Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 135

China Capitalizes on Rohingya Crisis

The human toll of the Rohingya refugee crisis continues to mount this week, as droves of Myanmar’s long-persecuted Muslim minority flee from (and in some cases fight) the brutal crackdown of its security forces. It’s a vicious cycle of persecution, reprisals, and radicalization that began when a Rohingya insurgent group launched an attack on Myanmar’s military this past month, and triggered a series of indiscriminate, scorched-earth reprisals.

Since then, neighboring Bangladesh has seen an influx of over 400,000 Rohingya and is straining under the weight of so many refugees. Myanmar’s government, under fire for its atrocities against civilians, now faces a concerted campaign by Western rights groups to re-impose sanctions and an arms embargo. And its embattled civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who was once the darling of humane internationalists the world over, now finds herself accused of complicity in ethnic cleansing. Constrained by the outsize power of Myanmar’s military and the political need to cater to the prejudices of Buddhist nationalists at home, Suu Kyi has largely chosen to stay silent, with only occasional interjections to lambast her critics for peddling “fake news” about the crisis.

If there’s one international player who has the potential to emerge stronger from the carnage, however, it is China. Midway through a recent New York Times piece comes a series of data points suggesting how Beijing could exploit the unfolding crisis to regain lost clout in Myanmar:

With regional powers vying to gain influence in Myanmar, China’s government sees potential benefit in backing Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, while she faces international criticism, said Yun Sun, a scholar at the Stimson Center in Washington.

“This is basically an opportunity for China and a vulnerability of Aung San Suu Kyi,” she said. “The Chinese government says the Rohingya issue doesn’t affect us and by supporting Aung San Suu Kyi we don’t lose anything.” […]

The state-run Myanmar News Agency quoted China’s ambassador to Myanmar last week as saying his country supported the crackdown in Rakhine State. […]

In another sign that China is drawing closer to Myanmar, last week it opened an interim liaison office in Naypyidaw, the remote city that was inaugurated as Myanmar’s capital in 2005. Most foreign missions have stayed in Yangon, the country’s former capital.

In short, while the West wags fingers, China sees an opportunity. That doesn’t mean that Beijing unreservedly welcomes the crisis; violence in Rakhine State threatens Chinese investments there, including an oil pipeline at Kyaukpyu that has already been jeopardized by local unrest. Those risks aside, though, the Rohingya crisis offers an opening for Beijing to present itself as a helpful and nonjudgmental partner to Myanmar, in contrast to grandstanding Westerners.

For starters, Beijing will surely veto any harsh sanctions against Myanmar at the Security Council. Although Beijing recently joined a unanimous Security Council statement condemning the excessive violence, it has no intention of backing up that rhetoric with meaningful action that could alienate an Asian partner that has lately drifted westward. Indeed, China is probably playing a double game in the hopes of becoming a mediator in the dispute: signaling to the West that it is “concerned” about the violence, while working with Myanmar toward an acceptable resolution that will be minimally punitive toward the government.

China has ideological reasons to take Myanmar’s side, of course: it has long touted “non-interference” as a key foreign policy principle, while waving aside the human rights concerns that dominate so much of Western diplomatic rhetoric. And as the plight of Xinjiang’s Uighurs has shown, Beijing feels no compunction about brutally oppressing its own Muslim minority.

But as seen recently in the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia, China’s allergy to humanitarian scruples also serves a strategic purpose. Unencumbered by considerations of values, Beijing can make friends with all kinds of unsavory regimes that the United States or the European Union prefers to scold or sanction. Wherever a Western ally falls out of favor with Washington on humanitarian grounds, China swoops in to fill the vacuum, currying favor with financial assistance, infrastructure investments, or arms deliveries.

In Myanmar’s case, that opportunity was less readily available to China during the Obama years, when the United States and European Union gradually lifted sanctions as a reward for democratic good behavior—notably the release and election of Suu Kyi—and steered the country westward. But that policy, however successful it seemed in the short term, was also short-sighted. In lifting sanctions and declaring “mission accomplished” regarding Burma’s democratization, Obama effectively deprived the United States of what limited leverage it may have had over the country, and generated ahistorical expectations that Myanmar would transform into a peaceable democracy overnight. Now that Suu Kyi’s Western patrons have soured on her, China is sure to double down on its bets there and play the good neighbor.

And what might China want in return? Continued energy cooperation, for one, including the oil links that allow Chinese imports to bypass the Malacca Strait, as well as a favorable foothold in the country’s hydropower sector, where planned Chinese projects have so far struggled to get off the ground. Beijing would also like to see a pliant Myanmar that will do its bidding in multilateral forums like ASEAN, while causing unease with neighboring India. And in the short term, Xi Jinping might appreciate the chance to play international peacemaker on the world stage. Earlier this year, Myanmar rebuffed China’s offer to play mediator in the Rohingya dispute with Bangladesh; if Suu Kyi responds more favorably to such overtures now, it would be a good indicator that China’s charm offensive is working.

Whether Chinese mediation would improve the Rohingya situation is another question entirely. The crisis remains a tragic and intractable one, the product of a complex colonial legacy, a resurgent Burmese nationalism, and a radicalizing Rohingya population that none of Myanmar’s neighbors want to take in. But even if Beijing cannot “solve” the crisis, per se, it is certainly clear that they do not want to waste it.

The post China Capitalizes on Rohingya Crisis appeared first on The American Interest.

How to Manage Post-Democracy Turkey

If you were an avid reader of the Turkish press, which is almost 90 percent controlled by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his extended partners and allies, you would be forgiven for thinking that the bloody, failed coup of July 15, 2016 was engineered by none other than Turkey’s longstanding NATO ally, the United States of America. Not a day goes by that a new calumny is not invented accusing the U.S. government, its military, its institutions, and citizens of complicity in the coup. It is not just the press that partakes in this orgy of recrimination; leading members of the government, including the President, have pointed accusatory fingers as well.

There is no question that Washington and Ankara have been experiencing perhaps the most difficult period in their bilateral relationship since the 1974 Cyprus crisis. At the heart of their present differences is Syria. It was not always thus. At the beginning of the uprisings in the Arab world, and in particular in Syria, Turkey and the United States seemed to be on the same wavelength and cooperated closely. However, divergences emerged first with the rise of al-Qaeda elements backed by Turkey and later with U.S. support for the Syrian Kurds in response to the rise of the Islamic State (IS). The Syrian Kurds, organized under the rubric of the Democratic Union Party of Syria, PYD, and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units, YPG, are closely related to Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, which has conducted a thirty-year insurgency against the Turkish state. Both Washington and Ankara have categorized the latter as a terrorist group, notwithstanding the fact that Erdogan himself a few years ago boldly engaged in peace talks with the PKK.

The U.S. reaction to Turkish accusations of complicity in the coup, as well as to the general atmosphere of enmity stoked by the Turkish leadership, has been relatively subdued. It is as if Washington expects that at some point in the future the Turks will relent in their senseless accusations, and the relationship will improve as it has after similar episodes in the past. Or perhaps at least some American decision-makers are exercising strategic patience, calculating that the Erdogan phenomenon is transient, and that the relationship is too important to sacrifice over a fit of pique by an exotic personality. If so, the focus needs to remain on damage limitation until the storm passes.

This time may be different, however. The problem may not be just or mainly Erdogan, but deeper changes in Turkish society and politics, highlighted by the now long tenure in power of the AK Party movement. Among other novel near-term factors is that Turkey has simultaneously been at odds with its European allies, accusing them as well of all kinds of perfidy. Ankara’s relations with Berlin hit a particular low this past summer and fall when Turkish authorities arrested and detained a German human rights activist who was taking part in a conference with a number of his local Turkish counterparts. Accused of trying to foment another coup, he has joined other Germans and German-Turkish dual nationals in prison who also have been remanded into pre-trial custody without having been formally charged with any crime.

Although one can argue that a long and arduous effort to repair the U.S.-Turkish relationship remains possible, the baseline will be even worse than it is today, because the real test is yet to come. It will come when the Islamic State’s capital Raqqa falls to the joint Syrian Kurdish Arab force, because, at that point, the Turks will expect Washington to stop supporting the PYD/YPG and prevent it from declaring an autonomous zone in territories it controls. Yet the U.S. government may be reluctant to stop its support for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Arab-Syrian Kurdish partnership under whose guise the YPG operates, because the fall of Raqqa will not mean the complete eradication of IS. The Islamic State is capable of mutating and dispersing itself with deadly consequences. The Syrian Kurdish zone in the north will remain an important bulwark not just against the rejuvenation of IS but also against Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and his Iranian allies. Hence, Erdogan will likely be disappointed in Washington. One influence that is also difficult to factor in is President Donald Trump’s personal preferences with respect to Turkey; it is worth remembering that, while Trump expressed admiration for Erdogan and even congratulated him on foiling the July coup, his business interests in Turkey did not lead to a reversal of his predecessor’s policies with respect to the Kurds but rather to their accelerated implementation.

The underlying truth to current tensions in U.S.-Turkish relations, a truth the colors the entire history of the bilateral relationship, is that the Turkish-American relationship, while generally close, has been characterized not by shared values—as with nearly all of America’s other NATO allies—but rather by realpolitik. For successive U.S. administrations, it has been Turkey’s geographic centrality, whether in the Cold War era or in the more recent era of Middle Eastern convulsions. For Turkey, it was the protection America offered in an uncertain post-World War II era, support for security challenges, and the economic benefits derived from what was by far the most powerful nation on the planet.

However, recent developments, catalyzed and mediated via the Syria cauldron, do not augur well for the future of Turkish-Western, and not just Turkish-American, relations. The reverberations careening out of Syria coincide with Turkey’s domestic crisis of confidence, which is both product and propellant for the emergence of an Erdoganist regime that is intent not just on reshaping Turkish society and political order, but is also determined to play a new and anti-systemic international role. That aspiration will change the European-Turkish dynamic and contribute to an international political environment that fosters greater distrust and competition among states. Erdogan’s grandiose plans for self-sufficiency and industrial prowess may be unrealistic but are probably harmless. The risks of his style of brinksmanship spiraling out of control are very real, however. Unless checked in one way or another, Turkey’s dependence on the West for its economic and political well-being may not survive.

Turkish-American Relations, Then and Now

Turkish and American officials, be they diplomats, soldiers, financial, economic and technical experts, have thick and numerous interactions on a daily basis. There is nothing surprising about this; after all, they are part of the same military alliance, NATO, and have even fought alongside each other, as in Korea. Until the end of the Cold War in 1989, the bilateral relationship was constructed on two axes: confronting the Soviet Union and its allies; and the management of the turbulent and antagonistic rapport between two neighboring NATO allies, Greece and Turkey. In general, the U.S. government had an interest in a stable and prosperous Turkey as the best possible bulwark against Moscow; democracy was preferable of course but until the advent of Turgut Özal, the maverick conservative and yet economically astute and visionary leader in 1983, Washington usually restricted itself to lip service about Turkish domestic political issues.

