Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 146

Does the UK Have a Brexit Strategy?

With her cabinet divided, her European interlocutors exasperated, and her domestic mandate weakened, UK Prime Minister Theresa May is struggling to convince the public she has a handle on the Brexit negotiations. And as Downing Street fights rumors that it will pay a hefty divorce bill to Brussels, May is announcing that she will release her elusive strategy… sometime soon. The Guardian:

No 10 has revealed it will release Brexit policy papers on key issues in the coming weeks, as it continues to play down the idea that Theresa May is prepared to pay a divorce bill of about €40bn (£36bn) to the EU.

The position papers are expected to cover crucial topics such as the UK’s preferred options for replacing the customs union and arrangements at the Northern Irish border ahead of the next round of talks with the EU.

They could also cover the financial formula to calculate Britain’s remaining obligations to Brussels, which the UK and EU will have to agree upon to progress to the next stage of talks on their future relationship.

May’s strained effort to re-establish control over the negotiations comes amid cratering public confidence. A new poll shows that 61 percent of voters disapprove of the government’s handling of negotiations, a number that has been steadily creeping upwards since May’s election gamble backfired. And prominent politicos are now openly sniping at May for botching the talks. Sir Simon Fraser, a former senior diplomat, recently made headlines for criticizing the cabinet infighting, unclear objectives, and reactive approach that have characterized the early negotiations. “We haven’t put forward a lot because, as we know, there are differences within the cabinet about the sort of Brexit that we are heading for,” Fraser said.  “Until those differences are further resolved I think it’s very difficult for us to have a clear position.”

Downing Street, of course, is rebutting those charges of cabinet disarray. But a look at recent news reveals that Fraser has a point: “soft Brexit” pragmatists like Chancellor Philip Hammond and “hard Brexit” champions like Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson have been openly clashing of late, leaving May awkwardly trying to position herself between them. Meanwhile, Parliament is also causing headaches for the Prime Minister. Many Euroskeptic Tory MPs bristle at the idea of paying a penny more to Brussels, and are already saying that a costly divorce bill will never make it through Parliament. Given that reality, May has been quick to deny reports that she would pay the EU a €40 billion settlement—even though the EU considers some financial settlement a prerequisite for moving on to trade talks, and it may well demand a larger sum.

Given the UK’s shifting signals, May’s conflicting incentives, and the absence of British proposals, it is hard to escape the impression that the UK is playing a seriously weak hand. In fact, the few Europeans challenging that consensus are arguing that the Brits have been so implausibly inept that they must be playing some cunning three-dimensional chess. Per Politico Europe:

Viewed from Brussels, the U.K. seemed so ill-prepared in the early rounds of Brexit negotiations that some EU countries think it must be a trap. […]

The Brits’ chaotic early posture in the Brexit talks has left them wondering whether London is pulling some sort of deft ploy — a strategy of pretending not to have a strategy. […]

“I think it’s tactics: They are playing for time on purpose,” one attaché from a Western EU country said, “under the pretext of chaos in London.”

“In September they’re going to swamp us with [position] papers on the fault lines — exactly the issues where they know we [the EU27 countries] are divided,” he warned.

This may be a flattering theory for British negotiators, but it is also an unlikely one; as David Allen Green has argued, the simplest explanation for the current chaos is a lack of strategic direction from the top. Still, the fact that some in Brussels subscribe to this theory only underscores the profound mistrust that exists between the two sides. If the EU doesn’t believe the UK is negotiating in good faith, divorce talks are likely to be even more prolonged and painful than expected—and the process of securing a favorable trade relationship will be even more more difficult.

Perhaps May will soon quiet the doubters, unleashing her strategic genius with the coming flurry of position papers. But so far, the UK’s directionless approach to Brexit has hardly inspired much confidence in her “strong and stable” leadership credentials.

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The Geopolitical Costs of America’s Nuclear Winter

Two South Carolina utilities decided last week to halt work on a pair of new nuclear reactors, dealing a blow to one of the most important power sources in America—both in terms of energy security and environmental stewardship. The utilities’ choice is an easy stand-in for the health of nuclear power in the United States today, and it comes on the heels of the industry leader Westinghouse filing for bankruptcy back in March. Nuclear’s struggles are the most pressing energy problem for the U.S. today—more so than the intermittency of renewables or the struggles of coal—because the power source is going to be leaned on heavily in the coming decades as we work to produce a low-carbon energy mix.

America’s fleet of nuclear reactors, currently 99-strong, are going to reach the ends of their life cycles in the coming years and decades, and there’s no supply of new projects under way to replace them. That’s especially problematic considering the massive capital costs involved in constructing these plants and the long lead-in times they require. But while America’s nuclear power industry languishes, elsewhere in the world it’s growing, and two countries in particular are looking to export their nuclear technologies.

Russia has been particularly aggressive in its efforts to construct and operate nuclear power plants outside of the motherland. “Moscow views nuclear reactor sales as a vehicle for expanding and enhancing its influence,” write Nick Belluci and Michael Shellenberger in an insightful article for Foreign Affairs (that’s well worth a read). The state-owned Russian nuclear power company Rosatom has its fingers in many, many nuclear pies, so to speak, including projects in Europe.

Back in 2015, the EU got cagey about a deal between Hungary and Rosatom that gave the Russian firm the right to design, construct, maintain, and operate two new nuclear reactors outside of Budapest. Brussels initially rejected the agreement on anti-competition grounds, before giving it the green light a month later after Hungary agreed to give Rosatom exclusive fuel rights for only ten years, as opposed to the 20 initially agreed upon. The Hungarian saga illustrates just how attractive Russia’s nuclear wares can be for energy-hungry countries, and also the stresses it can place on nations’ energy security. This is playing out in many other countries, including Armenia, Bangladesh, Belarus, China, Egypt, Finland, India, Iran, Slovakia, and Turkey.

