democrats, the U.S. version of social democracy, conquered the White House twice for Barack Obama, also pocketing the majority of the popular vote in the Clinton-Trump face-off. But look at the heartland. Since Obama was first elected in 2009, the Republicans have added 1,000 seats at the state level. They now control 34 of the fifty governors’ mansions.

What happened? “It’s history, stupid!,” Bill Clinton might growl. The democratic Left rose to power in tandem with a rising working class. These parties gave a voice to the new urban masses, acting as advocates of their interests. But the old working class, nourished by rampant industrialization, is no more. A simple statistic tells the tale. In the past half century, the GDP share of manufacturing (very roughly) has dropped from 35 to 15 percent. So social democracy has been losing its customer base.

The democratic Left has also lost by winning. The welfare state is a fact between Stockholm and San Francisco. Western governments at all levels take in and disburse about one-half of GDP—more in France, less in the United States. The effect is reflected in the Gini Index that tallies income inequality. Measured by the raw Gini, the United States is far less equal than Germany. When you factor in taxes and transfers, differences between egalitarian Germany and “ultra-capitalist” America wane. The advanced welfare state is a socialist dream come true: It redistributes from Peter to give unto poorer Paul, robbing the democratic left of its best selling point.

This is why the SPD’s Martin Schulz tanked with his “social justice” slogan: take from the rich and increase subsidies and services to the less fortunate. Alas, the party’s traditional clientele has gone middle-class, and it is not enamored with the promise of more taxes when the highest bracket begins to bite at €50,000—the salary of a skilled worker.

So nothing fails like success. As the welfare state expanded and the industrial sector shrank, the fortunes of the moderate Left declined. Yet more recently social democratic parties have come up against a new enemy. Call it populism (which always has both Right and Left varieties) in the guise of the “Alternative for Germany” (AfD), Marine Le Pen’s National Front, or the Trump Party. Those who defected to the new populists are not just the “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton had it, but vast swathes of the electorate that felt abandoned by what Thomas Frank calls the “Liberal Class.”

Educated and articulate, dominating published opinion, education, and the administration, this class has established “cultural hegemony,” to invoke a term invented by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. And the “forgotten man,” as he was known in the FDR era, doesn’t like it.

Resentment ranges from gender mainstreaming, correct speech, and minority politics to open borders for goods and people. The United States faces undocumented immigrants from the south. Germany just took in 1.2 million from the Middle East and North Africa. Italy battles the influx from Libya. “What about us?,” ask the so-called deplorables. These folks don’t write op-eds, but they have the vote. And now they have Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump. Or UKIP in Britain, Geert Wilders in Holland, and the AfD in Germany.

Ask them why they voted as they did, and they will probably all answer as Germany’s AfD voters did: 30 percent liked the party’s platform, 60 percent voted out of “disappointment” with the established parties.

So why doesn’t the moderate Left shift into competitive mode and offer a new menu to its defectors? You might just as well ask why the Democrats don’t go nationalist and mainstream instead of trying to cobble together a majority with ethnic and sexual minorities. It is in their DNA, just as in the case of their European comrades. If you are attached to globalization, secularism, and diversity, you can’t go protectionist, nativist, and nationalist. The old recipe of welfarism doesn’t beat the defensive nationalism gripping the entire West.

Social democracy, in short, is trapped between its creed and its defecting clientele. History whispers that its salad days are over. But then look at the upside. Throughout Western Europe, the new populists have scored but not conquered. Take the most recent case, Germany. The AfD jumped to 13 percent in the September elections. By simple subtraction, this leaves 87 percent for the parties of the democratic mainstream.

The downside is Hungary and Poland, where the authoritarians came to power in free elections. Plus Donald Trump’s America, where the most critical battle is unfolding because the United States is the world’s mightiest democracy. But remember: This constitution has held for 230 years. In Europe, myriad constitutions have been trampled or torn up since 1787.

The post The Relentless Decline of Social Democracy in the West appeared first on The American Interest.

