Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 131

Fracking Fails in Scotland

England may be tentatively embracing shale drilling once again, but Scotland is taking a more wary approach. Earlier this summer Britain drilled the vertical shaft of its first shale well since 2011, when the country issued a moratorium on fracking following a series of small magnitude earthquakes. This week, Scotland energy minister Paul Wheelhouse announced that his country would extend its own moratorium on fracking indefinitely.

Wheelhouse pointed to an overwhelming negative response from the public, when asked for comment about fracking. He also quoted a study from a consultancy firm that concluded that fracking would have borderline negligible impact on Scottish GDP.

Both concerns—public opposition and a stunted economic impact—are legitimate. Shale is deeply unpopular in the UK, a problem that may undermine its development in England, despite the green light new exploratory drilling got earlier this year. Part of this issue stems from a difference in property rights: in contrast to the United States, where landowners also own whatever’s underneath their property (unless those rights have been previously sold), in Scotland, the rights to oil, gas, coal, gold, and silver are “held in the national interest.” As a result, few households atop a shale reserve in Scotland have any incentive to accede to the disruption that comes along with oil and gas drilling.

But the biggest problem for Scottish shale is geologic in nature: there just isn’t that much oil or gas to frack. According to the British Geological Survey, Scotland contains just 80 trillion cubic feet of shale gas, a far cry from the 622 trillion cubic feet here in the United States. The upside just isn’t there.

Add Scotland to the long list of countries where exporting the American shale experience has been unsuccessful. The U.S. energy revolution has been churning for nearly a decade, and yet commercial production elsewhere has been scant, despite the fact that vast reserves of shale gas and tight oil can be found around the world. The longer shale continues to be a uniquely American experience, the more we can appreciate just how many variables had to go just right to get it off the ground.

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Iran’s Shadow over Lebanon

Last week, a Lebanese military court sentenced local Sunni jihadi leader Sheikh Ahmed Assir to death. Assir has been in prison since 2015 for directing clashes between his supporters and the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) in Sidon two years earlier in which 17 soldiers were killed. While few Lebanese will shed a tear for Assir, the announcement of his impending execution nonetheless sparked Sunni protests across the state. For many Sunnis, the harsh treatment of Assir is emblematic of the Shi‘a militia Hezbollah’s increasingly overt dominance in Beirut.

The story of Assir itself highlights Hezbollah’s preeminence in Lebanon. Back in 2013, the LAF engaged in a daylong military operation against Assir and 200 of his well-armed supporters in the Sidon neighborhood of Abra. Over the course of 25 hours, the LAF reportedly discharged some 400,000 rounds of ammunition while trying to dispatch the jihadis. Incapable of defeating Assir, the LAF called in Hezbollah backup, coordinating operations with the Iranian-backed militia to storm the militant’s stronghold and finally vanquish the group.

Since then, objectively speaking, Hezbollah has been coordinating even more closely with state institutions, including the military, to fight Sunni Islamist militants. The LAF, for example, has tolerated if not facilitated the movement of Hezbollah fighters and military materiel into and out of Syria, where the organization has been fighting on behalf of the Assad regime against Sunni rebels since 2011. And to prevent domestic terrorist attacks perpetrated by Sunni militants targeting Hezbollah, between 2013 and 2014 the LAF and Hezbollah established joint security checkpoints in Beirut.

Most recently (and egregiously), Hezbollah and the LAF launched joint military operations this summer against Islamic State militants along the Lebanon-Syria border. During the course of Hezbollah ground operations in July, the LAF provided artillery cover, reportedly firing U.S.-provided 155mm shells in support of the militia’s maneuvers.

The close cooperation and seeming congeniality between Beirut and Hezbollah—an organization that the United States and most of Europe deems to be a terrorist organization—stands in stark contrast to the state’s treatment of its Sunni terrorists. Indeed, the widely held perception in Lebanon is that the state affords Hezbollah and its allies impunity for their terrorist actions.

Consider, for example, that the Lebanese state has not attempted to detain the four Hezbollah members specifically accused by the Special Tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Premier Rafiq Hariri. These men are not fugitives in Lebanon; they are not wanted by the state.

Or former Minister Michel Samaha, a leading pro-Hezbollah figure and Syrian intelligence asset in Lebanon, who was arrested in 2012 for attempting to smuggle explosives to target Lebanese Sunnis. Samaha, who is designated by Washington as a “global terrorist,” was sentenced to 16 years of hard labor for his crime but served less than five prior to his release last year.

And then there is Mustafa Husain Muqaddam, the Hezbollah militiaman who in August 2008, opened fire on an LAF helicopter in south Lebanon, mistakenly believing it to be Israeli. Muqaddam killed an army pilot, was arrested, tried by a military court, and sentenced to five years in jail. Subsequently, however, the sentence was reduced to ten months, and after six, he was permanently released on bail.

Today, Hezbollah sits in a coalition government in Beirut with its erstwhile Sunni political opponents and a broad range of Christian parties. These Sunni members of parliament, led by Prime Minister Saad Hariri of the Future Movement, son of the former Premier assassinated by Hezbollah, were elected in 2009 on a pro-West, anti-Iran platform.

Yet Tehran’s increasing domestic influence, coupled with more than a decade of intimidation and local murders, has led to a pragmatic détente between the Shi‘a militia and Sunnis primarily focused on security. While Hariri’s Sunni constituents generally seem to support the government’s robust campaign against Sunni jihadis, the increasing lack of any semblance of neutrality has several concerning implications.

Last year, former (Sunni) Minister of Justice in Hariri’s Government, Ashraf Rifi, resigned from his post to protest the release of Samaha from jail. Ever since, he has been criticizing Hariri for what he characterizes as collaboration with Hezbollah. Rifi, who is from the Sunni city of Tripoli, is a fierce critic of Syria’s Assad regime and the Iranian “project” in Lebanon, as well. In May, largely based on his Sunni sectarian rhetoric, Rifi came from nowhere to win the municipal elections in Tripoli. If he fares well in the 2018 parliamentary elections, it would split and further weaken the pro-West Sunni community with respect to Hezbollah, solidifying the state’s tilt toward Iran.

This is not good news for Lebanon. But it’s also not good news for the United States. Washington has a profound interest in Lebanon’s stability—primarily because this state borders Israel. To this end, since 2005, the U.S. government has been providing the LAF with financial support and training: in 2016, it gave the Lebanese military more than $150 million. To be sure, this assistance has improved the capacity of the LAF to fight Islamist militants. Yet to date—and for the foreseeable future—it is all but certain the LAF will only be targeting Sunnis.

Notwithstanding resentments, Sunnis—who comprise approximately 35 percent of the LAF’s non-commissioned officer corps—will not be defecting en masse anytime soon. Indeed, there is stiff competition to enlist among the legions of economically disadvantaged Sunnis. In the longer term, however, as Ashraf Rifi’s strong performance in Tripoli’s municipal elections suggests, the state’s bias in favor of Shi‘a is fostering grievances, which over time could lead to radicalization.

The trajectory in Lebanon is not isolated from regional developments; it is inextricably tied to Iran’s increasing influence, which has for decades been ascendant in Lebanon, but more recently dominant in Syria and Iraq as well. To prevent a deterioration in Lebanon, too, it will ultimately be incumbent on Washington to roll back Iran. Fighting Sunni militants without countering what is perhaps the primary driver of their radicalization is not a winning strategy.

