Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 136

Abe and Modi’s Alliance Keeps Chugging Along

Japan’s deepening relationship with India will get a fitting photo-op tomorrow, when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrives to lay tracks for a $17 billion bullet train financed by Tokyo, reports Reuters:

The move by Abe, who starts a two-day visit to India on Wednesday, highlights an early lead for Japan in a sector where the Chinese have also been trying to secure a foothold, but without much success.

Modi has made the 500-km- (311-mile-) long high-speed rail link between the financial hub of Mumbai and the industrial city of Ahmedabad in western Gujarat a centerpiece of his efforts to showcase India’s ability to build cutting-edge infrastructure. […]

Japan is providing 81 percent of the funding for the 1.08-trillion-rupee ($16.9-billion) project, through a 50-year loan at 0.1 percent annual interest.

As with most Asian infrastructure stories, this one is as much about strategic considerations as sound investment decisions. It’s not clear that this will be $17 billion well spent: high-speed rail projects tend to turn into boondoggles, and that money might be better used repairing India’s creaky network of existing railroads.

But those objections may not matter much to Modi or Abe, as long as China gets the message: India and Japan are forging ever closer ties, and China has some serious competition in the Asian infrastructure game. Japan’s bullet train investment is not a one-off; Tokyo has also been eyeing India’s northeastern states, near the Chinese border, as a target region for new infrastructure investments. Abe and Modi are also expected this week to announce major investments in the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor, their new development agenda designed as a more fiscally sustainable, less centrally planned alternative to Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative.

China is also driving the two countries closer on security issues. This week’s visit from Abe will be accompanied by a host of defense deals, designed to counter the perceived threat from Beijing. It was recently announced that Japan and India would cooperate on anti-submarine warfare training and robotics research, with the details to be firmed up this week. And Modi is also expected to finalize a long-gestating deal to purchase a dozen of Japan’s US-2i amphibious aircraft, which India wants for patrols in the Indian Ocean (presumably to keep an eye on China’s activity there).

From the U.S. perspective, this is all to the good: India and Japan are natural partners and steady democracies who can help balance against a rising China with hegemonic ambitions. But that doesn’t mean that regional rebalance will happen smoothly or without blowback. The protracted Doklam border crisis, for instance, was a clear harbinger of the confrontations that could erupt as India seeks to contain Chinese expansionism. Tokyo’s role in that conflict, however, was under-discussed. While other countries stayed neutral, Japan was the only outside country to unequivocally back India’s position: a meaningful sign that Tokyo is tying its fate to India’s as both face an assertive China.

As both Japan and India expand their commitments, their tacit alliance is becoming ever more tangible—but China is sure to push back.

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Tensions Mount in Kenya as Do-Over Election Looms

Kenyans are slated to return to the polls in just over a month for a do-over presidential election, following the Kenyan Supreme Court’s ruling this past month that vacated the previous election results. The timing is tight, and it doesn’t look like Kenyan election authorities will be able to organize credible elections in time. Bloomberg:

With the next vote due in just five weeks, the electoral commission is mired in infighting over who should take the fall for last month’s botched contest. Demands by ex-Prime Minister Raila Odinga, 72, and his National Super Alliance that sweeping changes be made to the commission, including the removal of its chief executive officer, have also placed them at loggerheads with President Uhuru Kenyatta’s ruling Jubilee Party.

“As things stand now, most of the people that ran the Aug. 8 elections are still in office and the system that they used has not been changed,” Peter Wayande, a politics professor at the University of Nairobi, said by phone from the capital. “As long as that remains the case, one cannot expect credible elections. If things are not done right, there will definitely be a crisis that will result in political instability.”

Doing the same thing over a second time and expecting the same results is the definition of insanity. And Kenya appears to be veering in the direction of insanity.

Meanwhile, President Kenyatta and his supporters have moved from responsible, conciliatory talking points about the “rule of law” and respecting the decisions of judges to more ominous rhetoric. The East African reports that this weekend Robinson Njeru Githae, the Kenyan Ambassador to the United States, told a conference: “I can categorically say here looking you straight in the eye that the Supreme Court robbed Uhuru Kenyatta of his win and stole the election from the Kenyan people.” Fighting words! So much for respecting the judicial branch. And, also from The East African, President Kenyatta himself had the following to say about what would happen if Odinga were to win the new elections:

Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta has said that even if the opposition National Super Alliance Nasa presidential candidate Raila Odinga wins the October 17 repeat poll, ruling Jubilee has the numbers to impeach him in less than three months.

He did not elaborate the reasons that would lead to the impeachment.

The President said Jubilee, which has the majority of members in both Houses of Parliament, can make amendments to the Constitution based on its numbers.

“If Raila is elected how will he lead? How? In the last Senate we could not pass Bills…but presently, we can do business without a single Nasa member. In the National Assembly, with over 200 members we are 13 members shy of a two-thirds majority meaning we can change the Constitution.

“We have to tell Kenyans the truth. Even if he is elected we have the opportunity in Parliament within two [to] three months to impeach him,” Mr Kenyatta said.