Seeing the Administration Half Empty

Yesterday, NBC News reported a gossipy tidbit too juicy for the Washington press corps—or the President— to pass up. Secretary of State Tillerson over the summer came within a hair’s breadth of resigning and after one exasperating meeting allegedly called the President a “moron.” NBC:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was on the verge of resigning this past summer amid mounting policy disputes and clashes with the White House, according to senior administration officials who were aware of the situation at the time.

The tensions came to a head around the time President Donald Trump delivered a politicized speech in late July to the Boy Scouts of America, an organization Tillerson once led, the officials said.

Just days earlier, Tillerson had openly disparaged the president, referring to him as a “moron,” after a July 20 meeting at the Pentagon with members of Trump’s national security team and Cabinet officials, according to three officials familiar with the incident. [….]

The State Department’s spokesperson has denied the story. Secretary Tillerson himself has denied that Vice President Pence had to convince him not to resign. President Trump, in his own colorful way, has responded to the story as well:

The @NBCNews story has just been totally refuted by Sec. Tillerson and @VP Pence. It is #FakeNews. They should issue an apology to AMERICA!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 4, 2017

Whether the story is fake news or political gossip, it nonetheless points to very real problems that this Administration is facing in its operations. That Tillerson might say such a thing about his boss in front of staff who might leak, or that he was on the verge of resigning, is made believable by a series of very public rifts between Tillerson and the President. We’ve written before about the President and Secretary of State being at cross purposes over the Qatar crisis. Other examples include Tillerson’s apparent surprise that the President had already made a decision about the Iran nuclear deal, which is an extension of previous divisions between the President and his national security advisors over re-certifying the deal that emerged in July. The latest, and perhaps most humiliating example was President Trump’s rebuke last weekend of Secretary Tillerson’s diplomatic efforts towards North Korea:

I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2017

While Tillerson might be the most frequent focus of the President’s opprobrium these days, he’s hardly the only senior official to be subjected to such treatment. In an interview with the New York Times in July, the President said that if he had known that Jeff Sessions was going to recuse himself from the Russia investigation he would have picked somebody else as Attorney General. And the President was clearly seething over the stories surrounding HHS Secretary Tom Price right before the latter resigned. Then of course there are the slew of advisors inside the White House who have been sent packing in the past few months—Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Sebastian Gorka, Anthony Scaramucci, and Steve Bannon the highest-profile among them. The installation of John Kelly as Chief of Staff appears to have stabilized things to a certain degree, but stories (like this one) continue to bubble to the surface, suggesting that the “adults” are working overtime to “protect” the President from his own worst instincts, especially on foreign policy.

Tillerson’s survival at his job is less critical than it appears. While he has been portrayed by the media as one of the above-mentioned “adults” on foreign policy, he has shown himself to be a political neophyte who hasn’t notched any successes at his job. Indeed, a case can be made that this latest episode, which looked like a forced show of contrition, coming as it did hot on the heels of the President undercutting him publicly on North Korea, has fatally harmed his credibility. Who among his foreign counterparts would negotiate with him now, knowing that he ultimately does not speak for the White House? A credible interlocutor might be better for American foreign policy than an “adult” whom the President doesn’t trust.

Is the ongoing narrative about “adults” true, or just the product of journalists cobbling self-serving leaks into a master narrative? It’s impossible to know for sure, but there is circumstantial evidence that there is something to it. One U.S. official told BuzzFeed News that Secretaries Mattis, Tillerson, and Steve Mnuchin have a “suicide pact”, in which pressure on one to resign would be taken as an attack on all. That follows reporting of an agreement between Mattis and Kelly that one of them would remain within the United States at all times. True or not, it’s almost certain that existing American alliances have been kept more-or-less on an even keel by the mere idea that steady hands, such as Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National Security Council chief H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly, are helping the President keep within a broadly-defined mainstream of American foreign policy.