That changed with the end of the Cold War, as successive U.S. administrations increasingly perceived Turkey as a stabilizing force in the greater Middle East. Hence the American approach to Turkey became more nuanced and sophisticated, coming ultimately to define Turkish well-being in a three-dimensional way that included rule of law and adherence to some element of democratic principles. In this context, the Washington exhibited extraordinary zeal in supporting Ankara’s goals for joining the European Union. In effect, it became Ankara’s number one lobbyist in Brussels, constantly pushing the EU leadership to ease up on its requirements for Turkish association, be it for a customs union or EU membership to improve the road map for Turkish accord with Europe.

Fundamentally, it was Turkey’s geographic location that made it an essential ally for Washington. Turkey controlled Soviet access to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea through the narrow Bosporus and Dardanelles, supplemented European defense and hosted American military equipment and personnel at the critical Incirlik air force base in southern Turkey and elsewhere. To date, Incirlik has been a key component of forward U.S. strategy but has also become a source of contention between the two governments as the underlying foundation of the relationship shifted.

Starting immediately after World War II, Turkey sought protection from a rapacious Soviet Union that signaled it desired to absorb some of Turkey’s eastern provinces. Thanks to the Truman Doctrine and NATO adhesion, the Turkish state received protection and an opportunity to refurbish its antiquated military.

At first, the U.S. military planners were not enthusiastic about Turkish (and Greek) participation in NATO because they feared it would distract from their efforts to consolidate their defense plans for the central European theater. Turkey together with Greece, however, persisted in their desire to join the alliance and receive critical U.S. military and economic assistance. Since then the relationship has become deeply institutionalized, if focused largely on diplomatic and military personnel relationships. High politics relationships over the years have naturally been less dense and have fluctuated more.

The length and strength of the bilateral relationship, thus described, has paradoxically not stopped growing mistrust in Turkey for the United States. Just as in many other countries, the elite has embraced Washington, sending their children to study, absorbing the cultural and even some of the political attributes of America. Yet in Turkish politics, being closely identified with America has always been a burden. During the 1945 to 1989 period, three events particularly unsettled the Turks.

The first of these was the decision, in what was perceived to be a deal with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to remove antiquated Jupiter missiles from Incirlik. Turkish officials who saw in these missiles a nuclear umbrella and an American commitment were angered by the ease with which their interests were discarded. In reality, the Kennedy Administration had decided before the crisis to remove them.

The second event was the 1964 letter from President Lyndon B. Johnson to Ankara strongly warning the Turks against intervening militarily on Cyprus following outbreaks of inter-communal strife on the island. The “Johnson Letter” came to assume mythical proportions in Turkey as an example of American insincerity and duplicity. Nonetheless, the events surrounding the letter remain murky; the Turkish government, displaying all the signs of wanting to intervene and pushed by an engaged domestic opinion, did not really have the wherewithal to invade the island since it lacked the most elementary of necessities at the time: landing craft. Hence, the Johnson Letter could have been intended as a device that allowed Ankara to back away from doing something it could not do properly in the first place.

The third and probably most consequential event was the imposition by the U.S. Congress of an arms embargo on Turkey following its 1974 Cyprus invasion. Opposed by the Ford Administration, Congress was reacting to domestic constituencies that had been mobilized in support of the ban. Three years later the Carter Administration managed to get the embargo lifted; nonetheless, the episode left an indelible mark on the bilateral relationship and still failed in its intent to get Turkish troops off the island.

In the 1990s and beyond, Turkey also received critical U.S. support in its fight against the PKK. The most successful and dramatic event was the 1998 capture of the PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan who had received refuge in Syria. Forced out by Turkish threats, Öcalan was discovered hiding at the residence of the Greek ambassador to Kenya by U.S. intelligence and promptly handed over to Ankara. Despite Öcalan’s rendition, Turks, officials and the person on the street, to this day remain convinced that the U.S. government harbors secret intentions to carve up Turkey and create a Kurdish state in its eastern provinces.

The contrast between Turkish behavior and rhetoric has encouraged Washington over the years to discount public pronouncements and focus on the day-to-day business of diplomacy. In fact, despite disagreements, Ankara has allowed its territory to be used by American forces in many of its Middle East engagements. Ankara was intensely opposed to America’s support for Iraqi Kurds after the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s troops engaged in a murderous rampage that caused a humanitarian crisis as Kurds abandoned their villages and towns and escaped towards the Turkish border. At one level, the American response through Operation Provide Comfort prevented the Kurds from becoming a refugee crisis that Turkey was ill prepared to handle. However, without Turkish support for Operation Northern Watch, the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, Saddam could not have been contained and Iraqi Kurds could not have sowed the seeds of their own political institutions. As the U.S. involvement in Iraq deepened with the March 2003 invasion, the Bush Administration sought to use Incirlik. Though rebuffed by Parliament, Erdogan’s newly elected AKP administration did provide other kinds of logistical help.

The gist is that, despite several Cold War-era bumps and bruises, the bilateral relationship solidified, and stable mutual expectations grew. As already noted, original U.S. doubts about incorporating Turkey into NATO notwithstanding, over time especially strong relations developed between American and Turkish officials, civilian and military. Many Americans become real champions of Turkish preferences within the U.S. bureaucracy as what it is fair to call a pro-Turkey bureaucratic rump developed inside the interagency. Still, ongoing difficulties and a general lack of trust prevented the development of the kind of affinity that characterizes relations even between World War II’s defeated power, Germany, and the United States. In effect, the relationship, never warm, could at best be characterized as an alliance of convenience, or perhaps of perceived necessity.

Given that mixed history, it is not the least surprising that post-Cold War dynamics had a rumpling impact on U.S.-Turkish relations as, absent the Soviet threat, other issues surfaced during the Clinton presidency. The most important of these related to freedom of expression, religious rights, and human rights violations inside Turkey. Whether it was the repression of Kurdish rights or the right to express one’s piety more openly, increasing U.S. criticism rankled Turkish leaders. The 1990s was the last decade of overt military influence in Turkish politics; for the army, Kurds and religion were the two neuralgic topics. Turkey’s founder Kemal Atatürk had erected the new state on a strict interpretation of secularism that did not allow Islam a role except as defined down by the elite. Similarly, it had also created the fiction that all residents of Turkey were ethnically Turks and that Kurds, who comprised 15-20 percent of the population, simply were not who they thought they were.

Hence the return of the Kurdish question to the forefront—with the beginning of the PKK insurgency in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the rekindling of demands from religiously oriented parties—riled the army-backed establishment elite. Washington’s growing impatience—echoed by European capitals—with Turkish reluctance to open up the system despite the strong political and military support it provided to the fight against the PKK frustrated both the Americans as well as regime supporters in Turkey who resented the interference. The Iraqi crises of the 1990s did not help the situation.

The advent in 2003 of the initially religiously moderate Erdogan-led AKP, which embraced the rhetoric of democratization, tolerance, and adherence to European norms, opened a new chapter in Turkish-American and Turkish-European relations. Erdogan and the AKP’s espousal of these ideas was strategic; it ensured them a degree of protection from their own military and the secular nationalist elite and support from the U.S. and European governments. Events proved Erdogan and his colleagues right to construct these “democratic” alliances. In 2007, the military high command issued an ultimatum to prevent the candidacy of then-Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül for the vacant presidency. The army’s primary objection revolved around the fact Gül’s wife covered herself with an Islamic headscarf; his ascendancy therefore to the position that Atatürk once held was simply a step too far. Erdogan called the officers’ bluff by scheduling national elections that resulted in a resounding victory for the government. It was the single most important victory civilians had ever won against entrenched military interests, and Gül’s assumption of the presidency signaled the beginning of the end of military tutelage in Turkish politics.

Believing that the AKP phenomenon was pro-democratic and moderate as regards to Islam, many in Washington celebrated this turn of events. But not surprisingly, with the gradual decline in the military’s power, Erdogan and the AKP began to consolidate their hold on state and society. Reforms were introduced one by one that institutionally and informally further reduced the secular establishment’s influence, be it in the judiciary, educational system, business, or the bureaucracy.

As it happened, Erdogan had one significant ally in all this outside his own party: Fethullah Gülen. Gülen, a cleric who heads a vast global religious organization with numerous economic enterprises at its core had in late 1990s gone on voluntary exile in the United States. Erdogan and Gülen had similar interests; both saw themselves as victims of the secular state and collaborated in the effort curb the power of the military and its secular elite ally. With the 2007 elections and the 2010 referendum revamping the judiciary they had largely accomplished their agenda. It was abundantly clear that they were the two most powerful organizations left standing in Turkey.

Just as in a bipolar international system, these two leaders began to clash, each desiring to limit the other’s power. Gülen struck first by trying to sabotage the AKP’s opening to Turkish Kurds and then by leaking graphic tapes detailing corruption allegations against the government, including then Prime Minister Erdogan, his son, and other members of his entourage. Erdogan’s response was to turn the tables on Gülen and all of his business interests in an effort to cripple and eradicate him once and for all. He quickly had Gülen’s group declared a terrorist organization.

This transformation of Turkish domestic politics eventually had major repercussions for Turkish foreign policy and especially relations with the United States. The AKP-Gülenist domestic conflict culminated with the failed coup attempt on July 15, 2016. The government immediately assigned the blame solely on Gülen. It unleashed a countrywide effort to purge all societal institutions of Gülenist adherents and opportunistically of other opponents. The actual events of the July 15 remain of uncertain origin. Although very few units appeared to have participated in the attempt, the government immediately dismissed some 149 generals and admirals representing 46 percent of all general staff. Similarly, countless senior officers, colonels, majors, and captains—almost all staff officers, that is, those on whom the military relies for filling command positions—were also dismissed. Many were arrested and charged with complicity in the coup, although scores were not even in Turkey at the time but on post in NATO-member countries or NATO headquarters. Also, some 150,000 people were dismissed from their jobs in the civil service and 50,000 more were arrested, including 170 journalists.

Simultaneously, on April 16, 2017, Erdogan pushed through referendum that transformed Turkey from a parliamentary system into a presidential one that concentrated all powers, ranging from the judiciary to the educational system, in his person. The referendum passed by the barest of margins (51-49 percent) despite a massive one-sided campaign and harassment of all opposition efforts at challenging the government’s narrative. There were widespread reports of irregularities, and one academic study strongly suggested that Erdogan had in fact lost the vote. The referendum results demonstrate that, despite Erdogan’s complete command of the airwaves and the press, his rule and legitimacy are contested, creating a sense of ambient vulnerability within and outside the government.

These domestic changes have taken place in the context of what Turkey sees as a critical challenge on its southern border—that is, the ascendancy of the Syrian Kurds, loosed to roam and organize in the wake of the collapse of the Syrian state. Even before the Americans partnered with the Syrian Kurds serious disagreements surfaced between the Obama Administration and Turkey over the course of the Syrian uprising. Still, President Obama had pointedly visited Turkey in his first European trip to deliver a speech at the Turkish parliament. It was an attempt to showcase the Turkish-American relationship and to signal that the partnership would assume a new importance. The timing of the visit coincided with Turkey’s growing international presence and influence, improved economic performance, and, for the first time, membership in the United Nations Security Council.