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Trump Tightens Thai Ties

President Trump welcomed the leader of the Thai military junta to the White House on Monday, emphasizing trade and security interests with Bangkok over human rights concerns. ABC News:

Making no reference to Thailand’s military rule, President Donald Trump on Monday hailed strengthening relations with America’s oldest ally in Asia as he welcomed a junta leader who took power in a coup.

[…]

“We’ve had a long and very storied history with Thailand,” Trump said in the Oval Office alongside [Prime Minister] Prayuth, referring to a nearly two-century diplomatic relationship, which the president said has advanced since he took office in January.

“So we have a very strong relationship right now, as of this moment, and it’s getting stronger in the last nine months,” he said, stressing the importance of trade ties, which totaled $40 billion last year, with the U.S. running a $19 billion deficit. “I think we’re going to try and sell a little bit more to you now, make that a little bit better if that’s possible.”

Trump’s approach to Thailand differs remarkably from that of President Obama, who abruptly downgraded U.S. military cooperation with Bangkok and cut security aid after the military seized power in 2014. And the human rights community is predictably outraged by the reversal, arguing that Trump has given away America’s leverage over Thailand and emboldened a backsliding military regime. In a typical quote to Reuters, for instance, Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch called the White House invitation a “propaganda victory for Prayuth” that “will come at the expense of the people of Thailand, who will pay for it in the form of intensified repression.”

It’s a nice sound byte, but the uncomfortable truth is that there is simply no evidence that Obama’s policy of shunning Thailand did anything to improve the human rights situation there. Similarly, it’s hard to see how Trump’s outreach will automatically lead to a new crackdown. Yes, on the margins, the U.S. bully pulpit on human rights does have an effect: it highlights the abuse in a way that is hard for the rest of the world to completely sweep under the rug. But more often than not, the effect translates to concrete policy by pushing the human rights offender into the arms of rival superpowers with fewer such scruples.

And that is precisely what Obama’s policy ensured: it sent America’s oldest Asian ally straight into the arms of China, who was happy to fill the American void with arms sales, heavy investment, and security cooperation. The Trump Administration appears to be trying to regain that lost influence. And while one can be skeptical as to whether it will work, it’s hard to argue against giving it a try, especially given the state of play in Asia these days.

Thailand is one of the eight Southeast Asian countries that hosts a North Korean embassy, and despite an overall decline in trade, it still maintains significant business ties with the regime, coming in as Pyongyang’s fourth largest import partner in 2015. The State Department has also accused Bangkok of being a regional hub for North Korean companies—some operating openly, others disguised by front organizations—which it has been actively urging Thailand to shut down. That was the message delivered by Rex Tillerson when he visited Bangkok in August, and it was surely a focus of private talks this week as Trump cranks up the pressure on Pyongyang.

In other words, Trump is not just embracing the Thais unreservedly; he wants action on North Korea, and he figures he can get it more easily as a trusted ally rather than as a hectoring outsider. There are plenty of pressure points that Trump could exploit if Bangkok fails to deliver, including secondary sanctions on Thai banks. As the case of Egypt recently showed, Trump has proven that he is not above halting aid to allies who facilitate illicit trade with Pyongyang.

President Trump, of course, is not without his own idées fixes. The President’s obsession with trade deficits has undermined his strategy elsewhere in Asia, most notably in South Korea, where Washington is pushing for a tough renegotiation of the FORUS agreement even as it tries to reassure Seoul about the North Korean threat. Thailand, too, runs a trade surplus with the United States, so it’s conceivable that this could become a bone of contention going forward. Trump’s gentle tone on Monday, however, suggests that certain priorities have been set in this case—at least for now.

Overall, this is an instance where the Administration’s preference for pragmatism over preaching serves it well. In Asia, the stakes are so high that we need to work with the partners we have, not the partners we necessarily want.

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Rick Perry Wants to Subsidize Coal and Nuclear

Rick Perry wants the federal government to help prop up nuclear power and coal. Late last week the energy secretary asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to consider paying “resilient” power producers more for the electricity they supply to the grid. In a letter written to FERC, Secretary Perry highlighted the “undervaluation of grid reliability and resiliency benefits provided by traditional baseload resources, such as coal and nuclear,” a problem he would see fixed by a potential market intervention by FERC.

This policy recommendation is the result of a study Secretary Perry ordered earlier this year, which aimed to take account of what the recent rise in intermittent renewable power suppliers had done—and what it was going to do—to America’s overall grid stability. That intermittency is a real issue: renewables like solar and wind can only provide power when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and that up-and-down supply makes it difficult to match supply with demand. Perry’s request of FERC could, in that context, be read as an attempt to shore up U.S. energy security by making sure baseload power providers are compensated for the stable electricity they contribute.

It’s true, too, that even as renewables are seeing growth, some of those reliable baseload power providers are struggling. We’re not building any new nuclear power plants because the business case for doing so simply isn’t there, and dozens of old plants face decommissioning in the coming decades. There’s no doubt that the nuclear industry would jump at the opportunity to secure higher rates for the stable power it supplies.

Natural gas has hurt coal, another baseload source, even harder. Unlike nuclear power, coal is an extraordinarily dirty energy source. Coal pollutes locally by making air toxic to breathe (look to the smoggy skies of Beijing or New Delhi for proof), and it’s a global menace for the high amount of greenhouse gasses it emits. Like nuclear, though, coal supplies are being displaced by cheap natural gas, itself a product of the recent shale boom. Higher rates would be the lifeline to coal Trump promised to deliver in his campaign.

There’s certainly a case to be made that our energy markets, or more specifically power prices, don’t properly account for stability of supply. Above all, electricity needs to be dependable, and in that sense you could make the case for compensating power plants for their reliability.

But if that’s the goal here, why focus on nuclear and coal, and not on natural gas as well? In the Department of Energy’s recent grid stability study, questions were raised about natural gas’s ability to keep the lights on during extreme weather events, but fringe cases notwithstanding shale gas is undeniably reliable. Even better, it’s abundant and cheap. Natural gas-fired power plants have lower capital costs than coal or nuclear competitors, so they’re able to more easily ramp supply up or ease it down to match demand, as there is less of an imperative to stay operational to recoup those up-front costs. That doesn’t make natural gas an intermittent source by nature, it makes it a flexible one by design—that’s a feature, not a bug. The decision to exclude natural gas makes Secretary Perry’s proposal appear to be more about propping up two struggling energy sources and less about reliability of supply. Looked at another way, it’s the government picking winners and losers.

Beyond the particulars of the proposal, this looks to be a momentous decision on the part of Secretary Perry. The last time the Energy Department nudged FERC to intervene in our power market was in the 1970s, when the Arab oil embargo had the U.S. spooked about reliance on foreign energy sources. The Trump Administration appears to want to intervene during a time of widespread energy abundance—or even energy “dominance,” in White House’s own words. Already, Big Oil and Big Green have come together to advocate against the proposal, and if that doesn’t tell you that something strange is afoot, nothing will.

There will be plenty more of this story to come, and it is by no means clear how things will settle out. Stability of supply is undoubtedly valuable, but assigning that value is going to be a fraught task, to say the least.

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Hamas and Fatah Closer to Reconciliation?

Since Hamas’ takeover of the Gaza strip in 2007, the Palestinians’ ambitions for statehood have been thwarted not least by their own inability to form a united government. If for no other reason, there’s little point in recognizing a Palestinian “state” that is really two pseudo-states sometimes violently at odds with one another. And that’s all the more true when one of those statelets is governed by an internationally designated terrorist organization.

