Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 138

Haley: No More Can-Kicking on North Korea

Tensions are rising, stocks are falling, and pulses are quickening in the wake of North Korea’s sixth and strongest nuclear test. The Trump Administration has been quick to respond: on Sunday, after Pyongyang claimed to have detonated a hydrogen bomb, Defense Secretary James Mattis responded with a terse statement warning of a “massive military response” to any threat to the homeland. On Monday, President Trump said the Administration was weighing halting all trade with countries doing business with Pyongyang; the next day, he announced that Washington would sell “highly sophisticated military equipment” to Japan and South Korea.

At the Security Council, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is urging countries to support a last-ditch effort to choke off North Korea’s fuel supplies—or else.  The New York Times reports:

The Trump Administration, warning that North Korea is “begging for war,” is pressing China and other members of the United Nations Security Council to cut off all oil and other fuels to the country.

The effort, which senior administration officials described as a last best chance to resolve the standoff with the North using sanctions rather than military means, came as South Korean officials said Monday that they had seen evidence that North Korea may be preparing another test, likely of an intercontinental ballistic missile. […]

“We have kicked the can down the road long enough,” Ms. Haley told the council in an emergency meeting. “There is no more road left.”

Haley is right to acknowledge that the road is running out as North Korea marches toward a nuclear ICBM (we at TAI have been saying so ourselves for some time now). But the Administration has yet to wed that assessment to a viable long-term strategy. For all of Trump’s dramatic bluster, he has largely adhered to a familiar playbook of sanctions, stern statements, and exhortations that China must “do more” to restrain North Korea. The demand for an oil embargo is only the latest example.

Unfortunately for Trump, China and Russia are unlikely to follow him up that rung of the escalation ladder. China has long resisted a full-fledged oil cutoff that could endanger the survival of the North Korean regime. And Vladimir Putin promptly declared today that the new U.S. sanctions push was a “road to nowhere,” stating that the North Koreans would rather “eat grass” than give up their nuclear program. In short, the oil embargo sounds like it is dead on arrival—and when Beijing or Moscow vetoes it, they will have effectively called Trump’s bluff.

After all, Trump’s threats of “fire and fury” hardly look credible in Beijing and Moscow; any “military solution” to take out Kim’s nuclear program would kill untold thousands in the process. Few in Washington, and fewer still among the American public, would be willing to bear those costs. If anything, U.S. political forces are drifting toward disengagement from Asia: as Walter Russell Mead points out in the WSJ, both Bannonites on the populist Right and isolationists on the populist Left have questioned the wisdom of upholding American security commitments abroad. This is a trend that the North Koreans (not to mention the Chinese and Russians) are watching with great interest as they seek to dislodge the United States from its perch of power in East Asia.

In other words, China and Russia may be willing to live with a nuclear North Korea if that leads to a weakening of the American position in Asia. And if the United States must learn to live with it, too, we should be strategizing for how we can do so without surrendering our strong standing in the region.

So far, the Trump Administration has shown little ability for this kind of foresight; if anything, it is actively harming its credibility with existing allies. At a time when a united front with South Korea is more critical than ever, Trump has been threatening to withdraw from their bilateral trade deal and accusing Seoul of appeasement. That is a rift that China and Russia will seek to open further, by posing as the “responsible” mediators willing to give peace a chance.

In the long run, the United States will need its own such strategies—like seeking to repair strained ties between Seoul and Tokyo, for instance, or exploiting Beijing’s fears of a nuclear South Korea and Japan to coerce China into a more cooperative position against Pyongyang. There is no guarantee that these strategies will work, and Trump is right to gripe that previous administrations have merely kicked the can down the road. But with the end of the road approaching, it is past time to start gaming out scenarios—however unpalatable and unpredictable—to maximize our position when it finally runs out.

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How Harvey Helps DACA

President Donald Trump has decided to end the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, finally acting after months of on-again, off-again threats. DACA’s termination is the latest expression of the incoherence of American immigration policy. The program began as an Obama Administration effort to regularize the status of undocumented immigrants who had grown up in the United States, then morphed into an identity-politics effort to rule by decree, which in turn led to a nativist backlash that helped elect Trump. Meanwhile, Hurricane Harvey, which will require massive numbers of immigrant construction workers for reconstruction, has just jolted the underlying assumptions of immigration policy. The politics of purity—on both sides—needs to give way to a continuation of DACA and a realistic Harvey visa waiver program.

DACA, Overreach, and Reaction

There are 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center study, with 66 percent here for ten years or more. It is neither desirable nor humane to deport this many people, as demonstrated by the Eisenhower Administration’s sordid Operation Wetback, nor are there enough immigration enforcement resources to do it. Given the size of the undocumented population, the Department of Homeland Security is forced to allocate enforcement resources. Anticipating Trump policies, the Obama Administration refocused deportation efforts against the roughly 690,000 unauthorized immigrants with serious criminal convictions. It stepped up deportations to about 360,000 people per year, yet immigration courts have a 520,000 case backlog.

In 2012, as part of its triage, the Obama Administration limited enforcement against unauthorized immigrants who had come to the United States as children. Legislatively inept, Barack Obama had previously failed to address the issue by getting Congress to pass the DREAM Act (standing for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors). Instead, in “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” mode, Obama had the Department of Homeland Security promulgate DACA as an executive action—an interpretive memorandum from then-Secretary Janet Napolitano.  As Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler pointed out, because the Obama Administration promulgated DACA through executive action rather than the ordinary rule-making process (which would have provided opportunities for comment), the Trump Administration had similar discretion to end it.

The Obama Administration executive action covered illegal immigrants who came to the United States before age 16; who, as of 2012, had lived in the country for at least five years and were not more than age 30; who are in school, are high school graduates, or are military veterans in good standing; and who have clean criminal records. People who qualified (known by the media-friendly name of “Dreamers”) received deferred action on deportation for two years, with the ability to renew their status, and could receive work permits.

In a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, 63 percent of U.S. adults supported DACA—a level of support nearly identical to that in a recent NBC News/Survey Monkey poll. As of March 2017, the Pew Research Center estimated that up to 1.1 million unauthorized young adult immigrants were eligible for DACA, and nearly 790,000 applications had been approved.

Notwithstanding the broad support for DACA, the righteous never sleep. In 2014, the Obama Administration doubled down with its Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program. DAPA used executive action to promulgate protections for an additional 4 million young adults and their parents—or, combined with DACA, nearly 50 percent of the undocumented population. Twenty-six state attorneys general sued, and in 2016, a divided U.S. Supreme Court affirmed an injunction against DAPA.

In contrast to the anti-immigration state attorneys general, the Left has opposed virtually all immigration enforcement, notably in the sanctuary cities movement. After the 2016 election, with the potential threat to DACA students in college, many professors and students embraced the related campus sanctuary movement, which implicitly views colleges—and their inhabitants sharing politically correct views on gender identity, race, and ethnicity—as holy and above the law. Michael Roth, president of upscale sanctuary campus Wesleyan University, falsely asserted that “mass deportation doesn’t have any basis in American law.” Sanctuary didn’t work out so well for Thomas Becket and, by polarizing American opinion, it isn’t working well today.