China is also keen on constructing and operating nuclear power plants outside of its territory, and includes these energy projects as part of its One Belt One Road policy that aims to leverage infrastructure projects to help strengthen economic and political relationships abroad. Chinese nuclear firms are building reactors for Romania and Pakistan, and there are further plans to expand into Argentina, Armenia, Egypt, Kenya, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, South Africa, Turkey, and the UK.

Between them, China and Russia are actively exporting nuclear energy around much of the developing (and some of the developed) world, taking advantage of rising global energy demand and a dearth of American leadership. As climate concerns become more integrated into national energy policies, demand for nuclear energy in particular—the only source of scalable zero-emissions baseload power—is certain to grow.

At the same time, new nuclear technologies are going to mature, allowing for safer, cheaper, and in some cases smaller reactors, alleviating many of the concerns (justified and otherwise) that so many people seem to have with nuclear power around the world. This is an opportunity for the United States to do what it does best: innovate and thrive.

We’ve seen the oil and gas industry work with government to set off a shale energy boom that seemingly came out of nowhere, but had its roots in national labs. Replicating that for the nuclear industry through ARPA-E or new legislation would combat climate change and strengthen energy security not only here in the United States, but the world over. As Russia and China are demonstrating, if we don’t do it, others will—with strings attached.

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Erdogan Hints at New Military Action in Syria

The Turkish intervention in Northern Syria has been at a standstill for months as the Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army isn’t pressing against the Assad regime to the south and can’t push east to the Euphrates so long as the Kurds have U.S. protection. But now Turkey’s President Erdogan is making noise about renewed military action against the Syrian Kurds, as Reuters reports:

“We will not leave the separatist organization in peace in both Iraq and Syria,” Erdogan said in a speech on Saturday in the eastern town of Malatya, referring to the YPG in Syria and PKK bases in Iraq. “We know that if we do not drain the swamp, we cannot get rid of flies.” [….]

Recent clashes have centered around the Arab towns of Tal Rifaat and Minnigh, near Afrin, which are held by the Kurdish YPG and allied fighters.

Erdogan said Turkey’s military incursion last year dealt a blow to “terrorist projects” in the region and promised further action. “We will make new and important moves soon,” he said.

Turkey has been steadily building up its forces along the Syrian border at various points opposite YPG-held territory, but the choice of where the Turks might strike is a difficult one. So far, the U.S. has responded by making its presence sufficiently obvious that any Turkish incursion would meet U.S. resistance. Last month, U.S. special forces deployed to Tal Abyad, driving around the border town in trucks flying American flags and shortly thereafter appeared on social media:

U.S. forces tour the SDF-held town of Tal Abyad. pic.twitter.com/A1WKdzr6pE

— Afarin Mamosta (@AfarinMamosta) June 27, 2017

Tal Abyad has been suspected as one possible incursion point because the Turks could then drive directly onto Raqqa and claim that they did it to fight terrorism. But so long as the U.S. retains a presence in Northeast Syria that seems unlikely. More troubling is the Turkish buildup around Afrin in the northwest, where there is no known U.S. presence. An attack on Afrin, which the U.S. could do little to stop, might provoke a crisis for all of Syria’s Kurds, who remain the U.S.’s primary ground force against ISIS.

We’ve written before about how the standoff between Turkey and the Syrian Kurds will remain a tinderbox going forward. The U.S. presence and commitment to Syria’s Kurds has escalated significantly under the Trump administration, even as the President has terminated support for anti-Assad rebels. So long as the U.S. maintains its presence in Syria, a crisis with Turkey can probably be averted. The question is how long the U.S. is willing to stay.

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ASEAN Rebukes China, Then Gives Away the Store

At a summit in Manila this weekend, ASEAN foreign ministers showed a touch more backbone in criticizing China than widely expected, reports Reuters:

Southeast Asian foreign ministers ended an impasse on Sunday over how to address disputes with China in the South China Sea, issuing a communique that called for militarization to be avoided and noting concern about island-building. […]

The communique late on Sunday takes a stronger position than an earlier, unpublished draft, which was a watered-down version of one issued last year in Laos.

The agreed text “emphasized the importance of non-militarisation and self-restraint”.

It said that after extensive discussions, concerns were voiced by some members about land reclamation “and activities in the area which have eroded trust and confidence, increased tension and may undermine peace, security and stability”.

Unfortunately, this kind of mild rebuke is what passes for newsworthy political courage at ASEAN these days, where China has long bullied members into omitting even oblique criticisms of its island-building. In this case, the slightly tougher stance may have been driven in part by the United States. In a strong joint statement with Australia and Japan this weekend, the U.S. urged ASEAN to adopt a legally binding code of conduct to constrain Beijing’s maritime activity, while denouncing China’s land reclamation and militarization in no uncertain terms. That suggests that Washington has been trying to steer ASEAN members toward taking a stronger stance against China: a welcome sign of engagement after the U.S. has lately seemed missing in action on the dispute.

But it is doubtful that the Chinese are quaking in their boots over these rhetorical rebukes. ASEAN may have summoned the nerve to give China a rhetorical slap on the wrist, but Beijing still achieved its main objective at the summit: the negotiation of a wishy-washy, noncommittal “framework” for a code of conduct in the South China Sea, which no one seriously expects to be legally binding. Reuters again:

Foreign ministers of Southeast Asia and China adopted on Sunday a negotiating framework for a code of conduct in the South China Sea, a move they hailed as progress but seen by critics as tactic to buy China time to consolidate its maritime power. […]

All parties say the framework is only an outline for how the code will be established but critics say the failure to outline as an initial objective the need to make the code legally binding and enforceable, or have a dispute resolution mechanism, raises doubts about how effective the pact will be.

The Chinese certainly seem happy with the situation, with Foreign Minister Wang Yi touting the framework as a diplomatic coup and a sign of “really tangible progress” on the dispute. And he has good reason to celebrate: with negotiations for the actual code set to extend for months, China will have plenty of time to fortify its maritime positions. And with China set to prevail in making the code unenforceable, Beijing is already proving American entreaties to be hollow and ineffectual.

