Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 154

Grade Inflation is Worse Than We Thought

American high schools are giving out higher and higher grades even as real academic ability stagnates. USA Today reports:

Recent findings show that the proportion of high school seniors graduating with an A average — that includes an A-minus or A-plus — has grown sharply over the past generation, even as average SAT scores have fallen.

In 1998, it was 38.9%. By last year, it had grown to 47%.

That’s right: Nearly half of America’s Class of 2016 are A students. Meanwhile, their average SAT score fell from 1,026 to 1,002 on a 1,600-point scale — suggesting that those A’s on report cards might be fool’s gold.

The erosion of intellectual standards is worse at the elite level: “the upward creep is most pronounced in schools with large numbers of white, wealthy students. And its especially noticeable in private schools, where the rate of inflation was about three times higher than in public schools.” This is probably explained at least partly by the attitudes of overbearing parents whose children are in the Ivy League rat race: Giving out anything less than an A is likely to lead to email protestations and parent-teacher conferences with mom and dad.

It’s also significant that even as high school grades become less and less meaningful, pressure is building in the educational establishment to de-emphasize or dumb down alternate measures of achievement, like the SAT, which are supposedly unfair to the poor and disadvantaged, and class rankings, which create too much rancor and competition. In the long run, though, this will only help boost the fortunes of elite students even further: Without a strong objective component in the college admissions process, quickly-inflating GPAs will help rich students roll their competitors from below.

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Israeli Diplomacy Pays Off

Critics of Israel hoping for its isolation will have to hold out hope a little longer. On the heels of an amiable visit between Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and France’s President Macron and an historic meeting between Netanyahu and India’s Prime Minister Modi, Israel can add Eastern Europe to the growing list of regions and countries pushing for closer ties with the Jewish state. As Reuters reports:

Europe should better appreciate Israel’s key role in Middle Eastern stability, leaders of four central European nations said on Wednesday in a joint attack with Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu on Brussels’ current policy towards the state. [….]

Netanyahu met the Visegrad Four leaders of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, who backed Israel and called for an improvement in the EU’s relations with the state. [….]

“The Visegrad Four shares the Israeli view that external border defence is key,” [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orban told a press briefing. “Free movement of people without controls raises the risk of terror.” [….]

“The EU should appreciate the efforts Israel makes for the (Middle East) region’s stability, which serve Europe as it spares us from newer and newer waves of migration,” he said.

Netanyahu has faced criticism, both at home and abroad, for his handling of Eastern European diplomacy. Far Right movements have gained traction across Europe in recent years, and Eastern European political parties are increasingly flirting with anti-Semitism. When Hungary’s Viktor Orban introduced a billboard campaign vilifying George Soros (many of the billboards were subsequently defaced with swastikas) the Israeli ambassador in Hungary initially called for the posters to be removed. He was then overruled by Netanyahu (who is also Israel’s Foreign Minister).

Rather than slinging mud with Orban over his Soros-phobia, Netanyahu has engaged with these leaders on security and trade. Caught on a hot-mic, Netanyahu laid out his strategy in plain terms, from Haaretz:

“The European Union is the only association of countries in the world that conditions the relations with Israel, that produces technology and every area, on political conditions. The only ones! Nobody does it,” Netanyahu said.

“It’s crazy. It’s actually crazy,” he continued, referring to the EU’s insistence to condition the EU-Association Agreement on certain terms related to the peace process. “It’s not about my interest. I’m talking about Europe’s interest.

“We have a special relationship with China. And they don’t care. They don’t care about the political issues. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he needs water for his people. Where will I get it? Ramallah? No.”

Netanyahu’s relationship with the Jewish diaspora has been strained of late. His decision last month to renege on an agreement to create an egalitarian mixed prayer space at the Western Wall, long sought after by non-Orthodox Jews, created something of a crisis in international Jewry. His response to Orban’s Soros campaign hasn’t helped either. But whatever space there may be between Netanyahu and the diaspora, renewed support from the Eastern Europeans to pressure the EU onto Israel’s side is a major victory for Netanyahu’s style of realist diplomacy.