In the latest installment of the drama, nine anti-immigration state attorneys general threatened to seek judicial relief against DACA on September 5 unless the Administration terminated the program. They claimed that Congress must legislate, perhaps in an effort to embarrass the tough-on-immigration President Trump into action. In response, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo stating that DACA is unconstitutional—even though courts ordinarily defer to executive action unless it is arbitrary. Given limited enforcement resources, many courts would find that the Executive was not arbitrary in assigning low-risk Dreamers a low enforcement priority—and the Trump Administration itself concedes that Dreamers will be low priority. Furthermore, the Jim Crow period demonstrated the social costs of excluding groups from education and access to workforce advancement.

The Trump Administration has stopped accepting new DACA applications, and the program will expire on March 5, 2018. The two-year work permits issued to Dreamers will not be renewed, and will expire, according to one estimate, at a rate of about 1000 a day.

Drenched by Reality

Even if ideological purity justified upending the status of nearly 800,000 low-risk undocumented immigrants, the Trump Administration and state attorneys general have just been rained on by reality, in the form of Hurricane Harvey’s 50 inches. Current estimates are that 200,000 homes were damaged, nearly one quarter of U.S. oil refining capacity was shut down and 13 Superfund sites were flooded. Additional flash flooding is still a risk, and recovery could cost .

Even before Harvey, the United States faced a shortage of 150,000 construction workers (about 1.5 percent of total industry employment)—the result of the 2008 bust, George W. Bush and Obama Administration deportations of undocumented workers, and the decline of American vocational education. In 2013, immigrants comprised nearly 40 percent of the Texas construction workforce, suggesting that much of the additional Harvey reconstruction labor will need to come from Mexico and Central America.

There is an immediate need for cleanup workers to limit water damage and mold contamination, but the Trump Administration has announced that it will keep employment verification requirements in place for construction workers, in contrast to the George W. Bush Administration’s policy post-Hurricane Katrina. As a real estate developer, the President surely understands that if restoration is delayed because of labor shortages, the losses will be compounded.

President Trump has indicated that he would support DACA legislation. It would be desirable for Congress to rationalize immigration policy, but it has already failed to enact health care reform, and its calendar is now filled with proposed hurricane relief, debt ceiling, and tax reform legislation. If Congress can’t turn legislative (or Harvey) water into wine, Dreamer deportations will become a human tragedy and public relations nightmare, even as the pressure builds for Trump Administration executive action to grant mass visa waivers for construction workers.

Within weeks, the Trump Administration (not to mention Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who spearheaded the threatened lawsuit) will find it awkward to have ended DACA while Harvey-hit states are demanding tens of thousands of construction worker visa waivers. As our native New Yorker President should appreciate, DACA is now a third rail submerged in water. He has waded in.

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The DACA Fight and the End of Politics

“If you want to keep DACA, here’s a thought,” one conservative tweeter noted wryly in response to the torrent of outrage that met President Trump’s decision to scrap the program, “make a proposal that opponents are willing to compromise on. That’s how politics used to work.”

There is, as Yuval Levin notes, a “huge opening” for such a compromise. Some Congressional Republicans would be willing to codify DACA (which shields unauthorized immigrants who came here as children from deportation) if it was accompanied by certain restrictionist measures. And some Democrats might be willing to vote for more border security or a reduction in less-skilled immigration if it meant that “Dreamers” were given real security.

But anyone who has been watching American politics for the past several years has to be skeptical that any deal along these lines will actually transpire. Because however “politics used to work,” they don’t work that way anymore. Instead of a set of public-spirited representatives bargaining for partial victories, we are now watching maximalist factional leaders performing ideological purity rituals to increase their status within their tribes. The coming fight threatens to damage U.S. institutions even further.

The DACA chaos—from its unilateral inception under President Obama to its twilight without any fix in sight under Trump—isn’t just about immigration. It points to a growing disturbance within liberal politics itself. Understanding the roots of that disturbance can help prevent it from spreading.

“The historic contribution of liberalism,” wrote Daniel Bell in 1955, “was to separate the law from morality.”

In other words, just because something seems morally right doesn’t mean it should be reflected in the law. And just because something is the law doesn’t mean that it is morally right.

This insight is relatively new. It distinguishes modern republics from older societies where morality and the law were the same thing. “In older Catholic societies ruled by the doctrine of ‘two swords,’” Bell notes, “the state was the secular arm of the Church, and enforced in civil life the moral decrees of the Church. This was possible, in political theory, if not in practice, because the society was homogenous and everyone accepted the same religious values.”

Enlightenment thinkers, surveying the horrors of 16th-century religious warfare, saw that private morality had to be divorced from public law to keep the peace. For diverse societies to cohere, people needed to be able to hold a range of opinions about what was moral. A moral view could only be reflected in the law if it was approved in an agreed-upon process of collective compromise (like passing legislation). By the same token, the fact that something is written in the law doesn’t mean it carries moral force; bad laws can and should be amended.

The DACA crisis arises out of Americans’ deteriorating ability to separate their own moral views from the law—or to separate the outcomes they desire from the process required to achieve it.

This failure is particularly evident on the Democratic side. President Obama resisted DACA-like action for years, noting that he was “president of the United States, not emperor of the United States,” and that executive amnesty exceeded his constitutional authority. But Obama’s liberal base, which did not distinguish between its own views of what was right and the legal procedure that could bring it about, forced his hand. Because deporting unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the United States as children was immoral, and because morality and law are one and the same (to the pre-liberal mind), the administration was justified in unilaterally nullifying the law that provided for those deportations.

DACA proponents today are exhibiting a similar pathology as the Trump Administration scraps the program and calls on Congress to legislate a replacement. As our conservative tweeter from the first paragraph indicated, the bulk of liberal energies are focused on condemning the Administration and threatening lawsuits and protests. All of those courses of action are reasonable, but it remains to be seen whether they will be accompanied by the kind of procedural politics and compromise that will be necessary to actually protect Dreamers, or if the Democrats’ moral indignation has consumed their lawmaking strategy. As Jay Cost wrote, “In a constitutional republic, the ‘what’ of policy isn’t the only important thing. The ‘how’ is, too.” When these can no longer be conceived of as separate questions, liberal institutions begin to die.

The populist right wing of the Republican Party—people like Congressman Steve King, who ridicules Dreamers, who will fight any sort of DACA compromise tooth and nail, and whose intransigence encouraged President Obama’s undemocratic overreach—also tend to conflate law and morality. Because Dreamers entered the United States illegally, the hard Right argues, they did something immoral or have lesser status themselves. In this view, legal status perfectly corresponds with moral status; it’s not possible for someone to be in violation of the law but personally blameless, even if he entered the U.S. as a child. Law and morality are melted together, as in pre-Enlightenment religious monarchies. So the most reactionary anti-immigrant positions can also arise out of a rejection of the law-morality differentiation that is foundational to modern politics.

The blogger Scott Alexander has written that “liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war,” in that it creates incentives for people with wildly divergent moral views to compromise with one another through representative institutions. There are plenty of signs that our current technology is not functioning optimally—that it is overloaded, or outdated, or threatened by new kinds of viruses. The crucial indicator of this dysfunction is the collapsing firewall between morality and law. This is evident in DACA, where progressives increasingly think that their own moral vision is the law, process be damned, and reactionaries are so rigidly legalistic in their moral reasoning that they cannot empathize or compromise. But it’s also evident in debates over free speech, religion, and identity politics, where pretenses of neutrality are fading and the attitude on both sides seems to increasingly be “for me but not for thee.”

The coming DACA negotiations will be a major stress test for America’s beleaguered anti-civil war technology. Hopefully our polarized Congress and volatile President can produce a deal that preserves protection for Dreamers while addressing the serious concerns of the restrictionists. Getting there would require politics—the art of peaceful compromise between competing constituencies living under a single government. That process is frustrating and slow and imperfect. But it’s preferable to what would be unleashed if we let politics end.