Already a member of the G-20 representing the twenty largest economies in the world, Turkey was anxious to parlay its new stature into “soft power.” Indeed, Turkey was ascendant. Despite Obama’s warm opening to Turkey, Erdogan angered his American allies by engineering with Brazil an end run around American efforts to build a global consensus on imposing sanctions on Iran. Erdogan and Brazilian President Lula suddenly appeared in Tehran announcing a unilateral deal of their own that would have undermined months of painstaking American diplomacy. Washington furiously beat back the effort, but Turkey was the only U.S. ally to cast a vote against Washington in the Security Council. The Iran sanctions issue would not go away. Ankara, through an Iranian-Turkish business intermediary, Reza Zarrab, engaged in a massive effort to help Tehran evade some of the most onerous aspects of these sanctions. In fact, this businessman is now in Federal custody in New York, having been arrested more than a year ago during a U.S. visit for having aided the sanction-busting efforts.

The Turkish-American relationship damaged by disagreements over Iran got a brief reprieve with the Arab Spring. Increasingly, Obama came to see Turkey’s democratic experiment, especially the marriage between pluralistic institutions with Islamic piety, as an example for Arab societies undergoing monumental change. But it was in Syria that the partnership with Turkey assumed a role that went beyond that of exemplar to the Arabs.

Ironically enough, both government shared the same core goal in Syria: Assad had to go. Erdogan felt the sting of the rejected suitor, for he had invested much in a better Turkish relationship with Syria, only to watch as Assad spurned his every suggestion. He therefore sought and expected actual collaboration with the United States on the ground against the Assad regime. But here, too, Erdogan and Obama clashed despite sharing the same core objective. Frustrated with the inability of the Western-backed fighters to deliver a decisive blow against the Assad regime, Turkey provided support for all kinds of jihadis, including the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front. Southern Turkey became these extremists’ strategic depth as they set up their support operations for fighters in Syria. Much to the consternation of Washington and the discomfiture of Turkey itself, the Islamic State became the main beneficiary of this tactical system.

The real crisis between Turkey and the United States began with Obama’s October 2014 decision to support the Syrian Kurds, when IS assaulted the Syrian border town of Kobani. Erdogan made his preferences crystal clear: An IS victory was preferable to a Syrian Kurdish one. Turkish objections to supporting the Syrian Kurds were based first on the fact that the PYD/YPG were an extension of the Turkish PKK, a relationship the Syrian Kurds do not dispute. The PYD/YPG’s sudden ascendancy took everyone by surprise, including Turks and Iraqi Kurds, who had expected Syrian Kurds to come under their influence. The PKK had for years trained the YPG to transform them into an effective fighting force. American support for the YPG, the Turks feared, would therefore legitimize the PKK.

The second reason for Turkish alarm was the memory of the Iraqi Kurdish experience. The Turks established cordial relations and strong economic ties with the Iraqi Kurdish federated state after 1991, while opposing the independence of the Kurdistan Regional Government, KRG. Still, at the very beginning of the Iraqi Kurdish experiment, Turks worried that American support for Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam would ultimately extend a layer of legitimacy to the Kurdish endeavor and rekindle region-wide Kurdish aspirations. Hence, history would repeat itself in Syria as American support today, the Turks feared, will translate into another Kurdish statelet a la the KRG down the road—but with a difference. The difference is that Turkish Kurds are far more influenced by developments in Rojava, as northern Syria is called, than in northern Iraq, precisely because the PYD/YPG are products of the PKK’s reflected prowess.

The U.S. collaboration with the Syrian Kurds was not strategic at first. It was a response to tactical developments; the Islamic State having swept through Mosul and other territories in Iraq, not to mention Raqqa in Syria, had dealt the Iraqis a significant defeat and had captured sizeable quantities of brand new American military equipment. When IS decided to invade Kobani they brought up much of this captured Iraqi materiel to the war, thereby providing the U.S. military with an opportunity to destroy much of it. It is only after Kobani that the idea of going after the Islamic State in Syria and Raqqa in partnership with the YPG—as the only effective anti-IS force on the ground—gained acceptance in Washington. What started as a tactical decision was transformed into a strategic one by events—not for the first time, and probably not for the last.

Into the Future

According to a Spring 2017 Pew poll, U.S. approval in Turkey stands at around 18 percent (with a 79 percent disapproval rating). Since 2002 that number has never hovered above 25 percent. Even more striking is that only 13 percent of Turks have a positive perception of U.S. ideas and customs while 82 percent disapprove—the worst score for any of the countries surveyed by Pew. Similarly, 72 percent of Turks feel threatened by U.S. power and influence—up from 44 percent in 2013 and again the worst score among nations surveyed. To put these results in perspective, note that, as an earlier German Marshall Fund attitudes survey pointed out, Turks tend to have negative views of everyone save for Azerbaijanis.

The highly visible U.S. global role and the dominant conspiratorial atmosphere in Turkey help account for the low U.S. ratings. While this may not be different from many other countries, what makes Turkey unique among formal American allies is that its government-controlled media is spearheading anti-American opinions. These sentiments are shared by many in the opposition and society; still, a longstanding NATO-ally government’s role in intensifying it is extraordinary.

There is a qualitative difference, too, in the atmosphere in Turkey today compared to only a few years ago. While a populist-authoritarian Erdogan appears to have all the institutional requisites for a long-term hegemonic power base in place and conveys a great deal of self-confidence, the fact of the matter is that he perceives himself as the aggrieved and besieged party. This is all about the “Big Man” who has no affinity for democratic values but is adaptable; the resurgence of Islam is but one tool in his quiver that is deployed to deflect criticism in a pious society. The dubious win in the April 2017 constitutional referendum stands as a great failure considering that it was held under conditions most favorable to him. The opposition to his domestic agenda is far larger than he had anticipated. Hence his drive to institutionalize his personal rule has intensified with the introduction of new school curricula and bent reinterpretations of history.

While he has faced real challenges, from the 2007 military memorandum to the corruption scandals to the attempted coup d’état, he has always managed to extricate himself by taking the fight to his opponents. He refuses to go on the defensive; by attacking his opponents, real and imagined, he succeeds in turning the tables on them. These are the same tactics he has deployed against Europe as well; when the Dutch government refused Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu the right to land in Rotterdam for a campaign rally in support of the constitutional referendum, he remarkably said that “not even in the Nazi era had there been such policies”; Erdogan called the Dutch government “Nazi remnants.”

This appears to be his modus operandi with America, as well. Although he and his partisans know only too well that the U.S. government had no role in the botched coup, this has not stopped the Turkish government from blaming Washington for it anyway. It is his way of putting pressure for the extradition of Gülen, the return of Zarrab and a Halk Bank vice president also detained in New York on a similar Iran sanctions case. Zarrab alone, were he to face trial, could reveal embarrassing if not damaging details concerning the Turkish government’s activities. The stakes have grown of late as former Turkish Economy Minister Zafer Çaglayan and the Halk Bank president have also been indicted in absentia as part of the same case.

Moreover, there are hundreds of former Turkish military officers in the United States (as well as in Europe) who have sought asylum and refused orders to return home to face certain imprisonment. Erdogan would like every single one of these handed over, along with other dissidents, journalists, NGO activists, and others who also have sought refuge from Turkey’s recidivist authoritarianism. Turkey has also arrested several Americans or dual nationals—the exact number is unknown to outsiders—including a pastor, a NASA scientist, and a Turk who is a 37-year employee of the U.S. State Department. The pastor, for instance, has been accused of membership in an armed organization, a euphemism for Gülen, and in the CIA; some government-controlled newspapers have even claimed that he participated in the 2016 coup. Congress and U.S. officials fear that Erdogan is using them as hostages to exchange for those he would like to see returned to Turkey. These detainees, plus the events surrounding the beating of American protestors in front of the Turkish Ambassador’s residence in Washington by Erdogan’s security guards, has dissipated much vestigial goodwill for Turkey in the U.S. capital.

Beyond the dynamics of domestic politics that provide a convenient if not fertile ground for America bashing, the differences over Syria potentially represent a far more difficult and dangerous possibility for relations to deteriorate significantly. The negative atmospherics only help accentuate the problem. If, after the fall of Raqqa, Washington continues its cooperation with the Syrian Kurds, albeit in a diminished but still significant capacity, then Ankara will be faced with a dilemma. It has signaled anticipatory displeasure by considering the purchase of a Russian S-400 anti-aircraft system that is incompatible with NATO defense infrastructure and would require large numbers of Russians to serve in Turkey to install and help operate (and also build additional ones in a co-production agreement), thereby potentially exposing alliance secrets to a hostile power. On the other hand, with its air force and navy depleted of experienced officers and especially of F-16 fighter pilots, Turkey is in dire need of American assistance to rebuild its military. One source of concern for the U.S. government is the character of the new Turkish military; purged of its pro-American and pro-NATO officers, the new officer cadres are far more subject to the whims of Erdogan, and thus their loyalty is likely to be the leader and not the institution. In sum, the purge, including of the military, is part of the effort to capture the state. In this, he has succeeded.

Turkey does live in an unpleasant if not dangerous neighborhood. Ankara’s options are limited; it can continue the status quo, that is, the verbal assaults on the United States all the while it cooperates with and depends on its ally for critical undertakings—including nuclear deterrence. To date, the cost of this policy has been relatively low. Neither the Obama nor the Trump Administrations have been particularly critical of Turkey’s egregious violations of fundamental human rights, press freedoms, and unwarranted and wanton hostility directed at the United States. This precedes the 2016 failed coup attempt, and it is a record that probably led Erdogan to think he could bash the United States for the coup without much risk.

Raising the stakes, as he has been threatening almost on a daily basis, Erdogan could decide to preempt the Syrian Kurds by intervening militarily in Syria after Raqqa falls and the U.S. military removes some of its support and combat teams from the area. This is a highly risky strategy that could easily backfire, especially if any of the remaining Americans were to be caught in the crossfire. Moreover, the Turks encountered difficulties in an earlier limited operation, Euphrates Shield, designed to clear Syrian insurgents from territory stretching from the Turkish border to al-Bab, thus also separating Syrian Kurdish cantons from each other. While achieving their goals, Turkish forces nonetheless suffered significant casualties. The YPG is a far more formidable force operating mostly in its own territory and is likely to inflict much higher casualties, especially on an army reeling from the post-coup purges and that has all it can handle fighting the domestic PKK insurgency. There is also the risk of inflaming Kurdish sentiments at home, especially since Kurdish political activity is suffering from a political cum security onslaught that has decimated the legal Kurdish political party. The People’s Democracy party, HDP, has seen its leadership jailed, members of parliament ejected from their seats, and thousands incarcerated.

Erdogan’s primary fear is that the Syrian Kurds, having fought well, received American backing and increasingly also Russian support, will emerge from the crisis in Syria with concrete gains. This is why the U.S. special envoy for the region, Bret McGurk, has been savaged in the Turkish media; he is perceived to be the person with all the secret anti-Turkish plans in his pocket. The Rojava Kurds have made it clear that they, too, seek some form of autonomy, preferably a federation, at least as expansive as that enjoyed in the KRG. Whether they succeed will very much depends on the residual strength of the Syrian regime and willingness of the Iranians and Russians to continue fighting for Assad.

