Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 149

Connecting the Dots

In case you missed it last week, Damir Marusic and Karina Orlova mapped out in some detail the web of relationships linking the various Russians attending the now famous meeting attended by Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner early last summer. From their piece:

Digging through the murky networks connecting the people who attended that mysterious meeting at Trump Tower last year won’t provide the definitive “smoking gun” that so many in Washington are desperate for, tying the President’s campaign to some fanciful plot hatched inside the Kremlin to subvert American democracy. But at the same time, it casts serious doubts on arguments that there is nothing to see in the meeting itself. On the contrary, there is plenty to see. Looking at these networks recasts both our understanding of the real nature of Russian involvement in the 2016 election, and of what having a purely transactionally minded businessman for a President might mean for the United States—whether there was “collusion” or not.

To help orient you as you read the piece, we’ve put together this handy infographic (now also embedded in the original):

We encourage you to read the whole thing.

The post Connecting the Dots appeared first on The American Interest.

With Friends Like These

The “Qatar” crisis of recent vintage is vastly interesting from several perspectives: its still shrouded origins; the divisive headache it represents within the U.S. policymaking apparatus, where, to all appearances, State Department and White House views contradict one another; and the mystery of how it will all play out in the end. But one aspect of the crisis has gone nearly unnoticed: It highlights the continuing “second coming” of the “friendly tyrants” dilemma.

Qatar is a U.S. ally, which hosts the most important U.S. air base in the region at al-Odeid, but one that has made consistent and deliberate trouble for other local U.S. allies, and, worse, that has given aid and comfort to a range of radical Islamist organizations—some of them decidedly violent—that threatens friendly countries and the United States itself. It has been doing these things for years, and yet has remained an ally.

Qatari behavior has represented neither a unique nor a new dilemma for U.S. policymakers. During the Cold War the U.S. government maintained useful relations with a range of authoritarian regimes as lesser evils in the face of the struggle to contain Soviet communism. That policy did not go uncriticized at the time, and the criticisms did not go unrefuted.1 Since the Cold War, a similarly pragmatic attitude toward authoritarian allies has prevailed for other reasons, and this attitude as well has attracted criticism. Each case is different, but as a set the “friendly tyrants” dilemma persists in altered form in the post-Cold War period. To understand at a deeper level how the Qatar crisis engages U.S. policy interests, a review of its “friendly tyrants” precursors—particularly as focused on 911 and its aftermath—may prove useful.

Just ten days after the terror attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush addressed the nation and said, at the least, two notable things. First, having concluded that the attacks, although conducted by a non-state actor, were aided and abetted by state regimes, he said, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” (This was a bipartisan sentiment, for just a week before then-Senator Hillary Clinton had said: “Every nation has to either be with us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.”) Second, President Bush pleaded for “moral clarity” in the face of a national crisis.

This was music to ears of the Manichean-minded American public, who prefer their international conflicts drawn on the template of a passion play in a nation, wrote G.K. Chesterton, “with the soul of a church.” But there was an obvious problem with the “moral clarity” imperative: The three regimes that had played by far the most critical roles over the years in nurturing the kind of religion-inflected political radicalism that led to 911—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan—were allies of the United States. Were the governments of these three countries likely to be with us or against us—or would they be, somehow, some of both? How was the Bush Administration going to coax “moral clarity” out of that?2 The old saw—“With friends like these, who needs enemies?”—seemed to say it all.

Of course, most Americans knew very little at the time about the role these three countries played in the backdrop to 911. The war against Iraq, begun in March 2003, further distracted and confused undereducated Americans into thinking that Iraq had more to do with 911 than Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt. But to one extent or another, responsible U.S. officials knew the gist, and this created a strange dynamic. The governments of all three allied countries feared an aroused, wrathful America in the days and weeks after 911, and so tried to make it seem that they were with us, not against us. And the Bush Administration, realizing that it needed each government of the three countries to be part of the solution to a new and acute problem, became self-interestedly reluctant to recite their past sins in public. The result was a drama played out as a mutual pantomime of acceptable duplicity. If this qualified as moral clarity, it was moral clarity with three huge twists.

Each of the three cases was different. It was easiest for the Egyptian government to make the case that it was on the American side because its role in 911 was the least direct and the most remote and inadvertent. The Mubarak regime and its post-revolutionary predecessors under Nasser and Sadat were resolutely anti-salafi, for they saw radical, politicized Islam as a threat to themselves. They tried to suborn al-Azhar into doing their bidding, and as much of the Egyptian Sunni clerical leadership spread throughout the country as well. But combined with their governance frailties, their heavy authoritarian hand backfired, helping not only the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to thrive, but also more radical and violent groups like Egyptian Islamic Jihad—one of whose leaders was Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Zawahiri and his associates plagued Egypt with outbreaks of political violence, which led the state to crack down harder. From the late 1970s into the 1990s a deepening downward spiral of “dawa” and “muhabarat led to a series of increasingly harsh government crackdowns and subsequent relaxations. Mass arrests of suspected Islamists, on a few major occasions under Sadat and again after his assassination in October 1981, did not succeed in capturing all potential militants, however. The result was that a filtering process ensued over many years, which left the most radical individuals still at large comprising a much higher percentage of the anti-government movement as a whole. (Some fear that President al-Sisi’s current course could produce a similar, unwanted result.)