But while Hamas and Fatah have made noises about reconciliation in the past, yesterday’s visit to the Gaza Strip by the Palestinian Prime Minister suggests that the two groups appear to be closer to putting aside their differences than they have been in years. As Reuters reports:

The West Bank-based Palestinian prime minister crossed into the Gaza Strip on Monday in a move toward reconciliation between the mainstream Fatah party and Hamas, a decade after the Islamist group seized the territory in a civil war.

Rami al-Hamdallah said at a welcome ceremony his unity government would begin assuming control of Gaza’s administrative affairs, as well as “security responsibilities and responsibility for crossings and borders”.

Hamas, considered a terrorist group by Israel and the West, made its dramatic step toward unity last month, disbanding its Gaza shadow government, after Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates imposed an economic boycott on its main donor, Qatar, over alleged support of terrorism. Qatar denies the allegation. [….]

That deployment [of up to 3,000 Fatah security men to Gaza] would still leave Hamas’s armed wing — analysts say it has at least 25,000 well-equipped fighters — the dominant power in the Palestinian enclave of 2 million people.

For the time being at least, the Israeli government seems to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the unity efforts. The Israelis have a far more nuanced view of Hamas’ governance of the Gaza Strip than Israel’s advocates—or, for that matter, its detractors—give it credit for. Hamas might call for the destruction of Israel, but Israel isn’t exactly eager for the immediate destruction of Hamas. As former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon noted in an interview with The American Interest last year, the Israeli government, for one thing, used to provide Qatari oil to the Gaza Strip via Ashdod. That arrangement, as with the provision of Israeli electricity into the Strip that prompted the latest crisis in April, was halted by Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, not by Israel.

Israel is well aware that even in dealing with a terrorist group calling for its destruction, there are worse things than Hamas. With Egypt still struggling to defeat ISIS’ Sinai Province affiliate just across the border, the collapse of Hamas in the Strip might well entail the rise of something more like ISIS. The struggles of Gazan civilians under the alleged Gaza “blockade” (Egypt’s border closure is inevitably elided whenever this accusation is leveled at Israel) is also a diplomatic weapon for Hamas, never mind that the restrictions are necessary because of Hamas itself. And so Israel can at least be content if Hamas and Fatah come to a deal that keeps the lights on in Gaza.

Whether a unity agreement might lead to more meaningful restraint from Hamas remains very much in doubt, however. Hamas’ new “political document” that it released in April was a widely publicized opportunity to chart a new course. Even for Arab leaders, it was too cute by half. While stating that “Palestine” might exist within the pre-1967 borders, it refused to recognize Israel. While not mentioning the group’s foundational connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, it didn’t reject it. Announced from a plush hotel in Qatar, its release immediately preceded the Gulf Qatar Crisis.

Hamas may have conceded to Fatah’s key political demands, in other words, but there’s no real reason to think that any of this will lead to a kindler, gentler terrorist group. Still, some of the concessions might weaken the group while giving Fatah a foothold in Gaza, which is a positive outcome even if it’s of no great substance for Israeli security concerns.

The larger issue is what comes next in Palestinian politics. One key behind-the-scenes player in all of these negotiations between Hamas and Fatah is Mohammed Dahlan, who may be setting himself up as Mahmoud Abbas’ successor. The 82 year-old Abbas is a chainsmoker in less-than ideal health with no clear successor. Palestinian politics, which have been frozen in place for years, could get very interesting very quickly. These latest moves in the Gaza strip might just be the first steps.

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How to Improve the Iran Nuclear Deal

President Trump and Premier Netanyahu, two strident opponents of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA) discussed the agreement during their recent meeting and may have sealed its fate. Trump must decide by mid-October whether to certify that Iran remains in compliance, as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) maintains, and to extend the deal for a further ninety-day period. Netanyahu, who viewed the deal as a sellout that virtually ensures Iran will attain nuclear weapons, has called for it to be “fixed or nixed.”

When a President who is monumentally unsuited for high office, whose personality mixes unbridled ambition with deep-seated insecurity, confers with a Premier of similar ambition and uncompromising bent, whose reach consistently exceeds his grasp, the outcome may be worrisome. This is especially true at a time when both face severe legal challenges to their political futures and have taken public stands against the deal that will be hard to reverse regardless of what their respective defense establishments advise—to say little of America’s more pressing nuclear crisis in North Korea (whose outcome is actually of great consequence for Israel as well).

In reality, the options they face are few and poor.

Simply reopening the deal and negotiating a better one is a fantasy. The co-signatories, including Britain, France, and Germany, have made it abundantly clear that they are opposed to this, and Iran certainly has no intention of doing so. U.S. attempts to reopen the deal would strengthen Iranian hardliners, who have long portrayed the agreement as subterfuge for malevolent American intent. Iran has already threatened to withdraw and renew the nuclear program, should the United States fail to recertify it. Since the IAEA has determined that Iran is in compliance with the accord, detractors’ claims to the contrary notwithstanding, international opprobrium would fall nearly universally on the United States. Moreover, Iran has already gained many of the economic benefits that accrue to it under the agreement and may thus have an even more limited interest in preserving it. In some ways, a U.S. attempt to reopen the deal would be a win-win-win for Iran.

The United States could abrogate the deal unilaterally, or try to push the Iranians to the point that they would do so. One way of achieving the latter is the recent spate of ideas, according to which the United States would decertify Iran but not renew sanctions, or decertify and threaten to renew sanctions if Iran fails to accede to various demands. In either case, the United States would lose the co-signatories’ support and Iran would be free not just to renew the nuclear program but also to rapidly cross the operational threshold.

Another option, which remarkably appears to have gained renewed traction in Washington recently, is regime change. This is a laudable goal in and of itself; if ever there was a regime that warranted change, it is Iran’s. All the same, there is absolutely nothing new in this idea. Indeed, regime change has been U.S. policy ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, pursued in the interim at varying levels but with zero success. In reality, the belief in externally fomented regime change in Iran is folly. The United States has not successfully fomented regime change anywhere in the world for decades, without a military invasion, and will certainly not succeed in the case of a regime that still enjoys considerable domestic legitimacy. If change comes at all in Iran, it will come from within, and it is not imminent. Public statements by the United States in favor of regime change and open support for opposition groups will merely serve to confirm the regime’s deepest fears and solidify the position of the hardliners, leading it to further hunker down.

A targeted military strike against the critical nuclear sites is easily within U.S. capabilities, and the potential downsides, including the danger of a broader regional deterioration and consequent need for greater American military involvement, are probably highly overblown. A military strike may prove necessary at some future point, when all other options have truly been exhausted, but we are nowhere near there today. It is important to recognize, however, that such an attack would likely lead the Iranians to reconstitute the program and attempt to rapidly cross the nuclear threshold. Military action could thus do no more than buy a limited amount of time – an important achievement in its own right – which could then be used to bring all of the other non-military options back into play once again and thereby further extend the period of time gained—t, but probably not resolve the issue.

Only a diplomatic agreement may provide a long-term resolution, and there is already one in place. Like all compromise agreements, the JCPOA has significant flaws, but has so far proven effective. Instead of pursuing new options, which are no more than detours on the path back to a future diplomatic deal, we should focus on ensuring strict adherence to the existing one, while redressing its flaws.

This requires a painful recognition that the existing deal is the only realistic option and must remain the basis for the ongoing effort to prevent Iran from going nuclear. To this end, meticulous adherence to the deal by the United States and its co-signatories is a prerequisite, to justify ongoing and especially intensified supervision of Iran’s compliance.