Rebukes aside, then, the basic situation remains unchanged. Until China’s rivals (and especially the United States) decide to back up their rhetoric with action, Beijing will continue to shrug off their criticisms and plow ahead in the South China Sea, as its opponents sputter ineffectually from the sidelines.

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Locked In

Black lives matter. To do those lives justice, should we exhibit sympathy for disproportionately black criminal suspects, defendants, and convicts, or should we fight crime more aggressively in poor black neighborhoods? Can we do both? The United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners—and a disproportionate number of those prisoners are African-American. Today African Americans are seven times as likely to be in prison or jail than whites.

It’s now conventional wisdom among racial justice advocates that callous or downright racist white politicians and police forced tough-on-crime policies on powerless black communities. But in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, as a violent drug trade snuffed out or ruined countless black lives, more assertive policing in black communities was considered a civil rights imperative. Law professor and former public defender James Forman, Jr., tells this more complicated story in his surprising and insightful new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.

“This was not a story in which a white majority, acting out of indifference or hostility to black lives, imposed tough criminal penalties that disproportionately burdened a black minority,” Forman writes. Instead, black communities themselves, desperate for relief from a plague of drugs and drug-related crime, demanded law and order: “African-Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issues, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals.”

Initially, the War on Drugs had the support of civil rights leaders and black politicians desperate to stop heroin, PCP, crack cocaine, and the turf wars and violence these drugs brought to minority communities. In the early 1980s black newspapers such as The Los Angeles Sentinel called for drug dealers to be “tarred and feathered, burned at the stake, castrated . . . .” Jesse Jackson, Jr., seconded the emotion, insisting in 1988, “No one has the right to kill our children. I won’t take it from the Klan with a rope; I won’t take it from a neighbor with dope.” And in the 1990s, as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Eric Holder, Jr., equated tough anti-crime measures with civil rights, asking: “Did Martin Luther King successfully fight the likes of Bull Connor so that we could lose the struggle for civil rights to misguided and malicious members of our own race?” Under zero-tolerance policies embraced by many black political leaders, casual drug users were condemned along with drug kingpins: For instance, in the 1980s, Washington, DC Mayor Marion Barry threatened the confiscation of assets and long prison terms for anyone “caught with half a gram of cocaine . . . [or] with one marijuana joint.”

Today it’s clear that the dramatic increase in the American prison population during the late 20th century is a profound social and racial injustice. But the willingness of civil rights leaders and black politicians to countenance it suggests that it is not simply an instrument of white supremacy, motivated by racial hostility and indifference to black suffering. Why did so many Americans of all races come to see lawbreakers as irredeemable villains, rather than as fellow citizens who had made mistakes? Forman’s skillful analysis of the rise of tough policing in Washington, DC suggests an answer. 

First of all, America experienced a pronounced and prolonged increase in crime during the 1960s and 1970s. Criminologists argue about precisely what caused it, but the trend accelerated in the 1960s as the unrest of the counterculture collided with the long hot summers of racial unrest. This was the era of the Kennedy assassinations, the Symbionese Liberation Army, which killed a black Oakland school superintendent with hollow-point bullets packed with cyanide, and the telegenic Black Panthers—equal parts political movement, vigilante group, and criminal gang—who organized armed patrols of the streets of Oakland. By the end of the decade, voters had had enough and Nixon won the election on a law-and-order platform that set the tone for the events in Locking Up Our Own.

Race certainly played a role in dehumanizing the growing number of incarcerated Americans, but an exclusive focus on race misses the importance of the pervasive sense of disorder and menace in disrupting empathy for people on the wrong side of the law. Lawlessness and violence encouraged the law-abiding American bourgeoisie of all races to support increasingly punitive forms of law enforcement. African Americans living in crime-ridden neighborhoods were as likely to condone rough, “Dirty Harry”-style justice as were suburban whites. Forman tells the story of Washington vigilante librarian Tony Hillary, pictured with a determined scowl and pistol in each hand, who railed against ineffective police and patrolled the streets of Washington promising “retaliatory measures” against drug dealers: “[W]e’re going to shoot to kill.”

Indeed, the 1971 film Dirty Harry itself, now notorious for glamorizing police brutality, suggests racially mixed support for no-holds-barred anti-crime measures. Detective Harry Callahan’s arch-nemesis in the film is not a black radical or inner-city gang member but a white racist sociopath,“Scorpio,” who, in the beginning of the film, threatens to kill “a Catholic priest or a nigger.” Scorpio indeed kills a little black boy and, after Callahan’s unauthorized search of his home uncovers the murder weapon, Scorpio stays out of jail by exploiting legal procedural rules to exclude the evidence of his crime. Dirty Harry resonated with audiences frustrated with a “revolving door” criminal justice system that released dangerous offenders back into society—a revolving door that “many African-American observers,” according to Forman, “[believed] spun fastest for criminals who victimized blacks.” Dirty Harry tapped into anxieties about crime and violence that united Americans of all races.

The hard-working police officer thwarted by bureaucratic red tape and legal chicanery became a leitmotif of police dramas of the 1970s and 1980s. The late Harvard Law School Professor Bill Stuntz argued in The Collapse of American Criminal Justice that criminal procedural rights developed by the Supreme Court in the 1960s—such as the exclusion of evidence obtained through procedurally flawed searches—may have inadvertently encouraged the law-and-order crackdown of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. If the system routinely let the guilty go free due to legal technicalities, the public demanded tougher sentences for those who were convicted to make up for it.

More importantly, the increased cost of procedurally complex trials and the difficulty of securing a conviction led prosecutors to rely ever more heavily on plea agreements that eliminated the need for trials altogether. Meanwhile, longer potential sentences gave them the leverage to strike harder bargains with suspects. Today, it is estimated that over 90 percent of all convictions are the result of plea bargains: The vaunted trial-by-jury, presumption of innocence, and the procedural safeguards established in the 1960s are, for most suspects, only a cruel mirage.