Ultimately, “muhabarat” prevailed in Egypt and al-Zawahiri, having spent three years in an Egyptian prison after the Sadat murder and having met Osama bin-Laden in Peshawar in 1987, fled the country. He ultimately brought the now mostly exiled Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization together with bin-Laden’s group to form al-Qaeda, which set up shop first in Sudan, then moved during 1996 into Afghanistan at the invitation of the Taliban regime. So, therefore, on to the Pakistani case.

Pakistan’s dilemma was, and remains, very different. The U.S.-Pakistani alliance relationship has been on balance difficult and disappointing for both sides. The two countries have in a way been inevitable but terrible allies, and the reason is not hard to understand: They did not and still do not share the same putative enemy. U.S. Cold War policy, always aimed ultimately toward containing the Soviet Union and frustrating its ambitions, latched onto Pakistan because it could not have the larger South Asian prize: India. For Pakistan, the Soviets were never the main problem: India was.

Before 2001, this asymmetry polluted a whole range of bilateral issues, from counter-proliferation policy to development aid levels and back again. After the end of the USSR in December 1991 and the subsequent gradual improvement in U.S.-Indian relations, things changed for the worse in U.S.-Pakistani relations. But after September 11, 2001, everything changed again, threatening to get much worse. The potential for abject deterioration was punctuated sharply by the 2004 A.Q. Khan affair, which linked in U.S. eyes Pakistan’s proliferation sins to its complicity with terrorism in Afghanistan.

Very soon after 911, the Bush Administration sent Deputy Secretary to State Richard Armitage to Pakistan to read the riot act to then Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf got the message, and Pakistani policy became War-on-Terror friendly—at least rhetorically and in some non-trivial respects actually. But the Pakistani military and intelligence service—which were and remain the parts of the Pakistani government that matter in this policy domain—never went “all in” with American interests. There were two reasons for their hedging at the time, one of which still remains today.

The first reason concerned genuine sympathy for radical Islamist thinking within the Pakistani establishment, a trend that had been strengthened during the period of Mohammed Zia al-Haq’s tenure. That reason no longer prevails because indulgence for radical thinking backfired in a big way, between 2008 and 2011 bringing terrorism and general mayhem deep into Pakistan itself.

The second reason, however, is more important. Afghanistan is Pakistan’s defense-in-depth against India, and so must be politically contained from Islamabad insofar as possible. But it is at the same time a permanent source of irredentist danger, a fact of life based on ethno-linguistic realities. Pashtuns are a plurality in Afghanistan, and only a small minority amid Pakistan’s much larger population. But there are still significantly more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, which is one reason why the border—the Durand Line drawn by the British during the time of the Raj—in mountainous Waziristan has never been agreed between the two countries. Afghanistan and Pakistan nearly went to war in 1954 over such matters, when Kabul tried to woo Pakistan’s Pashtuns and the Pakistanis viewed that effort as an existential threat to the country’s territorial integrity.

Especially since the Zia era, most Pakistani strategists have reasoned that the best way to defang or dilute the attraction of Pashtun nationalism emanating from Kabul—and hence protect Pakistan against dismemberment and defenselessness against India regarding Kashmir—is to emphasize an Islamic basis for rule in Afghanistan. That is what led Pakistan, through the ISI, to support a range of Islamist-oriented but still mainly tribally organized Pashtuns, including the infamous Haqqani network. It is what led it ultimately to support the establishment in 1996 of the Taliban regime, and with it the Taliban’s hospitality for al-Qaeda leaders and training camps.

Senior American policymakers underestimated the dangers of the Taliban-Qaeda connection before 911. But after 911, alas, most could not seem to bring themselves to understand the odd ethno-linguistic geometry described just above, and so thought that Pakistani policy could be flipped on a dime and made to stay that way given enough U.S. pressure and aid entreaties.

Some years later, in 2003-04, I offered my view to Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage that the Pakistanis would say whatever we wanted to hear, and probably engage in a fair bit of self-interested cooperation with us, but that their perception of core national interests would prevent them from burning bridges with those we now considered dangerously important “bad guys.” The Pakistanis knew that we would eventually leave the region, but Afghanistan and India would always be there; the Pakistanis, therefore, could not be persuaded to do things that abraded against their long-term sense of survival. They would continue to hedge their bets and just hope we wouldn’t notice, or that our ire would remain below the threshold of bold rebuke.

