Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 137

Israel Hits Syrian Chemical Weapons Plant

Last night, a Syrian military site linked to the production of chemical weapons and precision rockets blew up. As has so frequently been the case with regime targets unexpectedly being obliterated, no party claimed responsibility for attacking the facility. Nonetheless, the Syrian military has ascribed responsibility for the attack correctly: Israel hit the plant.

This would not be the first major Israeli strike inside Syria. Just last month, the outgoing commander of the Israeli Air Force acknowledged that they had hit Hezbollah in Syria nearly 100 times. The air strike is nonetheless significant for several reasons, at least three of which are laid out by former Israeli Air Force general and head of military intelligence Amos Yadlin:

7. 2. Israel intends to enforce its redlines despite the fact that the great powers are ignoring them.

— Amos Yadlin (@YadlinAmos) September 7, 2017

8 .3. The presence of Russian air defense does not prevent airstrikes attributed to Israel.

— Amos Yadlin (@YadlinAmos) September 7, 2017

Those great powers unfortunately include not just Iran and Russia who aid and abet the Assad the regime but also, increasingly, the United States. Despite the Tomahawk missile strike in April against the Syrian base suspected of launching a Sarin gas attack, President Trump has signaled that the has no interest in confronting the Syrian regime’s other activities. The President’s decision to end support for anti-Assad rebels and to negotiate ceasefires with Russia has prompted unusually open criticism of the President from Prime Minister Netanyahu. In a press conference today with the Emir of Kuwait, President Trump said “As far as Syria is concerned, we have very little to do with Syria other than killing ISIS.” Leaving aside how short-sighted that is on the face of it, that approach is plainly insufficient for Israel’s security needs.

The target of the strike is also telling in regards to what exactly those requirements might be. While much of the media coverage is focused on the site’s production of chemical weapons, it seems just as if not more likely that the Israelis are worried about its production of precision-guided missiles. While Hezbollah has accrued an arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles, many of the Israeli strikes in Syria have interdicted long range and precision missile shipments that the group would need to carry out its threats to attack Israeli ports and David Ben Gurion Airport, among other critical infrastructure targets. While the possibility that the Syrians might even be trying to transfer chemical weapons to Hezbollah can’t be discounted, that doesn’t seem to have been the focus of their efforts in the past several years.

The strikes also make clear that even after Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war, an attack on a major Syrian regime military facility need not produce catastrophic escalation. As we’ve written before, the Obama administration’s excuses for foregoing a military option in Syria, that it would somehow take the U.S. down the path to regime change, have been proven demonstrably false by the Israelis again and again. Of course, the Israelis also have the advantage that they can exercise discretion and ambiguity after such airstrikes. The United States might carry a big stick, but seems to be utterly incapable of speaking softly about it.

The most important conclusion, however, is that the broader regional problems caused by the Syrian civil war are not going away anytime soon. The Assad regime is now more deeply linked to Iran and Hezbollah than ever before, and the cessation of the conflict will only make the transfer of materiel between them easier. For the Israelis, the next war with Hezbollah is clearly a question of “when,” not “if.” What Syria’s role in that war might be is of course unknown, but the Assad regime owes Hezbollah some serious favors, and will be strongly encouraged by Iran. While Israel is America’s most important regional ally, they aren’t the only one. As with Israel, there’s growing daylight between the United States and partners like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—not to mention differences between those countries themselves—about what to do as the Syrian civil war draws to a close. Now would be a very good time to work with partner nations to lay out the U.S. strategy for addressing their concerns. “Killing ISIS” just isn’t going to cut it.

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They Were What They Ate

What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

by Laura Shapiro

Viking, 2017, 320 pp., $27

Unable to sleep one night, food impresario extraordinaire Laura Shapiro pulled out a biography of diarist Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855), sister of the more famous William. She sought to lull herself back to sleep with the sweet, calm tale of young Dorothy keeping house for her brother at their home in Dove Cottage, enshrined in the glory of England’s Lake District. It might have worked; listen to how Shapiro puts it: “William devoting himself to poetry, Dorothy devoting herself to William, both of them aloft in reveries inspired by the mountains, the clouds, the birds and, of course, the daffodils.”

But after wearily skipping through a few chapters, Shapiro was suddenly wide awake again. Dorothy is at one point in the biography described as dining on black pudding— “that stodgy mess of blood and oatmeal”— served by a desultory cook in a dreary village remote from the beauty of the Lake District and the imagery of Dorothy’s own, well-known Grasmere Journal (1802) in which she recorded her time with her brother there.

Shapiro became intensely curious about whatever had happened to “daffodil girl,” as Shapiro calls her —eventually tracking the trail of clues from Dorothy’s own “food story.” That, in turn, led to Shapiro’s book about the lives of six famous women from different centuries and continents with “food right up front”—where she believes it belongs.

That’s because, according to Shapiro, “food always talks.” So opening a window on just what these six women—Rosa Lewis, Barbara Pym, Dorothy Wordsworth, Eva Braun, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Helen Gurley Brown—cooked and ate casts a very different light, she argues, on the usual narrative of their lives.

In the era of a global cultural bingeing on food, cookbooks, and celebrity chefs—a form of escapism, one suspects, from truly important but inedible political realities—that perspective might not seem so odd. But, as Shapiro points out, this gastromania we now behold is relatively recent, as well as focused on the now-fashionable intricacies of exploring food and cooking as ends in themselves.  She has an entirely different way to use food in mind:

Biography as it is traditionally practised still tends to honor the old fashioned custom of keeping a polite distance from food. We’re meant to read the lives of important people as if they never bothered with breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or took a coffee break, or stopped for a hot dog on the street, or wandered downstairs for a few spoonfuls of chocolate pudding in the middle of the night. History respects the food stories of chefs and cookbook writers and perhaps takes note when a painter or a politician happens to be a gastronome as well; but in the published account of most other lives, the food has been lost.

Shapiro has long been fascinated by what prompts people to cook and eat the way they do, marveling at the emotional and psychological baggage they bring to the table, often without even noticing how it helps to define them. She is the author of books with such titles as Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (2008), Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (2005), and a (inevitable?) 2007 biography of Julia Child to boot.

Her latest offering seeks to elevate what is usually treated as insignificant domestic “trivia”—food habits—into a central mode of interpretation. What She Ate emerged out of a revelation: “What struck me as I followed the paper trail through each life was that while extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary women, food makes them recognizable. If the emotional substance of these food stories rings familiar, it’s because they tend to be as messy and discomfiting as our own.”

Shapiro accepts that the women she chose to write about have already attracted enough scholarship, gossip, and anecdotes over the years to win a secure place in history. She still insists that digging deeper into each woman’s food story takes author and reader alike to a “more tenuous emotional realm’’ in understanding them. What she means by that she makes explicit: “It turns out our food stories don’t always honor what’s smartest and most dignified about us. More often they go straight to what’s neediest.”

This sort of orthogonal para-Freudian analysis risks becoming more an exploration of the author’s own tenuous intellectual realm than of her subjects. In determinedly linking the limited facts and records of food eaten—liked and disliked, picked at and gorged upon—with Shapiro’s own interpretation of their emotions and experiences at and beyond the table, she makes many leaps of faith between table and her subjects’ more well-known qualities. Sometimes she lands on her feet; other times she seems to land smack in the mashed potatoes, splashing gravy hither and yon. But she is still able to track enough of a culinary record to help justify her version of what was really going on underneath those very public lives.

It’s a diverse group Shapiro has chosen, to be sure. As she concedes, she can hear the objections of all the women to her choice of introducing each of them with the meal the author thinks sums her up. So just as Dorothy’s chapter begins with the mystery of the black pudding dinner, the Rosa Lewis chapter opens with Lewis whispering to Shapiro the secret of King Edward’s favorite meal: boiled bacon and broad beans. This for a former Cockney scullery maid who went on to become one of the most famous cooks in pre-World War I England, helped by the approbation of that same King Edward, and who was welcomed into all the great houses of London. “Rosa is demanding a rewrite: she wants an elegant French entrée that will assure her the place she deserves in gastronomic history,” Shapiro mocks gently.