In the short term, it is likely that some arrangement recognizing their distinct identity will materialize. Erdogan has to calculate whether or not a Turkish military intervention would prevent such an eventuality or speed its realization. Turkey is far more isolated in the region now than before; at the heyday of Turkish influence circa 2010, Erdogan walked on water. Now, the Saudis, Gulf Arabs, and Egyptians are furious over his support to Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood. Improving ties with Iran is not a panacea fundamentally because the new Turkish state remains a Sunni construction that views the Shi‘a and their offshoots with suspicion.

Turkey’s best option for the time being is to do what is already doing: reinforcing the territory it holds in Syria. It is bringing in civilian and military cadres along with equipment to consolidate its position, make sure the two parts of Syrian Kurdistan do not link up. While this works in the short term by postponing a crisis with the U.S. government, it risks becoming hostage to Syrian internal quarrels and thus to future violence.

Finally, how would the Trump Administration react to a Turkish intervention? Would the Turks threaten the U.S. military by denying access to bases in their territory, including to Incirlik? A sign that relations were hitting a new low occurred when the Turkish official news agency, Anadolu Agency, revealed and identified many secret bases the U.S. military had built in Syria. Not only would Anadolu Agency not have access to such information unless it was deliberately leaked to by Turkish officials, it certainly would not have published information that potentially put the lives of Americans (and some French) at risk without authorization from the top levels of the Turkish government.

Can American strategic patience last? Should it? In Europe, which has far stronger economic ties with Turkey, a blowback has started in the form of a decline in tourists visiting Turkey and deteriorating business attitudes. Germany has issued a travel warning for its citizens visiting Turkey. Could the U.S. government do without Turkey, not just for a while but more or less permanently? The importance of Turkish territory for military operations derives from the fact that other NATO countries can deploy there if necessary. Recent German-Turkish acrimony on whether German parliamentarians could visit their servicemen led the Germans to withdraw their air assets from Incirlik. Washington could manage without Incirlik, as it has in the past, but it would be costlier. Equally important are other bases that serve as liaison for American troops deployed or deployable in several extant and potential combat theaters.

Will the U.S.-Turkish relationship revert back to its old “alliance of convenience” mold once some of these current issues are resolved, or has it reached a tipping point of no return? By tipping point I do not mean a temporary break, but an operational downgrading of relations that allows Washington to push back on Turkish demands, complaints, and attacks. Erdogan’s rhetoric may point to a break with the West and a “let’s go on our own” attitude, but the fact of the matter is that he knows that is not realistic as Turkish economic, political, and military ties with the United States and the West cannot be undone except at great harm to core Turkish interests.

Flirting with Russia may play into the fantasies of some ultra-nationalists in Turkey but it remains a behemoth that when offered the opportunity is quite willing to throw its weight around, now more so with Putin. The Turks should have discovered Putin’s determination when he helped Damascus turn the tide on the opposition and imposed immediate and painful sanctions when the Turks shot down a Russian jet fighter that strayed into Turkish territory. Within weeks, the Ankara leadership, which had heralded the downing as a demonstration of Turkish prowess, was apologizing and back-pedaling dizzyingly fast by incredulously putting the blame on Gülenist pilots acting on orders from Pennsylvania. On Syrian Kurds, were the U.S. government to completely abandon Syria, Putin could through Assad or directly provide the PYD sufficient political support to frustrate Ankara. There is even less Erdogan can do to affect Russian behavior than he can with Washington.

Turkish apprehensions about U.S. alignment with the PYD/YPG are understandable, but it is Erdogan who eschewed opportunities by breaking off the peace talks with the PKK and declaring Syrian Kurds the enemy. Unwilling to appreciate American determination to defeat IS, he presumed that his vociferous objections, threats, and attacks would, as in the past, cause the Americans to rethink their strategy. Erdogan may still harbor hopes that Trump will see things his way, but the likelihood of such a development is receding primarily because of American domestic politics and Trump’s need for a tangible victory of some sorts against IS. By antagonizing the U.S. government on the PYD question, he has made it more difficult for Washington to abandon the Syrian Kurds, something Washington has repeatedly done with other Kurds in the past.

Paradoxically, a somewhat stiffened American resolve is the best chance to salvage the Turkish-American relationship and reset the balance. This is needed first and foremost to deter Erdogan or others in Turkey from undertaking actions that would certainly create irreparable damage to the relationship. The temptation to invade Syria, especially if domestic conditions were to sour on him, could be compelling for Erdogan, causing him to miscalculate. It would be foolish to think that the two could be equals; the United States as a superpower with global interests will always have a different perspective than Turkey. Erdogan, on the other hand, is in the process of constructing a different Turkey; one that is personalistic, far more ideological and unwilling to accept the American primus inter pares system that existed before. Be that as it may, if Turkey is to remain in NATO it will have to fulfil its membership obligations. In that sense, it is no different than Italy or Britain, or Hungary for that matter. Washington may want to learn from the Russians; Erdogan does respond to the careful application of pressure. What is needed is a continuation of “strategic patience” but with a necessary added element of forcefulness and directness hitherto absent in the American posture to make sure he understands the limits to errant behavior.

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The Future of Biofuels Lies in China

Here in the United States, biofuels have developed a bad name. A 2007 law mandates the blending of annually increasing amounts of ethanol produced from biomass into our country’s gasoline, and at the time it was hailed as a way for the United States to shore up its energy security while “greening” our transportation sector. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), as it’s called, was signed into law by President Bush, but it was President Obama who oversaw its rise.

Despite that bipartisan support, the policy is an unqualified disaster today. Because the vast majority of the mandated biofuels produced are distilled from corn, the RFS has raised global food prices, which hurts the world’s poorest. It’s led to an increase in monoculture in the Midwest, which scientists have correlated with a drop in wild honeybee populations. Studies have linked the RFS to a hike in gas prices, which no American driver will appreciate. The market for the credits refiners use to show compliance with the biofuel quotas has been the target of questionable Wall Street speculation. Perhaps worst of all, corn-based ethanol has been shown to have a negligible effect on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and may even increase them.

Outside of the farmers growing this corn that is in federally-mandated high demand, you’ll be hard pressed to find a stakeholder content with this system. In light of all of that, it’s perhaps fortunate that there’s a limit to how much ethanol we can blend into gasoline—once gas contains more than 10 percent ethanol by volume, it runs the risk of damaging older engines. That blend wall, as it’s called, has put a limit on the rise of biofuel here in the United States, but there are other markets out there, and there’s none bigger than China’s. It’s important news, then, that Beijing announced this week its intent to blend ethanol into 10 percent of its gasoline three years from now.

This policy choice makes a lot more sense in China than it does in the United States. Though both Beijing and Washington are keenly aware of their dependence on foreign sources of energy, here in the United States we’re in the middle of a remarkable shale boom that has undercut the need for biofuels. China doesn’t have a bounty of tight oil (though it does have plenty of shale gas), so the energy security side of this decision makes more sense. But more importantly, China has corn—a lot of corn—lying around, and it’s actively looking for industrial uses for the 200 million ton stockpile it’s amassed.

The only thing left to do is to distill it, and if Beijing is serious about hitting the target it just set in three years, Reuters analysis suggests it will need to construct 36 ethanol plants to the tune of $5.5 billion. That’s a tall task, but it’s also the sort of project that China has a chance at pulling off. Just remember: this changes nothing about the disaster that is America’s biofuel boondoggle.

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Will Pyongyang Make Tokyo Arm Up?

North Korea’s latest missile test has put Japan on edge once again, after Pyongyang launched an intermediate missile over the island of Hokkaido on Friday morning and warned that Japan’s four islands should be “sunken into the sea.” The second missile test over Japan in a month is also reviving thorny debates about Japan’s pacifist constitution and military readiness, notes the New York Times:

Officials in Japan who may have considered intercepting the missile faced two immediate constraints — the country’s missile defenses are limited, and the Constitution limits military action only to instances of self-defense.

Those same constraints have weighed heavily on the debate in recent weeks over how Japan should be responding to the North’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, including what role it should play as an American ally and to what extent it should upgrade its armed forces. […]

In recent months, the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has revived a long-simmering discussion over whether to acquire cruise missiles — which can be fired from land, air or sea — that would allow it to strike a launch site in North Korea if it detected signs of an imminent attack.

With missiles now regularly flying over Japan, and its current systems virtually incapable of intercepting mid-flight missiles, it might seem a no-brainer for Tokyo to acquire cruise missiles and a THAAD-like missile-defense system. But even those measures are a matter of considerable controversy, and not only because of Japan’s pacifist constitution.

For one, Abe knows that acquiring the U.S.-built THAAD system would infuriate Beijing and could provoke aggressive economic retaliation, a boycott of the sort that China unleashed on South Korea after it deployed THAAD. Beefing up missile defense could also sour relations with Russia, which sees THAAD as merely an extension of the U.S. missile defense network and has promised to “counterbalance” any additional deployments. Abe enjoys a good relationship with Putin and is still hopeful about a deal to resolve the Kuril Islands dispute; he is thus wary about antagonizing Moscow unnecessarily. And Abe has only recently recovered from an influence-peddling scandal that sent his approval ratings into a nosedive. Given that political climate, the Prime Minister may be hesitant to rush toward controversial new military capabilities that risk retaliation from powerful neighbors.

And yet, slowly but surely, Abe is steering Japan toward a more militant posture. He has announced plans to acquire the American-built Aegis Ashore missile defense system, provoking some concern from Moscow. He is still determined to revise the pacifist clause of the constitution by 2020. And his allies have been gingerly introducing the idea of cruise missiles and first-strike capabilities into public debates, while steering clear of more extreme proposals, like an independent nuclear deterrent for Japan (which only 9 percent of Japanese support).

In all of this, Abe has to walk a fine line: clearly anxious about the North Korean threat and eager to stake out a tough stance, he is nonetheless limited by public opinion, constitutional constraints, and the high-risk uncertainties of how China and Russia might respond. He may also be puzzled by what exactly the United States wants out of Japan. President Trump seems torn between his instinct to back up American alliances vigorously and his longstanding disdain for “free-riders” whom he feels should develop their own capacities and handle their own security threats.

Ultimately, the U.S. may need to split the difference, reinforcing the alliance with Japan while simultaneously encouraging Tokyo to responsibly beef up its own defense posture. We certainly do not want Japan left helpless by the constraints of a constitution written seventy years ago, or incapable of intercepting a missile that could be headed for the U.S. homeland. But we also do not want a rapid rearmament that could trigger an arms race in Asia. We may indeed want Japan to acquire stronger military capabilities, but we surely want to be on the inside of that process, doing the diplomatic legwork with Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, and Moscow to ease regional concerns and prevent a full-fledged security competition.

Getting that balance right will require a trust-based relationship with Tokyo, long-term strategic thinking, and the kind of care and feeding of allies that has not proven to be Donald Trump’s strong suit. Let us hope his administration is up to the task.

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Getting Rid of La Raza

Ever heard of La Raza? Probably not, but you and other taxpayers are funding it.