Strict American adherence is also essential to maintain U.S. credibility as the leading international actor. If one American administration can simply walk away from commitments made by its predecessors, especially when the international body responsible for overseeing the agreement and virtually all credible observers agree that Iran is in compliance, U.S. credibility will be severely undermined. No country in the future would have the confidence required to reach agreement with the United States, and American foreign policy would suffer a severe blow. Israel, too—which is ultimately dependent on American negotiated agreements or at least intervention in a variety of areas, not just on Iran, but the Palestinian issue, conflicts with Hezbollah and Hamas, and more—would also be adversely affected.

The above should not be misconstrued as a call for passivity, or unquestioning acceptance of a flawed deal. It is, however, a call for realism. As any adult knows, life, whether personal or diplomatic, is all about the realistically doable given the world as it is, not merely as we wish it to be. A number of measures can, however, be taken to ensure strict implementation of the existing deal and to address its primary shortcomings.

First, in a lengthy and technologically complex legal document, which included both unavoidable ambiguity and some intentional obfuscation necessary to reach agreement, the room for conflicting interpretations is considerable. Furthermore, the Iranians are past masters at taking advantage of such ambiguities and will push the envelope to the best of their ability. Any country would do the same; the Iranians are just better at it than most. The United States and Israel, and even more importantly the United States and the European co-signatories to the deal, must thus reach agreement on those Iranian actions that would be held to constitute violations of the deal and the corrective measures to be adopted.

In a similar vein, action by the United States and European co-signatories, in at least some collaboration with Russia and China, the other co-signatories, is necessary to address some specific areas of ambiguity in the agreement. One such example is the recent request by the Secretary General of the IAEA for his agency’s supervisory role to be clarified in regard to one of the clauses.

Most importantly, however, agreement is necessary on the measures to be adopted once the existing deal expires, the so-called “sunset clause”, to ensure that Iran, one of the world’s most dangerous regimes, will never be allowed to cross the nuclear threshold. The primary means of achieving this should be a new follow-on agreement, hopefully negotiated with Iran but imposed unilaterally, if necessary, by all co-signatories and as much of the international community as possible upon the current agreement’s expiration. The administration has already begun actively pursuing this idea.

The attempts to promote a follow-on agreement may have begun prematurely; it might have been wiser to leave the issue to a later stage, say year seven of the deal (five years from now). Nevertheless, the Administration’s threats to walk away from it entirely may have had the salutary effect of increasing the willingness of the Europeans and others to pursue this now. Encouragingly, French President Macron has expressed support. If the follow-on agreement—an addition to, not a substitute for, the JCPOA—is also necessary for Trump and Netanyahu to claim that they lived up to their promises to replace the existing agreement with a better one, then so be it.

Containing Iran’s hegemonic ambitions will be a generational challenge, and we are still at the beginning. The 2015 deal wisely focused on the nuclear program, by far the greatest danger Iran poses to the United States and its allies and the only potentially existential threat to Israel. Having addressed the nuclear issue, at least temporarily, the deal enables us to redouble our efforts to curtail Iran’s missile program, support for terrorism, involvement in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and human rights violations. The way to do so, however, is not by weakening or scrapping the existing deal, nor by linking it to Iran’s other misdeeds. Addressing them is a vital, but separate, battle.

A comprehensive American strategy is needed to contain Iran, including a more effective anti-Iranian Sunni coalition. If we are to succeed in our efforts to consolidate international support against Iran’s nuclear program and other malign activities, they must be viewed as the will of the (responsible) international community, not as attempts to sabotage the deal by those who opposed it from the beginning.

Finally, it would perhaps be surprising to some to find that the resolution of the Iranian issue is closely linked to the outcome of the North Korean crisis. The Iranians have undoubtedly been deeply impressed by Pyongyang’s ability to defy the United States ever since it crossed the nuclear threshold, and it will closely monitor U.S. efforts, and success, in addressing the current crisis. Moreover, there have been several reports that North Korea has secretly helped Iran circumvent the limitations imposed by the nuclear deal and of mutual support for the two countries’ respective missile programs.

The art of the deal, as Trump should certainly know (but Netanyahu, too), is to seek outcomes that all sides can live with. Knockout blows may be desirable but are not always realistic. The nuclear deal remains the best of the bad options and should be renewed. Then we can address the other issues.

The post How to Improve the Iran Nuclear Deal appeared first on The American Interest.

A Pyrrhic Victory in Catalonia

To judge by the Catalan government’s account, Sunday’s referendum on independence from Spain was an unequivocal triumph for the separatist cause. On Sunday night, regional authorities claimed that 2.3 million residents had turned out for the unsanctioned referendum, with over 90% favoring independence. And though the national government did its best to disrupt the vote—with security forces confiscating ballot boxes, shutting down polling stations and engaging in sometimes violent clashes with voters—those heavy-handed tactics seemed to backfire, generating international goodwill for the secessionists’ cause and criticism of the Spanish government for suppressing the vote.

But that apparent victory is by no means clear-cut. Even as Catalan President Carles Puigdemont signaled that Catalonia would soon unilaterally declare independence, he also anxiously entreated the EU to mediate with Madrid, in a sign of his own lack of leverage. And he cannot have been pleased with Brussels’s response. Per FT:

In its first public comments on Sunday’s vote — during which more than 800 people were injured — the European Commission said the Catalan question was an “internal matter for Spain”, adding that “violence can never be an instrument in politics”.

It also said that Catalonia would no longer be an EU member if it were to vote for independence after a legal referendum.

The spokesman for Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president, said on Monday: “The commission believes these are times for unity and stability, not divisiveness and fragmentation. We call on all relevant players to move from confrontation to dialogue. We trust the leadership of Mariano Rajoy to manage this difficult process in light with Spanish constitution.”

As Europe’s response shows, Sunday’s vote may turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory for the secessionists. Notwithstanding its mild criticisms of Madrid, Brussels shows no signs of budging from its existing policy of backing Rajoy, and it will be loath to grant legitimacy to the separatists by negotiating directly with them. If Catalonia declares independence, Madrid may well trigger Article 155 of the Spanish constitution to suspend the region’s autonomy and take full charge—and the EU will be happy to look the other way.

Indeed, Puigdemont would be naive to expect recognition from the EU; by any conceivable standard, the referendum was illegitimate and illegal, carried out in open defiance of Spain’s constitutional authorities. Outrage over Madrid’s heavy-handed tactics and sympathy for those hurt has tended to obscure this simple fact, as well as the serious flaws of the voting process itself. Most Catalans who oppose independence boycotted the referendum on principle, resulting in a highly skewed turnout favoring the secessionists (whom recent polls suggest represent barely 40% of the populace). And the voting process relied heavily on print-at-home ballots and permitted residents to vote at whatever polling place they liked, allowing for easy repeat voting. In short, a result of 90% support for independence under such circumstances is not a remotely accurate reflection of the popular will.

That said, Madrid cannot claim any kind of victory either. Rajoy’s approach to the referendum was in some respects the worst of both worlds: insufficient to prevent the vote in the first place, but heavy-handed enough to draw international scorn and fuel the secessionist fire. The hundreds of mayors and thousands of Catalan police who enabled the vote have already proven that they have little respect for Madrid’s edicts or its invocation of the “rule of law.” The situation is unlikely to improve after Sunday; widely circulated images of police brutality and bloodied civilians will only harden separatist sentiment and could motivate those on the fence to support independence.

Perhaps the prospect of an officially sanctioned referendum, held down the line under less chaotic circumstances and with mutually agreed ground rules, would lower temperatures in both Madrid and Barcelona. But it is difficult to see the stars aligning to avert constitutional crisis any time soon.