Mrs. Roosevelt, too, talks directly to Shapiro, acting again as appetite medium: “Eleanor is lecturing me, patiently, on the progressive rationale behind her luncheon menu.” That’s because the White House menu in the Roosevelt era is generally regarded as the worst in the history of the presidency. Ernest Hemingway, invited to dine there in 1937, told his mother-in-law that it was the worst meal he had ever eaten. He belatedly realized he should have followed the example of his fellow invitee and Eleanor’s good friend, Martha Gelhorn, whom he was surprised to see devouring three sandwiches while waiting in New York for the flight to Washington. Apparently everyone who was anyone in DC knew the rule for eating with the Roosevelts: “When you are invited to a meal at the White house, eat before you go.”

But while most historians blame Eleanor and her indifference to food for the deterioration in the quality of culinary experience in the White House, Shapiro posits a different theory: “In truth, what was happening at the White house table didn’t reflect Eleanor’s disdain for food, it reflected a welter of complicated feelings about being First Lady at all—a job she had never wanted and the public face of a marriage that tormented her.”

Eva Braun’s epigraph is a cheery invitation to Albert Speer to join her in a farewell bottle of champagne and some sweets. The catch is that the farewell was in Hitler’s bunker at the end of World War II, where Hitler and his mistress had been hiding out for several days just before they planned to kill themselves.

For Barbara Pym, the opening of the chapter is a description from one of her books of a meal of pale macaroni and cheese—lacking both sufficient salt and cheese. Pym’s books were often dismissed as tales of drab English spinsters pouring tea for the clergy. But Shapiro points out that Pym drew inspiration and passion from recording daily English life around her, including the details of how and what food was consumed, in order to describe personal character, social class, and sense of place with delicate but discerning irony. “Her favorite place to watch human behaviour was a restaurant, for there she could sit quietly in the background while people interacted with food. Each glimpse of the intimate relationship between the personal and the plate cried out to her.”

Helen Gurley Brown had an entirely different relationship with food, and with men.  Her life-long quest was to be sexually attractive to the “male gaze,” in particular to that of her husband David Brown. Her means of doing so was by remaining thin, thanks to her vigilant self-discipline about food.  So Shapiro’s chapter about her opens with Brown recounting that she would never eat with her husband at home, merely bringing him a “simple little repast” on a tray—perhaps Lean Cuisine or spaghetti and meatballs. Sometimes, she might have muesli with chopped prunes and milk before midnight if her weight was in check.  If not, it was back to tuna salad. Her dessert every night was an individual serving of sugar-free diet Jello with a dollop of Dannon light yogurt. “Fifty cals—heaven!”

Shapiro cannot resist extending such snatched glimpses of domestic habits into a more fulsome explanation of what drove these women’s emotional lives. So a young Dorothy Wordworth, for example, was ecstatic about the prospect of daily, ardent service to her massively talented brother, “so ardent she came to resemble one of those present day political wives whose gaze is permanently fixed on a god-like husband.” That included recording in her journal the details of quotidian living, what she fed him and what he liked to eat or even ignore, as he wrote poetry. Thus, for example: “While we were at Breakfast that is (for I had Breakfasted) he, with his Basin of Broth before him untouched & a little plate of Bread & butter, he wrote the Poem to a Butterfly.”

But William Wordsworth eventually married, creating a much more complicated domestic story that began with Dorothy fainting in bed on the wedding day. Shapiro raises but doesn’t answer historians’ questions about whether this reflected Dorothy’s incestuous love for her brother. She does, however, acknowledge that William’s marriage shifted the domestic center of gravity in Dove Cottage toward wife and mother Mary, and away from sister Dorothy, even as Dorothy remained with them for another quarter-century.  Eventually, she went forth to be a “fireside companion” to her curate nephew in the unprepossessing village of Whitwick, and to the equally unprepossessing routine of more black pudding dinners.

What is beyond dispute is that Dorothy became increasingly ill and was treated with laudanum, an opiate, mixed with wine or brandy. By the time she did return to William’s home, she was suffering from the dementia that accompanied addiction. What came to matter most to her at that point in her life was food.  She grew ever more demanding of ever more of it and steadily became more obese. Daffodil girl had completely disappeared from view, psychologically as well as physically.

By contrast, Rosa Lewis made her name and her unlikely career from a devotion to the preparation of food as a way of gaining entry into the drawing rooms as well as the kitchens of the most exclusive homes in London.  She took a job in the home of the Compte de Paris, an heir to the French throne exiled to England when the French made a second attempt at republicanism. But while the count lived in London, a French chef naturally accompanied him and Rosa was soon assisting in serving dinner to royalty from all over Europe while learning culinary skills in high demand in this “obsessively social era.” She later worked in the kitchen of one of the most social hostesses of the lot, Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston. When Lady Randolph’s royal guest, the future King Edward VII, made it known that he admired Rosa and her cooking, her social and culinary futures were assured. This was despite the social strictures of the time and the educational disadvantage of being a woman born to the lower classes when most English cooking was indeed terrible—though one would like to think still a cut above black pudding.

Rosa’s marital life was less successful, however. Her husband ran up huge debts while trying to manage the Cavendish hotel she bought with her own income. Rosa fired him from her life and business and based herself in what became the immensely stylish and popular Cavendish—at least until World War I changed English social tastes so much that she was left behind, pickled, as it were, in her reputation. Still, her 1952 funeral at St. James, Picadilly, was all she would have wanted, with piles of flowers sent by a roster of “brilliant names” from the London aristocracy.

In her prime, Rosa Lewis also introduced London to some of the tastes of the southern United States—which proved so popular that the luxury food shop Jacksons of Picadilly began stocking Virginia hams and brandied peaches.

Not that Rosa would ever have condoned the food tastes of Eleanor Roosevelt or comprehended “her bleak culinary reputation.” From early in their marriage, the Roosevelts did continue a Sunday night ritual wherein Eleanor made scrambled eggs for family and friends at the table in what was known as a “chafing dish.” But Eleanor’s interests from the 1920s onward were increasingly focused outside the home, particularly those involving women’s rights and a progressive political agenda.

In the midst of this activism she became interested in the science of home economics, which she defined as the effort to provide proper, utilitarian nourishment at low cost. She brought that effort to the White House in 1933, hiring a former acquaintance from the League of Women voters as housekeeper—Henrietta Nesbitt, who became the most reviled cook in presidential history.

By 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt was saying the main reason he wanted to win a fourth term was for the pleasure of firing Mrs. Nesbitt. Bess Truman finally did fire her, in exasperation. But why hadn’t Eleanor Roosevelt, given her husband’s antipathy to the food he was served?

Shapiro sounds sympathetic to the explanation of another biographer of the Roosevelts, Blanche Wiesen Cook, that this Eleanor’s way of seeking “revenge”—thrice daily—for her husband’s infidelity, which she first discovered back in 1918. In the White House, husband and wife almost always ate separately, with Franklin usually having meals in his study with his secretary, Missy LeHand, often after having a few friends over for cocktails.

But Shapiro’s main explanation is that Eleanor’s apathy about what was on her plate reflected her apathy about her marriage. Outside the confines of the White House, and later after Franklin’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt was very different, Shapiro argues. She was able to discover the delights of appetite and to learn “what food could mean when love did the cookin.”

Eva Braun was certainly in love with Hitler but did not go out in public with him, given the Führer’s constructed image of a man who had given himself wholly to the nation. He met Eva while she was still a teenager, and by the 1930s she was ensconced as the queen of Berghof, his mountain home.

Shapiro says that it was only at meals at Berghof that Eva was allowed to show herself off as Hitler’s beloved consort and “bask in the role for which she had trained by studying movie and fashion magazines.” That Hitler was a vegetarian apparently didn’t limit the appetites of his trusted inner circle of guests; he was served on a special tray while the guests feasted around him. His particular passion was sweets while hers was champagne. Shapiro still says that Eva treated food as a servant whose most important role was to keep her thin and looking beautiful in the many outfit she paraded in every day. Hitler believed women should be kept as far as possible from talk of politics, war, and world events; this suited Eva’s hollow-headed indifference to such issues perfectly.

But it is still remarkable, as demonstrated by her invitation to Speers, how sanguine she remained until the end. Hitler planned to shoot himself. Eva preferred taking cyanide. As she remarked to others: “I want to be a beautiful corpse.” Aged only 33 when she died, she probably was.