In retrospect, however, they trusted Musharraf, seeing in him not just an ally of the moment but someone who genuinely shared their detestation of Islamist extremism—and that was true. What was also true, however, was that Musharraf could not snap his fingers and change the mindset of the entire Pakistani military/intelligence complex, and of course he would not be in power forever in any case. The fact that Osama bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, and that Pakistani authorities very implausibly denied knowing about it after the U.S. Special Forces raid that killed him there on May 2, 2011, seems—to me, anyway—to have vindicated my analysis.

This problem is still not over, because it cannot be over, the confluence of geography and demography being what it is. And now we see the problem crop up again in the decision of the Trump Administration to double down, to some still-unclear extent, in Afghanistan to prevent a recurrence of Taliban rule. By now people like Generals Mattis, McMaster, and Dunford realize that with a sanctuary in Pakistan, it will prove impossible for any government in Kabul—even a competent and incorruptible one—to decisively prevail over the insurgency, which remains largely a Pashtun tribal affair. Predictably, the recent decision to “hold the fort” in Afghanistan has shone a troubling light on Pakistan and the U.S.-Pakistani relationship. Yet what is predictable to those who grasp the underlying motivational realities is not predictable to those who don’t, or, for some unknown reason, just won’t.

And then, behind door number three, there is Saudi Arabia. Like the Pakistanis, the Saudi regime rode the salafi tiger. The Pakistanis lost their grip first and nearly become the tiger’s dinner. Then, with the rise of ISIS in particular, it was the Saudis’ turn to fall off. But this took a very long time, during which the well-funded propagation of Wahhabi Islam far and wide—especially after the events of 1979 supplied both the funds and the catalyst of competition with revolutionary Shi’a Iran—upset a traditional balance within the Sunni world that went back nearly to Abbasid times. The Saudis thought they were planting the seeds of fruit trees and beautiful flowers; what turned up instead, or at least in addition, were noxious weeds of the “little shop of horrors” sort—in other words, giant Venus fly traps that ungratefully devoured their owners and tenders.

We have since debated endlessly whether this seeding of the Sunni Islamist terror menace was the work of the Saudi government, or merely of private wealthy Saudi citizens….and assorted princes. This matters to lawyers hired either to sue or defend governments, but for most practical purposes it makes no difference. If an authoritarian government like the one in Riyadh did not want such proselytizing efforts to continue, they would have stopped.

But they were not stopped because the fact of the matter is that Saudi Arabia is more or less stuck in a policy orientation just as Pakistan is stuck, only not for the same reason. In the Saudi case it is not geopolitics admixed with volatile ethnic realities that constitutes the problem, it is the very constituency of the Saudi state. The state, and the late-18th century fundamentalist movement that preceded it, has always been an inseparable conjunction of the Al-Saud and the Al-Wahhab. It is a nation with the soul of a mosque, to slightly twist Chesterton’s remark about America. For outsiders to ask that this conjunction be cut asunder in favor of the former is roughly comparable to asking Americans to junk the U.S. Constitution.

There has been positive change in recent years in Saudi Arabia, and more is likely to follow. With respect to state policy, the orders handed out to security and intelligence personnel make clear that over at least the past two or so years the Saudi leadership considers radical violent Islamism to be a mortal threat to the Kingdom. It now reads its interests as maintaining the recent policy change, but this does not mean that Saudi leaders have suddenly stopped being who they are. So as is the case with Pakistan, there are limits here. If we expect the Saudis to blow up the compact that defines the only political culture the country has ever known, and that defines Saudi relations with the rest of the Muslim world it aspires to lead, we are bound to be disappointed.

So we should therefore want regime change in Saudi Arabia, right? Absolutely not! The stupidities of Saudi bashing are obvious to those who understand that the only available alternatives to the Al-Saud as it exists today are all worse from a U.S. interests perspective.

What does this mean for U.S. policy going forward? Obviously the problem of having allies who sometimes act in ways inimical to U.S. interests persists and is not limited to the three “911” countries discussed above, but also includes Qatar—and Turkey as well. The former is enmeshed in a range of military activities with the United States and the latter is a NATO treaty ally. Both have supported the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Qatar makes it all too easy for its wealthy citizens to fund al-Qaeda as a more “moderate” form of radicalism than ISIS, all in the guise of “charity.” There is evidence that for a time Turkey quietly supported ISIS against the Assad regime through its intelligence apparatus before it, too, fell off the tiger and got mauled when ISIS started recruiting Turkish nationals and setting off bombs in Turkish cities.