Can this chaperoning engagement be sustained? McMaster reportedly fought a fierce battle behind the scenes with the White House on Afghanistan strategy. In the end, he managed to win the President over, but not without taking his lumps. Next up: a possible rift between the President and Secretary of Defense James Mattis. In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, Secretary Mattis confirmed that it was his view that re-certifying the Iran nuclear deal was in the national security interests of the United States. Mattis let this slip despite statements from the President that he intended to decertify the deal, and in the face of Iran hawks like Senator Tom Cotton, who have been egging the President on. The President’s respect for his Defense Secretary seems to have allowed Mattis to more or less manage his own shop up to this point. But will this continue to be the case?

Some of these concerns might be mitigated if the Administration had a deeper bench. While the Administration has grounds to decry that the Senate is taking an inordinately long time to confirm each nominee, they’ve also made fewer total nominations than any incoming Administration in the past 30 years. Virtually none of the assistant secretary positions at the State Department have nominees. Nor does John Kelly have any proposed successor as head of the Department of Homeland Security. Tom Price’s resignation leaves that department headless for the foreseeable future as well. Though not all of these positions have a direct bearing on foreign policy or national security, their vacancies suggest a bureaucratic dysfunction that greatly magnifies any of the staffing turbulence that this Administration appears to be particularly prone to.

The “moron” talk, or the whole idea of “adults” in foreign policy, may well be fake news—rumors and and self-serving narratives concocted by a Washington press corps seething at a Trump Administration it cannot stand. But even if this is so, it’s hard not to conclude that the Trump Administration is having a rocky time merely running itself. Whatever your political affiliations, that’s not welcome news.

The post Seeing the Administration Half Empty appeared first on The American Interest.

Japan Wants a Piece of China’s Belt and Road

Is Japan warming up to Xi Jinping’s grandiose infrastructure ambitions? That is the impression conveyed by Nippon Express, the major Japanese firm that is taping into China’s Belt and Road Initiative via a joint rail project with Kazakhstan. From the Nikkei Asia Review:

Nippon Express and Kazakhstan’s state railway company have teamed up to start carrying cargo from China’s east coast, through Central Asia and on to Europe.

The Eurasian rail route is likely to benefit from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a reimagination of Silk Road trade routes.

Nippon Express’s move will likely prompt Japanese companies to seek business opportunities along the route. The transportation company and Kazakhstan Temir Zholy plan to start the cargo service in 2018. Trains will begin their journeys from Lianyungang, a prefecture-level city in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province.

One project does not a trend make, but there are other signs that Japanese firms are eyeing new opportunities in China’s infrastructure push. Earlier this summer, Japan’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry set up shop with a “liaison council” in China designed to probe new joint ventures under the BRI framework. Japanese megabanks want in, too, and have been scouting out projects for their client companies that can be incorporated under the Belt and Road rubric.

The Japanese business community’s interest in Belt and Road contrasts with the government’s longstanding skepticism. Tokyo has long been concerned about Beijing’s push to build the next generation of Asian infrastructure, seeing the Belt and Road as a competitor’s devious design to dominate the continent through debt. For similar reasons (and due to U.S. pressure), Japan resisted joining China’s nascent development bank when it launched in 2014. And in several instances right up to the present, Tokyo has been a direct competitor with Beijing, as both pursue the rights to various Asian ports and try to outbid each other for influence in Asia and beyond.

Lately, though, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has begun subtly changing his tune. In July, he offered an opening by saying that Japan was willing to cooperate with Belt and Road projects as long as the procurement process was transparent and fair and the projects were responsibly financed. And he has recently sent a number of conciliatory signals to Beijing that suggest an improvement in relations, as The Hindu notes:

In tune with the commercial opportunities offered by the BRI, Japan is sending important political signals for reviving ties with Beijing. On Thursday Mr. Abe paid a surprise visit at a ceremony marking China’s National Day — a step that no Japanese Prime Minister has taken in the last 15 years.