Even as support for the War on Drugs waned in the black community, zero tolerance for gun-related crimes remained popular. Forman notes that in the early 1990s, Eric Holder, Jr., advocated the use of pretextual traffic stops and searches to uncover concealed weapons—a version of the now-infamous “driving while black” policing. Holder acknowledged that black drivers would be stopped disproportionately, but pointed out that, as Forman relates to us, “94 percent of black homicide victims were slain by black assailants.” Essentially, Holder suggested that when enough is at stake, it’s acceptable to burden racial minorities—young men in particular—with a disproportionate share of the cost of law enforcement.

Those costs are tragically high in the United States. According to Berkeley Law Professor Franklin Zimring, author of When Police Kill, African Americans are 2.3 times more likely to be killed by police than are whites. Worse yet, American police kill much more often than police in other countries because of the riskiness of American policing: “The threat of lethal attack is a palpable part of being a police officer in the United States,” Zimring writes. American police are 25 times more likely to be killed in the line of duty than police in the United Kingdom and 40 times more likely than police in Germany—a difference explained almost entirely by the availability of firearms. Guns are used in 90 to 97 percent of all fatal attacks on police and police respond to this risk with preemptive lethal force: According to Zimring, roughly 60 percent of the roughly 1,000 civilians killed by American police every year are armed with a gun or something that looked like a gun.

Forman observes that today’s militarized, SWAT-style policing was, at least in part, a reaction to heavily armed criminals who routinely outgunned police. In a poignant glance at lost opportunities, Locking up Our Own quotes Washington, DC Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives and gun-control advocate Walter Fauntroy, who hoped in 1975 that “[a]s handguns disappear from the national scene, this nation and this city may approach an era of domestic tranquility . . . where even the police do not carry guns.” Of course, precisely the opposite happened: “[P]olice officers began seeing themselves outgunned by teenagers. In response, the police armored up . . . .” By the early 1990s police departments had begun deploying high-capacity automatic weapons, military assault vehicles, and combat tactics in an ongoing war on crime and criminals.

Rising crime, social dislocation and unrest, increasingly violent drug turf battles, the proliferation of firearms, and frustrations with what was widely perceived to be an overly permissive criminal justice system—all of these inspired a series of new policies, law reforms, and law-enforcement practices that combined to exacerbate the injustices—and racial inequities—of law enforcement. Forman argues, “[m]ass incarceration is the result of small distinct steps, each of whose significance became apparent . . . only when considered in light of later events.”

The same is true of police violence. Changes in law enforcement tactics and priorities in the late 20th century victimized African Americans not by design, but because African Americans were—and are—disproportionately vulnerable to them: concentrated in high-crime neighborhoods where aggressive policing is the norm, socialized and conditioned to react to police in ways that inspire suspicion rather than trust, disproportionately involved in grey markets that entail minor transgressions, and unable to afford the legal services that would allow them to take advantage of procedural safeguards and legal rights.

Even those who benefit from excellent legal services can find themselves in dire straits, however. For instance, Forman describes the plight of his own clients, many of whom faced the choice of accepting long prison terms as part of a plea bargain agreement or facing the risk of even longer sentences if they went to trial. During one plea negotiation a prosecutor insisted on prison, pointing out that the accused had already been through rehab and reoffended, proving that drug rehab programs “don’t work.” Forman rejoined: “So what? [My client] has already served one mandatory prison sentence [too] . . . our system never treated the failure of prison as a reason not to try more prison.”

A good point, but of course much depends on what we mean by “failure.” Although the progressives of the 19th century believed that well-designed penitentiaries would—as their name suggests—encourage their charges to repent and abandon crime, few today still defend prison based on notions of rehabilitation. Indeed, many insist that prison is actually counterproductive or “criminogenic” because much of what prisoners are exposed to on the inside is the culture of law-breaking. The unspoken consensus is that the real purpose of incarceration is simple quarantine: Police and prosecutors strive to get law-breakers “off the streets”—not to reform them. There’s no doubt that prison “works” for this purpose. If popular support for mass incarceration reflects the desire to quarantine violent and potentially violent members of the underclass, then its failure to rehabilitate is beside the point. 

The fear that criminal justice has become little more than a policy of quarantine is the premise of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow—a required citation in discussions of mass incarceration. Forman duly acknowledges her contribution to activism opposing the War on Drugs, but while Forman and Alexander share a justified sense of moral outrage at the crisis of mass incarceration, there are some tensions between their respective analyses. Forman notes that drug crimes account for only a fraction of the incarcerated: “20 percent . . . [so] even if we decided to unlock the prison door of every single American behind bars on a drug offense . . . we’d wake up to a country that still had the world’s largest prison population.” This matters because the case against incarceration is strongest with respect to such non-violent offenders: Drug offenses are arguably “victimless crimes” (as well as crimes that a significant percentage of well-educated and prosperous whites regularly commit with impunity).

The focus on non-violent drug offenders also follows naturally from the conviction that mass incarceration is a new form of state-sanctioned racial segregation: Prison isolates thousands of harmless black people just as Jim Crow laws did. Hence, the disparity in Federal sentencing guidelines for possession of crack as opposed to powder cocaine is Exhibit A in the case that mass incarceration is a disguised form of de jure racial segregation.

But even the crack/powder disparity is understandable—if not defensible—when one recalls the violent crack cocaine trade of the 1980s and early 1990s. Crack and powder cocaine may have been similar with respect to their effect on users, but they were quite different with respect to the networks of distribution and sale. The Wall Street stockbroker who hoovered up his bonus in white lines was no less stoned—and no less culpable—than the inner-city resident who torched a $5 rock at a nightclub, but, as Forman points out, the crack trade “was extraordinarily violent. Some of the people involved had no connection to violence, but . . . pacifists didn’t survive for long.” Accordingly, “advocates [who focus on non-violent drug offenders] are pursuing an approach that excludes not just the majority of prisoners, but even the majority of incarcerated drug offenders.”