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China’s Toxic Air Is Getting Worse

After Trump announced his decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, there was a lot of talk about America ceding environmental leadership to China, whose leadership has been outspoken about tackling emissions and reducing reliance on coal-fired power plants. Beijing has been at this game for a few years now, talking up its ambitions for combatting climate change in the global arena, and more than a few hopeful greens have been beguiled by this rhetoric. There’s just one problem: China’s environmental record is downright abysmal, and as Reuters reports, it’s actually getting worse:

Air quality in China worsened in the first half of 2017, with 338 cities including the capital Beijing on average reporting fewer clean air days due to winter pollution in January and February, an official at the Ministry of Environmental Protection said. […]

Air quality in 338 of China’s largest cities on average deteriorated in the first six months, the ministry said on Wednesday, with 74.1 percent of all days during the period experiencing clean air, down 2.6 percentage points from a year earlier.

China’s “airpocalypse” has made plenty of headlines in recent years—the toxic smog that chokes the life out of the millions of citizens in its biggest cities is hard to ignore. Beijing has a clear interest in reducing this air pollution because its costs span economic, health, and social spheres. This talk, then, about wanting to step into the void created by Trump’s rejection of the Paris deal and becoming a global climate leader has more to do with domestic imperatives than some deep yearning to live more closely in tune with Gaia. Beijing is hoping to capitalize on some free good green press by bundling its push to tackle its catastrophic local pollution problem with the international effort to reduce emissions.

But this is more about signaling than it is about tangible results. The fact that China’s air pollution got worse during the first half of this year as compared to 2016 goes to show that the country is still far away from the responsible environmental steward it’s been trying to make itself out to be. Naive greens are complicit in this eco-dupe, and would do well to remember that the United States—not Europe, and especially not China—was the primary reason why global emissions stalled last year, whatever Trump has to say on the issue.

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Chaos City

Like all confabs of the world’s mighty, the recent Hamburg G-20 summit hasn’t produced anything memorable—except perhaps for the secretive one-on-one where Donald Trump might have given away Syria to Vladimir Putin by intimating the end of U.S. aid to anti-Assad rebels. If confirmed, the G-20 palaver would have served as the stage on which Big Boy collusion trumped the politics of global goodness—world peace, climate, development, and all.

The real action, billed by the organizers of the anti-G-20 protests as “Welcome to Hell,” unfolded outside the conference hall, with burning cars and looted supermarkets, and masked guerrillas hurling Molotov cocktails from rooftops and unleashing deadly steel balls from their slingshots.

About 20,000 police from all over Germany could not contain the mayhem that raged over three days, echoing the bloody anti-globalization battles of Seattle in 1999 and Genoa in 2001. This unheard-of deployment of state power may yet go down in the Guinness Book of World Records. But cultural historians will fasten on another first—on the brand-new iconography of urban warfare.

Take this photograph, plastered across German newspapers and speeding across the Net. In the foreground you can admire a young woman, her face artfully shrouded in a Palestinian-type keffiyeh, her torso bare but for her elegantly covered chest, her arm stretched out in a gesture of triumph. But wait! She is not balling her fist to demonstrate defiance. That would have been so yesterday. She was holding up her iPhone to click away at herself and the blazing wall of fire behind. So did countless others.

The emblem of the French revolutionaries was the republican cocarde in red, white and blue, that of the Bolsheviks the five-pronged yellow star. Today’s would-be revolutionaries sport a latest-generation smartphone. They roar “Down With Fascism!” or “Solidarity Without Borders,” as the posters on Hamburg’s university campus had it. But first, let’s get a selfie.

In academic terms, this is not revolutionary, but “expressive politics,” with myself at center stage. To put it more harshly, it is narcissism posing as heroism. Decked out in street-chic clothes, the lady and her comrades-in-clicking have spawned a new meme: the “riot hipster.” In Google, it gets over 100,000 entries.

In their retirement homes, folks in their seventies who once battled the “pigs” over civil rights and Vietnam from Berkeley to Berlin must marvel at this spectacle of “How Cool Am I” self-admiration. They will fondly recall that the old student movement—even the Weathermen—had not only grass and rock, but also a theory of sorts. It explained the world and guided collective action. Picture-taking was left to the domestic security services.