Seen from the perspective of American government officials, the behavior of the governments described here is in one sense seen in the context of a single theory of the case—they all are or have been “friends” who have acted otherwise—and in another sense all are different. Officials who know more about the Muslim world tend to recognize significant distinctions among the countries, while those in positions of authority with broader and usually more political orientations tend to conflate them. Knowledgeable officials, for example, can certainly distinguish between the incendiary content of Al-Jazeera and the anti-radical content of al-Arabiya. Similarly, knowledgeable officials understand that, at the present time, the Pakistani security and intelligence services compose a problem—mainly as concerns Afghanistan—in a way that Saudi security and intelligence services do not. As a general rule, the typical American fears Islamist terrorism a great deal more than does any serious expert, which is why the orientation to the problem of politically reared and oriented officials differs from that of issue-dedicated foreign and civil service personnel.

The best way to sum up what it all means is to recall Wallace Stevens’s beautiful and wise observation that, “Our paradise is the imperfect.” Compared to small and vulnerable polities, great powers have many more choices, but those choices do not include being able to pick perfect friends or, for that matter, perfectly horrid enemies. The world is all mixed up, and all germane political relationships are themselves mixed. This is a fact of life that serious people learn to live and deal with, while unserious people seem to have nothing better to do than to make trouble for them.

Alas, Americans do not particularly like ambiguity, nor do they have much patience for it on those rare occasions that they recognize it for what it is. Lyndon Johnson had it exactly right when he said at a November 1967 press conference, “Our American people, when we get in a contest of any kind—whether it is a war, an election, a football game, or whatever it is—want it decided and decided quickly; get in or get out.” So there will always be complaints about the shortcomings of American allies, and in some cases it will lead among the aforementioned unserious people to a desire either to have no allies or to insist that the U.S. government treat the allies it has like scum. This was true throughout the Cold War when, as noted, successive U.S. administrations sought and tried to maintain useful relations with a range of authoritarian regimes—Somoza’s Nicaragua, the Shah’s Iran, Marcos’s Philippines, Franco’s Spain, and many others—as lesser evils compared to the Soviet Union and its bloc of captive nations. Lesser evils are still evils, of course, and so it follows that maintaining these relationships bore a price in both reputation and sometimes behavior inimical to U.S. interests, at least at the margins. A good example of the latter is how our ally, the Shah of Iran, used the October 1973 Middle East War to maneuver via OPEC to create the first price-quadrupling oil shock, which hurt not just Western economies but the Western alliance’s capacity to resist Soviet expansion. Some, mostly left-of-center idealists, exaggerated these costs as against their prophylactic benefits, protesting this pragmatism as unbecoming of American values and, in their view, ultimately American interests, too. Thus, as suggested above, did this expression of realism within an overriding idealist framework produce what became known as the “friendly tyrants” dilemma.

With the Cold War over, the logic for enduring lesser evils weakened but, alas, other practical considerations, plus the inertia of habit, led another succession of administrations to maintain relations with “friendly” authoritarian states such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia—to name but a few. Whereas during the Cold War the U.S. policy rationale for doing so was the same in all cases, after the Cold War the monolithic anti-Soviet rationale fractionated into rationales, one each fitting the case to hand. Egypt mattered because its March 1979 peace treaty with Israel constituted a strategic bulwark for regional stability and was believed to serve as a platform from which Arab-Israeli peace could be expanded—as indeed it was with Jordan in October 1984. Pakistan mattered because of concern for stability in South Asia, and due to troubling nuclear weapons proliferation issues. Saudi Arabia mattered largely because of its central role in the global energy economy.

Then came 911, and some people who seemed serious suddenly began acting otherwise. President Bush said, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeated (in a June 20, 2005 speech in Cairo) that, “for 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East—and we achieved neither.” This was bad history and a sign of worse policy.

The fact is that the United States did achieve enough stability in the Middle East to prevail in the Cold War; on balance, the policy was a noteworthy success from the perspective of U.S. interests. But far worse, the statement implied that had it not been for U.S. policy those sixty years, democracy would have prevailed in the region—that, in point of fact, the condition of the region’s political cultures was somehow America’s fault. For even if democracy had not broken out all over the region on its own, the U.S. government supposedly had the power to bring it about but didn’t use that power—as the new policy, the “forward strategy for freedom,” proposed exactly to do.

This argument, now suddenly being made by self-avowed conservatives instead of leftists as in the earlier “friendly tyrants” debate, was not wrong in any simple way: It verged on the mystically insane. The urge to be transformational on a whole-regional or even global scale that arises from time to time in official American thinking resembles a secularized version of Christian messianic longing, so that many Muslims were not wrong to see this policy through the religious prism that comes naturally to most. To the originators and supporters of the “forward strategy for freedom” policy, who were unaware of the real origins of their own enthusiasm, the expression of this perception from within the region only proved to them that Muslim political cultures truly needed to be transformed, the sooner the better.