In the days to come, Puigdemont and the separatists will likely declare independence, and continue their appeals to sympathetic foreign publics and European officials. Madrid, meanwhile, will then be pressured to back up its red lines, give no ground, and impose heavier controls on Catalonia. Throughout this, the EU will issue mealy-mouthed statements supporting Spain’s constitution, urging dialogue, and reprimanding any violence, while trying to keep its hands clean. And the underlying issues that have triggered the crisis will be no closer to resolution.

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Is a Competent Trumpism Possible?

During the campaign, Trump’s most obvious differentiation—first from the rest of the field in the Republican primary, and then in the general election against Hillary Clinton—was less about policy than about feeling. His smorgasbord of policy positions—immigration restriction, a retreat from treaty obligations, trade protectionism, the repeal of Obamacare, disdain for Black Lives Matters, and other forms of political radicalism—got him branded a “populist” among the chattering classes, but that missed the point of his campaign. What united Trump fans was not so much a policy wish list that had been neglected by mainstream politicians across the political spectrum, but a heartfelt need to say “No!” to a political class that had long ago stopped listening.

Understood in this way, Trump’s gleeful and truculent displays of contempt for longstanding norms regarding acceptable political behavior become much less difficult to comprehend. And yet no one really got it during the campaign. The list of things Trump did while running for office was typically framed as a bill of indictment: the trafficking in conspiracy theories of the most blatant sort, the attacks on a “gold star” family and former prisoners of war, mocking disabled people, the hurling of thinly veiled racist invective at everyone from federal judges to star athletes, the reference to a reporter’s menstrual cycle, boasts about grabbing women’s genitals, the public profanity, the refusal to immediately condemn murderous white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and so on. Almost everyone decreed that such behavior made him unelectable. Almost everyone was wrong.

The stunning thing is that the conventional wisdom among elites still has not caught up to the paradigm shift that President Trump’s election has introduced into American politics. Most continue to believe that, yes, Trump won the election, but he did so despite his vulgarian schtick. Various explanations have been trotted out: Hillary Clinton’s supposed charisma deficit, the peculiarities of the electoral college, the surrender of the Democratic party to identity politics, the challenges any party faces in winning a “third” presidential term, James Comey’s involvement, or (in my view most implausibly) Russian meddling in our electoral processes. What each of these explanations shares, however, is the assumption that Trump won despite, not because of, his counter-conventional behavior.

Concerns about Trump’s campaign persona have carried over into handwringing about his performance as President. From Right and Left have come the cries about how unsuited his character is to the management of the office. Not only do majorities of poll-answerers consider him “unfit” for the Presidency, bringing shame upon the office and the nation alike, but his lack of personal or political discipline, his unwillingness to do the hard work of shepherding through legislation, and his short attention span and inattention to detail appear to fundamentally hamper his ability to execute his policy agenda.

And this in turn has led Republicans in particular to wonder whether a kind of “competent Trumpism”, or even a “kinder, gentler Trumpism” is possible. Political operatives are approaching this in the spirit of optimism: Trump has clearly shown that a kind of populist energy can be successfully tapped in today’s America. Could a more “conventional” politician maintain or perhaps even improve on Trump’s coalition, while at the same time more effectively realizing his policy agenda?

Of course, only time will tell. But surveying the scene, the answer appears to be “no.” Trump’s appeal is less rooted in any kind of mix of policy prescriptions but rather is directly related to his organizational incompetence and personal resentments. Indeed, both his policy agenda and his political charm, such as they are, begin and end with the florid expression of those resentments. To perform competently or to stop making odious statements would betray the essence of his appeal.

Let us begin with the matter of competence. The conventional view is that to be serious about policy in a democracy requires not only legislative goals, but also a sense for how legislation will in turn be adopted by agencies and bureaucracies. Not every President has come to the office with this skill set, but every President has sought to quickly figure out the mechanics of government in order to push through a legislative agenda. This in turn has required that the Commander-in-Chief learn how government actually operates. In short, the job has required gaining expertise in the management of a bureaucracy.

Almost nine months in, President Trump still appears to be utterly uninterested in any of that boring running-the-government stuff, a fact symbolized by his failure to nominate candidates for hundreds of positions within the federal bureaucracy. From the point of view of those who think the government has a positive and necessary role to play, this would seem to be the very definition of incompetence: a failure to perform the basic functions of the job as they understand it.

But imagine for a moment that you don’t subscribe to the view that the purpose of democratic politics is to serve as a legitimate mechanism for selecting policies that aim to improve the commonweal. Imagine that you view government as basically a bunch of corrupt rent-seekers who also subscribe to a set of alien “liberal” cultural values, and who are seeking to impose those values on the whole of America. From that perspective, the terms “bureaucratic competence” or “policy seriousness” reveal themselves as elitist ruses. Trump’s very lack of attention to bureaucratic detail, by contrast, proves he’s not one of those swamp creatures that his candidacy was all about mocking and attacking.

When Trump calls for draining the swamp, what his fans hear, not incorrectly, is a rejection of politics-as-a-means-to-pursue-policy as such. “The swamp” that Trump purports to want to drain is all those people who treat policy as a serious business, and who believe that the policy practitioners should be respected (and financially rewarded) by the people who don’t take policy seriously. This insight also helps explain why Trump’s failure to get anything done has not cost him anything with his fans: As long as Trump keeps telling the fancy-pants boys where they can stick it, he’s accomplishing his primary purpose as far as they’re concerned. The real essence of Trump’s campaign, and now his presidency, is not about policy; it is about sticking a finger in the eye of policy expertise and conventional opinions about what constitutes political decency. Just having him up at the podium in the White House is literally a standing rebuke to the very idea that the purpose of politics is policy. (This is also, incidentally, a good way to understand the remarkable appeal of insurgent Republican senatorial candidate Roy Moore: he boils down Trumpism to its most incendiary rejectionism.)

To say that Trump’s policy incompetence is essential to his appeal is not to assert that he lacks political skill. Something quite the opposite is true. While Trump appears to prefer approaching issues at a surface level that admits for little subtlety and has shown little respect for expertise on anything other than military affairs, his talent for commanding attention in today’s media environment is unparalleled. Consider the litany of nasty, sticky nicknames he has bequeathed to us: Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Low Energy Jeb, the Failing New York Times, and most recently, Rocket Man in North Korea. Equally memorable are his trademark slogans: American First, Make America Great Again, Drain the Swamp. Political and intellectual elites may condescendingly associate these skills with carnival barkers, infomercial salesmen, or professional wrestling announcers, but they do so at their peril. (As we all know from reading Bourdieu, this just shows us that the elites are snobs!)

From the point of view of Trump’s fans, it’s not the content of the policy proposals that matter, but the form. The big beautiful wall that the Mexicans are going to pay for is a typical example. On the one hand, experts on border security are confident that building a wall will make virtually no difference in terms of the flow of illegal immigrants or drugs into the country, and will have zero deterrent effect on terrorists, however broadly construed. Nor does Mexico show any sign of bending to Trump’s will and paying for any part of the putative wall. On the other hand, making this claim is undeniably a memorable and dramatic gesture of contempt, not only for Mexicans and immigrants more generally, but also for the U.S. elites who have long embraced ambiguity as an acceptable approach to immigration questions.

So, what does all this mean for the likely direction of policy under the Trump Administration? We already have a pretty good sense.