In the book’s final pages, Forman presses the necessary but much more difficult case for leniency with respect to violent offenders. They too, Forman reminds us, are more than their worst deeds. If criminal justice is to be more and better than simple quarantine, we will need to overcome not only racism, but also an ingrained and pervasive demonization of lawbreakers generally. By way of comparison, consider our current treatment of—disproportionately white—sex offenders who face increasingly long sentences and must register with the state and carry the stigma of their crime for the rest of their days. The popular image of the drug dealer of 1987 is not so different from that of the sex offender of 2017—an irredeemable menace to society, defined by his crime and deserving of no mercy.

In the 1980s, black communities insisted that drug dealers be “tarred and feathered, burned at the stake, castrated.” African Americans complained of “courts [that] don’t give a damn about the victims . . . [and] let the perpetrators of unconscionable violence go free to terrorize minority communities again and again,” demanding an end to leniency for drug crimes. Today, activists insist that police, prosecutors, and judges don’t take sex offenses seriously because of indifference to their juvenile and female victims: In Northern California there is a ballot initiative to remove a judge for being too lenient in sentencing a convicted sex offender. It is a valid complaint—as was the claim that whites tolerated “revolving door justice” when the door opened onto a black neighborhood.

There are good reasons to isolate and stigmatize violent drug dealers and violent sex offenders: retribution for their victims and deterrence of potential future crimes. Those good reasons explain why decent people—as well as callous bigots—supported the policies that have filled our prisons. Forman reminds us that reversing the injustice of mass incarceration will not be as easy as rejecting irrational prejudice and overlooking victimless crimes; it will require offering people who have done serious harm to innocent people alternatives to prison, welcoming them back into society as equal citizens who have made mistakes but paid their debt to society, truly treating them as better than their worst decision.

The title of Forman’s book contains an ambiguity few have noticed: Is it only African Americans who are locking up our own, or all Americans? The belief that simple racism is to blame for mass incarceration and police violence is, oddly, both too pessimistic and too optimistic. Its optimism lies in locating the failures and cruelties of American criminal justice exclusively in racism, as if Americans could not have been as unforgiving of people who shared their skin tone. But Forman’s history suggests that the fear of crime and the thirst for vengeance joined, rather than divided, the races.

At the same time, attributing the injustices of law enforcement to racism is too pessimistic: If mass incarceration is the expression of an atavistic racial prejudice that decades of civil rights activism has done nothing to change, then there is little hope of reversing the trend any time soon. As disturbing as it is, Forman’s account is also, in its own way, more hopeful: He suggests that the tragedy of mass incarceration was the unintended consequence of hard decisions made under pressure, driven less by irrational prejudice than by understandable fears and concerns. If decent people—along with punitive bigots—contributed to mass incarceration, decent people can change course and contribute to a solution. 

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A Teachable Moment

According to the Washington Post, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is ordering a re-write of the department’s mission statement, in which the phrase “a peaceful, prosperous, just, and democratic world” will be replaced with “a safer, more prosperous world.” The Post further reported that the State Department website has scrubbed its humanrights.gov website and shifted the contents to the more anodyne-sounding state.gov/j/drl. The reporter, Josh Rogin, quoted Elliott Abrams: “We used to want a just and democratic world, and now apparently we don’t.”

This re-write might be gratifying to President Trump’s hardcore supporters, who revel in his posture of contempt toward the foreign-policy establishment and his in-your-face “America First” attitude toward all foreign leaders not named Vladimir Putin. But it is deeply troubling to the thousands of seasoned and experienced Americans and foreign nationals who represent the United States overseas.

These men and women are not all “heroes.” (Please do not imagine a backdrop of muffled drums and rippling flags.) But, having spent the last decade interviewing a cross-section of these emissaries—diplomats and embassy staff; journalists and technicians in government-supported media like the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe; veterans of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq; and the indispensable foreign nationals who work with Americans in all these settings—I can attest that they deserve a lot more respect than they are getting from the nation’s current Commander-in-Chief.

Without using the vexed term “exceptionalism,” the people I talked to believe strongly that America has a unique role to play in the world, and that, despite tragic mistakes, that role is more positive than not. Some retired and others still serving, their political views range from deep blue to deep red, but nearly all insist that their job is to represent the United States, not further the agenda of a particular faction or party. Only one or two quit the job because they could no longer suppress their disapproval of certain policies.

But now these people feel the ground shifting under their feet. As one senior State Department official put it, “There’s a general feeling of standing on the shore watching the tide silently draw farther and farther back, as if a great wave were coming, but being unable to take any preventive measures.” From the Americans among them I hear worries about the President’s apparent disdain for the nation’s ideals. From the foreign nationals I hear fears of abandonment. From all, I hear the stark question: How can we keep doing our jobs when the country we respect and admire resembles a slo-mo train wreck?

The best answer I’ve come up with is that this is a teachable moment, meaning that, despite the train wreck or perhaps because of it, 2017 is an auspicious time to reaffirm the fundamental principles of liberal democracy to a turbulent and hostile world. This is not as crazy as it sounds. Unlike younger, more fragile democracies, the United States has a deeply ingrained tradition of unalienable rights, separation of powers, judicial independence, and rule of law—all set forth in a Constitution expressly designed to prevent a would-be “strong man” from seizing power.

As others around the world witness independent judges, journalists, and legislators raising obstacles to Trump’s brandishing of executive power (and perhaps recall the same dynamic occurring under President Obama), America’s overseas emissaries have a rare opportunity to explain the origin and purpose of those obstacles. If they do so competently, they will also, willy-nilly, be promoting liberal democracy as the best system—not because it brings utopia but because it prevents dystopia.

Yet here is a dispiriting note. A few months ago, I shared this idea of a teachable moment with a group of State Department officials well seasoned by difficult postings overseas. They agreed with the idea, but one of them remarked, “Most of our younger people are not competent to do that.” When asked to clarify, he explained that the majority of newly minted diplomats “don’t know this stuff. They would have to take a civics course.” In other words, this would be a teachable moment if we had the teachers. But we don’t.

It is too easy to blame Trump for weakening America’s commitment to a more democratic world; disillusionment with that project set in well before he appeared on the scene. One obvious reason is the claim, made belatedly by President George W. Bush, that the 2003 invasion of Iraq would bring democracy to the Arab Middle East. Another is the economic and political malfeasance that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-09.