Alas, things have not worked out so well. As the failure of several quixotic ventures in “nation-building” (a misnomer for state-building) have shown, the U.S. government lacks the ability to transform other political cultures in its own image, especially non-Western ones that for historical reasons remain organized along mostly patrimonial lines instead of the Weberian ones common to modern Western polities.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for all his sins, was once pilloried unfairly for saying that, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” But this is true. Just as true is that at any given forced decision point the U.S. government has to make its way in the world with the allies and associates it has, not the ones it might want or wish to have. Yes, we had and still have some allies who, through various sins of commission and omission, have in effect, whether deliberately or not, helped incubate the menace of terrorism. A wise policymaker does not waggle his figure at them to score political points or, worse, try to turn them into enemies by one means or another.

Nor does a wise policymaker do nothing. Rather, he (or she) endeavors insofar as interests require to moderate or more decisively change their behavior. That requires forging and maintaining bureaucratic consensus within the U.S. government and, subsequently, demonstrating tenacity, patience, respect for others’ circumstances, and hence an awareness of the limits of the possible. Serious people only need apply.

The post With Friends Like These appeared first on The American Interest.

Violence Flares After Venezuela’s Sham Elections

Venezuela could face further U.S. economic sanctions after the results of this weekend’s sham elections appeared to grant President Nicolas Maduro a new supra-legislature. With opposition leaders urging a boycott, the vote was predictably one-sided. Reuters:

Allies of the Socialist Party won all 545 seats in the new assembly, which will have the power to rewrite the constitution, dissolve state institutions such as the opposition-run Congress, and sack dissident officials. […]

Socialist party official Cabello hinted that the constitutional assembly would hold sessions in the same legislative palace as the existing Congress, which the opposition took over in a landslide 2015 victory.

“They kick us out the door we come back through the window,” he told a news conference. “We never surrender. We insist and insist until we win. Today we feel victorious.”

Maduro and his Socialist Party are boasting that 8 million people cast votes in the elections despite the threat of violence and protests. Exit polls from New York investment bank Torino Capital estimates the number of voters at 3.6 million, an 18.5 percent turnout, and around 20 people died in the deadliest day in Venezuela since anti-government protests began in April.

The jubilant enthusiasm from the Socialists was greeted with consternation around the world, with the United States readying a raft of sanctions against the Maduro regime:

The measures are not expected to include a ban on Venezuelan oil shipments to the United States—one of the harshest options—but could block sale of lighter U.S. crude that Venezuela mixes with its heavy crude and then exports, the officials told Reuters.

[…]

But the U.S. response, though expected to be the toughest yet against Maduro’s leftist government since Trump took office, is also being calibrated to avoid causing further suffering to the Venezuelan people or seriously damaging U.S. economic interests, the officials said.

The U.S. is also expected to impose individual sanctions on members of the newly-elected 545 member Assembly.  For his part, Maduro openly mocked the U.S. in a televised address celebrating the election results, referring to Donald Trump as an “emperor” and continuing to call Washington an imperial power. Maduro also claimed that opposition members who boycotted the elections will be treated as criminals and put in prison.

Venezuelan quacks, demagogues, thugs and thieves who form the international humanitarian disaster known as the government of Venezuela richly deserve all these sanctions, and more. But the question before the U.S. now is less about punishing evildoers in a foreign land than about working with others to prevent a complete meltdown before more damage is done to more people.

Putting the U.S. front and center in Venezuelan politics is more of a feel-good than a do-good move. Working behind the scenes with Venezuela’s neighbors and the EU may get more done, and will help the U.S. get more support for the real work still ahead: building an effective international coalition, including both Canada and the EU, to pressure Cuba to pull out and to stop supporting the destruction of yet another culture in the name of the Castro brothers’ failed vision.

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The Temple Mount Crisis and the Contours of Cold Peace

The Temple Mount crisis appears to be subsiding. Following further security concessions by the Israeli government, Palestinian religious leaders called for normal prayer services to resume at al-Aqsa mosque last Thursday. Despite some additional clashes over the weekend in Gaza and the West Bank, the return of thousands of worshippers for Friday prayers passed uneventfully in Jerusalem despite a temporary ban on men under 50 from entering the site. The mood in Jerusalem, previously tense, is now closer to Palestinian jubilation. But across the border in Jordan the crisis will continue to cause headaches, as The Times of Israel reports:

Hundreds of Jordanians held a protest near the Israeli embassy in Amman on Friday, calling on the government to shut it down and cancel the 1994 peace treaty with Israel.

Emerging from a nearby mosque following prayers, the protesters chanted “Death to Israel” and “No Zionist embassy on Jordanian soil,” an AFP correspondent said.

The protesters were also demanding justice for two Jordanian nationals killed by an Israeli embassy worker this week, including a 17-year-old who authorities said attacked the guard with a screwdriver.

The incident involving the security guard created an unusually high-level rift between Israel and Jordan. King Abdullah publicly criticized Prime Minister Netanyahu after the guard was given a warm reception home, including a photo op with Netanyahu:

“The Israeli prime minister is required to honor his responsibilities and take the necessary legal measures to ensure that the killer is tried and justice is served, rather than exhibiting political showmanship in dealing with this crime to score personal political points.”