It seems that Helen Gurley Brown—very different from Eva Braun, and yet eerily similar in her joyful acceptance of the role of dieting sex object—was equally determined to maintain a similar fairy-tale quality in her own life. “David is a motion picture producer, forty-four, brainy, charming and sexy… And I got him,” she declared on the first page of what became her most famous book, Sex and the Single Woman, published in 1962. That Helen was no longer a single girl merely allowed her to give advice to those who were on how to also find and snare the men of their dreams. Such advice on sex was the basis of all her books as well as a constant theme of Cosmopolitan, of which she became editor in 1965.

But despite persistently declaring her passion for food, reciting recipes, and professing her delight in cooking for her husband (even if just heating up Lean Cuisine packages), the sort of sexual appeal for which Cosmopolitan and the persona of Helen Gurley Brown became famous was still based on the need for strict dieting: “For Helen, dieting was a mission that went well beyond weight loss. It was a crusade against every enemy she had ever imagined lurking in her future, from poverty to spinsterhood to a pitiable old age.” Be thin forever, she advised readers. Be thin at any price. And stay a “girl.” “Whatever your age you can stay cute and petite and sexually attractive,” she insisted to an interviewer years later, though this was hardly the message that dominated the alternative zeitgeist of the second half of the 1960s.

Not that Helen Gurley didn’t support feminist demands for equal pay and rights and abortion and affordable childcare. But to her, all that had no connection to staying a girl, or the reasons for it. “Perhaps that’s where we and Women’s Lib part company,” she wrote in 1970. “We are pleasing men not because they demand it or to get anything material from them but because we adore them, love to sleep with them, want one of our own and there aren’t enough to go around.”

In her subconscious is she really talking not about men but about that enormous hot fudge sundae she knows she’ll never eat? Is that food talking? Well, no one can really know—not Laura Shapiro and certainly not me.

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Germany Isn’t Anywhere Close to Its 2020 Climate Target

Germany has fashioned itself a new brand for the 21st century as the global green leader, but it’s nowhere close to meeting the ambitious greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets it set for itself. The German government has targeted a 40 percent reduction of GHG emissions by 2020, as compared to 1990 levels, but with less than three years to go the country remains far from achieving that goal. Berlin already admitted that the 40 percent goal likely wasn’t possible, and instead lowered its sights to a 35 percent reduction, but even that seems unlikely now. A new study from the green think tank Agora Energiewende says Germany is likely to achieve only a 30-31 percent reduction.

That report lays the blame for this “drastically missed” target at the feet of bargain prices for both oil and carbon. The global crude market is awash in supplies today, which has meant cheap oil products (like transportation fuel) for consumers. People are driving further and more often, and that’s not helping German efforts to cut emissions. The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is similarly flooded with supplies, though in this case it’s emissions allowances rather than barrels of crude. This glut of permits has produced a price of carbon far below what is necessary to incentivize heavy emitters to alter their behaviors, which (again) has made the German quest to cut GHGs more difficult.

Europe’s broken carbon market and today’s new oil reality are important trends to help understand why Germany is so far away from that 40 percent target, but the elephant in the room here is nuclear power. As part of Germany’s clean energy transition—its energiewende—nuclear power was phased out, a process hastened following the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Some environmentalists will have told themselves that the zero-emissions power produced by these nuclear reactors was replaced by Germany’s surging renewables sector, but wind and solar produce a much more intermittent type of power, unlike reliable nuclear workhorses. The perverse result is that even as Germany has lauded the “greening” of some parts of its energy mix, it’s had to increase its reliance on lignite coal—just about the brownest energy source around—to compensate for its shuttered nuclear fleet.

That’s the big “what if” of the energiewende: what would have happened if Germany had combined its lust for renewables with an level-headed, evidence-based approach to nuclear power? Undoubtedly Berlin would be well on its way to that 40 percent target. What Germany has accomplished in changing its energy mix is in many ways remarkable, but the fact that it’s going to miss its target by such a wide margin feels like a defeat, and it’s very much a self-imposed one.

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Indian Army Chief: We Must Brace for a Two-Front War

In the wake of the Doklam border standoff, India’s top-ranking army officer has shattered the illusion of rapprochement with Beijing. Speaking at a think tank in New Delhi, General Bipin Rawat warned that China is “flexing its muscles” along the border and that India should prepare for a possible two-front war with China and Pakistan. From The Guardian:

General Bipin Rawat referred to a recent 10-week standoff with the Chinese army in the Himalayas that ended last week. He said the situation could gradually snowball into a larger conflict on India’s northern border. Rawat said Pakistan on the western front could take advantage of such a situation.

[…]

Rawat said credible deterrence did not take away the threat of war. “Nuclear weapons are weapons of deterrence. Yes, they are. But to say that they can deter war or they will not allow nations to go to war, in our context that may also not be true,” the news agency quoted him as saying. […]

“We have to be prepared. In our context, therefore, warfare lies within the realm of reality,” Rawat said.

Rawat’s remarks come at an inopportune moment: at this past week’s BRICS summit, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi made a public show of burying the hatchet, and on Tuesday they pledged a return to “peaceful cooperation” after the Doklam crisis. Yesterday, optimistic editorials were already praising Xi and Modi for finding common ground at BRICS and getting relations “back on track.” Rawat’s candor has thrown a wrench into all this positivity, and China is predictably furious.

But the General’s remarks, however undiplomatic, do serve as a helpful reminder: the carefully worded communiqués and pleasant photo ops that characterize gabfests like the BRICS summit shed little light on the true state of play between rival powers. The more important developments happen on the ground and behind the scenes—and in both cases, signs confirm Rawat’s assessment that India and China are headed for confrontation rather than cooperation.

Take the recent border crisis, for instance: after the two countries reached a disengagement agreement to end the stand-off, it was publicly touted by both sides as a serious diplomatic achievement. But the details that have emerged about the deal suggest it was more a face-saving pretense than a lasting resolution. According to the Indian Express, both sides remain on the plateau and have merely withdrawn 150 meters each, a tentative retreat that has not changed the fundamental disagreement. India still expects China to continue its periodic incursions (in a “salami slicing”  strategy to gradually gobble up land, per Rawat), and has moved artillery and surveillance equipment closer to the border to keep a watchful eye on it. This is hardly a picture of two countries who are learning to trust each other.

Meanwhile, the Indian government continues to make strategic overtures to China’s other rivals, in particular Japan. This week, Tokyo and New Delhi agreed to step up military cooperation on several fronts, including exchanges of maritime patrol aircraft and joint training on anti-submarine warfare. Those moves are not so subtly aimed at containing the growing Chinese navy, whose expanding network of ships and submarines has spooked both India and Japan, and drawn them closer together.

And China, for its part, continues to support and subsidize India’s greatest nemesis, Pakistan. Much ink has been spilled recently about China’s supposed “betrayal” of Pakistan at the BRICS summit, when Beijing joined with New Delhi to condemn Pakistani terrorist groups in an official declaration. But that rhetorical slight is insignificant next to China’s growing role as Pakistan’s prime lifeline and patron. Beijing’s immense investments in Pakistan, its complex web of infrastructure projects in the country, and its growing military alliance with Islamabad all ensure a confrontational course with India in the future. And as the United States seeks to nudge India into a larger role in Afghanistan, Pakistan could well drag China into that country to contain its arch-rival.

When General Rawat says that India should prepare for conflict on two fronts, in other words, he may even be underestimating the challenge. India is not doomed to all-out war with Pakistan or China, but its strategic rivalry with those countries shows no signs of subsiding in the years to come. Admitting such things publicly is not the polite or diplomatic thing to do, but the ancient adage still applies: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

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Gerhard Schröder: Donald Trump’s Doppelgänger?

To understand how our current President sees the world, look to how the former German Chancellor practiced politics—and continues to comport himself in retirement.

In terms of temperament, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and our current President Donald Trump could not be more different. Schröder doesn’t have an ounce of the brashness, braggadocio, or bling that define Trump. Trump was born into New York City wealth; Schröder comes from humble roots. His mother was a cleaner, his father, an unskilled worker whom Schröder never knew and who died in Romania in World War II.

But there are important similarities that shine through when you look a little closer. Though there was never any sign that the German shares Trump’s authoritarian instincts and contempt for democratic institutions, like Trump Schröder seems to admire qualities found in foreign autocrats. And Trump shares the ex-Chancellor’s reductive tendency to see all policy, and especially foreign policy, through the narrow lens of trade.