But a third, less obvious reason is a gradual shift of emphasis, in U.S. democracy promotion, away from fundamental principles and toward activism aimed at fighting prejudice against women, immigrants, and various racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities.

Such activism is understandable in the context of established democracies. But in the context of authoritarian regimes, to say nothing of failing, conflict-ridden states, it is likely to be counter-productive. Put bluntly, there is little sense in speaking, petitioning, and demonstrating against repellant social prejudices in political settings where people do not have the right to speak, petition, or demonstrate against anything. Not only that, but in societies where a majority of the population is religiously or culturally conservative, there also is the danger of powerful rulers using those same social prejudices to discredit liberal democracy.

This counter-productive aspect is clear to any American who has lived overseas long enough to overcome certain blind spots. But it is much less clear to rookie diplomats, journalists, and soldiers (not to mention NGO staffers) who may be adept at social media but who have little knowledge or experience of authoritarian rule, violent civil conflict, or the anarchy that follows the collapse of a state. Instead, many of these younger Americans have been habituated to believe that greatest enemies of freedom and democracy are domestic—namely, the racism, sexism, homophobia, “classism,” “ageism,” and other prejudices that continue to divide our society.

But maybe this is a teachable moment for the rookies, too. As they see fellow citizens from both parties using the system the way it is supposed to be used—to curb the excesses of an irresponsible and foolish executive—they may gain a new appreciation of the traditions and institutions that protect their own rights and liberties (or at least, quit taking those blessings for granted).

Of course, this would be only the first step. Appreciating the virtues of liberal democracy is a necessary part of representing the United States, but it is hardly a sufficient one. Ask the countless foreigners who have been subjected to patronizing lectures on “freedom” by well meaning but obtuse Americans. Rookies must also absorb a considerable body of lore about how best to communicate those virtues to foreigners who have reason to be dubious, distrustful, or hostile.

By lore I do not mean war stories or sentimental reminiscences. Rather I mean granular details, compelling anecdotes, and pungent observations not typically found in think tank reports or academic programs in public diplomacy. But here’s the good news: Almost all of the people I talked to proved eager to share their lore with anyone who shows a genuine interest. To absorb this lore is to acquire a species of wisdom that is in danger of being lost. And right now, we need all the wisdom we can find.

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A Migrant Reprieve for Italy?

Politico EU reports on a rare piece of good news about the immigration crisis in Italy: the month of July saw a sharp and unexpected drop-off in the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. More:

Data from the Italian interior ministry shows that about 11,100 migrants made the dangerous crossing in July compared to more than double that amount in the same month in 2016 (just over 23,500).

Indications of a change in migration patterns continued in the first days of August. Statistics released by the ministry Thursday indicate that between January and the first two days of August about 95,200 people crossed from Libya to Italy, compared to 98,500 over the same period last year — a 3.42 percent drop.

“It’s too early to say that we have won the battle,” warned a top migration official at the interior ministry. “But it’s a very encouraging sign and at sea right now we have only about 400 migrants to rescue, which is a reasonable number. It means this trend could last,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Officials have offered a variety of explanations to explain the downturn, from improved cooperation with the Libyan coast guard (which reportedly turned back 10,000 migrants in recent weeks) to a recent border protection agreement with tribal leaders in Libya’s southeast. The Italian government’s policy and tactics have also notably hardened of late. This week, the Italian coastguard seized a migrant rescue boat operated by a German humanitarian organization, which it accused of collaboration with Libyan traffickers. That move was seen as a demonstrative gesture to deter potential smugglers, and the first blow in a new campaign to crack down on NGOs that Rome suspects of facilitating the crisis.

So perhaps Rome is indeed learning how to better control migrant flows to its shores. At the same time, though, it would be wildly premature to claim any victory here. It was only a few weeks ago, after all, that the coastguard experienced a massive surge of 12,000 migrants in 48 hours. Whatever lessons Rome has learned since then, the roots of the crisis remain unaddressed, and the consequences of Italy’s inability to deal with its current migrant population are already threatening to tear the country apart at the seams.

As the Financial Times notes in a recent long read, the slowed growth of migration to Italy is less significant than the total accumulation of migrants, which the country remains utterly unequipped to handle:

Compared with 2016, the rise in migrants to Italy has actually been small. […] But it is the accumulation of this year’s arriving migrants on top of more than 500,000 over the past three years that is causing strain, logistically and politically, say officials.

The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, has warned that reception centres are almost at capacity. “Close to 200,000 accommodation places are available for refugees and migrants across the country, but are nearly all full,” it says.

Italy deserves its fair share of the blame here, given its delays in processing asylum claims and decentralized relocation process. But its neighbors are not exactly stepping up to help. France, Switzerland and Austria have increased their border controls to prevent migrants from leaving Italy, Brussels’ financial assistance to Rome has been utterly insufficient to handle the crisis, and several EU members are refusing to participate in the relocation scheme to distribute migrants throughout the continent. That combination of factors has created a potent environment for Euroskepticism to thrive in Italy, which could well benefit populist parties like the Five Star Movement or the Northern League in next year’s general election. Current polls show Five Star neck-and-neck with the ruling PD, with support for the Northern League steadily creeping upward.

In short, Italy shouldn’t take too much comfort in the temporary downturn. Given the EU’s collective action failures in guarding its borders, and the immense logistical challenges in assimilating existing migrants, the strain of the crisis will likely be bearing down on Italy—and potentially reshaping its politics—for many years to come.

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The Kaiser Has No Clothes

After President Donald Trump announced his decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord on June 1st, the media turned its proverbial head to another head of state for an instant reaction: Angela Merkel. The German chancellor is the de facto leader of the global green caucus, as she is an outspoken proponent of the international approach to combatting climate change, and her country is the undisputed leader in rolling out renewable energy. Merkel was predictably displeased by Trump’s renunciation of the Paris deal, saying that the decision was “extremely regrettable” while reaffirming her commitment to the UN-organized effort to help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. To the casual observer, Merkel and Germany are now playing the virtuous hero in this climate change story, a foil to the new Trump administration. But there’s a problem with that surface level reading of events: Merkel’s Germany isn’t the green champion so many environmentalists seem to believe it to be. Let’s take a look.