The post The DACA Fight and the End of Politics appeared first on The American Interest.

Gas Attack

The Russia/Iran/DPRK sanctions bill, passed overwhelmingly by Congress this past July and sent to the White House for President Trump’s grudging approval, represents a significant escalation in Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia. Provisions in the legislation raise the possibility of U.S. sanctions being imposed on companies that partner with Russia in projects to build pipelines for energy exports. It is widely understood that the U.S. bill is specifically intended to undermine the project of five major European companies and Russia’s Gazprom to build the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany.

I cannot definitively assess how the U.S. bill might affect a variety of Russia-related gas pipeline projects currently in the works or on the drawing board; presumably a small army of European corporate lawyers is parsing the bill’s language for indications even as I write. However, if the legislation succeeds in killing the Nord Stream 2 project, then the bill should be hailed as one of the most beneficial sanctions measures in history.

Opponents of Nord Stream 2 claim that it would inadvisably increase European dependence on Russian natural gas, making Europe more vulnerable to hydrocarbon blackmail. Opponents of the U.S. sanctions legislation point to language in the bill about increasing U.S. energy exports and creating American jobs, arguing that Washington is engaging in a blatant commercial grab—a compulsory displacement of Russian natural gas by American LNG—under the sanctimonious pretext of penalizing Russian geopolitical misbehavior.

Both of these allegations are mistaken, and miss the real rationale for either building or blocking Nord Stream 2.

The construction of Nord Stream 2 would not increase the amount of Russian gas flowing to European markets. Industry-watchers have pointed out that, in fact, the existing pipeline infrastructure operates below full capacity. Moreover, additional capacity could be added much more cheaply by upgrading the existing gas-transit system rather than building a new, underwater pipeline. There is no backlog of Russian gas searching for European markets, nor is there any pent-up European demand waiting to be satisfied by additional imports from Russia. There is no major infrastructural bottleneck constraining Russian gas sales to Europe and impelling the construction of Nord Stream 2. To the extent that hydrocarbon vulnerability is calculated in terms of Russia’s share of the European gas market, Nord Stream 2 would not increase that dependency by one iota.

Likewise, the failure to build Nord Stream 2 would not, in and of itself, decrease by one cubic meter the amount of gas that Russia sells to Europe, nor would it increase U.S. exports. The U.S. sanctions do not in any way restrict the amount of gas flowing through the existing pipeline infrastructure, which, as we have seen, could even support additional Russian exports. Moreover, even if Washington wanted to displace Russian natural gas with American LNG, both a) the volume of American gas available for export and b) the existing liquefaction/regasification infrastructure in the United States and Europe would be woefully inadequate to the task. The allegation that the new sanctions are simply a cover for American commercial imperialism is therefore bogus. Frankly, the language in the legislation about promoting American exports and jobs, far from being a serious statement of intent, strikes me as political puffery intended for a domestic U.S. audience. Creating American jobs is the flavor of the month in U.S. politics, and a plausible (or, in this case, even implausible) claim in this regard gives any policy added cachet.1

The fact is that the Nord Stream 2 project has little real commercial justification for Gazprom, which is prepared to spend billions of dollars to build essentially redundant pipeline capacity. The reason is not to increase Russian gas exports to Europe, but to divert those exports away from the current pipeline system transiting Ukraine.

The purpose is not business but geopolitics. The Russian economy and state budget rely heavily on the sale of natural gas to Europe. With the current pipeline infrastructure, a large portion of that gas must transit Ukraine. That dependence on Ukrainian transit creates a very serious problem for Moscow.

Putin’s great geopolitical endeavor has been to restore what most Russians regard as their proper place among the world’s great powers—an independent pole in the emerging multipolar world, respected by all and beholden to no one. The two flagship projects in this endeavor are the Eurasian Union and the more amorphous “Russian world,” both of which aim to weld the former Soviet space (and any other countries that can be induced to sign on) into a Moscow-led bloc that would increase Russia’s geopolitical heft and presumably provide some benefit to the other members as well. Despite Ukraine’s centrality to these projects, Kyiv’s interest in them has always been tepid, even under the ostensibly pro-Russian presidency of Viktor Yanukovych. As the Russian analyst Arkadiy Moshes put it some years ago, Ukraine has made clear that it seeks to integrate with Europe and cooperate with Russia, not vice versa.

However, quite apart from institutional arrangements for post-Soviet integration, Ukraine occupies a very special place in the Russian imagination. In pre-revolutionary Russia, Ukraine was known as Malorossiya (“Little Russia,” a term that most modern Ukrainians consider condescending), and Ukrainians were viewed simply as Russians with some regional peculiarities, and speaking an ungrammatical peasant dialect of the Russian language. In the Soviet period, notwithstanding famine and repressions, Ukrainians at least had official recognition as a discrete nationality. Curiously, post-Soviet Russia has seen a considerable reversion back to the Tsarist perception of Ukraine—not only among politically marginal nationalist groups, but even on the part of mainstream politicians and analysts. Putin has expressed his opinion of Ukraine as an artificial state comprised principally of lands “taken” from Russia, and has repeatedly assessed Russians and Ukrainians as “really” one people. In so doing, he is assuredly not advancing a theory that Russians are crypto-Ukrainians. Rather, it is the Ukrainian, not the Russian, identity and language that are expected to be subsumed and essentially disappear.

Russians have resurrected the pre-revolutionary concept of ukrainstvo (roughly, “Ukrainian-ness”) as a pejorative term for the scandalous and impermissible attempt (abetted, of course, by Russia’s enemies) to divide the Russian ethnos by the artificial creation of a separate Ukrainian identity. The actual beliefs and preferences of Ukraine’s inhabitants are irrelevant to the matter as far as Russian chauvinists are concerned. For them, ukrainstvo is not a manifestation of national consciousness; it is at best a condition akin to a psychiatric disorder and at worst a virulent infection to be eradicated as quickly as possible lest it spread.

Indicative is the July 18 proclamation by Aleksandr Kharchenko, de facto leader of the separatist Donetsk Republic, regarding the creation of “Malorossiya,” a new state entity designed to drive the “fascist junta” from Kyiv, reunite the country formerly known as Ukraine, and restore it to its proper place within the Russian world. Raising the 17th-century flag of the great Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, the erstwhile Donbas separatists of Novorossiya now aspire to become the liberators of Kyiv and even Lviv, and the administrators of a post-Ukraine entity subordinate to Moscow.

Although official Moscow has publicly distanced itself from Kharchenko’s trial balloon, the Malorossiya scheme does fit nicely into the Kremlin’s playbook. Do pesky, legalistic outsiders insist on the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity? Fine, we’ll satisfy that demand—but on the condition of turning the entire country into “Little Russia”—in every possible sense of the term. Malorossiya thus becomes a useful alternative to the floundering Novorossiya project. The two schemes are complementary rather than mutually exclusive: If Novorossiya embodies the effort to destroy Ukraine by smashing it into pieces, Malorossiya is an attempt to dispense with Ukraine by swallowing it whole. The standard of Khmelnytskyi now joins the banner of Novorossiya as a false flag under which Moscow can conduct its grim campaign against ukrainstvo.

What does all of this have to do with Nord Stream 2?