We shouldn’t be. Along with public broadcasters, environmental organizations, and other entities that use taxpayer money to keep insider networks in power, ethnic identity groups should be taken off public support. These movements have for decades lived off the government only to keep enlarging it, maintaining power in the hands of a self-dealing bureaucratic elite increasingly unaccountable and disconnected from outside society.

La Raza—recently renamed UnidosUS—is a case in point. Set up in 1968 with a grant from the Ford Foundation (which also helped create other movements), La Raza has always been more boardroom than barrio. It depends for its survival not on grassroots, but on government contracts and kickbacks, and grants from foundations and the corporations it can shake down.

This corporate and government coziness doesn’t mean that La Raza hasn’t been a divisive force in society. On the contrary, it’s been so from the beginning, and the balkanization it has caused has benefited elites.

No less a liberal lion than U.S. Representative Henry Gonzalez of Texas took to the floor of the House on April 22, 1969, to decry the Ford Foundation’s creation of “a very grave problem” in his district. “I cannot accept the belief that racism in reverse is the answer for racism and discrimination,” he said. It is worth quoting Gonzalez at some length, as the dysfunctions he identified remained a fixture of the group:

As deeply as I must respect the intentions of the foundation, I must at the same time say that where it aimed to produce unity, it has so far created disunity. The Ford Foundation believed that the greatest need of this particular minority group [Mexican Americans] was to have some kind of effective national organization…. This good desire may have rested on a false assumption; namely that such a disparate group could, any more than our black brothers or our white ‘Anglo’ brothers, be brought under one large tent.

La Raza was “invented for the purpose of receiving the grant,” said Gonzalez, and in its first year of existence had “not given any assistance that I know of to bring anybody together,” existing only to “promote the rather odd and I might say generally unaccepted and unpopular views of its directors.”

And that’s just it. Political scientist Peter Skerry describes groups such as La Raza as participants in a game called “elite network politics.” Even though these networks have “weak community ties,” the groups involved win policy brawls by participating in “a process of specialization and professionalization by which politics become more and more an insiders’ game…a politics increasingly turned in upon itself and insulated from the surrounding social flux.”

In La Raza’s case, that meant a turnstile relationship with the Obama Administration that the president himself boasted about. For example, Cecilia Munoz, a top La Raza lobbyist, became White House Domestic Policy Council. Government subsidies of La Raza went from $4.1 million to $11 million a year after she joined the Administration.

Nearly a half-century after Gonzalez spoke, La Raza was still engaging in “a scheme to funnel money to politically favored special interest groups,” as House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte put it in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. Goodlatte was referring to an Obama Administration practice of settling Department of Justice lawsuits by “asking” corporate defendants to make large donations to groups such as La Raza.

Meanwhile, studies show that minorities want to join the mainstream. A leaked memo from ten years ago made clear how strongly La Raza opposes this assimilation, for one simple reason: Assimilation is bad for business.

When people join the mainstream and feel they are part and parcel of the nation, they no longer view themselves as victims, and thus are no longer in need of groups such as La Raza. The competition between ethnic groups that these organizations want to perpetuate helps the increasingly cosmopolitan elites in obvious ways. Immigrants must maintain their foreignness lest they join forces with native blue-collar workers to check the upper classes. Diversity, says political commentator Michael Lind, is beloved by the elites of North America and Europe because it “reduces the likelihood that workers of different ethnicities will unite in a common front against economic elites.”

Some liberals are starting to call out this use of identity politics. The Indian-born British writer Kenan Malik, a visiting fellow at the University of Surrey, put it this way in a recent essay:

In practice, contemporary identity politics does little to challenge the roots of oppression. What it does do is empower certain people within those putative identities to police the borders of ‘their’ communities or peoples by establishing themselves as gatekeepers. It has allowed self-nominated authentic voices or community leaders to consolidate and protect their power. As solidarity has become redefined in terms of ethnicity or culture, so those who demand to be the voices of those ethnicities or cultures are afforded new privileges.

Such slouching toward ethnocracy can pose a threat to the nation-state whose pluralistic people are united through patriotic fellow-feeling. The aftermath of the recent hurricanes offers, on the other hand, an alternative view of what Americans accomplish when they look past race, ethnicity, or social class and pitch in as fellow citizens in a common cause.

Ethnic identity groups are not alone in empowering elites. NPR, PBS, and the other public broadcasters report the news from the perspective of a bien-pensant coalition that includes the bureaucracy, the academy, the entertainment industry, and the rest of the bi-coastal urban elite. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting gets about half a billion dollars a year from taxpayers to bring you their viewpoint.

One does not need to be a populist to think there is a problem in asking taxpayers to fund efforts that fuel insider networks—at the expense of said taxpayers. Let the fire sale begin.

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War Games Meet Mind Games

Russia and Belarus officially launched their weeklong war games on Tuesday, in a display of military muscle-flexing that has set much of Europe on edge. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the Zapad (“West”) drills began with Russian tanks moving toward Belarus, while a wary NATO keeps watch with a surveillance plane:

NATO had promised to keep a close watch on Russian military movements during the war games, known as Zapad. The plane’s deployment from its base in Germany to Riga, Latvia, was a high-profile display of its mission to reassure the Baltic states bordering Russia.

The Russian and Belarusian exercises are formally set to last until Sept. 20. While Russia has said they will involve only 12,700 troops, allied officials have estimated that because of simultaneous, interconnected drills held in Belarus and western Russia the true number of forces involved will be between 70,000 and 100,000.

Russia says the training exercise is meant to prepare the armed forces to deal with terrorist threats, but military analysts say the operation is being carried out with NATO in mind. The alliance and U.S. officials have warned of the possibility of an accident or miscalculation by Russian forces.

Russia’s Zapad drills occur every four years as part of its regular, rotationally scheduled war games, but this year’s installment has been the subject of unusually frenzied and anxious speculation. Some officials have warned that the drills are an opportunity for Russia to leave behind heavy military equipment and troops in Belarus, permanently moving its forces closer to NATO’s doorstep. Others have speculated in hushed whispers about the new “information operations troops,” formally incorporated into the Russian military in February, that Moscow may show off during the exercises. And some Western military planners fear that Russia could use the troop maneuvers as cover for another stealth invasion, à la Georgia in 2008 or Ukraine in 2014.

None of these concerns are entirely unfounded; given Russia’s revisionist behavior and its track record of covert military campaigns, NATO is wise to be on guard and vigilant. That said, the panic increasing in some quarters is out of proportion to the threat, and it could play into Moscow’s hands by amplifying perceptions of its military prowess.

In many ways, the Zapad drills are as much mind games as war games: a “massive psychological warfare operation,” in the words of Mark Galeotti. Part of the goal is clearly to spook the Baltics. The games’ underlying scenario imagines three fictional, Baltic-like countries that are being used as Western proxies to undermine the relationship between Minsk and Moscow, provoking a retaliatory Russian response. Given that framing, Moscow clearly means to communicate that it will aggressively fight any NATO-backed attempt to encroach further into its “near abroad.” The drills may also be meant to intimidate NATO-curious countries like Sweden and Finland who have lately toyed with the idea of joining the alliance.

Yet those psychological tactics are only as potent as we allow them to be, a point implicitly made by the Finnish Defense Minister when he criticized Western countries for “[taking] the bait completely” in overhyping Russia’s drills and conjuring nightmare scenarios in the press. Tabloid hysteria about Russia starting “World War Three” and panic about Moscow’s devious plans for a “Trojan Horse” in Belarus only benefits Putin by making him look stronger and more cunning than he actually is.

A more sober assessment of Zapad suggests Russia’s precarious position. The exercises are a conscious callback to the Soviet-era Zapad drills, but at that time Russia enjoyed the participation of Warsaw Pact countries that have since shifted their allegiances to NATO. Now, it must rely on lonely little Belarus, which has not been an entirely deferential partner. As Keir Giles points out at Politico, Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko invited NATO observers and Western media to monitor the exercises while Russia was opposed; he also decided to hold the drills in central Belarus, rather than near its borders, so as to ease NATO anxieties. Lukashenko has lately proven a deft middleman between the West and Russia, as he seeks to distance himself from his image as a Putin puppet. In short, he is not about to turn his country into a staging ground for a Russian invasion.

None of this is a reason to dismiss the Russian threat entirely. Russia will surely show off impressive new capabilities during the Zapad drills, it will surely employ provocative military plans designed to scare its neighbors, and it will continue to pose a long-term security challenge to Europe. But it won’t launch a massive new military campaign with NATO watching closely from the wings. And when the dust settles, the Zapad drills may prove as empty a display of psychological intimidation as the time that Putin unleashed his dog on Angela Merkel: the tactic of a strongman desperate to hide his weakness.

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The Militant Pragmatism of Hillary Clinton

The figure that emerges from Hillary Clinton’s 50-minute sit-down with Ezra Klein to discuss the 2016 election and her vision of politics is at once sympathetic and maddeningly hypocritical.

The first part of the interview focuses on Clinton’s view of political change—incremental and pragmatic, she says, rather than radical or sweeping. Clinton campaigned on policies that were doable in the here and now, while her populist opponents—Bernie Sanders on the Left and then Donald Trump on the Right—generated much more enthusiasm with detail-free promises and theatrics.

Fair-minded Clinton critics of all stripes ought to be able to sympathize with this challenge. Trying to fact-check populism is a bit like trying to fact-check a pornographic film. People don’t care how plausible it is. It’s not designed to appeal to that part of your brain. Wonkish or detail-oriented arguments against populism often fail to register. Clinton’s contention that she laid out a more coherent governing agenda than Bernie and Trump but the voters and the media brushed it aside in pursuit of shiny objects is important and largely true.

But as the interview progresses, it becomes clear that Hillary’s self-styled pragmatism is not, in fact, the open-minded and evidence-based pluralism that is advertised. Indeed, at its worst, it can be very nearly as militant, very nearly as contemptuous of its critics, and very nearly as impervious to counter-argument as the Left-Right populist pincer that brought it down.

Hillary’s particular kind of dogmatism is first on display when Klein asks her about her infamous Goldman Sachs speeches in the run-up to the election. Clinton cannot or will not acknowledge that pay-to-play can be a problem for public confidence in institutions—not for Democrats, at least, and certainly not for her. “I think it’s theoretically an interesting conversation,” she said, emphasizing the word theoretically, “but you look at somebody like President Obama, who took a lot of money from a lot of different interests, but it didn’t affect how he governed.”

“I think that’s strong, though, to say it didn’t affect how he governed,” said Klein, pushing back. “And I think there is evidence that these kinds of donations do give these interests more of a voice, and that does affect things, certainly in the details.”

“It has always been thus,” Clinton shoots back, impatiently. “If you have seen the musical Hamilton, you know” that in America there have always been special interests.

This is a short summary of a long and revealing exchange indicating that, to Clinton, the idea that corporate money could possibly be corrosive to her or her allies is laughable. After all, unlike the Republicans, she supports repealing Citizens United and implementing public financing for presidential campaigns.