Modern German energy policy is in a period of upheaval, as the country pursues what it calls its energiewende—a comprehensive plan to overhaul the way it produces and consumes electricity with the ultimate goal of reducing carbon emissions. On some fronts, Berlin has been extremely successful in this endeavor: for the past two years, it has sourced 29 percent of its power from renewables. Of course, in order to kickstart its clean energy industries, Germany was forced to subsidize the production of wind and solar power by offering producers long-term above-market rates for their supplies. Those feed-in tariffs, as they’re called, have produced some of the highest power bills in Europe, though Berlin is moving to roll back that government support as the costs of renewables drop and the outcry against high power bills grows. Increasing renewables’ share of the national energy mix to nearly one-third wasn’t cheap or easy, but getting it there is still a major achievement. It’s also why so many people think of Germany as a green leader.

But the reality is a lot more complicated—and a lot “browner”. One major part of the energiewende has been the phase-out of nuclear power, a process that Germany accelerated in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Germany’s decision to nix nuclear was motivated partly by security concerns (not exactly a rational fear, considering nuclear’s safety and the relative lack of natural disaster threats that German reactors face), and partly by the long-held revulsion the environmental movement has held for the energy source. How ironic, then, that a phase-out so foundational to a green energy transition would end up increasing greenhouse gas emissions: nuclear power is a zero-emissions energy source, which means that unless every watt taken offline during this systematic shuttering is replaced by a similarly clean supplier, German emissions are going to rise.

Sure enough, German emissions crept up 0.7 percent last year. Some analysts are pinning that increase on the growing German economy, but the country’s biggest brown problem is its reliance on coal. Coal is just about the dirtiest fossil fuel around, but it’s been in increased demand in Germany following all these nuclear shutdowns. Germany imports hard coal to supply 17 percent of its power, and sources another 23 percent of its electricity from domestically produced lignite, an especially dirty variety of coal. All of that adds up to a lot of emissions.

There’s a limit on how much renewables will be able to do, going forward. Wind and solar are intermittent by nature, and can’t be relied upon to replace more consistent energy sources like nuclear power or coal en masse. Germany’s reactors would have made a nice foundation on which to build this renewables revolution, but Merkel’s mind seems made up. But however hard she tries to position herself as the virtuous green, the fact remains that German emissions rose last year, while America’s fell three percent (thanks to cheap, abundant shale gas displacing coal). Words matter, but so do numbers, and the data tells us that lately—whatever Trump is trumpeting—the United States is doing more to combat climate change than Germany.

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Vietnam Backs Down in the South China Sea

The capitulation is official. The New York Times confirms today that Vietnam has suspended gas drilling in the South China Sea, after mounting Chinese pressure and doubts about Washington’s commitments:

Vietnam appears to have retreated in a high-stakes maritime gambit against China, suspending a gas-drilling project that it had approved in the South China Sea but that was said to have irritated Beijing.

The drilling, by a subsidiary of the Spanish energy company Repsol, had started in June off the southern Vietnamese coast, analysts said. The offshore block where the drilling was occurring straddles the border of Vietnam’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone but is challenged by China, Vietnam’s hulking northern neighbor, which is building artificial islands in the sea for its military.

Analysts say the project’s suspension, which Repsol confirmed to Reuters on Wednesday, appears to be another strategic victory for China at a time when the Trump administration is distracted by turmoil at home. They say it also highlights the difficulty that Vietnam faces as it mounts long-shot challenges to Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea — without much help from its neighbors in Southeast Asia or from Washington.

When Vietnam initially gave Repsol the green light to proceed with drilling, it was a bold gambit that directly defied China, asserting Hanoi’s rights to its exclusive economic zone over Beijing’s nine-dash-line pretensions. It was also a rich opportunity for the United States to put some teeth into its South China Sea policy. Given the Trump Administration’s increasingly estranged relationship with Beijing, its tough talk about confronting China in the waterway, and even Rex Tillerson’s own history battling Beijing over drilling rights as head of ExxonMobil, Vietnam may well have banked on a forceful response from Washington backing up its rightful claims.

Instead, the Trump administration was silent, and Vietnam was left out on a limb, increasingly vulnerable to Chinese intimidation. According to Bill Hayton, a veteran reporter on Vietnam and the South China Sea, the Chinese pressure campaign included threats of military action against Vietnamese bases. And in the absence of credible U.S. commitments, that left the Vietnamese Politburo debating whether it dared to call Beijing’s bluff. From Foreign Policy:

After two acrimonious meetings in mid-July, the decision was made: Vietnam would kowtow to Beijing and end the drilling. According to the same sources, the winning argument was that the Trump administration could not be relied upon to come to Hanoi’s assistance in the event of a confrontation with China. Reportedly, the mood was rueful. If Hillary Clinton had been sitting in the White House, Repsol executives were apparently told, she would have understood the stakes and everything would have been different.

We can never prove the counterfactual of whether a President Clinton might have backed up Vietnam more forcefully; it was the Administration she served as Secretary of State, after all, that allowed China’s artificial island-building to metastasize. But it is true that the Obama Administration was more outspoken in protesting China’s claims than the Trump administration has been—and the recent absence of U.S. leadership in forums like ASEAN has enabled China to manipulate them more easily.

Reuters reported yesterday, for instance, that Beijing is set to run the table at an ASEAN summit this week. Draft documents reveal that Beijing has preemptively leaned on friendly member states to neuter language that was critical of China, while successfully pushing a non-binding, unenforceable maritime code of conduct that imposes no real restraints on China’s activity in the South China Sea. In the past, the United States might have used its clout with ASEAN members to urge a tougher line on Beijing—but it has recently seemed disengaged from that fight and distracted by the North Korea crisis.