Moscow’s toolbox for bringing pressure to bear on Kyiv, including in the principled long-term struggle against ukrainstvo, has been cruelly limited by Russia’s reliance on Ukrainian transit for gas sales to Europe. In the event of hostilities, the Ukrainians could shut down transit for Russian gas exports precisely at the moment when Moscow would most need the revenues. Even a complete Russian conquest of Ukraine would not solve the problem; the Ukrainians, with their impressive historical experience of partisan warfare, could probably contrive to disrupt the pipeline system more or less indefinitely. Moreover, the potential for disruption of Russian gas supplies gives Europeans a strong incentive to work for prevention, rather than mere mitigation, of a wider Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

The existing gas-transit system gives both Russia and Europe a vested interest in Ukraine’s stability. The building of Nord Stream 2 and the diversion of Russian gas would not guarantee the outbreak of a wider Russo-Ukrainian war, but it would lower the bar for such a conflict considerably, both by freeing Moscow’s hand and by decreasing Europe’s motivation to oppose Russian military action. At the very least, Nord Stream 2 would further Moscow’s designs by depriving Ukraine of desperately needed revenues.

Moreover, Nord Stream 2 would work at cross-purposes with the EU’s ostensible policy of stabilizing and mentoring Ukraine. It would make no sense for Europeans to provide millions of dollars of financial and technical support to Ukraine while siphoning off billions of dollars in Ukrainian transit fees. It would be pointless for European diplomats to toil over the Donbas peace process while their corporations and politicians are joining forces to remove the single biggest impediment to the unleashing of a full-scale war across Ukraine.

There is a delicious irony in European proponents of Nord Stream 2 decrying Washington’s selfish high-handedness. These same Europeans have summarily dismissed urgent objections to Nord Stream 2 by the Central Europeans, whose security interests would be imperiled by the project. It is tempting to suppose that the Central Europeans even played a part, however minor, in generating the U.S. sanctions. Perhaps Transatlantic cooperation is not dead after all!

Those who imagine that the U.S. sanctions will push Europe into the arms of Russia should think again. Since a sizeable contingent of EU members has opposed Nord Stream 2 all along, any attempt to craft EU-wide retaliatory measures would be contentious and divisive not only (or even principally) between the United States and Europe, but within the European Union itself. Disgruntled proponents of Nord Stream 2 would be well advised simply to allow the Americans to play their traditional role as the bad cop. As the Germans, Austrians et al. pull the plug on this misbegotten project, it would be both face-saving and psychologically rewarding to blame crude American pressure rather than to admit that the Central Europeans were actually right all along about the substance of the matter.

In the best of all possible worlds, Russia would pump as much gas as Europe wants through the existing gas-pipeline infrastructure. Europe would be warm, Russia would be rich, and Ukraine would be secure. The disruption to this agreeable arrangement comes not from some Ukrainian lurch into fascism, nor from unwarranted Western infringement on some sacrosanct Russian zone of privileged interests. The root problem is Russian unwillingness to accept Ukrainian statehood, or even to tolerate the concept of a Ukrainian national identity, and Moscow’s consequent long-term efforts to bring maximum pressure– including military—to bear on Kyiv. The construction of Nord Stream 2 would send an unmistakable signal of European complicity with Moscow’s policy, conveying the message that the priest and the Levite on the road to Jericho could be relied upon to avert their eyes at the appropriate time.

Russia’s existential struggle against ukrainstvo is likely to be one of the defining features of European security for the next generation. Massive Russian expenditures on commercially unnecessary pipeline infrastructure, as well as the ongoing construction of Russian military bases on Ukraine’s border, testify to that reality. European interest in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline deal, unfortunately, exemplifies a mentality that vaguely acknowledges this fact but can’t be bothered when it comes to thinking through all the consequences. It recognizes that turmoil is likely to occur along the eastern fringes of Europe, and seeks to insulate Western Europe by ensuring that the resulting instability doesn’t disrupt the flow of Russian gas. Though the eastern marches of the continent may burn, Western Europeans must be spared collateral damage.

Although it is a well-intentioned attempt to shelter European gas consumers from disruptions in supply, the Nord Stream 2 project actually threatens instead to ignite a conflagration that would quickly overwhelm any feeble firewall the EU might try to erect. One can easily imagine a scenario ten years hence in which European diplomats are working feverishly on the text of a Minsk 12 Agreement, squeezing the Ukrainian government hard for a package of concessions robust enough to induce Russian-backed forces to withdraw from their bridgeheads on the right bank of the Dnieper River near Kyiv. The “Malorossiya Air Force” maintains a high ops tempo of devastating sorties using aircraft, including state-of-the-art MiG-35s, Su-30s and Su-34s all supposedly “captured from Ukraine,” and flown by volunteer pilots on holiday from the Russian Air Force. Meanwhile, international relief agencies record the three millionth Ukrainian refugee arriving on EU soil, with fifty-kilometer queues of desperate people still backed up at every EU-Ukrainian border crossing. Between their frantic calls for Washington to “do something,” European leaders might reflect, belatedly, on their shortsighted pipeline decisions of yesteryear. Unfortunately, at that point, pious European efforts to salvage something for Ukraine from the unfolding catastrophe would constitute the moral and practical equivalent of throwing their thirty pieces of Russian silver back into the Temple.

On the bright side, thanks to Nord Stream 2, at least the Europeans could purchase as much Russian gas as they needed to keep all those Ukrainian refugees warm during the winter.

1That said, at the margins, the availability of American LNG for export does exercise downward pressure on gas prices and helps undermine the traditional Gazprom business model of high contractual prices and often onerous conditions, purportedly a reasonable quid pro quo for reliable long-term supply. Moreover, even though American LNG could probably never seriously challenge Russian gas on the European market on the basis of either quantity or price, the gradual expansion of LNG facilities represents one element of a European “Plan B” in the event of a disruption, for whatever reason, of Russian supplies. However, none of this has anything to do with Nord Stream 2.

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Gulf States Rethink Their PR Wars

On August 17, UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash tweeted an observation in Arabic about the standoff between Qatar on the one hand and Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt on the other, now about to enter its fourth month. “The Qatar crisis is a hornet’s nest,” he wrote. “Its weapons are money and weak souls. It is vital to reevaluate the high price of mercenaries, consciences, and pens, which are costly to the Gulf and the region.”

Gargash’s comment refers to the formidable investment of all parties in winning over public opinion, both within the Middle East and among the Gulf States’ Western allies. A memorable 2014 New York Times investigative report showed that American think tanks receive millions of dollars annually in contributions from GCC governments. The NYT named, among others, the Brookings Institution ($14.8 million from Qatar over four years) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies ($1 million from the UAE to build a new headquarters). More recent reporting from the UK describes $32 million in grants from Bahrain’s royal family to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Lobbying and PR companies in both the United States and Britain receive many millions more. In both countries as well, more subtle forms of giving to former senior government officials aim to elicit their support.

Meanwhile, in Arab countries, not only do Gulf States’ own media outlets advocate their respective agendas; in newspapers and broadcasts in the broader region, journalists, editors, and public intellectuals receive cash gifts from Gulf coffers, too.

The Gulf money pipeline also affects inter-Arab relations. Aid and investment flows from rich to oil-poor Arab states reflect their positions on the GCC divide. Cash-strapped Morocco, for example, though a beneficiary of aid from every Gulf party to the conflict, depends disproportionately on Qatari money. King Mohammed VI has accordingly adopted a position of neutrality toward the GCC standoff, much to the chagrin of Morocco’s other Gulf allies.