All eyes are on the Kenyan Supreme Court, which is expected to release its full ruling before September 22. Until then, the ruling party and the opposition will continue to squabble and Kenya’s electoral commission will be riven with infighting and efforts to apportion blame. With time ticking, it’s unlikely that Kenya will make any progress on the path to credible elections before the Supreme Court releases its full decision.

To avoid a full-blown political crisis in Kenya, complete with ethnic bloodletting reminiscent of that unleashed in the 2007-2008 electoral crisis, the elections must be postponed. The Supreme Court’s 60-day deadline for new elections is too short. The elections must be credible, and it will take some time to reform Kenya’s electoral commission, or find a new group to organize the elections. Even with credible elections, however, the chances of a destabilizing political crisis in Kenya grow more dire by the day. Kenyatta’s creeping authoritarianism is deeply worrisome. Ambassador Donald Yamamoto, the Trump Administration’s newly-appointed interim Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, should place Kenya at the top of his agenda.

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NYT Wakes Up to Racism Against Africans in Libya

The New York Times breathlessly reported this week that African migrants face prejudice at the hands of Arabs in Libya:

When Kalilu Drammeh arrived in Libya he was in many ways similar to thousands of other migrants from across Africa, all of them desperate to cross the sea to get to Europe and, they hoped, a better life.

But in Libya, Mr. Drammeh, like many other people from his native Gambia and other sub-Saharan countries, stood out among the swirl of migrants and was an automatic target for abuse for one obvious reason: his skin color is darker.

Libyan smugglers call them “burned,” a racial epithet sometimes used in the country for people whose skin color is black. And while many of the migrants who pass through Libya hoping to set sail for Italy are beaten and otherwise abused by smugglers, Mr. Drammeh believes his treatment was especially harsh because of his skin color.

Fellow Muslims — even children — refused to let him pray alongside them. “They think they’re better than us,” Mr. Drammeh, who is 18, said by phone from a refugee camp in Italy. “They say we’re created different from them.”

Bigotry against Africans in North Africa is not news. But, reading between the lines of the NYT piece, Western journalists appear shocked—shocked!—to discover that race prejudice exists in other cultures too. The ill treatment of black Africans at the hands of Arab human traffickers should not surprise anyone with a grasp on the history of the region, particularly the trans-Saharan slave trade that endured for centuries. Of this historical context, the NYT has only this to say:

“Tensions between North Africans and sub-Saharan Africans have long existed.”

We may have a winner for “understatement of the millennium.” But by focusing only on the color prejudice of Libyan traffickers, the NYT misses the larger story: the centuries-long Arab slave trade, known to continue to this day in Sudan and Mauritania, has returned to the Mediterranean Basin.

Here’s the historical context the NYT omitted. Writing in BMC Evolutionary Biology, a team of scientists found that the long-lasting Arab slave trade reshaped North African genetics, with one-fourth to one-half of North Africans bearing significant sub-Saharan ancestry. They summarize the best estimates for the Arab slave trade:

Till now, the genetic consequences of these forced trans-Saharan movements of people have not been ascertained, being over-shadowed by the Atlantic slave trade towards the New World. In fact, the huge number of sub-Saharan people introduced in the New World from the 16th century onwards allowed to investigating in great detail the genetic consequences of this historical event, and the complete sequencing of L-lineages is indicating very precisely about the origin of lineages observed nowadays in America. Nonetheless, some authors affirm that the Arab slave trade of black slaves was much the same in total to the Atlantic slave trade, and interestingly far longer in the time scale. It began in the middle of the seventh century (650 A.D.) and survives still today in Mauritania and Sudan, summing up 14 centuries rather than four as for the Atlantic slave trade. Although estimates are very rough, figures are of 4,820,000 for the Saharan trade between 650 and 1600 A.D., and, for comparison purposes, of 2,400,000 for the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean trade between 800 and 1600 A.D.

The NYT alludes to the harsh conditions and forced labor African migrants face in Libya, but stops short of suggesting the connection to slavery. Libyan smugglers are not merely ferrymen for Africans on their way to what they hope will prove a better life in Europe—often, these traffickers are modern-day slave traders who keep their “clients” in appalling conditions. The parallels to the Arab slave trade are all too apparent. The Guardian, from April of this year:

West African migrants are being bought and sold openly in modern-day slave markets in Libya, survivors have told a UN agency helping them return home.

Trafficked people passing through Libya have previously reported violence, extortion and slave labour. But the new testimony from the International Organization for Migration suggests that the trade in human beings has become so normalised that people are being traded in public.

“The latest reports of ‘slave markets’ for migrants can be added to a long list of outrages [in Libya],” said Mohammed Abdiker, IOM’s head of operation and emergencies. “The situation is dire. The more IOM engages inside Libya, the more we learn that it is a vale of tears for all too many migrants.”

The story in Libya certainly includes racism—a phenomenon familiar to Western readers, and hopefully a frame that will provoke interest in and concern for the African migrants in Libya. But the story, bound up in the historical context of the Arab slave trade, is larger than prejudice alone. It is one thing to say that Africans are being discriminated against in Libya because of the color of their skin. It’s another thing entirely to suggest that the trafficking and forced labor of Africans in Libya amounts to modern-day slavery. The longer we delay calling what’s facing Africans in Libya by its real name—slavery—the more we postpone the day of their liberation.