The U.S. government is an enormous and largely self-operating bureaucracy, and as we have seen over the past eight months, it continues to steam ahead in more or less the same direction that it has for years. Despite all the chaos and performance art emanating from the White House, Mar-a-Lago, and various Trump golf courses, the supertanker of state continues to largely do the same things it has under Obama. We have maintained the same ineffective strategy in Syria and Afghanistan, though accompanied by rhetorical broadsides against human rights as a guiding principle of American foreign policy; the Affordable Health Care Act remains the law of the land, albeit administered a bit less well; trade policy hasn’t changed much yet, despite a fair bit of bluster; and deportations continue at more or less the same rate as they did under Obama (in fact, they are lagging a little behind).

Indeed, the only places where the Trump administration has actually moved the policy needle are exceptions that prove the rule: What changes have been implemented have come from the actions of cabinet-level officers or lower who in fact are experts in the policy implementation process and thus have been able to move the bureaucracy. For example, venerable Washington denizen Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department has implemented some significant changes. And though he resigned last week amid a scandal, Tom Price, another longtime Washington creature, showed his swamp skills by charting a path for sabotaging health care markets over at Health and Human Services. And Scott Pruitt at the EPA, while not technically a Washington insider, has been a staple of Oklahoma politics since the late 1990s, and appears to know what he is doing. By contrast, the true “outsider” appointments in Trump’s cabinet (like Ben Carson or Rex Tillerson) have failed to do much of anything at all.

Contemplating this spectacle, it would be easy for critics of Trump to take the smug view that all of this mainly signifies that the GOP as an institution is a failed state, and that his approach to politics is primarily an intramural problem for the Republicans. Likewise, as Tyler Cowen suggested in these pages six months ago, we might be tempted to see Trump mainly as a kind of political placebo, “giving his supporters a public voice and the illusion of more control without the control itself.” From this perspective, the best thing to do politically and analytically is to ignore Trump, and count on normalcy to be restored whenever Trump eventually leaves.

But this would be a mistake for three reasons. First and most obviously, a policy-oblivious President will do nothing positive about (and indeed may make worse) any acute exogenous crises that may erupt, ranging from nuclear brinksmanship abroad to the aftermath of natural disasters at home. Second, the United States faces many pressing long-term challenges, and having a categorical incompetent at the political helm makes it impossible for the country to deal with them. Most urgently, as I wrote in these pages last fall, the United States desperately needs to have a serious conversation about how to reconfigure our social and political institutions in order to position the country to take advantage of the coming waves of technological innovation. Under a Trump presidency, this will not happen. And finally, however valiantly the media and many members of the public may be fighting to prevent Trump’s destruction of the norms of decency and respect that underpin any effective and legitimate democracy, the longer he stays in office, the harder it will be to return to a politics predicated on the idea that policy outcomes should be the primary way in which we judge our politicians.

Given how U.S. elites have signally failed to create a political economy that provides Trump’s fans with a steadily growing supply of panem, we shouldn’t be surprised that they prefer a President who at least they can rely on to deliver circenses. For when it comes to the performance of political grievances, Trump remains America’s greatest ringmaster.

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Fixing Title IX

In a September 7 speech, as reported in the Washington Post, Education Secretary Betsy De Vos “announced plans to scrap an Obama-era civil rights policy that pushed colleges to take a harder line against campus sexual assault but drew fire from critics who said it trampled on the due process rights of the accused.” Then, on September 22, she actually did the deed.

The critics were right, and even many anti-Trump observers have come to agree, greeting the De Vos action with what might be described as a quiet nod. Indeed, the De Vos decision exemplifies a remark Thomas Friedman made a few weeks ago: Just because the Trump Administration, or even the President, says something doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. Secretary De Vos is right that the Obama Administration “weaponized” its enforcement of Title IX, forcing colleges to use the lowest possible standard of proof in order to obtain convictions, almost always of men accused by women of sexual harassment or assault.

So let’s hope that, whatever other very bad ideas she brings to the job (I detect several), her decision will succeed in putting an end to the Kafkaesque “men are rapists” misuse of Title IX. Perhaps that will also put paid to the corresponding misuse of the UCMJ (Unified Code of Military Justice) in the military—or at least at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, where I am now thick into year 31 as an English professor. I don’t wish De Vos or the President well in general, but in those few precious rare cases when they’re right, we cannot afford to let our political preferences mess up a prospect for positive change.

This would be a good time, too, to re-think the premises that led to the bizarre abuses of Title IX in the first place. Title IX began, in case you have forgotten or (youth that you are) never knew, during the Nixon Administration as a reasonable reform that prevented discrimination against women in colleges that received public funding. The impetus for it concerned something as relatively bland as women’s sports teams: Why should colleges and universities exert themselves to provide opportunities to men for intercollegiate and intermural sports activities, but deny the same opportunities to women? It was a traditional form of unfairness, and but it was unfairness all the same and deserved to be corrected. I don’t remember anyone at the time thinking that such a reasonable proposition would end up being one of the slipperiest slopes in American legal history. So how did that happen?

To simplify somewhat, it happened because feminism met postmodernism, the two became infatuated with one another, drank too much one evening, fooled around, and produced an illegitimate offspring: the crazy idea that the potential for men to rape women is behind all male-female sex.

Rape is a terrible crime, and men usually commit it. For much too long too many men got away with it, because the system was rigged to deter women from speaking out. From these twinned facts and that intolerable reality Susan Brownmiller concluded in a 1975 book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, that all heterosexual intercourse is based on coercion. Feelings of love and ideas about marriage and family apparently have nothing to do with any of it.

This idea, which is in a sense a weaponization theory of social relations, is akin to the idea that all social hierarchies in history have been based on efforts by the powerful and wealthy to legitimize their plundering of the commons via the original sin of private property. In the postmodernist version of this idea, what most of us think of as law, democracy, and the rest of the institutions of a liberal society—whether believed to inhere in natural law or based on some other moral foundation—are really just distracting palliatives for the masses that excuse and hide the plunder. Postmodernists do not credit any foundational truths, only the power of hegemonic narratives and “structural violence” to devise pretexts for unfair competitions. So in this way of thinking, what police and prison are to the victimized downtrodden in general, the threat of rape is to all women.

Other feminist theorists, including Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, picked up and elaborated Brownmiller’s basic idea. Dworkin, in her book Intercourse, argued that what passes for normal male-female sex is in fact an act of domination by men over women. MacKinnon’s most influential notion is her insistence that men “objectivize” women by looking at their bodies divided into parts. According to this view, the mere fact of being male makes men “natural predators” in our “culture of rape” who treat women like objects.

In some parts of the world, this caricature seems to fit. In eastern Congo and Rwanda, where I taught before the civil war and genocide, combatants regularly used rape as a weapon of social terror. But it’s not true here. Do young unattached men and women drinking too much at parties sometimes go astray? Of course they do, but this is a very narrow slice of a wide spectrum. Few Western women are under threat walking normally along a city street, or eating with their family (or even alone) in a restaurant, or attending a music concert. The problems aren’t general; they’re specific to specific situations and should be addressed as such. Very likely, the “mean world syndrome”—George Gerbner’s label for what happens when people confuse reality with high-shock-value fiction as communicated by mass commercial media—has played a role here in exaggerating the degree of male predatory sexual behavior to which women are vulnerable.

However it came about, the idea that male sexuality is all part of a spectrum anchored by rape has entered our treatment of what we call “sexual assault” in the military and civilian colleges. Rape has in many states, and under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), become legally joined to a spectrum of perfectly normal male sexual actions that are thus tarred by association. An attempted kiss that is rejected is reported as a case of “sexual assault” ranking right up there with rape.