To gauge the impact of the Gulf spending spree on American public opinion, the Saudi-owned newspaper Arab News commissioned the London-based YouGov to conduct a poll of 2,263 U.S. adults on July 19-21. For all such studies, the meaning of the results is largely in the eye of the beholder. Nonetheless, one way to sum up YouGov’s findings is that the Gulf States have been more effective at bruising each other’s reputations than at improving their own brands. Qatar comes across as the biggest loser: Most respondents who ventured an opinion about the country (as opposed to “I don’t know”) dubbed it “unfriendly” and an “enemy” to the United States. Asked about Doha’s flagship satellite channel, Al-Jazeera, most opined that its journalistic standards were low, its content demonizes America, and it has served as a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden.

But the results for the other Gulf States and Egypt were no great shakes either: Over three iterations of a similar question, the UAE was at one point designated an ally of the United States by 62 percent of respondents—an outlier among the group. Otherwise, no Gulf State including the UAE won the designation “friendly” from more than 39 percent. The survey results add nuance, in turn, to Gargash’s tweet about the “price” of this political slugfest: The region’s oil-endowed leaders may worry less about the tens of millions of dollars they are spending annually than the heavy toll in global esteem that appears to have been taken by all the mutual bashing.

There is a less cynical way to view the polling results, however. It could well be that Americans who take an interest in foreign policy—as opposed to the large “don’t know” category of the survey set—put little stock in PR campaigns. Instead, they follow the news, weigh conflicting viewpoints, and render an independent judgment. As to the think tanks and public figures from whom they draw information, it could be that most of them behave with integrity after all. That is because foreign money in Washington does not create convivial voices so much as it finds its way to voices that are already convivial. The result is an American public assessment of the Gulf standoff that turns out to be fairly accurate. Al-Jazeera’s Arabic channel is a hub of extremist indoctrination. The UAE, for its part, has earned its reputation as an American ally—by , and by countering extremism with a message of tolerance through Arabic media, all of which has found its way into the American discussion.

If this more charitable reading of how Americans form their views is correct, then it offers two lessons to the GCC as a whole—and a further particular lesson for Qatar. First, if all parties to the conflict slashed their heavy spending on American influencers, the outcome would not change much, if at all. All the eyewash just doesn’t work, for the simple reason that the relatively few Westerners who care about the issue are not susceptible to it. Second, if Qatar wishes to overtake its rivals in the court of Western public opinion, it could far more easily do so by changing its policies.

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The Once and Future Macbeth

There’s an old joke about a theater director so bold and full of genius that he dared to mount a production of The Merchant of Venice set in 16th-century Venice rather than 1930s Chicago or a modern-day Manhattan stock brokerage. The Metropolitan Opera’s recent production of Verdi’s Macbeth was not quite that innovative: It did take place in Scotland, but the props and costumes dated from the past half-century or so. The Met’s recent nationwide broadcast of Macbeth thus showed soldiers who carried machine guns instead of bows and arrows.

Indeed, looking past the guns held sideways and a few foot soldiers wearing do rags, there is not much about the opera itself that is specific to any time or place, and the major action of the story takes place in settings that haven’t changed for centuries. People are murdered with knives in a bed or in the forest, a spontaneous battle erupts in the wilderness, a political leader tries to convince suspicious elites that everything is all right at a sumptuous banquet—all of these things happen regularly today all over the world, in much the same way they’ve always happened. The blood was fake but to me it looked like as red and gruesome as real blood looks today and presumably as red and gruesome as it looked centuries ago.

True to form, the Met put together a crack team for this quasi-modern production. Anna Netrebko shines as Lady Macbeth, and her average notes are better than the best notes of most of the rest of the cast. She carried the production more than anyone else. Zeljko Lucic made a fine Macbeth, and a particular bright spot was Joseph Calleja’s excellent and heartfelt Macduff.

I feel I can speak with authority, about both the blood and the music, because I was able to watch the opera from very close up. This was not because I had excellent tickets in the Met’s stylish Manhattan venue, but rather because I was watching a broadcast from a movie theater near my home in my provincial red-state backwater town. Besides the reclining stadium-style seats and delicious popcorn, and no line at the bathroom during intermission, the viewing experience at a broadcast offers its own pleasures, even including a slightly different interpretation of the opera itself. When Banquo’s ghost appears to Macbeth at a banquet, the camera is placed low near the ground, and initially far away from him, suggesting how his presence looms over Macbeth. The camera slowly pans closer and closer to Banquo, until he seems to take up the whole big screen, much like how he took up an increasing portion of Macbeth’s consciousness even after death.

As delightful as these moments are, the opera itself is the main attraction. The production did full justice to the sincerity and musicality of Verdi’s work, which manages to capture the human dilemma of Shakespeare’s famous character: that he truly has freedom of choice.

First, a little background. Verdi wrote Macbeth, which premiered in 1847, before his more well-known works Rigoletto, La Traviata, and Aida, and before his period of greatest fame. It was his first of three adaptations of Shakespeare. He worked with an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave that stays quite close to Shakespeare’s plot, though Verdi’s score called for a large group of witches rather than Shakespeare’s three, probably for the sake of greater vocal sonority. However, Verdi wrote the music for the witches in three harmonic parts, with each group singing singular pronouns (“I” rather than “we”) to minimize even this small deviation from the original. The other differences between the libretto and Shakespeare are minor, and mostly involve cutting long discussions that time would not permit. It made sense that Verdi would author a faithful adaptation of Shakespeare’s drama, given how much he admired and revered it, writing once that “This tragedy is one of the greatest creations of man.”

The composer paid meticulous attention to details that he felt would ensure the unity of the work, and attempted to connect different scenes dramatically and musically. The Macbeths, for example, usually sing in sharp keys, and the witches in flat keys. Even in this early period, he was pushing operas towards being unified artworks rather than thrown-together collections of disparate arias and duets connected clumsily by recitative. The strong narrative of Shakespeare’s play made it an excellent vehicle for this musical endeavor.

Leonard Bernstein once called Verdi’s music “sincere,” though even he had great difficulty describing what exactly was sincere about it. Isaiah Berlin, in The New Republic, wrote that “Verdi’s art… is objective, direct…. It springs from an unbroken inner unity….” Berlin thought that Verdi’s peasant origins gave him a simple psychology and an ability to identify with the great mass of humankind and

give direct expression to the eternal, major human emotions: love and hate, jealousy and fear, indignation and passion; grief, fury, mockery, cruelty, irony, fanaticism, faith—the passions that all men know. After him, this is much more rare. From Debussy onward…innocence is gone.

Berlin’s opinion is not universally shared, but I can see something in it. Debussy wrote such beautiful music, but it is limited in its expressive possibilities. He could write something subtle and sweet about the reflection of moonlight in a lake, but can anyone imagine Debussy or his impressionist contemporaries writing something about a gruesome murder born of envy, lust, and rage? Verdi, maybe because he was “direct” or “sincere” or “true” or “grandiose,” was not shy to write crashing chords and barn-storming, shouting arias and narrate murders exactly as they happened. His spirit and emotional directness seem ideal for adapting a drama of directness and action like Macbeth. Indeed, it is the decision to act—dramatically, decisively, and at the cost of a life—upon which the story turns.

My favorite musical moments in this production were the pauses. This is not to say that the orchestra played poorly—quite the opposite. After conductor Fabio Luisi’s orchestra got started on a phrase, they were not shy to continue what they started, crescendoing energetically and even speeding up to get to the climax. But always, before the phrase began, Luisi was willing to hold a fermata or delay the start of a new section just the slightest moment longer than one was expecting. In the tense pause before the beginning of an important phrase, one could feel all the unrealized potential of what was about to happen. But as the wait grew longer, one began to wonder whether it would happen at all.