Besides, no Japanese Minister on August 15 — the day marking Japan’s surrender in World War II visited the Yasukuni shrine. The visit to the shrine that commemorates the Japanese war-dead has been a point of regular friction between China and Japan.

In reciprocation, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi — a former ambassador to Tokyo — said in a follow-up meeting with the Japanese ambassador to China, Yokoi Yutaka that, “We look forward to more good news on China-Japan relations rather than bad news after the good news.”

For two strategic rivals with a traumatic wartime history, those warm words and symbolic gestures are far from perfunctory.  Even as Japan deepens its development partnerships with Chinese rivals like India, it seems intent on bolstering friendly economic ties with Beijing.

One can consider this political bet-hedging, or strictly business. But if Beijing gets major Japanese buy-in to the Belt and Road, that fact will reverberate in countries like India that see the program as little more than Chinese economic imperialism.

The post Japan Wants a Piece of China’s Belt and Road appeared first on The American Interest.

Japan Wants A Piece of China’s Belt and Road

Is Japan warming up to Xi Jinping’s grandiose infrastructure ambitions? That is the impression conveyed by Nippon Express, the major Japanese firm that is taping into China’s Belt and Road Initiative via a joint rail project with Kazakhstan. From the Nikkei Asia Review:

Nippon Express and Kazakhstan’s state railway company have teamed up to start carrying cargo from China’s east coast, through Central Asia and on to Europe.

The Eurasian rail route is likely to benefit from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a reimagination of Silk Road trade routes.

Nippon Express’s move will likely prompt Japanese companies to seek business opportunities along the route. The transportation company and Kazakhstan Temir Zholy plan to start the cargo service in 2018. Trains will begin their journeys from Lianyungang, a prefecture-level city in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province.

One project does not a trend make, but there are other signs that Japanese firms are eyeing new opportunities in China’s infrastructure push. Earlier this summer, Japan’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry set up shop with a “liaison council” in China designed to probe new joint ventures under the BRI framework. Japanese megabanks want in, too, and have been scouting out projects for their client companies that can be incorporated under the Belt and Road rubric.

The Japanese business community’s interest in Belt and Road contrasts with the government’s longstanding skepticism. Tokyo has long been concerned about Beijing’s push to build the next generation of Asian infrastructure, seeing the Belt and Road as a competitor’s devious design to dominate the continent through debt. For similar reasons (and due to U.S. pressure), Japan resisted joining China’s nascent development bank when it launched in 2014. And in several instances right up to the present, Tokyo has been a direct competitor with Beijing, as both pursue the rights to various Asian ports and try to outbid each other for influence in Asia and beyond.

Lately, though, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has begun subtly changing his tune. In July, he offered an opening by saying that Japan was willing to cooperate with Belt and Road projects as long as the procurement process was transparent and fair and the projects were responsibly financed. And he has recently sent a number of conciliatory signals to Beijing that suggest an improvement in relations, as The Hindu notes:

In tune with the commercial opportunities offered by the BRI, Japan is sending important political signals for reviving ties with Beijing. On Thursday Mr. Abe paid a surprise visit at a ceremony marking China’s National Day — a step that no Japanese Prime Minister has taken in the last 15 years.

Besides, no Japanese Minister on August 15 — the day marking Japan’s surrender in World War II visited the Yasukuni shrine. The visit to the shrine that commemorates the Japanese war-dead has been a point of regular friction between China and Japan.

In reciprocation, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi — a former ambassador to Tokyo — said in a follow-up meeting with the Japanese ambassador to China, Yokoi Yutaka that, “We look forward to more good news on China-Japan relations rather than bad news after the good news.”

For two strategic rivals with a traumatic wartime history, those warm words and symbolic gestures are far from perfunctory.  Even as Japan deepens its development partnerships with Chinese rivals like India, it seems intent on bolstering friendly economic ties with Beijing.

One can consider this political bet-hedging, or strictly business. But if Beijing gets major Japanese buy-in to the Belt and Road, that fact will reverberate in countries like India that see the program as little more than Chinese economic imperialism.

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