Men know these aren’t often the same, and so do normal women. But if they talk back they are instantly silenced as being a part of the “culture of rape,” or for using “hate speech.” So they sit in silent fury while people who fundamentally misunderstand them tell them how horrible they are in their very natures. They are told that while their “victims” are never responsible for their behavior, because they are creatures constrained by “structural violence” in a system of patriarchal domination, young men are responsible for their behavior no matter their testosterone rushes or the ambiguous circumstances in which they may find themselves. The men then vent to their buddies; they don’t accept and cannot even understand the wild talk they’ve just heard, and they won’t change their behavior because of it. And the vicious circle of wild accusation, hurtful astonishment, silence, and more wild accusation continues.

I doubt this situation is healthy for our society, but I’m sure it’s unhealthy for the U.S. military. Having taught more than 3,000 mostly male midshipmen over three decades, I’ve seen how destructive the military’s embrace of extremist anti-male positions has been on the morale of these young men and their willingness to cooperate. Right now our society, led by elites who have normalized and bureaucratized a lower-common-denominator version of the Brownmiller thesis, is attacking men. And men don’t like it. Neither do most women, by the way, who actually like men.

While we’re at it, nor is it true, as Catherine MacKinnon insisted, that men are reprehensible because they “objectify” women and have to be forced or shamed to stop doing so.

First, it’s risible to think that most men want to have sex with objects. But it is true that we grade women physically. We do see bodies, and respond to them as bodies rather than as people. But at least in the military, and I suspect outside it too, this isn’t particularly aimed at women; it’s just something men do. In the military we’re worse with other men than we are with women. Come to the main weight room at the Naval Academy at eight o’clock at night to see hundreds of jacked, sweating, straight (well, most of them) boys “objectifying” themselves in the mirror—and the other guys around them. Every guy knows who has the biggest guns and pecs, and whose legs need work. All men in the military instantly rate—and give or withhold respect to—the new officer who enters the room for the first time based on what he looks like.

And that’s a problem now in the military. In a sub-world defined for millennia as a rite of male passage where men compete with each other and “objectify” each other far more than they do women, we now see a sudden influx of women—whom men are not supposed to see as women. This is like asking a 9-year old to look at an ice cream cone and pretend it’s spinach.

And nobody goes home at the end of the day: You are home. You live with these women, and saying that they are “sisters in arms” doesn’t make them your sisters. It gets worse if your mandatory training tells you you’re bad if you have any sexual thoughts at all. Why shouldn’t you? You see the male LT as a man and rate his pecs. Why shouldn’t you look at a woman’s chest? And are men wrong to associate the military with masculinity, as if several thousand years of conventional attitudes can be whisked away by a training lecture? Who thinks you can change all this by telling men they’re ill-informed? If that’s you, good luck with that.

As it happens, both male and female midshipmen object to the overall tone of “men are potential rapists” in the training sessions, usually led by female midshipmen, and they object to the fact that parallels are always drawn with gang rapes, which midshipmen are forced to say loud and clear that they abhor—as if somehow not saying it means they approve of them. The presupposition here is that men are beasts who can’t be reasoned with. The only way to control them, we conclude nowadays, is by coercion: more legal action, more prosecutions, more lectures about the destructive nature of men who predate upon women who are helpless damsels unable to protect themselves.

In fact, most men are reasonable beings, and women can grasp how we think and function, so as to make informed decisions for themselves. This has been going on for at least several thousand years, as best anyone can tell. Indeed, ironically enough in light of feminism’s articulated core goal, the image of women at the bottom of this crazy idea that all men are latent rapists is that all women are helpless victims waiting to be victimized. It is not healthy for women to adopt a victimization psychology, and most women don’t. More important, perhaps, it is not even remotely an accurate depiction of female reality in the West for at least the past four or five centuries.

The current attack-and-litigate approach fails to understand the most fundamental fact about men: Male sexual attraction is situational. Men do not indiscriminately throw themselves on helpless victims; we work within very narrow constraints that make most of the world an unambiguous sexual no-fly zone. Men observe these constraints in order to achieve what they think may be an achievable objective, which for most is a satisfying sexual relationship in the context of a loving, family-oriented future. If you watch too many shoddy movies you might thing that most men consider this sort of circumstance a kind of consolation prize, but it’s simply not so. At least amid sober reflection about their futures, that is what the vast majority of young men want, and want deeply.

As it happens, most women are typically located within this sexual no-fly zone: mom and sis certainly; married women; underage females; and female bosses. Women men are responsible for are too, like the female soccer players on a team coached by a male. Men know these rules and by and large respect them. If men were really just physically out-of-control creatures, we’d come on to most women most of the time—but we obviously don’t. So treating us as if only coercion, in the form of threats of shaming and litigation, will beat back our urges is not only an erroneous theory of the case, it’s downright dysfunctional for everyone, because it distorts the rules in such a way as to disorient men and women alike.

Which brings us to why college produces so many problems. What is the optimal situation these days for young men to meet unmarried and potentially available young women? Right: college. In today’s culture, men can be fairly sure that women are willing to have sex with somebody, even if not with them. In a rational man’s mind, a small chance is very different from no chance. Now add a party not held during business hours, to which attendees comes of their own free will, and all typically try to look attractive. Then add alcohol to reduce inhibitions. Most of us don’t have to guess what can happen next, because it’s easier simply to remember what happened next.

Such a party—common as they may be—is a small slice of life within a relatively small slice of society. Amazingly, it usually comes off without causing big problems. Do we still need to talk about it? Sure, but with the men, not at them. No one can talk at men in such a way as to stop them from taking any kind of sexual initiative, and, quite possibly, most women would not like them to stop. In any event, the guilty-until-proven-innocent “incipient rape” approach is definitely a loser. As Ben Shahn once famously said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.”

Besides which there’s no indication that, all of a sudden, things are worse for women now than before. Nothing has changed in the world to justify this bizarre turn of attitude toward young men. So whoever said that ideas don’t matter—not to exclude very bad ideas—doesn’t know what he’s taking about.

But given that we have defined an exploratory kiss as legally the same as rape, and that prejudiced advocates have gotten to decide if the “victim” was assaulted or not (as the famous study that is cited for the claim that 20 percent of college women will be assaulted did), then of course has been easy to proclaim a new crisis. Any clever and willful individual can make it seem as though something has changed just by jerking around definitions and statistics.

Of course college men sometimes do go too far, and so do some men in the military. Nobody justifies sex by force, or the coercion of sexual favors for advancement. But it’s just not true that colleges and the military have lately been awash in rape—read the newspapers to see frequent conflation of reports of rape with those of sexual assault, which for the UCMJ and many state laws includes “unwanted sexual contact.” [For documentation on this see the newly released book The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Assault on Due Process at America’s Universities by K.C. Taylor and Stuart Johnson—especially Chapter 2, “Misleading Through Statistics.”]

In the civilian sphere, the Obama Administration struck out into new territory by using the Title IX act of the Department of Education as a weapon against colleges receiving Federal funds (almost all do) to cast men as creatures always up for bad behavior who must be reined in by use of coercion. This legitimation of feminist-postmodern ideology naturally led to more complaints of sexual assault, more prosecutions, more expulsions. It also led to a further ballooning of the Title IX careerist track within colleges and universities, which essentially produced hordes of paid scolds to find such complaints, and, if necessary, occasionally to gin them up.

In colleges as in the military, as things have been before September 22 (and we’ll see what the De Vos decision changes and how long change will take), the alleged victim of sexual assault has typically been referred to simply as “the victim” (presupposing a guilty party) and receives a “victim’s advocate.” The woman (as it usually is) has had an unlimited period of time to decide that whatever happened was not what she wanted to happen, which is license for her to be a victim deserving of default sympathy. And it’s only her view of things that has counted. There is no other purported crime where the subjective view of one of the two people involved alone has decided whether a crime has been committed.