The pillars of the doctrine were Marx, Lenin, and Mao—the Eighteenth Brumaire, Imperialism: The Latest Stage of Capitalism plus What Is to Be Done?, and The Little Red Book. For a wholesale critique of Western culture, the avant-garde carried Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in their jeans pockets. (There were no backpacks then.) Those interested in more carnal matters tried to penetrate Wilhelm Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm and The Sexual Revolution.

Their children don’t seem to care about proper ideological grounding, especially since reading takes too much time away from texting. Yes, they do have their phrases down pat. The planet’s enemy is capitalism-cum-globalization, which impoverishes the many and enriches the one percent. This Satan goes to war for oil and profit, ruining the climate. “Make Capitalism History” runs one battle cry. Let’s do away with walls and borders, with the state itself. Since democracy cannot purge injustice and exploitation, political action is useless. Instead, it is “Bring Down the System!”

Now, anti-globalization rallies always start out peacefully. The kids and the grizzled veterans of protest may be angry, but they don’t come armed with crowbars, let alone bottles of gasoline. But in Hamburg, as in Genoa, they unwittingly provided the setting where, as Mao famously lectured, the guerilla can “move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”

In German, these folks are known as Die Autonomen and Der Schwarze Block (Black Bloc); in Italy as Autonomi, who had dispatched fighters to Hamburg. They came from as far away as Greece. They had prepared for the G-20 for months, training how to best the “bulls.” Like creatures of the sea, a thousand or so did swim among the ten thousands on the march. If they can’t breach the police lines around the conference center, they will tack where the “bulls” are not. Disperse, regroup, and strike.

No “riot hipsters” they. Their tactics provoke comparison with contemporary Islamicist warfare. During Israel’s forays into Gaza and Lebanon, Hamas and Hezbollah concealed their fighters and rocket ramps in hospitals, mosques, and schools. It was win-win-win. Either the Israelis could not locate the threat in time, or, unlike the Russians in Chechnya, they were deterred from attacking civilian structures—or they did unleash their missiles, invariably killing the innocent. The dead were priceless assets in the war of images, proving the bestiality of the “Zionist entity” round the world.

Of course, the Autonomen and the Black Brigades did not pack AK-47s, nor did they wear suicide belts. So in this respect the analogy is off the mark. But they did employ the same tactics, hiding among the demonstrators and pelting the cops with rocks and homemade incendiaries until these charged into the crowd. Great! The liberal state had dropped its mask in an orgy of “police brutality.” Quod erat demonstrandum. Naturally, the liberal media, as elsewhere in the West, had a field day, subtly shifting the discourse against the authorities. The charges covered the waterfront from “incompetence” to “provocation” and “excessive force.”

Europe’s homegrown terrorists also use the population as cover. Recall the Manchester arena bombing, the slaughter in Paris’ Bataclan music hall, the truck attacks on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais and Berlin’s Christmas market. Swim like a carp and kill like a shark.

There is yet another suggestive parallel. Contemporary terrorists, unlike the anarchists of yore, don’t churn out manifestoes or long-winded rationalizations. ISIS and al-Qaeda murder in silence and spread the images of carnage on social media. So do countless outfits that bomb the mosques of the heretics on the other side of the Sunni-Shi‘a divide.

It’s the “propaganda of the deed,” the sheer horror, that counts, as the ur-anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had it. Violence, even if only with cobblestones and slingshots, is not the means, but the end, and devastation the motive. Demonstrating power against the liberal state, which must fetter itself, delivers an instant rush and the ultimate kick. Ask the black-clads what they want and how they propose to get there, and they will pull down their balaclavas or reel off boilerplate.

But what do pillaged shops and blazing cars have to do with poverty and climate? Now talk to a youthful bystander and his mate who are watching at a safe remove from the battle. If they were honest, they might smile happily and cheer a wonderful party, complete with beer and improvised fireworks (if the burnt-out car is not theirs). This is the postmodern version of Rome’s bread and circuses—almost no risk and lots of fun. And selfies.

The game is global attention, not improvement. The real-time stuff is better than Netflix. So G-20 warfare à la Hamburg will erupt again, unless these meetings are staged in Russia or, as in 2016, in China’s Hangzhou. There, a third of the population was sent packing, and the streets were as empty as they are in post-apocalyptic movies. The media faithfully toed the regime’s line.