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The Overton Window Moves on Healthcare

Leading establishment figures in the Democratic Party are coming around to Bernie Sanders’ proposal—once considered a left-wing moonshot—to create a massive, federally-funded health insurance system. The Hill reports:

Sen. Cory Booker is throwing his support behind a “Medicare for all” bill being introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), becoming the latest Democrat floated as a 2020 contender to back the legislation.

The New Jersey senator told NJTV News that he would sign on as a co-sponsor of the bill, which is scheduled to be rolled out on Wednesday.

“This is something that’s got to happen. ObamaCare was a first step in advancing this country, but I won’t rest until every American has a basic security that comes with having access to affordable health care,” Booker told the New Jersey outlet.

It seems certain at this point that the party’s 2020 nominee will campaign on something to the left of Hillary Clinton’s pro-Obamacare incrementalism; in all likelihood, that something will be a version of single-payer.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have proven unable to reverse president Obama’s landmark legislative accomplishment. The GOP proposal that is still making (increasingly lonely) rounds in the capitol, Cassidy-Graham, is more of a reform of Obamacare than a repeal.

In August, Peter Suderman wrote that “the future of health policy politics is Republicans defending something like Obamacare and Democrats pushing for something like single-payer.” With the Democrats marching left and the Republicans paralyzed, this seems increasingly likely to hold up.

The interesting thing about this new dynamic is that both the moderate wing of the GOP and the hardliners can claim vindication from it. Referencing Suderman’s prediction, David Frum, the Republican intellectual who in 2010 encouraged his party (in vain) to compromise with the Democrats on healthcare reform, remarked on Twitter that “my mistake was being 7 years ahead of the times.”

But the don’t-give-an-inch conservative hardliners could also argue that their views are being confirmed. They warned of a slippery slope from Obamacare, a relatively moderate bill, to “socialized medicine.” And, they might say, Bernie Sanders’ slow-moving triumph over the Democratic Party proves that they were right.

As the Overton window moves on healthcare, Republican moderates will become more convinced of the need to make only moderate reforms to the existing law to blunt the push for single-payer. And the right wing of the party will become more convinced of the need for total repeal to flatten the slippery slope. This stylistic debate—”fighter” vs. “squish”—also gets to the core of the Republican identity crisis on issues like immigration and religious liberty.

The Democrats are moving toward single-payer because they believe (probably rightly) that it will excite their base. But perhaps the even bigger advantage is that it drives a wedge into their opposition, exacerbating deep tensions and opening up old wounds.

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Stateless Saakashvili Storms Ukraine

Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian ex-President and former Governor of Odessa, made a dramatic return to Ukraine on Sunday after being stripped of his citizenship by President Petro Poroshenko. Following a daylong drama that first saw the Ukrainian authorities halting Saakashvili’s train from Poland, the stateless politician finally crossed the border with the help of a supportive mob. Financial Times captures the scene:

As night began to fall on Ukraine’s Shegini-Medyka border crossing with Poland, a crowd of some 100 supporters, based on the Ukrainian side, broke through guards. They charged hundreds of metres past border posts to neutral territory where the Georgian was being prevented from trying to enter Ukraine using his revoked domestic passport. The crowds then pushed him past Ukrainian border posts into the country, without going through formalities.

Once on Ukrainian soil, the former leader of Georgia’s 2007 Rose Revolution who has reinvented himself as a challenger to Ukraine’s pro-western President Petro Poroshenko, spoke to a local television station to sum up the drama: “The people decided it this way … you saw the video, how it happened,” he said, before reportedly being ushered into a car heading for Lviv, a nearby provincial capital. […]

His attempt to re-enter Ukraine was accompanied by a media circus and opposition politicians including the former premier Yulia Tymoshenko. It came just over a month after Mr Poroshenko raised eyebrows by revoking the citizenship of his former university friend following a bitter falling out.

Saakashvili’s crossing was captured on video by several sources. It’s a sorry spectacle that is sure to embarrass Kyiv, showing how a riled-up crowd of supporters was able to shove past a line of border guards, dragging Saakashvili across with them:

Вот так Саакашвили просто занесли на руках в Украину практически. Пограничники стояли pic.twitter.com/RmdD1vMNzR

— Картопляний гівнюк (@belamova) September 10, 2017

But the laxity of Ukraine’s border enforcement may be the least of President Poroshenko’s worries now. In seeking to sideline Saakashvili by revoking his citizenship, Poroshenko may have accidentally given him a bigger platform than ever. Saakashvili’s dramatic journey back to Ukraine was an extended publicity stunt, allowing him to paint himself as a persecuted victim of the corrupt Ukrainian President. It was also a transparent attempt to launch a political comeback ahead of 2019’s elections—and in that effort, Saakashvili seems to have had a little help from his friends. His return was publicly aided by Ukraine’s former PM Yulia Tymoshenko and the young anti-corruption activist Mustafa Nayyem, suggesting a tacit opposition alliance to challenge Poroshenko in 2019.