But wait, if money in politics is so obviously a non-problem, why does she support such aggressive measures to change the way campaigns are funded (even if neither of the ones mentioned would have prevented her pre-campaign Wall Street speaking windfall)? Because, well, it is still a problem for Republicans. The Koch brothers, she warns darkly, “say they’re gonna spend $400 million in the 2018 campaign.” That’s a lot to spend if it won’t have any effect on governance! And Donald Trump “funded people on both sides to curry favors.”

Hillary is not corruptible, but the other side is. And Republicans aren’t only buying their way to victory (Hillary repeats this assertion despite the fact Democrats outspent Republicans by hundreds of millions in 2016), they are doing so with the aid of a dishonest and unfair media system. “We don’t control the media the way the right does,” she says, despite the fact that virtually all newspapers endorsed her over Donald Trump. “It’s harder for our message to get out”—this, once again, despite the fact that most politically active celebrities and business leaders, not to mention the sitting President, were championing Clinton’s social policies.

Clinton burns Republicans for wanting a new constitutional convention—”they want radical, pull-’em-up-by-the-roots change, they want to have a constitutional convention to rewrite our Constitution to make it friendlier to business, to inject religious and ideological elements”—but she wants not only to amend the constitution to reverse Citizens United, but to overturn the electoral college. Our system of picking Presidents is “an anachronism.” And that is just one of the ways that her defeat was tainted by illegitimate institutions and practices. “I won in counties that produce two-thirds of the economic output in the United States,” she pronounced. “I won in places that were more on the optimistic side of the scale than the pessimistic side. I won in places that understood and appreciated diversity. I won in places where African-American and younger voters were not suppressed, as they successfully were in, for example, Wisconsin and other locations that I didn’t win.”

When Klein asks her about geography—the Democrats’ growing tendency to run up huge majorities on the coasts and in cities, which the Constitution disfavors through representative institutions—Clinton pivots back to voter suppression. She spoke for the legitimate body politic—the wealthy areas, the cities, the places where Republicans have not corrupted democracy.

Hillary Clinton seems to see herself, and the broader center-Left, as self-evidently virtuous and public-spirited, as speaking for the real America, and blocked out of power primarily because of a sinister Republican money machine, a corrupted media environment, a constitutional/electoral system stacked against her, and anti-democratic voter suppression enabled by the “Republican majority on the Supreme Court.”

Of course, just like that of the populists, Hillary Clinton’s critique of U.S. democracy captures part of the truth. She and her compatriots certainly do want the best for the country, and are almost certainly not knowingly corrupted by the kind of jet-setting corporate speaking and consulting gigs that are now the norm for politicians in between runs. She did win the popular vote. Republican interests do spend money on American politics to great effect. State voter ID laws are ugly and counterproductive, even if their actual impact varies.

But she does not consider—she cannot grasp—that her way of seeing the world might be influenced by the types of people whom she spends time with and who bestowed enormous wealth upon her, even if she still supports Dodd-Frank. She does not consider that some people vote for Republicans out of conviction, not because of Koch brainwashing. She does not consider the way that the media has propped up her strand of liberalism even as it covered her unfairly in 2016. She does not consider that the Democratic disadvantage is not only due to GOP shenanigans but due to her own party’s failure to build a geographically broad coalition, which institutions like the House, the Senate and the Electoral College all demand.

So yes, Hillary is a pragmatist when it comes to policy—she wants to pass initiatives that can work, and that can pass, and that she sincerely believes can help people. But she is also, in her own way, a militant. She has internalized a persecution narrative of a system stacked against her and people like her. She is so dead-set in her “pragmatic” agenda that she is not open to any form of populist critique about the Democratic Party, about elite insularity, or about the ways that some Americans might have legitimate objections to her brand of liberalism.

We tend to think of militants as only existing on the Left or Right—and indeed, they do tend to congregate there. But perhaps the biggest problem for pragmatists in American politics is that they are developing a militancy of their own, complete with a sense of aggrieved disadvantage, personal infallibility, and an unwillingness to reform. So long as basically responsible policy custodians like Hillary Clinton cannot offer a more open-minded and pluralist vision of their place in the political system, voters can be excused for thinking that their exhortations to pragmatism are just non-threatening justifications for preserving the privileges of a specific elite faction.

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Trump Threatens the Big Banks in China

After China and Russia watered down the UN sanctions against North Korea this past week, the Trump Administration is threatening major Chinese banks that do business with the regime. It could be a new phase of Trump’s pressure campaign against Pyongyang, suggests the Financial Times:

Marshall Billingslea, a top Treasury official, told Congress on Tuesday that the US had not seen sufficient evidence that China was willing to curb North Korean revenue flows and “expunge North Korean illicit actors” from its banking system. He said the Trump administration … would “not hesitate to act unilaterally”. […]

“If China wishes to avoid future measures, such as those imposed on Bank of Dandong or the various companies sanctioned for illegal trade practices . . . it urgently needs to take demonstrable public steps to eliminate North Korea’s trade and financial access,” Mr Billingslea told the House foreign affairs committee. […]

Mr Billingslea said the Bank of Dandong action had had a “very clear effect” on its operations. “That was a very clear warning shot that the Chinese understood.”

Billingslea is one of many Administration voices suggesting that Chinese banks could be put in the crosshairs. The top Asia hand at the State Department, Susan Thornton, echoed his message in her Congressional testimony. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin made the threat explicit: “If China doesn’t follow these sanctions,” he warned on Tuesday, “we will put additional sanctions on them and prevent them from accessing the U.S. and international dollar system.” And President Trump has hinted, in his own informal way, that much tougher measures are on the horizon: the latest UN sanctions were “not a big deal,” the President said yesterday. “Those sanctions are nothing compared to ultimately what will have to happen.”

Coming after Trump’s first two rounds of secondary sanctions, those threats are credible enough that the Chinese are taking them seriously. As the FT reported on Monday, China’s five biggest banks recently implemented a ban on new North Korean accounts; some have gone further and begun cleaning out existing accounts held by North Koreans. Those marching orders came from China’s central bank, in a clear attempt to placate Washington and forestall further sanctions.

But those efforts may be insufficient to appease Trump. Experts assess that momentum is building within the Administration for an aggressive, take-no-prisoners sanctions campaign to squeeze Pyongyang’s enablers—one that could be modeled on past sanctions against Iran. The FT again:

Bruce Klingner, a former CIA North Korea analyst, said the combination of UN and US actions this year showed that Washington was “moving towards economic warfare” in the way Washington had targeted Iran. US officials have argued that such a path is critical to warding off any future pre-emptive strike to knock out a North Korean ICBM, or a broader “preventive” war that would aim to destroy all of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.

The mention of Iran is an instructive one, and it highlights the feeble nature of our sanctions against Pyongyang so far. Public perceptions aside, the United States is not close to exerting maximum pressure against North Korea; policymakers crafted a much tougher and more biting sanctions regime against Iran. The trick was not to rely primarily on UN sanctions, but on coercive unilateral ones, built up over many years and several administrations. The anti-Iran sanctions ultimately forced a stark choice on businesses and governments alike: cease doing business with Tehran or lose access to the U.S. financial system. Economic self-interest and coercive U.S. diplomacy made the former option vastly preferable, turning Iran into a financial pariah and eventually driving it to the bargaining table.

So far, the United States has hesitated to use this kind of leverage against the main Chinese banks sustaining Pyongyang. Doing so would certainly be risky business, provoking economic blowback from Beijing and vocal opposition from U.S. business interests. But it may be preferable to the current policy— blustery rhetoric combined with UN sanctions that Beijing and Moscow are quick to weaken and slow to enforce.

To be sure, tough secondary sanctions are no panacea: cutting off Chinese banks from the U.S. financial system would not be a cost-free exercise, and it certainly won’t make North Korea surrender its nuclear deterrent. But unilateral sanctions on Chinese banks, if applied judiciously, could serve a longer-term strategy. They would show Beijing that Trump is no paper tiger, and that China’s veto in the Security Council does not hold sway over U.S. policy more broadly. They would hit Pyongyang where it hurts, while raising the costs for China of sustaining its rogue neighbor. They would reinforce signals already being sent to countries like Egypt and the Philippines that they, too, could be punished if they do not dramatically curb their trade with Pyongyang. And at a moment when existing options seem exhausted, they could strengthen Trump’s hand for future negotiations that could freeze—if not “solve”—the current crisis.

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The South Asian Vortex

During the post-9/11 era, U.S. policy in South Asia has served as a nearly perfect illustration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s old line, “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” On the whole, Washington has lavished less attention and fewer resources on India, the most populous nation in the region and the state with the greatest potential to shape global geopolitics over the long run, than on neighboring Pakistan. In turn, U.S. officials have tended to treat Pakistan, with its 200 million people and impossibly frustrating bundle of policy challenges, as an irritating appendage of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. And even to Afghanistan the U.S. government has rarely devoted sufficient or sustained policy focus. The Bush Administration shortchanged it in favor of war in Iraq, and the Obama Administration’s surge was shaped more by U.S. domestic political considerations than by Afghanistan’s own realities or trajectory.

A smarter strategy for South Asia would offer realistic avenues for the United States to maintain a balance of power in favor of American interests—chief among them a liberal world order—over the long haul, not just to neutralize immediate security threats. To its credit, by the time the Obama Administration departed it appeared to appreciate the longstanding imbalance, especially with respect to India. The most that could be said of U.S. efforts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, however, is that the Obama Administration bequeathed to its successor a slow-motion train wreck rather than an immediate crisis.

Threats and Opportunities

The upside-down quality to U.S. policy in South Asia owes much to the fact that Washington has based major decisions on threats more than opportunities. President Trump took a similar approach when he unveiled his “South Asia strategy” in a primetime television address on August 21, 2017. His speech was first and foremost a declaration that the United States would not lose in Afghanistan. Then the President waved at Pakistan and India. He threatened the former with the back of his hand, warning that Islamabad had better end its support of Afghan insurgents, or else. He offered a more welcoming gesture to New Delhi, suggesting that India should take a more active role in Afghanistan, especially in promoting economic development.

Trump is not alone in taking an Afghanistan-first approach to the region. Bush and Obama mainly did the same, and it is easy to see why. In Afghanistan, Presidents Bush, Obama, and now Trump have had to consider the realistic possibility of defeat in what now qualifies as America’s longest war. That disastrous political prospect, perhaps more than the potential security threat posed by a reconstituted al-Qaeda (or similar terrorist network), explains a lot about the policy decisions reached by all three Presidents.

In Pakistan too, concerns about imminent threats tend to dominate American policy calculations. Pakistan’s role as a spoiler of regional peace, safe haven for terrorists, and nuclear-armed garrison state has demanded significant attention from U.S. national-security policymakers. Potential opportunities, such as Pakistan’s expanding market for U.S. goods or investments, have generated far less American interest. Even Pakistan’s vast, youthful population looks like a threat—a “youth bulge” that will bring greater volatility, extremism, and violence—rather than an opportunity for higher productivity and growth.