Think of Schröder as a toned down, European expression of Trumpist money lust and vanity. The ex-Chancellor, who once sued a news agency for accusing him of dying his hair, has always belonged to the Toskana-Faktion, or Tuscany faction of Germany’s Social Democrats. These are the pragmatic Lefties known for their appreciation of the finer things that go along with Brunello holidays in well-heeled spots in northern Italy. Schröder happens to be fond of finest cashmere, respectable Cuban cigars (Cohiba Espléndidos), and Brioni suits, arranged, to be sure, in private fittings by Brioni master tailor Angela Petrucci who does house calls and who counts Jack Nicholson and Vladimir Putin among her exclusive clientele.

Lots of attention has been paid to Donald Trump’s connections and affinities with the autocrat in the Kremlin. That’s a critical line of inquiry, but perhaps not as enlightening and suggestive as closer comparison with Schröder can prove to be.

In interviews about his prospective membership on Rosneft’s board of directors, Schröder has been telling German interviewers he was right about Iraq, and that history will prove him right again about Russia. Schröder says Germany cannot afford to isolate Russia. And anyway, the former Chancellor maintains, Rosneft is an international company, “not the extended arm of the Russian government.”

Since he was voted out of office in 2005, Schröder has been chairman of the shareholders’ committee of Nord Stream, the company that runs natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany and is 51 percent owned by Gazprom, the Russian government-owned energy giant. The German government approved the pipeline while Schröder was still in office, agreeing also to cover €1 billion of the project’s costs in the event Russia defaulted on a loan. At present, the ex-German leader’s election to Rosneft’s board, scheduled to take place at a shareholders meeting at the end of this month, is stirring new controversy. Rosneft has been under Western sanctions since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin, a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is himself under a travel ban and asset freeze.

On the Rosneft board Schröder will sit beside Andrey Belousov, an economic adviser to Putin, Alexander Novak, Russia’s Energy Minister, and Matthias Warnig, once a highly decorated spy with communist East Germany’s notorious secret police, the Stasi. Warnig claims he first met Putin a year after German unification, in 1991, although it’s not to be excluded that the two men knew each other when Putin was stationed in Dresden as a KGB agent in the 1980s. In any case, it’s clear that the two men have become chums. (In the well known photo of the warm embrace between Schröder and Putin in April 2014, taken weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when Schröder turned up in St. Petersburg for a lavish birthday party in the Russian President’s honour, the silver-haired, stocky man standing to the left in the picture is Warnig.)

In any case, when Schröder says Rosneft is just another international company with little to do with the Kremlin, he fibs. Russia’s government owns 50 percent-plus-one share.

It is not just Schröder’s apparent ease in operating in a post-factual universe that makes him and our own President kindred spirits.

Start where Schröder himself likes to start these days: with the Iraq war. In his memoirs, George W. Bush claims that the German Chancellor, during a meeting on January 31, 2002, in the Oval Office, pledged Berlin’s support if the U.S. invaded Iraq—an assertion Schröder now strenuously denies. Never mind the he-said-he-said for now. Berlin ended up opposing the Iraq invasion, which indeed turned out to be a debacle, and Schröder wants kudos for his vision and statesmanship. Entertain the possibility, though, that while Schröder was right about Iraq, it was for all the wrong reasons.

Like Trump today, Schröder’s foreign policy was, in the main, trade policy in the pursuit of commercial aims and advantage. There have been instances in our own President’s thinking— spasms really—where one might have thought other matters figure prominently. There were the Tomahawk missiles fired at an airstrip in Syria last spring. There were the “fire and fury” comments augmented by the “locked and loaded” warning toward North Korea. But that the President is today contemplating withdrawing from a free trade agreement with our ally South Korea, even as North Korea has apparently now carried out its sixth nuclear test, is telling. For Trump, America First has always meant commerce first in foreign policy. When the real estate mogul purchased ad space in the New York Times and other papers in 1987 to call for America to renegotiate its relationship with the world—two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, no less—he berated our closest strategic partners for having bamboozled the United States into paying for their protection. “The world is laughing at us,” said Trump. Three years later and in the same vein, Trump told Playboy magazine that if we were to “throw a tax on every Mercedes-Benz rolling into this country and on all Japanese products…we’d have wonderful allies again.”

As for Schröder, under his administration Germany did participate in NATO’s intervention in Kosovo (flying sorties in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia), and joined early coalition efforts in Afghanistan after 2001 (in peace keeping and reconstruction). And to be fair, none of this was politically easy in a country that had lived for more than a half century in the shadow of its Nazi past and which, as a result, had become exceptionally reluctant to think about global security or to send forces abroad. Yet through it all, Schröder’s loud insistence that German foreign policy be made only in Berlin, and that the Germans cease being a “cash cow” for the European Union also made clear that the SPD Chancellor, during his seven years in office starting in 1998, would pursue essentially Trumpian, “show-me-the-money” foreign policy. Schröder foreign policy was business-driven realism that defined the German national interest in especially narrow terms.

Which brings us back to Iraq. Schröder’s Middle East policy was little about security and a good deal about furthering commercial ties. Nor is there any evidence, much as in the case of Donald Trump, that Gerhard Schröder has ever possessed the human rights gene. As a result, German embassies in the region were essentially trade missions; as one frustrated German diplomat put it to me over coffee in a Gulf capital during the Schröder years, “We are basically here as door openers for German industry.” Open doors showed promise of opening wider in those days. Under Saddam Hussein, Germany and Iraq were doing roughly $350 million in business annually, with another estimated $1 billion through third parties. By 2002, Saddam Hussein had reportedly ordered Iraqi businesses to favor German companies as reward for Berlin’s opposition to Washington’s war plans. The year before Saddam was removed from power, more than a hundred German companies were present at the Baghdad Annual exposition.

So indeed, Schröder was against war. It was the counsel of German industry at the time (Siemens and Daimler Chrysler would later find themselves enmeshed in bribery scandals from their time doing business in Saddam’s Iraq). Opposition to conflict with Iraq was the strong preference of pacifistically inclined German voters in an election year, too. Yet Schröder went further. I recall at the time—I was living in Berlin as the director of Germany’s Aspen Institute—a close ally of Schröder’s Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, telling me how surprised, and actually concerned Fischer was that populist tactics, including raw anti-Americanism, were proving so effective in the red-green government’s re-election campaign.

Which brings us to the Russia question.

Like Trump, if there’s anything other than business that Gerhard Schröder has a soft spot for, it would seem to be strongman rule in Mother Russia. For his part, President Trump approved of Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s until the Soviet reformer got carried away with liberalization. Trump accused the Kremlin leader of “destroying the Soviet Union” (“Not a firm enough hand,” chided Trump in 1990). Then, long before Donald Trump was fawning over Putin (publicly anyway), Schröder had established himself as Europe’s leading Putin apologist. The Chancellor told an interviewer in 2004 that he was convinced that Russia’s leader was a “flawless democrat,” when almost certainly he already knew that exactly the opposite was true.

In the case of Gerhard Schröder, who knows what is exactly behind his devotion to Putin? Is Schröder influenced by notions of civilizational connection dating back centuries? In an address to the Bundestag in September 2001, Putin spoke about the “unity of European culture,” and lauded in fluent German, the “language of Goethe, of Schiller, and of Kant.” But bracketing Putin’s manipulations, on this point we might give Schröder some benefit of doubt. Respect for Russian culture runs deep in Germany. Thomas Mann was inspired by Russian literature, particularly having admired Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Gustav Mahler, a fervent admirer of Tchaikovsky and the Russian romanticists, chose Russia for his honeymoon in 1902. Rainer Maria Rilke thanked Russia for “making me who I am.” Forms of cultural affinity do indeed exist, and I take it as sincere when Schröder cites fondly how Putin sang Christmas carols in German to the two children he and his wife Doris adopted from Russia. For some, history matters. Unlike Trump, Schröder reads. He once read on holiday historian Fritz Stern’s double biography of Bismarck and Bleichröder, replete with rich accounts of 19th-century Prussian relations to the east, apparently passing the book along to others as the best introduction to recent German history.