Saakashvili’s return thus creates a political conundrum for President Poroshenko, who would like to get rid of a prominent rival but is faced with unpalatable choices. He could lock Saakashvili up on criminal charges currently being filed by the Prosecutor General, risking backlash and accusations of authoritarian overreach. He could extradite Saakashvili to his native Georgia, where he is wanted by his rivals on politically motivated charges. Or he could tolerate the grandstanding Georgian’s presence in Ukraine, calculating that a foreign politician with only 2 percent support does not pose a serious threat anyway.

Whatever happens in the showdown to come, Ukraine itself is likely to be the loser. Saakashvili’s partisans may cheer his comeback, but the incident reflects poorly on all involved—and paints a damning picture of Ukraine’s inability to overcome its endemic corruption and dysfunction.

President Poroshenko certainly deserves his share of the blame: despite his paeans to Western values and some meaningful reforms, he has largely ruled like an oligarch, stashing his money abroad and actively seeking to undermine anti-corruption activists who might expose his inner circle. Saakashvili was not wrong to criticize Poroshenko on these grounds. If Poroshenko had heeded those criticisms rather than stifling them, he may not have brought the current crisis upon himself.

At the same time, Saakashvili himself is hardly blameless, nor does he offer a compelling way forward for Ukraine. The brash Georgian has lately seemed more showman than statesman, a self-promoting opportunist eager to boost his public profile and perennially seeking a return to power. By many accounts, Saakashvili only turned on Poroshenko because the latter passed him over for the role of Prime Minister; his opposition is thus more about power than principle. Saakashvili excels at playing the crusading reformer for Western audiences, but he failed to clean up Odessa, and his democratic record in Georgia is far from spotless. In any case, his willingness to illegally charge a border with a mob at his back hardly suggests much respect for the rule of law.

And Saakashvili’s allies do not come off much better. Yulia Tymoshenko, an ever-ambitious political animal, is clearly in a marriage of convenience with Saakashvili as she pursues the presidency. And the support of Mustafa Nayyem—the young journalist-turned-MP who helped lead the 2013 Euromaidan protests—only suggests that the new generation of pro-Westerners is not above the scuzzy tactics and unpalatable alliances that have characterized Ukrainian politics for so long.

Saakashvili may gain a few approval points for channeling the public’s legitimate outrage at the Poroshenko government. But ultimately, the circumstances of his return are likely to exacerbate divisions within Ukraine while serving as catnip for its enemies. The footage of the border clashes is sure to play on a loop on Russian television, reinforcing familiar talking points: that Ukraine is a broken state incapable of policing its borders or enforcing its laws, riven by factional rivalries and subject to the whims of mobs. Saakashvili’s brazen defiance of Ukrainian law is sure to tempt Poroshenko to further authoritarian excess. And the competition is likely to set off an intensified round of elite jockeying before the 2019 elections, while leaving Ukraine’s underlying pathologies unaddressed.

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Russia: Why Not Buy It Out?

As Putin’s Russia and the Western world seem to inch their way ever closer to a new Cold War, debate in the United States has turned toward several proposals to contain Russia. One aspect of that debate, however, has frequently gotten short shrift: cost.

This is unfortunate, for the price tag of containment could be huge. From 2007 to 2016, while annual global military expenditures grew by $215 billion, NATO nations, the United States included, were slowly cutting down their overall defense allocations; billions of dollars will be needed every year to reverse this trend. We would do well to pause a moment and ask ourselves: Why should the West risk exhausting itself when Russia is ruled not by Stalin- or Hitler-like leaders obsessed by ideologies oriented toward world domination but rather by a gang of kleptocrats who put their money in Western banks, buy Western real estate, educate their children abroad, and hold fo­reign passports or residence permits.

These people do not rule Russia as they would if they truly sought global or even regional domination. Rather they rule so as to capitalize on their ownership of “Russia, Inc.” When something upsets this arrangement, they grow annoyed. During periods of growth (e.g. 2000–07) or of stable recovery (for example, 2009–11), for instance, Russia has been quite “civilized,” but when harder times have approached (as in 2008, or in 2014–15) it has fought low and dirty. It’s as if the Kremlin were trying to substitute a lack of financial capitalization with some additional form of “po­litical” capitalization.

This insight lends itself to a rather unconventional so­lution to the West’s looming challenges with respect to Russia. If Russia in fact acts not as a rationally organized modern nation but rather as a “corporate state” under the ownership of local kleptocrats, then its conduct would be better described not as intergovernmental but intercorporate. And in the corporate world the best possible move to be made with respect to a small but aggressive company is to try to buy it out and merge it within a larger business conglomerate.

How much, then, would Russia cost? By this I mean not the price of its people, or its territory, or its natural we­a­lth, but the assets which are considered by the ruling bureaucracy as its property? The answer is simple: All Russian companies traded on the Moscow exchange were valued at 33.6 trillion rubles as of August 1, 2017, or $559 billion, placing it somewhere in bet­ween Alphabet and Microsoft. There are of course some privately owned assets, as well as the income extracted from state unitary corporations, but if we double the above amount it still only comes to $1.1-1.2 trillion. At the same time we should deduct some assets that be­long to “real” foreign investors (that is, not Russian-controlled offshore companies) and to the businessmen who do not want to sell their companies under any circumstances. So let’s settle on a rough estimate of $1 trillion.