Democracies cannot and must not unleash the kind of ferocity that deters. Nor can they concede such summits to the authoritarians. Add to China such emblematic democracies as Turkey, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia—G-20 members all. So let’s do it by Skype or on a luxury cruise ship off the coast of Madagascar. A small flotilla of fast patrol boats and a couple of gunships overhead will suffice for security—at a discount, to boot. For the Hamburg party, the government had to drop €130 million (U.S. $150 million), not counting compensation for property damage. Plus medical costs for 250 injured police.

Alas, attention is what the world’s greats crave, as well. So on to the 2018 G-20 in Buenos Aires. The Black Brigades, and the groupies of urban warfare, will be there, too.

The post Chaos City appeared first on The American Interest.

Macron Sees Off His General

The head of the French armed forces resigned yesterday in a row over President Emmanuel Macron proposed budget cuts. :

In a statement, 60 year-old Pierre de Villiers said he had tried to keep the armed forces fit for an ever more difficult task within the financial constraints imposed on it, but was no longer able to sustain that.

“In the current circumstances I see myself as no longer able to guarantee the robust defense force I believe is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people, today and tomorrow, and to sustain the aims of our country,” he said.

The 39-year-old Macron moved quickly to replace de Villiers, appointing General Francois Lecointre, 55, to fill the role.

The fight hit a fever pitch when the general’s remarks (he said he wouldn’t let himself “get f—ed” by Macron’s government), given to Parliament in a closed doors, leaked to the press. Macron wasted no time in replying: “I have made commitments. I am your boss,” he told his military chiefs. Villiers resigned shortly thereafter.

“It’s not Erdoganism, but it’s not far off,” a prominent retired French general told Reuters.

Maybe, but it strikes us as a much less fraught situation than many of Macron’s emerging critics are making it out to be. As far as civil-military relations go, Macron is very much in the right: if generals don’t agree with their civilian bosses’ decisions, they really have no business serving. And as Reuters goes on to note, there is a pedestrian political dimension to the standoff: Villiers’ brother is the head of the ultraconservative Catholic Mouvement Pour France, and Villiers himself was Les Republicains’ Francois Fillon’s military adviser in 2008.

Overall, dismissing quarrelsome officials ahead of what could prove to be a very contentious period as Macron pushes through painful reforms is a sensible move. There is rarely a solid constituency for budget cutting in any country, and with the stakes as high as they are, Macron can’t afford to tolerate too much backbiting in his government.

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Turkey, Germany and the West

On Monday, a Turkish state prosecutor requested that six political prisoners remain detained indefinitely, pending trial. Given that more than 50,000 people have been arrested in Turkey since the abortive coup last July, this handful may not seem like a development that would ruffle too many feathers. But these six are human rights activists and, moreover, one is a German. Angela Merkel addressed the situation earlier this week. :

…Merkel said the case was another example of innocent people being “caught up in the wheels of the justice system”.

She said [the German detainee’s] arrest was absolutely unjustified.

“We declare our solidarity with him and all the others arrested … the  German government will do all it can, on all levels, to secure his release.”

A German human rights activist languishing in a Turkish prison was always going to be a cause for friction, but the particular tenor of the dispute is colored by ongoing tensions between the two countries.

With its history of receiving Turkish migrant laborers, Germany has had both a closer and a more complex relationship with Turkey since the 1960s than any other European power. More than once, Germany has thrown a lifeline to Turkey’s EU bid when it appeared founder. Angela Merkel also took the lead in pushing for EU-Turkey cash-for-refugees deal in 2016. Yet at the same time Germany also denied Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s request to land his plane in Berlin after taking flight from last summer’s failed coup.

This, in turn, is part of a bigger dynamic that has seen Turkey turn away from the West—and specifically embrace Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Not long ago, as Turkey’s relationships with the EU and Russia simultaneously cooled, it seemed that the Turkish President was bent on a self-destructive course of isolation. But things have turned around in Russo-Turkish relations, and the two countries are now collaborating on arms deals and joint naval exercises. Erdoğan’s willingness to turn toward an old rival that also happens to be NATO’s chief adversary, in order to advance his parochial interests, has sent a chill through more harried members of the transatlantic community.