Only in India do opportunities outweigh threats, at least from Washington’s point of view. It is worth pausing to recall that if not for 9/11, India would have eclipsed Pakistan and Afghanistan on America’s strategic agenda. Toward the end of its tenure the Clinton Administration started to appreciate India’s global potential in economic and diplomatic terms. The early Bush Administration appreciated India’s geostrategic heft as an Asian counterbalance to a rising China. By contrast, if not for Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan would have remained a small, landlocked, war-torn tragedy, but not one of great strategic consequence to the United States. Pakistan, buffeted by internal turmoil and addicted to self-destructive hostility with India, would have concerned American policymakers, but wouldn’t have led to expenditures of tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance or rekindled efforts at diplomatic and intelligence cooperation, which had largely fallen apart a decade before.

In short, India holds the greatest opportunity for the United States, Pakistan poses the greatest potential security threat, and Afghanistan is where U.S. forces will be stuck in an interminable war unless someone figures out how to exit a no-win investment trap without causing undo political damage at home.

Continuity and Change

For analysts who have followed South Asia over decades, too much about our present condition looks familiar and predictable. Had one fallen asleep in 1997 and woken up twenty years later, a number of assumptions, frameworks, and conclusions would still ring true.

Afghanistan’s war is America’s longest, but even the past 16 years since 9/11 are in many ways only the most recent chapter of a civil war that is about two decades older than the average Afghan alive today. Divisions within Afghan society—rural versus urban, tribe versus tribe, or ethnic group versus ethnic group—continue to stymie national political cooperation, a problem worsened by the corruption and institutional weaknesses of Kabul, and also by a political model imported via Bonn that asks the center to do more than it is able.

Similarly, Pakistan’s present condition, including political disputes between the army and civilian politicians and a culture of abiding hostility toward India, has been constant throughout nearly all of the state’s seventy-year history. The Pakistani state continues, as it has since at least the 1960s, to “do less with more” when it comes to making effective use of national resources in ways that contribute to basic socio-economic wellbeing, whether in terms of education, healthcare, or infrastructure.1 At the same time, it invests heavily in the tools of war, including a growing nuclear weapons program, largely aimed at India. Not even the present instance of mutual U.S.-Pakistan frustration is especially new, as neither side has been satisfied with the other since their first treaty alliance in 1954.

India is still in many ways a slow-moving, parochial behemoth. It is preoccupied with its own domestic dramas in ways that distract it from international action, too riven by domestic politics to implement the sweeping reforms needed to unleash the potential of its own people, and too zealously post-colonial and ambitious to enter binding international alliances.

These important points of South Asian continuity notwithstanding, today’s policy analysts must pay close attention to several changes. These new variables will help determine the region’s demographic, socio-economic, and geopolitical trajectories. By studying them, American policymakers can gain insights into the most effective way for the United States to bring about other changes. In short, Washington will generally find itself on firmer ground when its strategies align with prevailing trends and when it seeks to promote changes in areas where flux has been a more frequent feature of recent history.

The first change to appreciate about South Asia is its demographic reality. In 1997, Afghanistan’s population was 18 million, Pakistan’s 129 million, and India’s 997 million. Today those numbers are roughly 35 million, 193 million, and 1.3 billion, respectively. The region’s cities have undergone the greatest and most rapid change, with Kabul growing from one to four million, Karachi from 10 million to 16 million, and Mumbai from 16 to 21 million since about the turn of the century. And the region’s median age is still only 27 years, meaning that growth rates are unlikely to come down anytime soon. India’s population is projected to outgrow that of China by 2024. The most basic consequence of this growth is that it will make the region’s traditional scarcities—land, water, jobs, healthcare, and so on—even scarcer. Without improved governance, education, and infrastructure (perhaps aided by some breakthrough technologies), South Asia’s young populations will have little chance of competing in the global economy. Politics will also become more contentious and violent.

The second shared reality across the region is that of China’s increasing prominence. Some of this growth can be interpreted as a fairly straight-line projection of longstanding trends. India, for example, fought a disastrous war with China in 1962, and in 1998 justified its surprise nuclear tests by citing the security threat posed by nuclear-armed China. In recent years, India’s suspicion of the China has hardened, especially as both sides have invested in a wide range of military capabilities. Pakistan, for its part, has viewed China as its all-weather-ally since the 1960s, and so Beijing’s continued security cooperation with Islamabad—which has included the sale of sensitive technologies like missiles and nuclear warhead designs—represents a continuation of old patterns. Even in Afghanistan, China has for decades pressed its own limited policy aims, including helping to arm the mujaheddin in the 1980s and buying the massive Aynak copper mine in 2007.

In other ways, however, the ongoing evolution of China’s regional role is more dramatic. Recent India-China standoffs along their disputed borders, maritime spats, and diplomatic differences paint a picture of an increasingly contentious relationship. India fears China’s growing military presence throughout the Indian Ocean, perceives Chinese overtures to neighboring Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan as a part of a strategy of encirclement, and rejects Beijing’s benign characterization of President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiatives.” The stakes of this regional relationship have also grown exponentially. Far more than in 1962, a violent conflict between India and China would roil international markets and force other states—including the United States—into the uncomfortable position of having to take sides. Americans are not used to thinking in these terms about India (and may have forgotten how to think in such terms about Korea or Japan), but we may be forced to learn.

China’s role in Pakistan took a great leap forward with the 2015 inauguration of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a package of transportation infrastructure (roads, ports, trains), energy, and other industrial investments that could run into the tens of billions of dollars over the next decade. It is not remotely clear whether these investments will pan out, or even what fraction of China’s promises will be realized, but it is clear that China has decided to get involved in Pakistan in a new, qualitatively different way. It is also clear that Pakistan’s leaders perceive China as a sort of “last chance” foreign patron. Enthusiasm for CPEC is mutual, pervasive, and supported by both states, which launched the endeavor with heavy propaganda and some muzzling of even limited political opposition. Whether CPEC will ultimately help to stabilize Pakistan’s internal situation is an open question. The pathway from infrastructure investments to domestic tranquility is hardly straightforward. Similarly, CPEC (and more generally, China’s support to Pakistan) could cut either way with respect to mitigating or exacerbating Pakistan’s hostile relationship with India.

Finally, China took on an unprecedented new diplomatic role in Afghanistan when it agreed to participate in the “Quadrilateral Coordinating Group” during the latter years of the Obama Administration. That role never produced the Administration’s desired result, namely pressuring Pakistan to deliver recalcitrant factions of the Taliban to the negotiating table. Nevertheless, it marked a breakthrough in China’s willingness to step out of the shadows and take on greater diplomatic responsibility. More to the point it suggested a new reality in South Asia: Looking ahead, the United States will need to take China’s role and interests into account in ways that were unnecessary even just a decade ago.

The other major regional changes are the consequence of specific domestic developments within India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. India may be relatively slow to change, but its economy has picked up steam in ways that will make additional reforms at home possible, and allow it to assume a greater international role as well. India’s economic growth holds great appeal for the United States, but leaves open essential questions about how Americans might best benefit from it. Equally important are changes in India’s national politics, encapsulated in the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which represents not merely the historic collapse of the Indian National Congress Party but the rise of a new and charismatic right-of-center force, willing to part ways with some of the orthodoxy that has characterized Indian politics since independence. In the international context, Modi—like Shinzo Abe in Japan—has distinguished himself by a less moralizing and more muscular tone, especially in his dealings with Pakistan and China.

Pakistan’s most significant domestic change of the past decade is undoubtedly its internal war against Islamist militant groups. Until the mid-2000s, Pakistani leaders generally refused to accept the necessity of serious military campaigns against groups they characterized as mere “miscreants” along the Afghan border. Since 2007, however, the Pakistani army has been engaged in nearly constant battles against homegrown Pakistani Taliban and their sympathizers. Terrorist violence has repeatedly spilled into Pakistan’s major urban centers, and all told, Pakistani officials count over 70,000 lives and more than $100 billion lost since 2001 due to the conflict. Unfortunately, although the current generation of Pakistani soldiers has seen more action against jihadi militants than against India, the state has done precious little to address the socio-economic wellsprings of violent extremism or to curb anti-Indian sentiment in ways that would encourage peace over the long run.

Afghanistan’s situation has also evolved significantly, if not in ways that are yet self-sustaining. Afghans have participated in several national democratic elections and their army of over 180,000 troops now bears the brunt of fighting against Taliban insurgents. Although most Afghans have only known war, a majority cannot now recall a time before the American intervention that routed the Taliban from Kabul.

Nor can they remember a time before cell phones. Afghanistan has experienced a revolution in communications; 75 percent of Afghans have cellular service subscriptions. Afghanistan remains precarious—politically, economically, and militarily—but its troubles should not be interpreted as evidence of pro-Taliban or obscurantist sentiment. Indeed, in 2016, 93 percent of Afghans reported that they would fear encountering the Taliban. Strikingly, 81 percent of Afghans believe men and women should have equal educational opportunities.2

Myths of South Asia

Beyond these changes, policy analysts should also resist the allure of several popular “myths” about South Asia that have become common knowledge but really have little basis in fact. First, although it is fortunate that most American policymakers have dispensed with images of India as a land of cows and snake charmers, it is equally fanciful to believe that India has magically transformed into an enormous Silicon Valley. Yes, India has high-tech Bangalore and glitzy Bollywood, but roughly one in five Indians lives on less than $1.90 per day, and 53 percent of Indian homes lack toilets. The point is not to make light of India’s progress or potential, but only to appreciate its scale and complexity.

Second, it is only a myth that Kashmir is the reason for all of South Asia’s troubles. As a policy corollary, attempting to settle the dispute over Kashmir should not be a top American priority. Kashmir is better understood as a symptom of the broader India-Pakistan conflict. Kashmir is also, to be clear, a bundle of unresolved political disputes between local communities of the former princely states of Jammu and Kashmir and the countries in which they now reside. Hypothetically, one could remove Kashmir from the regional equation without seeing any improvement in relations between Islamabad and New Delhi. All of this is important because Pakistan frequently argues to ill-informed American audiences that the only way to make progress on peace in the region is to resolve the underlying dispute, by which they mean Kashmir. This is a ruse intended to focus U.S. pressure on India and turn attention away from Pakistan’s continued support for terrorists and militant organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose atrocities routinely threaten to spark Indo-Pakistani war.

Third, earnest supporters of liberal democracy frequently blame Pakistan’s military for its society’s ills. If not for its nefarious army and ISI, they suggest, Pakistan would find its way to peace and prosperity, not to mention better relations with the United States and India. This statement may be plausible on its face, but the truth is not nearly so simple. In reality, the civilian politicians of Pakistan are members of an elite “establishment” that is either thoroughly co-opted by the military or at least rather easily cowed into submission. Yes, there are factions within, and some prominent civilians are true democrats to the core, but none has—or is likely to have in the foreseeable future—sufficient desire or capacity to send the army back to the barracks and impose civilian authority over defense and foreign policy. It is best for American policymakers to deal with Pakistan as it is, to appreciate that a desired democratic transformation will take time to consolidate if it is to happen at all, and to appreciate the limits of U.S. influence over Pakistan’s domestic politics.