Since 2008, the dollar value of all these assets has plunged by at least two thirds: On May 19, 2008 the record valuations and a strong “pre-Crimea” ruble put the overall capitalization of Russian public corporations at $1.52 trillion. The downward trend has hardly pleased the Russian ruling class. I would also say that up until now the assets controlled by the elite have produced positive returns equaling perhaps 10-12 percent of their market value—or as much as $65-85 billion annually. For some reason this figure corresponds to the net capital flight from the country (of­fici­al­ly estimated at $644.7 billion for 2008–16 by the Bank of Russia). This means that the “owners” are trying to extract as much wealth as they can from Russia (I’m not talking abo­ut the greatest sell-offs by the “official” billionaires like Prokhorov or by the team be­hind the Alfa Group). Guess what would happen if all these pe­ople were offered a “fair” price for their property—for example, $2 trillion, or thirty times their net annual profits?

The Russian political and business elite isn’t behaving as if it had any serious hopes for stability thirty years down the line. Indeed a huge part of the elite is quite prepared to lose all its Russia-ba­sed assets tomorrow. Would these people drive a hard bargain if they got a good bid from a seri­ous buyer? I doubt it.

But how huge a sum is $2 trillion really? It’s less than a half of the $4.79 trillion the United States has al­ready spent on a useless war in Iraq. It’s roughly two U.S. defense bud­gets ($824.7 billion for FY 2017/18). One may recall that the Fede­ral Reserve balance sheet increased by $1.45 trillion in just two months in 2008 when the government decided to save America’s big banks. Is it such a big deal to do this once again? I don’t think so. Last, but not least, $2 trillion equals a tenth of the U.S. federal debt—the sum by which this debt increases every two years. This is hardly a high price for wiping out the greatest existential threat to the United States.

We shouldn’t think of this $2 trillion as money wasted and forgotten. A Russia buyout could become the best ever investment made by the U.S. government. Rus­sian companies are grossly undervalued, trading at a mere fraction of the­ir U.S. counterparts. If Russia were someday to acquire a more responsible leadership and a more transpa­rent judicial system—in other words if Russia were one day to become a more “normal” country rather than one that positions itself contra mundum—these assets would rise in value at least fivefold. In 2008 the Treasury bo­ught a majority stake in the AIG insurance company for $40 billion and sold it to investors by the end of 2012 for a gain of $23 billion—but in our case the return on investment could be even higher, and the profits even more massive.

Such a deal might be equally beneficial for all parties. Naturally one could presume that everyone on the Russian side would receive immunity from prosecution for financial crimes committed before the deal; that all the money deposited to escrow accounts would be free from any money-laundering pro­bes; and that the participants offering assets worth more than $20 million would be granted Western pas­s­ports or permanent residency permits. So the Russian bureaucracy’s business affa­irs would end with a peace, not a truce. The money the West would spend on this deal, moreover, would actually remain inside Western economies, being reinvested into real estate, stocks, and other assets in the developed nations. Western businesses would get an extraordinary new market, open to the world and in need of being “civilized”: an immense wealth of resources and talent. And, of course, ordinary Russians would beco­me the biggest beneficiaries, since the grand deal would bring law and acco­unta­bi­lity to a vast land that has never before experienced such things.

The majority of Russia’s problems arose from the fact that its leadership has fought to enrich itself while pretending be a modern, law-abiding political elite. The only difficulty Russia faces today is the impossibility for the elite of legalizing its wealth in the globalized world—this fact alone, and nothing else, makes Russia hostile to this world. If the West could invent a tool to resolve this problem, it might get Russia and its people—a people that is rational and European in its essential features—on board, securing a crucial advantage in a turbulent world.

One might say this project is unrealistic because it lumps together politics and business. I might agree with that—but perhaps we should try to realize it anyway, as the two have already been thoroughly mixed in the form of the larger-than-life businessman now occupying the White House.

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Macron Gins Up Great Expectations in Greece

French President Emmanuel Macron kicked off his Eurozone reform drive with a dramatic speech in Athens on Thursday, warning that the EU’s democratic legitimacy is at stake if ambitious reforms are not pursued. He also gave a preview of what those reforms might look like, per Politico:

French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday urged eurozone members to move with “maximum ambition” toward adopting a common budget and finance minister, in defiance of Germany’s position.

Speaking in Greece alongside President Prokopios Pavlopoulos, Macron heaped praise on his hosts for their efforts to carry out reforms and stay in the eurozone despite a crippling debt load and stringent savings goals.

To prevent future existential crises in the EU, the French president called for deeper integration between eurozone states, including a “real eurozone budget [and a] a permanent finance minister who leads this executive.”

“This is a democratic responsibility on the eurozone level, and as such it requires maximum ambition,” he added.

Macron’s speech was suitably dramatic for a President who has styled himself after the Roman god Jupiter: standing in the birthplace of Western democracy with the Parthenon looming behind him, Macron presented himself as a visionary leader capable of transforming Europe at a time when its “sovereignty, democracy and trust are in danger.” But those lofty expectations could come back to haunt Macron, whose blueprint for Eurozone reform looks likely to please Athens but antagonize Berlin.