One might say, too, that Schröder is a man of Ostpolitik. The ideology of detente and the idea of Wandel durch Annáherung—of changing the behavior of one’s adversary through rapprochement—runs deep in SPD poltics and lore. The only problem with this being that for Schröder, Putin was already a friend, not a foe to be transformed—how can one improve a “flawless democrat”?—and that Willy Brandt, the original Cold War Ostpolitiker, would surely have been horrified to see how in Schröder’s detente, East Europeans get thrown under the bus. Nord Stream’s expansion project, Nord Stream 2—puzzlingly still supported by Ukraine’s friend and Putin critic Angela Merkel—is adamantly opposed by Kyiv, Warsaw, and the three Baltic nations, who fear strategic vulnerability and even greater energy dependence on Moscow.

So was Schröder playing the role of devious grand strategist, trying to reinvigorate cold, calculating power politics in the aftermath of the Cold War? Unlikely—no more than tweety Trump is wittingly aligning himself with Putin to carve up Europe and undermine the West.

The SPD politician Hans-Joachim Vogel once remarked of Schröder: “The appetite for power is impressive…but power for what purpose?” Does Schröder have a bit of Felix Krull (the protagonist in Thomas Mann’s last novel) in him? Is he an intensively ambitious, morally flexible operator determined to show the world something? As a kid, Schröder once promised his mother he would drive up to the front door one day in a Mercedes. Perhaps Schröder is a blander adaptation of Mann’s character Adrian Leverkühn in Doktor Faustus, a composer who sells himself to Mephistopheles in exchange for limitless creative genius?

There’s a 1,038-page Schröder biography published two years ago by a German academic named Gregor Schöllgen which, I confess, I’ve not made my way through. There may be important clues in the Schôllgen opus as to what really makes Schröder tick.

My guess? That at the end of it all Schröder—at 73 years old, two years ahead of Trump in age and, through his fourth wife, one out in front in marriage—is simply a restrained German version of our pathologically self-absorbed, compulsively self-dealing 45th President. As such, that would make the ex-Chancellor just another vain, greedy sucker who Putin knows how to play like a cheap balalaika. One can imagine late night pow-wows during which Schröder and Putin exchange quips, in German, about those uncivilized, ignorant, and naive Americans; followed by even later evening night caps over which a KGB man and Stasi comrade make jokes, in Russian, about foolish and corruptible West Germans. Himself married to a Russian named Elena, Matthias Warnig—who in a sense today outranks Schröder, sitting as Warnig does on multiple Putin boards—maintains a home in Moscow and reportedly flies in from Germany to see Putin every third week. Who said the Cold War really ended?

Bottom line, for now: Schröder says of joining Rosneft—blithely dismissing any question of propriety and ethics—that this is “about me and my life.” Fair enough. And sure enough. A box of good Cuban cigars says this is exactly what a narcissistic ex-President of the United States will say one day when, in pursuit of the giga-deal of all time, he colludes, openly—puckered chin, thumbs up—with America’s worst adversaries.

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The Statistic That Explains the Trump Presidency

A new report from the Public Religion Research Institute contains the following remarkable tidbit: “Fewer than one in three (29%) Democrats today are white Christian, compared to half (50%) one decade earlier.”

Part of this decline reflects growing religious and ethnic diversity in America as a whole: White Christians make up 43 percent of the population, down from 57 percent in 2006. It’s conventional wisdom by now that ethnic diversity has contributed to white anxiety and resentment, and ultimately the election of a figure whose most potent political tool is trafficking in that resentment.

But PRRI’s partisan breakdowns, and the addition of data on religious identification, add color to that picture. Even as white Christian identification in the Democratic Party has collapsed, the GOP numbers only ticked down to 73 percent (from 81 percent in 2006). It may be that as the nation grew more diverse overall, rising ethnocultural anxiety prompted white Christians to seek a political vehicle for their identitarian grievances. The Democratic Party, increasingly responsive to its own diverse coalition of identity groups, could not play that role; the Republican party is.

If a white person told you he identified as a Christian during the first term of George W. Bush’s presidency, you wouldn’t be able to predict with much accuracy which party he or she belonged to. A majority of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party would have been made up by people matching that description. Today, you could predict with a high degree of accuracy that that person is a Republican. These data show more clearly than any others to date the way America’s former ethnocultural majority is expressing itself politically like an identity group.

Trump’s demagogic presidency, as well as the Democrats’ increasing absolutism on social and religious issues (a cause and consequence of their white Christian crackup), is likely to widen this divide further. And that means politics could get even uglier in the coming years.

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Is the Visegrad Group Splitting Apart?

Hungary and Slovakia—both members of the combative Visegrad Four grouping that has fought tooth and nail against the EU’s dictates on refugees—just lost a major court challenge brought against Brussels’s mandatory migrant relocation scheme. But in the wake of the European Court of Justice’s verdict, Budapest and Bratislava have taken notably different tacks in responding to the setback.

First, via Politico Europe, consider the fiery Hungarian response:

“The ruling issued by the European Court of Justice in the migrant quota case is outrageous and irresponsible,” said Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó at a press conference Wednesday.

“The real battle is only just beginning,” he added. “Politics has raped European law.”

Hungary’s harsh words were backed up by Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, who said the decision would “not change the policy of our government.” By contrast, Slovakia struck a much more conciliatory line:

“Slovakia fully respects the verdict of the European Court of Justice,” Peter Susko, spokesman for Slovakia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said. “We retain the opinion, however, that the so-called relocation compulsory quotas failed to work in real life.

“We will actively work to express solidarity with countries most affected by the problem of migration using solutions better suited to fit the purpose other than accepting migrants who have no desire or intention to remain in our country.”

The contrast between Hungary’s fight-to-the-bitter-end defiance and Slovakia’s gentle expression of disagreement is already feeding an emerging narrative that the Visegrad countries are parting ways over the migration issue. Poland and Hungary are doubling down on their defiant stand against the EU, the story goes, while the Czech Republic and Slovakia are gradually moving toward a more conciliatory posture as they seek to mend fences with Brussels, Berlin, and Paris.

There are certainly many in Europe who would like to see this happen. When Emmanuel Macron barnstormed through Central and Eastern Europe this past month touting his proposed reforms to EU labor rules, he pointedly excluded Poland and Hungary from the discussions, while gaining provisional support from the Czechs and Slovaks for reforms they have previously resisted. As Jan Cienski has argued, Macron’s moves were part of a wider effort to undermine the Visegrad Group’s solidarity, and prove to Poland and Hungary that their continued intransigence would only lead to further exclusion from important talks on Europe’s future.

That message was echoed this week by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who rebuffed Hungary’s request for additional border security funding in a sharp letter scolding Budapest for to refusing to demonstrate “solidarity” with the EU’s refugee policy. The message was clear enough: if Hungary (or any other Visegrad country) continues to defy Brussels, it can expect further isolation—or worse, including legal action and fines before the ECJ.

But are such tactics actually creating a split within the Visegrad Group? Here the evidence is mixed, and the outlook murky. It is true that the Czechs and Slovaks are sounding more EU-friendly these days: Slovakia’s Prime Minister recently declared that his country should be fundamentally “close to the [EU] core, to France, to Germany,” while the Czechs have been seeking observer status within the Eurogroup to deepen their fiscal integration with the EU’s core. But these developments are less a full-fledged political reorientation than a simple effort by Prague and Bratislava not to be left behind in discussions of Europe’s future. Neither country’s position on migrants has fundamentally changed; indeed, the Czech President’s response to the ECJ ruling was a defiant declaration that he would rather lose EU subsidies than take in more refugees against his will.

In other words, the perceived split in the Visegrad Group may be more wishful thinking than reality. And even if Brussels can browbeat countries like Slovakia and the Czech Republic into a more cooperative posture, it risks engendering even more backlash among voters. Every act of compulsion from Brussels is more kindling for the Euroskeptics’ fire. Whatever Brussels gains in short-term compliance with its refugee policy, it may lose far more due to the long-term resentments of those who resist its edicts.

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Will Chechnya Detonate Russia?

The mass murder of Muslims in Myanmar has prompted Chechnya’s dictatorial President Ramzan Kadyrov to take a rare political stance at odds with the Kremlin, revealing a shaky balance of power within Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya minority has not only infuriated citizens of Pakistan and Indonesia. It has led to an unprecedented set of protests by Muslims in Russia itself—most notably in Moscow.