Fourth, Afghans are not fighting to break up their country into ethnically pure smaller states. Afghanistan, despite all its internal conflicts, is an actual nation-state, in some ways more so than Pakistan (or the United States, for that matter). Afghans fight to control their state, not to cut it into pieces. Partition is not a serious option, only a magic bullet-style policy proposal that distracts from a far more challenging reality. That said, as already noted in passing, Afghanistan’s geography, diversity, and political differences probably render it a state better ruled through mechanisms of loose federalism than the highly centralized structures enshrined in its current constitution.

U.S. Policy, Real and Recommended

To be fair, in its waning days the Obama Administration attempted to reconfigure its approach to South Asia in ways that would better align U.S. resources—including the time and attention of senior policymakers—with opportunities and interests. This effort yielded broad shifts in policy for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, none of which was fully consummated by January 2017.

President Obama entered the White House in 2009 proclaiming Afghanistan a “war of necessity.” An extended policy review resulted in an 18-month “surge” of force. He reversed the surge in 2012 and announced plans to shift security responsibilities to Afghan forces by 2014. At that point, he declared that only a small embassy protection force would be in place by the end of his term.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the President’s timetables were politically motivated, a point that has been reiterated by his opponents ever since, including by some top officials within the Trump Administration. To the extent that President Obama’s decision to withdraw was justified by conditions on the ground, the relevant question for the President appears to have been whether the security threats posed by Afghanistan in the new era of ISIS justified an extensive U.S. military presence. He and his top advisers judged that they did not.

Yet Obama did not close out the Afghan war on his watch for three main reasons. First, the Taliban were making gains on the battlefield and a complete—or near complete—U.S. departure could lead to even more dramatic reversals, possibly including the collapse of the government in Kabul. Second, unlike the Hamid Karzai government, with which Obama had had an extremely contentious relationship, the new Ashraf Ghani-led government of national unity was a more willing partner that plainly wanted the United States to stay and help its cause. And third, Obama believed that Hillary Clinton would inherit the mess in Afghanistan after him and that she preferred a long-term commitment in support of the Afghan state, if not necessarily any serious expansion of the U.S. war effort.

The Trump Administration has announced plans to increase U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but only by roughly four thousand, taking the total to between 13 and 16 thousand. In addition, U.S. troops are expected to be less restricted in their use of force, as demonstrated in April 2017 when they dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal—a MOAB, successor to the Daisy Cutter—on an underground tunnel complex in eastern Afghanistan. Still, no realistic escalation of the U.S. military effort has any chance of “winning” against a Taliban insurgency that proved its capacity to stand firm even against 100,000 U.S. forces. In a moment of candor not evident in President Trump’s speeches, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged that the United States may not win a battlefield victory—adding, however, that neither will the Taliban.

The Trump strategy for Afghanistan is defensible only if the intensification of U.S. military effort is harnessed to severely circumscribed security and political ends. On the security front, the Administration should aim to retain a partnership with the national government in Kabul as a means to achieving the intelligence and access required to attack ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other international terrorist operations inside Afghanistan. On the political front, the U.S. goal should be a ceasefire, and in time, a settlement with the Taliban.

If a U.S. force of under 20,000 can stave off the collapse of the Afghan government without heavy losses, enable effective counterterror operations, and gradually wear down the confidence of the insurgency enough to open talks, the Trump Administration could sustain similar troop levels in Afghanistan indefinitely. Given the realistic alternatives, that outcome would even qualify as a win and a smarter allocation of U.S. resources than either Obama’s initial surge or his planned departure. However, serious Taliban talks cannot happen without a strong diplomatic initiative to complement the military one. That initiative would simultaneously work to identify opportunities within Afghanistan (between the Taliban and Kabul government), and to strengthen the supporting framework from without (by neutralizing potential spoilers like Iran and Pakistan and working with potential guarantors like China). Unfortunately, Secretary Tillerson’s present dismantling of the State Department raises doubts about America’s capacity to lead a robust diplomatic initiative. But that could change.

Returning to Pakistan, the Obama Administration experienced a similar initial surge of enthusiasm followed by stalemate, frustration, and a narrowing of ambition. The Holbrooke-era scheme for transforming the U.S.-Pakistan relationship from a transactional one to something more akin to a genuine partnership led to expenditures of tens of billions of dollars in civilian and military assistance that in retrospect were either too generous or too short-lived to achieve their aims. The Abbottabad raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in May 2011 encapsulated the essential problem, at least from Washington’s point of view: Pakistan was a profoundly untrustworthy ally, and not just with respect to Afghanistan. For several years before the end of Obama’s term, the U.S.-Pakistan relationship ran on fumes. The Administration avoided drama with Islamabad and let the clock run down, again likely assuming that an incoming President Clinton would prefer the flexibility to formulate its own Pakistan policies.

In his first major move regarding Pakistan, President Trump took a harsh stance clearly intended to compel Islamabad to cease its support of militant and terrorist groups like the Haqqani network in Afghanistan. In many ways, this was a shrewd and timely move. Trump is just unpredictable enough that adversaries have to take his coercive threats—even risky ones—seriously. Moreover, U.S. patience for Pakistan’s ties with anti-Afghan, anti-Indian, and anti-Western terrorist groups has run out, so truth-telling by the White House was in order. Without a Pakistani course correction, sooner or later the U.S.-Pakistan relationship would reach a breaking point, even though that rupture would be costly for both sides.

The question now is whether a coercive approach to Pakistan can work. The answer is a qualified yes. Above all, senior members of the Trump national security team must have the nerve to withstand Pakistan’s angry backlash, the unity to avoid being played against one another, and the sensitivity to recalibrate pressure in response to successes (or failures). Given China’s heavy presence and influence in Pakistan, a successful American coercion of Islamabad will also require some coordination with Beijing, otherwise it will be too easy for Pakistan to hide behind the insulating folds of China’s mantle.

All told, this would be an extremely tall order under the best of circumstances. Judging from the general pattern of dysfunction and turmoil within the White House to date, however, there is precious little reason for optimism.

More important than these concerns about the competence of the current White House, the United States has more at stake in Pakistan than just the war in Afghanistan or even the threat posed by Pakistan-based international terrorism. Those urgent threats should not be allowed to entirely overshadow American interests in a nuclear-armed state of Pakistan’s size, especially as Islamabad grows closer to China while failing to reduce its hostility toward India. Though it is not necessarily wrong to try to force a fundamental shift in Pakistan’s behavior, the effort is likely to fail, and that Washington must be prepared to deal with the consequences. Salvaging an unsatisfactory but workable relationship with Islamabad may in time look like a more palatable outcome than adding Pakistan to America’s list of outright adversaries.

The Obama Administration more-or-less held fast to a core strategic vision on India throughout its term. Obama ended his presidency on a high note of personal diplomacy with Prime Minister Modi in spite of their obvious ideological differences. At the top of the list of the Administration’s accomplishments with India is the tightening of defense ties, including military sales and cooperative agreements. These ties are narrowly functional, with the potential to improve defensive capabilities for both India and the United States. However, they also have a grander purpose: to build the foundation for a closer strategic partnership between the world’s largest democratic state and its oldest, and to tip the global balance in favor of liberal order that serves both Washington and New Delhi. To put a finer point on it, when it comes to managing the rise of Chinese power in Asia, both Indians and Americans appreciate the ways in which their national interests converge.

On India, Trump would do well to stay the course. The question is whether his Administration, such as it is or isn’t, and Washington more generally, will have sufficient patience with Indian policy, especially with respect to issues of trade and the global economy. On these matters American and Indian interests are less synchronized and even in outright conflict. Both Trump and Modi have similar inclinations to draw on populist themes, including that of anti-trade protectionism. The confluence of anti-trade sentiment in both countries could be a deadly one if it is permitted to crowd out areas of agreement.

So far, shrewd Indian officials have demonstrated themselves equal to the task of navigating summit diplomacy with the Trump White House, besting even their extremely effective Japanese counterparts. To reciprocate and, more importantly, to keep India on the Administration’s agenda even when other urgent issues threaten, the President will likely need to identify a senior deputy for whom India is a top priority. At different stages of the Obama Administration, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and Deputy Secretary of State William Burns effectively played that role.

To succeed in India, the U.S. government will need patience enough to focus on the strategic payoffs inherent in the rise of a powerful—and enormous—Asian democracy. It will need, too, to consider what the private sector is doing to affect the bilateral relationship in ways it need not with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

To succeed in Pakistan, the United States will need to force important changes in the way Islamabad operates. Failing that, it will need to identify the least costly means of managing Pakistan’s destabilizing influence over the long run.

And to succeed in Afghanistan, Washington will need to demonstrate commitment and flexibility sufficient to enable a political settlement minimally acceptable to the United States, Kabul, the bulk of the Taliban insurgency, and Afghanistan’s most influential neighbors.

Finally, all of America’s efforts should take into account the most significant—and likely lasting—change South Asia has witnessed since the end of the Soviet Union. This is not the threat posed by Islamist extremism and violence, but the growing economic, political, and military influence of China.

1William Easterly, “The Political Economy of Growth without Development: A Case Study of Pakistan,” paper for the Analytical Narratives of Growth Project, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (June 2001).

2“Afghanistan in 2016: A Survey of The People,” The Asia Foundation, December 7, 2016.

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Even When OPEC Wins, It Loses

For months, the oil cartel OPEC has worried about what it should be doing as its plan to restrict its collective crude production (and hopefully kick off a price rebound) was failing. The cartel has never seemed less cohesive than it does in this new oil reality, where production is surging from non-conventional sources and suppliers, and prices are trading at less than half of what they were just a few years back. That lack of cohesion has been evident in the way so many of OPEC’s members have exceeded the limits placed upon them as part of the attempted market intervention.

For some petrostates, like Libya and Nigeria, this was a matter of course as they work to recover from significant supply disruptions, but for others like Ecuador it was about open defiance of a painful plan to pursue when crude is barely fetching $50 per barrel. But even Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s leader and by far its most prolific producer, has slacked in 2017 in its commitment to reducing production. Back in June, the cartel collectively met just 78 percent of the cuts it promised. The message that sent was clear: cutting supplies was too painful a task for the already cash-strapped petrostates.

But in August, for the first time in four months, OPEC finally managed to follow through on its promises when its production fell from the previous month’s totals. The drop was modest—just 79,000 barrels per day—and it was driven in large part by Libya’s continued struggles to get its output back online, but starting the slide in production is an accomplishment. 79,000 bpd won’t cut it, but on the demand side there’s more working in the favor of a rebalanced market, as OPEC expects oil demand will increase by more than previously expected in 2018.

However OPEC may be like the dog chasing the car, not sure what it would do if it ever caught it: if prices do rise with any real significance as a result of the cartel’s actions, it will be American shale producers, not petrostates, that will be quickest to pounce. Fracking occurs on a smaller scale, and it’s easier to ramp up (or down, as the case may be) as a result of global prices. And U.S. suppliers aren’t just capable of seizing the opportunity for a rebound, they’re chomping at the bit—low oil prices have put a significant dent in the shale boom, and there’s already a backlog (or “fracklog”) of drilled but not yet completed wells just waiting for the economics to change.

The cartel is between a rock and a hard place, and none of its options are going to be anywhere near as comfortable as the era of $100 crude.

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