Throughout his Greek trip, Macron offered up proposals that were music to Greek ears. He bashed the International Monetary Fund, saying the IMF should cease making fiscal demands of Athens and had “no place in EU affairs.” He offered soothing words about the heavy costs borne by ordinary Greeks due to austerity, and called on other European countries to support debt relief for Athens. And he promoted an ambitious agenda of fiscal integration that would be favorable to Greek interests, including a common Eurozone budget, parliament, and finance minister to allow for more equitable and accountable fiscal decision-making.

But the same words that endear Macron to Greece could put him on a collision course with Germany. While Macron has been advocating a reform agenda of “maximum ambition,” Angela Merkel has been busy tempering expectations. As Politico reported this past week, Merkel has shown interest in a European Monetary Fund (also backed by Macron) which would act as a glorified version of the existing European rescue fund. But she has been noncommittal and unenthused about more sweeping reform that could diminish Germany’s say in the Eurozone and cause more fiscal transfers to the south. Macron’s talk of debt relief and excluding the IMF is not going to go over well among the famously close-fisted Germans, who have previously demanded the IMF’s involvement as a condition of signing on to Greek bailouts.

Macron is surely aware of these realities, and he may well be consciously staking out an ambitious opening bid with an eye toward a more realistic “grand bargain” with Germany. But it is also possible that he has miscalculated, overpromising to the Greeks and overestimating Merkel’s political flexibility on reform. In that case, Macron will find himself in a bruising battle with Merkel this fall as he seeks to extract German concessions—and he could fall swiftly out of favor with Europe’s south if he is unable to deliver.

One thing is for sure: Macron is not shy about setting expectations high. “Are you afraid of a European ambition that will enable us to win back our sovereignty, our democracy, our confidence?” he asked in Athens. “Have this crazy ambition. I promise you we will succeed.” Macron’s ability to deliver on that promise could make or break his reputation—and if you take his word for it, the EU itself.

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Betsy DeVos Came Out Swinging for Due Process on Campus. Will It Matter?

In an address at George Mason University Law School yesterday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issued a blistering indictment of the state of campus sexual assault tribunals. In the course of its well-meaning efforts to combat sexual assault on campus, she said, the Obama Administration had overreached and “weaponized Title IX,” forcing campuses to adopt overly broad definitions of sexual misconduct and arbitrary and unfair “kangaroo court” processes that doesn’t serve the interests of victims or the accused.

DeVos’ initiative to review the federal government’s Title IX regulations is a welcome step forward. In all likelihood, the Department of Education will emerge with a more balanced and less ideological set of guidelines for how colleges should handle accusations of sexual misconduct. But this might not have as much of an effect on the ground as its proponents hope and its opponents fear.

First, because this is a highly polarized culture war issue, colleges know the pendulum could swing again the next time a Democratic president staffs the Education Department. It may be a year or more before DeVos’ rulemaking process is completed and the new regulations are sent out, and many college administrators may choose to drag their feet with the implementation as they see how the political winds are blowing. A President Kamala Harris, for example, would be likely to re-install left-wing bureaucrats who, once in power, would bring down the hammer on colleges that had stepped back from their Obama-era policies.

Second, there is nowhere in American life (except perhaps at Hollywood awards ceremonies) where Donald Trump is viewed as more illegitimate than in academia. Any regulations emanating from his executive branch will automatically be viewed with suspicion and resistance. This is especially (and perhaps understandably) so with regulations relating to sexual misconduct, given that the President himself has been accused of repeatedly assaulting women. So while colleges willingly complied with the Obama Administration’s guidance, they may look for legal and bureaucratic means to block or soft-pedal DeVos’.

Third, the dynamics of campus politics make it difficult for administrators to roll back the excesses of the “sex bureaucracy” that has grown exponentially in recent years. Emily Yoffe reported in the Atlantic that “Harvard now has 55 Title IX coordinators.” There will be institutional pressure to keep them; any college president who tried to roll back such a system knows that he would face backlash and protests.

To be sure, DeVos’ new approach will take some of the pressure off of colleges to create even more draconian policies. PR-conscious administrators may be less likely to fear federal investigations and might therefore be less likely to overreact by punishing students who aren’t guilty. But it’s also likely, given all of the dynamics outlined above, that a significant portion of the new campus policies will stay. Insofar as Obama’s initiative did stop campus administrators from sweeping legitimate sexual assault charges under the rug, this is a good thing. But insofar as academia has created its own parallel justice system that really has in many cases abandoned fundamental ideas of fairness, it’s not.

The way to move closer to a lasting solution to the problem is for Congress to pass legislation clarifying the scope and limits of Title IX. Congress has the power to do more to address sexual assault than the Department of Education does on its own, and its legislation would carry more force than rules that would swing back and forth with each new administration. But Congress’ plate is rather full at the moment, so we shouldn’t expect this kind of effort anytime soon.

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Betsy DeVos Came Out Swinging for Due Process on Campus. Will it Matter?