Whether the damage to the relationship is irreparable is the big question facing both the EU and NATO going forward. The Erdoğan-Putin marriage of convenience is transactional at best; neither side trusts the other very much. It’s even possible Moscow is using its levers with the YPG to quietly blackmail Ankara—a strategic play with a long history.

It may not last. But if it does, or even flourishes, expect the standoffs to become much more frequent—and not just about narrower human rights issues.

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The Zuma Dynasty?

Rwanda, Kenya, Angola, and Liberia will all hold important national elections before the year is up. But perhaps the most important election on the African continent this year will take place behind closed doors. At its party conference this December, South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party will select its next leader.

Thousands of ANC delegates will meet from December 16 through December 20 in Gauteng, South Africa’s most populous province and the home of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Their objective: to elect the ANC’s leadership for the next five years, including its president. Barring a major fissure in the ANC or a colossal surge from the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), the ANC’s next leader will be South Africa’s next President, succeeding the term-limited incumbent, Jacob Zuma, in 2019.

What’s at stake in the ANC leadership contest? The direction of one of Africa’s greatest political parties and, with it, the future of South African democracy.

A quick aside for readers who haven’t been following South African politics of late: The Zuma years have been disastrous for South Africa. Despite charges of rape and corruption, Jacob Zuma won the ANC presidency at the party conference in December 2007. Born poor and raised by a single mother in one of the miserable Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa, Zuma was able to speak directly, and with considerable charisma, to the concerns of poor black South Africans. It was largely the votes of this still-suffering demographic that delivered Zuma the ANC presidency and two years later the presidency of South Africa itself.

In office, however, Zuma has notched few achievements to benefit his political base (reversing the Mbeki administration’s horrendous HIV/AIDS policies was one of them). While Zuma may have entered office promising “social justice,” his time in office could well be summed up with a different two-word rallying cry: “state capture.” Instead of serving the needs of the voters who elected him, Zuma has occupied himself with renovating his Nkandla homestead with $16 million in public funds and cozying up to the Gupta brothers, a trio of Indian-born industrialists who are accused of having undue influence over Zuma’s agenda. There’s an uneasy sense that South Africa’s democratic norms are being hollowed out from within by Zuma and chipped away from without by the Guptas.

Meanwhile, economic growth has slowed and even gone into negative territory. With two consecutive quarters of economic contraction in the last quarter of 2016 and the first quarter of 2017, South Africa has officially entered a recession. The bursting of the commodity bubble has hurt the South African mining sector, and, despite the calls of prominent South African business leaders to improve the climate for industrialization, it doesn’t look like factory jobs are on their way any time soon. In fact, South Africa’s statistics agency cited declines in manufacturing and trade—not mining—as the principal causes of the current slump. Unemployment stands at 27.7 percent, a 14-year high. Following President Zuma’s reckless firing of his respected and competent Finance Minister, Pravin Gordhan, last December, investors are spooked. The S&P responded by downgrading South Africa’s credit rating to junk status. This lower credit rating raises the cost of borrowing just as the government needs to invest in the electricity grid, which suffers from rolling blackouts.

Lovers of South African democracy might be prepared to breathe a sigh of relief in 2019, when Zuma is constitutionally obligated to step down (whether he will be removed from office before his time is up remains an interesting, but improbable, scenario). But here’s the catch: One of the two frontrunners to succeed Zuma is his ex-wife and political ally, Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. And it looks like she’s in the lead.

It would be wrong to attribute Dlamini-Zuma’s political fortunes entirely to her ex-husband, whom she divorced in 1998. In the 2007 ANC leadership contest, she was Zuma’s principal opponent. Having served as a cabinet minister for each of South Africa’s post-apartheid Presidents, she is an experienced political operator in her own right. Dlamini-Zuma, a medical doctor, has served as Health Minister, Foreign Minister, and Minister of Home Affairs; most recently, she was Chair of the African Union Commission from October 2012 to January 2017. And while it’s not impossible that a hypothetical President Dlamini-Zuma would seek to distance herself from her disgraced and unpopular ex-husband, South Africa’s chattering classes are speculating that she will pardon her predecessor should he be convicted of corruption charges.