More than five hundred Muslims protested before the Myanmar Embassy in the center of Moscow on Sunday. The next day, tens of thousands came out to the center of Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, with Kadyrov delivering a speech full of veiled threats aimed at Moscow. Chechen authorities claim a million people were out on the streets.

Before the protests, Kadyrov live-streamed commentary on the situation to his Instagram account, saying:

If Russia keeps supporting the shaytan that commits these crimes, I am against the Russian position. Because I have my own vision, my own position.

He added that he’d been asked multiple times to send Chechen troops to Myanmar, but said he didn’t have the authority to do so.

Russian journalists reporting from both Grozny and Moscow found that most of the protesters didn’t know much about Myanmar—most couldn’t identify it on a map—but rather were answering Kadyrov’s call. But while mass rallies of Muslims are relatively common in Grozny—in January 2015, over 700,000 Chechens protested against the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after a terror attack at its offices in Paris—seeing hundreds of protesters gather in Russia’s capital is something new.

And what was more striking than the mobilization of protesters itself was that they remained unmolested by Russian police—as if the protests were happening in a normal liberal democracy, not Russia. Thousands of people were arrested during the large (and legally authorized) anti-corruption rallies in Moscow and St. Petersburg in March. Recently, police even arrested a lone protester standing in Red Square holding a plain white piece of paper in his hands. But hundreds of people convening in the center of Moscow shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and “Buddhists are terrorists!”—protesting without an official permit but at the invitation of Ramzan Kadyrov—failed to rouse the police to action.

Kadyrov has built what amounts to his own sovereign state inside Russia. Chechnya has its own laws (mostly sharia-inspired) and the rest of the country has more or less accepted that reality as the cost of having peace in the restive and fractious Muslim region. But the protest by Kadyrov’s people in the center of Moscow has not only raised the hackles of Russia’s opposition, but also prompted the most pro-Kremlin (and the most popular) newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda to speak up. The newspaper’s well-known columnist, Aleksandr Kots, wrote that “this was doubtless not just a protest done out of solidarity with the oppressed religious minority in Myanmar. It was a test of power that demonstrated the mobility and cohesiveness of a politicized Islam—a new phenomenon not seen before [in Russia].” We have “seen all this before, both in Egypt and in Libya, where crowds were manipulated by puppet-masters of political Islam,” he added, calling on Russian security services to investigate who exactly had organized these protests in private groups on social media. “These are the very familiar techniques of the Arab Spring, perhaps being tested in Russia,” Kots warned. “A simple cause is enough to get a crowd of bearded men into the center of Moscow. And through prayer, they quickly shift from a simple expression of solidarity to political demands, including towards Russian authorities.” He concluded by asking rhetorically whether Kadyrov’s position on Myanmar is consistent with the Kremlin’s expectations of what a patriot should think. (Kadyrov rarely misses an opportunity to proclaim his personal loyalty to Putin, and frequently goes out of his way to call himself a great Russian patriot.)

Yesterday evening, Putin seemed to address Kots’s concerns, at least on the matter of patriotism. Answering questions at a BRICS summit in China, he said that every person is entitled to their own private opinions, regardless of their official position.

Earlier this week, I spoke with a former Chechen citizen who witnessed both Chechen wars, lost several siblings, and subsequently had to flee Russia due to his opposition to the Kadyrov regime. He told me that while Kadyrov has a long track record of successfully exploiting existing resentments within Russia’s Muslim community, this is something new. While many people came to both protests (in Moscow and in Grozny) as a matter of conscience, the protests can’t be seen as anything other than a show of strength by Kadyrov. Kadyrov has become a real player in Russian politics—a man capable of making Putin defer him. Kadyrov is sending a clear signal to the Kremlin, knowing full well its dependence on him to keep Chechnya subjugated. His comments about his own opinion are a signal to Russia’s Muslims, who already harbor doubts about living contentedly in the Russian Federation.

As for the lack of response by the police, the Chechen exile told me he thought that fear was one factor. Breaking up a demonstration of young, often well-trained Chechen toughs is completely different from breaking up a gathering of urban Russian youths or intellectuals. Another likely factor, he said, was the chain of command: Putin was in China when the protests occurred, and no one dared to make a decision that could have put the Kremlin on a collision course with Kadyrov.

For his part, opposition leader Mikhail Khodorkovsky largely agrees. He wrote on Facebook that the “meekness and hesitation displayed by the police in response to the well-organized Muslim community that showed up to an unauthorized protest in front of the Myanmar Embassy in Moscow” tells us that ”there is no such thing as the ‘Power Vertical‘ in Russia” and that “Putin’s vassals feel more and more independent.”

Maxim Dbar, a long-time ally and current press secretary of Khodorkovsky who now works at Open Russia in London, linked Kadyrov’s behavior more explicitly to politics. “In the late 1990s through the early 2000s, every governor’s election or appointment was always preceded by a paroxysm of nationalism,” he wrote on his Facebook page. The reason for this was always the same: to send the Kremlin a signal that only the current serving governor can control and contain these excesses of nationalism, and that the Kremlin had better not change anything in the region. Today this is still going on, Dbar says, except that it is happening at the federal level, in Moscow, and accompanies not the governors’ but the presidential elections. “Kadyrov is clearly saying that he is the only one who can contain the excessive irruption of religious ecstasy among Russia’s Muslims, who are feared by both the police and Russia’s National Guards.”

While Ramzan Kadyrov has strengthened his hand over the years and made Vladimir Putin politically dependent on him by guaranteeing order in Chechnya, he himself has also always been dependent on Putin. Kadyrov has built up a formidable personal army in Chechnya, in part financed by draconian additional taxes levied on Chechnya’s citizens. But Chechnya also receives billions of rubles of subsidies from the Kremlin every year—money that helps Kadyrov live like a king and pay his men handsomely. This is an arrangement that many in the Kremlin tolerate but are not happy about.

The fact that Kadyrov has chosen to demonstrate his power so bluntly now suggests that he feels he needs to do so. One possibility is that he is worried that Putin will decide not to run for President next year. Six more years of Putin would mean six more years of the easy life for the Chechen dictator. The subsidies from the Russian federal budget would keep coming.

Another possibility is that Kadyrov is trying to influence Putin’s decision on who might succeed him as the next President of Russia, be it next year or in six. There have been signs recently of Putin trying to change the dynamic with his Chechen protégé. This past July, Putin appointed Viktor Zolotov, the head of the National Guard, to lead counter-terrorism efforts in the North Caucasus—a move that was seen as the first step toward getting Kadyrov’s personal army under a degree of federal control. Before then, the FSB’s Second Service (its counter-terrorism division) had been the only federal agency that could enter Chechnya at will; all other law enforcement agencies had limited authority to operate in Kadyrov’s fiefdom. (For instance, after Boris Nemtsov was murdered in Moscow in 2015, attorneys from Russia’s Investigative Committee were blocked from entering Chechnya to interrogate Ruslan Geremeev, one of the most important suspects in the case and a close ally of Kadyrov. Geremeev subsequently fled to Dubai, where Kadyrov is said to have his own personal security and border control detail at the airport.) Zolotov’s 400,000-strong National Guard now supposedly has a free hand in Chechnya. But as the exiled Chechen I spoke with puts it, even 400,000 highly trained troops would have trouble reining in Kadyrov without kicking off a war.

Whatever the ultimate rationale for Kadyrov’s Moscow gambit, it portends serious political instability for Russia. Vladimir Putin’s initial promise to bring stability to the Caucasus after the two brutal wars required making a Faustian bargain with a Chechen devil. He may have thought he had successfully sealed the Pandora’s box of Islamic radicalism by working with Kadyrov. Instead, he may well have made Russia itself into a tinderbox.

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Ten Things to Watch in the German Elections

In another key European election this year, Germans will go to the polls in September. After a slow start, campaigning finally picked up this week with two televised debates among the key contenders. One of these pitted conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel against her main rival, Social Democrat leader and former European Parliament President Martin Schulz. Rather underwhelming on substance, the exchange effectively confirmed what polls have long been indicating: Merkel is all but certain to win a fourth term, while her challenger is further away than ever from projecting a credible alternative. If one were to judge by this debate alone, the results of the German election would appear to be a foregone conclusion.