In an address at George Mason University Law School yesterday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issued a blistering indictment of the state of campus sexual assault tribunals. In the course of its well-meaning efforts to combat sexual assault on campus, she said, the Obama Administration had overreached and “weaponized Title IX,” forcing campuses to adopt overly broad definitions of sexual misconduct and arbitrary and unfair “kangaroo court” processes that doesn’t serve the interests of victims or the accused.

DeVos’ initiative to review the federal government’s Title IX regulations is a welcome step forward. In all likelihood, the Department of Education will emerge with a more balanced and less ideological set of guidelines for how colleges should handle accusations of sexual misconduct. But this might not have as much of an effect on the ground as its proponents hope and its opponents fear.

First, because this is a highly polarized culture war issue, colleges know the pendulum could swing again the next time a Democratic president staffs the Education Department. It may be a year or more before DeVos’ rulemaking process is completed and the new regulations are sent out, and many college administrators may choose to drag their feet with the implementation as they see how the political winds are blowing. A President Kamala Harris, for example, would be likely to re-install left-wing bureaucrats who, once in power, would bring down the hammer on colleges that had stepped back from their Obama-era policies.

Second, there is nowhere in American life (except perhaps at Hollywood awards ceremonies) where Donald Trump is viewed as more illegitimate than in academia. Any regulations emanating from his executive branch will automatically be viewed with suspicion and resistance. This is especially (and perhaps understandably) so with regulations relating to sexual misconduct, given that the President himself has been accused of repeatedly assaulting women. So while colleges willingly complied with the Obama Administration’s guidance, they may look for legal and bureaucratic means to block or soft-pedal DeVos’.

Third, the dynamics of campus politics make it difficult for administrators to roll back the excesses of the “sex bureaucracy” that has grown exponentially in recent years. Emily Yoffe reported in the Atlantic that “Harvard now has 55 Title IX coordinators.” There will be institutional pressure to keep them; any college president who tried to roll back such a system knows that he would face backlash and protests.

To be sure, DeVos’ new approach will take some of the pressure off of colleges to create even more draconian policies. PR-conscious administrators may be less likely to fear federal investigations and might therefore be less likely to overreact by punishing students who aren’t guilty. But it’s also likely, given all of the dynamics outlined above, that a significant portion of the new campus policies will stay. Insofar as Obama’s initiative did stop campus administrators from sweeping legitimate sexual assault charges under the rug, this is a good thing. But insofar as academia has created its own parallel justice system that really has in many cases abandoned fundamental ideas of fairness, it’s not.

The way to move closer to a lasting solution to the problem is for Congress to pass legislation clarifying the scope and limits of Title IX. Congress has the power to do more to address sexual assault than the Department of Education does on its own, and its legislation would carry more force than rules that would swing back and forth with each new administration. But Congress’ plate is rather full at the moment, so we shouldn’t expect this kind of effort anytime soon.

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Sechin’s Sausages

A high-profile extortion trial in Russia of a former federal minister has officially crossed over into the realm of the absurd. What began as a sting operation involving a suitcase containing $2 million in cash has ended up revealing the seamiest underbelly of the Russian oil industry: the home-made sausages of Rosneft’s notorious CEO Igor Sechin.

Regular readers will remember the case from a year ago. In November of this past year, Alexey Ulyukaev, then serving as Minister for Economic Development, was arrested by FSB officers when leaving Rosneft’s headquarters in the center of Moscow. The scene—with Ulyukaev at first refusing to leave the car in disbelief, then desperately trying to make phone calls—was redolent of Stalin’s 1930s. The Minister was caught with a bag full of cash. He hadn’t touched the money, but his fingerprints were later found on the bag. Ulyukaev was charged with extortion: He had allegedly demanded money from Sechin for approving the sale of the oil company Bashneft to Sechin’s Rosneft. Initially Ulyukaev and his ministry were against the deal (which was billed as a privatization) because a controlling majority of shares in both companies belonged to the government. But later Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s cabinet approved the transaction, and Minister Ulyukaev was the one who announced the decision.

This week, the prosecution presented the court with two tapes of Sechin speaking to Ulyukaev. Nowhere on those tapes are either Bashneft or Rosneft mentioned by name. The first tape is a telephone conversation between the two, with Sechin inviting Ulyukaev to Rosneft’s headquarters to “see the company” and discuss things. The second tape was recorded in Rosneft’s office, and it starts with Sechin asking his assistant to bring tea and “a basket with sausages” into the room. The two then seem to discuss Rosneft, with Sechin bragging to Ulyukaev about his company’s success. Minutes later, Sechin once again inquires about the basket of sausages. Soon thereafter, a third man is heard saying “the Ivanychs” while presumably presenting the basket.

Rosneft’s CEO is a hunter, and he makes his own sausage products with deer meat at his own private factory. Sechin’s middle name is Ivanych, and informally he is usually called Igor Ivanych. (There is another public servant in Russia with the same first and middle name, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, and to distinguish between the two Sechin is always called “the real Igor Ivanych.”) The newspaper Vedomosti reported that Sechin frequently presents a basket of 16 different kinds of home-made sausages as a gift to his business partners. It published a picture of such a basket.