To its credit, the Trump administration seems well aware of that perception, and eager to correct it. The State Department recently gave assurances that it would not let the South China Sea go to the back burner as Rex Tillerson meets with ASEAN ministers in Manila this week. But that belated promise will offer small comfort to Asian nations who have already concluded that the dispute is not a priority for the Trump administration. If the U.S. remains missing in action, that judgment will only set in further—and China will continue to have its way in the South China Sea with little to fear from its rivals.

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How Obama’s Weakness Encouraged Russian Election Meddling

Amid the unrelenting media din accompanying the latest twist in the White House’s ongoing personnel struggles last week, BuzzFeed News managed to cause a minor stir by publishing an update on the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death of Mikhail Lesin, the former Putin advisor instrumental in cowing Russia’s lively media in the early 2000s. Lesin, who died in a Washington DC hotel room on November 5, 2015 of “blunt force injuries of the head,” was said to have fatally injured himself by falling after being “excessively” drunk for several days. The death was officially ruled an accident in October 2016. The BuzzFeed article updated the narrative: two FBI agents with some knowledge of the case seemed to suggest that Lesin had in fact been beaten, perhaps with a baseball bat; that he was in Washington to talk to the Feds, and was put up at his hotel by the Department of Justice; and, implicitly, that there had been some kind of cover-up by the Obama Administration.

I was at a small conference in Lithuania almost two years ago, alongside several other Russia-watchers, when the news of Lesin’s death first broke. As our phones lit up with notifications, the consensus was unanimous: “He’s been whacked!” Russia experts have a kind of gallows humor reflex about unexpected deaths of those surrounding Vladimir Putin. Lesin had stepped down as the head of Gazprom Media a little less than a year before amid rumors of having fallen out with someone well-placed in the Kremlin, so his death immediately conjured up conspiracies in our minds. The fact that the Russian Embassy was furiously spinning the story hours after it had broken, saying Lesin had died of a heart attack when there was no way they could have known, just added fuel to the fire. And when it took more than four months for the D.C. coroner to announce that Lesin had died from a blow to the head, and another seven months for investigators to conclude that he had received it from an unlucky drunken fall, those suspicions hardened into a theory: The Obama Administration didn’t want this spiraling out into a large scandal because, among other things, it sought Russian cooperation on Syria and Ukraine.

Does BuzzFeed’s article confirm the theory? Not necessarily. We on the outside can’t know everything the Obama Administration was seeing at the time as it was calibrating its policy towards Russia, and we won’t know definitively for many more years to come. But given what we know of President Obama’s foreign policy thinking during his second term, largely due to the work of Jeffrey Goldberg and David Samuels, we can say that as a tendency, the President saw Putin’s Russia as a problem child to be corralled, not as an aggressive actor to be confronted. And in practice, that personal tendency of the President manifested itself as an over-reluctance to react on the part of his Administration—a kind of timidity.

This timidity was on display all throughout 2016, well before the President was confronted with a detailed report from the CIA containing evidence of Russian interference in our elections. In July of that year, just a little after Trump, Jr. held his meeting with the so-called Russian lobbyists in New York, an explosive video started making the rounds—footage of a Russian security guard wrestling an alleged U.S. spy to the ground right outside the U.S. embassy in Moscow, in the process fracturing the American’s shoulder. It was an act of unprecedented aggression on the part of the Russians, with at least one former U.S. intelligence official noting how such brazen behavior was unheard of even at the height of the Cold War. And it was but the most egregious manifestation of what appears to have been a concerted effort to intimidate U.S. diplomats in Russia. One American family had found its dog killed upon coming home; another diplomat discovered human feces smeared on his rug; and around the time the video, already months old, was leaked to the press, a military helicopter had repeatedly buzzed a car carrying a U.S. defense attaché in the north of Russia. To these provocations, the Obama Administration repeatedly turned the other cheek, presumably out of a desire to not scotch what they hoped were promising signs of a breakthrough in Ukraine or Syria.

Of course, not only did the promising breakthrough not materialize, but a month later, CIA Director John Brennan was knocking down President Obama’s door with a grim intel assessment: President Putin had personally authorized his agencies to commence meddling in the U.S. elections. It was armed with this knowledge that Obama said he confronted Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Huangzhou, China, telling him to “cut it out, or there would be serious consequences.” Putin must have had himself a hearty laugh.

In explaining how he approached Putin, Obama defended his understated manner at a press conference in December. “There have been folks out there who suggest somehow if we went out there and made big announcements and thumped our chests about a bunch of stuff, that somehow it would potentially spook the Russians,” Obama said. “I think it doesn’t read the thought process in Russia very well.” Given the fuller picture we now can piece together, it’s clear that it is Obama who didn’t read the Russian thought process very well. If Russian agents had bludgeoned Lesin into a pulp on U.S. soil under the nose of the Feds and had beaten a U.S. spy on the threshold of the U.S. embassy in Moscow without any perceptible blowback, what possible danger was there for Putin to roundly ignore Obama’s feeble threats?

And indeed, as the Washington Post reported, while Obama did in the end quietly authorize U.S. intelligence agencies to start developing and deploying a powerful cyber-weapon into critical Russian infrastructure, the most visible element of his response to Russian election meddling was taking two compounds used for intelligence gathering and expelling 35 suspected Russian spies—a symbolic gesture. Adding to the irony, the confiscations and expulsions were originally mooted as a response to the roughing up of the American agent in Moscow. Had Obama acted forthrightly then, Putin would have taken him more seriously when he leveled his threats in September.

Many Democrats seem to have conveniently forgotten just how halting, indecisive, and weak President Obama’s approach to Putin’s Russia had been in practice. When the BuzzFeed story first broke, some of the more prominent conspiracy theorists even tried to tie it to the Trump-Russia investigations:

BREAKING: Vladimir Putin has likely killed another Russian related to the Trump-Russia probe. That makes it… {counting}… a *lot*. https://t.co/1YoFBYcJ8u

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) July 28, 2017

The truth is, insofar as Russian interference helped elect Donald Trump at the margins, it was Obama’s timidity that encouraged them to try such brazen things in the first place.

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