Abdullah’s comment and the Amman protests point to one of the chief lessons from this crisis. Israel’s Arab allies in Jordan and Egypt may be autocratic, but their leaders still have to account for the popular hatred of Israel that predominates in both countries. We noted last week that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ acceptance and even incitement of violence might be partly motivated by a desire to undermine Israel’s increasingly close relations with the other Arab states, particularly in the Persian Gulf. The Gulf motivation appears to have worked both ways, with Abbas trying to influence the Gulf and the Gulf encouraging Netanyahu to back down. Saudi Arabia’s King Salman reportedly sent a message via the U.S. to Netanyahu and claims a role in ending the crisis. Though the security concessions were recommended by all of the Israeli security services except the police, the diplomatic pressure on Netanyahu to concede the issue appears to have been significant in preventing a violent escalation.

As the President of a shambolic pseudo-state, Abbas has relatively few levers of power. His governance is corrupt by design, as his main domestic responsibility is to be a font of money (fully half of the PA budget is now designated to the families of “martyrs.”) But one thing he can still lord over the Israelis is an ability to provoke popular outrage across the Arab and Muslim world. Israel’s peace agreement with Jordan and Egypt has often been described as a “cold peace”, in which Israel is reviled even by those who accept the strategic benefits of peace. Those hoping for closer relations between Israel and the Gulf Arab states should remember that popular rage over the Palestinian issue will continue to hamper cooperation, even if the leaders of those states would prefer to work with Israel rather than deal with endless Palestinian dysfunction.

The post The Temple Mount Crisis and the Contours of Cold Peace appeared first on The American Interest.

Europe’s Car Emissions Scandal Just Won’t End

It’s been nearly two years since the U.S. EPA caught the German carmaker Volkswagen redhanded, cheating on car emissions tests by installing software in vehicles that would make them appear to be more eco-friendly than they actually were, and the scandals keep coming. The latest environmental malfeasance out of “green” Germany comes to us courtesy of Porsche, a subsidiary of VW, which according to the German transport minister is guilty of having similar emissions fudging software installed in its vehicles. Reuters reports:

Porsche on Thursday said it had discovered “irregular” engine management software during an internal probe into emissions. Porsche also said it had agreed to recall the vehicles to fix the problem. […]

[German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt] said: “We have examined Porsche Cayenne vehicles of the 3 liter TDI Euro 6 Mark – during tests these vehicles deploy a so-called defense strategy, which isn’t activated in real traffic.” […]

Dobrindt also said there were some 7,500 vehicles of this type certified in Germany and some 22,000 certified in Europe. “We don’t know how many are with dealers. These are the cars that fall under the certification ban.”

Given how regular these reports of European carmakers have become, there’s no reason to think that regulators have gotten to the bottom of the issue. Clearly there was a culture of deep cynicism and active scamming in this industry, and it’s a bit hard to believe that that’s all gone away now that one corner of it has been unearthed.

Not convinced? Consider that the United States was already calling out Europe for gaming emissions tests nine months before the bogus software scandal broke. Even when carmakers weren’t designing programs to make vehicles behave abnormally green during these tests, they were apparently taping doors, removing side mirrors and stereo systems, and installing special-made tires on vehicles to inflate mileage numbers. Keep that in mind the next time Brussels gets sanctimonious about America’s green record.

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Oil and Gas Innovation Goes Well Beyond Fracking

Linking the oil and gas industry with innovation these past few years isn’t controversial. The pairing of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal well drilling was a novel idea that set off an energy revolution over the past decade, remaking American energy fortunes and ushering in a new global oil reality (and increasingly a new global natural gas reality, as well). But innovation’s impacts on global energy security extend beyond the novelty of fracking. As David G. Victor and Kassia Yanosek write for Foreign Affairs, oil and gas companies are leveraging some of the same trends that are spurring on the information economy to extract hydrocarbons more profitably:

There are three trends driving the new energy revolution: smarter management of complex systems, more sophisticated data analytics, and automation. The first trend has allowed companies to become much more efficient while drilling for oil and gas in ever more complex geological environments…Simpler, standardized designs make drilling and production platforms easier to replicate, less expensive, and less likely to suffer costly delays and over-runs in construction. […]

Oil companies…have begun to use complex algorithms to analyze massive amounts of data, making it easier for them to find oil and gas and to manage production…The industry has also begun to use data analytics for “predictive maintenance,” reducing unplanned downtime by analyzing historical data to predict equipment failures before they happen. […]

Soon, intelligent automated systems will enable remote drilling, controlled almost entirely by a handful of high-tech workers in onshore data rooms hundreds of miles away…In the future, automation, along with better data analytics, will make it easier to manage the variation in supplies that comes from using renewable sources such as wind and solar energy and more complex, decentralized grids. It can also make the grid more reliable.