Next, the two can be heard putting on their coats. Ulyukaev asks, “And the basket?” Sechin replies, “Yes, take the basket,” and the two leave.

Minutes later, when Alexey Ulyukaev was sitting in his car, the FSB appeared and arrested him. They found a basket and a bag in the trunk of his car. When asked what is in the bag, the Minister reportedly said “a good wine.” The former Minister later testified that he thought the suitcase Sechin gave him contained wine and sausages, and accused Rosneft’s CEO and head of security, General Anton Feoktistov (a long-time Sechin protégé who came to Rosneft from the FSB’s 6th Service, a counterintelligence operation), of entrapment, a felony under Russia’s criminal code.

A couple of days after the bust, Vladimir Putin said that Minister Ulyukaev had been under FSB surveillance for a year.

The case was bizarre enough before Sechin’s sausages made an appearance; as I noted a year ago, there are at least two elements that suggest that the official story is absolute garbage. First of all, Rosneft is well known to be the equivalent of a personal slush fund for Vladimir Putin. So in any deal concerning Rosneft, the ultimate decision comes directly from Russia’s President and no one else. Not only is a lowly federal minister without an ounce of authority in such matters, but even Prime Minister Medvedev would also not have a say. Rosneftegaz, a state-owned company that accumulates profits from Rosneft, Gazprom, and energy firm Inter RAO, doesn’t report to the Cabinet despite laws saying it ought to. It sends its financial reports directly to Putin. The Finance Ministry, which is responsible for the federal budget, doesn’t know how much profit Rosneft brings in annually. Ulyukaev, just like any other minister, was simply irrelevant to the decision-making process in the so-called “privatization” of Bashneft by Rosneft.

Secondly, as Ilya Shumanov, the Deputy Chief of Transparency International’s Russian office quipped, $2 million is the cost of a deputy mayor in Russia, not what one might have to pay a full-fledged federal minister. (On the other hand, that amount of money fits perfectly in a briefcase!) And even if Ulyukaev had offered himself for cheap, who in his right mind takes bribes in cash? As we know from Alexey Navalny’s investigation into Dmitry Medvedev’s schemes—investigations that brought thousands of protesters out to the streets in March—high-profile Russian public servants prefer to avail themselves of assets like mansions and yachts instead of owning them outright.

During the year that Alexey Ulyukaev spent under house arrest, the case against him mutated. Initially the prosecution claimed that the meeting between Ulyukaev and Sechin was arranged by Andrey Kostin, the CEO of VTB bank. By the time the trial started, Kostin’s name had conspicuously disappeared from the case materials. And when Sechin submitted a report to the FSB saying that Ulyukaev had extorted a bribe from him, he named Moscow as the place the crime was committed. However, the final accusation presented in court states that Ulyukaev demanded money during a business trip the two took to Goa, India, on October 15, 2016. By that day, the Bashneft privatization deal had already occurred. This date mismatch is explained away by an allegation that Ulyukaev had threatened to obstruct future Rosneft deals.

Furthermore, preparations for the trial were accompanied by the notable resignation of General Anton Feoktistov from Rosneft, and his later dismissal from military service, signed by Vladimir Putin a couple of weeks ago.

And finally, the official indictment presented in court doesn’t say a word about the FSB’s year-long cultivation of the Minister. Indeed, the trial is no longer an FSB case against him. It is Igor Sechin accusing Ulyukaev of extortion, and Alexey Ulyukaev accusing Sechin of entrapment. The government appears to be standing aside.

“So instead of a story of a corrupted official under FSB surveillance,” Konstantin Gaaze wrote on the Carnegie website, “the court is now dealing with a case of ‘one word against another’: Sechin’s testimony against Ulyukaev’s.”

Before the trial got underway in August, Rosneft’s spokesman said that if subpoenaed, Igor Sechin would testify in court to “fulfill his civic obligations.” As the trial got started, Russian media reported that the prosecution had listed Sechin as a witness, but Rosneft’s CEO has not yet appeared in court. When asked earlier this week at the BRICS summit in China about the trial, Sechin didn’t mince words:

I will testify right away. Being a minister, Ulyukaev demanded illegal rewards, he defined the amount himself, came to get it, took it with his own hands to the car, and attempted to drive away. According to the Russian Criminal Code, this is a crime. There is nothing to argue about.

And today, raising the temperature even more, Sechin called the leaking of the tapes an act of “cretinism,” as the tapes contain top secret information. He also said that the trial should not be held in public.

As Gaaze notes, many have long been wondering when Sechin would “break his own neck” with his escapades. Maybe that moment has arrived, or maybe he just “breaks his leg” and loses the case in embarrassment. Whatever was originally behind Sechin’s play against Ulyukaev—a year ago, I suspected that it was actually a strike against Medvedev—today it increasingly looks like the commanding heights of Putin’s Power Vertical have decided to wash their hands of the whole affair, leave it to the courts to decide, and let the chips fall where they may. The next thing to watch for is whether or not Sechin is actually subpoenaed to testify. If so, we can probably conclude that the Rosneft CEO is not a powerful enough player in Putin’s Russia to put a federal minister in jail on his own.

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