The strategy of holding long pauses before intensely driven phrases could be reasonable for any music. But it seems especially appropriate for Macbeth. After embarking on a murderous task, Macbeth, warrior that he is, has the physical courage to see it through to its dramatic end, just like the orchestra saw each phrase through to its end. But just before undertaking each new murder, Macbeth always pauses, at the moment when the murder is still only potential, and agonizes about whether he should do it at all. In Macbeth’s reflective pauses, like the orchestra’s, we feel the greatest dramatic tension and witness the most interesting moments of the opera.

Seeing the falling-domino tragic consequences of Macbeth’s murders is like watching a violent car crash unfold in a movie—everything is governed by the laws of physics and therefore essentially predetermined, and it’s hard to resist watching just to see the kinetics and explosions. But the really interesting thing is that before the crash started it wasn’t predetermined. The driver made some free choice that set it all into motion.

G.K. Chesterton, for his part, agreed that the exploration of free will was the most important element of Macbeth. He said that Macbeth was the “one supreme drama” because of its

strong sense of… liberty…the idea that the best man can be as bad as he chooses. You may call Othello a victim of chance. You may call Hamlet a victim of temperament. You cannot call Macbeth anything but a victim of Macbeth.

If an audience member is convinced by Chesterton’s notion that Macbeth is a victim only of himself and his poor choices, he might feel despondent to think that his own decisions have caused a great portion of his own misery. Few of us have committed murder, but which of us has not freely made some terrible decision and been forced to deal with its awful consequences with the knowledge that we alone are to blame? At the same time, if Chesterton is right that “the best man can be as bad as he chooses,” then there would seem to be a natural corollary that the worst man can be as good as he chooses. At any point before the forest marched against Macbeth to kill him, he could have changed course and ceased his wickedness.

Believers in free will like Chesterton must think that it is the same for each of us—regardless of our past mistakes, we are all free to choose good things from the infinite possibilities in front of us. Even if one eschews moralistic distinctions between good and evil, there is a staggering range of possibility for the possessor of free will, from productivity to laziness, introversion to sociality, gentleness to forcefulness, hot-bloodedness to cold detachment, and so on. Regardless of circumstance and chance, one is always completely free to think, to feel, to work, to play, to start a business, to travel the world, to steal a kiss, to see an opera, or to kill the king. To be really convinced by Macbeth that we can rise as high or sink as low as we wish is to become open to a breathtaking range of personal possibilities.

Though I am not usually a fan of modern, anachronistic settings of the classics, the modern setting and costumes of this production help make the theme of free will more vivid and real for the audience. It is easy to think of the distant past of a millennium ago as dead—a book that’s already been written. Seeing Macbeth and his wife wearing our day’s fashions reminds us, as Paul Beston recently wrote, that “people in the past didn’t live in the past. They lived in the present, just like we do, making it up as they went.” When the Macbeths are wearing modern clothes, we can identify with them better, and more easily imagine what we would do in their places. Identifying with a murderer like Macbeth sounds macabre, but maybe Chesterton’s Father Brown was right when he said that “No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be.”

The role of free will (versus chance or predetermination) in affecting the outcomes of our lives has been debated for centuries. In the realm of policy, a TAI article recently discussed the degree of control that chance and choice have over economic outcomes and the implications for tax policy. If wealth is a matter of chance entirely, maybe we should tax income and wealth much more. If it is a matter of free will and choice entirely, maybe we should tax them much less. If alcoholism and drug addiction and obesity are truly diseases just like cancer or tuberculosis whose spread is entirely due to chance, it would imply optimal health policy and insurance programs quite different from those that we would pursue if we attributed those ills entirely to choice. If committing a crime is not under the control of the criminal, but only his genes or astrological chart or hormones or predestination, we should build prisons and sentence criminals very differently than we do now under the prevailing assumption that criminals have exercised some choice in committing their crimes.

And indeed, one might argue over the existence of free will within Macbeth itself. After all, the witches at the very beginning of the story already know that Macbeth will be king and that Banquo will sire a long line of future kings. They know that no man “born of woman” can defeat Macbeth and that a forest will march against him. If they knew these things already at the beginning, how can it be said that Macbeth made them happen? On the other hand, if these things were already certainties, why did the witches bother to seek Macbeth out and tell him about them? Their conversation among themselves reveals that they delight in causing harm to others, in taking revenge, and in seeing people’s ruin. Their prophesy to Macbeth was (I believe) meant to be self-fulfilling, to nudge him toward seizing the throne at a great personal cost, just as would delight the witches. Even Macbeth recognizes that his supposed destiny to be king still leaves him the choice of whether to deliberately make it happen, saying in Shakespeare’s original:

If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me

Without my stir.

In some parallel universe where Macbeth did not commit murder, there is no reason why all of the witches’ prophesies could not have been fulfilled with peaceful transfers of power and clear consciences for the Macbeth couple. But that is not the course they choose.

Again, we can draw an analogy to policy and political science. Macbeth’s murders were a way to both ensure and hasten an imagined blissful future. Another term for realizing a hypothetical utopian future is to “immanentize the eschaton,” a phrase used by political philosopher Eric Voegelin and later popularized by William F. Buckley, Jr. (Since then, it’s remained popular despite if not because of its abstruseness; there is even a Wikipedia article about it, not to mention plenty of punditry.) In Macbeth’s case, his personal eschaton is kingship, which he wants to hurry into existence. Voegelin understood the utopian political movements of the 20th century like Communism and Nazism as motivated by a belief in an eschaton—a divine paradise on earth that would end all disorder and misery. Like Macbeth, the Communists thought that their paradisiacal eschaton was inevitable, but also like Macbeth, they thought it would be worth it to hasten its arrival with the blood of countless innocents. The leaders of ISIS apparently also believe strongly in an eschaton and their own role in actualizing and hastening it. Looking through the past hundred years of history, it is difficult to find serious eschaton-immanentizers who have avoided Macbeth’s end: blood, misery, shame, and death.

Macbeth is not a didactic guide to the political science of the past century any more than it is a guide to the neuroscience of free will or the philosophy of leadership. The intellectual value of drama, to say nothing of its emotional or aesthetic value, lies in its ability to provide a fresh and concrete perspective on abstruse ideas. When studying something like neuroscience and free will, one can get caught up in thorny details about the chemical interactions of neurons and the quantum entanglement of electrons and millisecond timing differences in lab experiments. Before getting lost in all these details, or whatever other little details one is immersed in in one’s life, one should see Macbeth and get a compelling human-level perspective on free will and much else besides. The empirical science is always changing and always will. The remarkable thing about Macbeth is that it can provide food for thought more than 400 years after its debut. There is no reason to suppose that it will not be helping intellectuals think through difficult problems 400 years from now, with costumes that we wouldn’t recognize today but blood just as red.

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Merkel’s Vulnerabilities Resurface

This past week, a month ahead of Germany’s national elections, Chancellor Angela Merkel boldly stated that she has no regrets about her decision to open Germany’s borders to refugees during the 2015 migrant crisis. Despite her public confidence, though, Merkel’s government is struggling to cope with the consequences of that fateful decision—and she may soon face another difficult choice that will test her commitment to it. As the Financial Times reports:

Germany is facing a surge of up to 300,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees joining family members already living in the country, a prediction that will increase scrutiny of Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy just three weeks before federal elections.