It’s worth your time to sit down and read the whole thing. The authors embark on a brisk tour of the changing (and changed) energy industry in the 21st century. Big data, automation, and systems management aren’t just a hallmark of companies like Amazon—they’re also helping the bottom line of energy producers, and that’s good news for the global economy.

It’s also worth noting that new technologies don’t come with ideologies. When imagining how the international community might meet the climate targets set out in Paris in late 2015, many greens include the optimistic hope that technological breakthroughs will (in time) make clean energy options like wind and solar the only obvious choices. While it’s true that the cost of renewables has dropped significantly just in the past couple of years, it’s also true that breakeven costs for many fossil fuel operators has also come down over that same period of time. There’s no reason to think that innovation will favor one specific energy source over another—there exists the potential for breakthroughs in every corner of the industry, and that’s a tremendously exciting thought.

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North Korea Tests Another ICBM

They’ve done it again: the North Koreans successfully conducted another missile test on Friday, lobbing a missile over 1,000 km into the Sea of Japan. Within hours, the worst news was confirmed by the Pentagon (via the AP):

The missile launched Friday by North Korea was an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, the Pentagon said, marking the second time this month Kim Jong Un has demonstrated a theoretical capability of striking a portion of U.S. territory.

The missile was launched on a lofted, or heightened, trajectory that limited the distance it traveled, but data collected by U.S. radars, satellites and other sensors showed that it was theoretically capable of traveling at least 5,500 kilometers on a normal trajectory. That is the minimum distance to be classified by the U.S. as an ICBM.

Soon after the launch, top American and South Korean brass began discussing potential military responses to the test. Meanwhile, at an emergency National Security Council session in Seoul, President Moon Jae-in called for the U.S. to bolster “strategic deterrence,” and requested that additional THAAD launchers be deployed in his country—a stunning turnaround for a President who came to office vociferously opposed to the anti-missile system. At a moment when many South Koreans are clamoring for a nuclear arsenal of their own, Moon clearly understands that this is no time for dovish engagement with the North.

The only alternative seems to be… more pressure. After the previous ICBM test, the Trump Administration promised a global effort to ratchet up the economic pressure on North Korea, including with secondary sanctions on Chinese companies that illegally do business with the regime. The administration has already taken baby steps in that direction, but it is sure to march further up the escalation ladder in response to Pyongyang’s latest provocation.

Meanwhile, intelligence officials are warning that North Korea could have a nuclear-equipped ICBM as soon as next year, far faster than once expected. The clock is ticking, the road is running out, and good strategic options for dealing with the crisis are as elusive as ever.

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Were the Russians Playing Both Sides?

It is now widely known that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election to weaken Hillary Clinton, both by hacking and releasing emails and by spreading disinformation on social media and state-funded news outlets.

But yesterday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearings suggest that this may not be the whole story.

In the clip below, Senator Lindsay Graham asks Bill Browder—American businessman who has successfully lobbied for sanctions against Russia after his attorney was abused and likely murdered in a Moscow jail—about Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Browder notes that Fusion GPS—the opposition research behind the infamous “pee tape” dossier about Donald Trump—was at the time being paid by Russians to produce opposition research about him and undermine support for the Magnitsky Act, the bill Browder backed that froze the assets of a few dozen Russian oligarchs.

Fusion GPS is relevant to the Russia investigation for two reasons. First, as Browder says above, it was under contract by Russian oligarchs at the same time that it produced “dirt” on Trump. Second, Christopher Steele—the British former spy who produced the dossier on Fusion’s behalf—gathered much of his information from Russians.

The web of connections involved in this whole affair can get convoluted (if you want to be more confused, recall that the Russian firm that hired Fusion GPS, Prevezon Holdings, also retained Natalia Veselnitskaya—the lawyer who met with Don Jr. in Trump Tower last July). But the information we have now at least raises the possibility that powerful Russians were involved—as sources of information or money or both—in the creation of the Steele Dossier, perhaps the most influential piece of opposition research in history.

As Damir Marusic and Karina Orlova showed in their report on Trump and Kushner’s Russian business networks, it is too simplistic to think about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election as the product of a single, streamlined campaign with a clear objective devised by the Kremlin. Competing Russian oligarchs, government officials, and intelligence agencies have different interests and are prone to freelancing.

As Graham says, it’s quite possible that the Russians were collecting dirt on both sides in a bid to sow chaos above all else. We are likely to learn more as the Congressional investigations proceed.

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The Sanctions Blowback From the EU Begins

Yesterday, the Senate voted 98-2 to impose punitive sanctions on Russia and limit the President’s ability to remove them without Congressional review. That vote—the culmination of a lengthy process that saw the sanctions initially approved in the Senate, then held up in the House, and later rewritten after substantial objections—now clears the way for the bill to proceed to the President’s desk. If all goes as planned, President Trump is expected to grit his teeth and sign the bill; even in the unlikely event of a veto, the strong bipartisan support for the sanctions should be enough to override it into law anyway.