President Zuma, after all, has made it clear that Dr. Dlamini-Zuma is his chosen successor. He endorsed her candidacy in May. He has even provided her with her own security detail, drawn from the Presidential Protection Service (South Africa’s Secret Service)—a move that has provoked considerable public scrutiny, as the force is only supposed to protect high-level elected officials and their spouses. Dlamini-Zuma’s term as Chair of the AU Commission ended in January, and she is no longer the spouse of the President. Yet she retains her own security detail, at public expense, and the government is stonewalling. The Police Service refuses to comment, for “security reasons.” This is only the latest sign that the Zumas remain close political allies and think themselves above the law.

Dlamini-Zuma’s main competitor for the ANC presidency is Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, one of South Africa’s richest men and Nelson Mandela’s handpicked successor (suffice it to say that Ramaphosa, beaten by Thabo Mbeki in the 1997 ANC leadership contest, has been waiting for the ANC nomination for a long time now). Ramaphosa is a skilled negotiator whose contribution to the negotiated end of apartheid is the stuff of legend.

In his years out of government, Ramaphosa built up a business empire. Among other board positions and business interests, he served on the board of Lonmin, a platinum mining company. This position became a political liability for Ramaphosa in 2012, when he pressed a hard line during a strike by Lonmin’s workers, characterizing the strike and events around it as “dastardly criminal acts.” Police Services later opened fire on a crowd of striking workers, 34 of whom were killed and 78 injured in what was immediately dubbed the Marikana Massacre. It was the most lethal use of force in the post-apartheid era. Ramaphosa has since apologized for his language, but because of his association with Marikana, the Deputy President’s star has dimmed.

The competition between Dlamini-Zuma and Ramaphosa is shaping up to be a contest between jostling factions in the ANC and competing visions for South Africa. Calling for expropriation of white-owned land as part of a broader campaign for “radical economic transformation,” Dlamini-Zuma appears to be consolidating the core ANC party structures behind her candidacy; the ANC military veterans, Women’s League, and Youth League have all endorsed her. Nothing about Dlamini-Zuma’s candidacy indicates she is serious about making a clean break from the corruption, sluggish growth, and lack of policy ambition that have characterized her ex-husband’s years in power. More gravely, one ANC veteran has even alleged that state capture funds are now being used to buy the votes of local ANC branches in the lead-up to the December conference to “make sure that the corrupt (read: the Zumas) remain in power.

Ramaphosa, on the other hand, has made corruption a central issue of his campaign, vows to investigate state capture, and is expected to enact pro-business policies. He has won the support of the South African Communist Party (SACP), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)—an organization Ramaphosa founded in the 1980s and that continues to support him despite the controversy over Marikana. For many of South Africa’s “born-frees” (members of the generation born after the end of apartheid), however, deciding between Dlamini-Zuma and Ramaphosa is akin to a choice between state capture and Marikana. Ramaphosa faces the difficult task of persuading them that he is the lesser of two evils.

Should Ramaphosa win the nomination, he is likely to consolidate the ANC faithful and work for two years to distance himself from President Zuma, which will help to restore some trust in the ANC. Such moves are likely to blunt the momentum of the center-right DA, which won several major urban centers for the first time in last year’s municipal elections, but is still struggling to shed its image as the party of the white minority. Dlamini-Zuma, on the other hand, is somewhat less likely to consolidate the ANC’s factions. Running against her, the DA has a more plausible path to the presidency, especially if it succeeds in framing the election as a referendum on state capture.

It’s also possible the ANC will choose a consensus candidate when it meets behind closed doors this December. Baleka Mbete, Speaker of the National Assembly, appears to be the most likely to emerge as ANC President under this scenario. Like Dlamini-Zuma, she is a close ally of President Zuma.

Twenty-three years after Nelson Mandela’s election, South Africa remains a democracy with a strong independent judiciary and vibrant civil society. The Zuma years have enabled rampant corruption, seen moribund growth, and threatened to erode the rule of law. Whether the ANC picks a reformist candidate like Ramaphosa, or settles for dynastic succession with Dlamini-Zuma, will have profound consequences for South African democracy in the years to come.

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Trump Ends Support to Anti-Assad Rebels

The U.S. approach to the Syrian Civil War has always involved a degree of doublespeak. While publicly stating that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go, the Obama administration and the U.S. military never openly backed anti-Assad rebel groups. U.S. support for those rebel groups instead fell to the CIA—covert action to train and equip rebels directly and indirect funneling of weapons and funds via U.S. regional allies like Jordan. Today, the Washington Post reports that President Trump has cancelled that program:

President Trump has decided to end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.