Thomas de Maizière, interior minister, called for a temporary curb on family reunifications, which expires next March, to be extended, describing the number of relatives eligible to enter Germany as “huge”.

An estimate provided to the Financial Times by the German foreign ministry said an additional 200,000 to 300,000 Syrians and Iraqis could come to Germany to join their relatives. That is on top of the more than 1m refugees who arrived in Germany in 2015-16.

The current predicament is a problem of Merkel’s own making. In March 2016, her government kicked the can down the road by implementing a two-year ban on family reunification for a large class of asylum seekers. With that deadline looming in the distance—and hundreds of thousands stuck in limbo—Merkel is deflecting questions about whether she would extend the ban or allow another massive influx of migrants into Germany.

Needless to say, this is not a conversation that Merkel wants to be having before the election. Her main opponent, Martin Schulz, has been reluctant to press her on her immigration and integration policies, and she has tried to neutralize those political vulnerabilities by pointing to her subsequent crackdown on migrant flows after the initial surge in 2015. But the coming decision on family reunification will put the issue back in the spotlight, pitting Merkel’s original open-arms policy against the tougher tack she has taken in its aftermath. Public opinion favors a restrictive approach: according to a recent survey, 58% of Germans are opposed to refugees’ relatives being allowed to legally reunite with their families in Germany.

Migration is not the only area where Merkel remains vulnerable. The Chancellor recently declared her support for a common Eurozone budget and finance minister, both proposals offered by Emanuel Macron to deepen the EU’s monetary union. But those initiatives are opposed by many in Merkel’s own ranks, who reject greater fiscal integration with the Eurozone’s less responsible members. From the FT: 

While Ms Merkel’s comments might have gone down well in Paris, they are less welcome to many in Berlin. Many members of her centre-right CDU party — and its potential coalition partners after the election — want strict rules on how burdens can be shared across the bloc, making sure that German resources are not used to bail out less fiscally prudent countries. […]

The real opposition to further eurozone reform would be the rightwing of the CDU party itself. The chancellor would also have to contend with the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, whose members have been among the fiercest critics of pan-European economic policies such as the ECB’s mass bond-buying quantitative easing programme.

It’s not just Merkel’s own party that is irritated by her support for a Eurozone budget. The Free Democratic Party (FDP), which could conceivably act as a kingmaker in a coalition with the CDU, is also opposed; its leader Christian Linder called such talk “irritating” and stated, “The interests of Paris are not those of Berlin.” Such tight-fisted opposition to fiscal burden-sharing is prevalent in Germany, and could help Merkel’s rivals at the polls.

But will either of these controversies be enough to endanger Merkel’s re-election? Alas for the Chancellor’s rivals, the answer is probably no: Merkel still enjoys a comfortable polling lead, and her Social Democratic opponents are, if anything, even more supportive of welcoming migrants and increasing Eurozone integration than she is. Merkel’s past embrace of migrants and her present support for Eurozone reform may not doom her electorally—but they do present long-term governance challenges that could haunt her in a fourth term.

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The Doolittles and the Destroyers

The health care fight in September is fixing to be a battle between two extremes: those who want to do little, stabilizing the individual market for now and waiting till later to revisit big changes, and those who are still bent on immediate destruction.

In the “destruction” corner, we have Lindsey Graham (with coauthors Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, and Dean Heller, R-Nevada), whose plan proposes getting rid of the individual and employer mandates, and letting the states take care of the law’s other provisions themselves.

The plan may have a shot, but it’s tough to imagine Graham winning over all the other Republican Senators. Neither those who refused to vote for the last bill back in July, nor Mitch McConnell, who hasn’t endorsed it and may be moving on to other things, are likely to come aboard. The plan would mollify Trump, who has consistently called for the destruction of his predecessor’s signature law. The public? Not so much, or even at all: polls suggest that Americans want a health care fix, not a dramatic upset.

In the opposite corner are Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) and Patty Murray (D-District of Columbia), who will open bipartisan hearings on healthcare reform next week. A bipartisan proposal from Governors John Kasich (R-Ohio) and John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado), released yesterday, serves as something of a preview of where they may be heading.

The Kasich-Hickenlooper proposal would stabilize the individual market by making sure that Congress appropriates funds for insurance subsidies (called cost-sharing reductions, or CSRs), while keeping most of the law intact, including the hated individual mandate. The plan’s sweetener for Republicans is a certain amount of flexility granted to the states, allowing them to suspend some provisions (like the employer or individual mandates) if they want to, but making them stick to others (like permitting children to be on their parents’ insurance until age 26, and providing coverage to those with preexisting conditions). The catch is that the states’ experiments can’t contribute to the Federal deficit.

Yet the Doolittles don’t have much going for them, either. They will find it tough to convince Republicans with their hearts set on repeal to stabilize the individual market, especially since the rewards Republicans get in return seem comparatively underwhelming. And of course, Trump, who regularly bellows about subsidies given to shady insurers, will hate it. The bright side: Republicans may decide they need to pass something to steady the market in 2018 (which they’d have to do before September 27, the date by which insurers must submit their final plans). Otherwise, they’ll be causing trouble for Americans without anything to show for it. They may also be drawn to the attractions of calm bipartisanship after a bruising congressional session this past spring, and summer full of presidential offenses.

Nonetheless, bipartisanship seems to have less pull nowadays that polarization. Kasich and Hickenlooper revealed their plan a few days after denying that they would run together on an independent ticket in 2020. Astonishing as it may be, Trump may not have failed badly enough in the public’s eyes to make bipartisanship and caution a surefire path to electoral success. (Which is not to say he’s making a favorable impression.) Perhaps if both healthcare plans fail, and Congress succumbs to another round of futile hostilities this fall, that may change.

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Can North Korea Be Contained?

After a brief lull, tensions with North Korea are rising once again. On Tuesday, Pyongyang conducted its most provocative test yet, launching an intermediate Hwasong-12 ballistic missile over the Japanese island of Hokkaido. The move caused panic across Japan and triggered a fierce response from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who denounced the test as an “an unprecedented, grave and serious threat.” Two days later, U.S. fighter jets flew alongside Japanese F-15s in a show of solidarity, before joining their South Korean counterparts for live-fire bombing exercises.

If America’s Asian allies are united, however, the Trump Administration appears to be less so. On Wednesday, President Trump vented his frustration on Twitter, writing, “The U.S. has been talking to North Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years. Talking is not the answer!” Soon after, that message appeared to be contradicted by Defense Secretary James Mattis, who said that the U.S. was “never out of diplomatic solutions” on North Korea. This apparent contradiction—hardly the first in the administration’s approach to North Korea—has again raised the question of whether Trump has a serious strategy to “solve” the North Korean crisis.

But perhaps that is the wrong question to ask. Trump himself, of course, has promised to “solve” the nuclear crisis where past administrations failed. But in many ways, his approach has borrowed from the same stale playbook that his predecessors used: a combination of sanctions, pressure on China, demonstrative shows of force, and conditional overtures to bring Pyongyang to the bargaining table. In other words, Trump’s administration is using the same tired tactics that have been tried in the past—and that have manifestly failed to “solve” the crisis or halt Pyongyang’s drive toward a nuclear ICBM.