Yet much more interestingly, another debate featured the leaders of five smaller parties that will all end up in the new Bundestag. Three of these harbor hopes of joining the next governing coalition, while two represent the increasingly vocal radicalism on the Left and on the Right. That second discussion was rich in content and controversy. It warned Germans that their current national election, and the politics emerging from it, may yet become one of the most turbulent in recent history.

The combination of volatile public opinion, multiparty dynamics, and coalition arithmetic makes this campaign much less predictable than political ratings suggest. A number of policy issues—from refugees to the diesel scandal—may yet take over campaign season with a vengeance. Foreign affairs, from Europe to the United States and from Russia to Turkey, have begun to shake up the race. Here are ten key aspects to watch as Germans head to the voting booths.

The Merkel Vote

The performance of Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Christian-Democratic bloc (CDU-CSU) that she leads will, naturally, be watched closely. Polling at close to 40 percent for several months now, and leading her Social-Democrat (SPD) rivals by some 15 percent, Merkel’s conservatives are certain to come in first. However, more important than victory is the exact result. 40 percent or more, a repeat of the 2013 conservative vote, will give Merkel a near-free choice of her next coalition partner, putting her in the strongest possible position to create the next government and dictate its agenda. Just as importantly, such a strong result will silence all those who believed, especially in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis, that the Chancellor had passed her political zenith and was heading for political decline. In turn, any outcome that falls significantly short of the 40 percent mark will complicate coalition-building and fuel a succession debate. For the conservatives and their leader, then, this is a tighter race than their commanding lead in the polls may suggest.

A Thriller for Third Place

Unusually, who comes in second will be of little relevance. Germany’s other major party, the SPD, is stuck in the 20-to-25 percent range, with no realistic prospect of leading the next government. The question of who comes in third, however, will be critical for German politics in the coming years. Four parties are effectively tied for third place, all polling between 7 and 10 percent in recent surveys. Two of these represent the political mainstream, with the Free Democrats (FDP) pursuing a market-liberal and business-friendly agenda, and the Greens traditionally espousing environmentally conscious and socially liberal positions. If either of these smaller moderate parties secures third place, it will be best positioned to enter a coalition with the conservatives and to become part of the next government. Not surprisingly, then, both the FDP and the Greens have effectively made it their electoral ambition, and even slogan, to be the third political force in Germany.

The Left and Right Fringes

Such an outcome is not preordained, however. Two more, and politically radical, parties have an even better chance of taking third place, judging by recent trends in public opinion. The Left Party is a merger of former East German communists and the West German hard Left, and came in third in the previous election. Pragmatically, it endorses a socialist agenda at home but takes highly ideological positions on international affairs, including the rejection of NATO membership and free trade agreements. It is latently anti-American but openly pro-Russian. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is even more aggressively opposed to the political and social status quo. It is an anti-system party that ferociously attacks the political and media establishment, demands the rolling back of European integration, advocates closer ties with Russia, proposes a radical curtailment of migration, and rejects Islam. Neither of these fringe parties will find itself in government. Still, they can seriously impact mainstream political dynamics. The closer either or both get to the 10 percent mark, the more complicated coalition-building for the remaining parties will become—and the greater the political pressure on them in the new Bundestag.

Turnout Is Key

The September poll will be one of extremely tight margins. For Merkel’s conservatives, a mere 3 percent, give or take, can mean the difference between the freedom to govern as they wish and the necessity of striking hard bargains. For smaller parties vying for third place, even a 2 percent difference separates triumph from disappointment, and for the FDP and the Greens, that difference may determine whether they take their places in government or on the opposition benches. This situation puts voter turnout front and center for all contenders. After record lows of around 70 percent in the 2009 and 2013 elections, the upcoming contest is likely to see a substantial increase to 75 or even 80 percent, judging from similar upticks in recent state elections. However, higher participation is accompanied by higher-than-ever volatility, as nearly half of all Germans remain unsure whom to vote for. This higher volatility gives the political fringes an advantage, as Left Party and AfD supporters have largely made up their minds. Higher participation, in turn, typically favors the political mainstream and within it primarily the CDU-CSU and FDP. As a result, and more than any time in the past twenty years, the final tally will depend on the last-minute mobilization of voters.

Four Coalition Options

German governments are typically based on party coalitions. Unusually this time, a whopping four alternatives are conceivable, all led by Chancellor Merkel. Two of these are familiar to her. One is a continued grand coalition with the SPD. Its advantages include a large overlap in the parties’ agendas and an overwhelming parliamentary majority that would allow it to push through just about any policy. The other is a joint government with the FDP, as seen in 2009 to 2013. If, as current polls indicate, this coalition achieves only a narrow majority, it will be considerably harder for this government to pursue its policies. What mitigates against both these coalition options may be the serious reluctance on the part of the SPD and the FDP. Neither of them really benefited politically from their recent coalitions with the CDU-CSU. Rather than getting burned again in government, they may prefer to build their longer-term profiles and support bases from the opposition bench.

Two further possibilities mark uncharted territory in German politics, at least at the federal level. In the first, the CDU-CSU could enter into a coalition with the Greens. This would pit progressive Greens against arch-conservatives in the Chancellor’s own bloc, allowing Merkel to continue to “lead from the middle,” as is her preference. However, it is doubtful that the Greens can muster sufficient votes and, even more importantly, enthusiasm, for such a coalition. A second novelty would be a three-way alliance of CDU-CSU, FDP, and Greens. This coalition would command a strong majority and suit the Chancellor’s style of governing, yet it is still highly unlikely. The FDP and the Greens are difficult bed-fellows. Their programs are, regarding markets and the environment, narrow and contradictory; their styles, liberal laissez faire impulses and Green paternalism, hardly compatible.

Of these four options, only two find significant support among voters: a grand coalition and a CDU-CSU-FDP alliance. Clearly, Germans prefer to remain in familiar territory, but the question is whether the final distribution of votes will allow them to.

Where Is the Refugee Crisis?

Undoubtedly, the premier issue in German public debate over the past few years has been the 2015 refugee crisis and with it migration more broadly. Effectively, each of the recent state elections was a sort of referendum on Chancellor Merkel’s initially open, but later tightened, refugee policy. However, expectations that this issue would also dominate the current national election season have not so far materialized. With very few exceptions, it has been absent in the run-up to the elections, just as it has disappeared from media headlines. Germans’ anxiety over the refugee influx has subsided, and while about half of all Germans see migration as the most important challenge for the country, only 29 percent consider it the determining factor at the ballot box. Nonetheless, any large-scale incident or attack has the potential to throw this issue back into public view and to influence the elections.

Central Issues Missing

With migration on the back burner, the election season so far lacks a central and decisive theme. Several issues have come and gone again, gaining little traction. When massive violence enveloped the G20 summit in Hamburg, domestic security seemed poised to take top spot. This would have benefited the conservatives, yet neither they nor their rivals zoomed in on what, after all, is usually the public’s no. 2 concern. Then came the diesel scandal, the largest fraud scheme in German industrial history. However, even huge public disagreement with the government’s soft approach to sanctioning the auto industry did not propel this issue into the campaign spotlight, even though the Greens and the Left could have exploited it. It is not as if there are no major domestic policy issues, not to mention turbulent international affairs, that could shape this election. Germans are concerned with the state of their education system. The coming digital age finds the German economy, and society, woefully ill-prepared. Social security systems and energy markets face huge challenges. Yet instead of sparring over these and other pressing issues, Germans largely see a ping-pong of personal attacks, especially on the Chancellor. Ironically, no one benefits more from such a personalistic campaign than Merkel herself, comfortably running on a simple “you know me” ticket.

Keeping Quiet on Europe

While many in the European Union are holding their breath over who will next govern the Continent’s central power, the election campaigns in Germany have so far remained strangely silent on Europe. This is counterintuitive as the Brexit shock and the French elections have only just breathed fresh air into a seemingly deflated European project. Furthermore, major challenges lie ahead for EU integration, from managing Britain’s exit to reforming the Eurozone to reining in illiberal governments in Central Europe. To be sure, all parties have included elaborate proposals on Europe in their individual party programs. Yet none of them, with the exception perhaps of the Euro-skeptic AfD, is campaigning as openly on Europe as French President Emmanuel Macron so successfully did. This will likely leave a more substantial German debate on Europe until after the election, when major differences among possible coalition partners, including fundamental disagreements between CDU-CSU and FDP, will surface.