The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later.

Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump’s interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests. The shuttering of the program is also an acknowledgment of Washington’s limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power.

The optics here are not good, to say the least. Leaving the merits aside for a moment, the timing of the president’s decision to terminate this program—a decision which can only redound to the benefit of the Assad regime and its Russian backers—at the precise moment that the Administration is embroiled in scandal over its relationship with Russia, and for which the U.S. received no concessions from Assad or the Russians, is baffling. And the hits to the United States’ reputation—to be abandoning proxies fighting for their lives—should not be underestimated.

The President’s desire to end support to anti-Assad rebels is long-held, which might seem to mitigate the Russia issue. Except that his views on the matter are clearly driven by his desire to work more closely with the Russians. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal shortly after the election, then President-Elect Trump said:

“My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria. … Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.”

As early as 2014, before even declaring his candidacy, Trump believed that the “moderate” rebels were indistinguishable from ISIS:

The so-called ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels pledged their allegiance to ISIS after Obama’s address. We should not be arming them!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2014

As a factual matter, this is not correct. “Moderate” is a poor choice of words for groups that include Islamists and which are no ones’ idea of secular, America-loving liberal democrats. But U.S. backed groups like the Free Syrian Army—Southern Front (FSA-SF) are not extremists and are not ISIS. The notion that all rebels are terrorists was already in use by Assad’s supporters before the Russian intervention in 2015, and has since become a staple of Russian apologetics for Assad, who has been far and away the deadliest actor in the conflict.

It’s also worth distinguishing this covert program from some of the infamous failures of the Obama Administration. We wrote in 2015 about the disastrous effort to create, ex nihilo, an Arab anti-ISIS force that would not openly oppose Assad that cost $500 million and produced “four or five” fighters. That debacle was eventually resolved by the decision to back the Kurds, who are the only indigenous force that is anti-ISIS but not anti-Assad.

Rather, this program covertly backed groups like the FSA-SF and other vetted groups, arming them with U.S. made TOW missiles that have been used to deadly effect against regime tanks and armored vehicles that the rebels have otherwise had difficult countering.

That effort was made in coordination with regional partners like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and (very discreetly) Israel. Those partners are unlikely to be pleased by this decision. While the Post story cites unnamed Administration officials as saying that the decision to cancel the program had Jordanian backing, color us incredibly skeptical. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu very publicly stated that he is opposed to the ceasefire in southwest Syria negotiated between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. His opposition to the ceasefire is arguably the first major break between the Administration and Israel. Netanyahu rightly notes that such a ceasefire will be largely be to the benefit of Iran and Hezbollah who will gain greater freedom of movement along Israel’s northern border. U.S. Sunni allies in the region have likewise been among the most aggressive opponents of Assad. President Obama’s unwillingness to confront Assad was one of the major causes of the rift between the Obama Administration and allies like Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Those regional allies have also pushed the U.S. to consider backing more radical rebel groups. Without U.S. support for any rebels, no matter how “moderate” they may be, it would be easy to imagine Saudi Arabia and Qatar amping up the funding for out-and-out extremists.

Moreover, it’s difficult to see how this decision helps us leverage our position in Syria. President Trump has said, optimistically, that he wants to negotiate ceasefires with Putin all over the country. In a press conference in France last week the President said:

So by having some communication and dialogue, we were able to have this ceasefire, and it’s going to go on for a while.  And, frankly, we’re working on a second ceasefire in a very rough part of Syria.  And if we get that and a few more, all of a sudden you’re going to have no bullets being fired in Syria.  And that would be a wonderful thing.

In a war that has cost half a million lives and produced millions of refugees, that would be a wonderful thing from a humanitarian perspective. But U.S. support for these rebel groups is the primary American leverage to get them to agree to a ceasefire. There was already widespread skepticism about the meaningfulness of this latest ceasefire agreement given the lack of involvement from forces on the ground. It’s difficult to see how cutting off U.S. ties with the rebels will help the U.S. to mediate a resolution to the conflict.