How, then, to approach the North Korean problem in these changed circumstances? Thomas Wright offers a glimpse in a provocative piece over at Brookings. First of all, he argues, Kim has a more ambitious set of goals than commonly understood:

Kim’s ambitions appear greater than mere survival. He is a young man who believes he will be in power for another 40 years. The ICBMs are the key to his long-term strategy. He seems to believe that ICBMs will fundamentally change the balance of power in the region by forcing the United States to withdraw from South Korea. Kim may be right. One need just look at the remarkable interview that Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, gave to The American Prospect … Bannon said there was no military solution to the ICBM threat and he favored a deal in which the United States withdrew its forces (currently 28,500 troops) from South Korea in exchange for North Korea freezing its nuclear program and agreeing to inspections.

Kim will have read Bannon’s interview with great interest. It reveals the isolationist nature of America First, the foreign policy doctrine that is on the rise in America. U.S. interests are paramount. With an America First foreign policy, the United States will not risk its own security for those of its allies. Gone are the days of the Cold War when the United States was really to sacrifice New York to save West Berlin or Paris. The United States may not withdraw immediately but over ten or twenty years, who knows.

Wright’s essential insight is that North Korea presents a long-term containment challenge, not a short-term crisis to be solved. Kim aims to displace Washington from its prominent perch in Asia, not merely to preserve his own power. For that reason, the challenge for U.S. policymakers is less putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle—it’s too late for that—than maintaining Washington’s strong position in Asia and countering Pyongyang’s leverage in the years to come. This is a policy of “threat reduction,” as Nicholas Eberstadt has argued elsewhere.

Such a policy may include more missile defense for Japan and South Korea, stepped-up covert campaigns to subvert the North’s missile programs, a more vigorous effort to freeze the regime’s illicit foreign assets, and a clear commitment to retaliate proportionately if Pyongyang attacks. These moves could certainly increase the risks of conflict in Asia—but paradoxically, Wright argues, they could also get Beijing on board in pressuring Pyongyang:

Why would China go along? Containment of North Korea will mean enhanced missile defenses and more U.S. forces in Northeast Asia. It could mean Japan and South Korea acquiring nuclear weapons. It will also increase the risk of limited conventional conflict between the United States and North Korea as Washington tries to demonstrate that the ICBM’s are not the equivalent of a blank check. This means that China’s strategic environment will steadily deteriorate. If China plays a part in containing North Korea, it can help shape the response, influence that would be denied to it if it stood on the sidelines. That’s China’s incentive.

Wright’s argument here complements one that our own Adam Garfinkle made recently: for all the complications that a nuclear North Korea presents, the challenge is manageable, and could even provide some strategic opportunities. “Yes, it’s true that a nuclear-armed North Korea complicates the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence in East Asia, and it complicates the triangular relationship between the United States, South Korea, and Japan,” Adam wrote. “But it also complicates China’s life in ways potentially useful to us in the fullness of time.” If Beijing is faced with the prospect of two rivals acquiring nukes, for example, it may decide to become much more cooperative in curbing North Korea’s ambitions.

This doesn’t mean that we should be sanguine about the threat that a nuclear Pyongyang poses. But policymakers would be wise to game out scenarios that allow us to maximize our strategic advantage against a nuclear North Korea, rather than recycling failed policies or quixotically clinging to the idea that Pyongyang will disarm unilaterally. As Wright points out, victory for Kim may well be measured in decades, not years. The U.S. needs to plan for a similar time frame in order to frustrate Kim’s long-term ambitions and preserve a strong U.S. position in Asia.

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A First for Kenya and for Africa

Today, Kenya’s Supreme Court annulled Kenya’s presidential election results, mandating fresh elections in the next 60 days. No court on the continent has ever done such a thing. It is truly a milestone for judicial independence in Africa. The NYT:

The Supreme Court, which has bolstered its independence in recent years but had been — at least until now — viewed by many Kenyans as under government influence, was facing pressure to set out arguments that would persuade people on both sides, said Dickson Omondi, a country director for the National Democratic Institute.



The court case was an opportunity for the judiciary to truly show its independence, Mr. Omondi said, after it came under intense criticism for its mishandling of a similar petition by Mr. Odinga in 2013, which the presiding judge alluded to on Friday at the start of his remarks.



Most African courts feel pressure from leaders, Mr. Omondi said, so “It’s a historic moment showing the fortitude and courage of the Kenyan judiciary.” He also applauded other figures and groups involved — Mr. Kenyatta and the electoral commission — for appearing to have accepted the judges’ decision, and said the ruling could influence similar cases elsewhere in Africa.

“We believe in the rule of law,” said Kenyatta, accepting the decision.

“Official” results showed incumbent Presdient Uhuru Kenyatta triumphing last month over perennial opposition challenger Raila Odinga, this according to Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC)—and affirmed by independent election observers like the Carter Center. But University of Michigan professor Walter Mebane ran a statistical analysis of the results, estimating that at least 500,000 of Kenyatta’s votes were fraudulent.

Then there’s the murky matter of IEBC electronic director Chris Msando’s grisly murder mere days before the election, which the opposition seized upon in the waning days of the campaign as evidence that the elections would be rigged electronically. And it was electronic tallying, not voter intimidation or ballot-stuffing, that the Supreme Court highlighted in its ruling today. Kenyatta was declared the winner before scanned copies of official tally forms were uploaded online. It took more than 10 days for the forms to be uploaded, and even then many of them lacked the appropriate stamps, signatures, and watermarks. Some showed surprisingly high turnout (100 percent in places) and curiously monolithic support for Kenyatta.* These electronic irregularities are what led the Kenyan Supreme Court to declare the elections “invalid, null, and void.”

Ty McCormick, writing in Foreign Policy, highlights the role of external election observers in validating the now-voided election results:

Former Secretary of State John Kerry, who led the Carter Center’s observer mission, congratulated the electoral commission on the “extraordinary job” it did “to ensure that Kenya has a free, fair and credible poll.”



The Carter Center did not immediately respond to requests for comment.



“They are going to have to wipe a huge amount of egg off their faces,” John Githongo, an anti-corruption campaigner and former head of Kenya’s anti-corruption commission, said of the international observer missions. “People here are really feeling very hurt and cheated by the international observers. They did a very sloppy job. There’s a feeling that these guys came on holiday here and signed off on something that they should not have.”

Jimmy Carter and John Kerry have some explaining to do. Who’s wrong, Kenya’s highest court, or foreign election monitors? And how much did fears of election-related violence play into the observers’ decision to brand the elections as “free and fair” when some on the observation teams may have had significant reservations? Did American favoritism for Kenyatta, who is seen to be more cooperative on business and security cooperation with the United States, play any role in the enthusiasm with which American observers approved the results?

The next 90 days will be extraordinarily messy. It is unclear that any elections body, whether existing or new, will have the capacity to run elections to the standards demanded by the Kenyan Supreme Court. An already bitter campaign will seethe with fresh vitriol. Elections observers will redeploy, hopefully with a keener eye for scrutiny. After 60 days, Kenyans will vote once more. And in the tenuous 30 days after, we will see how Kenyatta, Odinga, and the Supreme Court respond to the new election results.

Today’s ruling raises many questions. If the elections are again marred by fraud, will the Supreme Court dutifully scrap them a second time? Will international election observers speak up? If Kenyatta loses, will he step down? If Odinga loses, will he concede? Will Kenya’s Supreme Court maintain its newfound independence, or will future presidents learn the lesson to stack it with loyal supporters? Only time will tell how Kenya answers these questions.

* To learn more about the irregularities in greater detail, read Helen Epstein’s gripping essay “Kenya: The Election and the Cover-Up” in The New York Review of Books.

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