In other words, the sanctions are effectively a done deal, even if they are not official law just yet. Opponents of the bill can read the writing on the wall—and they are already making moves to retaliate. On Friday morning, Moscow pulled the trigger on what it hinted could be the first of many retaliatory measures. From the NYT:

Russia took its first steps on Friday to retaliate against proposed American sanctions for Moscow’s suspected meddling in the 2016 election, seizing two American diplomatic properties and ordering the United States Embassy to reduce staff by September. […]

Referring to the vote by Congress to toughen the sanctions, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement: “This yet again attests to the extreme aggressiveness of the United States when it comes to international affairs.”

Moscow’s reaction here is predictable enough; the Russians have been threatening a version of this move ever since the Obama administration kicked out Russian diplomats and seized Russian diplomatic compounds back in December. With the Trump administration unable or unwilling to release those facilities, and a new slate of sanctions on the way, the time was clearly ripe for the Russians to express their displeasure with Washington.

But it’s not just the Russians who are upset with the sanctions. As we wrote last month, Germany and Austria have fumed that the sanctions threaten European energy interests, by targeting (among other European-Russian ventures) the Gazprom co-financed Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany. For the bill’s European enemies—among them the Netherlands and France, who have been quieter in their opposition than Germany—the sanctions are a thinly veiled excuse to promote American LNG exports and meddle in the European energy market. And top German business leaders are already mulling retaliation, as Reuters reports:

The head of the German Committee on East European Economic Relations said potential damage to European energy sector companies with business interests in Russia could justify counter-sanctions.

“It’s the last thing we want, but we must keep the option open,” Michael Harms told a news conference in Berlin.

“The sanctions they want against pipeline projects seem designed to boost U.S. energy exports to Europe, create U.S. jobs and strengthen U.S. foreign policy.”

The European consensus on Russia sanctions has always been somewhat fragile, resting on the tacit understanding that any sanctions stricter than the existing ones would not hold. By unilaterally imposing tough new sanctions that could hobble European business interests, Congress paradoxically seems more likely to unite Europeans against Washington than against Moscow—especially given the terrible image President Trump has among European electorates.

Ironically, American attempts to hurt Nord Stream 2 could also give it new life, turning the controversial pipeline into a cause célèbre among a public that only half-understands the bigger picture surrounding the issue. Angela Merkel in particular may see a golden opportunity before the German election to rally business to her side by embracing Nord Stream 2, railing against Trump, and fighting Washington’s interference in the project. She already decried an earlier version of the sanctions bill, after all, and has taken a hard line against outside countries interfering in Nord Stream 2.

It is still too soon to tell how serious the U.S.-European split over sanctions will be, or what measures the Europeans might take in retaliation. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said recently that he hoped to resolve the dispute through diplomatic channels, but that the EU would take unilateral action “within a matter of days” if necessary. However this shakes out, though, the whole episode is a powerful illustration of the law of unintended consequences. The new sanctions bill may well achieve Congress’s goals of imposing costs on Moscow and limiting Trump’s flexibility on Russia. Still, it perversely could have given Putin some common ground with Europeans, and could lead to bigger headaches down the road than anyone bargained for.

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Australia to Britain: Let My People Come

In talks with the UK this week, Australia is warning the British not to tighten their visa policies after Brexit, warning that a more restrictive immigration policy could jeopardize a bilateral trade deal. Financial Times:

Australia has warned the UK against introducing a tougher visa regime after Brexit, and indicated this issue could have a big influence on talks between Canberra and London about a trade deal.

Australia’s stance highlights a central tension in UK prime minister Theresa May’s self-proclaimed push to create a “global Britain” after Brexit that involves an aggressive push for free trade deals while simultaneously limiting the number of people who can come to Britain.

The UK would like to secure trade deals with Australia and India as quickly as possible after Brexit, but these are the key countries demanding a more liberal British visa regime.

In short, the UK is discovering that post-EU trade deals exist, but that they come with a price tag. Australia wants to make it easier for its citizens to live and work in the UK as part of any post-Brexit trade deal, and it wants the UK to help with the burden of adjusting pensions of retired Brits living in Oz for inflation. Meanwhile, India is demanding looser visa rules for its citizens—even as Theresa May seeks to fulfill her ambitious promise to dramatically reduce annual net migration to under 100,000.

It is unclear exactly how the UK can square this circle, but some American leadership here could be handy. Moving toward a world in which Brits, Ozzies, Kiwis, Yanks and Canucks could travel, study, work and retire in all five countries with as few barriers as possible would open new worlds to young people, provide big advantages to business in all countries, and capitalize on the cultural and linguistic characteristics of the Anglosphere to build a better world in a turbulent time.

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