There are good reasons to rethink U.S. commitments in Syria. In eastern Syria, especially, the Administration would do well to decide on its priorities and either make guaranteed, long-term commitments to groups like the SDF or look for ways to reduce U.S. exposure. The anti-Assad rebels, at this point, have no realistic hope of winning the conflict, but they can and do serve the interests of the U.S. and its regional partners in thwarting the ambitions of both more radical groups and the Assad regime and its partners Iran and Hezbollah. In that sense they are a low cost way to put pressure on U.S. adversaries while binding America closer to vital allies like Israel and Jordan.

While there is certainly a case to be made that the Administration should regard Syria with the realistic recognition that Assad has won, the President’s stated reasons for ending support for the rebels has little to do with that. And he couldn’t have picked a worse time to make un-earned concessions to Russia.

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NYT Soft-Pedals Soft Secession

The New York Times has an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand report about an outrageous new “travel ban” policy being adopted by a growing number of liberal states to bully conservative ones.

In a nutshell, coastal blue states like California and New York have banned state-funded travel to various red states, mostly in the South, in an effort to sanction them for insufficient social liberalism.

For a handful of liberal states, bans on government travel have become political pressure points during the country’s debate about gay and transgender rights. Beyond California, officials from New York to Minnesota to Washington State have pursued the bans in response to laws in states that they contend open the door to discrimination. […]

Even though the economic tolls of restrictions that bar nonessential travel at taxpayer expense are unclear — and may not be fully realized for years — the bans have already helped both Democratic and Republican elected officials grandstand, galvanize supporters and reinforce the regional fault lines of American politics.

The NYT describes this unprecedented culture war escalation as a “new tool for when states squabble.” In fact, it is something much more serious than that: It is a kind of “soft secession” by liberal states from conservative ones—one that could set the stage for a hard secession down the line.

America’s federal structure depends on the ability of different states to pursue different policies within the bounds of the Constitution and federal law. When states do violate protected rights and liberties, we depend on courts, administrative agencies, and their own voters to keep them in line. California, New York, and lesser liberal states are inaugurating something new and dangerous in American politics—official boycotts against states controlled by the opposite political party.

Red states could retaliate by cutting ties even more deeply—by declining to purchase products made in states with travel bans, for example. It’s easy to see how this escalates in a vicious cycle once the principle of state-on-state boycott and coercion is sanctified.

So far, America’s institutions have been able to accommodate deep differences of opinion while keeping the country together as a political unit. The new blue state brinksmanship seems like a deliberate effort to push this system to its limits.

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Do Centrist Dems Have a Future?

During President Obama’s first term, it was common to hear democratic-leaning political scientists and pundits talk about “asymmetric polarization”—the idea that while Republicans veered screechingly to the right, the Democrats remained an ordinary center-left party. That illusion was shattered by the 2016 presidential race, in which Bernie Sanders came close to winning the Democratic nomination on an Occupy Wall Street platform and Hillary Clinton embraced increasingly leftwing positions on social issues in response.

But there are still Democrats—especially in state offices—who occupy something like the liberal center that Bill Clinton helped forge in the 1990s. And based on the New York Times’ account of last weekend’s gubernatorial gathering in Providence, Rhode Island, some of them may have national ambitions:

Many elected Democrats have drifted left since the party’s shattering defeat last November, turning to a brand of progressive politics that is closer to Senator Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism than the more market-friendly liberalism that characterized the Obama era.

But when the nation’s governors gathered here over the weekend for their annual summer meeting, a group of pragmatic Democrats took center stage. And now one of them is taking the first steps toward seeking the presidency in 2020.

“I believe the time is right to lend my voice, the voice of someone that after getting elected has been able to govern in what’s viewed as a red state,” Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana said in an interview. “Some of the things that I’ve been able to do in Montana can also translate beyond just the state’s border.”

A more centrist variety of Democratic politics—one focused on job growth and not just redistribution, preserving Obamacare but not going single-payer, protecting the right to abortion without celebrating it, celebrating the benefits of immigration but also denouncing open borders—would be a formidable political force. The current Democratic Party is probably too tightly in the grips of academia and activist groups and leftwing foundations and think tanks for such a figure to make it through a primary. That’s a shame—for the party and the country.

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