Trump Effects

U.S. politics have left their imprint on previous German elections, and have entered this round already. Anti-American sentiments have long existed, especially among left-of-center voters. These have been fueled, and broader skepticism toward the U.S. has been prompted, by the election of President Donald Trump. The U.S. now elicits the same or even less confidence among Germans as Russia under Vladimir Putin. This has left Chancellor Merkel, known to be America-friendly, exposed to vicious attacks by the SPD for allegedly cozying up to Trump. Yet U.S. politics also have a positive import. The U.S. election, together with the Brexit vote, has acted as a vaccine against the seemingly unstoppable rise of far-Right populism in Europe. Potential protest voters, on whom parties such as Germany’s AfD depend for their success, are more reluctant to incur the political price they observe in the United States and the United Kingdom. This is already dampening the electoral hopes of the German far Right. With these Trump effects, U.S. politics are a mixed bag for the German elections.

Russian Meddling

Against the backdrop of Russian interference in the U.S. and French elections, observers have warned of similar attempts in the upcoming German elections, most recently including the Interior Minister in Berlin. Although so far no major Russian involvement has been detected, chances are that the Kremlin will still roll out a last-minute disinformation campaign to sway voters. The central aim will certainly be to maximally damage the reputation, and with it the election results, of Chancellor Merkel, a staunch critic of Russian aggression and advocate of a unified Western response. Should this not succeed, Moscow is likely to question the legitimacy of the election and its outcome. However, there is good reason to expect the impact of Russian meddling to be very limited. Having witnessed such manipulation elsewhere, Germans and their institutions are on alert. Their skepticism of Russia, the strong and stable outlook for their country, its established multi-party system, and quality media act as additional shock absorbers. Whether they will suffice will be worth watching up until, and beyond, election day.

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The State of Global Shale

While the United States gears up for what is expected to be a record-breaking production year in 2018, the rest of the world remains far away from catching up to America’s runaway shale success. But while the U.S. may be the only country producing commercially significant volumes of shale today, it’s not the only one with sizable shale reserves—according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Argentina, Algeria, and China all have more shale gas than the United States, and Russia has nearly as much tight oil. Given the American example of the transformative power of this recently “unlocked” resource, there’s plenty of motivation for these countries to get the hydrocarbons flowing, and there has been for many years. So where are they now?

Let’s start in Argentina, which contains the Vaca Muerta shale formation, one of the world’s largest. Argentina has more shale gas than the United States, and is second only to China, but thus far has yet to ramp up commercial production. But companies are spending more money on exploratory drilling in the region (to the tune of $1 billion per year), and according to Argentinian Energy Minister Juan José Aranguren, the Vaca Muerta will attract $15 billion annually in investment by 2020. That influx of foreign capital will be in many ways dependent on further market reforms—price controls, labor unions, and extensive subsidies have all been barriers to entry into Argentina’s fledgling shale industry. Meanwhile, production costs are, according to the country’s state-owned oil and gas company YPF, falling far enough to allow certain shale plays to turn a profit in today’s bargain crude market. Still, YPF’s shale chief admitted that the Vaca Muerta formation requires a lot more infrastructure to become competitive. With more strident market reforms, more foreign investment, and more developed oil and gas field infrastructure, Argentina can kick off its own shale success story.

Those same problems crop up elsewhere in the world, though other countries have their own unique challenges. In Algeria, there’s not yet enough demand for shale gas to kickstart the industry there. Algeria’s Energy Minister Noureddine Boutarfa said earlier this year that the country “doesn’t need, in the short term, to use its shale gas, because it has other natural resources, including [conventional] gas.” Algeria also has a state-owned oil company that controls the country’s hydrocarbon reserves, which makes it difficult to secure the foreign involvement so necessary to succeed in the technologically difficult shale space.

Russia has a similar demand problem, as the country already produces huge quantities of oil and gas in its conventional fields. But as these fields mature, production is slowing, and eyes are turning toward unconventional (read: shale) reserves for the future. No Russian shale formation is more promising than the Bazhenov, which the EIA estimates contains 74.6 billion barrels of tight oil, just shy of America’s estimated reserves. Moscow was slow to embrace the shale boom, initially dismissing it as a fringe phenomenon, but thanks to the current price of oil (in large part a result of surging American output from fracking), it now recognizes the importance of these unconventional reserves. But U.S. sanctions have prevented Western companies from plumbing the Bazhenov shale, and without the expertise, equipment, and technology that those firms have developed in America’s various shale formations, Russia has been unable to unlock its own. That may be changing, though, as Gazprom Neft—the oil division of the state-owned gas company Gazprom—has begun trying to frack without American assistance. As Gazprom Neft’s director of exploration Alexei Vashkevich put it, “it’s not a question of will we do it or not: it’s a question of time. It might take a little bit longer but we will get there.” That seems to be something of a theme for shale development outside of the United States—it’s a question of when, not if.

In the UK, shale progress has been stymied more by public opposition than by a lack of private investment, but there are green shoots in the country that contains some 1.3 quadrillion cubic feet of shale gas. Just this past month, the British company Cuadrilla began drilling the first shale well in the country since 2011, after the industry was shut down following a series of small earthquakes near exploratory shale operations. The British public is still deeply skeptical of fracking, though, and lacking any mineral rights, landowners have little reason to go along with the extraordinary disruptions that accompany major oil and gas projects. Theresa May’s government is setting up a Shale Wealth Fund, supported by taxes levied on shale firms, that will compensate affected communities, but it will still be an uphill battle to bring people around in a country with a higher average population density than those regions of the United States where shale is being drilled most vigorously.

Australia has seen political support wane for fracking, and just this week the state of Western Australia, led by the recently elected Left-leaning Labor Party, moved to ban the drilling process. It’s the fifth Australian state to place limits on hydraulic fracturing, leaving only two states—South Australia and Queensland—where the practice is permitted. That’s a big blow for a country which is estimated to contain 429 trillion cubic feet of shale gas, roughly two-thirds of America’s shale gas resource base.

But we’ve saved the best for last, and China may be the closest to replicating the American shale experience. China doesn’t have much tight oil, but it has far and away the world’s largest reserves of shale gas, and it has strong reasons to want to develop them, both in terms of pursuing greater energy security (and reducing reliance on energy imports), and also in order to reduce the amount of coal it burns for electricity and heat—and all of the toxic smog that that entails. China’s Ministry of Land and Resources said that in 2016 it upped shale production more than 75 percent to 7.9 billion cubic meters, and hopes to hit 30 billion cubic meters by 2020 and between 80 and 100 billion cubic meters by 2030. The certainty of those numbers is suspect, as are most official statistics coming out of China, but there’s no doubt that a lot of natural gas is lying fallow in Chinese shale formations, and that Beijing is working hard to extract it. For Beijing, water scarcity and the remote locations of its shale regions will compound the problems that many other countries face (like a lack of mineral rights and a dearth of fracking expertise).

Closer to home, Mexico just opened up its most promising shale region for business, as the country’s Energy Ministry offered foreign private companies access to onshore blocks of its Burgos basin—the same geologic formation that underlies Texas’s highly productive Eagle Ford region, one of America’s shale hotspots. Mexico has nearly as much shale gas as the United States, and now that it has denationalized its hydrocarbon reserves and opened them up to private companies, firms with the know-how and the profit motivation can start trying to get a foothold in the country. Canada has been fracking since 2008, so if Mexico were to join in, it would make the shale boom a North American phenomenon.

This is a time of energy abundance, and we’re seeing that in both oil and natural gas markets (and oil and natural gas prices). Unconventional production, characterized chiefly by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal well-drilling in shale rock previously thought to be unsuitable for hydrocarbon operations, is driving this growth in supply, and it’s cutting energy costs for consumers around the world while increasing the variety and the security of global supplies. Thus far, America holds a large lead over countries around the world on shale success for a long list of reasons, but slowly other players are coming onto the scene. As the technologies that have enabled the shale revolution mature, they’ll be disseminated more widely and other countries will take advantage of their own reserves. It’s a question of when, not if.

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