What has been going on under the mantle of Title IX in recent years bears a certain resemblance to the Salem witch trials of 1692. A wrong theory (that the devil or lesser demons can “possess” people and make them do strange things; that all men are demonic in that they are potential rapists) leads to hysteria, the invention of facts that aren’t (“spectral” evidence then, statistical evidence now), and not incidentally to the empowerment of some people over others. That leads in turn to prosecutions that come up well short of due process as that phrase is normally understood, then usually to convictions. As far as I know, no innocent men have literally been hanged yet, as nineteen innocent people were in late-17th century Massachusetts, but that is probably not for want of desire on the part of some.

If women do not like the status quo on campus or in the military and want change, the first thing to note is that what passes for effort now is not working. That usually suggests that something is wrong with the theory of the case.

My modest suggestion is that, to begin with, those who feel aggrieved should begin to devise a better approach by talking with men rather than at them. Nowadays all that young men hear in institutional settings is the feminist view of how they work and who they are, which is fundamentally flawed. But they typically don’t argue, at least not at the Naval Academy; they just tune it out. That often leads those people trying to “fix” men to think they have succeeded, but they haven’t. The men have merely left the room, puzzled and often more than a bit hurt. Even misguided policies rammed through Congress or invented by reg writers cannot change men.

Getting Title IX to do again what it was initially intended to do is a good idea. True, some present Title IX enforcer zealots at colleges and universities may eventually have to find other employment. But change always entails challenge. I hope Secretary De Vos’s decision puts us on a path to a better way to deal with the real challenges we face. We’ll likely have a better chance of meetings these challenges if we begin anew with a more realistic assessment of what the challenges actually are.

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Tillerson: The United States Does Not Recognize the Kurdish Referendum

The State Department on Thursday issued a press release from Secretary of State Tillerson rejecting the legitimacy of the Kurdistan Region (KR) independence referendum, which saw 93% of voters demand independence. After the half-hearted requests that the Kurds delay the vote, this is the strongest message so far from the Trump Administration that it’s not simply going to let the Kurdistan Regional Government force America’s hand. The State Department:

The United States does not recognize the Kurdistan Regional Government’s unilateral referendum held on Monday.

The vote and the results lack legitimacy and we continue to support a united, federal, democratic and prosperous Iraq.

We remain concerned about the potential negative consequences of this unilateral step. Prior to the vote, we worked with both the KRG and the central government in Baghdad to pursue a more productive framework and to promote stability and prosperity for the people ‎of the Kurdistan region. These aspirations, ultimately, cannot be advanced through unilateral measures such as this referendum.

We urge calm and an end to vocal recriminations and threats of reciprocal actions. We urge Iraqi Kurdish authorities to respect the constitutionally-mandated role of the central government and we call upon the central government to reject threats or even allusion to possible use of force. The United States asks all parties, including Iraq’s neighbors, to reject unilateral actions and the use of force.

The KR’s neighbors are nonetheless stepping up those punitive actions as we speak. On Friday at 6PM Iraqi time, the federal government in Baghdad demanded the halt of all international flights. As a result, the KR’s only independent link to the outside world now runs through the land border with Turkey. Domestic flights between the KR and southern Iraq are still open, but will nonetheless make things extremely complicated for foreign companies in the KR. The KR, for one thing, issues its own visas; getting visas from the federal government in Baghdad is substantially more expensive and onerous. That’s assuming domestic flights even continue; Erbil airport might be forced to close without international flight revenues. Unsurprisingly, foreigners have been scrambling to exit the KR for the past 24 hours. The economic consequences of this pseudo-blockade could be immense.

What will happen next remains unclear. The federal government’s demands include subjecting “all oil revenues in Kurdistan region…to federal control, audit and jurisdiction” and “all land & air border-crossings to be returned to the control of the Federal Borders Authority.” After decades of autonomy and with the Peshmerga fully in control of the borders, there is precisely zero reason to think that that will happen. As a result, the Iraqi Ministry of Defense issued a vague statement threatening that it would seize the KR’s borders by force in coordination with Iran and Turkey.

As we wrote last week, now is the time for meticulous and determined American diplomacy. Overly cavalier pundits pushing for the U.S. to overthrow the status quo and back immediate Kurdish independence fail to appreciate the risks of the present situation. A slew of such commentary leading up to and following the referendum has suggested that an independent Iraqi Kurdistan would lead inevitably lead to the further secession of Iran’s Kurdish provinces (or Turkey’s Kurdish provinces, for those who view undermining Turkey as a good thing.) Or they suggest that the new state would somehow counter Iran’s dominance of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

This is an oversimplification of the situation mixed with an ample dose of wishful thinking. All of the KR’s neighbors would go to war to prevent that result. The only possible protector and guarantor of Kurdish sovereignty in that circumstance would be the United States. The U.S. was willing to militarily guarantee the autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan against Saddam Hussein’s regime after 1991 by imposing no-fly zones, but the United States has not signed on for a ground war against Iraq, Iran, and Turkey.

There’s also very little reason to think the KR intends or is likely to play such a role. The KR government’s President Barzani has made clear that he intends for the referendum to be the start of negotiations, not the end. So long as the land border and pipeline to Turkey remain open, Turkey holds the upper hand. Erdogan can more or less name his terms to Barzani. With sufficient guarantees (and enough cold hard cash and light sweet crude), he might be convinced to back some kind of independent Iraqi KR. For now, he can play both sides, holding military drills with the Iraqi government along the border while likely conducting backroom negotiations. Either way, the KR is far more likely to end up as a Turkish tributary than an instrument of American geopolitics.

The post-referendum negotiations could also strengthen Iran. The referendum has already brought Iran closer together with Turkey. But the independence negotiations might strengthen Iran’s hand within the KR as well. Barzani and his Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) were the principal authors of the referendum. But Barzani’s political rivals, the PUK, which has a regionally distinct political power base, is much closer to the Iranian regime. It’s certainly easier to imagine the Kurds striking some deal with Iran—perhaps trading Kurdish assent for a more pro-Iranian, anti-American parliament in the upcoming elections in April, similar to the 2010 deal that secured the re-election of Nouri al-Maliki, in exchange for open borders, more oil concessions and greater autonomy—than the U.S. offering anything  to the KR that could compensate for total isolation from its neighbors. The U.S. loss of influence in the federal Iraqi government should be a warning; Iran’s proximity and guarantee of staying power gives it advantages in long-term influence that the U.S. may find difficult to match.

If the KR wants to pursue independence at all costs, that is their right. But the annual U.S. provision of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Peshmerga has not been a blank check for U.S. commitment to an endeavor that risks fundamentally undermining the regional position of the United States. A good outcome here would be to find a way to negotiate a settlement that strengthens pro-American voices in the federal Iraqi government like Prime Minister Abadi, that keeps the land route through Turkey open, and with it the possibility for Turkish support for the KR, and that excludes or undermines Iran as much as possible. That will require mediation, not a precipitous drive for independence.

Americans and Iraqi Kurds have shared values and have shed blood together such that it’s virtually impossible not to have a deep and abiding sympathy for the cause of Kurdish independence. It’s not the fault of the Kurds that the United States cannot guarantee their independence; it’s the fault of their neighbors. There is much that the United States can and should do to advance the cause Kurdish independence. But the present threats to Iraqi Kurdistan following this referendum are immense. The best favor that the United States can offer is to help each side back away from the precipice.

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